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 are synonymous for Nancy. There is an entanglement of writing and finding that scene into which short hair and breeches fits.

Her thoughts lead easily from one to the other:

If she were a boy at sea she would not be afraid. But how could she get it into verse? How express her mood in poetry or prose either? There was something too authentic and too storm-wracked about her emotions for the right word ever to come. And if the right word did come it would not be good enough to be printed and if it were not printed she would never get a friend.

This train of thought is exactly what the Women in Print movement—the thriving organised network of women’s presses, bookshops, and readers born out of lesbian-feminist organizing during the 1970s—cast to the wind: Do not be afraid to write! they said. Win freedom! they said. Write and print and find a friend! And this was a great success. Through this network the relationship between “print” and “friendship” was forged.

I have read the novels drawn out by the Women in Print movement, Lee Lynch’s Old Dyke Tales, Dusty’s Queen of Hearts Diner, met Frenchy in The Swashbuckler, the same visions of adventuring that Stephen dreamt of in The Well, that Nancy dreamt of, the Ann Bannon would seek out for her Beebo Brinker, to swash!

Through the whole of the twentieth century, I have read of young bodies longing for new manifestations by which to imagine a possibility of their future as riding horses, sailing ships and writing novels, and who, through the course of their narratives, substitute those adventures for something much underrated: the bars.

It is the mythical chimera of the bar-dyke who has left their impression on me thanks in part to Lynch’s irresistible portrait of the bar-butch:

Yeah, she walked like a man, or better still, she walked like a butch, lighter and more graceful than a man. All 4’11 of her was in the tough, bouncing walk. It said who she was. When guys on the street menaced her, she just got cooler, throwing herself into it more, dipping and weaving and dancing down the street. Yeah, she was bulldyke, and every Saturday night she loved being a bulldyke in a bulldkye’s world.

What the bar offered for the gender outlaw was a way of harnessing style as a mode of communication, an economy of desire organizing lovers and friends. And I wonder, had Nancy found it would she have lost her urge to write? Held inside the bar, butch style reads like print.

It’s frustrating, then, that the butch plot is set to lesbian-feminist margins. Inside of these margins the butch is figured as the ghost of lesbian past, their only role cast as the beginning of the story of lesbian-feminism. Frenchy and her counterparts are framed just as Heather Love describes, as “those who lived before the common era of gay liberation—the abject multitude against whose experience we define our own liberation.”

The novels of the Women in Print movement should be, I propose, reedited into an anthology of first chapters where we catch a glimpse of the bar-butch in writing. At the start of each of these repeatable plots, the dim light of the bar catches the glint in the butch’s eye, shadows flicker over a portrait of the soon to be transformed butch, their hair slicked back, sleeves rolled up, asking you to dance; born to lose, the butch still makes you swoon.

At the start of these books the bars are filled with beautiful people, the gay life is living, and the butch is cooler than cool, your boyfriend but better. It’s as if the authors can’t help but make them the sexiest thing in the room so that the reader has a crush on the butch in the bar despite the fact that they’re being told that they shouldn’t. Far from being the abject multitude against whom we define our liberation, a reader can easily find freedom in the short hair and breeches of the first chapters of these novels.

I’m hooked on Jack Halberstam’s reading of butch as “a fiction” and “a tough line,” tough to find, tough to read, and touch to write. He says “Of course, butch does not require penile proof, a fleshy monument to ‘real’ masculinity. Butch is a belief, a performance, a swagger in the walk; butch is an attitude, a tough line, a fiction, a way of dressing.”

The butch has certainly been a character. In Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis’ collected account of the Buffalo bar scene, Annie talks about her Sandy: “On some level, she is aware that her butch’s loyalty might be a fiction, but that doesn’t matter.” Halberstam’s position is that butch is a fiction which requires an interlocutor figured as the “reader of gender fiction.” That’s Annie. That’s me.

