Diane Torr
Performance artist who challenged perceptions of masculinity with her ‘Man for a Day’ workshops
DIANE TORR, who has died aged 68, was a performance artist who moved from a Scottish housing estate to New York’s “drag” scene, where she ran workshops which encouraged women to step – both figuratively and literally – into a man’s shoes.
Although, as a trained dancer, Diane Torr had long been interested in the differing physicalities of men and women, her introduction to drag came about by accident. In the late 1980s she was approached by fellow performer Annie Sprinkle, who was writing an article about transgender men and wanted her to pose for the accompanying “before and after” photographs.
Diane Torr wore her male ensemble to an event that evening, and was struck by the way in which strangers approached her. “It wasn’t long before a woman came up and started flirting,” she recalled. At 5ft 3in tall, she was hardly the most imposing individual; yet Diane-as-a-man was treated with a respect that Diane-as-a-woman would have not have received automatically.
Determined to explore the idea further, Diane Torr began running Drag King workshops – she claimed to have coined the term “drag king” as a counterpoint to the existing drag queen culture, though she later rebranded her sessions under the title “Man for a Day”. Attendees were asked to bring their own outfit, as well as material to bind their breasts and a fake penis (“Don’t make it too large!!”, warned a poster for one event).
In addition to providing wardrobe advice, she gave lessons on how to adopt a man’s intonation, body language – forceful hand gestures, legs wide apart – and facial expressions. To smile a lot, she advised, was unmasculine, since it betrayed an overanxious desire to be liked.
The workshops took her across America and Britain, as well as to more far-flung destinations such as New Delhi’s National School of Drama. Gay men started attending her sessions, looking for tips on how to project a more macho image in public.
At the same time she carried on performing at festivals and clubs as a variety of different characters, some female and some male. One such alter ego was “Danny King”, a middle-aged businessman and member of the National Rifle Association through whom Diane Torr explored the “sense of privilege” she saw as inherent in the white American male. In later years she also performed as her own brother, Donald, as a way of keeping his memory alive: he had died of Aids in 1992.
She was born in Ontario, Canada, on November 10 1948, and moved with her family to Aberdeen when she was four. Her father, a former petty officer in the Royal Navy, was a strict disciplinarian who would beat his children with a belt for misbehaviour. She and her two brothers sought respite through cycling trips in the woods. Donald, a year older than his sister, would also dress up in women’s clothes. In later years they discussed staging a drag act dressed as each other, but he died before the plan could come to anything.
The family moved to Kent when Diane was 15, and after her mother became ill Diane was taken into foster care. She graduated from Dartington College of Arts in Devon in 1976 and saved up her air fare for New York by working as a gardener in a stately home.
Settling in New Jersey, she found employment as a go-go dancer in working men’s clubs and enlisted two of her fellow dancers to take part in New York’s Women of the World Theatre Festival. The performance, in which the trio stripped before an all-female audience as they described the indignities of sex work, did not go down well with the festival’s attendees, and Diane Torr had to make her escape via a back alley.
She fared better with Arousing Reconstructions (1982), a crossdressing performance piece with fellow artist Bradley Wester, and with her all-female punk group DISBAND, founded in 1978. DISBAND was still active as recently as 2014, employing a variety of different “instruments” (hammers, bedsheets, fast-food buckets) in each performance. Towards the end of her life Diane Torr lived in Glasgow, where she was a visiting lecturer at the Glasgow School of Art.
When not in character, Diane Torr was a comforting and somewhat maternal figure – though, with a black belt in the martial art aikido, she was more than prepared to defend herself if challenged.
Diane Torr, born November 10 1948, died May 31 2017