Reading Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme is like attending a dinner party with people you never got the chance to talk to before-fascinating, brave, insightful people-some of whom are very well known and others are simply the people you want to get to know.

Includes a foreword by Joan Nestle, renowned femme author and editor of The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader, a landmark anthology originally published in 1992. It's a raucous, insightful, sexy, and sometimes dangerous look at what the words butch and femme can mean in today's ever-shifting gender landscape, with one eye on the past and the other on what is to come. Smith ( Cumberland), and Zoe Whittall ( Bottle Rocket Hearts) explore the parameters, history, and power of a multitude of butch and femme realities. Bear Bergman ( Butch is a Noun), Chandra Mayor ( All the Pretty Girls), Amber Dawn ( Sub Rosa), Anna Camilleri ( Brazen Femme), Debra Anderson ( Code White), Anne Fleming ( Anomaly), Michael V. The pages in this book describe the lives of an incredible diversity of people whose hearts also pounded for some reason the first time they read or heard the words 'butch' or 'femme.'Ĭontributors such as Jewelle Gomez ( The Gilda Stories), Thea Hillman ( Intersex), S. The people in these stories defy reductive stereotypes and inflexible categories. The stories in these pages resist simple definitions.

The result is Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme. In the summer of 2009, butch writer and storyteller Ivan Coyote and gender researcher and femme dynamo Zena Sharman wrote down a wish-list of their favourite queer authors they wanted to continue and expand the butch-femme conversation. Named a Stonewall Honor Book by the American Library Association

The Persistent Desire by Joan Nestle