Eden Swan
DR: What is the conference you’re doing?
ES: Its like a series of papers that are being presented under different themes and categories. The paper that I'm in the middle of writing is about queer specificity.
DR: What’s it about?
ES: Well obviously once you are queer, you understand it, but from the outside, if you're straight or you're not involved in queer culture in any way, you have a really set idea about what queer is and how it presents. Even to the point where it's strictly a sexuality – like that's all it means. My experience of being queer has nothing to do with that – sexuality is one aspect, but it really is just one. There's so many. Then I bring in things like capitalism that takes the rainbow and gives it an agenda, so on Pride week, everything is covered in rainbows all of a sudden, it’s commodifying the culture. My paper is really talking about my fundamental belief that queer is not specific. But it's being sold on and …
DR: Homogenised?
ES: Yeah, homogenised – and that's the most ironic take away from queer, that it's homogeneous. It's just not, unless you call inclusivity homogenous. So, it's going to be pretty scathing and I'm going to do a performance with it as well.
DR: What’s the performance component?
ES: Well, I'm going to do a music aspect, I want to do a kind of drag. Ironically I’m really into this song by Dannii Minogue. It’s a ridiculous song called I Begin to Wonder, I don’t know if you know it but …
DR: I don’t – I’m embarrassed to say. I should know it.
ES: Don’t be – I don't know of anyone else who knows this song but I certainly do. I'm interested in re-working it in a drag sort of way, because I think that the message of that song and also the music video ...
DR: When did that happen?
ES: In 2003 or something.
DR: That was a good era.
ES: Yeah, that was a good era, I was 13. But I think the message of that song and the music video is super camp. Even though it's so obscenely ridiculous and kind of regressed, it really speaks to the energy of what it feels like to be queer sometimes, in a world that’s trying to make straight lines out of everything, when you don’t naturally view the world that way.
DR: How long have you lived in Castlemaine?
ES: I’ve lived there since 2019, but I'm considering moving back to Melbourne.
DR: How come?
ES: I moved to Castlemaine after a breakup. It was one of those crisis moves – I just had to go somewhere else. So, I spent a year processing that and trying to evolve my life, post break up. It was somebody I was with for a long time – three years – so it felt like a divorce … and then we went into the pandemic. I feel like I had lost a bit of autonomy, and it was certainly not the worst place to land at all, but now that I have options, I'm considering taking them.
DR: What’s your experience of the queer community in Castlemaine?
ES: It's very scarce, but I think respected. When I say scarce, I guess I'm comparing that to my experience of growing up in Melbourne where the sheer number of queer people is ten-fold – maybe thirty-fold. I've always been around the queer community, because I've studied music, and theatre, and dance and art – and these are magnets for the queer. So I went from that to being in a small country town … Prior to that I was in the Macedon Ranges.
My other observation about the Castlemaine queer community is that there’s a lot of lesbians in the country, as opposed to any other type of queer. When I think about the queer people that I'm friends with in Castlemaine, there's a bit of tokenising. Some people I know are kind of labelled as the town gay. But because they're not being bashed and killed off like the old rhetoric of the town-gay – well, I don’t want to say the ‘old’ rhetoric as it’s still happening in certain places – but here the tokenisation becomes a kind of nice thing. You know, in certain cultures you have elders, and they stand out. They have their points of difference for good reasons. So it’s scarce but there’s a kind of respect and reverence in a country town because they’re kind of like the town shaman, or the town elder or something.
DR: Is that tokenisation from within the community or …?
ES: Yes, so maybe tokenisation is too much of a harsh word, but I guess it ends up being like that when you're singled out.
DR: Is that something you have experienced?
ES: Not so much me. Because I identify as bisexual, and there's less semiotics of queer to me, I think. I'm not like a gay male that has the quintessential gay voice, or expressive clothing.
DR: Not as clear-cut
ES: Not as clear-cut! but I'm sure that if I presented as louder, that would have happened, yeah.
DR: Can you explain further …
ES: I think that there's a certain loudness that comes with a sense of deprivation. If you are not being seen and heard, as a natural survival thing you’re going to start to become a bit louder and a bit more colourful, and hold your ground a bit more because you need to respect and support yourself, in a way. That's really the psychology of ‘the only gay in the village’. I respect that, I think it's really brave. If you're faced with an isolating experience, because you're not the same culture as the majority around you, you have a choice. Its either ‘if you can't beat them join them’ so you diminish your shine and you diminish yourself for safety, or you say, fuck that, I'm going to be exactly how I am – in fact tenfold. I see a problem in that reaction and response, but I see more of a problem in muting yourself.
That’s something that I've always been really drawn to in the queer community, because I was militantly straight ‘til I was 25 – in terms of the sexuality aspect of my queerness. My attraction to the queer community, before I identified as being a part of it concretely, was to that kind of bravery and that thing of, I don't give a fuck, this is who I am, this is who we are. I think it's the braver choice and that's really cool …
Anyway, back to this scenario: and then there's the other side of it where, as a queer person (being the only gay in the village), you choose whether you're going to be muted, or whether you're going to be loud about it, and stand your ground. I think the reception of that in Castlemaine is really quite positive, and people are really excited when these particular people are there. It’s like an elder, like someone special is there. I think that's really cool because it is special to be queer – still, at this point of modernity, because the majority is still very heteronormative. So, it is still a powerful position, a position where you can become empowered. There’s still that conflict there.
DR: You mentioned earlier that you still feel there is a space of empowerment within the queer community that hasn't been completely subsumed …
ES: Yeah, of course there always will be – of course, of course. I think it just gets harder – as you know it’s an economic thing ultimately and it gets harder if your human rights are removed or made difficult. Your energy is going to go into fighting and defending that. It can be easy to forget what you were doing and where you came from, and why you're doing it, when there are other massive threats. Right now there’s like massive economic threats to everybody. I heard last night that petrol is going to go up by 22 cents a litre tomorrow!
DR: And the impact of that on regional communities would be huge …
ES: Yes, it's ridiculous. So, in the end the economy does have an effect on even queer culture, because people are having to fight for these other things, as opposed to nurturing and practising their own culture. What I'm trying to say is that the queer culture is kind of cancelled in a corporate and capitalistic sense. It's only just recently that they've realised there's enough of us to make money from, so now everything’s got rainbows on it – but that's the only reason. We’re still the minority, certainly the economic minority so it's a real shame that that's all wrapped up in it. I hate that. But of course the queer community never dies – we are the most adaptable. Our whole thing is about adaptability and compassion and togetherness and I think human beings have proven time and time again that when you have that attitude, and when you come together, you can find alternative solutions. It doesn't matter what the force is – unless it's something like nature, we can’t win against that. But in terms of mind frames, there is something to be said for community effort. I think the queer community is an actual community.
DR: What is your involvement in the queer community in Castlemaine – day to day?
ES: I think – apart from just spreading the good word ...
DR: Standing on the street corner?
ES: I would if someone gave me a microphone. I just hang out with fellow queers. I'm not involved in groups – like there’s a queer tennis group.
DR: There’s a lot of queer groups, there’s the Falcons and the choir, I keep hearing of new ones, and now there’s a tennis one ... do you play in that?
ES: No, I’m not really part of those group things. Art is my big contribution – and spreading the good word. I do both those things quite loudly, so that's my personal contribution.
DR: What was your Arts Victoria grant for?
ES: The Creators Fund grant is a special grant – it's so fantastic! I'm so warmed by the experience – it’s been completely life-changing. Basically, they just fund an artist to continue their practice in a full-time capacity for six months.
DR: What a dream!
ES: Yes, it is a dream. Separate to my queerness, I also have chronic illness which causes a physical disability. I have this auto-immune disease, and one of the most difficult things is that it's very up and down. Some days I'm well enough to do basically whatever – normal things – and no one will have any idea, and other days I can wake up and be completely affected by all my symptoms and am not able to even move. So, I have done what any person who has not been properly supported with an illness does and ignored myself. I say that from a medical care perspective, because the condition I have is also rare and this adds more complications, like my ability to access medical care.
So I've ignored that aspect of my life and I've gone ahead with my career and everything, while really treating the illness as a separate thing. So I wanted to change that and formulate a new practice that incorporates my illness, and find a disability-inclusive mode of being. Because what I was doing before was just not conducive ultimately to my care. I called the activity BODY PARADOX:IN/VISIBLE ILLNESS. I'm exploring what it's like to have a body that holds this paradox, and what it's like to have an invisible illness, and how I can best create more radical works – like radically inclusive works for disability. I'm just at the early stages of that, and it's really exciting. I see the chronic illness as a very clear aspect of my queerness, because to be queer is to have an alternative viewpoint to the heteronormative, and if you ever want to discover an alternative view it's by living in a way that is highly, extremely, and radically different. Living with illness will give you that insight. So, I deeply link that to my queer experience.
DR: You said until the age of 25 you were militantly straight – that’s quite a strong phrase.
I was militantly straight. I identify as female and I grew up with a single parent (my mother), and I went to an all-girls Christian school, and all my male friends were gay. So my dose of the XY chromosome has been immense. And when I incorporated that into my romantic side, that's what I thought at the time. I was just like – no, I need balance.
I had this really weird experience, where I ended up being backstage at a Peaches concert. Which is a really long story, it involves a fur coat and my friend Jack Mannix, who was identifying as female at the time – he was in his pink dress and it was just hilarious, and we ended up partying with Peaches and her dancers at a lock-in at a bar somewhere in Melbourne, and Peaches messaged me the next day and was saying, I’d love you to come to my next show if you want to, let's keep partying, and I just thought, I just can’t believe any of this is happening because I’ve loved Peaches since I was a teenager – Fuck the Pain Away is obviously a cult, queer classic. Peaches and I share the same birthday as well so there's just a lot that I really relate to, and then I got a message that said I’ll put you on the door for the Sydney show if you want to come, and I was like, is this real? So I went to the Sydney show and we end up in a lock-in partying after that …
DR: What’s a lock-in?
ES: It's when you're at a bar and then it closes to everybody except staff and a handful of people that are either dating the staff or whatever, it’s always like 3, 4, 5 am. At night clubs and bars, there’s many hours left, if you work in that industry. Anyway, so we're at another one of these in Sydney and I just had this really harrowing moment. Peaches had left the bar with some Irish guy and I had thought up until then that she was strictly a lesbian, haha. Her female dancer, who I thought was straight, was hooking up with a girl and her gay male dancer was also hooking up with a girl – it was like all genders and all sexualities were mixed on this dance floor at this lock-in. Everyone was just loose, free and with each other and whoever – it was pure sexual and liberated freedom. I remember sitting on this chair, drinking and watching it all and I was suddenly like, Hang on – why the fuck am I straight? What am I doing? My whole world is gay like this, and yet I’m straight. This is a joke I realised I had issues and I had to work it out ASAP. My friend Jye, who is gay, and I went on the plane back from Sydney to Melbourne the next day and I was just crying the whole plane trip – I was like, ‘I’m gay, I’m gay!’ And the flight hostess was like, ‘Ma’am you need to calm down, we can hear that you're gay, but we need you to calm down.’ And Jye was like, ‘Shhh’ and I was like, ‘I WILL NOT BE SILENCED. YOU DO NOT SILENCE A GAY WOMAN!!!’ So in this unexpected way Peaches did what she does best – liberate on mass – and even I had been inadvertently affected. I got a girlfriend two weeks later and the rest is history. I am now militantly queer.
