Event: Drag Queen Story Time
Where: British Airways i360 beach building
When: Monday July 30 to Friday, August 3, 10am-10.45am
Time: 10am – 10.45am
Price: Free! Advance booking essential.
To reserve a place, click here:
TWO DJs will be going head to head on the BA i360 boarding deck for a Britney-themed silent disco on the eve of Brighton Pride.
Grab your headsets, choose between two channels – Britney classics or disco – and dance the night away.
Watch as the sun sets into the sea and the stars appear, with the old West Pier illuminated out at sea.
Event: Britney Beach silent disco
Where: British Airways i360 boarding deck on Brighton Seafront opposite Regency Square
When: Friday, August 3
Time: 7.30pm – 10.30pm
Cost: Standard ticket and headset: £15 per person (over-16s only)
VIP ticket and headset: £30 per person (over-16s only)
(Price includes flight in the BA i360 pod with drag queens, glass of Nyetimber sparkling wine, VIP chill out area, goodie bag of local produce and a commemorative photo)
To book tickets, click here:
Britney Beach is an Official Pride-Supporting Event.
TONY Thomas is England’s biggest film star, a matinee idol, a romantic leading man: he is adored by his female fans everywhere.
This is Tony’s public life. His private life is secret and concealed – this is because Tony is in love with Johnny Melrose and this is England in 1952.
The inspiration for the play is the life of the British film actor and movie star Dirk Bogarde and essential to this his fifty year ‘secret’ relationship with Tony Forward. The Leading Man is a well-made play in the tradition of Terence Rattigan and Noel Coward and produced by Philippa Hammond.
All proceeds from these readings will be donated to the Grace Eyre Foundation, a Hove-based charity supporting people with learning disabilities.
Event: The Leading Man – full cast reading
Where: The Purple Playhouse, 36 Montefiore Rd, Hove BN3 6EP
When: Thursday 2 and Friday August 3
Time: Doors open 6pm, Play starts 7pm – bar and intermission, play ends 9pm
Cost: Tickets £5
To purchase tickets, click here:
SINCE her diagnosis Sarah has received one round of chemotherapy and five sessions of radiotherapy in an effort to stop the seizures she was experiencing several times a day.
Unfortunately, after her first round of chemotherapy she developed grade 4 sepsis which left her fighting for her life. Consequently, Sarah’s chemotherapy treatment was halted because the sepsis had created a sizeable open wound in her arm that took several months to heal.
Following her recovery from sepsis Sarah needed reassessment before she could continue with the chemotherapy treatment which involved a full MRI body scan that took place in June. The results were devastating for her and Laura.
The scan showed multiple tumors in Sarah’s left lung with one large tumor located in the left lung. Multiple tumors showed up in each of her kidneys alongside her brain tumor which had increased in size too. Subsequently she was told that although she would receive “aggressive treatment” to combat the spread of her cancer, it was also explained to her that this approach was due to her being 33 years old rather than because it would provide a cure.
This prognosis prompted Sarah’s immediate move back to the UK because of concerns regarding her ability to travel if she was to become too sick. Since being under the care of the NHS Sarah has had her PET and MRI Scans repeated.
At the most recent meeting with the Oncologist Sarah was told that she had developed another tumor on her Pancreas and was terminally ill. As a result no further treatment is available to her.
Following researching a new treatment called IMMUNOTHERAPY, Sarah is appealing this decision. IMMUNOTHERAPY is a very new treatment for cancer and is extremely expensive. The NHS and the Social Security in Spain will not provide this treatment as it is not currently approved for Sarah’s specific type of cancer. This is because it is a very rare form of cancer and as such the funding for research trials would not be cost-effective.
However, Sarah can receive the treatment if she funds it herself which could possibly provide her with a cure. This is her next step, but she needs to access this treatment immediately before her physical strength declines further.
To have this treatment abroad each injection would cost 3,000 Euros. These injections would be given at three weekly intervals over a period of two years or more, costing in all 104,000 Euros.
Sarah does not want to die. But at this stage IMMUNOTHERAPY is her only option and she can’t do it without your help.
Before moving to live in Spain, Sarah and her partner Laura volunteered here in Brighton with MindOut, the LGBT mental health service as anti-stigma volunteers and fundraisers. They ran a fair few marathons and half marathons for MindOut raising lots of money and have been on the front cover of GScene with their marathon team not just once, but twice.
Sarah is only 33, without treatment she will die – in fact she may not reach the autumn. She is desperate to live and she has so much fight in her. Both Sarah and Laura think they can win this awful battle, but they desperately need your help.
To make a donation and help Sarah in her fight for life, click here:
TAKE your little groovers along for an open air Kidz Silent Disco with family-friendly music on headsets and watch them dance the evening away, as you relax with a drink overlooking the old West Pier and watch the sun go down. Junior zone available for families with younger children.
