Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is one of the essential books in the world of gender fluidity, published long before the current discussions of transgender issues, carving out a space unique to itself, a pure piece of fury at times, a heartwrenching search for the truth about one person’s self. The range between man and woman is a spectrum, not a pole of opposites. The story that Feinberg tells begins in the 50s and carries itself forward into the ensuing decades as protagonist Jess Goldberg makes her decision to live as a man. The decision proves to be earthshaking. This is the way bars felt in the sixties and later, whether they catered to men or women or the space between. A time when a woman could be “she” and “he” in the same day, switching back and forth as often as conversation or circumstance dictated. (The same was true of men but that’s not what this book is about.) The writing is straight out of the furnace of Feinberg’s being, and there are only a few books I have ever read that accomplish that feat.