Prologue: St. Louis, 1957
Baby butches, breath steaming and pluming about our shoulders, cheeks red, huddling awe-stricken on the corner of Grant and Olive in the sleety late winter/early spring of 1957 downtown St. Louis, watching the grown-up lesbians parade in and out of Shelley's Bar. The femmes - even the occasional homely ones - look so beautiful to us, like twittering Birds of Paradise. High heels click. Lush mouton coats the color of root beer cover angora sweaters. Full skirts swing, earrings sparkle. The butches sport suede jackets, wool car coats with wooden buttons, shirts with turned-up collars, penny loafers or wingtips, nifty "pegger" pants (with baggy legs and narrow cuffs you can hardly get your feet through). A few of them even wear jackets and ties, snappy.
Damn!
Baby Butches, wide-eyed and puppylike, fascinated by these grown-up femmes' breasts, mesmerized by the brisk flash of their shaved and nylon-stockinged legs, enthralled by their thick red lipstick and long red fingernails and towering, lacquered hairdos, and an occasional whiff of sexy perfume. Weak with envy whenever a grown-up butch, swinging the bar door wide with one hand, lightly places her other hand against the small of her femme's back.
Children already sure, already wanting (no matter what) to be butches because we adore femme women, lust mightily after them, and to harvest femmes it is self-evident that you have to be butch. No thought of roles here, just facts of life. Butch/femme is. The few others, the "ki-kis," are looked down on, laughed at, poor dummies who can't even make up their own minds what kind of lesbian they are. A grown-up femme deigns to smile our way and wink, we fall apart, trying hard with pounding hearts and valiant effort to be butchly nonchalant, instead looking aw-shucks helpless every time. Fierce arguments as to which of us she was really winking at erupting like our acne. There are long, turgid analyses of what that wink, smile, look might have meant.
Inside Shelley's Bar, so the story goes, there is a huge naked mermaid painted on the wall, a luscious mermaid who plays a harp and has a waterfall of long golden hair covering her breasts, and on this mermaid's tantalizing tail are exactly sixty-nine perfect, fishy scales. Oh, the wonder! And the adult butches strolling proudly in and out of the bar, some already known by their star reputations, which have filtered down even to our lowly level. Women who will fight the world for their right to be butch, their right to love femmes. Carol Brook. Dace Schusterman. Bobbie Wasco. Sonny Garamelli. Adult butches, unaware of our larval agonies, don't even bother to glance at us; we are so far beneath their notice. They are real butches. They are sophisticated. They have seen the mermaid.
They have done It.
We eager dykelets note everything, every detail about these butch women. Watch how suavely they walk, see how they style their DA's heavy with grease, all sleek waves on the sides and with an insolent little curl dangling between their eyes. See the way their cigarettes dangle from the corner of their mouths while they talk, one eye squinting sexily against the smoke. Hear how they greet each other - Joey or Stormy or Toby or Beau. Observe them solemnly shake hands when they meet at the front door of the bar. Admire how gallantly and with what elegance they hold the bar door open for a femme, the femmes strutting in first, then the butches disappearing into the warm darkness just behind them.
- Excerpt from "Prologue: St. Louis, 1957", A Crystal Diary, may not be reproduced without permission of the author, Frankie Hucklenbroich.
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