Sugar, Disco, and Marc Almond's Crotch:
A Conversation between Jake Shears and Martin Pousson

Scissor Sisters frontman Jake Shears and writer Martin Pousson's friendship goes back a number of years, and one of the strongest bonds between them is their mutual love for New Orleans. Jake conducted this interview with Martin—who was living in New Orleans and promoting his new book of poetry, Sugar—mere days before Hurricane Katrina forever altered the landscape, as well as the nation's perception, of that great city.

Jake Shears: Hey, Martin.

Martin Pousson: Hey, sugar.

Shears: How are you liking New Orleans?

Pousson: It's filthy. It's gorgeous. I love it.

Shears: You're not in a gay ghetto in New Orleans, are you?

Pousson: No. I don't know if there is a gay ghetto here.

Shears: There's that little part at the end of Bourbon Street.

Pousson: There's that little streak, but it's part of the larger streak of Bourbon Street. It's not like there's this whole separate district where you're gay when you're gay here. There are separate gay bars, but they're half a block from the straight bars. They're transparent in this way that gay bars elsewhere aren't, because straight people are actually passing by them. I love it because when you're heading down Bourbon Street, the whole top half of it—which is straight—is so brightly lit. It's like Vegas at midnight. Then when you get to Bourbon and St. Anne where the gay bars start, the lights drop and it's pitch black. [Laughs]

Shears: I love it when the frat boys wander too far down the road.

Pousson: Exactly. But then some of those frat boys end up having a better time than they expect.

Shears: It's really one of my favorite places in the world.

Pousson: You know, I was thinking about you when I was walking around earlier, and about the fact that you like it. I think that has a lot to do with who you are on the stage. You're this mass of contradictions, this girly boy. There's something very virile about Jake Shears and there's something very flamboyant about him at the same time. That's part of what's so fantastic. And New Orleans is like that. It's this mass of contradictions—rich/poor, black/white, man/woman, straight/gay, land/water. I think it's these tensions that hold the city together. There are oppositions everywhere and duality everywhere, but here in New Orleans the opposition is always flipped and inverted. It's all about being the opposite of what you are.

Shears: The city was kind of built on a big lie. From what I've read about it, when it was being built it was populated with nothing but unsavory ladies and bad men.

Pousson: And, honey, they're still runnin' around.

Shears: I think your book of poetry, Sugar, set me free of my intense poetry phobia, and I'm starting to like poetry a lot more.

Pousson: Why were you afraid of poetry, honey?

Shears: I could never really get my head around it and I could never bother with it. Poetry takes a bit of time, even though there are less words on the page. There's a lot more to think about. I was always a bit scared of it.

Pousson: It's sad that we've come to that place, especially as gay men. We are poetry. Poetry is now spelled with a big capital "P," and it's supposed to be intimidating and intense and academic. And it doesn't have to be! It wasn't like that originally. Poetry was music. It's what you do, baby.

Shears: I know. That's why I've been reading it more. I've come to the realization that I'm doing the same thing in my own little way.

Pousson: Well, then I've only returned the favor, because you made me stop fearing disco. [Both laugh] You put the IQ back in disco, sugar, and in a way that's smart, yeah, but playful. It makes me think a lot about the time Mistress Formika was kicked off the Wigstock stage for singing "You've Gotta Fight For Your Right To Party." It's not like she was dipped in patchouli and flying the peace sign all over the place. She wasn't political in that way. She was just strutting her sexuality on stage and saying, when you're queer, just being sexual in a public way is political, in the little "p" sense. And that's what you're doing with your disco, you know? You're reminding us that to flaunt ourselves is part of the point and it's also a hell of a lot of fun.

Shears: Well, in a lot of ways I think you're discussing things and dealing with things in your own poetry and your novel that don't get talked about a lot. I know that your first novel, No Place, Louisiana, was a page-turner, but at the same time it's tough to read because of the subject matter. Sugar almost seems like the poetry sequel of No Place, Louisiana.

Pousson: I think it is, but in the same way Mardi Gras functions are Carnivale. Because, if it is a sequel to the novel, it's the novel flipped on it's head. Everything that was suppressed in the book is now expressed outwardly. It's so much more queer and it's so much louder, and I hope more raucous and rock and roll and playful than the book was. The book was like a sad Cajun song or a country western ballad. I wanted this one to be more punk, more disco, more musical.

Shears: It's definitely funnier, but there are also moments in it that are pretty painful. There's a poem about sleeping with a black man for the first time.

Pousson: That old taboo, I wanted to touch it in the book. It's the old Huck Finn/Tom Finn story, but done over down here. It's the greatest taboo and the greatest desire all at once in a city that's split along black and white color lines. It's what we were talking about earlier, the whole duality. This city is segregated like so many other cities, but with a difference. Here, black and white are forced to live together, ride the same street cars, buses, to do business with each other, and there's this incredible tension between the races that I wanted to get at in the book. And it's painful in places, but I wanted the pain and the horror to always be followed with some sort of giddy laughter, because that's part of New Orleans, too. It's the happy, sad, tragic comedy face of Mardi Gras.

