The Catfishing of Tegan and Sara
a roundtable on lesbian cyberterrorism
Dearly beloveds, we are gathered here today to talk about Fanatical: The Catfishing of Tegan and Sara, a new Hulu documentary about an obsessive Tegan and Sara fan who initiated friendships and sexual relationships with other fans whilst pretending to be Tegan, and hacked the email accounts of Tegan and Sara and their friends, lovers, and management for over 15 years. This is a special crossover post with Maddy from TV Dinner and Julia and Clover, the real-life couple behind the Dyke Domesticity newsletter. We had a lot of feelings about this documentary and this post is long, so grab a snack, adjust your labret piercing, and read our raw, real, and correct opinions on email-based catfishing, the true crime genre, twin haircuts, lesbian cyberterrorism, and more.
If you watched Fanatical and you have feelings about it, or if you’ve ever been catfished by an internet entity pretending to be Tegan from Tegan and Sara, let us know in the comments. We want to talk.
Maddy: Hey Clover! Hey Julia! Thanks so much for joining me in this discussion of Fanatical, a true crime documentary about Tegan and Sara. I want to start by asking about your relationship with Tegan and Sara. Are you fans? When did you first become aware of them and their music?
Julia: I love Tegan and Sara, as demonstrated while watching the movie last night when I kept moaning “I love them” anytime old performance footage was shown, lol. I don’t keep up with their new music, but I loooove So Jealous, Sainthood, and (of course, my fav) The Con. I still love screaming along to The Con while driving on the highway — it scratches a very particular pleasure spot in my brain. Clover, I have a memory of us singing along to “Nineteen” and “Back Into Your Head” in the car together in Worcester, MA when we first started dating—so sweet.
I think I first heard of Tegan and Sara in early high school, because a childhood friend who is now also gay was a huge fan. But I didn’t get into them until the summer before my senior year when I went on a Jewish summer community service trip to Texas. I became close with one of the counselors, a recent college grad who was then presenting as a straight man (now nonbinary, I believe!). They introduced me to a ton of indie rock music that then became my personality, and they were a Tegan and Sara fan. I remember that they really liked the band’s most jagged songs, while I was more into the sappy, slow, love songs. I now love both! But I never had the haircut or anything. Clover, how about you?
Clover: As many know, I struggle to recall the specificities of my past, but I actually do know roughly when I encountered Tegan & Sara: first year of high school, which would be 2010 I think, when I saw the “Call It Off” music video for the first time and was immediately smitten. I was like “who are these tortured alternative babes who pronounce vowels so weird,” and it was also maybe my first real interaction with lesbians and lesbian desire, even though I didn’t understand it that way at the time. I eventually dove into So Jealous and it became a weird secret album I loved, even though I always felt more like I was trying to feel the intense obsessive emotions of the album more than I actually did. Like, I wanted to be a crazy, jealous lover who could cry, and I was nothing like that at all.
I wouldn’t say I was ever a huge fan of Tegan and Sara as people, I didn’t really follow along with their lives or perspectives on things too much, but over time I was definitely listening to their earliest records and I did see them live once. I also became really into a specific video of them doing an acoustic version of their song with Tiësto, “Feel It In My Bones”, so make of that what you will.
Maddy: I know this video! Oh man, the So Jealous, The Con, and Sainthood albums were BIG for me circa 2010. “Call it Off” will never not fuck me up–what gets me are the lyrics “Maybe I could have been something you’d be good at?” and the twin who’s singing’s voice (alas I cannot tell Tegan and Sara apart, physically or sonically) has this hopeful ring to it, even though her situationship is OVER before it even started and she knows it. I hear that and I’m basically 19 again. I just declared an English major and I’m fully in love with a popular senior who didn’t answer my “hey! How’s your winter break going ?” message on Facebook. DEVASTATING.
