Beneath the veneer of desire and ambition lurks something darker—the grotesqueness of wealth and the violence it implies.
Nora Ephron said, “Everything is copy.” But in a memoir, much like in reality TV, art cannot represent life exactly. People are characters, snapshots of their “real” selves.
I needed to fight my way out of the trance of thinness in order to find out what else was possible, in order to finally see myself.
When I think about queer masculine pregnancy and parenting, I think about Sarah Connor in ‘Terminator 2: Judgment Day.’
Like Pennywise the Clown, I too was stealing childhood from those who had more of it than I did.
This is the deal I’d make with God: my devotion in exchange for acceptance of the past, peace with the present, and assurances about the future.
This is what I became known for in acting class: old-lady drag.
I felt I had something to prove. But the Manhattan, unchanged since its nineteenth-century origins, has nothing to prove.
But of course, all of this isn’t about ‘Gaucho’ or masculinity, really. It’s about trauma, about breaking a cycle you didn’t consent to entering.
On its surface, Brazilian jiu-jitsu was not a sport that I belonged in. To say that it is macho is an understatement.