"I think they're . . . lesbians"

It’s June. So I’m joining the masses and going to talk about pride. Specifically, my own queerness and sexuality and how music and other art has morphed it into whatever shape it’s taking these days and will continue to do so into my future.

As a queer millennial, when the fun question of “when did you know you were queer/gay/bi/etc.?” comes up, I think I have fairly relatable answers. I remember my cheeks feeling constantly hot while watching Xena: Warrior Princess as a kid, feeling certain that Gabrielle and Xena were about to kiss at any moment. I was embarrassed by secretly hoping for something that never came. When Crysta met Zak in Ferngully, I was immediately furious. I found her simply too beautiful and special to be concerned with a boy, and I would fast-forward through that love song where they are hopping into those color-changing pools. I didn’t want her to fall in love with someone so un-special. Just some guy. To a very young me, special magical girls belonged with other special, magical girls.

I didn’t really feel like I was a special, magical girl though. I was envious of boys with swooping shiny hair that made girls put posters of them on their walls. I remember telling everyone in fourth grade that I was supposed to be a boy and my name was supposed to be Reese. Like of Reece’s Pieces fame. By the fifth grade I was regularly wearing my hair short and spending all of my time with boys. My family called me a tomboy and would still ask me who I had crushes on. “Uhhh Scooby Doo is the only boy for me.” I’d say. Unable to articulate that my crushes were almost entirely on girls and boys felt too kindred to crush on. From the fourth through the sixth grade, my best friends were all neighborhood boys. I remember trying to dress like them and always trying to be tougher than they were. We went camping and rode bikes and had sleepovers and it all felt so normal. They all felt like brothers. Until that feeling started to get more complicated. 

In 2002, My dad bought me the Avril Lavigne CD “Let Go” I was 10. Though I don’t speculate on Avril’s sexuality and can’t find anything specifically about it on the internet, I will say that that album is Heterosexual as Fuck. Don’t ask me why, it just 100% is. I remember sitting on the floor in my bedroom listening to the song “Things I’ll Never Say” and imagining one of my boy best friends while these lyrics to this wildly longing song about unrequited love played. He would be a very important first kiss and the beginning of liking boys in a way that didn’t really fit before that. I also was about six months away from getting my first period. So when I really think about it, I was well on my way to being a full blown lesbian and then Avril Lavigne and puberty made me a bisexual instead.

After we shared two awkward kisses and nothing more that summer, that friend moved to a new school and I moved on quickly to new and more confusing crushes. Middle school stands out as being confusingly queer again after Avril brought me to boys. I wrote heartbreak poetry about a girl who was my best friend until she got a boyfriend. I remember sobbing and writing all of our inside jokes onto a yellow piece of lined notebook paper and being so shocked at how devastated I was. It was jealousy and it was confusion because yet again, someone so special had chosen to spend all of her time with some Boy. That pattern repeated a few times through high school as well. I would become obsessively close with my friends that were girls, and when they got boyfriends it felt like dying every time. No one could be good enough for them in my heart. And it’s not like I felt like I was good enough to be romantic with them - it just always felt bigger than me. Just something that didn’t make sense.

I was still so uncomfortable with the idea of queerness and couldn’t hold a single thought around it. I remember showing my uncle Tommy the song “living room” by Tegan and Sara and turning bright red when I was talking about how much I liked them because they were “really cool and talented sister and they write really great kind of dark songs and I think they’re . . . lesbians.” He giggled and said “Cool! I love lesbians.” and I was too embarrassed to say anything else about it. I did take several pictures of both Tegan and Sara to my hair cut appointments though.

Through high school, I would pick unattainable boys to think of when I heard love songs. I developed a long-time crush on the son of one of my mom’s friends from the ages of 13-16. He was a few years older than me and I’d see him occasionally at family parties. The crush started because his dad made a mixed CD for my mom that changed the trajectory of my music taste. It was a flawless three track run of an opener of Beulah’s “Emma Blowgun’s Last Stand,” Grandaddy’s “The Crystal Lake,” then Nick Lowe’s “I Love The Sound of Breaking Glass.” I played this mix cd in my car constantly, and just assumed that if his dad linked music like this, his son must too.

This thought was proved correct when after a few years I found his MySpace page and Cursive’s “The Recluse” was the song that autoplayed on it. I truly believe that I manifested this boy into being my official first boyfriend completely by accident by listening to Cursive’s “The Recluse” three times on my iPod classic before bed every single night and imagining his face for exactly three months.

