Leslie Feinberg’s Buffalo: Historic Sites in Stone Butch Blues: A Lecture by Jeff Iovannone (VIDEO)
Co-sponsored by the Public History Initiative
Join Preservation Buffalo Niagara (PBN) and local queer historian and Cornell graduate student Dr. Jeff Iovannone as we explore transgender writer and activist Leslie Feinberg’s award-winning novel Stone Butch Blues through the lens of historic preservation.
Leslie Feinberg was an internationally known transgender writer, activist, labor organizer, and working-class intellectual from Buffalo. Stone Butch Blues, originally published by Firebrand Books in 1993, recounts the story of Jess Goldberg, a working-class gender nonconforming individual, as they come of age in the bars and factories of Buffalo, New York during the 1960s. Though Stone Butch Blues is a work of fiction, Feinberg based many of the book’s characters, events, and places on their lived experiences in Buffalo. In this virtual lecture, Dr. Jeffry Iovannone will discuss several historic sites represented in the novel to give new insight into Feinberg’s life and work and Buffalo’s queer past.
Dr. Jeff Iovannone, the former Coordinator of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at SUNY Fredonia, is the cofounder of PBN’s Gay Places Initiative. Founded in 2020 as a joint project between PBN and Dr. Iovannone, PBN’s Gay Places Initiative is dedicated to documenting, preserving, and celebrating LGBTQ historic sites in Western New York.
Register for the event on the PBN website.
Jeff Iovannone is a queer historian from Buffalo, New York, and an MA student in Historic Preservation Planning at Cornell University. He received his PhD in American Studies from the University at Buffalo in 2012 and coordinated the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at SUNY at Fredonia from 2013-2021. His areas of interest include LGBTQ heritage preservation, connections between preservation, public history, and social justice, and the use of preservation planning to benefit historically marginalized communities. Iovannone is also the co-founder of Gay Places, an initiative that documents LGBTQ historic sites in Western New York, with Preservation Buffalo Niagara.