Becoming a Man Quotes

“I am sitting next to a middle-aged Midwestern blonde from Shakopee, Minnesota. She is unremarkable; from the outside she looks less unkempt than some, a veneer of solidity that makes me wonder what she's doing here. Then she tells her story. Her thirty-year-old daughter, her best friend as she described her, had planned a big fiftieth birthday party for her. She had set up catering, had had a cake delivered to her mom's house. A few hours before the party, she had been with her mom setting up tables and making a playlist, and then left to go to her apartment to change clothes. She said to her mother what she said every time they parted, "I love loving you," and walked out the door. She never showed up for the party. She had gone home and hanged herself. This mother, that veneer I had misrecognized, was a husk, all that was left of a body destroyed by the unknown becoming known. "What had I missed?" she asked.

What was lurking inside the body of her daughter that day? What was underneath the party planning and the love of loving her mother? What could that young woman not bear to know, not bear to feel?”
― P. Carl, Becoming a Man: The Story of a Transition

“In the final image, he is sitting atop the horse. We have not witnessed a victory or a conquering, but a love scene, a man who knows innately how connection happens, how we traverse emotional distance, how we calm one another's fears.

Similarly, toward the end of the film, Brady goes to visit Lane. He is wearing his cowboy hat, green rodeo shirt, jeans, and a bandanna tied around his neck as if he's ready to go riding. With the help of the nurses at the rehab facility, he dresses Lane in boots, jeans, and his old maroon-striped rodeo shirt. Brady puts Lane's cowboy hat atop his head: "We don't want you to get a sunburn," he says. With great difficulty, they ease Lane over a saddle propped up on parallel bars. Brady holds the reins as if he is the horse and takes Lane riding again.

"You're loping off into the distance," he says as Lane struggles to stay upright. Lane's head falls and Brady cajoles it back up with the patience of a parent teaching a child to ride a bike.

Together they are in a rehab facility loping, smiling, tilting, riding, Brady talking softly, lovingly. Brady's man talk soothes me. I have been the horse and I have been Lane, broken through a transition, learning to allow my body to feel pressure, to be cajoled to walk two steps forward, to trust someone enough to help me imagine what it would be like to lope along in my cowboy hat protecting me from sunburn, to learn what it means to talk like a man.”
― P. Carl, Becoming a Man: The Story of a Transition

“I think it's hard for people to understand what I mean when I say "I'm a guy's guy." I am in one way "becoming" a man and in another way I have always been one and I'm trying out all the ways to understand how I want to live that out, good and bad. Becoming a white man visibly is like a newly found superpower-like when Spider-Man suddenly realizes he can scale the sides of buildings but doesn't quite know how to control his own power and smashes up against a concrete wall on his first several attempts. He flails until he eventually knows how to use his power for good.”
― P. Carl, Becoming a Man: The Story of a Transition

“As a woman, I would have rather been bipolar, something I could take medication for, than been treated like a woman - something I could not control.”
― P. Carl, Becoming a Man: The Story of a Transition

“At its worst, the purpose of a psych ward is to normalize you back into a community that is anything but. Its purpose is not to heal you, but to make you stay sick so that you can function alongside the lies of a country steeped in them, so you can function alongside the lies you are forced to tell about yourself. We are all doubling in order to live, and the psych ward tells you to squash that inner knowing. It's simply not useful if you hope to thrive. At its best, psychiatric care gives you tools to let your inner knowing walk alongside the insanity of the world and create survival tools to trust what you know and survive the gaslighting and discrimination that seeks to burn down your house.”
― P. Carl, Becoming a Man: The Story of a Transition

“The first time he went crazy was at a girls' slumber party at Sandy Biondo's house in the third grade. It was his inaugural overnight in a crowded sea of Barbie sleeping bags. Giggling and baking cupcakes, doing each other's makeup in the bathroom upstairs, and staying up until 3:00 A.M. As she lay in his plain, light blue sleeping bag, his heart began to race uncontrollably. She felt the racing pulse in her neck, something she would do a thousand more times in her fifty years of crippling anxiety. She had never felt his heart beat so hard. His stomach began to churn and she ran into the bathroom to vomit. Her first panic attack and his first attempt to escape. Her last slumber party.”
― P. Carl, Becoming a Man: The Story of a Transition

“His bridge partner of ten years arrives and brings him a pamphlet on holistic approaches to treating cancer. Has he met my dad —Jimmy Dean sausage's biggest buyer? The bridge partner asks me how my kids are doing. He thinks I'm my brother Christian. I tell him my daughter is becoming an accomplished hair stylist and colorist, which my niece is. Two more bridge players come up and ask to pray over Dad. I start to imagine a Christian rock group named the Fundamentalist Bridge Players. Then his most foul-mouthed friend, who he has played golf with for years, stops by. He’s been born again since his wife died a year ago. He tells my dad, "We have to get you right with God," and forces us all to hold hands and pray over my dad around his hospital bed. Another friend comes and brings him Ensure. My dad has said a thousand times that he can't eat, but he is knocking down those Ensures. This guy asks me, "Is your sister Polly coming?" "We are coming in shifts," I say.”
― P. Carl, Becoming a Man: The Story of a Transition

“His bridge partner of ten years arrives and brings him a pamphlet on holistic approaches to treating cancer. Has he met my dad —Jimmy Dean sausage's biggest buyer? The bridge partner asks me how my kids are doing. He thinks I'm my brother Christian. I tell him my daughter is becoming an accomplished hair stylist and colorist, which my niece is. Two more bridge players come up and ask to pray over Dad. I start to imagine a Christian rock group named the Fundamentalist Bridge Play-ers. Then his most foul-mouthed friend, who he has played golf with for years, stops by. He’s been born again since his wife died a year ago. He tells my dad, "We have to get you right with God," and forces us all to hold hands and pray over my dad around his hospital bed. Another friend comes and brings him Ensure. My dad has said a thousand times that he can't eat, but he is knocking down those Ensures. This guy asks me, "Is your sister Polly coming?" "We are coming in shifts," I say.”
― P. Carl, Becoming a Man: The Story of a Transition

“In an interview I did with the incredible drag performer Taylor Mac, he describes his dazzling stage manifestation this way,
"On stage the drag isn't a costume, but something I'm exposing about myself; it's what I look like on the inside." Drag is how he makes his invisible self visible.

I am interested in this idea of an invisible self. I have always said that I walked around invisible for fifty years and that now what could not be seen on the inside is finally alive on the outside. Yes, the outside is a kind of costume but it reflects an inner knowing.”
― P. Carl, Becoming a Man: The Story of a Transition

“Like a man, I am oblivious to the stakes of the diagnosis and to Lynette's rage taking on new proportions. I don't think I would have responded any differently pretransition. I didn't feel like a woman then. In the rare moments I have thought about my female anatomy, it's only to consider how to make it disappear. I yearned for my mother's breast cancer to be the genetic kind so I could have a preventive double mastectomy, and was disappointed when she called me gleefully to tell me it wasn't. I don't anticipate Lynette's rage coming at me, and I make a terrible joke: "Maybe the doctor would do a twofer," I say as we leave the surgeon's office. I would love to get rid of the body parts she is clinging to. I don't have a clue what it feels like to inhabit her body even though in a biology classroom way our bodies still have plenty in common. Binaries mean everything and nothing in these moments. The binary of what remains of our shared women's anatomy still does not allow me to inhabit what Lynette feels like as a woman losing her uterus. The binary that makes me a man in this situation brings a truth home to Lynette's body that we thought we had faced but hadn't.”
― P. Carl, Becoming a Man: The Story of a Transition