Meanwhile Ellen's Acting Academy was in full swing. Our initial class had been joined by a steady stream of new arrivals and groups were forming around similar interests. We organised sessions throughout the week for particular disciplines, keeping the Thursday evening slot as a general workshop to bring everyone back together. I charged them on a monthly subscription model with a higher level for private students, so members could come to as many classes as they wished.

The Shakespeare class ran on Tuesday evenings and had Jess, Hannah and Vic at its core, with other members using it to complement their general studies. The three of them went deep not just on the bard's texts but all the art and media inspired by them, with interpretations that were frequently morbid, passionate and sexual in nature - they would have loved Ellen's breakdown of Desdemona's murder. Hannah had a personal obsession with Millais's painting of the drowning of Ophelia, which she first saw as a child on a visit to the National Gallery. She told me she'd recreated the image in the woods at Morior Studios for a Mortal Masquerade awareness initiation, in a dress faithfully recreated from Millais' painting, sinking to her own "muddy death".

I worried that this trio might scare off the less morbidly inclined members, but they turned out to be pretty good at picking gears according to who was in the discussion and could do frivolity when called for. But even when working with Shakespeare's comedies they focussed on the mischief and mayhem of the material. Actually, they did a lot to bring others into the plays this way, moving them beyond dry recitation into something human and relevant.

Later on Jess brought her boyfriend Ben along, a towering hulk of a man who attended the Mortal Masquerade and acted as a stagehand when a menacing presence was required. Ben was a gentle giant who took some persuading to become a scary executioner, but Jess led him through it, using dramatic texts to help him take on another persona.

My private students were mostly Morior extras who wanted to develop their skills in order to be considered for proper acting roles. Kim and Lee were both Morior Kids who wanted to do more - they'd both come from rough family backgrounds before ending up here, but their approaches and ambitions were very different.

Kim was happy being typecast playing child and teenage roles - her early influences had been Japanese anime and young adult fantasy and she lived those roles in cosplay, as I'd seen when I first met her working the counter at Culture Collects. I worked with her on some classical juvenile roles - we did a lot of work on Miranda from The Tempest - then on general skills building a character from text, exploring concepts like naivety, streetsmarts, curiosity and relationship attitudes to build complex and believable interpretations for the job at hand. Sometimes Triana (or Trey) would accompany her, but mostly they saw Kim as the main acting talent between the two of them. I later learned that Try was taking lessons elsewhere in stage magic and circus, so that became her focus.

Lee on the other hand was desperate to play macho adult roles. He was a small man with all kinds of neuroses stemming from his stature and upbringing and a smouldering rage he wasn't sure how to control. The youngest child of a working class family, his older brother was a doorman and boxer with a hard reputation, his sister had been training to become a hairdresser. Lee felt like the runt of the family and frequently got into trouble fighting at school in an effort to overcompensate. His Dad got him to try boxing, but Lee didn't have the speed or co-ordination to compete as a lightweight and couldn't escape the shadow of his respected older brother. He did all he could to fit in with the lads on the back seat of the bus, telling dirty jokes and shoplifting top shelf magazines, but that's when he found another problem.

While all his mates were slathering over the nekkid ladies, Lee found it did nothing for him. He played along as best he could, but couldn't let on that the mags he'd rather be looking at were further along on the newsagent's rack.

"I could never tell my mates who I really fancied," said Lee. "Everyone says there's nothing wrong with being gay, but it's not something my family would have encouraged and it certainly didn't help with my efforts to prove myself as a man. My Dad gave me a hiding for acting up, but at least it was for that and not because I was mincing around embarrassing everyone."

"Being gay doesn't make you less of a man," I said.

"Sure, but it doesn't make you one of the lads either," said Lee. "Say all you like about being out and proud, but not everyone can be or wants to be. For some of us it's just not worth the hassle. All I wanted was to fit in, to be trusted and respected as one of the boys."

"What about when they were out chasing girls? What did you do then?"

"Played wingman, mostly. If anyone asked, I lied, picked some girl I knew I'd have no chance with anyway and talked about her while thinking of the guy I was actually dreaming of."

"It doesn't sound like you were happy. Didn't you want a partner?"

"I had my mates to hang out with and was happy in my way, so long as I could get my aggression out on something. Football, mostly - we supported Ketherton Athletic and gave the opposition fans hassle on match days... it's just how it was. I drank and did some crazy things, I'll grant you that. I'm still not sure of the details, but I think I died because of some daft stunt I was trying to do while pissed."

"How did you end up acting?"

"Well, pre-recall I found myself all alone without a job, then found one of Morior's adverts calling for movie extras. I thought, yeah, I can do that, went along and got asked to play a child because of my size. If it had been either before I died or after I recalled I might have kicked off about that, but I needed work and was still disorientated, so I agreed. Then they kept asking me back, and then it was just a job."

