Grayson Perry’s show about the interdependence of identity (which was more like codependence).
The blurby bit
What makes you, you? Is there a part deep inside of you that no one understands? Have you found your tribe or are you a unique human being? Or is it more complicated than that? In the last few decades a combination of individualism, the internet and the culture war has, for many of us, brought our feelings about our own and other people’s identity to the fore.
Grayson Perry, white, male, heterosexual, able bodied, English, southerner, baby boomer and member of the establishment takes a mischievous look at the nature of identity in his new show that will make you laugh, shudder, and reassess who you really are.
From Fane Productions website
Background
Grayson Perry was made famous in 2003 when he won the Turner Prize*. Twenty years later, in June 2023, Perry was knighted and attended the ceremony dressed as his alter ego ‘Claire’.
*For comparison see the winner of this year’s prize, won by a trans-identified female, which makes Perry’s shit pottery look more than half decent.
In an interview with the Guardian in 2014, shortly after collecting his OBE, Perry admitted that dressing up in women’s clothes was still an explicitly sexual activity for him. Wearing flared frocks has no doubt had the additional advantage of hiding any tumescent situations.
Does he still find it sexually exciting? “Oh yes,” he shouts excitedly. “Yeah!” But there is a problem, he says, with being a very public tranny. You mean, you couldn’t be seen at the Royal Academy in a nice frock and a stiffy? He nods enthusiastically. “You couldn’t do it. If I could manage it, I’m sure I’d be thinking how to do it. But I can’t.” He pauses. “My days of a spontaneous erection are long gone, anyway,” he adds a little sadly.
From Guardian interview in 2014 – Grayson Perry: ‘Just because you don’t have a dress on doesn’t stop you being a tranny’
And this photo from 2007, shows Perry at a children’s charity event (evident in the background detail), wearing a black dildo.
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl
The memoir is an ‘as told to’ affair and pretty well written by Wendy Jones, following hours of recorded of conversations with Perry. It covers quite fully his childhood and what he believes are the causes of him crossdressing.
Humiliation is one of the most powerful turn-ons for me.
pg 47, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl
His mother was open with him about her sex life and was ‘robustly sexual’ with her husband in front of him. The pornographic magazine Forum would be left out so that he could read it. We are told of his early sexual fantasies – pretending to have casts so that he was unable to move his limbs (pg 56). Most significantly he describes his ‘first sexual experience’. This was at the age of seven when he tethered a noose around his neck, fashioned from his pyjamas, to his headboard (page 51). The next paragraph goes onto describe the first pornographic story he had ever read, which was about a man wearing frilly knickers and being strangled by a prostitute. It is not entirely clear whether the incident of the story-reading is directly related to the incident of him fashioning his own noose, and no disambiguation is attempted.
Perry would also play bondage games with his teddy bear. By twelve years of age he had begun to crossdress.
However, Perry has rather rejected that he has developed a fetish because he was a child exposed to inappropriate pornographic material alongside family disconnection, instead subscribing to the theory that fetishes have existed since ‘time immemorial’. He claims to believe that most people have them and that having one allows the mind ‘to think metaphorically’ so that the unconscious can get want it wants emotionally (page 58).
[Little girls] are precious dollies, dressed up like cute pets; merely standing there and looking gorgeous is enough. I love it if a woman treats me like a little girl.
page 50, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl
On his membership of the Beaumont Society, he tells that he had to be vetted by two members in person before being allowed to join and that he took his girlfriend along to the first meeting. He doesn’t give the year but it seems to have been early 80s. We are not told that it was an exclusive club only for heterosexual men and rabidly anti-gay, nor how long he stayed a member, but we are left with the impression it was a good long while. Certainly he attended meetings. He also read the Beaumont Bulletin* and would have been aware, even if only tangentially, of the Society’s foray into activism, as the Gendys Conference started in 1990. I suspect the Society would have been very interested in him, being a famous crossdresser.
*I written a bit about the Beaumont Society’s bulletin here.
On other members, he clearly has mixed feelings, telling us that the leaders of the group were the ones which passed best (which doesn’t explain men like Alice Purnell and Christine Burns). He alternatively claims crossdressing is only about men in women’s clothes but also endorses the idea that one can transition.
Transvestism is not about being a woman; it’s about dressing as a woman.
