Andrea Lawlor

“I like pleasure! I mean, I'm queer because I find it fun to be queer, not because it makes me feel virtuous to be queer, not because I was "born this way." I don't care at all about why I'm queer; I feel very lucky to have this life, and that's it. Of course, many of us have struggled mightily, and we also have access to such particular pleasures, so many cultural traditions centred around sex and art and beauty and new ways of doing things. As the Pet Shop Boys said, "we were never being boring."”

“I had never identified as a lesbian; I liked how the word "queer" signalled transgressive desire without gendering me. I hung out with lots of queer men, and found something closer to my reflection in gay male culture, probably because I could identify with the combination of queerness and masculinity more than with lesbian culture (though I was primarily dating lesbians).”

“... we're in a rapidly unfolding global emergency. Why are we talking about this? You know what a pressing feminist issue is? Global climate change. Seriously, excluding trans women from spaces should not be near the agenda. It's obscene.”

“It’s hard for me to understand when people are calling some of these trans exclusionary people, "radical feminists" – I really always bristle at that. I don't think they're either radical or feminists. It's a real misnomer from my perspective.”

“And then meanwhile, the AIDS crisis is going on. There's a ton of activism, and some of my friends were a little bit older and were already going downtown to Act Up meetings. So I started doing that and that was really how I came into queer life, through that kind of radical organising. That was a really exciting place, because it was people working together across their differences to make change. It was a coalition: lots of different people working together with a shared enemy. It's a model which is obviously super relevant today.”

“I feel really excited to have found a way to have an adult queer life that feels great and rich, really different from what I thought was possible and also specifically queer. Chosen family, kinship, living arrangements, parenting roles, it all feels like, 'So this is one thing you can do and you can do it in a queer way.' And that's kind of amazing. I feel that every good thing that has happened in my life has come from being queer.”

“My kid's still pretty young, but my partner and I feel strongly about trying to make as much room as possible for liberation in terms of gender and socialisation, so that our kid doesn’t have to essentially have their spirit crushed at this early age. I think there's all these ways in which little kids get boxed in. Maybe it's a gift of being in a queer family, that you get a little more space to just be a person or a creature for longer. And it's all going to come in, we're not bigger than socialisation, we know it. But trying to make that space feels like a part of parenting”

“Finding a word that fits right is not my biggest concern, but I think it's a valuable thing and non-binary is useful. For me I say 'trans-ish'. Transmasculine works for me, if trans is a real umbrella term. I've got a number of friends my age or older who have a similar gender situation, who are using they/them pronouns or have switched recently. I'm just really grateful to young people for making that a viable thing. Pronouns have not been a place where I've put my energy and yet I've benefited from other people's energy.”

“Coolness is a big problem in queer life, always being attracted to the shiny thing and not always necessarily being kind.”

“At 18, 19 queer theory felt really glamorous and the place to get answers, and I feel like I understood about 1% of what I was reading. Barthes really spoke to me, Judith Butler's work felt highly important and I'm sure I still don't really understand it and that's become OK with me over the years. Queer theory was just really cool.”

“Sex is a part of life. I think pleasure's really important. I feel that our queer and trans cultural heritage is to prioritise pleasure and self-fulfilment, self-knowledge and art and humour – those seem like really good things to me.”

“I tried outlining, tried to understand three-act structure, tried to impose a plot, but kept coming back to my sense that I just needed to follow Paul, that my structure was going to have to be a little queer as well ... I realised my reluctance had to do with my understanding of how people change, how I've changed – really slowly, recursively, making the same mistakes over and over.”