Herald Volume LXXXV Volume 5 (Man Issue)

THE YALE HERALD March 1, 2019 | vol LXXXV | Issue 5

Yale’s most daring publication since 1986

the man issue

A special issue on masculinity. In this week’s cover story, TC Martin, BF ’20, writes about queerness, family, and trauma.

From The Editors Dear reader, We get it. Midterms can be hard. So can men! What a coincidence, because they’re what we’re writing about this week at the Herald.

We bring you our second themed issue of the semester, where we’ll be looking at masculinity, with all its woes and redemptions.

The way we feel about manhood is deeply informed by our fathers, whether we accept or reject the kind of men they are.

In our Features Section, five writers reflect on the forms in masculinity they have observed in their fathers.

VISIT US ONLINE AT YALEHERALD.COM

At Yale, I haven’t been able to wrap my head around the sometimes subtle differences between sadbois, softbois, and fuckbois. If you feel similarly, Max Himpe, BF ’21, and Amanda Thomas’s, SY ’21, conversation in this week’s installment of Tea Time will be particularly revelatory, at least on the sadboi front.

And then, buck up for Buck Angel, the trans activist once known as the “man with a pussy,” who discusses penises, pussies, and intergenerational trans activism in an interview on manhood with Kellyn Kusyk, SM ’20.

We hope that reading about how others have interacted with masculinity in their lives will get you thinking more carefully about masculinity, in your personal lives and in general. Snuggle up this weekend, enjoy the issue, and revitalize. We’ve got a long, cold week ahead, but Harold’s here for you.

Love, Joe Abramson Features Editor, Certified Yale Man

The Herald Masthead EDITORIAL STAFF EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Fiona Drenttel MANAGING EDITORS Marina Albanese Chalay Chalermkraivuth

The Yale Herald is a not-for-profit, non-partisan, incorporated student publication registered with the Yale College Dean’s Office.

If you wish to subscribe to the Herald, please contact the Editor-in-Chief at fiona.drenttel@yale.edu. Receive the Herald for one semester for 40 dollars, or for the 2018-2019 academic year for 65 dollars.

The Yale Herald is published by Yale College students, and Yale University is not responsible for its contents. All opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the views of The Yale Herald, Inc. or Yale University. Copyright 2018 The Yale Herald. Have a nice day.

EXECUTIVE EDITORS Emma Chanen, Emily Ge, Margaret

Grabar Sage, Jack Kyono, Nicole Mo,

Marc Shkurovich, Eve Sneider, Anna Sudderth, Oriana Tang FEATURES EDITORS Joe Abramson, Jordan Powell CULTURE EDITORS Laurie Roark, Helen Teegan VOICES EDITORS Hamzah Jhaveri, Mariah Kreutter OPINION EDITOR Spencer Hagaman REVIEWS EDITORS Kat Corfman, Everest Fang, Douglas Hagemeister FUZZ EDITORS Matt Reiner, Harrison Smith INSERTS EDITORS Sarah Force, Addee Kim

DESIGN STAFF CREATIVE DIRECTORS Julia Hedges, Rasmus Schlutter DESIGN EDITORS Paige Davis, Michelle Li, Molly Ono

cover photo by Fiona Drenttel

2 THE YALE HERALD

In This Issue 6

10, 16

Hamzah Jhaveri, TC ’22, gets dragged.

Sit down with Kellyn Kusyk, SM ’20, and Buck Angel, trans activist, adult film actor, and selfnamed “Man with a Pussy.”

Voices Mariah Kreutter, BK ’20, sketches the hairy end of an affair.

INCOMING

Man Issue

We love themed issues. Getting deep and in depth, baby!

OUTGOING

Man Issues

Stop exploiting your girl friends’ emotional labor. Thanks!

Whips and thighs haunt Chalay Chalermkraivuth, SY ’20.

The Herald asks five writers to meditate on ideas about manhood that they have taken away from their relationships with their fathers.

8

18

In Tea Time with Max and Amanda, Amanda Thomas, SY ’21, and Max Himpe, BF ’21, contemplate the confusing meaning of “sadboi.”

Cook up 155.2 g of protein with Marina Albanese, PC ’20, in a romantic dinner for two.

Opinions

9

Fuzz Fuzz talks to Itai Almor, SY ’20, about performance and drawing with the body.

Week Ahead 12

Cover

THE EX!T PLAYER PRESENT A MONOSCENE FRIDAY, MAR. 1 @ 8:00 P.M. HOPPER CABARET TUIB ’N’ FRIENDS SATURDAY, MAR. 2 @ 8:00 P.M. TIMOTHY DWIGHT DINING HALL THE FIFTH HUMOUR AND DOOX OF YALE PRESENT: FIFTH HARMONY WEDNESDAY, MAR. 6 @ 8:00 P.M. MORSE/STILES CRESCENT THEATER

Features

TC Martin, BF ’20, writes about queerness, family, and trauma.

Culture Molly Ono, ES ’20, talks about men who take up (studio) space and women who give it up.

Journey Streams, PC ’21, contemplates being a boy.

20

Reviews Commemorate the 50th anniversary of the release of Velvet Underground’s eponymous LP with Eric Krebs, JE ’21, as he reflects on the impact of the band’s legendary leader, Lou Reed.

Join Mara Hoplamazian, GH ’20, as they undertake a study of how Grizzly Man and Weiner individualize and valorize their white male protagonists.

Julia Hedges, SM ’20, reflects on Yung Lean’s discography and his music’s changing relationship with masculinity.

Inserts

WILL WEGNER, SY ’21

5.

My broken phone screen. Those online statistics must be self-reported. I mean, five inches, average? No fucking way.

My kid sister’s toy teapot. Next time she’ll think before inviting me. (How would the snowman from Frozen drink tea, even? He’d melt. Nice try, Susie.)

3.

My laptop screen. But only after my Google Scholar search “american average penis length independently verified” had zero results.

My grip on reality. In one of my recurring nightmares, I find myself encased in the stiff, rubber skin of some foreign body, overwhelmed by the familiar smell of french fries. From the inside of the plastic wrap that envelops me, I can make out my seven-year-old self. His pudgy hand rises and points at me. The angle of perspective pulls outward, and I see myself trapped in the form of a My Little Pony doll, displayed next to a Transformers action figure. I try to shout, to warn my past self of the repercussions of his erroneous decision, but my mouth is molded shut. I try to writhe, but I’m trapped in place. The McDonald’s employee assaults my smooth synthetic figure and drops me into the Happy Meal® box, sealing my youn self ’s fate forever. No matter how hard I try to convince him to choose Bumblebee, it’s me—Twilight Sparkle—every time. I don’t know. Maybe it’s the Red Bull I’ve been drinking before bed.

1.

4.

2.

Your nasal bridge if you ever call me “fragile” again. Understand me, you little fuck? (Wait, before you go, could I see your penis, real quick? For science.)

LUNA GARCIA, SM ’22

I

admit it, I was resistant to the idea for a long time. I’m different from a lot of Yalies.

I grew up with the notion that man was made in God’s image. But then I got to Yale and took WGSS 623, “Feminist Postcolonial Theory: Discourses, Subjects and Knowledge” and realized my error. God is in fact a woman. She’s probably like, Hillary Clinton or Sandra Oh. She has long flowing locks that drape sensually down her back, tantalizing any mortal that is blessed to gaze upon her with fiery eyes. And she’s probably really fit, like she does

4

THE YALE HERALD

Crossfit three days a week (and it’s not even expen- action. Salvation? Yes. Some mind blowing sex that would completely refigure the way that I perceive sive for her). life and the female form, making me re-evaluate God is a feminist like me. She would probably love my position as a male as well as a patriarchal figure it if the two of us sat down for an experimental in a world maligned against all women? Definitely. production of “The Vagina Monologues.” After- Maybe she’d be into some kinky stuff like having wards we would get a drink, maybe then she’d be me salivate and kneel before her ethereal figure, if willing to come back for a coffee at my apartment. only just to remind me, with all of her power, that God wears silky lingerie. She’d be wearing a slip God is a woman. while peering into my soul—wink, and ask me what it is that I expect from such a mortal inter-

5 ADDEE KIM, JE ’21 YH STAFF

Puffer 1 & 2 This has to be coordinated. Either that, or these two just have unbelievable intuition. Mark my words, the insulated jacket is going to be on every goddamn runway in Milan next season. We really dig the second’s subtle, neon-orange flair. But it really came down to the fact that our first contender here is wearing not one, but two insulated jackets, so we have to give it to him. Just phenom.

Plaid 1, 2 & 3 It’s really incredible how each contestant brings new life to this classic look. There is a sensibility and ease to this outfit: a basic t-shirt, jeans, and an unbuttoned plaid shirt. While all have beautifully executed this look, we have to give it to out long-haired contestant. Did he get carpal tunnel in both hands, or his he just a fashion icon???

Herald Sweatshirt This is a classic case of copy cat, down to the way that they limply hold their hands out from two inches from their bodies. But one is the obvious winner. The saccharin smile really completes this outfit and wins our hearts.

Voices Dragon HAMZAH JHAVERI, TC ’22 YH STAFF

Being dragged and burned at my seams, I seep into memories.

Abba was a dragon in that castle in the tree, spitting pretend fire at my brother and me.

I spent 90 degree summers watching Dragon Ball Z. Lazy mornings, boxers and a tee.

Brother dragon watched with me.

Kamehameha, we would joke and scream.

But the house caught fire, because brother burned the tree. Abba got mad. Amma drank her tea.

I ran upstairs, to my own party.

Traded in dragons for Barbies.

Pinks and purples, house of dreams.

But dragon calls, and I’m at his feet. For some reason, I can’t defeat his sharpened teeth.

He burns my pink and purple reverie.

I’m less a doll, now. More a drag queen. I’m always off on club-lined streets.

I’ve seen dragons, dolls, and the Keys. I’ve tried on heels, and felt dragon’s steam.

So find me, dragon, with my drag queens. Find me, try and drag me, please.

6 THE YALE HERALD

The Magician’s Box CHALAY CHALERMKRAIVUTH, SY ’20 YH STAFF

These days I do the valuable work of staying awake.

I am haunted by his whip and haunted by my thighs, last night skewered apiece on this skeleton, squabbled by his box, now knit in knives. He means to teach me what it is to have weight, that it is to be weight— distinctions for a fine mind, finer than mine in these days of no sleep.

I meant nothing. But on a good day, metering your whip to the audience’s cries, you dote on my thighs like any father. And me whole is an Easter miracle.

Otherwise, the night augurs spiders and I rock the box, spangling.

Well, my feet don’t touch the ground— one of these days it will be your work when you bow— it will be you, not they, one of these days, this horror box astounds.

7 Hair MARIAH KREUTTER, BK ’20 YH STAFF

P

ete used to complain that it got everywhere. I’d never noticed, but he was right. On the bed, on the floor, in his mouth. On the collar of my coat. I would joke that I could never have an affair with anyone because their wife would notice right away. Of course I was wrong about that.

It looks like corn silk in sunlight and just plain brown in shadow. The strands really do get everywhere. I run my fingers through it and it feels like a badly knitted scarf or a blood clot, everything intertwined, inseparable, stringy. I pull my hand away and there’s a spidery clot of the stuff. Does it grow back? Or am I slowly going bald, taking away from myself, tossing something vital out onto the bathroom floor?

Like teeth, it can be used to make charms and fetishes. It is dangerous in the wrong hands. If you believe in superstitions.

Pete used to say that I was worse than his cat. That I shed more than any animal he’d come across. I kind of liked it, though. Liked the idea that he might find blondish reminders on his pillow the next day. Liked that I was marking what I thought of as my territory, his apartment, his bed, his body.

All touched by something that came from me.

And then Pete left and the cat died and his wife invited me to brunch and asked me very nicely why I’d fucked her husband, and it all fell apart.

Then I wanted everything I had given him back. I wanted to deep-clean his old apartment and vacuum his bed and his clothes and his skin until every piece of me was extricated. I wanted oblivion. I wanted to be bald. But I couldn’t remove myself from him any more than I could remove him from me, or else I would’ve—would’ve done it with a boar brush and a scalpel.

Instead I remember everything. photo by Fiona Drenttel

Opinion Tea Time:

To Be Sad, Bad, and a Boy AMANDA THOMAS, SY ’21, MAX HIMPE, BF ’21 YH STAFF Max Himpe:

where they can actually get to the root of the problem. women. They belong to a breed of “sadpeople,” a group I cannot understand why a man would willingly iden- that often intersects with “Mitski fans.”

If you asked people on campus for their definition of tify as a sadboi. The lettering of the word itself is so a sadboi (correct spelling), I guarantee you’d be hard- childish it feels like an obvious parody.

In some contexts, I don’t mind emotional dumpers. Go pressed to find a clear-cut definition. In fact, I did just ahead and spill your woes, whims and worries onto my that and the answers were pretty diverse. Some of the So I don’t think men who healthily emote are walking anonymous lap if you so wish. People live juicy lives most common responses included: men in touch with around calling themselves sadbois or should fear being and I am always keen for a taste. In other contexts, their emotions; men suffering from mental health called a sadboi? Have you ever been called a sadboi? though, I do mind. When a friend demands my ears problems; men who manipulatively make women perand nothing else for a whole hour; when I’m emotionform one-way emotional labour to satisfy their needs; Side note: what about all the sadgirls!!! Are there even ally strained and my empathy levels have reached “soand “What is that?” The second-to-last definition was any sadgirls? I think it says a lot about our society that ciopathic”; when I’m never asked about how I’m doing, the most common and the most damning. we don’t talk about sadgirls. Are women just perfect and then the relationship becomes unsustainable. refuse to use their emotions in order to manipulate men?

None of these ways of being a sadboi should be taken Of course, I am not placed in the position of doing as lightly. Mental health, emotional labour and emotionmuch emotional labor as women. So take everything al intelligence are some serious buzzwords to describe Max Himpe: that I say with a pinch of man salt. But, Amanda, what modern men. Granted, sadboi is casual Yale slang and do you think it says about society that we don’t idenI am by no means on a quest to make this world a more Perhaps I’m wrong about people’s interpretations of tify sadgals? Is it absurd (or very male) that I enjoy serious place. But we currently have one casual word sadboi; I could just be a man with a UK visa and a an occasional emotional dump from others? Do you with no equivalent to describe three utterly different poor grasp on American jargon. Fortunately, no one think sadgals, if they exist, do dump more on men than male types. I’m worried that good sadbois (emotion- has called me a sadboi yet—at least not to my face; women? Damn, Teatime is hot this week. ally sensitive men) are being conflated with bad sad- reveal yourself, cowards! Nonetheless, we should find bois (emotionally manipulative men). I don’t want to a word to commend expressive bros that don’t burden Amanda Thomas: discourage bros from blubbering. If masculinity is in women. Tearjerks, maybe? Or Cry-ptonites? crisis, we need to love men who are in touch with their “Sadgals” is a much better term and I’m honestly hurt emotions, not pigeonhole them with shitty men who Coinage aside, Amanda has now got me contemplat- I didn’t come up with it first. Yeah, I guess I’m saying abuse emotional trust. ing sadgals. Men—especially straight men—usually that there are way fewer sadgals than sadbois. Maystruggle to get it up around me (“it” being emotional be any person who uses their emotions via a sob story I want a word to call out men who make women do honesty), probably because I am a man, too. But there to manipulate a person into spending time with them, emotional labour. But I also want a different word to are always people who treat friends and strangers like having sex with them, or dating them is a sadgal/sadcelebrate men who are okay with not being okay. And therapists. Lord knows I’ve stood in a club smoking boi. Maybe the binary doesn’t exist. There’s only sadI want a word for men who are experiencing mental area getting dumped on by a rando’s bout of emotional peeps. This is my thesis and conspiracy as follows: illness. One word simply won’t do the job. diarrhoea. And, yes, some of these randos happen to be The reason why we don’t talk about sadgals is because So, with that, I propose making some new words. Let’s women are, for the most part, taught how to deal with broaden the definition of men who emote. That’s right, their emotions and can have honest, emotional converit’s time to do some lexicography (ooh, yeah). sations with themselves from a very young age. Therefore, the women that are emotionally toxic and maAmanda Thomas: nipulative do not get as much attention because who’s going to call them out? Sadbois who have no idea what Sadboi is no longer an effective term. It’s been diluted emotional abuse is? to the point where I’m really not sure what the distinct qualities of a sadboi are. I think sadbois listen to a lot The more I type the sadder I get. I think it just speaks of Frank Ocean and are not in touch with their emoto how we need to start encouraging everyone to have tions. I propose that someone creates a comprehensive healthy conversations about mental and emotional checklist for sadbois, like they do for psychopaths. health so that we don’t have a bunch of sadpeeps running around. I’m sorry sadbois, you’re not cool, and as Maybe the difference between sadbois and emotiona society we need to start calling out all the sadgals ally sensitive men is that sadbois rely on other people too before they start ruining people’s lives. The Tea is (mainly women) as therapists, whereas emotionally piping this week! sensitive men want to have two-sided conversations

If masculinity is in crisis, we need to love men who are in touch with their emotions, not pigeonhole them with shitty men who abuse emotional trust.

8 THE YALE HERALD

Fuzz Iati (My Manly Triptych) For the Man Issue, Fuzz interviewed artist Itai Almor, SY ’20, about his photo series Iati (My Manly Triptych), and how drawing and performance relate through the body in his work.

F: Describe your practice.

IA: My practice is changing right now. It’s been mixed-media objects that feel handmade and exist somewhere between illustrations (in the sense of the modern market of images) and heirlooms or memorabilia. I hope they make people reflect on the “things” that shape their ideas of past and future. But lately, moving forward, I’ve been doing more installation- and performance-based work: costuming and painting on my own body and framing myself in constructed sets, but still thinking about similar topics.

F: Can you talk about the relation between the performance and drawing?

IA: I learned to draw from my own body in a mirror. For a long time I drew grotesque, mangled figures. I came to understand my body through the lens of, and as a tool for, performance. I was doing a lot of theatre at the same time, learning to communicate emotion, to be expressive through shaping the body in performance. The expressive content of my drawing became bodily.

F: In what sense does this piece relate the two?

IA: The paint in the piece is not representative of anything, other than the very basic gesture of “making art.” So there [are] the aspect[s] of the body and the body’s representation. [...]I was interested in the idea of my body being somewhat visible through the plastic, but through a shadow, being at odds with my own image—two foiled characters in the one body.

Features Sitting Down with Tranpa:

An Interview with Buck Angel KELLYN KUSYK, SM ’20 YH STAFF

Buck Angel is a transsexual educator, activist, and actor who has been producing porn featuring trans men and trans male sex education films since 2002. He is a prominent figure in the trans community, and I’ve looked up to him for a long time as I’ve sorted through my own thoughts and feelings about medically transitioning. We talked over the phone this week after I slid into his Instagram DMs. Our conversation touched on intergenerational dynamics in the trans community, the language we use to describe ourselves, the meaning of “manhood”, and more.

BA: So you know I did come to Yale like a billion years ago to speak at Sex Week.

Oh my God, that university freaked out on me. It was unbelievable. I mean not the students... they made a [College] Tea for me, and it was completely sold out, but I had such pushback from alumni.

KK: What did they say to you?

BA: I had death threats. Total death threats that if I [showed] up to campus, they [would] hang me from the tree and light me on fire.

KK: Holy fuck, that is so upsetting.

BA: Holy fuck! I was like “WHAT?!” I go, “This is Yale?!

What??” [...] They were literally coming after me. They weren’t playing. It was not a joke. They were really coming after me. Remember this was around 2006....We didn’t have a large trans community like we have today or [a] genderqueer [community] or any of what we have, none of it.

So I was the man with the pussy, right? ... I was like this crazy monster to them. [laughs]

10 THE YALE HERALD

KK: So, my first question is: what does manhood mean to you?

BA: What does manhood mean? I get these questions a lot from the cisgender world, because they can’t understand how a woman can become a man. I think being a man or having manhood is a very personal thing, and for me it meant becoming myself. It means to me being seen as a man and feeling masculine. [...] It’s being presented to the world as male. It’s being talked to as male. And really on some level, a responsibility to show the world that masculinity does not have to have toxicity to it.

KK: I was curious what answer you’d give to that because I’m pre-HRT [Hormone Replacement Therapy], and that’s something that people ask me a lot and I’ve never been able to give a straight answer in any way.

BA: Of course not, you won’t, because it’s the same thing that people say to me, “So, how do you think you can be a man when you have a vagina?” What a really dumb question...You could apply that question to a man who had cancer in his testicles. Or you could apply that to someone who was born without a penis, but identifies as male [and is] intersex. What we have focused on with masculinity is genitals and appearance. I’m totally guilty of that. Your generation is not so necessarily focused on appearance of masculinity as much as the older [community], or somebody like myself who really just had a sex change. And that’s really how I feel: I had a sex change. I’m not necessarily just a trans person. I’m a man. I was a woman who became a man.

KK: How do you perceive the sort of fluidity in the younger community?

BA: I think it’s important, I think it’s awesome. I think it’s going to help so many people, but I’m also going to tell you that it has divided our community on an unhealthy level.

We took the word transgender, which used to just mean one basic thing, and we turned it into an umbrella term.

When you take a term that is so specific and hide all of these identities under it, everyone who is gender non-conforming all the way over to FtM [people who medically transition from female to male], and then tell them all to call themselves trans, people are going to start arguing over who is trans and who isn’t.

KK: Yes, 100%.

BA: I have to tell you that I’m disliked and liked in this community. [...] I do consider myself transsexual and not transgender. As you know, that’s considered a derogatory term, which is very insulting to me on many levels. I don’t relate to all of the identities under the umbrella. I am none of those. I had a sex change. I really wanted to become a man and so I did that through hormones and surgery and I live my life as male.

That’s how you can always get cisgender men. Go at their penis, because they live for their penises.

11 That’s why we need to determine, I think, more specific I’ll always feel very attached to my porn. I still am in the identities and not just one word that encompasses every- porn world. and I believe in it a lot. I wouldn’t be here thing. without it. I always thought I’d just be a pornographer, and then my porn really catapulted me into the world as an activist when I realized my body and my vagina is my activKK: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. ism. I got people thinking about what makes you a [man], BA: The kids need direction. […] When we don’t talk before anybody was talking [about that]. about those things and when we eliminate the word transexual, you are actually eliminating your history. That’s not People would come at me like, “You don’t have a penis, you’re not a man.” And I’m like, “Really, seriously?” That’s okay. how you can always get cisgender men. Go at their penis, KK: How do you see yourself in the role of a “tranpa” to because they live for their penises. And I would always say this: “Well, hey, my friend, what if you lost your penis?” younger trans people?

Immediately they would stop in their tracks, think about it BA: I love that you know I’m a tranpa! Oh god, I live for and come back to me with a different answer. It was amazit. And I’ll tell you that I didn’t live for it before. In fact, I ing. It was like magic. pushed against the younger community for a while because I didn’t like their disrespect towards me; their disrespect All you have to do with a cisgender man is somehow get towards the word transsexual, the identity of sex change them to think about their penis and everything else kind [and] all the language that I grew up with, which means a of goes out the window, because that’s really the focus of lot to me and the older generation. But then I sat myself most cisgender men and their manhood. It really revolves down, had a talk with myself, and said, “Nope.” It’s the way around their penis. of the world and it always has been. Things grow. You have KK: Wow, that is super interesting. to grow with them.

So that’s how I became tranpa. I opened my heart, my knowledge, my concern, and my care for them. I understand that there are things I know that they don’t know and might want to hear. And when I started to share, they just came. […] It was like, “We want to know! We want this information!” And I’m honored. I’m blessed. I really feel like they’re my kids on some level.

BA: Totally, and I think that is what people need to understand. Also, in our community, we need to start respecting everyone’s choice of masculinity: non-masculinity, feminine male, butch male, whatever it is you want to be. I think we have these ideas that there is one way to be. There is never, ever one way to be, with anything.

KK: So much of the best cis allyship for me has been from people who are just so trusting that the way I feel is the way I feel and that it is valid.

BA: Yes, and you want to know why that is? Because they are confident and comfortable in their own self. I am not anti-cisgender at all. Most of my lovers are cisgender. A lot of my friends are cisgender. All the business I do is with cisgender people. I would not be as successful in my business if it wasn’t for cisgender people.

We have this idea in our community that cisgender people are our enemy. No, they’re not! Cisgender people are our surgeons. Cisgender people are our hormone doctors. Cisgender people are our therapists. Cisgender people are our teachers. And we really need to understand that for us to be respected and thought of as [equal to] the rest of the world, we have to integrate ourselves into the world. We have to BA: It is, I learned a lot from that. I learned how not to be stop separating ourselves. That goes with masculinity too.

There are different types of masculinity, and we have to a man. appreciate all of them, whatever they mean.

KK: Exactly, by watching how cis men are.

KK: Do you have any final thoughts you’d like to put out into the world?

BA: Yeah, thank god I’m not that [laughs]

KK: What does feel affirming of your manhood?

KK: Switching gears a little bit. Can you tell me about your identity as “the man with a pussy,” especially in the BA: Okay so, physical attributes. Like growing facial hair context of your career in porn? and getting muscles. Those things really were and are today a big part of my masculinity. And as you know, there’s a BA: Right. So now I’m no longer the man with the pussy. lot of pushback in our community about this now. About Now I’m tranpa. [laughs] Tranpa with a pussy. [laughs] passing, about passing privilege. I’ve been called toxic beThere’s just something not okay about that. [laughs] You cause of the way I look. They don’t really understand that know, I started my porn work literally 19 years ago. I mean, my appearance may look a certain way, but I am not toxic.

God, I feel so old. But when I started, I called myself “the man with the pussy,” because nobody did it. There were That said, I think the thing that affirms my masculinity “chicks with dicks,” and you must understand that lan- most definitely is my appearance, [but] also, my attitude: guage was never meant to be derogatory. It’s always been that I can walk the world as a man with a vagina very conmarketing; it was meant to be search engine traffic. Today fidently, [and] I can be naked in front of the whole world. we don’t say that, but 20 years ago women called them- My vagina on some level does make me feel masculine. It selves “chicks with dicks.” So I just played off of that be- in no way makes me feel feminine, and I really can’t grasp cause no trans male porn existed. I reversed it and I became enough words to describe to you why that is, other than “the man with the pussy.” the years of me living so openly with my vagina, and being really forthcoming and adamant about it. [It is] maleness I never went into porn as activist. I always went into it to me. It finally just makes me feel male on so many levels. [thinking], “I’m going to make a million dollars, and I’m going to create something that doesn’t exist.” But within KK: Yeah and I really get how it can be way more of a feeltwo years of pushback, mostly from the transgender com- ing than something that you can really vocalize. munity and the porn industry, people started to notice me outside of porn and say, “Wow, I think you have a voice for something that is bigger than pornography.”

BA: So let’s just say cisgender men are reading this right now. What I’d say to a cis man is this: Masculinity doesn’t necessarily mean you have to walk around with a chip on your shoulder, or worry that people are not going to think you’re man enough, whatever man enough means. Masculinity and manhood is all about you, and presenting to the world how you feel, not how other people want you to feel.

