Oral History Interview - Julie McNamara

Audio file

08/08/2017

2020.8

Audio recording of an oral history interview with Julie McNamara.

1 x audio file (.mp3), recording of an oral history interview with Julie McNamara. Total length - 1 hour, 26 minutes, 12 seconds.

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TRANSCRIPT OF INTERVIEW

[Julie_McNamara_2017]


Q. Can you start by telling me your full name, when you were born and where you were born? [0:00]

JM. I was born 26 March 1960, in Birkenhead. I was born on the corner of Mersey Park which overlooks the river Mersey and is about 10 minutes away on a ferry boat to central Liverpool.


Q. Can you tell me about how you came to be in Hackney? [0:31]

JM. I gradually was coming down from Birkenhead for work, I wanted to go to art college, so I wanted to go to Birkenhead Tech first of all and then I realised it was going to be too close to home and I needed to get the hell out of me family, so I moved to Chester first of all and I did a year in Chester Art College which I loved. And then I made the mistake of going to Loughborough University, it’s got the highest statistics of suicide in the country and I can see why.

I got very depressed and I got caught up in the counselling service inside the university. And very quickly got transferred to the psychiatric system and so I started being treated, believe it or not, for a homosexual retreat at the age of 19. Then I got the hell out of Loughborough and I went to Nottingham, transferred into the second year Trent Polytechnic which is probably known now as Trent University or Nottingham University, or something, and that would have been 1980. You look like you weren’t even born then.

And so I was in Nottingham, I was a day patient at St Towns Hospital. I even spent a little bit of time in Wakerley Park Hospital, came out of there and my first job in Nottingham was creating attitudinal test cards for their psychology department, testing attitudes to disability, which is interesting because that is very much part of what I do today, even though I am based at Hackney Empire as an associate artist or one of them, making plays and making mischief on stage.

But bit by bit I started coming south. I left Nottingham in 1983, 1984 somewhere around there, and came down to St Albans to train as a drama therapist. I wanted to work with the systems that had been used against me because I thought no one else is ever going to do that to me again. I learned everything about psychiatry, psychology. I was in individual analysis, you had to be, so three times a week we were in analysis, you had to be in a group for group therapy with all the other trainees and drama therapists and you had to be in individual therapy as well. Talk about laying it on with a shovel.

And I trained as a drama therapist whilst I was living and working in a long stay hospital called Harperbury, which you recently had an exhibition all about. You know, people in long system, the long care, the asylum system as it was known in those days, which many of us who lived and worked there called the old bins because they were repositories for people who were known as out of order, social outcasts, misfits.

I belonged there after being treated for homosexuality through the system. I was quite happy to go and hide in a long stay institution for a couple of years, sounds crazy, but actually once I had started working inside that place I couldn’t let it go because I couldn’t believe what I had uncovered in terms of the people who were hid away there. And Harperbury was one of 6 great big bins built as a kind of London overspill, it was known as the Hertfordshire cluster. Six great big bins, each one of them was like a 2,000 bed unit that was designed for patients of various different types. Like ours was supposed to be for people who were described as mentally subnormal in the day, great, isn’t it? And you or I could have been in there. You have no idea the people that were just shoved away, it was a desperate, desperate way of responding to what was then moral panics in the community.

Anyway I lived there for 2 years and then I needed to get the hell out, I realised I’d hit burn out, but also I had become so stuck inside that institution, I was a bit institutionalised myself. One of our patients at the time used to re-sell tobacco after he had collected douts, you know like cigarette stumps from an ash tray. So he would go around all the ashtrays in the local pubs and I found myself doing that every time I was out. Whenever I went for a pint with my mates I’d be collecting stubs in the ash tray. You know what, there is no difference between me and the patients I am supposed to be looking out for. No difference at all. I know that in me hearts and hearts but actually our behaviour becomes so institutionalised.

Anyway, I decided to get the hell out of there. My next job was from an advert in City Limits magazine. City Limits was the pre-runner to Time Out. They used to be part of the same magazine a long, long time ago and there was a massive in fight politically and the team broke apart and City Limits was perceived as more left wing more radical, although those people at Time Out might refute that now. But anyway they split apart. One magazine was called Time Out, the other magazine was City Limits.

About the same time the Film Council was created because the Arts Council was all about personalities and interpersonal politics, so then we had the Film Council with the Arts Council and to this day the Arts Council will not fund film and the Film Council will not fund exhibitions. And that’s what it comes down to, personalities all those bloody years ago.

Anyway, at that point the job I got on the back of City Limits was to be part of a team setting up a therapeutic community on a Greek island. I ended up working there for 26 years, every summer. But that first summer was 4 months work, setting up this creative community. They wanted people who’d learned art therapy, drama therapy what have you. And I was working with all the kids, doing these brilliant kids activities and two of the children belonged to the two founders of the whole place and space. And I came back and lived in Hackney.

And I was invited to live in Hackney by a few people who were in squats just up the Upper Clapham Rd and the Springfield Estate and I lived there for 2 years had me own firm connected, got the gas connected got the lecky, it was all above board except the rent. I kept coming back to Hackney Council and saying look, we have now got a whole community, because I had kind of been made the spokesperson for our squatting village if you like. Because we took over the whole second floor, actually the first and second floor of that part of the estate, loads of us, most of us were lesbian and gay, most of us.

There were a few people who I had known through Hackney Hospital so they were mental health users, but it was interesting because they were people who couldn’t find housing and I just thought well either we are braver then most folks or there is huge statistics of people who are perceived as social misfits or outsiders who can’t find housing through the usual roots.

So yeah, two years I was there and we had visitors from all over Europe coming to stay with us, in the squatter’s village. We looked out for the elderly people in that community who had been abandoned by the council frankly, because those flats were empty and they were terrified that as long as the flats were empty they were going to be taken over or they would be vandalised by people that they didn’t know, had no connect with.

Now the two people on our floor were both elderly Irish people, again it was in the 1980s there was a huge amount of anti-Irish racism. So they were people that had been abandoned by the council, weren’t being looked out for, had nowhere else to move on and yet these flats were supposed to be decanted, emptied, because there were issues around health and safety, fire safety and stuff like that. It was because of the designs basically because you had to go through the living room from your bedroom. Your bedroom was self-contained but you had to go through the living room and then the kitchen to get out your front door. Now if there had been a fire in the kitchen you’re trapped, if there had been a fire in the living room you’re trapped. If there was a fire in your bedroom you would just run like hell, wouldn’t you?

Anyway that’s how I came to be in Hackney and I have been here ever since. I have come and gone at times, I went and worked with Banner Theatre in the late 1980s. So I was away from Hackney for about a year and a half, I was on the road if you like. I went down South London to live for about a year and that was ridiculous. I ended up having something like 13 different addresses in London but most of them were in Hackney and here I am to this day, in Hackney.


