Moranthology (10 page)

 

Let's put the “Gay Moon Landings” piece next to my piece on transsexuals—making a little LGBT ghetto within the book. These pages will have markedly better delis and bars than the delis and bars in the rest of the book, and feature a mini-cab company run by a drag queen whose
Grease-
tribute act goes under the name “Sandra Wee.” You can find me on these pages most Friday nights—wearing only one shoe and singing “Womanizer” by Britney Spears with a male nurse wearing a sombrero, and waving poppers.

W
E
O
NLY
H
AD
T
WO
T
RANSSEXUALS IN
W
OLVERHAMPTON

I
n Wolverhampton in 1991, we had two male-to-female transsexuals, who would unfailingly be in the chip shop at the end of Victoria Street at 2
AM
, sobering up on curry sauce and chips after a night out clubbing.

As I went past them on the 512 bus, I would feel a kinship with them—a kinship that I would try to project through the glass.

“I feel as if I were born in the wrong body, too!” I would think, loudly, at them. “You were trapped, unhappily, in the bodies of men. I too am unhappily trapped—in the body of a fat virgin with a bad haircut. I wish
I
could have an operation to sort things out, like you guys—I mean ladies.”

I was reminded of what a moron I was this September, when a ten-year-old boy returned to school after the summer holidays as a girl. As the media coverage made clear, some parents at the school claimed to be “outraged.”

“We should have been consulted,” one said—presumably imagining a scenario where parents regularly throw open the raising of their children to a school-wide committee of other parents; possibly via a Facebook page called “Penis or Vagina: YOU Choose Which One You Think Suits My Weeping Child Best.”

Then, last week, the Department of Education announced that it was considering that schoolchildren be taught about transgender equality—which was greeted, again, with a predictable series of complaints.

Margaret Morrissey, founder of campaigning group Parents Outloud, said: “We are overloading our children with issues they shouldn't have to consider.”

This is an interesting stance to take on an issue—mainly because of its unappealing and extreme impoliteness. We have to remember that the descriptor “our children” includes both transgender kids (0.1 percent of the population), and kids who live in a world with transgender kids (the other 99.09 percent)—thus comprising 100 percent of all the world's children.

With those kinds of stats, it seems to be a good idea to enable children in learning about it nice and early on—before they start getting the kind of weird ideas adults have. We constantly underestimate children in these situations. I recall, when I was a teenager, the suggestion of “lessons” in homosexuality being decried for similar reasons of “complexity.” A generation later, and I watch kids in the playground, arguing over who should play the bisexual Captain Jack Harkness from
Doctor Who—
who fancied both Rose
and
the Doctor. Not only do they seem to have got their heads around it quite easily—but they're incorporating it into games involving time-travel, wormholes and paradox, too.

And, anyway, as a general rule of thumb, I don't think we need worry much about overloading kids with interesting philosophical subjects that help them develop both understanding, and tolerance of, other human beings. That's like worrying that the Beatles might have made
Sgt. Pepper
“too good.” That's what's supposed to happen. Carry on! Everything's fine!

One of humanity's less loveable tropes is an ability to get hurt, self-righteous and huffy about someone else's problem. It's amazing that “normal” people would turn on some transgender kid and go, “But what about meeeeee? What about myyyyyyy kids?” It's a bit like those dads in the maternity wards who complain about being exhausted.

And as a strident feminist, I'm always saddened by other feminists who rail against male-to-female transgenders—claiming you can only be born a woman, and not “become” one.

Holy moly, ladies—what exactly do you think is going wrong here? Having your male genitals remodeled as female, then committing to a lifetime of hormone therapy, sounds like a bit more of a commitment to being a woman than just accidentally being born one. And, besides, it's an incredibly inhospitable stance to take. Personally, anyone who wants to join the Lady Party is welcome as far as I'm concerned. The more the merrier! Anyone who's been rejected by The Man is a friend of mine!

Anyway. Since I was an ill-shorn sixteen-year-old on the bus, I've found out that the word isn't “normal”—it's “cis.” In Latin, the opposite of “trans” is “cis”—and so most of humanity is “cisgender.” This opens language up to a subsequent possibility: finally finding the “otherness” in transgender fascinating, and useful. We'll hurl satellites out into space, in order to find new and enthralling wonders—but we could simply turn to someone next to us, and ask a question about their life, instead. We endlessly debate what it is to be a man, or what it is to be a woman—when there are people who walk the Earth who've been both. If transgender people didn't exist, we'd probably be trying to spend billions of pounds trying to invent them. Instead, we won't even tell kids they exist.

