#butch lesbian books

[aroaessidhe]

A mutual of mine has this database of 100+ books with butch/stud/masc sapphics that might be of interest to some people!

[that-butch-archivist]

"Lesbian Weddings" by Wendy Jill York

source: The Femme Mystique, edited by Lesléa Newman

[hattersarts]

drew some book!husbands. they feel like they've taken more traits from each other than the show.

[dollhousefemme]

Mrs. S by K. Patrick

[cowboyjen68]

Looking for a book about the butch experience written by a butch woman!? Here you go. My friend Shayley wrote this and I can’t wait to dive in. I put her order link in my link tree. Available on Audio book too.

[unapologeticallygay]

Butch: Another way to be a woman

Another Mother Tongue: Gay Words, Gay Worlds by Judy Grahn (1984) / Asian American Sexualities: Dimensions of the Gay and Lesbian Experience by Russell Leong (1996)

[mysweetsinfulobsessions]

HIJAB BUTCH BLUES by LAMYA H.

Alright, changing it up a bit with my book stuff but this one hit home with me. The author draws very interesting parallels between stories in the Quran and her experiences as a gay muslim woman that are very interesting. And if you think you can’t be muslim and gay, or wear a hijab and be gay, or even tackle muslim culture and queerness in one, then you’re bound to be pleasantly proved wrong with this one.

[that-butch-archivist]

"Dyke March 1994" by Morgan Gwenwald

source: The Wild Good: Lesbian Photographs & Writings on Love, edited by Beatrix Gates

[makiquas]

Its Butchtober. Bear with me for a second as I rant about children's cartoon ships, butchphobia, the conditional acceptance of butches in sapphic spaces on the basis of desirability, and feeling erased as a butch kid.

It's so funny that I realised early on as a 2000-2010s teen/kid how a lot of so called "sapphics" of social media are really, really anti butch4butch, only by interacting with certain subsets of Catradora and Appledash haters. It may be flippant to connect butchphobia with children's cartoons, but you cannot deny it is there. We finally had two canon butch4butch and masc4masc lesbian animated ships. And the fandoms decided that the best possible reaction to this is to violently hate on the ships for bullshit reasons and write up masterdocs about how the butch character actually looks better with a femme character instead (in both cases–Rarity and Glimmer, who is arguably feminine but not femme, but that's a conversation for another day, how the SPOP fandom waters down gender identities for aesthetics).

This is not just about two cartoon ships; this mindset of seeing two masc lesbians and immediately going "actually they act like bros; but this BUTCHFEMME couple has real chemistry" comes off sounding really, really bad in 2024 when you have no idea how butch identity operates, outside of depicting us as pants-wearing sexually aggressive muscular women. Butches ARE bros, even the ones who kiss each other. Camaraderie and tomboyish swagger *is* a part of their life. It's not our fault you are too fanfic trope-pilled to read these interactions are sexless friendship bantering.

It's also quite concerning, given how there are only a handful of butch4butch books in the market, and almost all of them talk about the stigmatizing of relationships between two butches/studs/masc lesbians. There are many butch lesbians who themselves face internalized butchphobia because of societal standards and expectations of being turned into the "gallant" provider of femmes. Butch and femme are not always inherently complementary, butches can be attracted to other butches, there is no "natural order" model of lesbian/sapphic attraction and your thinly veiled butchphobia is really off-putting, given you guys don't seem to extend that same rhetoric to mascfemme ships like Korrasami or Caitvi, or femme-femme ships like Harlivy.

Here, I must mention relationships like Rei and Kaoru from Oniisama E, or Jess and Lupe from A League of Their Own, who have bucket loads of chemistry but still have some vehement antis only because both the lesbians are masculine. (What's funny is the new wave of lesbian Oniisama E fans are almost all Rei/Kaoru shippers despite the show putting them into two butchfemme pairings.) Something something to be butch4butch is to be failing the tests of palatability and desirability according to conventional models of societal norms. Forever.

