EXPLICACION DE LA RENTA ABSOLUTA DE MARX

Bøssehuset’s status in Christiania is closely related to its role as an im- portant cultural institution. Christianites, as well as people from all over Copenhagen, Denmark and the south of sweden, have enjoyed — and still enjoy — the many theatre plays, performances, cabarets and film festivals that have taken place in Bøssehuset, or been arranged by Bøssehuset.

Through the whole period, so-called women’s clothes and attributes have played a central role in Bøssehuset’s cultural and political activ- ity. Many of the gay men — probably not all of them, but those that i have met and heard about — call themselves fisselettes. Fisselette is a Danish word for ‘sissies’ or ‘wanton women’. Etymologically, it proba- bly comes from the word fisse, which means cunt. a fisselette is a man in women’s clothes who has feminine attributes, with a stereotypical- ly feminine manner. he is not pretending to be a woman and he does not want to pass as a woman. he is not even a drag queen, since the drag queen often tries to be as ‘authentic’ as possible. The gay men of- ten combine the feminine attributes with a beard and are eager to show that they are ‘men’.

Even back in the 1970s, when BBF visited schools to inform about gay liberation, they dressed in women’s clothes, used music and thea- tre because ‘the lectures were too boring’, as one gay man expresses it. it was a way to ‘pep them up’ and it became ‘more and more a strate- gy’ to achieve their political goals, he says. in 1976 there was an article in Ordkløveren about feminine gay men, in which the author claimed that they made a common cause with rødstrømperne (redstockings, the Danish women’s movement).17 he argued that the wearing of high heels, make-up, long painted nails, big hats, ostrich feathers and wom- en’s clothes was feminism, since it challenged the gender roles:

Probably heterosexuals get red rashes all over the body when they think of or meet homosexuals, since they consider gay men as men that betray the man’s role. Gay men refuse to be men. What is a man? a man is first and foremost characterised by the fact that he has acquired, through his socialisation and function in society, power and hegemony over wom- en, children and nature. Besides, it is his duty to manifest power over as many other men as he can. if a man thinks that this ‘power’ is something natural, something he has the right to, we call him a dick imperialist.18 according to the article, a man wearing feminine attributes showed that he was gay and that he had given up his male power. The author contin- ued by declaring that this exposed the fact that this power was not nat- ural; a fact that in its turn made men unsecure and put the male power in danger. i find this analysis interesting because it is almost identical with Judith Butler’s theories about drag, written fifteen years later.19 Pa- rodical performances of femininity or masculinity show that you make fun of them and of the idea of a true essence of identity. it becomes ob- vious for the observer that femininity and masculinity are not natural, but constructed and illusionary. Dissonance between any of the three levels; anatomical sex, gender identity or gender performance, actually unmasks and destabilises the heterosexual matrix. it is through using what Butler calls the ambivalent space, that we can change dominant norms and systems.20

in the article the author was obviously responding to criticism when he wrote that feminine gay men did not oppress women. On the contrary, the strategy was to provoke and eliminate the gender roles through mak- ing the feminine features grotesque and maybe combining them with a full beard. he wrote that they embraced the characteristics that men im- posed on women in order to make women sexual objects. The criticism that i assume he was responding to is made visible in the interview i con- ducted with a lesbian rødstrømpe in Kvindehuset (The Women’s house) in 2010. she claims that she is not interested in that kind of politics — she even implicitly hints that it doesn’t qualify as politics — because as a rad- ical feminist she has thrown all that feminine stuff out. she actually talks about a correct uniform for a true feminist that includes working trou- sers and no feminine attributes: ‘it is the uniform i think is appropriate for a feminist. i don’t think she should have long finger nails and stuff like that’. i would however argue that even if the genders that are performed in drag, fisselettes, cross-dressing and butch and femme, can appear ster- eotypical and conservative, they can be subversive in that they denatural- ise sex/gender, put them in new contexts and push the limits of them.21 Of course not all gay men embraced this strategy. in 1973 Bøssehuset had 20 activists from haW (homosexual action West Berlin) staying in Christiania. On Bøssehuset’s website one can read that Bøssehuset’s ac- tivists learned about the use of make-up and drag as a political strategy from the German activists. This is said to have led to some disruption in Bøssehuset, but later that year gay men from Christiania were giving out leaflets on strøget, some of them dressed in skirts.22

in one of the interviews, a man is very careful to stress that he is not a drag queen, but a fisselette. a fisselette is, according to him, a man who dresses in women’s clothes, and that is not the same as trying to look like a woman. he explains this by saying that he has kept his moustache and his beard when dressing in women’s clothes for performances. an- other gay man also talks about the use of women’s clothes and beard, in connection with the word fisselette:

it was a weapon we used. to emphasise that we were different. We kept the beard. Because when we walk around in our ordinary clothes we look like quite ordinary people. We used it as an instrument for struggle; to dress like women and at the same time being men. and continue to be men. to combine the dress or skirt with a beard seems to be a strong sym- bol for radical gay and gender politics.23 Through dissonance between anatomic sex and gender performance they unmask the heteronorma- tive gender system.

