A good union man

Due to the results of a Twitter poll (and my successfully pitching it to book club) I finally read Leslie Feinberg’s groundbreaking novel Stone Butch Blues, which until I started reading it I kept forgetting was a novel and thinking it was a memoir or a history or something else nonfiction. (Certainly tells you something about how little non-fantastical fiction I read.) This means that at some point I have to come up with discussion questions for it, so I’ll probably keep this review short and save my thinking energies for drafting questions and then having the discussion.

 

Stone Butch Blues is a novel about one Jess Goldberg, a working-class Jewish lesbian growing up in New York in the second half of the 20th century. Young Jess is a very masculine girl-child in a way that goes over very poorly in 1950s Buffalo, where she is continually asked “Are you a girl or a boy?” by every single person she ever meets, because apparently the 1950s were obsessed with propriety in a very particular way that did not involve anyone ever learning anything remotely approaching manners. She also gets beat up a lot. From there she grows into a very masculine teen who continues to get subjected to some fairly severe violence, and eventually she drops out of school, gets a job in a print shop, and starts spending all her spare time at the one gay bar in Buffalo. We follow Jess over the next few decades as she is mentored by older butches, has relationships with several femmes, acquires and loses a variety of factory jobs--many of which are in book production (unsurprisingly, these were my favorite ones to read about)--and gets caught up in several rounds of union politics at them, moves to New York City, goes on T, goes back off T, observes the political changes of the ‘60s and ‘70s but doesn’t get involved in them, is subjected to a good deal of very graphic police brutality, and generally struggles to figure out if she’s a man or a woman or both or neither while also trying to keep a job and not get beaten up too much, all of which are of course quite closely related. The book ends not with Jess settling on any specific, named point on the gender spectrum, but with her meeting up with an old union buddy to talk about communism--which is really the only sensible way for the book to end, in my opinion; anything else would not have fit.

 

This book is very intense and not in the sort of high-octane splatterpunky way a lot of the stuff I’m reading these days is. The writing style is occasionally a bit clunky but overall it’s just very straightforward in a way that really pays off when dealing with issues of violence--it’s not sensationalized but it also isn’t softened and generally doesn’t let you off the hook from looking at the fact that Jess’ life and the lives of a lot of the people around her are heavily shaped by sudden, extreme, and random acts of violence. (Random on an instance-by-instance level; they are, of course, targeted for violence due to nonconformity.) But the book isn’t all violence and struggle; there’s a lot of heartwarming nonsense and some amount of humor, as well. I admit I also liked the writing style because I require really plainspoken, no-fluff, no-fuckery approaches to stories about relationships if I am to have any hope of understanding what’s going on. (Unexpectedly relatable moment: When one of Jess’ girlfriends, Theresa, mentions that she can’t abide being read as straight by strangers, even though it’s safer, and finds the idea of going out in public on a man’s arm to be deeply distressing.)

 

I was a little caught off guard by how caught off guard I was by the books depiction of cities as places that are full of factories; I don’t think of the late 20th century as being that far back even though all of this book takes place before I was born and I am old enough to not like how old I am. This is extra dumb because at some point I did learn that the real manufacturing decline didn’t kick off until the late ‘70s, I just continually forget and want to move it like fifteen years earlier. 

 

Anyway, this book was extremely good and I highly recommend it, but it was also extremely emotionally bruising and I recommend not having anything important to do immediately after you read it.