https://stepawaymagazine.com » Queering the Landscape

A Message from our Guest Editors

dcarlaw — Wed, 12 Feb 2025 19:37:12 +0000

Whilst LGBTQ+ writers/artists/poets Frank O’Hara, David Wojnarowicz, Sarah Schulman, Edmund White, and Lee Lynch are known for their vivid 20th-century depictions of walking and sexuality, little contemporary writing about urban walking experiences by 21st century LGBTQ+ writers and artists exists. Aiming to alleviate this literary dearth and encourage and celebrate new voices, we were delighted to be invited to guest co-edit this special issue of StepAway Magazine exploring urban walking experiences by contemporary LGBTQ+ writers.

As writers and poets ourselves, our work has been influenced by issues involving the body, place, memory, walking and queer self-hood. The queer body navigating the urban environment at this point in history in 2025 is an interesting provocation within itself; the city presents a space where the queer body can feel seen in environments where this can be more difficult. Whilst many felt their sense of selfhood eroded by lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, it could be argued that it hit the LGBTQ+ community harder. Many queer folks I (Lee) spoke to at the time were asking pertinent questions including: ‘Is this ‘new normal?’ ‘What spaces are available for queer people to perform their visibility?’ What is the future of those (urban) spaces that I discovered on my walk that are currently closed?’ ‘Will the queer people that once inhabited these spaces become invisible/unseen as their safe spaces in various cities and towns across the world have disappeared?’

Now that the pandemic is (at least for the time being) over, maybe our relationship to (queer) bodies, place (in terms of the city), memory and self-hood have changed and indeed been re-imagined. Do we now celebrate the ‘joy’ of being in city as a physical space in ways we may have not thought of before the pandemic?

In this special issue of StepAway Magazine, the notion of the manner in which queer individuals negotiate their way within an urban setting has been interpreted in a very diverse fashion. The work published here takes the form of diaristic montage, prose, surreal short stories and thought-provoking verse. Each response deals with the anticipation, the excitement and at times the danger that is implicit in perambulation through a public space. Within these pieces the topography of the interior life both melds and is at odds with the physical realities of the city. Moving through the various landscapes described becomes a means of escape, a source of adventure and a method of remembrance. Structurally, these three ideas (Escape, Adventure, and Remembrance) form the narrative arc of this issue.

In the first collection of work, exploring city as escape, James Chantry’s ‘Codhead’ is a surreal and defiant expression of the resilience of identity in the face of prejudice. The birthing of a new self from the realm of suppression. Eliza Mary Coe’s ‘Seoulbound’ explores the concept of negotiating a foreign city as commensurate with the realisation of one’s own sexuality. The self as an alienated or estranged being in relation to the foreign expectations of family/society convention etc. Matthew Keeley’s ‘London Bridge’ explores mirrored water as reflective of the process of understanding oneself within the fragments of the city. The final work in this section, ‘Empirical Evidence of the Existence of Angels’ by Leon Clowes shares long walks, a self-confrontation with addiction and questions how we exist in these spaces and what it means to do so. Can aspects of the self be found? Finally, Nathan Evans’ ‘The Knowledge’ is a provocative calling of how the self is found and liberated through queerness, with reference to ‘Smalltown Boy’ by Bronkski Beat (1984).

In the second collection of work, exploring city as adventure, Ben Goldnagl’s ‘Sun / Moon’ explores the idea of crepuscular liminality as indicative of an identity between spaces. In Dale Booton’s ‘Birmingham’, the city is presented as kaleidoscopic and sonically overwhelming but ultimately hopeful. Noa Smith’s ‘Adonis Gate’ (extract) explores coming to know the city as analogous with the exploration of one’s own internal psycho-topography. If the city is a masculinised edifice indicative of patriarchal relationship, can these be re-examined and built anew? Joe Walsh’s ‘Dangerous Utopia’ paints the city and by extension ‘polite’ society as a walled off, inaccessible space. Yet one tinged with excitement, possibility and danger. Jay Whittaker’s ‘Gone to Earth’ brings forth the perspective of non-human residents of the city. The foxes exist alongside the human and canine effluvia, each fashioning their own existence and meaning. Troy Cabida’s ‘All my future husbands are walking around the Southbank’ where the author plays with the idea of looking and the gaze that is desirous yet fleeting. An interiority projected on the city’s fragmented scenes. Finally, Gabrielle Lisk’s ‘The Queerest Person I Know’ relates feelings the author has about someone with the vibrant colourfulness of city experiences.