Q. Going back to when you were younger, to what extent do you think you were aware of people who would identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual? For example was there anybody on TV or did you have any neighbours? [9:57]

JM. Loads of neighbours, half the bloody village, all the squatters were lesbian, gay, one trans women. She hated the word trans so you would never use the word trans. ‘Tranny’ you would use affectionately, I am always saddened that people don’t use the word ‘tranny’ affectionately because actually Stonewall began with a transgendered woman. A woman of colour, dark skinned actually, although she was mixed race, but anyway, she lobbed the first brick, trans woman, Stonewall 1968.

And so a lot of the people that I lived alongside down here were lesbian, gay, bisexual. A lot of people would have hidden their bisexuality because it wasn’t popular because a lot of us who had come out and fought to be out there on the front line, perceived bisexual people as passing. Hiding behind the power structures of the heterosexual norm. Hiding inside a heterosexual relationship and then coming out at night and queering it out, having their first experiences with lesbians in the bars. There were loads of bars in Hackney actually. I’ve kind of wandered off your original question.

I knew Hackney Women’s Unit, there were two people there who I knew were lesbians. I knew people at Hackney Mind there were two very out lesbians attached to them. I didn’t know very many gay men but I was quite frightened of men because of my own history as a child, I don’t feel like that anymore I have got loads of male gay friends and male friends and at that stage of me life I was very traumatised by men. So I wasn’t that connected to gay men.

But down here in Hackney there was a huge amount of lesbians and gays and bisexual people probably I would say trans people hid more. I was more familiar with people who described themselves as transvestites who were more comfortable in wearing, or cross dressing we would call it back then.

Now, actually I was just chucked out of TK Maxx a few months ago for trying clothes on in what they call the ‘men’s department’ and it’s a long story and I was so pissed off. Yeah, a few months ago in 2017. And this women said to me “you can’t change here” and I said what do you mean I can’t? I have just changed. “No you can’t, you must not.” I said why not. “We have a policy,” I said show me the policy, is it written down? “Yes, you must be in women’s wear.” How do you know, have you investigated what I’ve got between my legs, how do you know where I should be? She said “this is men’s wear” and I said no it’s not this is my wear. She said “these are men’s clothes” and I said they’re not, they are my clothes and in the end I threw the clothes down and got thrown out of the shop.

So I guess I would support people who now describe themselves as trans. Language changes all the time. But in answer to your question, there was a huge community here in Hackney and there still is, although some of the older lesbians and gay men are moving out now because the central London and I would argue that Hackney is now just slightly outside the centre of London, so within that inner ring more or less, it is no longer the East End. But it’s got so flooded and crowded there is no spatial integrity anymore so those of us who are getting longer in the tooth are thinking I want a quieter life. So there is now a huge community of people who have set up home in Whitstable, it is like a bloody gay village out there in Whitstable.

But I can remember going to Lesbos for the first time and thinking oh it would be great to meet new exotic lesbians out there on Sappho’s Island, you know. Half of Hackney was out there, I remember saying it, this is Hackney on sea. Seeing people that I knew from the pubs, people I’d drunk with, people who I had slept with for god sake and they were all naked on Arosos Beach and I was like I am not taking my clothes off in front of her, I remember her over there and I am not taking my kit off in front of her.

I couldn’t believe it. It actually, for a while Lesbos was called Rackets on Sea because of the great club at the Pied Ball near Angel, opposite Angel tube. I think it’s Boots the chemist now, anyway it was a brilliant night club. Competition only in the fallen Angel really or a couple of clubs down here. Bridie’s where we use to run on a Tuesday night and at the Rose and Crown, was it the Rose and Crown or the Three Crowns, can’t remember now. On Cambridge Heath Down it wasn’t even as far as Cambridge Heath, down at the bottom of Mare Street anyway. Yes we had a few good times. We used to have film nights, pubs, discos, tragic discos, can’t even go over that, bloody hell. Nobody should have to go through that.


Q. So what about before you came to London, was there anything like that in a similar scene outside of London? [16:02]

JM. Yeah, but I mean I came from Merseyside, I was born in Birkenhead but I used to go out to Liverpool because there was nothing going on in Birkenhead, there is very little going on there now. Sorry if there is anyone from Birkenhead listening to this but honest to god it is the one-eyed city. So called actually, because years and years and years back when Cammell Lairds was just setting up, they had no eye masks for their welders and so they were always getting injuries. So there would always be a que of people, usually blokes of course, outside the eye hospital and it became known as the one eyed city Birkenhead, because that is where all the welders came from Cammell Lairds and they were getting blinded in one eye by not having goggles or welding masks.

Anyway, so Liverpool and JoJos, JDs, Maxwell’s Plum, there was another few bars there, oh the Star and Garter, I used to go to the Star and Garter, until the orange men burnt it, down because actually what was very florid in Liverpool was the war in Ireland. I say the war in Ireland, the war on these islands, because the Queen still thinks she owns the six counties. But anyway, it is a very strong community of Catholics, nationalists from Ireland, and protestants from Ireland and so you know the marches on the 12th of July the orange man would be out in the orange order and I can remember them burning down St John’s market. I also remember them burning down Birkenhead market because I was there in a night club in Birkenhead just overlooking the market the night of that fire.

So there were places to go out and they were lively places we were more politicised I feel in Liverpool because it was a much smaller community and yeah, therefore the gene pool was smaller, but I needed to get the hell out of there because I needed to get away from me family but also I wanted to get down to London eventually, was where I was headed with me little knapsack on me back. Don’t know whether that answered your question really.

Q. Have you always felt quite accepted and welcomed by the lesbian, gay, bisexual community, you mentioned the squats already? [18:35]

JM. No, I’ve never felt welcomed at all, I still don’t and that has to do with the weave of your identity, who you are. For me it was because I came from a second generation Irish family. I am second generation so my family were Catholic and Protestant, so I always had that sense of being an outsider among outsiders. We were settled around Liverpool on Merseyside, but we were always mistrusted. So the fact of being a lesbian in the middle of that context, you get even more mistrust thrown your way.

I can remember my best mate at school, who I am still in touch with actually but we don’t see each other very much, she was terrified when I came out. She said you’ve just got wilder and wilder. I don’t know what is going to happen next. And I don’t know what her fear was about. Where does that take you if I am getting wilder and wilder? What does she mean by that, I have left home and live in a squat, now I’ve come out, what’s going to happen? Am I going to eat children? What’s the worst that could happen, you know? She was imploding, I don’t know what she was dreaming of, but she was very frightened.

