Why I plant pansies at scenes of homophobic abuse
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Version 0 of 1. From an early age, Paul Harfleet knew he was different. He spoke in a very particular way, he looked like a girl and he was perceptive enough to realise that his little peculiarities set him apart from everyone else. “I was just very aware that my sexuality, my identity was different,” he says. “I was the first male grandchild in my family and from the age of about five I remember noticing the emphasis on me representing the continuation of the family name. It was a weird pressure to feel at such an early age, but I did feel it. Even at that point, I knew it probably wasn’t going to happen.” Growing up in Surrey until the age of about eight and then Edinburgh, after his mother remarried, Harfleet quickly learned how to deal with the fact that he was obviously gay. “You lie,” he says. “You cover your tracks, you make things up and you act how people want you to act. When someone says, ‘What do you want to be?’ You don’t say fashion designer, which is what I wanted to be, you say racing car driver because that’s what they expect you to say.” At home his sexuality was never questioned. As the eldest of eight siblings, he didn’t even have to come out. “I didn’t come out of the closet because I was never in the closet,” he says. “It’s one of those things that my family have always known. It was so obvious.” However, at school things were a bit different. “When we moved to Scotland, I wasn’t just the gayish looking boy who was quite girly looking, but I was also English so I was basically the gayest person it was possible to be,” he says. “In terms of abuse, it was constant. It wasn’t violent but it was a damaging environment to grow up in.” By the time he got to university in Manchester, Harfleet was so used to the name-calling that someone screaming faggot at him from a moving car hardly registered. After graduating with a first in fine art he stayed on to do an MA, living in the city centre not far from the gay village. One day, walking into town, he was abused three times – and this in one of the most gay-friendly cities in the world. “That was the thing that jolted me out of thinking it was normal,” he says. “I started to get really cross. I thought about making work about it, but I was reluctant. I had always resisted doing something overtly gay because I didn’t particularly want to be a ‘gay artist’ as I felt somehow it would limit my opportunities.” Almost 10 years to the day, Harfleet had an idea. He returned to the locations of the abuse and planted a single pansy in the ground, like a tiny pink roadside memorial. He then re-visited the other places where he’d been called bent, batty boy and bender, or threatened with death or compared to a paedophile and planted pansies there too. So instead of the city being marked for him by these moments of abuse, it became one mapped out with flowers. The Pansy Project was born. “It took me a long time to work out how I could mark it and what kind of flower I would use,” says Harfleet. “I didn’t really like pansies but I knew they were the obvious gay flower. Planting them really did become transformative – it changed the way I felt about the location and it changed them from being a traditional housewife of a flower to a fuck-you flower. When they become associated with resistance to something like a hate crime, they become powerful. It was a simple and peaceful way of confronting homophobia.” Harfleet, whose design work with his brother won a gold medal at the Chelsea flower show in 2013 – has since planted pansies in more than 150 locations, from Gateshead to Belfast and in Hackney, east London, near where he lives. He has handed them out at arts festivals for others to plant at the scene of their own abuse, and this year he is taking the Pansy Project to France to make a documentary commissioned by Canal+, the cable television channel . Closer to home, the latest incarnation of the Pansy Project is a children’s book, Pansy Boy, which Harfleet has written and illustrated beautifully. Like the Gruffalo, it skips along in rhyming couplets and tells the story of a boy, “with eyes of green and hair that curled” – clearly based on Harfleet himself – “smart and bright, an inquisitive mind. The kind of boy you rarely find”. It’s about a boy who loves to draw, read and write and is obsessed with birds, insects, planes and all the world around him. The kind of boy who loves to learn, yet when it came to going to school, “his head hung low, face filled with dread, he loathed the thought of school block and bike shed”. It’s just the kind of book Harfleet could have done with as a child; one that celebrates difference and paints a picture that doesn’t conform to the gay stereotype of a boy in a dress. And it has exactly the kind of ending in which Harfleet would have found solace, as Pansy Boy cleverly finds retribution. “I feel it has a job to do. To educate children that they are not necessarily on their own or isolated,” says Harfleet. “I was that boy. I was into nature, into flight, into science. I knew I was different, but I wasn’t simply defined by that. I want to add another reading of being gay. I want to create a different character, add another element. The most interesting thing about me is not that I’m gay. There’s a lot more.” Pansy Boy doesn’t have a publisher yet, and if Harfleet can’t find one he plans to self-publish or release it digitally. In a world in which the word gay is used casually as a put-down in schools all over the country, it would be a valuable addition to any children’s bookshelf or school library. “I have been self-editing all my life,” Harfleet concludes. “It’s those everyday experiences – those little things you have to be aware of. Like, when I am with my boyfriend you’d have to go, can we hold hands now? Is this OK? Is this safe? The build up of all those tiny events is really damaging and that’s kind of what this is all about. It has been chipping away at me all the time and I hadn’t really realised it until I got old enough to go, actually, fuck you – I’m allowed to be the person I am and who I was born to be.” • For more information: @ThePansyProject, thepansyproject.com |