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Thomas Page McBee

Thomas Page McBee’s Lambda award-winning memoir, Man Alive, was named a best book of 2014 by NPR Books, BuzzFeed, Kirkus, and Publisher’s Weekly. His new book, Amateur, a reported memoir about learning how to box in order to understand masculinity’s tie to violence, was published in August to wide acclaim. Thomas was the first transgender man to box in Madison Square Garden, a “masculinity expert” for VICE, and the author of the columns “Self-Made Man” for The Rumpus and “The American Man” for Pacific Standard. His current column, “Amateur,” is for Condé Nast’s Them. A former senior editor at Quartz, his essays and reportage have appeared in the New York Times, Playboy, and Glamour.
  • Thomas Page McBee

    The Queer Syllabus: Transgender History by Susan Stryker

    In The Queer Syllabus, writers nominate works for a new canon of queer literature.

  • Thomas Page McBee

    SELF-MADE MAN #32: Grief is the Price We Pay for Love

    My son, Mom said, even when it must have been so hard for her to rewrite the moment I was born, the one that belonged to her alone.

  • Thomas Page McBee

    SELF-MADE MAN #31: Tenderness, Too

    Let’s try this again; here’s my throat and a sharp thing.

  • Thomas Page McBee

    SELF-MADE MAN #30: Tenderness

    I might inject testosterone every Thursday, but each man here is his own snowflake mix of glory days and Hail Mary second chances.

  • Thomas Page McBee

    SELF-MADE MAN #29: Ghosts

    I dodge taxis and drunk college kids near Astor Place and think how sweet to be a man in motion on a Saturday night; man formed of needles and a hundred sweaty locker rooms; a man without translation; a man…

  • Thomas Page McBee

    SELF-MADE MAN #28: The Lion, the Lamb, and the Grown Man

    The story of the lion and the lamb is itself a blur, as illusory as these hands bare-knuckling a speed bag, faster and faster until all you see is blood and ink so bright it glows.

  • Thomas Page McBee

    Self-Made Man #27: Fool

    I’d rather monkeybar across this subway car than turn away from possibility.

  • Thomas Page McBee

    Self-Made Man #26: Wild

    The wild don’t build fences; we let the worms and ivy and rats and love in.

  • Thomas Page McBee

    SELF-MADE MAN #25: Risk

    I need to be here, all skin and beard and elevator heart, where everything happens at once: the people we’ve been and the people we’re becoming creating a weird physics, time bending us toward each other, nine million stories bumping…

  • Thomas Page McBee

    Self-Made Man #24: Love Your Emergency

    As I look toward the East River and my teenage summers, I sometimes see my old body continuing on without me, living the slow-and-steady life I’d planned for so carefully and not this spectacular mess I’ve come, I think, to…

  • Thomas Page McBee

    Self Made Man #23: Serenity Prayer

    In this new New York, I’m living inside the Serenity Prayer. I say this at brunch and people laugh but I mean it.

  • Thomas Page McBee

    Self-Made Man #22: Second Person

    I guess that’s what the dream wants: for me to know that the worst kind of man, the man I was scared of becoming, doesn’t frighten me any more.

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