Notes & Queeries is a monthly column from Malinda Lo that focuses on the personal side of pop culture for lesbians and bisexual women.
Last Tuesday night, I went to my second Indigo Girls concert. I had initially thought it was my first, but a friend reminded me that I had seen them play at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival a few years ago. Thus prodded, I finally remembered their closing number – “Closer to Fine,” of course, sung outside beneath a black night sky, with all the other musicians who had performed that night joining them onstage.
I felt a bit deflated when I recalled this. It made me wonder if somehow my night was going to be less memorable because I wasn’t an Indigo virgin.
My girlfriend, a longtime Indigo Girls fan (yes, she’s that kind of lesbian), had bought the tickets months ago. “You don’t have to go with me if you don’t want,” she said when she told me about it, knowing that I didn’t own a single Indigo Girls CD.
“It would be my first Indigo Girls concert,” I said in error. “Of course I’ll go.” I envisioned some kind of lesbian anthropological research opportunity: Gay girls in their native habitat, here I come!
We drove north to Yountville, Calif., in the heart of Napa Valley, to see Amy Ray and Emily Saliers perform. Earlier that week lightning storms had struck Northern California, and by Tuesday more than 700 fires were burning. Wine country was hazy with smoke, turning the setting sun an intense red-orange.
As we drove past neat rows of grapes curving over the hills, I wondered whether the smell of smoke would infiltrate the fruit. “The wine has a distinct smoky flavor,” joked my girlfriend. We slid the air control vent closed, recirculating the air inside the car instead. My eyes stung.
When we arrived at the Lincoln Theater, we were a little late, and the parking lot was almost full. One car went zooming past the parked tour buses, the driver yelling out, “We love you Amy and Emily!” Sprinklers watered wide stretches of lawn, even though California is now officially in a drought. Inside the theater, a concessions stand sold wine and champagne rather than cocktails. Welcome to Napa, I thought.
The theater ushers looked like retirees who had volunteered for the job; they seemed slightly uncomfortable about being surrounded by so many lesbians. Our designated elderly usher fumbled with her flashlight as she attempted to read our ticket stubs, and then led us to our seats in the dark – the opening act, Brandi Carlile, had already begun.
A singer-songwriter from Seattle whose songs have been featured on ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy, Carlile was playing to a packed house. Her voice, in one word, is incredible. She wore cowboy boots and jeans so skinny they looked like they were painted onto her legs; when she tapped her foot in time to the music, the boots rocked back and forth, giving them an oddly remote-controlled look.
She was so thin I wondered if she were chasing Hollywood glory. But then she covered Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues” with nothing less than butch enthusiasm, and I could feel all the lesbians in the audience falling in love with her.
When Amy Ray and Emily Saliers came onstage, they looked comfortable, older, calmer. Amy wore gray plaid pants; Emily wore jeans that looked like jeans. They carried their guitars right in front of their bellies, like instruments – not manifestations of machismo.
A group of young women ran down to the front, clapping their hands and dancing. Amy cracked a smile at them, but an usher hovered nearby and soon enough asked them to move to the side, where they bounced in place for the rest of the show, singing along to every song.
When I looked around at the audience, it looked like a pre-Dyke March rally. There were butches and femmes, together and apart, granola dykes and straight-looking lesbians, grey-haired women and girls too young to have heard “Closer to Fine” when it first came out in 1989. The audience wasn’t entirely lesbian, of course. There were men, too, and probably plenty of straight women. Men who like the Indigo Girls enough to buy a concert ticket: Those are my kind of men. They probably adore Joss Whedon, too.
I first heard of the Indigo Girls back in the early ’90s, when the possibility that I was gay began to push at the edges of my consciousness. Everybody seemed to know that the Indigo Girls were gay, though it was only whispered at the time, not declared out loud. I remember the magenta cover of their album Rites of Passage, which was handed around my college dorm like a flag marking those of us who were contemplating switching sides.
I did listen to “Closer to Fine,” but the song that I remember most from those years is “Galileo,” with its chorus that demands, “How long till my soul gets it right? Can any human being ever reach that kind of light?” They’re not exactly the most comforting questions for an 18-year-old whose soul has suddenly started to question what she had always thought was true.
For whatever reason, I didn’t continue to listen to the Indigo Girls; I was more drawn to Tori Amos and her Little Earthquakes at the time. But I did know that the Indigo Girls were practically synonymous with lesbians. In 2004, that status was cemented by an episode of The L Word, “Looking Back,” in which the girls go on a mini road trip from Los Angeles to Dinah Shore weekend in Palm Springs. On the way they bust out the Indigo Girls’ “Closer to Fine,” and everyone sings along somewhat inaccurately.
Like Alice and Jenny and Shane and Tina, I didn’t really know the lyrics either. I had vague notions of what the song was about based on its happy tune and eminently singable chorus – “closer I am to fi-i-i-i-ine” – maybe it was about seeking out something really beautiful, something precious. I imagined it might be a girl.
But after Tuesday’s concert, I looked up the lyrics. I realized that instead of “Galileo” – though a fine song in its own right – it might have been more useful for me to listen to “Closer to Fine.”
When I was first coming to terms with coming out, everything was excruciatingly painful. There were few moments of calm: My life was a bumpy ride, and it all hurt. I sought the advice of friends; I went to therapy; I wrote volumes of impassioned journal entries and poetry bleeding with despair – not to mention healthy doses of teenage angst.
Everyone finds their way out of these emotions in their own way. But maybe instead of listening to Tori Amos, I should have given the Indigo Girls another spin. Instead of crucifying myself, I might have learned that “there’s more than one answer to these questions,” and that “the less I seek my source for some definitive, the closer I am to fine.”
Tuesday night at the concert, the giddiness of the girls dancing in the aisles was contagious. Amy and Emily, even when singing serious songs, had a joyful quality about them. When they sang “Power of Two,” they interrupted themselves and dedicated it to the California Supreme Court, which ruled last month that same-sex marriage is legal. There was an openness about them, a sense of possibility, a feeling that goodness might not be cheesy so much as necessary.
As we left the concert, a car full of fans went speeding down the street, the passengers loudly singing the chorus to “Closer to Fine.” The smoke from the fires was now obscured by the dark, and yet another sprinkler had turned on, dampening the sidewalks with water. The night was calm; we drove back listening to an Indigo Girls CD while I nodded to sleep on the empty road.
At home, possessed by a burst of so-tired-I’m-loopy adrenaline, I began singing the chorus to “Closer to Fine” and making up the lyrics as I went along. My girlfriend corrected me: “The less I seek my source for some definitive,” she said, laughing at me. I know the words, now.
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