Speculums, lampshades, earrings crafted out of castrated dog’s testicles: hardly your average drag queen props, but then Holestar is hardly your average drag queen. Billed by Time Out magazine as “London’s favourite tranny with a fanny” (Americans, please note: this does not mean quite what you think it means), she emerged from the world of dandyism-as-performance-art created in the 1980s by avant-garde fashion designer Leigh Bowery – he of latex dress/teetering platforms fame. Today, in day-glo wigs, vertiginous heels and impossibly long eyelashes, Holestar occupies similar cult status as a cross-dressing curio a la RuPaul and Divine. There is, however, one rather notable difference.
This former soldier with a degree in photography and masters in fine art from St Martins isn’t simply a man dressed as a woman. An altogether rarer breed, she is in fact – following the grand tradition of Julie Andrews in Victor Victoria – a (gay) woman dressed as a man dressed as a woman. Her modus operandi: “Reclaiming camp femininity from drag queens and glorifying it.”
“I never had a drag mother,” she says from a Bangkok cafe, en route to Phnom Penh. “Lots of drag queens combine forces but no one ever taught me. I just came up with the idea as an art project. It was supposed to be a one-off: me lip-synching to Shirley Bassey as a video piece. I moved to Vienna and met this DJ at a big Aids benefit, The Life Ball. A lot of my artwork at the time was to do with sexuality and gender, flamboyance and questioning those things. It was the perfect time to workshop it in front of an audience. The DJ didn’t know I was going to turn up in the worst drag ever; I had no idea what I was doing. I had a feather boa wrapped around my head; drew big lines across my forehead and put glitter on. It was just an art idea in a club and people liked it. The next thing I know I’m travelling around central Europe and making a living out of it.”
When central Europe proved too passé to contain her gender-bending persona, Holestar – real name Julie Hole (“It’s a joke but I say it because it’s true: I was Private Hole. That’s not made up. It’s my real name and it’s much better than being Private Arse.”) – gravitated towards the Big City of London where she performs everywhere “from bright stages to dingy basements” and hosts gay dating show, Take Me On. But daring to be different – to embrace the ‘other’ – isn’t without its drawbacks, even in London’s relatively liberal metropolis. Clients have cancelled gigs on discovering Holestar is genuinely female, and on New Year’s Eve she was punched in the face for intervening in a ‘queer bashing’.
“Hideous. Even in London, somewhere that’s supposed to be so open-minded. It’s New Year’s Eve, we’re all dressed up and this guy took offence to someone wearing a dress. And this is the thing: he wasn’t pretty drag; he was alternative drag, which is kind of where I’m coming from. The guy who got attacked is very avant-garde. He had these big black square eyes and a big red mouth down to his chin and he had a beard. It was quite obscure drag and this guy went ‘Eurrrghhh! What’s that?!’ and beat him up. I got a punch in the face for it as well. Absolutely disgusting.” After a complaint was lodged with the authorities, Westminster Police failed to turn up for a scheduled interview then made Julie wait 50 minutes to give a statement about the attack while they busied themselves processing someone who’d lost their keys.
“We think people are groovy and accepting of different types of people but they’re not. There’s still a lot of hatred and fear. I get people grabbing my tits and my crotch because I’m questioning their sensibilities and they can’t quite comprehend that. Don’t touch the freak! I’m here for entertainment. Something in their brain doesn’t compute what they’re looking at so they freak out. It’s rude. I’m still a human being. Come and talk to me and I’ll have a conversation with you; I’ll tell you why I do what I do. In the West, there’s a very binary sense of gender – the extreme male and female – and if you’re playing in between those roles, however temporarily, people still can’t decipher it. I like to think/hope that by the time I leave this mortal coil those boundaries will have been broken down a bit more. There needs to be more of us visible in the mainstream, which is why I believe in art and pop culture. Society is influenced a lot by pop culture.”
As an artist, Holestar deliberately sets out “to blur the boundaries between the avant-garde and mass entertainment, pop culture and the underground; indulging both those who worship at the altar of the contemporary art gallery and at the bowels of mass media”. But can such disparate forces ever be reconciled? “It took me a long time to accept that I fall in between the two. The mainstream side doesn’t get me; the avant-garde arts side doesn’t get me and I don’t really care. I know where I’m coming from and I know my intentions are good.
