The same year I came out, I saw the Indigo Girls perform live. The year was 2016; I was living in Iowa City and over the course of a college semester fell in love with a friend and classmate. I denied my feelings until I couldn't deny them anymore, and then hid my feelings from her until a shot from Jameson and a sense of recklessness prompted me to admit it. She reacted poorly. We try to draw boundaries to keep our friendship intact. We said good night. I didn't sleep at all.
Our boundaries don’t hold up. After weeks of pretending everything was fine, I finally broke out and poured out my hurt and anger to her in another heated conversation. My crying to my mom on the phone was enough to wake my roommate from her room. She came out and put her arms around me, not knowing what was wrong.
Some hurts have more layers to them than others: A few weeks ago, a friend of mine who, like me, uses a wheelchair, told me that she thinks it's easier for disabled women to date other women than men. "Girls are more open to different types of abilities," she says. I don’t know to what extent this is true, but I do know that internalizing this belief set the stage for a refusal to cause more harm and the shattering of my self-perceived worth. For months, I wrote about the aftermath, trying to make sense of who I was by piecing together the identity I had long accepted—my disability—with the identity I was still learning to live with.
Unpacking all of this is another article. However, it’s worth acknowledging that as a disabled woman, underlying my inherent beliefs about dating is the assumption that queer relationships between women will never end badly.
That summer I heard Amy Ray, a member of Emily Saliers' Indigo Girls, sing "Sadness" from their 1997 album Shaming of the Sun The rock ballad "Don't Give That Girl a Gun." Something inside me was shattered by Ray's snarling lyrics: "She's got a case against me, a jury of our peers, and the wrath of the righteous screaming in her ears." The narrator claims that at least Misconduct to a certain extent. Queer women—the ones I love, the ones I admire—can be imperfect, even villains. In turn, I may also be responsible for the conflict between me and my friend.
Ray’s songs helped me see queer relationships for what they are: messy, complicated, and painful at times—just like any other relationship.
Now, 35 years after the release of their first full-length album , Strange Fire , the Indigo Girls are still using songs to express their experiences and reach a new generation of listeners. In essence, this is what powerful art can do: show us truths we can’t pinpoint and give language to experiences we don’t yet understand.
The Indigo Girls rose to fame in the late 1980s as a folk-rock duo with a queer political perspective . Ray and Saliers have been friends since childhood, starting making music together in high school in Georgia. They both came out publicly in 1988, a year after Strange Fire was released , during a time when being gay was still considered an abomination or disease by most people in our country, except for straight and cisgender people.
They spent much of their careers celebrating romantic relationships between women at a time when representation of women was at an extreme. Lesbians have historically been portrayed as evil, tragic (think Tara and Willow's romance in Buffy the Vampire Slayer ), or seen as commodities for the male gaze (think lesbian porn obsession with queer women).
Among my friends, there is an idealized but equally superficial view of romance between women: Before coming out, I heard friends who complained about men saying, “God, I wish I liked girls. That It’s much easier.” I even said it myself.
“Being in my first queer relationship, I think that was pretty much the biggest impact on me,” says singer-songwriter Katie Pruitt, who counts Indigo Girls as a mentor. “There was this illusion that now I was with a woman, everything was going to be perfect.” Growing up, Pruitt idealized queer love, she said, because she longed for something she didn’t think she was allowed to have. thing.
The romanticization of women loving women is fueled by a variety of factors. “People associate men and masculinity with violence, and women with care, love, and tenderness,” Rachel Marie-Crane Williams, former chair of gender, women, and sexuality studies at the University of Iowa said the doctor. "[It's] a very old relic." It's a good idea - excluding men also means an end to violence. Of course, this isn't true.
When best-selling author Carmen Maria Machado conducted research for her memoir, "In the Dream House," about her time in an abusive lesbian relationship Experience, she was hard-pressed to find records of romance between women that weren't magical. “I think fantasy is a quintessential cliché of queer women,” she writes in the award-winning book. “It’s almost as painful to admit the inadequacy of this idealism as it is to admit that we’re just as stuck as heterosexuals in this regard: we’re just as stuck as everyone else.”
When Ray and Saliers put "Shame on the Sun" together, Ray had just ended a seven-year relationship. Ray wrote on Indigo Girls' Tumblr blog that the record reflected "a lot of transitions" in their lives at the time. In other words, mud.
In the 35 years since their first album, they have released 20 albums together, been nominated for seven Grammys and won one, and had four albums go platinum . In the past few years, they have been recognized by mainstream institutions: in 2019 they were awarded the Pell Arts Lifetime Achievement Award, in August they were inducted into the Women Songwriters Hall of Fame, and in September Brandi Carlile honored them with the American Music Award Received the American Spirit Free Speech Award at the Honors and Awards Ceremony.
