The Queer Syllabus: Transgender History by Susan Stryker
In The Queer Syllabus, writers nominate works for a new canon of queer literature.
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Thomas Page McBee
35 posts
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.
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.
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.
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 who invents himself.
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.
Self-Made Man #27: Fool
I’d rather monkeybar across this subway car than turn away from possibility.
Self-Made Man #26: Wild
The wild don’t build fences; we let the worms and ivy and rats and love in.
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 into the night, each of us calling the others home.
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 prefer.
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.
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.