Elliot

Elliot

he/him

Elliot is a 38-year-old queer man, born in Jersey, who moved to Brighton for university in 2007. He’s now a body piercer and manager of Punktured Body Piercing in Brighton’s North Laine.

Growing up on a small island and coming out in his early teens wasn’t easy. Intense bullying and rejection led him to internalise the idea that his queerness made him weak, worth less than other men, and that everyone now expected him to fit a stereotype. He found piercing at sixteen, and it began as an outright rejection of what people told him a gay man should be. He wanted to show he was hard, that he could do what other men could, that his queerness didn’t mean mental or physical weakness, proof to himself that he was strong, and armour against the negativity around him.

It was only as his relationship with body piercing developed, to the point where he took it on as a career, that he realised modification wasn’t a rejection of his queerness but an extension of it. He wanted to stand out rather than blend in, to be looked at rather than ignored, to have his differences, sexual and physical, celebrated as something worn proudly on the outside. He wanted his body to be as queer as he was within, without shame.