Being Conchita Read online

  I can’t remember exactly when it was that I started slipping into women’s clothes. I was able to do so only because my parents accepted it completely, showing me an unconditional love that I try to take with me into the world today. It also helped that I had a fresh opportunity for my fantasies to take shape: once again there was a Green Cave and once again it was a space where I could let my creativity run free. This time, the cave was up in the loft, and with the help of some old mattresses, unwanted carpets and discarded pieces of furniture (including one ancient mirror I still remember), Andi and I slowly converted it into a child’s paradise. Whenever our cousins came to visit, the adults always knew where we’d be hiding out. ‘The kids are upstairs,’ became a standard phrase in our household. We would spend hours on end flying from one fantasy world into the next. Later on, when Andi went away to boarding school in Bad Ischl, the cave underwent a transformation. It now became my creative studio, where I could indulge my passion for singing to my heart’s content, while coming up with designs for wonderful dresses. Theory has always been less important to me than practice, and I soon began creating clothes from my designs. I remember Andi coming home one day with the news that Bad Ischl was where the Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph had become engaged to the Bavarian Duchess Elisabeth Amalie Eugenie, better known as ‘Sisi’. On hearing this, I immediately threw on a dress that would have been suitable for the occasion.

  I had some wonderful times up in my cave, but I wasn’t blind to the fact that it was really my hiding place: I was keeping myself hidden from the eyes of Bad Mitterndorf. Even back then, I knew this was no way to live my life. That’s why, after finishing school at the age of fourteen, I decided to leave. Even though I was already a keen singer, the idea of going to somewhere like Vienna and studying at a conservatoire or music academy never crossed my mind. Nowadays, of course, they have proper processes for picking out children who are musically talented, making it easier for them to enter those kinds of establishment. They ask questions about whether the child has a strong affinity with music and sounds, whether they prefer expressing themselves through the medium of music, and whether they have a tendency to spend their time in musical activities. All of these things applied to me, but, at the time, the world of music was still too far removed from my own.

  With fashion it was a different story: both my parents and I saw dressmaking as a good, solid trade. One possibility was the Graz School of Fashion, which described itself as preparing students for ‘a career in industry, especially in the fashion industry’. Compared to Bad Mitterndorf, which had a population of 3,000, Graz would seem like a great metropolis. It was the state capital of Styria, which had become the fastest growing conurbation in Austria. These were factors that gave my parents cause for hesitation. Yet when it came down to it, they remembered having to stand on their own two feet when they were younger, so they knew that not all professions can be learnt in one’s hometown. Once they were assured that I’d be staying somewhere ‘decent’, Mum and Dad supported me to take my step into the unknown, and for this I respect them.

  CHAPTER THREE

  WITH NEEDLE AND THREAD

  ‘No need to come back at all’

  FROM THE MUSICAL AT HOME ABROAD

  ‘Now I can be my true self.’

  These were the words going through my head as I arrived in Graz, knowing next to nothing about the town. Without a doubt, it was a metropolis compared to the country idyll I’d left behind,. However, this image of it was soon put into perspective. It was true that Graz had everything that Bad Mitterndorf lacked – there were clubs, discos, bars and lounges – but these held little attraction to a fourteen-year-old boy from the country. My belief that this was somewhere that I could be my true self arose entirely from my desire to no longer be stared at, bullied and left out. I would have bet everything I owned that my new life would not be like that. It turned out that I was mistaken. The very opposite was true.

  The ‘somewhere decent’ my parents had banked on was a boarding house shared between students from the fashion school and other youngsters attending one of Graz’s many secondary schools or doing apprenticeships. It was a four-storey building with boys on the lower floors and girls on the upper ones and an impassable divide between them, like the old barrier between East and West. The strict ban on visitors was there to give the head of the boarding house some peace of mind, but it was completely ineffectual. In any case, my feelings towards the female boarders were completely different to those held by the rest of the boys, with their rocketing testosterone levels. While they were struggling with acne, wet dreams and delusions about what they’d be doing to the girls if given half the chance, the residents of the upper floors became my best friends. And so the madness of my school days picked up where it had left off. Since the boy/girl dividing line was a strictly monitored operation, it meant that most of the boys needed some sort of emotional outlet. It turned out that this outlet was me. The boy that was different. The boy that was gay.

