Pleasures
What, exactly, is masculinity?
From being boys together in girlhood, to before and behind the camera.
Masc Off is our week dedicated to expressions of masculinity as a quality. Has there ever been a better time to ask the big questions? Like: What, exactly, is a man? What was masculinity, and what could it become? In this series, our contributors pull apart the tenuously constructed structure of masculinity to unearth what lies beneath the masc.
Last year, Lily and Hans, two lifelong friends, spoke about the unspoken: a collection of rift years, in high school, when their closeness dissolved.
Lily: It was all my fault.
Hans: I feel the opposite.
Lily and Hans were boys together in girlhood, swimming in big t-shirts, staging miniature rebellions in their coastal Connecticut town. Together they stole candy from CVS, skateboarded themselves bloody, and co-pined for the prettiest of the boy-boys in their class.
Then, in high school, they were girls separated by closeness. This person knows the parts of myself that I need to pretend don’t exist. There wasn’t room for reinvention in a friendship of such core reflection. Reinvention was a developmental milestone, and also a tempering for safety and acceptance. It was no one’s fault.
They finally came back together. First, in laughter and remembering. Then, in sharing a look through the queer lens on their formative bond. It was all there from the beginning.
“That any girls do emerge at the end of adolescence as masculine women is quite amazing,” Jack Halberstam states simply in the preface to Female Masculinity.
If masculinity is strength and fortitude, then the inner musculature of this conversation was sturdy enough to hold their youthful separation, even hold it up to the mirror.
These portraits are their shared reflections on reflection.
When Lily came out, Hans mouthed from across the room, I love you.
H: I should have come out then. That would have been pretty epic.
L: I remember so vividly just expecting loneliness. If I can have Hans accept me for this then that’s all that matters.
In Lily’s photographs, behind Hans, the subject, is a small suburban backyard expanding like a much wilder, vaster land. This is how I imagine the yard where they played as kids must have felt: so so big, full of joys to trouble-make, replete with disgusting natural occurrences, like cicadas and impatient mothers, an endless source for exploration and
growth.
Lily’s photography practice focuses on queering portraiture. In the years that Lily took portraits of queer bodies posed to capture experiences and emotions beyond words, beyond any material apart from the self, Hans did not expect to be a subject. And yet, once they were in front of the camera, it was clear to both of them that they were, in fact, the first subject.
Here are friends who are family, on either side of a lens.
