this was originally posted in response to an ask I received. since then, I’ve cleaned it up and added some images for reference. the original ask has done the rounds already, but this revised version is far better.
a reader sent me this question:
why do butches love button-up shirts so much? does business casual/slightly dressy attire have some historical value within the lesbian community or is it just widely considered A Look by butches everywhere?
yes it does – in a few different ways.
partially, it springs from the bar culture of mid-century american lesbian life and the lesbian clubs in europe. many butches of the time were working class. going out to the gay bars was an opportunity to dress up – not just dress up, but butch up. to turn out as fine and handsome as possible, as their authentic selves, in an environment where they were desirable and essential. at a time when other working class women could barely afford one nice dress and the social pressure to gender conform was even more immense, for a butch to have dressy men’s clothes and a place to wear them was affirming of identity and personhood. black studs in particular embraced men’s high fashion and were often in full three-piece suits.
1940s (USA)
USA, 1920s
France, 1930s
France, 1930s
France, 1960s
USA, 1940s
USA, 1940s
France, 1930s
USA, 1940s
USA, 1930s
USA, 1930s
wealthy lesbians in american and british society at the same time and in earlier decades were also able, through their class privilege, to build small private networks. behind closed doors, dressing in men’s clothing was enjoyed and there are some photographs that exist documenting this. these include some of the earliest photos of gender non-conforming lesbians. radclyffe hall was one such lesbian whose wealth enabled her to eventually dress in men’s clothing full time without censure.
Radclyffe Hall with longtime lover Una Troubridge
Radclyffe Hall
Radclyffe Hall
by contrast, a working class butch may have instead been a “passing woman” in order to dress and live as was natural to her rather than having to conform. passing women spent their whole lives as men. sometimes, even their wives did not know they were women until their death.
Billy Tipton, a “passing woman” of the early twentieth century
or at least – they said they didn’t!
male impersonators – “mashers” – were also popular with audiences at the turn of the century in music halls and, later, nightclubs. the novelty was in seeing a woman – considering the extremely strict gender roles of the time, which were also particularly restrictive for women – imitating male mannerisms, speech and dress. incidentally, these performances were often satirical and parodying, undermining the “dominant sex” for everyone to laugh at. male impersonators often found popularity amongst lesbians (some were lesbians themselves) and the ‘perfect illusion’ they delivered on stage no doubt helped create aspirational desire in butches and gender non-conforming women in the audience.
Victorian Masher & Actress
Lily Elise and Adrienne Augarde
Gladys Bentley
Peggy Pierce
Ella Wesner
Vesta Tilley
Hetty King
Victorian Mashers
the social and status role fine men’s clothes carry have a role to play too – men are often presented at their most desirable when they are turned out to the nines in a good suit or tuxedo. for a butch, who does not identify with the ways women are commonly presented as desirable, this is an avenue through which they can feel and be so that is true to who they are.
and, I’m sure many will agree, part of the gut-dropping, knee-weakening erotic impact of butches is the fact they are so completely different to what we’re told to expect women to be. seeing them – and them seeing themselves – presenting as dapper and refined and stylish is a sincerely heady experience (not the only one when it comes to butches of course…). for those of us who are attracted to what was once commonly referred to in our community as “female masculinity”, they show us all the exciting things women can be when they defy the boundaries set to us. a butch in a man’s button-down or a suit is especially brazen and alluring in that regard. and clothes have always had a role to play in self-image due to the significance they hold in society and culture. feeling good in what we’re wearing can be a huge confidence booster. many butches experience discomfort and misery having to wear conventional girls’ clothing growing up. that autonomy of choice is powerful.
Louise, 1940s
unknown, 1900
1910
Anna Moor and Elsie Dale, 1900
ritual is important too – there is a ritual in getting ready to leave the house, especially when we’re dressing up. many gender conforming women take pleasure in the rituals we enact as we dress – it is soothing and satisfying. so it’s unsurprising that butches would also enjoy the ritual of dressing. there is a lot of ritual to dressing in clothes assigned male. repurposed by a butch, that ritual becomes self-actualisation.
there are many other elements of being butch and butchness that have similar significance of course. but this is one.
african-american lesbians had a strong presence in the bar scene and had a vivid butch-fem culture of their own. however, in collecting photos for this piece, I was unable to find many examples of black butches and studs attending in the bars to further illustrate this aspect of history. the book ‘boots of leather, slippers of gold’ is an extensive history of butch-fem culture in the 1940s and 1950s and is inclusive of black butches and fems’ presence and stories.
it’s interesting learning which homophobic ideas are confusing and unfamiliar to the next generation. for example, every once in a while i’ll see a post going around expressing tittering surprise at someone’s claim that gay men have hundreds of sexual partners in their lifetimes. while these posts often have a snappy comeback attached, they send a shiver down my spine because i remember when those claims were common, when you’d see them on the news or read them in your study bible. and they were deployed with a specific purpose — to convince you not just that gay men were disgusting and pathological, but that they deserved to die from AIDS. i saw another post laughing at the outlandish idea that gay men eroticize and worship death, but that too was a standard line, part and parcel of this propaganda with the goal of dehumanizing gay men as they died by the thousands with little intervention from mainstream society.
