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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Thomas Page McBee
62 posts
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.
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.
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.
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.
Transitions
At The Boston Phoenix, Rumpus contributor Thomas Page McBee writes about undergoing his own transition while making sense of the many public stories of transgender people that also occurred throughout…
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 #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,…