ABSTRACT
As a teenager and budding homosexual I was acutely aware of the disloyalty of my body which, so it seemed to me at the time, with every step, look and utterance betrayed the fearfully kept secret of my difference. Having convinced myself that I left behind me a wake of nudges, winks, whispered accusations and scandalised titters, I began to fear not simply all public spaces but, more particularly, the space behind my back, where rumour found the room to flourish and which thus became by implication private. In order to keep an eye on this Hinterland from which I had been expelled, I decided to perform my otherness with thunder and lightning, dressing in loud colours and producing a staccato drumroll by dragging the soles of my wooden sandals across the paved and cobbled streets of the city of my birth. I became quite literally blinding and deafening, dazzling and confusing the all-tooknowing gaze of the onlookers and, so I hoped, reflecting my own uncertainty as a sense of wonder and a need to question appearances. Ever since, the space of performance has seemed to me to be located at the behind, the meeting between spectacle and spectator, an aspect of the ‘After life’1 and the abject.
