Music shapes us. For many LGBTQ+ people, songs are the soundtrack to a first kiss, a tearful coming out, or the powerful realization that we can no longer hide who we are. Music can be a refuge — a fluid medium through which we share and receive revelations about queer experiences that are often hard to define in concrete terms. But still, we try to put them in words.
For our first-ever edition of Rewind, a new column about the anthems of our LGBTQ+ lives, them. editors and contributors are sharing the songs that helped us forge our queer identities and made us realize new possibilities for ourselves. Today, we’re highlighting tracks by Book of Love, Tegan and Sara, Ciara, Idina Menzel, The Magnetic Fields, Scissor Sisters, Kate Bush, The Drums, and Hole. Scroll down below to see our playlists on Spotify and Apple Music, and find our earlier music roundups here.
Book of Love: “Boy” (1985)
In “Boy,” recorded by the underrated new wave band Book of Love, lead singer Susan Ottaviano stands outside of a gay bar, yearning to be know its pleasures: “I wanna be where the boys are/But I’m not allowed.” The lyrics were written about Boy Bar, a staple of East Village queer life back in 1985 that has since closed. While they appear to speak to the loneliness of a cis woman in gay male spaces, the words hit differently for me. When Ottaviano sings repeatedly during the song’s chorus, “I’m not a boy,” it resonated with a feeling I have long tried to bury: I’m nonbinary.
I’m still searching for the words to describe my relationship to gender, but it’s as though when masculinity and femininity were picking teams in dodgeball, they forgot me. I spent so long feeling alienated from my community, not entirely sure where I fit in or where my people were, much like the protagonist of the song. I came out to friends and family earlier this year, and to be honest, I’m still figuring out my place in the world. But what has kept me coming back to “Boy” is its final note of radical acceptance: “Now it’s all right/Without those boys.” — Nico Lang
Ciara: “Like a Boy” (2006)
In the pop music canon, quite a few women singers have expressed that they’d like to be a man — if only for a little while. As is the case with Beyonce’s “If I Were a Boy” and Taylor Swift’s “The Man,” these pop hits often find the artists fantasizing about the privilege they could wield if they were cis men and about the freedom they would have to act without consideration for others.
