Grayson Perry: Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Girl

by Wendy Jones

  17

  ‘OH. DO YOU WORK ON A FARM?’

  WHEN JEN AND I first arrived at Fiona’s squat in the summer of 1980, ‘Princess Julia’, a glamorous, gay, breathtakingly beautiful woman glided down the stairs, looked me up and down, and asked, ‘Oh. Do you work on a farm?’ because I had a brown corduroy suit on, a ruddy face and looked very wholesome compared to these wraiths who hid from the sun and only went out at night to go clubbing. I had bumpkin status.

  Leather-jacket man

  Fiona was living in a four-storey Georgian hovel in Carburton Street, behind Warren Street tube station, with an outside toilet that didn’t have a roof. When a water pipe burst and flooded the cellar they’d used it as a swimming pool: ‘We had a basement swimming pool once!’ Her room was in stylish disarray, with fabulous dresses hanging from the picture rail, and stuffed full of dressing up – it seemed then that there were wonderful things to be discovered at jumble sales. Downstairs were Marilyn and Boy George. I don’t know if they were lovers but they were sharing a room. Boy George was George then, a cheeky tearaway with his hair in ratty dreadlocks. It was post-punk so everyone had pseudonyms.

  Next to the squat there was a derelict Lewis Leather shop in which Fiona decided to open a café called the Coffee Spoon, after T. S. Eliot’s line, ‘I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.’ We broke into the building, discovering boots and pudding-basin crash helmets from the fifties – one of which I had for a while. We also found plaster models of christening fonts that we used as ashtrays, a very New Romantic-Goth touch. The Coffee Spoon had a repertoire of basic dishes, all named after poets. Toast was Robert Burns, beans on toast was Pam Ayres, and tea was T. S. Eliot. Jen painted a mural of a horse, there were Abba records playing and it was 10p for a plastic cup of cider. It was a word-of-mouth café where squatters in the area would come, pose and avoid sunlight. Pinkie Tessa sat around dressed as a lilac Little Bo Peep with poke bonnet and arched eyebrows. She had a nipped-in waist because she had a corset on under her big skirt. Another squatter, Cerith, was incredibly tall, with greased-down hair and a big black overcoat. He had very long fingers like Aubrey Beardsley. All summer I hung out at the café, meeting pallid people dressed in black – I was struck by how pale everyone was. Everybody was hiding from the sun because New Romanticism and tan didn’t go together.

  I had thought I was the bee’s knees in Portsmouth in my wacky clothes and felt secure in my position as one of the hip students there. I didn’t like these art students in the café because they put my nose out of joint: they were cooler and worldlier, at ease in big London, whereas ‘I were like from downe Portsmouth waye and I were only just getting used to that’. I had that cocksure teenage attitude of ‘I know everything’, then all of a sudden discovering I knew nothing. I was a yokel in bohemia.

  Jen and I divided the people in the Coffee Spoon into Mods and Rockers. Mods were elegant, followed fashion, did the right thing, were neat, never messy. Rockers let it all hang out, made a mess, fell over drunk, weren’t scared of making fools of themselves and took risks. Extrapolated, it was Classicism versus Romanticism. Most of the people that summer seemed Mod, especially the camp, gay boys. I thought gayness was, by definition, a Mod, over-scrubbed state whereas heterosexual was definitely Rocker.

  There were occasional cabaret evenings at the café, where we took it in turns to put on a performance. John Maybury had been honing his film-making skills while befriending Derek Jarman and showed a Super-8 film of his pretty boyfriend dancing at Andrew Logan’s studio while reflected in a cracked mirror. His other reel was of Fiona dancing. In the film she was running towards the camera and at the exact moment she actually burst through the paper screen dressed in the same clothes.

  The evening came for Jen and me to do our cabaret. For some reason Jen was crying as I was getting ready in Marilyn’s room, so Marilyn came up to her asking, ‘Is it because your boyfriend’s a trannie, Jen?’ and Jen burst out laughing. I thought she did have some awkwardness around my transvestism but perhaps that was caught from me. I was very uncomfortable with dressing up because it was the first time I was doing it ‘out’. People were watching me because I had told everybody I was an official trannie. It was the first time I had got dressed in women’s clothing in front of other people and when I was putting on a pair of tights one of the girls remarked, ‘Oh, you’ve done that before!’ because I was putting them on in the correct way.

