Stone Butch Blues 2027
07/19/2026
Stone Butch Blues has been on my mind. The first part of this is that I’m casting about for a novel angle on Nevada, which probably doesn’t exist, which is made harder by the fact that Nevada isn’t my Nevada, my Nevada is Stone Butch Blues. Maybe this is good: maybe I will end up having more to say about Nevada if my relationship to it is more impersonal. It is one of the first trans novels I read but I had been trans for a long time by that point. I used to have a hard time talking about Stone Butch Blues because it changed my life more than any other single piece of writing* and I don’t think it holds up very well.
Nightboat just announced a reprint, which I had a really negative reaction to and have been kind of stuck on ever since. It is straightforwardly not in accordance with Feinberg’s wishes. After a kind of “Topside Situation” with Firebrand that resolved by moving to Alyson that resolved by protracted legal battle resulting in Feinberg retaining all rights, they put out a POD author’s edition with a long copyright statement in the back and shut everything else down.
I think the copyright statement in itself is really interesting as an effort to assert control: among other things it denies all permission to:
This policy is unbelievably restrictive and has been summarily thoroughly ignored— what I have found over many years of paying attention to this is that the people who are most stubborn about invoking their legacy are least interested in their wishes. Bookstores aren’t supposed to carry it, so they put it as a queer history staff pick with a standard markup. Nobody is supposed to cherry pick quotes for their own political agenda, so that’s how I found out about it, how I see it most often. In their announcement of the reprint, Nightboat thanks the Feinberg estate’s literary agent (Laurie Liss at Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc, whose clients include Rachel Maddow, Hannah Gadsby, and Jewelle Gomez). I wonder who they’ll get to write the introduction (perhaps Ms. Maddow would like to take a crack).have SBB be represented by a literary agency inquire about permissions to do anything with it adapt it visually in any form including non-commercial fan art post the book in whole or in part anywhere online write new introductions, including non-commercial translator’s introductions
I imagine that the transitional moment between hoping that people take your work seriously as part of what’s happening and hoping people remember your work seriously as a historical object is disconcerting. This week A and I reached a stack of cans with work print for films she never cut. When she retired, she went back and finished as many of them as she could, before she got assaulted and S got sick and covid isolated them and now it’s been almost a decade since her last completed work. When she was in her newly-retired finishing spree, she got more festival rejections than she had since the start of her career. She has all this time to re-engage, but the world had kept moving and she can’t figure out how to put herself back in it.
Having an artistic legacy is a marketing project, just like every other part of being an artist. It’s one that lends itself particularly well to grievance. I guess what I’m interested in here is understanding people’s wishes, and figuring out how much I believe in respecting my elders re: their wishes for their artistic legacies. I think lots of people don’t do it enough (I guess it’s better that Nightboat is a 501c3 and they’re doing a free PDF but I can’t get over that it’s a wholesale rejection of Feinberg’s last act, even if that act was cranky and stubborn). I think it’s impossible, because everyone’s wishes are contradictory and vague and arbitrary, especially artists. I think if we have to have copyright law it should probably all be void when you die even if that would produce a lot of stupid and disrespectful derivative works.
A has me color code the spreadsheet based on what she thinks should be publicly screened when she’s gone. Most of my favorites are blocked out. Something helpful she could have done for her legacy is title her films: I wonder if anyone but me will remember the difference between Untitled (1979) and Untitled (1982), which are some of her best work, and Untitled (1986), which is just ok. I wonder how long I’ll remember the difference if her wishes are respected and they are never digitized, never made publicly available again. Leslie Feinberg doesn’t even want you to quote Stone Butch Blues. They gave all their books to a community archive that doesn’t take blood money, but the cranky old man who lives there won’t let you see them unless you tithe cash and instant coffee and put up with his coterie of tenderqueer racists. Imagining all the things that bad actors might do with your work, and then reactively putting up barriers to access is a really good way from preventing your work from being encounterable. The audience who needs it is, I think, almost always in the chance encounter. If they know enough to be looking, they need it less.
*it is possibly tied in this regard with the Vito Russo oral history interview in John D’Emilio’s Making Gay History but I don’t know that I think of oral history as writing exactly.
currently reading:
listening to:
watching: