Queer Jubu Hero: Pieter-Dirk Uys — See Him In Darling! At The Jewish Film Festival

You have only two opportunities to see a film about the most politically subversive and influential drag queen in living history (if not all history). Don't miss it — "Darling! The Pieter-Dirk Uys Story" will be part of the 18th Annual Jewish Film Festival, at the Walter Reade Theater on January 29th. 

Uys is best known in the guise of his alter ego, Evita Bezuidenhout, the Most Famous White Woman in South Africa.  During the later apartheid years, as Evita, Uys appeared regularly on television and in clubs satirizing the evil of the apartheid government. When people who spoke out and challenged the government directly were imprisoned or worse, Uys managed to speak truth to power without finding himself disappeared. Nelson Mandela himself has said that Uys is one if his heroes.

Allow me a tangential discussion of the Mattachine Society here, which Harry Hay named in honor of medieval buskers who appeared in masks and whose performances were often satirical jabs at the ruling classes. Jesters if you will, who have always had the ability to couch the truth humorously, for the most part without penalty. Clearly Uys is a living example of this tradition. And while the horrors of apartheid are over, as Evita Bezuidenhout, Uys continues to perform in schools throughout South Africa, teaching children about how to protect themselves from AIDS, something the ANC government, with an HIV denialist health minister, has most strenuously not done.

This documentary film follows Uys as he goes from school to school. It gives something of his life story (we learn half way through, just as Uys only learned as an adult, that his mother was a Jewish refugee from Berlin).

In some ways, the making of this documentary is also an amazing story. The director, Julian Shaw, a native New Zealander, saw Uys perform on a trip to South Africa when he was 15 years old.  He went up to Uys after the performance and said he was coming back to make a documentary film about him. Uys was nice to him, but didn’t think he’d ever see the boy again. Except that two years later, Shaw showed up, camera in hand. For the next two years he shadowed him, capturing footage in schools, performances and at home. Another couple of years of editing later, and the finished film has won honors at documentary film festivals in Australia. 

Truth be told (though I am not in drag and you wouldn't want to see it) the film is far from perfect. But the story of Uys is compelling, as is the story of Shaw deciding to film him. I wish there had been more about Uys in the apartheid days, and more about Shaw’s life and his need to make this movie.

Quibbles. This film is a must see — and a mirror to what the gender clowns (this is meant very respectfully) in New York should aspire to.  The closest we have is the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, whose true charity work is masked by the drag clowning and whose serious challenge to organized religion is made more acceptable by the fact that men have feminized themselves.

There are all kinds of questions I have: does drag take away a man’s power and thus make it safe for him to speak the truth. Or is it the taking on the the feminine power that enables them to speak the truth? What do you think?

What’s even more interesting to me as an advertising copywriter is Uys appearance in a recent commercial for Nando’s, a fast food chain in South Africa. In this clever spot, Uys as Evita delivers a sell for a special meal deal, while setting up a very pointed political barb that comes as a stinger at the end of the spot. While such a jab at the current government (Uys is an equal opportunity satirist) is no surprise coming from Evita, I am amazed that the advertiser was willing to chance government disapproval. Certainly no advertiser in the U.S. would make such an obviously negative statement about either the Democrats or Republicans in a commercial. The spot runs below: