Teenage dream/teenage wasteland
Fall brings shades of my past self to the surface: the crispiness of it, the back-to-school shopping, the excitement that presages Halloween. So as far as I’m concerned, Tegan and Sara’s choice to release their memoir at the end of September was a cunningly effective strategy. It’s called High School, and it hurt to read in the way it hurts to look at photos of my younger self—a twinge that comes with remembering how it felt to believe the world was ending at least once a week. Except Tegan and Sara dropped acid and got wasted and fell down flights of stairs in a freewheeling teenagerdom that I would never have allowed myself, much less been allowed by my parents. And then, of course, there are the various romantic entanglements, riddled with paranoia (neither twin came out until their late teens) and thick with sentimentality. Sara loves Naomi. Tegan loves Alex. I loved all of them, fucking around and fighting and getting jealous and feeling like the world was ending at least once a week.
The romantic angst I could relate to—the constant intrigue about who was into who, who was hooking up, who was dating. But the burden of knowing, from a young age, that you’re not straight is something relatively foreign to me. All sorts of people come out at all sorts of stages in life; there’s no timeline, no “correct” narrative. But our collective cultural adoption of the teenage coming-out story in media, not to mention the stories I’ve heard from close friends and partners, has at times made me feel like an outsider looking in. Certainly there is risk associated with coming out at a young age, especially if you happen to live in a place where, or with people for whom, that concept is alien and repugnant. I wouldn’t wish that risk on anyone. The statistics on queer homeless youth are alarming. At the same time, the acute discomfort associated with declaring yourself as a teenager—the agonized self-examination, the sneaking around—becomes a sort of common language, a binding agent that allows LGBTQ folks to instantly understand each other.
High School is shot through with it. For so long Sara and Tegan had “best friends” instead of girlfriends. Both threw their whole hearts into these relationships, and both were terrified of being discovered. They wrote songs about the girls they fell in love with. The album accompanying the book’s release, Hey I’m Just Like You, is a compilation of songs they wrote at 15, reworked and reproduced for the modern era. The lyrics, though, are achingly familiar: “bye bye bye / I still want you / bye bye bye / I still need you.” It’s a relatable feeling for anyone. But for queer folks who read the book, who learn Sara wrote the song about Naomi when she went off to Toronto and got a boyfriend, it’s pure gut-punch—an extra layer of complexity that feels deeply personal. Last week I got to watch them perform a selection of these songs live, in a sort of variety show that also included live readings from the book and clips of home movies of the twins when they were actually in high school. The combined emotional weight of it all pulverized me into a weeping puddle.
Still, in some ways their story felt distant. My coming-out, as I remember it, was relatively seamless. Sure, there was plenty of agonized self-examination. But I was a twenty-something living in New York City and attending graduate school, free to do what I wanted. My parents, all told, were pretty chill about it. And no one in this city blinked an eye. My editors were happy to have me writing on queer topics. Ultimately, the goal is for more and more stories to sound like mine—for queerness to be accepted instantly and without question, for allies to be educated on identities outside the gender binary, for the element of risk in the process to be eliminated entirely. Stories like Tegan’s and Sara’s will become relics, relatable in fractions of feeling, but not as a whole. So much of the common language between queers will survive, because so much of it transcends the pain of those early days. But a small fraction of it will be lost. What grows from that loss—the new ways we learn to relate to each other—will be fascinating to watch.
My stuff
In addition to devouring the book and seeing the show, I interviewed Tegan and Sara about their memoir back in August. We sat on a hotel rooftop surrounded by happy-houring corporate types, and they were incredibly candid. As we walked back downstairs, after I’d turned off my recorder, we discussed astrology as related to the various people we’ve dated (they’re Virgos). I really wish I’d gotten that part.
I also interviewed two of my journalistic heroes, Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey of the New York Times. Their book, She Said, is a riveting look at how they pieced together the Harvey Weinstein story that indisputably changed the cultural landscape and the conversation around sexual harassment and assault. An extended version of this interview will appear in Vanity Fair’s November print issue, so keep an eye on the newsstands. And lastly, I covered dapperQ’s Pursuit, which was fun and wild and very, very gay.
Poignant stuff
Ask Polly: My Kid Is Nonbinary, and I Can’t Get Over It - The Cut - Talk about headlines liable to make you scream in frustration. But once you get past it, not to mention that at-times-infuriating question, this article reveals itself as a resource I haven’t really seen anywhere else. A mother whose child has come out as nonbinary is struggling with shift and mourning the “loss” of her daughter. (Fair warning: it made me cry, and could be triggering for some folks.) I do wish Polly had screamed “this is not even remotely about you, plus gender is fake” a little more forcefully in her response, but overall I thought this was a win for the strategy of meeting people where they’re at, and asking them to interrogate their own reactions. Added bonus: the labor here was performed by an ally, rather than a queer person. If you’re a queer reader and have thoughts, I’d be interested to hear them.
Stories About My Brother - Jezebel - Okay, yes, it’s a bit of a heavy newsletter so far, but this story from Prachi Gupta about the death of her twin brother is a) heartrending and beautifully told, and b) asks hard questions about toxic masculinity that are crucial to answer in the social-media age.
Jonathan Van Ness Comes Out - The New York Times - Another sort of wrenching read (sorry) in which the Queer Eye breakout star asserts his own complexity and dimension.
Fun stuff
Bell Hooks Holds Office Hours - The New Yorker - This conversation between Laverne Cox and Bell Hooks is the perfect palette cleanser.
New York’s Hottest Makeup Counter: The Port Authority Bathroom - The New York Times - I love the photos in this story of people applying their makeup for the day, and the women who help make it happen.
Insufficient Pleasures - The Shatner Chatner - “Being called “a national treasure” only once and not every day for the rest of your life, each time by someone who has never called anyone a national treasure before.”
Plus a short story
My friend Delia Cai, of Deez Links fame, wrote a creepy-good short story for Catapult about writerly circles and fandom in New York. I told her it made me feel like I’d taken a “tiiiiiny bit of acid,” and she said someone else described it as “bleak but tasty.” How could you not click?
Bonus round
I’m newly obsessed with Christine and the Queens dancing. Specifically: this performance of Intranquillité from 2016. This one with Charli XCX on The Late Show is also pure magic. How does she do that thing with her pelvis? I need to know.
Live shot of me hurling spooky season at everyone I know (and don’t).