DAVID HOYLE by David Dobson

David Hoyle

By David Dobson

“I hope nobody’s been offended” 

I remember late one night watching Channel 4 (way past my bedtime) when all of a sudden Divine David happened to me! I was completely unfamiliar with all things Avant-Garde but already felt a little out of sorts with the limited access I’d had to the scene in the village. It was powerfully liberating for me at that time to see not only a man in drag speaking to complete strangers in the street but a man looking like a ghoul from a Munch painting asking some very obscure questions of unsuspecting passers by. The completely confrontational and subversive nature of The Divine David Presents appealed to a side of me that expected more from gay culture.

Now I can’t honestly say that I watched the show religiously from that point on (the rigors of a late night TV schedule don’t gel well with the teenage stoners busy schedule) but the few times I did manage to catch it stuck with me to this day. Fortunately I now have the whole series to watch at my leisure and the joy has in no way diminished.

Whilst I regrettably never got to see David Hoyle perform as The Divine David live, I have seen a few live performances since The Divine prefix was abruptly terminated in 2000 and he still does not disappoint. It is rare to see a live performer that creates such an easy air of fear and joy. The anarchic paintings and diatribes on killing one’s children are not everyone’s cup of tea but whenever I see him, it’s like a gentle reminder to try and not take it all too seriously.

ARMISTEAD MAUPIN by Will Roberts

Armistead Maupin
by Will Roberts

I grew up in a village near Blackpool in the 1990s. Possibly as far away as you can get from San Francisco in the 1970s. Yet Armistead Maupin and his 'Tales of the City' books spoke to me as a 14 year old, and showed me it was ok to be different, it was ok to follow my own path and that I wasn't quite so alone.

Don't get me wrong, as stated, I grew up near Blackpool, gay wasn't an alien concept to me. It just felt so removed from who I was and more than just a little bit terrifying.

The Tales of the City series opened my eyes to a world where people were accepted and loved for their differences. A collection of misfits and drifters - the type of people marginalised and on the outskirts of society - all collected together as a surrogate family under the roof of 28 Barbary Lane. Despite their often outlandish adventures in and around the Bay Area, they never stop being fully rounded, living, breathing characters. They're not just a family to each other, though, they're a family to me too. Every time I re-read the old books, or a new one comes out, it's like checking in on loved ones.

I remember going into Waterstones in Blackpool and casually looking at whichever sections boarded the dreaded 'Gay and Lesbian' nook. Looking around until the coast was clear, then smash and grabbing the next volume in the series. When I'd get home I'd devour each entry in a matter of days. Always so full when I was done, but still hungry for more.

They were the first books that made me laugh and gasp out loud. They were the first books that made me cry (the beginning of Babycakes... I'll say no more), and Armistead Maupin is the man who gave me this world. This wonderful world created by this wonderful man.

He inspired me to go travelling around the States and spending a month in San Francisco. It felt like coming home. I met a guy who loved the books as much as I did and we visited all the locations referenced. We walked the streets holding hands and kissed in Golden Gate Park. I felt like the spirits of Anna, Mouse, Mary Ann and the rest were alive in me.

Before the release of 'Michael Tolliver Lives' - Maupin's return to the Barbary Lane characters after 18 years away, I went to listen to him speak in Manchester as part of the Queer Up North festival. To me it was the equivalent of going to see a favourite band, only bigger than that. I can't think of one person who's touched on my life in such a positive way as he has (outside of family and friends, obvs). He was as funny and articulate in person as he is in the written word, and it felt so magical to listen to him in an auditorium full of people who felt the same. When it came time for the Q&A I got to ask a question. I nervously stood up and told him what he'd meant to me growing up, and asked if he'd had any idea whilst writing of the impact his works might have had on someone like me. He answered that he had not, but he thanked me for telling him so.

In hindsight it was a silly question. In the 70s and 80s as he wrote his serialised stories in the San Francisco Chronicle, the world was a much smaller place. He wrote about what he knew - with added, ludicrous drama, it just happened to be that what he wrote and what he knew was so incredibly appealing to millions of people across the world.

He's given so many people an extended family they may or may not have known they were looking for. He's done so with charm, wit, courage and subversion. For these reasons Armistead Maupin will always be my gay hero, and will always be my most favourite funny uncle.

JOHN WATERS by Matthew Rothery

John Waters

by Matthew Rothery

My Dad was a big Johnny Mathis fan. So there’s a bit of a link there. But I’m not writing this blurb about Johnny Mathis, though I easily could. No, I’m here to tell you about the utter bloody shock value of John Waters, the filthiest film director alive. Of course John Waters is a huge Johnny Mathis fan. He’s one of John’s obsessions, one of many obsessions. There’s a whole chapter about Johnny Mathis in his book ‘Role Models’.

So I developed my own little obsession. I had a great introduction to John Waters courtesy of some good friends who lent me a pile of videos. ‘Pink Flamingos’, ‘Female Trouble’ ‘Polyester’ and ‘Desperate Living’. I’d seen ‘Hairspray’ and ‘Serial Mom’ when I was much younger but I was about 21 by this time and just beginning to discover underground film and I was attracted to this ‘trashy’ midnight movie era of cinema that celebrated queer identity and smeared it all over the screen. John’s films taught me that being an outsider was the best way to be. It was desirable to be gay, to be queer and I should be damn proud of it. I felt part of something that was important. Divine played a huge part in this, being fat, being fabulous and playing with gender in a way that I was discovering for the first time.

It was later when I read John’s books, watched his ‘stand-up’ and actually went to listen to him speak in person that I felt he reached out to me as a gay man. He helped me to understand how I fit into society. Actually, I don’t fit in. But that’s better, that’s what I want. I want to be on the outside. John helped me understand the absurdity of real people and appreciate the ordinary but yet quite extraordinary lives of others.

He brought me to other queer artists like Kenneth Anger, he taught me about Russ Meyer, William Castle and forgotten Hollywood films like ‘The Bad Seed’.

For all of this and more, I am eternally grateful to John Waters and I am longing for him to make a new film. Or at least let the world see ‘The Diane Linkletter Story’.

Matthew Rothery is a DJ, film maker and civil servant.

TOM OF FINLAND by John Hodgkiss

Tom of Finland

by John Hodgkiss

There’s something completely natural, something almost expected, about a generation appearing shocking or vulgar to the generation that preceded it. Mary Quant sent parent’s blood pressures through the roof as they watched their daughters’ bare thighs racing out though their front doors and the music of acts like Joy Division and that crazy goth Siouxsie and her bloody Banshees can’t have been an easy adjustment for many Grannies and Grandpas. However, the wheel keeps on turning and the next generation brings with it its own set of cultural and artistic standards which challenge and provoke it’s predecessors. That’s why there’s something so fantastic about a man, who if alive today would be 94 years old, whose work is still able to shock, unnerve and cause even the most desensitised among the current generation to gasp (and probably blush!). 

I can’t really draw, as others have with the subjects of their writing, many similarities between the life of Touko Laaksonen (aka Tom of Finland) and myself. Our parents were both educators, but that is about it. His work wasn’t something I became familiar with as a child and so holds a sense of nostalgia, as fetishised homoerotic imagery wasn’t really my parent’s thing (I don’t think). As a definite non-artist, I can’t even cite him as somebody who has influenced any of my own creative output (of which there is little). All I can say about his work is that I love it. I love it all. 

There was a time in my life, as I’m sure is the same for most LGBT people, when I felt a deep sense of unease about the person I was. Growing up in a predominantly heterosexual environment with very little exposure to, or understanding of, homosexuality leaves a lot of people confused, conflicted and unsure of themselves. This was certainly true for me. I remember visiting MoMA in New York in my teens and seeing a collection of Tom of Finland drawings in one of the permanent exhibits. I was certainly shocked by what I saw. Laaksonen’s work is truly unapologetic. You don't have to look at it if you don't want to, or if you find it disgusting or crude or just plain crap. But there’s no pretending it is anything other than what it is. There’s no ambiguity.There’s certainly no explaining it away to mother when she finds it under your mattress (not that that happened to me!). I remember looking at that art work hanging in that gallery and thinking how utterly brave it was. 

