Review of film: Emilia Pérez 

On the one hand, there is your typical AGP bingo, our man Manitas always knew he was trans, he’d been suicidal about having to live a lie, etc and so on. I’d expected that. And like a lot of gangster movies, there is more sympathy for the violent quasi-psychopathic character than is really reasonable. I might have expected that too. Ultimately Manitas (even as Emilia) can’t bear that his wife goes off and creates her own life with a new man, taking the children with her. Again, no surprises there. And of course, Manitas as Emilia is at the centre of all the women’s lives, particularly Rita whose existence is very much as a simp – she exists just for him, her love unrequited.

The inspiring story of Pop’N’Olly, the LGBT+ ‘edutainment’ company

The evening was also Olly Pike’s new book launch with the exciting opportunity to get a copy of Have You Ever Seen a Normal? This is self-described as ‘a delightful rhyming story designed to spark conversations about diversity and acceptance’. Some of the prose made up the beginning of Pike’s speech. It contains about a hundred uses of the word ‘normal’.  Did you know there’s no such thing as normal? For example, there is no such thing as normal food, normal houses, normal families, normal kids, being a normal height, normal love or normal heat. Et cetera.  Normal isn’t real.  The implication being, of course, is that there is no such thing as abnormal [behaviour] and that everything is relative. 

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