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Max Olesker| Longreads | July 13, 2023 | 15 minutes (4,199 words)

When I walk into the room, it is the enormous minotaur head that first catches my eye—its vast gaping concrete mouth containing the grate of a fireplace, its wide eyes staring back at me. Above the minotaur, ancient Greek tragedians are painted on the wall—Euripides, Sophocles, Aeschylus. Surrounding the minotaur on one side is an array of handmade military paraphernalia: shields, tabards, helmets, and weapons. Dismembered human body parts sculpted from newspaper adorn the other, limbs, torsos, and heads all aimlessly scattered near the bay windows.

It’s a cold February morning, and I’ve come to Birkenhead, just outside Liverpool, to visit the former home of a man named Ron Gittins, a property affectionately known as Ron’s Place. Over the course of 33 years, Gittins painstakingly transformed almost every surface of this flat with a series of artworks in a variety of styles and mediums, from friezes on the walls of his living room to a Roman altar in his kitchen and enormous, ambitious fireplaces (yes, multiple). It’s a singlehanded labor of love. But, because Gittins was renting the flat—with no right to modify the property to this extent—it’s also illegal. As a result, the work was created almost entirely in secret. It was only after Gittins’death at age 79 that word gradually began to trickle out about the existence of this strange cave of wonders.

It was in Koh Samui, Thailand, that I encountered my first “outsider environment.” Away from the bustling hubbub of the beaches and tourist strips, partway up a mountain, in a secluded grove surrounded by waterfalls and greenery, lies the Secret Buddha garden. It’s full of large, intricate stone sculptures—angels, snakes, musicians, and Buddha figures—in a world sprung entirely from the imagination of a man named Nim Thongsuk. A retired durian fruit farmer, Thongsuk started his project at the age of 77, constructing a vast, complex environment that even included his own tomb. Exploring the garden, I became taken by this industrious, audacious expression of something deeply personal. 

“Outsider art,” “folk art,” and “art brut” are designations frequently applied to artists—often untrained—who work outside the classical tradition (and frequently the law). If the work is a large-scale installation, permanent or semi-permanent, it might be deemed an “outsider environment” or “visionary environment.” Outside Madrid, a former monk named Justo Gallego Martínez spent 60 years singlehandedly building his own cathedral, working on it daily until he passed away in 2021. In Westbourne Grove, London, retired postal porter and factory worker Gerry Dalton, an “Irishman and self-proclaimed gardener” according to his site’s Instagram bio, created a series of remarkable outdoor sculptures along the Grand Union Canal, in a collection he dubbed Gerry’s Pompeii. In South Africa’s Eastern Cape, Helen Martins, who lived from 1897 to 1976, created The Owl House, which features over 300 sculptures made from concrete and ground glass. And there are many, many more across the globe, each with its own infinitely rich backstory.

I am partly drawn to these works because of my parents. My mother trained in visual arts and works with community groups, teaching thousands of people her skills and techniques; whenever she sits somewhere for more than a few minutes, sketches and illustrations emerge. Every birthday card she’s ever given me has been a wondrous one-off—illustrated, painted, or screen-printed—and accompanied by a poem from my father, a writer, poet, and word-obsessive from whom I’ve inherited my own compulsions. Both my parents have amassed vast bodies of work, unseen by galleries or collectors. Perhaps they too are outsider artists. And perhaps, via her teaching, my mother has even inspired the work of other outsider artists as well. 

Upon entering Ron’s Place for the first time, I’m unprepared for the feeling of being subsumed by a man’s imagination. The flat is dusty, strange, and wonderful.  

The central corridor is painted floor-to-ceiling with ancient Egyptian iconography—profiles of Horus the falcon-headed god and Osiris, Lord of the Underworld, beneath life-size depictions of a Cleopatra-esque pharaoh and impressionistic signs and sigils. On the left is the Minotaur Room, its cavernous mouth the focal point. Next is the bathroom, entirely aquatic-themed, with manta rays, hammerhead sharks, and all manner of other painted sea life swimming across the walls. The Georgian Room is filled with portraits of naval figures and the first fireplace Gittins created (a comparatively low-key affair, with fish for feet). Across the hall is the Lion Room, which features trompe-l’oeil friezes, including an area of faux chipped stone and a cheekily smiling horse, which faces Gittins’s technical masterpiece: a vast lion fireplace, spectacularly and carefully rendered. 

Throughout the flat are half-finished sculptures of busty women, bags of papers, books, bric-a-brac, passable (from a distance) replicas of military uniforms; miscellaneous items gathered and hoarded for some future use. Whatever task Gittins’ magpie mind focused on, he seems to have worked on it feverishly and industriously. Many of the paintings are naive. The painting on the high ceiling of the Georgian Room is particularly crude—the makeshift ladder and extra-long extended paintbrush he used clearly not affording him the detail he might have wished for. But the fireplaces, particularly the lion, are astonishing. And the totality, the experience of it all, is what Ron’s Place is about. Not one painting, not the model of the weirdly muscly cherub, nor the vast pile of notes seemingly devised to help Gittins remember entire history books (“TAASB; The American Army Surrounds Boston” “HLOTB; Heavy Losses of the British”), but everything, all together—that’s what makes this special. Taken as a whole, it’s an endlessly fascinating space; a window into a man’s life, into his mind. Although the flat is cold and musty, it’s a dreamlike place where time slips away. The experience is all-encompassing and leaves me feeling disoriented. 

“It’s all quite powerful, isn’t it?” says Martin Wallace, as he shows me around the flat. Wallace, 55, is a warm, articulate Scouser and BAFTA-nominated filmmaker who frequently collaborates with Jarvis Cocker, the frontman of ’90s Britpop band Pulp. Together, they made a documentary series, Journeys Into the Outside, traveling the planet to investigate extraordinary places built by regular people. Wallace, who lives nearby, is now working on a feature-length documentary about Gittins, and in the process has become inexorably drawn into the orbit of Ron’s Place. Initially, this only involved helping cover the flat’s rent—as a trustee—after Gittins passed, and thinking of a long-term strategy to preserve the unique interior. But it’s rapidly become far more problematic. Ron’s Place is under threat: After months of stasis, the landlord and owner, Salisbury Management Services, has finally decided enough is enough. The building is to be sold at auction.

The front door flies open and Jan Williams and Chris Teasdale hurry in. They huddle with Wallace in the Egyptian corridor; urgent crisis talks begin. Jan Williams, 61, is Gittins’ niece. Together with her partner, Teasdale, 71, they work as artists under the name The Caravan Gallery. Along with Wallace, they have now dedicated themselves to preserving Gittins’ legacy. The current discussions, hushed and frantic, are about potential investors who might work with them—but they don’t sound promising. One man claiming to have the money also had quite a lot of snot on his jumper. The housing associations who expressed interest the previous summer have all gone quiet, the occasional sympathetic voice inevitably getting lost in the mundane realities of running a large business. In order to be eligible to apply for funding, the trio has created a legal entity, The Wirral Arts and Culture Community Land Trust. But, with time now of the essence, it’s not clear how that will save the property. 

At one point, we all stand together in the Georgian Room. “What would you do?” Williams asks me. It’s hard to answer. It’s also hard to countenance the environment I am standing in being destroyed. Could an art gallery step in? Could the council? Could the Lottery? 

“Couldn’t Paul McCartney just buy it?” says Williams, exasperated. 

Ronald Geoffrey Gittins was born in 1939, the middle child between two sisters, and grew up in a small terraced house that was later destroyed as part of Liverpool’s slum clearances. His father, James, a navy man, worked on the docks, and his mother, Alice, worked in service for a wealthy family. In their small, ramshackle yard, where his father kept ducks, there was an outside toilet. Here Gittins would sequester himself away, training his voice by reciting Shakespeare, frequently Richard III’s opening monologue:

“There were theories that he was on some sort of spectrum,” says Williams. “At school, teachers didn’t know how to handle him. He was obviously really bright—but he didn’t know how to fit in.” 

“He was known as your mad uncle Ronny,” Teasdale says gently. 

After school, his employment was patchy. In the 1960s, he trained as a Methodist minister at a theological college in Derbyshire. “He became a sort of freelance preacher,” says Williams, “causing havoc and being a pain in the ass!” For a while, he became a white goods inspector, where he was known for being overly officious and invariably siding with the management, rather than the employees.

While the interior of his flat was a closely-guarded secret, Gittins himself was a well-known flamboyant local figure. He wore bright handmade suits and wigs—sometimes more than one at a time. He would take his guitar to the local bank and serenade the staff. “It’s kind of what we might call eccentricities, in a euphemistic way,” says Wallace. “Mental health problems, looking at it another way, of course.” He was sectioned on a number of occasions, following bouts of erratic behavior, and later in life shared his belief that he was a spy, intercepting articles hidden in newspaper articles. “People sort of enjoyed what he’d do, but also othered him quite a lot,” says Wallace.

But he was also clearly extremely bright and capable, fascinated with the world, and generous with his time. Christopher Lee-Power, a Liverpool-based actor, met Gittins in a chance encounter on a college bus and credits him with launching his professional career. “Ron took me under his wing and began refining my voice while teaching me drama, life skills, and art,” says Lee-Power. “We visited several art galleries, where he shared his knowledge of the great artists, and he even encouraged me to read aloud from a book to boost my confidence. As the years passed, I honed my acting skills and voice under his tutelage.”

And as an artist, Gittins wasn’t totally untrained—he took an art foundation at the Laird College of Art and at one point set up a logo business called Minstrel Enterprises, naming the company after a Bible quote in which King Solomon summons a musician to play. 

What’s more, Ron’s Place wasn’t the first home in which Gittins expressed his art; he had transformed properties twice before. He did it in his parents’ rented home:
pictures of pompeii help put ron to sleep reads the headline on a mid-’70s article in The Liverpool Echo, alongside a photo of a 35-year-old mustachioed Gittins sitting in his childhood bedroom and gesturing proudly at the space he has transformed. Later, he secretly recreated the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling on the ceiling of his rented room. But it wasn’t until 1986 that he found his true muse—the little flat where he would live for the rest of his life—and begin his greatest creative endeavor.

In the days after I return to London, Williams, Teasdale, and Wallace continue to tirelessly publicize their cause. A GoFundMe is set up, and donations trickle in. The public is enthusiastic, but the pledges are generally on the order of £10 and £20, and their target—£350,000—seems futile. 

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The precarity associated with Ron’s Place is not uncommon when it comes to outsider environments, which are often created without any long-term planning. This has led to some mixed legacies. After Justo Gallego Martínez’s death, Spanish officials deemed his junk cathedral unsanitary and refused to honor his wish of being buried in the crypt; the cathedral itself faced the prospect of demolition before eventually being preserved by a charity. Gerry’s Pompeii, though “saved” after a mass crowdfunding push, had a number of its artifacts removed by a relative, only surviving in a diminished, depleted form. But Helen Martins’ Owl House was declared a “provisional National Monument” in 1989, keeping her glass (and concrete) menagerie safe.

Discussions around the fate of these environments invariably prompt questions. What is art? What is valuable? But part of the joy and power of environments like these is that they are generally, almost obstinately, uncommodifiable. In this, they feel like the polar opposite of NFTs—they are not joyless, arid things, designed solely for the marketplace; they are not scalable. Instead, they speak to something inner. This is My World reads the sign that Helen Martins placed on the grounds of Owl House. “I will not be ignored” was Ron Gittins’ passionate mantra, often repeated to his brother-in-law Henry. 

But the defiantly impractical nature of visionary environments certainly doesn’t make them any easier to preserve or protect. “If Ron had made prints or T-shirts, everyone would want one,” says Wallace. “But what do you do with a minotaur fireplace?”

What do you do with a minotaur fireplace?

As the auction to sell the flat approaches, the atmosphere in Gittin’s camp oscillates between panicky, resigned, and frustrated. Appeals to the press are made: Articles appear in The Guardian and local papers; Williams speaks on BBC Radio 4.

Serious buyers begin to emerge but with no plans to preserve the unique ground floor space. Sensing a bargain, a builder draws up plans to gut the building and remodel it as a home for his family. The unthinkable—the destruction of Ron’s Place—now seems the most likely outcome.

In a last-ditch effort to keep bidders at bay, the team submits a listing to Historic England, infuriating the landlord and property manager. “The owners were absolutely furious, and said we’d stabbed them in the back after everything they’d done,” says Williams, “Which is a bit luxurious because we’d been paying the rent and we kept our side of the bargain.”

In life, Gittin’s relationship with his landlords was equally contentious. “He didn’t have water for many years because of a dispute,” says Wallace. “Originally his rent included water. Then the landlord was bought out by another landlord, and the second landlord said, ‘I’m not paying your fucking water rates.’ And Ron said, ‘Oh, yes, you are. And let’s go to court about it because it’s in my contract.’ Eventually, it was found against Ron—but he disputed that. So he’d walk miles for a standing tap.” 

With his penchant for high-handed letter writing, Gittins escalated things to the inevitable level. “Dear Mr. Gittins,” reads a letter dated January 16, 1996, “Thank you for your recent letter to the Prime Minister about your liability for paying water charges to North West Water. Your letter has been passed to his Department for reply.” When Gittins eventually did get water access, he would leave his water on constantly. “I don’t know whether he was trying to retrospectively get his money’s worth,” says Wallace, “or whether it was just so cold that he didn’t want the taps to freeze.”

The Gittins of my imagination reminds me a little of Johnny Rooster Byron, the central figure in Jez Butterworth’s play Jerusalem. A local drug dealer, retired stuntman, and teller of tall tales, Byron is a self-created creature of fantasy. He is set against his nemesis, the local council—a bureaucratic, clipboard-toting symbol of mundanity. He’s a romantic, creating art from the mythic history that surrounds him and the detritus of his life. Byron is a deeply flawed figure, but his impassioned fist-waving at authority has a certain power to it, a certain magic. He rails against the quotidian bean counters until the last, but you feel the walls closing in, and sense his world can’t last forever.

Yet, bizarrely, despite his outsider status, Gittins wasn’t just anti-authority; he clearly identified with the establishment. His journey through life was shaped by a testy, complicated relationship with the powers that be: part fascination, part frustration. An ardent monarchist and an enthusiastic Thatcherite, in 1973 he even ran unsuccessfully for Conservative councilor in Bevington. He became almost a tribute to authority, from his preoccupation with spycraft and military history to dabbling with organized religion and his prodigious, litigious, letter-writing. (He tended to begin his letters with the words “Without prejudice,” a phrase Williams feels reflects his positive outlook on the world, but Wallace suspects to be more a highfalutin means of being able to sound off with impunity.) 

And, though Gittins created all of his work outside of institutions, that wasn’t entirely by choice: In 1998 he submitted a piece of work to the Royal Academy. When I visit the flat, I see the piece—a bust of Alexander the Great, created in newspaper and glue. It wasn’t accepted. But he never seemed fazed by rejection, Williams explaining that he’d invariably see it as their loss, shrug, and continue work on his latest project. Perhaps he didn’t require the approval of the establishment because, in his own flat, he was the establishment. Gittins had created a visionary environment: A place where he rubbed shoulders with kings and commanders and beautiful women, where he dressed in the smartest of uniforms and corresponded with the highest offices in the land, and they with him.

In February, a final burst of creativity sets in at the flat. Local music students come to play there and Wallace films them. Andy McCluskey, the lead singer of the band Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, drops by. Paul Griffiths, the Birkenhead Poet, performs spoken word. But it’s a last hurrah; at 4.30 p.m. on February 28, the day before the auction, their license runs out. The keys to Ron’s Place are handed back. 

The next morning, however, Williams receives an email: “Just heard [the flat] is up for auction today. I would like to loan you the money needed.”

Tamsin Wimhurst is a 57-year-old history and heritage professional from Cambridge with a passion for rescuing unusual properties. In 2014, she and her husband, Mike, became the saviors of David Parr House, a Cambridge terraced house filled with beautifully preserved, intricately patterned interiors from the Arts & Crafts movement. Wimhurst was sat at breakfast flicking through a day-old Guardian when she read about Ron’s Place being put up for auction later that day. She sprang into action. “I rang my husband who was away to say we had to save this place, and made contact with Ron’s Place whilst also trying to catch a train to London,” says Wimhurst, “but I had to act quickly, as the auction was at midday.” 

The morning of the auction becomes a whirlwind. Gittins’ camp had the assurance of funds from Wimhurst, but, with mere hours to the auction, no actual money had changed hands. The Wirral Arts and Culture Community Land Trust they’d set up doesn’t even have a bank account yet. With the clock ticking, Martin Wallace takes a giant plunge. He offers to use his own credit card to secure the deposit. 

“It was all, you know, completely risky,” says Williams. “We were all in our van driving over to Ron’s, and Martin was saying ‘Should I? I’m gonna do it now. Are you okay with that?’” 

He places the bid.

Gittins seemingly never stopped having grand plans. When his parents needed a wall outside their house, he volunteered, promptly beginning a hugely ambitious Roman wall, the construction of which rendered the garden completely unusable for 12 months. Towards the end of his mother’s life, Gittins would wheel her out of her nursing home and take her to spend the night in his flat. His siblings were horrified, but Gittins didn’t seem to care—and, by all accounts, Alice seemed delighted. But it was worrying, wearying behavior.  

His family became frustrated. His sister Pat was able to retain an affection for her brother, but Pat’s husband, Henry, eventually washed his hands of Ron—and still can’t bring himself to talk about him. “Henry hasn’t got any interest—very little interest,” says Pat. “He [Ron] really had a detrimental effect on our family life, many times.”

The last time Pat saw Ron, there was none of the fire and brimstone of his more combative moments. They shared an avocado sandwich, and Ron ate a kiwi fruit. “We just chatted generally about different things,” says Pat, “nothing of any great significance. Before he left, he said, ’Can I say a little prayer with you?’ I said ‘fine.’ And he sounded quite reasonable and rational.”

But years of living in an unheated flat eventually took their toll: Gittins became ill. A local friend tried to put him in contact with social services and Age Concern, but Ron played down his illness and pretended he could look after himself, only allowing a head teacher from a local school to check in on him and deliver essentials. By this point, he had begun sleeping on the floor behind his front door, as though guarding the flat. It was here, on September 2, 2019, that Ron Gittins’ body was found—and the fight for the legacy of his extraordinary home began.

As the auction plays out, the atmosphere in the van is unbearably tense. But there is only one counteroffer—likely the landlord attempting to boost the bidding price—otherwise, the team’s listing of the property with Historic England works in warding off other bidders. At 12.40 p.m., a notification pings up on Williams’ phone. Their bid has won. 

Euphoric, they pull up to Ron’s Place. Outside, sitting in his car, is the property manager who had recently berated them for the Historic England registration. They knock on his window; when he rolls it down to tell them that the house has been sold, they say “We know—we’ve just bought it!” The issue was always knowing what to do with a space that wilfully ignored the rules of the world, and instead, chaotically, gleefully, created its own. The property management company was never some vindictive captain of industry; it just hadn’t signed up for a Roman altar to be created in one of its buildings. The bland, indifferent machinery of business was simply seeking to tame something strange and wild—to turn it into another cell on a spreadsheet. Or, as Williams put it: “The notion of a developer gutting the amazing art environment created by Ron Gittins over 33 years is like deciding to gut a pyramid to create a new branch of Primark.”

Tamsin Wimhurst proved to be true to her word, providing funds from the Muller-Wimhurst Trust to ensure the ongoing survival of Ron’s Place (and Wallace’s credit rating). The home had found a benefactor who sees value in the chaos. “It is unique and quirky, with the passion of one man’s life laid bare on the walls of his home. It immediately gets your mind whirring—how, why, who, what, when?” says Wimhurst. “I just thought, ‘How could it not be saved?’”