Bøssehuset has arranged several Frøken Verden (Miss World Con- tests) for gay men. it started off in Bøssehuset but, an interviewee tells me, when it became so popular that people crawled up on ladders to peep through the windows, it was moved to Den Grå hal (the Grey hall) in Christiania. The interviewee says that it was not a drag show, but a personality contest. When it became more like a superficial fash- ion contest they dropped it: ‘Then we did not want to do it anymore […] it lost its magic.’ During the interview with the lesbian rødstrømpe, she tells me about how lesbians were asked to perform as bodyguards at a contest in Den Grå hal. she laughs when she talks about the sissy gay men and the butch lesbians and says: ‘We support each other’. This very year, 2011, when BBF, as well as Christiania, celebrates its 40th an- niversary, Frøken Verden has been resurrected. On Bøssehuset’s web- site one can read that the misses — who can be of all genders — are said to come from the ‘homo underground’24 and that:

The show is probably the most outrageous drag monster contest. The show is a parody of the world’s beauty contests and the drag shows in the gay milieu […] Even if Frøken Verden mostly is about having fun, it is al- so a gender- and sexual political comment on a body-fixated world with stereotypical beauty ideals and gender roles, both inside and outside the gay milieu, in the best self-ironical spirit of Bøssehuset.25

another important thing that Bøssehuset has engaged in is Christiania’s Pigegarde (Girl’s Guard). Pigegarden’s history started in 1982 when

Bøssehuset participated in the Carnival of Copenhagen with some- thing called Bøsserup’s Pigegarde. a pigegarde is a uniformed marching women’s orchestra, and Bøsserup is a small village in Denmark. Chris- tiania’s Pigegarde was active between 1991 and 2003 and was, according to one of the interviewees, for the ‘ladies of Christiania’. The epithet ‘la- dies’ included, according to him, heterosexual and lesbian women and gay men. i ask him if there were any heterosexual men participating, but he did not think so. another gay man who was part of Pigegarden however says that heterosexual men have participated in Pigegarden. Christiania’s Pigegarde was a well-known phenomenon for people all over Copenhagen. They marched in the streets, in front of the castle and Folketinget (the parliament) and other places such as Bakken (a well- known amusement park with a zoo). When they performed they were always political, both in their uniforms and in their texts. One example is the use of timers on their shoulders, which symbolised the fact that the ladies had enough. another example is their creation of Kvindeligt Opløsnings Forbund (Female association of Dissolution), who in con- nection with the Danish referendum on the EU amsterdam treaty in 1998, marched under the motto ‘Close your eyes and think of the Fa- therland — we vote blindly’. They wanted to contribute to ‘the general voting psychosis’ and marched with white blind sticks, sunglasses and toilet paper with EU flags on their heads.26

several performance groups that experiment with gender attributes have existed in or visited Bøssehuset over the years, for example at Din salon (Your salon); ask helga, schwanzen sänger Knaben and aupair Outrair, just to mention a few. During the 1980s Bøssehuset performed some cabarets related to the hiV/aiDs crisis, something which i re- turn to later in this chapter.

When talking about Bøssehuset, the two interviewees who at the time of the interviews were active in Bøssehuset, both almost exclu- sively mention its role as a cultural institution. When i ask one of them what he would do if Bøssehuset did not exist, he first answers by talking

about his acting and that he maybe would not be able to play theatre any more. after that he says: ‘My life would be more boring. Bøssehuset has really pushed my limits as a human being. i have learned more about the necessity of accepting people as they are’. and again he returns to the significance of Bøssehuset as a cultural institution: ‘it is fantastic to be part of an underground movement, an off-off-Broadway-thing, it is marvellous’. The other man also talks about Bøssehuset mainly as a cultural institution, a theatre. When he came there he was a student actor. he highlights how Bøssehuset’s cultural character makes it easi- er for other people to go there. For example he mentions that his own parents have visited Bøssehuset to watch performances.