Telling It Like It Is

Excerpt from a play written by Keith Gilbert

(The Gender Centre advise that this article may not be current and as such certain content, including but not limited to persons, contact details and dates may not apply. Where legal authority or medical related matters are cited, responsibility lies with the reader to obtain the most current relevant legal authority and/or medical publication.)

All (Including Simone's parents): AIDS equals shit

[Brandy and the chorus exit stage right, leaving Simone on screen, her body (as Simone) with her parents, on stage. Simone continues to address her parents. During the following monologue, imagery on screen and/or stage may be used to enhance Simone's words]

Simone: Mum, I don't expect you to understand all this. Christ I've been living this life and it's taken me years to understand and accept it. But what I do expect is that you listen, at least. And show me the respect of acknowledging that it is my life ... [quoting the elephant man] I am not an animal; I am a human being. A woman. I am a transsexual, sex-change, trany, woman. And I am a whore. I know it bothers you, mother, and it bothers many of my "sisters". Well, hot damn, girlfriends! Let me tell you something. Your motherly, even "feminist" desire to take pity on this "poor lost soul" bothers me! It is out of date ... I once was lost, but now am found. Amazing Simone. How sweet the sound.

If I've learned anything about prostitution and the state, it's this. Yes! There are a lot of lost souls in prostitution, and that's sad. You can see it in their eyes. But I have also seen into the eyes of labourers after they have worked the graveyard shift. It's not so different. The way to combat sadness, I know, is to liberate the emotion, the body, the sexuality, the spirit.

Prostitution and coerced prostitution are two completely different things. The way to liberate coerced prostitutes is not to make all prostitutes victims of a macho, anglo, soulless, so-called justice system.

Justice is blind and must be seen to be blind. Justice renders all sex workers invisible. Invisibility and blindness make strange bedfellows. Do you have any protection?

[mimics the concerned feminist stereotype] and what about rape?

Yes, a lot of sex workers have been raped, and that's violence, and violence is violation and damage, and that's disgusting. Let me read you a letter I wrote to the newspapers, after a girl working the streets was raped, and Judge Jones let the guy off with a light sentence. This letter says it better than I could. [she reads from the letter] Most women and trannies, and many men and children, I know, have been sexually assaulted. We are all vulnerable. The added vulnerability for sex workers exists because we can't report crimes of violence. If we do, we face criminal charges:" ourselves - in the police stations; or contempt for our situation in the rape crisis centres; or secondary rape in the courts.

The moment of vulnerability to rape and murder occurs at that moment when a violent, angry man sees the blindness of justice; when he hears that a judge believes it's a lesser crime to rape a prostitute than another woman. The criminal element, the offender, in the rape of a sex worker, not the rape, nor the rapist.

The justice system has declared sex worker season open for police and other rapists. All year round. God save the queen. [puts letter down] Got published. Not bad, eh? But do you see? Prostitution doesn't increase or decrease rape, the system does.

[Focus on Mrs Armour, either through lighting or movement - she looks into the audience, and is clearly uncomfortable]

So where do wives fit into the prostitution equation? Well just imagine the look in the eyes of a judges' wife after he collapses asleep, pissed, and rolls off, next to her in the marital chamber, having sentenced a rapist by judging the woman who was raped, and not the man who raped her. Justice is blind. Imagine the look in her eyes. Invisibility and blindness make strange bedfellows, to quote Miss Brandy Snapps.

[Getting camp, maybe doing her best Marilyn & getting breathily excited] Simone says: Lose the sadness! End the violations! Change the system. But don't try to change me. I worked damn hard, and paid great money for these tits, this body. These universal accoutrements of womanhood fit my sexuality, they fit my person, my gender. They fit me. I have lost my sadness.

I am very happy with this body. And so is my lover. And so are many men from labourers to judges with wives.

Why shouldn't I celebrate this body, show it off in the most popular theatre this world has known - the bedroom? and I pay my own way. Who can justify my arrest, imprisonment, isolation, rape? Lots of people, apparently.

Is it because I offend? I think, perhaps, it's that I confront.

I confront you. I confront gay men. I confront lesbians. I confront women - feminists, wives and mothers, because no-one seems to understand that my sexuality is my sexuality and is unique, just like yours, and theirs!

I offend the legal system and I fuck its men - gay and straight - for money.

I am waging the battles in the gender war. Don't you know? I have been fighting inequality in wealth and gender for myself and all women everyday. [cheeky aside] Yeah. I know all the jargon.

[seriously again] I fend off rapists; and I teach other men to recognise both the difference and value in fantasy and fact. And I know what they cost.

What I am saying is, there's a hell of a lot more than gay and straight; women and men; good and bad; married and single; actress and audience; work and play. There's more to it than this, and it exists inside every one of us. ­All of ourselves.

It's that feeling, that sensibility, that desire, that gratification, that sex, that expression, that make up the spirit. It's there when you are born.

No. I wasn't born a woman, and I don't know what that's like. You are born naked and everything that follows is drag.

And I wasn't born a man either, yet by a strange twist of fate, I do know what that's like ...

You are born screaming, and everything that follows is a struggle to be heard. Come the day when women, trannies and gay men all have the personal and economic power to afford the services of sex workers, I doubt there will be a need for prostitution. Rape and coerced prostitution will have long been a memory. And so will I. And so will you. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

And so, I have lived accordingly, in my time. I have screamed and I have shouted. I have demanded and supplied, I have fought and I have loved, and I have been myself, and have made the most of it, and I have enjoyed it. All of myself. I am Simone. One whose read the script.

[Brandy Snapps appears on stage and performs to "Money Can't Buy It"]

"Money can't buy it, baby I Sex can't buy it, baby, Drugs can't buy it, baby I You can't buy it, baby I believe that love alone might do these things for you I believe in love alone, yea, yea ... Hear this, pay attention to me, Coz I'm a rich white girl, and it's plain to see ... "

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