Contrary to Julia, Stone Butch Blues was my favorite book of the semester. I was captivated by the queer world of the butch-femme dichotomy, and I learned a lot from Jess Feinberg’s story. So, naturally, I wanted to take it even further. I was curious about a lot of the characters in Jess’ life who fell off the radar and I wanted to recreate their stories from a different perspective.
We chose to make documentaries of characters that we wanted to know more about: Jess’ parents, Teresa, Butch Jan, and Jess’ English teacher. What happened to these people? How did they see Jess? What would the story look like from a different perspective? The most interesting character to me was actually Jess’ old English teacher, whom I liked a lot in the book. She seemed to understand Jess, and she was on Jess’ side (unlike everyone else at that point.) And in the interview, the teacher remembers Jess and asserts that Jess made an impact on her too. Even thought Jess thought no one cared about her at the time, the English teacher cared. Moreover, we added some irony and make the teacher unaware of Jess’ success in life. She says that Jess had a lot of potential and should have done something more with her life. But Jess did. If the English teacher knew then she would have been proud.
Overall, this was a fun assignment that let us think beyond the book. It often bothers me when characters are left hanging and we don’t know happens to them. Now, we know a little more about these characters.
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