Queer Intentions

by Amelia Abraham

  At about four in the morning, after hours of being asked whether I should be drinking on the job, I surveyed the room. Sean’s co-workers were dad-dancing in circles, forty-something men were sneaking off for a joint, and Natalie the best man was drunkenly telling Sean and Sinclair to ‘never be the one who’s scared to show their love more’.

  All in all, it really did seem like every other wedding I’d been to, except I wasn’t looking like Nigella Lawson because I didn’t have to wear a wrap dress and my mum wasn’t there telling me the bride looked bad. I danced with Mayor Jonathan to Kylie. I told him that I didn’t believe in marriage, but I was starting to think I could get on board with the gay kind. The next day at 9 a.m. I filed my copy, with a terrible, terrible hangover.

  I didn’t think about Sean and Sinclair’s wedding much after that day in 2014; at least, not until after my phone call with Salka, when the pair popped into my mind and I looked Sinclair up on Facebook. I suppose I wanted to see if he and Sean were still together, and I felt genuinely pleased when I saw their small, smiling faces in a selfie dated just weeks earlier. In my lingering misery it gave me the vaguest feeling of hope. From their tagged locations, they appeared to be living in LA. So I messaged Sinclair.

  ‘I’m coming to LA,’ I lied. ‘I’d love to meet up with you guys and talk to you about your marriage again.’ This last part was true at least; when I had gone to their wedding, marriage wasn’t very high up on my agenda, whereas now, after my relationship with Salka, I suddenly felt differently, it suddenly seemed important to find out if marriage was all it was cracked up to be, and what was at stake. I was also curious about what Sean had told me: that he’d felt reticent about marriage, until he’d met Sinclair. Did his 360 mean that decrying marriage was a stance people only took until they found ‘the one’? Was this what had happened to me?

  Sinclair replied the next day saying I was more than welcome to visit, which surprised me given how much I had freeloaded at their wedding. Then I did what felt like the right thing to do post-break-up: I asked my only friend in the city if I could crash on her sofa and spent all my worldly money on a flight to Los Angeles.

  LA was just like the pictures and the films: palm trees, congestion and people who are either too friendly or not friendly at all. My friend Alix picked me up from the airport in a Mini convertible that we struggled to get my suitcase into. I hadn’t seen her in four years. She had been in my classes at university, the daughter of a wealthy Texan, which was convenient now because it meant she could take a week off work to ‘assist’ me in my investigation by driving me round LA. Alix was a loyal friend, generous with her time and hilarious. She was also straight. Which meant she might ask my interviewees the questions I wouldn’t, and that I wouldn’t try to sleep with her in a post-break-up meltdown. Her apartment, when we eventually made it through the evening traffic, was in a spacious, modernist building in the sleepy family neighbourhood of Mount Washington, overlooking LA, where a fiery sun was dropping behind the mountains.

  Two days later, I found out that Sean and Sinclair had a pretty good view too. They lived in a village-like neighbourhood called Larchmont, and when Alix dropped me off with them, we went up to their rooftop, looking out over the city. Their apartment wasn’t fancy; it was under-decorated except for lavish red carpets in the shared corridors. But Sean and Sinclair looked good, more tanned than when I’d last seen them. They’d both been working from home that Wednesday afternoon, and seemed pleased to clock off early when I arrived. They offered me a glass of wine and I tried to better justify why I was there. ‘I want to know a bit more about you,’ I said, explaining that their wedding was a watershed moment for me – which was of course true, but around my head whirled the other, more private reasons I’d come. Like my break-up. Or that there were now too many married gay couples in the world to have chosen one to talk to at random. Or that I had wanted a reason to go on holiday to LA.

  ‘Sure, ask away,’ said Sinclair obligingly, and with an unexpected jerk of my hand I accidentally spilled my wine all over their white sofa.

  Sinclair was born in the Los Angeles Valleys. His mom was an air traffic controller; his biological father was mostly absent. He ‘always knew’ he was gay, but was in denial about it for most of his adolescence. His earliest memory of having a same-sex attraction was seeing Bill Clinton on TV when he was four or five, during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. ‘We were talking about the president in kindergarten and I told my mom that I liked Bill Clinton for the way he looks. She said that was strange and that’s when I realized it wasn’t normal for guys to like the way other guys looked.’

  Increasingly guilt-ridden about his sexuality, Sinclair didn’t come out until he was twenty, when he got engaged to Sean. In the interim, he pretended he was straight to his friends and family, and convinced himself he was bisexual. Though he never slept with girls – usually saying something about waiting for marriage – he was a ‘big slut’ when it came to men. His first experiences were with male classmates and friends, until he went online and pretended to be of age to meet guys on the Web. This was pre-Grindr, so he’d use craigslist (the mention of which made Sean cringe for Sinclair’s safety). Sinclair remembers this period as an unhappy one. He felt as if he was hiding. He was convincing himself, in his own words, that it was all just a phase, that he was straight, would marry a woman and have a nice house in the suburbs with kids.

  ‘I was frustrated and angry. I hadn’t seen my dad since I was really little, but I thought that if he knew he would probably beat me up. I was worried that my mom might not accept it; she never came off as homophobic or anything, but a lot of gay kids are afraid our families won’t love us the same. When she found out, she was surprised but she didn’t care at all, she just said, “I wish you would have told me.”’

  Sean grew up in a different world entirely, on a council estate in North London. His parents were together – his mum British, a housewife; his dad Iranian, an accountant. His dad’s side of the family were non-practising Muslims, and Sean was sent to a Catholic school. Like Sinclair’s mom, Sean’s parents didn’t really know, or at least weren’t informed, that he was gay until the marriage, although he remembers run-ins with boys as a child – hugging his male best friend in bed until the friend’s mum caught them in the act and they weren’t allowed to play together any more. ‘My parents will have seen that sort of behaviour because I was very expressive. I was also obsessed with Wham! and the Pet Shop Boys.’ In other words, all the signs were there. ‘I think they must have known something . . . but once I knew what it was, what being gay actually meant, I never told them or said anything about how I really felt.’

  Instead, in his teenage years, he got a girlfriend – which wasn’t too laborious, since at the time, he said, he did feel genuinely attracted to her. Whether that was because she’d gone out with his best friend, whom he also fancied, he wasn’t sure, but he got ‘stuck’ in the relationship for two years. They broke up at eighteen, but that was it – he was put off relationships and spent university and most of his twenties single – a mixture of fear, laziness and not meeting the right person until Sinclair came along. He didn’t formally come out either: ‘I think the idea of coming out annoyed me because I wasn’t uncomfortable with being gay and I knew deep down my mum wouldn’t be either. And even if I was straight, I wouldn’t be telling them the gory details anyway.’

  I nodded and Sinclair poured us another glass of wine. Despite their twelve-year age gap, they didn’t look to be of starkly different ages – or really seem that way – maybe because they were so in sync. I was starting to remember things about the last time I’d met them; they were what the gay community might call ‘straight-acting’ – not just as individuals, in the sense that they weren’t at all camp, but also with each other, keeping contact to a minimum. Until the moment they kissed and said ‘I do’, they could have been just friends. Now it was the same.

  Over the next two hours, we went over their marriage with a fi
ne-tooth comb – three years in, they still argued, but less; they still had great sex, but less of that too; they planned to live between LA and London, even though they had significantly fewer friends in LA; they didn’t currently plan on having children – Sinclair still thought ‘kids are gross’ – but if they did, they’d want to raise them in London for the school system. The main thing that had changed in their relationship was the level of respect. Their love, they said, had only grown deeper.

  When we returned to the question of why they got married, Sean seemed to hold the same opinion as before: that falling in love made him want to make a public commitment.

  ‘Why did you want to marry Sean?’ I asked Sinclair.

  ‘I’ve just never been any more obsessed with any other guy. If I could create my dream man it would actually be Sean. When he first took off his shirt, his hairy chest and his beautiful eyes . . . it was like he was just perfect and I couldn’t fuck this up. I remember when he invited me to London I was like, OK, I’m gonna win him over, he’s going to be mine, I’m going to look better than when he met me.’

