Men Performing Masculinity, Convo #2
A conversation with the self featuring Feels Like Home author Alex Lewis
Hello lovely reader! Over the next few months, in (roughly) bi-weekly intervals, I will be publishing a conversation I invited
, , and to have with themselves. I ask that you read these pieces through the lens discussed in the introduction piece Men Performing Masculinity and meet these wonderful men with empathy and grace. Thank you. 💜
An introduction to Alex
[Copied from Alex’s profile and about pages]
I’m a social media strategist, an essayist, and a freelance music writer for Columbus Underground based in Columbus, Ohio. I lead monthly Shut Up & Write events on Columbus’ South Side and help build community with BIPOC writers and creators at Unlocked | BIPOC Reads as part of Locked In.
Throughout my decade-plus of writing, I’ve returned to home — as a physical place, as a person, as a feeling. That we are loved and accepted as we are and can always return to this reality. And when we come home, we’re met with open arms and celebration. At home, you live with the good, the bad, and the uncomfortable. We find and hold space to move as one. Not a performance for one another, but dancing with each other.
As social media platforms continue to make it harder to keep up with the people I love and the things they’re putting out in the world — and for folks to keep up with me — Feels Like Home provides a space for me to share my writings and potentially even do more with my writing, while caring for the people I love most.
An introduction to Alex’s writing
[Excerpt from Not Another Math Lesson]
In Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights, there’s a chapter where he writes about the “delight of inefficiency.” He describes inefficiency—“lounging, sipping coffee, listening to the oatmeal talking in the pot”—as something that was not an option for his family due to them being “kind of broke and hustling to stay afloat.”
Even within our culture, doing nothing—or moving slowly—is treated as wasted time. Our lives are viewed as businesses for which every moment should produce a return on investment. We “earn” our “worth” with how we “spend” our time. Capitalism knows no bounds. Even our language is up for grabs.
It is no surprise we burn out. We’re instructed to focus on what we must do and rarely taught to understand who we want to be. And when we become overwhelmed, there is no room for recovery because its requirements often don’t have a profit motive. We feel like we’re wasting time by resting—and rest is typically viewed as something we only do so we can perform better at work.
I’m more interested in sustainability. Consistency. The longevity that balance and discipline offer. And that’s less about all the things I can do; it’s understanding I want to be good, and I want my people to be good. I want to be awake, alive, and alert. I want to love—and I want to maintain my capacity for love. I want to retain my ability to care.
A conversation with the self:
When was the first moment that you can recall experiencing what bell hooks refers to as soul murder--when you socially need to behave in a way modeled by other boys/men in your environment that felt wholly against your inner-self/values?
Growing up, I loved art. I loved drawing. I would sit for hours and draw my favorite NBA players or Digimon. I had notebooks upon notebooks filled with these drawings. I even remember, in elementary school, we got to write and illustrate our own picture book and mine was about my best friend at the time. All throughout the book, there were drawings of us playing together.
And then somewhere along the way, this stopped. I can’t recall the exact point where I started losing interest, but I do know my attention shifted to focus more on playing sports. In middle school, I began writing raps, and I remember mimicking the profanity and misogyny that I heard throughout popular rap music. None of it was true to my life; I just thought that’s how you were supposed to write rap songs.
Along the way, I picked up different instructions. Don’t cry. Fight through it. Be a man. Don’t act like a girl. Don’t be gay. Get the hottest girl. Look fresh, but don’t dress fruity. It’s cool not to care. And while it never felt like these instructions fully fit me, I wanted to be accepted even if it meant constantly having to play an act.
If you could go back and speak to your 12 year old self (and he listened!), what guidance would you give him around becoming a man in a patriarchal society?
Tyler, the Creator has this line, “Tell these Black kids they can be who they are.” And that’s what I would tell my 12-year-old self: be whoever you want to be. Especially as Black men, we’re often denied our full humanity. We have to be hard. We have to be cool. We’re not allowed to show emotion. We must do whatever it takes to earn respect—a respect we’re inherently denied within imperialism, white supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy.
