This week we’re deep in the world of politics. Next year there’s going to be a general election, your opportunity to stretch your democratic wings and say who represents you. Chances are you probably know which box you’re going to tick, but whose name is going to be in that box? This Sunday the local Labour Party are going to choose their representative for the seat of Brighton Pavilion and today we’re talking to Birgit Miller, one of the four candidates, Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
As a newly out person in Brighton, what does Pride mean to you?
It means a lot. I’m recently out, but also it’s now I’m a comfortable with it. I was out when I was maybe 16 or 17. I was aware I was bisexual, but I wasn’t proud and it didn’t work out for me. It felt actually quite scary, and I reverted to being straight for a really long time, until I had my first girlfriend last year. And last year I had COVID, so this is my first year feeling proud at Pride. And it just feels quite a big deal because I think I owe it to myself after growing up being so internally homophobic to myself, and just rejecting my entire identity, rejecting myself. I didn’t want to live my life that way. Now I’m so outrageously camp and queer all the time because I was afraid to express myself that way the whole of my life. So I’m excited to experience that feeling with other people and really feel the passion amongst everyone.
What bit of Pride would you feel part of? Would you feel comfortable being seen by the crowds, with the tourists coming to look at ‘the gays’? Do you want to be there being celebrated by outsiders?
It’s difficult because I’m not very queer presenting. People wouldn’t be able to tell I’m queer just by looking at me which is something I’ve struggled with in terms of finding someone to date. I’m very aware you have to fit into the stereotype to be seen. So like you can tell gay men are gay if they look gay, or butch lesbians, for example, but there’s so many other gay people who don’t fit into the stereotypes and I’m one of them. And I feel it’s difficult for me to feel seen in that sense.
I do want to take part in Pride, but I don’t think I would be able to because I don’t think people would see me. So it’s quite conflicting. But probably just being amongst the atmosphere and so many other proud people will be more than enough for me.
Physically the parade is down the middle of the street with the onlookers on the side. You don’t have to be gay to be in Pride. How do you feel about that?
I don’t like when people use it as a drunken street party, an excuse to get drunk during the day and wear glitter. OK, it’s nice, but you have to understand that queer people suffer a lot. It’s very, very new that we’ve been accepted, and can find communities with each other and go to gay bars and comfortably be safe, but even in Brighton… my friend who’s a trans woman got attacked and beaten to the ground by a bouncer of a queer bar. So even in Brighton you don’t feel safe all the time.
We really historically had to fight for acceptance by society and fight to find communities and everything and it’s just… probably straight people don’t see any struggles at all, you probably wouldn’t see those issues. But I see them all the time. But, of course, alliance is a huge contributing factor to being accepted and proud, and for those genuine people who come to cheer for us and support us, I love that!
You live Brighton, you’ve grown up in Brighton but there are plenty of very homophobic places. What does Pride say to the world?
I think it’s supposed to show solidarity and it’s supposed to show a celebration for being comfortable in who you are. That’s basically what it comes down to. Because most queer people fight with themselves for so long internally. You hide who you are for so long because you’re scared of what other people will think and you’re scared of being rejected by friends, family, society, everything. You fight with yourself for who you are.
Pride just comes down to being a celebration of people accepting themselves, of being comfortable with who you are and proud of who you are and each other. I’m proud, genuinely I’m proud. And I know that my queer friends, they’re proud and it makes a huge difference. Being in an environment that encourages feeling that sense of pride. Because your whole life you just you haven’t felt that at all. And it makes a difference knowing people care about you being OK with yourself.
But it’s also a blurred line because the city has made it a money making experience. You pay for tickets. The streets are closed off, the clubs are closed off, the parks are closed off, and it’s ticketed and the performers at the festival are straight. They’re queer icons. They’re loved by the queer community, but they’re straight people. Why wouldn’t you have queer performers?
Maybe but isn’t it about solidarity?
It is about solidarity, of course. But it’s Pride. It’s Gay Pride. Britney Spears performed.Britney’s not gay. She’s a cis straight woman. It’s Pride! Get Elton John, or anyone else who’s queer. So that’s the thing that makes me think it’s just about the money and the tickets and the people coming down.
For your first Pride, does that matter?
