Above, L-R: Nearsighted aesthete David V. Matthews (yours truly) and non-Disneyesque director John Waters, at the latter’s autograph-signing session at the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, May 21, 2005. Waters is holding up one of my most prized possessions, the September-October 1966 issue of Fact, a muckraking magazine that called itself “an antidote to the timidity and corruption of the American press.” A minute or two earlier, he signed with pleasure something in that issue: an article titled “Inside a Home for Unwed Mothers” that he’d written as a teenager under the pseudonym Jane Wiemo. According to his 1981 memoir Shock Value, he’d based his purported first-person account upon the story of a 13-year-old unwed mother he’d known, “exagerrating it ridiculously”. Indeed, the article reads like one of the campy, square-squashing flicks he would soon make for the delectation of William Bennett fans everywhere:
Miss Wiemo is a nice, normal 15-year-old girl from New Jersey. She sneaks off to New York City one day, gets “pretty well drunk”, and loses her virginity to “a typical Village beatnik of about 20”. She gets pregnant. She tells her parents, and they bundle her off to a “seedy” maternity home run by “complete religious fanatics” who are “the butchiest type of Lesbians” she’s ever seen, “short hair, unshaven legs, baritone voices and all.” The poor girls there must attend prayer meetings every morning where the preacher says “ ‘Are you girls truly sorry for your outrageous sins against God? Then raise your hands and tell Him you’re sorry!’ ” The girls endure further indignities, including “no recreational sports like Ping-Pong”, but the worst part of their ordeal is “the big ‘treat’ ”, a three-hour hayride from hell where they suffer “in agony from the constant jogging of the cart, the itching hay, and the stares of shocked people driving past in cars.”
Anyway, Miss Wiemo has her baby, a boy, which she gives up for adoption. She vows that if she ever has a daughter, “[e]ven if she turns out to be so holy she wants to become a nun, she is going to be fitted with a diaphragm.”
By the way, my hair usually doesn’t look like the Florida peninsula.
July 9, 2005
DAVID V. MATTHEWS 