8/16/2023 0 Comments Indigo girls gay![]() It would be so much easier.” I’d even said it myself. ![]() Lesbians have historically been portrayed as evil, tragic (think Tara and Willow’s romance arc in Buffy the Vampire Slayer), or as commodities for the male gaze (think the fetishization of queer women in girl-on-girl porn).Īmong my friends, an idealized but no less shallow view of romance between women persisted: Before coming out, I’d heard friends who were complaining about guys say, “God, I wish I liked girls. Throughout much of their career, they sang of romantic relationships between women at a time when representations of them existed at the extremes. They both came out publicly in 1988, a year after Strange Fire’s release, during a time when being anything but straight and cisgender was still viewed as an abomination or illness by the majority of our country. ![]() Ray and Saliers, friends since childhood, started making music together at their high school in Georgia. The Indigo Girls rose to prominence in the late ’80s as a folk rock duo with a queer, political lens. Tim Mosenfelder/Corbis Entertainment/Getty Images Ray (left) and Saliers (right) at an early-aughts benefit concert. At its heart, this is what powerful art can do: show us a truth we hadn’t been able to pinpoint and give us words for experiences we haven’t yet made sense of. Now, 35 years since the release of their first full-length album, Strange Fire, the Indigo Girls are still articulating experiences into songs, and for a new generation of listeners. Ray’s song gave me permission to see queer relationships for what they were: sometimes messy, complicated, and painful - like any other relationship. I, in turn, could hold culpability in the fallout with my friend. Queer women - the ones I loved, the ones I idolized - could be imperfect, even villains. Ray’s growled lyrics made something inside me come undone: “She’s got a case against me, a jury of our peers, and the rage of the righteous screaming in her ears.” The narrator was claiming wrongdoing, at least to a degree. That summer, I heard Amy Ray, one half of the Indigo Girls with Emily Saliers, perform the woeful rock ballad “ Don’t Give That Girl a Gun” from their 1997 album, Shaming of the Sun. What’s worth acknowledging, though, is that underneath my internalized belief about dating as a disabled woman was the assumption that queer relationships between women never ended poorly. For months, the fallout was all I wrote about, trying to make sense of who I was by piecing together an identity I’d long embraced - my disability - with one I was still learning to inhabit. I don’t know the extent to which this is true, but I do know that internalizing this belief laid the groundwork for the rejection to hurt more and for my self-perceived worth to shatter. “Girls are more open to different types of abilities,” she’d said. Some hurts have more layers than others: A few weeks earlier, a friend of mine who, like me, uses a wheelchair, told me she thought it was easier for disabled women to date other women than men. My sobs over the phone to my mom were enough to rouse my roommate from her room she came out and wrapped her arms around me without knowing what was wrong. After weeks of pretending everything was fine, I finally snapped, spilling my hurt and anger to her in another heated conversation. We attempted to draw boundaries to keep our friendship intact. I denied my feelings until I couldn’t any longer, then hid them from her until a shot of Jameson and a feeling of recklessness propelled me to an admission. It was 2016 I was living in Iowa City and had, over the course of a college semester, fallen for a friend and classmate. I saw the Indigo Girls perform live the same year I came out to myself. ![]()
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