As I've spoken to more and more people who are both disabled and LGBT+ there is a theme that's arisen i.e. that of the prevalence of those who are neurodivergent and LGBT+. I've already touched on this in a few previous episodes but for the next two I thought I'd take a more detailed look at the issues around this.
In this first of two episodes focusing on this I speak to Jorik Mol, an autistic gay man who speaks very openly and honestly about his experiences of being both queer and neurodivergent both in his home country of Holland and more recently living and working in the UK
We touch on a range of issues and as you might imagine Jorik has plenty to say which I'm sure will resonate with those of you who are also neurodiverse and LGBT or simply want to learn more about this topic.
I must also advise you that there is duiscussion of issues around mental ill-health, suicide and homophobic abuse .
You can get in touch with Jorik and find out more about this work via his website www.jorikmol.com
As I've spoken to more and more people who are both disabled and LGBT+ there is a theme that's arisen i.e. that of the prevalence of those who are neurodivergent and LGBT+. I've already touched on this in a few previous episodes but for the next two I thought I'd take a more detailed look at the issues around this.
In this first of two episodes focusing on this I speak to Jorik Mol, an autistic gay man who speaks very openly and honestly about his experiences of being both queer and neurodivergent both in his home country of Holland and more recently living and working in the UK
We touch on a range of issues and as you might imagine Jorik has plenty to say which I'm sure will resonate with those of you who are also neurodiverse and LGBT or simply want to learn more about this topic.
I must also advise you that there is duiscussion of issues around mental ill-health, suicide and homophobic abuse .
You can get in touch with Jorik and find out more about this work via his website www.jorikmol.com
Hi, and welcome to another episode of The Simply Equality Podcast, the podcast that seeks to foreground the lived experiences of disabled and LGBT people. For those of you that have been listening to this podcast for a while, you may have picked up there's a bit of a theme that's come through at times, and that's the theme of issues around the prevalence of neurodiversity within the LGBT community. It's something that I've touched on in previous episodes with a couple of interviews. And it's something that as I've done more and more work in this area, I've realised that it's, it is something of an issue that does often get discussed. For the next couple of episodes, I've decided to focus on this in particular. And so on today's episode, I've got a really, really, really fantastic guest. They are named Yorik Mol, they are from Holland, and they will be talking very much about their work as a neurodiversity campaigner, a trainer, a teacher, and about being queer. I have to also give a bit of a content warning for this episode. I'm really grateful to Yorik, for being open and honest and talking about their experiences. In doing so, they do talk about issues around mental health, suicide, abuse, and violence against LGBT people. And so if that's something that you would find difficult, then I'm giving you that warning now that you may choose not to listen, but I really think it's a really valuable discussion. We cover lots and lots of topics, with some humour and honesty, and I really hope you'll find it helpful. So as ever, I'll stop my chit chat and we'll get on with the main interview. So welcome to another episode of The Simply Equality Podcast. I've got with me a fantastic guest, somebody I'm really excited for you to hear more from. His name is Yorik, and I'm gonna let him introduce himself.
Yorik Mol:Okay, thank you. Thank you, Sarah. My name is Yorik, Yorik Mol. I am 33 years old, I live in Reading. I am autistic, I am cis, I am openly gay, and I live with another autistic man together in a very autistic household with lots of stuffed cuddly toys, who have taken on a variety of different identities[laughter]. I've also like at the centre of this, like, I think I'm the mother of the House of Aspie. Because there's lots of autists - I have a whatsapp group with lots of autistics in there. I used to - I'm a teacher, I teach English and MFlL, so languages. Right now, I'm a personal tutor, mostly. I'm on the national tutoring programme. I'm also an autistic trainer and educator, I educate organisations on autism, and neurodiversity, and comorbid existing disabilities and social inequalities, intersectionality mental health. Essentially, I'm a slag for hire, so please, prostitute me, there's nothing wrong with that. So I will come and speak for money [laughter]. I will make sure that I share your details in the Shire Hall. The reason why I've got you on here, and it's really interesting, is that you've already said, you know, you're neurodiverse, you're autistic, you're gay. And obviously this podcast is very much about that intersectionality. And what I have found interesting during this podcast, is there's a lot of people who are neurodiverse and LGBT. Yeah. And so I wonder, I wonder if you could comment on that at all. Yeah, because it's sexy. No, it's just our, you know, it's, we're this... I had a conversation the other day, it might have been with you guys, about ... no, it wasn't, it was for a piece of research I was working on. How do we find autistic participants who weren't diagnosed as adults? It's because - where do you find them? Well, you'll find them in in LGBT groups, because that's where we are. When - I was diagnosed at the age of eight, and I hated it. I'll talk more about that later on. I fought it, as I did my sexuality, and kind of confused about