People always ask me this one question: “When are you going to get the bottom surgery?” Can’t people see how comfortable I am? The fact is that people ask this question for themselves. If I got a penis, it would be for them not for me, because the rest of the world still has this idea that without a penis, you’re not a man. hey need to stop focusing on genitals, because the genitals are only a tiny little bit of who you are as a man. I think if we really start to re-educate men that their genitals are not what reflect masculinity, we’ll have a different type of man out there. But men are going to have a hard time hearing this, you know? And especially from a man with a pussy. [laughs] Secretly, they all want a vagina. You know it.

Boys Who Hurt T.C. MARTIN, BF ’20

CW: sexual assault, homophobia

D

ad knew what my cousin had done. He had been building up his nerve for most of the seven-hour drive from Maryland to Connecticut—but I didn’t know that yet. We sat silently in my white Impala as we sped northward on I-95 back to Yale’s campus. Fall break had just ended.

Our tires squelched over old snow. I had an essay on James Joyce’s Dubliners due soon, and I was trying to focus enough to read. I couldn’t get past the first story: “The Sisters,” the one about the priest and the boy. The word “paralysis” kept tripping me up like an uneven step I had forgotten how to avoid.

We stopped for gas in Fairfield, about half an hour from New Haven, and ate our Dollar Menu dinners slowly as if we were afraid of our empty mouths.

Dad revved the engine as we merged back onto the highway. The sun set as he drove. I was putting my headphones back on to drown out the talk radio my dad was playing when he asked if I wanted to talk about it. I instinctively knew— as all queer people know—exactly what “it” was.

I had anticipated this conversation for several weeks. I feigned ignorance anyway.

You know, it. Your sexuality, Dad said. I tried to act surprised.

Oh. Do you want to talk about it? I asked.

Are you sure this is the life you want? he asked, rubbing his chin like he does when he is confused or fuming. My memory of my answer has blurred. My dad’s question made me anxious about what he would say, ask, demand. It also made me angry. Angry at him for daring to break a 19-year-old silence. Angry at my cousin for forcing him to do the breaking.

Dad said something about the impossibility of a child of two lovingly married parents turning out gay.

He said something about being young and unsure.

Something about grandkids. I trained my eyes through the windshield on the green traffic signs as I counted down the exits to New Haven. I tried to do what I had been doing ever since I realized that my desires were an embarrassment. I kept quiet. I deliberately zoned out.

In the middle of all this blur, my cousin’s name sliced through. Why would Dad mention his name?

“Mom said you thought it was all your cousin’s fault,” Dad said. That was true; I did say that. He was the illustrations by julia hedges

one who outed me, after all. “But how did he know?” the news, who then told my mother, who insisted she Dad demanded. knew all along. Cousin, relative, grandmother, father, mother: this was the opposite of how I would have There was that uneven step again. I stumbled on it. wanted to come out. The order mattered. It still does.

I told Dad I didn’t know how my cousin knew I was gay. Maybe he was just guessing. Maybe he found my Mom assured me that she was fine with my choice.

Twitter. I don’t know.

I reminded her impatiently that being gay wasn’t a choice. I said things, hurtful things about my cousin “You and him were always strange together…” Dad that I no longer believe. A seismic power shift had trailed off. We took the exit for downtown New occurred between me and him after years of silence; Haven. I could see Harkness Tower in the distance, I needed that power back. I told Mom I needed its silhouette staining a dark sky even darker. space and went to bed, feeling like my axis hadn’t just shifted, but dissolved.

Finally we reached my dorm on Prospect Street. I unloaded my suitcase and told Dad I loved him as I drove myself home for Thanksgiving break slammed the trunk closed so he wouldn’t hear it. that year. Another seven-hour road trip with Dad was out of the question. The few weeks earlier, I had been sitting in weeks following my cousin’s outing of me were a Watson Hall, struggling with a set theory painstaking exercise in avoidance. I avoided Mom’s assignment that was due the next morning. invitation to watch And the Band Played On with her, Apparently, two sets with the exact same elements one of her many well-meaning attempts to prove her are treated as identical, even if some elements are wokeness to me. I avoided a trip to Orlando with duplicated. Even if they are in a different order. None Dad. I avoided Nana’s gaze. of it made much sense to me.

I didn’t have an occasion to avoid him until My phone buzzed with a text from Mom. A distraction, Thanksgiving. He showed up late for dinner at the I thought warmly. I scanned the paragraph-length house of my maternal grandmother, the one we both message. The words “gay” and “sexuality” flashed call Grandma. He brought his girlfriend, a thin onto my retina, remaining like seared afterimages. woman with hair the same color as mine and a voice My body froze over. I read the text. almost as soft as the one in which I once spoke to him. I cursed myself at these thoughts. Why should Mom told me that my cousin had gotten into a fight I compare myself to her? Why should I carry that with another relative of mine on his construction weight, too? jobsite. Somehow, in the tussle, he told that relative I was gay. This part of the story still baffles me. Not A cigarette dangled from Grandma’s smile. She because he knew my queerness could be used as a grinned at all of us, her whole family, as we fixed our weapon in our family—of course he knew that—but plates in the kitchen. I didn’t know if she had found because he chose to wield it anyway. out that I was gay. I still don’t know. Sometimes grandmothers know things, and sometimes they That relative told my paternal grandmother, whom I refuse to know them. call Nana. She got upset and came to my father with I stood in the back of the line for Grandma’s baked macaroni and cheese. I always wait for everyone else to grab a plate so I don’t look too eager; call it the food tax for fat people. He was once fat too—or at least not fit. I didn’t know why he held back with me, away from our relatives, who were flocking to the food. Grandma turned her back to us as she put her cigarette out.

A

I

I told Mom I needed space and went to bed, feeling like my

axis hadn’t just shifted, but dissolved.

He offers me a side hug. Haven’t seen you in a while, he says. I agree. I am spooning pasta onto my plate when he reaches down and grabs my right ass cheek. Another freezing-over. There is no means of

extraction for me. Only he can push us forward, out of this moment.

He decides he doesn’t want any macaroni after all.

He’s watching his figure, he says. I feel him watching mine as he returns to our family in the living room.

I steady myself on the kitchen counter and shame the flush in my cheeks until it disappears.

S

aturday after the holiday. My high school friend Kris was home from college for Thanksgiving too. Some people once told me they didn’t believe Kris when he said he was straight. I am mostly responsible for that. We are very close friends, and I’ve always been physically affectionate with those I care for.

I drove 10 minutes to his house and found him in his basement playing FIFA on his Xbox. I lay down next to him on the ratty ’90s-era couch. I rested my head against his abdomen as he stared blankly at the screen. He cursed softly when he lost his match, then asked if I wanted to watch a movie. I said yes and grabbed a blanket to share.

In the gentle darkness that rolls over you while watching the credits of a movie very late at night, Kris started talking. I began to see glimpses of the boy I had my first honest-to-God crush on several years ago. He told me about his girlfriend and how they wanted to get married one day, but not too soon.

He told me that he didn’t know if he wanted to go to medical school or work in pharmaceuticals. I could feel his diaphragm pushing out each sentence, I was

so close to him. The quiet between us was warm, almost mammalian.

He seemed to have nothing more to say. My turn.

“Can I tell you something?” I asked him. Of course, he said. I made him promise he wouldn’t breathe this to anyone.

“A long time ago, I was in a…sort of relationship.

And looking back now, I’m not sure everything that was done to me was entirely consensual.”

That was all I could say. I couldn’t make myself name my cousin. Kris nodded and sighed and let me hold him in the dark a little longer.

A

fter that night with Kris, the sensations came back to me. A sunless bathroom. A cold mirror. A doorknob that locks. Him with me, him on me, him in me. A pair of toy sunglasses that lights up blue so he can see what he’s doing. It doesn’t occur to me to say no. I feel so natural. No more writing lies about girls in journals that I knew my parents would read. No more pretending to likelike my girl best friends. I know what I want now.

Soon my backside is wet with something I’ve never seen before. I don’t remember the ages. Three years between him and me. He was old enough to know what this wet thing of his was, and I wasn’t.

The door holding in that memory unlocks after I talk with Kris. I can hear the other doors unlocking too, a whole hallway unlatching, a cascade of cold drafts slipping through the doors cracked open. One

door opens into Grandma’s pool. Another into his bedroom. A third into mine.

I don’t remember the year it began, or the year it ended. What use are years to somebody frozen?

But it happens again. Again. Again. Again.

C

15

hristmas, the year after he grabbed my ass. He arrived at Grandma’s house with a different girlfriend this time. She had two children, a girl and a boy, who seemed as in love with him as she did. We found ourselves together in the kitchen again. We were both wearing clothes we had received as presents that morning. He spotted a long sticker on the thigh of my new jeans. “54 in. x 32 in.,” it read, over and over. He peels it off slowly as though it were a scab. How can it heal like this? How can I? In a tidier universe, our story would be fiction. He would be the priest in “The Sisters” and I would be the boy. Our family would whisper, but if my father was any indication, they had been doing that for years.

They would be sure it was his fault. In that story, he is also dead. In that story, he exists only in memory.

T

he years, like I said, are blurry. I believe he had just entered high school when he ended it. In any case, he’d started dating his first girlfriend. He told me all the ways they loved each other: the things they did together, the boundaries of hers that he respected. I knew nothing of boundaries. He had just started to lose weight for ROTC. He got contact lenses and a Justin Bieber haircut. He began to worry about looking handsome.

I was still fat with unkempt hair and librarian glasses.

I was, by his appraisal, not handsome.

We still spent time together, but we rarely did things in the dark. Sometimes we would roughhouse, and he would hold me down until I tapped out, submitted to his dominance. Sometimes we would get into arguments, and he would tell me to stop acting like a faggot. What a strange word, I thought then. I knew it wasn’t desirable, but I liked the way the sentence sounded when I whispered it to my pet tabby cat one night, under my covers: “I am a faggot.” I had never been labelled so accurately, albeit so crudely, before.

Looking back, his reasoning seems quite simple. I wasn’t desirable; therefore, he was. I was a faggot; therefore, he wasn’t.

My first involvement with a boy did not simply end.

It was terminated. One day he realized what he was doing was somehow wrong. I don’t know what prompted this realization, though I suspect it had more to do with my gender than my age or my relation to him. In the end, he was the one who ended things.

His “no” was the one that mattered, because I was not aware of the possibility—the promise—of “no.”

I have since tried to blame him, but the blame isn’t simple. He is not innocent. The damage done to me was real and lasting. I still struggle to build relationships with men in which I feel secure in saying “no.” And yet, he was not the priest. I was not the boy.

I was a boy, and so was he, boys with a family who should have known better. One boy can hurt another, especially when he himself is hurting. These things happen, and that is not an absolution.

Features

Father Figures MARC BOUDREAUX, ES ’21

M

HELEN TEEGAN, ES ’21 YH STAFF

W

y father grew up in Gretna, a town hen my Irish father noticed I was reading across the Mississippi River from New James Joyce’s Dubliners, he told me that Orleans. It was there he learned to say I reminded him of the young narrator of pork like “poke” and shrimp like “shwimps,” and it “Araby.” I was like the young boy in Joyce’s story— was there he learned what a man sounds like. hopeful until I realized that I could no longer get what I wanted, as easily prone to disillusionment as And when he heard me speak twenty-some years to illusion. My father had to be there—he would later in a Sacramento suburb, he knew I did not fit always be there—to meet my disappointment when the bill. I was 10 when he told me that my voice was my imagination no longer mapped onto any realitoo breathy and soft, like that of a little girl. He said ty. Sometimes, he would be the one to break these it kept him up at night, thinking how no one would illusions. Most of the time, though, he wouldn’t be respect or listen to a man with a voice like mine. able to stop them from breaking. I think that broke his heart.

My dad didn’t say these hurtful words to me in his thick southern accent, but with a strangled tongue Since then, I have seen my father cry many times. that sprouted when he moved to San Francisco at Teary-eyed, he asks me to bring down a box of the age of 22 to attend medical school. He arrived Kleenex halfway through the movie Inside Out. to a sea of wealthy white faces. My dad was poor During drives to and from the airport—the only and southern and black, and he knew too well that drive we seem to be making together these days— his peers and professors would look down on him his nose runs as he tells me things that shatter the because of it. He also knew his cajun tongue would imagination I get so used to wearing as armor. make this problem worse, so he tightened his lips and spoke palatably. This worked for a while, but Twice, I remember those thin, sheltered tears giving after a few years his throat turned on him. Genetics way to uncontrollable sobs—the sobs that make your and unnatural stress made his vocal cords perma- lungs heave and your head ache. nently tighten, making him sound perpetually out of breath. To this day he labors to control his cracks These are the sobs you expect from Joyce’s characand sputters. ters. But few of his protagonists cry like this, even when most feel alone, are alone, think about death, In my father’s voice I hear my own, doomed to be or are dying. They stand tight-lipped and weightjudged, like his. He tried to change his voice, but 32 ed to the ground, their lack of motion synonymous years later, he still worries that it makes his patients with a lack of emotion. We want them to snap out quietly cringe. I might have tried to do the same but, of their immobility, and we want this so much that thanks to him, I know it’s futile. Thanks to him, I crying becomes an opponent of paralysis, a symptom speak freely––varied in pitch; full of drama; femi- of living. nine, masculine, and uncompromising.

If I am the narrator in Joyce’s story, filled with illusions, my father tries his best to help me find what I don’t know I am looking for. Seeing him cry is a reminder of the all-consuming reality he lives in to allow me, his daughter, more time to indulge in unreality. I am thankful because no imagined pain hurts more than real pain.

In reality, there is a lot of pain. Joyce knew this, as does my father, which is why both show that there is little pleasure in not crying. In fact, we feel most hopeful when a pair of Dubliner’s eyes brims with tears.

16 THE YALE HERALD

RASMUS SCHLUTTER, MC ’21 YH STAFF

I

kicked my soccer ball back under my bike, walked out of the garage, and came face to face with my dad, standing totally naked in the kitchen, flipping a fried egg by the stove.

He turned, smiled the smile he always does when he knows he is being weird but also thinks whatever he is doing is hilarious, and said to me, “If you want to be a dude, then you’ve got to be nude.”

I owe so much of the comfort I have in my own body to my dad. Whenever we’d walk into a bathroom together when I was little, he’d stop in front the mirror and say, “Wow, I am handsome.” At the mall, sometimes he’d pick up a shirt and exclaim (to my intense and also vocalized embarrassment) just how good he would look in it. He has this strange ability to teach body positivity by example; without ever needing to convince or demonstrate his own attractiveness to anyone else, he is comfortable in himself.

Yet he is not without his own insecurities or self doubt. He gets upset when my mom posts a picture of him on Facebook that shows his chin at an unflattering angle. He’ll snap at me if I ask whether he should be having a second serving of ice cream. His comfort does not exclude concerns about his weight, about his hair, or what he is wearing on a given day.

But it is with his attitude of bodily love that he deals with those insecurities and showed me how I could too.

So yes, if you want to be a dude, you’ve got to be nude. You’ve got to learn to love and relish in your own body, even if you can never escape your own self-doubts and fears about it. When my acne became so bad that I couldn’t look people in the eye when I spoke with them, or when I became totally obsessed with maintaining my weight during soccer season, that sense of bodily love, shown both quietly and, sometimes, loudly (“You’re handsome, you weigh 168 pounds and even if you weighed more you’d have nothing to worry about,” he’d groan) reminded me that my perception of my body might shift and change, but my love for it couldn’t. That love did not come easily or instantly, and it is still a love that I have to practice, but I am so grateful that I had my dad to model it, naked and beautiful and honest, for me first.

17 The Herald asked five writers for meditations on their fathers. They offer five perspectives on the arduous or fun ways that they learned their masculinities; on the intersection of fatherhood and manhood; on how they got their bearings in a gendered world.

MARK ROSENBERG, PC ’20 YH STAFF

EVEREST FANG, ES ’20 YH STAFF

T

he first time I saw my dad cry was over FaceTime. He called to tell my mom and me that his father had died, and he broke into tears as he delivered the news, his words tripping over each other as his eyes welled. Something snapped in my brain as my image of my dad—a hardened, distant, self-made man who grew up poor in mid-20th century China, who constantly ribbed me for being too soft—jarringly diverged from the emotion that was spilling out before my eyes. My filial piety melted into overwhelming empathy.

About a thousand times, my mom has told me about my dad’s soaring joy at hearing that she was having a boy, but she never needed to. From my earliest memories on, it was clear that my dad wanted a boy. He wanted a boy who played basketball, loved superhero movies, and got way too into video games. He wanted a boy who loved the wilderness, was obsessed with trucks, and wanted everything to be blue. He wanted a boy who didn’t cry.

I was none of the above. I was a soft kid, at times unable to withstand my dad’s tough love. I cried when his chiding would become too harsh, breaking down under the weight of his disappointment amid confusion over norms I didn’t understand. My guilt at not being a boy’s boy was a subtle yet constant theme of childhood. My dad tugged me along the path of father-son masculinity lessons, chastising me for watching my sister’s TV shows, buying me countless action figures, and taking me to basketball games.

The pressure lessened as I aged and my dad eventually lost interest in breeding a masculine archetype.

Public school would take over and indoctrinate me into American teenaged masculinity, a frightening monster that my dad never could have anticipated.

His role would ironically shift into keeping me away from other manifestations of masculinity: chasing girls, proving drug tolerance, looking for any and all trouble. Yet he did so at a distance, while maintaining the importance of academics and making money–in short, becoming a successful man. Nowadays, though he continues to harp on these points, our relationship gradually evolves beyond the confines of masculinity.

As he dragged me through the strange process of masculinity education, my dad couldn’t help but show glimpses of his true character: a quirky, hilarious man, movingly dedicated to his family. The first time I saw him cry, I cried too. I cried because I knew exactly how he felt. He had seen his father in a vulnerable state, and I saw mine become vulnerable too. As a kid, I never understood why my dad wanted so badly for me to be such a typical son, why he cared so much that I was a boy, why he insisted on taking me to those games. I always thought it was just the way that dads are, trying to prove their own manliness by showing the manliness of their sons.

