This group of librarians had been waiting half an hour for Feinberg to show up, and finally the author arrived, breathless, direct from the airport, where ze had flown in from New York after speaking at a twenty-fifth anniversary commemoration of the Stonewall Riots. One member of the ALA awards jury vividly recalls a celebratory dinner on Ocean Drive in South Beach.

In 1994, Stone Butch Blues, which was reviewed in the in the Fall 1994 issue of this magazine, won the American Library Association’s (ALA) Gay and Lesbian Book Award (now known as the Stonewall Book Award), as well as the Lambda Book Award for lesbian fiction. In the 1960s, Jess decided that she “can’t survive as a he-she much longer” and decided to start taking male hormones to “pass as a guy.”

Feinberg goes into chilling detail about police brutality that butches, femmes and drag queens faced when captured in bar raids.

In this semi-autobiographical novel, butch lesbian Jess Goldberg tells the story of growing up in Buffalo in the 1950s and running away at the age of sixteen. The family later moved to Buffalo, the setting for part of Stone Butch Blues (1993), Feinberg’s first published and best-known book. Transgender Warriors includes a slightly blurred photo of Feinberg, around age seven, looking as forlorn and hopeless as any child in a war-torn country. Transphobic health care providers offered only contempt, and the condition was left untreated for too long, leading to other medical problems.īorn Diane Leslie Feinberg in Kansas City, Missouri, ze recounted a few anecdotes of hir childhood in Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman (1996), a well-researched history of transgender people through history and across cultures. Earlier in hir life, Feinberg had been near death from endocarditis, an infection of the heart valves. Hir spouse, the poet Minnie Bruce Pratt, who stated that Feinberg was the “first theorist to advance a Marxist concept of ‘transgender liberation,’” died of complications from multiple tick-borne co-infections, including Lyme disease. … Being a masculine female means I am uni-gendered, not bi-gendered.” Feinberg, who died at the age of 65 in Syracuse, New York, on November 15, 2014, really just wanted to be Les Feinberg. IN Transliberation: Beyond Pink or Blue (1998), the late writer-activist Leslie Feinberg, who preferred the gender-neutral pronouns hir and ze, described hirself as “a masculine feminine”: “I do not identify as a male, so I don’t believe that I should have to change my body to ‘match’ my gender expression so that authorities can feel comfortable.

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