I like to think that I’m still young. Until the pandemic hit, I was with the youth frequently. At work I was in charge of a group of teens, and on Wednesdays I led games for a middle school youth group. I had a handle on what was hip, what was trendy. I was technically an adult, but I still felt like a teenager. But recently, Olivia Rodrigo has dragged me, kicking and screaming, into adulthood.
Our first run-in was on Twitter. People I follow, people I respect, were tweeting about this new song that was speaking to them. They described hearing the song as a sort of cathartic experience, and I am famously addicted to catharsis. So I pulled up Spotify, and I typed in “Driver’s License”. And something horrible happened. I didn’t get it.
Let me make this clear: the song is really good. The lyrics are strong, the hooks are catchy, and the bridge is stronger than most of the ones I used to cross while driving through Pittsburgh. Olivia Rodrigo will probably be huge, and if/when Jack Antonoff gets his claws into her, she’ll be a force to be reckoned with. My problem is not with the song.
My problem is the way it made me feel, or more specifically, the ways that it didn’t. It didn’t make me sad or reflective in the ways I was expecting, and that threw me into a panic.
Even on my first listen, I knew that if “Driver’s License” had come out when I was in high school, I would have worn it out. I can see teenaged Jesse sitting in his two-door Dodge Stratus, thinking about a lost love or a broken friendship or something similarly dramatic, and sobbing. It would have gone on one of my painfully named Spotify playlists (Hollowed Out and Numb, Best Playlist Ever!!!, etc.) next to “Perfume” by Britney Spears and “Bright” by Echosmith.
But “Driver’s License” didn’t come out then, it came out in 2021, and I couldn’t bring myself to relate to it. I kept on thinking stuff like, “Oh, she’s just a kid, she’ll get over it,” or “I don’t know if it’s really as serious as all that,” and it horrified me. I remember adults saying those things to me fairly recently, and I hated them for it. How was it possible that I was now in their shoes?
I wrestled with this for a long time. I listened to the song over and over, begging for a scrap of relatability, a single lyric I could latch onto and feel with my whole heart. I didn’t want to face the painful truth: I’m too old for this song.
With a sinking feeling, I realized that it was true. Without the lens of nostalgia, this story of teenage heartbreak did nothing for me. I had become old. It was only a matter of time before I became boring as well.
Being forced to stare at my age without blinking depressed me for a while. I lamented my youth, I spent days wrapped up in daydream scenarios of what I should’ve done differently in high school, I considered calling up people I hadn’t talked to since 2015 just to shoot the shit. It was dark.
After a week or two of this, I started to come out of my funk. I heard the song again, and this time, I was shocked to feel a sense of relief that I couldn’t relate to it.
I often get so tangled up in the webs of memory and nostalgia that I forget how much I fucking hated being a teenager. Everything hurt all the time, and the slightest disturbance threatened to shatter my world.
Back then, everything felt so serious. There were so many big firsts (first kisses, first parties, first drinks and loves and heartbreaks) and each one seemed like it would last forever. Life reached a sort of stasis for four years, and everything that happened in that timeframe felt as though it would last forever. As a result, every emotion was cranked up to a dangerous level, and nearly conflict seemed life changing.
As much as I don’t want to be old, you couldn’t pay me to go back to the raging hormones, the loss of innocence, the everyday traumas of the teenage years. I started to gain some much needed perspective.
Change comes for us all when we least expect it. I could swear I was eighteen when I closed my eyes last night, eyes sore from crying over a boy who would never love me, body aching from a tough wrestling practice, mind fixated a test that hadn’t gone my way. But today, I sit here, in the same room, on the same bed. Everything around me looks like it did six years ago, but I’m not the same person. I can barely remember anything about all of those pains that I thought would hurt forever.
As I made peace with the prospect that I was only going to keep getting older until eventually I turn to dust and blow away, I revisited some of those same memories that sparked such longing a few weeks earlier, this time without the sepia-tinged filter of nostalgia.
There were some good things about that time, sure. But many of the things that I thought I missed actually kind of sucked. I was too soft back then, too afraid to show the world who I was. I was ruled by the desire to impress everyone else, and because of that, I lost parts of myself that I’ve had to spend the last six years gathering back up. I let people push me until I broke.
Objectively, that period of time was horrible for me.
Nostalgia plays some nasty tricks on us, makes us think that we’re past our prime. Then we get to the next phase of our lives and realize that we hadn’t been past our primes then, but now that we’ve realized it, it’s too late, and we discover that the phase we moved out of actually WAS our prime. It’s a vicious cycle if I’ve ever seen one.
So I have to thank Olivia Rodrigo for helping me break free of that cycle, at least for a little while. And while getting old still scares the hell out of me, its nice to know that maybe in the next phase of life, I’ll realize that my current anxieties, hurts, and fears aren’t as bad as they feel in this moment. For most of my life, nostalgia has felt like a curse. I’m ready to make it a blessing.
And honestly? It’s refreshing to be able to hear a sad song and not be able to feel every bit of it in my bones. It seems healthy. It seems like growth.
Or: I’m Begging Straight People to Either Be Nice To Me or Leave Me Alone!
This has nothing to do with anything, but do you think my dad would like this shirt if I bought it for him?
We had to participate in mock elections in 9th Grade civics class. Four parties were formed based on surveys we all had to fill out that gave our teacher a vague idea of our political leanings. I was selected as my party’s candidate due to my overwhelming charisma and overall sex appeal probably.
Before we voted, we had to present our party platform and field questions from the masses. Our party, The Neighborhood, was the only one with any sort of liberal sway, and one of the issues on our platform was apparently gay marriage, and because this was rural Wisconsin, the worst people in the world tried to crucify us.
I had to stand up there and listen to people question why the gays needed rights. The reasoning fell across a wide spectrum. One dumbass told the entire class that most gay people are actually victims of abuse and are psychologically damaged into thinking that they’re gay, and therefore, as victims of abuse, shouldn’t have rights I guess? One said lesbians only deserved rights if they were hot, which is a whole different thing to unpack.
But the most prevalent thing I heard in these little debates, and subsequently throughout high school, college, the working world, etc. had to do with personal comfort and preference. Mostly, people said “I’m fine with gay people, but they make it their whole personality”. Luckily, at this point I had not yet heard Nikki Minaj’s verse on “Monster”, which means I did not yet know that I was gay, so I wasn’t overly traumatized.
But as the years started coming (and believe you me, they don’t stop coming) and I kept hearing these lame excuses of homophobia, I started to really think about what they meant.
Before I go any further, I do want to make an open plea to the homophobes of the world to stop making all of your weird issues my problem. I am already gay and easily distracted, I cannot keep devoting brain power to stuff like this! On top of that, it’s cutting into the time I would like to spend playing Persona 5 or talking about Anya Taylor-Joy’s eyebrow work.
But until y’all stop, I’ll continue trying to spoon-feed empathy to you.
I hate when people tell me that they wish that queer people would just act less queer. It’s hurtful to hear, and it’s also very stupid. I know that it’s stupid because my straight personality is nearly identical to my gay personality. The only real difference is that I try to lower my voice a bit and talk less shit about Azealia Banks.