I was never so into Tegan and Sara that I joined a forum or online fan community. But I do remember seeking out interviews and unplugged performances on YouTube and watching them for hours and hours. They have a really down-to-earth, vulnerable energy and are genuinely very funny together, so I can see how someone would develop a parasocial relationship with them or even a fantasy of being a girlfriend or confidant. Not to excuse Fegan’s behavior or the creepiness highlighted in this doc!
Speaking of this doc, it oozes Big Dyke Energy. The premise is basically, “We’re having feelings about a weird, convoluted situation and we need to talk about it, even though many years have passed.” There’s never any suggestion that Fegan’s victims should be embarrassed or take responsibility for their own naivete. Their feelings are valid, so are online relationships. The internet is a place where real life unfolds.
Julia: Should we maybe take a quick moment to describe the premise of the documentary? I want to give a warning now that we WILL DISCUSS SPOILERS. Stop reading now if you don’t want spoilers!
Okay, so, basically, the documentary follows an investigative process in which a femme true-crime filmmaker tries to track down THE FEGAN, a person (or people?) who posed online as Tegan Quin for over fifteen years in the Tegan and Sara fan community starting in the mid-aughts, convincing multiple fans that they were in (sometimes sexually-charged) friendships with Tegan. The doc is very much built around Tegan and Sara’s participation, and it is a raw demonstration of the fact that fame is hell. Tegan has known about the Fegan for a long time but has never spoken about it publicly other than once, early on, to warn fans that she is not, in fact, the person emailing them things like “do you like my haircut?” and leaking her own demos. She clearly is traumatized by the whole experience and feels compelled to aggressively broadcast her (genuine, I think) humility and empathy to everyone we see her interact with in the film. It seems exhausting! A definitive answer is not reached by the end of the film about the identity of the catfisher, though there is a late-in-the-game attempt at “gotcha” call with an anonymized fan/Fegan suspect who they call “Tara,” who seems like she may be both Fegan victim and perpetrator? Honestly, that call left me more confused than I was at the beginning…
Maddy: Alas I watched this documentary twice and am still confused about Tara! She was a fan who wrote Tegan and Sara incest fanfiction, I think, and she agrees to meet the filmmaker in Maine, but then never shows up. Later she agrees to a phone call with Tegan and the filmmaker, but is really defensive and rude the whole time. Is that right?
Clover: That is correct. Her whole vibe screams, “Has made someone go through a botched accountability process”— she mentions not getting paid as a reason for not showing up to the interview that she already agreed to do, as if she was being economically coerced, and she’s cagey and evasive the whole time when the light is turned on her, even though she spends so much time and energy exploding other people’s lives with Fegan-related nonsense. BUT I do not think she was ever the Fegan, and I think the “gotcha” interview was really poorly delivered. Maddy you are so right when you say there’s Big Dyke Energy around the whole conceit of “something is weird and we just wanna talk about it,” and that really comes up in this final interview where the documentarian and Tegan basically have nothing on Tara but just try to act like they do to get an admission. An emotionally raw meeting that’s acting like it isn’t litigation but absolutely is, where both sides are taking veiled stabs at each other, and everyone ends it feeling weird and exhausted with no progress??? That’s like what every other Tegan and Sara song is about, baby.
Also a total aside but the way the movie chose to “anonymize” Tara’s voice made her sound like a clocky trans woman, to the point that our friend watching with us thought she was trans. She is not trans, they just made her sound like that for some reason, lol.
Maddy: Yes, the conversation with Tara also left a bad taste in my mouth. Thanks for articulating that, Clover! Don’t judge me for saying this, but I was honestly jealous of how much writing The Fegan got done. In addition to producing what probably amounts to thousands of emails and DMs as Tegan, they were also pretending to be other people in Tegan’s life like her girlfriend and tattoo artist and basically writing out entire conversations with themselves. So there’s a stalker element to their behavior, but also a lust for the page and creating FANFICTION lol. Weirdly the documentary doesn’t go into the technical aspects of the breach—like, how exactly does one hack into an email account or iDisk? Can anyone do it or does it require specialized knowledge? When was two-factor authentication invented? I have no idea!
