helen
sandler | journalism
Rhona Cameron |
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A write of
passage Her fame has rocketed
since her rumble in the jungle and Rhona Cameron has now written a book about
the tough adolescence that formed her. Helen Sandler talks to the woman voted
Sexiest Celeb by Diva readers and finds a reformed character Rhona Cameron seems
nervous. She has written a book and doesn’t know how it will be
received. She doesn’t trust the gay press and claims the worst thing
ever written about her was in DIVA. She is doing non-stop interviews and is
starting to feel like her role in life is to sit in a room and be quizzed.
But despite all this she opens up to me immediately, in a stream of chat and
expletives, about her feelings, her drink problem, her troubled adolescence
and her controversial views on the gay scene. She admits that she just
can’t help herself – opening up is what she does. We have barely
been introduced – and she has not yet relaxed – when she tells me
she has a “deeply analytical mind” which has enabled her to survive
as a “lonely, damaged outsider”. I
can’t tell if her tongue is in her cheek but one thing is for sure, she
has used her ability to talk about herself to great effect in her memoir, Nineteen
Seventy-Nine: A Big Year in a Small Town. It takes a few pages to build up steam but then we are right in
there, under the skin of a 14-year-old lesbian in Musselburgh, a small town
near Edinburgh. For me, it was like reading my own teenage diary,
delightfully familiar in parts, disturbingly so in others. If your mum ever
bought a Kellogg’s Variety Pack for your caravan holiday as a special
treat, then you will be on familiar ground. And if you ever let boys do stuff
to you that didn’t feel too great, then you are going to revisit some
difficult moments. Rhona
describes a year in which the boys touched her up, the girls ran away
screaming, the teachers tried to discourage her crushes on them… and
then, towards the end of 1979, her father died from cancer. What was it like
to revisit all this? “I
went totally into the soul of me at 14,” replies the 38-year-old
comedian. On trips to her childhood home, where her mother still lives, she
hung out with the people she grew up with and played football with their
kids. As more memories surfaced, she made notes. “I
sat where I used to sit to write my fact files or diaries,” says Rhona,
“and I wrote my book – at the little pull-down MFI bureau in the
study which is barely big enough for a coatstand. I went back.” The
“fact files” were her obsessive notes on the girls she was
stalking: girls from school with whom she had imaginary relationships. She
watched their houses. She invited them round to her house and stared at them.
Sometimes, she declared her love… which usually led to the screaming. Rhona
says that early reactions to the book have differed markedly between straight
women and lesbians, with the former far more shocked at what she went
through. The dykes are not surprised. “I
truly think that lesbians have more miserable lives,” she says.
“I think there’s hardly any place in this society for
lesbians.” I
ask if it’s got any easier and she answers that it must have done to
some extent – just look at Alex on Fame Academy. Rhona wonders if she herself eased the way for
others by being out, but she didn’t do it for the sake of anyone else.
“I just did it ’cos I’ve always been like that. When I was
growing up in Musselburgh, I didn’t know any lesbians, I just
innocently told people what I was. I’ve never in my life once thought
of lying about what I am.” She
is not sure of the rewards for that honesty. “What have I got out of
it? I’ve been slagged off by the gay press quite a lot. It’s
mostly so bitchy and vacuous and, let’s face it, it’s mostly
pictures of men in vests with phone numbers underneath or lesbians going on
about cats or something. There’s no in between, no space for women who
have relationships with women but have another life. I don’t own a kd
lang album. I don’t want to go to a place just because it’s
gay.” Ironically, there are those who don’t want to
come to her show precisely because she’s gay. “A lot of straight
people think, ‘Well, she’s going to be doing vagina lesbian
material and I don’t want to go with my husband and watch that.’
I want to appeal to everyone, but you can’t win. Where is the place for
you, if you’re in the public eye, to be honest to yourself and other
people, to look after young impressionable people who might need you, and to
please the people you’re trying to sell your product to? It’s a
nightmare.” In
her ideal world, we would all live in a kind of cosmopolitan New York in
which, black or white, gay or straight, it wouldn’t matter what you
were. In the real world, she says it would have been better if she had not
known at such an early age that she was gay, or if she had stayed longer with
the nice boyfriend she had in her late teens, until she was ready for her new
life. She would advise today’s isolated teenagers to hang on in there
till they’re old enough to move to a city where they can find
like-minded women. Unfortunately for Rhona, history was not on her side when
she was seeking these women around Edinburgh in the days of the Greenham
Common peace camp. “I
had a very damaging young adult life,” she says. “I got involved
with lesbian separatist feminists and I think it’s the most unhealthy
environment for a young woman. I was lonely, I wanted to meet a girlfriend, I
wanted to get laid… and I had to join the fucking anti-nuclear
movement: middle-class, irritating, preaching, bigoted feminists who,
frankly, are now all straight anyway. We were not allowed to speak to men, we
were not allowed them in the house. All men were misogynists.” I
recall that I once went to a group where all men were called fuckers. You
didn’t say “man”, you said “fucker” instead. Rhona
bats back, deadpan: “I was in a group where you weren’t allowed
the postman delivering mail because it was considered an act of
penetration.” It’s a glimpse of Rhona the comedian: confident,
quick and funny. It’s
a persona she has developed but one that is only possible if you’ve got
a natural talent for making people laugh. “It’s a survival
instinct, if you trace it back to childhood.” Although she is this
magazine’s reigning Sexiest Celeb, she says she has never been someone
who walks into a room and gets attention for being gorgeous. “I know
this because I went round gay bars when I was young and desperate to get laid
and I never had anyone interested.” Unlike the most beautiful girls at
school, she felt she was okay-looking but didn’t turn heads. “Combine
that with the desperation to be loved which comes from a place of loneliness.
