When I was a young queer feminist, I was hot for my elders. My friends and I would see them at demonstrations and dances. We knew their names and jobs. We gushed about their outfits. Just last month, when I reported that I was sharing a stage with some of them in The Butch Bois Chronicles, one of my friends recalled the time one of our elders rolled in to a party in a denim patch suit, circa 1996. We sighed, recalling her butch glamour.

C.C. Carter has produced performances that have served as annual benefit events for the Lesbian Leadership Council of the Chicago Foundation for Women. This year’s benefit, The Butch Bois Chronicles, was on Friday, June 3, 2011 at the National Museum of Mexican Art.

I know exactly why I responded right away to C.C.’s invitation to participate in queer community theater: I want to be in spaces with older women of color. I have known C.C. for 15 years, and she has unbelievable social capital among queer women of color. C.C. snaps her fingers and 16 people, mostly not performers, show up for rehearsals and a performance of her theatrical exploration into the world of queer butches, transmen, and other women living and loving in a space she calls “masculine of center.”

In segregated Chicago, if I want my social world to include people who don’t look like me (especially elders), I have to go out of my way to get next to them. I am never finding them on a Wicker Park dance floor at 1:00 in the morning. The performance itself was a lesson in butch queer history and perspectives on female masculinity, but I did my real work in the car of an elder butch who lives north but conducts most of her social/political life on the south side. I am a sucker for a labrys pendant and a half-smoked cigar.

She was totally uninterested in me socially; I used the rides home to conduct an informal interview, getting her opinions on the trans liberation movement, Dyke March, androgyny, relationships, butch/femme dynamics, and white supremacy. I feel grateful to have had the chance to perform in such a poignant and politically challenging piece of theater, but even more grateful to share a bathroom mirror, elotes, and front seats with some of the Chicago queer matriarchs of color, whose work makes the world better (and sexier) for all of us.