What if Bob Hope bought the Washington Senators? This was almost a reality in 1968. The famous comedian went as far as to secure funding and lined up a General Manager to take over the team. https://t.co/2c0uVMMRVK What if Bob Hope bought the Washington Senators? This was al…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jul 3, 2022
42 years before Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon, a massive fire engulfed the center of American military might. The fire was not due to a terrorist attack, but was rather the result of. . . a computer? https://t.co/hzQ7pOFVzU 42 years before Flight 77 crashed into the Pe…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jul 2, 2022
What do a five-year-old boy, a woman working at a train station, and an African American newspaperman have in common? They all witnessed presidential assassinations in Washington, DC. https://t.co/ShFOTpWKRA What do a five-year-old boy, a woman working at a train station, an…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jul 2, 2022
Early 1900s postcard view of the interior of the Carnegie Library at Mount Vernon Square. The main entrance is off to the left. The old general circulation desk--long gone--is at the center. This space is now occupied by an Apple store; DC History Center is on the second flo…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jul 2, 2022
The Cochran Hotel stood on the northwest corner of 14th and K Streets NW from 1891 to 1928, when it was replaced by the Tower Building. In its later years, it was called the Franklin Square Hotel. More about it at: https://t.co/NlSnW02obL https://t.co/vuLqfD3V51 The Cochran H…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jul 2, 2022
Is Thomas Edison in part responsible for the Military Industrial Complex which defined much of the 20th-century? In 1915, Edison proposed the US set up a lab devoted to innovations of war. This would later turn into the Naval Research Laboratory. https://t.co/Mv53C57mtB Is T…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jul 2, 2022
Today in History - July 2 https://t.co/qWaU2Qe7wS On July 2, 1863, the lines of the Battle of Gettysburg, now in its second day, were drawn in two sweeping parallel arcs. Continue reading. On July 2, 1881, Charles J. Guiteau shot and fatally wounded the newly inaugurated U.…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jul 2, 2022
In the 1956 movie, Earth vs. the Flying Saucer, the famous scene of aliens destroying DC with their extraterrestrial space crafts was partially inspired by a train crash at Union Station just three years prior. https://t.co/18EQbH2BCf In the 1956 movie, Earth vs. the Flying …
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jul 1, 2022
Did you know in 1974, Arlington hired the nation's first career female firefighter? Her name was Judy Livers Brewer and she served on the ACFD for over 25 years, helping to pave the way for other female firefighters. https://t.co/iEHFAIyh8e Did you know in 1974, Arlington hi…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jul 1, 2022
We read a number of stories across the web this week, and you can always visit our editors’ picks or our Twitter feed to see what you may have missed. Among this week’s #longreads, here are five standout pieces that we recommend.
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Jackie Flynn Mogensen | Mother Jones | June 23rd, 2022 | 6,566 words
In May 2020, a plane full of monkeys intended for COVID-19 research was supposed to depart Mauritius. But it never did. Who purchased the monkeys? Where were they supposed to go? When Jackie Flynn Mogensen looked into the failed flight, and began to investigate the secretive global trade of research monkeys, she found there was an even bigger story: The U.S. is experiencing a primate shortage, and there aren’t enough monkeys for research across many areas of medicine. Primate research has led to life-saving discoveries over the decades, but it remains controversial, with no guarantees, despite animal testing guidelines, that animals are treated properly. “But no matter how you or I feel about it,” Mogensen writes, “it’s clear the practice has saved—and is saving—human lives.” This is a fascinating dive into the monkey trade and the players within it, like Matthew Block, who’s been a target of animal rights groups for years and, as you’ll read, is the owner of the company who arranged the flight. Mogensen also reports on a few alternatives, like lab-grown organs, but we’re still a long way from a world without animal testing. —CLR
Justin Heckert | Vanity Fair | June 27th, 2022 | 5,900 words
I can count on my hands the number of video games I’ve played in my life, and the only way I ever won a round of Mario Kart in middle school was by shoving my friend off the couch in the den where she kept her console. But even as an uninitiated reader, it was impossible not to become invested in this story of a man who amassed an impressive collection of old and rare games, only to have them stolen in one fell swoop. A satisfying true crime tale, much more Knives Out than Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, this piece features quirky characters who work at game stores with names like Grumpy Bob’s Emporium. It’s also a poignant meditation on nostalgia and how we assign value to objects that speak to our past. I needed a distraction from the barrage of terrible news this week, and Justin Heckert delivered. —SD
Gloria Liu | Outside | June 13th, 2022 | 3,100 words
It may come with being British, but growing up I was very prudish about nudity. A communal changing room meant an elaborate wiggle dance under a towel, into a swimming costume that would have met with Queen Victoria’s approval. Upon moving to the Pacific Northwest, I found more liberal attitudes toward nudity, and I relate to Gloria Liu as she discusses her jealousy of “friends who were less inhibited, so comfortable in their own skin.” Liu takes us on a gentle journey as she attempts to emulate these friends, and go naked outside. Spoiler alert: She makes good progress and ends up describing a beautiful nude night hike, where “Taking my clothes off with others wasn’t the exercise in courage or cutting loose that I thought it would be. It was an exercise in faith. To be naked, I had to believe that the world could be good. And tonight it feels like it can be.” This essay starts by considering nakedness — but ends up reflecting on friendship and the importance of building memories. —CW
Sharon Levy | Undark | June 22nd, 2022 | 3,433 words
Condor 746, on loan from a captive breeding program in Idaho, traveled to California in spring 2022. He’s the first California condor in over a century to reach the ancestral land of the Yurok Tribe, and made the journey to mentor four young birds in a condor facility in Redwood National Park. Condors are very social, explains Sharon Levy, learning best and benefitting from being under the wing of an elder. In this piece, Levy beautifully traces the journey of the species, and the incredible efforts of the tribe to ensure the bird’s successful reintroduction to the wild. It’s an insightful look into what it takes for captive breeding programs to work over time: creative solutions, dedicated biologists, and — in the condor’s case — monitoring for lead poisoning. (And a bonus: there’s an amazing photo of a chick next to a hand puppet — the first condors reintroduced were reared by puppets!). —CLR
Mychal Denzel Smith | Pitchfork | June 28th, 2022 | 2,287 words
Hip-hop has had subgenres nearly as long as it’s had the spine of a breakbeat, but at some point it was riven by a more seismic distinction: mainstream vs. underground, and specifically the rise of “conscious” rap. Mychal Denzel Smith was one of the many people who internalized that stance, who viewed hip-hop as a vessel of liberation and awakening to a degree that became an identity of its own. That was then, though. Now, with the 2022 return of Black Star and Kendrick Lamar — both avatars and resurrectors of conscious rap — Smith interrogates his onetime fandom, as well as the evolution (or lack thereof) of the music itself. “I was artificially limiting my perspective,” he writes, “in the name of some grand vision of consciousness that never cohered into anything other than my own sense of intellectual superiority.” This isn’t a discussion about art vs. artist. It’s a coming to grips with our own reductive tendencies, our willingness to flatten ourselves in the name of aesthetic belonging. If you’ve found that the backpack fits a little bit differently these days, this piece will help you notice where the straps are chafing. —PR
Making a Picture-Perfect Landing via NASA https://t.co/BLte6D6gEK https://t.co/oWKgRMr1s2
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jul 1, 2022
#OTD in 1967, performers and artisans ranging from a family polka band from Texas, to Mesquakie Indian performers from Iowa descended upon DC for the Smothsonians’s first Folklife Festival. https://t.co/LLXquWU49c #OTD in 1967, performers and artisans ranging from a family p…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jul 1, 2022
Today in History - July 1 https://t.co/81oM3NKnoa On July 1, 1847, the United States Post Office issued its first general issue postage stamp, a five-cent stamp honoring Benjamin Franklin, the first postmaster general under the Continental Congress, and a ten-cent stamp hono…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jul 1, 2022
OMG: The Beauty of Ice via NASA https://t.co/6GTGxNX5G1 https://t.co/auWSsJtiDf
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jun 30, 2022
The Perfect Landing via NASA https://t.co/MUvcS8MTYJ https://t.co/IpS1ZGlNOh
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jun 30, 2022
Churchman, a Quaker surveyor from Pennsylvania, produced this hand-colored map for the American Philosophical Society in order to support the proposed construction of a canal between the Delaware and Chesapeake bays. Look closer: https://t.co/0qYFziPkRA https://t.co/JNFRwbADfN…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jun 30, 2022
Today in History - June 30 https://t.co/bk4DClhGAJ President Abraham Lincoln signed the Yosemite Valley Grant Act, Senate Bill 203, on June 30, 1864. The legislation gave California the Yosemite Valley and the nearby Mariposa Big Tree Grove "upon the express conditions that …
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jun 30, 2022
Perhaps the nation’s most notorious snake oil salesmen, Harry Hoxsey went toe-to-toe with the FDA, defending his cancer treatments. It took until 1960 for the FDA to put a final stop to Hoxsey’s fake medication peddling operation. https://t.co/dHkORFv9lM Perhaps the nation’s…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jun 30, 2022
By Chloe Walker
In the days of classic Hollywood, the private lives of movie actors were zealously guarded — and often downright fabricated — so the viewing public would believe their carefully calibrated onscreen personas. There was little faith that audiences could keep public and private in separate boxes, so the private box was deeply buried, often not seeing the light of day until after the stars’ deaths.