So, in terms of the community we learnt to rub along. I found a community of squatters first and foremost we were squatters. It was by accident I found out that the majority of those squatters were lesbian and gay. That doesn’t mean necessarily that I felt welcomed by the lesbian and gay community, I didn’t. I felt like an outsider among outsiders. I can remember being turned away from The Bell the first time I went down to The Bell, which was near Kings Cross down St Pancras way, and they always had two bouncers on the door and there was this gay man and he took one look at me and said “you are not allowed in” and I said you haven’t even asked me me name yet and he went “oh from up north?” and I went yea and?

He said “well do you realise what kind of club this is” and I said if it has got anything to do with the pink boots you’ve got on I am in the right place. I mean I am a very visual thinker so I watch people very carefully, and also I came from a family that had received a lot of aggression, anger, outrage all of my life. So that made me a very watchful child. So I had spotted the pink boots early on even though we were in the dark in a night club called The Bell, which was both a pub and disco. It was a right sleazy place. But I can remember the gay men behind the bar. You’d be there on the front line waiting for a drink and they would lean across you and go “hello hunny” to the nearest gay man, “what would you like to drink, sorry darling what are you drinking, what’s that lovely, what are you having,” right over your head. But I know why they wanted to turn me away because I had a bloody mullet. My hairdresser was terrible, they probably took one look and thought you are not coming in here, it was the hair do. [laughing]

It was the hair-do tell the do. It was the hair do, yeah, I thought I was Rod Stewart. Spiky at the front and long at the back anyway, what a mess. No I didn’t feel welcome, I still don’t. It is interesting when you look at Diva magazine which is really the Harper and Queen for lesbian, bi and trans women and you look at that over the years and you think the amount of bloody work I’ve done in the arts over thirty years and some and they put my picture in there about 4 years ago in this kind of tabloid column of disabled dykes, disabled queers and the headline, Dykes to Watch Out For. And just underneath Women to Watch and I thought, really after 30 years you’re fucking kidding me.

And of course what they’ve missed was they use to have their power list, 1 and 100 and I was listed in that power list years ago but it is interesting isn’t it? I am not saying oh I should be in there every week or something, what I am saying is if you’ve got leaders in your community who have been very outspoken, who have made moves to bring community together, particularly unheard voices, voices from the margins to put centre stage its extraordinary that you choose to call that someone to watch out for 30 years on. It’s a bit like when I got the emerging artist award when I was 40 and I thought emerging, really? Fucking hell, can’t wait to see my middle age.


Q. Could you tell me a little bit about where you like to go in Hackney for a night out? [23:43]

JM. I am a nosey git, I‘ll tell you where I like to go. One of my favourite things to do in in the early 1990s was there used to be poker schools around Hackney in various people’s homes, and I know someone who is still running a poker school, she is probably in her early 60s now. And some of the best artists used to hang around her house, just down the bottom of Ridley Road Market, it is Ridley Road Market isn’t it? [In Dalston]. Just down the bottom of Ridley Road market, she shall remain nameless, but the poker school’s there. That’s where I want to go. I want an invite to that house and I want to go to every house in Hackney where they use to run the old Shebeens, which was illegal drinking houses and the poker schools.

We set up one once with Lesley Willis and Lesley Wood and it was Trish Sweeny’s flat, and we decided we were going to have a poker school. Well what we didn’t realise was there wasn’t one of us who knew how to play poker properly, or maybe Maggie Casey did. We were all musicians who use to knock around together from the Duke of Wellington that use to be just off Balls Pond Road, it’s probably still there now. The Duke of Wellington had music sessions there, it was run by two dykes. It was run by, what the hell was their name? Ah can’t remember their names that says it all. But on a Sunday we used to run Irish music sessions there and some of the women who came saw the musicians were great poker players. Not me, no one had every tutored me in playing poker, bloody hell. Because my dad was somebody who used to say, my dad originally came from a traveller family, and he would always say never let the grass settle under feet and never leave a debt behind you. And what he meant by that keep moving don’t leave a trace and by the same token never leave a debt behind you, and for that reason he never had a bank account until his very later years when he was living on his boat on the Mersey and he said he had an off shore bank account. Well what he meant by that was that he had been to Midland Bank on the Isle of Wight and he thought that was an off shore bank account. Anyway you asked me where I would go, bloody hell, I would want an invite to that house, and they’re still running a poker school.


Q. Other than the Duke of Wellington what other places in Hackney had a good lesbian scene? [26:36]

JM. The Rose and Crown down the bottom, or was it the Three Crowns? I can’t remember the name of the bloody pub where Bridies(?) used to be. The Women’s Unit here was really strong and I remember an officer called Hilary McColum and she was always setting up events, she had these screenings that she would set up.
Is it called Sutton House? No not Sutton House, it is a protected house, it is probably part of the libraries and protected buildings.


Q. Sutton House, the National Trust one down the road? [27:22]

JM. Yeah, it‘s close. Off Homerton Rd.

Q. I think that’s the one. [27:31]


JM. So she had screening there and all sorts of things. There was also somewhere else that she would have events and Ocean over the road before that became Hackney Picturehouse. When that first opened up there’d be the Emma Peel Fan Club or one of the first to launch that that was a nine piece women’s band. Angels’ Horns was a five piece saxophone band run by Angel Fronhmayer (?), dykes. Most of the Emma Peel Fan Club, dykes, I think they had one straight women and one questioning in there. The Electric Landladies, even before they went to Ocean actually, they were at Blow the Fuse on Stoke Newington Church Street, which was what the Vortex was known as then. Blow the Fuse is the name of the club, which was a brilliant jazz club, kind of live music, events, most of them were dykes. Gay men used to come of course, it was not separatist in any shape or form, not when you were out playing, but again all brilliant musicians. The Vortex was there for years until they moved down the road, down to some new space, just beyond the Rio. And the Rio used to do events as well, I can remember fundraisers there at the Rio, where they were screening of particular peoples work. Pratibha Parmar was always in and out showing her work, the people from Justice for Women doing screenings.

We were more politicized I think because we would pounce on a cause and make it our own. So Pits and Perverts which was part of the Lesbian and Gays Support the Miners’ strike in 1984, 1985 as well, that had been set up by Mark, I forgot his surname. Oh, there has just been a big film about it called Pride. But there were lots of us all around the country who were supporting that. Very politicized support for the miners’ strike. I can remember being out on marches, I can remember working in a theatre company that was working towards fundraising for the miners strict. Me own uncle, Jimmy McNamara, took two large haul lories from the docks in Liverpool, they hijacked them and took them down to Trous(?) Village, where they knew there was a miners village being starved back to work, and they filled those two lorries full of food and literally cut across the entrance to that village, the only entrance, so that they fed those miners and they fed the entire village out of two long haul trucks and the police couldn’t get in or around. That was Jimmy McNamara, my uncle. I dare say there was other people involved and I can’t credit them because I wasn’t there but anyway. I don’t think I have answered your question but it is an interesting diversion.


