Butch/Femme
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| Actress Kirsten Stewart gets her butch/femme on for Elle Magazine |
In
the 1940s and 50s, butch/femme relationships were de rigueur in the queer
sub-culture, especially for lesbians. They were notable at a time when straight
culture labeled gays and lesbians as deviants and pushed them toward nocturnal existences
in bars and underground clubs. A butch represented the
male role while femme referred
to the female role. Working-class butches lopped off their hair, rolled a pack of Camel
cigarettes in their tee shirt sleeves, sported blue jeans and leather
jackets in an era when girls were expected dress themselves in poodle skirts
and angora sweaters. Like exotic dancers, butches were the ultimate sexual outlaws.
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| Butch women in the 1950s |
Prior
to the middle of the 20th century, homosexual societies were
underground or secret, a fact that makes it difficult to determine how
long women have taken on butch and femme roles. The clandestine relationships were
celebrated in underground pulp-fiction paperbacks bought by heterosexual males.
Butch-femme relationships were the norm among lesbians and particularly
prominent in working-class lesbian bar culture of the 1940s, '50s, and '60s,
while butch-butch and femme-femme relationships were taboo in the sub-culture. Ki-ki was a pejorative used to describe lesbians who were
neither butch nor femme or who switched roles. In contemporary times, some call women whose traits are
not as masculine as a traditional butch either soft butch or chapstick lesbian.
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| A butch/femme couple in the 50s |
In
the 1940s in the U.S., society forced most butch women to wear convention
feminine dress in order to hold down jobs. "Saturday night" butches donned their jeans, tee
shirts, or men's suits on weekends to go to bars or parties. The 1950s saw the rise of a new generation of butches who refused to
live double lives and wore butch attire full-time, or as close to full-time as
possible. This usually limited them to a few jobs, such as factory work and cab
driving, which had no dress codes for women. Their increased visibility,
combined with the anti-gay rhetoric of the McCarthy era, led to a rise in violent attacks on gay
and bisexual women, while at the same time, the increasingly defiant
bar culture became more willing to respond with force.
The
presumption was that the butch was the physically active partner and the leader
in lovemaking inherent to butch-femme relationships, the top to the femme’s bottom.
Yet unlike the dynamics of many heterosexual relationships, the butch's
foremost objective was to give sexual pleasure to a femme. The ideal of
the stone butch,
or untouchable butch captured
the essence of the emotional/sexual dynamic. To be untouchable meant to gain
pleasure from giving pleasure. Although women involved in butch/femme
relationships emulated heterosexual society, they transformed those models into
an authentically lesbian interaction.
The
word femme is
the French word for woman and in gay culture referred to a
feminine lesbian in a butch/femme relationship.
(Femmes are
sometimes confused with lipstick lesbian, a modern term describing feminine
lesbians who are attracted to and partner with other feminine women.) The
word butch,
meaning "tough kid," is possibly an abbreviation of the word butcher. Although butch became the word used
for masculine lesbians in the 1940s, people also used the term to describe a
masculine person of either gender.
When
describing a lesbian, the term butch denoted
masculinity beyond the typical tomboy.
These women dressed in masculine attire, had male mannerisms, and often worked
in jobs usually reserved for men. Like effeminate males, society linked butch
women to homosexual communities and stereotyped them. Although modern culture
has changed in recent decades and is more accepting of gays and lesbians, it
was common for females with a butch appearance to meet with hostility at the hands of the police during raids of gay bars. They were subject to cross-dressing laws and embarrassment
of having their names posted in the city ledgers of local papers.
The
origin of the term dyke was obscure,
and students of gay history have proposed many theories about the word’s beginnings.
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED)
dates the first recorded use of dike,
dyke in Berrey and Van den Bark's American
Thesaurus of Slang, 1942. The usage of dyke has widened in recent
years to encompass queer women in general. Social historians have proposed
several theories for the origin of dyke. One
is that it was an abbreviation of morphadike,
or morphadite, a
dialect variant of hermaphrodite, commonly used for gay men in the early twentieth century. Some even
suggested the term derived from the late-19th-century slang use of dyke (meaning ditch) for the vulva.
The
term bulldyker,
from which dyke may
have been shortened, first appeared in 1920s novels connected with the Harlem Renaissance. For example, in the 1928 novel Home to Harlem, author Claude McKay wrote, "[Lesbians are] what we
calls bulldyker in Harlem. Two things in Harlem I don't understand, that is a bull-dyking woman and a faggoty man." In African American parlance,
some called a man who was a great lover a bulldyker. Bulldyking woman and bulldyker became terms for
women who resembled a bulldyker,
a male stud. Bull was
also a common expression for masculine and aggressive (as in bullish), and bulldyke implied a
"masculine woman." Some claimed the word bulldyker was a term used
for bulls used to impregnate cows. Bulldagger
is another American pejorative slang to describe a masculine lesbian.
The
terms bulldyker and bulldagger were interchangeable. While
many insist the term is African American, Southerners of every hue have called
lesbians bulldagger for
decades. At one point in time, lesbians considered the words bulldyke and dyke derogatory, but over the years, dyke has become a more
neutral term, only offensive when used in a derogatory manner by those outside
the LGBT community. Unlike dyke, bulldagger and bulldyke have remained offensive.
Stud is another common term to describe masculine lesbians.
African Americans originally used the term to describe a sexually promiscuous man who
was successful with women. Among African American lesbians, the stud is a dominant lesbian,
usually butch. A stud typically
dresses in masculine attire and enjoys male activities. The term stud refers to black
masculine lesbians, while butch designates
white masculine lesbians.
For more information on butch/femme, read The
Persistent Desire, A Femme-Butch Reader edited by Joan Nestle and Boots
of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community by Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis.
