God I Didn't Even Have Asks On I'm Sorry Y'all

(This used to be a part of this post, but I figured it wasn’t especially relevant to the topic at hand, so now it’s here.)

Many books discussing butch/fem(me) history point out that a number of women in the scene, particularly fems, were behaviorally bisexual. Due to this—as well as their femininity—fems and fish (a black fem identity) struggled in lesbian communities to be considered “true” lesbians as they were often stereotyped as bisexual. Many butches/studs assumed they were more likely to leave the “lesbian life” because they could “pass” for straight, which, y’know, totally doesn’t sound like how people talk about bi women today whatsoever.

While I’m not necessarily equipped to provide a full MLA-cited deep-dive analysis on butch/femme identity, here are a few quotes (and a very long paper about femme bisexuality if you’re especially curious).

From Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community (1994):

Fems, who never ceased to act on their own initiative, in some contexts were defined as other, as not really lesbian, because of their traditional feminine looks or their active heterosexual pasts.

In keeping with narrators’ varied experiences in finding their identities, the community did not have—nor does it now have—a hegemonic view about how to draw the line between the homosexual and the heterosexual. Many narrators see the butch lesbian as the true lesbian. Other narrators consider anyone who stays with women and is part of the community a lesbian.

The boundaries between heterosexual and homosexual have always been difficult to draw… The gay liberation model made the boundary clear by categorically including every woman who is attracted to a woman. But throughout the twentieth century there have been women who have spent some time in the heterosexual world and some in the homosexual world… Most narrators were aware of these ambiguities and took them into account by speaking in terms of bisexuality, or the pure versus the less-pure lesbian.

It may be important to note that even up until—and during—the 90s, “lesbian” was sometimes defined as “any woman who has at some time in her life loved another woman” (see pg. 11).

Bi butches have been around for a while, too. 

From the 1995 essay “Too Butch to Be Bi”:

But being a butch woman who is also bisexual can be difficult. It feels sometimes that the the idea is so challenging—since the assumptions in our communities are that all butch women are lesbian women and all femme women are bisexual women—that often a butch woman trying to come to terms with being bisexual is stuck. 

[…] But once we find a community that is accepting of our same-sex interests, we run into an entirely different series of messages. A number of these are about appearances and what they are supposed to say about who we are. The ideas about femmes (femme women aren’t really interested in other women, and femme men aren’t really interested in women at all) and butches (butches are always the aggressors in sex, whether they are men or women) permeate our queer culture. These ideas make it difficult for us to explore who we are and who we want to be. Many people feel too threatened to challenge the status quo of an already fringe community, for fear of being outcast from the one place where they have struggled to belong.

From a 1996 interview with Leslie Feinberg:

And I would say that people who were referred to as drag queens, [sh*m*les], female impersonators, drag kings, diesel [d-slur]s, butches, et cetera, uh… Nowadays we think of them sometimes as just being synonymous with a certain kind of sexuality, but in fact there’s a lot of butch women who sleep with other butches, or who are bisexual, and the same thing is true with feminine men.

From the 1997 book Femme: Feminists, Lesbians and Bad Girls:

[Heather Findlay]: Negative Message number three: ‘Don’t date a femme, because she’ll leave you for a man.’ […] I know tons of butches who have slept with guys, and for some reason there’s not some big stigma attached to that. That doesn’t threaten their membership in the lesbian community, but with us [femmes] it does.

From a 2000 issue of Bi Women: The Newsletter of the Boston Bisexual Women’s Network:

But I also think bi women like to experiment with the wide range of possibilities along the butch/femme continuum without feeling confined by them. And that’s fun to watch! And I think many people assume that because bi women are also interested in men that they all would be femmes. Oh, how wrong they are—hallelujah for butch bi women!

Femme/butch identities are not static and they are not necessarily constricting, but they can be. Femme/butch arose out of a historical context where woman to woman love was not safely or openly acknowledged… As queer people have established a safer, more visible place in the world, femme/butch have become much more fluid (and perhaps diluted) identities or presentations. 