Members of Rainbow Families, the informal social group for LGBT+ parents and their children in Brighton & Hove, Sussex and the surrounding area, are also invited to enjoy a free flight on the British Airways i360 during the evening.
Event: Kidz Pride silent disco on British Airways i360 deck
Where: On the deck of the British Airways i360 opposite Regency Square
When: Friday, August 3
Time: 5pm – 7pm
Cost: Child: (4-15 yrs): £7.50 per person
Adults: Two FREE per paying child!
To book tickets, click here:
IT’S NOW June 28, 2018, exactly 49 years to the date since the Stonewall riots of New York launched the LGBT+ civil rights movement and international Pride events were born.
It’s a dizzily hot summer’s evening in Brighton, the LGBT+ capital of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and he walks the length of the promenade lifted by the setting sunlight reflected from a mill-pond sea. He strides confidently towards the marina where his husband awaits him in a local hotel for a late evening birthday drink, his husband of 12 and partner of 18 years, a relationship that began at Pride in London at the turn of the millennium. A Pride event fertilised by the political fight back which had started exactly 49 years ago this very day.
Hundreds approach, possibly more than a thousand of local residents, day-trippers of every age and generational description. A visiting beach cinema has just released its patrons back into the wild following the final England game in the early group stages of the World Cup, which is an increasingly popular international football tournament. Although the national team had performed, and would go on to continue to do so, extremely well, this wasn’t a game that was won, they in fact lost.
And the hoards approaching our settled 40-something were at best dejected and at their not quite so best kicking the bins, bikes and railings along their route perhaps in frustration or perhaps because this was their normal reaction to two hours in unsheltered and sweltering direct sunlight, decorated with Stella Artois eau de tin can x 6.
He sees them approach but the mood is light, the sun is bright but his T-shirt tight so perhaps it’s this that draws the eyes, or the trousers short and yellow as the sun.
Something is said that’s unclear but unkind and he looks straight at them to let them know the something he has heard and is met not with embarrassment or a sheepish retraction of the eyes but a jeer that comes from a group of young lads imbibed with beer and a sense of ‘pack’. And so it comes as clear as the 6am seagulls that rape your Sunday hangover: “You F***ing Queer C**t”, and how they all laugh. And in that moment at 46 he is 13 again and just as it was in 1985 he looks around at the hundreds about him and they all pretend it hasn’t happened and so in shame, he does the same and walks on.
A mere 36 hours later we find him on his regular walk to work at 9am on a Saturday morning. It’s not late, there’s no sign of drink and the lost game of football is no longer hanging in the air. He strides on with an air of casual weekend confidence and, although not yellow, the shorts are as pink as his wink and colour match the lollipop T-shirt.
He’s not in disguise but thinks nothing of taking the usual underpass towards Paddington Green, it’s quieter than a Tuesday but there are plenty of people about and as the A40 rumbles over his head two young men approach from the opposite direction. And as if retching from the depths of his scrotum, one of them erupts into a volcano of spit and his lava of phlegm brushes the face of our friend so close he can smell it, and slaps the tiled wall beside him with a smack. Again, 46 and unafraid he looks directly at the origins of this instant underground Jackson Pollock and as our spitter grins his companion aggressively shouts “FAGGOT!”.
Perhaps without the added shame of an audience hundreds strong, our homo replies; “Ten points for observation,” and both parties continue in opposite directions and nothing has changed. For him for a moment, two moments within two days, it feels as though for 49 years of protest and Prides nothing has changed. Nothing has changed at all.
He is wrong. I’m wrong. He is no longer 13 nor without his tribe. As he gathers his thoughts and shaken dignity on a sweaty summer’s evening on Brighton beach he reminds himself where he is headed. He’s meeting his husband. His gay, same gender married husband who both bear one another’s names and of their shared life together. He thinks of an earlier part of the evening with two also married gay boys who invited him around for a snatched 40 minutes of his company because they wanted it. He was happy to share it and to receive theirs in return.
He looks up at the apartment block towering above the white cliffs that cradle the marina and thinks of his gay friend who lives there, his friend who was the first member of our communities to truly welcome him to Brighton and who sits next to him still after all these years.
As he steps out from the shady Saturday underpass into the sunlight above he thinks about the talented gay people he is to spend the day working with. Creative folk who saw in him untapped talents and asked him to join in their ventures to belong, together. He thinks of fun times at Pride events past and yet to be, of his year ahead and behind of Instagram poses with horizontal friends on rainbow pedestrian crossings, of owning the New York Easter Parade if just for one day in top hats, feathers and bright pink suits.