  Sean laughed, a little embarrassed. ‘You didn’t need to do that.’

  Sinclair carried on: ‘I wanted to go to London and I wanted him to see me and be like, “Wow, you’re better than I remembered,” so I got a gym membership, I got a personal trainer and I got a chin implant.’

  Is that what true love is? I thought, unsure of what to say. I was also trying extremely hard not to look at his chin. Luckily, Sinclair broke the silence, telling me something even more personal.

  ‘I’d always wanted a serious relationship but I thought that I wouldn’t be able to have that as a gay man,’ Sinclair said. ‘There’s a lot of hooking up in the gay community and not a lot of relationship-oriented people. That had a huge impact on me. That made me scared to have feelings for a guy.’

  ‘Where do you think that pressure comes from?’ I asked.

  ‘I think the media, definitely. I remember watching Queer as Folk when I was really young and they’re very promiscuous. Then, when I went online looking for guys, I realized, wow, this is all about sex, what position they like, how big their dick is. I met guys and I realized after a few encounters that to them sex was just sex and there were no emotions in it. I thought if I were an out gay man that would be my life. I felt that whole experience was really lonely, which was why I was probably so angry when I was younger, before I met Sean, because I felt like I could never meet anyone like him. It made me so, so depressed – I considered suicide many times. I didn’t want to live my life like that but I thought it was my only choice.’

  Sean agreed: ‘I think there are gay people out there who want relationships, proper, serious, boring relationships that could lead to marriage, whereas before, that option wasn’t really there. People like me weren’t really getting into relationships because they thought they couldn’t.’

  ‘I guess when you put it like that, gay marriage would have been pretty important for you to see as a teenager,’ I said.

  Sinclair told me that, after they got married, they received emails from gay people around the world explaining that seeing their marriage in the press gave them hope. Sean and Sinclair saw marriage as a ‘turning point’ for the gay community; whether it would take a few years or a few decades, it was going to change things for everyone.

  Sean and Sinclair’s wedding was the first time I’d seen two gay men brazenly kiss in front of a crowd and be met with a round of applause. It wasn’t the kind of kiss you see in gay clubs, where two sweaty men or women embrace in the darkness, strobe lights bringing them in and out of view. It wasn’t like the kisses you see at Gay Pride events either, which basically go unnoticed because everyone in the crowd is gay, and more interested in who they can kiss than who is already kissing. This was different; it was above ground and under bright lights. Everyone was watching. It was the first time I saw a gay kiss that felt formally condoned by the straight establishment, and as I looked at the pictures in the press of all the other same-sex couples to get married over the next few days – the lesbians, other gay men, young and old – I couldn’t help finding the images odd, as though something was out of place. I guess my eyes just needed time to adjust to seeing gay couples in this new context, surrounded by flowers, wearing pastel colours, leaning over one another to sign the documents. It was gay as I’d never seen it before: palatable and public.

  While talking to Sean and Sinclair made it clear to me that same-sex marriage had the power to change the way the world viewed gay relationships, obviously not everyone agreed with them. One of the reasons it had seemed like a good idea to travel to California was that the state’s gay residents had lived through an experience I found difficult to fathom. In 2008, they had been granted the ability to marry; later that same year, the option was taken away after a public vote in favour of Proposition 8, which moved to ban same-sex marriage. America’s most liberal state took a big step forwards, and then a big step back again, and during this small window of time, thousands of same-sex couples got married. Their marriages were still recognized by the state after the ban, but socially and psychologically, the legitimacy of the unions was thrown into question. If I could talk to someone who had experienced this, I wouldn’t just get an account of why we need the right to marry, but what it feels like to lose it.

