Presentation: The Butch Manual

The late San Francisco-based artist and writer Clark Henley wrote the popular, satirical book The Butch Manual. Although sadly out of print, the book remains a coveted treasure among collectors. Henley’s writing and art appeared in The Advocate, Christopher Street, and L.A. Edge among others. Before his untimely death, Clark was an active participant in San Francisco’s community of people living with AIDS. Writer and Henley biographer Brendan McHugh will offer a re-introduction to this seminal book and Henley’s visual art, followed by a humorous interactive performances to find out just how butch a person can be with poets Scout Faller and Eric Sneathan to explore the themes of the book, mainly that masculinity is truly just another form of drag. 

Brendan McHugh is a San Francisco based writer and bookseller. He was a 2023-2024 Friends of the San Francisco Public Library Brown Handler resident. You can read his work at Brokeass Stuart, KQED, washingtonpost.com, JSTOR Daily, and Catapult among others.  

Eric Sneathen is a poet and queer literary historian living in Oakland. He is the author of Don't Leave Me This Way (Nightboat Books, 2023), Minor Work (MO0ON/IO, 2021), and Snail Poems (Krupskaya, 2016) and he co-edited the selected fiction of Camille Roy, Honey Mine (Nightboat Books, 2021). His essays and interviews have been published by Jacket2, SF MoMA's Open Space, Sillages critiques and Social Text Online.

Scout Faller is a Pushcart-nominated poet and recipient of the Leijia Hanrahan Scholarship for Communist Women who Smoke. Their work has been shortlisted for the Surging Tide Writing Contest. Scout is rarely bored. They live in San Francisco with their girlfriend and their cat.