Course:CSIS200/2025/Starry Nights, Starry Fights: The Lesbian Star Tattoo in Post-War American Bar Space

A modern iteration of the lesbian star tattoo, done in a nautical style. See media attribution below.

Introduction

“...the cultural push to be identified as lesbians— or at least different—all the time was so powerful that it generated a new form of identification among the tough bar lesbians: a star tattoo on the top of the wrist, which was usually covered by a watch. This was the first symbol of community identity that did not rely on butch-fem imagery” (p. 189).

As the above quote from seminal lesbian historians Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline Davis denotes, the history of the “lesbian star tattoo” – and the dimensions of racialized, classed, and gendered desire that surround it – is a complex one, a representational question of identity that spans both generations and geographic locations. While some historians (namely Kennedy and Davis themselves) have pinned its origins to the working-class town of Buffalo, New York (NY) in the early post war period, both scholarly and community narratives that document its inception are scarce at best. According to Kennedy and Davis’s account, as discussed in their ethnographic overview of lesbian bar life in Buffalo from 1930-1960, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community (1993), the star tattoo, as a covert symbol of lesbian identity, can be traced to “an evening of revelry in the late 1950’s, when a few butches trooped over to ‘Dirty Dick’s’ tattoo parlour on Chippewa Street and had the tiny blue five-pointed star put on their wrists" (p. 189). While the creation of this practice may appear to encapsulate a singular narrative of sexual affirmation in the post-war period, its connections to structures of gender, race, and class conceptually complicate this monolithic account, providing an image of the star tattoo as a representational project deeply embroiled in larger systems of power, autonomy and categorization. This page will explore how the star tattoo, as a symbol of covert lesbian self-identification and desire, operates as a vessel for the exploration of gender transgression and working class solidarity in the sapphic bar spaces of post-war America, paying special attention to its origins in the Buffalo context.

Flagging and Erotic Identity Formation: Histories of Physical Desire

The "hanky code" in action, signifying the wearer's interest in fisting a partner. See media attribution below.

While the practice of flagging is most prolifically linked to the gay male “hanky code” of the 1970s and 80s – a complex system involving the use of erotically charged, differently coloured handkerchiefs to communicate queer identity and sexual desire – the symbolic representation of sensuality and identity has long been utilized by lesbians, sapphics, and other minoritized queer communities. As observed by lesbian scholar and fashion historian Eleanor Medhurst, lesbian flagging constitutes a practice of belonging that can be traced back to at least the early 20th century, wherein Parisian lesbians adopted the violet as a signifier of lesbian identity, a tribute to the writings of the seminal poet Sappho. This practice of symbolic meaning-making creates a temporal throughline of queerness, entering the digital lesbian spaces of the modern day through contemporary iterations like the TikTok-famous “lesbian earrings” (p. 145). Lesbian flagging practices draw on both historical and current narratives of sapphic identity to “carry the weight of sexual communications” (p. 142), frequently disparate symbols coalescing under a broader desire to be perceived as lesbian and visually intervene in heterosexual space.

Karl Maria Kertbeny, Austrian-born Hungarian journalist responsible for coining the terms heterosexual and homosexual that were later co-opted by European sexologists. See media attribution below.

Flagging	Drawing from the work of Eleanor Medhurst, flagging will be defined as “a way to understand the intentional choices made by lesbians and other LGBTQ+ people when signalling personal identities and intra-community solidarities through dress” (p. 8). For a more comprehensive overview of flagging, please see Elizabeth Akanbi’s page, The Carabiner as Sapphic Symbol.

As a project critically involved in the creation of a distinct “lesbian identity,” flagging’s role in queer self-identification is only as old as identity categorizations of sexuality itself. This is not to say that lesbianism, or representations of sexual desire through clothing and other personal affects, are new practices, but rather to acknowledge that the hetero/homosexual identification binary, as it is understood today, is a relatively recent invention. As the work of queer historian Meg-John Barker and cartoonist Jules Scheele illustrates, heterosexuality and homosexuality, as identity terms attached to a specific set of behaviours, were the direct result of late-19th and early 20th-century European sexology, a psychoscientific intervention into erotic behaviour that completely recontextualized sensuality on a global scale. Despite this transnational shift, early conceptions of homosexual identity largely focused on male sex acts, repressing narratives of female same-sex desire and erotic connection. Within this burgeoning historical climate, the strong desire to “be identified as lesbians” (p. 189) that Kennedy and Davis note in their discussion of the star tattoo in the early post-war period makes sense: a cry for community cohesion during an era of hyper-invisibility and emergent identity categorization.

