“Betty Carstairs’ Island” - Life Magazine
[K] Our love for vintage butch and heiress extraodinaire Betty “Joe” Carstairs is already well-established, but if this Life Magazine article from February 17th, 1941 is to be believed, we are in pretty good company. Among the not-quite-unimpressed descriptions of Carstairs qualities are:
- “alert and boyish face [which] does not show her 41 years”
- “notice the tattoo marks on her muscular left arm”
- “expert sailor”
- “sturdy tennis player”
- “demon cyclist”
Add to that her affair with Marlene Dietrich and I think we can just crown her “most impressive butch ever” and be done with it…
Pop Quiz: Which is (thankfully) not like the others?
[K] In Vevo’s Youtube-Advertisment for their major artists we have
- Lady Gaga’s smoking swagger in drag
- Katy Perry’s blank stare into a ventilator
- Beyonce’s “I’d rather not name that expression on a blog read mainly by girls who like vaginas”-face
![Pop Quiz: Which is (thankfully) not like the others?
[K] In Vevo’s Youtube-Advertisment for their major artists we have
- Lady Gaga’s smoking swagger in drag
- Katy Perry’s blank stare into a ventilator
- Beyonce’s “I’d rather not name that expression on a blog read mainly by girls who like vaginas”-face](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lzjb335CVL1qddduoo1_1280.jpg)
Vintage Butch of the Week: Gluck
[K] It would be a shame to let LGBT History Month pass without an edition of our Favorite Vintage Butch, wouldn’t it? Especially it the vintage butch in question has a formidably androgynous fashion sense like British painter Gluck (nee Hannah Gluckstein, 1895 - 1978)
Gluck, 1924, photographed by E.O. Hoppe (to whom a exhibition is dedicated right now at the National Portrait Gallery)
G.B. Jones - Tom Girl drawings
[B] G.B. Jones is what you might call an artistic multi-talent: She’s a musician, a filmmaker, an artis, a publisher worked among others with Bruce la Bruce and Caroline Azar. On top of that she’s openly gay and so is her work.
G.B. Jones has an uneasy fascination with authority and uses her gender and sexual preference to exploit fantasies of rock & roll, sex, groupies, booze, drugs, money, leather, torn jeans,motorcycles and stardom as an all out assault against values that would strive for assimilation of queer culture into the mainstream. She’s every queer girl and boy’s hero, whether you want her to be or not. Believe it or don’t, she is looking out for every queer’s best interests. (Source)
The drawings here are from different series such as Tattoo Girls, Cruising and I am a Fascist Pig, which was inspired by the idea of a lesbian fantasy movie like Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! For more information about her artwork and some other drawings you should go and visit queer-arts.org.
Music Videos That Made Me Gay - Today: Two Nice Girls “Let’s Go Bonding”
[B] Today’s band of choice dates back to the late 1980s. Two Nice Girls are, what you might call a badass, lesbian punk band from Austin, Texas. They released their same-titled first album in 1989, won a GLAAD award in 1991, and split up in 1992.
Not so much punk but still very gay their video of “Let’s go Bonding”:
Oh and they even do have a song called “Queer Song”.
For more vintage-lesbian hairstyles or old-school dressing advices you definetly need to check out their youtube-channel. For more music videos that made us gay you should go here.
Bitchy Butch - World’s Angriest Dyke
[B] This might be old news for some of you, but I haven’t heard of the Bitchy Butch till today and so far everything I read sounds pretty promising.
Bitchy Butch was created by Roberta Gregory as counterpart to her very successfull character Bitchy Bitch. Oh and it even gets better. Roberta Gregory started publishing her work in the 1970s. Among others in the Wimmen’s Comix, an all-female underground collection of comics. Her self-published comic Dynamite Damsels (1976) is the first lesbian underground serial comic book, at least according to wikipedia. Oh and on top of all that Roberta Gregory was the first woman to solo self-publish an underground comic.
If you’re interested in her work check out her homepage where among other things you can find some of her latest comic strips. Oh and of course you can get yourself a copy of Bitch Butch, the world’s angriest dyke at amazon.
Lesbian Procrastination Part 4
[B] It’s definetly time for another crossword. So are you able to find all of the well-known butch lesbian characters hidden? And are you able to name all the films, books and TV-shows they starred in?
Fashion Essentials: Studded Rings
[K] Even though I (kinda, for the most part, maybe not really) have given up on studded belts, now that I’ve seen these, my hands seem kinda naked without them. Want!
![Fashion Essentials: Studded Rings
[K] Even though I (kinda, for the most part, maybe not really) have given up on studded belts, now that I’ve seen these, my hands seem kinda naked without them. Want!](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ly0ho44ODe1qddduoo1_1280.jpg)
Why we should all be aware of/in love with Christine Vachon
[K] What do Poison, Go, Fish, Boys Don’t Cry and Hedwig and the Angry Inch have in common? They’re defining points of LGBT representation in cinema, milestones in US indepenent film, mandatory viewing items for “Queer Film Studies 101” and they have all been produced by the same woman: Christine Vachon. If we had a Favorite Contemporary, instead of Favorite Vintage Butch-category, Christine Vachon would be in it. But since we don’t have it (yet?), she is her own category for now - which is probably only appropriate anyway.
Because lang wasn’t beautiful or pretty, she was handsome. She was butch.
Never before had Americans seen female masculinity so overtly and unapologetically on display,
and we couldn’t take our eyes off it."
Ariel Levy on k.d.lang for New York Magzine
[K] Post Scriptum to this post.
01.14.12 ♥ 8![Elvis is alive…
and she is beautiful!
[K] Madonna on k.d. lang
(Picture credit: kroeja.de)](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lxltsxHZqM1qddduoo1_500.jpg)
[K] From: Alexander Doty “My beautiful Wickedness”: The Wizard of Oz as lesbian Fantasy (in: Hop on Pop) in which Doty argues for a reading of Dorothy’s dilemma as the decision between a butch and femme identity.
This big bad butch witch, who is loud, aggressive, violent, and wears an obvious “uniform,” had been developed by the time of the final script to function on one level as a contrast to good witch Glinda. However Glinda presents complications for lesbian readings of The Wizard of Oz that have someething to do with Rushdie’s complaint that she is a “trilling pain in the neck [in] frilly pink”. For Glinda seems to be one of those images of femmes in popular culture that are coded to be able to pass as heterosexually feminine in the eyes of certain beholders.
But look at Glinda again: there’s more than a touch of camp excess here that finally seems expressive oflesbian femmeness rather than of the straight feminine. And let’s not forget that while Glinda may look like a fairy godmother, she is a witch, and is therefore connected to the Wicked Witch and to centuries-long Western cultural associations between witchcraft and lesbianism. So what we have set before us in The Wizard of Oz is the division of lesbianism into the good femmeinine and the bad butch, or the model potentially “invisible” femme and the threateningly obvious butch.
Vintage Queer Subtext Moment
[K] What Sunday afternoon TV programs are good for: campy fun and hilariously queer movie scenes! (If you’re lucky)
Swagger to spare: Mauren O’Hara as a tough piratess
In this case, I stumbled upon a little gem from 1952: Against All Flags, in which Maureen O’ Hara plays swashbuckling Prudence ‘Spitfire’ Stevens - owner of her own pirate ship - opposite a rather sissy Errol Flynn who at one point teaches her how to behave more feminine (=less butch), while she answers his attempt to kiss her by drawing her gun. In an interesting turn of events, Stevens finds herself bidding for a Indian princess who is sold as a sex sklave /wife … and liking her price more than she expected. Enjoy!