Q. You were involved in setting up the Brides’ night so can you tell me little bit about how it came about? [30:40]

JM. Do you know what? It was a group of Irish dykes who were fed up with anti-Irish racism. Things were very lively in the 1980s and by that I mean there was a lot of fear on the streets, you would only hear an Irish accent and people would get antagonistic. There was a lot of violence.

The war in the North of Ireland was starting to be brought here, into London, to wake people up. People assumed once it was overseas i.e. over the Irish Sea it is not their responsibility, where as actually it began here in the powers in the White House. White House, god help me, in Westminster.

I can’t believe actually the sort of things that went on. People being bullied just for the sound of their voice, people being bullied when they heard where they came from. We decided we were going to set up an Irish club and we had a sympathetic voice down the road, down on the bottom of Mare Street on the right hand side of the triangle, and so they opened Tuesday nights for us. And we kind of knew that Gene Maldy (?), who used to run the Duke of Wellington just off Balls Pond road, were kind of getting fed up with our diddly diddly music because we had these sessions every Sunday and we just took over the pub and I must admit it was absolutely filled with musicians and we had musicians coming from all over Ireland, but we also got musicians drifting through London. They would come to the women’s music sessions. We were listed in some gay guide which was a travel guide for all over Europe. I remember Peggy Seeger from the Seeger family came over to sing with us, and Irene Scott. They were just doing an album at the time. They were about to do the album No Spring Chickens and they wanted to meet other musicians who were working in acoustic music and so they came to our sessions for a few weeks, a few Sundays. Which was amazing.

I remember Alix Dobkin, who was the first out lesbian on a vinyl album, who came to the Duke of Wellington, she also came to The Fallen Angel but that was another one, that was in Islington anyway. But yeah, she did a gig with us at the Duke of Wellington because there was a stage at the back, long before they put the pool tables in there and destroyed the place, there was a little stage there and we did all sorts of try out gigs and we had all manner of stars in there including Alix Dodkin who brought out the first out album called Lavender Jane Loves Women. Google that one, that will take you back. Yeah I remember that gig because I supported her, they asked me to come out and do 20 minutes and warm the audience up, it was a good gig. And we had Julie Felix in there as well. Julie Felix came in with Maryanne Seagle (?). I remember Janna Lane(?) making much of that because she got a blow-up seagull from the joke shop and she came out on stage with this blow-up seagull on her left shoulder. Janna Lane(?) was a brilliant musician I think she has gone down to Brighton but she was a Hackney musician for a long time.

And a lot of those musicians who came through ended up recording at Ova Tones music studio, actually in the early years it was Highgate Newtown Community Centre and then it moved to central London, they got masses amounts of money to do that move. They have high end clients, including Madonna, Sting, Diana Krall, numbers of them, Beverley Knight, I could go on and on. But the two sound engineers were both Hackney dykes, Lesley Willis and Lesley Wood, who is now down in Brighton. Why am I telling you that? I don’t know why I am telling you that.


Q. Can you tell me just a little bit about the Ova Tones music studio and your memories of it? [35:10]

JM. I can do better than that, I brought photographs in. So how did I get involved with that one? I’d been doing my circuit doing various gigs and I’d come out of an Irish community, Liverpool Irish community, so I was doing a lot of unaccompanied singing, storytelling. To be honest I never saw myself as a comedian until someone booked me for the Hackney Empire one day. And they wanted me as a comedian for the Jane Brown fundraiser and also it was to raise the profile of Jane Browns defence. She was the head mistress that was about to get sacked and she had so much bad press around her because what she was trying to do was point out that not every child in these classrooms could afford the tickets to go and see Romeo and Juliet. So what she’d suggested was, unless it was a company coming into the school to play for everyone, she wasn’t going to support these expensive tickets for half the class to go out with the nice dibby, dibby, probably white middle class parents with loads of money. Privilege and entitlement, so what she tried to do was very fair. And somebody on the school of governors, whoever it was, I don’t know some parents evening but they blew her up and shopped her to the media and said she’s a lesbian and she doesn’t like Romeo and Juliet because it is a heterosexual love story. I mean assumptions, it wasn’t about that at all. It was about trying to make sure every child had access to that story. That Shakespeare belongs to us all not just to that particular group of privileged children whose parents could afford those ridiculous fees for the tickets.

So anyway Hackney Empire got on board to support her, not in the least because there were quite a few lesbians in the running of Hackney Empire. Even during Roland Muldoon’s heyday. And so they gave the whole of Hackney Empire over to raise funds and raise the profile of Jane Brown’s case. And for some reason I got booked in as a comedian and I said I am not funny, there is nothing about me that is funny. And they went “well you are, you just don’t know you’re funny.” Well I wish someone would show me what’s funny then because from north to south it is different. I might be funny up north but not down here.

And I think it was the stories between the songs that got longer and longer basically. But I remember doing a set there that absolutely took off. I got a great review in the Independent. Which I have to say has never happened again, but there you are.

Anyway I met a lot of people there who were running events elsewhere and so we started swapping from one event to another and helping each other out and there was a sound engineer called Maxine, who still comes to Hackney and does the sound for me, although she is much bigger sound now and out on massive world tours, she is a fabulous engineer. Anyway she said you should record your stuff. I wouldn’t know where to go, Ova Tones. It is a studio run by women for women, Ova Tones music studios.

It was set up by a lesbian duo called Ova, how imaginative, Rosemary and Jana. And they set us those studios originally at Highgate Newtown. So I asked Maxine, who would you recommend then as an engineer that I could work with, because I am working with an unaccompanied voice, [inaudible] singing, I can’t see many people wanting that on an album. In them days, I meant recording it, I knew I could flog it very easily, in the very least in the gigs I am doing. So she recommended Livvy Elliott. Livvy Elliott runs Studio 9 down in Brixton which was one of the main engineers that Lesley Willis and Lesley Wood worked with. And so Maxine put me in touch with her, put me in touch with the studios. And I ended up working with two sound engineers. One was Lesley Wood, who originally came from somewhere in Australia, can’t remember where she is from now, Brisbane or somewhere, I might have made that up. And the other one was Livvy Elliott who I had a fabulous time with. And we recorded the album together. That is how I got involved with Ova Tones music studios and I ended up being a chair on their board for god knows how many years. But it was set up to educate women and girls around sound engineering, recording, creating soundscapes for theatre, sound for film. They did extraordinary work and they went into schools and colleges and they also set up one of the best sound studios I’ve ever been inside, and I’ve been in some in me life.


Q. What do you think the importance of educating women about how to do sound engineering, recording at that time was? [40:31]

JM. I still think it is hugely important to encourage women and girls to take creative control of their own voice. And weather your voice is your musical instrument, or its you speaking in a public place, or its you with your own songs or your own song writing, you need to take, we need to take creative control because women and girls are socialised to think that is man’s domain. I know very few schools or performance arts courses on these islands where women and girls are encouraged to understand the science of the sound wave or encouraged to understand what happens to your voice when you transpose it mechanically or you compress a sound. I know very few spaces and places where they educate women and girls to understand how to operate a sixty four track desk. Or to understand the difference between a small hall sound and a wider carnage hall sound when you are listening to music. And even if its even understanding what you like, what you really enjoy listening to in music. And I am now thinking about deaf people because I work with a lot of deaf people and I taught a deaf women who used to sing for cabaret who went deaf. Could no longer hear her top range anymore and lost all of her confidence, and I taught her to sing again by dropping her voice down into her belly. And we worked through the floor, and we worked through vibration, and we worked through balloons until she could feel her voice again and only through feeling her voice again could she reclaim it again. And she started singing in small halls where she could feel it more, she can’t sing in big halls anymore because she is lost. She can’t feel it. But she sings again and for me that is a huge change in her world and in mine actually. I found the whole thing very moving and an education within itself. Anyway don’t get me started on the importance of educating women and girls to take creative control of our voices, that’s why it is essential.


Q. Can you tell me a little bit about how you personally got involved with Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners? [43:04]

JM. Wow. Three different levels really.

One, I knew Hilary McCollum who is now a playwright in Derry. Hilary probably is the best researcher I know in terms of the Suffragette movement. And at the time her mate was Mark who was setting up Pits and Perverts, raising funds for the Miners strike. I knew nothing about it until a conversation. So that was part of it, I knew Hillary was involved and she was doing these fundraisers and her and Mark were very involved in Lesbian and Gays support the Miners’ Strike. I had got involved with Banner Theatre, oh no that was slightly later though the Banner Theatre stuff because they were looking back at the support for the miners.

Me uncle Jimmy was very involved in supporting the miners so as a family we had a ear on it the whole time, what was happening with the miners. There is a lot of Irish people who had settled around Wales and certain parts where our family was very involved in supporting the mining villages to eat and to stay on strike and to stay strong in terms of their voice.

I was involved with various folk clubs, there weren’t very out lesbians and gay in the folk clubs let me tell you, but there were a couple of lesbians and gays who were involved in Lesbian and Gays Support the Miners and they talked me into getting involved, so I used to do fundraisers. Chipping in, going on the marches, raising money. We all did our best. We all did our best. It was our cause as well as their cause, because they were fighting against Margaret Thatcher, and Margaret Thatcher was a vitriolic despot. I mean, you know. She was starving the Irish hunger strikers out of existence at the same time as she was starving the mining villages out of existence. She was decimating the trade unions and taking apart communities that had literally been constructed around particular industries. Once she smashed those industries apart, she smashed those lives. Generations built in one space around particular industries, coal, steel, gas, you name it. She just put a sledge hammer to the lot and I took that personally. I think we all did.


Q. Can you tell me about Pits and Perverts? [46:14]

JM. I don’t know a great deal about it because I didn’t go to the bigger clubs. Most of them were happening down here in London or there was a great big one in Cardiff. There was a little one and attempt at one in Liverpool, so I never actually went to the spaces, but heard a lot about them from people who did and it just sounded like an extraordinary night out all the glamour and the glitz.

The usual tat and tinsel of a gay gala accompanied with the rottweilers, the attack dogs, the politics. There would be that kind of bunch of outsiders among outsiders who would be rattling in and out of each of these gallas and spaces with a bucket, just a bucket collecting change, shouting “support the miners!” I remember doing it outside bookshops and on the corners of shopping precincts, there weren’t so many precincts in them days, near the markets, on the edge of the community kind of thing. Wherever we had a pub or club where there was a few nights for the queers we would be there with the buckets.

I remember getting booked, I don’t know who booked me actually, but it was in St Albans and they told me it was going to be a Support the Miners’ Strike. When I got there it was the conservative society of St Albans and they’d booked me to do this set of songs and stories. I would always say to anyone listening in, just read the contract very carefully before you sign and you know what you can always say no. Bloody hell that was a night and a half.


Q. Could you tell me a little bit about the Pride Festival, I think it was 1995 in Victoria Park? [48:18]

JM. Oh my god who told you about that? That’s the last Pride I ever performed at down in London, although I performed at Pride two weeks ago in Liverpool. I did 10 Prides in a row, and that was the last one I did. There was something aggressive about the atmosphere of that Pride.

It was a very uncomfortable atmosphere as far as I am concerned, it wasn’t safe. The First Pride I ever did was down in Brockwell Park, was it in Brockwell Park? No it was in Kennington Park. It was a tiny Pride in the mid-1980s and it just had such a teddy bear’s picnic feel about it. You could bring your family out, everyone was marching under the rainbow banner. There was something homely, lovable, accommodating. I have no doubt there was still people heckling because I got caught up in a ruck on my way home, even then. But actually I got caught up with a load of S&M dykes and S&M queers who had me cornered in a shop, until they heard my accent and then of course I came out all street kid, [laughs] and they wouldn’t take me on then. I would’ve taken them all on, I would’ve taken them out, I tell you. But I think they thought they had a pansy and they were literally gonna marbalise me, I don’t know what the hell that was all about, they kept shoving their fists in my face and going “take one of these”. I thought I’d got two bigger than them. Anyway, never mind. That was then.

There was something very different about that first Pride, the atmosphere of it and also the local community seemed more accepting, there was a tolerance. What happened down here in 1995 at Victoria Park felt aggressive and there was a tension around, there was a lot of agro. There were people who had literally come out and they were marching in gangs to pick on people, to take you out, that’ s what it felt like. But also when I got up to do the gig I just felt like the atmosphere in the tent was aggressive and hostile, so I didn’t feel like I was at home in a queer audience or a lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, questioning, queer, plus, intersex, anyone else I have left out, I am very sorry. Questioning, what’s impressive about questioning. I am not even going there with questioning. Anyway.

I was dressed as a failed drag queen, I think it was the year after there had been a huge ruck about too many drag queens on stage and no cis-identified born women. So there were trans people, trans women and there were drag queens on that stage, and I think their might have been one straight women who they brought in. I don’t’ know if it was Kylie Minogue, or somebody who would bring in the crowds, so there was a big name who would have been paid a serious amount of money to bring them over. And so there was a huge row about the programming on the main stage. And I knew the people in the Pride trust and there were two women on the directors of Pride, who questioned this themselves and got side-lined, and because of that I created this character called Hairy Omara. Now Hairy was a failed drag queen who was a man who really wanted to be a women at heart and so what I used to do in front of the audience I would come on as this kind of quite sad character who was male but half female dressing in the drag.

