Queer Intentions

by Amelia Abraham

  ‘How was your day?’ he asked.

  ‘Nice thanks, just had a walk around the city,’ I responded.

  ‘We saw some police . . . was something going on today?’ Emily interjected, as I shot her a worried look.

  He started shaking his head and tutting, like the old ladies along the streets where Pride had been. ‘It is the Pride,’ he said. We feigned surprise while he searched for something more to say. ‘I don’t have anything against it,’ he assured us. ‘It’s just . . . monk should not come out of monastery, and these people should not be on streets.’

  ‘Ah, I see,’ Emily responded. ‘You think they should stay behind four walls?’

  He nodded, avoiding our eyes. We immediately went and had sex in his guesthouse as revenge.

  During my last days in Belgrade, I decided to learn more about an aspect of Belgrade Pride that had surprised me. During my trip, someone I met had explained that there was not just one Pride in Belgrade, but two. As in Berlin, Pride had divided people here.

  In 2015, an alternative Belgrade Pride had materialized, more radical, and, they would argue, more community-minded. It started as a trans gathering at the main event, which many had felt was not very trans inclusive (punters at Pride the day before had told me the event was very cis-male heavy just three years ago). By the next year, this splinter Pride saw around two hundred people gather in front of the National Assembly and march to Republic Square. Adam had warned me about the event over Skype. He told me a group of ‘so-called activists’ organized a gathering in the city centre and named themselves Belgrade Pride.

  Emily and I met Andela, one of the organizers of this Pride, the day after the official Pride, at a bar in one of Belgrade’s trendier tree-lined streets. She was a stocky, straighttalking lesbian, who had a compelling way of explaining things from her own perspective, though I didn’t necessarily agree with everything she said. She used to work for the government, she said, but was now full time with an LGBTQ+ rights organization called Egal.

  ‘We mostly do field work, direct contact with community members, on violence and discrimination, harsh situations. We address all human rights violations against LGBT people,’ she explained. ‘And we’re about to be the first organization to get institutional support from the state to start a drop-in centre at a permanent location. It will provide aid and support for the LGBTI community. Our work is very focused on trans community members, so there will be services for persons who have undergone gender confirmation surgery. We also do advocacy, lobbying, legal work.’

  ‘What are some legal cases you’ve worked on?’ asked Emily.

  ‘In May there were three major attacks on trans persons in one month. One was attempted murder: a trans girl went out of a club at 4 a.m. – and Belgrade, by the way, is usually a safe place to go around when you’re alone, especially at weekends because everyone is on the street, but if you’re any kind of different, not passing . . . there were five young boys and they started calling her names and then one of them pulled a knife while they were beating her. There were concrete blocks from a construction site nearby and they started throwing the concrete blocks on her and they demolished a car with them nearby. Right after the attack, she had a broken arm and wounds on her head, but a taxi driver didn’t want to take her because he said he’s not going to give a lift to a faggot, a hooker or a person who is bleeding. And then, when she got to a police station, the policemen didn’t believe her. Then they said: “Why do you have to dress like that? You were asking for trouble.” When she asked, “What are you going to do now?” they said: “Kennedy was killed and we don’t know who killed him.”’

  ‘Have there been any charges?’

  Andela explained that they hoped this case would be the first time the country’s anti-hate-crime law could be used to prosecute someone. It had existed since 2012, but as of yet, nothing.

  Still, it was this kind of groundwork that put Egal in the position of understanding the community’s needs, said Andela, which was also how their Pride event came about. She told me it looked just like the main Pride, only smaller. There was music, rainbow flags, posters, but it wasn’t closed off from the city, traffic wasn’t stopped, there were few public figures, no private security and scarcely any police in attendance. The only threatening thing that happened was a taxi driver giving the crowd the finger.

  ‘We’ve had two June Prides so far and nothing happened on either one of them,’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘We had no fences. The city was open, it was a beautiful Sunday morning and I walked to the place. There were tourist buses, just an ordinary day, and people started coming and they were very like, “Where’s all the police? Are we OK?” And we were like, “Yeah, you’re safe.”’

