Overdrawn lips. Glittered beards. Thick, coloured-in eyebrows. Face paint. Wigs of all shapes and sizes. Torn-up shirts and disfigured dresses. Queens, Kings, aliens, monsters, and everyone in-between. The performers—Dinah Lux, Ginger Tarte, Lady B, Jeneva Convention, and more—mingle amongst the colourful crowd. Some wear ounces of makeup, others sport messy beards or abstracted faces. Yet, all of them stand out from the rest through their exuberant confidence and overthe-top styles.

As Oxford’s first ever drag night, Haute Mess has certainly earned the right to its name. This now-termly event brings together the likes of wide-ranging beauties and grotesque haunts who at once shock, disgust, and allure. The event has transformed Plush, Oxford’s LGBTQ+ club, each Thursday fifth week these past Michaelmas and Hilary terms. Haute Mess dubs itself as the “queerest and messiest space for total self expression,” and features lip-synced performers ranging from novices to well-experienced drag artists.

Despite drag’s only recent emergence at the Plush Lounge, students have seized upon both drag nights as opportunities for transformative self-expression. Haute Mess undermines mainstream restrictions on gender and sexuality, thereby enabling personal empowerment. Much like their predecessors from the UK or across what is now a worldwide conglomerate of drag stars, LGBTQ+ students in Oxford aim to dismantle heteronormative assumptions through individual acts of drag performance. Yet, students in this university town are also ushering in their own vision for drag by exploding expectations from within the niche itself. New-age drag is on the horizon, and Oxford boasts one of many LGBTQ+ communities catalyzing these trends.

Cross-dressing, and the derogatory use of the term “queen” for gay men, was common well before the 20th century. However, the drag queens we think of today got their start in the 1950s and 1960s in the US, and eventually migrated into the UK, though they were largely underground until the 1970s given the extent to which it was criminalised. Antisodomy and sexual indecency acts were on the books and regularly enforced in both the United States and the United Kingdom. In America specifically, states and cities across the country, stretching from Florida to Ohio and even to California, imposed anti-crossdressing laws from the middle to late 20th century. These laws prohibited people from wearing apparel typically worn by people of the opposite sex in public place, thereby institutionalising a strict gender binary as a cultural and social norm.

Despite the persistent legal suppression of transgender expression and drag performances, drag queens became intertwined with political resistance and the reclamation of queer identity. This most notably began in the 1960s when drag performers are said to have ignited the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion, aseries of spontaneous riots in NYC which took place outside a popular drag queen venue and bar known as the Stonewall Inn. The Stonewall Riots led to the formation of various grassroots organisations in the United States, and even in the UK through groups like the Gay Liberation Front, who aimed to fight back against legalised censorship and oppression of LGBT+ expression.

Thus, by the late 20th century, drag was elevated in various queer countercultures as a form of empowerment through transgression. Although drag performers provided high art and entertainment in pre-planned acts featuring music, dance, and humour across clubs and venues, it was also a multidimensional tool of empowerment. By sometimes crudely caricaturing gender, and blurring the lines between many different types of gender expectations, drag provides commentary on society’s restrictive norms on gender and sexuality.

From the 80s onwards, drag queens became associated with a range of styles, from messy personas to the highly sophisticated Divine, an infamous drag queen, who became a cult icon after eating feces in front of the camera in John Waters’ Pink Flamingos. In the 1980s, New York City saw the emergence of Club Kids, a group of individuals who invaded clubs and public spaces, restaurants, subway stations, and the like, with their “outlaw parties” featuring gender-bending and genderfluid costumes. Pervading all of these examples of drag was the idea that queerness could be reclaimed from the oppressive rhetoric and thereby eliminate its negative connotations.

In recent years, no other cultural force has done more to generate curiosity in drag than RuPaul, the first international drag supermodel, and his reality television series RuPaul’s Drag Race. The show, which is aimed at finding “America’s next drag superstar,” weaves together personal confessionals from each contestant alongside intense fashion and performance challenges. RuPaul’s Drag Race has specifically framed drag as a personally rewarding yet demanding and emotionally intense affair. For two Oxford student drag performers, Marcus Knight-Adams (he/they) and Re’em Moskovitz (he/him), RuPaul’s show provided a gateway into drag.  