He was an artist producing work in a time when homoerotic imagery was disguised as photography of men demonstrating physical fitness in health publications. Until the overturning of US censorship laws regarding male nudity in the early 1960s, his erotic work was privately commissioned. However, with the overturning of the censorship laws, did not come any huge shift in public opinion regarding homosexuality or indeed images of an explicitly homosexual nature. Although his artwork portrayed often eye-wateringly exaggerated representations of masculinity, these homomasculine images were a far cry from the notions of homosexuality present in the heterosexual popular consciousness. His work helped to represent a more diverse and growing homosexual subculture and became more widely accessible throughout the 1970s and 1980s. 

Tom of Finland’s work was and still is extremely divisive. I don’t much care whether you like it or you hate it. I don’t care whether you consider it art or pornography. That isn’t really anything to do with the point I’m making. The reason I wanted to talk about his work is because it helped me to come to terms with the person that I am. It helped me to feel as though I didn’t have to be ambiguous about the person that I am. I didn’t have to just say, “no”, if somebody asked me if I had a girlfriend. I could say that I had a boyfriend and that I loved him. Obviously Im not advocating walking around performing explicit homosexual acts in public just to make sure everybody knows you’re gay, or that discretion regarding aspects of your identity and private life are a negative thing. I just decided that day that I didn’t want to feel uncomfortable anymore about who I was and that I wasn’t prepared to live my life in secret. I was shocked, by a man long dead, into a thought process that changed how I thought about myself. His work helped me feel proud about myself and about my love. I think that is pretty bloody inspirational.

John Hodgkiss DJs at clubnight Hot Space and, in his spare time, is a Primary School teacher.

BETH JORDACHE by Erin Millar

Beth Jordache
by Erin Millar

At the age of 6 I pretty much had it nailed as to what love was. I’d heard the word bandied around: I knew my parents loved me but then there was this other kind of love, like the love between my parents, who were married. And it was at 6, I really got my head around what that love was, all thanks to Scott Robinson and Charlene Mitchell. A man and a woman fall in love and they get married, just like Scott and Charlene.

So it was from this point that I knew, that I one day too, like the veiled tomboy Kylie, would be betrothed to some boy, and all my family and friends would be around and it would all be incredibly poignant and moving and there may or may not be an incredibly emotive power ballad playing in the background. I had it sorted.

It wasn’t until January 1994 when Beth Jordache kissed Margaret Clemence in the first pre-watershed lesbian kiss that I had my Angry Anderson moment. Witnessing my first display of honest to goodness girl on girl smooching was such a grand, pivotal, power-ballad worthy moment. Suddenly Angry Anderson’s “Suddenly” made so much sense! I needed a Beth! But y’know, without the baggage.

And so it was with Beth and Margaret that my love affair with ladies that love ladies on telly began. After Beth and Margaret, there came Tracey and Collette in Band of Gold (Samantha Morton as a prostitute and a young Cersei Lannister as a dominatrix did not the ideal lesbian relationship model make), Angie and Gabi in Playing the Field (a much more dull but I guess much more healthy depiction of a relationship – I don’t want to even start thinking about the fact that I met the love of my life whilst playing for a Mighty Ducks-esque women’s football team – the idea that my life could be mirroring a shit ITV drama from the 90s is mildly disappointing) but nothing in my teenage years of flicking through the channels for Sapphic scraps came close to what good ol’ Brookside offered up.

When Danny Boyle included the kiss in his 2012 London Olympics Opening Ceremony, I was of course overjoyed that Beth and Margaret, my eternal telly-lezzer loves, were deemed to be such a significant part of the fabric of our society. But that joy also came with the realization that showing two women kissing is still deemed in some ways dangerous or controversial or political. Although the kiss only featured in the ceremony for half a second, many countries did not cut the kiss and so, 18 years after it first aired, it became the first same sex kiss to be aired in many countries. It aired in 77 countries where homosexuality is illegal.

