The story of Dancing in Heaven

In very early 2021, as the UK was in its third national lockdown, Channel 4 and Russell T Davies’ drama series It’s a Sin hit the airwaves, about a group of young men living through that other viral pandemic, HIV/AIDS. We met Ritchie Tozer who was shaking off a conservative upbringing, the party boy Roscoe Babatunde, who was queer, black and beautiful, the shy, Welsh Colin Morris-Jones who brought such sweetness, and Ash Mukherjee, a confident character with a glorious smile.
 
It was an incredible piece of television – bitter and sweet, funny and heart-breaking. But the only woman who featured in any detail was Jill Baxter, based on Jill Nadler, Russell T Davies’ childhood friend and author of Love from the Pink Palace. While she was amazing, I wanted to know more about the women who were there. I wanted to hear their stories.
 
An old friend of mine got in touch and told me a story I hadn’t heard before. She was a young nurse in the early 80s, and her first role at just 18 was in an infectious diseases ward in a London hospital. Did I want to hear her story? Of course I did. A fictionalised version became the monologue Dancing in Heaven.
 
The reaction to this first piece when I performed it for the first time made me realise that I wanted to hear more, know more, write more, share more about the women’s stories that I knew must be out there. The stories that became the collection Dancing in Heaven came from oral histories, articles, news stories, interviews and between the wonderful pages of the call logs from Switchboard, the national LGBTQIA+ support line.
 
Creating these monologues, which sit in the blurry spaces between fact and fiction, was a heartbreaking, wonderful and incredible privilege, and was only possible with the lovely people who helped me out by reading, editing, critiquing and providing encouragement and performance space, the amazing women who trusted me with their stories, the publisher Reconnecting Rainbows Press, and my wonderful wife Dee for her love, support and amazing cover art.