We live on a planet that rotates on its axis every day, and, at the same time as it has spun on its axis, our planet has repeated the same orbital journey around the sun each year for over 4 billion years, and yet we argue that change is inevitable.
Learning appears to be the impetus for change, and much of that learning comes from what is shared by the generations that preceded us, and in an ideal world, we would repeat and maintain what has proven to work well and rethink what has not. And as I consider the changes that have occurred in my lifetime and in particular within the Butch-femme community, I’m left wondering if, in our rethinking, we might have thrown the odd baby out with the bathwater. In other words, have we lost some of what was most valuable, things that kept as unique and with that tightly bonded as we tried to correct the obvious wrongs?
As I reflect back to the years when I first entered the community, there are things that stand out that I believe needed to change.
In these early days, there was the three-article rule where people could be arrested for wearing clothing deemed for the opposite sex https://www.history.com/news/stonewall-riots-lgbtq-drag-three-article-rule . This may not seem important, but for any Butch who might be reading this right now, the chances are they have already involuntarily flinched like the sharp recoil that comes from biting down on foil. In these early days, many Butches, regardless of ability, would look only for blue-collar work specifically to avoid having to wear skirts and heels; others, to be able to earn a living, would face the soul-destroying ordeal of feminine attire during daylight hours. It was a time when sexual inequality was at a high, and a woman’s place was in the home, a home that was paid for by the husband, and it set the stage for the launch of the second wave of feminism. While the fight for equality for women became an essential and positive change, the Butch got lost. With a rejection of the feminine and without any role models, many Butches, in the embracing of masculinity, looked to male behavior for guidance, and with that, adopted a language and behavior that could only be described as toxic, with alcoholism and violence often being the end result. And so, with feminism just as all men became the enemy, it was not hard to explain why the BF dynamic, and in particular Butch, got caught in the same backlash.
But this picture of violence and misogyny though it admittedly existed, an existence that of course needed to be eradicated, was not the full picture; this wasn’t who everyone was, and it wasn’t everywhere, but where it did exist, there were many many more in the community who were trying to right these wrongs. Butch mentoring happened to do exactly that, to provide role models, to show us how to handle masculinity and what that meant in a BF dynamic. Protocols were established to remind us who we could be; some of these were borrowed from the distant past, today many of us refer to these as OFOS (Old Fashioned Old School), where doors were to be held open, chairs pulled out, cigarettes lit, some were borrowed from leather communities to demonstrate loyalty, and respect, while others simply came from a need to demonstrate that we were neither men trying to emulate a heterosexual life, nor were we women looking for our mirror image in a lesbian partnership. We were Butch, and we owed it to ourselves and to the femmes that we loved to recognize and act accordingly.
Since then, we have experienced the third wave of feminism, laws have changed, and language has evolved. Fashion and bathrooms have become neutral territories. Classic songs and schoolbooks are edited, and the use of ‘they’ a default. We talk now of gender, and the non-binary, in an attempt to be all-embracing and nonexclusive, gay has become a 12-letter acronym LGBTQQIP2SAA, hormone replacement therapy has become accessible, and identity is self-selected. And in all of this richness, I still see members of the Butch-Femme community finding themselves needing to defend their dynamic. Change is inevitable, but sometimes the same fight remains, so perhaps it would serve us best if we remembered what we had, what it is that we did, that helped us survive the past.
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