BUTCHVoices.LA

Judith ‘Jack’ Halberstam – Keynote Speech, Sat. 10/9 –

Jack Halberstam from BUTCH Voices LA on Vimeo.

Carmen Vazquez – Keynote Speech, Sun. 10/10 – Text below
Leslie Feinberg – on receiving BVLA 2010 Butch Lifetime award – Text below
Jeanne Cordova – BVLA 2010 Chair, link to keynote from ButchVoices ‘09

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Notes from an Organizer:  Butch Conference Charts Historic Highs
By Jeanne Cordova, Conference Chair

Palm trees and 90 degree weather greeted the 548 lesbians and trans folk who attended Southern California’s first-ever Butch Voices Conference, October 8-10, 2010. The weekend, dubbed “Butch Fest West,” specifically welcomed lesbians of the butch and femme community, but was peppered with gender queer fashion hipsters, many isolated dykes from the still-closeted suburbs of hidden California, and a few transmen & transwoman. From the moment they registered, the crowd was transported into world of ideas, images, and conversation that celebrate masculine lesbians. Let me take you thru the experience starting with Sunday, my own politically favorite moment.

Sunday’s keynote Carmen Vazquez, a New York City’s top-drawer butch activist, rocked the house! She was in the middle of a stunning speech reclaiming feminism for butches, when the audience screamed out for her to repeat a key sentence. So, Vazquez repeated,

“I have come to understand that Butch and Femme are an insistence on feminism because sexual freedom and autonomy of the body are central tenets of feminism that allow us to honor one another’s choices in gender presentation and erotic desire. If feminism doesn’t mean that a woman can wear what she pleases, experience an unbridled, raw passion that includes fucking another woman as hard as she can because it gives both of them exquisite pleasure, then what is the point of it?”

The Puerto Rican born Vazquez went on to say, “Butch is not an anachronism as the many voices in this room can attest. Butch is not a stepping stone to trans male life. The space for Butch identity is diminishing and that is not a good thing. In our exploration and embrace of a wider and growing spectrum for gender identity, we must not insist that the logical conclusion to male identity in female bodies be the trans man. I say this with loving support and respect for my transgender sisters and brothers.” (Read the whole speech below)

Just when it seemed the audience was on a total roar, the organizers (the L.A. based lesbian cultural guerilla group called LEX) went on to give the first National Butch Lifetime Achievement Award to Leslie Feinberg, the author of Stone Butch Blues and Trans Gender Warrior. To everyone’s shock, including mine as Conference Chair, we learned that Feinberg, who’s been struggling with illness for years and not speaking publically anymore, had sent us a full speech posted on Facebook that morning! So we asked Joe LeBlanc, founder of Butch Voices, to read Leslie’s grand synopsis of her politics as a butch woman, a trans warrior, and communist organizer. A great hush fell over the audience as women realized we were hearing history –Vasquez and Feinberg—the later who may not ever speak publically again! (See below for full text of speech).

The speeches were followed by a two hour performance show called, “The Butch Revival,” produced by Angie Evans and her lover, Kat Laukat of the femme troupe, The Miracle Whips. They did a costumed riff off an evangelical couple Jimmy Butch Swagger and his wife Tammy Gaymaker—which evangelized, “Hallelujah! Praise the butch.” People who went to BVLA are now signing off their emails with, “praise the butch!” Sandra Valls, the lesbian Laina comedian, came out as butch and gave us a not-for-under 18, detailed account of making love to her femme. It had the audience holding their sides to catch a new breath to keep laughing.
And all this was only Sunday, the last day of the conference!

Butch Fashion Makes the Huffington Post Friday night’s kick-off performance set a new bar for butch fashion shows, and even made The Huffington Post, Autostraddle, and Velvet Park.  I’ve been to several butch fashion shows around L.A. and seen the New York City butch fashion events, but I’ve never witnessed anything like the choreographed piece of art that took place in this butch-constructed outdoor courtyard, surrounded by old Hollywood’s architectural columns that gave us, “INVINCIBLE; A Night of Sartorial Radicality for Daggers, Dandies & Dapper Dudes.”

When the Artistic Director, a devoted new PhD of Dance, named Dr. Tania Hammidi, first came to an early Steering Committee meeting and presented her idea of ‘sartorial radicality’ –none of us knew what she was talking about. But we decided to take a leap of faith.

So there we sat, about 350 of us watching, as wave after wave of lesbi-queer designers, models, and singers strutted out from behind blue velvet curtains, up and down a forty-foot elevated catwalk! Black, brown, white, and asian butches and studs of all colors—some wearing dildos, but all wearing butch boi hair and clothing, boots and hats, suits and hoodies made by and for the masculine woman. Even Jimmy Au’s, a Beverly Hills boutique which dresses short men (and butch dykes), asked to be included. Jimmy’s son Alan dressed up Tania and other models in the cutest, well fitting of luxury suits and tuxedos. As Tania told the audience, “INVINCIBLE is our state of mind: an unyielding spirit and a dream of an immediate future made manifest … where butch*/stud/trans/masculine-of-center folks like us take our place as the hot fashion centerfolds that we are in everyday life.”

Apparently, the Huffington Post agrees with Tania, because the next week they wrote, “Bulldaggers, tomboys, drag kings, butches, gender queers, and dapper dykes ruled the runway in West Hollywood on Friday night at the Invincible fashion show… Never has so much swagger been seen on the catwalk — this, my friends, is what high fashion has been missing—the masculine woman.”

