Dressed as a Girl

“We’re all des­per­ate to artic­u­late our­selves now that we know we can’t be fuck­ing bul­lied any more.” Scot­tee is one of six alter­na­tive per­form­ers pro­filed in direc­tor Col­in Rothbart’s doc­u­men­tary about the east Lon­don drag scene. This world is shiny, foul-mouthed, the­atri­cal and inspi­ra­tional to any­one look­ing for queer role mod­els who have proud­ly owned their coun­ter­cul­tur­al voic­es. It’s no fault of Jon­ny Woo, Amber Waze, Holestar, Pia, Scot­tee or John Siz­zle that this is an episod­ic film that would have worked more neat­ly as a tele­vi­sion ser­i­al. Each of the six per­form­ers is wor­thy of more screen and sto­ry time than they end up hav­ing in a doc­u­men­tary that man­ages to drag (sor­ry, not sor­ry) due to its lack of structure.

Still, at best, Dressed as a Girl pro­vides a way into the most dar­ing shows in town. Filmed over five years, it lets us see the seri­ous life chal­lenges that face these per­form­ers once they’ve exit­ed the stage. Amber – for­mer­ly known as Dean – is estranged from her father. The empow­er­ment she feels as her sex change pro­gress­es gives her the strength to reach out to her dad, a salt-of-the earth north­ern­er. The most hope­ful and won­der­ful scenes in this film show their char­ac­ters com­ing togeth­er for fab­u­lous, awk­ward bonding.

Holestar, who defines her­self as ​“a tran­ny with a fan­ny” is excep­tion­al­ly blunt about her life­long depres­sion. Although she dress­es up for a liv­ing, she doesn’t dress up her feel­ings. Stark com­mu­ni­ca­tion has a new poster child. Scottee’s macabre per­for­mances – vom­it­ing and cry­ing and delib­er­ate­ly vul­gar acts that speak more of suf­fer­ing and per­for­mance art than trans­vestism – are all we see of him for a long stretch. When he final­ly has some words to cam­era, it is a relief to hear his vital perspective.

Pia is a gen­tle soul with a strik­ing face. She is also a drugs casu­al­ty giv­en to earnest­ly recit­ing con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries. Jon­ny Woo is the com­pere, the most pol­ished head­line per­former, founder of ​‘Gay Bin­go’ and a man who had to switch up his sub­stance-fuelled par­ty lifestyle fol­low­ing seri­ous health scares. John Siz­zle is on the periph­ery for most of the film. Roth­bart remem­bers him in time to fold in anec­dotes about his for­ma­tive sex­u­al expe­ri­ences, which took place covert­ly, against a tree.

It is won­der­ful to meet these peo­ple and to hear frag­ments of their sto­ries. Giv­en the length of time that Roth­bart filmed for, it’s also clear that he has done a thought­ful job in col­lat­ing his strongest footage and let­ting the rest of it go. It’s just a shame that more thought did not go into the art of sto­ry­telling. Pithy insights and mag­net­ic visu­al vignettes are weak­ened by being crowd­ed by one anoth­er. This is an authen­tic slice of queer Lon­don his­to­ry that could have been an essen­tial exhib­it of queer Lon­don art.