Dyan Valdés

“Good Luck, Babe!”
On Chappell Roan and the Bittersweetness of Progress
By Dyan Valdés

I’m going through a breakup. And I’m listening to Chappell Roan’s “Good Luck, Babe!” on repeat.

“Good Luck, Babe!” is the #1 song on Spotify right now. For the few of you who haven’t heard the song, Chappell, a proudly out lesbian, sings about a doomed affair with a closeted girl who jerks her around and ultimately retreats into the apparent safety of heteronormativity, waking up next to her dull husband with regret after rejecting queer love. The song is a brilliant pop gem, and it is gay as fuck.

This was my first queer relationship in 20 years. For some reason, I abandoned my lesbian identity in the early 2000s and retreated into the apparent safety of heteronormativity (although as anyone who has dated or even been in the vicinity of a straight man knows, heterosexuality is not safe at all). So when I fell hard for a girl again, after all this time, and she seemed to maybe like me back, I was all in.

It was her first lesbian relationship, which, along with her being six years younger than me, meant that her entire experience with active queerness had started in an entirely different era than mine had. How I marveled at her ability to tell her friends that she had a girlfriend, without first having to sit them down and make sure they were ready to hear something awful about her very personhood that may make them abandon her forever. When she said that she would tell her family that she was dating a woman if they asked about her love life on a recent trip home, it felt almost flippant. Casual. No big deal.

I think back to my first lesbian relationship. I was 14, and when Michelle and I went to the movies and kissed in her car on the way home while Don’t Look Back in Anger by Oasis played on the radio, I felt for the first time that my heart had burst open. That the scared and sad and icky feelings that boys made me feel were not inevitable, that all the rom coms and love songs were not hyperbolic, that something magical could happen between two people who liked each other and wanted to make themselves greater than the sum of their parts, that I could belong somewhere, and in fact I belonged right there on the back seat of Michelle’s ’67 Mustang with my lips on hers and my hand tentatively down the front of her jeans.

And two weeks later, when she dumped me on the phone because she was still pining over her previous girlfriend, I lost it all. I felt the ground fall out from under me, losing not only my first love but my first feeling of connection to a new world, a place where I was safe, where I fit in and where I didn’t have to lie about who I was.

I cried so hard and so loud that my mom, who normally granted me a wide berth of privacy, came into my bedroom to make sure I was OK. She asked what had happened. I said I couldn’t tell her. I couldn’t keep it together though, and despite wanting and needing to guard my horrible secret, I let myself collapse in her arms and cover her body with my tears. I soaked her shirt through for the first time since I was a baby, and she wrapped her arms around me and rocked back and forth in silence.

She must have been so distraught, knowing viscerally the amount of pain that I was in, but also knowing that I wouldn’t ever tell her why. To her credit, she didn’t ask a second time what was wrong, she just gave me what I needed: she held me tight as I choked and sobbed my way through my first heartbreak.

I think now about how we were both robbed of a seminal moment – I should have been able to tell her. She should have been able to buy ice cream and put Nora Ephron films on the television, rubbing my back and telling me that Michelle was an idiot for dumping me, that the next girl would be better and that I deserved more. But no, because it was the ‘90s and being gay still meant that you were defective, we just awkwardly held each other in silence.

I wonder if she remembers that afternoon. I wonder if she still asks herself what on earth happened to me that day, why my world fell apart and why I couldn’t tell her the reason.

Which brings me back to Chappell. When I was fumbling through my first heartbreak, there were no mainstream songs I could see myself in. Sure, we had niche queer artists like Ani DiFranco (who is cis and straight-married, so does that even count?) The only other alternative for lesbian pop culture came in the form of the thin-lipped white sexlessness of Melissa Etheridge, KD Lang and Ellen, all of whom were breathlessly celebrated by communities jumping for scraps but were still fringe. Everything else wasn’t made by or for us. We had to swap the genders in the love songs, to imbue mainstream hetero culture with double entendre, to “queer code” the output of pop divas so that we could pretend that something, anything, belonged to us.

Dyan Valdes in her childhood bedroom, 1996, age 14

There’s a 14-year-old girl now, nursing her young precious heart after having it broken for the first time by another girl, and she gets to have Chappell. She can cry and sing along to words that explicitly deal with girls being shitty to each other in sex and love. She doesn’t have to code switch, she doesn’t have to gender swap. She doesn’t even have to go to a gay-straight alliance meeting in a dark hall of her high school to see her own experience reflected back to her, this song is number fucking one on Spotify. The straights have to gender switch if they want this song to apply to them.

I went to Chappell Roan’s sold-out concert last week at the Velodrome in Berlin. Thousands of beglittered and flamboyantly dressed young people, many with their equally beglittered and flamboyantly dressed parents, got to hear Chappell loudly proclaim that this is a queer space, this is a safe space, you can do your makeup however you want, dress however you want, love whoever you want and everyone is welcome!

This is progress, and it is huge.

But my feelings are bittersweet. My recent ex-girlfriend is only six years younger than me, and for her, professing a non-heteronormative sexuality was like saying she likes the color blue, or likes cats.

For me, it was like torturously vomiting up a cluster of barbed wire. My mother confronted me about it and I admitted to it, and yes, I’m intentionally using the language of crime and shame because that’s how it was. Being gay back then meant that you would get AIDS and die or get jumped and gang raped and murdered and your murderers would tell the judge they raped and killed you because they were grossed out by you being gay and then they would go free cuz gay panic.

But only a few years later, it’s profoundly uncool for kids to have a sexuality or gender identity that is NOT fluid.

Dyan Valdes, high-school senior portrait, 1998, age 16

Visiting my parents recently, my mom invited me to march in a gay pride parade with her local women’s activist group. I of course jumped at the chance and was happy to join my mom in supporting queer young people, but part of me felt sad for my teenage self who had to lie to that same mother all those years ago every last weekend in June when I snuck up to the city to march in San Francisco Pride. I watched her pass out rainbow-colored beads to all the cool and popular kids who loudly declared their crushes on other cool and popular kids of all genders, and while I beamed at their openness, I felt a bit sad that my experience had been so different. Had I been born just a few years later, I, too, would have been able to talk about my crushes without first making sure that the person I was talking to was sitting down, was safe, was not going to think that by me saying I thought Marcella was hot meant that I was a pervert. No, these kids were having beads draped around their necks by my mother, who probably still doesn’t know how many gay pride parades I snuck off to just a handful of years ago.

That handful of years is devastating. Yes, I’m so happy that those kids are safe and thriving. I’m so happy that Chappell Roan gets to write honestly about her love life, and that the whole world is singing along. That the kids at the Velodrom in Berlin got to experience that mass communal moment of queer and trans joy. But why did I just miss it? Why did I have to slog through those painful years only to see how easy and beautiful it could have been, should have been? It feels like such a waste.

I realize that as I’m going through this most recent lesbian heartbreak, I’m revisiting my very first one. I’m grieving that my past self didn’t have a number one song that looked and loved just like she did. I’m grieving that she had to choke back her tears instead of shouting “Mom, I’m so, so sad, somebody broke my heart, and it really, really hurts.” I’m grieving that she, at the tender age of 14, had to hold that pain, alone.

Progress is wonderful and beautiful. I don’t wish my teenage gay trauma on anyone. I’m happy that my most recent ex-girlfriend gets to experience her first lesbian breakup in a way that looks more or less the same as any other breakup. She gets to talk about it with whoever she wants, and she certainly can listen to songs about it. Good for her.

I’m happy that I don’t have to seek out dark corners of sub-sub-sub-culture to find a work of art that will sing my pain back to me exactly how it feels, without disguise or innuendo – I can simply listen to the number one song in the world right now, or euphorically scream along to every word of a sold-out arena concert.

I’m reaching back 30 years to whisper in my younger self’s ear that someday, she won’t have to carry her heartbreak alone and in shame. That the world will catch up. And yes, she will have sacrificed her formative years to a society that will eventually course-correct as if nothing had happened, as if it had been this way all along, but that’s just because she was born a few years too early.

So I’m hitting play on “Good Luck, Babe!” for the thousandth time. Fucking right on, Chappell, you keep on smashing the charts and being true to your proud queer self. I love you and I love all the queer kids who get to have you. Thank you for soundtracking my heartbreak exactly how it is, without apology, without shame. I’ll never get those few years back, but I can promise that heartbroken 14-year-old that she is safe, she is loved, and she will be OK. Good luck, babe.

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Dyan Valdés is a Cuban-American musician living in Berlin. She is the keyboardist of Hamburger Schule legends Die Sterne, a founding member of indie darlings The Blood Arm and synth-punk trio Mexican Radio, and has a solo project releasing hard feminist pop under her own name.