Did you know that pigeons are domesticated rock-doves? They used to be war heroes, until we abandoned them and labelled them scum. They build nests under bridges because its the closest they can get to rock faces in the city.

Did you know I used to hide paper cut-outs of Alan Turing in the computer room?

I think I would call it grief. And it is, in a way, grief. Mourning. The losses behind and the losses to come. I don't want to say queer is death, I want to say queer is power, queer is love. But the love comes from rage, and the power comes from a community in pain, as if the combined weight of sorrow could push forward another tide of change.

That's the thing about tides.

They flow, in out, over decades, so that a woman who has seen ten can stand alongside a child experiencing their first, two specks of sand in a shoreline, weeping. Gulls screaming next to the footprints of birds that have fled, or been shot down, or drowned in the seas, against the rocks.

I don't want to call it grief.

I want it to be powerful, cockroaches in a bar, a fifty year old pub with a skinhead-biting dog. A leather jacket passed down from father to daughter-to-son. A chorus of thousands of feet and voices, and people who join in after hearing the hatred, drowning it out.

We are all seabirds, falling towards the ocean and hoping our wings will spread before we hit the waves.