In the third and final collection of work, exploring city as remembrance, Ryan Thornton’s ‘Ways who Snickle against lost time’ is an exploration of the lost spaces that hold the ghosts of past encounters, a collapsing temporality of longing transcending epochs. Jack Westmore’s ‘Choumert Road’ is a melancholy fragment of remembrance. There is an excitement in walking but also a sense of loss. To where do we aim to walk? Lastly, Robin Lamboll’s ‘I thought of you, I think’ explores the notion of the remnants of past encounters written into the body’s self. The shrapnel of an old connection allowing the construction of new forms inscribed on the city’s exterior.

We hope you enjoy this important literary exploration of LGBTQ+ urban walking experiences.

Lee Campbell & Colin B. Osborn

Guest Editors, StepAway Magazine

Codhead

dcarlaw — Wed, 12 Feb 2025 16:26:00 +0000

The number 30 bus from Grimsby heaves over the Humber Bridge as the winter sun falls down by the marshy crackled mud that lines the estuary. The vast pole spokes that support the mile long snaking grey asphalt are brutal, unbending. Looking up is dizzying and the sheer scale of the bridge seems like its from another world. A sense of the world now being beyond flat rural Lincolnshire and the pubs and clubs that smell of beer, lynx and lipstick. The world that I don’t belong to and am happy and disorientated as to why I don’t want to be part of it. I hear a young lad call out to me as I sit at the middle side of the top deck of the bus. My heart sinks as I’m so used to this being a kappa lad, gravel voiced about to give me abuse and signal oral sex in dry Lambert and Butler mouth. Goaded by his mates, they don’t give up “come on then”. Transfixed looking forward, will they really believe I can’t hear them? Hyper focused on a sticker on the back of the seat in front of me, pretending to look at the bus ticket, head forward, close your eyes. Hopefully they’ll think I’m asleep. Living with this almost daily you have lots of measures in place that you have to plan, organise. Where you are going to sit on the bus. At the back or the front they’ll corner you and you have no escape. Downstairs the bus driver will pretend that it isn’t happening, do nothing and this only gives the lads more ammunition, gall and enthusiasm. Upstairs is better and if you have a fag out of the window on the middle left the driver can’t see you from their periscope mirror. Having a fag will also help you escape an attack, they’ll usually ask you for one and then you’re ok. They seem to forget that you look or act like a faggot if you’ve got ten fags in your pocket. I remain transfixed forward and I can hear the lad start walking from the back of the bus towards me. He throws himself down behind me and starts talking to me I’m transfixed. The lad is talking incessantly, can’t get his words out fast enough. I mean this with great warmth that his voice and figures of speech are so reminiscent of the women I loved on Coronation Street, and the ones that had big hair and blue eyeshadow that worked on Louth market on fruit and veg stalls and said things like “you could ride bare arsed to Mablethorpe on that knife Pam, gerrus another”. The lad didn’t even break for breath and didn’t need any kind of conversational exchange, he was happy just talking at me and peppering it with backhanded compliments like “you’d be pretty if you had your hair done, maybe get your eyebrow pierced.” The lad after the most impressive twenty-minute monologue introduced himself as ‘Scuffler’, I asked why and he never told me, just grinned and told me to work it out. I still don’t know. His broad smile revealed the brownest teeth I have ever seen, and it was so strange that the lad which was wearing thick foundation, lip gloss and jet black mascara had such an unkept mouth. He told me so many stories on that hour long bus ride, all totally untrue, I’m sure. His stepdad was a millionaire and had just bought him a convertible, but it hadn’t arrived yet. There was a sadness in his charming maniacal delivery and I’m sure he had a rough deal in Grimsby and living in a fantasy meant things were ok. He asked me for £20 and said he’d pay me pack, “my stepdad gives me five hundred quid whenever I want it.” He started mixing up stepdad and sugar daddy and it became obvious that the rich stepdad was an invention and that he was going to Hull to work the night with a cliental of older paying men. The bus arrived in Hull, traversed the docks and down into the city centre. We spent the last couple of hours while the shops were open in the charity shops. Thick gold banded belts, oversized blouses – Clockhouse from C&A. I can only describe that feeling of spending those random couple of hours in charity shops as some massive relief and act of defiance. It felt like the world and beyond, Scuffler crying out with joy when he’d found some outrageous brooch, huge fake glass gems and he strutted around Sue Ryder like a Slone ranger. We walked back to the bus station and got changed in the bus station toilets, taking it in turns slinging clothes and accessories over the cubicle doors. Silhouette nightclub was the only gay club I had ever heard of, gay nightlife in Lincolnshire was not about friends and dancing and totally about dark parks and alleyways. We walked in the large double fronted Victorian building; it must have been a grand municipal hall or perhaps merchants building previously. The club inside was a huge glittering ballroom, hundreds of queer people dancing to Madonna, I had never seen so much colour, make-up, hair, the lights, steam hanging in the air. Scuffler grabbed me by the hand pulled me onto the dancefloor, flung back his head and danced rhythmically and methodically clicking his fingers from side to side, up and down. Reminiscent of the choreographed dances by performers in ‘Paris is Burning’ (1990) I wonder how this queer heritage through movement and gesture became part of a working class boy from Grimsby’s routine.