He sees the rainbow adorned window dressings of retail outlets and, as he looks up at the rainbow flags flying atop Government buildings, he hears the voice of his friend upon recounting his tale you might be a c**t but you’re my f***ing queer c**t, he thinks of all of these things and he knows.
Everything has changed. Everything has changed forever.
“Be proud. Be proud whatever it is. Because everyone is someone” Jose Gutierez.
By Craig Hanlon-Smith @craigscontinuum
LOCAL designer Irene Soler has teamed up with around 60 volunteers and city organisations, businesses and groups to produce the piece at the Volks Railway called A Drop in the Ocean.
Irene got the idea after she started to pick up litter from the beach and noticed much of it was discarded bottle tops. She instantly realised that a design with the multi-coloured plastic would be a brilliant way of highlighting the plague of single-use plastics on the city’s beaches.
Irene said: “I hope that when people see all these little bits of plastic – each one with the potential to kill a sea bird, fish or other creature – they’ll think twice before leaving their bottle tops lying around.
“The design needed to be something visual to raise awareness. Something to get people involved, to get them talking and thinking about how the status quo could be different. Slowly the idea of A Drop in The Ocean evolved.”
The tops were collected from people carrying out beach cleans, and businesses – including the Big Beach Café, The Pump Room, Seafront Office, Jungle Rumble, Yellowave, Volk’s Railway Visitor Centre and the World Cetacean Alliance – all who had a special bottle where people could bin their tops rather than bin or discard them.
This installation, at 18 metres long is phase one of three. The final bottle tops will go up by the end of this year and the installation will stay up until spring next year.
So far, the groups involved are the 3D & Craft course at Brighton Uni, The Green Centre, Pier2Pier, SurfersAgainstSewage, The Fair Shop, RubyMoon, the Volks Railway crew and the City Council, whose Cityclean staff separated the bottle tops they collected on the beach and along the seafront.
The Rampion Fund granted funding to Irene to help raise awareness of the impact of plastic pollution.
Councillor Gill Mitchell, chair of the council’s Environment, Transport & Sustainability Committee, said: “This is a fantastic art installation that really raises awareness of the amount of plastic that is found on our beaches. It also shows how something very creative can be designed and produced from the co-operation of the community, various businesses and organisations, and the council.”
For more information about the project, click here:
ST JOHN’s will be open from 1pm for picnics, refreshments and loos. The Celebration Service for all LGBT+ people, their families, friends and supporters will start at 2.30pm.
For more information, click here:
PATRICK Marber’s adaptation goes for maximum laughs and early on in this 100 minute romp, they come aplenty.
The King is dead. Long live the king says the bodyguard/royal spokesman, played in robotic good humour by Derek Griffiths. Yet there is no next king. Berenger has reigned for an improbable 483 years and fake news has it that he invented everything from the aeroplane to nuclear fission while penning the plays of Shakespeare.
As the play starts – against a huge wall in the throne room, cracked wide open by the destruction which is spreading throughout the kingdom – we learn that in fact the country now measures only 5 square miles and that the 6 characters we meet in the palace are now the entire population.
There is the panto-farce of a doctor/astrologer, played with sardonic but bumptious glee by Adrian Scarborough. And then the queens – two of them; Indira Varma, magnificent as the ex Queen, who struts the stage like Cruella de Ville in black velvet gown and white fur train, her immaculate hair topped with a Diana tiara. And Amy Morgan as the current consort – all whimpering and gushing dumb blond babe in pink.
The characters, completed by the agile but ancient nurse, played with great mischievous relish by Debra Gillett, are all here to hasten the king’s decline to death but in a helpful way – or not.
In his blue silk pyjamas, stopped sometimes by a wobbly crown and sometimes by a woolly hat, Rhys Ifans arrives through an audience which is required to stand – and duly does so – with a magnificent ermine train, but also Heath Ledger Joker makeup . It’s not a good look, and he rapidly ages before our eyes, eventually unable to walk and barely able to speak.
It’s a potent Lear-like image of decay and only partial self-realisation. The play is cleverly set in real-time but the 100 minutes tournament out to feel like 100 years and the last 20 minutes of inaction and poeticising is a real drag.
But in Ifans many soliloquies and reminiscences you could have heard a pin drop in the huge audience, and he fills the acting space and auditorium with a wicked kind of humour interlaced with pathos.
Ultimately the evening is saved with a coup de theatre and a stunning visual ending where guru-like, his first queen guides the king to the next life.
Exit the King is in repertoire at the National Theatre.
Review by Brian Butler
WHEN asked why I waited until my mid-30s to transition I tell people a myriad of lies; “It wasn’t the right time”, “I couldn’t afford it”, “I wanted to get X, Y and Z out-of-the-way first”. However, the real reason I delayed transition for so long is that I never thought I’d ever be cis passing and I’d never be able to spend at least part of my life living stealth. This was reason enough to delay or even not transition because we only need look how trans people are treated in society and ask ourselves; “Can I handle that?”
When the alternative for many of us is suicide, we choose the lesser of two evils and prepare to put ourselves through ridicule for the rest of our lives, hoping that just sometimes people will see us for who we really are, men and women. Not trans men and women, just men and women. I can only speak here from a binary woman’s point of view and by no means talk for all binary trans women, men or non-binary people, whose experiences of passing and living stealth are far removed from mine. Not all binary trans people want to pass as cis, to blend in, and nor should they have to. Everyone’s experience is their own and only theirs and all of our hopes and desires in transition are valid and just as important as each others.
Now there are some people who I can never be stealth to. Anyone who knew me pre-transition, anyone who reads this or my other work, but if someone meets me in a public setting I’m blessed with the privilege of being able to be stealth – to not automatically reveal my gender history by my voice, my facial features, my body shape – to be assumed as cis by the cis people I am interacting with.
This is important for many reasons; the main one being safety of course but it also means that there isn’t a ‘but’ attached to my womanhood, I’m not Sugar, ‘the woman who used to be a man’, simply “Sugar, the woman”. This is also super important for my mental health too as it reduces gender dysphoria when I’m read as cis.
I realise that I’m speaking from a position of privilege here and that many trans folk will never blend as cis and for those who want to, that’s a hard thing to come to terms with. There was a point in my transition where I thought I’d never blend and I spiralled into a deep depression where I wondered if it was all worth it.
Was it really worth losing my family? My job? Spending tens and tens of thousands of pounds on cosmetic surgery, and the same again on hair transplants, laser hair removal, make-up tattooing? Going through the physical pain of it all just to be met with the mental anguish of not reaching my goal of being able to pop over to the shop in my joggers and a hoodie with no make-up on and be read as female? That part of my transition is long behind me now as the cosmetic surgery is all finally calming down and I’m read as cis more and more as time goes on.
Do I want to blend in with the cis community completely and start a new life where nobody knows I’m trans? Absolutely not! I love my trans family and don’t want to give up my trans-related work. I don’t want to erase all history of me from the internet, and I don’t want to stop mentoring young trans people and signposting them to services and helping them in their transitions.
I just want to be afforded the same privileges as cis women, privileges like not being beaten up, spat on, attacked verbally, receive death threats, all because of my gender history. That’s right, not receiving death threats because of your gender is a privilege cis women hold over me.
Ten weeks ago I met a man, two years my junior, on a dating app, and whilst I was clear about my gender history on my profile, as a cishet (cisgender heterosexual) man he had no idea what that meant, never asked me and after chatting for a few days we arranged a date. It wasn’t until during our date that I realised he thought that I too, was cis. I explained things to him and I had to give him trans 101 but at the end of it he said that he never saw me anything other than the woman I am and my history didn’t bother him.
Fast forward 10 weeks and we’ve been seeing a lot of each other. He comes from a very, very tight-knit family of seven brothers and his family kitchen is always a hive of activity, there are always parents, brothers, friends all popping in. I’ve been living a stealth life and it feels good.
Nobody has clocked me as trans, they treat me as the woman they see and I’m privy to conversations they may not have around someone they knew was trans. I’ve been spending most weekends at his house and I’ve been enjoying not having the prefix of trans attached to my gender. It’s been a fantastic experience, until one weekend his mother showed her friend (a cis gay man) a photo of me on her phone as she was proud to show her friend the woman her boy is dating. This guy outed me to her, told her I was trans, that I ‘used to be a man” and then to top it off he deadnamed me.
One of the very, very worst things you can do is out someone. You put them in potential danger, you trigger them of their history, you betray them. What followed was a horrendous few weeks for me where family members lacking the terminology contacted the man I was dating and asked him if he knew he was dating a tra**y, a transvestite, and other such terms that quite understandably caused me upset. I was lucky. Apart from losing my status as a woman like any other, some uncomfortable conversations with some of his family, a lot of upset and turmoil, nothing more serious happened to me.
As members of the LGBT+ communities, which is dominated by cis gay men, you men are aware of more trans folk than your straight counterparts. That’s just natural, we share space, we’re part of a wider community. You men are privileged enough to know more trans people than most and if you hold that privilege of knowing us pre-transition or knowing our deadnames don’t you ever let that out of your mouth. Forget it, erase it, for when you out somebody you’re quite literally putting their life on the line. Enough trans people are murdered each year as it is, don’t add to those numbers.
Respect us, respect our privacy and get the idea out of your heads that you have the right to know and share our history. We deserve to be treated like anyone else, don’t be disrespectful to us, don’t add to the numbers of trans murders and suicides and, please, let us have our dignity. It’s only humane.
You must be logged in to post a comment.