The things we know about Tom Cruise would have sent these Hollywood publicists to their own early graves. The innumerable strange, sinister stories from his very long, very public, embroilment with Scientology. The divorces and separations from his fellow A-list actors. The whole couch-jumping incident. Various other embarrassing viral videos. Anyone who spends four decades as one of the world’s biggest movie stars might rack up a few scandals along the way, but with Cruise, the baggage is on a different level.
The whole time, however, he’s kept working, and we’ve kept going to see him. As he moved from the charming young hero of ’80s hits like Top Gun and Risky Business, through his “serious actor” period in the ’90s, to the action hero of today, his movies have continued to make impressive money at the box office; even his few disappointments — War of the Worlds, The Mummy — wouldn’t be disappointing by most actors’ standards. His longevity, especially in the face of all those negative headlines, is formidable. His megawatt smile remains undimmable. His energy just as dauntingly intense as when we first met him, as a teenager. Cruise turns 60 on July 3, and it seems eminently possible he’ll still be flinging himself onto moving airplanes and scaling skyscrapers in a decade’s time.
Is that why he’s never seemed to exist in the same realm as us mortals? Or does this constant need to impress prove such a relatable aching vulnerability that it hurts to acknowledge it? While there are infinitely more deserving recipients of sympathy — those who don’t have endless money and aren’t the figureheads of a decidedly dubious religion/cult — I still can’t help but feel a little sorry for him. The pressure of being “on” all the time. The knowledge that the whole world knows your most embarrassing eccentricities. All celebrities must have moments of feeling like animals in a zoo, but it’s hard to imagine when Cruise would ever be able to escape that feeling. The gilded fishbowl of his particular fame is a place many would drown. He keeps right on swimming.
Some of the authors cited in this reading list are dazzled by Cruise’s grin or wowed by tales of his oft-lauded work ethic. Some find him a disconcerting figure, or a silly, pitiable one. Several of the pieces are solely concerned with his screen roles; others find patterns in those roles and draw conclusions about Cruise’s thinking and motivations, or even parallels between the trajectory of his career and America as a whole. Taken together, these 10 articles paint a kaleidoscopic picture of a complicated, fascinating, unique kind of stardom.
I don’t know if I’d really want to solve the riddle of Tom Cruise. Perhaps there’s no riddle to be solved; maybe he’s just an empty vessel behind a shiny surface, reflecting back at us our own ideas about the nature of celebrity, and what we require from our superstars. Maybe, despite all we’ve learned about him over the years, there are depths yet to be plumbed. We might never know for sure, but that’s okay — the contemplating’s all part of the fun.
Cruise is one of many ’80s actors profiled in Aljean Harmetz’s New York Times piece, which discusses the differences between stardom in classic and ’80s Hollywood. Harmetz asks which of the then-current crop of young talent has the best chance of making it big, and what exactly is a star anyway? Published the summer after Top Gun cemented Cruise’s A-list status, Harmetz questions him, and various Hollywood executives, as to what it is that put him over that titular line. Their answers underscore how consistent his persona has remained over the past four decades.
”That guy has the most winning smile of anyone I have seen except Eddie Murphy,” says Mr. Katzenberg. ”His smile says, ‘We’re going to have fun.’ ” Adds Ellen Chenowitz, a casting director, ”He has that killer smile that Nicholson and Redford have.”
”I don’t worry about whether I’m making the right decision,” says Mr. Cruise. ”I’m one to believe that everything I do is right, that I can make it right.” That kind of confidence is part of Ms. Chenowitz’s recipe for stardom. “Actors can’t apologize for themselves,” she says. ”You can’t get the impression they feel, ‘I’m not really good. You don’t want to see me.’ ”
Though Neil Strauss’ interview is ostensibly concerned with Cruise’s transition from the heroic roles of his early career to his more complicated characters in Magnolia and Collateral, more words are spent just on the strange experience of being in the actor’s presence. Describing their time touring various Scientology hotspots and riding motorbikes in the Mojave Desert, Strauss presents Cruise warmly, yet as a total oddball: charming, sincere in his interest in other people, but as something akin to an alien wearing a human skin suit.
And now, here it comes: the famous Tom Cruise laugh. It comes on just fine, a regular laugh by any standards. You will be laughing too. But then, when the humour subsides, you will stop laughing. At this point, however, Cruise’s laugh will just be reaching a crescendo, and he will be making eye contact with you. Ha ha HA HA heh heh. And you will try to laugh again, to join him, because you know you’re supposed to. But it doesn’t come out right, because it’s not natural. He will squeeze out a couple of words sometimes between chuckles – in this case, ‘Wouldn’t that be awesome?’ – and then, as suddenly as he started, he will stop, and you will be relieved.
Cal Fussman’s interview with Cruise is written as a first-person piece from the hand of the megastar and is perhaps the closest thing to an autobiography we might ever get from him. Although a sanitized account of his personal life — his relationship with his abusive father is mentioned in such a tangential way, it’s almost confusing — the attempt to present a relatable side and the self-mythologizing of his underdog story, from the bullied working-class kid of divorced parents to Hollywood luminary with a peerless work ethic, carry their own fascination.
These small steps of personal awareness came with the work. You know what else I found out? The better I became at the job, the better I could do it. The better I got at delivering newspapers, the more clients I got. And if I missed delivering the paper to a certain house one day, it was: Wow. This guy’s pissed. Then it becomes: What do I do here? And I realized, Oh, I gotta talk to this guy. Handle it. Then you see: Oh, I can fix this. By taking responsibility, I can fix this.
Published a few months after Cruise’s divorce from his third wife, Katie Holmes, Maureen Orth’s bombshell Vanity Fair piece details the many ways his romantic life has become entwined with his status as Scientology’s Superman. This cover article — ardently refuted by the organization — is packed with juicy tidbits that powered their own headlines for weeks, most prominently that Scientology held auditions to find Cruise an appropriate girlfriend following his split from Penelope Cruz. Orth’s piece describes in detail the brief, troubling relationship between Cruise and younger actress Nazanin Boniadi that sprang from these auditions.
Though the first month on the project was bliss, by the second month Boniadi was more and more often found wanting. Cruise’s hairstylist, Chris McMillan, was brought in to work on her hair; in addition, says the source, Cruise wanted Boniadi’s incisor teeth filed down. Finally, she was allowed to tell her mother that she was involved with Tom Cruise. Her mother, a hairdresser, did not like the fact she was now out of the picture, not even allowed to do her daughter’s hair, and she frowned upon the age difference between her daughter and the then 42-year-old actor. She reportedly also had to sign a confidentiality agreement, but she never reached the point where she qualified to meet Cruise.
Ryan McCarthy and Jim Tankersley’s ambitious, amusing discussion attempts to discover a throughline between all of the leading roles that Cruise played up to 2014. While they don’t quite manage to find something all-encompassing, the different categories they assign his roles (“The Working-Class Guy Caught in the Middle of Bad Institutions,”’ “The Cool, Unemotional Specialist Who Saves The Public”) are instructive, as are the parallels between the types of men that Cruise plays and the concurrent state of American society.
[McCarthy:] One of the interesting things about my thesis of the three major Cruise movie categories is that it’s semi-chronological. He started as the devil-may-care Maverick of the 1980s, moved to a guy being held back by bad institutions and now is mostly the dry-cool specialist fighting aliens or disembodied stateless terror organizations.
Which is weird, right? In a time of relatively tame job creation, wage stagnation, income inequality and general economic negativity, shouldn’t we be seeing more of the guy getting held down by bad institutions? Why did the relatively happy ’90s featuring a leading man always being held down by society? Why are Cruise roles basically counter-cyclical?
Cruise has been in action hero mode for so long now it’s surprisingly easy to forget that for a while he was a serious actor who looked for challenges more emotional than spectacular. He worked with esteemed directors like Paul Thomas Anderson and Stanley Kubrick and even garnered a few Oscar nominations along the way. Film critic and historian Mark Harris analyzes his three nominated performances — Born on the Fourth of July, Jerry Maguire, and Magnolia — looking at a time when the irrepressible energy and manic charm that still personifies his acting was directed at characters with depth, and how those characters were a perfect fit for the actor.
Cameron Crowe’s Jerry Maguire is essentially an essay on Tom Cruise that Cruise coauthors by enacting it. Everything we feel about him — how can he be so unbelievably charming, why is he always selling, can we possibly trust someone who asks for our trust that nakedly, does his need make him more human or more scary, shouldn’t that irresistible surface count for something, why does it have to be quite so polished? — is embedded in this character, who is either trying to be a better person or trying to convince you he’s trying.
In her LA Weekly piece, Amy Nicholson argues that Cruise’s move away from his artistically interesting ’90s output toward his safer action-oriented work was precipitated by the ruinous reaction to his infamous 2005 hijinks on Oprah’s couch. Detailing the confluence of events that allowed an initially innocuous-seeming interview to become one of the internet’s earliest and most indelible viral moments — primarily the firing of his experienced publicist, and the recent creation of YouTube — Nicholson laments that such a trivial incident could have cost us many years of Cruise at his most interesting.
Post-2005, we’ve lost out on the audacious films that only Hollywood’s most powerful and consistent star could have convinced studios to greenlight. Cruise was in his mid-40s prime — the same years when Newman made Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting — and here he was lying low, like the kid who’d run away to London. Imagine the daring roles that he hasn’t dared to pursue. Cruise’s talent and clout were responsible for an unparalleled string of critical and commercial hits. We gave that up for a gif.
Responding to the leaked audio of Cruise screaming and swearing at the crew on the seventh Mission Impossible movie about their lax COVID safety protocols, Nicholas Russell contemplates the opaque nature of “our least relatable celebrity,” and how Cruise stands so very far apart from his fellow superstars, who still yearn for said relatability. Russell considers how Cruise’s longevity — the sheer volume of years he’s spent as Hollywood’s most successful weirdo — has given him a degree of impenetrability. The rules just don’t seem to apply to him.
It’s disturbing to think of Tom as a person because it gives way to the possibility that he has an inner life and emotions. What could he possibly, ever, be angry about? What does that mean for the people around him? Is it even possible to talk about the desires of someone like Tom Cruise? He has existed for so long in a state of having every need, every whim, met immediately and without effort. Can a person like that be said to know what it means to want anything anymore?
For Deadline, Mike Fleming Jr. talks to directors whom Cruise has collaborated with throughout his career, gathering glowing tales about the various ways in which working with him was a pleasure. Whilst they discuss specifics of his craft, and the various kindnesses he has shown colleagues over the years, more than anything else the piece portrays a man whose love of movies and moviemaking is the driving force in his life. If there’s a singular answer to be found as to why he remains so widely adored despite all the baggage, perhaps it’s that.
[Douglas Liman:] I mention to Tom, ‘Are you thinking of going away for your birthday?’ Tom says, ‘No. I was thinking since we have the day off on July 3, we can use that time to have the eight-hour aviation meeting that we’ve been having trouble scheduling.’ I am beyond tired and I’m like, ‘You want to have an eight-hour meeting on your birthday?’ He said, ‘Yes, that’s what I want for my birthday. I want to be making a movie. That’s the best birthday present.’ There was no blowing out candles, either.
Thirty-five years have passed between Cruise’s breakthrough turn in Top Gun and his appearance in the sequel, Top Gun: Maverick. In his review for Vulture, Bilge Ebiri finds the recent film awash with melancholy, and heavy with the weight of all that has happened to America and the leading man during the cavernous three-and-a-half decades that separates the two movies. He sees Cruise as the poignant manifestation of that earlier era, the shiny carapace of his stardom tarnished and dented by the heavy weight of time. Maybe he’s not immortal after all.
Even Cruise’s remarkably well-preserved face and physique add to his out-of-time and out-of-place aura. The actor has never seemed so vulnerable; Maverick might be the first time he has played a genuinely broken man, and there’s a poignant irony to the fact that he’s doing so while resurrecting his most iconic character. His tears, when they come, reach beyond the screen — they seem like a cathartic lament for everything that has changed since 1986.
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Chloe Walker is a writer based in the U.K. She is a regular contributor to Paste Magazine and the BFI.
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Editor: Carolyn Wells
Copy Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Quote of the Day: "There are glimpses of heaven to us in every act, or thought, or word, that raises us above ourselves." - Robert Quillen
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jun 30, 2022
Today is “National Camera Day.” To celebrate the massive advancements made by the camera in the last 200 years, we look back at the early days of photography and the rivalry it spawned between 2 DC photographers: Brady and Gardner. https://t.co/OHLyNURXKj Today is “National …
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jun 30, 2022
Did you know the GW Parkway was one of the first modern highways (paved and intended for cars) in the US? Driving the Parkway was meant to be an experience as seen with the many pull-off points to look out over the Potomac and city beyond. https://t.co/NUvm4oymJx Did you kno…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jun 29, 2022
Turquoise Plumes in the Large Magellanic Cloud via NASA https://t.co/RdMd6ouByY https://t.co/FDKYHt9UMD
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jun 29, 2022
This 1901 map shows salmon canneries along the coast from California, Oregon, and Washington to BC and Alaska. It lists the names and locations of canneries, annual aggregates, and catch totals by year. Check it out: https://t.co/rXHPtHGqT5 https://t.co/ckMQWXt02o This 1901 m…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jun 29, 2022
In Dec 1910, a ceremony was held at the NW corner of Lafayette Park to christen the statue of Revolutionary War hero Friedrich Wilhelm Von Steuben. After President Taft gave a speech, daughter Helen pulled the chord unveiling the statue. Corcoran mansion seen in the backgrou…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jun 29, 2022
A duel gone right? When John Randolph and Henry Clay met on the VA side of the Potomac for a duel (Randolph insulted Clay), both men saw the futility of their actions, choosing to part on good terms. https://t.co/HsljDPJgWt A duel gone right? When John Randolph and Henry Cla…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jun 29, 2022
Today in History - June 29 https://t.co/jznE8L7ppe On June 29, 1852, statesman Henry Clay, known as "the Great Compromiser" for his feats of legislative reconciliation between the North and the South, died at the age of seventy-five at the Old National Hotel in Washington, D…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jun 29, 2022
Lisa Whittington-Hill | Longreads | June 2022 | 16 minutes (4,445 words)
Jennifer Finch is smiling, but she’s clearly frustrated. “Everywhere I go, everywhere I turn, I see this fucking face,” says the bassist for Los Angeles band L7. “Frankly, I’m sick of it.” Finch is holding a copy of the January 1992 issue of Spin, which happens to be Nirvana’s first national magazine cover; the face in question belongs to her ex-boyfriend, Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl.
The scene appears in the 2016 documentary L7: Pretend We’re Dead, but the sentiment dates back much farther. When the magazine was published, Finch and her L7 bandmates were in the studio recording their third album, Bricks Are Heavy. L7 had formed in 1985, two years before Nirvana was in bloom, and the two bands had toured England together in 1990. Yet, with Nirvana’s breakthrough 1991 album, Nevermind, Grohl, bassist Krist Novoselic, and lead singer/guitarist Kurt Cobain had seemingly gone from obscurity to ubiquity overnight: Nevermind was selling upwards of 300,000 copies a week, and was about to knock Michael Jackson’s Dangerous off the top of the Billboard charts.
Nevermind was not the only seminal grunge album released in 1991. Pearl Jam’s Ten hit the record store at your local mall in August 1991 and Soundgarden’s Badmotorfinger in October. By the time L7’s Bricks Are Heavy was released in April 1992, grunge had exploded: You could buy Soundgarden singer Chris Cornell’s look at your local Walmart, rusty cage not included. But as Finch and her bandmates would find, not everyone in the grunge scene was granted the same success; despite glowing reviews, Bricks Are Heavy topped out at #160 on the Billboard 200.
From the return of jelly shoes to the pop culture nostalgia of Showtime’s Yellowjackets, the ’90s are back. Chuck Klosterman’s latest essay collection, The Nineties: A Book, chronicles what the author calls “the last decade with a fully formed and recognizable culture of its own”; Vice’s series The Dark Side of the 90s revisits the Gulf War, the Viper Room, and the dating history of Counting Crows lead singer Adam Duritz (a Gen X Pete Davidson if ever there was one). And with 30th anniversaries this summer of albums from Sonic Youth’s Dirty to Screaming Trees’ Sweet Oblivion — not to mention the Singles soundtrack, which 30 years ago this week packaged the “Seattle sound” for a mainstream audience — our desire to revisit and re-consume the decade that brought us Baywatch, Beavis and Butt-Head, and Beanie Babies shows no signs of slowing down.
But not everything is cause for celebration. While the alternative and grunge scene of the early to mid-’90s celebrated opposition to the mainstream, it was also a very white, very male scene that downplayed the significant contributions of artists who didn’t fit that description. Female bands like 7 Year Bitch and Babes in Toyland sold significantly fewer records than their male counterparts, generated fewer bidding wars, and received less press. When not ignored, women were objectified by the media and marginalized by an industry that treated them like a fad, promoting only a handful of female musicians and only for a brief period. As we revisit the decade that gave us grunge, rather than be all apologies, it’s the perfect time to reexamine, reevaluate, and rewrite history — especially for the women who made up the scene.
* * *
“If you look at any history of that time, you’d think almost no women were making music,” Gretta Harley told Seattle magazine in 2013 of Seattle’s early grunge music scene. Harley, a punk rock guitarist, had moved to Seattle in 1990 just as grunge was changing the city and putting it on the musical map; she formed the group Maxi Badd (which would become the Danger Gens) with drummer Dave Parnes and bassist Tess. Lotta. But when Nevermind’s 20th anniversary in 2011 prompted a rush of tributes to Nirvana and its influential album, she realized that none of them accurately reflected the Seattle scene — or women’s role in it.
That inspired Harley, along with actress and writer Sarah Rudinoff and playwright Elizabeth Kenny, to write the 2013 play These Streets. “We started looking at the books that were written by different authors, and the women were absent, almost completely absent,” said Harley.
“[W]hen a 250-page history of Seattle’s rock heyday … only includes a page and a half on the women of the era — calling it ‘The Female Presence’ — something feels … wrong,” wrote Laura Dannen in a preview of the play for Seattle Met magazine. “Like a female guitarist was some kind of elusive Bengal tiger, caught only briefly on tape.” These Streets explored the experiences of women in grunge in the late ’80s and early ’90s, drawing on interviews with more than 40 women in the scene. From Carrie Akre of Hammerbox and Kim Warnick of The Fastbacks to Lazy Susan’s Kim Virant and 7 Year Bitch’s Valerie Agnew and Elizabeth Davis-Simpson, These Streets shined a light on the contributions that so many histories had ignored.
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Even those who managed to break through to wider renown, though, found themselves consistently undervalued. Like Nirvana, L7 had released one of indie label Sub Pop’s Singles of the Month, 1990’s “Shove/Packin’ a Rod.” After its second studio album, 1990’s Smell the Magic, was also released on Sub Pop, the band signed to Warner Bros. subsidiary Slash Records — for what is described in the documentary Pretend We’re Dead as a “shit deal” — at a time when major labels were scrambling to sign any band with a guitar and proximity to the Space Needle. Even when L7 finally got its own Spin cover in 1993, the compliment was backhanded: Next to the band’s photo was the coverline “More Than Babes in Boyland.”
The Spin coverline embodied everything L7 was against. It wasn’t just sexist; it also manufactured a rivalry between L7 and Babes in Toyland, another female band at the time, flattening both to a girl-group trope. L7 often avoided group interviews and refused to be part of “women in music” special issues because the band felt they deserved their own article and didn’t want to be classified by their gender. “When we were naming our band, we did not want a gender-specific name,” said singer and guitarist Donita Sparks in a 2012 Spin oral history. “I wanted people to listen to our music and go, ‘Who the fuck is this?’ I didn’t really want to be lumped in with anybody. Us being women wasn’t a political platform.”
The uneven treatment of women in the scene was even more pronounced if you were a woman of color making music. Tina Bell, a Black woman, formed Seattle band Bam Bam with her husband, guitarist Tommy Martin, in 1983; she was the frontwoman and principal songwriter. Bam Bam would perform with The Melvins, Soundgarden, and Alice in Chains, and were named KCMU/KEXP’s “Best NW Band.” Its 1984 EP Villains (Also Wear White) preceded Green River’s album Come on Down, often regarded as the first grunge album. Yet, while Bell is often referred to as the “Godmother of Grunge,” she’s also left out of most histories of the scene.
The Spin coverline embodied everything L7 was against. It wasn’t just sexist; it also manufactured a rivalry between L7 and Babes in Toyland, another female band at the time, flattening both to a girl-group trope.
“This modern genre’s sound was, in many ways, molded by a Black woman,” wrote Stephanie Siek in a 2021 Zora article about Bell’s legacy. “The reason she is mostly unknown has everything to do with racism and misogyny. Looking back at the beginnings of grunge, with the preconception that ‘everybody involved’ was White and/or male, means ignoring the Black woman who was standing at the front of the line.”
For more: Lisa Whittington-Hill unpacked Courtney Love’s legacy in 2019. Read that piece here.
Bell eventually left the band and quit music; tragically, she died in 2012, shortly before a scheduled reunion of the band. However, when Bam Bam is referenced in accounts of the scene, it is sometimes referred to as a three-piece, removing Bell and her legacy completely. When she does receive a mention, it’s often in the context of Kurt Cobain being rumored to be a fan of Bell and the band. (Cobain had discovered them while he was a roadie for The Melvins.)