Marcus nursed initial doubts about RuPaul’s show and drag itself, but he quickly became mesmerised. He was initially hesitant to watch the show not out of a rejection of his queerness, but because he did not “want to be overt about it. Two weeks later I was a raging queer ready to get into drag at any moment.”

For many Oxford LGBTQ+ students, whether freshers or finalists, drag ignites empowerment through newfound confidence and transformation. Re’em, who performs as Salmonella Versace, says “Once you do it, with the fifteenth layer of makeup and so much power you can barely breathe, then it’s kind of like wearing a battle suit and you gain a new confidence that you never had as yourself..but as soon as you wipe the makeup off nothing you did really still counts within limits.”

Drag performers rarely go unnoticed when donning over-the-top outfits and striking cosmetic transformations. Many drag performers are motivated by their audiences’ genuine admiration for drag as a form of performance art. Marcus notes the power of absorbing admiration whilst appearing at Haute Mess as Donner Kebabe.

“The way people treat you when you’re in drag, when you have those 8 inch heels on, when you have those huge eyelashes that come up to here, when you’ve got on your beat on and you’re fierce, people really treat you with such reverence,” says Marcus.

Drag enables empowerment through its genuine entertainment value, but its power does not come simply from on-stage performances or from gaining a spotlight in front of the camera. Rather, by erecting a context in which typically-suppressed acts of expression are overturned and actually celebrated by both audiences and fellow performers, drag encourages self-discovery.

As Marcus notes, “One of the best things about it is you are using your own queerness which people tell you you should be so ashamed of to actually empower yourself. I really think that is what is really addictive.”

For Re’em and Marcus, who together organise and host Haute Mess, building a drag community is integral to its success as an empowering form of expression. Although college events, like queer bops or themed parties, were Re’em’s and Marcus’ initial outlet for their work, both of them saw a need to develop a more formalised drag night in a queer space like Plush.

“When we met, we knew that in a kind of semi-selfish way, that we want a platform for our own drag and everyone else’s drag to be celebrated. We are the ones that seem to have an overt craving for it, so we were the ones that had to do it. If we weren’t going to give ourselves the stage for drag, who else will?” Re’em noted.

The formation of drag spaces typically emanates outward from queer, safe spaces such as Plush or during queer-specific events. However, celebrating drag need not be limited to LGBTQ+ bars or clubs. At Oxford, volunteers and exhibitionists are working at the Pitt Rivers to emphasise drag as an integral part of celebrating queer history month. The museum invited London-based drag king Adam All to lead a drag king workshop and perform at the launch party “Party at the Pit” for Out at Oxford, a month-long “specially commissioned trail highlighting LGBTQ+ experiences.”

Intentionally showcasing masculine-leaning drag performers at Party at the Pitt can be considered a milestone given marked tension within the drag community regarding drag kings and non-male performers. Many take issue with the association between “real” drag and what is known as the fishiest, or most realistic, feminine looking, queens.

According to Marcus, “The biggest issue in the drag community right now is the inclusion of drag kings and appreciating them as an equal art. Because It really is. Honey—there are some really fierce queens—I mean kings —see immediately when I say fierce I want to go to queens like instinctively.”

Party at the Pitt was hosted by two university students, Ellie McDonald (she/they) and Ellie Dibben (they/them), who are self-ascribed “drag princes.” They comprise the duo PATRIK and ARCHIE (Patriarchy). Patrik and Archie have planned several upcoming drag workshops for non-male identifying individuals, whether novices or veterans, who want to either step into or enhance their male-leaning drag looks. For both of them, drag should not be limited to a specific type of gender schema.

“There is no “ideal” form of drag as it’s a highly individualistic thing—we even both do it slightly differently. So long as drag is done consciously—avoiding cultural appropriation, mocking of trans people or other offensive parodies—then its diversity is its strength,” both said.