Although my mother would curse me for saying it, I was raised on television and so the depiction of queer characters on television and in film is so important. That’s why I love Beth Jordache – she shook up my Scott and Charlene view of the world. I know it could be argued that she maybe fell into a few too many dodgy lesbian tv-tropes (abusive father, prison, ends up dead!) but for me she was a trailblazer. Because of Beth we got Bette and Tina and Shane and Santana and Emily and Paige and Willow and Tara (sadly we didn’t get Faith) and Kalinda and The Fosters and Cosima and Big Boo and Nicky and Alex fucking Vause. I am so happy that we’re getting so much more of those scraps and that they’re getting bigger and bigger.

Erin Millar is an English Teacher and Television Enthusiast from Chorlton.

VITO RUSSO by Andrew Moor

Vito Russo

by Andrew Moor

Before the Stonewall Riots, Vito was a self-confessed Greenwich Village faggot, waiting tables, doing nothing much with his Literature degree, and drifting. He got caught up in the Riots at just 23 years old and they sparked in him a politicised gay consciousness of such focus and intelligence that it defined him for the rest of his life. In 1970, Vito enrolled on a Masters course in cinema at New York University, as if he knew that watching movies was somehow bound up with gay liberation, that activism and criticism went hand in hand. To me, he is the most important gay man of his generation because of his restless passion for equality and his no-bullshit, take-no-prisoners way of talking and writing about sexual politics and cinema history. He cut through the crap and became the spokesperson of a movement, right through to his death from AIDS in 1990. There was nothing quiet or quiescent about him.

He was there at the start of the ‘Gay Activists Alliance’ shortly after Stonewall. To have been at one of his ‘Firehouse Flicks’ film nights at their Community Centre in the very early 70s would have been to experience a sense of solidarity, debate and humour which the gay and lesbian community had not previously known. It is hard now for us to appreciate that safe places for non-straight communities were a new thing. And, oh, to have been there when Vito screened The Night of the Living Dead and the zombies were eating their victims, and a lesbian in the back row yelled out “Save me a Breast”….

Through the seventies he was researching cinema’s portrayals of gay men and women. He learned from the civil rights movement and from women’s lib, and was the first to diagnose, clearly and cogently, what the mass media does to people who stand outside mainstream society. It wasn't that he hated Hollywood – quite the opposite. He loved it. As he said, it’s fun to go to Disneyland, but you wouldn’t want to live there. He saw right through Hollywood’s lies, evasions, erasures, corruptions and demonisation, and he knew how damaging images could be. He wrote about film and encouraged new fresh images of gay and lesbian life so that ‘fourteen year old gay kids in Tulsa will be able to go to the movies and not have the idea that they’re the only ones in the world who are gay.’ Taking the game away from the studios and giving it to the audiences: this was his reason for writing, and it is what makes his landmark book The Celluloid Closet a masterpiece.

Vito was already an important voice when the AIDS crisis hit. In 1987 he co-founded the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), the direct action group that embraced all those affected by AIDS. I defy you to watch his ‘Why We Fight’ speech on Youtube (given at the ACT UP demonstration in Albany, New York in 1988) and be unmoved, but there’s not a trace of sentimentality in it. He doesn't play the victim: ‘If I’m dying from anything,’ he declares, I’m dying from the fact that not enough rich white heterosexual men have gotten AIDS for anyone to give a shit.’ It’s one of the great speeches of American public life. He’s our Martin Luther King.


Andrew Moor is Reader in Cinema History at Manchester Metropolitan University, where he teaches Film Studies in the English Department

ALAN BENNETT by Guy Garvey

Alan Bennett

by Guy Garvey

'He had never read Proust, but he had somehow taken a short cut across the allotments and arrived at the same conclusions.'

Alan Bennett, from "Russell Harty, 1934 – 1988", p. 52 (1988)


Alan, in my opinion, is the greatest living Englishman. He, like a lot of us, was born bewildered by his surroundings and family. Rather than rant angrily about it he has poured his life into gently and affectionately mirroring the absurdities of every day Englishness. There is sympathy for the bigots and the prejudiced in his stories and deep love and respect for the humble and ordinary. I'm always laughing so heartily at his wit the moment before he grabs me with a moment of tender poetry. A heart the size of his brain.The size of the county of Yorkshire itself. The biggest in England.

