This FIELD LOG mini episode is the third in the “From Survival to Sanctuary,” series, where we’re collectively asking how we perform and build sanctuary, and how we move to enact and build collective care, in the service of liberation for all beings and bodies. There’s been two longer episodes in this series to date, and two live ones from the free event series of the same name, where I’m joined in conversation by an incredible lineup of artists, thinkers, researchers, organizers, students, and radical faith leaders!
Our next roundtable is Tuesday May 14th at 7:30 EST - please join us! You’ll find a link to register in this episode. Each conversation is also available as a podcast and a YouTube video, with a full transcript and bonus content.
How many times have you been born?
These days feel like a constant reboot — just an afternoon often offers enough fresh data to present a new hypothesis on who I am and start again. This is at once deeply disorienting and comforting; God is Change and we are change and the only constant is change. Ego death and nonattachment are practices I’ve actively cultivated for years. But at least now I have a baseline that feels less foreign; my body now holds home in a way it never could before top surgery, now almost four years ago.
Most nights when I get home I strip down to a cheap white undershirt, which I often wear under my clothes. It feels most right, natural with a chain—some instinctive urge towards machismo kinship with the Southern Italian version I was raised around. But I see it in photos of my dad, too, even when he was a teenager, adopted into an Irish clan.
Nightly, this Giglio Boi factory reset form of me receives whomever took the stage that day like an exhale; it’s when and how I feel the most myself — yet when I reflect on it, I find myself doubting it’s who other people see.
I like the way tanks’ ribs cling lightly to mine, though I admit I find myself missing the aggressive sensory constancy of binding, the pinch of sharp wires, of stricture — three decades of essentially being tied up under my clothes has been hard to give up, as so much pain we’re used to is. You come to love it, even, you come to not understand or trust its absence.
You’ll sometimes find me with a band tightly tied around a finger for this and other reasons — a stim, a kink, a prayer. But so too if I’m not careful does the flickering, unsteady, familiar pain-light of relationships where I feel confused and hurt claim to be home; as Bessel Van Der Kolk writes, the scared animal returns here because it’s what they know. And we are animal, after all.
Today, having circled the sun for my forty-fifth time, I’m reflecting on what it means to see oneself, to feel belonging in the world and in my body, and in certain, well, drag – or more simply, clothes. The question of belonging and who feels it (and how perhaps more of us don’t than we might assume) has come up frequently as I consider the alchemy that might bring us from survival to sanctuary – in fact, I’m thinking of beginning an invitational series of one on one conversations around all the ways searching for home and belonging has impacted almost everyone…stay tuned on that, and I guess, if you want to have that conversation, let me know!
TO CONSIDER:
Where do you find belonging? What – or who – feels like home (if you’ve found it)? Have you experienced feeling like an outsider or alien? Do you feel that way now?Do you think that others would be surprised that you feel or have felt this way?
Is there something you wear (or could wear – whether you own it or not) that would make you feel at home in yourself, or that has in the past? What is it, and why?
As far as my own story is concerned, I know that I’ve felt like an outsider and an alien for most of my life – even in outsider spaces. In large part this came from playing a gender role and performing neurotypical personhood but not really knowing I was doing either of these things – just, well, sensing that I somehow had missed something, like I’d been in the bathroom when they went over the rules, so to speak. Then too there was growing up in a volatile and fractured family, in which both my parents saw themselves as sort of black sheep figures, passing on resentment, confusion, and deep disorder.
I don’t really…remember a lot of the relationships I had when I was masking and playing Girl. In describing this I started to write, “it’s almost like I wasn’t really there,” but in fact, I wasn’t really there. I had learned not to be myself, that it was a dangerous and shameful place, so I just studied every situation for what it meant to be good – in fact, the best – because frankly only then would I get what looked or felt like approval. Be myself? Absolutely not. My emotions and physical state weren’t welcome, appropriate, or of value in our house.
Can I find myself back there? And by “myself” I mean: can I find them? Can I find him?
