Too Radical or Too Retrograde: Conflict and Historical Memory in the Making of Butch and Femme Identity

Kira Hamilton

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Prerequisite for Honors in American Studies under the advisement of Paul Fisher

May 2021

© 2021 Kira Hamilton

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Table of Contents

Table of Contents ...... II

Acknowledgements ...... III

Introduction ...... 1

Chapter 1 ...... 9

Chapter 2 ...... 25

Chapter 3 ...... 52

Bibliography ...... 84

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Acknowledgements The 2020-2021 pandemic-shaken school year was never how I expected to be writing my senior thesis, to say the least. I am immensely grateful to my advisor Paul Fisher, who was patient and flexible as we adjusted to all sorts of new normals. His guidance and insight made this project not only possible, but a genuine joy. Additionally, I’d like to thank my committee—Octavio González, Brenna Greer, Genevieve Clutario, and my visitor and longtime mentor, Olga Shurchkov, for their time and feedback. I am also immensely grateful for the support of Samuel and Hilda Levitt, whose generous fellowship made this project financially feasible for me as a first-generation college student.

This project is a capstone of my four years at Wellesley, and there are so many fantastic professors that I’ve been fortunate enough to learn from. In particular, I’d like to take a moment to thank Steve Marini, whose fantastic Ethics course set me down the path to American Studies and truly changed my life. Thank you to Leigh Gilmore, as well, whose Politics and Sexuality course was where I first began formulating the ideas that would ultimately become this thesis.

Some personal notes of thanks are also in order. To my family—your love and support, even from 4000 miles away, is always felt. Thank you for trusting me to venture so far from home. To my dear friends—thank you for bearing with me when I began far too many sentences with “well, in my thesis…” and completely derailed a conversation with a tangent about lesbian history. To Ky, in particular—my favorite butch, without whom this thesis would remain untitled. And to my girlfriend, Francesca—your love and humor has sustained me in this tumultuous year. I could not have done this without you.

Finally, I owe the deepest debt of gratitude to the subjects of this thesis, historical and present. When I was first coming into my own identity as a lesbian, I spent hours researching and reading the stories of butches and femmes. The resilience and inventiveness of their love, their genders, and their communities resonated with me deeply. So many queer stories have been lost to the sands of time, through neglect or malice or simply because they never got the chance to be written. I feel immeasurably lucky to have been able to encounter some small fraction of them over the course of this project. Hamilton 1

Introduction Butch and Femme are ubiquitous and complicated concepts within the LGBTQ community. They are historical artifacts, they are contemporary identities, they are adjectives. I found myself fascinated by this contradiction: these words carried enough meaning to be a legible reference within and outside of the queer community, yet the identities themselves remain deeply subcultural. Butches and femmes are everywhere and nowhere.

To even define butch and femme is a complicated task. Madeline Davis and Elizabeth

Lapovsky Kennedy provide a good, simple working definition in their oral history of butch/femme culture in Buffalo, NY in the 1940s and 50s. They describe the roles that emerged in the working- class lesbian bars in the city, where “the butch projected the masculine image of her time period— at least regarding dress and mannerisms—and the fem, the feminine image; and almost all members were one or the other,” and “butch-fem roles not only shaped the lesbian image, but also lesbian desire, constituting the base for a deeply satisfying erotic system.”1 Yet, this definition raises almost as many questions as it answers. What, exactly, is the masculine or feminine image of one’s time period? Is one still butch or femme if they don’t participate in the dyadic sexual pairing of one butch and one femme? And what becomes the definition of these terms when the bars disappear, when the time period changes?

In this thesis, I attempt to take up some of these questions. I am motivated by two questions.

First: how has the definition of butch and femme changed over time, and how has conflict around butch and femme identity informed those definitions? Second: how are the histories of butch and femme utilized and interpreted in the constructions of the identities themselves, and in wider

1 Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeleine D. Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community (New York: Penguin Books, 1994), 5. Hamilton 2 debates in lesbian and queer politics? Notable femme, author, and archivist Joan Nestle, writing in the 1992, asks another version of these questions: “does the longevity of butch-femme self- expression reflect the pernicious strength of the heterosexual gender polarization—or is it, as I would argue, a lesbian-specific way of deconstructing gender that radically reclaims women’s erotic energy? Are femmes and butches dupes of heterosexuality, or are they gender pioneers with a knack for alchemy?”2 I share in Nestle’s assessment that butches and femmes have a “knack for alchemy”—these terms were in flux when Nestle was writing in the 1990s (a period I explore in chapter two), and have continued to find relevance since, even in a present moment that is deeply interested in deconstructing binaries.

Part of the reason butch and femme have endured is in the complexity of the form. As feminist scholar Sally R. Munt explains, “butch/femme is a way of being, sometimes a lesbian ontology, played consciously, but often skipping out on forms too quick to catch. It is now and then too close to call, too subtle to name directly, a localized culture, actualizing in the discrete specificities and corporealities of our lives.”3 Butch and femme are both intrinsic, and adopted; they are made manifest in the direct and the indirect. It was the harmony in this contradiction that drew me to this project in the first place. These forms are powerful: whether in support or opposition, in jest or in complete and utter sincerity, butch and femme is there. In a personal example: when reading Sara Crawley’s 2002 sociology dissertation, “Narrating and Negotiating

Butch and Femme: Storying Lesbian Selves in a Heteronormative World,” I was struck by a particular anecdote by some of her narrators. Crawley was studying attitudes toward and manifestations of butch and femme in her southern Florida lesbian community, and some of her

2 Joan Nestle, The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader (Boston: Alyson Publications, 1992), 14. 3 Sally R. Munt, “Introduction,” in Butch/Femme: Inside Lesbian Gender, Lesbian and Gay Studies (Cassell, 1998), 3, https://books.google.com/books?id=1G5M13Xida0C. Hamilton 3 fieldwork brought her to a meeting of a local lesbian discussion group, where they were playing a game where members would rank each other on a scale of 1-10 on their relative femmeness or butchness.4 I was struck—I had played this exact game with my friends at one of our own gatherings in a dorm room, hundreds of miles away, nearly twenty years after Crawley’s experience in that discussion group. Like the members of the group Crawley studied, we sat one another in a “hot seat,” and then discussed where the person in question ought to be marked on a butch-femme scale that we hung on the back of my friend's door. In our iteration, we also ranked along "top" and "bottom"—indicative, certainly, of the decoupling of butch and femme roles from a strict erotic form. People still play this game online—a popular internet meme from around that time was ranking not just one another, but just about everything on a "futch scale": from Monopoly pieces to Pokemon characters to pasta.5 Something about these terms demands attention, decades after they emerged, in forms almost completely alien to their first iterations.

Of course, complexity also invites misinterpretation, especially when a butch/femme pairing appears at first glance to be easily recognizable as heterosexual, or something akin to heterosexual presentation. Lesbian historian Lillian Faderman, whose pioneering work I do draw on to construct some of the historical context around butch and femme, is certainly guilty of documenting butch/femme while also misconstruing it. She writes:

Perhaps it was not so much that most butches desired to be men. It was rather that for many of them in an era of neat pigeonholes the apparent logic of the connection between sexual object choice and gender identification was overwhelming, and lacking the support of a history that contradicted that connection, they had no encouragement at that time to

4 Sara L. Crawley, “Narrating and Negotiating Butch and Femme: Storying Lesbian Selves in a Heteronormative World” (Dissertation, University of Florida, 2002), 99. 5 Charlie Mathers, “Here Are 15 Futch Scale Memes Only Queer Women Will Understand,” Gay Star News, May 7, 2018, https://www.gaystarnews.com/article/futch-scale-meme/. Hamilton 4

formulate new conceptions. If they loved women it must be because they were mannish, and vice versa. Therefore, many learned to behave as men were supposed to behave…6 Here, Faderman sees butch masculinity, and assumes the source of that masculinity must be from heterosexual men. While claiming that butches saw masculinity as somewhat inextricable from heterosexuality (at least in the sense of gender presentation and sexual object choice), Faderman’s speculation is far more indicative of her own assumptions about what masculinity must have meant to butches at the time because of what masculinity represents to her. I bring up Faderman here not to discredit her work—again, I found it tremendously helpful—but instead to illustrate that documenting the history of butch and femme is a practice that has been rife with misinterpretation.

Gender theorist Judith Butler took up the heterosexually-informed assumptions about butch and femme in her seminal work Gender Trouble, writing:

The idea that butch and femme are in some sense “replicas” or “copies” of heterosexual exchange underestimates the erotic significance of these identities as internally dissonant and complex in their resignification of the hegemonic categories by which they are enabled… In both butch and femme identities, the very notion of an original or natural identity is put into question; indeed, it is precisely that question as it is embodied in these identities that becomes one source of their erotic significance.7 Butler is pointing out that butch and femme are not merely copies of heterosexuality, but it is the act of performing masculinity on the butch body that’s ultimately erotically compelling. This interplay destabilizes the whole idea that masculinity and femininity were clearly aligned with male and female to begin with. Butler’s formulation also raises another question that I explore, particularly in the third, present-focused chapter of this thesis: as butch and femme have spent decades proliferating through the queer community, as supposedly recognizable, stable,

6 Lillian Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 170, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7312/fade07488. 7 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (United Kingdom: Routledge, 1999), 157, https://books.google.com/books?id=WDMpngEACAAJ. Hamilton 5 stereotypical categories, how do alternate formulations of femme and butch disrupt the already disruptive categories? When femme and butch are decoupled from each other, from femaleness, from lesbianism, what do we learn? What conflicts are raised?

Lastly, I would like to focus for a moment on the second question I pose: what does it mean to construct a history of butch and femme, and for what purposes do we construct those histories?

Here, I find the work of Jack Halberstam deeply insightful. He coined the term “perverse presentism” to describe his historiographic approach to engaging with concepts of female masculinity in the sex-gender models on the late nineteenth century (research I will explore in my first chapter.) His aim was to challenge presentist models of lesbian history that viewed all previous models for female same-sex relationships or gender nonconformity “as lesbians who lack a liberating and identitarian discourse.”8 Halberstam “perverted” this presentist approach by destabilizing the idea that there was a coherent definition of female masculinity in the present that could be applied to the past at all, by “questioning the first instance of what we think we already know, and then…move back toward the question of what we think we have found when we alight on historical records of so-called lesbian desire” [emphasis added].9 If today’s definitions of female masculinity are a site of continued negotiation and constant change, why would that change when applied to people of the past? Moreover, what do we learn about the present when we view it as a product of a contested past, not a manifestation of historical inevitability toward a particular identity? As Eve Sedgwick argues, when we view queer history as one of “supercession”—new models entirely replace old ones, in a narrative of constant moral progression—we obscure the

8 Jack Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Duke University Press, 1998), 52, https://books.google.com/books?id=UYAi9OEYRekC. 9 Halberstam, 53. Hamilton 6 formulations of identity that do not fit the models that become popular in the following period.10

We also lose the narratives of those who existed in these times of transition, who found the social context for their understanding of themselves washed away.

Halberstam was conservative in his estimation of how broadly useful his model of

“perverse presentism” is:

I make no general claim for the applicability of this method of perverse presentism, and I use it here only because I think a present-day intuition about the construction of masculinity changes the way we think about the records of latter-day female masculinities. So, what exactly do we not know in the present about masculinity that therefore can (and must) be applied to what we cannot know about the past?11 I, however, think that his central point—assuming that the past is as complex and unknowable as the present—is crucial to engaging with butch and femme roles and lesbian history more broadly— not only the particulars of the late nineteenth century. Perverse presentism strikes a balance that is sorely lacking from too many lesbian histories. It does not fault us for wanting to touch the past from the present, to use it to understand ourselves as we exist today. However, perverse presentism provides a methodology that does not presume that the vantage point of the present makes us any more correct about a past actor’s identity than they were with the formulations they had available to them at the time they lived in.

Heather Love’s analysis in Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History is also instructive for thinking about how to engage with contested histories of butch and femme. In this work, Love examines the complicated and at times contradictory relationship that contemporary queer discourses have with past figures.

As queer readers we tend to see ourselves as reaching back toward isolated figures in the queer past in order to rescue or save them. It is hard to know what to do with texts that

10 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (University of California Press, 1990), 47. 11 Halberstam, Female Masculinity, 53. Hamilton 7

resist our advances. Texts or figures that refuse to be redeemed disrupt not only the progress narrative of queer history but also our sense of queer identity in the present. We find ourselves deeply unsettled by our identifications with these figures: the history of queer damage retains its capacity to do harm in the present.12 Love points out an incredibly powerful force in the project of queer memory-making: as much as there is an impulse for progress, there is the simultaneous and at times conflicting desire to look backwards at outmoded relics of the queer past. In the context of Halberstam’s formulation of perverse presentism, that desire often plays out in this tendency to “save” past figures from their tragedy by imposing a false contemporary coherence: then, we can look to a history of conflict and disaffection without acknowledging that we inherit the resilience as well as the fallibility of queer predecessors.

Put simply, in this project, I am as interested in how we remember as what we remember about butch and femme identities, because those memories are inextricable from their present articulations, however much those articulations may have changed between the periods that I consider.

In my first chapter, I begin by establishing a short history of butch and femme roles, beginning with the late 19th century emergence of the concept of the sexually deviant, masculine female invert that emerged after an era of a middle-class, respectable construction of romantic (but still asexual) friendship. I parallel this with the conflicts that emerged between butches and femmes

(largely working-class lesbians who congregated in bars) and the middle-class homophile and lesbian feminist movements in the 1950s through the 1970s, respectively. I argue that both of these transitional moments in understanding of sexual identity—the creation of “homosexuality” and sexual orientation as concepts, and the growth in political consciousness and the gay liberation

12 Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Harvard University Press, 2007), 8, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvjghxr0. Hamilton 8 movement—were times in which butches and femmes were marginalized in discourses that established those identities. Specifically, they were ostracized because of the inherent gender and sexual nonconformity of their roles, and their already marginal working-class status.

In my second chapter, I examine two works of the 1990s, Madeleine Davis and Elizabeth

Lapovsky Kennedy’s oral history of butch and femme roles in the midcentury lesbian bars of

Buffalo, NY Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold (1994) and Leslie Feinberg’s landmark novel Stone

Butch Blues (1993). In this chapter, I focus less on external misrepresentations of butch and femme roles and construct a more positive formulation of butch and femme roles as lesbian-specific and politically important gender roles for those who practiced them. I especially emphasize Stone

Butch Blues’ impact as both a lesbian and transgender text, as it enables us not to look at these histories as separate or opposing, but deeply connected and in conversation with each other.

In the third chapter, I examine some of the ways in which butch identity in particular is being negotiated in contemporary queer communities. I first analyze contrasting constructions of butch pasts: from a supposed defense of lesbianism from encroaching transgender identification, and an examination of a more inclusive vision of butch history in the artist Ria Brodell’s collection of paintings, Butch Heroes. Then, I discuss Abby McEnany’s Work in Progress, a television show about a forty-five-year-old butch, queer woman who struggles with OCD as she embarks on a new relationship with a twenty-two-year-old transgender man. I use Work in Progress as a lens to reflect on the ways in which butch identity has expanded and shifted to fit into definitions of queerness outside of lesbianism. Finally, I reflect on what lessons these complicated notions of the past offer about moving forward. Hamilton 9

Chapter 1 Butch and femme are terms with notable longevity, and part of that sustained usage is the fact that these words were self-fashioned by the community that first began to use them. They described an aesthetic language, sexual and romantic behaviors, and gave the community structure and rules. This is one of the reasons I find the culture so compelling: it was one of the first community articulations of something recognizably lesbian by a modern eye, and adherents to the culture left a rich archive of self-definition. Of course, these pairings did not emerge out of nowhere, but pinpointing where and with whom is a contentious and complicated task that emerges in the making of all queer histories. In this chapter, I will discuss some of the historical trends that allowed lesbian identity and butch/femme dynamics to emerge, with particular focus on the advent of the concept of the “sexual invert” by late nineteenth century sexologists. Then, I turn to the

1950s-70s and discuss the impact of butch/femme roles and culture on the emergence of the homophile and lesbian feminist movements. In doing so, I argue that class issues and gender nonconformity played major roles in constructing sex-gender systems in both of these time periods and provide an important framing for understanding the historical context in which butch and femme operate.

The terms “butch” and “femme” rose to prominence in the 1950s and ‘60s as part of a working-class subculture in urban gay bars, describing the pairings between masculine (butch) and feminine (femme) women. In order to participate in the bar subculture, gay women generally had to pick a role within the community. Lillian Faderman, in her history of twentieth century lesbian life in the United States, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers, suggests that one of the most important functions of these roles was their success at creating “a certain sense of membership in a special group, with its own norms and values and even uniforms. The roles offered lesbians a social Hamilton 10 identity and even consciousness of shared differences from women in the heterosexual world.

Through them outsiders could be insiders.”13 It is this idea of a coherent social identity as lesbians that represents a seismic shift in lesbian history prior in the 1950s, and the shift would come to engender many of its conflicts: when sexual behavior is imagined not just as pathology or action, but an organizing principle, it is able to be criticized, affirmed, defended, and remade. The emergence of a lesbian social identity—not just among working-class, but middle-class lesbians as well—brought butch/femme identity into the fray of a burgeoning gay political movement.

