Eleanor C. Whitney discusses identity, sexuality, and the lasting impact Riot Grrrl had on a generation of young feminists.
During my junior year of high school in 1998, my dreams were flooded with girls: I dreamed of girl gangs, girl pirates, anarchist girl collectives, communities of girl artists. Growing up in rural Maine, I was one of two girls I knew who played guitar in a rock band, and girl musicians and band members populated my fantasies. I pictured us running around cities together with no fear, holding hands, maybe kissing. I had heard about women’s communes in the 70s, but what I was imagining was edgy, inclusive, and urban.
In reality, I was only connected to other feminist, punk, and artist girls like me through a web of mailboxes, online message boards, and AOL Instant Messenger chats. We wrote ’zines and letters, and sometimes I would drive the two hours to Boston or three hours to North Hampton, Massachusetts, to meet pen pals at shows or ’zine get-togethers, grasping at a version of my imagined girl utopia for a few hours at a time.
On weekdays, I raced through my homework so that I could spend time working on the next issue of my ’zine or writing back to one of my pen pals. Calculus and chemistry dissolved into a mush of meaningless symbols while I sat on the overstuffed, floral-upholstered sofa and repeatedly listened to records by Team Dresch singing, “She wants to embrace her / however the world will change / she wants to feel / but she can only describe it,” over and over on my family’s turntable. Team Dresch was a lesbian punk band from Portland, Oregon, who employed fuzzy, grungy guitars and sang about isolation, queer teenage drama, and the solidarity of feminist community. Their bold swagger and emotional rawness appealed to me. Their voices reached beyond the angst of their lyrics and hinted at something I feared I would never be able to embody — confidence and assuredness in who I was, unafraid if the world would accept me or not. As I listened, the pencil fell from my hands, and I slumped into the couch, tears sliding down my face.
I had recently broken up with my first boyfriend. He had seemed sensitive and sincere, and we had imagined a life after high school where we moved to Seattle in honor of our grunge-rock icons. However, his sweetness had quickly morphed into emotional manipulation, threats to kill himself if I left him, and extreme resentment about the girl-focused bands and ’zines I was growing to love. But instead of feeling relief that he was gone, I felt lost.
At lunch during school, I sat alone on a cluster of granite blocks between the brick school buildings to page through ’zines whose covers had been battered by being thrown into my messenger bag. I needed their presence with me throughout the day to remind me there was a world of brave girls in the universe beyond Maine. I especially gravitated to other girls’ coming-out stories, how they revealed to their parents and peers that they were lesbian or bisexual. Maybe, I thought, that was the source of my inner disquiet, though I didn’t have the words yet to capture the feelings that were colliding inside of me.
On TV and in magazines, girls’ bisexuality was portrayed as a strategy to cultivate an edgy cool and attract male attention. As a result, it often got dismissed as a phase or a trend for women. Men were not afforded the same flexibility due to more rigid standards around masculinity and a sexist notion that men’s desire would always be relevant and important to women. I hesitated to name my feelings for fear of being dismissed as following a trend or inviting jokes that my terrible boyfriend had “turned me gay” as opposed to my attraction toward women being a core piece of my identity.
I wanted desperately to claim my own desire and to affirm that being a girl, who presented and identified as feminine and liked other girls, was a source of power in my life and the world. I decided that my short skirts, dark lipstick, red nail polish, and patent-leather platform Mary Janes straight from the Delia*s catalog could be a symbol of the power I wanted to inhabit. Each day, as I applied my dark-red Urban Decay matte lipstick, I felt as if I were donning a protective shield against the world’s toxicity toward young women and anyone else who resisted the racist, capitalist patriarchy (a term I had recently learned, thanks to bell hooks). This stance toward a performative femininity, which I learned about from ’zines by other queer girls, was called “femme.” As soon as I read the word, it felt right. When I created a screen name for my new Yahoo email account, I chose “killerfemme,” imbuing my online identity with a sense of strength and dangerous feminine glamor that I hoped I could carry into the rest of the world.
I knew feminism and femme identity were more than what you wore or what music you listened to, but there was no apparent radical feminist group for young women in Maine that I could simply join. The closest equivalent I could find was a peer-to-peer training group that focused on raising awareness about bullying and domestic and dating violence. Their visit to my school had given me my first wake-up call about my ex-boyfriend’s controlling behavior, but compared to the protests, D.I.Y. punk shows, and Riot Grrrl conventions that my pen pals wrote about, it seemed fairly tame. I figured that at least it would be a start to becoming the political femme-feminist I so desperately wanted to be.
“Your training changed my life,” I wrote in my application, and earned the right to sit nervously in a circle of local teenagers to talk about how power, privilege, manipulation, bullying, homophobia, racism, and sexism all worked together. We collaborated to prepare skits to present at other local high schools. As I acted out the ways I had been mistreated and shared strategies on how to intervene, I thought about how I would help other girls wake up the way I had.
Our meetings were held in an old Coast Guard building, in a park next to Portland Head Light, a lighthouse that decorated countless Maine postcards and art in motel lobbies. One fall evening, a girl with short, dark hair, a square jaw, and an ample scattering of freckles approached me.
