The Cutprice Guignol

Queerbaiting is not a new phenomenon – sure, it’s rightfully called out more often in the modern pop culture sphere than it was a few decades ago, but that doesn’t mean it came to be the first time Disney claimed yet another first-gay-character. And when it comes to queerbaiting, as a woman who came of age in the noughties, there is one titan that towers above all the rest – and that is All The Things She Said by Russian pop duo t.A.T.u.

The song, which charted in the UK in 2003, remains one of the most controversial and iconic depictions of same-sex desire of the era – from the video to the lyrics to the banger tune itself, it’s been an earworm pop culture hasn’t been able to shake. More than twenty years after it first hit the charts, let’s take a look back at All The Things She Said – how it came to be, the women at the heart of the performances, and its legacy as a piece of queer pop culture history.

Yulia Volkova and Lena Katina first worked together not as t.A.T.u, but as part of the children’s group Neposedy, a musical collective with rotating members that had garnered recognition in Russia due to regular features on the TV show Morning Star. Katina and Volkova, fifteen and sixteen at the time respectively, earned places in the group, though Volkova last just under a year before she was ousted for apparent misbehaviour (including, according to contemporary tabloid reports, drinking and stripping).

However, her less child-friendly activities served as a perfect stepping stone into a group that producers Ivan Shapovalov and Alexander Voitinskiy were developing at the time – Shapovalov was inspired to, in his own words, create “this underage sex project” with the intention of catering to this seeking pornography of young-looking women online, an abjectly foul starting point that’s unfortunately all too reflective of the industry at the time. After a few rounds of auditions, Volkova and Katina found themselves the stars of a new pop duo, known as t.A.T.u. The name alone already had hints towards the lesbian themes in their music, a shortened version of the Russian phrase Ta lyubit tu (she loves her/this girl loves that girl).

The song itself first came about, in appropriately surreal fashion, after a dream that songwriter and partner of Shapovalov Elena Kiper had while under sedation in a dentists’ chair – Kiper woke from a dream about herself in a clinch with another woman exclaiming that she had lost her mind. The remark became the title for the original Russian-language version of the song, Ya Soshla s Uma (I’ve Lost My Mind), which originally featured as one of the lead singles for the duo’s debut album, 200 Po Vstrechnoy (200km/h Against Traffic). Working with Universal Music Russia, Ya Soshla s Uma was released in 2000, prior to the album’s release in 2001.

The album was full of various songs that alluded to forbidden love – with titles translating to They Won’t Catch Us, I’m Not Your First, and Gay-Boy, amongst others – and it earned notable success in Eastern Europe upon its original Russian-language release, t.A.T.u. becoming the first Russian artists to top the Polish charts. Determined to move the group to international success, Shapovalov contacted American producer Trevor Horn to rework the song into an English-language version, which was recorded in early 2002, before its eventual release in August of the same year.

And it was this English-language version, renamed All The Things She Said, that launched the song into LGBTQ pop culture history. The pop-rock track features Volkova and Katina crooning in the pre-choruses about all the things she said, running around their heads – breathy exclamations of wanting her so much and being with you has opened my eyes, it’s about as perfect a capturing of the angst-ridden sapphic yearning any young queer woman at the time (by which I mean me) could relate to almost at once. More to the point, though, it’s the absolute definition of a banger, and it soon climbed charts across the world, topping charts in thirteen countries – including earning a top spot in the UK charts for no less than fifteen weeks (and, for a not-insignificant portion of that time, it shared the charts with The Cheeky Girls’ Touch My Bum, which makes it, for me, the strongest fortnight in all of UK music history).

But where the song might have skated by without too much scrutiny, the lesbianism in the lyrics just about plausibly deniable enough if you weren’t listening too closely, the music video was what ultimately pushed All The Things She Said and t.A.T.u. into the iconic status they occupy today. The video – which was shot in 2000, when both girls were just sixteen – features Volkova and Katina in schoolgirl costumes, drenched in rain, behind a wrought-iron fence, fondling and snogging each other while a crowd on onlookers peer on disgruntledly.

In a lot of ways, this video is very much in line with the kind of stuff being released in the rest of pop music at the time – the schoolgirl outfits could have been lifted straight from Britney Spears’ Hit Me Baby One More Time, and the overtly sexual vibe was reflected in other big hits of the time such as Christina Aguilera’s Dirrty. 2003, the year that All The Things She Said really blew up, also saw the infamous VMAs kiss between Britney Spears and Madonna.

But All The Things She Said, with its combination of lesbian intimacy sixteen-year-old girls styled to look deliberately childish, exploded in controversy in a way little else had at the time. Daytime TV hosts Richard Madeley and Judy Finnegan declared it “sick, paedophilic entertainment” and called for it to be banned, while Larry Flick for The Advocate described them as “underage, porn-quality Lolitas”. CD: UK, ITV’s answer to Top of the Pops, banned the video outright, and, while the BBC made no outright statement on the matter, they uneasily avoided showing the video at all, despite the fact the song was the biggest thing in British music for several months during the first part of 2003. Vera Lekerava, from the then-committee of Youth and Women in Russia, unsuccessfully attempted to mount a campaign against Shapovalov, “to protect the souls of our children from the criminality of adults and their perversions” – the music video was edited to remove depictions of same-sex intimacy (which, to be quite honest, must have left them without about forty non-consecutive seconds) to allow for it to be played on MTV Russia, though it did go on to win an MTV Music Video Award.

