Perversity to match the curtains: Queering the life story with Grayson Perry

Is a queer life story a contradiction in terms? In it, we are dealing not only with a form based on the impossibility of identity, but one that is intensely interested in the destabilising effects of sexuality and desire. In this paper, I take a tour round the autobiographical pots of the Turner Prize winner Grayson Perry, to ask what happens when the classic structures of the coming out story are perverted, postmodernised and, indeed, ceramicised. Perhaps these beautiful but undoubtedly naughty pots will prove one persons answer to the conundrum of telling a sex life today.