I’ve been training for something like this.
Being stuck inside, the majority of my social interaction these days comes from the parasocial relationships on the internet I’ve accrued over the past decade. These are people who recognize the woman I am, people I admire, mentors and parents and siblings spread across the globe. I have people to talk to. They are the best and I love them.
But as I long to be grounded in the physical presence of those I care about, I am replaying old friendships in my head, reaching farther and farther back. And my first friendships were male friendships. I’m a trans woman, sure, and most of my friends now are either women or other trans people. But the majority of my life has been spent in the company of cis boys.
In Gregory Jacobs’ Magic Mike XXL, sincerely one of the great American masterpieces, a group of male strippers take a road trip across Florida to a convention where they perform. It is a film about a lot of things: a startlingly elegant articulation of self-expression and desire under capitalism, a collection of set pieces with the mythic and politic dimensions of a Western wuxia, a gendered masquerade that recalls Carl Th. Dreyer’s Gertrud. There are few films more suited to my brain’s preoccupations.
It is also a hangout movie where a bunch of men openly and unrelentingly love and support one another. This is the bit I often ignore, something like a secret, as a trans woman and lesbian. There is a temptation to reject masculinity wholesale because of the immense turmoil associated with it.
Of course not every queer/trans person who has lived as a man likes their experience in predominantly cis male friend groups. Everyone has their stories of ostracization, of homophobia, of predatory behavior, and I have more negative track record than positive when it comes to my interactions with men. But there is one part of what the gender scientists refer to as my “male socialization” that I cherish fiercely.
For four years as a teen I ran cross country with twenty-odd boys, this lanky collective of cargo shorts and a disproportionate number of aspiring DJs. I miss the awful smell of the locker room, the backpacks huddled on the floor. I miss the dizzy twenty degree runs through the woods, the six hour drives up I-95 to end-of-season meets. I miss giddily reciting It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia episodes in the Chipotle parking lot. We assembled a family, welcomed in the younger kids who likely fell back on the sport as part of an extracurricular requirement, devoted ourselves to one another’s progress under the façade of a MileSplit habit. I learned not to hate my sweat or my big thighs, that these were sources of pride and labor. I learned to giggle, because men giggle so much. I learned what a warm hand could feel like without expectation.
In Sophia Giovannitti’s essay "In Defense of Men" (which is excellent, and vast, and extremely worth your time), she writes, “I want all men to kiss their homies goodnight and I want it so badly that I, too, want to be a man who is a homie who gets kissed goodnight.” I got to be one of the homies, I got my kiss goodnight, I baptized that kiss in a pool of testosterone begging for a drain.
There’s been a recent resurgence of people expressing their love for the Jackass films and their odes to the giddy stupidity of men. I never quite clicked with Knoxville and co.’s version of male friendship, though I related to its desecration of male genitals. MMXXL, too, was a utopia of ecstatic comfort that teenage boys are not afforded, something the closeted me thought would be eventually attainable. But it didn’t speak to how the teenagers around me acted; Distance running could never posture as a seductive endeavor, and my boys were dorkier, less liberated, unsure of their bodies. They gave detailed breakdowns of each opponent in Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out! and put hours into designing Spring Break workout spreadsheets. They practiced assertion recklessly during meets. They would half-jokingly flex in the gym floor mirror. They talked about their insecurities and fears half out-of-breath forty minutes into a run, when the group had split off into smaller huddles.
I see that kind of masculinity, the one I saw in my most intimate moments with teammates, in Polygon’s Gill and Gilbert, or Buzzfeed Unsolved, or even the scene in Elaine May’s Mikey and Nicky where Peter Falk tells Cassavetes he should pick up piano again. I am not here to make assertions about whether or not men are inherently good or bad - gender is not itself a moral quandary more than any other politicized part of one’s identity. Rather, I want to express what an honor it was to experience a communal male friendship, to behold it as a thing of beauty.
There is another story I could tell about my adolescence, that I hated my body, that puberty was a painful betrayal that awaited in the shower after practice, that I was bad at being a man, that I was a Bad Man, that I was destructive and aggressive and angry, that I hated every man I fucked, even the nice ones.
The easy metaphor here is that I was trying to outrun my body, but that’s not entirely accurate. What I carry most dearly from that time is that I was running alongside men who liked me and took care of me and let me take care of them. I don’t think I let myself be known, but in spite of that, I felt, for the first time, what it was like to be loved by a group of men. In memories, I seek refuge in their heat.
Boys are good. I am grateful, all things considered, that I got to be one of them.
with love always,
helmet girl
i ran xc with sweet boys too <3 love this tender piece