They mimed a sympathetic head tilt and outstretched their arm as though they were offering me the scene of a beautiful wedding in front of us. ‘I was like: “Umm, no, not really, but I’m happy for you.”’ Amrou said the cousin seemed annoyed at this response.
‘I don’t know,’ Amrou continued. ‘I think it’s unfair. Why are we expected to celebrate straight people’s choices and to want to make the choices they make, but when it comes to ours they don’t get celebrated? I mean, where are the hallmarks for us? No one sent me a bunch of flowers after the last time I sucked off a stranger in a dark room.’
I told Amrou I still felt ambivalent; I agreed, obviously, but I was worried that Salka had shown me an ugly truth: that I just wanted to have a lavish wedding in Mykonos.
‘Don’t you ever feel like that?’ I asked.
‘I get what you’re saying,’ Amrou said. ‘I definitely experience it at work.’
Amrou explained that, while Denim perform in gay bars and stage fundraisers for queer organizations all the time, personally they had become near fixated on the need to transgress straight spaces, which basically meant seeking out gigs at brand parties or big festivals or kids’ birthday parties and bar mitzvahs.
‘Do you feel weird about it?’ I said.
‘All the time,’ they said quietly. ‘But I think it’s just about wanting to be accepted or feel legitimate, isn’t it?’
Amrou told me to stop talking to Salka, so I took their advice. There was one weak moment when I screen-grabbed a photo of her with someone else on Instagram and texted it to her with the question: ‘WHO THE FUCK IS THIS?’ But other than that, I remained composed. Mostly I just wrote her letters that I never sent. I cried at dinner parties. I went on a break-up speaking tour, boring all of my friends while I shaped what had happened into a neat narrative with a beginning, middle and end, until it began to sound more remote each time I rehashed it. Privately, I would go through our messages to one another, as though I was in a Netflix crime documentary where combing over old evidence was going to bring to light something new. Instead it just made me feel empty inside. I oscillated between being grateful that she was in another country, so that I wouldn’t have to run into her, and missing her small Icelandic town deeply: the imposing mountains, the long open roads, the weatherboard houses, and of course, her.
By day, I started to go for meetings to try to get some freelance work. But I walked into my old office and quickly found myself surrounded by dozens of ex-colleagues asking why I wasn’t in Iceland – the emotional equivalent of having a beehive thrown at you. I deflected, turning the whole story into a joke, with ‘ten days!’ as the punchline. By night, I began to rejoin the same dinner party circuit, went back to the same gay bars. I even started sleeping with someone I knew – a lawyer called Emily who seemed to be the opposite of Salka in every conceivable way. I moved between Emily’s flat and friends’ sofas in order to get out of my sister’s old bedroom, where I had been staying, and before I fell asleep, I would often cry into my pillow (sometimes, while this new strange person was sleeping next to me), not only because I missed Salka, but because my life had no structure. I would, at particularly low points, fixate on how she owned a house, had a good job as a doctor, and would probably meet someone new any day now. And when I would cry about the relationship, I would also cry about how heteronormative I sounded, as if our invisible children had been the be-all and end-all, the only road to happiness.
It was around this time that my friend Zoe lent me a book that she said might help. It was called The Queer Art of Failure, by the brilliant transgender writer Jack Halberstam. It was about ‘finding alternatives to conventional understandings of success in a heteronormative, capitalist society’, and asking why we value certain types of success and not others. I’d read one of Halberstam’s books before, I told Zoe: In a Queer Time and Place, which talked about ‘heteronormative time and space’ – marriage, kids, domesticity – versus what he called ‘queer’ time and space, defined as an alternative way of living, more transient and erratic. While some people grow up to do what’s expected of them, Halberstam wrote, others never grow up at all – some might see this as selfish, others might see it as a political choice. In The Queer Art of Failure, Halberstam goes one step further and asks us to deconstruct conventional life markers, such as settling down and baby making, and consider a life ‘unscripted by family, inheritance and child rearing’: a queerer way of living.
