Longing for an archive of one’s own
LoverBoyButch and online lesbian archives
A personal essay by Tanya, December 2025 (updated August 2026)
The idea of LoverBoyButch, an online archive project of butch and trans experiences, first came to me as a desire to create a space for myself to keep together all of the relatable media and archive pieces found during my own gender/sexuality journey. What has always been limiting me in this self-discovery were rigid categories and especially a fear of invalidating one’s community by adopting their label, since I felt like I was somehow diverging even from the ones that seemed to fit the best. In my case, I aligned with lesbianism but also transmasculinity, and was thinking I might “transition” and that way won’t be a “lesbian” anymore. I wanted to do a sort of experiment, and prove to myself in the first place that there have been and there are lesbians and butches who have bent the definitions, used the expansive labels, or kept a few at the same time that others thought to be “contradicting.” Isn’t it what queerness is ultimately all about?
So, I shared my first post, an excerpt from Michelle Handelman’s 1995 documentary, BloodSisters: Leather, Dykes and Sadomasochism, where Robin Sweeney describes his identity as a “bisexual butch” who is “awfully effete." To my surprise, just over the night this piece of media found a big wave of people relating to what was being said. Like me, others seemed to be happy (and relieved?) to see queer identities being used to describe a person’s unique experience, and not being adapted the other way around. Some have left comments about being tired of the “TikTok discourse” and of queers who “don’t understand the concept of he/him lesbians.” It’s then that I understood that there’s something important in the idea of creating modern digital archives, and that I was far from being the only one who felt the need to rediscover the experience of elder queers and define our own.
In fact, I was greatly inspired by other unique lesbian and queer archives on Instagram that are building a digital space for a community within a community. Like @Mtf_butches, created by Lucy, which is a project “archiving the legacy of butch trans women & transfemme lesbians.” Or @Butch4butcharchives, “photo archives celebrating butch-for-butch love,” whose creator Amy expressed the lack of butch4butch representation and feeling “invisible, excluded, and on the margins of one marginalised community within another.”
As Sam Bourcier, a writer and the activist behind the LGBTQI+ Archives of Paris, says, we should remember that the political meaning of an archive was historically a tool for categorisation and control, and that anything can be one, including our living bodies. Being interested in the nuances of queerness in the identities of “butch, gnc, trans, lesboys & fagdykes," I found it especially powerful to collectively create a digital archive that corresponds to what we are living, using a language that can only be understood within the community, and build it on our experiences and self-identification, rather than strict categorisations and identity policing. This collective dimension is what quickly became a determining part of the process for me as I wanted to share the multitude of butch & genderbend voices and experiences.
Along with the archives I had found, I started sharing submissions from the page's followers as collaborative publications (art, poetry, writing, photography...), putting them on the same level as historic finds. “To be butch is to take the limited options that I was handed, the narrow rutted paths that thousands of others had dug before me that felt inescapable, to take them and make something new,” writes Rohan, a bisexual butch trans man in his piece “An ode to my butchness." I believe that the experience can be just as valid even without the examples of the past: we are creating our own representation that we were always longing to see.
I was getting more and more comfortable in presenting as a transmasc butch: building the archive along with other gender non conforming folks truly helped me to ground myself and embrace this identity with pride and gratitude. Often afraid I’m “not butch enough,” I now felt powerful connecting with butchness. It allowed me freedom, one that made me stop fearing “contradictory” gender presentation or possible changes that I might do to my body: fagdyke butchness could embrace them as well. However, there was a part of my identity that was still missing. And that is, my origin.
I was born and raised in Russia in the early 2000s. I left at the age of eighteen; I grew up without almost any queer or lesbian representation from my country. Even though I could relate to the butch experiences I was sharing, they were mostly from the USA and never showed people who speak my language or share my culture. And after launching the LoverBoyButch project I felt the need to start the search of dykes and butches from where I was born. This is how I ended up discovering the Russian online lesbian communities from the 2000s. I wasn’t sure if the butch culture even existed in Russia, but it did, and the RU_Butch online community on Livejournal was a thrilling discovery for me. It was a Russian-language forum active from 2004 until 2010, “about butches, for butches and in the name of,” where they shared photos, thoughts and discussions. I learned for instance that the word “butch” was attributed to a masculine grammatical gender in Russian and most of the butches used he/him pronouns. I needed the example of Russian butches so much.
