Fame on the council estate.
August 2010
I am trying to find the right turn but the flashes from the camera are blinding me. It isn’t that there are hundreds of them, it’s more that even two flashing lights from old Blackberry lenses, blended with the voices of people shouting, is enough to disorientate me. I try to stay calm. I don’t want any sweat picked up on the camera. The dewy look wasn’t in quite yet.
I think about what I have learned in the tabloids, studying each gossip column like it is my SATs exam, and I assume the position: hand over eyes, face down, back slumped, move quick, always stay silent. No matter what they shout, never speak back. If you speak, you could become a soundbite, the moment etched in the public’s imagination forever. If you stay silent, when the cameras eventually retreat, it is only you left with this memory forever – rather than the whole world.
The shouts continue. I see a car I am passing and wonder if I grab a nearby pole to smash it with they will stop. I remember, it is best to do nothing, then eventually it will fade. Remove any sign of a fight, and the video will eventually stop rolling.
I carry on walking, trying to pretend they are not filming me, and get to the nearby shop.
A break. At last.
August 2021
I have finally found the QR code to order a vodka lime soda. For some reason I volunteered to get the rounds in despite my bank account screaming for someone else to do it. Just as I’m about to put my password into the account which should not need to be set up to order drinks —I hear someone say, ‘Excuse me, are you Travis Alabanza?”’ ‘Yes, I am.’ They ask if they can take a photo. I say yes. We smile and say goodbye.
My friend asks, ‘What is it like being famous?’
I say, ‘Famous? Don’t you mean micro LGBT+ figure that is sometimes loud on the internet?’ My friend replies, ‘Sure, how does that feel?’ I say, ‘A lot less famous than being a cross-dresser on a council estate.’
My friend lets out a sharp laugh.
I am not sure they get it.
What I could have said, if I was not ever-growingly aware of our eating out to help out having a limited time for drinking, was that to be visibly gender-non-conforming – or more specifically, someone that the world sees as a ‘man in a dress’ – is to know what paparazzi feels like independent of the follower count.
It is to become intimate with the idea of people knowing who you are, before you know them.
It is to be able to tell when people are looking at you even when you do not know who they are.
It is to be accustomed to the rules of public space and etiquette shifting around you.
It is to feel famous, even without the magazine print.
It is to be the talk of the town, the name on everyone’s lips.
It is to be, whether you want to or not, 100 per cent that bitch that everyone has heard of:
and all you have done is walk to the shops.
Is it to be asked if I want a photo? Oh the luxury of having someone ask.
To be gender-non-conforming is to know that consent is conditional, and that your actions will be the reason they say you are asking for it.
And isn’t that what is at the crux of fame? An exchange between consent for their dream. The snaps of the camera follow as we capture them going to the shops, or kissing their ex, or smashing cars in crisis – and if we stop to wonder if it is moral to gaze so intrusively into someone’s life, we respond: well, they chose all this, didn’t they? Justify us running down roads to find them, swarming shops to shout at them, critiquing and questioning their every move because, well, they knew what they signed up to, didn’t they?
Sometime in July 2010
I’m in a friend’s flat round the corner from my school. I say friend, I more mean: someone I met online who told me they also wear ‘women’s’ clothing. I will never tell anyone I was here. They lend me a dress. They say it is what us older girls have to do. And when I go to take it, their hand reaches out to grab me, and their voice drops.
They say: ‘You know though, babe, if you go out the house like this, you gunna be in trouble. People don’t know how to act. You keep this to yourself, unless you want everyone to know your name.’
Sometime in July 2019
I’m backstage at a performance at a charity gala where I’ve been paid my month’s rent to be in attendance. I am sat next to a famous singer that I used to do karaoke covers to when drunk in my mid-teens. I am pretending not to know who they are, and ask them their name; I thought somehow this would rebalance the power in a room. As if any of us put that power there. As if asking what someone’s name is is the greatest example of being a civilian.
Later, the backstage area will get swamped by managers, assistants, assistant assistants, PR people, stylists, make-up artists, and a person whose job it is to go round and check everyone else has a right to be in the room. The superstar will stay still, focusing on a dot in the room, as if to look around would be too disorientating of a moment. To finally see what pandemonium surrounds them.
Everyone has left, apart from the person whose job it is to never leave their side, and I clear my throat and say:
‘That was a lot, wasn’t it?’
They say, ‘Just a bit.’
I ask, ‘Did you always imagine this for yourself?’
They say, ‘No, but I grew up with no one knowing or caring who I was, and now they do. I guess I wanted that.’
I sat back in the now empty room. I thought about the pandemonium that has surrounded me when I have dared to walk outside in a dress. How traffic can stop, heads can turn, so many people unsure what to do yet they know they need to be there. How, when it is really bad, if I can see people taking photos without my consent, I will focus on the street sign ahead of me, and imagine I am on my own, walking in a perfect straight line, unaware of anything else around me. Sometimes I wave back at them, imagine they are a fan just wanting my attention. Adorning me in my roses that only if the lighting is bad feel like a jeer.
The superstar and I leave the room. Both awaking from our separate daydreams (read: dissociations).
They go out the back door, with a private car and their security team.
I, out the front, as the door man refuses to look me in the eye. I am sure we are both imagining what it would mean,
To be invisible outside.
