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Drag Noir: Chloë Yates

The lovely Paulina Succotash

Kiki and Me
Chloë Yates
One night in the dim and distant long ago, I was working the graveyard shift at that notorious punk drag dive, Axolotl Snot, on the grimy lower east bank of The City. The night outside was cold and inside the clientele wasn’t much warmer. One moment I was wiping down the ever-sticky bar for the hundredth time, the next I was slack jawed with awe as the infamous drag queen Kiki Le Shade sashayed into my world. She was a dame and she had balls. One look into those hypnotically glacial peepers and I was spellbound. She bent me to her will and I thanked her for every displaced vertebrae… At least that’s how I wish it had gone, but I’ve never worked in a bar and I’ve only ever admired drag queens from afar. I have, however, been in love with them since I was a kid.

 

Ideas of gender have always fascinated and appalled me. The way we step into the construct of gender identity at birth and then stick to it as though it’s all perfectly natural and right when it’s clearly absolute bollocks has plagued me my entire life. Arbitrary rules of behaviour and “deportment” (ugh) that depend upon whether or not you have a tallywackle or a witch’s cackle have never made the least bit of sense to me. I never understood why I was supposed to do this or that because I was a “girl” or why my friend couldn’t wear this or act like that because he was a “boy”. I just wanted to do the things I wanted to do because I wanted to do them. I believe that’s how everybody feels, deep down at least, but all too often life teaches us that stepping out from the baaing masses is fraught with castigation and derision – those wicked sharp whip licks of social control. Well, fuck, as they say, that shit.

 

The long and the short of it is I’m a fan of chutzpah, if you’ll allow me the indulgence. Bold, in-your-face, no apologies types are my number one poison, my idols and my role models, and who’s better at in-your-face than drag queens? Undoubtedly I have a romanticised view of them, but it certainly seems to me that drag queens make no apologies. More often than not it is their opportunity to act out, play up and throw their besequinned shit in the face of folks with wild abandon – and they seize it. Drag has never seemed like a mask to me. It is, rather, a medium for liberation. An excuse to be fearlessly bold, a ticket to kick the world in the tits while sticking your tongue out and wiggling your glitter-encrusted arse at it. That beautiful bright light of subversion being thrown so boldly in the face of a generally conservative world that pouts and frowns at “otherness” like we don’t all have secrets, fears, desires and frustrations that torment and thrill us, tickles me in all the best places.

 

Needless to say, I really wanted to write a story for Drag Noir but, after whacking my brain into inanimate object after inanimate object, I was stumped. Not because I couldn’t think of a million and one scenarios, but because I couldn’t think of the right one (some might argue I didn’t do that anyway but they can kiss my big fat bellend). Then I came across the song ‘Let’s Have a Kiki’ by Scissor Sisters. I can’t remember if it was on the telly or if someone posted it on Facebook, but it stuck in my head like only the most vicious of earworms are wont to do. It did the job though, one of those mental switch thingummies. I listened to that fucking song about eight million times while sitting in front of my screen and not once did my fingers stop typing. Kiki was pretty much born in one go, but she felt like she’d always been with me. First came the image of the faded drag queen, a shadow of her former self that long ago night at the Axolotl, sitting in a parking lot on one of those awful white plastic chairs, inches long ash clinging to a still blazing cigarette, lipstick smudged, wig askew. And I wondered what she was waiting for, because she was definitely waiting for something. Turns out, it wasn’t what I expected… which is just how I like it.


Click to buy!

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Drag Noir: Paul D. Brazill

Paul DeLiberace Brazill relaxing at home (thanks to S. L. Johnson for the photo)
Paul DeLiberace Brazill relaxing at home (thanks to S. L. Johnson for the photo)

How I Wrote A Bit Of A Pickle for Drag Noir

Paul D. Brazill
It goes like this: A rainy  night in Soho, thrown out of The French House and off to Ronnie Scott’s til dawn. Then a gypsy cab driven by an Islamic fundamentalist over to the East End and a dodgy pub near a meat market.  Go for a slash on in an alleyway near Crucifix Lane and get lost just off Druid Street. Follow a group of old women into a pockmarked terraced house and realise that they’re having a séance. A tall Polish woman with a turban gives me a message from beyond. And that message becomes A Bit Of A Pickle.

Pick up Drag Noir today by clicking on the picture below and get your glad rags on.

