Queen of the drags

By LINDA HERRICK

Tina de Malmanche lounges at home, wrapped comfortably around her big tiger cushion, the picture of kitsch domestic bliss. The caption reads, "Tina de Malmanche at home, Whakatane 2002." Another photo of Tina also appears (above) on this page: "Tina at Gay Lib Dance Party, Auckland 1974." It seems Tina, once queen of the pecking order in Auckland's drag scene 30 years ago, has mellowed.

The images were taken by photographer Fiona Clark, who was just 20 when she shot the earlier photo - and many others - of Tina and her mates, including the formidable Tiny Tina, Carmen, and people with names like Mamie, Lolly and Penny Lane.

When those pictures toured the country in 1975-76 in The Active Eye: Contemporary New Zealand Photography exhibition, they were attacked by morals campaigner Patricia Bartlett in Christchurch, removed from the Sarjeant Gallery in Wanganui, and stripped from New Plymouth's Govett-Brewster by the mayor and a minister in the name of "decency". Newspaper headlines from the time refer to "indecent exhibits", "obscene words", "transvestite photos" and "Miss Bartlett gives talk on pornography". By the time the show was scheduled to come to Auckland, it was cancelled.

Ironically, many of those same images are back at the Govett-Brewster in Go Girl, a major time-spanning, gender-crossing exhibition celebrating Clark's queenly work. Transsexual MP Georgina Beyer opened the show, preceded by a powhiri for those who didn't survive the partying.

"A lot of them have passed away," says Clark, "and their passing was acknowledged at the powhiri. It felt like it got laid to rest at last. There were a lot of tragic deaths and a lot of deaths people had never properly grieved for. We knew certain people had died and the families had buried them as male or as female, but not as they really were.

"The kaumatua at the service said, 'These people were thrown away but we don't do that'. It was quite beautiful and very moving."

Clark first met Tina when she was a student at Elam Art School. She took her trusty Leica camera to Auckland's gay-drag nightclub scene, recording a piece of New Zealand social history from which conventional eyes were averted, even though many of the in-your-face queens must have been hard to ignore.

Go Girl also contains updated contemporary portraits of the survivors from that time, oral history video interviews, and what Clark calls "collateral" images: black-and-white photos of long-gone Auckland coffee bars and cabarets, such as the Peter Pan Cabaret, the West Wind Coffee Bar and the Top of the Town, run by Tiny Tina.

The show is also supported by a comprehensive catalogue which includes a conversation between Clark and the show's curator, Govett-Brewster director Greg Burke.

"There's a huge expanse of history that's missing in our visual, written and oral history," explains Clark, who is based in Tikorangi near Waitara.

"Quite a few of the people in the show have told stories from that period which contain an enormous amount of information and set the stories straight. Some of the past is pretty slippery."

Clark wants to transcribe all the tapes and make a complete collection as an archive. "We don't want to lose the stories. We thought these were the first clubs but people were talking about clubs in the 1950s and 60s, which predates what we thought was happening, the scene, what happened at 6 o'clock closing, how many people were on the street.

"A couple of people in Taranaki have come to me to say they were doing the same thing in the 50s and 60s in New Plymouth and that is extraordinary.

"It was self-invented, this whole New Zealand attitude of make-do, how they coped. One of the stories is about how they used to go to Wanganui from New Plymouth on a long weekend and dress in drag and get away with it, go to the races and that sort of thing."

Clark, who grew up in Inglewood, left as soon as she was 16. "I didn't fit in in Inglewood, I was bored. At school we were told we had to go teaching. There was no way I was going to teach and I wanted to get out. I was determined to go to art school and I was also told Auckland was the den of iniquity, so I was off."

Working as a ward maid at Green Lane Hospital to support herself through Elam, Clark landed a job through circumstances amusingly related in the Go Girl catalogue in the Ca'Dora coffee bar at the bottom of Queen St, just opposite the ferry buildings. It was her entree into the world of drag.

"There were lots of queens and street people who came into that place. It did special coffees which, in those days, was illegal and highly risque. But the Ca'Dora was safe. Auckland didn't feel that scary to me after a couple of summers working there, I loved it."

At Elam, the lecturers were supportive of Clark photographing her friends, but the photography department did not have a colour darkroom and, "I could not photograph what I was doing in the night clubs and the people of the night in black and white".

So Clark and a friend at Elam built their own colour darkroom and she hand-processed the colour prints - the same prints appearing in Go Girl. "They've held up really well," she says, proudly. "We have rescanned some of them and some needed touching up but I have been very protective of the work.

"The most extraordinary thing is to go and visit these wonderful friends. They bring out their album and we talk about the photos I gave them 30 years ago. Their lives have been hell, they've been through all sorts of things but they've still got the photos."

Despite the Active Eye controversy, Clark has exhibited consistently in group and solo shows in public galleries all over the country, although she admits "that exhibition pigeonholed me as someone who dealt with those people".

Getting Go Girl off the ground has been a struggle, she says. "I've tried to talk to people over the past five years about the project and they said, 'Oh, it's just a rehash of the old work'. But no, it has a contemporary update and I've had to use language to make people believe it was okay to look at this again.

"They are good photographs but people were so distracted by the content still, and so distracted by their own issue of, 'Oh well, it's old so it's no good'. It does feel like pushing s*** uphill sometimes but the photography community and the old friends from that old art network who came to the opening think it's extraordinary and that it should travel."

One who agrees is Los Angeles Times art critic David Pagel, who was visiting New Zealand briefly last week and went to see Go Girl. "I thought it was really groundbreaking. It is wrong to think she is only working for an audience of one type of community. To say she can only target the gay community is plain wrong. I'm not in that constituency and I thought the images were just fantastic. They have so much humanity.

"I am going back to Los Angeles to show the catalogue to curators and writers to try to drum up interest. If these images had been made just this year they would be interesting but since they've been made over the past 30 years, they are a big chunk of history."

Have New Zealand art institutions really moved on since the Active Eye days, when Clark's drag queen images were so reviled? So far, only the Govett-Brewster has shown the maturity to mount the project. Others, we know, have rejected it. The laugh will be on them if Pagel's plan succeeds and Go Girl really gets going.

* Go Girl, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, until December 8; To get the catalogue sent to you, e-mail artanddesign@govettbrewster.com