It’s funny to me, when I hear the words “femme role model”… the first person I think of is actually a butch. The first butch I ever met, the first person who made me want to express myself in a way that made sense to myself, not to the androstandards that I had, that very night, been told by older lesbians who were supposed to be ‘taking care of me’.

Of course that was the night I met my first butch—a word I didn’t even know to use at the time, but that later I knew was the only way to describe the much older, chivalrous dyke. The only one who didn’t try to give me lessons on cutting my nails short to send ‘signals’, or to say that wearing clothes from the boy’s section was an excellent way to pick up the ladies, and, obviously, that my long hair needed to go. Granted, she didn’t tell me how to be femme, either, but at the time she was glimpse over the andro-dyke iron curtain I didn’t even know I’d been living behind. She obviously wasn’t a femme role model, but she’s the first person who cracked open the door to allowing myself to be femme.

The person who helped bring me out as femme, that came later. I had only met one other femme before her, and I’d always thought of that sparkly femme identity as something beyond my reach, that was just her.

Then I met the first femme I knew who used the word femme without fear. She and I went shopping together for things I never thought I’d wear… skirts, dresses, lace, heels. It took me a long time to go from helping her pick things to trying them on myself to actually buying them. It took a long time to give myself permission to want to buy those things, to want to look good in a way that made me feel good.

I remember the realization that it was ok to feel good about my body, to dress it in the way I wanted, fuck what other people saw. It’s an on-going battle, but that’s part of being femme for me—accepting my body and myself without apology or eating disorders. As time has gone on, there’s a lot that being femme has also taught be to grapple with, to figure out about my identity and my place in the world without hiding myself or allowing shame or other people’s opinions of what I ‘should’ do become more important than being honest about myself. And that’s what femme role models are to me, too.

The femmes that inspire me, my role models, are so varied. They are the femmes who are always fabulously done-up; the ones who ride motorcycles and love pitbulls best; the femmes who are so flamboyantly different it doesn’t matter if you know the word, they are clearly femmes. My role models are the older femmes who carry history in their veins, who have been doing this longer than I’ve been alive and defy what the few b-f history books would have you believe: that we die off when we get older, or disappear into hetero-normativity without a backward glance. They are the femmes who are tough as nails; unapologetic femmes who are brash but kind, too. Femmes who are strong. Femmes who can articulate their own power, their own identity, who need no shadow to have plenty of depth.

My femme role models are the ones that lick the proverbial razor blade, those femmes that just don’t quit. They’re the femmes who find their own ways of combating invisibility, of combating stereotype without combating themselves. They’re the femmes who are fat and proud, and remind me I can do that, too. They’re the femmes who build their own bridges, who are out in places other queers are scared to tread, the femmes who come out every day, the femmes who don’t police what that means, but live it for themselves fully, without fear. They are femmes who see the intersectionality of our lives—that being femme is part of the whole in a world that our race, class, language, sexuality, gender and other identities collide and define and re-work and exist even in contradiction or rarity.

My femme role models aren’t always the femmes I aspire to be—does that sound like a contradiction too far? Perhaps the best way to put it is that they are the femmes I admire, who inspire me to be more myself, as they are infinitely themselves. And isn’t that what being femme is all about?

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