which is not to say that not knowing this is your fault, or that i don’t understand. i’ll never forget sitting in a classroom with my high school gsa, all five of us, watching a documentary on depictions of gay and bi people in media (off the straight and narrow [pdf transcript] — a worthwhile watch if your school library has it) when the narrator mentioned “the stereotype of the gay psycho killer.” we burst into giggles — how ridiculous! — then turned to our gay faculty advisors and saw their pale, pained faces as they told us “no, really. that was real” and we realized that what we’d been laughing at was the stuff of their lives.
it’s moving and inspiring to see a new generation of kids growing up without encountering these ideas. it’s a good thing. but at the same time, we have to pass on the knowledge of this pain, so we’re not caught unawares when those who hate us come back with the oldest tricks in the book.
Even in the 90’s I met people who believed, with the utmost sincerity and a sense of sheer terror, that gay people were agents of Satan who chose to become gay so they could deliberately spread STD’s, deliberately die of AIDs as part of their “fetish” and deliberately offend god into accelerating the end of the world. This does sound like absurd cartoonish nonsense to most people just a little younger than me but I heard it and worse growing up. Millions of people completely, totally believed that kind of thing with the most dire certainty. Today’s lizardman hollow earth anti-vaccine theories actually kind of pale in comparison.
That is what LGBT people were up against not long ago and the remnants of that fantastical-sounding hysteria and fanaticism are not only still here but regaining power again in the U.S. pretty rapidly.
…and I don’t think people should forget that for all I just described and all OP just described, the hatred for trans people was several times worse. Their very existence was treated as UNSPEAKABLE by even the Satanic HIV Apocalypse theorists. This is why it’s so bizarre and ridiculous to see people today whining about “PC culture” like that’s the problem, like people who were condemned as loathsome hellspawn within most of their own lifetimes somehow have it “too good” practically overnight.
do you have any idea what the AIDS funerals were like back then
I will harp on this until the day I die. It’s not information that people have nowadays both because it’s not really needed – thank GOD – and it’s been erased – not so cool.
pastors would take payment to perform the ceremony and then not show up. crematoriums would sometimes refuse to handle the bodies; funeral homes were no better, and my dad once walked in on a mortician dumping rubbing alcohol all over himself after he’d BEEN IN THE SAME ROOM as the body of one of my father’s dead friends. the funerals were held in people’s basements, the very very few churches at funeral homes willing, meeting halls, and in the homes of lesbians, who were some of the most steadfast allies during that time period. The few straight allies pitched in where they could – like that one woman who buried a lot of them herself, in her own cemetery, because their families wouldn’t come claim the bodies – but it was awful.
my dad was a reformed catholic but he knew the words and twice he had to perform the funerals to lay these people to rest because he was the most qualified. I stood next to him as he tried not to cry over his dead friends and to let them rest in peace. I watched my mother, at the back of wherever she was, quietly sobbing, and her lesbian friends who had ACTUALLY watched the person in question die, still comforting her.
I got told by other adults that my entire family was going to hell because we deigned to care for queer people (and my dad especially, as a nurse, deigned to “waste” his knowledge and time and energy on easing suffering).
I was six years old. Freddie Mercury hadn’t even died yet.
recently a friend and I formed a queer social group/activism group and some older gay men came. And they cried, because, and I quote
“This is how it started, back then. we just got together, ten or twelve of us, and decided we were going to do something about it. And we made it out, despite everything, despite AIDS, despite the stigma. And you will too.”
And I had to respond, because I was little, but I was THERE for that, and I grabbed his hands and told him that his history is our history and we need to learn it.
we need to remember. the dead, the living, and their stories.
if you know an older queer person, inquire if they’d be interested in writing down their memoirs. If they’re not writers but want to tell the story, hit me up – I am, and I am absolutely willing to do a living memory.
they’re the only history books we have.
THEY ARE THE ONLY HISTORY BOOKS WE HAVE! It’s so important to record them at last.
Because lgbt+ history hasn’t been recorded, nor told forward by others. What we learn we learn from morgues, criminal records etc. Only ‘unlucky’ persons have been recorded in any ways and most of happy couples, lives and tales have been lost to history as they were not spoken about.
okay listen, i get what you guys are saying about the importance of listening to older lgbt people, obviously, that’s very right!
but you guys gotta know… they are NOT “the only history books we have.” because… we have actual history books. just because they are rarely taught in schools does not mean they don’t exist!
i’ve been keeping a list of all the lgbt books i want to read or reread, which are mostly history, and it is, at this moment, 239 books long. and that’s excluding quite a few that i was less interested in.
obviously, it can’t cover everything; obviously, it is skewed toward white american experiences; obviously, we should always be supplementing it by talking to older people in our community as much as we can. but it does us no favors whatsoever to pretend that all the knowledge in these books is lost to history, existing only in individuals’ minds, when actually so many people have taken great pains to write it down and make it available for us to explore!
so yes, meet older people and talk to them and take them seriously! but also please, i beg of you, read a book.
p.s. a note because i regret not making this clear enough in my original post: there is absolutely nothing wrong with gay men having many consenting sexual partners! homophobes’ statistics are obviously falsified for bigoted purposes, but that doesn’t mean those gay men who do have large numbers of partners are any less deserving of dignity and life, and they too deserve our defense.