I’ve got all the studio shots that Gonul Zeki did at Lenthall Road Workshop, so I will let you have the studio shots if you want. But I then used to drag up as a women, I had a hairy chest, I had long hands because I had extended fingers, nail extensions. I had hair on the back of my arms and I had a moustache, because I was quite a bold drag queen I decided to go with the facial hair and just love my hairiness. I had a corset on, shit kicking high heels, which I have to say I cannot walk well on, I’ve never walked well in high heels and I had a massive strap-on on the front. At one point this character had many strap-ons on because there were people walking out, I remember some of the really political separatist dykes walking out in disgust. But Hairy Omara then goes through these torch songs, and my pianist was Dan Gillespie Cells who you might know as the lead singer from The Feeling now days. Dan, who came from Palmers Green, out that way and we’d done some gigs together. He was only about 15, god love him. It was the first couple of gigs he had done in his life outside of his living room. We did one at the Jacksons lane and one down at Pride and he was on the key board, and at one point we were in the women-only space and of course they were very separatist with women only spaces, with only cis born, cis identified women and only women. And so I’d gone in with Dan who now identifies as a gay man, cis gay man. I got him a t-shirt that said Lesbian Thought Police and he quite long hair and I though nobody is going to ask him and no one ever did. It was always our joke that I walked into the women’s stage with Dan Gillespie Sells. Dan, young boy, 15, sweet faced, not even stubble yet with a big t-shirt on that said Lesbian thought Police, carried on playing our songs. That was Pride 1995.


Q. It sounds like you were involved in a bit of activism. What were some of the campaigns you were involved with in the past? [54:47]

JM. First campaign I was involved with was the Anti-Nazi league, hated racism in any shape or form and the Anti-Nazi league was where it was at, but they also did brilliant festivals with great music. So that would be my first and most important. Signing up against anti-racism. Still there, still wiping me nose, racism is like snot it is going to keep dripping. We’ve been spoon fed, all of us, whatever colour we are, we’ve been spoon fed to raise racism. And Support the Miner’s Strikes, Support the Miner’s Wives, Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners, any which way.

Campaign Against Psychiatric Oppression. Mined Out Campaign, which started here in Hackney. Survivors Speak Out, which was about mental health system survivors speaking out against really oppressive treatments inside the psychiatric system. I used to support lesbians and gays, and actually nobody included BTIQ+ in those days, but I used to support lesbians and gays who had been horribly treated inside the psychiatric system. We wrote about it, we did research around it, knew the [inaudible] at Hackney Hospital was doing a hell of a lot of research around it, she was brilliant. And so I used to go and visit people in hospitals who had been in [inaudible] or people who had been tortured inside of the mental health system. I knew a woman who used to dress very butch and she was literally stripped naked because she would only wear her father’s suit, and actually it was part of her grieving at the time. After her dad died she took to wearing her father’s suit, she looked great in it I thought and they hated her wearing the suit. One of the first things they did was hold her down stick a needle up her bum and forced her to wear a dress.

I knew somebody who was in the forces, and they had literally pushed her through aversion therapy where they put electrodes attached to her labia and showed her pictures of naked women. Actually anyone who knows any women’s sexuality, its very rare that we look at bits of naked women, that you’d see in Playboy or something like that, and go wow I really like that [inaudible]. Isn’t that a delicious [inaudible]. That’s wonderful that [inaudible]. That doesn’t necessarily turn you on, you just think how very interesting shapes it is a kind scientific thing, and object, it is objectifying the person. And those women who I know fall in love with people ,which is why I guess fundamentally we are all bisexual, it is just we have been shoehorned into letting people [inaudible]. So, this women had literally been through shock therapy, shock treatment to try and force her to loath a woman’s body and force her to be attracted to men. And so they’d take the electrodes off her labia and then show her something exciting and give her something sweet to eat when she’s looking at naked men. She is still a dyke to this day, She is a butch dyke that really doesn’t like anything electric near her, I think that is understandable. And she is not that taken with Playboy magazine either.

So that is the kind of campaigning I got involved with. I also got involved with Justice for Women. I supported women who had killed through their court cases and through the period just after their release. I was particularly involved with Emma Humphreys and the Emma Humphreys campaign because she had only been 17 when she was finally sent down but 16 when she killed the man who was attacking her and at the age of 17 she was sent down at her Majesty’s pleasure which means endless tariff. She could have still been there now and she wrote to Justice for Women for help when she realised reading through various other campaigns that actually she should have had a defensive of provocation against the man who had attacked her, but her defence lawyer didn’t defend her and she chose not to speak. She was only 17 and she was too frightened of the whole system so she ended up getting put away with an endless tariff which means forever and ever and ever. She came out eventually after serving 10 years, she started her own defence when she contacted Justice for Women to support her case. They offered her parole after 7 years and she refused to come out with the label murderer. She said I am going to try and defend myself from Holborn Prison so I was very involved with that case and with her as a person. She lived in Hackney for a while and we became good mates, very good mates. But sadly she only lasted three years after she was released. She died of the medication they put her on in prison, gave her heart failure.

So I used to campaign against the kind of medication they give to people in prison. I used to campaign against the medication they still use inside the mental health system. I worked with Survivors Speak Out, Survivors Poetry. I got very involved with Disability Arts. I am still there and still campaigning. I ain’t giving up. We are not dead yet.


Q. Can you tell me a little bit about how and when you became aware that you identified as a lesbian? [1:01:26]

JM. Do you know what, people nowadays hate the term “tomboy”, I love it. I was always a tomboy, I am still a tomboy, I don’t give a shit if somebody calls me a tomboy. I was identified very, very early on. Other people decided who I was long before I did and that was ok as long as I was accepted. My father raised me as his son for the first few years of my life. I was more like him then anyone else in the family. [inaudible]. He’ll never die as long as she’s alive, meaning me.

I would only wear shorts. I would try and pee standing up, the usual, you know. I can remember when I had to wear a dress for Sunday’s or for school when I first started school and I screamed the place down until in the end my mom allowed me to wear me shorts underneath the skirt of the dress and then I was fine. I was as happy as Larry.

I remember wetting meself at school, and the teacher only had a pair of blue y-fronts, these funny little cotton ones with holes in, y-fronts, underpants and she thought it was a punishment to put on me. She said they were the only thing in the box but to be honest she was a bitch, she was just putting me in them. It was the best thing she’d ever done for me, I wouldn’t give them back. And I can remember going home in these and my mom saying “oh did you wet yourself at school”. I said, yeah, but the teacher said I could have these. She said “no we’ll wash them and give them back.” No, the teacher said I could have these. Anyway my mum washed them to take them back, I was very annoyed. We took them back in a brown paper bag like we were guilty of something. She tried to give them back with to Mrs Dodd with the explanation they’d been washed and pressed, and Mrs Dodd apologised that’s all she had and my mom suddenly clocked what had gone on and she said “then you are very lucky to have them back because I’m told you had given them to Julie as a present.” So they identified me as a tomboy early one.

