Kellan: Full Interview

TRANSCRIPT

Kellan
Interviewed by Ross Horsley
23rd April 2019

RH: This is Ross Horsley recording for the West Yorkshire Queer Stories project on the 23rd April 2019. I’m here with Kellan. Kellan, would you like to just briefly introduce yourself?

K: My name’s Kellan, I’m 53. I identify as a trans person; I use the pronoun ‘they’. I was living in Leeds – Bradford in 1984, and I moved to Leeds in 198-, mid – actually Bradford and Leeds in 1984, and I lived in Leeds from ’84 to ’89. But I also have Yorkshire heritage because my father comes from Skipton, which is, that’s where my passport tick comes from, when Scotland – when Yorkshire gets independence I can claim the citizenship. Yes, there we go, and I suppose if I had to have an identity other than a trans person I’d say I was queer.

RH: Thanks Kellan. Perhaps you could tell us a little bit more about the time you spent in Bradford and the youth group that you started?

K: Well – I… so I ran away from home when I was 17, cos in 1982 the world was not very nice and I moved to Bradford because I had a friend at the university, and… to start off I didn’t know any gay or lesbian people, I went, I’d been on the Switchboard of Leicester Friend so I contacted Leed- Bradford Switchboard, who were very snotty, I have to say – and there was a person called Googi who was deeply unpleasant to me – and they had been the remnants of Bradford GLF, which had been associated with the university and then become a GLF group and had set up the Switchboard group, and they didn’t seem to have much contact with the scene, and I think there was an element of ‘washed-upness’ in the backwaters of the aftermath of GLF, and – but I didn’t really get to know them very much. And on a Friday, on the fourth, or I think it was either the fourth Friday or the fourth Saturday of the month, I can’t remember which, there was a – there was a club night upstairs from, it was either the ice rink or the bowling green or something, anyway, it was in – it was right at the bottom of the student district, near the statue of Victoria, and they had a gay night, once a month, and basically everybody from West Yorkshire, probably, certainly from Bradford, used to go, and I was walking up the stairs and there was this ginger-haired man, and I said, ‘hello’ – cos I thought it was this Googi person, and we went upstairs and got talking, and after about 10, no half an hour, he said to me, ‘I’m really sorry but actually I’m not sure I know who you are’, and then I realised that it wasn’t him at all, but his name was Will and he was, lived in Leeds as part of a group called Wild Lavender, which was a feminist, gay, radical, socialist housing collective that were then based in the squats, and later were in a housing co-op.

In Bradford at the time there was this club once a month and there was a pub – that had been there quite a long time. I can’t remember for the life of me what it was called. And then there was occasional club nights in straight bars on Tuesdays or Wednesdays, when they hadn’t got any punters, they would basically let the gays have the night. And it was – they were horrible, they were like, they’d have – there was one club where we used to go to once a month, it was near the shopping centre in Bradford – everything in Bradford is up a hill, and… it was – they had a female stripper. There wasn’t any women in the bar, it wasn’t like they were there for the lesbians, it was just that’s what they had on that night so they just, she just came out and stripped. You can imagine the atmosphere – it’s a female stripper, stripping to a group of gay men. It wasn’t even funny, it was just sad and horrible.

Anyway – anyway, I was living in Leeds and there was a paper called Leeds Other Paper, which I’ve mentioned quite a few times, and no one seems to have heard of it, but it did run for quite a long time. And I think if the archive – if the Queer Stories archive wants to find more about what was happening in West Yorkshire they really need to go out and find the archives of that. So, I was going backwards and forwards to Leeds and staying with Wild Lavender, cos I was dating one of them, and – which was of course controversial cos I was 18 and they were all over 21, so that was all very naughty – and I put an advert in Leeds Other Paper, a box advert, saying West Yorkshire Gay Bi Lesbian Youth Network, and we’d meet in – I think we met in Bradford the first time, but anyway, I can’t remember, it’s a very long time ago; and I would’ve been 18, and seven people responded. There was a Muslim guy from Bradford, there was a bisexual woman from Leeds, a milkman from Ilkley, a young man doing some sort of technical college work in Dewsbury… oh God, there was a couple of other people, I can’t think now – anyway, we met in Bradford, and we used to alternate between Bradford and Leeds so that, because, people, most, everyone apart from me lived at home. The guy – there was a guy that only came to the Leeds ones because he couldn’t be seen in Bradford, with anyone, in case – and I was, I had a Belisha beacon number four cropped hair, and drop earrings, and army, green army fatigues, so I did stand – and eyeliner – so I did stand out quite a lot, and… I think, being seen with me in Leeds was kind of okay because no one knew him but to be seen with me in Bradford was probably a bit frightening for him – I think it was a bit frightening for most people, to be honest.

To be honest I’m surprised I’m not dead, but – just because – I mean I used to walk round the streets of Bradford in a, in a dress, which was, had a sort of short neck, like a collared neck, and then sleeves, which went down to a collar, and then the rest of it was like a very large bag, and then the bit round the ankles was like a thick, sort of again like the top of the neck, and so it was basically like a large sack with armholes – and eyeliner, and lipstick, and I used to walk the streets of Bradford in 1984 and just go to the shops. And then some of the time, in the summer, I used to wear these shorts, which were so small they may as well have been a belt. And then I had an army combat trou – jacket, that went down to my knees, and I used to do it all up, and I had on Doc Marten boots and these and I used to walk around and the police would stop me, and the first question they would ask was if I’m a man or a woman, and the second question they’d ask me was, was I wearing anything underneath the jacket. And I used to throw the jacket open, which revealed no top and these shorts and go, ‘da-dah!’ And they’d go, ‘oh, fuck off’, because they’d met me, they knew – and after a while they wouldn’t even bother to stop me really. But as I said, I think – there was somewhere between bravado and stupidity, but whatever it was – and maybe a bit of naivety, and maybe that naive thing, I mean I used to walk to Manningham, which is not necessarily, specifically a queer story about qu-, I mean, it’s about me I suppose, that’s a queer story – so I used to walk to Manningham and there was – which was quite a rough area, and there was a big black community – and there were a few bars I used to go to where I’d be the only white person in the bar, and nobody was interested, cos I was just this fey, very skinny, little white person, who was obviously no threat to anybody, I wasn’t NF or anything, and they just used to let me sit there and chat.

And then one night I was there and these women, older women than me, I mean they were probably only in their 20s but I was only 18, they went, ‘oh come with us, we’re going to the Coconut Club’. I’d never heard of this. So we all went, we were all drunk, went up the stairs and it was an upstairs – bar I suppose, after hours bar, and all the women were white, and all the men were black, and it turned out it was actually a club where sex workers went, after they’d finished work, and their boyfriends would meet them – and you’ve never seen so much cocaine in your entire life, the tables were just covered in it. And one of them said to me, ‘whatever you do, don’t go through the fire door’, and I went, ‘why’, and she went, ‘Cos there’s no stairs’. And I used to go there, and after a while I stopped going to the pub first, I just used to go to Coconut Bar and hang out. And the men were not in any way phased by me, cos y’know, I was this fey, queer, queen, with loads of make-up on and the girls liked me, I wasn’t in any way threatening to any of them. Nobody made a pass at me, which, I think I was just, I don’t think I was feminine – I was clearly not a girl, but y’know whatever it was, I was just a thing with no – so I used to hang out with these women after work, and these black guys.

RH: Where was it, the Coconut Club?

