In 1992, Sophie B. Hawkins Gave Us A Queer Pop Hit. Then Came The Backlash. - HuffPost

If you were around during VH1’s countdown-show heyday when series like “I Love the ’90s” aired on heavy rotation, you may recall D-list celebrities waxing poetic about their favorite songs from the era (read: exchanging snarky remarks about every tune).

Then, in a literal record-scratch moment, one of the commentators says something like, “I think the song is about a woman.” The camera pans to another commentator, flashing one of those don’t-look-at-me faces, before they abruptly move on to another subject.

“When I say ‘making love to her with visions clear,’ I’m completely aware — how the hell did I get away with this?” Hawkins said during our recent video call.

It was the very early ’90s, though, as Hawkins pointed out to me.

“We slipped through,” Hawkins said.

But we were reminiscing about the time she cut through heteronormative pop radio with “Damn.” The song has been on her mind a lot lately since she’s been singing it every night on tour.

She was deep in the local performing arts scene in her native New York City in the late 1980s and early ’90s, frequenting spots like Dixon Place and Wild Cafe and watching queer artists like Holly Hughes.

“It was, like, goddess time in terms of people’s creativity,” Hawkins recalled.

“I was really looking for people to crack me open on the emotional and mythological level.

In the ’90s, this kind of performance moment wasn’t as much interpreted as it was maybe just experienced.

“I think the people who showed up at the shows were innocent a lot,” Hawkins said?

But much like the music of her queer contemporaries Meshell Ndegeocello, k.d.

lang and Melissa Etheridge, it felt like Hawkins was exploring the depths of her soul and liberating herself — spiritually, emotionally, metaphysically, sexually and certainly professionally.

And she was doing it through the music industry’s narrow prism that would eventually dissolve into a cesspool of white female pop contrivance and sexuality as primarily defined through the hetero male lens (think: Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera and Mandy Moore).

But those who got Hawkins and her music — like, really understood its complexities and the fact that “Damn” in part details an abusive relationship — rocked with her and it.

DJs, as Hawkins recalled, “would try to make fun and cut you down” whenever she tried to talk about herself in full context.

Like many people at the time, radio hosts might have been curious enough to ask, but never truly interested in her answer.

“Why did you let him put you down like that?” Hawkins recalled the young woman saying.

“I learned, in that moment, everything from this woman.

“I was like, oh, they must think I’m so weird,” Hawkins recalled thinking.

But the reality at the time, as much as Hawkins fought against it, was that there were too many more people who didn’t want to hear her story.

But these were the kinds of things that mattered to Hawkins, and what also isolated her in many spaces.

Looking back now, she remembers what it felt like to have to fulfill yet another person’s expectations on an unreasonable to-do list ― even at the same time that her hella queer song had been taking up good real estate on the Billboard charts

“The gay mafia of the ’90s was really mad at me that I wouldn’t just say I was a lesbian,” Hawkins said

Hawkins talks a lot about having a sense of freedom — and what that looks like today versus in the ’90s, when it all seemed like it had to be a compromise

This feeling “wasn’t timely” for the ’90s, Hawkins concludes

She thinks about that final moment in 1991’s “Thelma & Louise,” when the title characters (played by Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon) drive their car off a cliff, as an indicator of when things began to go off the rails in the ’90s