Clover: It was crazy-making to me that this was a stalking/impersonation/harassment campaign conducted entirely over email in the mid-2000s and yet Tegan and Sara’s management team never seemed to have got in touch with a computer expert or even an IT guy. They’re just pouring over the evidence between the two of them and going in circles trying to figure out who’s who by tracing clues in the emails themselves. The closest thing we get to computer expertise is some random talking head who’s like “Oh yeah, the culprit is definitely a woman, probably a teenager. The absolute worst kind of people,” LOL.
This also made me wonder if actually, this kind of thing happens to celebrities all the time. It’s hard not to think that plenty of huge celebs have people forming all sorts of bizarre relationships with them, including dangerous impersonation, but that they have teams that prevent this from becoming a real problem. Was the bigger crime here committed by Tegan and Sara’s management, who couldn’t do anything to prevent a preventable problem?
Maddy: They mention bringing in a cybersecurity expert after the initial 2011 breach, but they weren’t able to catch the culprit. Plus, Fegan struck again in 2013 so clearly the cyber was not secured. I agree that management should have been prepared for a situation like this, since people pretending to be celebrities online is absolutely a thing (according to the Wikipedia on Twitter Verification, the blue check was invented in 2009 because Kanye West was concerned about impersonator accounts). Most of all, I’m confused about why Fegan chose to share the iDisk with other fans. It’s a weird move! It makes sense that they would send song demos and personal photos in order to pass as Tegan and gain their victim’s trust, but sharing passport scans was really tipping their hat. Maybe they wanted to get caught??
I also found it so endearing how all of Fegan’s victims are so stoked to be talking to the real Tegan even in the context of a documentary about how they got catfished at what was, for most of them, a very sad and lonely time in their lives. The exception is JT, the musician from Vancouver who actually knew Tegan in real life. What did we all think of JT’s story?
Julia: Oh god, JT…… For those reading this roundtable in lieu of watching the movie, JT is a queer from the small Vancouver punk scene that Tegan and Sara started out in. JT has definitely had a difficult life: they grew up in the foster system and seem like they’ve seen some shit. JT and Tegan/Sara were acquaintances who would, like, see each other around at shows or house parties, but not actual friends. When the Fegan emailed JT to strike up a conversation, JT didn’t think it was that crazy, and it soon evolved into an intensely sexual email relationship. Tegan later learned of this after the first round of Fegan-busting. She was telling some old Vancouver friends about it, and they were like “uh…we have to tell you something….JT has been telling everyone in the ‘Couv that you guys are having an affair.” Tegan’s team then reached out to JT to let them know that they’d got got by the Fegan, but JT REFUSED TO BELIEVE THEM and persisted for quite awhile in her belief that she was e-lovers with the real Tegan. JT felt like Tegan and her team were manipulating her, and that Tegan owed it to her to reach out directly, while Tegan felt like JT was behaving in an unpredictable and frightening way and she didn’t want to feed into the whole thing. I can honestly see both sides of this conflict (seems miserable all around), but JT’s narrative that the Tegan situation unjustly drove her out of all Vancouver queer music spaces definitely made me say, “there must have been more going on here….”
Clover: As someone who has been in at least a small city punk scene I can say there was more going on there…
Maddy: JT was tweeting about Tegan’s misdeeds for what sounds like multiple years, which is not a great look. At the same time, I really didn’t like the way Tegan’s manager spoke about JT—felt kinda sneering and punching down to me. I don’t want to put words in JT’s mouth, but I sensed she was in this tricky emotional place of feeling both embarrassed of her actions and also justified in her anger towards the irl Tegan. I really hope she was treated well by the documentary and found closure. What did y’all think of the scene where she finally talks to Tegan?
Clover: I remember saying, “Why doesn’t Tegan just talk to JT instead of having them be separately interviewed about this situation?” and then when it did happen I thought it was a pretty strange and tense scene. I got the feeling from JT and Tegan’s body language and literal language that neither was comfortable being completely candid about what happened in front of a camera, for different reasons. JT was completely shaking with adrenaline and nerves – she didn’t want to be the emotional freak in front of a celebrity, and Tegan wanted to maintain a concerned remove from it all. I felt like if I was JT I would’ve walked away from it going “Okay well I guess that’s it but that sucks.”