As a lesbian feminist butch for forty years, I stood in the back and cried with joy—realizing that I’d lived long enough to see that my life long battle might be coming to a close.  Butch women were being celebrated (rather than chased, beaten, or humiliated), for who we are!
Workshops—A Visible Thirst The crying with joy took place for many others the next day, Saturday, as everyone piled into a day filled with twenty workshops. As a life-long conference organizer (this was my 4^th major lesbian confab), I know the heart of a conference is the workshops. This is what makes or breaks a conference. And putting together a program of smart politics was my specific job for BVLA 2010. I knew the workshops were good but even a veteran never knows if, in the end, the intimacy and emotional factors would carry the day. Our Program Committee had spent a hundred hours carefully accepting (and rejecting) a slate of the best speakers the West Coast lesbian and Trans community had to offer around the new politics of butch* and this spectrum of LBGT life. We’d dug deep into the famous and not-famous-but-great idea butch women & trans activists such as; writer/director of the movie Boys Don’t Cry, Kimberly Peirce, producer Cheryl Dunye (“Watermelon Woman”), photographer Cathy Opie (whose retrospective showed at NYC’s Guggenheim), Alice Hom (Astraea Foundation), B. Cole (founder of the Brown Boi Project), gay political strategist, Ivy Bottini, and myself, slated to present “Feminism & Masculinities.” I knew we had to address a nearly overwhelming range of topics that included all the butch identities formed in the Western states melting pot that is Latina, African American, Asian, Middle Eastern, and Anglo. We arranged life-lite dilemmas such as “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Butches and Femmes but Were Afraid to Ask” and “To Windsor or Knot” –how to knot your tie and take on a dapper butch lifestyle. And we juxtaposed these with more serious fare exploring the transmasculine spectrum like, “The Many Faces of Butch” and “Bromance, Kinships and Mandates: Unveiling Butch Taboos.”

To my surprise, the 300+ workshop goers roamed thru the day with a quiet, deliberate intensity from one workshop to another with an almost visible thirst—for new information! About lesbian butch history (Baby, You Are My Religion: Butch Femme Bar Culture 1940’s to 1980s by Dr. Marie Cartier). About black stud identity (Under the Smooth by Lori Brown); to ask new questions facing genderqueer life (Transphobia and Butchophobia, with trans-feminist femme, Dr. Talia Bettcher).

Julia Watson of Velvet Park had this to say about the workshops: “My fave was Keeping our Feminism. The panel was made up of three women-identified butches, a Boomer, a Gen-Xer, and a Millenial and that made for a interesting historical perspective on butch experience I loved how the conversation ended up on the importance of having butch role models, both just in terms of being comfortable in your butch identity and in developing a responsible, mature butch identity instead of getting stuck permanently in playa ‘boi’ douchewad mode.”

The End of Gender As We Know It Everyone was keyed up mentally and emotionally for Dr. Judith ‘Jack’ Halberstam’s keynote right after lunch. Later Jack would tell me that when I first asked her to come to keynoted Butch Voices.LA she’d thought to herself, “Are you crazy Jeanne…in Los Angeles…where butches are driven underground…there will only be twelve of us!”

But Judith/Jack was at her warmest and best addressing a packed audience that was hungry for her wide-ranging theoretical world view about “the end of gender…heteroflexible women…and pregnant men.” When she analyzed how butch-dad parentage represented a systemically radical challenge to the world’s heteronormative paradigm—butches in the audience were elated to have our potential contribution to society outlined for us.

(Jack’s is a gotta-read speech. We are still trying to get it as she flies around the country presenting at colleges. We’ll put it up on the BVLA2010.com website as soon as we get it).

Toward evening on workshop day I stepped out into the twilight to re-assign the staff on tonight’s performance taking place across town. We were all so tired, but the performance ahead of us was “Swagger; Butch Bravado & Stud Service for those who live it and those who love it.” We knew we’d have another crowd waiting to see Jewish lesbian folksinger Phranc doing her famous “Bulldagger Swagger,” and iconic elder-butch Peggy Shaw performing from “Menopausal Gentleman,” not to mention the funniest comedian I’ve ever heard, the Shri-Lankan Indian stand-up, D’Lo, who’d answer cell phone messages as he lay on stage ‘masturbating’ to a vibrator’s buzz.

The great batting order also included Skim, Heather Cassils, Dawn Kasper, and the Miracle Whips. SWAGGER was produced by Raquel Gutierrez of the Latina Butch performance duo, Butchlalis de Panochtitlan who performed a satirical Senate Hearing demanding that Obamacare included breast surgery for butches who want to give their breasts to transwoman “who really want them.”

The Meaning of ‘butch voices’ Standing alone, wondering how to make dinner appear for our worn-out staff, an older butch dyke of 60-something approached me and grabbed my hand. Looking into my eyes, she said, “I just wanted you to know. This weekend has changed my life.” I saw the tears in her hard-worn face and realized she was trying to say more but couldn’t find more words. ‘Changed my life…changed my life,’ she kept saying. We shook hands for a long time, just hanging on to each other, and I felt all the exhaustion from months of organizing drain out of my body, and dissipate into the earth. That moment I understood that the game-changer story of ‘butch voices’ is simply to see and hear others who talk, walk, and look like us.

