Sunday Herald

THIS LIFE interview

DAVID LEDDY IS A PERFORMANCE ARTIST, CURRENTLY APPEARING AS SOUL QUEEN PSYCHIC LA TOYA LEVINE AT THE TRON THEATRE. HE LIVES WITH HIS PARTNER AND CAT IN THE WEST END OF GLASGOW

"I LIVE on the 16th floor of a tower block in Broomhill with beautiful views all the way over to Arran. We see great sunsets. I love living in a tower block actually. It's full of people who have lived there since it was built in the Sixties really sweet old people. Everyone who comes round to my flat is really impressed. They're like, 'Oooh, it's really nice. It doesn't smell of wee or anything!' My partner Calum is a dialysis patient and he has to go to the hospital for dialysis treatment three times a week, so we need to get up early. We listen to the Today programme and shout at politicians we don't like.

My life changes a lot depending on what I'm doing, whether I'm rehearsing a show. At the moment I am, so I get up and do my lines. Rehearsing a solo show is quite strange because you spend a lot of time by yourself. It's quite a surreal experience. I'm really busy at the moment. After La Toya, I go straight into rehearsing a show for the Fringe. I'll be doing that right up to September. Learning 10,000 words is tough and there's no easy way; it's just slog. You just have to repeat it and repeat it and repeat it. Luckily I have a good memory.

In my show I wear all these costumes simultaneously and peel them off layer by layer as I change from character to character, getting more and more outrageous. They're meant to look like La Toya made them all herself, but actually it was a brilliant woman called Lisa Cochrane. This show, In The Shade, looks at issues of race and the way mainstream white culture appropriates black American urban culture. La Toya is a white drag queen; this white man who thinks he's a black woman.

I'm very interested in people who pretend to be somebody else men who try to be women, white people who talk black. So there's this notion of theft throughout the show: people stealing each other's acts, stealing each other's jokes, and particularly the stealing of cultural identity. The politics of that is really interesting. This notion that it's more palatable if we get a white person to do it.

I was watching a video of all the women I impersonate, the VH1 Divas Concert. It opens with Celine Dion singing River Deep, Mountain High and she's dressed like a secretary on a night out. Looks a state and sings with this awful French-Canadian accent, like Sacha Distel singing Hebrew. She's trying to do all the moves and I'm just thinking, you're such an embarrassment.

La Toya's story amalgamates all the stories of the divas she impersonates: Tina Turner, Aretha Franklin, Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, Diana Ross. She's psychicly channelling them, and doesn't care if they're not dead yet. Being a drag queen is purely theatrical. I find the mechanics the make-up, the clothes, the heels just painful and really annoying. I can't believe how long it takes to get ready or how much make-up costs! The joke isn't on women, but on notions of femininity which is why drag queens push it as far as they can go. They wear as much make-up as they can, the highest heels, the most outrageous outfit, be as glittery as they can, to highlight the constructedness of femininity.

Why does a man dressing as a woman enthrall people so much? It's a very strange thing.

Calum and I met in Brighton. It has a reputation for being really hip and cool, but culturally it's dead. Lots of manky gay bars with shit drag acts like La Toya Levine. But I do it for a joke, they're doing for real. Ugh! Awful. We lived in London too, but for me, Glasgow is the right balance. You get all the advantages of living in a good-sized city, culturally, but without the real grief of living in a big, draining city like London. In terms of being gay, I don't find any difference. I've never really experienced any kind of prejudice.

Except when I was producing Glasgay a couple of years ago and got death threats. They sent them by email; so modern! They were very detailed about how they were going to kill me and turn me into soap. Very neo-Nazi. It was quite interesting though. All the straight people I spoke to said, 'Oh my god, that's awful. You must be terrified.' And all the gay people I told went, 'Oh really? Whatever.' It wasn't really surprising to them. It did make me realise that I was quite vulnerable, not anonymous.

Calum and I can't really go away travelling much because of his dialysis treatment, but we like to go on little day trips around Scotland. Anything involving train or boat on the same day is good. We don't really care where we end up as long as we have a nice time getting there, and we can read our papers and drink our coffee. It's hard for him. It's a chronic sickness, but things like this bring you closer together.

We have a cat called Gato, which we love. Sometimes when I'm working away from home, I phone Calum to say good night and say, I want to hear the cat please. And he'll say, 'But she's not making any noise.' And I'll say, well just poke her then. And he does, and she growls in a really pissed off way. It's our late-night ritual."