Join Preservation Buffalo Niagara and local queer historian Dr. Jeff Iovannone as they explore transgender writer and activist Leslie Feinberg’s award-winning novel Stone Butch Blues through the lens of historic preservation. Click here to register.

Leslie Feinberg was an internationally known transgender writer, activist, labor organizer, and working-class intellectual from Buffalo. Stone Butch Blues, originally published by Firebrand Books in 1993, recounts the story of Jess Goldberg, a working-class gender nonconforming individual, as they come of age in the bars and factories of Buffalo, New York during the 1960s. Though Stone Butch Blues is a work of fiction, Feinberg based many of the book’s characters, events, and places on their lived experiences in Buffalo. Dr. Iovannone will discuss several historic sites represented in the novel to give new insight into Feinberg’s life and work and Buffalo’s queer past.

Dr. Jeff Iovannone, the former Coordinator of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at SUNY Fredonia, is the cofounder of PBN’s Gay Places Initiative. Founded in 2020 as a joint project between PBN and Dr. Iovannone, PBN’s Gay Places Initiative is dedicated to documenting, preserving, and celebrating LGBTQ historic sites in Western New York. This lecture is co-sponsored by the Cornell Public History Initiative (CPHI) which was launched in 2019 to stimulate and deepen dialogue among undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, staff, and their wider communities about the sedimented histories that shape our contemporary world.

A free, author-approved PDF version of Stone Butch Blues can be downloaded here.