This is My Culture’: A Masterclass on Life-Writing as Activism

Global Majority and Underrepresented Writers’ Programme Masterclass

Dan Glass is an award-winning writer, educator, and activist whose work spans queer cultural history and life-writing. In 2014, he re-formed the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) London chapter and successfully campaigned for access to PrEP on the NHS. He is the co-founder of This is My Culture, a protest-party that fuses creativity and activism.

In this masterclass, Glass draws on his work as a writer and activist to outline how life-writing can emerge from and shape activist practice. Participants will reflect on the creative-activist principles of This is My Culture and consider how life-writing moves between written practice and collective, embodied activism.

About This is My Culture:

Co-founded by Glass, This is My Culture is a free protest-party bringing together performance, music, and direct action. It is held annually on Hampstead Heath in June, the month of George Michael’s birthday. Rooted in histories of militant AIDS activism and queer resistance, it takes its name from Michael’s defiant response to press intrusion while cruising on Hampstead Heath—‘Are you gay? No? Then f*ck off! This is my culture!’—and reworks this moment of queer cultural memory into collective storytelling. The event celebrates Michael as a queer activist and icon while reclaiming, in his spirit, the Heath’s cruising grounds as queer public space.

Born out of the life and legacy of George Michael, alongside those of other queer activists, This is My Culture is shaped in part by Glass’s own life-writing, including United Queerdom and Queer Footprints. In turn, the event has inspired life-writing by Glass, Prishita Maheshwari-Aplin, and Anjali Prashar-Savoie. Described by Glass as ‘roadmaps for freedom’, these writings take up George Michael’s life and words as encountered through participants’ lived experiences of This is My Culture, and use those experiences to inform the authors’ models and manifestos for radical queer futures.

Further information about This is My Culture is available here.

Masterclass Details:

Drawing on the origins and effects of This is My Culture, this masterclass explores the symbiotic relationship between life-writing and activism. Participants will be invited to reflect on questions including:

What can life-writing offer activists?
How can writing and direct action enter into dialogue in activist practice?
How might we write the ‘liveliness’ of queer experience—its forms of love, protest, and collectivity—without fixing or containing it?

The masterclass will conclude with a guided writing exercise inviting participants to compose ‘a letter to the queers, visionaries and revolutionaries of the future,’ drawing on the lives and legacies of activists alongside their own lives, activist experiences, and hopes for a queer/radical future – producing life-writing not as nostalgia, but in the hope of generating collective, embodied resistance.

This masterclass will appeal to writers, students, and scholars interested in the relationship between life-writing and activism, as well as to anyone curious about how personal narrative can function as a form of resistance and collective mobilisation. No prior specialist knowledge or preparation is required.