The Daily Rumpus
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From Stephen Elliott
Shortly after yesterday’s bombing at the Boston Marathon, my Twitter feed was thick with Bostonians seeking and sharing information: Copley station was closed, cell lines jammed, marathoners meeting on the Common. People wanted to know where it was safe to go, how to get home, how to find each other.
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Sometimes I get this ragged wind in my chest. It’s a graveyard in there, too: instead of clothes holding my ghost shape, it’s my old self that calls out from beneath bone.
...moreTwo Rumpus treasures in one…treasure chest? Necklace? Treasury?? Okay, this metaphor didn’t work out, but Thomas Page McBee‘s interview of Cheryl Strayed (aka Dear Sugar) did. A small preview:
...moreBut what I’ve found as a writer is that every time I thought, everyone’s going to condemn me, everyone’s going call me a slut, or say “How dare you have an abortion,” but the reverse has happened.
On train platforms and slushy sidewalks, I find myself feeling strangely tender toward people bundled up against the cold New England winter.
...moreThe Rumpus’s Self-Made Man, Thomas Page McBee has an eloquent personal essay on BuzzFeed about Orlando Cruz, the first active boxer to come out as gay.
In the macho world of boxing, Cruz is a pioneer for the LGBT community and was an inspiration to McBee as he himself got into the sport.
...moreI imagined the sour-faced exec watching the video of our conversation and asking the teens why he paid for a bunch of queers to talk about Andy Warhol, and I have to admit, I was INTO IT.
The Rumpus’s Thomas Page McBee, who writes the Self-Made Man column, was recently tapped as a masculinity expert for a focus group conducted by a company looking to market grooming products to men.
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I’ve known what many would call evil: child abuse, a close call with a murderer. I know about other people’s dark impulses, and so I’ve been all the more terrified of my own.
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For our first interview of 2013, we sit down with the incomparable Zadie Smith for a thoughtful chat about identity, the pleasure of reading, and how to write honestly about the state of humanity.
...moreThe Dictionary Project interviews Thomas Page McBee about language, the definitions of words, and of course, his Self-Made Man column here on The Rumpus.
A tiny preview:
...moreFor The Rumpus, you write a column—or essays in installments—entitled Self-Made Man? If you were to write a dictionary entry for “self-made,” what would it say?
I used to believe that collapsing the Venn diagram-space between the public and private self was the best way to ensure authenticity.
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If masculinity could be defined by a quick Google search or a drive down a billboard-studded highway, then a “real man” is a paradox, captured crudely at the uneasy intersections of faith, love, public service announcements, politics, and advertising.
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Binaries are luxuries I can only study clinically; they lost their soothing qualities when I prioritized my reality over yours.
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We are all walking through life as if what mattered most were the symbols of our acquisitions and not the fluttering flags of our hearts.
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I’ve read that book over and over because I think it tells us something brilliant about the slippery nature of monstrosity: that the body is not ever evil; it’s the mind that bends.
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I see sixteen-year-olds now, with their subway chatter and baby fat, and try to imagine the ways they are saving each other’s lives.
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I saw myself, sitting away from the deck and the bottomless beers, listening to crickets and considering the loss of a body in metaphorical terms, drinking out of my own, grown-up Solo cup, me and my many-gendered grief.
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I’m trying to tell you that there’s something steady inside each of us, something unconcerned with expectation or gender or fear. There’s a center, and it’s like a friendly ghost of every person we’ve ever been.
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Last June, after he showed me how to pull back on the syringe and shoot the air bubbles skyward, my nurse injected an oily universe of possibility into me.
...moreAt The Boston Phoenix, Rumpus contributor Thomas Page McBee writes about undergoing his own transition while making sense of the many public stories of transgender people that also occurred throughout the past year.
“Going on hormones was scary. I was afraid of being alone, misunderstood, alien.
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I don’t know if this is the biology of it, but on the day of my testosterone shot sometimes I think I can feel my vocal chords widening, a throaty expansion.
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Em and I were both poets in high school, though she is the last one standing, her body of work forming into something beautiful as the son in her belly. Back then I liked her because she never fell for my tough guy act, my cigarettes and silly strut.
I am in a good mood when I meet a woman with a severe, sophisticated haircut for a business lunch on a sunny patio in Back Bay. She asks about this column, about my manuscript. It seems that some people are more at ease when they know I’m trans, some less.
I’m on the phone with my brother for the first time in months and my voice is deeper than he expected.
I walked in on Rob (not his real name), an ex-jock and Affleck-like Bostonian during a covert, one-man photo shoot in the men’s room at my new job this summer, and now—due to some untold mathematics of manliness—he’s my first uber-dude friend.
Look, it’s an old story, masculinity; usually discussed in terms of brutality and honor, power and powerlessness, and occasionally a highlighting of the tender underbelly that rises up no matter how much you try to push it down, like a grandfather spotted weeping into his hand in the kitchen.
I am in a public restroom off 95 in southern Maine, wondering what makes a man and also if I can muffle my piss stream with balled up toilet paper so as not to draw attention to myself. Will I ever be able to walk into a bathroom and not think about the sound of urine on porcelain?
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