out.com: 'Heather Cassils: Lady Gaga's Prison Yard Girlfriend '

via out.com:

Heather Cassils: Lady Gaga's Prison Yard Girlfriend

The performance artist and personal trainer chats about making out with the most famous woman in the world.

By Noah Michelson

Lady Gaga's "Telephone" video is nothing short of epic. Nearly 10 minutes long, it picks up where her "Paparazzi" video ended -- with the pop star headed to jail for murder. Once inside, Gaga does what any woman in her situation would do -- she finds herself a hot girlfriend. Canadian performance artist and personal trainer Heather Cassils was handpicked by Gaga to play the role of her prison yard girlfriend. We chatted with Cassils to find out how she ended up in the "Telephone" video, her feelings about depictions of queer women in mainstream media, and what it's like to make out with the most famous woman in the world.




Out: Were you familiar with Gaga's work before you were cast for the shoot?
Heather Cassils: I was not a totally massive fan per se, but my background and training is as an artist, and I did notice she was bringing a lot of elements of performance art into her pop cultural practice. And she has referenced people like Leigh Bowery and feminist performances, so I was aware of that, and that's what caught my eye about her more than anything else -- as well as the fact that she was doing something different and presenting herself differently from other pop stars who have been around in the last little while.

How did you get cast in the video?
I got cast because I work as a personal trainer. I run my own independent contracting business, and I run it out of a gay gym in Silver Lake. There's a woman at my gym named Dallas, and she's also kind of an aspiring actress of sorts, and she had been called in to play one of the guards. She called me up from the casting and said they were desperate for bodybuilders, and she told them, "There's this person at my gym who's not a pro bodybuilder, but she has a really cut physique," and she suggested I'd be perfect for it. So I went down and auditioned -- but I'm not hormones or anything like that -- so they ended up casting me as an inmate in the prison scene. They were blocking the scene, and the woman who was blocking for Gaga disappeared, and Gaga came out, and she just kind of instantly called me over, and it just happened like that. She called me over and asked me to portray her girlfriend and said, "OK, you're going to be my prison girlfriend, and you're going to come to me, and I'd like you to touch me inappropriately." [Laughs] We just kind of went from there.

So, it just happened right there on the spot?
Yeah. It was a very strange, organic Los Angeles moment.

What was Gaga like on set?
She was extremely professional and very, very funny. After we did the [kissing] shot, she screamed across the yard to me, "I think you got me pregnant!" [Laughs] She was also very present and real. She took the time to ask people what they did for a living and who they were and where they were from. She was a very genuine, grounded person.

OK -- let's get to the juicy stuff: What was the kiss like?
I think we did several takes -- to be honest, it was a little bit of a blur because it happened so quickly. On the first, take her cigarette sunglasses were steaming a little bit, but by the third or fourth take we were both inhaling a lot of secondhand smoke [Laughs]. It was kind of intense. And it just kind of happened naturally because she didn't really give me explicit instructions to kiss her -- it just felt like a natural thing to do. In fact, I sniffed her like a kind of aggressive beast. And as we got closer, she actually put her tongue in my mouth. She just went for it. [Laughs] It was really good.


Tell me about your feelings about depictions of queer women in popular culture.
I've been in shoots before, and I've worked with other artists, and there's this thing where they try to femme anybody up -- especially when it's mainstream media. And there's this expectation that you're either going to fit on one end of the spectrum or the other, so I really appreciated that I literally showed up on set and was allowed to go just as I am. My body is a complete construction. I feel there's a lot of pressure, even in the queer world, to go trans or whatever and take these real extremes, and I don't really think there's anything wrong with that, but I do think there's a lot you can do with your own body. And as a visual artist I think of the body as a sculpture of sorts. If you can manipulate it via exercise and diet and physically empower yourself and give yourself a body that has a certain masculinity to it -- that has a lot of power and you can insert that into mainstream images. People get really caught up on language, and when you're talking about these things people get kind of hysterical, but when you just present them with an image of something that's "other" or that they can't plot, I think that's really important -- and to offer up something in between that doesn't have binaries -- because it offers people more options. And I believe that binaries are dangerous across the board. If you look at mainstream representations, it's mostly things like The L Word. Or you have a trans character, but it's not played by a real trans man, it's played by someone with a grizzly man beard Scotch-taped onto their face. So I think we're moving closer to where we should be, but I don't necessarily identify as trans -- though I kind of do -- but I don't take hormones, and I don't want to alter my body in that way, but I think it's a real progression when someone who identifies in that way can then actually be that instead of having someone play you in black face or whatever.

