You Don't Live Like I Do

This weekend just gone was pretty good. On Friday night I cooked dinner and watched The Blackening with V and E, which was very silly. It's the first time in a while we've all been able to sit down and watch something together, and it was very cosy. Gym as usual on Saturday morning with cosmolinguist, except we picked up a friend who's just moved to the neighbourhood to give them a lift with us. It was nice to chat with them.

On Saturday afternoon we went to Manchester Alternative Pride, organised by Queer Roots Collective. It was at the Platt Fields market garden - the old bowling greens have been taken over and turned into a cool community garden growing edible food, but there's also space for a marquee and lots of little nooks and crannies. Again it was great that all three of us could go. We saw friends from a bunch of different places, enjoyed music and food, V got to do some lino printing of beetle patterns. After a little while I took V home due to tiredness, and came back for more drinks with E and friends. We got squiffy, talked an awful lot of nonsense with queer friends, and got crappy takeout on the way home, it was great.

On Sunday, me and E rented a van and drove to Merseyside, to help V's nephew clean out his late Mum's house. This had been planned previously but fallen through, so it was a bit more urgent now. It was a terrible, rainy day, and the house was dusty and its contents sticky. It was a horrible sensory experience for me, but E did a great job of ploughing through the kitchen, and between us we helped him make a big dent in the remaining stuff, including a trip to the tip. It was an exhausting day but I'm glad I could help out family. We came home to dinner cooked by angelofthenorth, chatted with a visiting friend and then collapsed in bed.

Last week, our usual Twitch / Discord club stream was rescheduled due to a music festival, so cosmolinguist had an unexpected free Thursday. There's a queer meetup in Manchester every Thursday, so we took the opportunity to head along - the venue has outdoor seating and it was a lovely evening.

We had a good time. There were people there I knew from other queer events across Manchester, including trans gym, but also lots of new people. I had arranged to meet a friend from Discord, recently arrived in Manchester from the States, and they were lovely. We drank beer and cocktails, chatted away, and didn't get home until after midnight. It was a very fluffy evening, and really made me feel like part of a community.

Last Sunday was Stockport Pride. Me and cosmolinguist went along, partly so I could be Extremely Petty. I'd gotten into an argument on Reddit in a conversation about a far-right web cartoonist getting doxxed. Somebody had claimed that doxxing is legal in the UK. I replied saying that I was happy this particular person got doxxed, and I don't think that legality and morality are inherently correlated, but actually no it wasn't legal. This led to a very heated argument wherein my interlocutor accused me of being a far-right sympathiser and transphobe, at which point I said that I wasn't going to continue to debate because I was off to Pride with my trans boyfriend. I then got accused of being an obvious sockpuppet making things up. So I made a little paper sign and took this photo there.

A little while later that person's comments had all been deleted, either by themselves or a moderator. I claim this as a petty victory!

Anyway apart from that Stockport Pride was a good day out. We failed to meet up with a former coworker of mine, but ran into many people from Trans Gym, and some friends from Queer Club, and got chatting to somebody who turned out to be a friend of a friend... small world. We poked around the stalls and bought some goth / queer crossover tat for mother_bones. I got to listen to Bad Heritage, a local guitar-based heavy rock band playing a Pride festival. They sounded like L7 fronting Black Sabbath, and that was a very good thing. Eventually we sat outside the Angel pub drinking pints and listening to Sister Mary McArthur, a tap-dancing singing drag nun, doing show tunes. Who needs expensive corporate Prides when you have that, eh?

We checked out another few pubs and were introduced to The Produce Hall, which has about half a dozen different kitchens and a common ordering / payment system. I had some amazing Carribean chicken stew, and E had a great pizza. It's technically indoors but the ceilings are high enough that the CO2 levels were pretty much the same as being outdoors. Around 9pm, we left the young 'uns to it and headed home, thoroughly satisfied with our day.

The local Queer Club had their Halloween party last night. They meet in an old library - it's a big room, and they have an air filter, so it's relatively low risk activity. I've been once or twice before and had a nice time - there's usually enough structure that it doesn't feel awkward. The Queer Club had a "costumes optional but welcome" thing on their party flier, and I've not dressed up for Halloween since I was at Uni. I always end up over-thinking it and not managing to do something that lives up to my expectations, or to get around to organising things. I've been planning to do a really good Hellboy cosplay for about 20 years now...

So I thought about doing something deliberately low-key and mediocre - getting one of the boxes out of the loft from when we moved house, and making a robot costume out of it. This is a proper five year old kid level of costume, so I picked up some cheap poster paints from B&M for decoration. I happened to crack open a large cardboard box full of Diet Coke cans, which I could repurpose as a helmet. As it happens, work was too busy (or rather, I slacked too much earlier in the week) to even decorate as minimally as I had planned and I ended up largely scribbling with a few markers. Also, I got down two boxes in case I messed one up, and cosmolinguist claimed the other for his own robot outfit. He put more effort into decoration than me, as I was focussed on putting enough sellotape on the cardboard shoulder "straps" to make sure the outfits didn't collapse around us.

