You Know I Like My Girls a Little Bit Older

Or Kelly Clarkson's Sapphic wink.

I had the pleasure of appearing on a Sapphic pop roundtable at Pop Con over the weekend, where moderator, friend, and multi-hyphenate Karen Tongson asked each of the panelists to provide clips in hopes of stirring conversation. The line-up was stellar, and so were the choices: Karen played Chappell Roan’s “Pink Pony Club” performance at the Grammys, Summer Kim Lee picked Lucy Dacus’s masc-off in “Best Guess,” Alice Motion chose Courtney Barnett and Jen Cloher’s May/December duet, Mairead Sullivan (author of Lesbian Death: Desire and Danger between Feminist and Queer) went with Janelle Monae’s “Make Me Feel,” and special guest Phranc, a Sapphic pop star of many eras, selected Julien Baker & TORRES’s new country collaboration, “Sugar in the Tank.”

Photos by Sarah Kessler

I chose something I’d seen all over my algorithm for the last two weeks: Kelly Clarkson’s viral ‘Kellyaoke’ performance of Outfield’s “Your Love.”

@kristenalwayswories#greenscreenvideo I’m just posting this so I can find it easily…. @kellyclarkson @Kelly Clarkson Show #kellyclarkson #wink #wlw

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I don’t watch The Kelly Clarkson Show (sorry, Kelly!), but I have always been a Kelly Clarkson fan—particularly after her performance of “Natural Woman” on Season 1 of American Idol. She wore a hat and tie for that performance and, still extremely unclear about my queerness at 18, can still recall feeling what Phranc referred to as “the Sapphic tingle” while watching her. I was so motivated by this tingle (which was, as yet, unexplored) that, despite not usually being such an active participant in televised competitions, I called in and voted for her (many times).

Sapphic pop is still so broadly (un)defined that during the panel, I mentioned not seeing it as a genre—because, like women’s music, many genres exist within it. An audience member asked if it was not a genre, then what is it? And is that definition ultimately more reflective of and reliant on its audience?