Dyke Activity

Learn to recognize other butches for what they really are: your people. Your brothers or your sisters. Both are just words that mean family. Other butches are not your competition, they are your comrades. Be there when they need you. Go fishing together. Help each other move. Polish your rims or your chrome or your boots together. See these acts for what they really are: solidarity.”

bombo.love

I just wish it weren’t such a lonely word. I have such a spectacular queer family, every stripe on the flag working together to tend, to hold, to mend. All of them are wonderful, and none of them had even heard of Stone before they met me. I wish that weren’t the case.

I struggle to reconcile the Stone community that I know must exist with the isolation that I experience. I struggle to talk about this in any meaningful online Stone spaces I’m a part of. (I’ve drafted this post and its lookalikes at least a dozen times.) I feel an obligation, since there are so few places for us, to be unstoppably proud of my identity. To be a force for fellow Stones, and to only write about Stones being respected, loved, and happy. To prove to myself and others in my stories that a happy life is possible for us.

Someone else has walked the path before me, and everything I write clears the brush a little more for the next traveler. For now, my Stone butch brotherhoods exist only in books. I read about their histories, and I feel like I could know them. They were like I am, a long time ago. Surely, there must be others even now. Surely I’m not the only one.

Collection of Pressed Flowers ❀

 by George Marr (1917)