It’s 3am, and I’m fast asleep in a Travelodge in Dudley having the strangest dream. In it, I’m living through the penultimate episode of a 16-part miniseries about my life; I’m a newly famous cult author about to give a talk in a city library, a large avant-garde building with high wooden beams and slanted skylights. As I arrive, my appearance is disrupted by a group of young activists who have some kind of grievance with me. In their inchoate rage, they performatively tear up copies of a book - but it isn’t mine, and I’m forced to tell them that they’re destroying the wrong book.
They also assault people in the atrium, whether they’re there to listen to my talk or not: one of my former colleagues (the only real person to feature in the dream) is slapped across the back of the head, and a young gay man called Hassan who’s innocently listening to an audiobook at one of the library’s headphone terminals is pushed to the floor. My other friend Oliver is unscathed and seems to view the whole affair rather wryly. The library staff do not intervene. The ‘wrong’ book, which a dark-haired girl called Gemma is tearing the pages out of while a fellow activist films her, is called Don’t Mourn.
I tell Oliver “This is exactly why I shut my Twitter down years ago. But they still keep fucking finding me.”
The event is cancelled. As we exit the library, my former colleague blames me for the fact she got hit by a protester; for inviting the controversy. I apologise profusely.
The scene ends, and a drag queen house mother played by Michael McKean appears. He’s the series’s narrator, and exists in an extratextual space in which he breaks the fourth wall and discusses the events of each episode with the audience. Signing off wistfully, he explains that he won’t be narrating or appearing in the next episode - the finale - because it’s too sad.
I wake up and write down the contents of the dream.
~~~
Back in the real world, the first time I got cancelled for something I’d written was in the year 2000, when I was 17 and studying for my A-levels at a high-school sixth form in Cheshire. One evening, I wrote a parody of the school’s newsletter in Microsoft Publisher ‘97 and brought it in to show a select group of friends. It was passed to another kid (a bitchy, closeted gay boy) without my knowledge, and - because his mother was one of the school’s secretaries, and because he was a dumbass - he used the staff photocopier in her office to make dozens of copies, then distributed them in the sixth-form common room. Within a couple of hours it had gone viral and was being shared around the entire school; more than one teacher told me how funny it was and that they were passing it around the staff room to each other. I was absolutely mortified, and was promptly summoned to the deputy head of sixth-form’s office.
My “reparations” were a) to gather up every copy of the newsletter b) to apologise to everyone I’d offended or parodied in the newsletter (the librarian, the dinnerladies, teachers, fellow pupils) c) to join the team of students who wrote the real school newsletter. I also had to show my parents what I’d written. The deputy head of sixth-form, a religious studies teacher, was particularly aggrieved at the presence of swearwords, saying to me “I’m sure your parents wouldn’t approve of you using language like that!” I felt like telling her “My parents swear like troopers”, but I bit my tongue. She could also see how shell-shocked I was, and in her letter to my parents explaining what had happened, she wrote “I believe [wolfstar] has suffered personally.”
All of my penances worked out OK. The kid who made the photocopies got a gigantic bollocking. Most of the people I was supposed to apologise to didn’t actually want or expect an apology. I got a standing ovation from the rest of the sixth-form for writing the newsletter and for getting in so much trouble; they didn’t think I had it in me.
That summer, I wrote a 7,000-word half-hour sitcom pilot and sent it to the BBC Talent scheme, but it didn’t get picked.
~~~
The next time I was cancelled was on Twitter in 2016, when I was in the throes of trying to sever my toxic relationship with the site. I’d already tried to stop tweeting more than once but kept coming back out of compulsion. On a certain subconscious level, I think I deliberately tweeted something offensive in order to get myself ostracised off social media. So on the morning of the Brussels Airport suicide bombing, I woke up, saw the news, and tweeted the first two off-colour jokes that came to mind - one about a minor Belgian celebrity, the other “I was in Brussels Airport last year. When I saw the price of the Belgian chocolates I almost exploded.”
