Pride is seen as the opposite of shame and is a counteraction to it. It represents visibility, acceptance, and belonging for queer people. The hosts of the Queer Student Podcast introduce themselves and discuss the meaning of Pride. They then interview Nick Cherryman, a queer activist, scholar, performer, and drag artist. Nick discusses their drag career and describes it as a space for self-expression and uplifting others. They also talk about their activism, including a piece they did using rejection letters from the government for state benefits.
I view pride as the other side of the coin to shame. Pride is the opposite of shame. And we, again, as queer people, as any type of people, whatever pride you want, be that disability pride, black pride, whatever, you name it, whatever pride there is out there, it is, for me, in the way that I view it, the counteraction of shame. When was the last time, for example, a straight person was ashamed to hold the hand, someone else's hand, of their partner on the street? When was the last time someone was ashamed to come out to their family? When was the last time someone was ashamed to do X, Y, and Z? This is us going, actually, it is okay.
And it's a level of visibility, which I think is very important. Hello, and welcome to the official Panorama podcast, The Queer Student, brought to you by Warwick Plan, the professional LGBTQIA plus network. I'm Jasper. And I'm Yusra. And over the next year, we'll be giving you everything you need to be fully equipped as a queer student, whether that be in careers, nightlife, or advice. Simply put, we are the career podcast for LGBTQIA plus students. As this is our first episode, we thought it'd be nice to introduce ourselves.
So I'm Jasper, my pronouns are he, they. I'm a second year English Lit and Creative Writing student. And I'm Yusra. I'm also a second year English student, and I go by she, her. Yusra, do you have a fun fact about yourself? Fun fact about myself? I've been told I dress up like a granny, Jasper. I think that's the most fun I get. You're a hot granny, though, so. Thank you, thank you. Fun fact about me? I said this, actually, on an episode of Insight last week.
I can move my ears. Yes, as freakish as that is, I guess that does suffice for it. Oh my God, he's doing it right now. But yeah, so over the next year, we'll get to know us a bit better than that. We're going to be putting out monthly episodes of The Queer Student for the planner on the podcast. Absolutely, and this week there's Pride. What does Pride mean to you? How are we celebrating it this year? So Yusra, yeah, what does Pride mean to you? I think Pride to me, Jasper, means that there's community and acceptance.
What does Pride mean to you? I think for me, yeah, just going off of that, like the sense of visibility, the sense of belonging. I went to my first Pride last year, and it was just such a very humiliating experience, actually, to see so many openly queer people in the same place. It was an amazing experience that I can't wait for this year. Absolutely. Now, on the topic of Pride, we thought it'd be amazing to interview one of the founders of Warwick Pride this year.
They are an absolute creative genius, and yeah, I'm delighted to say we're joined in the studio by, to put it plainly, an inspiration. Nick Cherryman is a queer activist, scholar, performer and drag artist, making a huge splash across the Midlands drag scene, performing under the brilliant stage name Ibuprofen. Students may be familiar with IB through their work on Warwick Drag Race and their regular performances at local queer venues. IB is currently studying their PhD here at Warwick, critically exploring the transformative power of drag performance, having earned an MA in Gender, Sexuality and Culture from the University of Manchester, in addition to an MA in Social Science Research at Warwick.
Their drag in academia has led them to be awarded with the Warwick Award for Teaching Excellence Prize in 2022, and to collaborate with some of the biggest names in international drag, including RuPaul's Drag Race alumni, Miss Cracker and Dr Cheddar Gorgeous, the latter of which IBuprofen will be interviewing in Warwick Arts Centre as part of Warwick Pride. More on that later. Their other inspirational work includes being the student chair of the Rainbow Taskforce and co-founding Queer Slash Disrupt, a research committee comprised of students and researchers working around queer spaces.
And just to open things off, we've selected a quote from IBuprofen about the nature of being queer. Queer is that which lurks out of the view of the camera shot, in the wings of the theatre and in the peripheries of social consciousness. It threatens the fragility of what we take for granted, refocuses the lens of what we see and draws our attention to the verisimilitude of social norms. In short, queer destabilises how we conceptualise the world around us.
