I read Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues back in November/December of 2024, and I really liked it. I've been trying to spend more time figuring myself out, figuring out who I want to be, etc, and so I've wandered through a butchfemme reading group and some of their other events a few times. They're by-and-large a good crowd, doing cool things (although, imo, they could stand to be a little bit more communist). I think people read the Jess Goldberg character at the beginning of the story having 0 class consciousness as what a quintessential butch is, and ignore the fact that she becomes a red-blooded american commie by the end.
Like I said, I've been trying to figure myself out. I've been trying to refine myself into something I can see and recognize and hold onto. When I was younger, I had a really strong sense of self as a chameleon that could fit in anywhere to achieve my aims and ambitions, but still be incredibly cool and eye-catching (I was clanking around in tripp pants with brass-knuckle rings for like 4 years). Over time, I kind of dumped a lot of those aims and ambitions, leaving me with just the ambiguous, people-pleasing chameleon part. And to be clear, I have been really good at matching vibes and being what the person across from me seems to want.
Between my depression and my suicidality, things like "dreams" felt especially rat-racey and fruitless. A great way to exhaust myself. How do you "be a person" without holding onto aspirations or preferences? That stuff kind of feels core to an identity to me. I feel like in a lot of ways my main preference in most things has been "whatever is the cheapest, fastest, lowest effort, most efficient". I've kind of capitalism-gamified my identity in that way, rubbed smooth by the numbers game, and I don't want to be like that.
In the book, Jess is a working class butch. Every chapter she goes through a phase of contraction or expansion. In times of contraction, bad things break through her defenses and in response she shuts down and shrinks, gets rid of everything and everyone she can't carry on her back. She gets bullied at home - she goes out to bars. She gets raped at school - she bails on a scholarship and drops out. Maimed at work, jumped by cops, apartment burns down, shrinking every time. But there's always a lesson to be learned, and old lobster-shells are shed to reveal fresh carapace underneath. New motorcycles, new girlfriends, new struggles, new friends.
It's a really easy book to read. It's written really simply, and it moves quick. The content is rough, at times gory or gross, but it never reads as gruesome to me. Everything is building towards a moral of the story: bad things build trauma, but the trauma can be shed or incorporated into a more resilient self that's more communist than before.
I'm dating two people now, Fey & Val. Fey and I just had our 6-year anniversary this past April 13th (plus 2 more from our first stint at dating in the 2010's), and Val and I have been dating since January 17th of this year, and talking a little more before that. Dating Fey is really easy. Sometimes too easy. We read each other deeply and quickly, and a lot of our communication is super smoothed out. Dating Val is really hard. I've known them since 2023, and I've been into them since a little before the summer of 2024. I've been in my 30s for the entirety of our friendship -- they weren't there for anything about me prior to that, and they've been figuring me out fresh. I've never jumped into dating someone this quickly. It's exciting, magical, scary, exhausting.
I'm only 32, and no one has ever made me feel at once so old and so young as Valentine. They are beautiful, energetic, erotic, and so, so creative. I admire them so much. I love going out with them. And then I get sleepy at 9pm. I can barely stomach two drinks these days, and the hangover will be hell. For Valentine: I want to eat right, take my meds, get exercise, make art, go to bed early - just so my body and soul can keep up with the whirlwind pace of what it's like to dance around alongside them.
Anyway, I've been thinking about life as a steady pulsing waveform, that starts strong and gets weaker over time. Peaks and valleys that get smaller and smaller as time goes on.
I got roped into buying a swanky, newly renovated duplex with my friend Jesse, and it's been over a year since we moved into our respective apartments. I regret it greatly, because my share of the mortgage is $1900 a month, and I could be renting a place thats $800 cheaper and with way fewer strings attached. But I'm clinging onto it anyway, for dear life. I refuse to let go. It's a deeply uncomfortable thing. Sometimes, I'm like a hollow stone that desperately wants to contract and go into a smaller and safer shape, to recharge and rebuild myself, but instead I've filled my life up with these big pieces of scaffolding that won't let me shrink small enough.