Welcome to the Crowdsourcing Mornings segment! Every weekday morning, Geek Alabama talks about and features one crowdsourcing project from crowdsourcing sites such as, Indiegogo, and others. The hope with Crowdsourcing Mornings is to feature and help a project be successful and reach its fundraising goal. Please enjoy today’s featured project!
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Absolute Pleasure is a collection of essays by trans and queer writers including Sarah Gailey, Grace Lavery, and Magdalene Visaggio, which explore the film’s complicated legacy, along with queer and trans joy, sexuality, family, generational understandings of queerness, and what we do with our problematic faves.
Rocky Horror began as a stage show in London in a tiny theater which only fit 63 people. When the film first launched two years later in 1975, it bombed. But a few true believers relaunched it with midnight screenings at The Waverly Theater in New York City, where the film found adoring fans among the queer folks and weirdos of Greenwich Village. They returned to see it again and again, and created the culture of audience participation which transformed Rocky Horror from a campy offbeat B-movie to an international sensation. Fifty years later, The Rocky Horror Picture Show has had the longest theatrical run of any film in history.
I’m Margot Atwell. I’m a queer writer, publisher, community-builder, and activist based in Brooklyn, New York. Rocky Horror was incredibly important to me as an unknowingly queer kid growing up in the 1980s and 90s. Representation of queerness and gender non-conformity in mainstream media was very rare back then, and mostly quite bad. And before everyone carried the internet around in their pockets, there truly were not very many ways for a young queer or gender non-conforming person to encounter queerness, let alone to understand the many gorgeous possibilities for our own queer lives.
In the United States, representation of queer and trans lives blossomed over the first two decades of the millennium, and now there are nuanced portrayals of people all across the rainbow in books, films, TV, and more. Back in 2022, I wondered: Do we still need Rocky Horror? Does it still resonate with people the way it did with me? And what do we do with the parts of it that are, let’s just say, Deeply Problematic?
I created this book to answer these questions, and many more.
Absolute Pleasure features 26 essays by queer and trans writers who answered my invitation to write about the film, sharing their critiques, analyses, and stories, to create a book almost as colorful as the film itself. As I edited these essays, I was so moved to realize that it’s not just a book about a weird film, but a rich, broad, and multifaceted representation of queer lives in the US and beyond over the past five decades.
The book is a gorgeous 320-page 6×9-inch paperback. It’s being published on September 16, 2025, by Feminist Press, a 55-year-old intersectional feminist independent book publisher. They have great relationships with reviewers, librarians, and booksellers. But book publishing is a noisy field, and at a time when visible queerness and gender non-conformity are increasingly being, and small-minded people are trying to shove it back into the closet, the more buzz we can build in advance with this Kickstarter project, the more likely it is that this book will be on shelves in stores and libraries, featured in publications, and find its way into the hands of the people who want and need it.
As of May 21st, this project has raised $10,510 of their $10,500 goal. This project has 1 days left to raise as much as it can. For a pledge of $15, you will get one eBook. For a pledge of $26, you will get one print book. To learn more and to pledge money, go to: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/margot/absolute-pleasure?
Categories: Crowdsourcing Mornings Stuff
