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Having a coffee with BIRD LA BIRD

Bird La Bird is an active member of the community and Bird Club is her platform, a platform for female artists to celebrate and promote feminism and politics; protest and manifest with creativity, style, passion and femininity. Coinciding with the celebration of Woman's Day on March, Bird Club offered a special 'Wimmin's Nite: The day before the show I meet Bird for an interview, and a coffee ...

Sister: Why are you using bird as name?

Bird: A lots of reasons, first of all you never know whether or not you're gonna get a smack or not if you call a woman bird! It's playful and I think it's a word, a noun, that has a lot of negative connotations the way men use it towards women in comedy in films specially in the 60's, in a lot of British sex comedy, the kind of Benny Hill types of things ... They were always referring to women as birds but I think there's much more to it than that, first at all often the word that can cause people to use to describe each other and is just seen as derogative only and not seen in terms of demons ... And actually some of us like being a sex object, me included! Ha ha ...!. Another reference is Nights at the Circus, is one of my favourite novels and it features a woman born with wings called Feathers and I just like the idea, I'm very interested in the bird as an animal as well as the human, the use of it to describe a feminine human, so the idea to be in comparison with a creature that can fly, I just absolutely love that.

Sister: People normally don't use some terminologies because of the connotation they have, but until you start using it in a different way, until then you will never change those connotations.

Bird: Absolutely, I think that all those words that people reclaim they do so because they are very powerful and when you take something like the word queer which has been reclaimed, they are really powerful and it's because they had the power when they were used the other way and you can use it back. Also I just like to bring a lot of surrealism into the mix and not to take things too seriously and not taking things too literally either since there's never just one meaning for something and there's lots and you can play with language; that's what I like to do anyway.

Sister: Yeah, you like controversy...

Bird: Well not so much controversy, I hate controversy...

Sister: ... but to put things up side down ...

Bird: Yeah, I've been in to butch/femme in one form or another all my life. I'm not exclusive to that. But I felt like shaking up a little bit, jugging into the 21st century.

Sister: So, when did all this get started?

Bird: Oh God! Well, I wanted to be a performer my whole life and when I was a kid. When I was about six I won a competition at school, it was public speaking, I went to catholic school and then you have to write your speech, so I created my own multi-media speech, about Guinea Pigs, and I won, and it was really funny, and then I went onto play Mary in the school Nativity play ... I've just got a taste for being on stage ...

I went to art school, I spent several years making visual arts, but I was very unhappy and angry, and I don't think that anything I did at that particular time was very interesting because I was just moaning all the time, and I was so kind of angry and fuc**d up that I couldn't tackle things about pleasure, and it was very didactic and also because I wasn't using myself as performer, I wasn't making queer art at that time, because I was just too unhappy with my sexuality to explore that, even though like, sex is probably my chosen specialist subject.

Sister: Is that why you were really angry?

Bird: Mmm ... Yeah! I think so, it's because I couldn't get a shag basically ... ha ha ha!!. .. And then I moved to Manchester and I started having sex and so of course I completely forgot about making art... ha ha ha! .. I just had fun for a few years, so until recently when I picked up doing bits of graphic design, but the very kind of political projects and things like that, so I've been doing things like that really since I moved to London, which is nearly 9 years ago, and then it's been three years since I started the Bird Club.

Sister: Is Bird Club linked to the Queer Movement? Have you always been doing it in that kind of way, not following the mainstream Iike "Oh you are a lesbian.:'

Bird: What got me to this point, is the impact the queer performers of the mid 90's had on me, like David Hoyle, Angela (name corrected by Bird) Ursula Martinez, Helena Goldwater. And there was a real explosion of queer creativity that started at that period, clubs like Duckie, and we used to come down to London from Liverpool just feed off all this energy and this amazing performance work and I really wanted to do it. I think I never fitted into the lesbian scene as it was, when I first came out there were no lesbians where I lived, so I didn't really have a lesbian culture around me to foster me or whatever. I think the great thing is when you get cities like London and Manchester, it is a real privilege, because is a fringe, and we have an enormous thing here because we can live the lives that we do, whereas if you are stuck being a lesbian or a bisexual woman are very, very restricted in what you are able to do.

Sister: Some people just like to be like that....

Bird: Yeah, yeah, they do and that's fine, but some of us have different itches to scratch and you need to get somewhere like London to be able to do that.

Sister: Also for many to move here is the only way to be able to live their lives .

