Briefs: The Second Coming

I felt moved to write a blog post because the other night I saw Briefs - all-boy, all-drag, all-faggy, acrobatic, burlesque cabaret from Brisbane, and I can’t get the image of the final solo performer, Mark Windmill aka Captain Kidd, out of my head. 

The whole show was wondrous fun from the very first underwear-and-feathered choreographed disco number, through the array of stripping, burlesque, acrobatics and all-round camp humour and subversion. 

Drag was used in its widest possible sense and animal drag featured prominently. Acts included pet-inspired drag, with a John Waters-esque gross out moment; Evil Hate Monkey, who was very fond of his phallic banana and sticking it in the face of various male members of the audience, encouraging them to take a bite (whilst I don’t want to speculate about anyone’s sexuality, let’s just say he didn’t go for the guys you would obviously read as gay); and a movie-inspired performance which included a re-enactment of the Serial Mom ‘Is this the cocksucker residence?’ prank calls. It’s all hosted Fez Fa’anana aka Shivannah, a Samoan-Australian drag queen of glorious wit and presence. 

There are political aspects to Briefs I think, but in a way that eschews the monotonous earnestness of many supposedly radical queer performances I have seen over the past ten years. The Southbank is of course uber white and middle-class, so the humour and politics are pretty refreshing for both a queer show and a night at Southbank.  The Briefs boys dress in spangly, torn-up Australian flag outfits for the final group number, but with the Aboriginal flag prominently spangling over the top of it. Fez at one point jokes when two of the white performers are cleaning the stage after Mark’s performance (which leaves it soaked) ‘Finally, I’ve made it! I’ve got a couple of white boys cleaning up after me. My people have been cleaning up after white people for years. All I can say is we did a damn better job of it!’ as well as shouting, ‘FUCK TONY ABBOTT!’ and saying all proceeds from the evening will go to feed starving children in poor third world countries ‘like New Zealand’. Above all it was refreshing to see a queer performance which incorporated politics, where the performers and audience were actually enjoying themselves.  

As one of the friends I went with pointed out, Briefs is a big fuck you to straight white masculinity, the ease and strength and stage presence of the performers make macho norms look as weak, contrived and pathetic as they are. I have often felt despair at the idea that as a trans guy I should aspire to dominant ideals of what it is to be a man, which I find gross and fucking boring. Briefs is an excellent antidote to that.

Back to Mark Windmill’s performance, in which he is suspended, holding on with various parts of his body to a ring above a gigantic champagne glass of water, occasionally splashing the audience as he performs acrobatics from above. It doesn’t sound as amazing as it looks, and I doubt a video could do it justice, because although what he does physically is amazing, there’s something in his presence which makes it doubly compelling. Watching this beautiful boy, covered in glitter and tattoos, so at home in his body, defying traditional norms of masculinity, yet so totally strong and connected that you see every individual muscle move I actually felt like crying. I think it would have been moving whatever the case, but I guess as someone who at times feels confused about my own body, often not in the way I’m expected to, but as someone who often stresses about my gender and presentation…to see someone so comfortable, so at home in their body, so unbothered about the constraints of gender, made me feel like crying. It wasn’t just the trans stuff of course, it was that level of comfort and ease the performer seemed to have within himself. Imagine feeling that! Even for a moment. Of course I have no way of knowing what was really going through his head, but it was so powerful to watch.

Now I’ve made it sound serious. It was actually totally innuendo-packed, full of hot boys and many a call-to-arms for the casual alcoholic. Shivannah got one shy young audience member to drink tequila off super cute new twenty year old performer Louis Biggs’s body, zealously anouncing: ‘You can either go for the cheap salt we got from the fish and chip shop or the snail trail left by all the wanking he did last night and hasn’t washed yet, the dirty twenty year old!’ Girl from the audience looked mortified.

Acrobatics, burlesque, subversion, humour and snail trails of cum. Being queer is fun again. 

Captain Kidd

If I could burn everything I would

This song and video sums up how I feel.

Also this.

I don't care if forever never comes

Neko Case has been in my head a lot this week, particularly the album Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, from which the above track comes. It reminds me of the last few years I spent living in Leeds. I unashamedly love That Teenage Feeling, even if it’s acoustic and the title is beyond cheesy, even though there’s pretty much nothing romantic about being a teenager -but maybe that’s why the brave friend Neko alludes to is still holding out.

As a teenager I hated nature and the countryside - I associated it with claustrophobic middle class car journeys and family day trips where there was an atmosphere of tension before one or more of us exploded or imploded. I aspired only to clubs which I was never let into, boys who didn’t fancy me (and I didn’t really fancy, but thought I should) and getting drunk on cheap vodka. I don’t believe in teenage innocence, everything matters too much at the time, at least it did for me, everything had to be analysed and compartmentalised until it was meaningless. I’ve spent much of the last few years trying to unlearn a lot of my ways of thinking since then and since before.

I moved to Leeds when I was 18, for University, I stayed until I was 24. During this period I changed my mind about nature. When I lived in Leeds I also spent a lot of time in the nearby Yorkshire country towns of Hebden Bridge and Todmorden. Working class towns, although increasingly gentrified, where many a permaculture-happy hippy, queer or lesbian migrated. Unsurprisingly several friends of mine either lived in those places or liked to visit. 

I first visited Hebden Bridge when I was nineteen, with my girlfriend at the time. She took me to Sylvia Plath’s grave as well as Hardcastle Crags and all the other places which had inspired Sylvia Plath’s and Ted Hughes’ poetry. A few years later -after that girlfriend and I had broken up, then got back together again in some fraught polyamorous arrangement- we were introduced to a place near Hebden called Lumb Falls. It was a small but impressive waterfall, with a plunge pool below it. It was surrounded by woods, so fucking idyllic you’d want to cry. We told all our friends about it and Lumb Falls soon became a top Leeds queer summer hangout; we’d all leap in from the waterfall. This was unnerving and we felt like we were being so brave; then we’d see fourteen year old local kids who’d find spots to jump from double that height who put us all to shame.

I went back to Hebden Bridge last week, visited the friend who I used to go out with as a nineteen year old then had the fraught poly relationship with. I don’t even think of her as my ex now; when we went out it was such a completely different period in both our lives. Anyway, she lives in Hebden Bridge now and co-runs a market garden there. Before I came I said I was looking forward to helping her out with it but one of my main contributions was almost chopping my finger off with a scythe and then getting irate about the possibility of losing said finger. There was so much blood I wish I’d taken a picture. Everyone else thought I was being a drama queen and it wasn’t that bad and they were probably right. I still have all my fingers and they all still work. 

Scythe incident aside -or maybe that adds to it!- it was so great to revisit Lumb Falls and Sylvia Plath’s resting place and see some of my friends again. Whilst back there I felt inspired to write something early one morning when possibly still a little drunk. Enjoy. Or call me a hippy. Or both.

NB Damage and fear are actually mine alone, the ‘we’ is just conjecture:

Full of damage and fear we climbed into the pool at the bottom of those falls, where the waterfall plunged. Despite some warmth from the now low sun, we shivered in the cold water. We slipped in on the green rocks as we entered, but soon got to the point where our feet couldn’t touch the floor. Where there was darkness. I still always get the initial fear at those points, fear of a hand or a crocodile or some monster lying beneath that will come for my leg and pull me to the bottom. No, there are no crocodiles in Calderdale, the mind isn’t rational.

We got used to the temperature of the water, swam around for as long as we could. When I got out I looked at my hand - the skin had gone from pink to white and the burn on my finger had turned purple where before it had been red.

We climbed into the water, scrabbled over the rocks. We didn’t jump in over the waterfall like we used to when we came here in our early twenties, before it was ever featured as a ‘must see’ place in the Guardian Weekend supplement. Now we've got The Fear -at least with waterfall-jumping- but even so I’m happier now than I ever possibly could have been then, the things that stalk me aren’t over with, but I have come to a point where I can see the slow beginnings of feeling at ease with myself.

From the falls I looked down across the river, surrounded by woods. That night we walked through the town and I found the hills that surrounded unbelievable, the big sky, all that space. I know it’s all the time spent in London; it was as though I’d never been to Hebden Bridge before. I must have been there nearly a hundred times.

When the sun set the sky became a shade of blue that signified night, blue but not black, as it was a couple of days before the shortest one of the year and didn’t properly get dark. As the sun was setting, what was left of the clouds turned orange. I kept thinking about the first time I went here with you, when we were going out, when I was nineteen. I can’t believe I lived until 31.

