Feinberg, Leslie

FEINBERG, LESLIE (1949-2014). A most unusual figure within the Left in trans terms, Leslie Feinberg was hardly less so in her role in the Workers World Party(WWP) and its newspaper, Workers World. Her lasting legacy, however, was her coming-of-age novel Stone Butch Blues (1993), which introduced many readers to the complexity of gender and sexual identity.

Born in a Jewish, working-class Kansas City family and raised in Buffalo, Feinberg dropped out of high school and started work in the display sign office of a local department store. Identifying as a butch lesbian, she found a milieu in the gay bars of a city well known for its blue-collar gay and lesbian bar scene (and subject of a famous oral history, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold). Working a variety of low-wage jobs, she met members of the Workers World Party at a demonstration typical for that organization: land rights and self-determination of the Palestinian people. She joined the local branch and moved to New York City, where she became active in the variety of activities associated with the WWP. Antiwar and antiracist mobilizations flowed into marches against the KKK and her own national tour around HIV/AIDS in 1983-1984.

Feinberg’s political identity and venue bound her usefully to the WWP, a small organization founded in 1959 and known for its mobilization of street activism on a variety of issues including Disability Rights and Gay Rights. Her gay-and-lesbian history column, “Lavender & Red,” could be considered one of the first in the non-gay Left and marked Workers World as unique. Her extending of “transgender” to everyone stepping out of gender categories, across modern history, from working women in men’s clothing to drag queens, offered a fresh note to journalists and scholars alike.

Feinberg also edited the political prisoners’ column in Workers World for fifteen years, and in 1999 became the paper’s managing editor, remaining until illness forced her resignation. In these years, the WWP re-emerged as a leading force in antiwar mobilizations, never gaining more than a few hundred members but maintaining a presence in a variety of communities.

Feinberg’s own literary career reached an apex in 1993 when her novel Stone Butch Blues received the Lambda Award. It was regarded as a key document treating a working-class, female blue-collar worker struggling with career and life in the 1970s and has remained an important literary document. The next year, the American Library Association added its own award to this plaudit. A second novel, Drag King Dreams (2006) might be considered semi-autobiographical. Feinberg brought the term “transgender” into the mainstream.

Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Art to Dennis Rodman (1996) reached many reas interested in the emerging field of gay and trans history. Trans Liberation Beyond Pink and Blue (1992) and Rainbow Solidarity in Defense of Cuba (1996) made political arguments consistent with the unique views of the Workers World Party.

Stricken with undiagnosed Lyme Disease acquired in the 1970s, Feinberg went into a severe decline from multiple tic-borne diseases after 2010. The National LGBTQ “Wall of Honor,” at the Stonewall Monument, includes her name as one of fifty US “pioneers, trailblazers and heroes.”

Feinberg, Leslie. Drag King Dreams. Seattle: Seal Press, 2006.

Kennedy, Elizabeth Laprovsky and Madeline D. Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: the History of a Lesbian Community. New York: Routledge, 1993.

Official Website: Transgender Warrior. https://transgenderwarrior.org