The day before I turned 25, I packed up my Subaru and drove over the Canadian border to watch Tegan and Sara perform on their If It Was You Tour. A close friend texted me with concern asking if I really intended to drive six to attend a concert alone. For me, there couldn’t have been a better way to close out a year laced with different kinds of heartbreak. It was a time where I needed art to survive the realities of my day-to-day life. Tegan and Sara were part of the tapestry of queer artists and changemakers who helped ensure that survival. Like many queer people before me, I found a space in their music when I didn’t feel like the world had space for me.
Tegan and Sara’s career trajectory and wide ranging discography has allowed them to create music which finds people during the different stages of their lives. I recently had a chance to speak with Tegan Quin about the band, the Tegan and Sara Foundation, the pair’s graphic novel Crush, and their new documentary Fanatical. Reflecting back on the many eras and extensive soundscape of their band, Tegan shares “I kind of look at the trajectory of our career, all of the albums, all of the different choices as akin to haircuts or style changes. Our first album sounds like when you’re 17 and you’re just figuring it out. You haven’t figured out your face yet or what haircut looks good. You haven’t come to terms with your sexuality yet. Each of our records represents a kind of basic bitch moment in the life cycle of humanness. The luxury and sheer luck of Sara and I having the opportunity to make records right from the beginning moment of our creative journey is that we’ve been able to create a photo album of where we were and who we’ve been.”
The two went on to more fully establish their sound in 2001 with the release of their record If It Was You followed by one of their most famous records So Jealous. “The real Tegan and Sara starts to show through with If It Was You and So Jealous which makes sense because we were 24, 25 when So Jealous came out,” Tegan says. “We’d had more time to establish our voices and figure out who we wanted to be in the world. When I hold up those early high school songs next to So Jealous, I can tell we’ve alway had a way of putting together songs and a good sense for music. We have the ability to draw out the emotions of the listener by unraveling aspects of our own personal experiences.”
The release of their fourth record So Jealous brought on a higher level of attention from the music industry. The White Stripes covered their hit song “Walking with A Ghost” and Rolling Stone went on to list So Jealous as one of the top fifty records of the year. Once they got approval from men like Jack White and major magazines, mainstream audiences started to understand what queer audiences had known all along: Tegan and Sara were undeniable musicians, and they were here to stay.
They had to be great to even have a chance at making it as an openly queer band in the early 2000s. They were never going to get the same level of attention and resources from the industry as their gloried straight male indie rock counterparts. Going back through early reviews and coverage of their band for this piece, I kept seeing the same misogynistic and homophobic patterns repeated over and over again. Perhaps the best encapsulation of how the music industry treated them comes from a Spin review of So Jealous which began, “Lesbians, sisters, and proud Canucks this duo was once Wicca-folk nightmare….” But none of the bullshit stopped them. They continued to break records and attract larger audiences. They refused to be limited to a set genre, putting out records ranging from indie rock to pop with The Con, Sainthood (justice for Sainthood), and Heartthrob.
Even as Tegan and Sara continued to grow, their shows remained a place for queer people to gather and enjoy music together. It was an opportunity for us to come together at a sold-out show to see an openly queer band singing about queer love and queer life. That wasn’t always easy to come by, especially during the years before we had cultivated internet spaces to share art and build community. “We’ve always been interested in community and listening and connection,” Tegan says. “I feel really proud looking back on it now hearing about all of these people who met or got married or found community through our band.”
“It’s interesting because our own fandom era happened pre-internet so we all had to act like crazy, obsessive fans in our bedrooms,” she continues. “You could walk into my room and clearly tell I was into Kurt Cobain because every inch of my room was covered in posters of him. I bought a t-shirt with his face on it and wore it around my high school to figure out who else liked him. Then we ended up being on the other side of fandom and were almost annoyingly disconnected from our power and our privilege. We struggled at times to understand what people saw in us because we’re complicated insecure artists who can so easily get stuck in the cycle of thinking nobody cares about us because Pitchfork gave us a bad review. Those negatives can become all you see. It’s funny because during those key growing years where community building was happening and social media was developing was when we felt the worst about ourselves. But now looking back on it now I can see it was so important and so integral to how people figured out who they were and came out and found our band.”
Fanatical: The Catfishing of Tegan and Sara
Tegan and Sara have also coupled their artistry with activism. In 2016, they formed The Tegan and Sara Foundation. The mission of the foundation is to support queer women and people of marginalized genders by working with grassroots, community-led organizations all over the U.S. and Canada. The organization has three main branches: supporting LGBTQ+ summer camps, providing queer health support, and funding community grants. This year, they were awarded The Humanitarian Award at the Juno awards ceremony presented by Elliot Page, who is a current board member of The Tegan and Sara Foundation.
“The Tegan and Sara Foundation mission is ever evolving but it’s always been our mission,” Tegan says. “It’s about so many things; building confidence, building self-esteem, building opportunities for economic justice. It’s about taking care of our community and giving us an official streamlined place to put our action, our energy, and in some cases our money.”
Tegan explains that some things in the foundation have remained consistent over the years, including one of its biggest programs, which is investing in LGBTQ summer camps: The foundation gives money to every single LGBTQ-focused summer camp in North America. “We saw that as a pillar because it’s where you breed confidence and connection,” Tegan says. “That’s the foundation to conquering the world. We see young people as incredibly important and they’re unestimated in so much of their young lives. Summer camps are a great place not only for them to see people like them, but to see older people like them. When you’re young you see your parents, you see your teachers. At camp you see volunteers and camp counselors who can serve as the cool, older LBGTQ people in their lives. It helps them see their future.”
