How to Be a Guy — MEL Magazine
How to Be a Guy — MEL Magazine
I’m writing a new, monthly column for MEL Magazine! It’s somewhere between social deconstruction and personal cartography: interacting with manhood, masculinity, and gendered spaces through a trans lens.
This is a weird one for me. On one hand: I’m really excited about this column. I’ve been wanting to write this column for a long time now. My editor is amazing and tremendously supportive; and MEL is a publication I’m really excited to be part of.
On the other hand: Over the last few years I’ve built up a lot of weird and obsessive rules about what I write about and, more, how visible I’m allowed to be in my own work. They’re not rational rules, but they’ve very much become a security blanket I cling to in the uncomfortable process of navigating public visibility as a private person.
“How to Be a Guy” breaks pretty much all of those rules.
And while I know those rules weren’t healthy, and that moving away from them is good for me as both a writer and a human, it is goddamn free-fall terrifying.
Very excited to read all future installments of this column, and not just because Jay’s one hell of a writer (which, y’know, is true). This is the crossover of a bunch of fascinating topics – masculinity, personal identity, gender as a whole – handled by one of the smartest folk I know who navigates these waters on a regular basis. In the unlikely chance that you’ve not already checked this out, you should.
A rule of thumb: when there’s an article that gets angry about a lot of
different things, look for the one that seems weirdest and pettiest.
That is probably the thing that’s really got under the writer’s skin,
the tail which might be wagging the dog of the entire piece.
