Peace On Earth This Christmas? (TLDR, Probably Not)

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“…and suddenly there appeared with the angel a great multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying: “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men on whom His favour rests!” When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let us go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has made known to us…”

Book of Luke, Chapter 2, Verses 13 – 15, Bible

Peace on earth. It’s a lovely idea and something that often appears on Christmas cards. But it seems a very distant dream given the times we live in. Times of escalating war, genocide and aggression. In fact, given how much war there is it seems like peace on earth is never going to happen. Nevertheless, I won’t write a post outlining the violence in the world today – we have the news for that – but I do want to write about how I think we can take a step closer to peace on earth, no matter how distant a destination it may be. And it starts with recognising where peace begins.

Peace on earth sounds like a very broad, ambitious and vague goal. The earth is huge, peace is a big deal and it’s not entirely clear how to acheive it (obviously the Bible, which I quote above, goes into a lot more detail on this). Perhaps I could focus on something smaller than earth, say, home. Peace at home sounds great. But homes can be very fractious and violent places, and many folks are rejected from their homes. And these things can really come to a head at Christmas when people who often spend time apart come together, with mixed consequences. So maybe I need to narrow my focus once again. But what is closer than home?

Ourself. The one thing we are all closest to (both literally and spiritually) is ourself. And given the quirks of evolution most of us have consciousness, self-consciousness, memory and language. We can take action and we can reflect on those actions. We can reflect on our self, meaning we can be in relationship with our self. As a caveat, this might sound simple, but for many of us it’s not and a range of psychological/physical health conditions can affect this. But for those of us able to maintain a stable enough relationship with ourself, the question then becomes, what sort of relationship? One full of judgement, self-loathing and shame, or one full of support, love and compassion? Over the years I have opted for the latter and it has been a long journey – learning how to challenge the abusive voice in my head and turn it into a kind and empowering voice (some of which I have documented on this blog). Just as the shepherds undertook an epic journey across the hills and valleys to meet the baby Jesus, so we can undertake epic quests of the heart.

Over time, I have turned my inner landscape into a more peaceful one. But this isn’t an individualistic effort a la the way capitalism loves to individualise repsonsibility – e.g. if we all do our recycling everything will be fine and let’s not challenge corporate greed etc. This isn’t just about peace for me (but sign me up), it’s still about peace on earth. This requires a collective effort. And while I don’t ever like to be too prescriptive, I do believe that if more of us committed to this inner journey of healing and love, then more of us could form larger collectives of people committed to healing and love. Surely that would take us a little bit closer to peace on earth. And even if we never make it, won’t the journey be truly wonderful.

p.s. I haven’t analysed the biblical quote but I would humbly suggest the angels could do with a broader definition of peace – not just for men but women and folks of all genders –  and not just for those on whom God’s favour rests – but on everyone. After all, many believers say God is love, and if that is true then surely that love is universal and boundless.

The Art of a Healing Heart

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Oof. Donald Trump president, again. But enough about him. I want to reflect a little on this blog and what it means for times like this. It’s called humanconditioned and the ‘About’ page sums it up nicely (which is convenient, because I wrote it):

The human is a highly conditioned being. We’re regularly told who to be, how to behave and why it’s best to just fit in. Yet all this cajoling and moulding is anathema to the one thing the frail human condition craves – freedom. But not freedom from being human but freedom to be human in as many different ways as there are people (with a few important caveats around not hurting other people and the planet).

Back when I started the blog in April 2015 the little title beneath the big one used to read “Because the human is not the humanconditioned” and now it reads “Human unconditioner: apply liberally”. And while I didn’t always know it at the time many of my posts have been expressions of the things I’ve been discovering and learning on my journey. That journey to uncondition myself from the toxic beliefs and behavioural patterns instilled into younger me and to find freedom beyond them.

