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stella41b -> RE: Ever out yourself by accident cause the vanillas got on your nerves? (6/22/2008 7:10:03 PM)
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Let me try and get this thread back on topic.
I'm TG and I'm 'out' and open about it. Partly because it is the best defence strategy, partly because it filters out all the idiots from my life, but primarily because it is who I really am. Doesn't make me any less female, just different. I'm also open about my LGBT and BDSM issues but like TG not completely. It's conditional. I'm open about who I am and my interests, but not about the way I live.
Seeking to transition, trying to transition and transitioning so far has taken me 10 years, but much of this was complicated by the fact that I'm a fringe playwright, the moment of truth came whilst I was living in Poland, during the most successful period of my artistic work, and it was a long, slow, gradual process which in the end fell apart miserably.
I feel it's important to make one point about society. Society here means North American or European society, or any English speaking country, and generally a society which is stable is more open and tolerant than a society which is going through a process of change or social upheaval. The five years under Lech Walesa in Poland between 1990 and 1995 were shock therapy, a nation's attempt to wipe out 60 years of its own history right up until - it seemed - the previous week, which created a very deep social division between 'old' and 'new', left and right, and even Poles themselves talk about Poland A and Poland B. The subsequent five years - from 1995 to 2000 were different under Aleksander Kwasniewski, it was an attempt to try to resolve some of the confusion and bring both the economy and society under control for entry to the European Union. For me personally these were my 'ascendancy years', where I arrived from nowhere, from the West, and came up with a style of theatre never seen before. My 'awakening' happened in 1998, and my desire to somehow start my transition was hampered by my growing popularity and reputation in theatre.
Lech Walesa achieved much of his success through the Catholic Church in Poland. Indeed, the term 'Solidarity' came from the teachings of Pope John Paul II - the Solicitus Rei Solidaris philosophy of the Catholic Church, which in Poland formed the unofficial political opposition to the former PZPR communist regime. Therefore the Polish Catholic Church was always supportive of the Polish Solidarity movement, more so after the brutal murder of Father Jerzy Popieluszki - a Warsaw priest who was most outspoken against the regime - in 1984 by three agents from Department IV, the anti-Church section of the former Polish Internal Affairs Ministry. Therefore the Church is supportive of the right wing in Polish politics. One of the side-effects of the bringing together of Poles to stand up against the former regime was intolerance towards gays and 'sexual deviants' but it can also be said that the former regime also conditioned Poles, as other Eastern Europeans, to be suspicious of anyone seen to be 'different'.
My whole life has been decided on two events - the staging of two of my plays in a pub at the International MALTA Theatre Festival in Poznan in 2000, one in Polish and the other in English, and the subsequent critical acclaim, and the success of one of my comedies in Warsaw theatre in 2001 and 2002. However at the time I was living in Warsaw I had already come out in my private life and was active in my real persona Stella in both the LGBT and BDSM communities. This was to start three years of a 'double life' where even a few of my neighbours in the apartment block where I lived in the centre of Warsaw assumed I was married... to myself. Increasing I became myself but I maintained a public image as an eccentric male playwright from the UK who had crossed over and become very much a part of Polish culture, known for this wonderful new 'teatr fringowy' (fringe theatre - my claim to fame is introducing this style of theatre to Polish theatre).
But living that double life was hard, very hard, and I had to be oh so very careful. It was stressful, in fact it was more than stressful, I was falling apart, crumbling, unable to function. I've outed myself on numerous occasions by accident, sometimes without knowing it or not realising it until later, a few times in media interviews, and wondering whether to just disappear before the papers came out or just leave Poland suddenly and mysteriously, which I did in 2004. But largely my coming out was deliberate, fuelled by the anger at both the restrictions on my own life, my own inability to go full time and transition, and by the oppression and intolerance faced by people in the LGBT and BDSM communities. I realised that I had a certain amount of influence in society and I decided I would try to use it. This is why some of my plays contain references to the transgendered, to LGBT, and to BDSM.
The last three years in Poland saw me at my most controversial. In 2002 I had staged a play about the sexual harrassment of women in the workplace, and my decision to turn from comedy to drama radically changed how I was perecived by people in theatre and in general. I was no longer loved by everyone, but had started to polarize people and divide audiences. But privately, as Stella, this won me more friends.
In 2003 I staged my play 'One Saturday' about domestic violence which was so successful at the MALTA Festival. My actors were drama students from the Academy of Film, Theatre and Television in Warsaw. Back in 2000 the actors portrayed a poor family, but in 2003 I told the actors I wanted them to portray a rich family. This play opens with a family meal, as the audience come into the theatre the actors are already on stage and eating a dinner on a table and the audience think they've missed the start of the play and all rush to their seats. They watch the actors eating.. then there's an eight minute long pause. No words, no actions, just three characters, father, mother, son, pissed with each other, staring into space. The actors wait, the pause is usually eight or nine minutes before the audience start becoming restless. When the atmosphere gets really tense the actors burst into a family argument which starts from one word - 'Dad' - and over four minutes there's 157 swear words exchanged a potential stabbing, fists raised, confrontations, plates fly and the entire dinner table is trashed.