K: That was in Manningham. I don’t, couldn’t tell you where it was. And then I would walk back at four o’clock in the morning and stop off at the all-night Asian supermarket and buy loads of sweets, y’know those kulfi and things like that, and go to sleep, really. Anyway, that was, that was part of my life. And the other thing that was quite funny actually, cos when I was dating a guy from Wild Lavender – I think that was after the Coconut Club, I dunno, it’s all a bit blurred now, it’s all so long… So I knew quite a lot of the students, of course, cos y’know my friend was a student, and I knew quite – well we went to a lot of student parties, and I met this guy, who was also a student there, called… I don’t remember his name. And the first time I met him, we were standing, there were two, there were three of us actually, were three gay men in a row, there was one a skinhead guy who’d been, come from London, and there was a guy from the north, and I was [?] at the party, and one of the women said to me, ‘Ooo, you must come and meet’ whatever his name is, and I went in and there were these two men, and they went, ‘Oh! Another one!’ And I went, ‘What?’ And then went, ‘They’re introducing the gays’, and I said, ‘Oh really’, and I went, ‘so you’re gay?’, and he went, ‘Yes’, and the other one said, ‘Yes, I’m gay’, and I said, ‘What do you think –‘, and they said, ‘I don’t think they know what to do with us, they’re just kind of introducing them to each other’, and I said, ‘You know what they want, don’t you?’ He went, ‘Yes, they think we’re gonna have sex’. And it was quite clear that none of us fancied each other, and so we then wandered round…

And at the time, it was both absolutely verboten to be bisexual on the political left, but at the same time straight guys, student trendy straight guys would pretend to be bisexual to look trendy. So y’know they’d go from the bar and they’d walk hand-in-hand down the street, that sort of thing. But one thing they were absolutely terrified of was if a gay man made a pass at them, because then of course they’d have to potentially – I mean, they didn’t have to do anything, but it would blow their cover. And we knew this, so we would go up to these men sitting on sofas in these house parties, holding hands, and go, [puts on flirty voice] ‘Hello! How are you?’ And they’d go, they’d look mortified, and then magically their girlfriend would appear. So, after we got on quite well, the three of us, mocking. But, and I mean we were sort of tolerated. I think it was – nobody really knew what to do with gay men or lesbians, then, it was like, sort of – it wasn’t even like everyone wanted a gay friend, it was just that they really didn’t have any clue, y’know. There was – I don’t think there was a gay society in Bradford, at the time. And, I was involved in the CND group, and me and my friend Mandy went to schools to speak about the dangers of nuclear weapons, and we both smoked, and we would sit in – of course, because we were naughty, we’d roll up cigarettes in the school and then smoke them in the classroom, and the teachers would go, ‘Did you have a cigarette?’, and we’d go, [high voice] ‘We might have’, and they’d be, ‘Oh goood’ y’know we were 16, 17, 18, anyway, but that’s beside the point, it’s not queer.

But very straight, it was very straight, and the – everywhere was very straight actually, and… And then I was dating Andy. And I went – he came over to Bradford once, and we went to the student union bar, where everyone was normally very nice, but suddenly of course I was with a man and I was dating him. And these guys were just – unbelievable, I mean the rugby club hated me, and I got threatened with violence quite often at club nights and parties and things, by the rugby club. But suddenly these straight so-called bisexual Labour students were suddenly really uptight and sitting with their arses stuck right against the wall, y’know. And when I went to the toilet they were really, really uncomfortable, and finally as we were leaving one of the girls, of their girlfriends said, ‘I’m really sorry about this, but they’re a bit uncomfortable cos there’s two of you’, and I said, ‘well’, and they went, ‘Because that means that you must be having sex’. And I went, ‘Well, you’re assuming we’re having sex’, and they went, ‘[mumble mumble]’, and I went, ‘And the thing is, they’re really revolted by the idea of anal sex’, and it wasn’t the idea of anal sex, it was the idea of being the passive anal person, y’know, and that’s – they were all mortified because they couldn’t work out which one of us was taking it like a girl, basically. I mean, I don’t think any of them would’ve used that language, but that’s what was going on – and that was kinda, quite left-wing, Labour students, y’know, they were still, well that’s the world we were living in. Y’know, it wasn’t sort of ‘basher fascists’ standing in the street, that was the sorts of people that were calling for a united Ireland, y’know, and abortion on demand, and y’know at the same time.

And then I moved to Leeds, and when I moved to Leeds I think the gay group kind of was more based in Leeds, because I was living there, and essentially I was ‘doing the gays group’, y’know… What I used to do was, there were two things, so there was – two ways he could contact us was that, we got no support off Bradford Switchboard at all, they didn’t like us. I think they thought I was just some Southerner coming in to their patch; they were very, very angry about London GLF, and I can understand, because I – there’s been some meetings of old GLF people in London recently, about this reclaim Pride thing, which is not going anywhere, as usual, but I went to a couple of things – not the actual meetings, but I met some people in the pub afterwards, and I asked some of them about what happened outside London, and one of these old queens went, ‘Well, we used to send them our newsletter’, and I went, ‘Yeah, did you contact them?’ And they went, ‘We went to Manchester once, I think’ And I thought, that was it, that’s exactly it, y’know, GLF went for four years in London and they went to Manchester once. So I imagine there was a really, I know GLF was quite often, outside London, there was, it was a student network, really, and local activists of course, but I imagine there was probably a lot of contact between different communities outside London but London, as usual – London hasn’t changed, y’know, the same arrogant crap, frankly. So I think there was a bit of that, maybe, a bit of attitude. Even though I wasn’t from London, y’know.

But anyway, when we got to Leeds, Leeds was a bit freaked out because our age range was 16 to 26, was 16 to 26, or 21? I can’t remember now. Might have been 23, I don’t know – it was over 21, but it wasn’t as high as – I think it was 23. And nobody on the Switchboard, initially, to begin with nobody on Switchboard, Leeds Switchboard, was young enough to come. So they knew this gay group was happening, but they didn’t know anybody in it, and of course they desperately wanted to be able to shunt under 21s somewhere, but they didn’t know who we were. And there was a little bit of nervousness because there’d been the Paedophile Information Exchange trials in London, so all these groups outside London were a bit nervous about where young people might go. So anyway, it turned out that Alan, who young, just young enough to come, so he came to one of our meetings and after that he, he sort of became a member for a while, and he – he basically gave us a clean bill of health, so people either responded to our PO Box at Leeds Other Paper, or they might be passed to us through Switchboard. But the same rules applied – they had to write to our box, we didn’t accept direct transfers. And then I would meet them on the steps of the Corn Exchange on a Saturday afternoon, because then anybody could be there, and even then, the Corn Exchange was a bit of an old alternative place. So you could stand on the steps of the Corn Exchange and not be identifiably anything weird. And then we would walk down Boar Lane to a department store, I don’t know what it was called now, and there was a big café on the third, second or third floor, and with little kind of beads and so we’d walk there and I’d order a coffee or tea or something and then we’d go and sit in a booth and I would sort of a) check out – I had no training in this, but y’know I would sort of ask a few questions and see. And then I would, if I thought they were okay, I would tell them about it and then that would be it. And usually I was the first gay person they’d ever met in their lives, and – they came from all over West Yorkshire.

Some of them were students at the university who didn’t feel confident enough to go to the gay society, some of them were, y’know, working class people from all over West Yorkshire, y’know. And of course middle class people too, but mostly working class people – I think what used to happen, I don’t know whether it still happens, but what used to happen is, because this was before the internet, if you were middle class you went to university, and that’s how you left home, and then you met lesbian and gay people at the gay society, or in the courses. If you were working class you didn’t have that option, cos only a very small percentage of people went to university. So you either met somebody through your own social circles, or you stumbled across a gay bar, which had its ups and downs, particularly if you were under 21. Or you found a youth group, and in West Yorkshire they found us, and so – and we did all kinds of strange stuff, y’know, we went swimming, we went to the cinema together, we had lots of meetings in coffee bars. We had a rule – we had a thing – we always met on the – I don’t know which Saturday of the month it was – it wasn’t the same Saturday – it was the same Saturday as I would meet people – well no we met [?] – I can’t remember which Saturday of the month it was, but we always met at this, on that Saturday, in the department store café, so that if you missed the previous meeting, you knew – because there was no internet, and I wouldn’t give my phone out, and a lot of people didn’t have a phone because they lived with their parents – so you knew that even if you missed the next meeting and you didn’t know what, what we were gonna do, we would first meet in this café, so you could rock up, miss a few months, rock up and we’d still be there. And then we’d go and – so we’d always wait say half an hour at two o’clock – it wouldn’t be, it’s probably about 12, but anyway, and then we’d go and do something. No, we didn’t always, sometimes we just sat in the café and messed about and camped it up and somebody would have always been out on the shag the night before, so we’d have a post mortem of what it was like, and if it were lucky several people had and we’d have a bit of a, y’know, filthy conversation.

