Barbarella Karpinski Re-Imagines ‘I’m Too Beautiful To Be A Lesbian’
Image: Photo from original Club Bent show featuring Barbarella Karpinski and Lotus Love. Image: Supplied/ Heidrun Lohr.
“Welcome lesbian fagfuckers, chicks with dicks, cocks in frocks, pretty boys, pretty babies, butch dykes, butch dagger dykes, lipstick and lavender lesbians, flannelette lesbians, boof boys, bootgirls, go-go girls, perverse playthings, cigar torturers, rough trade, drag trade and hardcore homosexual hypocrites,” Barbarella Karpinski began her performance of her controversial play I’m Too Beautiful To Be A Lesbian at the 1999 Sydney Gay and Mardi Gras Film Festival.
A 1999 report in RealTime Magazine says the audience made up overwhelmingly of women (98%) lapped up the performance.
Twenty-seven years after she first debuted the show for Club Bent at Performance Space in 1996, 78er Karpinski is reviving and re-imagining the show for a contemporary audience.
“It was a facetiously fetishist work about identity politics in the noughty nineties,” Karpinski tells Star Observer. “There are so many more labels now and identity politics is now an anachronism.”
Controversial And Cult Show
Controversies did not stop the show from becoming a cult favourite in queer circles, with a now iconic image of Karpinski on her fours in gold chains, with a boot on her (the boot and the leg belonged to Lotus Love) back.
The show was featured in documentary director Tony Moore’s Bohemian Rhapsody for the ABC and Anna Broinowski’s, Sexing The Label, for SBS. Karpinski’s voice-over was acquired by SBS for the show’s ad campaign – “Gay, lesbian, bi, straight, what’s in a label anyway?”
On ABC, the show got pushed back from prime time to the national broadcaster’s after-hours slot, which Karpinski bemoans was “reserved for R-rated renegades that few watched.”
“So, I became infamous and have waited till 2023, to now have the iconic image by esteemed photographer, Heidrun Lohr, of a genderless boot placed on my voluptuous ass, as the footprint of that work about power and politics. My body was the embodiment of experience,” says Karpinski, adding that she was inspired by Pasolini’s films and the “mother of performance art” Marina Abramovich. “That photo by Heidrun Lohr is about sexuality, power and politics. Some people see it as just sexual but the boot on my butt says it all”.
Defiantly Irreverent
Karpinski invited Shaun Parker to collaborate with her for the re-imagined show. “I invited him to collaborate with young blood dancers who were born in the nineties. Club Bent Back Up Re-imagined is my reverie to the 1990s – to sleaze ball, to that salacious era of queer,” says Karpinski.
Parker first met Karpinski when she was selected for his Queer Bites mentorship program. “I was immediately impressed with her intelligent, ‘clap-back’ and pithy style of writing which was both personal and topical. And at times very funny, whilst at other times very moving,” said Parker.
According to Karpinski, the new re-imagined work is about survival. “I am still fucking here. Now tawdry and tarnished, by being present I am defying convention as a soon-to-be- senior starlet. I have re-invented myself as a disability diva doing stand-up, probably in a chair, with a blend of sultry struts and outdated pop culture references. This new creation is defiantly irreverent. I promise not to disappoint,” adds Karpinski.
