“I’m a dyke. I don’t wear lipgloss or anything like that,” my coworker said at lunch one day. She is a decade older than me. Her lesbian world and its definitions are lightyears away from mine. 

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I ask. 

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She’d seen me in many shades of gloss. I’d also seen her in her fair share of dresses, backless or see-through tops, and even heels. She apologized, saying she’d “dated tons of girls” like me and she “loves the girly girls.” Between us — where I’d once seen mirrored realities through our race, lesbianism, and satorial appreciation — grew a wall. She was a “dyke” and I was… something else. 

I always wanted to be glamorous. Big curls and fluttery lashes. Hyperfeminity is hardly something I was forced into. As a girl, being attractive to men factored somewhat into this desire. But after coming into my lesbian identity in my adolescence, my fantasies of European boyfriends (who were suspiciously androgynous) vanished. My dreams of glamor remained. I would wear my hair in big curls, teased on top of my head like Dolly Parton, along with a bright-colored dress dripping with embellishments, platform heels that made me tower above the crowd, and eyeshadow that looked like stained glass windows. I would be feminine, yes, but feminine to a degree that intentionally sought attention, to a degree deemed “too much” by cisheterosexual standards. 

“Men see me as theirs, and most dykes I pass on the street do not give me a second look.” Paula Austin’s “Femme-inism” decodes the puzzle of the femme experience. Clothes are semiotic, holding symbols and meanings that make sense to those intended to understand. But the language of my femme fashion is tangled in double-speak. In the midst of a large crowd, I yell to my lesbian siblings, but sometimes they can’t hear me. The lipgloss alters the pitch of my voice to a frequency that routinely reaches the ears of men. 

It’s nerve-wracking to see someone in a crowd that you want to talk to, maybe platonically or maybe romantically. Before you speak, you look for any tell-tale signs — a carabiner, some kind of beanie or baseball cap, baggy jeans, rings scattered across knuckles, botanical tattoos. It’s not foolproof, but it feels safer. 

What do people see when they see me? Does my pink eyeshadow seem like a sign? Do my stiletto nails put them at ease? Are my platform boots welcoming? Does my lacquered gloss make them feel safe? Are they supposed to? Or do I remind them of mean girls from high school who bullied them, hurling “dyke”-engraved daggers at them? Do my heels remind them of pageant girls whose idealistic beauty left them crushed beneath leaden standards? 

While femininity came naturally to me, my security in it didn’t. 

In the first year of my MFA program, a piece I wrote about lesbian sexuality was ripped apart by a lesbian in my class. One of her only compliments about my piece was my analysis of unrealistic lesbian erotica. “I never understand how they do it with those long nails!” My classmates erupted into laughter. I sat quietly, as expected during critiques, and looked at my pink gel-x that went over an inch past my fingertips. I pulled them into my lap. 

While revising my writing, I realized that I didn’t have the language to describe my femme experience. I wanted to speak directly against these judgments laid at my feet, but I didn’t know how. 

“You should read Joan’s Persistent Desire and cite the essays in your piece. They’ll provide structure and context, and they’re better than those sex-negative French philosophers,” my girlfriend suggested. She sent me the PDF and told me to read several essays. 

I felt hesitant. I trusted her, and I trusted Joan. But I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to understand. Because of my staunchly feminist politics juxtaposed with my love of pink-taxed consumerism, I was worried I’d find pieces that called me out. What if I was doing femme wrong? I feared Joan Nestle and her contemporaries, revolutionary femme icons, reading me to filth from the pages of this over 30-year-old essay collection. 

I started with “The Femme Question,” with fears and minimal expectations. Joan deftly avoids an overly academic or anthropological summary, instead defining butch-femme relationships as “complex erotic and social statements…filled with a deeply lesbian language of stance, dress, gesture, love, courage, and autonomy.” My shoulders relaxed a little. This definition felt familiar, not to the discourse I’d read online, but familiar to something in my heart. She rejected the notion that femmes were simply a butch’s feminine counterpart, a definition I had seen all over butch-femme lesbian cyberspace. 

When Joan spoke of being rejected by feminists because they saw her as upholding heteronormative standards for wearing stockings and lipstick and dating someone who looked more masculine than not, I felt more comforted and horrified by how much it affirmed my own reality. The lesbians in my workshops made me feel small because my lesbian experience didn’t mirror theirs. 

Then, Joan said something that stopped me in my tracks: “Butches were known by their appearance, femmes by their choices.” “Feminism” and “choice” are often mentioned in terse discussions about the repercussions of choice feminism in the late 90s and early 2000s. Of course, I do agree that choice feminism is more regressive than not. 

But I’d never heard “choice” and femme” together. 

Joan implies that the femme is known by her choice to be with a butch, but I think more about her choice to be. My feminity is both an active choice and the only way I can be. I bristle in clothes that feel too baggy or androgynous. I want there to be no hesitation when someone calls me a woman. But I also make the choice to hold my butch girlfriend’s hand in the train car, looking left and right before squeezing and leaning my body against her arm. I choose to dance in a mini skirt at Ginger’s, hair whipping around me as I wave my hands, long nails glittering. I know almost every major pop song that plays at House of Yes and I yell the lyrics to my beautiful femme best friend as her neon braids glow underneath blacklights.

I choose to be seen as a lesbian. I invite someone to connect the dots. I invite the world to see me as not just a woman, but a femme lesbian woman. I want the world to see me as a dancer, a singer, a lover, a feminist, a lesbian, and a femme.

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