First, a necessary disclaimer: Leslie Feinberg is my friend and comrade. We’ve worked together for many years as writers and editors of Workers World newspaper.

I came to New York in 1990, a confused, green, and damaged kid who wanted so badly to be a revolutionist. Leslie took me under hir* strong wings and helped give me direction. Ze* taught me what it meant to have a sense of history, a long view of the struggle for working-class liberation, and a sense of yourself within it.

Through hir example of living as a trans person (and later through hir Marxist theoretical writings on the subject), Leslie taught me that gender, gender expression, and sexuality are not identical. I’d struggled through my teen years with questions of identity that I had no language for, other than the slurs of people to whom my friendships with women and concern with the world outside were enough to label me "queer."  Today, Leslie is still my paragon of what it means to be a revolutionary optimist, through hir daily struggle for hir right to exist and thrive in the world.

So yeah, I’m biased. But with that said, "Drag King Dreams" is still one hell of a good book.

DKD’s main audience will probably be among trans people and the broader LGBT community. Although trans fiction has blossomed since Leslie’s groundbreaking "Stone Butch Blues" was published 13 years ago, there are still far too few outlets for trans people to see their lives reflected in literature, and that alone makes DKD’s publication significant. But you don’t have to be trans or gay to identify and empathize with Max Rabinowitz, the book’s downtrodden protagonist.

Max, a sensitive and thoughtful former activist, works as a bouncer at a night club with a beautiful, dysfunctional family of co-workers. Max’s existence is always fraught with danger—a point hammered home in the book’s opening pages—but then he finds himself cast into the even more perilous, repressive world of post-9/11 New York.

As war begins in Iraq, and Arab and South Asian friends are among those "disappeared" by the U.S. government, Max is propelled into a life-defining crisis. He knows his obligation to the world is to stand up; he knows what he SHOULD do. But he’s had the self-confidence knocked out of him by his daily fight for survival. Will his fear and shame overwhelm him?

I found myself identifying with Max from the outset. Although I could never compare the special oppression faced by a trans person like Max to my own situation as a white male worker, I have often felt Max’s feelings and thought his thoughts. As a survivor of abusive relationships from childhood through adulthood, I’ve struggled—often with great difficulty and frustration—to find ways to stay connected to the struggle when it’s near-impossible to leave the apartment or be among people on the sidewalk, much less confront the capitalist state head-on.

DKD also grapples with another subject near and dear to me: the hidden history of important class battles which are ignored or distorted beyond recognition by the mainstream media, academia and other "experts." Leslie’s vivid account of events like the March 2003 Times Square demonstration the day after the U.S. invasion of Iraq is important work in reclaiming working-class history.

Hir writing has matured and grown more assured in the decade since "Stone Butch Blues." Max is our center, but the vital characters around him practically burst the bonds of the printed page. The dialogue is natural and convincing (something I’m very attuned to, since I struggle with it in my own writing). There were passages in SBB when I found myself noticing dialogue or internal monologues that seemed to be there only to move the plot forward; here the craft is surer, the characters’ speech providing forward motion without being obvious.

This is revolutionary writing, as surely as any great theoretical work of Marx, Lenin, or Trotsky, and accessible in form and language in ways those books are not.

The great value of "Drag King Dreams," like "Stone Butch Blues," is that it is a tool to help oppressed and working-class people break out of isolation. To know Max Rabinowitz is to know you’re not alone in your struggle—and that’s something we all need, especially these days.

--Redguard

 *Gender-free pronouns equivalent to her/him and she/he.