Stone Butch Blues

Madeline is one of the few people wearing a mask.

I talk with her and another volunteer, Melody Young, in a small library tucked inside an alcove by the bar, filled with zines and lesbian classics such as Stone Butch Blues.

This is also their free store, which carries food, clothes, fentanyl test kits-

It's amazing

my god that makes so much sense

Yeah, what do you got? Stone Butch Blues, Disco Elysium, Harrow the Ninth, Roger Zelazny, Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer, Octavia Butler, of course, Princess Bride, Count of Monte Cristo.

All the stuff that the grandpa in Princess Bride is listing off, like revenge, torture, true love.

That's what I had in mind here.

Mm-hmm

... and talks about living as a trans man, and I mean, they're just iconic to both groups, and their book, uh, you know, Stone Butch Blues, just became such a source of empowerment and strength for so many people, trans men-

Mm

... and butch dykes.

I think what happens is that, um, I think whiteness can think of itself in such an un-nuanced way that a lot of the white trans people I knew were just so present in being trans that I was like, "This is actually, this is a u- this is useful." Like, the white trans people I knew were more likely to have gotten top surgery earlier because a lot of them like had the resources to do so.

They were thinking about, you know, one of my c- one of my dear friends who's a, who's a, a white trans person, he gifted me Stone Butch Blues, and that book was like groundbreaking for me to read and sort of see that h- like laid out.

Um, but like he wasn't the person I was going to to think about my intersectional experience, you know? So I was sort of constantly in between groups of, you know, I had a, at one point, like this group of like masculine-presenting Black cis women who were like part of my sort of social world, and then I had these white trans people who were also a part of this like separate part of my social world.

And it was only when I became an adult, and especially an adult in poetry, that I now have what I would consider this like cohort, this like beautiful cohort of like Black trans masc people who are, you know, in my, who are in my world, who are my beloveds, who are like people I'm like kicking it with and, and texting and, you know, dragging their asses out here to the middle of Massachusetts to like watch the sunset with me.

"Or if they're trying to demonstrate respect," ze/she said.

Feinberg was best known for hir or her novel Stone Butch Blues, a groundbreaking fictional work published in March 1993 which dealt with the complexities of gender and being trans in 1970s America.

He was winner of the 1994 American Library Association Stonewall Book Award and a 1994 Lambda Literary Award.

When Feinberg died, the New York Times obituary described Stone Butch Blues as a landmark in the contemporary literature of gender complexity.

Feinberg was a long-standing member of the Workers World Party, a revolutionary Marxist-Leninist political party in the US, and wrote for its newspaper for many years.

As part of the party, ze/she helped organize multiple anti-racist rallies against the KKK and white supremacists, as well as taking part in community work against anti-abortion groups.

But let's move to your second book and see if we can get at some of the other ones.

So the second book is called Stone Butch Blues.

This book came out in 1993 by Firebrand Books, which is one of the world's oldest and largest publishers of lesbian literature.

It was written by Leslie Feinberg, F-E-I-N-B-E-R-G, who lived from 1949 to sadly only 2014, where she died from Lyme disease.

leslie feinberg describes herself as an american butch lesbian transgender activist and communist the cover is a big zoom up black and white close-up of presumably the main character jess it's a novel she has a shaven head and she kind of is looking at that at the reader like in sort of a very dark or sullen kind of face at you know like sort of not to But that's sort of like a darker kind of portrait.

And the overview is, this brave, original, award-winning novel is considered to be the finest account ever written of the complexities of a transgendered existence.

Vivek, please tell us about your relationship with the incredible Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg.

So, I mean, in a lot of ways, my experience of this book is actually, and again, without taking away from the value of this book on its own, but, you know, in the way that The Bluest Eye was sort of like, you know, the first time I read a book that sort of reflected myself back to me in terms of race.

So if we go back, that kind of idea really comes out of the mid-20th century.

When you have these stories like Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold, or Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues, Leslie meets Big Al, and Big Al is going to introduce you to everybody else.

It's also this creating these gender dynamics about butch femme, about things being passed down, certain kind of lineages.

I want to go back to Theo's really important point about the racialization of these spaces, because lesbian bars tend to take on really, really white norms.

Metallion is one of the few people wearing a mask.

I talk with her and another volunteer, Melody Young, in a small library tucked inside in the alcove of the bar filled with zines and lesbian classics such as Stone Butch Blues.

This is also their free store, which carries food, clothes, fentanyl test strips, Narcan, literature about STIs, and other supplies.

Above us hangs a sign, "Prom canceled 'cause lesbians." I remember a comment on Last Stitch's original announcement after the pile-on had begun, Scream Guy Was Up asked, "I'm sorry, all 400 of these crazy people live in Greenfield, Massachusetts?" I asked whether the people behind the angriest posts have genuine connections to the bar.