Esther Godoy’s project “Butch is Not a Dirty Word” is in danger of disappearing.

“Every month that goes by, I get more and more stressed out that it could just [get taken away] at any time,” Godoy said. “That’s where we’re at. We have a bunch of flags. We have a bunch of warnings. Literally could be any day. It might not happen. Might happen tomorrow.”

Godoy, who was recently featured on OPB’s Oregon Art Beat, has been sharing her work that features queer people who identify with the word “Butch” in digital spaces and on social media platforms like Instagram for over a decade.

Godoy’s project is a collection of photography and storytelling that she says “intimately documents, celebrates and uplifts Butch voices and Butch identity.”

The photos are a combination of portrait photography and photo journalism, often capturing people in their homes or in physical settings that are important to them.

Godoy often leans into softness, playfulness, and other traits that are less often associated with stereotypical masculinity.

In the next phase of her project, Godoy is aiming to take power back from traditional social media sites that are censoring queer art and stories, by building her own independent digital platform.

Ultimately Godoy hopes to create a freely accessible archive that shares queer art and documents queer history.

LGBTQ communities’ uneasy relationship with social media

Social media was never a perfect fit for this work.

“Our intent was never to have that be the hub for what we do,” Godoy said, “but as things slowly progressed, that’s where people’s attention was, that’s just where everyone was consuming media. And so we followed suit.”

In recent months, Godoy started to notice an alarming increase in the censorship of queer stories.

“Since November (2024), I’ve seen it escalate so intensely,” she said. “We can’t really even use the words butch, lesbian, or dyke in any context without getting flagged [as sexually explicit].”

To illustrate the extent of the censorship, Godoy points to a recent “Butch is Not a Dirty Word” story she posted on Instagram about a high school teacher named Eva Gonzales-Ruskiewicz.

“[The post] used some of those words [like butch, lesbian and dyke] in the context of the story,” said Godoy, “and it got flagged as sexually explicit, which is crazy because there was nothing to do with sex in the story at all. They were talking about professionalism and their identity, and how that translates into their work life… Totally G-rated, completely G-rated.”

Though Godoy has noticed a recent escalation of censorship, this is not a new phenomenon in online spaces.

For example, in recent years the lesbian community on TikTok started to use the coded term “le$bean” to avoid content moderation and censorship of their stories.

This new internet slang term spread onto other social media platforms and is also occasionally spoken aloud (pronounced “le dollar bean”). It may sound silly — and can be used in a joking way — but, it points to a disturbing trend.

“When those words are deemed as offensive on their own or they’re deemed as sexually explicit on their own, like literally the way we’re allowed to talk about ourselves… what we’re allowed to document changes,” Godoy said.

And in the case of Godoy’s work, it’s a darkly ironic development for a project called “Butch is Not a Dirty Word.”

These efforts to block or conceal certain expressions remind Godoy of a darker time in recent history.

“It’s oddly reminiscent of how people used to think about queer people in general, which was, like, sexually deviant and sordid and pedophiles…”

Godoy’s project has also documented the way conversations around gender and identity have broken into mainstream society and media over the last 10 years.

More broadly, “Butch is Not a Dirty Word” has become a unique historical record and archive of queer and trans history.

“Each story is its own individual story, but you really start to see these larger themes, that paint a portrait of the last 10 years and including culture and gender and how those things have progressed,” said Godoy.

A new platform that celebrates queer storytelling

With amplified pressure to save her project, Godoy returned to an idea she first started to work on in her spare time a few years ago: building her own platform and leaving established social media.

“What is a way we can divest from that as the centerpiece of what we do and go out on our own, and lead by example, and create an example of what’s possible?” she asked.

“Because I know all queer creatives are feeling this,” said Godoy, “but we’re also kind of sitting there passively logging into social media anyway, even though we know we’re being used.”

Godoy said it’s an unfair exchange between LGBTQ artists and the corporations that control the social media platforms that millions of people are using.

“All the people’s attention that we are able to curate, all of the content, all of the art, all of the energy… we’re not making any money,” said Godoy. “I’m feeding it right into the big tech machine. So somebody is making money off of it.”

And now Godoy feels a sense of urgency to transition her project to a new home.

“Looking at the censorship and the [Trump] administration and the way trans people are being spoken about, I’d like to try and get this done by the end of the year.”

Godoy is actively working to create this new, independent digital platform, where she can showcase photography and stories: part art, part archive and freely accessible to everybody.

“I have this vision for ‘Butch is Not a Dirty Word’ being a living archive effectively, that interviews and documents hundreds, thousands of people, in the most honest way possible,” she explained.

Divesting from platforms like Instagram gives Godoy the power to preserve queer history.

And, Godoy’s background in the creative and tech industries means they have the skills to see this vision through.

“That’s where my work has always lived, in the middle, like, where does the technical and the artistic collide? There’s no reason why we can’t be using the internet as a canvas in that way, as an art canvas,” she said.

“I can open up a website and I see, you know, hundreds or thousands of people that look like me, and I can easily filter between people that have the same ethnic identities, or maybe the same class background or the same gender identity…”

Ideally, Godoy says the future archive could provide artful, gallery like experiences for audiences across the globe.

“If I do an art gallery show in Portland, Oregon, no one in Barcelona can see it,” they said, “but if I can present it online beautifully in a way that you would consume it in an art gallery, then so many more people all over the world get to have that really beautiful experience of integrating something and experiencing the work and the art, not just scrolling through it.”

“We were here and this is what we looked like. This is what we sounded like. This is what our lives were like. No one can really rewrite that if we own that.”

To learn more about Godoy’s project, you can check out the Oregon Art Beat episode. Or see it play at the QDoc Film Festival on Sunday, Oct. 26.

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2025/10/26/esther-godoy-new-queer-storytelling-platform/