I didn’t want to stop there. With my friends and a few dykes I met thanks to the LoverBoyButch page we decided to create PostSovietDykes, an archive project aimed at finding and collecting lesbian experiences from so-called “post-Soviet” countries. As of today, this project is even more crucial to me, as a collective effort to reconnect with our past and sustain our present. We were already able to take part in an online public talk organised in Serbia by an artist Anna Shustikova with Sonja Franeta, a writer who documented lesbian stories in Siberia in the 1990s. We truly hope to rebuild a community of “post-Soviet” dykes around the world, whose stories were often censored, silenced and criminalised. But there are certainly limits to our work, and one of them is the safety concern. In the post-Soviet context, we have to constantly evaluate if our posts could put anyone in danger. A lot of the archives have to be left unpublished, and today’s experiences anonymised.
I am writing this text at the end of 2025, as fascism and dictatorships take over the world, and we can't help thinking of the durability of the methods we use to build our online archives today. Instagram and social media became a great tool to share the archival finds and reach others who can relate; however we are aware of the great limits of these platforms, which are queerphobic and are controlled by those who want to erase us and have more and more power to do that now. The digital space created with LoverBoyButch and PostSovietDykes supported me in my butchness and lesbianism, but today I’m left with the feeling of great uncertainty for the future of these projects and our queer lives. We don’t have any other choice than to try to find other ways to archive and build community resistance––and maybe now, it is going to be the return to local offline initiatives, independent printing and zines, rather than social media.
UPD: And that is exactly why, in the summer of 2026, with Diane, Jane and Zoé, passionate dykes I’ve met, we have decided to launch the LoverBoyButch’s first physical zine centred around butch, dyke and trans experiences. Since we are based in France, our first issue welcomed Europe/UK-based submissions in an effort to focus on a targeted geographic area and represent our local-ish communities (and for mailing reasons as well). We received more than a hundred proposals and are currently in the process of preparing the zine’s printing. This project is very dear to us, and it feels important to gather butch and queer voices and build a physical proof of our current existence.
As Leslie Feinberg wrote in the 2003 foreword to Stone Butch Blues, “The last chapter of this saga of struggle has not yet been written."
Find LoverBoyButch and PostSovietDykes on Instagram.
Tanya (they/them) is a Russian non-binary butch now living in France. Founder of LoverBoyButch and PostSovietDykes collaborative archive projects and a "butch to femme" dragqueen, they’ve published in a few queer zines such as The Lesbos Library zine, Baragouine and An Anthology of Us.
This blog series is running in anticipation of Sinister Wisdom issue 146: Butch-Femme Renaissance coming out in October 2027. There was such an incredible outpouring of work, writing and butchfemme brilliance, it couldn't be contained to only the print issue. We'll be running a series of digital-only butchfemme writings leading into the issue's publication, so keep an eye on Sinister Wisdom's blog and social media. Share, enjoy, and feast on this work — and get excited for Butch-Femme Renaissance coming out October 2027.
Images
1. The first version of the zine’s cover, a work in progress, taken by Diane, 2026. Cover credits: Arm Wrestle, by Louise Dalgleish (The Butch Order).
2. The first post on @loverboybutch, 25 feb 2025.
3. "An ode to my butchness" by Rohan. Posted on @loverboybutch.
4. Image on the main page of ru-butch.livejournal.com.
5. Gay and Lesbian Symposium, USSR. By Rex Wockner (1991). Posted on @postsovietdykes.
Print Print Print: Luddites, Archives, Zines, and Stuff
The Quanties
Then and Now: Did it Get Better?
