From the amazing Queer Action Figures

Hi there, loyal reader(s), I know I have been neglecting this blog as if it were my job to do so. But, to tell the truth, I’ve been conflicted about it for awhile now. I started Love Is The Slug as a way to write about my many pop culture obsessions/fascinations/critiques and that was good fun for a little bit. But I started to feel like it was all a bit pointless and redundant. There are tons of folks writing about pop culture stuff these days and I wasn’t quite sure how relevant it was for me to keep doing so. Anyone who knows me knows I love to blather on and on about pop culture stuff in a sort of sublime-to-ridiculous continuum. And that will probably never change about me. But it’s not what I want the focus of this blog to be anymore.

In case the image to the right doesn’t give you any sort of indication, Love Is The Slug will be taking on a much more markedly queer bent from here on out. I find that it was starting to go that way already and I have a lot more I want to say about queer life/culture/issues than I do about the larger blanket of pop culture. That is not to say the content here won’t ever be about queer and pop culture intersecting – it would be impossible for that to not happen here as the two are completely connected and often inform one another for better or for worse. And this is also not to say that this blog will become uber-serious or joyless, not at all. Sometimes there will be Serious Stuff and other times Fun and Frivolous and anything else in between. I also know that I represent one voice and not the queer world at large so I am hoping to get some interviews in here with other queer folks as well as (hopefully) some guest posts.

One thing that hasn’t changed is my work as a budding hairstylist is still a big priority for me and is where my main focus is at right now. This means I can’t promise any kind of set-in-stone posting schedule because I’d just be shooting myself in the foot. But hopefully I can keep the blog active enough to keep you reading and responding. And I do want response! Comments are a great place for respectfully critical dialogue to take place. And I cannot emphasize the respectfully critical part enough. I love a good debate but let’s not let ourselves get too hateful and heated, which is easy to do with issues close to our hearts and lives. Let’s give each other the benefit of trying to come to these issues with a good intention and have the dialogue be thoughtful, exciting and respectful. Trolls will, as always, be quickly deleted and blocked.

So, hopefully you’ll keep on reading as Love Is The Slug transforms into this new incarnation. And if you have ANY stuff you want to share through this blog or people you think I should know about/interview/etc. please don’t hesitate to use the handy email form on the sidebar to get in touch!!

xoxo Chriso

Iko Kagasoff, one of the stars of the video for "Uh-Oh!"

I’m dusting off ye olde blog to share with all of you a fantastic Valentine’s Day treat: the video for “Uh-Oh!”, by my band, Ex-Boyfriends, is live all over the web! It was directed by the amazingly talented, multi-media artist Love Ablan and she and her fantastic crew totally blew us away with this video. It’s a mini-movie all about love lost and love found and it’s sweet, sad, adorable and will make your heart melt into a puddle of delicious goo.And be sure to watch through the end for some funny little outtakes and more chances to see Iko Kagasoff in her super cute gingham shirt that I totally covet! She is completely my queer girl clothes twin!

You can check out Love’s blog post about making the video and be sure to like it on YouTube, share it on Facebook and make everyone you know and love watch it until they can’t stand to watch it anymore!!

(And keep your eyes peeled, I have not completely abandoned this blog – just considering a content overhaul/direction change.)

We 2 Boys Together Clinging by David Hockney

2010 only has about 12 hours left in my part of the world, so naturally my mind turns to things I may want to change for the new year. I’ve never been much for making resolutions because I try to work on change and growth all the time. And big declarative statements about the foods I will or won’t eat or the vices I will indulge in less always seems to end with me eating an entire bag of salt-n-pepper Pop Chips while watching too much online porn. But I do sometimes make a wish or two for the new year – either for myself or for people around me. This is a little bit of both.

