Annemarie Schwarzenbach, 1932

Ivan Coyote, A Butch Roadmap 

Butch, 2016

At age nine, Annemarie Schwarzenbach cut her hair, began wearing boys’ clothes, and insisted on being called, alternately, Fritz and Paul Otto. Amazingly, her ultra-conservative parents did nothing to discourage this behavior: in fact, her mother— who carried on a decades-spanning relationship with the opera singer Emmy Krüger— loved dressing Annemarie in various male disguises, and was amused by her early infatuations (reads one photo caption: “Annemarie with the love of her life— Ms. Fischer.”) Such preferential treatment was advantageous for Annemarie, who had been taken out of school under the pretext of poor health, and left almost entirely isolated with her mother, who, in the words of a servant, “disciplined her children with horrible severity, using both physical and psychological punishment.”

When Annemarie turned eleven, her parents began forcing her back into dresses; however, it wasn’t until 1925— the year when they discovered her relationship with a young actress— that the situation became truly unbearable. In response to her mentor’s advice that she leave “for both [her] psychological and physical health,” Annemarie wrote, “All of their ideology— selfish, too adult, almost pathological— says that I must dismantle myself. And for the first time, I’ve understood that, for now, there isn’t any other solution.” Three years later, in another letter, she returned to her theme with a slight variation:

“Moreover, what you called, in one of your letters, the ‘world of lesbians’, is so badly thought of! I read somewhere that for some people, it implies scandal, clandestine vice, filth and dishonor. ‘Unnatural.’ Because I know that you don’t think this way, I can tell you […] that I can only love women with any true passion. Towards boys and men, I know friendship and trust, and it’s only with them that I want to work, but as soon as I feel that they’re approaching me as a ‘woman’, they repel me to the point of disgust. Maybe this is bad and against nature: it is, regardless, my self and my nature. And if I were what the others call natural, I would be contradicting myself, and I find that simply abominable." 

I don’t want to give up the term ‘queer’, because it still bugs people like the middle-class gay homeowners in the Castro who have halted plans to open a shelter for homeless queer youth in their beautiful neighborhood. I use it because every time I say it, I get an unpleasant jolt of memories of being called vile names or bashed, and I guess I hope that if I say it with enough aplomb and nonchalance, those memories will lose their power to subdue and terrorize me. The jaws of assimilation have closed around the word queer, but they haven’t managed to crush it into dust just yet.

Patrick Califia - “Legalised Sodomy is Political Foreplay” (via projectqueer)

Medallion, 1937, by Gluck

A portrait of Gluck with her lover, Nesta Obermer

Female adolescence represents the crisis of coming of age as a girl in a male-dominated society. If adolescence for boys represents a rite of passage (much celebrated in Western literature in the form of the bildungsroman), and an ascension to some version (however attenuated) of social power, for girls, adolescence is a lesson in restraint, punishment, and repression. It is in the context of female adolescence that the tomboy instincts of millions of girls are remodeled into compliant forms of femininity.

Judith (Jack) Halberstam, Female Masculinity (6)

A cozy, late-night bonfire with the Twin Cities Queer Masculinity Group: s'mores, popcorn, Red Vines, beer, and hours of talk about personal identity awakenings, YA books, Tamora Pierce, the Pony Express, The X-Files, zine articles, The Matrix, queer theology, and the subtle artistic offerings of 2000s-era Disney Channel original movies. Thanks for a great night, friends. #twincitiesqueermasculinity #trans #nonbinary #transmasculinity #queermasculinity

requested | eleven + happiness 

[T]he revelation that gender is a social construct does not in any way relieve the effects of that construction to the point where we can manipulate at will the terms of our gendering. […] In other words, we are embedded in gender relations, and gender relations are embedded within us, to the point where gender feels inescapable.

J. Halberstam, Female Masculinity (119)

At age nine, Annemarie Schwarzenbach cut her hair, began wearing boys’ clothes, and insisted on being called, alternately, Fritz and Paul Otto. Amazingly, her ultra-conservative parents did nothing to discourage this behavior: in fact, her mother— who carried on a decades-spanning relationship with the opera singer Emmy Krüger— loved dressing Annemarie in various male disguises, and was amused by her early infatuations (reads one photo caption: “Annemarie with the love of her life— Ms. Fischer.”) Such preferential treatment was advantageous for Annemarie, who had been taken out of school under the pretext of poor health, and left almost entirely isolated with her mother, who, in the words of a servant, “disciplined her children with horrible severity, using both physical and psychological punishment.”

When Annemarie turned eleven, her parents began forcing her back into dresses; however, it wasn’t until 1925— the year when they discovered her relationship with a young actress— that the situation became truly unbearable. In response to her mentor’s advice that she leave “for both [her] psychological and physical health,” Annemarie wrote, “All of their ideology— selfish, too adult, almost pathological— says that I must dismantle myself. And for the first time, I’ve understood that, for now, there isn’t any other solution.” Three years later, in another letter, she returned to her theme with a slight variation:

“Moreover, what you called, in one of your letters, the ‘world of lesbians’, is so badly thought of! I read somewhere that for some people, it implies scandal, clandestine vice, filth and dishonor. ‘Unnatural.’ Because I know that you don’t think this way, I can tell you […] that I can only love women with any true passion. Towards boys and men, I know friendship and trust, and it’s only with them that I want to work, but as soon as I feel that they’re approaching me as a ‘woman’, they repel me to the point of disgust. Maybe this is bad and against nature: it is, regardless, my self and my nature. And if I were what the others call natural, I would be contradicting myself, and I find that simply abominable." 

The Evening Statesman, Walla Walla, Washington, January 21, 1910

“Sir, you’re a woman” hisses detective; “Sir, I am; what of it?”

Annemarie Schwarzenbach photographed by Marianne Breslauer.

Also available at the physical location of Boneshaker Books in Minneapolis.  I actually have an article in this new zine published out of Minneapolis. Well, it’s part article, part cut-up literary piece. I end up using Burroughs, Nietzsche, and Blanchot to look at a particular experience of gay male identity. I know the founder of this group, and from what I’ve heard, their approach is interesting in terms of resisting identity sectarianism, hence the relatively wide net cast for the publication. 

Because pre-op trans chests should be embraced more

❤️ BUTCH ON BUTCH LOVE ❤️ left to right: Sarah West and Marcy Coburn, Dane Whitaker. Photo by Laurel Elizabeth. Dolores Park, Dyke March 1996. Photo submission from A.R. 🔥🔥 posting with permission from all three butches 👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻 Sarah and Marcy were a couple featured in #OnOurBacks magazine, spicy! #lesbianculture #butchonbutch #butchlove