Guy Garvey is lead singer in band elbow and a presenter on BBC Radio 6 Music

THE LOVE PARTY AND THE COCKETTES

For our Pride parties we always seems to look back in time for our inspiration, looking back’s always a great way to know you’re still moving forward as you see how far we’ve come and laud the people who helped us get here. Our first Pride party Gay Sex In The 70s celebrated the sex fueled days of Pride marches, soulful sounds, bath houses and Anita Bryant whilst last year’s party took us on a holiday away from New York as we enjoyed the sunny gay getaway of Fire Island, all Adidas shorts, hairy chests and modernist architecture. This year our inspiration comes, in part, from a time just before our usual disco roots; it comes from the free-love time of the late 60s/early 70s that gave birth to the underground drag troupe The Cockettes.

As the psychedelic San Francisco of the '60's began evolving into the gay San Francisco of the '70's, The Cockettes, a flamboyant ensemble of hippies (women, gay men, and babies) decked themselves out in gender-bending drag and tons of glitter for a series of legendary midnight musicals at the Palace Theater in North Beach. With titles like "Tinsel Tarts in a Hot Coma" and "Pearls over Shanghai", these all singing, all dancing extravaganzas featured elaborate costumes, rebellious sexuality, and exuberant chaos.

The Cockettes were founded by "Hibiscus", a member of a commune called KaliFlower that was dedicated to distributing free food and to creating free art and theatre. They first performed as an informal group of friends in wild costumes, this evolved into bigger, wilder, and more lavish productions, and the Cockettes' shows fast became not-to-be-missed events for the hippest of San Francisco's free spirits. The audiences were often as wild as the shows.

Born out of the hippy ethos The Cockettes took no payment for their shows, they just did it for the love, performance and the gender bending. Sylvester, who became one of the biggest disco stars of all time, cut his teeth performing songs by Shirley Bassey and Etta James as part of Cockettes shows.

The Cockettes began doing reviews using old material and then hit even bigger success writing their own original narrative musical shows.Truman Capote and Rex Reed attended a San Francisco performance of "Tinsel Tarts in a Hot Coma", and Reed called it "a landmark in the history of new, liberated theater..." and Capote squeaked "The Cockettes are where it's at!". The Cockettes became national media darlings and were invited to New York where the San Fran reviews had the city buzzing with anticipation. With Hibiscus leaving the group at this time, they left their hippy ethos of total anarchy, no payment and no rehearsal behind and took the dollar and opportunity to head over to the Big Apple.

Fame and opportunity awaited...they were greeted off the plane by Oscar de la Renta for example! Sylvester had hired the Pointer Sisters as part of his back up band and the new show was a double bill of The Cockettes with Sylvester (now the stand out star) opening in a solo set. John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Liza Minnelli , Truman Capote, Gore Vidal, Angela Lansbury, Andy Warhol and his own trail-blaising drag performers Holly Woodlawn and Candy Darling were  all at that first night performance. But the opening night was a disaster, with New Yorkers expecting a much more put together, less free wheeling performance and they faced an indignity that no gay person should ever have to face… Angela Lansbury walked out on the show! Andy Warhol followed and most of the rest of the audience. After the show Gore Vidal quipped, "Having no talent is not enough." 

The Cockettes quickly returned to San Francisco, putting on their most successful and brilliantly titled shows including "Journey to the Center of Uranus" which featured soon-to-be-muse of John Waters, the divine Divine singing the song "A Crab On Your Anus Means You're Loved" while dressed as a big, red lobster. They gave their last performance 1972.

The Cockettes can be seen to have inspired the glitter rock era of David Bowie, Elton John, and The New York Dolls, and the campy extravaganzas of Bette Midler and The Rocky Horror Picture Show. "Their influence will be felt years from now,'' wrote Lillian Roxon, in her Top of the Pops column during the troupe's New York run. She proclaimed The Cockettes 15 years ahead of their time, and predicted, "Every time you see too much glitter or a rhinestone out-of-place, you (will) know it's because of the Cockettes."

