“It’s a superpower”

What would I say? Yeah, I just, I guess I would say, oh I don’t know, I’d say like ‘I wish I had access to all the things I have access to now’. ‘I wish I had all of the voices that you have to listen to’, but also like ‘I know what it felt like, I get it, and it’s like the best thing that will ever happen to you, being queer. It’ll be awful, it’ll be hard, but I would choose it if someone said to me. I don’t believe it’s a choice, I believe it’s an integral part of who we are, and you choose to acknowledge it publicly. But I would choose it, I’d choose this life. I love it, and, yeah I am every part of who I am because of being queer, and it’s a fucking superpower. It’s amazing’.

So I’m sort of, basically these days describe myself as transgenderless or, you know, like all of the flavour, none of the gender, or something. Kind of ace queer and other names that I’ve made up, because it’s what everyone gets to do now, which is fucking great.

And yeah, I’m as visible as I can possibly be online with all this stuff, because, like I’ve been on Tumblr for a decade and it’s a really big deal for people to get to see people in their sixties who are all of those things, because everyone’s trying to tell them ‘oh you’re just going through some young people phase, fad’. That’s, yeah.

There’s a lot of sadness in the community, with HIV and AIDS then, and also with isolation and homophobia, and internalised homophobia. Religion’s not done us any favours, let’s be honest. But, you know, there’s, I think we have to, as a community, stand up and embrace, as much as we can, everybody in it.

But I’ve had a lot of fun being gay. It’s been such a good, it is such a good place to go. And even if you just go to visit, do you know what I mean? You live the lifestyle but you pop in and out of it to reinforce yourself, I think it’s important. I’ve met so many amazing people out of the arts scene, culture scene, music, yeah, friendships of all varieties.