Edmund West

I’m autistic, I teach autistic children and I care for autistic adults, but I never kid myself that we are better than other people. When I asked a fellow autistic man if he could name any famous autistic people, he replied: ‘Hitler and Einstein.’ I love his answer because it punctures the romanticism around autism. There are evil autistic people, as well as geniuses. Was Hitler autistic? We’ll never know for sure, but he showed several symptoms. People who met him found that once he started talking, he would not stop. He was also nocturnal, had an addictive personality and developed lifelong obsessions (in his case, racial purity). Around half of all the people referred to the anti-radicalisation programme Prevent are autistic males.

I am not your typical Goth. I don’t have piercings or tattoos (I refuse to pay for pain), I have no mental illnesses and, most shocking of all, I am heterosexual. On the other hand, my birthday is on 22 May, World Goth Day, so maybe it was my destiny. I find comfort in the gothic world. As a child, horror films never frightened me because I knew they were fictional. What really gave me nightmares were the ‘Kill your speed, not a child’ adverts. I memorised the Bride of Frankenstein film to stop me thinking about those terrifying adverts as I went to sleep. While I didn’t start wearing black clothes ornamented with skulls until I was 16, I was always drawn to the macabre.

‘I’m not going to your place, it looks like a crack den.’ It’s not exactly a vote of confidence when your mother describes your home that way. Admittedly, the bedsit I have lived in for ten years is tiny. There is no central heating. The white blinds have faded to yellow. It’s not much good for house parties: I could fit four people, five if I sat between the sink and the microwave. However, I would like to defend living in bedsits. Whenever I hear people complaining about housing in London, I wonder whether they have considered a bedsit. I’m autistic and work as a part-time carer, but even on my salary I was able to go on holiday abroad four times last year, thanks to my living arrangements. In London, rent is my biggest expense by a huge margin.