Patrik and Archie are an example of individuals moving beyond the typical male-to-female schema that defines common drag queens or even bio-queens, cisgender women who do exaggerated, female impersonations. Both Patrik and Archie say they “wanted to do drag as a way to disrupt ideas of gender and show that nonmale people can appropriate masculinity in a disorientating and empowering way.”

The duo constructs their looks through the use of more abstract materials and designs, which they see as a step away from strands of drag which aim to realistically depict an opposite gender. Although Patrik and Archie appropriate masculine elements, they prefer to do this in surrealist and intentionally-obscured ways. In doing so, they both describe their drag personas as breaking away from “established tropes” in drag culture.

“We started out by attempting ‘realistic’ drag, stubble and the like, but both of us find typical masculine attire too bland for our personal tastes. We took inspiration from surrealist artists such as Noel Fielding and Sussi, and ended up with an odd amalgamation of many styles,” they note.

Although Patrik and Archie see their art as disrupting the gender binary in equally empowering ways as drag queens, they point out exclusionary attitudes build into the public’s consciousness of drag culture. They see RuPaul’s show, for example, as presenting “a particular definition of femininity which the queens can express and—there are no drag kings. Hence it is very exclusive and one dimensional.”

The lack of diverse drag performers on Drag Race is, according to Patrik and Archie, just one example of LGBTQ+ communities’ systematic exclusion of drag kings on main stages. “Drag kings seem to be less represented on the whole and are generally found in explicitly non-male spaces e.g. ‘She’ in Soho [a specifically lesbian bar]. They also tend to be viewed as less talented or aesthetically pleasing as queens despite showing more diversity in their performances,” they say.

Although drag kings face obstacles in achieving equal access and esteem, Patrik and Archie have not stopped themselves from paving their own road in self-expression. In independently fashioning their own articulation of drag, they see themselves as part of a movement towards diversification in drag itself.

“Modern drag is based on a more conscious parodying of gender, often in a less binary way, for example, we see queens without hair and the use of more elaborate costumes instead of seeking to ‘pass’. We see it in figures like Sussi who parody gender in an increasingly grotesque way,” they both say.

Marcus and Re’em echoed Patrik and Archie’s vision of modern drag as a more inclusive, diversified manifestation of queer art.

“For Haute Mess,” Marcus says, “we wanted to showcase a wide-variety of drag. By that, we don’t just mean pageant queens, trash queens, but that means looking at the monsters, kings, queens, and every part of it.”

Re’em adds to that saying, “Drag doesn’t have to be pretty. Pretty drag is expensive and that is not accessible. We want messy drag. We want confusing drag.”

Marcus, “We want expressive drag. We want ugly drag.”

Given drag’s history of flourishing in queer, artistic spaces, Re’em and Marcus believe it provides gender liberation through collective transgressions of normative culture. Drag allows one to embody deep-seated “fantasies,” as both of them called it, thereby enabling one to explore parts of themselves that they may otherwise be unable to display given social constraints on all aspects of identity. This situation is one of finding balance between individual self-expression and engaging with the collective meaning of “queerness.”

Oftentimes, the experience is difficult to pin down. As Re’em explained, drag allows one to “ conform to queerness but reject conformity in a way. It’s, well, you can understand it by seeing it. But it gives you the absolute freedom to go and become the deepest, weirdest fantasy that you can find.”

Both Marcus and Re’em spoke of their desire to speak of drag as letting out an amorphous illusion, or inner “monster” so to speak, rather than adhering to either side of a gender binary. Marcus echoed this sentiment when describing his look for Michaelmas’ Haute Mess. “I was rocking out my reptilian face with balloons in my hair. I live for that fantasy,” he said.

For many, drag’s disruption of gender is an opportunity for profound insight into one’s own attachment with society’s categories of gender. Archie, who is non-binary, says, “Drag has confused my perception of gender a lot as it makes you realise how unstable it is as an idea. I’ve started drifting away from seeing myself as a ‘woman’, which had always been a key part of my identity, and instead view gender as inconsequential.”

