Bird La Bird is the brains behind Bird Club. Bird Club is a performance space which puts queer femininity in centre stage irrespective of gender, sexual orientation or body appendages. You can live the Bird Club experience monthly every second Thursday at the Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club. Friction interviews Bird La Bird the curator and performance artist behind Bird Club

What is the Bird Club story?
Bird Club has morphed several times since we hatched in 2006. Bird Club started as a comedy act with Maria Rosa Young (Dyke Marilyn) and myself. We created Birdie characters to both subvert the stereotypes of Femmes but also to send ourselves up. We didn’t want to take ourselves or debates over identity politics too seriously.

I want to use Bird Club as a vehicle to bring together and promote artists, performers and designers. The fifth rule of Bird Club is “Anyone can be a Bird”. Wearing frilly knickers should not be dependent on what’s in them.  When I hear the word “real” before any category of person whether it’s woman, lesbian or femme I head for the hills. If you’ve ever been told you’re not “real” you’ll probably like Bird Club.

What makes Bird Club different to all the other burlesque acts out there?
What I do as Bird la Bird draws on music hall, punk, film and comedy rather than Burlesque.

Burlesque is an art form that’s been useful for many Femme performers as a way to break the drag king/masculine dominance of the queer stage. However the Burlesque scene tends to be very white. Why not have a retro scene that celebrates Rocksteady as well as Rockabilly? How about 50s Bollywood as well as Hollywood? Oh and the class snobbery really gets on my titties as well.

Bird Club is post-femme and post burlesque. However I do  hope that many of the more challenging neo-burlesque performers will come and join us on the perch.

Isn’t femininity over-represented in queer and straight worlds?
What’s interesting to examine which femininity is acceptable and which isn’t. This isn’t just about gender and sexuality it’s also about class, race and disability. I’m interested in how femininity is both demonized and highly prized.

There’s a lot of anxiety within feminism, queer and gender queer culture about expressing binary genders. While we’re right to challenge repression and enforcement of gender norms we also seem to have created a fear of being “normal”.  This can leave many femmes, transwomen, straight feminine feminists and lady transvestites feeling like we’re puppets of the Patriarchy by doing what feels good for us. Yet again it is putting politics before pleasure and that’s not very helpful to anyone.

How do you create something truly British in terms of language around gender and performance?
I want Bird Club to have a British flavour like Fish ‘n’ Chips.

I love slang, old fashioned gender nouns that are outside man / woman / male /female. Some people are perplexed by Bird Club and some of the language I use. I love it. So what if things aren’t instantly knowable and recognizable.  It’s good to have a bit of mystery. The debate round identity is way too earnest. Slang can mess it all up and bring a bit of irreverence, camp and cheekiness.

I also think colloquial words around gender that are white and working class are often assumed to be sexist and racist. The word Bird is definitely used in a derogatory way, but it’s not the whole story. I’m fascinated that birds and women are linked in language. I can’t think of another creature I’d rather be compared to than one with the power of flight.

What is your take on merchandising/branding the feminine?
This is something that’s very dear to me cos I do graphics as well as performance art. I love playing with imagery inspired by celebrity magazines, perfume, aftershave ads and fashion magazines.

Bird Club features lots of Birds of different species. I love the Bird Club banner which was a collaboration with textile artist Lucas McKenna. I want to get away from the pink for Femme/Black for Butch division. We need to move beyond this and find more interesting ways of expressing gender play visually. I love the work that the Butch is Beautiful crew are doing in Paris. They have the most interesting butch graphics I’ve seen in a long time.

To me style is at the heart of butch femme expression, so butch femme design work should reflect that deeply aesthetic and stylized sensibility, anything less is a disservice.

What has Bird Club got to say about Butch/Femme that hasn’t been said before?
I’m interested in post Butch/Femme and what happens when players themselves question and rewrite the roles.

I find the hostile reaction many non-players have towards butch/femme enthusiasts fascinating. I can’t think of another consensual sexual activity that has so much scorn and derision poured on it. I’m fascinated why many people find it so threatening and I’d like to see if that anxiety can be played with.

Is Bird Club art or activism?
It’s art, but art as in artiste rather than artist. Activism sometimes, but with a very heavy dose of humour, camp and surrealism. The most activist event Bird Club has organized was Bird Pride. That brought lots of the ladies together on the streets which hadn’t happened in London before.

A lot of activism revolves around consensus and community building. While this is essential to furthering many political causes they don’t necessarily make a good environment for making art or expressing very individualistic opinions.

I want the club to be a space where radical ladies can express themselves. There’s no reason why it can’t move between the street and the stage or dancefloor.

