Welcome to the internet’s - and maybe the world’s - only library dedicated to butch-femme lesbian life & theory.

While frankly, we think butches in 2024 need to get the everloving f* away from the blues, Leslie Feinberg’s** book Stone Butch Blues grants fodder for important conversations about the centrality of female homosexuality and femme lesbian women’s desire in any conversation about female gender nonconformity.

It is fundamentally gender-nonconforming to be homosexual as a female human being, when female people (and, the more traditionally “gender conforming” their appearance, the more this is the case) are supposed/presumed/disciplined to be sexually fluid — read: available — for everyone else’s desire, particularly but not limited to male desire. At SBD, we recognize femme lesbians and all women-identified female lesbians for their bravery in refusing to be liquified by queer, post-sex, post-body, post-passion erasure.

Pretending sex doesn’t exist is the simplest and cleanest way to protect the status quo.

Seeing proudly female butch-femme lesbians on TV for once might snap the status quo in half.

Below, we’ve selected quotes from these theorists’ work that generally aren’t the most-cited ones, because…you guessed it: they’re about lesbians. They’re often about female femininity and masculinity in conversation, how female diversity threatens male priority, and why butch-femme relationships are explosively radical. We’re allowing these diverse folks’ words about sex/gender theory, embodiment, sexuality, and lesbian specificity to exist in the same place. We’re centering lesbian thought, because the phrase “lesbian theory” was unjustly purged from the academic vocabulary and merits a full return.

You won’t find this collection in a university.