‘They cancelled me as a human’: What nearly killed Logie winner Hugh Sheridan

By James Button

Actor Hugh Sheridan was left shattered after a volley of “horrific messages” led to the cancellation of his Sydney Festival show: “You cannot support cancel culture if you care about mental health.”Credit:Tim Bauer

Early last year, the actor Hugh Sheridan was confirmed in the lead role for the musical, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, scheduled for the 2021 Sydney Festival. Six months before the show was due to open, Sheridan left his home in Los Angeles, leased a house in Sydney, and began walking around it in high heels and a denim miniskirt, excited, reciting his lines.

Sheridan, now 36, had won four Logies playing Ben Rafter, the goofy suburban boy in Channel 7’s comedy-drama, Packed to the Rafters. But in Hedwig, a highly demanding role that requires the actor to play a handful of characters, he had the chance to act, sing and dance, skills he’d trained in since a boy. Hedwig is born Hansel, a boy from communist East Germany who falls in love with an American soldier and has a sex-change operation so they can marry and flee to the US. But the surgery is botched and later the soldier leaves, pitching Hedwig into a life of sorrow, crazy bravery, fabulous wigs and rock ‘n’ roll.

For Sheridan, it was the role of a lifetime. His mother told him he’d been preparing for it since he first wore dresses at the age of three. To play Hedwig, he even gave up the lead in Pippin, a show that would play at Sydney’s Lyric Theatre for two months. He wanted to take the more daring part, and to show a mainstream audience – the kind that had watched Packed to the Rafters – “a queer love story”.

One day in November, just weeks into rehearsals for Hedwig, Sheridan opened his Instagram account to read some “horrific messages”. Four trans advocates had organised an open letter demanding he be dropped from the role. The letter, signed by more than 1700 people, said only a trans actor could play the role. Hedwig was a transgender character, and a male who was not transgender should not be “the gatekeeper of a trans story”. The choice of Sheridan was “offensive and damaging to the trans community” and “continues to cause genuine stress and frustration amongst trans and gender non-conforming performers”.

The letter prompted the American creators of Hedwig, John Cameron Mitchell and Stephen Trask, to issue a statement saying they did not believe that Hedwig was trans, and that anyone could play the role. But the Australian producers, Showtune Productions, cancelled the show. “We wish to assure the Trans and LGBTQIA+ community that the issues raised are respected and taken very seriously,” said Showtune in a statement.

The band, stage crew, set designers, props, lighting workers and wig and make-up staff (including a trans woman) all lost work. Sheridan lost much more.


When he checked his Instagram account that day in November, Sheridan had an “out-of-body” experience. He was being called “transphobic” simply because he’d accepted the part. He messaged back: “You’re insane” – he was an actor! He says an activist screenshot and re-posted his message, adding, “Now they’re calling me insane.”

“I went into a very, very dark place,” Sheridan says. He tried twice to commit suicide. “I put the people I love through hell.” Nearly a year later, he still feels devastated. “You cannot support cancel culture if you care about people’s mental health,” he says. “Corporations who are cutting down forests – cancel them. People with outlandish right-wing views – go for it. But people who are your allies? How can you crush somebody’s creativity and self-expression because I have not come out as trans?”

The trans actor, Zoe Terakes, who posted the open letter, declined to be interviewed for this article. A signatory to the letter, actor and theatre critic Suzy Wrong, a trans woman, says she signed it to support “the young activists who went out on a limb for the cause”. Wrong says, “Nobody ever intended to cancel Hugh, and clearly he hasn’t been cancelled, as he continues to work in high-profile shows – such as Rafters – and he’s getting more press than ever, including a lot of supportive coverage from the gay press”.

Wrong says many actors are considered only for a very narrow range of roles, and therefore “more privileged people should leave those rare opportunities to appropriate performers … If I am only in the running for roles that are both trans and Asian, for example, I would really hope that people leave those opportunities to me. They come by once in a very blue moon.”

For Sheridan, who says he’s had loving relationships with both men and women, what should have counted in playing Hedwig was not his sexuality but his ability to play the role. If only a transgender actor can know what it’s like to be trans, he asks, does that mean that a trans actor cannot play a character who is not trans? Could Cate Blanchett no longer play a man (Bob Dylan in I’m Not There) or Naomi Watts not play a woman confined to a wheelchair (Sam Bloom in Penguin Bloom)? “Cancel culture now prevents actors from playing anything they’re not,” Sheridan says.

This is the kind of debate that Wesley Enoch, the then director of the Sydney Festival, had hoped to see. Enoch thinks a discussion about roles for trans actors is “very important”, and that staging Hedwig, with Sheridan in the role, could have triggered it. But after so much preparation, the show did not go on. Just why remains unclear: Showtune’s artistic director David Hawkins also declined to comment. Did his company simply capitulate to an online campaign?

The story of Hedwig is a tale for our times. It concerns a term that captures many of the confusions, fevers, even terrors, of the day. That term is “cancel culture”.

To cancel means to shame, silence and cast out an individual as a way to make a larger political point. A cancellation most often starts with a social media campaign, usually – though not always – against a well-known person, and can end with that person losing their job or reputation. Books, films, TV shows and statues can also be cancelled.

Beyond that definition there is much dispute about what cancel culture is, who does it, and whether it even exists. Public cancellations in Australia have been rare and mostly confined to the arts world, whereas in the US they have happened to people working in corporations, media and universities. Yet in both countries something about the term has caught, and often cowed, people’s imaginations.

It drives the plot of three recent American shows: comedian Dave Chappelle’s special, The Closer; The Chair, a comedy-drama about a modern university; and the newsroom drama, Morning Wars, in which a weatherman faces cancellation for appropriating Native American culture after an on-air jest about his “spirit animal”.

In AppleTV+ series Morning Wars, actor Nestor Carbonell (right) plays a weatherman cancelled for using a Native American term in his on-screen banter.

Last year, 153 public intellectuals and writers in the English-speaking world, most of them from the centre-left, signed a letter in Harper’s magazine decrying a rising “intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty”. In 2019, Barack Obama warned a group of young people: “This idea of purity, and you’re never compromised and always politically woke … you should get over that quickly. The world is messy.”

Although it was the Macquarie Dictionary’s word of the year in 2019, cancel culture is an elite debate; not one likely to come up over drinks in the outer suburbs. But what elites say and do shapes the culture. Ideas that start in universities move into the arts world, publishing houses, important parts of the media and law, public service departments and schools, the institutions where progressive values predominate – and from there, into the mainstream.

The right side of politics, relentlessly seeking leverage against the left, seems obsessed with cancel culture, even if the term doesn’t express a simple left-right divide. News Corp Australia commentator Andrew Bolt writes about it constantly. Scott Morrison attacked it in two speeches in April alone. Donald Trump, no stranger to trying to cancel people, stood in front of the chiselled faces of past presidents on Mount Rushmore last year and denounced it as a threat to the American way of life. Last month, Russian President Vladimir Putin also condemned cancel culture, at which point satire became obsolete.

Melbourne employment lawyer Josh Bornstein finds the right’s denunciations ironic. He contends that right-wing politicians and News Corp columnists hounded ABC presenter and activist Yassmin Abdel-Magied and SBS journalist Scott McIntyre out of their employment and then out of the country. He represented McIntyre, who was sacked after his tweets on Anzac Day criticised Australia’s digger traditions, outraging conservatives.

Bornstein thinks the greatest threat to free speech comes from the rise of an authoritarian right that has suppressed the voice of institutions as diverse as unions, charities and the ABC. “Right-wing cancel culture is a much bigger threat to democracy than censorious leftists jumping up and down on Twitter,” he says.

“These discussions about ‘cancel culture’ are almost entirely about the privileged,” says Suzy Wrong.

“I believe we need to be a society that holds individuals accountable. If your misdeeds are so egregious as to have you cancelled, then you probably deserve it. So few have met that fate, really. I can only think of [film producer] Harvey Weinstein and [US television personality] Matt Lauer.” One thing worries her about cancellations: people don’t get an opportunity to learn from their mistakes.

