STUDIO

I’ve had one favorite band for nearly my whole life. But if you ask people in my life who it is, many of them wouldn’t know. I learned early to be a secretive fan, and like many things you learn early, I never really stopped. Why was it a secret? In a word, homophobia. The band? The Indigo Girls. “Lesbians?” you might ask. “Who cares about you liking the folk music of two lesbians?” Welcome to growing up in the rural Midwest.

It was 1992. I was eleven. Someone made a cassette tape copy of the new Indigo Girls record “Rites of Passage” and sent it to my mother, who started listening to it in the car as she ran us around town, took us to the lake or our grandparents’ house. We always sang in the car–my mother, my sister, and me. We listened to the radio, but mostly we listened to my mother’s cassette tapes. Bonnie Raitt. Anita Baker. K. D. Lang. Linda Ronstadt. Tracy Chapman. But “Rites of Passage” was a different experience for me. I became interested in a way that I wasn’t interested in the others–like it was a special puzzle meant for me to decipher. “Are these men or women singing?” I remember asking early on. I’d asked the same question about Tracy Chapman. The female singers on the radio–Mariah Carey, Madonna, Amy Grant–sounded feminine. But the women on these tapes were … different. Their voices were lower, stranger, and weren’t sweet, pretty, cute, flirty, or enticing. Sometimes they were angry. Sad. Or enticing but in a lower register, which felt … different.

I eventually stole my mother’s copy of “Rites of Passage,” and kept it until I bought my own. I listened to it on my Walkman everywhere I went, and whenever I was alone in my room. Even on family vacations I would stay up late into the night, listening when everyone else was asleep. I knew every word. And I loved singing along to this record particularly, when I was able to. I liked listening all the way through singing the Emily lines of the songs, in Emily’s register, and then again singing the Amy lines of the songs, in Amy’s register. It was deeply comforting in a way that nothing else was.

I tried introducing the record to my childhood best friend. She didn’t seem particularly interested. Then one day she told me, “My mom says I can’t listen to that tape, and you shouldn’t either. They’re perverts.” I felt my stomach fall to the ground. I couldn’t process what she’d said right away, but I knew she’d said That Word. And connected That Word to a thing I loved. I felt something that I’d felt before, and would feel very, very often in my youth: terror at the possibility that I was being perceived as a pervert. I wasn’t even sure what a pervert was, but I knew it was the absolute worst thing someone could be. “I didn’t know that,” I said weakly.

I went home and asked my mother, “Are the Indigo Girls perverts?” She frowned at me and I told her what had happened. She sighed. “No, they are not ‘perverts.’ The two women in the Indigo Girls are lesbians. That means they love women, have relationships with women, have sex with women–instead of men.” And while this wasn’t the first time I’d been introduced to the concept of lesbianism, it was a shock that I finally “knew” lesbians, and that they had come to mean a lot to me without my knowing this seemingly important piece of information. I admit that I felt despair in that moment, and disappointment in Emily and Amy, like they’d let me down and made me vulnerable to attack. I think I felt tricked.

“How do you feel about that?” I remember my mom asking. “I don’t know,” I said honestly. “Well, think about it,” she said, and moved on to something else. And I did think about it. I tried not to listen to them. I tried to associate them in my mind with perversion, like my friends would. I believed that the most important thing in the world was for my friends and classmates to like me, and not think bad things about me. I also have many conservative family members, and I knew they would reject and distance themselves from me for liking them too. But I also cared too much about the record to stop listening to it. After a week or two I talked to my mom about my conundrum. Her fateful words: “You don’t have to tell people you listen to them, or talk about them with your friends. It can just be your personal thing.”

So that’s what I did. Middle school came and went. I saved up money for their new records, and listened to them constantly when I was alone. I never discussed them with friends or family other than my mom and sister, and I never took the cassette or cd cases with me anywhere. I just hoped no one would look at what was in my music player. I had long bus rides to and from school, and I sat against the window looking out and listening, trying not to mouth the words. In high school this continued. I made an effort to become a fan of other bands my friends liked. And while I did have a genuine appreciation for some of those bands, it wasn’t remotely the same thing. And it never has been, with any other band.

You might be thinking: “This level of concealment seems like a bit of an overreaction. What’s the worst that would’ve happened if people had seen your Indigo Girls tapes? They would’ve made fun of you? Called you a lesbian? Called you a pervert? Those are just words. Couldn’t you stand up to them?” And the answer is no. Absolutely not. It was already bad enough, being the person they saw me for. Adding this to the picture would’ve annihilated any ability I had to continue “flying under the radar.”

I mean, I was a dork. I was extremely emotionally sensitive, and although I tried so, so hard to hide it I never could. I was a walking open wound, and it was obvious. I was painfully shy but tried to overcome it through nervous talking. Every emotion I had flashed clearly across my face at every moment. Embarrassing me, making me feel angry but powerless, making me cry, was very easy. Boys would shove me down in the hallways, just to laugh. Slam my hand in my locker door. Trip me. Yank the collar of my shirt back. Shout horrible things about me in the hallways, to see my face turn red. I was terrified every day. And I was already getting called a “pervert”–but just at the normal amount that dorks were called perverts. I wanted to stay at that level of pervert-shaming. Because I saw what happened if you did or said anything to fuel “perversion” rumors.

For example, in high school two female athletes were seen kissing in the back of the team bus. The next day at school I watched as everyone around me seized on this information with eager loathing and ridicule. “That’s disgusting.” “She has always been crazy.” “I always knew she was a pervert. She tried to look down my shirt once.” “I can’t believe I’ve slept over at her house.” Looking back now, I find it hard to believe my memory: which is that the two girls were suspended from school and benched for the season. That can’t be true, logically–it is so extreme, even knowing what I know about my town. But even if it’s not true, it shows you the paranoid level at which I catalogued the event in my mind: Any act of lesbianism no matter how seemingly innocent would result not just in social ostracizing, but also systemic punishment and (it seemed at the time) lifelong consequences. From that time on they were forever (in high school years, at least) associated with that “incident,” and rejected by many of their lifelong friends. At least, this is how I remember it.

I grew up in a small rural town in a deeply red part of the state. There were no residents who were visibly out. My father believes that no gay people live there. I’m not sure what it’s like now (I got the hell out), but back then homophobia was in the water supply. The only synonyms for “gay” were “weak” and “perverted.” Anyone whose sexuality was remotely in question (I can think of a few teachers here, for example) had to go out of their way to either emphasize the heteronormativity of their marriages, or they lived very, very reclusively. When boys were beat up by other boys, they were always called “faggot” during the process. To allow yourself to be seen as even potentially gay was to invite physical and verbal violence upon yourself.

One funny thing about me and my experience in this context is: While I eventually came to identify as queer, I am not a “lesbian.” And back then I wasn’t even interested in sex, let alone whether it was with a supposed Group A or Group B. I was only interested in being liked and accepted, and being seen as liked and accepted. And whatever I could do to make that happen, I tried to do. I liked boys who were nice to me, which was a very rare thing. I don’t think I felt true sexual attraction toward anyone until college. I felt totally alone, alien, and was functioning at a survival level, trying not to get beat up, and trying to find friends who would accept me. I never did–at least not back then. But I had the Indigo Girls.

So what is it about them then, if I’m not a lesbian? As if their music can be narrowed to only that topic, which is utterly ridiculous. For me they are the complete package: talented lyricists, technically sophisticated and polymathic musicians, devoted activists, and thoughtful intellectuals. They taught me so many things that school couldn’t or wouldn’t, and hooked me into fascinating historical specificities through their songs’ depth. Galileo. Reincarnation. The biblical prophets. The history of Wounded Knee. Leonard Peltier. Faye Tucker and anti-death penalty activism. Meridel Le Sueur and working class culture. Virginia Woolf and her amazing diaries. They brought a richness to my pre-college intellectual life that I wouldn’t have had otherwise. And they matched my emotional and sensory sensitivity to the physical world in a way that nothing else did.

But perhaps most importantly, to me, is a quality they possess that is so truly, truly rare in this world, rare in music, rare, it seems, even in activism. They are unfailingly earnest. I find it difficult to express how precious this is to me. Because I am also earnest by nature, but feel I have allowed this cynical world to crush that part of me, to ridicule it and scorn it until my earnestness became a small, tight knot buried deep inside me. And I see them, watch them, listen to them persist in their earnestness, their openness and vulnerability, and I find it so beautiful and inspiring. They remind me that it is possible to live in this world while sharing your rawest feelings and beliefs, your dorkiness and your sentiment, your fears and your struggles against shame–and turn it all into a gorgeous lifelong project that you offer to the world, hoping for love and connection to prevail over hate, but doing the work regardless. That is why my love for them became life-long.

My Top Ten Favorite Indigo Girls Songs, in chronological order and not ranked (because narrowing it to ten was difficult enough):

• I Don’t Wanna Know (though I love the live version on 1200 Curfews better than the original)

• Closer to Fine

• Three Hits

• Joking

• Cedar Tree

• Touch Me Fall

• Get Out the Map

• Hey Kind Friend

• Sister

• Dairy Queen