Freedom as an alibi
musings on pride month, moving to Nashville, and making myself small
On March 2, 2023, the Tennessee Adult Entertainment Act, also known as the drag ban, was signed into law by Bill Lee. A month prior, almost exactly to the day, I had made the move from Canandaigua, New York to Nashville, Tennessee, leaving all my friends, family, and familiarity to pursue my dream of being a songwriter.
In one of my first sessions here we wrote about what it felt like to get something you’ve dreamed of since you were a little kid and realize it wasn’t going to fix you. I felt often in those first few months after the shine wore off that Nashville had gone from some sort of country music Disney World, full of something sparkly and exciting at every turn, to just another city, full of burnt-out twenty somethings working day and night to try and make ends meet and spending their spare time on the dream they’d set everything aside to pursue. I called it the end of my honeymoon phase.
I was proud of myself for taking the leap, sure – but I found myself wondering why I’d come all this way just to work full time in food service, rush home to change outfits and play an unpaid round to a bar full of people chatting with each other and ignoring the music. (I can’t help but laugh when I look back now – that was never the point.)
In the session where we wrote that moving-to-Nashville song, I said, “Do you ever worry when you’re at Lipstick that someone’s going to walk in there and shoot it up?” I realized quickly that I was in a room with two queer songwriters based out of New York and a straight, cis, Christian, white man based in the south. No one in the room quite got it, not in the way I did, but as my sweet queer collaborators nodded in a sad, understanding way, I realized quickly it wasn’t a universal feeling. And I couldn’t hold that over the straight cis man in the room – he had no idea what it felt like to feel like every space that had been deemed “safe” sometimes felt like it had a target plastered on it.
Living in Nashville has forced me to sit with my queerness in a way I’d never had to before. I had never really called myself a country artist until I realized that’s exactly what I am, and the only reason I hadn’t been was that I just didn’t want to admit that I was taking up a space that a lot of people would rather not find me in. It’s forced me to confront the dangers of homophobia and transphobia head-on, not from a liberal arts school safe haven hundreds of miles away where the ideas felt almost conceptual.
As I wrote in that songwriting session, “They’ve got something here I’d never heard of / freedom as an alibi”. I sat still for a long while after writing that line. The demo’s still sitting in a folder somewhere on my laptop, untouched.
Every pride month, and especially this one, I feel a sense of gratitude for how far I’ve come since I accidentally came out at 14 in an argument with my family around the dinner table. I feel gratitude for my ability to celebrate pride, for my safety and stability and loving community that surrounds me, for the Black queer people who made it possible for me to celebrate pride at all in the first place, for the love and sense of peace that accepting myself has brought me.
I’m not sure how to negotiate the in-between of feeling this immense warmth while also struggling deeply to feel unashamed about my truth. I don’t have the answers. I’m not some perfect person with a shiny rainbow flag taped to my bedroom wall. I’ve got shit to work through. I find myself shoving a lot of myself down in certain rooms, in Nashville more than ever before. Playing up my best Straight Girl when it feels like it’ll get me farther in a certain situation. I’m ashamed to admit that, more than anything. I’m working on it. But I know this for sure:
My queerness is the way I save every little scrap from my life to tape up to my bedroom wall. It’s the way my roommate lays in my lap while we listen to the music on the floor at the house show. It’s my need to get as far away from home as I possibly can, my constant desire for starting over, reinventing. It’s my ability to forgive. It’s my chipped nail polish and my layered chain necklaces and my platform shoes. It’s the way it feels to hold hands with a girl in a movie theater during the scary parts. It’s the way I edit my best friend’s poetry, line by line, syllable by syllable. It’s me front row at a bro country concert scream singing along to a love song about a girl, meaning every word, not changing a damn pronoun. It’s my lavender oatmilk lattes. It’s my pink frilly dresses and sparkly makeup. It’s my XL men’s shirts from the Goodwill bins. It’s my walks at the park listening to albums start to finish. It’s everything about me, it is me, it’s for the 11 year old me singing in the church choir, it’s for 14 year old me whose first kiss was my friend in high school after she broke up with her abusive boyfriend, it’s for 19 year old me who started only going by Kat and started raising their hand in class. It’s me and my friend Weston playing on the seesaw outside Schulman’s, giggling like little kids.
“It was all I ever wanted”, I sing in the chorus of that song. “I wanna toss it all aside.”