Dykette and Uncontainable Lesbian Feelings

A conversation with Jenny Fran Davis, author of the new book, Dykette

*Nicolas Cage in Moonstruck voice* I love two things. I love dyke drama, and I love niche novels.

In Dykette, a new novel by Jenny Fran Davis, three lesbian couples leave Brooklyn to spend Christmas together in the Hudson Valley. There’s Lou, a trans masc who loves clothes, and their hot performance artist girlfriend, Darcy. Lou’s best friend is a handy, accommodating butch of revolving he/she pronouns named Jesse. Jesse brings his girlfriend Sasha, an insecure grad student studying “the femme miniature.“ They’re all gathered at the vacation home of one-queer-generation older Jules, a Rachel Maddow-coded newscaster who makes coffee in a “neoliberal t-shirt,“ and her girlfriend, a therapist and mental health podcaster whose attention throughout the story is diverted to the internet, where she’s being called out on charges of biphobia. The group is rounded out by Sasha’s emotional support pug, Vivienne.

The holiday gets off to a rough start when Sasha overhears Jesse talking to his therapist on the phone. Jesse is unhappy in their relationship and describes Sasha as cold and unloving. Over the ensuing week, Sasha retaliates with a variety of tests and demands on Jesse, while also struggling to tolerate Darcy, whose Eastern European accent, waifish bod, and 5-figure Instagram following make Sasha feel jealous and out-femmed. Sasha is anxious, painfully self-conscious, and 25 years old. Since the novel is narrated mostly through her perspective, seemingly small things like the fabric of a dress or someone complimenting her cooking are overanalyzed and interrogated until they take on huge, earth-shattering significance. There’s an unhinged, over-the-top quality to this novel—reading it, I felt like the recipient of gossip or a wild hot take. I loved Dykette and I’m anxiously waiting for all my friends to read it, so we can dish.

Last week, Jenny and I met in a Google Doc to talk about boobs, “queer elders” in quotation marks, and pugs as gender transgressive dogs. I loved this conversation and hope you do, too. And if you live in or around Boston, come see Jenny and me live and in-person at Porter Square Books in Cambridge on Wednesday, July 12th. The event is free and you can RSVP here.

Maddy: It’s often said that as a marginalized group, queer people are unique, in the sense that we don’t learn about our culture and history from our parents or families-of-origin. Instead, we rely on the guidance and wisdom of older queers. In Dykette, you play with this idea by assembling a group of dykes--two couples in their mid to late 20s and one couple in their late 30s/early 40s--who are deeply confused about what to do with each other. Jules thinks the young lesbians will be impressed by her wealth and large vacation home, but none of them are interested in her brand of normy success. Sasha views her youth as sexual currency, while also admitting that the older butch/young femme pairing is more of a fantasy than an actual thing that happens. There’s also Cate, the butch barbershop owner, who seems to befriend and romantically pursue much younger dykes because she herself is chaotic and immature.

There’s a moment in the first chapter when Jules and Miranda are first introduced as “queer elders” and I read it as sarcastic, as if the narrator thinks these power dykes don’t have all that much to offer their younger houseguests. Am I reading that correctly or am I just on Twitter where “queer elder” is an evergreen meme?

Jenny: No, totally. The “queer elder” thing is self-conscious on everyone’s part: Sasha’s, Jules and Miranda’s, and even mine. But there is something truly intoxicating and sexy about the generational gap present here: Jules and Miranda are about 40, hardly elders, but the gulf between them and Sasha (who is 25) is massive, money- and career- and cultural- and status-wise. I think that’s also something that happens in our community—gaps like these get magnified and filled in with all sorts of fantasies, projections, desires, agonies. We rely on our “elders” to help us make sense of our lives and relationships in the absence of family-of-origin models, it’s true, but there’s also something uniquely exciting and generative about the amount of social overlap we get to have with gays of different generations. That’s something many straight people miss out on. I should add that I’m writing to you from a WNBA game, where I’m seeing THE most iconic cross-generational dyke relationships of all sorts (romantic, friendship, parental). 

All the jerseys and normie families and dyke haircuts on straight women have me thinking about how Sasha (and the novel in general) has this unstated obsession with being gay and straight at the same time. You know, she’s “straight for butches” and draws inspiration from straight culture. I guess desire is always about sameness and difference. But to me, sports—the WNBA or the dyke soccer league that Lou and Jesse play in—represent this theater, this literal game that both gays and straights love and love to lose themselves in.

M: Totally. I’m pretty avoidant when it comes to sports, but my girlfriend is a WNBA superfan and the only way she can get me to watch a game is by pointing out which coaches and players are gay, who’s divorced, who’s secretly dating and dropping hints on Instagram, etc. It is a dyke fantasy to be on a team, fighting the good fight alongside a loyal crew of tall, athletic women of varying ages. But wait, can we talk about “agonies” for a second? Sasha has so many!!

J: That’s always the best part. I’m obsessed with how many of them date each other. I got really into Courtney Vandersloot (brb, changing my last name and my pug Lois’s last name to Vandersloot) and found out she’s married to a Chicago player, so I will obvi be returning to watch the wives jump ball. BUT, agonies. Yeah, Sasha has a lot. She agonizes over herself and others. Her own relationships and others’ relationships, her own body and others’ bodies, her own mind and others’ minds. She agonizes over important stuff and dumb stuff. She also sort of thinks she can agonize herself out of her agonies, but ultimately she can’t. 

But she’s also addicted to the mode of fretting. It feels very dykette to fret (frette?). If you’re not pouting, are you even a girl? And in that way, there’s something kind of rich/lush/satisfying about agonizing—or at the very least provides something that feels a lot like a personality. It’s filling, sometimes overly so. It makes your life feel real and consequential. But mostly, for someone like Sasha, with a rich interior life, agony comes easily. It’s familiar. 

dogette

M: Yes, totally! Out of everything Sasha frets and agonizes over, her body and size felt the most painful. Being small is part of her femme identity and gender. It forms the bedrock of her self-worth and how she relates to others. In my own niche dyke milieu, I see a real divestment from thinness. Everyone is into self-acceptance and body neutrality. But for Sasha, there’s no inkling that the way she feels about her body might be harmful or “wrong.” She’s not, like, searching out Instagram graphics on body dysmorphia and going to therapy. The agony is so complete!! 

Also this is so tangential, but I’m desperate to talk about pugs as a femme dog. Vivienne, Sasha’s beloved emotional support pug, is the snorting, peeing heart of the novel. In many ways, I can see why Sasha chose a pug as her confidant and companion. A pug is not a practical dog; they can’t swim or go outside on a hot day. Sasha is always fretting, a pug’s face always looks a little panicked. But I don’t know that I would describe a pug as beautiful, or very feminine. They don’t have long hair to brush and braid like a shih tzu, and they aren’t as petite and easy to carry around as a chihuahua or maltese. They snore and snort and breathe through their mouths.

J: Right, Sasha’s fixated on her body and feels as though her femininity won’t be complete or perfect until/unless she’s small. But she’s not particularly small. She’s burdened by the size of her breasts in particular – my friend and I recently decided that Sasha’s massive tits represent her burdensome and massive inner life. And that this analogy represents a central conflict in the novel. In the words of my brilliant friend Rebecca: “Sasha’s inner life (at least to her) is this monstrous thing spilling everywhere kind of dwarfing everyone else’s inner life. She has this sense that she cannot be contained and tbh she can’t—by a tit-belt or by expectations of social behavior.” 

She’s not small in any way, really: emotionally, physically, intellectually. She has huge feelings, big theories about the world, and a substantial personality in addition to being physically larger than she wants to be. All of these magnitudes agonize and disturb her. But even though Sasha herself might not realize this yet, not-smallness is a big part of femme identity in historical and contemporary dyke life. The divestment from thinness hasn’t reached her yet, or it has – no doubt she’s seen the infographics and probably agrees with them intellectually – but thin supremacy has its tentacles wrapped really tight around her. I hope she gets help soon. 

