Banned Book Review: “stone Butch Blues” by Leslie Feinberg
An observation clear to anyone with banned book review lists: almost all are LGBTQ themed, and if you read my review on the more recently penned Lawn Boy by Jonathan Evison, you know I asked, does anyone banning these books actually read them cover to cover?
Hey, you! You behind the fourth wall reading what I say. You can go read Stone Butch Blues for free right now on the author’s website. Toss that PDF into Apple iBooks! Read it to spite book banners with a billion downloads. I don’t care what gets banned, or how good it is. That it does get banned means I will talk about the book and make everyone read it. Books should never be banned! Most of you will probably dislike the book as I did. Reading banned books and discussing them online shows everyone, “We wouldn’t be reading any of this without your calling attention to it. Stop banning books!” Readers who wouldn’t care about it are picking up material like this because of the bans. Like telling someone you can’t go out past curfew, when if there is no curfew, everyone comes home early.
Now, on the topic of the actual book, I really liked Lawn Boy a lot more, and Lawn Boy was boring at bits. Stone Butch Blues is a thinly fictionised take of Leslie Feinberg’s real life, and not a really page gripping read for most of it. What I loved was Lawn Boy evoked a feeling, an artistic palette of emotions of coming of age. Stone Butch Blues sounds from the first bits like it’s going to be a lot about the Stonewall Riots, a strong Jewish identity post-WWII, how Jess our lead gal/guy/both felt forever post-assault by the high school boys, insights into the Manhattan LGBTQ equality movements, encountering heterosexual and LGBTQ feminists of the times, how she/he/they felt about the horrible words used in this time period for LGBTQ slurs. It is none of that. Leslie aka. “Jess” skips over everything I wanted more of.
I didn’t sign up for this book to read a lot about well, I guess you’d call them one too many “love scenes” to keep things PG movie rated here, smacked between a bunch of repetition about working at a factory and the office meeting notes of worker strikes. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle does worker’s equality a lot better. Any of the legendary early 20th century works provide a better played insight into that world. Book banners have lost their marbles thinking a bunch of teens are going to want to read the ins and outs of factory unions for fun. We have history class for that. As I recall, the times we talked about unions in school, everyone was focused on destroying the flies buzzing around who came in from the window and gossip about who threw an air condition unit off the fourth floor science classroom window above. At our five story school where nothing much happened, we saw the AC unit as a prankster’s triumph!
Jess is is a fairly unlikeable character as a protagonist. A three act story, she goes to he then some some sort of she/they later in the book, undoing some of the cosmetic changes. During the middle passage, living as a man, he has an intimate situation going to great lengths to pretend to be a cis man, followed by being upset when discovering that the female love interest made homophobic remarks at a gathering the next day she took him to as a date. I found this troubling, because whoever likes you should be made aware of this up front and will NOT CARE that you are a trans man. Jess’ friends and lovers throughout the novel to me would have been more interesting reads, like the tales of any of the trans women wronged during the LGBTQ bar raids or LGBTQ black women she/he/they came across in upstate New York and the boroughs of NYC.
These people are mentioned in passing like, “Oh, yeah, someone nameless or I barely told you about got assaulted in a raid/setup, so anyway, about me again.” Lots of these people don’t have names. Of those who do like Allison “Big Al,” the tough lady who is supposed to be a mentor figure, you might think Jess has a lot to say about Big Al’s issues. Big Al gets skimmed over to hear more about, wait for it, Jess. We need a lead character, but for a novel to reach our hearts, we need multiple people’s perspectives. I don’t want to read about people like newspapers report their tragedies. I want people’s stories in a book about people. EMOTIONS. The writer always talks about locking eyes with people to know their same pain, and that’s that. I don’t want a poor person’s guide to moving to NYC in act three. Who cares? I can Google Reddit results for that. We know Manhattan/Brooklyn/all of it is expensive. Give me the human side of the wonderful people you met in the boroughs! Bring me a moment in time about life in AIDS-fearing, 1980’s New York.