A number of rapid changes in American culture’s understanding of sexuality set the stage for lesbian subcultures to emerge in the 1950s. In Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers, Faderman marks the beginning of those changes with the rise of sexology at the turn of the twentieth century, when doctors and scientists began to classify and pathologize sexual behaviors.14 Before this, female sexuality was largely viewed in the context of men, so the idea of sexual relationships between women were not viewed as possible. Close emotional relationships between women were actually often encouraged—the idea of “separate spheres” fueled homosocial relationships and cross- gender socialization was not widespread outside of courtship, so women confined to duties of the home “found kindred spirits primarily in each other.”15 Among middle-class women, these close relationships with each other were called “romantic friendships.”16 Increased access to education with the founding of women’s colleges in the mid nineteenth century meant that two unmarried women might be able to sustain themselves on their own incomes (and inherited wealth, in some

13 Lillian Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers, 174. 14 Lillian Faderman, 40. 15 Lillian Faderman, 18. 16 Lillian Faderman, 18. Hamilton 11 cases) without the need for marriage—an arrangement so common around Massachusetts’ women’s colleges that they earned the name “Boston Marriages.”17

However, these women did not generally think of themselves as lesbians. Some of these relationships were genuinely nonsexual, or at least physical contact between romantic friends was not perceived that way by each other. Even amongst those whose relationships clearly had a sexual component though, those behaviors did not necessarily shape the women’s conceptions of themselves. Faderman highlights one example from the 1912 letters between Emma Goldman, an anarchist political activist, and her lover, fellow anarchist Almeda Sperry. Sperry writes to

Goldman about kissing [Goldman’s] “beautiful” throat with “reverent tenderness”, and how she has “known happiness” through Goldman’s climax, unable to “escape the rhythmic spurt of

[Goldman’s] love juice.”18 Yet, despite a clearly passionate sexual relationship between the two women in those years Goldman wrote a decade and a half later that she considered lesbians to be a “crazy lot” whose “antagonism to the male is almost a disease.”19 This retrospective comment suggests that even when the idea of a lesbian as a kind of person started to become available as a term for romantic friends—one that could accurately describe their behaviors—some were reticent to adopt that label as an identity.

Of course, the economic ability to evade marriage was really only available middle-to- upper class, and by extension, largely white women. Understanding the nature of working class and nonwhite lesbian relationships of this time is much more difficult, because they lacked the financial independence from men that enabled something like a Boston Marriage, and these women left behind much less written material behind that would illustrate what same-gender

17 Lillian Faderman, 15. 18 Lillian Faderman, 35. 19 Lillian Faderman, 34. Hamilton 12 relationships looked like in their circumstances.20 In Cheap Amusements: Working Women and

Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York, Kathy Peiss explores some of the dynamics of working- class women’s social groups. Young working-class women in particular were often members of same-sex clubs that hosted dances and other community events, but the “activities that young working-class women pursued in their leisure were largely heterosocial in orientation, directed toward meeting men, dating, romance, and fun.”21 While a young woman might have a particularly close female friend that would accompany her to dances and allow them to keep each other safe,

Peiss remarks that these relationships were very different in function from the romantic friendship, as “working women’s friendships as described by reformers and settlement workers occurred in a context that strengthened women's ability to negotiate the public, heterosocial world of commercial amusements rather than maintain a privatized female one.”22 Of course, this is not to say that there were not romantic relationships between working-class women of the time; rather, the social institutions of working-class women did not broadly sanction the kind of intense, devoted relationships between women that middle-class romantic friendships did.

In fact, it was the socially aberrant nature of sexual relationships between working-class women that made them a site of study in the mid to late nineteenth century. It was in studies of same gender relationships—particularly those involving masculine women—that sexologists first began to define the sexual “invert”, their term that encompassed a broad array of sexual and gender nonconformity.23 In the theory of inversion, a woman desired another woman because she had a man’s soul in her body, which explained both her attraction to women and propensity towards

20 Lillian Faderman, 37. 21 Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements (Temple University Press, 1986), 61, https://books.google.com/books?id=FeJVVXfF-FsC. 22 Peiss, 114. 23 Lillian Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers, 39. Hamilton 13 masculine dress and appearance; in this model, the difference between the concepts we might call

“homosexual” and “transgender” were negligible because the sexual object choice of an invert was inextricable from their gender nonconformity.24 Different sexologists had different explanations for why inverts existed and what ought to be done about them. Havelock Ellis, for example, suggested that inversion was, as queer theorist Nikki Sullivan describes, a “congenital predisposition” that, while innate and not inherently dangerous, could be discouraged by changing social circumstances that encouraged it like same-sex schools.25 Others, like Richard von Krafft-

Ebing, viewed inversion as a sign of evolutionary underdevelopment and primitiveness.26

It is important to emphasize the connection that some nineteenth century sexologists created between inversion, class and race, and the role that played in popular adoption of the concept. The nineteenth century belief that men were intellectually superior to women was complicated by the idea of a congenitally masculine woman, who by their definition would be more intelligent as a result of that masculinity than a conventional woman.27 Thus, there was significant social imperative “racially or socioeconomically” modify a female invert’s masculinity

“to produce the image of an ethnically-suspect, lower-class lesbian brain and intellect.”28 Because many of the “romantic friends” were gender conforming in appearance and inhabited a socially legible role (the spinster), they did not garner much attention from the sexologists as “inverts” until the rise of social reformers and suffragists whose status-quo challenging political views brought their supposed heterosexuality through gender conformity into question.29 Tension between gender

24 Nikki Sullivan, “The Social Construction of Same-Sex Desire,” in A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory (Edinburgh University Press, 2003), 10, http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.wellesley.edu/stable/10.3366/j.ctvxcrwj6.4. 25 Sullivan, 10. 26 Sullivan, 8. 27 Sullivan, 13. 28 Margaret Gibson, “The Masculine Degenerate: American Doctors’ Portrayals of the Lesbian Intellect, 1880-1949,” Journal of Women’s History 9, no. 4 (1998): 94. 29 Lillian Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers, 46. Hamilton 14 non-conforming, lower class expressions of same-sex desire and more conforming, middle-to- upper class expressions of same sex desire proved remarkably consistent, and as I will argue throughout this chapter, shaped the lesbian community discourse around butch/femme relationships for years to come.

Jack Halberstam’s Female Masculinity provides crucial analysis of some of the ways in which the sexologists taxonomic understanding of “sexual inversion” was a wide umbrella capturing a number of kinds of masculinities. Before I discuss Halberstam, it is important that I am explicit about my motivations for utilizing his work. In Female Masculinity, he is clear that his formulation of female masculinity is distinct from just retelling “lesbian history,” arguing that “by making female masculinity equivalent to lesbianism, in other words, or by reading it as proto- lesbianism awaiting a coming community, we continue to uphold female masculinity apart from the making of modern masculinity itself.”30 In other words, flattening inversion into some sort of early lesbianism erases the complexity of the sex-gender system as a whole that was operating in this time period, and the sex-gender systems that emerged out of it.

Halberstam is critical of Faderman, who I’ve cited heavily in my history of romantic friendship in particular, partially because of her projection of contemporary lesbianism onto historical records of female inversion.31 I want to be clear that I am aware that I run the risk of reducing the complexity of these female masculinities to serve my own purposes. This is not my intention. Rather, I see Halberstam’s formulation of female masculinities as underscoring my own arguments about the formulation of butch/femme roles. They engender so much controversy and discussion precisely because they complicate lesbian conceptions of history and belonging.

30 Halberstam, Female Masculinity, 46. 31 Halberstam, 62. Hamilton 15

As I will argue throughout this thesis, butch and femme roles relied on deeply gender non- conforming ideas of sexual identity. To even claim butches and femmes themselves as “lesbians” is its own shorthand—some butches and femmes centered their identities primarily as gay, or by their butch or femme role.32 Moreover, I am not suggesting that a sexual invert would have identified as some sort of sapphic or lesbian, or even a woman; they are not, in Halberstam’s words,

“lesbians who lack a liberating and identitarian discourse.”33 Nonetheless, butch and femme identity were always hanging at the edges of discourse about the formulation of lesbianism. The butch and femme roles were the product of decades of changes in the ways that sex, gender, and sexual orientation were conceived of—changes that began in earnest with the emergence of the concept of the “sexual invert.”

The concept of inversion as articulated in the late nineteenth century was deeply invested in a male/female binary, and as such, divided female inverts into the categories of masculine and feminine. The former were comprised of “cross-dressers, full developed inverts who looked masculine and took a masculine role, and degenerative homosexuals who were practically male.”34

Feminine inverts, on the other hand, were the feminine-presenting women who partnered with masculine inverts, though were still considered incorrectly feminine, which left them no choice but to partner with masculine inverts.35 Interestingly, there was a considerable emphasis on the innate, often congenital masculinity of masculine inverts (and an assumption that one would not move between different types of inversion), but feminine inversion was a primarily social phenomenon. Put simply, inversion was a description that collapsed a lot of different gendered and

32 Kennedy and Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold, 5. 33 Halberstam, Female Masculinity, 52. 34 Halberstam, 76. 35 Halberstam, 76. Hamilton 16 sexual experiences into one concept. This was, like many historical conceptions of sex and gender, problematic for a variety of reasons. First of all, these were not necessarily categories of positive, self-conceived identity, but an outsider’s description of behavior that was at best pathologized and at worst, demonized. It also conflated gender expression, identity, sex, and sexual orientation in ways that assumed those things were all fundamentally the same, even as the inverts they described varied wildly (as evidenced by their very definition in this chapter.)

Nonetheless, the naming of the category of “invert” did provide a description for a marginal experience that, for some, was a welcome identifier after a lifetime of knowing they were different but lacked the language to describe exactly how. Halberstam’s analysis points to at least one case study, of a “Miss V”, who described her discovery of the concept of inversion as evidence that she was not “an anomaly to be regarded with repulsion,” which suggests that this category was at least useful to some people in defining themselves, even if that wasn’t its intended purpose.36

While I want to be clear that not all “female masculine inverts” were necessarily early incarnations of butches (or that the “feminine inverts” who partnered with them were proto- femmes), the idea that gendered performance and sexual and romantic partner choices are intimately connected for some is markedly similar to constructions of butch identity especially. In fact, for at least some butches, they saw themselves in depictions of inversion, as evidence from

Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeleine Davis’ oral history Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold suggests:

Leslie had a harder time and remembers thinking in high school in 1936 that she was “the only one on earth.” They both read The Well of Loneliness before actively participating in bar life, and both identified with Stephen. They did not have to learn a butch identity when

36 Halberstam, 80. Hamilton 17

they entered the bars, but simply learned appropriate ways to express their already developed identities.37 The Well of Loneliness, Jack Radclyffe Hall’s 1928 novel, described as “the first ‘long and very serious novel entirely upon the subject of inversion,” was one of the most well-known works of lesbian fiction to the general public, in part because of the obscenity trial its publication spawned.38

While the category of lesbian fiction is rightfully contested by critics like Jack Halberstam and Jay

Prosser, its historical connection to the label of “lesbian fiction” is certainly important.39 For some young butches who were navigating their identities before they entered the bars, this account of inversion was a model of female masculinity and lesbian desire that was available to them before the label of “butch” was introduced to them in the bar scene.40 More pointedly, remnants of inversion informed the identity of at least some of the butches who participated in the lesbian bar scene.

The history of inversion and its relationship to gender politics and identity, I argue, is an important background for understanding some of the underlying tensions around class and gender- nonconformity that characterize the political environment during the height of the butch/femme bar culture in the 1950s.

The 1950s marked an important period of change in the gay rights movement, and gay people began to engage in political organizing as a distinct class of people that needed social and

37 Kennedy and Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold, 328. 38 Laura Doan, “The Mythic Moral Panic: Radclyffe Hall and the New Genealogy,” in Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of a Modern English Lesbian Culture (United Kingdom: Columbia University Press, 2001), https://books.google.com/books?id=1ltsZP0NgaMC. 39 See Jay Prosser, “‘Some Primitive Thing Conceived in a Turbulent Age of Transition’: The Transsexual Emerging from The Well,” in Palatable Poison: Critical Perspectives on The Well of Loneliness, Gender and Culture (The Transsexual Emerging from The Well: Columbia University Press, 2001), https://books.google.com/books?id=c8cedqYyloAC. and Halberstam, Female Masculinity. 40 For further discussion on the popularity of Radclyffe Hall among young lesbians, see Lillian Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers, 173. Hamilton 18 legal protections. The lesbian wing of the movement was centralized in the Daughters of Bilitis organization, its first chapter founded in San Francisco in 1955. The homophile movement’s approaches have been the subject of their own scholarly debate, but in general, the movement is considered fairly conservative. The name itself—homophile—de-emphasized sexuality as a part of lesbian and gay identity, and Daughters of Bilitis (DOB) and other homophile organizations goals were to assimilate gays and lesbians into heterosexual society.41

The conservative, assimilationist approach of the homophile movement was very much in line with American culture in the 1950s. As historian Will Hansen argues, the homophile movement was not only a product of Cold War America’s attitudes about conformity and deviancy but aided in the reproduction of those narratives. In order to create a public understanding of “the homophile” that could be assimilated—dignified, respectable—the movement had to amplify the stereotypes they sought to prove themselves different than, a process called “secondary marginalization.”42 For the Daughters of Bilitis, a predominantly white, middle-class organization, the practices of working-class lesbian role-defined relationships were a clear foil. According to their statement of purpose at their newsletter, The Ladder, the lesbian’s job was to “make her adjustment to society in all its social, civic and economic implications,” and one of the ways in which she must do so is “by advocating a mode of behavior and dress acceptable to society.” 43

The visual obviousness of butch/femme relationships was threatening to this idea.

Historian Elizabeth Smith suggests that class markers had a lot to do with the issues with the butches and femmes in the DOB, but they were not immune from sexual difference:

41 Elizabeth A. Smith, “Butches, Femmes, and Feminists: The Politics of Lesbian Sexuality,” NWSA Journal 1, no. 3 (1989): 400. 42 Will Hansen, “The Cold War and the Homophile, 1953–1963,” Australasian Journal of American Studies 38, no. 1 (2019): 83. 43 “Purpose of the Daughters of Bilitis,” The Ladder, November 1965. Hamilton 19

“differentiated” couples appear on nearly half of The Ladder’s covers in her study.44 There are a number of reasons why this visual dichotomy continued to exist, even when lesbians within the movement were often working to distinguish themselves from ideas of butch and femme. Mostly, though, these issues can be once again understood as part of the middle-class bias of the DOB. In a 1989 interview, Daughters of Bilitis founders Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin talk about their motivation to begin the organization, one of which being that the bars were always being raided, and that they did not feel inherently comfortable in that marginal space outside of their lesbianism.

As Martin recalled, “We were very shy. And so, we sort of were more like tourists. Going to the bars and watching everybody and wondering how we fit in.”45 (emphasis added) And, in some ways, they really were tourists; the gay bars of the 1950s existed because there were bar owners willing to be bought off by organized crime or overcharge patrons to fund police payoffs to host to a number of underground activities like homosexuality or sex work.46

The idea of “tourism” that Lyon and Martin allude to is also reflective of the broader history of the bars. Some of the earliest iterations of butch/femme practice in bars were among Black lesbians in Harlem in the 1920s, where there was enough tolerance for gay relationships that some butches and femmes were even able to hold weddings and obtain marriage certificates if they were able to pass as men or get a gay man to apply in their place.47 The relative tolerance in Harlem drew a number of white women to the bars to engage in sexual tourism, to “slum it” and seem more adventurous, engaging in a “fantasy world” where they could explore same-sex relationships outside of white society by inserting themselves into Black spaces for their own gain.48 While

44 Smith, “Butches, Femmes, and Feminists,” 403. 45 “Phyllis Lyon & Del Martin,” Making Gay History, accessed March 2, 2021, https://makinggayhistory.com/podcast/phyllis-lyon-del-martin/. 46 John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities, 1st ed. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983), 51. 47 Lillian Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers, 73. 48 Lillian Faderman, 70. Hamilton 20

Lyon and Martin’s forays into the bars 30 years later were operating in a different social circumstance than white bohemian tourism in 1920s Harlem, their comments exist in the wake of that history.

Later in Lyon and Martin’s interview, they again emphasize their primary experience of the bars being not community, but lack of safety:

Phyllis: Yeah, we’d been talking about DOB, and I said, what? She’s saying, “Couldn’t possibly.” Again, it’s sort of like, “Somebody might find out I’m a lesbian.” They’re never going to find it out in this bar. Nobody will ever know, but… Eric [Marcus, Interviewer]: But they felt safe in that bar, but not at a DOB meeting. Phyllis: Didn’t make any sense. Eric: Was it frustrating for you at all? Del: It seemed rather frustrating. Didn’t sound very logical to us.49

Lyon and Martin were begrudging participants in the bars and didn’t understand why others might want to participate in the bar culture on their own volition. These recollections emphasize the extent to which the early history lesbian organizing had no choice but to engage with lesbians whose experience of lesbian community was the lesbian bars, as those were some of the only spaces in which anyone could be openly gay and build social connections with other gay people, regardless of class. That in itself was its own form of safety that the Daughters of Bilitis had to find means of replicating or replacing. To that end, it is not so surprising that The Ladder implicitly referenced butch/femme aesthetics despite their hostility to the practice.

