 | | Melissa's Second Coming
By Samiya A. Bashir
Photo credit: Al Levine
Melissa Etheridge has been mesmerizing lesbians ever since she came out to her father, left her Leavenworth, Kansas, hometown and headed West to make a name for herself. And make a name for herself she did.
This year marks the 15th anniversary of Melissa's first record contract, which she signed with Island Records CEO Chris Blackwell. Blackwell spotted her performing before the rowdy, screaming fans crowded into a Long Beach, Calif., lesbian bar and inked the deal on the spot, spawning a new era in rock 'n' roll history. Etheridge is celebrating the anniversary in true rock 'n' roll superstar style with a strikingly personal new album, "Skin", due out July 10, and a new autobiographical book, "The Truth Is
", already in bookstores.
Now entering her fourth decade, the Grammy-winning lesbian icon is living single and relaxing into her ride as rock 'n' roll's "All-American Girl", showing off a calm maturity throughout one of the most publicized breakups of the decade.
Getting It On With the Butchies
By Pam Huwig
Photograph by Phyllis Christopher
The Butchies, Kaia Wilson, Melissa York and Alison Martlew, are at it again, girls.
And, oh my, lemme tell you that they've got a good scald on their new record, 3, which they recorded and mixed in eight days flat. They've been playing together for three years now, driving the girls wild with their sassy stage presence, wit and sex appeal. "Before you start asking us questions, let me ask you this," begins Butchies guitarist Kaia Wilson, who playfully continues: "I wonder if you've noticed that there are three of us in the band and that the new record is appropriately entitled "3"?" Ooh, the goosebumps I did notice. Tell me about it. "There are three of us, the new record is called "3", our combined age is 84, which of course is divisible by three, and we've been together for three years," she clarifies. I see. You girls have a lot of free time, huh? Wilson laughs. "Actually, we don't. But we still have plenty of time to come up with all this," she says. What it all really adds up to is that the Butchies have come into their own with a fierceness that can't be denied. Smart lyrics, thumping drums, and flawless bass by all indications, this is only the beginning.
Inside Her Head
By Diane Anderson-Minshall
When asked how it feels to be Madonna's top girl as she's frequently described by the paparazzi since performing at Mrs. Ritchie's Scotland nuptials DJ Tracy Young laughs.
"Really? I'm not sure, but aren't I Madonna's only girl?" She has a point. It was only two years ago that Madonna, along with pals Gwyneth Paltrow and Donatella Versace, discovered Young spinning at a South Beach, Fla., bar. After a wild night of dancing, Madonna remembered the talented mix-master and within weeks Young was flown to New York to spin at the film premier of "The Next Best Thing". After that, Young got what many in the dance-music industry consider the ultimate accolade: She became the first female and consequently the first dyke to be chosen to remix a Madonna song. Since she remixed the catchy tune "Music," Young has been all the rage, garnering more mainstream fans and turning up in of-the-moment magazines like "Teen People"
Burning Desire
By Gretchen Lee
photo: Karen Moskowitz
Equal parts agent provocateur and artist, bi singer-songwriter Magdalen Hsu-Li likes to tease a response from her audience that sounds as much like a conversation as a whispered quarrel.
Treading the edges of her songs is an anger tempered by understanding that spills into a playfulness as sexy as it is strong. Her new album, "Fire", slated for release this fall, takes its title from one of the five Chinese elements (the other elements being wood, earth, metal and water). Fire, representing relationships and the ability to love and be loved, is both a source of pride and a nemesis to Hsu-Li. "The funny thing is, in our society, I think that fire is the first element that gets really damaged in people," she says. "I've been working very hard on that particular element in myself."
Killer Opera
By Erin Raber
photo: Karima Cherif
Most people wouldn't consider the notorious "lesbian serial killer" Aileen Wuornos your typical lyric heroine, but for Bay area composer and librettist Carla Lucero, Wuornos' life story has all the elements that make up a great opera.
"It was really something you could pull out of a Greek tragedy ... murder, betrayal, self-sacrificing love, even the traumatic family," says Lucero over sushi at a San Francisco Japanese restaurant. "Wuornos", Lucero's first full-scale opera, debuted at the Jon Sims Center for the Arts in San Francisco in June and is likely to tour worldwide. Wuornos is making history in the opera community by adding Lucero to a small group of female composers who have actually seen their work in full-scale production. (New York's Metropolitan Opera last performed an opera by a woman in 1903.) Breaking the tradition of the "old boys' club" still firmly in place in the opera world, Lucero explores the world of violence and sexual abuse toward women through Wuornos' painful history.
Facing the Rap
By Shayna Phillipson
photo: Deb St. John
She lives in a world where words like "fag," "nigger," and "dyke" are spit in your face. A world where misogyny is commonplace and where hatred spreads like weeds growing in a field.
