The case for stud chivalry

or "why Black femme-ininity is worth the extra minute in the cold"

I wanted to use the Labrys butch flag since we’re discussing chivalry and knighthood at length, but its TERF-y history made me pause. Not sure how reclaimed it is, so I chose not to spread it until I can confirm.

Origins of Chivalry

The word “chivalry” is French in origin, referring to the soldiers on horses. This later became generalized with the image of noble knights in the European imagination. They originally ravaged villages and especially the women, but the noble classes like the clergy and the poets reshaped their violence into something more high-minded and moral. Now, chivalry was a particular set of manners and romantic gestures that proved devotion, protection, and allegiance.

Chivalric Terror in the South

Of course, just as European chivalry wrought terror in the name of Christianity and civility, so did the Southern “gentlemen” of the American South. In this iteration of the delusion, the white men of the planter class thought themselves to be protectors of the white woman from the Black majority. Instead, they enacted violence both physical and sexual on Black women themselves, while simultaneously believing that Black men were the hypersexual and violent monsters. The Lost Cause directly leading to the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan being founded after the Civil War laid the foundation for another century more of racialized and sexualized violence through Jim Crow. This, in turn, led to the Great Migration.

Stud and its Origin in the Midwest/South

Black Americans fled the South in two waves of the Great Migration, first in 1910 into the Great Depression then again starting around WWII and into the 60s. Midwest cities like Chicago, Cleveland, Indianapolis, Detroit, and St. Louis saw an increase in Black residents as destinations for new opportunities and more safety than the South’s lynchings demonstrated. Since these cities had Black residents from both waves, and even before Emancipation in some cases, Black life in these environments was mostly still segregated like the South, but with race riots and European immigrant racism instead. Racism persisted, and so did expanded freedom for African-Americans in the Midwest. This general segregation extended into our queer life, where Black and white lesbians develop language and terms in tandem.

The earliest recorded usage of the word “stud” relating to the lesbian community was recorded by Ethel Sawyer Adolphe, a heterosexual Black woman from Memphis who moved to St. Louis to study graduate-level sociology at Washington University. She wrote her thesis called “A Study of a Public Lesbian Community” about the Black lesbian community in a North St. Louis neighborhood and published it in 1965. In this community, masculine presenting lesbians were self-identifying as “studs” and feminine presenting lesbians labeled themselves “fish.” The Pruitt-Igoe complex where their community was based was a public housing project built in 1954 that became predominantly Black by the mid-60s. This was the community where stud is tracked back to, but Black lesbian writer Anita Cornwell has also documented usage of the word in her lesbian circles in the 50s and 60s.

Butch Chivalry

Queerness collides with masculinity and race as butch chivalry is a well-documented aspect to butch-femme lesbian subculture. While I could wax poetic as to why butches and studs are more alike than different in this article, I will instead succinctly say that we share in our working class backgrounds, gender non-conformity, and love of femmes. For our daring choice to assert that our world is centered around other lesbians, we are inherently gender non-conforming in a patriarchal world that insists women and femininity must be in service of men. Lesbian chivalry can be a beautiful gift to our partners that allows them space for femme-ininity and reclaiming womanhood for “fish” particularly.

Studly Courtship with Black Femmes

As a stud who exclusively dates Black women, the courtship, etiquette, and romance are all part of the fun of dating intraracially. Bulldagger, a Harlem Renaissance-borne term in the Black community for masculine women associated with “physical strength, sexual prowess, emotional reserve, and butch chivalry,” is something of a grandmother to the term stud, predating it by about four decades. This, along with many self-identified studs being from the South or only a couple generations removed, once more strengthens the connection between studs and chivalry working to help our Black femmes reclaim their womanhood and femininity, as it has always been denied to them in the American project of white supremacy and patriarchy.

When I’m out with another fine Black American Princess, I know that we are usually going to draw some level of attention and stares due to my obvious gender non-conformity. Other times, we are catcalled for our refusal to perform the kind of femininity or womanhood that the men want to see. If a man steps to my lady, I have to defend her honor as a lesbian and a Black woman and respond to that challenge, even though she can handle a man’s bruised ego all her own. As a femme beauty, the constant coming out again, invisibility, and disbelief in her lesbianism are par for the course. As a stud and womanist, I make it my business that she’s respected as a Black lesbian woman, a la Queen Latifah’s “U.N.I.T.Y.”

While stud chivalry and general acts of service for my eventual Black femme partner are specific to each person, I have a few things that I enjoy doing the most:

• Opening the door

• Pulling out the chair

• Pumping gas

• Taking out the trash

• Walking on the street side

• Carrying bags

• Using my manners

I enjoy the chivalry not just because of the historic context of Black femmes and their denied womanhood, but also because I love that my chivalrous acts signal that indeed this is my sweetheart, not just a gal pal. I love feeling seen in love. Is chivalry benevolent sexism? Yes. Will I opt out in the name of “I’m just a girl in boy clothes” feminism? Absolutely not.