Can Permaculture save us?

Streatham-based Social Landscapes is a Community Interest Permaculture Company who work with communities to create green spaces and social places that promote wellbeing. But what on earth is permaculture and why should we be getting involved? James Perrett got green fingered to find out how permaculture might save our world.

Permaculture is not, as spell check might suggest, a movement dedicated to the art of curling one’s hair. It’s a way of looking to nature to inspire change across all areas of our lives.

The term permaculture originated as a portmanteau of ‘permanent agriculture’, but it’s become more than that; a set of principles for a change in culture and communities.

“One of the best definitions of permaculture is ‘Common sense made common again’,” explained Social Landscapes’ Tish Vail. “If you go back to indigenous knowledge, people just did stuff because it made sense yet for some reason, we’ve lost the ability to make it really simple.”

What are the practices of permaculture?

Permaculture may be about making life simpler but the practice itself has many layers.

It emerged in the 1970s when University of Tasmania lecturer Bill Mollison and student David Holmgren began looking into our unsustainable structures for growing food and developed a methodology, drawing inspiration from diversity in nature.

For example: we grow big fields of one crop. If that one crop becomes diseased or eaten by pests, the whole food supply has been wiped out. Whereas in a forest the species are so diverse that if one dies, there would still be a huge number of others to supply food. 

They used nature herself as inspiration to develop the three strands that exist in permaculture today.

First: looking into ecology - observing how systems in nature work - then extracting those principles and applying them to a design.

Second: researching and putting into action the knowledge and practices of indigenous people. Working with the environment, not fighting it.

Lastly, looking at systems-theory and exploring relationships between things in a system; how behavioural patterns emerge.

Overarching these three strands are three ethics of permaculture:

People care (“How can this be beneficial to people?”)

Earth care (“How does this affect the environment and how do I make it beneficial for it?”)

Fair share (“Can I put this back into the system again or give it to a new system?”)

According to Tish, a lot of permaculture is about using the problem to create the solution.

She said: “If you have slugs on your veggie patch, what’s the alternative solution to putting chemicals down? Ask yourself what’s in your eco system that could help.

"Oh look, I have a pond with ducks so I’ll create a space that allows the ducks through the vegetable patch to eat the slugs.

“You’re feeding the ducks, getting rid of the slugs and the ducks can help fertilise the ground with their poo. Natural solutions.”

Similarly, Tish suggested that you can grow your own vegetables even on a small balcony by looking at the layering of plants in nature.

Instead of having flat-laying boxes, find a way to stack them on top of each other, as you might find in a forest, and create a food growing wall.

How can permaculture help our community?

Social Landscapes work with councils, particularly Lambeth, and communities to bring people together in what they call a “beneficial project”, as well as offering private workshops.

For instance, you may have seen the big “Edible Wellfield Road” planter pots of free-to-take vegetables, built and cared for by its residents as part of an engagement project in 2014.

“Within communities we've become very separated,” Tish said. “What we do is to try and use the garden spaces or outdoor spaces to bring communities and people back together.

“What we’ve found is that food is an essential part of our living and when you help people see they can grow their own food, you see these connections.

“When people see they have a beneficial output, whatever it may be; berries, apples, vegetables, there’s a delight in that and from our experience that’s where we’ve found that this sense of beneficial relationships is starting to bring people back together again.”

Approached by Lambeth Council directly, they’re currently working on a project for Roupell Park Estate in Streatham Hill.

Tish said: “There's a derelict piece of land just outside that's been empty for about 7 years; the council want us to turn it into a community space.

“We've had four community consultations to find out what residents want for the space, how they see it working, what they need.

“Lots of great ideas came out, all based on permaculture principles and us asking ‘how do we keep the system going once we’ve left them to it?’”

Social Landscapes also worked on a cycle tour around Lambeth, using permaculture principles to create a pathway for people to see the great projects going on in the borough.

How can permaculture save our planet?

Tish thinks we should be looking to permaculture as part of the worldwide discussion about our environment.

“Experts are now saying the impact we’re having on our planet has reached irreversible levels and if we don’t stop it’s going to be absolutely disastrous for us,” she said. “Not in a different generation but in 10, 20 years. In our lifetime.

