Guest Author - Barbara Sharpe

A few years ago, I read Stone Butch Blues for the first time. I read it again just recently because a friend read it and I wanted to be able to talk about it with her.

It’s difficult for me to read, emotional, but a book that I think every young gay person ought to read. Every gay, lesbian, bisexual or trans person ought to read, I should say. Though the story is told from the perspective of a butch woman, all of us share this history. There are butches, femmes, drag queens and, though they didn’t have the word then, transgendered men and women.
The story is complicated, as all good stories are. The author weaves class issues, racial tension and gender identity along with a startling accurate historical perspective on gay life in the 1960s and 1970s. Jess is a working class, Jewish butch. She leaves her family very young and gets a job in Buffalo, NY, where she finds a community of butches, femmes and drag queens. Unfortunately, it isn’t all smooth sailing from there.

As I was trying to write this, I went on the web looking for other reader viewpoints to inspire me. I found this and they say it as well as I could.

“When I first read Stone Butch Blues, it blew my mind. A lesbian friend – since transitioned – made me read it. Made me, and for good reason: it’s like a sledgehammer of experience for anyone who has ever lived in the world as queer, or working class, and especially for anyone who has lived in the world as both. My friend knew it would speak to me, as it spoke to him.” From myhusbandbetty.com

I also read an interview by Julie Peters with Feinberg that I found really interesting. Among other things, she tells us that Stone Butch has two meanings: one is the typical dyke definition of stone butch – a woman who doesn’t want to be touched sexually. The other is using African American slang in which “stone” means very. As in “stone broke.” So, stone butch. Feinberg also says that SBB is not autobiographical, as many assume. Go check it out.
None of this tells you why the book was so emotional for me. I’m not sure I can, not so that it makes any sense to you, in any event. Let’s just say it felt personal. I’ve been loved by butches, protected by butches, dismissed by the Lesbian Thought Police for loving butches.

There is a scene where Jess goes to visit her first butch friend who is now in an asylum. She is – I think the word is catatonic. She’s not present. For a few minutes, though, she is and she talks to Jess. What makes me cry is that her butch identity was erased. There she was, vulnerable, alone, with no one to protect her after all the years she protected others. It pisses me off beyond belief because I know it still happens. Old lesbians –and very likely gay men, I’m sure – are forced back in the closet by age or infirmity or mental health or whatever leaves them vulnerable and having to rely on someone else to care for them. It frustrates me that this story took place about the same time I came out – so 22 years ago – and this stuff *still* happens. It makes me tired to think about.

At the same time, Stone Butch Blues is a part of our history that we should know. The younger among us, I suspect, have no idea that things were like this as recently as the 1980s. For the history, another good book is The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader The Persistent Desire, edited by Joan Nestle. It may be “too butch femme” for some of you, but the earlier stories in particular are good for us all to read.