Five Frames

By T.J. Jourian

/ Nonfiction /      

I’m not sure what to make of this group yet. 

It’s my first time meeting these dozen or so he/hims and they/thems, some with names I recognize from seeing them in my inbox every so often on a listserv for the Masculinity Action Project. We are sitting in a circle in a… well, looking around, I actually can’t tell what this room is normally used for. There are seven or eight overflowing bookshelves across three walls, a small kitchen in one corner by the door, a TV and a couple of bulletin boards on the left side wall where we walked in, and several stacks of black metal folding chairs seemingly all over the place. Really taking “multipurpose room” to a new chaotic level. Whatever it is, we are in some room in the Lutheran Settlement House in North Philly on a sunny Sunday afternoon, semi-awkwardly moving through the first session of a four-part series of something called Reclaiming Closeness. 

Thank god the other three sessions are virtual.

At 43, I’ve already been a grouchy old man for at least six years, and I can sense my curmudgeon bubbling up as one of the facilitators describes the next activity. It involves moving and acting. Cue internal groan at having to do either. We have to scour our memories for five moments that are in some way connected to masculinity and in small groups take turns silently acting them out in single frames before sharing the backstories of each of our silly reenactments. At least they feel silly to me. 

It takes me a while to think of five. Not that five is a lot—because what moment isn’t about masculinity? It’s thinking about the acting out part that slows me down. I want the frames to be simple and short, to limit how much I embarrass myself. Only a couple of the moments show up relatively instantly. Finding the other three is like digging around the crevices of my hippocampus for the right film strip. Memories haven’t been easy recalls the last few years, not since the second positive COVID test, but the neurologist is unconvinced it is anything more than not getting enough sleep. She’s probably right, but I’m not confident I’m going to be able to test that theory out any time soon. Who is sleeping well or enough these days?

Frame 1 – Fists on Tables

Scene: I hold out my fists and slam them down against an imaginary table in front of me. 

---

I doubt there will ever be a time when reflections on masculinity do not conjure up my father’s violence. The image that flashes in front of my eyes doesn’t involve table slamming, but that is simpler to reenact in a single frame. My father’s fists met all the tables in our apartment at one time or another, the result of his temper boiling over and sometimes a prelude for more to come. Fists on tables were mundane, ordinary. This frame is not a moment, it is an entire childhood.

The image that had actually come to me, which is the image that most often comes to me, is far less mundane and more graphic; not something I want to reenact, for both my and everyone else’s sakes. 

It was the summer after my first year in college. The image is of my line of sight as I stood frozen in the doorway looking into our apartment, looking into the living room, past the dining and TV rooms between me and him. The details and sequencing are imprecise, but I saw his table-slamming fists by my mother’s jaw… was he hitting her, grabbing her, grabbing her to hit her? Neneh tried to stop him and I could hear her surprised yelp, when he pushed his own mother down onto the white armchair behind her. My younger sister, 16 at the time, moved to stand in front of him to let mum get away. He hadn’t been physically violent with either of us, right up until that moment when he grabbed her and threw her on the ground.

The memory ends there.

And I’m still frozen.

Frame 2 – Football

Scene: I step forward on my left foot and swing my right leg, kicking an invisible football.

---

It is not soccer, it is football. I said what I said.

I was in 5^th grade. Translation: I was in Armenian-secondary-school-in-Cyprus 5^th grade, the equivalent of 10^th grade in the US. We didn’t have a girls’ football team at the school, so a bunch of us—us being most of the girls’ basketball team—decided to hold our own mini tournament. Almost none of us had ever played, so we opted to go with the smaller and less gravelly indoor field. Any girl who wanted to play— most of the school as it turned out—could. There would be three teams; 1^st, 2^nd, and 3^rd graders in one, 4^th and 5^th in another, and 6^th and 7^th together.

A few of the 4^th and 5^th grade boys volunteered to coach us. They said they wanted us to represent our grades well. In retrospect, they also probably never considered this part-protest as anything more than a fun little display over a single weekend. They were not wrong to not be threatened. At least, as far as the school administration and coaches were concerned. 

The scene I remember most fondly was during the de facto final against the 6^th and 7^th graders, after both teams had already played and won against the young’uns. I was a right midfielder, so I spent most of the game being the feeder between the defensive line and the strikers. 

The frame I act out in front of a couple of the MAP guys is of when the ball rolled towards me at a moment when our strikers were not ready to receive it and their goalkeeper was preoccupied at the left end of the goal. So, I went for it. From just behind the halfway line, aiming for the upper right corner, I kicked the ball up and watched as it curled back down and hit the top post.

The whole arena roared. My teammates were screaming in disbelief, while the boys were chanting my name. I almost pulled a Beckham before Beckham had pulled a Beckham. Even though I didn’t score, they called me Maradona for the rest of the year. I had never felt proud of a nickname before, especially one bestowed upon me by a bunch of boys. 