Their performances were similarly laced with such passion, with Volkova and Katina regularly kissing passionately as part of their live shows. During their time on the American talk show circuit, their physical intimacy became a point of contention on both The Tonight Show and The Man Show (an early iteration of Jimmy Kimmel’s later late-night success). On The Tonight Show, an unauthorized kiss with tongue was cut from their performance to be replaced by a good twenty seconds of the guitarist rocking out in the background (while Volkova and Katina wore shirts adorned with “fuck war” in Cyrillic), while on The Man Show, Volkova covered their mouths with her hand so they would not be able to see their embrace, due to what a source described as “horndog leering” on the part of Kimmel and production. Maxim featured the girls in a cover image that depicted them holding each other semi-dressed, and many promotional images centred on Volkova and Katina in some sort of intimate embrace.

One of the biggest questions that revolved around t.A.T.u., though, was whether or not Volkova and Katina were actually in a relationship or if the members of the group were queer women themselves – a question that is still a hot topic of conversation in the t.A.T.u. fandom.

In Anatomy of t.A.T.u., a short documentary about the band, Volkova remarked that, prior to her involvement in t.A.T.u., she had “never imagined being in love with a girl before” but that “lesbian love was not shocking” to her. In the same documentary, she discussed having “warm feelings” towards another woman and that her time in t.A.T.u. had led her to notice women in a more intimate way for the first time. Of this relationship with another woman (who she does not name), she explained that there were “kisses and feelings”, though the relationship was not consummated – later in the documentary, she recounts waking up in tears from a dream about Katina confessing her romantic love for her. She went on to have her first child with a male partner just a couple of years after All the Things She Said came out, and, in 2012, she commented that she was “still” attracted to both men and women. A few years later, she made some atrociously homophobic comments about gay men, which Katina disavowed.

Katina, for her part, says that she initially considered the lesbian relationship to be little more than a marketing gimmick, and went on to relate advice her mother gave her on differentiating the intense friendships between teenage girls with actual romance. In a 2010 interview, she briefly mentions kissing a woman other than Volkova, though she was extremely drunk at the time. Volkova, in t.A.T.u. – En las Ruinas de la Fama, remarked that Katina would often go to her priest to confess the “sin” of performing lesbianism on stage, though whether or not that’s accurate isn’t clear.

In terms of the industry view on their sexuality, Artmey Troitsky, a then-veteran of the Russian music scene, commented in a 2003 article by The Age that “In Russia, this whole lesbian thing has never been taken seriously. When they’ve been interviewed on talk shows and asked, ‘Are you really lesbians?’ they’ve said, ‘No, it’s a trick, we have boyfriends, we are normal girls, we just do this for image’…Here, they were just like any other teenybopper pop group with a good gimmick”.

And a good gimmick it certainly was. I’ve spent the better part of the last couple of weeks digging my way through just about anything and everything that Volkova and Katina have said regarding their relationship – though, of course, it’s worth noting that much of this should be viewed through the lens of the undeniably-cynical campaign that had thrived on marketing the pair as genuine lesbian lovers. Not only that, but their home country of Russia has a notoriously appalling track record of legislating and discriminating against LGBTQ people in various ways, so it’s perhaps not a surprise (though certainly somewhat ironic) for one of their biggest musical exports to have some mixed messaging on the specifics of their queer identities.

But that didn’t mean that the song didn’t have an impact on those navigating their own queerness. As a young woman coming to terms with my sexuality around the time this song came out – and as an older woman well-aware of the machinations of the music industry at large and how it will exploit anything to make a hit – I have really mixed feelings about All The Things She Said. Because, obviously, it’s about as cynical an attempt to capitalize on the blatant sexualization of women in sexual and romantic relationships with other women as you can get, and underage ones at that. Toss in the schoolgirl outfits, the constant on-stage making-out which was allegedly orchestrated by their management down to the smallest detail, and the slavering media coverage focused on their nubile lesbianism, and it’s not hard to see the blatant pandering to the male gaze that was such a dominant part of musical pop culture at the time.

But, despite all of that, this song and this video in particular have a huge place in my heart, as I know they do in the hearts of so many lesbian and bisexual women who came of age in this era too. The depictions of lesbianism and same-sex desire between women was comically sparse, and what we did have was often palmed off as a joke about butch man-hating lesbians or titillating pseudo-porn of women with acrylic nails five inches in lad’s mags being asked whether they’d rather snog Eva Mendes or Jessica Alba.

And, despite it all, despite the rampant cynicism at the heart of t.A.T.u.’s very existence, there was suddenly this depiction of lesbian love and desire sitting right there at the top of the charts. And it wasn’t played for laughs by the women involved, nor was the music meant as anything other than to exist alongside other earnest, angsty love songs – it might have sprung from a place of manufactured pop, but manufactured was sincerely better than nothing. The moment at the close of the video, when they step out together into the sunlight holding hands, is a little glimmer of something real, something hopeful, even. The kernel of seriousness in the approach to same-sex desire and relationships was enough for it to mean something to me – which, I think, just serves as proof of how dreadful this era was for lesbian and bisexual representation.

Looking at it now, it’s easy to see the grubby fingers of homophobia, lesbian fetishization, and misogyny all over the video and the promotion of t.A.T.u. as a whole – in fact, it’s impossible to disentangle Shapovalov’s “underage sex project” from the DNA of this song and its marketing. But I truly thing the song has gained a life of its own beyond its original intentions – and remains, to this day, one of the most iconic sapphic pop songs of all time.

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Other Writing on LGBTQ Pop Culture and Media:

Satan Was a Lesbian: The Lurid Rise and Profound Impact of Lesbian Pulp Fiction

A “Jaunt into Journalesbianism”: Lisa Ben and America’s Gayest Magazine, Vice Versa

Palatable Poison: Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness, and Lesbian Sex and Love on Trial

(header image via Official Charts)