Indigo meaning among lesbians1/21/2024 ![]() ![]() ![]() The two met in elementary school, but didn't start harmonizing until the dawn of the Reagan era in 1981, when they were both in the choir at Shamrock High School. Ray and Saliers, or Amy and Emily (as their true fans refer to them with a loving ease and familiarity) have been making music together since they were young teens in Decatur, Ga. A deeper dive into the Emily/Amy dialectic, the heart of what makes the Indigo Girls' music so compelling with its wide swerves between gentle, lovelorn balladry and the anguished yawps of activist souls struggling to be born (at least in their earliest records) gives us insight into what female friendship - what lesbian friendship in particular - can offer to our divided worlds. In other words, the Indigo Girls have, with music as their conduit, accomplished the very best of what both queer theory and queer politics always aspired to achieve. What the Indigo Girls' story as longtime collaborators and friends who practice a healthy and gregarious exogamy with other romantic partners, musicians, producers and political comrades models for us is an enduring, communitarian project of world-building. Just because we are gay doesn't always make us gay for each other. This couldn't be further from the truth, driven as it is by the slightly phobic assumption that anyone of the same sex will do for anyone who identifies as a lesbian. Nevertheless, I'm constantly surprised by the number of listeners - my own wife included - who assume the two must have dated each other at least once in their lifetimes. Such information doesn't bear repeating for those of us who have carried their music like touchstones for most of our gay adult lives. But even though Emily and Amy have been together forever, they are not, nor have they ever been, romantic partners. All have aspired to hit their deceptively simple countermelodies and harmonic intervals so locked-in that people assume they could only be achieved by a romantic couple. Generations of guitar-strumming camp counselors and rootsy stoners of all ages and genders, as well as the global Sapphists who loved them from the beginning, have sung along to the Indigo Girls' expansive songbook by heart. During the festival's original run between 19, the duo acquired a reputation for being the most convivial of the Lilith brood by encouraging jam sessions, group-singalongs and backstage card games among artists as spiritually distinct as Sheryl Crow and Sinéad O'Connor. Most commonly known for their modest chart hits peppered throughout the 1990s, like "Closer to Fine," "Galileo" and "Shame on You," the Indigo Girls were a cardinal constellation in the Lilith Fair cosmology. Thinking about what it means to be part Emily and part Amy, and how those identities or stances both merge and diverge, gave many women a way to understand themselves along the lines of what the radical feminist poet Adrienne Rich called "the lesbian continuum." Though the "Emily and Amy dialectic" might initially present itself as neatly divided, all the gradients and the inevitable syntheses between the two are what ultimately matters. But in my own heart, the one I wear on my sleeve, I knew that I was at core an Emily: a formally skilled sentimentalist with a deft touch for finely wrought love songs, a sensualist with a penchant for the good things in life like food and literature. Like a lot of baby butches in the '90s, I wanted to be like Amy: an aloof yet accessible alpha butch whose salt-of-the-earth zeal, both political and emotional, broke a lot of guitar strings, and presumably a lot of hearts. Emily's are lyrical, jazzy and more ballad-like." Early publicity materials established an enduring impression of the contrast between them – like this bio, written three years before their self-titled 1989 album: "Amy's songs are gutsy, powerful and upbeat. The duo, which releases its 16th studio album Look Long tomorrow, has been together for 35 years. Īre you an Emily or an Amy? Few mainstream fans of the Indigo Girls would even consider that question, but for the lesbians over age 40 who love them, it's an elemental personality test. Find all Turning the Tables content here. ![]() ![]() In 2020, we will publish an occasional series looking closely at the careers of significant women in music, treasured albums or significant scenes. Turning the Tables is NPR's ongoing multi-platform series dedicated to recentering the popular music canon on voices that have been marginalized, underappreciated, or hidden in plain sight. ![]()
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