But Emma Dawson, head of the Labor-aligned Per Capita think tank, takes a more critical view. Identity politics and its extreme manifestation in cancel culture are “more worrying to me than just about anything other than far-right extremism”, she says. “It is pervasive among educated young people; very few are willing to question it.”

Dave Chappelle in The Closer.

Per Capita produces research and policy advice on class and economic disadvantage. These issues are far less fashionable among progressives than they once were, and Dawson worries that “woke culture, especially as it plays out online” is damaging the chance of addressing them. “It is so exclusive, so insular and self-regarding, that it can’t build a mass movement for social change,” she says. “It doesn’t recognise its own privilege and it will not reach across the aisle. Without compromise, the left will never frame the winning
coalitions we need to create a fairer society.”

Melbourne nightclub Sircuit, which was targeted for its tribute to four policemen killed while on duty. Credit:Facebook


In April, a gay nightclub called Sircuit, in inner Melbourne, bathed its street front in blue light to remember four police officers killed by a truck driver on the Eastern Freeway and to honour one particular officer, Glen Humphris, a popular regular at the bar. Dozens of posts by LGBTQI+ activists targeted the nightclub on Facebook: its act was “abhorrent” and “vomit”, they said. “Why not stand in the fight to stop black deaths in custody instead of supporting oppressors? The queer community will never stand with cops.” And: “White gay men proving, yet again, that they will always be white men before they are anything else.”

The bar owner, Chris Driscoll, acknowledged Humphris as a “valued member of our community”. But he also apologised – to the activists. The way the bar chose to remember the policeman “deeply affected our community,” he posted. “We will do better. We always want to … provide as safe a space for our community as possible.”

Another case concerned Readings Carlton bookshop, also in inner Melbourne. Alison Evans, an author who identifies as non-binary, tweeted that they would not speak at a Readings event unless it apologised for having staged a discussion three years earlier with Julie Bindel, a British feminist whom transgender activists say is transphobic. Readings apologised, prompting an outraged Bindel to accuse the bookstore of having “capitulated to bullies”. Readings owner Mark Rubbo told a UK journalist that he regretted his apology. “Bookshops should be homes to all ideas,” he said.

In both cases, there was pushback. Mary Crooks, executive director of the Victorian Women’s Trust and a longtime feminist campaigner who interviewed Bindel at the Readings event, said that while she did not necessarily agree with her, it was important to explore and understand people’s ideas, “not stomp all over them”. Crooks worries “that our society’s capacity for considered, safe, respectful and true intellectual debate is being eroded before our eyes”.

Similarly, a tide of Facebook comments condemned the “heartless” campaign against Sircuit’s decision to acknowledge the police deaths. “Cancel culture and the woke left in full flight!” said one. Other posts found no contradiction between condemning Indigenous deaths in custody, criticising police when appropriate, and grieving the deaths. “Davo Smith” posted that 30 years ago, gay men could get bashed or murdered in Sydney and the police were often indifferent. Now the bar was honouring a gay cop, “one of our own”.

Nevertheless, the apologies of the bar and bookshop show how online pressure can be irresistible. I speak to an Australian woman and man who were cancelled online in separate incidents. Neither wish to be identified, for fear of enduring further attacks. Both regard themselves as social progressives. Both had produced artistic work that was vetted and approved by leading practitioners in their fields before being published. Once released, their work was savagely attacked on social media for alleged racism and sexism. Both issued an unreserved public apology, which failed to abate
the fury.

The woman speaks of feeling so distressed she felt as if she was outside her own body. She was too scared to leave the house as she scrolled through about 300 hostile posts, all from people who did not know her. As she tells me her story, she begins to cry.

The man speaks of being barely able to get out of bed, needing to seek psychiatric care and contemplating suicide – and being saved by two staunch friends who checked in on him every day. “I actually felt like the entire world was attacking me,” he says. “I felt that everyone who did not get in touch with me hated me, was part of the mob. I lost major relationships with friends and family because they said nothing to me at that time.”

As these stories suggest, no one is cancelled for their views of economic policy, or climate change, or God. Instead, the charges are racism, misogyny, sexism, homophobia or trans-phobia. For progressives, such accusations, especially of racism, are lethal.

“It’s become so incredibly toxic that even talking about cancel culture can get you cancelled.”

And the cancellers? I approach more than 20 people who were involved in cancellations as instigators, targets or would-be mediators. None will speak on the record. A number cite potential career damage, their mental health, or the risk of turning up in another Andrew Bolt column. Maybe talking to a journalist on this subject feels like a losing game. As Rish Mishra, a 21-year-old Monash University student, tells me: “No one wants to say, ‘I am pro cancel culture.’ It’s an inherently pejorative term, like ‘the woke left’.”

I contact a well-known writer, a person of colour who feels Australian society has much further to go to address racism, to understand the rationale for instances of cancellation. He replies, requesting anonymity, that the environment “has become so incredibly toxic that even trying to talk about cancel culture can get you cancelled. In particular, it’s been heartbreaking to witness the left mutate into a bunch of f…ing cannibals who are eating their own.”


Cancellations came to America first. They have emerged in US universities over the past seven or eight years, as activist students used online petitions and pile-ons to “de-platform” visiting conservative speakers and even professors, conservative or liberal, who held unpopular views.

An early analysis of cancel culture came in a 2015 feature in The Atlantic, The Coddling of the American Mind, by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. They argued that the anxious, helicopter parenting of the educated classes, along with the echo chambers created by social media and smartphones, raised a generation of young people who did not want to hear opposing views, who were focused on micro-aggressions, safe spaces and trigger warnings, who believed they were fragile and in need of constant protection.

It is hardly new that a rising generation finds its struggles the most urgent society must face. What is new is the power of social media to swiftly summon a group to express a view. Since our new public square is online, the high profile of young voices in it upends the generational bargain of youth deferring to age. Even if the young hold no power anywhere else, they do here.

Two big changes in the US, watched around the world, brought cancellations into the mainstream. The election of Donald Trump horrified progressives. Here was a president – elected by ordinary Americans – who was racist, who winked at neo-Nazis and who told barefaced lies in a brazen assertion of power while claiming that the liars were the progressive media. His own strategy adviser, Stephen Bannon, said that the way to win the contest was to overwhelm the media with misinformation, to “flood the zone with shit”.

In such a degraded climate, for some on the left the defence of free speech has come to seem like an unaffordable luxury. This year, staff at the US office of global publisher Simon & Schuster sought, unsuccessfully, to cancel publication of a memoir by former vice-president Mike Pence. Their open letter accused the company of “rehabilitating fascists”.

The second change occurred in 2020, when a Minnesota police officer killed an African-American man, George Floyd. With Trump still in power, and a pandemic raging, people took to the streets. Statues fell. White people were filmed kneeling in shame at American racism. It felt like a revolutionary moment. And it was in that moment that cancellations, often of progressives by progressives, began in earnest.

A political researcher, David Shor, was sacked for tweeting out an academic paper pointing to the negative impact on the Democrat vote of violent protest around race. A California truck driver of Latino background, Emmanuel Cafferty, was sacked after another motorist tricked him into making what looked like, but almost certainly wasn’t, a white supremacist
gesture. A professor of Chinese, Greg Patton, was suspended after saying an expression in Mandarin in class that sounds like the n-word in English.

The New York Times’s editorial-page editor James Bennet was forced to quit after staff protested that publication of an opinion piece put “Black staffers” in danger. The writer, Republican Senator Tom Cotton, had called for troops to restore order on the streets. Since Bennet had been seen as a contender to be the paper’s next editor, his departure seemed to mark a new reckoning around the acceptable limits of public speech.

Not all cancellations turned on race. Boeing executive Niel Golightly resigned, after an employee complaint, for having argued, 33 years earlier, that women should not serve in combat. Apple products engineer Antonio Garcia Martinez was sacked, after three weeks in the job, for some paragraphs in a book that had been published to widespread praise in the progressive media. Five years later, these paragraphs were deemed “misogynistic”.

The facts of these episodes differ but the pattern is usually the same. Protesters sign petitions, backed up by a social media pack whose language is often off the leash. The petition to have Martinez sacked, signed by more than 2000 staff, said his presence at Apple made them feel “unsafe” and “profoundly distraught”. Explaining Patton’s suspension, the university dean said: “It is simply unacceptable for the faculty to use words in class that can marginalise, hurt and harm the psychological safety of our students.”

Everything turns on that claim of harm or hurt to a marginalised group. Whether harm was intended is irrelevant. In scripted apologies that one writer likened to hostage videos, many offenders recant, repent and commit to re-education. The apology, though, is never enough. An institution is called on to sack or otherwise sanction an offender.

These moments may seem revolutionary, but are they? The activists made their demands not against authority but to authority – a university or a corporation – and their confidence that the demands would be met is a sign of the reach of progressive ideas within cultural institutions. Indeed, authority cannot comply quickly enough. The Atlantic writer Helen Lewis calls it “woke capitalism”: the willingness of companies to spout any progressive value, claim solidarity with any marginalised group, sack any employee, as long as they are left alone to make money.

None of these campaigns was about wealth redistribution, better schools, or breaking up the vast monopolies of Big Tech. None made a dent in economic power. They did, however, expose the corrosion of the public square. Loud voices among both America’s right and left now support cancellation over conversation. Better to destroy one’s opponents than debate them. And so the middle space, the faith that people of different views can find common ground, vanishes.

In those grim weeks after Floyd’s murder, cancel culture came to Australia, an import as American as Coca-Cola and Kanye West. Yet Australia is not America. In cancel culture’s migration across the Pacific, some of its fervour might have been lost.

Netflix’s comedy-drama The Chair probes cancel culture on a US university campus.Credit:AP


In June last year, filmmaker Michelle Law, with the support of colleague Corrie Chen and other activists, accused the Sydney Film Festival of upholding a “white supremacist” system, and the Australian film industry as being “racist and broken”, after an all-white panel awarded a major prize to a short film, Mukbang, at the 2020 festival.

In a volley of tweets, Law said the film had appropriated the Korean custom of mukbang – an online performance of binge eating. She added that “beyond [its] racism and violence”, it was “dishonest and unfair” that a drawing of a white girl with her hands around a black boy’s neck had been edited out after the film had won the prize. In response, the director and production company made agonised apologies, with the latter saying they had failed to see “how insidious, persistent and deeply embedded systemic racism is in Australia and in us as white Australians”.

The episode triggered an unusual response. In an open letter to The Sydney Morning Herald, 27 film-industry figures and authors wrote: “Something is dangerously askew in the way we are talking about race in the arts in this country.” The signatories included many of Australia’s finest Indigenous filmmakers – Rachel Perkins, Warwick Thornton and Ivan Sen, among others – Asian-Australian filmmaker Tony Ayres and development executive Debbie Lee, writer Christos Tsiolkas and actor Joel Edgerton.

Unhappy about the treatment of Mukbang’s young director, Eliza Scanlen, they disagreed “with some Twitter voices” that her film was racist. Then they made a larger point. They agreed that systemic racism existed, but argued it could be addressed only by “examining and changing the institutions that make up Australian culture”.

The campaign – attacking the industry as racist, and talk of “burning it all down” – failed to acknowledge how much things had already changed through “the hard work of Indigenous people and people of colour who have come before them”, they wrote, adding that many industry leaders were now Indigenous and people of colour.

The award-winning film Mukbang was accused of appropriating a Korean custom.Credit:Harri Sharp

The letter provoked an angry response from some activists, who labelled the letter writers “gatekeepers” shutting down young people’s views. They had the power to get an open letter published in a big newspaper, while all the activists could do was tweet. Yet one signatory said the letter had so many names precisely to spare individuals from attack: “People are scared, totally scared.”

In that period, Law kickstarted a campaign against the fact that SBS had an all-white leadership team – pressure that helped to produce change at the multi-cultural broadcaster. But a few weeks after Law’s intervention over Mukbang, an anonymous Twitter user posted a scene from a film Law and Chen made in 2013, Bloomers. In that scene, three teenagers paint ash on their faces to stage “an ancient Mayan ritual” to bring on menstruation.