And you know what? People around my home town and the conservative hellscape I went to college in love me. They think I have charisma, I have moxie, I have spirit! And I act the exact same way talking to them as I do talking to my queer friends. I think that bit of information is important.
Because I know that a lot of these people would never have gotten to know me if they had known I was gay at the time we built our friendship. They never would have seen my moxie, because they would’ve snickered behind my back that I was a flamer, that I was “too gay”. The traits that make me fun to be around when I’m faking straight are the same traits that make me undesirable if I’m openly gay.
It’s honestly wild to me, and I think about this weird dichotomy a lot. Especially because people keep on telling straight Jesse that they’re fine with gays as long as they don’t act too gay. This leads into my big question: What the hell does acting gay mean? I’ve expanded my queer friend list quite a bit over the past few years, and I’ve spent a fair amount of time on the queer sides of Tinder and Bumble. And Hinge once. Never again.
In all of my time among the gays, I’ve learned something important. No two gays are alike. Because believe it or not, the LGBTQs in your life are also people. Shocking, I know.
The queers are a diverse people! We have our own factions and our own squabbles between them. There are gays that celebrate who they are loudly and unapologetically, and there are gays that you wouldn’t be able to pick out of a lineup. And, brace yourself for this one: Beyond being gay, we have a crazy wide variety personalities, of interests, of relationships with our queer identities. The only thing that all gays seem to universally agree upon is that none of them want to date me.
But people put up a kind of queer filter. They learn that a person is gay, and then view everything that person does through a lens of homosexuality. “They watch these movies because they’re gay. They like that music because they’re gay. They don’t hate themselves, so they’re obviously shoving their queerness down my throat.”
But in reality, most queer people aren’t obsessed with their queerness. We like it. We recognize that it does color our views of things and we talk openly and loudly about it. But the only people truly obsessed with our gender identities or sexualities are those that want us to hate ourselves because of them, to hide them away in shame from the world.
An exercise for the straights who got lost and ended up here: I want you to think through your recent conversations with straight people. I have a coworker (who I’m not out to) that I talk to almost daily. He’s one of those people who only likes gays that “don’t make it their whole personalities”. But if I was locked onto his sexuality the way he would be locked on to mine, I would say that being straight is his whole personality.
He talks about his wife constantly. He frequently references girls he finds attractive, past girlfriends, and Ryan Reynolds movies. His entire worldview is shaped by the fact that he’s straight. Which is obvious, because regardless of how much you want to say it doesn’t, sexuality plays a huge role in how you view the world!
If it seems like a gay person talks a lot about their experience being queer, I urge you to examine how often your sexuality influences your own speech. It’s more often than you think, but because it’s what’s “normal” to you, you don’t notice.
Add onto this the fact that most of us weren’t able to talk openly about our sexualities until we hit our late teens to early twenties. Even then, we have to constantly try to feel out new people in our lives about how much we can say. So when we can kick back and gay it up, of course we go hard! I tweet about being gay at least three times a week to make up for all the jokes I wasn’t allowed to share for the first 24 years of my life.
And at the end of the day, even if being gay is someone’s only personality trait, Who cares? Who is that hurting? We just witnessed a coup attempt by people who’s only personality trait is Donald Trump, who is not nearly as fun as being gay! We’re focusing our derision on the wrong people folks! Go after those dorks, they want to hurt people!
That’s really all I want to address today. I’m going to retreat to my gay little bedroom and think about my gay little life some more. And you know what? You can’t stop me.
In a recent friendship-ending argument, a former acquaintance accused me of self-righteousness and envy. The first charge is entirely true. I’m trying to build a brand on self-righteousness. My whole shtick would fall apart if I was ever on the wrong side of an issue and/or I didn’t make long winded posts about how everyone who has ever disagreed with me was wrong and should feel bad about it. I mean, I have a blog where I frequently discuss my trauma. Of course I’m self-righteous.
Someone told me that I’m self-righteous and judgemental, and I’m just like… yes? You haven’t picked up on this yet that’s like my whole thing
The accusation of Envy caught me off guard though. In my opinion, the only place envy belongs is onstage, fronting The Clash at Demonhead and singing “Black Sheep”. I don’t like envy. I’m not an envious person. And even worse, the thing he accused me of being envious of was another ex-friend’s upcoming MARRIAGE.
It was at this point that I knew that the person I was arguing with had never really gotten to know me at all. The Idea of marriage, especially at this Age, especially to a Republican, especially to a Woman like the upcoming marriage in question, is horrifying to me.
But I’m a reasonable man, so I did some reflection, and I found that there was, perhaps, a glimmer of truth to the accusation. I was a tad jealous, just not of the marriage. I was jealous that it was so easy for them to get married. I was jealous that they never had to worry about their marriage license being retroactively voided, or had to rush to find a spouse while they knew their union was still legal. I was jealous that they had the option to invite their entire families without any fear of repercussions.
But I was still a bit indignant. It was like being told that I’m jealous of John Lennon because he got assassinated, when obviously I’m jealous of John Lennon for having a wank with Paul McCartney in his prime. At the root of the statement, there may be some truth, but the explanation is so wildly off base.
Noted, that twinge of jealousy had nothing to do with the argument (he was angry that I’d told this other person that having a full-sized wedding at the height of a pandemic was irresponsible). But it made me think about and reflect on marriage critically in a way I hadn’t before.
You see, I’m what most Doctors would call “Sexually Repressed to the Point of Concern”. I am famously a virgin, and the very thought of sex often makes my tummy turn. Some theorize that this Repression is the result of my upbringing steeped in purity culture. I would say that its actually a natural response to having heard the song “Two Weeks” by FKA twigs when I was fourteen and too fragile to process it, resulting in the idea that sex is something Terrifying and Maybe Painful?
Whatever the reason, I’m scared of sex, which I’m told is a part of Marriage? And the only thing that scares me more than sex is the idea of making a decision to stay with one person forever. I have major commitment issues as a result of appropriating straight culture for twenty-three years.
I wish this was just a lame excuse, but I’ve ghosted every guy who’s ever shown an interest in me. And they’ve all been really great, and I was very excited at the prospect of getting to know them, but once they returned my interest, or were nice to me in any way shape or form, I was too terrified to engage any further. I’m a monster is what I’m saying. A cute and cuddly monster, like Elmo or Grimace, but a monster nonetheless.
All this to say, unless I finally find a Therapist that I click with and we make some Monumental Progress, I will probably never get married. Even if I overcome these fears and anxieties, I don’t know that marriage is really something that I want for myself. I think I’d rather have my own apartment, a strong friend group, and a rotating cast of quirky exes that my friends hate but who keep hooking me with their charms. Basically, my ideal future is living in Season One of the hit TV comedy Friends, except with racial diversity and far more lesbians involved.
Sometimes I feel like not wanting to get married is disrespectful in some way. Like, all of these people have spent decades fighting for my right to get married, and my response is just “thanks but no thanks!”
I feel like I’m disappointing my gay ancestors who had to sneak away from their families to visit their lovers on the side. Or worse, like I’m disappointed award-winning musician and Lesbian Brandi Carlile, who seems to be having a great time with the whole marriage thing.
