#madeline davis

[campgender]

Madeline D. Davis in “The Femme Tapes” by Joan Nestle, Madeline Davis, and Amber Hollibaugh (recorded 1982)

published in The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader (1992), ed. Joan Nestle

but I did touch her manually and made her climax and that was the way she came. It was quite a different experience from the next woman I got involved with about four months later, who really was a stone butch. She put her hand up inside of me and she came! And then I thought, “There was something else happening here.”

And this was a woman whom I was not in love with. She was cute, a short chunky version of Beebo Brinker; they were all dark with blue eyes then! You know it’s been a type I have been after. I didn't find too many, but after a while my tastes expanded. They had to. But I still look down the street after a dark-haired, blue-eyed woman.

Anyway, this was a woman who was obviously crazy about my body — the second woman — and I got a whole other feeling suddenly. I mean the men wanted to fuck me, they liked me, but this was a woman who loved my body. I never really loved my body. I was comfortable with it. I knew where all its parts were and that it was functional. But I was always somewhat overweight. I never thought I was pretty, and to this day, you know, eight hundred people can say you're gorgeous and you're never going to believe it. But here was a woman who, when she touched me, trembled, and god — the world opened up.

[femmeespeon]

“old femme” by madeline davis, author of boots of leather, slippers of gold

[abwwia]

Madeline Davis (L), Frances Dowdy next to her, Gayle Rubin third from left, Pat Califia (R). Sabrina Williams is pictured sitting on the floor. This gathering took place after the Barnard Sex Conference in 1982. Photo by Morgan Gwenwald.

Our Herstory – Lesbian Herstory Archives

Learn about the grassroots Herstory that formed around lesbian-feminism and political lesbianism during the early 1970s.

We founded The Lesbian Herstory Archives in the 1970s when a group of women involved in the Gay Academic Union realized that Lesbian history was “disappearing as quickly as it was being made.” Our mission is to gather and preserve records of Lesbian lives and activities so that future generations will have ready access to materials relevant to their lives.

[gatheringbones]

[".... When we develop our understanding of this community as a predecessor to the gay liberation movement, our analysis must include sexuality. For these lesbians actively sought, expanded, and shaped their sexual experiences, a radical undertaking for women in the 1940s and 1950s.

[...] In the forties, there were at least two social groups, focused in two prominent bars, Ralph Martin's and Winters. According to our narrators, the sexual mores of the two groups differed: The former group was somewhat conservative; the latter group was more experimental, presaging what were to become the accepted norms of the fifties. The lesbian patrons of Ralph Martins did not discuss sex openly, and oral sex was disdained. "People didn't talk about sex. There was no intimate conversation. It was kind of hush, huh... I didn't know there were different ways." By way of contrast, this narrator recalls a visit to Winters, where other women were laughing about "sixty-nine." "I didn't get it. I went to [my partner] and said, "Somebody says sixty-nine" and everybody gets hysterical.' Finally her partner learned what the laughter was all about. At that time our narrator would have mentioned such intimacies only with a lover. It wasn't until later that she got into bull sessions about such topics. Not surprisingly, this narrator does not recall having been taught about sex. She remembers being scared during her first lesbian experience, then found that she knew what to do "naturally." She had no early affairs with partners older than herself.

The Winters patrons had a more open, experimental attitude towards sex; they discussed it unreservedly and accepted the practice of oral sex. These women threw parties in which women tried threesomes and daisy chains. "People would try it and see how it worked out. But nothing really happened. One person would always get angry and leave, and they would end up with two." Even if their sexual adventures did not always turn out as planned, these women were unquestionably innovative for their time. One narrator from the Winters' crowd reminisced that it was always a contrast to go home to the serene life of her religious family. She also raved about two fems who were her instructors in sexual matters, adding, "I was an apt pupil."

During the fifties the picture changed, and the mores of the Ralph Martin's group virtually disappeared. Sex came to be a conversation topic among all social groups. Oral sex became an accepted form of lovemaking, so that an individual who did not practice it was acting on personal preference rather than on ignorance or social proscription. In addition, most of our fifties' butch narrators recall having been teachers or students of sex. As in the Winters group in the forties, an important teacher for the butch was the fem. "I had one girl who had been around who told me. I guess I really frustrated the hell out of her. And she took a piece of paper and drew me a picture and she said, 'Now you get this spot right here.' I felt like a jerk. I was embarrassed that she had to tell me this." According to our narrator, the lesson helped, and she explains that, "I went on to greater and better things."