Now the revolution came for Law and Chen. They hurriedly issued public confessions about their seven-year-old film. The scene was “racist” and “indefensible”; they were “horrified”; they thanked critics for holding them “to account”; Chen was educating herself about blackface and racism. Law was “especially sorry for the distress and harm these resurfaced images caused First Nations and Black people”.

I have watched Mukbang twice. It is a beguiling film about the emotional and sexual struggles of a teenage girl. A glance at Instagram shows that the practice of mukbang, like karaoke, has become part of global culture. And the girl’s desire to strangle the boy makes sense in the context of the film: she is both attracted to him and angry at his behaviour, neither of which is connected to his race. I haven’t seen Bloomers but I doubt it is racist, either. But as with Hedwig, what needed to come out of this episode was a public forum or debate about diversity in Australian culture. Instead, it turned into farce.

The bleak theatre of the Mukbang incident underlines how intensely a contest of power and ideas is playing out in Australia’s arts and culture industries. A new generation of writers, directors and actors from minority backgrounds wants to tell its stories and to see its faces on stages and screens. It wants more leadership roles. Several recent reports show that Australian film and television, more so than comparable countries, are still far from representing the diversity of the population. The same is true of Australia’s parliaments, boardrooms and courts – all its power structures.

A film and television industry whose leading and experienced figures are mostly white is responding, to varying degrees, through its hiring, story-commissioning and funding processes. In February, the ABC introduced commissioning guidelines to ensure “more diverse faces, voices, cultures and stories” in its broadcasting. While the commercial stations are slowest to change, more criticism focuses on the broadcaster that has done the most to introduce diverse stories – SBS.

Last month, an online petition with more than 2400 signatures called on leading television producer Princess Pictures to withdraw from developing a series of migrant stories for SBS TV. Some signatories to the “Diverse Creatives” petition – some of whom are named, others anonymous – belong to the Diversity in Australian Media Facebook group.

An association with comedian Chris Lilley (as Tongan-Australian schoolkid Jonah, above) meant another project by Princess Pictures was cancelled.

The petition fiercely criticised Princess Pictures for producing the work of comedian Chris Lilley, whose work, including the Tongan-Australian character, Jonah, “perpetuated racial violence”. It called on SBS “to stop funding this culturally ignorant company and giving them ownership of multicultural stories”. SBS should trust and fund “culturally competent and experienced First Nations and People of Colour-owned production companies who are working hard with little support”.

In a Facebook post, Princess Pictures founder Laura Waters said there had been a profound and necessary conversation in the screen industry in recent years over issues of representation and marginalisation.

“I have come to understand the suffering that has been caused by some of the programs I have produced … I accept full responsibility and I deeply apologise for that.” Waters said in her post that her company had sought extensive counsel about how to change “frequently biased internal power structures”. It would continue to increase the “cultural and ethnic diversity of our staff, collaborators and projects”.

Waters wrote that the series for SBS would ensure nearly all roles – more than 100 – went to culturally and linguistically diverse directors, writers and actors. She hoped the series would play a part in “combatting racism and providing opportunities for more inclusive storytelling”.

But the pressure from the petition was too great. Five days after that post, Princess Pictures withdrew from the project. The benefits of this outcome are hard to see. Critics have an absolute right to accuse Lilley’s work of racism and of causing hurt, and to demand an end to the use of blackface. But Princess Pictures also produced Wrong Kind of Black, created and co-written by Indigenous storyteller Boori Monty Pryor, and 8MMM Aboriginal Radio, co-written and co-produced by Indigenous writer and actor Trisha Morton-Thomas. It has a record of success in a tough industry, in which newcomers struggle to get a foothold. Cancelling the series seems likely to disadvantage many of the emerging writers, actors and directors the critics claim to represent.


