As part of London Writers Centre’s 30th Anniversary celebrations, we commissioned three London-based LGBTQI+ emerging writers to create a short original piece of work.  The commissions were open to London-based LGBTQI+ writers aged 18+, writing poetry, fiction or narrative non-fiction.

Men I Love + Boys I Ain’t by Aislinn Evans

When my fade is fresh I look like a first year plumbing student from the shitey side of Upminster. Barely drinking age, has a favourite lager. Favourite whiskey? Depends how generous his dad is. Design the character in my head while stomping Jubilee to C2C at West Ham, with my kin.  

* 

My old barber greeted me with a practised Turkic-cockney alright mate? Innit sunny mate? The emphasis on the T in mate was all wrong but the performance was soothing. We were both play-acting, both pretending to know how West Ham did in the league. Told him not to use the thinning shears, he reminded me he’d been cutting hair since before I was conceived. He shoulda been a butcher. 

* 

Kam’s has been on Old Kent Road for generations, blokes have grown up getting trims here and now bring their sons. I watch a boy and his old man get matching crops as I wait my turn. Glancing through the Sun. The fella has a mullet and my ex thought he was an egg. Only an egg could care that much about hair and look so shite. Burnt skin of his chest inches from my eyes while he does the front. 

He calls me boy. Grabs my head and leans it over the sink, holds me down with large soft strong hands as the water runs down my face too fast to breathe. Then he pulls me back and wraps the towel around my entire head, rubbing rough. I don’t let men touch me. When Kam grabs my face, thick fingers beside my lips, I watch the image in the mirror and it ain’t me. We’re silent the entire time, he takes about an hour, fifteen quid for a skin fade, second to none. One day I’ll take my daughter. 

* 

My dad ain’t been to the barber in over 20 years. He don’t want another man with a knife to his neck. He hates football, all sports, most other men, and don’t want nothing to do with women neither. A booksmart bus driver, he grows his grey curls out big and bushy and unmanageable and then buzzes it all off and starts again. He’s the kind of man who thinks he’s not doing gender. I think sometimes he’d be better off without it. 

He always told me he’s glad he don’t have sons. 

* 

I dunno what to tell you. I want men I like to see me like a little brother. I want men I don’t to remember I’m a woman. I want men I don’t know to think I’m a man. I want them to back off. I want, always, to be one of the girls. You understand what I’m saying? 

* 

Direct action is actually like so boring. I was sat on this roof in central London for five hours or so, and I dropped my water bottle. The other fella was a melt. To stay entertained I was waving at all the frustrated commuters bumbling past the cops. I got some smiles, elated honks, and I got flipped off. The best reaction was from bald blokes with dad bods coming off their construction shift. A subtle and very specific nod; small smile, vaguely diagonal. Good on you lad. 

* 

I’m drinking in the studio the day after my first big boy haircut, and this girl from Surrey says I’d be one of the safe lads at a music festival. That is what you’re going for right? I didn’t think I was going for nothing.  

* 

There was a fella in the loading bay called Yusuf who’d call out to me across the massive atrium of the art school. He was rooting for me; it was because we was kin. Behind enemy lines, us two. Art education was pulling my class standing into something fuzzy and difficult for me to claim, Yusuf pulled me back home with a loving clap on the back. It weren’t until graduation that I heard him – his voice was brimming with pride – call me ‘he’ and my stomach dropped. 

I knew, I’d always known, that this solidarity I get from blokes like him ain’t just a class solidarity. That’s not our only kinship. So when he claps me on the back and calls me a good man I let it happen. I try to let it feel good. Know what I’m saying? 

* 

Drunk men approach me a lot and I humour them too often. I’d cycled up to Edmonton on a hot day, aimless. You don’t go to Edmonton with aims particularly do you? It was sweltering; I was wearing this gay little crop top. The sun on the blocks by the park was sublime. The geez in question told me all about his massive crime family and why he was temporarily banned from Southend. His missus was livid. He showed me his ID, which I don’t understand strategically. He repeatedly asked if I was gay, and thrice I played coy. He had absolutely no problem with gay people, of course. Let him have his hug at the end. Swung my leg over my bike to piss off and he finally asked if he could fuck me. 

