Culture

Olly Alexander: "I Want to Make the Community Proud. I Don’t Know if I've Always Got It Right"


Feeling safe with his collaborators hasn’t been an easy journey, but now he’s in a good place for it. He also pointed out that it’s not just queers who can understand his vision: his bandmates are straight, he points out – “I really believe in working with straight people! Some of my best friends are straight!” – and his frequent collaborator, the producer Mark Ralph, “is a real ally to us gays”, who was always willing to vibe along to Paris Hilton singles with him.

A new sound – a queerer sound – isn’t just a risk in a world where Alexander’s performances are held to double standards and the linchpins of queer culture can still be seen as synonymous with perversion. The impossible standards queer work is held to don’t just come from the straight world: gay men can be terrible recipients of work designed for them too.

Russell T Davies has dealt with it his entire career: “There’s the problem of lack of representation, but there’s the problem that when you are represented, it’s just not seen,” he explained when I spoke to him recently. “You just learn to cope. I worry about it. I probably worry about it more than I say here, but at the end of the day it’s never stopped me writing the next thing.” But he gets it because he, too, is a gay man who consumes art and he sees the same biases coming out when he watches other queer-centric work.

Yet he was amazed that artists younger than him are still dealing with the same crises: “It’s what comes with being a minority. It’s what comes of oppression and you kind of expect this to pass. But then you talk to young people like Olly, who’s a different generation from me, and you find them thinking the same things,” Davies said. “I was lucky to have my training during an age when you’d be lucky to get one review in the Times. Now you live in a world of reviewers.”

When I ask Alexander if he worries how gay men will respond to a gay artist’s work, it is no easier for him to respond than it was for Davies. “Oh, God, you’re making my heart race now,” he says, breathless. “I should be careful, because I don’t want to demonise anybody. But I tried to really unpack this myself and… I’ll just sort of say it.” It is clear that this is intense for him: his eyes are looking watery as he tries to phrase it delicately.

“I have this – I think irrational – anxiety about gay men tearing me down. And I tried to interrogate that within myself and I think it’s complicated, because a lot of it has to do with internalised phobias and shame, about how I see myself versus how other people see me.” He begins to cry. “What I do know is that I want them to not hate me. And I want to make the community proud. It’s been at the heart of pretty much every decision I’ve ever made. And I don’t know if I’ve always got it right.”

It’s tough being an actor asked to shed light and humanity on a complex phase in British LGBTQ+ history; it’s just as tough to be a gay man trying to make pop music that speaks to the queer experience. But Alexander is doing both and, what’s more, he’s being unapologetically queer in the public eye. There aren’t many LGBTQ+ people in the position Alexander is in and it must be exhausting, I suggest, to be expected to speak for the needs and fears of an entire spectrum of sexual and gender identities. After all, he’s just one man who wants to be proud of who he is. “Sometimes, when I feel the most anxious, I have a voice in my head that goes, ‘Oh, Olly, why on earth did you put yourself in this position? You really are not the strong person people think you are.’” But, he says, he is learning he can’t speak for everyone, even if people expect it of him.

Instead, he’s focusing on being proud of what he’s done – the visibility, the audacity, the bravery – rather than the critique of his anxieties or Twitter trolls. “I’m always thinking about me as a teenager and how I’m creating the person I wanted to be in the world. I’m actually doing it! Holy fuck!”

@nickroyal

Styled by Nick Royal (@nickroyal). It’s A Sin is on All 4 now and Channel 4 on Friday at 9pm.

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