Playlist by a 90s gaybie

I never get tired of teasing my mum about the time that she came into my school, all guns blazing, because I'd come home singing Material Girl by Madonna. We'd been doing aerobics moves to it at school, and I loved it. I had no idea what a gold digger "material girl" was, and if it had been chaste prayers that had been set to such a catchy tune I probably would have been singing that too, but alas, my mother was furious.

We didn't listen to any music that was current and mainstream in my home when I was a child. I grew up on classical radio, The Beatles, The Seekers, and the soundtracks of old musicals like Oklahoma and My Fair Lady.

My parents liked to pretend that the modern era was not upon us. I attended an old Catholic primary school in the quaint, historical village of Richmond, Tasmania. The school was spitting distance from the oldest still -in-use bridge in Australia, and the touristy, romanticised yesteryear flavour that permeated the place heavily coloured my primary school years. There were constant revivals of olden day life, both in the township and within our school. Throwback dioramas, plays and period dress-ups to revive the spirit of a simpler time, when little girls wore long floral dresses with a smock over the top and a bonnet, and were expected to be sugar and spice and all things nice.

The desire to remain in the aesthetics of the past didn't stop there, either. My mum took it that step further by accosting the librarian of my primary school and banning her from lending me Babysitters Club books (frickin' Babysitters Club books!), preferring me to remain on a clean literary diet of old fashioned children's classics.

This was the sheltered world I inhabited until I turned 12. Cue the start of high school.

My childhood home was in a woop woop suburb that was near an airport and not much else, and rather than send me to the local high school full of feral pot-smoking, knife wielding ruffians, my parents decided to send me to a high school that was miles from where I lived, and required taking two bus trips each way. An hour plus worth of breathing in the fuggy smell of wet woollen blazers and teenage armpits, and listening to pop songs played through the tinny speakers of the bus. That's right! Listening to pop songs. Hello, world of modern music, as introduced by the Redline Coaches bus company and '90s Hobart radio station, Triple T!

My first foggy morning taking that long commute to school, we hadn't even finished crawling around my own suburb picking up other passengers when the Salt n Pepa song "Let's talk about sex" came on the radio. I remember this moment distinctly, not just for the liberal-minded lyrics, but because the two young girls sitting directly behind me, who were wearing the uniform of the swankiest private school in town, were having a casual conversation about whether or not they thought it was a good song. (THE SONG WAS TALKING ABOUT SEX, PEOPLE). My blood soon ran hot for the sexy rapping women of Salt n Pepa, and by the end of the year I was rapping along to Shoop with the best of them,

bright as the sun, I wanna have some fun, come and give me some of that yum-yum chocolate chip, honey dip, can I get a scoop?

but that was the mind-blowing moment wherein I stepped out of 1800s British convict colony times and into 1990s Australian life.

My playlist

Mmm Bop - Hanson

Ironic - Alanis Morissette

Wonderwall - Oasis

Brick - Ben Folds Five

Freak on a Leash - Korn

Hands - Jewel

The Middle - Jimmy Eat World

Mmm Bop by Hanson

It's a secret no one knows

It's a secret no one knows

No one knows

Mmmbop, ba duba dop

Ba du bop, ba duba dop ba du

As a young gay girl, this band was a godsend! I loved singing along to the uber catchy Mmm Bop, and pretending to have a crush on Zac Hanson. Hell, if I squinted just right he really did look like a cute, cheeky little baby dyke. I had over-lapping posters of Hanson from Dolly and Girlfriend (90s Australian teen magazines) covering almost the entirety of my bedroom walls, which helped make the tiny poster of the Spice Girls look inconspicuous. Winning.

Ironic by Alanis Morissette

It's like rain on your wedding day

It's a free ride when you've already paid

It's the good advice that you just didn't take

And who would've thought, it figures

When you're a teenager it feels like Murphy's Law rules. It was inevitable that the one day you got your essay finished on time, the teacher was going to be away, right? And of course the year that you finally make some good friends, your parents decide to move your family to Bumfuck, Idaho. Oh, the guy who elevates himself by dragging everyone else down got school captain? And the girl you have a crush on is...straight? Well of course. How ironic.

This is a smirky, sarcastic song that shrugs its shoulders in bemused resignation at the fact that things never quite work out how you expect them to, but they keep on chugging along just the same.

Wonderwall by Oasis

By now you should've somehow

Realized what you gotta do

I don't believe that anybody

Feels the way I do about you now

This song still swirls with the strange chemicals that started flooding my body as I walked into my 13th year. I remember staring out the bus window listening to it, full of so many feelings. I knew I was attracted to girls, but I didn't want to admit it even to myself, let alone to anyone else. It felt like the most addictive, obsessive, giddily wonderful sensation I'd ever felt, but also like no-one in the world would understand or approve of this side of myself that I had only just discovered. In conservative Tasmania, I really did feel like I was the "only gay in the village."

