“‘Sing it!’ shouts Chappell Roan with a, just who does she think she is? audacity demanding submission from glitzy, Grammy superstars who bow to a performance that will surely cement her as a pop icon. It’s February 2025. Cartoon bodies gyrate around her; gender non-specific cow-boy/-girl/-people/-clowns sway, serve and support her drag queening through a most fantastic She-Ra inspired outfit. Visually, her pitch perfect pop spectacle is a high camp tribute to Rupaul, Dolly Parton, Lady Gaga, and Britney Spears. Musically, the song wonkily teeters through its melody and lyric; it’s mournful and coquettish. Queer listeners, readers like me, hold on and tune in to, characteristic wobbly chromaticism in songs like these. We recall the way our bones trembled in the race to get the hell out of the small towns we never quite fit into. So, when Roan punctuates the line that she’s ‘gonna cause a scene’ with a high-kick, we’re the kids that understand why all-at-once she’s astride an enormous model of a shaggy-maned pink pony. Roan is out, proud, on the run, and she’s doing it at the fucking Grammy’s!
And yet, here I am; I have tears and rising panic in my throat.
Perhaps it’s the mix of queer, mournful pride that jolts my half-smiling/half-grimacing head as it falls into my hands.
I am strange and uncanny; I am home and outside myself. In an attempt to quash the weirdness, I breathe deep and long only for nausea to arrive on the exhale.
*
Is this overwhelm? Overjoyed by Roan’s queer party, my eyes prickle with pride. It’s not quite so simple; this is something else. In recent months, I have come to learn that bravery, hope, and fear are not mutually exclusive, rather they are co-dependent and synchronous; together, everywhere, and all-at-once. The Brighton mist rolls in because it’s midwinter, I spark a match and watch the light flicker into being in the open fireplace. Roan throws her pink tassled cowgirl hat off-stage, octave pedal bass guitar growls under her soaring soprano: ‘god what have you done?’ and the strange, uncanny bubbles up again. I am put in mind of Jose Esteban Munoz’s Cruising Utopia: the then and there of queer futurity. Munoz’s life was too short, he died suddenly in 2013, aged 46 – the age I am today, it’s my birthday today. His writing changed how I think about everything: love, hope, people, time, and the ways we organise ourselves culturally/socially. I’ll never forget the dazzling feeling of discovery on my first reading of Cruising Utopia, the sharp focus and sheer love of Munoz’s words;
‘Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer. We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality’ (2013: 1 my emphasis).
It’s the warm illumination that gets me every time; the arpeggiated piano that tinkles beneath Roan’s melodramatic, heavy vibrato voice – Munoz is in my heart, just as;
‘God, what have you done? You’re a pink pony girl, And you dance at the club, Oh mama, I’m just having fun, On the stage in my heels, it’s where I belong down at the Pink Pony Club’ (2023: online).
I feel Munoz articulated in each rumble of Roan’s pre-chorus power chords and equally, she has become etched into his words for me now too.
When Munoz writes about then/there, he explores the way past, present, and future can smash/merge. I love how the book assumes its (queer-ish) reader has taken a while to get there and is critical of a certain kind of nostalgia, as if to say;
You think you got here and now you’re queer?
Think again, look up, and look ahead, sucker!
Similarly, ‘Pink Pony Club’ is powerful for its retrospective lilt. It’s a song that joins a queer canon that includes ‘I’m coming out’, ‘Smalltown boy’, and ‘Constant Craving’. Songs about queer becoming/ becoming queer. But as Judith Butler (and Simone De Beauvoir before her) writes becoming, is never done, we endlessly repeat and reiterate our being across the life course. So too, Munoz wills us to look over the horizon – of what will be, what might become, and what ideals we can share together when we get to this impossible place. And, so too, Roan’s ‘Pink Pony Club’ invites us to a place of ideals with outrageous and fabulous dancing, just over there beyond our small house on the hill where I can see peak of the South Downs and beyond.
Here they come – I scratch my hot flushed cheeks with the fraying sleeve of my worn and comfy sweatshirt. For the first time, tears flow.
I cry for the way Munoz’s ‘not yet here’ is felt through Roan; ‘Pink Pony Club’ ceases to be retrospective for me. Just as Munoz’s horizon made me shine with hope through my discovery of his powerful writing, so too Roan’s pounding, seemingly always-ascending chords and melody become an intoxicating euphoria of what will be: she’s ‘gonna keep on dancing’ in the Never Neverland of West Hollywood. My cries give way to sobbing; how tangible her defiance feels; we hear Roan holding onto the horizon for dear life through her voice alone. The performance and the song itself becomes about hope, resilience, and endurance; it’s about loving fiercely and it’s the horror of anticipatory grief; and survival, whilst hopeful, suddenly feels ephemeral and conditional.
*
‘I’m stressed’ I tell my GP, Kate. It’s fall of 2024. I have a lot of reasons. I explain to her how redundancies threaten at work and say that I’m anxious because my Dad has recently been taken ill. I am, perhaps, blithe about my energy levels – swiftly mentally bullet pointing possible explanations:
- Perimenopause; I’m 45.
- Parenting is wonderful and exhausting; our beautiful son is 6.
- Seasonal affective disorder; we are approaching the winter solstice.
- Irritable bowel syndrome?; my tummy seems to be carrying my anxieties.
She nods and in the first instance we swap an agreement to do blood tests with a crumpled Post-It note with ‘FODMAP diet’ scrawled across it. Walking through the avenue of tall trees next to the skatepark, I mull over how Xennials like me seem to be the micro-generation that neoliberalism forces life events into neatly packaged products. Menopause? Maybe? Buy this book/supplement and take these drugs – and all in the name of agency and body autonomy.
The blood tests come back quickly – all normal, except for one: the CA125. Kate had included it as a ‘belt and braces’ precaution in the unlikely event there was something awry with or around my ovaries. The abnormal result ‘[didn’t] necessarily mean anything’ but it was worth pursuing with an oncology team, ‘to rule out anything sinister’.
Oncology (noun) A branch of medicine that specialises in the diagnosis and treatment of cancer.
My sobs collapse and my chest heaves with panic, I am slumped over my office desk obsessing about ‘sinister’s’ synonyms and euphemisms.
*
Holidays. My love of 20 years and I (with some ‘help’ from our son) pack up our little car with festive gifts and, warm in the glow of my most precious people, we go back to the small town. Dad has us all together before his (as it goes, oncology) treatment starts some three days later. Given that my story was still only potentially ‘sinister’ and still uncertain, we decide to keep recent events under wraps and pull Christmas crackers instead.
In the 10th anniversary edition of ‘Cruising Utopia’, a revised foreword by Joshua Chambers-Letson, Tavia Nyong’o and Ann Pelligrini draws from the notes of a talk that Munoz never got to deliver. The talk, titled ‘Hope in the Face of Heartbreak’, began with the line ‘Hope’s biggest obstacle is failure’. The threat of failure pulls me towards Roan’s vocal performance – the swooping portamentos drawing out my tears in a style that is reminiscent of the Dolores O’Riordan-style vocal flicks that soundtracked the small town in my teens. As it goes, like Roan’s voice, my body is threatening failure; it is failing in places and it is falling to pieces.
‘…a cyst; …a routine MRI scan; …exploratory surgery; …an introduction to a Cancer Nurse Specialist…’
My partner and I are both frightened. We develop a vocal tic between us. ‘As long as it’s only…’
*
It transpires the cyst has its own blood supply. The MRI scan induces a full panic attack. By late January, the exploratory keyhole surgery involves cameras being sent in and ‘sinister’ becomes material; synonym, euphemism and scare quotes fall away. Cancer is confirmed and over the following few weeks my diagnosis alternates and begins to unravel. More uncertainty. My case is complicated. Survival; Hope; Endurance; Grief. I begin learning what happens when queer time meets hospital time. What’s becoming? For some time, recognition doesn’t arrive. Then, on a pink horse, it does.
*
From 4mins 8 seconds, the performance begins its race to its climactic ending. Hazy cartoon stars float in the background; a shape echoed on the flags held by three of Roan’s proudly freakish entourage. She races to the steps on centre stage and joins the ensemble.
I’m gonna keep on dancing.
The ensemble run in place; they keep on dancing; reaching high and to the left; they keep on dancing; they turn and comically gesture that they are lassoing the song’s star who reciprocates the collective action. The insistence of the cast’s movement along with the celebratory howl of Roan’s joyous vibrato, as it soars above the 80s-inspired, lightly distorted disco-thumping cacophony of the backing band, is as beautifully Munozian as it is Roanian. Vocal yearning, running in place and keeping on dancing serves as a reminder that we all only have today.
I’m gonna keep on dancing.
We’re gonna keep on dancing.
The Munozian queer horizon is always there but never attainable, always unreachable and unapologetically full of promise of what might be. The repeated reprise resonates with my uncanny and now surgically scarred body. Cancer, and the ‘Pink Pony Club’ might seem to show how hope’s biggest obstacle is failure but I feel this in the precarity of the visual, vocal, musical, and muscle of the performance. The utopia of West Hollywood is no more certain than the Midwest town from which Roan (as protagonist) fled. So too, the utopia of a long and healthy life is no longer certain for me. I’m gonna keep on dancing in the same old, slightly ungainly but always ‘expressive’ (silly?) way I always have done except this dance does have cancer. Or rather the complication of my case is that I have cancers. I’m gonna keep on dancing with the particularly unusual case of two primary cancers: ovarian and womb. But I don’t need a side head tilt. Like you, like anyone, I can still get to that ‘special [queer] place, where girls and boys can all be queens every single day’. After all, Santa Monica is for those, like Munoz who know ‘we may never touch queerness’ but we reach and feel the horizon’s warm potentiality.
We’re gonna keep on dancing.
Emily Baker: Plays drums.
Lead Image: Justin Higuchi
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