One Can Make a Difference (6 page)

Tarra loved the sanctuary too. With her, freedom wasn't new. Even as we traveled together before the sanctuary existed, I would stop every day when on the road, somewhere interesting, let her out of her trailer so she could walk around, perhaps playing in a creek, river, or field. She was like a dog in that way, and we were best friends. Now, at the sanctuary we have eighteen elephants. They have come from all over: fifteen are Asian, three are African. Some of the needy elephants that come here are overwhelmed at first, shocked by the idea that they are free.

They are incredibly pleased and they all eventually become quite accustomed to it. After all, that's how it should be.

There is a Persian proverb, “With kindness and a smile you can lead an elephant by a thread.” This is the founding principle that guides us at the Elephant Sanctuary: respect the elephants and they will do their best to respect you.

LADY BUNNY

I Just Want to Be Me

Lady Bunny has a wicked sense of humor and lives a “wicked” life, as she'll
point out below. “She” is also built like a Mack truck, standing nearly seven
feet tall in her skyscraper heels and bouffant updo. With legs so long they should
be insured (Bunny claims she tones them by raising them over her head whenever
possible), it is hard, as with a Scotsman's kilt, to resist the thought of taking
a look up that micro-mini skirt to see how on earth she has so successfully
hidden “her” various bits and bobs.The drag queen founder of Wigstock—New
York's festival of drag—is quite a sight!

I first met Bunny (Jon Ingle behind all the pancake makeup), or The
Bunion as she calls herself, at a PETA event. When one of the Humanitarian
of the Year awardees graciously thanked his wife from the podium and
the spotlight scanned the audience for a glimpse of this wonderful other half,
Bunny leapt to her feet to take the bow as if she were the honoree's wife. Paul
McCartney, who was in the audience, howled with laughter! Later, I went to
her “Taste of Bunny” show at the Fez in New York and found myself grinning
from the moment her introductory “credits” were announced: thanks for
makeup to Sherwin Williams, body by Crunch (Nestlé's Crunch), and hair
by Weed Eater. Over the years, I've learned that Bunny is always willing to
help anyone who needs help, and not just with a quickie in the stairwell. She
adds a unique contribution to this book because she has used her talents and
chutzpah to challenge sexual stereotypes in the least serious ways imaginable:
to have transexuality and homosexuality seen as something to celebrate rather
than scorn.

W
hy did I become a drag queen, you ask? I say, well, honey, I don't know exactly, but I was sketching Marlo Thomas's flip from
That Girl
before I was six years old, as well as demanding dolls from my nervous religious parents. Years later, they confessed that they were worried that giving me dolls might make me gay. I told them,“If I was asking for them, I was already gay!” I've always identified with feminine things, even before I wore them myself. As a child, I wore my hair long and was sometimes confused for a girl. At ten or eleven, one Halloween I dressed as “a woman” with my best friend, Paul, as “my husband.” With each doorway that I darkened, the fact that I wore a dress, some of mom's heels and a (totally tragic and frumpy) women's wig confirmed many of my neighbors' suspicions about my budding sexuality. Later, as was the fashion in the New Wave era, I wore makeup, and the wigs and heels weren't far behind. Becoming a “gender-dysphoric freak” struck me as a very natural progression.

Performing came naturally as well. As a little boy, I'd often tie a sheet between trees in our backyard and invite the neighbors over to watch my plays. I'm sure they were pitiful productions, but it's telling that, offering nothing, I was able to round up my sister and other kids in the neighborhood to perform. Since my dad taught at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, I was sometimes called upon to play the child part in college productions, too. Were these half-assed reviews the foreshadowing of Wigstock?

