Wanted: Brotherhood

Butch is a Noun begins with “A Note to the Reader” where Bergman talk about how ze made the explicit and political choice “to structure the book in a way that would be most satisfying for those who felt comfortable with butches and butchness already” (9), as a proud nod to hir butch brothers. But, ze is nice enough to offer a “roadmap” of selections for beginners. When I saw hir at an author event at Lambda Rising in Washington, DC recently, I asked hir to point out a similar roadmap of favorites for butch readers. Ze offered the following: “Cocks,” “White Button-Down Shirts,” “Being an Asshole,” “This Gesture.”

Overall, it’s a fun little collection of short stories. Unlike DH, who shared with me that his strategy to savor the book was to read one (maybe two) selections each night before going to bed, I practically devoured the thing whole, only infrequently stopping to chew. Then again, I do like doing that, binge reading.

In any case, since then, I’ve been sitting on my post about Butch is a Noun, trying to give my mind time to digest it properly. What I realize is that there were pieces that I really LOVED, and others that I was really ambivalent about. I don’t know why I feel so much surprise at this, considering just how many different essays there are, but I do.

Okay, honestly, even though Bergman leaves the meaning of “butch” wide open in so many regards, and clearly takes the time and makes the effort to represent a diversity of dimensions of butchness, I was unsatisfied because there weren’t more butch-on-butch focused pieces (and here, I don’t mean just in terms of sex).

Brotherhood. Tribe.

These words figure prominently throughout Bergman’s writings. Yet, in the end, the book felt more about hir relationships to femmes being hir butch self. I certainly don’t fault hir for this.

It just makes me realize how hungry I am for a book about butch brotherhood. Maybe as a sequel? Or, maybe as a project of my own!


And, as usual, a list of my favorite passages:

Bergman, S. Bear. Butch Is a Noun. San Francisco: Suspect Thoughts Press, 2006.

(11) This is the first thing, the handkerchief. In its way, it is emblematic of the butch heart—it is something you carry with you at all times for the express purpose of giving it away when it is needed.

(17) I want you to feel in your mouth the hesitation, the frustration, the stumbling over gendered pronouns that you must do when speaking about a person whose gender is neither man, in which case masculine pronouns would likely be appropriate, nor woman, in which case feminine ones would probably be.

(22) Embracing the Zen of identity seems less tiring, for sure, less taxing, and certainly more logical, and yet the more I get identified in the world, the more it makes we want to have that moment of determination all for myself; the more it makes me want to offer the people I encounter a much wider understanding of potential identities so that when I am seen on the street I am understood by more and more people as what I am: a butch.

(32) The pack-animal needs to lie down in a warm pile with others of our kind, safer together against predators and weather.

(49) Any penetration is a grace offered to you by the person you’re inside; it is an intimate way of inclusion, a gift. …this is a world in which opening one’s self to someone else is always somewhere on the continuum between a gesture of welcome and an office of trust, and you should be grateful.

(56) What do I think? I think that all of these concerns and fears and angers and loves and all are completely valid and perfectly reasonable and utterly understandable. And I think that if we don’t quit spending so much energy on fighting amongst ourselves, we are going to look up one day soon and find the Department of Homeland Security on our collective doorstep, confiscating our papers and banning us from travel or work for being security risks by virtue of being too confusing, one and all. Then we’ll realize what a privilege it was to engage in border wars, when we had the leisure time for that. Before we ended up spending every scrap of energy on survival. That’s what I think.

(76) I want them to be able to ask, and I want us—if I can imagine myself elder enough to give advice—to make space for the asking to happen.

(76) What is keeping us from making ourselves resources for this next generation? As butches especially, we keep our fire inside—our proudest moment and our shameful ones, our mistakes and our triumphs—and sometimes it burns us instead of fueling us, sometimes we see our mistakes and our shames far too clearly, we imagine ourselves unfit or unworthy to try and teach anyone else anything about anything at all.

(93) I tell him that when he finds someone he wants to please as much as he wants to feel good himself he’s on the right track.

(94) I am hoping I am good enough. I am holding you close, as close as I can, hand cradling your head and breath on your hair, my whole body curved around yours, sheltering you as best I can, trying to remember that I cannot keep you safe, but I can keep you loved.
When it’s good, it’s perfect. When it’s good, I remember why I bother trying. When it’s good, I feel like I can get home from here.

(126) We grow around every injury, never able to heal it—we just encompass it. We take every ache, every hurt, every shame into ourselves and live with it inside our skins. Is it this that becomes our stone?

(127) I would urge you that you are more worthwhile, more deserving than that, too precious to lay yourself in harm’s way. We try to protect each other, in our imperfect ways, and when we can’t, we can at least stand and honor each others’ hearts for their honorable stupidity.

(129) I used to think my butch identity was getting rinsed away in these encounters until I started to see it like a willow tree, responding to being cut back by flourishing.

(138) Because I am not a well person, because I am so conditioned away from showing any kind of fear, sometimes my fear expresses itself as anger instead.

(147) I know that the truth is that I am stopped by my own fear of being seen.

(147-148) Sometimes you ask me what I want, what I need, knowing from the look on my face and the shadow behind my eyes that there is something I want so badly. You ask with your gentlest [end page 147] voice, but I continue to lie, continue to deny you; I don’t know how to do this. I am afraid of being a burden to you, a nuisance and a bother, I am afraid that if I ask anything of you I will become more work than I am worth.