Female Masculinities: Tattoos and the Butch Body

A tattooed sailor aboard the USS New Jersey in the intra-war period. See media attribution below.

As an important “symbolic neighborhood of lower class masculinity" (p. 33) tattoos have a long, gendered history, particularly within the context of class and social mobility in the intra- and post-war periods. Innately linked with the performance of a “hypermasculinity worthy of reflection” (p. 53)and a working-class (specifically sailor), imprisoned, or gang lifestyle, the gendered and classed dimensions of tattooing have served to construct the tattoo as a marker of both collective and individual identity, of shared economic status and perceived “manhood.”

Female Masculinity

A seminal theory from transmasculine* scholar Jack Halberstam (1998), female masculinity describes “the rejected scraps of dominant masculinity in order that male masculinity may appear to be the real thing” (p. 1). In this context, female masculinity specifically refers to butch lesbian masculinity, but female masculinity more generally describes deviant masculinities that fall outside normative understandings of masculinity as inherently associated with cisgender manhood.

While this visual language of distance from the social mainstream creates a strong ingroup identity, it often obscures the use of the tattoo in confirming alternative forms of masculinity – particularly the female masculinities embodied by butch, stud, and gender non-conforming lesbians. Indeed, the performance of a distinctly female masculinity within the context of recognizably lesbian relations is often solidified through the use of the tattoo as a bodily modification practice. This is a custom with great historical precedence: as reflected by the writings of literature scholar and pornography star Samuel Steward on his experience working as a tattoo artist in Wisconsin in the 1950s and 60s, “whenever [the butch lesbians] came in they frightened the sailors and many of the city-boys out of the shop” (p. 129). Even the barrier to entry for getting tattooed was a chance for butches to display their masculinity: while Steward required heterosexual women to be “twenty-one, married and accompanied by [their] husband, with documentary proof to show their marriage” (p. 129) to receive service, lesbians were an “exception…they [only] had to be over twenty-one and prove it" (p. 129).

This historical background illuminates what many lesbian communities have known for generations – that both the practice of tattooing, and of occupying space in tattoo culture, are  inherent displays of female (and specifically butch) masculinity. When applied to the context of the star tattoo, this history actualizes Medhurst’s observation that while “the star was not only worn by butches, a butch legacy is there" (p. 149). As a symbolic display of desire, the star tattoo is inseparable from larger narratives of gender and masculinity in a post-war era, shaped by the way gendered actors move through spaces of bodily modification and visually mark their bodies as outside societal norms.

The "Tough Bar Lesbian": Race, Class, and Desire in Lesbian Space

The former locations of Dirty Dick's Tattoo Parlour (white), where the first star tattoo was done, and Bingo's Café (green), a famous lesbian bar in Buffalo considered to be the quintessential bar for "tough bar lesbians." See media attribution below.

Displays of this specific butch female masculinity are particularly prominent within bar space, as is evidenced by Kennedy and Davis’s construction of the “tough bar lesbian” – a “new style of butch” who “dressed in working-class male clothes for as much of the time as she possibly could, and went to the bar every day, not just on weekends. She…was street-wise and fought back physically when provoked by straight society or by other lesbians; her presence anywhere meant potential ‘trouble'" (p. 68). Typically working-class, “tough bar lesbians” frequented cheaper establishments, ones that they secured as lesbian havens through their “willingness to defend lesbian space and physically confront the straight world" (p. 70), often through violent brawls within the bars themselves. These butches transformed lesbian bar space, cementing “seedier” bars like Bingo’s Café – where the star tattoo was born – as critical hubs of lesbian social life.

With working-class clientele at their forefront, lesbian bars became almost instinctively classed. Categorized as distinctly “rough and tough” spaces, “entering the bars – or more importantly, identifying with the people who frequented them – challenged the class identity of middle-class women" (p. 2). Many middle-class lesbians drew staunch lines between their own identities and those of whom they deemed “bar people," viewing bar life as “vulgar” and wholly inconsequential to their social networks. Despite the fact that many middle-class lesbians of the post-war period lacked key aspects of social mobility awarded to the middle-class through marital status, like “a husband earning a ‘family wage,’ children, [and] family vacations" (p. 5), middle-class lesbianism organized staunchly outside bar space, its proximity to working-class life threatening to their middle-class identities.

While this meant that lesbian bars often became sites of working-class community and solidarity, these spaces were certainly not utopian or inclusive for all. Like most American establishments in the early to mid post-war period, lesbian bar spaces still operated along racialized lines, often enforcing segregationist politics that either severely limited or completely banned BIPOC entry. Within the geographical and temporal context of Buffalo, NY – as the site from which the star tattoo emerged – the existence of racial hierarchies in bar space is relatively well documented, particularly through oral histories and life narratives. Joan, a Black lesbian living and working in Buffalo in the 1950s, speaks to this prevalent phenomenon, noting that racialization and segregation in lesbian bar space was a normalized practice of everyday exclusion that pushed BIPOC lesbians to create their own gathering spaces and social circles, often completely separated from white ones. When BIPOC (and specifically Black) lesbians were tangentially accepted into these spaces, they were often constructed as sexual threats to white safety: as Joan (1978) describes, “when black studs were coming to the bar, [white] people would just kind of put their arms around their woman and stuff… [as if] they were just coming there to snatch up their woman" (00:14:56).

04:33-05:18 nuances this discussion of racial exclusion in bar space, discussing the "race-based door quota" many lesbian bars of the time employed.

Illuminating the prevalent whiteness of the post-war Buffalo lesbian scene, Joan’s lived experiences echo researcher Anna Blatto’s assertion that “Buffalo-Niagara is one of the most racially segregated metropolitan regions in the nation" (p. 2). In this racialized context, it is thus important to note that the star tattoo, as a flagging practice emerging from a white lesbian bar at the height of American segregation, acts as not just a symbol of deviant gender and class expression, but of racial exclusion and access.

Conclusion

Although the legacies of desire that structure the star tattoo are oft forgotten in a contemporary era, reviewing their lengthy history provides key insight into the development of flagging practice and lesbian identity in a post-war American context. The interactions of race, class, and gender within bar space, from which this symbolic fashion emerged, invite a critical (re)examination of flagging practices as inherently entrenched in their respective sociohistorical contexts. Following the theorizations of sociologist Surya Monro, who states that “sexual and gender categories are historically and socially contingent” (p. 11), understanding the star tattoo as both a product and representation of the specific time and place from which it was forged is key in avoiding an incomplete picture of sexual agency, personhood, and eroticism that centres contemporary narratives. Like other flagging practices, the star tattoo exists within a contextual continuum, representing a newly emergent desire for external lesbian identification amidst working-class solidarities, butch female masculinities, and segregationist racial practices, set within the cultural backdrop of a newly emergent urban hub.

Author Bio

Charlie Sutherland is a transmasculine*, genderqueer, and disabled white settler on the stolen lands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, səlilwətaɬ, and Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Nations. Majoring in First Nations and Indigenous Studies with a minor in Critical Sexuality Studies at the University of British Columbia, Charlie’s research interests include trans* representational politics, archival justice, and female masculinities.

Media Attributions

Nautical star. Photo by Tina. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nautical_star.jpg. Licensed under a CC (Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic) license.

A red handkerchief symbolizes interest in fisting in the handkerchief code. Photo by OiYoiYoink. File:Red-Hanky-Handkerchief-Code.jpg. Licensed under a CC0 (Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication) license.

Much tattooed sailor aboard the USS New Jersey 1944. Photo by Fenno Jacobs. File:Much tattooed sailor aboard the USS New Jersey 1944.gif. Public domain.

Former locations of Dirty Dick's Tattoo Parlour and Bingo's Café in Buffalo, NY. Photo by CharlieSutherland (self-upload). File:Former locations of Dirty Dick's Tattoo Parlour and Bingo's Café in Buffalo, NY.jpg. Licensed under a CC BY-SA (Creative Commons License, Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0) license.

Karl Maria Kertbeny (ca 1865). Author unknown. File:Karl Maria Kertbeny (ca 1865).jpg. Public domain.

Marketing the Rainbow. (2022, December 11). Jägermeister & The Lesbian Bar Project: Documentary (2021) [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/5tJB7AQnmC8?si=KDAOYTEKB_xCgDOK