I’m writing a story about being a budding femme in the queer youth activist scene as a teenager and I’m trying to remember when I first heard the word femme. Considering how important it is in my life right now, it seems odd that I don’t have any specific, clear memories.  It’s not like someone said “femme” and light flooded the room and angels sang.

My first exposure to the concept of femme may have been in a history book, like Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers by Lillian Faderman, which I found in the school library.  Nerd that I was, my first step after deciding that I was queer was to read as much about it as possible.  I remember that the school library had Rubyfruit Jungle, Odd Girls, and The Girls Next Door: Into the Heart of Lesbian America, which was fascinating at the time but now that I think about it I remember it being very 1990’s lesbian chic in spite of itself.  There was also a sort of coffee table book about lesbian artists with black and white photos, lots of white women with long dark hair wearing jeans and looking seriously into the camera.

Anyway, I don’t remember exactly what I thought about butch and femme as presented in Odd Girls.  It didn’t occur to me to identify with femmes from the past anymore than I would identify with, say, pioneer women or army wives or any other class of women from history.

The Girls Next Door featured a photograph of two pale skinned white women applying each other’s lipstick.  The photo didn’t show their faces, just their lips and their hands holding the lipstick.  There was a caption about lipstick lesbians.  That disembodied picture didn’t speak to me, either.

I  remember listening to my internship boss talk about going to music festivals.  “I would wear a dress,” she said, “so the butch women would come and help me set up my tent.”  I felt strangely embarrassed by that declaration.   After all, I was raised to set up my own tent and then some.  My boss was and still is an amazingly powerful woman who sees what needs to be done in her community and then does it.  I thought her story was an admission of weakness.  It didn’t occur to me that the tent wasn’t the point - that she was looking for a friend or someone to flirt with.  And I didn’t question the idea that a dress was a means to an end, not something to enjoy wearing for its own sake.

When I heard people talking about femme identity it seemed really separate from my reality as a young, relatively radical queer. When someone said “femme,” I pictured well groomed white women in J Crew separates - the feminine, upper-class girls I went to high school with.  Those were not who I wanted to be.  There were some feminine-presenting activists in the marriage equality organization I worked with, but I never heard them talk about id’ing as femme.  And since they were older and professionals, they may have dressed and presented as they did for the sake of their careers, not as a matter of personal preference or expression.  I didn’t have role models for a femininity that was queer.  The big radi-cool idea at the time was “subverting the gender binary,” but that paradigm didn’t leave room for those of us whose gender identity and presentation in some ways matches (the way our culture it expects it to) our assigned sex.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008 at 10:22 am and is filed under musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.