Stone Butch Blues

This novel follows the life of Jess Goldberg who is a young lesbian growing up in Buffalo. As she was growing up, she came to have a doubt about her life of being a woman by degrees. She ran away from her house when she became 16 years old. She met many butches, femmes and drug queens in her life and learned many things from them. People call the kind of people like her “a transgender person” today. In 1950s and 1060s, however, they were not considered to be like that. I would like to show how were they identified, and how did Jess fight for her own identity.

In her early years, Jess became aware that she was different from other girls. She could not confide it even to her parents because she knew they would not understand it. Her parents noticed it, but they still tried to have her being a girl because they thought that lesbians should be despised. Not only her parents but also other people around her despised her because she was different. Many people asked her and her parents, “Is this kid a girl or a boy?” This question is very simple, but they couldn’t answer well. She was surely a girl, but it was not the girl who is expected by society. She felt isolated in herself from her disapproving parents. She could not identify herself in words. When her menstruation began, she did not suffer from it. However, she became to feel uncomfortable as her breasts grow. She could hide her menstruation from people, but she could not hide her grown breasts. People could define her as a woman by seeing her grown breasts. When she was considering going forward with the male hormones, she also wanted surgery to remove her breasts.

After she joined a lesbian community, she was fascinated with her newfound identity grounded in the friendship of similar gender expressions. Jess became to identify herself as a stone butch. At that time, there was a rule that women had to wear woman clothes at least 3. Social did not allow them to be lesbian. Police arrested