For Patrik, embodying their drag persona blurs several lines of identity. “The more I’ve performed drag, seen drag and dressed up in drag the more it became part of my identity. Patrik became less of a performance and more of an alter ego,” they said.

The correspondences between one’s own ego and public drag persona helps many of Oxford’s drag performers to see the experience as an intuitive one that flourishes outwards from inner personality rather than the adoption of an entirely othered, fictionalised character.

“When I am in drag, I take these few aspects that are a small percentage of my everyday, go-to-work personality and take them to a ridiculous extreme. It does feel more natural, because it is a kind of hidden personality that you have within yourself. You’re letting out the monster,” Re’em says.

Although drag is described by Re’em and Marcus as a powerful affirmation of individual identity, they both recognised the difficulties that individuals in drag face in mainstream spaces. Both of them recounted experiences of harassment or violations of boundaries whilst in drag. Re’em described a situation in which another person felt him up without his consent, and he noted instance that similar instances are indications of a systemic issues regarding the public’s perception of drag stars.

“People think that when you’re in drag they can feel you up or they can touch you or they can ask you really invasive questions that they would never ask you if you were dressed up in your normal clothing,” he says.

Perhaps, then, because Oxford drag is pushing the boundaries on so many fronts, from within the tradition of drag itself and also in a strongly heterosexual sphere of traditional academia, there can be a tense response to drag at times even within LGBTQ+ spaces in Oxford.

Still, the lack of conscientiousness in nonqueer spaces is oftentimes described as far more negative since toxic heteronormative assumptions undergird many of Oxford’s clubs and late-night venues. Marcus says, “I’ve found that when I’ve been out in more femalepresenting drag, people treated me in a way more like caricatured, sexualised manner… And it’s only then when I really started to get an insight into what it is like to be a female in these straight clubs.”

Thus, it is not uncommon for audiences to misunderstanding drag by perceiving the exaggeration of gender as a reinforcement of an extreme binary rather than an act aiming to disrupt the restrictive nature of gender itself. Marcus notes, “If people are seeing drag as a stereotype of women or a caricature of women, they will then treat them as a caricature of a woman in a very particular way. So hypersexualised or revered in a particular way that actually becomes to be about the appearance and the body.”

Drag is marginalised in both queer and non-queer spaces, but Patrik and Archie note that space can crucially predict how one might be treated in drag. “Queer spaces are very important in developing drag performances as there’s a shared understanding of the possibility of alternative forms of gender expressionwe’d get a lot more harassment in a straight space. However, even queer spaces can feel intimidating and unwelcoming to female and non-binary performers as they tend to be male dominated,” they say.

Re’em notes, “I wouldn’t go to Plush with myself with less than a group of 5 or 10 in drag. I’m a six foot seven man, plush six inch heels, plus two foot head dress. I could kill a man by mistake. It’s still scary because even with the queer community there isn’t always enough support.”

Drag positions its participants, both audience members and performers, into a liminal space. They are simultaneously threatened by outside, heterosexual culture yet empowered through celebration of the transgressive in queer locations. Performers may vacillate between self-doubt and authentic confidence, or they may feel both of these simultaneously. These complexities amplify drag’s power, marking its experience as enthralling yet potentially destabilising in the same instant.

Marcus describe drag as being, at times, similar to an out-of-body experience. “I think I have these moments when I’m in drag when, sort of, especially if I’m alone just in a room for a second, I’ll look in the mirror and I’m back to Marcus just for a moment and I’m like oooh fucking hell, okay, back to the room. And then you just sort of note that, and you go back into a character when you go back outside. It’s amazing, and I personally feel that flow.”

As drag continues to diversify in personas, looks, and perhaps even the platforms and mediums it manifests in, Oxford students will certainly be on the forefront of ushering in a new and improved attachments to drag whilst stressing its importance as a distinctly queer artform. For Re’em and Marcus, should drag become assimilated into straight culture, it cannot continue its objective of rejecting gender expectations.

