Queer Songs For Straight Girl Singers
These women loosened my voice and blew up my world in the process.
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Even now I can still feel it in my throat, my teenage voice, the one I was trained to use in only certain ways, at certain times, on certain stages. My voice was a Bonsai tree that was endlessly shaped, sheared and clipped, femininity by a thousand cuts. Pretty pretty pretty, or don’t bother opening your mouth. I grew up in a family of classical musicians who couldn’t fathom any other kind of musical education. Classical singing is brutally conformist, and gender policing runs rampant in its ranks. The classical music industry prizes pretty, femme women and girls, never “vulgar”, always “tasteful” in their presentation. I dressed, spoke, and sang accordingly. My voice felt small and pretty and completely dissociated from my body and my soul.
Yet a current of yearning, of craving ran hot in my blood as a teenager. I felt no one could see who I really was, a massive monster of appetites, stumbling around with my arms outstretched and my voice locked down. Words would rise up into my mouth and crouch on my tongue, words about what I longed to explore and understand through sex, love and connection, but I couldn’t push them out. Sometimes a strange shaking took hold of my hands and weakened my grip. I couldn’t hold on to my glass at dinnertime, and it would slip from my grasp and shatter. Every month, right before I was about to bleed, the shaking would move into my hips. I felt powerful energy suspended in my pelvis, the energy of Shakti, as I’d read in a book. Self-steered orgasm pacified but could not cure the issue. There was nothing to do but wait for sex to arrive.
The minute Han Solo came on screen and started bantering with Leia, I knew instinctively what I wanted from men. Not a domestic life with marriage and children, but an adventure that would provide artistic inspiration, spiritual connection, soothing comfort, and animal joy. There was no one to talk to about this instinct, and the engine of lust that powered it. Girls were not allowed to be aggressive or horny. The terror of being labeled a slut hovered in the air around us. The exact rules were never made clear, but if we deviated from expectations about our behavior, the social consequences could be dire. This was also the height of the AIDS era, when sex could literally kill you, and that fear was baked into every single Sex Ed class I ever took in high school. Condoms for everyone, but no talk of pleasure, or connection, or spiritual experience (or Queerness, for that matter). We were all supposed to proceed into the sexual realm with extreme caution.
In the thick of all this, something else was happening. A preliminary feminist scaffolding was starting to form in my psyche. The concept of feminism flowed in through the usual GenX channels: stories of yesteryear from the women in my family, TV episodes where women took a stand against an unfair Patriarch, books I found in friends’ mothers bookcases during snooping sessions when I stayed overnight at their houses. In school our history teachers would brush over feminism, briefly, when they taught about the 1960s, just another quaint relic of the past. You could catch a glimpse of feminist energy in TV commercials where women wearing blazers opened the doors of big office buildings, presumably walking into work. Sometimes fathers would talk about the feminist effect of women in the workforce in dark, tense voices, full of quiet but gritty resentment.
The sum total of all these bits and pieces was still blurry, but the urgent need for gender equality made instant and crystal-clear sense to me. The idea that women should push back against sexist societal dictates that severely limited our power and agency was unquestionable. But I had big questions about the other thing, the role of men in all of this. In particular, I was stumped by the sexual part of the feminist project.
I began to recognize how much sexist structures benefitted men, and how little they seemed to care about changing the status-quo. If that wasn’t bad enough, all the girls and women I knew were obsessed with shaping ourselves into objects of male desire with their bodies, hair, makeup and way of talking. Even if we wanted to deviate from the template, there were no prominent cultural figures to imitate, no examples of alternative ways that women could approach and couple with men on our own terms. I became more and more confused and disheartened. How were women supposed to engage the men we wanted to fuck, and get pleasure and comfort and inspiration without falling into sexist patterns of relating? Who made this shitty paradigm? The entire thing seemed risky, even rigged, and the idea that I would be enmeshed with it for my whole life felt exhausting and claustrophobic.
As always, when I was anxious, I sang to myself. Not the songs I was learning in my classical voice lessons, which felt like singing through a keyhole. I loved pop music more than anything on Earth, and I could memorize whole pop songs almost instantly. The airwaves were still dominated by men, but some women made it through. My voice felt a bit looser, more alive inside their songs, and the things they sang about were compelling. Madonna, Annie Lennox of Eurythmics, Janet Jackson and Sinead O’Connor sounded like they called the shots with men. I rotated their cassettes through my Walkman every week. Even their heartbreak ballads sounded strong, like they could bounce back from pain and vulnerability as soon as the song was done. This was a kind of beginner feminism that I could understand, but it didn’t actually solve the larger problem of the sexist status-quo that permeated male/female relations. It showed only a single, narrow path through the maze. I wanted to know why the maze existed in the first place, and if anything could be done to blow it up.