And let me tell you it’s a wild ride. I am letting go of the fear and anger that used to dictate so much of my behaviour. I am better able to navigate uncertainty. And I have so much time for joy and love and patience and liberation. Fundamental to this journey is an exploration of my past, so as to find the pain and trauma there, and bring to them healing. And when my heart heals, it changes. If anything, it gets bigger. Something else that has grown is my imagination as I take the time to imagine stories and worlds underpinned by queer, intersectional feminism. And throughout all of this I do one of the things I love the most – I write.

I write plays about queer teenagers changing the world they live in, I write novels about a queer guy solving murders in 1920s London, and I write blog posts like this. Unconditioning, healing and changing have unleashed my imagination and heightened my confidence to take creative risks and explore new worlds, and my art is the better for it. To be clear – my writing, including this blog, is not a how-to guide for healing but it is an expression of healing and an exploration of what it takes to change. What it takes to uncondition the fragile human heart and set it free. At a time when so much of the world seems committed to violence and so much art reflects this, it’s vital that we continue (or begin) our journeys of healing. In times like this I think healing is necessary, I also think it is meaningful – especially in a world where it can be so hard to find meaning. Just like love and truth, healing counts, and it has taken me places that a younger me couldn’t even imagine. And I use those experiences as inspiration for my writing thereby creating the art of a healing heart.

Photo by Neal Fowler

Thank You For Still Reading ☺

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It’s been a long, long while since I last posted on this blog. To be precise it was on January 18th 2023, a post called “Cabaret Is Really…Straight, Part 1”, about how much blooming fun the current London run of Cabaret is (and it’s still going!) but how surprisingly heterosexual it is despite its entry in the queer pantheon. And in a funny sort of way, the observations in that post link to why I haven’t written in so long. Because while I could spend my time critiquing the lack of nuanced queer representation in plays, novels, TV shows etc, I have another option – to write plays, novels and TV shows containing more nuanced queer representation.

Which is precisely what I’ve been doing. My play Dumbledore Is So Gay played at the Southwark Playhouse in south London last summer and it was an absolute blast. In other good news, I have my first novel coming out next summer. But more on that another time. Criticism is important in the artistic world as pieces of art are held up to scrutiny and analysed according to different standards and expectations. Nevertheless, there would be no criticism without creation and that’s what artists do – we create. And for many of us, we absolutely love it.

And I say this because we are living through a time of near constant destruction. For me, a UK resident, having just seen a Labour government take power, almost immediately (and entirely unsurprisingly) many Labour Members of Parliament began doubling down on their transphobia, trying to make the lives of trans, genderqueer, gender-questioning and non-binary people of all ages so much harder. What a waste and an abuse of power. But for those of us not committed to destruction there is the chance to create, hence my prolonged absence from humanconditioned.com. And I hope, in time, to be able to share more about the joy of creation and its absolute necessity in the face of destruction. Of course we must critique – of course the contemporary production of Cabaret needs to be analysed from a queer, intersectional feminist perspective…of course! But before I get back to editing my novel and writing my next play I would like to say thank you. I get to see the ‘back end’ of this website and I’m thrilled that so many folks are still clicking the links and reading the articles. It means so much to me that the words I write get read and, for that, I am deeply grateful. Thank you for still reading 🙂

Cabaret Is Really…Straight, Part 1

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Spoilers for Cabaret

Back when the West-End revival of Cabaret premiered in November 2021 there was some controversy around the casting of Eddy Redmayne – a straight chap – in the role of the Emcee, who had previously been played by queer icons Alan Cumming, Julian Clary, Will Young, Neil Patrick Harris and Joel Grey. Redmayne defended the decision and went on to knock it out the park and win an Olivier award. At the time I was disappointed, thinking yet another queer role had yet again gone to a straight person. Meanwhile, the posters for the show depicted numerous queer-presenting folks (but not Redmayne) and that just felt like rubbing salt in the wound. Zoom forward to last week and I’ve now seen Cabaret. And while it’s a blast one thing it really ain’t is queer.

