Dyke Bar* History: Leslie Feinberg in Buffalo, 1960s

Jack Jen Gieseking with Michaela Hayes and Mel Whitesell

To complement the launch of the Our Dyke Histories podcast, hosted by Jack Gieseking and co-produced in collaboration with Sinister Wisdom, we’re sharing a reading guide for the decades. For the first season, Our Dyke Histories is spotlighting dyke bars*: lesbian bars, queer parties,  and trans hangouts; the structures that made them necessary, the lives they made possible, and the worlds we built from them. This is the second part in a series, with the first part covering the 1920s-1930s!!

Feinberg, Leslie. Stone Butch Blues. Ithaca: Firebrand Books, 1993.

Being pointed to Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues as a young and/or recently out lez, bi, queer, trans, or sapphic person is as much a dyke trope as running into an ex-flame at the bar or fighting the urge to U-Haul after the first date (or second or third…).

And you know why it’s a trope? Because it’s fucking amazing and, yes, we are telling you to go read this book.

Feinberg’s perfectly devastating and epically beautiful novel follows Jess Goldberg, a working-class, stone butch lesbian-cum-trans man, through childhood into adulthood in New York. Throughout the book, the dyke bar serves as an important backdrop in Jess’s life. In Buffalo, it’s a place where Jess navigates growing up, finding queer community, gender exploration, heartbreak, and romance while facing violence at the hands of the state and police. In adulthood, New York City dyke bars become a place where Jess can reconnect with old friends and–wait for it, my trans friends and countryqueers–apologize to a butch friend for not respecting her butch4butch relationship in the past. Feinberg/Jess are classy shes/hes/zes, I tell you. Though fictional, Feinberg’s intimate book explores classism, racism, anti-semtisim, sexual violence, homophobia, and transphobia that were a reality for butches, trans mascs, and gender non-conforming dykes in the late 20th century–and still today.

We admit that Stone Butch Blues is occasionally a difficult read due to the graphic nature of the many different forms of violence Jess endures. Make sure you have some tissues handy. Ultimately though, this book is a classic we keep handing down–like Audre Lorde’s Zami and editor Cherríe Moraga and Gloria E. Anzaldúa’s This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color–because it carries both historical and present eternal lives. Whenever you’re ready to read it, please remember to tell the next dyke you meet to read it too.

Feinberg selfie from The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/nov/17/leslie-feinberg-author-tra...