Female musicians are often granted legitimacy based on their proximity to more successful, male musicians, and Bell is no exception. If you were a woman making music and Cobain name-checked you, you were automatically cool. (Sadly, Courtney Love remains one of the only exceptions to this rule.) “In general, in most histories, women’s participation has been disregarded from the get-go or cut from the narrative after-the-fact,” wrote Jen B. Larson in a tribute to Bell on the website Please Kill. “Though women have played key roles in musical innovations over time, we tend to notice them in hindsight, and only if dedicated crate-diggers are meticulous in excavating the past. The motif is especially apparent for Black women.”
* * *
For a 2016 issue celebrating the 25th anniversary of grunge, British music magazine Q published a special package that included insiders and musicians talking about the scene. Not surprisingly, the piece features no women. Hole’s 1994 record Live Through This is the only entry from a band featuring women on a list of the 25 most influential grunge albums. Mojo’s “Early Grunge Classics” and Revolver’s “Flyin’ the Flannel” both feature no entries by women. There are also no women on Rolling Stone’s readers’ poll of the best grunge albums of all time.
When the media covered women in the grunge and alternative scene, it treated them like a genre unto itself. This genre, though, received almost no in-depth profiles or features. Instead, women were given the listicle treatment: an easy way for an outlet to appear to cover female musicians, without the hard work of devoting actual words and thought to them. From “5 Female-Led Bands That Channelled the Fearless Ferocity of Grunge” to “10 Essential Alternative ’90s Bands Fronted by Women You Should Know,” the facile format signaled that a magazine didn’t deem their work or musical contribution worthy of serious consideration.
If music and talent weren’t the subject of the listicle, you can probably guess what was: appearance and sex appeal. In 2011, SF Weekly somehow managed to use a listicle to objectify women and celebrate male bands at the same time: “As Nirvana’s Nevermind turns 20 this week, and Pearl Jam celebrates two decades of being a band, we think it’s time to look back on the top 10 hottest women in grunge,” reads the introduction to “The Top 11 Hottest Women in Grunge.”
When the media covered women in the grunge and alternative scene, it treated them like a genre unto itself. This genre, though, received almost no in-depth profiles or features.
As for the lists themselves, they often highlighted artists who had little in common except their gender. Diffuser.fm’s “10 Best Female Rockers of the ’90s” includes L7’s Donita Sparks, Björk, and Juliana Hatfield — all women, yes, but all women making quite different music. (Garbage and Gwen Stefani on the same list? Why not! They both wrote songs with “Girl” in the title.) Not only do listicles reduce gender to a genre, but they also pit women against each other as they compete for the number one spot, or any spot at all. There are already too many competitive situations for women in music; we didn’t need a Spin top 10 to fuel yet another.
And then there were the “women in music” packages and special issues. These may have devoted more space to the acts in question, but they again flattened these women into a single monolithic group. “The all-women’s issue. The women in rock. This ghetto that they put us in. You get the one issue a year. People always compare us to bands with female singers. Not that we don’t love those bands, but it seems so narrow-minded to me,” said former Sleater-Kinney drummer Janet Weiss in an interview with Broad City co-creators Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson.
“Women in music” issues reached their tragic peak in 1997. First came Spin’s “The Girl Issue,” the cover of which featured Fiona Apple alongside the headline, “She’s Been a Bad, Bad Girl.” Inside, the accompanying profile included the line, “Fiona Apple is a pop star trapped in the body of a pretty teenage girl.” (The profile seems unable to stop reminding readers of Apple’s gender, comparing her to other female musicians and repeatedly talking about her looks and “sexy and girlish” outfits.) Not to be outdone, Rolling Stone published its own “Girl Issue” later that year, with a cover featuring the random-seeming combination of Madonna, Courtney Love, and Tina Turner. Magazines thought they were celebrating women, without realizing that the very nature of the celebration accomplished exactly the opposite. Seattle alt-weekly The Stranger punctured the tradition perfectly with its satirical “men who rock” special issues in 2012 and 2015 — complete with sexy-pose photoshoots and inane interview questions.
L7 (and a mystery woman) in a photoshoot typical of media coverage at the time. Photo: AJ Barratt/Avalon/Getty Images
When women in the ’90s received coverage, interview questions focused exclusively on the idea that a woman making music was a novelty. Women were repeatedly asked to recount tales of the sexism they experienced, feed into fake feuds with other female musicians, or talk about their looks, fashion choices, or who they were dating — all things that would rarely be asked of a man, except maybe in a parody issue of The Stranger. “When you’re a woman working in a man’s world, your gender is acknowledged constantly,” wrote Jillian Mapes in a Flavorwire piece on women rock musicians. “At times it can feel empowering, this sense of taking up richly deserved space in a man’s world. But at a certain point, gender-defined underdog status and tokenization grows old, even if it’s positioned as a necessary breath of fresh air in the press or among fans.”
When not objectifying them (“Spanks for the Memory,” reads the headline of a 1990 Melody Maker piece on Babes in Toyland), coverage focused on female musicians’ behavior over their music. Like L7’s Donita Sparks throwing her used tampon into the audience at 1992’s Reading Festival after the crowd hurled mud at the band. Or Alanis Morissette talking about going down on a Full House cast member in a theater. Or anything Courtney Love did. (“Love ripped through the grunge scene like a hurricane, marrying its prom king and becoming as notorious for her public antics as for her music,” reads the entry for Love on Diffuser.fm’s list of the “10 Best Female Rockers of the ’90s,” which echoed most of the pieces written about her in that decade.)
* * *
In the early ’90s, grunge was often associated with riot grrrl, the name taken by Olympia, Washington’s underground feminist movement. On the surface, the two scenes took a similar form. Both originated in the Pacific Northwest, had their roots in punk, and shared a DIY ethic. Grunge and riot grrrl bands often played shows together, signed to the same record labels, and formed friendships.
But not everyone agreed with the affiliation. “There was a sexist shock-value imagery with grunge,” said Allison Wolfe, a member of riot grrrl act Bratmobile, in a 2021 Guardian piece on the 30th anniversary of the record label Kill Rock Stars. “Especially from Sub Pop bands. It didn’t speak to us. I’m not that naked woman on the cover with blood dripping all over me [in Dwarves’ 1990 single “Drug Store”]. It was about forging a path to have a voice and knowing even if we didn’t have the musical skills that we had something to say that would be more interesting than half the shit these guys are saying.”
Female musicians were often labeled by journalists as riot grrrls, regardless of whether they self-identified as such. Not only was it lazy and disrespectful, but it highlighted the limited vocabulary and reference points that existed when talking about women making music. “Riot grrrl” became a catch-all to easily categorize and compartmentalize women.
Meanwhile, riot grrrl bands routinely met ridicule and dismissal from the media. Rarely, if ever, did journalists or critics engage with the substance of the music. Instead, articles focused on the physical appearances and fashion choices of the girls or wondered whether Chelsea Clinton would become a riot grrrl when she moved to Washington. A Melody Maker piece suggested that “the best thing any Riot Grrrl could do is to go away and do some reading and I don’t mean a grubby little fanzine,” and Newsweek called riot grrrl “feminism with a loud happy face dotting the ‘i.’”
“I think it was deliberate that we were made to look like we were just ridiculous girls parading around in our underwear,” said Corin Tucker, of Sleater-Kinney and Heavens to Betsy, in an interview for Riot Grrrl Retrospectives, a 1999 video project by Seattle’s Museum of Pop Culture. “They refused to do serious interviews with us, they misprinted what we had to say; they would take our articles and our fanzines and our essays and take them out of context. We wrote a lot about sexual abuse and sexual assault for teenagers and young women. I think those are really important concepts that the media never addressed.”
