The Rocky Horror Picture Show while the film's fan culture of cosplaying and audience participation during screenings laid the groundwork for the similarly influential cult following surrounding Tommy Wiseau's "The Room" (2003). Members of the queer community comprised most of the Rocky Horror cult following: they identified with the embrace of sexual liberation and androgyny, and attended show after show, slowly forming a community. Judith A. Peraino compares Brad and Janet’s initiation into Frank N. Furter’s world to the self-discovery of queer identity, and to the traditional initiation of ‘virgins’ in the shadow screenings . June Thomas describes the midnight screenings in Delaware as a
The Rocky Horror Show a BBC Radio 2 listener poll of the "Nation's Number One Essential Musicals". As an out-of-work actor in London in the early 1970s, Richard O'Brien wrote "The Rocky Horror Show" to keep himself busy on winter evenings. Since his youth, he had developed a passion for science fiction and B horror movies; he wanted to combine elements of the unintentional humour of B horror movies, portentous dialogue of schlock-horror, Steve Reeves muscle films, and fifties rock and roll into "The Rocky Horror Show". A major theme running throughout the musical is transvestitism, which according to O'Brien was not originally meant