Juno Dawson: on teenage crushes, books, gender and fashion

Hi, I'm David Sheppeard. And I'm Roni Guetta. And this is My Queer Museum, a podcast where we let some of our objects tell our queer stories. So for our first time listeners, Roni, can you just tell me a little bit more about the concept of this podcast? Well, we've invited some of our favourite queer people in Brighton and Hove to tell us which objects they would put in an imaginary queer museum. And these are their stories. Hi Juno. Thanks for joining us today. Hello. Thank you for having me. Thank you for letting me use your venue. Juno has just been, can I say what you've just been doing? Yeah. Juno has just been dressed as a nun. Juno has just been dressed as a nun. Having a, yeah, her pictures taken in the church.

Yes. I've seen some of them. They look really good as well. Like it looks really churchy. Which is funny. You look very convincing, I must say. Well, it's a real nurse. It's like we didn't, when we discussed this creative, I was really, really specific. I didn't want to do sexy nun. Yeah. Like, in fact, we even talked about Lady Gaga in the Alejandra video. Like she's in a latex habit. And I was like, I think that's a bit obvious and reductive. You know, I'm not looking to offend Catholics or indeed nuns. Oh no, I think you look very righteous. Thank you. Holy. Holy, I would say. Yeah, we were telling a sad, it's a sad story. It's a story of doomed obsession and forbidden lust. Would you like to introduce yourself to our listeners?

Yeah. My name is Juno Dawson. I am an author and screenwriter and very occasional actor. And I'm part of the Club Silencio Cabaret troupe in Brighton as well. So we're big Juno fans. And we thought when we started making this podcast, she was very close to the top of our list of thinking, who do we want to hear from? Very close. Not the top. It's a queer list, you know, it's very non... It's a nonsensical kind of non-hierarchical list. Excellent. Okay. Yeah. So we wanted to hear from Juno as to what she would put into our imaginary queer museum, because we ain't got a real museum, Juno. We've got an imaginary one. But we're aspiring at some point in the next 25 years to maybe have a real museum. And we would love to know what you would contribute. So maybe you could start by telling us what your first entry to the queer museum might be.

I'm going to go in chronological order of how these items kind of came into my life. So the first one is, and only a certain age of person will know the reference, is the 1990s board game Heartthrob. Which it is, the idea is, it's a board game that you play with your pre-adolescent girlfriends. And there are pictures of very 90s looking sort of tween men. And they all have names like Chad and Brad and Rock and stuff. And then you've got to guess which of these men your friend would want to date. And then as the rounds begin, you reveal information about the guy. It's like, he's the class clown. He doesn't know how to drive. He only eats crisps. That kind of thing. And then with each round, you have to work out whether your friend would re-evaluate her choice. Usually your friends don't. And the general vibe is they will always go for the one they fancy the most.

Yeah. Regardless of occasionally murder sex workers might have come up as a card. But everybody always sticks with the one they really like. And that was important to me because my sister had it. And I wasn't allowed to play with it because it was a game for girls. But more importantly, there was the guy on the front of the box. And at least in the UK. So he's this very dashing kind of 90s guy. And it says, his nickname is Lips. And I really fancied Lips. And that was like, it was like, I really did. And I had like quite vivid fantasies about this Lips guy. And it was kind of a real, you know, in the Venn diagram of me not quite understanding my gender or sexuality. Lips was really important.

Because I felt gutted that I wasn't allowed to play this game because of my gender. Like it was maybe one of the first times I'd been notably excluded on the basis of my gender. But moreover, like I knew that I definitely fancied Lips. And that was quite telling as well, because I wasn't supposed to fancy boys. Did you ever get to play Heartthrob? I've got it in the boo. I'm taking it for board game night tonight. I still have it. I stole it from my sister when I went to university. So yeah, and I literally have it in the boo outside. I'm going to play it with some of my friends later this evening. Brilliant. That is incredible. Yeah. I want to also just imagine the cards with loads of sort of boy band looking guys with curtains.

They all look a bit like Slater from Saved by the Bell. Right. Yes, almost kind of, I reckon these photos were maybe taken around 1989. So that very sort of like turn of the decade. So a lot of mullets. But kind of, so they don't look necessarily very 80s, but a bit kind of, who else did they look a bit like? Yeah, I'm going to say around 1989 to 91 these photographs were taken. Yeah. It's a very strong kind of aesthetic. And I think, do you still, I found it hard as somebody that like grew up in the era of kind of gladiators on television. There are certain formative things that I think, God, I wish I could get rid of that out of my kind of like, things that I'm attracted to. No, you know, because the gladiators were hard. And I think our age group, I'm guessing we fall into the same tick box.

I believe we are. We do. We find this about, like the unitard is a powerful sexual talisman. The singlet. The singlet. Yeah, the wrestling singlet. It explains a lot about the fetish circuit really, doesn't it? Yeah. Are you still lasting after lips? Would you still go there? No, no. Which is so weird because I very much sort of evolved out of that because when I sort of hit later adolescence, my type changed entirely. And not for the better in that I started to become attracted to much older Tories. Like what darkness is this? That is a type. Well, it was Ivan Massa. I mean, there was a notable issue of Attitude where Ivan Massa was on the front cover and it was very Fifty Shades of Grey. Kind of like he's a millionaire. He lives in a mansion.

And that kind of, dare I say it, daddy figure stayed with me for a lot of my 20s. Actually, really up until I transitioned, to be honest. And then estrogen changes your outlook somewhat, I think. But yeah, now I wouldn't, if I was to see lips nowadays, well, he would look like an East London art student now. Yeah. Thank you for sharing that. That's a beautiful memory about being inside and outside. And I guess teenagers always feel like outsiders anyway, such a weird time. And it was just so unnecessary. Like I just wish I'd been able to join in. Like, I know.

It's strange. And I wonder if that game sort of came along at that period. So then I saw this when I was a teacher later on as well, which is up until about eight or nine years old, kids will play with anything. Yeah. And nobody really cares that some things are for girls or for boys. But there's a very definite sense of shaming that kind of hits well before puberty, but around sort of eight or nine years old, kids become just vile. And it just stops being cute. And I think, I wonder if that's around the time my sister got heartthrob. And then later Dreamfern, which is very similar. Oh, yeah. Thanks, Julia. You're welcome. Would you like to tell us about your object number two? What have you brought up with you?

Well, I will. I mean, it's also a plug. But wait, it's not just crass product placement. I decided after some umming and eyeing that of all my works, I think it would be mad not to include a copy of This Book Is Gay, which was my book that came out in 2013. And it was like a nonfiction guide for young LGBTQ people to sort of really answer all the questions that, you know, I had when I was 11 or 12 years old. And I mean, I suppose the reasons for putting it in are twofold. The first is that I know that book has helped a lot of young LGBT people, which is interesting because I really hated writing it. Like every day that I had to write that book was just a miserable day. I had just been dumped.

And I was supposed to be sort of talking about the virtues of queer life. And I was just like, men are awful. Gay men are the worst. If you are a gay man, I feel desperately sorry for you. And so I had to kind of work against that because I had literally been dumped by a guy who was just like, I just don't think you go to the gym enough. And I was like, so yeah, I was full of rage. And I sort of had to induct young people into the queer family while I was really not feeling it. But then, you know, since this book is gay came out, around sort of like 90% of the emails I get from young people are around that book. Either from young people themselves saying, oh my God, it's the first time I've seen myself in a book or heard the word pansexual.

Or the first time somebody has really explained the difference between transgender and transsexual. You know, kind of, I get so many lovely letters. And from parents as well, sort of saying, you know, thank you. This book is so much easier to talk about than my child. Yeah. And it's created this kind of like neutral zone where both young people and their parents can talk about the issues without having to say directly. So do you think you're a lesbian? Because, you know, they can talk about the book. Yeah. But of course, if it hadn't been for this book is gay, like I don't know how my life would have turned out. Yeah. So tell us a bit about how the book came about. What was happening for you as a writer at that?

And what if you, yeah. Did you pitch this book or was it something that was kind of foisted upon you? It was brought to me by the publisher that I was working with. I'd just signed a deal with them and I'd done a nonfiction guide around puberty. And they sort of came to me and said, could you sort of do like a similar nonfiction book, but just for LGBT people? And initially I said no, just because I hadn't massively enjoyed doing nonfiction. Like I'm always going to prefer doing fiction. And then I was in bed and I thought of the title, This Book is Gay, because it was kind of around that time that, you know, like high school students were saying, oh, my God, those trainers are so gay and that haircut is so gay.