I agree with all the above, but also if you are someone who wants to record history or hear more oral histories there are a few oral history archives dedicated to doing this already! It’s possible to engage in that history right now:
Here are all the transcripts for the NYC Trans Oral History Project
Here’s the ACT UP oral History Project which has videos and transcripts
Here’s a list of a bunch of known oral history projects
And this is the podcast Making Gay History, which is taped interviews done for the book of the same name (with a bit of context added beforehand)
Here are some cool gals looking mighty dapper! You can click on each photo for names and here’s some info on each fabulous woman:
Lily Elsie: English actress during Edwardian era, famous for being in many musicals and operettas
Josephine Baker: French bisexual actress, singer, and dancer who rose to prominence in the 1920s, refused to perform for segregated audiences, active with the French Resistance during WWII and the Civil Rights movement in the 50s
Dorothy Arzner: American lesbian film director who was the only female director in Hollywood during the 1930s, created the first boom mike for the Clara Bow film “The Wild Party” (1929)
Dorothy Mackaill: British-American actress who was involved in the Ziegfeld Follies, also notable for her silent-film roles
Daphne du Maurier: English bisexual author and playwright, famous for her works like Rebecca and “The Birds”
Frida Kahlo: Mexican bisexual painter, known for the feminist and nationalist themes in her paintings, created 55 self-portraits and once stated “I paint myself because I am so often alone and because I am the subject I know best.”
Hannah Gluckstein, known as “Gluck”: British lesbian artist known for her evocative Modernist paintings, adopted the name “Gluck” because she thought the sex of a painter is irrelevant
Olive Thomas: American silent-film actress, involved in the Ziegfeld Follies, possibly the first “Vargas Girl” after posing for pinup artist Alberto Vargas
Jessie Matthews: English actress, singer, and dancer who rose to prominence in the 1920s and 30s
Katharine Hepburn: American actress who helped to create the “modern woman” image in Classic Hollywood during the 1930s and 40s, wore trousers before it was fashionable for women to do so, won four Academy Awards for Best Actress
On this day in 1999, the film Aimée & Jaguar was first released in its
home country of Germany. Set during World War II, the movie tells the true and
devastating love story of Lilly Wust and Felice Schragenheim, one the wife of a
respected Nazi soldier and the other a Jewish journalist hiding in plain sight at
a Nazi controlled newspaper.
The film begins in Berlin in the 1990s; two old women meet in a nursing
home, and when the narrator sweeps back in time to 1943, you know you are in
for a decades-long story that will stick with you long after the credits roll. The
foundation of Aimée & Jaguar is something we’ve all seen before:
bored housewife is swept off her feet by the charismatic and dangerous queer. However,
what makes Aimee & Jaguar stand out from the crowd of a dozen other lesbian
movies is the lingering knowledge that these were real women who actually lived
and loved in the city that was the heart of the Nazi empire; a gang of lesbian
friends all sitting around a table joking and playing cards, or a Jewish woman
in full suit and top hat waltzing around a ballroom with her lover are the type
of images that I never would have associated with 1940s Berlin before I saw
this movie. They are the type of lived experiences that have been buried under
the mythologizing of WWII-era Europe, and it is through Aimée & Jaguar that
you are able to see that, even though it was stifled under the rise of fascism,
Germany’s thriving gay culture of the 1920s and 1930s was still there, still dancing
and laughing and kissing no matter how many closed doors and curtains it was
forced to hide behind. At the beginning of the movie, I wondered why it wasn’t
titled Lily & Felice or something more obvious, but by the end I had
come to realize just how crucial Lily and Felice’s pet names were to their
relationship, and just how important sublimated identity was during this time
for lgbtq people, for Jewish people, and for any marginalized person living
under Hitler’s rule.
The real
Felice Schragenheim and Lilly Wust as pictured in Erica Fischer’s novel. The text at the bottom reads: (Left) Felice, in a photo taken by Lilly, on the Havel River, August 21, 1944. (Right) Lilly, in a photo taken by Felice, during the summer of 1944 on the balcony of Lilly’s apartment at Friedrichshaller Strasse 23.
Before the film was released, Lilly and
Felice’s story was told in novel form by Erica Fischer in her bestselling book Aimée
& Jaguar: A
Love Story, Berlin 1943, which you can check out here! Or hear the story
told through Lily’s own words in this 2001 interview with The Guardian.
Question of Smoke 