THE JOY OF HUMILIATION

GRAYSON PERRY WINS THE 2003 PERRY PRIZE

I met this kook in London recently at a celebrity-studded charity auction and could not figure him out. As a queen who favors lotsa make-up, it's sometimes tough to comprehend his type of drag look. And he's heterosexual! Sometimes the hetero queens don't have the drag queen's faggy flair for styling or even walking so they seem really odd. But Grayson breaks it down with humor in this fascinating excerpt from his book PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG GIRL which appeared in today's Guardian.



Grayson Perry made his first pot around the same time he discovered the thrill of girls' clothes - at primary school. That was just the start. Here he describes how transgression, potential disaster and a liking for the down-to-earth have been abiding features of his life.


In the autumn of 1964 my mother was a housewife, I was four and my sister was two. My father was working for an engineering factory in Chelmsford and had a part-time job as a wine waiter in a local dinner-dance restaurant. One night my father came home early and saw the milkman's car - a powder-blue E-type Jag - parked outside. He waited, then came home after the milkman had gone. Next morning he confronted my mother. She put her hands in the air, proclaiming, "Yes, I love him, and I want to live with him."

My father upped sticks but returned a few weeks later for the sake of my sister and me. Then he discovered my mother was pregnant by the milkman, and that was it - he was gone. Some time afterwards my sister and I went for a day trip with our dad to Dungeness power station; he wanted to show us where he was working. He asked, "Do you want to live with your mother or your father?" I remember not knowing what to say. I mumbled, "Iwanttostaywithmymum."
The milkman left his wife and moved in. My mother miscarried, but then she got pregnant again and my half-brother Neil was born. The milkman was 27, four years younger than my mother; maybe she wanted to be with him because of his patina of glamour. He was attractive in a brutal, brooding way. He was dangerous, he drove a flash car - a poor man's Tom Jones.

My father kept in touch sporadically for a few years, but then he did what many men did: he lost contact with his children. When parents say it's too upsetting for the children to maintain contact, I think they mean it's too upsetting for the parents. When he left, the rug was pulled out from under me. As far as I'm aware, it is the event that has had the largest impact on me in my life.

My stepfather was soon showing his real colours. My first and only nosebleed was from being whacked round the back of the head by him when I was six. I didn't know why he hit me. In subsequent violence my mother would implore, "Not the head! Not the head!"

When I was eight we moved into my stepfather's house in Bicknacre, in a flat, inconsequential part of the Essex countryside. There was something bright and go-aheadish about the architecture around me. When I think of my father I imagine plough horses, traction engines, thatched cottages and vicars on bicycles, whereas my stepfather is bleak flats and the tinny modernity of that time.

I was enrolled in Woodham Ferrers C of E, a tiny local school with only 60 pupils in three classes. The second year I was there, the Christmas play was an updated Nativity in which I was Gabriel. One of my earliest stirrings around clothes was over the costume I wore, a robe made from a white bed sheet with ribbon ties, silver cardboard wings and a halo. One morning I saw all the costumes hanging on a line in the school hall and I got a little feeling I still get now when I look inside a woman's wardrobe or think about women's clothes - a little flutter of excitement with fear around it.

My first pottery lesson must have been when I was eight, maybe nine. The vicar's wife came in and told us we were going to make a coil pot. I went through the motions; I don't think I particularly liked it, nor did I see it as a significant experience. I made my very first piece of pottery for my mum, a sad little yellow ashtray. She didn't use it.

We had to wear light-blue smocks. They were made of heavy, rubberised material, fastened at the back with snappers. In my first lesson I had last pick of the smocks, so the one I got was tight. The classroom helper, Miss Maple, who looked like Dusty Springfield, snapped me into it. The combination of this and the squeaky, smooth, restrictive smock turned me on. I was being dressed like a small child; it felt very humiliating. Humiliation is one of the most powerful turn-ons for me.

Some transvestites search out the recognition a grown woman attracts; I search out the attention a girl would receive. Dressing up as a young girl shifts the process from authentic to symbolic - it is almost impossible for a man to look convincingly like a little girl. I've only ever seen one or two cross-dressers who could pass for a girl under 16. I have to acknowledge that it is a ludicrous fantasy when I dress up as a little girl; but people are more comfortable with me dressed as a child because it is much less ambiguous. I am a bloke in a ridiculous frock. If a man puts on a little girl's dress, he wants to be treated as a little girl and handled with care. Little girls don't have to do anything, or take any responsibility - they can just be and are worshipped for being. I love it if a woman treats me like a little girl, if she coos, "Ah! What a lovely dress! Don't you look cute?"

