I think people assumed, or maybe I just assumed, that if I knew I was gay and looked gay, I must also like being gay—or at least not hate myself. You can stare at an aspect of yourself that you are ashamed of in the mirror and seek out that component of yourself in others.
The exposure can help ease your discomfort, amend your sense of commonality, and you can reconceive your identity through all that bouncing light. This feels like something of a miracle.
They have a new album coming out. Ha, I thought. Or, I am just like you. One last thing: After that Housing Works event in May I posted a photo to social media of Tegan and Sara on stage and half my relatives commented with Congratulations!
Did they think I was Sara and Tegan was the moderator? I have no clue. I simply said thank you. We publish your favorite authors—even the ones you haven't read yet. Get new fiction, essays, and poetry delivered to your inbox. Enjoy strange, diverting work from The Commuter on Mondays, absorbing fiction from Recommended Reading on Wednesdays, and a roundup of our best work of the week on Fridays. Personalize your subscription preferences here.
Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work. You guys are famous for your haircuts. As an adult, it seems so judgmental of me.
Sara articulated this idea very well over the last couple of months. There was the raver movement, and almost all of the women in our group of friends in high school had short hair.
And they were straight. They all had this spiky-razor do. So it was also really weird, because we could absolutely have had short, spiky hair. It was a hard one. As soon as we cut our hair, I just felt reborn. People eventually became very fixated on our hair.
And after that I definitely thought, Yeah, we should always have a weird haircut. But we were weird. We were in the indie rock world; everybody had weird haircuts. We were one of the more mainstream pop-indie rock bands, so we got a lot of credit… In those moments when we hypothetically advised our younger selves to get a haircut, the advice came from a place of shame.
I think we cut our hair exactly when we were ready. When we were ready, it was an unveiling. SQ: I think about hair a lot. Sometimes I feel my hair is a way of being disruptive. Everyone expects me to have short hair.
We begged my mom, from the time we could talk, to cut our hair. She finally let us when we were four. I loved it. And I basically had short hair until I got into middle school, and it was very clear to me that to be somewhat successful socially, I needed to grow my hair back out.
For some queer people, the first time they cut their hair is in adulthood, but I had already had that experience and had so deeply related to my identity as a young person with short hair, and I was constantly misgendered.
I think that in some ways, growing my hair out had nothing to do with my sexuality. It had more to do with not being seen as a boy. So I need to match my hair to my body. Shaving my head at eighteen was a way of saying, This is the way I want to look and feel. And, weirdly, in those first couple of years after I shaved my head, I got so much attention from guys. The second half of our career has been almost entirely focused on identity and being queer, and that feels overwhelming at times.
So there was a weird switch, and the book gave us an opportunity to talk about both halves of our career. In a strange way, I feel like we really used the trauma and the silence that we had to muck through during those first ten years to write the book. The book has given us an opportunity to reprocess not just our adolescence but that first big part of our adult life as we came to terms with who we were and created our identity. TQ: One of the things I was most bewildered by in terms of revisiting the music was how we basically have just rewritten the same song, like, fifty times.
In terms of the way we layer our voices and the interplay between our vocals and the way we actually write, the length of our verses, the structure of our songs—all of it was developed in high school. So we figured out who we were from to Nobody was writing about that time, and therefore it just disappeared. And then another big one for me was The L Word. And you guys. I hate it. And then I also want to be seen as that.
I remember two conversations that really stuck out to me after the Pulse shooting in There was this weird stigma that felt factually untrue. In the last five or ten years, there have been conversations about the disappearance of queer spaces and queer bars. Gay bars feel very different to me from straight bars. TQ: A lot of people have talked about how queer women have used music venues and bands as ways to get back to having a community space.
I mean, even as an adult I need to get away sometimes. You know, when I eventually ended up hooking up with my best friend who was a woman. It was hard for me to even articulate how I felt to her. I wanted to just disappear at times. That particular song is about an era where I felt this mad, crazy crush on this girl that I was close with, and we would have these sleepovers. She would ramble on and on in the dark, and I would lay next to her, listening, but also thinking how much I wanted to confess how I felt.
Yet I felt so incapable. I would just hold my breath next to her, hoping not to accidentally bump up against her, or somehow give away how I felt. I was so afraid. We wanted to showcase different eras of Tegan and Sara, and not just make a full-blown pop record. Music is moving away from those organic, human moments, so we wanted to make sure this record felt real.
Did you follow any rules reimagining them? We did have rules. We wanted to rewrite only what had to be re-written. We really wanted to not import too much of ourselves now. But we were also hesitant to make a nostalgic, throwback record, so we still wanted modern instrumentation. That sounds like the premise of a teen movie!
Are there any teen movies you find yourself coming back to? Oh, absolutely. My God.
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