The Paul Smith suit hangs well on Grayson Perry’s angular frame and with his clownish bob slicked back, his face hardens into menace. An East End gangster, I suggest. “Yeah, back to my Essex roots,” he growls. “Funnily enough, this is the first time I’ve ever felt I belonged in a suit.” But later, when he shows the Times photo to his wife, Philippa, “She freaked out and said it didn’t look like me at all.” Masculinity has never been a good fit for Grayson Perry. He has spent his life and art brooding over what manhood entails: the violence, emotional repression, the shame of being judged a “cissy”, which he was by the two men who tormented his boyhood: his father (who left) and his stepfather (who terrified him). A celebrated potter, a TV presenter and public intellectual who in 2013 was the first practising artist to give the Reith lectures, he is perhaps most famous for dressing up as a woman called Claire, collecting his 2003 Turner prize in shiny, red Mary Janes and a winsome, pink satin dress. Mainly – as today – he wears “male” clothes, colourful, boho stuff, chosen by his wife since buying menswear bores him. And he is – if these are still acceptable words – butch, blokeish, manly. He has a strong jaw and a raucous trucker’s laugh. When I arrive at his Islington studio, he is sitting around with a male friend discussing his weekend mountain-biking exploits. Perry is a keen and highly competitive cyclist. “Making this programme made me realise how masculine I am,” he says. “I’m not feminine at all. I never really have been.” In his series All Man, Perry enters three classic male milieux – cage fighters in the northeast, a teenage street gang and the City of London – and interviews men about how they feel masculinity defines their lives. Then he creates works of art reflecting what he sees and shows them to his subjects. Their reactions are often fascinating. Perry never warms to the bankers, even the Paleo-diet hedge-fund sophisticates who are far from the macho trader mould (he presents them with a ceramic phallus). But he is touched by the cage fighters, striving to construct a masculine identity in an old mining community where the heavy-industrial breadwinner jobs have all gone. And for the young criminals – rootless, fatherless, fighting pathetic turf wars around council estates – he feels great pity. “I saw my teenage years as a bit of a kind of psychic battle, and I think they’re in the trenches,” he says. He asks boys who’ve been arrested why they’ve ended up in a police cell. “They said, ‘I live on this crap estate, my parents were s***, the schools didn’t …’ And I said, ‘OK, how come 95 per cent of people who come through here are men? The women are from the same families, schools, estates, but they’re not in jail.’” He tells them they are victims of masculinity and they look bewildered: “The whole series I felt I was trying to talk to fish about water.” Masculinity in Perry’s view is a carapace that protects men in battle: hard but inflexible, strong yet brittle. It permits no expression of feelings, doubt or weakness. In County Durham, he meets the mother and mates of a gregarious guy who killed himself aged 30; no one had a clue he was suicidal. “I think some men don’t even know when they are sad,” says Perry. Growing up on a Chelmsford council estate, he felt stuck on a similar track. He was keen on boyish pursuits: Scouts, model aircraft. He dreamt of being a jet pilot, then joined the Army Cadet Force and was preparing for Sandhurst. What if you’d actually gone? “Oh, I’d have gone mental,” he says. When he was four, his father, a factory worker, left following his mother’s affair with the milkman, a part-time wrestler, who later became his stepfather. He didn’t really see his father again until he was 16, living in a cold, miserable household punctuated by his mother’s histrionic rages and his stepfather’s physical violence. (To protect his own sanity, he is in contact with neither.) Visiting other families, he was astonished to find they unwrapped Christmas presents together. “We opened ours separately in our rooms.” So the person who’d bought it couldn’t see your pleasure? “Never. It was a complete shutting down of intimacy and emotion. I hate Christmas to this day.” So, up in his bedroom, young Grayson lived in his rich, vivid unconscious, trying – through drawing and elaborate fantasy – to make sense of his world. In his boyhood iconography his teddy bear, Alan Measles, was an all-seeing god figure, a protector, maybe the father he’d lost. He still crops up constantly in Perry’s work and lives in his Islington home on a golden throne. And alongside his army ambitions was his desire to wear women’s clothes, which began when, aged ten, he borrowed a dress from his sister. He knew he was neither gay