In my first year at secondary school, a boy came round to play and I suggested, "Would you like to put on some dresses? It's really good fun, we can dress up as ladies." "No!" he scoffed and I realised it wasn't something everybody did. When I was 12. I surreptitiously cadged dresses from my sister's cupboard, although they were always too small, and then acted out detailed bondage fantasies.

My stepfather did house clearances and the garage was full of all the stuff he had cleared. One day I chanced upon a prim, demure dress in Crimplene. I loved the repulsiveness of it - my body was responding to the ghastly strangeness of the texture. It felt very feminine, like being furnished. Another afternoon I discovered a box of 15 polyester dresses, and tried them all on at once until I was like a fat woman. My sister came home; I panicked and hid in the stair cupboard until I had taken them off.

Part of the thrill was coming close to being found out. One afternoon I donned underwear, tights and a yellow dress, put my boy's gear over the top, then sneaked to the fields behind the woods where I knew I wouldn't meet anybody. I pulled off my boy's clothes, stuffed them under a hedge, and set off for a walk as a girl. It was the first time I had dressed up and gone out of doors.

My stepfather's hobby was wrestling. He was a member of Chelmsford Wrestling Club, practising through the week and wrestling in shows at the weekend. He would also launch into wrestling matches with my mother, and I would be frightened because she used to implore me to help. He would grab my mother or me and shake, throttle and throw. I once asked my mother, "Did he hurt you last night?" to which she drawled, "Ow, yes!" in a suggestive, Kenneth Williams way.

My mother was always open; she wouldn't mind me seeing her nude in the bath. When my friends visited, she would get her tummy out and slap it on the kitchen table: "Look at that - you don't get many of them to the pound." When she was showing one of my girlfriends around the house, she'd say, "This is the room where Grayson does all his wanking."

She was staunchly working class, almost aggressively so, whereas my stepfather aspired to middle-class values. The day Mrs Thatcher came to power was the first time I voted. My mother and I pulled up in front of the polling station in her clapped-out old Mini and the bootlid fell off with a clang. My mother shouted to the policeman, "Here come the Labour voters!" My stepfather was Conservative.

Although we lived in the same house for 15 years, I never had a conversation with my stepfather, certainly no more than an exchange of a few sentences. The commonest was, "Do the washing-up or your mother will get upset." Often he talked to me in the third person, or via a third person: "Tell that long streak of piss to get off the sofa", or "Could that Herbert do something to help his mother?"

In the autumn of 1975, when I was 15 and had just decided to become an army officer, I stumbled across an article in the News Of The World about transvestites and sex changes, with a photograph of April Ashley, the model, socialite and transsexual. I knew now that transvestism was a recognised phenomenon, and I developed typical transvestite fantasies of waking up in the morning to discover I had become a girl. If only I could wake up and be Anna Ford, or Sue Lawley from Nationwide with her neat hair and trendy dresses. (At the same time, I knew I was wholly heterosexual and was fantasising about girls.) I began experimenting with my mum's make-up. I paraded around the house dressed up and gazed at myself in the mirror. I was padding out a bra with socks and borrowing a pair of tights; I could just about squeeze into my mother's shoes.

In the back pages of the Daily Mail there were adverts for cut-price wigs. I ordered an auburn wig in a bob hairstyle for £1. I told my best friend, Tom Edwards, that I was buying a Christmas present for my mum but wanted it to be a surprise, addressed the wig to his house, and one week later Tom gave me a parcel at the bus stop. Finally, I had a complete outfit.

On November 5 1975, what I now call my alter ego Claire's birthday, I put on the full rig and stepped out of the front door. There I stood in my lipstick, blue chiffon headscarf over my auburn wig, wearing a brown polyester blouse and black-and-white dog-tooth check skirt, tan tights, black court shoes and a beige mac - a middle-aged look. She had no name: she wasn't yet Claire. Taking enormous risks, I walked down our lane, round the village, then back home. It was thrilling. It was icily cold, and the cold still has an erotic charge for me because of that day. For some silly reason Transvestite Day is August 4, when it should be something like January 27. Winter is the trannie season because it's chilly, you're wearing a wig and lots of padding; it's also dark so you can sneak out without the neighbours seeing, and you can cover up with a coat.

The perfect transvestite experience would be traipsing along the street with someone holding a gigantic mirror in front of me so that I could see myself the whole time. As I can't, wearing crippling shoes or being a tad cold reminds me I'm in the wrong clothes.

One day a school friend asked me, "Is your dad Derek Perry?" When I said he was, he went on, "I'm going out with his adopted daughter."

I was intrigued. I didn't know anything about my father, not even where he was living; I hadn't seen him since I was seven, and now I was 15. I arranged to meet my father's adopted daughter, Belinda, and one lunchtime I went with her to my father's house. There I met his second wife, Maureen-Ann, and told her, "I'd like to meet my father again."

