You can still pick up a copy of the 2011 calendar The Illustrated Gentleman by artist Elisha Lim.
“A 12 month calendar of handsome dandy queers from January to December. Full colour images and comics feature sartorial queer style, shopping anecdotes and strategies, and a celebration of walking proud in what you wear. The comics feature excerpts from “The Illustrated Gentleman” and “100 Butches” and contain a hand-drawn monthly schedule for each month. It is a quaint, trim 5.5″x7.5″ on glossy calendar stock.”
They sent Butch Lab a few images from the calendar to entice us:
Will there be any interviews with people who consider themselves butch but NOT genderqueer, trans, etc? I am someone who believes butchness is just a way to be female but all of this evidence to the contrary is actually making me feel bad about my identity, which I believe to be the opposite of this project’s intent. Alternately, can you point to some literature on genderqueer-ness that doesn’t marginalize my femininity, which abounds despite my hair and clothing?
(I’m leaving this here because I didn’t want to take away from any of the individual interviewees, all of whom have the right to identify however they wish)
Yes, absolutely, there have been (Ellis, Vittoria, Kelli) a few butch-identified women featured in the mini-interviews and there will be more. Right now I have almost a dozen scheduled to post in the next month or so and almost all of them are women-identified butches. It was kind of odd that there were quite a few trans identified butches in a row, actually. I didn’t plan that, it was just the order that the interviewees responded to me.
I certainly don’t want you to feel bad about your identity, and you’re right, that’s the opposite of the project’s intent. The overlaps with genderqueer and trans identity are pretty complicated these days, and quite common it seems. I am butch and woman-identified, for example, but I do have a relationship to the words genderqueer and trans. They might not be my primary identity words, but they do resonate with me.
And about your genderqueer question: I don’t know, off the top of my head. There aren’t a lot of good resources on genderqueerness out there in general yet—that’s still up and coming, I think. The first thing that comes to mind is http://www.genderfork.com, with which you’re probably familiar.
I’d like to second Sinclair on recommending Genderfork. That group presents a really excellent range of people who identify as gender-variant in some way. Not all masculine, not all feminine, not all androgynous.