Three days after the conference a 32 year old butch from the no-name town of San Louis Obispo, just north of California’s great central valley full of red-necks and farming, uploaded a You-tube video of how “awesome” the BVLA experience was for her. She said, “I never knew a butch world existed.” And that seeing hundreds of butches together made her realize she doesn’t have to transition in order to fulfill her life’s dream of being a ‘dad.’ My personal mission in joining the national Butch Voices board is to build butch community, and let our younger female generation know that they can claim masculinity as a woman, or they can transition, or they can settle into whatever kind of butch middle-ground that they wish. But along with their choice, I want them to also—‘pack’ their feminism where ever they go.

Self Critique As an Organizer Yes, we’ve heard! The conference goers want; more coffee & food options, more repeating workshops (like HBO!), more from API dykes, more volunteers, more time between workshops, more intersectionality focused on race & gender, more rituals/rites of passage for butches, more skill-shares, more inclusion of everyone, more on navigating butch/transmen tensions, more about butch identity, trans, stone butches, & transmen; more ‘connecting’ butch events, tighter better-organized performances, more ‘green’, just ‘fu—-‘ more of everything!

Statistics Chart (based on the BVLA survey)
Total Attendance:   548
Age Range:   20% in their twenties, 25% in their thirties, 26% of forty-something’s, 26% of fifty year olds, 3% elders of 60+
Race/Ethnicity:  2% Native American, 5% Middle Eastern, 5% Jewish, 6% API,17% Latina, 25% black, 40% white.

1. How do you self-identify?
Masculine of Center: 60.7%
Feminine of Center: 22.2%
Center of Center/‘Other’: 17%
Masculine of Center: Butch 27%
Soft Butch 11%
Corporate Butch 2.5%    (white for butch professional)
Butcha/Macha 2.5%    (Spanish for masculine of center/butch)
Male Id Butch 1   %    (male identified butch)
Genderqueer  16%     (includes “genderqueer butch”)
Dyke 16%     (often qualified as “butch dyke)
Tomboy 12%
Stud 7%
Boi  2.5%
Transman 1%
Dom 1%

Twelve choices of words were given. Some African American women who are masculine-of-center believe “butch” is a white word, so prefer the word “stud” or “Dom” (as in dominant), or “AG” meaning ‘aggressive.’ The etymology of “stud” is not known. The origins of “butch” has been traced, by lesbian herstorians, to the 1940’s, in the Northeastern states, to white working class, masculine of center women. The words “macha, maricon, butcha, and papi” are all colloquial Spanish/Latina words for butch women. There is a new breed of “butches,” mostly among younger generations, who use “butch” as a noun, and don’t necessarily think of themselves as “lesbian” or “woman” or “female.” The new term “masculine of center” was coined by B. Cole (founder of the Brown Boi Project), adopted this summer by Butch Voices, and popularized at BVLA.

Feminine of Center
Femme  53%
Queer Femme 33%
Femme Dyke 10%
Diva Femme 1%
(The survey choices given to this category were more limited)

Center of Center? Two Spirit, woman, androgynous, lesbian, gender free, fluid, and “other.”

4. How would you best describe your politics?
Queer 37%     (includes; queer lesbian feminist, queer socialist, queer progressive and queer Democrat.)
Feminist 25%     (includes; lesbian feminist & feminist Democrat)
Democrat 25%
Lesbian 15%
Progressive 15%

5. How did you like this Conference?

Very Much  68%
A Lot 29%
So so 2%
Not Answered 4  %

Income/Expenses: Yeah, we finished well in the black, no debts!

Next Year’s Butch Conference To read more about the people mentioned, workshops, and the politics of butch, see more on this site. Yes, BVLA plans to co-produce “The Butch Revival” again this winter, and to offer some of our workshops as single-evening events in greater depth, in LA, Eagle Rock, & Long Beach. Watch our website for dates.  The big news is that Butch Voices will stage the 2^nd bi-annual Conference in August of 2011, again, at the Marriot Hotel in Oakland, California. Oakland is the home turf of Butch Voice’s inaugural conference, which in 2009, drew over four hundred butch women & trans-identifed butch people. To sign up for “more of everything” check out our website at www.butchvoices.com.

CARMEN VAZQUEZ

Carmen Vazquez – Keynote Speech
Butch Voices LA Conference
Sunday, October 10, 2010
West Hollywood CA

I come to this place with humility and with absolute awe and gratitude for all the Butches and allies that created this space. I am sixty one. Never, in all my life, have I experienced a space like it. It is powerful, beautiful, overwhelming. Thank you.

I come to you a single Butch, much to my heartbreak. I share that not for sympathy or dates, much as both are welcome, but because I am in a profoundly different place in my life because of that last relationship and I am still struggling to own the gifts that it gave me.

I came today to speak of Butch Feminism. It is not a concept given much space in lesbian, bi or gender queer life. But it is one I proudly claim.

There is courtship in Butch life. There is sexual passion in Butch life. And there is sexism in Butch life. A sexism we need to own and then rip out of our lives because to not do so is to dishonor the women who fought for and still fight for the right of every woman to own and honor our bodies, our sexuality and our gendered lives. Those women are feminists and we wouldn’t be here without them.

On my hand are rings representing more than forty years of my life and the women who have loved me, cared for me, struggled with me. The elephant represents my mother who died three years ago and whose spirit and heart remain with me. Without them, I wouldn’t be here. I honor them all.

I came to share my own story and to try and frame what a twenty first century leadership looks like if we are to move beyond the silos of identity that our movements have become.