Viva Voce Virus directed by Kathleen Bryson and Kimmo Moykky. Viva Voce Virus is a wild vivid surreal film sci film which deals with the history of queer actors in the cinema being terrified of being ‘outed’. The main story is of the actress Ronnie played by Deni Francis who thinks to be successful she needs to employ the well-worn tactic of having a “beard” boyfriend. Ironically she is playing part a lesbian vampire in the contemporary remake of a B-movie written by dyke director Gloria LaFonche in the 1950’s.

The film draws on the gossip of old Hollywood in a Kenneth Angerish adventure thorugh the history of the closet. Meanwhile the other narrative includes two space travellers who exist in a fantasy world where men can suddenly find their best friend attractive and keep coming back for the blue cocktails in Gay Andy’s.

You are a writer primarily, why now a move into filmmaking?
I don’t think of myself being primarily anything! The truth is I have always done three arts, not one.
Writing, painting and filmmaking/acting. I came over to London to do a post-grad in acting originally in 1994, and in 1997 I was finishing up my MA in film theory right as I started to write my first novel, Mush. I actually began writing/developing The Viva Voce Virus the same year that Mush was published, 2001. I show my paintings every few years as well.

The reason it seems that filmmaking is a recent move is because feature-filmmaking by nature is sloooooooowww, and thats compounded when doing a micro-budget feature. I can whip up a short story in a matter of days: feature films - not so speedy!

What inspired you to make the Viva Voce Virus film?
Two things:

1. A dream I had in 1996 about a satirical movie where two “straight” men crash-landed into an all-gay resort where all the drag queens wore blue terrycloth bathrobes and stirred their blue cocktails with sparkly swizzlesticks. I pretty much dreamt the entire opening scene.

1. An audition I’d had in 2001 where I was one of the final 5 standing out of the original 90, and was on the third callback for a part for which I was eminently qualified. I’d already done the acting audition twice over, and this was just a verbal interview. I saw one of the casting director’s face change when I mentioned a girlfriend. It was kind of horrifically amazing as he struggled to compose himself. You wouldn’t think that type of prejudice exists among liberal people in theatre or film until you experience it first hand. The rule I broke wasn’t being queer - obviously, that’s very common - the rule I broke was talking openly about it.

You co-directed the Viva Voce Virus with Kimmo Moykky - what were the challenges of working collaboratively?
I am fiery yang to his more peaceful yin, which turned out to be complementary when working together. We have spookily similar artistic taste when it comes to films, literature, themes and aesthetics. If we had different opinions about how a shot should be set up, for example, we would both listen to the other person’s reasoning. If we could give a good justification and wanted it more, then the other
person would acquiesce. We kind of kept an unofficial tally: “Hey, you got your way last time, so it’s my turn now.” It balanced!

In six years we only had one 5-minute real argument, and that was the last week of production when we were probably missing like 50 hours of sleep. The real challenge was communicating long-distance during the post-production period once I had moved back to the United States. But we weathered that. We’ll definitely work together again and are actually in development with a second feature together, a futuristic horror piece in the 21 Days Later mode. We’ve been through some very trying situations and it’s great to know that you can be dear friends on the other side of that.

One of the themes about the Viva Voce Virus is the homosexual closet. Why do you think female actresses still stay in the closet more than male actors?
There are a lot of actresses who come out as bisexual, and I believe they truly are. But then what happens is you only ever hear about their boyfriends, and the media colludes with their publicists when they’re dating women to play that aspect down. Two good examples there are Drew Barrymore and Angelina Jolie. The media has no interest either in promoting sexual fluidity - that is just too threatening to consider, because that means any straight person could be the next to come out. Secondly, the almighty cock trumps all. You have men who have made a point of acknowledging their bisexuality like Alan Cumming or Gore Vidal being labeled  as “gay” while  women who call themselves bisexual who have had established relationships with other women being called “straight”. See the pattern? It always defaults to the male member.

With actresses, you’re already working inside this sexist system, and I reckon often it just becomes too much to deal with when compounded with homophobia. There’s a heartbreaking quote from the actress Tammy Lynn Michaels from an interview she did with Television Without Pity, where she says, “My managers and all my agents would be like [frantically], “Don’t tell them you’re gay! You’ll be ruined! You’ll never work again! You’ll be working at McDonald’s in a month!” I was so terrified.” There is incredible pressure to be conventionally attractive in a typically “feminine” mode - and to be perceived as straight.

