Being born in the body I was allotted, I was given a myth of boyhood. He was to be great. The gem in a line of praying women & heir to Los Angeles Black Church royalty. I was born of two ministers under the watchful eye of a devoted village. I began boyhood boisterous, bombastically brimming. I can’t remember when I first began to carefully cultivate charisma but I knew I was unable to hide. Openly queer from childhood, I was alleviated from many lasting, though archaic, limitations on masculine performance. I could be a kind of expressive faggot. Couched in my 6’5 Black body, this prismatic persona was made even more unrenderable. I learned I could masquerade in masculine spaces because my sheer size demanded caution. How lucky then for the young flesh thirsty gay, enjoying naively hallow grounds: boy’s locker rooms, straight guys cars, janitors closets after school. I surrounded myself with men not because I identified with them but I need them to make me feel a type of whole.

By the time I got to college, I decided the mythic manhood I was barreling toward needed to include networking with a matrix of men. Fraternity life was rife with myths, embolden by ritual, & scandalized with secrecy. It’s one of the most flagrant theatrical performances of masculinity. Even now I’m hesitant to reveal anything too sacred. We have our Founder’s tale, a group of twelve seminary students trying to bring a new frat to their school. We have our values, virtue, diligence & brotherly love represented by our colors red, gold & purple. We have handshake & songs: Should harm betide me, /Thou ever will guide me, Sigma, Dear Sigma Phi Epsilon True.  I was primed for this kind of community. I was conditioned with my extensive study of how men are & an unchecked desire to be needed by them. My fluency made me easy to talk to & early in my time as a pledge I saw how special they needed me to be.

My first role after becoming a brother was serving the Vice President of Recruitment as Social Chair. I helped throw the parties, logistically. I was to manage the guys working their stations, watch out for any liabilities & keep the noise within reason. Moreover, this was the beginning of me being tasked with both caring for the house & bringing in new people. By my junior year, I was Vice President of Recruitment & personally responsible for engaging potential pledges. I had no concept of care as I do now. My only language for persuasion was the flirtation that fortified my place among these earnest liberal-arts troglodytes I fancied so fervently. My recruits signaled a change for the fraternity. Our queer brothers increased, our brothers of color increased. We had more than just econ & comp sci majors. I felt like I was casting new men in roles my older brothers left vacant. There isn’t enough space here to map how my body was a site of experimentation for my older brothers but all these men told me I was special explicitly & otherwise. Facing the young men who came up under my tutelage taught me I wasn’t like the other Black or Queer brothers, I was a singular feature of the fraternity.

In the first year of my sobriety, I moved to Portland & began collaborating with local Black artists, curators, & spaces. I found sociality & new kinds of community that affirmed me as real. I had tamed my insatiable taste for being surrounded by “men”, with their mythic promise of security. It took months to re-center myself & invest in the Ballroom scene at large, but still, I ached for a place to fit. I had my creative & professional accomplishments from my time across the country but here in my home, I wanted to be known within a family.

My hormone therapy, about 6 months in at that point, had severely shifted my mood & my wellness baseline was raised. I found a new softness in everything. It was then I first imagined motherhood. I had jokingly begun claiming some young Black artists in town but wondered what if I did so with intention? I didn’t want my house to look like a team though, nor a fraternity. After asking my closest guy friend to be the Father, I felt poised to gestate a collective under my care. We had the myth of ballroom families readily available to us. I have two more children now & it’s not lost on me the vaguely nuclear quality to our structure.I jokingly call my first child (from my previous relationship) when telling my friends about my family.

I find myself mythologizing my history to my children often. I try to not over-romanticize how I got over & the never-ending nature of getting through this life. What’s left of my childhood faith I pass on in cautionary tales & demand for higher pay rates. I worry my narcissism fuels my motherhood, each of my children’s faces remind me of a favorite self. But they each tell me how specifically they fit into our unit & how I impact their worlds. I can’t always believe I was the best influence over my pledges but I believe I gave them another way to be in the world. They practiced me to be patient & possible for the earnest & every day. The realness I sought since childhood, I now know is the womanhood I am living in now. The mother/girlfriend/sister placeholder I served for those boys recognized a self I was yet to fully embody. Now, as a woman, I actively seek ways to be the best mother. It’s a realness I fashion from a boyhood that pledged to be more than the myth of a man.