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Posts by author

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.
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  • Features & Reviews
  • Queer Syllabus
  • Rumpus Original
  • Thomas Page McBee

The Queer Syllabus: Transgender History by Susan Stryker

  • Thomas Page McBee
  • November 8, 2018
In The Queer Syllabus, writers nominate works for a new canon of queer literature.
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  • Rumpus Original
  • Thomas Page McBee

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

  • Thomas Page McBee
  • July 13, 2015
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.
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  • Rumpus Original
  • Thomas Page McBee

SELF-MADE MAN #31: Tenderness, Too

  • Thomas Page McBee
  • July 30, 2014
Let’s try this again; here’s my throat and a sharp thing.
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  • Rumpus Original
  • Thomas Page McBee

SELF-MADE MAN #30: Tenderness

  • Thomas Page McBee
  • June 9, 2014
I might inject testosterone every Thursday, but each man here is his own snowflake mix of glory days and Hail Mary second chances.
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  • Blogs
  • Rumpus Original
  • Thomas Page McBee

SELF-MADE MAN #29: Ghosts

  • Thomas Page McBee
  • April 7, 2014
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.
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  • Rumpus Original
  • Thomas Page McBee

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

  • Thomas Page McBee
  • February 24, 2014
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.
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  • Blogs
  • Rumpus Original
  • Rumpus Originals
  • Thomas Page McBee

Self-Made Man #27: Fool

  • Thomas Page McBee
  • January 23, 2014
I’d rather monkeybar across this subway car than turn away from possibility.
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  • Rumpus Original
  • Thomas Page McBee

Self-Made Man #26: Wild

  • Thomas Page McBee
  • December 30, 2013
The wild don’t build fences; we let the worms and ivy and rats and love in.
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  • Rumpus Original
  • Thomas Page McBee

SELF-MADE MAN #25: Risk

  • Thomas Page McBee
  • December 11, 2013
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.
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  • Rumpus Original
  • Thomas Page McBee

Self-Made Man #24: Love Your Emergency

  • Thomas Page McBee
  • November 19, 2013
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.
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  • Rumpus Original
  • Thomas Page McBee

Self Made Man #23: Serenity Prayer

  • Thomas Page McBee
  • October 10, 2013
In this new New York, I’m living inside the Serenity Prayer. I say this at brunch and people laugh but I mean it.
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  • Rumpus Original
  • Thomas Page McBee

Self-Made Man #22: Second Person

  • Thomas Page McBee
  • May 31, 2013
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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