![]() ![]() It’s more about the way that receiving or losing love makes them feel, rather than the action of ‘loving’ itself, which has been really central in other depictions of queer folks in art in past decades.”įor Nancy, she’s been looking for herself in music for her whole life, “applying the bits and pieces I can or imagining how it would feel if I was them.” But, she says, “there's no imagining to be done here. Boygenius writes about “feeling intense joy about another person just shining their light on you, being grateful that someone else is alive/in your life, and being so monumentally hurt by a person’s actions but not necessarily blaming them for it. The boys’ music is “more central to what I’ve felt has been my actual queer experience,” Buchanan says, noting that even in our so-called progressive era, queer women are either invisible or vilified. There’s also the matter of seeing and being seen. Is there a web of songs written about each other-with each other’s backing vocals-to analyze? A video of Baker winking when she sings “make fun of the cowboys with their neck tattoos?” Absolute pandemonium when she wore her hair in a bun for a recent show? Check, check, check. Do they touch or kiss or generally shower each other with heart-melting affection? Check. “The lyrics are so of that age…while also speaking to the woman I am today.”Ĭonsider what they give us: Do they have lore about their personal relationships? Check. “Even though they’re all younger than I am, I kind of look up to them.” They’re “role models for unapologetic presentation of selfhood,” says Buchanan. Obsessive love for the boys also comes with an idolization many of us queer women missed out on growing up. ![]() “It’s also nice that many of their fans are queer, so that adolescent giddiness I feel… shared between most of us.” “I’m obsessed with them in a much more healthy way,” Bilodeau says. ![]() (Bridgers and Dacus, for example, have spoken about a fixation on their sex lives and fans’ desire for the two to prove their queerness or do what they call “ turning in their gay paperwork.” Fans, too, are sometimes subject to this same scrutiny.) ![]() “They don’t owe anyone details on their personal ”, she says. But Bilodeau, like Nancy, is wary of the parasocial relationship that’s taken hold among a contingent of boygenius fans. “I’ve seen Phoebe and Lucy live, and even when I watch interviews or watch videos of their performances on YouTube, there’s a giddiness I feel that I felt when I was younger and into Britney Spears, the Backstreet Boys, and *NSYNC,” says Jess Bilodeau, 32. It’s a distinction that’s key to the version of teen love we’re having as adults. My tender-hearted, straight best friend is completely obsessed with them - he’s just less embarrassing about it than I am.) (The boys-as they call themselves, or sometimes “brothers”-certainly have crazed appeal beyond the desperate screams of aging queer women like me. Women like me who humiliatingly spend hours on TikTok watching tour videos every single night, who refresh YouTube daily for new interviews, who screenshot and save the band’s pictures in some desperate need to hold them close, who dig for secret messages and easter eggs on Reddit forums. I now find myself in a community of queer women far beyond our teenage years who-for the first time-are experiencing that deeply youthful obsession of band idol worship. The shape of my obsession with supergroup boygenius-which started with the 2018 EP but reached a fever pitch when their album, the record, dropped in March-is embarrassing, maniacal, and distinctly teenage. That is, until a new set of “boys in the band” came around in the form of Julien Baker, Lucy Dacus, and Phoebe Bridgers. That desperate, teen obsession bordering on madness for boys with guitars-the forums, LiveJournal communities, memorizing the lyrics, writing them on binders, knowing every fact that ever exists-it didn’t do it for me. I’ll never forget my friend practically rending her garments over the All-American Rejects before they made it big, saying she would desperately miss them between tiny venue shows and dream about them at night. I could play the part without even realizing I was acting, but I couldn’t muster the bone-deep cravings my friends seemed to have, especially when it came to boys in bands. As a teen girl in the early aughts in Los Angeles, I did what I was supposed to do: hang pictures of Josh Hartnett on my walls and sob in the theater while Ryan Gosling kissed Rachel McAdams in the rain. ![]()
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