Then, people would scream “lezza” at me down the street. I remember this kid saying to me “are you a man or a women” and I said yes and this kid struggling with that answer. I can remember being called a lesbian on a bus. I mean I was ashamed and I remember going bright red thinking am I a lesbian? Everyone seems to know before I do. There was a kid at school, Christine Belcher, who was a lesbian and out about it and she used to sleep with a girl, Josephine, and I was so obsessed about it and I still remember her name and her girlfriend’s name now. My first kiss with another girl was when I was 11 ½ and we were playing doctors and nurses and I used to wear a pair of socks down me kacks and I was always on top. Not much changes you know. Anyway, Alison, her name was, which is interesting, given my current partners name. yeah somethings don’t move on. I think we recreate the fantasies of the past, that is what we do.

I didn’t have a cake, nobody baked me a cake, nobody came around with a basket of fruit and said happy lesbian day to you, I believe you are having a coming out party. It was nothing like that, it was more about abuse on the streets and name calling and feeling awkward and knowing that kissing Alison behind a bike shed wasn’t actually the same as what the other girls were doing. It was knowing when we went to school, Alison’s big sister Deb and Deb saying she was going to tell on us, “what are you two doing” when we were found in the dark under her covers in her bedroom. She knew what we were doing for gods sake. Anyway, so it was all kind of shame, silence and hidden secrets, really, which made it thrilling, and even more fun. Apart from being beaten up, that wasn’t fun. There was a few times I was getting beaten up on the streets because I liked to wear boots and tight jeans and leather jackets, I could handle meself. Maybe I looked like a bit of a Rockafella, don’t know, them were the days.


Q. Would you say that you came out at any point? [1:06:39]

JM. I think you come out all the time. I mean didn’t have a party. I didn’t say to me mom, you know that Victoria sandwich you did for our dem’s(?) birthday are you willing to do it…, see me mum found me in bed with two girls, I don’t know what she made of that. I told me mom in a conversation when she was trying to wonder why I was in bed with two girls and why I had left a copy of Billitis for her to look at, which was just the front cover or an LP record I was playing. I kept leaving her hints. Big hints. It was all a bit obvious really.

I think there are periods where you tell and you tell and you tell it again, in lots of different places and spaces. I never got to tell me dad meself, which always saddens me because it broke his heart allegedly and he threatened to kill himself. He was living on the boat on the Mersey at the time and he just pulled a banker and went missing for three weeks and then he stopped writing to me until I wrote him a letter and that was a big coming out letter, but my sister had already flushed me out. Largely because she had already had a baby, it was her third child, and she wasn’t married to the guy and my dad was profoundly Irish Catholic even though he had been excommunicated from the Catholic church himself. But my sister had decided she was going to flush me out because of course I was a bigger sin then having a kid out of wedlock. And so she went marching down the jetty to where his boat was, screaming across the Mersey, I can imagine with a big old Mersey gob on her. Screaming across the Mersey, “come and meet this baby”, she had the baby under one arm, “come and meet this baby, it’s no big deal and anyway our Julie is a lesbian, she is living with a woman down in London.” Screaming across the Mersey. I can imagine his face with all of his mates around the boat, he’d have died a thousand deaths. So then he said he was going to kill himself. Pulled the banker and off he went. Came back three weeks later, so he didn’t do a good job. Probably got pissed as a fart.

So my coming out was by degrees and depending on where and when and what place and what space. And then some people are very quick to come out for you. You know they will flush you out if they feel the shame of you. I don’t know, big mouths that just think it was a big issue and by degrees it became less and less of an issue. But I did receive the brunt end of a lot of violence over the years, I gave as good as it got. I learned to handle meself, you have to.


Q. You mentioned your family’s Irish Catholic background. Do you think that had an impact on your own views of your sexuality, and how your family felt about it? [1:10:04]

JM. Yeah, I have no doubt. There is a lot of sexual thrills you can get out of the fire down below and the forbidden. I’m just thinking about some mates of mine who literally photographed each other dressed as nuns fucking on the pews in a Catholic church. I remember thinking that was desperate, I thought it was the most daring thing anyone had ever done and they are going to burn in hell. I am still not sure they won’t. And I remember what happened to those photographs as well because one of them ended up in Del LaGrace volcanoes book. Would have been Del LaGrace in the early years. Which one, Love Bites, she had a book called Love Bites. Del was living in Hackney at that point.

The Catholic Church has got a lot to answer for, a huge amount to answer for. But it gives you something very clear to fight against and I learnt very well at my father’s knee because my father raised us Irish Catholic, was also ex-communicated from the Catholic church and by that I mean he was read out at the alter by the priest and refused his children baptism and refused to allow my father to enter that Catholic church again. And so it gave me great pleasure, last November when I was reading the prayers of the faithful in St Werburgh’s church in Birkenhead, the very church where my father was read out of the alter and ex-communicated from this church and from the Catholic church until the end of his days. i.e. burn in hell, you are now in limbo, although allegedly there is no limbo because the Pope’s tipixed it now. So I don’t know what happens to all those sould who have been in limbo for eternity. I guess they’re all just tipexed like it never happened. The Catholic Church is an interesting one.

I was there reading the prayers of the faithful because we had four of our kids baptised in that very church in November just, it was on the same day as Transgender Day of Remembrance. One minute I am in the Catholic church reading at the alter for our four kids, who are about to be baptised, and we now have a mixed race family, so our four brown children are all being baptised on the same day and then I have to jump the ferry and go over to Liverpool Museum for Transgender Day of Remembrance and I am doing a talk there, presenting there. And actually that’s more my tribe, that’s more my church – right there. That was a funny old day. I got very drunk at the end of the day. I didn’t know whether I wanted a shit or a haircut.


Q. Going back, You mentioned that you spent some time in a “homosexual retreat.” Have we talked through how that came about? [1:13:28]

JM. I was 19, I was very depressed, I wasn’t eating. I had been identified by somebody like a prefect that looks after newcomers in the university, I can’t remember what they called, like a house mother. It was the first time I was living away from home. I had been away from home like 3 or 4 months. I was in despair, I loathed Loughborough University. I don’t know why I had chosen it. I was there doing creative design and drama, what I really wanted to be doing was theatre with a bit of arts in there, like set design or something. And I had been to Art College, I had a brilliant time at Chester Art College. I’d had a very queer relationship at Chester Art College, that’s another story.

This house mother decided I needed counselling. So, I was sent to the counsellor who was there for the students on the campus at Loughborough University. And she decided it was too complex a case, she thought I had an identity crisis. And so sent me to, can’t remember the nearest psychiatric hospital, then we got transferred to Nottingham. So next thing I am bloody day patient in St Anne’s and I had been diagnosed as suffering from a homosexual retreat. It sounds like somewhere I’d sign up actually if you’d tell me were it was but it was a retreat from reality apparently. But reality was heterosexuality and I was experiencing a homosexual retreat. And apparently I am still experiencing it, so they’ve wasted a lot of public funding over the years treating me.