But there’s more to it. Even as he strove to transfer the teachings of masculinity, my father couldn’t help but show something deeper. Underneath all the tropes and norms, behind all the games and jabs, he just wanted to connect with his son. I’m sure his dad wanted the same.

W

e’ve got these 12-foot-high built-in bookshelves at my home and they’re filled with John McPhee and Robert Caro tomes. Both were careful observers and meticulous researchers. (Caro is still going on his LBJ biographies, but, like George R.R. Martin, it seems like he’ll never finish.) They’re among my Dad’s favorite writers, and I see them in him all the time.

He always has five pens and a little spiral notepad in his breast pocket. He keeps a farmers’ almanac of his entire life, assiduously documenting the weather, his biking mileage (daily and year to date), his garden yield (usually more rocks than potatoes, but what can you do with New England soil), and a thousand things I don’t know about. I’ll be going out for a drive and he’ll pull me aside, and whip out a napkin, and diagram all the tough intersections, should Siri lead me astray. Or we’ll be in the car together and he’ll point out how half of each tree is covered in snow and half is bare and that’s how you know it was a nor’easter.

I’m way more scatterbrained than my Dad but I feel the same compulsion to document and observe. I guess I do the late-millennial farmers’ almanac.

I keep a million lists in my Notes app and a hundred playlists on Spotify and they’re sporadic and fragmented. I try to slow down and read Caro and McPhee and biographies of Lincoln. Sometimes, we email articles from The Onion back and forth or listen to corny Taj Mahal songs or Bob Newhart stand-up bits and it feels like we’re on the same page. Once, I saw a double rainbow and called him at work and told him to look outside. It’s the only time I’ve ever noticed a beautiful sky before my Dad.

Culture La Protéine Pour Deux MARINA ALBANESE, PC ’20 YH STAFF

N

owadays, it’s getting harder and harder to find a girl who doesn’t like açai bowls.

And you’re no scientist—although Econ is STEM now, you know—but the açai bowl obsession is almost… pathological? You’re not against healthy food per se—you love a good a Tropical Smoothie Cafe smoothie, as long as it’s Lean Machine™, Muscle Blaster™, or Chia Banana Max™ (though, honestly, anything that has a “max” has you sold). You just can’t understand those tiny portions. Four slices of banana and a strawberry—what’s up with that? Anyway, maybe you’re not like other guys, but you’d so much rather have a girl order a cheeseburger than a salad.

So the first date is the best time to scope out whether a girl can meat your expectations, but the New Haven date restaurants—Barcelona, Harvest, Tarry Lodge— don’t really give you proper material for judging. So what better first date than a gourmet feast at yours?

Plus, cooking for her will guarantee that she comes out of the date believing you have a warm and loving relationship with your mother.

Be sure to take note of the running protein count, because as we all know, what makes a man isn’t courage or strength—it’s protein, duh.

Drinks: Protein Colada Because you also call it “making love” and you LOVE getting caught in the rain.

1/2 cup coconut yogurt 1/2 cup frozen pineapple chunks 1/2 cup rum 1 scoop vanilla whey protein 1 tbsp maple syrup

table and there your mother would be, ready with [X], piping hot and just the way you liked it. She was just so good at knowing exactly what you wanted. Deep down, you whisper, you’ve always been a mama’s boy.

Hold her gaze for a few seconds before you smile Slice each bacon strip in half. Wrap each piece down at your meat and start eating. It’s critical you around one sausage, secure with toothpick. Place in stare as intensely as possible, because you definitely do foil-lined baking dish. Sprinkle with sugar. Bake at not want her to ask you a follow-up question—you can’t let your perfectly cooked cut of meat go cold!

350°F for 1 hour. Serve.

5 slices of bacon 10 smoked cocktail-size sausages 1 tbsp brown sugar Toothpicks

1/4 cup soy sauce 1/4 cup olive oil 1 tbsp balsamic vinegar First Course: Chorizo, Bone’d 1 tbsp maple syrup This one goes out to all the boyos. Boyos love chorizo. 3 garlic cloves, minced 1 tbsp fresh rosemary 1/2 tbsp black pepper 1 sweet potato 1/4 tsp red pepper flakes ½ tsp cumin 1 lb flank steak 4 oz chorizo 1 tsp paprika Whisk all ingredients except steak and add to ziplock 1 cup kale/spinach bag. Add steak, shake (closed!) bag and refrigerate for 2 cups bone broth 3 hours or more. When ready, heat grill pan, transfer 1 tbsp chopped fresh cilantro pieces of meat without marinade to the pan. Grill to Peel and dice sweet potatoes. Lay out on baking desired doneness, but if it’s more than medium-rare sheet, drizzle with olive oil, and sprinkle salt, pepper, (4 minutes per side), you’re not a real man. Let rest and paprika. Massage (It’s good practice!). Roast for for 5 minutes. Slice and serve.

25 minutes at 400°F. Place large soup pot over medium heat, spray with Protein count: 64g per person olive oil and when hot, add chorizo. Stir around for three minutes. Add cooked sweet potatoes and pour Part 5: Dessert: A Shared Jar of Almond Butter. broth over. Add spinach or kale and stir until just wilted. Remove from heat, top with fresh cilantro and What, you thought it was going to be fudge brownies? I mean, it’s advantageous to be soft, but not that serve. soft.

Protein count: 25.1g per person 16-oz jar of almond butter 2 spoons Part 4: Main Course: My Mama’s [X] Protein count: 15.6g per person

Blend all ingredients with ice. Pour into nicest glasses you have. Top with one of those cocktail umbrellas The Main Course is the body of the meal, and you can and call it a parasol, so she knows you’re not afraid to really highlight this through the protein you choose show your sensitive side. to serve. Think pork belly, chicken legs, lamb chops, flank steak. I chose ribs, but all are equally macho, Protein count: 15.5g per person except maybe pork belly. Too fatty, not enough muscle. Make sure, however, whatever you choose, that Appetizers: Double Porked you explain that it’s your mother’s recipe. Talk about how you’d come home from a tough day at practice Mmm that’s hot. No seriously don’t touch it I just and your dad would come from a long day of work took it out of the oven! and the two of you would come straight to the dinner 18 THE YALE HERALD

Protein count: 35g per person That means the total protein count comes out around 155.2g per person. That’s almost three times the daily protein requirement for the average sedentary man (56 grams). And no, you’re not overcompensating for anything, you swear.

19 Major Pains E

arlier this semester, I walked into my classroom on the second floor of the art school building and came face to face with a situation I had not yet encountered in my two and a half years as an art major: half of the room had been stripped of the paintings that had papered the walls only a day earlier, replaced by a handful of gargantuan canvases with human faces the size of car tires peering out from each frame. It was an uncomfortable space to enter.

I learned later that this was the work of one of my classmates, a first year boy with a penchant for odd but earnest comments in class. He had rearranged part of the classroom in order to display some pieces for a visiting art dealer.

Upon hearing this, I fumed. Negotiation of space for art majors is crucial: without the space to work, you are unable to produce. Negotiation of space for women in particular is an inevitable part of our existence. Questioning the right to take up space, we are socialized to minimize ourselves in terms of our opinions, our voices, and even our physical body mass. The intersection of these realities then becomes a balance between socialized femininity and the practical need for space, between polite acquiescence of space and the desire to have the room to make pieces of art.

MOLLY ONO, ES ’20 YH STAFF

to take up half of the room, if only for a little while, al- concerns become magnified enormously in historically though the (female) professor had already warned him not male-dominated majors. To be a woman in any of the engito do so. neering departments, or the computer science department, or really the majority of the hard science and math majors, In a separate instance, a different first year boy took up must be a wholly different fight–for legitimacy, for intelan entire wall of the classroom—the working studio spaces lectual recognition, for respect—that I can only begin to of three older, female students. He did so for the sake of conceive of. a piece he had been commissioned to make, the canvas a whopping 15 feet long by eight feet wide. I should also But within the art major, there is a unique type of malemention that he had asked the female students’ permission, ness that persists: the men dispense their opinions freely, which he received, but still forced them to disperse around firmly, and with little room for argument, as if their word the classroom, relegating them to comparatively smaller ar- is law. They have Instagram accounts for their artwork and eas of the classroom while he worked on his monumental hypebeast-inspired clothing brand. They’re already being commissioned piece. paid for their work. They don’t worry whether or not they are encroaching on another person’s studio space. And they I have no ill will against these boys or boys like them, but have never once questioned whether or not they can call in the context of art-making, they have a clear entitlement themselves real artists. to space and time that the women in the class do not. And this sense of entitlement extends beyond the issue of physi- There is nothing wrong with the majority of these traits, cal space, infiltrating discussions, class activities, and claims except for the fact that they seem to belong exclusively on the professor’s attention. It feels frustrating and stifling to the men of the major. It is my sincere hope that the to bear witness to the monopolization of the class, especial- self-assurance behind these behaviors instead becomes an ly when the monopolizer hasn’t had to think through the attribute of all art majors: all of us, regardless of gender, same considerations and experience the same self-doubt producing interesting pieces while advocating for our opinbefore opening his mouth as I have. ions, our work, and our own space.