Sleater Kinney performs at the Riot Grrrl Convention in Los Angeles in 1995. (Photo: Lindsay Brice/Getty Images)
Nowhere was there any mention of the musicians who had influenced riot grrrl acts like Bratmobile and Bikini Kill. It was as though Kim Gordon had never co-founded Sonic Youth, as though The Slits had never existed. Women making music were treated like a novelty — each group of female musicians treated like the first, their history erased and their connection to the future denied. “There were a lot of very important ideas that I think the mainstream media couldn’t handle, so it was easier to focus on the fact that these were girls who were wearing barrettes in their hair or writing ‘slut’ on their stomach,” said Sharon Cheslow, who formed Chalk Circle, Washington D.C.’s first all-female punk band in 1981, in another Riot Grrrl Retrospectives interview. Riot grrrl eventually declared a media boycott in 1992 over growing concerns that their messages were being misinterpreted, diluted, and trivialized.
And just as with “women in music” special issues, female artists were seen as disposable and automatically compared to each other. “PJ Harvey‘s record-breaking contributions to indie rock are redoubtable, but rock’s one-in one-out policy for women has made her an inescapable comparison for any rock woman standing alone with a six string and toe pressed to a distortion pedal,” wrote Charlotte Richardson Andrews in a 2012 Guardian piece.
One-in and one-out also applied to radio airplay and concert bills. If there was already a woman on a festival lineup or in radio rotation in the ’90s, there was resistance to adding another. I remember attending Lollapalooza in 1992, disappointed there was only one band featuring women on the bill — British band Lush — especially because the festival prided itself on its diversity. (I also accidentally locked myself in a port-a-potty and missed all of Pearl Jam’s performance, which has led to a lifelong fear of both the band and portable toilets, but that’s a different piece.)
Lilith Fair launched in 1997 to counter the lack of women on festival lineups and offer support and exposure for female artists — not to mention all the Biore pore strips audiences wanted. The event grossed $16 million its first year, making it the top-grossing touring festival, but not everyone was happy. “The latest trend in rock and roll: women,” announced ABC News’s Elizabeth Vargas, opening a segment about Lilith Fair. Sleater-Kinney declined to join Lilith Fair; Garbage’s Shirley Manson, among others, criticized it for its lack of diversity. Lilith Fair also helped contribute to the misbelief that music made by women had to be personal, had to be polite, and had to include an acoustic guitar. It also reinforced the idea that women’s music is only for women audiences.
Lilith Fair represented a more mainstream, commercial approach to feminism than the political action and activism of the riot grrrls, but both contributed to the idea of the ’90s as an encouraging and supportive utopia for female-fronted acts which gave the illusion of gender equality in music. While women musicians achieved undeniable success during the decade, Revolution Girl Style was far from over.
* * *
Grunge benefitted from its connection to riot grrrrl because it made the male-dominated scene seem more feminist, more progressive, and less sexist than it was. When women took Sharpies to their skin, the media dismissed them; when Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder did it, it somehow became cool and subversive. During a performance of the band’s song “Porch” on their 1992 MTV Unplugged show, Vedder wrote “PRO-CHOICE!!!” on his arm with a black marker; later that year, he appeared on Saturday Night Live wearing a T-shirt with a wire hanger and a pro-choice slogan on it. He also penned a 1992 op-ed on abortion for Spin. The mainstream media could handle politics in its music — as long as it was men doing the talking.
Whereas riot grrrl’s anger had scared journalists, resulting in misrepresentation and mockery, Vedder was allowed to be angry. “All the Rage,” read the cover of Time’s 1993 issue about how this new breed of angry male rockers was expressing the “passions and fears of a generation.” Both Vedder and Kurt Cobain declined to be interviewed for the story, but Vedder ended up on the cover anyway. This trend continued through the ’90s: men being lauded for their anger while women like Alanis Morissette were policed for it, accused of manufacturing outrage as a marketing strategy. Female musicians like Morissette had to be just angry enough to sell records, but not angry enough to risk offending anyone.
But male grunge bands also promoted a progressive, feminist stance, and changed the tone from the machismo and sexism associated with Mötley Crüe and other ’80s bands. They helped to bring gender politics to the mainstream, and regularly challenged sexism in their song lyrics, interviews, and videos. They championed feminist organizations, causes, and musicians, helping to bring them to a larger, more mainstream audience. I’d grown up watching ’80s hair-metal bands on MTV; male musicians promoting the idea that women were something other than bangable flesh trophies blew me away more than a RATT video’s pyrotechnics ever could.
I’d grown up watching ’80s hair-metal bands on MTV; male musicians promoting the idea that women were something other than bangable flesh trophies blew me away more than a RATT video’s pyrotechnics ever could.
In interviews, Cobain regularly supported and name-checked female musicians, from Shonen Knife to The Breeders, expanding the audience for these artists. In some cases, as with L7, these bands had been making music for longer than Nirvana, but unfortunately, it took a man championing them to bring the girls to the (fore)front. Cobain and Vedder also supported female musicians by bringing them on tour or joining them on the bill for benefits in support of a variety of causes, including Rock for Choice and Rock Against Rape. I remember a male friend praising Vedder for organizing Rock for Choice. He assumed the singer was responsible for it after he saw a picture in a music magazine of Vedder sporting a shirt for the benefit concerts. (He didn’t; that was L7 and Sue Cummings, a senior editor for LA Weekly.) Bands from Rage Against the Machine to Mudhoney played Rock for Choice concerts during the ’90s and while Vedder wearing the shirt helped to raise the cause’s profile, it also overshadowed the important work L7, and other female musicians did.
What’s often overlooked, and important to remember, is that female musicians influenced Cobain’s feminist message — notably Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna and Tobi Vail — as did the the formative time Nirvana spent in Olympia. Cobain’s activism didn’t come from nowhere; it came from his proximity to, and association, with riot grrrl. “From the very beginning, he was aware of the gender issue,” said NPR music critic Ann Powers in a Daily Beast story about Nirvana’s legacy. Cobain may have promoted Bikini Kill and riot grrrl in interviews, but he wouldn’t have had his feminism without them.
This year marks the 28th anniversary of Cobain’s death. Each year the music media commemorates the occasion with tribute articles, think pieces, and reminders of all the conspiracy theories that still surround Cobain’s death. “10 Years After His Tragic Death: Why The Man And His Music Still Matter” reads the cover of an April 2004 issue of Spin. The “special collector’s issue” includes a history of grunge, a list of 30 essential Nirvana recordings and other media, and musicians from The Strokes to Soundgarden sharing their memories of Cobain. Similar tributes mark the anniversary of the deaths of Soundgarden frontman Chris Cornell, who died by suicide in May 2017, and Alice in Chains singer Layne Staley, who died of a drug overdose in April 2002.
Sadly, the deaths of female musicians don’t receive nearly the same level of media attention. The anniversary of the death of Mia Zapata, lead singer of The Gits, who was murdered and brutally raped in July 1993, deserves more tributes. The deaths of Hole bassist Kristen Pfaff, who died two months after Cobain, or 7 Year Bitch lead singer Stefanie Sargent, who died in 1992, should also not be overshadowed by the deaths of male musicians.
Deaths are not the only occasions that are marked. When Nevermind turned 30 last year, the anniversary was marked by special commemorative issues of Uncut and Mojo. There was a 30th anniversary reissue box set, online tributes, social media shoutouts, and an endless-seeming parade of dudes telling you where they were the first time they heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Similar tributes happened with the album’s 10- and 20-year anniversaries. When we think about nostalgia, it’s important to notice whose legacy is remembered, who gets the anniversary covers, whose cultural significance is celebrated — and whose isn’t.
* * *
Grunge is far from the only musical scene to marginalize women’s contributions. In a 2014 Guardian article about the punk scene’s misogyny, writer Charlotte Richardson Andrews argued that women had to fight for visibility in a scene where men held all the power. Women were too often excluded from an industry that only promoted “the lucky few to whom industry gatekeepers deign to give a platform.” The piece could just have easily been describing grunge.
