When Club AntiChrist's bloodthirsty boylesquer, and our own sickest columnist, performed for Alice Cooper's pleasure the old rocker reportedly commented "I'm going to need a lot of therapy for a long, long time. That is the most disturbing thing I've seen all day". Though our hearts bleed, Alice can afford his own therapy bills. For the SinZine psychiatrist, there could few case studies more fascinating than that of the mind behind an act combining snakes, bellydancing and cult cinema, which is set to grace the AC stage on Oct 28th. Please welcome Sex0r to the couch...
So let’s start by talking about the incident that led to you being referred here to my couch. You have announced your intention to perform as a “snake-hipped belly dancer from Hell”, at a nightclub seemingly operated by a Satanic cult of some description. What could you have meant by this statement?
I actually told them I'd be performing as a 'snake-dicked bellydancer from Hell' but clearly they fucked it up, so everyone's obviously going to be disappointed. I like my taglines to be interesting without telling exactly what's going on - usually the 'Don't watch this show if you're easily upset' warnings are more informative than the show title. The actual name of the show I'm doing is 'Le Serpent Rouge', and it's a twist on an infamous scene from a cult classic film that I've loved since childhood. But if you want to know any more about it you'll have to buy tickets and come and watch it, won't you?
Now, Sex0r…. do I have to call you ‘Sex0r’? Surely this can’t be the name which your mother bestowed upon you! How did you come to adopt this deviant persona? And why?
Yes, you have to call me Sex0r. I've had people pull my real name in interviews before and they've ended up as two unsightly lumps under my kitchen lino - it's rude to dismiss someone's stage name, you know. It's interesting that you use the word 'persona' because I actually don't like being viewed that way. For me, the word 'persona' implies a mask that you put on to become something else, and the shows that I perform aren't fabrications, they're exaggerations of myself, which is why I can't answer when I 'adopted this persona'. I'd happily use my real name on stage if it wasn't so fucking impossible for the remedial masses to spell right. But it's all just me performing what I feel I want to perform - the gore shows are demons that I'm exorcising, the porn or strip shows are expressions of my sexuality, and so on. I've never felt that it's a persona - it's me taking all the things I can't say or do without being injected in the face with valium and locked away and turning them into my idea of a good time. I understand why people think of it as a persona - I've had a lot of people tell me that I'm very cartoon like and that I can't possibly be like it in real life, but I am. I spend half my life with a tiny, fluffy dog sat on my lap, sending explicit photos of myself bouncing up and down on a courgette to an IT consultant and defrosting dead rats. Sometimes I name the rats and act out little dead rat puppet pantomimes. It might seem persona-like to the outside world, but to me, I'm just hanging out doing what makes me happy.
Performing for Alice Cooper
Now that we mention the parents, many psychological schools of thought have it that disorders of the mind can be blamed upon the parental units. Did you - and do you still - enjoy a good relationship with your mother? Is she aware of your preference for earning your living by splattering a crowd of spectators with bodily fluids?
She's aware of what I do for a living and from what I gather she's supportive, but if I'm honest, that woman is a bitch. I've never had a particularly close relationship with her, we don't speak any more - with any luck the next time I talk to that cow it'll be via an ouija board. My Dad died when my Mother was pregnant and she had a series of disastrous relationships since then, which I was forced to spectate and endure while I lived with her. It was exhausting and infuriating - I left home and slept rough when I was 16. It's something that I've addressed in a few performances actually. Huge cliché, but whatever.
With your referral I received not only your medical notes, but several journal entries, titled ‘Sex0r Says’. These reveal a preoccupation with adoption and having a child of your own, which suggests to me that your issues are rooted in deep in your childhood and that, through your wayward behaviour, you have been seeking to rectify these issues in your adult life. Tell me, was yours a happy childhood? While your peers were off say, joining a gang - or engaging in some other typical boyish pursuit, was there a point at which you realized you might prefer to dress up, play with what we perceive as girls’ toys (like this one, perhaps?) and perform for an audience?