However, it was not just the aesthetic of butch/femme relationships and the gender nonconformity they embodied that made their existence contested. The visibility of butch/femme relationships also made obvious the sexual nature of their relationships, something that the DOB did not abide. The Ladder was a publication that was pointedly about love, not sex. There were

49 “Phyllis Lyon & Del Martin.” Hamilton 21 practical concerns for this—discussion of lesbian sexuality in explicit terms was heavily suppressed, and even their tame articles had already landed their magazine with a “for adults only” sticker on their mailings, for example.50 But The Ladder also wanted to provide a model of lesbian love to combat negative stereotypes about the predatory, oversexualized lesbian. One of the few other forms of printed lesbian media at the time was the lesbian pulp novel. Those stories, while occasionally sneaking in depictions of lesbian desire for a lesbian reader, were largely hypersexualized for the male gaze, and contained warnings against homosexuality baked into their plots: the transgressing woman rarely met a fate outside of “suicide, insanity, or… realization that she was never in love with her same-sex romantic interest.”51 Unsurprisingly, these novels also implicated the bars and butch/femme dynamics in their salacious lesbian tales: the feminine, otherwise heterosexual woman was seduced by a short-haired, mannish, aggressive lesbian, often in a dark, underground, dangerous bar.52

The sexual politics of butch/femme relationships were also a critical reason for the lesbian feminist rejection of butch and femme roles. Like the Daughters of Bilitis, the lesbian feminist movement was largely middle class and white, positions which clearly influenced their definitions of proper lesbian behavior and politics. However, where the DOB held concern that butch/femme relationships were incompatible with a straight society that they were largely trying to carve space for themselves into, the lesbian feminists saw butch/femme relationships as fundamentally incompatible with the conception of a feminist, woman-centered society that they wanted to achieve.

50 Smith, “Butches, Femmes, and Feminists,” 408. 51 Laura Westengard, “LIVE BURIAL: Lesbian Pulp and the ‘Containment Crypt,’” in Gothic Queer Culture, Marginalized Communities and the Ghosts of Insidious Trauma (University of Nebraska Press, 2019), 86, https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvmx3j60.8. 52 Westengard, 77. Hamilton 22

At the center of the lesbian-feminist ideology was an unflagging assumption that patriarchy and male structures were the most important root of all women’s problems. As gender theorist

Judith Roof explains:

Since all things that were masculine were evil and all things that were feminine were good, sex between a man and a woman could only enact an oppressive situation, while sex between two women necessarily tapped into such positive womanist traits… “real” lesbian sex hence, was woman-to-woman sex and any practice that marked itself in any way as a relation of dominant and submissive…were perceived as reproducing the oppressive relations of patriarchy.53 Butch/femme relationships violated these principles on a number of levels. First, there was a masculine partner and a feminine partner, and the sexual relationships common to butches and femmes were not built on sexual equality; butches, at least outwardly, pursued femme partners, and much of their sexual pleasure came from pleasing their femmes. There’s an inherent inequality to that dynamic, and to the lesbian feminist, any inequality was inherently oppressive, even if all parties were consenting and women’s pleasure was at the center of this sexual expression.

Part of the reason why sex became so important to the lesbian feminists is that their movement was predicated on the idea that the personal is political, and thus the innermost intimate experiences of sexuality were pushed to the foreground of their political vision. Thus, they flipped the discourse around butch and femme sexuality to embody opposite meaning than the DOB had; while the DOB viewed butch/femme as too visibly overt and public, the lesbian feminist perception that bar lesbians were simply interested in fulfilling unenlightened sexual needs made them apolitical and “closeted.”54 In a few short years, butch/femme sexuality went from being decried as a sexual subculture too fringe and radical to be welcomed into the fold of the emerging gay

53 Munt, “Introduction,” 28. 54 Smith, “Butches, Femmes, and Feminists,” 412. Hamilton 23 rights movement, to being too retrograde and conventional to have a place a forward-thinking, radical feminist movement.

These biased conceptions about butch/femme sexuality that were divorced from the lived experiences of butches and femmes also obscured some of the important and relevant perspectives they brought about community and liberation that emerged from the subculture. Madeleine Davis and Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy, whose pioneering 1994 book on the butch/femme bar culture of Buffalo, NY is explored in greater detail in my next chapter, reflect on this in a 1986 Feminist

Studies article featuring some of their oral history work:

When we initially gathered this material on the grow development of community life, we placed little emphasis on sexuality. In part we were swept away by the excitement of the material on bars, dress, and the creation of public space for lesbians. In addition, we were part of a lesbian feminist movement that opposed a definition of lesbianism based primarily on sex. Moreover, we were influenced by the popular assumption that sexuality is natural and unchanging and the related sexist assumption of women's sexual passivity-both of which imply that sexuality is not a valid subject for historical study. 55 Here, Davis and Kennedy are made aware of just how many assumptions they were carrying into their own perceptions of what butch/femme relationships and spaces must be like: ideas that were only changed by years of conversations with scores of people actually involved in the subculture speaking to their own experiences. It took considerable time and effort to learn how to listen to these stories, and not project their own assumptions about identity onto the people they talked to.

In this chapter, I have spanned a considerable period of time, drawing parallels between conflicts nearly a century apart. Why do I draw some of these parallels between the inversion/romantic friendship binary and the later debates around butch/femme and the lesbian political movements? I do so partially because of the fact that the sexological constructions of the

55 Madeline Davis and Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy, “Oral History and the Study of Sexuality in the Lesbian Community: Buffalo, New York, 1940-1960,” Feminist Studies 12, no. 1 (1986): 9, https://doi.org/10.2307/3177981. Hamilton 24 late l800s were a part of the historical lineage that midcentury America was building off of.

However, I also suspect that conflicts emerge most strongly in moments of attempt to create a taxonomical understanding for human sexual behavior. In the case of the rise of sexology, these categories were externally imposed by sexologist. Though, as Jack Halberstam points out, the production and reproduction of sexual categories is a complicated practice and there were plenty of women who found that the category of invert provided them language to describe their experience and thus incorporated these concepts into their own understanding of themselves.

Nevertheless, the desire from the medical community to pathologize and name sexual behaviors and attribute those categorizations to moral character and behavior was significant. In the 1950s and 60s with the rise of the modern gay rights movement, these groups were engaged in another moment of attempted taxonomy: this time, from within. To be a group that could advocate for its own political rights, it had to define who was and wasn’t a lesbian, and to negotiate what goals such a movement should have. And, though decades later, the very same issues of gender nonconformity, sexual behavior, and class characterized these conflicts.

Hamilton 25

Chapter 2 In the preface to his 2002 book The World Turned, esteemed queer historian John D’Emilio remarked: “Something happened in the 1990s. Something dramatic and, I expect, irreversible in its consequences… For in the 1990s, the world finally did turn and notice the gay folks in its midst.”56 He was remarking on a number of political and cultural forces that made gay and lesbian identity visible in the public eye to an unprecedented degree. The “Gay 1990’s”, as it has been coined, was not just a time in which the heterosexual public began to take notice of queer history and culture.57 This coincided with the “post-feminist” era of the 1980s and 1990s which saw a renewed interest in and resurgence of butch and femme identification within the lesbian community outside of its original articulations in the 1940s and 1950s.58 This era brought in a host of new, complex changes in community understanding of what it means to be butch or femme, in part as a response to lesbian feminist criticism of butch and femme roles from the 1970s and 1980s.

In this chapter, I’m interested in the ways in which the history of butch/femme in the 1950s-

70s was being debated and revisited in the 1990s.59 I focus my analysis on two of the most notable works on butch/femme history from the resurgence of the roles: Leslie Feinberg’s novel Stone

Butch Blues (1993) and Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeleine Davis’s oral history Boots of

Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community (1994). I pair these works because they both focus on the working-class lesbian bar culture in Buffalo, New York, rooting these observations in not only a time period, but a place. In contrast to my last chapter, which largely focused on how others talked about butch and femme, this chapter’s focus is on the experiences

56 John D’Emilio, “Preface,” in The World Turned: Essays on Gay History, Politics, and Culture (Duke University Press, 2002), viii. 57 Jess Cagle, “America Sees Shades of Gay,” Entertainment Weekly, September 1995, 20. 58 Sara Crawley, “Are Butch and Fem Working-Class and Antifeminist?,” Gender & Society 15, no. 2 (April 2001): 176. 59 For an excellent anthology of butch and femme writing which includes interviews, stories, prose, and poetry, see Nestle, The Persistent Desire. Hamilton 26 of butches and femmes themselves, and about the lessons about gender and class in particular that can be drawn from these works of the 1990s.

Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold takes an ethnographic approach and interviews a collection of forty-three narrators, predominantly lesbians who frequented in the bars with varying frequency, as well as people who were familiar with the crowd at the time. Their project is explicitly in conversation with the other writers, like Lillian Faderman, redefining—and to an extent, creating—lesbian history in the early 1990s, and is explicitly interested in creating space to understand the political nature of butch and femme.60 Specifically, they argue that the stories of their narrators do not show a group of women mimicking heterosexual roles passively, as the lesbian feminist critiques and contemporary histories did, but instead show a group of women reshaping and reimagining gender in their own confines. Kennedy and Davis were also two of the first scholars working to redefine butch and femme in the late 1980s and early 1990s; cultural anthropologist Evenlyn Blackwood notes that “Kennedy and Davis’s insights into the complexities of butch identities offered analytical purchase and encouragement for the study of gender transgression among female-bodied individuals,”61 and that their pioneering work “provided an important platform for and prompted the development of work on female masculinities.”62

Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues, originally published in 1993, is a fictional depiction of one stone butch63 in the heyday of the bars for the first half of the book, and the latter half engages with some of the fallout of the decline of the bar era as it existed in the 1940s and 1950s.

60 Kennedy and Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold, 13. 61 Evelyn Blackwood, “From Butch-Femme to Female Masculinities: Elizabeth Kennedy and LGBT Anthropology,” Feminist Formations 24, no. 3 (2012): 95. 62 Blackwood, 97. 63 A stone butch is a butch who did not allow themselves to be touched sexually, preferring to exclusively give sexual pleasure. This was particularly valorized in butches in the 1950s, though the extent to whether butches were truly “untouchable” remains unclear; nevertheless, butches certainly had a reputation and presumption of being completely or mostly untouchable. See, Kennedy and Davis, 204. Hamilton 27

Feinberg64 was a labor organizer, activist, and member of the working-class bar community that existed in Buffalo, NY in the McCarthy era. While Stone Butch Blues is a work of fiction, Feinberg emphasizes that it is a fiction with explicitly real-world political implications. In the Afterword of the 10-year anniversary edition, zie explains, “’Is it fiction?’ I am frequently asked. Is it true? Is it real? Oh, it’s real alright. So real it bleeds. And yet it is a remembrance: never underestimate the power of fiction to tell the truth.”65 Feinberg was dedicated to this book’s ability to speak that truth—the book is part of hir larger body of activist work and can be downloaded for free on hir website. At the time of writing, it has over a quarter of a million downloads.66 It’s also hard to understate how successful Stone Butch Blues has been at reaching actual people who needed it.

Writing shortly after Feinberg’s death, lesbian journalist June Thomas reflected, “on the rare occasions when people have unironically handed me a book and declared that it changed, or perhaps even saved, their life, it has almost always been a dog-eared copy of Stone Butch Blues.”67

Feinberg hirself found the “reports that copies of Stone Butch Blues are passed around in prison cell blocks until they are worn and tattered” most resonant.68 Indeed, Stone Butch Blues is a staple of butch literature.69

Both of these books, in their own ways, seek to create space for the lived experiences of working-class lesbians in their relevant contexts: feminist theory, gay liberation, and especially in

64 For the duration of this work, I will refer to Leslie Feinberg with zie/hir/hirs pronouns. While zie used a variety of pronouns in the course of hir life and expressed interest in respect over “correctness” when it comes to pronouns, hir desire to exist outside of the binary gender system is the belief of hirs that I spend considerable time exploring, and the language I use should reflect that. 65 Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues, First Alyson Books Edition (Los Angeles: Alyson Publications, 2003). 66 Leslie Feinberg, “Stone Butch Blues,” Leslie Feinberg, n.d., lesliefeinberg.net. 67 June Thomas, “Stone Butch Blues Author Leslie Feinberg Has Died,” Slate Magazine, November 18, 2014, https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/11/leslie-feinberg-stone-butch-blues-author-transgender-pioneer-has- died.html. 68 Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues, 2003. 69 On a personal note—when I first began to realize that I was a lesbian, Stone Butch Blues was the first book I encountered. I read the entire PDF from Feinberg’s website in one sitting and have been the one recommending it as life-changing countless times since. Surely, Hamilton 28

Stone Butch Blues, the history of labor and worker’s liberation. In this chapter, I argue that these books allow us to interpret butch and femme as lesbian-specific gender identities that emerged in the creation of an incredibly complex, meaningful subculture amidst violence from mainstream culture, as well as from within the burgeoning gay movement. In Boots of Leather, Slippers of

Gold, these gender identities are ultimately absorbed by and interpreted through the lens of womanhood and women’s history. In Stone Butch Blues, Leslie Feinberg challenges the assumption that lesbian gender identity is inherently “woman” and portrays a community that situates transgender history as central to the history of butch and femme. In doing so, zie utilizes an understanding of transgender identity that emphasizes a removal of gender from binary systems that is an important catalyst of today’s discussion of transgender, and specifically nonbinary, identity. To organize my argument, I will first consider how Stone Butch Blues and Boots of

Leather, Slippers of Gold describe butch and femme identity as it operated in the bars, and show how these dynamics upended notions of womanhood both within and outside of lesbian community. Then, I will consider how butch identity in particular can move away from womanhood entirely by exploring how the specifically trans narratives in Stone Butch Blues operate.

Navigating Womanhood through Butch and Femme

Stone Butch Blues is a bildungsroman that follows the titular Stone Butch, Jess Goldberg, over the course of her tumultuous life. Jess’s gender takes on a variety of different forms throughout the course of the book. Jess describes her childhood as a “constant refrain” of “‘is that a boy or a girl?’” and consistent alienation from her family as a result of her clear gender nonconformity.70 She leaves home at sixteen, after venturing to the bars at the reluctant, somewhat

70 Feinberg, 5. Hamilton 29 accidental recommendation of a co-worker. There, she meets Butch Al, who becomes her mentor and an example of an alternate gender expression—stone butch—that she can identify with. Jess narrates, “She took me under her wing and taught me all the things she thought were most important for a baby butch like me to know before embarking on such a dangerous and painful journey.”71 In the heyday of the bars, when Jess initially enters the scene, she feels solid in this identity, when there was a thriving community of others like her.

What did that bar community look like? Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold provides a rich backdrop to analyze how butch and femme operated as both individual identities and as a means of organizing community. Davis and Kennedy define “bar lesbians” as “that group of people that regularly frequented lesbian bars or open or semi-open house parties in the 1940s and 1950s.”72

For the purposes of this analysis, it’s important to understand who this includes, and who it doesn’t.

The bar lesbians were largely working-class. The industrialization of Buffalo and greater degree of freedom to work outside the home allowed women to support themselves more independently, even if those salaries were meager.73 Stone Butch Blues expends considerable energy detailing butch experiences in factory work. Jess is an active participant in unionization efforts and strikes at some of the plants she works at and earns significant respect from some of the men who work with her for her efforts, but butches at the plants still faced sexual harassment and discrimination, at one plant not even being allowed at union meetings.74 Middle-and-upper class lesbians in

Buffalo, for the most part, avoided the bars, as they were often in rougher sections of the city and

71 Feinberg, 29. 72 Kennedy and Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold, 3. 73 Kennedy and Davis, 10. 74 Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues, 2003, 83. Hamilton 30 their wealth allowed them to socialize in more private, safer environments (a phenomenon I discussed in the previous chapter.)75

Part of what made the bar environments so dangerous was the virulent homophobia that lesbians at the time experienced, particularly in the bars. Police violence was routine, and part of what enabled the relative freedom of the bar culture was accepting that economic opportunities to any sort of financial security for most women at the time, namely heterosexual marriage, were mostly off the table to them. The police also enforced their violence in particularly gendered ways: while the existence of gendered-clothing laws is actually historically contested, police would routinely arrest butches on these grounds76 and the names of those who were arrested in raids were often published in the paper the next day.77 Sometimes conflicts with the police also turned physical, though often not in the bars (the police were notoriously corrupt and paid off), but on the streets outside. Black lesbians in particular were often targeted in their own neighborhoods by the police.78 Stone Butch Blues suggest that butch lesbians were sometimes the target of corrective rape or sexual assault at the hands of police as well; one of the most harrowing scenes in the book depicts a bar raid where Jess’s head is forced into an unflushed toilet before being raped by the police officers who conducted the raid.79

It's also important to note that the bar lesbians were largely white. The lesbian community in Buffalo was largely divided between Black and white lesbians. Black lesbians tended to socialize more often at house parties, especially in the 1940s when the Black community in Buffalo was smaller and thus less anonymous—some of the 1940s gay bars were actually in the Black

75 Kennedy and Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold, 44. 76 Lillian Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers, 185. 77 Kennedy and Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold, 55. 78 Kennedy and Davis, 92. 79 Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues, 2003, 62. Hamilton 31 section of the city, and as one narrator notes, “you can’t be funny in your own neighborhood.”80

Even as bars became more integrated, those early divisions remained. Some of the narrators in

Kennedy and Davis’s account of the bar culture are Black and Native American, but they were

Black lesbians who spent substantial time socializing in the white bar community. Attempts to contact Black lesbians who primarily socialized in Black lesbian spaces were unsuccessful.81

Nevertheless, butch and femme roles were practiced by both Black and white lesbians to some degree, though Black butches often used the term “stud” and adopted a more formal attire when going out.82,83

Stone Butch Blues provides an account of some of the difficulties Black butches in particular faced navigating the largely white bar spaces, as shown through some of Jess’s friend

Edwin’s experiences. Edwin (referred to as Ed, largely) was initially reticent to allow Jess to get particularly close to her; when Jess expresses an interest to go to the Black club on the East Side of Buffalo that Ed frequents, Ed was defensive, telling Jess, “I’ve got to think about it. I don’t know.”84 Soon after this scene, we learn from another butch, Grant, that Ed stopped coming to the bars for a period because she “‘had a chip on her shoulder’ ever since Malcolm X was killed in

New York City.”85 Though Ed does ultimately come back to the bars and take Jess to the Black club with her, she is guarded when she sees Jess again. As Jess describes, “It was springtime when

I finally ran into Ed at the diner…she eyed me guardedly, as though examining me for the first time. I feared she wouldn’t like what she saw. After a moment she opened her arms to me.”86 Ed

80 Kennedy and Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold, 43. 81 Kennedy and Davis, 17. 82 Lack of adherence to roles was taboo in the bars, and racial differences exaggerated that; for an account of a Black, working-class experience of feeling alienated from white lesbian bar culture, see Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (The Crossing Press, 1994). 83 Kennedy and Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold, 163. 84 Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues, 2003, 54. 85 Feinberg, 54. 86 Feinberg, 55. Hamilton 32 had good reason to be suspicious—Grant, in particular, was hostile and racist towards Ed at multiple points in the work (providing some insight on what Grant must have said to Ed about

Malcolm X’s death that led her to characterize Ed as “having a chip on her shoulder.”) At one point, Ed and Grant get into a fistfight after getting into an argument over American involvement in the Vietnam war, leading to the owner barring Black patrons from the bar.87

After the altercation, Jess talks to Ed for a couple of hours, and Jess reflects to her lover,

Theresa: “I always assume that what Ed and I deal with every day as butches is the same, you know? Ed reminds me about what she faces every day that I don’t.”88 While that conversation strengthens Edwin and Jess’s relationship and Jess helps convince the owner of the bar to reverse her decision to make it all-white, it’s clear that Edwin still has to sacrifice a lot to continue patronizing bars with white butches, as Grant wouldn’t even apologize “for the racist shit she said,” and Ed told Jess to “let it go for now.”89 Even when she was rightfully angry about the racism she experienced in the bars, Edwin had to both accept mistreatment from Grant without so much as even an apology, and also expend her time and energy mediating Jess’s attempts to advocate on her behalf if she wanted to continue to socialize in the lesbian bar spaces.

Belonging in the lesbian bar scene was also contingent on how much one was willing to engage in the roles of butch and femme. Kennedy and Davis’s account shows a relationship with and adherence to butch and femme roles was also varied. The broad definition was quite simple: in searching for romantic and sexual partners, one person would take on a more masculine or

“butch” role, and the other, feminine partner would be the “femme.” These were also important roles erotically, as butches were expected to be the “physically active partner and leader in the

87 Feinberg, 125. 88 Feinberg, 129. 89 Feinberg, 129. Hamilton 33 lovemaking” while the femmes played the receptive role.90 Regardless of the extent to which any individual lesbian felt compelled to engage in role-playing, “roles were the organizing principle” of both in-community interactions and interactions with the outside world. Butch and femme were

“code of individual ethics” around appearance and sexual behavior, as well as a visual message:

“the presence of the butch… or of the butch-fem couple—two women in a clearly gendered relationship—announced lesbians to one another and the public.”91 So, in order to gain the benefits of strong community with potential friends and lovers, one had to be willing to engage in restrictive roles.

In Stone Butch Blues and Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold, butch and femme are shown to embody a complex relationship with the concept of gender identity itself—in the bars, “butch” and “femme” were not merely roles, but gender identities that existed both inside and outside of

“womanhood.” Feminist scholar Sally R. Munt, though writing about butch/femme identity’s contemporary iterations as lesbian gender in the 1990s, described this complex relationship to womanhood well:

A recurring trope of the butch is that she is a failed woman (too little woman), or of the femme that she is the hyper-woman (too much woman). The shadow of womanhood skates butch/femme. For femmes talking about being a woman is often a passion, an aspiration, both being and becoming, it is playing for real. Butches talk about womanhood less, their ambivalence swings between a secret pride, shame, and protested irrelevance—this denial of womanhood is predicated upon a similar, but muted, elevation.92 Whether the formulation is too much or too little womanhood, butch and femme expose the imperfections of the category itself. In the words of Judith Butler: the repetition “reveals the original to be nothing other than a parody of the idea of the natural and the original.”93 Though

90 Kennedy and Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold, 192. 91 Kennedy and Davis, 152. 92 Munt, “Introduction,” 3–4. 93 Butler, Gender Trouble, 41. Hamilton 34 butches and femmes are considered “women”, they are also considered not women through their inability to play the part in the correct, “natural” way. They expose how flimsy the category of woman was to begin with.

After all, butch/femme was a complex interplay between the natural and the adopted.

Identification with butch or femme roles did precede a variety of social behaviors: in order to participate in the bar culture, one would have to at least model the roles, aesthetically and sexually.

These roles were choices and identity formations that were not necessarily inherent to the people who chose to enact them. Being butch or femme was just as much about behavior and community as it was about dress. Butches had to be tough protectors, especially in the 1950s as the community became louder and more violent in its clashes with the outside world and straight men in particular.94 Femmes showed their public resistance by acting as supports for the butches, either through direct care or by the simple act of being seen with them and validating their identities.95

One was not simply butch or femme because they looked masculine or feminine; they were butch because they acted butch, and that was a position that could be threatened by not acting butch enough (for example, by dating another butch.)96

It's also worth nothing here that there were number of circumstances in which, particularly for butches, dressing as a butch or a femme was difficult or impossible (especially in the straight world), underscoring the point that it was not merely dress that made the butch or the femme. As historian Alix Genter points out, dressing butch was not always an option outside of the bars. She found that “many butches navigating the terrain of postwar fashion found that manipulating or complying with women’s styles allowed butch identity and a preference for discretion to

94 Kennedy and Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold, 103. 95 Kennedy and Davis, 153. 96 Kennedy and Davis, 152. Hamilton 35 comfortably coexist,” by doing things like picking more tailored women’s suits or simply relegating their butch dress to their free time.97 Stone Butch Blues is narrated through Jess, who was certainly not the kind of butch who found that she could comfortably comply with women’s styles (Jess calls them, somewhat derisively, “Saturday-night butches.”)98 However, even in Stone

Butch Blues, there are still circumstances when even the most stone of butches donned feminine clothes. A particularly poignant example is at an older butch in the community, Butch Ro’s, funeral, where the other butches had to dress femininely to be let into the funeral home to say their goodbyes:

Wearing dresses was an excruciating humiliation for them. Many of their dresses were old, from another era when occasional retreats were still necessary. The dresses were outdated, white, frilly, lace, low-cut, plain. The shoes were old or borrowed: patent leather, loafers, sandals. This clothing degraded their spirit, ridiculed who they were. Yet it was in this painful drag they were forced to say their last goodbye to the friend they loved so much. Ro’s femme, Alice, greeted each one of them. You could see how much she longed to fall against their solid bodies, to feel the gentle strength of their arms. Instead she respectfully refused to acknowledge the pain they all shared together. She held in her own. Ro—the butch Alice had loved for almost thirty years—lay in the casket next to her, laid out in a pink dress and holding a bunch of pink-and-white flowers.99

The concept of drag is complicated in this passage when it’s being performed through socially coerced butch expressions of femininity. If, as Butler says, “the performance of drag plays upon the distinction between the anatomy of the performer and the gender that is being performed,” then when the anatomy and gender that is supposedly ought to be performed are aligned but the performance is still a kind of humiliating and painful drag, the “false naturalization as a unity” of gendered performance of womanhood becomes even more suspect.100

97 Alix Genter, “Appearances Can Be Deceiving: Butch-Femme Fashion and Queer Legibility in New York City, 1945-1969,” Feminist Studies 42, no. 3 (2016): 613. 98 Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues, 2003, 7. 99 Feinberg, 116–17. 100 Butler, Gender Trouble, 175. Hamilton 36

In other words, the complicated dynamics inherent to the butch/femme bar subculture described by Kennedy and Davis meant that the participants’ status as “women” is something that was always being interrogated, and the social roles that they constructed were informed by those interrogations. Kennedy and Davis point out that their narrators, at least, were “not [trying] to pass as men,” and as one narrator says, “we all knew we were women, let’s face it.” To be butch was not the same as being a “passing man,” who would use he/him pronouns and have some degree of formal false identification.101 However, butches were clearly navigating womanhood in a unique way, both by dress and often by taking on unisex names and nicknames that signaled affinity with the culture and distanced themselves from femininity, and publicly announced their homosexuality

(or at least, didn’t deny it.) In a moment of reflection, Kennedy and Davis acknowledge that from their position in the 1980s and 1990s, “it is difficult to separate being a butch and a passing man,” yet for this community, these distinctions were clear.102 Both contemporarily and in retrospect, butches and femmes in the bars were carving out space for themselves in gender categories that did not wish to hold them. While for Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold narrators, this meant expanding and functionally changing the definitions of womanhood to hold their experiences.

When they say they are “women”, they are clearly speaking about a definition of “woman” that differed from people outside of their community in the 1940s and 1950s and in the 1980s and

1990s. This does not make them not women, but it does show that woman, as a term, could be used to encapsulate a wider variety of gender identities, specifically ones informed by lesbianism.

Of course, some butches also didn’t identify, ultimately, as women at all; Stone Butch Blues

101 Kennedy and Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold, 167. 102 Kennedy and Davis, 168. Hamilton 37 provides an account of one iteration of that perspective, which I will explore in greater detail at the end of this chapter.

Though they faced gendered violence for transgressing traditional gender roles, butches and femmes were cut off from the burgeoning feminist movement. As I discussed in Chapter 1, mainstream, middle class lesbian feminist organizing like the Daughters of Bilitis were highly suspicious of the butches and femmes of the bars. In her essay “Towards a Butch-Femme

Aesthetic,” Sue Ellen Case describes an instance of the DOB organizers deliberately distancing themselves from the butches and femmes, when a butch joined the DOB and refused to wear a dress, only to become friends with a gay man who helped her to “feel comfortable with herself as a woman.”103 Such a description underscores the degree to which the DOB, though lesbian and feminist, were also engaging in gender policing of the bar lesbians, as it was through their presentation as legibly not women that they were alienated from the women’s and lesbian feminist’s movements. Both Case’s example and Kennedy and Davis’s work do confirm, though, that this isolation was not for lack of interest in some of the goals of lesbian rights and women’s liberation. In fact, some of Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold’s narrators avoided gay liberation groups because their goals simply did not reflect their lives: they were “out” to begin with by virtue of being butch and femme in public, so achieving visibility wasn’t a central concern in their lives.104

Jess also struggled with knowing where to fit in with mainstream organizing. It was one of the central conflicts of her most significant romantic relationship, a femme named Theresa. When

Theresa got a temp job at the local university, she began to attend women’s liberation meetings

103 Sue-Ellen Case, “Towards a Butch/Femme Aesthetic,” Discourse 11, no. 1 (Fall-Winter -89 1988): 58. 104 Kennedy and Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold, 187. Hamilton 38 and view herself specifically as a lesbian woman as well as a femme. It was important to Theresa that Jess understand and participate in women’s liberation with her, but Jess was uncertain how much she can possibly identify with a movement that requires her butchness to be rooted in a sense of womanhood, at a time when the bars were closing down and the butch/femme culture as it had existed in the 1950s and early 1960s was disappearing. They have the following conversation:

“…You’re really getting into this women’s lib stuff, aren’t you?” Theresa sat me on a kitchen chair and plopped down on my lap. She pushed the hair out of my eyes. “Yeah,” she said, “I am. I’m realizing a lot of things about my own life—about being a woman—that I never even thought about until the women’s movement.” I listened to her. “I don’t feel it so much,” I told her. “Maybe ’cause I’m a butch.” She kissed my forehead. “Butches need women’s liberation, too.” I laughed. “We do?” Theresa nodded. “Yes, you do. Anything that’s good for women is good for butches.”105

Theresa was in a position a number of femmes found themselves in during the emergence of the lesbian feminist movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s: as a woman who had been pursuing lesbian relationships in public and facing significant gendered violence as a result of those relationships, the women’s movement had a lot to offer her. Yet, the women’s movement’s hostility to butch and femme roles made it difficult for women like Theresa to fully participate, though some did try. In the same conversation, Theresa recounted that “when a woman tells [her],

‘If I wanted a man I’d be with a real one,’ [she] tells her, ‘I’m not with a fake man, I’m with a real butch.’”106 Despite her quips, though, the widening gap between Theresa and Jess’s ideas about what it means to be butch or a lesbian made it hard for them to understand each other without the bar culture.

105 Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues, 2003, 138. 106 Feinberg, 139. Hamilton 39

To Theresa’s point that the women’s movement did, at least theoretically, have a lot to offer butches and femmes (or, butches and femmes had a lot of relevant life experience that the women’s liberation movement could have listened to), it’s instructive to return to Case’s essay on butch/femme aesthetic. Her exploration of butch/femme identity provides a useful, though incomplete, framework for understanding some of the ways in which butches and femmes are an excellent example of a group in which a feminist subject could actually exist: absent the gaze of men in the specific construction of a lesbian community dynamic, the “heterosexual context” that entraps women can be lifted and she can be a woman capable of actual self-determination.107 She roots her analysis in the idea of lesbian camp as it exists through the roles of butch and femme.

Specifically, she enumerates the ways in which both butches and femmes used artifice to create a visual language of desire that, while engaging in masculine and feminine dyadic pairings, were simultaneously subverting them.

Thus, these roles qua roles lend agency and self-determination to the historically passive subject, providing her with at least two options for gender identification and, with the aid of camp, an irony that allows her perception to be constructed from outside ideology, with a gender role that makes her appear as if she is inside of it.108 In other words, while butches and femmes borrowed visual language from heterosexual gender constructions of “man” and “woman,” their adaptations within subculture turned them into entirely new, lesbian gender identities that carried vastly different meanings than the same visual cues held in heterosexual culture. Or, to once again quote Theresa’s words: she was not with a “fake man,” but a “real butch.”

Case also situates these pairings as gender identities—though related to and inside of womanhood (to an extent), the intentionality of these roles makes it something altogether different.

107 Case, “Towards a Butch/Femme Aesthetic,” 56. 108 Case, 65. Hamilton 40

The butches are easily understood as gender non-conforming: people raised as or identifying as women, wearing men’s clothing, and often working men’s factory jobs. The femmes, however, also engaged in a version of femininity informed by this artifice that was also not altogether conforming. Obviously, the fact that they were performing femininity for other women was a massive upheaval from expectations. As Monique Wittig posits in The Straight Mind, the category of lesbian itself is disruptive: the categories of women and men are so deeply tied to difference in sex, constructed politically to consolidate patriarchal power and maintained by the institution of heterosexuality.109 In that sense, femmes were clearly gender-nonconforming.

However, 1940s and 1950s bar-going femmes’ particular form of femininity also had its own specificities and distinctions that set it apart from conventional expressions. Some femmes chose to only or mostly wear pants, a choice that got one of Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold’s femmes in trouble at her job, but was a perfectly acceptable form of feminine dress within the bar community.110 Femmes also tended to emulate Hollywood, sexy glamour, aided by the emergence of cheaper textiles that made those styles accessible to them.111 This is notable for two reasons.

First, this serves to further Case’s point that the act of dressing up and intentionally adopting these roles was an important part of creating a femme identity that was not just “woman”—they were taking their cues from pop culture figures like Marilyn Monroe that built their own images on exaggerated femininity. Secondarily, emulating glamour and Hollywood was an important avenue for femmes to confer their identities with dignity. They modeled their own dress after people who were celebrated for their beauty, and in a culture that was quite literally constantly under attack,

109 Monique Wittig, “The Straight Mind,” in Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1990). 110 Kennedy and Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold, 162. 111 Kennedy and Davis, 162. Hamilton 41 taking time to cultivate “sophisticated and sultry” appearances that situated themselves as desirable to butches and worthy of emulation from other femmes was important.

Appearances were only part of the butch and femme identities of the 1940s and 1950s bar scene—they were exercised in large part to signal what kind of romantic and/or sexual relationship they were looking for. While it was the specific nature of the pairings—a masculine and feminine partner—that engendered much criticism of the roles of butch and femme as an attempted imitation of heterosexuality, the relationship and sexual dynamics of butch/femme relationships were one of the biggest differences between heterosexuals and lesbians. The entire sexual logic of the butch/femme subculture was predicated on femme pleasure. While butches were outwardly aggressive, that aggressiveness was largely absent in their relationships and “the culture did not eroticize violence.”112 Part of the reason that violence was not a common part of butch/femme sexual culture was because the experience of being a lesbian in the 1940s and 1950s was often marked by sexual violence or the threat of it. In An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and

Lesbian Public Culture, Ann Cvetkovich analyzes butch and femme as in part a response to violent assumptions about what it means to be sexually “passive.” In her words:

For all these women, femme sexuality is about voracious desire for which no apologies are necessary because it can be accepted and fulfilled by another’s attentions. Central to femme discourse about being the recipient of a lover’s sexual attention is the recurrent need to counter the notion that this position is a passive one—an assumption that also pervades the image of trauma as a violent breach of bodily boundaries.113

So, even as the receptive partner in sex, femmes had a great degree of freedom to fulfill their desires in the way that they see fit. This was markedly different from straight women at the time—sexual discourses in the 1940s and 1950s were extremely phallocentric, and there was

112 Kennedy and Davis, 226. 113 Ann Cvetkovich, “An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures,” February 21, 2003, 57, https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822384434. Hamilton 42 significant stigma about premarital sex. These stigmas didn’t exist in the lesbian bar culture.

