F-A-T-T-O-G-O

on chappell roan and a lifetime of feeling weird at concerts

Unless you’ve been sleeping under a rock (one of my favorite expressions, just because I love the basic premise of someone missing big news because they were snoozing in a quarry), you’ve probably seen how rapidly Chappell Roan has blown up in the last several months. I won’t say I heard it first — I am a bandwagon fan, I have unapologetically jumped on board the express train to Midwest Princess territory and I will be pretending like I know everything about her. No, I won’t go full fangirl on you here — I did that recently about Sabrina Carpenter, however — but I will say this: After seeing her live twice, I can confirm that she’s as good as everyone is saying she is.

I’ve been going to see live music since I was about eight years old. My first concert was at Blossom Music Center in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, the kind of place where half the audience sits in an amphitheater and the other half sits in the grass and everyone has to walk approximately three miles through an open field at the end of the show to find their car. I went with my parents and a few of my aunts, my mother’s sisters who I idolized and one of whom had the distinct pleasure of being shit on by my kid brother right before we left for the show. Luckily there was a change of clothes available. I dressed in an all white outfit, a white T-shirt and white culottes my mom had to buy for me in the Sears women’s section because I was such a large child, and much like my wardrobe I felt extremely ~adult~ for being allowed to go — I played my “Something to Talk About” cassette on repeat in the days leading up to the concert and sang to the mirror in my elasticated waist jorts, the tiny lesbian within me stirring awake long before I knew what to do with her.

I will never forget that concert, but over the years seeing live music became a bit more fraught. Around 15, I started dating a boy on the wrestling team who was extremely into ska music. He didn’t play an instrument but all his friends did, and we’d spend our free time at Cleveland clubs like The Odeon and the Beachland Ballroom, watching his friends compete in various battles of the bands and pretending that every shitty little ska-punk band from South Euclid was about to be the next Less Than Jake (whatever that meant). I felt conflicted at the time: Dirty clubs and loud live shows made me feel rebellious and independent and like I was doing something sneaky, like I was claiming something for myself. Then again, I fucking hated ska music. I hated the aesthetic, I hated the skanking, I hated the fact that my boyfriend spiked his hair with wood glue and I hated all the girls with baby bangs and checkered Vans who I assumed were cooler than me but actually were just bitches.

Eventually, however, I befriended one of those bitches, around the same time that I got dumped by the boyfriend — not for a ska girl, which would have confirmed all my deepest darkest fears about myself, but for a gymnast who went to the same school as him. Fine, I guess. Anyways, the bitchy girl I befriended was named was Lauren, she was a year older than me and had long dark hair she kept awash with maroon using Feria Chocolate Cherry. She smoked Marlboro menthols and drove a Jeep had all kinds of shitty boyfriends and was regularly displeased with basically everything. Looking back, I think I loved her.

We used to go to punk shows together and while I always tried to put my best foot forward to impress her, inside I was basically always in a state of panic. I hated the environment at those shows — people who remember the early aughts will know that male-dominated music scenes were very unfriendly and fucked up for women, especially young women. Lauren “fit in” of course — but me, in my thrifted T-shirts and ball chain necklace and glasses? I was a terrified imposter. She’d would jump into the pit without hesitation; one time at Warped Tour (lol) I tried, and my glasses were knocked off immediately. I somehow managed to grab them off the ground before they got smashed, but I was so overwhelmed I started crying. A grown man with more glue in his hair called me a fat bitch and told me to get out of the way, and I stood at the back with a knot in my throat until the show ended.

I have so many stories like those from that era, and dozens more from seeing live shows over the years. Eventually I worked up the confidence to tell myself and others that no, I don’t really enjoy ska or punk music, and I certainly didn’t enjoy the vibes at those shows. I started revealing my love for pop music little by little, during a time when being a pop girlie was a fast way to lose your credibility in certain scenes. I stayed in a hostel to walked 3000 miles through Chicago to Lollapalooza, standing at festival stages for hours in the scorching heat to see . I traveled to secondary and tertiary cities to see obscure bands, and when I moved to South Korea I spent my 25th birthday at the Pentaport Rock Festival in Icheon to see Kishidan, a Japanese pop rock band who created their aesthetic around bōsōzoku, the biker gangs that first became popular in the fifties. The next year I camped on the slide of rainy mountain for that very same festival, seemingly unbothered by the fact that our tent slide approximately 7 feet down the muddy slope every time we went to sleep.

The thing is, as much as I have intentionally sought out live music in whatever phase of life I’ve been in, there was always some level of anxiety associated with the experience — and a lot of it was wrapped up in the fact that I never felt comfortable in my skin, or cool enough to hang. At shows, I was always, always acutely aware of my body; how much space I took up, how my outfit was never quite cool enough, how every other girl in the crowd seemed to be a size 2 in a baby tee and her boyfriend’s cargo’s and I was a size 18 in a sensible boot cut from Kohl’s. I never allowed myself to dance, really, or move much at all, lest I draw attention to myself or get made fun of. I was always enjoying the music (unless it was a ska show), but no matter how loud it was it could never overpower the running inner monologue of unworthiness telling me I didn’t deserve to enjoy the things I loved until I fit a certain mold — that being present physically was actually all I deserved, even if it meant I could never really let go and enjoy myself.

That didn’t really change until my early 30s, extremely uncoincidentally around the time I came out. It wasn’t until then that I really let myself dance at live shows, working up the nastiest sweat and screaming along to the music. Early into my life of lesbian dating chaos, I went to a H.E.R. show with a dyke who would eventually shatter my baby gay heart into a million pieces, and I wore a hot outfit and let her dance behind me and make me feel sexy. I could write a many more words on this evolution, but in the interest of time and future memoir pages what I will say now is this: Rectifying with my body and self image issues opened the door for me to step into my queerness, to realize that the two were not mutually exclusive, to actually acknowledge that every single moment I was at a show desperately trying to make myself smaller, what I was trying to minimize wasn’t just my size, but the fundamental truth of my very existence.

And while I’ve seen lots of shows in the time since I’ve come out — Syd, Jazmin Sullivan, H.E.R. again, SZA, Khalid, The Magnetic Fields, Giveon, Katy Perry (??), Kacey Musgraves, Waxahatchee, Madi Diaz, to name a few — none of those shows have given me the sense of my experience being a big fat gay person with a lifelong passion for live music coming full circle as much as everyone’s favorite new fiery red queer gemstone, Chappell Roan. For one, it brings me such joy to look around at the crowds at her shows and see so many different kinds of people in so many different kinds of bodies, wearing just about whatever the fuck they want to. And secondly, I love that just when I least expected it, a 26 year old person came along and essentially wrote the soundtrack to what I like to think would have been my younger self’s queer awakening, had she only seen it live in concert somewhere along the way. And that even as a 38-almost-39 year old, it still finds a way to hit. One thing that hits different, though, is the walk to the car after hours of standing in a crowd. It was more of a limp, really. But unlike pretending to like ska for a boy, it felt worth it. Happy Pride.