IB, thank you so much for joining us today on Plamarama's Queer Student Podcast. We are so excited to have you here today. First of all, how are you? I'm fabulous! How are you two? We're doing amazing today. Thank you so much. That was the least convincing amazing I've ever heard. Let's try this again. How are you two? I'm doing amazing. There we are. That's the energy we want to fucking see. There we are. And Jasper, you just sat there silently staring at me with terrified fear in your eyes.
I can see the whites of your eyes from across the table. How are you doing? I'm doing fabulously. Yeah, slightly nervous. Why? I don't know. This is the first episode. This is a big moment for us. Oh! Oh! Oh! I'm taking your podcast for Junity. I have been known to pop a few cherries at a time. This is going to make the air at all, if it is. People are going to have a fun time, aren't they? Oh, this is what we're all about here on the Queer Student Podcast.
Popping cherries. Good lord almighty. I'm sure there's a report and support for that somewhere. Yeah. You've been incredibly busy with Warwick Pride, your PhD. How are things going? Are you on top of everything? Ha! Ha! Sleep. What is sleep? What is sleep? There's too much blood in my caffeine system. I function on three hours of sleep at the moment. At night, I run around the place. I recently adopted a stray cat. I thought, let's add more stress to my diet.
It's called Oreo. It's very, very lovely. Sleigh. My PhD is going wild, by the way. So you're going to have to work with me. I'm sorry on this one. I'm sorry if you're ever editing this as well. Yes, fabulous. Warwick Pride is kicking off. I've got meetings left, right and centre. I've got gigs coming, gigs going out. PhD. What's a PhD? Oh, what, what, what, what, what? My supervisors are getting concerned for my progress on that.
I'm getting shit scared for my progress on that. But all in all, yes, fabulous. Fabulous. I'm very, very excited about next week. I cannot wait. Oh, this week? This week? Because, oh my god, this is coming out this week Yes, absolutely. Ivy, I'd like to start by asking you about your drag career, your artistry. How best would you describe your drag to listeners? Oh, what is drag? What is drag? Well, for me, drag, drag, drag, drag.
Drag is... I don't know if I explain how I came into it. That would be useful because it would give you a bit of context. So I started drag about four and a half years ago. And actually, I entered a competition. And there was five heats and then a final. And I got through to the final. But between heats four and five, lockdown happened. Oh. Yeah. So I spent two years in my flat not doing much.
I'd just gone through a divorce. I got the flat and the dog, so I won. It's okay. And I basically did all of that. So I very much did my drag in isolation in the early stages of a community per se, or a community in person. So my drag, for me, is... I mean, it is for everyone. But for me particularly, it's very much individually formed. It's very much a space that I needed and created for myself.
And then as we've opened up over the past few years post-lockdown, I've tried to keep that space open for exploration, uplifting, championing. Other people are up and coming in this scene. I have a drag son called Raphael Ho, who is... That's beautiful. Yeah, he's coming. Pride is absolutely fabulous. Oh, you must be excited for that. Extraordinarily! Very, very, very, very. It'll be good. But, yeah, it's really important. It's a space where we can uplift. It's a space where we can express.
It's a space where we can do the artistic things that we as queer people are often told we aren't allowed to do, shouldn't do, or repress. And I openly and explicitly engage, encourage, and embrace the weird and the queer. So it's political. It's sharp. It's intelligent. It's stupid. 100%. I mean, we definitely get a sense of that looking at your Instagram and having seen you perform as well at Warwick Drag Race, for instance. Yay! I was a big fan of your rendition of Lewis McCartney as someone you love.
Big fan of that. You kind of alluded to your drag being heavily rooted in protest, activism, education. One of your recent pieces, which really caught my eye, was your piece which was your outfit made of rejection letters from the government to your request for state benefits. Would you want to explain that for the listeners? Yeah. So it was PIP benefits, and it was to do with the fact that I was reaching out for support, basically, from the government for kind of daily living.
