Veteran performer Paul Capsis has spoken about his strict upbringing, strong female role models and finding his place in the world. The cabaret legend, best known for his role in the 1998 film Head On, said he was raised in a patriarchal and socially conservative Greek-Maltese household where the women were his inspiration.
'It was always the women I looked up to in my family. The men were miserable,' Capsis said. After his parents split, he moved to Surry Hills in inner Sydney, where he was raised largely by his maternal grandmother, Angela. He recalled being adamant as a child that he was a girl, and that his grandmother would protect him from punishment by the men in the house.
Capsis said he was 'so naive as a child' about sex, but that changed when he began performing on the Sydney drag circuit in the late 1980s. He found the bitchiness and misogyny among gay men at the time shocking. 'I'd entered a world that was so bizarre to me. The drinks and the drugs. I thought I'd found my people, but I was a minority among my people. I wasn't fully embraced,' he said.
Discussing his gender identity, Capsis said puberty was 'monstrous' but led to self-awareness. He does not identify as trans, describing himself as 'a feminine gay man'. He acknowledged that contemporary understanding of gender 'would have given me words around my experience', but he is unconcerned about labels.
