That 'L' word
| That 'L' word |
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In 1999 Aquila Wolf Wild came out as a lesbian. It had taken her most of her life till then to finally come to terms with who she was. “I was definitely in the closet,” she tells SX. “I was married for 15 years and have three children. When I came out I identified as lesbian, not bisexual. My absolute preference is for women. If there were no women on this earth I think I’d be celibate!” Although Aquila, 39, may be comfortable enough with the ‘L’ word to choose Lesbian Love Junkie as her stage name, she admits it took her a while. “One of the reasons I chose that is because one of the hardest things for me to was to accept that I was a lesbian,” she says. “I grew up being a tomboy and called a dyke so I struggled to prove I wasn’t. It was such a dirty word, so taboo. I had an encounter with girl at 13 and never spoke of it again so I went deeper into denial and the closet. When I was married, I struggled with my lesbian identity. When I finally came out and I rang my father and siblings they said, ‘Thank God! We’ve always known’.” So how did her husband and children react? “My husband and I didn’t have a good relationship,” she admits. “And a lot of my problems were associated with living there. Some of my songs are about getting free and domestic violence. I really didn’t care what he thought I suppose! I see my oldest child who is 19 and I have contact with one of the others but the third lives with his father and there’s a lot of complications with that. It’s something I’m trying day by day to cope with.”
Aquila – whose day job is a computer software specialist and web designer – describes her sound as “bluesey” but says it’s “hard to put me in a hole and say ‘that’s my genre’ ”Her songs range from “cheeky” and upbeat tunes such as ‘Retro Funky Femme’, which is about her partner, to touching on darker subjects such as depression and suicide. “‘16 days and 28 years’ is about despair and coming to a place where I was literally standing in the middle of a highway,” she explains. “It was the beginning of me going to a very dark place. It talks about drug addiction and my battles with my own demons. I got out of it by changing my attitude. One day, I realised I couldn’t go on being a person who didn’t want to live and who was miserable and couldn’t see any options. One day I realised there were options and I had to put one foot in front of the other.” Having battled to claim her lesbian identity, Aquila is passionate about performing for queer audiences. In the 20 months she’s been living in Sydney (she grew up in Canberra), she’s sung – with her trusty synthesiser that makes it sound like she’s accompanied by a full band – at the Dykes on Bikes Bike & Tattoo Show, Go Acoustic at the Bank Hotel’s Velvet Room and Fantasy night at The Oxford Hotel. Her latest gig is at Slide this month. “It’ll be an interesting journey,” she says of the show. “It starts off in darker places then I take you to where I am now.” Aquila’s is certainly an inspiring story of one woman’s struggle out of the darkness, and even her chosen surname Wolf Wild reflects that journey. “Wild is to do with not being caged,” she explains.
“A dog can be trained and tamed and be obedient and loyal but a wolf will always want the wild, will always run away; it can’t be changed. That signifies freedom to me – a calling, a yearning. For me that yearning was to be with a woman and being able to breathe. I don’t think when I was in the cage that I could actually see the bars. I don’t think I could even tell the door was open when it was. It wasn’t until I was out of the cage that I could see that’s where I’d been.”
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Aquila Wolf Wild – aka Lesbian Love Junkie – sings of drug addiction, domestic violence and finding herself. She spoke with Katrina Fox.
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