Transgressing Familiarity: Talking with Thomas Page McBee
Thomas Page McBee discusses his new memoir, AMATEUR.
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Join NOW!Thomas 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.
...moreGuernica interviews Rumpus columnist Thomas Page McBee; he touches on his upcoming novel, American masculinity, and his steady transition across genders and cultures: I didn’t transition until I was thirty. It was complicated, there were a lot of reasons that I didn’t transition sooner. Part of that conflict was that I had really negative associations […]
...moreIf you’re in NYC, swing by the Strand tomorrow at 7 p.m. to hear Rumpus columnist Thomas Page McBee present his new memoir Man Alive. The author explores manhood, identity, and personal histories through his encounters with an abusive father and a mugger who threatened his life. Rumpus founding editor Stephen Elliott will be around to […]
...moreThe Rumpus talks to contributor Thomas Page McBee about his new book, Man Alive, heteronormativity, getting mugged, living in New York City, and what it really means to be a man.
...moreRumpus columnist Thomas Page McBee has just released a new memoir, Man Alive. The new book is, in his words, “basically a prequel” to the Self-Made Man column, and attempts to answer the question “what does it really mean to be a man?” Check out the book that Roxane Gay says “shows us what it takes […]
...moreYesterday, Rumpus columnist Thomas Page McBee kicked off his new series, “The American Man,” over at the Pacific Standard. Featuring “gonzo reporting from barber shops, boxing gyms, frat houses, and other bastions of masculinity in an effort to define what makes a modern man,” the writing will also form the basis for McBee’s next book.
...moreThe wild don’t build fences; we let the worms and ivy and rats and love in.
...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.
...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.
...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.
...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.
...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.
...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.
...moreIt’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.
...moreI’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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