What I remember distinctly is my obsession with men’s dress clothes of all types. I first convinced my mother to allow me to have her 1960’s Evan Picone houndstooth blazer in highschool, with its leather elbow patches and covered buttons (which I still have and wear). But long before this I was begging for men’s oxfords at the Thom McAn on Greenpoint Avenue in middle school, and I began feeling myself in fedoras, beanies, and baseball caps in grade school.
I reverently selected my first navy blue felt fedora at the Woolworth on Union Square in the late 80’s before it closed. I can remember running my finger along the stitches on its ribbon, being so careful not to dent the brim which had a wire running through its edge to keep your desired angle of rakishness. On the other hand, my cap of choice was the classic red and black Chicago Bulls hat - how I loved that team! When I see pictures of myself in these, or the high top converse I saved up for I recognize a glimmer, but then my voluminous, nearly impossible to believe Jessica Rabbit body had its own ideas about who I was – and no one who interacted with me would let me forget it.
And so I did with this identity what I did with all things: learned how to do it best. Basically, I perfected drag, not understanding myself to have another option. Actually, I sort of assumed what I was doing is what everyone was doing – until I realized in my 20’s and 30’s that this …wasn’t the case.
Fast forward to a few months ago, when after many years of using solely they and them pronouns, I decided to add he… but I haven’t made any official announcements – so, I guess, here we are. Hi, I’m really enjoying what feels very much like my boyhood era.But it’s not a simple shift. And also, critically, *I* haven’t changed. I inhabit all pronouns in certain relational spaces and then sometimes none at all. But she is a catty bitch, reserved mostly for fellow gays, performance, and the occasional roleplay – and I have always “felt” predominantly masculine, energetically.
Where this has shifted though is intimately, where partnering with femmes sometimes now takes on a hetero dynamic that my body reacts to immediately with a no – and where what I’m drawn to more consistently is to be met by similar energetic masculinity in whatever gendered form it appears. T4T ideally. And that’s a mindfuck, because again it's a question of how others perceive me.
Top surgery has offered a refuge for me, alone, but sent me back to a relational boihood indeed where I feel like I’m starting over. New body, new sensations, lack of sensation, and a deep need to be seen and perceived and be attracted to as and in my gender. The years of craving being wanted as and for a body that felt like a prison makes this ever more pronounced now that I’m in my own.
My dad, Greg, was born in 1955 and was the eldest of five brothers. If you’re looking at the picture on substack you’ll see a group of these boys in 1969 on the steps of the Maina family house on Vista Street in Staten Island. Clockwise from top left you’ll see Greg at 14 (the one who… looks like me) then Gary at 11 next in line – both of them were adopted, but not related to each other. Then there’s the three that followed – Michael, David, and Paul – who were born to my Grandma Ginny and her second husband – also Michael Maina, senior. In this photo it’s David, at 5, then Paul, at 3, and Michael, at 7.
The story of getting reacquainted with my uncles in 2019 will need another episode at least but for now, as we’re thinking about belonging and normative drag I want to talk about David – who called to wish me happy birthday this morning. We ended up talking about gender and queer shit as we often do, and I’ll start off by saying he gave me carte blanche to include anything and everything about his story here when I told him what I was writing about. (Thanks Uncle David!)
Because you see – David came out officially as gay around 2012, when he was 47 (so, two years older than I am now) after 22 years in a straight marriage with beloved kids. But – as he describes it – he knew exactly who he was after an undeniable first encounter with Bear Magazine in 1997. If you see David and his (absolutely adorable) partner Tex now, and their wide circle of fuzzy Bear friends, you see that he is living that dream… and making up for lost time in any and every way. But it’s been a complicated road to say the least.
Something my Uncle David and I share is an understanding of the before and after within our adulthoods – to have lived a life essentially as someone else, but still have love and appreciation for the person we were, or were trying to play, during those years. And we also share a desire to truly live as ourselves now, unapologetically. Which looks like renegotiating relationships with anyone who knew – or thought they knew – us before. Because I met my sisters and reconnected with my uncles after more than thirty years at 40 years old, we’ve only known each other as the flaming gays we are now, but are bonded by this shared experience, another knowing.
