The Queer Syllabus: Transgender History by Susan Stryker
In The Queer Syllabus, writers nominate works for a new canon of queer literature.
...moreIn The Queer Syllabus, writers nominate works for a new canon of queer literature.
...moreThomas Page McBee discusses his new memoir, AMATEUR.
...moreMy 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.
...moreLet’s try this again; here’s my throat and a sharp thing.
...moreI might inject testosterone every Thursday, but each man here is his own snowflake mix of glory days and Hail Mary second chances.
...moreI 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.
...moreThe 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.
...moreI’d rather monkeybar across this subway car than turn away from possibility.
...moreThe wild don’t build fences; we let the worms and ivy and rats and love in.
...moreI 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.
...moreAs 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.
...moreIn this new New York, I’m living inside the Serenity Prayer. I say this at brunch and people laugh but I mean it.
...moreI 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.
...moreShortly 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.
...moreSometimes 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.
...moreOn train platforms and slushy sidewalks, I find myself feeling strangely tender toward people bundled up against the cold New England winter.
...moreI’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.
...moreFor 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.
...moreI used to believe that collapsing the Venn diagram-space between the public and private self was the best way to ensure authenticity.
...moreIf 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.
...moreBinaries are luxuries I can only study clinically; they lost their soothing qualities when I prioritized my reality over yours.
...moreWe are all walking through life as if what mattered most were the symbols of our acquisitions and not the fluttering flags of our hearts.
...moreI’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.
...moreI 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.
...moreI 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.
...moreI’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.
...moreLast 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.
...moreI 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.
...moreI cock my arm and send another heavy stone into the Atlantic.
...moreEm 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.
...more