As I prepared for this presentation, I found myself stuck because so much of what I wanted to talk about echoed conversations I had often had with my ex lover. My therapist, bless her heart, said I should just go there, write about her. So I did and I share now what came of that exercise. It was, really, a final love letter.

I have to tell you this so I can let it go and also appreciate you for it.

What is most impossible to forget, take in and own for myself so it no longer belongs to us as a couple is how I learned to be vulnerable to you. How I let you take me and fuck me. I remember the tenderness and passion of that night and how I cried so hard after and needed your comfort. I remember how I went from impenetrable to so very open. What I always feared about that kind of surrender and vulnerability – that of being fucked – is that I would become open and could be hurt. In the end, I was hurt.

What I need to own for myself is that I needed to be made open, no matter the hurt. That it happened in relationship to each other, but that I needed it to happen for me. That I needed to be broke open. I chose to do it with you. You made it safe for me to do so. And it meant

I was and am open forever after. It wasn’t just a sexual opening.

It was an awakening to my own vulnerability that made so much more of myself open up. I became open to my own grief, to pain, to regrets, to passion, to innocence, to joy. To all that living fully and openly means. But open.

Since you left, I have struggled to take in and understand what this exchange between us meant. And what I have learned is that it created a space in me for gentleness and being maternal towards the babies I play with and put to bed in my life. It made me ever more open to feeling and receiving your passion. I learned I could be all that without losing the public Butch in me who can boldly stride on a stage to talk about desire and sex and gender and politics and still be gentle and humble and courting enough to walk off the stage and offer a lady a hankie, and go to my room happy with what I had done and offered.

I learned to not be lonely while doing my work because if I am open and can stay open, the work and my life and my loving are all of a piece.

I learned that I am all of her and him in me. I came to embrace all that with you and in surrender to you.

I know it also took a whole lifetime and many lessons from other lovers and times. But the consciousness and learning about why I needed to be vulnerable came in relationship to you. I can’t know what happened to me in relationship to you and forget it. I don’t want to. I am forever changed because of it.

The loss of you as my lover will always hurt. But what I was able to change about myself in relationship with you will also always stay.
Thank you.

I share the letter because it was in relationship to this strong and beautiful woman that I finally could understand and embrace Butch Femme as a Feminist construct that need not be undermined by her or my internalized sexism. I share it because it was in relationship with her that I finally understood what Audre Lorde famously called the power of the erotic – not in my head, but in my body and heart and soul.

Butch is not an anachronism as the many voices in this room can attest to. Butch is not a stepping stone to trans male life. The space for Butch identity is diminishing and that is not a good thing. In our exploration and embrace of a wider and growing spectrum for gender identity, we must not insist that the logical conclusion to male identity in female bodies be the trans man. I say this with loving support and respect for my transgender sisters and brothers. But there are questions we are not answering. Is there, in fact, pressure on our young male identified sisters to take hormones and transition? Is there sufficient research on the safety and efficacy of prolonged hormone use on female bodies? What kind of leadership do we need to engage in a conversation as allies that can address these questions without blood letting? What role do our femme sisters have in that dialogue? These are real questions for which I don’t have answers and they are not central to what I came to share today. But they are questions that gnaw at me. I hope the leadership for that dialogue and for a feminist analysis of the Butch, Gender Queer and Trans Male terrain and the medicalization of male identities in female bodies can begin to emerge from the spaces that Butch Voices is creating.

The butch is woven into the fabric and history of lesbian life. It is an identity whose history remains largely unrecorded. Studied, but rarely recorded in our own words. It is a history of struggle and violence and passing. But it is also a story of courage and defiance and grace and survival and desire. It is a story and identity much more complex than Radcliff Hall’s hero or the ladies of Bloomsbury. It is more complex than the simple embrace of masculinity in a female body. Butch is a way of walking and feeling and dressing and imagining and desiring other women. For me, it was the notion, at age six, that I was the captain of the rocket ship. It was the notion, at ten that I was the soldier, Adelita’s savior, out to rescue her by land or by sea. It is not male. It is not female. It is both and neither.

What “butch” means and looks like changes or doesn’t because we change or don’t with age and new fashions, with changes in our economic status, with more or less money. Faded jeans give way to Christian Dior, or Jones New York, to Club Room ties instead of Salvation Army hand-me-downs. Added weight makes the breasts heavier and I grudgingly concede to bras. Then I get old enough to say ditch the damn bra. Cold weather in New York makes Calvin Klein boxer briefs more interesting than silk boxers in sunny California. But the essence of who I am does not change. Living in the shadows of a gendered world, in the nuances between male and female does not change. I am butch, as I am lesbian, as I am Puerto Rican. Dress me up or dress me down. It doesn’t matter. I’m still the Captain of the Rocket Ship.

I’m still the person who relishes the public space and struggles with how to be open and unafraid in the private spaces of my life. I am still the boy, excruciatingly afraid of vulnerability who has learned to slay the “vulnerable” dragon in public but still steps back, forgetting how to breathe sometimes, from the private world of intimacy, from the danger of surrendering to trust. My sense of, my feeling of gender and my sexuality are inextricably bound to each other.

It is an identity that still needs to be defended because “Butch” is not simply about what I wear. It is about desire and sex. It is about the raw, complicated, breathtaking and sometimes violent explosion that happens between people who desire each other and allow that desire to take them out of their skin and mind in a tangle of sweat and skin and cum and passion. For all the cars and perfumes and clothes that desire and sex sells in America and the world, it is still not what most Americans think of as essential to their dignity and humanity. Certainly, it is not what most Americans think is essential to the dignity and humanity of Queers. You can’t defend Butch identity without defending desire and lesbian sexuality.

