Monday Musings: Pride Special
Considering My Crushes & How You Can Support a Very Important Cause
It’s Pride Month! Which means I have a great excuse to share a piece I had a lot of fun writing last year. This essay was originally published via
’s smart, funny and revolutionarily sex-positive Substack She Dare’s To Say. Almaz is a multidisciplinary writer and creative working in sexuality education, journalism and branding. Her Substack is a space where she explores how culture impacts the way we engage with sexuality, pleasure, intimacy and desire. You can read the latest post here.When Almaz asked me to write a guest piece for her series Considering My Crushes, I jumped at the chance. What unfurled was a nostalgic journey towards a greater understanding of my queerness and, in turn, myself.
I’m so excited (and slightly nervous!) to share it with you.
First though…
A bit of housekeeping
It’s now just 2.5 months until my novel False Idols lands in bookstores (yikes!). I’m so happy and excited to be able to gift all new paid subscribers a preview of the first three chapters. In a stunning PDF, you’ll get the front and back covers as well as the first 34 pages in tablet, phone-friendly and printable format. All you have to do is reply to your welcome email saying you want your copy when you sign up as a paid subscriber.
For those of you who have been paid subscribers for more than a year and have now signed up for another year, I have something even more special for you: A signed proof of the entire novel that you can hold in your hands. Just drop me a line with your address and I’ll send it over. This offer is also open to anyone who chooses to come on board as a Founding Member.
When I was eight years old, Zara, a girl in the year above, emerged from the Sex Education talk our school had just done for her year group, cornered me in the hallway and told me everything she’d just heard.
I was horrified. Surely this couldn’t be true. The idea of bleeding for a whole week every month and allowing someone else to put themselves inside of you sounded both terrifying and disgusting. Traumatised, I told my mother what Zara had said while on the walk home, in the hope she’d laugh and say that Zara was a wind up merchant who was telling fibs. But she didn’t. She confirmed my fears (as gently as possible) but explained I wouldn’t need to worry about any of this stuff for several more years at least.
& So I didn’t, engaging in harmless crushes and enjoying the funny little fizz of fantasises without attaching the burden of too much detail to them.
The first dream I ever had that could be construed as sexual featured the pop artist Usher. The odd thing about this is that I’d never fancied him or even thought about him in that context before. What’s even more odd is that, in truth, it wasn’t really a sex dream. He basically just gave me a really good hug. But, I remember the weight of him, how defined his muscles felt and, most notably, how thrilled I was by the whole experience when I woke up.
It was around this time that I developed five serious crushes.
The first was on a boy called Lee who used to come and wash my Dad’s car. My Dad drove an old white Citroen which, to be honest, he was perfectly capable of cleaning himself. But Dad took a shine to Lee and thought it was great that he was so entrepreneurial and willing to work hard for the few quid he asked for in return. It made a change from the other local lads who spent their free time throwing eggs at windows and putting fireworks in wheely bins.
So, Lee ended up coming fairly regularly and, each time he did, it was the highlight of my week. I’d make sure I was wearing my favourite clothes and then I’d stand by the door chatting to him about God-knows-what. I’d usually only get a couple of precious minutes before Dad would shoo me away.
Lee was about 14, ridiculously good looking and very, very cool. He was tall, lean, permanently tanned and, most importantly of all, he had a bike. I was 8 and awkward but, for some strange reason, my child-mind convinced me I was in with a chance, despite Lee offering me nothing but mere politeness. The reason why I remember him always being so smiley is likely because he thought I was a funny little thing and perhaps, embarrassingly, it was entirely obvious that I was desperate to impress him.
Lee eventually stopped coming. Hopefully, not because of me. I think I vaguely remember Dad saying he’d started an apprenticeship and his absence didn’t matter for long. I had already developed another crush. Another older boy who attended the local amateur dramatics youth group I had recently enrolled in. Danny wasn’t just chatty and charismatic like Lee was. He was talented. He could sing, dance and act like nobody’s business. And he was almost certainly gay. This turned out to be the case for many of the boys I had crushes on between the ages of 8 and 12. Even when they were age appropriate, they were still out of reach.
