“Some black women complained that when they moved outside the ghetto into integrated lesbian communities in certain areas, even in the 1970s, white women sometimes automatically assumed that black women would be butch in a sexual relationship or even manipulated them into being butch. As Iris, a black lesbian from Omaha, Nebraska, remembers, “They didn’t like you to wear make-up. They wanted you in masculine dress, but they wanted to be real ‘fou-fou’ themselves.” She attributes the predilection to a covert racism that is blind to femininity in black females.”

— Lillian Faderman, “The Return of Butch and Femme: A Phenomenon in Lesbian Sexuality of the 1980s and 1990s.” 1992.