 

Is it time for my Lady Gaga interview? Let's do my Lady Gaga interview—given that this is the gay ghetto of the book, and Gaga is the most gay-friendly pop-star ever.

Interviewing Gaga was one of the more extraordinary moments of my life—not just the night out with her itself, which is all in the feature, but the reaction to it afterwards, as well. I posted it on Twitter on the day of publication with the message, “I'm not being funny, but you really won't ever read a better interview with Lady Gaga than mine.” This is mainly because I was drunk when I tweeted it—but also because it's got the lupus exclusive, and a sex club, and her having a wee, and an empowering talk about feminism, and us getting hammered, and me exclusively finding out she didn't have a penis, and me ruining a couture cloak. Everything you want, really.

In the three days following my tweet and the link to the piece, it got re-tweeted over 20,000 times. It went around the world. I lost count of the people who read it and told me they liked it—mainly because I have both very poor both long- and short-term memory. My favorite person who told me they liked it was some orange, handsome dude I met at the Glamour
Awards in 2010. We were in the smoking area having a puff and, when I told him my name, he went, “Oh, you! You went to the sex club with Gaga!” and we had a lovely chat. Throughout our conversation, I was aware of an odd atmosphere around us. A semi-circle of women had gathered, and were watching us with expressions of what can only be described as “hunger.”

When we finally finished our fags and bid each other adieu, the moment Mr. Orangeio walked away, a woman, who looked on the verge of fainting, went “What's he LIKE? I CAN'T BELIEVE YOU WERE TALKING TO HIM!”

Turned out he was some bloke from
Sex and the City
who all the birds fancy. I didn't have a clue. I hate that show like bum-plague. I thought he was the PR for Vaseline Intensive Care, which was sponsoring the awards. No wonder he looked confused when I asked him if he took his work home with him, and used it to keep his elbows moist.

Mind you, that was the same party where I talked to an old dear in a tiara for ten minutes, thinking she was the editor of
Glamour
's mum—and it turned out to be Home Secretary Theresa May. I'm not so good with the faces.

C
OME
P
ARTY
W
ITH
G
AGA

T
here's nothing quite like watching a plane take off without you to really focus your mind on how much you want to be on it. As flight BA987 knifes off the runway, and begins its journey to Berlin, I'm watching it through a window in the Departures Lounge—still holding the ticket for seat 12A in my hand.

Due to a frankly unlikely series of events, I got to Heathrow three minutes after the flight was closed. Although no missed flight ever comes as a joy, this one is a particular mellow-harsher because, in five hours, I'm supposed to be interviewing arguably the most famous woman in the world—Lady Gaga—in an exclusive that has taken months of phonecalls, jockeying and wrangling to set up.

It's not so much that I am now almost certainly going to be fired. Since I found out how much the model Sophie Anderton earned as a high-class call-girl, my commitment to continuing as a writer at
The Times
has been touch and go anyway, to be honest.

It's more that I am genuinely devastated to have blown it so spectacularly. Since I saw Gaga play
Poker Face
at Glastonbury Festival last year, I have been a properly, hawkishly devoted admirer.

Halfway through a forty-five-minute-set that had five costume changes, Gaga came on stage in a dress made entirely of see-through plastic bubbles, accompanied by her matching, see-through plastic bubble piano. You have to respect a woman who can match her outfit to her instrument. Although the single “Poker Face” is a punching, spasmodic, Euro-house stormer, Gaga took to her piano and started to play it as cat-house blues—all inverted chords and rolling fifths, with falling, heartbroken semitones on the left hand; wailing out like Bessie Smith sitting on the doorstep at 4
AM
.

It was already incredible
before
she did the second half of the song standing on her piano stool, on one leg—like a tiny, transvestite ballerina.

Twenty minutes later, she ended her set literally bending over backwards to please—fireworks shooting from the nipples of her pointy bra, screaming, “I fancy you, Glastonbury—do you fancy me?” The audience went wholly, totally, dementedly nuts for her.