Marriage, of course, was not an option for lesbians even if they wanted it. Even in their serial long- term relationships, there was not an expectation that anyone was “waiting” for sex to take place exclusively in the context of those relationships, and casual sex outside of relationships was a normal and accepted behavior. These relationships were also free of many of the hierarchies that characterized heterosexual relationships: butches did not have much more economic power than femmes (in fact, given their feminine presentation, femmes sometimes were able to function more easily in society at large and gain employment.)114

However, the lesbian feminist’s movement’s fundamental understanding of lesbianism as something between women-identified-women was a hurdle that proved insurmountable, at least for Theresa and Jess. After the bars closed, Jess and some of the other butches begin to consider medically transitioning to pass as men, partially to get jobs. Hearing these stories, Jess becomes aware of the extent to which she really didn’t feel like a woman at all. She has a dream where she has a beard and no breasts, and describes the euphoria that the change in her body gives her to

Theresa, likening it to the way that she felt when she found the bars. But, Jess clarified, “in the dream it wasn’t about being gay. It was about being a man or a woman…I always feel like I have to prove I’m like other women, but in the dream I didn’t feel that way. I’m not even sure I felt like a woman… I didn’t feel like a woman or a man, and I liked how I was different.”115 Though finding the bars and comfort in her sexuality gave her at least some degree of belonging amidst the violence she experienced, her realization about her gender provided no such path forward. Given no option to exist in between, though, Jess comes to the conclusion that her only option is to go on hormones and pass as a man. Theresa is insistent that she can’t “go out with [Jess] in the world and pretend

114 Kennedy and Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold, 234. 115 Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues, 2003, 143. Hamilton 43 that [she’s] a man,” because she can’t “pass as a straight woman and be happy,” so they break up.116 Without the language of butch and femme and a subcultural context where those roles could be enacted, Jess and Theresa become illegible to each other. In the next section, I examine the period after Jess’s transition, which takes the fundamentally cisgender assumptions about butch and femme communities that lie at the heart of histories like Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold.

Stone Butch Blues: Uniting Lesbian and Transgender Histories

Stone Butch Blues is widely regarded as a work of trans history—Leslie Feinberg was a dedicated transgender activist. One of hir directly preceding works to Stone Butch Blues was the

“Transgender Liberation” pamphlet for Worker’s World, in which Feinberg traces some of the historical roots of trans identity and argues that contemporary ideas of “the closet” and “passing” are inventions of capitalist oppression that erase a history that is actually full of celebration of trans identity. 117 In the very beginning of hir argument, Feinberg explicitly connects hir experiences in the bars to this larger trans history, reflecting, “when I first worked in the factories of Buffalo as a teenager, women like me were called ‘he-she’s.’ Although ‘he-shes’ in the plants were most frequently lesbians, we were recognized not by our sexual preference but by the way we expressed our gender.”118 Here, Feinberg makes it clear that marginalization of Buffalo’s working-class bar lesbians was not only homophobia, but specifically because of their gender expression and identity.

In this framing, Feinberg is arguing that transgender experience was not incidental to the lesbian bar culture, but foundational to its very existence. Because of the rigidity of gender roles at the time, working in the plants and finding community in the working-class bar scene constructed a culture that had a myriad of alternate gender identities—“transvestites, transsexuals,

116 Feinberg, 152. 117 Leslie Feinberg, Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come (New York: World View Forum, 1993). 118 Feinberg, 5. Hamilton 44 drag queens and kings, cross-dressers, bulldaggers, stone butches, androgynes, diesel dykes or berdache—a European colonialist term.”119 Thus, when reading Stone Butch Blues, we are not merely reading a novel about a trans, gay character, but a community that was built on a multitude of gender and sexual identities.

The first portion of the book, which I focus my analysis on for the first part of this chapter, follows Jess’s experience as stone butch in the lesbian bar culture that Davis and Kennedy describe.

However, as the jobs at the plant began to dry up in the recession of the early 1970s, so too did the butch-femme community that relied on the economic support butches could obtain in factory work.

Thus, the context in which Jess could understand her gender changed quite drastically. At this time, Jess began the process of transition to pass as a man in order to get work. Jess was ambivalent about what this meant for her gender identity. When her friend, Grant, inquired whether Jess might actually be a “transsexual” and suggested that she go to a sex change clinic, Jess is clear that she doesn’t view the process of medical transition to a man as gender affirmation, explaining, “I don’t feel like a man trapped in a woman’s body. I just feel trapped.”120 Absent a social structure that made her stone butch gender identity legible, Jess and some (though not all) of her other butch friends are forced into the position where they have to re-imagine their own gender identities back into a binary framework that fit some of them worse than others.

In Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold, Kennedy and Davis emphasize the difference between butches and “passing women”, as the narrators called people like Jess in their communities.121 The narrators in Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold were mostly butches who continued to identify as women throughout their lives, although some did indeed spend some time

119 Feinberg, 5. 120 Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues, 2003, 159. 121 Kennedy and Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold, 168. Hamilton 45 passing as men and most knew people who did. In this instance, Boots of Leather, Slippers of

Gold’s narrative of the history of this period diverges somewhat from Feinberg’s recollection. In their retelling, the passing women were marginal to their experiences of the bars.

In Stone Butch Blues, Jess’s entire social circle was the bars and she was deeply entrenched in the culture; she may have partnered exclusively with femmes, but “she loved [the butches] too… because [she] was so much like them.”122 Jess’s experience passing as a man was a deeply lonely period of the book, as Jess no longer has deep connection to her community and is afraid to get close to any friends or romantic interests who might realize that she’s passing and put her in danger.

Absent a social circumstance that allowed her to exist in the complexity of her non-binary gender experience, Jess is miserable. So, the idea that Jess’s experience transitioning fully might have been one that took her out of the bar scene and thus would be more absent from community oral history makes sense; associating too closely with lesbian culture while trying to pass could put someone in danger of being outed—this was an ever-present fear of Jess’s. In one particularly poignant scene, she becomes close with a man working in the plants with her and they share a moment of vulnerability about his experience in prison—an experience she can relate to, as she had also experienced violence in jail after raids. Unable to share this part of her history and foster a moment of mutual understanding that she so desperately craves, she denies her coworker any knowledge of her past, leaving her “closed and protected” while he was “left naked.”123 This choice made her feel miserable and invisible, but the cost of being outed was too high to allow herself to experience meaningful connection.

After a long period of passing as a man, Jess reconnects with an old friend from the bars,

Edna, who had previously been with another butch who transitioned, Rocco. In her relationship

122 Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues, 2003, 7. 123 Feinberg, 185. Hamilton 46 with Edna, Jess is brought back into the butch identity that she had to forgo while living as a man.

Edna encourages Jess to embrace some of her own uncertainty and validates Jess’s butch experience with gender: she says to Jess, “You’re more than just either-or, honey. There’s other ways to be than either-or. It’s not so simple. Otherwise there wouldn’t be so many people who don’t fit.”124 While Edna and Jess’s relationship ends in this scene, Jess clearly takes her validation to heart; the next chapter begins with Jess deciding to no longer live as a man and stop taking hormones, as the beard she had grown “no longer revealed the contours of [her] gender.”125 Instead,

Jess once again lives simply as herself, not a woman, but not a man, either.

Jess’s decision to inhabit transgender as a complete identity—not as simply a term to describe movement from one binary gender to another—remains a transgender experience that is underrepresented. The “trapped in the wrong body” metaphor that Jess cites in describing her own alienation from other “transsexuals” remains the dominant one in popular culture stories of transgender people, and contemporary nonbinary people share frustration that dominant narratives around transition follow this pattern.126 Of course, even relatively positive (or at least humane) representations of transgender stories, “born this way” or otherwise, were still few and far between at the time of Stone Butch Blues publishing in 1993. Prior to the 1990s, Jack Halberstam notes that mainstream films that had any transgender representation tended to portray those characters as

“mad, bad, and dangerous”, with “the connection between gender variance and serial murder seem obvious and inevitable.” Even films with more trans stories that began to emerge in the late 1990s and early 2000s treated “trans* identities…as a kind of aberration, as something in need of

124 Feinberg, 218. 125 Feinberg, 222. 126 Ashley Elizabeth Meyers, “Beyond ‘Born This Way’: Reconsidering Trans Narratives” (2019), 4. Hamilton 47 explanation, or as a symbol for illegible social identities.”127 Certainly, these stories are very different from the complicated and ambivalent story in Stone Butch Blues, where Jess inhabits a variety of gender identities and focuses on experience over explanation (though, that was certainly helped by the fact that Stone Butch Blues was not a mainstream novel.)

As Eve Sedgewick argues, the “deadlock” between “essentialist” and “constructivist” understandings of homosexuality “has been the single most powerful feature of the important twentieth-century understandings of sexuality,” regardless of which side is more “correct” or

“prevalent.”128 Essentialist arguments have had a significant amount of rhetorical power, especially for a culture that is hostile to LGBTQ people. After all, one of the hallmarks of homophobic rhetoric is the phrasing “sexual preference” over “sexual orientation”, which implies that LGBTQ people are choosing a lifestyle of sin, and could choose to live a straight, “correct” lifestyle if they had enough willpower. “Born this way” arguments are a clear intervention here. If sexuality isn’t a choice, then it follows that it might be eligible for some other legal protections that other oppressed groups have on the same basis.

Of course, those legal protections remain incomplete and have hardly eradicated oppression, but access to legal institutions remains an important component of any assimilationist project. Being “born” in a particular way also implies that it is scientific and biological, and there is epistemological power that is granted from being able to be considered “correct” under scientific knowledge. Indeed, a major win of the gay rights movement was the removal of homosexuality from the DSM-II.129 Conversely, the concept of gender dysphoria requiring medical treatment has

127 Jack Halberstam, “Trans Representation,” in Trans, 1st ed., A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability (University of California Press, 2018), 92, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/j.ctv1wxs8s.9. 128 Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 91. 129 Jack Drescher, “Out of DSM: Depathologizing Homosexuality,” Behavioral Sciences 5, no. 4 (December 4, 2015): 565–75, https://doi.org/10.3390/bs5040565. Hamilton 48 been a large driver of access to gender-affirming surgery for trans people: a medical problem

(being born with the “wrong brain”) can be ameliorated with a medical treatment (cosmetic surgery, an otherwise “elective” procedure.) While this medicalization has increased some access to care, it still implies that transness is both biological and some sort of malady, and current movements are working to remove gender transition from mental disorder manuals and decouple affirming care from a diagnostic problem.130

Because of the political ramifications of gayness and transness being intrinsic and biological, stories that challenge simplistic explanations of trans identity remain rather rare and under-explored. The contemporary category of nonbinary identity, an umbrella term for a variety of gender identities outside of “man” and “woman”, has been an important step for categorizing and making coherent transgender experiences that aren’t about transition from one binary gender to the other. Cultural critic Jay Prosser describes Stone Butch Blues as a narrative

in which the transitional/transitioning does away with the fixed points and homogenous categories of gender and sexual identities, in which journey—simply the act of leaving the home or the familiar—brings with it the recognition that home (the body/identity) is made up, a construct, and thus, along with the narrative of gendering, to be relinquished.131

In other words, what makes this narrative trans is not the idea of a destination, but the process of moving itself. Jess’s experiences of transness fit into this framework well, even if she never identifies as “nonbinary” herself, as the term did not yet exist as an identifier (at the time of Prosser or Feinberg’s writing). Even Feinberg’s use of “transgender” to describe a non-binary experience was a concept zie hirself popularized with Transgender Liberation.132 Yet, as Prosser points out,

Stone Butch Blues also depicts “a distinctly unqueer yearning for home both in the body and the

130 Amets Suess Schwend, “Trans Health Care from a Depathologization and Human Rights Perspective,” Public Health Reviews 41, no. 1 (February 19, 2020): 3, https://doi.org/10.1186/s40985-020-0118-y. 131 Jay Prosser, “No Place Like Home: The Transgendered Narrative of Leslie Feinberg’s ‘Stone Butch Blues,’” Modern Fiction Studies 41, no. 3 (1995): 489–90. 132 Feinberg, Transgender Liberation. Hamilton 49 community.”133 Jess’s character finds (and loses) that sense of home multiple times over the course of the novel, but her search for it is what drives the narrative at nearly every point. And, by centering one of the homes that Jess finds in butch/femme culture and identity, Feinberg weaves the transgender narrative inextricably into lesbian history and identity by demonstrating that the butch and femme roles had room for both, if imperfectly.

The emergence of the butch and femme identities in lesbian bars was a substantial shift in how gender and sexual orientation were being thought of, and the question of the extent to which one influences the other hangs over both Stone Butch Blues and Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold.

Contemporary experiences of gender and sexual orientation reckon with the inherent connectedness of those questions, too, and the persistence of those tensions is notable. Many mainstream education efforts about LGBTQ identity have focused on the differences between sexual orientation and gender identity, out of a desire to decouple the idea that if one experiences same-gender attraction, they must not actually identify as that gender. This idea is rooted in heteronormativity and certainly is damaging, but the emphasis on decoupling gender and sexual orientation as concepts to straight, cisgender audiences erases some of the more complex ways in which sexual orientation and gender identity are endlessly informing each other. In The Straight

Mind, Gayle Rubin posits that heterosexuality is so deeply tied to the conception of “woman” that to even be a lesbian is to no longer be one, a concept that I previously established can help explain how femme identity is gender nonconforming as well.134 While, of course, one can identify as both a lesbian and a woman and many do, her analysis is instructive insofar as it enables us to consider how much gender expectations are rooted deeply in expectations of heterosexual availability and performance. The resulting incongruence is one that must be negotiated in one’s personal identity,

133 Prosser, “No Place Like Home,” 490. 134 Wittig, “The Straight Mind.” Hamilton 50 however one decides to resolve it. In Stone Butch Blues, the answer is to decouple lesbian identity from womanhood; in Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold, the narrators instead doubled down on their identity as women, as well as butches or femmes. In both, the negotiation is unavoidable.

A transgender-affirming history of butch and femme, what is often considered to be a history of lesbianism, has particular importance in contemporary political discourse about transphobia in lesbian spaces. Partly due to the history of transmisogyny in lesbian feminist discourses, lesbians are often seen as particularly transphobic members of the LGBTQ community.135 As I will explore in my next chapter, some of the vocal transphobic lesbians have been making their arguments partially on the basis of the existence of trans men and women erasing lesbian identity and history by demanding space in the movement; histories like the Buffalo bar culture in Feinberg’s retelling show that trans and lesbian history are illegible without each other, and to attempt to erase the trans narratives out of lesbian existence is both bigoted and simply false.

The lesbian bar culture in the 1940s and 1950s was a pivotal moment in lesbian history, particularly for the history of butch and femme identity. Their complicated, contextually rooted relationship to lesbian gender identities is a fascinating product of a moment of shifting economic landscapes, urbanization, and a burgeoning gay liberation movement. One of the most remarkable things about this culture is the extent to which this very particular moment introduced words into the lexicon that still find wide usage in the queer communities: butch and femme. Perhaps one of the reasons these terms have stuck around is because the same gender instability in the lives and identities of Buffalo’s working-class lesbians are perennial issues that they gave voice and

135 See Sheila Jeffreys, “Transgender Activism,” Journal of Lesbian Studies 1, no. 3–4 (July 16, 1997): 55–74, https://doi.org/10.1300/J155v01n03_03. in which Jeffreys deploys a “feminist analysis” to claim that “transgenderism” is in fact female mutilation and should be viewed as a human rights violation, for example. Hamilton 51 language to. Kennedy and Davis and Feinberg’s readings of these experiences in the early 1990s helped bring these voices into emerging discussions of gay history.

Hamilton 52

Chapter 3 In this chapter, I would like to shift my attention to the past decade: how do butch and femme fit into contemporary debates and understandings of LGBTQ experience and identity? The landscape for LGBTQ lives has shifted dramatically since the time period focused on last chapter, the 1990s. Today, 72% of Americans now say that homosexuality should be accepted by society, when only 51% of respondents said the same in 2002.136 Nearly half of the states in the US explicitly prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.137 These numbers show a significant amount of remaining work to be done for even basic legal protections, but the US Supreme Court’s decision to legalize same-sex marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges in

2015 and the changes that decision wrought reflects a substantial strengthening in “the right to be out.”138 Far from a complete or even linear narrative of progress, what these numbers do reflect is a rapidly shifting outside understanding of LGBTQ experience as more and more LGBTQ people are made visible and gain access to public institutions, like marriage or schools or the workplace.

