MULTISENSORY QUEER STORYTELLING · R&D CALL OUT OUT

Good Enough

You've carried something for a long time.

01 - UK - SHARE A STORY

02 - SCOTLAND - JOIN THE COHORT

WHAT THIS IS

An interactive story box.
A hidden life inside it.

Pencil sketch of a participant leaning into an illuminated storybox on a table, small figure visible inside, freestanding screen to the right.

Pencil sketch exploring bone conducting audio and haptic vest design for the Good Enough storybox experience, with ear and figure diagrams.

Pencil sketch showing a framed sequence scene with silhouetted figure in doorway, and a lone figure surrounded by swirling watching eyes.

A handcrafted box containing fragments of a life: objects, images, sound, text. One person enters the experience and witness the interior world of an older gay man — and the hidden self he carried alongside his visible life, for years, sometimes for decades.

Duration

Fifteen minutes

Venues

LGBTQ+ safe spaces, community halls, library rooms etc.

Format

One person

Reach

Touring widely across Scotland

WHO THIS IS FOR

Queer men over 50.

Particularly the ones who don't usually see themselves in work like this.

  
    ✓
    You rarely see your experience reflected in arts or theatre work
  
    ✓
    You're not publicly out, or not fully, and you navigate that carefully every day
  
    ✓
    Your experience of being queer was shaped by working-class life, or communities where it had no language or no room
  
    ✓
    You lived through the AIDS years and carry what that time left
  
    ✓
    The public face of gay life has never quite felt like yours

You've survived. You've adapted. You've built strategies for getting through. And you've rarely been asked what that cost.

If any of that is you — this is for you.

A NOTE FROM THE DIRECTOR

I grew up in the North East, working class, in a world where the newspapers on the kitchen table told me — without ever saying my name — that who I was becoming was wrong. At school I learned to be quiet. Not because I had nothing to say. Because quiet was safer.

There is a whole generation of men who did the same thing. Who came of age under Section 28, through the AIDS crisis, through decades of being told that who they were was not enough. Men who built extraordinary survival strategies.

Good Enough is for those queer men. What you carried was real. It had a name. And you were not alone in carrying it. The stories of men in this community are not illustrative material. They are the foundation.

John Darvell · Director, NOCTURN

“One thing that what was rather confusing and puzzling was the frequency with which other people, you know, usually people outside the family, people who weren't neighbours, people that you would meet in other situations, friends of the family that hadn't seen you for a while or friends of neighbours and so forth, they confused me with being a girl. I don't remember feeling particularly hurt or shocked with that. Maybe a slight indignancy. Feeling of being indignant.”
“It was only when my mind started to develop and my body to mature, that I began to think, “There's something odd here. I'm not quite like my friends. I am different. And in a way I was kept apart from them – especially at school. When we got out of school, everything was fine, but in school, amongst the others, amongst the group, I was kept out. I was like a 'tiùrragan' [a small heap, such as might be left over on the shore, an insignificant thing]. I didn't understand why. What did they see in me? Maybe they saw something in me that they didn't find in themselves, or perhaps something in me frightened them in some way.”
“Well, you see, because I want to go back to this distinction between male and female that was really a very strong, everything, there was that that dichotomy was drummed into you. So anything that wasn't masculine about you meant that you were, you must be feminine. And that was somehow a failure to me. I I didn't know how to, I didn't know how to be anything else than than I was. I don't remember saying, right, well, I'm going to make friends with the bully because or tell him jokes or win him around that way, just to save, to save me. My mind didn't work that way. And so I was bullied at school.
And, I remember, I think I must have been in about 12 or 13 quite early in secondary school in the boys' toilet, in a cubicle, closing the door, and there was my name on the inside of the door. Robert is a poof. So I knew it was me and I thought, Lord, love us, what's going on here? What does this mean? And it was obviously something pretty devastating to me at the time. So, and yet, you see, I didn't, I didn't, I didn't change my behaviour. What I did do is I think I became more introverted.”

Extracts by kind permission from the OurStory Scotland LGBTQ+ oral story collection.

UK-WIDE · GAY, BI & TRANS MEN OVER 50

01

Share Your Story

Written or voice recording · No arts background needed

Loose charcoal sketch of a bald figure leaning over a desk, writing or drawing, in expressive black mark-making on white.

Image Ben Qureshi, Illustrator

A memory. An object. A moment.

Something specific and true.

There is no right kind of story. There is no story too small or too ordinary.

You can contribute anonymously — your name will never be attached to anything without your explicit permission.

No closing date — this is a long-term conversation, ongoing into 2027