Stone Butch Blues
Well, it's been aaaages (due to LC having to do a hell of a lot of late nights for her day job - don't ask) but we're back with Episode 5 of our series on LGBTQ+ authors, this time on Leslie Feinberg's acclaimed "Stone Butch Blues".
In discussing our most affecting examination of the LGBTQ+ experience, the girls get into:
Stone Butch Blues being, straight up, a critical novel in our learning about the historical experience of gay women when living a gay lifestyle or presenting as gender nonbinary was straight up illegal
Trigger warning: This episode discusses physical abuse and rape – a lot. Because it happened a lot to these characters we loved. That’s why we need to talk about it and show it in the way it’s shown in the book. But if that is a source of trauma for you please be aware before listening, or indeed reading Stone Butch Blues.
It’s important to note that this story is restricted to the experience of a white gay woman, presenting as gender non-binary in 1950s America, but this is also something the author is very clear about – with Jess learning from her friends of colour what their struggles at the intersection of racism and homophobia are. And we experience the effects of that on her loved ones along with her
This book isn’t for the faint-hearted. Or maybe it is. We need to look the vile things our predecessors did head on. We are the better for reading about people we would have known or been related to or loved, dehumanising these people simply because they did not understand the way they live their lives
But I mean, of course there were tangents:
Chloe has named her new haircut. She’s that excited about it
Chloe and Katie get into a fight over the symbolic nature of the Purple balloon in the Permission to Dance video – Katie's likely more accurate but Chloe’s theory is a LOT more entertaining
Interestingly Chloe did also come up with her latest possible t-shirt phrase “Men, lesbians want nothing to do with your gross little willies”
Followed closely by Cliodhna’s “Lesbian Minesweeper Wiz”
And not so much a tangent but definitely something we want to be aware of – given the anti-capitalist stance of the author we do not have ads for this week’s episode (even if they are made up and not for anything real). Instead LC is sharing information on LGBTQ+ resources
It's all here on our latest episode of Chick Lit 4 LIfe!
Catch the full episode
More on Stone Butch Blues:
Published in 1993, this brave, original novel is considered to be the finest account ever written of the complexities of a transgendered existence.
Woman or man? Thats the question that rages like a storm around Jess Goldberg, clouding her life and her identity. Growing up differently gendered in a blue--collar town in the 1950s, coming out as a butch in the bars and factories of the prefeminist 60s, deciding to pass as a man in order to survive when she is left without work or a community in the early 70s. This powerful, provocative and deeply moving novel sees Jess coming full circle, she learns to accept the complexities of being a transgendered person in a world demanding simple explanations: a he-she emerging whole, weathering the turbulence.
As per Leslie Feinberg's Author Declaration to Stone Butch Blues (which we urge everyone to read) -
Stone Butch Blues lives on the digital page here at http://www.lesliefeinberg.net/.
Please do not digitally remove Stone Butch Blues from the digital page where it lives; please do not repost the book or parts of the book.
As an author, I have always retained my digital rights. My union—the National Writers Union/UAW Local 1981—educated me to fight for those rights in publishing contracts. I’m with the union to defend the digital rights of workers.
More on Leslie Feinberg:
Leslie Feinberg, who identified as an anti-racist white, working-class, secular Jewish, transgender, lesbian, female, revolutionary communist, died on November 15, 2014. She/zie succumbed to complications from multiple tick-borne co-infections, including Lyme disease, babeisiosis, and protomyxzoa rheumatica, after decades of illness. Zie/she died at home in Syracuse, NY, with hir partner and spouse of 22 years, Minnie Bruce Pratt, at hir side.
Hir last words were:
“Remember me as a revolutionary communist.”
To find out more about Leslie Feinberg, visit