Personal Essay - Pride 2026
Most Pride Month content starts with We've always believed... or At [Brand], inclusion is core to who we are...
I'm not going to do that.
Not because I don't believe in any of it. Because you can tell the difference. The copy that comes from a legal sign-off has a particular texture - warm, general, containing exactly no specific information about anyone. The kind of sentence you could publish above any logo and it would still fit. I'm aware BillingtonPix has that risk. I have a financial interest in appearing like a brand that cares about things. I sell wrestling tights and festival leggings and luchador prints. Every time I write something that sounds meaningful, I'm also, on some level, running a marketing campaign.
So let me try to write something that would make no sense above anyone else's logo.
Wrestling came first
I watched professional wrestling when I was a teenager.
This was before I had language for most of what I was feeling. Not about wrestling. About most things.
What I remember is the theatricality, long before I had a word for theatricality. Men constructing characters from scratch in front of thousands of people. The entrance music. The costume. The persona. The way a man could walk through a curtain and be someone entirely else - and the entire arena would agree to meet him at the character. Would play along with the fiction until it stopped being fiction.
The Undertaker didn't wear black because it matched something. He wore black because he was dead. And once you'd agreed that he was dead, everything else followed. The slow walk. The light going out when he arrived. The audience didn't think it was real. They thought something more interesting: that it mattered.
I understood that. At fourteen, fifteen, sixteen - watching this and not yet knowing why it was the most instructive thing I'd ever seen.
I should also tell you: I am gay. I grew up in a house in Manchester in an era when the only public framework available for being gay was either tragedy or punchline. Wrestling offered a third thing. A stage where excess was not embarrassing. Where the man who showed up in a sequined jacket with an orchestra wasn't a figure of embarrassment. He was Gorgeous George, and he was the whole point of being there.
I didn't consciously think: this is my permission. I was a teenager watching wrestling because it was on. That's how permission usually arrives. It comes through the back door. You only notice it had been there after it's already done something.
What the mask is actually for
The luchador tradition is the clearest version of what wrestling was trying to show me.
In lucha libre, the mask is not a disguise. The word sounds like hiding. It isn't. The mask is a declaration. It says: this is the man I decided to be. El Santo wrestled in his mask for decades. He was buried in it. The man underneath had a name - Rodolfo Guzman Huerta, if you want the birth certificate version. But Santo was what he chose. Santo was who he was.
This is a genuinely different idea of identity from the one most of us are handed.
The version we're handed says: there is a real you underneath everything. The costumes are performances. The masks are things you put on and take off. The authentic self is the thing left when all the layers are removed. Get rid of the performance and find out who you actually are.
Lucha libre doesn't agree. The character isn't hiding the real person. In many cases, the character is where the real person lives. Mick Foley was never quite Mankind. Except he was, entirely.
I found this useful. I still do.
The idea that identity might be constructed - performed, chosen, assembled from available parts rather than simply received and then inhabited - I didn't read that in a book first. I got it from watching men decide who to be in front of twenty thousand people, in masks, in capes, in tights, under lights. And the audience not finding this embarrassing. The audience treating it as real, because it was.
What I never quite found elsewhere
Gay culture had plenty of theatricality. I'm not trying to claim wrestling invented the idea of constructed identity - drag exists, camp exists, the history is long and much better documented than anything I could offer here.
But wrestling was the specific version I encountered first. And what it gave me that I didn't find elsewhere was this: the theatrical man who was also taken seriously as someone who could fight. Who was not ridiculous. Whose excess was power, not weakness.
The problem with the frameworks available to gay teenagers in the late 1980s - or at least the ones I encountered - was that visibility came packaged with a kind of apology. Here we are, sorry for the intrusion, we'll try not to take up too much space. Or alternatively: here we are, and isn't it brave, and look how far we've come.
Wrestling wasn't interested in apology. The Undertaker did not apologise for taking up the entire arena. Gorgeous George did not apologise for the peacock feathers. Rey Mysterio does not apologise for the mask. They were not asking for permission. They had decided.
Camus would have had something to say about that. I didn't read La Peste until I was seventeen - the summer of 1987, a paperback from Hulme library. Something in it changed and hasn't changed back.
The problem he's working on is this: the universe is vast, indifferent, and offers no explanation for itself. You arrive asking for meaning and it hands you silence. That gap - between what you need and what exists - is what he calls the Absurd. L'ennui is the lived experience of it. Not boredom in the ordinary sense. The flat, grey recognition that arrives when you look at the silence long enough to understand what it is.
