Live... by Edward

After all the weeks of work we put into creating our portraits, it was pretty exciting to finally see them, in all their giantness, up on the walls around brighton.

 

I was kinda surprised that when I found my poster I actually felt very self conscious. There are perhaps levels of being out.

 

Being out as trans to your friends and families is one thing, being out as T in a room of LGBT people who assume you're G is another thing. Having your face on the wall facing the seafront, identifying yourself as queer - thats a whole new world of out.

Taking part in the project was sometimes difficult for me, but only because I was unsure of how I fit the word 'queer' into my life, and how to find images that showed that. I didn't find the idea of being out as queer difficult, until I was on the side of a building.

Not that I regret doing it. I am just extremely lucky, that I have not faced intimidation on a regular basis because of my identity. I came out at my own pace, in my own time. I am unused to feeling exposed.

My arm hurts... by Matt

I've always been tall - it's a physical trait that has never escaped me. I used to be self-conscious of it, not helped by people peering up at me (even as a child) and asking me how the air is 'up there' or inquiring if my mother put my feet in grow-bags at night.

Hilarious and keen observations, obviously.

Being tall has its uses, once you grow out of the awkward stooping gait acquired by attending infant and primary schools that only cater to children of 'average or below' height. I can reach high shelves, see over things and other people, and for some inexplicable reason I am more likely to be asked to tackle the opening of a difficult jar of pickled onions at Christmas. I find that tea towels are the best method for the latter task.

I don't have any pictures of the process of taking portraits because my tallness was being utilised for one very important task: Holding up the light thingy as Ed so succinctly put in his blog post.

We were trying (and I think we succeeded in doing so) to capture the photobooth style that we had discovered was a most excellent fun  thing to do in the very first sessions of not going shopping. But where those snaps had been in the very forgiving black and white, these shots were to be in full colour.

I've certainly not shied away from taking pictures of myself, I even set it out as a challenge in my head to overcome my hatred of viewing pictures of me. My journey over the past year has been, at times, melodramatic to say the least. In fact I was chatting to a friend over WhatsApp the other day and he remarked that my life had become a bit 'Jezza Kyle' (Jeremy Kyle, in case you were wondering) of late.I used to fear chaos as I thought it marked me out as unable to cope but I'm slowly realising that the secret to chaos is to be within the eye of the storm as much as I can.

And so the seemingly mundane task of holding up flash box whilst all around me people chatted, took photos, were having their photo taken, adjusting tripods and lens focus, and making a lot of tea and coffee allowed me to relax and take stock of the project.

I'll admit that I've felt a lack of focus of late. I am no longer shackled by the camera, although I certainly see things in a new way. I can see a good photo opp where once before I would have sailed by and then cooed over someone else's photograph of the event.But I don't instinctively reach for the camera now. I can relax.

Saturday's session was a rekindling of the energy and enthusiasm that I felt in the first sessions of the project and I was buzzing that we were actually taking portraits. I felt part of the experience more than I ever have before. Certainly more than I did all those weeks ago when I felt irrelevant to the project and expressed my thoughts on Facebook.

I can't wait until this Saturday's session. We'll be doing it all over again and my arms will hurt a bit but it's totally worth it.

Portraits, part 1 ... by Edward

 I almost broke the camera, but only for a second. Being the tallest, Matt ended up holding the light thingy (flashgun maybe?) for most of the day, though the rest of us managed standing on a chair quite well.

 

 

And of course we were entertained throughout by Orlando The Dog, who posed magnificently, even if I did end up with quite a few nose shots.

Making The Cut ... by Edward

Photos have been taken, cropped, edited and printed and now laid out across the table we've been making the cull: keeping our favourites and ruthlessly removing anything not up to scratch.

It was a tricky process of first finding themes and connections between eleven different people's photos, all very different in style, all coming at the queer in brighton project from different angles, and then selecting from these the ones that worked best, the ones we loved.

