It is a golden Los Angeles afternoon the summer before my freshman year of college, and it feels like a weight is lifted with each lock of shoulder-length hair that falls onto the salon floor. I’ve wanted short hair my whole life. One of my strongest childhood memories is sobbing on my bathroom floor, tugging at my tangled, rib-length black hair, intensely dysphoric but not knowing the word yet, not until years later.
For years, my mother and hairdressers alike told me that my hair and face aren’t right for short hair, everyone insisting that my long, black hair is “so beautiful.” As a teenager, I would tie my long, black, “beautiful” hair into a ponytail and tuck it into a beanie to give the illusion of short hair; it became too short to create the effect when I was finally able to convince my mom to let me cut it to shoulder length. She thought we had reached an impasse. It wasn’t enough for me.
This afternoon, though, she’s made the mistake of dropping me off at Fantastic Sam’s, so I can get what she thinks will be a quick trim. Instead, the pierced, bleached-blonde hairdresser shears my liberation into existence. When she is done and I see my new undercut in the mirror, I almost cry, positively embodying the stereotype of a baby dyke. I don’t care. I’m finally starting to look like myself.
After picking me up from the hairdresser in furious silence, my mother begins to cry. She can’t quite understand that there is more than one way to be a woman, ways that don’t involve men or long hair. But this point of contention has existed between us since I came out as a lesbian in my freshman year of high school, and I’m tired of fighting her on something she may never fully understand, and compromising myself for the comfort of others. I’m just counting down the days until I leave for college in New York in the fall, something I always dreamed about but never thought I would actualize.
Visiting New York over spring break to tour colleges changed something deep within me, though, or perhaps re-awakened something that laid dormant for years. After spending my adolescence feeling like I’d be trapped forever in a vapid, neverending suburbia, spring break made me see my future — school, graduation, a career, escape — in a new, more tangible way, rather than a vague, nebulous concept not extended to people like me. It gave me hope again.
So I cut my hair.
A few months pass. I’m halfway through my first month of college, sitting in a packed basement classroom on a late Thursday night for the first meeting of the campus humor magazine.
And then there’s you.
You stand and introduce yourself with your name, pronouns, and favorite non-pornographic thing to masturbate to (this is a humor magazine, after all), and I see you for the first time, though it doesn’t feel like the first.
You, with your curly brunette crop, wearing a black and teal windbreaker zipped up to your chin. I can’t determine your gender just by looking at you, and when you open your mouth I find that your voice is just as hard to parse, low and soft but managing to sneak inside me and nestle somewhere between my ribs nonetheless. Even though I sit on the opposite side of the room and you are wearing a pair of thick black frames, I can sense the warmth in your eyes. All of this draws me to you instantly.
Later, when everyone is hanging out at the editors’ house, the first words I say to you are:
“Do I know you? I feel like I know you from somewhere.”
I cringe as soon as the words have left my mouth, feeling like a creep, preparing to run if you give me a weird look, but you say:
“Yeah, I feel like I know you, too.”
I attend future meetings intermittently and don’t see you much otherwise, save for when we exchange quick “hey’s” in passing on campus. Sometimes we don’t even do that, and I just stare at you walking around with your hands in your pockets, clunky black headphones obscuring your ears. I always wonder what you’re listening to.
I occasionally make it out to the open mics and shows that the humor magazine editors host in their garage; you do too. It’s after one of those open mics that I hear you say the magic word. You, me and a few others are at the one restaurant on campus open past nine, and I’m more invested in my penne alla vodka than the conversation we’re having, but I jolt my head up as soon as you say it.
“Wait, are you butch?” I ask.
“Oh yes definitely,” you respond. “I try to be as butch as hell.”
Without thinking, I blurt out, “I’m into that,” and I immediately feel my face go up in flames and excuse myself to run to the bathroom, berating myself over and over for being so damn obvious.
But how can I help myself? You are the first butch I’ve ever met in real life. The Butch, capital B, like a figure on a tarot card, existed purely within the realm of mysticism for me before this, a specimen I admired from afar, never thinking I could know one, and definitely never thinking I could be one. Now, in the bathroom stall, caught within a feedback loop of anxious thoughts, all I can think is that I have never heard anything as beautiful as the word spoken in your deep voice.
It really is a magic word, one that opens up a realm of possibility for me.
A few months later I cut my hair again, a DIY affair in another lesbian’s dorm room. It’s a little shorter this time, which terrifies and thrills me in equal measure. I go from a full beat nearly every day to a completely bare face. I wean myself away from skirts and dresses.
And after months spent navigating a silent tension that underscores all our interactions, you and I begin to spend more and more time together. You go from sitting at my desk while we watch movies to sitting next to me on my bed while I play guitar, acting like I can’t see you staring at my hands. Soon enough, you’re nestling up against me nearly every single night, our bodies fitting together like clockwork when we spoon. Our wardrobes merge into a singularity of tacky sweaters and flannel.
And despite the fact that I have essentially shed compulsory femininity like an oppressive snakeskin, I still hesitate to call myself “butch” outright, settling for tacking a “soft” onto the front. There are times when I worry that there must be something wrong with me, or that it would be inappropriate for me to claim the label. I have never seen or heard of a butch attracted to another butch, and I worry that this means that I cannot be butch myself.
But time goes on, and soon enough I come into undeniable butchness, and you yourself are undeniably, wonderfully, adorably butch. So I allow myself the label, and to hell with preconceived notions of what a butch must be.
I learn that butch is nothing like what the mainstream queer community says it is: cold, harsh, toxic, gender traitorism, women who wish they were men and act accordingly, reaping the benefits of a mystical “masc privilege.” It is all softness, all tenderness, all warmth the likes of which I’ve never felt before. Gender traitorism, maybe, but I find that you and I both hate being read as male, which happens frequently, and somehow I don’t feel that masc privilege when I’m getting harassed in the bathroom in Penn Station, or at work, or at school, or, well, you get it.
“Butch” is you fawning over babies we see on our Trader Joe’s runs. It is me running my fingers absentmindedly through the hair on your arms, at the nape of your neck where your hair is shaved the shortest, down your happy trail.
It is us cooking and sharing a meal in the dorm kitchen, you wrapping your arms around me from behind as I stir-fry tofu. It is us constantly getting mistaken for a gay male couple, and the simultaneous amusement and fear that this phenomenon engenders. It is us never having to explain or justify our bodies and boundaries to each other.
It is shamelessly reinforcing aesthetic stereotypes — shaved heads, button-downs, carabiners, combat boots — and reveling in the stares we receive in public. It is simultaneously destroying stereotypes and reveling in that ability, too. It is a quiet, resilient strength. It is feeling seen, really seen, for the first time ever.
Time goes on, and I undeniably fall in love with you, which I only realize during winter break when you are in Chicago and I am in LA. Once I do, though, it feels obvious. Since the moment I first saw you, you have always felt inevitable. It takes every ounce of the little self-control I possess to not blurt it out when we Skype before bed, as we do nearly every night of those five weeks.
The very first night we get back to New York from winter break, you wait for me at the train station for hours in the freezing weather, like the total dork that you are. I lean in to kiss you, hardly even believing that you are real until your soft, slightly chapped lips press against mine. It feels like coming home. It feels like deliverance.
Later, when we are holding each other in your room, my head snug in the curve of your neck, I look up into your hazel eyes, an infinite, sparkling ocean of kindness and warmth.
“What’s up?” you ask, and what I have wanted so desperately to tell you — to scream from every rooftop in the city of my heart — spills forth.
“I think I love you,” I whisper, trembling slightly.
You immediately burst into sobs, and you say, “I think I love you, too.”
And I think I finally love myself, too, or at least I’m getting there. I’d love to say that I did it all on my own, that I came into college completely sure of who I was and who I wanted to be, and forged my own path with that good old-fashioned butch swagger I always had. But that would just be a disservice to you, and to everyone and everything else that’s helping me along the way.
It’s a year and a half later now, and you and I are both more butch than ever, and very proud of it — your parents gave you a pair of clippers for Christmas, for god’s sake. I’m home from college for a moment, coming up on the two year anniversary of that fateful haircut. I could not have possibly anticipated that this is where I would be two years later. I have no idea where I’ll be two years from now, or two months from now, for that matter.
And for once in my life, I’m okay with the not knowing. I’m okay with being in the present; I am in my body and my body feels like home, and that in and of itself is miraculous. Regardless of what happens between us, I will always hold dear the quiet rebellion we shared our freshman year. With you, I realized that it is okay to be a woman who breaks all the rules, and to want other women who break all the rules, and that there are women who will love me for that.
More importantly, I’ve realized that I can love me for that, too; for being authentically, cockily, truthfully, loudly, unapologetically butch.
“You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.”
— mary oliver, “wild geese”
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