#joan nestle is a genius she is everything i worship her

[that-butch-archivist]

"Every time I speak at a lesbian-feminist gathering, I introduce myself as a femme who came out in the 1950s. I do this because it is the truth and it allows me to pay historical homage to my lesbian time and place, to the women who have slipped away, yet whose voices I still hear and whose V-necked sweaters and shiny loafers I still see. I do it to call up the women I would see shopping with their lovers in the Lower East Side supermarkets, the femme partners of the butch women who worked as waiters in the Club 82. I remember how unflinchingly the femme absorbed the stares of the other customers as she gently held onto the arm of her partner. Butches were known by their appearance, femmes by their choices. I do it in the name of the wives of passing women whose faces look up at me from old newspaper clippings, the women whom reporters described as the decieved ones and yet whose histories suggest much more complicated choices. And if femmes seemed to be "wives" of passing women, the feminine protectors of the couple's propriety, it was so easy to lose curiosity about what made them sexual heretics, because they looked like women. Thus femmes became the victims of a double dismissal: in the past they did not appear culturally different enough from heterosexual women to be seen as breaking gender taboos, and today they do not appear feminist enough, even in their historical context, to merit attention or respect for being ground-breaking women."

- An excerpt from "The Femme Question," written by Joan Nestle and found in The Persistent Desire: A Butch-Femme Reader. (Emphasis in bold my own.)