New York's cabaret queen is back and she's mad, writes Katrina Fox

Penny Arcade is pissed off with the so-called 'gay community'. The legendary performance artist from New York, who is bringing her new show Rebellion Cabaret to Sydney as part of the New Mardi Gras festival, isn't afraid to tell it like it is, regardless of whether it offends her potential target audience. "The most disturbing element of what has occurred in what was once the proud and honourable gay world is the pathetic need for acceptance by the middle-class world," she explains. "This is something that the very people who had the nerve to create a backlash against a small-minded and intolerant society would have never stooped to. No one who needs the amount of acceptance that the current gay and lesbian community needs from the dominant straight culture would have had the guts to come out of the closet before 1970."

It's this lack of individuality, 'queer' becoming "a homogenised brand as empty as any other style", the "morass of celebrity culture", gentrification of real estate and ideas, and marketed rebellion that Arcade, a self-described "bisexual faghag" explores in her show - an eclectic mix of comedy and music. "I got thrown out of school for rolling up my skirt two inches above my knees but today any 14-year-old girl can go to school wearing hot pants. It's all been marketed - we're living in an era where rebellion has become a commodity. Everything is for sale," she says.

This mass consumerism has led to the demise of the original artist who has been replaced with manufactured acts and reality TV which turns the most inane person into a celebrity, according to Arcade. "We are living in the emptiest, drabbest, most cheaply produced, contentless era of entertainment ever," she says. "People are despondent, empty, bored out of their minds. There's not a lot of value placed on having a good or beautiful life, or on having integrity, so instead of thinking about the bleakness of their lives, they're going to tune in to see Paris Hilton on The Simple Life. Anyone can be famous in America if they have $6000 a month to spend on a press agent. In the past, celebrity meant you were celebrated for something. Look at who are celebrities today - Jennifer Lopez is a celebrity? She's never made a record that's not pieced together word for word in the studio and it doesn't matter anymore, nobody cares. When I was a little girl I could certainly be jealous of a Hollywood party with Elizabeth Taylor or Marilyn Monroe, but am I really expected to be jealous of Puff Daddy's beach party with Donald Trump - I mean oh yeah, I wish I was invited - it's ridiculous."

One of the prices Arcade says she's paid for remaining true to her beliefs is that she's not a household name - coupled with the fact that she turned her back on Hollywood at a young age when she could have exploited her newly-found status as a 'Warhol superstar', after being spotted by Andy Warhol during her involvement with John Vaccaro's Playhouse of the Ridiculous - New York's original queer, political "glam-punk-glitter theatre" of the late 1960s - and later appearing in the Warhol/Morrissey film Women in Revolt with drag queens Holly Woodlawn, Jackie Curtis and Candy Darling. "Being a superstar was like joining the Salvation Army," she says. "First you were chosen by Andy and then you were available to be part of his entourage for parties and openings. We were in our late teens and early 20s with no visible means of support - we liked the posh houses and free food and we liked to dress up and carry on. In retrospect, did I take advantage of the situation? No. Is it a good thing? Yes. I would have never survived Hollywood as a teenager and probably not even in my 30s and 40s."

Instead Arcade spent most of the 1970s quietly in Spain living under her birth name, Susana Ventura, before returning to New York at the beginning of the 1980s to resurrect Penny Arcade and become one of the city's most outspoken and acclaimed performance artists. But despite refusing to compromise in her art, she nevertheless harboured desires for fame and recognition. "I was in competition with Madonna since 1984 and I thought 'yeah it's ok, she's doing that, I'm doing this and eventually I'll get the same result', which is ridiculous," she reflects. "But Madonna's paid a price for what she does and mostly it's a price of self-delusion. She thinks she's this powerful feminist, whereas in fact she constantly lies to the public about what her life is like. She's not hitchhiking naked on the highway - she has 16 bodyguards, but there are girls in pubs all over Australia getting beaten up because they've gone there dressed like Madonna. To talk about the self-delusion of Madonna, do I have to say more than two words: Swept Away."

The appropriation by mainstream entertainment of the 'bad girl' aesthetic such as that espoused by Madonna is something Arcade finds pathetic. "To be a real bad girl, something has to be at risk - you have to be losing something by standing up for your values," she says, citing Lydia Lunch, Diamanda Galas, Nina Hagen and Marianne Faithfull as examples. "The art and entertainment world loves the bad girl aesthetic but fears the real bad girl. That's how you end up with Avril Lavigne - pseudo bad girl who doesn't run away from suburbia, she runs to the mall where she causes havoc in shops - yuck!"

In 1995 Arcade confronted audiences in Australia with her show Bitch! Dyke! Fag! Whore! in which, among other things, she discussed lesbian penetrative sex at a time when it wasn't politically correct to do so. Ten years on and this time she's saying what few people dare to say about the transgender revolution. Instead of seeing it as a positive move towards gender fluidity, Arcade, who has spent years around transsexual people, warns that hormonal and surgical procedures, particularly those undertaken by young women, may stem from a more sinister root: homophobia. "You have 23-year girls cutting off their breasts. Now, some of them may need gender reassignment, but let's face it, a lot of it is just trendy. Not every 23-year-old girl is really a boy. Suddenly a lot of girls don't want to say they are lesbians and being butch isn't butch enough - now you have to be a boy."

Her views may not be popular with everyone, but since one of art's functions is to provoke, it's doubtful anyone will leave her show unmoved. And while she may have a lot to say, she does it with a sense of humour. "Like all my shows it is about real life, and it is a comedy. I'm funnier than most stand-ups. The audience can expect to laugh and cry. They can expect to dine out on my one-liners." Her old friend, author Quentin Crisp, once told her "time is kind to the non-conformist". Was he right? "Oh yeah, I'll probably be in great demand when I'm 80!" Arcade laughs. Let's hope so.

SX News is one of Australia's leading gay and lesbian arts, entertainment, news and culture magazines For more information visit the magazine's website at www.sxnews.com.au