This powerful book recounts the author’s relationship with the iconic trans activist and butch lesbian Leslie Feinberg
BY MINNIE BRUCE PRATT, IMAGE BY MARILYN HUMPHRIES
In S/HE, Minnie Bruce Pratt blends poetic memoir and theory to explore the fluid, dynamic landscapes of sex and gender. Through vivid vignettes, she recounts her journey with her spouse Leslie Feinberg, challenging binary norms and oppressive frames of respectability. Pratt’s reflections bring liberation, lived theory, and vibrant humanity to life.
Standing in the pit of the auditorium, you are someone I don’t know yet, handsome in a silky shirt and tie, hair clipped close almost as skin on your fine-boned head. You read a story about bar raids in the ‘50s, a dawn scene on the street between a butch just released from jail and the woman who has waited for her, who now smooths her shirt and mourns the bloodstains that will never wash out. As you read, I am the woman who touches the shirt, startled to be so translated to a place I think I’ve never been.
Yet later I remember that when I got to the trailer she had already showered and changed out of her overalls. The plaid shirt, her favorite shirt he had slashed with his knife, was a heap on the bathroom floor. I thought then that he had raped her because she was a lesbian. But he raped her because she was also a butch, her cropped hair, her walk, three o’clock in the afternoon, taking out the garbage to the dumpster behind the 7-Eleven, finishing up her shift. I smoothed her shirt over my knees. I pinned the frayed plaid together. I hand-sewed with exquisite care until the colors matched again, trying to keep us together.
In the dim light of the auditorium, you see me standing in your past. Your message on my phone machine the next morning says, “So glad to see a femme from the old days.” I write to you, to explain about my lesbian-feminist political coming-out. In return, your letter says, of me listening in the auditorium, “While I was reading, it was as if you were moving emotionally with me in the symmetry of a slow dance.” I don’t understand what you mean, me who begins to wander off in my own direction halfway through every dance with a lover, my attention and my confidence failing. I reply, dubiously, hopefully, “I have so much trouble following—perhaps I haven’t had a skillful enough partner?”
When you come to visit me in D.C., we go to dance at the Phase. You have a pocketful of quarters and arrange for three slow Anita Bakers in a row. I am nervous and tentative for the first song and a half; you murmur endearments and instructions. Then suddenly I lean back in your arms, look into your eyes, and begin to move as if the dance is air I am flying into or water I am finning through, finally moving in my element. When we sit to drink Calistogas and lime with friends, you say, “I never thought I’d dance again with a femme lover in a bar like this, like the ones I came out into.” Behind us the jukebox glows like a neon dream, and dykes at the green baize table are clunking their pool cues. I tell you about my first bar, in North Carolina, almost ten years after the Stonewall Rebellion in New York City, an uprising of lesbian and gay liberation that I had not yet heard of. At that bar we parked around the corner so the police wouldn’t photograph our license plates. We had to sign a roster at the door because it was a “private club.” Rumor was that the lists got handed over to the police. My friends taught me to give a fake name; sometimes I signed in as Susan B. Anthony. Everyone always turned around to see who was coming in when the door opened. Everyone knew about the second exit in the dance room, double doors onto the street just in case of a raid, which never came while I was there. You lean towards me, tie loosened, shirt sleeves rolled up in the heat. You pull me into the hard circle of your arm and say, “Baby, no one knows about the second exit except someone from the old days.”
From S/HE by Minnie Bruce Pratt © The Estate of Minnie Bruce Pratt, 2024. Used with permission. New edition now available everywhere books are sold. For more information sinisterwisdom.org/s-he
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