We just listened to The Murmurs because we love them, we love their music. Tegan: When we discovered The Murmurs and Leisha Hailey and heard that she was gay, that was a huge deal. It had a gay story in it, it was so cool." And mine's like, "Today, me and Sara and dad went and saw Chasing Amy. I read a lot, I was raised in the same house as Sara, but Sara's journals are dark and brooding and deep and existential. In terms of queer culture, it was very similar but probably had very different impacts on us. Sara was so tortured about it and I was kind of just excited and then put it off and was awkward about sexuality and sex, so I didn't really want to talk about it. Sara and I had such different experiences as queer people. But did we think it was the best movie on Earth? Absolutely, because there were queer people and there was a queer storyline and it was so profound. When All Over Me came out in 1997, it was just like, Is it the best movie on Earth? No idea. She rented us this movie, When Night Is Falling, which was queer '90s cinema, peak of '90s cinema. She did bring a lot of queer stuff to us because we had queer friends, so I think that she was trying to create a safe space for us. My mom was a social worker, feminist, really alternative, although she kind of had a very typical parent response to us being queer later on in life. And I had a friend who kind of looked like her and was definitely my first crush in third grade. Our root is Anna Chlumsky from My Girl, that was a big one. what's the word, Sara, that you always use about what's your first gay, when you meet somebody. Tegan: For Sara and I obviously growing up in the '90s, there wasn't a ton of gay representation out there, so I think what gay representation collided with us, it sparked joy and excitement and nervousness. As we talk about their earliest queer pop-culture touchpoints, they're graciously open about their ever-shifting understanding of themselves, gush about the movies, musicians, and TV shows they love, and marvel at the newest queer generation. It's definitely weird, a nonchalant negligence that downplays their lived experiences wrestling with gender and sexuality, which they detail intimately in High School, and each with their own distinctly different journeys to self-enlightenment and -acceptance. Especially when you're talking about us in context with other people-the most famous example of this is when Rolling Stone was talking about the best Oscar performances and in our blurb, it said, 'lesbian duo Tegan and Sara performed with The Lonely Island.' And it's like, why did our sexuality have to be brought into it? It's really weird." "I would prefer to be known as a musician, not a 'queer musician.' I'm happy for people to know I'm queer, but I can do that-you don't need to do that. "We had a career where we talked about being queer the whole time, but I didn't always want to have to talk about being queer all the time," Tegan says. It's a new feather in their artists' caps: Since they started making music at 15, they've released nine albums, ranging from scrappy folk punk in their early days, breaking out with the 2007 indie rock record The Con, and naturally evolving into more of a synth-pop band, with their 10th record due out sometime this year. "This is the first time Tegan and I are involved in making something that is related to us and our band and our legacy, but we are not necessarily in the driver's seat," Sara says, who was on set for all but a few days of the three-month shoot. It's really queer, it's really beautiful," Tegan says. Starring TikTok twins Railey and Seazynn Gilliland, the show wrapped filming a few weeks ago and is due out on Amazon's Freevee in the fall. Lately they've been heads-down working on a slightly fictionalized TV adaptation of High School, helmed by their old friend, Happiest Season director Clea DuVall, and penned by Insecure writer Laura Kittrell. First it was for their 2019 memoir High School, for which the two dug out old journals to write. The Quin twins, Tegan and Sara, have spent a lot of time over the past few years reexamining their youth.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |