It Ain't Easy Being Green”

In this article, the author analyzes the cultural, racial, sexual, and gendered politics that inform the staged and quotidian performances of masculinity by the late Stormé DeLarverie. A mixed-race butch lesbian male impersonator who, in the 1950s and 1960s, performed with the famed Jewel Box Revue, a racially integrated drag show at the Apollo Theater, DeLarverie was also a central figure in the 1969 Stonewall Riots. The author reaches across DeLarverie's personal history, life-long activism, and staged performances as a way to frame the relationship between DeLarverie's gender presentation on stage and off, and her cabaret-style singing within a 1990s butch aesthetic. The author argues that DeLarverie's butch swagger and presence highlight a female masculinity readily legible in the 1990s, a female masculinity that troubles contemporary queer discourses surrounding “butch” as a marker for those assigned female at birth that now operates as out of place and time, under the threat of constant erasure, and framed within the vocabulary of extinction. The author challenges narratives forecasting the inevitable butch disappearance and, instead, proposes that DeLarverie's transtemporal embodiment and performance of a racialized female masculinity helps us to imagine future possibilities for butch survival

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