I’ve been passing as male for six years, and I still have no idea how to do the Slappy Man-Hug.
This only recently became a problem. With the increasingly queer rhythms of my daily life, I’ve been spared this form of male interaction for most of my transition. The species of “straight men who want to hug me” nears extinction in my wild, where I move between queer film festivals, drag shows, poetry readings at leather bars, and gay picnics with gay friends.
But now, I’ve started volunteering with a program that sends volunteers on runs with people in rehab. Excuse me—that sends them on jogs, I should say, because when I told my best friend from when I lived in a recovery house that I was doing this, she responded by saying “going on a run means relapsing.” I clarified I was not volunteering with an organization that picks people up from rehab to go do a bit of heroin together.
Instead, we all wear our matching tank tops (precious) and huff and puff down the bike path near my apartment, and when we have enough oxygen, we talk. The guys are surprised to learn I have 9.5 years sober, probably because I’m only 33 to begin with, but also because the Trans Fountain of Youth makes me look even younger. My time surprises me, too, because the decade has snuck up on me, a sober life I didn’t plan when I was in their shoes looking to dry out and get back to my bottle. I don’t feel like a fountain of wisdom, but not drinking generally feels normal to me now, which is as free as someone like me can hope to get. Sometimes the men ask me how I’ve done it, what my life looks like now without booze, what my rehab was like, when things got better for me, if they ever did. (They did.) As we chat, I feel useful and friendly and it isn’t about gender, it’s about getting our heart rates up and connecting, and in the morning air and the presence of these newcomers I don’t even have the social anxiety that’s been stifling me at every group function since the pandemic.
Except for the moment of my arrival at their rehab. Now that I’ve gone on three of these jogs, I’m starting to know these guys—so now, when they see me, this parade of tatted-up, newly sober straight men come at me with the Slappy Man-Hug.
And I freeze.
Time after time; slap after slap.
I want to connect with these men. I want to be a person in long-term recovery who they can talk to and confide in. But whenever they come towards me, with that particularly heterosexual gait and arms spread wider than when they approach women, my mind goes blank and my body freezes and I feel like a robot in a human suit who forgot to read the chapter of the textbook explaining how to have Man Friends.
Our bodies bumble against each other: they’ll offer a hand, which I shake, but then they pull me in and slap me on the back, and my loose arm has nowhere to go, and I logically understand that if there’s one rule about Slappy Man-Hugs it’s that you shouldn’t let your tummies touch but my body still instinctively steps toward them (like how normal people hug!! by making physical contact!!!), and I end up a stew of panic and elbows. Occasionally I can make up for my awkwardness by hitting them extra hard on the back—hitting each other makes the hug a more butch affair—but I’m only capable of this if I can successfully get my arm around their shoulder before it’s time for the hug to be over, a small and precious window of time in the case of the Slappy Man-Hug.
Here comes Andile, about to hit thirty days sober, who on our first run asked me what he should be doing to set himself up for time like I have.
Here comes Connor, who could barely make it to the start of the path his first time jogging, but now runs the whole way step for step with me, almost five miles.
Here comes Josué, who just graduated from the rehab into transitional housing so we all shout with glee when he comes back to volunteer, who I thought was a volunteer to begin with because of his big genuine smile, his ever-present joy.
Invariably, the men don’t look at me as they pull away. Like maybe they did something they weren’t supposed to do. Like maybe there’s a followup rule, that if you do let your tummies touch, or your slaps were too similar to pats or—dare you admit it—caresses, you can erase the event from the annals of history by not making eye contact for the rest of the day.
I want to be here for these men, to greet them with joy. They don’t know I’m trans. There’s no reason, in their minds, I should be incapable of male hugging. Their bids for connection are genuine, even if they come in a language my body doesn’t speak.
The ironic consequence of my ineptitude: whenever someone greets me, I’m pretty sure I look like an asshole. Like I am uncomfortable with masculine intimacy. Like even getting sober has not made me okay with hugging another dude.
Me, the gay trans guy.
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Straight men are a mystery to me, but my friendships with women have changed very little since I transitioned. Long, deep conversations have always been my favorite friendship activity. I joke (but it’s not a joke) that I have two available topics: work and dating. Though to be fair, because I’m a generative artist, every single other thing I’m passionate about, like restorative justice or housing insecurity or recovery or gender transition or kinky sex, has been subsumed under my “work” umbrella. The long talks I have with female friends feel the same as they always have—if anything, there’s even less sexual tension now, because testosterone bumped me from “bisexual who prefers men” to solidly gay. When a call comes in from my friend Amy, I know it’s not an emergency—it’s that she just received a very weird email from her ex, with whom she’s decided to work with on a project, and she wants to vent about it. Our friendship, same as it ever was.
My friendships with queer men, on the contrary, have changed dramatically. Usually, their penis is involved. Sometimes that’s because I’m doing interesting things to it: I’ve had very uncomplicated, delightful friendships grow out of random sexual encounters with gay and bisexual men, something I never experienced in heterosexual dating. Whenever I check availability to find a time to hang with my friend Jake, who is the switchiest and most bisexual person on the face of this planet, we then also have to decide if we’re having sex, doing an impact scene, having a threesome, going to see a movie, making something from his Star Wars cookbook, going bowling, or some combination of the above.
But even with my gay male friends who I don’t have sex with, our friendship involves sex tangentially. My friend Ben is strictly a bottom, like me, so there’s never been any question of us connecting sexually. But we have gone to cruising spots together, in the shade behind the hill at Boy Beach in Provincetown, occasionally exchanging sexual favors with strangers while the other hovered politely a few feet away. We’ve traded hellos at Folsom Street Fair, which I spent most of being led around by my primary partner on a leash and collar.
I tell Daniela, one of the other jogging volunteers who is rapidly becoming my friend, about the Slappy Man-Hug challenge I’m facing with the guys. When I tell her these hugs are unique to straight men hugging men, she asks, “How do gay men hug?” Daniela’s not in recovery herself, but she shows up for these runs at the rehab every week and gives encouragement. I’ve made enough references to making trans art while jogging that I’m pretty sure she knows I’m trans; if not, today’s exchange makes it crystal clear.
“Gay men hug the same as women,” I respond. “Two arms, it’s okay if your bodies touch.”
Then, a moment later I add: “Well, depending on the bar, they might do more than that.”
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Since transitioning, I have made exactly zero new straight male friends. Trans memoirists before me have chronicled the strangeness of passing in the cis straight world; but I find myself out of step with these spaces, not purposefully avoiding them but simply not happening upon them. It’s not that I literally never see straight men—they show themselves occasionally at my boxing gym, or at networking mixers for the non-queer film festivals. I am happily other in these spaces: either I am at the gym for my overall well-being rather than to be one of the cut-up dudes who can fire off endless rounds, or I am showing my gay trans movies. Maybe I would be more concerned about my outsider status if I wanted to get in the ring; as it is, I have no reason to assume the cut-up guys of the gym don’t pick me as their partner because of my queer masculinity, when it’s far more likely related to my burpees looking more like the inflatable tube man than an athletic event. None of the straight men I’ve met in these spaces have actually become friends.
Straight men are generally more standoffish with me than I remember them being before. They make less eye contact, they touch less, they smile less. Do I not know how to read their friendship cues? Maybe straight men befriend other men differently from how they befriend women: no more touch of the arm that they swear is innocent, no more questions they feel entitled to ask or basic facts they appoint themselves to explain. Maybe I should learn to read a curt nod as a sign of camaraderie from men now, replacing whatever a straight man’s sly smile was supposed to convey before.
Or are they more standoffish because they can tell I’m gay? Maybe straight men want to keep me at a distance. Maybe there is a reality to the coldness I read from them, a hostility they throw my way unconsciously. Most of the gay men I know are friends with other gay men, so I’m not sure how gay/straight male friendships function, or if they really exist. My partner (a cis gay man) did have a close straight male friend, but they went barhopping and ended up trading blow jobs, so that doesn’t really count anymore.
I decide to ask Ben about the Slappy Man-Hug. I’m sleeping on an air mattress in his living room in the Castro tonight, a stopover on my way back to Los Angeles from a trans camping retreat in the mountains of Northern California. “Do you think straight men hug you differently because they know you’re gay? Like more like they hug women?”
“Definitely not,” he says right away, though it takes him a moment to figure out why. “If anything, the hug would be even more slappy and ridiculous—because they want to push away any potential for intimacy.”
As we talk more, Ben adds: “A straight man would definitely not hug a gay man the way he would hug a woman.”
Ben doesn’t say anything about violence, or straight male suspicions. But there’s something in his tone that reminds me of the gay male history I don’t share: the experience of being the gay boy in the locker room, stuck in shared space with straight boys whose masculinities are all too easily threatened. The adult gay and straight men in my world are grown from boyhoods shared and deeply not shared. As an out gay adult, I have never been in a group of straight men who assumed I was one of them. I enter the dynamic of masculine friendship laterally, from a childhood altogether different. I did not grow up with the fear that my desire for a man would be met with his violence; I grew up with the fear that his desire for me would take away my personhood.
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I do still have a few straight male friends from before my transition. These men don’t hug me in any particular way: their hugs are what I see as “normal,” two arms wrapping around another person and giving a brief squeeze. But I wonder if they would hug me differently if there wasn’t some other version of me lurking somewhere in their subconscious memory, that excuses them from the showy bravado of the slaps.
I love asking these men for advice on masculinity. This is the sweet submissive in me, the happy bottom who likes being shown things and feeling small and attentive. In the height of the pandemic, one such friend made an elaborate training video to teach me how to shave.
Maybe I need an in-person instructor to teach me the ways of the Slappy Man-Hug. I need someone to practice hugging. Do I know straight men in Los Angeles? Can I ask some random dude at my boxing gym to help me out? But, more importantly: Would a straight man even be able to teach me the hug if I asked? Men know they’re shaving; I don’t know whether they know how differently they hug men and women. It’s unconscious, I think, who they feel safe enough to touch. Who they feel empowered to touch. Who they want to touch.
I don’t miss the way straight men hug women. I don’t miss the expectation of intimacy, the touch-first-and-ask-later mentality that is indoctrinated in too many men. But I knew the script, at least, for those interactions, in a way I don’t have a script for the Slappy Man-Hug. I just want to accept the bid for connection, from these men in rehab who got sober more recently than I picked up my last PrEP prescription.
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I do know one straight man in Los Angeles who might entertain my questions. I first met Jamie during my nonbinary phase, post-they/them but pre-testosterone. Social transition didn’t change any of my friendships, except with people who were irritated by having to refer to me as they/them (spoiler alert: those friendships were strained). I continued to sleep with straight men, who knew I was nonbinary but were either flexible in their sexuality or able to pretend I was a woman. No one, back then, had a visceral man-to-man response to being in physical proximity to me.
It’s not like Jamie has ever been my best friend: he was (and is) the partner of my friend from grad school, a friend who identifies as nonbinary and uses she/they, so Jamie’s straightness should come with an asterisk. He’s a climate activist and a politician, a small skinny guy who never tries to make himself seem better than he is, who knows his words will be powerful enough without pumping himself up.
I admire how safe Jamie seems to feel in this world. I think this is one of the core reasons we’ve never been closer: I am uptight, afraid, always struggling to feel at ease. I am slow to take a risk. Maybe this is a gendered difference, born of my discomfort in my body and the culture as a queer trans person; maybe I am just uptight, and he is not.
We camped together at my first Burning Man—which was his tenth or so—and explored the vast, spacelike expanse of Deep Playa late into the night. I was afraid—I was on edge about being in recovery at Burning Man, when everyone I knew in this alien landscape was on some kind of substance. I made my exit plans before I even arrived; Jamie put out a call for sober rangers who got on Zoom with me before camp, and I spent my first day finding the twelve-step camps. On the night of our big outing, when everyone at camp roamed the chaotic art desert together, I didn’t want to go anywhere I could possibly get lost—but our group wanted to board an art car, this massive vehicle blasting EDM.