And I kind of wanted to sort of reclaim it in a positive way for a book that was gay. And so I went back to them and said, I will do it. But it has to be on my terms. Like I want to talk about lubricant. I want to talk about, you know, sort of anal pleasure and all those things that I felt. I really think that, you know, you know, I think now by that point in 2012, 2013, schools were, you know, doing some sex ed for LGBT people. But they certainly weren't teaching young gay, lesbian and bi people about pleasure, about, you know, the difference between kind of straight sex or gay sex. And so I was like, we have to do that because otherwise, what's the point of this book? If it's not bringing something new, if it's not doing something that like a PSHE teacher wouldn't do, what's the point?

And hats off to my publisher. They were great. They never flinched from my description of golden showers or cottaging or all these terms. I was so confused. Like, I didn't know what cottaging meant, you know, until I was well into my 20s and I just nodded along. And so they really let me go for it. But it was through the process of writing it that I sat down really properly for the first time with trans people. Because at that time, my lived experience had only been as a white, gay, able-bodied person. I was kind of like, well, I need to speak to some other more diverse people because the experience of a gay disabled woman is going to be very different from my experience. So I did a huge big survey and then sort of rounded up lots of the more interesting people who I thought might have something to say.

And I did more in-depth interviews. And for the first time, really, I mean, by this point I was nearly 30, you know, I actually sat down with trans people. And, you know, there was a couple of local trans people in Brighton and then some trans people in London and then some trans people in America as well. And it says a lot about the 80s and the 90s and the environment that I grew up in, that it was the first time I'd really interrogated what it was to be trans. And particularly the interior world of a trans person. Like, I knew there were people in the world. I thought of it as a very medical thing. You know, there were, there were some people in the world that almost want to look like men or want to look like women.

And I'd not really given much thought to what happened inside a trans person. And then, you know, I would sit down with these people who were telling me, you know, when I was a child, you know, I only ever really pictured myself as a boy or I only ever really pictured myself as a girl. When I role played, it was always as a female character. You know, I, you know, I was drawn to, you know, wondering what my name would have been as a girl, what I would have looked like as a girl. Beyond just, oh, I wanted to play with Barbie. I mean, for some, for some trans people, that's the thing. Like the whole, oh, I was a tomboy thing. But for most, it was more about the way they pictured themselves. And all the way through, I was like, well, yeah, I felt like that.

Well, yeah, that's what I was like as a kid. And, and so I'd always known that was what it was like inside my head. I'd always known that I wanted to be a girl. But what I didn't realise was that that was kind of one of the things that can be a sign that you might be trans, kind of. Or that your gender identity doesn't match the gender you were told at birth, kind of. And so it was a real earth shaker. Like if it hadn't been for This Book Is Gay, would I have got there? Maybe, probably. I like to think so in the end. But it was definitely the exposure to those trans people when I was writing This Book Is Gay that really, I had to start questioning my interior world. Which, you know, I'd just taken for granted, you know, I just thought that all boys wanted to be girls, you know, or all gay guys wanted to be girls.

And I mean, and that was the other really sort of turning point. You know, I told some gay friends in London that, you know, I'd been having and asking big questions of my gender. And I was really hungover, like steaming hungover. It was New Year's Day, so New Year's Eve had been a heavy one. And I just sort of said, like, sipping this tragic cup of peppermint tea. I was like, don't just all gay men wish they were girls, though? And this table of gay men were just like, no, not once, never. And I was like, shit. And I was like, oh my God. That's really embarrassing. Kind of like, well, I was like, right, in that case, then maybe I need to think more about this gender thing. And so, yeah, that book, you know, it's changed my life, you know, on A, financially, because it's my most successful book.

But B, on a much more important level, that book literally changed my life. So I do think this book is going to might need to go in the museum. I love this story, Juno. It's like you've written something as an educator and as an elder in some respect for teenage queers. And then actually you've discovered something yourself that's really incredible. It's a very, you know, are we talking that it's a really queer process, isn't it? Yeah. You're educated, but you're also somehow learning something. I think it is. And I think that's something maybe we can all learn something from that, about that we're all, you know, we're all constantly transitioning. You know, who of us is not? And it's like, you know, I used to be really scared of getting older as well, which I think is quite common in some queer circles.

