Stone Butch Blues

"Yes. This leads me on to my second book, Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg, which is subtitled ‘A Novel.’ But that’s partly to signify something it both is and isn’t. I did a similar thing with the memoir, its title is Trans: A Memoir , to say this is simultaneously a memoir and not really a memoir. It does use the memoir form and it is at its core a memoir, but it also tries to subvert that and blur the boundaries of the genre. There are some interviews where Feinberg takes some distance from the text and says, “No, this is a novel, the protagonist Jess Goldberg is Jewish and grew up in the same part of the US as me, and had some of the same jobs and stuff, but actually it’s fiction.” But then Jay Prosser in the book Second Skins , highlights another Feinberg interview where Feinberg says, “This is a very thinly veiled autobiography.” Around the same time I was reading Johnson I started to read people like Kate Bornstein, Gender Outlaw . She has a really interesting approach to these divisions between theory and memoir and included a lot of autobiographical detail in a political text that was structured differently to the conventional transsexual memoir, which would reach a climax and closure in surgery. I tried to avoid that in my book. Feinberg includes some of the conventions of those memoirs in Stone Butch Blues : hormones, some surgery, interaction with the medical establishment. But it avoids the closure of saying, “OK, I’ve resolved this ‘conundrum’.” I think Kate Bornstein talked to Five Books before about how traumatic Feinberg’s novel is. It illustrates a lot of problems of cross-gender, or gender-variant, living at the time. I also like the fact it takes place in a queer context. Prosser picks up on “Feinberg’s sustained ambivalence between genres.” It’s not quite autofiction, as it doesn’t use Feinberg’s own name, and it doesn’t specifically set out to blur the boundaries between Feinberg’s own life and fiction. But, nonetheless, it does end up doing that. Feinberg said later that the reason Stone Butch Blues is written as a novel, and titled thus, is because autobiography would pull back—fiction would allow a greater amount of truthfulness, even if it wasn’t so factual. Feinberg’s differentiation between truth and facts is a very useful one. In the Epilogue of my book, I talk about the dialogue and I say that in lots of places I can remember dialogue, or I have it in journals, so I use real dialogue where I can. But where I couldn’t, I just try and make the dialogue truthful rather than factual, because there’s no way I can remember exactly what I said to my friend on a bus in Manchester in 2003. A related point is that I didn’t really want to write this text as a novel, but I did want to write it as autofiction. A part of me wanted to write a text with a central character called Juliet Jacques, which had some experiences that were mine and some that weren’t. But you can’t really do that when you’re dealing with prejudice: with institutionalised transphobia, social transphobia. It would have been utterly appropriative and I think just morally wrong to do that, so this book not only had to be truthful, but it had to stick to the facts of my life as much as it possibly could. That’s a really interesting question. The task of writing about the physical body, whether you fictionalise it or do it autobiographically, is incredibly difficult. I was talking to a friend about B. S. Johnson, and this friend said one of the things he liked most about Johnson is he’s better at describing physical pain than anyone else he’d ever read. I think that’s true. There are bits in my book where I’m trying to describe pretty intense physical pain that’s come off the back of the surgery and I don’t know how well I did it. And, obviously, it’s impossible to remember physical pain. You can remember that you felt pain, but you can’t remember the pain itself. Your mind doesn’t let you do that. With the surgery, by the time it came round, I knew I’d be writing about it, so I was taking notes at the time (maybe quite cynically). In lots of ways it is easier to describe pain inflicted from the outside because you can describe the emotion you feel, the motives you read in the other person in a way that’s a lot easier to convey. A pain that’s coming purely from within you is a lot harder to explain to yourself or anyone else. Absolutely, in that power structure."

"Stone Butch Blues is the trans classic. Everybody who reads it takes away something different. It’s one of those magical books that has an entrance point for every queer person. And that’s an amazing accomplishment for a book. It’s something I aspire to. This is a loosely autobiographical tale. Some parts of it are based on Les Feinberg’s life. It’s about a character named Jess Goldberg, a working class Jew who doesn’t understand why she has to be a womanly woman. She’s not attracted to men. This is the early days, in the sixties. That was a scary ass time. It’s the queer book of Job, a heart-wrenching book. There are scenes where Jess gets her head pushed into a toilet. Bring the Kleenex. It’s an intense emotional journey of a young woman who has no idea how to express herself as a strong stone butch. I’ll define the terms for you. Stone is someone who loves sex but doesn’t want to be touched – they want to be the one that gets you off. Butch is the radical representation of masculinity without the patriarchal trimmings. It ranges the scale from dandy through overalls and t-shirts to drag king, so there’s a whole spectrum of butch. You don’t know? Drag kings now outnumber drag queens. Drag kings are women who get up on stage, the way drag queens do, to lip synch for their lives in satirical, political, smart, sexy numbers. After the AIDS epidemic wiped out so many of the queens, the kings kind of took their place on stage and people started watching them. Queens are just now beginning to blossom again. As RuPaul’s Drag Race – one of my favourite shows on television – attests there have always been wonderful queens, but kings are an important part now of drag culture. Kings, like queens, are royalty in queer culture – they’re the bravest ones. Transgender Warriors goes back to Joan of Arc and shows how we’ve been on the frontlines of the intersection of sexuality, gender, class, race and religion forever. The import of Transgender Warriors is that it shows how integrated gender crossing has been with other aspects of the margins of the culture. That you’re not a freak for wanting to be one. Period. Why else do we remember heroes from our past? It gives you strength, it gives you the courage to face another day and to walk with the always present fear of somebody pointing and laughing, or worse. One of the most recent examples of the worst is the case of CC McDonald in Washington State, a trans woman of colour who was brutally attacked and in self defence ended up killing one of her attackers. She was sentenced and found guilty of second degree murder. It seems that the justice system turned aside her plea of self-defence, when it obviously was. It can get that bad. In my own case I’ve been raped twice. Walking through the streets of Paris in the 1990s, which was an extremely bi-gender city, people threw things out of cars at me, like bottles. I was refused a hotel room, even though I had made a reservation – the guy took one look at me and said I’m not going to rent you a room. It’s pretty hard."