Empowerment

Dumbledore Is So Gay (Yes, He Is)

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It’s showtime…tomorrow! After a long 18 months, sell-out success Dumbledore Is So Gay is back onstage, at the Pleasance Theatre from 21st – 26th September, get your tickets here! And it’ll be available online from 27th Sept – 11th October. Below are a few paragraphs from me that will be included in our online programme.

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Early 2019, I was doing the Pottermore Sorting Hat test. I got Gryffindor. I had mixed feelings because some of the Gryffindors can be pretty self-righteous (here’s looking at you Percy Weasley) but gold and red are great colours. Then one of my friends got Hufflepuff and, I’m ashamed to say, I made fun of them for it.

Early 2019, I’d been at a school in North London helping run a workshop on LGBTQ+ issues. I shared a real life story about a particularly bad experience of being bullied at school when I was a teenager. After I’d told my story some of the students wrote questions on post-it notes and one asked whether someone had helped me through the bullying. The answer was no, I had been completely alone. The student also wrote that they would have helped me through it, which kind of broke my heart. A lot of my life caught up with me then and so began a very acute and difficult period of depression.

Early 2019, a few months after the workshop and with the Sorting Hat on my mind, I started writing a script. The character of Jack quickly emerged, a Harry Potter super fan who struggles with getting sorted into Hufflepuff just as much as he struggles with his sexuality. The early drafts were written for me, more an exercise in figuring out and reclaiming my story. I’d read the book Straightjacket by Matthew Todd during the summer of 2016, which predominantly focuses on the experiences of gay men in contemporary society and the absolute minefield of issues they face, including prejudice, isolation and suicide. Over the following years I was able to locate my own experiences in this minefield. It was a tough reckoning that I never saw coming and absolutely no one had prepared me for. Towards the end of an early draft Jack wishes he has a Time Turner, so he can go back and transform his life for the better. Wait a second, I thought, maybe that could become part of the plot…

Early 2020 and rehearsals were underway for the first run of the show at the VAULT Festival. It was no longer my story but Jack’s and with lots of help from the cast and crew, especially director Tom, the script was well polished and stage-ready. The final week in February was a dream come true and we had an absolute blast staging the show. As a queer child and teen I lacked agency and power. I was told the wrong stories and experienced too much pain and indifference. It’s only as an adult that I can look back and better understand what it was I went through. It’s only now I can appreciate why so many queer folks don’t make it, including people I knew. I want this to change. So older queers like me can heal and younger ones won’t get hurt in the first place. For this, we’ll need good stories, which is why Jack’s back to take centre stage. His story is a testimony to the strength and resilience of LGBTQ+ folks, and a celebration of the endless immensity of the queer spirit.

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Don’t forget those tickets, Pleasance Theatre and  online!

I Think It Is Called Belonging

RobertLeave a comment

The Quest, think Queer As Folk meets Lord of the Rings, just ran for a week at the Arcola Theatre in East London. For six nights I got to watch a fabulous, queer troupe bring a range of characters and worlds to life. There was Fred, the bisexual teenager on his first Tinder date, whose past catches up with him, and Zemuel, of the mythic Valley of Embers, sent on a quest to banish the monster that haunts them. There were other characters too such as adoptive mothers, gossiping friends, a village Elder, a sarky waiter, a loving dad, teachers, a LOTR-disliking intersectional feminist, a best friend and a waterfall lover. The directing was fantastic and it was amazing to see my words brought to life on stage. And the audiences loved it. There was laughter, tears and many words of congratulations. Many people felt deeply moved by the stories of Fred and Zemuel, and they hit home for a lot of the team as well, as growing up queer in an oft hostile world means we are all faced with monsters. So, really, this was so much more than a play, it was its own quest, one for belonging.

Because that’s what I crave as a member of the queer community. I want to feel like I belong among people who care for me and care for our wider community. People who are spiritually, emotionally and physically nourished, and given a chance to heal the wounds of their past so they can live lives of greater freedom and face the difficulties of today. I want us also to be able to enjoy the many joys of our lives – such as making an ace piece of theatre. There is so much unbelonging in the world, for so many of us, and the queer community is hit by this unbelonging at a number of intersections. As the King of Brunei imposes the death penalty for gay people, so the fight for survival is still very much real. In Britain there will continue to be high rates of LGBT+ suicide, especially among young people, there will be LGBT+ homelessness, and a range of mental health problems exacerbated by societal prejudice and indifference. It’s a tough world to live in and the quest for Queertopia continues. A quest that straight and cisgendered folks need to join, so they can offer their power and allyship to their queer companions who will stand by them in return (and make ace pieces of theatre to boot).

So, thank you to the wondrous cast and crew of The Quest who helped prove that Queertopia can exist here on earth. While the play might be over I know we have all come away with pride and, hopefully, a little more of our soul – a sense that even though many of us might still struggle with belonging in this world, we can at least belong to ourselves more deeply and, hopefully, one another. Now in an act of unforgivable arrogance I will leave the last word to Zemuel, after they have vanquished their monster and returned to the villagers in the Valley of Embers, their new home…

“They are all there. A feeling wells inside of me, one I can barely name, but I think it is called belonging.”

The Valley of Embers – photo courtesy of …

Bertie Did Burlesque!

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Back in the autumn of ’16 I had the privilege of watching the fierce, fabulous, queer, Canadian, Burlesque wunderkind that is Rubyyy Jones perform at Ku Bar’s first ever Kindness Kabaret. They stripped to sparkly underwear, they sang and they stuck two fingers up at the God awful patriarchy. Suffice to say it was love at first sight and a year and a half later I found myself in a small dance studio in East London being coached by Rubyyy in the art of Queerlesque.

I signed up to the course for two reasons: one, I do actually love Rubyyy and couldn’t pass up the opportunity to spend more time with them and, two, I wanted to turn my overly-intellectualised dissatisfaction with mainstream beauty norms into something practical (put my money where my sparkly jock strap is, sort of thing). The Queerlesque classes themselves were a wondrous adventure – I learned about classic burlesque, neo-burlesque, lip sync, choreography and costume. I also got to do the course with five other epic folk, all there for different reasons and all of whom taught me lots about dancing, stripping, living and being queer. The course culminated in a graduation show at the Hackney Showrooms (just last week actually) and, given I had never done anything like this before (discounting singing and dancing in front of the mirror), I had to come up with an act. It came in the form of Bertie. He cropped up as an idea early on in the course and gradually took shape: a former public schoolboy and Oxford University graduate conditioned into toxic masculinity and poshness but yearning to reveal his inner queerness (sound familiar!?). Cue chinos, loafers and a tie being stripped away to reveal tights, jock-strap and mesh. And then I had to perform the thing in front of an actual, live audience!

Rubyyy led the way and one by one we did our acts until my name was called. Pushing my need to pee aside I stepped up onto the stage and, basically, had fun. I wasn’t there to prove myself to others or try and be sexy for them, I was there for me and for Bertie. Besides, sexiness is in the eye of the beholder, so I can’t control that, but I can bare my body and own it. I can occupy space and queer it. I can be me and have fun. Don’t get me wrong, there were a lot of nerves, but I did what my acting friends do – I acted confidence until I felt it. And it felt great to rip off the layers of posh programming and show the real(er) me beneath and it felt great to get applauded for it. So, for one night, myself and six others (we had a bonus guest appearance from a previous Queerlesque course), led by the fantastic Rubyyy, kittened by the fab Lydia, shared a bit of our souls and varying amounts of our skin. Together we created the world we long for – queer, fabulous, inclusive, just and joyous. At least that’s what it felt like to me. Now, here’s Rubyyy…