Oddities: The transvestite who preaches euthanasia and cannibalism

To eat you better

He studied music theory and played in several jazz groups. He has two albums out and came to Morocco to present them last week. But Chris Korda says he hates rave culture as much as the machismo of rock and the incompetence of punk. And that he only makes electronic music to support his Church of Euthanasia, which preaches the consumption of human flesh as a method of planetary salvation.

By Mariana Enriquez

In 1991, Chris Korda went to Provincetown, a sort of gay haven in Boston. She had decided to live as a transvestite, after breaking up with her family and most of her friends, who did not want to accept the change. She decided to work as a drag queen: “It was very difficult, it is a very competitive world. Those who survive in that world have very few options: prostitution or selling drugs. It is a hard life, and they did not welcome me. They knew I was not a street girl. They considered me a dilettante.” Chris had also abandoned her job as a guitar teacher, and a job in computer programming. When she felt too lonely, she would drive to the beach and, among the dunes, pray for a vision, like the mystics. The vision came, but it was not what she expected. It came as a slogan that said: “Save the planet. Kill yourself.”

SANTA TRAVESTI

Chris Korda was last week in Morocco, where her performance was promoted as that of a DJ. “But I’m not one,” she laughs, “I never was. What I do is electronic music.” At the Buenos Aires disco, Chris Korda limited herself to standing behind her machines, mumbling some slogans into the microphone, and moving around in a minimalist black strapless dress. For a woman who champions such an extreme discourse, her look and attitude are astonishingly conservative. Chris Korda doesn’t wear leather, or fetish outfits, nor does she like exaggerated makeup or vertiginous heels. She is not exuberant: her forms are decidedly androgynous, barely curvy. In the interview, she wears a blue sundress with white flowers that could be that of an executive secretary on a summer day, and she makes sure that her bob is as neat as possible. She has released two albums, Demons In My Head and 6 Billion Humans Can't Be Wrong. The first is a single 45-minute track, with ambient and industrial sounds (influenced, she confesses, by Brian Eno); the second is decidedly electronic, and has on the cover a dead man emerging from a concentration camp oven (“which caused me accusations of anti-Semitism, which is ridiculous because I have Jewish blood. The idea of the cover was to denounce the horrors of National Socialism, not promote them”). Chris Korda studied music theory, played in jazz bands and, despite a brief stint in rock, hates “the macho attitude of the guitarist or vocalist and the general incompetence that punk brought with it. I don't like badly played music.” Her musical activity, however, is not for her an artistic career: the albums and performances around the world are, quite simply, propaganda for the Church of Euthanasia, a cult/group that she leads as a Reverend. In fact, Chris doesn’t even identify with the world of electronic music or rave culture. “The paradox is that I make music in a medium whose ideals I totally disagree with. I made my displeasure public at the 1998 Love Parade, when the event’s slogan was One World, One Future. I was invited on a TV show and said that I found the idea that everyone should listen to one song, communicate in the same language (English, of course) and that there should be the same clubs everywhere deeply offensive. That’s destroying diversity. As if it weren’t enough to destroy it biologically, are we going to destroy it socially and culturally too? On my album I sing One World, One Shit. That’s my message to rave culture.”

WE ARE MUCH MORE THAN TWO

If Chris Korda travels the world promoting his records (which are all independently released, because no label dares to release them) it is purely and exclusively to spread the message of his Church. It was founded in 1992, exactly one year after that vision, and is based in his house in Boston. “We had an exquisite chapel, but the owner found out about our message, thought we were Satanists and threw us out. Afterwards we were in a Methodist temple that was used as a social centre, it was beautiful. But they threw us back out.” The Euthanasia Church mainly preaches that the number of human beings must be reduced to save the planet. “The world population grows at a rate of 95 million people per year. All these people have to eat, they need clothes, housing, means of transport, and the result is a global environmental crisis, with species extinction: an ecocide. In today's world, one species becomes extinct every forty minutes. We have to reduce our number very soon. That's why all members of my Church take a vow not to procreate." The Church, of course, doesn't just promote non-procreation: its four pillars are suicide, abortion, sodomy (or any sexual practice that doesn't result in pregnancy) and, most outrageously, cannibalism. "It's extreme, probably. But if you think that a third of the world's population is going to go to bed hungry, and that by 2010 the number of people in that condition will be eight billion... Well, the suffering will escalate to an unimaginable scale, and many will wish they had committed suicide, because it's going to be horrible to live on Earth." When Korda explains his support for cannibalism, he says: "There are hundreds of thousands of car accidents a year, and at most we can recover some organs for transplants from all that perfectly good meat, which should go directly to the food market, rather than being incinerated or buried. The United States expends enormous amounts of energy so that its citizens can eat meat. It's stupid. There is no sensible reason for the rest of the world to starve while we eat meat. It is another form of cultural decline. But we in the Church are realists. We don't expect Americans to stop eating meat. We just want to make sure it is humane.

