SELF-MADE MAN #11: Blood and Ceremony
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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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 #10: Pride
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.
SELF-MADE MAN #9: Passing
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.
SELF-MADE MAN #8: What Makes a Man
I cock my arm and send another heavy stone into the Atlantic.
SELF-MADE MAN #7: Translator
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.…
SELF-MADE MAN #6: Observer Bias
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…
SELF-MADE MAN #5: Flipbook
It’s magic hour on a Thursday. In my living room I do side planks on a mat for 90 seconds, and then 10 hard chin-ups in three sets. I put…
SELF-MADE MAN #4: On Violence
I’m on the phone with my brother for the first time in months and my voice is deeper than he expected.
SELF-MADE MAN #3: Stitches
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,…
SELF-MADE MAN #2: Old Stories
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…
SELF-MADE MAN #1: The Truckstop
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…