“I struggled with being seen as gay and trans at the same time,” he explained. “It feels like one gets cancelled out for the other.” That tension wasn’t framed as bitterness - more a gentle truth about how our communities, even our queer communities, still sometimes flatten people into categories that often don’t leave room for complexity. For Ben, being seen fully means acknowledging the life he lived before transition, the man he is now, and the queer relationships and experiences that have always shaped him. It’s not about choosing one version - it’s about holding all of them at once.

When Ben transitioned at 33, he found language for a self he had always carried. But he also carried the old life with him. Not in a nostalgic way, but in the sense that he had lived on both sides of society’s gendered expectations. “It became important that despite wanting to be seen as a man, people also understood I had lived, been conditioned and educated as female. That perspective doesn’t disappear.”

These experience’s sit quietly underneath his work, a kind of layered vision that lets him write characters with nuance, tension, and compassion.

As a disabled playwright and regional artist, Ben also speaks with real clarity about the importance of community, mentorship, and belonging. The Midsumma Pathways Mentorship program for LGBTQIA+ disabled artists, which is where I first met Ben back in the early 2020’s, was, he says, life-changing. An experience that helped him see himself not only as an artist but as a disabled artist whose creativity doesn’t cancel out his access needs.

In our interview, he laughed often. He almost cried once. And he spoke about the complexities of being seen in a country town where anonymity is impossible and history clings to you in ways that can feel both comforting and suffocating. He talked about the fear that still flickers when he and his partner walk down the street.  “We’d love to walk down the street holding hands, but we still don’t know if we’d be targets. Young people do it now with such ease. That gives me hope.” He says quietly.

I asked Ben about the influence of the person who has been Ben’s mentor since the start of his Pathways program days - acclaimed actor, screenwriter, producer and director Kate Mulvany OAM. When her name entered the conversation, his whole posture lightened - not with sentimentality, but with the gratitude of someone who knows he’s been profoundly, unexpectedly supported. To Ben, Kate is not just a mentor; she’s a storm of generosity, insight, and unwavering belief. “I pinch myself every day,” he admitted, marvelling at the sheer luck of being guided by someone who meets him exactly where he is. What moved him most wasn’t her accolades or status, but the way she insisted on treating him as a peer - using his own language, honouring his instincts, and handing him confidence piece by piece. Kate, for him, is the kind of mentor who doesn’t stand above, but beside, and her presence in his life is less about formal guidance and more about being truly seen by another artist: gently, fiercely, and without condition.

Ben carries humour the way some people carry light.  Not as a shield, but as a soft lantern he lifts up between himself and the world. In speaking with him, it became clear that comedy isn’t an afterthought in his storytelling; it’s the architecture that lets deeper truths unfold. He talked about humour as a way of disarming people, of making them comfortable enough to hear the truth. But it’s more than strategy. It’s connection. It’s community. It’s that moment when a room breathes in and out together. A shared laugh that softens the ground beneath harder conversations. “When you laugh with someone,” he told me, “you’re not far from crying with them.” And in his work, as in his life, those two states sit close enough to touch.

Most of all, Ben talked about storytelling. For Ben, writing isn’t a hobby - it’s how he stays alive, connected, and part of the world. His plays become children of a kind, carrying pieces of him into rooms he might not otherwise enter. And as his latest work The Placeholder moves toward the stage, he’s handing that child over to audiences with a mix of pride, terror, and delight.

Although The Placeholder, will take centre stage in a separate article, it’s impossible not to acknowledge its significance here. This work is Ben’s love letter to the women who held space for him as he became himself, and a bold exploration of friendship, identity, and transition in a regional town where histories linger and community is both anchor and pressure. It’s a deeply funny, tender, and clear-eyed play that asks audiences to see themselves in its characters - and, in doing so, to see the humanity of trans lives with greater care. If Ben’s writing is his legacy, The Placeholder is its heartbeat.

For Ben, The Placeholder isn’t designed to convert the immovable or to wage war against people determined not to listen. He knows there are minds that won’t shift - not yet, maybe not ever, and he’s made peace with that truth. Instead, he writes for those standing at the threshold. People who are curious but unsure, compassionate yet without firsthand personal relationships that help bring clarity and understanding. The sort of people whose assumptions come not from malice, but simply from a lack of personal connection.

What he hopes is simple and profoundly human, that audiences might recognise something of themselves in the characters onstage, and in doing so, allow empathy to slip in through the side door. He wants them to leave with softened edges; perhaps a little more courage to stand beside trans and gender diverse people and a willingness to do so if required around others in their own lives. If he can open a single window in someone’s understanding, give them a new way to see a neighbour, a colleague, a stranger - then the play has already done its work. Because The Placeholder isn’t an argument. It’s an invitation. And Ben hopes people will accept it.

The image that stays with me from our chat is a man who has lived a life of self-interrogation, transition, humour, and resilience. Someone who is joyfully, and quietly certain of who he is.

I hope I captured this in my pictures of him (when I finally did raise my camera lens). And if there’s one thread that runs through every minute we spoke, it’s that visibility isn’t about being looked at. It’s about being known.

And Ben, in his work, offers that knowing to others with remarkable generosity.