DR: Are you going to move back to Melbourne, do you think?
ES: I think so, but I’ve been living here five years, so it will be like coming back to a whole new place in a way – which is exciting and good. It would be nice to start over now that there's fresh energy because before this I lived in Melbourne for 25 years. I haven’t lived overseas so it can feel a bit ‘much of a muchness’, you know. I mean this is an exciting city, it’s not like a small outskirts’ town or whatever, so maybe that sounds ungrateful. But I'm interested to move back and start afresh for sure.
DR: Does that shift your relationship to Castlemaine and the queer community? Can you see it more from the outside because you are thinking about leaving? Does it change your perspective?
ES: I guess, this is the thing about the nature of being queer – we're all different and I've always been a bit Sigmatic. Do you know what that is – the Sigma?
DR: No, please tell me.
ES: So, it’s often referred to in a wolfpack. It’s about the personality types that exists in a collective. The Alpha male is the wolf that's likely to attack, the Beta is the second down from that – usually his wife, and then there's a whole bunch of different ones – Delta, Omega etc. Sigma is the wolf that leaves the pack and goes solo. So, I'm a bit Sigmatic, I always have been. I was raised as an only child to a single parent so my initial concepts of family are micro – really small. I carry a sense of solitude with me, it is how I understand and navigate life. So when I think about moving to Melbourne and the relationship between my queerness in Castlemaine and my queerness in Melbourne, I don't think it alters that much – just because that’s the way I am. It’s not like I have to say goodbye to the queer tennis club … or stop DJing at the queer night club. Because I'm Sigmatic it will be quite a smooth transition, I think.
DR: I guess I’m talking about how you think about the community here, knowing that you're going to be moving away – do you see it in a different light?
ES: I think I see it as even more special, because the battle and the journey is so much more difficult for a more overt minority. Melbourne is a very queer city if you’re not queer – it's kind of weird. Particularly in my stomping ground of Brunswick.
DR: Have you seen any homophobia or backlash against the queer community or experienced it yourself?
ES: Absolutely, absolutely. Where there's a straight, white man there's going to be some homophobia. What can I say, it's just totally entrenched in that culture. A person of that description would have to work really hard to get away from that. I've heard snide jokes, comments, stuff like that, but I haven't seen or heard of any full-on violence. But I think that ambient homophobia is still a violence even if it's not punches. It’s the energy of not being welcome.
DR: Have you experienced that in Castlemaine?
ES: No, I think because I was militantly straight until I was 25, I don't have a history of being a victim of homophobia specifically. But I have had my share of other exclusions – like my disability and the chronic illness, and I'm also half Asian – there's been lots of things. But being actively called out or excluded because of my sexuality – no. I haven't done anything particularly provocative to those homophobic groups either, so perhaps if I had I would have experienced it.
DR: How do you know they are there?
ES: Because I hear what they say.
DR: Not to you directly?
ES: No, because I’m passing, I don't look like a gay man or a gay woman. Do you know what I mean – the typical look? I'm not butch and I certainly don't look anything like a gay man so I have the semiotics of a straight person.
DR: So you hear about it from other people?
ES: Yeah, or jokes made in my presence as if I would laugh. Like certain holes are for exits not entries, you know – talking about anal sex. That's like a run-of-the-mill, boring focal point particularly for straight men – they are phobic of anuses, particularly anyone who uses them in a sexual way. That's just off the table if you're a straight man.
DR: What happened in that instance?
ES: I was with a group of people that were making these jokes, and I said directly to the person: have you tried anal before? and he was like, what!? and I said, you should try it – you might really like it. That’s my approach to bullying – I like to highlight the ignorance and be like, what the fuck are you talking about? But I also put it back on them to realise how mean and nasty and cruel it is. The science doesn't support these jokes and theories and stuff – maybe it used to, as I think science is very heteronormative. But it's being proven more and more that Queer is a normal option. If I see homophobia occurring, I'm always really vocal about it, I don't care.
DR: Are there instances where that has happened in Castlemaine?
ES: Yeah, just stuff at the pub, where there's lots of white men – they have alcohol, and then they are even more white men-ish. I mean straight white men. I think whiteness is directly linked to Catholicism – which is where a lot of the cancelling of gays has come from – the Bible. The Bible is used as evidence by homophobes that it's wrong – so, that's why I use those generalisations because it's backed up by the indoctrination and the culture of what it's like here in the west.
DR: How about in the street?
ES: No, nothing in the streets that I'm aware of because in Castlemaine everybody's walking around looking weird. There's lots of weird looks, so you wouldn't even know. There’s lots of artists, there’s lots of disabled people, lots of unusual people traipsing the streets. I saw a guy on a penny farthing with nothing on but a beanie and nobody batted an eyelid.
