Queer Intentions

by Amelia Abraham

  Some of the people in my life interpreted it as an absence I was trying to fill with a kind of wider political purpose: that as a white, middle-class female whose homosexuality hadn’t caused me any major problems, I just wanted a marginal identity group to belong to, a classic by-product of the age of identity politics. Others wondered if it spoke to an insecurity about being gay, that a sense of community somehow legitimized my sexuality. Or was it a self-defence mechanism: a kind of ‘I’ll call myself gay before you can’? Maybe it was a bit of all these things. But now that I thought about it again after Turkey, I suddenly found I had a much more straightforward answer: my journey had reminded me that I’m in love with it, all of it. The challenging, the questioning, the universal truths that make me feel that we’re all bigger than our own queer experience, interconnected somehow. My journey had thrown the differences into sharp contrast – like those between Ayman’s coming out story and my own – but it had also given me the opportunity to think about what we have in common as queer people, what our shared goals are, what we are collectively striving towards. And on this we seemed to be able to agree: we wanted to be rid of shame and stigma, we wanted our rights enshrined in the law to protect us, and the freedom to express ourselves as we wish. But most crucially of all, perhaps, it seemed to me that fighting for all of these things was, in and of itself, what made us queer.

  This idea is not new; it’s been there since the very beginning in queer studies, the notion of queerness as something to enact or work towards, rather than an achievable end point or a fixed category. The academic Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick described queerness as ‘the open mesh of possibilities’. The academic Judith Butler argued that we produce queerness as we go along, acting it into being. And another, José Esteban Muñoz, even developed it into a utopian vision of the future: ‘Queerness is not here yet,’ he wrote. ‘Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer.’ Muñoz described it as ‘the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality’, and equated it with looking through an open window. By looking out of the window, we’re supposed to be dreaming of something better – a world where no one is oppressed along the lines of gender, sexuality, race or ability, a world beyond binaries, beyond the idea that we’re either male or female, straight or gay, monogamous or polyamorous. A place to be free. A utopia.

  After Turkey, I also found myself thinking about where to end my journey. I knew utopia wasn’t a real place, but I thought I might as well try and get close. I wanted to go somewhere progressive, somewhere that set the bar high.

  For a while, I thought about going back to Iceland. Maybe in the process, it would give me some more closure. Emily even told me that, if that was what I wanted to do, I should do it, that she’d support me – even come with, if I wanted her to. But I concluded that I just couldn’t face it. I hoped I’d meet Salka again some day, and I hoped she was happy, but when we talked, for every minute we spent on the phone it became more apparent that what had happened was best left as a happy story with a sad ending. I missed her, and maybe she missed me, but there was nothing we could do about it – bar forging some painful, long-distance friendship – and I didn’t need to return to Iceland and exacerbate my nostalgic tendencies.

  Instead, I chose to visit somewhere else with a good standard of LGBTQ+ rights, somewhere forward-thinking, somewhere that people were living their life outside of the binary. I chose to go to Sweden because I wanted to climb those higher steps of Seyhan’s staircase, to see what it was like up there.

  ‘Sweden is a chicken-shit country.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, slightly disappointed. ‘What do you mean by “chicken shit” exactly?’

  I was sitting with Timimie Märak, poly, non-binary and queer, a spoken word poet and LGBTQ+ activist. Timimie was also Sami – Sami people being the indigenous population of northern Sweden.

  ‘Sweden wants to look good to other countries but Sweden is a joke,’ Timimie continued. ‘We who are moving about in Sweden, we have so many privileges, we do, but it is chicken shit.’ Timimie railed on: ‘They say we haven’t had war in two hundred years, but they are selling arms to other countries. They say we are open with sexuality because we have cis white gay males running Pride, then people who are against same-sex marriage and abortion are walking in the Pride parade. They say we are open borders but you still shit upon the Samis. I can’t remember the term in English . . . what do you call it when you are changing to what your friends are doing?’

  ‘Fickle? A fair-weather friend?’

