Whatever It Feels Like For a Girl, whatever the name of the book, will be an eight-part series for BBC Three and BBC iPlayer billed as a 'wild, anarchic twist on a coming-of-age drama' inspired by Lees' (photo) story.
Here's the synopsis: "It's a new millennium - Madonna, Moloko and Basement Jaxx are topping the charts and there's a whole world to explore. But teenage Byron is stuck in a small working-class town that hasn't been the same since the coal mine in the 1980s closed. Sick of his mother, sick of his father, sick of getting beaten up for "talking like a sissy," sick of everyone shuffling around like a living dead, whining about kitchens where they're too poor for his and marriages they're too scared to leave. Byron has to leave and he doesn't care how."
The story follows Byron's escape into Nottingham's underworld and the discovery of the East Midlands' "premier stage-dancer-cum-hellraiser" Lady Die, who takes Byron into her family of hilarious and chaotic troublemakers in the early 2000s British club scene.
Read edits the story and Chris Sweeney (The Tourist, Liar) directs. Hera Pictures (Mary & George, Temple) produces. Both are executive producers alongside Liza Marshall and Ron O'Berst for Hera Pictures, with Nawfal Faizullah for the BBC.
The shooting will start next year.
Journalist and writer Lees is one of the UK’s LGBTQIA+ community’s most prominent figures, described by i-D magazine as “the voice of a generation.” She called What If Feels Like For a Girl “a deeply personal project.”
“I’m excited, hysterical, thrown and overblown with bliss, but most of all I’m just having so much fun bringing this universe to life in a visual medium,” she added. “It’s a primal scream — from the depths of a council estate — against a world that would prefer people who don’t fit the norm didn’t exist. But we do and we’re not going away, we’re not apologising and we’re not shutting up.”