[A few paragraphs later]
Many older trannies go full time […] they decide, ‘I’ll live as a woman for the rest of my life’.
page 151, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl
Interestingly also he refers to the crossdresser as the ‘trans-gendered man’ (page 150), the book was first published in 2006 and there is no use of the phrase trans women, non-binary, asexual, etc.
Onto the show
Impressions
I have to say it was very brave to do over two hours of comedy, when he is an amateur comedian at best. Lots of it could have been cut – the pointless audience participation for starters, which was no more than a filler that Perry relied on, to drive things awkwardly on. Typically the youngsters loved the chance to fiddle about with their smart phones, the older ones – not so much. Only about half the people in the section I was sitting in bothered to engage with the Slido app, though it didn’t help that the screen displaying the questions was only partially visible from the balcony (so much for equity). The Theatre Royal Drury Lane is massive though, and whilst not sold out, attendance was extremely healthy, mostly female and mostly Middle England. No surprises there.
I booked because the blurb promised to explore identity and that it would literally make us ‘reassess who you really are’. Perry alternately explained to us that identity was extremely important, whilst also claiming it wasn’t a replacement for personality. One idea that he clearly wanted the audience to take away though, was that our identity requires the buy in and support of other people.
Introductory video
In which Perry explained that through his artwork he explored identity and the ‘masks we wear’ accompanied by portentous music. ‘Identity is something we perform over our lifetime, so the idea that we are this static thing, is an illusion,’ Perry pontificated, but has anyone really believed that since the sixties?
Introductory song
And then Perry came on stage, dressed as a clown – naturally – and sang a song about being a national treasure. ‘I love you all, I love you all, I love you all,’ Perry sang in a grotesque pantomime voice which turned a bit punk at the end. It was going to be a long night.
The cod psychology starts
Perry took aim at those who weaponised identity, such people, Perry opined, simply had ‘really rubbish personalities’. There were ‘two forces’ he wanted us to understand: ‘certainty’ and ‘intuition’. The brain loved certainty and had a ‘desperate need to understand’, whereas ‘intuition’ was the need to understand something without conscious reasoning. He wanted us to consider these ‘two forces’ in relation to identity.
Whilst we were still bamboozled by this intellectual google, Perry bought up Toco. Toco is a Japanese man, who supposedly identifies as a dog, dresses up in a dog outfit and likes being shut in cages. Toco, Perry pointed out, likes to go out in public on all fours and go up to strange women – ‘nothing weird or kinky about that,’ said Perry pointedly and laughed.
Once you had an identity, you then had an in-group, and in-groups were bad because then there was an out-group.
Pointless vox popping
The show had been inspired by a question he had asked when he had done his last show. Thus, the pointless electronic vox popping of the audience began: How spiritual are you? was the first. Others were income bracket, age, political views, etc, the outcomes of which were all entirely pedestrian and were pretty much in line with who you would think would attend a show with Grayson Perry. Assessment of the results were merely clunky opportunities for him to make predictable gags.
Biology is a huge part of who we are.
No shit, Grayson. And, how you are perceived influences how you get treated. Again, this is not news, honey. ‘You can’t have an identity, I’ve heard, without a body,’ said Perry. You have to embrace your body, it’s part of who we are, he told us, joking that people with university degrees barely understood the concept, so weighed down were they by their own intellects. (Some of us non-degree holders have even heard of Cartesian Dualism, Grayson.)
Nature versus nurture
There were two forces which have influence on us, which Perry referred to as biology and culture, rather than the more accepted phrase nurture versus nature. An example of culture, or being ‘co-created’, was a newborn baby having no sense of being a separate being from his or her mother (though, if true, this must be a purely biological response). A study of ‘people who were pregnant’ showed that people had conditioned responses even to the sex of infants in utero. Again, this is not news to anyone, as obstetric ultrasound have been in use since the sixties, so observations about the same are at least that old, yet here Perry was reiterating it as if it was brand new information.
If a tranny is walking through the forest, and pulls off his shoes, and nobody hears him, does he exist? Does he exist? Yeah. We are very dependent on our identity on other people. Toco, the dog man, got very upset because in the park, the other real dogs, wouldn’t play with him.
Grayson Perry on the interdependence of identity
He went onto explain that we had to negotiate our identity with others, we couldn’t force people to go against their ‘intuition’. We need other people to support our idiosyncratic idea of ourselves and used the example of Nicholas Perry (aka Nikocado Avocado), who began life as a vlogger on the topic of healthy eating but now makes money force feeding himself fast food (in his new iteration, he has 3.75 million subscribers on YouTube).
We perform our identity, said Perry, yet again clearly referencing a certain J. Butler, though strangely mention of her was absent throughout, instead he referred to a pet philosopher who apparently said ‘”I” is a verb masquerading as a noun’. Another arse-about-face reflection.
The subtle art of not giving a fuck by Mark Manson
He recommended this film, based on a self-help book by the same name, apparently currently available on Netflix. Perry talked about Manson’s ‘Law of Avoidance‘, i.e. we avoid the things that most threatens our identities, be it positive or negative, which is just so much bullshit. Me identifying as, for example, a funny writer is not threatened by people who read this piece and didn’t think it was funny. If you did think it was funny, again, so what? I mean, for fuck’s sake. Welcome to being over 40 with an axe to grind. Can I have self-help book deal now?
Talk to the person next to you about the person you hate most in the world
In a base tactic to get the audience’s emotions going. Um, okay.
Hierarchical pressures on identity
When you’re young, you are unaware of the hierarchical pressures on your identity, Perry told us, like capitalism. Why, he wasn’t even aware that he was working class as a child! (easily explained by having apolitical parents). His other identities include the biological states of being white, male and growing older.
Being male put him further up the hierarchical pyramid but being male these days was not such a jolly old time, because men had mental health issues and stuff. He wanted the (few) men in the audience not to worry too much though, as they were still top of the pile in terms of (committing) murder and sexual assault. Ha, ha, ha!
In the second half
Perry wanted to explore the unconscious and demonstrated the vastness of it in comparison to what we are conscious of, by turning all the lights off and holding up a candle. Perry alleged that Carl Jung said: ‘Until you make the unconscious, conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate,’ (apparently he didn’t, I suspect Perry’s intellectual life is a bit stunted). Our emotions come out of the unconscious and become present in our bodies, which our brain then tries to rationalise. Sometimes the brain gets it wrong. The brain is like a spin-doctor.
An unethical experiment on epilepsy patients had shown that the brain functions in two distinct halves and that the other side of the brain would make up a story in order to fill out the details of the bit it couldn’t see in the other half.
Freud said: ‘Dreams are the royal road to the unconscious,’ (citation found). Perry’s dreams had been very useful during the time that he was in therapy. One dream found him in a room, wanting to put on women’s clothes, but with only a brown polyester dress from M&S available, that he did not want to wear. Perry was invited by his therapist to interpret the dream from the point of view of the dress and ‘uncovered’ that the meaning of the dream was that he felt unwanted. (I thought a more straightforward reading was that the dress represented a conflicted desire for humiliation. Additionally, in the memoir, he admits to hankering after such polyester garments.)
It gets a bit more icky
Perry claimed that a famous feminist once said: ‘Women protest in the day against things they fantasise about at night.’ And then archly: ‘That’s a dark thought, isn’t it?’ Then ribald laughter. He didn’t name this famous feminist and a search on Google bought up no citations for the quote, so I guess it was just a thought he wanted to put out there.
He wanted to ask two questions of the audience now, about sexuality, and there were just two options. Were you straight/LGB? Or, were you aromantic, allosexual, graysexual, demisexual, pansexual, hypersexual, etc? Yeah, it was a funny gag, reading out the long list of stupid identities. Sixteen percent of the audience went ‘a la carte’. This was completely normal! Perry told us, and – guess what – he would put himself in that niche bracket too.
I’ve always been interested in fetishes, being a bit of a perv.
Grayson Perry
He showed us a map of the world and the most popular fetishes in those countries, it clearly wasn’t a map created from real data, merely a vehicle for smut. A fetish for feet was most popular in Lebanon, he claimed. ‘Sploshing’ was big in Congo. The UK was top for ‘dogging’. ‘We love a bit of seagulling,’ barked Perry and delighted that an audience member laughed knowingly.
Fetishes are culturally born, whereas sexuality was innate. Cultures produced fetishes and fetishists. Perry claims that there are people with puffer jacket fetishism. Another fetish we would see quite soon was people who could only orgasm when their partners were on the phone.
