LADYBEARD: WORLD DOMINATION!
Ladybeard Domination Is Coming
He’s the Adelaide death metal singer / pro-wrestler in pigtails and a babydoll dress who’s taking Asia by storm. What’s not to love, asks Andrew Creagh.
Ladybeard is the creation of Australian actor, musician and stunt man, Richard Magarey. He dresses like a doll and sings like a demon. With his hardcore band Deadlift Lolita, pro-wrestling stage show and cross-dressing, he’s finding fame in confusion, contradiction and artistic freedom!
During a recent live performance in Spain, Ladybeard back-flipped from the stage, taking a nasty crack to the back of the head on the way down. There was blood, the show was stopped, stage managers scrambled, but, of course, the cameras kept rolling and the emergency was well documented and posted to social media. There’s a video on YouTube.
But such is the extraordinary and extreme world of Ladybeard, it was difficult to tell if the accident was real or, in the tradition of prowrestling, all just showbiz.
“Oh, it was real,” assures Richard Magarey, aka Ladybeard. “That was unfortunate – but it was funny! I was in a wheelchair, strapped into the ambulance and then wheeled into the emergency room – and I’m still in my dress with my pigtails pinned behind my head, make-up smeared everywhere and blood all over the place, blood in my hair. I looked like the girl from the Exorcist… and there’s 50 Spanish grandmothers looking at me in terror.”
The accident came at the end of two exhausting weeks in which Ladybeard and Reika Saiki, his bandmate in Deadlift Lolita, had learned two difficult new songs in Japanese, rehearsed demanding new choreography (“lots of jumping”), and were performing the world-premiere of a song, live, all of which was being filmed.
The pressure was on. The pair are extremely famous in Japan and China, where Richard was recently mobbed after being recognised on the street. He needs a disguise to appear in public in Japan. Deadlift Lolita are constantly touring and performing their unique blend of wrestling, hardcore metal and… cross-dressing.
It’s all a long way from Richard’s posh Adelaide up-bringing.
“I went to St Peter’s College, a private allboys school, and the best school in South Australia. I’m the son of a lawyer from a very academic family. So I’ve definitely made an unconventional career choice,” he laughs.
“School was really horrible, to be honest. An extremely stressful experience. I didn’t fit in at all. I had my group of mates – but we were all the kids who didn’t fit in. The kids who did drama. Plus, I was obese. Being a fat kid in Australia in the ’90s meant I was tortured.”
But at age 14, something funny happened – and it wasn’t just the hormonal growth spurt that started transforming him into a tall, skinny kid. A friend threw a party with a school uniform dressup theme. Instead of wearing the same trousers and blazer he wore to school every day, Richard decided to wear his sister Lucy’s school dress.
“It was absolutely hilarious for a bunch of 14-year-old boys,” he says. “I did it the first time and it was hilarious, didn’t do it for a while, then did it again and it was hilarious again. And I’ve found that I’m more successful in life when I’m wearing a dress compared to when I’m wearing pants. Fast forward 20 years and it’s my fulltime occupation.
“It probably would’ve been funnier if I’d started cross-dressing two years earlier because then I would’ve been this butterball wearing a dress.
“At 14 I was very aware of the hormones kicking in, but I was also making more mature decisions. Mum used to buy the big family bag of potato chips with the 12 smaller snack packs inside – and I remember the day I got home from school and decided not to eat that. I started taking responsibility for my food. I found exercise that I liked. Sport had always been about the fit kids bullying me for being crap. I started training in taekwondo and rowing and I really enjoyed those. My underactive thyroid sorted itself out and I started building muscle,” he says.
Those formative years, however, made a deep emotional impact. “I was told every day I was a fat piece of crap. It haunts me. All my issues are associated with being fat.”
After school, Richard studied theatre at Flinders University, continued practicing martial arts, and trained as a stunt man, all of which lead to work in the busy Asian film industry. He has featured in action movies as both a stunt performer and an actor, often as the Western bad guy (see The Fortune Buddies).