“I think you live near me. Could you give me a ride home?” She wore work boots and tan Carhartt work pants.
My insides wavered slightly. “Of course,” I responded, as I wiped the moisture from my palms on my black, velour skirt.
Katie loved folk music, especially the Indigo Girls and Ani DiFranco.
“I liked them in middle school,” I started to say and then quickly stopped myself. The next week, I brought her a mixtape complete with a collaged cover of the folkiest music of mine I could find — Lois, Elliott Smith, and selections from an acoustic solo record by Kaia, one of the singers from Team Dresch. “These are some bands that are really important to me that I thought you might like,” I offered earnestly, hoping the tape would say everything I didn’t dare to just yet.
“Thanks,” she responded, and took the tape ambivalently.
My heart sank.
One night, as we lingered in the car in front of her house, I drew in my breath, leaned over, and kissed her. I was shocked when she kissed me back. I felt a fluttering warmth spread through me. I could kiss a girl, and she could kiss me back!
After another kiss, Katie darted out of the car with a quick wave. I drove home elated. This was the transformation I was hoping to achieve — I felt like I was well on my way to being worthy of the brave girls whose ’zines I read, a girl who liked girls, who helped other girls, a real feminist who put women and girls first in her life and wasn’t afraid of her own identity and sexuality, however it was defined.
I invited Katie over to watch Bound, a lesbian thriller recommended by the local independent video store, which I felt represented my sophistication in choosing appropriately queer themes. We arranged ourselves awkwardly under a plaid wool blanket on a folded-out futon in the attic room where I practiced guitar. I figured we would look innocent enough if my parents happened to look in — just two girls lounging, watching a movie on a Saturday afternoon. I shyly reached over to take her hand, and she took mine back. I expected the same electric energy that shot through me when we had kissed. Instead, I felt our hands together, clammy and sweaty. I tried harder, turning toward her for a kiss. Her lips felt too moist, and, based on her heavier breathing, I felt I should try to be more into it. I closed my eyes and put my hands on her back. Still nothing. I heard my mom coming up the stairs, and we bolted apart. We spent the rest of the movie staring ahead in silence, propped up on our elbows, while a glamorous woman, the epitome of high-femme, writhed onscreen and escaped the villains in a sweet red pick-up truck.
The following week, on the way home from our meeting, I leaned over to kiss her again.
She wriggled free and quickly opened the door. “My parents can’t find out.”
“I thought you were out to them?”
“No. I mean, they say they are okay with gay people, but they would be really mad. Also, they think that I’m at basketball practice when I go to this group. And you’re not out to your parents, either, so it’s awkward.”
“Yeah, you’re right, I don’t think this is going to work. I don’t feel it between us.”
“Are you breaking up with me? I can’t believe it; you’re a femme!” she said, incredulous.
“Yeah, well, I guess I’m breaking up with you.”
I drove home, fuming in the icy February rain. She thought I was a shifty bisexual who was just dabbling in queerness. It hadn’t occurred to me until that moment that there was a stigma attached to femininity in some parts of the lesbian and queer community and that Katie thought femmes like me were weak and had no backbone. Sexism, I realized, always went deeper than I thought.
My parents were just sitting down to dinner when I got home. This is it, I thought. Tonight will be the night. I sat down at the table and waited until everyone was settled.
“I have something I want to tell you guys,” I began at the dinner table, summoning my courage.
Suddenly, the power went off with a flickering thump, and the room was bathed in dark closeness, lit only by the candles my mother insisted we have on the table to create atmosphere. My dad leapt up, clattering around the kitchen to find a flashlight.
“Michael! Sit down!” my mom yelled. “She’s trying to talk to us!”
I nervously plucked cooled wax off the side of the candle.
“Well, I wanted you to know that, uh, I like girls. Katie and I were together, but now we’re not.”
Both my parents looked directly at me. I pushed a piece of fish around my plate with my fork and held my breath.
I thought about all the stories I had read of parents who kicked their daughters out of the house when they found out their kids were lesbians, who had informed them it was just a phase they would grow out of, or were horrified that their teenaged daughters had any kind of sexuality at all. I braced myself.
“Well,” my dad began, “it’s clear you’ve felt this way for a long time. And you know your Aunt Noelle also feels that way.”
I looked back at my plate, embarrassed that being biased toward heterosexuality as a default meant I had never considered that my own family members could have been gay. I was also a little sad that I didn’t get to have a dramatic, defining moment of my young, queer life. The power sputtered back on, and we returned to polite small talk.
Being out wasn’t the radical transformation I was hoping, but a weight had been lifted. I realized that who I was as a femme remained an open question. My lack of chemistry with Katie and my parents’ tacit acceptance of my sexuality helped me realize that no two queer narratives were the same and that what applied to others’ lives wouldn’t necessarily map to mine. In an understated, New England way, that gave me the permission I was seeking to forge my own path as a feminist, as a femme, to venture forth to become whoever I was going to be in the world.
