Secretly Watching “Secretly”

This article has been peer reviewed

Picture it: Glenroy, 1999. You’re a 13-year-old boy watching rage late on a Saturday night in your bedroom. You’re lying under the covers with the sound at a level that won’t wake your brother asleep in the room next door. Rage is a long-running Australian music video program that airs on the ABC network on Fridays and Saturdays. The curation of music videos would begin at about 11pm and then run until 11am. The show is Australia’s longest-running music video program and, for over 35 years now, has presented a stream of music videos in an idiosyncratic and minimalist manner.¹ From 1990, Saturday night programs would feature a guest programmer, who would introduce their selections and regularly talk about their choices. As Anwyn Crawford wrote in The Monthly for the show’s 25th birthday, rage “had an ageless, mysterious quality, as if it were transmitting, uninterrupted, from a distant galaxy.”² Having a television in my bedroom meant that I was able to engage in the act of watching things secretly. Beyond being an activity that made me feel cool; this was a safe option for me to access culture beyond sneakily using my parents’ dial-up internet in the study or watching television in the shared space of the lounge room. I could watch all these weird and wonderful clips by myself. On one particular evening, a music video came on that would replay over in my mind again and again in the coming weeks. 

This music video was, coincidentally, “Secretly” by British rock band Skunk Anansie, a song that featured on the Cruel Intentions soundtrack and their third studio album Post Orgasmic Chill. The clip notably draws on the film’s themes of rebellious youths exploring their sexuality. Skunk Anansie were a cool rock band that were an alternative option to what was playing on commercial radio at the time. The video clip was directed by Giuseppe Capotondi, who had also directed the band’s video for “Charlie Big Potato”, which featured nightmarish visuals from a child’s perspective. The other music videos for Skunk Anansie’s singles off Post Orgasmic Chill were for upbeat song “Lately” and the mournful lament “You’ll Follow Me Down;” these songs and videos demonstrated the tonal and aesthetic breadth that Skunk Anansie offered. Led by the powerful vocals of lead singer Skin (see figure 1), Skunk Anansie were part of the Britrock movements of the 1990s and 2000s and have sold over five million records. The name Anansie comes from the trickster character of Akan folklore. This article will explore the cultural context of this act of watching things secretly in one’s bedroom, whilst also offering a queer reflective reading of the music video itself. The title of the song, “Secretly,” is also significant, as I was often engaging in the act of secretly watching queer content in my bedroom at night. Secretly watching “Secretly” was a queer transformative act.

The Video Clip

The music video is a convergence of the fields of popular music, film, television, photography and advertising. Whilst their seemingly initial purpose is to promote the artist and their song they can also stand alone as a creative product.³ They are, as Turim argues, commercialised art.⁴ The music video has also evolved within the context of technology, audiences and cultural appreciation.⁵ As a medium, the music video has long been a respected art form, as many feature film directors, such as Michel Gondry, Sofia Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Paul Thomas Anderson and Spike Jonze have made many music video clips. Artists like Daft Punk and Beyoncé, have produced and collaborated on full album-length videos. As Vernallis, Hanson and Turim argue, they have long been credible forms of art, exhibiting innovative forms that blur the boundaries between popular culture and high art.⁶ In Shuker’s argument that they are a postmodernist form of media, they “collapse [the] distinctions between art and the commercial, the aesthetic and the unaesthetic, and the authentic and unauthentic.”⁷ Rage was programmed, not hosted, Giuffre argues, and, as a result, “provided at the time a unique opportunity to access music videos without editorial interference.”⁸ 

There are various interpretations of the song, but for 13-year-old me, it’s about harbouring secret feelings for a friend. Whilst it would have been possible to watch queer content in music video clips in shared spaces, such as during the broader televisual flow of morning segments of rage or Video Hits, there was something intimate about having the freedom to lean in and watch queer content intently. This recounting of the video clip draws on my own memories, which is not a source of actual experience but a discursive framework that shapes the interpretations and narratives of the past.⁹ 

Before I look at the clip itself, I want to cover the narrative that develops in the lyrics. The song begins with the narrator concealing their true feelings. They are “biting [their] tongue” and acting “subtly kind,” to repress their desires for another person. As the lead singer’s voice soars towards the end of the first verse, she admits that she’s been secretly lusting after this friend. As the song develops, the tension arises as Skin describes the difficulty of being close with someone that they so intensely desire. 

“Trying hard to think pure”, she sings. It’s “Bloody hard when I’m raw” whilst the object of one’s desire talks out so “sexually ’bout boys & girls & their friggin’ dreams.” In the end, the person who they are in love with is “busted” for being with someone else, which coincides with the video clip’s queer reveal. The narrator of the song feels jealous and hurt that they’ve been led on and that they should have left the object of their desire to be on their own. It’s a song of anger, hurt, frustration and regret. The lyrics explore the internal struggle one faces and the consequences of suppressing one’s emotions.

In hindsight, it seems obvious why these lyrics resonated with me as a young person questioning their own sexual identity. But back then, before I had a name to put to these feelings, this song spoke to me in a way that I couldn’t fully comprehend at the time.