And – you can’t defend something you’re not willing to talk about. It has been my experience that very few of us are capable of talking about sex. We study it. We make a lot of jokes about it. We don’t talk about it. We don’t talk about what we want. We don’t talk about what we are afraid of. We don’t talk about what we think is delicious and what we delegate to the category of “yuck.”

I didn’t used to talk much about it myself. For most of my life, I was that boy afraid of vulnerability, afraid of surrender.

Because I was him, I willed an impenetrable shield around myself. One that kept me sucking the air out of the room. One that kept me always being right and having the last word. One that kept me drinking myself stupid. And one that kept me far, far, from the power of my own eroticism as a woman with a woman.

Oh, I was always smart and I could always make a speech. I could take all the passion of my spirit and put it into organizing and challenging the status quo and firing people up at rallies. I could always flirt and court the femmes. My sexism was not of the ball scratching, woman, come fix me dinner and bring me my drink variety. It was about how little I valued their intellect, their care for me, their bodies and their desire. It was about how easily I could make myself not be present when they touched me.

I had a lot of learning to do.

I was twenty the summer of the Stonewall riots. They did not touch me. The only Stonewall I knew of was a Union General in the civil war. I was very much a practicing homosexual with my high school sweetheart and girlfriend Angie Rodriguez and living in the Bronx sharing life and bid wiz with our best friends Lucy and Jay, a perfectly normal heterosexual Puerto Rican couple whose best friends and the God Mother of their daughter happened to be lovers. We didn’t even know we were lesbians then. She was just my sweeter than honey brown girl and I was her Papi. Gay was tomorrow.

I came of age politically and sexually in San Francisco in the mid seventies. It was a heady time. Boys had lots and lots of sex and reveled in it and really, the girls did too. No one aspired to monogamy except, of course, in Pat Parker’s great truth – when we were in love – which happened every other month. I remember Cedar and her vests and boots and swagger and I could smell a femme. There was a sweet Jewish femme I had only one night with, but oh, how

sweet it was. There was Blue, who I never had sex with but who cooked endlessly for the house and proclaimed “food is love.” We were all filled with a sense of possibility, of relationships without possession, of collective lives. We didn’t know how hard it would be. We dealt with a lot of sexually transmitted diseases.

There was Harvey Milk and his brilliance, his insistence that we all come out. And God help us, we believed him.

But for me, there was also the painful negation of my gender expression. Oh, I tried to hold on to that Butch and her tie, but it was not the stuff of radical lesbian feminism circa 1978. It was a tool of the Patriarchy. It is very hard to clearly separate race from class as it relates to a Butch identity and in so many ways painful. My experience of butch- femme in working class communities of color is very distinct from what it has been with white middle class women. My coming out experience is couched mostly in poor and working class communities that were my life with Angie in the Bronx and nowhere in my experience of adolescent and early adult lesbian life and love do I ever recall a single instance of “androgyny” among the women I hung out with and those who became my lovers. There were butches who absolutely could not pass and there were femmes who passed as straight all the time in their working lives and moved with ease through the night in the company of their butch lovers. No one questioned the authenticity of those identities. That’s just how lesbians were.

The devaluation of my male identity was something I experienced almost exclusively within a white and middle class context. I credit feminism with saving my life, but that was made possible by my friendships and working relationships with women of color and white femmes (including lovers) who identified as feminists, did have a consciously critical awareness of sexism and racism and retained butch and femme as valued social and erotic identities. It

was made possible by the many women of color who claimed identity within a liberation framework. The ethos of radical white lesbian feminists in the seventies and their rejection of everything male would simply have been too painful a choice for me to make without the intervention of women of color.

Fortunately, it is not a choice I had to make. I have held on to my Butch identity and to a feminist consciousness. I have come to understand that Butch and Femme are an insistence on feminism because sexual freedom and autonomy of the body are central tenets of feminism that allow us to honor one another’s choices in gender presentation and erotic desire. If feminism doesn’t mean that a woman can wear what she pleases, experience an unbridled, raw passion that includes fucking another woman as hard as she can because it gives both of them exquisite pleasure, then what is the point of it?

Defending desire and the power of the erotic doesn’t come without cost. In the eighties while with the Women’s Building Collective, I was on the losing end of a debate to allow SAMOIS (and organization of women supporting and defending sado-masochism) to meet at the Women’s Building. I felt in my gut the terrible contradiction of slave/master and racism, but I also knew these were women seeking to express their desire and they deserved my support. In the years that AIDS decimated our community I knew that this would be the new disease model for queers the Right would exploit and I fought as hard as I could for safe sex, not an end to sex. I was on the losing and unpopular end of a debate to have NAMBLA meet at the Community Center in NYC. My own history of sexual abuse made it a very hard conversation to engage in, but I could not deny the possibility and truth of intergenerational relationships that were, in fact, a part of my own coming out story. When Gay men railed against the constraints of sex safe on their sexual lives and dared to speak of bare backing, I was as anxious as anyone else about the possibilities of unprotected sex between my brothers, but I could not deny the conversation, because my own life was the stuff of denial and condemnation within and outside our movement.

Over the course of my life, I have grown in my ability to become more vulnerable to the women in my life. I have learned to become less strident. I have learned to listen and accept the many manifestations of my desire and erotic life and how to defend them. But what I defend is not just personal. It is also very much a political stand.