With an ethos of love, androgyny, flowers and glitter… we can’t think of a better bunch of LGBT people to take inspiration from this Pride.

DUSTY SPRINGFIELD by Mark H. Evans

Dusty Springfield

by Mark H. Evans

“Many other people say I'm bent, and I've heard it so many times that I've almost learned to accept it ... I know I'm perfectly as capable of being swayed by a girl as by a boy. More and more people feel that way and I don't see why I shouldn't.” 

– Dusty Springfield, 1970

I had been exposed to the sweet sound of Dusty Springfield’s voice at an early age, thanks to my mother playing her home-made soul mixtapes in the kitchen while she washed dishes and I sat at the table drawing. However it wasn’t until my 13 year old self first listened to the Pulp Fiction soundtrack that I really began to fall in love with her voice. Soon enough, listening to “Son Of A Preacher Man” on my CD walkman became a daily event. I couldn’t get enough. 

My new-found fondness for Dusty didn’t go unnoticed by my mother, who began to lend me her mixtapes to listen to, and would often chat about how much she adored Dusty as a teenager growing up in the 60’s. From discovering her early hits like “I Only Want To Be With You” and “I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself”, through to realising that she was the same fierce blonde from The Pet Shop Boys’ video for “What Have I Done To Deserve This”, Dusty became a constant part of my musical life. 

What I later learnt about Dusty, such as being responsible for introducing many Motown recording artists to a UK audience for the first time, only served to cement my fondness for her. But when I came to learn about her difficult later years, where rumours of her sexuality swirled and gurgled around the tabloid gutter press and she became increasingly withdrawn from public life, I felt genuinely sad for her. Why would anybody seek to scandalise this amazing artist just because she dated girls? Who gave the tabloid press the right to harass her to the point that she self-harmed? Her music took on a new poignancy, as I began to understand the isolation and atmosphere of suspicion that she must have felt during this period. This sense of being surrounded by an atmosphere of gossip and suspicion resonated even more deeply for me later on, as I struggled with my own sexual identity during my late teens and early twenties. 

Though I managed to turn out okay in the end Dusty, like so many other greats, was struck down too soon after losing her fight against breast cancer. But when I listen to Dusty now, I don’t just hear the beautiful melancholy in her voice but also her determination and strength. To me, she will always serve as a reminder to just be yourself and do what you love as best as you can. Cheers, Dusty.

Mark H. Evans is a graphic designer who currently lives in Manchester.

TERRY HIGGINS by Greg Thorpe

Terry Higgins

by Greg Thorpe

Such is the monolith of the charitable industries of AIDS that the name ‘Terrence Higgins’ has become little more than a brand, but the story of the first man in the UK to officially succumb to AIDS is nothing short of film-worthy. Born in 1945, a genuine baby-boomer, Terry was only 37 when he died of the disease in 1982. He was a renegade with a debauched, maverick sense of humour (he‘d painted his Royal Navy ship with a hammer and sickle to get himself discharged).

At the time he became sick he was working as both Hansard Reporter in the House of Commons and as a barman in Heaven, the oldest gay club in London, which meant he could walk from his day-time overground life to night-time underground existence in a matter of minutes and if there’s a better metaphor for the duality of gay life I’d like to hear it.

It was in Heaven, summer 1982, that Terry collapsed on the dancefloor as the sickness started to take hold. Such was the dearth of knowledge about the illness in those early years that Terry’s boyfriend selected to study HIV as part of his PhD, and tested positive himself, in his own lab, in 1984.

Asked what Terry might have made of having a charity set up in his memory, his boyfriend said, ‘I think he would have found it very funny’. He sounds like a man worth knowing.


Greg Thorpe is a freelance writer and DJ.

PET SHOP BOYS by Gary Williams

Pet Shop Boys

by Gary Williams

One of my big memories in life is watching the ITV Chart Show, I was nine and I remember seeing Pet Shop Boys, big, bright and brash, singing Go West in a hyper-pop CGI world. It scared the living shit out of me. They might as well have been Doctor Who monsters. But it wasn’t the Dali-esque pop art visuals, it was just how gay it all was that made me turn it off before it reached the end.

