Amy Elizabeth Ray is an American singer-songwriter and member of the contemporary folk duo Indigo Girls.

The story of Indigo Girls started when Amy Ray met Emily Saliers when they both attended the same high school. They began performing together and recorded a demo in 1981. After graduation, Ray and Saliers went to different colleges with Ray attending Vanderbilt University. By 1985, both women had transferred to Emory University in Atlanta and formed the Indigo Girls. In 1986, Ray graduated from Emory with majors in English and Religion.


When asked a question about her new album “trans nation” she said, "God, in so many ways. I think it gave me a comfort level with myself that is very freeing. Because I’m older the language of the trans movement is not something I grew up with. I grew up in a southern suburban environment where just being a feminist was a stretch, you know? My language around my own masculinity and my own gender was stilted and I didn’t totally understand it and I didn’t feel comfortable with…I mean I felt comfortable with myself, but I didn’t know how to express to someone else in a language what that meant. One thing the trans movement did was give me a language, an articulation of my own gender struggle in myself. But it also gives the queer movement a certain propulsion that it needs to look beyond mainstream issues and to look into a gender spectrum and to look into the idea of gender and sexuality being separate from each other. And push that envelope. And to look at the queer community as larger than gay and lesbian. For me it was a broadness that was missing from the gay movement. And just on a spiritual level I felt like after I toured with the Butchies in 2000 and really started being exposed more to the trans movement I just felt better. I don’t even know how to put it.

It’s a certain comfort that I hadn’t felt in my queer community. I was from a community that was kind of conservative in a lot of ways. Not by their own choice, just an exposure issue. We were working on the most basic idea around being homosexual. To move beyond that from separating what your sexuality is from your gender is, that’s a whole other thing. The Trans area is just one portal. There are so many other ones."

" I also don’t like when people are so deprecating about the old school lesbians and they talk about it as if it’s a bad thing. "

"I think there are important reasons to reject some of it. But I think it gets mingled with a very deep homophobia and a very deep sexism. It’s so internalized in ourselves. It’s less comfortable to say “lesbian” because it has all these female connotations that just eat at the most sexist part of our core. I think the trans movement has to look at that too. "

Tags: Famous Lesbians Female Amy Ray