Whereas now I really quite look forward to that. And kind of what will this kind of like third part of my life be like? Kind of. And I quite look forward to changing again. Kind of. And I, but you're right. I think when I set out to write that book, I thought I knew it all. You know, I really did think that I had had it all figured out. But it's interesting. It's with, again, with hindsight, when I particularly look back at my 20s, which, you know, I was that kind of quite typical hot mess in some ways. Because, you know, the coal was coming from inside the building. Like I was running all around Brighton and all around London looking for something. You know, more success, different career, guys and money and just desperately looking for something.

But it's been really interesting that since I've transitioned, everything has just felt a lot quieter. And it's really obvious now that, you know, the alarm, it was inside my head. You know, that's, that's what I was looking for. Kind of me.

That's an amazing story. I just, I just love this idea that actually, and that happens so much in our community, doesn't it? That we go to young people as elders to teach them things. And actually we're learning so much. From them. From younger people at the moment. We're learning so, so much. Just, you know, I guess, yeah, we are the same, around the same age too. I mean, I do find myself very, for lack of better words, falling in love with teenagers at the moment. And just how, yeah, just very beautiful. That's so radical as well. Or maybe it's just that we're getting older. So we're less, I don't know. But they are, yeah, we can all learn a lot. Juno, would you like to tell us about the third entry into the crim?

Well, I am a big fan of costume museums. The V&A is my favourite London museum for this reason. And I love the sort of the stage costumes. And so the item that I will put in, well, it's either going to be one of two. So you can decide. It's either going to be the first female garment that I bought when I really properly started my transition in like 2014. 2014. And I think like a lot of trans people, I was very worried about going shopping, you know, kind of like, and having to use women's clothes shops for the reasons that transphobic people do not think. Which is, I was terrified of being attacked in a changing room. You know, I was not worried about attacking someone in a changing room. I was terrified that I was going to ask to try a dress on in H&M or wherever.

And somebody was going to be like, oh no, get out of our shop, you terrible freak, kind of. And so shopping was very scary. So the first garment that I bought was from ASOS. Other online retailers are available. And it was like, I think I remember when I wore it out for the first time, it was to the Marlborough, obviously. And my friend Stuart, I think, had assumed I was going to kind of emerge in like some sort of like ball gown. Like full, like crazy taffeta gown. And it wasn't, it was just like a really boring kind of like shift dress, like in a check. And I wore it with like some leggings underneath and some like boots. But, and the funny thing is, it was gross and didn't really suit me because it's almost like I had to relearn what suits my body.

And strangely, I kind of just wear jeans and t-shirts now. But it was, it was an important dress that has since gone to a charity shop. So I will have to go in search of it to find it. So that is why maybe the second instead in its place, I could potentially either put my wedding dress, which will be ready as soon as we're allowed to get married again. Or potentially, I think one of my, the one that will stay with me forever, which was my first night out as Juno, which was the Stonewall Equality Awards in 2015, where I wore like a tuxedo jacket and some pleather trousers with some insane skyscraper heels. And I still think that outfit is really sick. And it was kind of like how I'd always wanted to dress.

Yeah. And I'd sort of said to my friend, right, maiden voyage, everyone knows I'm Juno now. I want to dress kind of like Kate Moss. And it was just perfect. I looked exactly how I've always wanted to look. So maybe I'll donate that one to the museum. Oh, that's beautiful. That's wonderful. I like the evolution and like going from your friend imagining that you'll come out as Cinderella somehow. I don't know what he thought was going to happen. Like, did he think I was transgender or... Danny LaRue. Danny LaRue or a dragon. But then this is the thing, because there is, you know, that real confusion between sort of cross-dressers, trans people, drag queens. I think unless you spend time immersed in queer culture, a lot of people don't understand the difference between Peppermint and RuPaul, for example.

I think a lot of people wouldn't know the difference. Absolutely. Absolutely. I think, how has your kind of dress sense evolved, do you think, from that early emergence of Juno? It was like being a child again and having to learn what suits you. Not everything does, you know, and that's true whether you are trans or cis. You kind of have to find your style. And weirdly, my style now is very like it was pre-transition. Like, I'm not a girly girl. Pink looks terrible on me. Like, if I wear pink, I look like Rachel in that episode of Friends, you know, where she wears that bridesmaid dress. And it just clashes with her whole person. So it's kind of, so I mean, you know, and it's deceptive. So I mean, I suppose if you were looking at my Instagram, you would see me at kind of like photo shoots or red carpet-y events or kind of professional events where I will don a skirt and a shoe.

