Write those stories and write them large.

"I will write for people that can’t speak for themselves.”

Since it’s Pride Month, we here at Haywire thought that an LGBTQIA+ Pocketfull special would be the perfect thing to do. We have two pieces coming your way over the next two weeks that have been made by LGBTQIA+ creative teams. ‘Home’ written by Jon Nash, is about “a gay man returning to his childhood home, that he has literally or metaphorically been exiled from, with his partner after the death of his father and is about him coming to terms with whether it is home now or not.” and is the first piece coming your way this Friday. The second ‘A Thousand Words’ written by Nick Maynard is “just short of a thousand words and it looks at the idea of gender. The main character of the piece is explaining how they perceive themselves and how they explain their gender. They have found the perfect word for them, but they never quite share with you what that is. They’ve done all the leg work, and you just need to be okay with it.” Both pieces explore, in their own ways, what it means to be LGBTQIA+ in a local community and wider society that doesn’t understand you fully. 

I recently sat down with Jon and Nick to chat about their monologues and discuss why stories like the ones they are telling are important to share in our current society. I have been directing both pieces over the last couple of weeks, and for various reasons they sit close to my heart, so I was keen to get further insight into where these stories came from and just get a discussion started between creatives making work with similar goals. We covered everything from representation of queer stories, comparing past to present, the shift in society acceptance and how much it has developed, the boldness of young LGBTQIA+ people, the current school system and education being offered, and the importance of multi-generational discussion on topics like these. It was a lot to cover in just an hour, and I’m sure all three of us could have easily chatted away for the rest of the evening, but we all felt pretty satisfied with the conclusion we came to. So let's get into what they had to say… 

“Which at the time felt like a bit of an outlier for things living in the UK, where things felt a little bit better. Who can say now….”

We opened the discussion with them both sharing more about the inspiration behind their pieces. Nick had written A Thousand Words a number of years ago so couldn’t quite remember why this is the topic he chose, he just knew that he wanted to challenge himself to write a piece that was no more than a thousand words long. Later on in the discussion Nick said, “I feel a need to speak out for those that don’t feel confident, that feel that they don’t have the voice, or the eloquency. So I will write for people that can’t speak for themselves.” Since starting rehearsals Nick has been open to myself and the actor, Lottie Webb, making edits to the piece and putting our own spin on it from experiences we have, which has been wonderful and part of the beauty of work like this. LGBTQIA+ stories can be so personal to an individual, that being given the freedom to put your own spin on a piece or leave your mark is so important. 

Myself and Jon have also made a couple of changes to Home, for similar reasons, to fit more with the actor, Gavin Hayes, and to root it more in UK culture and our experiences as creative team living in the UK. The piece was originally based in Chechnya, which I will let Jon tell you more about; “It came from two things, one a bit more big and thematic and one a little bit more personal. The big thematic one was learning more about the state of affairs for LGBTQ people in Chechyna, including a documentary which was about an organisation which was helping smuggle people out of the country whose family had rejected them or whose family would report them to the authorities where they would then be imprisoned. Put through whatever kind of conversion therapy etc. Which at the time felt like a bit of an outlier for things living in the UK, where things felt a little bit better. Who can say now….”

“Our community needs to see that we can live happily ever after.”

“Then that got tied in with during the first lockdown, sitting here in this house where I live with my partner and looking at a crack that is on the wall up there, which kind of becomes a motif in the piece. And about what that means to maybe build a home that you didn’t (at one time) think you’d have.”

“I wanted to write something where it's 10/15 years later in Chechnya and those dangers aren’t there anymore. And a different kind of home is being built there. We’ve kind of made it a little more open in that sort of UK setting, which feels prescient.”

The current discourse surrounding LGBTQIA+ individuals in the UK is an interesting one, and something we get into in a little more detail later on in the discussion, but the fact that in the last couple of years a piece that Jon wrote that felt so far removed from his life in the UK has now become relevant is scary for LGBTQIA+ people living in this country. It reminded me of a conversation Nick and I were having the other day in rehearsal; we’d both seen an image going round on Twitter of the phrases used to describe trans people today and how these are nigh-on the same phrases used to describe gay men in particular back in the 1980’s and during the AID’s epidemic. We in many ways seem to be entering the same cycle, just with a different target. Both Home and A Thousand Words have positive endings, something that is important to both Nick and Jon.

Nick: “I personally think, or believe, that all our stories have to have positive endings. Not necessarily happy ones but they do have to have positive endings, especially now. Having grown up through times where Clause 28 was in action, and before, all queer stories ended very sadly and very badly. It was like we deserve to suffer, and although suffering is good, because that's where the drama comes from, I think now that it's got to be positive. Our community needs to see that we can live happily ever after.” 

