Douglas Stewart

Why are you like that?

And so I was just deemed as being too effeminate very, very young.

And that was before I had any sexual notions at all.

But that sort of followed me all the way through my youth.

And made me feel very lonely in the only place I think I ever felt like I belonged, which has been a sort of through line in all of my work.

Actually, I had a really complicated relationship with religion when I was a child.

I was actually what was essentially born into a mixed marriage.

My father was Protestant.

My mother was Catholic.

And at the time, that was deeply taboo.

And so all throughout my life, there was sort of confusion over what my spiritual upbringing should be.

And all my family rituals were Catholic, but all my education was Protestant.

And yet no one quite fully claimed me and so I was a little bit outside of religion.

It became a more pressing urgent matter for me when I became a teenager because often in the east end of Glasgow where I grew up, young boys would organize themselves into tribes and on the weekends they would get together and then they would fight the opposite tribe.

And the tribe was often very loosely organized around religion so there would be a group of Protestant boys versus a group of Catholic boys.

But for me, from the age of 14 to maybe 16, I was going out every Saturday night and having pitch battles as a Protestant against the Catholics.

But then as soon as that was all over and we'd congratulated each other, and by the way, the fighting was fun.

The young men enjoyed doing that.

It wasn't just about violence in a negative sense.

It was a way to sort of have a camaraderie.