Cover by S. L. Johnson
Cover by S. L. Johnson
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Drag Noir: Redfern Jon Barrett

RedfernJonBarrettDisability as Drag
Redfern Jon Barrett

Regardless of the social progress made in recent years, our world is still not yet kind to the subversive: women who love women remain the target of stares and lewd comments; men who love men have blood which is considered unclean by the majority of the planet’s health authorities (because ‘AIDS was invented by homos’); whilst men who dress as women are still victim to physical and verbal abuse. Public acceptance may be on the increase, but as every queer person and drag queen knows, we have a long way to go.

Meanwhile, a different yet parallel rights movement is fighting for its own social and legal equality: rights for the disabled. Those with cerebral palsy are still the target of stares and verbal abuse; those with mobility needs are still denied access to the majority of the planet’s public transportation (back of the bus? You’re not even getting on!); whilst closed-circuit hearing loops are still absent from most public spaces. Progress has been made, but as every blind or autistic person knows, we have a long way to go.

Of course there are more similarities between disability and gender nonconformity than my structuring two similar paragraphs on each. Firstly, each has the ability to make the public uncomfortable, as each causes us to question our own identities: whether the shaky and often-transitional nature of our perceived gender, or our immortal able-bodiedness. Each presents us with  a deviation from the norm which a great number of people still feel uncomfortable with, and which presents this difficult truth: that the privilege one receives for cis-heterosexuality or able-bodiedness is a result of random chaotic chance.

The second similarity is that both gender nonconformity and disability have been heavily medicalised by both public discourse and institutions. The very term ‘homosexuality’ was coined in an attempt to diagnose a mental condition; trans people are subject to intense physical and mental scrutiny by medical professionals who pass ultimate judgement on their personal identities; the disabled are also still viewed through this same medical lens. Are deaf people merely a medical condition, or a culture with its own language and social groupings? The nonconformists share a history of dehumanising medical discourse. Both groupings have been the target of eugenics programs. It is this similarity which prompted me to write my sci-fi short story ‘Straight Baby’.

It is this shared discourse lies at the heart of the story. In a world in which parents have (or believe they have) genetically engineered every aspect of their children, the disabled and the queer face the same threat of marginalisation and persecution. This shared struggle is embodied in Thomas, a disabled homosexual who faces intense persecution because of the random chaotic chance of his birth – a deviance which can never be truly eradicated, regardless of technological advancement.

Yet the story also examines the interplay between his identities as a gay, disabled man. Whilst other gay men are beaten and arrested when caught with other men, Thomas’ physical disability has, thus far, allowed him to escape the clutches of the heterosexist legal system. In this future, as in our own time, the disabled are frequently viewed as asexual. Thomas’ physical state covers his deviance as a homosexual: his disability is his drag.

Yet Thomas’ drag is not merely external. He manages his position in society via an internal drag, mentally conceiving of himself as a female femme-fatale – a perspective which allows him to navigate his affairs with married men. In short, Thomas is a sexual being in the ‘asexual’ drag of disability, perceiving himself in female terms. Each ‘deviance’ contradicts and reinforces the other. He is a threat masquerading as harmless.

At its root, the story is based in the fact that every struggle is a shared struggle. Gay men and wheelchair users, lesbians and the blind, drag queens and the autistic have all been marginalised by social and medical discourse. Without solidarity and recognition of our shared fight, we risk a future in which society once again uses technology in an attempt to eradicate the nonconformists – a future in which no drag can save us.

DRAG NOIR is out tomorrow!

 

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Drag Noir: Becky Thacker

Becky Thacker
Portrait of the author in her younger days

How I Came to Write ‘Geezer Dyke’

Becky Thacker

A port stop during a cruise disembarked us in Mexico, facing a row of tour vans and buses.  Most of these were staffed by sign-wielding native folks with weary, worldly-wise faces; obviously they did this job for the living it provided and not because they found it fun. One of the tour guides was a lesbian, white-skinned, aging none too gracefully, and it was evident from her accent that she’d begun life as a North American Midwesterner. She looked and clearly felt, however, more akin to her brown-skinned career associates than to the flocks of North American tourists who surrounded her. We wondered what, or who, had led her to this path.   And of course, romantics that we are, we wondered whom she went home to when her day of tourist-wrangling was over.

DRAG NOIR: Out this Halloween!

Cover by S. L. Johnson
Cover by S. L. Johnson

 

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Foreword to Drag Noir

The original Jim West, Robert Conrad

FOREWORD to DRAG NOIR by editor K. A. Laity

I wanted to be Jim West. The hero of the television programme Wild Wild West played by Robert Conrad epitomized cool as far as I was concerned as a kid. He looked slick, fought bad guys and lived in luxurious style in a train caboose with his pal Artemus Gordon—every week a new location and a new adventure.

