Being Conchita

by Conchita Wurst

  So, is it true?

  Or isn’t it?

  From the maelstrom of thoughts racing through my head the following sentence was gradually formed: ‘I don’t want to lie about this anymore.’ About it. About who I was. About what I liked, which didn’t feel different or strange or whatever else it had been labelled over the previous years. And so I took a deep breath and gave the honest answer: ‘Yes, Niddl, it is true! Yes, Austria! Yes, Germany! Yes, Switzerland! And Yes! to whoever else happens to read this one day: it is true. I am gay.’

  They say the truth always comes to light in the end – but did it really have to come to light like this, emerging right into the spotlight? The problem was that ‘Yes, Niddl’, and ‘Yes, readers’, also meant: ‘Yes, mum and dad, your son is homosexual.’ Perhaps you already suspected, perhaps you already knew, perhaps you had been suppressing it – but now he’s shouted it out for everyone to hear. He hasn’t opened up to you first, like he should have done. Words are tumbling from his lips and it’s far too late to try holding them back now. Because he doesn’t want to lie anymore. Because he’s already been through too much. Because in his deepest heart he believes that the truth has the power to change everything. Holding this belief means being convinced of the good in everyone. It’s something I still believe today. And then the interview was over. Niddl had turned off her microphone. One of the assistants gave me a pat on the back and said I’d been ‘very brave’.

  I knew I’d made the biggest mistake of my life.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE ROAD TO CANOSSA

  ‘What is this feeling, so sudden, and new?’

  FROM THE MUSICAL WICKED

  The magazine was due out four days after the interview. At that point, Bad Mitterndorf would know what Bad Mitterndorf had always suspected: the boy from the local restaurant is gay, is homosexual. Anything might happen then, or at least that’s what my overheated imagination was telling me. The locals could turn against us, and my parent’s restaurant stand empty. Or worse still: people could start harassing them, just like they’d harassed me. I grew even more anxious when I thought about the lack of trust I’d shown towards my parents. I’d revealed in public what I should have told them in person. The fact that I hadn’t planned things that way, that my mouth had – as the saying goes – run away with itself, that one word had led to another: these things were no longer important. I was infinitely sorry about what I’d done, yet there was no way to take it back. Faced with this situation, I picked up the phone and called my grandma.

  My grandma is a remarkable woman. Life has by no means been a bed of roses for her – far from it. I remember as a child catching snatches of the conversation between the old men who were regulars at our restaurant. They would talk about the ‘bad times’ during and after the war. The state of Styria had been occupied by the British, while Burgenland, its eastern neighbour, came under Soviet control. In the early days of the Cold War, everyone lived in constant fear of the Russians mobilising their tanks and extending the boundaries of the Eastern Bloc further westwards. This was the era in which my grandma grew up. She was born into a large family with many siblings, and since money, food and pretty much everything else was in short supply, she became a so-called holiday child, spending most of her childhood in Portugal, not far from Lisbon. She was taken in by a wealthy family and came into contact with a whole new way of life. Her foster father ran a chocolate factory, which always made me think of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory whenever my grandma mentioned it. She learnt Portuguese in the space of a summer; visited Bairro Alto and Chiado – two of Lisbon’s ancient city quarters; went on excursions along the Tagus River; and she was very well taken care of.

  ‘After four o’clock,’ she would recall, ‘we girls weren’t allowed down to the beach anymore. It was when the factory workers finished work for the day, and they didn’t always know how to behave themselves.’ Everything she saw back then was new to her, yet she never stopped being inquisitive and hungry for knowledge. One time she took me aside and said to me: ‘Sea folk are different from mountain folk.’ She was talking about the difference between her childhood home in Portugal and her home back in Austria. ‘The sea always brings in something new. You soon learn that just because something’s different, it doesn’t mean it’s bad.’

  She later returned to Austria, where she eventually met my grandpa. He had jet black hair and a swarthy complexion, as if to prove that, even in the mountains, the unexpected does happen every now and then. He wore gold-rimmed glasses, smoked exotic-smelling cigarettes and earned a living as a long-distance lorry driver. I’m certain that it’s from him I inherited the nomadic genes that make me just as keen a traveller as he was. He told me about his journeys all over Europe, about the harbours of Rotterdam and Marseille and the pine trees that lined the streets of northern Sweden. My grandpa transported fridges and televisions, coffee and sugar. Once, on unloading a couple of crates of bananas he’d transported to Antwerp, he discovered hundreds of spiders that had come along for the ride and that presently crawled out of the crates and all over the inside of his truck.

  Sadly, he died young, and ever since then my grandma had lived on her own. We went to see her regularly, and the two-hour car journey felt like an eternity to me. Sometimes I dozed off and the first thing I saw on waking up was the big cartwheel that hung in the hallway of her house, telling me we’d finally arrived. I’d charge from the car and jump into my grandma’s arms. It always smelt good at her place, a mixture of menthol and eau de cologne. While staying at Karl Lagerfeld’s for a recent photoshoot, I had a sense of déjà-vu: it smelled just like my grandma’s at his place, and I was immediately transported back to a more carefree existence. No wonder I felt so at ease in his presence – I’m sure my grandma would too. She always kept her place spick and span. There was never a speck of dust on any surface, nor so much as a droplet of water splashed on the sides of the ceramic bath tub. We could have eaten off the floor if it hadn’t been bad manners.