I’m a gay man – or a queer man, as I prefer to say – and so I’d like to make a wish for my community, as it were. (We can debate the idea of community until the cows come home and go on vacation and come back again, so let’s just use that word because it’s a known quantity.) I would like to see gay and queer men be kinder to one another. I would like to see us stop policing each others’ identities and each others’ desires. I would like to see us stop announcing what is or isn’t a “real man”. I would like to see us use our unique place in the world to expand and explode notions of gender. I would like us to recognize what a massively diverse group we are and to realize that, because of this, not all of us are going to do our gayness or queerness the same way another one of us might. And that’s okay. I would like to see us not take all of the hatred and intolerance that we experience and turn it one on another. Because that is what I think a lot of us do – we need an outlet for all that shit we take in so we just turn it on the easiest available people: other queer guys. It’s a cycle of abuse and we just keep running around it like a hamster on a wheel. But we can stop, too.

So that is my wish for myself and my community. I know it will be hard to make it come true – we’ll all have to work at it. I will too. I don’t write any of this from a place of perfect non-judgmental behavior. I do my own policing, my own unleashing, my own transferring of my shit onto others. But if we start thinking about it more and realize that we’ve all got enough going against us in the world that we don’t need to add being against each other to the mix, maybe things can actually get better. And if we realize that, yeah, even if we think this one way is the best way to be gay or this other one way is the best that we’ll all be fine if not everyone adheres to it. You know, kind of like how we all keep saying that it doesn’t matter if people are against gay marriage because they don’t have to marry a gay person. Let us be who we are and live in the world with a little less hateful judgment.

I’ll try if you try.

Sinead O’Connor – “You Do Something To Me”: This was easily my most favorite track from the compilation, with O’Connor surprising us all with her subtle, nuanced take on this classic song. The video is loaded with images of people of all genders and races dancing and mingling with one another, while Sinead herself performs a kind of campy drag in a platinum blonde wig, vampy makeup and a glittering gown, only to end the video with her trademark bald head and subdued clothing, leading a somber candlelight vigil. Even in this moment of soft and lilting song, O’Connor was always ready to provoke and incite.

The Jungle Brothers – “I Get A Kick Out of You”: A couple of hip-hop tracks on the compilation brought out some of the loosest and freshest interpretations of Porter’s songs. The Jungle Brothers take nothing more than the song’s title for a hook and instead spin a tale of lust and safer sex peppered with images of gloved hands, water guns spurting and ice cream drenched in chocolate sauce. While some of these images are almost  goofy or over-the-top in their blatant, cheesy sexuality, marrying them with the topic of the song and the images of safer sex paraphernalia elevates them beyond mere music video porn-lite and very concisely reflect the difficulty of trying to balance desire with precaution. Furthermore, the video came at a time when people were ignorant of and willfully ignoring the impact of HIV and AIDS on the black community in America, making the visuals all the more powerful in their marrying of blackness, safer sex and HIV and AIDS.

Debbie Harry and Iggy Pop – “Well Did You Evah!”: This song never fails to fill me with joy – it’s so full of camp and piss and vinegar and that indelible New York toughness that is the trademark of both Harry and Pop. The video finds them sending up rich couples, society life and even robbing a bank before, apparently, being vaporized from colliding with Mars as the lyrics imply will happen to us next July. But for all the camp and hilarity, there’s a subtler reading that can be taken away from the video as they lampoon the excessively wealthy and saunter through the streets of New York City where thousands were dying in poverty as a result of HIV and AIDS, mere inches away from the glittering wealth of many Manhattanites. Class standing always has and always will play a role in the quality of life for people living in this pandemic.

Neneh Cherry – “I’ve Got You Under My Skin”: This track was another favorite of mine and another fantastic, bold reinterpretation of the original. Cherry uses the chorus of the song in a dual manner, to chillingly underline the nature of the disease and as a tribute to loved ones lost but never forgotten. The icy blue treatment of the videos color scheme, the stark closeups of Cherry and the other people in the video singing with her and the loan male dancer in the full body vinyl suit all convey images of isolation, desire, frustration, fear and sadness, mirroring back how complex our responses can be around a disease that can be transmitted via sex.

Erasure – “Too Darn Hot”: Erasure are going to deliver the camp, there’s just no doubt about it. But what I love about this video is how they use camp to really drive the message home. With images of 50s-era suburban families in red blindfolds watching TV while Andy Bell as a news caster sings the song while projecting statistics and information about HIV and AIDS is a pretty fantastic way of saying that people need to wake up and realize this disease isn’t just impacting gay folks in big urban cities. I also love the moments where various folks sing the chorus as if they’re man-on-the-street interviewees, further driving home the idea of how this impacts everyone and that everyone should be talking about it.

Annie Lennox – “Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye”: If there was anyone to interpret this already heart wrenching song for a new generation, it was Annie Lennox. Her haunting, restrained interpretation takes the song beyond a paean to a lost lover and transforms it into a lament for those lost to HIV and AIDS. The footage of what seems to be a family video of a brother and sister or two friends playing and frolicking throughout their youth could very easily represent Annie and a lost brother or friend, but exist as powerful imagery for anyone who has experienced that kind of loss and look back at the person or persons they once knew.

Very Mary Kate is an ongoing comedy web series from the hilarious and fertile brain of actor/writer/comedian Elaine Carroll. The show satirizes the life of the eternally tiny Mary Kate Olsen, one half of the infamous Olsen twins. In the series we see Mary Kate struggle for independence by moving out of her apartment with sister Ashley (also played by Carroll) and into an apartment directly next door. She relies heavily on her bodyguard, named Bodyguard, to make her Xanax and watermelon smoothies, feed her water from a bottle like a hamster, clean up after her many drug-induced mishaps and find her Vera Wang Snuggie because “it’s brrr in here”. (She’s always cold due to her tiny-ness. In one episode she has a fever of 74 – her normal body temperature is 62.) Each episode tops off at around 2 minutes and 30 seconds and yet any one of them could make you feel like you’re about to wet yourself laughing. Aside from her sister and Bodyguard, Mary Kate also spends time dodging the lascivious advances of Philip Seymour Hoffman, trying to date Zac Effron and attempting to bullshit her way through college with a major in ponies. New episodes generally show up every Tuesday and Thursday so check it out! You’ll be talking about how full you are from looking at pictures of food in no time.

Speaking of funny, multitalented women, Jacquetta Szathmari is a writer, actor and comedian you had best keep your eye on before she shoots into the stratosphere and becomes a huge star. Full disclosure: Jacquetta was one of my good friends back in my Sarah Lawrence College days. But trust me when I say that my love of her hilarity is totally unbiased – there is nothing more painful than having to fake interest in the bad work of a good friend. Thankfully, Szathmari makes that sort of situation totally unnecessary. Blessed with a dry delivery that would make a British comic weep with envy, Jacquetta has been slowly building up buzz and attention with her one-woman show “That’s funny. You didn’t sound black on the phone.”, which made a big splash at the 2010 Fringe Festival in Los Angeles, and her comedy podcast Hey You Know It co-hosted by Katie Kazimir. The podcast has so far covered topics as varied as politics vs. religion, supernatural occurrences, holiday hell, phobias and plastic surgery. Every episode finds Szathmari and Kazimir in the “Celebrity Corner” wherein the discuss which B, C and D-list celebrities are currently serving up the same type of work as A-list celebs at a deep discount. (E.g. Giovanni Ribisi serving Sam Rockwell at a 40% discount.) Here’s a stand-up segment Jacquetta did for the In The Flesh Reading Series’ Sex & Comedy Night. And keep watching for Szathmari, she’ll be going places.

