fearing k.d.

Editors’ note: The following is the written transcript of a speech originally delivered by the author at My Formative Queers on 14 November 2024. 

It was the summer of 1992. I was nine and my parents had just split up. 

My mum had moved into a housing commission flat in Joondanna in Perth’s Northern suburbs. My brother and I would get dropped off there at 8am on Saturday mornings, just in time for the pointy end of the ABC rage countdown. 

The big dogs battling for number one at the time were Guns N’ Roses with their turgid murder ballad “November Rain” and the Red-Hot Chilli Peppers’ depression anthem “Under the Bridge”, featuring Anthony Kiedis walking topless in LA for some reason. Neither appealed.  

The music video I longed to see was Ugly Kid Joe’s “(I Hate) Everything About You”, a juvenile, sourpuss pop-rock anthem that matched my tempestuous emotional landscape well. The lo-fi, black and white clip opens with a female blow-up sex doll flying away along a sandy beach, where a bunch of skinny, long-haired rockers play a noisy set.

These lanky, pretend-angry long-haired dudes were my style icons, and I desperately hoped that I, despite being short, squat and female, might grow up to look and sound like them. I simply couldn’t understand why this rockin’ track never made it past number nine in the top ten countdown. 

Watching rage in this era came with some risk, however, as there was another black and white music video in heavy rotation that I feared more than anything else. 

It was k.d. lang’s “Constant Craving” (Mark Romanek, 1992). 

If Ugly Kid Joe showed me the images of the kind of man I wanted to grow up to be, k. d. lang showed me the kind of woman I was afraid that I was destined to become. 

This music video also opens on a performance, but this one is filled with educated, artsy, Parisian-looking types watching on with curiosity at some kind of carnival freak show. 

In the next scene, k.d., looking every bit like the hot, butch female young Elvis that she was, starts singing in a parked car on her own on a rainy, lonely night. We then see her crooning soulfully to a goldfish trapped in a vase filled with flowers. The metaphor was lost on me at the time, but I think I get it now. 

Then, in the chorus, in an off-kilter, ambivalent melody, sung in an oversized men’s striped shirt, she swoons relentlessly about her constant cravings. 

I didn’t know what it all meant, but I did know that if I was in the room while that film clip was on, my brother would laugh and tease me relentlessly for being a lesbian on account of my tomboyish gender presentation. 

So, when “Constant Craving” came on, I immediately fled to the safe haven of the kitchen cupboard where Mum stored the Cadbury’s mini blocks of purple individually wrapped chocolate that she bought especially for our visits.  

As an adult, re-watching this clip now, I am struck by how much the scene reflects the kind of life I have built for myself as a queer person here in Melbourne. It almost seems like a prophecy. 

The audience, smoking and watching the strange theatre show in their suits and quirky fur coats would not look out of place in my current friendship group. I realise now that the performance was not a carnival freak show, but a recreation of Samuel Beckett’s infamous Waiting for Godot, a play that I pretentiously insisted on subjecting my classmates to over four painful hours when I was in Year 12. 

As the clip comes to an end, a painted man-in-the-moon descends from the rafters, and I realize that k.d. lang was offering me a gift. A vision of the future, far away from the rampant homophobia of 1990s suburban Perth, to a world filled with thoughtful freaks, geeks and gender non-conformists of all kinds. 

Somewhere along the way, thank God, I stopped being charmed by Ugly Kid Joe’s all-American misogyny. It took me longer to get over my internalized homophobia and develop an appreciation of the mysterious, queer possibilities offered up by k.d. lang, and her divine, other worldly voice. 

I even found the courage to go and see her perform at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl in 2011, one of the greatest gigs of my life, amongst a sea of salt and pepper haired queers. 

I just wish that I’d been able to appreciate this butch icon when I was young, back when there was no one else like her on TV.