I think about her song “Party of One” often, and the way it highlights a certain kind of pressure that I’m assuming a lot of LGBTQs feel regarding marriage, like we’ve got to make sure it works out not only for our happiness, but also to prove that we’re not a disgrace to the entire concept of marriage like we’re painted to be.
Maybe it’s just me, but I feel like if I get married, I need to make damn sure not to get divorced. That’s not really too radical of a statement. Most people don’t get married with divorce in mind. But it’s a different kind of pressure for us Gays. For gays to get married is already such a struggle. Strangers will throw every weapon in their arsenal at us to prevent it from happening. I don’t want to “prove them right” by getting married and then getting divorced.
I know that that’s silly, and maybe it’s just the perfectionist in me talking, or the people pleaser that resides deep in a pit where I tried to bury him after my senior year of high school. But this added pressure I feel around marriage might tie back to my fear of commitment and my aversion to the thought of marriage. Who’s to say?
Unfortunately, despite all of my hangups around marriage, the thought of having a wedding still appeals to me for some reason. I think it might be because a big wedding, full of dancing and loved ones and food that’s either burnt or raw depending on which side of the pan you pull from, is the last bridge to the Heterosexual Lifestyle that I haven’t burned.
I know that longing for a wedding stems from watching too many rom-coms, or reading too many British novels. I tell myself this over and over again, but I still find myself sad that even if I would choose to get married, my wedding will likely be a small affair. Most of my family would never come to a gay wedding, and most of my former friends think similarly.
But it’s still fun to imagine what my wedding day would look like, to imagine what song I’d walk down the aisle to (I will be the one walking down the aisle because I’m addicted to attention). I have a plan for the first dance (we’ll walk out to the floor and get into slow dance position as “Can I Stay” by Ray LaMontagne begins, but after a moment, the music will switch to “Jig of Life” by Kate Bush as me and my new husband burst into an intricate Irish Stepdance choreographed by my friend Ashley). I’ll have spice cake as an option.
You know what? I’m going to work to overcome my fears so I can get myself the wedding I deserve. If you follow me on Twitter, you’re automatically invited. As you’ve likely deduced from the last paragraph, it’s going to be marvelous fun. And we’ll all be as self-righteous as we want, all while shedding any last shreds of envy that have clung to our power suits (BTW the dress code is power suits for everyone, this is not optional).
If I could have dinner with one person, I’d probably choose the Pope. I don’t have much reasoning behind this honestly. I’m not Catholic, so I don’t feel like meeting him will do my eternal soul any favors or anything. But I think it would be fun to pick that holy brain of his, to see if he remembers how to talk like a person, or if he’s so used to being set so high above the rest of the faithful of the world that he no longer knows how to communicate with a single person, alone, no cameras or spectators. It would be cool to see.
Even cooler would be telling my Grandma about it afterwards. She’d be impressed, but I don’t think she’d be jealous. She’d ask me what Pope Francis had to say in the same way she’d ask me what Aunt Tracy said last time I spoke with her. And then she’d ask if I finally believed in Purgatory and Transubstantiation.
After that, she’d ask me to sit down and make me some cocoa, usually in the microwave, always too hot to drink, and we’d talk and laugh about nothing and everything for a few hours before I told her it was about time for me to get back home and eat supper. We’d hug and I’d drive off, and she’d turn on the radio in time to listen to the Rosary.
I guess I can do most of that without having dinner with the Pope, but I’d love to see her reaction to the news. It would probably be no more than a half-second’s flash of surprise before she regained her composure, but I’d love to see the way her eyes would shine.
It really is a shame that if she knew what I am she’d think I was going hell.
From the time I was thirteen, I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up: Straight. I wanted to have a doting wife, a couple of bratty kids, and a minor alcohol problem that we were all aware of but refused to acknowledge. A life lived exactly like my father’s and his father’s before him.
The only problem with this dream was my complete disinterest with the feminine anatomy. To this day I don’t know that I’ve seen a vagina on purpose, though I do remember being shown a diagram of the female reproductive system in 7th grade health class and being astounded that it looked so much like a spaceship.
I spent my formative years deeply ambivalent to women. I respected women and their privacy, and altogether found them superior to men, but I was more interested in being like them than being with them. When the neighbor girl “forced” me to play Barbies, I relished the opportunity to role-play as a successful businesswoman, kicking ass in sparkly pink heels.
A year later, when my mother gifted me two hunting action figures together with a box of campsite accessories, I had no interest in roleplaying the hyper-masculine hunting trips that my father always left for. Instead, I had my men strip nude and cuddle in the sleeping bag to keep warm, their smooth nether-regions jammed against each other in positions that could not have been comfortable. This was far more interesting to me.
My religious upbringing didn’t help sway my budding questions and curiosities either. I sat through sermons where the Pastor condemned the sins of the flesh, and I learned about what would happen if my sinful eyes gazed upon a woman with lust. But as far as I knew, the Bible said nothing negative about me gazing upon boys with lust, so I figured my soul was fine.
But once we reached 8th grade, it was deemed appropriate to let us know that Gay people existed, and I was taken aback. I still had no concept of what sex was, so to hear that sometimes two men engaged in this abstract thing designated by God to take place between a man and a woman? Shocking. Even more shocking was learning that sometimes men fell in love with other men, and in some places, they could even get married. Of course, these little tidbits were only dropped in preparation for the hard truth that such a marriage was rooted in sin, such love not true at all but a trick of the devil and a fallen world. I was disappointed to hear that, but I still wasn’t sure why.
Until all of the sudden, I was eighteen, one month away from going to college, and the thought of continuing to kiss my girlfriend goodnight was making me nauseous. She was one of my best friends, and I’d already told her I loved her, but when her tongue was in my mouth I found myself counting down the seconds until I could break free. (This is nothing against her! I’m sure she’s an excellent kisser! But a propane heater will reject even the most premium diesel. I think.)
At first I thought that the kissing was what was making me uncomfortable. I was a child of God, and I respected the hell out of this girl, so maybe that explained my reaction. But then I found myself thinking about my other best friend, the quarterback on the football team, and how I wanted much more of him in my mouth than just his tongue.
I spent a few months trying to justify these fantasies, trying to come to any conclusion that wasn’t the obvious one. But I finally hit the point where I couldn’t lie to myself anymore, so without ever using the words that I was now certain applied to me, I prayed that Jesus would cleanse my filthy heart. I packed my bags at the end of the month, headed to one of the most conservative Christian colleges in the country, and hunkered down for a long four years of praying the gay away.
But a funny thing happened after I’d made my realization. The more I suppressed my true feelings, the more they started to weigh me down. I spent my first year or so of college happy, surrounded by and blending in with a crowd of Summer Camp Christians who made sure that everyone else knew how dedicated they were to Christ. And boy, were we dedicated.
I went to Bible studies and classes and found a group of friends that I thought would last forever. I flirted with both the idea of heterosexual relationships and the women who could enter into them with me. I truly thought that I was happy. But happiness that comes from denying yourself so wholly can never last.
By junior year I was so depressed that I had a mental shut down and completely stopped talking. I had to leave school for a week while a kind nurse in the psych ward helped me to regain both my words and my will to live, and a mean nurse told me to stop faking it and wasting the doctor’s time.
