This is my ode to the butch-femme culture of the mid twentieth century, to the voluntary gender roles, and to the femmes who are perceived as straight to the untrained eye.

I’m Black and a lesbian. I imagine the Venn diagram and all the invasive questions people ask? “Is that your real hair?” “How do two girls do it?” [Other invasive questions they ask Black people] “So..with your nails..how do you…well you know?”

As of late I’ve been practicing silence and consideration. Sometimes, I take a long time to respond because I’m running through all the outcomes in my head and of course practicing my statement before I speak, something that not everyone does.

When you’re Black and a lesbian, people treat you as if you’re an oracle, as if you hold all the knowledge of both Black and lesbian history and present. And since we’re talking about Blackness and lesbianism, I’ll say, it’s an extended form of consumption. Life is all about breaking yourself down into not only bite-sized but processed forms of your being that bare no resemblance to your soul.

“Help me understand how you conduct your life because you’re living in ways I can’t fathom.”

And you can never really answer how you want to. People’s “innocent” curiosities are glaring lights displaying how you will never be like them.

I consider myself to be a femme lesbian, a term that can encompass both gender and sexuality, it does for me. On the gender and gender presentation side, femme lesbians can do a lot of signaling. I almost never have belt loops so my carabiner goes on my purse. There were ways to differentiate a femme lesbian from a straight girl. Gaydar is not new. A lot of femmes lean into hyper-femininity. High heels, long nails, makeup.

Why does this matter in lesbianism and gender when women are taught to do that anyway? I believe it lies in the perception of lesbians by non-lesbians. Many people are under the impression that lesbianism a gender confusion and lesbians want to be men just because they may adopt masculinity. I think of the vintage pins that say “I once was a tomboy, now I’m a full grown lesbian.”

Some lesbians, yours truly, were never tomboys. I was always attracted to the tomboys, but there was never much overlap. I’m not particularly outdoorsy and I quit all four sports that I tried because I hate sports. In addition to all of this, I love dresses and skirts. I wore skirts almost everyday of high school and I try to avoid wearing pants if I’m leaving the house. Although, I recently got cute jeans.

Around age nine or ten, I had cornrows and a boy in church had cornrows. I started wearing all pink, so people wouldn’t forget that I was a girl. This memory feels like my first entrance into hyper-femininity. I wanted to make a point. Despite having “girly” interests my whole life, my femininity has always been up for debate. Whether it’s being called Kodak Black in high school for wearing Bantu knots or having a buzzcut in college and being told that short hair is masculine. I really can’t go into how Black women are always masculinized.

Part of the queer community agreed that gender is more than meets the eye, but the bus speeds past Black femmes. If gender isn’t already projected onto us, we have to go the extra mile to be feminine. Since gender is already a performance and I’m interested in fashion, I don’t mind concept dressing or signaling, I mind discrimination.

Even within doing the most to be perceived as feminine, there are what I call the little rebellions because well, a girl has to rebel.

I always put on deodorant, and somedays if I feel like I’ve hit the feminine threshold for the day, I don’t put on my vanilla-scented perfume. When one of my DIY gel X nails pops off, I don’t always glue it on immediately. I never learned how to do a full face of makeup, so I draw my eyebrows with an eyebrow pencil and rub my eyes to smudge out my eyeliner. (It’s retro!) I want my wigs to be frizzy.

I took my feminism 101 and I went to church. I learned that women started wearing pants during the Suffrage movement and women had to be very intricately made up to be considered presentable. I learned that skirts were more modest than pants and that if my skirt was too short or tight I would have to change or cover up. I learned that women could do anything that men can do and that women can’t preach. I learned that men expect me to smile for them and that’s objectification. I learned that I should smile because God woke me up today. I learned a lot.

They don’t just want you to be sexual. They want you to be heterosexual and have heterosexual sex, not before marriage. All of society wants a lot from me. Frankly, I don’t have it; i’m not getting it, and I’m not answering any questions about it.

I’m not perfect and I don’t want to be.

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