When the opportunity to get into pro-wrestling in Hong Kong came up, he realised he would need a strong stage persona. From past >>
I’ve found that I’m more successful in life when I’m wearing a dress compared to when I’m wearing pants.
>> experience, he knew that a man in a schoolgirl’s uniform would do the trick.
“In interviews I always get asked, ‘Why do you dress like this?’ and I have to sum up the 10 to 15-year evolution of how it happened in a matter of seconds.
“If a man cross-dressed in Australia in the ’90s or Noughties, maybe it’s funny, but it’s not really a huge deal. The homophobia in Australian culture has been watered down to a certain extent. Maybe I’m wrong – I don’t live there any more – but that’s how it feels to me. But in Hong Kong, still a very conservative society, they were like, ‘You’re the craziest, funniest person I’ve ever seen!’ So, again, I found that I was being much more accepted by the people around me when I was wearing a dress. I thought, ‘All right, if this is what’s working for me, let’s see what I can make of it’.”
The Ladybeard character was born and was an instant hit on the pro-wrestling circuit.
“The difference between me and a lot of other cross-dressers is that many felt the urge to cross-dress, but society wouldn’t let them,” says Richard. “For me it was the other way around. It happened as a joke, by accident, and then everyone embraced it. I was treated well when I was in a dress and not so well when I wasn’t. I was forced into it,” he laughs.
His band with Reika Saiki, Deadlift Lolita, perform a kind of music that’s been branded “kawaii-core” combining the Japanese word “kawaii” (cute, loveable, adorable) and the abbreviation “core” from hardcore metal. Sometimes it’s also called “baby metal”, a reference to Richard’s earlier band, Ladybaby.
As a vocalist, Ladybeard growls and bellows, jumps and thrashes around on stage in the style of most death metal frontmen – but is dressed as a little girl. In the band’s video for Muscle Cocktail Ladybeard and Reika (also a pro-wrestler) enter the ring dressed in satin and lace, slam wrestle, pull each other’s pigtails and pillow fight, then hit the gym to pump iron.
“What we do on stage now is classified as a musical performance but I still consider the whole thing to be theatre,” says Richard. “We do wrestling inside the music show. The music is just one element of it. I don’t think people are coming to the shows to hear my beautiful voice. I think it’s the spectacle, and the message and the meaning that the work gives people.”
What is the Ladybeard message?
“It’s one of possibility. It doesn’t matter how ridiculous your dreams and aspirations are, you can do them if you go and do them. I wanted Ladybeard to be the evidence of that.”
Australia has a grand tradition of exporting drag and cross-dressing characters to the world: Dame Edna Everage, Priscilla, Courtney Act. There are also the local alt-drag heroes who pop up from time to time like Aunty Jack (also bearded) and Vanessa Wagner (also hirsute). Now we can add Ladybeard to that proud alumni. Richard has a theory about where our love of a cock in a frock comes from.
“I’ve heard from actor friends, that one of the reasons Hollywood likes casting Australians in leading-man roles is because we have a quality of manliness,” he says. “Potentially, we are soooooo manly we’re comfortable enough to have a good time putting on a dress. I don’t feel threatened in a dress. We should make more of it as a national characteristic. We should change Australia Day to Blokes In Frocks Day!”
In fact, manliness is essential to Ladybeard’s success.
With the guidance of photographer Naoko Tachibana, Ladybeard has perfected many of the iconic pin-up poses of the Varga calendar girls of the 1950s – the up-skirt, the coy schoolgirl, the exposed thigh; all poses that male photographers have traditionally used to objectify women. But Ladybeard is a muscular, hairy and obviously male model – it’s fun and deliberately subversive.
“Yes, it was conscious,” says Richard, “but it took a lot of trial and error to get to that point. I try to make my body as masculine as I can and then juxtapose that with the fashion, and make the performance as feminine as I can – that gap is what creates the impact and the effect of the character.”
