To end LGBT History Month, 2013, and to look forward to the 2014 theme, Music, Polari asked the singer-songwriter Sabrina Chap to recall a song important to her.

‘Both Hands’ – Ani DiFranco
by Sabrina Chap
………………………………………………………………………………………….

Songs are like invisible tattoos – they settle deep inside your skin and silently etch a memory of exactly where you were when you first heard them. People often get tattoos to mark a change in their life, and each time they gaze at that tattoo, they remember. If anything brings me viscerally back to a defining moment, it’s a song. ‘Both Hands’ by Ani DiFranco brings me to the very first page in my book of love, to the small dorm room of where it all began.

I am walking
out in the rain
and I am listening to the low moan
of the dial tone again
and I am getting
nowhere with you
and I can’t let it go
and I can’t get through…

I was a freshman in college. I had just been spit from the gutteral commercialism of my Midwestern upbringing into my own blazing independence. The music I heard in high school was terrible – overproduced pop hits whose lyrics I could never understand. Once I finally did figure out the lyrics, I understood why they’d been covered up by synthesizers in the first place.

Picture this – class president for four years, a straight up annoying “Rachel from Glee” do-gooder who overachieved for the pure sport of it. Then suddenly, there I stood, facing Ani DiFranco’s debut album cover, with her shaved head and quiet, calm face turned towards the camera. She was beautiful and tough, and suddenly, I wanted that.

the old woman behind the pink curtains
and the closed door
on the first floor
she’s listening through the air shaft
to see how long our swan song can last

Her words were clean and clear – a girl’s quiet eye view account of the bruised world before her. It was all boiled down to some words and a guitar, fiercely fingerpicking chords that could have easily been strummed.

I am watching your chest rise and fall
like the tides of my life,
and the rest of it all
and your bones have been my bed frame
and your flesh has been my pillow
I am waiting for sleep
to offer up the deep
with both hands

I knew that Ani sometimes slept with girls, but part of the thrill of the song was that there was no gender to the person she was talking about – it could have been anyone. I wanted it to be anyone – without the pressures of having to say he or she. I wanted to simply wonder at a body beside me, drawing graffiti on their naked back as the light through the curtains cut us into blocks of warmth and shade.

in each other’s shadows we grew less and less tall
and eventually our theories couldn’t explain it all
and I’m recording our history now on the bedroom wall
and when we leave the landlord will come
and paint over it all

Her name was _____, and she loved poetry. We listened to Ani together, our eyes shifting past each other’s bodies, considering, yet too afraid to make a move. Back then, the glorious ‘all you can eat buffet’ word of encapsulating varying sexual desires, ‘QUEER’, didn’t really exist. The word ‘LESBIAN’ did, which confused me. I didn’t ‘look’ like a lesbian. I didn’t feel like a lesbian. I felt like me. I just didn’t know who that was yet.

I was terrified and perhaps slightly drunk when I first kissed _____. I was definitely drunk when we first slept together. Back then, I wouldn’t allow myself to consciously do the things I subconsciously wanted. I needed to be mentally incapacitated to allow myself these small admissions. Word for word, Ani allowed me to name them.

and I am walking
out in the rain
and I am listening to the low moan of the dial tone again
and I am getting nowhere with you
and I can’t let it go
and I can’t get though

My time with _____ stretched over several teasing years of strategized flirting, admissions of love and terrified retreating. We didn’t know how to say what we wanted from each other, but that feeling, that silent want, that quarter in the slot phone call towards each other was the first we’d made in trying to fulfill that desire

I don’t have any tattoos, any visible ones. I like the fact that upon seeing me, there is no visible trace of the who’s I’ve been. But now, years later – the lovers I have passed under, the hands that have traced my back, the taste of blood oranges in Paris, that destroyed bunkbed in Austin … I realize that all my loves and sexual hi-jinks bloomed from that first page of possibility with ______.

Since then, the words ‘both hands’ have become my unconscious motto. Invisibly tattooed right across my jawline. That’s how I want to live, and to love. To give with all I have to give, not holding back. Sometimes I forget to do that, but when I listen, this song reminds me every time.

So now use both hands
please use both hands
oh, no don’t close your eyes
I am writing graffitti on your body
I am drawing the story of how hard we tried
how hard we tried
how hard we tried