Bird: Yeah, absolutely, and I think that there's so much overlap between like lesbians and queers, one of the other big influences on me was the Lesbian Avengers, they were an activist group in the 90's and they used to produce these amazing graphics and go on demos to promote lesbian visibility and they had a very edgy queer visibility. That kind of lesbian thing I'm really interested in but I'm not interested in ... , I think sometimes one of the problems for me about lesbian culture is that it is too introverted, too focused on the couple, too focused on the domestic and ,the interior rather than looking out and I never felt part of that, I've been single for the most of my life. You know, in these days I like butches, I like trans men and sometimes, I like some sis (corrected by Bird) cis men as well so ... you know, that's me.

Sister: Do you thing that lesbians are different because they are trying to fit in and queer people are like saying "No, I'm just gonna do whatever I want" instead of trying, I mean like the fight for gay rights has been good for everyone, for rights, for visibility, for acceptance. It's like they are trying to be one often, would that be one of the main criticisms nowadays of the mainstream gay life, like gay marriage and so on?

Bird: So many different things are going on, like, I think the kind of queer thing we have to be really careful not to start, is getting on our high, horse being holier than thou. I've been in queer spaces over the last couple of years and there are places where there is absolute hysteria about wanting to be different and wanting to make sure that: 'I'm different, I'm not like the mainstream, I'm not heteronormative, I'm not normative' And it's almost like, there's more anxiety about not being normal and not fitting in than there is about saying: 'Well actually, this is me and I like doing bla, bla ... sometimes I fit in and sometimes J don't: So I've always been resistant to those ideas. We have all the civil partnership culture and you know, people have had really hard times, you can't blame them for wanting to fit in really, can you? Nobody wants to be bullied or whatever.

Sister: Does Club Bird have a purpose?

Bird: Yeah! Yes, Several, em .. , Oh god! Where to start... There's lots ... Well, I hate the phrase ‘kill two birds with one stone; I'll say I'm trying to hatch more than one egg in one sitting, he he! I want to create a platform for people who are interested in femininity and feminism, and I think that for too long, for the people who do butch/femme, the femme has kind of been in the shadow of the butch, and it's like, yeah, we love butches but, you know, it's not all about how heroic butch dykes are. I think that I want to break it apart from only being about butch/femme as well, the Bird Club is not post-butch/femme, because butch/femme is like, if it doesn't exist anymore, but it does but it's kind of looking at how we could reshape it a little bit for the 21st century.

Sister: How would you describe butch/femme?

Bird: Butch/femme now? Well, it's really interesting because, again, in some of the queer spaces in London at the moment, and you know I'm kind of like: 'Oh! I'm so older; you know because I'm in my late 30's and I go out to discussion and there's people there and they are early 20's and they talk about butch/femme as if is the dominant culture and I just find that amazing and I think like, since the whole rise of the gender queer movement in London, it's been a Renaissance but it's only in specific places, like it's always tied to race, class, like, if you go to spaces where a lot of non-white woman hang out butch/femme has never kind of gone away, where in a lot of white spaces it's pushed away by the combination of feminism and the whole lipstick lesbianism thing that kind of hated any masculinity within women, so it is those two things combined.

Sister: So, the Club ...

Bird: What I do with the Club each month is try to create my ideal Club like where would I really like to be, people I like around me and artists, music, everything. The politics is very important but the pleasure is as well, and I just love it, like I think the whole idea of cabaret has kind of come back again. I love the idea of nightclubs as spaces as well, I think as queers, as LGBTQIQ, whatever, we are really successful at cabaret and we are not, specially female queer artists, why are there only two visual artists in this country that are famous lesbians Sadie Lee and Maggie Hambling? It just feels like an art form that is more useful to us and also if you make a club that is successful you can finance it yourself so kind of you can't pay the artists a lot of money but at Bird Club we get everyone a bit of money.

Sister: Tomorrow, your performance, is about Julie Bindel, related to the way she thinks about trans people, isn't it?

Bird: Julie Bindel has been a controversial character within feminism and within lesbianism ever since I've known about her. I've kind of known about her and her writing for years now.

Photo by Sam Nightingale

Sister: Have you ever met her?

