Douglas Stewart

And I remember him standing over it and saying, I can't wear that, that looks really, you know, that looks... He used the slur for it.

And I just thought to myself, wow, men are really stuck here, you know, but...

They really have themselves in their own trap.

And I was only like 12 or 13, but I just thought this is insane.

Well, I think one of the things that sort of made me very conspicuous to these other boys was the fact that my mother dressed me for all of my childhood, which is not unusual for children.

But I do think there comes a point where boys sort of rebel against that and want to be their own person and have their own hairstyle.

And I never reached that point because I was so close with my mother.

So when I look back on photos now, I almost look like the husband my mother wishes.

Yeah.

She had, you know, I have very carefully parted hair.

I look at least 30 years older than I am when I'm like, you know, eight years old.

And I look back on it now and I'm just so out of time with all the other boys who were a little bit sort of shabby and knockabout and crazy.

And so my own sense of style when I get to fashion college and I start to develop it comes very slowly for me.

But it also comes in the mid-90s when people are finally really playing with gender in an interesting way.

When we start to hear things like unisex and ambiguous and things like that.

And so I take all opportunities to sort of blend genders and really go through about six years where I'm playing with that, the things that had oppressed me as a child.

I once had this conversation with the great Irish writer Colm Toibin, who is a little older than I am.

And he said, oh, I used to go to gay bars in Glasgow when you would have been a child.

And he said they were always under the railway station and they always felt like they were full of sort of hairy, sweaty, self-loathing Presbyterians.

And I felt that was a part of gay history in my city that I didn't access.