Zoe told me she found both books after the end of a seven-year relationship with a man, at a time when she was feeling anxious about not being with anyone, about her work, and about being in her thirties and childless. She said it helped her see that she could be radical or queer or refuse the pressures of expectation, particularly as a bisexual woman living in a world that constantly reminds you of what she described as her ‘so-called ticking biological clock’: ‘It made me look around and appreciate the fact that I have a cross-generational group of friends who refuse to conform to the social ideals of an ordered and sensible adult life,’ she said. ‘It helped me realize that over something structured, I’d rather have anarchy. Or spontaneity.’
Zoe’s outlook was exactly what I needed, so I tried to start doing what you might call ‘checking my heteronormativity’ – stopping myself when I was having self-indulgent thoughts about how I’d never own a home or get another job or find ‘the one’, and starting to ask myself why I viewed these as markers of success to begin with, why there were right and wrong ways of living that we all subscribed to, why we felt we were meant to jump through certain hoops to be happy. But it wouldn’t work; something in me, I realized, had changed.
Eventually, I called my friend Paris Lees and confided in her about how I was feeling. A well-known transgender activist in the UK, she confessed she’d been having similar thoughts.
‘Five years ago it was all, “I’m queer, I don’t give a fuck, I’m a strong woman, don’t care about taboos. Fuck marriage! I’ll wear what I like – a suit one day then a dress the next! I’ll lick a pussy, and suck a cock, don’t slut-shame me . . . I’m Madonna, I’m Kim Cattrall!”’ She suddenly inhaled (I hate talking on the phone, but you can never get Paris off it). ‘It’s like, yeah, that’s fun for a bit, isn’t it? And then you realize you’re left with this big gaping hole – and no, I don’t mean what you’re thinking! An emotional one.’ She paused so I could absorb the poetry of what she had just said, then continued: ‘These days I just want to be a middle-class mum who stays at home and bakes for their kids.’
‘Really?’ I said, surprised to be hearing this from the closest living person I had met to Samantha Jones from Sex and the City.
‘Yeah. I used to think I didn’t want all of this – so maybe I’m just going from one extreme to the other, and maybe I’m never satisfied? But I think we all feel like that, don’t we, whether we’re straight or gay or trans or whatever? Maybe “I want a husband” is just another fucked-up, perverted fantasy.’
Talking to Paris had made me feel less alone, but it hadn’t made me any less confused. She was right that most people feel torn over their life options at some point or another – not least after a break-up, which tends to throw even the most resilient person into an existential crisis – but the more people I talked to and the more I thought about it, the clearer it became that this ambivalence is more pronounced for queer people. On the one hand, we have a desire to live differently, to say ‘fuck you’ to tradition, to mainstream visibility, to the institutions that have rejected us for so long; and on the other, we long to feel accepted, to find legitimacy in the mainstream, even if just for our own safety or happiness. It is this tension that causes us internal conflict, that so often divides our LGBTQ+ community on political issues, like what we should be fighting for, and that left me with countless questions: Was increased acceptance always a good thing? What would happen to queer culture if we did all suddenly decide to live like straight people? And, perhaps most importantly, who would get left
behind, especially in the places where LGBTQ+ rights aren’t so advanced?
My personal choices felt connected to these big questions, so before I could make up my mind about how to live my own life, I needed to go in search of answers. I needed to explore this strange moment that we were living in, when it suddenly felt like we were expected to emerge from clubs and bedrooms, blinking into the daylight, and find someone to spend the rest of our lives with. I needed to talk to more queer people about what was happening to our culture.
On Boxing Day, six weeks after I came back from Iceland, I got drunk, broke my promise to Amrou and called Salka. She told me that she still loved me, and that she still wanted to marry me some day.
Finally, it seemed wise to cut contact.
Why is everyone so obsessed with marriage? I thought, for at least the fiftieth time since we broke up.
