My name’s Adam Dillon, I’m a transgender gay metal musician and researcher based in Meanjin.

Nowadays, I present myself as masculine, but in an overtly queer way. As a metal musician, playing with gender and non-normative ways of presenting is in baked into the art form – despite what transphobes and bigots might have to say. Wearing makeup (be it the full-face paint of KISS or, in my case, dragged out cut-creases), heels and jewellery may be gay, but its something that is intrinsic to metal. In my humble opinion, the gayer the metal, the better.

Growing up, as a girl in an all-girl’s Catholic School, I wasn’t able to present myself in a way that felt like ‘me.’ Whether that was with piercings and freaky hair, or whether it was having the space to properly feel out my gender identity as a transgender man, I either wasn’t allowed to or I didn’t feel comfortable. When I finally got out, after clawing my way out of the layers of closets, I started medically transitioning.

Hormones, and eventually top surgery, and about a year into testosterone, I felt ready to fully dive into performing live. Finally, I’d cast off the invisible, restrictive ties that choked me, and performing – particularly performing metal – became home.

It is how I ritualistically re-affirm who I am. It is a demonstration, a communication, between me and some unknown force that I am yet to name, that I have become who I am becoming. Forever shaping and re-shaping, but still knowing at my very core, that embracing my trans-ness, carving a new body from the old, adorning myself in loud, aggressive sonics and ferocious, full-body movements, was the best act I could’ve ever done for myself.