  ‘Yes. Sweden is like that.’

  Timimie and I were sitting in an anarchist cafe called Kafé 44 in Sodermalm, one of the central islands that make up Stockholm. The cafe was covered in graffiti, animal rights posters and ACAB – ‘all cops are bastards’ – stickers. Timimie ate a vegan burger while holding forth in a huge, red (fake) fur coat, spread out across the sofa like a cat. At one point, I enquired about the tattoo on their face, a small line drawing, almond-shaped, just beneath the eye. Timimie proudly explained that it was a vagina, and although not immediately obvious, once this had been pointed out I couldn’t unsee it.

  Timimie was a friend of my ex-girlfriend, Madde (yes, another one), who was one of the reasons I had decided to come to Sweden. Not only because I could stay at Madde’s house, but also because her lifestyle had gone a long way in shaping my view of what life for queer people in Sweden could look like. To put it plainly: nothing made me feel as vanilla as hearing about Madde’s sex life, which comprised polyamorous relationships and a dedicated immersion in the Stockholm kink scene. Madde, for the moment, self-described as a ‘relationship anarchist’, which for her meant that she didn’t subscribe to preconceived rules about relationships or monogamy, just making it up as she went along instead. As for her interest in fetishes, she once sent me a picture of an S&M torture chair that looked like something out of the Saw films. And a few weeks before I visited, she told me she had attended a BDSM-themed adult baptism, in a church, where everyone wore kink gear.

  Sweden was somewhere that I had always perceived to be on the front line of a sex and gender revolution, but it wasn’t just Madde and her friends that gave me this impression. Sweden was famously an early adopter of LGBTQ+ rights, with same-sex sexual activity legalized in 1944 and the age of consent (fifteen) made equal in 1972. Sweden was also the first country in the world, in 1972, to allow transgender people to change their legal gender after gender confirmation surgery – all relatively ahead of the curve in comparison to other countries.

  Since the 1960s, Sweden has had the word hen, a gender-neutral pronoun that you can use when you don’t want to assume someone’s gender, which is now widely used in the media, socially, and in legal documents. It has become a way to make language not just less sexist, but also less violent towards trans people. To say ‘I’m a hen’ is to say ‘today I don’t have a gender’. And then there is the law that has been in place since 1998 to ban teachers from promoting gender stereotypes in kindergartens: no ‘boys do this’ or ‘girls do that’, as I was taught at my Catholic convent school, something I had discovered while shooting a documentary about raising kids gender neutral in Sweden a few years earlier. In one of the kindergartens I had visited, Egalia, there was actually no mention of the words ‘boy’ or ‘girl’ at all, just ‘children’ or ‘friends’.

  In these schools, I watched as they read the kids stories about two male giraffes trying to have a baby together, and two princesses falling in love, years of avoidable gay shame flashing before my eyes. The producers of the documentary had me climbing trees with five-year-olds asking how they identified (something I wasn’t wholly comfortable with) but the kids themselves seemed disinterested in labels. When I asked them what they wanted to be when they grew up there was no worry about gendered professions; when I asked them about games there were no conceptions that boys were better at anything than girls. These Swedish institutions were actively pushing against binary understandings of gender from a yo
ung age; the idea being that, if you could raise kids to view gender as fluid or varied, and sexualities as myriad, then maybe you’d have a less sexist and more queer-friendly society.

