Playlist: Middle School Dance While Unknowingly Gay
INT. CHURCH PARISH HALL – NIGHT
It’s the late 90s and we descend on a school dance in a room adjacent to a church full of PRE-TEENS. ADULT CHAPERONES line the walls, though they appear painfully unaware of the very SEXUALLY EXPLICIT MUSIC that pumps through the room. We zig-zag through the crowd of literal children grinding on each other, slowing and GOING WIDE as we approach and train on our protagonist, ERIN, 12, a white girl who is clearly gay but doesn’t know it. There is a backwards hat involved? The audience will feel a strong sense that she’s obsessed with the Spice Girls, Geri in particular. She’s avoiding the bodies around her by pulling the “edge of the circle” move, when suddenly the 69 BOYZ SONG playing cuts short. We see her tense up and brace herself. She knows what that extended pause means – the DJ is switching to his slow dance collection.
A SLOW BUT STILL SEXUALLY EXPLICIT SONG begins to play. Erin attempts to make a beeline for her bag against the wall, really any bag will do, when she’s stopped by A BOY with a butt-part of all things. He motions back to the dance floor as if to say, “Want to slow dance?” and Erin is emotionally and physically unmoved. Nothing about her demeanor exhibits excitement. She agrees, but we feel with her a sense of loss, knowing she’ll eventually come to realize just what she missed out on.
CUT TO:
INT. BAR – NIGHT
TEXT: 18 YEARS LATER
ERIN holds the room hostage playing on the jukebox every song she endured.
1. Nobody – Keith Sweat
2. They Don’t Know – Jon B.
3. Show Me the Meaning of Being Lonely – Backstreet Boys
4. 2 Become 1 – Spice Girls
5. Angel of Mine – Monica
6. Anytime – Brian McKnight
7. God Must Have Spent a Little More Time on You– *NSYNC
8. From This Moment – Shania Twain
9. I Can Love You Like That – All-4-One
10. I Turn to You – Christina Aguilera
11. I Wanna Know – Joe
12. So Into You – Tamia Ft. Fabolous
13. Have You Ever – Brandy
14. Crazy – K-Ci & Jojo –
15. Red Light Special – TLC
16. Never Had a Dream Come True – S Club 7
Two Women On ‘The Bachelor’ Started Dating and I Am Finally Vindicated
feature image via @megan.leo.marx on Instagram
It only took 20 seasons of The Bachelor spanning 14 years, four spin-offs and two international franchises for two women from the show to start dating each other, but it finally happened. Twenty seasons spanning 14 years, four spin-offs and two international franchises for two women on the show to look around and realize they could just date each other. Not this man from a J.C. Penney catalogue.
Oh, and I would’ve waited another 20 seasons and 14 years. I would be in a group home at 95 and pause my mancala marathon to log on to my stories awaiting that gay spark. And then, if I had to haunt this mortal plane to finally witness the moment when the women on the show started eyeing each other at the cocktail party, I would.
Because I refuse to believe that this is what women really want:
I don’t care how straight you are, I refuse it. Which brother from the ABC Original Family Movie, Charity’s Distress, is the one for you? IT’S NONE OF THEM IT’S THE GIRL FROM THE SKATING RINK.
Also, you know what? I deserve this. With the hours I’ve logged into this show, my reward shouldn’t just be a feeling of gratitude that I’m not straight. I watched Bachelor in Paradise: After Paradise – I deserve to know that two women on The Bachelor probably shot a confessional being upset about something Kyle/Ben/Jamie/Geoff said and then went where the cameras couldn’t see them while stifling laughter and then made out.
This is also for every woman who’s been on The Bachelor. No one deserves to be compensated for going on national television to push an aggressive version of heterosexuality with gallons of pinot grigio. They deserve to be compensated with a fulfilling gay dating situation with a woman with whom you plan on hiring a professional photographer for your Instagram photos as a couple.
Megan Marx and Tiffany Scanlon said there were fireworks from the very first cocktail party on the last season of the Australian Bachelor. And ladies, if you can find love in a room full of cameras and women with eyes who want something from your soul trying to get a read on each other while mainlining booze, you absolutely deserve the love you’ve found. Congratulations, and welcome to the club!
KT Tunstall, Self-Described Heterosexual, Has Feelings About Gender And Kissing Girls
KT Tunstall is, it turns out, definitively straight. She is thankful for her lesbian following, but she’s not a lesbian. She kissed and possibly did other things with girls when she was young, and it was not “just a phase,” but also, at the same time, she is heterosexual. She does identify as genderfluid, and also Donald Trump apparently used one of her songs?
All this clarity comes to us by way of an interview in PrideSource, throughout which hope seems to almost spring eternal that Tunstall might be one of us.
From day one when she put a picture of herself in rainbow suspenders on her album cover, “all the gay community thought I was gay — and they still think I’m gay! They’re just waiting for me to figure it out,” she says.
And, it seems, it’s time they quit holding their breath. Although KT speaks fondly of engaging in sexual dalliances with gals, she’s not looking for a girlfriend in the future.
“I think it would be disrespectful to call it a phase. It was part of life. It was learning about love and learning about lust and desire and sexuality and becoming an adult and experiencing people. It was a really important part of my formative years.”
She also spends a lot of time praising young women like Kristen Stewart and Cara DeLevingne for being label-free — who cares about a label! That’s the point! Meanwhile, KT decidedly uses the label of hetero, but it definitely wouldn’t be a big deal if she weren’t.
Other revelations from the article include that KT is a top-button-buttoning kinda gal, she describes herself as genderfluid, and she feels like she channels masculinity when she performs. She’s leaning into her dyke appeal, and she knows it. From the interview:
I don’t want to classify the last album, “Invisible Empire,” as having a “lesbian folk” sound but…
(Laughs) Listen, I was playing folk music and I was buttoning up the top button of my shirt – that’s all I need to say.
This raises some questions: Is KT queerbaiting us? Does KT know about bisexuality? Does she need someone to tell her? We may never know! It’s important to trust people to own their own narratives, even if their heterosexuality seems really super gay. So hopefully she’s happy, wherever she is.
The 14 Gayest Things at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County
by Carrie and Mey
Back in June, Mey was planning her trip to LA for the summer and tweeted about how she was crying just thinking about how much she loves the dinosaurs at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. And Carrie read that tweet and was immediately transported back to the wonders of childhood, when she spent countless afternoons roaming among said dinosaurs in between visits to the Rainforest Room. So we (Mey and Carrie) made a plan to go to the museum and relive memories and cry.
Turns out, that place is also pretty gay. Or maybe it’s just that we’re pretty gay now? Either way, though, we had an amazing (or maybe “amGAYzing??? – Mey) day and made a number of delightfully queer discoveries, which we’ve cataloged and brought back to the lab for analysis. (Carrie wrote this last sentence, you can tell because she’s a bigger nerd than me – Mey)
14. We can’t decide if this looks like a heart or a broken heart (guess which one of us is on each side of this argument), which is a pretty apt metaphor for being a queer woman.
13. They ripped this headline straight from a sign at a Planned Parenthood protest. Or a Lifetime movie.
12. Museum display? Or lesbian bed and breakfast?
11. Too easy, we know, sorry, we had to.
10. Vegetarianism: calling card of our people since the Cretaceous Period.
9. We had a long debate about whether vegetarianism or communal living was gayer. Ultimately the separatist commune won out. Scientists will discover this same evidence when excavating A-Camp locations thousands of years from now.
8. You know, just like the one you have with your roommate/best gal pal!
7. Professor Percy Pelican, the museum’s resident animatronic bird specialist, inspired many a young gay’s modern-day gender expression and general affect. Educational in so many ways – including ones the curators never intended. Thanks, Prof!
6. Dealing with men has driven many of us to “rarely leave our seaside home,” y’know?
5. “Where did we go? What did we do? I think we made something entirely new.” “And it wasn’t quite me, and it wasn’t quite you, I think it was someone entirely new.”
4. Matriarchy now, matriarchy forever.
3. Alternative lifestyle haircuts were all the rage among pterosaurs. Looking sharp, indeed.
2. I mean
1. But at the end of the day the gayest thing on display was, of course, us.