Country as a Site of Queer Tenderness, Power, and Fun (Part 1)
On "Sugar in the Tank" by Julien Baker & Torres and Reclaiming Country Culture
“He’s got a little sugar in the tank” is a Southern euphemism for being gay — likely rooted in homophobia and the myth that sugar in a car’s gas tank will destroy the engine. So when sapphic musicians Julien Baker and Torres belt out “Come on, baby, put a little sugar in the tank” on the refrain of their new country love song, they’re reclaiming the phrase, turning a slur into a sweet invitation. What was once meant as a dig becomes an expression of affection and desire.
This is the ninth installment of my weekly music share. (You can check out the others here.) Today I’m talking about “Sugar in the Tank” by Julien Baker and Torres. I’m also going to write a bit about the history of queer country music and what it means to “love a culture that doesn’t love you back,” as the organizers of the Gay Ole Opry put it. In working on this, I realized I have a lot to say and it feels important to get it right. So I’m going to break this into parts. This is part one.
Let’s jump right into the music—and more specifically, the music video. Baker and Torres perform in what looks like a queer country bar, and it’s a vision: flashes of people in all kinds of gender expressions and configurations line dancing, laughing, kissing, kicking their boots, twirling each other. I could watch this on loop.
What a Love Song
Lyrically, this is such an excellent expression of consuming love. And Julien Baker and Torres sound great singing these lines with a combination of tenderness, power, and yearning. This is how the song opens:
I love you all the way to hell and back
I love you tied up on the train tracks
I love you clear as day and in the dark
I love you sleeping on my dead left arm
There’s so much to love here. But my favorite line by far comes a bit later: “I love you now, already, and not yet.”
“I love you now, already, and not yet.”
The experience of being in love is one that bends and collapses time. The feeling of knowing someone forever and having just begun. Of being in the future, past, and present all at once.
Reclaiming Country Culture
The main thing I want to talk about regarding this song and its music video is what it means to see and hear openly queer and trans people embracing country culture while being fully themselves. I’m lucky enough to live somewhere with a monthly queer two-step night (plus full-band honky tonk karaoke—come on), and I’ve been to queer line-dancing nights too. Watching this video, I feel the same things I’ve felt on those dance floors: joy, connection, and a particular kind of belonging. A feeling like homecoming. Like reclaiming a culture that once cast us out, and making it ours again.
Julien Baker grew up in Tennessee and Mackenzie Scott (who performs as Torres) grew up in Georgia, and many outlets have described this album as a “return to their roots.” Country music is not just a Southern thing of course, but its origins are in Appalachia and the deep south. Despite developing out of a multiracial and multilingual foundation — Appalachian ballads, African-American blues and banjo traditions, Mexican folk rhythms, and Southern gospel — modern country is associated with conservative white identity. And mainstream country music spaces have largely excluded queerness, racial diversity, non-Christians, and people with leftist politics. Many of us probably associate a country western bar or honky tonk with being unsafe. And other elements of country culture also signal danger to queer and trans people: small towns, pickup trucks, cowboy hats. But many of us came from these cultures and love elements of them.
I’m reminded of Orville Peck’s cover of Smalltown Boy by Bronski Beat—a song that’s always broken my heart. It tells the story of a young gay man forced to leave his small hometown, and it’s long resonated with me. I come from places I knew I’d have to leave in order to become my full self. So it means something profound to hear Peck—one of today’s most prominent and commercially successful country country artists—take on this song. In his version, he subtly reshapes the lyrics to reflect country culture: “mother” becomes “mama,” and the refrain shifts from “cry, boy, cry” to “cry, boy, cowboy, cry.”
The official audio on YouTube features a photo of a kid, presumably Peck, dressed as a cowboy. The message is clear: queer country kids from small towns often have to leave to find the lives they deserve.1 And hearing that truth voiced from within the genre feels like a kind of reckoning.
But as many queer rural folks will tell you, leaving isn’t always possible—and it isn’t always what we want. As TT Jax writes,2 “rural queers are expected to make exodus to the great glittering cities to seek validity and assimilate, regardless of where their grandparents are buried, or what particular shade of light or stink of marsh mud their heart leaps to.” Sometimes we’re in love with places and cultures that don’t love us back. Or more precisely: places and cultures filled with people who only love parts of us. Rae Garringer, who founded the Country Queers oral history project in 2013 and later published Country Queers: A Love Letter, reflects on this in an essay about the project:
“For some of us, this highly celebrated narrative of queer ‘success’—one in which you leave the farm and never look back, one in which you enter a fabulous landscape of glitter and queer dance parties—just isn’t all that appealing. For many of us raised in the country, following this normative queer migration narrative rips us from the landscapes, communities, and traditions that are as much a part of ourselves as our queerness.”
This is why queer people making country music about queer love means so much. Too many of us have been uprooted from our cultures or have to hide incredibly important parts of ourselves to stay connected to them, leaving us only ever partially rooted.
When I watched the Sugar in The Tank video for the first time I cried. Today I shared it with my partner who hails from southern Louisiana, and she also cried. This video is a reminder that queerness and country culture don’t have to be kept apart. It’s joyful. It’s defiant. And it’s just plain fun. Again I return to the use of “sugar in the tank” — the video and song are saying, yeah we’re southern, yeah we’re queer, and isn’t it great to be both?
Further Reading
In addition to Rae Garringer’s book Country Queers: A Love Letter, they also edited To Belong Here, an anthology of queer, trans, and two-spirit appalachian writers reckoning with “life in the mountains.”
Make sure to subscribe to my substack if you want to be sent (or notified about) part two of this little series on queer country. I’m going to dig into queer country music history and share a trans country artist!
This is storytelling, to be clear. Peck himself is from South Africa and since moving to the U.S. has mostly lived in coastal cities. But is a story that rings true for many many queer and trans people.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the original source of this quote. I read it in an article by Sarah Fonseca, titled The Ones We Left Behind: On Being An Ally To Small Town Queers, but the link Fonseca provides for attribution for the quote leads to a now dead website.