I guess Marvel Comics must have read my letter to them and decided that, instead of trying to win back my love, they would petulantly and bald-facedly continue to push me away by rolling out the latest evidence of their evil possession by Disney by having to trot out a zillion Tron-ified variant covers for almost all of their books to dovetail with the upcoming release of Tron: Legacy. (Which I actually want to see, so this is not about bagging on the movie.) And yes I get it, these are huge corporations and they’re all about sales and marketing and yadda blah blah. But it just feels so tacky and over-the-top and off-putting. Like what the hell does Spider-Woman have to do with Tron? Nadda! Zippo! Zilch! Nunco! And Marvel could stand to lay off the variant covers in general. Does every issue really need to have 3-4 variants? It just feels desperate and a little embarrassing. Just because we’ve broken up it doesn’t mean I don’t still care about you, y’know? And I’d like to see you comport yourself with a little dignity.

In less bummerific comic news, I had the chance to sit down and read every existing issue of Echo, written and illustrated by Terry Moore, while I was on an east coast vacation. I was hesitant to read it at first because the entire series is in black and white and I thought that might make it seem uninteresting. But my friend Christopher urged me on and I ended up spending a late night devouring as many issues as I could and finishing the rest the next day. The series is absolutely spectacular and the lack of color in Moore’s artwork does nothing to detract from the complex, engaging, sometimes scary, sometimes funny story being told. The story centers around Julie, a young photographer struggling after a major breakup and trying to find her way out of personal darkness. She accidentally discovers a high-tech, government made, cyber suit that puts her at the center of a whirlwind of  government secrets, world-threatening weaponry and an ever-growing number of interconnected people who all are linked to this mysterious suit in some way or another. The story is totally breathtaking and I found myself racing through each issue to devour every detail of Julie’s story. Moore builds some fantastically human characters into this book and his artwork, colorless as it is, brings so much life to their struggles. And humor. I cannot emphasize enough that there’s some truly laugh-out-loud moments in the midst of the violence and confusion. I cannot wait for the next issue to come out and for my local comic shop to order me the existing trade paperbacks!

And, finally, a little bit late to the party but I couldn’t possibly not comment on all of the brouhaha surrounding the announcement of a reboot of the Buffy The Vampire Slayer franchise that will not include Joss Whedon, the original creator/writer/director of the film and the TV show. The Internet, naturally, burst into bright and fiery flames at the announcement of this heresy. And while I was not pleased with the notion in any way, I found myself feeling less than totally furious at the idea. I glanced lovingly at my much-adored boxed set for the BTVS series, knowing I could watch any episode of any season any damn time I wanted to. And I also reminded myself that it has become Hollywood’s goal to dig up the corpse of every piece of my pop culture past and necrophilia the besjesus out of it while I sit and watch. Or even if I don’t. And it seems Joss Whedon came to a similar conclusion when he responded to the news via email to E! Online, with the requisite Whedon humor fully intact.

Thankfully, my worries were unfounded. But I have to admit, I was a tad resistant when I first laid ears on 1,000 Years by The Corin Tucker Band. This is partially due to the fact that the free MP3 that we all got to download before the album came out is for song “Doubt”, a fantastic song, don’t get me wrong! But it’s super full-out rockin’ and has a bit of an S-K-esque vibe to it. And, in comparison to the bulk of the album, it’s a bit of a trickster tune. But I totally get why that was our first taste – it’s different enough that it doesn’t sound like a Sleater-Kinney cast-off but not so different that people will run for the hills because it’s not a familiar enough sonic offering from Ms. Tucker. So when I first listened to the entire album and heard a lot of acoustic and strings and less of The Voice, I was a little put-off. But upon further listenins, the album started pulling me in like a siren lures a ship to the rocks. There’s a lot more hush to the album than one might expect from something involving Corin Tucker. But if we’d all been paying attention to Sleater-Kinney songs like “A Quarter To Three” or “The Swimmer” or “Night Light” then we knew that Tucker was just as interested in vulnerability as she was in bombast. In fact, as a long-time fan of Corin Tucker and her mighy voice, it’s highly satisfying to hear what total control she has over that impressive instrument of hers. She can go from hushed and fragile to full-throated and booming in the blink of an eye and it all sounds fucking fantastic. And it turns out that the songs on the album that are the most unlike her previous work are the ones that I am the most in love with.

