The Revolution Starts in Minneapolis
Prince foretold it, and I'm here for it. But not nearly enough.
“Hey! I've been there!”
I can say that about so many places, and it almost always makes me happy and proud. But when shit goes down, like the L.A. fires and the terror attack on Bourbon Street last year, it breaks my heart.
With every trip I take, I fall in love. These places are home, even if it's just for a night. As if the act of sleeping in an unfamiliar place is so intimate as to capture a piece of me that will live there. Especially places where I can viscerally imagine a full life.
And when something awful happens in one of these places, I feel it. Not like the actual residents, of course, but a different ache than what I feel when a place I haven't visited is struck. The horror feels fresher, a clean papercut instead of a pale bruise.
When a place I love is suffering, I write about it. Even though I annoy myself, I'm still compelled to do so. Adding to the collective grief, being a part of a bigger world.
Yes, this is about Minneapolis.
Pop culture alerted me early that the Twin Cities might hold something for me. A Gen X girl/baby journalist, I grew up watching Mary Tyler Moore tossing her hat into the air in Nicolette Square.
Then Prince made the city seem like a magic place. I'd fall for purifying myself in the waters of Lake Minnetonka if he asked.
In August 1983, before I turned 12 years old, the Soviet Union shot a Korean passenger jet out of the sky. I watched the story unfold on the morning news, went to my bedroom, put on my 45 of “1999,” and listened over and over. I didn’t know what else to do with the feeling that nuclear war was about to start.
It was the first time I took the big feelings I didn’t know what to do with, and purposefully turned them over to a song, something I still do today, that continues to save my ass.
A few years later, Sassy magazine had a feature article about a Twin Cities punk band. Rowdy boys with messy hair, wearing flannel shirts and dresses. I was intrigued and, based only on the article’s description, ordered one of their tapes from Columbia House. And that’s how The Replacements became my favorite band of my late teens and twenties. And every other Tuesday now.
Then, in college, I fell in love with the Twin Cities-produced show, “Mystery Science Theater 3000.” I was studying radio and TV communication and English at the University of Missouri, always thinking about where post-college life might take me. Minneapolis felt like it should be my next home. A day’s drive from my hometown, with all the familiarity of being in the Midwest, there was a city where maybe this weirdo creative could find a place.
I moved to St. Louis instead. Because of a boy.
It took nearly 20 years for me to even visit the Twin Cities. I had a little bit of the same fear that I had with New Orleans that kept me away for so long—I was afraid I’d fall in love with the city and never come back.
But since the very early pre-CJ 2000s, I’ve had a very good reason to visit the Twin Cities: my favorite cousin moved there in 2002. And guess what. They loved it and never moved back.
And it STILL took me another decade after their move to visit Minneapolis, and it was for her wedding.
While my cousin and her bride, whom I also adore, had been planning their wedding for some time, the date serendipitously landed on one of the first weekends same-sex marriage was legal in Minnesota. They got hitched with the Minneapolis skyline behind them, the officiant opening the ceremony with, “Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to get through this thing called life…”
It was a fast and busy trip with 9-year-old usher CJ in tow.
We visited family and friends that included blogging superhero Jodi, and hit a couple of CJ-friendly sites while we were in town. I ate a Juicy Lucy. And then we went home, confident that I could visit the Twin Cities and return to my old life intact. So surely it would become a regular on my places to visit list.
I’ve been twice since then. It’s shameful.
Cheap airfare and guilt got me there in September 2019. With a full house that includes two little boys—ages almost-5 and 1.5 at the time, young enough to still require consistent schedules—I found myself a beautiful Airbnb in a St. Paul high-rise with a view of the Mississippi River, so I wouldn’t disrupt them too much.
During the days, I hit all my Minneapolis music sites, like Paisley Park, Bob Dylan’s Dinkytown flat, Electric Fetus Records, and the spot where The Replacements threw their master tapes (they thought) into the river.
After school and that weekend, I spent my time with my family.
It pains me that I don’t feel comfortable posting their names, photos, and stories. Because we have so many awesome stories. And those boys are just the cutest and sweetest and smartest and funniest.
The fact is, my cousin holds public office in a Twin Cities suburb. And they’re a queer family that’s active and known in their community, which has helped make their hometown a wonderful place. However, as progressive as the Twin Cities are, harassment has been a part of their lives for years. I don’t want to add to that.
Right now, I’m ferociously protective of them because this week, a family not too different from theirs, in their city, was destroyed when an ICE agent murdered Renee Good.
Let me say it again: FUCK ICE
In the middle of the quasi-quarantine days of Covid, eaten up with cabin fever after almost six months of a sort of lockdown, I drove to visit my Twin Cities family, taking every precaution available (which weren’t many at that point).
Two months before my trip, George Floyd had been murdered by a Minneapolis cop kneeling on his neck while he cried for his mother.
