In San Francisco, where Sienna lived a few years back, she dated “black women who drove Harleys and were college-educated and loved punk rock. That’s really hard to find out here.” She’s never been interested in girly girls. “I’m not into all that princess shit,” she says. “I’m from Alaska, where women are all just pretty tough, and I grew up hunting with all these like 60- or 70-year-old women. So to come down to New York City and see all these women who are identifying as butch and acting with all this bravado doesn’t mean jack shit to me. To me, a boi is someone who doesn’t have so much to prove. We’re not in the clean, pressed, buttoned-up world—you’d never see a boi cop. Basically we threw the term around in San Francisco, and the last couple years I’ve heard it more here. It’s new.”

So new that most people—most lesbians—over the age of 30 have no idea what a boi is. Deb Schwartz is a 37-year-old West Village butch who has been out for fifteen years and has, at various points, worked as an activist for groups like Fed-Up Queers and ACT UP and as an editor at Out magazine. “It’s just wild to me that there’s this whole phenomenon out there that is completely news to me,” she says. “Here I am, a bulldagger of a certain age, and when I first heard the term—recently—I had a conversation with an equally butch friend of mine and she was completely in the dark, too. What’s new is seeing these kids who really seem to be striving for a certain kind of juvenilia, not just masculinity. They really want to be kids. This hit me when I saw this girl—this boi, I guess—barreling out of a store in Chelsea in huge, oversize jeans, a backpack, and a baseball cap pulled down low. And she was running as if she were late for the school bus . . . Her whole aura was so completely rough-and-tumble 8-year-old that I wouldn’t have been surprised if she had a slingshot in one pocket and a frog in the other.”

Most bois are in their twenties and have come of age in a time when women’s and gay rights seem like more of a given and less of an urgent struggle than they did to lesbians ten or twenty or more years older. So it makes sense that they—like young women in general—have the luxury to prioritize play and pleasure in a different way, and that worrying about things like male privilege seems old-school and uncool.

But there are other criticisms bois hurl at the butches and femmes who came before them (and co-exist with them still). “I’m so against the whole butch-femme dichotomy,” says Jules Rosskam, a good-looking 24-year-old boi who is a documentary filmmaker (her latest is about female-to-male transsexuals who have given birth) and the associate producer of Brooklyn-based Dyke TV. Rosskam started taking testosterone several months ago and will correct you if you refer to her as “she” (which creates an interesting reality: One of the three people in charge of Dyke TV is a he). Jules is “absolutely positive” about getting top surgery. “It’s just a question of getting $7,500,” she says. “I have the money technically, but it’s tied up. I just have to get my dad’s permission to use it.”

Despite the hormones and the impending surgery, Jules thinks that the idea that there are two distinct genders and nothing in between is constricting, unsophisticated, and outdated. She dates whoever she feels like dating, and she doesn’t much care for the question: “I just feel really defensive; I don’t like when people feel the need to put people into categories like that. It’s like when you ask me, Do you date femme women? What does that even mean? Who are you even talking about?”

There is, however, a particular camp of bois who date femmes exclusively and follow a locker-room code of ethics referenced by the phrase “bros before hos” or “bros before bitches,” which is to say they put the similarly masculine-identified women they hang out with in a different, higher category than the feminine women they have sex with. Kelly, a boi in her late twenties, recently sent an e-mail to a fellow boi, an Internet acquaintance, regarding a femme they both know from the scene, that reads: “I hope she’s not a big deal, that you’re just riding her or whatever. Do you want me to keep an eye on her? Bros up bitches down.”

This school of bois tends to adhere to almost cartoonishly unreconstructed fifties gender roles, but, obviously, they reposition themselves as the ones who wear the pants. Alix, a Williamsburg boi, said she wanted to meet at an East Village gay bar called Starlight for an interview on a Sunday night. After she didn’t show up, Alix sent an e-mail explaining her reasoning: “I didn’t see you but I’d be lying if I said I was there. It was raining and I need to know what I’m getting if I’m going out in the rain for some chick and she better be slammin’. And anyway, I should be the one calling the shots.”

Sarah*, a 28-year-old who moved here from San Francisco a little under a year ago to work in market analysis, says she has met “maybe 30” femmes over the Internet—on Craig’s List and Nerve and through the Village Voice personals—and occasionally she’ll say “boi seeks girl” instead of “butch seeks femme” just to mix it up, and because it’s the cooler term. But she’s not crazy about all its implications. “I’m not entirely comfortable because so many people I’ve met consider boi to mean transgendered or faggot,” by which she means butch-with-butch or boi-with-boi. “I definitely do not want my name attached to those definitions. I don’t understand the faggot culture . . . I think it’s disgusting,” she says, and her face crumples with distaste and confusion, and then she laughs.

Sarah has smooth, icy pale skin and green eyes. Her black hair has little patches of silver and is cut very short. She is wearing big jeans and a pinstripe shirt with rolled-up sleeves under a navy-blue vest, and she sits with her legs wide apart and her big arms crossed over her chest, making her body a sculpture of toughness. “What I like about women is femininity,” she says. “I’m interested in women who look like women, who have womanly gestures and smell and feel, and I don’t understand the appeal or the sense of two faggot dykes riding each other,” she says, and cracks up. “Femme-on-femme is stupid to me, too. It’s air. It’s air on air. It just seems like Cinemax fluff . . . long nails, you know. One thing I hear a lot of people say about lesbianism and gayness in general is that it’s narcissistic. I’ve heard so many people say that—and not just my mother. But in a butch-femme dynamic, it’s not mirror images.”

Sarah’s current dating M.O. is fairly lupine, an agenda that’s easy to advance with the help of the Internet, the sexual glutton’s new best friend. But her ultimate aspirations are quite a bit more conventional: One day she wants to give up this swinging bachelor’s life. “I’ve got this model of a household that’s probably sick to a lot of people that makes perfect sense to me,” she says. “What I want is to have a job, and have a life, and I want a partner with a job and a life to come home to, and a high standard of living, and I want us to have kids that go to school and do their homework and go on trips with their parents.” She smiles for a minute with the self-satisfaction of an athlete about to cream his opponent. “And, you know, at the end of a hard day, I would like to come home from work and have my wife suck my cock.”

The question for many women is why, given the chance to redraw the map of gender relations, anyone would choose to be that wife. Why is there such a thing as a femme? The most obvious answer is that it’s not actually a choice; that desire follows a logic all its own and nobody can really make rational sense of why they like whatever it is they like. But the more complicated explanation is really another question: Is there something subversive about playing the role of the doting wife when your husband is a woman?