Queer Virtue by Elizabeth M Edman

Author:Elizabeth M Edman [Edman, Elizabeth M]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780807061350
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2016-02-15T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

ADOPTION

When I came into the bar in drag, kind of hunched over, they told me, “Be proud of what you are,” and then they adjusted my tie.

—LESLIE FEINBERG, Stone Butch Blues

Have you ever read a book that changed your understanding of yourself, of your place in the world? That’s what Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues did for me. A fictional memoir of one butch’s life from the late 1940s through the 1980s, the story rocks back and forth from brutal accounts of raids and bashings to extraordinary moments of courage and tenderness.

The book challenged me to look at my own prejudice. Coming out in the 1980s, I inherited an arrogant disdain for butch/femme culture. It was common then for white lesbians who were involved in the feminist movement to disparage what we perceived as an aping of the oppressive heterosexual gender roles that we sought to escape. Ours was a shame-filled response, the result of having been similarly disparaged by mainstream feminism in the 1970s. Feinberg’s book put human faces on what to me had been merely labels.

I was surprised just how much of myself I saw in her characters, in their need of each other, in their determination to survive with as much integrity as they could muster. The world they inhabited was the one I would have inhabited if I’d been born twenty years earlier; the bars that were home for them would have been mine, too. Feinberg’s book was a gift, a legacy. I read it and felt claimed by people I desperately wished to claim back.

In 1993 Feinberg held a reading at Judith’s Room, a women’s bookstore in the West Village. I had to go. I just wanted to be in the same room with her. After the reading, I had to stoke my courage to go up to her. I think I was trembling as I reached out to shake her hand. She looked me right in the eye, generously encouraging me. “Thank you for writing this book,” I said. “I didn’t . . . I didn’t know . . .” I struggled to get the words out. “I didn’t know that we were a people, with a history.” She thanked me, and I turned to go. When I hit the sidewalk, tears spilled. I stood there for what seemed a long time, crying, shaking, caught up in an experience that I knew I would remember the rest of my life.

Leslie Feinberg gave me one of the most important gifts that one gets from community. It is the same gift that the butches in the bars taught her protagonist, Jess, as they lovingly straightened her tie: the knowledge of self that comes from belonging to others.

“We see you. We value you. You are a part of us.”

These messages are bedrock for other messages that are crucial to a healthy conception of self: “Know who you are. Be who you are. Be proud of who you are.”

Queer identity may be discerned in relative isolation, but it comes to life in community.

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