When Butchdom Was in Flower

I’ve just had one of the most unusual experiences of my life – being in unknown city surrounded by 400 Butch identified - women, dykes, bois, trans folk, youthful studlets, aged bulldykes, feminist she/he’s, rapper-aggressives, classic and soft butches, and every other kind of lesbian Butch I’ve never seen nor heard about.

Yeah – I was there at the start of a new movement being born within the great family of LGBT people, but here the “B” stands for Butch. Yes, I’m talking about the first ever Butch Voices Conference in Oakland, August 20-24, 2009.

Walking into the grand ballroom of the Marriott up to the stage to give my keynote address, I saw and felt a great wave of power and awe sweep toward me. The power in the surge felt all-woman, yet also mass-culine, a rough-and-tumble, yet strangely elegant surge of love. What is this power? I asked myself as my shoulders coiled in fight or flight mode, the first instinct of growing up butch in a hostile world.

But then I saw Jewelle Gomez in the second row stand up and start clapping. And then the whole room rose up like an old-bull rising to her feet one last time, and I realized that they were clapping for me like I was Achilles returned from a lifetime of war.

And suddenly I realized that this surge was the force of butch-love. And it wasn’t just for me it was for each other. None of us had ever in our lifetime been with a great crowd of our own kind and this was awe, amazement, and wait… I remember the feeling from the 70s, great bands of lesbian feminists gathering and shouting and reveling in ‘sisterhood’, but only this time… it was lesbian brotherhood.

And later I found myself in a workshop led by Sasha T. Goldberg - a room packed with 60 butches who’d come to hear what the hell the workshop title “Bulldagger: For Women-Identified, Female Pronoun using Butches” – meant. And what it turned out to mean was some fear that our kind of butch might be an endangered species. We worried that so many of the young Butches were choosing unusual combinations of mixing ‘butch’ with masculinity. Did that mean that our definition of butch was being cut off at the knees? So we put our fear out on the table and looked at it. We talked about the loneliness of growing up as the original gender-warriors of lesbianism. And out of that shared pain came the realization that we need to re-define ‘butch’ in a post-trans world. And out of this realization we decided that we would not surrender to fear, not even to the fear of extinction. No, that’s not the butch way. We don’t surrender to fear. So we decided, we are not going to cut off our junior brothers who are taking ‘butch’ beyond the binary of male & female. How could we reject them when our own lives are about demanding that the straight world move over and accept the existence of masculine woman? How could we divorce them off when they are only creating a new platform out of the freedom we fought to give to them?

And so it was decided, almost from the very first day, not just in this workshop, but the Butch Voice Conference as a whole declared that we didn’t want to draw a line between female and male identified butches. We didn’t want to cut off the new shadows of what it might mean to be butch. We just said “no” to dividing ourselves along the patriarchally created lines of binary genders that we’ve fought so long and hard to bury.

And in case some dykes are out there saying, so what’s the big news, a bunch of ‘guys’ got together and decided they are guys? That wasn’t the case. When I gave the Conference organizers the title of my keynote, “Keeping our Feminism, While Exploring our Masculinities,” I thought I might be a lone voice of feminism at the weekend. But I was determined to insist that the new generation of butches know the strength of Feminism and don’t grow up without it. So I was shocked and over-joyed when butch after butch, particularly the African American, working-class butches, whose voice was strong this weekend, claimed feminism as a cornerstone of their own ideology of ‘butch.’

And yes, Butch Voices also taught me a lot about class. Things that this other class, privileged, Chicana, feminist, classic-butch never knew. And I had one of the best nights of my lesbian life rocking to the performance night talent called “Butch Nation” which blew the roof off Humanity Hall in Oakland. But these are others stories…more stories about butch voices…that I hope to write about later.

So for the thousands of dykes who missed this extra-ordinary event, tune into http://www.butchvoices.com/ - because the awesome organizers promise ButchVoices2 two years from this summer.

For more from me see my website under construction at subterior.com/cordovajj, moving shortly to www.JeanneCordova.com

PS Title of my blog gives a nod to 1922 book/play/movie 'When Knighthood Was in Flower', about chivalry in the Tudor Period!

PHOTO: Lisa Everly. (seen here, Lynn H. Ballen & Jeanne Cordova, co-producers of the LEX-Lesbian Exploratorium exhibit, GenderPlay, part of the BV art showcase 'Visually Speaking' )

Time to Pass The Torch

Katha Pollitt's recent column in The Nation is about intergenerational feminist conflicts. Read it at this link... & then my response below... http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090615/pollitt

I write to affirm Katha Pollitt’s view that it is not about waves, it is about power. And to suggest that 2nd wave feminists (and I am one, albeit a youngster of 60) all need to start pass the torch to Generation O, the Obama Generation.
Perhaps we do more action and less hair splitting here in L.A., where this passing of the torch is already well underway. And I am speaking more of the LGBT Movement, which strongly overlaps the re-burgeoning young feminist movement.
Both had their re-birth with the same historical events in 2007 – the campaign between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. And in California, at least, Generation O has further earned their stripes on the same Election Day November defeat over Proposition 8, which would have given same-sex couples the right to marry.
For the last eight months, California’s Generation 0, a huge passel of high school, college and post college young kids – often led by young women – have taken to the streets in protest on a weekly basis. They have organized so many new groups that we’ve had to form a coordinating coalition called OUT West that now includes 40 organizations.
I have met these young militant adults at a half dozen history-teach-ins, civil disobedience actions, panels, rallies, marches, and on Facebook. And unlike their parents’ generation – the 40 to 60 years olds who went partying or lip-sticking during the Bush’s dead years - they want to hear from us, their grandmothers of the 2nd wave.

That’s the real news -- that the kids are back on the streets again and wanting us to tell them: what is consciousness raising? How do you get a thousand people to a rally? What are the tricks of the trade?
With a looming defeat on our state’s agenda, and having been radicalized in Hillary’s campaign AND Obama’s brilliant grass-roots organizing, the only thing they want to know is – how do we win?

These young women – and dare I say, young men as sweet and feminist as their grandmothers raised them to be. Their vigor and idealism warms my heart. They are a super-bright, socially conscious lot and I sleep well at night knowing that after the fallow years (80’s & 90s’s) – the kids are back!
And now it is our job to school them, (Our Council of Elders is putting a book list together that covers everything from Simone de Beauvoir to Kate Bornstein), to support them, and turn the power over to them. We need to be pushing them forward, making sure that on every panel of old feminists, there are Gen O speakers too. We need to open our meetings to them, yes the top planning meetings too. And make sure their views and interpretations of the world get air time too.
And now, Robin Morgan, we do need to pass the torch. We had our day and did a hell of a job with it. But now it is time to be mentors to them. They are the future.

from our Archives

If you ask the average feminist of 2008 if the world has changed much in the past 30 years she will likely say, "No." When it comes to violence against women, not much has changed as all.
These women could be marching just like this today and they are.

Violence against women and girls continues unabated in every continent, country and culture. It takes a devastating toll on women’s lives, on their families, and on society as a whole. Most societies prohibit such violence — yet the reality is that too often, it is covered up or tacitly condoned. — UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, 8 March 2007

Posted by ANG