DR: I’ve also been asking people about the importance of language in relation to queerness – either to you personally or in general … Why are you laughing?
ES: Because you're actually asking the worst person about that. I’m laughing because I want to give you a PC answer.
DR: No, just give me your answer. It doesn’t have to be PC – just tell me why you are laughing because it’s interesting – no filter.
ES: I have always really hated the staunch and stuffy traditional use of the English language in general. I always really hated Shakespeare – I studied a lot of Shakespeare because I did theatre.
DR: Where did you do that?
ES: Lots of different places in Melbourne – I started when I was 10 and I was touring by 11, with a company, it was non-fucking stop. I would juggle between school and rehearsals and shows.
DR: So, you were like a ... there’s a name for it …
ES: A child star. Well, I wasn’t a child star, but I certainly had that lifestyle and was constantly encouraged to become one, which never sat well with me because it was so difficult. It was so rough, like an athlete. I was like, this isn't fun – this is hard work. I enjoyed it at the same time but it was not sustainable. Anyway, I've always found language to be very, very stuffy. There's a real classist nature to language, and because I'm a singer and a vocalist, I've studied the voice – the way it operates, and things like sibilance and timbre and accents and stuff like this. It comes with certain semiotics – if you speak in a particular way, it means something – usually about your class. So, even though I'm like a gonzo academic – I don’t believe in elite structures of any kind so I never went to university – I did get a private school education. And I was already reading and academically inclined as a child. So I have a very grounded sense of – not my strategic mind, I want to call it my rational mind. I can think, and I can do academic things, and I enjoy that – I really do. But I try to speak with a little bit of bogan flare intentionally because I don't want to permeate or perpetuate the classist thing that comes with language.
I think this also rolls into your question about queer language, because calling somebody ‘gay’ in the 90s meant dumb and lame. It was like – that's so ‘gay’. There are much more harsh words, but gay is a good entry point for what I'm talking about ultimately. Now that I am ‘gay’, I like to use it, in whatever way I choose. Sometimes I do call something ‘gay’, as in lame and stupid, because I can, and I like to reclaim that. I'm allowed to say that because I'm the thing that’s being oppressed. But other people who don't identify and haven't suffered under that umbrella can't talk like that – do you know what I mean? When I talk about using ‘gay’ as a slur, I do that confidently and very academically – almost informed. I know my place in that, and I've never once been pulled up for doing it, because people are like – well she's gay, and she knows what she’s talking about. I have the best intentions and I'm being funny and I'm being provocative and I'm trying to be progressive. It's kind of lame to break all of that down, the ins and outs of those choices, but I do have a very special love and connection with words and I just think the language thing is fucking ridiculous.
I like the idea that I have freedom of speech and I can say whatever I want. If I say something that offends somebody, or hurts somebody's feelings, and it gets really dark, it's obviously for me to then apologise and understand what kind of problem I have created unnecessarily. But I like the opportunity – people can communicate and find those differences, and find a harmony in the balance, hopefully. We can't just mute ourselves and say this and not say that. How do you explore? How do you progress? How do you change things, if you're not free with your fucking words and trying some new things out? It's like my most favourite artistic practice.
DR: Because you write songs ...?
ES: Yeah, I write songs but all the work that I've done, whether it’s music or performance art or writing or presenting papers, is heavily informed by language – I’m a very wordy person and I always have been. While I was a kid doing all that the performing and training and whatever, at school all my teachers said she's going to be writer, and maybe I will be a writer one day.
Anyway, you asked why I laughed when you asked me about language. I have a very elaborate connection to that and it's so important to me. I think language and communication are the bridge and the barrier. It’s the way into curiosity and learning and connecting with other people, and I wish everybody had confidence in that particular way of connecting. I would love a world that is less – how do I explain it – PC? Where there’s less particular language for certain things. There’s a queer language and there's a straight language there's a blah blah blah language, and everybody's stressed out between those different nomenclatures. I like the overlap, I love exploring different things through speaking, and that's why I said yes to this interview. This is a comfortable realm for me – I like to connect and understand things this way.
I've taken that provocation too far on many occasions for sure and that’s part of the experience. It hasn't always landed well, and those are things for me to learn, but on many occasions it has landed well. It’s a risk that you take when you are queer. If I had to summarise queer in a word it would be ‘risk’ – a risk I'm willing to take.
We live in a time in which there are a lot of options and I say that with an extreme degree of privilege because I live in Australia, even though I have less options than other people because of the nature of my body and my lifestyle and whatever. It’s all much of a muchness in the end, some people have things others don't, but it's still stressful because, with all the options, you really want to be true to and solid about what it is you're trying to do in your lifetime.
DR: Yeah, there’s a lot of pressure, I know what you mean. What's the audience like in Castlemaine for you, do you have an ideal audience in mind for your work?
ES: I like to do it for younger people and for queers and for outsiders – outsider artists. My work’s not for the ceramic circle, I'm not doing slow, beautiful, earthen works. I do electric, explosive, illegal works.
DR: How are they illegal – because of the pyrotechnics? Or are you being metaphoric?
Yeah, metaphorically explosive. In my last work there were scorpions, I was hanging from the roof, I was naked and screaming. I am a disruptive energy – on purpose. I'm not the ceramic circle – I'm trying to provide a bit of electricity and excitement for the concept of being out of step with things and truly liberated from the norm. So, when I think of an audience, it’s people who need support in that way, that want the same thing, which means they are often outsiders and younger people and queer people and … it's exciting to be avant-garde, I guess.