“A lot of the environmental issues we’ve got feel like they’re too big and global and the individual can’t make those changes. It feels defeating.

“What permaculture does is give you a way to make small, manageable, changes.

“If everybody started making these small changes the collective can have a big impact rather than people thinking they need to change the world.

“It’s an activist movement but in a positive way.

“You can just quietly get on with it – you don’t have to make a big statement and it makes you feel good – you always get a benefit from it.

“Once you start doing it, it encourages you to make more changes.”

http://www.sociallandscapes.co.uk/

@sociallands on Twitter

"We're still here," says Brixton's longest-running bar. "Come and see us!"

Long-standing establishment Café Cairo sits tucked away on Landor Road, in that stretch between Brixton and Clapham that both stake a claim in.

Behind a red façade, Café Cairo opens out across two floors; beyond the bar is a sprawling courtyard of tented corners, hand-crafted Egyptian dividers, plump lounging cushions and a pizza oven.

Café Cairo opened its doors in 1996, the creation of former BBC reporter David Lodge. After travelling to Egypt for work, David fell in love with the culture and brought it back to the UK in the early 90s as a tent in Glastonbury. The current space, built by David himself, remains not just a bar but a community hub for artists; a live theatre stage, a belly dancing studio, a cinema. 

"David was doing this in London before anyone else was: mixing café, nightlife, culture,” bar manager Aaron Molloy told me over Brixton Electric IPAs.

Everything you see in Café Cairo has been built by David, Aaron and girlfriend Rhiannon Parry (also David's partner in business) – it's all DIY, recycled and eco-friendly.

Rhiannon said: "It’s literally our blood sweat and tears, this creation. It's always been a labour of love."

The bar burnt down on 4^th November 2007 in what the couple still think was an act of arson. They closed for four years, a group of them keeping the name alive through Café Cairo Events; designing and decorating spaces for parties – a house party here, a church in Nunhead there. But the call of Cairo was strong and they spent a year rebuilding it from the ground up.

Rhiannon said: "It was all still here like a ghost town, just sitting here for four years covered in dust and ash."

Current Café Cairo serves only locally-sourced drinks with all mixers homemade from scratch.

"We believe if you have better alcohol you get intoxicated in a better way, you get happier" explained Aaron. "With organic ingredients there’s no sulphites which are what give you a headache."

They're more than happy for you to come and drink mint tea at midnight, too, or tuck into vegan chocolate and vegan pizzas. 

Aaron and Rhiannon want to promote the eclectic range of events the café hosts; from their "wild" Halloween party, to BeLLy BoX, a small cabaret night with hand-picked "very odd, but brilliant" acts.

"All different types of people come through the arch," said Aaron. "You don’t want to stay at home? Come to Cairo. You want to go partying but you’re a bit too scared of big crowds? Come to Cairo. You just want to hang out and watch a film? Come to Cairo."

Rhiannon added: "We’re not trying to be original, we just want people to know that Cairo has been in Brixton for so long. People need to know that there are places in Brixton from “back in the day” that are still here. We’re still here, we’re still going, come check us out!"

 

For opening times and contact details, visit https://www.cafecairo.co.uk

Facebook: Café Cairo

The Fall

(originally published in Third Lives Matters magazine, summer issue)

Britain’s National Youth Theatre celebrated its 60th birthday by staging a hard-hitting play about the way young people see their relationships with old people, ageing and their own futures. James Perrett, 27, went to see it for TAM 

“Do you think it’s that bad, being that old?”  

“I suppose we’ll find out soon enough.” 

What is your life worth? Not existentially, but in cold, hard cash? 

That is the question throughout the three subplots of James Fritz’s The Fall, recently performed by the National Youth Theatre at Southwark Playhouse in London. 

Each story questioned the balance between the value of an older person’s life and that of the young people around them. 

How much can the younger generation truly empathise with the older, when the former feels dispossessed and views the latter as financially secure? 

The first: two young lovers break into a 92-year old’s house to find him semi-conscious, having taken an overdose. The ethical question: do they leave him to die “the way he wanted” or do they call an ambulance, risking their own arrest? 

They already resent the man for living in "house number three" of the Monopoly board they will never get on. The dissonance between their ages and his is clear in their attitudes towards “pills and shit like that keeping us alive too long.” 

