#butchmasculinity

It has been almost a month in Mexico. This morning, headed into the Museum de Bellas Artes, I took a photograph of the iconic exterior. After all, I’m only in the city for brief hours of my journey, and it is the nature of tourist photography to snap one of your own. Sort of like writing on a wall, it may be filled with graffiti, but there is something private about the act.  Inside the exhibit I saw photographs of the exterior and the interior in the work of Nacho Lopez. Photos from the mid 20th century.

Before that I ate breakfast in a nearby cafe where there was a landscape painting of a dirt road in Michoacan, where I have spent the last three weeks. It looked just like a photograph I had taken a week earlier, I felt this painting was pointing to my loneliness, so much more like a gangling limb in the city. It was strange to look at a painting of a place I had just been so happily isolated, so comfortable and limited in my intake. Arriving back into DF was practically a culture shock. Not Mexican culture but rather urban. I was eating breakfast alone, looking deeply down the road of the painting.

Then, at the museum, to see position interior, exterior and what seemed a variety of tenses that should not go ignored. So I am reflection of these positional images. Vectors that point back at me, a visitor, an elementary spanish language speaker, a white skinned body, a transed person that seems to be doing a decent enough production of masculinity to be not bothered. However on the top floor of the museum, in the architecture exhibit, there was a handsome gallery attendant. Short hair, glasses and those terrible polyester blazers everyone must wear in that job ever. They smiled at me and said buenos dias, and then the smallest thing: a wink. I went down and cried in front of the Diego Rivera murals, unable to butch it up, thinking of Elkins and crying in front of paintings, thinking who cares about butch masculinity as safety, frankly there is no discernible history of people attacking men that cry, or those who were, before crying, doing an acceptable presentation of masculinity.

I heard about the Orlando massacre while I was still out in the country, arriving at a colonial hacienda in the middle of fucking nowhere, high walls and an oasis of gardens, stained glass and the best mole I will ever eat. I was in a van full of artists and we hadn’t been really getting along some of us, it was not a group for political emotional endeavors. This 50 dead news, 53 shot, they need blood donations, it was a mostly latino nightclub. There were explosives, I knew before asking about the assault rifles, we sort of allowed it to take position in the back of reality since we were indeed about to sit around a large table and discuss the ending of this experiment we had all undertaken together.

After getting into the city I spoke with my person, the two of us treading lightly of the violence of bodies, the deep stir of lately, the precariousness of recent assaults and losses, infections and new stories. I trust her mind as I trust nothing else and I imagine my body as a tank in its protection in everything that is us. I am guessing I saw this coming though. I was so happy to leave my home state for just a moment, a place where I defiantly take up space and defend the existence of the queer and the left and the outcast, and it has lately become the specter of glossy magazines that were lost in print, spread across the streets in steel and glass.

I am returning home and need to feel strong.