About The Film

why a film about butch-femme?

a PERSISTENT Desire is a feature length documentary film that celebrates and gives visibility to an historical and marginalized lesbian sub-culture -- the butch/femme community. This film examines how butch/femme gender identities, dynamics and sexualities are showing up in the 21st century.Through the articulate and heartfelt testimonies of self-identified femmes and butches, we are allowed a rare and intimate look into the everyday lives and perspectives of butches and femmes from a diverse range of ages, races, ethniticies, and class backgrounds.This film affirms and celebrates the diversity of lesbian and gender queer identities and sexualities, and seeks to dispel the stereotypes and misperceptions that still surround these identities.

Historical Background
Butch and femme gender identities became visible in the United States and western Europe as early as the 1890's, when butches appropriation of masculine cultural coding functioned to give visibility to lesbians, assert and advance women’s sexual autonomy from men, and enabled the development of a lesbian sexual and social identity. From the 1940s through the 1960s, femmes and butches formed active lesbian communities -- a necessary precursor of what later became the lesbian feminist and gay liberation movements of the 1970s. But during the 1970s, as the feminist movement challenged sexism, and patriarchal gender roles, butch and femme identities and dynamics also came under attack from both heterosexual and lesbian feminists, who believed that butch and femme identities and dynamics and the expression of "femininity" and "masculinity" were only reproductions of heterosexist gender roles, and pronounced them "politically incorrect." Having no sanctioned place in "the movement," butch/femme communities were forced underground for two decades.

Re-Emergence
The 1990's saw a visible re-emergence and re-defininition of femme and butch identities and dynamics from within a feminist context. During the past two decades, dialogue and writing by feminist femmes and butches, have disputed the notion that femme and butch identities and dynamics are heterosexist gender role imitations, and have called for a re-assessment of these identities. Research for this film was gleaned from sources too numerous to name here -- many of the books used as resource material can be found in the Butch/Femme Bibliography.

Butch and femme identities are gender queer identities, and are called by many names (dees, aggressives, toms, femmes, studs, butches etc.) depending on the cultural context. But regardless of the names used, what is universal is their persistence in coming into being throughout history regardless of culture or location. Despite the stereotyping, misunderstanding or maligning in western and colonized societies, these identities call for validation and inclusion within the diverse spectrum of lesbian and queer identities and sexualities.

Inspiration
Inspiration for the making of a PERSISTENT Desire is credited to to the self-identified femmes and butches all over the world who have persisted in claiming their identities and living their desires, along with the scholarly and cultural works of several of the film's advisors, among them; Joan Nestle, co-founder of the Lesbian Herstory Archives, and editor of The Persistent Desire: A Femme/Butch Reader, considered by many to be the seminal text for butch/femme studies; Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy, co-author with Madeline D. Davis of Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold, the groundbreaking book that documents and analyzes butch/femme communities from 1940-1970; and Judith Halberstam, author of Female Masculinity, which analyzes butch, trans, and FtM identities and their cross sections.

a PERSISTENT Desire is a groundbreaking film that offers a rare opportunity to explore what authentic "femininity," or "masculinity," reclaimed from a patriarchal definition might be, and what desire and sexuality between people of the same sex or gender, but with opposite gender identities looks like. Through this film, we are given access to a marginalized culture of lesbian and bisexual women that is rarely represented in mainstream or even LGBT media. Witnessing femmes and butches speak the truth of their experiences, joys and struggles, we are compelled to wonder to whom and what purpose it serves to keep them invisible unempowered.