Federico Windhausen writes about experimental film and video and teaches film history at California College of the Arts.

The influence of Jack Smith's casually outrageous style, which interpreted the B movie in a sexually inventive manner, and his refusal to separate his persona from his art can be seen in artists from George Kuchar to Andy Warhol; performances in his New York loft, even more fugitive and underground than his film production, were forebears of the avant-garde theater. Among classics of New American Cinema, Flaming Creatures was the most maudit, and the most frequently seized for obscenity. The setting for this pre-Cockettes fantasy of sexual confusion is a transvestite orgy where Smith's "creatures" go in for the kind of role-playing and exhibitionism that made him the (il)legitimate daddy of camp.