Yes, it does. I just want it to feel authentic and genuine. I don’t want it to feel like a commercialised business venture. I know people come to Pride and they don’t care about gay rights. They don’t care. I’ve been with people previous years who don’t care about gay rights, straight people who’ve never spoken about gay rights and they go just want to go and get drunk because everyone’s out on the streets and it’s fun. So you don’t know if it’s genuine these days. You don’t. I’m going because I am proud and I want to see other proud people. But it’s bittersweet because you know other people are coming down and they don’t give a fuck.
An extended version of this interview with Loulou Novick is available on the new Whistler podcast
How to describe Matt Whistler? We could play it really straight and say he’s an artist. Or a performance artist. We could say he’s a comedian. When I asked him he said “Say I’m a modern day Charlie Chaplin. An eco clown. A walking artwork.” It might just be easier to say “all of the above”. A mischievious comedian with a creative free spirit. But if you scratch the surface there’s a serious message about the environment and waste.
“It pains me to walk past things that have been discarded. I just look at them and thing “What can we do with that?” (We met Matt outside Objet D’ials during the last / worst days of the bin strike and someone had left a huge pile of flattened cardboard boxes next to the throbbing pile of bin bags.
During our chat, he’d created a gallery exhibition of them, a sculpture, there was an idea to line the pavement with the cardboard and slogans and… Did any of it happen? Some of it, maybe all of it, maybe none. It doesn’t matter. There’ll be another idea along in a second. Talking to Matt is like talking to the little silver ball inside a pinball machine.
Matt’s recent projects have ranged from painting an old locomotive near Glastonbury, an exhibition of his dot-based work (“I don’t know what happened but I broke through to the other side and I haven’t stopped doing dots since”), a cafe in the Marina (“I went for a coffee there and just thought ‘Hold on a minute, there’s a canvas here. There’s a cafe in a really nice area next to the sea’…”) and a project involving painting – breathing new life into – the covers of hundreds of albums he found in a skip.
But it’s as his latest creation Artist Dotty that there’s most fun. An oversize character in a whose looks nod in the direction of Leigh Bowery but who, like so much of Matt’s work, treads the line between absurdist and message. Dotty has a habit of appearing where you least expect him. Right now you’ll find him on the back of a series of jackets in “Objet D’ials”.
Is Dotty a classic absurdist device to created to highlight the madness of our society – in this case, waste and the environment – or a very strange bloke in a green screen onesie? “Let’s say an eco clown whose job it is to make people look, laugh and maybe think.”
Rabindranath Tagore was a Bengali polymath – poet, philosopher, novelist, Nobel Prize winner… and resident of our fair city. And now there’s a plaque marking his life. Dr Jeanne Openshaw looks back at his life and times
Commemoration of Rabindranath Tagore in our city has been a long time coming. To state the obvious, a plaque needs a wall, and searches in local street directories and Indian archives for the Tagores’ precise home address have long drawn a blank. The solution was to switch focus to the school he attended, aged 17, in Ship Street (now part of the Hotel du Vin).
Rabindranath Tagore was a world-renowned polymath – poet, philosopher, novelist, visual artist, composer and activist. Born into a talented and cultured upper-class family in Calcutta (now Kolkata), India, with extensive estates in what is now Bangladesh, he came to embrace humanism and universalism.
He transformed Bengali written and visual culture, and in 1913 became the first non-Westerner to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was knighted by George V for his services to literature, an honour he later repudiated, in protest at the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in Amritsar.
A strong advocate of freedom from British rule in India, he nevertheless argued: ‘Patriotism cannot be our final spiritual shelter; my refuge is humanity. I will not buy glass for the price of diamonds, and I will never allow patriotism to triumph over humanity, as long as I live.’
Much later, two independent nations, India and Bangladesh, were to select Tagore’s song lyrics as their national anthems.
When the plaque was finally unveiled on 28th October, 7 Ship Street was accordingly festooned with three flags, and the Salvation Army played three national anthems.
Over 200 people turned up to the unveiling. But not, unfortunately, the High Commissioners of India and Bangladesh. COP 26 had claimed their presence instead. So the event was quieter than expected, although the seagulls tried to make up for that. The weather smiled on us – wind and rain held off until the following day.
Tagore was one of the most travelled persons of his time. However, the first place he lived in outside India was Brighton and Hove. He later wrote:
One thing in the Brighton school seemed very wonderful: the other boys were not at all rude to me. On the contrary they would often thrust oranges and apples into my pockets and run away. I can only ascribe this uncommon behaviour of theirs to my being a foreigner… (My reminiscences, translation from Bengali published in 1917).
On the day, Dr Kalyan Kundu, Tagore Centre UK, spoke about Tagore’s early schooling (or rather lack of it), and his first impressions of Britain.
Professor Shahaduz Zaman, University of Sussex, provided a Bangladeshi perspective. For Bangladeshis, Tagore is associated with the 1971 struggle for independence from Pakistan, and the new nation’s emphasis on Bengali language and culture.
Tagore’s descendants in India sent a touching email to all present.
A reception was held in the domed school room inside no.7 Ship Street, appropriately decorated with images of Tagore with various luminaries, as well as prints of his paintings, provided by the Tagore Centre UK. Songs by Rabindranath were performed by Mamata and Sunith Lahiri, also from the Tagore Centre.
Our neighbours, Vinod and Meena Mashru (of Bright News, Buckingham Road) provided vegetarian food and non-alcoholic champagne. Noori’s restaurant – across the road from the plaque – supplied the non-vegetarian Indian food. The Hotel du Vin provided ‘western’ food and drink (non-alcoholic on this occasion).
Credit is due to Brighton and Hove City Council, especially the Brighton and Hove Heritage Commission chair (also chair of the Brighton and Hove Commemorative Plaque Panel), Roger Amerena.
I’ve lived in Brighton for a few years now, on and off, but this is only the second year I have seen the Christmas lights in Western Road. You don’t get Christmas lights across the streets in West Hill: they’re probably considered a little garish. Especially on Dyke Road, between St Nicholas’s and Seven Dials.
But down in the big city, or the rather strange and somehow ungentrifiable Western Road, they like a display. I can’t remember what the lights spelled out last year: I think they might have said something like “BELIEVE” which I thought was a bit vague. Believe in what? Christmas? Santa? Climate change? I mean, there are all sorts of things you can believe in but not all of them are good. I think another set of lights said something uncontroversial like “PEACE” but then that’s pretty much par for the course for this time of year.
I wasn’t prepared for the slogan strung out across the road by the Sainsbury’s Local. What the pretty lights said this time was: “HERE WE GO AGAIN”.
I went into a kind of reverie. I imagined a meeting of the Christmas Decorations committee of Brighton and Hove City Council. It has been a long year: the months-long garbage strike has left everyone rattled and exhausted. And I suspect the Council has rather less money to play with than it did last year. The biscuits are not fancy. The coffee is not hand-ground Nicaraguan: it is Nescafe.
The Chair looks round the table.
“So what’s this year’s slogan going to be?”
Somewhere round the table, a spoon clinks against a coffee cup. Someone nibbles a Waitrose Essentials Garibaldi. They used to have Hobnobs. Chocolate Hobnobs.
“Anyone?”
“Nah,” says Trevor. (No council meeting in England is considered quorate unless there is someone called Trevor attending.)
“I’ve got nothing,” says Sue. She has spent the last month going over the accounts, and lost the will to live in mid-November.
A deep sense of Sisyphean ennui steals over the room. A voice pipes up from the back. It is Steve, known for his mordant wit, like Tim from The Office. “Here we go again,” he says.
There’s a long silence.
“Well,” says the Chair, “if no one’s got anything better …”
Steve is about to say that this was not meant to be a slogan, it was just a cry of despair, but then realises that if he says this, the meeting will drag on, and it is already as close to going-home time as makes no difference. He reads the room: everyone is looking at him, fiercely willing him to remain silent. So he remains silent. The Chair slaps her folder shut.
“That’s settled, then,” she says, and everyone files out. My God, they think: we got away with it.
And that’s how I like to think the meeting went. I couldn’t love this town more if I tried.
“It might sound glib, but I wrote it because I think Brighton is so special.” Daren Kay tells Katrin Johannessen why
‘The Brightonians’ is the debut novel of former advertising copywriter, Daren Kay. It tells the story of a social group in Brighton uncovering a mystery of the past, sparked by an old letter found in a hymn book at the funeral of iconic former (fictional) mayor Grace Davidson. It spans multiple decades and different generations of mostly queer people.
It was important to Kay, that the novel included different generations, as there can sometimes be a disconnect within the queer community between age groups.
“As a younger gay man, I learned a lot from older queer people and I think it’d be great to foster that intergenerational communication again, which is why in the novel I wanted to make sure there was a full spread.”