  Her house was set into a hillside, and life played itself out mainly on the upper floor, in the conservatory and in the garden. In order to bring a little bit of nature into the house, she’d put up a gigantic canvas of a lake surrounded by a forest of fir trees, and had covered the floor in moss-green carpet. There it was again, now for the third time in my life: the Green Cave. It was a sheltered existence I led at my grandma’s, though this was also in part because she was a born leader and didn’t let anyone make the decisions but herself. She was the one that set the tone in our family, and even though she bossed me around a bit, she was still a calming person to be around. It’s from her that I inherited the determination to make up my own mind, although back when I was child I loved letting her be the one in charge.

  Perhaps this was what led me to make that desperate phone call and tell her about what I’d just done. It was also the first time I’d talked about my homosexuality with her, but she didn’t waste any time discussing it. After all, she’d learnt that just because something’s different, it doesn’t mean it’s bad.

  ‘You’re to go home,’ she said in a voice that told me it was no use trying to argue. ‘And I’ll be there soon.’

  ‘But grandma, you’ll have to drive for two whole hours, and—’

  She didn’t even let me finish the sentence. ‘It’s for the best’, she said, and I knew she was right.

  I’d always enjoyed travelling back home to my parents, even when there’d been a real danger that someone might be lying in wait for me at the station. This time, however, the journey couldn’t go slowly enough. I remembered that there was a term – the ‘Walk to Canossa’ – that refers to the act of making a humiliating apology. King Henry IV had been forced to go to Canossa after being threatened with excommunication by the Pope. According to the history books, the King had had to wait outside Canossa Castle ‘barefoot and until four days had passed’ before he was let in. I was sure that my parents weren’t going to force me to wait out in the st
reet for four days, yet this didn’t stop me feeling like a penitent going to seek forgiveness. It didn’t matter that I was already well past the stage of being bothered by my homosexuality. The real issue was that I hadn’t given my parents a chance to prepare themselves for this.

  My aim was to burst through the front-door, grab hold of them and immediately confront them with the truth – a sort of ‘This-is-the-situation-so-deal-with-it’ approach. As I’d feared, that day they already had enough going on as it was and were working flat-out preparing meals, setting up the dining room and making up beds for new guests. Now on top of all this here I was, showing up with news that no one had any time for right at that moment. All three of us were overwhelmed by the situation, and I remember an awful argument breaking out. It was a disagreement about the manner in which I’d come out, something it was already too late to change, and by the end of it each us was in tears. It was at this point that my grandma turned up. I’d already forgotten all about the fact that she was coming. The elegant poise, grace and authority she exuded swept through the room like a spring breeze. Without so much as a ‘hello’, she launched into commander mode:

  ‘Shouldn’t you be sorting things out for when the guests show up this evening?’ she asked my parents. ‘Pull yourselves together and get to work.’

  I spent the next few days at my grandma’s house, during which time my parents calmed down a great deal. I got a phone call from my brother, whom I’d already told three years previously that I was gay and whose only response had been: ‘Well, it figures.’ My parents still needed a little longer to reach the point where it figured. Every so often, they tell me how grateful they are to me for teaching them to care less about what other people think. This always strikes me as remarkable: in our society it’s usually meant to work the other way round, with children learning from their parents. The very existence of the concept of ‘coming out’ – this bizarre term that really just expresses the idea that people are obliged to tell others about what or whom they like – shows how far away we are from being a tolerant society. My mission as Conchita Wurst is to change this.

  There’s still a long way to go.

  CHAPTER SIX

  STARMANIA

  ‘Wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles’

  FROM THE MUSICAL FIDDLER ON THE ROOF

  No matter how talented a singer you are, you’ll struggle to make it big if the only venues you ever play are your attic and other people’s birthday parties.

  Although I’d never had the benefit of traditional vocal coaching, it felt like the time was right to start performing in public. Nowadays, I sometimes joke that it was the Little Mermaid who taught me how to sing, though this is obviously stretching things a little. After all, she was busy sacrificing herself for love in the hope of transforming from a mermaid into a human. Looking back today, I realise that I was planning something along the same lines: a transformation so complete and so earth-shattering as to be almost inconceivable. But that was all still to come. Even so, every journey begins with a single step, and I decided to sign up for Starmania.

