Amelia Abraham
QUEER INTENTIONS
A (personal) journey through LGBTQ+ culture
Contents
A Note From the Author
Introduction: A (Not So) Queer Time and Place
Chapter One: Cooking Dinner Forever
Chapter Two: The Business of Drag
Chapter Three: In the Beginning, There Were Gay Bars
Chapter Four: What Have we Got to be Proud of?
Chapter Five: Now You See Me
Chapter Six: Now You Don’t
Chapter Seven: Gay Capital
Chapter Eight: A Queer Utopia?
Acknowledgements
For Emily, and my grandmother, Doreen
A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR
From LGBT to LGBTQIA+, there are lots of ways of referring to our community. I have decided to use LGBTQ+ throughout this book as an inclusive shorthand for ‘lesbian’, ‘gay’, ‘bisexual’, ‘transgender’, ‘queer’ and other identity categories like intersex and asexual. That said, mainly in the Istanbul chapter, I have used the term LGBTI because this is what is generally used locally. Elsewhere, I have stayed true to my interviewees’ acronyms of choice within their quotes. When I am speaking about a specific subsection of the LGBTQ+ community I have named this subsection. Similarly, I have used the word ‘queer’ where relevant, either as an umbrella term for the identities that fall under LGBTQ+, or to refer to a more radically politicized sector of the LGBTQ+ community. I hope this usage becomes obvious in context.
A note on pronouns: I have used the pronouns that my interviewees asked me to use at the time of writing. I acknowledge that these may have changed, or might still.
And finally, on a couple of occasions names or other minor details have been changed to protect privacy.
introduction
A (NOT SO) QUEER TIME AND PLACE
There’s something acutely embarrassing about crying on an easyJet flight. I could tell I was making everyone feel uncomfortable, but I couldn’t stop. I was blinkered by the unparalleled narcissism of break-up misery. The kind of cloying break-up misery that will evolve from Will I make it from my bed to the shower ever again? to Why won’t this bottle of wine fit into the pint glass? to Am I going to die from this? The kind of break-up misery you experience when you’re not just mourning the loss of an individual, but also the grand narrative of a life together. I was crying because one version of the future had slipped away again, and I was back to an uncertain one.
The easyJet flight landed at Luton airport, which is the least welcoming place imaginable to herald tourists into the UK. There are no posters, no bad patriotic artwork on the walls, just rows of people queuing for security and transfers, like cattle filing into an abattoir. Outside, the area directly through the building’s sliding doors is always crowded with men sucking on rolled-up cigarettes, bagless, so you can’t tell if they’re arriving, departing, or even catching a flight at all. I stood with them and puffed on a cigarette of my own. The crying had stopped, and I enjoyed the mundanity of watching tourists wheeling suitcases across the car park as a burst of sunshine hit my face. I realized I hadn’t seen the sun for almost two weeks.
My journey had carried me home from a remote part of Iceland called Ísafjörður, where there had been only a few hours of daylight, the sky had been a constant shade of grey and the wind had felt like a chemical peel. I’d moved there to be with my girlfriend, Salka. It was a Wednesday evening, earlier that year, when we matched on Tinder. I was the last person in my office and I had nowhere to be, so I started chatting with the smiling headshot in my hand. By the time the conversation had outrun my commute home, it became clear that this person on my phone wasn’t interested in small talk. Maybe it was an Icelandic thing. Maybe while British people want to make banal conversation about their hangovers, weekends and mutual friends, Icelandic people want to know your hopes and fears for the future, what you look for in a partner, and whether this conversation is going anywhere. My mum told me this is how the over-fifties behave on dating apps – an age bracket, she said, in typically morbid fashion, with no time to waste ‘because we are all going to die soon’. I wasn’t expecting this brilliant level of directness from a beautiful twenty-six-year-old redhead, and it charmed me almost instantly.
‘Do you want to go for a drink?’ I asked before I went to bed that night, assuming she lived in London.