It was just a little bit here. I wasn't sure if I was going to get it. But going through the process for it was so deeply unsettling, difficult, uncomfortable, and quite violating, for want of a better phrase. I won't go into specifics on the podcast, but the questions that they were asking were nasty. And in particular, it made me think of a friend who, unfortunately, took their own life after benefits had been cut. And I remember thinking, if I struggle with this as a confident, male-presenting, white drag performer who has no problem going out there and being bolshie, someone who is significantly more vulnerable than me, and I found it deeply depressing, someone who's more vulnerable than me, it was awful.
So the piece itself was an outfit made of the PIP rejection letters. And what I did was it was clown-like because, or kind of inspired from Piero the clown, the sad clown, because of the fact that it felt almost like we were being laughed at as queer people and kind of disabled people. But I very realistically bled on it. And it was a real cannula, it was real blood at the time. And it was very much, without being too heavy-handed than it is, it was very much there's blood on people's hands here.
Like, for the sake of what people's lives are being taken and at stake. And that one story for me, and one story about my friend who took their own life years ago, that's just the ones that I'm aware of. There will be hundreds if not thousands out there. It was very, very specifically targeted and political and direct, that one. It was probably one of the heavier pieces I've done. Definitely, I found it just so striking. And just going into that, how do you feel about the drag scene today, particularly with the influence of RuPaul's Drag Race and the so-called RuPaulification of drag, if you mind me calling it that? The kind of idea that drag needs to fit under this certain aesthetic or idea in order to be recognised.
I feel like you might have strong opinions on this. I do, actually. I'm having an hour-long conversation with Chedi Gorgeous about that, called Compromise, Censorship and Its Consequences. I've put my ticket for the front row, don't worry. That's what we're talking about. We are talking about the idea that RuPaul, as a franchise, not necessarily the person, but the person as part of that franchise, has done some incredible things for drag. It has given it a platform way bigger than anything I think anyone who's been in the scene for a while could possibly have imagined.
With that, it has unfortunately narrowed the field of what people expect from drag. So it's done some brilliant things in some ways and it's given opportunities to queer people in ways which no other franchise has in this particular industry. On the flip side, and there's a few flip-sidey bits, it does kind of commodify it to a certain extent. It means that because it's so franchisable now, it has basically, and again, this is what we're going to be talking about with Chedi, it has meant that for it to be marketable and for drag to be marketable, we have lost some of the queerness.
And by the queerness, I mean the sharp edge of parody, the sharp edge of politics, the sharp edge of social commentary, because that's not marketable. The final bit on this, because I could go on for ages and I will, is that there's something very interesting about... Do you mind me asking how old you two are? I'm 21. Yeah, I'm 20. I get it. So RuPaul has been around, the show, the franchise, since you were five and six.
Oh, wow. OK. You have grown up going, this is what drag is. Absolutely, yeah. So what we end up with is people your age and younger and around your generation entering a drag scene with a very specific idea about what drag is, what it does and what it's for. Now, I'm not going to say that's not right, but when people are coming in and going, this is all it is, all it does and all it is for, what we end up with is an unintentionally invalidated certain types of drag or there's been a removal of the irony of drag in a certain way and you get a lot of people coming in thinking that this is what drag queens do.
Absolutely. It's quite restrictive to put that image and those binaries on top of drag, which is a celebration of identities. It can be, yes. It can be many, many things above and beyond that as well in exploration. But yes, one of the things that I struggle with is the idea that people, it's not a fair representation of the culture. So an example of this in practice, you see a lot of young queens coming in being catty, bitchy and reading and everything and they don't understand the culture as to why that's there and it's kind of creating a particular tier where there's a cattiness and a bitchiness in drag over the past 10 years that people my age, the ancient age of 33, just aren't prepared to tolerate and it can cause rifts.
I'm not interested in having some bantamweight twink turn up and think they are the next RuPaul because they want to make some shitty comment to someone. I will cut you verbally, cut you down, right down to size and you'll learn very quickly that that's not what it is. So I think people go into it expecting one thing and getting another which causes another disconnect. Yes, strong warning there to any twinks listening. Oh bless, he thinks he's a twink.
