‘Something’s bubbling and it feels a lot scarier’: Charley Marlowe and Jaxon Feeley on the increasing hostility towards LGBTQs
The pair appear in Attitude and Channel 4's 'Tip Toe or Ta-Da' series, based on Russell T Davies' suburban thriller 'Tip Toe'
By Dale Fox
Jaxon Feeley is nearly six years into his transition and still won’t walk around with his top off near his home in Wigan, Greater Manchester.
“There is still a fear there, in terms of danger, in terms of people’s opinion,” he tells Charley Marlowe in the first film of Attitude and Channel 4’s digital series Tip Toe or Ta-Da, shot in the Canal Street bar that serves as the real-world setting for Russell T Davies’ Tip Toe.
The suburban thriller- which stars Alan Cumming as a gay bar owner whose simmering tensions with his radicalised next-door neighbour eventually turn violent – asks what happens when intolerance stops being something you read about and starts being something you live with.
Feeley has an answer from his own working life: the teenage boys he supports in residential care reach for the language of Andrew Tate the moment any argument breaks out. “That rhetoric – that’s what’s coming out of their mouths. Trans now is kind of where Black people were 60 years ago, where gay people were 20, 30 years ago.”
“It’s not just trans people – it’s queer people, it’s women; every bit of diversity is affected” – Charley Marlowe on the UK’s increasing marginalisation
Marlowe, who turns into what she calls “Scrappy-Doo” when men stare at her and her girlfriend in public, says of the threat facing the community: “It’s not just trans people – it’s queer people, it’s women; every bit of diversity is affected.”
Asked whether the political climate has changed around her, she says: “Politics used to be, ‘Oh, you think that, I think that, we can both get along’. Now it feels like ‘I’m gonna kill you’. Something’s bubbling and it feels a lot scarier.”
“When you’ve fought so hard to be happy, that’s all you want to be,” Jaxon adds. “You’ve got no interest in dragging anybody else down. When people are homophobic or transphobic, there’s something they’re not dealing with – they’re not being true to themselves.”
Watch their full, unscripted discussion on Attitude’s YouTube channel.
The second film in the three-part Tip Toe or Ta-Da series – featuring Unicorns actor Jason Patel and retired nurse Dottie Shufflebottom – launches on Thursday 11 June on Attitude’s YouTube channel. Stream Tip Toe on Channel 4 now.