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Molly Mulready is a mum-of-three, and one of her kids is trans. She writes in The Guardian: My son, in his distress, helped me realise that there is something even worse than being abused in the street, and that’s being told by strangers you’re not who you know you are, that the truth of you… [more]
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Let’s have some new music from David and I. I can hear echoes of Elbow and Talk Talk in this song: I usually throw everything including the kitchen sink into recordings, so this is exceptionally sparse by my usual standards. That’s something you’ll find runs through a lot of our new stuff. Lyrically this one… [more]
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I don’t usually travel for gigs, but I made an exception for The The’s Comeback Special: this is a band whose songs I’d long given up on ever hearing live. So off I went to the Royal Albert Hall. It was worth the trip. The sound was exceptional, the performance magical, and me and the… [more]
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I can’t remember if I’ve posted this before, but Rolling Stone’s piece on how the religious right decided to target trans people  as a proxy for everybody they don’t like is a superb piece of journalism. a small band of well-connected far-right activists was resurrecting an approach from the oldest anti-LGBTQ playbook: to transform the… [more]
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This piece made me cry. Every evening when the sun starts to set, my daughter picks me a bouquet of light. The front door of our house is glass-paned, so she crouches in front of it, where lines of sun are drifting across the wood floor. She pretends to scoop something up — the motion very much… [more]
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My friend Chris Phin retweeted this pic of Grayson Perry’s alter-ego Claire earlier. He commented: Might it be true to say that people who have a problem with, eg, this are at some level reacting to the idea of _them_ wearing it, whereas I’m just really happy the world contains Claire wearing it. It’s wonderful.… [more]
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One of the reasons I haven’t binned Twitter is the existence of block lists. These enable you to automate the blocking of various bad people; they can’t see your messages (there’s a way around that, but few bother with it) and more importantly you don’t see theirs. The numbers can be quite terrifying. One of… [more]
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Another day, another bad article in The Spectator. The answer is no. The EDL founder was arrested for deliberately breaking the law on Contempt of Court. Whether Liddle or his editor Fraser Nelson actually believes his nonsense or is just trolling for money is irrelevant: by continually trying to paint racist clowns as free speech… [more]
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30 years ago today, Section 28 (Section 2A in Scotland) was introduced to ban the “promotion” of gay and lesbian “lifestyles” in schools to protect children from the entirely invented dangers of gay and lesbian people. It wasn’t repealed until 2003 in England and Wales, although Scotland canned it in 2001. I was 15 when… [more]
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James Kirkup of The Spectator has written many articles that unquestionably parrot the propaganda of anti-trans bigots, but he reached a new low this week with the story of sniggering arsehole David Lewis. Lewis is – or rather, was; Labour suspended him for, well, being a sniggering arsehole – standing for election as a women’s… [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.