With these contradictory messages at the forefront of my mind, I deduced that my depression and subsequent breakdown were my punishments for carrying a sinful desire in my heart. I left the hospital armed with three new medications and the resolve to work even harder to burn the homosexuality out of my soul with the flames of The Spirit. It worked for about two months. And when it failed, I started to drink away the parts of me that I didn’t like.
By the second semester of my senior year, I was going to the bar and getting wasted every weekend to supplement the solitary drinking I did in my apartment most week nights. I was a mess, but nobody seemed to notice.
But during this time, something interesting happened. On Valentine’s Day 2019, I downloaded Tinder. And when it asked for my preferences, I finally swallowed my pride and internalized homophobia and said men.
My first match was a seminary student in Pittsburgh. He saw where I went to school and asked me where I was in my faith journey and my how my understanding of Christianity impacted my sexuality. The question scared the hell out of me, so I made up some lie about how I realized that I could have a relationship with a man and a relationship with Christ, and if people didn’t get that, that was their problem. He was impressed. I stopped responding to his messages later in the week, but my encounter with him lit a spark that I was unable to extinguish. I started to believe the lies I told him about being secure in my faith and sexuality.
As I began to go back to the Bible and read through it, I started to realize that maybe God didn’t care that much about who I slept with. And even if he did, if I still believed in Him and followed all of His other rules, wouldn’t He forgive me regardless? How all-powerful can a God be if He doesn’t even have the power to forgive a part of me that He created?
With that, my drunken escapades slowed down and took on a new form. I’d get sloshed to the point where I could barely see and then I’d come out to a random friend. I still don’t know how many people I came out to in that way, but it started to feel a little more healthy. Those nights I would go to sleep without being completely ruled by self-loathing.
One time, this fun new game led to me walking around campus with a boy until the sun started to rise. We talked and held hands and laughed for hours. He let me go on about Hunter from Tinder, who had left me on read two days prior after I told him I saw The Lego Movie 2 at the theater.
Some time around 4:00 A.M., I asked if I could kiss him, because I wanted the first boy I kissed to be special. He let me, and after I pulled away I told him that I wanted to do unspeakable things to him. He laughed and invited me to his room. Ever the gentlemen, he made me play Smash Bros. instead of letting me smash. I felt so totally at ease with myself. After that night I knew that I would never be truly happy until I could live like that all the time, openly myself, openly gay.
I knew that if I came out, God would still love me. And maybe, for the first time in my life, I could start to love myself. But I would lose the love of everyone around me. At first that seemed okay. I could handle the losses. My parents might not approve, but they’d adjust eventually. And the majority of my non-affirming friends weren’t treating me super well anyways, so I might actually be better off without them.
But then I remembered my Grandma. My favorite woman in the world. The person who I want to make proud above anyone else. She’d be worried out of her mind if she knew I was gay, knowing as she did that for a man to lie with another man is an abomination, and therefore the homosexuals rot in hell. She wouldn’t hate me (at least, I don’t think she would) but she’d never look at me the same way. Cocoa would be a thing of the past. Could I live with that?
I still don’t know if I could. It’s sick, but for a long time when she came down with the flu, or had a stroke, or fell off of a horse, I would catch myself thinking “This could be it, the start of my life!” After all, she’s 87 now, and I’m only 24, so I decided that I could wait a few more years if that meant she wouldn’t worry about me. And I’d never met a man worth risking visits with my Grandma for anyways.
I’ve heard that George Michael did something similar. Throughout the height of his career, he kept his sexuality a secret because he didn’t want his mother to worry about him catching AIDS. He was outed after her death, so she never learned his secret. When I first heard this story, I felt such a kinship. And I thought of how good we were, me and George, how selflessly we lived.
But then I really start to think about it, and I ask myself if we took things too far. Is it love to hide a such large part of who you are from a person? I’m fairly certain that it is love on our parts, but is it love on theirs?
I can’t speak for George. He’s no longer with us, but I wish he was. Maybe that’s who I’d like to have dinner with. I would die to ask him if he’d do things differently if he’d had the chance (and one of these days I will). Because I keep thinking in these circles, and I always come back to the same question: Does my Grandma love me, or does she love the person that she thinks I am? If she can’t accept this part of me, does it invalidate what she feels about me entirely?
And I’m starting to wonder if I’m receiving love from my Grandma at all. Because the Jesse that she loves, the sweet, conservative, straight boy she thinks I am, does not exist. And I have no doubt that she loves that Jesse. I can see it in the way she talks to him, the way she gushes about him to my aunts and uncles.
But he isn’t me. When she compliments him, she’s not complimenting the angry, gay, socialist man that I’ve become. She doesn’t even know me, so how can I feel that she truly loves me?
There’s a chance she could surprise me. I could bring home a man and introduce him as my fiancé, and she could invite us in to chat, get to know him and reacquaint herself with me. She could make us hot cocoa, and tell us stories, and we could laugh until we couldn’t breathe.
Or she could shut the door in my face and tell me never to come back. And the scary thing is, to her, this option might seem like the more loving option. She wouldn’t want to encourage my perversions.
That’s what terrifies me about love. In the conservative worlds that birthed me, so many people take this beautiful gift that’s been given to us all, this unmatched capacity to love, and they get to work, forging it in flame and grinding it until its sharp and deadly. They hone their love until it cuts even deeper than their hate.
Their love is cruel. It’s unforgiving and unwilling to consider the differences that make us all unique and beautiful. There’s a reason these people think the term “snowflake” is an insult. They’re terrified of the idea that every single person deserves respect and love. That’s not the way we were brought up in the midwest.
Love was always something we had to earn. We have trim down the parts of us that don’t fit, suppress the bits that make us different. We have to be someone else’s version of the perfect person if we’re going to expect them to love us.
I think that’s why me and the other queers I’ve met who had a similar midwestern upbringing are so willing to accept far less love than we deserve, certainly far less love than our straight peers expect.
Lately, I keep thinking about a lecture that I made the mistake of attending during my sophomore year of college. It was about the dangers of left-wing Christianity and how it was destroying the faith, given by a white woman with a made up name.
I was deep in the closet at the time, but already more liberal than the college would have liked (This was a low bar to clear, and at the time meant nothing more than I believed racism was real and poor people didn’t deserve to die on the streets), and another closeted friend was also at the lecture. Neither of us knew the other was queer.
I talked to them about the lecture the next day, and we both said how fair the lady was. She openly condemned homosexuality, but she did it for biblical reasons. She didn’t seem like she wanted to actively hurt the gays though.
And that’s such bullshit! We were two queer kids in a place where neither of us felt safe enough to be our true selves, and we just sat through a lecture where the speaker said repeatedly that we were the problem with the church in America. The culture of the place in which we heard this woman speak was so oppressive that we had to dance around each other with our true feelings on the lecture because we didn’t know if it was safe to reveal our queerness. At a school like that, coming out to the wrong person could lead to social isolation, loss of campus employment, or referrals to conversion therapy, not to mention casual death threats that the administration did nothing to stop.
So we sat there complimenting this lady who openly hated us, simply because she didn’t actively wish us harm.
Why did we act grateful when the people who hate us don’t openly threaten us? More importantly, why do I continue to act this way to this day? I notice this trend with my queer friends more than anyone else. We take everything that’s thrown at us, and as long as the people speaking don’t explicitly wish us death, we thank them for their kindness. And we don’t just accept the disrespect and vitriol from the openly hateful people. We accept less from the people who ostensibly love us as well.
