Queer Productions?

“Peer Productions - more like Queer Productions!”

Queer Productions has been thrown at us intended as an insult too many times over the years. We are sadly no strangers to receiving homophobic and transphobic abuse. Back in 2009, when we were creating our film about the impact of homophobia, in which the everyone was assumed gay, and it was the straight people who were the minority, our office received several very unpleasant phone calls from a local counsellor, who genuinely asked us why, if we could ‘promote’ homosexuality why we were not, including paedophilia and bestiality!

Much more recently, as the right wing rhetoric gains traction, we have been accused of pushing an agenda to young people. For example bafflingly a handful of people were disgruntled by our primary school play ‘The Space Between - My Head and Heart’ which tells the story of a group of young astronauts and their journey to understand their feelings and their friendships. The decision was made to use the pronoun ‘they’ for everyone. This gives us flexibility to cast people of all genders in any role and means there won’t be a slip up if a female actor steps into a role as understudy previously played by a male actor. We are not presenting a group of non-binary characters, but instead, we want every child to feel free to identify with any character (human, robot or alien) regardless of their gender! 

For most of us who work in this field saying an actor training programme is LGBTQIA+ friendly seems so obvious that it shouldn’t need to be said. Arts company welcomes queer young people is hardly headline news!  We, as staff and students at Peer discussed whether we even wanted to post about this. Would we look too ‘try hard’ or like virtual signalling. But, having thought about it, if only one young person felt safer applying for a Peer Programme knowing that who they are will be respected and celebrated, then we can stomach the ick factor. 

So, to shout it from the rooftops, here at Peer, everyone is welcome of all genders and sexualities.  We regularly invite pronoun checks and will always strive to use the pronoun that you have asked for. Will we mess it up sometimes? Yes - because we are human but we will apologise quickly, correct ourselves and move on. We have an open culture where everyone is able, if they want, to talk about their experiences and the people that mean the most to them. We have several overtly queer characters in our plays and many other roles which could be coded in that way. Many of our staff are queer and so, usually at any given time, are many of our learners and let’s face it many of our young audience members.

Love is love. We are proud of everyone in our team. Happy pride month! 🌈