‘I was in London last week,’ she typed. ‘Now I’m back home.’
I absolutely cannot tell you what inspired me to book a flight to Iceland three weeks later. But I can tell you that it was out of character. Maybe it was because I was dating a few people in London that flying for two and a half hours to meet a pure stranger didn’t have the air of desperation that it might otherwise have had. Besides, we’d FaceTimed to make sure she wasn’t a catfish.
‘This is how all good Nordic crime dramas start,’ my flatmate said as I packed my bag. ‘She’s going to murder you with an ice pick.’
Other friends thought it was romantic: ‘Maybe you’ll fall in love and start behaving like an adult.’
I was unprepared for both eventualities, so I pretended I was writing a travel article and blagged a free hotel room as a backup in case something went drastically wrong. Only, I never checked into the hotel room. When we first met, in a sun-drenched bus station car park not unlike the one at Luton airport, she walked right up to me and kissed me. For the next few hours, our bodies were in constant contact; making out, lying in one another’s laps, holding hands. It felt like the first time you fall in love, when you’re naive and fearless because you don’t know what a broken heart can do to you yet. It was like every bad romcom, except this time, both of the protagonists were girls.
Conversation with Salka wasn’t all that different from talking on the phone – only now the words fell out faster. We told the usual pretentious stories that you tell when you’re trying to impress someone new: how she’d once moved to South America alone; how I cried after I interviewed my heroes. But neither of us really listened to the other showing off because we were too distracted by the mounting question of when we were going to sleep together. It happened early evening. Immediately after, lying in bed together, she asked me if I wanted to go and have dinner at her parents’ house. I felt relieved, almost, as though if she hadn’t done something so psycho that first day it would have all felt like a giant prank – like I’d landed someone too ‘normal’ for me. I think it was the relief that compelled me to agree, coupled with the fact that I wanted to see more of her life, and I had only two days in which to do so.
We drove out West, to her family’s weatherboard house in the middle of nowhere and when we got there, she showed me around. In their lounge, a huge reindeer head was mounted on the wall. Salka explained that her dad had shot and killed it, and I suddenly got a strange feeling in my stomach. It seemed to be telling me that, if anything went wrong, my head would end up next to that reindeer’s. And yet, at the same time, I felt like I wanted to stay there forever. It was all very exciting.
Over the next six months, the excitement between Salka and me turned out to be very expensive. We would fly back and forth to visit one another, and if we couldn’t be together physically, we would talk constantly in between.
This wasn’t my first relationship – I’d had several – but this time, things were different: I’d never been so sure about someone so quickly, and a wedding, kids and old age played out in my mind like a tightly edited trailer for a film. Before we’d met, looking into a child’s eyes had still felt like staring down the barrel of a gun, but over the course of six months, Salka slowly began to desensitize me to the idea of having children by talking about them constantly. When I was hanging out with her, it fel
t as though everywhere we went together – the supermarket, the public baths (as popular in Iceland as, say, pubs are in England) or restaurants – we ran into friends of Salka’s who had babies, and faster than I would have expected, their lives became the blueprint for our own.
When we realized a long-distance relationship was no longer sustainable, we agreed that I should move to Iceland, and I found that I was willing to give up my job, flat and friends in London to pursue a semblance of what ‘forever’ looks like – moving in together, pooling our funds, arguing over baby names. So I put the wheels in motion, quitting my job and giving notice on my flat. But I never mentioned that I was sacrificing anything, because for Salka it meant too much responsibility. ‘Tell me you’re not doing this all for me,’ she’d say dramatically. And so I just pretended I’d woken up one day as a child and realized it was my dream to live in Iceland.
