The Times

"When A Man Lives A Woman"

By Hannah Betts
25th April 2000

EXHIBITION: Hannah Betts on the big girls' nights out that inspired Sara Davidmann's Orlando's Butterflies

The morning I go to meet Sara Davidmann I wake up, smooth cream into my face and apply foundation to my nose, chin and forehead. I dab concealer under each eye, draw a dark line along my eyelashes and coat them in mascara. I dot rouge along my cheekbones and across each cheek. I dab berrycoloured lipstick on my lips.

When I go through these motions I am taking part in the most conventional of social rituals. When the subjects of Davidmann's latest exhibition do the same, they are labelled deviant.

The exhibition, Orlando's Butterflies, runs until July at Oxford's Museum of Modem Art and features I5 portraits charting Davidmann's exploration of transvestism. The Orlando reference is a tribute to Virginia Woolf's beautiful, metamorphic hero. The allusion to butterflies is obvious when you see the images - gorgeous, dazzling, ultimately elusive.

The colour hits you first -shimmering fabrics, riotous mouths, vast prisms of eye make-up. Then you notice the subtler, more suggestive detail. An escaping nipple too high up to be female, a lock of chest hair above gargantuan breasts. The fascination of a look that flirts with - yet resists - any sort of category.

It was coming face to face with a 6ft 6in transvestite with an image uncannily like her own -bleached blonde hair, kohlwinged eyes, pillarbox mouth -that captured Davidmann's interest in cross-dressing. "She was a larger-than-life version of me," she says. "That was the hook. Transvestites do exactly what women do in constructing an image which they present to the world, but the gender base makes the result very different, androgynous, a third gender.

The encounter spurred Davidmann to make a journey into one of our few remaining underground cultures. There are seven transvestite nights held in clubs across London each week. On a Saturday, about 600 cross-dressers are out on the town in London and hundreds more in areas such as Brighton and Manchester. Davidmann discovered her butterflies by going into clubs with a tiny, amateur camera - an Olympus mju-I 35min - that she could pull in and out of her pocket as the opportunity arose. "I needed to form a relationship with my subjects,"- she explains. "If I'd gone around with vast equipment, it wouldn't have worked. They needed to be able to see my face."

She discovered an incredible diversity and creativity - of images, people and stories - in a community too often dismissed in the most negative of terms. The myths about transvestites are legion - not least, that they all yearn to be women (they don't) or that they are all gay. Although there has been no definitive research, it is thought that the number of homosexual transvestites mirrors that in the rest of the population, between 5 and I0 per cent. Davidmann's subjects divided half and half, but the balance may have been altered by her club-scene focus.

Cross-dressers have rarely been dressed as girls when they were children. Nor do they act like women all the time. That most cherished assumption -that they get a sexual kick out of it - is less common than the feeling that their clothing enables them to be more themselves.

Stereotypes aside, Davidmann's butterflies reveal motives that are as individual as their own particular images. Girlishly pretty, Candy wishes she had been born female and sees cross-dressing as a way of achieving this. Claire Tramp, whose flamboyantly muscular body is swathed in pink Lycra, views her image as an expression of radicalism. Steffan regards himself/herself as male and female, a stance reflected in the ambiguity of his/her look.

What unites Davidmann's subjects is a belief that their crossdressed personae are a kind of alter ego, a female character independent of their male selves.

The drag artist Ruby Venezuela expresses this forcefully: "Ruby's a completely different person, with her own voice, attitudes, and gestures. If I go to an opening or an interview it will be completely different, depending on whether I go as Ruby or as Brian. I can't fake Ruby and find it difficult to be her when I'm not in costume. I get a mental block when I'm. dressed as Brian. It's completely Jekyll and Hyde."

In addition to Ruby, Luana, Magenta and Celeste, Davidmann has got to know a graphic designer, a City worker, a hairdresser and a host of other men, most in nine-to-five jobs. Is meeting her butterflies in their caterpillar forms like making friends with someone really exciting and then meeting their boring other half? "0h no, it's always really interesting to meet them as men but they're like different people. It's the girls I know best."

The duality can be confusing: "I called Claire's house once and asked to speak to her. And her flatmate said, 'No, there's no one called Claire here'. And then I remembered and had to say, 'Oh no, sorry, I mean Dave'."

Most, like Joan, are confident that no one would recognize them in female guise, not even their wives and children. Did Davidmann recognize Joan when she met her as a man? "No," she says emphatically. "No one would!'

The desire to cross-dress can undoubtedly bring suffering. Some of the men Davidmann has encountered live in constant fear that their families will discover their transvestism, and they are forced into lives of subterfuge and half-truth.

But the message of the exhibition is as assertive and optimistic as the portraits. Candy, who has finally told her parents about her transvestism, has never been happier. Joan, who has discovered cross- dressing in retirement, says the same. Claire scrutinizes her picture as evidence of her evolving image.

We take a final look at these other-worldly creatures, wondering which would pass for women and which would not. The chokers to hide Adam's apples, the obsession with Eighties lip-liner, the smiles. "The opening will be stunning," sighs Davidmann. "A big group of us are going down together. The girls have two hours to get ready. I wanted to hire a Transit bus - a tranny van - but we decided to go in style."