I had twenty-five minutes of banter with the Non Binary Trans artist “Dagger Polyester,” who is a freaky, campy, and dark performance artist. We got to cover their new work, and a whirlwind conversation about their new album “Perversion For Profit”, filming techniques, and just laying it all out there. Dagger Polyester is a lot like Wendy O Williams, Hazel O’Connor, and even Josie Cotton (I hope someone got that joke), with no shame, and loves pushing the limits.
Jeremy Hinks: Well, Dagger, thank you so much for your time.
Dagger Polyester: Thank you for having me.
JH: So you just released the album ‘Perversion For Profit’ and I loved it, but it was very messy in your face. Some parts I got a kick out of, but other parts were a jab, and made it kind of hurt.
DP: I’m sorry it hurt, but I guess we can talk about it.
JH: Well, in your music, I got a lot of Wendy O’ Williams, Dale Bozzio (Missing Persons), Iggy Pop, and Josie Cotton. You had some fun, playful Josie in there. Your publicists know how to push my buttons by now. They send me something saying, “I’m sure you’re gonna like this,” and they dangle it in front of me. This one, I thought, “Wow, this is a lot of fun.” My first exposure was when I watched “She Kissed The Gun”. Actually, let’s talk about the video first, the cinematography of it looked like it was a blurred late 70s punk rock style Sid Vicious type of film.
DP: It’s just the film; we shot it with Super 8 cameras.
JH: Ok, caught that, it was really gritty. And the certain shots, the frames around everyone, certain cuts you had the frames filigree drawn into he film, but the other cut with you in the Marie Antoinette hair, in the old picture frame, as an ancestor from the past speaking to us now.
Dagger Polyester – She Kissed the Gun
DP: In terms of the video Sammy Lamb did all the video with that filigre, it was the fencing around the “Pyrenees Castle” which was Phil Spector’s home where he murdered Lana Clarkson, and the picture frame wasn’t so much as a direct metaphor, but what was the “neuvau riche” at the time, and evoke this over the top sense of “Gaudy” with some B-movie aesthetics.
JH: Yeah, I saw that pulling a lot from old horror films I like, with a real grittiness like “Dogs In Space” and “Sid and Nancy”, then there you are looking like Marie Antoinette with the blood pouring down your face. I loved your visuals. But why did you pick the Phil Spector story? Was it to show the injustice in the industry, or just a rich man committing murder and thinking he can get away with it so blatantly?
DP: I don’t know if I have a moral take on the situation nessecarrily, I think it’s obvious where a human being would feel that it’s a wrong situation, but I’m really interested in stories, and when 5-6 years ago, I read that he made the statement in court “She kissed the gun” to explain what happened, I thought was so wrought with imagery. I like telling the story with a macroscopic, more zoomed-out lens. I’m interested in human behavior and ask, “What made him think to say that when he killed someone?”.
JH: But in the same vein, one of the defenses used for Sid Vicious was “She threw herself on the knife”, that is what he told the police during his arrest. I hear these things and think, “What the hell, man?”
DP: I grew up in Los Angeles, and I saw a lot of injustices towards women, yes, women, but all kinds of people, so it seems that my moral stake in it is that there is continual violence. I’m not trying to preach to anybody because we all know that murder is bad.
JH: Yes, but that he could so flippantly have taken someone’s life. Another point on that here, do you know Paula Cole?
DP: No.
JH: She did the theme for that show “Dawson’s Creek” with that song “I Don’t Wanna Wait”, in her video she was dressed the same way, with the whole padded face, and Marie Antoinette hair, and she was there singing, and the easter egg was that you saw all these urns in the background of the video, and that was all of her former lovers in those urns. You just reminded me of that. I also noticed that you have the same crew acting in your videos.
DP: Yeah, they are just my friends. I don’t have a huge video budget, I just say, “I got some food, and some booze, and if you show up, you can have some”. Between us, we are all creatives, and we all collect costume pieces. Actually, a week before those videos were shot, a huge costume shop in Burbank went out of business, so we were all in there with shopping carts, grabbing shit as fast as we could.
JH: I see you have your own costume shop right there. (Dagger has a loom and a sewing machine behind them).
DP: You don’t even wanna know what’s behind that curtain, it’s hoarder level, but I end up using them.
JH: So the here made me think of your name, “Polyster”, “Don’t you see what they’re doing to us, breeding the perfect consumers”.. What was polyester man? It was a plastic, petroleum-based cloth for the ultimate consumer. I thought that was funny if that was you trying to Easter egg in there.
DP: It’s something I focus on a lot; we are all subjected to it.
JH:
“Don’t you see what they’re doing to us?
breeding the perfect consumers
spinning on their wheel
powering their attention economy
It’s the dream of the 1950s
total standardization”
Polyester is the byproduct of all of that, and then
“We stand on the shoulders of giants
But have we learned nothing?
no apologies, no assimilation
No nation under god
putting the blinders on, feeding us fear
we stare, starе at the wall
All we can see is what to buy next
thе perfect life, the perfect breeding ground”
DP: Yeah, nothing subtle there (Laughing).
JH: No not at all, you laid right into that, I thought ok so, yes we are the consumers, but they are also selling us all this political bullshit, lies about how it needs to be, by this, do this, trade that, just to be part of what society expects us all to be. I mean, there are so many ways this one could go.
