By Ione Gildroy
In a recent interview on her upcoming film Nosferatu, actor Lily-Rose Depp told MTV that she likes to keep her boyfriend’s hair in a locket, adding, ‘I like lockets. I think they’re very romantic.’
Illustration by GAY45.
Depp’s use of the term “boyfriend” sent people into something of a frenzy, given that Depp has been dating rapper 070 Shake (Danielle Balbuena) since January 2023. Balbuena uses she/her pronouns, while acknowledging that she operates outside of a traditional gender binary, and hasn’t publicly labelled her sexuality other than saying ‘I don’t really identify myself as queer or gay or anything. I just like girls.’
‘Isn’t she dating a girl?’ one comment on the TikTok posted by MTV Reads. Other comments range from curiosity – ‘Who’s her boyfriend?’; to confusion – ‘Why does she say that?’; to uncomfortable comments on Balbuena’s gender and pronouns.
There were also some more supportive comments, including from MTV itself, which replied to a comment that questioned Depp’s use of the word boyfriend with: ‘As Lily said boyfriend, we’re respecting her terms.’ Other excited comments include: “Lesbian boyfriend representation on mainstream we are so back,” and quite simply: ‘Lesbian boyfriend lesbian boyfriend lesbian boyfriend lesbian boyfriend lesbian boyfriend lesbian boyfriend.’
So, what is a lesbian boyfriend? And where does this term come from?
To begin with, the idea of a lesbian boyfriend is not a particularly new idea. Throughout history, similar ideas have existed for as long as women have loved women. Queer couples have always played with gender expression and terminology in radical and non conventional ways.
In the 17th and 18th century a similar concept that existed was the term “female husband,” used to describe someone born as a woman but living as a man and married to a woman. As these people lived before identities such as trans or lesbian, we can’t be sure what they would’ve identified as today. But this way of living subversively, and with a female lover, sits in this bigger story of queer relationships rejecting traditional binaries.
Later on, in the 1920s in Harlem in New York, female blues singers in the neighbourhood’s Black lesbian scene wore typically masculine clothing, sometimes identified as “bulldykers,” the term used at the time for butch lesbians,” and even sang about loving women. Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, known as the “Mother of Blues,” sang ‘It’s true I wear a collar and a tie, … Talk to the gals just like any old man.’ “Mama” and “papa” relationships also emerged around this time in these communities, similar to what we see today as butch-femme dynamic. And so the dynamic continued.
Ma Rainey was known as the “Mother of American Blues” and was an early pioneer of the “lesbian boyfriend”.
The term “butch” wasn’t adopted by lesbians until working-class lesbians took it on in the 1940s. As relationships between butches and other women developed, a word was needed to describe these relationships they were forming, and so butch-femme was born. Joan Nestle, the founder of the Lesbian Herstory Archives, wrote in her essay Butch-Femme Relationships and Sexual Courage in the 1950s: ‘Butch-femme relationships, as I experienced them, were complex erotic statements… filled with a deeply lesbian language of stance, dress, gesture, loving, courage, and autonomy.’
While some argue that these relationships aim to uphold and mimic heterosexual relationships and stereotypes, others say that it challenges heterosexual stereotypes and makes queer women, especially femmes, more visible in society, a political act.
So how does all of this feed into Lily-Rose Depp’s use of the term “lesbian boyfriend”?
The idea of a lesbian boyfriend is undoubtedly related to this history of butch-femme relationships. It’s a playful way to blur the lines between gender roles and highlight how queer couples inherently reject traditional gender binaries.
It’s also a term which highlights gender non conforming lesbians, and shows how gender and sexuality aren’t necessarily related and how neither has to be rigid, formal, or really that serious. Gender can be played with in any way you want to use it, and lesbian boyfriends are just part of this. It’s not a term that’s meant to be particularly serious or even that meaningful, and is one that is used somewhat irreverently and flippantly.
If 070 Shake has chosen to be called Depp’s boyfriend, then that’s really the end of the story.
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