And thus it is no wonder that this transpired, that one of I am sure that my frustrations with space and entitlethe youngest (male) members of the class felt it necessary ment are not unique to the art major; I imagine that these

On Boyhood T

he concept of manhood is funny to me. We treat it like it’s something earned, acquired by checking the boxes of normative masculinity until one day we can bask in the upper echelon of unapologetic entitlement. The word “manhood” makes me cringe.

I think of boys in middle school flexing their pre-pubescent abs in the mirror, reveling in reaching every benchmark of successful masculine performance in fruitless competition.

And to prove what? As someone who has been hyper-aware of his queerness since childhood, manhood felt not only out of reach for me, but like a tormenting ideal for boys in the throes of pubescent insecurity. I’ve been surrounded by boys consumed in this aspirational masculinity for as long as I can remember, and all I’ve ever felt is sorry for them.

Traditional masculinity teaches us that to succeed, men must be dominant, mature, strong, the best, but that ideal has always seemed like more of a burden than a solace.

JOURNEY STREAMS, PC ’21

made up and the points don’t matter. Though, at Yale They make manhood look miserable. Embracing boyhood my suitemates have turned the games of boyhood into a has allowed me to traverse life, sexuality, and self-expresbattleground of manhood. sion with childlike wonder. Boyhood has taught me that life is never to be taken seriously, that the platitudes about In my all-male suite, I feel like I’m in middle school individuality and self-expression we’re told in grade school again—watching frat boys chug protein shakes, flex in the can be true if we let them. I think the spectrum of gender mirror before going to sleep, pass time talking about the extends not only between the two poles of gender essengirls on Tinder that they wished they matched with. May- tialism, but also within them. Boyhood is something I’ve be it’s just a byproduct of straight culture that I’ll never always cherished because it is, in a word, fun. fully understand, but it seems like the aspiration to be a man—and the competition to be the best man—is what Yale masculinity, in particular, has felt so disparate from defines manhood, from middle school through college and how I perceive my own masculinity, from the manner in beyond. Everyday something becomes an opportunity for which I want to traverse the world. It is a constant performomentary dominance. My suitemates have proven that mance we witness, a performance that in many respects has any activity can become a game of winning and losing. It’s led to the parts of our social culture some of us hate most. ironic that the stakes of manhood can rest on a game of I have never lived around so many straight men before, and Super Smash Bros. I’ve watched the competition devolve probably never will again, but if they are any indication of until a disgruntled suitemate gets up and unplugs the con- how masculinity on this campus is socialized, I wonder Though I’m verging on 20 years old, I am still very much sole. They’ve turned the common room into an arena of how much happier Yale boys would be if they stopped trya boy. I think it’s partly a desire to shirk all adult respon- contestation over an ideal that I don’t think I fully grasp, ing to be men. sibility for as long as I can and partly me internalizing but I can say that often there are no winners. In attemptthe infantilization of twinks in the gay community, but ing to distance themselves from boyhood, they only regress I don’t think of myself as a man. Being a boy means back to the adolescent dick-measuring contest I thought I that I wield masculinity only as a formality to my cis left in gym locker rooms. identity. To me, masculinity is like a game. The rules are

Reviews ERIC KREBS, JE ’21 YH STAFF

T

oday marks 50 years since the release of the Velvet Underground’s 1969 eponymous LP. It’s also been just over half a decade since the death of the band’s lead singer, songwriter, and creative visionary: Lou Reed. Throughout his life and work, Reed constructed and deconstructed his own masculinity. How Reed dealt with masculinity, femininity, drugs, sex, and everything in between deserves both discussion and commemoration for just how forward-thinking, artistic, and, above all, honest it was.

long before he joined entered Warhol’s scene. Let’s look at “Heroin,” off The Velvet Underground’s 1967 album Velvet Underground & Nico (ethical concern: it just happens to be my favorite song). Musically, the song features two chords played ad infinitum. In lieu of harmonic change, the tempo mimics a user’s heart rate while shooting up: speeding up, slowing down, ready to explode. Cale’s screeching electric viola punctuates the track, and it’s perhaps the gnarliest sound ever put to tape.

Lyrically, it’s scarily lucid:

I was first exposed to Lou Reed’s music in a Johnny Rockets.

I was nine or 10, inhaling an Oreo milkshake, when the warm bassline of “Walk on the Wild Side” crackled over the speakers.

Reed’s lyrics followed, and the exposure became indecent. The song features a deadpan account of a cast of characters curated from Reed’s time with Andy Warhol’s entourage: Holly, who “shaved her legs and then he was a she”; Candy, who “never lost her head / even when she was giving head”; and New York City— Reed’s favorite protagonist—the place where they say, “Hey babe / Take a walk on the wild side.” The portrait of police officers and firefighters on the wall suddenly seemed less Norman Rockwell and more Tom of Finland.

‘Cause it makes me feel like I’m a man When I put a spike into my vein

Much of Reed’s childhood probably looked like that Johnny Rockets. His upbringing as the son of an accountant in 1950s suburban Long Island—squeaky clean, family-friendly—proved a perfect backdrop for rebellion. By high school, Reed was playing gay bars on the Island with his band, writing homoerotic poetry, and smoking weed—still taboo, even within the budding youth culture of the time. He began writing. Never one to “go steady,” he attained a reputation for philandering.

Underneath his suave exterior, Reed was troubled. Panic attacks, anxiety, and depression plagued his teenage years. His condition only worsened during his freshman year at NYU, when his parents brought him home in a nearly shell-shocked state. Fearing that their child might be homosexual, his parents—loving, but products of their time—made the ill-advised decision to pursue electroshock therapy. Reed would feel the results of the treatment throughout his life, including short-term memory loss. He eventually resumed his studies at Syracuse University and by the time he graduated in 1964, he was practiced in sexual, musical, and poetic exploration.

After graduation, Reed moved to New York to be an in-house lyricist for Pickwick Records. During a one-off session for a Reed-penned parody song, he met multi-instrumentalist John Cale, with whom he would found The Velvet Underground.

Andy Warhol discovered the band at one of their regular gigs on the Lower East Side.

While the world around him was undeniably saturated with creativity and freedom, Reed’s innovative spirit was present

20 THE YALE HERALD

The song was written in 1964. In ’64, the Beatles were singing “Can’t Buy Me Love” in suits on The Ed Sullivan Show, and Leave it to Beaver had only been off the air for less than a year. No monikers or nicknames, no “Mary Jane.” Reed is talking about heroin, the drug he injects into his bloodstream to get high, the drug that’s killing him. It’s seductive, it’s honest, it’s terrible. Years before the Summer of Love with its romantic, tune-in-turn-ondrop-out conceptions of drugs, Reed was already over it. Forget diamond-lined skies, Reed was face down in a gutter. Sharon Tate was dead, Hendrix was dead, Bobby Kennedy was dead.

America hadn’t even begun to be culturally de-flowered, yet Reed was burning his floral print and buying a leather jacket.

as femininity, sex clubs, and drugs were something to look at, so was masculinity. Take “Candy Says” off the self-titled Velvet Underground. Candy Darling was a trans woman who Reed met while part of Warhol’s world. The song explores themes of body dysmorphia and the inner struggles of being a trans woman in a time even more hostile towards non-binary folks than today. The song’s chorus longingly exclaims: What do you think I’d see If I could walk away from me In this short life, one’s own identity is simply one of many pulpits from which to view the world. And one could only imagine what they’d see if they could step outside it. Reed’s explorations of identity—from rocker to strung-out junkie to effeminate songster to middle-aged man—are further evidence of this belief in fluidity. Unlike his most comparable contemporary, David Bowie, however, his explorations were never characters. There was no Ziggy Stardust, there was no White Duke, there was only Lou. The understated beauty of his lyrics, the ceaseless boundarypushing of his compositions, the undying rock ’n’ roll spirit that characterized Lou Reed all reflect a dialectic vision of the world: everything and nothing, beautiful and ugly, infinite and claustrophobic.

This is evident even in songs covering more traditional rock ’n’ roll material. “Pale Blue Eyes,” off 1969’s Velvet Underground, is a classic affair-with-a-married-woman confessional. In its archetypal form, the narrator is a masculine conqueror who sleeps with women while their husbands are at work. Drawn from a real relationship, “Pale Blue Eyes” is neither regretful nor celebratory of its affair. It is modest, painful, and candid. Absent is the machismo of the “Back Door Man.” Love was not a conquest to Reed, even when it was a sin. And in Reed’s youth, the love he engaged in was often quite sinful.

Reed was a schlub from Long Island who also happened to be one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. Reed’s version of love, of life, and of masculinity was devoid of any sense of machismo. He was never Robert Plant, linen-shirt open, on stage soaking the crowd with a flick of his wrist. When The Velvet Underground closed up shop in 1970, he moved back in with his parents. He was never a cavalier perusing the New York nightlife with a sense of empowered aloofness, he was that world. He lived what he sang about: drug addiction, free love, hopeless love, body dysmorphia, botched medical operations, being a sad sap washed up rock star living in your parents’ basement at 28 years old.

