On ELO, “Mr. Blue Sky,” and Envisioning a World Where People See Me
Queerness and fantasy have long been inextricably tied. When you’re discovering who you are and don’t see an outlet for expressing your gender or sexuality, you imagine it — you craft elaborate scenarios where you can feel fully yourself. Fantasies, of course, come with soundtracks. To celebrate Pride Month, four writers paid homage to the songs that invite curiosity, discovery, and fantasy in their lives. In this essay, nonbinary writer and journalist Elly Belle honors Electric Light Orchestra’s “Mr. Blue Sky.”
At 15, I was a mess with long, unkempt dark hair who didn’t know how to dress on the outside in a way that matched my insides. I ricocheted between wearing too much black and forcing myself to wear dresses because I thought that’s what I was supposed to do. I had no idea what or who I could be if I allowed myself to want it. But there was a song that I’d play on repeat to give me faith that there was a different person buried deeper inside of me somewhere, and that someday they’d be seen.
I could see myself rebirthed, in my mind’s eye, walking across the Brooklyn Bridge with short hair, tattoos, and piercings — a different gender presentation, a different life. “Mr. Blue Sky” by Electric Light Orchestra plays in the background, offering another reality, one that I imagine cis, straight people always get to feel. Everything is right. The way people see and think about me on the outside matches who I am inside.
Listening to ELO's “Mr. Blue Sky” at 15 gave me magical glasses, but not ones that helped me see myself — glasses that helped the world see me correctly. I put the song on and suddenly it felt as if everything was aligned, that people might realize they had been looking at me through the wrong lens the whole time, that their version of the world was wrong and not mine. Even now, a it plays, a feeling snaps through my bones that the world sees me as I am, that no one thinks of me as a woman, that I am understood.
Deep in denial to survive and drowning in my pretend identity as a cisgender and straight teenager, I felt like I was literally stuck in the dark. “Mr. Blue Sky” was a hatch in a pitch black room that let possibility—the possibility of living openly—in through a crack. It made me feel happy and whole enough to believe that specific future could be possible. Despite feeling like someone who was far from what, who, and where I wanted to be, the sunshine that exists in the song helped me float through the years until I had the capacity to swim.
A whole universe existed in the funky guitar solo upholding the ways that life could be good—that it has just stopped raining and the sun shines brightly, that everyone is smiling, that things might get dark, but remembering the sunshine when the night comes is a way to hold onto that version of the sky forever. In moments when I was trying so hard to be feminine, to be a girl, and to repress being attracted to girls, there was nothing else in my life as bright as that image of my true self shining through.
In 2021, I now dress much more masculinely. I no longer wear dresses because I don’t really like them. I have a short haircut, 18 tattoos, and several piercings. People still get my pronouns wrong and assume I’m a woman. I often have to explain what it means to be trans. But I am not stuck inside myself anymore. I have walked across the Brooklyn Bridge in clothes that feel more like the person once buried deep inside. And I have found a community of other queer and trans people who I don’t need to give any magic glasses to, or play a song in my head, for them to see me for who I am.
Queer fantasy and queerness itself is often stereotyped as being overtly sexual, wild, or even dangerous. The truth is that so much of queer fantasy is rooted in imagining a world where we can simply exist as ourselves without the added labor of having to explain to everyone that we know exactly who we are. There is nothing that stirs hope inside of me more than the idea of just existing and being seen for who I am, the clouds no longer obscuring anything after waiting so long, under a simple blue sky. And it’s a beautiful new day.
Check out the other essays in this series:
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