But none quite so out of reach as my biggest childhood crush: Aladdin. Yes. The cartoon character in the Disney film. I couldn’t tell you how many times I watched that film as a kid. Not only was it the first time I’d seen a whole cast of cartoon characters with the same colour skin as me but Aladdin was easily the most beautiful man I’d ever seen.
The smooth chest, that wisp of hair that always fell into his eyes and, of course, that million dollar smile, always shining bright, despite his “street rat” status. I imagined the voice actor must look exactly like him and how, one day, I would meet him and we’d immediately fall in love. What a shock it was to discover that all of the voice actors on the film were, in fact, white and the actor playing Aladdin couldn’t have looked less like him. Thankfully, this wasn’t something I found out until my twenties, and so that fantasy lived on for many years.
Footballer Paul Ince played for Manchester United when I was very small and his club legend status continued long after he left the club and went to play for Inter Milan. His official Merlin football sticker lived in a little box in my room alongside a few others, my burgeoning collection of pogs and a couple of Zig and Zag collectors’ items I’d got in cereal packets. I saw Paul’s time in Serie A as a sort of sabbatical. He’ll be back, I told myself, as I stole clandestine glances at his sticker whenever I was alone in my room.
& He was. At least, back in the Premier League. Only, he didn’t return to Manchester United. Instead, he signed for Liverpool, our rivals and my Dad’s favourite team. This meant he was on the TV all the time again, which only drove home the betrayal. He was back where I could see him except for the fact he wasn’t. He was there. With them. Our love affair was over. I had to move on.
One childhood crush I still stand by is Take That’s Jason Orange. Of all the members of this particular boyband I could’ve fancied, he’s the one who has arguably matured the best. Like my amateur dramatics crush Danny, he could sing (sort of), he could dance, and he always seemed like a relatively nice young man. He seemed less interested in fame than the other members of the group (illustrated by the fact that he’s almost totally disappeared in recent years) and I found an attractive mysteriousness in that. I imagine he is now living off grid somewhere like India or Indonesia, doing shitloads of yoga and meditation or maybe making art is some other form. I think we’d get on.1
Between the ages of 6 and 9 years old, I was pretty obsessed with the Spice Girls. More specifically, Mel C. In playground games of “let’s pretend”, my friends and I would do routines and sing their songs and I would always beg to be cast as Mel. & I was. Just... the other Mel. Don’t get me wrong, Mel B was awesome, I just resented being pushed into playing her simply because I was the only girl of Black heritage to hand. I wasn’t “scary”. I was “sporty”! Couldn’t they see that?
It wasn’t until my mid-teens that I started to wonder if I did want to be Mel C or if it was something else. The Spice Girls had long since broken up, yet I still thought about her. I’d followed her solo career and knew all her songs but it was more than that. I liked looking at her. The same way I liked looking at boys I fancied.
Maybe I’m just curious, I told myself. It doesn’t mean anything…
You like boys, I said, over and over in my head. There was evidence of that written all over my journals and scrap bits of paper. My first name coupled with their last name. Meet a boy, fall in love, get married, have babies. Happily ever after. That was the “natural” order of things. This was just a phase.
But then, I developed a crush on a girl in my eighth grade English class. It was a year after we’d emigrated from Manchester, UK to Georgia, USA and let me tell you, the Bible Belt did not feel like a safe place to be LGBTQ+ at that time. I didn’t even want to question my sexuality, let alone admit to anything.
The girl in question sat in the row next to me, several desks towards the front of the class. In retrospect, it’s possible the reason I struggled to grasp English grammar was that, instead of focusing on the teacher, I was staring at my crush. Watching the way her long hair snaked down her back. Hoping for a glimpse of her profile when she turned her head slightly to the right. I thought a lot about being with her in ways I’d never thought about being with boys before. Until then, I hadn’t understood why anyone would want to kiss with tongues or have sex but this crush helped me get it. Even though she never, ever found out how I felt.
Thank God.
I read, in a magazine, that this was a phase very common for girls going through puberty. I was just curious, the writer told me. Curious about other women’s bodies. This was “normal”.
