February 1957

It was the Queen's Men first concert in London. Richard Jones, a record store owner who'd known Brenda Stein for two years, had offered the band a generous sum of money for performing in a nightclub called The Lion's Cage. He'd witnessed a performance they'd given a month before at another nightclub in Liverpool and had been impressed of all the member's performances, especially Rhiannon's, since he claimed he couldn't remember the last time he'd seen a woman playing the drums anywhere, much less for a rock group.

Two hours before showtime, Rhiannon was going through the band's music sheets alongside Mitchell Swanson. Of the two boys in the band, Mitchell was the one who'd gotten closest to Rhiannon. Despite her hesitation, he'd come home with her several times after band practice, insisting she couldn't become a full member of the band without having at least one of the other band mates over. And much to her relief, he didn't mind her family's small house, or how her parents couldn't offer him anything fancy for meals beyond stew or beans. In fact, Mitchell himself lived in a small room upstairs from the hardware store where he worked as an assistant, and his meals often consisted of whatever he could take home from the restaurants he often visited between work and band practice. "Your place feels likes like a mansion in comparison to my sad excuse of a home," he'd said one day as they were looking through magazines in candlelight by his desk, since there was a thunderstorm that had cut the power off shortly after they'd arrived.

Mitchell had come from a working -class family not that far off from where Rhiannon currently lived, but because his father had steady work in manufacturing, they never struggled too much. He'd done well enough in school to get into the grammar school, but because he'd done poorly on his O levels, he'd failed to get into university, much to the disappointment of his family, who had been depending on him to provide a better future for them all. They'd forced him to leave home after graduation, and he'd had to work odd jobs while staying over at friend's homes for over a year before he'd gotten hired at the hardware store. It had been while there that he met Alex and started the Queen's Men. "I'd always loved playing music, and with rock and roll being so popular, I figured what better way to get well-known than by trying to create our own songs in that same style?' he'd told Rhiannon during their first practice sessions.

Right now, the two them went over some last- minute details while eating burgers from a nearby diner that Brenda had recommended. Alex was close by, but only jumped in to help them if they asked him first. Of the three of them, he was the only one who was economically well-off. His father was an accountant who was all too willing to help financially supplement the band, although he was convinced that it was just a hobby for his son. He sometimes questioned Alex's choice of fellow musicians, wondering why he couldn't just find some of his old bosom friends and perform alongside them instead, but always acted decently enough when he was around them.

"Think you're ready to get back on stage again, Rhiannon?" Mitchell asked her once they were done.

"Mitchell, how many times do I have to tell you that I'm not afraid of getting up on stage anymore? After my first time doing it, it's been quite easy for me," Rhiannon said. While it was true that she got a little nervous before she performed in public, Rhiannon did not go through that paralyzing fear some people experienced during those moments. Instead, she would imagine herself playing the drums, sometimes going over the scene a dozen times in her head before she headed onto the stage, letting that "short movie of myself", as she would later call it in interviews, give her enough confidence to go on with that activity she was slowing starting to love.

"If you say so. Sometimes when I'm onstage, I must pretend I'm alone in my small place before I can start singing. Otherwise, I feel as though I might faint."

"I thought only women tend to swoon when they're nervous."

"In that case, you better think twice before acting all high and mighty for being a female drummer. When I was at the doctor's when I was six, I got all dizzy and ended up collapsing seconds after I got a shot. If it looks like men never do something, it's because they're pretending to be much braver than anyone else."

"Thank you for letting me know men have the same fears as women," Rhiannon said with a chuckle.

"And thank you for being so understanding as a woman," Mitchell responded.

While other women her own age would soon take offense at those sorts of jokes from men, Rhiannon never made a big deal about it, thinking both genders deserved to tease each other in a good-natured way sometimes. In fact, her attitudes about this would soon make her and the other Belles the target of some second-wave feminists' criticism, with one influential magazine from the 70s claiming that "by embracing all the chauvinism of rock and roll and making their emotional dependency on men very obvious through the constant media exposure of them with their spouses and boyfriends, the Belles came across not as feminist heroes, but as foes of their own sex, being as problematic as the fairy tale princess of the past or today's overly dolled up models." When asked about this article through a 1974 interview with Playboy, Rhiannon had responded, "If they think we're bad feminist role models just because we refuse to cast aside all men from our lives and go in our own direction with our music, then to hell with these feminists. Neither me nor any of the other former Belles are trying to gain Gloria Steinem's approval any more than we are Richard Nixon's. Why not let young women and teenagers hear us out for themselves and let them decide if we're good feminists, because I bet many of them would say yes without any doubt."

