'I was brave, fearless' — transgender performer Saekja, 69, steps off the gender bar stage and into a solo show

It was the early 1970s when a 16-year-old boy left home. The only thought in his head was that he could not stay. He made his way to Pagoda Theater in Jongno, Seoul — he had read in the magazine Sunday Seoul that he could find people like himself there. The old double-feature cinema next to Tapgol Park, then known as Pagoda Park, was one of the few places where sexual minorities with nowhere else to go could recognize one another.

Saekja's life began with that choice. For the next 50-odd years, she performed on the gender bar stage — sometimes a queen, sometimes a king, always a prima donna who held audiences in the palm of her hand. This year, she stepped down. "They told me I was getting too old to keep going up there," she said. "I don't feel sad about it. It's just bittersweet."

Performing was in her nature. But performing meant working in bars, and that part she never fully embraced. "From the time I was young, those were the only places that would have me," she said. She describes her younger self as "something like a hostess, a gisaeng." "At 70," she added, "you simply don't exist in that world."

Born in 1957, transgender performer Saekja is 69. She prefers "gender" to "transgender" as a self-description. She has left the nightclub stage, but one stage remains: a solo show titled "Living Without Getting Slapped Can't Be All There Is to Life," running Thursday and Friday at the small hall of Arko Arts Theater. Written with director Ku Ja-hye, the piece premiered at the 2024 Feminism Theater Festival and is now in its third year. This time it has been invited to the Seoul Performing Arts Festival, or SPAF. All seats are already sold out. Each year the show is updated to reflect where Saekja's life has taken her.

"Because it's the story of a real person, it can't help but keep changing," Ku said at a recent meeting at the Korea Arts Management Service in Daehangno, Seoul. "The first and second runs felt more like a microhistory of Saekja's life. This time, we wanted the performance itself to become an archive." The show also incorporates, for the first time, Saekja's half-century on the gender bar circuit — a chapter she is leaving behind partly by choice, partly not.

The two met in 2021 on the production "Drag × Gentleman in Disguise." Ku, a director long drawn to stories of marginalized people, saw in Saekja both an individual and a piece of collective history. The first meeting was not entirely smooth. Saekja recalled feeling quietly hurt that Ku never ran her through rehearsals. One night, after a few drinks, she posted a message in the group chat: "I don't need a director for my scenes." The next day she apologized, and Ku's reply caught her off guard. "You were so good there was nothing to rehearse." Saekja smiled at the memory. "She said, 'You're younger than me, but let's be friends.'"

The play itself was born at a drinking table. Saekja had encouraged Ku to try writing something commercial, telling her she had the talent for it. Ku said she wanted to tell Saekja's story instead. "From where I stand, that is a massive commercial production," Saekja said, laughing — though she was quick to add that she was joking.

"She wanted to give strength to young queer people, and she felt that being visible on stage could do that," Ku said. "She has lived a life that must be recorded. I wanted to preserve it."

The title came from a line Ku had written for a play about queer youth. "People say life has gotten better for queer people compared to the past," Ku said, "but the disappearance of physical punishment doesn't mean the conditions for living have been put in place."

The day Saekja received the title over KakaoTalk, she wept. Not getting slapped did not mean life had improved. In those years, there were things worse than a slap. Working in Itaewon in the 1980s, she was regularly hauled before summary courts on charges of "disturbing public morals" — dragged to the police station for having hair that was too long or a skirt that was too short. In 1983, Jongno Police Station in Seoul brought a group of cross-dressing men working at gay establishments before a summary court.

Police required each establishment to send two people voluntarily to Yongsan Police Station twice a month. One August, Saekja's turn came. She and about four colleagues, each handed a three-day detention, were loaded into what was known as a "chicken-coop van." The vehicle did not head to a holding cell. It went to a recreation area, where the officers waded in the water and ate chicken while Saekja and the others waited for hours inside the black van with its single small window. It was the suffocating height of summer.

"We're lucky we didn't die in there," she said. "Nothing like that kind of human rights violation would happen today. It wasn't as if we'd committed murder." The cheerful demeanor she had maintained throughout the conversation gave way to tears as she recalled those years. "Every time I talk about it, I remember how hard it was," she said. The scene appears as dialogue in the show. The repression of the Fifth Republic era was not visited on gender minorities alone. "The crackdowns on long hair, on miniskirts — all of it was repression. Those were years of repression."

