A really great read, and I think much more revealing about butch/fem culture than the works of Les Feinberg (as much as I love Feinberg's work, and appreciate hir work towards liberation.) Kennedy and Davis make incredible use of their interviews; they let their narrators speak for themselves in ways that I think many historians still struggle to do, and their analysis is clearly done with a deep sense of care for the community, while also being realistic about the darker aspects of lesbian community. The specificity here is also just such a gift; they're so careful to pay attention to what makes this site, and the narrators within this site, important to pay attention to. Their direct engagement with feminists who have really shaped the conversation around butch/fem makes it honestly an incredible resource from that perspective, and blows open the claims made about butch-as-oppressors as well as butch-as-masculine. There are clearly aspects of butch that get dropped out in the focus on "lesbian" as a category made up of women; those who passed as men full-time, for example, are not interviewed and are generally dismissed by the narrators, but I think in combination with Feinberg's work it's totally possible to get a far more realistic understanding of working class butch/fem culture than the misrepresentation of what it is that seems to plague our current understanding.

Really, I want to shove this book into the hands of so many, and if butch/fem is something you'd like to learn more about, I'm not sure you can get a more thorough examination than in this book. Just really great work, detailed and so careful while leaving room for so much analysis and moving forward.