29th November 2020 at 7:15pm UTC “SEEING/NOT SEEING” by Lee Campbell (London, UK) dur 5min


“SEEING/NOT SEEING” by Lee Campbell

First presented to audience acclaim at a recent PoetryLGBT event, this short spoken work performance charts teenage-hood; discovering one’s sexuality in private, away from one’s parents. As a teenager, you do not really know who you are. This performance is a self-reflection – a ‘this is what it was like’ to come to terms with my homosexuality; of me finding somebody attractive (men) but not really knowing what I am. I speak my personal truth, my personal history of seeing and not seeing to confront the politics of seeing and underline how validating seeing can be but also the difficulty of not being seen. Whilst it can be understood as one person’s (my) narrative so too can it easily be read as lots of different voices layered to talk about wider levels of experience with various references to cultural context that (any)one can relate to: George Michael, late night tv, bad porn. Part of the performance includes reference to a dad and son (me and my dad) conversation exploring what one is seeing and what the other is seeing about the same action of men in football with one person viewing it one way and the other a different way. Here we travel back in time to 1996, to a football match between Chelsea and Aston Villa courtesy of a cassette recording played through a tape recorder made at the time of the match.

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

Lee’s recent films have been selected for many international film festivals including Queerbee LGBT Film Festival in London, SPLICE Film Festival, New York, MicroMania Film Festival, MicroActs International Artist Film Festival 2020, The Gilbert Baker Film Festival, Kansas 2020. HOMOGRAPHY, Brussels, Visions 2020 selected by Hetain Patel, The Nunnery, Bow Arts Trust, London. He was awarded a Special Mention at London-Worldwide Comedy Short Film Festival Autumn 2019 and won Semi-Finalist (3rd place winner) at SPLICE Film Festival, New York in 2020. In 2020 he has been featured in John Hopper’s Inspirational magazine, appeared as a guest speaker for Tim Kirk’s ZERO Q: 20 QUESTIONS WITH INTERESTING PEOPLE FROM THE LGBT COMMUNITY and featured twice already this year on Queerguru.com