Thoughts on a Beloved Old Friend (Book)

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I find myself rereading Stone Butch Blues again for the like 4th or 5th time. I accidentally found the free PDF (HTML link) of it on my computer when I was looking for something else. All the other times I’ve read it, it’s been in print, an old used softcover, printed in the 90s, that I probably got at the now closed GLBT bookstore in town.

I was reading the first chapter of it, which is, in its entirety, a letter written to an old lover from years past. It’s so beautiful, so poignant, honest, and simultaneously so educational to anyone who hadn’t lived through those times (but it never works at being educational… it just IS). I found myself thinking “even if just the first chapter would have been written and nothing else, it would have been enough.”

And that’s when I thought “Dayienu”. It would have been enough. (An important part of the Jewish Seder is the Dayienu, when they sing about the various things G-d did for them in their escape, and how even a single one of them would have been enough.)

I love it when different threads of my life cross, when I can gather meaning and importance from different things I’ve learned and apply them in different formats. (This one is fitting, too, because of the cultural/secular Jewish context from both the author and the book’s protagonist.)

I would love to write a Dayienu around Stone Butch Blues, a way of honoring Leslie Feinberg’s life and work. Leslie was a revolutionary communist who worked hir entire life to advance intersectional Left causes, especially gender, orientation, class, disability, and race long before the word “intersectional” ever was used. There are few people I have more respect & admiration for than Leslie, and when she died, I literally cried in public. I happened to get to meet Leslie in passing during a Dyke March long before I had read her book… zie complimented my friend Rob’s socks. I knew the basics of Leslie at the time, but it was only later that I would read Leslie’s works and grow a true appreciation for them and an understanding of the struggles of hir life (and the lives of all like Feinberg) throughout the ages. In a way, it was probably best it happened later… I probably would have embarrassed myself if I had met Leslie now.

Anyway, I just felt like getting this down. I’m probably posting this to multiple of my blogs because it fits there.