Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community

"This is a classic of lesbian history. I included this book because, again in terms of approach, it’s almost exclusively an oral history. Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline Davis interviewed 45 women who lived in and around the lesbian community of Buffalo in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s. And, based on those narrations, they came up with this book, which came out in 1993. Again, we are coming back to the activist-researcher, specifically the position of queer historians, and how they intervened in the lesbian feminist debates of the 1990s. So this book is first trying to address the middle class bias of lesbian feminism, looking into a decidedly working class lesbian subculture. This book is trying to make good a white bias, because there are also Afro-American and Latina women among the interviewees and the culture that is described here is racially and ethnically diverse. And the authors also address the over-focus on big cities, and metropolises, by looking into Buffalo, which is upstate New York, a place with around 500,000 inhabitants. It was one of the first studies looking at such a setting. Most importantly, the book wants to redeem the butch-femme way of structuring lesbian intimacy and sociability, the idea that women come together, performing specific gender roles, with one woman performing the more male role and the other women performing the more feminine role. This was absolutely discredited in lesbian feminism from the 1970s onwards, but this book tries to bring back and redeem this butch-femme kind of constellation, and those butch-femme practices, describing them as a kind of pre-political resistance. It was not only a way for same sex-desiring women to survive in the United States in that kind of medium-sized town setting in the ’40s ’50s, and ’60s, but also a way of making sure that they have spaces where they can meet, and are able to defend those spaces. There’s a lot about street violence in the book. It also allows those women to find a specific way in which they can organise their personal and intimate relationships. Being an oral historian myself, I really like this book. It does so much with the interviews. It is also very attentive to respecting the individual narratives. And it deals with those narratives, interviews, and testimonies, in a very productive fashion, really allowing the reader a very detailed view of a specific place and subculture and the internal logic and dynamic of that subculture. I think that this question raises two issues. One is whether we look at queer history with that kind of pre- and post-Stonewall lens, where you focus on post-Stonewall liberation activism that primarily struggles for decriminalisation. And that brings us to the second issue you’ve raised, which is how we understand persecution. These women in Buffalo were heavily persecuted, yet not directly because they had sex with women. They were actually persecuted by the state and by the police for all kinds of reasons, for being a public nuisance, for engaging in fights, and sometimes also for sexual offences, which in the ’40s and ’50s could still be very widely defined. But this is not the main point. The main point is stigmatisation and the difficulty of finding a space for oneself, the danger of losing your job, the danger of being ousted by your family, of losing your house, your apartment. So, I think it’s important—and I think that’s where queer history generally is moving now—to have a broader understanding of persecution, that goes beyond a fixation on the criminal law and the criminalisation of primarily male, same-sex desire. “These women in Buffalo were heavily persecuted, yet not directly because they had sex with women” During the ’50s and ’60s those women put up a fight when somebody tried to take the bars they were frequenting away from them, and when people tried to hinder them from being visible in public in their butch performing fashion and mannerism. It’s a liberation struggle, but it’s different from the kind we are more familiar with, that of organized lobby groups that use published magazines—or nowadays, online websites. But I think it would be wrong not to describe the earlier forms as a liberation struggle. I think that’s actually exactly what Kennedy and Davis mean when they talk about this pre-political form of resistance. There is a liberation struggle. There is actually an astonishing degree of visibility and power exercised by that lesbian subculture, although most of those women would not describe themselves as lesbians, but that’s a different point. There is an astonishing struggle going on. It may just be that, given the lenses we have now grown accustomed to, we find it a bit difficult to read it as a liberation struggle, but I think it definitely was."