Two years ago I spent my summer reading a great history of the Riot Grrrl movement. The book, Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution (Amazon | Indiebound) by Sara Marcus, chronicled the rise and short reign of Riot Grrrl’s prominence in America by following some of the young women at the front of the movement.
After finishing it, I downloaded some Heavens to Betsy and Bratmobile songs and sat on my back porch, wishing I could go back to 1993. The lyrics were so raw and evocative, I could picture girls shouting into microphones while furiously strumming guitars in basements packed full of other girls dancing their hearts out.
I wondered what it was like to be at one of those shows. Or to get a zine in the mail that said all the things you wished you could to the people who were in control of your life. I tried to imagine what it must have been like to feel chills the first time you read the Riot Grrrl Manifesto, knowing you were not alone, that there were others like you out there.
I never got to be a teenage girl. I am a transwoman who did not come out until I was in college and then did not transition until I was old enough to rent a car.
Even though I try not to think about it these days, because transitioning later in life is as much a part of who I am as being transgender in the first place, I really regret never having all the typical teenage girl experiences: having girlfriends I did everything with, getting dressed up for the prom, having a first kiss or a first date. I had my own boy versions of these experiences, of course, but when I transitioned I left most of that behind me. In a way, my life started over again at 27 when I let myself become who I really am.
Reading Girls To The Front only made me feel even more like I missed that boat (filled with maxi pads, liquid eyeliner, fishnets and chiffon prom dresses) entirely. It made me really sad, but I accepted that I would never get to experience what it was like to be a part of Riot Grrrl for myself.
It never would have occurred to me that I would get to live out my Riot Grrrl dreams in a video game.
The game is called Gone Home, and it’s set in late 1995. You play as Katie, a girl who spent a year backpacking around Europe while her mom, dad and kid sister, Sam, moved into a giant house in the Oregon hills. You arrive home late one night to find the front door locked and to your surprise, nobody waiting for you.
In order to find out why nobody is home, you start looking for clues. The house is old and dark, and there is a massive rainstorm, creating a persistent background of rattling windows and cracking thunder. The game has you play in first-person perspective, and as you move from room to room, you often have to scramble through pitch dark for the nearest light switch or lamp.
Littered throughout the house are scraps of ephemera: bills, to-do lists, magazine articles clipped out for later, letters from school and work. The story is told through these objects and through a set of letters from Sam to Katie presented as narrated diaries.
The diaries help keep the plot moving, but the real meat of the story is in these things you pick up and study. You find yourself having to read between the lines to piece together what is going on, and often the most tragic of events are only hinted at with the vaguest of clues. In this way, Gone Home tells its story through induction, something that most other video games have yet to figure out. It’s the kind of story that almost has to be told through a game.
The story begins with Sam starting in a new high school after your family moved. You quickly realize she is going through her own teenage rebellion phase, finding notes passed in class, letters to your parents from the school that indicate Sam has fallen in with a new, rougher crowd, class assignments turned into mocking parodies.
And then you find the first cassette tape.
Through an audio diary, Sam tells you that she was given the tape by her friend Lonnie, who said “You’re gonna like this one.” So you insert it into a tape deck and with that familiar tape hiss you hear a girl sing:
“We’re so cool, yeah yeah
Yeah, we’re so cool, cool
We’re so cool, yeah yeah
Fuck you too! Cool schmool!”
The guitar roars to life with a killer riff and the drums kick in a second later. You instantly understand what Lonnie was talking about. It is remarkable that the makers of Gone Home went to the trouble to license actual Riot Grrrl music to be used in the game. This means you-as-Katie get to be right there with Sam as she hears this music for the first time and Riot Grrrl becomes her life.
As the game progresses, you find out how Sam began to learn more about who she is and what kind of person she wants to be. Soon she is going to her first punk show with Lonnie. As you enter new rooms of the house, you start to find show posters, set lists and Sam’s first zine (Kicking Against The Patriarchy!) made from cut-outs of magazines and comics.
But this comes with a heavy price. At risk of spoiling everything–you should really experience the narrative for yourself–I can say that you follow Sam’s emotional journey as she experiences the highs and lows that come with figuring out who you really are.
For weeks now I keep thinking back to the things I saw in that house: the funny notes between Sam and Lonnie, the way you could tell Sam’s parents were trying to understand what their daughter was going through and ultimately how they failed her. How their own stories play out on a parallel track, culminating in the events that lead up to Sam making an important choice that will change the rest of her life, with you rooting her on as you piece it together.
In contrast to Gone Home, my teenage years were about as vanilla as you can get. Raised by middle-class parents out in suburbia who divorced while I was in high school, I had my share of angst, but it was mostly a tempest in a teapot. It was not until I was in college and learned that a person could be transgender that things started to make sense for me.