The fifties also saw the advent of a completely new practice— experienced butches teaching novice butches about sex. One narrator remembers that younger women frequently approached her with questions about sex: "There must be an X on my back. They just pick me out...." She remembers one young butch who "had to know every single detail. She drove me crazy. Jesus Christ, y'know, just get down there and do it— y'get so aggravated." The woman who aggravated her gives the following account of learning about sex:

"And I finally talked to a butch buddy of mine.... She was a real tough one. I asked her "What do you do when you make love to a woman?" And we sat up for hours and hours at a time... "I feel sexually aroused by this woman, but if I take her to bed, what am I gonna do?" And she says, "Well, what do you feel like doing?" and I says, "Well, the only thing I can think of doing is.... all I want to do is touch her, but what the full thing of it... you know." So when [she] told me I says, "Really," well there was this one thing in there uh.... I don't know if you want me to state it. Maybe I can... well, I won't... I'll put it in terms that you can understand. Amongst other things, the oral gratification. Well that kind of floored me because I never expected something like that and I thought, well, who knows, I might like it."

She later describes her first sexual experience in which she was so scared that her friend had to shove her into the bedroom where the girl was waiting."]

Madeline Davis and Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy, from Oral History and Study of Sexuality in the Lesbian Community: Buffalo, New York, 1940-1960, from Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, edited by Martin Duberman, Matha Vicinus, and George Chauncey, Jr., Meridian Press, 1989

[yourdailyqueer]

Madeline Davis died this April

Her post has been updated. Thanks for letting me know.

[outweek30]

Many Days of Courage

I want to talk about courage this afternoon — as we gather here today to commemorate that special courage that has come to be known as the Stonewall Rebellion. But before that explosive night in Greenwich Village 20 years ago, gay people were not just a silent people, were not just a submissive people. I know this from my own gay life, which started in the late ’50s, and from the voices that I live with in the Lesbian Herstory Archives.

Being a lesbian in this city in the ’50s challenged all my fears and shaped all my liberation politics. Whether it was taking my allotted amount of toilet paper in the bathroom line at the Sea Colony, or walking past the Women's House of Detention on a hot summer night and hearing the desperate cries of incarcerated lesbian lovers, or holding on to my butch's arm in the back room of a bar so she would not be goaded by the police taunts into a battle that would leave her bloody, I was deeply educated in the power of the state to control and dehumanize our lives. But in the face of this constant police surveillance and social bigotry went a thousand acts of lesbian courage.

Listen to this pre-Stonewall lesbian voice: "Things back then were horrible, and I think that because I fought like a man to survive I made it somehow easier for the kids coming out today, I did all their fighting for them. I'm not a rich person; I don't even have a lot of money; I don't even have a little money. I would have nothing to leave nobody in this world, but I have that, that I can leave the kids who are coming out now, who will come out in the future, that I left them a better place to come out into. And that's all I have to offer, to leave them. But I wouldn't deny it; even though I was getting my brains beaten up I would never stand up and say, ‘No, don't hit me, I'm not gay, I'm not gay.’ I wouldn't do that."

This is not the voice of a so-called famous lesbian woman, it is the voice of our everyday courage before Stonewall. It is a voice preserved because of the gay and lesbian history movement in this country, in this case the work of Liz Kennedy and Madeline Davis of Buffalo, New York. The Lesbian Herstory Archives is alive with stories of daily resistance from the ’50s and before: the butch woman who sewed lace on her socks so she would not be arrested for impersonating a man, the fem who took her lover's arm in the street marking them both as homos, the masculine looking woman who would not change her appearance even though no one would ride with her in the elevator of her early ’60s New Jersey housing project, the gay lovers who rode the subway to Riis Park and faced the taunts and fists of outraged spectators as they played in the sun, the early members of the homophile organizations that took on the McCarthy witchhunts, the early bar goers who carved out public territory for their own kind, and so many more small stories of a huge bravery.

But you know these stories because every step of coming out that each of you has taken in your lives — these are all Stonewalls, all moments of courageous resistance to homophobic tyranny.

We are not a people of one great moment of history, we are a people whose courage has been tested through the generations. Stonewall is a marker for a movement, a public political stance, and as such it heralded all the braveries of the ’70s and now. But gay courage was not born that day, and its form was not fixed that day; our history of courage is a complex thing, as complex as our lives and the conditions under which we live them. In the coming years, we will be called upon to find our courage time and time again, not just the courage of our public spokespeople, or ACT UP members, or our cultural workers, but every one of us who pursues the dignity and pleasure of our same sex touch.

An understanding of this rich and varied heritage of resistance will create bonds between us that their fists and laws cannot subdue; it will strengthen our alliances between ourselves as we work in different ways for sustained political and cultural change; it will guide us as we build our own institutions. Our courage, both individual and communal, is not the legacy of just one day nor of one decade; it has no single voice or face, no one membership card and because of this, we all can be creators of our history of liberation.