"Like when you were a brownie?"

Lee made a face. "Kim told you about that, didn't she? Yes, I played a girl in a pack of brownies. I did it like I do any other acting job - wear the costume, do what you're told, get paid, that's it. Look, I get what you're doing, getting me to know myself and all, but I just want to act a bit older and grittier. Can we do that, please?"

We started working on angry young man roles like Jimmy Porter and Stanley Kowalski, but I felt Lee needed to find a more positive sense of his own masculinity before he could properly control and channel his aggression. It occurred to me how little repertory material actually fell into his particular Venn diagram of working class, gay and butch - gay characters in the theatre were mostly upper class, flamboyant or both. But for all his protests, I sensed that Lee found in acting a release from his years of frustration and pent up sexuality. I genuinely think he liked the do-over innocence of playing young and even enjoyed playing a brownie, but wasn't able to admit it even to himself. He knew he didn't have to be in the closet anymore - the friends and family that forced that weren't around - but he genuinely missed those friends and family and still put up defences out of habit. So I tried a different tack. Instead of choosing aggressive roles, I steered him towards characters on affirming journeys. To become the actor he wanted to be, Lee would first need to grow into himself, to learn to accept and channel his own emotions. He really needed to experience love, but I couldn't help him with that directly. Davis offered to take him out to meet the gay community around Ketherton, in hopes of finding someone he could connect with or at least help him become more comfortable with who he was.

I wanted to help Lee because I knew from experience what it was like to emerge from repressed sexuality.

---

By the time I left school and went to train as an actor I was decidedly bi-curious, if not confirmed bisexual. I'd come to enjoy the positive attention I'd received from my performances in feminine stage roles and even though any reference to sex had been carefully directed out of the scene my time as Desdemona opposite Paul's Othello had left a mark - I had quite a few vivid dreams involving the two of us that I was careful to keep to myself. I never considered myself anything other than a boy dressed up to play the part of a girl - I didn't think of myself as trans - but my feminine side had been awakened, such as it was, and left me eager to get more intimate experience of boys and girls alike.

I shared student digs with two girls from my drama course named Liz and Bex and a handsome English Literature major called Ken. Liz and Bex were never interested in me sexually but got a kick out of my school play stories. They put me up to fully dressing as a girl to go with them on girls' nights out and took me shopping to put together some outfits for my femme alter-ego, who we named Roche. Back at home they gave me the full makeover; clothes, make-up, nails, hair, waxing... and that's when Roche started getting attention from Ken.

I liked Ken - he was witty, good looking and shared many of my interests - so I had no qualms reciprocating. It turned out he had a thing for t-girls and loved seeing me dressed. He treated Roche like a lady, bought me gifts and took me out on dates before we took to exploring our sexuality together in all kinds of exotic ways, trying out all the fun and weird kinks we could find, usually with Roche in some kind of costume. But Ken's love was for Roche, not me - this became particularly apparent when I began weight training to build my body for more masculine acting roles and his enthusiasm cooled noticeably. Eventually the conflict became too much to bear and we parted amicably. Ken found other partners and I was happy for him, he'd never treated me badly and I had genuinely enjoyed being his girlfriend. But Roche marked the end of my life as a girl; from that point on I was all man. I still dressed androgynously for comfort, but by then it had nothing to do with transgenderism. Clothes are just clothes after all, as demonstrated by the spectrum of transgendered spirits on this plane and Kim's comment about us getting the bodies we know to be our true selves.

After Ken I had one nighters and short-term relationships with all genders, but when Ellen entered my life my wandering days were over. I loved her from the moment I saw her, from that point on there was no other I had eyes for, man, woman or non-binary. We became the de facto owners of the Blemished Theatre Company when Gareth and Emily left to pursue other opportunities - Gareth his first TV role, Emily going to work on the cruise ships. Ellen and I were a formidable team, taking our brand of interactive horror mysteries nationwide and cultivating a cult fanbase. We married in an over the top ceremony that climaxed with us being burned at the stake together, which we filmed and posted up as a publicity stunt. We settled in the Ketherton hills soon after, making the town our base. We had a lovely home, a successful business and were creatively fulfilled.

My only regret was I could never give her children. We made a proper go of it in our late twenties, but for whatever reason, whether I was shooting blanks or whatever, Ellen never conceived. We considered adopting, but thought the notoriety we'd reaped from helming the BTC might prove an obstacle. So instead we considered the actors, collaborators and supporters of our company to be our children, and felt genuinely proud whenever a fledgling actor passed through our company on the way to a big break elsewhere in the industry.

I couldn't imagine myself as someone's Dad anyway. Or their Mum, for that matter.