Transgressing Familiarity: Talking with Thomas Page McBee
Thomas Page McBee discusses his new memoir, AMATEUR.
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Thomas Page McBee
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.
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SELF-MADE MAN #31: Tenderness, Too
Let’s try this again; here’s my throat and a sharp thing.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Self-Made Man #27: Fool
I’d rather monkeybar across this subway car than turn away from possibility.
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Self-Made Man #26: Wild
The wild don’t build fences; we let the worms and ivy and rats and love in.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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I cock my arm and send another heavy stone into the Atlantic.
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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. Back then I liked her because she never fell for my tough guy act, my cigarettes and silly strut.
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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 this column, about my manuscript. It seems that some people are more at ease when they know I’m trans, some less.
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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 weights in my backpack and feel like Superman, crushing 25 decline push-ups off a wooden chair in the kitchen.
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I’m on the phone with my brother for the first time in months and my voice is deeper than he expected.
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