Welcome to my little world my name is Kerry Nope, a London girl from the UK

Hiding in my bedroom and reading through a magazine called ‘The Exchange - a Mart’, I noticed a few ads about guys who dressed but there was very limited information about it and this is where my story starts…

I’ve been dressing since a very young age and it had been a huge secret until the tin ternet came along, as it was not something you chatted to your friends and family about in those days.

I just thought I was weird.

I stopped dressing as I went through high school as I tried to focus on getting through the nightmare of not been able to be the person I wanted to be. I turned into a very angry person who was always in trouble because of all the mixed emotions going on in my head.

To compensate my anger, I turned into a bully and hung around with the ‘wrong’ crowd to try and not become the victim.

My biggest passion was playing football and I was chosen a few times to play for my school which helped me blend more in with society as concentrating was not easy as I kept day dreaming about this very special world.

School was not great by any standards and about this time I started going to watch a football team named ‘Chelsea’.

Chelsea fans were known for been violent hooligans and this kind of life took me to a different dangerous level in my life…

My first experience of attending a football match changed my life for years to come.

In those day’s I was in a ‘youth training scheme’ and had very limited money to my name, so I only had enough money for the train ticket, my bovil and meat pie and the match and not enough for a Chelsea shirt. I’d worked my route to the Chelsea grounds on a piece of paper but as we all know when arriving somewhere new, things never look the same as on paper.

I eventually found a café near Fulham Broadway with time to spare and this is when things in my life took a turn for the worse.

Two skinheads (tattoo’s and Doc Martins as standard) noticed me sitting on my own and came over and started chatted to me about the upcoming game and wanted to know if I wanted to join them in watching the match. I was in awe as they were 4-5 years older than me and they wanted me to hangout with them.

Walking up the gates of the football stadium, all you could hear were the words ‘Chelsea’ bellowing out from the stands and it made my skin tingle and I felt a buzz of excitement fill my body.

My excitement soon changed into violence as my new friends were more into fighting against the opposition than watching the football. I was now mixing with more than 10 skinheads fighting against other hooligans at the ‘Shed End’ of the Chelsea stadium.

This was my biggest mistake in my life!!!!!

For the next 5 year’s my life spiraled out of control as I got a huge adrenaline rush from fighting with anyone who wanted to fight. I was now part of the violent hooligan fans of Chelsea. It was so bad that I never paid for ever using the train as the police would try and get us off the trains without asking for tickets just to remove us.

The world of dressing was nowhere to be seen or heard of……. TO BE CONTINUED