Photo: Rolando Rodrigues
Jibz Cameron Brings Dynasty Handbag to Provincetown
by Steve Desroches
Jibz Cameron has always found gender to be funny, even absurd. It can come with a lot of baggage. It can come with expectations. The multi-media artist, perhaps best-known for her performance work as the character Dynasty Handbag, has spent her career exploring that which is rewarded versus shunned while snapping off the braces that can stunt one’s own self-expression. With self-liberation anyone can be queer regardless of gender or sexuality. It’s more of a mindset than any one particular identifying characteristic.
“I’m definitely queer and I’m definitely a lesbian,” says Cameron. “Though I think queerness is about challenging the status quo. Gay. Lesbian. Queer. Those words have definitions for sure. But being queer is about challenging a system. It’s not just believing what your told, but asking questions. Queer can definitely be overused academically. But it’s like that bumper sticker from the eighties: Question Authority. I’m always questioning. Maybe it makes me a little tinfoil-hat brigade, but I just think there’s some motive or control behind things. I’m always, ‘what do they want and why do they want to give it to you?’ My friends laugh at me because I won’t even get an AMC Stubs card. They just want me to use it so I’ll end up buying stuff I never wanted to in the first place.”
Cameron laughs at her own strident position. In fact, she laughs easily, even though she is deeply thoughtful whether the subject be important current affairs or a silly joke. It makes sense, as she was born into a comedic political and social revolution. Born in Annapolis, California, in 1975, Cameron’s parents were part of the Hog Farm, the famed hippie commune founded by Hugh and Bonnie Romney, better known as Wavy Gravy and Jahanara. The Hog Farm entered international consciousness when they were featured in the 1970 Academy-Award-winning documentary Woodstock, which captured the iconic 1969 music festival of the same name, as they had been hired to do security as the “Please Force,” using positive reinforcement to keep the peace with only cream pies and seltzer bottles instead of guns. In particular, the scene in which Wavy Gravy takes to the stage and addresses the crowd by saying, “What we have in mind is breakfast in bed for 400,000,” made him a counter-cultural icon.
Wavy Gravy became a type of hippie clown and he and Jahanara opened Camp Winnarainbow in Laytonville, California, in 1975, a summer camp for children that focused on circus and performing arts with a touch of activism. Cameron attended the camp throughout her childhood with the children of the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia as fellow campers. Every summer Cameron would study improv with Wavy Gravy, an experience that informed the rest of her life and her life’s work. “His whole philosophy is that kids should have fun,” says Cameron. “And it was really, really fun.”
Her counterculture youth wasn’t all tie-dye good times, though, as she describes her parents as “wildly irresponsible hippies” even though her mom was often a babysitter at Grateful Dead shows. Cameron was on her own by age 15, creating a structure to life that she craved. And while she didn’t graduate from high school, she was accepted to the San Francisco Art Institute, which propelled her to life as an artist, and an exploration of performance art. But a move to the East Coast proved a more informative if not informal education.
“It always elicits eye rolls,” says Cameron of performance art. “That it’s pretentious. Or that it’s weird. That it’s just people in black leotards running around…though I do wear leotards. But I’ve never really tried to define myself as an artist. I’m either a funny performance artist or a weird comedian. I’ve never really found the right fit. Maybe alternative comedy? I was aware of people like Laurie Anderson and Yoko Ono, talented musicians, but they were different. They were performers. It wasn’t until I got to New York that things started to make sense. I didn’t have to name it; I could just do it.”
At this point in her life Cameron is particularly reflective as her memoir, Hell in a Handbag has just been released, bringing her to Provincetown as part of a book and performance tour with an event at the Provincetown Bookshop and a show at the Gifford House. Cameron sighs as she expresses a deep affection for Provincetown. She’s performed here before as part of the Afterglow Festival, which used to take place in mid-September. But in all the years she lived in New York she never visited as she felt the town might just be a vapid, never-ending circuit party and that it was too expensive. But a friend told her that Provincetown was extraordinary and requires a deeper dive. And now she’s fallen in love as she visits every summer and has found encouragement to come back and perform from friends, rock star Roddy Bottum and Paul Soileau, also known as drag terrorist Christeene and a cast member in the experimental theater troupe Shaboom!
Here she’ll be performing as Dynasty Handbag, an alter ego she created in 2001. The character is a “failure at womanhood” as an exploration of unrealistic standards placed on women and femininity as well as the pressures on queer people. Dynasty Handbag overshares her dark inner emotions to great comedic effect. And her queer representation is counter to the socially acceptable image of gay men and lesbians as good consumers, benevolent gentrifiers, and “mortgage-ready,” as recently coined by author and historian Jim Downs to describe a blanching of a gay identity. Cameron talks in particular about the recent “wellness movement” as another example of telling women, in particular, they aren’t good enough and how these products marketed under what sounds like health care are the trick. That pisses her off…and makes her laugh. With Dynasty Handbag born the same year that the world flipped on its head making the 21st century confusing and disorientating was a coincidence, but apt as Dynasty is one of those people the system sets up for failure.
“Upon reflection it was a cynical time,” says Cameron. “I don’t think the US had taken stock of herself, so to speak. After 9/11 anything seemed possible. We realized how fragile we were and that we had done so much damage to the planet and that people are pissed. There was built-up rage.”
Jibz Cameron will be in conversation with Svetlana Kitto at the Provincetown Bookshop, 229 Commercial St. in celebration of her new memoir Hell in a Handbag on Sunday, June 21 at 4 p.m. The event is free, though RSVPs are appreciated. To do so visit provincetownbookshop.com. For more information call 508.487.0964. Cameron performs her show Hell in a Handbag at the Gifford House, 9 Carver St., on Friday, June 26 at 7:15 p.m. Tickets ($30/$40) are available at the box office and online at giffordsprovincetown.com. For more information call 508.487.0688.