  I understood the wider argument against the militarization of Pride, but I couldn’t quite reconcile what Andela was saying with the violent hate crimes that she had just described.

  When I put this to her, she brought up the four walls idea: ‘Yesterday they had four entrances to the Pride . . . they could have put three, or five, but no, they had four.’ She almost laughed, but not quite. Her point was that closing Pride off to the city was just reinforcing the idea that LGBTQ+ people should be hidden away, the antithesis of the message that used to be at the heart of Pride. ‘Maybe ten years ago there was a need for all this, but look at our lives – we live openly 24/7. Having to pass corridors of police cordons is kind of an insult for somebody who lives as LGBT, and adds more pressure for anyone who would like to attend but is scared. You don’t see armed police in the street on an ordinary day.’

  ‘But 2010 was so violent,’ I appealed.

  She explained that one of the reasons they held their event in June was because schools were off for the summer, making it harder for young ‘hooligans’ to mobilize. Then she told me the other reason: that it was closer to the anniversary of Stonewall. ‘When you advocate the idea in public, it’s much easier to explain to people in Serbia, who really don’t know anything about LGBT issues or history, that we do this in June because this thing happened years ago, the first time the community rioted against the repression from the police – that’s why all over the world we march in June.’

  ‘But so many Prides across Europe happen later in the summer,’ I replied.

  ‘Yes, and there are two types of Pride marches now: the celebration of achievements and everything that’s been done, like Berlin, for example. And then you have other Prides – as it should be in Serbia – where it’s a protest; it’s a moment when you say, “We suffer violence, we need changes of legislation, because we’re citizens of this country,” and you ask your state to recognize your rights. This year for September, you have the press clippings all about who came, who wore what, but you cannot hear demands and that’s wrong on so many levels. Pride is important but it’s not just about that one day or one month of campaigning – it’s like, what do you do the rest of the year?’

  Her point made sense, I thought, but in her voice there was some real animosity.

  ‘Did you go yesterday?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes. I felt awful yesterday but of course I went. We support the idea of public assembly of the LGBTI community so we attend all events, whether we agree or disagree with the politics. But something felt deeply wrong . . . the weird-looking guys in black with glasses, a security company that get paid to be there.’ She was referring to the security details, the men (badly) undercover in dark glasses and black clothes. ‘It didn’t feel right. I can’t even explain it rationally. I’m not saying violence isn’t an issue – of course it is, it’s a huge issue – but it is possible to be visible, to be exposed, and it’s an offence for every one of us exposed in that kind of way to go on this protest where we were all gathered and surrounded by so many police enforcement, blocked off from the rest of the city. Do I need that every day? Do I need to live in a different place? Should I go outside of Serbia?’

  Andela’s answer was poignant, but it made me sad in more ways than one. Be
cause when I talked to Goran in the Civil Rights Defenders office, he explained that despite all the ‘juicy arguments’ that had happened between the teams behind Andela’s Pride and his Pride – of which there were a lot, from ‘you stole our name’ to ‘you’re funded by suspicious foreign investors’ to ‘you’re in cahoots with bent politicians’ – at the end of the day, it kind of felt as if both sides wanted the same thing: a Pride that was political and demanding, a Pride that was safe for the people who attended it, and a Pride that was visible to those who feared it.

  ‘You think we have any influence on the number of policemen? You think I can say I want more or less please?’ Goran had exclaimed when I asked him about their presence. ‘The event they have in June is not announced much in advance. They announced it ten days before, it’s summer and no one is in Belgrade. We have a press conference here and we’ll announce Pride in 2018 to be 16 September, one year in advance, it’s very public. The police assess the amount of officers needed. We say we want less police, they say, “If you want less we can ban Pride.” Every year they exaggerate the assessment and then they realize and next year they decrease it. This year there were two thousand police.’

