{"id":56,"date":"2024-12-10T22:16:42","date_gmt":"2024-12-10T22:16:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meaghanvandyke.com\/blog\/?p=56"},"modified":"2024-12-10T22:35:42","modified_gmt":"2024-12-10T22:35:42","slug":"an-open-letter-to-the-trump-supporter-listening-to-chappel-roan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meaghanvandyke.com\/blog\/longessays\/an-open-letter-to-the-trump-supporter-listening-to-chappel-roan\/","title":{"rendered":"An Open Letter to the Homophobe Listening to Chappell Roan"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"Rainbow
Photo by Meaghan Van Dyke<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The whole time I ran Cross Country, I never fully exhaled.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I breathed in short, spacey breaths taken when I thought no one could see me. It burned my lungs and made my legs sting most days, but I was surviving. I took in enough air to see the next step and the next step only until I started all over again.
I wasn\u2019t the best one on the team, but I was running. I was finishing the race. I was finding the faces of my family and friends at the end of the final 100-meter sprint and collapsing on the track that stained my sneakers. I was still running. I was still breathing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I tell people that I ran Cross Country in high school, I am very careful about the words I use. I ran Cross Country. I was not a part of the team, despite my presence in the end of the year photos. I ran Cross Country. I did it alone. That much was made clear to me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Before races, I was reacquainted with hate. Being one of two queer people on the team, I was met with a lack of eye contact from my coach in his extremist hat and the whisper of slurs low enough that I thought I might have been going crazy. I thanked the people who pushed away the kid who uttered the particularly nasty one to me and kept running. It didn\u2019t make much difference. I belonged, but at the cost of my lungs. I finished the season, the race, and hung up my spikes.
In the end of the year photo, I sat in the front row of the team and smiled. I was determined not to let this effort go to waste.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Determined not to be forgotten.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Despite backhanded efforts to make me disappear, I had done it. I was there. That needed to be recorded.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In May, I graduated and shed my hometown skin for that of whatever Fredericksburg had to offer me. I reintroduced myself to the world. Here I could be Meaghan, Meg, or in one very confused case, Matilda, and I could do it freely. I placed fake plants in the windowsill. I hung string lights and started talking to my neighbors. I watched the part of me that defined the very breaths I took to melt away until it was only a piece of myself again. I relished this new sense of a patchwork identity. I relished the sounds of my roommate\u2019s broken Chappell Roan vinyl and felt the word \u201cqueer\u201d sit lighter on my chest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first time I heard Chappell Roan, my roommate and I had decked our room in Christmas lights that blinked slowly around the ceiling at night. The Michael Bubl\u00e9 record spun lazily around my roommate\u2019s turntable beneath the growing polaroid wall. I raised my shoulders higher when I walked. My parents commented on the way I seemed to giggle when I talked. When the pride sticker I\u2019d stuck on my laptop started to peel, I taped it onto the Microsoft logo on the back so it illuminated when I turned the computer on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My roommate slowed the spinning Christmas record with her hands and pulled out the Midwest Princess vinyl. On the last Sunday before finals week, I sat on my carpeted dorm floor and crafted Christmas gifts while the story of the record unfolded. It was one that demanded attention, and eventual silence from my roommate and I who chatted softly together for the first few songs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What Chappell Roan did with The Rise and Fall of the Midwest Princess was not entirely original. The title itself borrows its name from the likes of Bowie and demonstrates the same bizarre arc if you look closely enough. What made Chappell most successful was her honesty, perfectly and completely brutal. Love was messy in the Chappell Roan universe. It demanded too much, sometimes sharp and overly constricting in what it took and what it left behind. Love was freeing, more or less so than infatuation in many songs. There was imperfection and chaos that melted into something beautiful, almost patchworked together. At the heart of the album was an experience: deep, easy breaths made into crescendos I tried and so miserably failed to sing along to around the dorm room. This was honesty, and therefore visibility. It wasn\u2019t the first attempt at a mark on the music industry, in fact, in some comparisons, it may be likened more to a scratch, but it was enough. It was proof that I could be loud. I could exhale.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I won\u2019t flatter myself by pretending that Chappell was a sort of underground artist that only I knew about after discovery. For years, Chappell lived her career as a sort of Midwest icon. While a few of her singles received a few ten thousand streams on Spotify, she remained in this state of campy limbo- well known amongst her loyal fanbase of young college students and just well-known enough to be caught under the breaths of people you passed on campus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess was a paradox. For seven years, Chappell worked tirelessly to write and promote her music in LA, persevering even after being sent back to Missouri after an unsuccessful pitch (the song that was denied was called Pink Pony Club- ironically one of Chappell\u2019s greatest hits today). Midwest Princess was the core definition of a passion project. Without a record label pushing agendas for a certain number of sales or a definitive and marketable brand, there was a sense of freedom in Chappell\u2019s writing. The Midwest Princess was a character created out of one of the greatest motivators artists can have: nothing to lose and no expectations to meet up to. There was no pressure to label, no pressure to apologize for who she was or what she sang about, no need to euphemize the experience for the straight audience. It was a collective breath of fresh air.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was 10 the first time I heard the word \u201cgay\u201d at a sleepover late at night. The other girls gathered around her listening faithfully, like the phrases she recited were prophecies to be interpreted by the other 10-year-old. She spat the word like it was venom in her mouth. I looked over to catch the stare of the only other girl with wide eyes, reeling with a mix of discovery and tragedy that closed my lungs and sent me panicking. For years, I worked to unlearn the hate that settled into the skin of one of my closest friends. I watched as she posted \u201cRed Wine Supernova\u201d to her new boyfriend and wondered how she could avoid the reconcile her hate with the lyrics that had given me new life, or if she even felt she needed to.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The problem with Chappell Roan\u2019s new popularity is not the fact that she was becoming more popular in the first place. Although most popular amongst queer women, Chappell Roan made music for everyone. Her music was candid to the whole of her experiences, not only as a singular part of her identity. The problem lay in the TikTokers who remixed \u201cHOTTOGO\u201d as a pro-Trump anthem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chappell Roan carries a message that demands to be listened to, to be considered. To use a song created as a triumph of abandoned labels and stereotypes to promote hate is a direct disrespect of the way Chappell has so determinedly tried to make herself known. It is a direct constriction. I watch my rights be challenged to the sound of \u201cPink Pony Club\u201d and wonder if young queer people know how to find the safe space behind the hate. If they know they are allowed to breathe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The whole time I ran Cross Country, I never fully exhaled. I breathed in short, spacey breaths taken when I thought no one could see me. It burned […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-56","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-longessays"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meaghanvandyke.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meaghanvandyke.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meaghanvandyke.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meaghanvandyke.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meaghanvandyke.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=56"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/meaghanvandyke.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":71,"href":"https:\/\/meaghanvandyke.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56\/revisions\/71"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meaghanvandyke.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meaghanvandyke.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meaghanvandyke.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}