What is your understanding of butch lesbian history?
How did you learn it?
I have an understanding of butch lesbian history that somewhat predates the development of the butch-femme bar culture and later resurgence in the 90s. But my greatest understanding lies in butch-femme culture and the relationships, alliances, communities, and hardships that came with it. Like many, Stone Butch Blues was definitely one of my starting points and honestly changed my life. I have since explored other literary, video, and community-based resources. Butch is a Noun by S. Bear Bergman was particularly influential. Same with Dagger: On Butch Women. Oh yeah right I think it's sort of like well you know you have your Boston marriages but then after that I think that was like the stereotypical lesbian couple was butch-femme. I get really excited for butch couples that I see because they finally can be out as they are, when historically speaking like even within the queer community that was not acceptable, it was like thumb your nose at it. I think although we have a place like foundational, I think it was still limiting yeah right like as lesbians couples started to emerge or lesbian started to emerge people are like oh yeah butch OK lesbian that's fine and then butch-femme made sense but then like butch-butch no that doesn't work. We see all different types of lesbians today that aren't necessarily in the binary of butch-femme and they struggle to be seen and so I do think like we’re very fortunate and I will speak my experience as a butch person not for the collective, I do think that there is some recognition within like the historical context of what it means to be butch and a lesbian. I do think sometimes there's kind of like an acceptance that isn't always I would imagine for some other lesbians that don’t identify as butch. I don't think that particularly me growing up in the 80s and 90s there really was no common mainstream history that you could really draw from. Again you had to go off of what you say in media and generally that was pretty negative. In college as I was actually starting to come out I think that what happens is you’re in this community of people and you learn things word of mouth. You start to do your own research, as you’re kinda understanding things. I also took a number of women’s studies classes. It was mostly from my own exploration and I’ve always been really involved with the community so a lot of it is that community involvement. The San Diego History Museum has a LGBTQ exhibition, it’s kind of a long-term installation but it’s pretty cool. Things like that you can actually go and experience things like that. Having not really grown up in San Diego, but I knew San Diego very well, but since this wasn’t the place I came out, I didn’t spend my young adulthood here, I didn’t come here and for a long time I wasn’t really out to my family that lived here. So I don’t really know what the sense of the history is in San Diego. The community center is one of the largest in the country and I don’t remember but potentially the first one that was open in southern California and that’s so cool. Many suffered so that I could be free. That butches have been around for centuries. Mostly from history books or historical novels. What I have learned online and through my own reading, I highly recommend Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg. I properly learned about the true history of butch women through the Internet and being exposed to more butch women. I learned about it through connecting with lesbian community, especially with other GNC and butch lesbians. Mostly in online communities such as lesbian Facebook groups, and through places like the Lesbian Herstory Archives. |
I think for me it's learning about it and then really discovering what that means. I kind of ended up going more backwards than most people only because thankfully my drama teacher had stacks of art books of fashion reference photos, but there were a couple books of just vintage gay couples and there was one really good one that was literally just the LA area I think like the 30s to the 60s. And it was all LA club scene shots, but least a third of them were gay bars and gay clubs. Just seeing the jobs that vintage butch lesbians you know they had, they had to be bartenders, they had to be bouncers, they had to be entertainers and their partners were really the breadwinners. Learning about that history backwards but then seeing the actual representation of how it played out like in a world where you can actually dressed masculine and get a job as a woman. Yeah kind of see how like those roles are in the way still there, but how they’ve evolved over time and there's just something about like seeing those older photographs is just like the fixing of the suit or the fixing of the collar, always really made me happy. I want that. Some part of that I want that. I learned about it from—it was something I knew for a long time because my mother is sort of lesbian-adjacent. Definitively straight, but somehow involved and aware of lesbian culture. It would come up I guess as an idea. I don't remember initially learning about the history. I don’t know where it started. Or I know where butch-femme culture and lesbian bar scene started. But yeah I guess I did do my time reading the literature. Tumblr was a big one. And there's some of my lesbian friends were fairly like instrumental in learning about that. I guess that also aligns with Tumblr because they're all on Tumblr. Wikipedia articles, absolutely Wikipedia articles I learned a lot. It’s almost possible to learn more of the history from people saying what the history isn’t. There have been no things in my life that are like here's access to that. I don't have other people in my life like sharing that with me and I haven’t personally sought that out. To be honest I don’t even know where to start. I think it’s something I need to do eventually. I’ve kinda all been about what’s here and now, what’s like the current. Places that I see myself in history I have no idea. It’s also what history comes with; I might see parts of myself in it, but I know that history has not been kind to anyone who’s not a white cis straight dude so it’s also really painful to learn about that. It’s about knowing that there’s gonna be some celebratory knowledge, but also some grieving to be had. It’s not all rainbows. I’m excited to learn I just don’t know where to start. I have not. I feel like Stone Butch Blues is like that starting point. I feel like there's a lot of rhetoric in currently LGBT communities and queer communities that butch used to be this antiquated role and that there was stuff to do with like butch-femme dynamics and how butch signified gender presentation and sort of sexual dynamic as well and all of the butch-femme bar culture. A lot of my understanding of that comes from Stone Butch Blues. But I feel like I honestly don’t know as much about butch lesbian history and I wish that I did. Aside from talking to other butch lesbians and reading some books and slowly gathering information, there’s not a good resource for that. I don’t know older butch lesbians and I wish that I did. Or had a way to find them. I feel like finding stuff about lesbian history is complicated enough and I until recently didn’t really know that many lesbians. I didn’t even identify as lesbian for a long time. That’s like a whole other thing, how do you find information about lesbian history, let alone butch lesbian history? I learned about from old school femmes like Joan Nestle. I read anything I can, as the history is what makes us. Research and word of mouth. Reading Stone Butch Blues. I have limited knowledge of butch lesbian history. |