All Balls and Glitter (10 page)

During my time as a crimper, Deanne fell for another man and left me. She suddenly took off for three weeks without warning. When she came back, she knocked on the door and announced: ‘Our relationship’s over. I’m in love with someone I work with. I’m going to be living here, but I’ll be in the spare room and that’s how it is.’ So I said, ‘Fine.’

I was slowly becoming the real me. It was a bit like in
Muriel’s Wedding
, where she goes back to being Muriel after living her life as someone else. I changed my name back to Craig and got a boyfriend for the first time, although the relationship only survived for a month. At long last, I could be openly gay.

Deanne wasn’t surprised that I went from her to a man because I never lied to her about my bisexuality; we discussed everything. The big hurdle was breaking the news to my family, but that turned out to be remarkably easy. I told my sister, Susan, and she told Diane, who told Mel, and they all told Mum.

Shortly afterwards, I went back to Ballarat to do Mum’s hair. (As I had been training to be a hairdresser, everyone expected free haircuts, naturally, so whenever I was at home, I would do my sisters, my mum and my brother. Even the aunties and uncles would pop round for a trim! Of course, I never minded, as it was actually a lot of fun – and the perfect way to indulge in a decent chinwag with them and catch up on their news. We all know how hairdressers like to talk.)

I was in the middle of giving my mum a perm, which was all the rage at the time, when she said, ‘I know you’re a bit “that way”.’

I replied, ‘Yes, I am.’

Nothing else needed to be said. It was totally accepted.

Later, I told my dad in the car, on the way back from Melbourne to Ballarat one weekend. I had been quite worried about informing him, because he was a navy man, and I didn’t expect him to take it well. He did give me a little speech, along the lines of, ‘You know, you can get court-martialled in the navy for that sort of thing,’ but on the whole he coped very well.

Coming out can be a horrendous experience for some, but sometimes the fear of the family’s reaction can be a lot worse than the reaction itself. It certainly was in my case.

As soon as I ditched the hairdressing and decided to focus all my energies on becoming a dancer, I needed to find a quick-fix job. I had to move out of the flat I shared with Deanne, too, because with no real money coming in I couldn’t possibly afford it.

John Link, my friend from the Ballarat amateur company, was now living in Melbourne, so I rang him and asked if he knew of anywhere I could stay. Thankfully, he had a room going spare in his new pad so he let me reside awhile at his place again. It was quite a big house, but the only room vacant was a box room. At times there, I felt like I was sleeping in a cupboard.

One of John’s flatmates was a girl called Cecily Grant. One day, she announced, ‘Craig, I’m moving out of here. Do you want to come and live with me?’

She offered me my own double room for the same rent, so we moved up the road to a house in Dow Street, Port Melbourne. Cecily was a delight and we had a totally crazy time when we were living together – including my first experience of hard drugs.

We were in a bar with some of Cecily’s mad friends and one of them offered me a line. So, I tried a snort of cocaine. It didn’t have a good effect on me. First, I fell backwards off my chair and then I spent the rest of the night sitting beside the toilet, thinking I was about to croak. I wasn’t actually sick, but I felt like I could vomit at any second.

It was the one and only time I tried charlie and it put me right off. Looking back on it now, it’s quite embarrassing. Cecily and her friends had to look after me because I was lying on the floor morbidly saying, ‘I’m going to die,’ over and over again.

Cecily and I seemed to attract drama wherever we went together. She taught me such a lot and tirelessly encouraged me in my career. I have so much to be grateful to her for. We’re great friends to this day, although she’s in Australia and happily married to a charming and highly successful international businessman now, so I don’t get to see her as often as I’d like. When we do meet up, whether it be in New York, Paris or Rome, there’s never a dull moment.

Cecily had been a dancer in the United States, in European television and theatre productions, and in Paris at all of the major shows, including the Crazy Horse, the famous topless cabaret house. The girls there are chosen for their perfection: they’re all the same size, height, weight and bust size, and all of them are amazing dancers. She’d had to give up her dance career because of injury, which is why she’d moved to Melbourne. It must have been fate – because she was about to change my life completely and forever.