He starts talking to three, what I now know to be, drag queens who are each six feet tall and have made matching costumes that look like the ‘B’ movie science fiction costumes of powerful alien woman, Devil Girl From Mars (1954). Latrice, Chandice, Shaunice introduced themselves and we danced and danced and danced. I am what I am by Gloria Gaynor ended the night and I saw a tear roll down Chandice’s cheek bone and she spun on one heel. “We must get to the fucking river” said Shaunice and bundled Scuffler in the long faux fur wrap, she pulled from a disgruntled cloak attendant. I couldn’t imagine why the three queens had wanted to spend the evening with me, a lost and scared kid from the middle of nowhere. I know now we were all lost and scared kids in a violent and binary world, looking beyond the horizon, behind the curtain. Scuffler is growing grey and paler by the minute and I ask what’s wrong. I car screeches by and a Lambert & Butler mouth, Man U shirt and gelled fringe, roars dirrrtty fucking faggots. Latrice in what seems an instant strides across, climbs onto the Vauxhall Nova and sits defiantly on the roof. The Lambert and Butler mouth doesn’t know what to do, he wasn’t expecting this. A crowd circles around the car and he’s outnumbered by queers. He gets out continues to shout and mumble, Shaunice grabs me, Chandice holding Scuffler who is now moaning and breathing heavily, and we get in the car. Latrice slides down into the driving seat and we drive off. Lambert and Butler mouth foaming at the mouth veins bulging alone on the street. We drive along the dual carriage way that follows the steep river bank. The car is parked under a concrete flyover near Toys R Us and we begin to walk along the banks through thick marsh silt. Latrice marching ahead in 4 inch stillettoes that defy gravity and finds a weeping willow tree. The queens lay down Scuffler and I assume he’s taken something, I think he’s dying and in panic I fall to my knees and hold him. “It’s fine, I’m having a baby” I assume he’s delirious and not making sense. Latrice sits behind him and supports his head, Shaunice to the left and Chandice to the right of him. He clutches their hands and long painted nails glisten in the river light as Scuffler clenches and screams. The queens stroke his forehead, belly and sprinkle river water behind his ears to soothe him. A final guttural yet falsetto wail and sigh, a doll faced creature begins to appear from Scufflers glitter shorts, he tears the gusset open of the purple tights underneath and the queens guide the baby out. Scuffler is carried into the river and lies arms stretched like the Lady of Shallot. I’m handed the baby and gently sooth its now gurgling cries and I notice that it is made of the estuary and land. Its mouth a humber hagstone, its skin sandy shingle. Latrice, Chandice and Shaunice form around Scuffler and take the offspring form me and hold it to the sky in exultation. They say in unison “This is of our past, and our future, it is our time”.

