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Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community

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The painstaking research and preparation for Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold by Madeline Davis and Elizabeth Kennedy included lengthy and comprehensive interviews of over 30 women who openly participated in lesbian social life in Buffalo, New York, during the 1940s and 1950s. The women interviewed here are quoted at great length; their accounts are informative, heartfelt, and sometimes humorous as they speak of the suffering, frustration, liberation, and delight they experienced. I am profoundly grateful for the authors' decade-long effort and for their decision to quote the interviewees at such length, thereby allowing them to reveal their individual (and very likable) personalities as they speak for themselves. I am even more deeply indebted to the subjects of the book for their candor, courage, and tenacity. They consciously sacrificed their safety, their families, their health, and their jobs so that other lesbians, including those not yet born, might not have to.

Topics examined in this book include:

- The degree of hostility or acceptance lesbians received from their families.
- The process of initiation into the lesbian bar community.
- Formation of butch/femme roles, including butch modeling or modification of self-expression in imitation of older butches, male relatives, and popular male celebrities.
- Butches' physical fights with antagonistic heterosexual men to defend themselves, their femmes, and lesbian bars; the unending, intense fear and risk lesbians faced.
- Police brutality (particularly against black butches) and other societal hatred, contempt, misunderstanding, and occasional support of lesbians.
- Problems generated by employment (examples: the effects of a femme prostitute's job on her relationship with her butch; a butch's severely restricted employment options resulting from her unconventional clothing and masculine attitude).
- Incidence and specific causes of lesbian (particularly butch) self-hatred resulting from internalization of societal values.
- The sexually untouchable butch (and an unusual type of "orgasm").
- Casual versus committed relationships, cruising, courtship, romance, sexual practices, and nonmonogamy.
- The ways in which lesbian relationships did not simply mirror heterosexual relationships but instead were consciously structured according to the values and needs of this community.
- The function of the butch/femme dichotomy and attitudes toward lesbians who fell outside of strict butch/femme personas.
- How femmes viewed butches and vice versa; butches' emotional reliance on femme validation of butch self-expression; butch suspicion and resentment of femmes' ability to mingle within heterosexual circles; subsequent physical abuse of femmes by butches.
- Lesbian attitudes toward and history with straight women, straight men, gay men, motherhood, heterosexual marriage, rape, religion, alcoholism, military service, the formal homophile movement, and lesbianism itself.
- The effect of race and class on lesbian social networks.
- The degree and significance of uncloseted versus closeted status.
- Butch and femme physical presentation (clothing, hair style, attitude).
- Butch solidarity, competition, and social etiquette.
- Sexual conservatism versus sexual experimentation among lesbians and the degree of social openness or silence surrounding sexual issues and practices.
- The fun they had.

This book is WONDERFUL! There is little information available about the hidden life of Lesbians but the author combined wonderful talent and compassion to telling the story of how women who love women have been around for a long time. It mostly focuses on the daily life of people like us who have fought for the recognition to love whomever they would love! There is a point in the book where myself (& the friends whom I have shared it with) were looking at the pictures and recognizing people like ourselves reflected there. The life stories are acurate and descriptively colorful, the pictures worth a thousand words and the writing style is funny yet serious...Making for a great read! I hope that you enjoy the book as much as I have & continue to be loving and kind to those whom we don't understand-this book certainly was!

Kennedy and Davis have written an excellent ethnography on lesbian culture in Buffalo in the 1940's and 50's! The authors take great care to give first hand accounts, interpret them, explain their interpretations, as well as place them in the broader context of what was occuring socially at the time. They are careful to point out differences in opinion of the various women from whom the information was gathered; moreover, they attempt to rationalize these differences. The books is also well organized in its chapters with headings and subheadings. Information on specific topics is easily found in the book (despite its 400 pages!), and the juxtaposition of topics discussed is chronological and understandable in its progression. At the ends of the chapters, the authors recap the concluded discussion, as well as place it in a broader context to facilitate its relevance to the broader text. I highly suggest that anyone interested in the history of lesbian identity development read this book.