I would tell my 12-year-old self to hold out for people who accept him as he is. We all want to be accepted. We all want to belong. And we often deny vital aspects of who we are in trying to perfectly fulfill patriarchy’s restrictive and ever-shifting criteria. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come home to myself by surrounding myself with people who not only allow but encourage me to be who I am. Lean into those people. They will save your life.
In a patriarchy, much of our behavior is driven for the need to be accepted by our peers/community/family, and as such we often behave contrary to how we internally feel. When was the last time that you felt enough when performing patriarchy?
I don’t think I’ve ever felt like I’m enough when performing patriarchy. This is largely because the target is always shifting. In his book Punch Me Up to the Gods, Brian Broome wrote, “The masculine requirements of the body are as endless as they are restrictive.”
There are these trends online of people stating what men are and aren’t allowed to do, as well as people asking why men are doing certain things, such as posting photo dumps or watching reality TV. And while they’re often meant jokingly or sometimes even to show how ridiculous performing patriarchy is, these are the types of hoops men jump through to avoid not being perceived as feminine.
When I feel like I have to live up to some standard other than feeling at home within myself, it’s impossible to feel like I’m enough. Because I’m being asked to be someone who is not me.
In what ways do you believe community, especially through sports, can be healing?
I grew up within the Black Church and evangelical Christianity, and there’s this line in the first book of the Bible: “It is not good for man to be alone.” I still believe this wholeheartedly. People can care for us in ways we’re not able to do in and of ourselves. In Angela Y. Davis’ Freedom Is a Constant Struggle, she wrote, “It is in collectivities that we find reservoirs of hope.”
While sports can often be one of the biggest stages for performing patriarchy, team sports, like basketball, football, and sprint relays, taught me how to care for others and that every player—whether on or off the field—has a role to play in achieving the team’s goals.
“We know that to be us and to be free is to help others be them and be free,” wrote author and former college football player Danté Stewart for ESPN. On the journey of self-love and unlearning patriarchy, my people nudge me back toward myself—the things I love and the people and moments that have shaped me. They remind me of what we’re capable of and that freedom is our birthright.
“What happens to one happens to us all,” wrote Robin Wall Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass, “We can starve together or feast together. All flourishing is mutual.”
The way forward is through calling folks in, into community, into collective liberation, into empathy. How do you practice this?
My writing is often an invitation for people to come home to themselves. For my newsletter Feels Like Home, in writing about things I love and the people and moments that have shaped me, I hope to help others be themselves and be free. My writing is community-oriented and aims to help us see that we need each other, that we’re all we have.
Beyond my personal writing, I work to bring people together virtually and in my city of Columbus, Ohio. Virtually, I’ve teamed up with some wonderful writers on Substack to help build community with BIPOC writers and creators through Locked In. We write together every Friday morning and invite participants to submit their work for a curated collection of reads by BIPOC writers and creators.
In Columbus, I host monthly Shut Up & Write meetings with the goal of providing space for dedicated writing time. Also, I work with Columbus’ Black Men Build chapter to help facilitate Noname Book Club meet-ups focused on building community through political education. We’ve read a variety of books, including Carvell Wallace’s Another Word for Love and Kiese Laymon’s Heavy, that have explored manhood under patriarchy.
I hope that everything I do stems from a desire for me to be good and my people to be good. Something special happens when we’re together, and I try to prioritize these opportunities when and where I can. All of us dancing together, finding home within one another.
Further Reading
Subscribe to Alex’s newsletter here: Feels Like Home.
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Thank you for inviting me into this conversation, Kate! I’m so grateful for the work you do and how you give us permission to return to ourselves 🙏🏽
This is such a great read, and such an important series. It can feel really overwhelming to navigate this moment when people are pushing back against patriarchy, because in the push-back I worry that men, particularly young men still figuring things out, can feel criticized in ways that aren't constructive. I'm coming at this from the perspective of a mom to a young man. I know it's a confusing world, and I don't always know how best to support him, and how to keep an open dialogue about the conflicting messages and harms of patriarchy without just sounding like his crazy feminist mom. I want him to trust that his family will alway be a refuge for him, but sometimes I worry that he feels like he has to be a different version of himself out in the world than he is here at home. I want for him to live a whole life with all the parts in harmony. Conversations like there are so important. Thank you.