We’re living in a never-before-seen age of prominent queer representation in our media…but that’s not to say that it’s perfect. We’re more likely than ever to come across queer characters in the pages of our books, but often those queer characters are depicted in a specific way: gentle, pretty, romantic but not particularly sexual, inherently non-threatening. Particularly in popular depictions of lesbians, you’re likely to see two sweet sapphic girls leaning in for that first kiss, focused on the other’s soft skin, her pretty hair.
There’s nothing wrong with those depictions, of course. But they’re just one slice of the weird and wild world of lesbianism, which makes it important to look beyond its scope. So when we started writing our new novel Feast While You Can, we knew who we wanted at the heart of our intoxicating, obsessive love story: a butch lesbian. We wanted her to be tough and smart and kind. We wanted her to be entirely uninterested in the male gaze. We wanted her to be subversive and playful with her gender. We wanted her to be toppy and cocksure and very aware of her own desires… which were not particularly soft. We wrote the butch lesbian heroine of our dreams, the kind of woman whom we love and see parts of ourselves in, and Jagvi Marino came strolling out of our heads and onto the page, boxy leather jacket, short mullet, hands in her pockets, all swagger.
We wanted, too, to write a heroine who could stand amongst our own private pantheon of butch heroines who paved the way for Jagvi. The following list is the best of the fictional best. (Shout out to Leslie Steinberg, Audre Lorde and Alison Bechdel, who wrote about their own butchness in trailblazing and revolutionary perfection… but they’re real people writing about themselves, so we’re leaving them off.) They see their own butchness and their own queerness in different ways, they fall in different places on the spectrum of being a queer woman, they live in different times and cultures and universes… but they have that masc edge, that knowing look, those competent hands and eager eyes which speak to butch.
Gideon, from the Locked Tomb series by Tamsyn Muir
The GOAT. No one can compete with Gideon Nav from her exuberant, untamed entrance into literally the very first sentence of Tamsyn Muir’s sci-fi series about necromancers in space. Gideon packs “her sword, her shoes, and her dirty magazines” and sets out to escape the dead planet upon which she has been trapped. A million skeleton hands reach out to claw her back. Pretty soon, you understand why.
Gideon Nav is the heroine that butches deserve. She shoulders her way through every crowd, wielding her quick and dangerous mind, a powerful sword, a pair of aviators and a dry roll of Kiwi wit lingering in her every drawl that makes it impossible not to love her. She is kind even when it gets her into trouble, and she has a terrible weakness for swooning women which, inevitably, gets her into even more trouble.
No spoilers, but at the end of the book Gideon does something awful and beautiful. It is a moment of triumph and sacrifice that you might spot, like us, seconds before it arrives, with just enough time to plead for it not to happen… before it does. Obviously, it is a moment of heroism. Gideon is a perfect and singular character in literature, but it is also wonderful to watch a butch lesbian claim a place among heroes.
Hero, from America Is Not the Heart by Elaine Castillo
The first things you see about Hero, even before you see her face, are her ruined hands. Her uncle Pol asks “how her injury was healing; if the surgery had been successful” and by the time we meet Hero, who seems at once damaged and dangerous, we’re already on tenterhooks. She has already taken on a dozen identities: a bisexual rich kid growing up in the Philippines, a doctor for a guerilla revolutionary group, an emigrant moving to live with her family in San Jose, California. She has just escaped a military prison which broke her hands and ruined her craft. Still: she knows how to wield them.
America Is Not the Heart is about family and trauma, food and culture. It immerses you, carefully and deliberately, in the Filipino community of the 1990s Bay Area. Everything about it is slow-burn, from the way Hero connects and forges new, obsessive ties with her family to an excruciating, perfect romance with Rosalyn, who works next door to the restaurant where Hero spends much of her time. The attraction between them, and particularly in Rosalyn’s stumbling, defiant but shy reactions to Hero—who, she announces, looks like the Purple Rose, the cold and antagonist anti-hero of the Japanese shōjo manga series Glass Mask—is full of all the thrilling pleasure of the best femme/butch romances.
