The Secrets Against Me! Left Us To Follow

This is Flirted With You All My Life, Niko Stratis’ column of personal essays about the intersection of sobriety, popular culture, recovery and music.

It’s Dry January right now, according to the ads haunting my Instagram stories and sponsored content in lifestyle magazines. Imagine all the possibilities lying in wait for a month free from alcohol. In the years since I quit drinking, I’ve noticed Dry January turn from a casual idea drawn up on pages of new desires for the year to another cog of a content machine, churning and moving without nuance or deeper consideration. I’ve been sober for almost five years, because I needed to be and because my time had come. This, like so many things, is not a straight line to an easy answer.

I think about my sobriety and my transition as two eternal highways, uneven pavement running parallel through the void—roads that look the same, dipping and turning the same way at the same time, only sometimes taking unexpected turns away from the other but always finding their way back. These were both hard roads to start on, impossible to believe they could still be driven on for so many years.

That desire for an easy answer, a quick fix in enquiring about identity, is well known to my heart—this haunting idea that there is a right way to ask one perfect question that unlocks a lifetime of secrets and half-known truths, a burning desire to know yourself through someone else’s mirror. The easy answer is the hard one; there is no one true and easy way to come to know yourself, you just have to be willing to do it, and that there will always be secrets out in the world letting you know you’re on the right path that never quite show the way. You can’t ask just one question because there is no just one question, there is an endless field of just one more to get lost in, none of them bringing you any closer to an answer that feels right.

This January also marks the 10th anniversary of Against Me!’s landmark record, Transgender Dysphoria Blues—a signpost record for a legion of trans girls, myself included, all of us desperate for answers and secrets at one point or another and it is in this spirit of searching for answers in questions that have no end that I’m here with flowers for a different memory: Against Me!’s 2005 record, Searching For a Former Clarity.

I found Against Me! when they signed to Fat Wreck Chords, the indie skate punk label formed by NOFX’s Fat Mike and his former wife Erin Burkett in 1990. I was one of legions of punk rock kids that became opinionated teenagers in the ‘90s buying Fat Wreck and Punk-O-Rama compilations from the used CD store. My foray into punk rock was guided by these carefully constructed label samplers, learning all there was to offer in the world of a somewhat tonally homogeneous southern California punk rock scene. Opinions and identity absorbed through silver discs spinning in Discmans or laying in wait at the front of a CaseLogic CD wallet. A band releasing a record on Fat Wreck was a stamp of approval, a mark that this was worth taking a chance on. Against Me! released their second album, As the Eternal Cowboy, on the label in 2003, as the punk rock scene was changing—the face of pop punk was taking the conversation to more mainstream stages, bringing refreshed flavors into a scene that had been starting to taste stale.

Against Me! delivered punk rock that felt raw and gritty and angry again, refreshingly not just another band from insert locale in southern California. Against Me! are from Florida, first Naples and then Gaineseville, which I knew largely as the home of ska punk veterans Less Than Jake. Laura Jane Grace’s vocals were furious, growling, demanding and frantic. Her name wasn’t Laura Jane Grace yet, but we’ll get to that in due time. They felt like a punk rock band you found living under the floorboards of a long lost living room, they felt like being in the middle of a fist fight you couldn’t remember starting but were determined to see all the way through, they felt like answers to all the haunting things I had been trying to find the right questions to for.

In 2005, when Searching For a Former Clarity came out, I tried to come out as trans for the third time. The first time was in Red Deer, Alberta in 2001 while Nickelback’s “How You Remind Me” played in the background. It didn’t take. The second time was in the bathroom of an apartment in Edmonton, in the middle of a fight with a girlfriend whose name escapes me now. I just remember the smell of whiskey and wine on our lips as we yelled at each other and I let slip that I wanted to be a woman. I don’t remember her name, but I remember the flattering slurs she called me.

The third time I told someone I was trans, it was on a flip phone while I was stuck in an Arby’s drive through in Calgary. I had just left the record store, was about to scale the long highway between Calgary and Edmonton alone, stocking up Big Beef and Cheds, curly fries and a mostly full Coke to slip a little booze into for the road ahead. Between ordering and delivery, I texted the woman I was dating—using T9 texting on a goddamn flip phone—to tell her I was a transsexual. A lot of letters to conjure from repeatedly hitting numbers on a entry-level Motorola while idling in the driver’s seat of a ‘94 Plymouth Acclaim in an Arby’s drive through. I never heard back from her, but I did get extra curly fries—and sometimes, all you can ask for is a nice surprise. All the while listening to Laura Jane Grace yell fucking Miami through speakers cut into the door panels of a car slowly falling apart.