Where there is shift, there is conflict as new boundaries are drawn and people adjust their understandings of themselves and others in these new contexts. Increased mainstream acceptance has certainly changed the contexts in which people negotiate their identities—the kind of subcultural spaces that allowed for complex, intercommunity forms of relation like butch/femme don’t exist in the same way anymore. As of October 2020, there are only fifteen lesbian bars left in the entire United States, according to The Lesbian Bar Project; the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on in-person social spaces and the bar and restaurant industry makes any possible

136 Jacob Poushter and Nicholas O. Kent, “The Global Divide on Homosexuality Persists” (Pew Research Center, June 2020). 137 “Movement Advancement Project | Nondiscrimination Laws,” accessed April 25, 2021, https://www.lgbtmap.org//equality-maps/non_discrimination_laws. 138 Stuart Biegel, “Marriage Equality and Its Aftermath,” in The Right to Be Out, Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity in America’s Public Schools, Second Edition (University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 23–52, https://doi.org/10.5749/j.ctv5zftvs.7. Hamilton 53 revitalization of those spaces far more difficult, if such a thing were even desired.139 Thus, the landscape of contemporary butch and femme identity and lesbian identity writ large is far more complex and multifaceted than one chapter could hope to capture.

The diffusion of these identities throughout the culture means that there are a number of ways that people are still practicing and incorporating these roles into their lives. Some still practice active butch-femme roles; one active Facebook group for the butch-femme community that a butch/femme couple have been running for the past ten years boasts over twenty-two thousand members, and has adapted to include a number of identifications under the butch-femme umbrella:

Included in the Membership here, we have Butch, Femme, Agender and Non-Binary folks, Lesbians, Queer Femmes, Stone Butch, Stone Femme, Masculine of Center (MoC), Transmasculine, Transgender folks, Studs, AG, Aggressives, Kings, Queens, Machas, Bisexual folks, Queer Identified folks, Bulldykes, Bulldaggers, Genderqueer, Gender fluid, Pansexual, bois/girls and so on - the list of Gender Identification grows every year.140 This list is an important one, as it illuminates an important underlying dynamic that I will be exploring throughout this chapter: butch and femme, despite the binary inherent to the terms, has adapted and continues to adapt to a non-binary, far queerer understanding of sexual orientation and gender that exists today. Many are practicing butch and femme alongside a number of other queer identities.

In light of this flexible, responsive understanding of butch and femme, I argue that butch and femme today are best understood as terms and identities that frame a number of contemporary discourses, decoupled, and defined by their continuing presence and conspicuous absence from

139 Michelle Kim, “This New Fundraiser Aims to Save the 15 U.S. Lesbian Bars Left Standing,” them., October 28, 2020, https://www.them.us/story/lesbian-bar-project-fundraiser. 140 “Butch-Femme,” Facebook, accessed April 25, 2021, https://www.facebook.com/groups/ButchdashFemme. Hamilton 54 lesbian life. Nevertheless, these histories and identities remain important. In this thesis, I’ve looked at multiple sites of conflict in the lesbian community, centered around conflicts around butch and femme identity. Conflict, however, is also synonymous with transition; this perpetual process of identity negotiation, like similar moments in previous chapters, brings forth the same anxieties over gender performance and propriety: seemingly new, yet deeply old.

In this chapter, I will be examining two cultural sites where these conflicts are being negotiated, particularly around butch identity. In the first part, I will look at two opposing examples of attempts to imagine a butch past: from transphobic rhetoric about lesbians and transmasculine people that seeks to solidify an imagined definition of butch that was once both clearly “woman” and accepted; and Butch Heroes, a series of paintings by non-binary, trans artist and educator Ria

Brodell in 2018 that also looks to the past for “butches,” using butch as a lens of analysis for understanding a variety of transmasculine identities and honoring those experiences in context. In the second part, I will use butch as a lens to analyze season one of comedian Abby McEnany’s breakout Showtime series Work in Progress (2019), which is a still-rare example of a mainstream television show that engages themes of butch experiences, evolving lesbian identity, and intergenerational queer conflict and community.

Contemporary Imaginings of Butch Past

Before I discuss the role that butch identity in particular has played in debates around transgender identity, it’s important to take a moment to contextualize some of the landscape around transgender issues specifically. In the last decade, transgender people have been the subject of increasing attention: a phenomenon called the “transgender tipping point” by Katy Steinmetz in Hamilton 55 her groundbreaking Time Magazine profile of trans actress Laverne Cox in May 2014.141 As trans historian Susan Stryker notes, this tipping point is “more like the fulcrum of a teeter totter, tipping backward as well as forward, than like a summit where, after a long upward climb, progress toward social equality starts rolling effortlessly downhill.”142 In other words: this is a moment of unprecedented visibility, which means attacks as well as successes. Since the 2011 repeal of Don’t

Ask, Don’t Tell that allowed gay men and lesbians to serve openly in the military and nationwide legalized same-sex marriage in 2015, transgender issues have been given far more focused attention by mainstream advocacy organizations like the Human Rights Campaign.143

There’s also been a number of specific attacks on transgender rights that have necessitated that support: North Carolina’s House Bill 2 was a particularly high-profile example, whose passage garnered national attention in 2016. The bill outlawed transgender people from using the bathroom aligning with their gender identity, as well as barring cities from enacting any new anti- discrimination legislation; national outrage and corporate boycotts ultimately repealed the bill, though its ban on new anti-discrimination legislation remained as a three-and-a-half-year moratorium.144 These attacks continue, with some of the more recent ones focused specifically on children—playing into long-standing “fears that exposing children to homosexuality and gender variance will make them more likely to develop homosexual desires, engage in homosexual acts, form homosexual relationships, deviate from traditional gender norms, or identify as lesbian, gay,

141 Katy Steinmetz, “The Transgender Tipping Point,” Time, May 29, 2014, https://time.com/135480/transgender- tipping-point/. 142 Susan Stryker, Transgender History, Second Edition: The Roots of Today’s Revolution (Basic Books, 2017), 196. 143 Stryker, 225. 144 Dan Avery, “LGBTQ Rights Fight Reignited 4 Years after N.C.’s ‘bathroom Bill’ Controversy,” NBC News, December 8, 2020, https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/lgbtq-rights-fight-reignited-4-years-after-n-c-s- n1250390. Hamilton 56 bisexual, or transgender. In one form or another, these are all fears of the queer child.”145 In April of 2021, for example, the Arkansas state legislature passed one of the most expansive anti- transgender bills in the country on this principle, barring people under eighteen from receiving gender-affirming medical care, regardless of parental consent. This is only one of nearly one hundred anti-trans bills being considered by state legislatures in the year 2021, the highest on record.146

Clearly, there has been a rise in transphobia from the religious right, but like many of the previous moments of conflict studied in this thesis, these attacks have also come from within the gay and feminist movements (or, perhaps more accurately, under the guise of these movements.)

The lesbian community in particular has struggled with transgender inclusion. Notable lesbian music festival MichFest, for example, shut down in 2015 after years of controversy around its exclusion of trans women.147 One of the longest-running lesbian pop culture blogs on the Internet,

AfterEllen, has come under significant criticism for offering a home to transphobic rhetoric, for example, retweeting lesbian YouTuber Arielle Scarcella’s video entitled “Dear Trans Women,

Stop Pushing ‘Girl Dick’ On Lesbians.”148 This kind of exclusion frames trans women as predatory men encroaching on lesbian spaces, but there is also a significant amount of transphobia towards trans men and nonbinary people assigned female at birth in this rhetoric from this group, called

Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists, or TERFs. In this section, I would like to focus on some of

145 Clifford Rosky, “Fear of the Queer Child,” SSRN Scholarly Paper (Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network, October 18, 2012), 608, https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2163837. 146 Raisa Bruner, “In Arkansas, Trans Youth Face the Country’s Strictest Laws Yet,” Time, April 9, 2021, https://time.com/5953363/trans-youth-arkansas/. 147 Diane Anderson-Minshall, “Op-Ed: Michfest’s Founder Chose to Shut Down Rather Than Change With the Times,” Advocate, April 24, 2015, https://www.advocate.com/commentary/2015/04/24/op-ed-michfests-founder- chose-shut-down-rather-change-times. 148 Mary Emily O’Hara, “AfterEllen Was a Refuge for All Queer Women — Until It Wasn’t,” February 13, 2019, https://www.out.com/news-opinion/2019/2/13/afterellen-was-refuge-all-queer-women-until-it-wasnt. Hamilton 57 the contours of where this argument becomes about defending a particular, trans-exlusionary idea of lesbianism, and how butchness is evoked as antithetical to make their claims.

Often, these debates around the supposed thread to lesbian gender identity happen in online spaces, making them difficult to catalogue and analyze. One such thread, by American journalist, author, and former attorney Glenn Greenwald that garnered thousands of responses, though, provides an excellent case study for how transphobia masks itself as concern for butch lesbians. In this thread, Greenwald shared tables from a Gallup poll published the same day, highlighting generational differences in LGBTQ self-identification between generations, particularly among lesbians:

Finally, as famed lesbian @kittypurrzog notes, there are now—among Millennials and Gen Z—more people identifying as trans than lesbian. She has previously argued that masculine girls are now encouraged to identify as trans, causing a decrease in the lesbian population:

Figure 1: Jeffrey F. Jones, “LGBT Identification Rises to 5.6% in Latest U.S. Estimate,” Gallup.com, February 24, 2021, https://news.gallup.com/poll/329708/lgbt-identification-rises-latest-estimate.aspx. as cited in Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald), “Finally, as famed lesbian @kittypurrzog notes, there are now—among Millennials and Gen Z—more people identifying as trans than lesbian.” Twitter, February 24, 2021, https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1364617687423471621. While Greenwald is technically correct, that as a percentage there are a slightly higher number of transgender people than lesbians, it is an obfuscating statistic to make his particular point about a supposed crop of young girls being coerced into identifying as trans (Figure 1). Namely, that for Hamilton 58 both Generation Z and Millennials, lesbians are a larger share of their respective populations than

Generation X, Boomers, or Traditionalists. In other words, there’s never been more lesbians. So, clearly, even within the evidence Greenwald cites, the so-called disappearance of lesbians is a rhetorical claim, not a factual one.

Greenwald also cites the longer piece, “Where Have All the Lesbians Gone?” a November

2020 article by the “famed lesbian” Katie Hertzog to underscore her argument. In it, she attempts to outline when lesbian became an outdated identifier, subsumed by concepts of “queer” or

“nonbinary.” In her argument, these are once again considered concepts that are mutually exclusive from lesbian identity, as well as ultimately problematic, quoting editor-in-chief of the embattled lesbian blog AfterEllen, Jocelyn MacDonald, who expressed concern over increasing identification with nonbinary genders among people that Hertzog and MacDonald consider women is inherently bad for butchness. MacDonald says, “Butch lesbians especially have fought for the right to claim space as women, and now women are running from that instead of boldly stepping into it. It’s another way of saying ‘I’m not like other girls,’ and it’s demeaning to other women.”149

This argument is deeply infantilizing, assuming that nonbinary people are women and simply refuse to acknowledge it out of misguided, adolescent misogyny, and advances an idea that it is somehow more courageous to be a butch, gender-nonconforming woman than a gender- nonconforming person who does not identify with womanhood at all. She ignores the ways in which these experiences often have far more in common with each other, existing on a spectrum of lived experience, rather than neatly divided into lines of self-identification.150 She also shapes

149 Katie Herzog, “Where Have All The Lesbians Gone?,” Blog, The Weekly Dish, November 27, 2020, https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/where-have-all-the-lesbians-gone-0a7. 150 Evan Urquhart, “A Dispatch From the Shifting, Porous Border Between Butch and Trans,” Slate Magazine, April 24, 2015, https://slate.com/human-interest/2015/04/butch-and-trans-a-dispatch-from-the-shifting-border.html. Hamilton 59 a historical narrative in which butch lesbians were embattled, were accepted as women, and are now being turned against by a younger generation that does not understand the struggles of the previous one.

Hertzog’s argument relies on this feeling of generational loss and loneliness, speaking to a sense of lost community—not lost to her personally, but lost to a whole generation: “I do not know how things were in olden times for the elder gays, so I admit that a paucity of lesbian friends may in fact be normal for twentysomething gay women in left coast liberal cities, but I like to imagine there was some Arcadian past where short-haired women in Carhartts could gather in groups greater than two.”151 In this sentence, the emotional core of Hertzog’s argument is clear: this is an issue of alienation and loneliness being discussed as an issue of lesbian history. Here, butchness is excavated as a simpler, easier life, one that must have existed: the condition of lesbian loneliness, then, can be blamed on a present, transgender bogeyman. The reality, though, as illustrated throughout this thesis, is that butches were the gendered enemy to womanhood of the past. This is why, for all that Hertzog’s article attempts to ask, “where the lesbians have gone?” she never really answers where they were. To do so would be to confront the actual past, not the imagined one: a past where butchness has always been a marginalized experience of gender, even within lesbian community.

Hertzog’s argument is not new, either in the larger history of attitudes toward butchness or in pop culture depictions of butchness. Her argument—that young butch lesbians are being lured away from womanhood by the temptation of transness—is remarkably similar to an argument made in Showtime’s The L Word, one of the most popular mainstream television shows about

151 Herzog, “Where Have All The Lesbians Gone?” Hamilton 60 lesbians to ever air on television (and the first to include an ensemble cast of lesbian characters) which ran from 2004-2009.152 The L Word’s depictions of butchness are few and far-between; the only initial main character that isn’t conventionally feminine is Shane, who’s best described as androgynous. The show later introduces Max, who originally identifies as a butch lesbian before transitioning early in his story arc. In his introduction, after moving to Los Angeles from a working-class upbringing in Illinois, Max is alienated from the group by virtue of his butch presentation and class status; when he asks Shane to help him move bags from the car, referring to the two of them as “us butches,” Shane’s girlfriend laughs and teases Shane by calling her a

“big butch.”153 This is one of the show’s only explicit mentions of butches, and it’s a principal site of alienation for Max in a group that is otherwise defined by lesbian (and to a much lesser extent, bisexual) identity.

When Max later comes out as a transgender man, his alienation from the group is only worsened, manifested in narratively structured transphobia (his fundraising for gender-affirming top surgery is paralleled with another character’s mastectomy to treat breast cancer that ultimately kills her, for example) and in transphobic rhetoric from his friends. One such speech comes from

Kit, ironically one of the only straight characters in a majority-queer cast, who says to Max: “You know, it just… it just saddens me to see so many of our strong butch girls… giving up their womanhood to be a man. You know, we're losing our warriors… our greatest women. And I don't wanna lose you.”154 Kit’s dialogue reads remarkably like Jocelyn MacDonald’s quote in Katie

152 Maya Salam, “The Very (Very) Slow Rise of Lesbianism on TV,” New York Times, November 29, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/29/arts/television/lesbian-tv-shows.html. 153 The L Word, Season 3, Episode 3, “Lobsters,” directed by Bronwen Hughes, written by Ilene Chaiken, featuring Daniela Sea, Kate Moennig, and Sarah Shahi. Aired January 22, 2006, on Showtime, https://www.showtime.com/#/play/125207. 154The L Word, Season 3 Episode 9, “Lead, Follow, or Get Out of the Way,” directed by Moises Kaufman, written by Ilene Chaiken, featuring Pam Grier and Daniela Sea, aired on March 5, 2006, on Showtime, https://www.showtime.com/#/play/125212. Hamilton 61

Hertzog’s article, nearly 15 years after this episode aired. Both display a patronizing transphobia towards transgender men, rooted in an investment in butch womanhood as a strawman. In order to do so, both construct butchness as inherently preferable to and distinct from transness, and in doing so, sanitize the history of repression and violence towards butch women, and distance themselves from any possible solidarity to be found in life experiences the two groups share. The temporal distance between these two sentiments only underscores the extent to which the idealized, imagined past of somehow acceptable butch womanhood is ever-present in this discourse but ultimately unfounded in fact. Butchness was historically constructed as a threat and is now constructed in this discourse as under threat, without an intervening moment of a true acceptance of butch womanhood that these arguments presuppose.

However, butchness is not only being resurrected from the past to further transphobia and division under false pretenses. Non-binary, queer artist Ria Brodell’s 2018 collection Butch Heroes is a particularly fascinating example of the contemporary desire to create a butch past. In Brodell’s work, “butch” is not a static, coherent identifier of a kind of womanhood (most of the people

Brodell paints lived before “butch” was a term, let alone one they may or may not have used).