Butch is a question: “Do you read me? Over” The desired response being “Roger that.” And Nancy is desperate to write in order to be read. Read me! she cries into the melodramatic winds of young queer boyhood and the Women in Print movement allows the Nancys to write!

Yet, in writing butch we sidestep the ways in which the butch was already being read, loud and clear, within the matrices of the butch-femme bar scene. The way Lynch tells us that Frenchy’s “tough, bouncing walk” says who she is. The way Feinberg describes butch and femme morse code as the lighter tapped on a whiskey glass, or nails tapped on a whisky glass respectively, or Joan Nestle remembers the semaphore of a “pinky ring flashing in a subway car,” and Camille Roy writes how Nadine “cocked her hip, lifted the beer, ran her fingers through her hair—the whole bar vocabulary.” The butch never needed words.

Camille Roy offers that “that the truest respect one can show towards the past is to allow it to be something other than a predecessor of the present” and I agree. The butch in the bar signifies more than the beginning of a journey toward the latest iteration of enlightenment, the butch in the bar is a whole unspoken language with which to keep trying to write. Jess explains, “That’s exactly how I felt. We really were in this life together. We might not have the words, but we both knew exactly what we were choking on.”

Roy might describe this shared choking as writing “that carries relation in its texture.” The closest I have found to reading Feinberg’s exact conceit of choking being a place of shared understanding is in Georgia Cotrell’s Shoulders. A young Bobbie passing around a joint, pretending she knows what she’s doing: “Still choking I gasped, ‘Yeah, I guess I wasn’t inhaling.’ (Soft, wave, Marcel Marceau, bloodstream velvet, coral flow to the spine and skull. Xylophones. Oh Bobbie. Oh Cisco, Oh Pancho.)”

Bobbie is choking here, yes, but it’s in the parenthesis we hear choking more clearly. The best butch novels move away from using language to transfer meaning solely, towards a more immersive being inside of language inarticulately, the bit still stuck in the throat.

Roy continues:

While a text may be difficult, relation does not fall away due to difficulty. Obscurity is a social substance. Recognition can ripple through the text as sequences of tiny transformations, one question into another, so that a poem riddles itself. Alternatively, the poem may unfold as a sort of suspense novel. Rigid understandings undermined from below.

I am yet to read a more acute observation of butch language than “[o]bscurity as a social substance.” We do not communicate to explain ourselves but to find ourselves, that is, to find ourselves amongst others. Language not of a self but of a self sustained inside a scene, relation in each line, the texture of the sentence: tough. Some group of words which land the same as fingernails tapping on a whisky glass, as light bouncing off a pinky ring, cutting through the dark.

Nancy’s will to write is stifled by her distrust of language as the correct substance to express what she is choking on, she has not yet found words worthy enough to set in print. Her hope is to “plunge into a morning when poetry was common to existence, to be free of this twitter-light of stumbling prose.” This is my hope for butch writing: to see it plunge into the morning light of poetry. To let the poem unfold into prose written by stumbling twitter-light!

Indeed, Bryher does not turn from prose to seek out poetry but stumbles—no—swaggers towards it. Both Development and Two Selves carry butchness safely through the bucking waves of time, the quality of writing, at moments, so affecting as to make your stomach flip as if a great ship has lurched beneath you. And, in writing, Bryher finds a friend. Carrying their prose with them, Bryher walks straight up to the front door of poetry who comes embodied, a person who is both a writer and their reader, H.D.

Bryher and H.D. would go on to spend a lifetime together. They meet in the last line of Development where we hear H.D’s voice telling Bryher, the first time they set eyes on one another: “I’ve been waiting for you.” Lurch goes the ship beneath me, choke. I think of Jess, walking the streets looking for Theresa, seeking out those laughing teasing eyes fluent in butch, worried she’ll never be read by those eyes again. I want to tell Jess, I have been searching for you.

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Greasepaint by Hannah Levene is available via Nightboat.