Desperate Livin’: Stone Butch Blues Audiobook

Leslie Feinberg’s novel Stone Butch Blues has been uploaded to the Desperate Livin’ website as a free, open-source audiobook. The project was narrated by a collective of transgender, queer and ally volunteers and hosted on Desperate Livin’, an interactive digital archive of trans community resources created by artists Raju Rage and Zoyander Street and supported by Studio Voltaire.

Stone Butch Blues (1993) is a novel written by organiser, trans activist and butch Lesbian, Leslie Feinberg (1949–2014), and is considered a foundational work of trans fiction. 

Inspired by Feinberg’s own experiences as a butch lesbian and activist living in New York, the book centres on Jess Goldberg, a stone butch lesbian living in an industrial town in the US at the end of the 20th Century. Traversing the 1950s–1980s, the book details a nonlinear, ongoing exploration of gender identity that encompasses fraught relationships, community-building, political struggle and collective action. 

“Stone Butch Blues has probably touched your life even if you haven’t read it yet.”

—Alison Bechdel, creator of Dykes to Watch Out For and Fun Home

“Feinberg was a pioneering transgender activist, author and communist who significantly intersected trans liberation with disability justice. At the time of hir death in 2014, Feinberg was preparing the 20th anniversary edition of Stone Butch Blues, working up until just days before hir passing to make the text freely available online in an open-access format. Within activism, Feinberg demanded ‘deaf and disabled access’ as part of a broader human rights agenda. With this in mind, this audiobook now exists to bridge that gap between the written novel and an accessible audio version, in time for the 33rd year and fourth decade of the book being in existence.” 

— Raju Rage, artist and initiator of Stone Butch Blues audiobook  

Thirty-three years on from its original publication, and almost twelve years since Leslie Feinberg’s death, the audiobook is a testament to Stone Butch Blues' enduring relevance to contemporary social and political struggles. As definitions of ‘transgender’ and ‘gender identity’ have shifted over time, Feinberg’s novel has been a valuable resource to many who recognise the novel as situated within its own social and historical context, putting it in dialogue with broader contemporary social and political efforts to right societal wrongs taking place across the globe. 

In the afterword to the 10th Anniversary Edition of Stone Butch Blues, Feinberg wrote that “Recovering collective memory is itself an act of struggle.” With this new audio project, Raju Rage and an international group of peers continue on the important mission of recovering collective memory. Through their voluntary labour, persistence and commitment to access, they have created a beautiful, deeply tender and enduring addition to Leslie Feinberg’s work and life. 

“I am typing these words as June 2003 surges with Pride. What year is it now, as you read them? What has been won; and what has been lost? I can’t see from here; I can’t predict. But I know this: You are experiencing the impact of what we in the movement take a stand and fight for today. The present and past are the trajectory of the future. But the arc of history does not bend toward justice automatically—as the great Frederick Douglass observed, without struggle there is no progress… That’s what the characters in Stone Butch Blues fought for. The last chapter of this saga of struggle has not yet been written.” 

— Leslie Feinberg, Author Afterward Excerpts, Stone Butch Blues, 10th Anniversary Edition (2003) 

This audio project has been narrated by Aliyy, Anuka, Assia, Beth, Bodi, Emilia, Emma, Georgia, Kabir, Leila, Maz, Nadia, Nat, Newroz, Nim, Rabindranath, Rashi, Rena, River, Sarah-Mary, Shemaya, Sophie, Syrus, Tallula, Trầm, Troy and West. It has been edited by Raju and illustrated by Simone.