“Casey Spooner: I begged to go to a gay bar in Istanbul last week and they had these incredible drag performances that were… yeah they’re terrible, they’re home made, they’re messy… It’s that kind of nightclub aesthetic that’s campy and trashy… But there was something that was so fascinating because it’s like you were saying. You love watching someone be uncomfortable on stage. No matter how bad it is, there’s still something fascinating about just someone putting themselves in that position, and how they react. But the thing that was kind of creepy about the whole thing was that I was with one of our dancers and we couldn’t work out what was going on. And basically it was very misogynistic. It felt like it was drag by people who hated women.
Kembra Pfahler: Everyone hates women in every country. The only other place where people don’t hate women would be on another planet or in another century. They just hate women everywhere. So at least they didn’t kill your dancers! People get killed for being a woman and people get killed for being a homosexual every single day in the year 2010, which is, maybe, that’s the sad thing about traveling to these other countries.
Casey Spooner: It feels like when you see drag in other places they’re sort of celebrating women, or they want to have the freedom that women have to be expressive that you don’t have as a man. You know, there are a lot of things you can’t do as a man that women can do. And a lot of times what drag is accessing this freedom. But it felt like this drag was more making a mockery of these Turkish women. It was very ugly. It was very sad.“
Interview by Casey Spooner with Kembra Pfahler of The Voluptuous Horror Of Karen Black from The First Transversal Style Magazine Candy, Fall-Winter 2010-2011