Girls, boys – there wasn’t a thing called trans, I mean there was transsexual women, but I don’t think any of us knew any transsexual women, and I mean… so it wasn’t like – but there was a woman, there were people, there was a woman, I say a woman, I use that word, but – there was a person that came to the youth group that was about 17 and she wore a three-piece tweed suit, and she had a side parting, which for Leeds in the, in the early-mid 80s was very butch, I mean it’s very dated in that sense. And I think, looking back, and I think, I wouldn’t, on the whole I don’t approve of labelling people backwards. I mean I would label, I would say James Barrie was probably trans, but on the whole I think we have to be very careful, because we don’t know the context, in which somebody – but I suspect that they were, would now identify as a trans person. But – who knows? But then sadly we were so extremely stupid, which was a problem. When we were going, one time we were gonna go swimming and they wouldn’t go swimming, and initially we thought it was because they would have to wear a swimsuit, because we couldn’t imagine this person in a swimsuit, we didn’t think we would ever see them in something like that, and it turned out the reason why she wouldn’t go swimming was not because of the swim suit, though that was an issue, it’s because she knew that sperm swam into the vagina. And she thought that if she went swimming that the sperm would swim out of the man’s penis, swim across the pool, swim up her leg, in between, up her costume and get her pregnant. And no matter how much we told her that the sperm didn’t swim like that, and anyway they weren’t big enough, she wouldn’t have it, so she wouldn’t come cos she was frightened of being pregnant. Which is the terrible state of sex education, but – that sticks in my memory still, all these years later, this poor girl, she wouldn’t go swimming because she thought she’d get pregnant.

RH: You mentioned that, y’know there weren’t really trans people, or people identified as trans then, but there were – there were transsexual women. Were you not aware of any transsexual men?

K: No. I don’t think such an idea even existed. There must’ve – you see, I knew, from when I came out at 16, I knew very butch women, butch femme women on the Leicester scene and in, less so in Leeds actually, because of the feminist separatist community, they looked down on butch femme. But in Leicester, the pu- when I came out in ’82 it was like the end of an era. So I caught the very end of the butch femme scene, butch men, femme men, butch women, femme women. There were feminist lesbians in Leicester who took to – y’know, changed their name from their father’s name to the place they were born, and wore, wore those trousers with the thing at the front.

RH: Dungarees?

K: Dungarees, y’know, all kinds of awfulness like that. But, not really no, I think if you were – if you, if you were inclined to a very masculinist dressing style and behaviour, you probably just identified as a butch woman. I mean, and some of the women were so butch and they wore suits to work, and they went with their male colleagues after work to the pub, and their female partner, who always wore heels and a dress, would be at home and doing the housework and have the dinner on the table when they got in. So to all intents and purpose they were living their lives as, as heterosexual couples but they happened to both have female bodies. And some of those people, I suspect, if they’d been living now would identify as trans, but that didn’t exist – the only concept, not just in the lesbian and gay scene but in society at large was people like Julia, who made the amazing documentary, Becoming Julia, where it was a trans, what we now call a trans woman, who documented her life on camera in her transition from a man to a woman and, they had a very – I mean still now, of course, particularly if she’s stuck at Charing Cross hospital as there’s still an expectation of how you will perform this new gender, to their eyes, the gender, so y’know it’s still a lot of dresses and high-heeled shoes and eye makeup and…

But also, even today and even then, lesbian feminism saw people who behaved in a masculinist way as being maybe a bit, I mean, you see it now with the TERFs [trans exclusive radical feminists], they don’t, they tend, they’re not interested in trans men. They tend to think they’re misled, but they’re not in-, what they’re interested in is men entering women’s spaces through the, through this idea. I mean, if there’s a very influential book called, by Mary Daly, called Gyn/Ecology, which I think everyone had read on the left, certainly queer peo- well we didn’t use the word queer, but – what we’d now call – radical people read, and it’s incredibly transphobic and incredibly homophobic and incredibly heterophobic and – it’s horrible. It’s a horrible book, but at the time it was very powerful, and it has a whole section – she’s a classical, she’s a classical scholar. She’s a university lecturer and a, and she used to be a Catholic, y’know a person who’d been signed off as an approved Catholic lecturer, so she was really creating categories of sin, but in a social political sense. And she has a whole section on how Zeus impregnated his thigh with a male child, and that she compares that to transsexual operations, and the idea – men creating women without the need for women and that’s what transsexuality was about, so men using science, because of course science is bad, using science to bypass the natural creative power of women. And that was very influential. And when Donna Haraway wrote A Cyborg Manifesto, which was partly an explicit response to this sort of ‘womb-in’ naturalism, it was massively attacked because it was seen as exactly what it was, which was saying actually, feminism and women have to be part of science, have to be part of this sort of stuff, y’know. And that did cast a big shadow over all kinds of radical sexual politics in the ‘80s.

So, not only were we putting up with massive homophobia, and violence on a regular – I mean I was queer-bashed so many times – massive homophobia, massive violence. The papers of course, from the early ‘80s onwards, particularly the tabloid press, but also other papers as well, were absolutely fixated on AIDS and also poofs in the pulpit, destroying people’s lives and monstering people who were dying, the fear – it meant that there were loads of trades unions supporting workers who were refusing to look after people with HIV, so there was a big – I was in, I was in I think it was Unite, or maybe it wasn’t called Unite, was it the one before Uni- anyway, I was working in the NHS and there was a group of cleaners that refused to clean up after, in I think it was South Wales – someone had come to do a talk about HIV to a gay and lesbian society at the university, and the cleaners refused to clean the room afterwards because they were scared they’d get AIDS. And, there was a big hoo-hah about it, and the university said this is completely ridiculous, and they threatened to suspend them, and the union, big state union, supported the rights of the workers not the infected, rather than saying this is garbage. And I actually wrote them a very strong letter and resigned from the union, cos I wasn’t having that. Can’t remember what I joined instead. Think it was Transport and General Workers Union, I mean none of them were very good, to be honest. I mean, they were awful on gay rights and they were awful on AIDS, but, so all of this was going on, and at the same time, on the political left, amongst y’know radical lesbians and gays, there was this massive over-hanging shadow of separatist, feminist lesbianism, which was influencing liberal feminism and socialist feminist as well, and the view was that, y’know, at – gay men were, at best, okay because they were not taking part in patriarchy, though that changed over time; transsexual women were trait- were abusive and trans men, I suppose, liked straight women, or bisexuals were traitors to their sex.

And I knew quite a few heterosexual women, good what we’d now call allies – we didn’t use language like that then, we just, y’know, we were just people together – but I knew several straight women who had children with men or were living with men and when they did that, lesbian fem- their lesbian sisters would be like, y’know, ‘sleeping with the enemy’. And one of the women I knew, she was bisexual, she had a relationship with a woman and that was fine – they didn’t like the fact that she was bisexual, but then she started a relationship with a man and some of them wouldn’t talk to her – then she had a male child, and the idea that she’d given birth to a man, even though of course she has no… thing, and a woman turns round to her and goes, ‘Well, y’know, you obviously didn’t, you obviously wanted a male child’, and it was like blaming her for producing yet another, y’know, warmongering man. So that atmosphere was very strong, so all the things I’m telling you about the ‘80s – the other thing that was going on in the ‘80s, which was very powerful in the early ‘80s was the miners’ strike.

I was living in Leicester and Nottingham and Leeds and Bradford and commuting up and down and going to all the rallies, and that was all incredibly empowering, because we weren’t there as lesbians, gays or whatever else it was, we were just there as working-class people engaged in this incredibly powerful struggle, y’know. And the miners’ wives, I mean – obviously there was Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners, and when we, when I went down to London we’d give the money, but up north that didn’t have any, there was no – cos it was very integrated communities y’know. The miners’ wives were amazing – on the Mansfield rally, which was after Orgreave, there was about 10,000 people and there were all these lads, y’know, and this girl was hanging out of a window, and she was, and they all started chanting, ‘Get your tits out, get your tits out, get your tits out’ – and this group of miners’ wives started singing, ‘Get your cocks out, get your cocks out, get your cocks out for the girls’, and there was a bit of embarrassment and someone went, ‘Go on then, go on let’s see how big your cock is’, and that just shut it up y’know, cos it was, it was working-class women telling working-class men, ‘fuck off’ y’know’. Whereas if some, I dunno, some lecturer or some person, middle-class person from a political party had come along and told them off it would’ve been like being told off at school. But when it’s your peers and your sisters and your comrades, that’s a very different thing, y’know.

So I was involved in miners’ strike stuff and I was very out, and nobody – I didn’t get, actually there was much better solidarity and support from working-class people – of course, because the image of working-class people in the ‘80s was that a lot of people had run away from horrible environments and they’d been raised to think that working-class communities were full of nasty horrible thugs and full of violent people, which is the classist crap you get, and… when just as much middle-class people, y’know they might not punch you in the head but people have just as much horrific stories of the silent treatment and being, and having their – one person I knew, she went to university, when she came out her parents refused to give her any money, so she had – which I mean in the ‘80s was quite hard, y’know.

So there’s, there’s abuse in different ways homophobia operates, but there was a sense that somehow working-class people were suspect, and you couldn’t be gay and working-class almost, y’know, cos to be gay was to be aspirational, y’know, you had to – you couldn’t like football, you had to like opera, which I would say you can be working-class and like opera too, but then it was very classist, so if you read the gay press – y’know Gay News was amazing, and I think it’s a great loss to us that it closed, but it did have a section on theatre, opera and classical music, but nothing about pop, or rugby or football. So – I think most people didn’t, in the gay community – once they’d come out they stayed on the gay bars, they stayed in the gay community, and that’s maybe true still, but that’s where I, my politics were, y’know I’m an anarchist and y’know most people on the gay scene are not anarchists, so you go and spend time with the communities you spend time with. So, you know I would be fighting for, on the front-line defending women’s refuges and opposing the David Alton bill [aimed to stop late term abortions] and all that sort of stuff, and hanging out with straight people, and to me it wasn’t – that didn’t matter, y’know. I wasn’t interested in people’s sexuality in that sense, I was interested in where their politics were, where their solidarity was, y’know.

RH: Were the members of the youth group quite political?

K: … Not massively. I mean, I think after Section 28 that changed everything. That politicised the whole of the lesbian gay scene in Britain in a way that Margaret Thatcher could never have possibly imagined. And – I think, no, I think… It’s hard to remember – that’s the sort of thing it’s quite hard to remember, because I don’t remember – you might be better talking to someone else who was – when it first started I think it probably was, because people would’ve found it through Leeds Other Paper and that was a left-wing paper. I don’t know really.


RH: That’s fine. This is a bit of a broad question as well, don’t worry if you don’t have an answer, but related to those topics you’ve been talking about around class and kind of economics, were you aware of a sort of different climate or a different feel between Leeds and Bradford?

K: Yes, well, not… Bradford was poor. I mean, Bradford – where I lived, in whatever it was called, the student area, there were places where the drains – you could smell the sewage, and… there was one year when I think there was more cases of whatever it was, something, typhus or, it couldn’t’ve been typhus, but – there was quite a serious illness, and there were more cases in Bradford that year than there’d been in the whole country the year before. And it wasn’t – I mean, yeah, you’d go to the city centre in Bradford, well I mean it wasn’t a city centre, but you’d walk up the hill to whatever that awful, awful shopping centre was called, and the Morrisons in Bradford in comparison to the Morrisons in Leeds was, it was… massively different, y’know. I was probably more – because I was in the student district [laughs] – in those days you got a full grant, you got your fees paid, you got housing benefit in the summer holidays, you got unemployment benefit in the Easter holidays and summer holidays. Most of the people in Bradford student district, if they rent – if they kept renting the house over the summer they only paid half rent and yet they got full housing benefit, so they were on a winner and they considered themselves to be really poor. And I remember a cartoon in the Leeds, in the student paper saying, and it was some group of students handing, dishing out some horrible other food and it says, ‘oh y’know, we’ll have to cut back next week cos we come off, y’know, we’re back on student benefits’, and…

But the money – on the dole, I was on the dole and at the time I was, there was a thing called, it was atrocious, ‘group rate’, which is if you were living with more than one person you could claim a slightly higher level of benefits. And of course benefits were paid from 16 onwards and there was no different levels, and none of this under 25, under 18, everyone got the same rate. So I used to sign on at, y’know, 17, 18 and I got £25 a week in benefits, and if you think about the fact that 37 years later you get £57 a week you can think what that was like. £25 a week was quite a lot of money, and students got a lot more money than that, but their perception was – because you had to be quite middle-class to go to university – their perception was they were in poverty, y’know. Maybe they were, but y’know, I found it quite, even at the time I thought that was hysterical, listening to them whining about it all – and obviously now, you look at what students don’t get, or what they get now, I mean, there are people who my peers who are probably in lots of y’know positions of authority in the state, some of who may indeed be in parliament, they’re voting against these things – talk about pulling the ladder up behind you.

Leeds – I mean, so I was living in the student district and apart from the forays to Manningham, which were very different, and y’know hanging out with black drug dealers and white sex workers, y’know, money is a different game then, and in fact I never bought any drinks because – I suppose I was a bit like a mascot, y’know, or a pet, but not – in a pleasant way. I was broke. I didn’t really think about it. Leeds, yes, Leeds was – what was most striking was there was almost no… once I’d gone to Leeds it was like the two little pigs, y’know it’s almost like you crossed the county boundary. Once you’d gone to Leeds there was no contact, y’know the two communities, these two cities lived next door to each other, they were only a short bus ride between them, but they might as well be in other – might have been Scarborough and Southport, for all it mattered, y’know.

RH: Was that reflected in the LGBT communities?

K: Yeah! I mean, y’know, there was a thriving gay scene in Leeds, and there wasn’t a thriving gay scene in Bradford, but people didn’t go over from Bradford to Leeds to go to the clubs, y’know, you just stayed in Bradford, y’know. And there was a bit of a siege mentality, y’know.

RH: How do you mean?

K: Well you know, people just didn’t leave Bradford, y’know – it was almost a Millwall thing, y’know, the Millwall football chant is, ‘Nobody loves us and we don’t care’, and there was a bit of that with Bradford really, it was like, ‘yeah we’re in Bradford, and…’ stuck up, stuck up, Leeds was seen as stuck up, even though of course half of, at least half of Leeds is, more than half of Leeds was absolutely solid working-class people, y’know, it’s only little bits of Leeds in those days that were in any way middle-class but as far as the Bradford people were concerned, Leeds was stuck up, y’know.

RH: Did Bradford have an equivalent to the Leeds Other Paper or anything like that?

K: Well Leeds Other Paper was across West Yorkshire, so it was sold in Huddersfield and Halifax and all these places, I don’t know how many thousand, it must be tens of thousands of people. There was another, there was a gay bar in Halifax, I think it was. What the hell was it called? And it was completely lit by fairy lights, with thousands and thousands of fairy lights. Some of them blinked, which was very disturbing, and by the mid/late ‘80s people used to come and, y’know straight people would come, and just stand on the other side of the road and look at it, cos it was this huge gay bar, flashing, and that was its thing, that was its, I suppose its thing. And then there was a bar in, was in Halifax as well, or Huddersfield, there was a bar in Huddersfield – anyway, I don’t remember. I visited them all because I was a – I set up a column for Leeds Other Paper, with a lesbian, she was very butch, I was very femme, so we called it George and Mildred, because we always thought George and Mildred [1970s sitcom] were really a lesbian and gay man, living in a marriage of convenience – they couldn’t, because George was y’know, and Mildred – they can’t possibly be straight, they’ve got to be secret queer icons, or gay and lesbian icons.

So she, so we did George and Mildred for Leeds Other Paper. I don’t know how long we did it for cos I don’t remember really, but um. And we used to do reviews, and we used to go to the cities, the towns and cities and do reviews of the bars, and we weren’t always very nice, and because we had a pseudonym y’see we could go. No one knew who we were, and so we’d go to these bars and we’d say how many women there were in the bar. I don’t think we talked about people of colour in those days, and anyway we didn’t call them people of colour, I don’t know what we called people then, black, probably. But anyway, we didn’t talk about race, we just talked about women, men and women ratios, and… and the price of a pint, that was right. Y’know, how many, how much you could get.

So we went to this one bar in Huddersfield, Halifax, I don’t remember, and it was in a crossroads and there’d be an underground toilets. And we’d discovered through our contacts that it had orig- it had been a cottage, a famous cottage, and then it had been closed down, and somebody had bought it and turned it into a bar. And they still had toilets, but the main centre area under it was now a bar and then there were little snugs, which would’ve been where the cubicles were. And it was horrible, really horrible [laughs] it was like being – it was an underground cave, really. And it was all men, and essentially – essentially it was like a cottage, except y’didn’t – you kept your clothes on. It was just awful; I don’t even know what it was called. So we did a review of that. We went to the one with the fairy lights, and went back to Bradford to do one of the bar there.