Isn't it cute? So we've touched a bit about politics earlier. I would like to ask you how you feel about the queer politics scene today in Britain, particularly with the general election coming up less than a month away now. In recent weeks we've seen that trans rights to be politicised to a completely new level with the controversial CAF report seeing the access to puberty blockers for trans children being effectively stopped by NHS England. What are your thoughts on this? Do you have any messages for any trans students listening? So I was asked to comment on various national newspapers on the CAF report as an expert comment to the point where I actually got in a back and forth row by email with the science editor of the Torygraph and she doesn't like me.
The fact that I have to explain to her that calcium contributes to stronger bones. Anyway, I got in a hard back and forth with her. The CAF report is not good. And by that I mean in its most objective scientific way it is a deeply, deeply flawed report. I think the intentions were genuine. I think the bias within CAF didn't even realise it had a massive impact on that. The politicisation. At the minute, trans people and gender non-conforming people or people who appear gender non-conforming, I should be specific there are a political whipping post at the minute.
There is a huge amount of fear around what queer and trans bodies are and do. I think it was Charlie Sprague who pointed out, for example, this fear around trans women in toilets. There are more Tory MPs with sexual assault convictions than trans women. You know what I mean? I'm like, right. There are several things here. First of all, the numbers alone. But also, much as I would like to think trans women are role models in society I'm going to go, no, actually the MPs are probably a bigger role model.
Sort out your own house. Clean your own side of the street. Shut the f*** up. And then come for us. If you're going to come for me, come correct. And I have a real issue with the weaponisation of trans people where often trans people are reduced to a soundbite. Trans people are reduced to only being trans and nothing more. And I think they are being utilised and weaponised in a way which is deeply dehumanising to trans and queer people.
Sorry, I got a bit ranty there, didn't I? Honestly, that was so well put. And I think, just going back to the whole soundbite idea, I think that's really what it comes down to. And it's just so upsetting to see human rights being degraded to a dog whistle just to get people angry and, I don't know. One of the things, the argument I had about, I refused to give them a short sentence. I refused to give them an un-nuanced sentence and I very carefully phrased things in a way where they were unable to take it out of context.
And I think it really wound her up because I think she knew that I knew I was doing that. And I was like, I'm not giving you, I'm not going to allow you to weaponise me in this space. If you're going to use a quote, use the proper quote. Give me the context, do it properly. And it got to the point where I just said, I just hope you report on this with integrity. And we stopped talking then.
She didn't like me because, I mean, she refused to engage on my terms whilst asking me as an expert witness, opinion, whatever you want to call it. So I was like, well, don't ask an expert and then remove the expert from it. No, no, not how that works. In line with the general election, the two main parties are contributing to this vitriol and venom. What would you say about that? I'm going to use a gross metaphor here and a sweary one to deal with it.
It's how I describe it. It's like, you've got two buckets of shit and you've got to get to the bottom, right? One's solid, one's a liquid. Which one do you want to go through? You know what I mean? Which of the two buckets of shit do you want to go through? And you've just got to pick which one's the less gross for you. You know what I mean? With that said, I do think one is slightly better than the other pile of shit to go through.
Maybe the bucket's smaller, maybe not. What, unfortunately, because of the current rhetoric and the politicisation of trans bodies, and I mean bodies both as in identities, but actually the physical bodies of people, I actually don't have anything to say further on that. What I would like to say, however, though, is to any kind of trans people listening, I'm 33 years old. I sound so old. I sound like a kind of queer elder. I used to hate this rhetoric when I was about 18.
It gets better, it gets better, it gets better. First of all, two things. It does actually get better. Secondly, find the communities you need. If it isn't being offered to you explicitly, look for it. It is there. You can find it. I'm not going to pretend it's easy. I'm not going to pretend it's even nice. But make sure you are looking after yourself and find your tribe. And find the people who give a shit. Find the people who care.
Because at the minute, the fucking government doesn't give two shits about you. And it's horrible to hear, and it's horrible to put it so bluntly, but it is the truth. So find the people who care and stick to them. They are your family. They will pick you up when you are down and they will be the ones to support you. Because otherwise, you're going to be dropped like a bag of shit and unfortunately, a lot of people don't make it out.
