Written by Mixie
When I was a teenager in the late 2000s, I was consumed by feminine rage. At the time, I was a gay boy not yet identifying as trans. It wasn’t until years later (after discovering drag) that I fully came to terms with my gender identity.
This was post-911 America, pre-Glee and pre-Transgender Tipping Point. Gay people were reluctantly welcomed into mainstream film and television roles as the stereotypical “gay best friend.” Young women like Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears were regularly harassed by paparazzi for tarnishing their Disney “good girl” public image by going to parties and having sex. The girls and gays were tremendously misunderstood with few to turn to. We were pissed off queer people with no outlet for our angst.
One day, while educating myself on musical history through elite VH1 programming, I stumbled upon a grunge band named Hole and their ferociously beautiful lead singer: Courtney Love. Blonde, brash, and bitchy, Courtney Love had a diva punk edginess that fascinated me. My furious gay heart fluttered with fiendish delight. I bought every single one of Hole’s albums the next day.
Like a vast majority of gay teens, I struggled with suicide attempts and self-harm because the world seemed to want queer people like me gone.
This year marks the 30th anniversary of Hole’s magnum opus Live Through This, an album which was released only days after Nirvana’s frontman Kurt Cobain — Love’s husband at the time — committed suicide. The album details Love’s experience with fame, motherhood, sexual violence, and the burdens of being a woman rock star in a “boy’s club.”
She named her band Hole after a line from Euripides’s Medea, a Greek tragedy of female rage and revenge. “There’s a hole that pierces right through me,” as she paraphrases it. Emptiness? Existential dread? Repressed rage? These are all feelings common to teenagers, especially gay teenagers. Like a vast majority of gay teens, I struggled with suicide attempts and self-harm because the world seemed to want queer people like me gone. Hearing a woman express her anger and vulnerability through art encouraged me to do the same. Live Through This pierced right through me. It gave me the strength to survive in a cisheterosexist world.
“I told you from the start just how this would end. When I get what I want, then I never want it again.” In Violet, the album’s opening song, Love adopts a hypersexual persona in reaction to her own objectification.
As a femme boy, who both yearned for and feared men, I resonated with these lyrics and wept along with them. Would I ever be the “girl with the most cake”? Would he break me?
“Asking For It,” a song about sexual abuse, was written after Love was sexually assaulted while stage diving. As she retells it “suddenly, it was like my dress was being torn off of me…people were putting their fingers inside of me and grabbing my breasts really hard.” Love was writing this during a time when riot grrrl bands like Bikini Kill were demanding to bring “girls to the front” of the stage to avoid violence and sexual assault within the male dominated punk scene. I strongly resonated with this as a teenager attending metal and punk shows, actively avoiding being sexually harassed by middle aged men.
“Doll Parts” expresses both a desire to be desired and the violence that ensues from that: “I want to be the girl with the most cake. He only loves those things because he loves to see them break.” As a femme boy, who both yearned for and feared men, I resonated with these lyrics and wept along with them. Would I ever be the “girl with the most cake”? Would he break me? Was it all worth it? Being feminine, after all, is so often assumed to mean being submissive, kneeling in servitude before a man. Love herself even adopted a more soft, feminine aesthetic for her band so that she wouldn’t be seen as a competitor to her male rock counterparts. “It’s bad that I have to do that to get my anger accepted,” she admitted.
Love’s honesty about her relationship to feminine beauty and her art awoke a feminist rage within me. Women are told to “be a model or just look like one,” as Love sings in “Asking for It,” while also being mothers, wives, and career women. It’s no wonder why her lyrics are so fraught with sexual aggression and poignant honesty. Trying to reclaim your own power while actively being suppressed and violated is a maddening experience, to say the least.
It was through Love’s music that I came to terms with my own queerness, embracing my femininity as rageful as it was soft and gentle.
The queen of grunge urged femmes to expose their anger to the rest of the world. “I want every girl in the world to pick up a guitar and start screaming,” she once famously said. Her music still inspires women and queer artists today. Miley Cyrus covered “Doll Parts,” back in 2020, Doja Cat covered “Celebrity Skin” in 2022, and Olivia Rodrigo’s music video “Obsessed” is an overt homage to “Miss World,” combining beauty pageant aesthetics with punky vocals.
Unsurprisingly, Love’s album is still so topical. Women in music continue to face sexual abuse, stalkers and misogynistic accusations of being “industry plants.” If Love’s music has taught me anything it’s that the fight for gender equality and queer liberation is far from over. Listening to this album again reminds me of how much more we have to live through. It was through Love’s music that I came to terms with my own queerness, embracing my femininity as rageful as it was soft and gentle. Through her art, I was inspired to become a performer. My drag name, Mx Underworld, is heavily inspired by the song “Miss World.” It’s my own genderqueer interpretation of the song, and eventually became part of my chosen name: Mixie. There are too many more examples of Love’s influence in my daily artistic life, so I’ll make this conclusion short and sweet. I don’t think I would have been the same person I am now were it not for Live Through This.
About the Author:
Mixie (Mx Underworld) is a nonbinary writer, drag performer, and PhD candidate at Northeastern University. Their work focuses on queer digital media and popular culture, and has been featured in HuffPost and elsewhere. Check out their socials and newsletter here.