A recent interview with Julie for RADAR Bulletin:

NB: You’re involved in so many strands of performance, how do we describe you?

Julie: Theatre practitioner, performance artist and writer. I began my training in the theatre but after I had a breakdown when I was 20, I realised that I found traditional theatre too competitive. I began writing my own stuff, mainly one-woman shows that I performed on the folk and fringe circuits .

How did the politics come in?

Julie: A shrink told me that I was too sensitive to be working in theatre and that I should train in special needs. I'd lost confidence so I trained in Dramatherapy which gave me my first insight into how the process of psychiatry worked and the power of group dynamics.

I then applied for a job as a social worker which I got. As it was near the end of the year, I met my future colleagues at the Christmas party and I was put on the rota. Then the day I was supposed to start I got a handwritten letter stuffed under my door saying my application had been unsuccessful. I ignored it and went to work anyway. It turned out that I had ‘failed the medical’, a medical I hadn't been invited to attend . They’d written to my GP, a man I’d never met who'd replied : ‘this person is fundamentally unstable and unfit for work’. He’d made that assessment from notes referring to my psychiatric history. That’s why I say a psychiatric record is the most disabling label you can have in the job market.

Ironically, the job was to work with mental health user s and if they were going to ban me from that work, they were effectively saying that mental health system survivors can never recover which of course raised the question of why they were wasting public funding on such a project. I took my story to the newspapers and the local authority gave me my job back. But I was politicised overnight.

How has that affected your work?

Julie: After that, my life’s mission and all my work, whether poetry, music or theatre exists to challenge the fundamentally false divide between service-users, perceived as unproductive, ' useless eaters’, to coin a phrase from the Third Reich, and service-providers who are the productive glitterati.

I hear you’re going to Australia this month.

I’m performing Pig Tales which was commissioned for the Xposure Festival of Disability Arts in 2002. It’s a theatre piece about a female child raised as a boy within a feuding Irish family struggling in England . It shows up the dysfunctional nature of the church, the police and the psychiatric system. It’s very much based on my own experience, bleak but very funny. Writing it was a catharsis or, as a friend put it, an exorcism! I’ve just finished the follow-up Pig Sister.

You perform a lot in drag.

I’m a drag king which is nowhere near as acceptable in public as a drag queen. It’s about challenging male power. I did a photo-shoot for Pig Tales for which I had excellent make-up artist who had everything including a real beard. I went into my local pub still dressed as a man and nobody recognised me. I pretended to be from the Inland Revenue. I felt the power. Women step aside as a man approaches.

My first cross gender show ‘Life’s a drag’ in which I played a failed drag queen was inspired by an argument at Pride about there being not enough drag queens on the main stage. I thought it was amusing that they were arguing over there not being enough fake women on the stage when there were even fewer real ones.

How does your sexuality affect your work?

Julie: My work is passionate. It's also very dark. I write about isolation. I turn anguish into the absurd. Both the lesbian scene and the disability scene suffer from an obsession with their own version of the body beautiful. They find our human vulnerability hard to accept. It’s certainly very difficult to come out as a mental health system survivor on the gay scene. All of my work is a celebration of difference. I’m an outsider among outsiders challenging stereotypes, conformity and the fear of difference that creates hatred and starts wars.

Click here to go back to the Sanity Fair Page