The great John Waters, self-described maven of filth and a pioneer in queer underground cinema, will be receiving a special honor from Frameline in March, at the Castro Theatre.

The Frameline Award, which has not been given out since 2019, is given to a person or entity that has made a major contribution to LGBTQ+ representation in film, television, or the media arts. And this year it will be bestowed on filmmaker, writer, and visual artist John Waters during a special presentation on March 17 to kick off Frameline's 50th anniversary season.

The event will also feature a screening of Waters's 1994 classic Serial Mom, starring Kathleen Turner, with live commentary from Waters and Peaches Christ. Find tickets here, and they're likely to go fast.

"Celebrating John Waters, a titan of transgressive independent cinema who also never fails to bring us together and make us laugh, captures the spirit of Frameline so well," says Frameline Executive Director Allegra Madsen in a statement. "If the world excludes us, we’ll build the one we want to see — and we’ll have a damn good time doing it."

Previous recipients of the Frameline Award include indie fillmmaker Gregg Araki, avant-garde lesbian filmmaker Barbara Hammer, historian Vito Russo, drag legend Divine, and actor George Takei.

Waters, who has been a part-time resident of San Francisco for over two decades, began his career making underground movies in Baltimore with his childhood friend Glenn Milstead, later known as Divine. As the legend goes, Waters and Milstead used to hang out in high school at a local dive bar called Martick's in downtown Baltimore, which is where they met some of their eventual collaborators in making the loony, campy, bizarre "midnight movies" that Waters would first become known for, like Multiple Maniacs (1970), Pink Flamingos (1972), and Female Trouble (1974).

By the late 1980s, Waters's work became more mainstream, beginning with 1988's Hairspray — an ode to 1960s pop music that doubled as a fable about segregation. That was followed by the films Cry-Baby (1990), and Serial Mom (1994) which solidified Waters as a creator of satirical dark comedies with an edge that was, by that point, not as subversive as at once was, though just as camp.

Waters hasn't made a new movie since 2004's A Dirty Shame, which was rated NC-17 and marked a return to Waters's "trash" roots, but was also a box-office disappointment and failed to capture the attention of a broad range of fans.

In the last 20 years, Waters has primarily turned to writing, penning the novel Liarmouth (which at one point in recent years was being discussed for a film adaptation), a book of essays called Role Models, and a hitchhiking memoir titled Carsick.

Waters has often expounded on his love of "bad taste," saying things like, "To me, bad taste is what entertainment is all about." Also: " To understand bad taste one must have very good taste. Good bad taste can be creatively nauseating but must, at the same time, appeal to the especially twisted sense of humor, which is anything but universal."

The Frameline Film Festival, the oldest LGBTQ+ film festival in the world, kicks off June 17 and will be returning to the Castro Theatre for the first time in three years.