Dykette

by Jenny Fran Davis

Sasha didn’t feel uncool staring at Chloë. She felt instead profoundly lesbian, seen-by-butch, seen-as-femme. Maybe a better word for it was dykette, containing both the butch’s gaze and the femme’s stare—because, of course, they’re looking at each other. It’s not a stare from below, the lesbian stare, but a pure wanting, a desire whose direction is always in flux.

“This is an act of sweet imagination,” says the femme in Stone Butch Blues who teaches the butch protagonist how to use a dildo. It’s a hot scene, the femme coaching the butch to Come Inside and fuck her—she teaches him the right pace, the right pressure, the right way to lock his hips against hers. In the end, she comes, and they are both happy.

“Start a frat house. I wanted to be in a fraternity so bad in college.” “You did?” Sasha couldn’t really tell if she was kidding or being serious. “Yeah, but instead I just fucked all the sorority girls,” Darcy said. Sasha didn’t doubt it was true (Darcy could be a womanizer, a femme-for-femme Casanova; this much was well documented), but she sensed that Darcy said this for her own benefit—and maybe Lou’s, as they were within earshot—rather than Sasha’s. It was part of Darcy’s never-ending, continuous narrativizing of her own life: the crazy people she’d fucked or dated, the art she was making.