Role Play

Conservative businesswoman by day, popular drag king by night: It might sound like nothing more than the hook for an art house flick, but this is the life of Océan LeRoy, who inhabits the tense spaces around the borders – woman/man, entrepreneur/artist, French/German, public/private. Imogen Badgery-Parker catches a glimpse of the person behind the roles.

“I want to force you to call me ‘he’,” says Océan LeRoy in a charming French accent and the unmistakable voice of a woman.

“I want you to break your own borders … It’s not because you think I’m a woman that I am a woman.”

To many, Océan is indeed a woman, running a successful media consulting firm in Berlin. To others, like the Jakarta security guard who stood frowning at the door to the ladies, Océan passes as a man, complete with an instant three-day growth.

And to those in the know, Océan is a popular drag performer, whose multimedia stage show features songs, poetry and the signature quick transition between “woman” and “man”. This is Océan’s life and art: challenging, defying and manipulating the gender roles our societies expect us to play.

It’s a very important point … with the deconstruction of gender,” Océan says. “If you put all the roles away, what is left of yourself? Who are you? Of course you are all the roles you play. That’s why I identify as a transgender person.”

We meet during the Q! Film Festival in Jakarta, following a screening of Risk, Stretch or Die, a documentary that has Océan as the protagonist. The film shows Océan binding his breasts and talking frankly about his gender identity; we even catch a few scenes of Océan as woman, “female” despite the androgynous business suits. Yet there is always a sense of Océan performing; we learn surprisingly little about the whole person.

Who is Océan LeRoy?

“I am not the person on the stage,” he says in the film. “Nor am I this businessperson making money. But it’s me in both cases.”

Océan comes to the screening “passing” as a man, in baggy clothes with mascara painted over his fine female facial hair giving the impression of a fledgling beard. Well-traveled, well-educated and fluent in French, English and German, he is articulate and charming, with a prodigious intelligence evident long before he admits to having been “a gifted child”. He has clear ideas about how he wants to be portrayed and is reluctant to part with even the most basic details of his “real” life – what he does reveal is not for publication but recounted as “an encounter between you and me”.

Part of this caginess is Océan as shape-shifter, performer, trying to control others’ perceptions, dodging labels and categories and challenging us to do the same – to strip away our social roles and discover who we are.

“When you know somebody’s job, their gender, their age, already your mind is categorizing them somewhere, you have an image of them,” he says. His mission: “I want to break this.”
This reticence is also part of his fierce protection of his mainstream identity – the established businesswoman who is making the money to fund his art, whose clients just might defect if they knew what he got up to at night – although he does risk discovery by appearing on the cover of alternative magazines and allowing the documentary to be screened in Berlin.

But money is not the only reason Océan continues his double life.

“I’m in between and I want to live in between,” he says. “I need the tension to live. You feel alive when you have tension. Because this is very tense. This is extremely tense.”

Inhabiting the in-between space, Océan finds an affinity with his adopted city of Berlin, whose historic wall provides a metaphor for the duality embedded in culture and society.

“The wound hasn’t healed yet,” Océan says of the city in the film. “Maybe I also felt divided. Maybe I am still divided. I am still two parts. Like Berlin. It hasn’t healed yet.”

Océan says now he has healed (“I think I’m a normal person, I think I’m sane”) but adds, “I don’t like too much the ‘healing’ word because I didn’t feel sick. I felt torn. I’m not torn anymore. …

“It’s about being balanced, about integrating the two parts of you. I was playing the girl for quite a long time and I was feeling like a boy for quite a long time, and you’re torn because of society.”

Océan was most torn when his life was one that “society” admired, when she was a conventional career woman who stayed neatly in her socially assigned gender role. Although she had “started out with women”, she had married “a beautiful guy, very intelligent, great business manager, very rich, everything ... But I was, I was ...”

Not happy.

“I could not apply anymore the woman’s role. I was forcing myself, I realized. It was more and more difficult every time.”

And so came the next painful, and often lonely, step: Throwing it all away.

“It’s difficult to say no, I’m not going to have a great marketing career, no, I’m not going to have a great marriage with great children. … It’s going to be great for my parents, it’s going to be great for my husband, it’s going to be great for everybody, but it’s not going to be great for me, and sorry, I have only one life.”

Divorced, Océan began to explore his/her gender identity, using art to express and challenge the politics of gender and society, honing a performance and taking to the stage. He made his drag debut in 2002 and has followed it up with numerous media appearances, films and the stage show touring the world with Risk, Stretch or Die.

The 60-minute documentary ends with a music video clip where Océan, portrayed in self-conflict as woman and man, sings of “the Wall of Fear” against the backdrop of his totem, the Berlin Wall.

What is the Wall of Fear?

“All the things that make people suffer on earth, all the things that make you not do things is fear. The fear to meet another part of yourself,” he says. “Fear can block people forever. Block them, and it’s a wall, and they will die that way. I don’t want to die that way.”

Yet perhaps fear blocks him still, as he remains unwilling to throw in his safe day job and embrace the risky artist’s life full-time, a life he admits he craves.

Or perhaps that is just plain common sense. Perhaps he is as “solid” as he claims to be, and it would not matter if it all came tumbling down.

“If you throw away all the superficial things, if you throw away the play of society, all the roles, I’m still behind that. I know who I am, and the people I love know who I am,” he says.

And asks how many of us can say the same.

Risk Stretch or Die (2007)

Risk, Stretch or Die by Saskia Heyden is a documentary focusing on Océan LeRoy’s art and identity.

Heyden originally planned a short film with three protagonists, but Océan’s story and character proved complex and interesting enough to sustain a 60-minute film, and the project developed into a portrait.

“What the film did for me,” Heyden said after it was screened as part of the Q! Film Festival in Jakarta in August, “was I got a view into the queer, transgender scene. That certainly opened up the way I look at the world.”

Since its premiere in March 2007, Risk, Stretch or Die has been screened at numerous international film festivals. As described for one festival, “This documentary is not merely about a drag king; it delves deeply into a different and more fluid perspective that shatters conventional notions of gender. Told in a lyrical tone with a keen visual eye, director Saskia Heyden unveils the core of this fascinating figure and beautifully captures an androgynous person who outwardly defies masculine and feminine constraints.”

http://www.risk-stretch-or-die.saskiaheyden.eu/

Photo by Avital Drumlewiez

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