The one demand that is made on us is to be seen and heard for what we are — women who make love with women and men who make love with men. As we gather in greater and greater numbers so do those who hate us, those who would watch us die rather than touch our bodies, those who call our art a moral pollutant and want it pulled from their museums, those who want us to be sexually controlled and domesticated and yet declare our relationships illegal. Our most courageous answer to this barrage of exclusion is to go on living our lives without betrayal of our diversity, of our knowledge of our people's history and our way of loving. You are the spirit of Stonewall; you, your faces, words, touches are the living legacy of our people's history. "But I wouldn't deny it; even though I was getting my brains beaten up I would never stand up and say, ‘No, don't hit me, I’m not gay, I'm not gay.’ I wouldn't do that."

— Joan Nestle, speech given at the Celebration 20! pride rally in Central Park on June 24th, 1989, as printed in OutWeek Magazine No. 3, July 10, 1989, p. 28.

[lesbianartandartists]

[H. Seeberg, Inc., Genesee St location, ca. 1940: Buffalo History Museum via Daily Public]

To bring Buffalo, New York’s mid-20th-century lesbian nightlife to life in 2018, and in celebration of the 25th anniversary of the publication of Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community, the Buffalo-Niagara LGBTQ History Project created She Walked Here, a street tour of historically important sites of mid-20th-century lesbian sociality and culture in Buffalo. On October 13 I had the privilege and superb surprise of taking the shuttle tour alongside Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy (coauthor with Madeline Davis of Boots of Leather) and Bobbi Prebis, Kennedy’s partner, who has been instrumental in her partner’s and Davis’s original research.

As we left the location of the former 132 Club (132 Genesee St, operating as a gay bar from 19581 or 19592 to 1961), Bobbi pointed across Genesee and quietly identified a site that the Buffalo-Niagara LGBTQ History Project hadn’t known about to include: the location of the former men’s clothier where she and other butches she ran with bought their menswear.

She didn’t name the store, and it isn’t named in Boots of Leather. I spent the next two days (on and off) digging. In poring over Buffalo Architecture and History I found the name. The store was H. Seeberg, Inc., operating its factory and retail storefront in the building on the southwest corner of Genesee and Oak3 from 1929 until “at least 1980, at which time the company appears to have gone out of business”4 and having four other Buffalo locations in the 1960s.

Last night at the conclusion of She Talked Here: An Evening with Liz Kennedy (during which Kennedy focused noticeably on ethical concerns in taking oral histories from, or with, LGBT research participants), the last event in the event series, I asked Bobbi if the men’s clothier she had mentioned on the tour had been H. Seeberg, Inc. She seemed to recognize the name right off, saying “Yeah”, and although she then wavered, she stated firmly that she was certain of the spot: whatever men’s clothier had occupied the Seeberg building during her bar-scene days had to be it. (I’ve been backwards and forwards through the history of the building and the block, and the only clothing store in the Seeberg building was Seeberg’s. Harry Seeberg was also the proprietor of Charlie Baker Clothier, retailer of “Mens and Boys Fashions”, in the Werner building west of Seeberg building on the same block.5) She added and gently emphasized that H. Seeberg, Inc. on Genesee St was the go-to of black butches.

[H. Seeberg, Inc. ad dated August 17, 1960: Buffalo Stories archives]

One more piece of history about black butches in mid-20th-century Buffalo!

Guest post by Catherine F.

1. The Men’s Bar History Project.

2. Buffalo-Niagara LGBTQ History Project. “132 Club” (MP3). On She Walked Here Street Tour. 2018.

3. In the 1930s Harry Seeberg expanded out from both sides of his commercial space at 119 Genesee (then often “East Genesee”) St, unifying lots 113–125 into the singular Seeberg building. After that the company used 121 (East) Genesee St as its address, which I found out through ads for Adam Hats that ran in Ebony in October and November of 1968. View the ad from the November 1968 issue alternatively as a separate image here.

4. Clinton Brown Company Architecture, PC, Buffalo. “The H. Seeberg Building”. New York State and National Registers of Historic Places Nomination File. Authored January 11, 2011. (Not entered into State or National Register of Historic Places as of writing.) CBCA cites Michael F. Rizzo, Nine Nine Eight: The Glory Days of Buffalo Shopping (Lulu Press, 2007), 49.

5. Jennifer Walkowski. “The Genesee Gateway Historic District”. The City of Buffalo Application for Local Landmark/Landmark Site. Clinton Brown Company Architecture, PC, Buffalo. Authored May 17, 2010. Adopted July 6, 2010.

[campgender]

“You can’t tell butch-fem by people’s dress. You couldn’t even really tell in the ’50s. I knew women with long hair, fem clothes, and found out they were butches. Actually I even knew one who wore men’s clothes, haircuts and ties, who was a fem.”

white butch “Reggie” quoted in Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community by Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy & Madeline D. Davis (1994)