Clifford Bradshaw is a young, American novelist who arrives in Berlin in 1929. On the train he meets Ernst, a friendly German chap who suggests Cliff seek lodgings at the house of Fraulein Schneider, a lonely, cynical woman. After securing a room Cliff goes to the Kit Kat Klub – a raucous, seedy nightclub full of all sorts and presided over by the mysterious and somewhat menacing Emcee. There, Cliff meets the one and only Sally Bowles, a cabaret performer. It’s not long before they’re living together in Cliff’s room and soon after that Sally realises she’s pregnant, although she’s not sure who the father is. Romance even blossoms for the world-weary Schneider as she falls for her tenant Herr Schultz, a Jewish fruit vendor. Act 1 ends with their engagement party which is ruined when Ernst reveals himself to be a Nazi. In Act 2 things go from bad to worse as the Nazis rise to power. Fraulein Schneider breaks off the engagement, Herr Schultz leaves the boarding house, Sally gets an abortion and Cliff leaves Berlin. Life is most decidedly not a cabaret.

It’s a brilliant and tragic musical about anti-Semitism, the Nazis and people’s different reactions to tyranny – particularly those of denial and wilful ignorance. But one thing this musical is not about is queerness, especially as its central relationships are heterosexual – between Sally & Cliff, and Schneider & Schultz. However, in this version Cliff’s sexuality is briefly explored. At the Kit Kat Klub he’s approached by Bobby, a man who he had some sort of relationship with back in London (but it’s all quite vague). Cliff no longer seems keen to pursue things but the pair do briefly share a kiss on stage – the history of this kiss dates back (I think) to Sam Mendes’ West End revival of the show in 1993 and is very much not in the original 1966 version. Later Sally asks Cliff if he’s a homosexual, a question which makes him uncomfortable and he doesn’t answer, leading Sally to take back the question. Beyond this the nuances of Cliff’s sexuality are not explored and Bobby is largely forgotten – making their kiss feel more tokenistic than meaningful, as if the production really wanted to get something ‘gay’ in there despite how straight it is. Talking of straight, let’s not forget the Emcee, about whom there was all that fuss. Tbc!

Hate & Violence

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Content note: discussion of transphobia and trauma.

In my previous post I wrote about pain and love. About how people who have suffered pain often end up inflicting that pain on others. They do not sufficiently explore the nature and origin of their pain, and they do not work to heal it – to create that crucial distance between the source of the pain and their self. I wrote about this because I can relate to being in pain. The queerphobia of my youth and adulthood traumatised me and it wasn’t until my early thirties that I realised the extent of this pain – partly through reading about queer oppression and being able to connect that to my own experience. This knowledge allowed me to slowly create a distance between myself and the experience. I poured love, patience, therapy, friendship and kindness into this gap to help heal the wound. And it has healed.

So when I look to the people at the forefront of the transphobic moral panic I draw from my own experiences to try to relate to them. As a person who’s suffered pain I try to connect with the ways they have suffered pain. Hence the title of that previous post, “Pain & Love”. But in doing this I forget about that other key ingredient of transphobia – hate. That visceral loathing for trans women, that hateful disregard for non-binary people and all the other ways hate manifests in a ‘movement’ that wants to see trans people scared, erased and, for many, dead. These things have nothing to do with pain and everything to do with hate and the activating of that hate to harm other people. Another word for this is violence. Simply put, transphobia is violence.

