Queer Intentions: A (Personal) Journey Through LGBTQ+ Culture

Journalist Abraham debuts with an astute and freewheeling survey of LGBTQ communities in Europe and America. Forced by a painful breakup to contend with the choice between “queerer ways of living” and conformist “heteronormativity” in her own life, Abraham set out to better understand “what the LGBTQ+ people before me had been fighting for: our right to be the same as everyone else, or to be different.” Her profile subjects include a drag queen in L.A. who bemoans the commercialization of drag; a 50-something DJ in London’s gay club scene; a Serbian trans-rights activist; and a “queer, genderless, three-parent commune” in Sweden. Abraham’s conversations touch on same-sex marriage, pride parades, the disappearance of gay bars, YouTube vloggers (“one of the places where young people were going to learn to be gay”), and the phenomenon of RuPaul’s Drag Race. An excellent interviewer, Abraham gives her subjects the space to reveal themselves, then mines their discursive conversations for astute insights, such as the importance of gay bars in providing “a place to actually do gay rather than simply be gay.” The result is a stimulating and authentic account of queer life today. (Nov.)