My huge wide-leg jeans dragged through the thin coat of snow on the driveway and across the sagging porch. All of us had to be careful not to get our wet jeans on the bed. At least 9 of us crammed ourselves into one room, its door askew and imparting a gouge into the floor that was the same shape as my protractor from geometry class. I don’t know whose house it is. How could I? Half the people I know I only know by nicknames: Mouse, Ogre, Goat Boy, Prophet. I don’t know if this counts as going to a “party” or not, but I’m hoping it does. My crush is there, and everyone's drinking, although I nurse a single glass bottle of something grossly sweet and neon blue, clutching the neck of it close to my chest all night—partly to do something with my hands, but holding it close to me means I take up less room. It’s crowded. We’re all jammed in there. I want everyone to be comfortable, even if it means leaning my shoulder against the wall—although one person does offer me a space on his lap. I don’t know what we will do all night. Probably listen to music on an Aiwa 3-disc changer. People are definitely smoking weed, blowing the smoke out the unscreened window with all the heat in the room going out with it, but at that point, almost everyone is too impaired to notice, or to notice that I’m not. One of only two girls that night, I am mostly overlooked, unless it is time to scrutinize my authenticity, to make sure I’m enough like them to have earned the right to be there. Someone is playing an unplugged electric guitar clumsily enough that even I can tell he’s shit at it. I’m let down that what I thought would be an exhilarating night is more like listening to the boys in the back of the lab dare each other to hold their finger up to the bunsen burner a few more seconds than the last.
*
In George Michael’s video for “Faith,” he dons ripped jeans and a studded leather jacket. A woman’s disembodied long legs appear every so often, the shot panning upwards from her high heels all the way to the tops of her bare thighs. The framing of this seems intentionally…misogynistic? Objectifying? No, not quite. At least it doesn’t feel that way when watching it. Maybe it’s because the camera never even shows Michael looking over at her. More like it’s deliberately echoing how women are almost always portrayed in music videos (at least in the 80s) but in the most benign way possible. While Michael did have relationships with women, people seem desperate for proof that he’s gay, proof that the way they want to see him is the way he truly is. Perhaps the best tool he has to deflect that rumor is with a headless prop with perfect legs.
*
My parents refuse to let me go to the Family Values tour in the Fall of 1998. I’m too young. It’s inappropriate. It’s too far. I argue the futile argument of teenagers everywhere: But my friends can go. But I know someone who will drive me. I can pay for the ticket myself. The solving of the practical dilemmas is no match for the real dilemma, which is that a teenager out of sight from an invested adult is more freely able to transform into whoever they’d like, and most teenagers are naive enough to think they know who that person is. It is not the temptation of trouble, but rather that the road to self-actualization is paved with trial and error—some errors of which can be grave when hours from home and surrounded by hundreds of strangers. But at fourteen, I am mostly pissed off by this, and have to settle for the Family Values tape when it comes out. I rush out to buy it the day it's released, but am willing to wait a few days, trying not to pick off the shrinkwrap until one of my friends can come over and we can watch it together. I want to share it with her in the same way we’d both see it at the same time if we were actually there.
*
Marissa, the only other girl, shows up to the party an hour later and totally shitfaced, and it might even be her apartment? I thought she was only 17? One of the guys says something about how he’s 23 and wishes he had his own place. Although it’s not quite an apartment. I don’t know what to call it, since it’s just a room. She shares the kitchen and the bathroom, neither of which we’re allowed to use. The guys just piss out in the yard, trying to melt their initials into the snow. I wish I had peed before we left the mall. I squirm for a long time before asking as politely as I possibly can. One of the boys with an alias shouts that I shouldn’t get special treatment just because I’m a girl, that I should go outside like the rest of them. Women. Jesus Christ. Who cares if you have to take your pants off? You know I’m just kidding, right?
*
When George Michael is arrested in April 1998, he gives the officer his birth name, Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou. In this moment, he is both concealing his identity as well as being true to it. The incident is consistently called a “lewd act,” although some sources imply he was discovered alone mid-act in the public toilet, others that it was the result of trying to pick up an undercover police officer. Whatever happened was clearly considered illicit, but the media remained vague, perhaps to protect their audience’s delicate sensibilities about what is appropriate or not. All coverage, of course, comes along with implicit confirmation that Michael is gay.