There’s a phrase that “hurt people hurt people” but, do you know what, I’m a hurt person and I try my damndest to not hurt other people – even the people who hurt me! I try my best not to meet anger with anger, even though a lot of people get angry with me, and feel justified in blasting me with their anger. But that hurts and, surprise surprise, I don’t enjoy hurting people. It’s not fun to shout at others, to wound them, to cause them harm. When it comes to hate “hurt people hurt people” simply won’t do as an explanation (or excuse) for the actions of bigots. “Hateful people hurt people” might work a bit better and while it’s important to understand the origins of that hate, just as it’s important to understand the origins of people’s pain, the first task is to defend those being harmed by that hate. So that’s why I’m writing this post – to remind myself to say no to hate. For so long I was conditioned to excuse and tolerate the behaviour of my abusers, constantly making excuses for them, and empathising with them (while they had zero empathy for me), and that conditioning affected my politics too and how I engaged with oppression. But I’ve changed and this post is a reminder that while healing and rehabilitation are vital destinations on the journey to peace, before either of them, we must first hold haters to account and say no to their hate.

Pain & Love

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In Helena Bonham Carter’s recent interview she defended the transphobia of J.K. Rowling. She said: “It’s been taken to the extreme, the judgmentalism of people. She’s allowed her opinion, particularly if she’s suffered abuse. Everybody carries their own history of trauma and forms their opinions from that trauma and you have to respect where people come from and their pain. You don’t all have to agree on everything – that would be insane and boring. She’s not meaning it aggressively, she’s just saying something out of her own experience.”

My response is simple. Yes. Rowling is allowed her opinion. But if that opinion is transphobic then folks like me will stand up for our dignity and rights. Yes. I do respect where people come from and their pain. But I do not respect when people take their pain, weaponise it and attack others with it. Later in the interview, when asked about Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint speaking out against Rowling’s transphobia, Bonham Carter said: “Personally I feel they should let her have her opinions, but I think they’re very aware of protecting their own fanbase and their generation.” The phrase for when one generation harms another with its own trauma is intergenerational trauma. I want my legacy to be one of ending the intergenerational trauma which I have been given – and there’s been a lot. I’ve spent years exploring, understanding and doing the best I can to heal my pain. And one of the necessary balms I’ve needed to heal is love – filling myself with love from within. The results have proved transformational!

There is now a greater distance between myself and my pain. My trauma no longer defines me and it doesn’t dictate my behaviour (i.e. usually resulting in defensive or aggressive actions). I am better able to take control of and responsibility for my actions, ensuring I inflict less harm on others. This allows me to contribute more to the sum total of healing. This has yielded so much more happiness for me and a greater energy to do that which I think is important. It has liberated my imagination allowing me to imagine worlds beyond trauma, patriarchy and pain, rather than just imagining yet more ways of traumatising others. Love proves a wonderfully sustaining force and so much more motivating than hate. If hate burns like coal then love is a renewable energy like the flow of the river or the current of the tide.

 

Thor: Love And Heterosexuality

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Spoilers for Thor: Love & Thunder and Ragnarok, Doctor Strange In The Multiverse of Madness, Avengers: Endgame

Surprise, surprise, Thor: Love and Thunder did not deliver on its vague promises of greater LGBTQ+ representation despite Natalie Portman telling us the film was “so gay” – compared to what, marriage? Nevertheless, cast and crew have come out to defend the film’s ‘choices’ and here I’ll spend a few minutes responding.

Since her arrival back in Thor: Ragnarok fans have been wondering if Tessa Thompson’s brilliant character Valkyrie is LGBTQ+. Love & Thunder answers that question by confirming that she did have a girlfriend, another Valkyrie, hurray! However, said girlfriend died saving our Valkyrie in a brief flashback in Ragnarok. The MCU gives and the MCU takes away, and now we have yet another dead queer in the MCU pantheon. Firstly, there was the gay guy at the start of Avengers: Endgame grieving the loss of his boyfriend in the Blip (when Thanos annihilated half the universe’s population). Of course, when the film ends and all the blipped people come back do we see the boyfriends united, do we sh*t, we see the straight superheroes reunited with their opposite sex partners. Meanwhile, the teen character America Chavez in the latest Doctor Strange film could be queer because she’s wearing a Pride Progress badge throughout the film or she could just be an ally…the script doesn’t bother to clarify. But in a brief flashback we do see her two mums, yay! Although within seconds they’re sucked into an interdimensional portal and presumably killed, boo! So it would appear there are three options for queer characters in the MCU – invisible, grieving or dead (or some combo of the three).

