bulldagger

Ginger sees her as a "baby butch" (133), Gingers mother calls her a "bulldagger" (141), and when an old woman in a shop gives Muriel a skirt, to "show you legs," Audre recalls how she visited "that store in dungarees for years" without the saleswoman ever offering her more lady-like clothes (204).

It was "entertainment for the adventurous lesbian," and it even included a Playboy-like centerfold: "the Bulldagger of the Month."

He introduces the archetype of the bulldagger, a masculine black female Blues figure of the 1920s and 1930s that Anne Stavney describes as neither male nor female, unhinging essentialist concepts of sexuality and gender, (2) as the most effective position from which to analyze Piper's progressive body of work between 1970 and 1975.

Dear BOB: Darlin', there's nothing wrong with you that the right attitude and a nice bulldagger with a plump package and impressive forearms couldn't fix.

She got her start performing at private parties and cellar clubs but eventually worked her way into the big time, getting long gigs at Hansberry's Clam House and the Ubangi Club, both on the jumpin' nightclub strip of West 133rd Street known as "Jungle Alley." Both clubs attracted an interracial mix of writers and entertainers, including many lesbians and gay men, who adored her "bulldagger" looks and her inspired reworkings of popular tunes.

well give yourself over to the bulldagger, who will provide for you and

S/he looked like a man, a soft, decidedly un-macho man; she didn't look like a bulldagger anymore ...

One of the most compelling images is a self-portrait by Honey Lee Cottrell titled Bulldagger of the Season, 1981.

Class and race differences are articulated by Karla Jay, on behalf of Djuna Barnes as a working girl among the idle rich she described in the Ladies Almanack, and by SDiane Bogus, on behalf of the bulldagger "Queen B" in twentieth-century African-American literature.

(Bulldagger I've been called, bombshell; well, maybe not.) But today I'm going to change all that, thanks to the help of two women: a 30-year burlesque queen slash local icon, Bombshell Betty, and her trusty rock-star photographer, Darling Propaganda.

This production also makes it clear that the residence is run by a gay man and a lesbian--Simon Jones plays former chorus boy-turned-administrator Perry Lascoe, and Dana Ivey's superintendent Sylvia Archibald, who strides about the house in pants and answers to the name Colonel Archie, is the gruffest, most affectionate, nonhomicidal bulldagger we've seen on Broadway, possibly ever.

The climate surrounding Ouida and Zella as they set up house together remains cool; they do not deny the word "bulldagger" when it is hurled at them.

Several trips to the Lesbian Herstory Archives led to the discovery of lyrics by Gladys Bentley, an African-American singer and "bulldagger" who sang of tearing off the clothes of her girlfriend and doing it in the parlor when they got home.

Even though I've written about women in jazz, I knew little about Gladys Bentley untill read Eric Garber's fascinating profile, "Gladys Bentley: The Bulldagger Who Sang the Blues" (Spring 1988).

Darling, your FB is really such an exceedingly gentle mack truck of a bulldagger, but occasionally, the old "sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind" maxim illuminates our only path.