Queer Intentions

by Amelia Abraham

  ‘Well, if it is the last taboo we should work with that!’ Zafire laughed. ‘BDSM can be so many things. It doesn’t have to be someone giving someone else pain – although that is a delicious part of BDSM. What is often the most fundamental thing is consent and negotiation, and I think that is the element we can bring into so many other parts of our lives. We can learn tools for communication from BDSM. It’s a way to disarm power structures and to heal from all the crazy traumas we get from patriarchy. You can play a scene you’ve experienced before but the roles are negotiated and the space is safe; you can re-enact something that has possibly been painful or violent and be in charge and secure. For me, BDSM is very therapeutic and those tools it’s given me have helped me so much in other parts of my life, in terms of clarity.’

  ‘Can you give me an example?’

  ‘Well, in the family here I think it’s easier to communicate about something, or with friends, or at work or whatever, if I’m just able to articulate a need for something. And of course to be able to read other people’s boundaries. I’m not saying I would negotiate my whole life and all the people that I meet – it’s not a constant negotiation – but I do get really aware of boundaries and how to respect them. You get more sensitive, which is handy for a relationship with anyone.’

  ‘How would one be able to go to a workshop?’ I asked. Was I fishing for an invite? Zafire was, admittedly, selling it to me.

  ‘We have a Facebook page and people can approach us on Facebook, but we have to know people and people recommend others that come to us. It’s a small place and it’s important for us to make it as safe as possible, so it’s better to let it grow organically than to advertise it widely.’

  ‘How many people come to CRS?’

  ‘If we use our own space we’re usually between ten and fifteen people, but we sometimes do things in other spaces that can take more people. For big events of thirty or thirty-five, we try to find another space.’

  ‘What would that be?’

  ‘Then it would be more like once a year, a big play party where we would invite all the people that joined us during the year. But personally my big interest in the usual space is the intersection between BDSM and spirituality.’

  Madde had told me about this, and I had also read about it on the Facebook page, but as a not-very-spiritual and slightly cynical person I had failed to understand it. ‘Go on,’ I said.

  ‘I do a lot of things on sex magic and on different kinds of sexual meditations. I do a guided meditation called the Queer Breath of the Universe, which is connecting to our ancestry and the queer courage and the queer breath that is made in previous generations and previous species before humans.’

  I must have looked puzzled because Zafire put on a patient face and carried on explaining: ‘If everybody would have done the same thing all the time evolution wouldn’t have happened. So species that do differently could be considered radically queer or non-binary or fluid or questioning. We are the ones who make evolution possible. If beings would have been normative, binary, nothing would have happened.’

  ‘Shit,’ I said, Zafire having induced an epiphany.

  ‘Humans wouldn’t exist,’ continued Zafire casually. ‘That shifts the perspective totally, that means we should celebrate that we are trans, non-binary and queer. Because we are creating the future. And if binary gender starts to dissolve, all of us who are already living outside the binary, our experience is incredibly valuable because we have so many tools already. It’s like people who live without money, or try to – when capitalism falls, the experience of surviving your life without monetary transactions is extremely valuable. I think it’s similar with non-binary people: our experience will be valid for the future of humanity.’

  ‘Can you see that happening . . . gender falling?’

  Zafire deliberated for moment. ‘Yes, but maybe not in my lifetime. Things are happening. When I guide this meditation and go back to the beginning of time and connect with queer energy that made evolution possible, we also look forward to the future and breathe with the queer existences that will be there in the future. So of course it will happen because I can feel it, even if I might not experience it.’

  ‘I feel like I’d cry if I did your meditation.’

  ‘That’s OK,’ they smiled. ‘Everybody does. I cry too.’

  Zafire went to make us more coffee and I looked around their apartment. It was brightly coloured, with flock wallpaper in greens and purples and oranges. Outside, it was starting to snow. What I admired about Madde’s friends, I thought, was that they were a community of people who were actively trying to erode the very boundaries that I felt trapped by after my break-up with Salka: heteronormativity and queerness, decorum and freedom, success and failure. In many ways, when I talked to Madde, while I didn’t necessarily want to go to a BDSM baptism myself, I felt I wanted to embrace the ideals of the people who did. Which is to say that I always felt I was hearing about a group of people who were living by their desires rather than shaping their desires into arbitrary boxes society had handed them. They were creating new structures that worked for how they felt, not the other way around.

  This, as far as I could gather, was what Zafire was doing with their family, and I wanted to know more. ‘I would love to know who lives here, how you met them,’ I said when Zafire came back.

  ‘I live with three other people: a child that’s five years old, called Rio, and then Rio’s other two parents, Mina and Cal,’ Zafire smiled, visibly lighting up. They told me that Mina was partnered with both them and Cal, and that they had other partners outside this constellation. Mina and Zafire had been partners for maybe seven years, and Mina and Cal had been partners for about fifteen years. They decided to move in together in 2011 and began thinking about having a child, which was something Zafire had wanted for a long time. ‘The other two had too, but they’d been partners for a long time, and weren’t sure they wanted to be two parents. They weren’t sure that they believed in that idea, and they were afraid that that would affect their relationship too much to be just the two of them.’

  Because Zafire had experienced trying to create a family and also a family with multiple parents before, they could initiate a discussion on power dynamics, and who should be the legal parents and who should be the biological parents. In Sweden, only two parents can be legally acknowledged. So they discussed openly who had the most power, who could read the other people better, who had the most advantages when it came to their needs and wants and recognition and experience. They decided that, because the person who carried the child would automatically become the legal parent, they would divide it so that one got the other legal position and the other got the biological position; that way, they were all linked to each other and it would be harder for someone to run away with Rio or shut someone else out. ‘This is how the legal system would protect us,’ Zafire explained, ‘but since we don’t have a full legal protection we needed to create those hooks on each other ourselves. It’s worked incredibly well; all three of us are sex educators, work with communication and finding solutions to things, so we have a very functional family based on evening out the power structures within the family. And a very rational agreement.’

  ‘So how do you divide the responsibility?’

  ‘Since the very beginning we divided the responsibility into three, so Rio was not breastfed, which was a choice that Rio made because Rio didn’t want to eat from the breast, so we had a pump and everybody could feed Rio. We also divided up the responsibility so that we would be responsible for one night each, so the other two could sleep a full night without being disturbed, or maybe they would wake up but they could just go back to sleep. We share a household, we are a family together, but we still divide the time between the three of us and other people in the extended family, people who have their own relationship with Rio. We’re all here, but we have responsibility every third weekend each, and one or two or three nights a week where Rio would turn to us for wanting or n
eeding something, or there might be slightly different rules, for example, the rules of the person who is in charge, which makes for much fewer conflicts between us.’

  ‘Is it a gender-free household?’

  ‘As much as possible. We use gender-free pronouns for Rio. Whatever Rio wants to define as they can define as that, they can be a shark or a rabbit or a dog. I’m not saying that’s the same thing as being trans, but just to make sure that Rio gets acknowledged and respected, it makes them more courageous and more clear. Since about a year and a half, they’ve picked a non-binary identity, for now. They’ve said that, “Yes, I want to be a hen, not a boy, not a girl.” I feel like this is really the choice they’ve made and they’re free to change that whenever. We are all non-binary and hen so it’s easy because we all have the same pronouns, and “parent”, for example, is easy because it’s a gender-neutral word already.’

  ‘If Rio chose a binary gender identity how would you feel?’

  ‘Fine, as long as it’s their choice. I’m amazed that Rio is so unaffected by gender. I didn’t really know that this was possible. In the beginning, when they started to speak, they used “she” for everyone. Now they use hen. But it’s really important to have a gender pronoun if you’re a binary trans person, for example – it’s incredibly important to be recognized as the gender you have. This is what made us talk to Rio about gender in the first place, correcting Rio if they say “she” to a trans man, for example. If it was a cis man I don’t think it matters as much but it’s less nice to say “she” to a trans man.’

  I inhaled as I took in everything Zafire was telling me. In that moment I thought about my mum again, and how insane she would find it all – or had found it all, when she’d watched the documentary I made when I was last in Sweden. Admittedly, there were moments when it felt as if the parents in that film were being more forceful about instilling gender neutrality on their children, the kids not ready to break free from gender norms when in their outside lives they were still exposed to them. When the rest of the world is fixed on binary ideas about gender, it can be hard trying to push past this, to be the first, and you could argue that an adult is better equipped to bear the burden of that than a child. But you could also argue that people shouldn’t go around telling kids, or anyone for that matter, what colour clothes they can wear, or how they should express themselves, or what name they should use. This was what Zafire’s family set-up tried to avoid, but I understood how people could find it challenging, such as – according to Zafire – some of Rio’s grandparents.

  When I raised this with Zafire, they pointed out that it didn’t make total sense because, actually, a lot of parents don’t subscribe to gender roles; a lot of people have extramarital relationships, and a lot of families don’t look like your traditional family.

  ‘Restructured families are maybe more common than a nuclear family that sticks together. In Sweden nearly half of marriages end up in divorce, so they would be families that don’t look the same as they looked when they were created. It’s more common to have a bonus sibling, live with one parent one week and another the next. But the advantage we have being queer and trans and creating our own structures is that we are more prepared for things that nuclear families aren’t – they’re often not prepared for the restructuring of family life at all . . . if you create a new family with someone then that partner would not have legal rights to the kids unless they are related to them or adopt them, which can make family life difficult on the legal side. And if you fit into the binary monogamous nuclear family constellation there’s so many things you haven’t negotiated or talked about: How would you deal with conflict or a potential break-up? How can you secure your relationship to the kids? It’s not something you talk about because you have a mould already that you’re supposed to fit into. Our family is so strong and healthy because we negotiated it rationally, non-romantically, around feminist values and a queer and gender-neutral upbringing. I’m not saying our family will last forever – who knows? – but it’s a very safe foundation. And the special thing about us is we planned this from the very beginning, we created this from scratch, and I don’t know many families who have done that.’

  ‘I guess you’re right. At one point, with step-parents, I had four parents; my parents broke up after I was born and they recoupled with other people. There was animosity between parents at different times, and my stepdad left and I never saw him again after twelve years of living with him, and I think some of my parents are progressive but my mother would baulk at the idea of this three-parent family without realizing I came from a four-parent family, only here everyone gets along. So many families aren’t nuclear families any more but they’re not doing it in a caring way or a communal way or a queer way . . .’ I trailed off, unexpectedly emotional.

  Zafire nodded gently. ‘I think so many of those families can benefit from realizing how much advantage queer families can have when it comes to negotiations and rational solutions and creating safety outside of boxes we don’t fit into. I think we should honour and celebrate queer life and non-binary existence.’

  Zafire’s attitude – like Meredith’s – was that the rest of the world had something to learn from queer people. Zafire believed in the theory and demonstrated in practice that we could queer the institution. And that didn’t mean everyone had to live in a queer commune, it meant taking tradition and doing it your own way.

  ‘Final question: What to you is utopia? Would you say you guys are doing your best to create it?’ I said.

  ‘I don’t think I would call it utopia because it’s here, I live it. It’s not a dream so I wouldn’t call it utopia. We have a queer, gender-free, safe environment that we are parents in. It’s nothing that we might have in the future. We have a space where we can explore what is radical in sex, and talk about how we can transform ourselves and our environment and our future. Even if it’s three or five or twenty people. It’s possible to do that here and now. The whole world doesn’t have to become a queer utopia before we can start.’

  I left Zafire’s apartment, and trudged through the snow back to the metro station. I rode the train silently to Central Station. I bought myself a hot dog in Pressbyrån, the Swedish alternative to 7-Eleven, and sat on a bench inside the station.

  Emily called me on FaceTime Audio.

  ‘How was it?’

  I told her about Zafire and Rio and the queer sex magic workshop.

  ‘Do you think I should go?’ I said. ‘It’s in three weeks. Would that be weird?’

  ‘Well, you can go if you want but I don’t think you’ll like it. You’re not very spiritual and you always describe sex parties as organized fun.’

  She was right. ‘You’re right,’ I said, thinking about how there wasn’t much point taking up space at things where you weren’t going to contribute anything anyway.

  ‘So are Cal and Zafire in a sexual or romantic relationship, or are they each just in one with Mina?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh, I forgot to specifically ask,’ I said. Emily would always ask me a really obvious question right after an interview that I forgot to ask during the interview. ‘I don’t suppose it matters,’ I said, quite chuffed with how liberal I sounded.

  ‘Did you like the three-parent family thing?’ she asked.

  ‘I did. And I think, if we decide to have a baby, we should have three or four parents, because then we have more free childcare and could go on holiday more often.’

  ‘Agreed. I’ll start asking around,’ she said.

  Then I told her what Zafire had said about utopia, how you didn’t have to wait for it, that you could build it yourself. As I spoke, it dawned on me that this was what we were best at as queer people, this world-making, and that everyone I’d met had – in their own way – created their own utopia in the now; for Patty, it was her family; for Jeffrey, it was in a nightclub basement; for Hans, it was his Pride Walk; for Kia, the ballroom; and for Ayman and his friends, it was the four walls of Tea and Talk. To me
, the fact that there were so many versions of utopia probably spoke to the moment we were in – a moment we had fought for ourselves – when life for many LGBTQ+ people was starting to have a new potential: the potential to look like whatever you wanted it to.

  I had recognized this moment at the beginning of my journey, and I had wondered if it was as good as it was cracked up to be, whether this unprecedented acceptance of LGBTQ+ people and everything that came with it – from same-sex marriage to drag TV shows to ‘queer’ Instagram filters and stickers – was necessarily a progressive thing. After everywhere I had been, it was clear that there was no easy answer to this question: to some people, our assimilation into straight culture was just another form of oppression or cultural dominance; to others it was the long-awaited prize for years of political fighting.

  In truth, I saw both sides of the argument, but I knew, more firmly than ever before, that acceptance would homogenize us. What I had seen was more options, more multiplicity, more ways of being. Our myriad genders and sexualities were nothing new, of course, but now, instead of denying their existence, we were finally giving them words, allowing them to be, educating about them, and as a consequence, we no longer lived in such a binary, heteronormative world. We were evolving out of one, and as Zafire would have it, queer people were leading the charge.

  But what would come next? What would become of the places further down on Seyhan’s staircase, or the fights happening outside the mainstream, the new frontiers, the smaller minorities, where fewer people were at the protests or the Prides? How would we react when progress didn’t always move in a straight line? What would we collectively decide to do about it?

  These questions seemed as important as whether assimilation was good or bad for us. Because if the outcome of improved LGBTQ+ rights was that not all of us had to be fighting any more, I had also witnessed the catch; and it was that our work would never be done. That we could have our freedom and our rights and equality on paper, but we would still carry shame, trauma and internalized hatred, as long as we were still taught that there are right and wrong ways to be, or that some LGBTQ+ people are more worthy of acceptance than others.