Is leaving him to die kind, or self-serving? 

The second: a tale of getting old through the eyes of those around you. 

We watch a couple's life grow until they are "48 and still renting", struggling to raise a teenager and fractured with disagreement about accepting the offer of the husband's mother, Jean, to sell her house and give them the money. In the end, the husband refuses, and Jean has to die before she can help her family. 

We never see the slowly ailing Jean; she's the abstract concept of "getting old" that lingers in the minds of the young. 

The disgraceful lack of help is highlighted: a government-funded carer has 15 minutes to get to the house, finish and leave. This may be the only human contact an old person has for the entire day. "How can there be no help?" the wife asks, as we ask it too. 

The third: a dystopian but realistic vision of current under-25s as over-95s, in a home offering euthanasia as a means to provide financial security for their families. 

This may be a dramatic knee-jerk solution to our very real housing problem and to the perception that there are “too many” old people. But one only has to think about it to wonder what the consequences of the dearth of affordable housing will be 70 years from now as governments continue to ignore it. 

Might being priced out of this world be 2088's version of the “social cleansing” that is today seeing people priced out of their homes as private replaces social housing in cities all over the UK? 

My Conversation With: A Gay Virgin

(Originally published in Dear Boy Magazine Issue 03am, May 2018)

Dawn: for some people it means sliding out of a stranger's bed, crawling around the floor in search of their underwear then skulking down a street, staring into the window of every Prius hoping to find their Uber driver. For some it means waking up alone, by choice.

When somebody close to me told me that not only she but also a number of friends were saving themselves for marriage I thought it was not just rare these days, especially for people her age, but surely very difficult. I thought there might be LGBTQ+ people choosing to do the same but after reaching out on Twitter, hunting through Meetup groups, calling churches and asking old friends, I found nobody.

Just before I gave up on the notion that we're not all the sex-obsessed animals that mainstream LGBTQ+ media would have us be, three brave men stepped forward.



This is one of their stories:

Sam, not his real name, is 23, out ("I can't say two words and stay in") and living in Manchester. He's chirpy, quirky, and by the end of the conversation I think he's pretty wise beyond his years, in contrast to one of the first things he tells me:


S: Once you get to a certain age and you've still not had sex It's kind of like, you know, you're seen as immature. There is a kind of barrier between me and a lot of my other friends who are gay because they've obviously had committed relationships, some have even got married so there's always something in my head that I feel like I’m not emotionally there yet. I'm not as mature as you guys. I know that sounds so stupid but I feel like I’m a child in comparison.


JP: Have you had any relationships?
S: Maybe two years ago I was seeing a guy; he didn’t want to make it official and stuff but when he turned around and was like we're ready to, you know, do it, I kind of wanted to make it official... And I remember he just freaked out about that and ghosted me a little bit all because I didn't have sex with him that one time.

Sam has had challenges with his mental health as well; a combination of these snowballing insecurities and the struggle to fit in with friendship groups, especially at university:


S: The conversation of sex would come up and I wouldn't be allowed to talk about it because you know “you're Sam you don't do that, you don't have sex, it's weird, ew.” And I was put in a down spiral because if I'm not allowed to feel confident or sexy around people and I can’t talk about it and I can’t act in a certain way, it put me in a state of "I'm not liked by anybody" so I ended up having to go to counselling. Every time I was anywhere I was thinking people were like ‘oh can you just go away you're not on our level’ and I even find that in the gay community.



JP: What about guys in Manchester, do they expect sex from you?

S: There is a group of gay guys I go out with but they're very much "I am masc4masc only". They get offers quite a lot when we go out; I find myself standing in front of someone's back usually. The minute we walk into G-A-Y they just whack their tops off and it's like great...I'm going to go invisible.


JP: When it comes down to it, have you got close to having sex? And what is it that’s stopping you?

S: Usually what happens is the other guy wants to but my reasoning for it is I'm doing that thing that all naïve 13-year-old teenage girls do and say "I'm waiting for that special person, I'm waiting for that one person to come into my life who I can be with and trust." Because it is quite a big deal. I want to get there on my own terms. I know for a fact I'm not being frigid, I'm not being uptight, I'm not closing people off I'm just waiting. I think if you put all your cards out on the table first night. I don't think I’d ever find somebody who'd want to stick around. I know that's an exaggeration but that's honestly another reason why I withhold myself because I think if we allow this to happen will you be around next week to say let's go out for a drink? Because I don't think you will be.


