In the Old Days, We Dreamed About the Old Days

Some of my readers may be old enough to remember the butch/femme renaissance of the mid-90s. Joan Nestle, also one of the founders of the Lesbian Herstory Archives, published The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader in 1992. In 1993, Leslie Feinberg published Stone Butch Blues, a memoir about living as a transgendered butch in the pre-Stonewall days (this also was the start of a new awareness of, and debate about, transgender issues in the lesbian community).

Feinberg's lover Minnie Bruce Pratt followed up with S/he, a collection of short pieces about (among other things) her relationship with Feinberg, their exploration of gender and butch/femme, and their shared nostalgia for the days when the police raided gay bars, women had to have on at least three pieces of women's clothing when they did, and there was a back entrance for people to slip out of when the cops pulled up in front. (Pratt mentions the secret exit; Feinberg says smokily, "Only a femme from the old days would know about the secret exit." Then they fall into bed. Again.) The ever-prolific Leslea Newman edited The Femme Mystique a couple of years later.



For awhile there, it seemed like everybody was all heated up about butch/femme. I myself actually began wearing makeup again during this era, and sometimes gave readings in a blue velvet strapless cocktail dress and high heels. This get-up was very effective at attracting exactly the kind of woman I was attracted to: butches in black t-shirts and motorcycle boots, the kind of woman who'd open your car door for you, steer you through the door of the restaurant with one hand in the small of your back, take you home and tell you to take off everything but the shoes. I had one girlfriend who liked to slow-dance with me at the Lesbian Center, whispering a little fantasy in my ear about being in one of those dim old bars. Pehaps, she thought optimistically, she might have gotten into a knife fight over me!


It was a form of cosplay, I think now. Of historical re-enactment. It was a playful erotic fantasy brought out into the light of day. It was also an honoring of our foremothers, women who bravely lived their lives in a time of repression we didn't experience. Each of us hoped we would have been among them, that we might have shown up in some blurry photo Joan Nestle and her colleagues pulled out of the archives, that we would not have spent those decades as obedient daughters, wives, and mothers.

Lesbians at the bar, circa 1950

I've been thinking about those days lately--those long-ago days when we dreamed about long-ago days--because of how I've changed. I was young enough then to think that I was growing into the authentic expression of my sexuality; it never occurred to me then that I could be in a phase. I was a lesbian; not just that, I was a femme lesbian. Not just that, I was a femme lesbian whose attraction to stone butches bordered on being a full-blown fetish. One woman I dated said to me, "I'm afraid I'm just not butch enough for you." I was afraid of that, too. We didn't last long. I had high standards in those days. High, and inflexible.

And then, you know, Raider happened. But I didn't generalize from him. I didn't think, "I like men now!" (This is an interesting contrast to my original coming-out, when I declared myself a Lesbian for Life as soon as I'd kissed my first girl. I was wedded to firmly-bounded identities back then). I figured I was still basically a femme not-lesbian-but-something-kind-of-like-a-lesbian who liked stone butches...and Raider. The very special exception I'd chosen to spend my life with.

I am interested to discover that this isn't as true as I thought it was. In my mid-life renaissance, I am discovering that I am attracted to a lot of people. I have a profound appreciation for women in all shapes and sizes and forms of self-expression; indeed, I've had to force myself to stop complimenting women in my homeschool group on how cute/hot/charming/lovely they look, for fear they'd think I was hitting on them.

I'm also attracted to people on the female-to-male genderqueer spectrum (note: not actually a spectrum per se). If you knew how many of my "stone butch" ex-lovers were now living as men, this would totally not surprise you. But I like the softer ones, too, these days. And strong femmes with a core of steel. And persons born in male bodies who wear beards and skirts and sparkly hairbands. And I spend the occasional week or so enjoying the torment of a hopeless crush on a man I know perfectly well is as gay as a daisy in May.

Back then, though, I was so into my femme self that I wrote an essay about lipstick. Leslea Newman published it The Femme Mystique. Lambda Literary Review gave the book a lukewarm review, but called me and my piece out by name as highlights. I created a file I optimistically called "reviews" (plural!) and put it away in my filing cabinet. At the moment, my heart is broken, because that file apparently doesn't exist anymore. In that drawer, you can find copies of every magazine I published in from 1994-2001 (More than I remembered! Almost none you've heard of!). You can find 20-year-old submission cover letters that really should be recycled, ten copies of a chapbook I published in 1995, and the synopsis for a Star Trek novel I knew I'd never write but couldn't resist outlining because it was as much fun as a day at Disneyland. But you cannot find a copy of what I believe may have been my only published review. You have only my word for it that it was a good one.

But you can judge for yourself. I have braved the deepest cellars of my computer hard drive and brushed the cobwebs off "Lipstick." I have resisted the temptation to re-write it, to tone down the overblown rhetoric a bit. This is the writer I was twenty years ago. This is the woman I was twenty years ago.