I had supportive friends who encouraged me to explore, but when I came to the conclusion that I wanted to transition to living as a woman, I started running into problems that culminated in forcing me back into the closet for years. By the time I finally did transition, I felt like I could not wait a minute longer and I was resentful for having wasted so many years not being the person I am.
But even if I had been born a girl I would have missed out on Riot Grrrl anyway. In 1993 I was only nine years old. And growing up I never had any guiding cultural influences, no cool aunt or friend’s older sister to give me mixtapes and hand-me-downs. As much as I regret it now, all my music and movie recommendations came from watching countless hours of VH1 and MTV until I was well into college.
I like to lie and tell people I did not discover music until 2005.
So even if I had been a girl, I still would only have read about Riot Grrrl in a Rolling Stone retrospective many years too late. My version of Revolution Girl Style Now was asking my dad to drive me to Best Buy so I could buy the Spice Girls’ first album.
Despite all that, I figured it all out eventually. Through the internet I have been able to find people who think and speak the same way I do about the things that matter to me, I have made friends I am able to confide in, in ways I did not think possible, and I have had the experience of counting down the days until my favorite band came to town before finding myself standing in the front row screaming along every word. In a way, Titus Andronicus is my Bikini Kill and Waxahatchee is my Bratmobile.
Reading Girls to the Front made me regret that I did not get to participate in the Riot Grrrl movement, but playing Gone Home both gave me a real sense of what it was like and reminded me that my experiences are just as valuable. It did this by not just telling me about what happened from a historical perspective, but by giving me a proxy and letting me connect the emotional dots for myself.
Even though the details were different and I came to it many years later, I was Sam, and Gone Home was my story too. I am just so happy they reminded me.
[Image via Wikimedia Commons]
Tags: alice lee, bikini kill, bratmobile, girls to the front, riot grrl, trans* issues, video games
This is lovely! I know the makers of this game pulled out of PAX because of the Penny Arcade guy being such an asshole–I’m so glad they’re getting exposure otherwise!
That was actually how I first heard about the game! During the last bigoted tirade by the Penny Arcade folks, someone on my twitter timeline ended up posting the Fullbright company’s blog post where they explained why they weren’t going to show the game at PAX. I had never heard of them or the game but that post instantly won them my respect and I promised myself I’d buy the game when it came out, just out of knee jerk solidarity. That it ended up literally being one of the best games I’ve ever played in my life is just icing on the cake.
Aaah, I read the first few paragraphs of this piece and thought “The author should really play Gone Home!” And lo and behold…the piece was partially about Gone Home!
I can’t recommend this game highly enough, even if you’re not the type of person who normally plays games. It doesn’t take any kind of skill to play, other than a sense of curiosity. It’s a genuinely touching little story which is both very specific (uncovering who Sam and the rest of the family are) and also universal (it’s about growing up, how we interact with our families, and other genuinely human stuff). I honestly feel like it’s the first videogame I can recommend without qualification to my non-gamer friends and family as a “work of art.”
Also, it’s a rock solid piece of 90s nostalgia. Not just Riot Grrrl. There’s, like, X-Files VHS tapes everywhere.
I THOUGHT THE EXACT SAME THING. And I really have to second this recommendation! Also, in case anyone out there is on the fence about it, it should be noted that it’ll probably only take you 2 hours to play through the game (MAYBE 3 if you take your time, which you should!), so the time commitment is minimal. It IS $20, which maybe seems a bit much for a 2-3 hour long game, but I can’t stress enough how thoroughly worth it it is. It’s beautiful and heartbreaking and heartwarming and unexpectedly funny.
One more thing–while this is definitely the kind of game you recommend to your friends who don’t normally play games, if you’re someone who DOES play a lot of games, it plays on and subverts your expectations in really interesting ways, so it’s not like it has less to offer to “gamers”. Not that anyone was really saying that to begin with.
Full agreement to everything said above!
This was very nice!
I do understand the crestfallen feeling of having missed the boat on one’s favorite bands in their heyday, but when it comes to things like movements, I try to think they can only really exist in terms of sound and the evolution of said. In most cases the movements we tend to think about, especially nowadays, are constructions of media. Typically you’d have your first wave of bands, sometimes in disparate places and largely ignorant of each other, most often in the same place and informing one another, who don’t really care to form a movement. And from there you have zines and media coverage and it becomes something else.
Like most popular indie music, Riot Grrrl descended from principle-focused hardcore punk and (quicker than most other scenes of its ilk) mostly dissolved when the majors and media outlets came calling. ANYWAY the point I was getting to is this: the thing about Riot Grrrl, the thing about any politically-oriented music movement, was that it wasn’t a “scene”, per se. That it seems like a scene that grew and then died is a function of 1) the first and most prominent bands / local communities dissolving, and 2) the media spinning a narrative from that fact, as though bands never break up.
Riot Grrrl is an ethos, right? It existed outside of the bands that encompassed it, it existed before itself, even. And it’s existed since it came to prominence. There are a lot of bands that, even if they don’t wave the banner (and few if any did, “riot grrrl” being a name given and thus not trusted) still continue in that vein. The real tragedy is that with the death of record stores came the death of zine culture, which was the real lifeblood of that era of indie music.