Back in London, I didn’t know any children, but I had definitely not been acting like a grown-up: going out constantly, exhibiting a general disregard for financial planning, failing at monogamy with most of the people I had been dating. My friends, even those in long-term relationships or in their thirties, didn’t seem interested in kids. Many were gay men who had casual sex and casual relationships by choice, and would stare at me blankly if I asked them whether they’d considered the idea of starting a family, some because they had been brutally rejected by their own. In my immediate friendship group, we’d occasionally discuss which of the gay men would impregnate which of the lesbians and where we should base our queer commune. But we hadn’t turned it into a reality yet, preoccupied as we were with existences that centred on underpaid creative jobs, social media, clubbing, chemsex, drinking all of the free wine at art openings, fucking our way through dating apps, dealing with mental-health problems, throwing ad hoc drag pageants, and incessantly talking about ourselves.
To us, the idea that everyone ought to fall into distinct categories of ‘hetero’ or ‘homo’ was a ridiculous one. But at the same time, what these categories meant beyond sex itself felt real. ‘Hetero’ didn’t necessarily mean being in a straight relationship or even having straight sex, it meant heteronormativity: having your shit together in the boring, traditional sense of the term. It meant falling into complementary gender roles, marrying someone of the opposite sex, and staying faithful till death do you part. Our very existence as people – as gender variant, same-sex attracted and potentially likely to cheat with a stranger in a club at 4 a.m. – meant that this wasn’t really an option for us. So did our economic situations (as one friend told me: ‘Maybe you could buy a flat if you stopped buying trainers,’ to which I couldn’t help but think, I wish I had six thousand pairs of trainers). Instead, we opted for what we saw as queerer ways of living: rejecting conformity, making irresponsible decisions, attempting to be more free. Or at least, that was my life . . . until I met Salka and she told me she wanted to marry me someday, which wasn’t the first time I realized I might be able to settle down – that happened when same-sex marriage was legalized – just the first time I thought I might want to.
I prepared for my new normative lifestyle as if I was preparing for the apocalypse; I purchased thermals, said goodbye to my friends and put all my belongings into storage. Meanwhile, as my moving date grew closer, Salka grew more distant. She reassured me – work had been busy – but I could feel the gulf between us for the first time. ‘You’re moving there in three weeks. She should be buying you a double gym membership, not ignoring your calls,’ my best friend told me. I didn’t know what to say. Things were getting so bad between us that I had gone into a state of denial, and still hadn’t booked my flight. When Salka did bother to contact me, we laughed less and argued more, the pressure of the decision we’d made, and the speed at which we’d made it, creating a palpable tension. Still, ‘We’ve come this far,’ we both reasoned, ‘maybe things will be better when we’re together.’
They weren’t. When I got to Iceland, Salka didn’t pick me up from the airport, she hadn’t cleared out a drawer for me, and she had made a lot of plans that didn’t involve me. These should, in hindsight, have been tell-tale signs that things weren’t as they should be – especially for me as a journalist, who gets paid, albeit not very much, to notice things – but out of her mouth came all the words you want the person you’re in love with to say to you: ‘I love you,’ for example. It was just that her behaviour didn’t match up.
In the end, my move to Iceland lasted just ten days.
Yes, ten days.
And we spent the last five breaking up.
If you’ve ever seen the French film Blue Is the Warmest Colour, you’ll know what a long, drawn-out lesbian break-up looks like. If you haven’t, it’s a lot of sex, arguing and crying – like straight people’s break-ups; only with lesbians, all three happen at the same time.
The decision I made to come home was one of the hardest I’d ever made – we didn’t leave one another on bad terms, just very confused terms. She was confused about how you can love someone so much and still not feel 100 per cent sure that they’re right for you. I was confused about why we couldn’t just ‘be’, but always had to be deep in love or deep in an argument, with no middle ground in between. I think maybe Salka didn’t trust that I was a forever type of person, and no grand gesture from me – not even moving to another country – was going to be enough to prove otherwise. Maybe, deep down, I didn’t believe I was a forever type of person either. In that sense, we both got catfished in the end, in the same way a lot of people in relationships do; you hope for one thing and you get another. It’s not the other person’s fault, it’s just that your particular dynamic makes you act like strange versions of yourselves, until you can no longer control, or even recognize, who you are any more.