“It is really important that we are the heroes of our own stories, that we are survivors and that we come out on top, and all those things that straight society has had for so long. We want that now, and we will write those stories and we will write them large. And that’s really important.”

“As I was saying earlier you know 90% of plays are, we come out, we go to a drag show, and then you die of AIDs. And we’re so much more than just those 3 things.” 

Jon: “Yeah I think there's a lot I’d agree with there. Because I think you know when  you live in a culture that is riddled with homophobia and transphobia and biphobia and all those kinds of ways of seeing the world, I think it's quite easy to replicate those things that are so widespread. In the culture, in what you’re making and writing. Even without realising that you’re doing it, necessarily.” 

“It’s never bothered me, that idea of feasting with panthers has always been at the top of my list.”

“I think, to sound briefly wanky, I think there's like a colonisation of the imagination that happens, where we just don’t even know that we're taking on those kinds of stereotypes and assumptions. I remember being much younger and writing a little short play that was set in my home town and it was a little romantic scene between two teenagers. I am gay and have been gay all the way through that, but it was a straight couple. And I wrote this play and it was part of a little festival and I remember and somebody else came and said to me “Why have you written a straight couple for this Jon?” And I didn’t have a good answer to that. Except that I think I was replicating what I saw and what I was reading and my brain took that assumption and ran with it. Despite that not reflecting what was happening in my life at all.”

Many LGBTQIA+ stories are filled with tragedy, trauma and hardship, because that is a common experience many members of the community have, especially 30, 40 years ago. It is important that those stories aren’t erased and that young people are able to learn the history of the community they are part of, as it certainly isn’t taught in schools. However, I agree with Jon and Nick, we have some incredible theatre and art that shares that part of our history, so let's start making new things. New stories that showcase hope and the diversity of the LGBTQIA+ experience. In a diverse series of locations, scenarios and settings.   

Jon: “Sometimes… sometimes these exaggerated things are true. But I think I’m really interested in opening that up and putting queer people outside of a city, or outside of a story where it’s “I grew up somewhere awful and remote, and the happy ending is… I left”. Because I think that’s a bit pernicious as well.” 

“We’ve never been safe, it’s always been an illusion, and we are no more in danger than anybody else that is seen as different.”

Nick: “But still more positive than “I died and then I was happy!””

Jon: “Yeah that’s true I guess!”

Nick: “We can only be together in heaven. Over the rainbow!” 

Liv: “I think that’s really important, that’s something that really… when I read your scripts I put a message into the team and was like “I want to do these, these are really important to me”.  Because I think both of them have that wonderful resolution and positive ending, not necessarily joy filled, but they both end with an idea that ‘not all problems have been fixed and not everything is perfect’. In A Thousand Words it’s that bittersweet of that well-I-know-who-I-am-now and this-is-the-best-way-I-could-explain-it-to-you and some-of-you-aren’t-going-to-get-that-and-that’s-okay. And with Home it’s the staying, and the idea that it might not always be perfect, but I’m making it my home now. It’s that active positivity that both of them give. That both of the characters have been proactive in their happiness in these pieces.” 

This ‘proactive happiness’ is something that I love. As I was saying earlier, we seem to be repeating a cycle of hate and struggle just with a new target. In my opinion, Jon and Nick are so right about the need for positive stories, and stories that provide relatability. It shows audiences, and members of the LGBTQIA+ community, that their experiences can have happy endings, regardless of the conditions, environments or societies they grow up in.

Jon: “It’s a really interesting question about how you have these difficult conversations, a lot of which we maybe thought had been settled in that last 10, 20, 30 years, that we’re having to have again. I’m suspicious of that “We all just have to be more polite to each other!” while we disagree about whether the other people should exist and be able to go about their lives. I’m over that as an idea in some ways.” 

Nick: “I completely understand that. A good friend of mine, well actually 2 friends of mine, are moving from London back up to Manchester because they no longer feel safe in London anymore. Which I thought was a bit strange. And my retort for that was “We’ve never been safe, it’s always been an illusion, and we are no more in danger than anybody else that is seen as different” 

“…one of the kids went, “anyone who is LGBTQIA+” and like two thirds of that circle swapped spaces and that kind of blew my mind.”

“I was born in a time when I was a criminal, for god’s sake. It never stopped me doing what I was doing.” 

“It’s never bothered me, that idea of feasting with panthers has always been at the top of my list. I like that about it-”

Jon: “Cool play title?” 

Nick: “I know!”

Jon: “You gotta write whatever that is Nick, that’s great!”