But for much of their early careers, they were belittled or ridiculed by much of the mainstream media. When Shame on the Sun was released in 1997, Rolling Stone wrote, "The Indigo Girls may have the charm of an Earth sister, but they haven't yet made music mellow enough to reflect real-world life," and went wild. , "Not every sullen coed who plays guitar in the campus coffee shop grows up to be Bob Dylan or Joni Mitchell." Even the "Saturday Night Live" sketch in 2005 Chong also spoofed Closer to Fine, which was filled with lesbian caricatures such as plaid, mustaches, and ambient self-righteousness.
However, Indigo Girls never had to be Dylan or Mitchell. They are creating a legacy in their own way and have connected with the audiences who need them most.
When 14-year-old Brandi Carlile first heard the music of Indigo Girls in 1995 , she was immediately drawn to it. She saw them perform a few years later and eventually toured with them in her 20s. "I mentally went straight to their sounds and intuitively recognized something in them that I couldn't put into words or explain at the time," she said at the American Music Honors in September. “[Their work] gave birth to me and it affects every step I take as I walk through the world Indigo Girls built for me.”
Musician Allison Russell says they work with other queer singers like Tracy Chapman, kd lang and Melissa Etheridge Together, the composers created this world by "kicking open and keeping open" doors for future generations.
"I learned this from [Indigo Girls] and Tracy Chapman, and I learned this from [Indigo Girls] and Tracy Chapman, to write about difficult stories in a nuanced and candid way. Things, being unapologetically yourself, and becoming strong through vulnerability and honesty.” “I was a black queer kid raised by severely abused white supremacists and I felt like their music was like arms full of love. Surround me."
"More than ever, people are truly embracing their stories and incorporating them into their art," singer-songwriter Amythyst Kiah said in an email. “There’s no doubt that Amy and Emily had and continue to have a huge impact on this.”
Pruitt found the band's entire approach to the business inspiring—not just their songs, but their activism. In 1993, Saliers and Ray co-founded Honor the Earth, an Indigenous-centered environmental justice organization with Indigenous leader Winona LaDuke, and have remained committed to reproductive, racial, Food and climate justice and queer liberation. This year alone, more than 150 anti-LGBTQ+ bills have been introduced across the country. Courts have blocked some of them, but about 50 have passed or are under consideration.
“The fight for equality in our music community, in our ecosystem, in this country will not be won easily,” Ray said during his acceptance speech at the American Music Honors & Awards ceremony. "Joan Baez said to me one time when we were talking about activism, 'I'm not going to pass my torch to other people, I'm going to keep it going, and I'm going to help other people light their torches.'"
Last year, they performed on a pontoon boat in the middle of the Mississippi River to protest the construction of the Line 3 pipeline because they couldn't be arrested in the middle of the Mississippi. (Line 3 was completed in October 2021, but efforts to mitigate its impact are still in full swing.) In September, they helped organize the Water is Life festival and concert to benefit the ongoing fight. They spent the fall campaigning for Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams.
“They are people I want to emulate, not just as musicians but as people,” Pruitt said. "They are deeply rooted in gratitude, community, love and kindness. They are just the OGs."
Ray and Saliers' devotion to their work is partly what allows musicians like Carlile to speak to packed audiences about her wife and daughter, and Russell to write songs imbued with queer desire. This allowed Pruitt to release an album documenting gay life, love, and heartbreak in the South, and it also allowed listeners like me to put pieces of my own story back together.
When I saw their performance in 2016, I took the first shaky steps toward coming out. It was wonderful, but I'm still scarred by the experience that pushed me out of the closet in the first place. In the months leading up to the concert, I played the song "Learned It On Me" from their 2015 album One Lost Day over and over again. "I guess I should be happy, I was the lesson that set you free, I just wish you didn't learn that from me," Saliers sings. I became immersed in the story of a man who was hurt by another woman, who forgave but did not forget.
Their new music is also resonating, like the 2020 song "Country Radio," about a queer kid longing for the type of love that country music sings about while waiting to hear himself in those stories. I needed this song when I was in college. I still need it now. "Country Radio" demonstrates the power of song to spread and the human experience of longing for the good. In the second stanza, the narrator closes his eyes and surrenders to the music. “It’s like I stepped on my heels and it’s me in the story and the story is real,” Saliers sings.
During their 35 years on the national stage, Ray and Saliers have told us stories that help us understand our own stories. It's a powerful, life-changing gift that's still necessary in 2022. As Carlisle said in September, "Indigo Girls go where they are needed, and we need them." We did, and we did.
