Appearing in the light, centre stage, an innocuous glance shot at the audience, and quickly, the fully lashed eyes return to an unfocused glare into the distance. The hands stretch out and lengthen, fingers depleted, to graze the air with the history of glamour itself. Bunny, from her six-inch heels, lip-synchs to a golden-era Hollywood tune as she twists and swerves around her tiny waist. Star quality is not something you can cheat; God only gave it to those unlucky few performers who can’t escape it. And Bunny is one of them. She has us transfixed with each little gesture; the wrists and elbows direct our eyes as her lips embrace the words she only gets to whisper.
I meet Bunny at her work. She’s agreed to meet me on her lunch break. She works as a make-up artist at the Belvedere academy, just around the corner from Belvedere College. This is the first time I’ve seen her without her full costume. I call her Bunny but soon switch to Chris. Chris Rowan is Bunny’s real name. I recognise the face instantly when he shows up at the door; the large features and curved cheek bones can’t be hidden by any amount of makeup. But this time the long bob of red hair is gone, revealing a short Mohawk on a mostly shaven head.
He sits me down in the studio, which is being refurbished into a professional make-up school, seating himself against the light of the window, so I find myself blinded when facing him. It’s hard not to feel like a transgressor when you’re sitting in front of someone you admire and you need to get them to talk to you. I end up asking the awkward question of how he came up with the Bunny character: “I saw, when I was very very young, a performer called John Epperson. You should look him up. He has a character called Lypsinka. And Lypsinka never speaks but she uses bits of old movie dialogue and she just lip-synchs to those and she’ll make perfect sense. She’s never using her own voice. And she has these theatre shows where, you know, it will show her slowly going mad, but it’s using bits of B movie dialogue. But she was this red-head and she was very sort of, em, very 1950’s and diminutive on stage and I just loved that. But also, it’s very technical.
I’m a giant rugby-player shape of a man and so for me to stand on stage with any other drag-queen and look in any way anything other than a giant rugby-player of a man, I have to be very technical about it and do certain things to try and take away from the mannish shape. And you get a lot of people coming up to you and who go ‘look at your waist’, ‘look at this, look at that’ and you go ‘right, cause you’re looking at the right things’, cause that’s distracting from the giant face, the giant head and the big broad shoulders.” It’s true, sitting here in the shadow is a broad and muscular young man who looks away when he’s finished saying what he has to say. There’s something he seems used to in his interactions: he’s used to not expecting much from the person he’s talking to. He talks and casts his words into the air, not looking for a reaction or an answer or any sign of approval; a stage-man who doesn’t expect his audience’s applause or laughter.
I want to flatter her, let her know how much of a fan I am, hope she knows how good she is, so I tell her: she’s one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen. I’m not lying. I’ve never seen someone be a woman as much as her. Chris takes no flattery though, he waves it all away as just necessity: “It’s this thing, if you’re going to do something, and you’ll see it at Halloween, where there’ll be a lot of guys that think it’s hilarious to dress up as a woman. A million queens are born at Halloween. And they will do this thing where, to make sure that everyone knows that they’re not into it, they will purposefully walk like a guy, even more manly than they ever would. And so I have this thing that I say which is if you’re going to do it you can’t keep one big toe in man, you have to commit. Because otherwise it looks ridiculous, it’s ridiculous to start with. You know, you’re standing there on a stage, lip-synching to somebody else’s song, painted like a stolen car, with a giant piece of plastic on your head; you can’t take it seriously. So you just have to commit to it and be the clown and go the whole way with it.”
To see Chris as a clown is not easy for me. But the admixture of darkness and merriment that clowns carry around them like an aura is not too far off the spot. At 24, Chris has lived more of life than most people can claim to. He reveals by the way that his bushy eyebrows, which make his makeup so tedious to apply, are due to the fact that he had a tumour when he was fifteen and lost all his hair. He tells me he went to a military school from the age of eleven. “I’d probably have been in the army if I’d stayed but then I got sick at fifteen and so that was sort of my whole background. And at the age of fifteen the gay community saved my life. I ran away because I couldn’t deal. And started working in clubs and started making friends in the scene. That was how it all started. Nobody asks you your age when you’re all done up. And so I sort of fell into it which has been a real lifesaver for me. Because I really didn’t know how to do anything else and I never got a chance to learn how to do anything else. It’s one of those weird things where I’ve had quite a life already.”
But Bunny is not your typical drag queen. She has her own range of idols that surround her performances. “I was so obsessed with the old school stuff. Whereas nowadays, somebody who gets up in a gay bar and wants to perform, their influences are completely different. You’re always going to perform based on who inspires you. These kids are inspired by Beyoncé and Lady Gaga. It’s great, it’s fantastic. Good for them. But it certainly wasn’t for me. I was looking at people like Peggy Lee, Nina Simone and Judy Garland; signers that could sing.