I was scared at how loud they were being, how obviously queer they were to me and how they might have been broadcasting my secret to everyone else in the world. Whilst some people saw Suede or Morrissey or David Bowie or Marc Almond or Pet Shop Boys and thought “Great, there’s someone else out there like me” and put their posters straight on the bedroom wall and idolized them, I didn’t. I had the opposite reaction. And I’ll always be a little jealous of people who had that relationship with a myriad of wonderful, androgynous pop stars who challenged gender and sexuality through music and MTV visuals. I just switched the TV off and hid it and hid myself away for years.

So it was wonderful in later life to slowly regain my relationship with myself as a gay man, to make it a positive thing, to make it something that gave me strength, gave me friends, gave me creativity, love and a community. At the same time as this I found I started to let Neil and Chris into my life. Their work isn’t just Go West or Always on My Mind - bombastic and camp and known by your whole family (one of the songs became a football anthem and one was Christmas number one) – it’s also the quiet, emotional masterpiece Behaviour and an album of 12” house anthems in Introspective (probably my two favourite PSB albums). Last year they turned out a near-perfect Stuart Price produced EDM album, Electric.

The reason I love them now is why I didn’t when I was younger. Neil’s voice is instantly queer, with it’s femininity, frailty and inate intelligence (I often think Neil’s cool, androgynous voice is the reason some people don’t like the band), the pairing of two seemingly unknowable men is very attractive to a man who knows himself a little better. They stand on a stage almost as a gay couple - one a cold, art school brainiac up front and the other a silent Blackpool bruiser into his dance music and synths. Most couples are like this - I’d be the louder Neil in our relationship and my boyfriend would be the quieter Chris, on the back playing keyboards but doing most of the work really. And they stand there and let their work speak for them, often sneering at you, not showing any emotion so you can use yours to engage with their songs. Their work, like disco can come across as big, daft and camp - the popular stuff certainly is - but there’s so much more soul when you take the time to listen to more. Every lyric is poured over and as singer-songwriter as any indie idol; every beat is made to make you dance. They write witty, emotional and Northern dance music. What’s not to like?

There’s a line that always makes me smile when I think about the Pet Shop Boys and my relationship with them, from frightened child to confident adult who gets to put on amazing parties and events for a living and I shall close this little blog post with it and, I hope, on this Pride weekend, you can judge yourself successfully against this lyric as an LGBT person like I have had the pleasure to:

“I never dreamt that I would get to be the creature that I always meant to be”

That line is from their best song Being Boring. If you've ever dismissed them like I did, let me tell you...there’s a lot to be learnt from the UK’s most successful pop duo of all time.


Gary Williams is an events producer and promotor from Manchester. He is one quarter of Drunk At Vogue and also runs gay dance night Hot Space.

ALAN TURING by Paul Harfleet

Alan Turing

by Paul Harfleet

The more I learn about Alan Turing the more I love him. He was quiet, shy perhaps even introverted. He was eccentrically brilliant and most who knew him testified to this. His work in science and mathematics and philosophical thinking about what we all take for granted is so prescient, it is almost magical; you’re looking at what he was imagining now. A computer.

Alan Turing was thinking about this nearly a hundred years ago. Thinking about the potential and possibility of an ‘electronic brain’. He was involved in designing the first versions of what computers have become. He is often referred to as the forefather of computing and that is what he was.

He was also part of a team that helped reveal the mysteries behind the coded messages that the Germans used to conceal the secrets of battle during the Second World War. Turing and his colleagues probably cut the war short by years. They probably saved thousands if not millions of lives.

Though Alan Turing also happened to be gay. His brother referred to him as a ‘pansy’. His colleagues and friends knew he was a so-called homosexual. That was just part of him. He refused to think of his sexuality as abhorrent or wrong as so many did at the time. He simply was who he was. Something that even now find discombobulating.

When the police caught up with him, the country he had fought for in secret and helped to protect, failed to protect him from the law that criminalised homosexuality. He was found guilty of ‘gross indecency’ by a court in Knutsford. He was given a choice of prison sentence or treatment. He chose what he thought was the least catastrophic to his thinking and research. Hormone treatment was at the time thought to reduce homosexual feelings. And so it was the discipline he had done so much for that was now used against him.

