The world of these butch women is both beautiful and claustrophobic. And so, Jess rides a motorcycle and emulates the tough veneer of Butch Al and her other butch mentors, while learning to live with the daily disgust and dehumanization she faces for being a “he-she.” The lives of butches are radically limited: by the kinds of jobs they are allowed to hold (mostly in bars and factories), the places they can go, when or where it might be safe to go to the bathroom, and their ability to get medical care. It is by watching their relationship that Jess learns “what I wanted from another woman.” Jess can’t pass as anything other than in-between (she is no “Saturday-night butch”), which is what draws friends and lovers to her and seems to repulse everyone else. A butch/femme couple she meets, Butch Al and Jacqueline, become her mentors they help her buy her first sports jacket and tie, explain butch/femme sex to her, and even cut her hair. Jess discovers a world where butches wear suits in bars (and, she later learns, white t-shirts on the assembly line), where they slap each other on the back and slow dance with femmes. When she finally summons the courage to go there a year later, she finds solace and community, and her butch education begins. At fifteen, she gets an after-school job at a printing press, and from a coworker learns about a local gay bar, Tifka’s. “The world judged me harshly and so I moved, or was pushed, toward solitude,” Jess thinks. The refrain she hears throughout her childhood is, “Is that a boy or a girl?” Jess also comes from “the only Jewish family in the projects,” who in turn represent one of the only working-class families at their synagogue. Growing up white and working class in Buffalo in the 1950s and ’60s, Jess is bullied by other kids adults make her feel different and wrong, and she is questioned about her gender at every turn. Stone Butch Blues tells the heartbreaking story of Jess Goldberg, a fictionalized version of Leslie Feinberg. But, along with my youthful inability to fully digest a world unlike my own, I see now that, at eighteen, it must have been hard to look honestly at the word “butch” for fear of recognizing myself there. I’d existed so far away from the world of the book-the factories, working class bars, police beatings and rapes, and all the butch bravado that surviving it entailed I still do.
Before I reread the book a year ago, I hadn’t remembered much about it beyond some blurry butch/femme bar scenes, and that it felt like important queer history. At the time, Stone Butch Blues was talked about through the queer grapevine as a book I had to read it was part of both the lesbian and trans canons. I was involved in a lot of pretending, and was coming to realize that not everyone grew up wealthy-and that I had. In fact, I had zero experience doing adult things like cooking, laundry, having a job, and writing a check, and was still trying to convince myself I was bisexual even though I was obviously gay. I was a young eighteen, though I considered myself mature and cultured, mostly because I was from Manhattan. When I first read Leslie Feinberg’s 1993 novel Stone Butch Blues, I was a first-year college student in a queer reading independent study I had devised with some friends, one of whom I hoped to date. The years of fearing how people perceive me, and in particular my gender, seem to slip away. I feel more alive, more present in my own body than I have in a long time. “Whoa,” I exclaim, laughing, “No going back now.” Adrenaline shoots through me. “I want it to come off in clean pieces,” I say, before my partner drops a clump of brown hair in my lap. And then I feel the cold teeth of the buzzer vibrate from my widow’s peak to the back of my head. I smack my gum, shifting on the cool plastic of the barstool beneath me. My father-in-law has his phone out to video, and jokes that this is the kind of thing people will come up with in isolation. My partner holds the buzzer up inches from my face and I eye it with a nervous smile. There’s a Harley up on a motorcycle lift behind me and an illuminated Jack Daniel’s sign beside it.
My hair is gathered in a ponytail atop my head, the sides that I usually keep in a fade have grown out so that my grays show. It’s early April of 2020 and I’m in my in-laws’ garage-a week after my partner and I spontaneously downloaded hours of children’s shows for our then three-year-old, packed up the Honda, and fled pandemic Brooklyn for the relative safety (and childcare) of rural Minnesota. A passage from Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg.