Sara Davidmann

And the Bridegroom

Colour photograph with text by Stephen Whittle

2006

This photograph was made in collaboration with the UK’s leading transgender legal expert, Stephen Whittle OBE. The photograph is based on a painting by Lucian Freud of Leigh Bowery and his wife, Nicola Bateman. In the 1980s and 1990s Bowery became the embodiment of queer, best known for his extreme drag performances.

I was astonished to realise that it was Leigh Bowery in the picture. His regular drag performances in which he never attempted to be a woman, merely a man dressed UP like a woman, and his polysexual/gay ‘lifestyle’, all seemed to counter what the picture is telling us.                             

But of course, Bowery wasn’t merely gay, nor was he just a transvestite… He was always taking the world by a storm, and the storm that surrounded his life was something able to be witnessed as an art storm in itself.  In his art, as in his external life, his outdoor spaces, Bowery had become the embodiment of the Queer. That is also my slightly unnerving experience of my life. As here, unclothed in the bedroom, he becomes that representative of the overwhelming masculinity. In my bedroom, Sarah has also upheld my maleness, my manhood, and my masculinity – a reassurance, a shoring up, of my-self against the challenging outside.            

I know now that Bowery was who I wanted to be, and that I still want to be him as much as when I first witnessed his ‘drag pictures’ in newspapers so long ago. I don’t want to do performance, drag, I just want to be me – even as those things were him, I want to express those things which are me. 

That he had married Nicola Bateman shortly before his death is telling, for how can a man who desires women’s clothes also desire those who wear them. Bowery through his gay portrayal had never let us into that little part of his secret life, in which he was to be this man, the husband, the patriarch rather than the effeminate, cross dresser. Ironically marriage only came shortly before his death.

With Sarah, over these 30 years, I have wanted to be the Leigh Bowery of this picture; a big man, a man with strength, a man who can fling open his body to the wider world. Having a body that contradicted me was always the problem, to her it never was.

As I have travelled through the life of my own, every ongoing transition. I was once a tiny baby with rickets whose mother was told ‘your child is like a wrinkled old man, and is already close to death’ through to now, strangely and most challengingly, growing smaller into that wrinkled old man, it has always been the dream of being myself, whatever that is, that has sustained some semblance of sanity.

I needed to emulate this picture… to try and show to myself what Sarah has always seen. Our 30 years of partnership and love has always gone against the grain of what we were meant to be. Within a patriarchal view of the world, you could say that we simply reinforce the status quo, but of course we haven’t – we have upset it a great deal.

To have collaborated with Sarah, and of course the ‘other Sara’ in creating this new man has been a real privilege. I have loved Sarah so much and for so long that now she is as much an essence of me as any essence I might have.

The picture places Leigh Bowery into a relationship with his wife to be. The new photograph creates a relationship and like Bowery and Bateman, a new representation, an icon of what the partnership can be, alternative different, but the same and as powerful. Like Freud, Sara has demonstrated the ‘alternative’ family – the haven of love and peace. Sara has a new way of looking at how trans people are in relationship to their bodies and their partners. This photograph is not about me. It is about how a relationship between two people can make much more.

Stephen Whittle, 2006