Photo credit: Anthony Dimaano

Cole is a PhD student in Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She has an MSc from the London School of Economics. For the past decade she’s worked as a community facilitator, strategist, and consultant. In 2009 she launched the Brown Boi Project, a leadership development program that bridges gender and racial dialogues between masculine of center womyn, trans men, queer men, and straight men of colour. This work is a reflection of Cole’s deep commitment to bridging academic discourse and social movements of change, rooted in communities of colour. Cole is a Rotary International Ambassadorial Scholar and winner of the Harry S. Truman Scholarship and the Spirit of Dolores Huerta Award.

Cole’s piece for Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme is called “Masculine of Centre, Seeks Her Refined Femme.” She described it as: “an exploration into intersectionality and privilege from a really different vantage point. It originated from a problem - how do you build community if you don’t have a language to build community? - and led to a journey and a discovery that I’m still on. How do we allow language to become a tool that is empowering instead of disempowering and marginalizing? I see this piece as an open invitation to a conversation.”

What made you want to be part of this anthology?

I’m really excited that my piece is in the book because I think that there is a history of folks of colour, particularly radical queer feminists of colour, who have straddled an academic and social justice divide that continues to persist today. I want to be one of those people who straddles both worlds.

This book is an opportunity to build on this history, ensuring that the knowledge we create as queer folks and as people of colour is not taken out of our communities. What’s really exciting about this piece and this book is that it’s leaving a path that others can follow and build on and take to new places that we don’t even envision now.

Who are your butch and/or femme role models and why?

I always think about it in terms of my masculinity. I often say, and I feel like this is really true, there have been so many people who have let me borrow bits from their masculinity over my life, to kind of compile myself. That has included the very early butches who snuck me into clubs when I had no language for who I was, to the men of colour in my life who have laid down a framework that’s really powerful, that’s rooted in community and family, that has helped me to decide the kind of masculine of centre person I want to be. I feel like all of those people would never meet each other but they do through me.

If you could say one thing to future butches and femmes, what would it be?

My piece is an invitation and it’s also a really powerful intergenerational conversation and dialogue. We build a path out of only that which we can see. We are taking this conversation and this dialogue and the community as far as we can, and our goal is to be committed to doing that work, and to do it with as much intention as possible, to know that we are preparing the ground for you to take that work to ultimately where it will go. Life is so much an evolution. You should always feel inspired by who we are but never bound by our legacy.