If I can sing, I am free, and no legislation can stop me.
Two years on, at Stretford Stadium I represent the school in the 400 meters dash (of sorts), legs muddied, face wet with rain, I clamber in at fourth place. My father is standing by the finishing-line. As I approach him he says, ‘You didn’t win,’ and he looks away, and life decomposes in a bucket. Perhaps I didn’t win but it didn’t help anyone to point it out.
Each day is Kafka-esque in its nightmare, and the school offers nothing at all except a lifelong awareness of hate as as general truth.
Like a lost lark I drag all curiosities back to the sanctity of my bedroom where the door closes and James Dead is not Dean art fills wall and headspace as neat boxes of 7-inch discs explain me to any passing psychiatrist. I have no other identity and I wish for none.
I cried for poetic language and I cried out to find those who were unafraid, those free agents, unbigoted and unshackled. I didn't want to live unseen, camouflaged within the crowd. I knew then that life could only ever be changed for the better because somebody somewhere had taken a risk－often with their own life.
Books on non-sexist language flip my life for the better, and I understand feminism to be a social savior because it liberates everyone without exclusion, whereas masculinism damns itself by measuring a man's health by the amount of sexual gratification he receives.