From Pagoda Theater, the story moves through a rented room in Donam-dong and Itaewon, and then across the sea to Japan. Saekja traces on stage the day she still cannot forget — Dec. 24, 1984, when she first traveled to Japan on an entertainer's visa, five years before overseas travel was opened to all Koreans. From around 1993 to 2002, she performed in Himeji.

Ku noted that the era of martial law and curfew — a nightly ban on movement from midnight to 4 a.m. — overlaps with Saekja's life in ways that add another dimension to the work. "For me, that whole period is remembered as one solid block of violence," Ku said. "But through conversations with Saekja, I came to understand that violence and suffering don't exist as a single mass — the violence experienced by a minority within a minority is something different again." That is why, she explained, archiving is not the goal of the performance but something that follows naturally from laying Saekja's life bare.

How much of Korean history to weave alongside Saekja's story, and how far to take it, is still a question Ku is wrestling with. "Saekja's life is intertwined with Korean history, and the two need to move together for the life to be fully understood," she said. "But that means the explanations can get clunky, and that worries me." Saekja's answer is simpler. "What is there to agonize over? Just put it in."

Nobody had to tell her. She knew herself early. She never shared the confusion some peers felt — wondering why, in a male body, they were drawn to men. With nothing to hide, she had no reason to hide. The more fingers pointed at her, the higher she held her head.

"I hadn't done anything wrong," she said. "It's just a different life. I hadn't killed anyone or stolen anything." In the 1980s she was called by the Japanese word "okama." When the word "transgender" arrived in the 1990s, she dropped the "trans" and began calling herself simply "gender." "I never thought of it as something shameful. I just thought: there are people like me too."

In 1986, in her late 20s, Saekja underwent gender reassignment surgery in a rented room — a decision she describes as so desperate it felt like a trade with death. The five-hour procedure cost 2 million won ($1,490 at the time) and was performed under local rather than general anesthesia. Even so, she has never changed the gender marker on her national ID. Courts did not recognize gender correction until a Supreme Court ruling in 2006. But to change the marker, a person must provide medical records proving the physical change — and Saekja, who had her surgery in a rented room rather than a hospital, has no such documentation.

"Even if I changed it, my original sex wouldn't change," she said. "I had the surgery, but I never thought I could become a woman. I was born male — I'm just gender." For Saekja, gender was never the dividing line of a life. "Whether you're a man or a woman doesn't matter. You just live as a person."

Ku, whose work has long grappled with social disasters and marginalized deaths through experimental forms, found that working with Saekja required a different approach to the stage. "Fitting Saekja into my directorial framework wasn't just impossible — it felt wrong," she said. Whenever she tells someone else's story, she is always on guard against objectification and othering.

"The moment you put someone else's life on stage — in the name of art, in the name of direction — objectification kicks in," Ku said. "But Saekja drives the stage forward with the power of willingly objectifying herself." In that process, Ku said, she realized that being overly cautious on the grounds that it was not her own experience was itself a form of othering.

The rules of the stage come from Saekja's own judgment. She will lay out anything from her own life, but she will not turn the stories of friends and colleagues into scenes for theatrical effect. When a moment like that arises, she tells Ku: "I don't think I can share some of these — they're about my friends' pain."

The life Saekja has brought into the open is vivid and full of color. Through her, the journey of a first-generation transgender person — one whose existence was long invisible — comes to light. Yet Saekja herself pushes back against the "first-generation transgender" label. There were sunbae who blazed the trail before her, she says. "People call me first-generation only because they don't know. I'm actually not."

Still, it is a fact that through this show Saekja's name has come to represent transgender people of her generation. "Theater takes time and money and exists only in that moment, so it carries even more representational weight," Ku said. "But there are still people living in the shadows."

That is precisely why Saekja keeps taking the stage. A prima donna her entire life, she appeared as a transgender bartender in the 2016 film "The Bacchus Lady" and, following her theater debut in 2021, received the special prize at the 62nd Dong-A Theater Awards last January. "There are many young people who struggle before becoming gender," she said. "None of us became transgender because someone told us to or pushed us into it."

"We are born this way. So I hope people can think of it as being chosen. We are not sinners. There is so much to do out in the world. Being born like this is itself a gift — so don't stay in the shadows, don't suffer in silence, come out. Many people are waiting for you. Be brave."

Saekja's stage does not stop here. After the run ends, she plans to start a new chapter as a YouTube creator — "something to make a living," she confided. Looking back over a long life, she says she is happiest now. She has a message for her 16-year-old self, too. "You were brave back then. Fearless. You walked out of school with a buzz cut and still made it this far. Saekja, you are remarkable."