While the San Francisco flower-in-your-hair culture dominated the collective memory of the mid-to-late ’60s, a very different world was budding on the East Coast in Lou Reed’s life and music. He frequented sex clubs like the Anvil, Plato’s Retreat, and the Eulenspiegel Society, a suit-and-tie BDSM society.

These sadomasochistic interests permeated Lou’s lyrics, especially salient in “Venus in Furs,” from Velvet Underground & Nico.

As the world changed and Giuliani cleaned up New York and rock ’n’ roll died and was reborn and died again and the trans existence received (at least partially) the dignity it deserves, Lou was still Lou, taking it all in. In Reed’s last statement in his last interview before dying from liver cancer in 2013, he concluded: “There are nature sounds that are whooooo. The sound of the wind, the sound of love. Whooooo.”

The seedy underbelly of the city fascinated Reed. He was Like the wind, like love, like life—ephemeral and passing. both voyeur and subject, interviewing transsexual people, Rock ’n’ roll. photographing clubs, and taking friends on “expeditions” through the night. In his personal life, he had relationships with men and women alike, living with a trans woman named Lauren for a few years. Reed treated relationships, sex, and masculinity in his work with a sense of simultaneous distance and intimacy. Just

21 MARA HOPLAMAZIAN, GH ’20

I

n the opening scene of Werner Herzog’s 2005 film Grizzly Man, Timothy Treadwell finds himself in a field of wildflowers in Katami National Park, 40 feet from a couple of grizzly bears, kneeling by a tripod. “Most times I am a kind warrior, out here,” he growls, “but sometimes the kind warrior must become so formidable, so fearless of death, so strong, that he will win.” He looks like Darth Vader meets Christian Slater in Heathers, in a dark trench coat and blackout Cobain shades, fists held tightly together. The documentary is predominantly composed of recovered footage that Treadwell shot on his tripod in the 13 summers he lived among grizzly bears— before one of them mauled him to death. By the end of the film, Treadwell’s status as a metaphor for the human condition, a man alienated by modern life and seeking refuge in nature, is clear.

Weiner, a 2016 film by Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg about Anthony Weiner’s 2013 campaign for Mayor of New York, opens on a similar shot: the man alone, facing the camera. “Shiiiiiiiit,” Weiner breathes into a phone, “this is the worst. I’m doing a documentary of my scandal.” What unfolds is an hour-and-a-half exploration of Weiner as narcissist, family man, and sexter. His rage and capacity to alienate those around him are depicted so brutally that, in the last minutes of the film, Kreigman is disposed

to ask, “Why have you let us film this?” But rather than leaving the audience estranged from Weiner and his campaign, the intimacy of the documentary provokes a depth of empathy in the viewer that extends even in his most depraved moments.

in order to humanize him. Neither of them seem to belong to a wider category of “white men unhinged” because they each escape the pressure to stand in for anything besides their particular, bewildering selves. Consider the garden-variety white mass shooter, whose behavior gets blamed on a history of personal Grizzly Man and Weiner at once pathologize and valorize turmoil rather than on extremism or domestic terrorism. Treadwell the men they depict. Treadwell and Weiner are very obviously and Weiner enjoy this same freedom from generalization. unhinged, which neither film attempts to hide. Each man’s personal pathology is used as illustration of disillusionment. What makes Grizzly Man and Weiner so distressing is the They are spectacles, morals of stories about whatever Herzog, ease with which a viewer can identify with their obviously Kriegman, and Steinberg consider to be the conditions of troubled protagonists and the difficulty we have as an audience modern life. Treadwell is perhaps both product of and solution in understanding them as part of the same trend. Through a to the chaos and discomfort of life in urban United States, while valorization of their masculinity and their whiteness, Treadwell Weiner is a horror story of surveillance and public scrutiny in the and Weiner escape the disenfranchisement that many contemporary political system. Together, they are props for the documentary films inflict on their troubled or bewildering telling of stories that eclipse them. subjects. The generosity extended to them is vast: their rage is made rational, their torment is legitimized, and the viewer is on Though Treadwell and Weiner become props for these kinds of their side, even as they inflict harm on those around them. social analysis, they enjoy the characteristically white privilege of personalization. The interviews with former lovers and their loving mothers allow them to escape the simplification that so often comes with troubled subjects. Herzog goes so far as to pull archival footage of Treadwell’s college diving team routines

JULIA HEDGES, SM ’20 YH STAFF

W

hen Yung Lean makes lo-fi art rock, he goes by the name Jonatan Leandoer127. Jonatan Leandoer127 dropped the album Nectar on Jan. 25, 2019—but the name Yung Lean wasn’t even mentioned once in the album’s press releases. Yung Lean, the Swedish musician and totemic sad boy, who became famous at 16 for his depressive cloud rap, is now 22 and is trying to reinvent himself.

Yung Lean started on SoundCloud and rose to fame in 2013 when his music video for “Ginseng Strip 2002” went viral. He went on to release the EP Lavender and his first mixtape Unknown Death 2002, and then the single “Kyoto,” his most popular track to date. “Kyoto” dropped right as I was learning to drive, and I spent hours driving my friends around with the bass turned all the way up, the car vibrating to the track’s heavy reverb and lush synthesizers. Even then, I knew Yung Lean was not a talent. Yung Gud, Yung Lean’s friend and producer, uses echo and autotune to envelop Yung Lean’s despondent, hollow voice. This lavish production allows Yung Lean to posture as the leader of the sad boys. Literally, because Yung Lean co-opted the term to name his crew Sad Boys Collective.

lyrics are filled with references to luxury brands, drugs, Arizona tea, and Japanese culture. Like many SoundCloud rappers, he’s an outsider. He’s a mix of internet meme and rapper, using imagery of early 2000s internet nostalgia: vaporwave, flip phones, Microsoft Paint, and anime. Primarily, Yung Lean has cultivated a devoted fan base of boys between the ages of 13 and 18 through pure sadness.

with his parents. When he dropped Stranger in 2017, he finally managed to reach genuine emotional depth, drawing on his own personal experience as well as his nightmares. But while he was encountering real hardship and exhibiting sincere growth, the landscape of rap has come to adopt his hazy, melancholy, insincere cloud rap style. His artificial sadness became mainstream, but somehow Yung Lean doesn’t seem able to participate in his genre’s success. His most recent album as Yung Lean, Poison Ivy, His lyrics capitalize on the aesthetic of performative melancholy. was an unimaginative regression.

His earliest tracks in 2013 and 2014 built a cult fan base on insincere emotional anguish. In “Yoshi City,” on Unknown Only months after Poison Ivy, Yung Lean might have a new Memory, Yung Lean raps, “I’m a lonely cloud.” In “Die With Me,” audience in mind with Jonatan Leandoer127’s new rock album.

Yung Lean says, “I’m worthless, I’m nothing.” On “Gatorade,” Nectar casts the old Yung Lean’s lyrics in a new compelling light, Yung Lean covers all his usual bases: self-harm, luxury, and apathy. applying his disaffected sensibilities to a new genre. Without the His fans speak his language, express his lifestyle, and manifest clichés of his cloud rap, he’s able to transform the sad boy into his sadness as a foil for self-absorbed masculine wallowing. They something more profound. “I wonder why / You treat me so good are immersed in the image of his movement: Hawaiian print, / When I’ve been so sad / I put a curse on myself,” Leandoer127 bucket hats, red-tinted sunglasses, Xanax, lean. Lean’s lyrics are sings at the beginning of Nectar’s “Razor Love.” As Leandoer127 filled with female-fueled pain, drugs, violence, and aesthetics. reflects in what feels like a truthful way, he takes responsibility This, in association with depression, has the ability to create a for his past, accepting his role as a player in an actual music scene dangerous cult of young sad boys who conflate mental health with instead of just an internet meme phenomenon. a contemporary culture and aesthetic.

“I got an empire of emotion / … / Coke filled nose, too weird for them other fuckboys / Catch Lean and Sad Boys,” Yung Lean After his initial success in 2014, Yung Lean went on to release two mumbles to the camera in the “Kyoto” music video, standing in albums of the same ilk, suffer from addiction to the substances he front of a row of Arizona teas in an Asian convenience store. His rapped about, get hospitalized, and move back to Sweden to live

OUR KIND Patron T. Spielberg

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Donors C. Morales Ervolino Sam Lee Joshua Benton George E. Harris Laura Yao Ted Lee Michael Gerber Brendan Cottington Marisol Ryu Natasha Sarin Emily Barasch Marci McCoy Julia Dahl Maureen Miller

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The

Black List THINGS WE HATE

THE FACT THAT ONLY 1/3 OF THE JO-BROS CAN BE HOT AT ANY GIVEN TIME Sorry Kevin, at least you’re always in the majority

MEN, GENERALLY you know who you are

MEN, SPECIFICALLY you know who you are

FIRST YEARS WHO WIN OSCARS I’ll get over myself if you do

FIRST YEARS WHO WIN OLYMPICS Can you even tailgate the olympics?!?

DISPROPORTIONATELY SMALL BAGS OF CHEETOS Is anybody in there????

SMUCKERS

INFO-LESS INFO SESSIONS

Schmuckers

Where are the crepes?

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