“The drag that the wider community—and when I mean community I mean global, not queer, since queer community is a different question can accept is limited I think. They can only deal with looking at queens who are campy and look like a “drag queen” with big lips, big eyes, over the top hair, over the top dress—the dame if you will,” Marcus says. 

The institutionalisation of Oxford’s LGBTQ+ community, from Plush or even to queer history or gender equality events, is consequential experience for every level of drag participants. These events are important even those who may never perform in front of a large crowd, since it normalises drag as a worthwhile experience. Whether we are speaking of lay participants adorning drag for the first time or decked-out artists going the extra mile during a Plush lip sync, drag elevates the significance of queerness in collective and individualised ways.

“The chance to explore my own gender has lead to me feeling more confident in going out in a waistcoat and ruffle shirt for a tute,” says Patrik. “I don’t really have a label for my gender because I don’t think it matters, I just exist and usually do it in a top hat and tails. The reaction of people to what I wear or what I do is what I find really cool. People are usually more curious and supportive of it then I ever thought possible, especially from people who aren’t queer themselves.”

Yet, for all the complexities and contradictions that empower drag as a form of selfexploration, it is also functions an absorbing, shocking form of celebration and excitement. For all these reasons, Oxford’s LGBTQ+ community’s talent and energy makes it uniquely situated to foster a type of unchained, purposeful self-exploration in a context in which anything is on the table. As Marcus puts it, “It’s fun. It’s just drag. In the end it’s really important to remember that it doesn’t matter if… if you’re eyelashes are fucking wonky, or if they’ve ended up under your armpit, or whether you’ve smudged your lips because you’ve been getting off with every person in the club. That doesn’t matter. That’s part of it.”

Re’em speaks of the future of drag not as a dichotomy between feminine or masculine parodies, but rather a medium that elucidates our deep-seated imaginations, the ones beneath our unconscious acceptance of gender schemas, as a form of emancipation.

“I think that we want to encourage everyone to find their own fantasy. We want our Haute Mess to be a collective safe haven for everyone regardless of what they want. If you can find your own fantasy by just wearing bunny ears, then that’s it. If you want to come in the decrepit wedding dress and full of blood, that’s also fine. It doesn’t matter how far you want to go, as long as you feel liberated, this is what we want. A safe haven for gender liberation.”

Even in Oxford, separated by thousands of miles and a social and cultural chasm from the events of the American Civil Rights Movement, there are people who have experienced climactic moments in the march towards global justice. Joe Martin lived through the pivotal years which saw the struggle for civil liberties come to a fore. His story is necessary not simply in its poignancy, but for the way in which—as a white man who had lived in the segregated South—Joe has come to terms with social justice in his own life.

Having left the spires and cobble-stones, and an ever-growing pile of paper behind, I find myself just outside of Oxford, sat in a little white house. Here too are piles of books and pages: it is a collection which spans decades. It is the lifelong, intellectual and moral pursuit of one man seeking to make use of the privilege his race affords him. A pursuit which stems from a childhood in the segregated American South and is directly linked to the school which features in three laminated pictures, stuck with a purposeful precision to a kitchen wall.

The school is Central High: Little Rock, Arkansas. And the man who has opened his home to me is Joe Martin. Not only was Central High Joe’s high-school, but it was here, a few years following his graduation, that the admission of nine black children to the school sparked the decisive battle between federal and state power over the legal right to integration in segregated 1950s America. The ‘Little Rock nine,’ as they came to be called, were subject to the same emotional and physical abuse which with a sickening thud reverberated throughout the Civil Rights era. Their actions, poise, and courage were at the heart of one of the most crucial battles in the struggle for equality.

