Loving the Alien – Guest Author, John

Let’s start with the basics – I’m white, English, male, and basically heterosexual (despite being hugely camp). Now, you might have heard some fuss from other white straight men that they are being ‘cancelled’ (often via their newspaper columns or TV shows!) and that modern culture is ignoring them. I don’t think it is, but even if it was, from my own selfish point of view I’d say, so what?

I have quite a lot of experience of life as a straight white man, and while it’s great to read a novel or see a film or TV show that reflects that, I’m far more interested in learning about someone else’s life, or seeing something seemingly familiar from an entirely different point of view. In recent years, I’ve been excited by classical music composed by black musicians (thanks largely to a fantastic Lenny Henry documentary) like Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, by women like Louise Farrenc, and indeed by black women such as Florence Price. Much as I love my Beethoven and Bach, it’s been a revelation to hear the different journeys in sound taken by people with a unique perspective.

I want to read novels about other cultures, other lives, other genders. As a child my favourite books included many that might be termed ‘girls’ books’ like The Little House On The Prairie, or the Milly Molly Mandy stories. I also loved fantasy for a similar reason, it was about something I didn’t know, even if that something was purely imaginary, and among my favourites (like Tolkien’s Hobbit) were others by women like, early on, Enid Blyton, later Tove Jansson (female, Finnish and a lesbian) and Ursula K Le Guin, who wrote a novel about a society with no fixed gender. I always agreed with David Bowie about ‘loving the alien’ – which wasn’t about Captain Kirk teaching a green skinned space woman how to kiss, but about the fascination of the strange and foreign. Seeing someone else’s culture, food or religion and wanting to know more, not rejecting it because it wasn’t the same as your own.

I had no trouble accepting and enjoying a female Dr Who, or elves and hobbits played by black and Asian actors in recent fantasy dramas. Similarly, historical dramas with non-white actors in usually white roles has been refreshing, although best of all are historical dramas showing the experience of non-white non-male characters in otherwise familiar settings. Two of my favourite TV shows growing up were Roots and Shogun, the first about the lives of black slaves (still valid even if not all of it was truly about Alex Haley’s ancestors as has been questioned since) and the second about a British sailor who does indeed love the alien, learning to understand and embrace the strange Japanese culture to the extent that he himself becomes a samurai.

Travelling the other way, our own culture has been enormously enriched by the arrival of migrants throughout our history, and more recently by the increased presence of non-white, non-male and non-heterosexual artists and performers in all cultural fields and I for one hope that continues. I’ll keep loving the alien.