My childhood sucked more metaphorical dick than I suck actual dick, which is saying something. I won't go on about it too much because I don't like to smash the popular theory that I never was a child and was in fact just found fully formed under a rock in Eastern Europe. I will say though, that as a kid I was very theatrical. I was always making wild stories up and doing accents for my toys - my favourite was that my two action men were trying to artificially inseminate an Optimus Prime figure but couldn't agree on whose spunk to use. I'm being totally honest. This poured out into my day to day life - I was always remarked on as a very bright, intelligent, but fucking bizarre little boy. I'd usually get cast in the main role for the school Christmas production but I'd find it incredibly frustrating; I'd want to change Red Riding Hood's basket to a suitcase full of dead bodies and write scenes where Puss in Boots got skinned alive and turned into a hat. I genuinely thought these ideas were amazing and couldn't understand why I'd be quickly told to be quiet and ignored. I'd simultaneously developed a total fascination with old splatter movies like Braindead and Evil Dead, so it was always natural for me to want to create violent or upsetting productions. I always wanted to be in front of an audience, preferably making them throw up, so it's just been a natural continuation into adulthood for me.
To answer your question about dressing up and playing with girls toys - I once famously put the outfit on that my Mother wore to my Dad's funeral, went downstairs and asked her if I was beautiful. When she freaked out and sent me upstairs, I spent the rest of the day drawing pictures of her cadaver on a skewer and crying to Simply Red. I think the desire to wear ridiculous clothes was always there, too.
Of course your primary disorder, according to my notes, is not dressing up but quite the reverse! When did these impulses to shed your clothes in public first present themselves? Can you recall the first occasion on which you acted upon these desires?
Anybody who thinks my 'primary' disorder is taking my clothes off is a bad journalist. I didn't start stripping until I was 18 and I'd been knocking around various scenes for a long time before that - I learned to eat fire and lie on a bed of nails when I was 14, so I actually started as a sideshow performer, meaning that my primary disorder would be pyromania. Did you actually go to psychiatrist school or did you just suck a Professor's dirty cock for the certificates? If you're asking when it was first decided that I'd go into the more sexual side of performing, then I can recall the exact first gig. Weirdly enough, it was at Club AntiChrist in March 2009. I wore a shitty PVC corset and danced on a podium in the main room and wiggled my arse around. It was great fun and the boss asked for me to come back at a later date so that was it, I was off! I was working as a professional Dominant at the same time, and would occasionally perform demo's and whatnot at private swingers parties, so it all went very hand in hand - strip at the fetish club, get your boots licked at the fetish club, get drunk at the fetish club. Simple. I was happy as a pig in shit.
Cases of your type are often unable to recognise what is socially unacceptable behaviour. Tell me, how do you perceive bystanders who are witness to your lewd public displays to be affected by what they see?
I'd like to think they're affected in any way possible. Apathy is the worst reaction you can ever have to a creative output. I don't know, I've had reactions varying from asking me out on a date to complaining to the management and boycotting future events so I think it's all relative, and I like that. My favourite reaction is by far when people say "Wow, I've never seen anything like that before, that was really unexpected." I've been going to live entertainment events forever and one of my biggest mission statements is not to pander to any of the namby pamby shit you see time and time again. I've paid £30 to go to an event advertising allegedly amazing performers only to be met with fat, housewife slappers prancing about in nipple pasties and drunk metalheads breathing fire and it winds me right up, so I deliberately go in there and give everybody far more than they bargained for. That gives me real happiness and sense of accomplishment, to think that I've even left a scar on the most open of minds. I think the type of events you see me at have become very socially acceptable and safe and that kind of pisses me off - when I first started going to these places it always felt a bit naughty and risky and now it's just another Friday night. I like to think that people have come in paying half a mind to what's going on in the performance area, and by the time I'm done have left with their jaws a few feet lower from their faces, only to spend the next fortnight telling everyone about this one performer who was completely and utterly beyond words. It's gotten to the point where even the other performers backstage leave when I'm getting ready - I perform a show where I have a victim on stage with me whose rectum is loaded up with pig guts. I shove my fist up his arse and yank them out, so preparing for that show backstage basically involves me prodding guts up his arsehole with a stick while he holds a speculum in place. Other performers have to leave the area when I'm prepping for that show - not because I tell them to, but because they can't bear to watch what's going on. That really tells you something about the genuine nature of the people who profess to be SO different, SO engaging, SO artistic that you have to pay to watch them perform, doesn't it? I like to think that, even if I offend and upset you, that I've given you your moneys worth. You've seen something different, you've got an experience to tell people about at work on Monday - that's the name of it, isn't it?