At the beginning of our chat I asked Sam if he felt he'd been pressured into having sex by guys and he told me that he hadn't. So the next story he told me, of a guy he met on Grindr in the early hours of a lonely morning, was troubling:


S: He came over baked off his tits and he was drunk and I didn't realise. It was one of those ones that went on and on and I was not feeling it in the slightest, there was no desire, I was totally turned off. He was asking to do really weird things…it was a nightmare.
It took a long time and fingers were in places that they shouldn't have been. Afterwards he literally just got up and left. He didn't say anything. In that moment I'll be honest I did curl up in bed and cry for a little bit, because I was made to feel totally like a cum-soaked rag. I was like ‘I don't want to do this anymore; I shouldn't have to put up with this.’

JP: And did you feel like you could say no during it? Or did you feel too uncomfortable?

S: Any kind of uncomfortable feelings I had I had to get rid of them because in that moment he was asking me to do really quite nasty stuff.


JP: What was he asking you to do?

S: Well, he asked me to take bowel movements on him. Which I wasn't going to do! And he kept asking to bite on things, asked if I had any items he could suck on while I was doing things. He was asking weird things and then he would try to have his way with me, put it like that. And I had to say ‘no we're not doing that.’ And he said ‘no we're doing it.’ And I'd say ‘no we're not doing it!’ And it did kind of, I was hoping it wouldn't become a rape situation. I had to put my foot down and I was scared, because he was trying to have his way with me. I was losing control of the situation. Fortunately, he went a little bit too crazy downstairs and he finished off there and then and it didn't have a chance to escalate, which I was so thankful for.


I worry that Sam doesn’t realise the seriousness of this guy's behaviour; that when he set off to Sam’s house "everything but" was not an option. That this story didn't instantly spring up in his mind invokes in me a fear that this kind of thing might be casually passed off as "just another Grindr disaster" across a glass of Pinot Grigio.


S: In myself, I feel emotionally immature in that I have not gone that way with men yet but loads of them have and I seem to be the one with the level head. Again, I feel like that should be flipped around; I feel that those who have got the level headed mind should be in a committed relationship, with an interest, and those that aren't in that shouldn't be getting what they get. I feel like I’m years behind in gay years, I feel like there's still that barrier that's stopping me from being like I'm on that same level. But that's something I need to break through myself really and that's what I'm working on.



Two other very brave men shared their inspiring and painful stories with me in the hopes that others like them may read it and know they’re not alone in the world. Read the rest of the interview on https://www.dearboymag.com/stories/

Death in Dulwich, Homicide in Herne Hill – watch out Peckham and Streatham!

(Originally published on the Brixton Blog 26/04/18) 

I talked Agatha Christie, Elizabethan bear-baiters and murder most foul in our neighbouring leafy suburb of Dulwich, with author of The London Murder Mysteries series, Alice Castle.

Celebrated author Alice Castle knows a lot about Dulwich. She also knows a lot about crime writing and why so many have been inspired by the area to write about the darkest side of humankind: murder.

We caught up on a sunny Wednesday at Dulwich Books on Croxted Road, ahead of their event: Life and Death in Dulwich With Alice Castle that evening.


So, what is it about this part of South London that you think has inspired so many people?

It’s an interesting conundrum because it’s such a beautiful place, it’s a fantastic façade and seeing a lovely façade always makes me wonder what’s underneath it and I’m sure I’m not alone in that.

I think that’s partly because the Dulwich Estate has had a very strong role in keeping the place unchanged, unlike the rest of south London.

Dulwich has hardly changed at all. Yu can look at the old photos from 100 years ago anyway and see that it’s pretty much the same. !I think that strict, strict control has been a factor in allowing people to think about things and let people’s imaginations run to dark, dark corners.

Edward Alleyn, who bought Dulwich in 1605, was a sort of raffish character. He ran brothels and did bear-baiting and that’s where he made his money. We think of him as this very sedate Shakespearean actor but, actually, he was into all sorts of stuff and had a lot of fingers in lots of pies and that brought a lot of like minded people to the area.