Bird: No. It's quite a complex history. The thing about transgender, she wrote an absolutely dreadful article four years ago, it was quite unbelievably offensive in 'The Guardian' and since then she has retracted, she's apologize for the 'tone' of the article but not for what she said and to me, I see that as being like a kid that puts her hands behind her back and crosses her fingers when she says sorry and she doesn't really mean sorry. She constantly goes back to the beginning of her argument that there was a case, in America or Canada, of a woman [a trans woman] who wanted to work in a Rape Crisis Centre and there was a whole problem with that and I don't remember the way the whole case got settled but what makes me really angry is the way she uses it, as she tries to manipulate people's pain and anger about rape to demonise transwomen and I find that completely disgusting. For a start, so many trans-women are really really vulnerable to sexual violence and we need to all stand together to support the most vulnerable women again and then secondly, for anyone who's been raped, surely the most important thing about their rape counsellor is that they support the person who has been raped not what their gender identity is. I think is really manipulative in terms of the National Press because it is like now you and I, we can sit here and make a really long list about the amazing, incredible feminist thinkers, writers, journalists who could have a column in The Guardian and do something really useful with it and instead we've got this, you know, immature dribble being published. Most lesbians I know are completely embarrassed about Julie Bindel because they don't think like that. People are reading The Guardian and they're thinking that's what the dykes think, you know?

Sister: 'Isn't that the problem with being a minority? If there's one person out there now can they represent all the people? They can only represent their view. If it was a bloke writing in The Guardian nobody is gonna blame him for what he's saying, he's not promoting the white, male, middle class view they just see him as an individual, but in this case you only see a lesbian writer, and therefore what lesbians think.

Bird: Yes. The whole performance is using satire and what I don't wanna do is bully Julie Bindel, cause I don't like bullies and nobody wants to be bullied. We need to get away from the bully culture that we have in this Society, but equally if you are going to put things out there in the public realm you're gonna be challenged and for me the way I am interested in doing that is as a performer using satire and using comedy.

Sister: So you think that your performance tomorrow, which is going to be on YouTube, it's gonna be a personal confrontation with her, like a message to her?

Bird: Yes, yes, I hope it does reach her. ln the play I play her mother and she is gonna be like a tomboy school kid and the idea of the performance is that I treat her like a child cause she writes in a really immature way, so it's not taking on her as an adult, it's infantilising her and basically I am gonna put her over my knee and pull her pants down and spank her after I have chastised her. There's a lot of subtext in the performance like I am really interested in the idea of family and creating fantasy families so in the family there's lots of famous LGBT people historically and they're kind of like her aunties, her uncles, my aunties, my uncles, my lover so it's kind a like the idea of that, there's all of us.

Sister: What do you want her to feel when she sees it? Would you do that to your sister?

Bird: Yes. I want her to, she needs a kick up the ass. She's writing some absolute bloody nonsense and I want her to think about things she says in the broader society, to think about the way she considers trans-women and sexual violence and misogyny against trans-women. I think she might laugh as well, actually, cause she's a Northerner and the performance is very very Northern, it's got a real Northern humour to it, she might see the satirical side and show it to the editor of The Guardian cause he is in it as well. The way it goes in the end of the performance puts it all back on the man in power, cause at the end of the day they are the ones who decide who speaks and not.

(Interview end)

The day after I went to Bird Club and I was fascinated by a forest of diverse creatures. Bird Club offers a space to socialize and interact and amazing performances! Radical, political and inspiring were Project Caramel, Rollagerl, Violetta Storm, Riot Show Grrls, Bird la Bird la Bird and Holestar.

After meeting Bird I went on to research about Julie Bindel, that article specifically but also about many others and what she has been up to ail these years as a feminist activist and as an uncloseted journalist and she has done a lot! is she defined by one article? When we have so little representation in the media why then do we expect so much on the few that make it? They can’t win under the pressure the entire LGBTQIQ whatever they do. The views of this article represent the views of the interviewee, not Sister. We are just a platform and we would love to interview Julie Bindel for her side of the story.

Like all any famiiies, sometimes we fight. Could we, the community, try to dissolve our differences and be able to team up and fight together for the same causes instead of among ourselves? Who is Julie Bindel, her work, that article, the controversy, her nomination for the Stonewall awards and, maybe baby, Bindel herself in next issue!!

This is an open debate, please feel free to send us your opinion, what do you think about:

Right to speech, punishment, respect, understanding, forgiving, bullying, embarrassment, public embarrassment, exposure, community, sisterhood ...

Email us to editorial@sistermagazine.co.uk

By Rebecca Mondejar-Puig