Or hip-hop, for that matter. Starting in the late ’80s, female hip-hop artists like Queen Latifah and MC Lyte achieved undeniable success. In 1988, Salt-N-Pepa’s “Push It” was one of the first hip-hop singles to be nominated for a Grammy. Latifah’s most successful album, 1993’s Black Reign, was certified gold, and its Grammy-winning single “U.N.I.T.Y.” explicitly celebrated women’s rights. Their music defined the genre as they spoke out against assault, discrimination, and misogyny. But like women in grunge, this perspective didn’t receive as much attention as it should have: Songs like “Ladies First” existed within a male-dominated genre and culture where, as Jeff Chang wrote in Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, “scantily-clad dancers seemed in endless supply, while women rappers were scarce.” At least in grunge, Eddie Vedder wasn’t pulling a 2 Live Crew and singing about someone blowing him, as much as he may have wanted Ticketmaster to.
In 1999, Billboard named pop singer Mariah Carey the artist of the decade. For those who had grown up with grunge, it seemed a fate worse than whatever Y2K had planned. By then, grunge bands were long gone, replaced by mass-produced boy bands and pop princesses, as well as the burning (literally) mess that was Woodstock ’99. Riot grrrl’s girl-power message had been co-opted and commercialized to sell pencil cases and baby tees. Smelling like Teen Spirit had been replaced by actual teen spirit as preteen girls flocked to The Backstreet Boys, *NSYNC, and The Spice Girls.
But, thankfully, yesterday’s pioneers refuse to stay in the background. After six studio albums, L7 went on indefinite hiatus in 2001 — only to reform in 2014 and tour with its original lineup for the first time in 20 years. Later this year, they’ll tour again to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Bricks Are Heavy. Sleater-Kinney, who released their 10th studio album Path of Wellness in 2021, also returns to the stage this summer. Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon is back with This Women’s Work: Essays on Music, an anthology she edited with music journalist Sinead Gibson. “‘What’s it like to be a girl in a band?’ The often-repeated question throughout my career as a musician made me feel disrupted, a freak or that we are all the same,” wrote Gordon in an Instagram post promoting the book. “I once asked my boyfriend what it was like to have a penis? To me they are sort of equivalent questions. Hopefully, this book begins an unravelling of this myth that if you’re a female musician you are ready-made, easily digestible.”
It’s long overdue.
* * *
Lisa Whittington-Hill is the Publisher of This Magazine. Her writing has appeared in Longreads, The Walrus, Hazlitt, and more. She is currently writing a book for the 33 1/3 music series on Beauty and the Beat by The Go-Go’s to be published in 2023. Girls, Interrupted, her collection of essays on how pop culture is failing women, will be published by Montreal’s Vehicule Press in Fall 2023. You can find her on Twitter at @nerdygirly.
Editor: Peter Rubin
Copy Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Fact checker: Sky Patterson
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By Melissa Hart
In the 1980s, kids and their queer parents in the U.S. marched together in pride parades in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York City. I, on the other hand, hid in my bedroom in my abusive father’s house and longed for my mother. She had lost custody of me and my siblings after she left Dad and came out as a lesbian, and a homophobic judge declared her unfit to parent.
Related Reading: Read Melissa Hart’s essay, “The Game Was Rigged All Along,” at DAME.
The first nine years of my life, Mom cooked, cleaned, and hosted Tupperware parties and children’s birthday parties — all the duties expected of a suburban housewife. My brother was born with Down syndrome, and she devoted herself to his well-being, enrolling him in physical therapy when he was still an infant and then in a therapeutic preschool. She led my Brownie troop. She drove the gymnastics carpool and baked cupcakes for school fundraisers. She took Spanish classes with me at the local library.
And then, she was gone.
She’d fallen in love with my brother’s school bus driver, who saw her black eye one morning and invited us all to move in with her. Mom accepted, but my father showed up two weeks later with a police escort and a court order to reclaim us. It’s impossible to estimate how many parents found themselves torn from their kids after coming out in that tumultuous era. The DSM had, in 1973, removed homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses, only to recategorize it under “Sexual Orientation Disturbance.” Some newly out parents retreated back into the closet, terrified to lose what limited child visitation they’d been granted. Others, like those featured in the 2014 documentary Mom’s Apple Pie: The Heart of the Lesbian Mothers’ Custody Movement, banded together to fight the system.
My mom fell into the former category. The judge allowed her to see us every other weekend; she’d pick us up on our father’s porch in her VW bus at 5 p.m. on Friday, and we’d spend a glorious 48 hours together before she dropped us off again on Sunday at 5 p.m. sharp, lest Dad get upset and call his lawyer.
COLAGE originally stood for Children of Lesbians and Gays Everywhere; today, it goes by its abbreviation.
Growing up, I felt alone. I believed my siblings and I were the only kids in the world with a queer parent, a beloved mother unjustly persecuted for daring to fall in love with a woman. At 31, I finally discovered the demographic that called themselves “queerspawn” — activist peers who came of age in the ’80s and ’90s and started the support group COLAGE while joining their parents in public protests against homophobia. Some of them were writing memoirs or compiling essay anthologies to reflect their childhood experiences. Meema Spadola made a documentary. Alison Bechdel wrote a graphic memoir. All of them inspired me to begin sharing my story.
As the U.S. has seen victories for queer folks and families over the years, our family’s saga began to feel anachronistic. The next generation of queerspawn, and their parents, have been able to enjoy, even thrive, in a more tolerant time than my mother’s generation. But then Donald Trump became president. The same year, the Proud Boys surfaced with their far-right, extremist agenda, and what happened in 1979 to my mother and her children — to us — felt like a cautionary tale worth noting: a reminder of the injustice that had occurred and could occur again if we don’t remain vigilant.
These days, I worry that if librarians continue to find themselves under attack for shelving books with queer storylines, if teachers lose their jobs for including LGBTQIA+ content in their classrooms, and parents face government inquiry if they seek gender-affirming care for their kids, then families may find themselves right back where we were four decades ago, mired in fear and oppression. Fortunately, the digital age enables queerspawn to easily connect and mobilize. There’s also a wealth of resources available online as well — memoirs, novels, essays, and interviews with older queerspawn. In this spirit, I’ve curated this reading list — for children of queer parents of any age — so that, hopefully, they’ll never have to feel alone.
I love Hope Reese’s interview with queerspawn Alysia Abbott about her memoir Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father. San Francisco, where she grew up with her single gay dad, was always a special place for my mother and me; we rambled around North Beach and the Castro a couple of times a year. This is a fun read about the city in the ’70s and early ’80s, and I recognize parts of my mother’s journey in Alysia’s story about her father living out and proud among a community of queer friends and activists. Three years after my mom lost custody of me and my siblings, she met the love of her life, who introduced her to a group of buoyant, child-free 20- and 30-something lesbians. They had raucous pool parties and picnics. Sometimes, my mother took my brother, sister, and me to these gatherings, and I remember her friends treating us with kind indifference. I wonder how my mom felt in those moments. Did they see her as a “breeder,” a heterosexual woman tasked by her husband and society to bring children into the world? Was she embarrassed by our presence?
But the gay parents of my father’s generation came into their parenthood very differently than gay parents today. Then, most children of gay parents were the children of straight unions, where one of the parents was closeted, or came out after the child was born and divorced, or stayed closeted. They were exploring their sexuality in the exciting, heady time before AIDS. Growing up believing all your impulses were sick, could get you arrested, and were sources of shame and secrecy and hiding—now suddenly you could be gay. And most of the people in that time and place did not have children. It was very unusual for a father to be fully responsible for a child like my father was. There were no models. There was very little in terms of how to make this work, or a community to compare notes with.
