I feel most like a man when I'm angry. When I'm hungry with nothing to fill myself with. When the hunger is within my bones. When I can feel my blood boiling behind my eyes. When my fingers slowly curl in and out of fists. When my muscles bulge out of my tight shirts. When I make eye contact with a woman and I can tell her lingering implies desire. And when a woman ignores me. When a woman comes to me with a question and is surprised by my kindness. When I wake up and rip myself out of bed to get to work, yawning, growling, day after day after day after day after day. When I push myself to work through exhaustion and frustration. When the veins are prominent under my skin. When my chest is white-hot from the strain of catching my breath: running, lifting, biking, stroking. When I wheeze and when I sweat. When the sweat burns my dry skin. When I scowl in a photo. When my brothers ask me for money (not advice). It feels like masculinity in me, too, when I think of all the ones who have stolen from me that I forgave, that I never confronted, whose fates I've left to karma. When the waitress brings the bill to me even if I'm not the one paying. When I pay the bills every month without any assistance. When I'm wondering how I'm going to afford everything near the end of the month. When I go hungry some nights because there isn't anything left in the fridge but beer and molding leftovers. Endurance. My masculinity is endurance. And my masculinity includes a child glancing away from me out of some instinctive fear. A woman hearing me approaching and glancing back and moving away from my path. It is when no one speaks to me or seems to hear my low-frequency cries for help. When Future and Brent Faiyaz croon chaotic and I remember the words. When I reread all the letters left to me by women that no longer associate with me. When I'm filling her mouth and she's looking up at me from beneath her brows and her eyes are red, makeup is running down her face, when her moans are gripping my veins. When I'm throbbing. When the muscles are sore. When the eyes are dry from dehydration, not apathy. And then when the apathy comes in.
These days I'm allowing myself to hang around with other men. Baby steps. It is uncomfortable. It is not yet superior to my solitude. For now it feels like losing my individuality but gaining a different kind of strength. We cannot get into the same spaces but we take up more space, physically and not. Also it means falling into the role of a man in a group — more hungry for potential, more financially potent. A pack of wolves, blood dripping from the fang to the snowdrift below. I am braver in the group, more impressive, less vulnerable.
It’s like men can tell even through the computer screen that I’m not experienced being around them. There is respect and energy between us, but not closeness, not comfort. I’m not sure on whose end it originates from. (“Every relationship is a two-way street,” I often tell my clients…)
Years ago my father was waving goodbye at me from outside the car at the military airport, his eyes and face hard and hidden, while my mother was silently weeping in the front seat. Looking away from him. Swallowing concern for him.
There were many poems I wrote in which I said my father’s favorite color was absence. (When I find a motif I like, I squeeze all the juice out of it.) Now I don’t blame him. He had no father present of his own, only the streets and the danger of the NYPD cracking down on anything they found. When the time came for him to take up the role, he was oceans away from me, performing masculinity for other soldiers and giving little Brown children a minstrel show of American “heroics”. My father didn’t teach me how to be a hero, he taught me how to leave home. And looking back now I also see why my throat often closes up in times of stress: by example, he showed me that feelings should be expressed in invisible ink, behind a transparent pane of glass, hidden away as best as one can manage.
The first time I knew myself, I still remember, was coming home early from kindergarten and stumbling across my mother bent over double on her bed, sobbing, clutching her stomach, stillbirthing.
The second was in the back of the class line, first grade, wondering, when do I get to be a girl?
Coming back to myself... What does it mean for you to be a man? she asked. I wanted to say: What choice do I have in the matter?
And being born a Black man… what can I say about it that hasn’t already been spelled out in blood on concrete?
There is a way to be a disgusting sort of man. So I've heard. There seems to be something in it about desire. A man isn’t satisfied just by looking — there is the ravenousness of a jackal in the cat's eye's periphery. One’s hands should be vicious. A man should be striving for something. I don't actually know this — all I know is the curling of my top lip around the snarl that results when I see another man and think to myself, disgusted, “That's not a real man.” Yes, I know well how a man should not be. Such moments strike me strongly, like when a man threatens or imposes violence on someone (socially/physically) weaker than him. Especially a woman. Or when a man is lacking in ambition or drive. When a man openly and leeringly makes another uncomfortable, when they trespass boundaries and exploit others. When a man is content allowing others to take care of him. When he is dishonest, dishonorable, greedy, gluttonous. When he is unclean, unkempt, unexciting. When a man is uninterested in understanding those who rely on him. When a man complains more than he works. When a man abandons, runs away, neglects his responsibilities. When he does not care to show care for his child(ren), who want nothing more than to be seen by him.
Yes, it feels most like a wanting, a needing. Every popular image of a man is one who does not have what he wants. The revenger, the invader, the hallucinator, the parishioner, crusader, sacrificer. To go without and bear it, even to grin if you're strong enough. Never an influencer. Never abundant but generous, giving to the partner, the parents, the community, giving, giving, emptying in the name of duty and chivalry.
Strength, power, fear. I seem to believe that being a man involves suffering and bearing it. Being motivated and energized by it. Having big muscles and broad shoulders. Warring against yourself and the world. This is stupid, irrational, inaccurate, biased, harmful, prejudiced, ignorant… I know. I know, trust me, I know. And yet…!
I have no attachment to traditionally masculine concepts such as duty, patriotism, stoicism, I am even disgusted by traditional masculine spaces such as most sports, business, finance, incarceration…
Believe it or not I felt very feminine at Rikers. There is more to the scale of gender beyond its two extremes, which may be closer together a la a horseshoe rather than ends of a linear 180° spine, but in a place like that everything is reduced to the primitive. Having long hair, curling eyelashes, and a wrist narrower than 8" meant I was considered a woman, or at least adjacent enough to one to deserve desire. It gave me newfound awe for the burden a typically woman has to carry. It’s unnerving knowing that you are desired violently, that you can and would be taken and ridiculed if there weren’t safety measures in place. The inmates were often confused by the enormity of their desire for me, and so I could also sense their malice, their misguided frustration at me for inciting them. The nurses trusted me — the inmates catcalled me. The guards smirked at me. The bus drivers ignored me.
And the rage built. Inversely my body broke down.
Creation is feminine, you said. She never liked me that way because I was too feminine, I heard. Thin around the neck and the wrists, another her told me I wasn't big enough to make her feel as safe as she wanted. A different she can't keep her eyes from widening when I reveal I'm not gay — and maybe she meant to position herself further away from me after that. Maybe I have no choice but to present as “fluid”. Maybe, when a man calls me “sis”, I'm supposed to feel uncomfortable instead.
Maybe I shouldn't be able to give birth. No one likes my writing more than the woman I'm sleeping with. That’s how its always been for me. My style may be too intimate an act, too much exposure for the world in general to respect. But I am a man and I resist what the world believes. Especially this world, which seems to sense my power, and seeks relentlessly to erase me and smother my voice. My masculinity looks most like a resistance to being anything or anyone other than myself.
I need more.
This was sheer excellence. I was already blown away by that first paragraph where you described your perception of masculinity, but then you just had to blow my mind even more with your navigation of your own perceived femininity. Thank you for such beautiful writing!