Though this period of two years where Alan Turing was apparently disgraced did not appear to make this man of science bow down to society. He appeared to take most of these absurd challenges in his stride. He apparently laughed off the fact that the hormone treatment made him develop breasts. To quote Andrew Hodges book* “his reaction had been so different from the wilting, disgraced, fearful, hopeless figure expected by fiction and drama”. When Alan Turing apparently took his own life, most were shocked and bewildered. Those that were not close to him assumed that he had been shamed into suicide.

When Turing’s housekeeper found him dead from an apparent cyanide overdose imbibed by eating an apple dipped in poison the authorities quickly assumed that he had chosen to end his life. Though Turing had no real signs that he was struggling or felt this way, there was no suicide note, experiments still bubbled away in his quarters and he’d booked theatre tickets for the following week. Accident or suicide? It’s unlikely we’ll ever be sure.

The complexities of Turing’s legacy and his growing cultural presence are not quite enough to recognise this man’s influence on society. It’s easy to paint this man as yet another tragic figure in gay history though this is not quite the case. He was great and loved and brilliant. He was the forefather of computer science. It’s now almost inconceivable to live without computers, they are so entwined within our daily lives. Alan Turing would be delighted.


Paul Harfleet is an artist and award winning garden designer, perhaps best known for The Pansy Project. Paul's Pansy Project exhibition is showing for the next six months at DoubleTree by Hilton, 1 Piccadilly Place, Manchester.

www.thepansyproject.com


*Alan Turing, The Enigma by Andrew Hodges

JOHN CAMERON MITCHELL by Ben Turner

John Cameron Mitchell

by Ben Turner

I consider the moment I first watched Hedwig And The Angry Inch as the moment I truly understood sexual diversity. Rather than labelling someone as “gay” or “bi” or “transsexual”, it proudly displayed the whole spectrum, with sexualities, genders and sexual behaviours as fluid and as different as the people exhibiting them. From that moment, the man behind Hedwig, who wrote the play, starred in it, adapted it for film, directed it once again and defiantly starred in its titular role, thrusting his unknown face into the world’s spotlight far enough to even get a Golden Globe nomination, became my personal icon and Hedwig herself, my totem.

John Cameron Mitchell is uncompromising in his stoic depictions of sexuality on film. Never before has a director been so determined to showcase the whole array of human sexuality than in his second movie Shortbus. Though light and comic in tone, the movie defiantly shouts “Sex is nothing to be ashamed about!” and doesn’t flinch at showing us everything. The people involved aren’t pornstars, but nor are they afraid of showing us that sex(uality) shouldn’t be a taboo. And to illustrate his point, if you squint hard enough and pause at the right moment, there too is Cameron Mitchell, practicing what he preaches in an orgy scene.

Like all artists, he has paddled in various pools, with the subtly nuanced Rabbit Hole in 2011 a striking departure from his trademark brazen boldness, but it is for being such a loud voice in the Queer Arts that Cameron Mitchell will be remembered. From Tarnation to his Agent Provocateur commercial and his seminal music video for Scissor Sisters’ Filthy/Gorgeous, his is a CV cluttered with flashes of artistic excellence married with a stark refusal to be censored. The world he shows us is the Gay Community we know, not the Gay Community people want it to be, unsanitised, both light and dark and bursting with colour and life. He holds up a mirror without judgement or comment, determined to show humanity in all its sexual and diverse glory.

Hedwig exploded on Broadway this year, winning universal acclaim, Tony Awards and huge audiences, wowed by its mad glamour. Cameron Mitchell’s work is surfacing in the mainstream at last, but this has never been his concern. If ever there were an artist who stayed “true to themselves” and maintained his artistic integrity, it’s him. You wouldn’t see this acclaimed director popping up in a directing credit on a summer blockbuster, because that’s simply not who he is. And for that I’m grateful – the world that Cameron Mitchell lives in is the same as we do and for as long as the Gay Community exists as it does, he will be one of its most creative and reflexive voices.


Ben Turner writes for blog Haus of Phag.