And that's outrageous and disgusting and ugly and grotesque. But make sure you find your people. Let's talk about Pride. It's Pride Month. There will be celebrations across the country. For you, what's the importance of Pride right now at the moment? So, people often think Pride is a bit going out there. I know it sounds, bear with me to explain. I'm being, oh, I'm proud to be gay. People are like, well, I'm not proud to be anything.
I think for a lot of people, it can feel a bit strange. That's not how I view Pride. I view Pride as the other side of the coin to shame. Pride is the opposite of shame. And we, again, as queer people, as any type of people, whatever pride you want, be that disability pride, black pride, whatever, you name it, whatever pride there is out there, it is, for me, in the way that I view it, the counteraction of shame.
When was the last time, for example, a straight person was ashamed to hold their hand, someone else's hand, of their partner on the street? When was the last time someone was ashamed to come out to their family? When was the last time someone was ashamed to do X, Y, and Z? This is just going, actually, it is okay. And it's a level of visibility, which I think is very important, that shows, for example, I always think of a pride.
I always think, who is Pride for? And I want to say, Pride is for everyone. It is. But for me, Pride is most effective when you see the 14-year-old trans girl come out and look at someone and go, yeah, that's who I can be. Oh my God, it's okay. I'm not a freak. I'm not weird. I can be that. And look, they look happy. And it creates a sense of space and optimism for young queer people who often are hopeless.
And it goes, you can live your life, and you can be fabulous, and you can have your family, and you can have your people there. And that is sometimes enough to keep people going to when they are in a better place. Because too many people take their lives. Too many people live their life in shame and in pain. And Pride is a shield against that weaponization against queer bodies. And for me, that's what Pride is. For the same reasons, I really think that Pride should be free.
And I feel like the second you start restricting access to Pride, imagine a 14-year-old. How is she going to afford £70 to get into a weekend ticket at Pride? It's one of the reasons why Warwick Pride, we have made the entire thing free. The only thing that isn't free is the Loud and Proud evening event because that's always charged. And I know for a fact the SU, because I've explained to them that, are losing money on that.
They are doing it at cost because what they're doing is just getting by because it's so important that the space is there. Yeah, I honestly couldn't agree more. In terms of just going to Pride and just that visibility there, I went to my first Pride festivals last summer and just, honestly, it sounds really weird to say, but you kind of forget that many people exist. Absolutely. On the train, seeing people just so visible and things, I was so taken aback.
I read something somewhere, someone saying, and I've never forgotten it, much as I agree. And I actually think sometimes people are like, people are like, oh, Pride's a protest. Yes, it can be. It can also just be a place for people to enjoy their queer selves. I've read somewhere, I said, with that in mind, I don't want us to forget, I forgot who it was, but they said, one of the saddest things I've ever seen is on the train back from Pride and seeing all the queer teenagers take off their Pride badges, off their bags, change into black tops over the top of their rainbow stuff and clip their rainbow earrings, like, remove their makeup.
And it's like, oh, yes, they've been able to have this fabulous time, but they have to go back. You know what I mean? And I'm glad the space is there for people to have that. But what I don't want to forget is we actually have to create that space and work to create those spaces because otherwise people don't have them. Absolutely. That completely makes sense. I mean, Pride for me is always contained this aura of comfort.
And especially coming from a city like London, it can get quite alone where going to a festival like Pride, you feel that sense of community. Even if you don't know anybody, you feel like there are people there who understand you and they want to get to know you. So I think you've put it quite nicely. Yeah. Without a doubt. You kind of touched there on the kind of process element, I guess, of Pride, but at larger festivals like London and Brighton, for instance, we see these huge, massive corporations like Coke, BMW, Virgin Atlantic, Costa Coffee, to name a few, which may have slightly negative conversations to what they support or how they treat their workers, for instance, their environmental output.
Is this kind of, I guess, process element of Pride slightly undercut by their involvement? I was just wondering where you might stand on this. Someone said something to me and at the time I was a bit like, what? And I won't say who, because they're quite famous, actually, and I don't want to throw them under the bus, potentially. They said capitalism has done a lot of good things. It's also done a lot of bloody awful things.
