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[felis_ultharus]

The research continues. Today I'm reading up on the lesbian community in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s.

You know I'd always assumed that "butch" was just a political or fashion statement, the way it is now. In the 1950s, it seems to have been more of a job description. The butches of Montreal protected the femmes -- you actually had to get permission from one to speak to a femme.

They also played the role of bouncer. Plus the butches local army protecting the bar from bashers and the police. When the bars closed, the butches spread out to patrol the streets so the femmes could get home safely.

I had no idea the role was formalized.

Not sure how interesting anyone else finds this historical stuff, but I find it really neat. Today I went out looking for the original Joe Beef's tavern by the Old Port, another major Montreal landmark, and probably the only bar in the world to have ever used a real live bear as crowd control.

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[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

That was my feeling, too. And of course it wasn't universal -- we're only talking bar culture here.

But everything I've read suggests that it was that extreme, in the bars here in Montreal. Women involved in that scene usually explain that they thought the roles were natural, that no one else was going to defend them so some women had to defend themselves.

In the mentality of the time, that meant taking on men's roles.

It also helped for identification. If you were a woman who wanted to meet another woman in 1955, you went down to Les Ponts de Paris, which was in what's now the Village. The usher looked at you, and decided whether to seat you on the left (with the lesbians) or on the right (with the gay men and heterosexuals). To be seated on the left, you had to look like a lesbian -- either butch (dressed like a man) or femme (dressed in a low-cut, revealing outfit).

Respectable women wound up on the right, and as Les Ponts de Paris (and similar places) tried to protect its lesbian clientele, no one was allowed to change places.

If you dressed butch, you were expected to help protect the place (if it came to that), or at least protect the femmes from harassment. In that era, that's what men were supposed to do for women, and there were no men for that role.

Not that the butches were angels. Even many lesbians from the period described them as frightening. The bars were often connected to organized crime, and some of the butches were linked to that as well. They were stereotyped as violent, and freqently developed a rude exterior to survive.

It started to die in the 1970s. When Denise Cassidy opened the Baby Face Disco, she tried to keep heterosexual women out by applying the old butch/femme rule. But feminism had come, and there plenty of women wanting in who didn't fit the old roles. Cassidy couldn't believe these androgynous women were actually lesbians.

(I've seen a picture of Cassidy -- in her 1970s leisure suit, it's almost impossible to tell she's a women.)