James Chantry

Seoulbound

dcarlaw — Wed, 12 Feb 2025 16:12:03 +0000

I stepped out of my apartment complex, glad to be free of the musty-smelling interior and the cramped studio apartment that served as my home base during my one-year tenure in Seoul. The day was gray, and the air was thick with conflicting scents ,from the brisk, freshly fallen rain to the rotting food waste set out in designated buckets. I walked down to the end of the street, where I met Aliaa, one of my fellow teachers at the Academy.

“Hey,” she said, flashing me a bright smile that stood out against her olive-toned skin. “Have you decided what you want to eat yet?”

“Not yet. Maybe something new,” I said.

“I’m down. We can walk to the mall,” Aliaa suggested. Our apartments were close to Lotte World Tower, and there was a bookstore near one of the bus stops that sold books in English, so naturally we frequented the area.

I agreed, and we began our ramble down the familiar back streets. We passed the art school with its unicorn sign, and the alterations shop where racks of clothes were visible through the window. There were two elderly women exercising on the equipment in the small park. They chatted animatedly with each other as their legs swung back and forth on the elliptical-like apparatuses. Soon we came to the street corner where our usual seafood joint was situated. As we walked, the air filled with the scent of spice, and Aliaa began to gush about the boy who worked at the tteokbokki place down the street.

I tried to engage in the conversation, but I didn’t relate to the butterflies of a budding flirtation. It had taken me years to come to terms with my asexuality—I grew up in a conservative family, where heterosexual was the only viable option for one’s sexual identity. For so long, I thought that my lack of curiosity about sex and intimacy was normal. But then college came around, and while the people around me developed romantic relationships, I stayed disinterested. It made me realize that I was different from those around me. Over time, I realized who I was, and that realization led to an acceptance of myself that I hadn’t experienced before. Knowing that the way I thought and felt had a name, that other people experienced the world through the same lens, gave me comfort.

We rounded the street and emerged into the main thoroughfare, where large signs advertised businesses ranging from the laundromat to a noraebang, or karaoke room, where our group of foreign teachers sometimes spent an evening singing along to our favorite songs. Aliaa and I often performed Evanescence’s “My Immortal” when we were feeling melodramatic; Aliaa would sing with all the passion of past heartbreaks, and I would simply bask in her vulnerability while I questioned if I would ever know what it’s like to have love.

While Aliaa kept the conversation flowing, I felt my attention drifting to the city that teemed with life around me. Most of the people we passed were young, and they wore fashions that would put my meager closet to shame. The women tended to wear short skirts and heels, the kind of clothes I had never jived with. My Korean co-teacher sat the Academy were often getting on my case to wear skirts and dress more feminine, and their rigid ideas of what it meant to be a woman had made me realize I don’t identify with those ideas.

Even with the conflict I felt looking at the people around me, I never took for granted the new and exciting landscape, knowing that I would someday return home, and this place would be reduced to memories. I had formed a habit of typing up descriptions of the city in my Notes app on my phone so I’d never forget how Seoul looked and sounded and smelled.

We passed our favorite fried chicken place and made our way to the larger intersection. There were quite a few people standing on its edges, waiting for the signal from the streetlight on the opposite side to tell us we could make our way across. It wasn’t like back home, where you would look both ways, say a quick prayer, and jaywalk the hell across the street. Here in Seoul, I still glanced both ways when the light signaled for us to go; I’d already been hit by two cars and one of those delivery bikes that rarely gave way for pedestrians, so I knew not to take a proverbial green light at face value. Funny how that had become an analogy for my romantic prospects, too—facing the idea of love always felt like striding across that crosswalk, feeling exposed with each step I took into the intersection, just waiting for something to crash into me and tell me I didn’t belong there.

It was about a half hour’s walk to the mall. I enjoyed strolling past the food stalls lining the street, until I passed the fragrant vats of frying beondegi, or silkworm pupae, and remembered my disastrous experience tasting one. Still, I was glad to be out and about with Aliaa. Our excursions into the city were a welcome break from writing my current novel. I had a tendency to embrace solitude and spend weekends cooped up in my apartment, but since Aliaa joined the teaching staff at the Academy, I finally had a friend to encourage me to leave my bubble. And on a day like this, with the smells of the recent rainfall mingling with those of fried foods, I thought to myself that an adventure would do me good. Get me out of my shell. With that thought in mind, I walked with Aliaa down the cool, cramped streets, my hands in my pockets and my thoughts on the city I had come to call my home away from home.

Eliza Mary Coe

London Bridge

dcarlaw — Wed, 12 Feb 2025 16:09:33 +0000

The water under London Bridge
makes mirrors.

I fall down here, at our leaving place
into my
underground
nerve system
shooting trains and misfires
on the same ancient stuck patterns
making me sick.

But before, and after, this was my joke fantasy – a train station.
Look at that giant stretched crystal piercing the city crust beside us.
Movie crowds streaming a million ways and me with a way to go,
no tourist now.

This place is two places
like Regent’s Canal where I swung legs last summer
and held as you cried this summer,
and this bed where I told you once-things first
but cupped you with a sick, sunken stomach too.

I think the mirrors are doors
Where I creep from to steal my own place,
holding my head underwater behind my back.

Matthew Keeley

Empirical Evidence of the Existence of Angels

dcarlaw — Wed, 12 Feb 2025 16:04:54 +0000

In mid-August 2021, I began attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings daily at age 51.

Throughout lockdown, I developed an increasing interest in numerology, astrology, tarot and taking long walks around Central London where I live.

For eleven days and eleven hours in September 2021, when I noticed an angel feather (some may have been pigeon feathers on the street or goose or duck feathers at home: hard to differentiate), on my walks around London, I noted the thoughts in my head, along with the location and time.

This was to document the existence of angels.

Tuesday, 7th September 2021

12:00 Long Acre

I’m into astrology and all that shit

15:00 Trafalgar Square

Please don’t be nice to me as I will start crying

Wednesday, 8th September 2021

07:00 Bow Street

Oh, I love that feeling of the early morning city when people are starting to mill about and you know it’s going to be a scorchio day

13:00 Lewisham Way

Wonder if ASDA sells kettles

Thursday, 9th September 2021

10:00 Kingsway

‘It was the finest, it was the finest, it was the finest in the world’ (Lotte Lenya singing ‘Bilbao Song’)

10:32 Lewisham DLR station

‘Bill’s Dancehall in Bilbao, Bilbao, Bilbao’ (Lotte Lenya Singing ‘Bilbao Song’)

(time not noted) Petrol Station / Tesco Express

‘Mosey Don’t You Know – Take Me Out’ (unremembered lyrics to Franz Ferdinand’s ‘Take Me Out’)

16:59 New Cross Road

“A feather falls to the floor in front of me – I looked up and there was this angel that I am sure was Archangel Michael” (Summer Bacon live in conversation to Bracha Goldsmith on YouTube)

Friday 10th September 2021

18:43 Green Park

Do you think I would get arrested if I pissed behind this coffee stand as it’s in sight of the palace?

19:09 Serpentine

The last year you saw me on my birthday I’d had seriously about three hours sleep

Saturday 11th September 2021

00:19 My bed found as I pulled back the duvet

I wasn’t thinking anything

08:56 Shaftesbury Avenue

I’ve got this dis-ease

11:51 Lewisham DLR station entrance

I feel uncomfortable that I should want to know what it was like to be in his skin to think I don’t feel appalled or disgusted about that or him and that I feel I should

12:00 Outside Lewisham Retail Park

I really need to meditate

Sunday 12th September 2021

08:57 Shaftesbury Avenue

I wonder what would be a good font

10:40 Earlham Street

It is up to me to stop that family lineage of sexually predatory behaviour

10:53 Tottenham Court Road

I’m concerned with the duality of things

11:24 Tottenham Court Road

‘Some mistakes were built to last’ (listening to George Michael’s ‘Freedom ’90′)

11:31 Shaftesbury Avenue

G, you made lovely coffee this morning

13:24 Waterloo Road

‘I’m free to do what I want’ (listening to the Soup Dragon’s ‘I’m Free’)

14:45 Lewisham Way

Hi, I’m leon and I’ve just got a £5.50 kettle from ASDA

15:02 Lewisham Retail Park

‘Don’t look at the carpet – I drew something awful on it’ (David Bowie ‘Breaking Glass’ earworm)

Monday, 13th September 2021

12:37 Waterloo Road

We’re alcoholics, of course we are in our own heads.

12:56 New Kent Road

I mean 51 and to be thinking about risk-taking behaviours

18:43 Waterloo Station toilets

Not quite hitting the high notes, that’s all I’m saying.

22:59 Home Living Room floor

‘Fear is at the beginning’ (watching Acyuta-bharva Das on YouTube)

Tuesday 14th September 2021

09:39 Home Bedroom floor

No thanks, I really don’t want cocaine, no good for me.

12:41 Fleet Street

Anyway, I don’t have to justify this, it is what it is, I am what I am, and that’s what I’m doing about it.

14:38 The Cut

Last time I went there, J was visiting and I went back for a beer after my jab.

17:25 Baylis Road

Yes, well maybe they’re right about that, just maybe.

17:59 Baylis Road

Must remember to call someone from AA before I go to those preview drinks on Thursday so I’m prepared.

18:30 Old Kent Road

I’m going to be in by about half nine, I hope that’s not going to get in your way.

Wednesday 15th September 2021

05:35 Home My Bedroom by the door

Wonder what the connection is with Croatia?

06:59 Home Living Room cushion

Perhaps I should go to Lidl twice today as I’ve got those vouchers that will expire.

07:24 St Paul’s Churchyard

Anyone’s persuasion is up for grabs after five pints and a couple of lines of coke.

08:52 London Bridge

‘Well, hello Dolly’ (listening to Barbara Streisand)

10:26 Thornton Road

I need to remember that sometimes.

17:12 Lewisham Way

What a lovely big yucca plant he’s got.

17:32 Lewisham Way

God, the side of that building puts me right into 1988.

17:55 Old Kent Road

Relax your face. Remember how screwed up in pain you only realised Sandra’s face was when you saw her laid out in the chapel of rest.

Thursday 16th September 2021

07:30 Home Living Room a feather appears in the air

“Honey, I’ve just seen an angel.” (watching Suzanne Gieseman giving a YouTube talk, “Archangel Michael is real: This story leaves no doubt”)

11:28 Home Living Room under the sofa

Thanks honey. Let’s see how I get on finding homes for my stuff. (WhatsApp message from E to me)

12:11 Bedroom Bottom Of Mattress

To be honest, I don’t really want to go.

20:58 Ludgate Hill

What started as terrible turned out to be what could possibly be one of the most beautiful days of my life.

Friday 17th September 2021

06:39 Home Bedroom Under The Bed

I should make CDs and sell them.

10:12 Mill Street

That’s fine. You are welcome to touch more than my feet.

10:21 Jamaica Road

It’s because I walk every day.

10:29 Southwark Park

Really shouldn’t drink tea before walking in.