ES: Its like a series of papers that are being presented under different themes and categories. The paper that I'm in the middle of writing is about queer specificity.
DR: What’s it about?
ES: Well obviously once you are queer, you understand it, but from the outside, if you're straight or you're not involved in queer culture in any way, you have a really set idea about what queer is and how it presents. Even to the point where it's strictly a sexuality – like that's all it means. My experience of being queer has nothing to do with that – sexuality is one aspect, but it really is just one. There's so many. Then I bring in things like capitalism that takes the rainbow and gives it an agenda, so on Pride week, everything is covered in rainbows all of a sudden, it’s commodifying the culture. My paper is really talking about my fundamental belief that queer is not specific. But it's being sold on and …
DR: Homogenised?
ES: Yeah, homogenised – and that's the most ironic take away from queer, that it's homogeneous. It's just not, unless you call inclusivity homogenous. So, it's going to be pretty scathing and I'm going to do a performance with it as well.
DR: What’s the performance component?
ES: Well, I'm going to do a music aspect, I want to do a kind of drag. Ironically I’m really into this song by Dannii Minogue. It’s a ridiculous song called I Begin to Wonder, I don’t know if you know it but …
DR: I don’t – I’m embarrassed to say. I should know it.
ES: Don’t be – I don't know of anyone else who knows this song but I certainly do. I'm interested in re-working it in a drag sort of way, because I think that the message of that song and also the music video ...
DR: When did that happen?
ES: In 2003 or something.
DR: That was a good era.
ES: Yeah, that was a good era, I was 13. But I think the message of that song and the music video is super camp. Even though it's so obscenely ridiculous and kind of regressed, it really speaks to the energy of what it feels like to be queer sometimes, in a world that’s trying to make straight lines out of everything, when you don’t naturally view the world that way.
DR: How long have you lived in Castlemaine?
ES: I’ve lived there since 2019, but I'm considering moving back to Melbourne.
DR: How come?
ES: I moved to Castlemaine after a breakup. It was one of those crisis moves – I just had to go somewhere else. So, I spent a year processing that and trying to evolve my life, post break up. It was somebody I was with for a long time – three years – so it felt like a divorce … and then we went into the pandemic. I feel like I had lost a bit of autonomy, and it was certainly not the worst place to land at all, but now that I have options, I'm considering taking them.
DR: What’s your experience of the queer community in Castlemaine?
ES: It's very scarce, but I think respected. When I say scarce, I guess I'm comparing that to my experience of growing up in Melbourne where the sheer number of queer people is ten-fold – maybe thirty-fold. I've always been around the queer community, because I've studied music, and theatre, and dance and art – and these are magnets for the queer. So I went from that to being in a small country town … Prior to that I was in the Macedon Ranges.
My other observation about the Castlemaine queer community is that there’s a lot of lesbians in the country, as opposed to any other type of queer. When I think about the queer people that I'm friends with in Castlemaine, there's a bit of tokenising. Some people I know are kind of labelled as the town gay. But because they're not being bashed and killed off like the old rhetoric of the town-gay – well, I don’t want to say the ‘old’ rhetoric as it’s still happening in certain places – but here the tokenisation becomes a kind of nice thing. You know, in certain cultures you have elders, and they stand out. They have their points of difference for good reasons. So it’s scarce but there’s a kind of respect and reverence in a country town because they’re kind of like the town shaman, or the town elder or something.
DR: Is that tokenisation from within the community or …?
ES: Yes, so maybe tokenisation is too much of a harsh word, but I guess it ends up being like that when you're singled out.
DR: Is that something you have experienced?
ES: Not so much me. Because I identify as bisexual, and there's less semiotics of queer to me, I think. I'm not like a gay male that has the quintessential gay voice, or expressive clothing.
DR: Not as clear-cut
ES: Not as clear-cut! but I'm sure that if I presented as louder, that would have happened, yeah.
DR: Can you explain further …
ES: I think that there's a certain loudness that comes with a sense of deprivation. If you are not being seen and heard, as a natural survival thing you’re going to start to become a bit louder and a bit more colourful, and hold your ground a bit more because you need to respect and support yourself, in a way. That's really the psychology of ‘the only gay in the village’. I respect that, I think it's really brave. If you're faced with an isolating experience, because you're not the same culture as the majority around you, you have a choice. Its either ‘if you can't beat them join them’ so you diminish your shine and you diminish yourself for safety, or you say, fuck that, I'm going to be exactly how I am – in fact tenfold. I see a problem in that reaction and response, but I see more of a problem in muting yourself.
That’s something that I've always been really drawn to in the queer community, because I was militantly straight ‘til I was 25 – in terms of the sexuality aspect of my queerness. My attraction to the queer community, before I identified as being a part of it concretely, was to that kind of bravery and that thing of, I don't give a fuck, this is who I am, this is who we are. I think it's the braver choice and that's really cool …
Anyway, back to this scenario: and then there's the other side of it where, as a queer person (being the only gay in the village), you choose whether you're going to be muted, or whether you're going to be loud about it, and stand your ground. I think the reception of that in Castlemaine is really quite positive, and people are really excited when these particular people are there. It’s like an elder, like someone special is there. I think that's really cool because it is special to be queer – still, at this point of modernity, because the majority is still very heteronormative. So, it is still a powerful position, a position where you can become empowered. There’s still that conflict there.