Me: can’t find any Poison Ivy bisexual memes

Me: Be the change… you want to see in the world 👏

(In order) Bisexual femme, butch, and futch flags <3

Why does a sexuality have to be inclusive of everyone? If t4t is perfectly fine, what's wrong with afab4afab?

you can do whatever you like, if you want to go down that path, i just called out you claiming it’s not a TERF label and then going on to describe how it is.

i wanted to do my own “recolors” of different pride flags (adjusting hue, saturation, brightness) for funsies

feel free to use them, but if youre reposting them on their own, please credit me (@ mynndesign / mynnthia)

ROW 1: gay - lgbtpoc - bisexual ROW 2: lesbian - transgender - nonbinary ROW 3: genderqueer - genderfluid - agender ROW 4: aromantic - asexual - aroace ROW 5: butch - bear - leather

heres the comparison between the original versions VS my version

i might make a separate post with the information in plaintext if ppl are interested in reading the change notes

edit (19 june 2023): tweaked rainbow flag colors slightly, made the green more cool-toned for the genderqueer flag

Preserving Bi Women’s History

Bisexual activist and scholar Robyn Ochs just announced the successful conclusion of a project she has been working on for 7 ½ years in collaboration with Amy Benson of Harvard University’s Schlesinger Library.

Back issues of Bi Women (now the Bi Women Quarterly) (1983-2009) and of North Bi Northwest (a publication of the Seattle Bisexual Women’s Network) are now archived and available via Harvard University’s Schlesinger Library. They have been digitized, and are searchable and available to the public.

Here’s the press release from Harvard’s Schlesinger Library:

Boston is home to the longest-lived bisexual women’s periodical in the world. Bi Women Quarterly, a grassroots publication, began in September 1983 as a project of the newly-formed Boston Bisexual Women’s Network.

Staffed entirely by volunteers, and containing essays, poetry, artwork, and short fiction on a wide range of themes, Bi Women Quarterly provides a voice for women who identify as bisexual, pansexual, and other non-binary sexual identities.

Robyn Ochs, editor of Bi Women Quarterly since 2009, donated the only complete collection of this publication to Schlesinger Library several years ago with the agreement that it would be preserved, and digitized in a searchable format. The digitized collection at Schlesinger covers the years 1983 to 2010. We are delighted to announce that this project is complete, and this resource is now available to researchers and to the general public through Harvard’s catalog.

Making the voices of bi women accessible will hopefully provide researchers primary material with which to begin to fill this gap.

Issues of Bi Women Quarterly from 2009 to the present can be found online a BiWomenBoston.org. These more recent issues will be added to the Library’s collection in the near future. 

biphobic wlw who insist bi women cant use butch or femme, while giving the reason that bi women dress or present themselves to get the attention of men as their justification, are repeating biphobic stereotypes - bi women are all hyper feminine, are less committed to women, etc - that have a very ironic history considering current discourse, its very strange.

like, in the 90s and further back, it was assumed that femmes were bisexual and butches were lesbians (keep in mind, i am using modern terms here, ‘bisexual’ was not in common use as a sexual identity in the 50s as bisexuality was deemed an impossibility by the medical establishment at the time. bisexuals were seen as switching between the straight world and the gay world). nowadays, thanks to some biphobes who cant read their own history, a lot of ppl think bi women arent allowed to id as femme or butch at all. but, although the word ‘bisexual’ has been erased, bi women’s participation in butch femme bar culture is obvious in the similarities between femme stereoypes and bi women’s stereotypes.

femmes were seen as ‘less committed to the life’, they were distrusted bc they could pass as heterosexual, femmes were assumed to take the passive role, they often struggled to be considered ‘true’ lesbians, and were thought to not truly be interested in other women. bi women on the other hand, will inevitably end up with men, they have straight passing priviledge, are stereotyped as submissive, have their attraction to women dismissed as a phase, and are just straight girls who hook up with other women to get the attention of men.