What do you think about Lyndsay Lohan coming out? What difference will it make?
Lindsay Lohan and Sam Ronson are interesting, because in a way they’re just going ahead with their relationship without make a big to-do about it. They’re behaving as if it is already an ideal-world situation where everyone accepts lesbian couples on par with straight ones, and more power to them for that.

It’s not as if Hollywood isn’t predominately gay already, so I doubt they’re shunned. Also there are many gay and lesbian couples who are well known in Hollywood that go under the mainstream radar, most of whom who have straight “lovers”-cum-beards for public consumption.

From what I understand, Sam is not the first woman with whom Lindsay has had a relationship - just the first that the general public has picked up on. This wasn’t helped, of course, by Lindsay’s publicists or whoever was working overtime over the last few years to emphasize just how heterosexual she was. This plan really backfired, may I say, as Lindsay started to be seen as slutty and also, perhaps not coincidentally, begin to show signs of emotional strain. My hunch is there are several other public starlets with very well-known breakdowns who have been having lesbian affairs. It must be difficult to deal with the cognitive dissonance of lying to the public and sometimes to oneself.

Your film is very multicultural, was that a conscious choice?
Both Kimmo and myself talked about it at the beginning and decided that we wanted so-called colour-blind casting, and agreed we didn’t conceive of any characters as being African-Caribbean, or Caucasian, or Asian, and we decided that we would cast instead according to gut instinct (with the exception of the lead Deni Francis, whom I actually had in mind while writing the script).

When I wrote the main character Ronnie’s girlfriend, Madeleine, for example, I had a vision in my head of her being blonde and white and perhaps somewhat snotty - I loosely based her on some of the women I’d met working in publishing. But then when we had Semsem Kuheri read for the part, all of a sudden there was a new way of conceptualising the character of Madeleine. There are sometimes good arguments for ethnic-specific casting, but often there aren’t and I think white directors/casting agents/producers have a responsibility to examine their pre-conceived character casting notions.

Something I really love about Mike Figgis films is that he has a variety of people from different backgrounds and they’re not there as tokens or meant to represent something, but are present as true characters. And recently you get TV series like Gray’s Anatomy and Dexter, where the same thing is going on in terms of casting, and that’s just bloody refreshing.

On a semi-related note, at one point in the middle of production, Kimmo and I looked at each other and realized that all of the villains in The Viva Voce Virus were white, which was interesting. That wasn’t a conscious choice, either. I am not sure how that happened, but it seemed fitting that the evil people who had the most power in the film would also be operating from a more powerful angle of relational dynamics when it came to race. They were also all closet cases as well, of course.

There are men and women, straights and gays in a queer film which rocks, why did you go against the grain?
Because that’s what makes up my personal world. Gay men, lesbians, bisexuals and straight people. Although if you look carefully, there are actually allusions to every single character being to some extent queer, including Ronnie’s straight male best friend. Not all of them are closeted, either, just sexually fluid. And come on, people, not all of us exist in a sexually segregated world. If that makes it harder to label The Viva Voce Virus as a “gay film” or a “lesbian film”, then so be it. You can’t argue with the fact that it’s a queer film, though; it just happened to be a queer film for men, women, straights, gays, lesbians and bisexuals… and others.

When do you plan to show the Viva Voce Virus in the UK?
We just finished the final cut in June and are starting to send it off to festivals this month, so once we’re accepted to a festival in the UK, you better believe we’ll be there, with bells on. Perhaps wearing blue terrycloth bathrobes and brandishing sparkly swizzlesticks.

Links
Viva Voce Virus
Viva Voce Virus blog
Kathleen Bryson’s blog personal blog
Viva Voce Virus Facebook
Viva Voce Virus MySpace

Laura Mulvey in her essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema put forward the view that dominant cinema was created to give pleasure to male viewers. How women and men were placed in relationship to each other in the frame, how women were lit. All were done to make ‘woman’ a visual spectacle. She called this the ‘male gaze’.

How things have changed! Now male bodies are under scrutiny and put up for spectacle for the ‘female gaze’ viewers. Recently David Beckham’s pecs and his pack, in the new Armani underwear ad, have been cause for much discussion. His image is no longer the classic imposing manly authoritative pose. He has been framed is in a way classically used for females in cinema/photography of a bygone era. On his back and open legs. The only signal to his male gender is he is allowed to look directly into the lens. He is now in a long line of men starting from Mark Wahlberg whose bodies have been used to sell underwear.

But is this gaze a result of female liberation or the power of another kind of gaze - the queer male gaze? Is this construction for the lustful look of gay men? Has their desire to own those very same pecs and well ‘own them’ been exploited also by the fact that with that manipulation of their desire comes the powerful and lucrative pink pound?