  However, according to Timimie, the gender revolution in Sweden hadn’t quite happened yet. Yes, there were a lot of out non-binary people, and there was a lot of visibility around this on the Internet. There were figures like Freja Lindberg, a well-known non-binary trans activist with tens of thousands of Instagram followers, or Timimie, who had their own loyal following. There were a handful of gender-neutral schools like the ones I had seen. And there were gender-neutral toilets in certain galleries and public buildings. But there were few general statistics about how many people were trans or non-binary in Sweden, little understanding of these issues amongst the general populace, and in Timimie’s mind, there were only a few hangouts for trans and non-binary people. Perhaps this was the most important point – that these spaces were needed because life for trans and non-binary people was not necessarily safe. Timimie even gave me an example: the previous year, they’d run into an ex in a club and got chatting. Timimie told the ex that they were now using gender-neutral pronouns. The conversation grew more heated, until their ex started shouting transphobic abuse, and then attacked Timimie physically. There were several witnesses and the act was caught on camera (cleverly, Swedish bouncers wear security cameras). When the case went to court, the perpetrator was prosecuted, but it was tried as a case where a man punched a woman he had dated for not wanting to have sex with him. ‘That’s one of the most common statistics today in Sweden, that men who are drunk and want to have sex punch women,’ said Timimie, referring to Sweden’s domestic violence rates – yet another reason it was not quite utopia. ‘But it was not because I’m a woman and it was not because I didn’t want to have sex – it was because I’m trans. And there were like seven people who can say it’s because I am trans. I won the case in court but in the papers it says the wrong pronouns for me and the way it was prosecuted means that the statistics are still wrong.’

  ‘Right. Because you can’t . . . prove that you’re trans . . .?’ I said. Timimie identified as non-binary, so hadn’t legally changed their gender because there wasn’t yet a third option (although in November 2017, the Swedish government announced that they’re considering it).

  ‘Exactly. You don’t get killed for being LGBTQ+ in Sweden . . . at least not by the police, but until recently there’s no law to say it’s a hate crime to punch a trans or non-binary person in the face.’

  As Timimie spoke about this angrily, it occurred to me that their case was a lot like those I had discussed with LaLa, in that a lack of recognition of someone’s gender, or a disavowal of how they chose to identify, led to their invisibility in the eyes of the law. In some of the most supposedly progressive countries in the world, you still can’t legally define your gender yourself unless you’ve had surgery or gone through a long bureaucratic legal process, and there is no official legal category for non-binary people. This was why Sweden once ranked highly on the list of the world’s most LGBTQ+ friendly countries, but has since dropped to tenth place. Sweden, like Britain and the Netherlands, was falling behind in the rankings for LGBTQ+ rights because no matter how progressive you are, there’s always somewhere new to keep pushing.

  ‘In the UK some schools are introducing gender-neutral toilets and uniforms, as are institutions, and there is a bill up for debate that would allow people to self-determine their legal gender . . . where are you at with that here?’ I asked Timimie.

  ‘What Sweden needs is people being open to form a new movement. The conversations you are talking about – gender-neutral schools and toilets – it’s happening very slowly. It’s not the politicians pushing for this, it’s the activists and the artists doing this.’

  ‘Do you think Sweden has become complacent?’

  ‘A lot of people here are white and live friction-free . . . If you are a white kid in Stockholm, people before them have paved the way for them to come out as non-binary. I’m not saying it’s easy, I’m just saying it couldn’t happen without all the other stuff before it: Gay Liberation, women’s rights, trans rights. In Sweden thirty years ago there were huge demonstrations for equal rights and homosexual rights, and the homosexual men got it better, and then they just disappeared from the front lines and the struggles and left behind all of the queer people, all of the women, all of the non-binary people, all of them.’

  ‘Right,’ I said. I gathered that while Timimie probably wasn’t solely referring to themself in this last group, they were at least in part. This was, after all, why I had wanted to meet them.

  I didn’t know a great deal about Sami people, but I knew a bit. Sami territories stretch across to Finland and Norway. A reindeer-herding civilization, their culture is thousands of years old, and they generally lead a secluded life in the snow under the Northern Lights, where temperatures can drop to minus forty-five degrees and brutally cold winters can last as long as eight months. Timimie told me that we can think of Samis as a bit like the European version of Native Americans; there are huge cultural differences, of course, but the struggles that they face are similar, namely colonization from outsiders and the knock-on effects of climate change on their ecosystem. I had anticipated that Timimie would be a little biased about the progressiveness of Sweden, given that the government had a long history of using Sami people and their land to its advantage; mining it, building power plants, polluting waters by using them as waste dumps and then claiming that the Samis were in the way. For more than a hundred years, Sweden had displaced Samis to access iron, coal and oil. Samis, said Timimie, often came out looking like the bad guys; if they protested, then they were denying Swedes power and jobs.