Frame 3 – Stoic

Scene: I shove my hands into my pockets and stand still. Or at least I try to, uncomfortably rocking back and forth just a tiny bit.

---

It was sophomore year in college and I was—yet again—getting unsolicited advice on how to “pass” by cis people. At this point, I was still figuring out all that gender stuff, but there was discomfort in the greys. Not for me, mind you. I reveled in my genderqueerness, in the “what is that?” looks from others. As an otherwise rule-following-do-gooder, I was late to my rebel phase, so I didn’t mind lurking about in the greys for a little while longer. The discomfort was everyone else’s, not mine.

It was almost like the second I told people that, hey, I don’t think this girl/woman thing quite fits, I needed to be reassigned immediately, at least in their mind’s binary, if not the world at-large. And I needed to learn how to act accordingly, to fit into my reassignment, and obviously I’d want their sage feedback. I didn’t need to ask; it was their pleasure.

A few people told me I moved my hands too much when I talked, that as my wrists flipped around to the cadence of whatever I was saying, I was giving myself away. I was instructed to keep my arms down to my side and stay still. Loom large, but still. I don’t know if I actually bought that as much as I just acquiesced so they could feel good, pat themselves on the back for being such great allies, and move on. So, I shoved my hands into my pockets to anchor my arms down.

That next summer, I went home, which was still Cyprus at the time. Home was being around Middle Eastern men. Men who loomed large, but didn’t stay still. Men whose wrists and arms flailed around as they spoke gregariously. The more air space their arms took, the manlier they seemed and likely felt.

And that’s when I realized. I wasn’t actively being socialized to be a man. I was actively being socialized to be a white man.

Frame 4 – N’Drag

Scene: I jump up and twist midair about 45 degrees to my right, landing with my feet about a foot-and-a-half apart. My right hand impersonates a quacking duck flying in front of my chest, while I lip synch the words “bye, bye, bye.”

---

Drag was a refuge, a creative outlet, an experimental space, and so much more. Admittedly, I also didn’t mind the amateur idol status I got when I stepped on stage, nerves calmed by a shot or two of Tequila Rose. I felt sexy watching queers and straights, trans people and cisses, line up at the end of the runway, beckoning me with dollar bills folded and held up in between their fingers. That was my Leo moon basking in its own glory.

The bar was Stiletto’s in Inkster, just outside of Detroit. We were mostly a bunch of college students, playing with spirit gum and gender. It was one of the few places in my life where masculinity wasn’t a medium for violence. Indeed, the masculinities that pranced and strutted and danced and thrusted on that stage were liberating and liberated sources of happiness, laughter, mockery, and desire.

N’Drag became Drag King Rebellion. Boy band numbers became elaborate skits that transformed songs into protest and truth-telling. We kept a few boy band numbers and cheesy pop songs to keep the crowd entertained and coming. For a few hours a night, for about a dozen or so nights a year, we were benevolent kings and a couple of femme queens lovingly serving our drunken realm. And it was glorious.

Frame 5 – Breathwork

Scene: I stand with my arms pointing downwards, my palms open and facing forward, and my eyes closed. I lift my chest up, and take a deep breath.

---

We were standing around in a circle. Thirty or so Black and brown bodies, shoulder to shoulder, our attention on the one who had brought all of us to Oakland, some time around mid-March 2013. It was the last day, but it could have been the end of any of the seven days we had been there. As instructed, we drew a collective breath in, letting the air inflate and deflate our bellies—the way we’re supposed to breathe, the way we were born knowing how to breathe, before we’re taught to be ashamed of our bellies and conceal them. A contingent of almost all queer bodies—cis, trans, genderqueer, women, men, questioners alike—with varied entanglements with masculinity, both the abstract and the embodied, breathing together.

The Brown Boi Project was a space for masculine of center people of color of any gender to gather, one cohort at a time, and connect around our responsibility to enact gender justice in our communities. That week was the first time I felt like I could breathe. I was a couple of months shy of 32 and I could not remember a time or place where my full self had emerged before, given permission to be, allowed to rest among kin who did not need any type of performance from me to be seen or validated. At least not now that we were at the end of our retreat, our nourished time together that we would not be able to replicate ever again.

But now I knew that it was possible—to exist whole, to breathe—and that knowledge alone has reinflated my belly and my chest several times since.

---

Five moments. Five frames. Each seemingly a lifetime away; each seemingly encompassing a lifetime within it.

But what do these five moments mean today? How did they get me here—to some room in the Lutheran Settlement House with a bunch of people I just met talking about gender and masculinity through amateur miming? I take in one of those belly breaths, remind myself that no one made me come here, that I chose to do this in search of more people I could breathe around. Right now, it feels instead like I’m holding onto my breath, afraid to let it go, not sure what this group will do with it.

I tell myself I need to give it time. It always takes time. And this might not be that space either. But at least I’m looking again. 

I’m coming up for air and searching for breath again.