This year, the Proud Awards will induct another member into the Hall of Fame – celebrating the work and achievements of those who have made an exceptional contribution to the visibility and culture of WA’s LGBTI community.
Previous winners include DJ Seb Sharp (FKA Kinky) and STYLEAID creator & WA AIDS Council stalwart Mark Reid.
This year, drag phenomenon Strykermeyer will join the past honourees as the 2018 Hall of Fame award winner.
Stryker is perhaps best known internationally for his work as a BAFTA-award winning make up artist, lending his talent to The Adventures of Priscilla: Queen Of The Desert, and the Stephan Elliott documentary Ladies Please – and his more recent appearance on the drag episode of ABC’s You Can’t Ask That.
Locally, Stryker has brought decades of unique performance and aesthetic to queer and art spaces in WA – often collaborating with fellow performer Ash Baroque to create moments in time that smash the limits of what drag can be.
Speaking to OUTinPerth, Stryker explains that while he certainly uses ‘drag’ as a descriptor, it’s hard to pinpoint his style.
“What a strange leg of drag that we do – and it is so strange,” he says.
“Somebody recently, her mother said to me ‘what do you actually say what you do?’ and it’s a great question because I don’t really know what to call it anymore.’ It’s a really hard thing to put a finger on, it’s very specialised but I don’t know what you’d call it.”
Chatting to us earlier this year, Stryker said he wasn’t really doing drag lately. Besides stunning appearances at Connections Nightclub’s 42nd birthday celebrations and the fabulous Artball, he had been exploring painting and other creative outlets.
“The future’s got absolutely nothing planned for me and I really like that. I don’t wear a watch because there’s no time to do anything!”
“Through Ash [Baroque] I’ve been doing styling for film clips, occasionally being in them, not many but a few. I guess there’s an extra kind of thing there but they ask me specifically because they want exactly what I do.”
“I’m in to anything that interests me. I’ve never really been in to drag as a career or to make money, I never got it in the beginning,” “And I don’t even ask for it now.”
Stryker’s career sparked in the 1970s, after catching a train from Kambalda to Perth – and he explains it certainly didn’t come easily.
“I was robbed on the train coming to Perth by a man who was so funny. We shared a cabin on the Indian Pacific and he stole all my money that I’d saved up,” Stryker explains.
“So I had enough money to buy a one night stay at a place called Haywin House on the corner of Hay and Irwin streets, and a great big Kajal pencil… so I put that on first, and I went to stay in this very posh place for one night – then I was homeless.”
“I was sixteen, and there was a club called Matches on William St and it was a cool little place. I’d never ever been in to a gay nightclub before – in fact I’d never been to a nightclub before.”
“There was kind of this pub where Miss Maud’s is now and that was gay during the day, and that was rough as guts… so I needed to go to a nightclub and I was asking people where the gay nightclubs are. Actually I didn’t even know the word gay then, it was homosexual nightclub,” he laughs.
“I saw Candy Conrad which was the very first drag show I’d ever seen and she was hysterical! Her comic timing was sensational. She was one of the best things to ever leave Perth. She helped put Perth gay people on the map.”
Of course, the drag and queer scenes were very different almost four decades ago, but there was a community who was coming together and performers were stepping up to give it a go.
“Occasionally people would put some makeup on and do a show, so I thought I would. I’d done it a million times in my bedroom before I got to Perth, and so I did.”
Stryker remembers his first song choices were Gary Numan’s Are Friends Electric? and Iggy Pop’s I’m Bored, which he performed in ‘boy drag’.
“That was where I felt comfortable, but I totally had stage fright. I wouldn’t say it was a good show… the song choice was good… but I couldn’t get enough of it.”
Having moved from a rural town, Stryker found connections in the burgeoning drag community – finding a mother figure in Perth’s Audrey Woodstock-Rose.
“Audrey Woodstock-Rose took me under her wing and he was possibly the most incredibly big genius ever and a guru to me. He taught me amazing things about theatre, not just drag, but ancient tricks from Noh theatre, Kabuki theatre, Butoh – which is something that really rang home with me – Audrey was a huge impact on me. I’m not interested if I can’t go deep.”
Stryker explains that people often perceive his style as intentionally dark, or spooky – but that is not the intention.
“I’m like a Brussell sprout in Brussels, there’s just a sprout there. I live in a dark world, that’s how I see it, and I’m just an artist in it.”
“I’m not a purposeful spooky artist, I don’t like limits like dark or horror or gory, I find it so boring. Really, I find blood especially boring. Oh you’ve just ruined your look now because you’ve gone straight to TV, or this reissuing of the same thing all the time and I don’t like it. It has to come from the soul.”
Now Stryker says he draws inspiration from the autobiographical, taking moments or themes from his every day life and exploring those through performance.
“I’ve never called it a character. I don’t think anybody really just goes into another character, I just think it’s bullshit. It’s not other characters, it’s all me. It’s all the things I need to say but sometimes can’t.”
Preparing for his appearance at the Proud Awards ceremony, Stryker says he was recently reminded of a particular poem by William S Burroughs – aptly titled Love Your Enemies – after he was left pallid and covered in cement water after being sprayed by a rogue tradie working in the CBD.
“Songwriters say it so much better, poets say it so much better, and hardly anything is new anyway these days, so I don’t mind at all elongating even a dead poet’s work because it’s still valid, it’s still good, it’s still wonderful to hear and people can still learn a lot from it.”
The Proud Awards will be held on Friday 2nd November at The Court Hotel. Tickets available from Ticketbooth.
Leigh Andrew Hill
Images:-
1: Siraj
2: Ash Baroque & Strykermeyer
3: Madoka Ikegami