That relationship was just a year, but it was full of mix cd’s and hours-long phone calls to press play on good songs, and so much new music discovery. We’d spend hours digging through the used CD’s at Graywhale and the ones at the library - hungry for sounds that could articulate the feeling of falling in love

for the first time. I remember hearing The Dirty Projectors album “Bitte Orca” on the day it came out, as well as the Department of Eagle’s “In Ear Park” with him - both of us eyes wide and jaws dropped at my kitchen counter as the guitars in Cannibal Resource swooped in electric and crunching through tiny laptop speakers.

During that relationship I remember rolling some queer ideas around on my tongue, running my teeth over words like “bisexual,” but still not finding a place to bite down yet. My MySpace page said something corny like “I could find love anywhere, whether it’s the girl making my coffee or the curly haired boy down the street.” So it was there, I just didn’t really have any examples of it yet to know that that could exist. My loves for boys up until that point felt so real, and my loves for the girls in my life felt so much bigger than friendships, but I had examples of adult lesbians in my life and loads of examples of straight people, and I didn’t really think you COULD be something in between, so I stuck with what everyone assumed.

My first kiss with a girl I liked wasn’t until my 21st birthday. And because I was drunk, I didn’t know how to talk about it the next day. I felt confused but I wanted to hang out again. I remember being met with an eye roll and something being muttered about “straight girls all being the same.” It was at that point that I felt like I didn’t have a place within queer spaces. I would listen to my then lesbian coworker play Tori Amos on a regular basis and talk about his relationships with women and I didn’t relate to a lot of what he said. So I sort of just leaned into the straight parts of me that would guide my next few years.

It turns out that when you don’t talk about something within yourself for a lot of years, it tends to come out in a pretty messy and explosive way. Especially when you are living your early twenties like you’ve got it all figured out. I really thought I did. By 25 I was getting married and had bought a house and was starting a job that has turned into my career for almost a decade. I think I was hesitant to figure out a lot of stuff about myself, and being on the relationship escalator of what everyone expected me to do felt really easy. I was good at living up to expectations.

In 2017, I experienced the death of my stepdad Mark. He’d been an incredibly supportive and loving presence in my life since I was born and the loss was devastating and horrific to experience. After losing him, I leaned into the life I’d built for myself in a big way. I didn’t allow myself room to feel. I didn’t process much of the loss for a year.

In 2018, I met a girl at work that broke me open. I felt an emotional connection to this person that I’d never felt before. All of my relationships have a pretty musical aspect to them - I have a hard time dating anyone who doesn’t have some overlap in the music I love because it’s so important to me - but this person loved the same songs I loved in the same ways I loved them like no one ever had before. She felt like my musical soulmate. We were also able to talk about emotions and loss and grief in a way that I hadn’t been able to for a long time, and she was an out lesbian who I related to when she’d talk about relationships a lot. I cannot listen to Valley Queen’s entire album “Supergiant” or Hop Along’s “Bark Your Head Off Dog” without being transported to my bicycle in the summer of 2018 - listless and alive and terrified of what speaking up about what I was feeling meant for the life I’d been hiding myself in for years. The process of meeting her woke me up after a long, depressed time and ultimately speaking up about what I was feeling for her was the first domino in a long line of dominos that landed at the end of my marriage.

After 2018, I was able to call myself queer for the first time in a way that felt true to my heart. I started calling myself bisexual. I can’t say that since then I’ve been confident and clear in my sexuality. I’m not. In fact, similar patterns of hiding parts of myself away and bringing them to the surface again and again has been something surprising to navigate through the years. I thought I would have come out at 26 and things would have been smooth sailing from there on out. But at 32, I’m always “figuring something out” when it comes to queerness, and I can’t even begin to mention gender here because this is already too long! But the confusion and the heartbreak that comes with all human relationships has never outweighed the beauty and security I feel in a room with other queer people. The ability to hold the complex, sticky, messy parts of each other. To give each other the grace to change and grow, to revert back to old habits and discover new parts of ourselves- that all feels so inherently queer to me - no matter your gender or the gender of the people you love. My labels will continue to change and they’re only a conversation starting point anyway - but I know that as I continue to “figure it out,” music will continue to play an integral role in giving me a vehicle for emotions, especially ones that might be harder to articulate or too big just yet to hold. Happy pride, loves. I am so proud to be on a constant journey of self-discovery with you all.