About half the people at Queer Club had dressed up, mostly as various characters from film etc. One of the club hosts was dressed up as Section 28, having literally printed out the relevant legislative clause in really big text on a A1-sized board around his neck. Our robot costumes were well received, and I added "beep/boop" to the pronouns on our name stickers. About halfway through the evening I took the costume off, because I couldn't sit down and I was getting too hot. We mingled and chatted and snacked.

Just as we were about to leave, the organisers called for a group photo so we put our costumes back on for that... then they reminded us that the flier had also talked about a prize for best costume, and E won for his better-decorated robot! All in all, it was a good evening. I felt good about the costumes - about having actually done something, however imperfectly.

Last Saturday, I went to Trans Pride Manchester for the second time. With the far right protesting in the city centre, I wanted to be there to help protect my trans friends, if only by being tall and huge at potential troublemakers. So I got on the bus with cosmolinguist who was heading to the gym. A few stops later, some student-age young queers got on with their mobility aids and trans flags and we made eye contact and nodded. There were also half a dozen middle-aged ladies speaking some Southern European language too fast for me to identify it; their leader asked me in halting English if I knew how to get to Oxford Road station and I promised I'd tell them when to get off the bus.

The bus was just about level with the Manchester Aquatics Centre when the driver got a phone call and stopped the bus to take it. After a long conversation, he announced to us passengers that bus routes through the city centre had been suspended due to the presence of the fash, and we'd have to get off and walk into town. We were about a mile short of my intended stop, and between the delays and extra walking there was no way that E would make the gym, so he decided to come along with me.

The middle-aged ladies and the baby queers didn't know how to get where they were going from where they were; we were going to the same place as the latter and it took us past the former's destination, so I ended up leading an odd convoy! It turns out that the ladies were from Spain and were escaping the heatwave in Barcelona by coming to Britain; they were headed to Liverpool for the day. They asked me why the bus had stopped, and I simply replied "fascists". It's a usefully international word in that regard. When they got to the station their leader kissed me on both cheeks, wished me "Adios" and "Gracias", and they filed off up the station approach.

We escorted the baby queers to Castlefield for the start of the march. We avoided St Peter's Square where there was some kind of noisy demo, and instead took part of the march route, backwards. It was their first Pride-type event and they were excited. They found their friends, we sat on the grass in the shade and relaxed among hundreds of trans people and allies, recognising a few faces and saying our hellos here and there. We listened to speeches and poetry, fierce and angry and proud. Just as the march was starting off, we met up with some friends as planned, and the four of us walked together. The march was great - no trouble, lots of chants, good signs, seemingly lots of support from passers by and even the motorists we were holding up. The route kept us away from the city centre so there was little chance of running into the far-right. However at one point the stewards forgot the changed route and started marching towards Piccadilly Gardens, before doubling back on themselves and heading down into the Village. This was great because it meant that people on the march got to see other people on the march. And also because it happened right by a Yates pub, where a bunch of fash who couldn't get served in Piccadilly Wetherspoons had ended up, so they got to see even more of the happy, weird queers marching past them, chanting and waving banners.

We ended up walking through the Village and into Vimto Park on the old UMIST campus on Sackville Street. Originally we'd planned to picnic there but it was clearly too crowded. We ended up in the beer garden at Yes on Charles Street, a good enough place for food and drinks. We spent a few hours eating, drinking and talking nonsense with our friends, before getting the bus home, back on its normal route. On the way back to the bus we ran into one of the baby queers who'd been to the LGBT Foundation to have their deed poll witnessed by a lawyer, and they were clearly stoked by the experience.

All in all it was a very positive day - we actually outnumbered the racists in the city centre, not that we got any press coverage. There was no trouble that I saw or heard about. People were supportive. We made new queer friends and helped some foreign ladies. The only shame is that E didn't make the gym and had to walk too much on his dodgy ankle.

On Monday night I went to the Bridgewater Hall in Manchester to see Elliot Page talk about his memoir, "Pageboy". He was in conversation with the gay actor Russell Tovey. The first half was questions from Tovey, then during the interval they put up a QR code which allowed audience members to submit questions for vetting, and vote on others'. The second half was Tovey asking these questions.

There was some interesting trivia - Elliot has never seen a Bond film, and likes karaoke post-transition - but no earth-shattering revelations. What did come across clearly though is confirmation that he's a decent human, aware of his position of privilege as a white, rich trans guy. He was keen to pay tribute to the trans people, particularly women and people of colour, who came before him and who still struggle more than he does.

Afterwards, on the way to the pub with friends, one of them mentioned that our ticket stubs entitled us to a free copy of the memoir. So I headed back to the Bridgewater Hall, and just caught the stall as it was being taken down. I returned to the pub with three copies of the book, for me and the people I'd been with, feeling victorious.

Compared to the Q&A, the memoir is heavy going. It's not a difficult read - I devoured half of it very quickly before getting distracted. But the subject matter is deep. Tovey described it as an "exploration of the power of shame", and it certainly feels like that, describing Elliot struggling to fit into the world of a straight, cis Hollywood actress. However, it also explores liberation from that shame, and how his journey to self-realisation has helped him start to escape these expectations and feelings. I'm looking forward to finishing it.