There was, of course, quite a bit of disagreement. Some photos were removed and returned to the keeping this pile a few times before the end of the day. And it was tricky partly because we don't know yet what the photos are going to sit beside, what the text will be, how the page will be laid out, even what size they will appear in the book. But we picked from instinct. What grabbed us, what said something.

Handing in the camera ... by Matt

I posted this on the Facebook page on Tuesday, 22 October 2013.

Matt Robinson

On the bus, running late, returning the loan camera.

I've had fun with the project. It was a good creative outlet at a time in my life where everything else seemed to be chaotic.

I could be glib and suggest that being queer in Brighton is like being anything else in Brighton: I am subject to the same trials and tribulations as my 'straight' friends, family and colleagues. But that's too easy!

I am here, I am queer, I've been shopping (though I hate it!), I continue to love and work and despair and cry with happiness. I love Brighton. I am in love with its offbeat perspective on life.
Where else can I cycle to work, a mundane activity that is slowly giving me killer legs, and pass a drunken man cycling the other way as he plays a trombone? ( this happened - and I couldn't capture it on camera! Aargh! )

I don't need a flag, but I did when I was 16 and I had just come out. I remember walking into Virgin and buying some terrible soft-core porn, thinking that was the sum of my life. I grew up confident in my queerness even though I wasn't confident at all in any other area of my life.

I looked to my parents, who are now approaching 45 years of marriage, and thought that's what I had to do to be successful - only my marital bliss would be with a man that I loved.

It didn't ( and may never ) work out like that. I'm still sad over the ending of my relationship with Andrew. I have days where I immerse myself in the break-up music - Del Amitri and Kirsty Macoll are excellent exponents of this genre - And days where I embrace the awesomeness that is my life right now.

I had a poignant experience yesterday, sitting in the waiting room of the Claude Nicol, waiting for my six month sexual health check-up. I picked up a copy of Latest7 and read my ex's columns. It was poignant because I still had a connection to him. He mentioned me fleetingly at the end of a piece about a restaurant. Not by name but by a seemingly innocuous encounter over a whole dressed crab. Andrew could never confront me about anything but thought nothing of doing it in print. I was genuinely touched. Queer World, innit?

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Apps ... by Matt

After the London 2012 Olympic Games, many people are now aware of the smart phone app Grindr. There was a story doing the rounds that the arrival of so many athletes to the Olympic village had caused Grindr to grind to a halt. This was all good journo grist for the mill and, I suspect, excellent free advertising for Grindr itself.

There are quite a few of those apps out there, all designed to allow (predominantly) men to hook up for casual sex, to chat, or more commonly to waste other people's valuable time.

I'm a fan of the first option and when I was initially aware of Grindr I did not have a smart phone:. I had a crappy, large-buttoned 'granny' phone with a tiny screen and absolutely no capability for connecting to WiFi or the Internet at all. My life was simpler then. I was happily married and commuting between Brighton and Eastbourne every day. Certainly no time for a bit of extra-marital how's yer father with a flight attendant who's into underwear and role play. I sometimes wonder, in weaker moments, if the explosion of Grindr, Scruff, Growlr, Recon, Gay Network, Gaydar (the app), Squirt and all those myriad apps and websites into my life wasn't the herald of the end of days of my relationship with the now-ex.

Of course it wasn't. To blame the entirety of my break-up on software is no different to the Daily Mail-fuelled garbage bandied about every time a new GTA (Grand Theft Auto) game is released. Like any good piece of software, or hardware, user input is accountable for 95%* of the experience, good and bad.

When Andrew deigned to give me his hand-me-down iPhone in exchange for him using my upgrade to get a sparkly new one, I immediately rushed to the App Store to see what I could lay my hands on. We had an open relationship so it was cool. I knew Andrew used the apps as we had, in the past, used them to pick up passing trade on our trips to see his family in Somerset and South Wales.

