Essays

“Football in the time of covid,” published by Hoxie Gorge Review, Fall 2020

“I usually watch Bills games at the bar. It’s the only time I like going to places like Buffalo Wild Wings, where I can camp out on a stool at the end and watch the game while eating overpriced, lukewarm appetizers and drinking shitty domestics. I love sitting there, listening to the people around me, cheering and booing as their respective teams play on competing TVs. I love the sensory overload of it all, the way I can start to tune it all out and focus, really focus, kind of like I do when I’m writing at coffee shops. The energy is contagious. Invariably, there’s a middle-aged white guy who sits next to me and gets chatty, but as long as he’s not a Patriots fan and we steer-clear of politics, we usually get along okay. He always gives me shit about the Bills; I always say, “this year’s our year,” even though it never is.

I was raised by half-assed Presbyterians and haven’t been to church in over 15 years. Football is my one and only Sunday ritual.”

“How Learning to dress myself helped me understand my trans identity,” PUBLISHED BY CATAPULT, SEPTEMBER 26, 2019

“I remember, sometimes, the feeling I used to get when I’d stand off to the side and look longingly at the men’s side of the store. The longing to wear those jeans or that T-shirt, to wear a shirt and tie for a special event instead of a dress, to just run a comb through my hair instead of standing in the bathroom for what felt like hours while my mom used the curling iron and blow dryer and hair spray.”

“Fifteen things I’ve noticed while Trying to walk 10,000 steps per day: Muncie, indiana Edition,” published by Hobart, may 14, 2019.

“3. On a snowy Friday night in January, on my walk to play euchre with friends: an undergrad standing in the snow, dressed in a pair of gym shorts, snow boots, and a black North Face, holding a PBR tall boy in one hand and a leash in the other, connecting him to a tiny, fluffy white dog, nearly hidden in snow up to its belly.”

“On the Fifth Anniversary of My First Shot of Testosterone,” Published by Redivider, Spring 2017.

“Before I started testosterone, the thought of these changes freaked me out. I was simultaneously thrilled at the prospect and terrified of how things might change. But when they happened, when my body actually began to change, I was far less ambivalent. Once my family saw me with a beard for the first time and I realized everything would be okay, I stopped worrying completely. I’d been right.”

“On Visibility,” published by waccamaw, Spring 2017.

“If you had asked me, when I first came out as transgender, if I wanted to be seen, I would have said yes. I wanted people to really see me—the way I saw myself: as male. But, in truth, what I really wanted was to be so ordinary that I completely blended into a crowd of men. I wanted a beard, a deep voice, a flat chest, a driver’s license and birth certificate and passport that declared me male. I wanted to be invisible.”

“What Real Men Do,” published by The Normal School, Fall 2016

When he buys his first home, just after turning 28, he tells himself he’ll do it all: pull up the carpets and install new flooring and strip wallpaper and paint the walls and maybe even build a raised-bed vegetable garden in the backyard, where he can grow tomatoes and cucumbers and zucchini. He buys a house that needs a lot of work—cosmetic work, though, nothing in terms of the structure or plumbing or electrical, at least not that he can see—because he wants to do it all. He grew up in a house where his father did these things—built decks and front porches, tore down walls and built additions—but he never helped, never learned, and now he wants to prove that he can. He wants to prove it to everyone else, of course, but he mostly wants to prove it to himself.

“Just a Guy at the Bar,” published by Slate, January 18, 2016

“Until I was 24, my slim knowledge of football came from a few places: bits and pieces of Jim Kelly–era Buffalo Bills games I’d watched as a kid, the movie Remember the Titans, the TV show Friday Night Lights, and the handful of games I’d been forced to attend (and refused to pay more attention to than absolutely necessary) in high school as a member of my school’s pep band. But a few things changed in my mid-20s. I moved from Western New York, where I’d lived for my entire life, to Ohio; soon I started watching Bills games while drinking Labatts as a way to combat my homesickness. Then I started teaching at Ohio State and interacting regularly with undergraduates who expressed so much enthusiasm for football that I couldn’t help but be caught up in it. Then, finally, at the age of 24, I came out as transgender and started trying to figure out how to live openly as a man.”