Queer Classics Rewatch: If These Walls Could Talk 2

As a heads up, this post discusses gender policing, purges within lesbian feminism, and anti-butch hatred, and trans antagonism. 

I’m toying with the idea of writing about my experiences rewatching films and tv (and perhaps rereading books as well) that were important to me as a younger queer person and discussing what I get from them at this stage in my life, as a way of thinking about my future work and what I want from queer media. This is the first of a potential series on the subject.

Today I rewatched If These Walls Could Talk 2. Just the 1972 segment, which is the only one I’ve really ever cared about. I remember the first time I saw it, how much it meant to see a butch character in something so mainstream, how excited I was about having that kind of representation, because I was so starved for any representation, and at least there was a happy ending; the couple end up together.

(It can be found at the embedded video below, if you wish to see it yourself. The rest of this post contains significant plot spoilers for the segment.)

When I watched it today, now that I’ve been writing romance, and really thinking about what makes a happy ending and what I want from romance, I still love seeing Chloë Sevigny as a butch, and the chemistry she has with Michele Williams is beautiful, but this isn’t the kind of romance I want to watch, or read, however compelling their performances are.

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This story is all about the conflict between 1970s lesbian feminism among college students and working class butch/femme queerness, and it centers a lesbian feminist protagonist who goes to a queer bar and is attracted to a butch for the first time. It’s her story, about her internal conflict, and the butch character gets treated like shit throughout most of the story, by her and her friends. There’s even a gender conversion attempt by a group of lesbian feminists, which the feminist character does not intervene in, and which serves to help the feminist protagonist grow.

This story is deeply othering towards the butch character, while still also framing her as intensely sexually attractive. Its a combination of things that feels eerily familiar to me as a trans butch viewer, as this is often how trans people are framed in media, as both othered and intensely sexualized, often in combination. The hardest moments for me are the juxtaposition of sex between the protagonists and gendered hatred toward the butch protagonist either immediately preceding or ocurring immediately afterwards. The most painful of these juxtapositions for me was the gender interrogation the lesbian feminist protagonist subjects the butch character to immediately after waking in her bed, where just moments before we were watching an incredibly hot sex scene between them.

This story is structured quite a lot like a trans acceptance narrative, and reminded me very much of what it was like in queer women’s community I was part of in the mid 1990s when trans men began to come out. The butch character’s existence and comfort with her own gender is treated like a threat to the lesbian feminists, and they respond to it with cruelty, rejection, and ridicule. They make it very clear that the lesbian feminist protagonist who wants to date her would do so at the peril of her acceptance in the community.

All of this is reflective of the real history of purges within lesbian feminist communities; that community rejection threat was carried out; the stakes were actually that high. And the daily life of butches in the early 1970s was one of living with threats from outside queer communities as well, including law enforcement, something that’s alluded to in the story as well. That’s real and part of the history. They got the historical context right in this book.

That said, as a romance writer, when I think of the kind of romance I might write with a butch protagonist, set in 1972, it’s not one that places the butch protagonist’s gender at the center of the conflict in the story. I wouldn’t want the story to be about someone struggling to accept their attraction to her and what it would mean for their life and identity. I wouldn’t want gendered harassment towards the butch protagonist to be the thing that helps her love interest grow as a person and realize she is willing to stand up to her community and be with her love interest.

This romance centers the wrong story, that’s why it’s not the kind of romance I want as a reader/viewer, or as a writer. Instead of framing butchness as problem, source of conflict, or thing that someone works on accepting, I would want the butch protagonists gender to be a source of strength, community, and connection for her. I don’t want her love interest othering her or working to accept being attracted to her butchness, I want a love interest who isn’t struggling with her attractions but enjoying them, who enjoys being with the butch protagonist for who she is. Not in curious, othering, or fetishizing way. In a real way, the same way folks have been attracted to butches for as long as there have been butches.

I am hungry for butch representation in media, especially in romance, but I don’t want to settle for stories that frame us this way. I know that we can do better than this. I know that we deserve better than this in our historical romances.