Bravery is a common quality between the butches in these novels, and it’s Hero’s defining characteristic, her own stubborn inability to do anything but live up to her name. She stumbles, she misspeaks, she acts rashly and then far too slowly, she is sometimes unkind, but she never seems to let her chin fall.
Hild, from Hild and Menewood by Nicola Griffith
The eponymous heroine of Nicola Griffith’s bewitching, intricate historical series would not describe herself as a lesbian. Firstly because she has a significant and compelling relationship with a man, her childhood best friend and eventual husband. Secondly because she is living in 12th century Britain, where the word ‘lesbian’ does not exist. But within Griffith’s assured recreation of 12th century politics, culture and relationships is the equally assured understanding that queer people have always existed. Hild might not have the word, but she does have relationships with women, and Griffith writes queer desire with her trademark precise, devastating accuracy: “Gwladus put the flat of her hand on the small of Hild’s back, as you would a person who was old or ill, and Hild’s mind went white.”
Hild is a fascinating rebuke to anachronism and patriarchy in the same easy blow. Griffith makes no attempt to modernize Hild, to transform her into a cool or feisty heroine flipping her hair and rebuking the norms of her time with hollow quips. She is also fascinated by what a woman could do in the early medieval period. The answer, for Hild, is a lot: she is a prophetess and a warrior, a leader and a mother. She is inherently political, operating with her far-sighted intelligence (which is better than magic), and deeply empathetic, invested in her family and her people.
Her butchness is hard to define. But there’s something about the way she puts on her armor, how relentlessly physical her body is. The ease with which she wields a sword. (Yes, there’s something about butches and swords: every butch deserves one.) The hesitation and then, slowly, the determination with which she can kill a man. Even the way her lover looks at her body: “Gwladus put her hand on Hild’s thigh and strokes as though Hild were a restive horse: gently, firmly. Down the big muscles, up the long tight muscle on the inside.” It’s also something about the way she looks after her people. Listen—in her own way, unspoken at the time, unmistakable in the read, she’s a king.
Kerry, from Too Much Lip by Melissa Lucashenko
Like a fever dream of dyke power, in the opening pages of Melissa Lucashenko’s award-winning Too Much Lip, Bundjalung woman Kerry Salter roars back into her hometown on a stolen motorbike to talk to the crows, wrangle her family, say goodbye to her dying grandfather and then get the hell out of dodge. She marks herself out as someone to keep a close eye on; when her brother unexpectedly flings a beer at her, she catches it mid-air: “Triumphant, she straightened and casually knocked the bottle cap off on the table edge with an emphatic thump of her right fist. You’ll have to get up earlier in the morning than that to fuck with me, mate.”
After growing up in a traumatized family and a deeply racist hometown in Australia’s northeast, Kerry is marked by her keen intelligence and a deep defensive streak. The trauma of being an Aboriginal woman living in a colonized country rears over her like a wave—but Kerry refuses to be beaten. There is a moment incredible in its mundanity, in its tired exhaustion and near tenderness, when she thinks about “throwing herself into the swollen brown serpent of the river… It was the Elder. Let it decide whether she lived or died”. But in the end, “Kerry found she lacked the will to chuck herself away. Her legs were trembling and her heart hurt like a bitch, but she wasn’t quite defeated, not yet.”
A self-declared dyke, Kerry surprises her readers by having a romance with a man, but she doesn’t leave her butchness behind to do so. Her relationship with Steve, a white guy almost-crush from her old high school, is hesitant, push-and-pull, abruptly tender then combative. When she realizes she wants to be with him, despite the heterosexual relationship, it carries a queer pulse; in Luchashenko’s depiction of a mixed race relationship between a straight white guy and a queer Black woman, our understanding of this romance deepens and complicates itself as something that both is and isn’t, always, about power. “This one’s on my side, she thought, in astonishment.” Love as a battle cry.
It’s not a real spoiler to say Kerry fails to get out of dodge. She sinks into all the danger and promise of returning to her home, being on Country, totem animals showing up to make their mark and ancestral spirits leading her. She flames like a beacon: by the end of the novel, you’d follow her anywhere.
