R.I.P. Leslie Feinberg

Sad news:  Leslie Feinberg has died.

Of course, she is best known as the author of Stone Butch Blues, the first coming-of-age story about an LGBT person many of us read.  But she also became the sort of scholar I admire most:  an independent one.  While her writings on gender identity and gender politics (Her last words were: "Remember me as a revolutionary communist!") are widely cited in academic circles, she herself was never affiliated with any university.  In fact, she stopped attending school around the 10th grade, but would still receive her high school diploma.

Her life and work gave us important lessons on how we can, and how we must, evolve in our sexual identities and gender expressions.  Though she, for years, lived  as a "butch" lesbian, she later identified as a trans person, though not as a trans man. Near the end of her life, she said she had "never been in search of a common umbrella identity, or even an umbrella term, that brings together people of oppressed sexes, gender identities and sexualities".  Instead, she believed in the right to self-determination for members of oppressed individuals, groups, communities and nations.

Her philosophy was encapsulated in her use of she/zie and her/her for herself.  As far as I know, she did not try to convince other people that they should use the same pronouns, though which ones they use are important.  Still, she pointed out, "people have been disrespectful of me with the right pronoun and respectful with the wrong one".  

I find such comments particularly interesting because when I first read Stone Butch Blues, years before I began my own transition, I was struggling, as I had been for a long time, to find a language and other means to express my own gender identity and sexual inclinations.  They didn't fit into the terms I'd been given--boy/girl, man/woman, marriage, even love--because such terms could only be hetero-centric because they were taught to me, however unwittingly, in hetero-centric ways.  As Jess, the lead character (and, some would say, a stand-in for Leslie Feinberg herself) in SBB says, "I need 'butch' words to describe my 'butch' life".  Jess's girlfriend, Theresa, understood as much but needed to hear it from Jess, who has shut herself down emotionally because of the brutality and violence she's experienced.  To Jess, like others in the lesbian subculture of the time (early 1960's), that lack of emotion is her butch identity and what gets her "props" in that world.  But it also led to the breakdown of her relationship with Theresa.

Even if you don't identify on the "spectrum", the book is interesting in all sorts of other ways.  For example, the story begins in Buffalo, where--at the time Jess "comes out"--there were still many blue-collar jobs to be had, and butches like Jess worked in some of them.  Jess would leave that city and move to the other end of New York State, to my hometown.   Later, when she returned to Buffalo, she found that her lesbian friends had died, moved away or married men.  There was no more blue-collar work; instead, her old friends were working as store clerks or night managers, or not at all.  

Aside from the history lesson, SBB taught me (and many other readers) much else.  When I read Christine Jorgensen's autobiography as a teenager, I was interested in, but not absorbed by it.  Part of the reason was (what I felt) her very mannered way of telling her story.  But more important, aside from feeling that I was male only in my genitalia (which I hated), I found little in common between me and her.  Most important of all, I didn't get the sense of Ms. Jorgensen's evolution, much as I hate to use that term.  I never had a real sense of how she came to see herself as the female she was, let alone how she explained it to herself or anyone else.  What I couldn't articulate then was that she eschewing one proscribed role (that of a man of her times) and taking on another (a woman of the 1950's).  Of course, it wasn't her job to instruct me or anyone else on how to perceive and express our self-identity.  But I would not find any insight on how I could define, let alone express, what I knew to be true,--or intellectual or spiritual sustenance for the journey of becoming myself.  Ironically, one of the first places in which I found such things was in SBB, the story of a butch lesbian who later comes to understand her own version of her trangender identity.

Then again, Leslie Feinberg and I were more alike than I ever could have realized.  After all, we are both transgenders who are attracted mainly (actually, in Feinberg's case, entirely) to women.  She identified as a transgender lesbian; I think of myself as a trangender bisexual with lesbian tendencies, though my lesbian tendencies are decidedly of Feinberg's butch variety.

And I'll admit that the one and only time I ever met her, I felt attracted to her.  Yes, in that way.  I mean, why wouldn't I be?  She was smart:  my first requirement.  And she was--at least when I saw her--disarmingly warm.  Perhaps her warmth disarmed me only because I was expecting to see the "stone" character she portrayed in her book.  And, finally, I will never forget the way her face lit up I told her my name:  One of her characters is also named Justine.

Paris Is Burning: A Document Of The Lost Generation Of Trans People

I saw Paris Is Burning not long after it was released in 1990.  I was very deeply in the closet then.  So, perhaps, it wouldn't surprise you to know that I went to see it with a woman with whom I was trying to initiate a more-than-friends relationship.  (It didn't happen.)  The funny thing is that she suggested the film.

But I digress.  One thing that's very interesting about the film, even for someone who's not interested in drag balls or "voguing", is that it shows a city and culture that were disappearing at the very moment Jennie Livingston (a white lesbian) was directing it.  In that sense, it reminds me of Leslie Feinberg's novel Stone Butch Blues, which portrays an upstate New York of smokestack industries and blue-collar jobs, and the "butches" who worked some of them.  That way of life was dying just as the novel's protagonist was coming of age, and was long gone by the time the novel was published.  As Jay Toole (who is not given to hyperbole)  remarked in a recent conversation with me, "There aren't any stone butches anymore!"

Likewise, the kinds of young African-American and Latino gay males and transgenders Livingston presents are all but gone, literally as well as figuratively.  Several of the subjects of the film are known to be dead, from AIDS and other forms of violence, and it wouldn't surprise me that others have passed.  Many ran away from, or were thrown out of, their homes before reaching the age of majority, which means that some were probably "off the grid" in that era just before the Internet.

The ones who have survived, as Melissa Anderson points out, probably would not recognize New York as it is now (assuming, of course, they still live here).  Then, the Christopher Street pier, where many of them hung out, was as weathered, splintered and rotted--and, in daylight, as forlorn--as a piece of driftwood on a beach. So were most of the other Hudson River piers of Greenwich Village, Chelsea and other downtown and West Side neighborhoods in Manhattan.  Now the Christopher Street Pier and others around it are, in essence, little parks that stand between the Hudson Greenway and the river.  Instead of young people who are essentially homeless and outcast in other ways, the Greenway and piers are filled, at least on fair-weather days, with cyclists, runners and parents with their kids in strollers, and  people walking their dogs.  The Chelsea Piers, which occupy the piers that formed planks from the ends of the streets in the West 20's, is full of restaurants, shops and other attractions that bring in families and tourists.  The subjects of Paris Is Burning almost certainly could not have afforded to go to any of those establishments--not that they would have--even if they were doing sex work, which was the most remunerative employment available to most of them.

Which brings me to my next point...The young gay and trans people who were "voguing" in the '80's and early '90's almost certainly wouldn't recognize me, my trans, gay and lesbian friends or, in fact, nearly any member of today's LGBT communities.  Although things are far from perfect for us today, we have no need for those balls to which the young gays and trans people expended much of the energy, and what little money, they had.  The fact that they tried to portray, as accurately as possible, supermodels, actresses, singers and other female performers, in competitions in which they represented "houses" named after fashion designers like Chanel, is an expression of their yearning to belong to the rest of the world and the knowledge that they don't, and perhaps never will.  (Note the use of the word "houses" by young people who were disowned by their families.)  Some would never have the means to belong--Many of them shoplifted the clothing and makeup they wore for those competitions!-- while others simply won't live long enough.  

Most of them could not finish high school, and could not imagine going to college or into any sort of program that will train them for a job that would provide them with the trappings of a middle-class life.  They never met gay or trans people who were writers, scientists, professors, economists, musicians, engineers, doctors or historians; if their teachers were in the LGBT spectrum, those young people would not have known, at least with any certainty.  And they almost certainly could not have imagined a world in which Dick Cheyney would express his support for same-sex marriage, or in which straight entertainers or other celebrities would advocate for trans people.

They would not have seen trans people my age, and might not have known that any existed.  That is because--as they could not have known--most trans people around my age would begin their transitions at an age, and in an age,  to which most of them would not live.  

In other words, whatever Jennie Livingston's intentions were, Paris Is Burning has become a document of the lost generation of transgenders and the history and culture that disappeared with them.