Living with Cecily gave me total independence. I finally knew who I was. I wasn’t scared of being out and everyone knowing I was gay. And she provided me with a job. She trained me as a fitness instructor and I taught aerobics to businessmen at 6.30 every morning, under the name of Craig Stevens.

It might seem bonkers that I kept changing my name, but I was so determined to be a successful dancer that I didn’t want any other profession to be associated with it.

The fees from those aerobics sessions covered my rent, my food and my dance classes. What the sessions couldn’t do was persuade me that I had an acceptable body shape; despite the punishing schedule I was forcing it to submit to day after day. My tendency to put on weight has always been the bane of my life.
When I lived in Melbourne, my obsession with losing fat left me with serious food issues.

Many people think that this is more of a woman’s problem, but a lot of men battle with their weight too, and I’ve struggled with it all my life. I was always prone to chubbiness as a child. At ten, I was slightly porky and had little, fat boy boobs. My Auntie Mavis used to call me Tits, which I hated. I got bigger at twelve and even fatter at thirteen, much to the disgust of my unsympathetic PE teacher. It wasn’t until my overnight growth spurt that the plumpness left me. When I started dancing, I began building muscle. I was still developing physically, which was a good thing because it enabled me to get a decent bone structure for a dance body.

In the six weeks I was away with Mr X, I didn’t do any exercise or dancing at all. Walking up Sturt Street in Ballarat one day, after my return, I happened to glance at my reflection in a shop window. The sun was shining, making the likeness crystal clear, and I received quite a shock. ‘My arse has dropped!’ I thought. It had fallen, literally, by about an inch. Due to sheer lack of exercise, my whole body had sagged. I couldn’t get back to the dance class quick enough.

By the time I took up aerobics alongside the dance, I was really just bones, but I still thought I had all this body fat, because I wasn’t toned enough. I used the gym instructor job to try to create my perfect shape, but it soon became an unhealthy fixation. I was actually really thin, and had lost far too much weight, but I always thought I was tubby. When I looked at myself in the mirror, I saw my skin and anything that wasn’t rock-solid muscle as fat.

Looking back, I now know that I was suffering from a severe eating disorder. I would starve myself and eat only lettuce for lunch and dinner for two weeks at a time. I was paranoid about every ounce of fat on my body, but I wasn’t helping myself because I wasn’t eating protein, so my energy levels were plummeting too.

There were times when I would go on a drink binge, and then pig out on ridiculous food like pizzas and burgers. I had no energy for dancing because I was either drinking and gorging on rubbish, or eating nothing at all. It was an awful time.

Although I hid my food issues from Cecily as much as possible, she proved a wonderful support, particularly with regard to my dance ambitions, which was my ultimate focus in life. She put me in touch with a wonderful Russian ballet teacher, Miss Golding, and forced me to go to her classical Russian ballet class at 9.30 every morning, making sure I was up and out the door and at the class on time. The cast of
West Side Story
, which was on at the Princess Theatre at that time, attended the same class, so I was training with professionals.

I’d been to see that production loads of times. Cecily used to take me because I couldn’t afford the tickets, but she loved it as well because of her dance background. I can still remember sitting in the audience thinking, ‘This is phenomenal.’

The classes were making me stronger and stronger. When an open audition came up for
West Side Story
, I thought I’d give it a go, just for the experience.

I was still in the relatively early stages of training and I didn’t imagine for one moment that I was ready yet, dance-wise. The last audition I had been to, for the Channel 7 Dancers, had been a disaster, so I was apprehensive about going to this one. Nonetheless, Cecily persuaded me that it would be a good opportunity to face my fear and gain practical knowledge at the same time.

On the day, I wasn’t nervous, just very excited. I’d seen the show three times by then and I was a bit starry-eyed about it. For the try-outs, we were asked to learn a routine from
A Chorus Line
,
which had lots of high kicks, pirouettes and double turns to the knee in it: steps for which the choreographer was famous. I walked on the stage and performed it with all the other auditionees. Then we were broken down into groups of three and I danced again and again and then again.

