Queer Contact… the story so far!

It’s been a rollercoaster of variety already: funny, serious, questioning, confrontational… Here’s what I’ve got up to at this year’s Queer Contact so far.

Life’s A Drag is a piece by artist Jez Dolan looking at Manchester’s drag history, and present day, and these live performances represent the first fruits of an ongoing project. Written with playwright Chris Hoyle, Life’s a Drag is a meta-comedy where we see two drag queens preparing backstage for a show. While they bitch, kvetch, laugh and take us on a journey back in time via the make-up box, they teach one another about the relevance of their own particular school of drag and gayness, from Polari to RuPaul. We encounter legends and legendary nights out, from Foo Foo Lamaar to the Hulme drag ball, and it’s all done with such a light touch that it feels like a genuine eavesdrop, even as they kick down the fourth wall with heels. There’s a superbly moving moment with a pair of earrings that crystallises what the piece is about for me, plus an astonishingly good musical medley at the end, sung across the decades, but no spoilers as to the songs…

FAdoubleGOT and The Daily Grind worked well on the same bill. The former is Jamal Gerald’s very personal story, encompassing bullying, education, a second-generation immigrant experience, youth, sexuality and life in a Northern town. Using monologue, symbolism, music and pop culture, it’s performed with a charming combination of earnestness and sass that perhaps even its very young creator isn’t fully aware of. He’s also a terrific poet and his verse threads neatly through the piece as he goes. The Daily Grind is the work of a slightly older, very serious theatre maker, all about life on dating apps. Don’t be surprised if you feel vulnerable and discomfited as much as moved to laughter. The dissonance of the performance comes from its single performer and writer, Laurie Brown, flitting between friendly, camp, menacing and monstrous. For anyone in the know it mirrors convincingly the Jekyll and Hyde nature of online encounters. The last five minutes of the show were a borderline genius move.

A personal highlight so far has been Outspoken, the poetry and spoken word event. A real triumph of curating, the breadth of writing styles and extremely high standard of performance, not to mention the content which ran from surreal to sad to hilarious to too-damn-true, made for a really inspirational evening. Such a treat to see Jackie Kay perform, and a first real life encounter too with my online favourite, poet AJ McKenna. Also introduced me to astonishing work from Paula Varjack and Keith Jarrett too. Seek them out.

Another personal favourite was STUD, a bizarre and hilarious journey through masculinity and the world of horses (yes, horses). Created and performed by a truly confident and accomplished performer, like no other show on the bill the audience were in this performer’s hands from the opening seconds. It’s hard to even describe the show or why it works so well, suffice to say after twenty minutes you stop even noticing the glorious pubic bush that’s constantly on show. It’s a piece that gently terrorises gender, with a handsaw, a raw carrot, whatever comes to hand or hoof. Eilidh McAskill, I salute you.

Still to come for me: Our Lady J, which will be a Valentine musical weekend sensation, and a religious experience in the shape of Jesus Queen of Heaven, on a Sunday of course… Full line up is here, and check out the pics from my own Queer Contact event right here. See you soon…!

Queer Contact 2016

Gender isn’t a exactly new frontier for queer people, it’s always been a frontier. The law that got to be too damn much at Stonewall – as we should know by now but as Laverne reminds us – was that all patrons must wear three items of clothing ‘appropriate to their gender’ otherwise the police would crack skulls.

Gender and its multiple expressions are deep in the heart of queer history and art. It wasn’t long ago that homosexuality / drag / transgenderism were talked about as a continuum of expression. You encounter it in contemporary accounts of the Stonewall era, right up to Paris is Burning. The scare queens, butches and femme queens of yesteryear might not necessarily connote cis or trans precisely the way we think of those terms today. Our connections to one another as queer people of all genders are deep and abiding and vital.

Timely as ever, this year’s Queer Contact Festival puts together a broad and exciting programme where gender is frequently at the artistic frontier. Transparent has been one of the most radically queer mainstream shows ever created, winning dozens of awards as it interrogates ideas about sexuality, history and identity. It’s something of a coup that one of the writers and series advisors, Our Lady J, is appearing at Queer Contact 2016. Her original musical show ‘For the Love of Gospel’ will help demonstrate why she has worked with everyone from Sia to Debbie Harry, via Antony Hegarty, Lady Gaga, Cyndi Lauper and Scissor Sisters.

Next, from high-femme to bold and butch, Eilidh Macaskill’s ‘STUD’ puts a queer woman’s perspective on the traditional gender binary as she performs a series of hyper-masculine tropes, exercising her ‘penis envy’ with full comedy intact.

For a more local perspective on the performance of gender, Jez Dolan and Chris Hoyle’s ‘Life’s A Drag’ is the beginning of a year-long project that celebrates Manchester’s drag culture and its deep roots with performance, oral history and maybe even some participation, so get your foundation right.