This upset both a lot of people and most journalists and it broke a social taboo of domestic violence. For the first time I was giving interviews and the media were hostile. 'Do you think this happens in Polish homes?' they asked. 'It happened in my home a lot, it happened in many others, and I don't see how Polish households would be any different' came my reply. I had already become controversial for my outspoken views on Iraq, on Islamophobia, and in my responses to the media I attacked the double standards of Polish society in that a BDSM scene between consenting adults was socially unacceptable but nobody wanted to talk about how many Polish women were beaten by their husbands and how many kids were also beaten. I also made a fatal error - I let slip that I was preparing a play called 'Sunday 6.46am' about homosexual Polish priests.
This brought ostracization and even death threats. My phone was tapped. I lost a few friends, vanilla ones, those in the community promised to stand by me, and they did for some time. When a small group of people started picketing my rehearsals the artistic director suggested I take a break from the stage. I started to do voice overs, appeared in a film, and tried to set up Underground working with well-known Polish actors in a bar. But it didn't work out. Journalists started to ask me about my private life.. Meanwhile as Stella I started to get e-mails from television journalists asking me for an interview or information. I hid myself away. I didn't turn up for Christmas Eve 2004 with friends, planning to commit suicide on Boxing Day. This didn't work out due to friends, I tried to transition in Warsaw and find work as a woman and half-succeeded, but early 2005 I woke up, packed a holdall, left my apartment, stopped off at the Internet cafe to inform a few journalists that I was leaving Poland for good and went back to the UK to live in a BDSM household. Poland's top theatre critic wrote an article entitled 'A Curtain Falls' in the national newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza.
However 3 months later I returned to Warsaw, to the south, Zywiec due to the fact that I couldn't get on a gender reassignment program in the UK and things didn't work out in the BDSM household for one reason or another. I set up a theatre in Zywiec, going back to the double life, which attracted further media attention. By now it had become a game, I returned shortly after the death of Pope Jon Paul II and the rise of the right wing in Polish politics, unaware that this together with the mass exodus of Poles west had somehow changed Polish society. Hurricane Katrina only briefly interrupted a growing issue in Polish society - equal rights for the LGBT community. But I had come back to Poland intending to come out and wrote another play entitled 'Death' in Polish, intending to come out at the start of this production and direct it as Stella. My comeback was successful, my double life intact, but something changed.
It was a Sunday in October, I had a friend round reading the reviews, including a one page feature entitled 'Englishman and Cabbages' in the regional edition of Gazeta Wyborcza. I was reading the article in the tiny kitchen of this apartment, and happened to glance out of the window and see my neighbour - a middle-aged man who was jobless, and he was leaving his apartment with a plastic bag to collect beer cans to sell for recycling. 'This is f*cking bullshit' I thought. I felt guilty that I was deceiving people who had given me everything, and yet I could not be myself and I had to lie and deceive others.
But then again I had given too much away previously, I was still being asked in my interviews about my play 'Sunday' about homosexual priests and whether I intended to stage it or not. I either had to come out or be found out. I bit the bullet and chose the former. By now there were the Equality Parades where the LGBT community would march for equal rights. The big controversy was over the decision of the then Warsaw President Lech Kaczynski (later the Polish President) to declare the Warsaw Equality Parade illegal. The Poznan Equality Parade was broken up by hooligans and the extreme right wing Mlodziezy Wszechpolska (hard to translate into English but the Universal Polish Youth movement) and in Krakow gays and lesbians were being stoned whilst police looked on. I came out in November 2005 when the Warsaw Equality Parade was declared legal, informing my bosses at the theatre and City Council that I was transgendered, wished to be known as Stella and would be attending the Warsaw Equality Parade as Stella to show my support for the Polish LGBT community.
My downfall and the end of my career in Poland was no less spectacular than the beginning - I didn't even last 10 days and lost everything work, career, reputation, friends, contacts, money, my home, the whole damn lot. My saving grace was the translation of a Linux manual from Polish into English which repaid the money I borrowed to get away from Zywiec. I left behind a very uncomfortable silence and social taboo.
My friends tell me that even today people in Zywiec talk about the 'afera' (scandal) and all but two of my actors had to leave Zywiec. One took over the theatre, which now has an official website in Polish which makes no reference to me or my work, and another actress who still nobody wants to know.
I have no regrets. Not least since I'm expecting a visit from television journalists from Gdansk in the next week or two who want to interview me for a programme talking about LGBT and BDSM issues in Polish society. I got an e-mail a few weeks ago out of the blue, the fact that someone remembered me was a pleasant surprise, more so that they're interested in what I have to say.
But I am now here in London, and having come west I am well and truly out. I'm free to be myself and am opening in July a play which features characters interested in BDSM but I have a better idea of where the boundaries now lie as a result of my own learning curve. I guess I'm privileged to be able to use the stage as a platform for raising public awareness on BDSM issues. I have been accused in the past of trying to change society but this comes with a disclaimer, everyone who comes to see my work does so of their own free choice.
I still make the same distinction as before - I'm open about who I am and my interests, but the manner in which I live and my own lifestyle is very much my business and private. I'm happy to satiate curiosity and promote awareness, but I draw the line at providing people with validation for their preconceived notions and prejudices.
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