John Cameron Mitchell: ‘There’s been a certain sex panic in the air’

It’s just that it’s hard to imagine film-making this proudly and playfully carnal coming out of the American indie scene: we’re living through a remarkably chaste period of cinema, perhaps marked by post-MeToo caution and responsibility, as film-makers reconsider the boundary between exuberance and exploitation.

Shortbus, meanwhile, still feels radical its depiction of sex on a spectrum from banality to euphoria, sometimes beautiful and often hilarious. You certainly can’t turn to porn for a scene of one gorgeous, hard-bodied gay man singing The Star-Spangled Banner into the arsehole of another: Mitchell’s film took that peculiar gap and ran with it. His film was a riposte not just to porn, moreover, but the sterner aesthetic of sex in the arthouse.

With hindsight, Mitchell sees films like Shortbus and Tarnation – the raw, ragged documentary self-portrait by the queer artist Jonathan Caouette, who cameos in Shortbus – as beneficiaries of a last gasp of punk sensibility in American film. “I had thought that Jonathan’s film would launch a million David Lynches on YouTube,” he says, “but narrative film-making has kind of faded out in favour of people even just making a web series.

Sure enough, Mitchell has been busy: in recent years, he has released his musical Anthem: Homunculus as an all-star podcast series, released a couple of concept albums for charity, popped up on TV in series such as Shrill and The Good Fight, and will shortly be seen as Joe Exotic in Joe vs Carole, Peacock’s dramatic adaptation of the documentary phenomenon Tiger King.

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