  While I was never beaten up in Graz, psychological abuse can be more hurtful than any physical injury. From Monday to Friday, I was at the mercy of my housemates. On Friday afternoons, I would take a two-hour train to Stainach-Irdning, change to the local service for Bad Mitterndorf and arrive there half an hour later. If I was unlucky, I’d cross paths with someone whose main pleasure in life was harassing people like me before I’d even managed to leave the station. It’s not really surprising that I spent most of my time up in the attic once more, in the Green Cave – much to the benefit of my vocal skills and my proficiency with a needle and thread. I was able to hone my abilities as a designer and dressmaker, sailing through fashion school as a result. As for my singing, it was in the attic that I built the foundations for translating talent into success.

  I was recently reading American author Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers: The Story of Success, in which he describes a study carried out by the psychologist Anders Ericsson. In The Making of an Expert, Ericsson establishes that so-called ‘high-flyers’ don’t actually start life as geniuses: their success is down to hard work and discipline. We now know that it takes ten thousand hours of practice to become a top singer, pianist, violinist, writer or athlete. Ten thousand hours sounds a lot, and it is, but if you’re passionate about something then it’s achievable. It’s this quality – this being passionate about something – that separates the wheat from the chaff. If you put in four hours of dedicated practice a day – which isn’t much for an aspiring singer – you fulfil the quota in 2,500 days. With your average working day of eight hours, it takes 1,250 days, or three-and-a-half years. I don’t consider myself a ‘high-flyer’, despite what many people were saying after my Eurovision victory. To some people, those who hadn’t heard of me until that point, I was like a phoenix rising out of the ashes and into the spotlight. Staying with this imagery a moment longer, it’s worth remembering that the phoenix has already had a previous life. In my case, it was definitely not the life of a high-flyer. It was a life of hard graft. When I came home for the weekend, the attic became my vocal studio, a place where I spent hour upon hour upon hour training my voice.

  I often get asked the following question, whether in person or via social media: ‘Should I pursue my talent, Conchita?’ My answer is neither ‘Go for it!’ nor ‘Definitely not!’ I point people in a different direction: if you want to clock up your ten thousand hours of practice, you really need to derive a sense of fun and enjoyment from what you’re doing. That’s the secret of success. If you’re enjoying yourself and you bring that feeling into your singing, into practising an instrument, into whatever it is you’re doing, then sooner or later you’ll reap the rewards. What needs to accompany this enjoyment is the discipline to persevere even when things aren’t going as well as they could be. It’s a lesson I had to learn for myself.

  So it was that I spent Friday evenings, Saturdays and Sundays in the Green Cave, up in the attic back home. It wasn’t the easiest of situations for my pare
nts. Being able to successfully run a country restaurant is dependent on local interest; my mother and father couldn’t simply be indifferent to the residents of Bad Mitterndorf and their opinions – or, as we say in Austria and southern Germany, they couldn’t just not give a toss (es war ihnen keinesfalls wurst). I had no idea back then that these tensions would one day contribute to my choice of stage name. My parents have my respect for managing to navigate the sometimes irreconcilable chasm between the demands of society and what they themselves believed. While I was up in the attic practising my arias, downstairs they were serving up plates of steaming dumplings along with pint after pint of beer. It was a collision of two different worlds. Thankfully, these worlds no longer stand as far apart as they used to, but back then they were separated by another one of those impassable divides. From time to time, I would cross over to the other side and enter into restaurant life, mostly by doing a performance or putting on a small fashion show. Yet no-one ever crossed onto my side of the barrier. The only people who came up to visit me were relatives and close friends. The Green Cave was my shelter, and it remained so for a long time.