Jarvis Cocker succinctly summed up Ron’s Place in his statement to the press: “With environments like these, you get a complete work of art that somebody is living in and that they’ve established the rules. It’s like a personal universe.” Adding, with beautiful understatement, “Everybody decorates their house in some way, Ron has just gone that extra mile.”

On March 29, the day after the sale finally goes through, I speak to Williams. She is elated: “Miracles do happen!”

There’s more work to be done. Having fought tooth and nail to preserve the dilapidated house that contains Ron’s Place, Williams, Teasdale, and Wallace are now faced with the challenge of what to do with it. 

Further fundraising is beginning, with the aim of renovating the property and making it safe to welcome the public. But there’s now the sense of being at the start of a new chapter, rather than the closing of an old one. 

“Ron’s Place will thrive as it has a group of passionate people behind it who have worked so hard to conserve it,” says Wimhurst. “I don’t mind what it becomes—that is for Ron’s Place to decide—but I know that the community, wellbeing, and creativity for all will be at the heart of it.” 

“We want to make the house really beautiful, just make it a really fantastic place,” says Williams. Their Community Land Trust now has ambitions beyond Ron’s Place, too—to take on other old buildings and transform them into creative spaces. 

I ask Williams what Gittins would have thought of the drama surrounding his old flat.“Oh, he’d have been absolutely over the moon,” she says. “He always said, ‘I will not be ignored.’ So it’s like he’s getting all the attention you could ever have wished for, even after he’s gone.”

And so, against the odds, the minotaur continues to roar. Ron’s Place—with all its grandiosity, impossible aspirations, outsized ambition, surprising accomplishments, exasperating complications, contradictions, and surprises—lives on. And so does Ron.

Ron’s place is being renovated before a grand reopening. In the meantime, you can tour Ron’s place online or find more information here.

Max Olesker is a London-based writer-performer, comedian, and Associate Editor at Esquire Magazine UK. His feature writing has also appeared in The Observer, Times, Telegraph, and Esquire’s many international editions, and he is the co-creator of the ITV sitcom Deep Heat. His radio sitcom, The Casebook of Max & Ivan, is available on BBC Sounds.

Editor: Carolyn Wells
Fact-checker: Julie Schwietert Collazo
Copy editor: Peter Rubin

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Sorayya Khan is a Pakistani-Dutch writer. Her new book, We Take Our Cities with Us, is a multicultural memoir of grief and the immigrant experience that illuminates the complexities of identity and inheritance in a global world. It will be published on November 7th, 2022 by Ohio State Press / Mad Creek Books. Her 2017 Longreads essay, “Raising Brown Boys in Post-9/11 America” was adapted for the book. We spoke with Sorayya about what it means to live “in between” cultures and how those experiences shaped her as she mothered her own sons, years later.

* * *

In the opening of the book, you describe the light and dark skin your mother and father had respectively and you note that “I am in between.” Can you tell us more about what it means and what it has meant to you to be “in between”?

My father used to tell my siblings and me that being half Pakistani and half Dutch meant that we had the best of both worlds. My parents were a product of the heady post-World War II moment that shaped them, which made possible a marriage that combined such different worlds, one in Lahore, the other in Amsterdam. It has taken my parents’ passing for that moment to come into focus for me — to see the risks and fullness with which they lived their lives, a belief in the future and themselves that is hard to comprehend in our current moment. I can’t be sure what my father had in mind, but as a child, I used to think of his “best of both worlds” mantra as a place which, if I could ever find it, is where I’d belong.

There have been times in my life when being in-between meant not fitting in smoothly or entirely or at all. Most were when I was younger, coming to the US for college at seventeen, for example. Those feelings were tied to a time in my life when I longed to fit in seamlessly somewhere, to be fully one thing or another, to be rooted. In college and graduate school, where I studied political science and international studies, I discovered the reach of history and our interconnectedness, and I began to think of being in-between as coming from multiple places with a shared global history.

Writing rooted me. Drawing on different worlds and gathering them in a single place — on the page — helped me make peace with my in-betweenness. In fact, my mixed background (and all those cities!) gave me my subject matter. As a writer, I explore the interconnectedness of our world, how place and history shape us. My novels and memoir reflect on what it means to belong, whether neighbors in post-Partition Lahore, a soldier returning home from war, a young girl coming of age, or parents who’ve raised children far from their homes. While writing has been a home for me, having a family, too, changed everything. With my husband and children, I’m at home, I belong.

Your mother — someone who was Dutch and light skinned, was considered an outsider. What does it mean to be mothered by someone who is an outsider?

I suppose there are many ways to be an outsider. For some, there’s an urgency to rid yourself of the reality by assimilating as quickly as possible, a frequent immigrant response to enormous social pressures faced in making a new home. That was not the case for my mother. There was a time in our first year after we moved from Austria to Pakistan that I recall her completely out of place, but not imagining the same of myself or my siblings, as if we had escaped what she could not. But my mother was a person of conviction and, as I say in a scene in the memoir where my aunt teaches her how to buy meat at the market, She did not look away and she did not pretend. In some ways, her outspokenness made her an outsider wherever she lived.

My mother made a home for us in two countries that were not hers, Austria and Pakistan. In both places, although especially in Islamabad, my mother subsumed her life to the one she was building with my father. Doing so relegated her heritage to the background which, perhaps, she didn’t mind as much as you’d think– for reasons I discovered while writing the memoir. Even so, raising children is filled with all sorts of compromises, and when cultural and national identities are at stake, parents make decisions about balancing them (or not) in the process. My mother was an example of how to make a home and raise a family far from your own. She taught us to navigate multiple worlds — home, school, country — and that although the process was challenging and complex, it was possible.

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My mother was a voracious reader and her hunger for books meant we shared recommendations and discussed recent reads. I’d already been a writer for many years when my mother passed away, but during her illness, when I’d begun for the first time to think about writing memoir, I was struck by her need to read, as if her hunger for worlds extended to the realm of books — in all genres. I wonder now if the ways in which she navigated belonging led me to books and writing. Regardless, she passed along her love of stories to my siblings and me, and when she died, we divided up her books between us, loath to give up even one. Now I have her copy of Agha Shahid Ali’s The Half-Inch Himalayas, not just the photocopy that she made for me decades ago when the book was difficult to find in Islamabad.

Above all, the experience of being raised by an outsider gave us the gift of locating ourselves in the world. My mother was forever interested in the world around her, turning on the news first thing in the morning and last thing at night, as if knowing what was happening around us all kept her grounded. She passed on this way of being, as if she knew that our home was the entire world.

In some ways America will always treat you as an outsider, simply because you have roots in Pakistan. I read that prolifically throughout the first section of the book, with the awkwardness at the bus stop, the anecdote about Nick, the questions you fielded about life in Pakistan. Sometimes you’re treated as an outsider, even though you are not an outsider. How do those experiences of being treated like an outsider when you were younger affect how you mothered your sons later in life?

They gave me a certain (unwelcome) familiarity with some of the challenges my sons faced as school children, and made me sympathetic to their travails, although even then I was sometimes slow to understand what they faced. But my own experiences also kept me off balance, making me question my sense of belonging and my status in this country. I worried about what repercussions we might face. Every so often, in the midst of my sons’ difficulties, I had a sneaking, secret suspicion that ignoring what was happening might be the better response, which doesn’t make me proud. Defending our children drew attention to us and, lacking my mother’s courage, I would have rather not been in the spotlight. But between my husband being a political scientist (not to mention his own international background) and my parents’ emphasis on the larger world, it was natural to encourage our children to think about their context in it and, also, to think about the forces that produced the harm they were experiencing.

Your two sons are adults now. How has growing up in a post-9/11 America shaped them? How has it shaped your family? How has it shaped you?

My children’s complex selves are a result of their post-9/11 lives. They were introduced to racism as children and learned early to think about the social and political conditions that perpetuate injustice, both in the US and abroad. One of our goals as parents raising our children far from our own families and where we grew up, was to impress upon our children that the world we are a part of is much larger than our New York college town. While our children might have had that sense without their childhood experiences, I think the aftermath of 9/11 drove home the point.

It’s hard to say how it shaped our family because I don’t know what our family might have looked like if we hadn’t shared those experiences. It gave our children a greater appreciation for their father’s lifetime work of thinking about the larger structures that produce the behavior that clouded our lives. Ironically, we understood that our situation was comparatively mild with respect to the violence that was unleashed elsewhere, here and abroad, and appreciated that luck. Certainly, there was a sense of us all being in that moment together, and that sharing it as a unit would help us get to the other side.

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The events around 9/11 confirmed that I was an outsider in this country, a sense that was re-confirmed with the Trump years when Muslim bans were put in place, hate speech proliferated, and the US became even less tolerant of its minorities, which is where it remains today. But I don’t believe 9/11 shaped me. The event and the retribution, both at home and the wars abroad, were shocking, but not unexpected. As open as this country presents itself as being, it has a history of turning against its citizens, and whether domestically or internationally, it does not value human beings equally. But as a parent, it’s always difficult to watch your children go through tough times, and there were many confusing and sleepless nights for us all. That constant worry, shared by so many of us, of how our children might fare in interactions with authorities, whether school administrators, police, or immigration officers, is the background hum of parenting and I imagine it would be less insistent had history unfolded differently.

***

Sorayya Khan is the author of We Take Our Cities with Us: A Memoir, and the novels, Noor, Five Queen’s Road, and City of Spies which received the Best International Fiction Book Award, Sharjah International Book Fair, 2015. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram @SorayyaKhan

Last weekend, a friend forwarded me a video. I clicked on the link nonchalantly, expecting a joyful puppy or perhaps a triumphant head of lettuce. But as the clip played, I sat up straighter, a coldness creeping over my heart. It started innocently enough, with a woman browsing in a store, but something catches her eye, and the chilling wall is revealed: A wall of ’90s Halloween costumes. 

For $5, you can wrap a velvet choker around your neck, adorn your hair with butterfly clips, and clasp a fake Nokia 3310 to your ear. Ten dollars gets you a black slip dress, the kind I remember proudly pairing with purple Doc Martens for a Red Hot Chili Peppers concert back in ’96. The bomber jacket was a particular twist of the knife — at age 13, owning a bomber was my raison d’être, and I harassed my mum into buying me a particularly hideous sky-blue version I wore diligently for the rest of the summer, no matter if it rained or shined. (It really didn’t matter: puffed cloth proved equally ineffective against wet or cold.) 

If I’d felt old when my local club changed ’80s Night to ’90s Night — presumably deciding those nostalgic for eighties classics should now be in bed by nine with a cup of cocoa — the Halloween wall made me feel like I’d picked the wrong chalice. Not only had my teenage outfits morphed into vintage costumes, but they’d done so just as I was swaddling myself in a cocoon of nostalgia, blissfully unaware of just how historical it was. 

I had come across Buffy the Vampire Slayer on Disney+, and dipped in for a quick reunion. I was now on season four and in deep, reveling in all those knitted jumpers and chunky, chunky shoes. My teenage self would have been agog — whole seasons on tap was surely witchcraft only Willow could pull off. When Buffy first wielded a stake and a pun, back in 1997, I was lucky to even see a complete episode. Buffy aired on a Friday night. Since I was spending that timeslot getting rejected from bars, I would set up a video cassette to record it (you know the sort, you can buy a replica from your local Halloween store). Repeatedly instructing my parents to press record at eight, I was lucky to see half a show, with mum inevitably only remembering her mission by eight-thirty. 

Comic-loving, nerdy Xander used to be my favorite character. But clearly, I had overlooked his more misogynistic traits. During the rewatch, I noticed that, despite having minimal powers compared to his badass female friends, he oozes sexual entitlement. Not only does he constantly make suggestive comments to Buffy, but he’s prone to quips like, “Just meet me at Willow’s house in half an hour and wear something trashy…er.” The creator of Buffy, Joss Whedon, has admitted Xander is based on himself, so it is of little wonder that, years later, some of the Buffy actors went public with the toxic work environment Whedon created. 

Sadly, no one called Whedon out at the time, and perhaps it’s misleading to say I missed Xander’s misogyny. It would be more accurate to admit that I accepted it. After all, in ’90s England, that sort of behavior would have been labeled as “banter” and ignored — laughed at even. It was an age in which shows such as TFI Friday had a “Freak or Unique” and “Ugly Bloke” spot, and FHM could project an image of Gail Porter’s behind onto the Houses of Parliament (without her permission, as a joke). The ladette was queen, and the king was a Bantersaurus Rex. Taking anything too seriously was deeply uncool. The Xander/Whedon-style snark was the tone of the decade. 

So maybe I was too quick to complain that the ’90s — butterfly clips, sexism, and all — had been unfairly relegated to the realm of Halloween costumes. Before mourning my youth too deeply, I needed to spend more time considering this decade beyond the scrunchies and acid-washed jeans. I had rewatched Buffy; now, it was time to reread Rebecca Schuman’s thoughtful 2018 Longreads series, The ’90s Are Old. Schuman is a wise guide, one that could help me unpack the confusing cultural legacy of this decade, and decide if it really was time to let go. 

You’ve Reached the Winter of Our Discontent 

The first installment of Schuman’s series looks at the “mopey, tortured Gen X man-child who embodied … cool.” Her analysis takes the form of an experiment: she shows the film Reality Bites to several people born the year it came out (1994). Her focus group is not impressed with “cool, loser dream boy” Troy Dryer, clearly lacking the perspective to understand that “in the nineties, every sincere emotion had to be conveyed through at least six layers of hair grease and spite.” Reading this, long-dormant teenage angst determinedly bubbled to the surface. It had been a confusing time; the rotation of boys on my pedestal ranged from Troy Dryer types to Prince Eric from The Little Mermaid. (Both of whom thought speaking for a woman was the height of romance.) It’s a tricky enterprise to examine older pop culture under the light of today’s values, but Schuman handles it here with aplomb and humor. But be warned: Your teenage crushes may come crashing down.

The other crucial facet of nineties emotional intelligence, such as it was, was that while caring about things was not cool, caring about people was, so long as you displayed your care for them by being as damaged as possible and then letting them know that your damaged self had, out of all the other damaged selves in the world, chosen them. Hence, how, in Reality Bites, Troy gets to say this:

I’m sorry Lelaina, but you can’t navigate me. I might do mean things and I might hurt you and I might run away without your permission and you might hate me forever, and I know that that scares the shit out of you because I’m the only real thing that you have.

It’s Like This and Like That and Like What?

In this essay, Schuman explores the “white-liberal narrative” of ’90s hip hop. As she explains, in 1990, just one hip-hop single made it to the top spot on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100: the squeaky clean (vanilla if you will, with my apologies) “Ice Ice Baby.” By 1999, Schuman states, “what had heretofore been called “hardcore” hip hop was so ubiquitous in ‘mainstream’ (read: white) culture that its ubiquity became a bit in Mike Judge’s 1999 cult classic Office Space.” She renders a fascinating look at this progression — which, as a bonus, led me to quietly sing Snoop Dogg’s “Who Am I?” to myself while reading. 

Biatch — its offensiveness, its ascendance in the (white) mainstream — is indeed something of a microcosm of why Doggystyle was as scandalous as it was wildly popular. In the ’90s as now, all humorless old people knew that the best way to impede an album’s popularity was to be very offended by it (ha) — and, as such, ’90s hip hop was also largely defined by the older generations’ aversion. If you were an American over the age of 45 in 1994, there was no question that you loathed “the gangster rap.” The only question was how you hated it, and that defined your place in the cultural milieu.

When The Real World Gave Up on Reality

I have to admit I have never watched The Real World, but I have wasted countless hours on the genre it spawned. In 1992, things were different, and as Schuman writes, “the very thought of someone going on television for no other reason than to live in an apartment with a bunch of randos was extremely novel.” Producers had not yet come to the realization that “trauma equals drama.” It didn’t take long for the penny to drop. Schuman deftly explains how The Real World “went from a sanitized, but largely sincere documentary of young adulthood in the ’90s, into a grotesque spectacle of young-adult pain” — a model followed to this day.

Even with a stilted flirtation between be-girlfriended Neil and fencer Kat Ogden thrown in, the London flatmates simply refused to devolve into dramatic bickering for the cameras, instead often seeming to temper their behavior instead. Their very presence in the dungeonesque Notting Hill flat was so weighed down by decade-appropriate irony that all anyone did was, well, nothing — which, being the Nineties’ most important activity, made the London season the realest of all Real Worlds. Not even doofus St. Louisan race-car driver Mike Johnson and his Quixotic search for ranch dressing could provide enough clash to cramp the London season’s style.

Bridget Jones’s Staggeringly Outdated Diary

In one of my favorite essays from the series, Schuman takes on ’90s chick-lit and “dick-lit,” looking at two classics of the age: Bridget Jones’ Diary and High Fidelity. I devoured both books at the time, so it was a little disconcerting to look back at them with a more critical eye. However, willing Bridget on as she attempts to navigate “the Rules” and secure a man — while getting skinny to boot — does now seem a little dubious. Schuman does not mince her words: “these books — despite their cool Gen-X setting, cool Gen-X props (cigarettes), and cool Gen-X openness about failure — are some inveterate Baby Boomer bullshit.” However, Schuman also read them back during their original heyday, so some residual fondness for Bridget and High Fidelity’s Rob Fleming creeps in. It’s a fun read.

Yes, it is all bollocks, Rob. It really, really is. Rob’s full of it — and Marie knows it, but, being a mature ‘90s American woman, doesn’t care, and is only looking for a one-night stand herself. High Fidelity ends in a similarly bollocks fashion, with Laura and Rob getting back together even though he still doesn’t begin to deserve her. Here’s where my Sick-Boy-from-Trainspotting unifying theory of life comes in: The success of High Fidelity, just like the success of Bridget Jones, The Rules, and Men Are From Mars, is the eternal return of the same imaginary ‘50s, idealized boy-gets-girl-back wish-fulfillment bullshit that took over Gen-X popular culture, probably because we were too lazy, or unambitious, or angst-ridden, or whatever, to fight it off.

The Gilded Age of (Unpaid) Internet Writing 

Sometimes I forget that the internet wasn’t always a thing, with my excitement at Dad bringing back a second-hand computer from the university where he worked now only a vague memory. It was the size of a small car. But it was a computer! In our home! In the ’90s, that was a big deal, as Schuman points out: “In 1996 there were only 100,000 websites in the Whole Wide World. (Today there are almost two billion.)” In this homage to early webzines, Schuman takes you right back to the days of listening to “CHHHHHHHHHH BEEboo BEEboo BEEboo.” Discussing the early predecessors to the platform you are on right now, she finds that they were “the absolute perfect venue for talking shit.” Many writers found their voice in the wild west of the early internet, including Schuman herself, and this is a fittingly snarky account of those pioneer days. 

There is plenty from the late-’90s webzine era that I am grateful is now extinct, gunmetal cargo skirts and unchecked uses of the word “twat” among them. (Sorry I called you a twat in 1999, Wendy Shalit.) But I agree with Havrilesky in wishing that someone, somewhere would still bankroll “seriously freaky, opinionated, bizarre, illustrated, odd material with no timely angle or link to some fucking movie or book or product. I’m part of the problem,” she says, given that this very interview coincides with the upcoming release of her book. “But I’d love to see the Sucks and Gawkers and Grantlands and Awls of the world find a nice tolerant Sugar Daddy who keeps them alive eternally. It’s not like it’s that expensive to pay a handful of great writers to write great stuff. Popularity should not be the only metric we use to measure value.”