  Goran continued with implied reluctance: ‘You can accept these things,’ he said, ‘but you cannot accept that nobody can observe Pride. We have some people watching here or there, but we don’t have people that will watch Pride as observers, and that’s a big, big problem.’

  On the plane home, Emily and I discussed Andela and Goran’s feud. ‘I’m sorry to sound like Miss World, but I wish they could just get along,’ I said.

  ‘Maybe their disagreement isn’t such a bad thing,’ she said. ‘It’s more queer in a way, isn’t it? Having multiple Prides?’

  ‘I guess you’re right,’ I said. But Goran had left us with a more empirical question: What is the point of a Pride parade if no one can see it?

  chapter five

  NOW YOU SEE ME

  I was discovering ‘coming out videos’ late in life, or at least, later than everyone else, but after my summer of Prides, I fell down the rabbit hole. They’d been there for a decade, these YouTube clips of LGBTQ+ vloggers opening up about their sexuality online. I’d dismissed them as irrelevant to me: too saccharine, too earnest. I had gone through the process of coming out and ‘coming to terms’; why would I want to watch other people do so?

  Now I was eating my words.

  I got started with Rose and Rosie, two attractive British vloggers who were married, lived in Hertfordshire, and made videos where they bickered, teased one another, phoned up their exes and sometimes made out on camera for their fans. This formula had – perhaps unsurprisingly given the girl-on-girl content – helped them to accumulate 145 million views on Rose’s YouTube channel and about 30 million on Rosie’s.

  I told Emily about them with the excitement of someone who had discovered some new, untrodden pocket of the Internet. She was shocked that I hadn’t heard of them before.

  ‘Yes, Rose and Rosie. Emily and Amelia . . . we could have made a fortune by now,’ she said, as though I had deprived her of the right to become a YouTube sensation.

  There was a time when I would have responded to that comment with, ‘No one is interested in the boring ins and outs of our prematurely middle-aged lesbian life,’ but having scrolled through the comments under Rose and Rosie’s videos, I could see that people clearly were.

  ‘These TWO FUCkerS are The REAson I REIlizaD I WAS gaY AND afTER WATCHING THIS I REMEBER WHY,’ wrote one fan, under a compilation video of Rose and Rosie that was created by yet another fan.

  Rose Ellen Dix and Roseanne Elizabeth Spaughton had come out on camera separately, the first as a lesbian and the other as bisexual. They met through a mutual friend, and then started vlogging as a couple. They had announced their engagement on YouTube, posted footage of their wedding on YouTube and, more recently, begun sharing the details of their attempts to have a baby. If I had presumed this type of YouTube content was aimed exclusively at a teenage audience, they soon proved me wrong: one episode detailed their search for a sperm donor, another discussed IVF. Watching these, I was actually learning something, and kind of enraptured by seeing into another lesbian couple’s domestic set-up. It was like what I had experienced when I went to visit Patty, only broadcast direct to my home: a glimpse into the future that was cheerier than those I’d grown up watching in lesbian films, where someone usually died at the end.

  Rose and Rosie’s coming out videos led me to others: I discovered the American twin models, the ‘Rhodes Bros’, two twinkie angels whose video showing them come out to their dad down the phone put a lump in my throat. It had 24 million views and counting. I saw the coming out video made by Ingrid Nilsen, a young female vlogger who explained how supportive her ex-boyfriend was about the process. That video had 17 million views, more than the video in which she interviewed President Obama. In lesbian couple Bria and Chrissy’s ‘10 Worst Ways To Come Out’ video, they jumped out of actual closets in the most laboured visual metaphor I’d ever seen: also around 17 million views. I watched the videos of celebrity YouTube star Gigi Gorgeous, who after coming out as a gay man came out as a trans woman, and later a lesbian, all over a period of several years. And finally, I watched Emma Ellingsen, a Norwegian blogger who was just fifteen years old, tell 3 million viewers that she was transgender. Each vlogger had a strong look, a logo, an HTML identity. Most seemed to take themselves quite seriously, and were comfortable with crying to camera.

