Love

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

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.

 

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.

*

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.

The Shape Of My Love

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The shape of my love is the shape of my heart and the shape of my heart is an approximation of a heart because it has been shaped by my history. I am the ways I have been loved and the ways I have not been loved. That was the love my heart could give, was trained to give, and if I want it to be different I must learn my history so I can see the mould and break it.

When I was growing up I learned to see the pain of others and to feel compassion and offer empathy. I learned that the needs of others are important and my task is to accommodate those needs. I learned how to listen. I learned that in a world in which gay and queer were slurs that there were pieces of me that would never be seen. For decades I believed this and it wasn’t that I thought these pieces would never be seen it was that I couldn’t even imagine what it might be like if they were. Those around me were comfortable with this and it pleased them. I liked pleasing people, it helped me to feel liked and to feel like I belonged. For a long time I assumed my heart was heart shaped and I was told it was because we, all of us, had grown accustomed to lacking a valve or two. I was dutiful to patriarchy – to its assumptions of gender binary and its glorification of heteronormativity. I laboured hard to belong because it was in this world that I was given love.

I say I laboured but, really, it was an unpaid internship, if that, and my line manager was ignorant and her manager was prejudiced and the business model was bankrupt. So now I do the only thing I can – quit. I cannot accommodate the pains of patriarchy and I will not be dutiful to the cis-tem and the heteronorm. I have to protect my heart, which is learning to pump new blood into valves which are opening for the first time. The mould in which my heart was set was too small. It was warped. The history in which I grew up was not mine. I will rewrite this history so my heart can be the shape of one and I can love properly. I will start by loving me.

Abstract, Detail, Art, Texture, Background, Structure

“Truth counts, Truth does count.”

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So says Mr Emerson in E.M. Forster’s lovely novel, A Room with a View, about repressed middle class Edwardians who happily travelled around Europe and went skinny dipping in ponds. Like those fusty Edwardians I too was long schooled in the fine English arts of passive aggression and stiff-upper-lipness. Confrontation was something to be avoided at all costs and emotions were best left repressed. Nevertheless, after a breakdown in my early 20s I slowly learned that mental health is vital as is the ability to experience, process and communicate my emotions. A not dissimilar breakdown last year taught me that telling the truth is also vital, be it recounting my own experiences of suffering and isolation as a gay man or speaking up for the wider suffering within the LGBTQIA+ community. Just like Lucy Honeychurch, the protagonist of A Room with a View, I have learned that love and truth do count, they really do (incidentally, my privilege let me go travelling in South America, much further away than Europe, and there was definitely the odd bit of skinny dipping).

The COVID-19 pandemic requires love and truth on an unprecedented scale. A love that is being demonstrated in abundance by the UK’s key workers who are working tirelessly to save lives and a love we need to show towards ourselves, those we care for, the vulnerable, the NHS, our key workers and, actually, everyone. And the truth matters just as much because many people still don’t understand the severity of the pandemic and the need for us all to take action following the recommendations of the WHO (World Health Organisation) and medical experts. This includes staying at home, regardless of whether we have symptoms or not, an incredibly simple yet powerful thing we can do to stop the spread of the virus.  We can follow the advice of the government as well but we must remember that the government has been slow to act, so there will be times when we can act more responsibly than Boris Johnson is telling us to. It’s in our hands (but hopefully not on our hands because we’re washing them regularly).

This isn’t a self-help blog and I can’t tell you what to do but I can tell you that I am doing my best to honour truth and love. I’m having difficult conversations with people I care about (conversations we might call ‘conflict’ but are actually about trying to do what’s best for everyone) and encouraging people to speak up for themselves. And, I confess, there are times when I have shied away from these conversations because I fear someone’s reaction more than I do the consequences of inaction. I will do my best to change this behaviour because it could save lives. I am trying to look after myself so I’m in a better place to look after others. I am trying not to catastrophise (too much) but I am also trying not to deny the rapid ways in which ‘normality’ has irrevocably changed. I am trying to love myself, I am trying to tell myself the truth, and I am taking it one day at a time. Over to you Mr Emerson and Dr. Rita Issa:

“…we fight for more than Love or Pleasure: there is Truth. Truth counts, Truth does count.”

Home Is A Verb

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“Home, imagined, comes to be.”

The Operating Instructions, Ursula Le Guin

Unsurprisingly, the late Ursula Le Guin has a lot to say about home. She talks of the need to find your people, to build customs and habits together, to live out traditions and to question them too lest they become stagnant and oppressive. She talks of how the written word can connect us to other minds throughout the world and history and, how there, in that text you can find a piece of home as well. She talks of the need for listening and silence as integral acts of community building. And the more she talks of home the more it becomes clear that home is a verb before it is a noun.

Because home is something we have to do for ourselves and for others. Life for the individual is a long process of homecoming as we, hopefully, delve deeper into ourselves through the years, learn more about ourselves and become more of who we are – sloughing off old ways of being that don’t serve us anymore and striving through painful and violent impositions that others, alive and dead, may have enforced upon us. Thus, as we live so we are always coming home. Life for the collective is not a dissimilar process as we learn how to live well together, how to enact our love, set our boundaries and share what we have. Ceremonies, celebrations and rituals are a vital part of this – be it praying together, getting KFC together, or chilling out on the sofa – as they help to keep the social fabric strong as we weave it over and over again. Home is a collective endeavour.

However, for many, home is a painful and difficult process as we are so often cut off from ourselves and others be it due to the swift atomisation of ‘modern’ society, a lack of teaching and knowledge about all the different ways there are to be and live, and/or violence. So home becomes a privilege but, really it shouldn’t be, all should have the right to home but it is clear we do not. Thus, home can be a mindset and a mission for those with the privilege as they can make the space for others be they refugees fleeing other countries or LGBT+ folk cut off from their own gender and sexuality by repressive societal norms and so many other forms of violence or those facing the prejudice of being HIV positive. Home is not something that can be taken for granted, home must be done and it must be done together over and over again. So, yes, I think home is a verb – a state of being, possibility and hoping. And, if we’re lucky, home, imagined, will come to be. So let us never stop imagining.

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…