DR: You mentioned earlier that you still feel there is a space of empowerment within the queer community that hasn't been completely subsumed …
ES: Yeah, of course there always will be – of course, of course. I think it just gets harder – as you know it’s an economic thing ultimately and it gets harder if your human rights are removed or made difficult. Your energy is going to go into fighting and defending that. It can be easy to forget what you were doing and where you came from, and why you're doing it, when there are other massive threats. Right now there’s like massive economic threats to everybody. I heard last night that petrol is going to go up by 22 cents a litre tomorrow!
DR: And the impact of that on regional communities would be huge …
ES: Yes, it's ridiculous. So, in the end the economy does have an effect on even queer culture, because people are having to fight for these other things, as opposed to nurturing and practising their own culture. What I'm trying to say is that the queer culture is kind of cancelled in a corporate and capitalistic sense. It's only just recently that they've realised there's enough of us to make money from, so now everything’s got rainbows on it – but that's the only reason. We’re still the minority, certainly the economic minority so it's a real shame that that's all wrapped up in it. I hate that. But of course the queer community never dies – we are the most adaptable. Our whole thing is about adaptability and compassion and togetherness and I think human beings have proven time and time again that when you have that attitude, and when you come together, you can find alternative solutions. It doesn't matter what the force is – unless it's something like nature, we can’t win against that. But in terms of mind frames, there is something to be said for community effort. I think the queer community is an actual community.
DR: What is your involvement in the queer community in Castlemaine – day to day?
ES: I think – apart from just spreading the good word ...
DR: Standing on the street corner?
ES: I would if someone gave me a microphone. I just hang out with fellow queers. I'm not involved in groups – like there’s a queer tennis group.
DR: There’s a lot of queer groups, there’s the Falcons and the choir, I keep hearing of new ones, and now there’s a tennis one ... do you play in that?
ES: No, I’m not really part of those group things. Art is my big contribution – and spreading the good word. I do both those things quite loudly, so that's my personal contribution.
DR: What was your Arts Victoria grant for?
ES: The Creators Fund grant is a special grant – it's so fantastic! I'm so warmed by the experience – it’s been completely life-changing. Basically, they just fund an artist to continue their practice in a full-time capacity for six months.
DR: What a dream!
ES: Yes, it is a dream. Separate to my queerness, I also have chronic illness which causes a physical disability. I have this auto-immune disease, and one of the most difficult things is that it's very up and down. Some days I'm well enough to do basically whatever – normal things – and no one will have any idea, and other days I can wake up and be completely affected by all my symptoms and am not able to even move. So, I have done what any person who has not been properly supported with an illness does and ignored myself. I say that from a medical care perspective, because the condition I have is also rare and this adds more complications, like my ability to access medical care.
So I've ignored that aspect of my life and I've gone ahead with my career and everything, while really treating the illness as a separate thing. So I wanted to change that and formulate a new practice that incorporates my illness, and find a disability-inclusive mode of being. Because what I was doing before was just not conducive ultimately to my care. I called the activity BODY PARADOX:IN/VISIBLE ILLNESS. I'm exploring what it's like to have a body that holds this paradox, and what it's like to have an invisible illness, and how I can best create more radical works – like radically inclusive works for disability. I'm just at the early stages of that, and it's really exciting. I see the chronic illness as a very clear aspect of my queerness, because to be queer is to have an alternative viewpoint to the heteronormative, and if you ever want to discover an alternative view it's by living in a way that is highly, extremely, and radically different. Living with illness will give you that insight. So, I deeply link that to my queer experience.
DR: You said until the age of 25 you were militantly straight – that’s quite a strong phrase.
I was militantly straight. I identify as female and I grew up with a single parent (my mother), and I went to an all-girls Christian school, and all my male friends were gay. So my dose of the XY chromosome has been immense. And when I incorporated that into my romantic side, that's what I thought at the time. I was just like – no, I need balance.
I had this really weird experience, where I ended up being backstage at a Peaches concert. Which is a really long story, it involves a fur coat and my friend Jack Mannix, who was identifying as female at the time – he was in his pink dress and it was just hilarious, and we ended up partying with Peaches and her dancers at a lock-in at a bar somewhere in Melbourne, and Peaches messaged me the next day and was saying, I’d love you to come to my next show if you want to, let's keep partying, and I just thought, I just can’t believe any of this is happening because I’ve loved Peaches since I was a teenager – Fuck the Pain Away is obviously a cult, queer classic. Peaches and I share the same birthday as well so there's just a lot that I really relate to, and then I got a message that said I’ll put you on the door for the Sydney show if you want to come, and I was like, is this real? So I went to the Sydney show and we end up in a lock-in partying after that …
DR: What’s a lock-in?
ES: It's when you're at a bar and then it closes to everybody except staff and a handful of people that are either dating the staff or whatever, it’s always like 3, 4, 5 am. At night clubs and bars, there’s many hours left, if you work in that industry. Anyway, so we're at another one of these in Sydney and I just had this really harrowing moment. Peaches had left the bar with some Irish guy and I had thought up until then that she was strictly a lesbian, haha. Her female dancer, who I thought was straight, was hooking up with a girl and her gay male dancer was also hooking up with a girl – it was like all genders and all sexualities were mixed on this dance floor at this lock-in. Everyone was just loose, free and with each other and whoever – it was pure sexual and liberated freedom. I remember sitting on this chair, drinking and watching it all and I was suddenly like, Hang on – why the fuck am I straight? What am I doing? My whole world is gay like this, and yet I’m straight. This is a joke I realised I had issues and I had to work it out ASAP. My friend Jye, who is gay, and I went on the plane back from Sydney to Melbourne the next day and I was just crying the whole plane trip – I was like, ‘I’m gay, I’m gay!’ And the flight hostess was like, ‘Ma’am you need to calm down, we can hear that you're gay, but we need you to calm down.’ And Jye was like, ‘Shhh’ and I was like, ‘I WILL NOT BE SILENCED. YOU DO NOT SILENCE A GAY WOMAN!!!’ So in this unexpected way Peaches did what she does best – liberate on mass – and even I had been inadvertently affected. I got a girlfriend two weeks later and the rest is history. I am now militantly queer.
