Growing up in the Bible Belt, MTV opened up a world that felt free for Beth Ditto. Here, the singer writes about queer visibility and why positive role models are still so vital
My earliest memories of queerness come from pop culture. I was born in 1981, when it felt like queer culture was just pop culture. This was around the time that Girls Just Want to Have Fun and Material Girl came out. Prince was everywhere, as was Annie Lennox and Culture Club. Boy George was really the first explicitly queer person I saw on TV; I was four years old. My mom had me young (even though I was her fourth kid) and she was a “cool mom” – meaning we had cable TV. I remember we’d watch MTV, which was brand new, and that’s where I saw Boy George. I was so enamoured of him. It didn’t not make sense to me. I never thought: so that’s a boy dressed as a girl? Wearing makeup? It was almost like it was home.
Not everybody felt that way. After I saw my first images of queer people on MTV, the channel was banned in our town, Searcy, a small place in Arkansas. The county was and still is influenced by a very conservative Christian college – you couldn’t go to a bookstore and buy a gay or feminist magazine, you had to ask behind the counter. We weren’t even allowed to have dances! It was the Christian college that made the cable company drop MTV and when they did, those images of Prince, Annie Lennox and Boy George were the last glimmers of pop culture I’d see for a while. But they stuck with me. It’s like I had a tiny window into queerness in my little developing brain. I took those moments and ran with them. They shaped my idea of what gender is and what music is.
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