* 

Two lads are roving round Jaywick on one bike, boy B cradled in the handlebars in this way I love. Intimate. Precarious. Gay. ALRIGHT DAVE they call out to me and I nod. Stomping round all day in my trackies, having a nervous breakdown about being a girl who looks like a boy and how everyone in my nice progressive art school has started carefully he’ing me as if I ever asked for that. Two-boys-one-bike swing by hours later ALRIGHT DAVE. I nod. IS YOUR NAME ACTUALLY DAVE? No. Off they go. 

* 

While the bartender in Jaywick is arguing with me about how I could possibly be 21 without a beard, I’m trying to figure out why that geez in the bodywarmer looks funny. The pub’s named after a race horse and I’ve already had a little tyke tell me I’m probably from a shithole as well. I don’t know why I don’t just tell people I’m a woman. That’s why they’re confused. I’m committed to not asserting myself. Geez in bodywarmer, who is in fact a woman in her 40s, has no such problem. It’s when she speaks that I clock it. All Essex agg. She got a dolled up wife and a kid. She’s winding up the fellas all night, they clap her on the shoulders and laugh. Know what I mean? 

* 

Later, I’ve successfully bummed a ciggie off the butch in the bodywarmer. I cough my lungs out and she tells me I don’t smoke. Fail to strike up conversation So I’m stuck talking to her mate with the gobby sprog. This man who runs a gym starts manhandling me and telling me about how he’s gonna clean up all the scum in this town. He drags me down the road to see the place, slapping me on the chest and calling me a good lad. The butch, watching, winks. 

*  

As a teenager doing crew in community theatre I was, this won’t come as a shock to you, in the minority. Being a girl who looks like a boy can make you invisible to men. And I was on sound. The boys had figured out that an actress in a particularly low cut top could be ogled from the fly floor. The lighting desk boy teased her with the roving spotlight: each time she looked up she improved the view. I listened in the dark. Thought those boys were a right laugh. Rather than work they’d whack the volume up on this little speaker and sit on it. I didn’t learn how to use a drill on that job but I did learn how to feel stupid. You get me? 

* 

Lived with a fella with his own battle with blokeyness. He was either from east or south east London depending on who you asked and it took me six months to realise there was a correct answer. He did not, tactically, support Millwall or West Ham. He was talking low and fast through his teeth to another guy once and got spooked when he realised that I, being of his ilk, was comprehending every word from six feet away. I’m still smug about it.  

* 

For the first time I live with men who don’t appear to hold any doubt I’m a woman, and certainly don’t treat me like a girl. Got invited up to drink with them once and held out until 7am – the next youngest in the room was 39. When we fix things round the house they’re this close to sending me out for tartan paint. It don’t feel like the boys at the theatre. They show me how to use a drill and it’s gentle. I may be the world’s first female little brother. I talk to other women in the house, and they describe what these fellas can be like. I don’t get to feel it in my body like them. I do get to hear why they do it. See what I’m saying? 

* 

Sometimes right, men confess things to me. Once they get that I’m not one. In pubs, at work, over breakfast – this stuff tumbles out their mouths. About muzzles put on them by dads and mates and girlfriends. These guys don’t describe being men like it’s a lark, or even on purpose. It’s a job they’re shit at and it’s always too late to retrain. Some of them are brave enough to tell me what they want. Some are just women too. Plenty ain’t. 

* 

I been seeing this one bloke all the time: a brief glance in the mirror, then I realise it’s just me. He got broad shoulders and she looks like a first year plumbing student from the shitey side of Upminster. He has a gentle smile and would probably be trusted at a music festival. She looks exactly how I intend to. You know. 

About Aislinn Evans

Aislinn Evans started in poetry, had a love affair with comics, a rather dramatic divorce with both, and now is something of an essayist. Her work concerns intimate and personal explorations of the built environment, a queer phenomenology of place, class struggle, and the failure of memory. Her practise can be defined as somewhat restless, formally ambiguous, and a tad confrontational. She makes videos and stuff too. 

Aislinn said:  

“It’s an honour to receive this commission, which will give me the time and space to build my writing practice into something deliberate, considered, and integrated into a wider world of creative nonfiction.” 

All work (C) Aislinn Evans 2026