my gender. And I - well, there's nothing wrong with being confused about your gender, but it's pretty cool, but in my case, it was bound up with trauma. When it comes to autistic adults, well, lots of us are queer. There have been numbers coming out about autistic people transitioning gender legally, 40% of people transitioning gender legally are autistic. If you go to any gay bar, there's lots of autistics there. It's how - it's where we find ourselves. It's, I did this, I read this book recently about a play I saw in 2019 called The View Upstairs with the gorgeous Andy Mientus in it. Who is, it might - the book I've written. He is my head canon character for the character Jonas. So you're gonna have to read my book first first. Uh huh[laughter]. And my love of Andy Mientus, and he's probably terrified of me. He's just a small American man. And in that play, there were two characters who were both sex workers. It's set in 1970s in New Orleans, and one of them was Andy Mientus who was a weirdo. And the other one was another character who was probably the same age or younger. And they were in their early 30s. And they were a mess. And they were a mess because they weren't physically attractive in a sort of normative way. And they were socially pretty inept, and the character was drawn with very autistic tropes. So in the same way that you have queer tropes, so villains in Disney films are always monstrously gay, and not gender conforming, and losers and kind of creepy characters are drawn monstrously autistic, because that's how we are drawn as well. So that's the interplay within wider culture about who we are. I think I've got distracted. Oh, yeah. LGBT in autistic - sorry, I have a very distractible mind.
Sarah Stephenson-Hunter:That's fine, keep going.
Yorik Mol:I don't, but some people say that there is a genetic predisposition. I tend to mistrust those people, because some of them are thought about Autism Speaks and they make me barf. But when it comes to queerness, there is a point of going well, maybe autistic people are less bound by the rules of society. I just think it is something that happens. And I think it's more use, it's more doable for neurotypicals to be closeted about having a divergent gender or divergent sexuality and just adapt, and they will believe themselves. And for us, we don't have the luxury to mask very well, especially when we're young. I talked, when I met you, Sara, a while ago to have a meeting, regarding another job. I remarked on the fact that I was homophobically bullied by strangers from the age of five. I was cycling to school and I was apparently cycling to school in a very gay way. Now, I do cycle in a very gay way. And there's nothing wrong with that, because I was a five year old and I was looking at the stars. I thought I was Brian Cox avant le lettre probably, and someone just shouted to me, "hey, homo, gang vor!" like, hey -
Sarah Stephenson-Hunter:I'm really intrigued how you cycle in a gay way. But never mind.
Yorik Mol:Be me, be me in 1993.
Sarah Stephenson-Hunter:OK That's the answer. 1993, and just being shouted at by people on the street. And because I'm from Holland, and Holland is a very kind of culturally like, uniform place. It's a very - Uh-huh
Yorik Mol:- mentality, people from Australia, or Scandinavia will know about this. If you are different, that is your fault. And you need to fix that. It's an imposition that you make if you're queer or trans non binary. If you're not somehow conforming to the norms of society, you're being the bully, you're being the arsehole and you stop being an arsehole to people who are just trying to live your life, live their life. In Holland, the most, one of the most frequently used expressions is "doe gewoon normaal je bent al gek genoeg" - just be normal, you're crazy enough already. Like that.
Sarah Stephenson-Hunter:I like that.
Yorik Mol:It's quite cruel, because it's like, that's told to people who are different. And they are set-they are told, well, just be normal. If you don't stop, if, if you're, if you're behaving this way, you are being, deliberately upsetting the natural order of things. And you stop doing that, because it's irritating to other people. So if you have mental health issues, well, you don't say, you just block them up. And if you're somehow queer looking, then you are told, stop being so queer looking because you're just being weird. Like just be normal. Just be like all the other boys will be, like all the other girls.
Sarah Stephenson-Hunter:Do you think that's quite specific to Holland?
Yorik Mol:Not specific to Holland. It's - I think the directness of it is specific to Holland. Because those reactionary viewpoints are very widespread. It's interesting, there's a Dutch author, called Gloria Wekker, who's a professor of gender studies and an expert in intersectionality within the Netherlands, and Holland is very good at understanding its normativity as something that is, you know, sine qua non, that just exists, and that is not really questioned. So, if you're a person of colour, then you're the one being a bit weird. So it's kind of seen as like, even instead of very left leaning milieux, if you're a person of colour and come into a party, she says, oh, well, tropische verrassing - literally tropical surprise because it's related to a piece of advertising. And that's about race. There's a huge view that even though Holland was the first country to legalise gay marriage in 2001, homophobic bullying, never stops and is carried on. And the right in Holland has managed to shift the blame of institutional homophobia onto Muslims. And it's, er, Holland is a very frightening place right now. I've just voted long distance in the election, and I don't think there's any good to come out of it. I essentially fled the country. Really.
Sarah Stephenson-Hunter:I mean, let's touch on that subject. You're from Holland.
Yorik Mol:Yeah.
Sarah Stephenson-Hunter:But you now live in the UK?
Yorik Mol:I do.
Sarah Stephenson-Hunter:What was that journey like, what got you into the UK?
Yorik Mol:Uh, a bus
Sarah Stephenson-Hunter:[laughter]
Yorik Mol:Sorry, that was bad.
Sarah Stephenson-Hunter:That's fine, I asked for that.
Yorik Mol:Initially a bus. I went to the UK. I'd never been to the UK before the age of 21. I taught myself English at the age of six. Because in Holland, TV shows, kids shows in the early 90s, they weren't dubs. They were subtitled. I could read from the age of three, you just add those two together, I started learning English pretty much immediately. And I was fluent enough to function by the age of 11. However, never went to an English speaking country until I was 11. And I went to Australia for a month, which really influenced me and so[putting on Australian accent] I, for a couple of years, sounded like this. And -
Sarah Stephenson-Hunter:Yeah
Yorik Mol:Yeah, I know. There's, I'm one of those voice Aspies, like I do voices all the time, and it irritates people. Yeah, I'm, I'm quite good at that. It's also the - that's one of my skills, I'm very sensitive to languages of the sounds of words, I've got perfect pitch, I'm able to do that relatively easily and pick up different things. I went to school in Holland, I went to Steiner school. I was diagnosed autistic at the age of eight, and I hated it. I pushed back against that diagnosis. Because I didn't feel- I didn't want to be retarded, I was called retarded all the time in Dutch. The Dutch language itself is a bit of a trigger for me, because I, the time I've been beaten up and abused and taken advantage of and assaulted, that happened in the Dutch language. And so the language itself makes me feel a bit unsafe. So I've kind of like, looking back at it, I kind of detached myself from who I was, by speaking in a different language. I was diagnosed at eight because of, well, constant bullying. And the fact that I had massive anxiety. The fact that teachers, like, made me do certain things like when I was five, I had to do arts and crafts, and my fine motor skills are still terrible. And I would just get really frustrated and stop. And the teachers I just had were kind of old fashioned. And they would just go just keep on going. Just keep doing it. Keep doing it. I was not allowed to go and read books because I was too young for that. As I said, I could read by the age of three. And so my first kindergarten teacher allowed me to go to the big children library in the school. I was horrified. I remember like, I felt so tiny. And these massive children who were like six, seven, I was like, I was four. I was walking in the library[theatrical gasp]. And I got a book very gingerly and just ran out [laughter]. I was allowed to read that. But not my second year kindergarten teacher. She was very much more traditional and said no, that is not appropriate for his age group. And so I wasn't allowed to read books in class anymore. I had to do knitting or something.
Sarah Stephenson-Hunter:Oh my gosh, I mean nothing wrong with that. Nothing wrong with knitting, but -
Yorik Mol:Very pro-knitting as long as I don't have to do it, like -
Sarah Stephenson-Hunter:Yeah
Yorik Mol:Yeah, I hate doing any of that stuff. And I hate the sense that - I hate sensorily the feeling of wool between my fingers. It's AAAAAAAAH!
Sarah Stephenson-Hunter:absolutely
Yorik Mol:Sorry
Sarah Stephenson-Hunter:That's fine, that's fine. So that was that was you at school, had your diagnosis but you hated it.
Yorik Mol:Yeah, I fought it because I was, because at the same time, in 1996, there was very much still a paradigm of: you have something wrong with you, and this is your diagnosis. So there, I was always afraid that if I acted out of line, I would be put in a home, I would-that I was, that I would be put in a disability centre, and I would not be able to see my mum again, or I would be locked up, locked away essentially. And so even at eight, I was like, No, I'm not autistic, because the fear is that I would be cut away from the people I love most. And I always used to think that that was because me just being overdramatic and stuff like that, because I am overdramatic. But I got a complex PTSD diagnosis in early 2020. After working on a piece of research about autistic people, and trauma. And we did the trauma study. Before that we had to do- you have to do a diagnostic assessment. And the person who did the diagnostic assessment sent me a message going okay, well, look at this this diagnostic assessment. And you scored, I think it was 89 out of 100
Sarah Stephenson-Hunter:Wow
Yorik Mol:The basic level for PTSD would be 41.
Sarah Stephenson-Hunter:Wow. Yeah, that's, Yeah, absolutely.