I was telling David about the undershirts and gold chains and my joy in this and he understood of course – but we were also talking about what it means for me to prioritize feeling and presenting as this person all the time, which I’m struggling to reconcile with my other values around consumer culture and capitalism, an area he approaches …somewhat differently. But it’s good for me, because his drive to make up for lost time, his absolute delight in the permission to live freely which came after so many years in hiding makes him a fierce defender of the liberatory potential of things I otherwise might convince myself are vain or wasteful.
On a long drive this week I was listening to Lama Rod talk about his own experiences learning from fashion icon André Leon Talley as he asked himself similar questions to my own – seeking to find right balance between the critical anticapitalist values of his own justice work and the simple, spartan life seemingly urged in some faith traditions with giving himself permission to enjoy queer pleasure, joy, and even opulence in dress.
I find myself connecting these thoughts to an unexpectedly transformative afternoon in 2022 when Candystore and I met up at Sadie Barnett’s recreation of The (New) Eagle Creek Saloon at the Kitchen in New York City – an installation reimagining the first Black-owned gay bar in San Francisco, started by her father, Rodney Barnett, in 1990.
On this late winter day two years into Covid’s reconfiguration of NYC life, we left a sunny Chelsea street and walked through a portal of sorts – into the low lit performance space reborn as nightclub, graced by host DJ’s and performers from Carry Nation and the House of Aviance. And on this day too, I was – like in my undershirts – gratefully welcomed home. I think it’s fair to say I had a generous club “kid” era, one that extended well into my 30’s and which I haven’t entirely abandoned – but between the pandemic and my own health issues it had… been a while. But oh my goodness. I was so… relieved by the lights and the queer expression and the music and the dancing, like an oasis of possibility.
The years prior (maybe without my choosing to) had deepened my already creeping sense of responsibility to austerity but at that moment the punishing future I’d feared or felt in my body stretched – and it suddenly didn’t feel like an either-or situation. The future, whether we were living in cars or growing our own food or wearing masks would, in fact, include fabulous versions of us all: a costume closet, drag, play. But not only would it be possible, it was essential to our survival.
And yet – to shop or replace my drawers and closets of the costumes accumulated by the person I used to perform doesn’t feel available, and so I still often don’t feel like myself until I (mostly) undress. Shopping feels like an activity from another time, as alien as an earlier version of myself. It isn’t something to which I’m in the habit of giving my attention… or resources.
Are you surprised? On most days, I don’t give it mind — the limited palette of old choices is a constraint I approach gamely: I truly don’t think clothes are gendered and I enjoy troubling the intersections of a palazzo pant I bought in 2004 with “men’s” suiting elements I got on the Buy Nothing group in my neighborhood, etc.
Yet as midnight passed and my marked day of birth began I found myself wondering what would change if I felt all day, every day, how I feel when I take off my second skin. How would I present myself differently if I believed it to be possible or available or something I could find a way to prioritize, adding to the limited parts of my wardrobe that already feel aligned with me, not the me at 24 who bought the shirt I wore out last night.
It’s funny because I think I’m thought of as a person who is extremely intentional about my aesthetics and that’s true, but what I’m bringing to the table may be more about a conditioned deprivation kink than what’s actually available. And I’m ready to explore the ways in which I might be the one closing the doors I’ve believed myself to have found boarded over.
TO CONSIDER:
Do you deprive yourself of yourself? Can you think of ways you deny yourself comfort, pleasure, growth, or may be resisting or keeping yourself from things that feel outside your reach, that you are ashamed to want or which in some way seem to challenge other values you hold?
Do you feel that there are joys you might be keeping out of reach that might in fact be available if you approach your choices from another lens? Has this been part of your story of what you needed to do to survive?
Today’s episode has been all about the open questions I’m asking myself, and inviting you to ask yourself, too. I hope you can be gentle with what you learn, and I’m doing my best to bring that gentleness home here, too.
That’s it for today, folks.
See you soon, in the Sanctuary.
Onward, fellow humans.
I love you.
050924 | A FIELD LOG FOR MY FORTY-FIFTH YEAR : FROM SURVIVAL TO SANCTUARY PT 3