But more than that, the look: that snugly fitted suit, short jacket, broad shoulders and black boots. Sure he did spend a lot of time shirtless and tied up, too. Somehow at the advent the androgynous glam rock look of the 70s and the nascent punk scene, anything at all seemed possible—at least until my body betrayed me with the double-whammy of adolescent hormones and a thyroid that tipped over into overdrive, hitting my rangy frame with unexpected curves and bewildered loss of identity.

Tilda Suited by ShermanI grew up with two brothers, four baseball diamonds and a football field behind my house, so I played a lot of sports. Yet when I started school I was expected to wear dresses. I wanted to be the boy in My Side of the Mountain but it was a revelation to see Karen Carpenter play drums because it was a thing girls weren’t supposed to do. I was a guileless and mostly unaware child so it came as a bit of a shock when I realised there was a great deal of anxiety attached to who I was supposed to be. I failed so much at being a girl that I was sent to charm school, a racket run by the local department store.

It failed.

My adolescent discomfort sprang largely from being forced into a category that didn’t fit me, as much as it did with being trapped in one place when I wanted to travel the world. Academia belatedly taught me an essential term: slippage. Our brains like to categorise things into distinct pigeon-holes, but nature just bleeds into the margins. I like slipping between categories (as these noir mash-ups show). Then as now I hated to be pigeon-holed. On my website I quote Kierkegaard: “Once you label me, you negate me.”

It’s no wonder that I took to gender studies like a PI to trenchcoats; it explained the discomfort I had struggled with for so long—and proved I wasn’t the only one. It gave me so much more to think about when I considered my own childhood (not to mention two men living together in a caboose—hello!). Judith Butler showed me gender was constructed by culture, just as I’d always intuited. She instilled in me the love of playing with those conventions consciously, testing people’s reactions, and teaching students to be conscious of them as well.

But it was Ru Paul who cut to the essential: “We’re born naked, and the rest is drag.”

Manufacturers seem to have doubled down on building the great gender divide; all you have to do is look at the ‘girls’ aisle in any toy store—a throbbing pink ghetto. Toys that were bright primary colours a couple decades ago now receive a varnish of glutinous pink. The ‘princess’ industry is reinforced 24/7 on the Disney media empire of television and radio. Maybe it’s the last ditch backlash against a broadening culture that not only recognizes the rainbow spectrum of genders, but increasingly celebrates them. I’m all onboard with the Pink Stinks camp, but maybe princess power isn’t as monolithic as I sometimes fear (given my tomboy self). I was pleasantly surprised the other day when the Executive Toddler (3) and her brother (9) were on scooters, which he reminded her both belonged to him, when she told him imperiously that she liked ‘boy things and girl things’. I leaned over and said, ‘I’ll tell you a secret: there aren’t really “girl things” and “boy things”—there are only “things”‘.

You can spend your life trying to protect the divisions between categories, but nature bleeds through the barriers. That’s why we have parthenogenesis. Nature will find a way. Try too hard to maintain those artificial borders and you’re bound to fail.

Of course noir is all about failing, but it’s also about shadows, surfaces and a lot of grey areas. Hiding and revealing, deceptive appearances, buried truths: the stories here run the gamut. So do the writers: some I knew already, others I didn’t at all. I was disappointed to have so few drag king stories, but maybe that leaves room to revisit the topic. I had no idea what I would get, but I was pleased with the results. I hope you are too.

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Drag Noir #FreeRead: Smallbany by Graham Wynd

Cover by S. L. Johnson
Cover by S. L. Johnson

In the run up to the release of Drag Noir, we’re featuring a few spots to drum up the excitement because, well — we’re so excited! Here’s a story from skulk member Graham Wynd to give you a sense of the flavour of the collection. Consider it a “bonus track” for the anthology.

SMALLBANY
by Graham Wynd
Content alerts: salty language, guns, drugs, sexual shenanigans

I desperately turned every door handle along the corridor while swearing a blue streak, trying to figure out where it had all gone wrong. The image of Bomber’s face covered with blood still haunted my vision though I tried to push it aside long enough to think straight.

“We have to seize the means of production,” Bomber had said. I laughed at the memory of his words and gripped the handle of the French horn case even tighter. There had to be a way out of here.