But I then got roped into the psychiatric system because I think once you are depressed, and somebody labels you, and forces you into a particular way of thinking, then you get given the medication, then you get caught up in the circus really and it’s bloody hard to get out of once you have a label. Then they will stick another label on you because somebody else is experimenting with you because they think you’ve responded really well to treatment, and actually what happened was that I fell in love with the therapist that was looking out for me. She was just lovely, she was gorgeous with a wonderful singing voice, a beautiful musician - what’s not to love? So of course I didn’t want to leave the hospital, never. Yeah, interesting because I look back and think did that do me any good? On one level it did because at least I had somebody sitting there just listening to me even though I took the tablets. On another level, no, it did me no good at all because I got caught up in a cycle that was really hard to get out of. I don’t think it would happen today. I think today they would go, do you know what, you’ve been a tomboy all your life, you’ve messed around with gender in every shape we can see. I used to cut out my own penis out of a rubber glove for God’s sake, you may have gender issues, you may have some dysphoria let’s explore all that stuff with you and see where you want to go with that, if at all. But they wouldn’t necessarily bang you up and say you’re suffering from a homosexual retreat, and that retreat is from reality and the reality we are looking at is the front line heterosexual behaviour. You should be a heterosexual that’s the norm.

Well, if you are asking my opinion I would say what a waste of bloody public funds. I might sit down and do that, just cost it up to see how much it has cost them over the years, including all the tablets, including all the sessions with people talking about my sexuality, writing about it, reading their writing about it. I met some good people inside, and of course some of the highest statistics of people inside are queer, some of the highest statistics of people inside are so healthily represented by black people, people of colour. Overrepresented on the inside of locked in spaces, what’s that about then if it’s not about containment and control, leading us all back to that hallelujah good land heterosexual frontline, the real world, reality. Yeah, so I am still in me homosexual retreat, it’s quite sunny here.


Q. You’ve been involved in a lot of activism with regards to mental health and psychiatric treatment. Can you tell me a little bit about Mind Out, which you said started in Hackney? [1:18:40]

JM. As far as I am concerned it began in Hackney, it began with someone called Jackie(?) I have forgotten her surname, she did some training here. It was the Mind Out campaign and it was attached to Tudor Road, Hackney Mind used to be down there and Homerton Hospital and Hackney Hospital. In fact there was a group of lesbians, gays, and transgender people attached to that, very tender early group, who were two counselling organisations there was Pace which was just off Holloway Rd, not far from Holloway Prison. And then there was East London Out Project which begun down near Stratford, that was in a Mind opposite Stratford Town Hall, and then they moved up to Waltham Forest around that way, and they now call themselves ELOP and they regularly used to support the Mind Out Campaign, but it actually began down here in Homerton and Hackney. And Jackie (?) who set it up went straight, I don’t know how that happened. I suppose sexuality is fluid. I knew she wanted kids and she had two kids. I hope she is very happy. I mean that as well. I think sexuality is fluid. A lot of people felt really disappointed and felt she should be drummed out of the brownies for that, but I was secretly tickled because I thought yeah go on. Perhaps she had been in the closet for years because she was a dyke with short spiky hair and uniform with big boots and suddenly she was straight with two kids and I thought good on you girl. We get love where we can and nobody should judge. There’s a mate of mine who was a lesbian for 25 years, she came on a Pride march with me this year, because we made it to Pride this year, and she was saying “this is my tribe, I belong here” but she’d been in a relationship with a bloke for 10 years, she jumped that fence and while she was screaming out at anyone who would listen, “this is my tribe, I belong here” I said to her, how does it feel? She says “well it feels ok, I’m queer.” I’d said yeah, I know you are. And anyway her bloke always seemed like a lesbian to me. I don’t think anyone should be bullied to take on a label or sit on a box for any other bugger on earth, anyone. But I don’t know how we make it comfortable for people to be fully themselves. How do we make that comfortable? I don’t know, because there is still such a lot of fear of difference. No matter what our difference is, whether it’s about your skin colour or my skin colour, whether that’s about your religion or my religion, whether that’s about class politics, where you’re reared to expect what you should be, where I should be reared where I was not expected to be, you know. Whatever it’s about, how do we make it completely comfortable for people to be fully themselves, the whole weave of who they are? I leave that with you to think about.


Q. Do you feel safe in Hackney? [1:22:32]

JM. Depends what time of day it is and depends where I am. I feel very safe in Hackney but that is about me feeling very safe inside my skin. I could be anywhere. Its interesting because I had a friend stay over from Australia who was staying in Hackney and I walk my dog in the common, the little bit of common near me, every night and she said “is it safe?” and I said it is never occurred to me to think it is not safe but I will tell you something the street where I live people always said it is very quiet here. It is off the back of Stoke Newington, on the back of Lower Clapton. But the first time I moved in somebody got shot, so I remember thinking that night I can either set this as the culture of where I live and this becomes the template in which I live my life or I could go, it wasn’t my gun, I wasn’t out there, it’s got nothing to do with me. Unless I am out there as a witness in which case it is my social responsibility to support that person who is a victim of crime, then that changes my behaviour. I am in indoors, I am lying strip-jack naked in me own bed and somebody’s been shot outside that’s got nothing to do with me. So made a decision that I was going to be safe and I am safe wherever I go. I like Hackney, I love Hackney, its very much like Liverpool. I am missing the river. I do miss the river and don’t tell me there is the river Thames that’s out there somewhere in London. I am talking about Hackney. I am lucky, I live walking distance to parks. I love the mix of the people. I love my neighbours, bonkers that they are, let me tell you.

My neighbour next door is one of my local heroes because she stopped a knife crime one night. It was a postcode war between one end of the street and another postcode coming in, and she stood there this wiry little white women in the middle of the street and fended off close to one hundred kids, 50 one side and probably the same number on the other. And she made it alright for them to put their knives away and back off and back down and go home to bed because her grief was visceral, as she stood there in the middle of the street screaming for her own son’s life. Screaming that she would not let him die that night. And she screamed for all of them to go home and go back to your own postcode and go to bed, put your knives away now, screaming at them. I think people were so shocked and those young people, so shocked to witness that, and also the bravery of it, because she wasn’t backing down she was like a bear with her pelt up I watch her back and she watches my back. Tell you who I don’t feel safe around is the police, so twice I have woken up to an armed response unit at me own home. An armed response unit, both times they were from Stoke Newington Police Station, I don’t feel safe with them bastards. People die behind their closed doors, I don’t feel safe there but they could be anywhere, it’s not just Hackney. So if you ask me if I feel safe in Hackney I’d say yea of course I do, I feel safe in my own body. If you asked me if I feel safe is Stoke Newington Police Station, I’d say no way, no way.