The night I arrived, I settled into an Uptown apartment and ordered fried chicken from a Dominican restaurant, which my cousin later informed me was Floyd’s final workplace. Even in big cities, that’s how close humanity is: the man whose murder maybe ticked the clock closer to justice could have been the man who fried my chicken had I traveled just weeks earlier.
Of course, this visit didn’t have all the tourist moments of the previous one. No Paisley Park and record-shopping. No finding the perfect vintage cameo necklace at a cute boutique. No eating cotton candy and ice cream with the little guys at the food hall in an old brewery. But lots of time spent together, and some good solo time where I revisited my favorite coffee joint in Lyndale, sitting outside on a perfect summer day—the warm, comforting way summer is supposed to feel. Not that oppressive, soupy summer hell I’m used to in St. Louis.
While drinking my coffee, I stared at the guitar shop across the street and wondered what musicians I love might have walked through their doors over the years. Paul Westerberg, a Stinson brother or two, Mr. Mould, Kat from Babes in Toyland, maybe even … Prince?
I did some Googling to see what music history might have happened across the street, and learned that I was just a couple of miles away, off Lyndale Avenue, from the house where Bob and Tommy Stinson of The Replacements were raised. The cover photo of the band’s masterpiece, Let It Be, was shot on the roof of the house’s porch.
You know exactly what I did next.
But first, a little bit about my favorite song on Let It Be, “Androgynous.” Take three minutes and have a listen:
This album was released in 1984, before the language of the trans world was somewhat common knowledge. “Androgynous,” written by frontman Paul Westerberg, forgoes the band’s usual raucousness for jazz club brushed drums and tinkly piano, a departure from the noise and dark humor of songs like “Favorite Thing” and “Tommy Gets His Tonsils Out” Even Paul’s voice is somewhat hushed as he sings about a pair of lovers who’ve shirked their gender roles in favor of living their lives as their authentic selves despite the opinions of everyone else. It’s not sarcastic like so many of Westerberg’s greatest lyrics, but earnest with a hint of desperation for understanding.
Sometimes I wonder why “Androgynous” hasn’t been adopted as a song for the trans movement. And then I remember that the trans movement is now in the hands of people like my almost-22-year-old nonbinary kid. They grew up hearing the song, but it’s not theirs. It belongs to us elders, teaching us how to accept our queer kids before they were a glimmer.
There wasn’t any parking on the block where the old Stinson place sits, so I drove past to loop around the block, planning to cruise around until a spot opened. But I stopped dead at the end of the block, which ended at an apartment complex dressed in multiple gay and trans pride flags.
Do the kids living in this building know what happened just a few doors down so long ago, when a rarely-sober lyrical genius captured the heart and soul of gender nonconformity in a brief and beautiful song? Probably not. And that’s fine. They’re making their own songs.
But I felt the connection. Something in the heart of this city, this neighborhood, that embraces human difference, throwing off the old ways occasionally, so something that had been taboo can come forward and be known.
Could a tiny, femme-ish Black man in a zebra-striped Speedo and thigh-highs have become musical royalty in 1981 in any city other than Minneapolis?
Could a two-thirds queer trio with a loud guitar in a band named after a board game make it anywhere but Minneapolis?
Could a hard-drinking malcontent scream and howl beautiful words about a couple of trans kids and get away with it anywhere but Minneapolis?
The Twin Cities are Midwestern enough to seem “normal,” weird enough to create genius, and small enough to give the weirdos a platform and an audience when other places might not be so willing.
When I found a parking space and walked up to the house, I found a handful of young guys on the front porch, drinking beer, smoking cigarettes, playing guitars.
They’re still making music at the Stinson house.
In the bay windows on the second floor that I’d seen in that blue-tinted cover photo for so many decades hung a stained glass window of the Let It Be album cover.
We talked for a bit, the guys on the porch, while I stayed on the sidewalk because of the virus. In a perfect world, I would have joined them for a beer and our chat, but …
None of them knew the history of their home when they moved in, but they embraced and welcomed looky-loos like me who mind their manners but share their joy.
“The house has music in it. You can feel it,” the owner said.
I didn’t need to sit on the porch or go inside to feel it. I knew.
I wish I had something to say about how the strong heart of the Twin Cities, the magic that has made generations of music possible—can you believe I barely talked about Bob Dylan in this?—will save this city from the white supremacist, racist, and homophobic forces that killed George Floyd and Renee Good.
All I can say is, the Twin Cities have had my heart long before I ever set foot in them. First, they provided art that a weird kid in Missouri grasped. Then they gave refuge and a home to someone I love when our native state proved to be incompatible with their queerness.
And now? I’m not the first to say this, but the revolution has always been in Minneapolis. It’s happening now. It has been happening longer than anyone outside knows. As long as the city has produced people who think differently and can express the truths of the world, it has been a revolutionary place.
And that alone gives me a modicum of hope that maybe we’ll be okay.
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