This piece explores how Meredith Fenton — the former program director at COLAGE — and her mother came out to each other as lesbians. I adore the witty anecdotes about how her mother sent her rainbow-themed care packages at camp and brought her best friend from high school — also a lesbian — to watch Fenton’s Harry Potter-inspired drag musical. And oh, how I relate to so many parts of this essay. When I finally discovered COLAGE and the queerspawn, I worried they’d regard me as a fraud. After all, my mother came out when I was 9, and I didn’t get to live with her again until I was 19. But the COLAGE community welcomed me and helped me find my footing.
When I first started becoming a leader among the queerspawn, as we affectionately called ourselves, I was worried I was kind of a fraud. I mean, my mom had only been out for a matter of years, and most COLAGErs had been dealing with divorces or donor insemination or custody battles or a lack of protections for decades. But what I learned is that every single person who has or had an LGBTQ parent, even though the details of our individual stories may be different, there is something essential we share.
I learned so much from my queerspawn peers—about resiliency and hope that was honed from surviving bullying and surviving HIV and homophobia in custody battles. I learned that there are as many different kinds of families as there are snowflakes, and that each of them is worthy of respect for the ways they take care of each other, overcome intolerance, create new traditions and define what it means to be a family.
I sort of hate that I can totally relate to Gabriela Herman’s first sentence: “My mom is gay. But it took me a long time to say those words out loud.”
My mom came out in 1979. My classmates at my suburban schools throughout the ’80s hurled the words “fag” and “lesbo” at each other as insults, and I never, ever told anyone — not even my best friend — that my mother had a girlfriend. Later, in graduate school, I got to study with authors and activists Jacqueline Woodson and Sarah Schulman, who were instrumental in helping me see my story and confront the homophobia that had devastated my mother’s life — and my own — so that I could move on and celebrate our family’s dynamic while writing about the injustice that defined it.
The quotes that accompany some of Herman’s photos in this essay make me smile: They capture newly out parents’ awkward attempts to explain their sexuality to Generation X and millennial kids, raised in decades informed by homophobia and transphobia. Words like “partner” and “roommate” to describe same-sex lovers, or the idea of “coming out” about a parent … this all resonates with my experience in the ’80s and early ’90s.
As we talked, we recalled having to juggle silence and isolation. Needing to defend our families on the playground, at church and during holiday gatherings. Some aspect of each story resonated with my experience and helped chip away at my own sense of solitude.
We — the children of gay and lesbian parents — are not hypotheticals. While my experience was difficult, I am hopeful that won’t be the case for the next generation. This inequality will fade, and my future children will wonder what the fuss was about.
This piece by Christa Olson is such a smart and thoughtful response to Gabriela Herman’s photo essay. Written from the perspective of a scholar in visual rhetoric — a lesbian raising a toddler with her wife — the commentary calls out the photographer’s decision to depict her portrait subjects as solitary, contemplative, even mournful. It’s not the wisest choice, Olson points out, when you’re trying to convince the Supreme Court to legalize same-sex marriage.
Still, two weeks after Herman’s photo essay appeared in print, and three days after Olson’s rebuttal, the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage. On that first day, June 26, 2015, my mother and I happened to be in San Francisco together, and we went to City Hall to watch the weddings. We stood in the rotunda and hugged each other and wept at the absolute joy on the faces around us.
Taken one-by-one, the photographs capture strong, thoughtful young adults in moments of solitude. Cumulatively, though, the series takes on an inescapable sense of sorrow and isolation, and not just because of captions that frequently emphasize the subjects’ struggles with their parents’ identities. As a [gay] parent viewing the photo essay, I felt a rush of defensiveness and worry. As a scholar of visual rhetoric, I wanted to understand why. What was it about these photographs that so set me on edge?
After a hard look, it finally came clear to me: This photo essay explores the difficulty of having a gay parent in the 80s, 90s, and early 00s. As a reflection on what gay marriage means for today’s generation of kids, though, it is (I hope) rather out of date.
I love this piece by Elizabeth Collins because it captures so many of the gender stereotypes and conflicts that my mother experienced, having grown up in the ’50s. Like Collins’ father, my mom spent her early years in a small town. Her father, a strict World War II veteran and a Mason, insisted she become a Job’s Daughter and attend cotillion. She married, as expected of her, at age 18, and didn’t come out as a lesbian until her early 30s. As a mother, she could be so much fun, but she could also be very prim and proper. A lady didn’t say “fart,” much less commit the act. A lady wore foundation and lipstick in public, even when she and I were heading out for a 50-mile bike ride. After my sister and I grew up and married, Mom cooked four-course meals for our husbands and sat at the dinner table lavishing her attention on the menfolk while we sat silent and ignored. It was both frustrating and hilarious, and Collins captures that dichotomy of emotion skillfully, especially when describing how her father would demand that she make him a cocktail.
My father tried to do what his family and society expected of him. He played football, got married and had children. And while the irony is not lost on me that he was also putting unrealistic gender expectations on me, I had sympathy for him.
Though I knew no transgender people when I was growing up, I know a friend from high school who transitioned in their 20s, and my teenager has several trans friends at school. In this essay, I appreciate Catriona Innes’ candor when writing about her complicated emotions, particularly when she recalls looking at old family photos before her dad transitioned. This piece is full of insight on what adults who transition later in life may have sacrificed to protect spouses and children — and themselves. Ultimately, it’s a happy piece that can serve as a roadmap for people with a parent who’s transitioned.
It’s because I want to break the rhetoric that surrounds being transgender. There’s a message out there that this is something that destroys families and I’ve always wanted to send out the positive side of the story. Especially since I’ve found that, unless you let it, there’s no need for a transition to affect a relationship at all – a lesson that most certainly emerged following my mum’s death.
This profile of football players Trey and Toby McBride, who grew up with two moms, makes me smile every time I read it. It reminds me of all the wonderful weekends my siblings and I spent with our mom and her girlfriend in their sprawling house and yard in Oxnard, California. Safe inside their home, we could be exactly who we were with abandon. We built treehouses and ziplines and cooked huge meals and danced and belted along with the soundtracks from A Chorus Line and Victor/Victoria. We put on costumes from Mom’s dress-up box and went to IHOP late at night and made all the diners laugh. Always, there were cats and chickens and rabbits, and at least one dog trotting around dressed in toddler-sized clothing. I dressed my rabbit in doll clothes and pushed it down the sidewalk in a baby carriage. For two weekends a month, I was so happy, and so I love how Sean Keeler captures the joyful chaos that informs the McBride household in this piece.
Two moms, 12 adult dogs, a litter of new puppies and a pair of cats. Kate heads up the family business of breeding and raising Golden Retrievers. Jen works for the Morgan County Sheriff’s office.
Over the years, the McBride menagerie included ducks, geese, horses, emus and at least three llamas “to keep the coyotes away,” Kate explains. A loved one bought them twin goats once, and the duo used to have the run of the house.
So, yeah, traditional. If your idea of traditional is streaming on Animal Planet GO.
“That’s my normal,” said Trey, who went into last weekend third on the Rams in receptions (30) and receiving yards (381). “My parents are kind of like, ‘We’re just going to do our thing. We’re not going to worry about what anyone else thinks of us.’ I’m just very grateful that I grew up with them, that they took care of us and they did everything they could for us. It’s just normal for us.”
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Melissa Hart is a journalist, author, and public speaker from Eugene, Oregon. She teaches for the MFA program in creative writing at Southern New Hampshire University. Her essays and articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, CNN, Smithsonian, Brevity, and numerous other publications. She’s the author, most recently, of Better with Books: 500 Diverse Books to Ignite Empathy and Encourage Self-Esteem in Tweens and Teens, and of the forthcoming middle-grade novel Daisy Woodworm Changes the World with a queerspawn character and another who has Down syndrome.
Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Copy editor: Carolyn Wells