  I dressed as the cook, Fanny Craddock; Jen was in biker gear as Johnny, Fanny Craddock’s husband. We were on my Suzuki 125. It was a stormy evening, the wind flung open the door, there was a crack of lightning, the crowd exclaimed, ‘OWWWW!’ and I rode straight into the centre of the café, revving up the bike, skidding to a halt in the middle of the floor. Then we cooked banana flambé. It was a cookery demonstration on a Baby Belling and I passed the flambé round for the audience to taste. The whole time I was achingly embarrassed.

  The reason Jen and I had come to London for that summer was because I had tramp fear. I had a tight budget to survive on for term-time but hadn’t accounted for the vacation. When the summer holiday arrived, I panicked, ‘Where am I going to stay?’ I couldn’t go back home because the old man said he never wanted me in the house again. The first time I was aware of having tramp fear was that spring when I told Jen, ‘I like it when the weather’s good because, if I have to, it’s easier to sleep rough.’ I felt safer when the weather was warmer. Tramp fear was a constant nag because financially I existed so close to the edge: it was an anxiety that lived with me for many years afterwards.

  My only option for the summer was to stay with a friend of a friend, Mo, work as a security guard at the local sports centre and hang out with Fiona. When Jen and I arrived at Mo’s, she was in the throes of giving a Scottish party with handsome gay boys in frilly white shirts and eccentric students in kilts, tartan, sashes and long white socks. Mo was sweet, with a black bob and turquoise eyes, a fashion student at St Martin’s. She gave us the room at the front of the flat above a bookmaker on the Holloway Road, right at the junction where the articulated lorries change down a gear and I was never able to sleep a wink unless I was dying of exhaustion. For someone who’d lived in the country and then in a quiet place like Portsmouth, the flat was incredibly noisy. We ended up on a single bed in the bathroom, which was inordinately inconvenient, but at least I was able to nod off.

  Me/Jen/Veronica, 1981

  New Romanticism was ironic and funny to us but also innocent, because of our youth. People wore fancy dress in the street, dressing as pirates, highwaymen or poets, with an abundance of velvet, high boots and frilly shirts, and got shouted at all the time. To Fiona, the obvious thing to do with all these people who wore costumes was to put on a New Romantic Christmas panto. That summer we began our rehearsals. It was to be The Snow Queen because Fiona had a script written for her Girl Guides by one of the local Guide leaders. She somehow managed to hire the Notre Dame Hall off Leicester Square, for one night only, and sold tickets. I was going to revive my Fanny Craddock as well as being an extra in the forest. The Two Roberts were drag queens who ad libbed wittily. Little Robert was short, Big Robert was tall, willowy and blond, and went on to have a sex change. Fiona, in leder-hosen, played Kay, the boy who gets the shard of glass in his eye; while Jen, in a proper dirndl, played the girl who rescues him. Galinda, being an ice maiden, was the Snow Queen; her German accent gave her the perfect Snow Queen voice. Everyone joined in. It must have been awful in some ways, but funny. That Christmas it played to a packed house.

  The summer taught me that art wasn’t a nine-to-five job. I had been thinking art was an activity that you did, not something you were. The people in the squats lived art all the time; they were as creative in their food, clothes, conversation, nightlife, parties – in their everything – as in their art. Somebody once said, ‘You cook your sculpture and you eat your paintings.’ Everything was constantly evaluated and played with. Everything was an opportunity to be imagin
ative.

  18

  ‘I COULDN’T FIND THE LIGHT SWITCH IN THE LOO’

  THE BEAUMONT SOCIETY were obsessed with anonymity since they thought transvestism would be every member’s worst secret and the press would be desperate to infiltrate, to expose everyone’s predilection. So when I wrote requesting to join, I received a letter stating ‘You must be vetted’. Jen and I dressed normally, then biked to a restaurant in Southampton to meet the local organisers for my interview. I was expecting to meet glamorous, fully garbed T-girls, but instead two elderly gents hobbled in wearing blue polyester trouser suits, eyeshadow and wigs, and looking like little old ladies. They’d been on a yacht en femme all day on the Solent. ‘We love sailing dressed up!’ they announced jollily. One was a farmer; he was perfectly passable. I breezed through the inspection; all they wanted to know was if I was an authentic trannie and not a journalist, or insane.