The effort to create a modern lesbian and gay civil rights movement divorced from the centrality of our sexuality as the essence of both our oppression and liberation is useless. We will not attain the power to change our status as sexual outlaws by sanitizing ourselves as good old American boys and girls who simply want to procreate, buy a house, marry and pay our fair share of taxes. It is not going to happen because no matter how “masculine” our men or how “feminine”

our women, every single time we make love to someone of our own gender we create teeny little waves of revolution because we weaken the links in the ages old chain called sex for reproduction that then later got called marriage instead of prostitution. We need to understand that our desire and our expression of it is a politically and personally transformative reality. Every single time we dare to embrace our desire and make love to someone of our own sex or gender we are claiming the sovereignty of our bodies. And the body is the final battleground. Control the body, control the human. Can’t control the body? Kill the human.

We had better learn how to talk about the truth of who we are and that truth is not only about our desire and sexuality but it is fundamentally about our desire and sexuality, about embracing and defending who we are, about defending our culture and history and dignity.

To do otherwise is inauthentic and politically inept. People in Da Bronx and East LA know we have sex. No one listens to liars or people who hide. No one listens to people without the capacity for empathy and compassion that comes from knowing and embracing yourself and your people. No one listens to people unwilling to hold on to their own dignity. People of color have little motivation to listen to white gay people asking us to support marriage equality because they haven’t been there for us. Because Lesbian and Gay leadership keep talking about lesbian and gay rights when we know there is no such thing. That there is only the right to live without fear of violence. There is only the right to a wage that will let you eat and feed your children and have shelter. There is only the right to claim the sovereignty of our lands and our bodies.

When we have loud and visibly “gay” campaigns to support people suffering through the devastation of Katrina or Haiti or this numbing recession and the ever growing rolls of poverty, we might have reason to be heard. When we tell the world of the poor and the marginalized that we understand their struggle because it is our struggle too, when we are open and powerful enough to understand that our humanity is diminished by their suffering; we will have reason for their empathy. When we are loud and visibly gay supporters of higher wages and better working conditions because it is the right thing to do and we finally do get that our own people are deeply impacted by double digit unemployment, then there will begin to be cause for genuine alliance.

Doing that is not possible without a twenty first century leadership in our many movements that insists on a liberation framework, a human rights framework, what my young friends call an intersectional politics, in the lived world, not as an academic trope. It can no longer be that racism is what Black people deal with or immigration what Latinos deal with or sex what queers deal with. It can no longer be that disabled people are the only ones fighting to create safe spaces for differently abled bodies. It can no longer be that the professionalized women’s, gay, immigration and civil rights movements stay in their damn silos. Poverty, violence, stigma, discrimination and hatred are the shared experience of millions of people thrown to the margins not just by the rich, white, heterosexual elite, but by our own people. The leadership you must develop, support and embrace is one that understands the liberated body has to live through many identities and in many movements. The liberated body is free. It is not raped by poverty or racism. It is not denuded, violated or disparaged by bigots. It is not isolated or hidden away from public life because it is old or disabled. It is not denied the right to reproduce or not reproduce. It is not denied the right to change itself through medical intervention or physical presentation. The liberated body cannot be silenced because it has the resilience to transform poverty and sexual abuse and racism and grief into hope and a vision for the liberation of the human spirit. The liberated body is strong. It is proud. It is Feminist.

We need a twenty first century leadership that understands desire to be about hope and the ability to dream and create a better self and a more just world. For the sake of cold, clean air in our lungs, for the sake of melon moons, for the grown ups, children and puppies we love, for the sake of music and laughter, for the sake of our spirits, for the sake of the grand adventures and inexplicable mysteries that are the essence of life, we must embrace and defend our desire and our right to an erotic life. We must defend the right to gender and sexual freedom, the right to economic justice, the right to sovereignty that begins with the body. When we can do that, we will be bigger than our individual selves. We will have genuine compassion. We will understand our struggle within the much larger global struggle for human rights. We will take the hand of others who have been beaten down and walk with them. We will leave white only organizing forever behind because it wrong, unnecessary and not in our interest. We will create and celebrate queer family and queer kinship. We will celebrate that which we create not with blood or genes but with trust and respect, with humor, with great sex, with courage, with honor, with love.
© Carmen Vazquez

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LESLIE FEINBERG

Speech sent to To Butch Voices LA conference
by Leslie Feinberg
on receiving
first Butch Lifetime Achievement award
Sunday, October 10, 2010

The Butch Voices LA Steering Committee was honored to present “The Butch Voices. LA 2010 / Butch Lifetime Achievement Award” to Leslie Feinberg.  And the Community Activist Award to Nancy Valverde.
[NOTE: This talk can be quoted and reproduced under Creative Commons copyright requiring attribution, no derivatives, and no commercial use.]

I sincerely thank you for recognizing my activist work and writing for the first Butch Voices Lifetime Achievement award at this Southwest regional conference.

As merely one activist in a world of struggle, I dedicate this award to all those who are fighting for economic and social justice–from Phoenix, to Oakland, to the West Bank in historic Palestine–since liberation cannot be won without collective struggle, cemented with unity.

By recognizing a lifetime of work by a revolutionary communist, Butch Voices demonstrates the kind of courage this historical period of economic and social crisis demands. But before I comment more on this, I want to say something about how illness has affected my own butch voice.