nor wanted to be a woman, simply that wearing women’s clothes was an emotional outlet and a thrilling sexual transgression from all the orthodoxies of boyhood. “Nobody is more conservative than a 14-year-old boy,” he says. “They are the most boring people on earth. They wear grey tracksuits and they talk about computer games and they listen to the regulation music. My greatest sort of potent sex dream was to be a housewife walking down the road; my biggest nightmare was being found out.” “Claire” was at first a sexy suburban housewife, with a smattering of his mother and a tad of Mrs Thatcher, then she evolved into a vulnerable little girl. Lately, she’s become more of an haute-couture clown. He is aware of his own ridiculousness: “When people say, ‘Aren’t there more sophisticated ways of accessing femininity than putting on a dress?’ I say, ‘I didn’t decide to become a transvestite when I was a sophisticated adult.’ I decided when I was eight, when your unconscious is saying, ‘Femininity, woman, thing in dress.’” He stresses he is a transvestite, not transgender: he dresses up for sexual thrills. Transvestitism is bound up in his taste for fetish sex, PVC clobber and sadomasochism, which featured often in his early work. “The trans spectrum is a whole different thing. I wouldn’t particularly want to live full-time as a woman. It’d be such a fag for starters, the amount of preparation every day!” (It takes him 90 minutes to apply the wig, make-up and padding.) I say I don’t find being a woman nearly so onerous. I’m being facetious, but like many feminists, I’m weary of womanhood being defined as an elaborate façade: fancy nails, false eyelashes, lingerie, sparkly clothes, heels. “Transvestites – I speak for my own community – are heavily invested in sexism,” he says. “You go to a transvestite gathering, you won’t see anybody in trousers. It’s a joke, you know: if one of the other transvestites regularly wears trousers, they go, ‘They’re going to have a sex change any minute.’ Because only real women wear trousers all the time.” Yet no one is equal in their sexual fantasies. “At some level, everybody is either being bent over the desk or is bending someone else over a desk. They’re not saying, ‘Shall we get cat litter on the way home?’ while wearing matching fleeces. Although in reality that’s exactly what me and my wife are doing. We live functional lives with people we love and our sex life, all the exotic stuff, happens off stage. And it’s best kept that way.” His first date with his wife was at a fetish club, but now they’re more likely to be at home watching Gogglebox: “It’s so funny. And it can be very moving.” But we live at a moment when sexual identity appears to be in flux. Perry thinks the transgender lobby “is a very vocal group. They punch above their weight. I do wonder why they are so angry.” Maybe because trans women almost always began as heterosexual men? Perry laughs. “Yes, so they have that entitlement. Yes, it could be.” As Germaine Greer and Ian McEwan have discovered, there are vicious words and possible “no-platform” edicts for anyone who doubts the new ethos that anyone who “identifies” as female – even if in possession of a penis – is a woman. In his lectures Perry has learnt to insert endless caveats to ward against those seeking out offence. He argues all identity is “co-created: other people have to believe it. It is not enough for me to say, for example, ‘I am a black man,’ if no one agrees with me.” He tells me of a theory in psychotherapy – of which he has had a great deal – whereby a victim feels entitled because of their perceived oppression to become a persecutor. “And they enjoy the persecuting rather too much. Self-righteousness is an addictive drug,” he says. “People need to be weaned off.” “Transvestite” – how he’s described himself for decades – is now considered unfashionable, perhaps derogatory. He even says “trannie”, now politically verboten. Eddie Izzard, the only transvestite more famous than Perry, has recently declared himself “transgender”, talking about having “boy genes and girl genes”. Although Perry says, “I have no special insight into being a woman. And I would never claim that. I am just a bloke in a dress.” Maybe, he says, the whole gender-fluid, transgender explosion is fuelled by men trying to escape masculinity’s narrow parameters. Meanwhile, as a new wave of feminism has gained force, “being a man has negative associations: I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a crisis because of the guilt young men hold now for being men. They’re so demonised.” Although no one, I note, is more down on masculinity than Perry himself. In his own life he’s only experienced the downside. “I have to be really careful. My bias is really strong.” He describes masculinity as a “skeuomorph”: an architectural term for a feature that once had a practical use but is now merely decorative. “Masculinity had a function, you know, in hunter-gatherer societies for most of human existence. Being the strong, stoic man might work when you’re in battle or whatever. But you’re not in a battle any more – now you’re just committing suicide.” But what about the good things about men? Courage, forbearance, strength. Perry counters that women are brave, too. He is eager to grant masculinity all its stereotypical vices, but none of its virtues. Instead of Sandhurst, Perry headed to study fine art at Portsmouth Poly, then to London to live in a squat and join the flamboyant Taboo club scene with Boy George and Leigh Bowery. He started making pottery, but made little money for years. He was supported by his wife, Philippa, a psychotherapist who also had family money. Now, although not as rich as Damien Hirst or Tracey Emin, he’s wealthy. “Yes, I was a kept man. I was quite happy with that; that was fine. But now I tend to be the major breadwinner, so I can pay her back.” They have a daughter, Flo, who grew up believing his transvestism was just part of his character: no big deal. Now 23, she works at BuzzFeed. He was utterly bereft when she left home. “You sort of turned up at university and there were all these notices saying PARENTS – TIME TO GO and arrows to the door. Like it was, ‘She’s ours now!’” Fatherhood made him go into therapy: he was worried his awful upbringing would make him a liability as a parent. I wonder if he’s glad he didn’t have to raise sons? “Having a child brought up all sorts of stuff about being a child myself, and that’s a fairly common thing. So a boy would have really put a magnifying glass on that.” I say I believed gender was socially constructed until I had sons and saw them tearing around, drawn to sticks and trucks not dolls. But Perry doesn’t believe there are any inherent gender differences. “Socialisation is so deep, parents do it unconsciously.” Yet Perry is never didactic. Wary of rigid masculine thinking – defending an opinion in an argument to the death – he makes a point of flexibility. “When I give lectures, if someone can ask me a question that embarrasses me and makes me change my mind about something, I say, ‘Good. Bring it on!’” Most artists I’ve met are utterly self-absorbed. But Perry is at ease in his eccentric skin and he listens, isn’t just on transmit. Which means he truly connects with his TV interviewees. Lately, he’s enjoyed being a public figure: receiving his CBE from the Prince of Wales in a fetching outfit inspired by the Duchess of Cornwall; giving the Reith lectures; appearing on the cover of Radio Times. All provide him with a chance to dress up and enjoy the adrenaline high of the transvestite out in public. “I’m a total adrenaline addict.” He doesn’t mind being part of the establishment. “Eccentric, bohemian, maverick, all these words turn my stomach,” he says. “What I’ve learnt from art is you need to get on with it. It’s show, not tell. Just do it. And do it in your own way.” He’s a lifelong Labour supporter, but gets called upon by the government as a “sort of creativity tsar”. Getting older, he says, “I’ve become less down on the Tories. One of the things I’m learning is that the left wing are curiously more rigid than the right wing.” He is 56 now, “with a whole roster of 56-year-old man conditions”. He lifts his hair to show discreet hearing aids, although he admired a deaf guy in his last series “who had sterling silver punk hearing aid covers with big spikes on them”. It is healthier, he believes, to celebrate not hide your vulnerabilities. In a recent talk on masculinity, Perry presented his Male Bill of Rights: “We men ask ourselves and each other for the following: the right to be vulnerable, to be weak, to be wrong, to be intuitive, not to know, to be uncertain, to be flexible and not to be ashamed of any of these things.” The men’s rights lobby, which he finds frightening and aggressive, merely “defend old-school masculinity as if it were fixed in stone”. Feminism is always looking forward: “‘Where can women go? What space can we take up?’ Whereas masculinity is nostalgic the whole time: ‘Oh, we’re not like men used to be.’” I wonder if part of the solution isn’t giving uptight men more creative outlet. Art saved Perry. And in County Durham the beautiful mining banners express something sacred for those men, while the friends of the guy who committed suicide have his face tattooed onto their skin. The teenage gang loved the artwork Perry made about their lives – a tribal figure of a hoodie, covered in rust and dirt. “They thought it was ‘boss’,” he says. “But the nearest these boys get to art is painting a huge c**k and balls on a wall.”