How Emo Music Saved Me As A Queer Teen
Growing up queer can be tough. In a personal essay, our Mel tells the bittersweet (and pretty funny!) tale of her teenager years, featuring girls, guitars and everything Emo.
I was that teenager. The black skinny jeans, heavy fringe across my face, band t-shirts, studded belts, intense eye makeup, and attempting to master the skateboard. I fully embraced the Emo phase a lot of teens go through whilst experimenting with their identity and dealing with being a young person.
I remember all of a sudden my tiny boxroom in my mum’s house became a poster shrine to boys who looked like girls and vice versa, guitar heaven and a pile of CDs stacked up high as the leaning tower of Pisa! The Emo phase hit me hard. The sadder, more emotional a song was or the darker, more miserable a band looked, the better. I was always first in line to buy a ticket to their show so I could be moshing around with other music loving, heavily eye-lined folk.
I can’t put my finger exactly on what it was that drew me to Emo but I was coming out at the time and the moods and messages within Emo music just seemed to resonate with me. Unrequited love, tragedy, broken hearts, being different, lashing out, sticking up for something you believe in - it just got to me.
I remember the day when I found the band The Used and listened to their album In Love And Death and it just described everything I was going through as a queer teen even if really it had nothing to do with that. I was walking home from school one day and the song I Caught Fire came on my Walkman:
In your eyes
I lost my place
Could stay a while
And I'm melting
In your eyes
Like my first time
That I caught fire
Just stay with me
Lay with me now
Never caught my breath
Every second I'm without you I'm a mess
Ever know each other
Trust these words are stones
Why cuts aren't healing
Learning how to love
At the time I was going through a major school girl crush and found myself gazing into the abyss dreaming of this girl I couldn’t be with, whilst listening to heart piercing lyrics (why do we do it to ourselves!?). I had a knack of falling in love (let’s use that term lightly!) with straight girls. To be honest there wasn’t a huge choice of queer gals in my school and my hormones were raging. What was kind of weird was I sort of enjoyed the tragic beautiful feeling of what this music was doing for me. It was affirming all my feelings and solidifying my undying love for women and how that made me feel amazing and confused at the same time.
Shortly after discovering The Used I found other bands like Story of The Year, Hellogoodbye, The All-American Rejects, Panic! At The Disco, Paramore, Funeral For A Friend, and Hawthorne Heights. These bands reached out to me in a way no one ever had before or could at the time. Of course my friends followed suit and before I knew it we all looked the part and I was begging my mum for a lip piercing and tattoos (she said no to both but when I reached 16 I went and got my lip pierced in secret).
My obsession with Emo also connected me to something much bigger. It meant that I belonged to something and felt like I was a part of something beyond being the only queer in the village, in my small town in South Wales. It was a way of life.
Photo: Mel is her Emo days.
My love affair with Emo music hasn’t really gone away, although the floppy fringe and the eye liner have. I often find myself listening and reminiscing. I think the “Emo phase” is often the running joke at parties or social gatherings and I do cringe thinking back to some of the things I wore or posted online (like using song lyrics as screen names on MSN, cringe!). But still I am grateful for this music; it was healing and powerful. It helped me to gain lots of new friends along the way. It was a community as much as a music genre and at a time where my world was changing and I was becoming someone not even I could yet understand, it was somewhere to channel my passions. I even took up bass guitar because of it.
Ultimately, emo music was a safe haven for people who felt different. So on behalf of teenage Mel, I’d like to say a huge thank you to Emo.
Here’s a taste of some of Mel’s Emo classics.
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