  I guessed there weren’t many Sami people who were non-binary, and Timimie seemed to confirm this when they later told me that they knew maybe six or seven others (and being the most well-known LGBTQ+ Sami person there was, I thought that they were probably well placed to estimate). What Jeffrey had said was true – we are all minorities of one – but equally, there wasn’t much precedence for an identity like Timimie’s.

  Their story, they told me, started with their mother, who moved down from Sapmi, the area in which Sami people live, when she was fourteen years old. In Jokkmokk, the Sami village where Timimie’s family were from, there were around three thousand people, and Timimie’s grandfather was the priest, meaning that their mother couldn’t get much privacy. She moved to Stockholm in search of the anonymity of a bigger community, and so Timimie was born and raised in the city, mostly, but also in Sapmi. Being of indigenous culture and ethnicity in a big, modern, progressive city like Stockholm came with complications, especially since Samis were often maligned or subjected to racism. There was a pressure for young Sami kids to assimilate into the colonizers’ society – to start speaking Swedish. But whenever Timimie went back to Sapmi, it would be the other way around; they had to minimize their queerness. In the reindeer society ‘gay is not OK’, said Timimie, describing it as a harsh, cis-male, patriarchal society where sexism and transphobia were the norm. While a lot of Swedish queer people decided to step away from their family if their family did not accept them, ‘As a Sami kid you can’t really do that,’ said Timimie, ‘because you are your family.’ The whole society was built on familial ties. ‘Falling between cultures, being taught how to be a Swede but never being Swedish enough, and never being a stereotypical Sami, being queer, being non-binary, being poly, also working with art, it annoys people there a lot. There’s a way of being a stereotypical Sami, and when you’re not matching that role people get annoyed. But here in Stockholm, being Sami has always been seen as being bad.’

  ‘So it’s a sort of lose-lose situation?’

  ‘Yes. You always feel like one or the other has to be more important. Do I want to be Sami and less queer and always be in a fight about that? Or do I want to be queer and always have to explain my Sami part or slowly let it fade away a bit? That
can seriously give me anxiety attacks.’

  Timimie came out as queer first, then, later, as non-binary. They told me they had always wanted to be a boy, or something like a boy. As a teenager they oscillated between dressing up as a man and loving burlesque: ‘All of my life I have felt like I’m doing drag, no matter the way I dress.’

  Timimie started to identify as genderqueer in 2015. They joined a performance group at a theatre, and as part of the process of creating the performance they decided to ‘decolonize the room and break it down to an almost molecular level’.

  ‘What does that mean, to decolonize a room?’ I asked.

  Timimie explained that it meant deconstructing the ‘norms of the space’, be that the language used, or presumptions about other people’s backgrounds. Instead, they went around and shared their pronouns regularly, and people could talk in whatever language they felt comfortable with where possible. It wasn’t assumed that anyone had money, or wanted to go out drinking after rehearsal, for instance. And they talked about how they could actively drive toxic masculinity out of the space. ‘It might sound like I have it more figured out now but this was a process of six months where we tried to create this toxic-masculinity-free room. It was things I’ve been thinking since I was eleven when I first heard about SCUM Manifesto.’

  ‘What kinds of things were you thinking about?’ I asked.

  ‘I’d been working in so, so many environments where men take up space. I was and I am a loudmouth and I take up a lot of space and I say what I feel, but for me, massive changes started to happen within me at that time and I began to open my mouth about what was moving inside of me. I started to notice people in my family making jokes and I would say, “That’s not funny.” I started to see that my biological family was not even a safe space. I was dating another non-binary person at the time, which I realized was not a good relationship at all, and then I met this other person who was a trans guy and we started to talk a lot about this stuff and he was the first one to say my actual name.’