Queer Storytelling in the Capital of Scotland

A woman in a thick Scottish accent was describing how many clits she had licked to be queer enough, skewering the absurd gatekeeping she’d faced. I don’t remember the details of her story – my brain was fogged with jet lag after crossing the Atlantic earlier that day, but the underlying message was memorable and her humor cracked open something deeper.   A live audience of 100 people was rapt, alive, listening.

Then the host reminded us, almost mischievously, that half of the building belonged to the Church of Scotland.  These queer stories were unfolding inside medieval walls that had seen centuries of silence, and now, a different kind of truth-telling.  All stories were welcome here at Queer Folks’ Tales.

The event was housed in the Scottish Storytelling Centre, a literal center devoted to the art of storytelling. The sunlit first floor hosts workshops, socials, and the Haggis Box – a tiny window kitchen serving mouthwatering haggis, neeps, and tatties.  Below it sits a deceptively cozy and steep theatre that seats exactly ninety-nine people, for one storytelling show after another.

Running perpetually late, I rushed to get there before they closed the door, navigating a country and city I’d only just met that afternoon.   The usher slipped me into the very last seat.  Sold out.  Ninety-nine people paid twenty quid each to sit shoulder-to-shoulder and hear stories together.  As I later learned, the interactive Queer Folks’ Tales wasn’t an outlier – nearly every performance on the Centre’s calendar was selling out in advance.

Queer Storytelling in the Capital of America

Months earlier in D.C., my partner and I were excited to see one of our favorite storytellers and podcasters, Kevin Allison, who happened to be hosting one of the last RISK podcasts and shows (at least for now).  Think storytelling that wavers between deeply vulnerable and raw to just … raunchy, and always with a heavy dose of queer.  We arrived late – bracing for a packed house. 

Instead, the old, grungy, cavernous theatre, with its velvety crimson curtains and room for hundreds, held barely thirty people. We checked the tickets twice. Time was correct. The audience simply… wasn’t there.  Maybe people were more content to stay at home, looking at Instagram stories from the couch. 

Kevin and locally selected storytellers still delivered, giving us their full storytelling presence. But when we met him afterward, there was a clear ache beneath his gratitude. He gestured at the empty seats and talked about the sharp drop of in-person storytelling since 2020.  He hoped that a move to Thailand might bring him back into rooms buzzing with community again.  I hoped so too.

Storytelling Forges Community and Awareness of All Genders

On my last night in Scotland, with darkness and freezing rain settling in after a 4 p.m. sunset, I wandered back to the Storytelling Centre on a whim – 6 weeks after the first show I saw here to start a trip around the United Kingdom.  They had tickets left for A Wheen O Whimmin: Singing Our Stories – a group of older women powerfully sharing the joys and struggles of womanhood through folk music. Some songs were their own; others were centuries old. When the performers invited us to join in, the entire audience (except for me!) – people of all ages – sang every word from memory.

One ballad told of a woman trapped in poverty and abuse. Sung in an old Scottish dialect, I caught only fragments of the plotline.  But emotionally?  I understood everything.  Tears streamed down my face, and knew from the chorus of sniffles around me that I wasn’t alone.  The tears weren’t limited to women’s and femme’s experiences – even the older man beside me didn’t bother wiping his cheeks.  The song meant something singular to each of us and yet bound us together in the same emotional tide of humanity.

After the show, I walked through the massive stone city – this place where strangers routinely stop to help unhoused neighbors, offer dog treats, or call the hospital for an unhoused stranger without hesitation.  It’s not perfect, but on the streets, I was taken off guard by people seeming to genuinely see one another here.  And I wondered if storytelling and common song was one of the missing components in America right now – the raw, ancient human practices that let us understand stories outside our own stories – on a primal level. 

Because there is power in stories told honestly and vulnerably. There is also power in shaping them – pulling meaning from humor, sorrow, joy, and despair. Seeing perpetually sold-out storytelling shows in Scotland reminded me that people still crave this kind of connection.  It renewed something in me: appreciation for the storytelling work poured into the All the Genders Photo Project, and for the courage of everyone who shares their truth through this project.

And during our recent Transgender Week of Awareness, that matters deeply.

Trans stories are still erased, doubted, legislated against, and flattened into stereotypes. But storytelling – messy, funny, tender, unfiltered storytelling – is one of the oldest tools we have for survival, visibility, and cultural change.  It is how we remind the world (and sometimes ourselves) that we exist, that we have always existed, and that our lives carry meaning across generations.

Holding, shaping, and sharing our stories is not just art. It is activism. It is community-building.

And it is how we make sure that trans and gender-diverse voices are woven into the narrative of history, not as footnotes, but as full, resonant, human stories worthy of being heard in rooms of ninety-nine people, or thirty, or even just one.