DP: I think a lot about how we actually stand on the shoulders of giants. I was watching a lecture by Chris Corda, who is a musician and professor whom I admire, who founded “The Church of Euthanasia,” which was an art project in the 90s. But she talked about “Surveillance State,” which is something I think about a lot, distraction culture, and short-form media being the culture of distraction, and our attention feeding and powering this thing that we get nothing out of, really. And she mentioned how incredible the human race is and how far we’ve come and that evolution, and de-evolution are in line with each other, and its frustrating, I am frustrated with myself when I give into these things, it’s frustrating in the microcosm of the music industry, and having to focus on all of this shit not about art making, not about the practice of creativity, but selling what kind of person you are, 10-30 second versions of yourself someone has to buy on a certain level of yourself, and the socio-political level, it’s a frustrating time.
JH: How many times have people said to the musician, “You’ve got to polish your brand”, and the artist is just saying, “Look, man, I just want to sing.” They don’t care about how they look; it’s just to get on stage and give people their art. Good commentary on that, I mean Carl Marsh formed a band called “Happy Head” that was poking fun at the “Fabulous” culture of buying everything and credit.
So, let’s get heavy, I don’t know if you are a Lou Reed fan, but Lou Reed is the God of Rock & Roll….
DP: AMEN!!!!
JH: Oh, right then… So, he wrote a song called “Kill Your Sons.” Do you know that one?
DP: Yes.
JH: That was about his parents putting him through electroshock therapy because he was bisexual; it was how it destroyed him and stripped his personality from him. I live here in Utah, and the current religious paradigm, I was raised Mormon, but in the 60s-70s, and 80s, they pushed conversion therapy, they had their own system for it. They thought that if they could “Cure” homosexuality or “same-sex Sex Attraction”, then people would see them as the true church, and it would get them more members.
Dagger Polyester – Conversion Therapy
DP: Yeah, that makes sense.
JH: And I knew one guy who had been through it, in the early 80s, he said it was terrible, but the church leaders said, “Maybe God gave you this affliction, so that you could go through this therapy, and prove that it works, and then God would be glorified for it”. That was how they convinced him to agree to do it. He said it screwed him up in so many ways; the electroshock and the guilt therapy just destroyed him. He said they paid him a HUGE settlement outside of court, and he won’t need to work again for his entire life, but it still wasn’t enough. Strangely enough, not a single person who went through it was ever cured.
DP: Oddly enough, right?
JH: Yeah, it didn’t work, and the church finally shut down its conversation therapy program just a few years ago. And the state of Utah made it illegal, not soon enough, but I saw a startling headline today, on CNN this morning, “Conversion Therapy is quietly spreading across America again, and these survivors say it nearly cost them their lives”.
DP: I saw that today also, and this is why I wrote the song 4 years ago (the song is called “Conversion Therapy”). 4 years ago, I saw this rise in the way I was being treated as a trans person. I saw a shift as there is more trans visibility, and there was a pendulum swing. As soon as we see progress, we have a backlash. People didn’t know how to identify me and my strange queer friends walking down the street; they said, “They are some kind of gay, just leave ’em alone”. Then, suddenly, when they could identify us, I started getting thrown out of bathrooms, getting strange treatment, and I noticed in the rhetoric I paid too much attention to transition on the right, 2020-2021, people were online expressing themselves. I got the feeling that conversion therapy would rise again and the way that people were always trying to save me all of a sudden, talking to fundamentalist christian member of the family, it started becoming obvious to me that I had to write a song about conversion therapy as a parody of someone trying to put a person through conversion therapy.
JH: Thus, the line “My agenda, NOT YOURS”
DP: Yeah, it’s turning it on its head, not to say it’s reverse conversion therapy, just calling it for what it is, that’s why the video is actually a mix of bringing up the crusades, just the absolute imagery.
JH: Well, there was the one clip there that was sort of the crucifixion scene, where you were lying on the ground, and the 3 Roman soldiers standing over you, it was a “Hi, look at the crucifixion, FUCK YOU” that I got from that part of the video.
DP: It’s not like I’m rallying against a religion on the whole. I talked to the person in the video being crucified; their uncle runs a church in the Midwest and loves the song. We talked about it in detail, and when I was recording it, he said that the song was so funny and so sad. We talked about how he struggles to keep a queer friendly church in the town that he lives in, and I think that a lot of Christians would agree with me on these points. That the extremism has always been out of hand, but it’s getting personal for me and affecting the people that I love.
JH: I appreciate you doing that, first of all I don’t have the musical talent to write a song that cool, so when I hear someone doing that I really my hopes up, I think “Yeah this is one we could play to the world”, I hope that it makes people uncomfortable, I hope it makes people think. Your ideas are hurting people. When you enforce these ideas, you are going to hurt them. I can’t do that musically, man, so I have people like you doing it, so I wanna give you as much voice as I can.
DP: Thank you, I appreciate that.
JH: Final question, what would your message be to that young, vulnerable trans kid who is hurting, vulnerable, and afraid?
DP: I would say you are perfect. You should be scared; it makes sense that you are scared, and that means you are a reasonably smart young person. It can only get better if you have the right resources. I wish I had something more uplifting to say, but you have to find your community, and our community is in a state of emergency. But my life gets better every year, you gotta get out there, to a bigger city, find your chosen family, and they will accept them, and love them.
JH: I hope that helps some kid. Thank you so much for your time, Dagger.
gender affirming therapy is the new conversion therapy.