They just keep changing
Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg (1993)
More than any of the books I’ve written about so far, the reputation of Stone Butch Blues precedes it. Talk to enough book-loving queer women and trans people—or just find your way onto queer BookTok—and you’ll learn that Stone Butch Blues is considered something between a cult classic and a sacred text. Writing for The Atlantic, Shauna Miller calls it “the heartbreaking holy grail of butch perspective.” In Slate, June Thomas goes further, writing that, “[o]n the rare occasions when people have unironically handed me a book and declared that it changed, or perhaps even saved, their life, it has almost always been a dog-eared copy of Stone Butch Blues.” A panel assembled by The New York Times Style Magazine gave the book the top spot on their list of The 25 Most Influential Works of Postwar Queer Literature and I challenge you to find a listicle about queer classics in which it doesn’t appear.1
That being said, I imagine there are many of you who aren’t familiar with the book, so here’s a quick summary: Jess Goldberg grows up in a working class family in 1940s Buffalo, where she struggles to conform to the rigid gender norms of the era. After leaving home at 16, she finds her way into the local lesbian bar scene, working a string of blue collar jobs by day and coming into her identity as a butch by night.
Having already suffered a violent rape while at school, she experiences similar sexual violence and brutality at the hands of police, who regularly raid the lesbian bars and toss the butches in jail for the crime of wearing fewer than three articles of women’s clothing in public. Amid this increasing level of violence, Jess finds some stability through her relationship with Theresa, a femme she meets at a factory job. They have a few good years together, even holding a marriage ceremony at the local bar, but are ultimately torn apart by shifts in lesbian and feminist culture as well as Jess’s own confusion around her gender.
In one of Stone Butch Blues’ pivotal scenes, Jess gets home from work to find Theresa in a downcast mood, having just returned from a consciousness raising group on the local college campus. Instead of being welcomed into the nascent second wave feminist movement, members of the group mocked her for being a femme, declared that she was brainwashed, and that butches are no better than male chauvinist pigs. Jess responds with confusion, “Wait a minute… We’re too masculine and you’re too feminine? Whatdya have to do, put your index fingers in a meter and test in the middle?” Their conversation continues,
Theresa patted my arm. ”Things are changing,“ she said.
”Yeah,“ I told her, ”but sooner or later they'll change back.“
”Things don't change back,“ she sighed, ”they just keep changing.“
And they do. Jess decides to medically transition, hoping that she’ll be able to live a safer life as a man, and Theresa breaks up with her. Jess begins taking testosterone and undergoes breast reconstruction. Finally able to pass at work, she’s less exposed to violence and discrimination, but she finds that she’s equally ill at ease on the other side of the binary. As Jess describes it,
[W]ho was I now—woman or man? I fought long and hard to be included as a woman among women, but I always felt so excluded by my differences. I hadn't just believed that passing would hide me. I hoped that it would allow me to express the part of myself that didn't seem to be woman. I didn't get to explore being a he she, though. I simply became a he a man without a past.
Who was I now—woman or man? That question could never be answered as long as those were the only choices; it could never be answered if it had to be asked.
After a few years of living as a man, Jess decides to stop taking hormones, but there’s no “changing back.” While her body regains some of its old softness, her chest remains flat and her voice stays low. By the end of the novel, Jess no longer passes as male or female, constantly confusing the outside world, but finally feeling at home in her skin. She also finds a new love, this time with a trans woman named Ruth, which fills her with hope for the future.
To be frank, I didn’t particularly enjoy reading Stone Butch Blues. On a content level, the book is front loaded with numerous scenes of brutal, senseless violence, made all the more painful because you know each scene is grounded in truth. On a craft level, every character not named Jess Goldberg is thin as cardboard, the dialogue is often hokey and wooden, and Jess’s lazy identification with Indigenous spirituality made me cringe. So why is this novel, with all its challenges and flaws, so widely beloved?
Early on in the novel, Jess discovers The Norton Anthology of Poetry and discovers “that women and men, long dead, had left me messages about their feelings, emotions I could compare to my own. I had finally found others who were as lonely as I was. In an odd way, that knowledge comforted me.” After spending a month trying to figure out why people love this novel so damn much, I think it’s that simple. While there have been butches in literature before and since Stone Butch Blues, they are rare enough to be treasured when they do appear. There’s a reason Shauna Miller called the book a holy grail—while the quest for it may be painful, to look into it and see one’s own reflection staring back is healing.
Do they dare speak its name? 💬
Given that this novel was published in 1993 and set in the second half of the 20th century, it’s not particularly noteworthy that the word lesbian appears frequently in Stone Butch Blues to describe individuals, groups, bars, etc. As such, I’m more interested in the words used to describe the book’s trans and gender non-conforming characters. I was surprised to find that words under the trans umbrella appear very rarely—“transsexual” and “transvestisms” appear once each—and the word “transgender” doesn’t appear at all.2 Instead, the word used most often—first as a pejorative, then as a more or less neutral self-descriptor, and finally as a reclaimed epithet—is “he-she.”
By 1993, Feinberg was regularly describing hirself as transgender and zie had published the pamphlet "Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come" the year before, so I have to assume the choice not to use these terms was a deliberate artistic one rather than a reflection of the language zie used in hir daily life at the time.3 I can’t find an interview in which zie spoke about this decision, but my best guess is that it may have been intended to make the book more linguistically accessible to a wider audience; if not a straight audience, then at least a broader gay and lesbian one. Even if you’ve never heard the word “he-she” before—and what person who went through an American public school in the 20th century hasn’t heard it—the word’s meaning is self-evident. That it makes people uncomfortable in addition to being so clear is probably a bonus.
How sexy is it? 🍑
Setting all of the nonconsensual and violent sex acts aside, I’m going to call this open door.
How can you read it? 📖
There’s a persistent myth that Stone Butch Blues is out of print, that physical copies are difficult if not impossible to find. When I google “stone butch blues,” the first page of results tell me as much: they include a blog post titled Why Is It So Hard To Find Leslie Feinberg’s 'Stone Butch Blues'? and a Reddit post called Why is Stone Butch Blues so expensive/hard to find??.4 I have had at least three conversations with friends and acquaintances who didn’t know how to get a copy of Stone Butch Blues, plus one with a used bookseller who was selling a 1993 edition of the book for $150 because he was under the impression that it was out of print.
Frankly I think this myth has worked in the book’s favor—it gives it a kind of mystique, making it feel like some kind of semi-forgotten, sacred text—but it is a myth.5 While it’s unlikely that you’ll find a copy of Stone Butch Blues at a third-party seller or bookstore, one of the last things Leslie Feinberg did before zie died was to buy back the rights to hir manuscript and make the 20th anniversary edition of Stone Butch Blues available to the public at an extremely low cost via hir website. At that link you’ll find a print on demand service where you can purchase an at-cost paperback edition of the book for $12.21 plus shipping as well as a free pdf of the book.
That being said, because the book isn’t sold or distributed by a large publisher, it’s still relatively difficult to get at a bookstore or library. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible, my library system currently has 42 copies of Stone Butch Blues in circulation,6 but the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library system, for example, the one Jess might have used when she was growing up, has none. As far as I can tell, there isn’t a public library in Upstate New York that has the book in its collection, which is sad given that it would be of local interest to the patron base there.
Feinberg essentially made it impossible for anyone—from corporations to indie booksellers—to make a buck off of hir book, a decision that this lefty can’t help but respect. Unfortunately, that decision also made it difficult for libraries to justify including the book in their collections. Like bookstores, libraries primarily place orders in bulk to take advantage of publisher discounts and reduced shipping rates. Those savings evaporate when you’re paying for print on demand copies. This may sound minor, and to some large library systems it probably is, but libraries operate on extremely fine margins. There is no perfect choice here—just as there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism, there’s no ethical production or distribution either—but I think it’s a shame that this choice happens to disadvantage those who primarily get their books from libraries. That being said: most of us can just cough up the the money for the print on demand copy, don’t bother waiting for the rare used copy to turn up unless you’re a collector.
Lesbian classic cliché bingo! 🏳️🌈
Maybe a quarter of the way into Stone Butch Blues, I was pretty confident that it would get bingo. What I didn’t expect is that it would get bingo four times! Inspiring stuff, really justifying both the existence of this exercise and the time I spent reading this book.
While I was poking around for relevant writing about the book, I found that there’s a summary of Stone Butch Blues available on Blinkist, an app created to sum up airport nonfiction for people who want to seem like they read books but don’t actually want to spend their time reading. I’m enjoying coming up with scenarios for what would lead someone to read through each of the 49 titles in Blinkist’s Best Pride Books collection. Like, picture a harried executive trying to pretend like they read Epistemology of the Closet to impress a 27 year-old bisexual they met on Raya. Or a different harried executive reading a summary of Sister Outsider in an effort to relate to their Oberlin-educated nonbinary offspring. I could go on.
A strange aside: my edition of Stone Butch Blues includes the following quote from The Village Voice describing Leslie Feinberg as, “a historian, an activist, a relentless bridge-builder. The one whose 1993 novel, Stone Butch Blues, gave the word transgender legs.” While I’m inclined to believe that the novel played a part in the wider awareness and consideration of trans people that emerged in the early 90s, it seems unlikely that it helped to popularize a term it doesn’t ever use. Maybe The Village Voice meant to refer to hir less widely read but nonetheless influential nonfiction book Transgender Warriors? Unclear, since I can’t even find the article from which it originates even though it’s quoted widely online. Annoying!
Now seems like as a good a time as any to mention that Leslie Feinberg used she/her and zhe/hir pronouns for hirself during her life, but also was fine with he/him in certain contexts. Zhe wrote that “I care which pronoun is used, but people have been respectful to me with the wrong pronoun and disrespectful with the right one. It matters whether someone is using the pronoun as a bigot, or if they are trying to demonstrate respect.”
It also includes a Reddit post called Is stone butch blues like Leslie Feinberg problematic?, which, lmao.
The other Stone Butch Blues myth I’m puzzled by: that this is a straightforward roman à clef or even an autobiography. While Jess is clearly similar to Leslie in many ways—both grew up in Buffalo, ran away from home, worked in factories, and medically transitioned before discontinuing testosterone—they are not one and the same. Jess is well-meaning but politically naive, whereas Leslie worked as a labor organizer. Jess wanders into a rally without knowing what it’s for and Leslie was an activist and a writer for the Workers World. Clearly, Feinberg used experiences and feelings from hir own life to inspire and inform Stone Butch Blues, but there’s more invention here than people give hir credit for.
Not for nothing, the sixth largest library system in the country by population served and the 16th largest by holdings.