On growing up queer

[bibliogramma]

Stone Butch Blues, Leslie Feinberg

Feinberg never pulls punches. This novel, rightfully hailed as ground-breaking when is was first published in 1993 (and still profoundly relevant today), is about growing up as a working class butch lesbian in the pre-Stonewall era and finding a way to survive with your soul not necessarily intact, but still unbowed if badly bloodied. It’s raw and painful and brilliant and heart-breaking in its depiction of the realities of life for Jess Goldberg, who even as a young girl does not “fit” the strict rules of gender performance or the socially mandated directions of desire, and who learns from the very beginning that society polices and punishes otherness with rage, fear and violence. Feinberg’s characters – the butches who work hard hours in factories and face sometimes petty, sometimes violent retaliation from employers, police, and all the other pillars of a comfortable and conventional society, the femmes who can pass more easily but still face the consequences of being women who live outside the roles appointed for them, without the protection of (cisgendered) men – live precariously at the intersection of gender identity, sexual orientation and class, where survival is never a given. Gut-wrenching, but also inspiring, to remember not just how many were broken, but how many survived for so long.