We did Mr Gay UK in Leeds. I wrote this incredibly scathing article about why do we want, need beauty pageants, y’know why do gay men and les-, why do gay men need beauty pageants? If this is really supposed to be finding representatives of our community, maybe the people, that we should be judging people not on their ability to wear swimwear – I can remember it all now – not on their ability to wear swimwear but on their ability for them to have a cogent argument about lesbian and gay liberation. And they got letters – it got rung up by the organisers saying, y’know, ‘this –‘, y’know and then I used to write really nasty things, not nasty but critical things about Rock Shots. And I also used to go to Rock Shots a lot, and the New Penny, and I was a drunk, so sometimes they’d have to not let me in. And I was chatting at the bar one night to the staff, and y’know obviously I’d been chatting away, and this guy said to me, ‘Oh, did you see Leeds Other Paper? That George and Mildred, oh they wrote something about the act last week’ – cos, this boyband had played, I don’t know who it was, and they were just playing to the audience, and I just wrote about, y’know, ‘yes another heterosexual boyband comes and flirts with a gay audience so they can get a bit of a thing, y’know, as soon as they get famous they’ll dump us all and pretend they’re all straight’, because one of the lads, from the boyband, had been in the toilets afterwards having sex, so y’know, but we all knew that as soon as they became famous that would all have to be hushed up, so… So I’d written something scathing, and he’d gone, ‘Oh yes, they really want to find out who this George and Mildred is, y’know’, and I said, ‘Why?’ and he said, ‘Cos we’ve been told that if any of us find out who they are, they’re banned’. And I’m standing there thinking, ‘Hahahaha!’ They never found out it was me, but apparently, I’m banned – I was banned, y’know.

RH: Did you write anything else for the Leeds Other Paper, as well as the George and Mildred column?

K: I used to write crosswords. I used to do cryptic crosswords. I can’t do cryptic crosswords that are set by other people, but I used to write the cryptic crosswords.

RH: And how did you get involved with the newspaper?

K: I don’t remember. I think I just… knew people. Y’know, I’d worked at the Wharf Street Café and Beano and I knew people and I lived in a housing co-op in Leeds and I’d been involved in – […] Wild Lavender was by that point was also in Tangram, which was a housing coalition, I believe is still there, and I lived just down the street, also in Tangram and – the scene was very small; there’s a lot of co-ops in Leeds, workers’ co-ops, housing co-ops. The scene was, I mean, it was just really tiny, y’know, I mean – the political scene was basically between, there was a very small university set and then it was basically a small part of Harehills and Meanwood, and then Hyde Park and Headingley. That was probably it. You knew everybody, y’know. And you got your hair done at Chops hairdressers, whose name I can’t remember, name of the place I can’t remember, he’s dead now, I can’t remember what that’s called. And if you got – went home and washed the dye out yourself he gave you a reduction. And you ate your food at Wharf Street Café and you bought your food at Beano’s and you got your car done at the co-operative’s car mechanics’. Everybody knew everybody. So I would’ve known them, and then this, and then the person who did George and Mildred, that’s right, she knew somebody and she approached them and they thought it was a great idea. And so we did that, and then y’know, I said, ‘could I put some crosswords in?’, and they were thrilled about that so I used to write these cryptic crosswords, and some – usually it’s part of the George and Mildred column, and Jane Czyzselska who was, became the editor of Diva magazine, I met, I knew, I met her in Leeds when she was an art student, and she used to date one of the women that I – cos I used to live with two lesbians, and – and she was dating one of the lesbians, so we had a laugh about that, now that she’s famous. And very left-wing, thankfully. Yes! I’m reminiscing now, ask me something.

RH: Can you tell me a little bit more about Wild Lavender itself, and your involvement?

K: Pause the thing, I’ve got to have a pee.
~
RH: This is Ross Horsley recording for West Yorkshire Queer Stories on the 24th April 2019, and this is part two of the interview with Kellan.

K: It’s actually the 23rd April.

RH: Thanks Kellan.

K: That’s alright. Okay I was going to talk a little bit about my chequered gender and identity history. So… So I – when I was a child, 1972 – I know this because my mother and I have talked about this in recent years – there was a point when most children, between six and eight, they tend to separate into single sex groups, and I was playing with the girls. And school was a bit concerned about this, and they’d had a word with mother, and I was living in West Staffordshire at the time, a tiny little village of about 400 people, and there was no internet or anything y’know. And they didn’t want – they were trying to discourage me from playing with the girls and encourage me to play with the boys, and I was questioned about it and I said I didn’t understand why, because I was a girl, so why couldn’t I play with the girls. And, obviously no one knew what to do with that answer. It was very clear. It wasn’t like I was confused. That was – I was very, very clear, my mother was saying, I was very clear I was a girl, so why will you not let me play with the girls? And she had to – then she had to spend quite a long time telling me that I wasn’t a girl, and then…

I had child psychology and stuff. I mean, I didn’t know that of course, but that’s what was going on. And essentially what they decided was that I didn’t have enough role models, cos it was why, whatever the answer was, I think it was the only thing they had really. I suppose it was lobotomy or that, but they didn’t have – so I moved from my idyllic village to a local city, which was, we went from a village of 400 people to a place where the school itself had 1800 students. And I essentially had a breakdown. I was deeply suicidal. I started – I was having puberty. I was having erections; I didn’t know what the hell to do with them. I’d just stand there, in my room, with this erection. It wasn’t like – I didn’t want to touch it, it was just – I wasn’t disgusted, I just didn’t know what the fuck it was, y’know. What was it?! What was I supposed to do with it? I didn’t know. So I just used to ignore it. And, that when on

And went I was about 13 I got involved in CND in Leicester, and… – I was very young, very politically actively young and I think it was, I mean, y’know it’s very difficult to ascribe all these things, I mean I had read, I was a voracious reader and by the age of 13 I’d read Socrates, Plato and Marx, which is quite, quite early, really, for those sort of things. And I’d got involved with the CND and I started writing for the CND newspaper, in Leicester, and the guy that was write – the editor of the CND paper was this 22-year-old bisexual man and, in the course of the conversation one day, he said, ‘Do y’know’, and I’d been talking about various different things, and he said, ‘Do you know it sounds like you’re gay to me’. And I didn’t really know what that would mean, but – and he told me what gay meant, and y’know, ‘if you fancy people like yourself’, and I was attracted to men, and I realised – I guess I just accepted the idea that I was a man, albeit confusedly. And it was interesting actually cos he was into S&M as well, and so you know I was only 14, so I’d come across gay sexuality and S&M at the age of 14. He didn’t, we didn’t have sex – he was terrified – I was 14. He leant me Jeffrey Weeks’ Coming Out, the original issue – this is ’82, yes, no ’80, 1980, so it wasn’t out long. So I read the whole of that at age 14 so that’s a bit of a, y’know, and that made me a historian, actually.

And… and then obviously I said, y’know, I went, by the time I was 17 I was wearing full facial makeup and skin-tight stretch trousers and a long jumper down to my knees, and walking round the streets of Leicester with long flicked-back hair, looking somewhere between a drag queen and a New Romantic and God only knows what else. And, going on the gay scene, and I didn’t – I identified as a queen, cos I read, I read Quentin Crisp’s Naked Civil Servant and unlike almost every gay man I ever met from that era who read that sorta stuff and found it completely alienating because they did not feel like they were a feminine gay man. To me, it spoke to me. It was like someone spoke to me, and he had this great line of that, ‘If they were going to call me a homosexual, I would dress like a homosexual’, so I dressed like a homosexual. So I, y’know, so I walked the streets of Leicester, Bradford and Leeds, y’know… on some kind of death wish, except I didn’t, it wasn’t bravery, it wasn’t even a sod you thing, it was like, ‘I’m going to do this, and I don’t give a shit. Don’t care’.

And, so when I ran away from home, at 17, I was living in a hostel for homeless teenagers with a lesbian, and I was cross-dress, well I’d call now cross-dressing – I was wearing all her clothes, shaving my legs and wearing full facial makeup and had a female name, which I can’t – really annoys me, cos I can’t remember what it is. Somewhere, it’s in there somewhere, but, anyway. I know I had a female name. And so I was effectively living as a woman. But the only places that I could go to were gay bars, and so I was having sex with gay men, who were having sex with me on the basis that I was a very young boy, cos I was 17 y’know, probably having sex with people that I shouldn’t have been, they were probably a bit abu- looking back on it, I mean, y’know the power dynamics of it were absolute shit, but there we go. So it was strange – I was living as a woman, but I was going to a bar and having sex with people on the basis that I was a man, or a boy, y’know. Maybe my femininity made me younger, I don’t know.

