Tapes recorded in my bedroom

When I was fifteen, my friend William taught me how to cover the tab openings of an old cassette tape to record over it. It was 2011, and there was no particular reason for me to be making tapes other than the illusion of coolness that came from using vintage technologies, my indulgence in nostalgia for a time before I was even born. At this point in my life, I was just beginning to figure out my own identity, and walking around Atlanta with my headphones on (savoring the tape's low hiss that whispered underneath the music) allowed me to construct fantasies in my head in which I was free from my spatial, temporal, and physical realities. I spent countless hours making mixtapes, and each mixtape was the soundtrack of a different life I led in my dreams. In these dreams, I cut off all my hair, played baseball while the sun set, drove through the city with a girl I had a crush on. I was rugged and boyish and untouched by shame.

For a long time, I was afraid the person I wanted to become would forever be trapped in my imagination, seeping into the world only in bits of staticky song. It’s been ten years since that first summer spent recording over old tapes in my bedroom, and I am less afraid. I’ve cut my hair, changed my name, fallen in love, had my heart broken, spent more hours making mixtapes & dreaming about the things I want.

Here are some songs, all by LGBTQ+ artists, from my tapes throughout the years. They are soft songs for the kind of pride that comes from contemplation & introspection.

1. Everest by Ani DiFranco

I think the singing went outside / And floated up to tell / All the stars not to hide / 'Cause by the time church let out / The sky was much clearer / And the moon was so beautiful / That the ocean held up a mirror

My parents were born in a small town in rural Georgia, and some of my earliest memories are of visiting my grandfather's farm. Before I knew much else about myself, I knew I loved Georgia (red clay, rows of peanut plants, dilapidated landscapes that could easily be misconstrued as ugly). As I got older, I began to recognize the friction between who I was and this place I considered a home. While my queerness, among other things, alienated me, I still knew: any identity I ever have will be inextricably tied to this land where I first learned what it means to love.

2. Cactus by Ferron

It's been a year / Since you left home for higher ground / In the distance I hear a hoot owl / Ask the only question I have found / To be worthy of the sound it makes / As it breaks the silence of your old town

I spent a lot of high school dreaming about the day I would graduate and leave home. I envisioned places I had never seen where I would have space to find myself. I would close my eyes at night and play through imagined scenes of people I could maybe, someday, be, at some college in Vermont or California or New York or....

3. Million Miles by Mirah

If I could see you I'd take off your clothes / And we'd lie in the garden and watch the weeds grow

During my first year of college in Western Massachusetts, I fell in love with a girl in my environmental science class. I was too scared to tell her, but before we left for the summer I gave her the address of the farm I was working on. We spent the summer mailing letters across the country, talking on the phone late at night, constructing cryptic playlists to send each other. After work, I would sit in the grass next to the tomato fields and listen to her music, wondering what she was trying to say to me.

4. True Love by Joan Armatrading

We've got harmony and understanding / It's love for the first time / Like the morning sun that's breaking / Giving out that special light

At the end of the summer, we met in Georgia to drive back up to school. We learned that for some time in the 80’s, our parents had lived in the same college town. We stopped at a little diner in Athens and ate their favorite dishes and kissed for the first time. For the first time, I felt like the world inside my head was possible. I saw it stretching out before me in the curves of an east coast highway. I heard it hanging in the air in the long note of a love song on the radio.

5. Colour of Anyhow by Beverly Glenn-Copeland

Look into my eyes, the country of anywhere / The roads will take you there any time / And I won't ask how long you’ll love me / Babe, though it's on my mind

When we broke up two years later, I lost: my favorite t-shirt, a book of Eileen Myles' poetry, the ability to listen to certain songs without crying. I kept: my belief in a world where I can be my most authentic self.