At the time I had 2500 followers and a certain cachet, particularly within one fandom, and things immediately kicked off, so I deleted both tweets again within half an hour. One friend saw what was going on and immediately texted me to ask if I was OK, while others replied or DMed me supportively, but I was struck by the cowardice and silence of a lot of my mutuals, many of whom I’d met in real life. I took my account down for 36 hours then posted the following:
All I achieved yesterday morning was upsetting a bunch of teenagers at a vulnerable moment, by impulse-tweeting the first two bad-taste jokes that came to mind before I'd even got out of bed. Mea culpa. I apologise. I appreciate the people who engaged with me over it and rightly told me it was the wrong thing at the wrong time.
As someone who grew up on South Park, Family Guy and Charlie Brooker, my sense of humour isn't always a fit for today's sensibilities, or well-judged. And I often do deliberately aim to unsettle or say something borderline, because it frightens me how censorious we seem to have become these days, especially with regard to humour and people's entire worth as a human being being judged on a single utterance or even just the perceived sentiment behind an utterance. Social media is a bearpit and everyone gets sucked up in the drama of stuff very easily. I used to be as bad as anyone for micro-policing people's speech & getting performatively outraged about things, until as recently as one year ago.
Yeah, it annoys me when everyone goes crazy over a terrorist attack on Brussels but ignores one in Turkey nine days earlier that killed just as many people, but it's also not on me to police people's reactions and I need to remember that a lot of people on here are just kids. As a 32-year-old man with my own business, what am I doing arguing with teenagers on the internet? But then that's what a lot of public figures here seem to spend their day doing too - it's partly in the nature of the medium. Is that good?
I grew up in northwest England during a period when there were IRA terror attacks in the news what seemed like every few days... Warrington town centre was blown up by the IRA when I was a kid, as well as that of Manchester. I know Brussels and am a Dutch speaker. Maybe I'm irreverent about stuff as I think that gives it less power over us. I react to things in my own way, which can come over as insensitive. If anything happens to me, like being fatally glitter-bombed by an outraged fanboy, I want people to be making the sickest possible jokes within 10 seconds flat (as the blood pools on the floor, a coating of glitter poignantly decorating its surface) because I think it's an extremely healthy way of dealing with things.
80% of those tweeting their outrage at me yesterday were people I've never or barely interacted with, and who either didn't follow me or I wasn't aware that they followed me, plus a small handful of cliquey gays I've pissed off in the past for other reasons who were just looking for the perfect excuse to jump on me and I gave them it.
At the same time, given I deleted the first tweet within about 30 minutes and the second within about 10 minutes, after people raised their concerns, we're veering into the realm of thought-crime. Yes, I have bad-taste thoughts. Most people do. Black humour is normal and healthy. Yes, sometimes I give in to the impulse to tweet them when I shouldn't. For every joke my brain comes up with that works, it comes up with at least one that doesn't or that I know would sink on here.
While 90% of those reacting yesterday were upset/angry, there were 2-3 specific people who milked my faux-pas for all it was worth to get likes and boost their own social media brand by using me as a "folk devil", thereby showing everyone how righteous they are. But that's the culture. If "let's hate wolfstar hour" provided a meaningful bonding experience for kids on their smartphones yesterday, then good for them. I hope they feel better about themselves.
I was especially incredulous to see other people I have good relationships with on here being policed for failing to "unfollow and block" me. I've talked about gay-on-gay bullying before and some of what goes down on Twitter is remarkably similar to what I experienced at high school where, although I was never "bullied" (implying a regular activity) per se, I hung with straight friends due to being picked on by gay kids.
I think it was also interesting that one of the reactions was #gaymisogyny: "i think wolfstar is a woman.they've always been a nasty bitch". Also, a couple of others I was mutually following quickly proclaimed I'd "always" been "nasty" or "a cunt", to show what side they were on.
Never work with animals, children or gays with smartphones. I shouldn't use fanboy as an epithet though. Ich bin ein Fanboy. Love u all. All of you who've met me know I'm a fucking pussycat in real life anyway. At the end of the day I just need cuddles.
~~~
Now it’s 2024, and look at the state of things.