Calmer John Waters

John Waters grew up homosexual in the 1950s chafing under conservative sexual norms. And as those norms disappeared, so, too, did the shock value of John Waters’ movies.

Shrewdly, the bawdy bard of Baltimore, who started out screening gonzo sex movies like “Mondo Trasho” in church basements in the ‘60s, reinvented himself for mainstream acceptance.

In place of gutter-revelers such as 1972’s “Pink Flamingos” — no one who saw it has forgotten that thing with the canine fecal matter — came tamer satires such as 1994’s “Serial Mom,” which starred Kathleen Turner and Sam Waterston.

The move paid off. Mr. Waters has only grown in stature. The Broadway musical based on his 1988 movie “Hairspray,” for instance, was a big winner at the Tonys last year and is still running with a new cast.

Mr. Waters, 58, still lives in Baltimore part time and keeps offices there. (He also has homes in New York and Provincetown, Mass., a Cape Cod enclave popular among wealthy homosexuals.)

And every time he visits a college campus to give a talk or a video store to sign copies of his movies, he finds a new crop of young fans.

“They’re as enthusiastic as audiences were for ‘Pink Flamingos,’” Mr. Waters says in a recent conversation at the Four Seasons in Georgetown.

“I’m not gonna say [I’m still relevant]. You have to ask others that. But I think I’ve kept up.”

With the flap over Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl striptease and the ongoing debate about indecency on the airwaves, it could be that the times, by retrogressing, have kept up with him.

And there, like a stonewall — a stonewall with a pornographic mural — stands John Waters, with visions of a post-moral society where nontraditional sexuality is not just tolerated but seen as irrelevant.

His latest movie is “A Dirty Shame,” a farce about sexual fetishists taking over a Baltimore neighborhood. It mocks intolerant “neuters” and half-jokingly raises the specter of a public”decency rally.”

It earned an NC-17 rating — the equivalent of yesteryear’s X — from the Motion Picture Association of America, whose ratings board quit taking notes halfway through the movie.

It told Mr. Waters not even to waste time making cuts for an R-rated version.

For once, the filmmaker himself was shocked. “It’s an insane movie,” Mr. Waters concedes. “I’m not saying that I don’t understand how eyebrows would be raised. But this wasn’t conscious. I didn’t purposely think, ‘I want to make an NC-17 movie.’ I should have realized it, but I didn’t.”

Mr. Waters feels the early reaction to the movie is part of a wider clampdown on sexual expression. “A Dirty Shame,” he says, shows no actual sex on camera and includes few four-letter words. “You can’t even talk about sex anymore,” he says.

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