A flirty, feminine, sexually available Ladybeard in a peek-a-boo sweater exposing big hair pecs is an image many straight men would find both confusing and arousing.
“Good!” chortles Richard.
The character seems to offer the sexiness of both male and female stereotypes wrapped up in one package. Are fans getting a sexual thrill out of Ladybeard?
“I think there probably are fans who do, which is lovely,” says Richard. “When I first got to Japan I was sexualised very much by women. Promoters would say, ‘The fans want to see you be sexy,’ and I’d say, ‘Well, okay, to be sexy for a group of heterosexual women I would put on a suit and cut my hair and shave my beard…”
But that wasn’t what they wanted.
“They wanted me to show more skin. We used to do sketch events where I would do life modelling and the fans would sketch me. They would say things like, ‘the line of your calf is really sexy’. Or the ‘line of your shin running into your in-step is really sexy’.”
How people interpret Ladybeard varies depending on their cultural background, gender and sexual orientation. In China, he’s regarded as something of a Japanese anime cosplay character. In Japan, he’s the “funny foreigner”. Photographer Naoko says Japanese culture requires conformity so standing out is appealing. She also says that the Japanese are proud when a foreigner comes to their country and embraces the culture and that’s a huge part of Ladybeard’s appeal there.
The term “gender fuck” has been used in relation to Ladybeard, and Richard’s also familiar with the French concept of “creat-ture” (drag with animal characteristics), but he believes cross-dressing best describes what he does, not drag.
“I think drag is something completely different. There’s so much more to drag than just putting on a dress. Drag is glam. They wear heels and make >> Street Fighter 2.
>> themselves seven feet tall and have the massive eye-lashes and the wigs… with Ladybeard I specifically made sure that didn’t happen. I wanted to make sure I wasn’t doing drag. Back in Hong Kong, pre-Ladybeard, I did a drag show and I was the worst drag queen ever! Terrible. But it was very important in the Ladybeard process because it taught me that I could produce my own show.”
Like it or not, gender politics is now a major component of a celebrity’s public persona, particularly those challenging sexual and cultural norms. It applies as much to the queens of RuPaul’s Drag Race as to Beyonce. Although Richard says he believes in equality for all, he’s not entirely sure whether Ladybeard is a feminist, or even a counter-balance to the toxic masculinity of the #metoo era.
And what about Ladybeard’s sexuality? Well, she’s a 5-year-old Japanese girl so her sexuality is still a mystery. What about Richard’s sexuality? He’d rather not say because it would influence the way audiences perceive Ladybeard, which is a fair call.
“The fact that I’m having this conversation with a gay magazine, I find very humbling and satisfying,” says Richard. “When I first got to Japan I was embraced as a hero for the LGBT community, which made me really happy because I was scared that the community would interpret what I was doing as a piss-take. That’s not what it ever was.”
The Japanese are famously squeamish when it comes to images of pubic hair and manly bulges. DNA is not sold in Japan for this reason. Ladybeard’s manly bulges are well concealed, usually covered by a little skirt (she’s a 5-yearold girl, remember). Richard laughs at the observation.
“That alarms me! I don’t wanna look like I don’t have any junk. I wanna fly the flag proudly,” he says, before admitting he did get into trouble in Japan for not tucking.
From a stuffy private school in Adelaide to a genre- and gender-bending career across Asia, this story proves how far a dress, a beard and some hairy pecs can take a boy. And Richard has still grander ambitions yet to be realised.
“I have a bunch of Ladybeard action movies I wanna make, and I want Ladybeard to be an all-media brand. Movies, anime, comics, TV shows, the whole media gamut, and operate globally across multiple platforms. World domination, baby!”
And those school bullies? Where are they now? “Occasionally I come across someone on social media,” says Richard. “Which is a great experience because now we can all communicate like grown-ups, like real humans. It’s fascinating for me to see them not being douche bags… and I imagine it’s incredible fascinating for them to see what I’ve become!”
As Ladybeard says, it doesn’t matter how ridiculous your dreams and aspirations are – go and do them.