Imagine your friendship group, y’know, those people you care about and love spending time with. The people who know you and help you deal with life’s problems. Now imagine being told that one by one they are dying. They’re dying because of a disease called GRID, gay-related immune deficiency. That’s right, gay men are spreading diseases. GRID is deadly. You can get it through physical contact, sharing food, sharing a drinking fountain and even through sneezes. A phone call, another one of your friends has died. Meanwhile, GRID gets a new name, AIDS. The public is outraged and not because people are dying but because gays are spreading diseases. People are calling for AIDS patients to be quarantined, to be tattooed and to be forced to carry identity cards. Another phone call, another death, it’s your best friend this time – if only he’d said something. You worry you’ve got the disease but you don’t know who to talk to. Your family is homophobic, your local bishop is urging the parishioners to stop drinking from the communion cup and, now, your boyfriend has been diagnosed with the disease.

This was the reality for many gay men living through the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and was vividly realised onstage by The Inheritance – a new duo of plays that recently finished showing at the Young Vic. The plays explore the trauma and the stigma that typified so much of the crisis and how both impact on the lives of gay men living today. I am a gay man living today and I often think of what I have inherited from the AIDS crisis. As well as the ability to live positively with HIV, something denied to my forebears, I have also inherited a gaping hole in my history. Not just a lack of knowledge and education but also a lack of people. As the script says, people who could be mentors, friends, lovers, teachers and elders but cannot because they have died.

I have often been told how disappointing gay men are – we spread diseases, we’re narcissists, we’re too irresponsible to be allowed to have sex at the same age as heterosexuals, and other such criticisms. But I wonder if the people who criticise me and my community have spent much time actually thinking about my community and its history. I doubt it. This is why plays such as The Inheritance (and Angels In America) are a vital weave in the fabric of the gay and queer community, a stitch in time to save lives and ensure our future can be better than our past. Fortunately, the show will be transferring to the West End to ensure more folks can enjoy such a smörgåsbord of acting, directing, teching, writing and staging talent. And for those of you who don’t want to spend six hours in an auditorium but do want to know more about the AIDS crisis and its legacies why not click here.

A great post from fellow blogger Matt Bates, who eloquently captures the difficulties our society is facing post-referendum and the need to unite across the many divides.

It’s alright, I never really liked Peepshow anyway, the humour is so predictably cynical and masculinist that it just gets boring. The best thing about it was Olivia Colman, I’m very glad her career has gone stellar, whilst her co-stars just sit on comedy panels with other white, self-congratulatory men. Talking of whom, David Mitchell just missed the point in a recent piece on the Rhodes Must Fall campaign at Oxford University (my previous post explains what the campaign is all about). Like many privileged white men before him he thinks it’s alright to make trivialising jokes about racism without actually adding anything of substance to the debate. Nevertheless, here’s another post to reiterate why racism is bad.

There are an awful lot of arguments to keep the statue up. Some are openly racist – there are still people who venerate Cecil Rhodes and don’t like black people (for example, the many alumni of Oriel College who threatened to take the college out of their will if the statue was removed). Some are ignorantly racist – some don’t really know who he was but think it’s all a bit too much and impolite to ask for a statue to be removed, especially to ask in a forthright matter (the sort of people who’ve never been part of a racial minority). Then there are the likes of David Mitchell, again, just racist, somewhat apologetic about it but certainly not ignorant.