11:50 New Cross Road

Will there be a message for it?

21:30 Russell Street

I don’t know where I’m going.

leon clowes

The Knowledge

dcarlaw — Wed, 12 Feb 2025 15:55:41 +0000

is within us a cartography
of queerness unfolded
on Smalltown platforms
contours clear as bloodlines
as hunting calls on playgrounds
known as backs of hands
rote as routes out of boyhood
gridlock razored as retorts
on the portcullis of campness
curlicued as the consonants
of primetime palatalisation
salted as wounds from legacy
legislation sweet as ass
holy as matrimony

Nathan Evans

Sun / Moon

dcarlaw — Wed, 12 Feb 2025 15:39:42 +0000

I stand on the highest point between the velodrome and the water

Right by the rings

And I watch the sun set over Hackney

I tell myself: stand here, soak it in,

Until the sunset is complete

But it’s taking kind of a long time

And my eyes are starting to hurt

So I think:

Really,

It’s just a matter of perspective

If I go down the hill,

Slowly,

I can set the sun myself.

As I walk back home I see the moon above the bluer skies of Newham,

Or it’s probably another borough behind there already

Or actually it’s nowhere at all

It’s all empty space underneath

I see the moon above, next to that high rise hotel with the bit missing

And I like this duality

The sunset

The moonrise

And really, neither has just happened.

But both are true.

Both bodies are there all the time.

And really, I think to myself,

Sun and moon are such a false binary

They aren’t at all the same category of thing

One is a bright burning star

The other just happens to be the only satellite in the orbit of our planet

Sometimes reflecting that star

But to us they signify day and night,

Darkness and light,

Or rather

Light that displaces darkness

And light that remains in the darkness

And we find meaning in that

And whether they rise or they set

They shine or they hide

Just depends on whether we see them

My sunset has happened before yours

Your moon is already up

My sun set before yours

Your moon rose before mine

And yet our bodies, sometimes celestial,

Are always there

And, really, the same.

Ben Goldnagl

Birmingham

dcarlaw — Wed, 12 Feb 2025 15:29:25 +0000

this city is so loud    it’s been years
since I last heard myself
think    years since I last stepped outside
headphoneless    meandering through
the shoppinghaul crowd    glass channelisation
of inner-city life    if I close my eyes
this city vanishes    carried away
by the trickling waves of Sigrid lyrics
come the end of May    this corridor of performance
will house colours of rebellion
redorangeyellowgreenindigoviolet
perhaps a few will know more of progress
than of history    brandishing love
with a profit    when the crowds collect
watch a community stride and dance
to anthems of freedom    they’ll see
two people holding hands
and smile    long past rainbows wrung out
folded away into boxes at the back
of a store cupboard    someone told me
next year is your year   I’ve not met you
but I hope your face might drown out the noise

Dale Booton

Adonis Gate

dcarlaw — Wed, 12 Feb 2025 15:22:59 +0000

Yet this ritual walk cannot exist without the car. The mental balance of narratives gets harder to hold, the gymnastics of it all becomes more complicated with every step I take. What do I say? I think about my Dad. The unfortunate timing of it all. Dad, 20th century apostle, phoenix raised from the ash of the post war docks, rat-running car devotee. Just as I was about to experience my own crash, a sudden climatic release of one self into the other, a finite moment, a date to remember and revere, it was aborted. Dad’s decline reached a precipice just as I gained a true knowledge of myself. The Ballardian tightrope between sex and death was flattened, from the sharpness of a novel, into the extended dullness of reality. The last months came in the heat death of autumn. The fiery passions cooling with the body temperature. The decisions of what to call myself got lost under the decisions of what last things to say before the decay of understanding got too far. There was no freedom under the rot and no escape in the loss.

