I grew into activism sideways, through the stage door. As a queer artist I was always acutely aware of who was allowed to take up space and who was treated as “too much” or “not enough” by the rules we never voted on but somehow live under. So I did what I knew how to do: I made things. Performances, images, events, strange little experiments in public that tried to stretch the frame of what was sayable and who was visible. For years I thought of that simply as art, not “activism” – even though the whole point was to smuggle different futures into the room and invite people to feel them together.
Meeting and marrying Michael was my gateway drug to frontline activism. He opened up a world of youth work, community organising and policy fights that I had circled but never quite entered. Through him I began to understand why youth and community work matter so much: because they are where people first learn that they are not the problem, the system is. I brought my arts brain into those spaces, and slowly, deliberately, I started to name what I was doing as cultural activism – using aesthetics, emotion and story as tools for collective power, not just personal expression.
At The Rowan Trust I finally had the room to knit those strands together on purpose. I worked on designing and integrating the arts as a form of activism inside a foundation, insisting that creativity isn’t a luxury add‑on to “real” social change work, it’s one of the engines. We backed artists and organisers who were already blurring the line between the gallery and the street, between the rehearsal room and the community meeting. Somewhere in the middle of that I started describing myself, half‑jokingly at first, as a cultural activist, and then realised I meant it.
What I’ve learned is that my route into activism – through music, images, performance, atmosphere – wasn’t a detour, it was training. Artists are already skilled in sensing mood, holding contradiction, telling the truth slant when it can’t be spoken straight. In a moment where far‑right organising and anti‑trans backlash are so emotionally sophisticated, we can’t afford movements that only speak in policy briefs and position papers. We need choirs and banners and awkward, gorgeous, collective moments that make a different kind of sense in the body.
So when I talk now about the work I do with NB Social Justice Studio, or in community and philanthropic spaces, I am really talking about the same thing I was doing as a young queer artist trying to survive: using creativity to amplify what is already true in us and around us, and to make it harder for oppressive systems to pretend they are inevitable. I didn’t leave the arts for activism; I just stopped pretending they were separate.