That seemed like a good place to start.
chapter one
COOKING DINNER FOREVER
On 29 March 2014, forty-seven years after homosexuality was partially decriminalized in Britain, same-sex marriage was legalized, making England and Wales the sixteenth and seventeenth countries in the world to adopt the law. The night before, I was sent on my second proper reporting job. I had to go to one of the UK’s first gay weddings and write about what it meant for the LGBTQ+ community.
For many people, marriage was a watershed moment in gay rights: the final frontier in gaining equality, the ultimate public symbol that gay people were recognized as being just like everyone else. I also knew the counter-arguments. That it was too little too late. That marriage was a trivial pit stop on the way to actual equality, which should improve the lives of all LGBTQ+ people, whether they wanted to get married or not. That queerness is supposed to be radical, whereas marriage is in many ways the ultimate institution, something to submit or conform to. The queer theorist Lisa Duggan famously described it as a ‘political sedative’, sarcastically suggesting that first we ‘get marriage and the military, and then we go home and cook dinner, forever.’
Personally, I wanted to have the choice to get married as an LGBTQ+ person, but I didn’t want to take it. My reservations were a combination of Duggan’s ideas and the fact that I thought of marriage as a horribly sexist institution. Until the late nineteenth century in Britain, a man marrying a woman meant she was his property under the legal doctrine of coverture. But while I didn’t necessarily believe in marriage, I did believe in weddings. Weddings are great. They’re a positive affirmation of our ability to love one another, a place where you can start drinking before midday, and an opportunity to eat a delicious meal that has been pre-paid for. The couple whose wedding I was being sent to, Sean Adl-Tabatabai and Sinclair Treadway, were extremely accommodating on this front; they invited me to watch them get ready at home, then to attend the ceremony and the after party too. The exchanging of vows was to take place at midnight because that was when the law would formally come into effect; Sean and Sinclair would be racing a few other couples around the UK to get there first.
Sean and Sinclair had met on the gay hook-up app Grindr in 2013. They were both in Los Angeles at the time, and arranged to meet at Sean’s hotel for drinks – the Beverly Wilshire, which, coincidentally, is the one from Pretty Woman. Sean, a thirty-two-year-old TV producer from the UK, was on a business trip to LA, where Sinclair, then twenty, was living as a student. Sinclair was downtown for his aunt and uncle’s wedding anniversary dinner, but when he saw Sean’s profile picture, and learned that he was from London (Sinclair had always found the British accent sexy), he knew he had to skip out early. He knocked on Sean’s door late at night and they ordered room service, ‘fooled around’ and talked until daylight. They told me it wasn’t like other Grindr hook-ups, where you usually just fuck the person and leave. It was romantic.
Two nights later, they met up again, and things were the same, only more intense and this time there was more sex. In the morning, Sean had to fly back to the UK and their relationship moved from Grindr over to Facebook, Skype and iMessage. Sinclair booked a flight to London, but Sean went quiet. Sinclair started to panic; the same panic I would later experience with Salka. He wondered whether he should even make the trip. Was he going to get rejected on the other side of an ocean?
Sean told Sinclair to come, and when they reunited in London, the two weeks flew by and Sinclair just didn’t – or couldn’t – leave. By this point, they were too in love.
That was the end of summer 2013. A few months later, around New Year, marriage came up in conversation and the feeling was mutual; neither Sean nor Sinclair proposed per se, but they both felt certain that they wanted to get married as soon as possible. It would allow them to live in the States as a couple, and it also ‘felt right’. Long distance had been too hard and they didn’t want to go through it again. They knew the bill had been passed allowing same-sex marriage in England and Wales, but they also knew that it hadn’t quite come into motion yet, so they emailed their local council in Camden to request when it might be possible. The response they got surprised them. It asked if they wanted to be the very first same-sex couple to marry in the borough. It wasn’t something they’d had in mind, but they thought, why not? Wouldn’t it be a bonus that they would be making British history while declaring their love for one another?