While their organization has set programs, it’s also designed to adapt to the different systemic challenges queer people face.“As we see anti-trans restrictions, bills, and religious freedom acts hitting the floor both in the US and Canada, we’ve put a lot of our focus into getting grassroots organizations money very quickly,” Tegan says. “When COVID happened we wanted to make sure community spaces like GSAs and summer camps were able to move into a virtual space so these kids could still be together. Our big goal is funding initiatives like that which can get easily overlooked. The big funders aren’t often really directly invested in small communities. We’re really invested in the smaller communities, the smaller organizations. We’re taking the money that people so generously donate and getting it out the door into the hands of those communities right away.”
In addition to their music, community building, activism work, Tegan and Sara have made a commitment to self-archiving and making sure their story is shared. This began with putting out their memoir High School, which went on to become a TV show. They then went on to adapt their story for a younger audience putting out the graphic novel Junior High followed by its sequel Crush, which tells the story of a fictional junior high-aged Tegan and Sara navigating life as young queer musicians coming of age in today’s world. “Junior High and Crush as a duology hits on the major milestones every kid experiences from bullying to crushes to getting your period,” Tegan says. “There’s also a lot in there about how kids see themselves against the backdrop and fabric of the world today. With social media we’re all contrasting and comparing all the time. Our generation didn’t have to do that. We didn’t have to see what everyone everywhere was doing all the time. Part of the reason we loved modernizing the story was that we got to examine those questions.”
One of the many things I love about following the story of young Tegan and Sara is that it speaks to the emotional landscape of what it means to come of age as both a queer girl and as a musician. In Tegan’s words: “I don’t really want to sit down to talk about the process and show you how I play a song. I want to tell you what happened to me and I want to hear what happened to you. Our experience with music is through emotions.”
In Crush, the young versions of Tegan and Sara get big opportunities all at once, like landing a manager and making a music video. “They get opportunities before they’re ready,” Tegan explains. “Instead of going along with it and giving into the pressure they feel, they draw a boundary. They choose to connect back to what matters most; being a kid, enjoying their friends, living their lives. It was great to live that out because that’s the opposite of what we did.”
Writing that alternative history was cathartic for the duo, who worked with queer illustrator Tillie Walden — author of Spinning and Are You Listening? — for the graphic novels. Tegan sums up one of the book’s takeaways as “if you have the talent and ability, you don’t have to do it today. It will be there when you’re ready.”
Fanatical: The Catfishing of Tegan and Sara
Tegan and Sara are continuing to work to change the culture around what it means to be a musician in their upcoming Hulu documentary Fanatical, which premiered at TIFF this year and hits Hulu on Friday. The documentary tells the story of how someone (or maybe multiple someones) stole Tegan’s identity and used it to build false relationships with fans. Throughout the documentary, we see the hurt caused not only by fake Tegan, but by celebrity culture overall. “For the victims of Fake Tegan, they don’t care about who this person is,” Tegan says. “They don’t want to unmask the person. For them this story isn’t about glorifying what this person did; it’s about taking back their power. It’s about telling their story.”
In conversations with the victims of Fake Tegan, the duo heard the same things repeated over and over. Fans felt stupid and manipulated and like it was so ridiculous they had to keep it a secret. “Which is how I felt,” Tegan says. “Like this was somehow my fault or that I did this.”
The film, she explains, became about forgiveness. “All of us have done things we regret. On both sides,” Tegan says. “Maybe you put something shitty online and now you’re mature enough to understand that was wrong. On the other side, people have been taken advantage of and hurt. Not all of us have been Fake Tegan, but certainly all of us have put on a mask. Many of us have pretended to be something we’re not. Many of us have hurt people and maybe not even understood why.”
In asking those questions of who we are and who we can become, the film shows the full dangers of how we as a society allow fan culture to operate. “At some point, you get somebody or many somebodies crossing your lines,” Tegan says. “We started receiving sexual content, dick pics, and takedowns of our bodies when we were 17. You learn to put up with it. You learn, at least our generation learned, to put up with it. You learn to let it go. You learn to protect yourself. You make yourself less and less available.”
“It’s amazing to see so many of these young artists like Mitski and Boygenius and Chappell Roan engaging in a cultural change that needs to happen,” Tegan says. Indeed, these artists have all spoken out about toxic fan culture in some way, Chappell Roan recently taking to social media to explain the ways her boundaries have been violated and the toll it has taken on her mental health.
“Ten years ago, we went on tour with Katy Perry during a time she was hunted,” Tegan says. “People forget this, but she went through a whole period of time where she just wore one Adidas tracksuit everywhere because it devalued her photos. And we’re fine with it as a society because if we weren’t we would change it.”
Tegan compares this societal complacency about the issue to the fact that people have normalized not paying for music. “The second an option for free or very very cheap came out, people took it, even though we knew artists would no longer be able to be paid or pay back their debt to the label,” she says. “As a society, we have to take that in and ask ourselves the hard questions about how that feels. When you go to a concert there are security and barricades. Ask yourself why. For me, the film became so much more powerful the second we started asking those questions, not just who did what.”
I’m forever grateful to Tegan and Sara for everything they’ve done for me and for our community. They’ve given us space and stories and art that reflects us. Queer people are far too aware of what it’s like to go through life without those things. It’s why we love so fiercely. It’s why I was willing to drive six hours to see them perform. But our love for art cannot spiral into something so big it overtakes the humanity of the artist. That’s something we as a society need to change and unlearn. I hope this film is part of the larger shift that helps us do that.
Fanatical: The Catfishing of Tegan and Sara streams on Hulu this Friday, October 18.
I loved reading this. I do have a responsibility towards artists and their wellbeing, even though I stay far away from most social media. It doesn’t mean I’m not involved in what goes on.