Because part of being butch is owning it, the whole aura around it.” “But I’m afraid I’m not butch enough to really claim it. “It’s a lovely word, ‘butch’: I’ll take it, if you give it to me,” she says. The graphic novelist Alison Bechdel, 59, doesn’t refer to herself as butch but understands why others do. Many of us wear the butch label with a certain self-consciousness, fearing the term doesn’t quite fit - like a new pair of jeans, it’s either too loose or too tight. “Many people don’t even know how to ask questions about who we are, or about what it means to be us.” Both a gender and a sexuality, butchness is about the body but also transcends it: “We exist in this realm of masculinity that has nothing to do with cis men - that’s the part only we know how to talk about,” says the 42-year-old writer, former Olympic swimmer and men’s wear model Casey Legler.
Butch is an aesthetic, but it also conveys an attitude and energy. She wears men’s clothing, short hair, no makeup. The old adage applies: You know her when you see her. “BUTCH” HAS LONG been the name we’ve given a certain kind - that kind - of lesbian.