Isabel, from The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden
Spiky, selfish Isabel manages her family home in the rural 1960s Netherlands like her own tiny kingdom. She busies herself with her domestic duties, tending to the garden, supervising the servants, keeping constant stock of the silverware. For much of this work she wears an old pair of men’s trousers. When visiting town or her extended family she dresses up dutifully, strapping herself into dresses and painting herself with lipstick with the bitter obligation of a wild horse forced into a stable. But whenever she puts those work trousers back on, you feel something slotting into place. The first time she thinks of them consciously is when she wears them to shield off a man, the lecherous Johan, who put his hand on her bare thigh the night before. A moment later the trousers serve an entirely different purpose, when she is greeted by Eva, her reluctant house guest, who is knocked visibly off-kilter: “Confused a moment—eyes quick. Her gaze lingered somewhere at the height of Isabel’s waist.”
Amidst the intrigue and mystery of its addictive plot, The Safekeep is also a book about Isabel’s journey of discovering her inner masc. Isabel’s moves toward butch presentation are tentative; sometimes they falter, but their impact never fails to land, inspiring freedom and self-actualisation in Isabel and irresistible desire in Eva.
Toward the end of the novel Isabel goes through the baby butch rite of passage and chops off her own hair, cutting it off “in a fit in the night”. When she sees herself in the mirror it recalls Eva’s words about feeling “not especially pretty and not especially ugly,” instead something in between – perhaps handsome, perhaps simply removed from standards of feminine beauty. Perhaps Isabel puts it best herself: “she was not who she once was”. Her conservative uncle is unable to note the significance of the change, commenting on Isabel’s haircut as something odd and trivial, best left ignored. But Isabel feels that “this should be visible from a great distance.” And there in the great distance is Eva, her eyes wide open and ready to fix on Isabel. When she finally sees Isabel’s short haircut, she understands it instinctively. “It suits you,” she says, half-angry.
Lieutenant Wei, from “Kindness” in Gold Boy, Emerald Girl by Yiyun Li
Sometimes, as a queer reader, you want to say to an author: You might or might not have known that you were writing a dyke, but I know. This is the overwhelming feeling that Yiyun Li’s short story “Kindness” imparts from the moment when its childless, single narrator notes that if she closes her eyes she can still feel Lieutenant Wei’s finger “under my chin, lifting my face to a spring night. ‘Tell me, how can we make you happy?’”
The very next sentence tells you that Lieutenant Wei is firmly out of reach: first off, dead; second off, a mother; third off, a wife. But the thick magic of Li’s prose is already carrying us back, further back, and the world the rest of the story inhabits is that of butch chivalry.
Our narrator comes from a poor family who live on the outskirts of Beijing, and spends a year in an army camp, where she falls under Lieutenant Wei’s command. The relationship is dictated by power. Lieutenant Wei is determined to make the narrator submit to the authoritarian atmosphere of the army; she corrects the narrator on her use of titles, chides her for her slovenliness, and berates her for her inability to take orders. But she is also deeply empathetic, concerned about the narrator’s lack of ties with home, determined to find a place for her, willing to forgive her transgressions, wanting only to reach out her hand and lead her out of that dark place of unhappiness which Lieutenant Wei, gifted a kinder life than the narrator, cannot understand except to reject.
There’s a moment in the middle of the story where Lieutenant Wei catches the narrator reading a forbidden D.H. Lawrence book. “‘What are you hiding from me?’ Lieutenant Wei asked in a low voice.” The following scene, in which the two characters carefully discuss the contents of the book and its import, is like a chess game. Every story in this collection is powerful, but this one, its opening, is also perfect. What are you hiding from me?
The Baroness, from The Group by Mary McCarthy
Mary McCarthy’s 1963 classic, which is mainly about the damage men do to women as told through the story of a group of 1933 Vassar graduates and their loves, holds a delicious surprise for any queer reader. At the very end of the novel, after 300+ pages of heterosexual misery, Elinor Eastlake—known as Lakey, a “taciturn brunette beauty” who spends most of the novel’s action mysterious and out of reach—returns. And she doesn’t come alone.