The following Saturday I arrived at his home in Chelmsford, a skinny, shaven-headed teenager in Doc Martens and a combat jacket. We spent the day together tinkering around with his old Bedford van; he was always tinkering around with cars.

I arranged to stay for a weekend with my father, thinking, "Here's a lifeboat - I'm going to leap into it." I took my army bag with my uniform, pretending to my mother that I was going away with the Cadet Force - I was getting quite deceitful. That weekend my father took me for an Indian, the first time I had eaten in a proper restaurant, and got me drunk on Irish coffees.

One evening I casually mentioned to my mother that I'd seen my father. She was incredibly angry and shrieked, "And I suppose you want to go and live with him?" I floundered: "Well, yeah. I would." Within half an hour she was driving me to my father's. She left me at the top of the street where he lived and drove away. I was put into the lodger's room; I can't imagine he was very happy. But although there were a few tearful phone calls, my mother didn't ask me to come back.

As soon as I moved in I became utterly obsessed with getting hold of some women's clothes. I began scoping for discreet public toilets. The best ones I found were behind Chelmsford museum - 1930s public conveniences, underused and covered with bushes. I would shove all my women's stuff into my Adidas bag, then cycle to Central Park in Chelmsford after school, sneak into the women's lavatory, dress up and totter round the park. My first inkling of how I looked came when I was walking down Moulsham Street in Chelmsford and a bloke in a Jag shouted at me, "Helloooooooo darling!"

One day my dad announced, "I want to have a little chat with you." He sat me down and said, "I've found out about your little game." At first I thought he meant some kind of petty criminal activity I'd been up to with my friends. He added, "You're dressing up."

I went completely numb and depressed. What had happened was that Belinda had found my diary. Maureen-Ann was incensed that I had used her clothes and that I'd been doing what she imagined young transvestites do in women's clothes (and she was probably right): wanking. My mother came to visit, demanding to know, "What's this about you dressing up?" My stepfather said, "That's it! You're never seeing your brothers again." He thought that I was some sort of pervert. In a way, I was, but not the sort of pervert he thought.

My father and Maureen-Ann discovered my suitcase of women's clothes under the bed and confiscated them. They sent me to the GP, who examined me physically. The GP thought dressing up was to do with being gay, asking me if anyone else was involved. My dad booked me an appointment with the psychiatrist in Chelmsford hospital but I refused to go. And then that was it - I got away with it.

Later that year, after a row with my stepmother, I moved back in with my mother and stepfather. "We don't want any more of that cross-dressing thing," he grunted.

I often fell asleep at school, but never in art. I once did an intricate pen drawing of a giant woman in Victorian dress towering over a row of houses, which Mr Shash, the art teacher, liked. He asked if I'd thought of going to art college, and a light bulb popped. I made my decision, wrote it on a piece of paper in my mind, put it under a mental mattress, slept on it and never needed to look at it again. I went home and announced, "I'm going to go to art college." I think my mum was disappointed: art wasn't thought of as a proper career and until then I'd been intending to go to Sandhurst.

I started a foundation course at Braintree College of Further Education; suddenly I was on a 40-hour art-making week. The course was about pulling us away from doing very detailed pictures of cars, bombers, or girls' tits, which was what I drew. At school my art teacher had said, "Sex has been an inspiration to artists throughout the ages, Grayson, but it can get in the way." At art school our tutor was battling against students being overly neat, worried about "doing the right thing"; instead he offered us the template of the roaring wine, women and song, Augustus John-type artist, who drew with his dick.

After foundation, I went to Portsmouth Poly; it was well regarded and a long way from Essex. I knew I was able as an artist but I had no sense that I was especially gifted. Contemporary art demands a voice, and few artists have found their voice at 19. My work was still very derivative: I wanted to please my lecturers, and made pastiches of their work.

The head of department was a Francophile who led an annual student trip to Paris. I hadn't been abroad before. While crossing the Channel I copped off with Jen Mortimer, an art student in the year above me. We started snogging as soon as we boarded the ferry and became a couple during the trip.

Very soon into our relationship I was lying in bed when I announced, "Jen ... Jen ... I've. Got. Something. To. Tell. You. I... AM... A... TRANSVESTITE." She burst out laughing at my formality. Jen and her flatmate Veronica helped me piece together a haphazard wardrobe from Oxfam, advised me on make-up, and I began having surreptitious dressing-up sessions in my room. My college lecturers had said a camera was an essential tool for an artist, so I bought an extremely cheap, third-rate SLR, which enabled me to take my first photograph of Claire - an important moment for me as a trannie. Claire was me in a bad frock looking nervously into the lens.

