Why Is It So Hard To Find Leslie Feinberg’s 'Stone Butch Blues'?

Trans and queer history and art tends to be informally documented, and even culturally significant works can be transient.  Because mainstream publishers, editors and agents have frequently avoided queer narratives and experimental or radical art, many LGBT publications happen through small journals and indie presses, which often struggle with financial stability and longevity. Stone Butch Blues was originally published by Firebrand Books in 1993, and by Alyson Books in 2003. After Alyson Books filed for bankruptcy, Feinberg embarked on a protracted, expensive court battle to recover hir rights to the novel, eventually winning them in 2012. Feinberg, whose last words were “remember me as a revolutionary communist,” decided not to sign any new commercial contracts for the work, to ban all film adaptations, and to “give [Stone Butch Blues] back to the workers and oppressed of the world” through hir website as a free PDF or an at-cost print edition. This arrangement means that Stone Butch Blues is available for free to anyone with internet access, but it can be difficult for libraries and bookstores to procure copies.

After selecting the novel as one of The New York Public Library's 125 Books We Love, the Library ordered copies of Feinberg’s updated edition to meet patron demand. You can find a copy at many of our branch libraries or request a copy through our catalog.

If you loved Stone Butch Blues, here are some follow-up reads, arranged by theme.

Trans Identity

In Stone Butch Blues, Feinberg’s character Jess eventually stops taking hormone replacement therapy after realizing that ze prefers to live as a gender-nonconforming person, even if it means risking violence. Jess then meets and courts a trans woman, who becomes hir partner. Neither of them are legible to the cisgender, straight world around them. In many ways, Feinberg stood at the vanguard of a new movement of transgender political identity and solidarity that was taking shape in the 1990s. In 1992, Feinberg penned a pamphlet titled “Transgender Liberation: A Movement whose Time Has Come,” which detailed a brief history of the ways that people outside gender norms have always existed and called for a movement of transgender people—a broad category then described as encompassing transsexuals, drag queens, butch lesbians, and more—who would question and combat colonial and patriarchal gender norms.

The following works explore transgender history and representation before and since Feinberg’s pamphlet.

• How Sex Changed  by Joanne Meyerowitz (NONFICTION) — A history of transsexual identity from the 1890s to the present day, including information on shifting identity categories such as "transgender" and "transvestite" and how different groups of trans people engaged with and took advantage of contemporary medical systems to access health care and legal rights.

• Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity by C. Riley Snorton (NONFICTION) —  A history of Black trans people, a history of the erasure of Black trans people, a study of media and scholarship's focus on white trans subjects, and an in-depth exploration of how whiteness and the construction of sex norms in the Western world are intertwined.

• Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility, ed. Reina Gossett, Johanna Burton, and Eric A. Stanley (NONFICTION) — In a series of fascinating essays by diverse contributors, this work highlights particular historical periods of trans activism and art, and also tackles specific issues, such as Black trans women and documentation and the prison industrial complex. 

• Holy Wild by Gwen Benaway (POETRY) — Benaway, an Ojibwe trans woman, explores indigeneity, gender, colonialism, and the body in expansive lyric poetry that combines English and Anishinaabemowin (Ojibwe) text.

Queers, Work, Race and Disability

Feinberg, who lived with Lyme disease and remained working-class hir whole life, emphasizes in Stone Butch Blues how disability and lack of class solidarity with male union members makes Jess's life less survivable, and how solidarity between working queer people makes it more survivable. Class, race, and ability inform experiences of queerness. The following books explore queer working people struggling within capitalism and empire and enabling each other to survive with dignity. 

• When Brooklyn Was Queer  by Hugh Ryan (NONFICTION) — A highly narrative, animated examination of primary documents and oral histories of queer life in New York City, centering primarily on waterfront nightlife and working-class culture. This book makes it clear how trans, lesbian, and gay histories exist where we least expect them, and are often incidentally preserved in medical records, letters, and other marginal documents that may vanish from broader narratives. Ryan was the NYPL’s Martin Duberman Visiting Scholar in 2017, and you can listen to a talk he gave in February of that year. 

