[Ginger]

I see you standing on the subway platform and in line at the grocery store. I saw you get out of a car, then run around to the driver’s side window to kiss your girlfriend goodbye. I see you in the faculty dining room, book propped in front of you while you eat, and going up the escalator, talking to a student.

I know you sometimes don’t like the heightened visibility that comes with being Butch, but there is an upside to that—you are visible to me. It lifts my spirits, to catch sight of you. I notice your belt, your shoes, your shirt, your jacket, the way you step back so some kid can get in front of you on the subway stairs.

I saw you this morning, heading toward an office building near mine. It wasn’t just the suit, the crew cut and sturdy shoes that made my antennae quiver, it was your steady pace—more steady than my own, as I navigated pot holes in heels and it started to drizzle—and I noticed the watchful way you kept an eye on your surroundings.

I loved you the whole ten years I was with N, who was amused by my crushes on Butch women, and didn’t understand what I wanted any better than I did, myself.

I trace my pull toward you to adolescence, when I read a young adult novel about a teenage girl who crushes on a boy, the whole book building toward their first kiss. I read and reread that scene where they’re standing together and she brushes her face against his starched white shirt, reaches her arms around his neck and feels the soft bristle above the back of his collar. I translated that scene as Butch-Femme erotica, though I didn’t know those words.

I was looking for you even then, in the books I read, and the TV shows I watched. When I heard the word “feminist” for the first time, I sensed something dangerous about it, something exciting. I asked my mother what it meant, and she told me to consider its root word, which I knew was “feminine.”

“So it must mean, a lady who’s really feminine,” I said, somehow bothered with the connection.

“Just the opposite,” my mother shot back, stitching my devotion to you even tighter.

I joke about going to a lesbian bar in Los Angeles when the Olympics were held there, but I was serious about finding you and I did, the whole rowing team at one long table, passing a couple pitchers of beer. Thank you for inviting me over, I had a great time and still think your biceps are awesome.

Where was I.

Oh yeah, looking for you. And I feel elated when I find you. And what I love about you, is that you always find me, too.

If I’m in a crowded lesbian bar, like I was a couple weeks ago, and there is one Butch in there, she will keep me in her sites. Sometimes I need a hit of that attention—which is different, by the way, than how I felt last night on the roof of a parking garage, wind whipping my dress against my legs in a way that made me uneasy. “Nice,” leered some guy with a briefcase, and I looked up to see where the voice was coming from and glare at him.

If you had been there, you would have looked, and maybe even leered, but not in a way that would have made that defense mechanism rise in me. I don’t assume you’re some kind of priest or knight in shining armor—I hate some of the stereotypes imposed on you—but I know if it had been you watching me on that roof, in that wind, I would have met your eyes, Ha, caught you, and smiled, and you would have had the sense to laugh at yourself.

I finally let myself look for you in a purposeful way, after my life’s most significant, long-term relationship ended, and my sister died, and I quit my nice job and left New York then came back two years later and everything was different. It was like I had hit the “reset” button my life.

I started with dating websites, and the shy vagueness of my ads got me a few blind dates with nice lipstick lesbians with whom I had great talks over dinner, comparing notes on the whole online dating thing. We admired each other’s shoes (yes, a cliché, but true), and earrings.

Soon after that, I stepped up to the plate and put “Butch” in my ads, front and center.

And then, there you were. It felt daring, a kind of “coming out” for me, and I enjoyed the learning curve.

For one thing, I learned that masculine energy in a woman is expressed in unpredictable ways, and I am still sometimes caught by surprise when a Butch reveals things I forgot could be there: She shaves her legs. She collects little ceramic things. She has more expensive moisturizers than I do. She wants to be taken of, sometimes, and she's tired of being in charge.

Those surprises make me love you even more. I respect how you hold on to the things that make you who are you, no matter who arises to police your action; even people in your own community.

What’s changing though, is our community’s acceptance that Butch women are not all cut from the same cloth. I love you in all your shapes and sizes. I hear loud and clear your struggles with body image, your discomfort in public restrooms where women call security, thinking a man is there. If my new straight friend thinks “Butch” has negative connotations, it’s her ignorance that is the problem, not you or my attraction to you. If someone at work sees you pick me up outside our building in your leather and work boots, assumes you’re my boyfriend then stammers, realizing you aren’t, I’m just happy to help open that person's world a little wider.

My connection with you is a source of joy for me, and people’s stares take nano-status next to my big feelings for you. That time I caught you browsing a bit furtively in Victoria’s Secret (where I’d told you to meet me—what was I thinking!), I was laughing at myself for my lapse in judgment, not you, and I was welling with affection at what a good sport you are.

I want you with me at my nephew’s wedding. I want to sit with you at the most romantic table in the restaurant, and I want you to kiss me goodbye at the airport, because no one’s horrified look, a whole terminal of horrified looks couldn’t matter more than that kiss.

I know you’ve had to negotiate with the world in ways I haven’t, and I am in awe of how you’ve emerged with your authentic self, intact—despite a culture poised to punish you for rejecting its standards, and eager to mock you, if you try to meet them.

Sometimes I think you’ve forgotten, that I need you as much as you need me, whether we are partners, friends or just existing in the same community.

I love what Butch women see in me, and I don’t like living without that validation.

If I am partnered with a woman full of masculine energy but who doesn’t ID as Butch, she must—at the very least—understand that if I want her on my side, it doesn’t mean I can’t take care of myself.

She has to be there for me in a way that doesn’t make her "strong" and me "weak," and she must never see as less-than, the things about me that are different from her—in fact, I want her to love those differences.

Those differences are at the heart of why I love Butch women. It varies partner by partner, friend by friend, but it’s your reverence for those points of difference that makes my heart leap and my breath change, and makes me keep an eye out for you, wherever I am.