Butch

Masculine, often deliberately so: a gay man whose voice, look and manner read as a traditional tough guy; also used for masculine lesbians.

Butch means masculine, and among gay men it usually means deliberately or visibly so: the deep voice, the beard, the boots, the way of sitting with knees apart and saying very little. A butch gay man is one whose manner reads as "a real man" in the most old-fashioned sense, whether it comes naturally or took years of practice in front of a mirror.

The word works as an adjective ("he's quite butch") and as a noun ("a butch"). It is the opposite of nelly and femme, and the older cousin of today's app word masc. It is also shared with lesbians, where butch and femme have a long and proud history of their own.

Where it comes from

Butch is short for butcher, and its first slang lives were all about toughness: a butcher's knife, then a nickname for hard men in 19th-century America, the kind of guy called "Butch" in a police report. From there it moved into gay and lesbian speech. Green's Dictionary of Slang finds it for a masculine lesbian in 1932, and for a masculine gay man in 1951, in Donald Webster Cory's The Homosexual in America, which noted that "a camp" and "a butch" are one vowel apart.

That pairing tells you a lot. In mid-century gay life, butch and camp were two styles everyone could read, and plenty of men switched between them depending on the room. A butch number was a gay man who seemed so masculine that people wondered aloud if he was gay at all.

How it is used today

Among gay men butch today is often half ironic. "Butch it up" is what you say to a friend before he meets the straight in-laws; "very butch" is how you describe a man changing a tire in skinny jeans. It belongs to the language of camp, which loves nothing more than pointing out masculinity as a performance.

The serious side is the old hierarchy. For decades, butch was valued and nelly was mocked, inside the community as well as outside, and the clone look of the 1970s turned butch into a uniform. That legacy lives on in "masc for masc" and "no fems" profiles, which is why many gay men wince at the worship of butch even while they enjoy looking at it.

Butch or masc

Masc is the app-era word and usually means "doesn't look or sound gay". Butch is older, campier and more self-aware: a butch man can be the gayest man in the room, he just does it in a lower register. Think of the leather daddy or the bear: butch, and nobody's fooled.

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