And then I finally met Wild Lavender, and it’s funny, through Wild Lavender I stopped wearing a lot of the feminineness. I think it was partly because they were very supportive of the feminine side of gayness. They were very, their feminism and their radicalness was, saw that gays, male gay spectrum involved everything from drag queens to leather queens, and so that was a quite warm, safe space and I spent, that was really good.

And then I got involved in the goth scene, where of course nail polish, loads of makeup, massive spiked mohican, black clothes – did the goth stuff for a while, and then of course, and then my alcoholism got worse and worse and worse. And… and I subsumed I think, essentially. I mean, I suspect my alcoholism was directly connected to my self-loathing and body dysmorphia. I weighed seven stone when I was 18. Because, the thing is, and teenage girls would say the same thing, if you don’t have control over enormous parts of your life, you take control of the things you have got, and the thing I had control over was my body. So I made myself so thin that I looked ill, and I was ill, and then I used to wear incredibly skinny femme clothes, trousers not skirts but very femme-looking clothes, and – and walk around. And I used to get beaten up on the streets, I got beaten up outside the New Penny once actually, I was walking to Leeds Other Paper, Leeds Other Paper if I remember, I vaguely remember it used to be on Call Lane, I don’t know why I think it was there, anyway. I think it was opposite the New Penny. You might be able to correct me on that, but maybe it wasn’t, I don’t remember. Anyway, in my head, I was walking past there and I got – a van pulled up outside the traffic lights, they took one look, they got out of the van, they beat me up, on the street, and then I went into Leeds Other Penny, Leeds Other Paper and they kind of y’know patched me up, and I went home.

RH: What would have happened if you’d reported that, or tried to report that?

K: Oh I hadn’t thought about it. I couldn’t imagine going to a police station. I couldn’t imagine speaking to a policeman and getting anything, no. Police were not my friends, y’know. The police were horrible. The main contact you had with the police was they would, was they would pick, arrest people for cottaging, y’know. And also, I was 18, the age of consent was 21, y’know. If I went to the police and they then decided to go through my house would they find names and addresses in a book, would I, would I accidentally incriminate people and they would get sent to prison, so y’know there was a really good vested interest – I might get sent to prison, y’know. So there was a very strong vested interest in not telling anybody involved in authority. Similarly, y’know, social services or education, anyone, y’know.

When I moved to London I was, I – after I’d come off alcohol – I got involved in the London Lesbian and Gay Centre, initially as a volunteer, because I knew that I needed to be somewhere where I could get to know people without alcohol. And, you could volunteer at Lesbian and Gay Centre and they gave you a meal and travel expenses, it wasn’t a very great deal, but all the same. You could sit in the café bar, and I used to do the door and reception and then sit in the café, and I got to know people, and then one day I started working on the bar as well, which was funny really, as an ex-alcoholic. Actually it’s quite therapeutic cos you stand and serve people who’re appallingly drunk and think, ‘I never want to do that again’.

And I worked on some iconic bars, like Sadie Maisie’s, I did the bar at Sadie Maisie’s, which was the first dance club, mixed lesbian and gay S&M bar in the country.

RH: Where was that?

K: It was in the Lesbian and Gay Centre once a month. It was fantastic. You’d get people in full leather, on their knees with a collar on their neck, dancing with somebody who was also in full leather, holding the other end of the lead, y’know, it was great. And dykes and gay men dan- in the same club, y’know. And… and I discovered S&M, which was fantastic. And I realised I’d always been into S&M, that was the thing. It was like, when I discovered it I thought, ‘God! How did I know- how did I not realise’ – I did come out as a sadomasochist in Leeds, actually, accidentally, because in Wild Lavender there was a magazine called Smart, SM-art, or Smack or something, anyway. And it was put together by a group of lesbians and gay men, who I later got to know, who were living in London. In fact I dated one of the people who set up it up. They were younger people who wanted to get away from the kind of old school master/slave thing and have a more radical approach, more political approach. And it was a very thin magazine, and because Wild Lavender was subscribed to all kinds of radical gay and lesbians gay stuf, it was in their bathroom, so I used to read it. And there was a mention about the Samois Society’s book, called Coming to Power, which was a lesbian feminist sadomasochist book of erotic essays, art, poetry and stories, published in ’83 or 4, and it broke the scene in, the feminist lesbian scene in America went completely fucking haywire. And it became, it was the first step in what became known as the ‘Sex Wars’, which basically in America, particularly, the feminist lesbian scene, feminists in general, fought backwards and forwards over sex, [?] sadomasochism, bisexuality, etc. etc. Didn’t really happen as much here, but y’know it was, on the edges it really happened at the end of the ‘80s, early ‘90s in Britain.

So, Alison Hegarty I think her name was, came up from – it was just, it must’ve been just after the raid on Gay’s the Word, and she came to do a talk at Leeds Lesbian and Gay Society, which was appallingly prescriptive. And I was talking, they – she did her talk, and I said, ‘Does –‘cos most radical bookshops in the country wouldn’t sell the Samois Society because at the time S&M was seen as fascist sex. It was fascism, it wasn’t even a sexuality, it was just seen as, y’know exploitation of women and a celebration of fascism. So I said to Alison, I said, ‘Do you sell Samois Society’s Coming to Power?’ And she looked quite astonished, and she said, ‘Yes’. And I said, ‘Oh, do you do it mail order?’ And she went, ‘Yes, but we wouldn’t sell it to a man’. And I said, ‘Not even a gay man?’ She went, ‘No’, and I said, ‘Well, why not?’, and she went, ‘Because people might buy it to get off on it’. I said, ‘Well surely a gay man wouldn’t buy it to get off on it’. And she said, ‘Well why would a gay man buy it?’ And I said, ‘Because it’s the only, because it’s a feminist… analysis of sadomasochism, which is fine’, and then one of the women, who was particularly unpleasant, went, ‘Well what is this book?’ And I looked at this woman from Gay’s the Word, with that kind of look as if to say, ‘Don’t do this’, but she just said, ‘It’s a book about sadomasochism’, and they all just looked at me. And this woman went, ‘Why would you want a book about sadomasochism?’ And there was the longest pause, not the longest pause in my life, but one of the longest pauses in my life, and I just went, ‘Well [sigh] I dunno, maybe I’m a sadomasochist’. And then it was like, y’know, all hell broke loose, and people wouldn’t talk to me in the street, and I was threatened by people for being a fascist.

And they had a disco night, Leeds University students used to have a disco once a month, and by this point I was wearing a leather jacket, which was a fascist uniform, see, because y’know, all fascists all wear leather jackets don’t they, y’know. And, I’d written in Tippex on the back of this – I’d not actually had S&M sex, I should note, it was all theoretical, but I knew it was true, I’d just never done it. Didn’t know anybody to do it with. It was almost like being gay in the ‘50s really, I didn’t know – I knew there were sadomasochists somewhere, I’d never met any of them. I knew damn well I was one, but I didn’t know how on Earth I was going to meet any. And I think this is why I wasn’t really dealing with my gender identity, because I was dealing with a different thing, two different complicated things. So I’d written on the back of my leather jacket: ‘You may like vanilla but I like Neapolitan’, in Tippex. That was [unclear], walking round the streets of Leeds and I went to this club, and my friend Alan […]
Anyway, he said to me, cos it turned out later he was an S&Mer as well, he said to me, I was going to go, and he said, ‘Okay, we’ll both go down together, in your leather jacket, and if they won’t let you in, we’ll picket them’. Anyway, we turned up and everyone just let us in, and we just danced to Sylvester, and had a really nice night. But people were very, very weird with me for quite a while afterwards because I was a sadomasochist. And…

And then I came to London and y’know, ACT UP was full of sadomasochists. And we used to have a joke that it’d be like, oh we’ll go do an action and the people’d be like, ‘Have I got to bring my handcuffs again?!’ and we’d be going, ‘Yes’, and ‘Oh God! You broke the last one!’ Y’know, and this sort of stuff, and then we’d go to the dead hutch [?] parties in the afternoon and then do ACT UP actions in the evening or whatever it happened to be.