But normally, nine times out of ten, I will just be in jeans. Like, I kind of want to look like the final girl in a horror film from the 70s. That's kind of... You can make a run for it. The last girl standing. You have to get out, to run away from turfs. Comfortable shoes. Comfortable shoes, flat shoes. And yeah, sort of a lot of kind of Brando-esque biker boots and leather jackets and things like that as well. Well, I have to say, we were running the Marlboro for a long time, myself and Tariq. And kind of seeing Juno's evolution into becoming the wonderful creation that she is was one of our great sort of like, oh, this is a really important place for people to kind of try out their authentic versions of themselves in a small way.

Yeah, the Marlboro saw it all. Like the hair extension years, various nurse jobs. Yeah, just it's all there. It's all in those bricks. But, you know, since I came back in 2015, you know, my sort of notoriety or however you want to, I guess, because just prominence in the media kind of went up. And so it was, I mean, it was kind of very flattering to sort of go into the Marlboro to say that I was only, what, five or six years into my transition and have people at the start of their transitions come up and go, oh my God, you really inspire me. And I was like, well, that's mad because, you know, five years ago I was you, you know, and the Marlboro was the only place I would dare wear a dress. And I really, really hope when we get out the other side of this, hope maybe that space will reopen up.

Who can say? Or wouldn't like it. Amen. Amen. Well, thank you so much for being with us, Juno. Thank you. It's been a pleasure. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me. And we'll invite you to our physical queer museum at some point when we're all old. Yeah. When we're all in our third phase. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

We invited our resident queer museum curator EJ Scott to listen to Juno's stories. And this is what EJ had to say about them. Everywhere you look in queer and trans history, there's fashion. It's what French philosopher and one of the greatest queer thinkers of all time, Michel Foucault, would have called a technology of self. Sadly, he died of AIDS in 1984. Fashion goes right back in our history from, you know, the macaronis who would have come to Brighton dressed in their fine silks that would have been woven in spitalfields by the Huguenot refugees. They fled France from religious persecution where they would have been targeted because they were Protestants. And it's also it's worth noting as well that it wouldn't have been bum sex that they were taking the mickey out of.

It was actually because they were effeminate. Fashion is thought to have been an effeminate pursuit. And that's why it was left out of the museum for so long in the first place. Silly women's business, you know. I guess that brings us to the point that gender and sexuality were actually tied together. It's a modern phenomenon to draw them apart. We see right up to the present day that fashion is a very important part of our community. The Museum of Transology's collection has pieces in it donated, for example, by Miss Kimberley, the first dress that she ever wore. And it was donated to us in a huff because she couldn't fit into it anymore. And even in the V&A, there's an amazing 1938 evening dress that was donated by Anglo-American.

He was called the architect of fashion, Charles James. And it uses a piece of silk to make it. It's this green silk evening dress. And it's been designed, the silk's been designed by Jean Cocteau. And in the pattern of the dress, it's really coded. But when you look at it really closely, you can see that it's actually got silhouettes of both himself and his boyfriend, who was the French movie star, heartthrob, Jean Marais. It's always fashion's always been used by our communities to express our gender and our queerness. But I think it's also important to remember that we often use it just to fit in. And one of the most popular ever items of dress to this day is just the plain old pair of denim jeans.

But of course, queers do like to code. And the image of the butch dyke and the leather daddy, both of them respectively, in denim, is completely and utterly imprinted on our community's collective popular memory, which just goes to show the importance of protecting our stories and our photos, as well as our objects to hand down to future generations. Because, you know, that queer denim hasn't ended up in precious museum collections. Thank you so much, EJ, for that added context. As you can hear and feel that this fashion is just this DNA that runs through our identities. And I think that's something that was really picked up very thoughtfully in Juno's interview. So thank you so much for being with us, EJ.

And we look forward to having you back to comment on our next entry into the Queer Museum. Thanks for listening. The My Queer Museum podcast is a Queer Heritage South project created by Marlborough Productions and supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund. For more information about our work, visit queerinbrighton.co.uk. Original music and editing by Olive Mondegreen.