Right. I think it's important to have people who complicate our notions of gender -- whether they be playing with butch/femme or consider themselves gender queer or just don't fit into the gay/straight/bi/trans spectrum so neatly -- because we still have a long way to go with our understanding of gender and sexuality, even in the queer community.
Absolutely. I couldn't agree more. One thing I like about Lady Gaga is that strange rumor about whether or not she has a penis. I'd like the same rumor to circulate about me. [Laughs] The not knowing and the suspension of disbelief and what that does to people -- it starts with the body, but it can translate into all kinds of other important things.

Definitely. And the other thing about the penis rumor is that she doesn't deny or confirm it. It's like she's saying if she does have a penis, it's not a bad thing, and if she doesn't have one that's not a bad thing either. It gives people permission to be who they are.
Exactly.

What do you think about the new breed of younger pop stars -- and some have accused Gaga of this -- who claim bisexuality or a kind of pansexuality in an effort to use queer culture for their own personal gains?
That's been going on since the dawn of time. Elvis stole from African American music. Everybody's constantly riffing -- Madonna stole voguing from poor, disenfranchised black drag queens in Harlem. This isn't a new concept. I think there's more reverence with regard to Lady Gaga as she's obviously educated herself in her trajectory with visual arts practices and the stuff that she's doing isn't light stuff. It's difficult when they're making millions of dollars and placating to the masses -- it's tricky to maintain that, but I think she tries. And even including someone like me is a part of that. The thing that was kind of interesting was that in between takes I was getting kind of annoyed because the camera guys were really kind of drooling and talking about "girl-on-girl action" and I said, "What about boy-on-girl action?" And she turned to me and said "Oh. Do you identify as male?" [Laughs] And I said, "Well, probably more than you do." And she said "I'll be sure to tell people that." We just had this abstracted conversation about gender in the middle of this shoot, which I thought was really weird and pretty interesting: A) that she would take the time and B) that she would even ask me about that.

Tell me about your own art.
I started off as a painter and a drawer, but I now do performance art, and I know that sounds absolutely terrifying, like you imagine people shoving yams up their asses, but I think of my work as moving paintings essentially. There aren't a lot of massive, sweeping actions. It's more like I use the fact that the image is live to try to capture and transfix people, because people can walk away from a painting. I do portraits of sorts. I recently got funding through the Franklin Furnace, which is the largest nonprofit performance art fund in New York City to do this piece called "Hard Times," which is kind of my portrait of the current culture of California. It features me -- I train really, really hard so that I get really beefy and really ripped in a kind of scary way, and I do this performance on a really, really high piece of building scaffolding. I'm basically wearing a blonde Farrah Fawcett wig and a coral body thong. Basically, I do these body building poses but I slow them down incredibly, and I transfer from pose to pose so slowly that I create a nervous system overload -- the entire body starts to quake and then the scaffolding does too. And when I turn around, you see that I have this prosthetic mask on that looks like my eyes have been removed from my head, and I have this soundtrack that I composed with a sound designer friend of mine, which is made up of 12 to 20 different wattages of just raw power -- like literally the sound of electric power -- and I mix all of that together and do this piece that basically, to me, is a portrait of California in this kind of economic crisis and this need to uphold the beautiful and the superficial in a place where we are rotting from the inside out in a lot of different ways. So I wanted to create this image that plays with the expectation of this beautiful woman that you're going to see, and then you get something else. And all of it is using a lot of tropes from film because I live in Hollywood.

Have you been recognized from the "Telephone" video yet?
Yes. It's very strange. It's kind of like the people you wouldn't normally talk to you all of a sudden really want to talk to you [Laughs] -- just because you've had this experience of being close to a celebrity. It's kind of crazy. My Facebook page exploded, but in terms of just off the street? It's mostly from Facebook -- like people posting and re-posting and re-posting. So it's not like complete strangers but more like strangers of strangers of strangers who've seen my friends' post. But I was just at the Fusion Festival -- the LGBT people of color film festival in L.A. -- and I was definitely approached there quite a few times at the opening.

So the attention is flattering? It doesn't weird you out?
It is a little weird to be someone who works really hard at what I do, and then to do something like making out with a pop star and to get so much attention for that. I do think being in the video is important because there are going to be kids watching that who maybe haven't seen anything like that before and can then maybe imagine themselves being something different. So in that kind of simpler way I do think it offers something important, but it's not the same kind of level of rigor or mental work as when I'm doing my own performance work.

It really speaks to the idea of visibility. When you think about the way queer women are presented -- even in 2010 -- we never see images like you and Lady Gaga making out.
Oh, yeah, and that's a very sad thing. It's like the opening of The L Word will have a pregnant married couple, and it's like a fucking nightmare! [Laughs] And it's not that I'm not for fighting for equal rights but come on -- what makes us queer? To be queer is to be on the outside and to be on the outside is to be a force of resistance. I think of my body as that, and I think of it as armature -- I don't want to belong in that really particular way. I think it's important to posit something that will make people raise their eyebrows. It's not about just being accepted -- it's about opening up people's brains a bit.

Whenever I see truly queer representations, especially embedded in such a mainstream moment like "Telephone," I think of kids in the middle of Kansas who maybe aren't exposed to anything, and then they see this Lady Gaga video, and they start asking questions. Even something as fluffy as a pop music video can be hugely influential.
Totally. Gone are the days when if you're against the war you go and protest on the street. Protesting doesn't stop wars anymore. Going to your gay pride rally is nice -- it makes you feel good, but unfortunately we don't live in that era anymore. The only way you can create social change is to insert yourself into the machine.

Right. And cast yourself as a monkey wrench.
Exactly.

For more information about Heather Cassils, visit her website.

'Is Lady Gaga a Feminist or Isn’t She?'

via Ms Magazine Blog:

Nobody could describe my relationship with Lady Gaga better than she does: We’re in a Bad Romance.

She’ll say something feminist one minute and equate feminism with man-hating the next. Sometimes she seems too skinny, too blonde, too commercial–but then she explains how her Bad Romance video simulates the trafficking of women as commodities in the music industry and I swoon. So, with the newly released first unofficial biography of Lady Gaga in hand, I set out to settle the question: Is Lady Gaga a feminist or isn’t she?

Emily Herbert’s Lady Gaga: Behind the Fame adds to the already familiar growing-up-Catholic-school-girl backstory new insight into Gaga’s artistic vision and business savvy. In an industry in which many women (and some men) are shepherded to stardom with little input, Gaga appears to be completely in control of her image. As Herbert explains in the book, Gaga’s creative collective, “Haus of Gaga,” is fashioned after Andy Warhol’s Factory. Every member is under 26 years old and hand-picked by Gaga. Together, they handle everything–the music, the clothing, the performances–and are wildly successful at creating exciting, strange art and music that large numbers of people love.

Her art provides a running commentary on gender, sexuality and beauty. There are hints of David Bowie, Prince and Madonna in the way she plays with sexuality, but while Gaga acknowledges these similarities she wants it to be clear she is something entirely her own. With her deliberate juxtaposition of conventional platinum blonde beauty and fashionably ugly costumes, she toys with conventional rules of attractiveness. Half of her appeal throughout 2009 seemed to be the question of whether or not she was pretty, whether or not people felt comfortable liking her. “I am not sexy in the way Britney Spears is sexy,” Gaga is quoted in the bio, “I just don’t have the same ideas about sexuality that I want to portray. I have a very specific aesthetic–androgyny.”

What effect does it have for someone who defies conventional beauty to be sexy? Maybe it means broadening what sexy is.

Gaga also espouses safe sex and embraces her queer fans.“I want to free [my fans] of their fears and make them feel they can create their own place in the world,” Gaga told Barbara Walters in December 2009. What is more feminist that creating an inclusive atmosphere where people feel accepted?

Lady Gaga speaks at October 2009 National Equality March

And Gaga beautifully articulated the double standard within pop music in this interview:

You see if I was a guy and I was sitting here with a cigarette in my hand, grabbing my crotch, talking about how I make music because I love fast cars and fucking girls, you’d call me a rock star. But when I [sing about sex] in my music and videos, because I’m a female, because I make pop music, you are judgmental and you say that it is distracting. I’m just a rock star.

But moments later she stomped on my heart:

I’m not a feminist. I hail men, I love men, I celebrate American male culture– beer, bars, and muscle cars.

Feminist fans around the country joined in a collective hand slap to the forehead.

Of all people to be afraid of a word, the controversy-loving Lady Gaga just doesn’t seem to fit. So is Lady Gaga really fearful? Or just ignorant?

I was heartened when finally, as the year came to a close, she admitted to the LA Times that she was a “little bit of a feminist.” And I think she’s more a feminist than she admits. Throughout her time in the spotlight, Gaga has made consistent statements about being a strong woman, focusing on her career and being in control. On a radio show in September 2009, she addressed a rumor that she was a hermaphrodite: “I think this is society’s reaction to a strong woman.”

Lady Gaga is a young artist who seems to renegotiate her image and identity with each bit of education she receives. Maybe she has made some feminist faux pas, but to her credit, she educates herself and comes back with a stronger statement than the last. She thinks about who she is and how she presents herself, and that is refreshing. And “a little bit feminist.”

I can’t help but fantasize about just what Lady Gaga could do by identifying as“feminist.” Her immense popularity and youthful, outspoken image could be the perfect set-up for a revolution of the word.