Iconoclast filmmaker John Waters grew up in racially segregated Baltimore, Maryland during the stifling conformity of the 1950s and early 1960s. Waters, now an openly gay man, came of age as a filmmaker in the late sixties. As a young man, he lived in a closed society where racial mixing and homosexual sodomy were illegal. Furthermore, the emerging American youth countercultures—the hippies, anti-war and student movements in the 1960s6—greatly influenced his work. The social and political unrest during this decade often resulted in confrontations with the authorities. Participants in these social movements used the media, especially television, to exploit their arrests and gain support for their causes prior to and during trial.