This is a brief essay on Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg.

1. Stone Butch
Avery Brow
I just spent $8 on soap from Whole Foods. It is some fancy goat’s milk soap and the
packaging claims that it will make my skin softer. I just unwrapped it and put next to the
sink near the toothbrush and my mouthwash. The soap smells amazingly clean and
refreshing. What does this soap say about me? What would people think if they knew I
bought this soap because it claims that it will make my skin softer? I wonder what people
think when I pass them on the street and I wonder if they suspect that I shave my legs
using that goat’s milk soap.
Sometimes strangers walk up to me when I’m sitting on the bench waiting for the bus, or
waiting inside the shelter for the light rail to take me from work to school for the
afternoon, that I look sad. Others tell me that I look distant. I noticed the same sort of
distance expressed by the stone butches in Stone Butch Blues. A lover once told me that
looking into my eyes was like staring off a cliff to the vastness of an ocean vista below —
and filled them with the same fear they felt when standing on the edge. She might have
been the closest to the truth as I see it. I often notice that I’ve drifted off somewhere else,
lost in my own eddying world of thought and emotion.
Maybe it was the love that Jess and Ruth finally find in themselves, and for each other, at
the end of Stone Butch Blues that has triggered this moment of self-reflection. I hate self-
reflection because I’m prone to get caught up and it takes me days to recover myself. The
more of the book I read, the more that I wanted to read but this also stirred a sense of
disconnected reality. I wanted to read more, and I desired to read more (and in fact, did
read more) but I also dreaded turning the next page. I suppose that this is not such a
surprise, really. All good books should make someone do that. They all share an ability to
postpone sleep, or laundry, or dinner, or cleaning or even fill someone with dreadful
longing.
Maybe the disappearing is also the strength. I am struck by different portions of the
novel, particularly when Jess talks about her experiences during the arrests, or the
assaults all stone butch lesbians faced when bars were raided or they said the wrong thing
at the factories. The disappearing is the coping mechanism. I think it is the idea of being
able to disappear from reality and disconnect from the torture of the moment that I share
with the Stones.
I used to disappear sometimes. I always thought it was just a Libra thing. But there were
times when I just couldn’t go on and I would lose myself in a sea of tears and pain. It was
overwhelming and I would just lose control, curled into a ball as small as I could make
myself. I met my lover eight years ago and he has only seen it happen two or three times.
It frightens him into immobility; frozen with fear. He always professed to not know what
to do for me. He said once it was because I was the strong one, I was the one who always
had the answers, or knew the right thing to do, or say. I was the one who remembered
that pizza always made him feel better, or that cooking with my grandmother calms her
anger, or gardening with my mother soothes her. But he never knew what to do for me.
My identity is my own, and so is my sexuality. My lover just calls me pensive. I always
do what I think is right, no matter what others will think of me for it. I refuse to live by

2. 2 STONE BUTCH
other’s standards and dismiss those rules that I find repressing, outdated or useless. A
classmate said that I only obey those rules I agree with. I was offended at first, but now
realize he was exactly correct. He called it being ethical.
I more I think of Stone Butch Blues the more I realize that it is a story that was less about
determining her own identity, but being comfortable in existing in somewhere in
between. I was struck by the incidents that Jess experienced: the rapes, the relationships,
the muggings, the thefts and the fire of her apartment building - a fire that led her to Ruth.
The importance in this semi-autobiographical novel does not lie as just a story about
gender, but as a story about acceptance within oneself, of being different, of being
yourself.
My lover knew that I would recover fastest if he put me in a hot shower and rubbed my
back. The last time he carried me to the tub and turned on the water. He let it run over my
body until my skin was pink from the heat. He slowly rubbed my back and ran his fingers
through my hair. He slowly washed me, lathering his hands and gently running them over
every inch of my body. When I stopped crying he wrapped me in a towel and carried me
to bed. He never asked me what was happening inside or where I went when I
disappeared like that.
I think he was frightened of what the answer would be.
I was reminded of the last time I left myself behind when I read the scene with Butch Al
and Jess after Butch Al’s stroke when Jess visits her at the asylum. Butch Al is gone and
then comes back, for a brief minute, to speak with Jess before she drifts away again. This
scene was poignant and surreal because I felt that longing to return to the place where I
could forget. Just like Butch Al. Those places are so comfortable because there, we can
be ourselves and allowed to forget the rapes, or the beatings, or the words spoken out of
hatred and fear. In these places we can exist with no expectations, no pressure to be the
rock. To be stone. To be butch. Only to be ourselves.
Is it okay for me to call myself a stone butch? I imagine that Ruth and Jess would
embrace me with an implicit understanding. I imagine that Butch Al would be angry, her
fists smashing a table because no one should live in those dark places lest they become to
comfortable to leave. I wonder if someday I’ll end up there permanently too like Butch
Al. Labels exist to identify yourself and others. The constraints they place on people are
difficult to break and horrifying binding. Sometimes they break us instead, like Butch Al.
But maybe instead, like those other rules I find frivolous and impossibly demanding — I
can break this rule too. Gay or lesbian, male or female doesn’t matter; the only identity
that does, is Stone Butch.