It caused me to have this—unprecedented—thought: “She's making Madonna look a bit slack and unimaginative here. After all, when Madonna was twenty-three, she was still working a Dunkin' Donuts in New York. She weren't playing no rolling fifths.”

Since then, I have followed her career like boys follow sports teams. As a cultural icon, she does an incredible service for women: after all, it will be hard to oppress a generation who've been brought up on pop-stars with fire coming out of their tits.

She's clearly smart and clearly hilarious—she pitched up at the Royal Variety Performance on a sixteen-foot-high piano, modelled on Dali's spider-legged elephants—but has never ruined the fun by going, “Actually, I'm smart and hilarious” like, say, Bono would.

And, most importantly of all, she clearly couldn't give a f*** what anyone says about her. When she appeared on
The X Factor,
it was the week after Simon Cowell had said that he was “Looking for the new Lady Gaga.” She performed
Bad Romance
in an eighteen-foot-long bathtub with six dancers—then played a piano solo on a keyboard hidden in a pretend sink, while sitting on a pretend toilet. Clearly, Simon Cowell would never sign up anything like that in million, billion years. It was very much in his face.

So yes. I am a Gaga supporter. I'm Team Gaga. She's my girl. My pop Arsenal; my dance Red Sox; my fashion England.

A
t Heathrow, as I go through the rigmarole of booking the next available flight—which will get me to Berlin two hours after my appointed slot—I know what awaits me at the other end. Angry Americans. Very angry Americans from her management team.

Because in the year since Glastonbury, Gaga has taken on a semi-mythic air, like Prince, or Madonna. Since she has sold fifteen million albums and forty million singles, and has become a tabloid staple, she now rarely does interviews. The last one she did in the UK—with
Q Magazine
—ended with her leaving halfway through, in tears. Pap-pictures of her looking spindly—covered in scratches and bruises—have carried with them the inference of those most female of traits under stress: eating disorders, self-harm. There have been collapses: last minute cancellation of concerts in Indiana, West Lafeyette and Connecticut after irregular heartbeats and exhaustion; near-collapse onstage in Auckland.

When you've just been named one of
Time
magazine's “100 Most Influential People in the World,” this is, traditionally, where you are expected to start going a bit . . . Jackson.

It's incredible I was ever granted access at all—and now I've, unbelievably, stood her up.

I will be genuinely, tearfully grateful if I get even a ten-minute Q&A from a piqued megastar pulling a gigantic huff, and answering all my questions with monosyllabic, “yes/no” binary tetchiness.

This is the worst day of my life that hasn't involved an episiotomy.

“H
i!”

Gaga's dressing room, backstage at the 02 World Arena in Berlin. With the walls and ceiling draped in black, it resembles a pop-gothic seraglio. But while scented candles burn churchishly, a gorgeous vintage record player on the floor—surrounded by piles of vinyl—and works of art hung on the wall give it a cheerful air. There is a table, laid with beautiful china. There are flowers, growing in the dark. And at the head of the tea table, amongst the flowers: Gaga.

Two things strike you about her immediately. Firstly, that she
really
isn't dressed casually. In a breast-length, silver-gray wig, she has a black lace veil wound around her face, and sits, framed, in an immense, custom-made, one-off Alexander McQueen cloak. The effect is having been ushered into the presence of a very powerful fairytale queen: possibly one who has recently killed Aslan, on the Stone Table.

The second thing you notice is that she is being lovely. Absolutely lovely. Both literally and figuratively, what's under the veil and the cloak is a diminutive, well brought up, New York Catholic girl from a wealthy middle-class family, with twinkly brown eyes, and a minxy sense of humor.

“So glad you finally made it!” she says, giving a huge, warm hug. “What a terrible day you're having! Thank you so much for coming!”

Holding her for a moment, she feels—through the taffeta atmosphere of billowing McQueen—borderline Kylie Minogue-tiny, but warm, and robust. Like a slender, teenage cheerleader. This is some surprise, given the aforementioned presumption that she's cracking up.

So when Gaga says, with warm good manners, “This tea is for you,” gesturing to a bone china cup hand-painted with violets, I can't help myself from replying, uncouthly: “I know you're tiny and must get knackered—but why do you keep collapsing?”

“My schedule is such that I don't get very much time to eat,” Gaga says, holding her teacup daintily. I don't think the teacup is her infamous “pet tea cup” that she took everywhere with her earlier in the year—including nightclubs. Perhaps it's too famous to be merely drunk from now. Maybe it has its own dressing room.

