Stone Butch Blues, Leslie Feinberg’s 1993 first novel, is widely considered in and outside the U.S. to be a groundbreaking work about the complexities of gender. Feinberg was the first theorist to advance a Marxist concept of “transgender liberation.”

“Stone Butch Blues is the queer great American novel— it will be read, loved, studied, and denounced for a long, long time.” —Holly Hughes, performance artist and author of Clit Notes: A Sapphic Sampler “Reading this book changed my life. The narrator of Stone Butch Blues both walks achingly alone and tells

Hir impact on mass culture was primarily through hir 1993 first novel, Stone Butch Blues, widely considered in and outside the U.S. as a groundbreaking work about the complexities of gender. Sold by the hundreds of thousands of copies and also passed from hand-to-hand inside prisons, the novel has been translated into Chinese, Dutch, German ...

I worked briefly on a movie version of Stone Butch Blues until I discovered that the producer’s prospectus was trying to raise capital from investors by offering a sexual fantasy: an invitation to watch butches being raped by police. I requested that no movie be made; I don’t believe any movie can be made true to the intention of the book.

I have received many generous offers to translate Stone Butch Blues, without cost, into numerous languages, including Kannada, Spanish, Russian and French. But I remain too ill to get back in touch with willing translators, or to negotiate individual contracts.

Photo Credits: All photographs donated with permission by activists / photographers / artists. Labor & Consultation: CeCe McDonald Andrea Jenkins Billy Navarro Jr.