At SXSW some years back there was some asshole comedian that made a crack about roller derby being a Godsend because it kept women from starting bands, which, obviously that dude is a massive shitheel, but the tiny sliver of truth in that is the commonality of perspective and identity that runs through riot grrrl and the derby scene (I know some derby girls in bands, and they’re good). So I guess while we can and do lament that initial blossoming of the scene, there’s still plenty of stuff to immerse ourselves in and perpetuate that culture of defiance.
At this point I’m not sure who that’s directed towards, but I’ll just let it sit. Go to derby bouts, is the takeaway.
Oh and this is a good place to put this, with regard to the legacy and lineage of riot grrl: A french punk blog (blogs: the new zines??~) compiled a 12-disc (!) downloadable compilation of songs from bands that were either woman-fronted or involved women in their core creative processes, from 1977-1989. It’s a lot of stuff, and if you like punk it’s a motherlode:
http://kangnave.blogspot.com/2013/05/a-reference-…
I was so happy to find that compilation. And there’s one for female-fronted metal too!
Oh and this is a good place to put this, with regard to the legacy and lineage of riot grrl: A french punk blog (blogs: the new zines??~) compiled a 12-disc (!) downloadable compilation of songs from bands that were either woman-fronted or involved women in their core creative processes, from 1977-1989. It's a lot of stuff, and if you like punk it's a motherlode:
http://kangnave.blogspot.com/2013/05/a-reference-…
This is really wonderful, Alice. Thank you for sharing your experiences. I don’t play videogames but now I really want to play Gone Home!
It’s very non-gamer-friendly. I encouraged a friend of mine who’s almost entirely game-illiterate to give it a try, and she loved it, cried over it, the whole nine yards.
Hey, this was cool!
Aaaaaah I was so delighted when I hit “a video game” and this was about Gone Home – that game is inspiring so many amazing pieces of writing, both from those who loved it and those who were disappointed.
And I know what you mean about missing the boat – we’re the same age and the ephemera of Gone Home, the video game cartridges and X-Files VHS tapes and Lisa Frank-style folders, is the stuff of my childhood rather than my adolescence. But it felt familiar anyway, and Sam’s story just resonated so deeply.
Thank you for sharing this story with us. <3
hey Alice, this was a beautifully paced piece of writing! Thank you.
I hope, though, in your version of femininity and what teenage girldom would have been like to live through, you don’t accidentally end up constructing this very stereotypical version and speaking to yourself & others as though *that* is what it is to be a teenage girl. This is what rubbed me the wrong way, I guess: “missed that boat (filled with maxi pads, liquid eyeliner, fishnets and chiffon prom dresses)…” Probably you were just writing via compression, and don’t actually think that these things necessarily compose part of a girl’s life, but the essay read as if you did, and that stuff (except maybe maxi pads for utilitarian reasons!) really have zilch to do with lots of women’s experiences of being a teenager. Zip. Zero. So let’s break open gender confinement for everybody, as I’m sure you want to do yourself, since you love the riot grrls!
hey Alice, this was a beautifully paced piece of writing! Thank you.
I hope, though, in your version of femininity and what teenage girldom would have been like to live through, you don't accidentally end up constructing this very stereotypical version and speaking to yourself & others as though *that* is what it is to be a teenage girl. This is what rubbed me the wrong way, I guess: "missed that boat (filled with maxi pads, liquid eyeliner, fishnets and chiffon prom dresses)…" Probably you were just writing via compression, and don't actually think that these things necessarily compose part of a girl's life, but the essay read as if you did, and that stuff (except maybe maxi pads for utilitarian reasons!) really have zilch to do with lots of women's experiences of being a teenager. Zip. Zero. So let's break open gender confinement for everybody, as I'm sure you want to do yourself, since you love the riot grrls!
This is so interesting to me because, hi, I was also born in 1984, missed all this fun shit, and ache for the same kind of teenage girlhood described here, which I came close to having but never actually experienced. I had the maxi pads and a little bit of eyeliner, but a confluence of problems at home and severe mental health issues led me straight away from prom tickets/chiffon/etc and into an exciting world of GED acquisition, institutional failures, and predictably unpredictable consequences.
Gone Home wrecked me in every possible way, and I SO BADLY want to cry into a comment box about it, but … spoilers spoilers spoilers, I guess. Anyway, point being, I was a queer teenage fuckup whose ideas about what adolescence should look like came from the early-mid ’90s. Gone Home gives me all the feelings, to the point that I’ve forced my dad to play it with the express purpose of grilling him over its coals and writing it all up for absolutely nothing because I don’t even LiveJournal anymore. So!! Thanks for writing this, because I am addicted to talking about and reading about this game from different perspectives and yours is amazing.