I am very ill right now, from a 30-year undiagnosed Lyme infections and other tick-borne co-infections, which I contracted in the U.S. I’ve been home in a darkened room for most of the last three years.
I’m also in the midst of a very debilitating treatment, which makes writing and reading even more difficult.

I have been able to write group messages: short public updates in cyberspace about how ill I am and why. These personal messages were to let you know that I’m too sick to travel or write or to follow e-mail. I have worked with many activists in the U.S., here and around the world, and I wanted to let them know that a lack of response from me was a sign of disability, not disrespect.

As I’ve written these messages about my individual health, however, I have tried since my 60th birthday last year to write a public statement, in my own voice, about the medical politics surrounding this epidemic, and how those who are oppressed are affected.

But these tick-borne illnesses make analytical reading and writing in the English language an actually painful work space in the brain for me–like writing with symptoms of a severe migraine. Language-driven work is difficult and largely unproductive for me right now.

I have moved much of my work and memory to a different area of the brain: making, developing and printing photographs–narrative images, grouped for greater context. My photos are my personal gift to you, up on flickr.

But weeks ago, in the midst of trying to get work done and preparing to go into this treatment, I awoke during the night and thought: If I don’t write something in my own voice now, then when? I’ve already experienced dramatic loss of abilities, suddenly and gradually, from the illness and the treatments.

If I don’t research and write up something in my own butch voice, then the voice of the bigots and bullies who claim to be experts on my body and my oppression will narrate my life.

This last planned written political statement is entitled, “Casualty of an undeclared war.” I’ll begin serializing it online to share with you all. I hope to begin posting it to MySpace and Facebook soon. Then it will go up on my website. You can find all my web connections at: pageflakes.com/transgenderwarrior

If you introduced me as she or ze, either is correct. I don’t claim the pronoun he.

I do claim the pronoun “she.” My body is the site of oppression and resistance as female and as a butch lesbian. There are no borders in my embattled body between the fight against women’s oppression, sexual oppression and trans oppressions.

Taking me out of the category of female skews understanding of the spectra of gender expressions and weakens the struggle for women’s liberation, as well as trans liberation and lesbian/gay/poly sexual liberation.

My life has been shaped by the apparent contradiction between my birth sex and my gender expression. And I’ve been shaped by being a masculine lesbian female who found community, or perhaps more accurately: communities, plural, and together against a common enemy.

I don’t want to romanticize anything about bar life in the pre-Stonewall bars: exploitation by organized crime, police raids, groups of bashers, oceans of alcohol and fights.

I remember one bar and party game in particular: rating butches from 1 to 10 on the aspect of their gender expression that was considered masculine. I do recall how those who played rated the same butch differently, showing difference in individual perceptions about gender expression. I also recall some butches protesting the rating they received, showing that individuals often perceive themselves differently than those around them do.

But mostly, I look back and think about how the game made gender expression a contest over who was the most masculine, like so-called beauty pageants award the most feminine.

Let no one say that anyone is “too masculine” or “not masculine enough” or criticize anyone else’s gender expression. No one’s gender expression is liberated yet.

In the 1960s many thought that being a masculine female was synonymous with being lesbian. That was the societal assumption. So it seemed that the masculine women we worked with in the factories, orchards and fields, who had male-bodied husbands, just hadn’t come out yet.

That underlying assumption skewed understanding about gender variance and sexuality. Gender expression doesn’t determine who you are sexually attracted to or what feels sexually pleasurable for your body.

The assumption on which the game rested, however, was also that being a butch lesbian was a shared identity and had a quality of experience that could be quantitatively measured with the same ruler. The rating helped perpetuate the idea that some peoples’ gender expression was “more” and others’ were “less.”

The real lesson of the game was missed: The 1 to 10 scale didn’t rate “high” and “low,” “more” or “less.” instead, the exercise invited us to examine gender expressions that were considered the same gender expression, and find many degrees of variation.

The assumption of the game implied that gender expression is an essential characteristic that rises above class lines, national boundaries, above the struggle of oppressor and oppressed nations.

It ignored the experiences that were not shared, including racism, male chauvinism, unemployment, disability, and differences between urban and rural tolerance, and class divisions.

Racist segregation was the law of the land in the U.S. at that time, not just in the South. Buffalo, where I lived then, was apartheid segregated–still is. East Buffalo was community to those of African descent–and the banks and politicians used red-lining to create all-white neighborhoods west of Main Street.

Those who came out to the working-class lesbian and gay drag bars defied the racist segregation in public facilities. Although those who came out to the bars were predominantly white, there were also Black, Haudenosaunee, Latino/a workers of all sexes together in the same bars, united against a common enemy who could come through the door at any moment.

Many of butches of different nationalities also worked together all week long at factories, or stood in line at dawn–summer heat or winter cold–talking as we waited for day work outside the temporary labor offices.

The movement grew as we organized resistance to police raids and took up the cry: “Out of the bars and into the streets.” As that fightback intensified, it sparked consciousness and militancy, and forged pride and greater unity.

You honor and continue the coalition character of the struggle with the sensitivity and inclusion you bring to the language of your mission statement, a statement which could only have been hammered out with group labor, and the thought and discussion that work generates.

You describe BUTCH Voices as a social justice organization that is race and gender inclusive, prowomanist and feminist.  Your mission statement explains: “Our mission is to enhance and sustain the well-being of all women, female-bodied, and trans-identified individuals who are masculine of center. We achieve this by providing programs that build community, positive visibility and empower us to advocate for our whole selves inclusive of and beyond our gender identity and sexual orientation. We recognize our diversity as having a foundation rooted in butch heritage. We welcome the on-going development of movements intentionally and critically inclusive of our gender variant community.”