Shears: Being in the South and being in Louisiana there's also this kind of give and take. People kind of have to tolerate one another and you can get away with a lot. I think you can get away with a lot more in New Orleans than you can in New York at this point. But there does seem to be that sense of people having to put up with each other's craziness. It is a real clash of cultures, especially being gay down there.

Pousson: Yeah, I had a friend visiting last week, and he was walking down the French Quarter. It was hot as a witch's tit. He rips off his shirt around midnight, walking down Bolton Street, and he was thrown up against a building by a bunch of cops.

Shears: He was thrown up against a building?

Pousson: Yeah, because he took his shirt off! Now, if he was parading around in his Abercrombie & Fitch shirt, which he was wearing, and he had just functioned like a good, consumerist queer, keeping his sexuality hidden, then there would be no problem. But the minute he stripped his shirt off, that was the exact moment the cops pounced on him. There is a lot of tension here. Straight sexuality is paraded around in such a public way as a lure to getting people down here. But the minute a queer strips his shirt off, it's a problem. The reality is there's racism everywhere. The difference here, I think, is that it's so overt that you have to deal with it in a really direct way.

Let me tell you something. My teeth are starting to hurt, so we'd better stop talking about Sugar for a moment. I wanna hear about your next album.

Shears: I'm not gonna talk about my next album. [Laughs] You'll hear it soon. You've heard a couple of [the songs].

Pousson: I have, because I did some sneaky research online! I caught a clip of "Everybody Just Wants the Same Thing," which I love as a title, by the way.

Shears: Thanks. You know, after we wrote that song I did a search and I don't think there's a song with the same title—which is strange. Because there are a lot of songs in the world that have the same title. I haven't found one. Actually, it's the best feeling in the world when you write a song and it's almost so familiar to you that you can't possibly believe it hasn't been written already. Those turn out to be the best songs.

Pousson: That's what I love about what you're doing. It seems simple and self-evident, but it's actually really complicated. You know, Shakespeare's As You Like It. It's that play done over in a pop song—"Everybody Wants The Same Thing." It's really smart and playful. But, I wanna hear about "Cher Baby," because I saw your lineup at the Mercury Lounge, and I see this title "Cher Baby." Where did this come from?

Shears: It's a misinterpreted title, actually.

Pousson: Oh, I'm misinterpreting it?

Shears: It was written down wrong. That's actually not the name of the song. It's actually called "Hair Baby."

Pousson: Oh, baby, there's a lot of difference between "Cher Baby" and "Hair Baby." [Both laugh]

Shears: Although, Cher does come up in the song! To answer your question, the album is going very well. I'm so obsessed with it. We've been working so hard. Take the song you were just talking about, "Everybody Wants the Same Thing." We wrote that and I was kind of excited about it. But then I thought it was a really crappy song for a while. So we started playing it, and the demo of that song right now sounds terrible. [Laughs] It's really the worst thing you'll ever hear. Live, I think it's sounding wonderful. It's really the band that has made that song come alive more than anything.

We met when you were just finishing up No Place, Louisiana. How has writing these two books changed you or has it changed you at all?

Pousson: It has changed me, because I felt the novel was so damn serious I wanted to loosen up a little bit. The novel literally drove me nutty. I really lost it for a while trying to get into that mindset. I thought, I wanna turn this around and really have some fun. And that's what I did with Sugar. But Sugar's a lot older. The first half of Sugar is much older than the novel is. I was writing those poems ten years ago. But the other half of the book was written within the last year when I had a contract. It was gonna be a hybrid collection of poems and short stories but we ditched that. Suddenly I was told I had to double the book in just a few months. [Laughs] I feverishly worked at 40 other poems in just over a years' time. They are a reaction to the novel and they have changed me. The poems remind me to loosen up. They remind me you have got to have a good time. You have got to laugh. You've gotta shake it out of your system.

Shears: We met at one of my favorite New York nights ever. I was with one of my dear friends, playwright Tom Donaghy. We went to an opening at the MOMA. Then we went to see Rocky Horror on Broadway. Then we went to Barracuda, where I ended up meeting Martin Pousson.

Pousson: I was bartending. That night Marc Almond was performing. We were in the front row and Marc Almond was bumping his crotch right in front of our faces! I saw this 21-year-old kid with a bedazzled jacket on.

Shears: I missed the Marc Almond performance. I was there right after he got off stage.

Pousson: Oh, you showed up afterwards? So, it wasn't Marc Almond that brought us together, but it was your bedazzled jacket. And I have to say, I was there for your very first performance on a fucking milk crate at The Bowery Bar. [Both laugh]. You were wearing—let the world know—overalls with a drop panel. And you proceeded to shimmy and strip for the talent show that night.

Shears: Yeah, I was up there with Ana [Matronic] and B.D. And I did get down to a pink, bedazzled G-string.

Pousson: And I think when they asked you why you liked performing, you said something like you were born a stripper. So it all comes back to New Orleans.

Shears: I think after that performance you pulled me aside, put your arm around me, and told me to never to that again!

Pousson: Yeah, and see how well you listen?

 

Read an excerpt from Sugar
For more information on Sugar or Martin Pousson, visit: suspectthoughtspress.com

Jake Shears is the frontman for Scissor Sisters.