The Truth Is ... Read online

  We played the Kansas State women’s prison and I remember standing on stage, staring out at the inmates, and thinking, “What are all these men doing inside a women’s prison?” It took a while for me to realize that they were women. And once I had that realization, I was curious about them, interested. Not on a conscious level, of course, but there was something going on in that prison that fascinated me.

  The Bob Hammill Variety Show was great fun for all of us. It’s where I learned how to get up in front of people and perform. No matter where the stage was—local schools, old folks’ homes, wherever—I loved it. I loved the attention. I loved the warmth. I loved the appreciation. I loved the spotlight. I felt secure and loved and safe and at home on stage.

  The stage became the safest, most rewarding place that I have ever been. I am allowed to open up everything about myself on stage. Being on stage worked so well for me emotionally that, for the longest time, it was all I wanted to do. I would have done anything to do it on as large a scale as I possibly could. Like the movies, it was an escape for me. Performing gave me the ability to hide out and be who I wanted to be, and be loved and feel safe and secure.

  Performing in the Bob Hammill Variety Show

  Me, at age four

  I was ten years old when I wrote my first song, “Don’t Let It Fly Away.”

  As I became more serious about my music, I would ask my parents for their opinion from time to time about my career choice: to be a rock-and-roll star. These conversations were kind of funny, coming from an eleven-year-old girl. Dad was supportive, but he never planned on my dreams ever coming true for me. He’d say fatherly things like, “Well, I believe that only one in a million persons can ever become successful at it, and we want you to know that the chances of disappointment are probable and huge, but we don’t want to discourage you from something that you love.” Somehow, I think my parents believed that my interest in music was a passing phase, and if it did persist, I could always become a music teacher. They never discouraged me, but they never gave a lot of credence to what I was doing.

  My optimism—my naïve teenage buoyancy telling me that I could make it—came from inside of me. It wasn’t a developed hopefulness from my surroundings. It was all my doing. My ambition drove my success. Even as a child. From my very first gig, I saved all the money I made. Dad bought me my first guitar, but from that point forward I bought everything else from my own money—every sound system, every amp, and every instrument I played.

  Dad would drive me to band practice or to a gig. He never said no to me about that. There were venues that wouldn’t allow me in because of my age, unless one of my parents was there. And Dad was always happy to oblige. I was twelve years old when I started playing in adult groups like the Wranglers. We played lots of country and western, and we performed in local bars around Leavenworth. Until I was a senior in high school, I played with a bunch of different bands—the Showmen, the Mid-West Express, the Road Show. I learned at an early age how to duck away from a flying beer bottle and how not to get hit in the face with a microphone if a drunk patron accidentally fell onto the stage.

  I was myopic in my thinking. I could see only one thing: my future as a singer/songwriter. But first, I had to “learn the trade.” There are some people who would say that, as a child, I wasn’t necessarily as gifted a singer as I thought I was. They found my voice too raspy and harsh. At one point, even my mother said that I wasn’t born with a great voice but I taught myself to have one. In an effort to help me, my parents sent me to a singing coach who had been a classically trained vocalist. She had sung at the Metropolitan Opera. She was a great vocal teacher. I was just not a malleable student. I tried to sing these Italian arias, but she understood that I sang from my soul, in a raw, untrained way. Clearly, this was going nowhere. She said, “As long as you just breathe right.…” I would listen and breathe from my diaphragm, and I became aware of how to pronounce words while singing. That was all she could give me. After three lessons, she told me: “I want you to go home and I want you to tell your parents not to waste their money because you’re going to sing the way you sing and I shouldn’t try to teach you how to sing differently.”

  As my confidence on stage grew, I finally thought I had reached level ground. A safe place where I could be who I was, who I wanted to be outside of my family. Life’s never that easy, is it? By the time I got to eighth grade, things started to get very confusing for me.

  Ready to Love

  • • •

  PEOPLE ALWAYS ASK ME: WHEN DID I KNOW I WAS GAY? The answer I’ve always given is: “I had a crush on my kindergarten teacher.” Which I did. But the truth, as always, is a little more complicated than that.

  My first kiss was in the sixth grade, with Mike Strange. I suppose we were doing what most kids at that age do, running around and chasing each other. We were in a dark basement, listening to the Temptations singing “Just My Imagination,” when we kissed for the first time. It was one of those closed-mouth kisses, awkward and passionless. We were twelve years old and the world was still filled with tremendous possibilities. We danced and listened to music. We would see each other in school and talk on the phone. He was my boyfriend.

  When adolescence started to set in, so did my confused feelings. I guess my adolescence wasn’t really any different than anyone else’s. It’s when you discover your sexuality—the point where you experiment and become who you’re going to be. I realized that while most of my friends were all excited about whether this guy or that guy was going to ask them out or to the football game, I was wondering why my best friends would rather be going with them instead of me. All of a sudden, the girls that I liked as my best friends, I REALLY liked, if you know what I mean. I started to question what it was that I really wanted from these friendships, which were becoming ever more important in my life. Too important. My friends couldn’t just be my friends, they had to be devoted to me. I had to have their focus all the time. They had to love my music. I was filling myself up with them—with their attention, their concerns. Of course I wasn’t dealing with what was really going on. I didn’t know what was really going on.

