Persistence 

All Ways Butch and Femme

Illustration of a person with short dark hair, wearing a blue shirt, applying lipstick with a pink background. The text on the image reads "Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme" and is edited by Ivan E. Coyote and Zena Sharman.

Published by Arsenal Pulp Press, 2011
Co-edited with Ivan Coyote

Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme celebrates the incredible diversity of people whose hearts pounded the first time they read or heard the words "butch" or "femme."

The contributors to Persistence explore the parameters, history, and power of a multitude of butch and femme realities. It's a raucous, insightful, sexy, and sometimes dangerous look at what the words butch and femme can mean in an ever-shifting gender landscape, with one eye on the past and the other on what is to come.

Includes a foreword by Joan Nestle, renowned femme author and editor of The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader, a landmark anthology originally published in 1992. Featured contributors include Jewelle Gomez, S. Bear Bergman, Stacey Park Milbern, Zoe Whittall, and Sinclair Sexsmith.

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Stonewall Book Award medallion with a black triangle, open book, and pink circle, presented by the American Library Association.

Named a Stonewall Honor Book by the American Library Association, 2012

Gold medal with the Lambda symbol in the center, surrounded by the words 'Lambda Literary Awards' and decorated with leaves and an open book at the bottom.

Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award winner for best anthology, 2012

Praise for Persistence

“Reading Persistence is like attending a dinner party with people you never got the chance to talk to before—fascinating, brave, insightful people—some of whom are very well known and others are simply the people you want to get to know. All of them talk frankly and with genuine courage about what it means to live outside the norms of society. It is a manifesto and an invitation. Read Persistence and look again at what you thought you knew and get to know some of the people that will be defining what it means to be revolutionary in the coming decades.”

—Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard Out of Carolina and Skin: Talking About Sex, Class, and Literature

“The death of butch-femme has been greatly exaggerated. This beautiful collection captures the intensity of gender variant communities now while continuing to make important links to pioneers from the past. Here we meet femme sharks and cowboys, faggy butches, studs and futches. This book is like a pocketknife, it is useful, sharp and in the right hands it can do anything.”

—Jack Halberstam, author of Female Masculinity and The Queer Art of Failure

“The butch/femme dynamic is a conscious, loving binary of desire and trust … it's a dance of love and outlawed romance. Butches and femmes share a sense of tribe, extended family and kinship—no matter what our genders might be. There is no doubt in my mind that this book will soon be recognized as a major contribution to the shelves of our queer literature. And it's totally gonna be a must-have bedside reader for many. This is a smart, loving book by some terrific writers. They all know what it means to live and love as butch/femme beyond the stereotypes, and they've made their diesel femme Auntie Kate very proud of them.”

—Kate Bornstein, author of Hello Cruel World and Gender Outlaw

“A poignant, defiant, sometimes amusing and often challenging exploration of the terms butch and femme.”

—Xtra

“Twenty years after Joan Nestle's The Persistent Desire: A Butch-Femme Reader, this rambunctious, truth-telling, gender-confronting anthology both honors its antecedent and pulses with contemporary, assured, personal and provocative prose about the personas of femme and butch within the queer community."

—Book Marks ("Best Books of the Year")