I spent Wednesday night in a room full of people I have admired for years.
The Attitude Awards is one of those evenings where you look around and have to remind yourself you are allowed to be there. There are people who changed things, people who took risks when it cost them something and people whose names I knew long before I could even imagine being in the same room as them.
I do not take nights like that for granted, after 16 years of advocacy work, from content to Pride to politics to community to now. It still feels like a pipe dream, as someone who makes things and tells stories rather than someone with a title and an institution behind them… It’s a privilege I’m still getting used to.
What strikes me about those evenings is how much of the room is built on people who are no longer in it… Every award, every speech, every bit of progress being celebrated traces back to someone who did something difficult and often thankless, frequently at personal cost, and who is not around to see what it became – You feel that in the room.
I spent a lot of the night thinking about a specific someone who, sadly is no longer able to fill such a room.
James should have been in that room. The Vivienne should have been on that stage, probably hosting it, definitely upstaging everyone on it. Instead a lot of conversations circled back to the same absence… And I understand that is what the first years after a loss are like: you keep noticing the shape of where someone used to be.
Which brings me to legacy, and what we actually mean by it.
We talk about legacy as though it is something a person leaves behind, fully formed, like luggage, but it’s not. Legacy is something the living decide to maintain, or quietly decide to let go of. It takes effort, and people prepared to do unglamorous work for years after the flowers have gone, long after it stops being the thing everyone is talking about. Nobody inherits a legacy – people build one, deliberately, or they don’t.
That’s harder than it sounds, because the window to ‘create’ said legacy closes quickly. Our collective grief is loud for about six months and then the world moves on, entirely reasonably, because it has to. What happens after that is a choice on whether anyone is still doing the work when it has stopped being emotional and started being admin.
For the last several months I’ve been working with James’s mum, Cassie, on Bring The Vivienne Home, a campaign to commission a permanent lifesize statue of The Vivienne at the entrance to Liverpool’s Pride Quarter. It has been, by one hell of a distance, the hardest thing I’ve worked on, but not for the reasons you may think – not the fundraising, though that is hard, but what it asks of everyone emotionally, and the fact that doing it properly means doing it slowly, when every instinct says move faster.
People occasionally ask whether a statue is the right use of money, and whether it would be better going to a charity. And y’know what, it’s a fair question. The honest answer is that campaigns like this create giving. Money raised in someone’s name only works when the thing itself means something to the people giving – House of The Vivienne does that for addiction support in North Wales, whilst the statue does it for Liverpool.
I’ve worked in the third sector over a number of years, be it Pride, Sahir and now The Proud Trust – individual giving is one of the hardest income generators there is. People either just don’t have the money, or don’t want to give it away unless they feel a connection to where it’s going. Fighting for a local LGBTQ+ charity was difficult when in the same lists as a children’s health charity… you just can’t argue with sick kids, y’know? So to say we could put the potential £30,000 we could raise at an upcoming fundraiser to another use is admirable, but it simply wouldn’t exist.
But there is also another argument – permanence does something a donation cannot. Liverpool was the first British city to officially recognise an LGBTQ+ quarter, and in recent years that Quarter has lost venues, lost footprint, and lost visibility. A permanent piece of public sculpture at its entrance is not sentiment. It is a marker that says this part of the city is not up for quiet erasure, and it will still be saying it in fifty years, when everyone involved in the campaign is long gone.
There is something else worth saying – Liverpool decides who Liverpool commemorates. James chose this city at sixteen. He built The Vivienne here, in venues on and around Stanley Street, years before anyone outside the city knew the name. The people who want this statue are the people who were there, those who loved and want to see a lasting tribute that acts in a multitude of ways, and, in true Viv style, will be the first of its kind.
The last few months have not been smooth. The campaign has had to restructure, we have had to pause, and there have been weeks where progress was invisible from the outside. It has kept going because James’s mum, Cassie, has been immovable, because Liverpool Business Improvement District stepped forward when it mattered, and because people kept giving when there was nothing new to show them.
If anything, the difficulty has clarified it. Easy things do not test whether you meant it.
So I will keep going.
Nights like Wednesday are a reminder of what it costs to build something that outlasts you, and of how many people never got to see what they built. James will see his. We will make sure of it.
The Vivienne is coming home.