Skin delivers powerful vocals on the track “Secretly.”

Rage in the Bedroom

The act of secretly watching “Secretly” is indicative of the queer coming of age of those born in the 1970s and 1980s. This period saw a presumption of young queer isolation where they were often depicted in media as growing up without knowing other LGBTQ+ people.¹⁰ This context is typified by a number of factors. First, this period pre-dated Web 2.0 internet and lacked the access to audio-visual content, social media networks and other resources on LGBTQ+ identities. Young LGBTQ+ people coming of age in the 1990s also became sexually active after the HIV/AIDS crisis.¹¹  Homosexuality had also been decriminalised in all Australian states and territories by the late 1990s. There was also the beginning of commercialised gay and lesbian cinema and some LGBTQ+ content on television.¹² As Hillier et al. note in their study of young LGBTQ+ Australians, those born from the 1990s and onwards tend to recount their identity formation through engagement with film, television and social media.¹³

These moments of remembering how we grow up or come of age are important to how we make sense of our own identities.¹⁴ For those that come of age as a queer person, encounters with film, music or other audiovisual artefacts are often only recognised with hindsight. In his research on Australian queer screen audiences, Rob Cover interviewed audiences who were born in the 1970s and 1980s.¹⁵ For him and his team, two key themes arose. First, was the importance of place, where the physical environment for media engagement shapes the context for this queer experience. For me watching this queer music video, I had the safety of my own bedroom, where I knew that I had the safety and privacy to watch something on my own. As a young person, I would often watch Queer as Folk on SBS, the volume down low and my finger on the off button on the remote in case anyone knocked on my bedroom door. Cover and his team also identified that time was integral to these formative experiences. The temporal dimension of these spaces was key. In my own context, for instance, I consumed this media late at night when I knew my family were all in bed. As Cover et al. note, pivotal to these formations of identity is queer film, where one is given the language and imagery to help explore one’s own identity.¹⁶ This act of viewing secretly in my own bedroom is also indicative of viewing habits in the 1990s. This period saw the increase of households with multiple television sets. Households with higher disposable incomes increasingly separated entertainment and living spaces and also provided children with their own television in their bedrooms.¹⁷ This meant that I was able to watch something in the privacy of my own bedroom without having to consume it in the shared space of the living room.

Postpunk Queerness

The music video’s queer reveal rebelliously challenges the heteronormative terrain of music, be it pop or alternative. Queer music video clips are not new as Frederik Dhaenens:

“Introducing the gay narrative into music videos is certainly not a new practice. Videos such as Bronski Beat’s ‘Smalltown Boy’ (1984), the homoerotic ‘Domino Dancing’ (1988) by the Pet Shop Boys, and Madonna’s ‘Vogue’ (1990) touched on same-sex sexual practices and gay and lesbian identities in subtle, equivocal, and connotative ways.”¹⁸

Like all young gay boys, I was entranced by the vocals of a powerful woman. Post-Orgasmic Chill would go on to heavy rotation in my Discman and later my iPod, along with The Cranberries, Bjork, Alanis Morissette, Fiona Apple, Garbage and many others. As Skin’s voice builds throughout the song, the power of her voice develops the rising emotions of the song. Her tone is at once delicate and angry. The adoration of female music icons has long been an important aspect of gay formations of taste.¹⁹ In his notable account on gay sensibility and fandom of Judy Garland, Richard Dyer argues that stars that attract gay fandom do so through their camp appeal, which is “a characteristically gay way of handling the values, images and products of the dominant culture through irony, exaggeration, trivialisation, theatricalisation and an ambivalent making fun of and out of the serious and respectable.”²⁰ In updating this gay veneration of female singers, Craig Jennex argues that this form of fandom has its roots in gay male opera fans. “Participation in opera culture,” Jennex writes, “allowed gay men with the necessary capital an opportunity to perform their non-normative identities in ways that created a queer space in what is conventionally identified as a heteronormative experience in Western culture.”²¹ In making this connection, the fan admires the music and performance as a metaphor for the courage they need in their own everyday life. What differs from contemporary music icons to those from Judy Garland’s era or from the world of opera is that these contemporary singers directly incorporate and advocate for alternative forms of identity in their music. Their vocal strength, creativity and advocacy for various forms of social justice resonate with queer fans in specific ways. To draw on Mary Rogers, such singers can become icons “because of their versatility, thick folds of meaning, adaptability to diverse individuals’ needs or interests, ultimate ambiguity, and open-ended nature.”²² The female icon’s creativity and vocal strength is malleable and, as such, can resonate in queer ways. Stan Hawkins also explores the many ways pop music can be queer. He argues that pop music and music videos have the potential to trouble gender norms and open up non-normative ways of feeling time.²³ The queerness of pop and rock music can be an aesthetic and performative force whilst also being deeply politically subversive. 