  Until now, the only similar videos I’d seen were my Belgian sex worker friend Lyle’s – the beautiful and genuine video in which he came out as HIV positive – and before that, the British Olympic diver Tom Daley, who had made one in 2013 and posted it online via his own YouTube channel, getting 4.5 million hits in the first day. ‘I was thinking I could do a newspaper interview, but you wouldn’t want somebody to twist your words,’ Daley later told Simon Hattenstone at the Guardian. ‘You could do a TV interview, but you don’t want to be asked questions you don’t want to answer. So I just said exactly what I was comfortable with saying at the time. And nothing could be twisted.’ For Daley, already famous, making a video himself was about control, about ownership. While this seemed true for some of the vloggers I had come across, others gave me the feeling that if they weren’t vlogging about being gay or bi or trans they’d just be vlogging about something else – maybe free holidays or make-up (actually, some were already doing that too) – but it felt significant that they had chosen their gender or sexuality as noteworthy content, and that we, in our anonymous millions, had chosen to watch it.

  I contacted Rose and Rosie for an interview but failed to get a response. Then, after emailing again, nothing. I got mildly irritated. I even tried going through a friend who knew them, but to no avail. I was beginning to realize what I had been too out of touch with youth culture to realize before: that YouTubers are more famous than God. At one point, I got a tweet back from Rosie about the interview, further fuelling my obsession, but then they went quiet again. For a while, it was sort of like when you fancy someone and they ignore your texts: them stonewalling me only made me more pathetic and eager. I began to bring them up in conversation, and even planned to go to a pre-teen vlogging conference they would be at, which was ordinarily my notion of hell. When I told Emily about this, she looked concerned, so I decided to drop the Rose and Rosie idea altogether, and instead asked myself why I had watched an accumulative ten hours of vlogging content over the last three weeks to begin with.

  On some level, the sense of spectacle in these videos made me uncomfortable, especially the fanfare made of coming out. But on another level, I found the vloggers compelling; for most of my queer friends, humour and privacy were the two most vital tools for existing in the world, but these people were poker-faced, invested in themselves, happy to share their ‘journeys’ with the world. The thought of coming out in front of so many people would have been a waking nightmare to me at fifteen or se
venteen, but maybe that’s because this type of content didn’t exist yet. I’d come of age in a time before same-sex marriage and before YouTube and social media, when dial-up Internet and MSN messenger were the height of technology. From my Nokia phone, I had no access to the Instagram accounts I follow now, the ones that post pictures of campy LGBTQ+ icons and chronicle LGBTQ+ history. In fact, in hindsight, I can see that my teenage years were a barren wasteland of LGBTQ+ people. We had our suspicions about certain pop stars but they were in the closet; UK TV had several gay men presenting chat shows on prime time but far fewer gay women. There were peripheral gay storylines in sitcoms, but no main characters who lived fully formed gay lives.

  The only gay woman I knew while growing up was my school hockey teacher, and from the age of eleven to thirteen, my classmates and I would screech, run and hide whenever she came into the changing rooms. We used ‘lesbian’ as a term to insult one another. At fifteen, when news leaked that two girls in the year above had made out at a party – not for the entertainment of boys (I went to an all-girls Catholic convent school; we really didn’t know many boys) – we were scandalized; being bisexual automatically meant you were a lesbian, and being a lesbian automatically meant that you were a predator. When a friend came out to me as bisexual at sixteen, I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing at all.

  At seventeen, I too realized I had feelings for a girl. From the minute I saw her, I knew. I didn’t tell anyone; as far as I can remember, no one in our college of two thousand students was out. If we became friends, maybe it would go away, I thought. So, like a double agent, I gained her trust. Every day, we would hang out; every night, I would look at her Facebook photos. I never did anything about my attraction. I just waited to get over it, but when I realized that wasn’t happening quickly enough, I did the most homoerotic thing I could do given the context: I slept with the guy she was sleeping with.