spot the difference lol. the reason both sets of stereotypes are so similar is bc femmes (while not always bisexual just like butches arent always lesbians), were assumed to be bisexual to the point where a great number of negative attitudes towards femmes at the time are probably due to biphobia, and modern attitudes towards femmes still reflect this history even if bi women themselves are currently being pushed out of iding as butch or femme. considering this, its ironic to see these same biphobic attitudes being repeated as the apparent reason why bi women cant use the terms at all now.

it makes me wonder how much of the misguided effort to push bi women out of these identities was done to have femme become a legitimate lesbian identity with the same complexities as butch. if femme lacks complexity its due to biphobic stereotypes associated with the identity. therefore the solution becomes to state; “bi women are gender conforming and therefore cant be butch or femme, because obviously they cant understand the complexities of either identity and any bi woman who ids as femme must mistakenly view butches as men lite with no real understanding of how femme is a subversion of femininity that deliberately rejects men.” the same biphobic sentiments that discredited femmes before are now used to bolster the identity for some by saying there is a wrong way and right way to be femme (and butch by proximity), then, pushing the ones doing femme wrong out of the community.

but if thats the solution it doesnt solve the underlying problems of biphobia (and misogyny lets be honest here), which has a negative effect on all wlw not just bi women. not to mention basing an identity on a rejection of men alone isnt a stable identity itself bc it means you always have to outwardly perform that action of rejecting men over loving women to be seen as correct in that identity, all wlw will be under scrutiny for their identities until the actual problem of biphobia gets solved.

also here are my sources: [x]  [x]  [x]  [x]  [x]  [x]  [x]  [x]

Hesticarn Flags 🌸🌸❤️🌺🌺

Hesticarn, bi hesticarn, lesbian hesticarn, and sapphic hesticarn flags (in that order)

Hesticarn is a mixture of butch, femme, and futch, at an almost even balance, but is always/often incorporating a sparkly, pink, or typically feminine aesthetic

Hesticarns might feel liberation from wearing pink dresses but with sneakers, being a motherly/maternal figure to others but like in a fruity big bro sense, doing traditionally masculine activities but with a girly aesthetic like working out but with pink weights or pink gym clothes, dressing completely masc but with glittery pink lipgloss, and redefining what a mix of butch and femme means to them. It’s giving Barbie Butch. Think pink suits and ties rather than pink dresses. Or pink dresses but with hairy legs and “sitting/behaving masculine”. It’s however a sapphic transforms butch and femme identities while always/often incorporating girly/pink aesthetic in some form.

The name is derived from Hestia, the Greek Goddess of the Hearth, and Carnations, a flower (which is also the flower on the sapphic hesticarn flag!)

Why is the in-general hesticarn flag (for bisexuals, lesbians, all sapphics) almost identical to the bisexual hesticarn flag? 1. The crescent moon on the bi hesticarn flag will tell them apart and 2. It’s okay for different identity flags to look similar, the genderfluid flag would basically be the asexual flag if you swap the pink and blue with the grey, 3. Bi women are pushed out of butch and femme spaces so much I wanted to create a butch/femme identity flag that was centred on bi sapphics, even though it does represents all sapphics!

Flags open to all sapphics! Bisexuals, bi+ wlw, lesbians, unlabelled sapphics, nblw, etc!

𝔹𝕚𝕤𝕖𝕩𝕦𝕒𝕝 𝕒𝕟𝕕 𝕊𝕒𝕡𝕡𝕙𝕚𝕔 ℙ𝕣𝕚𝕕𝕖 𝕄𝕠𝕠𝕕𝕓𝕠𝕒𝕣𝕕 🎀

oh you totally should’ve mentioned that, it’s cool that we both thought of it then!

Hecatic flag 💜💜🤍💜💜

Hecatic (dervived from the Greek goddess Hecate) means when you’re bisexual + sapphic, I’ve seen many bi sapphic combination flags and just wanted to make my own :) Hecatic is all bisexual sapphics regardless if they have a specific preference or not, and regardless of relationship status (or lack of) <3

I wanted to make it pink and purple to showcase bisexuality and sapphicism :3 and the flower in the centre is a moonflower! It felt fitting with moons being a bi symbol and a flower on the sapphic flag!