And then… then I got into S&M as well. Then that’s what led to, I went, I was dating a guy called Andrew Hunt, who used to work for, what’s it called, oh God – Project Sigma. And he’d done a study, the only study that I know of in Britain, he’d done a survey of the thoughts, identities and ideas about S&M men, which was in 1991 or 2. And it’s before Project Sigma had been turned into this big thing, y’know, it was still quite small. And he surveyed S&M gays, and I was dating Andy – Andrew – and he was presenting this talk at an event at the ICA about the effects of the Spanner judgement on art, and I vaguely had heard of the Spanner judgement, we’d all vaguely heard of it, but, I was by this point having S&M sex of my own. And I went to hear it, and there was this discussion afterwards about how we might approach the thing, and I said, something along the lines of, there were some straight S&Mers in the front of the room, and then mostly it was lesbian and gay S&Mers in the room, and I said, ‘Y’know, the thing is’, I said, ‘I think that as a gay S&Mer’ and I stopped, no ‘As an S&M gay I think that the vanilla gay male community are gonna sell us down the river for equality and leave us, hang us out to dry’. And I got quite a lot of shit from some of the gay men, because I’d chosen to reflect the other way round, and say I was S&M first and gay afterwards. But I got a lot of support from the lesbian community. Lesbian S&Mers. And that led to me founding the Spanner Campaign, because I came out of, standing in ICA I said, ‘Do you know, it’s come up to the appeal, at the Law Lords, d’you know we should do something, we should do something, cos this is – we’re basically being walked over, we really should do something’, and people were going, ‘Yeah, yeah we should’, and I got home and I thought, ‘Well, something has to be done, and it looks like it’s going to have to be me’. So I went, I spoke to Michael Mason, who was the editor of Capital Gay, who was a kinky bastard. And I said, ‘If I set up a group would you put a advert in the paper?’, he said, ‘I’d give you a full page’. And then I sat down one night at two o’clock in the morning and wrote a leaflet, and my then-boyfriend, who was one of the people who had run the Smart magazine in London in the early ‘80s, basically we photocopied it on his work’s photocopier, then we went and stood outside S&M clubs in London and handed it out. And it basically said, y’know, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if we had a march’ and we got Pat [?] to speak, and y’know, we should have the right not just to walk down the street holding hands, but to walk down the street handcuffed to my boyfriend. And, y’know.

And then I had a, we had a public meeting, the last weekend of July 1992, and… And I had me, Angus Hamilton, who is now a judge actually, who was representing Tony Brown and Ronan Jaggard, and Derek Cohen, who had also been a member of this S&M Smart group years before, who was now a member of S&M Gays in London, and he said he’d chair and Angus would do a piece about the law, and I wrote this really inspirational speech recognising all the past stuff to do with S&M and all this stuff and then called on people to call to arms and organise a march. And we, I said to him, it was quite important, cos I said to, y’know, I said to Derek, ‘Y’know, I could be crucified here’, cos I’d been the spokesperson for ACT UP London and a was a leading member of Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, and I was very well known in the Lesbian and Gay Centre and on the left in London. Yeah, I said, ‘If this goes wrong, that’s my political life over’. And he went, ‘Yeah, I know’. He said, ‘Y’know, are you sure about this?’ And I said, ‘Well what are we gonna call it if it’s a success?’, and he went, ‘Well look, if 20 people come, then I think we could call it a success’. And 150 people turned up, and they were in the corridor with the door open listening to my speech and I got a standing ovation for five minutes at the end. And thus, the rest is history really, isn’t it, y’know. We had our S&M Pride march, and… yeah. Some of the proudest things – the proudest things I’ve ever done in my life, actually.

Anyway, so that was that, but what happened then was you see was I was an S&Mer and, the thing about the S&Mers was – I used to have – I used to do a lot of flogging, and I would go to these mixed straight general clubs, and I would flog people – men or women, I didn’t care, cos it was the act of the flogging that was turning me on. And actually, I used to say that the thing about married women who’ve had children is that they’ve got pain thresholds out of the window, because they’ve had to give birth. And they used to love me, because up, because I wasn’t a straight man, and I wasn’t, it – I hadn’t been raised to that kind of ‘you can’t hit women’ sort of thing, I used to really hit these women with floggers, and they loved it because I really used to belt them hard, and I loved it cos I could do that, y’know, so we had a great time.

And so I was kind of – and I had a, I had a thing of ‘am I bisexual?’ I used to think, ‘am I bisexual?’ And then, y’know, and then that… by 2003 I was completely burned out, and then I met this – in 2005 I met this lad called Graf and he was involved in Queer Mutiny, and we came to the Queer Mutiny conference in Leeds, which – I don’t know if you’ve got any stuff about this?

RH: No, please feel free to tell me more about it.

K: It was in the squatted convent, somewhere between Leeds and Burley, and… It was a whole net-, basically it was the next generation or anarcho-queer, I mean they were queer by this point, they were no longer gay and lesbian, they were definitely queer, and they were young. I was, I was in my, how old would I be, 2005, that would be 14 years ago, so I would be – I was 39/40, and they were in their, they were either at university or a little bit older than that – they were between about 18 and 26/27. I don’t think there were many people older than that, certainly, probably between 30 and my age there wouldn’t have been anyone at all: there was a big gap. And… it was really exciting, y’know it was very, very cold, very, very cold – no heating, and we had… we were using rain water to do the, to wash the toilet, and on the, we all arrived on the Friday, and – and I knew quite a lot of the people from various different places, but there’s a lot of new young people, many from Leeds, and a lot of people who were – again, the trans identity wasn’t as clear as it is now. It was still, they were still testing it, and non-binary didn’t exist, still, as an identity, so people were still, there’s mainly, it was mainly women, or people who would be identified as women, and a lot of women were experimenting with male pronouns, but they weren’t necessarily identifying as men. It was very fluid. And there was a general sense from Queeruption, that had been going for a while, that people wanted to tear down the gender binary altogether, but still identify as queer. So it’s not very clear what was going on.

And there were trans people, I mean, I knew trans people who had – I knew quite a few lesbian S&Mers who’d been into the sort of dom roles had transitioned into being trans men, some of whom had then left the whole gay scene behind and just gone to live as, y’know live, not necessarily married to – though I did know, I did know one person who transitioned into being a man and got married, in a registry office, and just didn’t tell anybody that they were not a biological man, and for whatever reason the registrar didn’t ask for their birth certificate. So they conducted a wedding between a man and a woman and they got married, and they just disappeared off into wherever they went to. So it’s, and I’m sure that was happening for centuries before, in fact I discovered recently that, up until the 1960s, if you wanted to change your birth certificate you could just go to Somerset House and change your birth certificate by deed poll. So it was only in the ‘60s and ‘70s that it became a big thing, so actually when people are talking about the right to change your birth certificate, it’s not a new thing, it’s connecting to – it’s reclaiming something that people forgot.


But anyway, so butcher, and dom lesbians, and actually, yes, were transitioning into trans guys. But that was very separate to the sort of radical queer community, which was more about people who would be perhaps described as women experimenting with gender differences. The men were, on the whole, very young, very shy… they had no idea what to do with me. I was this big, older person, and I think some of them saw me as a predatory older gay man, and – which was very hard. And that’s been true of a lot of my adult life, has been because I’m an older person, who tends to hang out with rad, where youth radical politics are, I’m often the oldest person in the room, and because people identify me as male, particularly as I got bigger, there’s a tendency for people to see me as someway predatory or problematic.

