Trembling, I painted my lips scarlet, stroke after stroke, in Miss Selfridge Doris Karloff red. My bedroom mirror reflected my alabaster 14-year-old face, whitened with talcum powder. Around the mirror’s rim were ripped pictures I’d stuck of Leigh Bowery, his moon face covered in a silver mosaic.
Downstairs, the gong rang. Dinnertime. In the commune, the gong announced every meal.
It was 1984. We’d lived in the 60-room crumbling English mansion for eight years, a utopian experiment meant to reinvent the world. Sighing, I got ready to face 50 drably dressed people in the communal dining room.
In our house, everyone wore socialist utilitarian clothing: overalls, dungarees. “Lipstick,” a woman would bark at me later that night, “is a form of exploitation.” My mother, siblings and I had arrived at the commune in the late ’70s after my parents’ divorce.
I quickly learnt that, in this new social order, I was no longer a daughter, a six-year-old individual, but part of a collective, an unparented gang left to run wild. “You’re Rousseau’s revolutionary children,” adults shouted in meetings. The commune’s members were second-wave feminists, rejecting patriarchal objectification, the nuclear family, and class discrimination, as well as heels, hairspray and their ilk.
A dreamy child, I silently longed for ribbons, lace, and dresses, while outwardly trying to appear as masculine as possible: hardening my body, cutting my hair, the breeze tickling the back of m.