We sat on the bench near your house sharing a bottle of cheap red wine, looking out across the valley, and I kept repeating how happy I was. I tried to tell you all my thoughts on writing but I couldn’t articulate them properly and sounded like one of those eighteen year old Philosophy students we'd overhear in the bars in Leeds and laugh at from the wisdom of our vantage point of 23. I guess in writing terms, I am still the equivalent of one of those people. You told me about the things you were doing, how it was a struggle to keep afloat, but you read blogs by queer nomads who were hiking from Mexico to Canada and you told me about how they would write about being in the desert, their water and food having run out and they just had to keep hiking until they got somewhere with food and water. And you said to me, well, this is hard but at least I’ve got water and food and a roof over my head. And because my mind is drawn to dark things, I thought of The Road by Cormac McCarthy, a book which I instantly related to, the doom and the horror of it. I feel like I’ve lived that in my own head throughout so much of my life. In the book they just carry on because that’s all anyone does.  

I remember phoning my dad a few years ago. I was slowly trying to claw back my brain after experiencing an inevitable breakdown, something which most of my life had been building towards. I could eat again, that was something. I wasn’t back at work and I couldn’t stand being alone with what I saw as the terrible things inside me. I’d do better for a morning or an afternoon or an evening but the rest of the time was still fraught. I wasn’t sure it was possible to go on living with the horror in my head. The day I called him was a few weeks after the breakdown and I was sat on the grass of Islington green, waiting for a friend to go to a gig with, and I felt myself falling again.

I almost never talk to my family about anything personal, I called out of desperation, I was scared I had drained everything from my friends over those weeks and maybe I had sapped every reserve of empathy from them. I was scared to talk to most people anyway, scared to make myself that vulnerable.

I told my dad on the phone I was going crazy. The first thing he said was, ‘Don’t be daft! Of course you’re not going crazy’. Maybe that was the dismissive white male logic of a man whose motto of ‘just grit your teeth and get through it’ enraged me at the time, but for once I was grateful he’d said it, because I am gullible and part of me believed him. I don’t remember the second or third things he said, the last –which he admitted was cheesey- was that life is the greatest thing there is and even in a life of pain there are moments of light and it’s those moments a person has to live for. I was surprised my dad had said all the things I needed to hear at that moment. I realised that even though things aren’t always perfect between us and we will never truly understand each other, our relationship had become so radically different from how it was growing up, as to be barely recogniseable.

I don’t know if life’s the greatest thing there is, it’s just the only thing. Like writing is the only thing I feel driven to do no matter how frustrating and unrewarding it is. No matter if what I write is any good or not.

It’s morning as I write this. I make another coffee, prepare to climb to Heptonstall, make that obligatory pilgrimage to Sylvia Plath’s grave. And I feel all the shaken-upness in my body and heart and head I felt a few years ago when I could bear it no longer, when I was certain the only place it would take me was insanity, despair, death, and I feel OK.

Bookslut

I strongly believe Peckham Library is the best place ever and if the entire world was destroyed but they left that square in Peckham which contains the Library, the gym and the notorious discount brand pub that sits ironically next to the gym, then things would not be so bad. I mean for me at least, soz if you didn't make it to the square, these things happen. That is Peckham for me, that and Rye Lane and Burgess Park, those are the places as yet undestroyed by gentrification where everyone in the community hangs out, the best places. OK, maybe the destruction of the world could spare Rye Lane and Burgess Park. Oh alright, Nunhead Cemetery too, but anymore and we may as well not destroy the world at all. 

I always feel such a sense of satisfaction going into Peckham Library. I used to work for Camden Libraries and I think all are great places, but perhaps I didn't feel the same sentimental attachment to Camden because I didn't live there. But attached I still felt. When I first started working there I was mostly at Highgate/Archway, young kids would come in from local estates and play in the children's library, they were all very interested in me and would try and work out whether or not I was a boy or a girl based on a series of carefully thought out questions and clues they'd collated. We'd have really fun chats about gender and whether or not it mattered and I introduced the idea that you didn't have to be one thing or the other, it felt a lot more honest, worthwhile and enjoyable than most chats I have about gender with adult queers.

Occasionally the Librarian would ruin it by trying to enforce gender roles on them. There'd be some after school craft thing and the kids would be making model people: 'Are you going to make that one a boy or a girl?' he asked one of the kids. She replied a girl. 'A girl? Well why don't you give her long flowing blonde hair?' he suggested. Like many of the kids who came into the library the girl was Somali and did not herself have long blonde flowing hair but that hadn't occurred to the white librarian. Sometimes a parent would come in and tell the kid what my gender was, or rather what they thought it was. Kids are way more astute than adults though, adults have been told how everything works so many times we believe it and cling rigidly to ideology, plus we've been told not to question, we can't be honest with each other because we've learnt that so many things about ourselves are wrong and we don't want to be further rejected by daring to be forthright, with kids stuff is still possible.