“There’s snobbery about what I do from certain sections and a lot of misogyny as well. It’s about accepted norms; that idea that anyone dressing up and playing gender roles is going from one to the other. It’s the fact they want a straightforward male-to-female or female-to-male. They don’t want people playing with those gender roles. Even in England, what I do is confusing for people and a little bit racy. We have so-called equality in terms of being gay or whatever but we’re still a long way off that and gender is a big taboo. People don’t want to acknowledge that there are people who play with that.”
Our conversation returns for a moment to the fusion of high and low culture, her boldest would-be act of which revolves around a tale of two testicles – those of her pet dog. The plan was to give these severed orbs a new lease of life as earrings, a plan that induced a state of near-apoplexia in animal rights’ activists. “I didn’t do it in the end but only because I moved house recently.” She lets loose a gleeful snigger. “They were in the freezer for a long time and I didn’t have the chance to put them in another freezer while I was moving. And I was getting abuse from animal rights people. It’s interesting that people think I’m doing these things to aggravate them but really it’s just the way my brain works. I’m not interested in shocking people. I don’t think it’s weird but I forget that my normal is very weird for other people. I Googled it and thought it was quite obvious. I just thought: ‘Well, no one has done it before.’”
Besides, how does that differ from fellow British artist Damien Hirst’s predilection for pickling everything from sharks to sheep? “Exactly! And this is MY dog. He’s fine; he’s not being attacked by other dogs now because he’s lost his testosterone. Otherwise, they’d just go in an incinerator. The people who attacked me for it, they just wouldn’t come round. I’ve come to the realisation that anyone who’s militant about anything, you can’t talk them out of it; whether they’re militantly religious or militant about animal rights. I don’t care. I just do what I do – and I do regret not doing it. This is my normality and it’s not freaky or weird but when I occasionally look at the world through my parents’ eyes – they’re very conventional; they read the Daily Mail, unfortunately – to people like them I’m odd but I don’t think I am at all.”
It’s Holestar’s resolute sense of self that has led her to lecture in the subject of alternative drag at several British universities, including Rose Bruford College of Theatre & Performance – something she intends to replicate here in Phnom Penh, in between scripting a new hour-long show and revelling in the success of her latest EP, Queen Of Fucking Everything. “I’ve done quite a few lecturing courses in alternative drag because there’s a history of queer studies and I was asked to do a drag queen workshop. I wasn’t really interested in the old theatrical side of things, so I did a post-Divine alternative new gender identity course and it was fabulous. It was really interesting to see people who’d never done anything at all with drag before just fall into it. There was one girl with a shaved head; a biker, really butch. By the end of it we’d put a wig on her, put some heels on her and she was fabulous!
“I felt like a mother hen with her little chicks, setting them free – ‘I’m so proud of my babies!’ It’s nice to show people there’s a new style of drag and it doesn’t really matter what’s in your underpants. It’s just about expressing yourself, so if you want to wear a lampshade on your head and have a beard and wear a pair of panties and lipstick, that’s completely fine. From what I understand about this part of the world, drag and gender are very tied up in romanticised ideas of being a pretty female lip-synching to romantic love songs, which is fine, but there are other options.”
The two-day workshop will include an introduction to the work of avant-garde pioneers Divine and Leigh Bowery – “the innovators of alternative styles of gender bending, fashion and art” – and culminate in what promises to be a deliciously flamboyant Paris Is Burning-style alternative drag pageant. “There are lots of pseudo-political things going on but ultimately it’s about having fun and being positive and empowered no matter what your gender is. I get people contacting me, especially biological women, and saying: ‘Oooh, I really want to do this.’ Well, do it! Express yourself. It’s about playing with gender roles and what people expect them to be. I don’t believe gender is binary.”
Any final words of advice? Holestar laughs her raucous, throaty laugh. “Just be fabulous, darling!”
WHO: Holestar
WHAT: A woman dressed as a man dressed as a woman
WHERE: Pontoon, St. 172
WHEN: 9pm January 24
WHY: Explore the fine art of being fabulous