Blue Not-So-Stone Butch
November 20th, 2014
It will go on to become one of those I remember where I was and what I was doing moments, the moment I heard she was gone. Like where I was when the two towers fell, what I was doing when the Berlin wall fell, I will go on to remember that it was a sunny Saturday morning in late November the day Leslie Feinberg's chest rose and fell for the last time. She was almost the exact same age as my own mother, born just four days after my mom was, in the same year, 1949.
"Remember me as a communist revolutionary." Those were her last words. Spoken soft and certain to her long-time love and ferocious femme partner, Minnie Bruce Pratt.
That was five days ago, and I feel like a foot soldier whose sergeant has died, I feel like I am stalled in the water on a ship whose skipper has passed away in the night and the dawn has stolen up too early on the rest of us sailors, and the crew is standing around on deck, unsure of who we should see as second in command.
Leslie Feinberg was my first trans butch writer hero, and I really needed a hero. It was 1993. I was 23 going on 24 years old, and I was standing alone in the back stacks of the old Little Sister's bookstore on Davie and Thurlow the first time I picked up That Book. How many lonely baby butch and trans hands have grasped it since, That Book, that literal, literary lifeline? How many femmes, too, have perused its pages, looking for clues to their own history, to our collective queer pasts, looking for the instruction manual to unlock the often closed and bound and untouched and sometimes bruised bodies of their butch and trans loves? How many of us of every gender have found solace, and hope, and the comfort of collective despair in her words? I am not saying that all femmes must love a butch, or that all butches are really or will one day be trans, or that a butch cannot love another butch in that way, please, hear me when I tell you I am not saying any of those ridiculous things. What I am saying is that Stone Butch Blues spoke directly to my young butch heart. That Book taught me that I had a family that looked like me from the inside out, it showed me a path to my people. Her words stood up and stated without apology that we, her people, were worthy and deserving of all of the ways we could love each other, even in the face of a world that would actively hate us and will us to disappear. Reading those words allowed me to finally find myself in the Us corner of Us and Them. Not so stone as her, but still, that story found me, and moved me, and left me so much less alone.
To say that Leslie Feinberg paved the way for me as a butch and trans writer would be an understatement of epic proportions. There just simply was no other book that spoke to the possibility of being something resembling me before Stone Butch Blues came out. It really is as simple as that. Maybe not so stone as her, but still. That book taught me how to love the muscle and wide bone and calloused hands of me. It taught me to lift my chin proud because my back was strong and hard work runs in my blood. It sketched directions to the only place I have ever, ever really felt safe, and seen, and held, and loved for exactly who and what I am. It taught me to crack my heart open like a rusty old warehouse door and let in the light that shines in the eyes of a certain kind of lady hard-wired to love a not-really-a-man like me.
Leslie, I promise you I will always write myself down, like you did for me, so that we may be found, and followed. I will remember you forever as a revolutionary communist, just like you asked. I will also remember the fixed and strong line of your jaw, the hard muscle of you showing under your dress shirt and tie and jacket. So many pictures of you online show you with a microphone in your hand. You fought every day of your life for all of us, butches and femmes and trans people and queers, for sure, but you also spoke out in solidarity with workers, and poor people, and immigrants and Walmart employees and prisoners, too. The downtrodden and marginalized and the disappeared all knew your sisterhood and support.
Leslie Feinberg, it is finally time for you to rest. And rest assured, there are so many of us, legions you inspired with your words and your warrior life, who will pick up your torch, and your burdens, too, and carry them for you now. In your name and in your honour I promise you this from the bottom of my heart. This aching heart, my heart, this heart of a writer, and a fighter, too. If my heart resembles yours in any small way, it is only because all these years I held yours up as my compass, and my map.