
In 2016, Miles told Scenester.TV that she “knew and marched with Leslie Feinberg” and that she was making the feature film version of Stone Butch Blues to work toward “furthering the charge to fight transphobia with trans voices.” On 11B’s website, her bio reads: “A successful entrepreneur and business executive, Jelayne is also a principal in Frontier Fiscal Services, a finance company she heads with her husband, Dean Throntveit, serving the oil industry throughout North Dakota and Montana.” In 2015, Miles filed to create Stone Butch Blues LLC, less than a year after Feinberg’s death.

Feinberg was featured as part of an episode about Camp Trans.
#Stone butch blues series
The adaptation is being helmed by 11B Productions, founded by Jelayne Miles of the Emmy-nominated trans-focused series We’ve Been Around. When Jess travels to New York City, they begin to glimpse at a new sense of self, hope and home.” Jess begins to take testosterone, alienating Jess from the Buffalo community and those closest to their heart. Eventually Jess comes into their own as a passionate union leader in the factory. “When Jess begins working at a local factory with butch women by day and frequenting the local underground gay bars at night, Jess finally finds some semblance of community. “Based on the book by Leslie Feinberg, Jess begins their journey growing up as a masculine girl in 1960s blue-collar Buffalo, struggling with identity and self-acceptance in the pre-Stonewall era,” reads the production description. They also go on to assert: “No permission for derivative use,” lamenting their experience with a cartoonist who wanted to create an illustrated adaptation that they found to be false.
#Stone butch blues movie
I requested that no movie be made I don’t believe any movie can be made true to the intention of the book.” In the next section titled “No movie version,” they continued: “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. “Don’t tell me you’re honoring me by saying you can tell this story better than I did,” Feinberg wrote.
#Stone butch blues free
… While very ill in Spring 2012, I recovered my rights again.”įeinberg went on to assert that despite requests, their wish was for Stone Butch Blues to remain as they created it, free of any adaptations. “When the first publisher went into Chapter 11 court, I had to spend thousands of dollars of my wages on legal fees to recover the right to this novel. “I had to work to recover my rights to Stone Butch Blues,” Feinberg wrote. Then they self-published a 20th anniversary copy/author’s edition in 2014 that was accompanied by a new introduction.
#Stone butch blues pdf
After winning the book back, Feinberg released it as a free PDF on their website. In their final years, Feinberg fought to recover the rights for Stone Butch Blues, which was out of print for several years after secondary printer Alyson Books folded. Persistence, resistance, and daring to exist is Feinberg’s message, executed through a kind of unapologetic storytelling detailing the truths of queer and trans lives at a time when even appearing to beLGBTQ was especially harmful.

They also find comfort in the factories and unions working alongside other butches, despite the harshness and bigotry that exists within the patriarchal hierarchy that dooms them to fail. Leaving high school before graduation, Jess finds their people in the dyke bars of Niagara Falls and New York City, exploring the roles of butch/femme and experiencing police brutality for wearing men’s clothes. Stone Butch Blues follows protagonist, Jess Goldberg, a gender nonconforming youthwhose parents are less than loving, and whose peers are largely hateful, some even violent and sexually abusive.

The novel, first published by the feminist small press Firebrand Books 25 years ago, won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction in 1993, but has since been seen as a seminal trans text, with Feinberg’s own identity “cross the cultural boundaries of gender,” the author and activist coming to self-identify as both a lesbian and trans. Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues is one of the most influential pieces of literature in the queer canon, especially for lesbian and biwomen and trans people who found themselves included in the semi-autobiographical story of a gender non-conforming person moving through the world as a working class “he-she” in upstate New York in the 1940s, 50s, 60s, and 70s.