And… there was a workshop on AIDS, and there was a leading member of Queeruption, who believed, who argued that HIV was not the cause of AIDS, and that was still the prominent view, and a lot of anti-pharma stuff saw HIV as a conspiracy to promote useless drugs. And, we had a workshop, me and Martin – Greg, me and Greg, we had a workshop about HIV and the truth of HIV and AIDS. And it’s very controversial. And most – everyone came, and a couple of people were very argumentative about it, and I just laid out the science in a big way. Because I was older and because I had been an activist, and I had laid down in the road, my word had some sort of creduli- credibility. But it was still controversial – I was very upset afterwards, I cried actually. But…

And then I disappeared off the map, then, 2006 I got involved with FairShares, which is a vegan food cooperative in London. I just felt really quiet. And then, I was then about 49 or 50 and I knew a lot of anarchist young people in their 20s that I’d met through various different squatted projects, and one of them was this guy called Alex, who was kind of like my brother, nephew, peer, friend – he’s a radical anarchist gay man in his – he’s 30 this year, and I’m 53, so I’ve known him literally half his life – no – a third of his life, that’s right, I’ve known him a third of his life. And – we were talking about, the cis identity appeared, and I found that really made me very angry. I was very angry about trans guys actually, for a while, it’s just you can’t be, I said, ‘Y’know, you can’t just decide you’re a man’, I said, ‘Y’know you’re got to walk’ – I used to say, ‘When has Del walked their path’ – Del LaGrace this is – ‘When they’ve walked their path in the shoes I wore, then they can call themselves a man’. And I was talking about this to Alex, and Alex said to me, ‘Have you ever thought about the fact you’re not a man?’ I went, ‘What?’ And he went, ‘Well maybe the reason why you’ve walked, your path of being a man has been so hard is that you’ve been trying to be something that you’re not.’ And it was like a huge door had opened, and then he told me all about cis identity and trans identity, and then he told me about [?] – and I had just managed, this had all passed me by, y’know. And I just thought, I thought [pause]

And y’know, literally, I mean you’ve heard me talking this session, y’know – me being speechless is not common. I went home, and I cried. And then I had memory flashbacks to various different things, obviously one remembering me at 10, standing there with a penis erection thinking, ‘What the fuck am I doing?’ And I thought, ‘Oh!’, and I looked it up, I read about it, and d’you know – and it was like a major, suddenly a dawning, y’know that all these years maybe the reason why it’d been such a struggle for me wasn’t because I was a gay man, maybe it was a struggle because I wasn’t a man at all, and I was trying to impersonate. And I’d always had really good friends, and I’d always been very empathic and supportive with and for and by woman friends, and y’know maybe this is because actually I have the same sensation of being on the outside of patriarchy, and so… I read a lot about it, and I started identifying as non-binary.

And then, after a little while I talked to my – my mother and I were talking in the garden – picking gooseberries, I think, – and she said to me something like, 'so do you, what do you think about your sex? [unclear]' and it was completely out of the blue as far as I was concerned and I talked a little bit about it and then she outpoured all this stuff about me being a girl as a child and I said, 'well I actually don't identify as a man or a woman any more' and she said, 'well that makes perfect sense to me'. And then she said: 'so if you don't identify as a man does that still make you gay?' And I said, 'I have no idea!' She said, 'well no, I don't suppose you do, do you'. I said, 'no this mess doesn't really have a resolution with a single label really'. So I've tended to use the word queer because of... because I can't think of what else to describe my sexuality is because it's just a mess, really.

And so I've increasingly decided that I identify as a trans person because I don't... I think non-binary... I have been to some non-binary groups and they are really young people and they have a very different upbringing and ideas about gender – not always very political I have to say – some really quite conservative views about gender actually and some quite strange assumptions about what men or women are like or what straight or gay people are like; you get that sometimes with gay people cos, you know, I've always had friends – a whole range of people – and they'll go, 'Oh God' you know, 'it's all bloody heterosexuals around here' and I'm thinking, 'well, there's heterosexuals and heterosexuals', you know, you can't. People who belong to 90 - 80 -9 - percent of the population you can't categorise in a simple way and a lot of that sadly does come back to what I was saying earlier that it's class assumptions being made about when people talk about a heterosexual it's quite often middle class, or maybe working class, but very much men, it's very much men.

Anyway, so I started non-binary and that was like a revelation. And then of course I began to flick back through my life and see what clothes I was wearing, and I was in fact impersonating a man or I wasn't even bothering to. So my position now is that I don't care and I'm not going to try, you know. I'm not identifying as a man. I don't want to be a woman. I think, I don't want to be a woman I don't know what a woman is and it’s not really where I want to be, but my mother – the last time I saw my mother which was about six weeks ago and she, we were talking in [unclear] again about this because she is having problems with my gender, my pronouns – she doesn't like 'they'. She says: 'It makes you sound like you've got a mental complex'. So she wanted to call me 'it' and I said 'I'm not a refrigerator' so I've said, I've now given her permission to call me 'he' because my dad is still a bit homophobic so, we've decided that he probably won't handle this bit – masculinity is the problem for him – so I've given her permission to call me 'he' because it would be too complicated but she has to deal with the fact that both my nieces call me 'they' and they call me Uncty Kellan as opposed to uncle and aunty and she'll just have to get used to that. And then she says, what was it – I was going to say something then… Doesn’t matter. But, yes. It’s just like…

It's very, I feel very positive, but that's right, she said to me, 'Well, I suppose the thing is, if I was eight now - or six now - and I was saying “I am a girl” I would have a completely different life and transition and become a woman and my life would be completely different’, and I said: 'well yes that is exactly what would happen' and she went: 'But we didn't have any choices in 1972' and I said: 'I know you didn't. I don't blame you. Don't feel blamed' because I don't feel angry towards her. She, you know, it wasn't her fault, you know. I feel angry to some people, but on the whole I don't feel angry to anybody in the '70s really because, I just think, you know, nobody knew any better. And it wasn’t like – I mean there were some malicious bastards out there, but most people, even those stupid social scientists who were doing gender reassignment when they were giving people penises or taking them away at birth, they were trying to do their best and the very limited knowledge that we had, y’know. I mean, I think later, by the time you get to Jeannie Stryker [?] and Mary Daly and Linda Bellos in the ‘80s, then I think well you can start saying, ‘Actually, you are actively, deliberately persecuting people and making their lives miserable’, and certainly now we’ve got Linda Bellos and, y’know, whatshername, Julie Bindel, I mean they are, they know exactly what they’re doing, y’know. But, I don’t feel anger to people in the ‘70s.

RH: Do you think if you had led your life as a woman, would that have been a positive thing?

K: Yeah, it’d be completely different. I think I wouldn’t have spent so much of my life having terrible mental health problems. I think I would’ve always been political. I mean, I think if I’d have, I think if you transition at any – even now, if you transition now there’s an element of it’s a political process, y’know, negotiating the mental health and psychiatric professions, and let’s be honest, dealing with them, y’know you read – you think, you think if you were, if you were eight or nine or ten now and you were going to Gendered Intelligence or the Tavistock Clinic and you’re becoming a teenager and you’re on beta blockers and you’ve got Julie Bindel talking about, and Graham Linehan talking about ‘damaged children being mutilated and that they should be allowed to grow up gay’, I mean that is going to politicise you isn’t it, y’know? It would be different kinds of politics, but I think it would politicise you really.

And also, you look at that age group, the millennials – they’re not the millennials are they, they’re teen, the post-millennial group – but that whole under 35s, I mean the sorts of angsts that they have – I mean, when I was in their age, and I was in my teens the fear was the fact that we would be bombed to nuclear winter by the Cold War, and there was a beginning of awareness of environmentalism. You fast-forward now, you’ve got Greta Thunberg making these amazing speeches about, y’know, there’s 12 [unclear] that’s right, I spent three days last week sitting in, on barriers in Extinction Rebellion, y’know. And my nine-year-old niece is a vegan and she goes off, she goes, ever month she goes on a school strike. I think, well, I may not have kids, but I’ve got lots of niblings who are between her at nine and friends of mine with, probably my oldest niece is someone I adopted when she was 23 and she’s now 30, and she sends me uncle cards, uncty cards, y’know. And, y’know, she’s 30, so by the time we get to 2050 she’ll be 50, my age basically, she might have kids, may not, but. She’s gonna live her old age in whatever shitty planet we have left, let alone nine-year-olds. I won’t be around.

But I tell you a thing, and I have to go in a minute, but – in 1985, I remember standing in the garden, my front garden, we had through terraces in Harehills, and we were, there was the youth group and we were all going to some goth night, or maybe some of the youth group were going to the goth night, and we’d all got our hair, we were spiking our hair up with hair spray, and it was the time of the ozone layer, and we were all going, ‘Oh whatever’, y’know, ‘It’s gonna happen 200 years, who cares anyway?’ So we’re all spraying and spraying hairspray and laughing about it all. I never thought that I would be in my 50s and global warming would be here, I thought we’d be dead by now – but oh how we laughed! [laughs]

Anyway, I’m gonna stop now, cos I’m conscious that it’s half past three and I’ve been here for hours, and while I’ve filled your tapes, which is great, I’m quite happy to come back and do more. We haven’t even got onto either Leeds Other Paper or Leeds Gay Group, which I think is really important.

RH: We’ll do a follow up with that.

K: I did, I was the youngest, what the – what CHE / GLF became, when I was going there in the ‘80s I was the youngest person by years, but I used to go to the social events and things. I doubt many of them are left alive now at all so I’m quite happy, next time, I’m quite happy to come and so some more.

RH: That’d be brilliant, thank you very much Kellan.

[END]