The Suitcase

cover illustration: Fox Fisher

The Suitcase

In September 2019, we formed a writer’s room with a group of trans and non-binary young people in order to develop our script. We’d learned that a suitcase full of Hirschfeld’s papers, notebooks, letters and his death mask was found on a rubbish heap and as a group we kept coming back to this image of a suitcase full of queer history, put out with the rubbish.

In our script, the character Suitcase says the responsibility of time travel is to make the times you are living in better and to send messages of hope out so that they might reach people from the future who need them. 

What would you put in your suitcase to send a message of hope to trans and non-binary people of the future?

Upload an image of your luggage along with your message to Instagram and tag #transthrutime

My suitcase would contain a pipe and some tartan slippers. I came out quite late in life because the language that described who I was, didn’t exist when I was young. I don’t think there is a limit on knowing who you are and presenting that to the world, it’s a joyful thing at any age.
When I was a teenager, I loved to collect things that I found. A discarded shopping list say or a note someone had dropped in the street. One day I struck gold. I found a photocopy of a picture – I now know it to be “Two men dancing at a drag ball” taken by Diane Arbus in 1970 and someone had written on it “what they think is nothing compared to what you know”. I kept it until somehow I lost it, but it’s always stayed with me and now I’m sending it into the future in case it’s useful there. 
Fox Bio

Fox Fisher (Honorary Doctorate & MA in Sequential Design & Illustration) is an award winning artist, author, filmmaker and trans rights campaigner.  Fox is a co-founder and trustee of Trans Pride, Brighton. Fox co-created the My Genderation project, making 100+ short films. Fox is advisor to All About Trans, facilitating interactions with the mainstream media. Fox is Artist in Residence for this year’s Homotopia festival. Fox’s 3rd and 4th books will be released in 2021.

“I’d leave our whole catalogue of @MyGenderation films in the suitcase, to show what trans lives were like ‘back in the day’.”

@thefoxfisher

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