Written by:
Marissa Pareles
» Order
this Issue of Curve:
Vol. 13#8
I’m a firecracker on the 4th of July
I’ll make your mama beg, I’ll make your daddy cry
I’ll walk a million miles for just one piece of your pie
I’m not a stranger, darlin’, so don’t you be shy
— Beth Ditto, the Arkansas-born and -bred heartthrob who fronts queer blues-punk-rockabilly band the Gossip
Only four years after she graduated from high school, Beth Ditto’s throaty vocals, bluntly sexual lyrics and penchant for exhibitionism had become libidinous bywords among teen and twentysomething dykes. Her band, the Gossip, has gained momentum with three rich, taunting, relentlessly original albums, the most recent of which, Movement (Kill Rock Stars, 2003), mixes punk, gospel and blues into what’s been called “a swaggering throwdown of blooze punk fix with gospel flair” and “a party album for the revolution.”
In many ways, Movement marked a personal and professional turning point for 22-year-old Ditto. “I say the word ‘he,’” she says, “and it’s just a small thing, a pronoun, but it was a big deal for me,” she admits. Ditto’s lyrics have always been explicitly girl-girl, but her current partner, Freddie Fagula, is a transgendered man.
“There’s a lot of love, a lot of relationship stuff going on in that album,” she says. “A lot of heartbreak. And not just romantic heartbreak, either — there was a war starting, and Bush was in office. He is in office. Everyone I knew was so afraid. People usually think of us as a fun dance band, but that record was really dark and emotional.”
Movement wasn’t all heartbreak, though — it also marked a triumphant moment for the Gossip. “It was the first time that we were ever actually in a real studio,” Ditto says. “On that’s not what i heard, we were recording in Kathy’s basement on some not-very-fancy equipment, and in a bathroom. It was super, super low-fi. Then, on Arkansas Heat (Kill Rock Stars, 2002), we were in a rented studio space, all together, playing our instruments in one room. So being in a real studio this time, I really felt like a grown-up.”
This summer, the habitually clothes-shedding punk rocker and fat activist (her concerts often culminate with shirtless audience members shaking their bodies in awed imitation) surprised and captivated fans with a luscious, sexually explicit photo spread in On Our Backs. “It was a big moment in my life. It was kind of a radical thing to do. I got my period just 10 minutes before we got there, and I was totally bleeding. I was doing it with my tranny boyfriend, who I’m in love with, and I was totally bleeding — how radical is that? — and I’m a fat person, and I’m a femme. It felt really good.”
With none of the arrogance of a hardened rock star, Ditto laces her conversation with unintentionally hilarious self-deprecation, denying that her fans lust after her and saying that her band is composed of “kids that can’t play their instruments, that just jump around onstage and act like kids.” When I ask her whether she thinks she’s a sex symbol, she replies, “I don’t feel sexy. I’m a really dorky person. I don’t think I’m a sex symbol. Like, oooh, look at that thigh truck.’”
Self-deprecation aside, it’s obvious that Ditto is proud to be a fierce, fat Southern femme. “I used to think being queer and fat was easier, because queer people talked about fat. Then I started to realize that people talk a lot, but they don’t act a lot. Like, why does everyone have a thin girlfriend? It’s really fucking weird,” she says. “I do see more thin femmes with bigger butch people, and I feel like that’s more acceptable. But I can only speak as a femme, and why are all these really awesome, hot, fat girls that I know — why are we still getting bummed out about our bodies? Sometimes the media might as well say outright, ‘You’re fat. You’re ugly.’ There are women on radio commercials that are like, ‘I used to be 50 pounds heavier and I was ugly. I just hated myself.’ Wow. Could you be more blunt than that? It doesn’t make it any easier to live your life when people think, ‘Wow, you’re queer and fat — how easy.’”
Ditto learned to stand up for herself as a kid in rural Searcy, Ark. “Being feminist and being queer came out of my pores,” she says. “As a kid, I was always mad — just noticing the women at Thanksgiving, running around the kitchen, while the men were watching football. And I was like, fuck this! For one, I don’t want to cook, and for two, I hate football. I was stuck in the middle. All I knew was that it was really fucked up that my mom worked herself to death, and my dad would just come home and sleep. They haven’t been together since I was 5.”
At age 8 or 9, Ditto was already praying that she wasn’t queer. Although her mom wasn’t homophobic, Ditto had learned from her Southern Baptist upbringing that gay men and lesbians go to hell. “So I used to pray, ‘Please, God …’” she remembers. “I liked girls!” At age 10, she stopped talking to her dad, “because he would try to get me to make dinner for him and stuff like that. In Arkansas, at 10 years old, you might as well be 16. You grow up so fast. But you know, I think girls everywhere have to grow up fast.”
As she got older, Ditto says, her feelings toward other girls just got stronger. “In junior high, I would get crushes on my best friends and get so mad at them for getting boyfriends. I really wanted it to go away. But then I was 15, and I came out to my mom, and I got over it and was just like, ‘Fuck it,’ because I knew being queer was something I had to do.”
Meanwhile, she was also discovering riot grrl and Third Wave feminism, which made a “huge difference” in her life. “There were people like Kathleen Hanna making feminism accessible to people who grew up in Arkansas, and putting out stuff that you could actually read and understand. Moms who quit school in the eighth grade — there was a lot of that where I grew up — could read this.” Riot grrl “really helped out. It was the first time ever that I was like, this is what I’ve been needing my whole life.”
When she was 17, Ditto met current bandmates Kathy Mendonca and Nathan Howdeshell, also Searcy natives. “When I met those kids, it changed my life,” she says. “I was a weirdo, a total baby dyke, with short hair and big baggy pants. I shaved my body in all kinds of ways, and I would wear tons of eyeliner and dye my hair pink.”
But she was a loner, too. “And then I started reading zines and listening to people’s music, and I actually had a connection to a small scene of my own,” she says. The trio, Ditto, Mendonca and Howdeshell, started the Gossip, and had put out their first record by the time Ditto was 18. She calls that’s not what i heard “pure sex” — a chronicle of the band’s first year living in Olympia, Wash., surrounded by other queer people. “It was a smorgasbord,” she remembers.
These days, she lives in Portland, Ore. She’s still interested in challenging some of the unacknowledged oppressions within the queer community, especially fatphobia. Queer people “can be really self-righteous,” she says, about accepting differences within the community. “But are you comfortable looking at me? When you look at me, do I scare you? Are you afraid that I’m going to come on to you? I think people are surprised at how sexual you can be when you’re fat.”
When I tell her that Gossip fans think she’s the hottest ever, she replies shyly, “Oh, that’s really sweet. Thanks, dude. I like to dress up. I think it’s a pure accident. For real. I don’t try to be sexy.”
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