The true heartfelt words never survived the tightness of Dad’s throat, closed tight by the stiff lip and inward pressure to be a man. The meaning implied in his brief words of encouragement, the subtle looks and a hand on my back was something to be learned through time. I understood his care, as much as he was able to give, but there was no assuredness in the implied. We had to believe in the motive behind his actions. We were denied a confirmation in his voice. In a final becoming of man, of following tradition, I denied him a definite knowledge of my true self. Maybe he already knew. I have no doubts he would only have been supportive of my life and proud that I choose to do things my way. I’m sad I didn’t tell him, when time is precious there is only so much you can say.

The truth, as much as truth can ever be such, is that the conversation would never reach a full understanding, how can you speak with someone who never uses their voice? Questioning my sexuality inevitably leads to questioning my gender. Compared to the hours spent walking with Elsie this writing process has crossed epochs and with it the coming out changes. The thoughts develop with time, the ritual representing further clarity than I had during the walk. Such magick is a powerful force. My disjointed relationship with masculinity can now be more effectively expressed as dysphoria. Wrong peg, wrong hole. The conversations would deflate for lack of intense self-reflection on his part. I have never been able to live without questioning everything about myself. So what I thought was a final becoming of manhood, the supposed final understanding of self, was a completion of standing the dominoes. How they fall.

The journey at this point had reached a doldrums of appropriate road signs. Like the best adventure stories we journeyed onwards with great distances covered in a few words. Nits on the barren scalp between thinning hairs. The buildings are getting taller, the streets more cavernous, yet they have never felt more barren and inhuman. The capital succumbs to capital. The bustling streets docked off to be replaced with displays of maximalist dominance. Yet the glass buildings that constitute these displays are fragile and hollow as glasshouses; no one here throws stones. No one ever questions why. The very act would sag the steel beams, liquify the foundations. Introspection as total collapse.

The traces of masculinity in the city’s architecture haunt me as they loom above. I’ve always wanted to know the city as well as my dad did, all of its streets and cut throughs. To become this master of the city is secretly a masculine goal; it is to become dominator, overseer, all knowing, to control it. Or is this need for control my way of overcoming masculinity in its architectural physicality? A way of coming to terms with my masculine patrilineage by repurposing it as my own queer self-discovery. All this stone, concrete, steel and glass is a cover for never really knowing, never questioning what it means to be a man, whether any of us were even meant to be one, it is a facade above all else. Once I understand the geography I’ve won. I am above it. Build all you like but the streets are mine.

In passing, Dad’s life has become serialised into a mythology of fragmented memory, all stitched together with what we can recreate of the human. But I need a reality I can feel, I hope the physicality and geography of the city can guide me to my own knowledge. So I stitch it together, to Dad, to my lineage, to the city. To grant myself the backing of place, to grant myself the energy to call myself “human” and be strong enough to believe my true feeling of what that is for me. To face the city’s streets with confidence is to face my dad with confidence; that I am who I am, whatever that may be.

Noa Smith

Dangerous Utopia

dcarlaw — Wed, 12 Feb 2025 15:18:17 +0000

The walls drew you in,
The walls and the buildings,
The closes and the wynds,
The wet sets shining,
Greasy in the moonlight,
The secrecy of the steep vennels,
Where eyes avoided eyes,
Hands fumbled,
And knees trembled,
Where you left alone,
To walk miles home,
After stepping on cracked syringes,
And kicking Irn Bru bongs along the gutter.

Oh, didn’t you take it all in,
And sink like a stone,
Oh, didn’t you believe in it all,
The sweet repugnant dream,
Of a dangerous utopia.

It was cleaner then.
Even with its dirty secrets,
And the black, reek encrusted buildings,
It was still cleaner.

And more honest.
Even with the shame and the lies,
It was more honest.

The long walks back through beery mist,
Were part of the experience,
Banished boy living in exile,
Outside of the ancient walls,
And their protection,
The walls that drew you back,
Every single time,
To their secret excitement,
And underhanded promises.

To the place that hypnotised you,
Where you strained to look up,
Because everything good was high,
Out of reach, in the golden light,
While you waited impatiently below,
Pacing the murky streets,
And making friends in the shadows.

Joe Walsh