At last a handle moved under my sweaty grip. I pushed through the door. A supply closet: stacks of cocktail napkins, swizzle sticks and whatnot filled the shelves. Dead end, I knew. But maybe I could hide out here while things calmed down.

I threw the case in the corner and shoved a few bigger boxes together to make a leaning tower of booze boxes, then ducked down behind it. I willed my breath to slow down, but the ragged rasp of it continued. The bellows of my lung threatened to give me away if anybody tried the door behind me.

Maybe no one had followed me down the corridor.

Bomber’s gory face swam into view again and I cursed his name. ‘Means of production,’ my aunt Fanny.

Both of them.

“What do you mean, ‘means of production’?” Moaning Murdoch had asked him. He’d had that unfortunate moniker since back in the kiddie days when we were wet enough to let girls drag us to Harry Potter films. No matter that he outgrew the round face, that the big specs were replaced by contacts and Murdoch himself landed a scholarship playing for the Danes as a fullback. He was still Moaning Murdoch.

Bomber smiled in that way he had that suggested he knew the inside track. His smugness had only grown since he switched his major to business. The original plan to be a rapper had been scuppered due to his inherent lack of talent (which we all could have told him before but never mind that, he wasn’t listening).

Continue reading “Drag Noir #FreeRead: Smallbany by Graham Wynd”

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What is Noir?

extricate ebook 72ppiBy Graham Wynd

What is noir? You can Google the term and come up with a bunch of answers, but as librarians will ask you, are you sure you have the right one? I always say I’m a ‘duck test’ sort of person — an out-dated Americanism for recognising ‘communists’ viz. if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck (though Senator McCarthy might have been wise to have looked into more stringent methods).

Most people who like the genre of noir will point to the films with their bleak cityscapes, inky shadows and sudden gun shots. Ida Lupino and Humphrey Bogart frown with worry, Lauren Bacall and Gloria Grahame show their gams, while Farley Granger looks lost. In novels, Patricia Highsmith’s slippery Tom Rippley worms his way into people’s lives while keeping his intentions hidden, or Dashiell Hammet sends the Continental Op to a seedy location and the blood spills red down the walls.

When I think of ‘noir’ I tend to think of women who don’t see the options and men who make bad choices. The very gendered split of that thought is what led me to thinking about Drag Noir and how people might play with that divide. In the noir world, people invest in the gender divisions because it brings them some certainty in an uncertain and dangerous world.

Buddhists say desire is the beginning of suffering: noir is all about the suffering. And the desire — whether it’s for money or sex or something less certain. Fred MacMurray lusting for Barbara Stanwyck: we know the Double Indemnity story so well. But what about Lily Dillon in Jim Thompson’s The Grifters? Especially as embodied by Anjelica Huston in Frears’ film, she’s hungry and restless as a shark, but nothing really fills it for long. Sometimes there’s a hunger that can’t be fed.

Some folks spend their whole lives trying to keep it
They carry it with them every step that they take

Till one day they just cut it loose
Cut it loose or let it drag ’em down…

Yeah, that’s noir.

Extricate is out now: buy it Amazon.

A writer of bleakly noirish tales with a bit of grim humour, Graham Wynd can be found in Dundee but would prefer you didn’t come looking. An English professor by day, Wynd grinds out darkly noir prose between trips to the local pub.

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Author Posts: Alasdair Stuart

FINALAMZPSeudoTapesVol1Al you are a journalist, podcast host and all around geek about town. You wrote the essay collection The Pseudopod Tapes so to start off tell us a little about the podcasts you are involved in and your role in them?

I host 1.5 of the shows put out by Escape Artists Incorporated. There are three, each covering a different genre of short fiction; Escape Pod for science fiction, Pseudopod for horror and Podcastle for fantasy. They’ve been going for close to a decade now, with Escapoe Pod whistling past episode 400 and Pseudopod not far behind.

The set up for the shows is really simple; the host introduces the story, provides a little background on it and the author and then gets out of the way. The host then pops up at the end of the story, reads a little feedback from previous episodes in some cases, pleads for donations to the show in all cases and closes.

What I do is a little different; each show I host has a micro essay on the back about something in the episode that I liked, or something it reminded me of, or that affected me. Some of the time they’re funny, some of the time they’re grim but they’re always very personal. It’s a weird approach, and one I openly steal from mid-1990s TV show Midnight Caller, but it works, and I enjoy doing it.

 

What would you say typifies your writing, what can people expect when they see Alasdair Stuart on a byline or book?