Nick: “I’ve been trying to setup a company with a friend of mine and we’re struggling with a name, and I keep pushing for Feasting with Panthers, and he’s like “Yeah but nobody is going to get that!””

Jon: “They don’t have to get it, it’s just so vivid, it’s great.”

Nick: “I know… So yeah, I’m happy to break the law, I’m happy to be a criminal, I’ve been one before, I will be one again. It is what it is. And that’s easy for me to say, I’m sure it’s harder for other people to say that. Probably, if I’d have been beaten up a few more times then I wouldn’t be saying that, I wouldn’t be as blase about it. But I haven’t, so I can, and I will.” 

I wanted to include this part of the conversation between Jon and Nick because I think there is often a disconnect between the history of the LGBTQIA+ community and young LGBTQIA+ people. There has been a shift in society, representation has become more widespread in the arts with theatre, film and TV all depicting LGBTQIA+ stories a lot more frequently, but we still have a long way to go. We really got stuck into the topic of young people and education during the interview, we talked about how the number of open LGBTQIA+ people has increased massively since we were younger, and why we as a society have a responsibility to ensure young people feel as though they can be open. I shared what school was like when I was growing up. 

Liv: “There was one gay boy and one lesbian girl and that was it and they were very much out and everybody accepted it, but there was still this weird space. So many people from my school have come out since we left, in the last like 4, 5 years, which is crazy. And when I went to university, being on a theatre degree, oh my god, everybody on that degree… you were in the minority if you were not, in some way, gender queer or LGBTQ+ or whatever.” 

Jon: “We’ve done quite a bit of school work in the last couple of years and we did a project last year where we were working with KS3 in a secondary school, and we were doing the good old standard, in a circle, ‘anyone who’ is going to switch places. There’s maybe, I don’t know, 15 kids. And one of the kids went, “anyone who is LGBTQIA+” and like two thirds of that circle swapped spaces and that kind of blew my mind. Cause yeah when I was in school, which is not billions of years ago but longer ago than I care to admit, a bit like you’re saying Liv, I think there was one bisexual in the sixth form and that was the quota for the school.”

“I think that's what live theatre does. It gives you that connection with somebody else's life…”

I believe that theatre and the arts play a big part in providing young people with information that, yes they have the ability to access through social media in a way that myself, Jon and Nick didn’t, but also isn’t really coming from any other adults in their lives. Right now there is a lot of debate about what should be taught in schools, and the information we should be teaching young people, but while it's not widespread in schools it's important that it's present in the art we consume. There are a lot of anti-LGBTQIA+ (and in particular anti-trans) conversations happening in the UK right now, and returning to what Jon said earlier about how we absorb and reproduce the world we see around us, the importance art and education plays in the protection of our young people is a point that became integral in our discussion.  

Jon: “I think what we’re touching on, is the need - and again in terms of the conversations that are going on in the country right now - for those conversations to not be about abstract ideas of people, but to be about, either a real experience of a real person, or as theatre and lots of other things do well a fictionalised version born from experiences.”

“Frequently that's what missing in these debates, you have can have whatever arbitrary opinion you have about trans people but they are here and at some point, what you think arbitrarily in your head meets the fact that there is a human being here before you that has needs and life and their rights and their connections they have to a broader society.” 

“I also feel a responsibility of providing those queer characters, particularly onstage…”

“I think for me that's part of what, part of why I choose to spend time working in theatre and writing in one sense or another. It’s not necessarily good at communicating in-depth, information data stuff, but what you can do is work as an engine for empathy. Because you feel that experience from someone else who isn’t your own. As a cis-man, I can, at the start of I Joan, when Joan in that show at the Globe walks out onto the stage and says, trans people are sacred, I can feel the excitement and defiance and everything of that even though that’s not my own experience. Again that's what trying to tell these joyful narratives is about.” 

Nick: “I think that's what live theatre does. It gives you that connection with somebody else's life that you can feel you have more of an awareness of than if you had just read it in a text book. Or see it online. Because you’ve had an experience.” 

Nick goes on to elaborate. 

Nick: “It's like, when you go and see Dracula and then come out and necessarily want to be a vampire. We might do it for a couple of seconds, it’s cool to be a vampire, but then you think “Well maybe not”. And this idea of somehow, we're teaching people to be other than they are. You know, with geography we’re learning about clouds, it doesn’t mean people then leave wanting to become a fucking cloud. All we’re doing is giving information.” 

“As long as we teach young people to keep an open mind, I think we can sub-navigate some of the prejudice…”

“We need to protect young people of any gender and any sexuality. These are the laws of the land, this is what school is supposed to do, it’s supposed to teach you and prepare you for life, and in life there are people out there who aren’t like you and you’ve got to get along with them. Or not. That’s up to you but we’d be doing a disservice if we didn’t inform you that these things do exist.” 

