18th meeting: Stone Butch Blues

On Sunday, the 18th meeting of Eat, Drink, and Be Literary was hosted by Tana-- it also marked her last meeting since she is graduating (color me jealous) and will be moving to Boston to start a post-doc.  For her last book, Tana chose Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg.

Our meeting was small this time-- only five people-- but we had a great discussion of the novel. It is the story (seeming based loosely on Feinberg's life) of a young butch lesbian, Jess growing up in the 1950's-60's in Buffalo as she struggles with her her gender identity and finds a place in the world. It was brutally hard to read at times (emotionally, I mean), but I am so glad I got through it. This book helped me to really take the perspective of a group of people that I haven't ever before.

The struggles that Jess faced as a child and young adult were horrific, and while this story was fictionalized, I assume that it s representative of so many people's stories. The entire group mentioned how glad we were to be living in a time where women can't be arrested and beaten and raped simply for dancing with one another. While the fight for equality in this country is far from being won, I am thankful that we are closer now than we were 50 years ago.

As happy as I am that I read this, I didn't love all of it. I thought that the first hundred pages were incredibly powerful and eye-opening, but the middle of the book just dragged for me.  A huge part of the novel dealt with the formation of unions and other social movements of the 60's, and while I find this whole era incredibly important and fascinating, I almost thought that there was too much going on in certain points of the book. Too many characters, each with so many struggles I almost became desensitized to them. I guess I just think that the plot could have been streamlined somehow.

Ninth Meeting: The Charioteer

June's meeting of Eat, Drink, and Be Literary was hosted by my friend and former roommate Matt. He picked a book called The Charioteer, by Mary Renault. The story was about Laurie, a young british soldier in WWII who also happened to be gay. He struggled with these feelings and with who he wanted to be, and found himself quickly caught in a love triangle- one side he is being pulled by Andrew, a very innocent concientious objector o the war with whom he has an innocent love that neither of them act on, and on the other side, he is being pulled by Ralph, a young man that Laurie had gone to school with when he was young. Ralph is not innocent like Andrew, at all, and in many ways acts as a mentor to Laurie as he discovered himself and what his sexual-identity was.

The book was really difficult to read-- perhaps our most difficult yet! For one thing, the book was written in the 1950's, and for another thing, the book was written by a British woman. So, the vernacular and style were basically foreign. However, there were times when the language used was absolutely poetic. The writing is much more flowery than is found in today's novels, and in between the vague and hard-to-understand sections were beautiful descriptions.


For me, something that made the book even more difficult was that I didn't really like any of the characters. In fact, my alliance laid more with the peripheral characters in the story than Laurie or his two loves. Also, I embarrassingly interpreted all 1950's British slang as innuendo.... and I found out at the meeting that I wasn't the only one who experienced this!

The discussion of the book was one of our best yet. It was a small group this time (only six), probably because of the difficulty of the book, but six of us showed up with treats and ideas in hand. As usual, we were divided on our opinions of the book, but we all agreed that we didn't quite know what happened. Thank goodness Beth (who majored in English literature in college) was there to explain everything to us! Matt asked some great questions that really made me appreciate the story more. After having the plot re-explained to us, we discussed the symbolism in the book, and then whether we thought the book was still relevant today. We also talked about the author who wrote the book partially based on personal experience. Ms. Renault was working as a nurse during the war, and was a lesbian. She wrote the story based on gay soldiers she had befriended, and presumably also relied on her own experience while in search for her gay identity in a time where there was no such thing.


Though I didn't particularly like reading the book, my opinion towards it after our discussion is a lot higher.