You’ve got this unchanging, tranquil scene and a lot of creative, experimental, people and that sort of juxtaposition has made people think about crime. It’s bizarre but there have been so many crime writers: Raymond Chandler; Simon Brett, who went to Alleyn’s School, has written about 200 crime novels; P G Wodehouse, though not a strict crime writer as it were … his character Bertie Wooster was always up to some sort of crime, breaking into stately homes or nicking policemen’s helmets; Enid Blyton was born here and she wrote at least two series all about crimes, the Famous Five and the Secret Seven spend every summer holiday unmasking foreigners who’ve done terrible things!

Even Charles Dickens – who didn’t live here but used to come here a lot and drink in the Greyhound in the village – he used to write a lot about the Victorian crime scene, particularly in books like Oliver Twist with Fagin and the pickpockets. All that is very, very accurately written, I did history at university and I specialised in the Victorian city; his descriptions of the gangs of pic pockets are completely spot on. so he did do his research.

I think it’s a strange and interesting little quirk that people think about crime while sitting here looking at the picturesque windows and wondering what’s behind the façade.


I read that you’re a fan of Agatha and the titles of your London Murder Mystery series are quite Christie-esque; how do you feel about her legacy for women crime writers in the 21st century?

Well I think she was a mould breaker. She had a very long run as being hugely successful, her first book was stratospherically successful and, if you read it now, it’s still very surprising. I think she did lay the path open to other women crime writers and then it became this amazing era where you had people like D L Sayers and Majorie Allingham and Ngaio Marsh taking up the baton, pushing the crime genre into all these psychological areas and literary fiction like The Tiger in the Smoke – it’s a very beautifully written book.

Agatha Christie is often criticised for having quite “cardboardy” characters, but we still love her plots. I wouldn’t say that she’s like Shakespeare, but, in the way that her plots can be reinterpreted, she is slightly similar; the mechanics of the plots are amazing really. You can play them in all different ways.

You may hate her individual books and think some of her plot devices, you know, unexpected twins or whatever, are a bit hackneyed, but she has some real gems in there. She had a lithium poisoning, for instance, years before Litvinenko so she was way ahead of her time in many ways.


What do you see as the differences between women crime writers and your male counterparts?

I don’t know. I think the trite thing to say would be that women don’t write such violent stories but that’s not true, they write some really horrible stories!

I think there’s a kind of cold gaze that women sometimes have that people can find disconcerting. I think men, this is a terrible generalisation, but I think men are maybe more concerned with keeping the action moving forward, the page is turning because stuff is happening whereas sometimes it’s quite nice to dwell on the why. I don’t know, maybe women are very good at “whydunnits”.


Do you see yourself in your lead character Beth and, if not, has it been tempting to put any of yourself in that character?

I think people always presume that your lead character is you to some extent so I’ve been quite careful to make sure that she’s quite different. She’s 20 years younger than me, she’s a single mother, she’s got a fringe!

I think the main difference is that she’s a lot braver. She’s not reckless exactly, but when she’s in the middle of a case or something she’ll throw herself into danger which I’d never do! I watch a thriller and somebody’s going down into the cellar with a torch that’s running out I think “no don’t do it! Turn around!” But Beth would definitely go into the cellar, so I think, in a way, there’s a bit of wish fulfilment in her character in that she is so brave, she does venture more and I think “good on her!”

But at the same time, she’s got a lot of self-doubt so I hope she’s sort of relatable to most women; wracked with doubt about what they’re wearing to have they screwed up their children? Never ends really does it.


As a seasoned journalist what, if any, real-life crimes have crept their way into your books?

One book is based on an actual crime which caught my eye because it was just such a sad story. I’m always looking out for weird deaths. That sounds awful, but there’s plenty out there that’s actually happening, you don’t need to search for terribly clever plot devices because it’s out there.


How many more locations have you got in the pipeline for the series?

Well Homicide in Herne Hill is coming out this winter and then the next one will be in Peckham Rye and then I’m thinking of Streatham after that.


What advice would you give to people who think they have a really good story and it’s a case of turning that story into a book?

Just do it. Just start and see where you get to. It could take a long time or it could just flow. But you never know unless you give it a go.



