Long, long ago in 1967 a couple of years before Stonewall and armed only with John Rechy’s “City of Night” as a map I went out on the road exploring first to Greenwich Village and then to San Francisco.
I looked like a sixteen year old and I attracted the chicken hawks. I had my first few sexual experiences with gay men. everyone of them told me having sex with me was like having sex with a girl because I was a girl in bed.
I started observing the so called femininity of gay men. It really isn’t femininity. It is obvious gayness. Susan Sontag called it camp. I think it is innate and “gay” not masculine or feminine and I’ve seen elements of it in the butchest of gay men and the nelliest of queenish gay men. It is the thing that causes me to look at a number of straight right wing Christo-fascist Republicans and think, “Who does that closet case think he is fooling.”
As for the masculinity of lesbians. In the 1940s and 1950s see “Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold” many in the lesbian community that was studied gave oral histories indicating that femmes weren’t considered real lesbians, only butches were.
Far more recently I made the comment regarding the emergence of female to male transsexualism, “There are two kinds of lesbians, women and men.” It is a nasty quip.
In the 1970s I had a discussion with the other women on the “Lesbian Tide” where I was a photographer and production artist regarding an article on Butch/Femme. This was the 1970s and many feminist women had opted to become lesbian as a political choice. Butch/Femme were considered artifacts of a pre-liberation time.
I was a photographer, played electric guitar as well as accoustic, soldered together kits for my synthesizer, did Tae Kwon do etc. Yet I also wore tight designer jeans and t-shirts etc. In short I defied the Butch/Femme labeling. During our editorial meeting we sort of decided that butch/femme existed as a comparison of one person being more butch or femme than an other.
But I’ve also observed in the years since that many lesbian identified women are more bisexual the way I am and that being feminist and competent complicates defining as butch or femme based on patriarchal ideas of femininity.
Among lesbians there are some traits that seem obvious lesbian traits in the same way gay men seem to have obvious traits and they aren’t really masculine in the same way those of F to Ms are instead they are lesbian and cause lesbians to ask the question, “Doesn’t she realize she is a dyke?”
02/28/2009 at 3:53 pm
> I started observing the so called femininity of gay men. It really isn’t femininity. It is obvious gayness.
Ah, something where we have a common platform again. It gets really importent when it comes to the diagnoses of Gender Identity Disorder in Childhood, which has a 95% failure rate when it comes to be used as diagnosing transsexual children – and is often used to denie hormonal treatment when a transsexual person would benefit the most. Actually, the diagnoses is somewhat a cosmo test with 5 questions and there is no real try to distinquish between what doctors call pregay and transexuality. There is a possibilty do distinquish and its not on clothing.
02/28/2009 at 7:30 pm
In my experience gay men are still masculine men and Lesbian women are still feminine women. However both have an unmistakable style that makes it possible to identify both especially if you have been able to tune yourself in. So to that extent Suzan I agree with you. During my early days I spent some time in the company of London’s gay men and women. The gay men were not interested in me at all since I was far too female. The lesbian women once they discovered I was transsexual and “straight” just accepted me as a woman, much like the men did. Both groups were happy to socialise with me. It is this openess to difference from both gay men and women that has lead to what I call “The Tragic Alliance” that is LGBT. While it is right that we should support each other and we do have common ground, I really don’t feel that the formal alliance has been that helpful to the transsexual cause. Much of society simply see us as a more extreme version of both. Patently wrong but that is how they view us.
03/01/2009 at 11:35 am
My experience aligns with that of Evangelina. I can smell the testosterone and groove with the estrogen, no matter the packaging.
By the way, here in the DC area, our Gay and Lesbian friends all see us as women – always have.
There are some folks in the city who seem stuck in the past (1sr, 2nd, pick the wave) and can’t get out of their particular rut. But how is that any different from people generally?
03/02/2009 at 1:07 pm
While most friends of me known I was TS because I told them, some did not – those often thought I were gay (never had a perfect male passing, I suppose) but not one time did a gay think that of me. Obviously it works the other way arround, too