Butches and Studs, in Their Own Words

[Music] oh my god hi Casey Wian blaring nice to meet you this is a meeting of the minds that we should be burning some crazy like Palo Santo there's some magic happening do you feel it you know yes yes it's very exciting to be here with these other people today to be in this group identified by a witness is really cool it never happens all of us have had the experience of us being just a little too much and so that everyone gets to show up on this set and be acknowledged and celebrated is which is empowerment self-identified self-awareness strength love owning your own body and unapologetic which is awesome in butch's female body that wants to stay in a female body but loves female masculinity when I was sort of looking around for what does it mean to be a lesbian butch women were the visible lesbians you do have a feeling of being an outsider you have a feeling of being different you know you're seen in a certain way in public that's the first word I would say is authentic because for me it was always this struggle to just be allowed to be who I was and always having to fight against people who wanted me to look differently you know I have really photographers it's a real war you know it's like I'm 17 years old it's sort of like there's a lot of you know the aging older woman the you know kind of gauzy look and I'm like dude you know like front-load my masculinity like like but this be kind of craggy and awesome the way a man would hold space I've always just thought it was just such a powerful identity sexy in a way that is I think often overlooked for me you know it's almost like genetic its DNA I was always going to be the person who's right here in front of you and naturally so I don't think it was any kind of shift means I have two spirits in me and they there's a nice balance of it in a way it's I'm a nice contrast to to the feminine I think the butch aesthetic is very diverse so I mean once in a while I cut my hair off but largely I feel better with long hair so I'm kind of a long haired butch I think there's so many butch aesthetics like there's so many masculine aesthetics and I always kind of go back to gay men and the clone era the 70s and 80s and you know those things like the construction worker and you know leather daddy and the preppy for me it's like timberland boots work pants maybe like gas-station pants a white t-shirt maybe a black t-shirt a silver chain got to have the silver chain I think I'm a dapper butch I'm old school I think of myself as Cary Grant for me it's a lot of t-shirts and dark denim I am really into shoes and so I will always butch out in a pair of snazzy shoes I have a lot of Blazers a lot of leather jackets Kidd was the first person that was you don't even know the studying out that happens I've never identified as a stud but the studs that I've been friends with definitely hold down a very very tight strong masculine identity sometimes they used a in them pronouns sometimes they use you know he and him pronouns kind of in the old-school Butch sense like you know really serve fims in a very particular kind of way stud is a term of huge affection I think for us it's very much female body with masculinity I know like when I was in high school for like the two days that I tried to do it the energy is like I mean it to me is like they were the sexiest ones you know like unafraid of that area that gets a little maybe even close to stereotype but it's not that it's like very much who they are sex men I'll call them like you know macho but I just couldn't keep it up like I feel like I was 200 baby you're looking at a stud there's no kind of like straight answer to what I think the butch identity is but what I do know and what I think about a lot is like where I come from I'm sure since the beginning of time there's been butch isms does go back to Radcliffe Hall I would say that there was a level of a butch heyday with what Radcliffe Hall was doing in the well of loneliness because those people had less community [Music] if you think back to the the 40s and 50s those [ __ ] they so wanted to wear you know men's clothing that they would put it on and they would get arrested for it you know stone butch booze is great you go back and you reread that and you're just like they were fighting for their lives now why would you wear man's clothing if the risk was getting arrested because it's who you are because you have to do it because you want to do it because it turns you on because it turns your girlfriend on because it's how you bond with your friends and it's just like it's a world and it's a culture being a little kid during the civil rights movement and seeing women who identified as butch that was a part of righteousness and that was a part of identity that was making as much of a statement as black people were making in his country about what we deserved as human beings I came out in the 70s and it was like there was this kind of woman identified thing and so there was sort of a suppressed butch because that was the 50s and 60s when the hippie stuff was coming in and there was more sort of lesbian feminism happening there was this feeling among younger lesbians that it was sort of old-fashioned and too restrictive and and maybe patriarchal to be butch or to be femme but the 80s were suddenly you needed to identify as a butcher I found I came out as a lesbian like write it in 1980 the prevailing look for young lesbians at that moment was very androgynous but soon after that everything started to change and I started hearing people talk about this idea of Butch and femme historically like it had been a thing I learned in the 50s and 60s when lesbians you know couldn't live openly and that this culture had evolved a subset of lesbians would identify as either butch or family or Chi Chi if you were in the middle so the young woman if my generation were looking back to that earlier generation but now young women were reclaiming it as this exciting genuine sexual expression I started drawing comics about lesbians in the early 80s when I was in my 20s because I didn't see images in the culture of people who looked like me and it felt really important I was doing it as much for myself as for anyone else and I started calling them dykes to watch out for and then it grew into a comic strip not a whole ongoing world about these women Asian butch women I don't think that's so celebrated being a model and ain't queer it was very difficult for me when I first started cuz I started in the 90s when they approached me and I met Calvin