Joe points to the pictures of Central High. This is what I’ve come to talk to him about—the building, the town without, and the people within it. I wonder if there is a current of penance that has motivated his life-work. Joe later confirms that, yes, having been a white man on the ‘privileged’ side of segregation, this “puts an obligation on me” to put himself in the position of those who did not have his same privileges. He draws in his breath—”it makes me so angry” he says, as he recalls a hatred against blacks which he has had to access through the pages that fill his home. The gains of the past where black and white began to merge, has today given way to a violent, murky darkness—just as the oil mixed in water separates once more. We see it in the present American divisions surrounding police-involved killings, poverty, and institutional distrust. It is this resurfacing of old hatred through the cracks in our present, which makes Joe’s life-story, his internal struggle and attempt at understanding, ever-more essential for Oxford students to understand the real history of the American Civil Rights Movement and its lessons for our own time.

Born in 1934, Joe grew up in the ‘segregated South,’ where the racial divide was both instituted and reinforced by the day-to-day intellectual and social practice of ‘acceptance.’ It is this—an unquestioning personal and tangible reconciliation with segregation— which remains one of the most terrible and foundational aspects of the simplistic brutality of the racial divide. Though he does not believe that many were used, Joe tells me that in his neighbourhood, each house had been built with a servant’s quarters attached to the garage. ‘The help’—a term that he struggles to use, explaining to me that he will only repeat such terms to me in telling this story, as this

was the language of the time—were all black, like the ‘yard boys’ who would work in the gardens. Of course, these ‘boys’ were men, and Joe says he hates the term. And yet, the allusion to these anachronisms reminds us of the potent force of language, which acted to first reinforce a notion of racial hierarchy, and then, led to the debasement of the black social contingent.

Language, however, is merely the signifier for what translated to distressing and deplorable social realities. Somewhat to this end, I asked Joe at what point he had found himself aware of a racial ‘difference’—this social construct which necessitated society to draw boundaries, strengthened by fear and enmity, around ‘the other’. He told me that, in fact, he had grown up only vaguely aware of the divide, with a perception of blacks simply being the servant class; these were the only people of colour he encountered.

As was the tradition, he and his sister were taken care of by black nurses, and in his household the cooks and the cleaners were black. He tells me that he loved his nurse, and yet there remains an undeniable irony in so many growing to alienate and hate so deeply those whom, as children, they had grown and known to love.

Joe never learned to be comfortable with these contradictions. He has spent his adulthood attempting to understand (though he is the one to express how, removed from the experience, full understanding will never be wholly possible) the torments of the life that plagued those on the opposite side of the divide that demarcated his early life. As a child, it was an inexplicable feeling of ‘wrongness’ which first made him ‘aware’ of segregation and division.

As a toddler, in the years before America’s entry into WWII, Joe recalls how one of the ‘servant’s quarters’ annexed to the houses along the street was occupied by a maid, who had a small child of four or five. Joe, around the same age, along with other children in his neighbourhood, would all play together with the boy—evidently black. And yet, for no reason other than ‘the grown-ups’ belief that this interaction was ‘wrong,’ the white children were not simply told to stop playing with the maid’s son, but both the child and mother were forced to leave the annex—their home— and live back in the ‘black’ side of town.

It was at this point that Joe remembers feeling upset, that this was not right. His epiphany mirrors the gradual realisations of countless others at various moments across the South, having reached that point at which the scales are at first tipped from a point of innocence to hardening enmity towards an unjust system. Martin Luther King provides a poignant example. In The Autobiography of Martin Luther King , Jr., he writes:

“From the age of three I had a white playmate who was about my age. We always felt free to play our childhood games together.”

But later… “the climax came when he told me one day that his father had demanded that he would play with me no more. I never will forget what a great shock this was to me… and here for the first time I was made aware of the existence of a race problem.”

Similarly too, my own father, a black child in Wales, remembers the first time he felt ‘different.’ Walking along the road with my grandmother, a little white boy came up to her, kicked her in the shin, called her ‘black’ and then ran away. Stories like these, where we bear ‘witness’ to the moment at which the children are conditioned to hate, and to ‘see’ race, remain the greatest tragedy to me. They are the greatest proof, perhaps, that difference at its core is truly founded upon artificial distinctions.