Having a word to describe your condition made you feel better.
Perry poked fun at those who protested against Drag Queen Story Hour (a number of the performers have been arrested for child sexual abuse – see here). He had grown up in a house which had no books, until an uncle gifted him some encyclopaedias published in the 1920s. Thus he had been exposed to ‘Right Wing Story Hour’.
Word clouds on gender
The Slido app also gave the audience a chance to enter words to create a word cloud. Perry wanted to know what words the audience associated with male. The most popular words were: strong, man, penis, cock and dick. But there were also smattering of words like: wanker, toxic, patriarchal, violent, smelly, loud, power, dominant, angry. Predictable, given the content he had exposed us to already.
Words associated with female were much more positive, words like strong, mother, soft, caring, power, love, wise, nurturing, multi-tasker, kindness.
‘What a difference though,’ Perry exclaimed, ‘you’re much nicer to women!’
Erotically charged decisions are made by your gonads …
… and in particular men were driven by their sexuality. Even decisions which might appear to be unrelated to sex, were -in fact- about sex. For example, a classical historian he knew had been driven to his profession by the sight of Kirk Douglas in Spartacus. Perry feels that his career choice as a potter was guided by a formative experience he had at school of being forced to work on the girls’ table during a ceramics class (though the memoir shows the career path was pretty incidental and mentions only of his enjoyment of being dressed by the teacher in a tight blue PVC smock which buttoned up at the back (page 47)).
I expect some of your children are wanking off to *Hentai.
Grayson Perry
*See here for the Wikipedia entry on Hentai, which is cartoon porn featuring child-like characters.
A TMI moment from a TIM
His first sexual fantasy*, aged about 12, was being a prisoner of war in World War Two in a POW camp. The guards, for extra punishment, made him wear dresses. It was the thought of the humiliation which excited him and the following day he asked his sister (who obliged) if he could wear one of her dresses.
*In contradiction to the memoir.
Two years later he found the word which described him – transvestite – in a Sunday tabloid. Perry wrote it in his diary. His stepsister read his diary and asked his mother what it meant. His mother chucked him out of the house when she learnt that he was crossdressing.
(In his memoir, the reason he was chucked out by his mother was because he saw his biological father without her knowing. He then went to live with his father and stepmother. When his stepmother found out he had used her clothes to crossdress (and he coyly hints, wank in) she was understandably ‘incensed’ (pg 86). His mother also turned up at the house to express displeasure that he had worn her clothes too. Despite this, the father and stepmother did not chuck him out but sent him instead to a psychologist. He was told to leave some time later following an argument with the stepmother, not specifically for crossdressing, and was taken back in by his mother.)
How to be a woman though male
Later he went onto read How to be a Woman Though Male, written by Virginia Prince and joined the Beaumont Society. He had a lot of fun in the Beaumont Society, attending social events, including dressing up as bridesmaids. To be high status in the Society was related to how well you ‘passed’. By his mid-30s he began to find ‘passing’ as a woman in public ‘a bit boring’ and was also the time he began to seek therapy. The issue of ‘authenticity’ came up – was he his true self? Was his crossdressing merely conformity with his in-group? Perry followed his ‘intuition’ and started to dress in the frilly little girl dresses he is known for. When he won the Turner Prize he got ‘push back’ from Society members, who felt that he should be trying to look more ‘passable’ but Perry was beyond caring (so much for needing others to ‘co-create’ your identity).
Final words
Perry finished with a evangelisation. We should remember to give our brains a break and to hold our beliefs lightly. We needed to remember that ‘identity is co-created’ and our identity is an investment in all our relationships. Awww.
Final song
Grayson Perry finished on a weepy little song all about his fragility. Champing at the bit to get the hell out of there, I left as he warbled his innermost before the descent of the masses began.
Conclusion
The funniest bits of the show were his observations on class. Perry has the typical British obsession with it and understood acutely that his audience were mostly lower middle class Pooters. His observations on identity though were all over the place; identity was an essential part of who we were but not that important when it came to being interesting, identity needed the rubberstamp approval of other people, unless – like Perry – you couldn’t give a shit what people think of you. Thus, what he must of really meant then, was that he didn’t want people to criticise the aberrant behaviour of men like himself. That’s certainly what it sounded like to me.
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