Mangina: a life on stage

From being a sporty kid in Fifties' Melbourne to doing drug tours of Asia in the Seventies, Amanda Monroe shares it all in her solo show, Mangina. She spoke to Andrew Shaw about her extraordinary life.

If the 120 kilogram, chronically depressed, heavy-drinking middle-aged man slumped in the car at the intersection was having a near death experience, he was also having an epiphany.

“It was 1999, I’d spent 15 years in the workforce being a nine-to-five, dead on your feet at the end of the day person; a Type A personality achieving everything and getting nowhere; I’d ended up a tired, old man drinking a bottle of whisky a night trying to sleep.”

Amanda Monroe pauses. For a moment there’s just static over the phone from the UK. “This was not my first near death experience,” she continues. “But this one opened my eyes to what I had avoided my whole life, which was that I’m transsexual.”

Monroe is speaking from Old Harlow, Essex – a town she describes as “the Geelong of London”. She’s there with Melbourne’s very own Drags Aloud girls doing the Highlight comedy club circuit. But she’s about to fly home to do her first solo show: the autobiographical Mangina, which debuts in Melbourne then goes to the Adelaide Fringe.

Mangina is a no-holds-barred look back at life for this 60-year-old performer, who started out as a sporty little boy in the Fifties, good at swimming and football – his specialty was being able to kick back over his head – then went to Monash University in 1970 to train as a teacher. Back then, in the age of free tertiary education, people were paid to train as teachers, the catch being that they were required to take jobs in the sticks on graduation (“like Wake in Fright,” Monroe explains, citing the 1971 Aussie flick).

Then something happened that stopped young Monroe’s career as an educator dead in its tracks: drugs.

“After I left uni I didn’t do much except hang around Melbourne and get stoned,” she says. “Then I was lured up to South-East Asia, because as I say in the show in those days drugs were cheap and there was more money made selling drugs to tourists than selling [out] tourists to the police.

“It was the wild west: Thailand, Laos, Malaysia. I was touristing and doing lots of drugs. I eventually stepped into some very shady areas and decided it would be a good idea to come home.”

Those shady areas included trips into the jungle with gun-toting crims and “being shaken down in the back streets of a town called Udon Thani”.

“I was injecting heroin for a while and a couple of times I killed myself but didn’t die and woke up again hours later. There was something that pulled me back. I don’t know whether it’s ‘fate’; I hate to say that to people, because then it’s like, ‘OK, well I’ll just keep going [and] if it’s going to be that way, then it’s going to be that way...’ But I think there’s an innate sense of self-preservation that one has.”

Back in Australia, Monroe tried living in the country “getting stoned and being an organic farmer” before the city beckoned. Around that time she came out.

“I thought, I’ve spent 48 years as a miserable, unhappy male, trying to avoid life by taking drugs. Then I thought, I’ll spend the rest of my life being female. I confided in a very close friend who said, ‘It’s about time you realised!’ So from then I started the process.”

One night out on the club scene she was invited onstage by drag legend Doug Lucas and had her first taste of the limelight. Monroe says the girls around her then – Terri Tinsel, Jacqui Roberts, Michelle Tozer – were supportive of her journey, what she calls her “process of feminisation”.

“Going onto stage in drag gave me the confidence to go into the street,” Monroe says. “When you’re a drag queen, you’re safe behind that mask. Then you realise you don’t need that mask.

“I was a pretty broken man. I’d done everything possible to break up what I was. I’d done personality deconstruction and disintegration with the LSD; I’d done ego destruction with heroin; brain damaging material – I don’t know how I’m going to remember this show!

“It was pretty much a shell of a male that was left and then that male died at the traffic intersection where I had my epiphany.”

The term ‘mangina’ is provocative, yet ambiguous – a sort of ‘Mind your own business!’ response to that common question asked of many drag queens and trans people.

“The show’s called Mangina because everybody wants to know. It’s the criteria by which they measure you. If you look like a man in drag, that’s fine. As soon as you start to look female, they ask, ‘Are you on the mones? Have you had the operation?’ ‘Mangina’ is an ironic quote back to people who are interested in my genitals.

Monroe’s take on that tampon ad – where a woman whips out a tampon to beat a drag queen in a feminine duel – is that it feeds in to the ‘black or white’ idea of gender.

“I don’t think it was complimentary to women or transgender people or to drag queens because it’s the constructed model of behaviour that comes when straight people try to imagine how drag queens behave,” she says.

“How do you measure a female? How do you measure a male? I don’t consider myself either. I’m fairly politically incorrect, but fairly political about what gender is.

"People are trying to assign such a binary logic: vagina equals female, penis equals male. But what if you’ve got both – or neither?”

Mangina, Downstairs at Almas, 1 Wilks St, North Caulfield, February 10-12, 2012. Bookings: downstairsatalmas.com.au