Lately, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the night I came out to my parents. My father said I probably shouldn’t get married because he wanted me to go to heaven, and that life would probably be easier if I didn’t tell people. My mother said nothing at all, just frowned like a fish and let tears well up in her eyes. I went to sleep, and we have not talked about it since. When I told people about it, I said that it had gone well, and I believed it.
It took me almost a month to realize that I wasn’t okay with this reaction. I thought of my father’s words, how it would be easier if I didn’t tell people, and I started to question that. What exactly is easier if I spend my entire life denying who I am to the entire world? And who would it be easier for? Was he trying to protect me, or was he trying to protect himself from the teasing and ridicule that he’d receive from his morning coffee buddies?
I still don’t know, but I’m sick of settling for this kind of love. Because I’m finally getting the hint that a lack of open hatred is not the same thing as love, not the same thing as support.
All this to say, I’ve decided that I’m changing how I operate. From now on, every time I come out to a person, if they respond with that “I love you, but I don’t agree with your decisions”, I’m phasing them out of my life. Because, 1) my sexuality is not my choice, and 2) what they’re giving is almost never love. It’s barely acknowledgement. It’s an uncomfortable proclamation meant to tell me that this person will talk to me, but only so long as I live a life of celibacy and never reference my sexuality without a regretful tone.
From now on, I refuse to accept that type of love. This pseudo-love is not outright hostile, but it still hurts in a way that I don’t know how to describe. The little comments sting. And dancing around my sexuality with the people who are supposed to love me unconditionally is exhausting and painful. I’ve long since grown out of the desire to willingly hurt myself, so I’m ready to stop.
If you see the person I am, the loving friend and devoted son, the guy who gushes about Paddington and spends hours listening to “Fast Car” while making bad memes, you should know my worth. And if my sexuality makes you think that I’m inherently broken, a fallen person unworthy of love, I know that there is literally nothing more I can do to prove to you that I am worthy.
On that note, I would like to change my answer from before. I’m not going to waste my special dinner with any person in the world on someone who doesn’t love me unconditionally. Sorry Pope Francis. And sorry George Michael as well. I think I figured out the answer to my own questions.
So now, I’ll choose to eat hot wings with Azealia Banks, and I will finally get to the bottom of what happened that weekend she got trapped in Elon Musk’s house.
The year 2020 has filled me with so much angst and longing that I have dived headfirst back into loud music. Punk, the emo, DIY stuff, anything that makes me want to put my head through the wall from sheer adrenaline. My fingertips tremble just thinking about it.
These songs let me feel without thinking, let me express myself without having to look at myself critically. But every once in a while, I let myself listen to the words and dissolve into puddles.
“Drunk II” by Mannequin Pussy was the first of these aggressively angry songs to puncture me, and now I can’t stop hearing the words. The bombastic soundscapes are just a distraction, and now I listen to the song the same way I listen to Julien Baker or Phoebe Bridgers, tears rolling down my face and singing along in broken phrases.
And I love it so much. “Drunk II” is such a perfectly crafted rock song. It flies out of the gate swinging, with lyrics detailing the type of self destructive partying that we’ve come to expect from the genre. But Mannequin Pussy doesn’t bother trying to glamorize their actions. It’s fascinating though, because the most self deprecating lines are hidden in decrescendos, the lines blurring into each other, letting you sense the sadness that pervades the song but refusing to let you wallow in it.
The line that broke me the first time is so plainly spoken, and speaks to me so specifically. In the chorus, lead singer Marisa Dabice reveals the cracks in her armor and sinks into vulnerability, singing
And everyone says to me
"Missy, you're so strong"
But what if I don't wanna be?
And everyone says to me
"Missy how do you stand?
There's so much you don't see
BRUTAL.
And the whole time, the guitars are chugging along, the drums are slamming, and Ms. Dabice is just WAILING away with a vocal performance that is truly blistering. The results are a brilliant ode to the type of healing that can only be accomplished through debauchery. But there’s no promise of healing at the end. In fact, as the music ramps up at the end, the vocals settle into a repeated refrain of
Half pitcher down
I drink to drown
I am alone
Over and over again. This is a song about my favorite part of heartbreak, when everything is dark and scary and the only light is at the bottom of the bottle. It so perfectly captures the limbo of lost love, the point where everything hurts and nothing feels good. But instead of the whispery guitars that usually define songs like this, we get a certified banger. Which to me, feels like a more accurate representation of that feeling.
When I look back at the times my heart has broken, the memories aren’t sad necessarily. They’re desperate, colored with the regrets of a blur of drunken weeks. They’re delirious, swirling, and a little unhinged. They feel like this song.
My favorite lyric from this song comes from the first verse, again so blunt, again so perfect.
Do you remember the nights I called you up?
I was so fucked up
I forgot we were broken up
I still love you, you stupid fuck
Who among us can’t relate? WHO?
Hearing this line, hearing this song makes me realize that even during the times I felt most alone, I wasn’t. Other people have the same experiences, they spiral in parallel formations. These events that seem so specific at the time are really so universal. I wish I would have known that at the time.
I wish I would have realized that half of the people at the bars I would frequent were there to do the same thing. I wish we could have recognized each other, helped each other through it. More than anything, I wish that “Drunk II” by Mannequin Pussy was on the jukebox so that we could all mosh the pain away together.
Carrying on the tradition this blog was founded on: shitty fan art by Me!
I first heard of The Owl House when a bunch of conservative housewives shared articles warning parents not to let their children watch it as it allegedly glorified witchcraft and demon worship. Naturally, I started watching immediately and was transfixed by the world and its inhabitants as well as all of the loving nods to various fandoms and general nerdhood.
On the surface, The Owl House is a children’s fantasy cartoon. Luz, the protagonist, is a fourteen year old girl with an overactive imagination. She’s magically transported to The Boiling Isles and decides to stay for the summer while her mother thinks she’s at camp. During her stay, she meets a colorful cast of characters, including Eda the Owl Lady, who takes Luz in and attempts to teach her magic, and her companion King, a demon who is lovable and cuddly despite his best efforts.
This show, which started out so simple, has grown into a complex and layered narrative. The world of The Boiling Isles seems like it’s always existed and there’s a consistent feel of dangerous whimsy. The background characters are brilliantly creative little eldritch horrors that I wish were my friends, and the monsters would give me nightmares if they were presented to me in any other format.
As the first season nears its conclusion, I find myself looking forward to new episodes in a way that I haven’t looked forward to television since childhood. I’ve told friends that I’m not available to chat on Saturday evenings to make sure I don’t miss seeing new episodes as they air. I’ve watched video essays dissecting the characters (sent over by my buddy Grant, who’s love of the show goes even deeper than my own). I think about the characters often. I even named a chicken after Amity, a minor antagonist turned main characters.
Amity the chicken’s baby picture
All this to say, I was already in love with the cast and the story before August 8th, 2020, the night that changed everything.
I snuggled up in a blanket on the couch in my parent’s living room. Losing my job and living in my childhood home through the pandemic had reverted me to my teenage personality, comprised almost entirely of gay yearning and angst. Watching The Owl House was one of the few things I took genuine pleasure in.
