I Think Of Butches On Father’s Day

There’s a picture of me at two years old, sitting on an ‘80s brown carpet wearing my grandfather’s auto body shop ballcap. I jokingly call it my “baby butch” photo. Growing up, I didn’t have a lot of positive masculine role models, but honestly, I didn’t have role models. I had a father I didn’t really know until I was an adult, an abusive alcoholic mother, and a stepfather who terrorized me. I did have my grandparents who loved me in their own way, despite being unable or, more so, unwilling to save me. Having watched my grandfather disown his oldest son, I knew his love was and always would be conditional. I experienced this myself when my own coming out meant we never had another complete conversation. I left home at 17, and found family and commonly with punk queers. It was queers who took me in, and helped me figure out how to live, thrive and survive. It was butch and gender weirdos who caught my eye, as partners, mentors, and family. These are the masculine mentors I think of most on Father’s Day because I can’t imagine where I would be all these years later. 

Reading Masculinity

Like so many elder millennials, I was raised by the media that I consumed, an experience which extended into my adulthood. I grew up without a lot of great role models or examples of queerness in my life, so I looked for representations that I could identify with in the pages of books. The first butch I dated made me read Stone Butch Blues so I would understand the risks our people took. Iconic novels like Patrick Califia’s Doing It for Daddy gave language to sexual desire. I learned it was ok to be angry from Diane DiMassa’s Hothead Paisan and saw myself, my friends, and lovers in the pages of Lynn Breedlove’s Godspeed. These were the books that helped me see a queer future. These fictional characters were my friends, who kept me from feeling isolated and alone. These were examples of queered masculinity that delighted me, comforted me, and gave me hope that I’d find my own way through. They were the dads I never had.

Punk Butches

The homeless trans butches and trans queer kids  I met were the first people who showed me caring masculinity. They showed me, just by existing, that survival was possible, that I was desirable, and that I was not broken by virtue of where I came from. They brought me home to their punk houses; they moved my boxes of stuff again and again and again. They taught me queer history; those punk butches taught me how to fight and fuck. They showed me how to make a home. They taught me to dress myself in thrift shop/thrift box fashion, and we fathered each other. We made art together, showed up on good days and bad days. We rebuilt each other’s lives and genders in new ways, we promised each other that we were not, and would never be defined by the people who made or raised us. We made the rules—our bodies and our lives were our own. Street kid ethics meant standing boot to boot, loving each other in ways that our families never had, and we still do all these years later with greying hair and creaking knees.  

Leather Dykes 

Leather dykes showed me that there is strength in submission, and nothing more powerful than vulnerability. The butch daddies and bois have been some of my closest friends, chosen family, mentors, and partners who have taught me to turn pain into pleasure. These butches brought me up, turned me out, and trained me to be the kind of leather boi who I used to lust after when I was a baby queer, searching for place and belonging.  After my divorce, it was my leather roots that helped me to feel confident in who I am, who I have always been, and the kind of life I want to live. Since my earliest punkhouse days, leather dykes have loved me, reminding me that it’s safe to allow myself to be challenged and cherished. Leather, when done right, feels like the antidote to toxic masculinity, where tears are strength, and there is no shame in naming fears, hopes, dreams, and desires. 

RENT-A BUTCH 

Six months ago, my mother drank herself to death, and her body was found in the hoarded house where I grew up. I hadn’t talked to her in 24 years. I got a call from the county informing me that as her next of kin, I was responsible for her estate. The police report stated that the neighbors told them that I was dead—she’d long told the story that I had run away, become an addict, and died with punks under bridges. The irony is that I never used drugs or alcohol. When the house was finally empty of rotten food and empty wine bottles, I toured it with real estate brokers who saw green steel stacked outside.“What is that?” they asked. Immediately, I realized it was the planters my grandfather had welded out of torpedo tubes after WWII.“I think I want them,” I said, a declaration that surprised me.

The six planters are 10 feet long each and made from WWII steel. They are…. heavy. I looked at different options to get the planters moved to my house, and was delighted to discover a butch moving company existed in Portland. While bidding for the job, the butch movers (Rent-A-Butch – highly recommend) said, “It’s going to take four of us and a U-Haul because of their size to move those planters.” This was starting to sound more like the plot of one of my novels than real life. I signed the contract, and the Rent-A-Butch movers transported the planters to my yard. I loved that the planters were being moved by a team of butches, something my Catholic grandfather would have hated.  

New Beginnings

After the planters arrived in my yard, I filled them with dirt and seeds, and hoped. Seeing a picture of the hose water leaking all over me, a generous friend who I’ve known since my punk-house days asked if I was watering the plants or myself. 

“I’m using the new hose,” I responded.

“Did you not use a rubber washer when you hooked it up?” he asked.

“Wait, is that what the little rubber circles in the box are for?”

We laughed together about how raising myself in punk houses meant that I, in my 40s, am still learning the small, simple things that people who grew up with functional parents and families take for granted.

I’m not going to pretend that queer masculinity has always been perfect. I spent way too many years begging for the love and attention from butches who didn’t deserve me. These were folks who embody the kind of toxic masculinity we don’t want to emulate. These folks liked to police who was butch or masculine enough. I’ll never be enough for whatever moving target of masculinity they dream up, but I’m old enough not to care.  Learning to laugh at their insecurity, cut those folks out of my life, and not allow others with those same toxic traits close to me was something that took until my 40s to fully figure out.

Butches have hurt me, but they have also loved me better, harder and more fully than anyone else ever has or could. Butches taught me that it was never too late to build the life that I have dreamed, and the disfunctional world I was raised in does not define me. Butches have come in the form of mentors who helped me recapture the dreams that were stolen from me when I became homeless, and build the career I only dreamed as a artist and dog trainer. Queerly masculine chosen family has shepherded my books into existence and held me tight on long, lonely nights when it was hard to find hope. 

 On Father’s Day, I don’t think about the cisgender straight men who, at one point, feel or have felt entitled to that title of dad. Instead, I think of the butches who I looked up to and grew up alongside, as we raised each other up, and built new worlds together. I think of my Leather Sir looking down at me on my knees and locking a collar around my neck, claiming me. I think of the artists who have inspired me, the punks who taught me to bind, and cook, and love, who gave me a home.  In big and small ways, it’s my community of tender masculine queers who have and continue to care for me as I do them. I found the washers. I fixed my house. I now water my grandfather’s planters each night, under the fluttering rainbow flag hanging on my front porch.