Yorik Mol:So they were like, so she said, get a diagnosis, which was, which was useful because it got rid of my borderline personality diagnosis that I got from 2016. And my sort of personality disorder diagnosis from 2012. It's made my life a lot easier when interacting with with medical professionals. Mm hmm. So what about, what about your, your queerness? When did that first become something you perhaps were aware of? Oh God
Sarah Stephenson-Hunter:What was it like for you?
Yorik Mol:It was made clear to me that I was queer. Other people pointed it out, often violently. My father didn't like it at all. My father loved the bits about me that that made him look good. Like my perfect pitch, my memory, my talent for impersonations and songs, and my intellect. Because I was a very brainy child, I really wanted to impress people. I wear glasses, I look like what an autistic person in your brain looks like. Only chunkier and Dutcher. But yeah, I was very much, very think-y. I loved learning, loved reading. But he liked that. But the fact that I was also really quite like faggy, and, and clearly autistic, that made him very uncomfortable. And I needed to be told that.
Sarah Stephenson-Hunter:By your father, your father told you that?
Yorik Mol:Yeah, yeah, he did. And so it's kind of like, okay, maybe don't do that with your hands. So you can see this very kind of early behaviourist thinking, slipping in. But like I said, it was hard in the 90s. Then I went to Steiner school where I was bullied less, because it was no longer a, I was no longer in a regular school. And it was a smaller school. And so I was let free a bit more and I didn't receive as much bullying. Even though institutionally, it wasn't set up to deal with neurodivergent kids in a way that is, would be seen as appropriate now. They had so much love and genuine kindness for me, and never once tried to cure me, which I don't think would happen now anymore, because the many people who are associated with Steiner schools who are part of anti vaxxer movements and things like that, but I joined Steiner school just before all that broke. When I was 11 my father tried to commit suicide, and ended up in hospital, and he completed suicide in February 2000. And he died then.
Sarah Stephenson-Hunter:Oh wow.
Yorik Mol:That kind of kicked me in the nuts because I was always horrified of what would happen. And the worst thing I could think of was that my parents would break up, for instance, and I remember being about 10 and saying, okay, I would stay with Dad, because I didn't want my brother to be on his own with our father. I thought that my brother, my mom would be better off on their own, if I had to be with someone I'd be with my father just to take it. And it kind of messed me up for a while, but it also sort of made me feel less guilty. I didn't feel like I was to blame for everything that was wrong with our family, which I did before. Which is kind of a common way to approach it. I then grieved for a while and figured things out a little bit more. I was no longer... I was such a big target now that I was stud - even the slight bullying I had before kind of dissipated. Because I think the bullies in my school - I went to a second secondary cyber school still very small - even the bullies in my year were like, no, this is too easy. So they stopped bullying me for that. Like I was gay, I was autistic, like, Dad had killed himself. This is not fun. As a bully, I have standards. And you're way below that, I'm sorry - which made my life a lot easier. There's nothing wrong with that. I struggled a lot coming out.
Sarah Stephenson-Hunter:When did you - when would you say that you came out as such, or was it a - people say you're still coming out, if you know what I mean?
Yorik Mol:No, I'm out. I'm out now. I think I probably started coming out when I was 20... 24 I properly started doing it. Because I wanted to make a go of being normal. I want - I thought if I just work hard enough, I could do it. If I just make a go of it, I could do it. And going to drama school was part of that. After I left school, I just got into drama school on a whim. And I don't really know how that happened. I always wanted to do comedy. Because I was in control of who laughed at me and how. And I got to drama school, and that was crap. It was, I thought it was.. I thought... ah God, school was awful. My childhood was awful. I've had those 18 years of shite. Let's go up a level, a-ah, crushed right down the floor. There's a Brendon Burns bit, he's an Australian comedian, which is like, [with Australian accent] "You know what, if you think you've hit rock bottom, you can just keep on digging." And that's what I did. I thought it was doing the right thing. I thought I was like, okay, this group of weirdos, this drama school, this is going to save me from being disabled. If people laugh at me, or people harass me in the streets, it's because they've seen me in something. And I preferably have that, than just harass me and laugh at me in the streets for existing. It felt safer, in a way, it was kind of counting back from that. It wasn't, however, I had a very bad experience. Like I said, I was still closeted. I was gonna come out, I think when I was 18, and I had a place at university, so at the University of Nairobi[?], to study history, which I should have really taken instead of going to drama school. And I would have started coming out there, because I didn't want to come out in school because I didn't feel safe. I'm from a sort of - the south of Holland, Achthoven, which is a pretty rough part of the country. And it's quite homophobic there. So I would have come out in[unclear]. And then I went to drama school and found it's all of my classmates being profoundly homophobic to my face. And I was like, oh, okay, right back in the closet we go. I didn't feel safe -
Sarah Stephenson-Hunter:Which is really surprising, because I think for those of us in the UK, as you said, Holland has this reputation as liberal, and gay marriage, and all of those things. And yet here you are saying that homophobia, homophobic bullying, was rife and still is.
