Stone Butch Blues

"She pointed to the circle the ring cast on the ground. I nodded, acknowledging that the shadow was as real as the ring. She smiled and waved her hand in the space between the ring and its shadow. Isn't this distance also real?"

Warning: This is a ramble.

THIS is the book that caused my recent reading and reviewing slump. Having finished Stone Butch Blues, nothing looked in any way interesting enough to move on to. Nothing I typed out made sense, or, even if there was some sense in it, it did not read as anything but a regurgitation of the same thoughts, the same sentiments that so many other reviewers have expressed already.

I think this is the very crux of the problem: this book seems so well known, so "iconic" that anything relating show more to it sounds a bit unoriginal, a bit cliche.

So, how about we get some of the "cliches" out of the way and see what is left?

- Stone Butch Blues is a "tough" book. True, there are a lot of descriptions of physical and sexual violence, but it also gives a lot of insight into people trying to cope. It beautifully describes characters without over-analysing what makes them tick.

- The story is very moving. Yes, it was written to be deliberately moving but then so is much of literature. And while I admit to being the first to criticise other books for manipulative writing (yes, I am looking at you, The Book Thief), it works in the favour of Stone Butch Blues because the book is somewhat rugged. Stone Butch Blues does not try to manipulate with pompous / pretentious writing. The narration is very down to earth, naturally clunky, and it works beautifully.

- The writing style is atrocious. It is not polished writing, but it works (for me). Most of the book is written from the main characters point of view. It would not befit Jess' character to tell her story in polished or flowery language.

- The book has a political agenda. It is true that the author had strong political convictions and that the book does feature the role and workings of unions. That does not constitute the book itself serving a communist agenda.

- The story focuses too much on the butch/femme dichotomy and not enough on other variances of gender identity. Erm, have you read the book? All of it? To the end? Go read it again. Besides, the story is told from the perspective of one person. It's one individual experience.

- The book is important. I have nothing to add to this.

So, what is left?

For much of the time that I have been thinking about writing this review, all I wanted to do was to join the chorus of readers who have loved this book "so damn much" (yes, that's another cliche). However, I wanted to know why.

Having thought about it, I did not like this book because it is important or moving. Well, at least not exclusively because it is both. I also liked the book for the descriptive detail and because it provided some historical context I was not familiar. The reason I love the book, however, is because as a coming-of-age story, Stone Butch Blues is as powerful as To Kill a Mocking Bird or The Catcher in the Rye or any other you'd care to mention.
It uses the best and worst aspects of humanity, cruelty and kindness, perception and reality, success and failure, to form the individual that is Jess Goldberg.

"My neighbour, Ruth, asked me recently if I had my life to live all over again would I make the same decisions? "Yes," I answered unequivocally, "yes." I'm sorry it's had to be this hard. But if I hadn't walked this path, who would I be?" show less

Jess Goldberg grew up in upstate New York and always knew she was different. She started going to queer bars (well, there was just one queer bar at that point) in the 1960s as a teen. She felt most comfortable as a butch, with the lesbians setting up their alternative binary of butch and femme. After years of passing as a man to get factory jobs, getting outed, getting sexually assaulted, she tries to make it in New York City. Life is hard, but there are more opportunities and access to Hormone Replacement Therapy, which Jess hopes will make her feel more at home in her body. Eventually she realizes that the butch/femme binary is just as false as the heteronormative one, that the only thing that matters is friendship and respect, love show more and safety. She gets a job as a union organizer, where everyone knows who she is and she can be completely herself.

It was very interesting to see changing ideas about gender through such an intimate lens. There is a lot of violence, including sexual violence, in this story, but also a lot of friendship and camaraderie, as well as sex and love and breakups that don’t have anything to do with bigotry. Most of the terminology and culture Jess encounters in these couple decades is not familiar to modern eyes, and even by the end Jess isn’t quite sure what she wants her pronouns to be or how she wants to be seen. But the point of the story is that that’s okay. From such a close perspective it feels very natural for Jess to try things out and change over time, and just because she, for example, stops taking masculine hormones or starts dating a trans man, doesn’t mean she regrets anything previous in her life nor does it negate the experience of anyone who doesn’t do those things.

This is a great classic, absolutely worth reading. My only negative is that I kind of wished it had been Leslie Feinberg’s story, instead of a fictional one, especially as Leslie was much more of a political activist than the fictional Jess. I’m definitely going to read more by zir.

This book can be read digitally for free and paper copies at-cost for personal use or public library purchase at the author’s website, https://www.lesliefeinberg.net/ . It is not legally available anywhere else. show less

La muestra de que la ficción puede ser un testimonio, y que los personajes pueden ser un vehículo político para decir cosas mucho más efectivo que un discurso vociferado frente a mil personas. Stone butch blues es un viaje casi a ciegas en el que la protagonista descubre el mundo de la forma más dolorosa, que es intentando encontrar su modo de habitarlo en consonancia con sus emociones y autopercepción. No hay en Stone butch blues bajadas políticas ni imprecaciones directas a quien lee, sino el fundamental viaje en el que acompañamos la vida de una persona excluída de los principales lugares de la sociedad. A través de sus dolores, risas y llantos, Jess nos enseña distintas dimensiones de se runa lesbiana butch judía de show more clase trabajadora en forma descarnada, al punto que sus dolores se sienten como propios y sus alegrías se festejan como las de una amiga que sufrió demasiado. show less

When I was younger, the experience of reading every book was absorbing and relevatory, but it has been years since I genuinely felt like a book opened a door for me. This book did that. It expresses a way of existing in the world with a specificity only possible perhaps through fiction. It's technically a little rough, perhaps especially in contrast to the afterword written by the author in 2003: the novel is a bit repetitive in its prose and its events, but the later words are much more eloquently strung together. There is heart in this book, though, and the urgency of a revolution. It's a different style of prose when people write unmoderated by the traditional neutered prose of literature; it's what I might call a manifesto tone. show more There is less concern about how the words sound in relation to the canon, and much more concern about what they mean. Writing truly for communication. This is a depressing, hopeful novel, a young and angry and good book.
Recommended by Karen. show less

This is a tricky book to pin down. At one level it is a rather simple-minded parable about solidarity and political and social change that would fit better into the 1930s (or perhaps the late 60s) than the 90s; at another it's an attempt to set the historical record straight about the "butch-femme" approach to sex between women that was current in the mid-20th century, but subsequently marginalized by both the women's movement and the lesbian and gay rights movement; and at a third it is a complicated personal tale about the search for the narrator's own gender identity.
The political and historical stories have both lost a lot of their impact in the meantime. It's ground that has been gone over by so many other writers since; the only show more thing that still makes it worth looking at is the immediacy of what is obviously first-hand testimony. The descriptions of police brutality and the constant threat of random violence still have the power to shock, even fifty years on and half a world away.
The more personal story of the narrator's progress from awkward girl to "he-she" to butch to passing male to a kind of gender identity that s/he feels comfortable with has kept more of its relevance. It doesn't attempt to generalise or draw big social or historical parallels, except to establish that gender involves a lot more than "either/or" categories. The narrator's story illustrates the complicated interaction between cultural expectations and individual nature that happens when we don't feel right in the roles that society projects onto us. It makes clear that categories aren't constant in time, space, or social class. There aren't any neat answers: although the narrator seems to have found a workable compromise at the end of the book, we know that there is still a long way to go. show less

How is this book NOT on every progressive worker's list? It is a wonder (and you can get it free, BTW, so there's even less excuse) - a book that lives intersectionality while being a gorgeously written piece of fictionalized biography. Its complicated praxis of "being butch" is one of the greatest I've ever seen, the equal of Kate Bornstein's discussions of her own complicated gender identity. It's working class literature in a way that should make American lit's heart sing. I mean, it has unions, drag queens, the 1960s and 70s done without nostalgia...I cannot say enough about this remarkable book.

Perhaps the most influential book I've read, this one turned my world upside-down in the most wonderful of ways. A semi-autobiographical novel that follows a butch from early teens through adulthood, this book is accessible to anyone regardless of their connection, or lack thereof, to the butch or butch-femme world.