The music is loud and the people are gorgeous. Gay bars are definitely the place to be on a late weekend night in Los Angeles. I personally am attracted to the opposite sex, and yet I follow all of my friends who are to their local “hangs” when they go out on the weekends. My newest friend, an actor who plays a straight man on TV but is gay in real life, just recently took me to a spot in West Hollywood, where karaoke Friday is singing “Seasons of Love” with a pint of Heineken in your right hand and your best man on your left arm. The men and women at this bar are all different types of people. Businessmen, women in the arts, teachers, you name it. And they’re all looking for the same thing that I look for when I go to the 9-0 or the Row; love or a one night stand?
Veronica and Torri were two or the greatest people I’ve met since being out in Los Angeles. Torri is a 30 year old a personal trainer; built and strong as a bull, fit to handle celebrity clients and train men and women on reality TV. Veronica, more reserved than her butch, is a nutritionist who wears J Crew and Lily Pulitzer. Their relationship is beautiful, pure, magical. In their relationship, there’s no very obvious “butch” or “femme”, however clearly Torri is more masculine and Veronica more feminine. Neither dresses in male clothing, however Torri always wears pants when going out to the clubs at night. That night at the bar, we strut in, my heels clacking and Veronica’s dress swirling against wood floors. As I think back to that night, I remember feeling some sort of longing to belong. As I looked around at everyone paired off, I was alone. Single, straight; I didn’t have much going for me at this joint.
Judith Butler writes that gender “cannot be understood as a role which either expresses or disguises an interior ‘self’, whether that ‘self’ is conceived as sexed or not. As performance which is performative, gender is an ‘act’, broadly construed, which constructs the social fiction of its own psychological interiority”. She writes that genders can neither be true or false, since they are an ‘act’ and neither “real nor apparent”. If gender is an act, than gender is just as simple as the pair of pants Torri puts on in the morning.
Butch and femme reinforce the idea of heteronormative categories of sex and gender, as there is one masculine and one feminine persona in the pair, thus completing the “natural” male-female mating pair that heteronormativity begs. However, it denaturalizes it as the relationships are between two women, which is not what “heteronormative relationships” stand for. When Torri puts on the pants and the couple wanders around their lovely Santa Monica home, it makes for a more picturesque couple, butch and femme, she will say, jokingly. But often, we don’t joke about it. They talk about gay rights all the time, and how people don’t know what they would rather and be more comfortable seeing (similar to Judith Butlers paragraph on gender as an act on stage vs. in reality); two women dressed like “women”, or butch and femme.
I think it's interesting that you brought up the point that the general majority doesn't know what they prefer among all the different types of difference. Often we see things as "self" and "other," and if we can't assimilate something to our world view, we just cast it into the realm of "other." As you said, people aren't more or less comfortable with a gender-normative lesbian couple versus a gender-bending lesbian couple. Perhaps this is because there is no scale for "queer." Are two feminine women more or less "queer" than a femme-butch couple? Things outside of the traditional spectrum confuse our categorization methods, to say the least.
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