We hear nothing about the experiences of cis and trans people in the psych ward when LGBTQ life was seen as a mental illness. Nope, it’s like, “I went to the psych ward,” and a few pages later, “I got out! YEAY! Found the name of a safe space bar!” Do we hear about safe bars surviving raids or a lot of the business behind them? Hardly. I was really fascinated by the mob’s involvement with running a queer friendly bar until she, like she ended her book and every interesting point ever made in this whole thing, changed the subject after a few paragraphs.
“I was a bit disappointed in this because I have heard good things about it, however, 90% of it was the same plot pattern repeated with not much happening. Also, it was full of descriptions and tbh quite boring at times.”
I never plan on reading this book again because it is, as I read it in one gulp, too sad at times, and mainly, too boring, with too mean of a character for me to care about him/her/them. Sorry, I’m not cool with you feeling breaking a lady’s heart is OK, but the world is out to get you the way you mistreated her and severed ties with your ignorant but not evil parents who raised you and bought you everything you had, or you dumped your LGBTQ safe spaces and any friends you could make there because you moved on when they needed you. When I was younger, LGBTQ and heterosexual youth read Harry Potter and Bridget Jones books. Stone Butch Blues in a condensed format might speak to some people who grow up with the feelings around gender that Leslie Feinberg had. I don’t in any way believe this book as it is with how sloppy and boring it becomes in lots of it is going to be that book. This definitely skews a lot older, I’d go with a 45 year old audience, maybe people who are involved in political causes at a grassroots level, definitely people who work at factories or within unions.
And, I never plan on reading this book again with the high level of assault occurring in the book, start to end. Some people feel the lead’s “love scene” being dishonest with the woman grieving from problems with her husband counts as one, if you read this article.
“This is s*x by deception. And s*x by deception is r**e. The scene between Jess and Annie is never acknowledged as an act of sexual violence – not even during the novel’s conclusion, when Jess tries to make amends to anyone she has wronged after a near-death experience. And there is nobody she wronged more than Annie.
Jess doesn’t leave Annie out of guilt or responsibility. She ends the relationship after Annie uses a homophobic slur and implies gay people are sexually abusive. And there’s an irony to Jess’s moral outrage, given her own predatory behavior.”
“It’s an insult to r*p* victims to have Jess get r*p*d over and over again with zero interest in emotionally processing the real effects of r*p* in the text.”
If an academic, I would feel immoral recommending this as required classroom material for any age, not high school, not a university program, not a PhD program. My students would have to read it in their free time. Trigger warnings aren’t to be used lightly. Stone Butch Blues is a book I would definitely want a huge trigger warning on the book jacket / digital PDF with as to why, and how frequent, the material gets to be too much. A better alternative can be an educational leaning Stonewall book. I felt really uncomfortable much of the time with the large number of assaults described and too many “love scenes” that add nothing to the story. Worst of them: the passages with Annie, the woman destroyed by her husband who gets used and terribly disrespected by Jess. It definitely was not the book for me. In a true review, I didn’t want to be like those people who say they hated a movie without saying why and never finishing it as half of social media does. The right thing to do is finish something and decide if and why I continue to dislike it.
Real change will happen when we have quality LGBTQ characters inserted into whatever is the next Harry Potter. Preferably, family friendly reading material that can inspire. I’m going to be 37 in a few months, unable to pay attention to this book. 14 year old me who loved old American and British lit and poetry wouldn’t have cared for it. 14 year old contemporaries of mine who loved Legally Blonde and Never Been Kissed wouldn’t have touched it. People who want LGBTQ storylines if we were all young again might be, myself included, glued to the screens for HBO’s Euphoria. See, book banners? You’re really barking up the wrong tree with banning things most youth wouldn’t want to read in the first place.
Should you friends reading my review go ahead and read it? Yes, only because it’s banned, read this and every book immediately as a protest. Then set it down and read more banned books. As things appear, you and I will never stop. More books are being banned somewhere every year!