Cancel culture is in part an argument about power. One axis of power it confronts is between the old and the young. I speak to two Monash University students – Nathaniel Diong, 20, and Rish Mishra, 21. They are the children of migrants, from Malaysia and India respectively. Diong is a commerce and global studies student, the Victorian finalist for 2021 Young Australian of the Year, and founder of Future Minds Network, a social enterprise for young people he started at 16, he says, after falling into a clinical depression about his powerlessness to make a difference in the world.

Like many of his age, Diong is not instinctively hostile to the idea of cancel culture. He says he likes the way it holds well-known people, such as author J.K. Rowling, accountable for their actions, and sets out acceptable conduct for these times. But Diong also thinks cancel culture tends to favour people “who are the loudest or most aggressive”. It can “almost serve as a sort of
vigilante justice”.

While social media helps to open windows into the lives of others, such as those with disabilities and LGBTQI+ people, Diong thinks it also imposes huge pressure to always take a stand. For example, “on Instagram, during Black Lives Matter, everyone was posting black squares to show solidarity”. But the action risked becoming tokenistic: people posted out of fear of being called out. “Cancel culture is on the rise because young people want to feel like they’re making an impact.” One way to do that is to lobby against people with huge influence. “Because we feel like we don’t have enough.”

Mishra, a law and economics student, agrees that “social media is usually the loudest voices saying that other people should not be heard”. But he supports hearing all ideas. “If we disagree with someone, we should take the time to refute them, not cast them out.”

A member of the Greens, Mishra thinks social media companies are “wreaking havoc on communities and social cohesion” and wants to see legislation to break them up. He also sees the personal costs of cancel
culture. “Face to face, I’m pretty unabashed about defending myself,” he says. But when he sees outrage on social media, often expressed by people his age, “it definitely has a chilling effect. You don’t know when the cannon gets aimed at you next.”

If the term cancel culture captures something of our moment, it is because it speaks to fraught questions, especially of race, gender and sexuality. Society seeks to address such questions by enabling argument, contest and storytelling in the public domain. People have fought to widen the view of parliaments, media, courts and classrooms. Let more voices speak, hear those who have not been heard, but expose all claims to the light. That’s how we stumble towards truth.

The internet has expanded the public square, while creating opposing camps on its edges. Yet social media, at its worst, rewards aggression and bullying, people wielding power while disavowing their power, causing pain while crying pain. The paradox of cancel culture is that it visits a brutal, symbolically violent act on individuals in the name of some of the most sacred ideals of our times: diversity, anti-racism, the respect and recognition we owe every human being.

Some say no one is ever really cancelled: that J.K. Rowling and Dave Chappelle are doing fine. But celebrities are not the point. The point is the potential impact of a more fearful speech climate on all of us, on the culture.

This year, Hugh Sheridan put on a one-man show, Hughman, an exuberant mash-up of pop, hip-hop and tap that celebrated a world without gender or sexuality labels, in which we are all human. But Hedwig “has taken a toll on my personal life in virtually every area – strained family, friendships and my love life”.

Sheridan says that when he came out last year as loving both men and women, some in the LGBTQI+ community accused him of timing his announcement to justify playing Hedwig. “It had nothing to do with Hedwig, I had considered it for a long time.” He’d been due to make a statement about his sexuality in Men’s Health five months before the role was announced, but the magazine folded before the article was due to appear.

“I feel as though I’ve been cornered into a place where I’m not allowed to play straight, transgender, a father, a mother.”

He says he came out on the eve of the Hedwig announcement only because he thought people would feel more at ease knowing he was comfortable playing a queer character.

During that “very vulnerable time, when I had opened myself up”, he lost the part. Since then, the only roles he has been offered have been gay men. “I feel as though I’ve been cornered into a place where I’m not allowed to play straight, transgender, a father, a mother.” Roles like Ben Rafter “were straight characters, roles that weren’t me, but that I had created as an actor through empathy and understanding.

“It’s been an incredibly difficult year. I put on a brave face but that is my job. They cancelled me as a human in more ways than they will ever be able or willing to understand.”
Lifeline: 131 114; Beyond Blue: 1300 22 4636

This is the first in a three-part series on cancel culture; parts two and three will appear on Sunday and Monday.

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