Remembering Clark Henley’s ’80s cult classic The Butch Manual

Drag gloriously affirms to the world that gender is a construction of the hands and mind. Cosmetics, costumes, attitude – it’s all a matter of performing coded language and behaviour with style and verve. But where the feminine may be a flamboyant spectacle of glamour and panache, the masculine is reserved, a reversal of paradigms that requires no less strict discipline to pass. 

American artist, writer, and model Clark Henley (1950 – 1988) understood this better than most, authoring The Butch Manual: The New Drag and How to Do It! in 1982 with a knowing eye and a wisened pen. First published by Sea Horse Press, The Butch Manual became a cult classic, landing on multiple bestseller lists and winning the praise of critics. Today first editions sell for more than $500 (£370), a testament to the staying power of the masculine mystique. 

Now reprinted by Dark Entries Editions – the publisher behind Daniel Case’s captivating monograph Outdoor Sex – The Butch Manual is back in print after more than 40 years. It’s an idea whose time has come, again and again, in a culture hopelessly obsessed with rugged masculinity. 

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“No one is born Butch,” Henley says with the reassuring tones of one who dares to mix a pair of red pumps, sunglasses, and hot pants while pumping iron for the book cover. Butch takes work, and Henley has it covered from soup to nuts with chapters on body, movement, dressing, drugs, locales, and noises. 

But perhaps most concisely is the column titled ​“What is Butch?” – a study in the impossibility of gender as a fixed phenomenon. Sunglasses, moustaches, large pecs, sweat, poppers, talking dirty, and athlete’s foot are just a few signifiers that make the cut, alongside instant coffee and processed cheese. Suffice to say, Butch is designed to be affordable – the demand outpacing the supply, as it has been since the beginning of time.

“When Clark wrote this in the ​’80s, he was pointing out this masculine drag that gay men were doing by certain dress codes,” says writer and bookseller Brendan McHugh, who wrote the introduction to the new edition. ​“It was a subversion of the argument that masculinity is something for straight men and it’s a very serious thing inherent to who they are. There were gay clones, gay rodeo, Leathermen, gay preppies, and gay yuppies.” 

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Henley implicitly understood his reader’s desires, their wish to embody and/​or attract the quintessential red-blooded American male, but also have a familiar voice poke fun at gender as a hall of mirrors lost inside the house of love. He writes with whimsy and warmth that is pervasive in the photographs, at once instructional and absurd as a pair of leather chaps. 

But reading it with a modern lens, there’s an extra layer of poignancy. The Butch Manual was originally published in 1982, just before the AIDS pandemic began to take hold and ravage gay communities worldwide. In its pages, is a freedom in its prose and pictures, and a playfulness befitting a time of creativity and pride, in the preceding moment before it was stripped away – Henley himself passed away in 1988, due to AIDS complications.

Today, it’s a celebration of a writer who created a book unlike any other. ​“Clark had a wide array of influences,” McHugh says, pointing to children’s books, Edmund White’s 1980 opus, States of Desire: Travels in Gay America, and Strunk & White’s seminal 1959 English grammar guide, Elements of Style. Taken together, Henley strikes the perfect pose as an authority who is at once camp and endearingly sincere in his quest to unlock the mysteries of the hyper-masculine ideal.

The Butch Manual: The New Drag and How to Do It! is published by Dark Entries Editions.

Miss Rosen is a freelance arts and photography writer, follow her on X.

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