The show’s creator Dana Terrace and the episode’s writer Molly Knox Ostertag had promised that “Enchanting Grom Fright” would be a special episode, but I was skeptical. I’ve never been a person who cared too much about dances or television surrounding dances, so I thought a prom-themed episode wouldn’t do much for me.
But Grom was different. More than just a dance, in universe Grom is an annual ritual where one student, the Grom Queen, has to destroy a monster that takes on the form of its adversary’s greatest fear before said monster escapes and destroys The Boiling Isles. Amity is crowned, and Luz offers to take her place. It’s sweet, and highlights how far Luz and Amity’s friendship has come.
And then, the unthinkable happens. The show takes a turn for the gay.
My jaw dropped. Tears began to flow freely, because I realized millions of kids across the world had just seen the same thing I did. And not behind a paywall on Netflix or Hulu. Right on Disney Channel. Accessible to anyone with basic cable, likely without a parent’s permission.
As I cried and messaged Grant, I couldn’t stop thinking about what had happened.
The Owl House wasn’t marketed as a show for LGBTQIA+ folks. As things played out, I was refreshed to see a total disregard for “traditional” gender roles and had some gay ships in my head for sure, but I never let myself believe any of them were possible. We were talking about Disney after all. While some of the more embarrassing members of my extended family think that Disney is a poisonous company spewing forth progressive propaganda in an attempt to dismantle the nuclear family, I knew that that was (sadly) not the case.
Truthfully, Disney and the other Big Media Conglomerates have been dancing around representation in cartoons since the medium’s inception. Representation has traditionally been about subtlety. It’s about coding certain characters as queer while maintaining enough plausible deniability that a midwestern housewife won’t notice. In most cases, the only chance for outright representation comes from sidecharacters or is made canon in the seriesfinale to limit potential backlash. (Note: most creators are not the ones standing in the way of increased LGBTQ+ representation, and are simply doing the best they can with what the studios will give them.)
Recently, we’ve made steps in the right direction. She-Ra and the Princesses of Power on Netflix is the single gayest piece of mainstream media I have ever seen. It’s also one of the best cartoons ever made, with thrilling action, high stakes, and complex characters. And I still haven’t seen Steven Universe, but everyone I know who has seen it says it has fantastic representation as well.
But The Owl House is the first Disney Channel cartoon to feature LGBTQ+ leads. It’s also the first cartoon I’ve seen where the queer characters aren’t already in a relationship. This opens the door to so many wonderful slow-burn storylines that queer people have traditionally had to rely on fanfic for.
Once my tears dried, I took a moment to consider the impact of this. Growing up in rural Wisconsin, I did not meet an openly gay person until I went to college. The few gay people on tv or in movies were either punchlines or punching bags. And now, one of my favorite cartoons had at least one queer character.
Conservative talking heads like to complain any time a show lets an LGBTQ+ character have screen time. When it’s a cartoon character, the complaints turn into outrage and scandal. To have a main character be gay spurs greater backlash.
Recently, CNN tweeted out an article about The Owl House and its historic representation for the Queer Community. The comments section was the flaming heap of trash that you’d expect to accompany this kind of article. What really got to me were the people saying that children didn’t need to see this kind of content, and that there shouldn’t be a potential for a gay romance between two fourteen year olds. They said the show was sexualizing children.
There are so many reasons that this is bullshit. The double standards of “sexualizing” children have been called out millions of times, but for a refresher, shows frequently depict children having heterosexual crushes/love interests/relationships/kisses/etcetera and that’s never a problem as long as the kids are straight. But if queer kids do anything remotely similar, it’s inappropriate.
But even more egregious to me than that stale argument is the thought that fourteen is too young for children to think about sexuality. When I was fourteen, I knew I was different, but I still didn’t have the words to describe how. Around age sixteen, I figured out I was gay and that I would go to hell if I ever acted upon my “sinful desires”. I was a freak, and I didn’t have any reference points in real life or in media of a gay person who was loved and accepted for who they were.
By the time I was eighteen, I had internalized years of self-loathing and homophobia that I’m still trying to work through. I became dangerously depressed and suicidal because I thought there wasn’t a place in the world where I belonged. I’d see commercials promising that “it gets better,” but there was nothing in real life or the media I consumed that supported that statement. I still carry mental (and physical) scars from that time period.
I was twenty-three before I felt comfortable enough with myself and my surroundings to come out to my friends and family. I still have one foot in the closet to protect myself from the outpouring of abuse many in my ultra-conservative hometown and conservative Christian college would heap onto my me and my family.
I can’t help but wonder what would have been different if I saw that being gay wasn’t a sentence to a life of misery. What would have happened if I had seen a gay person flourishing not in spite of their sexuality, but because they were able to be fully who they were without fear? What if the homophobic people in my life grew up watching a cartoon with a powerful, complex, and interesting gay lead character and realized that a person’s sexuality wasn’t something to bully them for? What if they grew up knowing that being gay was normal?
What if I didn’t have to work overtime my whole life to make sure nobody could tell that I was gay and instead could have enjoyed the ability to explore the things that interested me, to be fully myself?
For a long time, I couldn’t watch a person come out in a TV show or in a movie without an involuntary twinge of sadness hitting me. I couldn’t help but associate queerness with a life filled with depression, rejection, and loneliness. And I would immediately feel guilty for having that twinge of sadness and smile and celebrate a small win for representation.
Watching “Enchanting Grom Fright” was the first time I didn’t feel that sadness. Maybe it’s because I’ve been engaging with more gay media lately. Maybe it’s because the world that Dana Terrace has created is already so magical that it only makes sense that queer people could live their best lives in it.
Or maybe it’s because for the first time, I’m seeing a show on a major network presenting a same sex crush and potential relationship as something completely normal and lovely. Something aspirational. And millions of kids are getting that message loud and clear. Some of them are already gay. Some will come out, secure with their place in the world at a far younger age than me and my friends were. And honestly, most won’t. But they’ll hopefully have internalized the message of love and acceptance and grow up to be people that their queer friends feel safe around. And that’s a beautiful thing.
The Chicks have dropped the Dixie from their name, severing one of their last ties to the Country Music scene that showed them such love only to snatch it away the second they refused to play nice with Republicans. As one of only two acts that have ever been successfully canceled (the other being Janet Jackson, both consisting of the type of strong and empowered women America loves to demonize, neither deserving the ridicule and scorn that was heaped upon them), I had thought that a Chicks reunion was out of the question for years.
But rumors of a reunion started to reach my ears a few years ago. A tour was announced. The Chicks were allowed to perform on the CMA Awards show with Beyoncé. The local country DJ played “Traveling Soldier” when I requested it. The Country world seemed to be ready. But the album wasn’t.
Fast-forward to July 15, 2020. I pick up a delivery at the local co-op, twelve beautiful and healthy chicks to be raised as laying hens and to fill the chicken coop I built from scratch a month ago in a fit of manic quarantine productivity. Now when I go into the back hall, I hear the sweet sound of baby chicks, peeping nonstop, running laps around their enclosure, alternating between avoiding their heating lamp and cuddling up beneath it. I’m in awe of the way the chicks rally around each other, cleaning wood shavings off of each other, resting their heads on each other’s backs, making joyful noise as they adjust to their strange new surroundings.