  I went to a Christian youth summer camp when I was a teenager, and there was one particular girl I became rather fixated on. Her name was Jo, and, man, did I have a crush on her. I didn’t understand my obsessive feelings toward her at the time, but they certainly complicated things for me. I couldn’t quite figure out that what I was feeling was sexual and not just emotional. It was never a question of wanting to kiss her, or being attracted to her. It was about so much more. More than she could have ever given me. More than I would ever get. I wanted to be with her every minute of every day. When I was with her, I felt great. When I wasn’t, I felt desperate—alone and confused. But the more I wanted from her, the clearer it became that I was going to get nothing, so I just cut it off—completely. She, of course, never understood my emotional hot-and-cold behavior. I recently found my diary from 1975 and the entries are just hilarious to me. On one side of the page I am professing my love for a boy named Melvin. Missy-’n’-Melvin, TLA. And directly next to that page is my frustration over why I can’t see Jo, and wanting to tell her how I felt, but being so scared and uncertain of how she would react. She tried to make plans with me, but I just wasn’t capable of having her in my life. My feelings were too strong and I had no clue how to handle the situation. I have always felt so sorry about doing that to her because of my own lack of understanding of what was going on inside of me. But, the truth is, I had a big crush on this girl, and it completely freaked me out!

  I had nowhere to put these feelings, no one to talk to about them. I didn’t know where to turn, didn’t even know how to talk about it, much less anyone to talk to about it … And then one day, in ninth grade, my social studies teacher kept me after school. She was this really sweet, caring, special lady. She sat me down in the empty classroom and she told me a story about a girl she had gone to college with. I listened carefully, not quite
sure of what she was saying to me. She told me that she had had a friend in college who she really loved a lot. They spent all of their time together. One day, this girl called my teacher and played the Beatles’ “And I Love Her” over the phone for her. I couldn’t believe what my teacher was telling me. It made a huge impact on me because I was feeling all sorts of things in school, so unsure of what it all meant. I was feeling insane, but my teacher—who, incidentally, was married—was letting me know in her own way that there were people like me out there in the world. She reassured me that I was not crazy. I didn’t know what she was trying to say at the time, but, a couple of years later, it all made sense and I am so grateful for her gesture. That kind of tolerance and support was hard to come by in Leavenworth when I was growing up.

  But there was still the sense that these feelings, these romantic feelings I was having for other girls, were something I just should not talk about. So I didn’t. I tried to fit in just like everybody else. So, like everyone else, I dated boys in high school.

  I had a boyfriend at the end of my sophomore year. It was mostly a summer fling. He had just graduated and was getting ready to go to college in the fall. We had a lot in common. He was a musician—a saxophone player and a really, really good one. We sort of had a band together, playing big-band numbers. His buddies were horn players, and I remember writing a song with him and it was a lot of fun to do that with someone I liked. I remember telling him my dream of becoming a famous rock star, and his response was, “Well, that’s all fine and good but when I get married I want my wife to stay home.” That was a big lightbulb over my head, and I realized that, no, that would not be okay with me. I was never going to be someone’s stay-at-home wife. I wasn’t going to let anyone get in the way of my dream. That idea, that dream, was so much more important to me than any person could ever be in my life. That much I was sure of.

  We were boyfriend and girlfriend all summer long, and he was my first real sexual experience. We never actually had sex, but we did just about everything else. I remember it as just being very clinical in my head. I remember thinking, “I wonder what I’m missing here.” I wanted to know what sex was all about because all my friends were so into it and I just wasn’t getting the same feelings they were getting. I didn’t feel anything, but I didn’t know exactly what I was supposed to be feeling anyway. I had nothing to compare it to. He was all hot and horny and everything, and I tried to get into it. One day he came to me and told me that he had been reading “Dear Abby” and the column was about women who are frigid. Frigid? Like a refrigerator? I just stared at him, not really sure what he meant. What am I supposed to be? I didn’t realize that he was talking about my physical response to him. And of course I couldn’t really take that in or relate how I was feeling about him to my feelings about girls. So I just shut him out. Like a door slamming.

  The Showmen and me. I was thirteen years old here.

  Our Road Show promotional photo

  An entry from my diary in 1976

  Having no one to talk to about all these feelings sure made me a better songwriter. I’d disappear into my basement for hours at a time—singing, writing. I began to create whole worlds inside my lyrics. Worlds that made sense. Worlds where I could say whatever I wanted to.

  In those days, I wrote about all sorts of things I had never seen or experienced firsthand. I had a vivid imagination and learned to use my imagery effectively in my lyrics. I wrote songs about how cold it was in New York in December, but I had never been to the Big Apple. To some degree, I was also writing about girls, though I was unaware of it at the time. I would change the lyrics from “you were” to “he was” so that I could veil my true feelings. I was always missing someone. I was tortured by my need for love and affection—my need to find someone who could fill up the emptiness inside me. I’m still driven by that need as a songwriter. The best songs I write are still the songs that have an I’m-so-very-sad-and-alone theme.

