Icon Drag Race about confronting your own prejudices Donesia.com

Courtney Act is guilty of transphobia. Racism too. And she’s not ashamed to admit it.

“It’s a slow unpacking, understanding that we have these unconscious biases, understanding that if you let go of them, you might end up with yourself more often,” she says. PinkNews.

She’s not flippant, rather she lightens the mood as we discuss the deep-seated biases many of us in the queer community carry: in who we choose to sleep with, interact with, and accept. as part of ours.

That’s the way the Courtney Act – tackles big issues with intelligence and charm, educates with empathy rather than contempt. That’s what she did on Celebrity Big Brother, when she won the hearts of the nation by educating notoriously anti-LGBT+ politician Ann Widdecombe on gay rights. That’s what she’s been doing for the past few years, opening up to the public about her pansexuality and gender fluidity. And that’s what she will do again, if fate permits, when she visits her new cabaret show Fluidwho embraces all that she is and confronts her own prejudices head-on, as she recounts to us a hot and humid summer afternoon.

PinkNews: Where are you right now?

Courtney Act: I am at home in London. There’s a construction site next door so I closed the window all day. I’m sitting in my underwear, I still have a wig.

Me too – minus the wig. Anyway, you just announced a new tour, Fluid.

Yeah, and I’m super excited. It’s a full live original music cabaret tour with a band, something I’ve never done before. It’s about gender, sexuality, and how this concept of fluidity is really part of everyone’s daily life, but maybe we don’t always recognize it.

We’ve gotten so good at polarizing the binary – young/old, black/white, fat/thin, gay/straight – even trans/cis, weirdly, have become polarized. Although these are very big personal stories about my own struggles with my gender identity, when we did the show in Sydney, at Mardis Gras, even straight cis people would come up and talk about how universal it was , how they didn’t realize that all these impositions and impacts like that were things that affected them too. I want to break everything binary!

You speak with confidence on topics of gender and sexuality. How did you get to this place?

It was a long journey. I’m 38 now, and was confused for most of my teens and 20s, which is interesting, I think that’s how you’re supposed to be.

I think some of the biggest difficulties come from people who think they are not intended Wrestle. I think if you see it as a struggle, it becomes self-fulfilling. But if you just see your journey unfolding as a lifetime, then you can see it for what it is and not be so attached to an ideal of resolution, perfection, or happiness. You just become who you are and you start to realize that part of the confusion can also be part of the beauty.

A lot of the confusion for me came from growing up in a world that didn’t really have many options when it came to sexuality or gender. And that’s just the last kind of five years since Laverne Cox was on the cover of Time magazine really, that I think the conversation opened up so much.

As someone who has always wondered where they fit on the gender spectrum, this conversation gave me space. Having people like Laverne and Janet Mock and Chaz Bono in the public eye gave me these amazing examples of trans people, giving such brilliant conversation, which allowed me to put aside my internalized transphobia about of my own identity and relating to it, and exploring what that really meant.

I think a lot of queer people, cis and trans, have dealt with this feeling of internalized transphobia. How did you deal with this?

I also think the way you unpack and confront your own biases, whether it’s race, which is obviously very relevant, or whether it’s queerness or trans identity, is by hearing a lot of different stories, it’s listening to the stories of different people and fostering empathy. I don’t think a lot of people actually understand what that means, but empathy is about listening to someone else’s story and not having to try to understand it through your own experience.

For me, my gender identity was entangled in my life. Even though I was hanging out and performing in a very feminine face, it was something that I always polarized as being a job. I was too transphobic to consider whether I was trans or not.

It was the first time I learned to accept trans identity through someone else’s experience and not my own life.

My friend Chaz Bono and I were talking about gender in 2013, and he was telling me about his experience. I remember saying to him, “Don’t you just think that in the future, trans people will be so accepted that they can live their lives as they see fit and not have to go through a medical or surgical transition?”

And he said, “No, that’s what you think because that’s who you are.”

I don’t have body dysmorphia or anything like that, but for Chaz, his surgery was an intrinsic part of his identity. It was the first time I learned to accept trans identity through someone else’s experience and not my own life. And it was really powerful.

You mentioned race, which is obviously such an important conversation right now. I noticed you were outside protesting.

I was in Los Angeles when the protests broke out. To be there, feeling the anger, the pain and the fear – and also the hope – of the black community was really powerful.

Although it has peaked now and we are seeing protests around the world, we only have to look back to last year when Manchester Pride decided to adopt the flag for queer people of color , and there was a huge stench. People never took the time to listen to what the story was. People were so caught up in their own unconscious racism that they just acted out. They said, “You can’t change our flag. That’s wrong. We don’t like it”.

It was an example of racism in our own community. And I know that sexual racism is a big issue in our community, I know those things because I was that person. I talked about becoming aware of my own racial biases and also of my own sexually racist biases.

I grew up in a society where I was taught to be racist.

I grew up in a society where I was taught to be racist. The media had these narratives and these archetypes of not just black people, but all people of color, portraying them in unfair and unfair ways. It manipulated and demonized them for political purposes. When you’re faced with this, it can be easy to say, “Oh, I’m not racist.”

But as a white person, I understand now that I was raised in this world. I don’t blame myself for those racist feelings I had, but I take responsibility for it instantly. It’s not inherently who I am, it’s something I’ve learned and it’s something I can unlearn, have and continue to unlearn.

This is something that white people living in the western world have to constantly unpack, because there are such strong marks of racism in the communities in which we live.

Especially in the gay world. I’m black, and so many times I’ve been told “Oh I don’t like black people, that’s just my preference”. As a white person, do you think that’s valid? Can you have a preference? Or is it just racism?

I think people probably haven’t done the work to fully understand why they think it’s just their preference.

If we lived in a fair and just society where all people of different skin tones were treated equally, your preferences would be more valid. But in this society where the oppression is systemic and long standing, it still exists today, and we’re brought up with those ideas, you can’t really make those statements without just being racist.

I think there’s so much to understand and unpack when it comes to sexual racism in the gay community and the queer community. If you let go of these unconscious biases, you may find yourself finding yourself more often.

I noticed years ago I would be on Grindr and just go back to profiles of people of color faster and stay on profiles of white people longer.

It was actually one of the things that was the trigger for me. I was like, “Oh, did you notice that? Why is that? Am I even able to discern whether I like someone or not that quickly, or am I just using all this categorization of a person to brush them off? »

As an activity, I started to actively stay – and look, some of that is contrived, because it must be because you’re trying to thwart the systems – but I’d be like, ‘OK, let me stay on these slightly longer people of color profiles. What am I thinking? Do I feel attracted? What happens when I look at this black guy or this Asian guy? Does it turn me on, am I turned on by him? »

It’s weird because it’s kind of like meditation on Grindr – but if you can, rather than just reacting, rather than just saying yes or no to every photo, take a moment and try, as you see in the photo, to feel what is happening in your body. What sensations arise in your body? Are there memories, thoughts or ideas?

This small act opened up my world exponentially.

It’s brilliant. You can apply it to so many things, to how we judge people for how they present themselves in their gender, whether they’re female or butch, cis or trans or non-binary.

Many men I sleep with identify directly, I often sleep with them as Courtney. By the way, I’m not just a heterosexual, I’m an equal opportunist – but I wondered why there was such interest in the impossible.

Is it just that you want what you can’t have? I looked it over and realized that my sexuality started at puberty, in high school, and I was attracted to the boys around me at school. All of them, ostensibly, were straight, so of course I couldn’t express that attraction to them.

And I would miss these boys, who were never going to love me back because I couldn’t even express how I felt about them, because I didn’t really know what queer was, and they were all straight.

That’s where my sexuality started, and that’s when my sexuality got delayed, because it wasn’t able to grow beyond this idea of ​​being attracted to these guys who were straight and who would never love me back.

Even observation is such a powerful moment. I’m writing my memoirs and it’s been really powerful. I unpack many formative experiences.

Courtney Act Fluid will play in the UK and Europe in April 2021. Tickets are on sale now.