Amy Ray and Emily Sailers, who make up the lesbian folk-rock duo the IndigoGirls, are opening up about addiction, recovery and how their music continuesto be a lighthouse for the LGBTQ community.
The musicians recently sat down with Glennon Doyle for her podcast We Can DoHard Things during which Saliers, 59, opened up about her years-longaddiction to alcohol and how her drunken antics nearly caused Ray, 58, to quitthe band.
“I was destined to be an alcoholic,” Saliers said, acknowledging thatalcoholism runs in her family. “I didn’t know it. When we played bars andstuff and we did shots from the stage — this is when were babies — anddrinking was such a social part of what we did for work, and then I had a verysocial life I thought I was an extrovert, but I was really just an alcoholic.”
Saliers goes on to explain that, due to the overconsumption of alcohol, herbehavior eventually turned unruly. Soon, it started to become a liability forthe band.
“Amy can attest to how terrible it was when I was drinking,” she shared. “Allthe excuses I made, my irresponsibility, not showing up [to work]. But I wasterrified. I think all alcoholics are terrified to admit that they’realcoholics.”
Added Saliers: “Everybody knew I was just f****d up and dying, and Amy wasgoing to quit the band. Everything was falling apart for me and I tried tohide it so much — and you just can’t. “
After Ray made multiple attempts to intervene, Saliers’ family and friendseventually staged an intervention that led her to spend three months in rehab.Looking back, she says the experience saved her life.
“It’s the hardest f** thing I’ve ever done,” she says of getting sober.”It’s so hard sometimes, you just wanna get out, you know, quickly, and youcan’t anymore. You have to sit through a lot of discomfort and the other thingI’m learning now is I lost a whole chunk of my development — intellectualdevelopment, my evolution as a human being. I just deprived myself of that inthat time that I was drinking so hard.”
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“So, now I feel a lot of catching up, and feel a lot of unworthiness becauseI’m behind,” she explained. “But to be sober, to wake up feeling good, to knowthat you’re not self-destructing, to know that you can be, like, now I’maccountable to Amy, responsible to do us. To all the people and to myfamily. I never would have had my wife [Tristin Chipman]; she would have leftme, she was going to. Or my child. All the most beautiful things in life havecome from sobriety.”
Ray and Saliers, whose latest album Look Long was released in April,couldn’t help but acknowledge their contributions to advancing LGBTQ rightsand visibility in music as well.
Despite their iconic status in the community, both admit that they still dealwith internalized homophobia.
Ray and Saliers giving an intimate performance at Eddie’s Attic in Decatur,Georgia in 2018. (Photo: R. Diamond/Getty Images)
“I came up with feeling, at some point, the bubble was bursting, I was feelingself-hatred about being so masculine,” Ray explained of coming to terms withher sexuality when she was younger.
“It’s internalized homophobia,” she added. “It means you’re scared of what youreally are and sometimes you don’t want to face it. I think when you’re young,you don’t really know what it means.”
For lesbians of her generation, who she says felt pressured by societal normsto remain closeted, Ray says losing that emotional baggage takes work — which,she says, is in stark contrast with today’s queer generation that oftencelebrates identities rather than suppressing them.
“For us, it’s kinda like, we were just not able to celebrate [being queer] forso long that we got conditioned to that,” she said. “We were taught that youdon’t celebrate it.”
“We didn’t know what the word gay meant, really, when we were kids,” shecontinued. “Now when you come out, you understand that there’s sexuality andthere’s gender, and that’s different … The thing that helped me the most whenI got older was, all of a sudden, having all this language to talk about whereI was at.”
Saliers added that the queer community was key to not only her sobriety butalso her coming-out journey.
“People who are coming out [today] don’t have to deal so much with the self-hatred and self-homophobia that I still deal with,” Saliers says. “Some of theyoung people I know who come out, they’re overjoyed and happy, and they didn’t have to fight this internal battle.”
“The influence, the power of these systemic structures that affect us: thechurch, social norms, binary thinking, fear about fluidity in so many ways,you take a step back and look at the power of those forces on us. That’s whywe need community,” she says. “Together we can navigate that, tackle that, andaffirm our validity as human beings, our dignity. That’s why we needcommunity.”
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