Feature

Where the Bois Are

Deborah is a pretty Jewish girl with long, curly brown hair and big hoop earrings who says she “never feels more proud than when I’m on a butch’s arm.” She wears a jean skirt and a striped top and eyeliner. “I don’t go out of my apartment without makeup on unless I’m going to the gym, and even then I’ve got my sunglasses on,” she says. Her apartment is small but has the spectacular advantage of facing Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker’s back garden. “I love Sex and the City,” Deborah says. “I have a horrible mold problem in this place, but I don’t want to move and give up facing the Parkers.”

Deborah is 34 and has been out as a femme dyke for fourteen years. “Everyone I’d ever seen was a goddamn bull dyke and I was like, I’m not that! That’s not me! After I met my first femme friend, I was like, Oh: I can be exactly who I am. And then I got a huge crush on a gentleman butch. Old-school. Shaved head. Hot. I thought my heart was going to stop.”

For Deborah, anything remotely short of butch-femme seems silly, icky, neutered. “One of my really good friends was like, ‘If I was going to be with a girl, I would want to be with a girl like you, Deb,’ ” she continues. “And I’m like, ‘You’re sweet, but a lot of the girls who are totally like me wouldn’t ever in a million years sleep with you.’ Ever. I don’t want to fuck myself. What kind of balance is that? And the whole b-o-i business, I’m like, what the fuck? What does that mean? In one respect I thought it meant a little bit butch of center, slightly more andro, with this whole tweezed-eyebrow business that makes me want to puke.” She laughs the laugh of the fed-up. “It’s gotten to the point where I see men on the street and go, Damn. If that were a woman? That’s how far I’ve been pushed in this city: I look at pictures of Johnny Depp longingly and think, If only you didn’t have a penis.”

New York is to San Francisco in the lesbian scene as New York is to Los Angeles in the entertainment scene: You can make a real go of it in Manhattan, but the unrivaled epicenter is California. On a warm night, Diana Cage, 34, the editor of the lesbian magazine On Our Backs (the title is a sexed-up play on the feminist publication Off Our Backs), and her friend Kim* are having dinner at an Italian restaurant around the corner from a San Francisco dyke bar (the San Francisco dyke bar) called the Lex.

Kim is feeling anxious about the evening, because later on, Clara*, the boi she is seeing, is supposed to meet up with them at the bar, and things have been very touch-and-go. “Clara’s biggest fear when we started dating was that I was going to try and fuck her. She’s obsessed with operating sexually as a male,” says Kim, a pretty, punky 24-year-old who resembles the actress Rachel Griffiths. “I find bois the most attractive. I like the young, andro look, but I’ve dated across the board—butches, femmes, trannies—and that really bothers Clara. All her girlfriends in the past have been pretty much straight.” Kim offers a rueful little laugh. “It also threatens her that I’m not totally vapid and vain . . . Her big relief was when she found out I wear a thong.”

“For bois it’s like in high school,” says Diana. “The girlfriend is not a person, she’s something that everybody’s intimidated by, and they’re all worried about how they look and maybe if they have a girlfriend that’s not cool and will their friends approve?”

Kim, looking increasingly forlorn, pushes her pasta around her plate. “This all ties into their kind of approach to women in general—they are so very predatory about it. It makes me kind of uncomfortable. Clara won’t just touch on it, like: That girl’s hot. She will talk and talk and talk about how she wants to get them home and fuck them.” She looks at Diana, concerned. “I’m nervous to see her now because I’m not dressed up . . . and then, all of a sudden, it’s like I’ve come full circle. It’s like I’m trying to please a guy.”

Names with an asterisk next to them have been changed.