Tell me about your feelings about depictions of queer women in popular culture.
I've been in shoots before, and I've worked with other artists, and there's this thing where they try to femme anybody up -- especially when it's mainstream media. And there's this expectation that you're either going to fit on one end of the spectrum or the other, so I really appreciated that I literally showed up on set and was allowed to go just as I am. My body is a complete construction. I feel there's a lot of pressure, even in the queer world, to go trans or whatever and take these real extremes, and I don't really think there's anything wrong with that, but I do think there's a lot you can do with your own body. And as a visual artist I think of the body as a sculpture of sorts. If you can manipulate it via exercise and diet and physically empower yourself and give yourself a body that has a certain masculinity to it -- that has a lot of power and you can insert that into mainstream images. People get really caught up on language, and when you're talking about these things people get kind of hysterical, but when you just present them with an image of something that's "other" or that they can't plot, I think that's really important -- and to offer up something in between that doesn't have binaries -- because it offers people more options. And I believe that binaries are dangerous across the board. If you look at mainstream representations, it's mostly things like The L Word. Or you have a trans character, but it's not played by a real trans man, it's played by someone with a grizzly man beard Scotch-taped onto their face. So I think we're moving closer to where we should be, but I don't necessarily identify as trans -- though I kind of do -- but I don't take hormones, and I don't want to alter my body in that way, but I think it's a real progression when someone who identifies in that way can then actually be that instead of having someone play you in black face or whatever.

Right. I think it's important to have people who complicate our notions of gender -- whether they be playing with butch/femme or consider themselves gender queer or just don't fit into the gay/straight/bi/trans spectrum so neatly -- because we still have a long way to go with our understanding of gender and sexuality, even in the queer community.
Absolutely. I couldn't agree more. One thing I like about Lady Gaga is that strange rumor about whether or not she has a penis. I'd like the same rumor to circulate about me. [Laughs] The not knowing and the suspension of disbelief and what that does to people -- it starts with the body, but it can translate into all kinds of other important things.

Definitely. And the other thing about the penis rumor is that she doesn't deny or confirm it. It's like she's saying if she does have a penis, it's not a bad thing, and if she doesn't have one that's not a bad thing either. It gives people permission to be who they are.
Exactly.

What do you think about the new breed of younger pop stars -- and some have accused Gaga of this -- who claim bisexuality or a kind of pansexuality in an effort to use queer culture for their own personal gains?
That's been going on since the dawn of time. Elvis stole from African American music. Everybody's constantly riffing -- Madonna stole voguing from poor, disenfranchised black drag queens in Harlem. This isn't a new concept. I think there's more reverence with regard to Lady Gaga as she's obviously educated herself in her trajectory with visual arts practices and the stuff that she's doing isn't light stuff. It's difficult when they're making millions of dollars and placating to the masses -- it's tricky to maintain that, but I think she tries. And even including someone like me is a part of that. The thing that was kind of interesting was that in between takes I was getting kind of annoyed because the camera guys were really kind of drooling and talking about "girl-on-girl action" and I said, "What about boy-on-girl action?" And she turned to me and said "Oh. Do you identify as male?" [Laughs] And I said, "Well, probably more than you do." And she said "I'll be sure to tell people that." We just had this abstracted conversation about gender in the middle of this shoot, which I thought was really weird and pretty interesting: A) that she would take the time and B) that she would even ask me about that.

Tell me about your own art.
I started off as a painter and a drawer, but I now do performance art, and I know that sounds absolutely terrifying, like you imagine people shoving yams up their asses, but I think of my work as moving paintings essentially. There aren't a lot of massive, sweeping actions. It's more like I use the fact that the image is live to try to capture and transfix people, because people can walk away from a painting. I do portraits of sorts. I recently got funding through the Franklin Furnace, which is the largest nonprofit performance art fund in New York City to do this piece called "Hard Times," which is kind of my portrait of the current culture of California. It features me -- I train really, really hard so that I get really beefy and really ripped in a kind of scary way, and I do this performance on a really, really high piece of building scaffolding. I'm basically wearing a blonde Farrah Fawcett wig and a coral body thong. Basically, I do these body building poses but I slow them down incredibly, and I transfer from pose to pose so slowly that I create a nervous system overload -- the entire body starts to quake and then the scaffolding does too. And when I turn around, you see that I have this prosthetic mask on that looks like my eyes have been removed from my head, and I have this soundtrack that I composed with a sound designer friend of mine, which is made up of 12 to 20 different wattages of just raw power -- like literally the sound of electric power -- and I mix all of that together and do this piece that basically, to me, is a portrait of California in this kind of economic crisis and this need to uphold the beautiful and the superficial in a place where we are rotting from the inside out in a lot of different ways. So I wanted to create this image that plays with the expectation of this beautiful woman that you're going to see, and then you get something else. And all of it is using a lot of tropes from film because I live in Hollywood.


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