As they went on with their work, they were approached by Penelope Oswald, who was Brenda Stein's assistant in the music store she owned. She seemed a little too prim to Rhiannon despite being only five years older than she was, since she always insisted that the band members never smoke, drink, or cuss in her presence, but she was always supportive towards Rhiannon once concerts were around the corner.

Right now, she said, "Mitchell, would you mind if I spoke with Rhiannon alone for a while?"

"Go ahead, Penelope. I'm sure you can give her plenty of advice than neither I nor Alex could," Mitchell said.

With that said, Penelope held on to Rhiannon's hand and said, "Come along with me, Rhiannon. I've got quite a lot I'd like to tell you before we get started today."

"Okay," Rhiannon said, wondered what could be so important that Penelope wanted to have a word with her so urgently as she followed Penelope out of the practice room.

Once they were out in the hallway, she said, "So, first of all, how's it been working with these boys? They aren't giving you too much of a hard time, are they?"

This wasn't too surprising to Rhiannon. Penelope seemed to think Mitchell and Alex needed to be watched over whenever they were around her, having even once asked Brenda how comfortable she was with their "unusual" working arrangements. However, she always did her best not to make such a big deal out of Penelope's concerns, so she replied, "Everything's fine with them, Penelope. Mitchell and Alex might be the biggest gentlemen I've ever worked with, which I'm sure you never hear other girls saying about rock and roll lovers. We haven't had any issues working together so far, and they always help me out with the drums in any way they can. If I could perform with them for a living, I'd be happy to go along with it."

"Good. That's very good, Rhiannon," Penelope said. Then, lowering her voice a little, she said, "And how are things between you and Brenda?"

Rhiannon frowned. What reason could Penelope have for being so secretive about Brenda? "It's all good. She's been helping me out a lot, and we get on well enough. Why do you ask?"

Penelope turned around to see if anyone was close. Upon noticing that no one else was around, she said in her normal tone, "The matter is, Rhiannon, that I believe Brenda is a good woman. She does much to help her customers at the store and for your band, and she helped give me a job when no one else wanted to. Not that different from your situation, in fact. However, there are others who aren't very fond of her for reasons that you may find rather strange, if not completely shocking."

"What are you talking about? Do people have problems with her because she's a woman running a business and a band? Or she is doing something questionable, like, you know…?"

"Like sleeping around with the men she works with?" Penelope finished for her. "Not exactly, although there's probably a client or two who's gotten that idea into their heads. Some do have problems with her being a woman, and Jewish, on top of that. However, what has most people talking is how they don't see her enough with men outside of work, unless you count her father. In some cases, seeing a woman who shows little romantic interest in men raises as much questions as a woman who spends a little too much time with them."

"What are you trying to get at here? Are you saying Brenda is possibly frigid?" People didn't talk as much about frigid women as they used to, although Rhiannon sometimes heard other girls at work bring that up jokingly if they pointed out a handsome boy and one of them showed little interest in him. "What's the matter, Jane? Getting too frigid so soon around boys?" someone once said when a well-dressed university student had walked in with his friends.

"There are some who believe that, but that's not quite what I mean. What I mean is her interest seems to be more towards other women."

At first, this didn't come across too clearly to Rhiannon. "Interest? Interest in a romantic or sexual way? Is that where you're trying to get at?"

"Yes. That's exactly what I'm trying to say," Penelope said.

This revelation had Rhiannon gasping. Like most girls of her time, most of the things she'd heard about homosexuality were far from positive. People always spoke about it in the context of sexual perversion, telling horror stories of men who pried on other men while drunk in bars or of them secretly getting together in public lavatories. They were men who took pleasure in acting similar to women or dressing up like them, who were scornfully called fairies and sissies, or women who were much too masculine for their own good, who were called lesbians or dykes. In recent years, homosexuality had been declared a mental illness, leading some to take either less resentful views of these people or else despise them as much as always, pointing out the many supposed crimes they committed as evidence that they were less moral than everyone else.

