But what are “lesbian boyfriends”? If you haven’t heard the expression in recent days, know that it is making the rounds on the internet following an interview with Lily-Rose Depp for MTV, in the middle of promoting the film Nosferatuin which she refers to her girlfriend as her “boyfriend”. In the comments, fans are losing their minds and even questioning 070 Shake’s gender identity. Fortunately, the specialized media them made an article, which explains everything behind the expression “lesbian boyfriend”. Take out your notebooks.
“I have a necklace with a lock of my boyfriend’s hair inside”launches Lily-Rose Depp, leaving doubt as to the pronouns used by her lover, the American rapper 070 Shake, whom she has been seeing since January 2023. In an interview for Pitchfork in 2018, Danielle Balbuena (real name), who uses the pronoun “she”, already stated, about her gender identity and sexuality: “I don’t identify as queer. I just like girls.” But then, why “boyfriend”?
As the media explains them in his dedicated article, the term “boyfriend” goes hand in hand with the term “woman” in Sapphic language (read: linked to the lesbian world). Thus, in many female couples, we find a dynamic defining a very “feminine” person (embodied by the “woman”) and a very masculine person (embodied by the “boyfriend” or the “butch”). As the article points out, emblematic couples operating this “butchfemme” dynamic have made history, such as Jenny Shimizu and Madonna in the 1990s.
Still according to the article, this concept of “butchfemme” relationships first arose within the working-class lesbian community, notably in Harlem in the black community of the 1920s, in which female couples were most often composed of of two people nicknamed “dad” and “mama”, in accordance with this dynamic of “butch/femme” or “boyfriend/femme”. In 1992, writer and theorist Joan Nestle even studied and theorized the issue of “butchfemme” relationships in her work, which became manifesto, The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader.
However, the concept of “butchfemme” relationships has, for several decades, been called into question, notably by several feminist groups accusing it of being the result of patriarchal dynamics, favoring binary gender expressions and considered archaic and limiting. A fascinating text published in 2024 on the website lesbianherstory.com tells us more about the tensions that such a concept can give rise to, at a time when different and sometimes irreconcilable social classes are trying to (re)define it.
In short, when Lily-Rose Depp refers to her lover as her “boyfriend,” it doesn’t really say much about 070 Shake’s gender identity, nor the pronouns the rapper prefers to use. The expression is only part of a legacy of the queer community, where the attribution of so-called “gendered” roles within a lesbian relationship is common, and where dress or behavioral codes will thus favor the use of certain nicknames, such as “boyfriend”.
