Jess Reviews Queer Intentions by Amelia Abraham
February is LGBT+ History Month, and so when I was looking for my next book, I decided this would be a great time to pick up one I have had on my ‘to read’ pile for quite a while: Queer Intentions: A (Personal) Journey Through LGBT+ Culture by Amelia Abraham.
The book follows Abraham as she speaks with queer people of all kinds from different backgrounds and as she revisits people and stories from across her career as a journalist covering LGBT+ culture, to find out how the changing face of LGBT+ rights has impacted people years on. From the UK’s first gay married couple to queer sex workers in the Netherlands, the book spans countries, highlighting the different struggles and successes of queer people from Turkey to Sweden to the United States. Central to the book is Abraham’s friend Amrou Al-Kadhi, a non-binary Muslim drag queen, whose candour and confidence is a delight to read. Reading up on the book afterward, I discovered they have recently released their own memoir called Life as a Unicorn: A Journey from Shame to Pride and Everything in Between.
For all its coverage of the difficult and dangerous parts of queer life, Queer Intentions conversely does a great job of showing queer happiness, whether that be the joys of performing in drag, creating communities, enjoying the fun of gay nightlife, and hookups, or living in married domestic bliss. The chapter on the closing of UK gay bars was particularly interesting to reflect on, alongside the question: now that queer people are so much more accepted in the mainstream, is there even a need to segregate out specifically LGBT+ spaces in this new culture? Abraham (and I) think the answer is yes. Reading this book and reflecting the effects of the pandemic, it’s clear that there’s a hidden effect on LGBT+ people and access to the community. It started to hit home how important these spaces really are and what it is that they provide: they’re not just a reactive response to a hostile society but a joyful place of community and self-discovery.
Most interestingly, this book doesn’t treat queer people as a monolith. In fact, I thought it was highly effective at showing the multitude of opinions even within LGBT+ communities on topics like pride and its commercialisation or gay marriage and potential assimilation into more heteronormative institutions. So much of the time, queer activism can be undermined by conflicting needs from within the community – to some LGBT+ people, gay marriage is vital in legally recognising their committed relationships in the same way as straight couples are able to; and for others, marriage is a symbol of a stifling heteronormative culture which they want to escape rather than conform to. But at its core, the struggle for queer liberation is a fight for self-determination, to be able to see many possible futures for themselves. There is no wrong way to be queer, and in the last chapter, Abraham pulls together this conclusion in a way that has stuck with me. She writes: ‘I suppose I had been confused about what the LGBTQ+ people before me had been fighting for: the right to be the same as everyone else, or to be different. Now, I realise it was both. It was the ability to choose.’
You can request a copy of Amelia Abraham’s ‘Queer Intentions’ here.