Liv: “Nowadays there's so much terminology and there's so many different words you can use to describe yourself and you can learn about, that other people might use to describe themselves. Young people don’t just magically become an adult and all of a sudden know all these things. The ones who have always felt gay or queer or whatever, will start to learn about them and start to use them. But the other ones won’t. They won’t bother. Because why would they need to, they’ve not been told that they need them in their vocabulary.” 

What Nick goes on to say next I think is a wonderful analogy for how everybody, but particularly the next generations should be equipped for handling the crazy world that we live in. 

Nick: “I’ve always believed that school gives our basic running programmes. If we were a new computer then it gives us Windows. And from Windows we can go and get our packages that we need for ourselves in order to run whatever specialist programmes we need. And we become specialists in whatever we do in the future. But if we get the right tools, then we can find that information for ourselves, in case our schools or our parents are lacking So I think that’s really important. And that’s why theatre and books and films and TV is important because it gives us that extra information. It’s that app that we need later on. If we know where to find it, then we can access that and we can get the information from the other source.” 

“As long as we teach young people to keep an open mind, I think we can sub-navigate some of the prejudice because young people are open to getting this information and getting hold of it, as long as we put it out there for them to access. And make sure that it’s of a quality that is going to inform rather than harm.” 

“There might be an awkward conversation with Olivia Coleman about it but you’re having it with Olivia Coleman so it’s fine.”

And he’s completely right - in my opinion at least. All young people are impressionable, and there's so much content out there that is harmful. If they are exposed to it for long enough, by the time they get to adulthood changing their minds or trying to present them with new information can be difficult. I’m not saying that all theatre is the correct or best way to educate young people on everything, but I do feel that when it is used effectively it can provide accessible insight into a community. We were all in agreement that especially when it comes to the LGBTQIA+ community, members of all ages benefit and need to see positive queer stories at the forefront of the media we consume. Many of us who are grown up, are already influenced by the things we have lived through and I often find when I watch plays, films, tv shows that show LGBTQIA+ stories in a positive and healthy non-stereotypical way my first thought is, ‘I wish these had been around when I was young.’ So in my mind, they must in some way be having positive impacts on our young people today. We’d circled back to this positive representation by the end of our discussion, and below are the final thoughts from Jon and Nick. 

Jon: “I also feel a responsibility of providing those queer characters, particularly onstage, I don’t write for screen as much as I would like to, because I didn’t have them. And that's true for lots of people at the moment. This kick back at the moment, against that representation, again misunderstands how vital that is. A bit like you were saying earlier Nick, stories that just teach you your life will be tragic and then over very quickly, the responsibility for our queer stories is to allow queer people of all ages, but particularly young queer people, to imagine themselves happy in the future. I think it’s actually really subversive to have a Heartstopper universe where sexual and gender identity isn’t a thing that they sort of really have to worry about massively, right? It doesn’t torture their lives and consume every moment of that story. There might be an awkward conversation with Olivia Coleman about it but you’re having it with Olivia Coleman so it’s fine. I think there’s potentially a quiet radicalism in showing those other futures, or those possible presents.” 

“You know bit by bit, this drip feeding is going to change people.”

Nick: “There was a great documentary about how the BBC is our colonialism still. That what we do is we go, ‘Right we’re British and we know how you should be living.’ And then we sell our TV programmes that show this idealised version of how we should all be living, and because the BBC is so successful the shows they get shown all the over the world. I cannot wait for Doctor Who to happen, with Russell T Davies back in the driving seat and every leak that is coming out. You’ve got drag queens, you’ve got out gay tv and film stars that are getting involved. You just know there are going to be queer story lines there and that is going to a gazillion different countries. You know bit by bit, this drip feeding is going to change people. It’s gonna take generations but we’ve started.”

And that's it really. Making theatre like Home and A Thousand Words aren’t going to change the world overnight, we’d be naive to think so, but they are providing a positive representation of LGBTQIA+ people. Something that we need, especially when so many in society are against us. If this conversation with Nick and Jon has taught me anything it's that the arts are integral to preserving the voice and stories of the LGBTQIA+ community, and it’s a notion I want to be more present in the work I create. The final note I want to leave you with is from Nick, he excellently brought our conversation to a natural conclusion the other night and I think it’s the perfect way to end this blog post.

Nick: “I’m excited about the future of the arts because I think that the majority of them are in the right people’s hands and it’s the politics that are in the wrong people's hands. But that's fine. Because arts are there to fight against that and to give people that escapism. And if they can escape into our world they can make that fantasy a reality. If enough people do that then we can change the world, one person at a time.” 

Liv x