I read with great care and appreciation that you welcome to this conference: “[A]ll who identify as Butch, boi, genderqueer, tomboy, stud, butcha, dragking, jock, dyke, two-spirit, FtM, trans-masculine, androgynous-with-a-butch-twist.”
“Connect with the power of our diverse, many-cultured communities of lesbians, Queer, feminist, womanist … whatever kind of butch you are.”
And you include femmes and other allies in your welcome.

I send you my deepest solidarity in your organizing efforts. This is a time to be bold and bodacious and to act, not to be immobilized by fear.

There are many things that have been won in decades of struggle, but as the experience of Nazi Germany demonstrated, those gains can be quickly wiped out. Bankers and industrialists in Germany funded the rise of fascism as a last ditch effort to save their capitalist system from a workers’ revolution.

Today, neo-fascist organizing by the Tea Party forces is on the rise. Arizona and other states are re-imposing apartheid segregation. ICE agents carry out Gestapo-like raids on undocumented workers, demanding passbooks and tagging workers and families by skin color for interrogation and deportation.

This is racist scapegoating to divert attention from the capitalist economic crisis, in which the rich are getting richer. Immigrant workers don’t steal jobs. There’s no set limit of jobs in a society. Every working person creates the need for more goods and services.

The State Department, Pentagon and pro-war media are trying to create pro-war sentiment in the LGBT communities, aimed at formerly colonized countries that assert their right to sovereignty, self-determination, and/or a break with the profit-driven capitalist world market.

Meanwhile, the CIA and other U.S. experts in the development of the science of torture have included rape and other forms of violence and attempts at humiliation and assassination of personhood, using prisoners’ sexuality, gender expression and sex, as well as racism. Some of the guards at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo learned their interrogation and torture techniques as guards in prisons in the U.S., where sexual, gender and sex humiliation–like racism–is rampant.

Now, maybe the Pentagon generals and admirals will even drop their “don’t ask, don’t tell” witch hunt long enough to marshal fresh troops to send out to kill other working and oppressed people, or be killed. The Pentagon has no right to so brutally and violently discriminate against GI’s. But that doesn’t mean that the Pentagon is a kinder, gentler killing machine and therefore we should join.
“Big firms get rich, GI’s die.” That’s the first protest message I ever raised my voice to chant.

The left wing of the early LGBT liberation movement in the U.S. during the late 1960s and early 1970s expressed solidarity with all who were struggling against capitalist and imperialist oppression and domination around the world, including in the U.S.

There’s a big economic difference between the period I came out into, in the 1960s, and today.

Then, war for empire was still a boon to capitalist big business. The FBI carried out a covert domestic war of frame-ups and disinformation in an attempt to isolate and break up the struggles for national liberation, the organizing against the Pentagon war in Vietnam, and those uniting to demand women’s and LGBT liberation.

But today, Wall Street and the banks are making a fortune in profit off workers’ labor, while millions are hungry, johless and homeless. Where are the safety-net social programs? Where’s the WPA jobs program? Where’s the neighborhood clinics and food banks?

We’re told there’s no money for life-and-death social programs, but there’s a blank check for endless wars for profit. Yet, today, imperialist war is no longer able to artificially pull the capitalists out of economic crisis, and those who are at ground zero for “shock and awe” invasions, and brutal occupations, are resisting by any means necessary.

The tinder is dry, and sparks of resistance will ignite a conflagration. As the union song demands an answer from each of us: Which side are you on?

Today, I dedicate this award and my solidarity to all who are protesting and organizing–through speech, signing, marching, rolling, tapping, and clicking the send button on an online petition:–in the struggle for jobs, health care as a right, housing, education,
–to those battling white supremacist ideology–the nationalist ideology of the oppressor nation; to those demanding: stop imperialist wars for profit, and bring all the troops home, now!
–to those defending Muslim, Arab and South Asia immigrants being rounded up, tortured and deported; to those working to stop the racist war against undocumented immigrants and to boycott Arizona.
–to those protesting police occupations of oppressed communities, and the racist police brutality and killings–from 7-year-old Aiyana Jones in Detroit to Oscar Grant in an Oakland BART station.
–to those organizing in defense of anti-war and internationalist solidarity activists who are being harassed by the FBI and are now facing subpoenas to appear before grand juries.
–to those battling misogyny, trans-bashing, gender-phobia and other forms of sex, gender and sexual oppression in a patriarchal-dominated capitalist society, to all those on the front lines in defense of reproductive justice
–to the youth who are struggling for life and consciousness against right-wing white supremacist, LGBT-bashing, anti-immigrant, woman-hating, and anti-disabled bullying in schools
–to all those struggling to remove obstacles to social and economic access that create disability
–to those who have the courage to refuse to kneel in surrender and pledge an oath of anti-communism to prove loyalty to the emperors of banking and industry and their imperial wars.
–and to the anti-capitalist Abolitionists, revolutionists who work to overturn this profit-driven, divide-and-conquer system of private ownership of all that collective labor has built over millennia, and to replace capitalism–in which abundance creates widespread poverty–with collective ownership of production and a planned economy in which people can contribute to society what they are able, and receive in return what they need and want.

Many battles lie between us and liberation. I am with you at every barricade, at every front line.

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