In Search of a Rare Queer Voice: Hannah Levene on Butch Lesbian Literature

I have long searched for butch in writing. I pick up The Well of Loneliness every few years and cry each time the horse dies. I am working my way slowly through the thicket of Gertrude Stein, relinquishing understanding for something more like knowing. I have read Nightwood , Djuna Barnes’ ghostly evocation of a woman untamed who, if we squint through the modernism, can be seen wearing tailored clothes. I have fallen for Sarah Schulman’s smart dykes starting with Lila Futuransky in Girls, Visions and Everything and followed those who took up her mantel of adventurers through lesbian boyhood to Ali Liebegott, Cha-Ching’s Theo and her world of “sirma’amsirs,” and Lynn Breedlove’s lovable rogue Jim in God Speed , dedicated to The Hags. Who I am really searching for, book to book to book, is the butch who carries the 1950s with her—maybe she keeps it in her back pocket, maybe it is knotted into her tie, maybe it’s just in the look she gives you. I have read Bryher’s Development and Two Selves and heard in Nancy’s voice the same needs Leslie Feinberg writes for Jess Goldberg in bar butch novel par excellence, Stone Butch Blues. In 1950s America, Jess and her comrades need their “sleeves rolled up, our hair slicked back, in order to live through it” and in 1920s England, Nancy sought “[b]reeches, short hair and freedom.” For both characters, butch is a quest they are on; to live life butchly so as to inhabit their own skin comfortably, and to be a worthy member of a scene which enables that comfort. The butch narrative is different from the individualistic coming-out novel or the bildungsroman in that the revelation is not of the self but of a scene; the young queer heads out not to find themselves, but to find themselves amongst others. Nancy grapples with the same question I grapple with, the relationship between butch and writing. She says: “To win freedom I must write a book.” Freedom comes from short hair and breeches just as it comes from writing a book, the two […]

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