Back from Paris, Lakey brings a “titled friend… the Baroness d’Estienne”. A “short, stocky foreign woman”, the Baroness is unfriendly and uninterested in the other women. Then they “hear her call [Lakey] ‘Darling’ with a trilled r. It was Kay who caught on first. Lakey had become a Lesbian. This woman was her man.”
“This woman was her man”: has there ever been a sexier sentence, or one that speaks more to the subversive intersection of gender and desire at the heart of butch? “Maria is a bear,” Lakey tells her friends. “She growls at strangers.” Lakey and her Baroness plan to move somewhere rural and quiet, to her friends’ horror: Lakey is the “exquisite captive of a fierce robber woman, locked up in a Castle Perilous, and woe to the knight who came to release her from the enchantment.” When Lakey is forced to give a lift to one of the novel’s particularly evil male characters, one onlooker wonders aloud: “What do you bet he makes advances to her?”
“Let us hope he does,” another character answers dryly. “I understand the Baroness packs a pair of brass knuckles.”
Her brass knuckles, her short, stocky form, her disinterest in playing nice within the complex power dynamics of the Vassar crowd. You never see the Baroness from Lakey’s perspective, which means that her portrait is a homophobic, threatening one. But Lakey, alone amongst her poor heterosexual school friends, stands alone in a relationship of equality and trust, where the only power differences are cultivated for an additional thrill. The Baroness in all her butch glory is the secret savior of The Group. A happy ending is possible, if you’ve got a butch to look out for you.
Lacey Bond, from Rainbow Black by Maggie Thrash
We first meet Lacey Bond as a thirteen year old whose life is upended when her parents’ hippie daycare center is targeted by the burgeoning hysteria of the Satanic Panic. Lacey’s days become a slew of appointments with child psychologists, sleazy defense lawyers, and aggressive journalists; all made more torturous by the fact that Lacey is openly, undeniably queer. “I wore hiking boots to school, I had a sweatshirt sewn into my denim jacket, I knew how to tap for maple syrup… It had been apparent for a while now that I was a lesbian.” While Lacey’s parents are content to let Lacey be Lacey, musing that “love is fluid and can take the shape of any vessel”, Lacey’s confrontations with the state and legal apparatus persecuting her family are nowhere near as sanguine.
In perhaps the most affecting courtroom exchange in an increasingly cruel litany of courtroom exchanges, the prosecution argues that Lacey’s lesbianism makes her a sexual deviant, just like her Satanist parents. The defense argues that homosexuality is no longer considered a deviance; prosecution responds this is only true if Lacey wants to be a lesbian – if she doesn’t want to be, then she may be suffering from a (patently bullshit) disorder called “ego-dystonic homosexuality”. Before a hostile jury and leering audience, Lacey is forced to answer:
“Ms. Bond, is it your wish to be a… lesbian?” She uttered the word ‘lesbian’ like it was ‘shit-eater’ or ‘crack whore.’
“Yes,” I said.
“Just for the record, could you state that in a full sentence?”
“It is my wish to be a lesbian.”
“So even if it were possible, you wouldn’t choose to be heterosexual.”
I gritted my teeth. “I would not choose to be heterosexual.”
It is the most perfect depiction of bravery in the whole world. Lacey is so cornered, in that witness stand, so helpless and alone, this tiny teenage butch in her checkered shirts and scrappy haircut, surrounded by adults who have destroyed her life in the name of children’s protection. She’s forced to humiliate herself in front of everyone by declaring what they already know to be true: she’s a flaming butch and she likes it that way. But even in a moment of utter subjugation, Lacey doesn’t back down. She stands tough; she grits her teeth; she refuses to succumb to shame.
That grit is really the core of Lacey’s character, and everything she does next. Lacey is dealt shit hand after shit hand but she never loses her bedrock of tough, noble butch identity. You want simultaneously to gather her in for a cuddle and let her lift you overhead like a dumbbell.
Aragorn, from Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien
Not taking any questions at this time, thanks!
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