Two days later, I hear the sounds of a different set of Chicks through the Bluetooth speaker in my bedroom. The sounds are more melodic, they harmonize, and they play their own instruments. But these Chicks share the sense of sisterhood and camaraderie with the chicks in my house, and they’re trying to navigate a world just as strange, one that has fallen apart along with a marriage.
Gaslighter is the album we deserve in these trying times, an album that sucks you into the world and makes you forget your troubles outside of its narrative. The Titular track is a call to arms against a shitty man and sets up the conflict that will be revisited throughout the rest of the album. (It’s also where we first discover that Natalie Maines’s husband fucked a lady on their family boat I guess???)
The details of infidelity on this album are heartbreaking in their specificity. There’s no illusion here. When Ms. Maines sings that “My husband’s girlfriend’s husband just called me up, how messed up is that?” on “Sleep at Night”, there is no doubt in my mind that this is something that has happened to her. This isn’t a Mitski-type fictional album. Maines is the one who had to laugh at the absurdity of the situation before releasing how unfunny it is that her two little boys will be torn apart by the infidelity and lies.
The most heartbreaking moments come on “Everybody Loves You”, which physically hurt my stomach to listen to. And “Young Man” is so tender and showcases the tricky balancing act of making sure a child knows that he should still admire the good parts of his father even if he broke up their family. In a year full of pseudo-emotional bro-country ballads, the ladies once dismissed as “Sadam’s Angels” have released the most personal and impactful country songs of the year by far.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention “March March”, the only overtly political song on the project. Lyrically, it’s brilliant. Musically, it wasn’t for me. That’s okay, I’m happy it exists. It’s uncompromising and perfectly snarky. There’s a line about 3D printing guns and taking them to the gun range followed by a spoken “Cut the shit, you ain’t going to the gun range.” It’s a timely protest song for sure.
But first and foremost, this is an album of loss and divorce, but where it really shines is in its moments of hope. “My Best Friend’s Wedding” is the purest distillation of the album as a whole. The bluegrass and country elements shine, and the harmonies are on point. A subtle synth bassline strums underneath, adding to the soundscape without ever overpowering it. The song is in turns regretful and hopeful, such sweet sadness, the perfect example of melancholy as it was described to me in Because of Winn-Dixie that I never verified with a dictionary. It’s such a mature approach to sorrow, a slight smile as a face turns to the future, an acknowledgement that life doesn’t end after divorce.
And it is immediately followed by “Tights On My Boat”, a perfectly petty and bitter breakup song that starts with the scathing line “I hope you die peacefully in your sleep, just kidding, I hope it hurts like you hurt me” and includes the repeated refrain “you’re going to get what you’ve got coming to you”. It’s the perfect chaser to the sweetness of the song immediately preceding it.
Gaslighter sees The Chicks sounding the best they ever have, and that’s saying something. While they may not have been recording together for the last fourteen years, the album is so cohesive and brilliant that it makes you wonder what took them so long. It feels criminal that The Chicks have been depriving us of their collective talents for this long (Yes I’m aware of Court Yard Hounds and that Natalie Maines solo album. They’re fantastic, but not the same).
This is an album that bounces between the hopelessness and the hopefulness, that relishes in wondering whether there’s darkness or light at the end of the tunnel. And with production by the master of the breakup album, Jack Antonoff in his first country outing, The Chicks have hit their stride so hard it’s a wonder that it doesn’t break.
The chicks in my home are at the beginning of their lives, but The Chicks I’ve been playing on repeat have lived full lives. They’ve fought sexism, prejudice, the GOP, Toby Keith, and Mainstream Country Radio to be exactly who they are, and who they are is one of the greatest Country bands of all time. Truly, I believe that if they were still beholden to the Mainstream Country Music Industrial Complex, this album would not be nearly as good. It certainly wouldn’t be able to use no-no words so freely and effectively.
At a time when we need White Women to not be Shitty, The Chicks have arrived to pledge their support. And for that, we must thank them.
“Clumsy” is Fergie’s best song, and that is hard for me to say. Front to back, The Dutchess is all hits. It spawned five multi-platinum singles and it still feels underrated. We did not know what we had with Fergie, and I for one will forever be grateful to her for her contribution to the Pop Music Landscape. But even on an album with “London Bridge”, “Glamorous,” and “Big Girls Don’t Cry”, “Clumsy” stands out.
It’s so instantly recognizable, so iconic. It’s one of those tracks that you recognize the second it starts up, and you run to the dance floor as soon as your mind registers what’s playing. It’s one of three songs that I can’t listen to while driving or I will crash. If it comes on the radio, I pull over and let the ecstasy wash over me.
It’s so true to the spirit of having a crush and/or falling in love too quickly. In her cheeky little spoken-word interlude, Fergie confesses that this ain’t the first time this lovesickness thing has happened to her, because she loves serious relationships, so even after one ends, the love bug just comes around and bites her again. Relatable.
I don’t date at the moment, but I DO jump from crush to crush like a flea at a dog show. At any given moment I’ll have a crush on 1-5 people, some of them serious, some of them fleeting, most of them Republicans. They’ll usually last between a week and a month (the amount of time it takes for me to confirm that they are in fact Republicans), but when one drops, a new one forms, and I’ll spend all night stalking their socials for any hint that they might be interested.
They never are, and they’re usually poor choices for me, and it’s generally kind of a relief when I find a post of them with their significant others, but the feeling of butterflies in my stomach is so wonderful. I LIVE for the experience of “slipping, tumbling, sinking, fumbling,” and being “clumsy cause I’m falling in love.”
I love crushes so much, because they require no commitment from either party and no one has to know they exist! I can admire from afar and not get my feelings hurt, and that’s all I’ve ever wanted. With a crush, it doesn’t matter if they’re gay, straight, or taken. You don’t have to spend money on them. And you still get that sweet shot of serotonin when they favorite your tweet or laugh at your dumb joke. There are no negatives!
This all feels topical this week because I have two big stupid crushes that will never formulate into anything, but they bring me lots of joy and they’ve been giving me attention lately. So if you need me, I’ll be bumping “Clumsy” 24/7 and smiling at my phone for the foreseeable future (ending only when they reveal themselves to be Republicans).
*** Author’s note: “Clumsy” is yet another song that we wouldn’t have had without the genius and vision of Little Richard. It’s built around a sample of “The Girl Can’t Help It,” and truly would not work without it. Little Richard was a pioneer, and there’s a huge hole in the music industry where he once stood. Never forget that Rock and Roll was created by people of color and colonized and claimed by white men, like just about everything else in history.
In an unprecedented move for this blog, I’m going to talk about a song that is Bad! It’s truly terrible, but I find it so very funny, and I’m sure if I had heard it when I was 13 it would have been my favorite song of all time. Plus, I absolutely love a song with a narrative, and as flawed as it may be, there is definitely a narrative here.
There’s a lot to unpack here and no good way to decide where to start. The backing track is so quintessentially 90’s that it feels like a scam for it to have come out in 2000. It has everything from grossly tight snare drums to excessive record scratches. The scratches in particular blow me away, because they have no business being on a song like this, and yet here they are, taking center stage. They’re especially prevalent on the radio censored version, going hard over the blank space where words like “dick” and “gun to school” and “ass” should be.