To get to the root of your issues, we need to consider what motivates you to put on these deviant shows. How does performing these spectacles for an audience make you feel? Before, during and after the act.
Depends on the show. The really vile ones are my favourite - before the show I get really amped up. To deliver a show as grotesque as fucking a dead baby or force feeding a screaming man his own intestines you need to be in a zone. It needs to be high energy, over the top, total 80s B movie splatter so I get really buzzed before those shows. The XXX porn parody shows tend to make me more nervous before I go on, mainly because I have to use several enemas to ensure that the audience don't get more than they bargained for when I start spraying whatever it is I feel like spraying out of my butt. Nobody wants a face full of yesterday's roast, do they?
During the show, whatever type of show, I go into my own little world. I often don't completely plan the act - I have musical cues which denote when a certain move/stunt/prop needs to be set off but the rest is improvised. It's definitely the best part, it's like meditating or some shit. For those few minutes I'm totally in my own world and it's the best place to be. If I'm performing something dangerous I'm very focused and controlled but it's still the same kind of feeling. A bit like being on crystal meth, but without the part when you stab your wife in the head.
Afterwards is my least favourite part - I'm usually bleeding, burned, covered in half a dead pig or scrambling around trying to find my clothes which isn't really helpful in being in a good mood. That, and I'm incredibly critical of my work so as soon as I'm off I immediately start going over what felt right and what felt wrong, how the audience felt, and how it needs to be tweaked and improved in the future. Then, after I've wound down, it's usually straight to the shower. I don't like spending the rest of my evening stinking like an Essex girl's cudge.
And finally, the most abstract, yet often most revealing of all the questions in this short psychological evaluation; the inkblot round. Tell us what you see in each of the following images - write as little, or as much, as you wish - go crazy! Or rather don’t. Please don’t go crazy, Sex0r….
It looks like a bloke with pincers for hands and a huge moustache. Doesn't look too dissimilar from this bloke I was fucking when I was 15 - he'd pick me up from the bus stop down the road and hold a gun to my head while he wanked through the car window - like the really hot scene in Bad Lieutenant. He didn't have pincers though. I wish he had - how many people can say a man with pincers has ejaculated in their eye?
I see a really, really mangled vagina. I'm not being inflammatory, that's honestly what it looks like. You know when slutty girls think it's sexy to pull their flaps apart with their fingers like they're trying to catch flies? It looks like that. Why do women do that? If someone could explain I'd be really grateful.
I don't know what the fuck you expect me to say about that. It looks like a disease. I hate germs. I carry a bottle of Domestos with me and flick people who look like they belong in that inkblot with it. Filthy, awful creatures, people. I used to have chronic hygiene compulsions actually - washing hands constantly, incessantly blowing my nose, getting through half a bottle of antibac gel a day - I really don't like the idea of bacteria.
I saw an episode of South Park the other day with Cthulhu in it; it looks a bit like that. I love any octopus-like animal, they're amazing. I'd love a pet one but I get ridiculously attached to my animals and where they only live for a year or so it wouldn't be healthy for me. I'm settling for getting one inked on my body instead. Maybe around my arsehole. That's cute, right?
