Where Are All the Butches?

I was swapping e-mail with an acquaintance recently when she grabbed the chance to pick my brain about a little problem she's having with the local queer-girl dating scene. Or, as she gently phrased it: How the fuck does a femme twentysomething find a poly, kinky, and available butch woman in this goddamn city?

Well, one could ask eternal optimist Donald Rumsfeld, who still says we're going to find WMDs in Iraq. But I'm guessing Don hasn't spent much time trying to score at the Wildrose. If he had, he'd know that femme lesbians have been complaining about the scarcity of butch women since time immemorial--or at least ever since I was old enough to get into bars.

Now, the uninformed observer might look around Capitol Hill and say, "What do you mean, where are the butches? There are butch women all over the place." No. There are lesbians all over the place, but short hair and a pair of Carhartts do not a butch make. Being a butch (or a femme) is a specific erotic identity. A butch knows that she is a butch, and she knows she's being sexually transgressive by mixing up what we think of as maleness and femaleness. That is part of her charm.

I could write a whole book about why butches are butches, and all the different ways of being butch, but that's not going to help my frustrated femme friends. Unfortunately, the only advice I can offer is this: Keep looking. And as you look, be aware that sometimes you'll run across a latent butch who just needs a little encouragement to blossom. The world is frequently a hostile place for butch women, and I've had a lot of butches tell me that they only came fully into their butch identity when they met a femme lesbian who made it clear that she liked it. Why, I once met a woman in the Wildrose wearing dangly earrings and tie-dyed drawstring pants, but after a couple of months of gentle coaching she evolved into the sweetest butch daddy you ever saw. Learn to recognize potential. That may seem like a slim hope, but hey, if you search through enough pairs of drawstring pants, you might just find what you're looking for. That's better than Donald Rumsfeld is going to do.

Note to the many bi girls who responded to my column from January 8: I haven't forgotten you. See www.mistressmatisse.com/bigirlsparty.htm for details.

matisse@thestranger.com