Breaking the Spell: Rethinking queer community

[Slater]

Originally Posted by Liam

What time was butch considered specifically a female identity?

My understanding and knowledge of queer history, is that the term butch is and has been used by both lesbians and gay men, and it is not, nor was a term exclusive to females.

I should have been a bit clearer in what I was saying. It’s certainly true that gay men use the word butch. I don’t know for sure whether they adopted it based the usage in the lesbian community although it doesn’t actually matter to what I was trying to say, but wasn’t quite explicit about.

I wasn’t talking literally about the collection of letters b-u-t-c-h (which is of course also used as a first name), but with the distinct identity of butch that exists in our community. While butch is used by gay men, it has never coalesced into an identity and community the way it did among lesbians. But regardless of the nature of its usage among gay men, it occupies in a separate part of the cultural landscape than the butch identity I was speaking of, so in that sense they might as well be different words. A little bit like life forms that may share a common ancestor but evolve distinctly on neighboring mountainsides.

So what I was talking about was the butch name and butch identity that exists is our part of the cultural landscape, the one on our mountainside. That butch identity was a female identity. That butch identity has changed to no longer be a specifically female identity.

I don’t know if that makes what I was saying any clearer or not. Hopefully it does. My intention in bringing it up in the first place was merely as an example of the way a change, even when it makes sense for the community, can mean the loss of something that is valued by at least some members of the community. And I think if we were better at being mindful of that and acknowledging it along the way, we might be able to incorporate changes with a little less friction.