I just listened to some old Sinead songs I loved as a teen and it always amazes me the capacity music has (more then other art forms, for me) to conjure a particular place and time and feeling. When Paula Cole sang her hit we self-righteous dorks screamed “say a little prayer for MEEEE.” There were so many cool queer or queer-adjacent adult women it felt like a promise of a future and 4. It was the first time I had seen people drunk or high (cf my conservative Christian community), 3. All the middle aged women there were very impressed that a middle-aged white guy took his newly 13-year-old and her twin friends to this festivalI, 2. He took me and my best friends to Lilith Fair in 1998 (sadly not a venue she played) and I mostly remember 1. I associate her music with my late father who admired her voice and feeling and strength of belief. I Do Not Want was one of the first CDs I bought with my own (babysitting!) money. Listen: her unapologetic activism, her nerviness, her angst, her fight, her courage, her struggles with trauma and despair, her constant quest for self-discovery.Īs a queer pre teen in the late 90s grappling with myself in the context of a conservative faith community Sinead felt like a beacon of what could be possible, to inhabit myself and my world. Look at her! Her shaved head, her genderqueer presentation, her Doc Martens and her leather jackets and her ripped-up jeans. In many ways, however, Sinead’s personal affiliation with a queer identify was only part of the reason she became a queer icon. In her 2021 memoir, Rememberings, she describes herself as specifically not a lesbian or a heterosexual, but asexual. Sinead was married to four different men in her life and had four children. If I fall in love with someone, I wouldn’t give a shit if they were a man or a woman.” In a 2014 interview with PrideSource, she said she believed that “if you fall in love with someone, you fall in love with someone, and I don’t think it would matter what they were… I don’t believe in labels of any kind, put it that way. I lean a bit more towards the hairy blokes.” But I actually am a lesbian… I don’t think I necessarily paved the way for anyone, but other people paved the way for me.”īy the time she spoke to Entertainment Weekly about her sexuality in 2005, she’d landed somewhere else: “I’m three-quarters heterosexual, a quarter gay. “I’m a lesbian… although I haven’t been very open about that and throughout most of my life I’ve gone out with blokes because I haven’t necessarily been terribly comfortable about being a lesbian. She appeared on the magazine’s cover, next to the words “Sinead Comes Out,” telling readers: Sinead O’Connor’s disinterest in mainstream popularity perhaps was part of what enabled her to come out as a lesbian in Curve Magazine in 2000, which was not a popular time to do so. “It was about the kinds of provocations we accept from women in music.” “But the overreaction to O’Connor was not just about whether she was right or wrong,” writes Amanda Hess in that same profile. It was open season on treating me like a crazy bitch.” In 2021 she told The New York Times : “I’m not sorry I did it. Because, again, being a pop star wasn’t her dream. To O’Connor, that was hardly the end of her story, that was a return to the one she’d wanted to tell all along. Like so many progressive and valid points made by misunderstood women of the ’90s, it should hit different now.
The response to this political action was near-universal outrage, and it overshadowed the reason she’d done so in the first place: to protest the widespread sexual abuse of children in the Catholic Church and the Church’s lack of action around it. The most popular story of her life is one that begins with her first album, The Lion and the Cobra, which earned her first Grammy nomination, and ramps up with second album, I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, which contained her first big hit, “Nothing Compares 2 U” (written by Prince), and essentially ends in October of 1992, the night she ripped up a picture of the Pope on Saturday Night Live. Her journey through this dimension has been a journey - her romantic relationships, her spirituality, her mental health, her career, her political activism. Every narrative thread doubles back on itself. Sinead O’Connor’s life is impossible to summarize or to even try and summarize. Singer-songwriter Sinead O’Connor performs on stage at Vogue Theatre on Februin Vancouver, Canada. The Autostraddle Encyclopedia of Lesbian Cinema.LGBTQ Television Guide: What To Watch Now.
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