As befitting a serious historic event, the dress code for the ceremony was ‘hot, sexy and camera-ready’. For Sinclair, this meant a shiny blue velvet suit jacket, while Sean wore a smart navy blue suit. I watched the couple get dressed together at their house in Kentish Town, as they did away with the tradition of staying separate before the ceremony. When I got there, they seemed quiet, nervous perhaps, and sipped on champagne as I asked them intrusive questions. My being there, and them playing the role of public figures for the night, had created a kind of forced intimacy that I was not yet familiar with, and I didn’t quite know how to punctuate it.
Sean explained why he thought some gay people would oppose same-sex marriage: ‘A lot of gay people feel like they’ve been excluded from heterosexual society, so they think, “We’ll keep our culture separate,”’ he said. I asked if he’d ever felt the same. ‘I was a bit anti-marriage and anti-establishment,’ he acknowledged. But now he thought the fact that the law was changing was ‘positive and progressive’, and by getting married, he hoped to show his support. Besides, he loved Sinclair, and wasn’t marriage something that two people who are in love are entitled to?
After the couple had fixed their outfits, we all jumped into taxis to Camden Town Hall, where the wedding was to take place, and were greeted by Jonathan Simpson, Camden’s first openly gay mayor. Jonathan resembled a heavyweight boxer more than he did an elected official. He explained that he wrote his speech quickly. ‘I was speaking from the heart, but I am nervous,’ he told me. ‘I think I’ll struggle not to cry, what with the music and the importance of the occasion.’ Jonathan explained that, for him, the wedding could not be viewed in isolation. ‘It’s a political act,’ he said. ‘Around the world kids are living in fear every day because their families won’t accept that they’re gay. They will see this, and it will give them hope.’ I asked him whether he thought gay weddings should adhere to the normal traditions, and he said he thought it was up to the individuals: ‘If someone wants to get married in an underground sex club, that’s up to them.’ Then I asked if he would ever get married. ‘If I found the right person,’ he said, smiling.
When we entered the hall to take our seats I chatted to Stephen, the registrar (who was also gay), and he explained to me the deeply unromantic process of ensuring that Sean and Sinclair were the first couple to get hitched. A document had to be printed out at midnight, as soon as it became available, then Sean, Sinclair and Stephen had to sign it before the couple would officially be wed. I downed my champagne. The room, all polished wood and green leather chairs, looked a bit like the House of Commons. It contrasted nicely with Sean and Sinclair’s pre-made playlist, which was blasting ‘F
antasy’ by Mariah Carey as guests shuffled into their seats.
Sean’s friend Natalie took her place as best man, and the grooms’ mothers led the boys down the aisle to give them away. Despite these details, the ceremony itself was much like any other wedding, including that awkward moment of silence when the registrar asks if anyone objects. I had half expected something bad to happen at that moment, like an angry mob of fascists bursting through the doors with pitchforks, but everything went smoothly. At about six minutes after midnight, Stephen uttered the words, ‘I now declare you husband and husband.’
I cried. Jonathan cried. Few people who actually knew the two grooms seemed to cry. The band came in with strings, but those words, ‘husband and husband’, hung in the air.
Outside the hall, the women of the Camden Council PR team were scanning Twitter on their iPhones, disputing whether Sean and Sinclair had in fact been the first gay couple in the UK to marry. The grooms didn’t seem to care, making out in front of the camera crews on the street like a pair of horny teenagers. Then we piled into one of those tacky old London buses and headed to the reception. When I walked in, Kylie Minogue’s ‘Can’t Get You Out of My Head’ was playing, and the room was shrouded with red silk. The evening had officially reached peak camp. I sat in the corner with a mustachioed gay man in an all-white suit and we discussed the ‘fag hag’ stereotype while necking drinks from the bar. After a few drinks I drunkenly cornered Mayor Jonathan and asked him everything I’d desperately wanted to ask him up to that point, like, ‘Are you allowed to go to gay clubs if you are Mayor?’ He cryptically described himself as a ‘naughty mayor’ before slipping off to give an impromptu speech: ‘Tonight we made fucking history in Camden. Islington might have beat us, but we had the sexiest couple!’
Queer Intentions Page 2
