I highly, highly recommend 'Butch Is A Noun' by S. Bear Bergman.
The origin of 'butch' is contested. Some people think it comes from 'butcher' or from 'bulldagger,' but neither of those sources are actually very well-attested at all. The best-attested source for butch is from Polari, a queer cant (often called a 'gay men's cant' but it is important to remember that at the time it was used, the concept of transfemininity and transmasculinity was not well understood AND a lot of other "lower class" or "rough" people used Polari too) that was used broadly in those groups until at least the 1970s in the UK. There is in fact an episode of Doctor Who where a traveling performer addresses The Doctor in Polari, mistaking him for another performer!
Polari contains words from Italian, Romani, London slang, Yiddish, rhyming backslang, thieves' cant, theater cant and later on added in some 60s drug culture slang.
A few other words which passed from Polari into 'queer words' are 'trade' to refer to sex work, bona for face, naff to mean bad or dull (this word passed to general British English from Polari), and zhush up (to dress something up, as used often by JVN on Queer Eye). In its first recorded use in 1902, 'butch' meant 'tough youth.'
Butch has been used by every stripe of queerness since its known inception in at least the 1950s. You can see it being used in Paris is Burning and POSE to refer to a performance of queer maleness ("The category is: Butch Queen Business," "Butch Queen Military," etc.) as a contrast to a performance of queer femininity which at the time referred to transfemininity but also referred to drag ("Femme Queen" is the contrasting term -- in the series these categories were often walked by trans women characters but Pray Tell, a Black GNC (but cis, as far as the series has words to define that) gay man, also walked a Femme Queen category at least once during the series). I refer to POSE in this as an excellent source since several people from the ballroom scene going back to the 1980s and earlier were involved in the production and it is easily found and watched online, so it makes a good resource.
Butch and femme have a rich history within lesbian subculture, but a lot of the very strict definitions of butch and femme come from specifically white lesbian subculture, where the worst sin during the midcentury queer era was to be 'kiki,' or 'neither butch OR femme.' We see butch and femme as relationship roles and identifications rising and falling with popularity, and there have been a lot of arguments over what the words mean and whether the terms simply replicate heterosexual relationship patterns within queer relationships, and I'm sure there will be many opinions on that for a long time to come.
It's important to remember, too, that we will encounter lots of contradictory information before, say, the mid-nineties to 2000s, and while we will see less of that today, the myth of the 'universal queer community with just one face and just one meaning' shatteres utterly when we slide back to pre-internet -- or pre widespread internet -- days. Queer communities were extremely regional.
What is clear, however, and extremely well-supported by queer history across the US, is that butch and femme are not and never were "lesbian exclusive terms." They were terms available to a wide variety of gender expressions and identities, sexuality expressions and identities, and they were terms with corollaries and alternate terms which are available only to specific subgroups (for example: stud and aggressive are Black terms, and white queers should not) or refinements which refer to specific subgroups of the wider butch and femme identities, like stone butch (butches who do not want to receive genital stimulation), hard femme (a fat-positive, QTPOC political identity which is gender-inclusive). I've heard "tomboy" is sometimes used by Asian queer folx as an aesthetic and gender identity instead of butch.
Butch is my (non-binary) gender identity; for me, it refers to a certain gentleperson sort of identity which exists as a queer performance and identity of masculinity. It is to manhood as salsa is to bolognese sauce: it contains some of the same ingredients, sure, but the way it is prepared, and the end result of the preparation, the way it is consumed and who will want to consume it are all different. Butch for me is suspenders and cuffed jeans and boots, spoiling my femme darlings, holding doors and pulling out chairs, shaving my face rather than plucking stray hairs even before I went on T, carrying a clean handkerchief and knowing how to diagnose what's wrong with a gas lawnmower and a car engine, but it's a performance of those things which has nothing to do with anyone but me, and it also comes with a side dish of knowing this is my butchness, and doesn't need to be anyone else's. It also -- for me -- contains room for me to carry the "mom" role for my daughter, and to acknowledge -- again, for me -- my upbringing where the world thought I was a woman, and the impact and effect it has on me that I am still commonly presumed to be a woman because of my non-binary presentation, and therefore has room for me to deal with the misogyny that I experience daily in all aspects of my life despite and in some cases because I am viewed as a GNC woman.
Unlike the cis assumption of masculinity, where there is only one way to "be a man," the queer assumption of butchness contains a lot of the same elements from person to person, but the final expression and identity options are far more flexible. No gender is denied the ability to be butch, and if you find roots in and strength from your self-discovered and self-defined butch identity, then butch is for you, and no one can take that away from you. Anyone who tries is a shithead, and you can ignore them. :)
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