Queer and Trans Culture

My queer and trans cultural work encompasses zines, talks, films and live art.

Zines

I was making trans zines in the mid-1990s, including Trantastic and fifteen issues of Girly, which is featured on the cover of Teal Triggs’ contentious Zines book.

A montage of 11 copies of Simon Murphy/Mona Compleine's Girly trans zine from the 1990s, folded A4, bold graphics, some hand-coloured, some on coloured paper
Girly, my trans zine from the 1990s

Presenting

I was part of Transfabulous and screened my film about Barbie at the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. I performed at the first Queeruption.

A pink polyester halterneck dress lies on a towel and paper on the floor. It has been spray-painted with a stencil that reads blow it up burn it down repeatedly
My iconic dress, 2013 edition

Live Art

I’ve collaborated with Charlotte Cooper for decades. We started out making a comic called All Right. I worked on her projects The Chubsters (see below), The Fat of the Land and Fattylympics, all of which are documented in her bestseller Fat Activism: A Radical Social Movement. I dance in her film Lovely and Slim. More recently we worked together as Homosexual Death Drive, I soundtracked her performance lecture on fat dance and we co-produced the queer neurodivergent zine You’re Not My Dad! (download back issues).

Chubsters by Charlotte Cooper, featuring performance and music by Simon Murphy

Outskirts (2018)

I was one of the contributors to Flo Brooks’ project Outskirts. Flo is a fantastic painter and created this exhibition and publication to explore trans and gender non-conforming narratives through text and image. I wrote a piece about my gender identity.

https://outskirtsproject.tumblr.com/

https://makinabooks.com/outskirts/

Poster for Flo Brooks' project Outskirts featuring a wiggly line and a dot that loks like a question mark, a list of all the contributors, and details of where the exhibition took place
Poster for Flo Brooks’ Outskirts private view