LGBTQ+ Literature and Transgender Working Class Life in Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues, 1993

Leslie Feinberg

Book

Feinberg, Leslie. Stone Butch Blues is a 1993 work of LGBTQ+ literature central to transgender, butch, working-class, and queer cultural history in the United States. The novel follows Jess Goldberg through bar culture, factory labor, police violence, passing, intimate relationships, and political awakening, giving literary form to experiences often excluded from mainstream fiction and from institutional records of late twentieth-century queer life. First published by Firebrand Books, the book won the 1994 American Library Association Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Book Award, now continued through the Stonewall Book Awards.

Feinberg, Leslie. Stone Butch Blues. New York: Firebrand Books, 1993. Trade paperback softcover. 304 pages. 8vo. The text is historical fiction shaped by Feinberg’s own experience of gender difference, butch identity, labor politics, and queer community formation; Feinberg’s official site identifies the novel as winner of the 1994 ALA Stonewall Book Award and a 1994 Lambda Literary Award. The title page contains pencil notes by a previous owner, including page references and interpretive comments such as “P. 135, walled off to Ben” and “P. 148, Teresa doesn't want Jess to pass,” giving this copy added evidence of reader engagement with the novel’s treatment of passing, emotional guardedness, and queer intimacy.

Stone Butch Blues belongs to the cultural sphere of queer small-press publishing, where transgender and butch narratives circulated through feminist, labor, prison, and activist reading communities outside dominant commercial literary channels. The cover is very clean; pencil annotations appear on the title page; text block tight. Overall very good. A strong copy of a major work of transgender and butch literature, with contemporary reader notes that underscore its use as a text for interpreting gender, survival, class, and queer community.

Item #19599

Price: $480.00