The Indigo Girls are an American folk rock music duo, consisting of Amy Ray and Emily Saliers. They met during elementary school and began performing together as high school students in Decatur, Georgia, part of the Atlanta metropolitan area. They started performing with the name “Indigo Girls” as students at Emory University, performing weekly at The Dugout, a bar in the Emory Village.

Living very separate lives when not performing or recording, Ray has released solo albums and initiated a not-for-profit record company while Saliers is a restaurateur and a published author. Both Saliers and Ray self-identify as lesbian and are active with political and environmental causes.


Both Ray and Saliers have long identified themselves as lesbians. Saliers jokingly prefers "gay" because — she says — "lesbian has three syllables."[5] They have never been a couple. Because of their engagements for LGBT rights they are regarded as icons of the movement.

When she asked How has the trans movement influenced her, 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. "

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