Before turning to crime, Alice Castle was a UK newspaper journalist for The Daily Express, The Times and The Daily Telegraph. Her first book, Hot Chocolate, set in Brussels and London, was a European hit and sold out in two weeks.

Death in Dulwich was published in September 2017 and has been a number one best-seller in the UK, US, Canada, France, Spain and Germany. A sequel, The Girl in the Gallery was published in December 2017 to critical acclaim. Calamity in Camberwell, the third book in the London Murder Mystery series, will be published this summer, with Homicide in Herne Hill due to follow in early 2019. Alice is currently working on the fifth London Murder Mystery adventure. Once again, it will feature Beth Haldane and DI Harry York.

Alice is also a mummy blogger and book reviewer via her website, Facebook and Twitter. To buy books: Girl in the Gallery, Death in Dulwich, Hot Chocolate

She lives in South London and is married with two children, two step-children and two cats.

My Conversation With: Two Internet Sugar Daddies

Monday afternoon: reports have been sent; reports have been ignored; things that require any brain power have been surreptitiously filed away. The mind is full of memories: beautiful, sun-kissed, prosecco-hazy memories of the summer that lead to that inevitable, millennial question: "Can’t I just have someone pay my way through life?" 

Once, as a student, I signed up to an escort service because I wanted money to buy shoes (sorry Mum) but only got as far as one uncomfortable phone call with an elderly man during which he asked me what services I provide and I gave him the classic, and classically unsexy, "I can do whatever you want me to do". I am a poor man’s Julia Roberts.

I swiftly removed my profile and my escort career was over as quickly as the phone call had been. But what about people who do manage to do this successfully? I get the motivation for a "Sugar Baby" but what, besides the obvious, is in it for the daddy?

Unsurprisingly my investigation got off to a slow start but a few unanswered tweets, some questionable profile pictures and two days later, I had a couple of cautious but willing participants. Both handles were @SugarDaddy so let’s call them Daddy One and Daddy Two because that also sounds extra naughty.

"I have been contacted by several playboy models and porn stars" Daddy One boasts; all traces of nervousness gone after initial protestation of inexperience.

I should add, for context, that this conversation is happening in my Twitter DMs against a backdrop of noisy tourist children running around the British Museum.

Did he take them up on the offer?

"One of the playboy models was out of her mind asking for $50,000 if I'd like to meet her."

That’s a no, then?

I'm curious as to how two young men found themselves in this line of work, when I’d always attributed Sugar Daddies to lonely, rich widowers and bachelors-who-left-it-too-late.

Daddy Two, a guy in his 20s from Detroit, is also relatively new to the scene, having explored it for about a year. He talks about his experience as if he fell into it like a grad job: “It wasn’t really me thinking of myself as a sugar daddy at first,” he says. “I found a woman attractive on social media and simply gave her money.”

While Findom (a portmanteau of Financial Domination) is a fetish that's starting to creep into mainstream conversation, both Daddies insist that it's not what drives them: "It's not a fetish. I do this because I like spoiling ladies but don't like the relationship commitments," Daddy One tells me; a Middle Eastern guy in his mid 20s.

What I've seen so far on the internet is a mix between a fetishized and professional relationship but when I put the question of motives to the guys they both talk about wanting to help people, choosing ladies they feel "deserve" their lavish gifts and Daddy One even goes so far as to say he "hate(s) girls who ask for things. I will spoil you if I want to."

"I'm not lonely or anything it's just that I do make a lot of money," expands Daddy Two. "It's more of a habit than a fetish, I just really enjoy making them happy. Knowing they have someone if they need help."

I don't think you could quite call it a God complex but a Good Samaritan complex seems accurate. These men both get off – either sexually or non-sexually – on being needed, not wanted.

Daddy One's bravado is back as he continues to tell me he's "not [an] ordinary bloke", as if for a second I thought he was: "I am not the mainstream guy who wants the attention and will pay for it.

"I just like to spoil girls that I think deserve it. 

"Most of the time I also help them if they have a legitimate Go Fund Me account to help with surgeries/school."

So, what about the sex? To my surprise and confusion, both say they’ve never actually met a woman they’ve paid gifts and money to due to small issues like security, time, or the fact they live on the other side of the world. 

Daddy One claims he doesn’t care about sex; with ladies in his personal life who take care of those kicks. 

I suggest they’re just internet relationships with money, but Daddy Two is vehement: “The answer is no, I do not use the internet for sexual desires.”

I can feel Daddy One pulling away as we continue to chat and, deciding that delving into the question of Middle Eastern attitudes towards women was unwise over Twitter with a stranger, I go for my theory of unrequited love:

"In terms of relationships then, have you had them in the past?"

"What do you mean relationships?"

"So, girlfriends. Or dating exclusively without financial reward."

"Never had that."


My conversations with these guys followed very similar patterns in that neither one pays for sex; they just spend copious amounts of money on Amazon wish lists and surgery bills to feel needed. Is this the new Hugh for the internet age? Or, being amateur in my search, have I just stumbled upon the amateurs of the industry? I did find them on Twitter, after all.

It must be so easy for Sugar Babies to play on, knowing the Daddy would struggle to catch up with them if they took the money and ran. "Well of course there are those that like to run off after sending a big amount," Daddy Two laments.

I saved the burning question that most people ask until last: "How DO you have the money to splash on ladies?"

Daddy Two: "All I can say is that I am self-employed."

No need to dwell on that one, I think we get it.

Daddy One: "Family business."

Ah, so Daddy One has a Sugar Daddy of his own.

Gay Twitter: Should We Be Exclusive?

What is it about that phrase "apply for membership" that is simultaneously repugnant and intriguing? It's like my personality splits instantly; one half goes "urgh" and walks away, the other is halfway through typing an application form detailing why it is I would be great for this club and frantically trying to find 'cool' photos to upload to Instagram.

But those clubs make money from being exclusive; “Gay Twitter™", however, does and should not.

So why, oh why, are gays still trying to siphon themselves off from the rest of life? Why do people include an ACTUAL TRADEMARK after 'Gay Twitter'? These are all questions I ask myself as I scroll through my Twitter feed each morning.
Still, my issue isn’t with the idea of the name ‘Gay Twitter’ itself; that’s just the title for a demographic of Twitter users, really. My issue is with some of the influential members of ‘Gay Twitter’ and the damage I feel they’re doing to what we strive to keep an open, encompassing community.

Looking for inspiration, guidance and I'll be honest some networking opportunities, I started following a few of the editors, sub-editors, contributors etc of certain successful flagship LGBT+ publications on Twitter. While I was expecting to be inspired as a wannabe-editor, I’m continually disappointed by what I can see is just one big clique. “Unfollow them!” you say? Why? I’d have nothing to write about.

I watch these intelligent, prominent writers spend all day @ing each other in tweets; usually about an in joke and/or anal sex. And when their followers try to chime in? Oh, don’t expect a response unless you’re someone they have/want to/are going to shag. Didn't we grow out of that somewhere after GCSEs? Haven't we gays all had enough of feeling left out of a social group when we were at school?

What upsets me the most is that some of these are the people running the publications that I looked up to when I was desperate to get out of small town life and be one of them. For example, Gay Times has a print readership of 170,000 people; 869,411 web page views and a social media following of 13,348,700 people. In total, their reach is two million!* That's two million people in their sphere of influence that they’re either peacocking in front of or ignoring completely.


Now don’t get me wrong, the beauty of Twitter is that it’s an unfiltered stream of consciousness and it’s your own personal account but they cannot deny that they're in the public eye (hello? You have a big blue tick next to your handle!) These guys are writers after all; write something that young gays will look up to! When there's so much out there with the potential to damage young minds and yet even more channels for them to reach out through, how about show the next generation how to be dignified LGBT+ people by tweeting something that doesn't involve you being a bitch? How about using your high profile for charitable good, or to highlight issues from the community? I'd love to hear a voice that isn't just cynicism and sycophantism.

The private members’ clubs I get: being exclusive is literally their business, it's in the title. But 'Gay Twitter' needs a wakeup call: engage, inspire, broaden some knowledge - because the elitism is hurtful.

While I'm at it, dear publishing Lords, give me a man topless on the cover of a gay lifestyle magazine who doesn't have abs! But that rant is for another day when I haven’t eaten a Five Guys straight after the gym.



*Gay Times Publishers Statement July 2015