Subscribe[W]hat he described in his stories was only too familiar to me from my work as a doctor, and no one could write so clearly of such matters without a deep sense of purpose.and secondly his use of the pseudonym was:
The Reverend Toby Forward, as it happens, is not the scion of privilege, even of privilege in decline; his biography in outline followed that of Rahila Khan's very closely ... Both his parents, who were working class, left school when they were fourteen years old. They lived in slum areas of the unlovely cities of the Midlands, and he himself went to schools in which half the pupils were of Indian or Pakistani descent. His early life was lived in precisely the social environment depicted in Down the Road, Worlds Away: that is to say, in a society in which a nihilistic and entirely secular white working-class culture was thrown into involuntary contact with a besieged traditionalist Indian culture in which religion, particularly Islam, played a preponderant role.
because he did not want to receive letters of rejection in his own name, which would somehow be more wounding to his pride than rejections send to Rahila Khan. But he also realized that Rahila Khan would be more likely to get a hearing than the Reverend Forward, and he felt that he had something important to say that ought to be heard. He had already sent his stories about working-class boys to the BBC under another pseudonym, Tom Dale, while he sent the ones about the Muslim girls as Rahila Khan. The BBC had treated the two writers quite differently: kind and considerate to Rahila, brusque and even rude to Tom. He learned his lesson.
I don't suppose linking your essay to men using female avatars in gaming would work?
posted by spec80 at 8:57 PM on November 25, 2008