Searching For a Former Clarity is the control group for Against Me! records, the data by which everything else can be measured. Other records of theirs are louder or cleaner or more vocal in their message, but here the band was setting a foundation to build towers upon. Laura Jane Grace was testing the weight and feel on the blade in her voice; the band was learning how to take varying genres and disparate influences and stitch them together into a homunculus of tremendous fury.

Grace was railing against the walls that may have been starting to feel tight, the claustrophobia that your brain can create when it tells you they’re moving in on you. There’s the expected targets here, temperamental punks and a mercurial music industry. This was the first time I stopped to consider that, even with the venerated punk rock labels of my youth, there may be gears moving behind the machine that work in problematic ways. Grace would describe in later years issues that arose from the label, detailing in Tranny (her 2016 biography co-written with Dan Ozzi), Fat Wreck Chords boss Fat Mike complaining about the production and the album art and the vibe not being to his desire.

Against Me! are a band of anthemic peaks and valleys, even in Laura Jane Grace’s deepest howl you can’t help but want to scream along. It is hard to craft a perfect kind of pop song, one that feels like it’s hiding in the walls of a punk house—a movement of song that leaves some grit on your teeth. Against Me! has proven time and again they are capable of doing just this, threading sharp hooks onto unexpected lines, and it feels its most organic on Searching For a Former Clarity.

Secrets reveal themselves best to the people looking through the clues they leave behind. On “Pretty Girls (The Mover),” Grace builds to the sirens call of a chorus where she laments, Sometimes at night, I pray to wake, a different person in a different place, and if you are looking for clues to all the questions you have in this life, you may have found one here lying in secret. Like a dog whistle, like the only one who sees Bigfoot. Suddenly a new truth becomes real, and you will never be alone again.

I drank a lot when I was young, which is often but not always true of people who become alcoholics in their lives—just as not all trans people know who they are from a young age. I knew that truth too, at 7 years old. I always knew who I was, and it was always terrifying. I drank from a young age because it helped solve the problem of having to know myself. To listen to the whispers in the weeds of my mind. I could just shut them all out with drugs and booze.

The secrets revealed themselves all the same regardless of how hard I worked to shut them out. I tried to find words for them in living rooms and Arby’s drive-thrus without ever fully knowing what they mean. I just knew they were there, swimming in my mind and begging for help, begging for someone to hear them. Hearing Laura Jane Grace sing Oh God, I want to be healthy, I don’t want this problem for the first time, I suddenly felt like the words I was painstakingly typing on a T9 flip phone weren’t so fucking terrible and lonely. There was someone out there who knew what they might mean too.

“How Low” trails the anthemic lamentations of “Pretty Girls (The Mover),” turning power chords into swaggering country twangs, Grace prowling through the all too familiar feelings of regret, desperation and anxious depression that comes from losing yourself to the rhythms of hiding, of too many problems in all our darkest corners. It’s a haunting and beautiful break from form, slowing the rhythms down but letting the intensity stand in the room and simmer, building to an uncontainable pressure. In the final verse, Grace yearns for release, sick of feeling like I’m losing my mind, sick of doing the same thing most nights, sick of self-loathing and self-absorption, self-destructive narcissism, sick to death of being constantly fucking sick of… and lets her voice trail off into paranoia, pleading I don’t know who I can trust, thought there was us, but there’s just no one.

In my worst moments I have found myself here, staring in the mirror and yelling at myself, telling the face looking back at me swaying on her feet how much I hated everything about her, her secrets and her lies. I never did see my own face, just this person with dead eyes looking for something beyond all this. Where Searching For a Former Clarity haunts me is the closing track. A kick drum beats a rhythm into a dark space, then for texture drum fills like a floor tom falling down the stairs. Grace comes in, singing alone to a sparsely strummed guitar. You can imagine the entire album as stagecraft—dioramas and backdrops and little vignettes of a life that built to this moment—and now, Grace has arrived at the closing to say a final farewell to the audience. I heard this song for the first time alone on a highway with a bag of Arby’s and a little alcohol, just enough to keep me buzzing, keep me alive. Now the doctor’s didn’t tell you that you were dying.