“But I certainly don't have an eating problem,” she continues. “A little MDMA once in a while never killed anybody, but I really don't do drugs. I don't touch cocaine anymore. I don't smoke. Well, maybe a single cigarette—with whisky—while I'm working, because it just frees my mind a little bit. But I care about my voice. The thrill of my voice being healthy on stage is really special. I take care of myself.”

Later on in the interview, Gaga takes off the McQueen cloak—perhaps pointedly, for the nosey journalist—and reveals that, underneath, she's only wearing fishnets, knickers and a bra. As someone who is practically seeing her naked, from two feet away, her body seems non-scarred, healthy: sturdy. She is wiry, but not remotely bony. It's a dancer's body—not a victim's.

I hand Gaga a page torn from that day's paper, which I read on the plane. It's a story about her performance at the Met Ball in New York—one of the big events of the global celebrity calendar. In the report, it is claimed that Gaga “angered” organizers by “refusing” to walk the red carpet, and then suffered an attack of stage fright so severe she locked herself in her dressing room, and had to be “persuaded out” by “her close friend Oprah Winfrey.” It's merely the latest of the “Gaga cracking up” stories in the press.

“Is this true?” I ask her.

She reads through the story—frowning slightly at first, eyes wide open by the end.

“I wasn't
nervous!”
she says, witheringly. “To be honest with you? I don't give a fuck about red carpets, and I never do them. I don't like them. First of all—how could any of these outfits possibly look good with an ugly red carpet under them?”

For a moment, I recall some of Gaga's more incredible rig-outs: the silver lobster fascinator. The red PVC Elizabethan farthingale. The tunic made of Kermit heads. The red lace outfit that covered her entire face, peaking in a two-foot-high crown. She has a point.

“It's just visually horrid,” Gaga continues, in a merrily outraged way. Her manner is of your mate in the pub, slagging off the neon smock she's been forced to wear working at Boots. “Hollywood is not what it used to be. I don't want to be perceived as . . . one of the other bitches in a gown. I wasn't
nervous,”
says the woman who appeared in her “Telephone” video dressed in nothing more than “POLICE: INCIDENT” tape, strategically placed across her nipples and crotch. “Don't be SILLY!”

But still these rumors persist—of collapses, and neuroses. “You are, after all, a twenty-three-year-old woman coping with enormous fame, and media pressure, on your own. You are currently the one, crucial, irreplaceable element of a 161-date world tour. How do you keep depressive, or panicked, thoughts at bay?”

“Prescription medicine,” she says, cheerfully. “I can't control my thoughts at all. I'm tortured. But I like that,” she laughs, cheerfully. “Lorca says it's good to be tortured. The thoughts are unstoppable—but so is the music. It comes to me constantly. That's why I got this tattoo,” she says, proffering a white arm through the black cloak-folds.

It is a quote from the poet and art critic Rainer Maria Rilke: “In the deepest hour of the night, confess to yourself that you would die if you were forbidden to write. And look deep into your heart where it spreads its roots, the answer, and ask yourself: ‘Must I write?' ”

“I think tattoos have power. I did it as a way to kind of . . . inject myself with a steadfastness about music. People say I should take a break, but I'm like, ‘Why should I take a break? What do you want me to do—go on vacation?' ”

On stage, later that night—dripping in sweat, just after playing a version of “Bad Romance” where the chorus sounds even more tearfully euphoric and amazing than usual—Gaga shouts to the crowd, “I'd rather not die on a vacation, under a palm tree. I'd rather die on stage, with all my props, in front of my fans.”

Given that one of her props is a six-foot-high hybrid of a cello, keyboard and drum machine, with a golden skull nailed to the side of it—something that makes the “keytar” look like a mere castanet—you can see her point.

But it has to be said, for a twenty-three-year-old, death is a recurrent theme in her performances. The thematic arc for the Fame Monster tour was “The Apocalypse.” In the current “Monster Ball” tour, Gaga is eventually eaten by a gigantic angler fish—a creature she was terrified of as a child—only to be reborn as an angel. Her MTV Awards performance of “Paparazzi
,
” back in September, had her being crushed by a falling chandelier—amazing—before bleeding to death while singing.