Interview with Rae Spoon

Photo credit: JJ Levine

via Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme.

Rae Spoon is a transgendered indie-folk musician living in Montreal. He tours in Canada, the USA, Europe and Australia. Rae has released five solo albums, and was nominated for the Polaris Prize in 2009. He is currently working on a book of short stories about growing up in Alberta.

“Femme Cowboy,” Rae’s piece for Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme, “is an account of my gender identity from my childhood as a Pentecostal to the realization that I am most comfortable being perceived as a femme trans man.”

What made you want to be part of this anthology?

It’s a huge honour to be included in this anthology with great queer writers and role models. I felt like I really wanted to write about my experience of butch and femme as a trans person, and it was the perfect forum for that.

If you could give your younger self one book to read, what would it be?

Anything but Christian teen novels… but seriously I wish I had read Stone Butch Blues as a teenager. I think it would have helped me make better sense of Alberta.

If you could say one thing to future butches and femmes, what would it be?

I would say that it’s great to see the butch femme community evolving and growing stronger. I would stress the importance of making room for everyone in the spectrum of butch/femme identities regardless of gender and sexuality.

Historicizing “Femme” in the Queer Vernacular

(A discussion of “Butch” and “Femme” Men.)
This reminds me a little bit of that episode of “This American Life” about sissies where Dan Savage talks about gay men policing masculinity within the queer community. He celebrates femme guys in that segment as hot and brave.
“It seems that a quote referring to femmes as girls angered some of the trans men in the community, and led to a discussion of transphobia in the femme community, as well as — and this is where it involves me directly — a discussion of variously male-identified folks who identify as femme, and whether that is okay. […]

However, I think they err in suggesting that queer men, specifically, who call themselves femme must be appropriating the identity from the specific, modern primarily queer female femme culture. Queer men have been calling each other butch or femme for ages. I was called “femme” by others ever since I came out, often in tones of high insult. One of the first books I read as I was coming out, and probably the first place I came across the word, was The Unofficial Gay Manual by Kevin DiLallo, a rather terrible guide to normative gayness, that uses the words “butch” (as a compliment) and “femme” (as an insult). It was published in 1994.

I’ve since discovered that gay men have been using the words butch and femme much earlier than that. “Femme” is an entry in The Queens’ Vernacular: A Gay Man’s Lexicon by Bruce Rodgers, published in 1972, referring to both lesbians and to gay men. The latter definition is marked “dated,” suggesting that it had existed still earlier. “Butch” is also an entry, with the meaning “masculine heterosexual man” dated to the 1940s. As femme men’s star fell in the 1970s, “fem” became also one of the many epithets flung at effeminate men in Craig Alfred Hanson’s virulent screed “The Fairy Princess Exposed,” in Karla Jay and Allen Young, Out of the Closets: Voices of gay liberation, also published in 1972.
I’m not able to determine from these resources whether the word “femme” originated in the queer women’s or queer men’s community. (Couldn’t it have been both at the same time? I don’t think they were always as separate as they can be now.) But the point is that there is a history of gay men using “femme” (and “butch”) for decades, well before the rise of the modern femme community. Accordingly, I think I have a good reason to think of the word “femme” as part of my cultural heritage as a queer man; that’s certainly how I received it in the first place.”

(Source: femmeguy.wordpress.com)

An Interview with Zoe Whittall

Zoe Whittall is the author of two novels, Holding Still for as Long as Possible and Bottle Rocket Hearts. Bottle Rocket Hearts was a Globe & Mail best book of the year and was shortlisted for CBC’s Canada Reads. Zoe has also published three books of poetry, most recently Precordial Thump. She won the 2008 Dayne Ogilvie Award and was shortlisted for the 2010 ReLit Award. Zoe lives in Toronto.

Here’s how Zoe describes her piece for Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme: “‘A Patch of Bright Flowers’ is a short story and both a satire of the Canadian publishing industry, and humorous exploration of intergenerational queer relationships and butch-femme clichés.”

What made you want to be part of this anthology?

When I discovered anthologies about femme and butch identities in the 1990s, they opened up a whole new world to me. At the same time, because it was the 90s, the ideas seemed fairly limited, retro and over identity-politicky now. There is such a lack of content out there that is both current and high quality. I’m honoured to be a part of this book.

What’s one of your favourite lines from your piece?

“Julia isn’t sure what to do about aging. She loves that queers are granted an extended adolescence and don’t really expect to marry, have babies, or own property until they are well into their thirties, if at all. She used to see ugly babies or annoying children and think, Oh, thank god I’m not a parent. Thank god I can do whatever I want, whenever I want. Recently, when she sees ugly babies, she thinks, I would love that little monster SO HARD.”

If you could say one thing to future butches and femmes, what would it be?

Everyone has already said variations of love yourself and know your history, and I echo these sentiments. I would add - don’t throw away your journals, read many books before you try to write one, don’t police people’s politics and have a sense of humour about yours.

Via persistence anthology

I am trying to say that as femmes we found a way to create a sexual space for ourselves that made us different from the traditional woman and yet let us honor our women selves. We exiled ourselves from one land but created another. I have a feeling that butches started out with a certain clarity also, and that clarity… was about how to be powerful in their bodies and their visions of themselves, the same way we wanted to be in our femme, giving selves. The language binds us. I am not sure it is masculinity, even if they say it is and it looks like it. They too chose exile from gender to be another kind of creation.
Joan Nestle, “Femme Tapes” 267

wanna dance?