When discussing Valkyrie’s sexuality Thompson said it was important “not to hang the character’s hat solely on her sexual identity just because she’s a queer character. I think that’s one way of minimizing her humanity, actually, if that’s the only facet that you get to explore her in.” A similar argument has been applied to Elsa and Dumbledore, as if giving them any agency as queer characters somehow reduces their humanity. Curiously, this argument is never applied to straight characters but let me tell you this – in Love & Thunder Thor is 100% defined by his sexuality. When he’s not fighting people/monsters he’s falling back in love with Doctor Jane Foster as played by Natalie Portman. The film is a very silly romcom about two dysfunctional straight people having another go at being together. These characters’ hats are firmly hung on their super powerful hammers and they basically just exist to fall back in love. In this light, Thompson’s comments are interesting because I’d suggest that Thor and Mighty Thor (Dr Foster gets super powers in this film when she picks up Thor’s old hammer to see if it will help her fight stage four cancer) absolutely suffer from minimised humanity as characters. Thor does get a bit of a character arc though as Dr Foster encourages him to keep his heart open but to teach him this lesson she has to die. Yup. This film 100% betrays its new superpowerful female character by killing her. So, what’s the message for young girls – that you’ll either die of cancer or you’ll die trying to be as powerful as the male protagonist, great. Not forgetting Doctor Strange In The Multiverse of Madness which told us that powerful women become unhinged psychopaths hellbent (literally) on having kids, despite all the nuance WandaVision tried to bring to the character of Wanda Maximoff.

Meanwhile, the film’s director Taika Waititi said he’d “love to see [Valyrkie] with a girlfriend in any movie” but in this one thought the “really interesting” think to do was show her as “someone who’s OK with being alone…she’s trying to learn how to love…herself. And I think that’s just a stronger message, no matter what your orientation.” So somehow Valkyrie drowning her grief in alcohol while watching Thor and Jane make out is meant to be read as her being OK with being alone? C’mon, that’s bad storytelling on the best of days and proves there’s a huge gap between what a creative team wants to portray and what actually ends up on screen. Why not give this arc to the relentlessly heterosexual leads? It’s clear these straight characters have zero ability being OK with being alone as they rush to define themselves via heterosexual romantic love…that is until the female partner dies. It’s almost as if straight people depend on problematic, monogamous relationships to facilitate some form of emotional growth…or at least these are the stories they like to tell (a lot).

I think it’s high time straight (and queer) people stopped making excuses for bad queer representation. Maybe instead they could focus on themselves and explore whether their humanity is minimised by heterosexuality (spoilers, it is). They could even take a closer look at heterosexuality itself and where it came from (clue, the word heterosexual didn’t exist until the 1860s and was originally an illness). Having said all that I did quite like Korg the Kronan rock guy revealing that his species is all male and make babies by holding hands over lava. And he gets a rock boyfriend at the end with a big moustache, cute.

 

An Inalienable Right To Be Non-Binary

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“Children who need to be taught to respect traditional moral values are being taught that they have an inalienable right to be gay.”

Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Conservative Party Conference, 1987

Thatcher’s comments were applauded and the following year Section 28 was imposed, which prohibited the promotion of “homosexuality as a pretended family relationship” by UK local authorities. Officially, this meant state schools and public libraries couldn’t educate on LGBTQ+ lives and rights, nor support LGBTQ+ people. However, its reach stretched beyond the state sector and empowered other institutions, such as my private boarding school, to say nothing. Silence and neglect were my education and whenever I heard the word gay it was a slur. Section 28 was repealed in 2003 just around the time I was discovering an interest in guys.