Yorik Mol:Yeah, it is. So with homophobia in Holland, Holland was the first country in the world to legalise gay marriage in 2001. However, the Dutch are also very good at self presentation. So the Dutch have this liberal image for you guys, because they want you to come over and smoke weed in the Capitol and make lots of money for tax reasons, which is probably also the reason I got to university and I got a full grant. So thank you very much for that. Thank you very much for going up to Amsterdam and smoking dope, which Dutch[unclear] smoke. It's a really kind of right wing and reactionary society, which got worse in the early 2000s. And as the country as a whole moved politically even further to the right, and is still there. It's been flirting with fascism ever since about 2003, 2004 really, when it kicked off. And now that's, you know, that has been, you know, as you know, the intersection of race, gender, sexuality and class are magnificent. Combine that with a kind of old fashioned patriarchal mentality of just be normal. And, yeah, you're in for a world of hurt, especially because over the last 20 years, the Dutch media and Dutch politicians have tried and succeeded to shift the conversation about homophobia away from institutional issues and towards Muslims. So I was on Grindr in 2017 when I went over to my parents for a laugh, and I- my parents live close to a university town, there were three people of colour in the Grindr area in the nearest 20 miles. The first... all three of those were East Asian, had English, English profile details. The rest of them in Dutch. The first white person I looked at close to me said, no blacks, no white- no blacks, no mocros.
Sarah Stephenson-Hunter:Yeah, yeah. And that's -
Yorik Mol:Mocros means Moroccans and essentially means North African people of all stripes. That's white gay men, white gay men are just as capable of being exclusionary as anyone else. And I've had situations where, when I was in England and started coming out, I felt less safe in gay environments because of the normativity expected there.
Sarah Stephenson-Hunter:Yeah, to do with, just explain that a bit more, the normativity of...
Yorik Mol:The normativity of gay spaces, the normativity of queer spaces, because, however much we feel like, you know, as LGBT people, we want to be inclusive of people of all genders. Well, there's loads of transphobia in gay spaces, there's loads of biphobia in queer spaces. I've had to, I used to be complicated about bisexual people, because I thought, well, you can go back into the closet anytime you like. But I learned pretty quickly that no, if you're queer, even just a little, a little - bisexual is not less queer than anyone else - they will find you out and they will hang us on the same three at the same time. There is no... people who are bisexual don't get a free pass. In fact, they get it worse. I'm currently living and in a very happy relationship with a bisexual, who is on the asexual spectrum. But yeah, when it comes to coming out, I didn't after drama school either. And then I went to the UK for the first time in 2009. And I went on a bus and I went to the Edinburgh Festival, I wanted to do stand up in English, because I wanted to do that for myself. And then I would start an English degree at the University of Amsterdam. I felt I was going, like, I felt like an elephant going off to die alone on that bus, on the Megabus, all the way up, it's a 24 hour trip from Utrecht. And then I met loads of people who I'm still friends with, including my best friend Jane. And they liked me and they didn't constantly tell me off for existing or for looking weird, or for being shifty, or for being depressed, or for being weird, or stop doing that with your hands, or... they just like England, the UK as a whole was kind of like a safer place for me than Holland had ever been. And it was a refuge. And I now know that even if I've finished university in an - which I did, but I'd stayed in Holland, I would now be living in supported housing, and I would not be able to have a job, because I'm autistic.
Sarah Stephenson-Hunter:That's really, really interesting that you say that, your account's really interesting. For those of us in the UK, that will come as a bit of a surprise.