The opening title track acts as a framework for the whole album, as Corin sings about finding her way back from a less-than-whole existence without music: “Who is that zombie that is wearing Mommy’s clothes?/I want the woman/Want her back/Want her whole/With each song I get closer/With each note I return” she sings over strummed acoustic guitar, tremolo-drenched riffs and muted, throbbing drums and hand claps. Tucker’s never been one to write clean, uncomplicated songs and the album is loaded with messy, difficult moments like this one – knowing her past in Sleater-Kinney and her current life as a stay-at-home-mother of two makes the aforementioned lyrics all the more harrowing. And rewarding. Hearing Tucker sing her way back to this part of her life that was missing is as bracing and exciting as it was to hear her sing about the broken romantic relationship she once had with Carrie Brownstein as she was standing three feet away from her onstage. And she’s neither throwing away her current life or trying to escape back to what she had before, she’s merely finding a tricky balance of all of those parts.

Further prickly, difficult moments are explored on the Slits-esque “Half a World Away” and the lushly acoustic “It’s Always Summer” when Tucker gives vent to the difficulties of having a spouse who spends a lot of his time working on the other side of the planet. But, in true Corin Tucker fashion, she never fully gives in to melancholia or self-pity, instead preferring to explore the push-and-pull that even functioning relationships have. But it’s “Miles Away”, the closing track to 1,000 Years, that provides the most breathtaking moment on this impressive collection of songs. Backed with only a piano and some sparsely strummed acoustic guitar, Corin Tucker reminds us that she is one of the reigning queens of longing and heartache, showing off just how powerful her voice can be when she’s at her most subdued and nuanced.

On the aforementioned “Doubt”, Tucker sings of how she “Turned down the sound to try to live without/I’m grey nothing, I’m washed out”. But lucky for her and for us she came out of that grey nothing and reminded us all what a musical force she is. And as much as I am excited beyond belief that both she and Carrie Brownstein have expressed lots of openness to a Sleater-Kinney reunion (yes please please please please x 1000!!!) , I have to say that I’ll be interested to hear what else Corin Tucker has to say on her own. I have a feeling it will always be worth listening to no matter where she’s at.

Okay, I’ve been trying to write this letter for awhile now and I keep putting it off because, well, there’s absolutely nothing easy about it. But if you’ve been paying any attention then you probably saw this coming. I mean, you must have noticed that your presence on my pull list at my local comic shop has been dwindling more and more over the years. And the growing presence of that…other comic book company on said list. I know, I know, this is totally painful – it’s hurting me too. But the writing is on the wall and we just have to come to terms with it. Marvel, I think we need to break up.

Now come on, don’t get all upset and start throwing stuff and cursing me out, you know exactly why this is happening. And exactly how hard it is for me to be doing this. I mean, I’ve been with you for, what? 32 years? That is a long-ass time for any relationship to last! But if you really think back, it hasn’t been 32 years of uninterrupted bliss – this has happened before. Yes, it has, and let’s not pretend it hasn’t. Remember back in the early 90s when I split up with you? And you remember why, right? Because everything went from compelling stories and character development to endless crossovers and nonstop battles without any substance. And the artwork, man, it was heinous! But that was the early 90s in comics all over, so I won’t hold you entirely responsible for that part. But I do hold you responsible for making me decide I hated comics and didn’t want to read them for years. And then slowly, I let you back into my life. And you came back the same way you first got in – with the mutants; my beloved X-Men in all of their many iterations. You were letting Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely do these wonderful, weird, creepy and funny things with them. And that opened the floodgates for some truly great stuff to enter my life: Runaways! Astonishing X-Men! X-Factor! Young Avengers! Alias!

But then, after getting comfortable in your loving arms once more, you started to pull the same shit you did before. Yes you did! Don’t even try to deny it. First you give me House of M, which, while a fun read and a nifty little story, went and de-mutantized a zillion mutants as well as trotted out your really overly worn Incredibly Powerful Female Hero Goes Mad and Creates Mass Destruction on an Epic Scale storyline that you think were not all tired of. P.S. We are. And it pretty much went quickly downhill from there. You turned most of your X-books into generic catch-all titles for all of your little post-House of M story arcs (Endangered Species! Messiah Complex! I Used To Be a Mutant and All I Got Was This Lousy One-Shot!) and tossed aside almost any interesting character development for endless battle sequences, non-stop plots involving a dozen different anti-Mutant groups and other rehashed, been-there-done-that antics. (Seriously, you revived Nimrod. Nimrod! The petal-pink robot from the future who will Kill All Mutants!) Worse still, you crapped the bed on great titles like Runaways and New Avengers, letting them become watered down and lifeless. Or, worse still, you gave great characters like the original Spider-Woman her own title again only to do nothing interesting with it whatsoever and kill it after 5 issues! And don’t even get me started on what a waste it was for you to revive the New Mutants if you weren’t even going to try to recapture even a fraction of their former glory!!

Damn. I told myself I wasn’t going to get all worked up in front of you. Look, I know you didn’t mean to let this happen – and its not like you haven’t done anything good. X-Factor is still pretty damn great. And Uncanny X-Force seems like it could be a fun ride for awhile. And I’m enjoying Avengers: The Children’s Crusade because YA is such a good team and you really should just let them have their own book again. But, honestly, you’ve got vampires in the X-Men book (quelle originale!) and a thousand one-shots and spin-off minis from that. Uncanny X-Men is as boring as all fuck and Hope running around finding the “5 Lights” just doesn’t do anything for me. New Avengers got boring a long time ago and no amount of revamping can undo that. I mean, you went and took Jessica Jones, one of my favorite new characters you created in a long time, and turned her into a one note character. That is just unforgivable!! Agh!!! Okay, I’m getting all angry again. So I’m just going to go before this gets too hard. I’ll still be in touch to keep up with those one or two books I mentioned before. But it will kind of be like we’re Facebook friends – we keep tabs on one another but it doesn’t go much deeper than that. And if you see me around town with some folks from some of those other comics, well, try to see past your jealousy and hurt and maybe you could learn a thing or two about why I’m spending my time with them. You never know, maybe we’ll get back together in the future. But it’s really going to be up to you.

Love always,

Chriso

There are barely words to express how awful these recently publicized suicides are – horrible and unnecessary and heart-rending. I mostly write about pop culture on this blog and in the last decade we have seen an ever-increasing amount of LGBT representation in mainstream pop culture  – from TV to movies to music – and what seems like an ever-growing tolerance and even, shock of shocks, acceptance. And then reality comes crashing down in the form of four dead boys who should have lived to be ancient before they left this world and it becomes clear that no amount of Glee or Project Runway or The L Word or Brokeback Mountain can take away the very real pain of living in a world where you are fed messages again and again and again – from your family, from your peers, from your co-workers and teachers and religious leaders – that everything about you is sick and wrong and dirty and horrible. And for some of us those messages are just too loud and too painful to endure for one more moment.

