Amelia Abraham & Tom Rasmussen
Amelia and Tom became friends in 2015. They bonded over queer theory, gossip, and working in the same field: journalism. Tom is also a drag queen and performs in the group Denim, of which Amelia is a longstanding superfan. They both have books coming out in 2019. Tom’s memoir, Diary of a Drag Queen, is out first, even though technically Tom copied Amelia when she got a book deal (her book is called Queer Intentions - Tom came up with the name). For their contribution to close, Amelia and Tom decided to have a conversation about their own friendship. Because they are narcissists. But aren’t all drag queens and journalists? xoxoxo
TR: Hey queen,
How are you??
Okay so this tiny letter thing — why don’t we set out some rules?
1. An email a day each.
2. Each email has to end with a question, something we perhaps both answer if necessary, so the conversation keeps going.
3. Let’s avoid being lofty or too boring? Don’t wanna be snooze. Let’s talk lots about feelings??
Gonna start with how we met, because starting at the beginning is heteronormative but if we do it we’re queering it right? Right. Okay.
So, I’d heard of you because you were a ‘known face’ on the scene — you had written an article about drag queens and their mums and I was frankly fume that you hadn’t asked me to be a part of it, but whatever it’s been three years, have just forgiven you so all good.
Anyway, I had added you on Facebook — ahh the old days — and you had accepted. I was sat in a yurt cafe in Limehouse because I’m cutting edge like that and I saw you. Knowing it was you I started to flirt with my eyes, first, then a smile, then my body language, as you sat there with a sausage bagel pure flirting back. It was love at first sausage bagel, or so I thought.
Having never met you, instead of approaching you, I messaged you on fb like “hey beauty I see u in this yurt cafe. Wanna come hang on my table wink wink.”
And then, what was your reply?? <3
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AA: The way I remember it, I pretended that the girl you thought was me was in fact me, and invited you over to say hi, and it wasn't me and you were furious and embarrassed, and then I met you that night anyway, by chance, and we laughed about my prank. But I now see from checking our messages from March 2016 that it didn't happen like that. I think my memory embellishes stories so that they are more interesting?
Anyway, my response was actually just "If we were straight this would be so romantic"
Which is sad to read back because meeting you was romantic. But before we go into that I think we should explain why we want to talk about queer friendship.
For me it's because there is a special quality to our friendship that I don't necessarily experience with other friendships, and I think partly because you are a special person, but also because we connect on certain things — that I hope we will explore here — that I don't necessarily connect over in other friendships. I don't know if the nature of our relationship is 'queer' per se, but I would like to talk about what that would look like.
Interestingly, after another message from 2016 where you sent me a video about how viennetta is made, you sent a message about an article you were writing that said: "im saying that coming out is limiting, we consume references that allow us as LGBTQIA people to to only exist within this matrix of references"
That seems like an interesting proposition within the context of queer friendship: do you think we were.... SOCIALISED TO BECOME FRIENDS???
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TR: You remembered it correctly, because you said “If we were straight this would be so romantic” and I was like omg this is Amelia, so I got up and walked over and the sausage bagel girl was like “wtf who tf are u?” And then I was mortified, and I got back to my computer with like 100 laughing messages from u.
Anyway, to the nuts, nut, and bolts I reckon.
Re special qualities to our friendship, I agree. I felt like I really loved you very quickly. Like I knew you, after maybe two meetings. I have felt this for other queers. It’s beyond platonicism (made up word, but they all are stfu), but not quite sexual. Is there a word for where we sit?
I would, rather un-queerly, say you could probably list the reasons queer friendships can so often feel so very much stronger than other, cross-orientation friendships. These would go something like this:
1. All you’re really searching for in friends, on a very base level, is to not be alone. The queer experience for so many of us growing up is very lonely, it was for me from a working class background far from any cultural epicentre, so when you finally meet people who share your interests, references, but also who have been oppressed within the same system, they make you feel less alone instantly. This predisposes us to be friends. I think of all my best friends now and there isn’t one that isn’t queer. Mood.
2. With this, I want friends who share my politics and so it’s likely queers will share similar stances because we are often fighting for the same things.
3. We go to the same places, enjoy the same music, the same culture.
So to answer the question of whether we’re socialised to be friends then: perhaps it’s half and half? We create the references and the spaces in which we socialise, and they bring us together. God, I don’t know necessarily. I will say if we are ‘socialised to be friends’ that comes from within us, our community. I don’t feel like there is a higher force — the straights, for example — engineering a bank of memes that we will then send to each other which will make us friends. Although, I guess by others outcasting our culture, and driving the beating heart of it underground, we are forced into space together in a way.
I’d be keen to know what you think makes a friendship queer? Is it the bond, the feeling? Or is it reference? Space? Its contents? Does ours fit within it? How is it different to a non-queer friendship?
Love you sm, xxx
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AA: I love you too!
Because you mentioned memes I want to start with a meme I saw last week...
TV writers: it’s just not realistic to have more than one LGBT person in a friendship group
Me: *hasn’t seen a straight person in 3 days*
This feels quite true of my life at the minute. On Wednesday I went to the pub with a straight guy I know, which is something I never do and I felt quite self-conscious, like I was conducting an ethnographic study of straight men?? and every time he said something sweet about his feelings I felt kind of incredulous / gripped? Which is cruel but whatever. The same thing also happened when I watched love island in the summer.
Anyway, I guess this is how you know you spend too much time with queer people, when you start to find straight people inherently interesting or even Other...
I agree with everything you said about why we form different or special bonds with other queer people. I suppose you could summarise by saying circumstance throws us together, but there is more than that, I think. I have a friend called Amin Ghaziani who is a queer sociologist and when I interviewed him he taught me a new word: homophily. I love it because it has homo in it, obv, but also because of what it stands for: it’s basically sociology speak for the saying “birds of a feather flock together”. It means that people with a shared likeness gravitate towards one another, but also that we teach each other things, our behaviour rubs off. So I guess we’re friends because of shared sensibilities, but we also engender modes and codes of queerness in one another. Which feels generous somehow, like all the time we spend savagely gossiping or complaining about power structures (through the medium of savage gossip) we are actually teaching one another “How To Be Queer”.
I also just Wikipedia-ed homophily half way through writing that because I kind of forgot what it meant and it says that forming networks with likeminded people encourages tolerance. “Tolerance” isn’t a word I love when it comes to queerness, but I suppose that’s also a nice idea, that we create safe microcosms for ourselves in the world through the bonds we form. And it actually reminds me of the point I wanted to bring up next, which is something that I think underlies a lot of our friendship, and that’s shame...
I would like to think our friendship offers a space free from shame, but I also think shame is something we have bonded over.
Do you want to pick up here? Lusm
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TR: Ugh homophily getting my life for this, and couldn't agree more. I also, conversely, think that while, yes, we "rub off" on each other and almost goad each other on — you know, "the gayer the better" which is something lovely about queer friendships — it being a space where your queerness is totally lived for in its very essence — we also pull each other up.
It is in a queer space, a queer 'friend' space, where I've been pulled up on my misogynies, my racisms, where I can pull people up on their classisms (made up word but they all are so whatever) and transphobias, because a) I/others feel safe to do so and b) I want to see my queer friends thrive. It's funny that, in scenarios you describe — the rare ones where you're at the pub with a cis het — I feel like I can't challenge them. Both like I don't want to offend people/ruin the vibe but also like they don't deserve it but also like I'm not safe to do so. This is a problem: str8s have either attacked me or fetishised me my whole life so sometimes I don't know how to ask more of them, even though they should be doing more.
But this tension melts away with queer friends: that's why we love each other so much, why we're so protective of each other and our friendships I think, and why we bond very quickly in my experience. Because of safety. A friend of mine asked me, the other day, what I truly wanted from life and I said 'safety'. I have been poor for a lot of my life, and oppressed by masculinity, patriarchy, expectation, and classism, and I want safety. And my queer friends give that effortlessly, by just being. I feel sorry for cis hets in this respect.
This is where shame comes in, yes! Because it's that coded look from a straight person when you mention bum sex or taking drugs or orgies or making out with your best friends which loads these actions with shame, and makes you feel not-normal. Ergo shame. But among queer friends these are things that are celebrated as totems of a life done right — signals to each other that we've seen behind the curtain and are now much freer than any of the people who shot you those looks in the first place. Until I met my queer friends, family, I had always experienced shame as something corrosive, but now it's the things that others would deem shameful in my past that are really loved by the people in my present. It's indescribably empowering. Please add more to my ramblings!
It means our behaviours and our relationships are much more fluid because shameful consequences can melt away from desire (often, not always) which is why I've (minimum) made out with almost all of my queer friends. What do you think about this?
With my queer friends the relationships bleed across lines of the platonic, family and romantic. There's no word for it: is there a word for it? What do you think about this? About there being an indescribable element at the core of proper queer friendships?
Lusm, lusm lusm xxxxx
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AA: Firstly, I don’t think we’ve ever made out? I’m not sure whether to be offended. Especially since I just started reading your book and you said you made out with your dog?
Maybe that’s a good segue to shame... or rather shamelessness. I think one thing we bonded over a lot was this idea of shamelessness. You once said to me (well on a panel discussion we both did lol) that you felt so full of shame growing up that it was almost like you subconsciously decided to fully embrace it one day, and started just doing the most shameful shit imaginable, and to own the narrative was a kind of power. I guess until you said this to me I had never seen my own behaviour that way, never thought about how, by becoming that person with the story at the pub about getting DP’ed by two strangers I met on a family holiday (a totally made up example!), I was able to pre-empt any shame anyone else could place on me for being queer. And so you haven’t just given me a shame-free zone in our friendship in that I feel free to share whatever with you, you’ve also given me a new way to view my past shameful behaviour...
And also I guess once you have power in numbers, a queer community, you can start to see new things as shameful, like homophobia or transphobia or not accepting your children for who they are. Cause like shame is a social construct and we can unlearn it and ascribe it to different things within the worlds we build for ourselves???
I think what you said about fewer boundaries is right, it does make things more interesting and honest. ;) But maybe for me, the thing that strikes me most about some of my queer friendships — you know particularly this group of friends I have, Gays Aloud, which is like another group of my queer friends that isn’t you lol (but they’re all obsessed with you) — is the power of invention. So quite often we will be hanging out and it will turn into a huge pageant, or a group therapy session where everyone cries, or a childish but hilarious game created out of thin air, or maybe once or twice, a sex party. I think that’s something I really treasure in the quality of those friendships, that we don’t need external stimuli... and it seems to me that queer people are good at this inventive way of entertaining ourselves. At like, celebrating nothing. Having a party for no reason. There’s a lot of writing out there that describes our party vibes as queer self-destruction or a death drive, but I think of it mostly in terms of Jack Halberstam’s book The Queer Art of Failure – that it’s a way of rethinking success and celebrating our own choices. I witness it constantly: celebrating nothing as an important form of resistance among queer people who might not celebrate traditional life markers like marriage or baby-making (see also the Sex and The City episode ‘A Woman’s Right To Shoes’.)
I find that the ones in my friendship group who most often instigate all this invention and celebration are the gay boys who grew up lonely – dancing and dreaming in their bedrooms, with Madonna playing – and now as adults, having met like-minded people, they take you back there with them. It’s beautiful. And I think it speaks to a broader history of queer people doing the same — finding ways to deal with loneliness, or not being given anything, so having to create it for themselves.
But anyway! Maybe it’s this loneliness that a lot of us experienced that makes us seek out friendships that fulfil multiple roles — partner, lover, friend, family member... I am privileged enough to have a loving family and not to have had too difficult a time around my sexuality, and I still feel like I crave this type of queer relationship. In that sense maybe queer friendships are like my relationship with gay bars — i.e. I’m lucky enough not to NEED them on a physical safety level, because of my privileges, but that doesn’t mean I don’t WANT them. That they don’t make me feel validated and seen and understood. But the nuance there is the difference between necessity and desire.
What do you think about how our so-called “assimilation” or acceptance as LGBT people affects our “need” for queer friendships?
Xxxx lusm
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TR: Yes for shamelessness! I realised I had spent so much of my life wasting energy on self-hate and I remember realising that I’d done nothing wrong — probably because I had friends who reassured me of that too.
I think I would be a very different person if I didn’t have them, so maybe to be myself I need to have queer friendships. We need each other. I think, as you said about our ability to create, that’s not something we want but something we need. We’re not allowed to be free bodies who create in public space, so we do that with each other.
This question:
What do you think about how our so-called “assimilation” or acceptance as LGBT people affects our “need” for queer friendships?
I mean frankly I feel very far from assimilated. I feel unsafe around cis het straight people, and I know a lot of people who feel the same, and a lot of QTIPOC who feel unsafe around cis het white people too. I think the notion of queer assimilation into heteronormativity remains to be seen — yes maybe gay men are assimilated but even then, gay men run in clans — and I can’t think of one person who has predominantly straight cis friends who is also queer.
Yes I have a lot of cis het female friends but they have almost assimilated into queerness: into an understanding and politicisation that aligns with the worldview and lifestyle of queers, and never the other way around.
I don’t know how to process the idea of a need. (Niche but..) domesticated horses often have a salt deficiency and you’ll find them working out ways to get more salt: licking themselves when sweaty, eating salty soil beneath grass etc. When you give salt deficient horses a salt lick they devour it, and then they eventually equilibrate and lick it slowly. That’s like me and queer friends: I had a need and I tried everything: I did drag, went to queer clubs, joined reading groups and went to events and now I have my salt, and I don’t need to go back to a time in my life when I was a saltless mood... this is so niche.
I am aware that I am very lucky: leaving the north, finding a queer group. I needed that. We all needed that. But that is a huge privilege.
A big question is: do you think you could live without your queer friends? Do you think you would be who you are without them? Why/why not?
X
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AA: I LOVE this horse metaphor!! Not sure I even totally followed it in the middle but loved it anyway. So pastoral!
I also really enjoyed the point about reverse assimilation… I think it’s important to remember that there’s an osmosis that happens and actually sometimes we have the agency to indoctrinate str8s (if we can be bothered etc).
I hear you about assimilation being somewhat a myth, broadly speaking it is, but I think there’s a difference between acceptance and assimilation. And actually I have met LGBT people who take the stance of “this is not my defining characteristic so why would I need to surround myself with other people who are gay / bi / trans”. And while there is also a difference between being gay / bi / trans and being queer — I mean I think a desire for queer friendships might be part of it — and I guess it’s not for me to speculate on those people’s situations or emotions, I will just say I am so so grateful for my queer friends, and to answer your question, no I would not be who I am without them. They have given me an education, a safety net, and shown me a world of possibility. Many of my straight friends have actually done this too, and I get different things from different friendships, but in a time when rights are so precarious and we are facing so much resistance to the gradual erosion of gender norms, I am particularly grateful, for the continuous learning (and patience that comes with it), the solidarity and the joy friendships like ours provide. It’s exactly like you said: as well as giving us the space to try to be better, queer friendships allow us to be shame-bags, fuck-ups, imperfect.
I guess I’ll end on a quote cause I just said something so cheesy and world peace I might as well lean into it now. Here’s one I love from Jack Halberstam:
“The concept of practicing failure perhaps prompts us to discover our inner dweeb, to be underachievers, to fall short, to get distracted, to take a detour, to find a limit, to lose our way, to forget, to avoid mastery, and with Walter Benjamin, to recognise that ‘empathy with the victor invariably benefits the rulers’. All losers are the heirs of those who lost before them. Failure loves company.”
;)
XXX