However, Rhiannon had taken notice that for some reason, some of the worst resentment was reserved towards homosexual men. While similar women were still looked down upon, people tended to talk much less about them, and without the many condemnations that were almost always involved when bringing men up. The stories on alcoholism, lavatories, and predators seemed to exclusively involve men. Stories on lesbians tended to involve boarding school and university dormmates, and in some cases, Catholic convents, as some resentful folks at her family's Anglican church had once gossiped about at a Sunday picnic. Rhiannon herself didn't hold any strong resentment towards these people, although at the time, she didn't see at as normal either. If anyone had asked her, she would have said that they'd turned out this way because they never had much luck with those of the opposite sex when they were teenagers.

When she finally managed to speak up, she said, "How do you know about this, Penelope?"

"When I started out working at Brenda's store, I had a customer come up to me and whisper that I ought to watch out for my boss, because she had a reputation for behaving improperly around other women. I asked this woman to explain, and she said she'd been one of Brenda's old classmates, and when they'd been thirteen years old, someone had noticed Brenda kissing one of her bosom friends while they were out in the woods. They couldn't figure out whether anything else had happened between them, but from then on, most of the girls made a point of avoiding Brenda whenever possible. There was no outright teasing or reporting of the incident to the teachers or her parents. They just stopped speaking to Brenda unless they really needed to and made sure never to invite her to parties or the movies or anywhere else. Being as naïve as they were, that seemed to make more sense than shunning her for something not even they fully understood."

"And was Brenda aware of this?"

"I asked her about it a week after this woman spoke to me, and she admitted that she had once kissed a girl, and that it was this same girl who'd let her know what all the other girls in their classes were doing to her. Brenda had gotten upset about it, but she never confronted anyone about it. Like everyone else, she knew that perhaps it was better if this incident was never brought up again, even if it meant she had to continue with little to no friends for the rest of her school years. And that's how it stayed. After graduating from school, she started working in her father's music store, taking over the place after he started getting too sick to continue running it. As far as I know, she's never had any other similar incident with another woman, but she claims those feelings she had as a teenager have never gone away, and she's not sure what to make of it."

Rhiannon shook her head. Not once in all the time that she'd spend with Brenda would she have guessed that she was this way. Yes, she may have been a little broad shouldered and awkward with her mannerisms at times, but otherwise, there wasn't much about her that wasn't feminine. Was it always this hard to know who was a lesbian? And what did that say about her actual character? Was it possible that she was just as perverse as the homosexuals from those stories, or was it nothing more than some mild sexual disorder that might go away once she had more experience with men?

"Is there anything I should do about this, Penelope? Should I talk to her about it or is it best to stay quiet about it?" she finally asked.

"I would avoid bringing it up as long as you can. Don't tell the boys or anyone else you may interact with about it," Penelope responded. "I have my own morals about sex, but I see no reason for being hard on Brenda. She's a woman with good principles, unlike some the others who are the same way, and I'm sure she'd never do anything harmful to you or any other woman. Go on with your work with the band and grow as close as you can with everyone without any funny business going on. That's all I can say about it."

"Okay," Rhiannon said, still unsure how she felt about all this, but deciding it was probably best to go along with what Penelope said. Regardless of whatever Brenda was supposed to be, she still liked her so far, and was glad she'd come across someone who not only thought highly of her talents, but was also willing to work along with her so she could steadily improve over time.

"Well, what took so long, ladies?" Mitchell asked once they got back in the practicing room. "We were about to call Brenda to see if an emergency had come up."

"There's no emergency, Mitchell, unless you consider private talks over lady business to be an emergency," Penelope said with a sneaky smile.

Alex laughed. "I don't, but knowing most girls, perhaps you two do see it that way."

"Oh, be quiet, Alex," Rhiannon said. However, she couldn't be more thankful for the boys' playful teasing after what she'd just been talking about with Penelope. Being as young as she was in a time with strict sexual mores, she had yet to understand exactly what her manager was going through, or what all these people she'd been hearing so many bad things about were actually like.