Joan Nestle

A Femme-Butch Reader A groundbreaking anthology about femme and butch identities in the lesbian community.

A Femme-butch Reader

The Persistent Desire

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I have always considered myself butch identified. I have never felt feminine. I wore dresses because my mother bought my clothes, but as soon as I drew my first paycheck at age seventeen, I paid down on my first suit. Over the years women have asked why I dress so mannish. My response has been that I like wearing man-tailored clothing; it’s the way I choose to express myself. It is becoming more apparent every day that I am exactly where I’m supposed to be, and I am doing exactly what I’m supposed to be doing.

When the girls bragged over break of their sundry loves,

Flaxie blithely told them her old lady Althea took her dancing every weekend

and did not care who knew she loved the mind of a woman.

and did not care who knew she kept company with a woman

and did not give a damn who knew her “man” was a woman.

The experience of working in the clubs together had forged a great bond among them, forming something like a sorority for poor kids who had no college, but riskier. In the fifties, you could still get busted by the vice squad for being a transvestite (“masquerading” as a man) unless you wore three pieces of women's clothing. So you can imagine the rigors of life for a butch who worked in drag in the forties.

When the butch crooners sang, the fans swooned. They may have had good voices, but their real talent was for women: the ones who went to nightclubs in long dresses and mink stoles, like the heroines of a black-and-white movie.

The butches were even more gorgeous. Slender, wistful girls stared out of eight-by-ten-inch close-ups with curly hair or straight hair, blonde or dark, cut short likea boy's and slicked back with Vitalis or Vaseline Hair Tonic. They had beautiful, androgynous faces with smooth cheeks and sculpted jaws. One looked like Errol Flynn. They passed not only on stage, where everybody knew the score, but on the street, too. Most of them owned few or no female clothes, and on visits in drag to the Copacabana, for example, they used the men's facilities without incident to avoid confusion in the powder room.

M: Yes. I like to wear pants. Then I always dressed kind of tailored: skirt and blouse and things like that. But I like the pants and the cap. But I never considered myself being a man. Because I never liked the men that much. And anything I don’t like, I don’t take up. And I always took up being a woman because I liked the women and what they stood for.

I had Joan laughing, because I called Lillian “Little Bear.” But when I first met her, in 1932, she was, to me … a duchess — the grand duchess — and I can’t remember what she called me now.

I will always think of Deanna when I say we are not speaking of roles but of identities. Her butch self was not a masquerade or a gender cliché, but her final and fullest expression of herself.

Marriage is not what this society means by marriage when two women do it; passing women are not men, though their survival might depend on others thinking that they are; a woman poppa is a gender creation of her own, of our, own.

“When Jeanie died, she knew what she needed to know: that she was loved.” Flamboyance and fortitude, femme and butch — not poses, not stereotypes, but a dance between two different kinds of woman, one beckoning the other into a full blaze of color, the other strengthening the fragility behind the exuberance. We who love this way are poetry and history, action and theory, flesh and spirit.

The Persistent Desire A Femme-butch Reader

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