Leslie Feinberg: Linking NYC and Ithaca, NY, with Cornell University

Trans lesbian activist and writer Leslie Feinberg is the subject of a new digital exhibition by friend of the Project, Jeff Iovannone. “Leslie Feinberg’s Buffalo,” organized via Cornell University’s Department of City and Regional Planning, documents and spatially maps historic sites represented in Feinberg’s award-winning novel, Stone Butch Blues, originally published in Ithaca, New York by Firebrand Books in 1993. Join Project co-director, Ken Lustbader, and Jeff Iovannone *live* on Instagram on Monday, April 24th, at 12:30PM EST as they discuss Feinberg’s legacy in Ithaca as well as New York City, and the important work of documenting place-based history.

More on the exhibition: Though often not read as such, Stone Butch Blues is a particularly spatial and geographic work. Feinberg based many of the novel’s locations, events, and characters on her own lived experiences coming of age in the factories and bars of Buffalo, New York. Stone Butch Blues can, therefore, be read as a map of Buffalo’s queer history, and Leslie Feinberg’s Buffalo makes apparent a geography hidden just beneath the surface of Feinberg’s text. The exhibition was made possible with funding from the Kermit C. & Janice I. Parsons Scholarship from Cornell University’s Department of City and Regional Planning.