John Cameron Mitchell reflects on 25 years of 'Hedwig' — 'a story of trauma, abuse and the government deciding what you are'

Collage by Kellan Doolittle/Little Village

For John Cameron Mitchell, the writer, director and star of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, punk rock has to be in the moment. Currently on tour for the film’s 25th anniversary, Mitchell will stop in Iowa City on Sept. 23 and 24 for a musical performance as part of Hancher’s Infinite Dream Festival, as well as a film screening and Q&A at FilmScene.

“Our tour, in effect, is talking about Hedwig, a Midwestern bitch trying to find her way to wholeness,” Mitchell said.

Punk, as a perspective, aesthetic and music genre, must be deeply entrenched in a sense of geography, a collective response by members within a community to provoke action in a specific place. In the film, Hedwig first discovers her star persona in rural Kansas, the same state where Army brat Mitchell came of age.

Hedwig and the Angry Inch began as a successful Off-Broadway show, in which Mitchell originated the titular role of the genderqueer punk singer from East Berlin who needs to undergo sexual reassignment surgery to flee the country with her male lover. The procedure leaves her feeling fragmented in more ways than one, a pain that is only exacerbated further after Tommy Gnosis breaks up with her and finds fame by stealing her songs.

John Cameron Mitchell as Hedwig in ‘Hedwig and the Angry Inch’ (2001)

In thinking about Hedwig’s cult legacy, Mitchell is filled with tremendous gratitude and admiration for how the story has continued to resonate with audiences. “When I meet people along the way with Hedwig tattoos, it’s very humbling. Bigger hit movies or Oscar winners don’t necessarily elicit that kind of reaction. You don’t see a lot of Argo tattoos.”

While Mitchell has only passed through Iowa, it did play a small role in the making of his musical. Mitchell shared that Hedwig co-creator Stephen Trask, who composed the music, lyrics and also appears in the film as Skszp, wrote the song “Wicked Little Town” in Grinnell, Iowa. Trask was visiting friends and wrote the song in their home, which was so close to the road he could feel it shake when trucks passed by.

“I don’t think of Grinnell as a wicked little town, but he [Trask] was thinking about Junction City where I lived,” Mitchell said. The autobiographical song plays a key role in the film, as it sheds light on the isolation of being queer in a small, conservative town. It is the first song the character Tommy sees Hedwig sing, before the two strike up a creative and romantic relationship that will eventually lead to heartbreak and betrayal.

One of the first times Mitchell conceptualized Iowa City, aside from the vague home of the Writers’ Workshop, was also bound up with queerness. “I actually learned about it from Andrea Lawlor’s book Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl, which if you haven’t read, is brilliant, and it takes place, at the beginning, in Iowa City.”

Lawlor, a nonbinary author and University of Iowa alum, crafts a tale about a 23-year-old in 1993 who can shapeshift their body and gender expression. It’s a refreshing image of fluidity briefly set in a state whose leaders no longer consider gender identity worthy of protection in the Iowa Civil Rights Act. But no matter how hard legislation tries, many queer people continue to call Iowa home.

Hedwig and the Angry Inch is vital to the growing tapestry of genderfluid media, despite not being a straightforward gay or trans coming-of-age liberation story.

“It’s a story of trauma, abuse and the government deciding what you are,” Mitchell said.

He’s frustrated to see rightwing ideology flourish in the Midwest, a place he always saw as using common sense as a force for progressivism. For Mitchell, those on the far right “don’t want to read the fine print; they just want to trust daddy. It’s weird that this [Trump] is the daddy they’re trusting. Daddy, who just seems to want to eat the world, is not very Iowa, you know.”

The story of Hedwig, inspired by Plato’s Symposium, is one about the process of discovering your other half, but coming to terms with the fact that feeling “complete” can only come from within. When asked if Mitchell himself has found wholeness, he said he has, thanks to art.

“It allowed me to investigate parts of myself that I wasn’t comfortable in; exercising or exposing sides of me that we might think of as ‘feminine’ or ‘masculine’ and realizing that we’re all a mix of all these energies, and if we suppress them, then we’re a closet case in some way. You can be a closet case in many ways. If you’re crushing your artistic creative side, you’re also a closet case.”

John Cameron Mitchell in 2008. — International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival/Wikimedia Commons

Hedwig as a character becomes a vessel for self-awareness and self-love. Pondering what might have happened to Hedwig later in life, Mitchell jokes, “She just wants to tell her story, and eventually maybe she’s telling other people’s stories. I imagine a sequel would be that she’s teaching writing and philosophy in Iowa.”

Now 25 years old, Hedwig and the Angry Inch is a love letter to the misfits, the neglected and hated who are brave enough to keep living and keep making change through art. In the true spirit of the road movie, Hedwig advocates for moving forward through the mess and finding the humor in it all.

“I love that the story is universal, that it travels, that it will continue to travel after I’m gone,” Mitchell said. “It’s the unloved who changed the world.”