Based on this interview, maybe ‘no short responses’? : )

Aside from that sage advice of course, a couple of things. I LOVE genre fiction, it’s got me through every single one of the bad times in my life and that’s IMG_0293given me a baseline of respect for any piece of fiction I interact with. Creating it is incredibly difficult and just finishing a project with a modicum of coherence is a win worth acknowledging, if not celebrating. That in turn marks me out as, if not a forgiving reviewer, certainly a far more understanding one than the World War Z-esque stampede to see who can piss on someone else’s work fastest this business sometimes seems infested with. Throw in humour, self-awareness where it’s needed and that’s basically me.

Oh and meta-fiction. Meta-fictionality is one of those words that brings people out in hives but it’s actually really good fun. The strand of it I always enjoy is the idea that similar stories connect, because that gives you a new layer of understanding to drop over the top of something. For example;

Hellboy is recovered in the closing stages of the Second World War and, ultimately, grows up to join the BPRD. Up until that point, the BPRD field team includes Indiana Jones, Atomic Robo and Rick and Evie O’Connell. Following the war, Rick, Evie and Indy are stood down from active duty and placed in secure jobs. Rick and Evie end up consulting with the British government, themselves plagued by a constantly accelerating stream of extra-terrestrial contacts whilst Indy is given tenure at his old job. There, decades later, he teaches Lara Croft and, a couple of years later, Nathan Drake. Meanwhile in the UK, the O’Connells are contacted by Barbara and Ian Chesterton, two Cambridge dons who haven’t aged since the 1960s about doing a little field work for a new government organization called Torchwood…

Stories are lego. You can connect them together very easily and every new shape is more fun than the last. It’s also a massively useful analytical and educational tool and most of all, it’s FUN.

You have been a huge supporter, not just of Fox Spirit but of the whole Indie publishing movement. What is it that excites you so much about the indie scene?

Three reasons, firstly because I think Fox Spirit, and the small press, are home to some of the most vibrant, interesting writing in genre fiction. Secondly because, especially now I don’t write fiction anymore, I can see how so much of the field is by definition inward looking and cliquey. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing and it’s certainly not a universal one, but you can only go to so many conventions and hear the same jokes from the same people before the Bill Hicks Flying Saucer Tour starts to sound like a good idea. The small press flies completely in the face of that, and some of the most talented, nicest, hardest-working people I’ve met work in the field. They’re unsung heroes and if I’m not prepared to sing their praises, then who else will?

Thirdly, I’m a contrary bastard. I’m tremendously lucky in that some of the places I blog for have huge footprints and that mouthpiece has been demonstrated to help authors and events on more than one occasion. It doesn’t get the audience feedback a lot of stuff does but it makes a difference. I grew up listening to the Mark and Lard show on Radio 1, and it was amazing. Two hours a night Monday to Friday, all off chart, all weird as hell and all interspersed with poetry, film reviews and books. I finished the first stage of my education with them and whilst they never got the acclaim everyone else did, the work they did, the mindset they had of being open to the new, is something that really sunk in with me. Someone needs to be the Mark and Lard of genre fiction and, honestly, I don’t think anyone else is better at it than me.

Your interests run the gamut of genre, film, TV, books, magazines, video and role playing games and all the stuff I haven’t mentioned. What is the common thread? What is in in any media or genre that hooks your interest?

ColdbrookExcellent question. I think it boils down to two things; clarity of approach and FUN. I watched the first episode of Top of the Lake last night (As I write this) and …honestly I may not be back. It’s beautifully shot, has three of my favourite actors in it and there’s a scene in the first episode that just breaks the show in two. It’s a monologue about the friendship one of the female characters had with her chimp, how badly it ended and how that’s why she’s ended up at Holly Hunter’s character’s compound. It’s one of the most demonstrably bad pieces of writing I’ve ever encountered and it just hits the ground like a lead weight. If it’s meant to be funny then it isn’t, if it’s meant to be poignant it’s absurd and if, as seems likely, it’s meant to massively differentiate the male and female viewpoints in the series then it’s so clunky you can hear the gears shift halfway through. There’s nothing close to it in tone in the rest of the episode and that sort of huge disparity, the moment where a writer gets too attached to a character, a beat, an image is a deal breaker for me. Conversely, a story that stays on target is a thing of beauty and we’re blessed with far more of them than a lot of people seem to notice.

