on earth we're briefly gorgeous

"I understand the vision for the Asian American masculinity project so much better now," I tell Reia, tarot cards for The Scholar, The Ancestor, The Lovers, The Mother, The Daughter and a dozen more scattered around me, DSM: Asian American edition by their side. I imagined having those resources as a kid, those words too sophisticated to understand even now but tugging at experiences and truths and wisdom and comfort otherwise buried in a world foreign and hostile in so many ways. I imagined being a boy and having alternative visions for masculinity and gender available in such beautiful objects, ones more conscious of extant harm and violence and yearning, dreaming, living into existence something better.

"Why do you put they/them ahead of he/him pronouns?" Reia asked me after reading my AAMP welcome email. It's the first time I've actually done it, ever.

"Do you identify as non-binary?" Reia asks. I reply that I don't know, that maybe I do it as a way to run away from my masculinity and all its problems instead of confronting it, or maybe I do actually feel like masculine identities don't describe me, or some third reason I forgot, and most likely a bit of all three.

We say some binary-ass things, questioning our respective masculinity and feminity, and then it occurs to me that it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if we have a good reason to be non-binary. Instead of questioning ourselves we can question the question in the first place -- why do I have to measure myself up against masculinity? Isn't that the dream of queerness and genderqueerness, that the binary categories don't matter? The most "traditionally feminine" cis girl in the world shouldn't have to feel bound to a binary gender category, and in the spaces I (we) want to see more of in the world, neither should I.

Reia tells me how she was read as straight-coded by members of her queer soccer league, how her queerness was illegible to them. She tells me she considered shaving her head. Undercut? I ask, to which she replies, no, too stereotypically gay. That and the tarot card shoulder tattoo.

Why did I suddenly use they/them pronouns in that AAMP email? I've gotten a lot more comfortable with non-binary identity and with not leaning on my masculine identity, at least in spaces like Pomona and like AAMP. I think about AAMP training: setting a role model for mentees, about creating a safe and perhaps slightly challenging space, about how this might be the first time mentees are able to explore gender and queerness. I think about the impact of Lily saying they use any pronouns on me at the beginning of last year, of Jordan dressing the way he does. I think about the space that I can make for others by taking up a bit of queer space for myself, and I feel good about it, and I write they/them pronouns ahead of he/him ones.

Ai Binh asked me what I need queerness to be, and I promised to think about it, and I suppose this is what I've arrived at for now. I need queerness to create space for myself to feel comfortable, to distance myself from the violence of masculinity and the parts that feel uncomfortable to me; to reach for the things barred off by masculinity that bring me joy and comfort and connection; to have space to do so even when I don't need need need it, even when I wouldn't completely suffocate without it, and to have that space in a way that centers those who do need need need it and are choked and harmed by the lack of it.

Reia lends me her copy of Time is a Mother and I read the first poem, or re-read it, because I've read it before with my sibling. I glide over the words. Sometimes I stumble: one part in particular, "needing beauty / to be more than hurt gentle / enough to hold". Reia says it's beautiful. I can't get through it smoothly. I ask Reia what she thinks of the poem. She talks about the hurt beneath the aesthetic beauty, something characteristic of Ocean Vuong.

I think about what I think about the poem and eventually decide to stop thinking and sit with it, and that's when I -- "feel it," Reia says before me. I feel the unsaid musclature, the strength, the brutishness of the bull. I feel the violence of murderers. I feel, without realizing I felt it until now, the isolation of the night and the stillness, the purple and black and blue, the void into which I reach. I feel the intensity of the blue eyes, kerosene-blue eyes, green-blue lamp swirling in its socket. I feel the piercing weight of choice and lack of choice, of "...& like all murders, my god / was stillness. My god, he was still / there.", of "He kept breathing, / to stay alive.", of the comma that breathes and makes the line feel even more breathless, the poem even more crushing. And finally at the end I feel the release without closure: "I reached -- not the bull -- / but the depths. Not an answer but / an entrance the shape of / an animal. Like me."

And of course I think about, or maybe I feel, masculinity. In the bull and the violence, the isolation, the crushing intensity of the utter lack of choice I have in my masculinity, something I can't run away from, can't turn away from, have to eventually "opened the door / & stepped out. Wind / in the branches" to meet what watches me persistently from the backyard, something that when I truly confront I find that I don't touch -- of course I don't touch, was it ever solid, real, physical in the first place? -- but reach into and find depths, an entrance, the shape of an animal, me.

originally posted on updately

related: https://electricliterature.com/my-drag-masculinity-steals-the-show-in-everything-everywhere-all-at-once/