I’m obsessed with the pug-as-femme-dog theory. When I first got Lois, my pug, I think everyone assumed she’d be femme. I got her a pink harness and pink sweaters. She shocked us all by being first futch, and later butch! (We could tell by the way dresses made her look more butch, not less – the telltale sign of a butch.) But pugs are gender-expansive in that they’re sturdy and robust and have the most delicious roly and muscular bodies and squished faces, but they’re still a toy breed. Lois won’t go out in the rain, for example, and as you say, she overheats easily (join the club!). She’s dramatic and has to be tended to very carefully, like a Neopet. For that reason, she’s a great partner in crime for a femme, particularly a femme writer. I’ve braided our identities and needs so thoroughly that when Lois is hot, I’m hot; when Lois is tired, I’m tired; and when Lois is hungry, I’m hungry. 

splendor in the grass

I know you have two iconic rescue dogs. Are there two types of gays, Pitbull mix rescue and purebred designer? (I will say that Lois came from a Midwestern family whose pug was having puppies. I did, however, fly to receive her at the Kansas City Airport when she was four months old.)  

M: There’s so much happening with breasts in Dykette. Sasha is so attuned to boobs, as well as bras and other containment strategies. At one point, she’s in a sauna and refuses to take off her clothes because her friends are “small-tit people” and therefore unable to handle her ginormous bazongas. Lou has had top surgery, while Darcy and Jesse are considering it. So maybe to be a “small-tit person,” for Sasha, means wanting to feel comfortable and at-ease in your own body. 

I don’t know many lesbians with purebred dogs, but you like what you like!! I have so much to say about pitbulls, always, but I feel like it’s very lesbian to choose a maligned, outcast dog. Pitbull owners talk a lot about the cruel comments and assumptions people make about their dogs and I’ve definitely experienced that opprobrium (especially while looking for housing!!), but pitbulls are very much a dog of the people. When I’m out with Louis, so many people stop and express their love for him and his ilk. It feels a lot like being queer—there’s societal hate, but it opens up this whole web of connection and solidarity.

My girlfriend’s dog, Weezy, is a lab-adjacent mutt and she’s very self-contained. If you try to hug her or pet her for too long, she will get up and go into another room. So we have a business bitch dog and one very needy guy, which allows us to create narrative tension and drama between them. I agree that having a dog is like a Neopet. More so than cats, you have to be attuned to their needs and that can be a good counterweight to writing and being online all the time. Does Lois have a favorite outfit or accessory? In our house, we call bandanas “pitbull outfits.”

J: I love pitbulls so much. Bandanas are so pitbull outfits! Lois’s favorite look is this mesh tee shirt that one of her uncles (@prince_alice_) airbrushed for her to say “party girl.” It’s loose and breezy but also makes her feel like a Euro club kid. She also loves her Coach leash, which my boyfriend Tess got as a push present for me when I got Lois. Automatic upgrade to any outfit!

Absolutely re: boobs. Sasha has an unchallenged idea that her boobs will shock and dismay the small-tits she’s surrounded by, which is to say that she fears that she is uncontainable and shocking and dismaying in some basic way. I’m like Sasha in that way: I delight in being provocative and risqué, but the minute I actually provoke anyone I’m like, “No, I didn’t mean it!” 

There’s also an obvious link to gender—she has these hyper-feminine/feminized mommy milkers that she knows are hot and fun, but they’re painful too. And that’s sort of the feeling I wanted to create in Dykette—I want it to feel like candy, like gossip, like dessert. Delicious in moderation but sickening and crazy-making in high doses. Sasha’s femininity, one piece of which is her boobs, feels very much the same way. 

M: Yes! Speaking of being too much, we’re just about to hit the Substack email length limit. Thank you so much for chatting, Jenny. For everyone reading at home longing to continue this conversation on lesbian dogs and big bazongas feelings, go read Dykette. And if you’re in Greater Boston, come see an expanded version IRL at Porter Square Books on July 12th!

Dykette is available from your local library or bookstore. Read an excerpt of the first chapter, where Sasha takes a nude using the Grinch filter, here.