This is me nine years ago today being interviewed just before the first performance of Jesus Queen of Heaven in the Museu Mineiro in Belo Horizonte, Brazil.
My hands are covered in dough because they gave me a little oven to bake bread in for the performances. I used to love baking bread for Queen Jesus, and it's a real sadness that the health and safety regulations mean I can't really do it anymore.
I'm looking amazingly relaxed, given that Brazil then, as now, was notorious for being a place where trans women were murdered.
And I was very aware that in doing a play which imagines Jesus coming back to earth as a trans woman I was making myself something of a target.
And particularly then, in that very turbulent time in Brazilian politics, that time that was leading up to the Bolsonaro presidency.
I was performing in a strange room which was full of golden, jewelled, images of Christian Saints that had been created by enslaved labourers soon after the Portuguese conquest.
The enslaved people involved in this work were also simultaneously making images of the deities of Condomble… and so there was a strange energy to the room that somehow affected me.
Whatever the cause, on the last night of that particular run of performances I collapsed on stage and had to spend three days in intensive care.
I'm proud of those performances, though, because they paved the way for Renata Carvalho to perform as the Brazilian Queen Jesus in Natalia Mallo’s production.
That production toured to every city in Brazil for the next three years, attracting vicious protest and fervent demonstrations of support.
It sold out everywhere; going to see the play became an expression of support for LGBTI rights and a protest against censorship.
And that production changed the face of Brazilian theatre forever.
In those days it seemed very much as though Scotland and the UK were progressing towards becoming decent inclusive societies and I was very proud of the fact that Queen Jesus seemed to be part of that process.
Just as I'm very proud in these hard times that Queen Jesus part of the resistance.
I didn't foresee any of this way back in 2008 when I wrote Queen Jesus, all alone in a flat in the middle of Florence, when I first performed the show a year later, feeling very vulnerable as the only out trans performer that I knew about, and surrounded by hatred on all sites…
I never imagined I'd be ever taking the show to Brazil, or America, or Australia, or that there would be Queen Jesus's in Germany, Argentina, Australia, Norway, and now Denmark.
Nor did I foresee that the UK in general, and Scotland in particular, would so quickly abandon all pretense of being a decent society and go back to the kind of intolerance and hatred that governed all my childhood and most of my adult life.
But times change; and I know this absurd grotesque period of absurd and spiteful hatred will also come to an end.
It's worth remembering what Queen Jesus says:
“Bless you if they persecute you for being who you are
Because it means you are bringing about change.
And bless those who persecute you, too;
For hatred is the only thing they have.
And it doesn't amount to much; and they will lose it in the end.
For no matter what they say and what they do, they cannot stop the change that is coming.
And one day we will all be free.”