His argument rests on the familiar case that removing the statue is tantamount to “erasing history”. It’s a sensationalist argument that purposefully misses the point and makes it all sound far simpler than it actually is. But he’s wrong. Removing a statue isn’t erasing history, it’s one small act of recognition of the UK’s oppressive and violent legacies. We are not removing books on Cecil Rhodes, nor his Wikipedia page, nor all sites about him that would come up on a google search. If David Mitchell really wants to learn about Rhodes he can use the internet. He even admits to never having seen the statue which implies he’s not that interested, he just wanted an excuse to write a ranty, cynical article. I very much doubt he’ll make the effort to walk down the Oxford high street, look at the statue and think: “gosh, this is a potent reminder of how terrible imperialism is and was, and how we shouldn’t venerate racists”. The reason I think this is because his article, like so many others, is void of any history. He glibly refers to Cecil Rhodes being a “shit” and follows the line, “other than all the racism in history which, it goes without saying, doesn’t go without saying”, with no account of racism in history. So, actually, it does go without saying then? He ignores the history and present realities of racism because it suits him to and he’s too lazy to try to identify with oppressed groups he is not part of.

Mitchell also compares the “unwavering moral self-confidence” of the colonial Victorians who thought Rhodes was “right and good” with the students protesting as part of the Rhodes Must Fall campaign. Yup, he’s comparing nationalistic racists with anti-racism activists. It’s a lazy comparison but maybe he’s just stating that these groups of people have points of view, unlike Mitchell who seems happy to repeat what others have already said. Of course, if he can find an activist who is actively calling for every trace of Rhodes to be removed (this would include the burning of books, the deleting of websites etc) then that would be a problem but he hasn’t and I doubt he will because the RMF campaign is far more nuanced and progressive.

“Do they [the RMF campaigners] think that we can have the debate about colonialism, about racism, once and for all now, and then just move on, having wiped away all offensive traces of our former ills? Do they really believe that they are simply correct about everything now – that, after millions of years, humanity has cracked it, that the truth about how to be has been discovered and must be propagated and enforced? History warns us that terrible things are done by people who think like that.” The answer to both his questions is No and I’m not sure he’s given any examples of people ‘who think like that’ (has he even talked to one of the campaigners?). Why? Because he’s lazy and couldn’t be bothered to do much research for his article and because he’s white and privileged and lacks empathy. There are lots of people like Mitchell – scared individuals who hide their insecurities and vulnerabilities behind acerbic repartee and cynical jokes, who lack the compassion and empathy to identify with others. But rather than dig his heels in and continue to speak from a place of fear and ignorance why doesn’t he step up as a privileged, white guy and do what he can to redistribute that privilege? He’ll probably make lots of new friends in the process as well. So here’s an amazing TED talk by Vernā Myers to kickstart that process.

About a month ago I was in a shop with a friend waiting for her to return a dress. Somewhat curious I asked one of the staff what dress size they thought I might be. A 10 as it turns out. Still curious I thought, sod it, I’ll just try one on. So I did and I liked it and so did my friend. Then a little while after that I found myself trying another dress on and this time I shared the picture on Facebook and it went down well – y’know, plenty of likes and comments (the real stuff of self-affirmation). And now all I want from Father Christmas is a dress.

So why do I, as a guy, want to get a dress? Predominantly because I think life is too short not to. Dresses are brilliant and far more interesting than the often monochrome array of clothes on offer for men. I wore dresses when I little, as part of dressing up, and back then no one batted an eyelid. But then there came an age when I stopped wearing dresses and stuck to trousers and grey t-shirts  – in other words I adopted normalised masculinity and the idea of breaking this norm became increasingly hard to imagine. At school it didn’t even occur to me to wear a dress and if I had, imagine the ridicule, bullying and how stupid I’d look. Someone born with a penis, testicles and presumably a Y chromosome isn’t supposed to wear skirts after all.

But is that really it? A doctor saw my penis at birth and designated me a man and because of that I was put in certain clothes, certain schools and granted certain privileges. So many expectations and assumptions were attached to me just because I was a boy, including what clothes I should and should not wear. But I’m a little older now and less fearful of bullies (because I actually get to choose who I hang out with) and better at interrogating the expectations that others have of me, so maybe I can finally get that dress. Add to this what the sales assistant said to me as I asked for their opinion on the second dress I tried on – they said there are more important things to be worrying about at the moment than whether some random guy is wearing a dress. And I agreed. Even if other people do find it weird, if I look good in it, then why not!

