Wnt2bbutch      << As my name indicates I want to be butch but I'm not really sure what that involves or even if that is something that I am capable of being......Any helpful hints, ideas, whatever this message evokes from you would be great.>>:::chuckling:::....I have been butch for as long as I remember and am still not sure exactly what that involves.  It's more than any one thing that "butch" brings to mind.  More than the haircut or the clothes or the job or the women I chose to love.  Male essence contained in a female body comes about as close to what butch is as I have heard but I have yet to find a definitive definition...:::grinning:::.....or see a check list that you could go over and come up saying.....ayup, I'm butch.  But your question evokes a couple of memories........one of which I'd like to share. 

Over thirty-five years ago I learned some of the art of being butch vicariously.  It was the time before women who worked wore anything but dresses to do so.  That aspect of working did not appeal to me at all.......so I had finagled a "boys" job, the weekend fry cook, at the donut shop so that I could wear bakers pants and not those little mini-skirted uniform dresses that the counter girls were required to wear...:::rolling eyes heavenward knowing he‘d feel like he was in drag to wear one:::::::smiling and eyes focusing into the past::: 

Sugar and grease.......those smells bring them back to me.  The women whose names I never knew.  At 2 AM I would watch those "manly-women" through the storefront open car doors for their femmes and offer them their arms to escort them inside.  Laughing and smiling, their faces flushed from alcohol and the excitement of a night out, they would pour life into the shabby little shop. They would help their women out of their coats and hold the stool steady as their girls slid onto them.  They'd order for both and loosen their ties...grinning at the baby butch who leaned on the door jam between kitchen and donut shop.

I watched their style and attitude, the nonchalant flip of a Zippo that brought fire to a Camel dangling from their lips or the lifting of an eyebrow or the tilt of head...::::knowing he practiced these things behind a closed bathroom door at home::::   They'd laugh and talk till the early morning factory rush crowded them out to their homes.  They treated their women as princesses and held them precious to their hearts.  And so I learned the outward art of being a butch.  And even though for years and years now, in the lesbian community, it has not been acceptable and supposedly demeaning to treat a woman as a princess, I persist in the practice.  It’s just a part of the who I came to be.

Joe :::smiling at his trip down memory lane….grateful to those manly women who have no idea that they helped to educated that once upon a time baby butch:::::::::