I fumbled about with setting up profiles, taking selfies that I thought had a certain Myra Hindley quality about them, proudly displaying my 'Open Relationship' flag for all to see. Considering a lot of gay men I know play around outside of relationships, there's an awful lot of judgement going on from all sides the moment you declare that you're allowed to have sex with other people.

Andrew and I had always reasoned that playing about in the bushes, for example, doesn't lead to declaring love for someone else - at least not for two, level-headed men such as ourselves. Open relationships do seem to work for some but, in the end, it was a part of what drove a wedge between us. As I stoked the ashes of our relationship, I realised that Andrew's way of keeping me with him was by allowing me my Droit de Seigneur. I think he lacked confidence in his ability to keep me distracted.

I soon found that a lot of men using the apps were firmly in the 'wasting other people's valuable time' category. Men would show an interest, a couple of lewd pictures would be exchanged and then I'd frighten them off with the seemingly innocuous but obviously very dangerous line, "So, shall I come round in an hour?" Silence.

And those men that I did meet opened up a World of possibility to me: I might like the freedom to meet who I wish more often than just whenever Andrew was off gallivanting about town and I thought I had enough time to be discrete about it. I met interesting men with exciting lives who always spoke of the apps with an air of secret shame. We had fun and my sex life was enriched all the more for it. But as I trudged home, thinking up a good excuse as to where I'd been in case Andrew had arrived home before me, the depressing sensation that I really shouldn't be proud of being in an 'Open Relationship' crept over me.

As I write this now, it's a slightly different story. For one I'm 'Single' and open to 'Chat', 'Networking' and 'NSA' (No Strings Attached). I am more confident in my outlook being a singleton and in turn I am rewarded by far more (genuine, for the most part) interest from the men of Brighton and Hove.

I still face the disappointment of the fantasists who like the idea of meeting but really just want a picture of my cock so they have something to masturbate over later on. Of course I could be being a little hasty in my judgement: Perhaps they're just not as confident as me and are certainly not in the same place as I am, head and heart. Perhaps.

I take rejection on the chin from the guys with porn star bodies who aren't into hairy men with beer bellies.

For the first time in my life I am able to chat to guys who are younger than me. I know what it's like to project an air of confidence and experience whilst being 21 years of age, wanting something more than fleeting physical contact with a stranger because, well, that's what you're supposed to want, isn't it? A boyfriend? Someone to buy expensive furniture with and be middle-aged before your time. Until the next hot guy comes along at any rate.

In short, I love and am loved. Just not in that romantic, 1950s movie way. And I love it.

* I just made that statistic up

Where on the rainbow are you? ... by Sarah

One of the most amazing things about taking part in Not Going Shopping is being able to talk about identity with people from such diverse backgrounds and across different generations. I could spend a whole weekend talking about what labels mean now, what they meant back then and what they might mean in the future. Anyway, I came across this quote after the workshop on Saturday just passed and made a drawing of all the people I like (not including the special place in my heart for people who can fix bikes).

What I love about being queer is the ability to grow and transform my sexuality. The recognition that our sexualities are complex and ever evolving, just as every other part of us, is a blissfully freeing thing. Regardless of anything else in the entire world, I am not bound by anyone else’s rules beside my own. Queer is freedom, possibility and space.-Kim Crosby, Toronto

Third week already! ... by Edward

Bursting with ideas this week. Not all of them good. Some of them too big of course! How many costumes am I planning on buying for this project? How much new camera equipment? Stop that, I don’t need that. Must remember to keep it simple.

I have started to think about themes of identity and self and representation. Kinda big themes but also nice and open. I’ve got lots of room to explore those things. Lots of ideas, so I reckon I'll just see how they pan out. Take the photos and come back to them later and see what I’ve got. Take them all along to the group and see what the others make of them. It is very easy to edit your ideas in your head until you end up with nothing left.

This week’s theme: family. In our first session we all talked about "friends as family" in the queer community. So I'm thinking about that, and thinking about my own family too.
Who do I call "my family"?
And why?