N.I.Double-K.I. lives in a hip-hop world where anti-gay messages swirl around her. But N.I.Double-K.I. is a lesbian, and she's proud. N.I.Double-K.I., a.k.a. Nikki Mixon, spits out lines like a machine gun and hits her mark every time. Onstage, her whole face fills with rage. Her dark eyes stare down the audience and her mouth encircles the microphone as she busts out her message. She's on a mission to get her words out to anyone who's listening. "It's a struggle to be a black woman in hip-hop. It's not our game," N.I.Double-K.I. says. She grew up staring stoically at crack deals and hustlers in San Francisco. "That was the main influence on my style," she says. "I write about the struggles that I see around me. That's the stuff that's interesting.
"Man, I Feel Like a Woman!"
How Feminism found a foothold in the honky-tonk hellcats and liberated ladies of country
By Diane Anderson-Minshall
When I was 5 years old, my friends Susan and Juanita and I would spend every afternoon gathered around the Shwartz family stereo.
Susan had a new copy of Lynn Anderson's 45 "Rose Garden" and we three girls memorized every single word. Just the opening refrain of the chorus, "I beg your pardon," used to send a gap-toothed grin to my face every time I heard it. Anderson was then called the "queen of country music" because her crossover hit topped the pop charts for five weeks, long before Garth Brooks did the same. After listening to "Rose Garden" at least 10 times, we'd turn on the radio and belt out whatever country tunes were popular that week along with the crooners themselves.
And then the most remarkable thing happened: A 13-year-old girl named Tanya Tucker came on the radio belting out a remarkable manifesto of female liberation called "Delta Dawn." We didn't know Bette Midler first sang the song in the gay baths of New York. We didn't know Helen "I Am Woman" Reddy borrowed it from Bette. We didn't even know what "feminist" meant yet. But to the three of us working-class girls one Jewish, one Latina, and one mixed-race Tanya Tucker became our new icon. Within two years, the Seminole, Texas, girl with the smoky twang had a Grammy nomination, a greatest-hits album, and graced the cover of Rolling Stone. (And she was one of the first country artists to do so).(More in the current issue of Curve)
Myles High
By Whitney Vaughan
photo: Jack Pierson
Eileen Myles is one of those trickster poets which not to say she's full of hot air, but that one gets the sense she could whip your ass if you put your cash (or your words) on the table.
Since the late 1970s, Myles has published eight books of poetry, including "Maxfield Parrish" (1995); the Lambda Book Award-winning "School of Fish" (1997); an anthology, "The New Fuck You: Adventures in Lesbian Reading" (1995), co-edited with Liz Kotz; and "Chelsea Girls" (1994), a collection of stories that inspired Michelle Tea's recent "Valencia". Myles has also written plays for experimental theater and even ran for president in 1992 as the "first openly female" candidate.(More in the current issue of Curve)
The Spirit of An Island
The world watches as the locals in Vieques struggle to survive a standoff with the Navy
By Liz Winston
Located just a short ferry ride from the main islan of Puerto Rico and also accessible by plane, Vieques is a small island in the Caribbean that has become a fierce symbol for Puerto Rican independence.
The controversy generated by the U.S. Naval base there has sparked a dialogue of international proportions. But talk to the gay men and lesbians who make their homes on Vieques, and you'll come to see the island as they do: a place where you can still stumble on remote, beautiful spots. Ironically, this place offers the lesbian traveler her own version of Caribbean adventure Ginger-and-Marianne-style. And, despite the military presence, it is also a place where women can feel perfectly safe walking hand in hand through the streets of its small towns.
Heating Up with LAVA
Sarah East Johnson Covers New Ground with LAVA an All-woman Dance and Circus Troupe
By Whitney Vaughan
photo: Nancy Brooks Brody
Despite the many strong women who have defined modern and postmodern dance in the last century, there's still an alarming amount of dance/theater being produced that fails to challenge gender stereotypes and heterosexist norms. Even among choreographers who distance themselves from the dying swans of ballet or the borderline porn of some jazz styles, many continue to be mired in complacent thinking about women in motion.
Against this underwhelming backdrop, however, stands the occasional maverick. Sarah East Johnson, director of the circus-dance troupe LAVA, is one such exception. A Brooklyn-based choreographer, Johnson manages to politicize the stage with her all-woman company. To see these five women support one another onstage, with a radical coupling of physical strength and vulnerability, is in itself a challenge to either/or thinking about gender. But as a troupe of performers who will pull off hoop-diving, trapeze work, acrobatics, dance and wrestling in a given show often with video samples and music such as Babe the Blue Ox adding texture audiences would never suspect something like an agenda from LAVA.
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