  For a few weeks, in the beginning of my junior year, all of this changed. There was a new boy in school. His parents had just moved to Leavenworth with the army. He was the classic good-looking American boy: blond, handsome, star of the football team. And he asked me to go to the homecoming dance. Me, a tomboy who didn’t know how to do all those girly things. My friend Laura had a huge crush on this boy and she was shocked that he asked me, “I can’t believe he asked you.” It’s not like I was an ugly duckling or anything. I just didn’t know how to do pretty. Makeup wasn’t even a concept in my life. And it was such a great surprise. I was completely excited about my date and the dance. For two weeks, I was thinking about my hair and my dress, and I was just normal. That fantasy Kansas dream. The football player. Homecoming. Normalcy.

  We went to the dance—some streamers in the gym, records blaring from a bad PA system. I asked him if he wanted to dance. I have always loved getting out on the dance floor. I kept saying, “Let’s dance.” He kept turning me down, just flat out saying, “No, I can’t.” I thought he meant that he couldn’t dance, as in he didn’t know how to dance. But he explained to me that dancing was against his religion. His father was a preacher, and dancing was expressly forbidden. It was like a scene from the movie Footloose! I had never heard of such a thing. So I sat there at the homecoming dance with him, just sat there on the bleachers and talked to him for the rest of the night. He drove me home and walked me to my door, the perfect gentleman. Standing on my doorstep, I looked up at him. After all, this was the big-kiss-at-the-end-of-the-night moment, and I was a little nervous. But he just stuck out his palm to shake my hand. And I shook his hand good-night. But, as he turned to leave, I asked him, “Why did you ask me to the dance?” He told me that I was the safest person to ask because if he went to the dance with me, he wouldn’t be tempted to sin. I just said good night, turned around, and thought to myself, “Thanks!” It was a huge adolescent “ouch.”

  But that’s how relationships with boys were. Confusing. Full of mystery and a set of rules that I never seemed to understand. I went on a date with a boy named Hector once. He was a dark-skinned Cuban boy who had this crazy accent. Hector was cool as could be. The girls just loved him. We had a great time together, laughing, talking. And then I made a joke about being his girlfriend. Suddenly, Hector became totally serious. He looked at me and said: “You can’t be my girlfriend. You’re Missy Etheridge.” He was staring at me, telling me I’m different. And I just didn’t get it. It was all so confusing—the way that other people seemed to know things about me that I didn’t. I started to think that nothing about dating or relationships would ever make any sense.

  And then I met Jane. It’s not her real name, but I’ll call her that to protect her privacy.

  Jane was very popular, with lustrous hair and beautiful fair skin. She was quiet and mysterious with a hidden sadness that I found so attractive. I had to make her my best friend. And I did. For a year, we had a friendship that became very obsessive. She was emotional—endlessly emotional. She cried at my songs. She was delightfully unhappy, and I loved it because she could show all of her emotions. I was completely, maniacally, in love with her. I know that every high school has two girls who are in this kind of friendship, but it was never a concept in my head that we were “the lezzies.” In fact, I thought that was a term for someone who was weird or just didn’t fit in. I never realized it was a reference to a girl who was gay.

  Jane and I grew closer and closer. I had my music—I played all over the state on the weekends—and I had Jane. At the time, it seemed like enough. There were moments, though—moments that caused me to take a step back from the relationship and wonder about it. In my junior year, Jane and I went to a football game. I spent most of the night talking to another girl, who was a year older than me. Her name was Mary and she was beautiful, with dark skin, dark hair, and bewitching eyes. She was definitely my type. After the game, Jane and I walked to the parking lot and stood there for a minute. But then, out of nowhere, she turned around and slapped me. Just
like Jennifer in the bathroom. Whack! She was so mad. She screamed at me for spending the whole night talking to Mary. Her jealousy was so scary. But it was also attractive. After all, if she got that angry, then she must really like me. I came from a family where there was never this type of reaction—no show of emotion, no passion. Jane’s reaction was justified in my mind as caring. I soaked it up like a sponge that had never had this kind of passion before. So this is what it’s like: passion, obsession, fervor, and infatuation. From my past, the only thing I had to compare this to was my relationship with my sister. She had hit me a couple of times, and Jennifer could turn on a dime, just like Jane: nice one minute and plain mean the next. That’s all I knew about physical relationships with women. Jane was mirroring Jennifer’s behavior, so I guess I thought that this is what love was supposed to feel like. It just fit.

  Of course, you don’t have to be Freud to see where this was going. Step by step, it was clear that choosing women, especially women who were going to be unavailable to me, was going to become a habit of mine—one that would be extremely hard to break. Let’s face it, like Jo or Jane, part of the attraction was the forbidden nature of the whole thing. Attraction, for me, is very cerebral. It’s a mental game. If I like you and you like me, then I would never go out with you. It’s too easy, too predictable, too accessible. Ah, but if I like you and you reject me, like my mother or my sister did, then it is a familiar place for me. I’m trying to get from other people what they are simply not capable of giving to me. Wanting it. Needing it. Craving it. Obsessing over it. But never attaching the concept of ever receiving it.