Yorik Mol:Yeah, well, the UK at least has the narrative. So UK at least has language that is attempts to be inclusive, it's got nothing else like it doesn't have benefits, it doesn't have a disability support system. In Holland, you get put in a cage, but you survive. In Britain, you're left free, but you're left to drown. And so I've just been incredibly lucky being able to survive like this in the UK of being able to kind of make my own way and sort of create my own existence. But many people are not so lucky. I had the good fortune of being part of the Erasmus exchange - of the UK then still being a part of Erasmus exchange system which, after the Brexit vote, the United Kingdom public decided that they didn't want to be in the EU anymore. So therefore also not Erasmus. But Erasmus is the reason I'm here. I was able to go to the University of Sussex on my Erasmus exchange in my second year of my degree, and I lived there, I was really happy. For the first time in my life, I felt I was at home somewhere. I could exist in this language. I made lots of friends, did lots of stand up people liked me. And I had my first relationship with a woman. My first relationship at all, I was 23. And I was - I genuinely thought I was gonna die a virgin, because I thought I was just so physically repulsive. Like, I just thought I was disgusting, because of who I was, because of what I was, that's being disabled, which I think - I subscribe to the social model disability. So if you're disabled, you're disabled because society deems you so, and I was deemed so. The idea of someone like me having sex with anyone, that's disgusting. There's been, like in Holland, there's been lots of TV shows that actually include people with disabilities, but often as a laughing stock, and if they're included at all, they're usually people with either cognitive disabilities or physical disabilities, autistic people are nowhere to be found in Holland. But no - I did not know any autistic people who were on TV, or writing books, or even had jobs. I wrote a book recently that's about autistic people. And it's about three autistic people growing up in 1930s Holland. I didn't know as a kid that it was possible to be autistic and alive, because we were so invisible. And the UK allow - culturally has had more of a open heart to sort of oddness and social awkwardness and people with specific interests. And the UK was kind of a way to set me free. And I felt more free here until the EU referendum and then -
Sarah Stephenson-Hunter:Well, yeah...
Yorik Mol:- you guys voted to say - to tell me no, you are not welcome here after all. Okay, bye.
Sarah Stephenson-Hunter:Well, I didn't, I didn't
Yorik Mol:I know you didn't. I know you didn't. But I like to take - I think it's just funny to...
Sarah Stephenson-Hunter:Absolutely. So here you are now. And you've been in the UK now, what, 10 plus years?
Yorik Mol:I had to go back to Holland after my Erasmus year, to finish my degree, had a huge depressive breakdown, got on medication, and went into hospital. I was in hospital for three weeks until I was assaulted by one or the other people. That didn't work, it wasn't necessary, and I was kept on, for instance, the benzos I was put on Clonazepam, four milligrammes of Clonazepam every day in the morning, which is the same amount of Clonazepam that Michael Jackson took before he died. Because they just essentially wanted to cure me. And I wanted to be cured. I wanted to be cured of my sexuality, I wants to be cured of my autism, I wanted to be cured of depression. I wanted to be normal, because my main fear was turning out like my father. And I felt that my mental illness had to be suppressed at all cost. Doesn't work, obviously. And so after a year extra, where I tried to have some therapy in Holland, which didn't work, because there is no- there was no therapy appropriate for autistic people, I just left and went to London to do my master's at UCL. And I broke down and I had to quit studying after four months, and I put on a two year interruption. Then I met Harry, who is still my best friend. They, well he, as they were identifying then as male, and they, uh, we met doing stand up. And Harry's also autistic. And we fell in love. And like with our first meeting, Harry said like, yeah, you're autistic. It's like, no, not autistic, no, not me! He was like, yeah, you are. You definitely are, you're the same as me. We were together for three years. And Harry is still the closest friend I've ever made. And we're still best friends. We broke up in 2017. We'd lived together at that point for a while. And then we found, you know, we were in lockstep together. We were together all the time. Because being autistic, you lose a lot of friends, but specifically neurotypical friends, because we're not very good at keeping contact in the way that neurotypicals do. I certainly am not because I'm super busy sometimes. And people just think, oh, they don't - he doesn't care about me. Or I am overly con - like overly contactable and overly talkative and people are like, urgh, go away. And so friendships just don't last between me and many neurotypicals. I don't think I've got many neurotypical friends left. I think Jane is one of the few ones that I've still got left who is neurotypical. I just end up with autistics. Because we just get each other, we get the idea that we can, you know, spend more time doing other things and then get back in touch. And that's okay. With Harry, I finally found a way to exist in a way that's truly autistic. And we rock together, we flap together, we have our specific jokes, and we echo, and all of those things we celebrated. And those are the exact things I tried to repress for so long. When I was 26, and at UCL, I finally decided enough is enough. Fuck it. I have failed. And so I started coming out properly, started dating guys. And like I said, then was with Harry for three years, and then I - I mean how was that? Coming out, starting to date, as an autistic person? I think Grindr is a brilliant tool for autistic people, especially.
Sarah Stephenson-Hunter:OK, what makes you say that?
