You can doubt whether you want to marry, but you should at least have the right to choose to. So while I do admire writers who have a strong sense of conviction and are more polemical, the kind of writing that feels most natural to me is writing that deals in nuance.”Īlthough you need a foundation to build on. I have a lot of opinions, but I wouldn’t say that I have a real strength of conviction behind them. “I’m a people person, so writing seemed like a great way to meet people, to try to understand them and to tell their stories. Nuance has been a driving force in Amelia Abraham’s writing since she began her career as a journalist for publications such as Vice, Dazed, Vogue, The Guardian and The Observer. That most human trait of not knowing and failing along the way opens the door to empathy, inclusion, humanity. It is those shaky, ever doubting legs, which today stand in fake Crocs – “I wouldn’t want to trade them for the real deal!” – that make Queer Intentions such a ruthlessly important book. That you can be many things at once, and that you can get there on shaky legs and with a broken heart. The conclusion of that journey along so many stories of different people across the LGBTQ+ spectrum – from Britain’s first groom and groom and the world’s biggest drag convention in Los Angeles to trans activists in New York and Syrian refugees in Turkey’s underground LGBTQ+ scene – is that you must have the choice, but that you don’t have to choose.
She wondered: How do I feel about marriage? What happens to queer culture if we all start living like straight people? Is increased acceptance always a good thing? And who gets left behind? What in fact are we fighting for? To be different or to be like anybody else? “On the one hand, we have a 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,” Amelia Abraham writes. A Personal Journey through LGBTQ+ Culturewas a way for the journalist who is now working on her first novel – “a dark comedy about a woman who goes on an Eat Pray Love kind of post-break-up trip to Italy and gets possessed by the ghost of a lesbian nun think Call Me by Your Name meets Black Swan” – to find a space for herself in a larger community which never before has been as present in the mainstream as it is now. Those same friends were asking themselves if Amelia Abraham was going to write another book: “‘One that opens with you crying on the Eurostar home from Brussels?’” It sounds harsh, but Amelia Abraham can handle a bit of teasing, not the least because the break-up with her Icelandic girlfriend Salka in 2019 proved to be fuel for a book that may count as a benchmark for the contemporary queer experience, and might even be up for a television adaptation. This time, I waited six months to see if things worked out before I told my friends, and they went: ‘What, you live in Brussels?’ They hadn’t even noticed I was gone!”
So it was extra awkward when I came back home a week and a half later, crying on an easyJet flight because we had broken up after ten days.
( Laughs) When I left for Ísafjörður, Iceland in 2016 to be with my girlfriend who I had met six months previously, I told everybody.
“Though I would like to point out that there are six years apart between the moves. “With Brussels I kind of did a soft launch,” Amelia Abraham says about her move from her London home to a flat in Vorst/Forest almost a year ago.