And actually, if we're weighing it up, it's done more awful than good. Capitalism is a factor of the life that we live in this society, whether we like it or not. Now, with that, if it comes down to whether or not we can offer that space or not, are the corporations being performative? Right? And they might be. I'm not going to pretend they're not. A lot of them are, probably. With that said, though, is it actually performative when it does create the space for the micro? I think it can do both.
So, it is a double-edged sword, a poison chalice, as you will. It can do good. What I don't like is I think people should be selective about what sponsorship they get. And there's always a balancing act between someone offering... At what point do we go, this is a big enough sum of money for you to not... So, a really good example of this is HSBC at Birmingham Pride. Because they, for example, millions into Israeli weapons. I chose, for example, on this one, not to do Birmingham Pride.
I did the parade because it was, A, unpaid. B, it wasn't in the paid section. And C, visibility is important, as I said earlier. I didn't attend. I didn't perform or do anything as a paid gig there. That was my choice. And I also believe that as people, as particularly queer performers, we are as much subject to the whims of capitalism as anyone else. And sometimes we have to make choices where we go, I have to perform in a place where I feel uncomfortable.
I don't have a place to live or eat if I don't get the bills. And I completely get that. And I think as long as it's reflective, as long as you've critically thought about it, I think that's okay. Because sometimes, again, I'm fortunate I have a queer tribe and a queer family outside of this. I will never begrudge someone who, for example, doesn't and needs a queer weekend of just joy and abandonment and just the space they don't get.
I don't want to take that away or nullify that either. I don't think it's a... You know, I mentioned earlier, I'm not giving you a soundbite answer here. I'm not insisting or asking for one either. But it's an incredibly nuanced conversation. It can go down to the individuals at the time, the individual corporations. Just to kind of touch on Warwick Pride, Warwick Uni Pride here, I was fortunate enough in the funding that we got and how we managed to get the money where we were able to offer it for free.
And I think that festivals and institutions and people who organise this should be working harder to make it as cheap and as free as possible. And as long as people are trying to do that, I want to kind of restrain my criticism because we are all within a system that fucks us over. And we're just doing the best we can. And as long as someone is doing their best, I can't fault them for that. You know what I mean? Even if it's not a perfect outcome.
Does that make any sense? Have I just gone off on a random little anti-capitalist rant? No, no, no. Absolutely not. Changes are linear. Absolutely, it's a process. In an ideal world, every Pride would be free. We would all have a society where we can all function and do it because we love it and we enjoy it, but we don't. Much as we would all like that. So we have to deal with what we've got. It's the buckets of shit again.
It always comes down to buckets of shit. That's your takeaway from this podcast. Planarama's podcast, buckets of shit. Well, moving on from buckets of shit, let's go on to something just amazing, which is Warwick Pride. Yes, so excited. And we were both quite gobsmacked when we saw what was going on in comparison to last year's. So I can give you some background. I can give you background on that because I helped organise that one as well.
So we had 17 days from getting the money to putting on the show. Last year. We had less than, we had two and a half weeks from being told we had the money. So everything that was done last year was basically that. Now, it was never what we wanted. It was okay given the time frame. It was not as well attended as well, but we knew that because of A, it was in week 10. But also what it actually allowed us to do was, and we kind of went in expecting this, was allowed us to do a proof of concept, which allowed us to do it this year.
Because we said, look what we did. So last year we had 15K, 15,000 and 17 days. And I was like, look what we did with that. Now we have just under 30K and five months. Wow. And look what we've done. This is a bigger, better boulder. And our options were, do we just leave last year? Or do we go with it with the knowledge that we can then pitch and go, look, this is what we had.
Now let us do it properly with the time frame and the money that we can. And I do think we've done a pretty good job. No, absolutely. We're both quite excited to be there. The lineup is... It's insane. Just to name a few, Black Pepper, Cheddar Gorgeous. We have Seance, Mamby Bang Bang. Me, of course. Seance, by the way, is one of the funniest human beings I've ever met. They're at the Soho Theatre at the minute and are from Coventry originally.
So we tried to keep it a mixture of local and big name. And we've got students performing. We've got Bandsock, MTW, Big Loud and Proud in the evening. We've got drag performers up there. We've got Polesock up there doing things. We've got some go-go dancers. Oh, no, we're having a great time. Like, I'll... Oh, my God, OK. So you can't see it on the screen, but I'll show you what the set is for it because the set...