“What I really felt was important is I think a lot of queer history has been erased, it’s been forgotten, it’s been purposefully left to one side and so I wanted to do my little bit to make queer history interesting to another generation.”
Not only is there a spread over generations, but the characters also come from different parts of the UK and have different accents, Polari is also represented.
“It was largely a reflection. There isn’t anyone that is based on anyone that I know, but I would say that the characters are a mixture of a couple of people and lots of the characters have bits of me. I think Brighton is a melting pot. It might not be the most multicultural place, but I do think it is a melting pot. One thing I will say about Brighton is you very rarely meet people in Brighton from Brighton.”
Although the social scene is shown as quite competitive and perhaps even cynical at points, there is a definite sense of community throughout the book. Kay himself has experienced how the LGBT community has come together during times of struggle, such has the HIV crisis and the introduction of Clause 28.
“I was in my early twenties when that happened. My experience in Birmingham and Sheffield was that there was a separatism until that happened. I think the HIV crisis and Clause 28 brought lesbians and gay men together for the first time in a big, big way.
“I know from historian Alf Le Flohic, who is quite known in Brighton for his knowledge of queer history, he lived in Brighton in the ‘80s and he said that the lesbian community was very supportive of gay men during the crisis. So, it’s been solid for a long, long time. Particularly with older people. I think age is a great leveller.
“I’ll be really blunt, I think sometimes the different communities within our community spend too much time arguing with each-other, when we have a common enemy, which is quite obvious out there.”
Kay replaced the security of his job in advertising and started freelancing and following his passion for writing, resulting in the ‘The Brightonians’.
“I wrote it for me. As a copy writer, I went into advertising because I loved writing and as you go further up the ladder you get more and more removed from the reason you went into the job in the first place. So, when I left that job, I rediscovered my love of writing through this book.
“The other thing I wrote it for was Brighton. It might sound glib, but I wrote it because I think Brighton is so special. I just find it such an incredible place and I wanted to capture what I love about Brighton. That amazing concentration of some quite unusual people.”
In the novel one of the characters at one point ‘plays the Brighton card’, when she uses her love of Brighton to score social points.
“I’ve invented that, but I do think it exists. I think I have played the ‘Brighton card’. I’ve gone even further and played the ‘Kemptown card.”
“I think the proximity of Brighton to London is one of the things, that has made it so unique. I lived in London for 25 years and I find Brighton even more sociable than London. I think the geography of it, because it is quite small or concentrated people are much happier to do things.” Kay said.
Brighton is more than setting in the book and through a fantastical seagull it gets a chance to speak for itself.
“Brighton is so much a part of the book, I needed a way for Brighton to speak, so Charles de Gull basically became the voice. I’ve referred to seagulls in interviews as nature’s CCTV, because they’re just always there. For people who write, they are just always watching us. It seemed like the most obvious vehicle for Brighton to have a voice. What I liked about the seagull is that in my head the seagull has been there for 200 years, so it’s almost like a fantastical seagull really.
“Brighton has always been a really significant town on the south coast, because of its proximity to France and London. But Brighton in most people’s heads didn’t really become a place of any interest until the 1750s, when Dr. Russell recommended our seawater as this great sort of cure for everything, and people started to come down. So, I wanted Charles de Gull to have existed since that time. So, he allows me to set the scene and say this is a town, which has always been a centre of liberal thinking and artists.”
The people in Brighton might like to complain about the seagulls, maybe especially when having their food stolen by a shifty one, but they still have a special status in town.
“It’s weird. The book cover was designed by my friend Sarah Arnett. In her work, she has lots of birds, but she’s never done a seagull. It’s a very divisive thing in Brighton. It depends on if you’re being shat on, I suppose.”
His next novel is already in progress and it’s called ‘The Brightonians Under Siege’ and is about the last year and Covid.
“One of the things I wanted to capture and celebrate was the social scene and parties and what I sometimes call ‘competitive partying’ that I see in Brighton and now to suddenly have that stopped I think it’s really fascinating.
I do think that when people read this book still on the ends of lockdown, they will feel nostalgic for those fancy-dress parties and for being able to meet up with people and having a gin and tonic.”
The Brightonians will be released on April 23rd.
Anyone who signs up to www.darenkay.com before 30.04.21 will be entered into a prize draw for the chance to win a porcelain mug featuring the cover design by Sarah Arnett
The book is available to order now at Waterstones, Book Depository & Foyles:
