Steve_Bamlett_blog

Still at home when this was taken, I am readying myself  for a day trip

It starts well. My outward train was only 2 minutes late. Once there, I am meeting up with my friend, Mike (with me for the day till their  6 p.m. return train), having lunch if there is time, before the first event at The Lighthouse,  the radical bookshop on Nicholson Street with Malcolm Cull on their new book, What Gender Should Be. I will buy a copy there and one as a gift for Mike, because they live the life more than I, fellow traveller and friend.

But first Mike and I took time to enjoy a pizza for lunch and chat. Since it is long since I have see them, in fact at last year’s Festival. So here they are at Pizza Express.

Without tbe fabulous jacket, that photo gives nothing away, so as we set of to the Lighthouse Bookshop, I took another, with the  Scottish National Library in tbe background.

Neither of us knew the author of the book about which the event we went to related but the book seemed pertinent to both of us and indeed proved so. Malcolm Cull is an academic philosopher working at Edinburgh University so it was pertiment that they were interviewed by another philosopher cited in his book and with similar interests in social ontology, feminist philisipher, Catherine Jenkins.

Malcolm identifies as non-binary but you couldn’t listen to them long being probed by a distinguished academic peer without realising how limiting is the meaning even that label sheds on how precisely Malcolm articulates their gender identity outside of obvious marker pronouns and dress preferences. The book cover itself seems to bear an image seeking truth in the partial rather than full illumination of the dark, in which much of the exploration of the potentials of gender still resides.

This is not because the book is ‘obscure’, because it definitely is not from the parts I read, but because it sees so much potential plurality in gender positioning by real people that it does not even try to be comprehensive and illuminate all options. What is clear is that the book.and this talk started with the description of a method, rather than a taxonomy, that can be used in conceptualising questions of gender – that method is named conceptual engineering.

I will report back, perhaps, when I have read it but from the talk, the argument seems to be that the aim of gender discourse is not the production of conflict over personal identification but the recognition that gender is fluid and plural in potential not only in fact across populations but within each person scross the time and space of their lives. How we identify matters but only as an concept we aim to engineer into an accepted reality everywhere and at all times, not as a present fact.

Even new gender identities are only things in the  process of being engineered, and some have become redundant from the force of social entropy  into social truths. In the meamtime gender fluidity is trans friendly even in contexts where ‘misgendering’ might be allowed to occur for pragmatic reasons – to ensure the safety, for instance, of a trans child not out to their poweful and prejudiced parents or in contexts where insistence on inflexible gendering threatens significant danger to life or safety of a person.

The aim is to bring about gender integrity as any self-identified group by changing the world in the future not pretending it can be achieved as an assertion of immutable fact.

Anyway Mike and I liked the event. After the talk we parted. Me off to a play at  Summerhall, Mike distribting flyers for their one-person show curently playing online. I have seen it. It is brilliant. Here’s a link to the trailer for their show: https://youtu.be/-iClN3GUEp8?si=aEBFaYs0UGUqXquY.

The play I saw , even in a very minor way participated in, being cast to read a one-line role, a statement by the villain of the piece, Walter Adams. By the way  you only get called on to read if you have consented so to be called by wearing a badge advertising the show. HERE IS MINE.

Lessons on Revolution, ran from 14:15 – 15:15 on the day I saw it on Thu, 22 Aug 2024 at the Former Women’s Locker, Summerhall. Its ostensible topic is the shortlived experiment in politics in the London School Of Econonics [LSE] in which the student body focused its revolutionary energy on the eradication of ‘pedagogogic gerontocracy’, a quote from a LSE Socialist Society pamphlet of the time, represented by one particular ‘old man’, Walter Adams, a right wing historian whose academic career in university administration started in Rhodesia, operating as a tool of the illegal white state’s rulers but then used the transfer of its knowledge of the maintenance of white minority rule in that state’s higher education institutions to rule over unrest at LSE with a rod of implacable iron.

But it was so much more than that. Not only a  first rate theatrical experience, its ‘actors’ , keen to insist they were not actors, were two young queer men who play themselves. This was even as they also performed a commentary we see them enacting the process of tesearching and writing on their stident careers in the modern LSE and in their rack-rented student flat. That flat burns with them in it during the play because of its acknowledged flaunting of health and safety rules and decent standards of guman accomodation.

But it also includes their lives. Gab [left below], an Italian  who come to London to study but whose queerness was still treated as a secret by his family and beloved brother. And Sam [right], his housemate and companion. Their coming out they attribute to the legacy of politicalicisation by  the LSE Gay Liberation Movement. All of this interweaves into the conceptual, emotional and sense level of the play we experienced.

The claustrophobic space of the underground locker room was made evident with its temperature record [17 degrees] heightened by an audience of 37, we know both tjese things because that numeration (visibly collected by Gab in a head count) was projected from marked acetate written by Sam in situ and shown  on an overhead projector that reeked of academia in the 1970s, even in the deliberate poor quality of the reproductions of old photographs of LSE. Though there were good visuals; of the modern LSE spiral staircase library of modern times, for instance.

The space we sat in, we were told not only enacted itself, in its Summerhall decay, but also various spaces at various times of the LSE’s history, including a lecture theatre occupied by students in which the administration turned off power to quell the riots, leaving students brewing revolution in the dark.

Amongst the parts read by willing audience members was an American LSE student leader, whose surname was Bloom, who before queer liberation, became eventually a suicide victim. This wove into this political tragedy, wherein only the institution thrived. Walter Adams being knighted Sir Walter Adams.

After this wonderful, beautiful and moving show, I walk across the Meadows to meet up with Mike to see two favourite queer novelists and collect their signatures on my books, abandoning him first to drop my bags in my hotel room.

AT 16.00 we atyended the event Men in Love: novels by Andrew McMillan & Jon Ransom. 16:00 – 17:00, on Thu, 22 Aug 2024, at Courtyard Theatre,  a large marquee in the green courtyard of Edinburgh Futures Institute. I have seen my favourite of all.poets, Andrew, on many events but never Jon Ransom, whose novels I love. The event was great like the novels. I got to ask my question to Jon ostensibly but about the swirling, stirring set of lies that surround ignored and forgotten queer lives in locales and classes structurally marginalize. This theme applies to Andrew’s novel ‘Pity‘ too.

Both of these writers have kindly acknowledged my blogs about my reading and Andrew even more so wrote that in his dedication on the only publication of his I had left to sign, his introduction to Jack Hilton.

Mike and I both enjoyed out day and I lost them  then to their 6 p.m. train and husband, Kenneth, working at home

The evening was for the play ‘The Outrun’ at Church Hill Theatre but that is tomorrow’s blog.

Hope you’re there

With love

Steven xxxxxxx