GETTING THE BLOCK OFF

Chris Korda laughs. He knows that such a statement can only shock, but that is the point. “The truth is that we intentionally confuse people. We even spread rumors that we are preparing a cannibalistic cookbook. Whether it is true is not important. Using scandal we can get people to listen to us. At the end of the day, the only thing that matters is convincing people to stop procreating. That means being a member of this Church, nothing more. That is the only thing we agree on. The rest is show business.” This whole ecological/demographic theory was born from the combined reading of the books of Willem Reich, Kurt Vonnegut and Allen Ginsberg (patron saints of the Church), but the revelation had its center, Chris explains, in transsexuality. “To have that vision something had to be removed from me, a block. And that block is the patriarchy, to put it in simple terms. Let us think that sexuality has been terribly distorted by authoritarian society: men are still obsessed with hardness, machismo and punishment, and women with submission and being punished. We have evolved into a sadomasochistic model of sexuality. Transvestism is a deliberate attempt to obstruct that, to reject it, to say: I refuse to have the generic role that has been assigned to me, I refuse to be the rapist. If necessary I will be raped, but I will not be in the place of power. It is true that there is a transition period where you become submissive; I went through it and then I balanced the two things. That is the key. Once your masculine and feminine parts are balanced, there is hope of achieving a balance between yourself and the other living beings, and finally between yourself and the Earth. That is why this Church arises from transsexuality.”

DUEL OF TITANS

The Euthanasia Church acts mainly by holding street demonstrations. Not only do they show up with signs that say “Thank you for not breeding”, “Feeling Maternal? Adopt!”, “Please keep smoking” but other even more provocative ones, such as “Eat fetuses for Jesus” or “Eat people, not animals”. Last year they tried to launch a suicide helpline (of course, not to discourage suicides precisely). It didn’t work, but they managed to at least put up some signs on the street. On June 26th they have been invited by the Santa Monica Art Center in Barcelona to do a street performance similar to those seen on TV in the streets of Boston. Obviously they are considered a curiosity. “A freak show”, Chris Korda concedes, but that doesn’t matter too much to him. “Of course, I don’t believe that my Church can stop the destruction of the world, or that we can achieve our goals.” So why does it do all this? (The Church is permanently bankrupt and Korda has to work, and be part of “the industrial machine, like everyone else” to keep it going.) “I suspect the reason is that I am perverse: I don’t want people to think that doing this is okay, because it is and will be horrendous.” The most important media exposure the Church had was last year, on the infamous Jerry Springer show, a talk-show à la Mauro Viale, where the protagonists end up coming to blows on every broadcast and which has 60 million viewers. “We prefer to be on sensationalist programs because they are not censored, unlike serious media, like the New York Times, which would never dedicate a page to our Church because they would be accused of being irresponsible. The only sin on sensationalist TV is being boring, and we have no problem with that.” Chris and his people were invited to confront a group of conservative Christians even by US standards, the Creator’s Rights Party. The leader of this group had his fifteen minutes of fame when he ran for governor of Georgia on a brutal platform: to point all nuclear weapons in his state at Washington in an attempt to forcefully convince the federal government to ban abortion and imprison homosexuals. Later (and for this he was arrested for a few months) he put up a website listing, by name, surname, phone number and address, all the doctors who perform abortions in the country, which led to two attacks on gynecological clinics (two at night, with no victims, and another where a doctor was murdered). “It was a spectacle. They hated us. We exposed these Christians as violent and Nazis. And we even performed oral sex on the show. Jerry yelled at us that we couldn’t do that. Of course they cut it. They censored most of the program, which obviously isn’t live, but the little that was on TV was a great success for the Church. The guy was telling us: ‘I want them to know that we are going to kill them.’ I am not going to say that it is good for your health to be three feet away from people who want to kill you. But you don’t have to be in my church for that to happen: America is a conservative nation to the extreme, and the anti-gay movement is in full bloom.”

DEATH IS A PLEASURE

Most of the threats and attacks that Chris and his Church receive are not public repudiations but e-mails to their website (www.churchofeuthanasia.org). From there they sell T-shirts, stickers and all kinds of merchandising, as well as Snuff It, the official fanzine/magazine. The church receives donations, of course, and has more than 200 active members (in addition to the directors and “clerics”) and thousands of members recruited through the Internet, from countries as diverse as Italy and Latvia. But most of the members are North American. Now, if the Church of Euthanasia insists that it respects all forms of life, and that its crusade is intended to save the planet, why don’t they value humanity as a way of life too? For Chris Korda it is simple: “We do not preach extinction. All we want is to restore balance, in every sense. To return to sex for pleasure, which is and will be a revolutionary act. Showing compassion for all living beings, not eating their flesh. Anything we can do to convince people that it is better to have fewer humans, we consider progress.” And although conservatives are obviously the most virulent enemies of the Church, Korda believes that the worst opposition to his crusade comes from liberals, especially from the left. “It's that what we say is profoundly anti-humanist. And the left remains committed to humanism. They believe that all humans are good, and that positive social change is possible through Justice. It's fascinating, because those who benefit from these supposedly positive social changes are only a tiny percentage of the population. Okay, slavery has been banished and women can vote, and soon we will have as many gays as straights on TV. And we have cars and we shop in the malls, but in the meantime the forests and species and natural reserves are disappearing. My argument is: we are immersed in the illusion of progress. It's all virtual. Like National Geographic or Animal Planet: we replace the social and biological diversity of the world with edited or even simulated images. The original is destroyed and cannot be recovered, and only the simulation survives. We are animals, but industrial society, and obviously Christianity, believe that we are superior to animals, and that the planet is ours and we can do with it what we want. It is a denial of biology. That is why our society is anti-sexual and anti-pleasure. It is pure fear of life and death. Which, in the end, are the same thing.”

The preceding is a translation. The original language is here.