The question of sight and blindness was one I talked about with Joe. Given his devout Christianity, I wondered how one reconciled segregation with a religion preaching of the brotherhood of all people. His struggle seemed to bear something in common thematically with the story of the black church in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird that is turned into a white gambling house on weekdays. It is a question which I sense Joe has struggled with before. He tells me that, particularly in reading about the lynchings of the 1920s and 30s where death became a sport and a spectacle, he finds it hard to believe that those people, standing there, taking pleasure in the killing, were true Christians. He closes his eyes, pained, as he shakes his head at the thought of these lynchings. He tells me that learning about these events came as a painful surprise. And yet, as our conversation deepened, I came to believe that it is our duty to—however pain- fully—resurrect this past, so that it may form a barrier to the hate which begins to take its ancient forms once more.

He evokes his own father to me—a partner in a roofing company—who Joe says not only directed a large group of all-black workmen, but was respected for his fairness. Though he was proud of his father’s decency, he acknowledges that the idea of integration was unthinkable to his parents. Though they were kind and fair, they operated within the limits of segregation. He does not believe that they were not Christians: he argues that it is wrong to devalue their professed faith as Christians for their blind spots as, like them, there were many who still practised love and fairness. However, there remains on his part a decisive and lasting frustration with what they did not see, and how they could not escape the boundaries they imposed.

However, for Joe, the Church was also the institution through which he was able to discover a community supporting increasing resistance to the segregation, racism and prejudice of the time. In Sunday School classes at the Methodist Church, Joe tells me how by the time he was twelve or thirteen, teachings would incorporate the idea that separation on the basis of race was wrong, and that this “resonated with what I felt within myself.” There were other instances of attempts to encourage tolerance, and integration, with the members of the Nationalist Women’s Methodist group setting about building a campsite near Little Rock, which was to act as a forum for inter-racial discussion in the ‘de jure’ era of segregation.

However, whilst Joe helped build the campsite, after just one meeting with the members of a Youth Group from a Black Methodist Church, no further events were allowed to take place due to the ‘concerns’ of white parents. The suppression of progress was di cult to bear. Joe himself says that even when he had reached a point where he was at last aware of segregation, he still believed that integration was an ideal, a state of living that he would not see in his lifetime. It would take many years to come about. This would seem to exemplify to me above anything else the sheer extent to which segregation was ingrained in the psyche of the time, and doubly, Joe tells me that this came from his lack of true understanding of black lives.

For all the tragedy, the scene that Joe paints of the time is a bitter comedy. The expanse of Central High, which took up the space of two city blocks, was deemed “the most beautiful high-school in the country”. Joe recalls how he and his classmates would talk of “how wonderful it was” that there was such diversity in the school (whose students came from three distinct socio-economic areas), with all its different classes and backgrounds, and that this was ‘special.’ They were ‘blind’ to the fact, however, that 25 per cent of kids their age were not there, but in a different school, for black children, on another less beautiful block in town.

Segregation was taken for granted. The permanence of the racial divide continued into Joe’s college years when, as a scholarship student at Harvard, he remembers there only being ten black freshman amidst 1,000. He remembers one, Clifford Alexander, to have been an ‘outstanding’ person, President of the class, and talented. Yet even though the students ate at the same table, the black members of the class were so few among the sea of thousands that ‘you didn’t get to know them, really.’

It was in the summer after his freshman year that that uncomfortable, growing sense of an ‘unjust’ status-quo, a feeling which originated in interrupted childhood friendship, reached the point where knowledge first touched ‘understanding.’ It was in coming to know the permanent directors of a Christian campsite, who in turn knew the leaders of a Black Methodist run camp, that Joe first agreed to help one day, and then took up the offer to stay a week in the camp run for black children.

Joe Martin sits on his sofa and I take this moment to say that I admire him greatly: for his fearlessness to draw out and reflect upon his, and all our limitations, the way in which he thinks carefully and fully before and as he speaks, and for the way in which he sees no end to betterment. He tells me then, with the genuine scope of seeking to understand this time in his life, that he remembers that he found it a ‘somewhat frightening prospect’ to spend the night as the only white man among many black men.