  At carnival time the situation was different. Bad Mitterndorf was a town that always honoured its traditions, and one of these was the raising of the maypole. On the evening of 30 April, a 30- to 35-metre-high tree was cut down and then lifted into position with the assistance of most of the town. The tree had to be guarded overnight, a ritual stemming from the old custom of ripping down the maypoles of neighbouring villages. When the band came marching through town the following morning – with me blasting away joyfully on the clarinet – it marked the end of possible enemy capture. Throughout this period, business in the restaurant was booming, and it was the same at carnival time.

  The ‘fifth season’, as it was universally known, became a time of joyful exuberance for me. I was suddenly allowed to do what I’d always wanted: to dress however I liked and celebrate alongside other people without having to keep monitoring myself. While the carnival tradition is associated with the idea of casting out the winter, it has its origins in a type of medieval court where commoners could vent their grievances against their masters. When you look at it in this light, carnival time could basically have been created with me in mind! Yet as soon as the celebrations were finished, I had to return to my hide-out in the attic. I would go back to my singing exercises, to my world of fabric, needle and thread, where I spent Sundays anxiously peering at the hands of the clock as they ticked mercilessly on towards three o’clock. That was when I had to take the train back to Graz, to boarding school, to the boundary between girls and boys and to loud-mouthed attempts to stamp the ‘otherness’ out of me.

  There’s a saying that our worst enemy is our best teacher, and there’s a sense in which this was true in my case. My experiences in Graz taught me that I was stronger than I thought. Yes, I could be brought to tears by the injustices, hostility and pointless arguments that I faced – but I also had a fighting spirit in me that many underestimated. When it comes to reaching my goals, I can be unbelievably tenacious. At such times I’m like water, finding my way round any wall or obstacle standing in my way even if it means carving out an entirely new path. My goal at the time was to successfully complete fashion school, so leaving was out of the question. When things became unbearable at the boarding house, one phone call to my father would have been enough for him to drive over. I never made that phone call. Instead, I clenched my teeth and thought about something that made me happy, which was above all my classes. We were given lessons in drawing and painting, learning all there was to know about the proportions of the body and the power of colour. We discovered how to go from a rough sketch to a garment of professional quality, and were taught the many possibilities for enhancing and reworking fabric. To help us with life after graduation, we had classes in economics that prepared us for the possibility of self-employment. I still use a lot of what I learnt today, despite ultimately choosing a singing career.

  My interest in fashion remains strong: the dress in which I caused such a stir at the Eurovision Song Contest was one I’d designed myself. When I’ve got five minutes to spare, you’ll often find me messing around with a pencil and paper, coming up with new designs. I can feel my mind becoming focused in the process – working on a drawing is like getting a breath of fresh air. Each time I do focus like this, I know I’ll be able to tackle the tasks ahead with renewed energy. I’ve spoken to several renowned designers who like to start each day by coming up with a handful of new ideas, and I’m much the same. What I also took away with me from fashion school was an unerring eye for outstanding craftsmanship. Whenever I go to see Karl Lagerfeld or Jean Paul Gaultier, I can’t help flipping the most beautiful garments inside out and inspecting how the seams have been put together. I’ve always strived for perfection and was fully supported in this by the tutors at fashion school.

  At the weekend, if my parents asked me how I was doing in Graz, I would tell them about my classes and about how wonderful they were. I was more reticent when it came to life at the boarding house and the difficulties I faced there. Nevertheless, it was enough for my mother and father to come up with a plan: they offered to pay for me to stay in a little flat, as they’d done for Andi. It was the start of a fresh chapter in my life. My new shelter was in the house of a lady who lived on her own and was renting out some rooms on the ground floor. The one drawback was the distance to fashion school: after struggling up a steep hill, I had to catch a tram from the final stop on the line all the way to the city centre. Everything else was pure bliss. My landlady was the type of woman I still swoon over today: stunningly beautiful, intelligent, and independent-minded – a combination that often results in a lonely existence for a woman, since no man can buck up the courage to speak to her. She had studied to become a dental technician, and made her living by travelling around the country and teaching primary school children how to brush their teeth. If fate had ever sent her over to the children of Bad Mitterndorf, we would definitely have become massive fans of dental hygiene.