However we would come to see that break-up in the future, one thing was clear: I didn’t want to be back in the UK, standing outside Luton airport. I still desperately wished I was with Salka, in whichever country she was living in.
A few weeks after my return from Iceland, I called my friend Amrou Al-Kadhi. I first met Amrou in 2015, at a performance event where our mutual friend was doing drag. Amrou – pronoun ‘they’ – was also a drag queen, in a drag troupe called Denim, whom I’d seen perform on stage at Glastonbury Festival one year when I was there for work. Denim met at the University of Cambridge in 2008 and had a reputation for being quite political – they didn’t just lip-sync, but sang live covers (they all have great voices), and wrote original shows that covered topics like racism and homophobia, always with trash and hilarity. If the film-maker John Waters did the Spice Girls, you’d get something like Denim: a girl band made up of five people in drag performing ludicrous characters like soccer mom Aphrodite Green. Amrou’s character was called Glamrou La Denim, a Middle Eastern goddess inspired by their mother’s glamorous brand of Iraqi femininity – which was fitting given that Glamrou played the mother of the group too, bossing all the other queens about.
When I first saw Amrou perform as Glamrou, I immediately developed a friendship crush. So I did what I usually do in that situation: asked if we could do an interview. ‘My autobiography would be called Hijabs to Hollywood,’ was the first thing they said to me, sitting on a faded avocado-green sofa in their living room, in full drag, wearing a pink wig and silver stilettos. ‘The sequel would be From Burkas to Bikinis,’ Amrou continued, ‘and then From Quran to Queen.’ I said I probably couldn’t publish the last one because it might annoy people too much.
Undeterred, Amrou went on to explain how their parents are from Baghdad, and how they grew up between Britain, Jordan, Bahrain and Dubai. They were encouraged from a young age to behave as a Muslim boy is expected to: masculine, straight and observant of Islam. But for Amrou, this was impossible. When their parents found gay porn in their bedroom at sixteen, they ordered Amrou to step back into the closet. ‘This is a phase,’ they said. ‘You have to get over it.’ Then, when Amrou was twenty-one, their parents spotted a G-A-Y
club stamp on their wrist and realized the phase wasn’t over. They reacted by throwing away anything Amrou owned that was pink, as though this would magically cure them of their gayness. It didn’t, and now, with their parents living in the Middle East and Amrou based in the UK, the two parties just ‘agree to disagree’. There’s a whole terrain of conversation that they don’t cover and when Amrou saw their mum recently, she urged them to marry a girl.
Whenever a relationship ends, I dread talking to certain friends because, as you tell them about your break-up, you can see the cogs turning in their minds: Another one bites the dust, they think, working out that the common factor in all the failure is in fact you. But I knew Amrou wouldn’t make me feel like that – not because I hadn’t known them long enough for them to have seen all the others come and go, but because they weren’t judgemental.
‘This is just the end of a relationship, not the end of your entire life,’ Amrou told me as we sat in Dalston Superstore, a gay bar where we’d both, separately, spent most of our early twenties, single and trying to chat people up. It was a stupid place to meet; it just emphasized that we were still single but now even older.
‘Look, you’ve gotten over a relationship before and you will again,’ they continued.
I protested that it wasn’t the same before, that I had never actually expected to spend the rest of my life with someone. Which was true, but part of me was also sick of hearing these kinds of post-break-up platitudes.
‘Settling down with someone is just one way of doing things,’ Amrou reminded me.
We ordered a drink and Amrou started telling me the story of an Arab wedding they had gone to over the summer, and how it stood for everything that bothered them about heteronormative institutions like marriage. ‘It was my cousin’s wedding in Mykonos. It was incredibly lavish. Everyone was in couples. I remember a moment when my cousin took me to one side and said, “Don’t you want all this, Amrou?”’
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