[Sasha T. Goldberg and Leslie Feinberg, from Goldberg’s blog, State of the Butch Union]
“I was in an alleyway in Chicago the first time someone told me about Stone Butch Blues. “You’ve got to read this book,” she said. “Stone Butch Blues.” The “she” in question was an older Femme (they always were), and the name of the book got right under my skin. I can remember the feeling: My ears perked up, head tilted back, eyes focused. Stone Butch Blues, I thought. Ok. I was sixteen years old, had been out since I was fourteen, and had been a tomboy all my life. The word and identity of “Butch” made inherent sense to me, and partially explained why my masculine, old soul self, always temporally geared backwards in era and well beyond my actual years in age, didn’t exactly fit in with the contemporary gender expressions of middle of the road andro-dykes and most other women at large. At the time, I also had a searing brand of body dysphoria, which, in conjunction with relentless negative messaging from the world about female masculinity, sent me wondering after manhood as the only socially viable option. And then there was Leslie Feinberg.
It’s not just that the main character had the same Jewish last name as me, or that an old organizing photo of Leslie’s beautiful, handsome, Semitic good looks graced the back cover; it’s that finally someone was writing about how I felt. I’m not the only person who feels this way—indeed, many, many Butches and masculine-inclined others have seen themselves in Leslie’s words—but, as a sixteen year old, Leslie belonged to me. Her words were my words, her passions my passions, her frustrations my frustrations, her alienations and joys my alienations and joys. She wasn’t afraid to write about want, need, desire, community, celebration, isolation, exile, and return. She wrote about all of it, and, nearing eighteen years after I first read Stone Butch Blues, I can look back and see myself in my teenage bedroom, shutting the book and being unable to proceed, the first time, after Leslie describes “a Butch so stone she showered with a raincoat on”—a reference that I do not need to look up to remember. (Do you remember the next part? The Butch hangs herself after the cops force her to strip in a bar.) I identified so strongly with the passage that I felt like someone had written every devastating pain of my teenage heart and put it down on paper for the whole world to see. It undid me.
Is it too grandiose, then, too twilight, too hindsight to say that Leslie Feinberg saved my life? To say that reading her words about buzz cuts, white T-shirts, and sweet, caring Femmes gave me hope for my entire future? What masculine girl-child does not know the pain and cruelty of not understanding a future, of literally not seeing anyone who looks like an adult version of how she, herself, looks and feels? The first time I saw the updated cover of Stone Butch Blues, I was taking the long route home from school. Home and youth were both painful place to be, those days, and I remember walking slowly sometimes, struggling. I passed by the window of a neighborhood bookstore, and there was Leslie. The photo, which was the front cover of the updated edition of Stone Butch Blues,had Leslie’s face on it, up close. Her strong, stunning face took up the whole cover—defiant, proud, warrior eyes—looking directly into the the camera. It wasn’t a queer bookstore, not Women and Children First, to which I would travel over an hour each way by bus to look at gay literature, or see readings; there Leslie was, in a regular old shop, right in the front window. It was cold out, the Fall was passing, and there I stood, staring. I couldn’t stop looking. And in the reflection of the glass, finally, literally and metaphorically, I could see myself, and Leslie, at once. I think I started to understand what I could be in that moment, that I belonged to a proud tradition of Butch women. That there was a place for me in this world. That I could grow up. For the first time, I understood that I was looking at who and what I would become as an adult. It was breathtaking.”
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