Category LGBTQ+ rights

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Kae Tempest on creativity and his gender transition: ‘I’m just glad to be alive’

Ten years after his debut novel, the poet and musician has written a follow-up exploring self-discovery and a life lived on the edge. He talks about sexuality, pronouns and drawing strength from the literature he loves

Kae Tempest sidles into a pub near his house on a weekday afternoon and orders a pint of mineral water. At his side is Murphy, an enormous, 14-year-old alaskan malamute dog with startling blue eyes who settles down on the floor next to his master and goes to sleep. “He’s all right,” Tempest says. “He’s very friendly. He won’t even put his nose up.” The rapper, performance poet, playwright and novelist has a ginger beard and is wearing Timberland boots, baggy jeans and a black hoodie over a blue-and-white striped collared shirt. His hair is hidden by a cap. Years ago, his dramatic russet hair was long, but he cropped it when he dropped the “T” from his first name and came out as nonbinary, a watershed moment in his gender transition. Now testosterone has deepened his voice and his journey has reached its final stage – from they/them to he/him.

As Tempest has been famous since his late 20s, showered with accolades ranging from Mercury nominations for two of his albums (including his debut, Let Them Eat Chaos) to becoming the youngest poet ever to receive the Ted Hughes award for the epic performance poem Brand New Ancients, this odyssey has taken place in public. On his song I Stand on the Line, from his last album Self Titled, Tempest vividly describes the anxiety of having to deal with the hostility of some people’s reactions to his “second puberty” (“Out in the limelight like, please, nobody look at me / I’m looking for myself, all I’m seeing is the bitterness / Coming my way when I’m using the facilities”). So is it a heavy burden to be such a visible trans person? “It’s just my life,” Tempest replies, his voice a soft south London growl, much quieter than the thrilling, declamatory style of his performances. “I’m just glad to be alive. How beautiful,” he adds. “Because you felt like you might not be at some point.”

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Jan Morris by Sara Wheeler review – masterly account of a flawed figure

The journalistic adventurer and trans trailblazer is revealed as brilliant, prolific and deeply selfish

Jan Morris had two stipulations before she would agree to sit for a painting for the National Portrait Gallery in London. Ibsen, her Norwegian forest cat, should feature. And so should one of her calves. The gallery acceded, and the resulting portrait shows Morris, then just shy of 80, in a yellow jumper and dark green skirt, Ibsen glowering beside her bare legs. She was pleased with the portrait, though she thought it could, perhaps, have been a little larger.

Could any canvas contain Jan Morris? Janus-faced hardly does her justice. She was a sympathetic historian of empire who became a republican Welsh nationalist ( and who nevertheless accepted a CBE). The author of more than 50 books ranging across travel writing, biography, history, memoir and fiction, she was a workaholic who, as some of those books testify, could be shockingly lazy. A preacher of the “religion of kindness”, she was cruel to her children.

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Tales of the Suburbs by John Grindrod review – an entertaining alternative history of queer Britain

From London’s commuter belt to the country village gay club, these portraits of LGBTQ+ life are filled with humour, compassion and observational flair

Generations of readers have loved Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City novels. His chronicle of queer life began in 1976 in the eclectic glamour of San Francisco’s Barbary Lane, where queer people learned who they were and how to live their lives. But even Maupin relocated in the end. The most recent instalment, Mona of the Manor, saw one of its key characters move to the Cotswolds to navigate a very different kind of village.

The social historian John Grindrod nods to Maupin in this fantastically entertaining alternative history of queer life in Britain, which departs from the usual tales of city-based freedom and discovery to tell the stories of people who grew up in the suburbs. “The suburbs” resist easy definition, and Grindrod handles this lightly. Sometimes they’re marked out by social class, sometimes by geography, each facet blurring into the other. His locations range from London’s commuter belt to hamlets, farms and towns, from the edges of Portsmouth and Hull to pockets of Glasgow and Wilmslow and a tiny village in Lincolnshire, where a gay builder is protected from homophobic abuse in the pub by the local darts team.

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‘There’s a sense of our freedoms becoming vulnerable’: novelist Alan Hollinghurst

A knighthood, a lifetime achievement award and a hit theatre production of The Line of Beauty… the author on a year of personal success and political change

If there can be a downside to receiving a lifetime achievement award, it can surely only be the hint of closure it evokes. I put this as tactfully as I can to Alan Hollinghurst, this year’s winner of the David Cohen prize, which has previously recognised the contribution to literature of, among others, VS Naipaul, Doris Lessing and Edna O’Brien. It does have “a certain hint of the obituary about it”, he concedes, laughing. “So I’m very much doing what I can to take it as an incentive rather than a reward.”

But there have been plenty of rewards recently. Hollinghurst was knighted in this year’s New Year honours list, a couple of months after the publication of his novel Our Evenings, the story of actor Dave Win’s journey from boarding school to the end of his life, which received rave reviews. In the Guardian, critic Alexandra Harris announced it his finest novel to date, noting that it “forms a deep pattern of connection with its predecessors, while being an entirely distinct and brimming whole”.

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What did Pasolini know? Fifty years after his brutal murder, the director’s vision of fascism is more urgent than ever

With mystery still surrounding Pier Paolo Pasolini’s death, the poet and film-maker’s warnings of corruption and rising totalitarianism offer a chilling message for our times

Pier Paolo Pasolini was murdered at around midnight on 2 November 1975. His blood-soaked body was found the next morning on waste ground in Ostia, on the outskirts of Rome, battered so badly the famous face was almost unrecognisable. Italy’s premier intellectual, artist, provocateur, national conscience, homosexual, dead at the age of 53, his scandalous final film still in the editing suite. “Assassinato Pasolini,” the next morning’s papers announced, alongside photographs of the 17-year-old accused of his murder. Everyone knew his taste for working-class hustlers. A hookup gone wrong was the instant verdict.

Some deaths are so suggestive that they become emblematic of a subject, the deceiving lens through which an entire life is forever after read. In this weirdly totalitarian mode of interpretation, Virginia Woolf is always walking towards the Ouse, the river in which she drowned herself. Likewise, Pasolini’s entire body of work is coloured by the seeming fact that he was murdered by a rent boy, the crowning act of a relentlessly high-risk life.

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