Black Lesbian - Tumblr Posts
Lesbian visibility week includes m spec lesbians and bi lesbians reblog if you agree
caption too real 😭
"Ira Jeffries (far right), with her girlfriend, Snowbaby, and her mother, Bonita (standing), celebrating Ira's sixteenth birthday in a Harlem club" from the Lesbian Herstory Archives. Captioned: "I'm the butch but I'm not allowed to dress as I please yet."
source: The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader, edited by Joan Nestle
Ifé
A portrait of an extraordinary Black French lesbian living in San Franciso in 1990
ppl are so nasty about stud4stud, butch4butch, etc. it tends to come from our own community the most sometimes and it's very strange. at the end of the day both are WOMEN whether they're both masculine presenting or not.
Why you can’t use stud if you white: A TED Talk
Differences in black masculinity and white masculinity. So like in ye olden days, lots of butches presented as men because it was safer for them to pass, yet that wasn’t really true for studs who were targeted regardless of gender, because racism. Homophobia and shit has always been so rampant within the black community because of respectability politics. Being Queer was seen as white. Black people, but more specifically black women,  really didn’t get rights at the same rate as whites. Any sort of deviance was punished even more aggressively.
Studs deal with over sexualization, except with added fetishization. We are seen as naturally more aggressive than our white counterparts, because black masculinity is seen as more aggressive, even in queer spaces. One of the other terms for Studs is AG, which stands for Aggressive, a reclamation of what we have always been called, now used for confidence .
I’ve linked a good doc to the stud experience.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna473796
Elizabeth Anderson, a thirty-three-year-old gender-blender who works in accounting, shared how her gender display changed over time. She thinks lesbians develop a certain gender presentation once they spend time in the community. She says that when you first come out, “you’re just ‘being gay,’ you don’t realize how the community is.” In the newness of spending time in gay social circles, what she noticed first were the nonfeminine women: “You might think that everybody looks like a boy and you’re the only one who looks like a girl. But then you see that some people look like girls, some people look like boys, and some people are in the middle. So you will pick something that you are comfortable with.” Elizabeth said that when she first came out she wore feminine clothes to social events because that is how she used to dress for social occasions in the heterosexual world. However, with a feminine gender display mostly nonfeminine women were drawn to her. She wanted to attract feminine-looking women and learned to change her clothing and adopt a more masculine style, saying that “feminine girls are usually not attracted to other feminine girls, so you’ve got to be a little more aggressive-looking to get the feminine girls.” In constructing a gender-blending self, Elizabeth said she also found this style to more closely reflect the way she feels inside. She is divorced but says even when she was married to her ex-husband she never had a very feminine style, and the pictures from her married life support this recollection. So participating in the black lesbian social world gave her the freedom to “be herself,” as she put it, by dressing in a nonfeminine way, and it also rewarded her with the attention of feminine women, who found that gender display highly desirable.
This work finds that black lesbians in New York use gender display to structure social interactions, and the order of these social interactions maintains social control in the community. In order to attract a person with a certain gendered style, one must possess a complementary gender display. However, the structure imposed by these norms also grants women a certain agency or freedom to present themselves in a gendered way if they so desire, and that is different from the expectations in many lesbian-feminist social circles that encourage a look that is not overtly feminine or masculine. In black lesbian environments, lesbians like Elizabeth as well as Asa, quoted earlier, feel liberated by these categories of gender display, especially the gender-blender identity, because they allow for a way to express a nonfeminine gendered self and to have that identity valued by other gay women.
In today’s society, women have a significant range of styles that are considered acceptable, so the categories of femme, gender-blender, and transgressive have the most meaning when they are presented in a context where lesbians are present. It is in the larger group of black lesbians that the subtleties that often accompany a femme or gender-blending presentation of self are made clear. Athletic jerseys and baggy jeans on women as they walk down 125th Street in Harlem or Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn do not immediately mark them as lesbian but reveal their membership in a gender display category once they step into a convention center or nightclub filled with black lesbians.
Lipstick or Timberlands? Meanings of Gender Presentation in Black Lesbian Communities, Moore, Mignon R. (2006)
Note: I love how this gives depth to the stem(me) identity. Presenting masc and fem is part of it but this takes it further. Studs, stems and fems helped to reaffirm each other's masculinities and femininities and I think that's beautiful.
Not stem as in a 'Black futch', stem/stemme as in reclaiming Black masculinity and femininity by performing both or existing in them simultaneously. Not stem as in a 'nicer' stud, stem as in masculine of centre, in it and on the edges, in solidarity with studs, bois, AGs and tomboys under the umbrella working together to protect femmes, especially Black femmes. Not stem as in 'half butch half femme', stem as in stud-femme and Black gender nonconformity. Stem as in its own subculture and identity.
Joy Oladokun: singer-songwriter.
realising that a lot of “queer drama” that is popularised on this app and tiktok is really not my business because those spaces don’t gaf about black people. like no one is reporting on black and poc business so I actually don’t care anymore 🙏 even the queer theories and histories we share on here are super white centered and western. like and that’s what we’re working off of (basically soley) — western schools of thought to try and change the LGBTQ community without thinking about how it affects anyone whose not white? ya snooze.
this is going to be a hard post. but i feel like it needs to be said. it’s hard to find anyone in my community that looks like me. (black nb lesbian.) when the majority of people i see are white (which isn’t a attack to you guys in any way possible). it’s just hard for me to relate with you guys i guess, i can’t look like you guys cut my hair short and shaggy, my top scars wont look like yours. everything will be different in a way if that makes sense. i don’t want to receive any type of hate because of this post i am just speaking my mind and how ive felt for a while.
the blacker the berry, the sweeter the dyke
how are people my age and younger getting partners as lesbians like teach me your ways 😭😭😭
Omg being a teen lesbian IS the strongest battle
Can't believe I didn't know about butch appreciation day 😭🤦🏾
Happy Belated Butch Appreciation Day 🎊🎊
Ngl it's getting a lil bit annoying seeing super detailed and nuanced posts about lesbian gender identity, the importance of butchfemme dynamics and its history and the celebration of lesbian gender non-conformity then when it comes to studs and stems everyone can only say 'I didn't know studs were Black!' and 'I thought stem was a lesbian that did science haha'
I didn't become the stemme historian™ overnight obviously. I didn't know a lot myself (which is why I made this account) but it's still annoying how Black lesbian masculinity and femininity (or androgyny) are left as an afterthought. What happens when we go from 'I don't know anything about Black queer labels' to 'Why don't I know anything about Black queer labels?'