DR: Are you going to move back to Melbourne, do you think?
ES: I think so, but I’ve been living here five years, so it will be like coming back to a whole new place in a way – which is exciting and good. It would be nice to start over now that there's fresh energy because before this I lived in Melbourne for 25 years. I haven’t lived overseas so it can feel a bit ‘much of a muchness’, you know. I mean this is an exciting city, it’s not like a small outskirts’ town or whatever, so maybe that sounds ungrateful. But I'm interested to move back and start afresh for sure.
DR: Does that shift your relationship to Castlemaine and the queer community? Can you see it more from the outside because you are thinking about leaving? Does it change your perspective?
ES: I guess, this is the thing about the nature of being queer – we're all different and I've always been a bit Sigmatic. Do you know what that is – the Sigma?
DR: No, please tell me.
ES: So, it’s often referred to in a wolfpack. It’s about the personality types that exists in a collective. The Alpha male is the wolf that's likely to attack, the Beta is the second down from that – usually his wife, and then there's a whole bunch of different ones – Delta, Omega etc. Sigma is the wolf that leaves the pack and goes solo. So, I'm a bit Sigmatic, I always have been. I was raised as an only child to a single parent so my initial concepts of family are micro – really small. I carry a sense of solitude with me, it is how I understand and navigate life. So when I think about moving to Melbourne and the relationship between my queerness in Castlemaine and my queerness in Melbourne, I don't think it alters that much – just because that’s the way I am. It’s not like I have to say goodbye to the queer tennis club … or stop DJing at the queer night club. Because I'm Sigmatic it will be quite a smooth transition, I think.
DR: I guess I’m talking about how you think about the community here, knowing that you're going to be moving away – do you see it in a different light?
ES: I think I see it as even more special, because the battle and the journey is so much more difficult for a more overt minority. Melbourne is a very queer city if you’re not queer – it's kind of weird. Particularly in my stomping ground of Brunswick.
DR: Have you seen any homophobia or backlash against the queer community or experienced it yourself?
ES: Absolutely, absolutely. Where there's a straight, white man there's going to be some homophobia. What can I say, it's just totally entrenched in that culture. A person of that description would have to work really hard to get away from that. I've heard snide jokes, comments, stuff like that, but I haven't seen or heard of any full-on violence. But I think that ambient homophobia is still a violence even if it's not punches. It’s the energy of not being welcome.
DR: Have you experienced that in Castlemaine?
ES: No, I think because I was militantly straight until I was 25, I don't have a history of being a victim of homophobia specifically. But I have had my share of other exclusions – like my disability and the chronic illness, and I'm also half Asian – there's been lots of things. But being actively called out or excluded because of my sexuality – no. I haven't done anything particularly provocative to those homophobic groups either, so perhaps if I had I would have experienced it.
DR: How do you know they are there?
ES: Because I hear what they say.
DR: Not to you directly?
ES: No, because I’m passing, I don't look like a gay man or a gay woman. Do you know what I mean – the typical look? I'm not butch and I certainly don't look anything like a gay man so I have the semiotics of a straight person.
DR: So you hear about it from other people?
ES: Yeah, or jokes made in my presence as if I would laugh. Like certain holes are for exits not entries, you know – talking about anal sex. That's like a run-of-the-mill, boring focal point particularly for straight men – they are phobic of anuses, particularly anyone who uses them in a sexual way. That's just off the table if you're a straight man.
DR: What happened in that instance?
ES: I was with a group of people that were making these jokes, and I said directly to the person: have you tried anal before? and he was like, what!? and I said, you should try it – you might really like it. That’s my approach to bullying – I like to highlight the ignorance and be like, what the fuck are you talking about? But I also put it back on them to realise how mean and nasty and cruel it is. The science doesn't support these jokes and theories and stuff – maybe it used to, as I think science is very heteronormative. But it's being proven more and more that Queer is a normal option. If I see homophobia occurring, I'm always really vocal about it, I don't care.
DR: Are there instances where that has happened in Castlemaine?
ES: Yeah, just stuff at the pub, where there's lots of white men – they have alcohol, and then they are even more white men-ish. I mean straight white men. I think whiteness is directly linked to Catholicism – which is where a lot of the cancelling of gays has come from – the Bible. The Bible is used as evidence by homophobes that it's wrong – so, that's why I use those generalisations because it's backed up by the indoctrination and the culture of what it's like here in the west.
DR: How about in the street?
ES: No, nothing in the streets that I'm aware of because in Castlemaine everybody's walking around looking weird. There's lots of weird looks, so you wouldn't even know. There’s lots of artists, there’s lots of disabled people, lots of unusual people traipsing the streets. I saw a guy on a penny farthing with nothing on but a beanie and nobody batted an eyelid.