Anyway, a bit of a tangent there..I was originally writing this blog to talk about the last three books I read, all of which I got from Peckham Library but then I got distracted thinking about how great it was.

THE LONELY LONDONERS - SAM SELVON. Written in the 1950s, still completely relevant today and one of the best and most astute novels about London I have ever read, as well as race, migration and class. Narrated in the third person in creolized English, LL tells the stories of 'the boys', all of whom are young Caribbean men recently arrived in London. Amongst the things they come up against are the 'polite' but actually devastating racism of the UK, the internalisation of that (at one time a character angrily addresses the colour Black as the cause of all his problems: '...is not he who causing botheration...but Black, who is a worthless thing') and the hardships of trying to survive in London in the 1950s as a Black working class immigrant. But it's not all Dickensian bleakness, moralising and 'issues' - it's told with warmth, wit and humour. Towards the end of the novel, one of the characters, Cap (most characters are known by their nicknames), struggles to feed himself by attempting to trap seagulls outside his window. This is soon after another episode when poverty drives 'Sir Galahad' to hunting pigeons in the park only to be screamed at as a 'monster' by a passing white woman who rushes to locate a policeman. The novel touches upon many of the absurdities and hypocrisies of the UK, which are of course always most visible to 'outsiders'. The novel also talks a lot about the inexplicable lure of London:

What is it that a city have, that any place in the world have, that you get so much to like it you wouldn't leave it for anywhere else? What it is that would keep men although by and large, in truth and in fact, they catching their royal to make a living, staying in a cramp-up room where you have to do everything - sleep, eat, dress, cook, live. Why is it, that although they grumble about it all the time, curse the people, curse the government, say all kind of thing about this and that, why is it, that in the end, everyone cagey about saying outright that if the chance come they will go back to them green islands in the sun?

The conclusion you'd have to draw from the book, and possibly from living here, would be it's something to do with summer. But then 'Lonely Londoners' is pretty short, read it for yourself why don't you? 

THE ROAD - CORMAC MCCARTHY - Holy fuck. This book destroyed my mental health. At least for a day or so. Not because it's disturbing, which it is, but because I couldn’t BEAR to leave the characters and go to sleep. I had to find out what happened to them, it was completely impossible to close it without knowing. It’s the story of a father and son, but don’t let that put you off, it's set in some horrible dystopian future which is of course a definite possibility, some kind of enormous environmental catastrophe has struck and most of the world’s resources have been destroyed, nature itself has been ransacked and all trees are burnt out, charred. Few people have survived and of those that have, many become cannibals capturing and eating (and worse) their fellow survivors. There is a constant sense of danger and fear of capture but the father and son must keep moving, though seeing as nowhere has been spared the devastation their chances of finding any sort of happy ending at their destination, the coast, are pretty slim. It’s such a brilliant book. I read it because it was on Oprah's bookclub. Not really (although it was on the bookclub, it was even made into a film), I read it because someone told me it was the one book they’d save if their house was on fire and I totally understand why. 

There’s an obvious metaphor which I doubt the author consciously intended because it’s maybe a bit trite, but I was reading the book and thinking, why the fuck are they even bothering, it’s hopeless? But that could probably be applied to most peoples’ lives even when not in such a grave situation. You could also read it as all our lives are pointless if you wanted to be more cynical, but you'd have to be a bit of a jerk to not feel at least in some ways moved by the plight for life. I see it as a defense of living, no matter how hard.

ANTWERP – ROBERTO BOLAÑO. I love Roberto Bolaño but I have to admit I didn’t really follow this novel, perhaps because it's told in fragments and I kept putting it down and then picking it up a few days later. This is one of his early efforts, written in 1980, 22 years before it was published. A few things jumped out at me though, but actually mostly the intro where he looks back on his situation at the time of writing:

My sickness, back then, was pride, rage, and violence. Those things (rage, violence) are exhausting and I spent my days uselessly tired. I worked at night. During the day I wrote and read. I never slept. To keep awake, I drank coffee and smoked.

Thank god there was no Facebook to distract him!