Lipstick

I pull my lipstick out of my bag. My lover is across the room. We're separated by music, smoke, crowds of other women. I roll the lipstick up from its tube, spread it, wide and generous, on my lower lip, press my lips together firmly, delicately fill in the arches of my cupid's-bow with the pointed tip. As I re-cap the lipstick and drop it in my bag, I glance at my lover. She gives no overt sign of having noticed my slow touch-up, but her hand rests unobtrusively on her belt buckle. I bend to smooth my stocking at the ankle; from the corner of my eye I see that her fingertips are lightly stroking the inside of her thigh, near where I know the head of her cock is hidden in a fold of her black jeans. This is a part of our lovemaking. It begins in our separate houses with my lace underwear and her crisp white shirt; I can't tell you where it ends.

* * *

 Watching my mother, I learned the right way to get dressed for a party without getting makeup on my nice clothes. After her shower, she left her dress for the evening hanging safely in the closet or on the back of the door until she had finished with hairspray, nail polish, and powder puffs. Of course, she put on her underthings, stockings and slip; it would be indecent to remain naked. She slipped her feet into her pumps, to protect her hose from runs and snags. Her white slip was a pale suggestion of the evening's dress, full or narrow where the dress would be full or narrow, slit up one side or dropping deep down her back. Her arms, shoulders, neck, and face were bare and clean. Her hair lay tight and wet against her head, the comb-lines visible. She stepped into the bright light of the bathroom. Her pumps clicked on the tile, her brushes and compacts of eye color and lip color clicked on the counter as she laid them out. I was breathless as I watched her lift the first jar: she would be beautiful when she left this room.

I learned this ritual from sitting in an easy chair in the corner of my mother’s bedroom and watching her, and I practiced it all through my teen years. In my bathroom, wearing my slip and heels, I curled my hair, running the hot comb or iron through it again and again, rolling the hot curls around my fingers. I loved the feel of the warm ringlets on my neck and shoulders, and then the shiver that ran through me when I pinned the curls up and the cool air hit the back of my neck again. I wore a pink demi-cup underwire bra that lifted my breasts from underneath, as I imagined I might hold them in my hands to offer them to a lover. I dusted their tops with soft beige powder the color of my skin, the inner curves with blush a shade or so darker, to deepen my cleavage. The bra's clasp was in front, between the cups, and when I unsnapped it with two fingers, my breasts fell out abundantly, apples from an overturned bushel basket, loose gems from a velvet bag, tumbling out for my lover to catch. I practiced that movement over and over.

I loved the greasy act of putting makeup on. I pulled all my colors out of the drawer and arranged them before me, opened all the compacts and considered their contents. I was willing to make up, take it all off, and make up again to get it right. I sometimes spent whole evenings trying out new ways to wear eyeshadow, new lipstick colors. From magazines for girls I learned to smooth foundation under my chin, down my neck, around to the back, into my hairline. Its ending had to be a secret; no one should see the line. Powder followed, then blush in two shades: lighter on my cheekbones, darker blush below to create shadows. I brushed on eyeshadow in four stages, and dipped my eyebrow brush in sugar water; once dry, it kept each shiny hair in place. I pulled my lower eyelids down and smeared eyeliner pencil inside, behind the roots of my eyelashes. I was extravagant; I wore lipliner pencil and two lipsticks at a time—the lower lip one shade darker to make it look swollen and pouty, like I’d already been kissing for hours.

Eventually, I discovered department store cosmetics, and stopped buying waxy two-dollar lipsticks at Perry Drug. I threw away my Revlon eyeshadows, and the cheap plastic applicators with sponge-rubber tips that had come with them. In Hudson's Aisles of Beauty, the applicators for the blushes and eyeshadows were bits of soft chamois cloth on smooth wood, or brushes sold separately; some were made from real hair, like artists' brushes, and they were round, flat, angled, beveled. There were tiny brushes for liquid eyeliner, and huge soft brushes for loose powder. Loose powder! That was a revelation. I gladly abandoned pressed powder compacts, with their abrasive puffs and powder that clumped and streaked on my face and neck. Loose powder came in a beautiful wide-mouthed jar. I loved to unscrew its lid, plunge the brush in, tap off the excess, and brush the powder on with a light motion of my wrist, rapid and even, from my forehead to the top of my bra.

The lipsticks at Hudson's were heavy, greasy, meant to stay on for hours without drying, meant to soften and ease the friction of two mouths connecting. I loved those lipsticks. I could spread samples from the testers up the back of my hand nearly to my elbow, studying my skin tone, comparing the colors. Even the powder eyeshadows were moist, clinging to my eyelids like humid air. Cheap cosmetics were stiff and powdery; they flaked if I smiled, if I frowned, if I talked too much. Good makeup was a soft veil; the weight of it pulled my eyelids to sleepy half-mast.

I learned to be sexy from my mother in her slip, leaning toward her mirror with a lipstick in her hand. My mother in her slip turned me on. I wanted to be sexy that way, boldly, my lipstick a challenge and a declaration: yes, I know I'm sexy. I dare you to look at me. I dare you to look away.

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