DR: I’ve also been asking people about the importance of language in relation to queerness – either to you personally or in general … Why are you laughing?
ES: Because you're actually asking the worst person about that. I’m laughing because I want to give you a PC answer.
DR: No, just give me your answer. It doesn’t have to be PC – just tell me why you are laughing because it’s interesting – no filter.
ES: I have always really hated the staunch and stuffy traditional use of the English language in general. I always really hated Shakespeare – I studied a lot of Shakespeare because I did theatre.
DR: Where did you do that?
ES: Lots of different places in Melbourne – I started when I was 10 and I was touring by 11, with a company, it was non-fucking stop. I would juggle between school and rehearsals and shows.
DR: So, you were like a ... there’s a name for it …
ES: A child star. Well, I wasn’t a child star, but I certainly had that lifestyle and was constantly encouraged to become one, which never sat well with me because it was so difficult. It was so rough, like an athlete. I was like, this isn't fun – this is hard work. I enjoyed it at the same time but it was not sustainable. Anyway, I've always found language to be very, very stuffy. There's a real classist nature to language, and because I'm a singer and a vocalist, I've studied the voice – the way it operates, and things like sibilance and timbre and accents and stuff like this. It comes with certain semiotics – if you speak in a particular way, it means something – usually about your class. So, even though I'm like a gonzo academic – I don’t believe in elite structures of any kind so I never went to university – I did get a private school education. And I was already reading and academically inclined as a child. So I have a very grounded sense of – not my strategic mind, I want to call it my rational mind. I can think, and I can do academic things, and I enjoy that – I really do. But I try to speak with a little bit of bogan flare intentionally because I don't want to permeate or perpetuate the classist thing that comes with language.
I think this also rolls into your question about queer language, because calling somebody ‘gay’ in the 90s meant dumb and lame. It was like – that's so ‘gay’. There are much more harsh words, but gay is a good entry point for what I'm talking about ultimately. Now that I am ‘gay’, I like to use it, in whatever way I choose. Sometimes I do call something ‘gay’, as in lame and stupid, because I can, and I like to reclaim that. I'm allowed to say that because I'm the thing that’s being oppressed. But other people who don't identify and haven't suffered under that umbrella can't talk like that – do you know what I mean? When I talk about using ‘gay’ as a slur, I do that confidently and very academically – almost informed. I know my place in that, and I've never once been pulled up for doing it, because people are like – well she's gay, and she knows what she’s talking about. I have the best intentions and I'm being funny and I'm being provocative and I'm trying to be progressive. It's kind of lame to break all of that down, the ins and outs of those choices, but I do have a very special love and connection with words and I just think the language thing is fucking ridiculous.
I like the idea that I have freedom of speech and I can say whatever I want. If I say something that offends somebody, or hurts somebody's feelings, and it gets really dark, it's obviously for me to then apologise and understand what kind of problem I have created unnecessarily. But I like the opportunity – people can communicate and find those differences, and find a harmony in the balance, hopefully. We can't just mute ourselves and say this and not say that. How do you explore? How do you progress? How do you change things, if you're not free with your fucking words and trying some new things out? It's like my most favourite artistic practice.
DR: Because you write songs ...?
ES: Yeah, I write songs but all the work that I've done, whether it’s music or performance art or writing or presenting papers, is heavily informed by language – I’m a very wordy person and I always have been. While I was a kid doing all that the performing and training and whatever, at school all my teachers said she's going to be writer, and maybe I will be a writer one day.
Anyway, you asked why I laughed when you asked me about language. I have a very elaborate connection to that and it's so important to me. I think language and communication are the bridge and the barrier. It’s the way into curiosity and learning and connecting with other people, and I wish everybody had confidence in that particular way of connecting. I would love a world that is less – how do I explain it – PC? Where there’s less particular language for certain things. There’s a queer language and there's a straight language there's a blah blah blah language, and everybody's stressed out between those different nomenclatures. I like the overlap, I love exploring different things through speaking, and that's why I said yes to this interview. This is a comfortable realm for me – I like to connect and understand things this way.
I've taken that provocation too far on many occasions for sure and that’s part of the experience. It hasn't always landed well, and those are things for me to learn, but on many occasions it has landed well. It’s a risk that you take when you are queer. If I had to summarise queer in a word it would be ‘risk’ – a risk I'm willing to take.
We live in a time in which there are a lot of options and I say that with an extreme degree of privilege because I live in Australia, even though I have less options than other people because of the nature of my body and my lifestyle and whatever. It’s all much of a muchness in the end, some people have things others don't, but it's still stressful because, with all the options, you really want to be true to and solid about what it is you're trying to do in your lifetime.
DR: Yeah, there’s a lot of pressure, I know what you mean. What's the audience like in Castlemaine for you, do you have an ideal audience in mind for your work?
ES: I like to do it for younger people and for queers and for outsiders – outsider artists. My work’s not for the ceramic circle, I'm not doing slow, beautiful, earthen works. I do electric, explosive, illegal works.
DR: How are they illegal – because of the pyrotechnics? Or are you being metaphoric?
Yeah, metaphorically explosive. In my last work there were scorpions, I was hanging from the roof, I was naked and screaming. I am a disruptive energy – on purpose. I'm not the ceramic circle – I'm trying to provide a bit of electricity and excitement for the concept of being out of step with things and truly liberated from the norm. So, when I think of an audience, it’s people who need support in that way, that want the same thing, which means they are often outsiders and younger people and queer people and … it's exciting to be avant-garde, I guess.