Diary

I just happened to find this in a jacket pocket and it made me so happy.

It's a ticket for JESUS QUEEN OF HEAVEN in the National theatre of Uruguay, in Montevideo.

It was the first time a trans woman had performed in that theatre, and I was happy for Fabiana Fine, the actress, and happy for me.

I remember soon after I first performed the show in 2009, and I was so hurt by all the hatred it had inspired., I'd sent the script to a minister I knew down in Oxford.

She wrote back to say she had read to a trans woman she knew who was in hospital and dying of AIDS.

"When she understood what it was about", my friend wrote, "her eyes grew as big as saucers. And she started smiling. A big big smile. Your text really blessed her."

I remember a young trans woman in Sao Paulo telling me, tears in her eyes, how much the play was helping her and helping her sisters too.

I didn't mean it to be a play that helped, and I didn't know it when I first performed it, but I know now that it does, somehow, that art can be activism, and that it matters.

I think the same about EVE. And that's why I think it's important to keep performing them.

And why, as the working year really begins, I am doing what I can to keep them both alive.