‘Harry Styles? Hardly’: John Cameron Mitchell on sex, punk and the next David Bowie

John Cameron Mitchell and I are playing a fun game. It’s called “Who is the David Bowie of this generation?”

I start with some low-hanging fruit, eager to elicit some easy outrage. What about Harry Styles, I tell him? Harry Styles often gets compared to Bowie.

Mitchell shoots me a dead-eyed glare. “Hardly,” he says. “I think he’s talented, I just don’t see him as a groundbreaker. Bowie would go to very strange places, and we would go along with him. He would try stuff that didn’t always pay off, but he tried it.”

Maybe Kanye? An innovator and provocateur who’s even going through his own fascist period, much like Bowie’s coke-fuelled Thin White Duke era.

“Very talented, but truly seems mentally ill,” says Mitchell. “I don’t know if he is, but the Kardashians seem to think so.”

Um, Yungblud? The British musician is no Bowie, but he has seemingly based his entire identity on Tommy Gnosis, the glam-rock ingenue in Mitchell’s Tony-winning musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch (played in the 2001 film by Michael Pitt).

“Yes, he’s very Tommy,” Mitchell laughs. “I like him, he’s got a good vibe. He’s a populist, meaning we’re all in this together. But he also seems like a good lad. He’s not the usual brat boy.”

There’s a spate of silence as we ponder the question further. We’re struggling.

“The eclecticism of Bowie is hard to pin down,” says Mitchell. “There’s some who have surface eclecticism, like Madonna, but she didn’t write her own songs so it just seemed like fashion, a change of clothes. Like Lady Gaga, that’s just – what do you call it? – channel surfing. That’s not Bowie. Bowie would really think about his persona and go fully into them instead of just a photo shoot. I don’t know who else does that. I can’t think of anyone, really.”

Mitchell – filmmaker, actor, Tony winner and queer icon – has, as ever, got Bowie on his mind. After Donald Trump’s return to the US presidency last year, and with fascism rearing its head and technocrats flaunting a new world order, he was reminded of a quote from Gary Oldman: “It’s all been downhill since Bowie died.”

He dove back into Bowie’s most apocalyptic songs to help make sense of the moment. The result is I’m Afraid of Americans: A Bowie Song Cycle, a theatrical concert he’s bringing to Australia that celebrates the enduring relevance of Bowie’s work amid our impending end times.

“We’re in the middle of it now, and it’s pretty embarrassing and pretty repulsive. I think [Trump’s] doing himself in with all his mistakes, but the danger now is we’re afraid we’re going to go down with him,” says Mitchell.

But don’t worry, the show is not about Trump. “It’s about Bowie’s way of looking at the world. Someone once said about Ann-Margret, ‘She was anything but reassuring’, and Bowie’s not reassuring. In his lyrics, there was always a certain amount of fear and panic.”

Now 63, Mitchell has been a lifelong acolyte of Bowie’s. The pair had a tight, if limited, relationship in real life. When Hedwig and the Angry Inch premiered off-Broadway in 1998, Bowie – clearly the musical’s main inspiration – was among its early champions.

“He came to the show in the first incarnation, and it was very exciting,” says Mitchell. “I met him at his rehearsal studio where my boyfriend was working, and he said ‘John, you got it right.’ That was a beautiful thing to hear.”

Bowie also got involved when the show moved from New York to Los Angeles. “David put money into that production, and then lost all of it,” Mitchell laughs. “Hedwig has always been hard to stage because you need a place that’s more comfortable with rock ‘n’ roll, and a theatre doesn’t always do that. It wasn’t well-thought-out.”

Mitchell’s draped over a sofa in his New York apartment as he shares these stories, enjoying a day off from his run in Oh, Mary!, Cole Escola’s Broadway smash. “It’s already a hit so we don’t have to fight for an audience, so it’s a hoot and a half,” he says.

His main home these days is in New Orleans, where he permanently relocated to three years ago. “It’s the last US city with its soul intact,” says Mitchell. “Kooks come to New Orleans. It’s a very community-based place, especially because they’ve been at the forefront of dealing with climate change forever. The disasters come and go, but the people stay.”

A few weeks before we speak, the city made headlines as the site of actor Shia LaBeouf’s latest booze-fuelled, homophobic meltdown. “Yes, he’s not welcome,” says Mitchell. “He’s one of those tourists that are not getting with the program, and it tends to spit them out.”

Mitchell’s coming trip to Australia is his first since he shot the Peacock series Joe vs. Carole in Queensland during the pandemic. He played Joe Exotic, who voiced his displeasure at Mitchell’s casting from jail where he’s serving a 21-year sentence for animal abuse and conspiracy to commit murder-for-hire over his plot to kill animal rights activist Carole Baskin. “He saw a picture of me as him, and he said I was gonna make him look like ‘a fag’ … which I guess he isn’t,” Mitchell says with an arched eyebrow.

