University of Utah history professor Elizabeth Clement spoke to a packed hall at Salt Lake City’s First Unitarian Church on civil rights and liberation.

“Are gays the same as straight people? Do they have different ideas about the appropriate roles of men and women? And do those differences in understanding gender influence the way gays think about family, marriage, and sexual relational practices like monogamy?”

Because butch-femme may never come up at your church:

“The largest expression of organization in 1950s gay culture was in the bars,” Clement said. “That culture tended to be very accepting of, and in fact, almost requiring gender experimentation and difference. This is the era of butch-femme role playing, where you have very, very butch women and very, very feminine women pairing off.”
Homophiles viewed this vibrant bar culture with a lot of disdain. “One organization called the ‘Daughters of Bilitis’ published a newsletter in which they
argued that, ‘The kids with butch hair cuts and mannish manner are the worst publicity we can get.’ ”
But that dour attitude presented a recruitment problem.
“When working class, particularly butch or drag queens, wandered by a homophile meeting and thought of joining, they had great difficulty understanding what the homophiles stood for,” Clement explained. “[The drag queens] already were living much more political lives.”
Their soberly dressed counterparts just weren’t provocative enough.
Look at it this way: “The last thing you really wanted to be in the 1950s was a butch-lesbian construction worker with a nice femme girlfriend that other heterosexual men might actually be interested in,” Clement said. “That’s a recipe for getting the snot beat out of you on a regular basis.”
Still, what better way to be front and center?

I gotta say… I don’t know that many “nice femme girlfriends.” Is that supposed to be similar to a nice obeying wife (sounds like it to me).