Today, history is repeating itself as Conservative MPs such as Liz Truss (and most of the Tory PM candidates), journalists such as Janice Turner and famous novelists such as J.K. Rowling wage “culture war” on “Generation Woke”, reducing trans rights to a ‘debate’ and refusing to even acknowledge the existence of non-binary people. To this, I say bullshit. I’m older now and I don’t rely on my parents and teachers as I did as a child and adolescent, I can speak for myself. I will claim my inalienable right to be non-binary.

Trans rights are not a ‘debate’ they are human rights. Being non-binary isn’t about being ‘woke’, it’s about being a human. Fighting for my rights isn’t a ‘culture war’ it’s a fight for my fundamental right to exist. Just because I was born into an oppressively binaried system of gendering doesn’t mean I have to stay in it. For some this might mean expanding what it means to be male and female beyond the violent limitations of patriarchy. For me, it means stepping beyond the binary itself. I’m not strong because I’m male. I’m not kind because I’m in touch with my feminine side. I’m strong and kind because I’m human. I don’t oscillate between two poles of gender, i.e. male and female, I’m just me. And while I was profoundly shaped by my male upbringing it does not define me. It’s a part of me, absolutely, but it’s not all of me, and I’m excited to keep growing with the years.

The tactics of our oppressors are very familiar – bullying, neglect, abuse, ridicule, vilification – I recognise these from the playground. And I’ve survived them. I have every intention to survive them again despite the rising levels of transphobia in this country. I will meet their hate by loving myself and championing myself. I will meet their destruction by building a life for myself in which I am loved and championed for who I am. A world built of hate can only burn but a world built of love is beautiful and, after all, non-binary is beautiful.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/75/Nonbinary_flag.svg/1280px-Nonbinary_flag.svg.png

Cancel Culture Ain’t The Problem, Part 2

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It’s taken me longer than I intended to write the Part 2 post to Cancel Culture Ain’t The Problem. Partly because every time I’ve written a response to a current instance of transphobia a new one crops up – Liz Truss, the UK’s equalities minister and foreign secretary, using the Conservative Party’s spring conference to denounce the so-called “ludicrous debates about languages, statues and pronouns” was my initial inspiration but in the meantime we’ve had Ricky Gervais, J.K. Rowling, The Times, the UK Government’s Attorney General…and the list goes on. I was even planning on writing a response to Janice Turner’s deeply transphobic Times article titled “Cult of gender identity is harming children” which she wrote on 21st September 2019, likening gender identities beyond man and woman to Pokemon (i.e. made up). And then I watched the wondrous Jeffrey Marsh’s video on hate and they said four magic words… “hate is largely chaotic”.

That’s when it clicked. I was spending all this time engaging with the work of transphobes be it their articles, tweets, policies, or speeches. I would do my best to articulate a response that explained why their transphobia was bad (and why it was transphobia, full stop, given so many people deny transphobia is transphobia) and to offer a more loving and liberated alternative. I would try to understand them so I could better understand the things they said, wrote and believed. But what they say, write and believe is hate. Transphobia is hate. And these transphobic people have literally zero interest in my blog posts and zero interest in treating trans people such as myself better. Their hate is not thoughtful, well-researched, logical, compassionate and empathetic…it’s just hate. As Jeffrey says, hate is largely chaotic. I was expending so much energy trying to make sense of their chaos. Exposing myself to hate over and over again, trying to turn it into love. And, boy, that is a fool’s errand.

The likes of Liz Truss and Janice Turner will carry on hating me until they don’t (which will probably be never) even while claiming they don’t hate me (if they ever get called out on it, which they probably won’t). They won’t seek to understand me, they’ll just keep hating me. They won’t listen to me from a place of openness and compassion, they’ll hate. They’ll dehumanise me. They’ll ridicule ‘generation woke’, ‘cancel culture’, pronouns, and anything else they want to justify their hate. They’ll use all the familiar moral panic tropes/lies such as ‘threats to children’, ‘paedophilia’ and ‘recruiting young people’. Janice Turner, in her article, even says being non-binary is homophobic. Well, I’m a gay man and a non-binary queer, and I sure for one ain’t homophobic (and nor am I trying to foment hate within the LGBTQ+ community to further my transphobic goals). As Jeffrey says, hate is largely chaotic. Navigating chaos is impossible. Trying to make sense of chaos is impossible. Asking hateful people to listen to me and see me as a human is a job that requires more hours than I’ve got left to live. Hate is a war that has been (chaotically) designed to ensure I cannot win.

I’m done. I care too much about myself to immerse myself in hate. I want to have fun. I don’t want to get triggered every time I try to write a blog post. I don’t want to get caught in hate on the off chance it rubs off on me and I end up hating the haters. I simply don’t have time to hate. And we all know what the opposite of hate is…it’s freedom. A profound personal and collective freedom based on love and unbounded liberation. Of course I’m still going to write sassy blog posts calling out queerphobic tropes in trashy/fun films but I’m no longer going to meet the haters where they’re at. They’re too chaotic to even know where they’re at. They’re too lost in their hate (and on a good day I’d pity them). Having said that, there are still battles I must fight – because our rights and identities are being marginalised and trampled upon. There are material, political and social battles to fight. But I’ll be better resourced to fight them if I do it from a place of such self-love that the hate of others slides off me like water off a duck’s back. At the moment, this ain’t the case, I’m too tired, traumatised and triggered, their hate still hurts. But thanks to Jeffrey I know I can stop trying to make sense of it. “Where does hate come from?” asks Jeffrey and their answer, “Who cares?” I’ll care about myself instead, which feels much more like Queertopia.

*

And talking of utopias…in mine, words aren’t used to hurt and dehumanise. Words aren’t used to worsen people’s suffering and push them closer to death. Words aren’t used to minimise acts of transphobic violence, thereby encouraging them. Nope. In my world, words heal. They give life, offer hope and inspire. They do not cancel, they welcome (while clearly not welcoming prejudice). Words are carefully chosen and freely spoken. Words are acts of love realised through ink on a page, clever technology (which I don’t understand) on a screen, chalk on a wall, and vibrations in air. Quite simply, words are magic.

I Loved Hearstopper But…

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Big spoilers ahead. Without caveat I loved Heartstopper, the queer teen romance taking Netflix by storm. It centres on gay and out 15-year-old Charlie Spring (played brilliantly by Joe Locke) falling for the could-he-be-gay 16-year-old Nick Nelson (played equally brilliantly by Kit Connor). Turns out Nick’s bi and, eventually, the two finally get their romance. They’ve got epic friends as well and the series offers a true diversity of identities – lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans – and so many races beyond white. There’s also a teacher who wears a Pride Progress badge and offers the sort of sassy support all young queers deserve and there are even some parents who seem pretty okay with having queer kids. The show made me laugh, cry and cheer, I loved it. And while it did make me think of my adolescence and how I would have killed for a series like this, I’m just glad it’s here, now.

Thinking of my youth, when I was a teen I had Big Brother’s Anna Nolan (the gay ex-nun) and Brian Dowling (the gay flight attendant). I loved that show so much, especially as it introduced me to a world of diversity my boarding school lacked. What my boarding school didn’t lack was prejudice, homophobia, toxic masculinity, bi-erasure and bullying. I also didn’t have sympathetic parents or teachers I could turn to for support. I fought those battles alone. I also remember Queer As Folk, which was definitely not the family-friendly sort of show Heartstopper is, and Angels In America, which blew my teenage mind. Gay guys cropped up in Eastenders, Hollyoaks and Dawson’s Creek but something like Heartstopper, which is incredibly PG and lacking in violence and tragedy, just didn’t exist. What’s more, I don’t think a show like HS could have existed in my time. I can just imagine the backlash from the cis & straight majority. A majority hell-bent on educating queerness out of the youth (via Section 28) and stopping us having sex (the age of consent for male homosexuals was equalised with straights in 2000). I shudder at the thought of the hate-filled articles in The Times (just like the transphobic ones being written today) and all the ‘concerned’ parents speaking out on behalf of the ‘safety’ of their children. Furthermore, as a writer I couldn’t even have imagined writing a story like HS back in my teens. Gay-ish characters cropped up in my Soul Calibur and Final Fantasy fan fic but it wouldn’t be until much later that I created my first exclusively queer play, aka The Cluedo Club Killings.

But. Just because Hearstopper exists now and paints a nice (enough) picture of the queer teen experience, it doesn’t mean everything’s ok – far from it. There’s a review by Amanda Whiting in The Independent titled, “Heartstopper’s sunny vision of school queerness is a fantasy – but that’s OK”. Whiting comments on how predominantly great the school is in the show, a place where “a gay highschooler’s romantic experience isn’t significantly more traumatic than the regular highschooler’s romantic experience.” Whiting states that this isn’t realistic as the realities are often far more worse. But I’d argue that the vision of the school in the show is far from sunny – Elle Argent (played by the wondrous Yasmin Finney), a teenage trans woman, had to move to a different school because of transphobic bullying; Charlie is bullied for being gay (even though we only see a bit of this in the show); and the teacher who provides support does so in the privacy of his art classroom and there’s little sense any of the other teachers have anything to say. This isn’t sunny, it’s just less stormy. It’s also worth noting that a few people commented on Whiting’s review saying their experience of school is actually better, which fills my queer heart with joy. This is also why I’m being careful in this post to not generalise my experience of school to other people’s. Meanwhile, people are praising the character of Sarah Nelson, Nick’s Mum, played by the iconic Olivia Colman, for being “the world’s biggest and best ally“, mainly because she isn’t a massive bi-phobe when Nick comes out. But, again, I’ve got notes. For 16 years Sarah has assumed her son is straight until he tells her she’s not. That’s not allyship, that’s bad parenting. He’s the one who has to come out – which is a huge amount of emotional labour to expect of any teen and itself a product of oppression – while she’s done nothing to hack down the closet she and the rest of society built around him. She then makes a quick apology which, as far as I’m concerned, ain’t enough. I know Sarah Nelson is played by Olivia Colman but we can’t forgive her characters everything.

These observations are not criticisms of Hearstopper which I’ve made clear I lurve! They are criticisims of our relentlessly queerphobic society, which has fought against the creation of shows like HS for years (oh, but huge shout out to G.B.F. of 2014). And because queers of all ages have been dying for a show like this (and literally dying at the hands of said queerphobic society) it’s unsurprising we’re over the moon. I know I am. And because queers like me are so used to lowering our expectations and being grateful for whatever minor visibility we get (such as Scar in The Lion King), when we do finally get better representation it can seem like the weather is sunny when it’s actually still overcast. But Heartstopper isn’t trying to present a utopic view of school, instead it celebrates a diversity of queer loves and characters, and it does this perfectly. Five stars from me.

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On the topic of utopias, if we want a truly sunny vision of a school then I want it to be a school without bullying, without enforced toxic masculinity, without transphobia (and with more sports than blooming rugby which I know far too well from all my time at all boys’ school). When we imagine utopias we liberate ourselves and we uncondition our imaginations. We can dream as big as we want to (and then bigger still). And just because we can’t live in our fantasies doesn’t mean they can’t inspire us to make changes, even very small ones, in our own lives. I know, from personal experience, how painful the gap between reality and fantasy can be, especially if you’ve got a strong imagination, but I’m learning that our ideal places such as Queertopia or Heaven or Truham Grammar School for Boys are there to inspire us. These places exist within our hearts and minds, and they exist to liberate them too.