The 17-year-old is a Justin Bieber look-a-like and these moments do more than just provide the college student with a taste of what life is like for his idol. For Blake the recognition provides him with hope and a lightness that has been missing from his life - for the teenager was actually born a girl named Rebecca.
His decision to switch gender and live his life as a boy has seen him on and off the police protection list for five years due to a campaign of abuse that has seen him beaten unconscious and his house pelted with rocks, snowballs and metal poles. He has even attempted to kill himself in a bid to escape his tormentors.
But Blake said yesterday he finds comfort in impersonating Bieber, 20, and that the Canadian pop star’s music has given him the confidence to be himself.
It is believed Blake is Britain’s first transgender Bieber look-a-like.
A person is transgender if they believe the body they were born with does not match how they feel as an individual. Blake said he has known he was a boy from a very young age and has now decided to undergo surgery and hormone treatment to change his body from that of a girl to that of a boy.
He said: ‘I was born a boy but my body reflects differently because I’ve not had the op yet. I knew at quite a young age because I was always copying my brother and doing what he was doing and I just didn’t feel right.’
His mother Sharon, 52, also noticed early on that something didn’t seem right. She said: ‘I knew there was something because I would try and dress him up, not thinking and doing his hair with girly things.
He would say I don’t like this and I would tell him it looks good and he would go along with it but he was never really happy. I knew there was something but I could never put my finger on it. Even then he would come home and take the girl clothes off and put on football, Manchester United, stuff.’
After coming across Bieber on YouTube when he was 12, Blake, who lives with Sharon and his older brother Bradley in Wigan, said he felt an immediate connection with the singer and his lyrics.
He has since worked hard perfecting the likeness, closely studying music videos and interviews to memorise Bieber’s mannerisms and spending hundreds of pounds on clothing, sometimes spending days trawling the internet to find versions of the singer’s outfits at affordable prices.
However, the work has paid off and he is often mistaken for the real Bieber. He said: ‘I’ve had my shades on and my hat backwards and I went into Blackpool and a small girl came up and her mum asked if she could have her picture taken with me because she thought I really was Justin Bieber. And, when I went to Birmingham, these girls on the escalators were going crazy because they thought I was him.’
Currently studying public services at college, Blake hoped to join either the army or the fire service before deciding to try and make a career as a lookalike. These are professions he will go back to if he impersonating Bieber doesn’t go to plan. His current aim is to land jobs either modelling as Bieber or performing at children’s parties.
Having passed the psychological evaluation necessary before undergoing gender reassignment surgery, he is now scheduled to begin taking testosterone before eventually having the full procedure.
He hopes these next steps will help him look more masculine and therefore more like Bieber and plans to get tattoos and build muscle at the gym to make himself more like the star.
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