One afternoon I was talking about what one of my teachers had been wearing that day. I felt a strong compulsion to bring this teacher into as many conversations as possible. She was so funny, so pretty, so interesting. I can remember the exact corner we were driving around as my mum said "If Mrs T was a man, I'd think you had a crush on her!"

After that I started pretending to hate everyone I had crushes on, so that I could talk about them a lot, but people wouldn't think I was, gasp...gay.

Brick by Ben Folds Five

Now she's feeling more alone

Than she ever has before

She's a brick and I'm drowning slowly

Off the coast and I'm headed nowhere

In 1998 we moved 2.5 hours away to a dreary dead end town that I hated - Launceston, Tasmania. My dad had been working there for three years already, and had given my mum the ultimatum that we all had to move there too or he would divorce her, and so I was forced to move away from my childhood home, all of my familiar haunts, and most importantly, my friends.

The "she" in this song wasn't a girl for me - not a human one anyway. "She" was my new empty, colourless existence in Launceston. It felt like the day I moved there a pallet of besser blocks had been tied to my ankles and was dragging me down under a deep dark sea of the murkiest of emotions.

I had pimped my piano and violin skills to earn a 50% music scholarship to a private school in my new town, which had seemed exciting at first, but I quickly realised it had been a mistake to try to ingratiate myself into a place that I didn't belong in.

I didn't fit in at private school. I wasn't cut from the right class of privileged cloth. Everyone else had known each other since kindergarten, so they were extremely cliquey. Not only did I not make any meaningful friendships the whole time I was there, but I was also the subject of merciless bullying from my very first day, when I laughed in the hall on my way to history class and a boy behind me imitated it in a mocking, unflattering way. I hadn't experienced anything at all like this at the all girl state school I had just come from, where everyone was quite tolerant and accepting, and it was a shock, but quickly became an hourly reality.

It also felt like no-one there cared about the things I cared about. The school clearly favoured STEM subjects, and gave no money or support to their drama, art, or music departments. The state school I had gone to back in Hobart had streamed their art classes, and gave us quality materials to work with. Here I was in an expensive school, and we were mixing cheap primary colour paints to create any other colour in senior art classes? What kind of piss take was this?

Freak on a Leash - Korn

Something takes a part of me

Something lost and never seen

Every time I start to believe

Something's raped and taken from me from me

The three years that I lived in Launceston is the only period of my life that I listened to a lot of aggressive music. I found myself listening to Marilyn Manson, Eminem and Korn, needing an outlet for my anger. Listening to the lyrics now I can still feel the desperation and pain that I carried. I felt like that place was taking its pound of flesh from me and giving nothing back.

Hands by Jewel

My hands are small, I know

But they're not yours, they are my own

But they're not yours, they are my own

And I am never broken

I do have ridiculously tiny hands, for anyone, let alone a pianist, but I would like to believe that they belong to me. Private school, however, had other ideas. They treated me as though I should "dance monkey, dance!" at their whim, since they were paying for me half of my education. It sounds silly, because the meaning I put onto this song is laughably literal and not at all how it is intended to be read, but this song gave me strength and hope.

I'm not sure if my teachers knew, or cared, how much effort it took for me to get the diploma level pieces I was learning to something even approximating performance standard, but every other week I was expected to perform virtuosic pieces in front of hostile crowds full of students, teachers, and parents who didn't like or see me. I was expressing my deepest emotions via the divine and complex music of Mozart, Beethoven and Chopin to crowds of people who were, at best, apathetic towards me, and at worst, the very same assholes who were trying their best to break me. These jerks were sitting there listening to the thinly veiled messages of my heart, and it felt like a prostitution of the soul.

"Hands" was my quiet anthem of resistance.

The Middle - Jimmy Eat World

It just takes some time

Little girl, you're in the middle of the ride

Everything, everything will be just fine

Everything, everything will be alright, alright

As soon as high school was over I moved to the other side of the country, where I didn't know a soul. It was terrifying, and I cried a lot the first few months, but moving to Queensland turned out to be one of the best things I've ever done for myself. I went from being freezing all the time and having no friends, to living on a warm and sunny street that was permanently littered with frangipanis, in student accommodation that was full of wonderful, interesting people for me to befriend.

The first time I heard "The Middle", I was sitting in the backseat of a car that was full of other students from my new digs, on our way to a theme park down on the Gold Coast. I remember feeling so happy and light, and thinking, yeah...yeah, it is going to be alright.

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