Queer Performance - Central Research and Creativity Online

ought myself a webcam and sat in front of Chatroulette, in drag, for five
days. Chatroulette, if you don’t know, people wank on the Internet and you
don’t know who you’re going to chat to and impregnate. Mostly it’s bankers,
it’s hilarious, it’s a social experiment, it’s fascinating. I had four different
screens so they had me and their reactions. It was more about their reaction
than anything and some people were amazing. People were really lovely, they
were like, ‘Where you been?’ and I was like, ‘Oh, I met some tranny from
America.’ And of course there were a lot of people going, ‘You fag, you fag,
you tranny!’ and I just thought, ‘I’ll take it, you know, it’s fine, I’m used to it, I’m
used to rejection.’
The weirdest thing about all of the negative criticism was that it was girls
doing it. I felt more offended when the women were going, ‘You fucking nah
nah.’ The men do it en masse. Actually it’s because they wanted to fuck me,
but obviously they wouldn’t say that in front of their friends. The thing I found
really quite peculiar was these two guys, and I don’t know where they were
from, who sat there looking at me and they said, ‘Are you a man or a woman?’
and I sort of sat there – the whole point was that I was supposed to be looked
at – and smiled. They went, ‘If you’re a woman, where’s your Hijab?’ Call me
a fag, call me whatever you want, but that shocked me.
DL: But by indication, I believe if you are a drag queen, that’s fine. You don’t
even where a scarf at all. That’s bonkers.
H: But at the same time, it’s the Internet that’s done that. You can get that
backwards and forwards from people, which didn’t exist before.
SF: From watching your video, one of the things I found fascinating is the
things that you did – when someone did something, you did it back to them,
when they smiled, you smiled back, so you mirrored a lot of them and
observed a lot of their anxieties.