He was not spat upon or kicked at, and staying the night did not launch a battle between state and federal power, and yet, in a time where it was too easy to live in blindness, much in the spirit of the Little Rock Nine, Joe made his own first steps towards integration and towards positive change. It was “good for me to be the one in the minority.’ Preaching to the crowd the next day—his first ever sermon, which he says was not a good one, written by the eighteen-year-old that he was—he recalls with a laugh how encouraging that congregation was, clapping this young, white preacher.

It was then that Joe tells me that he came to the realisation that his ideas concerning segregation’—his belief that it would take generations for change to happen, were ‘unjust’. He came to understand the necessity of change.

Joe has lived in England for many decades now, and he recites to me the words of his dear friend Sylvester Jacobs, who with the help of Joe’s late wife, wrote of his experiences as a black man. These were words which Joe said affected him deeply. Jacobs, in his writings, asks ‘I kept wondering, am I really inferior, does God really hate black people?’ Joe talks to me of how it long it took Jacobs—a grown man—to be able to look at himself in the mirror; to look at himself and like his dark skin, his ‘black’ face, his black lips, the palms of his hands which were faded and pink, and the blackness of his body.

On Joe’s wall are photographs taken by Jacobs, black and white images which are poignant not for the colour of the people’s skin but in the universality of the pain they depict, as parents stand together at a funeral. We talk of Joe’s house in England, and of how he made sure that his door was open to all (despite the British being much less inclined to walk in). It brings him great happiness to see that his children, who he wanted to condition not to division, but to inclusion, are raising their own children in the same way.

Joe visits Little Rock every five years, for his high-school reunion. He tells me that each time, he walks back down to his old home, knocks on the door and asks whoever is in whether they would like to know the history of the house. He tells me, also, how one such time, it was a black man who opened the door. A black man wearing a Harvard jumper, and who had also gone to Central High. They’re great friends now, and always sit down for tea. Joe tells me with great joy how happy it makes him that it was “my house that integrated Little Rock!”

At his next high-school reunion, Joe wants to suggest that the alumni from Dunbar—the black high-school in Little Rock—are invited too, and he points me to a new study on Civil Rights era America on his windowsill that brings him as much pain as understanding. Yet, as we get up to look at the pictures on the wall, what strike me are the emotions—the sadness of Jacobs’ pictures, and the happiness in the Martins’ wedding day photos. It is simple, it is clichéd, but I think somewhere it must be said that we are all ‘human,’ all people.

The photographs of Central High are beautiful, but perhaps a tad artificial with no person in sight. Joe says that the hostility that the Little Rock nine faced in the halls which he had just left was ‘ludicrous’. And yet, there is some promise in those three pictures, a reminder that we are the ones who fill the halls, and have the ability to build up barriers and break down walls. Let us break down walls.

Returning home, the familiar path I take down past G&Ds is one that I am fortunate to take. I don’t ride down to a part of town where I must live in oblivion due to the colour of my skin. For now, the only pit of despair I must climb out of is an essay crisis. And yet, I say this all with a very heavy pinch of salt. My father became the first of his family to make it to university, kicked and spat at in school, and himself one of the few black men or women among hundreds. Unlike him, I was not told to not bother trying making an application. Yet, I remember wondering since a young age, being someone somewhere between black and white, what path my life would’ve taken as one, or the other. Because race matters. It still matters today, as latent lines of segregation x in our minds, and a propensity to divide still reigns.

Somewhere today someone was shot dead because of the colour of their skin, for their religion. The headlines ash, we feel a pang, and yet most of us fall back to our old rhythms: those of the past. My greatest admiration for Joe is his refusal to see an end, or to believe it to be the duty of the future to bring about change. He admits that there is still much to be done, and indeed we must do. We cannot be blind. We must remain aware—“woke”—and not allow time to soften the image or the reality of events of history or of today. It is for us to strive to know our other, and work to understand, so that one day all can truly live in the image of the maxim, that that we are all indeed “just human.”