This balance of ferocity and softness in Skin’s voice is clear in the video clip that captivated me back in 1999. The clip follows three young people who are conventionally attractive: a young blond woman and two men. They are rebellious youths, similar to what we might see in a Gregg Araki film (see figure 2). They rob a convenience store, break into a laundromat at night and trash a hotel room. Amongst these antics, we cut to Skin and her band performing the song, with the three rebellious youths amongst the crowd. In analysing Araki’s films Totally Fucked Up (1993), The Doom Generation (1995) and Nowhere (1997) as part of the New Queer Cinema wave, Arnau Roig-Mora argues these films:

“Participate in this postmodern pastiche, giving voice to marginalised teens and blatantly eschewing a positive cleaned-up homonormative imagery: the queer misfits that populate Araki’s trilogy steal, kill, doubt and suffer in ways that the characters of mainstream gay cinema of the 1990s did not.”²⁴

The clip for “Secretly” is reminiscent of Gregg Araki’s films from the 1990s.

Drawing on Michele Aaron’s claim that the theme of defiance united much of the films of the New Queer Cinema,²⁵ Roig-Mora argues that Araki’s film work “dismantles classic narrativity while his teens defy society, adults and their institutions.”²⁶ Kylo-Patrick Hart writes that Gregg Araki’s films of the New Queer Cinema era represent postpunk style in modern filmmaking.²⁷ His work is a confluence of postpunk bricolage and anti-consumerist cultures, where he “functions as a bricoleur in the way he modifies Godard’s techniques in order to produce films of even greater subversive potential.”²⁸ Araki, Hart continues, reworks Hollywood genres, such as juvenile delinquency and road movies into queer scenarios. My connection of “Secretly” to Araki’s oeuvre is no stretch, then, as this music video’s narrative is fundamentally about rebellious youths with a queer twist. The video clip for “Secretly” embodies this scrappy, low-budget energy akin to Araki’s work. The handheld camerawork, rough edges and urban decay backdrops infuse the imagery of youthful rebellion. This connection between “Secretly” and Araki’s aesthetics supports the aforementioned music video scholars, Vernallis, Hanson and Turim, who argue that the music video has the potential to be viewed as a form of art.²⁹

The music video clip shifts between the subjectivity of each of the characters. At one point, the young woman is sitting in the back of the car as they wait at traffic lights. A police car pulls up next to them with a wealthy-looking woman in their custody. The two women look at each other blankly. Perhaps this is a warning for the woman’s future? As the guitar riff builds towards the song’s crescendo, the three jump into the pool, taking off their clothes and kissing each other. The camera bobs above and below the water, capturing their frivolity. The act of diving into a pool is often a trope employed in many queer audio-visual narratives, representing a variety of themes from rebirth to submerging themselves in their desires. There is a reckless abandonment to their desire for each other. They dunk each other under the water and kiss. This scene is a further echo to the bisexuality and polyamory of Araki’s Nowhere. In this scene, there is a constant switching between the fast movement of their antics and the slow movements of Skunk Anansie’s performance. This juxtaposition mirrors the balance of ferocity and softness in Skin’s voice.

The sexual nature of their relationship is revealed to the viewer. A high-angle shot looks down as one of the men lies on the bed, kissing the woman. The camera cuts to a low-angle shot of the second man standing above them on the motel bed, taking pictures with a disposable camera. He takes a photo, lowers the camera, and pauses, a look of sadness. He feels left out. But who is he jealous of? Does he want to be with the man or the woman? This moment coincides with the peak of Skin’s vocal performance. As the final chorus concludes, the three young lovers tend to themselves. One of the men bathes, the other drinks from a mug in their dingy motel room. The two men sit on the end of the bed, eating burgers and watching television. There is an adolescent quality to them.

The song’s crescendo coincides with the clip’s queer reveal

Closing Thoughts

As the song slowly concludes, we cut to the three lovers sleeping in the one bed. The woman is between the two men, both literally and figuratively. She looks at them both, gets out of bed and dresses. She looks at the two men as she leaves the motel room. One of the men wakes up as the other gets closer and spoons him. He seems content with her choice. In looking back at this clip, I take delight in how it can be interpreted in many ways. While I don’t want to generalise about the audience at large, there is an acknowledgement of a queer spectator here. Brett Farmer (2000) argues that film scholarship aimed at identifying and castigating the effects of Hollywood’s heteronormative agenda is important, “but with its exhaustive taxonomies of pernicious stereotypes and its impassioned diatribes against an alleged universal filmic hetero-centrism, it has effectively marginalised gay spectatorial desires out of existence.”³⁰ This music video came at a time of increasingly varied queer audiovisual representation and an identifiable queer audience. While the mainstream media was full of stereotypes, from In & Out (Frank Oz, 1997) to Will & Grace, alternative media forms such as limited-release films and music video clips offered more interesting portrayals of queer lives.

“Secretly” is a simple story of wild young lovers, with the woman moving on, to leave the two men to pursue their love for each other. As a young, confused boy, watching rage late on a Saturday evening, the sight of two cool-looking men kissing and being intimate in a music video clip to a power ballad was revelatory. The true significance of why this got under my skin didn’t become clear until much later in my teen years. The meaning behind what Skin sings in the song underscored my own secret desires for years to come.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to the peer reviewers for their thoughtful suggestions.

Endnotes