  Now I was in California, it occurred to me that I vaguely knew someone this had happened to: Patty, a musician I had interviewed years before. I dropped her an email and waited. In the meantime, I realized I hadn’t planned what else I was going to do in LA. I lazily put up a Facebook status asking if anyone knew somebody who might be relevant to speak to about what marriage might mean for LGBTQ+ people, and went to the beach. Responses were few and far between. Alix told me to relax, that people were inherently self-aggrandizing and would want to talk to a journalist, especially about themselves. The next day, still nothing. Then a contact introduced me to someone I hadn’t heard of before: a guy called Steve Deline at the LA LGBT Center.

  Steve was well known, it turned out, as an activist who’d campaigned against the passage of Proposition 8 with a special method called ‘deep canvassing’. He was also in no way self-aggrandizing. When I emailed him he kindly invited me down to the centre. I got there on a Thursday afternoon and found a tall, sandy-haired man with glasses waiting for me. He led me out into the leafy courtyard of the building, which had the air of a hospital or mental-health facility – maybe because I could see a counsellor sitting on some steps having a sympathetic conversation with someone who looked very upset. In a way it was like a hospital; they offered one-on-one support to LGBTQ+ people experiencing discrimination at home or in the workplace, as well as STD testing on site. But they also had a programme of comedy, events and talks.

  Steve’s gig was ‘The Leadership LAB’ – a core team that helped to organize people to fight homophobia in their communities. Steve explained that, of the eleven years he’d lived in LA, he’d been working at the LA LGBT Center for almost six. He grew up on the East Coast, in the suburbs of Baltimore, with fairly liberal parents, and came out at nineteen. He could have done it sooner, he said, but was conscious that he’d have no control over the outcome – how it would make people feel about him. In college, he learned about queer theory, but ‘was not at all political’; he didn’t go near the LGBTQ+ scene – social or activist – because he was, he confessed, privileged enough not to have to think about it. Being gay didn’t have to be a big part of his life. As he put it: ‘Even when I came out, I didn’t have to step out of my socioeconomic bubble.’

  When Steve moved to LA in 2005, that thinking began to change. He started working at a record store up on Sunset, and doing social documentary stuff on the side. ‘I was literally out front on my break one day and a volunteer from the campaign against Prop 8 said: “Hey, we really have to fight this! Do you want to come to the phone bank to call voters?” I’d never done anything like that before in my life but I said, “OK, I
care about this, it seems important, I’ll try it.” So I came to a few phone banks.’ By this time, Steve had met his first boyfriend, who also happened to be the first person he ever kissed and his manager at the record store. Living together, they were what he called ‘marriage-minded gays’. He didn’t remember when they first talked about it but remembered thinking it was an obvious option: ‘Like a hetero couple, that was always my internal narrative.’

  As much as Steve wanted to get married, soon that possibility would evaporate. On 5 November 2008, Proposition 8 came into effect, approved with a close-cut 52.2 per cent majority at the ballot. Steve found out it had been passed the same night that Barack Obama was elected. Gaining a president he’d voted for and losing the right to marry on the same evening was a surreal experience. He’d been campaigning against Prop 8 for more than six months at that point. He called his sister who lived in Washington DC, and she said everyone was celebrating in the streets, but he couldn’t share her happiness about Obama’s win when he felt so devastated that all he’d been working for at the phone banks was lost.

  ‘The thing is, we just didn’t expect to lose that vote,’ he said gravely, wind blowing the leaves across the courtyard. ‘I mean, most of the polling data said that we were gonna win by a sixty–forty margin.’

  ‘Do you think that’s why you weren’t super passionate about it – because you didn’t think you would lose?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, part of it was that, but . . .’ He paused. ‘It took me a while after we lost to really realize what an impact it was having on me. Almost immediately that night I could see that it was the first time in my life I was experiencing animus in the diffuse sense, because I was so privileged. That feeling of, “People around me have cast judgement on me and have limited my life options based on some arbitrary feeling they have about who I am.” A lot of people experience that every day, for a number of reasons, but I had never experienced that before. My first taste of it was enough to totally freak me out. I was moody, I was picking fights with my boyfriend, I just was not a happy person, and it took me a while to realize, “Oh shit, that’s what this is about.”’