When I was 17 I came out of the closet to most of my friends and family. Well, to be honest, I came out of the closet to a few close friends, told one “social friend” who blabbed it to the rest of my tiny high school and then my mom read a very personal letter from a friend who I had come out to and then confronted me. So, you know, the usual parade of shit. I was lucky in a lot of ways, my family accepted me with some minor-to-less minor speed bumps and my peers at school were cool with it for the most part. (I seemed to get teased more as a kid before I came out than after I came out. I also had transferred from public school to a little artsy/hippie school, which was not perfect, but it was already a bit of a misfit culture as opposed to the relentless jock/preppie nightmare that public school was, so it was a bit easier. ) But the faculty at my high school went ballistic and acted like I was a walking potential rapist and that every male on campus was in danger from my lascivious and unnatural ways. I had a teacher who I had admired and felt close to take me aside one day and tell me all about a faculty meeting that was held where they decided they needed to let me know I couldn’t bring a guy to the prom. Regardless of whether or not I had a boyfriend (which I didn’t, of course, this was New Hampshire and it was 1991), they just wanted to make sure that I wasn’t going to “push my sexuality on the other students”. Mind you, they weren’t pulling aside my friends who were in a heterosexual couple who would basically make out and dry hump on a chair in the student lounge on a daily basis because there’s no way they were forcing their sexuality on anyone, right?

And that is where the crux of this lies for me. I want all of you reading this, especially my heterosexual readers and extra especially my heterosexual readers who consider themselves allies to queer folks, to think very hard about what it is like to grow up and live in a world where your sexual preference is seen as abnormal. As an anomaly. As wrong. As chosen and chosen based on being full of sin and evil. I want you to think of what it would be like to grow up with no role models for how to live your life, how to express your sexuality. I want you to think about all of the movies and television shows you’ve watched in your life, of how many books you’ve read and the vast number of songs you’ve heard and how many other pieces of media you’ve consumed that reflect some version of heterosexuality back at you. And now I want you to imagine having about 97% of that never existing and having to live off of those crumbs of representation for the bulk of your life. Because let’s not kid ourselves that the increased presence of queer folks in pop culture constitutes the massive avalanche that all the anti-gay, Bible-thumping, hate-mongers would have us believe. But the truth is, I don’t think any of you can imagine what I’ve written because you’ve had the good fortune of growing up in a world that reinforces and celebrates and totally backs you up for being who you are. But I still want you to think about this when you very honestly lament the loss of these young men, because that is so much of what is at the heart of this – people who don’t know how to live in a world that so often tells them they are wrong for simply existing. Can you maybe understand why some of us may think death is the only option to escape that?

And while it may be very well-intentioned to tell the kids It Gets Better, is that enough? Is that even true? I mean, I am all for giving people hope just like Harvey wanted to, but there’s a difference between hope for the far-flung future and hope for the now. And what about giving these kids and outlet for all of the bottled up rage and anger and frustration they feel? Or is that too icky and difficult to face? Because, trust me, it’s there. After having peers hassle me in the hallways in grade school, push me down the stairs and into lockers; after having my 5th grade teacher (who was such a closeted lesbian it wasn’t even funny) mock me in front of the entire class for being in plays instead of participating in sports; after the faculty watching me like a hawk and having meetings about me and after my step-sister telling me I “dress like a faggot” and after having a football player-sized guy gay bash me and my best friend in a Burger King when I was 17, I didn’t just need hope. I needed a punching bag or a concrete wall and a box full of cheap glassware. And that is what no one wants to talk about – how bullying and abuse and gay bashing places violence in our lives and inside of our souls. And that is the kind of damage that lasts longer than any of us may think. And don’t think for a second that those of us who don’t die didn’t suffer – we just managed to stay on this planet and continue to fight for our right to live on it. That’s the real tragedy here – that these kids didn’t think they deserved their place among us anymore. And I can only hope the people who pushed them to that point really understand the full depth of what they’ve done. And I hope they suffer with the knowledge of that for quite a long time.

Postscript: I had to add this one video from a young woman who posted her take on It Gets Better. Her words are so honest and amazing and I seriously have so much love in my heart for her saying what she says. Not platitudes, no sugar coating, just real and difficult and true.

