Pillow Talk Scotland

Self-care note: This wrap-up includes discussion of suicide, sexual abuse, anti-LGBTQIA+ policies and behaviours, gender based violence, and more. If you find this distressing or triggering, remember to take it at your own pace. You may prefer to read small sections, wait until you feel ready to read it all, or choose not to read it at all.

Self-care note: This wrap-up includes discussion of HIV, cancer, anti-LGBTQIA+ policies and behaviours, gender based violence, and more. If you find this distressing or triggering, remember to take it at your own pace. You may prefer to read small sections, wait until you feel ready to read it all, or choose not to read it at all.

Self-care note: This wrap-up includes discussion of HIV, child trafficking, anti-LGBTQIA+ policies and behaviours, gender based violence, and more. If you find this distressing or triggering, remember to take it at your own pace. You may prefer to read small sections, wait until you feel ready to read it all, or choose not to read it at all. The UK AIDS Memorial Quilt is being displayed in full in Scotland for the first time, with all 335 panels brought together at Tramway in Glasgow.

Self-care note: This wrap-up includes discussion of IVF, anti-LGBTQIA+ policies and behaviours, gender based violence, and more. If you find this distressing or triggering, remember to take it at your own pace. You may prefer to read small sections, wait until you feel ready to read it all, or choose not to read it at all. The Scottish Government has launched a national review into whether NHS-funded IVF should be extended to single women, with recommendations expected next summer.

Self-care note: This wrap-up includes discussion of anti-LGBTQIA+ policies and behaviours, gender based violence, and more. If you find this distressing or triggering, remember to take it at your own pace. You may prefer to read small sections, wait until you feel ready to read it all, or choose not to read it at all.

Texas, Annie: The Legend of the Moan Ranger is a campy pop-rock musical about a renegade sex toy dealer in Texas, where sex toys are declared illegal. It’s based on a real-life Obscene Devices law that was created in the ’70s, [in the US] stating that if you own six or more sex toys, it’s a felony. So you can legally own more guns, technically, in Texas than sex toys. The law was challenged federally, and it was overturned in 2008, Texas did not take it off the books.

We spoke to Holly Paterson, the writer behind Uncorked at the Edinburgh Fringe, about using fertility and pregnancy to explore the changing shape of long-term friendship, why female friendships deserve the same emotional weight as romantic relationships, and what happens when two people who have grown up together suddenly find their lives moving at very different speeds. I was really interested in what happens to a friendship when life starts moving at completely different speeds for two people.

A significant aspect of the long-standing filmic tradition of the charismatic psychokiller (from Dexter and Patrick Bateman to Hannibal Lecter) is that such narratives tend to give their audience a good reason to root for their monsters. Sometimes it is a moral code; sometimes sheer charisma; sometimes an attraction to refinement, intelligence, or the perversely compelling logic of a criminal mind.

The body swap is one of comedy’s oldest tricks – and has long been used for various purposes. The multiple film adaptations of the famous novels Vice Versa (1882) and Freaky Friday (1972) use swaps between parents and children to pose generational and familial questions. Other films use them to explore differences of race or class and, finally, the classic romantic-comedy take on the trope asks what it might be like to experience the world as a different gender.

In OnlyFans for Therapy, Verona Verbakel uses video to revisit places and memories connected to her own trauma. Rather than offering a neat story of recovery, the show moves through fragments: returning to places she has avoided for decades, watching recordings of herself confronting them, and considering what it means to live with trauma long after the events themselves.