• Zami: A New Spelling of My Name  by Audre Lorde (NONFICTION) — A memoir of adolescence and adulthood as a blue-collar Black lesbian poet, this traces Lorde's childhood in New York before following her to health-threatening factory jobs and initial inklings of lesbian community, into her first success as a writer.

• Semi Queer: Inside the World of Gay, Trans and Black Truck Drivers by Anne Balay (NONFICTION E-BOOK) — Balay, a scholar of working-class sociology who has worked as a truck driver, explores the lives and health of working-class queer people who transport consumer goods across America for a living.

• This Bridge Called My Back: Writing by Radical Women of Color, edited by Cherríe L. Moraga and Gloria E. Anzaldúa (NONFICTION) — This 2015 edition, issued for the thirty-fifth anniversary of the original, compiles the original essays by women of color on class, race, sexuality, family, feminism, imperialism, and trauma with a new introduction and additional art.

Runaways, Queerness, and Found Family

Existence in families of origin is often painful, and many queer and trans people—like Jess—choose to look elsewhere for support. Stone Butch Blues isn’t the only narrative of messy, unreliable, and ultimately life-saving connection between queer kin. Here are several other titles to check out.

• Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars by Kai Cheng Thom(FICTION) — a funny, speculative roundhouse kick of a novel, this follows a runaway trans girl who journeys to the big city and starts a girl gang to defend herself and her trans sisters from attack and abuse by police and predators. Also available as an audiobook.

• Roving Pack  by Sassafrass Lowrey (FICTION) — a runaway 18-year-old genderqueer boi lives in Portland, Oregon around the year 2000. Spread between squats, cheap rooms and nonprofit youth space, Lowrey follows a group of teenage lovers and friends, who puzzle over crushes, take hormones and stop taking them, use and misuse BDSM, and feel deeply alienated from wealthier LGBT spaces.

• Confessions of the Fox  by Jordy Rosenberg (FICTION) — a modern trans academic at a pharmaceutical-funded public university, discovers a manuscript that he believes is the diary of eighteenth-century master thief Jack Sheppard, who is actually a trans man--and also, along with his girlfriend Bess, an anti-capitalist revolutionary. Part Marxist fantasy, part swashbuckling love story, this book overflows with complicated alliances, queer love, and femme intelligence.

• Tiny Pieces of Skull by Roz Kaveny (FICTION) — Kaveny, fast-paced as a racecar and darkly funny,  lingers on trans street life and bar life in London and Chicago in the late 1970s. The complex, often-cruel women who populate Kaveny’s narrative struggle to be sisters to one another in a world with few protections.

 Here are some further resources available through the NYPL’s research collection.

• The Feminist Bookstore Movement: Lesbian Antiracism and Feminist Accountability by Kirsten Hogan (NONFICTION) — Details the growth of independent feminist and lesbian bookstores in North America, the distribution of feminist and lesbian literature via independent presses, and the structure of community/business institutions which sought to promote women's voices and which briefly became feminist cultural hubs, even in small towns. Intriguing exploration of arguments about disability, race, class, and the role of small presses in advocating for change.

• Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold  by Elizabeth Lopovsky Kennedy (NONFICTION) — An oral history of working-class lesbian communities in Buffalo, New York (where Feinberg grew up) from the 1930s to 1960s.

• Exile and Pride by Eli Clare(NONFICTION) — Clare, a disability activist who now identifies as a genderqueer trans man, authored this book while living as a butch lesbian in the 1990s. It explores ecological devastation, disability in working-class communities, collective trauma, and queer alienation both at "home" and outside it.

• We Both Laughed in Pleasure by Lou Sullivan (NONFICTION) — Diaries of the gay trans activist and writer who successfully lobbied for changes to homophobic standards of care for trans men and advocated for social acceptance of gay and trans people.  Foreword by Susan Stryker.