Stone Butch Blues recounts the story of Jess Goldberg, a so-called “he-she” from a working-class background who, like Feinberg hirself, comes of age in Buffalo. In 1996, Bereano received the Publisher’s Service Award from Lambda Literary for her contributions to lesbian and small press publishing. The press was established as part of the rise in small press feminist and gay publishing in the wake of the Gay Rights and second-wave Women’s Movements and helped to launch the careers of luminaries such as Dorothy Allison, Alison Bechdel, Beth Brant, Jewelle Gomez, Audre Lorde, and Lesléa Newman. Firebrand, founded in Ithaca New York by Nancy Bereano, published literary fiction, poetry, and non-fiction with lesbian and feminism themes between 19.

These early experiences shaped Feinberg’s first, and most celebrated, book, the novel Stone Butch Blues, published in 1993 by Firebrand Books. “When I heard about Stonewall,” Feinberg said, “I was mad I missed it because I was ready to fight.” In addition to queerphobic harassment and violence, ze had difficulty finding steady employment due to hir gender expression and was forced to take a series of low-wage temp jobs. The harassment and physical and sexual violence gay and gender nonconforming Buffalonians faced at the hands of the police was little different from the actions that precipitated the 1966 Compton’s Cafeteria Riot in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, or the much-mythologized Stonewall Inn Riots of 1969.

Despite Buffalo’s racial segregation along east and west sides of the city, gay and drag bars hosted a mixed crowd of working-class whites, African Americans, Latinos, and Haudenosaunee. Buffalo’s lesbian bars, which were surprisingly plentiful in number, were both a space of community and a source of terror for Feinberg. It was at this time that Feinberg entered Buffalo’s gay social scene which, like many other mid-twentieth-century American cities, consisted primarily of bar culture.

As a result, ze dropped out of school at the age of fourteen, working various low-wage jobs to support hirself. Ze was born on September 1st of 1949 in Kansas City, Missouri to a working-class Jewish family who was not accepting of hir sexuality or gender nonconformity. Feinberg, who used the gender-inclusive pronouns “ze” and “hir,” was harassed simply for walking down the street as a butch lesbian and a masculine female. Coming of age as a gender-nonconforming person in Buffalo, New York during the 1950s was not easy for Leslie Feinberg.

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