The Summer of 2003

The Justified/Stripped Tour and my burgeoning sexuality

I’m slowly working my way through Britney Spears’ memoir, The Woman in Me. I will admit, celebrity memoirs are hard for me; I always end up losing interest and putting it down, so it’s going to take me time to get through it. One of the things Britney talks about in her book is when Christina Aguilera and Justin Timberlake went on tour together and posed on the cover of Rolling Stone to promote said tour in 2003. I’m not going to rehash what she said because it ultimately doesn’t matter. The point is that her bringing up this particular moment in history brought up a lot of feelings for me.

It may have felt like a slap in the face to ol’ Brit Brit, but the Justified/Stripped tour (and that entire era) were so influential on me as a teenage bi bebe. If you asked me who my biggest celebrity crushes were in 2003, I would have told you Justin Timberlake and Christina Aguilera. Well maybe I would have told you about Christina. My bisexuality was still reserved for a VERY small amount of people I felt I could trust. Which means like one maybe two people knew. 

Last year for Autostraddle, I wrote about how the video for “Dirrty” played a part in my sexual awakening, my burgeoning queerness, and my understanding of tapping into sexual power for the 20th anniversary. (It is wild to me that both of these albums have been out for 21 years. How am I not still 16?)

“The music video was really what caused my teenage sexual awakening. The imagery of “Dirrty” and Christina’s Stripped era is so burned into our consciousness, and it’s still iconic. I can close my eyes and see those assless chaps even now. Gone was the platinum blonde girl who wore crop tops and sang “Genie in a Bottle.” She was replaced by X-tina, a woman with black streaks in her infamously blonde hair who had not only a nose stud but also a stud in her chin. (She also had piercings in other places including her nipple, tongue, and her outer labia.) She was wearing triangle bra tops and skirts so short they were practically a belt. But it wasn’t really the clothing (or lack thereof) that had me enamored, it was the raw sexual confidence that oozed out of her. It didn’t feel fake or forced — she actually looked more like herself than she had previously.”

From the fall of 2002, the two albums that were in heaviest rotation in my room were Justified and Stripped. Both albums tapped into the older teen I was evolving into. Gone were the bubblegum pop days, I was expanding the kind of music I was listening to. I became more interested in lyrics and finding myself in the songs I loved. I was listening to music with more grit, more soul, basically I was trying to use music to figure out who I was becoming. I could write paragraphs on each album and why they mattered so much to me, but I’ll spare you all of that. Just know, I loved both albums a lot and they very rarely left my five-disc changer. 

At 16 I didn’t have crushes on real life people. My world was pretty small, which I didn’t mind, but there wasn’t anyone I knew who I was interested in as anything more than a friend. It didn’t really matter, because the idea of crushes were always fun to me until I had to actually do something about it. I wanted to obsess about them and be weird around them, but I didn’t want to actually ask them out, and I don’t know what I would have done if one of them asked me out. Celebrity crushes fulfilled the need and had none of the commitment. They were both in their 20s, and I was still in high school, so there was an added level of safety knowing that a 21-year-old superstar wasn’t going to magically fall in love with me, even if I wrote pages and pages of fan fiction about it.

Justin was hot in a way that teenage boys were definitely not. He was buff, but not overly so, and had a smile that turned my insides to goo. I will admit that 2003 Justin was not my favorite look of his; I didn’t love the shaved head/manicured goatee look. It looked douchey. Even though I felt that way, the look worked for that Rolling Stone cover. It oozed sex appeal and even though it would be another three years before he would release FutureSex/LoveSounds, you could see where the aesthetic groundwork was being laid. 

For two people who had been friends since they were twins and had no romantic or sexual past, Justin and Christina knew exactly how to tap into their innate sex appeal for that Rolling Stone cover. I remember seeing it for the first time and feeling all sorts of tingly in my soft parts. I hadn’t seen it in years, but seeing it splashed across my Facebook feed last week brought me right back to those teenage feelings. God, they were both so fucking HOT — all blue eyes and sex appeal. 

By the time the Rolling Stone cover dropped, I had had my first kiss with a girl named Lauren. We actually did more than just kiss if you get my drift. While the idea of kissing a boy was still abstract, I understood what it was like to be intimate with a girl, and I couldn’t help but place Christina in the situations I had found myself in that summer. I could picture the way her soft hips would feel as I pressed my fingers into them, the way her glossy lips would slide across my own, losing my hand in her raven hair. I wanted to insert myself as the peanut butter in that sex sandwich.

I don’t remember a ton about going to the actual concert (it was 20 years ago after all). I went with my besties Dana and Rachel (originally Dana’s boyfriend was supposed to go, thank god that didn’t happen) and I was HYPED. It was the end of summer, kind of a last hurrah before I started senior year of high school and Dana started freshman year of college. Rachel already knew that I was bi and very in love with our co-headliners. I don’t know if Dana knew in advance, but I’m sure she figured it out after watching me losing my gob the whole night. I can’t remember what I wore (probably something a little skanky, it was late August), but I still remember how my body felt like it was on fire for almost three hours. I can remember screaming when Christina went full X-tina in a low-cut bodysuit, and feeling my heart swell with pride watching Justin hold his own on stage without the other members of *NSYNC. I remember the way my nerve endings tingled with every hip thrust and the way that high lasted for hours, if not days. 

To this day, my teenage crush on both Justin and Christina still exists. I think they were cemented that night in New Jersey, when I was on the precipice of teenage self discovery. (Also, they’re still both fucking hot.)