  The Beaumont Society was staid, if it’s possible for a transvestite society to be staid. I subscribed to the Beaumont Bulletin, which was like a Women’s Institute newsletter complete with crossword, a few fashion tips and a black-and-white photo of somebody using their pen name and membership number: ‘By Sonia, No. 1264’. And no mention of sex whatsoever. The logo was the yin-yang sign with ‘BB’ in the centre. Beaumont was after the Chevalier de Beaumont de Eon, a famous cross-dresser in the seventeenth century who spied on the Russian court dressed as a woman and is buried at St Pancras church.

  I decided to go to a Beaumont Society meeting. I donned a vintage Art Deco dress in grey silk, although I no longer needed a wig because I’d been growing my hair since I’d come out so it was fairly long, certainly long enough to be convincingly female. I put my goggles on over my badly applied mascara and chugged to Southampton. Jen came with me – by then she had christened transvestism the man-lady phenomenon. As we pulled up, I noticed a Mini parked in the street rocking because someone was getting changed inside. I thought, ‘I bet we see him later.’

  The restaurant was owned by one of the transvestites, who had closed it for the Beaumont Society function. There were a dozen men, one of whom was in his nineties and had been a pilot in the First World War. He staggered in, escorted by two helpers, wearing hugely high heels, a skin-tight satin dress over a corset and the most enormous loop earrings. He was the first person I’d seen with a pierced septum; he had a large gold ring through his nose. He talked very loudly, probably because he was deaf, about flying biplanes in 1917. There was Deborah, a glam cross-dresser who ran a bookshop and looked like a presenter from daytime television. I got on well with her and she came to Jen’s degree show dressed up, and everyone thought she was my aunty. You refer to transvestites as ‘she’, it’s polite.

  We were sitting around dolled up when one member, a travelling salesman who used to dress in his camper-van, then troll round the campsite at night, commented, ‘I’m so jealous of you lot all dolled up, I’ve got my ball gown in the campervan but I haven’t got my wig.’ The lady who owned the restaurant offered, ‘I can lend you one.’ This was great. He went to the toilet to change and when he came out he had his wig on back to front, and his lipstick and eyeshadow looked as if it had been drawn on by a five-year-old. He said querulously, ‘I couldn’t find the light switch in the loo.’ It would have been very out of order to laugh. Deborah leaned over and whispered in a kindly way, ‘Here, let me sort you out …’ turning his wig round and licking the corner of her hanky to wipe his make-up.

  It felt odd to be there. Suddenly I was confronted with, ‘I’m one of them. I’m like that. I look as gawky, awkward and funny as these men.’ When I was dressed up alone it was easier to maintain the fantasy that I was a glamorous woman; in my mind I could distort my own mirror image as much as I liked. When I gazed in the mirror cross-dressed, I only perceived the transformation in my appearance, how different I looked although – in reality – I looked more similar than different.

  There was a touch of the self-help group to the Beaumont Society: everyone had the shared pain of being forced to cope with transvestism. Some hadn’t begun to put on women’s clothes until they were late middle-aged, one didn’t start dressing until he was seventy – he suppressed it while he was married, waiting until his wife died. Most began cross-dressing when they were teenagers, some even younger. No matter at what age the men at the restaurant began dressing, none of them was fully passable as a woman. I learned that it is rare to meet a transvestite who is convincing; most aren’t credible, they are blokes in dresses with wigs on. The stereotype is a man in his fifties in old-fashioned women’s clothes, perhaps a knife-pleated skirt with tan tights. Trannies are part-timers, they’re amateurs, although a posse of younger T-girls are emerging who are groovy and sexy.

