In Dykette, Jenny Fran Davis Makes Her Contribution to the Lesbian Lexicon

Jenny Fran Davis shows up to our interview with, as promised, a prime piece of book swag: a white baseball cap with Dykette, the name of her forthcoming novel out May 16, in hot pink cursive along the front. On the walk from her apartment to the coffee shop, she hadn’t quite worked up the nerve to don it, she said. “I was like, Am I a fraud? Can I really walk the walk and wear the hat? It’s blazing neon. I found that I couldn’t. And even though I was carrying it very prominently, men still hit on me! I thought that would be an interesting experiment. If you’re wearing the hat and men still hit on you, that might be the most dykette thing of all.” 

In the queer world, where language, concepts, and terms describing sexuality and gender are both supremely important and constantly in flux, new additions to the lexicon are lapped up feverishly. Davis’s Dykette reads like a taxonomy of queer theory, references, and history, while offering up wholly new words and takes on contemporary lesbian life. Chief among them is the eponymous dykette, which Davis describes as “a dyke with frills and bows and ruffles. An accessorized, aestheticized, decorated dyke. The most extreme, exaggerated version of a femme. So exaggerated that it kind of perverts itself and becomes weird.” 

At the center of the novel is Sasha, an unapologetically fashion-obsessed femme and self-styled dykette, whose preoccupations include queer tropes, her pug Vivienne, out-femme-ing everyone around her, and her “boyfriend” Jesse (a he/him dyke). At the beginning of the book, Sasha overhears Jesse say some less-than-flattering things about her in a therapy session, right as they are about to join two other queer couples on an upstate getaway. The ensuing trip is a blur of intoxicated dinners, dysfunctional relationship dynamics, major/minor infidelities, performance art, and endless vibes, all read through Sasha’s perspective, which is not exactly reliable. “Part of being a dykette is being in thrall to someone else’s reality, getting to reality by way of someone else’s perspective. It’s very unstable. Which is fun, but also scary, right? To put your reality in someone else’s hands, especially masc hands.”

The precursor to Dykette is Davis’s 2020 essay for Los Angeles Review of Books, “High Femme Camp Antics,” a manifesto and polemic that announced a new kind of lesbian archetype, an over-the-top femme who, when their desire is too big or complicated or unsavory to be satisfied, performatively acts out excessive femininity. Examples, as she writes in the article, include “Alice B. Toklas replacing the word ‘may’ with ‘can’ every time it appeared while copyediting Gertrude Stein’s Stanzas in Meditation because Stein’s ex-lover was named May. The top-bitch attitude of Glee’s Santana, played by the late Naya Rivera, along with her smirky catchphrase, ‘wanky.’”

Sasha was born out of Davis’s essay, which went viral, with Davis recalling one tweet calling it an “apologia for lesbian abuse” and other readers lauding it as a true investigation into the weird unpredictability of lesbian femme logic. Though I’d be hesitant to call myself a dykette (out of fear I’m not femme enough, which Davis says “is so dykette” of me), I felt extraordinarily seen by the notions of lesbianism laid bare in Dykette. 

Vanity Fair spoke with Davis about trends in queer fiction, femme studies, and the “spiritual center” of her novel. 

The below interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. 

Vanity Fair: So much of queer fiction seems to be acutely sincere, or only about oppression and hardship. It’s as if we believe that unless we’re peddling our suffering, we don’t have literary value, or won’t be taken seriously. There’s a place for all types of queer literature but I’m very excited that you aren’t doing that, and that you wrote a fun, funny lesbian book. 

Jenny Fran Davis: It never occurred to me to write a book about gay people where they’d suffer—why would I? And it’s not that my life or my friends’ lives have been devoid of suffering. But it’s much more funny than it is sad to be gay. We are hilarious. We’re always laughing and having fun—whether we’re laughing at or with each other. There’s a moment in Dykette when Jules’s parents call on New Year’s Day and brag about how much fun they’re having on their holiday cruise, and Jules hangs up the phone and is ranting and raving to the group and says, with bloodshot eyes, clearly traumatized from the week: “We had so much fun! They can’t even imagine how much fun we had!” A humorless butch is 10 times funnier than a straight man. It just seems like the ratio is all wrong in these tragic tales. I think the book is a rejection of the humorless, moralizing, holier than thou tone in literature that I see so much of. A friend of mine said that Dykette is a love letter to our community, but it’s also a gentle spank. I think that was kind of the perfect way to put it. It’s humor and callousness and frivolity are kind of spanking our culture to say: It’s okay to have fun and be beautiful and sexy and not be so serious and suffering and weighty.  

It brings up a really good question about seriousness, both of the book and Sasha as a character. Firstly, can a book be funny and serious at the same time? And also, when it comes to Sasha, we often don’t know if she is being serious. For example, this moment: “She couldn’t believe straight girls made such a big deal about never faking it, like faking it was anti-feminist. Faking it was easy and fun. She sighed cutely into Jesse’s sweaty hairline for good measure.”