Join us on this whistlestop tour from the 1960s to now
BY ELLA GAUCI, IMAGE BY BFI PLAYER
It’s Butch Appreciation Day! And what better way to celebrate the glorious butches in our lives than looking back at the way they’ve been represented on screen?
The term “butch” first popped up in the 1940s, used in queer vocabulary at the time to describe masculine-presenting lesbians in butch-femme dynamics. This is not to say butches weren’t around before then. Like all languages, the queer lexicon is constantly changing and shifting as we find new words to express our identities.
While butches have often been at the forefront of queer history and politics – thank you Stormé DeLarverie – it’s safe to say that they aren’t often represented on our screens. Although finding a butch on screen can feel as impossible as climbing Mount Everest, it’s not an entirely fruitless task.
1960s
In 1968, the UK was rocked by Robert Aldrich’s highly controversial and very lesbian film The Killing Of Sister George. Adapted from Frank Marcus’ stage play, it focuses on actor June Buckridge, who plays a sweet district nurse on a popular soap opera. In reality, June is a cigar-smoking butch lesbian in a toxic relationship with her younger girlfriend Alice. When it’s announced that June’s character is being killed off, it’s clear that everything is going to change. The film was groundbreaking at the time, with a scene even shot in the iconic lesbian bar, the Gateways Club. When it first came out, the British Board of Film Censors initially refused to issue it a certificate in the UK due to its explicit lesbian sex scene. The US even gave it an X rating. It’s not the best representation of a healthy lesbian relationship, and since its release, many LGBTQIA+ audiences have taken issue with the representation it provides.
1980s
The eighties were about more than just big hair and shoulder pads. Butch characters were slowly but surely starting to crop up on screen. 1980 film Times Square saw Robin Johnson play Nicky Marotta, a streetwise runaway who forms a punk band with an unlikely friend. A baby butch with shaggy hair and a leather jacket. Patrice Donnelly played a track star in the 1982 film Personal Best. Jill Godmilow made a film all about Gertrude Stein called Waiting For The Moon in 1987.
1990
As LGBTQIA+ visibility continued to rise socially, butch representation on screen continued to get better and better. A very young k.d lang starred in the 1991 film Salmonberries, including an iconic nude scene. Go Fish and The Incredibly True Adventure Of Two Girls In Love start to build up the butch canon. Who can forget the cultural impact of Corky in Bound?
The 90s also saw several stud characters appearing on screen. (A stud refers to a Black masculine-presenting lesbian.) Cleo, in the 1996 action film Set It Off, gave a whole new generation of studs and butches a slice of representation. Cheryl Dunye’s iconic film The Watermelon Woman has inspired stud filmmakers for three decades now.
2000s
Butch rep in the 2000s continued to grow, with butch voices and filmmakers leading the charge. Silas Howard’s 2001 film By Hook Or By Crook was a seminal piece of transmasculine and butch storytelling. Michelle Ehlen’s 2007 film Butch Jamie brought butch stories to the world of rom-coms. The 2004 film Mango Kiss took viewers into the BDSM scene. In Germany, the film My Friend From Faro explored navigating romance as a butch in a story of self-discovery.
2010s
The 2010s were a treasure trove of butch rep. From the 2011 film Cloudburst, which provided vital representation for older butches, to the classic British film Stud Life, butch stories were cropping up more and more. The 2011 drama Pariah by Dee Rees was especially impactful for paving the way for even more stories about Black butches, studs and mascs. But the real turning point in the 2010s was the hit show Orange Is The New Black, which premiered in 2013. Featuring a whole host of LGBTQIA+ women, characters like Big Boo and Poussey brought butch representation to a mainstream audience. Towards the end of the decade, shows like BBC’s Gentleman Jack and The L Word: Generation Q continued to show audiences the breadth of butch experience.
2020s
And that brings us to now. While there’s certainly room for even more, butch stories are still being kept alive by the magic of cinema and screen. Georgia Oakley’s masterpiece Blue Jean showcased butch4butch love, and Kristen Stewart rocked an iconic mullet in Love Lies Bleeding. A League Of Their Own gave us baseball-loving butches like Max, and Jonica T. Gibbs had us all hooked on Hattie in show Twenties.
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