Queer? What? Why now?

When the original UK television series of Queer as Folk launched in 1999 it felt like a messy revolution. I was already done with the gay commercial scene by 1999 (or so I thought, but that’s another story) but Queer as Folk resonated in several opposing ways.

The scene of my adolescence was a northern English industrial town, surrounded by steelworks, the sky lighting up red as the slag was tipped, the sirens sounding across the town when the worker’s shifts changed. There’s a saying up there, dating back hundreds of years: ‘There’s nowt so queer as folk.’ Which translates roughly into ‘There’s nothing as strange as people.’ People would tut and roll their eyes at some perceived misdemeanour and smile and say ‘There’s nowt so queer as folk.’

But then queer was used in other contexts. It was a hissed word in school corridors, a warning, a way of being told what I was before I knew it myself. A warning to keep out of the way. There was nowt so queer as me.

I did get out of the way and like hundreds if not thousands of provincial gay boys rejected from their families I got to London and started building a life at age 15 with an illegal sexuality. I marched with the Gay Liberation Front wearing the infamous purple fist badge in the early 70s and learned to accept myself as ‘Gay’. I’d only ever heard ‘Queer’ – never as identity, always as insult.

And even on those Gay Liberation Front marches we heard it again from spitting onlookers ‘Dirty Queer’. We tried to tell ourselves that ‘Gay’ stood for ‘Good As You’. It was the kind of slogan we repeated until we almost believed it. I’d only ever heard ‘gay’ in the context of Bright Young Things in the 1920s and though I was having a gay old time it wasn’t all costume parties and champagne.

Queer as Folk gave a narrow, sex‑heavy, issue‑light portrayal of gay life, foregrounding club culture, casual sex and hedonism. I didn’t associate with that either.

Years later, I was still having problems associated with being queer. I thought queers had to look queer, behave in a queer way, and in fact I was looking at queerdom in exactly the same way the uninformed looked at homosexuality in the 70s.

And then I looked at my bookcase: ‘Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis 1918-1957’, ‘A Queer Inheritance’, ‘Straight Acting: Shakespeare’s Many Queer Lives’, ‘Some Men in London: Queer Life (two volumes covering 1945 to 1967), among others, and it slowly dawned on me. There was no getting away from it. Reading queer lives through a modern lens was an eye‑opener. I mean, I’ve been a drag queen and I’ve been a leather queen, but even then I never saw myself as queer. Now you can enrol in Queer Studies courses at the Universities of, among others, Amsterdam and York.

And now here it is: Queer After Everything, printed at the top of my own site, quiet and unapologetic. I didn’t reclaim it in a single moment. It returned to me slowly – through books, through other people’s courage, through the long work of living. This blog begins, I suppose, with the question of how a word can wound you and still become the one you choose to walk with – and what it means to live a life after that.

These issues possibly only arose as a native English speaker. In my mid-forties I upped sticks and left England for the Netherlands where I had to get used to the perfectly respectable use of the word ‘homo’. But that’s a story that belongs to another corner of this unfolding life.

A Person in Three Notes

There is a quiet alchemy to sitting at my blending table watching different, distinct elements drop into a vial and slow-bleed into one another until they form a single, complex identity. The architecture of a scent mirrors the architecture of a human soul.

Lately, I’ve been wondering whether the truest framework for understanding people isn’t found in a psychology textbook at all, but in the traditional fragrance pyramid of top notes, heart notes, and base notes. While these terms are technically meant to describe molecular weight and evaporation curves, a person, it turns out, is simply a fragrance in motion. We reveal ourselves in layers. We evaporate, bloom, deepen. We linger. We surprise. We contradict ourselves.

And somehow, all of it blends into a life.

Top notes are how we greet the world, how we enter a room, the first hello – bright, volatile, quick to appear. They are lively but soon evaporate, the part of a person you meet at a party or across a counter. They’re the Persona in Jungian terms: charm, wit, nervous sparkle, the social mask that catches the eye but isn’t built to last. Citrus, aldehydes, mint, green leaves – the “hello, I’m here” energies of the world. We’ve all known someone who is pure bergamot at a party. They shimmer beautifully, then vanish the moment the room heats up. For many of us in the queer community, our top notes were our first armour. They were the performative shimmers we put on before we were ready, or safe enough, to let anyone taste our deeper truths. They made a beautiful entrance, but they didn’t define the whole story.