Again, one may have valid reasons for disliking these fictional ships (what, I genuinely don't know). But it *is* weird that you guys can watch fifty white fem4fem sapphic shows in a year and read 100+ GL with the same feminine girlish blonde and brunette/pink haired archetype and not bat an eyelid, but conjure a world of made-up "platonic" dynamics just because you read every butch4butch interaction as fundamentally platonic.

A lot of you love to throw around Stone Butch Blues as a catchphrase to educate strangers on the internet about 1950s-70s blue-collar bar culture and USA butch femme history, but how many of you actually know that within the book itself, the lead character acts prejudiced and hates on another butch for being butch4butch? How many of you know that she apologizes to her friend at the end for her hateful remarks? Fun fact: when you ostracize a butch for not fitting into your butch-femme subculture aesthetic, you're no better than lesbiphobic bigots actually.

Anyway, here are some butch4butch resources if you are a baby butch4butch and feel alienated by these kinds of weird rhetoric in online and fandom queer spaces too:

Butch4Butch romance books

My Butch4Butch books masterdoc (**being updated regularly**)

Leo Wilder's Butch4Butch writing (18+)

Butch4Butch photography archive (insta)

Boyish² Butch4Butch yuri anthology (insta)

@milsae Butch4Butch artist (tumblr/insta)

This post is made by a trans masc butch of color. Terfs, racists, biphobes and radfems kindly do not derail or interact.

[leostimstuff]

Tang LMK stimboard for meeee!!! :3

📚 🍜 ✨ | 📚 ✨ | 📚 🍜 ✨

[lunaathorne]

browsing through one last stop edits and am ever so certain that some of you simply choose to refuse to acknowledge the fact that jane is a chinese butch lesbian and not a skinny pale femme with a shaggy wolfcut........ please try harder to source better pictures of butch lesbians, it's so tiring to see this erasure. jane does NOT look like this!

Like???? this is not jane lmaoooo. she is a queer punk leather dyke!!! not an ulzzang korean girl!!!some of you cannot imagine butch lesbians as "aesthetic" and it fucking shows.

THIS IS HOW JANE LOOKS BTW

STOP ERASING BUTCH BODIES FOR AESTHETICS. BUTCH = BEAUTIFUL.

[holeymolars]

Laura and Nina, Florence (Del LaGrace, 1993)

(Photo ID: A black and white photo of two shirtless butches in swim trunks standing back to back. They are both muscular and curling their biceps. Neither is directly facing the camera, but both have their heads turned to look at it. One is wearing sunglasses, a bandanna around their wrist and a watch, with white trunks and appears to have a tattoo on their ribcage. You can see their left breast, but their right is covered by their arm. The other is wearing zebra (I think) print trunks and a watch. They both have short, curly hair and light skin. They appear to be on the beach, though you can not really see anything in the background besides what appears to be the sky.)

[read-alert]

This does come with the caveat that I can't quite remember if the characters in How to Find a Princess, Funeral Songs for Dying Girls, and Chain-Gang All-Stars identity specifically as lesbians or not, but they are all sapphic. Full titles under the cut!

EDIT: Apparently Alice Walker is a big proponent of a famous antisemitic conspiracy theorist, David Icke, so be aware of that when considering The Color Purple

Happy Lesbian Visibility Week! 📚📖🏳️‍🌈

Hijab Butch Blues by Lamya H

In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado

How to Find a Princess by Alyssa Cole

Cantoras by Carolina De Robertis

The Color Purple by Alice Walker

Under the Udala Trees by Chinelo Okparanta

Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg

Funeral Songs for Dying Girls by Cherie Dimaline

Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

[rjalker]

Stone Butch Blues links again. Paste this post wherever the fuck you want.

Here is the free official PDF of Stone Butch Blues, by Leslie Feinberg, a nonbinary lesbian.

Here is where you can buy an official physical copy, paying only for the cost of the materials and shipping.

(Edit: Epub now included! Click here!)

As a warning, there are several scenes of police brutality, rape, and some other violence, but they are there to show the affects and reality of oppression, not to be gratuitous or add fake drama.

[lavendermenace99]

[that-butch-archivist]

"Pearls" by Morgan Gwenwald

source: The Femme Mystique, edited by Lesléa Newman