Blowing Up in the ’90s

In the final piece of the series, Schuman asks when the decade actually finished. Dabbling with a listicle, she muses on which precise date deserves the title “end of the era.” The winner? June 6, 1998. For Schuman, the “dishonor” lies firmly at the feet of Sarah Jessica Parker. The 1998 premiere of Sex and the City brought with it a new age: “Unlike the cool of the ‘90s, which depended upon the rejection of anything commercial and popular, you could purchase [SATC’s] cool at Barney’s and the Patricia Field store on West Broadway.” 

This felt fitting. Sarah Michelle Gellar’s Buffy drew me back into the ’90s, and another Sarah ended it all. But I still don’t think I’m quite ready to don that Halloween costume.

The actual termination point of the ’90s required an attitudinal shift that would decentralize the role of Generation X as the admittedly-petulant target of all culture and advertising — the thawing of the winter of the bong-ripping couch-slacker’s discontent; the disappearance of gin and juice from house-party bars; the centering of the hot tub on The Real World; the sobering realization that both men and women were from Earth and just sucked; the demise, for that matter, of Suck itself.

Editor: Peter Rubin

Copy Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

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By Joshua N. Miller

In 2019, Marvel Comics was getting ready to celebrate its 80th anniversary. It had begun as Timely Comics, and quickly came to dominate the landscape with superheroes like the Human Torch and Namor the Submariner; now, for a special graphic-novel collection, the publisher invited superstar writer Art Spiegelman to write an introduction reflecting on Marvel’s legacy. There was just one issue: They asked him to compromise his own legacy to do so.

Spiegelman is best known for his independent graphic novel Maus, which retold his father’s experience surviving the Holocaust. Yet, when he compared then-president Donald Trump to the Red Skull, the fascist supervillain leader of a Nazi organization known as Hydra, Marvel balked. Demanding that a Jewish writer revise his material for the sake of remaining apolitical felt particularly disingenuous, given that Captain America made his 1941 debut punching Hitler in the face on the cover of his first issue. Over the years, Marvel writers had used superheroes to explore myriad political and social issues — sometimes explicitly, sometimes by merely existing. The success of 2018’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, and the Spidersona trend that followed it, attests to the positive impact diverse representation can have on audiences.

Superhero comics aren’t only political, but they’ve nearly always been political. Since Superman’s debut first made the genre mainstream, superheroes and their stories have advocated for social justice. And while some writers (and the corporations that employ them) may have lost sight of this reality, the communities these heroes represent can see when the forces that be abdicate the responsibility the heroes gladly shoulder. The essays collected below explore how superhero comics capture the lived experiences of marginalized communities — as well as how some comics have only served to stigmatize them.

Golden Age Superheroes Were Shaped By the Rise of Fascism (Art Spiegelman, The Guardian, August 2019)

In recalling the origins of the superhero genre, Spiegelman stresses that the immaturity often ascribed to comic books was as prevalent in the 1930s as it is in the present. If there’s any notable difference, it likely lies in the fact that publishers themselves were aware of this and consequently chose not to prioritize making the high-quality products we see today. (“Just give them a lot of action and don’t use too many words,” publisher Martin Goodman once told Stan Lee.) Though Superman’s debut shifted the medium by introducing an archetype that captured the hearts (and dimes) of millions of readers, the sentiment that comic books were for immature audiences endured. But the adventures of these heroes and the lives of the creators who made them tell a different tale.

Bold as it was to introduce Captain America by having him punch Hitler on the cover of his first issue in 1941, the impact of his debut is better appreciated if you understand how tolerant the U.S. was toward Nazi sympathizers until the country properly entered World War II. Just two years prior to Cap’s debut, thousands of members of the German American Bund rallied in New York to express their approval of Hitler’s antisemitic sentiments. The sales of superhero comics began to dwindle after the war, which not only suggests that consumers were aware of their political nature, but implies that publishers were willing to exploit those politics for profit.

The pioneers behind this embryonic medium based in New York were predominantly Jewish and from ethnic minority backgrounds. It wasn’t just Siegel and Shuster, but a whole generation of recent immigrants and their children – those most vulnerable to the ravages of the great depression – who were especially attuned to the rise of virulent antisemitism in Germany. They created the American Übermenschen who fought for a nation that would at least nominally welcome “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

Superman is Jewish: The Hebrew Roots of America’s Greatest Superhero (Rich Goldstein, The Daily Beast, July 2017)

Straight to the point, Goldstein opens his essay by making an important observation: Superman owes his stranger-in-a-strange-land origin to the Jewish heritage of his creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. But his roots are often overshadowed by his association with American culture. Contemporary comics frequently depict Superman with American iconography, even though he’s repeatedly acted as a hero for Earth and beyond. So it’s not surprising to think that readers would try to compare him to Jesus Christ, given the important role that Christianity plays within traditional American values. Yet, hyper-fixating on Clark’s Christlike attributes serves to obfuscate the superhero’s Jewish origins.

Here was a being who had immigrated to a land that supposedly offered the prospects of a better life, and changed his name (Kal-El to Clark Kent) to do so  — just as some Jewish families who immigrated to the U.S. changed their names to avoid prejudice. Goldstein posits that the antisemitic sentiments of the time would have gotten Superman’s comic cancelled before it even began, and invites the reader to question how warmly the character would have been received if his Jewish influences were more explicit. More importantly, however, his article affirms the fact that the creation of Superman — and the rise of the superhero genre — should be credited to the imaginations of Jewish creators who produced a hero that stood against the oppression they faced.

Superman is as American as apple pie, in that both have their origins in the Middle East. Apples, because they are thought to have been first domesticated in Turkey, and Superman, because of his oftentimes overlooked Jewish heritage.

House of X / Power of X Moves Mutants Forward (Stephanie Williams, SYFY, January 2020)

Even those largely unfamiliar with superhero comics are likely aware of the X-Men. But before the blockbuster sales and long-running film franchise, the beloved mutants came to prominence thanks to the efforts of Len Wein, who created characters like Storm and Wolverine, and Chris Claremont, who confronted them with dilemmas that blurred the traditional lines of good and evil. At the heart of the franchise’s moral ambiguity is the ideological schism between the X-Men founder Charles Xavier (Professor X), who seeks to protect mutants and mankind despite the latter’s extreme prejudices against the former, and Erik Lensherr (Magneto), who prioritizes the well-being of mutants above all else. The duo has often been compared to Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X for the characters’ respective beliefs, but since the X-Men were created any significant strides toward the dreams of either camp have been brief — if they existed at all. 

That changed in 2019 with the debut of House of X / Powers of X. Spearheaded by creators Jonathan Hickman, Pepe Larraz, and R.B. Silva, HOXPOX offered mutants a way forward that appeased both Xavier’s accomodationism and Lensherr’s hardline approach: separation. The first issue lays out a broad-based mutant-led effort to create a culture detached from mankind. As Williams notes in her review, part of the appeal of the comic’s premise lies in the fact that mutants finally “get out of their own way”; recognizing how paralyzed they’ve been, they acknowledge that the only way to advance is to de-center the desires of the community that so despised them. Three years after their new culture’s founding, the mutants still face opponents bent on their destruction. The difference now is that extinction no longer lurks in every defeat. On the contrary, every victory against those who seek to destroy them asserts that they, and the marginalized communities they’ve been thought to represent, owe nothing to their oppressors when it comes to their survival.

The safety and future for all mutants becomes the only goal, and there is no trying to continue to convince humans they are worthy of occupying the same space. It’s proven time and time again to be lethal to incorporate humans into their plans. The focus is now Krakoa and making sure it remains a place where mutants can truly be free — all mutants, not just the ones who adhere to a specific ideology. There are still mutants who lose their lives in order to secure the future of Krakoa, but at least it’s for the greater good and not for selfish men.

‘House of M’ and the Vilification of Mental Illness (Lia Williamson, AIPT Comics, August 2021)

While Wanda Maximoff’s popularity has certainly been bolstered by her appearances in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, her character has a deep history within the Marvel comics. Introduced in the first issues of X-Men, Wanda (Scarlet Witch) was originally a villain operating with her brother Pietro (Quicksilver) as a member of Magneto’s Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. Over the decades, however, her allegiances changed, and she became a prominent member of the Avengers. Like most other characters, she’s gone through her fair share of ups and downs over the course of the past few decades, but none quite compare to the hardships she faced during the 2005 event House of M.

Most Marvel comics fans recall the event as the time when Wanda experiences a mental breakdown and loses control of her reality-changing powers. The consequences for these episodes are dire: She’s manipulated into creating an alternate reality where mutants aren’t hated, and subsequently depowers nearly all mutants when that reality is compromised. While all superhero parties involved were aware of Wanda’s poor mental state and how she was manipulated, since the comic’s release she has shouldered most of the blame for the tragedy. By dissecting the story, Williamson opens a dialogue regarding the treatment of the mentally ill in comics — and concludes that, much like Professor X and Magneto’s ideological conflict, there is rarely an effort made to properly address the issues. House of M failed Wanda on multiple levels: narratively, because it suggested that for all the crises the world’s mightiest heroes faced, they were helpless to support one of their own; and conceptually, because it places the onus of the fallout on a character who was robbed of her agency.

House of M is a low point for Wanda and how comics deal with the topic of mental illness overall, vilifying a woman’s mental breakdown by having her virtually wipe out a species (one she also belonged to in 2005, mind you) and kill several of her own teammates. The story strips her of her own agency while making her the sole bad guy left to pick up the pieces years later. It’s a story that says the mentally ill are dangerous, that we’re capable of horrible things and maybe we should be “put down” before those things can happen.

On Queer Superhero A-Listers and a Lack of Visibility (Madeleine Chan, AIPT Comics, June 2022)

One of the most notable examples of comic book media to emerge in the pandemic has been the Cerebro podcast. Hosted by literary agent Connor Goldsmith, each episode welcomes a guest to talk about the many characters of the X-Men franchise. These discussions often entail a discussion of the queer subtext at work throughout the characters’ histories (since explicit queerness was traditionally taboo in mainstream comics). In the past decade, one of the benefits of the increased push for diverse representation in comics has been increased visibility for queer characters. As Chan notes in this piece, both major and minor characters have been confirmed as queer either by their creators or within their comics — which raises the question of why there’s been so little effort to do the same for the major characters in their film and television incarnations.

But our world is no utopia, and so Chan’s essay raises the issue of how exactly queer characters are being portrayed in their respective comics. They note the cancellation of Al Ewing’s Guardians of the Galaxy run, which is interesting not only because it marked the second cancellation of a series in which Star-Lord was queer, but because the Guardians’ handling in the comics has been heavily impacted by their portrayal in their movies. With this essay, Chan has exposed yet another display of disingenuity in regard to Marvel and DC’s handling of marginalized characters. Their halfhearted approach to depicting queer characters suggests that their priority is to avoid upsetting intolerant audiences. 

While there is very limited visibility — Zoë Kravitz’s Catwoman in The Batman was played as bisexual and Ryan Reynolds’ Deadpool could be interpreted as pansexual — they still weren’t seen as queer by the larger public. And the queer hints in Wonder Woman 1984 were only supposed to be just that, and the odds for Star-Lord to be visible as queer in his upcoming MCU movies is low for multiple reasons. It seems DC and Marvel don’t want to risk disrupting the ubiquitously popular mainstream image of these characters to not deter their straight, cisgender male audience. Translations to the screen would be more likely if their queerness was more prominent in the source material.

Monica Rambeau Was WandaVision‘s Real Hero, and the Show Did Her Dirty (Charles Pulliam-Moore, Gizmodo, March 2021)

Many heroes have taken up the mantle of Captain Marvel in the Marvel universe. In the 2019 film about the character, we were introduced to two of them: Carol Danvers, who became closely associated with the role since she took it on in 2012, and Monica Rambeau. If the movie was the extent of your exposure to either character, you might assume that Monica wouldn’t follow in Carol’s footsteps when it came to being a superhero. And you’d have good reason not to, because Monica was actually Carol’s predecessor. Introduced as the second Captain Marvel in the same year the original died, she quickly rose to prominence as an Avenger, even becoming the team leader during Roger Stern’s tenure on the book. However, she was sidelined soon after losing her powers and relinquishing her title to a newer character that was made to have stronger ties to the original Captain Marvel. 

Since then, there have been various periods in the comics when Monica struggled to stay afloat appearance-wise. The past decade has seen a renewed effort to return her to the spotlight in titles like Ultimates, Damage Control, and her upcoming solo series. Unfortunately, her appearances in the Marvel Cinematic Universe so far have failed to capture her might in more ways than one. In this piece, Pulliam-Moore delves into the issues with Monica’s portrayal in her second MCU appearance, 2021’s WandaVision. It’s bad enough that Monica has been reduced to playing second fiddle as often as she has, but it’s much more problematic that she’s been portrayed in a way that suggests her heroic nature is heavily influenced by her white peers.

While it’s very nice to think that one would choose to be the bigger person after being possessed and attacked by a witch, this characterization for Monica given everything else that happens to her in the series felt like an unnecessary misstep that cast an unignorable shadow over the series as a whole. By not sticking its landing, all of WandaVision’s subtle sleights against Monica lose their ability to work as dynamic texture to the story and more like a reminder of how the show missed a choice opportunity to point out how Black sitcoms were huge for a hot second before disappearing almost entirely from network television.

‘Into the Spider-Verse’ and the Importance of a Biracial Spider-Man (Richard Newby, The Hollywood Reporter, December 2018)

When Stan Lee was asked why Spider-Man (Peter Parker) was one of his favorite characters, he responded that a key factor was Spider-Man’s relatability. “He’s the one who’s most like me,” he said in an interview with the Chicago Tribune, “he’s got a lot of problems, and he does things wrong and I can relate to that.” This sentiment is likely one that resonated with fans: Spider-Man became one of Marvel’s most popular characters shortly after his 1962 debut. Readers could see themselves in Peter Parker’s everyday struggles when he wasn’t wearing his mask. However, for legions of nonwhite readers, that relatability was only partial — at least until Miles Morales came along in 2011 to embody Lee’s vision for the rest of the world.

For a time, Miles lived in his predecessor’s shadow. Fans knew that he was created in an offshoot universe that allowed creators to be more flexible with Marvel’s iconic heroes. But he rose out of that shadow with the help of his unique powers and distinct background. Standing as his own hero when he was folded into the canonized main comics, Miles’ existence embodies the importance of diverse representation in comic books. Like Captain America’s debut long before him, Miles’ success shows that for all the scrutiny a character may be subject to because of prejudice, there will always be an audience for characters whose identities are treated respectfully on the comic book scene.

Miles Morales’ journey to becoming Spider-Man isn’t a straight line. It’s the strands of being black, Latino, a son, a nephew, an honors student, a graffiti artist, a hip-hop fan, all woven together to create the web that is the wide demographic of Spider-Man — a union of many of the best parts of humanity. There’s a shot in the movie of Miles Morales starring up at a glass display case containing Spider-Man’s uniform. It’s a brief moment without dialogue, but it resonates as one of the film’s most powerful moments because it represents Miles so well, and the tremendous legacy of carrying more than one identity. For all the kids of color who dream of being superheroes, and all the adults of color still grappling with power and responsibility, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse leaves us with a clear message: We could always be Spider-Man with the mask on, but now, and perhaps more important, we can be Spider-Man with the mask off as well. 

Joshua N. Miller is a cultural critic who aims to dissect prevalent social issues through his analysis of comics, film, television, and video games. His writing is available at his website joshuanaimiller.com and he has content forthcoming in Mangoprism. 

From left: Said Ag Ayad of Tuareg ensemble Tinariwen; Finnish singer Marja Mortensson; a Tuvan throat singer of the Alash Ensemble; Galbadrakh “Gala” Tsendbaatar of Mongolian folk-metal band The Hu. (Photos: Getty Images)

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By Chris Wheatley

“I’m not interested in heritage,” said musician Martin Carthy on the eve of his 70th birthday. “This stuff is alive.” With these words, Carthy, a celebrated and driving force in English folk music across several decades, appears to perfectly capture folk’s persistent prominence across the boundaries of language and geography. It is ironic, perhaps, that the genre is often portrayed as outdated, irrelevant, even elitist — because folk music is, in fact, the antithesis of all these things. It is a living, revolutionary art form documenting the social concerns of humanity, created by the people, for the people.

But folk music can also be difficult to define. Carthy himself cites African-American blues guitarist Elizabeth Cotton as a major influence. Mongolian band The Hu blends the sounds of horsehead fiddle with electric guitars and drums; in Japan, Wagakki Band incorporates the traditional three-stringed shamisen into its blend of heavy rock. This sort of recombinant cross-pollination isn’t new: Since the widespread commercialization of sound recordings began in the early 1900s, arguments around “authenticity” and the tension between tradition and innovation have raged across numerous cultures. Such debates reached an absurd height during Bob Dylan’s infamous mid-’60s tour of the U.K., when an audience member, appalled at the singer’s switch from acoustic to electric instruments, shouted that the musician was “Judas!”

Martin Carthy himself, who has enjoyed a lengthy and successful career both as a solo artist and as a member of renowned groups Steeleye Span and The Albion Band, is no stranger to blending modern electric instruments with traditional acoustic equipment. Yet the concerns outlined above, as we can see from some of the articles presented below, continue to this day, alongside fears that traditional art forms may die out altogether: abandoned by subsequent generations in favor of newer, shinier sounds; falling foul of commodification; even, in extreme cases, deliberately smothered by political forces.

Which brings us back to the definition of folk music itself. What can we say for sure? “If it was never new, and it never gets old, then it’s a folk song.” So observes Oscar Isaac’s titular musician in Inside Llewyn Davis, the Coen brothers’ cinematic ode to the genre. I can think of no better way to describe this music, which continues to bring joy, pride, and hope to millions of listeners around the world.

Arctic Magic (Chris Campion, The Guardian, January 2007)

For some time, I have been fascinated by the yoik singing of the Sami people. Native to what is now Northern Finland, Sweden, and Norway, the traditional yoik song form serves many purposes. It can be an identity marker for individuals living or dead, a tool of communication with animals and nature, even a doorway to other realms. It is an ancient tradition, with roots in prehistoric times, but it is only relatively recently that this artform has seemingly been brought back from the edge of extinction.

This article by Chris Campion provides a magical peek into the world of the yoik as it is experienced and practiced firsthand, chronicling the efforts of two young Sami determined to preserve and revive their beloved tradition. Happily, in the 15 years since the publication of this piece, yoik appears to have flourished, with several artists and bands recording commercially. Besides the group Adjágas, who you will read about in this essay, albums by Ára, Áššu, Marja Mortensson, Hildá Länsman, and Viivi Maria Saarenkylä have garnered significant acclaim.

“Sometimes in adjagas I feel that I understand all the world,” says Sara. “I understand all the questions that I sometimes wonder about. You feel that and then you are really open for these yoiks to come. If I couldn’t yoik, I think I would die.”

Desert Blues | The Music Moves in Circles (Randall Grass, Kosmos Journal, Fall 2022)

Blues music’s standard 12-bar chord progression, which most experts agree developed from African American slave work songs and spirituals, underpins almost all Western popular music. What an absolute delight it is, then, to see the blues travel full circle, exported back to the country of its ancestry, reclaimed, repurposed, and revitalized. So-called “desert blues,” emanating from Africa’s Saharan region, has been steadily growing in popularity over the last 20 years, driven by the band Tinariwen, whose founding members first united while in exile in Algeria.

