The Riddle of Gender - Deborah Rudacille [94]
People began to play with gender, to “bend” gender, in ways that hadn’t been seen before. The elegant female impersonators of Finoc-chio’s, a San Francisco supper club popular in the fifties and early sixties, were a far cry from the Cockettes, a group of singing, dancing, gender-fuck hippies who began performing in San Francisco in 1969. The Cockettes were female impersonators on acid—a psychedelic melange of beards, glitter, and colorful thrift-store robes and dresses— who spun about the stage like dervishes. Led by Hibiscus, a gay mystic who founded a commune of like-minded souls, the Cockettes ignored identity in favor of play and self-expression. Most of the Cockettes were gay men, but some were straight women and men who embraced the gender-fuck aesthetic. “They were people who brought together clashing styles,” says historian Susan Stryker. “Full beards and pink tutus, silver glitter combat boots, fucking with gender, fucking up gender. A lot of glam rock came out of that sensibility, that sense of ‘I’m not trying to pass as something.’ It was a conscious way of manipulating the signifiers of gender to call attention to its constructedness, often in a playful, militant, and politicized way.”
For a time androgyny, a blending of masculine and feminine, became the new ideal. “Many of us believed that the best way to eliminate the male/female divide was for all of us to look as much like one another as possible. Men were encouraged to wear their hair long and to sport jewelry such as beaded necklaces. Facial hair was discouraged,” says Karla Jay. “In contrast, short hair was favored for women, and I was applauded when I finally cut my hair in 1972.… Most of the lesbians favored bell-bottom denims, boots, and flannel shirts with a T-shirt underneath. After all, we were dressing for the revolution, not Vogue.” This new aesthetic posed some problems for those who were, quite literally, “androgynous”—drag queens, transsexuals, and other gender-variant people. On the outside many didn’t appear revolutionary at all. Drag queens and transsexual women wanted to look like girls—and girls wore high heels, makeup, and short skirts or, in the hippie style espoused by folksinger Beth Elliott, granny dresses. Girls flaunted their womanliness. They didn’t try to hide it under layers of flannel. Lesbian women and straight feminists were angry and appalled by what they perceived as the charade of femininity expressed by some drag queens and transsexual women. To them it exhibited a lack of respect, akin to the lack of respect shown African Americans by white actors in blackface. Drag was perceived as a kind of gender minstrel show.
Some lesbians and female-bodied transgendered persons were also having a difficult time adjusting to the new regime. If drag queens were too “feminine,” butch lesbians were too “masculine” for evolving standards of gay gender presentation. In Stone Butch Blues, a novel that reflects hir experience coming of age as a young butch lesbian in Buffalo, New York, Leslie Feinberg poignantly documents the turmoil in hir community that followed Stonewall. The new androgyny affected not only the masculine lesbians who had previously found a measure of comfort and security in the tight-knit lesbian community in the face of society’s hatred. Their femme partners, who were viewed by the new breed of lesbian