Butch women don’t always get the respect they deserve in popular lesbian culture. Lea DeLaria, however, is proof that butch is badass as ever.
First of all, Lea is the proudest self-proclaimed butch dyke we know! She is the first butch lesbian to be portrayed on a mainstream television series (Orange is The New Black, in case you live under a rock) and her character Big Boo is an icon for butch visibility. Off-screen, Lea is outspoken and involved in LGBT causes, and just like Big Boo, she says exactly what she means.
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She’s not afraid to talk about tough issues within the LGBT community. In 2015, Lea told Curve magazine, “I’ve spent my whole life trying to put a positive face on what it means to be butch-in the face of much adversity, I must say-because not even in my own community do I get support for that, not even from queer people do I get support for that. Queer people are more inclined to support transmen than they are butches-not that there’s anything wrong with supporting transmen. All I’m saying is nelly fag and butch dyke still bear the brunt of animosity in society, and especially from our own community.”
“When people refer to us as a community I just laugh, because we’re not a community, we’re a bunch of factionalized individuals and groups that don’t trust each other. That is the No. 1 issue. We all need to shut the fuck up and listen to each other and accept what other people think. At first, it was gay men hating dykes, then it was the dykes always whining about gay men-but through the AIDS crisis the dykes taught the gay men how to be political, and the gay men taught the dykes how to make a joke once in a while. So we came together in the early part of the ’90s, but now, because of mainstream assimilationist wannabe queers who usurped our movement in the early part of our century, we’re back to where we were before. That comes down to class. I’ve been around a long time watching this.”
That full interview is HERE.
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And then there was the time she said this:
In an interview with Tagg magazine, she said, “There are two things that I’m proudest of: never being in the closet and never turning my back on butch.”
Who can resist a confident, outspoken, lesbian? As far as we know she’s single, ladies.