Tinariwen blends electric guitars with traditional instruments to create a beguiling blanket of sound that encapsulates the majesty and stark beauty of the Sahara, and their commercial success opened the door to a wave of like-minded musicians. The interaction between “Western” blues and the African continent, however, goes back much further, as explored in this fascinating piece by Randall Grass, in which the author recounts his experiences with local musicians while living in Kano, Nigeria, during the mid-’70s.

Afterwards, I shared a beer with Alhaji Liu in a little bar. As we talked, via a translator due to my limited Hausa, an Albert King blues song played over the bar’s sound-system. “I can play that,” Alhaji Liu said. That was my introduction to what has often been labeled “desert blues.”

Harry Smith’s Musical Catalogue of Human Experience (Amanda Petrusich, The New Yorker, September 2020)

It is difficult to name a record (or records) more influential than Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, which served as a virtual bible for ’50s and ’60s folk revivalists, Bob Dylan among them. Comprising recordings bought and selected by Harry Smith himself, this three-LP collection still stands as a cornerstone of Western popular music, and yet its genesis and rise to prominence form one of the strangest and most inscrutable tales in music history.

Central to this story is the wonderfully bizarre figure of Smith himself. A bohemian outlier with esoteric tastes, including a passion for magic and alchemy, he was only in his early twenties when he put together his “anthology.” A practicing member of The Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica (a church founded by the infamous occultist and “magician” Aleister Crowley), Smith held a predilection for the arcane, as evidenced by some of the wilder cuts included in this set. Bascom Lamar Lunsford’s “I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground” and Chubby Parker’s “King Kong Kitchie Kitchie Ki-Me-O” are both fine examples.

In this fantastic essay, Amanda Petrusich explains exactly why this “strange cosmology of music” continues to enjoy reverential status.

Once, in a strange fury of obsession, I spent several months on the lower level of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, trying to track down Smith’s own 78s, some of which he had sold to the library before he died. Smith believed that objects have power; I thought there might be something to learn from holding those records in my hands.

A Revival of Indigenous Throat Singing (Joel Balsam and Stephanie Foden, BBC, April 2021)

The particular strength of folk song is that it intrinsically belongs to its people. The music unites communities, entertains them, and documents their loves, losses, and struggles. It’s a genre that has long been used to stir passions, swell pride, and resist injustice and oppression. Little wonder, then, that colonialists and dictators the world over have routinely sought to curtail, or even extinguish, the traditional music of the land. Folk music provides identity and hope, not least in the extraordinarily intimate tradition of Inuit throat singing.

In the early 20th century, Christian missionaries in the Arctic branded the music as blasphemous, even Satanic, in nature — and throat singing all but died out. This moving article by Joel Balsam and Stephanie Foden follows Shina Novalinga and her mother, Caroline, as they fight to reinvigorate the tradition via the distinctly modern means of social media.

In March 2020, when the first wave of the pandemic hit Montreal, Shina started sharing throat singing videos on TikTok. The videos also showcased the gorgeous handmade parkas sewn and designed by her mother along with facts about Indigenous history. “For me it’s so normal, but I realised how unique it is for everyone to hear that, and even just different aspects of our culture, our food, our clothing,” Shina said.

Rhythm in Your Blood: Meet the Young Artists Keeping Cuba’s Traditional Music Alive (Marisa Aveling, Pitchfork, June 2016)

Cuba occupies a special place in music history. Partly thanks to its unique blend of Spanish, African, and Caribbean music, the island’s creative influence extends across the globe, feeding numerous genres from jazz and rock to ballroom dance, classical, and even hip-hop. The spectacular success of the album Buena Vista Social Club and its accompanying documentary film, both of which showcased some of the best of the country’s talent in the mid-’90s, brought Cuban music to a new generation — but much remains to explore.

Ironically, Cuba’s vibrant traditional music scene may well have thrived within its borders in part thanks to its relative isolation from the outside world. However, with the country appearing to gradually temper its hard-line stance, that relaxation may catalyze change. As Marisa Aveling observes in this fascinating piece, some are concerned that, new freedoms and visions — not to mention alien influences — may well distract young people away from their historic art forms. Enter the Manana music festival, the first such international event to take place on the island, and one aimed squarely at preserving and developing Cuban sounds.

“It’s an expression of Cuban style,” says Geovani del Pino, the 73-year-old director of Yoruba Andabo, the Latin Grammy-winning 15-piece band that has been fundamental in representing rumba internationally. “I don’t think that someone who calls themselves Cuban feels a conga without his feet moving.”

Griot on Wheels (Joseph McLellan, The Washington Post, May 1978)

Almost every civilization, it seems, has its version of the West African griots: itinerant musicians and orators, revered for both their skills and the vital role they play in preserving history and continuing traditions. Celtic cultures had ancient bards; Vikings had their skalds; classical Greece, its rhapsodes. Griots, however, still form an integral part of contemporary societies from Senegal and Mauritania to Nigeria and Mali, serving as living libraries, genealogists, entertainers, and ceremonial functionaries.

In this beautiful piece from 1978, Joseph McLellan talks to Batourou Sekou Kouyate, a griot from Bamko, Mali, as he tours America in an old station wagon, making new friends, new connections, and speaking with passion about the ancient craft of his art.

“In my country,” he said in an interview at the Museum of African Art, “I can go with my kora to anyone’s house and say, “I want you to help me,’ and with three wives and 10 children, I could move into that house and spend my whole life there, and when I die my children could stay there after me. That is what we call nobility.”

***

Chris Wheatley is a writer and journalist based in Oxford, UK. He has too many guitars, too many records, and not enough cats.

Editor: Peter Rubin
Copy Editor: Krista Stevens

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As fall crept up and sofas beckoned, two streaming giants went head-to-head with fantasy offerings: Amazon Prime with the laboriously titled The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, a prequel to (you guessed it) The Lord of the Rings; and HBO with House of the Dragon, a prequel to Game of Thrones. Similar as these offerings may initially seem, they are at different ends of the fantasy spectrum. Where Rings of Power is high-end — think elven Kings and noble quests across vast lands — House of the Dragon, with its street brawls and brothels, is more a pint of lager than fine wine. Delighted to delve into any fantasy world, I was happy to bounce between the two. Both eschew streaming’s all-at-once cadence for weekly episodes, leaving me plenty of time in between to do some light background reading on Middle Earth and Westeros. That reading led me back to Adrian Daub’s 2017 Longreads essay “Here at the End of All Things.” 

In his piece Daub focuses on the role of maps in building fantasy lands (particularly the two lands that birthed these series, J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth and George R.R. Martin’s Westeros), and recounts with pride how much he relished such maps as a child. I remember the same thing: poring over deliciously unfamiliar names, elaborately penned on an inky map under a book cover, constantly looking back as quests reached new lands. For a reader, a map brings a new world to life; for a writer, it can help them craft it in the first place. Tolkien was one of the first to use such maps, and Daub details how crucial this was to the writer’s storytelling: “Through map design, Tolkien could telegraph some of the complicated culture he had dreamed up for Middle Earth: the maps for The Hobbit were full of Runic inscriptions and historical notes, to the point that several scholarly books have devoted chapters to a detailed reading of these maps alone.” 

Even as those worlds leapt from the page to the screen, their cartography remained crucial. The Rings of Power uses maps between scenes to track location in the huge world portrayed, which this time reaches far beyond Middle Earth. Daub explains that Tolkien based Middle Earth on medieval Europe, with the land beyond deemed something more “exotic.” Westeros, too, has been compared to Europe, despite its American creator, and Daub reminds me of Game of Thrones’s glorious opening credit swoop over its inverted-UK terrain. Sadly, in House of the Dragon, the map has been replaced by what seems to be some very viscous blood seeping over stone. (With less travel in this series, it’s not as crucial for story-building.) 

Revisiting this essay was a treat, filled as it is with both nostalgia and fascinating information. Daub refers to himself as a “geek,” but I will dub him an expert. We are roughly at the halfway point of both House of the Dragon and Rings of Power; read this lovely essay before the second act, and remind yourself of how such elaborate fantasy worlds come into existence.

For every moment when we take in glumly how far our heroes still have to travel, there are ten moments of the opposite: of luxuriating in how much world is yet out there for our heroes to traverse, a burning desire to see the lines and shadings filled in with people and story. This, too, is part of Tolkien’s maps. Between the world wars, the British Isles were seized by a hiking craze. Maps, organized tours, and walking guides proliferated during the years Tolkien began charting Bilbo’s great hike towards the Lonely Mountain. Thror’s Map, which Tolkien himself drew and which his characters use as a guide to get into the Mountain, may look like the map of Treasure Island that Robert Louis Stevenson included as a frontispiece in his 1883 novel. But the paths and pointers, the famous sight at the center, and the reams of text and historic markers make it feel like a hiking map.

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By Cheri Lucas Rowlands

Monday night’s Emmy Awards ceremony was an unsurprising mix of boring and strange and mostly forgettable, with the occasional funny moment or moving speech. (The video clip of Abbott Elementary star Sheryl Lee Ralph accepting her Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series — singing powerfully into the mic on stage — was impossible to miss in your social feed.)

As you wade through Emmys takes this week, we’d love to recommend the recent work from Scalawag’s newsletter “Pop Justice,” which examines popular culture through an abolitionist lens. This week’s essays take smart and critical looks at several Emmy-winning or nominated shows: Abbott Elementary, The White Lotus, The Dropout, Yellowjackets, and RuPaul’s Drag Race. Here are three favorites.

Abbott Elementary and the Promise of Schools Without Cops

“With Abbott Elementary, what I got was not only a cheerful single-camera mockumentary, but also an unexpectedly abolitionist storyline,” writes Eteng Ettah. Black schools in the U.S. are heavily policed, and schools in Philadelphia — where the show’s titular, predominantly Black Abbott Elementary is located — are among the most segregated. Eteng Ettah commends Quinta Brunson, the show’s creator, lead actress, and now Emmy-winning writer, for keeping cops out of Abbott’s storylines; in Brunson’s universe, the protection and care of Black children comes instead from a community of patient, risk-taking, and challenging teachers. Ettah’s piece, however, is not without criticism: She also points out how the ABC sitcom occasionally “falls into the easy trap of copaganda,” citing an episode in which the teachers — discussing a social media trend among the students called desking — divide into “good cops” and “bad cops.” But overall, Ettah is elated to see in Abbott Elementary a portrait of a different — and better — world.

Still, without cops or school resource officers roaming the hallway, Abbott invites us into a world that’s possibility-laden and imaginative. It asks us both: What does it actually feel like to be a Black student? And: What should it feel like? Simultaneously grappling with how to move through an antiblack world designed to oppress Black peoples globally while imagining, organizing, and building a new world that ushers in Black liberation is one of the many central challenges of abolitionist organizing.

But our imaginations have been so flattened by media mimicking our reality that we find ourselves asking entertainers to reflect back our violence instead of offering a portrait of a better world.

The White Lotus Is Supposed To Be Satire. Hawaiians Deserve the Last Laugh.

In this essay, Mariah Rigg outlines the many problems within The White Lotus, HBO’s dramedy (and Emmy winner for Best Limited Series) about a group of guests and employees at an exclusive resort in Hawaii — and how their lives intertwine over the course of a week. Creator Mike White has claimed the show is an indictment of white American privilege and settler colonialism, but as Rigg digs into its use of policing and stereotypes, it’s anything but. Consider how all the Native characters are either sidelined (Lani, the employee who goes into labor); exoticized (the male paddlers who venture out to sea); or vilified (Kai, the staff member who falls for Paula and is arrested for attempting to steal from the Mossbachers). The show “[sanitizes] the moral failures of white capitalists at the cost of Kānaka Maoli and locals,” writes Rigg, and missed an opportunity to critique the systemic harm, targeted policing, and cultural obliteration of Native Hawaiians throughout history to today.

It’s hard to see political or cultural critique in a show that was filmed in Hawai`i during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, when Kānaka Maoli and politicians alike were asking visitors not to come to Hawai`i. It’s even harder when the writer and director himself was comfortable saying that his idea for the show came from a desire to “get out of L.A.” during quarantine.

If the show is satire, it’s the wealthy white elite who get the last laugh. Because while Kānaka Maoli characters like Kai are arrested for attempted robbery, white characters like Shane get away with “accidental” murder, reinforcing the white American idea of Hawai`i as an amusement park to be exploited for pleasure—much like Westworld—an adventure they can buy and abandon for their privileged lives on the continent.

The Dropout Dramatizes Elizabeth Holmes’ Fraudulent Rise. Endless Military Funding Is Also a Scam.

Bria Massey examines the rise of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, portrayed in The Dropout by Amanda Seyfried, who won the Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Limited Series. She asks: How could a dropout raise $945 million and win the support of important investors and public figures with fraudulent technology? And what can bring political opponents together? “The answer to both questions: U.S. imperialism, or the promise to advance it.” Massey explains that Holmes got as far as she did because she “[played] into the illusion that a portable blood-testing device could be used on the battlefield to save American lives,” and appealed to public figures and political leaders — some of them on Theranos’ board of directors — who have historically supported war, military expansion, and mass incarceration. “We deserve so much more than police, prisons, and jails,” writes Massey. “We deserve so much more than Theranos and companies alike, or the shows that glamorize this terror.”

It’s hard to fathom that someone could rack in billions of dollars from investors without evidence of a viable, working product. Nevertheless, history shows us that the budget and support for police and military funding is limitless. Technology has always been a tool used to advance western imperialism; the implications of this oftentimes result in the death and destruction of our most vulnerable and under-resourced communities. So it’s unsurprising to learn that the billionaires and public figures who supported Theranos didn’t do their due diligence to better examine the company’s claims. These same individuals have shown us, time and time again, that there’s no expense too great, including the lives of poor and working-class people, to expand the military and prison-industrial complex further.

David Gambacorta | Longreads | July 2022 | 16 minutes (4,445 words)

The girl was no more than 12. Night had fallen, and the caravan of gospel singers that she’d traveled with from Nashville had steered their sedans and station wagons to a quiet space under an oak tree in Mississippi. Booking a hotel room wasn’t an option, not for this group of Black performers in the early ’50s. Instead, they shifted and turned in their seats, in search of a comfortable position and a few hours of sleep.

Their peace was interrupted by the rumble of approaching engines. Candi Staton heard doors clunk open, and several pairs of footsteps approach. Flashlight beams invaded the cars, stirring awake the other occupants. A voice cut through the air. “What are you n—s doing here?” asked a white police officer.

“We’re singers,” said one member of the caravan. “We travel. We just stopped to take a nap.” Staton had experienced the terror of the Ku Klux Klan years earlier, back home in Alabama, where her mother used to tuck her under a bed when Klan members rumbled by in pickup trucks, armed with smoldering torches. Now Staton — who would befriend and tour with Sam Cooke, Aretha Franklin, and The Staple Singers — was in Mississippi, where 581 lynchings were reported between 1882 and 1968. “In those days,” she’d recall years later, “you didn’t know what to expect. That song — ‘strange fruit, hanging from the poplar trees’ — came to mind whenever a police officer stopped you. Especially more than one.”

The officer turned his attention to five men, who sat terrified in another car, and ordered them to get out. He told them to sing and dance. One meekly protested that they only sang. “You gon’ dance tonight, n—,” Staton would remember the officer responding. “You gon’ dance tonight.” He aimed a gun at the men’s feet, and opened fire. “The police fell out laughing. They kept shooting at the ground,” Staton says. “I cried. I honestly cried for the men.”

The encounter, a microcosm of the bigotry and violence that Black Americans routinely faced, could have compelled Staton and her older sister, Maggie, to quit their group — The Jewell Gospel Trio — and return home. But Staton pressed on. As a small child, she’d discovered that when she sang, her sound was unlike anything the adults in her life had ever heard. Her voice could crackle with campfire warmth, or summon freight train strength; she instinctively understood how to make a listener actually feel the joy or sorrow that a sheet of lyrics hinted at. Staton wanted only a chance to share that gift. What she often found though, were obstacles — people and circumstances that threatened to silence her voice.

There was a missed opportunity — an invitation, at 18, to move to California with her friends Cooke and Lou Rawls and pursue a recording contract. A jealous husband who beat her and wanted her nowhere near any stage, leaving her a single mother of four at age 24. To support her children, Staton worked at a nursing home, while some of the musicians she’d traveled with as an adolescent found stardom. It was a practical, understandable choice. But a thought nagged at her: What if she could somehow find her way back to performing?

Toward the end of the ’60s — without the benefit of a modern DIY star-making vehicle like TikTok — Staton built a new musical career from scratch. She played smoke-filled nightclubs, toured the unpredictable Chitlin’ Circuit, and recorded some of the most arresting soul music to come out of FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, visceral songs about heartache, and the torture of doomed relationships: “Too Hurt to Cry,” “I’m Just a Prisoner (Of Your Good Lovin’),” “I’d Rather Be An Old Man’s Sweetheart (Than A Young Man’s Fool),” “Mr. and Mrs. Untrue.”

Staton reinvented herself in the mid-’70s, becoming a disco star and an early ally of LGBTQ+ communities — and then reinvented herself again in the ’80s, this time as a Grammy-nominated gospel artist who doubled as the host of shows on Christian television. Another rebirth, in the ’90s, saw her become a house music sensation in the U.K.; in the aughts, she returned to Southern soul, just as a younger generation of musicians, like Florence + the Machine and Jason Isbell, were drawing new attention to Staton’s past work.

Her story is almost too big to fathom, a life that weaved through multiple chapters of American musical history, and weathered dizzying amounts of public success and private anguish. Staton’s admirers believe she possessed one of the defining voices of her generation, yet has sometimes been overlooked in conversations about soul music greats of the last 50 years. Her talent and tenacity, they argue, deserve wider appreciation. At 82, Staton has outlived many of the musicians she called friends. “She’s a legend to us,” says John Paul White, the singer, songwriter, and former member of the Civil Wars, who was born in Muscle Shoals. “But I quickly realized that outside our circle, she’s less known. And I always felt like that was grossly unfair — the talent of Candi Staton, in relation to the celebrity of Candi Staton.”

***

It was on a 40-acre farm in rural Alabama that Canzetta Maria Staton first learned that music could represent hope, a channel of light in life’s darkest valleys. Her family lived in Hanceville, surrounded by dirt roads; just 12 miles to the south sat Colony, a town originally settled by previously enslaved people following the Civil War. “We were dirt, dirt poor,” Staton says. “Our family was so poor, we didn’t even have shoes to wear for school, until my mother got enough money. We had some of the ugliest shoes you ever wanted to see. They cost but $1.98. They were boy shoes, not girl shoes.”

Throughout Staton’s childhood in the ’40s, Jim Crow laws reigned. Schools were still segregated — the U.S. Supreme Court wouldn’t rule that practice unconstitutional until 1954 — and it was impossible to avoid the menace baked into everyday life. Staton remembers reading a sign affixed to a nearby bridge: “Run n— run. If you can’t read, run anyway.” When Klan members stalked past their farm in search of a target, Staton’s mother dropped to her knees, and prayed, “Oh Lord, please don’t let them come to our house.” Those past aggressions no longer seem so far away. Republican lawmakers have advanced hundreds of bills across the U.S. to restrict voting access, while activists have launched coordinated campaigns to ban books about, or by, people of color and LGBTQ individuals. “I’ve lived all these years. [Black women] fought hard to even get the right to vote,” Staton says. “Now they’re trying to pull that backwards. Gradually. Day by day, incident by incident.”

As a child, Staton and her five siblings fixated on a new family possession to help them process the cruelty of the world: a radio. The children stretched out on the floor, and listened as a melange of booming voices — Mahalia Jackson, B.B. King, The Five Blind Boys of Alabama — unspooled stories of love, struggle, and spiritual reassurance in song.

When Staton was 5, her mother answered a knock at their door. Members of a traveling church group asked if they could use the family farm for an impromptu performance. She agreed, and Staton was drawn to the sound the group conjured. “They set up their drums and tambourines. It was nothing like the boring churches I was used to. They sung fast songs, and they were dancing,” Staton explains. “I thought that was the most joyful thing I’d ever seen in my entire life.” Soon after, Staton and her 7-year-old sister, Maggie, started to sing together, and learned how to harmonize. “Do you know how I got a voice? God gave me a talent,” she says, “because of my mother’s generosity to strangers.”

A few years later, Staton found new possibilities in Cleveland, where her mother had relocated her children to escape her husband. “Papa was a rolling stone,” Staton says. “Drinking and gambling and chasing women.” There, Staton and her sister participated in a singing contest at a local church, and caught the ear of a towering woman, Bishop Mattie Lou Jewell, who oversaw dozens of churches, and a Tennessee-based school called the Jewell Academy. Jewell offered to let Staton and her sister attend the academy for free — as long as they’d sing at revivals that she staged across the country. The Staton girls formed their gospel trio with Jewell’s granddaughter, Naomi Harrison. A teenaged Staton can be heard on some of the group’s surviving recordings; on a track like 1957’s “Praying Time,” she sings with the poise and power of someone twice her age.

On the road, they met kindred spirits, other young performers who possessed stunning voices and a hunger to connect with strangers through song. In between performances at churches and auditoriums, they’d play softball and muse about their futures. During one conversation, Sam Cooke confided to Staton that he’d decided to leave his group, The Soul Stirrers, and transition from gospel music to the blues. Staton was startled; crossing over to secular music had long been considered too risky, personally and professionally, to even attempt. She’d once watched a gospel audience boo and shout “Traitor!” at one of her idols, the pioneering guitarist Sister Rosetta Tharpe, who began playing secular venues in the late 1930s.

“When we think about a person who’s performed in and who grew up in the world of sacred music, it really is a cultural phenomenon that absorbs every aspect of your life,” says Katie Rainge-Briggs, the exhibition and collections manager at the National Museum of African American Music, in Tennessee. “When that happens, intrinsically moving to the space of the world seems to have so many pitfalls.”

In 1957, Cooke released a dreamy new song that he’d written: “You Send Me.” The track shot to No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 and Rhythm and Blues charts, an encouraging sign for other gospel singers, like Lou Rawls, who wanted to follow in Cooke’s footsteps. A year later, when Staton was 18, the two men suggested that she join them in Los Angeles. “Sam and Lou said they’d get me with Capitol Records,” Staton says. “I was so excited. I told my mother, ‘They said they’d take me to California!’ But my mother said, ‘No way. You’re never singing the blues, little girl.’”

It’s easy to imagine this what-if moment having gone differently — a young Staton landing a record deal, her star rising steadily as the doo-wop wave of the ’50s gave way to the Motown sound of the early ’60s. But Staton isn’t so sure. “You know, I was 18. Full of energy and excitement,” she tells me, letting go of a small sigh. “And wide open and ignorant. I don’t have a clue what would have happened to me.”

Rawls, who would duet with Cooke on their 1962 hit, “Bring It On Home to Me,” briefly dated Staton, and assured her they would be married. Rawls’ mother intervened, and told Staton she should instead return home and finish high school. Staton reluctantly agreed. It was another pivotal choice — one that nearly cost her life. Back in Alabama, she met a man who drove an eye-catching ’57 Chevrolet and doted on her. Soon, she became pregnant. Staton hoped to continue her singing career, but instead found herself married, the mother of four children. The stage never seemed so far away.

Staton discovered that the man she married had a dark side, one that would prove dangerous. He became verbally and physically abusive, she says, and grew jealous if he thought other men looked at her. “When I got married to him, he owned me,” she says. “I was no longer free.” On Valentine’s Day 1964, Staton laid in bed with her 18-month-old daughter and watched TV, while a chilly rain fell outside their Birmingham home. Her husband barged in, accused her of cheating — and began attacking her. Staton says he dragged her toward his car. She believed he intended to take her to a nearby portion of Interstate 65, which was under construction. “He planned to take me up there, jump out of the car, and let the car go off the road with me in it,” she says. A relative who lived next door heard Staton’s screams and intervened.

Staton filed for divorce, and — like her mother, years earlier — moved with her children to Cleveland, where one of her sisters lived. Staton had been a little girl during her first visit to the city, one whose singing voice pointed to a bright future. Now, her circumstances were far more bleak. She landed a job at a nursing home, which barely paid enough to cover her bills. She had two arms, and four children; trying to meet all of their needs could sometimes feel impossible. “This is why I could sing the blues,” Staton says. “I had to face the blues everyday.”

On one rare evening, Staton had some time for herself. She ventured to a nightclub where her old friends, The Staple Singers, were appearing, along with The Temptations. Backstage, she caught up with Pervis Staples, Mavis’s brother. Their conversation was interrupted by David Ruffin, the lanky, mercurial Temptations singer. Ruffin glanced through his dark-rimmed glasses at Staton, who wore a pink dress and no makeup. “Whoa, where’d you get that little country girl from?” he blurted. “That your girlfriend, Pervis?” Staples tried to explain that Staton had once been a singer, but Ruffin continued needling. “If that’s your girlfriend,” he laughed, “Lord have mercy!”

A fire sparked inside Staton. She had once dazzled audiences across the country with ease — and now she was being treated like a punchline. She turned to Ruffin. “I knew what I could deliver, if only I had a chance,” she says. “I looked him in the face, because I’ve never been shy. I said, ‘You’re gonna regret these words. You gonna be paying to see me one day.’”

***

Staton wasted little time trying to make good on her backstage vow to David Ruffin. She would quickly find success and validation — and new challenges that threatened to derail her career. Her first step was to find a stage. In Cleveland, her brother approached a band at a small club, and persuaded them to let his sister have a turn at the mic. “I didn’t know them. They didn’t know me,” Staton says. “But everybody knows ‘Stormy Monday.’” She tore through the decades-old blues number, which traces a week’s worth of misery, a sentiment Staton understood all too well. “I can’t sing a song if I don’t know the meaning of that feeling,” she says. “I have actually lived that moment.”

In 1968, she moved to Tennessee, and ran into an artist she’d played with years earlier, the blues singer and songwriter Clarence Carter. Fate was about to bend in Staton’s favor. Carter insisted that Staton travel with him to Muscle Shoals, a city in Alabama situated about 20 miles east of the Mississippi River. There, a producer named Rick Hall had turned a small, unheard-of recording studio into a hit-making phenomenon. Wilson Pickett recorded some of his most popular songs — “Land of 1000 Dances,” “Mustang Sally” — at Hall’s FAME Studios in 1966, with a band composed of local musicians who possessed an almost preternatural ability to find a groove. A year later, Aretha Franklin recorded what was then the biggest hit of her career, “I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You” with Hall’s crew. The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, and Paul Simon were among other artists who would make a pilgrimage to Muscle Shoals, hoping to tap into the local sound.

But now it was 1969, and Staton was auditioning for Hall in an Alabama hotel. He listened for a few minutes, and delivered a verdict: She needed to get over to FAME Studios. Hall hastily assembled some musicians, and they recorded several tracks. The first — “I’d Rather Be An Old Man’s Sweetheart” — begins with some keyboard vamping and a punch of horns. At the 13-second mark, Staton’s voice explodes into the track, and the song takes off like a rollercoaster. “Her voice jumps right off the record,” says Clayton Ivey, who played keyboard on some of Staton’s early recordings with FAME. “I’ll tell you what’s amazing, to be sitting in the studio … you get caught up in her vocals for a second. It’s like, damn! She can really do this!”

Staton began to perform on the Chitlin’ Circuit, a network of clubs and theaters for Black audiences and performers that traced its roots to the ’30s, when big band music was the chief draw, and was later a critical incubator of early rock ‘n’ roll. Her experience on the Circuit, she says, “was good and bad at the same time.” She learned how to shut down hecklers and won devoted fans. But the clubs could sometimes be claustrophobic, and she also contended with male promoters who tried to cheat her out of money, or coerce her into sleeping with them — deterrents that proved exhausting.

“I had to be a gangster and get me a .32,” she says. “I learned how to cuss. I’d go to promoters, and say, ‘You better have my money, motherfucker.’ I’d take my little gun, and lay it out.” Singer Gloria Gaynor, a friend of Staton’s, confirms this was too often a reality for many female performers. Gaynor recalls once having to search through a club for a promoter who tried to stiff her after a show: “He was in the kitchen, crouched between a refrigerator and a freezer, hiding from us.”

In 1971, Hall encouraged Staton to record a cover of the Tammy Wynette country hit “Stand By Your Man.” In Staton’s hands, Wynette’s cloying message of wifely devotion took on an edge of knowing irony. Staton’s performance was nominated for a Grammy Award; another nomination followed in 1973, for her affecting cover of the Elvis Presley song “In the Ghetto.” Just a few years removed from feeling stranded in Cleveland, she was now playing concerts amid the neon of Las Vegas. Still, some of her supporters felt Staton had been deserving of more commercial success.

“I think Candi’s one of the greatest soul singers of all time,” says Rodney Hall, Rick’s son. “But I think she’s been a little bit overlooked. To be honest with you — my dad used to say this and I’ll say it, too — part of the reason for that is that she wasn’t on Atlantic Records. She was on our label, which was distributed through Capitol. If she’d been signed directly to Capitol, she would have gotten more promotional muscle.”

Broader music tastes began to change — and Staton’s did, too. She continued to record with Hall, but grew tired of singing about cheating men and women who pined for them. In 1976, she signed to Warner Bros. Records, and a new producer, David Crawford, sketched out a song based on comments Staton made about a relationship that was wreaking havoc on her life. “Young Hearts Run Free” embraced the surging sound of disco — the four-on-the-floor beat, swirling strings, sunny vibes — and spoke the language of female empowerment. “Never be hung up, hung up like my man and me,” she warns in the song’s chorus, before later declaring, “Self preservation is what’s really going on today.”

Staton had been on the sidelines when songs recorded by Cooke and The Staple Singers became part of the fabric of the civil rights movement; now, her music spoke directly to women’s liberation efforts, much like Gaynor’s 1978 song “I Will Survive” later would. “Young Hearts” became the biggest hit of Staton’s career, climbing to No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot Soul Singles chart, and No. 20 on the Hot 100.

To soul music historian David Nathan, Staton’s ability to successfully transition from gospel to Southern soul and then disco made her a peerless figure in 20th-century music. “She is just completely unique,” he tells me from his London home. “I can’t think of any artist who I can say is like Candi Staton.” Staton’s disco records were embraced by the LGBTQ community, and she, in turn, embraced it. Some musicians, Nathan says, were still wary in that era of acknowledging such a connection. “But she played LGBTQ-oriented events, specifically for the community. She’s a true LGBTQ musical icon.” Staton paid little attention to critics who didn’t approve of this bond. “I don’t want anybody telling me how to live,” she says, “or who to love.”

By the late ’70s, Staton was living hard. She’d married blues musician Clarence Carter and had a child, but their relationship unraveled when Carter became unfaithful, and allegedly assaulted her. Now she was on the road constantly, trying to parent from afar, and responsible for house and car payments. The occasional glass of Johnnie Walker Black to unwind became a daily necessity. “I became overwhelmed. I felt like I couldn’t even function without it,” she says. Staton began drinking before she took the stage, and her performances suffered. Then she developed kidney problems. “I had an antibiotic in one hand,” she says, “and a Scotch in the other.”

She could feel everything she’d built start to slip through her fingers. During a visit to a club in Atlanta, Staton drank so heavily that she fell off a bar stool. She staggered into a bathroom, and glimpsed herself in a full-length mirror. “For the first time, David, I saw myself,” she tells me. “I saw who I had really become. And I started to weep.”

Candi Staton needed to break away. To go back to her roots.

***

“Oh my God. Oh, oh my goodness,” David Letterman huffed appreciatively, as he strode across the New York City set of the Late Show with David Letterman on an early October evening in 2013. His destination was Staton, who stood in a shimmering black jacket and dark pants, flanked by Jason Isbell and John Paul White. Led by Isbell’s sinewy slide guitar, the trio blended their voices for “I Ain’t Easy to Love,” a song that appeared on Staton’s then-new album, the appropriately titled Life Happens. At 73, Staton had lost none of her ability to sway an audience. Letterman bowed his head, and pecked her hand.

Staton had spent much of the aughts establishing herself once again in the realm of secular music — and firming up her legacy. In the ’80s, having given up alcohol, she embarked on what she calls “a 25-year sabbatical.” She started a record label and publishing company, and focused entirely on gospel music, earning two more Grammy nominations. “I was burned out,” she says. “I went back to the church, and got refreshed.” Gaynor cites a song Staton recorded during that period, “Sin Doesn’t Live Here Anymore,” as her favorite. “It’s a prayer,” Gaynor says, “to make me a better person.”

Yet the ’80s and ’90s had, in one sense, been another lost opportunity. Recording artists from the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s enjoyed some renewed visibility — and replenished bank accounts — when their catalogs were made available on CD. But the essential music that Staton recorded with FAME was nowhere to be found; the company was embroiled in a lawsuit with Capitol Records over the rights to her recordings that wouldn’t be resolved until 2000. “So, pretty much for the whole CD era, her music wasn’t available,” Rodney Hall says.

Staton still loomed particularly large in the imaginations of aspiring musicians in the South. White grew up in Tennessee, and often heard bar bands chugging through covers of Staton’s soul classics. “The main thing I took from Candi, and the trajectory of her career, is to make sure you’re always doing it for the right reason,” he says. “She sings things that she’s felt, that she’s been through. She was not chasing hits, or chasing trends. She was always herself.”

In the early ’90s, the British group The Source released a remix of a song that Staton had recorded, years earlier, for a documentary. “You Got the Love” climbed U.K. dance charts, and introduced Staton to a new audience: electronic dance music fans. Younger artists, like Florence + the Machine and Joss Stone, later recorded popular covers of the song, and Staton became a sought-after touring attraction in the U.K., playing the Glastonbury Festival — which draws upwards of 200,000 spectators — in 2008 and 2010.

Thoughts of mortality intruded in 2018, when a breast cancer diagnosis forced Staton to cancel a planned tour. Within a year, she’d added cancer to the long list of obstacles that she’d overcome, and spoke openly of feeling grateful to still be among the living. “Every time I look around,” she says, “another one of my friends is gone.” She has continued to write and record — new Americana gospel album, Roots, is planned for a fall release — and squeezed a handful of live appearances in between several waves of the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, she’s mulling a U.K. farewell tour.

Rainge-Briggs, of the National Museum of African American Music, argues that Staton’s career has added up to something more significant than album sales or hits. “Her music is a perfect example of someone saying, ‘Guess what? I’m not perfect. I’m not pretending to be perfect,’” she says. “Her career is a demonstration of redemption. Her imperfections are an example of her growth.”

When pressed, Staton acknowledges that it might be nice to have a little more recognition for all that she — a country girl from Alabama — managed to accomplish through sheer determination. Perhaps a lifetime achievement award from the Grammys, an honor they’ve bestowed on many of the performers she once considered peers. Maybe a movie, given all of the cinematic drama that punctuates her story.

But if none of those things happen — well, that would be fine, too. Because Candi Staton still has her voice. Sometimes, in conversation, the mention of an old song will trigger an almost involuntary reaction. A melody will rise up from somewhere deep inside, and she’ll start to sing, all of her pain and joy circling around the words like growth rings on an oak tree. “It is what it is,” she says. “We’re all born for a reason. A purpose. Some of us meet that purpose, and some of us never find it. And I found it.”

***

***

David Gambacorta is a writer at large at the Philadelphia Inquirer. He’s also written for Esquire, The Ringer and Politico Magazine.

Editor: Krista Stevens

Copy Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

Fact checker: Lisa Whittington-Hill

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Lisa Whittington-Hill | Longreads | June 2022 | 16 minutes (4,445 words)

Jennifer Finch is smiling, but she’s clearly frustrated. “Everywhere I go, everywhere I turn, I see this fucking face,” says the bassist for Los Angeles band L7. “Frankly, I’m sick of it.” Finch is holding a copy of the January 1992 issue of Spin, which happens to be Nirvana’s first national magazine cover; the face in question belongs to her ex-boyfriend, Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl.

The scene appears in the 2016 documentary L7: Pretend We’re Dead, but the sentiment dates back much farther. When the magazine was published, Finch and her L7 bandmates were in the studio recording their third album, Bricks Are Heavy. L7 had formed in 1985, two years before Nirvana was in bloom, and the two bands had toured England together in 1990. Yet, with Nirvana’s breakthrough 1991 album, Nevermind, Grohl, bassist Krist Novoselic, and lead singer/guitarist Kurt Cobain had seemingly gone from obscurity to ubiquity overnight: Nevermind was selling upwards of 300,000 copies a week, and was about to knock Michael Jackson’s Dangerous off the top of the Billboard charts.

Nevermind was not the only seminal grunge album released in 1991. Pearl Jam’s Ten hit the record store at your local mall in August 1991 and Soundgarden’s Badmotorfinger in October. By the time L7’s Bricks Are Heavy was released in April 1992, grunge had exploded: You could buy Soundgarden singer Chris Cornell’s look at your local Walmart, rusty cage not included. But as Finch and her bandmates would find, not everyone in the grunge scene was granted the same success; despite glowing reviews, Bricks Are Heavy topped out at #160 on the Billboard 200.

From the return of jelly shoes to the pop culture nostalgia of Showtime’s Yellowjackets, the ’90s are back. Chuck Klosterman’s latest essay collection, The Nineties: A Book, chronicles what the author calls “the last decade with a fully formed and recognizable culture of its own”; Vice’s series The Dark Side of the 90s revisits the Gulf War, the Viper Room, and the dating history of Counting Crows lead singer Adam Duritz (a Gen X Pete Davidson if ever there was one). And with 30th anniversaries this summer of albums from Sonic Youth’s Dirty to Screaming Trees’ Sweet Oblivion — not to mention the Singles soundtrack, which 30 years ago this week packaged the “Seattle sound” for a mainstream audience — our desire to revisit and re-consume the decade that brought us Baywatch, Beavis and Butt-Head, and Beanie Babies shows no signs of slowing down.

But not everything is cause for celebration. While the alternative and grunge scene of the early to mid-’90s celebrated opposition to the mainstream, it was also a very white, very male scene that downplayed the significant contributions of artists who didn’t fit that description. Female bands like 7 Year Bitch and Babes in Toyland sold significantly fewer records than their male counterparts, generated fewer bidding wars, and received less press. When not ignored, women were objectified by the media and marginalized by an industry that treated them like a fad, promoting only a handful of female musicians and only for a brief period. As we revisit the decade that gave us grunge, rather than be all apologies, it’s the perfect time to reexamine, reevaluate, and rewrite history — especially for the women who made up the scene.

* * *

“If you look at any history of that time, you’d think almost no women were making music,” Gretta Harley told Seattle magazine in 2013 of Seattle’s early grunge music scene. Harley, a punk rock guitarist, had moved to Seattle in 1990 just as grunge was changing the city and putting it on the musical map; she formed the group Maxi Badd (which would become the Danger Gens) with drummer Dave Parnes and bassist Tess. Lotta. But when Nevermind’s 20th anniversary in 2011 prompted a rush of tributes to Nirvana and its influential album, she realized that none of them accurately reflected the Seattle scene — or women’s role in it.