“I was eleven years old, and I remember this, Danny La Rue was on the television. He was a drag queen, but he was a big, big super star. And he did this:” Chris extends his arm gracefully and sweeps it through the air like a jazz dancer. “And it was the first time I had ever seen a man do anything glamorous. And I remember watching that and not being able to work out what it was because I knew it was a man that was dressed as a woman, and it wasn’t that I wanted to dress like a woman, but it was just that that was the first time that I had seen that there was a possibility that, you know, a kid being brought up in a very religious house, with military education, that you could actually be more than one thing.”
Bunny’s performances have that power to make us see the plurality of things we are usually blind to. She makes me feel what Louis MacNeice says in his poem: “the drunkenness of things being various.” Like any true artist, she widens the breathing space for the soul. Magic happens when she goes on stage, as there is this sense of infinite possibilities being unfolded in front of our eyes. She disagrees with me of course. “You have to understand, I do four gigs a week, and a lot of the time it’s in bars and the majority of the time it’s in places where people are completely ambivalent to what you do and you’re part of their night, and quite frankly, you’re in their way.”
Just standing on stage, dressed and done up as a woman, might be the ultimate act of defiance that can’t be traded for simple protestation or revolt. It’s Chris, his person, standing there, in drag, for all of us to see. And it’s terrifyingly beautiful. “There’s this beautiful, beautiful quote that I live my life by. Literally. And it’s from Eartha Kitt. And it’s: ‘Take all the manure that’s been thrown at you, all of your life, and use it as a fertilizer for a rose to grow.’ And it is that thing of you didn’t go through what you went through, you weren’t ostracized, made feel different and bullied, or whatever you were, to learn nothing from it, to then find a place in the world, in the gay community, where you’re supposed to be allowed to be yourself, to assimilate and to just try and be like everyone else.”
Chris just performed as Bunny in the play “The Sanatorium” which was playing in the Smock Alley Theatre on the 19th and 20th of October. “I’m just doing two pieces in it. And it’s kind of like a full circle moment for me because one of the pieces in it is my sort of version of a John Epperson Lypsinka piece. I got to spend about two hours working on it on Sunday with the lighting guy and my queues, and the sound guy with my queues, and the set is stunning. It was just like, oh my God, I’m finally in a real theatre, which is sold out, directed properly, with a script. With everything that I needed; all of the lights that I needed properly done, all of the stage stuff managed: this isn’t me on a bar lip-synching to a Whitney Houston song anymore, this is the real thing. So it feels like ten years to get that five minutes, but at the same time, for some people, they never get that. If I had the feeling that I got just being in the dress rehearsals for that, with a bunch of people getting to do what they have written, and knowing they were as excited as I was, it is worth it, it’s completely worth it.
“It’s that thing of, I think- it sounds, really, really pretentious- but, everybody’s who’s on the fringe, everybody that performs sort of where we perform, they would love for five minutes to feel legitimate. They would love to have that moment where they were respected in that same way, not by people who just come to it and see it for what it is, but people who actually come in the same way that any other audience would come to see a performer, and it’s just such a rare occurrence.”
I ask Chris if he’s ever thought about stopping. “Oh yeah. This is my last year. I won’t tell people. When I left Belfast, I didn’t say, I did it. I just left. And, you know, it’s the way it happens.” He takes his time between his sentences and I realise there’s nothing anybody could say to change this guys mind once it’s made up. “We’ll see. We’ll see how long it is before, just, I’ll know. I’ll just get on stage and just, and just no. Once you’ve made a decision, you’ve made a decision.”
Chris has the taxonomy of old-Hollywood and gay references to offer me; lists of films and books I have to see and read if I’m to get on in life at all. The best one is Quentin Crisp, the English writer and storyteller. “He was out and gay in the 1920’s and 30’s. He was there wearing nail varnish, in drag in the 1930’s and he would be beat up in the street. There’s this amazing story about him which is he was waiting at the bus stop, and this is a sort of daily occurrence for him, and his point of view was that you had to be seen. There was no point in being militant about being gay, there’s no point in being militant about being flamboyant. You had to be seen to be normal. You could look as unusual as you wanted to, because that was the way you wanted to look, not who you were. But you also had to be seen to be normal so that people would actually understand that you were a human being.
“And so, he was waiting at a bus stop and a woman had already stamped on his foot, and a man had already spat on him. The bus came along, and he got on the bus. And his hair is coiffed, died purple. And his nails are gold and his lips were red. He was wearing a velvet suit with a cravat and a pin. And he got onto the bus and the woman wouldn’t let him sit down. And he said, If you like, I’ll get off and walk. But you should know that people like me can’t walk everywhere.”
“The bigger thing to do is just to make my point and get on with my life.
