Edinburgh Festival / Day 16: Side View: Laughing Gayly

Laughing Gayly

Mark Davis on homosexuality and the American Right

My show here is a compilation of what I consider to be my best work over the past four years. A lot of it is autobiographical. When you're born on Friday the 13th and are the seventh son of an undertaker, there's no need to embellish the material much. Some of it, like the faggot-with-a-gun portion of the show, is fantasy. I wanted to do something provocative as a response to my anger and frustration with the American Right. I think that people are more genderphobic than homophobic. They don't like it when people refuse to fit into a prescribed gender mould. In Britain, gays are treated as a class of people who are tolerated as long as they mind their station. People here don't like seeing politicised queers with aggressive male energy. I do female characters in my show who act as allegories. I don't consider it drag. They're just characters with wigs. Catherine Denouement came from a period of my life in LA when I did a lot of drugs. I see her as an entity which inhabits me and forces me into cruel sexual altercations. Every performance is an exorcism for me. I put her in the show after reading a particularly melodramatic entry in my journal. Generally, I'm a bowel movement writer. It all pours out one night at three in the morning. I also read the papers every day. I notice that a Laura Ashley shop was bombed recently. I suppose that the IRA has been taken over by fags who bombed it for fashion violation.

(Photograph omitted)