Written by Guest Butch, K
Much like in the misogynist male dominated world where brotherhood and the “man-law” dominates friendships, the butches have one too. I have a simple group of friends. Although…none of them I would call my brothers anymore. Except my actual brother. Johnny was primed from a ripe age to know that anything I said to him wasn’t repeated to our mom. Even if she told him to. But that doubly he could tell me anything no matter what. My son, S, and I also share that type of relationship. I’m able to level with him differently than even his own father or J.
Very few friends have been inducted into my “brotherhood.” Not even some of my oldest friends are in it. There are rules to the brotherhood. Codes of conduct that go unspoken. I had a friend who I always called my brother. She would lie for me but not to me. Protect me under any circumstance. Her name was Z. When you break the rules of brotherhood though….all is lost. There is no ensuing friendship or even an acquaintance. Z broke the bonds of brotherhood by not protecting my family the same way that she would protect me.
Another piece of broken brotherhood would be SAL. SAL was accidentally inducted…she was someone who J had a faraway crush on for a while…but I finally introduced them through an accident. J and I were close to SAL for a short period of time and SAL had a girlfriend who had a husband. SAL’s girlfriend was manipulative and swore she wasn’t going back to her husband, but of course that was false. We tried to keep her away after everything happened. To keep her mind off of things we invited her out on my birthday. Through her drunken ramblings she tried to come on to J. Not only that but she had no regard for the fact that I was sitting right next to them. Drunk or not I was pissed, I told J not to say anything but alas she couldn’t resist I guess. SAL attempted to convince me it meant nothing, but the bonds of brotherhood had been broken. She infiltrated instead of protecting.
The brotherhood is sacred. Its something that cannot be replaced by girlfriends or couple friends…it is to me the most sacred bond. The locker buddies of the lesbian world.
Do you have a brotherhood? The unmistakable bond of something that can only be broken by a grave deed of mistrust.
I have a very tight-knit circle of STRAIGHT female friends. We’ve all been inducted into this unofficial club via pretty much the same route: we were all “rescued” from bad relationships in our early- to mid-twenties. It’s how I got in, it’s how the girls before me got in, and it’s how every girl since has gotten in – including my own girlfriend (obviously we never meant to be exclusively straight and haven’t been for a few years now).
This group of friends has been the most important part of my life with the exception of my family, but I will admit that now it is slowly dissolving. It’s not really because of any one thing anyone has done wrong, but times change, and we’re getting older. Some of us have moved away. Our priorities are becoming different, and some of us are better than accepting that than others. Some of us have a drive to continue growing and reaching out to meet new people, and some of us are antagonistic to the very idea of anything or anyone new.
As for a lesbian brotherhood, no. I am tight with my lesbian aunts, and my girl and I have a handful of friends. Our community, though, has slim pickings, and we frequently run into the problem of flakiness. We haven’t really met any of our own over the course of YEARS who have shown themselves to be as reliable as our straight group of girls.