I wrote requesting to join the Beaumont Society, which is as staid as it's possible for a transvestite society to be. I received a letter saying, "You must be vetted." Jen and I biked to a restaurant in Southampton to meet the local organisers for my interview. I was expecting to meet glamorous, fully garbed T-girls, but instead two elderly gents hobbled in, wearing blue polyester trouser suits, eye shadow and wigs, looking like little old ladies. They'd been on a yacht en femme all day on the Solent. I breezed through; all they wanted to know was if I was an authentic trannie and not a journalist, or insane.

For my first society meeting in Southampton I wore a vintage art deco dress in grey silk. Jen came with me. There were a dozen men, one of whom was in his 90s and had been a pilot in the first world war. Suddenly I was confronted with the realisation, "I'm one of them. I look as gawky, awkward and funny as these men." When I was alone it was easier to maintain the fantasy that I was a glamorous woman, but there was a touch of the self-help group about the Beaumont Society. Not one was fully passable as a woman. The most passable transvestites are small, old and need hardly any make-up. If I could change one aspect of my appearance, I would be shorter.

Trannies are usually too dressy, walking around on a weekday in clothes most women would wear to a wedding. There's a tug between needing to look realistic but wanting to wear exhibitionist clothes - the frillies and the sexies. I've succumbed to the frillies and the sexies now because I'm no longer concerned about looking authentic.

When I'm dressed as a woman, I would never speak in a squeaky voice and defer to boorish men. I was once at a trannie do in a pub function room in Twickenham. After the pub closed a few select punters were let in for a drink, and there was one bloke, a rugger-bugger type, who was boring on. After a while he said to us, "I think you're brilliant because I find myself treating you like real women."

I replied, "Yeah, you've monopolised the conversation and ignored us. That's pretty realistic."

I'll definitely be a transvestite for the rest of my life, although it was a long time before I was able to embrace my sexuality and publicly celebrate Claire - not until I went into therapy at the age of 38. I appeared as Claire when I won the Turner Prize; the only issue for me then was whether or not I blushed because I thought I looked stupid. If I think I look ridiculous, it's horrible, although simultaneously the disgrace is fantastic.

At the start of my second year at Portsmouth I was stuck. My lecturer told me to go away and write 10 pages about myself, then make that into an artwork. Transvestite Jet Pilots was my formative work, the first movement towards the art I make now. It was a dressing table carved into a jet cockpit. On top were a brush, comb and mirror moulded from clay alongside dinky pots decorated with penises, and in the bottom drawer were five photographs of me transforming from Michelangelo's David into a trannie. It was a mishmash but it had an energy to it that none of my previous work had had. Art was no longer something I did for the lecturers, nine to five. Now I wanted to make art about me.

The Death Of Macho was the piece for my degree show that took the longest, was the least successful and brought my marks down. It was a figure of a classical god with a great big hard-on being crucified on a Harley-Davidson. Although it took many weeks of work to cast it in bronze, it was nevertheless twee. I graduated with a 2:1, a representative mark because I had potential but, in the end, I didn't show it. I blame taking LSD.

Jen and I moved to London, and in September 1983 I had my first proper pottery lesson. Jen's sister Fiona went to evening classes at the Central Institute, and said, "The teacher's really nice. You should come along, Grayson."

I wanted to be an artist, to get a gallery and an exhibition. I had been working hard at making small sculptures on our kitchen table, building pieces from junk I'd found on the pavements or in skips. Every day I was working on the elaborate collages in my sketchbook; their obsessive detail, busyness and horror set the tone for the work I make now. I find it difficult to leave empty space; I'm a detail freak.

It was the first time I had been exposed to pottery skills and traditional techniques like coiling, glazing and stencilling, all of which I now use. The first thing I made was a devil giving birth. I'd embedded fragments of glass in it, which melted in the kiln. That got stolen.

To start with I was being provocative. I was using the rudest images I could think of: women being shagged by wolves, handicapped fascists, Thalidomide girls, lots of swastikas, S&M hospitals. Apparently, some students led a delegation to the head of the college to complain about me. To his credit he said, "Oh, leave him alone. Let him get on with it."

Some of the things I made in that first year were bad. Often they would literally fall apart; some of the early pots were irredeemably ugly. I didn't really think pottery was my métier. It took me a long time, between 10 to 15 years, to realise that pottery was my prime medium. Pottery wasn't and isn't a glamorous proposition. It's very British: it was never going to be a flashy, gay, window-dressing art; it was always going to be humpy, heterosexual and earthy. However trite and dilettante the images I put on the clay, the material would bring it, literally, down to earth. I thought, "I can be as outrageous as I like here because the vice squad is never going to raid a pottery exhibition."

· This is an edited extract from Grayson Perry: Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Girl, by Wendy Jones. The book will be published by Chatto & Windus on January 12, at £12.99. To order a copy for £11.99 (inc UK mainland p&p), call 0870 836 0875, (guardian.co.uk/bookshop).