Seriously I really recommend Bolaño. I read ‘The Skating Rink’ and his short stories and I want to read more by him but I honestly couldn’t make a critical comment about ‘Antwerp’ one way or the other, I've heard it's good from other people, so it may be more my poor concentration skills than Roberto himself. One day I’ll give it another go maybe.

Golden Age of Hustlers

I remember when I first heard the wondrous Mx Justin Vivian Bond performing this song in a grotty faux-squat in Oval not long after I moved to London six years ago. JVB was covered in glitter and accompanied by the equally sparkly, angelic-looking Nath Ann. The song cut through everything else I saw that day because JVB imbibed it with such warmth, rawness and emotion. Originally 'Golden Age' was written and performed by transsexual punk chanteuse Bambi Lake and was about the Polk Street hustler scene in San Francisco in the 1970s. I got it in my head today because I was reflecting with sadness upon how much division there seems to be amongst so many trans people at the moment, queers as well. Of course we have differences and we aren't going to agree all the time and the 'can't we all just get along?' thing can be used to silence those with already marginalised voices, but recently I've seen a lot of queer and trans blogosphere discourse, particularly with gender, which has involved pretty strong lines being drawn around identities that for many of us are quite blurry. Of course we're gonna disagree on stuff but I worry when arguments become dogmatic and try to speak to an assumed shared experience which we don't all have, even if we use the same words. I identify as a trans boy but I know many people who ID the same with a completely different idea as to what that means. Julia Serano recently wrote a blog cautioning against generalising about the experiences and positioning of all trans women and all drag queens. 

For me personally being queer was supposed to be about throwing the rule book out the window, but the more time I spend around queer public discourse (the internet) the more I find it has become a total protocall fest. And no one is even sure what the protocall is, hence we're all terrified when we take to our keyboards lest we say the 'wrong thing'. Theory is fine, disagreement is fine, but when arguments try to prove there is a correct way of actually being, living one's life or identifying, or ascribes a universal meaning onto the experience of a particular group we have a problem.

I feel really over judgement, dogma, censorship, us and them.

Anyways, I was thinking about this song today and how it evoked a sense of unity between trans people, hookers, drag queens, gays, queers and other awesome outcasts, so I looked it up and only discovered that they'd finally made a blooming video of it directed by Silas Howard (formerly of Tribe 8, who also made a pretty decent film for Valencia: the Movie/s) and Erin Greenwell. Vid is totally intergenerational and multi-gendered and features people like the amazing transgender activist and writer Kate Bornstein as well as the Brooklyn drag queens Merrie Cherry and Untitled Queen. Me being me, I missed the premiere two months ago and am only now discovering it. Oh well.

There's a good intro to it and discussion with the directors here but I really really like these two things Silas said about it which got me a bit emotional so I will quote them:

'The song takes place in the mid-1970's, an era Bambi describes as an innocent, "golden age" of hustling in a pre-AIDS San Francisco. Yet she side-steps romanticizing the era, honoring the loss of many in a community living on the edge of social acceptance. In this way I feel the song is timeless, speaking not only to the AIDS epidemic but also the crises of a diminishing landscape and the collateral cost for certain creative rebels.'

"I'm obsessed with the idea of queer and trans lineage and how the past and future can live in the same room. Perhaps it's in part due to coming of age in the midst of loss from AIDS, that I feel a kinship to the mentors gone too soon. Though Bambi wrote the song in the early '90s, in a community of "misfit" queers, sex workers, transsexuals, queers and punks, it speaks to a modern time in that many of us still look for places where all parts of ourselves can find home. I'm grateful to Justin Vivian Bond for carrying Bambi Lake's legacy forward, allowing us access to learn from Bambi as a performer and a punk transsexual icon of an older generation, who prevailed and created art that represented an experience of living outside the "mainstream." I think of the music video as a kind of love letter from our past to the next generation."

A FINAL NOTE: if you like Mx Bond, you will like prob like this cover of the Bahamian musician Exuma. I just remembered seeing them doing it live in Soho and it was pretty great.

Benny Lava

I am not sure how many times I have watched this video now but I can tell you it's a lot. Song used, rapping and ostentatiously high budget video are all top notch, much like are Heems and Riz's dress sense. As usual I didn't watch this till a week ago and it's been out like a month or something but just in case you're as slow as me...