Klein and his wife and I thought you're like patriarchy you're just like in it you know like I'm just a joke in your world the more I thought about it the more I realized oh I have to do it I had to do it because I was Japanese I'm short on a diet got tattoos everything that you know I've never seen I'm happy actually I did that because everything was very terrifying but at the same time I knew that anything that made me sweat and feel scared was something I needed to do seeing Jenny's photo in the Calvin Klein I saw that when I was probably in like seventh grade living in the suburbs of Pittsburgh for me that was really meaningful because I'd never seen an Asian person with a short hair like that and so I would say just like people like that they paved a path if there was a heyday of bitchiness I would say it was in the 90s early 2000s especially when Lea delaria came onto the scene we haven't been in control of our own narrative mostly when people see a butch that they're reading about or they see it on TV or in a movie this characters usually been written by a heterosexual it's usually been being performed by a heterosexual and directed by a heterosexual I think it probably really wasn't until the character that I played in orange is the new black that people realize that witches are different making boys don't cry that was to bring my identity of myself to life I read Brandon's story and that was a version of my own story so I went around and interviewed all my butch friends and I was like what do you think how do you have sex you know do you think that Brandon's you know butchered trans I identify I think as of a lesbian and a butch and a dyke I think I'm trans so we're in such a moment now where trans misses so much more in the fore and yet I think butch was the first way to identify with as one who grew up thinking perhaps that you were a boy rather than a girl you know there's a lot of complaint among a lot of witches that witches are dying off that weren't endangered species it's a very hard identity to protect in the culture because I think that the culture by affirming trans which is a great thing I also think what's happened is the binary has been reaffirmed here's the thing I don't I don't want to be a man there's some kind of shedding of cultural prescriptions about what it means to occupy your sex for me is just like it's about being at a core self my work is an extension of myself I think the idea of women loving women and putting that forth in my work is a radical aesthetic and because I'm using my creative voice and it's self-identified because I'm using women in my everyday life whether they're lovers or friends I think in that sense I'm creating this agency for women who look and identify as me when you thinking about that intersection culturally as a woman of color it's completely different from a woman who's not a woman of color because we're dealing with not only our families religion there's this whole other thing this weight to it so there's this double-consciousness constantly if you see me on the street or I get in the elevator with you and you feel uncomfortable with certain things I experienced it as a as a black man as masculinity in Latin countries is very problematic so when I was becoming butcher I had to learn how other people especially Latinos identified as masculine and then unlearned that and so I try to ingest that and remix it in a way that's like oh I can be butch I can be androgynous but at the same time I can be nice to women it played a lot of lesbians I've played a lot of butch lesbians I got offered this new job and the showrunner on that who's an old friend of mine you know I was like I don't know if I can just play lesbians for the sake of having a lesbian on TV and she was just like listen man you have to accept that you're gonna play a lot of lesbians you look gay you are gay you sound gay you are gay and it's your job to accept that and it's also your job to come to work every day and bring something new to this character so that people that are watching this see something that they've never seen before and little by little they start to understand that every single but every single lesbian is different and maybe it starts with you seeing that about yourself and that was you know kind of mind-blowing commitment in 2013 I was the first woman who got signed to Ford on the men's board I we're men you know men's clothes because the ones that fit and they're the ones that I feel super comfortable in that make me feel like my insides match my outsides I showed up on set and they had a full rack of women's clothes and I realized in that moment that what was happening was way beyond me there was an entire community of people who actually did not know what it meant to be butch and that it was okay for me to just wear men's clothes I'm really glad I was 36 because they got to come more from a social justice perspective and so I got to bring a lot of language that didn't exist on these sets the last kind of real fashion editorial that I did was with Peter Lindbergh I felt like when I showed up on that set and there was just men's clothes that I had finally done something right do I think butch lesbians are tribe of people absolutely yeah we're we're strong tribe [Music] [Music] let's make a big space because more of us are coming and more of us are creative in how we say who we are but you see like if you call yourself something else I still see us you know and I embrace us and I'm really happy for the evolution the best that we can do is hold the story of where we are now so that those who come afterwards will have a reference the future of business is just the future of the gender presentation spectrum kind of exciting in terms of it really could be anything I think that as things like we are doing today come out more and more people gonna learn a lot more about who and what but just are [Music] [Music]

Channel: T: The New York Times Style Magazine Singapore

Views: 291,946

Rating: 4.9547729 out of 5

Keywords: Casey Legler, Eileen Myles, Roxane Gay, Lea DeLaria, Collier Schorr

Id: SdN4PnSv0qg

Length: 15min 11sec (911 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 23 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/msinformation01]

Lea Delaria, Alison Bechdel and Roxanne Gay all in one room?! What legends and pioneers. That was such a fun watch. Thanks for sharing!

[u/girlmouths]

“With photographers it’s a real war, you know I’m 70 years old... let this be kind of craggy and awesome the way a man would hold space” ... Just love that