Actually while we’re on the subject, another absolutely baffling thing about this song is that an uncensored version does not exist. It’s been eliminated from the internet. On Spotify, Wheatus has two versions to listen to, a radio edit with more censoring, which appears on their self-titled album, and a less censored version, which reinstates “dick” and “ass”, but leaves the line about someone bringing a gun to school out, still covered by those awful record scratches. This version is available to stream from one source, Songs from Dawson’s Creek Volume 2. This feels so backwards to me, but that’s the type of journey Wheatus has taken I suppose.
I’m kind of in love with the vocal performance I will admit. It’s so funny. More air exits his mouth than his nose for the entire song. Like, I can’t imitate the way he sings here, because it tickles my nose and then I have to sneeze before I get to the first chorus. This is such a choice, and I applaud Wheatus for it. He sounds so meek and frail, like every 110 pound punk boy I went to high school with, taking tough when no one is listening and retreating into himself the second someone questions what he said.
And the final verse is simply breathtaking. I have no other words for it. The reveal that Noel is ALSO a teenage dirtbag, sung from her perspective? The lead singer adopting an even HIGHER and MORE NASALLY singing voice? It’s no longer just a song at this point. It’s performance art.
But the thing that makes this song for me is the story. Again, I love a narrative. There’s a reason I still listen to Country Music.
It’s a tale we’ve heard many times, and frankly, it’s a teensy bit problematic. Boy sees girl. Boy pines for girl. Girl has no idea who the fuck boy is. Boy seethes in rage that girl doesn’t know what she’s missing while girl lives a happy and fulfilling life completely unbothered. And the girl here is cool. It’s Noel! She wears Keds and tube socks and those are the only concrete details we have here. We also know Noel has a boyfriend who is (allegedly) a dick. For perhaps the only time in this song, I trust the narrator when he says that this dude really is a dick, because he follows that observation up by casually mentioning that he brings a gun to school, which is, quite simply, a dick move.
So there’s Noel, and there’s our narrator, the titular Teenage Dirtbag. Why’s he a dirtbag? We don’t know. Apparently because he listens to Iron Maiden, which is honestly fair. The only teenager I knew who was super into Iron Maiden was such a nice guy, but, I hate to say it, kind of scummy. Like, he was a good and loyal friend, but he also kept trying to sell me drugs and would tell me about the orgies he went to on the weekend. Nothing against him, but some would argue that he was also a Teenage Dirtbag.
The part that weirdly resonates with me is that last verse, which I touched on earlier. Here, Mr. Wheatus feels like mold (hilarious, brilliant creative writing, will be stealing this phrase), but somehow Noel learns who he is. She walks over and (in her voice that is definitely a woman’s and not the lead singer jumping up the octave) reveals that she too is a Teenage Dirtbag and invites him to an Iron Maiden concert.
This verse does not track with anything the rest of the song was saying. It throughs the whole narrative out the window, but I love it, and not just for the weird vocal choices. It’s the kind of wish fulfillment we all want to see in our own lives.
It really reminds me of a guy I met in college. He was a DJ at the radio station with the shift right before mine. He was a big music nut, and I admired his taste. I wanted desperately to be his friend.
Then, two weeks before graduation, a mutual friend invited the two of us to hang out. It was just three of us, and me and this guy hit it off. We had a lot in common, and we had so many shared interests. To me, this was like Noel coming over to invite me to an Iron Maiden concert. It was so improbable that my friend crush would ever develop into a friendship, but it happened.
We ran into each other a few more times and talked a bit, but unfortunately for me, two weeks wasn’t long enough to form a lasting bond. I haven’t heard from him since. I actually find myself thinking about him and the other last minute relationships that I developed in the last few weeks before leaving college. If I hadn’t been such a 20 year old dirtbag and introduced myself sooner instead of being all emo, thinking that these people didn’t know what they were missing by not seeking me out, would I have that cool array of friends and people that I found fun to be around still? Would we have stayed in touch?
It’s impossible to know for certain. But what I can say is this: Andrew, if you ever happen to read this, hit me up. I’d love to be your friend.
There are many hills that I will die on, mostly because if I did all the work to climb up that hill, why would I want to come back down? I’d rather stay put so that I don’t have to put in that kind of effort again. But the tallest hill that I will die on, really more of a mountain, is that Iggy Azalea’s The New Classic is excellent. No skips, just bangers all the way through. But some truly revolting revisionist history would have you believe that it was garbage, as if “Fancy” and “Black Widow” weren’t two of the biggest songs of the decade.
Honestly, if Iggy Azalea was the talentless hack that people try to insist she is, why was everyone lining up to collaborate with her? She worked with Arianna Grande, Brittany Spears, Ellie Goulding, Jennifer Hudson, Jennifer Lopez, and Wiz Khalifa, among others.
And the people will cry “Oh but she can’t freestyle!” So? We know this! She’s an Australian who performs with a Southern Accent. Do you know how hard it must be to do that consistently while also rapping? You want her to make shit up on top of that? Sounds like you have some unrealistic expectations, and you shouldn’t be disappointed when people fail to meet them. Besides, plenty of rappers can’t freestyle. Have you heard Lil Yachty try? It’s a hard thing to do, and we should stop acting like it’s an expectation.
But that’s all beside the point, because while I could go on for hours about Iggy Azalea as an artist, I’m more interested at this point in talking about “Work” specifically. This song is wild!
Every time I hear the phrase “Walk a mile in these Louboutins”, my soul exits my body and I enter a trancelike state of ecstasy, because I know the next 3:39 are going to be LIT. What follows is the type of Cinderella story that would be at home on the Hallmark Channel if it weren’t for the profanity weaved throughout and the pulsing synths and snap and trap beats underneath. Iggy spins the tales of her triumphs and failures in a way that’s well thought out, never glossing over the grit for the glitter. There’s sadness and loneliness here, presented alongside the dedication and hard work that give the track it’s name.
And in the most iconic moment of the song, she puts a halt to the action to tell a joke! So bold, so unexpected, so funny! “You don’t know the half, this shit gets real! Valley Girls giving blowjobs for Louboutins, what you call that? Head over heels!” Then she does this little giggle! It’s ludicrous, but I truly believe that “Work” would not be half of the song it is today if it had been excluded.
I don’t know why it became so popular to try and dunk on Iggy Azalea, and it makes me kind of sad. She had the hits and she put in the effort. She flew in from Australia when she was only fifteen to chase the American Dream, and against all odds she caught it. People love that stuff, so why do they so decidedly hate Iggy?
It’s hard to say. Is it sexism? Jealousy? Anger at a perceived lack of reverence for the Conventions of Hip Hop? It could be (potentially valid) accusations of cultural appropriation and lack of self awareness.
But at the end of the day, I guess it doesn’t make a difference to me. The music makes me feel good, this song makes me want to dance like an idiot alone in my kitchen, and at this moment in life, I need songs like that. Throw in the encouraging messaging about how hard work can lead you to your dreams, mix it all together, and what do you get? A winning recipe for a Song of the Week baby!
Jesse Freaking Rogers 