This essay is part of the forthcoming Fuck What You Love zine edited by Claire Biddles, which focuses on queer crushing on popstars and will be out later this year.
Hometown Glory
Adele’s London is a hometown vastly different than my own. 19 came out when I was 15 years old, and I didn’t feel like I owned any part of the city I grew up in. Adele Blue Adkins grew up in a sprawling city, where cultures clashed with vibrant fission. Eugene, Oregon was a type of hometown that felt indifferent to me, without a city’s kinetic energy or a smaller town’s tight knit warmth.
Eugene’s “hometown glory” was sports, and running in particular. My high school was essentially a herd of lithe, lean muscled sprinters who ate protein bars and had university professor parents that drove them to marathons in Priuses. I was taller, with gangly legs that spread into plump thighs and full hips and small breasts. A potato on stilts — that’s how I jokingly referred to my body as my athletic friends teased me about my lack of coordination. The wonders of my hometown, and the small world it seemed to keep us trapped within, were girls who weren’t afraid to undress in the locker room. I nervously tugged my oversized shirts in gym glass on the off-chance a flapping piece of fabric would reveal the pearlescent stripes that were beginning to appear on my hips and thighs. We were two different species, and I anxiously tried to exist within their orbit of thinness at any cost.
Watching the ‘Chasing Pavements’ video became a nightly ritual after I retreated from the unnerving social dynamics of high school. Adele’s voice effortlessly snaked around seemingly impossible notes, but that wasn’t all that had me enthralled. She was unlike anything I had ever seen, all soft and rounded rather than sharp, muscled edges. Her clothes could barely contain her figure but not because they were strategically draped to hide her hips and breasts. Adele was unconditionally beautiful and sexy, unapologetic of her figure by way of acting like it was her own kingdom. I didn’t know what gay or queer was yet, but I knew that watching her was something akin to desire. Whether it was desire for confidence like hers, or for Adele herself, I wasn’t sure yet. She had made a home of her body in a way I couldn’t even conceive of yet, in between my own fits of frenetic exercise and compulsive eating.
Make You Feel My Love
My weight reached its highest peak in my senior year of high school as I started to sit in bed eating pasta almost every day after school while Grey’s Anatomy buzzed in the background. I napped my way to homework time. A close friend had passed away in a freak accident that sent the whole school reeling. Grief has a funny way of elucidating your place within your community. Religious rituals like funeral masses or sitting shiva are meant to remind people they don’t carry the burden of sadness and loss alone, but justifying my own grief and questioning mortality left me more isolated and sad than ever.
Songs weren’t anthems to me in high school they way they are now. But during that time, when people wept openly at school and I lost my breath trying to strategize who I could bring my tears to, ‘Make You Feel My Love’ became my lullaby. I was surprised when someone finally told me Bob Dylan had penned the song, because the way Adele wrapped the lyrics in warmth felt so personal. It was like the deepest sort of hug, like wrapping my arms around someone’s waist and burying my face into her neck. No matter how big I got, the person’s arms would find the exact same places around me. She seemed like she could approximate that intense love in her voice alone, and I was constantly in awe. I was surly towards annoying boys and emotionally distant from my friends. Death feels like a severed connection that only certain gestures of love can restore. Adele’s voice was strong enough to bridge that chasm, even though she existed so far from my own reality.
Set Fire to the Rain
2011 contained so many milestones. Jack’s death, high school graduation, moving to New York for college, 21 was released. It was the year I finally felt like I found my footing and left Oregon for good. It was also the year I got angry.
Whoever hurt Adele, the man who inspired ‘Set Fire to the Rain’ and ‘Rumor Has It,’ became the amorphous depository for millions of people’s pent up fury — mine included. I became indignant about so much around me, all the while trying to rebrand myself as enthusiastic, cheery, and easy going enough to accommodate every person I met. I couldn’t voice my frustration to the world, so I set fire to my body instead.