That inspired Harley, along with actress and writer Sarah Rudinoff and playwright Elizabeth Kenny, to write the 2013 play These Streets. “We started looking at the books that were written by different authors, and the women were absent, almost completely absent,” said Harley.

“[W]hen a 250-page history of Seattle’s rock heyday … only includes a page and a half on the women of the era — calling it ‘The Female Presence’ — something feels … wrong,” wrote Laura Dannen in a preview of the play for Seattle Met magazine. “Like a female guitarist was some kind of elusive Bengal tiger, caught only briefly on tape.” These Streets explored the experiences of women in grunge in the late ’80s and early ’90s, drawing on interviews with more than 40 women in the scene. From Carrie Akre of Hammerbox and Kim Warnick of The Fastbacks to Lazy Susan’s Kim Virant and 7 Year Bitch’s Valerie Agnew and Elizabeth Davis-Simpson, These Streets shined a light on the contributions that so many histories had ignored.

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Even those who managed to break through to wider renown, though, found themselves consistently undervalued. Like Nirvana, L7 had released one of indie label Sub Pop’s Singles of the Month, 1990’s “Shove/Packin’ a Rod.” After its second studio album, 1990’s Smell the Magic, was also released on Sub Pop, the band signed to Warner Bros. subsidiary Slash Records — for what is described in the documentary Pretend We’re Dead as a “shit deal” — at a time when major labels were scrambling to sign any band with a guitar and proximity to the Space Needle. Even when L7 finally got its own Spin cover in 1993, the compliment was backhanded: Next to the band’s photo was the coverline “More Than Babes in Boyland.”

The Spin coverline embodied everything L7 was against. It wasn’t just sexist; it also manufactured a rivalry between L7 and Babes in Toyland, another female band at the time, flattening both to a girl-group trope. L7 often avoided group interviews and refused to be part of “women in music” special issues because the band felt they deserved their own article and didn’t want to be classified by their gender. “When we were naming our band, we did not want a gender-specific name,” said singer and guitarist Donita Sparks in a 2012 Spin oral history. “I wanted people to listen to our music and go, ‘Who the fuck is this?’ I didn’t really want to be lumped in with anybody. Us being women wasn’t a political platform.”

The uneven treatment of women in the scene was even more pronounced if you were a woman of color making music. Tina Bell, a Black woman, formed Seattle band Bam Bam with her husband, guitarist Tommy Martin, in 1983; she was the frontwoman and principal songwriter. Bam Bam would perform with The Melvins, Soundgarden, and Alice in Chains, and were named KCMU/KEXP’s “Best NW Band.” Its 1984 EP Villains (Also Wear White) preceded Green River’s album Come on Down, often regarded as the first grunge album. Yet, while Bell is often referred to as the “Godmother of Grunge,” she’s also left out of most histories of the scene.

“This modern genre’s sound was, in many ways, molded by a Black woman,” wrote Stephanie Siek in a 2021 Zora article about Bell’s legacy. “The reason she is mostly unknown has everything to do with racism and misogyny. Looking back at the beginnings of grunge, with the preconception that ‘everybody involved’ was White and/or male, means ignoring the Black woman who was standing at the front of the line.”

Bell eventually left the band and quit music; tragically, she died in 2012, shortly before a scheduled reunion of the band. However, when Bam Bam is referenced in accounts of the scene, it is sometimes referred to as a three-piece, removing Bell and her legacy completely. When she does receive a mention, it’s often in the context of Kurt Cobain being rumored to be a fan of Bell and the band. (Cobain had discovered them while he was a roadie for The Melvins.)

Female musicians are often granted legitimacy based on their proximity to more successful, male musicians, and Bell is no exception. If you were a woman making music and Cobain name-checked you, you were automatically cool. (Sadly, Courtney Love remains one of the only exceptions to this rule.) “In general, in most histories, women’s participation has been disregarded from the get-go or cut from the narrative after-the-fact,” wrote Jen B. Larson in a tribute to Bell on the website Please Kill Me. “Though women have played key roles in musical innovations over time, we tend to notice them in hindsight, and only if dedicated crate-diggers are meticulous in excavating the past. The motif is especially apparent for Black women.”

* * *

For a 2016 issue celebrating the 25th anniversary of grunge, British music magazine Q published a special package that included insiders and musicians talking about the scene. Not surprisingly, the piece features no women. Hole’s 1994 record Live Through This is the only entry from a band featuring women on a list of the 25 most influential grunge albums. Mojo’s “Early Grunge Classics” and Revolver’s “Flyin’ the Flannel” both feature no entries by women. There are also no women on Rolling Stone’s readers’ poll of the best grunge albums of all time.

When the media covered women in the grunge and alternative scene, it treated them like a genre unto itself. This genre, though, received almost no in-depth profiles or features. Instead, women were given the listicle treatment: an easy way for an outlet to appear to cover female musicians, without the hard work of devoting actual words and thought to them. From “5 Female-Led Bands That Channelled the Fearless Ferocity of Grunge” to “10 Essential Alternative ’90s Bands Fronted by Women You Should Know,” the facile format signaled that a magazine didn’t deem their work or musical contribution worthy of serious consideration.

If music and talent weren’t the subject of the listicle, you can probably guess what was: appearance and sex appeal. In 2011, SF Weekly somehow managed to use a listicle to objectify women and celebrate male bands at the same time: “As Nirvana’s Nevermind turns 20 this week, and Pearl Jam celebrates two decades of being a band, we think it’s time to look back on the top 10 hottest women in grunge,” reads the introduction to “The Top 11 Hottest Women in Grunge.”

As for the lists themselves, they often highlighted artists who had little in common except their gender. Diffuser.fm’s “10 Best Female Rockers of the ’90s” includes L7’s Donita Sparks, Björk, and Juliana Hatfield — all women, yes, but all women making quite different music. (Garbage and Gwen Stefani on the same list? Why not! They both wrote songs with “Girl” in the title.) Not only do listicles reduce gender to a genre, but they also pit women against each other as they compete for the number one spot, or any spot at all. There are already too many competitive situations for women in music; we didn’t need a Spin top 10 to fuel yet another.

And then there were the “women in music” packages and special issues. These may have devoted more space to the acts in question, but they again flattened these women into a single monolithic group. “The all-women’s issue. The women in rock. This ghetto that they put us in. You get the one issue a year. People always compare us to bands with female singers. Not that we don’t love those bands, but it seems so narrow-minded to me,” said former Sleater-Kinney drummer Janet Weiss in an interview with Broad City co-creators Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson.

“Women in music” issues reached their tragic peak in 1997. First came Spin’s “The Girl Issue,” the cover of which featured Fiona Apple alongside the headline, “She’s Been a Bad, Bad Girl.” Inside, the accompanying profile included the line, “Fiona Apple is a pop star trapped in the body of a pretty teenage girl.” (The profile seems unable to stop reminding readers of Apple’s gender, comparing her to other female musicians and repeatedly talking about her looks and “sexy and girlish” outfits.) Not to be outdone, Rolling Stone published its own “Girl Issue” later that year, with a cover featuring the random-seeming combination of Madonna, Courtney Love, and Tina Turner. Magazines thought they were celebrating women, without realizing that the very nature of the celebration accomplished exactly the opposite. Seattle alt-weekly The Stranger punctured the tradition perfectly with its satirical “men who rock” special issues in 2012 and 2015 — complete with sexy-pose photoshoots and inane interview questions.

When women in the ’90s received coverage, interview questions focused exclusively on the idea that a woman making music was a novelty. Women were repeatedly asked to recount tales of the sexism they experienced, feed into fake feuds with other female musicians, or talk about their looks, fashion choices, or who they were dating — all things that would rarely be asked of a man, except maybe in a parody issue of The Stranger. “When you’re a woman working in a man’s world, your gender is acknowledged constantly,” wrote Jillian Mapes in a Flavorwire piece on women rock musicians. “At times it can feel empowering, this sense of taking up richly deserved space in a man’s world. But at a certain point, gender-defined underdog status and tokenization grows old, even if it’s positioned as a necessary breath of fresh air in the press or among fans.”

When not objectifying them (“Spanks for the Memory,” reads the headline of a 1990 Melody Maker piece on Babes in Toyland), coverage focused on female musicians’ behavior over their music. Like L7’s Donita Sparks throwing her used tampon into the audience at 1992’s Reading Festival after the crowd hurled mud at the band. Or Alanis Morissette talking about going down on a Full House cast member in a theater. Or anything Courtney Love did. (“Love ripped through the grunge scene like a hurricane, marrying its prom king and becoming as notorious for her public antics as for her music,” reads the entry for Love on Diffuser.fm’s list of the “10 Best Female Rockers of the ’90s,” which echoed most of the pieces written about her in that decade.)

* * *

In the early ’90s, grunge was often associated with riot grrrl, the name taken by Olympia, Washington’s underground feminist movement. On the surface, the two scenes took a similar form. Both originated in the Pacific Northwest, had their roots in punk, and shared a DIY ethic. Grunge and riot grrrl bands often played shows together, signed to the same record labels, and formed friendships.

But not everyone agreed with the affiliation. “There was a sexist shock-value imagery with grunge,” said Allison Wolfe, a member of riot grrrl act Bratmobile, in a 2021 Guardian piece on the 30th anniversary of the record label Kill Rock Stars. “Especially from Sub Pop bands. It didn’t speak to us. I’m not that naked woman on the cover with blood dripping all over me [in Dwarves’ 1990 single “Drug Store”]. It was about forging a path to have a voice and knowing even if we didn’t have the musical skills that we had something to say that would be more interesting than half the shit these guys are saying.”

Female musicians were often labeled by journalists as riot grrrls, regardless of whether they self-identified as such. Not only was it lazy and disrespectful, but it highlighted the limited vocabulary and reference points that existed when talking about women making music. “Riot grrrl” became a catch-all to easily categorize and compartmentalize women.

Meanwhile, riot grrrl bands routinely met ridicule and dismissal from the media. Rarely, if ever, did journalists or critics engage with the substance of the music. Instead, articles focused on the physical appearances and fashion choices of the girls or wondered whether Chelsea Clinton would become a riot grrrl when she moved to Washington. A Melody Maker piece suggested that “the best thing any Riot Grrrl could do is to go away and do some reading and I don’t mean a grubby little fanzine,” and Newsweek called riot grrrl “feminism with a loud happy face dotting the ‘i.’”

“I think it was deliberate that we were made to look like we were just ridiculous girls parading around in our underwear,” said Corin Tucker, of Sleater-Kinney and Heavens to Betsy, in an interview for Riot Grrrl Retrospectives, a 1999 video project by Seattle’s Museum of Pop Culture. “They refused to do serious interviews with us, they misprinted what we had to say; they would take our articles and our fanzines and our essays and take them out of context. We wrote a lot about sexual abuse and sexual assault for teenagers and young women. I think those are really important concepts that the media never addressed.”

Nowhere was there any mention of the musicians who had influenced riot grrrl acts like Bratmobile and Bikini Kill. It was as though Kim Gordon had never co-founded Sonic Youth, as though The Slits had never existed. Women making music were treated like a novelty — each group of female musicians treated like the first, their history erased and their connection to the future denied. “There were a lot of very important ideas that I think the mainstream media couldn’t handle, so it was easier to focus on the fact that these were girls who were wearing barrettes in their hair or writing ‘slut’ on their stomach,” said Sharon Cheslow, who formed Chalk Circle, Washington D.C.’s first all-female punk band in 1981, in another Riot Grrrl Retrospectives interview. Riot grrrl eventually declared a media boycott in 1992 over growing concerns that their messages were being misinterpreted, diluted, and trivialized.

And just as with “women in music” special issues, female artists were seen as disposable and automatically compared to each other. “PJ Harvey‘s record-breaking contributions to indie rock are redoubtable, but rock’s one-in one-out policy for women has made her an inescapable comparison for any rock woman standing alone with a six string and toe pressed to a distortion pedal,” wrote Charlotte Richardson Andrews in a 2012 Guardian piece.

One-in and one-out also applied to radio airplay and concert bills. If there was already a woman on a festival lineup or in radio rotation in the ’90s, there was resistance to adding another. I remember attending Lollapalooza in 1992, disappointed there was only one band featuring women on the bill — British band Lush — especially because the festival prided itself on its diversity. (I also accidentally locked myself in a port-a-potty and missed all of Pearl Jam’s performance, which has led to a lifelong fear of both the band and portable toilets, but that’s a different piece.)

Lilith Fair launched in 1997 to counter the lack of women on festival lineups and offer support and exposure for female artists — not to mention all the Biore pore strips audiences wanted. The event grossed $16 million its first year, making it the top-grossing touring festival, but not everyone was happy. “The latest trend in rock and roll: women,” announced ABC News’s Elizabeth Vargas, opening a segment about Lilith Fair. Sleater-Kinney declined to join Lilith Fair; Garbage’s Shirley Manson, among others, criticized it for its lack of diversity. Lilith Fair also helped contribute to the misbelief that music made by women had to be personal, had to be polite, and had to include an acoustic guitar. It also reinforced the idea that women’s music is only for women audiences.

Lilith Fair represented a more mainstream, commercial approach to feminism than the political action and activism of the riot grrrls, but both contributed to the idea of the ’90s as an encouraging and supportive utopia for female-fronted acts which gave the illusion of gender equality in music. While women musicians achieved undeniable success during the decade, Revolution Girl Style was far from over.

* * *

Grunge benefitted from its connection to riot grrrrl because it made the male-dominated scene seem more feminist, more progressive, and less sexist than it was. When women took Sharpies to their skin, the media dismissed them; when Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder did it, it somehow became cool and subversive. During a performance of the band’s song “Porch” on their 1992 MTV Unplugged show, Vedder wrote “PRO-CHOICE!!!” on his arm with a black marker; later that year, he appeared on Saturday Night Live wearing a T-shirt with a wire hanger and a pro-choice slogan on it. He also penned a 1992 op-ed on abortion for Spin. The mainstream media could handle politics in its music — as long as it was men doing the talking.

Whereas riot grrrl’s anger had scared journalists, resulting in misrepresentation and mockery, Vedder was allowed to be angry. “All the Rage,” read the cover of Time’s 1993 issue about how this new breed of angry male rockers was expressing the “passions and fears of a generation.” Both Vedder and Kurt Cobain declined to be interviewed for the story, but Vedder ended up on the cover anyway. This trend continued through the ’90s: men being lauded for their anger while women like Alanis Morissette were policed for it, accused of manufacturing outrage as a marketing strategy. Female musicians like Morissette had to be just angry enough to sell records, but not angry enough to risk offending anyone.

But male grunge bands also promoted a progressive, feminist stance, and changed the tone from the machismo and sexism associated with Mötley Crüe and other ’80s bands. They helped to bring gender politics to the mainstream, and regularly challenged sexism in their song lyrics, interviews, and videos. They championed feminist organizations, causes, and musicians, helping to bring them to a larger, more mainstream audience. I’d grown up watching ’80s hair-metal bands on MTV; male musicians promoting the idea that women were something other than bangable flesh trophies blew me away more than a RATT video’s pyrotechnics ever could.

In interviews, Cobain regularly supported and name-checked female musicians, from Shonen Knife to The Breeders, expanding the audience for these artists. In some cases, as with L7, these bands had been making music for longer than Nirvana, but unfortunately, it took a man championing them to bring the girls to the (fore)front. Cobain and Vedder also supported female musicians by bringing them on tour or joining them on the bill for benefits in support of a variety of causes, including Rock for Choice and Rock Against Rape. I remember a male friend praising Vedder for organizing Rock for Choice. He assumed the singer was responsible for it after he saw a picture in a music magazine of Vedder sporting a shirt for the benefit concerts. (He didn’t; that was L7 and Sue Cummings, a senior editor for LA Weekly.) Bands from Rage Against the Machine to Mudhoney played Rock for Choice concerts during the ’90s and while Vedder wearing the shirt helped to raise the cause’s profile, it also overshadowed the important work L7, and other female musicians did.

What’s often overlooked, and important to remember, is that female musicians influenced Cobain’s feminist message — notably Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna and Tobi Vail — as did the the formative time Nirvana spent in Olympia. Cobain’s activism didn’t come from nowhere; it came from his proximity to, and association, with riot grrrl. “From the very beginning, he was aware of the gender issue,” said NPR music critic Ann Powers in a Daily Beast story about Nirvana’s legacy. Cobain may have promoted Bikini Kill and riot grrrl in interviews, but he wouldn’t have had his feminism without them.

This year marks the 28th anniversary of Cobain’s death. Each year the music media commemorates the occasion with tribute articles, think pieces, and reminders of all the conspiracy theories that still surround Cobain’s death. “10 Years After His Tragic Death: Why The Man And His Music Still Matter” reads the cover of an April 2004 issue of Spin. The “special collector’s issue” includes a history of grunge, a list of 30 essential Nirvana recordings and other media, and musicians from The Strokes to Soundgarden sharing their memories of Cobain. Similar tributes mark the anniversary of the deaths of Soundgarden frontman Chris Cornell, who died by suicide in May 2017, and Alice in Chains singer Layne Staley, who died of a drug overdose in April 2002.

Sadly, the deaths of female musicians don’t receive nearly the same level of media attention. The anniversary of the death of Mia Zapata, lead singer of The Gits, who was murdered and brutally raped in July 1993, deserves more tributes. The deaths of Hole bassist Kristen Pfaff, who died two months after Cobain, or 7 Year Bitch lead guitarist Stefanie Sargent, who died in 1992, should also not be overshadowed by the deaths of male musicians.

Deaths are not the only occasions that are marked. When Nevermind turned 30 last year, the anniversary was marked by special commemorative issues of Uncut and Mojo. There was a 30th anniversary reissue box set, online tributes, social media shoutouts, and an endless-seeming parade of dudes telling you where they were the first time they heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Similar tributes happened with the album’s 10- and 20-year anniversaries. When we think about nostalgia, it’s important to notice whose legacy is remembered, who gets the anniversary covers, whose cultural significance is celebrated — and whose isn’t.

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Grunge is far from the only musical scene to marginalize women’s contributions. In a 2014 Guardian article about the punk scene’s misogyny, writer Charlotte Richardson Andrews argued that women had to fight for visibility in a scene where men held all the power. Women were too often excluded from an industry that only promoted “the lucky few to whom industry gatekeepers deign to give a platform.” The piece could just have easily been describing grunge.

Or hip-hop, for that matter. Starting in the late ’80s, female hip-hop artists like Queen Latifah and MC Lyte achieved undeniable success. In 1988, Salt-N-Pepa’s “Push It” was one of the first hip-hop singles to be nominated for a Grammy. Latifah’s most successful album, 1993’s Black Reign, was certified gold, and its Grammy-winning single “U.N.I.T.Y.” explicitly celebrated women’s rights. Their music defined the genre as they spoke out against assault, discrimination, and misogyny. But like women in grunge, this perspective didn’t receive as much attention as it should have: Songs like “Ladies First” existed within a male-dominated genre and culture where, as Jeff Chang wrote in Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, “scantily-clad dancers seemed in endless supply, while women rappers were scarce.” At least in grunge, Eddie Vedder wasn’t pulling a 2 Live Crew and singing about someone blowing him, as much as he may have wanted Ticketmaster to.

In 1999, Billboard named pop singer Mariah Carey the artist of the decade. For those who had grown up with grunge, it seemed a fate worse than whatever Y2K had planned. By then, grunge bands were long gone, replaced by mass-produced boy bands and pop princesses, as well as the burning (literally) mess that was Woodstock ’99. Riot grrrl’s girl-power message had been co-opted and commercialized to sell pencil cases and baby tees. Smelling like Teen Spirit had been replaced by actual teen spirit as preteen girls flocked to The Backstreet Boys, *NSYNC, and The Spice Girls.

