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BBC Scotland has announced some of the shows for its new channel, launching next year. And it’s clear that with a roster including River City (But Broadcast Slightly Earlier), it may need some fresh ideas. Allow me to introduce “Battle Royale Mile”. The premise is simple. Each week, two Scots music legends fight in a [more]
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It’s National Coming Out day today, a well-intentioned US campaign to persuade LGBT people to love themselves and live their authentic lives. Here are some people sharing their coming out stories on BBC’s The Social. But as the excellent DIVA columnist Cerian Jenkins points out on Twitter: BUT I do feel that the dominant narrative [more]
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Is it still an album if you don’t release it as a physical product? Anyway. Here’s our most recent music collated in handy playlist form: HAVR – No-One Jumps On Rainy Days. As I wrote on Soundcloud: These songs were written about the big stuff: big love and heavy sadness, huge life events and little [more]
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It’s world mental health day today, which has the worthy goal of trying to end the stigma around mental illness. But we also need to ensure that the help people ask for is actually there – and while a lot of that is about funding, it also means education. Some of that education is needed [more]
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Yes, another trans post. I’m as bored as you are, believe me. What many people call trans activism is just trans people being pissed off with constant attacks on their right to a quiet life, and with just days left in the UK government’s gender recognition consultation the attacks are getting pretty intense on social [more]
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The UK government’s consultation on gender reform finishes in a few days time (please fill out the consultation if you already haven’t; God knows, the bigots have in their hundreds). To mark the occasion, Vice magazine has published absolutely tons of trans-related stuff. It’s a welcome alternative to the barrage of anti-trans material in the [more]
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This is the final song from the album we’ve been uploading in dribs and drabs. I still haven’t come up with a title for it, and we’re nearly done writing the next one. Oops. New Normal is a song about heavy sadness: what if everybody feels the same and we’re too scared to say it? [more]
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As you may have noticed, the new series of Doctor Who starts tonight. I was never a Whovian – I watched it as a child and the rebooted series never appealed to me – but thanks to my daughter I’ve rediscovered it and realised what a great show it can be. Tonight isn’t just about [more]
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The first time I heard John Grant, I burst into tears. People who know me won’t find that remarkable, because I burst into tears a lot. Long before I became the hormonal mess I am today, music often made me blub. But this was unusual, because it was – terrible pun alert – blub at [more]
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Keeping up with trans-related news is a pretty depressing exercise: most of it is ill-informed or malicious, often parroting the very same “talking points” set out by viciously bigoted evangelical organisations. You can usually tune out if you see the words “cultural Marxism” (an anti-semitic far-right trope), “transgender ideology” (a phrase coined by right-wing evangelists) [more]
Read me in books
My debut memoir, Carrie Kills A Man, was a Scotsman book of the year and Damian Barr’s Literary Salon book of the week, and it was shortlisted for the 2023 British Book Awards book of the year in the Discover category.
My latest book, Small Town Joy, is a celebration of queer influences on and queer artists in Scots music and is out now.
I’m also a contributor to the excellent anthology Fierce Salvage, which is also out now.
