#36: Stone Butch Blues
On Cate Blanchett, Judi Dench, and a landmark in trans literature
Hi!
These newsletters have been sporadic at best for the last two months, which I think is fine since no one is paying me to write it. But part of the reason is that I’ve been working on another (also gay) project, which I’m hoping to share more about next week.
I’m also working my way through Cate Blanchett’s entire filmography, which I’d highly recommend.
This week’s pick was Notes on a Scandal (2006), in which Cate plays a young new art teacher at a secondary school. When she sleeps with a 15-year-old student, Dame Judi Dench uses her knowledge of that fact to forge a close friendship between the two women, based in secrecy.
Both Cate and Judi acted the hell out of this movie. Watching them go head to head is an absolute delight, and it feels unfair that they haven’t worked together since. Also, without giving away too much of the plot, it feels relevant to mention here that there are undertones (arguably overtones) of lesbian longing.
Now, onto a really good book.
— Becca
Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg
Fiction, 1993
I’ve been putting off writing this review, since I’m well-aware that there’s no way I could do this book justice. Stone Butch Blues was a landmark in trans literature when it was published in 1993 and even now, 28 years later, it remains one of the most important works we have on gender, class solidarity, police brutality, and what it is to exist as part of a marginalized group.
Feinberg, who died in 2014, identified as “an antiracist white, working-class, secular Jewish, transgender, lesbian, female revolutionary communist,” and used the pronouns ze/she and hir/her. Stone Butch Blues is a semi-autobiographical work of fiction, and dives into each of these intersecting identities at length.
The novel begins as Feinberg’s protagonist, Jess, grows up in working-class upstate New York in the 1950s. After running away from home (and from parents who send her to a psych ward for trying on a suit), she finds the lesbian bar scene in Buffalo. Still just a teenager, she takes her first factory job, explores her butch identity, and repeatedly experiences extreme violence at the hands of the police.
It feels worth mentioning here that there are quite a few scenes of violence in this book, all of which are painful to read. But as Feinberg writes at the beginning of the book, none are gratuitous.
In fact, at a time when major publications like the NYT and The Washington Post are publishing op-eds calling for cops to be welcome at Pride (and claiming that banning them is “discriminatory”), it feels more like required reading than ever.
But even in the face of this violence, the pieces of the book that take place in the working-class lesbian bars of the ‘50s and ‘60s feel like a celebration of queer sexuality, and specifically of butch and femme identities. Though this dynamic has often been written off as dated (or as a replication of heterosexual roles), here it’s a dynamic of tenderness—of queer women taking care of one another as best they can.
Care feels central to the novel, as does the way that care translates into action. Working in factory jobs for the majority of the story, Jess is involved in several attempts to organize her workplaces. And as higher-ups do everything they can to divide the workers, she and the other organizers struggle to create solidarity across racial, generational, and gendered lines.
Later, as the burgeoning women’s movement finally brings gendered issues to the forefront, we again see how these divisions get in the way and prevent marginalized people from coming together as a unified group against oppression. By this point in the story, Jess has begun taking hormones and had top surgery. And while passing as a man has drastically improved her safety in public, she’s no longer welcome in women’s spaces, including lesbian spaces.
Without the support of these communities, she’s left to grapple with her gender identity alone:
But who was I now—woman or man? I fought long and hard to be included as a woman among women, but I always felt so excluded by my differences. I hadn’t just believed that passing would hide me. I hoped that it would allow me to express the part of myself that didn’t seem to be woman. I didn’t get to explore being a he-she, though. I simply became a he—a man without a past.
Jess (like Leslie) falls somewhere in the middle of the vast spectrum between these two binary identities. That in itself was revolutionary for the ‘90s, and I’d argue that it’s not much less so almost thirty years later. I’m struggling to put into words how grateful I am that this book exists, but make it the next book you read if you haven’t done so already.
Queer points:
Don’t feel so appropriate for this one.
Check out Stone Butch Blues at your local library, find a used copy somewhere, or get a free PDF/at-cost copy from lesliefeinberg.net. (Note: One of Feinberg’s priorities before hir death was making Stone Butch Blues free/low-cost for anyone who wants to read it. After purchasing the full rights to the book, ze made it so that only at-cost copies can be produced, and no publishing companies can profit off of hir work.)