If the Pet Shop Boys are ‘The Smiths you can dance to’, Erasure are the Pet Shop Boys you can really camp it up to. Singer Andy Bell’s Contact show will take him on a somewhat different route as he explores the vexed polysexual character of ‘Saint Torsten’ through a song-cycle written especially for him and lately performed at Edinburgh Fringe. It’s a chance to see and hear a legendary gay pop voice as never before.

Another Queer Contact highlight is the return of Debs Gatenby, star of the much-loved Hi, Anxiety, whose new solo show looks at those journeys, inside and out, in search of ‘A Place Called Happiness’.

A dose of raw comedy can be had in the Comedy Playground where seven stand-ups battle it out for your love and lolz, including Bethany Black of Cucumber/Banana fame, Suzi Ruffell from telly and a familiar flamboyant host...

As for me, I’ll be throwing a Queer Contact launch party in the shape of A Queer Revue! at Band on the Wall, featuring international and local trans, gay, lesbian and queer talent, including contemporary dance, singing drag queens, Kate Bush and Bowie tributes, poetry, pop videos, comedy and a big old party afterwards.

As for the rest of the programme, you can tuck into the full listings here, or use my handy taster guide below…!

For the vivid voices of Black sex workers…

For the ultimate queen of heaven…

For getting read to filth and back…

For the godparent of gender outlaws…

For getting your voice heard…

For a frank voice on Black LGBT lives…

For an uplifting night of LGBT spoken word and writing…

For the highs and lows of internet cruising…

For religion and sexuality explored…

For the undisputed Mother of queer cabaret…

For our young voices…

The Queer Forum

My friend Siobhan and I have started a venture called The Queer Forum. Inspired by the TED Talks, we are hosting irregular get-togethers in which we invite half a dozen LGBTQI/Queer-identified people to give an informal talk to a friendly audience about something of importance or interest to them, and/or to our community. We might also show some short films, time permitting. It's not-for-profit, community focused and aimed at bringing queer folk together for education and fun.

We held our first event during Pride weekend and it was a really lovely, warm, eye-opening and well-received event. We learned about the film critic Vito Russo, about being a visiting covert lesbian in Bolivia, about gay erotic art, LGBTQI Muslim life, and more. You can see videos of some of our talks at our Vimeo channel.

Our next event is on Sunday 7th December at 6pm at Bangkok Restaurant on Princess Street, Manchester.

If you want more of a taste of what we're about, here's the Introduction I gave to our first event:


Hello. Thank you to everyone for coming to our first ever Queer Forum event. A special thanks to Rachele and the team here at Bangkok for giving us this lovely space to work in, and for including us in the Queer We Are program of events. Rachele approached myself and Siobhan separately to do an event here and, because great minds think alike, we both came up with the same idea; to do something like the TED talks that was for, by and about LGBTQI people. We both feel strongly that making yourself heard is an important thing for queer people. Stephen Beresford, who wrote the movie Pride, which no doubt you’ll all be going to see next month, said the other day how hard he’d found it as a gay man to make himself heard about anything other than sex; and that’s as a middle class white guy. There are voices everywhere that should be heard and we want The Queer Forum to be one of the places you’ll hear them.

Of course it’s no good making yourself heard if there’s nobody to listen, so this project is also about bringing people together, for support, for sharing, and to bear witness. We should be able to come together and share ideas in an environment that’s fun and intellectual, and that’s not just about partying while Rome, or indeed Paris, burns. Laverne Cox has said that it’s important to always remain teachable in the face of ignorance; including your own. So let’s all promise ourselves to remain teachable. It takes a lot of courage to talk in front of an audience and I know you’re all going to be supportive and welcoming. I hope you’re inspired by what you hear today; perhaps inspiredenough to come and be one of the speakers at a future event.

So, I’m going to put my money where my mouth is, andbe today’s warm up act and give you a selection of great quotations from queer people:

Join us as we explore Manchester’s Gay Village. It’s meaning. What is it saying to us? Is it a powder keg of the avante-garde?
The Divine David Hoyle

Straight people aren’t the enemy. Gay people aren’t the enemy. Ignorance is the enemy.
Anonymous dancer from Flesh at The Hacienda

The only ‘queer’ people are those who don't love anybody.
Rita Mae Brown

It is a rather amazing fact that, of the very many dimensions along which the genital activity of one person can be differentiated from that of another, precisely one, the gender of the object choice, emerged from the turn of the century, and has remained, as THE dimension denoted by the now ubiquitous category of' sexual orientation.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

I think God is a callous bitch not making me a lesbian. I'm deeply disappointed by my sexual interest in men.
Diamanda Galás

My name is Martin Boyce, and in 1969 I was a drag queen known as Miss Martin. I remember on that night, when we saw the riot police, all of us drag queens, we linked arms like the Rockettes and sang this song we used to sing: "We are the Village girls, we wear our hair in curls. We wear our dungarees above our nellie knees." And the police went crazy hearing that, and they justimmediately rushed us. We gave one kick and fled.
Martin Boyce

We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.
Alan Turing

I remember much of it as if it were yesterday. It is difficult to celebrate when one has such potent, painful tragic memories. We held so many of each other in our arms. One never forgets love like that. Make no mistake, AIDS was and is a terrible tragedy that need not have escalated into a worldwide plague. There were 41 cases when I started. There are 75 million now. It takes a lot of help from a lot of enemies to rack up a tally like that.
Larry Kramer

The dead are still here holding our hands.
Jackie Kay

Pride: afterthoughts

I thought this year I’d wait until the dust settled. It seems it’s very important in Manchester to have an opinion about the annual Gay Pride festival, or at least to tell everyone about it on Facebook. If you run a gay night or two, like I do, some people want to perceive you as some kind of spokesperson. I’m not, but I was needled several times to say something scandalous in the direction of Manchester Pride. I don’t have it in me. I think it boils down to this: Pride as a party, or Pride as a protest/political consciousness raiser? Doing both isn’t really working. At least not for me.

Don’t get me wrong, we need big gay cultural happenings, and we have them: Homotopia, Queer Up North, Duckie at Southbank, Queer Contact... These sorts of events are by and for LGBT people and have been brilliant over the years. Go and find out. Buy tickets. Support them. But spending bundles of pink pounds to hire The Feeling and a reformed Sugababes under a banner of ‘Gay Pride’? How exactly does it ‘celebrate LGBT life’?  I’m not sure I get it. Or want it. If you must attend a Kate Nash concert, just go to one, like everyone else does. I go to gigs all year round, I don’t need Pride for that. I need Pride for something else.

We might be about to get marriage equality in the UK, but worldwide the net is closing in on gay people. It’s real and I am frightened by it. If you don’t have a global perspective about yourself as a gay person, the concept of perceiving yourself as a group at all – which is, after all, the essence of Pride –falters. Except that Pride itself isn’t the place to talk about this, and I wonder if it should be. I am pleased that Manchester Pride expanded its Fringe program to include smaller arts and cultural events, including, crucially, some that take place outside the ghetto. I am glad the Pride Board has a trans* individual on it. I am glad they erected a ‘To Russia With Love’ wall in the Village to show Mancunian’s support towards persecuted people in our twinned city of St Petersburg. I hope they leave it up beyond Pride, I’d like to see it myself. But why Russia now, and not Uganda any other year, or any one of the dozens of ex British colonies where we exported homophobia to in the first place, at any other Pride? It’s complicated, and I’m trying to dance here.

During Manchester Pride, only a paid wristband gets you access onto Canal Street, unless you live there, and even bar staff who work in the Village can’t see the big bands without paying. I put parties on for gay (and non-gay) people outside the Gay Village. I do it all year round and I do it over Pride too. You might think this is somehow divisive, luring punters away from the gay enclave. But sexuality has no postcode, and the Village itself has barely any club space anyway, while the bars during Pride weekend – it has to be said – are overcrowded, overpriced, riddled with bad beer and bad music. I moved away from Blackpool a long time ago to get away from that. It’s not for me.

This year, I’m part of a newly-formed and loose collective of promoters under the name Queer Alt. Manchester who hosted a roster of alternative and non-Village gay and queer events during Pride. If you think we’re cashing in; yes, we absolutely are. Every last one of us donated cash to charities, and paid our performers. As for Pride itself, I’m not sitting in judgement, it would be the height of hypocrisy. It was only a few years ago I went out on the Thursday of Pride, and with very few breaks, kept going one way or another until the Monday. Trust me, I wasn’t thinking about St Petersburg then.

Besides, I’m not sure what form a more politicised Pride would take anyway. For the most part I’m an armchair activist. The odd demonstration aside, I’m all about petitions, letters, angry Tweets, political discussions, charity donations, that kind of thing. Are you much different? But I would like another way to get to meet the community sometimes, one that didn’t involve booze. Especially now, when I feel so powerless to contribute to any kind of positive change in the world. I feel hopeless when I think about Uganda or Moscow, never mind Damascus or Cairo or Palestine. But this has happened to me before, and the way I got out of it? Reading Angela Davis and listening to Larry Kramer. Watching REDS. Reading about mass resistance and small victories. Watching TED lectures about community action and feminism. Watching ACT-UP videos on YouTube. Watching We Were Here. This is where something like Gay Pride should come in, to bolster that feeling of insurmountable human aggression and oppression, to tackle the apathy that inevitably follows. Watching Barclays Bank drive a truck down Deansgate decked out in this year’s designated Pride theme (‘The 1980s’) was never going to do that for me. And I really need it.