Then there’s the fun, because there should always be fun, or at the very least enjoyment. In the space of the last few days I’ve read Coldbrook by Tim Lebbon, seen Pacific Rim and watched the latest episodes of Hannibal and a chunk of season 5 of The West Wing. All of which are hugely enjoyable, despite being tonally completely different. In each case it’s because they have a clear tone, stick to it and have fun playing with their particular set of narrative toys. ‘Access’ the CJ-centric documentary episode of The West Wing was as enjoyable as watching Gypsy Danger use shipping containers as knuckle dusters which was, in turn as enjoyable as reading Tim Lebbon’s uniquely horrific take on the zombie apocalypse. Fun is the programming language of all good fiction, whatever it is, and whatever approach it takes. As long as it’s entertaining you’re more than halfway home.

What one thing would you say everyone should know coming into scene be it through journalism or fiction writing, game design, cover and comic art or whatever?

Don’t be British about anything. My career has been hurt, over and over, by being too polite, too modest. It’s as bad, and more insidious, as click hunting or endlessly beating your own drum because it changes how you think. You’re work isn’t good enough, you don’t deserve the attention, keep going and eventually you’ll be discovered without ever having to do anything.

It’s all crap. All of it.

Every single aspect of every single art requires mental focus and discipline. The foundation of that is confidence, not arrogance, confidence. It’s very 39928easy to be frightened of ‘no’ and it’s even easier t hide under ‘maybe next time’ forever. If you do, you will be a decade down the line with nothing done and so much more work to do that you may not bother with any of it.

Please don’t do that. You deserve better. We all do. Show up. Start something, put your hand up first, volunteer. Feel frustrated no one’s noticed what a genius you are yet? Use that as motivation. Can’t finish a project? Be honest, put it away and start something else. Never, ever stop moving, never, ever stop trying and for the love of all that’s holy don’t be British about anything. The natural reticence and modesty that people like to view as part of the national character is creative kryptonite. Don’t go near it. Put your hand up. Try something. Make something. It’s much more interesting.

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Author Post: Ruth Booth

Desert Islands

A few weeks ago I went to see an exhibition by Toby Phips Lloyd called Desert Island. Known for exploring self-conception, Lloyd had recreated his childhood bedroom, right down to the painted over-wallpaper and drawing pin holes in the wall. This sat in a giant wooden box in the centre of the exhibition, while on footage played in the background, Lloyd took the role of interviewer and interviewee to ask himself about his life and the records in the style of Desert Island Discs – also supposedly broadcast from the radio in the corner of the bedroom.

As a fellow teen in the nineties, I got a kick out of the possessions on show (Pitchshifter CD, Red Dwarf on VHS, Hunter S Thompson clippings…) – but what made me think was the contrast between what Lloyd-as-interviewee remembered, versus Lloyd-as-interviewer’s analysis of his teenage years. The bullying wasn’t as bad as he recalled it, and he considered that perhaps some of the choices of song or reading material reflected how he wanted to be seen more than anything else.

Most of us look back on our teenage years with mild embarrassment – things that we said or did. More often it’s that we so readily used XYZ to dictate what we thought or who we made friends with. Often we forget how important it was to us to have that grounding in common culture, a sense of community, when the ways we regarded ourselves and the ways we were regarded by others were first ripped from their moorings, and set in perpetual motion.

Yet we also forget that little has changed since then. Log on to your social network feed, and you’ll find friends linking to cool things they have found, sharing their opinions of this and that, demonstrating support of causes and struggles around the world. We share photos and videos of ourselves looking sexy and exciting – and hide the ones we don’t like so much. In many ways, engaging in social media is a lot like is a lot like decorating your teenage bedroom – hell, they’re even called walls. We communicate in books and movies and games. We present a picture to the world of a version of ourselves, and this is ever changing. Just as we did back then, we are still making ourselves, every single day.

With this in mind, it’s little wonder we fear control and monitoring of our online profiles. It’s not only about personal information getting into the open, it’s a violation of our sanctum, abusing and using the face we show without our permission. Think about the word­ we use to describe posting as someone else on Facebook – “frape”. And identity fraud isn’t just about stealing your credit, or your money. It’s about stealing you.

Memory is a fluid thing. We rewrite the stories of our lives as we go along. Often the use of cultural tropes as shorthand is considered a bit teenaged, or indicative of a lazy brain. In some creative contexts, sometimes it’s even frowned upon, or considered vulgar to be referential in this way. Some forms of art are considered “lesser” for doing this. But why is that? Cultural tropes are ways of exploring and sharing the world and how we interpret it. Like pirates, we should always treasure our own desert islands.

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