  In the headscarf

  Some, though very few, transvestites do transform completely, and the mark of status in the Beaumont Society and the transvestite world is who looks most like a woman. The trannies of whom others comment, ‘She’s good! Look! You would never know,’ are the leaders in a group. Trannies spot trannies. When I come across a transvestite I recognise her: I’m an expert, I’ve been doing it for thirty years. I’m alert to the smallest nuances, even in a realistic cross-dresser, because those are the nuances I scour myself for in order to eradicate them. The usual trannie look in public is furtiveness; moreover, trannies tend to have an air of excitement to them. Body language is the hardest aspect to suppress, facial expressions, rhythms and slight movements are gender different: men move with a muscularity and stiffness, women are more graceful. A wig invariably looks like false hair so having your own hair is a benefit. The most passable transvestites are small, old and need hardly any make-up. If I could change one aspect of my appearance I would choose to be shorter; being petite would help me look more androgynous and make it easier for me to pass as a woman.

  There are blokes who arrive at a Beaumont Society weekend with four suitcases of clothes and five ball gowns, and constantly change their outfits throughout the following two days. Part of being a transvestite is having umpteen outfits and constantly acquiring lovely new clothes, sometimes lavish ones. Cross-dressers always have two wardrobes, perhaps having only one pair of jeans and four T-shirts for their male wardrobe but bankrupting themselves over their female closet. False bosoms and wigs can be costly too. A trans-gendered man will willingly pay considerable sums for elaborately embroidered garments, luxurious fabrics or custom-made clothing. Preciousness, display and ostentation are desirable. Trannies are usually too dressy, walking around on a weekday in clothes most women would wear to a wedding. It’s because there’s a tug between needing to look realistic but wanting to wear exhibitionistic clothes that express the feminine feelings – the frillies and the sexies. I’ve succumbed to the frillies and the sexies now because I’m no longer concerned about looking authentic. Transvestism is not about being a woman; it’s about dressing as a woman.

  When I’m dressed as a woman, I would never speak in a squeaky voice and defer to boorish men! I was once at a Beaumont Society trannie do in a pub function room in Twickenham. After the pub had closed a few select punters – ones who could be trusted not to cause any hassle – were let in so they could have a drink after hours. There was one bloke, a rugger-bugger type, who was boring on. After a while he said to us, ‘I think you’re amazing, I think you’re brilliant because I find myself treating you like real women.’

  I replied, ‘Yeah, you’ve monopolised the conversation and ignored us. That’s pretty realistic!’

  I’ll definitely be a transvestite for the rest of my life. It is agreed that transvestism in a man doesn’t vanish. Many older trannies go full time, especially when they reach retirement: they no longer work, they have free time, so they decide, ‘I’ll live as a woman for the rest of my life.’ There are a lot of little old ladies out there who are actually little old men. They trundle down to the shops with their trolley baskets. ‘At peace’ is how many of them describe it.

  19

&n
bsp; I STARTED INTERACTING WITH THE LOCAL WILDLIFE

  MY LECTURER, DARRELL VINER, was intense; there was a noose hanging up in his office and he was the first person I’d met who’d had psychotherapy. At the start of my second year I said to him in a student way, ‘Oh Darrell, I’m stuck, oh, oh … I don’t know what to do …’

  He responded, ‘Go away. Write ten pages about yourself,’ which I did. Then he ordered, ‘Now make that into an artwork.’ That was all he said, I don’t think he even bothered to read the essay. Transvestite Jet Pilots was my formative work and the first movement towards the art I make now. It was a dressing table carved into a jet cockpit. On top were a brush, comb and mirror moulded from clay alongside dinky pots decorated with penises – I made caveman versions because my skills were crude – and in the bottom drawer were five photographs of me transforming from Michelangelo’s David into a trannie. I surrounded it with a parachute painted with sunrays so it looked akin to an altarpiece, then stuck on plaster feet. Helen Chadwick was a visiting lecturer; she thought Transvestite Jet Pilots was good. It was a mishmash but it had an energy to it which none of my previous work had had. Art was no longer something I did for the lecturers, nine to five. Now I wanted to make art about me.

  Transvestite Jet Pilots

  Detail of Transvestite Jet Pilots; inside the drawer, David through to Claire

  I felt more sophisticated. I had lived a little, had an adventure during my summer in London. I’d cycled to the National Gallery to see a painting of Chatterton lying on his deathbed and decided ‘I want a shirt like that’, so my apparel became a flowing white shirt, leather waistcoat, leather jodhpurs, riding boots and blowzy hair. I wore that outfit every day in the second year. I probably stank.