Esther Godoy’s journey with the word “butch” began when they were a young queer person discovering their identity.
Esther Godoy, seen here in her home on September 8, 2024, is the founder of the multimedia project "Butch is Not a Dirty Word," which uplifts people who identify as butch across the gender spectrum.
Emily Hamilton / OPB
“I came out around 21, and I had always had this masculinity about me, but [at the time] I was too butch-phobic and far too ashamed to even think about leaning into it,” Godoy said. “I’d been ridiculed about it, I’d been teased about it. Like I was used to people being upset about my existence and my presence in their spaces.”
The 39-year-old Australian-born creative producer and photographer first started to reframe the way she thought about her masculine-of-center gender expression after a visit to Portland, Oregon, in her early 20s.
“As soon as I landed in Portland and I got into this van with this bunch of really riff-raff, kind of skater girls, I saw this butch lesbian who was just a little bit older than me,” Godoy remembered, “and she was really tall, and she was super well dressed, and I had never seen anything like it in my life. I was like, ‘I had no idea I could be like that.’”
“I was like, ‘dude, that’s what I am,’” Godoy said. “I’m gonna look like that person. I’m gonna lean into my masculinity. I’m gonna get my hair cut super short, and everything’s gonna be great for me. And when I got back to Melbourne, I did all those things and I felt awesome. And I went out into the queer community and it was terrible. Like, I have never felt so invisible in my life.”
The acceptance Godoy experienced in Portland was a stark contrast to her experiences back in Australia.
“[In Melbourne] there was still this element of, like, the butches were the older people, and they were the angry people, and they were the people you didn’t approach. Everybody thought of them as outdated, and everybody laughed at them and everybody was like … ‘we don’t wanna look like that. We don’t want anything to do with them.’ I would go out to queer bars and just hear people talking so negatively about these people,” Godoy said.
Photographer Esther Godoy (left) and her camera assistant, Murph Murphy, take a peek at what she's captured during a photoshoot on September 8, 2024.
Emily Hamilton / OPB
The rejection Godoy experienced “was just so painful. I think it’s one thing to be rejected by mainstream society because you can easily make sense of that. You’re like, ‘Wow, I’m a bit different.’ But when you find your people, and you find queer community and you find lesbian community, and they reject you too, it’s like a whole other level of, like, what’s wrong with me?” Godoy said.
But these contrasting experiences in Portland and Melbourne gave Godoy a unique perspective on butch identity that eventually sparked an idea for a project. “I wanted to show people in Melbourne how people thought about butch lesbians or butches in the States because I felt like they needed to know,” they said.
It started small, “originally, it was just supposed to be one little zine,” said Godoy.
But after the first release party in 2016, the idea grew. Now Godoy’s project is a fully fledged multimedia platform: a print and web magazine, an online presence, and Godoy also produces in-person community events in Portland and beyond. In their own words, “Butch is Not a Dirty Word” is the “world’s largest media resource dedicated to Butch identity, visibility and voice.”
“I’ve always wanted the platform to function as kind of like an older sibling energy because so many gender non-conforming and butch people grow up without anybody to really teach them or anybody like to learn from, to look up to and say that’s what I want to be,” they said.
Through storytelling and photographs, Godoy intimately documents, celebrates and uplifts butch voices and butch identity.
“I just think it’s awesome that she, like, they make everybody look extremely hot in every way,” said Silver Skye Medina, Portland artist and one of Godoy’s recent photo subjects. “It’s absurd. It’s insane to like, you don’t really see the beauty until you see it. And they’re capturing it so well in so many different ways,” said Medina.
“I do really love that Esther’s project feels like it really highlights different forms of butch-ness,” said Marisa Morse, another project participant. “It’s like, not every butch is the same. And that’s something I’ve really taken away from that page.”
“It’s not something that I planned to do,” said Godoy. “It happened by accident all along the way. And every time that I get frustrated with it or it’s too much work, or it’s like we don’t have the money for something, I go to put it down and every time I put it down, some external force will come in and, and be like, no, keep doing it, keep doing it, keep doing it.”
To hear more, check out OPB’s Evergreen podcast episode here.