its really weird to me that people venerate the 50′s butch/femme community so much…. like the entire reason those roles existed was the extreme gendered division of labour in the first place, because there was no real means of employment and therefore survival for women that didn’t either conform to a feminine labour role or a (blue collar) masculine labour role ((also probably an important note: this entire subculture was a distinctly working class phenomena)). women could either get the jobs for women that required them to be feminine (bank teller, sales clerk, waitress), or one of the few jobs that didn’t have dress codes for women (dock worker, factory worker, cab driver) ((femmes usually made more money bc it was often really difficult for butches to get hired anywhere)). a lot of butch/femme spaces were anywhere from disapproving of to openly hostile to women who didn’t cleanly fit into either the butch or femme categories, partially because of the rigidity of these categories within the community and partially because if you weren’t obviously butch or femme people assumed you were a cop. butch/butch and femme/femme relationships were also somewhere between mildly frowned on to completely taboo depending on the time and place. i could go on but my point is, even though there’s a lot of important things to be learned and remembered from this particular part of lesbian history, it really shouldn’t be idolized as the golden age of lesbian society or something. it was a distinct and complex working class community that developed out of class struggle and violent mccarthy era homophobia
i think a lot of the historical facts and analysis you bring up in this post is correct. a lot of the roles did spring up because of the gendered division of labor, a lot of butch/femme spaces were hostile to non-aligned lesbians due to fear of police plants, b4b and f4b relationships were taboo and marginalized.
however, i think that if you believe the conditions that gave birth to the bar scene are completely alien in modern times, your understanding is lacking. the core difference in economic conditions between then and now is the shifting of the united states from an industrial rising imperialist power focused on industrial production into a world-dominant imperialist power focused on importing the fruits of oppressed nations’ industrial labor and the use of its own working class as cogs in the machine of bourgeois pleasure centers (what we call the service industry). working class butches still have extreme difficulty finding work outside of industrial/male dominated fields. the prole butches i know have all either been mechanics, back of house food workers, industrial paint mixers, or in school (attempting to exit their class position and transfer into the petty bourgeoisie or labor aristocracy, and it should be notes that during the bar era petty bourgeois and bourgeois lesbians were afforded much more societal freedom in their occupations and activities). femmes are still generally filtered into feminine-coded jobs. most femmes i know still do work as waitresses, early level schoolteachers, baristas, or sales clerks. i myself work as a barista. and before that i worked as a hostess and before that a cashier. you also failed to mention that during the bar scene a vast portion of femmes were involved in the sex trade, generally as prostitutes in horrible working conditions. as the sex trade has transformed in the united states over the years (in concert with the development of pleasure centers) many femmes now not only work as prostitutes, but many of us work as cammers, nude-sellers, or self-employed fssw(petty sex bourgeoisie); many of us work as dancers, phone sex operators, adult actresses, peepshow performers, etc. this is a huge point of continuity in the butch/femme community that cannot be ignored and ties a lot of modern femmes to the history of our culture, this is especially true of stone femmes. your post implies that the gendered division of labor no longer exists, which is fundamentally untrue especially in the working class. it is in full swing if not on the rise. the only difference is a move away from industrial production towards the service industry.
for another thing, yes, non-butch/fems were marginalized in the bar scene because they were presumed to be cops, which was not an unreasonable thing to expect. since butch/femme were fundamentally working class identities/presentations that made us stand out from other women it was necessary to use the distinction to snuff out our enemies (pigs, gay-bashers, etc.) in an age of rampant homophobia and fascism. in modern times the butch/femme community has been aggressively pushed into obscurity and ostracization by the radfem movement of the 90s and subsequently by the queer movement of the 2000s. the main reasons being that we don’t fit into a perfectly androgynous ideal of a radfem (fascist) conception of womanhood or we are too set, too binary, and too un-fluid from an liberal conception of “queerness” — quite literally liberal capitalist and fascist schools of thought are antagonistic towards the butch/femme community for not being androgynous/non aligned. while yes obviously it was bad that unaligned working class lesbians were completely ostracized in the bar scene, that cultural distrust rose out of necessary paranoia given the social conditions, which persist today in a new form.
i’m not going to get into the whole butch/butch and femme/femme thing on this post, but needless to say, the understanding of those relationships have drastically changed over the years as conditions have changed and it is fully possible to not kick lesbians in those relationships out of our spaces and appreciate their love for each other without fully abandoning an appreciation of our culture and history.
you are right that the bar scene was not a golden age, it was a period of extreme oppression, rising fascism, and mass suppression. but those conditions in many ways mirror ours today, and it makes complete sense that modern butches and femmes seek meaning, comfort, veneration, and identity in that past. we deserve that much after everything.