Shit they say to sexworkers

So the 'shit' meme surely died an over-saturated death about two years ago but I only recently came across this one and it is pretty funny and spot on. The questions 'But what do you really do?', 'What do you do? I mean apart from this?' and -as in the vid- 'This isn't a job, it's just something you do to make money' come up again and again in some form or other posed by therapists, friends and other random people I've told about my work. Some people try to come up with better career options for me without asking whether that's what I want. They ask me what is it I really want to do because they assume I couldn't possibly be happy being a sex worker. These questions have been asked of me an amazing number of times since I started doing sex work.

I watched a predictably annoying documentary about sex work the other night (though by no means the worst - it at least interviewed workers and critiqued the bizarre UK laws around brothel-keeping) where some uncharismatic hipster who used to work for vice went round asking various sex workers (though all cis women) about their work. Though the uncharismatic hipster got a range of answers she still drew her own conclusions and spouted off something earnest about the risks of sex work being high at the end. I won't pretend there are never any risks and of course this depends very much on a worker's particular situation (and laws that criminalise and stigmatise workers or clients, along with police harassment, definitely make working riskier) but to just round off with such an oversimplified single line which actually didn't reflect the experiences of all the workers she spoke to was pretty meaningless and not very useful or informative. In any case risk does not mean that we should have our agency denied us or that we're just victims to be pitied and rescued as some people seem to think (who if they actually cared about sex workers would listen to what we needed or support sex worker initiatives around safety and organising rather than trying to criminalise us and our clients).

One of the most infuriating attitudes is that if a sex worker doesn't enjoy the sex all the time then this is proof of victimhood. Though many of us do enjoy our work it's important to remember that in any profession NO ONE enjoys their work all the time and few people enjoy it most of the time.  Generally speaking having sex with someone you're not attracted to and not particularly enjoying the sex isn't the end of the world for a lot of people and does not feel worse to everyone than doing any other job you feel so-so about, particularly if the hours are better. It seems to boil down to some weird out-dated moralistic idea that sex without love will kill your soul. But whilst most people can cope with the idea of one night stands/fucking someone you barely know it's harder for  many to get their heads round someone being paid for it. Sex work is the best option for some people, it certainly was for me, but it seems like the hardest for so many others to respect. There are no exit programs for nine to five office jobs and surely this is where some of the greatest human misery accumulates. Of course sex work is not for everyone and if a person felt violated and traumatised every time they see a client then that is a very specific scenario but even so if a person who felt that way still chose to be a sex worker their choice should still be respected and rather than pathologising that person those with a saviour complex would do well to look at the impact of cuts, austerity measures and capitalism instead of assuming the worker has a false consciousness.

As a sex worker you can't talk publically about having a bad day at work without someone trying to exit you, where else does that happen? Rape/abuse are not the same as prostitution and conflating the two things together as many moralists (some who think they're feminist) do just adds to the whorephobic and often sexist myth that if these things happen to a hooker they are asking for it and they deserve it, therefore legitimising the behaviour of perpetrators when they commit these acts against a sex worker or someone they perceive to be a worker.

As I'm a trans guy who doesn't pass a lot as male I get the additional back-handed rhetoric where people feel the need to ask 'how's that going because you're quite niche aren't you?' or when I was telling someone things were quiet they responded by letting me know they had a friend who was a sex worker who made loads of money 'but she was really conventionally good looking'. Of course society's conventional ideals about looks/gender presentation are favored by a lot of clients and you can't exactly go work in a parlour if you look like me but comments like that are still pretty annoying, though sometimes I say them myself about myself so I don't even know exactly where I stand on people saying stuff like that. But I think it's still annoying. After I told someone I knew about a bad experience with a client they told me that when I have surgery and start taking hormones I'll get different types of clients and I can start to charge more and I avoid situations like that in future. That may be true seeing as the world is transphobic and sexist but it's still fucked up and to me it felt like she was saying, 'in your current circumstances you can't expect to be treated any better than that'. I think it's great for people to care about you if something shit happens and support is awesome but she didn't think to ask how I might strategise to deal with that stuff in the future it all came down to whether I would pass better as male. What if I didn't want to take hormones and have surgery?

Anyways if I ever get it together to make trashy queer hooker comedy youtube sketch show I will begin by having an earnest white middle class woman's voice overdubbing a scene in an office, reeling off some made-up statistics and talking about the terrible conditions in which these poor people have to work, how many of them came from abroad to the UK dreaming of starring in West End theater productions yet now they are temping eight hours a day for less than the living wage at a well-meaning if dubious and soul-sucking not-for-profit.

If I'm honest though I'm actually a bit bummed no one's ever asked me what the weirdest thing I've ever done was.