At the time, I remember trying to parse what all this was really about: I had already heard of numerous sex scandals, and couldn’t understand why this one was different. I eventually figured out that this one was about shame: not the kind of being caught, but shame other people felt on behalf of Michael’s sexuality being confirmed, despite that he didn’t seem particularly apologetic about it himself. Initially thinking it was his way of coming out, Michael reconsidered the purpose of this experience: in a 2004 interview, he explains that “now, I honestly think it was a desperate attempt to make the trauma in my life about me, because then, maybe, I could control the outcome.” I read this as an adult, and extract it, make my own leaps: it is a strange, particular power to get to decide how you want to be hurt; to make an intentional choice for the sake of feeling like you can influence the type of pain you experience. At the time of the incident, Michael had recently suffered enormous losses: his mother to cancer, and his longtime partner to complications from AIDS. How else to regain a sense of self than to attract so much attention, to become a spectacle even, in order to know you are still there when it feels like everything else is so much bigger, so much more powerful than you?
Both “spectacle” and “speculate” come from the same root, one that means “to look.” Which is what people need to do before we can be seen. Our ability to steer what they see, however, is mostly up to chance.
*
It’s finally Friday, and my friend’s mom has dropped her off at my house. I shimmy the tape out of its cardboard sleeve and pop it in. My friend and I wistfully note how cool it will be to finally go to a concert someday.
About two minutes into the opening, before the concert footage even starts, there’s a vignette of a woman exposing her breast, another woman licking her pierced nipple with a raised eyebrow and a grin into the camera. In a panel next to it, a translation of a member of Rammstein reads What disturbs me the most is that the Americans are so conservative. I blush. I frown. Something about the juxtaposition feels off, but I can’t put my finger on it. I try to shrug it off, figuring I’m just being a prude.
The first act on the video is Limp Bizkit. I am a little bit in love with Wes Borland. He strikes me as shyer than the others, mysterious. Wes Borland is sometimes a skeleton, or a macaque, or a dozen other personas, and by withdrawing into this costume, I feel drawn to follow him in there. Wes Borland’s contacts give him big pupiless eyes, like he’s mentally absconded to another realm, and I wonder if he wears them because he already feels invisible, like I do. I think of him as weirder, and deeper—but also safer—than Durst and his screeching and posturing, all extroversion and testosterone, whose trademark red baseball cap and baggy Dickies make him identifiable almost anywhere.
You’re freaking me out. You wear a mask called counterfeit.
You’re a fake. You’re a phony.
The song ends, and the camera cuts to a girl in the front row of the pit, white tank top, jumping up and down, her arms pinned by her sides instead of flailing in the air, squishing her cleavage together, smiling into the camera. She is the only one not looking at the stage.
When “Faith” comes on, Fred Durst introduces it by saying that “This song is dedicated to the women across America.”
*
I see my crush quietly pick up the guitar that someone lost interest in and discarded on top of a pile of laundry next to the bed. He tinkers with it, counting the frets to find chords. It is more curiosity than anything else, unlike the other boy who wanted everyone to see him showing off. I am drawn to him because he is sweet, and not because I want to find the nearest walk-in closet or the most shadowy corner behind the Denny’s. I seem to be the only one that hasn’t entered that phase of frantic desire yet and wonder if there’s something wrong with me. I like him because he is gentle and asks me questions about myself and shows me cute photos of his nephew that he has in his wallet, and he let me wear his hoodie once when I was cold. He is two years older than me, and even though he can’t drive yet, he always asks if I have a ride and then finds me one if I don’t. I watch him stumble over the strings, trying to make music, and he sees me watching him, and smiles at me. And we hold that gaze a second too long, and both turn away from each other, embarrassed.
*
When Fred Durst sings “Faith,” his version modifies the final verse of Michael’s, replacing “Oh, baby, I reconsider my foolish notion / Well, I need someone to hold me but I'll wait for somethin' more” by simply repeating the previous verse about being a strong man and showing his lover the door. Maybe it was too much work to learn a few more lines of lyrics. Maybe it was too much to say, even in a cover song, that he needs someone to hold him, that even the potential suggestion of wanting tenderness alongside sex is too embarassing. Or that authenticity is maybe overrated when he could be signing a breast with a blurred-out nipple 17 seconds into his own music video of the song. This way, unlike Michael, no one will wonder even for a second about Durst’s sexuality. However, like Michael’s video, he, too, doesn’t ever look the woman in her eyes. Durst flips up a middle finger at the start of the first chorus for good measure.
*
In between concert coverage, the Family Values VHS includes a bunch of brief commentary and interstitial footage. This is as close as I’ll probably ever get to backstage, and I am dying to see these bands just being themselves between shows. But I soon realize that’s not quite what this is, or at least how I envisioned it. The closest this gets is Fred Durst weaving a Razr Scooter down a hallway, like every smug high school boy I’ve ever met. More so, it’s the embodiment of a teenage boy from a different angle. A white girl with dreads looks into the camera and pouts her mouth into a kiss. A member of Orgy talks into the camera, smiling like he’s about to let you in on a secret: “You know what would be cool if like, every time you sign an autograph, another chick, the thing would be, like, to flash her titties.” It cuts to a blonde woman shaking her breasts inside her tank top with a big, lascivious smile.
In another scene, four or five girls are ushered backstage. Neon yellow tube tops, pleather mini dresses: not a single band t-shirt to be seen. We see the opening scene with the pierced nipple again, extended: it seems like the two girls are friends, that one of them acted a bit impulsively by exposing herself, the other even more so, and both look taken aback at what exactly transpired. It seems both spontaneous and rehearsed. They seem anxious. They do not appear to enjoy this interaction, but are trying to. Their body language feels familiar: it’s the way I watched every girl in my grade try to do something flirty—wrap her arms around her bestie’s waist for show, sit in her lap with a suggestive smile—things she would never do if people weren’t watching, and then look to see if it was working, if it was enough, if her audience was falling for the performance or not. And if it wasn’t, she’d have to raise the stakes quickly.
I look at my hands in my lap. The friend who's in my living room, watching this with me, keeps her gaze fixed straight ahead at the tv screen, unwavering, at whatever scene comes on next, even though I know she can see me looking at her. We are not quite “tomboys,” but are often considered one of the guys. We hardly wear makeup. We wear the baggy clothes of our crushes—often shopping in the men’s section, even for jeans—and while we've never talked about it, I think both feel a certain pride that we don’t resort to that kind of flirtation. And yet I watch this footage feeling betrayed, that people I admire and whose music made me feel OK about all the awful feelings I had about the amount of awful shit in the world were, in fact, at least a little bit as monstrous as all the authority figures griping about “mature content” said they were. Or maybe it was more that the music that spoke to me, that I thought was written for people like me, was not actually meant to be for me at all. I keep staring at my friend, willing her to look at me. I want to talk to her about this unsettling thing that I don’t know how to describe, and I see her eyes shift just a little but she won’t turn her head. She folds her knees up to her chin and wraps her arms around them tightly, shrinking into my couch.
*
Faith in what? The benevolence of the universe? Our lovers? Ourselves? From what I can tell, it’s broadly a breakup song steeped in reluctance. About letting go of something you love because you think it’s bad for you, that it’s hurting you. Or maybe not love, per se, but enjoy. Desire. But are we putting our faith in simply finding another lover—or in believing we deserve better than to be with someone that doesn’t fully value us?
Maybe “we” is not the best pronoun to use here. I can’t speak for Michael. I know that he spoke openly about his attraction to women, saying that, if he was single, he “would have sex with women, no question,” but that he “would never be able to have a relationship with a woman because [he’d] feel like a fake.” “Emotionally, I’m definitely a gay man,” he states, meaning that he, too, seems to see women first through the lens of attraction in the same way Durst does. Maybe this song is about nothing other than writing a catchy hit single. But I keep landing on the line in Michael’s original lyrics, “but I’ll wait for something more,” and how something more is so undeniably vast and vague. Are we putting faith into the idea that, someday, we’ll finally be able to pinpoint what it is we are looking for from other people?
*
"I love George Michael and decided to cover 'Faith' for fun. We like to do really aggressive versions of cheesy pop hits," Fred Durst is quoted as saying in an interview. "I didn't expect him to get busted in that bathroom but his misfortune actually helped us. We couldn't ask for more of a buzz.”
*
Marissa is yelling about something, slurring, flailing her arms, each hand holding a mostly empty bottle. She is the stage of drunk where she’s telling people she hates them while also asking them if they think she’s pretty. Two guys are holding Marissa back by her arms as gently as they can while still trying to keep control of her. “Did you know I’m bisexual?” she shouts at one of them. “Don’t you think that’s so hot? Of course you fucking do.” My crush is smirking with a raised eyebrow, scanning her body with his eyes. Marissa stares wide-eyed at me, suddenly seeing me for the first time. I know what is probably coming next, and am calculating fast. She breaks free from their grip, lunging toward my edge of the bed, toppling onto me. “I’ll prove it right now. Watch me.”
Lisa Mangini is the author of five collections of poetry and short fiction. Some of her work can be found in McSweeney's, Ms. Magazine, Mid-American Review, Memoir Mixtapes, and other publications that may or may not begin with the letter M. She is the Founding Editor of Paper Nautilus Press, and teaches writing at Penn State. You can find her at @lisaquarius or knitting in her living room.