Leslie Feinberg’s Country
The great trans author’s final work — photos of hir home in upstate New York — helped me learn how to survive.
Upstate New York is a hard place. The landscape is imposing for a city person: Cold, and craggy, with huge, deeply forested hills and jagged rock cliffs that rise up around you the moment you drive out of the city center. It has a personality, and not always a nice personality, whipping sleet and freezing wind at your face for six or seven months on end, icing over the pavements until you can’t walk to the drugstore without breaking your leg. The land is old and tough and she’s been through some shit. She will not accommodate strangers. You have show her you can keep up.
It’s hard for other reasons, too. Syracuse, where I wound up living, is hyper-segregated along racial lines, and has the most concentrated poverty in America. It nearly leads the nation for lead poisoning in children. The problem is particularly bad for the city’s refugee community; people move here for safety and find themselves living in decaying, slumlord-run houses unfit for human habitation. It’s a Rust Belt town. There were factories, and they left, and the city has spent the intervening decades climbing shakily to its feet and being knocked down by recession after recession. The land is hard, but people and capitalism…
