Growing up, Ridley didn’t like his hometown. He was asexual and trans, with a white mother and a Black father—both upper-middle-class doctors in a town that vaguely resented them and outright resented him. His parents didn’t handle any of it well. In order to be “well-rounded,” he’d been made to learn line dancing, wood carving, horse riding, pottery, and the piano, which—obvious to him but not to his parents—didn’t help ingratiate him with his peers. The wood carving had stuck, but Ridley had excised the rest from his life.