In general, maybe the most special thing about this documentary to me is that it is a weird investigative journalism doc about a crime committed against a celebrity where the celebrity is part of the investigative process the whole time. Putting Tegan Quin in these weird situations where she’s trying to rectify her position in the manipulation of a small-time Vancouver punk artist or confronting a bodiless incest-erotica writer over the phone struck me as rare and bizarre in an alluring way. Hearing Tegan pressure someone to explain to her why they would write incest erotica about her and her sister as if she hasn’t outgrown personhood to a large audience is ripe for lesbian analysis, imo.
Julia: To me, the most special thing about the movie is that it gives us the chance to get to know all of these dedicated OG Tegan and Sara fans who are .5 to 1 queer generations older than me (and probably you, Maddy? I feel like we’re close to the same age!). I love the concert footage, I love the haircuts, I love the glimpses into their fan culture. One related complaint is I wish they would’ve used MORE Tegan and Sara songs as backing tracks for the movie. There should’ve been a different topical song every 5-7 minutes throughout the whole thing. My other favorite thing was getting to read all of the weird, terse emails sent by the Fegan.
Clover: The email recreations were by far the best part. I still cannot tell if any of them were real transcripts or just someone guessing what the conversations might have been like. Maddy, do you have any Very Important elements of the movie that you want to highlight?
Maddy: I’m a sucker for complicated queer relationships and online dyke drama, and this documentary delivered that! It does linger in some boring places, including the history of fandom and a scene where they just read unhinged tweets by fans of various celebrities?? Like Julia, I was way more interested in Tegan and Sara’s specific fans and their online haunts in the oughts and early 10s (I’m almost 33 and didn’t spend much time online until I got my first personal computer until 2009, so Julia is correct in slotting these people as 1 or .5 queer generations above me.) I was so intrigued by the person who identifies as their archivist and filmed all their early shows–she says that in addition to Fegan, the Heartthrob era was super rough because T&S stopped greeting their fans and became a lot more popular. Like, tell me more! I want that niche lesbian history.
And of course, I love Tegan and Sara being self-serious in boxy basics and playing internet detective in their beautiful, Scandimodern homes. They really do coordinate their hair and outfits as twins!!
Clo: Lmao we kept going, “Wow Sara looks so good in her all-white fit!” Julia leaned over at one point and asked me “Do you think they get Botox” and I was like “Babe yes look at them and everyone they know, look at Tegans's ex. They're like 50 years old.”
Julia: They are 44, but I take your point. Last thing I’ll say on their style: it really is shocking the extent to which they’ve committed to coordinating haircuts over the years. I can’t help but think that if I was a twin I would make a different choice, but I respect it.
Maddy, building off of your point, although I thoroughly enjoyed watching this movie, I think it suffered from conforming too much to the genre of the made-for-streaming true crime documentary, which led to completely unnecessary moments like a three-minute video essay on the history of the term “stan.” Delving into the personal history of the archivist and exploring her collection (and exploring other little nooks and crannies particular to the aughts Tegan and Sara fandom) would’ve been soooo much more interesting, and I think the reason why the movie didn’t do that is that it would’ve seemed too unrelated to the true crime plotline. TLDR: streaming/algorithm culture makes everything dumber. This didn’t need to be a true crime movie.
Maddy: This documentary is trying SO HARD to be true crime and it should just lean into being about what it’s about: a weird thing that happened to a very specific group of homos. We never learn the Fegan’s true identity and motivations, so the treasure should have been the friends we made along the way and yet…no friends were made.
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lol 44 year olds can have nice skin without botox—being straight is what ages you prematurely!!!
the fegan emails/texts got the biggest gasps (and quickly stifled giggles as both tegan and sara were in the crowd) in the theatre 💀