The trip will be a lengthy one. While in Australia, Mitchell will also appear at 25th anniversary screenings of the film adaptation of Hedwig and the Angry Inch and at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, where he’ll lead a masterclass on punk, an elongated riff on an opinion piece he wrote for The New York Times last year titled “Today’s Young People Need to Learn How to Be Punk”.

In the piece, Mitchell – setting himself as a sort of common-sense Gay Unc, adrift among a “younger, judgier generation” – issued a call to arms to young people to “stop cancelling each other, find out about punk, and get laid while you’re at it”. It echoed a feeling that’s pervaded leftists and liberals since Trump’s re-election, one that comedian Marc Maron summed up in his last special when he suggested the left’s moralistic policing had “annoyed the average American into fascism”.

“You can’t cancel a dictator,” says Mitchell. “Sometimes political correctness, though it had great intentions, becomes its own kind of power base and becomes pushy and people get quite anti-authoritarian about that. But I actually think, happily, that even the most right-wing people don’t actually want fascism once they see it, when their neighbours are ripped out of their houses for doing nothing.”

In the piece, Mitchell urged young people to get “problemagic” and championed the work of radical French surrealist Claude Cahun, who used her transgressive art to fight the Nazi regime (Mitchell’s new play LSM is about her).

His 2006 film Shortbus, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this year, itself remains a transgressive benchmark. That film featured unsimulated sex (including a mass orgy in which Mitchell himself partook), and infamously opened with an actor performing auto-fellatio.

Even though Nicole Kidman was apparently a fan (“She watched Shortbus, didn’t comment on it, but immediately afterwards offered me Rabbit Hole to direct,” Mitchell says), Mitchell has insisted that Shortbus couldn’t be made now. I imagine it wasn’t so easy to make back then either?

“Well, back then, the religious right might have objected, but no one was forcing them to watch it. It wasn’t a digital time yet where the slightest thing sets people off, so people had their own worlds; the film would play all over and there was no objection because no one was seeing it that didn’t want to see it. Now everyone’s touchy, every comment is pored over. When we re-released it four years ago, the objection was more from so-called liberal kids, younger people.”

In a post-#MeToo culture where sex – both onscreen and in real life – has become complicated, the film plays differently. “Yeah, just looking someone in the eye is terrifying for my young assistant,” Mitchell quips.

In his essay, Mitchell described a campus screening of Shortbus last year, when he was asked by a student if the film’s main plot – of an Asian woman seeking an orgasm (played by Sook-Yin Lee) – was his story to tell. “I said, yes! Because when you collaborate with actors, it becomes our story to tell. What’s it got to do with me? This is a collaborative art,” Mitchell says.

He bristles at the prevailing prudishness of younger generations. “Sex to them is offensive. They’re acting the way old people would, when really they have a fear about it so they transmit that into disapproval, that if someone’s having sex on film, someone is by definition being exploited. I’m like, I don’t think so. Ask anybody who was in [Shortbus], it was their favourite experience. There were no intimacy coordinators because we were all intimacy coordinators, as we should be! You don’t need to hire someone to do that if you’re already doing it and making it the right way.

”I always told the actors I never want you to do something you don’t want to do, but I do want you to challenge yourselves because that’s what I want to do to the audience. Their fears can be met by us meeting our fears about it,” Mitchell adds. “Sex is connected to different parts of our lives. If you watch someone having sex for real, it tells you something about them that they can’t otherwise express. So, to me, it’s like why avoid that in the cinematic world? I know logistically why people don’t do it, but we were seeing a lot of films at that time using sex, but they were grim or boring or too serious. We wanted a more New York comedy.“

Joseph Gordon-Levitt famously auditioned for the film. Why didn’t Mitchell use him? Wouldn’t it have been a coup to land a big Hollywood name in such an explicit indie film? “I don’t care about big names!” Mitchell says. “Big names come with big needs. It was much more about compatibility with other actors. I had to create couples, and if people weren’t into it, it wasn’t going to work.”

Despite his apparent crankiness towards today’s wayward youth, Mitchell still feels hope in the new generations. It’s partly because they’ve all been watching (or rewatching) Girls. The kids embracing Lena Dunham’s once maligned and provocative – and yes, sex-heavy – HBO series can only be a harbinger of good.

In the series, which aired from 2012-17, Mitchell played Hannah Horvath’s chaotic e-book editor, David Pressler-Goings. He noticed the show having a moment a couple of years ago, when a group of young girls pointed at him and yelled “Girls!” while he was walking down the street.

“They were quite young, and I was like, ‘You’re watching Girls?’, and they were like, ‘Yeah, it’s our Sex in the City or our Golden Girls’, and I’m like, ‘What did you call me?!’” Mitchell jokes. “But what they were saying was, take us to that time, let’s say, before political correctness took over, where it was okay to investigate everything, even if sometimes it was a little messy and maybe even a little glib.”

John Cameron Mitchell’s I’m Afraid of Americans: A Bowie Song Cycle is at Sydney’s Enmore Theatre on September 6 and Melbourne’s Recital Centre on September 9. He will appear at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas at Sydney’s Carriageworks on August 22-23.

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