  The show had already run for two series and they were now auditioning for the third. Language is full of sayings such as ‘He Who Dares, Wins’ and ‘If You Don’t Ask, You Don’t Get’. It doesn’t change the fact that it takes real courage to put yourself out there and to ask yourself the question: ‘Am I capable of this?’ The first two series had attracted a decent number of viewers and the show’s producers now wanted to go even further. Arabella Kiesbauer, a TV personality from Vienna who’d risen to fame with her talkshow Arabella, would be returning to Starmania as the host. There had been 2,500 applicants battling it out for 18 places, so it already felt like an achievement to be proceeding to the next round, and I looked forward to having the summer holidays to prepare myself. The point at which the anxiety really kicked in was when I was subsequently selected to go through to the finals. How are you going to manage this, I began to ask myself: you’ve got school all day and then homework most evenings. It wasn’t clear how I’d find the time to squeeze television shoots into this packed schedule.

  If, just as I’m doing now, you spend a few moments looking back at your life, you realise it contains several points where you reached a crossroads: points where you had to make a decision that would change the course of your future. You can ponder endlessly about which is the right path to follow. You can also listen to your intuition, that gut feeling that some people say doesn’t exist. It definitely exists in my case, and it had some advice for me now.

  ‘You’ve got to grab this opportunity with two hands,’ my instinct whispered to me. ‘You can always go back to school later on.’

  This was exactly the argument that the rational side of me needed to hear, reluctant as it was to let me to drop out of school essentially overnight. At first, I didn’t tell anyone about the decision I’d made. The first episode went out on 6 October 2006, with one group of singers performing for the first three weeks and a second group performing from 27 October for another three weeks. The first contestant to take the plunge was Dagmar Hinterer, who had to do her performance on the opening night itself. Each of the following weeks saw a new contestant take to the stage. Six weeks later, we were down to the final line-up and then the game was on again: singing, voting, being chosen to stay on or being voted off. It was the first time I’d ever sung in competition with others, and I had mixed feelings about it.

  While it was amazing to be able to sing in front of such a large number of people, whenever anyone else was voted off it was as if I was experiencing the same feelings as they were. I’d grown close to several of the other contestants, and their disappointment was my disappointment. Meanwhile, my family and friends had of course become aware of what was happening – and instead of telling me off for not being at school, they were there to cheer me on! I had no option but to win. By this point, we were already into the new year, and on 26 January 2007, for the very first time in my life, I would be taking part in a finale. Millions of viewers! Voting! Two contestants in tears, but only one crying tears of joy! The trailers tried to build up as much suspense as possible, and in the end it was a choice between Nadine Beiler and me. ‘There can be only one,’ murmured one of the cameramen in my ear, quoting the tagline from the film Highlander.

  A lot was at stake – specifically, the offer of a recording contract, something I’d never even dared to dream of until now. Nadine and I both sang our hearts out, each of us put in the best performance we could, and in the end the audience decided. Tom Neuwirth reached second place. Nadine was the jubilant queen. Four years later, she represented Austria at the 2011 Eurovision Song Contest and came eighteenth. As Starmania came to a close, the idea that I too would go on to perform at the Eurovision Song Contest never crossed my mind. At that point, I could happily have gone back to my studies. Yet something deep inside me rebelled against this idea.

  As part of Starmania, contestants had each been assigned a category of music from which they would perform their own version of a song. My category had been ‘Eurovision’ and had consisted of a choice of five songs, one of which was ‘Everything’ by Anna Vissi. In her home country of Greece, Anna is a superstar. I don’t know whether it was by coincidence or not, but at some point Anna heard me doing a performance of her song, and after my Eurovision victory she invited me to visit her on the beautiful island of Mykonos. The festivities to celebrate her 40 years of performing were under way, and she greeted me like an old friend. There was singing and dancing, food and laughter. Trying to match her energy could be a life goal in itself. She put on a spectacular three-hour show by day, only to dance from dusk till dawn. A remarkable woman! Although it was only the first time that I’d met her, it felt like we’d already known each other for years.

  One night, she invited me for a private dinner, over which she spoke to me about her life. Although we were in an exclusive restaurant, Anna had young men fawning over her all evening, sizing me up with envious glan
ces. I couldn’t help but smile to myself: life always follows the same pattern. Here’s a woman who attracts men like moths to a flame, but none of them stands a chance. Then I come along – someone who adores women, but isn’t attracted to them – and can get a tête-à-tête with the drop of a hat.

  By the time I returned home, one thing was certain: I wanted to continue along the path on which I’d set out. I had no idea where it would take me, no map in my pocket, no clear destination in mind, but I’d tasted blood. It’s possible that I was guided onwards in my decision by a recollection of my favourite musical, Wicked: The Untold Story of the Witches of Oz. It follows the story of the Wicked Witch of the West, a character who’s always fascinated me. Now I too would be straying from the straight and narrow. I would be doing so timidly, and with reservations, yet firm in the decision to not return to school. Instead of putting my energy into a third year of fashion studies, I jumped for joy every time the phone rang. It was frequently a call from a magazine, a radio station, a TV company. There was a lot of media interest around the Starmania contestants, especially the finalists. I could now be glad that I’d already gone through the process of ‘coming out’. I no longer had to hide behind a lie when appearing in public, and this was a huge weight off my shoulders.