But, thankfully, yesterday’s pioneers refuse to stay in the background. After six studio albums, L7 went on indefinite hiatus in 2001 — only to reform in 2014 and tour with its original lineup for the first time in 20 years. Later this year, they’ll tour again to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Bricks Are Heavy. Sleater-Kinney, who released their 10th studio album Path of Wellness in 2021, also returns to the stage this summer. Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon is back with This Women’s Work: Essays on Music, an anthology she edited with music journalist Sinead Gibson. “‘What’s it like to be a girl in a band?’ The often-repeated question throughout my career as a musician made me feel disrupted, a freak or that we are all the same,” wrote Gordon in an Instagram post promoting the book. “I once asked my boyfriend what it was like to have a penis? To me they are sort of equivalent questions. Hopefully, this book begins an unravelling of this myth that if you’re a female musician you are ready-made, easily digestible.”

It’s long overdue.

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Lisa Whittington-Hill is the Publisher of This Magazine. Her writing has appeared in Longreads, The Walrus, Hazlitt, and more. She is currently writing a book for the 33 1/3 music series on Beauty and the Beat by The Go-Go’s to be published in 2023. Girls, Interrupted, her collection of essays on how pop culture is failing women, will be published by Montreal’s Vehicule Press in Fall 2023. You can find her on Twitter at @nerdygirly.

Editor: Peter Rubin

Copy Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

Fact checker: J. Patrick Patterson

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Anne Thériault | Longreads | June 2022 | 29 minutes (8,006 words)

From the notorious to the half-forgotten, Queens of Infamy, a Longreads series by Anne Thériault, focuses on world-historical women of centuries past.

If you love Queens of Infamy, consider becoming a Longreads member.

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In the late summer of 1326, a small mercenary army gathered in Dordrecht, Holland, preparing to cross the North Sea and invade England. This in and of itself wasn’t all that unusual — from the Romans to the Vikings to the Normans, it seems like all of the European historical heavyweights wanted a piece of that green and pleasant land. I mean, I get it! It’s a classic case of those itchy Julius Caesar fingers: A man sees an island, and he wants to take it. What set this case apart was that the person leading the army wasn’t a king or a prince or a red-headed upstart duke, but a woman who was already the queen of England — had been queen, in fact, for nearly two decades. And the king she wanted to depose wasn’t some usurper who had unjustly taken the throne, but rather Edward II, her husband and the father of her four children. As she stepped onto that boat, the 31-year-old queen would set into motion a sequence of events that would leave her forever remembered as Isabella the She-Wolf of France.

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The French social scene of 1308 began with two glittering back-to-back events: the wedding of the future Charles IV of France to Blanche of Burgundy and, a week later, the wedding of his sister Isabella to Edward II of England. With Charles clocking in at 13 years old, and Isabella having just celebrated her 12th birthday, it was a double tween wedding extravaganza! Charles’ new wife, a veritable spinster at the ripe old age of 11, was young but at least age-appropriate. Edward, meanwhile, was nearly twice his child bride’s age — he would turn 24 three months later. Still, it wasn’t exactly an inauspicious start. By all accounts the union of the king and future queen of England was a sumptuous affair, attended by no fewer than eight European monarchs, as well as assorted princes, princesses, and other nobles. For Isabella, who was brightly turned out in robes of blue, gold, scarlet, and yellow and a crown dripping with precious stones, this was the moment she’d been preparing for since she was 4 years old. Isabella of France was likely born in 1295 or early 1296, since most contemporary chroniclers agree that she was 12 years old at her wedding on January 25th, 1308. At the very least, we know that she wasn’t any younger than 12, since that was the minimum age at which someone could marry in the church. Her brothers all have recorded birth dates, naturally, but I guess when royal daughters were born someone just scrawled “fuck, looks like another girl,” in some forgotten journal somewhere.

Isabella was born into the illustrious Capetian dynasty, which had been ruling France since 987 A.D. Her father, Philippe IV, was also known as Philippe le Bel, because along with his many other sterling qualities he was also, apparently, extremely good-looking. It’s always good to have a hot king! Bolsters the national morale and all that. Philippe did a lot of stuff, including various wars, quashing the Knights Templar, and, at one point, arresting the pope. Dante Alighieri referred to him throughout the Divine Comedy as the Plague of France, but that’s just one Italian man’s opinion. Anyway, he certainly had an eventful life.

Isabella’s mother was Joan I of Navarre, a sovereign ruler in her own right, though she left the actual governing of Navarre to various appointees. She and Philippe had grown up together at the French court, and by all accounts they were mutually smitten with each other. One source I read described her as “plump and plain,” but, like, come on, by the time she was 25 she’d already given birth seven times. Let’s cut the woman some slack. Joan died in childbirth when Isabella was just 10 years old, already predeceased by two of her daughters. Only four of Philippe and Isabella’s children lived to adulthood; of those, Isabella was the youngest and the only daughter, and some sources say that her father doted on her especially.

Meanwhile, Isabella’s new husband had never really been close with his own father, Edward I of England, also known as Longshanks and the Hammer of the Scots. For one thing, there was a 45-year age difference between the two and Edward II was raised mostly by his nurse, and for another, Edward I’s legacy was just a lot to live up to. It probably didn’t help that Edward II was the fourth and only surviving son of Edward I and Eleanor of Castile — I feel like after you’ve seen three potential heirs die, it’s kind of hard to get invested in the last one. Like, oh, I guess you’re going to be king. Good luck! Try not to fuck it up too badly.

If Philippe IV was famous for being hot, then one of Edward I’s key personality traits was being so tall that you could climb him like a tree (and many women did). As his second nickname suggests, his other main thing was that he loved going to war with Scotland. Loved it! He’s the one who killed Braveheart! One historian even reported that his dying wish was to have all the flesh boiled off his body so that his bones could be mounted on a standard and brought onto Scottish battlefields. Now that’s commitment to a fault.

EDWARD II: I also did a lot of wars in Scotland

EDWARD II: you could say it was a sort of inheritance my dad left me, along with being really tall

EDWARD II: I didn’t get any fun nicknames, though

EDWARD II: actually, if people did have nicknames for me, I doubt they’d be flattering

EDWARD II: so it’s probably for the best if I don’t know about them

It must have been difficult to grow up in the shadow of a father who basically embodied the medieval ideal of kingship. It didn’t help that the younger Edward had some quirky hobbies: ditching, hedging, and thatching roofs. You know, peasant shit. Edward II’s dream vacation involved slumming it with a bunch of commoners, drinking beer with them and doing some manual labor, followed by a quick dip in the river (swimming just wasn’t a thing in England at the time, so Edward’s fondness for it was seen as further proof of his weirdness). But while all this stuff caused a fair amount of side-eye at court, the thing that people gossiped most about was Edward’s lifelong series of intense, emotionally charged relationships with men that made him behave in seemingly irrational ways.

Was Edward gay? That’s a tough question to answer, especially since medieval England didn’t have the same conception of sexuality as we do now. We do know that, along with his relationships with men, Edward also slept with at least one woman other than his wife, so maybe if he were alive in 21st-century Britain he’d identify as a chaotic bisexual. Or maybe not! This stuff is so tricky to unpack without assigning identities that may or may not be accurate. What is certain is that, whether or not the relationships Edward had with these men were sexual, he loved them and was infatuated with them to the point of self-destruction. What is also certain is that many of his contemporaries believed he was having sexual relationships with these men, and much of the ill-treatment he would receive at the hands of these contemporaries was rooted in homophobia.

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When the king tried to talk to his son about this little misadventure, the younger Edward “uttered coarse and harsh words to him.” The past is a foreign et cetera, but back-talking teenagers are forever. As part of his punishment, the prince was forbidden from seeing Piers, though it wouldn’t be long before the two were back in each other’s orbits. This was the beginning of a pattern that would last the rest of Piers’ life: He and Edward would get up to some shit, the pair would be forcibly separated, Edward would somehow finagle a reconciliation, and then after a brief period of quiet the two would once again get up to some shit.

EDWARD II: eventually my father just straight up exiled Piers to Gascony

EDWARD II: because of “undue intimacy” between us

EDWARD II: I’m sorry, is that a crime in this country now??

EDWARD II: he also forbade me from ever bestowing any titles or lands on Piers

EDWARD II: I wasn’t even allowed to go visit him

EDWARD II: anyway, when my dad died, the first thing I did was bring Piers back to England and make him the Earl of Cornwall

EDWARD II: like, literally, first thing

EDWARD II: less than a month after the old dude kicked it

Five months after his father’s death, Edward sailed to France for his wedding. When the happy couple returned to England on February 7th, 1308, Piers was there waiting for them at the docks. To say that Edward was thrilled to see him would be an understatement — one contemporary account describes the king falling into Piers’ arms and “giving kisses and repeated embraces.”

What did Isabella think of all this? It’s hard to know, since her reaction to meeting Piers went unrecorded. Actually, a lot of things about Isabella went unrecorded — we don’t know what color her hair or eyes were, how tall she was, or really anything about her appearance other than that she was routinely described as beautiful. Edward himself called her Isabeau the Fair (which is a pretty cute nickname, to be honest). And really, what else do you need to know about a woman other than whether she’s hot or not?

Isabella might have found Edward’s behavior strange, but then again she was a 12-year-old arriving in a whole new country — she probably found a lot of things strange. Maybe she took her husband kissing and clinging to his favorite as yet another bit of culture shock. Or maybe she thought it was totally normal! This was, after all, a time when men were much more physically affectionate with each other, and kissing was a common greeting. That being said, the other noblemen gathered at Dover to greet the king and his new bride certainly knew that something was up — for one thing, even if kissing was culturally normalized, there was only one man among them getting kissed. And, of course, these men all knew that Piers had already been sent away from the young king twice. Even if the rumors about Piers had yet to reach Isabella, they would soon.

The coronation was a disaster. For some reason, Edward let Piers plan the whole thing, even though he had no background in event planning (and, after that day, no future in it either). First of all, Piers outdressed everyone in pearl-encrusted robes of imperial purple silk, even though that color was supposed to be reserved for royalty. Then he went ahead and assigned himself the best role in the procession, carrying England’s most sacred relic: the crown of St. Edward the Confessor. But fashion and religious slights aside, the whole thing was just a shitshow. Lack of crowd control led to a wall behind the altar collapsing and killing a knight. The food for the feast arrived hours late, and when it did come it was so badly cooked that it was inedible. Piers seated himself next to the king, a spot that should have belonged to the new queen. But the insult that truly put things over the top for Isabella’s family was the fact that the tapestries on the walls had Edward’s arms next to Piers’ arms, while Isabella’s were conspicuously absent.

PIERS: the whole thing was devastating, to put it mildly

PIERS: here I am, trying to plan this beautiful day for my king

PIERS: and anyone who knows me knows that my passion is pageant planning

PIERS: I was trying to look my best for him

PIERS: trying to publicly redeem myself after that humiliating banishment

PIERS: and some of the stuff that went wrong legitimately wasn’t my fault

PIERS: for one thing, a wall collapsing seems more like a structural issue

PIERS: and of course Edward wanted to sit next to me, his age-appropriate friend

PIERS: what is a grown man going to talk to a little girl about?

PIERS: which horsie in the parade had the prettiest braids in their hair?

PIERS: how to dress your poppet for the pretend ball??

PIERS: please!

PIERS: I’ll admit that the tapestry thing was a touch too far, though

What was Isabella’s reaction to all this? We don’t know, though several contemporary chroniclers noted that several close family members who were present — specifically, two uncles and a brother — were absolutely fuming over the insult. Some accounts even have them storming out of the feast, silk robes and velvet capes a-swirling. While that most likely didn’t happen, it’s still fun to imagine because medievals had the best flouncing clothes. Modernity has its upsides, but it’s hard to make a dramatic exit in jeans and a sweatshirt.

But even if we have no historical record of what Isabella was going through in the wake of her disastrous coronation, she must have felt incredibly hurt and alone. Not that anyone should be too sympathetic to the royals, who live lives of unbelievable wealth and comfort, but it is pretty unhinged to be born into this very public job and have to do that job until you die. Not to belabor this point, but Isabella was 12, an age where everything about life seems excruciatingly embarrassing. I can only imagine what it must have felt like to be sent off to a whole new life, with a new husband who can barely give you the time of day, to live in a new culture whose customs you don’t understand, and then be humiliated in front of everyone who’s anyone.

However, life goes on, and Isabella had little choice but to figure out how to live in a strange royal ménage à trois. At least one contemporary source says that Isabella hated Piers (at first, anyway), but even if she did, there wasn’t much she could do — a prepubescent, foreign-born queen doesn’t exactly wield much institutional power. Edward continued to see Piers frequently, whether his wife liked it or not. Piers continued to further alienate the rest of the English nobility by making up rude nicknames for them (“Sir Burst-Belly” and “The Whoreson” are representative of his sense of humor), while also limiting everyone’s access to the king. Basically, if you wanted a favor or any kind of patronage, you had to go through Piers, and you also had to be ready to pay him for the privilege. Unsurprisingly, the favorite remained extremely unpopular among everyone who wasn’t Edward.

The nobles started intriguing against Piers pretty much immediately after the coronation. When Parliament met in March, almost everyone present demanded another banishment. Edward told them he’d think about it, then granted a bunch of his stepmother’s lands to Piers. Parliament met again at the end of April and renewed their demands. Meanwhile, Isabella’s father, perhaps prompted by complaints from his daughter, sent some spies envoys to make sure that he had an accurate picture of the queen’s life at court.

Eventually, Edward caved and agreed to strip Piers of his title as earl of Cornwall and exile him. Considering that his “exile” involved a cushy appointment as the new lieutenant of Ireland (who, by the way, had viceregal powers), it doesn’t seem like much of a punishment. Isabella flourished while Piers was away, traveling across the country with her husband as he carried out his official duties. Edward, meanwhile, seemed to finally notice his wife, and began granting her lands and privileges. The queen must have hoped that she’d finally winnowed her marriage down to two people.

PIERS: PSYCH

PIERS: I left Ireland less than a year after arriving there

PIERS: then Edward immediately restored my titles

PIERS: Just picture me sailing to England while Eminem’s Without Me plays in the background

PIERS: CORNWALL’S BACK, TELL A FRIEND

The barons were extremely chill about this development and decided to just live and let live when it came to the king’s favorite. Kidding! Piers’ return pushed the country to the brink of civil war. A bunch of barons calling themselves the Lords Ordainers planned — with the backing of Parliament — to come up with a bunch of regulations curtailing the royal abuse of power. One of these barons was the earl of Lancaster, who happened to be Isabella’s uncle and Edward’s first cousin and would prove to be an enormous thorn in the king’s side. Edward was not thrilled about the regulations, called Ordinances, but Parliament basically told him that if he didn’t accept them, he’d be overthrown.

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Backed into a corner, Edward decided that now was a great time to start a military campaign against Scotland. Everyone knows that wars are great for the economy, plus if you’re a guy that everyone is accusing of being gay and corrupt, it’s good branding to look like you’re following the footsteps of your strong, masculine, extremely heterosexual father. Oh also Piers was going to come too.

The campaign was a disaster, at least in part because most of the nobles who were pissed at Edward refused to join in. It’s cool to let your own commoners die in battle because of petty infighting! Meanwhile, Robert the Bruce, king of Scotland, was up there reaping the rewards of England’s inability to get their shit together. Thanks, Ordainers!

Things continued to not go well for Edward. That winter, the earl of Lincoln died, which was a problem for the king since the earl had been one of the few moderate voices in Parliament and had managed to somewhat control the Ordainers. After that, the shit really hit the fan. The Ordainers finally completed and presented their list of 41 Ordinances, and chief among them was that Piers would be exiled again. Edward, never one to properly read a room, said that he’d agree to the rest of the Ordinances as long as Piers could stay. The thing about bargaining, though, is that you have to offer something of equal value in order to get what you want. The king had nothing to offer and everyone knew it.

Piers left England on November 3rd, then snuck back in, possibly as soon as late November. Certainly by early 1312, Piers and Edward had been reunited. I’m not sure how these chuckleheads thought this was going to play out, but obviously it didn’t end well.

ROBERT THE BRUCE: Edward even asked me at one point if Piers could come stay with me in Scotland

ROBERT THE BRUCE: I’m sorry, but weren’t you trying to invade my country last year?

ROBERT THE BRUCE: and now you want a favor from me?

ROBERT THE BRUCE: ok, bud, good chat

Meanwhile, Isabella turned 16 and, just a few months later, found out she was pregnant.

What was the Queen up to during all these Piers shenanigans? Mostly just queen stuff, like, patronages and whatever, plus publicly supporting Edward and his doomed quest to keep one hot man in the country. But while Isabella might not have been able to speak out against her husband’s antics — assuming that was even something she wanted to do — she was in a better position than she’d been in a few years before. Not only was she older and more experienced but, most importantly, she was carrying what everyone hoped would be the heir to the English throne. Four years into her role as England’s queen, Isabella was finally ready to step into the spotlight.

Four years into her role as England’s queen, Isabella was finally ready to step into the spotlight.

But first there was the whole Piers issue to resolve, which Edward did by fleeing from the Ordainers with the queen and his favorite. Early in the journey they were all traveling together, but later the two men ditched the pregnant Isabella, either because they were worried about her safety or because her household was moving too slowly (this wasn’t exactly a high-speed chase, since everyone involved had an entire staff of servants plus carts and carts of supplies). Anyway, eventually there was a siege, Piers was (predictably) captured, then tossed in a dungeon until his jailers could decide what to do with him.

EDWARD: so they had a little mock trial

EDWARD: where Piers wasn’t even allowed to speak in his own defense

EDWARD: then they took him out into the road and ran him through with a sword

EDWARD: I’ve seen animals slaughtered with more dignity

EDWARD: they called it an execution, but for what crime?

EDWARD: me not wanting to follow their made-up rules?

EDWARD: rules that let them arbitrarily exile people they don’t like?

EDWARD: no wonder the rest of Europe thinks we’re a barbarian backwater

Edward was devastated, and would grieve the loss of his favorite for the rest of his life, but Piers’ death did have a stabilizing effect on the country. For one thing, the Ordainers had gotten what they wanted, more or less. For another, all the nobles who weren’t part of that core group of Lords Ordainers thought that what had happened was, frankly, super fucked up. As a result, the king enjoyed far more support than he’d had since he’d come to the throne.

His image also got a boost from Isabella’s pregnancy, since that helped dispel some of the rumors about his sexuality, plus a royal baby is always good for PR.

By the end of 1312, Isabella was 17 and finally settling into some kind of normalcy. With Piers out of the picture, the queen seemed to come into her own, managing a large household, doing all her official queen stuff, and even occasionally advising her husband (to be fair, he needed all the advice he could get). Edward, to his credit, seemed to dote on his wife even as he mourned Piers’ death. Things weren’t perfect — one historian describes Edward’s court as a “disorderly hotbed of jealousies, intrigues and tensions,” which sounds like it would be fun for maybe a week and then get very old very fast — but they were stable. Which might be why he and Isabella decided to go to France in the spring of 1313.