But it doesn’t matter how the fuck you look or where you’re from,
if you make people laugh.” She
says people on the comedy circuit are an odd bunch, citing Eddie Izzard and
Billy Connolly, both of whom she admires. “And look at Victoria Wood. I
saw her when I was 16. She was not a very beautiful woman, she had a suit and
tie and mad hair and did all these funny monologues. It didn’t matter.
You can fall in love with anybody who’s funny, it’s such a
pull… And they become more beautiful with confidence.” Rhona
lives alone and is currently single. At this point, not for the first time,
she starts to interview herself: “But do I have emotional connections
to people? Yes. Do I feel totally free? Mmm… ish. But yeah, I’m
single.” She
enjoys her own company. Writing the book required discipline and clarity and
she made the decision to return to the sober mind of 1979 by giving up drink
for a while. That was seven months ago. How does it feel? “It’s a completely new life. I’ve
drank more days in my life than I haven’t. I’ve calculated
I’ve had about 10,000 hangovers in my life which roughly works out as
nine or ten years. You meet people and go, ‘I’ve given up drink,’
and they go, ‘You don’t want to do that. We’ve all had a
drink,’ and I go, ‘But I don’t remember my twenties,’
and they’re like, ‘Yeah, well, we’ve all done that.’
And I go, ‘What, like hospitals and police stations?’ and they go,
‘Oh no, not like that.’ And I go, ‘Right then.’
Lesbians are worst. There’s so much alcoholism in lesbians, it’s
unbelievable. Let’s please, people, be honest about that. It’s
astonishing.” The
young Rhona in the book is also an apprentice cutter, nicking her wrist with
a blade, then putting on a plaster and covering it with her wristwatch. Is
self-harm another lesbian trait? Rhona
feels that in her case it was more to do with being adopted. She knows a lot
of adopted people who have harmed themselves and traces it to an obsession
with the body as a separate entity. When you don’t know your birth
parents, she says, there is no evidence that you were born of flesh;
it’s almost like being an alien. “So,
perhaps my body’s indestructible and I can take seven grams of coke or
ten ecstasies or I can headbutt people and smash my hand through panes of
glass and cut myself. I’ve done things like that when I was young, I
lived like the Incredible Hulk. I do NOT recognise that person. It makes me
very sad, the way I’ve lived, and I want to make up for it. “I’m
really against the British attitude: denial about health and psychoanalysis
and drinking. There are so many fucked-up people. It’s very sad. The
amount of people in my industry as well… casualties.” Football
keeps her going. She plays with Camden women’s football team and has organised
her current comedy tour so that she doesn’t miss a game.
“I’ll play as long as my knees hold me. I guess there’ll be
a time in my early 40s when I’ll have to stop – or maybe
I’ll become so successful that I’ll have to go to Hollywood and
direct my film.” She
is only half-joking. Preliminary meetings about a film of the book are taking
place. Since she came out of the Australian jungle after the TV survival show
I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here!, her profile has rocketed and anything is possible.
She is grateful that she did the programme, but the tabloid “Rhona the
Moaner” moniker is still stinging. “What
I am learning,” she says, “is that you can’t please
everyone.” But
you wouldn’t want to, would you? “Yes.”
She laughs. “All performers want to please everyone. You want everyone
to like you. Right? If you’re on a stage and there’s 800 people
there and you can spot one person at the left-hand side of the stalls not
laughing, that’s the only person you care about. Fuck everyone else
that likes you. That’s the burden that we bear.” At
last year’s Libertas festival concert in York, she had an audience far
bigger than 800 and everyone was laughing their heads off. There was a
private reception afterwards at which I noticed a young woman standing at the
window holding up a poster saying something like “I love you Rhona, can
I come in?” I
ask if she gets a lot of fans who are as obsessed with her as she once was
with her biology teacher. “Yeah,
yeah, and I try to be really patient and nice because I think about how
desperate I was. If somebody I really thought was fantastic, like Julie
Walters, was to have just spoken to me, I would have been so made up. So I
try to go, what is it that you want? It’s a small price to pay, to chat
to people and sign things.” And
so I ask her to sign my book. Nineteen Seventy-Nine: A Big Year in a Small Town is
published by Ebury, £9.99 © Helen Sandler 2003 This article first appeared
in Diva, December 2003 |
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