Most people deal with this by not looking directly at it.
Sisyphus is Camus's answer. The man condemned to push a boulder to the top of a hill, watch it roll back, push it again, forever. In every other telling this is tragedy. In Camus it isn't. It is choice. It is the decision to do something anyway - not because it will last, not because the boulder will stay up, but because the act of pushing belongs to you. The struggle is yours. That's the only ownership on offer.
What I didn't know, watching wrestling before I'd read a word of any of this, was that I was watching a variation on the same argument. The universe is blank. It doesn't care what you wear. And there were men deciding anyway - in sequins, in masks, in capes, under lights - furnishing the blankness with colour because the alternative is silence.
You can push the boulder grey and say nothing. Or you can paint it. Both reach the bottom of the hill. One of them was more interesting to me.
The man who didn't stay put
BillingtonPix is named after a demolished street.
Billington Street, Hulme, Manchester. My Irish ancestors arrived there in 1851, fleeing famine. They spent their years moving between numbers on that street because they were too poor to stay put. William Bain - my great-great-grandfather - died of bronchitis at twenty-six. The record of him is a name in a census, addresses where he didn't stay long enough to matter to anyone who wrote things down.
I think about this more than is probably healthy.
There's a thread that runs through the brand's name, through the wrestling obsession, through the whole project of making something bold and visible: the refusal to disappear the way people like William Bain disappeared. Not because he wanted to. Because the world didn't give him enough room to be remembered.
The shop is named after people like him. And the phrase I kept coming back to - men who refuse to be forgettable - is the direct inversion of what happened to William Bain. I want to be clear it's not sentimental. It's not a heritage story. It's something closer to a grudge.
The excluded buyer - the man who wants to look athletic and disappear into anonymity - I understand him. I just don't think that's something to celebrate. Disappearing is what happens when the world wins.
Wrestling, for me, was the first evidence that it didn't have to.
What I made when I started making
BillingtonPix started in lockdown. I am, by training, a web developer - not a fashion designer, not a cultural theorist, not a wrestler. I spent the lockdown largely alone in a flat in South London, which was a reasonable way to spend it, and at the end of it I had built a brand selling bold-print men's leggings and wrestling tights.
The explanation that makes sense to me: the left brain was exhausted. Something else needed somewhere to go.
The wrestling obsession was always underneath it. The specific idea that tights - leggings - are not sportswear in the minimalist sense, not anonymous athletic compression, but a surface. A surface where you put something that says who you've decided to be tonight. That the print is not decoration. It is the argument.
The luchador print that maps bilateral symmetry onto the body isn't an aesthetic choice. It's a specific statement about identity: here is the central axis, here is the self, here is the point around which everything else organises. That's what the lucha libre tradition means when it draws a character's face across a mask. That's what the tights are doing on a ring canvas. And that's what they're doing in a festival crowd, or a gym, or wherever a man decides he's going to be seen.
Masked Mythology
The Masked Mythology collection is the part of BillingtonPix that takes this most literally. Luchador prints, bilateral symmetry, ring-quality fabric. Built on the idea that the mask is a declaration, not a disguise.
Read the style guide →Why this is for June - and why it isn't only for June
Pride Month makes me uncomfortable when it functions as a temporary setting.
The brand that is Pride-adjacent for thirty days and then reverts to its usual self is doing something specific - it is purchasing visibility without paying the price of actual exposure. The rainbow version of the logo, then back to normal. I'm not interested in that. I'm not particularly interested in my logo in any colour other than the one it already is.
What I'm interested in is saying something true, in a month when the pressure to say something true is at least louder than usual.
The founding insight of BillingtonPix is queer in the broadest sense. The discovery - made first through wrestling, made later through Camus, made again and again through the act of building something loud when the world offers quieter options - that identity is something you construct, not something you receive. That the bold print is not extra. It is the decision.
Most of the men who buy from this shop aren't gay. But they've found the same thing. That the version of masculinity most widely on offer - compressed, minimalist, anonymous, performing competence without expressing anything - is not the only version. That there's a stage. That they get to decide what they wear on it.
I built this brand because a teenager in Manchester found that out from watching men in sequins and masks and capes decide who they were going to be in front of twenty thousand people, and took it seriously.
I'm still taking it seriously. I think you probably are too.
The Luchador Collection
Ring-quality luchador prints. Bilateral symmetry. XS to 3XL. The mask as a declaration.
Explore the collection →