Rat Girl would almost better be described as a micro-memoir. Instead of giving readers the usual overview of a life thus far, Kristin Hersh presents us with one year of her life – 1985 to be precise – when she was 18 years old. And while I’m sure lots of us had our share of sturm und drang swirling about us at age 18 – it’s a teenager’s job to be full of drama and darkness, after all – the 18th year of Kristin’s life found her band, Throwing Muses, signed to 4AD Records amidst a growing whirlwind of buzz while, at the same time, Hersh was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and then found herself pregnant with her first child. But if that makes you think you’re in for a chick-lit-eqsue ride through tears, hand-wringing and a parade of victimization, you couldn’t be more wrong. One of the best things about Rat Girl is Hersh’s slightly self-deprecating detachment from telling her very intense, very chaotic, very painful story. The tone of Rat Girl often reminds me of Susana Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted, a memoir of the author’s diagnosis with and hospitalization for borderline personality disorder. Hersh approaches her story with much of the same refreshing lack of sentimentality and poor-me-ness that Kaysen utilizes when recounting her experiences but with a voice that is uniquely Hersh’s own – peppered with made-up words, the naturally fractured nature of diary entries and snippets of song lyrics that Hersh felt related to or illuminated a given situation. And with Hersh, songs are always one of the biggest parts of her life.

I’ve often read about and heard that Hersh’s bipolar disorder often took the form of auditory hallucinations that would consume her until they forced her to sit down and give them structure and form with actual music and lyrics. But in reading Rat Girl I learnedthat she was the victim of a hit-and-run accident that takes place right before the beginning of her 18th year: an elderly woman ran into Hersh with her car, throwing her from her bike and causing her to slide along the pavement in such a violent way that she received a double concussion. It was in the hospital that Hersh first began hearing the relentless noises that eventually formed into the “song bodies” that have informed much of the music she has produced over the years. Soon after, Hersh is diagnosed with bipolar disorder and it’s like some sort of macabre chicken-or-the-egg scenario as she and the reader try to divine whether or not this condition came about as a result of the accident or if the accident merely brought out something that was already latent. Through it all she makes music with the bandmates she loves with a fierce protectiveness, goes to school with Betty Hutton, a faded Hollywood actress who makes the most charmingly odd companion for the tiny, besieged musician and tries to prepare for the new life she’s about to bring into the world.

But if all of this still sounds overwrought and dramatic, you really have to trust me when I say it’s not. I found myself belly-laughing at top volume on more than one occasion. Hersh’s stage shows have always proved she has a knack for hilariously wacky storytelling and Rat Girl proves that on a whole different level. From her tales of living in a squatter-esque household full of musicians and painters and the clashing dynamics inherent in those two groups co-existing to navigating the inherently silly world of music as a band of strange outsiders, Hersh manages to present truly harrowing stories and mundane events alongside each other with equal wit, insight and a surprising lack of pretentiousness. One of my favorite elements of the book is reading about conversations and interactions that clearly went on to fuel the lyrical content of so many of her songs. “Hate My Way” is one of Throwing Muses’ most visceral, aggressive, fantastic early songs and I had always wondered what it was that inspired Hersh to come up with the dark, disturbing lyrics that I’ve heard hundreds of times since my teenage years. Reading the banal-yet-oddball encounter that inspired said lyrics both had me chuckling in disbelief and admiring Hersh as an artist even more to see how she could mine just about any moment in her life for artistic inspiration. And Rat Girl is the ultimate expression of that talent. It takes a truly remarkable individual to be able to take one of the most difficult, dark, painful and simultaneously exciting and joyous years of her life and turn it into an enthralling, hilarious, unsettling, moving and completely readable piece of written art. Thankfully, Kristin Hersh is just such an individual. Now all I wanna know is when do we get year 19? And 20? And 21? And…

[Read a fantastic interview with Kristin Hersh about Rat Girl here at the Powell's website.]

P.S. I had to add that one more wonderful component of Rat Girl is that Hersh and Throwing Muses are presenting four intimate sessions recordings of songs presented in the book called The Season Sessions. You gotta get the book to get the info on how to download these unique takes on classic TM/KH tracks. So much goodness, really.