Heart notes are how we love. Once the initial sparkle fades, the mid notes emerge – the emotional spine that holds everything together. This is the Ego: the core character, the values, the emotional weather system that shapes how someone moves through a room once the small talk has burned off. Florals, spices, herbs, tea notes – the slow, authentic unfurling of a person’s true self. Heart-note people are warm, relational, textured. Their humour blooms gradually; their steadiness carries the melody for hours. This is the part of a person you build a life with. If the top notes are the greeting, the heart notes are the conversation that makes you stay.

Base notes are how we endure. They are our inner gravity, the parts of us shaped by memory, temperament, childhood, old wounds, and old loyalties. They can get a bit heavy, but they are still much needed to support the rest of the composition. Woods, resins, musks, amber, leather: the deep hum beneath everything else. Our queer base notes are often dense with history. They hold the sediment of our struggles, the grit of our coming out, the heavy baselines of the families we lost, and the chosen families who anchored us. Base-note people carry intensity, reliability, history. They can overwhelm if experienced entirely alone, but without them, nothing holds. They’re what stays on your scarf the next day – the emotional sediment that refuses to evaporate.

Once you start thinking this way, whole personality types begin to smell familiar:

The Citrus / Bright Cologne (The Optimist): Sparkling, social, refreshing. Joyful in the moment, sometimes restless in the long term.

The Woody / Chypre (The Stoic): Grounded, intellectual, a little reserved at first. Deeply stable once you know them.

The Amber (The Enigma): Warm, emotional, dramatic, unforgettable. A presence that fills the room and lingers.

The Fresh Fougère (The Pragmatist): Clean lines, clear boundaries, structured, dependable. Lavender and oakmoss in human form.

We recognize these people instantly, even without the language of perfumery. I’ve met people who were all top notes, and I’ve loved people who were mostly base, and I’ve spent years learning which of my own notes arrive first.

The Fixative – What Makes Us Last

Every perfumer knows that without a fixative, even the most beautiful composition evaporates too quickly. Our human fixative is self-awareness – the thing that allows the bright, fleeting parts of us to linger long enough to matter. It’s what keeps our top notes from burning out, our heart notes from collapsing, and our base notes from overwhelming us. It’s the quiet discipline of noticing ourselves before we spill. A well-balanced perfume is a kind of emotional equilibrium. It is a tangible reminder that we need the light, the substance, and the gravity – all working together – to become something beautiful that lasts. And the way those layers interact – harmoniously, chaotically, unexpectedly – is exactly what makes us human. It is what makes us beautifully, resiliently queer after everything. It’s the quiet alchemy of being alive, making each of us a scent story still unfolding. We are all still blending.

White Bread – A Small Act of Reclamation

A short meditation on how an ordinary white loaf can become a way of reclaiming the table, the past, and the meanings we outgrow.

Some things appear in a kitchen without ceremony.

A loaf tin cooling on the counter.

A faint line of flour on the sleeve.

A white loaf — plain, steady — waiting for its moment.

It looks ordinary. But the ordinary is where the deepest histories hide.

Freshly baked bread for lunch is a treat, but it needs planning: the overnight starter, the early rising, the slow choreography of knead, prove, knead, shape, prove again. Domestic labour, yes, but also a way of shaping the day before the day shapes you.

I grew up with this bread.

The white tin loaf was the bread of Daily Mirror households — the bread of terraced kitchens, post‑war prefabs, and back‑to‑back streets where the radio murmured and the world’s scandals were first encountered over tea. It belonged to the people who worked, who made do, who knew their place because the country kept telling them what it was.

To bake it now is to step back into that lineage, not nostalgically but knowingly. Domesticity becomes a kind of quiet authority, a way of reclaiming the spaces that once defined us. A loaf can be a declaration of domesticity as power.

The tools gather their own weather.

The tin — heavy, rectangular — shapes the dough the way a northern town shapes a childhood: firm edges, fixed expectations, heat absorbed and held. The cooling rack raises the loaf, not to display it but to let it breathe. A loaf cools where a life once overheated.

And somewhere between the kneading and the waiting, memory rises.

The kitchen table was the site of my political awakening and my illegal sexuality — the place where class, desire, shame, and possibility all sat elbow‑to‑elbow. Baking a white loaf now is not nostalgia; it is reclamation. A way of saying: this life, this table, this history — mine.

Reclamation has its own rhythm.

Some things once used to diminish us become part of our architecture simply because we’ve lived long enough to outgrow the old meanings. A loaf can do that. So can a word. So can a life.

When the bread slips cleanly from the tin and gives that hollow knock on the base, something settles. Not triumph. Not nostalgia. Something quieter. A recognition that the simplest things can carry the heaviest meanings.

A white loaf, warm from the tin.

A small act of reclamation.

A reminder that the ordinary is never just ordinary.

A simple loaf, after everything.