Food was casually whittled from my diet, until I subsisted on raw tofu and sad looking cafeteria lettuce. Class and schoolwork and work-work were scheduled around brutal gym sessions. At times, I felt catharsis through exercise and every bad interaction felt expunged from my memory after some punishing cardio. But it’s a funny thing, your relationship to your body. I became a more vigilant feminist and snapped at anyone who body shamed even an acquaintance. Women’s bodies were vessels to carry their ambitions and dreams, not societal expectations, I argued. But of course my own body was the only exception to this rule.
There was a beautiful security guard who sat at my dorm’s entrance. She glared at drunk boys who stumbled through the doors of our women-only dorm and became a mother hen who was a Madonna to me. I was terrified of her, but badly wanted to be her friend. One day, while talking about Beyonce, she mentioned seeing Adele perform live on television. I offered to loan her my 21 CD. A week later, we gushed about her voice, her songs, her angry heart. “She’s really beautiful and has this great full figure,” the security guard commented. “She sure does,” I murmured, then headed back to the gym for the second time that day.
One and Only
Queerness snuck into my periphery when those love songs — which for so long I thought must be phony caricatures of real love, because real love between men and women couldn’t possibly be that good — suddenly applied to a girl. “You hang on every word I say,” Adele coyly but generously tells her lover. I felt brave and brash for the first time, even when things were lopsided and screwy in that first relationship. I felt the way Adele sings in ‘One and Only.’ It’s not so much a plea to someone, desperately begging someone to love her, as it is an invitation to her heart. Not everyone will reciprocate, I learned. But you can share it with someone and feel as proud as a little kid with a shittily drawn picture taped to your parents’ fridge.
My hips and thighs and little stomach pooch seemed like my own for once, and weren’t burdens. I began to swoon not just over Adele, and not just over that first relationship, but over myself and all that I could offer someone. It felt bold. It still does.
I Miss You
25 is where Adele meets her match, her voice full of love that you recognize as real and fought for and won. 19 and 21 cemented her independence, her autonomy, her ferocity. 25 is vulnerable because it admits just how much it takes to love someone who meets you more than halfway. She seems more at home in her voice and narrative than ever, and so I am with my body. I didn’t need to find someone who loved every bit of me to make that happen, but it definitely helped. Just like you can hear how not broken Adele is, how she is beautifully unmoored by this new love but not traumatized by it, I felt wholeheartedly accepted in a new way this year.
‘I Miss You’ holds the closest resemblance to that feeling of losing someone who holds half your heart. Incidentally, it’s also Adele at her sultriest and sexiest. It’s funny how attracted you can be to someone who always makes you cry tears of realization and heartbreak. ‘I want every piece of you,’ she croons, ‘I want your heavens and your oceans too.’ Sadness and desire can be so intertwined, I’ve realized, and they can pull you from every bodily concern. When I see Adele perform now, she’s more enrapturing and magnetic than ever. There’s something about growth that is sexy no matter how hard it is to manage.
Remedy
‘Remedy’ was written for Angelo, Adele’s son, and it encapsulates every new facet of herself she’s discovered in this four year hiatus. I’ve always been skeptical of proclamations that motherhood changes you forever, that it necessarily gives you renewed purpose and happiness. But ‘Remedy’ is more than a lovesong to a child, I think. It’s an unequivocal promise to be someone’s refuge, which any of us can do if we try sincerely and steadfastly enough.
Your body is your home. Adele’s body might be a temple and mine might be a food truck but I have found a home in mine. My body is mine alone, and I have a right to feel at home in it. It’s what carried me through every pain and backbreaking moment. But it’s also what offers comfort and refuge to others, whether through holding my friend’s hand the night after her little sister died or cradling my most special person as she cried over the ending of us. Adele’s body is more than strong lungs and vocal chords that push magnificent sounds out of her mouth. It’s what cares for her son and gives him a safe haven.
I once read that a nice coincidence of being queer is that you can look up to the same women you harbor the biggest crushes on. I love everything about Adele, from her cackle to seeing her eyes water at Royal Albert Hall as the crowd finishes the lyrics to ‘Someone Like You’ when she can’t bear to sing anymore of it. I’m going to keep trying to embody her, while also loving her body.