Another magazine featured Orlando Bloom on the cover soon after and I kept that issue under my bed, ready to look at every time I doubted my heterosexuality. He became a sort of litmus test. As long as I still fancied him, everything was absolutely fine. It didn’t matter that I also thought a lot about Jennifer Connelly in A Beautiful Mind, Eva Longoria in Desperate Housewives, Aisha Tyler’s guest stint on Friends and those pictures of actors Salma Hayek and Sophia Bush that I’d torn out of magazines and kept.
I moved back to the UK to go to University when I was 18. I was going out, kissing boys, drinking and not really thinking about anything beyond the next party and my studies. It was another three years before I came out as bisexual and, other than my Mum, it didn’t seem much of a surprise to anyone.
So what was the thing that finally got me out of the closet?
You would think, dear reader, it was the girl I had been on several dates with and had decided I wanted to marry. But it wasn’t. In all honesty, it was probably down to the TV show Sugar Rush because watching that was the first time I felt like it was genuinely okay for girls to like girls. It also made me realise that lesbians and bisexual women came in many different forms, despite the homophobic media landscape of the 90s and noughties attempting to convince us otherwise.
The Channel 4, youth skewing comedy-drama was set in Brighton and was all about the misadventures of a teenage lesbian called Kim and her ridiculously fun and totally reckless friend Sugar. Coincidentally, Sugar’s real name was Maria Sweet (insanely close to my name, no?) and she was mixed race so this show really made me feel seen in a variety of ways. It also starred a young Andrew Garfield, who was apparently 22 at the time but looked about 14.
Sugar Rush normalised Queerness for me by providing relatable characters excited about exploring and owning their sexuality. Plus, it gave me a whole new crush in the beret-wearing, sex-postive DJ, Saint, Kim’s long term love interest. The show also massively romanticised Brighton, filling my head with fantasies: Walking along the beach front with salt and vinegar covered chip shop chips, arm in arm with the love of my life, dates in ice cream parlours and fun-filled nights in arcades.
These days, I’m engaged to a man (gasp) and I never actually made it to Brighton in the end. But coming out was still absolutely worth it. Growing up admiring such a broad spectrum of people is part of what makes me... well... me and being able to talk about all current and historical crushes without shame or fear is a privilege everyone deserves.
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Q&A
Did you have any crushes on cartoon characters or unexpected famous/infamous people when you were growing up (or even now!)? If so, I’d love to hear about it in the comments. My Aladdin crush can’t be that unusual, can it? 😂
This Pride month, I’m keen to shine a spotlight on a serious issue currently impacting the LGBTQ+ community in the most challenging of ways.
A recent UK Supreme Court judgement has opened the door to widespread discrimination against transgender and non-binary people and has legitimised a worldview that puts us all in danger. You can read more about this in my piece on the subject:
What’s unfolding now is an attempt to reverse progress. To punish honesty and to squeeze identity back into a narrow, rigid binary.
We cannot let this run.
One of the organisations seeking to support our trans, non-binary and intersex siblings through this horrendous ruling and beyond is the brilliant Not A Phase. They fund initiatives that help improve and uplift the lives of trans+ adults, including a wonderful fitness, wellbeing and self-defence programme called Misfits.
Until the end of this month, I’ll be donating any new subscribers’ first month’s subscription fee (or equivalent for yearly subscribers) to Not A Phase.
So, if you sign up for a paid membership to The Ampersand by 30th June, you’ll get full access to every post and special member perks, all whilst knowing you’re supporting an incredible cause.
& Finally…
I had the best time doing my first book event for False Idols last week at Derby Book Festival, answering audience questions about the book and signing proof copies. Thank you to all who came!
STYLIST magazine also recently featured False Idols as one of six “must read” novels for those “obsessed with cults”. If that sounds up your street and you haven’t yet pre-ordered your copy, you can do so here:
Happy Pride Month, everyone! &, As always, thank you for being here.
With love,
xK
Update: A few months ago, Jason Orange walked into my favourite local coffee shop and ordered a hibiscus tea. I could not believe my eyes. We exchanged a smile and I quietly went to back to working on final edits for my book. The world is smaller than any of us know.