  I sometimes looked after her dog, an adorable golden retriever, and in return she would give me cooking tips. I don’t share my mother’s talent for whipping up fantastic meals from whatever ingredients she has to hand, regardless of whether she has one or one thousand mouths to feed. The way I saw it, snipping away at vegetables was a tiresome inconvenience. At times, I would find myself wistfully remembering childhood days of coming home after playing out in the fresh air and simply choosing a dish from the menu. Nowadays, I see things from a different perspective: when I was fifteen, I learnt how to cook, wash, clean, and generally do what you have to do to be able to stand on your own two feet. It made me independent. Today, no-one can fob me off with phrases like ‘this is how it’s done’ – I’ve been my own master too long for that to work. My parents didn’t simply write me a blank cheque: while they helped out with the rent, everything else I paid for myself. At one point I decided I wanted a sofa for my little flat. I already had a desk and an armchair – the sofa would be purely a luxury. Along with two girls from my fashion school, I went to have a look round some furniture shops. The sofa I liked the most cost €300, a figure well beyond my price range. ‘Let’s head back’, the girls were saying. But I had other ideas.

  ‘There are two ways to react when you don’t get what you want,’ I told them. ‘You can give up and go home, or you can find an alternative.’ Even at that age, I wasn’t the type of person to become disheartened if I encountered a setback. €300 is too expensive? Then I’ll find something for €50. Actually, that was still more than I could really afford – but at least it wasn’t more than what I thought I should be able to afford. I steered my friends to the children’s department, and that’s where I saw it: an absolutely magnificent inflatable sofa selling for a joyous €49.99. ‘I’ll even get change!’ I joked as we made our way to the till. The girls started to laugh. ‘You always come up with the best ideas – we’d never have thought o
f looking in the children’s section. That sofa’s awesome!’

  There’s a term you sometimes hear today – helicopter parenting – which refers to anxious, over-protective parents who constantly hover over their child, to the extent that the child never develops the ability to do anything independently. That wasn’t the way my mother and father treated me. They made me think for myself, instilled in me their values, helped me to be courageous: what’s important is that you enjoy what you do, they used to tell me. They wanted me to achieve. So long as my grades were good, they would happily carry on financing my flat, no question about it. Having this simple arrangement in place suited me fine. In fact, we only ever went through one real crisis – and it was triggered by me.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  COMING OUT

  ‘I want to break free’

  FROM THE MUSICAL WE WILL ROCK YOU

  It was around this time that I started to do the odd gig as a singer, performing mostly at very low-key, informal events. Nevertheless, word began to spread and every now and then I would be asked to give an interview for a radio station, newspaper or magazine. The interviews usually just involved answering a few trivial questions for local media, but one day I found myself sitting across the studio from Anita Ritzl – or Niddl, as she’s better known. Niddl had been a contestant on the first series of Starmania, a hugely popular talent show screened on Austrian television, where she had reached fourth place. Now she was working for a magazine and had invited me in for an interview. Maybe we’ll talk about Starmania, I mused. Maybe she’s got wind of the fact that I’m thinking of becoming a contestant myself. As it was, we didn’t talk about Starmania at all. Completely out of the blue, our discussion turned to the question of my homosexuality, something about which I’d never spoken in public. All of a sudden I was being asked: is it true, or isn’t it? There I was, seventeen years old, in many ways still a child but an adult nonetheless. This magazine would be read by hundreds of thousands of people, my parents included. And now this question: is it true? Or isn’t it? My entire future hinged on that tiny word it, that word with which those who are ‘normal’ define those who are ‘abnormal’: the word with which heterosexuals define homosexuals, whites define blacks, the able define the disabled, the sighted define the blind. It determines whether we belong or are separate, it leads to integration or discrimination, it is what tells us humans apart.