And that’s really the main reason I want to get a dress for Christmas, because it suits me. I’m not making a comment about my gender (that’s for a different blog post) and I’m not trying to parody what it means to be a woman by wearing clothes that are typically sold to women. No. I just want to wear clothes that I like and it’s a sad state of affairs if other people have a problem with that. But it’s their problem, not mine. What we wear is a big deal and we express ourselves through our fashion but that still doesn’t mean we can be reduced to our clothes, there’s so much more to people than that, and nor should it mean that little boys who like to wear dresses should stop having to wear them because others can be too close-minded. Of course, there’s more to this than style, there are bigger questions to be asked of gender identities, roles and norms; the gender binary itself and what biological sex really is. But for now all I want is for Father Christmas to give me that dress and not another lump of coal.

The 21st Conference of the Parties (COP) happened in Paris last week as representatives from all the countries of the world came together to try and save it (y’know, climate change, carbon emissions etc). The results were predictably disappointing especially as the deal that 195 countries negotiated was voluntary – so, each country can say it will reduce emissions but there are no legal mechanisms in place to actually make them do it. An incentive to cut emissions? Cut corners more like. Now, before I bore you with another blog on why COP21 was such a cop-out I thought I’d get a little philosophical and write about time instead (that’s right, the stuff on clocks).

Back in 1992 the Rio Earth Summit (which got the COPs rolling) set out “to stabilise greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system”. 20 years later, the clock’s still ticking, and what with another warmest year on record and a booming fossil fuel industry it kinda looks like we’ve failed. Or maybe some good will come out of the COP21 deal (or should that be “deal”) and there might be just enough time to change things. Or maybe it really is too late and all the deadlines have passed (goodbye Arctic, hello defrosting methane).

Well, I don’t like deadlines. Not only is the word ‘dead’ in them but they’re so pressureful – all that rushing about having to appear busy and that false sense of achievement once I’ve reached one only for another to appear. All that time slipping through my fingers. And maybe it’s not just deadlines that I don’t like but time itself. All those little lines etched on a clock face passing swiftly by, those digits on my Apple watch silently ticking, serving only to remind me that time doesn’t stand still for anyone, not even me (the cheek!). And when it comes to saving the planet, is it too late, have we run out of time?

Or maybe one could argue that we’ve never had enough time anyway – from the moment we set foot on the planet humans have gone about thinking up increasingly inventive ways to inflict violence on each other culminating in a war that will take down our planet as well as our enemies. Maybe our minutes were always numbered from the get go. Or maybe the time we tell is arbitrary – who gets to decide the time when something becomes a problem (why did it take until 1992 to start talking about climate change?), who sets the deadline, who watches the clock and who, if anyone, actually holds anyone to account if nothing has been done by zero hour? Is it a wealthy Western nation that hasn’t really had to experience the brunt of climate change or is it a small island state that faces submergence or someone who has struggled through desertification, increasingly extreme weather patterns and dislocation? Sure, some of us still have time but for many people it ran out long ago. Perhaps all this time telling is just arbitrary anyway.

But if you’re one of those people who really needs a deadline otherwise you won’t even get out of bed in the morning then you can have one, if you must, but not for me. I think caring for others and the planet makes sense without a ticking clock, it’s just a shame it doesn’t make sense to globalised business, the arms trade and belligerent nation states (and belligerent, aspiring nation states). We either ran out of time a long time ago or maybe we never had enough in the first place or maybe time is just a number, a number invented by humans to help us navigate the spaces in between day and night. Either way it’s still a great idea to be nice to one another, to cut down on meat consumption and start sticking it to the globalised military-industrial complex. We can be 100% renewably powered, we can keep fossil fuels in the ground and we can all get on. And there’s no time to waste because there’s no time anyway, so game on. Meanwhile, here’s Brandalism making poster-based mischief in Paris the other week as they brew up a mug of ‘say-it-like-it-is’…