I am so excited for this set. So I'll show you first of all what the first option they gave me was. And I was like, oh, what's the other option? So the first option... Swing into this microphone. First option was this. And I was like, oh, OK. Second option... Oh, that is... You are telling us that will be in up, one and only. That's so good, isn't it? And I was like, well, very obviously we're doing that.
You've got us on stage. I was like, absolutely. I was like, out of the two options. I was like, are you... It's not a choice. It's not a choice. Make this a clear cut. It's really giving Strictly Come Dancing a lot from that. I can see... We're going to have... So one of the things I'm actually really excited about, actually, about this is the DJ we've got. Is it Disco Dave? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's Just Soraya.
I don't know if people know that. People will know... People will probably have heard Just Soraya without realising it's Soraya. First of all, Soraya is lovely. She is a lesbian. She's a person of colour, which was important for us for our presentation anyway. As well as the fact, I'd argue she's one of the best DJs in the West End. She's at the Nightingale Club. She regularly... She was... She's been on BBC One Extra, The Beat Kiss.
She's on Gaydio. She is, importantly, the recipient of a BBC One Extra Future Figures of 2023 for our recognition to the LGBT community. She is up and coming. She is one of the nicest people I've met. She is, frankly, bloody amazing. We have a... When I say she's top-notch UK DJ, that is who we have. She is bringing it. I'm so excited. It's going to be a hell of a party, basically. It really is. It's going to go on until 2am.
It's going to be a big blowout. If I get my way, they're going to kick me out. I'm going to be clinging to the stage. Did you guys go to Loud and Proud Blast in Term 1? The big one in Term 1? The big Welcome Week one. Yeah. I'm not going to lie. My memory is wiped out from that one. I was on that stage dancing that one for so long. I laid down on the stage afterwards with my drag son who was also there.
It was about five minutes and we'd got up and there was just this perfect outline of sweat on the stage. I was like, that's disgusting, but I love it. It was an amazing night. If we can get even closer to that, I'll be ecstatic. It really was. Get your tickets if you haven't already. Yes, get your tickets. Can we just implore any students listening, it's so important for us to turn up in numbers for this, because if we show our support for it, we'll get more of it.
Please, students. Absolutely. Really, just to echo that, I know from behind the scenes conversations, we are pushing for this. If you want these sorts of events, you have to turn up, basically, because otherwise there's no drive for it. Please, please, please, if you are able to turn up, have fun, party, and just enjoy yourself. For God's sake, have a good time. 100%. We need a bit more fun in this world. In the buckets of shit. Amidst the buckets of shit, we could do with a bit of glitter.
Ivy, we've come to the end of our discussion. No! We know. It's been an absolute pleasure. Before you leave, we just have one last question for you. Oh, God, why? What do you want? Why do you want things from me? Why do you even invite me to things? Well, this is a nice one, I promise. We want to make it a tradition on the podcast here that we ask each of our guests to give us a few words on what they would say to their younger queer self, whether that would be advice or anything.
With that in mind, Ivy, what would you like to say to younger Ivy? God, this is quite heavy. Keep going. People will make you feel like shit. And people will make you feel bad. And if you keep going, you'll find yourself in a place where you'll be doing things you didn't think you would. You'll be better off than you think you would be. And you'll be able to offer an opportunity to people who didn't have someone like you.
My philosophy is always, be the person I needed to be when I was younger. And you've become that person. And you should be really proud of yourself. Even if you don't always say it to yourself now. And, yeah, it will be okay. You'll make it. Well, Ivy Faux-Fane, thank you so much for joining us. No worries! Yeah, we've had an excellent time. You can see Ivy at Warwick Pride on Friday 14th June. Please come along. Please, please come along.
Say hello, wave, shout. I'm also taking over all of the SU stuff and all of the social media. So if you see me, I might be able to get you in the social media. Oh, yes please! For some reason, they thought giving me control of the social media would be wise. It's going to backfire very quickly. It's the scandal we need. So, yeah. We can't wait. Thank you so much. We've had a blast.
