“My arousal has always come from what I could touch or see in her, it has never come from the attention to my own body. When many years ago I finally met someone who liked to take as much as I liked giving and who recognized that it was her stimulation that triggered mine- that I understood that I could find women who wouldn’t run away from a stone butch. I’m not uncomfortable with my body, it’s just that my erogenous zones lay within her.” –Anonymous Commenter

As a high femme, reading this for the first time a year or something ago was equivalent to cathartic.

a (very ad-hoc) list of butch reading and writing, (mostly) by butch authors. books I've read myself in bold; take the rest with a grain of salt. additions, addendums, and commentary welcome :)

general/literary fiction:

mrs s by k patrick

stone butch blues by leslie feinberg

boulder by eva baltasar

running fiercely towards a thin high sounds by judith katz

tipping the velvet by sarah waters

a crystal diary by frankie hucklenbroich

godspeed by lynn breedlove

cha-ching! by ali liebegott

the ihop papers by ali liebegott

greasepaint by hannah levene

lucy and mickey by red jordan arobateau

the bull-jean stories by sharon bridgforth

development by bryher

notes of a crocodile by qui miaojin

america is not the heart by elaine castillo

the slow fix by ivan coyote

the swashbuckler by lee lynch

old dyke tales by lee lynch

sci-fi, fantasy, and horror:

gideon the ninth by tamsyn muir

the unspoken name by ak larkwood

vermilion by molly tanzer

metal from heaven by august clarke

scapegracers by ha clarke

the unbroken by cl clarke

fire logic by laurie marks

the seep by chana porter

these burning stars by bethany jacobs

feast while you can by mikaella clements and onjuli datta

non-fiction, memoir, and autobiography:

hijab butch blues by lamya h

gender failure by ivan coyote and rae spoon

fun home by allison bechdel

butch is a noun by h bear bergman

female masculinity by jack halberstam

burning butch by rb murtz

when we were outlaws by jeanne cordova

leaving isn't the hardest thing by lauren hough

odd girls and twilight lovers by lillian faderman

another mother tongue by judy grahn

boots of leather, slippers of gold by elizabeth lapovsky and madeline davis

the persistent desire ed joan nestle

persistence: all way butch and femme ed ivan coyote and zena sharman

“ During the last twenty to thirty years discussions about the gender and sexual preferences of the younger talented tenth of the Harlem Renaissance — 1924 to early 1930s — artist, performers, writers, and singers have challenged the heteronormal perception of this elite group. There is one blues singer whose reputation and image appear in discussions of literary artist from this period and in a very public way embody an insurgent encounter to conventional gender identities. Blues Cabaret singer, Gladys Bentley, who Hughes refers to in the opening epigraph, gained popularity with her spirited lyrical renditions of popular melodies that she often preformed in masculine attire. The colloquial term used for some Negro, masculine, women was bulldagger. At that time ‘bulldagger’ was not a pejorative term in the black community ; they ‘…are associated with physical strength, sexual prowess, emotional reserve, and butch chivalry. The term has roots in African American communities of the early twentieth century, especially with 1920s Harlem where sexual and gender mores were more flexible.

According to Jeanne Flash Gray, ‘who participated in Harlem gay life in the late 1930s and 1940s,… ‘There were many places run by and for Black Lesbians and Gay Men, when we were still Bull Daggers and Faggots and only whites were lesbians and homosexuals’ (qtd. in E.Garber 1989, 331) ”

Source: How Does a Bulldagger Get Out of the Footnote? or Gladys Bentley’s Blues from ninepatch: A Creative Journal for Women & Gender Studies Vol, Iss 1, Article 31

They were us.

Like literally genetically they were US, just like. A while ago.

Like

Would you trust a TV caveman with a baby? Probably not

What's on my mind? Oh, just Penny and Deb from the flyleaf note of a book a friend found at the second-hand store. And for only 50 cents.

i see memes and posts about autistic (and even non autistic 🙄) people using the word “nonverbal” to describe going quiet during sex. and nobody ever talks about this (kinky spaces are pretty much exclusively filled with low support needs, speaking autistics) but

nonverbal does not mean what you think it means!

you are not “going nonverbal” from good sex or even bad sex! this is not our word to use for that experience!!!

nonverbal, according to ACTUALLY NONVERBAL AUTISTICS, is a NON TEMPORARY state of reduced or absent ability to understand language-based communication. people who are nonverbal stay nonverbal and it’s so much more than just not being able to speak. it’s struggling to write or type and understand written or spoken word too.

if you read stuff from actually nonverbal people on tumblr you will find that they are often NOT COOL with us using that term. and multiple nonverbal people have given us alternative language to use so as to not co opt the word and clutter online spaces of actual nonverbal people.

if we are experiencing a temporary loss of language or reduced or absent ability to understand language, we can say:

losing speech

losing words

becoming unspeaking

verbal shutdown

AND SO MUCH MORE -> https://birdofmay.tumblr.com/post/715098940280897536/what-words-are-there-to-describe-the-situation