Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme

These contributors bravely bare their journeys and hard won self knowledge that we might be more liberated to pursue our own. This collection of voices from our community sings a song of authenticity, of validation, and of permission for exploration and expression of self. Empowering and emboldening, these voices unite us even while illuminating our tapestry of difference.

I usually love everything Ivan E. Coyote is involved with, but the essays in this book were hit or miss for me, and by the end they were starting to feel a little samey to me. Also, there's not as much diversity in the authors' definitions of "butch" and "femme" as I'd like to see.

This post-modern peek into a sub culture of a sub culture direct from the front lines is refreshing, it's predecessor The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader broke the ground of it's time, may Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme do the same for this and the next generations of of the butch/femme paradigm introducing more trans awareness and great sexy stories.

Love love love this book on Canadian queer stories. Such a mix of gender-bending, queer experiences, from butch to femme to trans. My favorite queer anthology; you'll find yourself somewhere in these pages.

This a great collection of stories and essays put together with a clear train of thought. The collection is a must read for LGBT folks.

good condition

In the summer of 2009, Ivan E. Coyote and her co-editor, Zena Sharman, set out to collect stories by their favorite queer authors. The result is Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme, an edgy, sexy and poignant mix of genre, form and gender that defies labeling. The book's contributors have written fiction, essays complete with source references and poetry. It is the personal stories that are my favorites: particularly those of Ivan E. Coyote, Zena Sharman, Anne Fleming and Rae Spoon.Spoon's "Femme Cowboy" is a sensitively written piece that describes his upbringing as a girl "in a fundamentalist Christian home in Alberta" and coming out as trans in Vancouver in 2001. Spoon hopes "that the space for diversity will continue to open up" and knows "that we are all changing combinations of many things, with a fluidity that is very human."(Although Rae Spoon's bio uses the pronoun "he," more recently I've seen the use of "they" as the "transgendered indie-folk musician's" pronoun of choice.)What I have realized from reading the book is the importance of self-identification. Essential to our well-being is not the label given to us by someone else but the name we give ourselves.Coyote and Sharman found words for who they are--butch and femme--when they read Joan Nestle's The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader published in 1992. She wrote the foreword to Coyote's and Sharman's collection. At seventy and as a self-defined '50s bar lesbian, Nestle continues to be "an activist, a theorist, and a femme."Zena Sharman, "a gender researcher and femme dynamo," writes in "Looking Straight at You" about the privilege that comes with passing as straight: "Sometimes being queer while looking straight is about blending in, which has the potential to be a powerful and subversive act. You find out who your allies and your enemies are pretty quickly when they assume you're 'one of us' (instead of 'one of them').""Femme invisibility or passing can help keep you and your loves ones safe," Sharman points out. She gives the example of being the one to speak to two police officers when they thought a "raucous Pride party" might get out of control.As Anne Fleming writes in "A Dad Called Mum": ...butch is a self-definition." At the end of her personal essay she writes: "...butch is not a faked or pretended masculinity but a distinct masculinity, with its own fluidity and give, depending on who's inhabiting it."As for the word "butch," Nairne Holtz in her essay, "Slide Rules," says "today in the queer community we are more likely to hear the terms 'bois' and 'transmen.'To offer some insight on terms, Jeanne Cordova includes a chart with her essay. It reveals a "continuum of masculinity" and "visually explains the new politics of butch."Reading the bios of the contributors is as fascinating as their stories. They do much good work in the world. Anna Camilleri is engaged in a creative writing residency with students at the Triangle Program, Canada's only alternative high school for LGBTQ youth. Miriam Zoila Perez is a reproductive justice activist and a trained doula. Stacy Milbern pours all of her time into "radical disability organizing."Books like this one save lives in that the life experiences of the various contributors are saved and the lives of people who read the book are saved. Literally, especially in the case of queer youth, it's possible they have found the courage to live when they find out they're not alone. There is someone else in the world just like them.by Mary Ann Moorefor Story Circle Book Reviewsreviewing books by, for, and about women

as a femme, this book speaks directly to my heart. i've reread it...three times now? and every time i find something new that resonates with me. incredible, amazing, might actually buy a physical copy so i can hug it.