![]() The court sentenced me to mandatory rehab. I could not make sense of the visceral response it released in my gut, even as the waves of emotion doubled me over.Ī few months later, I was arrested for drunk driving. Somehow, the sound of that song on the radio saw me and called to me, but I couldn’t understand what it was telling me about myself. I was hoping to succeed my way out of the feeling of being lost. We had to push the limits of what was possible. I demanded that those around me work harder, too. So I worked harder, tried to make more money, and became grandiose. I was lost, careening the wrong way down a one-way street. I lived with a gaping hole in the center of my being that I poured booze and dope and romance and success and any other thing I could jam in there to deaden the pain, the sadness of an unlived life. I’d spent the last decade subconsciously flirting with death. I established and ran several restaurants. I was a restaurateur now, a businesswoman, a CEO, a chef. But when I grew up, I put away childish things.” Made peace with 1 Corinthians 13:11: “When I was a child, I spoke and thought and reasoned as a child. Women who did not (or could not) abide the compulsory rules of gender - the sexualized female appearance tailored to the male gaze - didn’t stand a chance in the real music business, right? I’d grown up, turned away from music. I had put my guitar and musical longing aside, buried them both in a past I did not contemplate, and forgot about them. But the call wasn’t even a memory anymore. I had a hole in me that the call to songwriting had once upon a time tried to answer. I was drunk, stoned, and tired of feeling alone. I banged both hands on the wheel … harder, then harder still. When the song ended, I turned off the radio, clenched the steering wheel, laid my head down, closed my eyes, and cried. The alchemy evoked a buried self I had not yet met, the future songwriter in me, entombed in a personal Pompeii, frozen under layers of active drug and alcohol addiction. The sound was pointing me to something vital about myself, but I did not know what it was. Those harmonies landed like a déjà vu - utterly familiar, but not at all known. The song coming out of the radio was called “Strange Fire.” Hearing it for the first time in my truck that evening literally hurt. The harmonies peeled back layers of scar tissue at my center, exposing a longing in me that I could not name. What was this, some kind of cosmic lesbian musical sorcery? Who were these people? They fucking rocked. I parked my black Toyota restaurant truck in the driveway, turned the radio up loud, sat there stunned, and listened as the song played out. Though I did not know it consciously, a part of me understood: Those voices were gay women from the South, like me. ![]() There was SOMETHING THERE for me, personally - a brand new, yet deeply familiar sound. Imagine my surprise when I moved to Boston in my early 20s and heard the Indigo Girls for the first time on WUMB college radio. I found myself listening to Southern folk singers like John Prine, Guy Clark, Townes Van Zandt and other male songwriters whose words I felt close to. I loved the great Canadian folk singer Ferron, but as an angst-filled, queer, ’70s teenager from the Deep South, I did not relate to much of the womyns music scene. A nod to Hall’s 1928 book, the polite LC personals were called “The Wishing Well.” I read it, then landed on its predecessor, the bi-monthly mailed-in-a plain-brown-paper-wrapper-lesbian-newsletter, LC (Lesbian Connection). My research brought me to one book: Radclyffe Hall’s sad book, The Well of Loneliness. When I began to wonder if I was gay, I went to the library looking for lesbian authors. I grew up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in the 1970s. When I was a kid, the mere thought of such a thing was laughable.
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