Isabella and Edward’s trip to France went fine, except that a tent that they were sleeping in caught fire. Edward bravely scooped up his wife and carried her out, though she suffered burns on her arms which troubled her for several months. One contemporary chronicler noted that the king and queen of England were completely naked when they came out of the tent, which must have been a titillating sight. But other than being That Time When The Royal Couple Almost Burned To Death After Doing It, this trip to France is best known for allegedly being the time when Isabella sowed the seeds of the Tour de Nesle Affair, an event which would help speed the demise of her family’s entire dynasty. Whoops! Here are the facts of the situation: Isabella had three brothers, all of whom were married. At some point it was discovered that two of her sisters-in-law were cheating on their husbands with a pair of Norman knights, and the third sister-in-law knew about this and was somehow aiding and abetting. Isabella’s father found out and shit went very sideways for the wives and their boyfriends. The knights were castrated and then, according to various sources, either drawn and quartered, flayed alive, or broken on the wheel and then hanged. All three women went to horny jail, though one of them was eventually pardoned.

Facts aside, here is the rumor that dogged Isabella for the rest of her life: During her time in France, she allegedly gave some cute purses to her sisters-in-law after watching a “satirical puppet show” with them. Later that year, Isabella noticed a pair of knights holding those same purses at a dinner in London. She apparently came to several conclusions from this: Purses are both genderless and useful, and also her sisters-in-law had slept with these knights and then gave them these purses to remember them by. So the queen called up her father and told him that his daughters-in-law were giant sluts. Isabella’s alleged motive was to get rid of all these potential royal baby-making machines and clear the way to the French throne for her own children. This makes absolutely no sense, since a) Isabella’s children were not in line for the French throne and b) she had no way of knowing that all three of her brothers would die without any surviving male children. It was one of those stories that gained traction later, when there was a succession crisis in France and this narrative seemed to prove certain ugly things about the English queen’s character, but when looked at closely it doesn’t hold any water.

Meanwhile, things were chugging along in England. Edward cycled through a few new favorites, but none of them held his attention the way Piers had. In the summer of 1314, he decided to start yet another military campaign in Scotland, apparently forgetting that just two years earlier he’d been begging the Scottish king to give sanctuary to his favorite. Not sure if you’ve ever heard of a little battle called Bannockburn, but it was an absolute disaster for the English. Edward left home at the head of an enormous army and returned to England in a fishing boat. It was another public humiliation in a long line of public humiliations and reignited some of the tensions between him and the Lords Ordainers.

If Edward hoped that 1315 would be a better year, he was sadly mistaken. Heavy rains and flooding led to poor crops and drowned livestock, which in turn led to widespread famine. Obviously, this did nothing to bolster Edward’s popularity, though Isabella did help national morale by popping out another son in 1316, which she and Edward named John. Then in 1318 she gave birth to a daughter, which they named Eleanor after Edward’s mother.

Obviously, this did nothing to bolster Edward’s popularity, though Isabella did help national morale by popping out another son in 1316, which she and Edward named John.

Shortly after Eleanor’s birth, something truly bizarre happened: A man named John showed up claiming to be the real king of England. He said that he was the true son of Edward I, but his ear had been bitten off by a sow when he was an infant, which had led to a royal nurse switching him out with a commoner’s baby, who then grew up to be Edward II. The king thought the whole situation was pretty funny and suggested John be made into a court jester. Isabella was considerably less amused. The matter might have ended there, but John kept trying to convince Edward to fight him in single combat for the throne. In the end, John was put on trial for sedition and hanged. What a weird little interlude.

In late 1318, a man named Hugh Despenser became Edward’s new chamberlain and, shortly thereafter, became Edward’s new favorite. In many ways, their relationship would mirror the one Edward had had with Piers, but there was one crucial difference. While Piers had never seemed to have any goals besides exclusive access to the king (and making up rude nicknames for everyone else), Hugh was power-hungry. Isabella had always more or less graciously endured Piers’ presence, but she would soon come to absolutely loathe Hugh.

By the time 1320 rolled around, Edward was in deep smit, and Hugh was embroiled in some extensive land-grabs in Wales. This resulted in a new set of enemies for the king: the so-called Marcher Lords from the border between England and Wales. They showed up at Parliament to demand Hugh’s exile shortly after Isabella gave birth to her fourth and final child, a girl named Joan.

ISABELLA: Edward refused, of course

ISABELLA: I was terrified that this was going to spiral into another Piers situation

ISABELLA: except worse

ISABELLA: so I got down on my knees and begged Edward to exile Hugh

ISABELLA: on my knees

ISABELLA: in public

ISABELLA: while still recovering from childbirth

ISABELLA: he eventually gave in, but I’ll let you guess whether that exile stuck

Meanwhile, Edward came up with a plan to get rid of the Marcher Lords and, of course, bring Hugh back. He came up with a scheme that involved Isabella going on a “pilgrimage” to Canterbury, but then detouring along her way to stop at Leeds Castle, which belonged to one of the Marchers. The queen demanded that she and her retinue be accommodated at the castle for the night, which was her right. But with the lord of the castle away, his wife refused to admit Isabella since, you know, her husband was in a fight with the king. Isabella’s servants tried to enter the castle by force, and six of them were killed by the castle guards. That was all Edward needed to start an all-out war against the Marchers and end Hugh’s exile.

The war with the Marcher Lords ended in a decisive victory for Edward at the Battle of Boroughbridge. This resulted in the exile, imprisonment, or death of many of Edward’s enemies, including the old earl of Lancaster, whose execution mirrored Piers’ murder all those years before. Edward was finally able to get his revenge, but he didn’t stop at punishing those who had been directly involved in Piers’ death. Instead, he and Hugh went on a years-long campaign to destroy anyone and everyone related to Piers’ killers. Lands and titles were taken and redistributed to Edward’s supporters (especially Hugh), possessions were confiscated, widows and children were imprisoned.

EDWARD: I don’t know who it was that said that the best revenge is living well

EDWARD: but they were wrong

EDWARD: the best revenge is the kind that lines your pockets and makes children cry

EDWARD: THERE, I SAID IT

What did Isabella think of all this? She’d publicly supported Edward throughout his war with the Marcher Lords, as well as helping run the country while he was out on campaigns, giving up a few of her strategically placed castles to aid in the fighting, and, of course, taking part in the ruse that Edward had used to start the war in the first place. Some contemporary chroniclers paint her as being shocked and distressed by the death of her uncle, the earl of Lancaster, but there had been so much enmity between the two of them over the years that it seems equally possible that she was unmoved. What we do know is that around this time there began to be obvious cracks in Edward and Isabella’s relationship, and in just a few years Isabella would blame Hugh for destroying her marriage.

In 1322, Edward launched yet another disastrous military campaign in Scotland. You might be wondering why I’m bothering to mention it — are these failures even noteworthy at this point? This man has two hobbies: toxic relationships and fucking up in Scotland. But this particular failure involved an event that — for Isabella, at least — was a true crossroads. At some point during the conflict, while the queen was staying at Tynemouth Priory, she was in danger of being captured by the Scots and had to flee through pirate-infested waters. It was a calamitous and possibly even deadly escape; one chronicler alleges that a lady-in-waiting died and another went into preterm labor, though these claims can’t be verified. What is certain is that Isabella felt abandoned by her husband, and she said that Hugh had “falsely and treacherously” counseled Edward “to leave my lady the queen in peril of her person.”

After that, Isabella kind of disappeared from the public record for a while. In late 1322, Edward said that she was going on a pilgrimage to “diverse places within the realm,” but it’s not clear if that’s true. It’s equally possible that Edward sent her away to cool off, or that the queen had finally peaced out of her own accord. If I thought my husband had abandoned me to the Scots and/or a dangerous sea voyage, I would probably leave too!

Things continued to go badly for Edward, or, rather, Edward continued to cause things to go badly for himself. In 1323, Isabella’s brother Charles, now the king of France, insisted that Edward come and pay homage for lands that England held in France. Edward was pissed because the French had slowly been encroaching on these lands, so he politely told Charles to go fuck himself. Charles even more politely told Edward that he was free to go fuck his own self, and a small war ensued.

On September 18, 1324, Edward seized Isabella’s lands in Cornwall under the pretext that they were vulnerable to French invasion and thus he had to … protect them I guess? That was already his job as king of the whole country, but that’s fine. He also seized the rest of her lands and castles, even though the majority of them weren’t on the coast. In lieu of her income from these properties, which was what paid for all her household expenses, Edward granted her an allowance. He also removed all the French attendants from the queen’s household (except for her chaplain) and either imprisoned them or forced them to return to France. According to some chroniclers, Edward even appointed Hugh Despenser’s wife as some kind of guardian for Isabella, meant to surveil her communication with her family. All of this was intended to be cruel and humiliating to the queen, and she was sure that Hugh was behind it.

ISABELLA: but then in March of 1325, my husband sent me to France

ISABELLA: to work out some kind of peace with my brother

ISABELLA: kind of a weird move, considering

ISABELLA: I wish I could be pithy and say, “this was his first mistake”

ISABELLA: but, let’s be real, this was more like his one millionth mistake

Six months later, Edward made another enormous blunder: He sent his eldest son, the 12-year-old Edward of Windsor, to join Isabella in France. Although a tentative peace had been reached, England still had to pay those pesky homages for their French lands. Edward should have gone himself, but he knew how unpopular his little regime was and he was worried that someone would assassinate Hugh in his absence (he was especially anxious because a magician named John of Nottingham had recently tried to kill them with magic). The king might have brought his favorite along with him to France, except that Hugh had been banished from that country. So instead, Edward decided to throw his son into the snake pit and hope for the best.

By the end of 1325, it was clear to everyone that Isabella was not returning to England and neither was her son. She didn’t mince words about it either, declaring publicly that “… someone has come between my husband and myself […] and I will not return until this intruder is removed.” What’s less clear is whether or not she was already formulating a plan to invade England and get her husband off the throne.

At some point during Isabella’s time in France, a man named Roger Mortimer entered the picture. He was one of the Marcher Lords, and, though Edward had tried to imprison him, he had somehow managed to escape and flee to the continent. Much has been speculated about Mortimer’s relationship with Isabella, some of it based in fact, but most of it not. For example, the rumors that the two of them had been secretly in love for years, or that Isabella had somehow helped him escape from jail were highly improbable. Same with the popular narrative that Isabella found Edward too effeminate and thus sought gratification in Mortimer’s virile arms — not only is this wildly homophobic, there’s also just no evidence that Isabella was unhappy with her husband before Hugh came onto the scene. These bits of fabrication might provide people with satisfying story arcs — that Isabella and Mortimer had a secret years-long affair right under Edward’s nose, or that the queen was enacting some kind of revenge against her husband by taking her own lover — but real life is rarely that tidy. But whether or not Isabella and Mortimer were sleeping together (and there’s no conclusive evidence that they were), they formed a powerful political alliance.

Edward begged Isabella to come back. He begged her to send their son back. Eventually the pope got involved, writing separately to both Edward and Isabella to try to get them to reconcile. The pope even wrote to Hugh, telling him to back off. Isabella stuck to her guns and said she wouldn’t budge as long as Hugh was in England, adding that she feared he would kill her if she returned. But getting rid of Hugh was the one thing Edward couldn’t, or wouldn’t, do.

POPE JOHN XXII: have you ever watched someone absolutely run their life into the ground for a bad relationship?

POPE JOHN XXII: and you ask them why they’re doing it and they don’t have a real answer?

POPE JOHN XXII: they’ll be like, ‘I know it’s bad, but …’

POPE JOHN XXII: then they just keep doing it?

POPE JOHN XXII: anyway, this was like that, except he was running an entire country into the ground

POPE JOHN XXII: sometimes a person’s choices are just so astonishingly bad that you almost have to admire them

Mortimer wasn’t the only English lord hiding out in France, and soon enough the queen had amassed quite a following. Isabella began planning her invasion, but there was one very obvious sticking point: She was broke. Edward had, of course, cut her off long ago, and without her lands in England, she had no source of income. But the resourceful queen figured out a way around this: She brokered a betrothal between her son and Philippa of Hainault, the daughter of a wealthy Dutch count. Isabella was able to fund a mercenary army with the aid of Philippa’s substantial dowry. On September 7th, 1326, she set off to conquer her own country.

Isabella and her army landed in England just over two weeks later, and didn’t face much resistance as they began zigzagging across the country. Edward had made many enemies in high places, and even the general population was pretty sick of his shit by this time. The king, sensing that things would not go his way, fled London for Wales, at which point the capital descended into chaos. Isabella and Mortimer, meanwhile, were hell-bent on vengeance. When they caught Hugh’s father, another crony of Edward’s, they hanged the elder Despenser and then fed his body to a pack of dogs. Then, on November 16th, 1326, Edward and Hugh were captured in south Wales. The jig was up.

Isabella and her allies gave Hugh a mock trial during which a long, long list of his crimes was read out. He was found guilty on all charges, of course, and sentenced to a brutal execution that involved a dragging through the streets by four horses, being hauled up and down by a noose around his neck, having his penis and testicles cut off, and then being eviscerated. His head was taken to London, where it was displayed on London Bridge, and the rest of his body was dismembered and sent to the four quarters of the realm. That’s what we call hanging, drawing, and quartering, baby!

Edward, now a broken man, was moved to Kenilworth Castle under heavy guard. Isabella, meanwhile, installed herself in Wallingford for the Christmas season. The pope wrote to her several times encouraging her to reunite with her husband, but that wasn’t happening. Invading your spouse’s country and horribly murdering his favorite and a bunch of his friends seems like an obvious relationship deal-breaker.

When Parliament met in early January of 1327, they agreed to depose Edward and crown his 14-year-old son. Isabella would act as regent until Edward III came of age. A deputation was sent to Kenilworth, where a swooning Edward II, dressed all in black, agreed to abdicate the throne and begged his subjects’ forgiveness. What else was he going to do? He was smart (or defeated) enough to know that there was nothing to be gained from fighting back. His enemies had won. All he could do now was try to make sure his eldest son was given his proper inheritance.

Isabella kept up a friendly correspondence with her estranged husband, in spite of the fact that she had just destroyed his life. She wrote to him enquiring after his health, sent him little presents, and said that she wished she could visit him but the “community of the realm” wouldn’t permit it. In fact, Isabella would never see Edward again. On September 21st, 1327, Edward died under mysterious circumstances at Berkeley Castle, where he’d been sent after a foiled plot to free him from Kenilworth.

ISABELLA: people thought that I had him killed, of course

ISABELLA: you’ve probably heard some of the rumors

ISABELLA: like the one about him dying from a burning poker up his …

ISABELLA: you know what, I’m not going to repeat it

ISABELLA: suffice to say that it was as ridiculous as it was disgusting

But these weren’t the only rumors. There were others that said that Edward hadn’t died at all, but had, in fact, escaped, and the body that lay in state for a whole month at St. Peter’s Abbey in Gloucester belonged to someone else entirely. There continued to be sightings of the dead king for years. One man even wrote to Edward III in the late 1330s, saying that his father was living in a hermitage in Italy.

It would be nice if this story ended with Isabella competently running the country until Edward III came of age, a satisfying conclusion after all that she’d gone through to wrest the country out of Hugh Despenser’s grip. But, again, real-life narratives are rarely so convenient or tidy. What actually happened was that during her handful of years as regent, the queen emptied the country’s coffers and enriched Mortimer with lands and goods much in the same way her husband had with Hugh. Much like Edward’s relationship with Hugh, it’s hard to figure out what it was about Mortimer that led Isabella to neglect her country so badly. Did she love him? Was she in on the take? Was there some kind of extortion going on? Had she ever really wanted to save England from her husband and Hugh, or had it all just been petty revenge?

Speaking of revenge, by late 1329 or early 1330, the 17-year-old Edward III was already fomenting his own rebellion. He was tired of his mother’s controlling ways, and felt that she behaved badly toward Philippa, who was now his wife. As for Mortimer, he had started behaving as if he was king, and undermined Edward III at every turn. The final straw for the young king was when Mortimer ordered the execution of his father’s half brother Edmund. With Mortimer picking off everyone who stood between him and royal power, Edward III must have wondered if he was next.

On Friday, October 19th, Isabella was relaxing with Mortimer in her bedchamber at Nottingham Castle when Edward III and a small group of knights burst in. Mortimer was quickly taken prisoner, while Isabella was placed under guard (as her favorite was being dragged, bound and gagged, out of the room, Isabella allegedly cried out, “Fair son, have pity on the gentle Mortimer”). Just over a month later Mortimer (still bound and gagged) was convicted by Parliament of the murder of Edward II and sentenced to death. He was hanged on November 29th. Though his trial and death bore eerie parallels to that of Hugh Despenser, Mortimer was at least spared the whole castration/disembowelment/beheading thing.

Isabella, who was only 35 years old at the time of her downfall, was held under house arrest for two years and then retired to lead a country life. Once the restrictions on her freedom were lifted, she enjoyed traveling around the country, hosting visitors, and doting on her grandchildren. The wayward queen who had once rebelled against her husband and invaded her own country died a quiet death at the age of 63, an apparently contented woman.

In the years after Isabella’s death, popular depictions of her grew increasingly dire. She was portrayed as an unnatural woman, bloodthirsty, out to emasculate all the men around her. When an 18th-century poet combined Christopher Marlowe’s unflattering portrayal of Isabella with the term She-Wolf, which Shakespeare had used to refer to Margaret of Anjou in Henry VI, the nickname stuck. Her image became a two-dimensional caricature of sex-crazed bitch, instead of the complicated person she’d actually been.

It’s impossible now to know why, exactly, Edward and Isabella behaved the way they did. How could Edward not see how harmful his relationships with his favorites, particularly Hugh Despenser, were to the rest of his life? How could Isabella repeat a pattern of behavior that she had so loathed in her husband? How could two people who seemed so fond of each other for most of their marriage treat each other with such cruelty? And yet they did, and on a national stage to boot.

And while it’s tempting to slip into a WOW, WHAT A BADASS WARRIOR QUEEN, GET IT GIRL kind of rhetoric when talking about women like Isabella, what makes stories like hers endure is the fact that beneath all the superlatives is someone who’s profoundly human. Isabella was messy in her personal life. She made bad choices, choices that sometimes irrevocably harmed relationships with people she cared about. She could be selfish and capricious. She could be downright cruel. But she was also brave, resourceful, and, in her own strange way, loyal to a fault.

For all that there is to criticize about Isabella, there’s so much to admire as well. She strategized, launched, and completed a successful military campaign against all odds. With the backing of a relatively small band of soldiers, she managed to take an entire country. And maybe most impressive of all, she believed that she had worth in a world that mostly considered women to be worthless. A meeker queen would have been cowed by Hugh and stood helplessly by while her husband took away her lands and rights, but not the She-Wolf of France.

LONG LIVE THE FUCKING QUEEN!

For further reading:

• Kathryn Warner’s Isabella of France
• Alison Weir’s Isabella
• Helen Castor’s She-Wolves

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Previously:

• Queens of Infamy: Boudicca
• Queens of Infamy: Lucrezia Borgia
• Queens of Infamy: Mariamne I
• Queens of Infamy: Njinga
• Queens of Infamy: Josephine Bonaparte, from Martinique to Merveilleuse
• Queens of Infamy: Josephine Bonaparte, from Malmaison to More-Than-Monarch
• Queens of Infamy: Zenobia
• Queens of Infamy: The Rise of Catherine de’ Medici
• Queens of Infamy: The Reign of Catherine de’ Medici
• Queens of Infamy: Joanna of Naples
• Queens of Infamy: Anne Boleyn
• Queens of Infamy: Eleanor of Aquitaine

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Anne Thériault is a Toronto-based writer whose bylines can be found all over the internet, including at the Guardian, the London Review of Books and, obviously, Longreads. She truly believes that your favourite Tudor wife says more about you than your astrological sign. She is currently raising one child and three unruly cats. You can find her on Twitter @anne_theriault.

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Editor: Krista Stevens
Copy editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Fact Checker: Lisa Whittington-Hill
Illustrator: Louise Pomeroy

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