In
The Winter's Tale
, I played the prince. Wrong gender, but still royalty, honey! In grade school, I was cast in the school variety show as a snake charmer. If I could have looked into a crystal ball I would have seen that in the years to come I would “charm” many “snakes” indeed! I convinced my mom that slanted eyeliner, a la Barbara Eden on
I Dream of Jeannie
, would “exoticize” my look; together with a turban and harem pants, it might as well have been drag. I assumed that I'd continue acting, but when college hit and I was cast in the supremely dull
Our Town
as baseball player number two, I remember thinking, “I've been forced to act straight throughout high school. I'm ready for some more flamboyant parts—this isn't ME!” Plus, an actor is a mere pawn. A drag queen is able to be her own costume designer, choreographer, makeup artist, hairstylist, scriptwriter, arranger, director, etc. So I have more input and control with what I do, not that I'm an impossible, controlling monster bitch or anything!

And why is Wigstock so important? Hmm. Well, the only thing worse than sounding pompous is an old battleaxe like me coyly batting her long, fake lashes in a failed attempt at false modesty, so let me brag a bit about starting Wigstock! In 1982, I moved to Atlanta to study at Georgia State, but who needs a degree to become the town drunk! Besides, I found the future superstar drag queen RuPaul and his cast of crazies far more interesting than the college curriculum of an undecided major. I tagged along on one of Ru's trips to perform at NYC's Pyramid Club and never left, rising from the ranks of go-go dancer to Wigstock organizer. I organized the very first one—an all-day drag festival of dancing and music and stage acts, including me as the emcee—in 1985. It was supposed to be a little transvestite festival and about a thousand people showed up! Everyone wanted to see or be seen or both. We had terrific acts every year, from recording artists like Deborah Harry, Deee-lite, and Vickie-Sue (“Turn the Beat Around”) Robinson to big name queens like RuPaul, Lipsynka, and John Cameron Mitchell as Hedwig.Wigstock continued to grow and probably reached its zenith with the 1995 release of the thoughtfully named documentary
Wigstock: The Movie
.

I am proud of several things. I was single-handedly responsible for the massive East Coast syphilis outbreak, for example—oh, just kidding—but organizing Wigstock is even more important than that. And it lasted twenty years, not a bad run for New York City. For a couple of years we had terrible weather—it's hard to clap and hold an umbrella at the same time—and we lost money hand over fist. At present we've stopped putting the festival on as an annual event, but who knows what'll happen in the future. Wigstock transformed people. It allowed me to bring a lot of zany, bewigged freaks together in the light of day for a very memorable annual blowout bash—even the somber
New York Times
wrote that “the karma was dynamite.” And it allowed me to use my smart-ass humor—with the emphasis on ass, of course.

SUE COE

Illuminating the Truth

Sue Coe's work shocks and upsets people, in no small part because it encompasses
such shied-away-from subject matter as the Ku Klux Klan, apartheid,
Malcolm X, skinheads,AIDS, labor and sweatshop conditions, war, and animal
rights. Her paintings are whole depictions, rather than glimpses, of what goes
on in places most of us will never set foot in because we never, ever want to go
there, physically or mentally. Once Sue Coe draws you inside them, through
her work, any comfortable view of the world you might have had is whisked
away. Somehow, too, her work is alive with sounds. Opening her book,
Sheep of Fools
, I can hear the sheep boarding the multitiered, open-decked ships taking
them to the markets of the Middle East; in
How to Commit Suicide in South Africa
I can even hear the escaping breath of the men who, because
of the color of their skin, are sent plummeting into the abyss. The sounds aren't
there on the page, but I hear them; that is how powerfully she paints.

Sue believes her paintings are beautiful for reasons she explains in this
verse:

Are these pictures all too dark for you?

Too much black? Too much blue?

Too much squalor?

Too much crime in this landscape of our time?

Then open your eyes,
X out their lies,
and work with your minds, your hearts, your sinews for a better world.

It would seem many people are keen to embrace Sue's “better world.”
Trained at the prestigious Royal College of Art in London, her work has
appeared in numerous publications including the
New York Times
, the
New Yorker
,
Art News
,
Time
,
Newsweek
, and
Mother Jones
. Her paintings
have been included in the permanent collections of countless museums including
the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney,
and the Arts Council of Great Britain. Yet in spite of all her acclaim, what Sue
really cares about is telling the truth.

O
ur house, when I was growing up, was in front of a hog factory farm, and one block away from a slaughterhouse. The pigs were kept in steel sheds. In front of the sheds was a chained German shepherd; he was chained for my entire childhood. The chain would rattle and get caught up in the dog's legs. Lights would go on in the sheds at night, illuminating our bedroom, and the pigs would start to scream. It was a very rundown place, and my sister and I were scared of the German shepherd. There were a lot of rats, and they would get the exterminator to come and put down poison. In the morning, we would find moles that had been killed, and would examine their soft fur and perfect paws.

One day, a small pig escaped the slaughterhouse, and she ran in and out of the traffic, desperate to get away. Men in white aprons, covered in blood, ran after her. Small groups of people congregated to watch, and they started to laugh and point. I asked my mother why this was so funny, and she said it was not funny, the pig was going to be caught and killed. My parents grew up in England during World War II and always told me that they didn't know about the death camps; what the Fascists had done came as a total shock. They survived the German bombs as teenagers, and because of this, everything in their lives was related to the war. Many buildings where we lived outside of London were still in ruins, entire rooms would be exposed, showing a fireplace, and photographs on the mantelpiece, staircases intact, but no walls. Our questions as children weren't really answered about how this could have happened, but even without their input I made the connection between the hell of the war and the hell of what was going on next door to us.

When it came time to slaughter the pigs, which would happen every six months or so, there would be a terrible noise at night. They'd whip the pigs to get them into the truck, and they would go down the road to the slaughterhouse. I wanted to know why this was happening, and my parents said this was “food” and to “grow up,” and not worry about it. Yet here we were, living next door to a death camp, but for a different species. And then I started to understand why this could happen, how we humans can develop a mechanism to deny reality. Our behaviors are learned for the most part, and we learn early on as children that some lives are lesser than others. A spider web can be torn down, a mouse trapped, a frog dissected, a deer in the garden becomes a nuisance, a rat becomes “vermin,” an undocumented worker becomes an “infestation.” If we accept that some lives are more valuable and important than others, then we can be easily manipulated by corporations into killing total strangers in wars, and slaughtering billions of other animals for no logical reason other than profit and power for a tiny minority. Therefore, why not a pig?

When I was about ten years old, I went with my friend to the door of the slaughterhouse and demanded to be showed around, as I wanted to know what was happening. The workers in the slaughterhouse treated our request seriously, they were not patronizing, and they did show us around, they showed us everything that happens in the process of slaughter. The vision of the escaped pig couldn't be ignored; she became louder and louder in my mind, along with the sad chained dog, the mice that were kept in the school laboratory, the fishes in plastic bags, won as prizes at the fair, the old elephant at the traveling circus.

This experience as a child sent me on my lifetime's mission that was to be an artist, and to reveal what was being concealed. To get into places that have closed doors, and to give art the potential of changing the world, not just reflecting it. Truth is beauty, to me. If the art is honest, and shows the reality, then it is beautiful. As an artist, I have drawn in slaughterhouses, stockyards, prisons, AIDS hospices, night courts, and sweatshops. A pencil is not threatening to people, they can see what I am drawing, and can witness the process, and if they want the drawing, they can have it. I think that people don't want to go into slaughterhouses, because they say “there is nothing I can do about it,” but what they really mean is they don't want to be a witness without power, because that would put them in the same position animals are in for their entire lives. To witness shocking events is to be traumatized on some level, and what artists do who depict these scenes is retraumatize the viewer. It's a way for the viewer who cannot gain access to a slaughterhouse, or prison, or miners' strike, or women's shelter, or canned hunt, or be in a war, all those sights we are denied by the mass media, to access that information at their own pace, without being told what to think. It's a way for the artist to share that vision and for the victims not to be alone; their voice is heard, even if it is by only one other. When I drew women in prison who had HIV/AIDS, I was frightened of the women, but then I realized that it was their lives that were frightening, not them. It only took a few moments to comprehend that I could be in their shoes, a few moments of reality to undo the propaganda we are fed.The seemingly conquered and oppressed are always kinder than the conquistadors.