These questions burned like fire in my heart and mind. I took as many music and art classes as I could cram into my schedule, searching for a way to release the pressure. Art class was the only place where we were allowed to listen to our Walkmans. I sat beside a shy, wheat-blond boy whose eyes almost never left the big jocks that sat up front. They drew lewd cartoons on their desks with permanent markers while the rest of us hunched over our paints, zoned into our headphones. The blond boy got up to use the bathroom and asked me to watch over his Walkman while he was gone. I strapped his phones to my head and found the voice of Amy Ray. She sang a song called, “Blood and Fire” that sounded like she’d been slashed and burned, but survived both with genuine wisdom. Her voice was unpretty, threadbare, and I could feel my pain through the holes in its weave. I bought the same Indigo Girls tape that very day and wore it out by the end of the school year.
That summer there was a spontaneous road trip to the mountains with a few neighborhood friends. Halfway up the road most radio stations faded to static, but the University station stayed steady. As we putted up the steep hills, Melissa Etheridge sang “No Souvenirs” with a voice that sounded like lightning coiled in a thundercloud. My arm burst forward from the back seat and cranked up the volume. She knew something, I could feel it. She had found wild freedom in desire, and led with it shamelessly. Her voice had courage that I could almost taste in my mouth when I sang along with her.
Grade Twelve finally came to an end. After graduation I spent a gap year working as a hostess in a busy tourist restaurant downtown. It was a hot, humid summer and the place had no air conditioning. To cool off we had to walk through the narrow, greasy kitchen out to the shady parking lot. On my breaks I would sit on the hood of the owner’s car and chat with one of the cooks, a woman in her 40s with short spiky hair and piercings up and down her ears. Every day after her shift was done she got in her car and blasted the same song as she drove off. Weirdly it started with an accordion, then a woman’s voice came through, not singing but crooning. Her pitch was absolutely perfect, something I could appreciate from my classical training. Yet her tone was muscular, not merely pretty but fucking gorgeous. I finally asked the cook about the song, and the next day she grabbed my Walkman out of my hand and installed kd lang’s “Constant Craving” inside it. The lyrics were simple but astounding. The magnet pulling souls toward truth grabbed me in its tractor beam, vibrating my bones.
I loved their songs, but it took some time to understand the romantic context that these women sang about. The airwaves were publicly straight, even as George Michael, Freddy Mercury, Pet Shop Boys, and Culture Club produced global mega-hits. These men were powerful superstars who had protection from the music industry, which was deeply invested in the lie of their public sexuality. But you could see right through it if you knew how to look.
Queerness in the women of this era was much harder to spot, at least for straight, femme girls like me. In every love song there is a you, the object of the singer’s affection. After high school my friend group expanded to include kids who were definitively un-straight. I found my same Indigo Girls, Melissa and kd tapes in their cars, and hearing my new friends sing along suddenly made the you in those songs come clear. A weird and wonderful expansion of the world began to take shape.
These women are not singing about men! I walked around the neighborhood with my headphones on, grinning to myself. The truth of it was so powerful. The thought of living as a lover without men in the equation made me giddy. I knew who I was, and I wasn’t gay. But the love songs of these lesbians revealed an alternative to the maze of sexist male/female dynamics that had tormented me. For the first time I could see how a new paradigm of human existence might take shape, one that did not automatically default to the needs, wants, and demands of male desire. More kinds of sexuality, love and relationships could loosen the vice grip that Patriarchy had on every aspect of culture and society. Men might be able to drop the constant fronting of control, and be unafraid of their own emotions. Women might get to be openly lustful, messy, unconcerned about conventional standards of beauty and behavior. When I really thought about it, the lesbians in my social circle were already doing this. They were outside the maze, off the map, in a brave new world that they created for themselves.
Their courage was dazzling, and it had a powerful and lasting effect on me. During that time I also started writing my own original music (I taught myself to play guitar from an Indigo Girls song book), and began to perform and make records. Little by little, my voice started to get free. Sometimes I would add a cover by Indigo Girls, Melissa Etheridge or kd lang to my sets, and there were always women in the audience who cheered and hollered appreciation for those songs. When the Lilith Fair era dawned and women became a more powerful gender in the music business, each of those singers got more famous and gained global recognition, which was truly delightful to see.
I’m still here inside the maze working my way through as best I can, but I always believed in the other, outer territory, and I still do. I offer sincere gratitude to the women whose songs made it visible to my eyes, and much love and respect for all the Queer singers. Your voices have always mattered.
You can learn more about my work as a Power Voice Coach for Career Women here.
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