Instead, butch is used as a lens of analysis for a variety of gender and sexual expressions and a means of constructing a shared, queer history: one connected to ideas of lesbian, transgender, and intersex identity, certainly, but not wholly the property of any of them. In their artist statement,

Brodell explains their use of the word:

… I have chosen the term “Butch” for my title because of its dual nature: it has been slung as an insult and used as a congratulatory recognition of strength. It has a history within the LGBTQIA community and is familiar to the cisgender, heterosexual community. In addition to the term’s traditional associations of being masculine in appearance or actions, Hamilton 62

I chose to use “Butch Heroes” to indicate people who were strong or brave in the way they lived their lives and challenged their societies’ strict gender roles.155 Brodell’s statement highlights the extent to which butch is an identity that is both ubiquitously understood by straight and queer audiences alike, and rife with contradictions in its position as both a historical insult and reclaimed label. However, Brodell doesn’t attempt to offer the viewer easy answers for how to square any of the contradictions of butch identity in their work. Butch is used only as a frame and never the explicit identifier in any of the works. A number of terms are used to describe some of Brodell’s subjects in the source material they cite in their references—

"female sodomy”, “hermaphrodite”, “homosexual”, “female husband”, “lesbian”, “berdache”,

“passing woman”—but none of those terms are used in the artist descriptions.156 Instead, Brodell refers to their subjects by their birth names and chosen names to assist in further research, and chooses pronouns that accord with their presentation at the time Brodell is writing about (or uses he/she or they, if unknown).157

The concept of “heroism” is also important for Brodell’s rendering of butchness. The subjects of their portraits are both constructed as heroes by the actions of their lives—sometimes through traditionally “heroic” acts like military service, or sometimes through the act of simply existing in hostile environments—but also in the method of portrayal themselves. Brodell paints each of the portraits in the style of a Catholic prayer cards, which depict the Virgin Mary, Jesus, or a saint and are a “common form of popular religious devotion” often passed out at funerals.158

For Brodell, who was raised Catholic, these prayer cards have personal resonance as “intimate”

155 Ria Brodell, Butch Heroes (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018), xii, https://books.google.com/books?id=onp8DwAAQBAJ. 156 Brodell, 67–77. 157 Brodell, xi. 158 Erin Hasinoff, Faith in Objects: American Missionary Expositions in the Early Twentieth Century, Contemporary Anthropology of Religion (Palgrave Macmillan US, 2011), 206, https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230339729. Hamilton 63 mementos shared in their family depicting role models and revered members of the church— designations often denied to queer people.159 This is especially poignant given the role that

Christianity often played in the deaths of some of Brodell’s subjects—Lisbetha Olsdotter, aka Mats

Ersson, for example, was decapitated by axe in 1697 for “mutating their sex, deceiving God and his order, and deceiving their fellow Christians.”160 If sainthood is a way to “provide the faithful with compelling contemporary models of heroic Christian virtue,”161 it’s powerful to see those who Christianity has wrought tremendous violence upon for their “deceptions” made holy and worthy of reverence.

The prayer card format—an inherent reverence for the people who they depict—is an important framing for the portraits themselves because they confer dignity upon every figure

Brodell paints. Brodell only paints real people in this collection, and the only times when many of the Butch Heroes are made visible in the public record is when they are arrested (and sometimes killed) for their gender transgressions. It’s worth noting that not all of Brodell’s subjects are depicted violently—for example, “Biawacheeitche or Woman Chief,”162 depicts her looking stoic in full tribal regalia, “Rosa Bonheur”163 is dressed as a painter in a field with relaxing cows, and

“Jones or Jonesie”164 stands smiling with her mango tree and dogs. Nevertheless, some of the only information Brodell has to construct an image of a number of their subjects is a violent one. While this is a true telling of these life stories, “there is something deeply troubling when the maimed or wounded butch or FTM body becomes the ultimate cultural anchor for the reality of butch or FTM

159 Brodell, Butch Heroes, xii. 160 Brodell, 10. 161 Kenneth L. Woodward, Making Saints: How The Catholic Church Determines Who Becomes A Saint, Who Doesn’t, And Why (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), 31. 162 Brodell, Butch Heroes, 31. 163 Brodell, 33. 164 Brodell, 53. Hamilton 64 suffering and existence.”165 In light of that well-taken criticism, Brodell’s depiction of violence in their paintings is fraught, but both the format of the prayer card and Brodell’s choices in their subject’s positioning maintains dignity for their subjects, despite the depictions of brutality on butch bodies.

Figure 2: Katherina Hetzeldorfer c. 1477 Germany One such image that exemplifies the balance between dignity and pain is the first portrait in Brodell’s published book of the portraits, “Katherina Hetzeldorfer,” who was drowed in 1477

“for a crime that did not yet have a name”166 (Figure 2). Katherina had been living with a woman, who he/she167 had described as a sister, in Speier, Germany, but word had spread in the community

165 Madelyn Detloff, “Gender Please, Without the Gender Police: Rethinking Pain in Archetypal Narratives of Butch, Transgender, and FTM Masculinity,” Journal of Lesbian Studies 10, no. 1–2 (2006): 96, https://doi.org/10.1300/J155v10n01_05. 166 Brodell, Butch Heroes, 2. 167 I am borrowing pronoun usage from Brodell’s artist descriptions. Hamilton 65 that their relationship was actually romantic and sexual in nature. Katherina was ultimately sentenced to death by drowning, “a particularly demeaning sentence reserved for women.”168 In

Brodell’s painting, Katherina is depicted in this moment of drowning, but in a pose of strength despite the circumstance. He/she is gazing directly at the viewer, taking up the majority of the frame, almost standing straight and tall. He/she also holding the large stone being used as a weight to drown him/her. Alongside Katherina is a red, leather “instrument”169 —a dildo—that Katherina used with his/her partners and was part of the evidence of his/her sexual aggression and gender deviance that was the grounds for his/her execution. Katherina is also wearing a tunic and leggings, short hair uncovered; a masculine dress despite a feminine execution. The card is rather haunting, and somewhat unreal: aside from a blue tinge, Katherina looks to be nearly alive and in control of his/her descent into the depths of the water.

168 Brodell, Butch Heroes, 2. 169 Brodell, 2. Hamilton 66

Figure 3: Catharina Linck aka Anastasius, c. 1687-1721 Prussia While many of the Butch Heroes portraits are largely realistic depictions of a person in a scene, often performing their jobs or posing with their partners, Brodell does employ this sense of unreality to bring dignity to some of the other subjects who met violent deaths. “Catherina Linck aka Anastasius” (Figure 3), a Prussian person who was beheaded and whose body was burned for sodomy, shares parallels to “Katherina Hetzeldorfer.” In this portrait, Anastasius holds his/her dildo (like Catherina, the leather “device” he/she used with his/her lovers was mentioned in the records of his/her crimes) and his/her own head in the other. Anastasius stands before a burning pile, representing the fire in which his/her body was burned. Again, Anastasius gazes directly at the viewer, despite holding his/her head in his/her hands.170

170 Brodell, 12. Hamilton 67

Both “Katherina Hetzeldorfer” and “Catherina Linck aka Anastasius” exemplify the way

Butch Heroes is a project that is equal parts excavation of history and an imagined past. The people that Brodell depicts are real and researched to be depicted accurately, but their narratives and images are used to tell stories of butch life and resilience. These two paintings are exemplifications of that point because they introduce a uniquely fantastical elements of life and strength even in an image of death, in comparison to the rest of the paintings in the collection, which is largely realistic.

Though he was writing about queer experimental literature, I find Tyler Bradway’s insights on queer fantasy relevant here: “fantasy is an idiom to grapple with the relations of power that demarcate the social possibilities of queerness—that, in some contexts, make queerness altogether impossible.”171 In the case of Hetzeldorfer and Anastasius, their queerness was quite literally socially impossible in their time; they were killed for it. In creating a fantastical representation of these violent deaths, Brodell does not “arrest the relations between fantasy and reality… because to do so would falsely close the gap between what exists, and what could exist, and what is not allowed to exist.”172 In other words, by blurring the lines between what occurred and what was quite impossible, Brodell is staking claim to an impossible queer dignity in the violent, dehumanizing deaths of these subjects. The search for past figures is not a neutral project: to search for these lost figures, to view them through a butch lens, is to bring them back to life, even in death, even if all we know is their death. The figures that are created are both real—they existed— but also not real: their histories are excavated and shaped for an urgent and political purpose. They

171 Tyler Bradway, Queer Experimental Literature: The Affective Politics of Bad Reading, Palgrave Studies in Affect Theory and Literary Criticism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan US, 2017), xlvii, https://books.google.com/books?id=HCwvvwEACAAJ. 172 Bradway, xlvii. Hamilton 68 tell a story of a lineage of butchness, one that is being constructed in the present for present purposes and projected backwards.

Ultimately, both the discussion of “lost lesbians” and Butch Heroes emphasizes the extent to which constructing a past and feeling ownership over that past remains an important aspect of discourse around contemporary butchness, from two contradictory perspectives: one that seeks to limit the definition of butchness in the face of the reality of its expansiveness, and one that seeks to honor the vastness of butch identity and see its reflections across history. In the next section of this chapter, I will turn to a television show that engages all of these themes, but through the lens of an individual navigating these warring perspectives, to mixed success.

Work in Progress: Reckoning with the Past, Looking Towards a Future

Work in Progress (2019) is a semi-autobiographical Showtime comedy series created by

Abby McEnany. McEnany is a Chicago-based improv comedian who produced the pilot to Work in Progress for Sundance, and it was later picked up by Showtime as a series.173 Work in Progress follows a fictionalized Abby (played by McEnany),174 as she navigates mental health issues

(suicidal ideation and OCD, primarily), as well as being a “fat, queer dyke” navigating her first relationship with a twenty-two-year-old trans man at age forty-five.175 McEnany, now in her fifties, modeled the story after her own experience dating her now ex-boyfriend, also a trans man. In this show, interestingly, the word butch is never actually uttered. However, in multiple interviews about Work In Progress, McEnany does identify herself—or at least her image—as butch, and

173 Libby Hill, “Abby McEnany Knows Exactly Who She Is and You Can Take Her Words for It — Awards Spotlight,” IndieWire (blog), May 22, 2020, https://www.indiewire.com/video/abby-mcenany-work-in-progress-awards- spotlight-1202233060/. 174 For the sake of clarity, I will refer to the real-life Abby McEnany by her full or last name and refer to her character as “Abby.” 175 Hill, “Abby McEnany Knows Exactly Who She Is and You Can Take Her Words for It — Awards Spotlight.” Hamilton 69

Abby is a semi-autobiographical character.176 The story Work in Progress tells is inextricably wrapped up in butchness, transness, and gender nonconformity. Thus, I argue that this series is a butch story, and one that has rarely been given voice to such a large or mainstream audience. Butch was a discursive lens through which we can interpret a story in Ria Brodell’s Butch Heroes, even if that is not made explicit in the text: butchness is present and referential, even when it is not an explicit identifier. That remains true not just in history, but in contemporary stories like Work in

Progress.

Work in Progress contains a number of contexts and themes that make it a unique and fascinating butch narrative. First is its position as a TV show on a prestige network: butch characters on screen remain few and far between, and when they do appear, they are often side characters in other narratives. Work in Progress is part of a growing body of butch protagonists on

TV—other notable examples include Lena Waithe’s Twenties (2020), Mae Martin’s Feel Good

(2020), Tig Notaro’s One Mississippi (2015), and arguably Gentleman Jack (2019)—but even this growth in representation is small and still very new.177 Work in Progress also airs directly after another new show focused on queer stories—the reboot of The L Word, The L Word: Generation

Q.178 The original show was criticized for many errors, one of which being representations of transness and gender nonconformity in Max—namely, that his character was routinely ridiculed by the narrative and other characters, and his portrayal of transmasculinity was both unrealistic

176 Rebecca Nicholson, “Abby McEnany: ‘When Guys Dream of Lesbians, They’re Not Thinking of Me,’” The Guardian, December 4, 2019, http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/dec/04/abby-mcenany-when-guys- dream-of-lesbians-theyre-not-thinking-of-me; Jude Dry, “Work in Progress: How Abby McEnany Made the Best Queer Show on TV,” IndieWire, January 26, 2020, https://www.indiewire.com/2020/01/work-in-progress-abby- mcenany-interview-showtime-lesbian-lgbt-1202206057/; Ari Shapiro, “In ‘Work In Progress,’ A Darkly Funny Coming-Of-Middle-Age,” NPR.org, December 13, 2019, https://www.npr.org/2019/12/13/787522751/in-work-in- progress-a-darkly-funny-coming-of-middle-age. 177 Lisa Selin Davis, “The Rise of Butch Leading Ladies on TV,” Shondaland, May 28, 2020, https://www.shondaland.com/inspire/a32689332/rise-of-butch-leading-ladies/. 178 Dry, “Work in Progress: How Abby McEnany Made the Best Queer Show on TV.” Hamilton 70 and played into stereotypes of masculine aggression.179 While Generation Q continues to be largely representing feminine lesbians, Work in Progress’s airing and simultaneous advertisement of the two shows demonstrate the extent to which butch stories are slowly but surely being viewed as worthwhile and important to center in emerging (or, in the case of Generation Q, re-emerging) queer media.

Work in Progress lends itself to a number of interesting sites of analysis—McEnany’s portrait of OCD and mental health in general in this show is complex—but for the purposes of the themes of this chapter, I am particularly interested in the way that Work in Progress engages in dialogue about butch experience, particularly within the LGBTQ community, as well as how the show engages with ideas of butch pasts—both Abby’s personal relationship history, and her relationship to changing ideas of lesbian identity over her lifetime—and envisions a future, through her relationship with a twenty-two year old transgender man named Chris and her ongoing mental health struggles. Work in Progress asks the question: how do we move on from the past that haunts us? What does moving forward look like? Who must we become to fit into a positive vision of the future?

Work in Progress’s central relationship, between Abby and her boyfriend, Chris, is fertile ground to explore how individuals navigate ever shifting and fluid notions of queer, lesbian, and transgender identification and community. One notable episode fits into a staple of butch and transgender narratives—what Jack Halberstam calls “the bathroom problem.” Bathrooms, he argues, are a site of extremely public and often violent binary gendering, and transgressors are perceived as a threat: “Not-man and not-woman, the gender-ambiguous bathroom user is also not

179 Riese Bernard, “A Letter to Ilene Chaiken From Trans Computer Search Champion Max Sweeney,” Autostraddle (blog), March 2, 2009, https://www.autostraddle.com/a-letter-to-mama-chaiken-from-ftm-computer-search- champion-mighty-max-sweeney/. Hamilton 71 androgynous or in-between; this person is gender-deviant.”180 Though Halberstam made these reflections in 1997, over twenty years later Work in Progress devotes an entire episode to the ways in which Chris and Abby navigate this extremely gendered space, as a trans man and a butch- presenting woman.

In this episode, most of the plot is moved forward at moments when Abby needs to use a public restroom—first, at a restaurant, where she receives an “are you in the right bathroom?” look from a woman next to her at the sinks at a restaurant, and Abby defensively pitches up her voice to establish her belonging in the space. She recounts the event to her sister, who is surprised—

“that still happens?”—to which Abby assures her that it does.181 The bathroom harassment that

Abby continues to receive is also complicated by her OCD, which causes her to wash her hands obsessively for lengthy periods of time, extending her presence in a fraught space while at a particularly vulnerable moment for her.

In a flashback to a Pride event—it’s undated, but she’s with her previous ex-girlfriend,

Melanie, who she dated nearly a decade prior to the events of the show in 2019—Work in Progress demonstrates how specific her experience is to both her neurodivergence and her gender presentation. Melanie is conventionally feminine, and while she is Black, Work in Progress doesn’t explore the extent to which her public display of femininity might be mediated through that experience. At Pride, Abby needs to use a restroom and Melanie suggests one at a nearby bar, the smell of which makes Abby anxious; nonetheless, she capitulates but asks Melanie to stay nearby. Melanie quickly wanders off with friends. Abby emerges from the restroom and a woman

180 Halberstam, Female Masculinity, 21. 181 Work in Progress, Season 1 Episode 4, “161, 153, 137, 122, 106, 104, 102 (We’re Still Counting Almonds.),” directed by Tim Mason, written by Abby McEnany and Tim Mason, featuring Abby McEnany and Karin Anglin, aired on December 29, 2019, on Showtime, https://www.showtime.com/#/play/3475333. Hamilton 72 outside tells her that it’s a women’s restroom, and she can’t be there, to which Abby has to emphatically reaffirm her womanhood and place in the bar. She’s upset at Melanie for leaving her alone and not understanding how much anxiety this situation caused her, particularly because this is a lesbian space: “I was just yelled at for being a man by a lesbian in a bar packed with fucking lesbians in the middle of the biggest lesbian-fest of the year in the middle of lesbianville. Even up here, I can’t use the fucking bathroom.”182 This scene emphasizes the extent to which Abby’s butch experience was fundamentally different than her experience being a woman dating another woman in a lesbian space. Even within her relationship with someone of ostensibly the same gender,

Abby’s gender-nonconforming expression and Melanie’s lack of reflexive understanding of that experience creates conflict and leaves Abby feeling othered and alone. The bathroom, by nature of its coercive gendering, makes visible the ways in which even queer women and lesbians are capable of imposing gender expectations on butch women. Abby is unable, and does not want, to

“pass” as a man, despite others gendering her that way, as a gender-nonconforming woman, “the notion of passing is singularly unhelpful.”183 Even in a bathroom in a lesbian bar, the gender marker on the door—the gender order of the cisgender, straight world outside the confines of a

Pride parade—proves more powerful than any notions of community solidarity.

In some ways, this makes Abby’s relationship with Chris one far more based on a notion of same-gender attraction than Abby’s relationship with Melanie. While Chris is a man and Abby is steadfast in her identity as a woman, the two of them find mutual understanding in their struggles to be safe and gendered correctly when they move through the world. After Abby’s bathroom altercation at the restaurant with her sister at the beginning of the episode, she recounts the

182 Work in Progress, “161, 153, 137, 122, 106, 104, 102 (We’re Still Counting Almonds.).” 183 Halberstam, Female Masculinity, 21. Hamilton 73 experience to Chris. She expresses her frustration that she “[hates] being seen as dangerous.”184

Chris is able to relate to her without any further explanation, and even offers practical advice to

Abby about an application he uses to locate single-stall bathrooms to try to avoid harassment. Here, disentangling butchness from lesbianism enables her to experience a relationship that is more affirming of her experience as a “queer dyke.”

