Long before films like Boys Don't Cry alerted the world to the challenges--and extreme violence--transgendered people experience, Leslie Feinberg's blockbuster classic, Stone Butch Blues, offered a harrowing window onto transgendered life. Her brutally candid autobiographical novel about a blue-collar butch lesbian coming of age in pre-Stonewall Buffalo, New York electrified readers everywhere, particularly "genderqueers," whose lives up to that point had been marginalized even by lesbians and gay men.


Now Drag King Dreams picks up the conversation begun in Stone Butch Blues. No longer chronicling the past, however, Feinberg shows us where we live today. Max Rabinowitz, a bouncer turned bartender in an East Village drag club, has hit a mid-life crisis. She feels lonely and detached from her circle of activist friends, who are puzzled by her sudden political immobilization. Like many of us living in post-9/11 America, Max is outraged by her government’s actions but overwhelmed by the demands of opposition. Yet when her friend Vickie, a cross-dresser, is murdered, Max taps into her old activist spirit and—in solidarity with the queer community and other forces for progressive change—reclaims her voice.