Yorik Mol:Because it's very clear. It's a, like, I lost a lot of weight in 2017 and I got back on Grindr then. I knew now that I had a body that people might find attractive, rather than just something that was just huge. There's nothing wrong with that, of course, there's lots of people who are overweight and a lot bigger than I am now. And than I was then, and I find incredibly attractive. But not when it comes to me, there's this internalised fat phobia that I still have and I need to deal with. But it's very clear, I always put on my profile that I am autistic. And so people know about it. Like other other autistics at the front of the queue I said, I think I said. It's very clear, like, do you want to have sex with me? Yes or no? Okay. Yes, boom, I'll go and see that person. No, like, block me, you're fine. Yeah, it's very clear. Because I will never be able to pick up a person in a bar. I never have, I never will. Because I do not read the social signals. I have to work so hard to already do my own act to perform in a way that is conducive to that environment. To then not have to, like do all of these other things as well, trying to read the other person, where they're not saying what they actually want, what they actually think. Grindr necessitates that because you can't see their face on a still image, or more than still image. So you have to do it in words. And I'm pretty good with words. So I can puzzle those out. People are clear on there. But the relationships I've been in since Harry was with Chris, who's still a really good friend, who I met actually over Grindr, but then we just really connected and stayed really good friends. And we were together for a few weeks, and then we broke up again. And now Luke, Luke, I met in 2017. At a write- at the Oxford writers circle, I started my novel Teeming, which I finished late last year, in 2016, when my grandmother died. And then I met Luke in 2017 at the writer's circle, became really good friends, again, shared our autism and our interest in writing and reading. In 2018, the book was selected for the WriteNow, for WriteNow, which is a system within Penguin Random House that brings writers from minority backgrounds together, and I think I was the first autistic writer, openly autistic writer, to be selected for it, in the five years that it was going. It's about three characters. One is real, Marinus van der Lubbe, who's definitely autistic. I've spoken to people. The other - the other two are fictional characters. One is Sarah, who is at the start of it a girl, and not quite sure what actually that means. 12 years old, and like my grandmother was sent to work in the 1930s, during the Depression, second daughter of a large Catholic farming family. So you are sent out to work and your father is paid for your work there. Because that was just yeah, essentially selling your child off as slave labour. That's what happened, and that still happens in some places in the world. But it happened to my grandmother, she was always like, she was jealous of me having gone to university, and feels so proud of me having gone to University. The second character is Frank, and he is gay, cis gay, and also autistic, and has suffered abuse when he was in a religious seminary. It was selected for WriteNow. And then I met an editor at that session. And she essentially said, yeah, you have to think more about the reader. This is too autistic, it's like, isn't the entire point of it to be autistic? It took me a while then to start back up because I then started working as an autistic activist, and being queer is so helpful when being autistic because you see society and the way patriarchy functions in both ways. When it comes to gender, like I said before, I hated my body. And Harry, when they met me, thought I was a transgender woman, because I was, I was just so uncomfortable in my own body. And it wasn't until my late, until I got with Harry, that I could realise that my body could be a beautiful thing rather than something to be disgusted by. This sounds so so so so wanky, especially with people who are tran,s and who have had far more of a struggle than I have. But when it comes to gender, like, I don't think I realised that I was cis until my late 20s. And that's for now at least, I might change my mind. But for now at least my body feels pretty good, and I think it feels as close to, like, real as it possibly can. Going back to your first question about why there are so many neurodivergent people who are queer, I don't know. And until we can map the brain and say what everything is, we can't know. We don't know what a thought weighs, what a - and what an emotion smells like, we do not know those things. And so until we can map the brain fully, and quantify in the way we can do a kidney or a liver, we can't answer that question. It's just a fact that they just happen to coexist all the time. And that's, intersectionality is fundamental to explaining that. Because being queer, and a person of colour, for instance, is a different experience to being queer and whites. Being autistic and a person of colour could mean the difference between life and death, for instance. I will talk a lot about people like Matthew Rushin, who was imprisoned falsely for like driving into someone after he'd had a meltdown and then had a meltdown. The person wasn't much hurt, they were a bit hurt, but not much. And then Matthew, because he had a meltdown was put in prison and went down for 40 years for manslaughter, attempted manslaughter. And... because he had a meltdown, and because he realised, oh, God, I hit someone. He said, I don't want to - I deserve to die, I deserve to die, Ideserve to die, which is things - which are things I have said in a meltdown, whilst punching myself in the face. And the cops said, okay, well, you've just confessed to wanting to murder this person. So he went down for forty years, and he's just been released.
Sarah Stephenson-Hunter:Wow.
Yorik Mol:If I had a meltdown like that, and I've had one like once like that, in London, banging my head against the, against the pavement, because I was - I moved between boroughs and I was denied mental health care. I... if I'd been Brown, it would have been tasered. If I'd been Black, I would have been shot. Because I at the time was 18 stone, six foot four, and I was behaving in an abnormal way. And the fact I was white saved my life there. Because if I'd been black, I would have been seen as someone who was causing a nuisance or I would be seen as drunk or addicted to drugs, and I would have been neutralised. This is why so many neurodivergent autistic groups are overwhelmingly white, because they die. And we still die in overwhelming numbers far younger than the wider population. Suicide rates are ridiculous. This is - the numbers I hear from, I'm using here from I think 2016. But out of all deaths in 2016, 1% of those were suicides, of those suicides, 11% of those were diagnosed autistic.
Sarah Stephenson-Hunter:Yeah, yeah, I know, it's, it's shocking stuff.
Yorik Mol:Add that to the mental health issues that are experienced by the queer community through minority stress, communities of colour, disabled communities. And you just see that, like [S.T. Selma?] says, the era of crimes against humanity never stopped. We're still here, we're still doing it. And in my own small way, I try to make things a little bit less shit with the understanding that we're pretty rubbish species on the whole. And the human sp- the human race isn't worth saving. But we try to, like - wanna try to do as much good as possible in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Sarah Stephenson-Hunter:Yeah, yeah. So in the here and now you do this activist work, you do this, this chattering? You go out speaking to places...
Yorik Mol:I was fired, I was fired in November from a teaching job, so I had to pivot. I'm still officially on benefits.
Sarah Stephenson-Hunter:Oh, wow.
Yorik Mol:Yeah.
Sarah Stephenson-Hunter:How do you feel about where things are now for those who are queer, disabled? What your perspective on that?
Yorik Mol:Well in 2019, the British public made their wishes very clear, that's against us. Politically, we're not in a good place. The British public voted for a Tory government, and we got that, and therefore also the erosion of the rights of queer disabled people, neurodivergent people, because that's what their thing is they wants to break down protections for communities that are made weaker by by the forces of capitalism working as they do. So yeah, not great.
Sarah Stephenson-Hunter:No. But in terms of you and your situation and where you're at in your life, as a - somebody who's out as queer, somebody who's out as autistic. How are things for you?
Yorik Mol:I feel very empowered that the things I hated most about myself, I know are now the way I make a living. Are now the way that- are now best things about me, like the fact that I'm autistic, is the centre of my talents, it is why I'm good on my feet, it is why I'm good at writing, why I'm good at teaching. The fact I'm gay is the centre of my joy, is because I love another man, who is also autistic. I, like - it's fundamental to my sense of humour, it is fundamental to my empathy, and how I'm, how I'm, like, being. I don't like - I shift between identifying as queer and as gay. But as queer... I see that as a political statement, and our very lives are political. And we have to fight the current status quo. Because it doesn't work. And especially not for us. And it's... the reason I'm good at what I do is because of those very things I used to hate myself for, and that is a very pleasant form of irony.
Sarah Stephenson-Hunter:Yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah, it's a shame we, we often have to go to that extreme pain and distress to get to that point, but I guess...
Yorik Mol:I don't think we have to, I just think we live in a society that wants us to.
Sarah Stephenson-Hunter:Yeah, well, yeah, certainly echoes with my journey.
Yorik Mol:Yeah.
Sarah Stephenson-Hunter:How can... come on, plug yourself, Yorik! How can people find out more about you, if...
Yorik Mol:Yeah, I said that I am to be found at www dot. I don't know if people still use www dot but I'm old, so I do: yorikmol.com. And that's spelled J, O, R, I, K, M, O, L dot com. Contact me there. If you're interested in reading my blog, for instance, where I write about being autistic during lockdown, where you can book me for speaking engagements and trainings where you can talk to me about supporting you or your child or people you work with, regarding special educational needs, so neurodiversity, or intersectionality. You can also read about my book that I am still waiting for agents to come back to me about, it's called Teeming. And I hope, I pray to Gods that something might come of it because I've only worked on it for three and a half years... But I've reduced medication, so I should be starting on the second part of this trilogy soon enough. So I kinda hope that that's, that'll....
Sarah Stephenson-Hunter:Yeah I hope so, because it would be really good to read it.
Yorik Mol:Yes, I would like to read it. I read like to read it because it's exactly the story about being queer and autistic, including a sex scene between Frank and Jonas, that I am so proud of, because it's about how Frank experiences having sex with Jonas physically, in a way that would have been seen as absolute disgusting and perverse, simply because Frank is autistic, when I was growing up. And the fact that we have a capacity to have sexual attraction, and to experience sex in a very physical sensory way, that is very taboo, and how to see also how it intersects with political radicalization, with masculinity, femininity with Sarah's fight to exist and to function and to be a woman if she wants to be or not be a woman if she can't, if she can't be. The connections with the natural world are so fundamental, like I really need to be out in nature at least once a week.
Sarah Stephenson-Hunter:It's been an absolute pleasure, delight, speaking to you. And I obviously wish you every success with your work, and we we can't wait for that book.
Yorik Mol:Yeah, thank you so much for your time. Thank you for everything.