The Angry and Surprising Soundtrack of My Youth
How I converted masculine angst into queer liberation
Growing up, I was a good kid — but even good kids get punished sometimes.
Clashes with my older sister were the catalyst to most of my run-ins with parental law. She would refuse to hang out with me and I would pester her until she snapped, leading to skirmishes that would get us both banished to our rooms.
I would slam my bedroom door, collapse onto a bean bag chair colored like a soccer ball, grab a journal and a few glitter gel pens in various colors, turn on some music, and write my childhood angst into oblivion while the soundtrack of my queer anger raged through the small boombox on the shelf next to my head.
The albums I turned to in times of perceived distress were portraits of angst, some odder than others: my go-to was the more predictable Let Go by Avril Lavigne, but another, more surprising, favorite was Ozzy Osbourne’s Ozzmosis. The rest of the CDs on my small shelf ranged from fluff like the Now That’s What I Call Music collections to the operatic substance of Evanescence.
Many of the more masculine selections stemmed from albums I would hear in my dad’s car and then later ask for so that I could explore them on my own. This masculine energy ended up fueling a…
