Review: The Swashbuckler, by Lee Lynch

Reviewed by Morgayne
     In her book The Swashbuckler, Lee Lynch writes a beautiful story about pre-Stonewall Lesbians and Gays in New York. Her characters come alive in Provincetown and on the streets of Greenwich Village where people went who didn’t fit in anywhere else. There we are privy to the various substrata of diversity including the extreme role-playing of the Butch/Femme lesbians, lesbian hippies and gay men who want to find boyfriends. Lynch’s brilliant use of the language unique to each of these subcultures paints a vivid picture for our voyeuristic pleasure and her prose are dynamically philosophical and admirably poetic.
     She brings her 4’11” swashbuckling protagonist, Frenchy Tonneau, to life on a Saturday night swaggering and diddy-bopping her way to a bar on Greenwich Avenue. It was a walk that angered straights and provoked threats, but it was her own natural walk. Frenchy’s entire life is about being gay. At twenty-one, she is a stone butch who isn’t the marrying kind and who lights femme’s cigarettes and opens their doors. She wears her hair in a pompadour which she combs into a ducks ass at the nape of her neck. Yeah, she was a bulldyke, and every Saturday night she loved being a bulldyke in a bulldyke’s world (p.2).
     At the end of each Saturday night Frenchy has to submit to the restraints of society by combing out the pompadour and taming her natural walk before she gets to her subway stop. The Bronx is home to Frenchy and her widowed mother who is unaware of her daughter’s sexual preference. Looking in the mirror French hates what she sees. Gone is her bold arrogant look that brings women to her arm, replaced by a wary expression. Frenchy works in a grocery store and she fears she’ll lose her job if they know her personal truth, so only on Saturday night does she live as her authentic self.
     After so aptly painting a picture of Frenchy’s reality, Lynch confounds us by introducing us to an unwed mother, Mercedes, who, like Frenchy is Butch. The idea of imagining two Butches together is like imagining two straight men together, it just doesn’t work, but Lynch makes us believe it, delights us when she has them fall in love. Here Lynch becomes the philosopher who easily alters the dynamics of the “set in stone” butch world. Mercedes says, “I see all of a sudden that every butch is a femme; every femme is a butch.” In the end we learn that love trumps any well-played role.
     The Swashbuckler was well written and fun to read. I have to say I’m more than a little enamored with Lynch’s story-telling ability. The bars where Frenchy met her friends and picked up women came to life. The political implications of being openly lesbian in the 1960’s and ‘70s left me afraid at times for the women in this story. Having been stationed in the Army in Texas in the 1970’s I completely related to Lynch’s tale because I faced the danger of my own dyke walk. And like Frenchy my courage came not in being unafraid; but rather in facing the fear everyday and honoring my natural walk anyway. Don’t miss reading this classic novel!