I thought I'd have a different type of cancer - one they could just cut out

When I look at the pictures Ashley took of me, I see that I’m fighting,” Tutu says. “But if you don’t understand why I’d step in front of the camera to show my relationship with cancer, it’s because you don’t know me. I had no choice.”

In 2009, ex-stripper and performance artist, Tutu, discovered she had breast cancer. But instead of hiding when she heard the news, as many people would, Tutu grabbed her plastic Viking helmet and invited her old friend and Bizarre photographer, Ashley, to document her battle with the disease: he followed her with a camera when she had chemotherapy, when she lost her hair, and when surgeons botched a breast reconstruction operation and left her feeling mutilated.

To reveal a different side of cancer from the pink information pamphlets that show ladies “sipping tea and wearing headscarves”, Tutu now wants to exhibit the photos that Ashley took – seen on these pages – under the abrasive title Cancer Sucks.

STEPPING INTO THE LIGHT

Californian-born Tutu has always felt the need to perform and express herself. Swept up by the 1980s Fame craze, she attended dance classes run by Paula Abdul that David Bowie also went to. But low confidence and dyslexia held Tutu back from going to auditions, so she “did her own thing” to music instead. She left school and took tickets on the door of a local jazz club in Los Angeles, where she met her first husband – a popular fusion jazz artist who Tutu won’t name – who played a gig there one night.

“He was 33 with two young daughters, and I was 19 when we got married,” Tutu says. “I went from hanging out on the beach, camping and walking through the wilderness, to attending the Grammys and riding around in limousines. It was really strange.”

The pair were in love, but worlds apart, and the marriage crumbled when Tutu was 22 years old. However she gained an injection of alimony money from the separation and, tripping on acid one evening, she impulsively booked a flight to England and dropped in on an old flame from a summer fling. Finding that he had a girlfriend and nowhere for her to stay, she landed a job as a nanny, which she did during the day, and became a strip-o-gram at night.

“I’d always wanted to be a stripper,” Tutu admits. “You get to dress up, swing around and grab money. You don’t have to go to college and you still make loads of cash. It was a no-brainer!”

Working pubs, stag dos and birthdays, it was a booking at an East End working man’s club that changed the course of her career. “It was a private Sikh event and I was attacked by about 20 of the men in the venue,” says Tutu. “The security guards finally pulled me out and I ran down the street in just my underwear. The company I worked for didn’t care and that fucked me up for a long time. Eventually, I started putting on my own club nights and performances in the early 1990s, so I could do what I wanted on my own stage.”

Tutu’s performances were a hit at London gay clubs. Her schizophrenic Courtney Love Vs Doris Day striptease went down a storm at Heaven, and she did a turn for foodies in which she shoved copious amounts of mashed potato into her tights. Everything was going well until 1994, when Tutu sat on a wobbly table onstage that collapsed, causing her leg to break in 27 places.

“That kind of ended my performance career,” Tutu says. “I tried stripping in my wheelchair while my leg was in a cast, but that was too much for some people. The doctors told me I’d need a stick for life, but I rehabilitated myself and gradually began walking again. Maybe it was time to stop throwing myself naked on bars, but even so, I went into a big depression because I felt like I couldn’t express myself.”

Ashley was the in-house photographer for Tutu’s club night, Monster. When he took pictures of her while she was in her cast, it helped raise her spirits.

RUNAWAY DISEASE

Five years later, Tutu needed the therapeutic power of Ashley’s photos again. When she discovered a lump in her breast in October 2009, she put it down to fat, but was quickly diagnosed with cancer.

“Within two weeks of getting checked out, doctors had taken a lumpectomy sample, then some lymph nodes, and then announced they were going to take away my entire breast, rebuild it, and give me a course of chemotherapy, radiation and a five-year course of pills,” says Tutu. “I told them, ‘I don’t have time for this!’”

The breast reconstruction operation that Tutu had after her mastectomy didn’t go according to plan. During the procedure, the skin and muscle tissue that surgeons had taken from Tutu’s stomach to rebuild her breast was rejected, and she was left with a large, jagged scar. “I think they screwed up,” says Tutu. “At one point during the operation, I woke up and tore everything out. I ended up with a gash on my chin, with bruises all over me. I think I was putting up a fight.”

But nothing was out of bounds for the camera. “The shot of me in a doorway (see p91) was taken 30 minutes after I got home from the hospital,” Tutu explains. “Do you know what was going through my head at that point? That really cheesy Elton John song ‘I’m Still Standing’. I was up to my eyeballs on morphine. There’s even one shot of me looking at my mastectomy scar in the mirror for the first time (see p92). I looked deformed. It was unreal and I was thinking, ‘How are they going to put that right?’ And seeing what they did to my stomach... I mean, I wanted a tummy tuck, but...”

Ashley also accompanied Tutu to her chemo sessions – not shying away even when she was vomiting into a paper bowl as her body dealt with the aggressive chemicals that were being pumped in.

“That was my last treatment,” she says, pointing to a photograph of her sitting in a hospital chair, wincing, as a nurse administers an injection. “My veins were like wood by then. The doctors had a hard time getting anything in. I wore a Wonder Woman T-shirt for all of my treatments,” she says with a smile.

BLACK HUMOUR

When Tutu talks about life she swings between comedy and tragedy, and her experience of cancer is no different; from imagining the line-up of chemo patients at her hospital wearing wigs and singing ‘Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life’, to feeling that she deserved to fall ill because she had made money from getting her tits out in the past.

“I thought, ‘OK, this is the way I’ll learn my lesson,’ she says. “I was strong enough to bring the cancer on, I’m strong enough to get rid of it. I had no room for fear in my life.”

Tutu’s been in remission for four months and last had surgery in May 2010. Now she’s concentrating her efforts on bringing Ashley’s photographs of her to the public.

“If some people find the photos inappropriate, I’ll tell them that I feel the same about all the big parties held for the rich and famous in Breast Cancer Awareness month,” says Tutu. “They all turn up and walk away from the evening swinging their swag bags. Bring those swag bags to those of us who are having toxic Kool-Aid shoved into our veins. I want to show cancer for what it is: it hurts, it’s sad, it’s painful, it’s scary, it’s empowering, and loving, and life-changing. Sometimes I’d lie on the couch for five days and shut down, but I needed to express that.”

Tutu’s not out the woods yet, and she knows it, but whatever the next stage of her journey brings, you can put money on the fact that she’ll handle it with her helmet on.

VISIT SAVAGESKIN.CO.UK TO SEE HER FULL SET OF CANCER SUCKS PICS