The Ghost Archive

Early in Leslie Feinberg’s queer classic Stone Butch Blues, the protagonist Jess narrates the setting of her birth. What she tells is her mother’s story, a story echoed across Jess’s childhood, one that thus comes to constitute her own sense of being. The story, in sum, is this: Trapped alone inside her apartment during a fierce storm, Jess’s mother weeps loudly in labor. Hearing these sounds of distress, the Dineh women who live across the hall intervene to help birth the baby. When they offer the newborn over to its mother, she responds with a chilling declarative: “Put the baby