It’s February, so in recognition of and solidarity with LGBT+ History Month, I’m posting a link to me reading Radical, my poem about how a radical bookshop helped me work out who I was and how I might come out in the days before the internet and in a time of wholly negative disinformation about LGBT+ folx. It was first published in Shooter, and is republished in Sweet Anaesthetist.
I was a teenager in suburban Nottingham in the early 1980s, a few years younger than the characters in It’s a Sin, and remember the iceberg leaflets about AIDS landing on the doormat and the casual, pervasive homophobia that was usual at the time. In the papers, on the telly, at school, in the street, at home. My family wouldn’t tolerate racism but “nancy boys” and “mannish women” (chapwench was my Dad’s word) were fair game. At home, as at school, I shut down, kept my head down, played Bronski Beat’s Age of Consent on repeat, and took a long time to join the dots. A friend introduced me to Mushroom, Nottingham’s radical bookshop at that time. In a world before the internet a radical bookshop provided access to information otherwise unavailable, and my world began to open up.
Jay Whittaker 