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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

    Into the Fold

    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…

  • Thomas Page McBee

    SELF-MADE MAN #21: Love Your Zombie

    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.

  • Thomas Page McBee

    SELF-MADE MAN #20: On Dignity

    On train platforms and slushy sidewalks, I find myself feeling strangely tender toward people bundled up against the cold New England winter.

  • Thomas Page McBee

    SELF-MADE MAN #19: Notes on Negative Space

    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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    Thomas Page McBee

    The Rumpus Interview with Zadie Smith

    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.

  • Thomas Page McBee

    SELF-MADE MAN #18: In Real Life

    I used to believe that collapsing the Venn diagram-space between the public and private self was the best way to ensure authenticity.

  • Thomas Page McBee

    Self-Made Man #17: Real Men

    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.

  • Thomas Page McBee

    SELF-MADE MAN #16: Trapped in the Right Body

    Binaries are luxuries I can only study clinically; they lost their soothing qualities when I prioritized my reality over yours.

  • Thomas Page McBee

    SELF-MADE MAN #15: Everybody Passes

    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.

  • Thomas Page McBee

    SELF-MADE MAN #14: Untroubling the Body

    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.

  • Thomas Page McBee

    SELF-MADE MAN #13: Queerly Beloved

    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.

  • Thomas Page McBee

    SELF-MADE MAN #12: Holy, Holy

    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.