Culture

Amelia Abraham's "Queer Intentions" Digs Into The Most Pressing Questions Queer People Face Today


Well, I guess that my thinking was quite binary! I learnt that you’re not either a boring married assimilationist or a radical poly genderless queer who runs kink parties from your commune. But I think I had to go to the same-sex wedding and the commune for myself to work that out. In these places, I learnt about the nuances around what equality means to different people, and maybe most importantly, who it leaves behind. Talking to Serbian lesbians, trans women of color in America, and gay men in Istanbul, I saw how much work we have yet to do — equality is not equality unless it’s for everyone. Seyhan, a Turkish trans woman I interviewed in Istanbul, put it very nicely when she said “you will never see all the colors of the rainbow,” referring to how many ways of being queer there are. She described equality as a staircase with 100 steps; are at the top, fighting for marriage equality, while some are at the bottom, fighting for their basic right to survive. We need to climb the staircase more or less step by step.

Who did you write this book for? Do you see yourself as explaining queer cultures to outsiders, tackling queer issues for queer people, or both?

Both, for sure. It was a challenge trying to write a book that would appeal to queer people who know a lot about LGBTQ+ issues and read about them all the time on amazing websites like them., and others who know very little but want to learn more or be a better ally. It’s tough to satisfy both parties without over explaining or patronizing, so I tried to avoid that — I might explain what cisgender means, for instance, but then I’ll leave people to Google “bear culture.”

I guess I’m in the lucky position of someone who writes about LGBTQ+ rights for a living. So I was my hardest reader, in a way, because I know a lot about the topic. I tried to think about what would make this project fun for me, and I concluded that it would be to go to places we rarely read about, focus on personal stories from people we don’t always get to hear from, and then to leave in all the humor and weirdness, the heartbreak, the times I got drunk on the job, and also the times I fucked up my reporting or things went wrong. Hopefully this honesty will feel accessible to outsiders too. I wanted everyone to feel like they were welcome on the journey.

How did the journey of the book change your thinking on queer life and culture? Or how did it reinforce what you already thought?

I guess in smaller ways, my eyes opened. I was cynical about marriage, but when a cis couple who got very publicly married in the UK told me they didn’t do it to show straight people that they are equal — they did it to show their younger selves that there were alternative life models to fucking your way through Grindr (although that’s okay too!) — I felt less judgmental. Similarly, my thoughts about the corporatization of Pride softened slightly when I heard that Amsterdam Pride uses corporate sponsorship as a way to hold companies to account for how they treat LGBTQ+ people — that it was about Pride changing companies, rather than companies changing Pride. Whether that actually works I can’t say, but it was a perspective I hadn’t really considered.

How different would you say queer life is right now, in general, between the US and the UK?



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