In 8th grade, I downloaded a .zip file entitled “Jet Boy Jet Girl, Or: Gay Stuff Mix” from my favorite blogger on Tumblr, who was probably seventeen or eighteen at the time and therefore infinitely cooler than anything I could fathom. The artwork (nsfw) they had drawn to accompany the playlist was fairly raunchy by my standards and I was simultaneously grossed out and intrigued by it. However, the most shocking aspect was not the line drawing of a penis but the fact that the fifth track was Seeing Other People, a song by Belle and Sebastian. I was familiar with some of the other artists on the playlist, fully aware of their queerness—The Magnetic Fields, for example, or Sleater-Kinney—but their inclusion of the Glaswegian indie group threw me off. I had listened to If You’re Feeling Sinister, the 1996 album on which this song first appeared, probably a million times before and never once given thought to the possibility that it was gay in any way.
In retrospect, I probably should have been able to figure it out, considering the lyrics:
You're kissing your elbow
You're kissing your reflection
And you can't understand why all the other boys are going for the
New, tall, elegant rich kids
You can bet it is a bitch, kid
But if they don't see the quality then it is apparent that
You're going to have to change
Or you're going to have to go with girls
You might be better off
At least they know where to put it
I think Belle and Sebastian’s general themes of naïveté and anxiety—especially regarding sex and relationships, especially from an adolescent perspective—and feeling ill at ease with yourself in the world lend a lot of their songs to gay interpretations. More interesting to me, though, is the plainspoken nature with which frontman/songwriter Stuart Murdoch refers to non-cishet characters: it’s not exactly subtle (“the boys go with boys and the girls with girls” in She’s Losing It, the entirety of Seeing Other People), but it’s nondescript enough that listening to these lyrics as a repressed twelve-year-old didn’t inspire any kind of panic in me. It was just a simple identification, a minor blip on my mental radar that only served to warm me to the band, the way I also identified with the title character of Sukie in the Graveyard for hating school or the subject of La Pastie de la Bourgeoisie for being too tall and having split ends. It was similar to how I didn’t panic when I caught myself ‘fantasizing’ about women (in a presexual way) when I was very very young—I had no reason to think that it was unusual, and plus there were no boys in my life so I simply didn’t have the faculties to daydream about them. As such, there was no cause for anxiety.
I think Stuart Murdoch's success in writing about gay and trans characters is due to the fact that he genuinely loves and cares for them. The reason why I am always eager to see Belle and Sebastian in concert is that the band always seems equally eager to be there: despite having been together with more or less the same lineup since their debut record in 1995, they never seem to tire of their own songs—even the oldest and most over-played. When I last saw Belle and Sebastian, Murdoch mentioned that sometimes people ask if he gets sick of doing the same songs again and again, a prospect he scoffed at. He suggested that performing served as a reminiscence both of the songs’ subjects and of the songs themselves, memory layered upon memory. At this show, they played their 2003 song Lord Anthony as a projection of two men dancing together flickered against the back wall of the venue. Like many of Belle and Sebastian’s songs, Lord Anthony is about a misfit kid who dreams of leaving his small-minded hometown and high school bullies behind, but it’s clear that the protagonist of this song is specifically victimized for his apparent lacking in masculinity. (“And if the boys could see you they would pass you right by / Blue mascara running over your eye.”) Glancing behind himself at the projection, Murdoch talked about how he hoped that the protagonist of this song had grown up to be comfortable with themselves and maybe they had even become a dancer and that they might have moved as beautifully and with such ease and confidence as the men in the video. The frankness that characterizes all of Belle and Sebastian’s music is particularly striking in this context, I think, because it makes the song feel genuine in its melancholy as opposed to pitying or condescending. I cried to think that after 20 years Stuart still cared for this person who had maybe not been real to begin with but had become real in the telling again and again, that he cared enough to imagine a future peace for them.
The main challenge of fiction writing for me has always been character creation. I’m of course impressed by complex world-building or intricate interwoven narratives, but the idea of conjuring a whole person from the ether of one’s own imagination is nearly unfathomable to me. I love any media that gets bogged down in the milieu of a character’s life and thoughts because I am ultimately fascinated by people more than anything else. That Stuart Murdoch has managed to create dozens of people whose whole existences are limited to three minutes of song, who are so vivid and alive in only a couple verses and then gone again by the time the music fades out—in my mind, this feat is nothing short of miraculous.
Seeing Other People is about sexual experimentation (“kissing just for practice”) and trying things out in that sense, but it’s also about the act of trying in and of itself, the idea around which so much of Belle and Sebastian’s music is centered: trying to relate to others, trying to believe in God, trying to adopt different identities in hopes of finding oneself. This same idea is reflected in Murdoch’s songwriting and the band’s overall tenor, his effort laid bare in the earnestness with which he still sings these songs: all these years later, he is trying to do right by these characters. Trying is hard work, even more difficult when one suffers from a chronic condition as Murdoch does. Sometimes the attempt is more important or more difficult or more interesting than the thing being attempted. To try is to render oneself vulnerable under the threat of failure—either on your part or on the part of other people who might not recognize your effort.
Belle and Sebastian is not a queer band (except perhaps in the sense of the word’s traditional definition) but there is something in their music that appeals to queer people nonetheless, and for good reason, I think. And regardless of one’s personal interpretation of the lyrics, their songs are delicate in their sincerity and effective in their honesty, pockets of truly meaningful storytelling among jaunty violins and gentle guitars. They are the sonic equivalent of the cool side of the pillow, soft and soothing and all the more intimate when shared.
Alas, as always, someone else has already managed to say all of this in a much more succinct manner than I ever could. So, TL;DR—
— ECT