The final bathroom scene in the episode is perhaps the most interesting, because rather than focus on the interiority of Abby’s particular struggles with bathroom politics as a butch woman the way that Abby experiences it, the audience is directed to confront that Abby is a deeply unreliable narrator. Heretofore the emphasis has been on Abby’s experience and the pain she feels from people making assumptions about her and mistreating her; in this scene, where two men at a

Dolly Parton concert think Abby is a man and follow her into the bathroom, we see the extent to which Abby is not immune from making her own, self-motivated judgements and lashing out at others when she is in pain. After the men follow her in, Abby is asked to leave the bathroom by another patron even after she insists that she’s a woman, so she calls the other woman ignorant and begins to complain about how much more difficult her life is than everyone else’s in the bathroom. At every turn, another person comes out of a bathroom stall to challenge Abby’s sense of her own victimhood—first, when a trans woman emerges Abby tells her that her life “is worse than everybody else’s” because of her OCD.185 A beat after, a girl in a wheelchair emerges and

Abby backtracks and says she must be the exception, only for the girl in the wheelchair to correct

Abby’s assumption that her life must be bad, and Abby assumes that that’s because “nobody hates her on sight” because “everybody feels sorry for her.”186 The girl in the wheelchair responds,

184 Work in Progress, “161, 153, 137, 122, 106, 104, 102 (We’re Still Counting Almonds.).” 185 Work in Progress. 186 Work in Progress. Hamilton 74 telling Abby that “disabled people are not the yardstick to measure how much shittier your life could be.”187 Abby remains undeterred, further projecting onto others in the bathroom: next a nun, for her adherence to the Catholic faith (which Abby has been hurt by), and tells everyone to “read a book,” only to be told that two of the people in the bathroom are librarians.188 Again and again,

Abby is confronted with the fact that her pain does not exempt her from hurting others, but she continues to externalize her pain and sense of victimhood.

While none of the confrontations Abby has with others in the bathroom are explicitly about

Abby’s race or the race of any of the other bathroom patrons, Abby’s relationship to victimhood as a white queer person provides an important lens into the construction of her own image of her social position. Psychotherapist and researcher Damien W. Riggs posits that many white queer people approach the intersection of these two identities with a “but”: “I am white and middle-class but I am queer too,” thus using queerness to, on some level, absolve themselves from the privileges that their whiteness and class status affords them because of the victimization of their queerness.189

Abby is engaging in a particular form of this when she is confronted with other kinds of disadvantage experienced by others but continues to reinforce her own victimhood by virtue of her particular intersection of butchness and mental illness. Riggs states that a more productive formulation of the aforementioned phrase is to flip the clauses: “I am queer, but I am also white and middle-class.” In doing so, this phrase “throws into question the category queer as one that automatically evokes an unqualified experience of marginalization.”190 In the Dolly Parton concert bathroom scene, the viewer is also being compelled to flip the script because this is the first of the

187 Work in Progress. 188 Work in Progress. 189 Damien W. Riggs, “On Accountability: Towards a White Middle-Class Queer ‘Post Identity Politics Identity Politics,’” Ethnicities 10, no. 3 (2010): 345. 190 Riggs, 355. Hamilton 75 bathroom scenes where the audience is being compelled to view Abby as something other than the one that is solely marginalized in these encounters. She is portrayed as being harmed by virtue of her gender presentation, but also as capable of causing harm when weaponizing her particular marginalization against others who are marginalized in different ways.

Both the first and last episode of the first season—all that has aired at the time of writing, though another is slated for production—frame the themes of reckoning with the past well. During

Abby’s first date with Chris, who becomes her boyfriend, Abby spots Julia Sweeney, the comedian who played Pat O'Neill Riley on Saturday Night Live in the early 1990s. In this ongoing sketch

(and eventual movie), the central joke is that Pat’s character is ambiguously gendered, with short, dark curly hair, thick-framed glasses, and a button up shirt tucked into khakis. Every other character in the sketches are trying desperately to discern Pat’s gender. Pat seems oblivious to these attempts or laughs almost childishly. Even the theme song to these sketches, with the refrain

“it’s Pat,” substitute a demeaning “it” pronoun when referring to Pat.191 In short, the depiction of gender nonconformity in these sketches is offensive and dehumanizing, in both premise and execution. Abby reflects on this to Chris when she spots Julia Sweeney across the bar (a moment that highlights their age gap—at 22, Chris was born after Sweeney’s entire tenure on SNL):

Abby: She played Pat. [Abby hunches over, making a gurgling sound and tapping her fingers together in an impression of Pat] Horrible… that woman over there ruined my life… Chris: You should go talk to her. Abby: I’m not going to go talk to her! Chris: Go tell her that she ruined your life! Get it over with and be done!

191 Saturday Night Live, Season 17, Episode 3, “Kirstie Alley/Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers,” directed by Dave Wilson, aired on October 12, 1991 on NBC. Hamilton 76

Abby: How do you see that going? Like, “Hey, Ms. Sweeney, my name is Abby and your character Pat that you played, who nobody could tell if it was a man or a woman, ruined my life. Have a good night.” for years after, people would always say that I looked like Pat.192 Here, Abby articulates how much Julia Sweeney’s characterization of Pat as a punch line was projected onto her, as she moved through the world as someone who was also routinely misgendered. Abby both holds onto that resentment—for years, people used Pat as a way to other her—but also initially refuses to attempt to resolve those feelings by confronting Julia.

Later in the episode, Abby flashes back to one of these moments at a party where a man harassed and embarrassed her using the “Pat” comparison, showing the viewer how viscerally humiliating and dehumanizing the Pat jokes were when they were another person’s only frame of reference to understand Abby’s gender expression.193 Back at the bar, Chris ultimately does walk over to Julia and talk to her, causing Abby to pass out in anxiety over the confrontation. When she comes to, Julia apologizes to Abby for the harm that Pat caused, and the two of them ultimately strike up a friendship.

This first episode is important for a number of reasons: it sets up Julia Sweeney and the character of “Pat” as a framing device, and it sets up Chris’s role in Abby’s life and their relationship. Abby had—rightfully—been hurt by Julia Sweeney’s character and the license it gave others to target her; however, Abby’s general fear of confrontation and feeling of being stuck in her life meant that she fully intended to internalize that resentment and never resolve it. Chris breaks her of that cycle. Chris ushers in an era of newfound openness and desire to grow for Abby, partially because his youth makes him far less burdened by the aggregate of his experiences, the

192 Work in Progress, Season 1 Episode 1, “180 Almonds,” directed by Tim Mason, written by Abby McEnany and Tim Mason, featuring Abby McEnany, Theo Germaine, and Julia Sweeney, aired on December 8, 2019, on Showtime, https://www.showtime.com/#/play/3475330. 193 Work in Progress, “180 Almonds.” Hamilton 77 way that Abby feels at age forty-five. This transformation in Abby is necessary for her character arc in general, but also for the resolution of the Julia Sweeney arc at the end of the season.

Figure 4: Julia Sweeney as Julia dressed as Pat (left) and Abby McEnany as Abby (right), where Abby confronts Julia over trying to "rehabilitate" Pat In the final episode of Work in Progress, Julia has invited Abby to her live show, recording an episode of This American Life. Abby, amidst her own crisis over crossing Chris’s only boundary and learning his deadname194 (and subsequently hiding that she knew from him), almost doesn’t attend. She meets Julia in the alley outside the venue, only to discover in horror that Julia is once again dressed as Pat (Figure 4). Julia offers this explanation:

Julia: Because we’re taking it back! Everyone though that the joke about Pat was that you didn’t know if it was a man or a woman! But we’re bringing Pat back to make it clear that Pat has evolved. Pat is no longer oblivious to other people’s discomfort. Pat has become aware…but get this! Pat doesn’t care what other people think. [snickers] Pat walks through

194 A deadname is the name a transgender person was assigned at birth. Hamilton 78

life with pride, with a smile on, and doesn’t give two fricks what the haters say. What do you think, Abby? I fixed Pat!195 Julia, here, is seeking to reclaim the character she created out of an experience that wasn’t hers to begin with, without actually asking Abby, who lived the ambiguously gendered experience that

Pat offensively portrayed, whether this character was worth reviving in the first place. The viewer doesn’t ultimately see how Julia purports to have “fixed” Pat—instead, we hear Abby’s plea to

Julia:

Abby: No. No, Julia, I don’t want you to fix Pat. I want you to bury Pat. You’ve got your whole career from a character that makes my life the butt of a joke. Julia: No, Abby. We’re reclaiming Pat. Abby: Stop saying “we”! Who is “we”? Julia: You and me! You opened my eyes and showed me what it’s like to have dignity and just owning who you are. I think Pat could be a progressive icon.196 Julia still, clearly, does not understand that assuming the Pat costume and knowing a gender- nonconforming person is not tantamount to living this experience in her day-to-day life. The figure of Pat, in other words, cannot be rehabilitated because Pat was never a truly first-person perspective: Pat’s rehabilitation only serves to rehabilitate a cisgender, straight comedian’s reputation. This point is underscored by the final incident of the scene, where a man emerges from another door in the alley, sees Julia in the Pat costume, and calls out “Hey, it’s Pat!” before doing a Pat impression remarkably similar to Abby’s in the first episode of the season upon seeing Julia for the first time.197 The image of Pat is tainted, still a subject of ridicule, because no retrospective

195Work in Progress, Season 1 Episode 1, “3, 2, 1,” directed by Tim Mason, written by Abby McEnany and Tim Mason, featuring Abby McEnany, Theo Germaine and Julia Sweeney, aired on January 26, 2020, on Showtime, https://www.showtime.com/#/play/3475417. 196 Work in Progress, “3, 2, 1.” 197 Work in Progress. Hamilton 79 context can erase what Pat was. To attempt to rewrite that history—rather than moving forward, allowing that character to be buried—only furthers the harm that that character caused.

Abby’s character is an imperfect mouthpiece for this message. While this scene was a moment of triumph for her character, allowing conflict in order to stand up for herself and her dignity, the next scene is one of the darkest. After disrespecting Chris’s boundaries multiple times (in finding out his deadname, and her subsequent behavior after Chris becomes aware of this), he comes to Abby to end their relationship. In a moment of desperation, Abby screams out

Chris’s deadname at him as he walks away, so he “can feel as broken as [she] feels.”198 In this scene, she is denying Chris a similar dignity she demanded of Julia—she wanted Julia to “bury”

Pat, Chris asked Abby to respect the “burial” of his deadname. Everyone fails each other, and the season is over.

All of the conflicts in Work in Progress are made especially interesting with the understanding that this is a work of autofiction—which literary theorist Marjorie Worthington describes as a form of autobiographical storytelling that, though “distinct from the memoir genre…draws upon the truth-telling traditions and expectations (not to mention the current popularity) of memoir to achieve its rhetorical purpose.”199 These texts are both true in the sense that they are self-referential, but also contain elements of fiction because the self-inserts are ultimately characters placed in fictional situations. What is true is ultimately “adulterated by constant, if deceptive, connection to the world outside themselves.”200 Autofiction is also an important lens to consider this work through, because that has become somewhat of a staple of butch storytelling. Three of the four other, notable examples of butches on television that I

198 Work in Progress. 199 Worthington, “Memoir vs. Autofiction as the Story of Me vs. the Story of ‘Me,’” 147. 200 Worthington, 149. Hamilton 80 referenced previously—Twenties, One Mississippi, and Feel Good—are all semi- autobiographical.201 So, too, is the subject of the second chapter of this work, Stone Butch Blues.

In the afterword to the novel, Feinberg wrote, “Never underestimate the power of fiction to tell the truth.”202 A more critical lens of autofiction, and Work in Progress, cautions us that we should also be wary of overestimating the power of truth-telling in fiction, particularly when those fictions are purposely constructed to blur those lines.

To that point in Work in Progress, Abby and Julia are, in some ways, particularly unflattering versions of themselves in this narrative. Speaking on character Abby’s “My life is harder than anyone else’s” line in the Dolly Parton bathroom scene, McEnany said, “I hope people know that I don't really believe that. That's my character at a really low point and not being a very good person.”203 It’s a fascinating relationship to ownership over self-fashioned characters and what they’re trying to say about the real world, outside of the fictionalized, just- adjacent one. In this case, McEnany distances herself from her fictionalized counterpart’s worst behaviors: it is when Abby is being not-so-good that McEnany draws the line between her character and her actual self.

Real-life Julia Sweeney, however, has a more complicated relationship to her fictionalized counterpart. Sweeney portrays a version of herself that is perhaps quite close to how she really feels: Julia is sorry for the hurt that Pat has caused but is unwilling to bury the

201 Davis, “The Rise of Butch Leading Ladies on TV.” 202 Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues, 2003, 304. 203 Jeffrey Masters, “Showtime Star Abby McEnany: ‘Dykes Can Do Whatever the F--- They Want,’” December 17, 2019, https://www.advocate.com/television/2019/12/17/showtime-star-abby-mcenany-dykes-can-do-whatever-f- they-want. Hamilton 81 character. Sweeney, when reflecting on Pat even after working on Work in Progress, is still unsure whether she owes a real apology for Pat:

I'm obviously still struggling with it. I don't want to automatically offer an apology without really feeling like I did something wrong. And I'm not sure I did something wrong. But I also acknowledge that there was a byproduct of what I did that made a certain group of people maybe feel bad. I need to understand what the apology really is. Is it that I should have known then not to do a character like that?204 What, then, is the conclusion we should draw from Sweeney’s portrayals of Julia and Pat in

Work in Progress? In this statement, Sweeney clearly wants to be genuine in her apology for Pat, if she is to give one, and acknowledges harm that was done, but she is unwilling to extend that to truly decry the source of the harm she acknowledges that she caused. In the show, Abby (and by extension, Abby McEnany) is able to articulate her feelings about Pat as a character and express a need for Julia to understand her. Because of the nature of autofiction bearing such striking resemblance to reality, it’s easy to think that Julia Sweeney’s participation in this scene—where her refusal to actually understand Abby and denounce Pat is portrayed quite negatively—is an apology for Pat. However, real-life Julia Sweeney also won’t make that apology, stating in the same interview: “I am also not going to apologize for Pat…I thought it was a pretty great character and I’m glad I did it.”205 It begs the question: to what extent does autofiction illuminate interior truths? Does that narrative distance created by fictionalizing oneself hinder accountability? The answer remains unclear.

However, as a mode of butch storytelling, the impulse towards autofiction is understandable, and still powerful. As Worthington writes:

204 Bill Radke, “Julia Sweeney, Is pro-Androgyny but Not Quite Ready to Apologize about Pat,” January 16, 2020, https://www.kuow.org/stories/julia-sweeney-is-pro-androgyny-but-not-quite-ready-to-apologize-about-pat. 205 Radke. Hamilton 82

Part of the effect of the autofictional novel is that it demonstrates the continued relevance of the author, despite theoretical arguments about his (and sometimes her) death. Far from being dead to these novels, the author is the protagonist. Furthermore, by requiring a constant adjustment and readjustment of reader expectations as to what is factual about the author-character and what is fictional, autofiction requires a continual recognition of the presence and authority of the actual author.206 Butches, as I have demonstrated throughout this thesis, are so often talked about and referenced to; far rarer are actual depictions of butchness from those who live that experience. The relevance of the butch voice is continually underscored when the reader (or, in the case of television, viewer) is not allowed to “kill the author” in their reading of the text: autofiction demands that the life of the author, the butch voice, is central to the experience of the work.

Butchness is structurally living, refusing to be construed as a relic of the past. Butchness speaks through the text as much as it is spoken about. However complicated the message, the form guides the conversation.

Conclusion

Work in Progress is slated to get another season, but the narrative as-is poses important perspectives—and warnings—for constructing butch futures. Abby is a complicated protagonist, a woman trapped by her past. When she is at her best, she is surprisingly flexible, accommodating, and open to others. When she is at her worst, she is vindictive and self-centered.

In Abby’s internal conflict, I would argue that we see a parallel discourse to negotiations of a butch past I discussed in the first section of this chapter. Work in Progress is as much a story of

Abby’s journey to find purpose in her future as it is Abby learning to make peace with her past including the pain and trauma that is inherent to a butch narrative. Like Katie Hertzog and

Jocelyn MacDonald, Abby does have a pattern of weaponizing her past to harm. Sometimes that

206 Worthington, “"Memoir vs. Autofiction as the Story of Me vs. the Story of ‘Me,’” 165. Hamilton 83 is directed at others, like Chris, or passerby in the bathroom scene at the Dolly Parton concert.

Often, that pain is weaponized to hurt herself, through the self-destruction inherent to lashing out at those close to her. Hertzog and MacDonald weaponize butch pain is with the intention of privileging that hurt over the hurt experienced by trans people, which is distinct from Abby’s intent; yet that is exactly her impact when she hurls Chris’s deadname at him during their breakup scene. While she is gender nonconforming, she is not trans and does not have the particular pain of a deadname, and she wields that against Chris when he needed understanding—when Abby could have chosen understanding.

Butchness, as evidenced by the conflicts chapter, is going through its own reckoning in culture at this point in time. This chapter has focused on only a fraction of these discourses, namely on how people have chosen to engage with problematic pasts when constructing visions of themselves and their communities—a practice that can be wielded for solidarity or division.

What seems abundantly clear to me, though, is that this is a practice that shows no sign of disappearing. Though it has taken many forms, gender nonconformity and lesbian and queer identity are inextricable from each other. Whether in active identification or as a discursive frame, questions of butch and femme identity and experience—and all of the gendered, racialized, and class-based conflicts that these identities and concepts engage with, have been pivotal in the last century of queer history, and remain important in visions of the future.

Hamilton 84

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