Interview
Alter Ego – Fame – Playing Straight
Photos by Luxxxer.
Even Lady Gaga’s gone ‘authentic’.” So says Anthony Keigher, aka international celebrity wannabe, Xnthony, who returns to the Dublin Fringe this year with a sequel to his 2015 show, Douze, in which he made a bid for Eurovision glory with a song selected by the audience. This time around, having failed to get to the finals, Xnthony is seeking to reinvent himself, as a very on-trend, inoffensive pop star in the vein of Ed Sheeran.
“Gaga had that Artpop phase, which was just a disaster; so she came back with Joanne, which was country. Then Beiber comes out with ‘I’m so sorry,’ or Miley turns from acidic pop queen to softness and balloons. Everyone’s trying to rebrand as authentic, trying to appear like Ed Sheeran or the queen of authentic, Adele. But there’s nothing authentic about it at all.”
Xnthony equates authentic with a kind of straight queerness, and his show, The Power of Wow, sees him marry collaborator Tiffany Murphy every night for the run, with the audience attending their wedding.
“He’s rebranding himself as a straight man and getting married to a woman to broaden his audience,” the 28 year-old Keigher says. “It’s a comment on the homogenisation of queerness. It’s about being gay, about denial, about failure and trying to be authentic. It’s about truth, but at the same time it’s the least authentic I’ve ever been.”
Keigher grew up in Roscommon town, and he’s acutely aware of its reputation in the wake of the 2015 marriage referendum, when the county was the only one to vote No. “I know that Roscommon has bad branding,” he says. “There was a huge push from the Yes side, but the politicians there just didn’t push it. I don’t think the people are bad. I never felt isolated in Roscommon, ever. If you’re a hard worker, and you work well in the community, it doesn’t matter what your background is, or what you’re doing.”