In honour of the butch

Ever read something so smack-you-between-the-eyes stupid that you wonder how the hell you and the writer exist in the same world? Especially when you both allegedly live in the same small niche that the rest of the world ignores, denigrates or uses for titillation? There’s supposed to be some solidarity in those circumstances, right?

Yesterday I was chatting with my beloved and she clued me into an article printed in g3, a free monthly lesbian magazine. Now, I have read this magazine over the years, and can appreciate that, with an estimated readership of approximately 140,000, such a magazine cannot be expected to truly represent every single queer woman out there. But from a quick scan of their data about their average reader, I was the walking embodiment of that average reader.

Until I became a poor student again, of course.

My beloved is still smack dab in the middle of the average reader category. But according to the offending article, she does not even exist.

You see, my beloved is a butch. A short-back-’n’-sides, big-boot-wearin’, checked-shirted butch. She has more pairs of jeans than a Levi’s museum and channels a glorious Jimmy Dean-esque charm and quiet charisma. And the leather jacket is somewhere between her uniform and her armour.

According to the g3 article, butches under 40 do not exist, so sorry, darling, you’re an impossibility. Not only is this article just plain wrong, it was so poorly argued with no internal logic that the writer and the editor should be ashamed to have published this shit. The writer manages to both note that butch represents gender fluidity that increasingly no longer exists and to argue that butch is no longer necessary because we have enough gender fluidity. Yup, I can’t get my head around that one either.

Another beautiful piece of circular logic suggests that we don’t need to dress butch any more because you can just go to a gay club or check out a profile to find another queer woman. But at the same time, straight women are increasingly dressing like queer women, who are increasingly dressing like straights, so it can be hard to figure out who might be up for a Sapphic encounter or two. Damn it, why can’t you just tell by the way that women dress? It’s all too confusing!! Oh.

Of course, butch might just be about being in yer face political, opines the writer. Because walking down the street every day taking the random abuse and rudeness that people hand out to butches is absolutely about being political. These dang women are just being difficult and you know there’s just no need for a nice lesbian to do that any more!

I hope you note the liberal dose of sarcasm laced through the preceding chapters. Please don’t miss it.

I am a butch-loving femme. A smile from a butch makes me go weak at the knees in all sorts of good ways. So I am absolutely biased. I am also apparently invisible as well. Those gay clubs that are allegedly the obvious places to go to find a fellow queer woman are not particularly helpful places for me. I get read as a fag hag and dismissed by most queer women. In clubs for gay women, I get treated like I do not belong, unless I have a woman with me to validate my credentials. I walk down Old Compton Street with my beloved and she gets cruised whilst I am blatantly ignored as irrelevant by most queer women. Butches, on the other hand, always recognise me for who and what I am. It’s like we speak a language other queer women cannot or do not want to understand. And I can tell you that there are butch women out there, including butches under 40.

It takes a lot of courage to be a butch, because it means being yourself. It means knowing who you are and refusing to hide or pretend, just to make other people feel less challenged. It means holding your head high every single day and rejecting all the judgement and insults that the rest of the world might throw at you today. It means being prepared to fight to be treated like a human being just because the cut of your hair, the clothes you wear and the way you move are not the way that you have been told to behave. Being butch means being brave.

So when a community magazine declares butches extinct, whether due to gender fluidity or rigidity, lack of political need or just plain fear, my heart bleeds for the butches that I know and my own beloved butch. To me, this article smacks of an internalised misogyny and homophobia . And I know that there are butches out there who feel now even more isolated, since even their own community does not recognise that they exist.

Believe me, butches, there are women out there who love you just as you are and would be devastated if you disappeared.