Thread by @cmclymer

I turned 13 a few months prior to Train's "Drops of Jupiter" release as a single. My birthday dinner was okay. My father took me to a steak house to mark my "official entrance into manhood". It's okay. The steak was okay. The convo was okay. It's okay. Everything will be okay.

At this point, was it ten years of everything being okay? I hadn't really kept count. It wasn't something I monitored, or wanted to. It was just there: a gnawing feeling that something just wasn't right. With my body. With my soul. Something is missing. Or maybe should be.

I heard the song for the first time in the late summer of 2001, and it was instantly magical. I couldn't afford to buy CDs, and so, I waited for it to play on the radio or television, and I would listen with a lot of joy and a little sadness that I couldn't immediately replay it.

My stepmother bought me the CD that October for my birthday, and it might be well the most excited I've ever been about a gift.

It became a sickness. I have no idea what the other tracks are on the album. To this day, I haven't listened to them. Just the one song, third in sequence. Put in CD, two clicks over. Press play.

When I tell you this was the only song I played for months and months and months on my portable CD player, I mean this was literally the only song I played for the better part of a year. Again and again and again.

Fifteen times in a row. 20 times. 30. 40. Hours and hours of the same day passed listening to just this song. Non-stop. Just. One. Song.

Think of your favorite song in the world, and I'll bet few of you reading--if any--have willingly, eagerly, listened to the same damn song and just that one with a hunger that can't satiated, day after day, week after week, month after month.

I would go to class and need to listen to it. I needed to escape and listen. Bus ride to and from home, just one song. I remember crying one day when the batteries died. Have you cried over dead batteries? I did. Right there on the bus.

"That sounds incredibly unhealthy and a little frightening. Were you depressed? Suicidal?"
Yes, I was, but I'm not sure I was in a place to fully understand why I wanted to kill myself. Or if it was normal. I had learned through years of sexual and physical abuse to numb myself.

"But the song? What the hell?"

Teenagers wish for different things, and all these things are some sort of combination of empowerment and independence and popularity and peace and general happiness.

I wanted to be the woman in "Drops of Jupiter" so badly that the closest I could get is listening to Pat Monahan sing about her over and over. I dared not try to dress up like a woman in attempt to be her, lest I get beaten bloody, but I could live in that world. With my ears.

Volume all the way up. Again and again. Until my ears rang.

I wasn't sick because I'm transgender. I didn't know the word "transgender" at the time. I was sick because I couldn't be anywhere close to my true self, a woman, and I craved that so intensely that I became obsessed with the safest option: listening to this song and imagining.

Yeah, I get it: this is extremely weird + probably scary.

I had nothing else. I wanted to be a good kid w/ good grades who was loved and approved, and the thought of disappointing adults was anathema to me. I didn't ask questions. Didn't talk about this. Didn't seek out answers.

I had the song, and it was my song that made me feel like a woman, and that was good enough at the time. I still feel an instant rush of joy when I hear "Drops of Jupiter". It hasn't worn off, and I don't think it ever will. I am immune to that song being overplayed into my ears.

For me, a kid who had no visible trans role models and knew a boy wanting to be a girl is bad and wanted to please adults, "Drops of Jupiter" is a song about a transgender woman.

In reality, Monahan wrote it about his mother who passed away from cancer, and he has clearly stated this, and thus, it is 100% irrefutably about that and has nothing to do with being transgender. We know this. It is a fact.

But with the utmost respect to Monahan, for 13 year-old me, it was a lifeline, and for me now, out of the closet and living my true self, it will always be about a trans woman. Always. I could never listen to it and have it be otherwise.

When you lack visibility, when you feel alone, you grab unto things that keep you afloat. This song is mine. It kept me alive.

I don't expect anyone else to understand that or validate or accept it. It's still mine.

Today, Mark Saltzman, the gay writer who co-created Bert & Ernie, confirmed they are definitely not a gay couple as they do not have a sexual orientation.

It follows decades of debate over their sexuality: a 2011 petition to validate their gay relationship (rejected by PBS), a 2013 New Yorker cover depicting them as a gay couple to honor marriage equality, + millions of convos around the world speculating on their relationship.

They're not a gay couple, according to Saltzman. But as he's quoted in the New York Times today...

"The puppets, Mr. Saltzman said, are an example of love, meant to help preschoolers through the issues of their young lives... [...] A boy in foster care who is sharing a bedroom with another boy. And, yes, a preschooler learning what it means to have gay parents."

"It's like poetry. It's what you need it to be," he said.

It's like all art. In a way, it has the potential to become you in ways that you need it to be.

Bert & Ernie are not a gay couple. "Drops of Jupiter" is not a song about a trans woman.

We know this.

But if that's what it means to people so alone, so afraid, so beaten down, so awash in darkness, what does it take away from you that they adopt art in ways that sustain and heal them?

It costs you nothing. So, why charge them? /thread