The auditions were in the actual theatre, so to step out on to the set of
West Side Story
was frightening. I was terrified. If I didn’t get the part, I told myself, at least I would have danced on that stage. Leigh Chambers, the choreographer, watched us intently. He was very camp, but I had to be as butch as possible because the role required it.

After I’d finished, Leigh said, ‘Thank you very much,’ and it was all over. As far as I was concerned, I hadn’t got the part. I didn’t know anything about auditions. I assumed that if you weren’t hired on the spot, that was it.

Two days later, the phone rang and I was asked to join the company in the role of Pepe. I couldn’t believe it! Little ol’ me, the boy from Ballarat, was going to be in a professional show in the big smoke, with Philip Gould and Caroline O’Connor (who later performed the famous ‘Roxanne’ tango in
Moulin Rouge
) playing the leads.

Before rehearsals began, I was invited by a group of pals to a Miss Alternate
beauty pageant, a drag queen extravaganza where all the participants get frocked up in the most outrageous costumes. One friend convinced me to drag up for the night.

When I got there, attired in all my finery, I happened upon some of the cast from
West Side Story
. It was the first time I’d met the company and I was introduced to them all as the new ‘Shark’ boy. Those of you who know the musical will remember that the Sharks are tough little Puerto Ricans. There I was, 6 foot 2 tall, skinny as a rake and in full make-up and high heels. God knows what they thought!

That was the first time I’d been in drag properly. I was quite taken aback at my transformation. A female friend had said, ‘I’ll do your make-up.’ So I let her paint my face and put false eyelashes on me, then I slipped into a tiny snap-crotch teddy with stockings and suspenders, and squeezed my feet into a pair of platform shoes.

Finally, I steeled myself to look in the mirror. What a shock. ‘Wow, that’s amazing,’ was my initial reaction. Scanning the
photo I took of myself on that night from the distance of twenty-odd years, I demur – I look tragic – but at the time I thought I looked fantastic.

After that, I learned how to apply professional make-up so that I could paint my own face, sculpting the eyebrows and so on. Up close, it’s frightful, like it’s been laid on with a trowel; but on stage, under a spotlight, it looks great.

That night was also the first time I met Stuart McGhee (aka Magatha), who was in
West Side Story
in the swing position (which is not as rude as it sounds!). The swing is essentially the understudy to all roles: the cast member who goes on in the place of anyone who’s sick or injured. Magatha was to become one of my closest friends. He would later prove instrumental in my move to Europe.

The
West Side Story
rehearsal period was about two weeks. Jane Beckett, who played a Jet girl, Velma, in the show and was one of my favourite dancers at the time, had the job of teaching me the routines, as she was the dance captain. I was in awe of her, and I never thought I was good enough next to her.

She taught me how to dance on a rake, which is the slope of the stage, as it changes your centre of balance when you’re turning. There were about twenty triple pirouettes to the knee in that show, so you absolutely had to know where your centre was, otherwise you’d take out all the other dancers. When I got on stage to rehearse, I kept on turning down the rake and she’d scream at me, ‘Change your centre!’ over and over again. What a frustration I must have been for her, especially when she was really tired at ten in the morning, having danced in the show the evening before. It’s a skill you really can’t learn in a studio, though, where the floors are generally flat.

Plus, there are varying degrees of rakes, as each theatre requires different levels to enable the audience to see the stage from their seats. I learned so much in such a very short space of time thanks to Jane’s patience and persistence.

My first time meeting the full cast was one of the scariest moments of my performing career, especially as I’d seen all of them on stage and knew them only as their characters: rough, tough fighting machines who would stab you in a millisecond. The company manager took me round the dressing rooms to introduce me.

I was full of admiration and completely star-struck. As I undertook my meet-and-greet, most of my new colleagues looked distracted and busy, getting ready for the performance ahead. They each possessed this intense confidence.

They had been on the road as a company for a year, so they knew one another intimately and had formed very tight, strong friendships – and enmities – with each other already. When I was introduced to them, some seemed not to care or just grunted at me. It felt quite awkward, as if I was in the way. They had nicknames for each other, and the mucking around and play fights were all too much to take in. It felt hostile, and I was completely overwhelmed by the amount of testosterone pumping through the backstage corridors. I was both unnerved and thrilled by it.