If you have an interest or passion for lesbian history, you will find this book fascinating!
The lesbian history studied and preserved here is priceless! It may have all simply disappeared had it not been focused on by the authors. This is a wonderful look at working class lesbian women in Buffalo...I know you've seen it so many times before, oh wait, actually never before!.
This is so unique, interesting and heart felt. Research on middle class lesbians or professional lesbians like the history of the DOB is more abundant (though still uncommon). Even more reason to be grateful for the work of Kennedy and Davis. In my research of the authors I have found them both to be passionate and driven in whatever they have done. This book is no exception.

Angela Brinskele Director of Communications, Mazer Lesbian Archives

This compiled oral history gives voice to a group of people that has been largely overlooked in other history books. "Boots of Leather" provides a whole compendium of valuable facts, histories, anecdotes and details about lesbian life in the forties and fifties, and though it covers only one particular community, one can at least get a better sense of what life was life for lesbians during those years. While much has been written about eras and decades in US history - world war II, the home front, the fifties, this book speaks directly to a group that has been around during all those eras but has either been ignored, passed over, or omitted altogether from the pages of history. "Boots of Leather" takes a group that has existed under the radar or on the fringes of society, and shines a light on it, giving us a much longed for glimpse into what life was like for lesbians back before stonewall or gay rights or gay marriage had ever inserted themselves onto the American consciousness.

This is a wonderful, funny book. I loved the information on African American lesbian communities in the Northeast--upstate NY and PA. This book helped me create several passages in my own lesbian mystery novel with a romantic bent. Thank you, Elizabeth Kennedy.

I like this book for the vast amount of information. I like it so much I want someone to take the information write it in a less academic style of writing. Say the way Lillian Faderman or Jonathan Katz does. I've been wading through it for several months, it is that captivating yet the redundancy of information makes me wish I were doing the blue pencil role.

Leslie Feinberg's "Stone Butch Blues" would be a good companion piece.

Graceful stylists these authors aren't. But what their book lacks in elegance, flow, and punctuation, it more than makes up in content. Their material is fascinating; their analyses are thorough, thoughtful, and illuminating. Even if one doesn't fully accept all their conclusions, Davis and Kennedy have asked the right questions and have explored their subject with sensitivity and subtlety. Their narrators are compelling women; I would love to know where they all are now. And I would love to see more lesbian scholarship of this high caliber.

Elizabeth Kennedy and Madeline Davis' book Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold does everything right! Though the book focuses on the history of one lesbian community in Buffalo, New York from the 30s to the 60s, many of the themes and ideas are more generalizeable. The book is comprehensive and inclusive of every imaginable theme. From societal attitudes and politics to sexual practices and relationship patterns including butch/fem culture and psychology, this book covers it all. My favorite aspect of this book is the way the stories of lesbians of color and lesbians of low socio-economic status flow prominently and smoothly throughout the entire book. In addition, it includes a section just for an even more in-depth analysis and comparison of these cross-sections of the lesbian community. Also the authors find an excellent balance and combination of using the actual words of the women they write about and summary explanation of relevant concepts. This book is a must read!

Elizabeth Kennedy and Madeline Davis' book Boots of Leather,Slippers of Gold does everything right! Though the book focuses on thehistory of one lesbian community in Buffalo, New York from the 30s to the 60s, many of the themes and ideas are more generalizeable. The book is comprehensive and inclusive of every imaginable theme. From societal attitudes and politics to sexual practices and relationship patterns including butch/fem culture and psychology, this book covers it all. My favorite aspect of this book is the way the stories of lesbians of color and lesbians of low socio-economic status flow prominently and smoothly throughout the entire book. In addition, it includes a section just for an even more in-depth analysis and comparison of these cross-sections of the lesbian community. Also the authors find an excellent balance and combination of using the actual words of the women they write about and summary explanation of relevant concepts. This book is a must read!