Being Seen
I never see myself portrayed on TV. In fact, I rarely see characters like my friends or family, or the worlds I inhabit, on screen. And that's OK. I'll happily watch dramas about lawyers or aliens or Russian nuclear disasters. But the stories and characters that really hit home, that take over my head and my heart to the point where I'm heading to online discussion forums, reading the scrips, watching YouTube interviews with the writers, even penning my own fan fiction - those are the ones with worlds and characters that I know, that I've met, that I understand and relate to. It just happens so rarely that when it does it hits me like a sledgehammer. The first time I remember feeling that punch was with Queer As Folk. I knew people like that, I understood that world. The bars, bitchiness and hedonism of Manchester's Canal Street reflected my own experiences of Birmingham's gay village. I was seeing an aspect of my life portrayed on screen for the first ...