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Another thing that confuses me about the ‘butch/femme are lesbian only terms and m-spec women shouldn’t use them’ thing is that I’ve been seeing queer men use femme for like, a really long time?

Same. And it’s… telling that not a single word about them, that I’ve seen anyway, has been said by the “they’re for lesbians only” crowd. Like. If they are lesbian-exclusive words, shouldn’t gay men using them be just as in the wrong as multispec women?

I would ask why it is I haven’t heard a single word about that, but… I think the answer is pretty clear. (Hint: it’s multispec antagonism.)

It’s also just a complete lack of understanding of where the terms butch/femme came from. I can’t yell enough about how people need to look up Polaris and learn about the whole fascinating history of the cant that gave us butch and femme in the first place. 

I mean, “Stone Butch Blues” shows men and women identifying as femme in Buffalo, NY’s bar scene in the 50s, but of course some random exclusionists on Tumblr.hell can go off, I guess.

Stone Butch Blues is actually set in the 1970s, but otherwise you’re dead on. 🙂 

Hell, there’s a book on my shelf with quotes describing men as butch that go back to the 40′s (so what’s that whole “it came out of 50′s lesbian bar culture” thing again?):

Like most of Derrick’s partners – among them the “butch number” in charge of the electricity generator – Fred marries and raised a family after the war [WWII] was over.

[…]

The New Zealand Pictorial drew 1955 to a close with tales of this new urban phenomenon. Like the Observer some eight years earlier, the Pictorial managed to moralise, inform and titillate all at the same time:

“Homosexuals have a strict code of their own and on no account will they sexually associate with women. Oddly enough they fight among themselves like kilkenny cats [sic]. For this reason a group of homosexuals is always controlled by the “queen bee” whose word is absolutely final. Others in the sect are “marthas”, who dress as women; “arthurs”, who adopt the normal male role, and “butchs” who stand in either way.”

[AN: this was written by straight people, and as such may not be accurate terminology, but it also stands as evidence that these terms were widespread enough for straight people to notice them.]

[…]

One avid party-goer wrote about this in-between time of evening in “The Night Is Young and We’re So Beautiful”, an unpublished 1966 story about his Auckland social circle:

[cut for length] “The more discreet or nervous would exit hurriedly and linger not. They would attempt an air of “How ever did I get mixed up with this lot when I was really drinking in the side bar with all those butch sporty types?”, and rush to their transport looking neither to right nor to left. “

– from Mates & Lovers: A History Of Gay New Zealand by Chris Brickell

Also, there’s a claim that floats around sometimes that butch and femme mean different things for lesbians because they relate to gender identity and expression. That’s a cool claim! It also goes for gay men:

Many stereotypes of gay men presume some form of cross-gender identification and remain prevalent even though the past two decades have seen a large-scale “butch shift” among gay men in Western communities.

[…]

“Butch is to straight-acting what camp is to effeminate – it’s like taking qualities that we consider masculine and over-emphasising them.”

“Butch can be camp in a way. It’s almost like it’s an exaggerated, overblown, unrealistic version of masculinity – you know, it’s not real.”

While butch is taken to clearly be a performance and generally a self-conscious and entertaining one, straight-acting is ambiguous in the same way as camp.

[…]

“When I first came out I actually got quite camp in both my speaking style and my movement style and then sort of when I decided that was actually really dumb, I swung back and got sort of completely butch in both and now I think I’ve sort of settled somewhere in the middle somewhere and I’m quite comfortable.”

[…]

Interviewee: I think camp’s making a parody of the masculine stereotype [whereas butch] is trying to be the equivalent of what straight men should be, like really tough, macho.

Chris: Do you think it sends it up or actually values it?

Interviewee: I don’t know, I think both to an extent. I mostly think it values it.

[…]

The interview accounts discussed here suggest that, rather than attempting to dismantle the taxonomy that incorporates butch, camp, effeminate and straight acting, gay men are refining that semantic space by introducing a new dimension of authenticity to the available distinctions.

– from “What it means to be a gay man” in Queer In Aotearoa New Zealand (2004), by Chris Brickell and Ben Taylor

And as a bonus, some comments on gay men in film by Vito Goddamn Russo:

To make matters worse, it was just about this time (1969) that gay men, themselves buyers of the American dream, rejected the sissy confessions of The Boys in the Band, opting for the macho drag of Joe Buck instead of fuzzy sweaters and teased hair, in order to prove that homosexual men could be just as butch as anyone else. (Which is true, of course, but why bother?) Instead of recognizing and destroying the worn-out myth of the real man, faggots adopted the solution of the traditional male. Just as Marion Morrison changed his name to John Wayne, they jumped on the bandwagon and became part of the parade.
[…]
George Schlatter’s Norman, Is That You? (1976) may have been the first pro-gay fag joke. Schlatter combined what looked to be good intentions with a production that only a hack could love and a solution that nobody could believe. The short-lived Broadway comedy about the parents who discover their son’s lover and gay lifestyle on a weekend visit went on to become a big dinner theater hit, and it is easy to see why: it plays both ends from the middle, refusing to make any comment on the situation for fear of offending someone. The black lover is butch, obviously the “husband”; the white lover is nellie, obviously the “wife.” Just like us, George!

– from The Celluloid Closet

Butch and femme are very important terms to lesbian history, I’m not arguing against that. But it hacks me the hell off to see the claim that they’re only for lesbians because that’s an active denial of my history and culture as a bi man. Plus, there are gay men out there right now with “no fats no femmes” in their grindr bios; try going and telling them that it’s a lesbian only term lmao

Thanks for adding all the citations! This is very good reference material.