She opens somberly, moving through line and verse that give the appearance of the final act opening to the death of the author. It sounds dire, it sounds terminal. The drum beat keeps a steady rhythm. And then Grace sings again, and in the journal you kept at the side of your bed, you wrote nightly in aspiration, of developing as an author. And the parts of me that have been writing in secret and showing them to no one feels called out, suddenly the scene has shifted and the backdrop becomes something else, something real, something terrifying, Confessing childhood secrets, of dressing up in women’s clothes, compulsions you never knew, the reasons too.

My face burned red the first time she ever laid the secrets so heavily down on the table. The first time someone who felt like they existed in a world I knew, a body in the clown car full to tipping with cishet white men that was punk rock, might conjure words that create a diorama that I could see myself standing in front of too. This was a hard song to listen to for a good many years in my life. When Grace gets to tracing the disease, the disease of self-destruction driven by dysphoria and compulsive desires, moving through veins urged onwards by a frantic heart, ferociously delivering words in pained anguish, heart wrenching, beautiful and biting all at once.

The year after Searching For a Former Clarity came out, I found out that my ex-partner had been diagnosed with cancer. A year after that, I got the call that she had passed away peacefully in her sleep the night before and wanted to say goodbye but wasn’t able to. I was passed out on the lawn in front of the house I lived in the basement of when I got the news, my Motorola flip phone buzzing in my pocket bolting me awake to news I had been dreading hearing. Let this be the end, let this be the last song, let this be the end, let all be forgiven.

When Against Me! released Transgender Dysphoria Blues in 2014, I knew my secrets well. I knew Laura Jane Grace’s, too. When she came out in the pages of Rolling Stone, I wasn’t really surprised—but I knew my time was going to have to come eventually, that this would all be unavoidable. I was jealous, and I was eager to be seen just the way she was, not understanding the weight she was taking on in being brave enough to be so boldly known. That same year, I tried to get sober for the first time and my partner told me “Don’t become one of those people who doesn’t drink,” and so I didn’t. I wasn’t ready to become one of those people.

There’s a lot to be said about being ready to know yourself. To me, this is what coming out as trans, and then getting sober, has been about. They are not perfect fixes and they are not solutions and they are not easy. They are lifelong processes of understanding, of asking hard questions and accepting hard answers in return. Getting sober—well and truly sober—is a process of learning who you are and who you might be the same way that transition can if you let it, if you allow yourself to be open to the prospect of a life lived without filters to hide behind when the questions become too real and the anxieties start to gnaw at your skin.

I worry about Dry January as a branding exercise to sell flavored water, only because I believe there is more to all of this than the liquids we choose to keep and the ones we put away. When I quit drinking, in March of 2019, I had to agree to know myself better than I ever had. I had to learn to be kind to the eyes I see in the mirror that don’t always see me back. I had to learn to know myself in all the good and difficult ways you can know a life. It’s not easy to know who you are in all the hard days, it’s not even easy on the good ones. There’s a thread you have to learn to weave through all your days without knowing the full pattern. You have to learn to trust yourself to get where you’re supposed to go next.

I like Dry January just the same, as I am firmly of the belief that coming to know yourself is a beautiful disaster, and I think the greatest lives are the same. Never perfect, never crumbling, but balancing somewhere in between. There is no right way, and there is no easy answer to any of these things. We get sober, we come out of closets—only when they make sense for us. What matters is that we’re given the space and tender care we need to make these decisions and feel safe within them. This is the project we undertake together, building the safety of a room that we are all welcome to stand in when we’re ready to be seen within it. This is why we should cherish the people who came before us to share the stories of their journey here.

I love Transgender Dysphoria Blues because I credit Laura Jane Grace for giving me the final push to the finish line, the knowledge that she had acted on the secrets she had been leaving behind and, if she was going to take the leap just to show it was safe to land, than it was on me to follow. I had heard her after all, that day in a ‘94 Plymouth Acclaim and all the days after. But Against Me!’s Searching For a Former Clarity was the opportunity for me to know that the words I was struggling to say; questions I was struggling to find and answers I was unaware I needed, were shared by someone—that we are all connected here and welcomed into this beautiful disaster of a life. Let all be forgiven.

Niko Stratis is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in outlets like SPIN, Bitch, Autostraddle, Catapult and more. Her work primarily focuses on culture, the 1990s, queer/trans topics and as often as possible where all those ideas intersect. Niko lives in downtown Toronto with her fiancé and their dog and 2 cats. She is a cancer.