Queer Intentions by Amelia Abraham

On the one hand, we have the 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?

Amelia Abraham, a young English lesbian fresh off an emotional break up, in between journalist jobs, set off to figure out what the world can look like for a young English lesbian, but her exploration expanded to investigate what it means to be queer in the late 2010s throughout the world (or at least the northern hemisphere).  She begins her journey by looking at the issues that hit closest to home for her: she writes about the importance of gay bars to gay culture and how that's changing by interviewing members of a group trying to save her favorite London gay bar from being torn down and replaced by a mixed use development and tries to envision how her life might play out now that same sex marriage is legal in the UK by interviewing a couple of wealthy white married lesbians in California and the first gay couple to get married in their town in England.  She gradually expands her reach: she has seemingly a lot of friends who are drag performers, so she attends DragCon in LA and interviews performers about how RuPaul's Drag Race has impacted the economics and culture of drag; she attends Pride events in Amsterdam, Berlin, and Serbia; she discusses coming out and representation with trans women in the fashion industry; she learns about how Middle Eastern queer people in Turkey meet each other and form communities.

As she travels, she reflects on the tension outlined in the above excerpt.  She shows how a lot of rich white people got the right to marry who they want and kind of stopped caring about what happens next, content to know that if they live in LA, they probably won't be fired for the gender of their spouse.  She discusses the juxtaposition traditional Pride, which started as a riot and continued as a political protest, and the direction Pride is heading, a family-friendly, corporatized celebration, and how some people and places still benefit from and need the protest elements, while acknowledging the benefits of Pride becoming more mainstream (for example: in Amsterdam, one of the sponsors set up a 360 degree camera on a parade boat and broadcast it online so that people around the world who either didn't have Pride events or who couldn't safely attend could feel like they were part of the celebration.  Also, people complain about how corporate sponsorship affects Pride, but Pride events also affect their sponsors by requiring them to have queer friendly corporate policies that their employees benefit from).  One of her interview subjects states it succinctly: "...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."

Where Abraham shines is the diversity of her interview subjects.  She interviews trans models in New York City, queer sex workers in Amsterdam, Syrian refugees in Turkey, and a non-binary/genderless poly parent in Sweden who is raising their child with two other people as free from the gender binary as possible, among others.  It's easy and popular for rich white people to talk about lifting up marginalized voices, but it's another thing to actually do it.  If I were writing a book, I'd love to share my platform with an indigenous trans person from Sweden, but I wouldn't even know where to begin to go about doing that.

Overall, Queer Intentions was compelling and fascinating, and I felt that it did a good job of giving queer people space to feel good about the progress we've made (especially in the US or the UK) while encouraging us to continue the fight for those who do not have the same freedoms.