“Where’s it going?” I asked.
“Don’t know!” Jamie responded. “You in?”
I crossed my arms, braced against the wind, neon lights cutting up the darkness as far as my eye could see. I needed to be tethered to a safe place, to my stuffed hippo in my tent in case I got triggered; I didn’t want to go somewhere unknown.
“We’re getting on,” he said, the group having already clambered onto the vehicle. “You can go back to camp if you want.”
I didn’t want to go home. I wanted to feel as safe as they did, to be open and free and not afraid of where I would end up. But I didn’t feel any of those things.
So I went back to camp, tucked into my tent with my stuffed hippo in my arms, and I cried.
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Recently, Jamie asked our Burning Man camp chat if anyone wanted to join a book club with him. I am very quiet in the chat, having not returned to Burning Man since my first adventure in 2022, more for financial reasons than lack of interest. Jamie was reading Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow, a massive meta-historical text that had been on my list for years but I knew I wouldn’t get to on my own. I end my tenure as a chat lurker to say I’d like to join, and my partner takes me to Barnes & Noble to pick up a copy of the book the next day.
As it turns out, everyone who shows up to our first meeting is a man—and it seems, from our small talk before the discussion, a straight man.
I won’t lie and say I’m not a little delighted by this turn of events. I’ve been in very few men-only spaces that weren’t gay bars, fuck parties, or prisons (where you’re not allowed to hug at all). To accidentally be part of a men’s group is only sweetened by the fact that it’s a book club, something I usually associate with wine, chocolates, and my mother.
Now there are more men that I can scout as potential teachers of the Slappy Man-Hug: there’s Jamie, sure, but also Derek, who is covered in tattoos and has a PhD in something to do with this book (anthropology maybe?), and Tim, another climate activist. Our conversation is easy: we’re all compelled enough by the book’s thesis, and when we disagree with each other, it sends a wave of delight through the room, a playful competition engaged.
We decide to read a second book together—we are really a team now, ready to eat fresh figs and dive deep into discussion again. No one has named that we’re all men in this club, but I’ll tell Ben with a devious grin that I’ve joined a Men’s Book Club. “What are you reading next?” he’ll ask, and when I say we’re reading The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin, he’ll make the kind of face that only a sassy bottom can make before he replies: “Very manly.”
As we’re leaving book club, I hug Jamie—a regular hug, moved into naturally by both of us together. Maybe because he remembers me from before testosterone? Or, maybe Jamie gives normal hugs. He is straight with an asterisk, after all. He may not be petrified of his tummy touching another man’s tummy. Or, another theory, maybe this book club doesn’t go as hard as rehab: there are certainly fewer face tattoos, fewer long goatees.
I don’t hug the others. We’ve just met.
But I do spy, hopefully not creepily, as the others hug Jamie goodbye: Derek, skipping the handshake but still slapping Jamie’s back a few times during a short squeeze; and then Tim, with only the one arm over Jamie’s shoulders, more bumping their hips together with adornment than really embracing.
I want to ask them for hugging practice, but there is no normal way to do that, and we have science fiction to read.
This is book club, not Slappy Man-Hug tutorial club.
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But don’t forget—another day with Jamie—when he, his partner, and I went camping in December on the California central coast, near the beach, as everything was starting to open up from COVID, and I was only beginning to pass as a man.
It was too cold for swimming, we decided, but we could at least walk along an estuary together. We could look out over the rippling waves, hear the crashing of the ocean.
But sometimes, the sea has other plans—sometimes, the sun is setting over the Pacific, and it is lighting a strip on fire, and it doesn’t matter how cold it is, it doesn’t matter if you aren’t wearing a swimsuit, it doesn’t matter that you don’t have a towel. Sometimes, the only thing that matters, Jamie knew and now I knew, is that you run, that you chase that banner of reflected sunset, that you strip off your shirt and your pants and your everything and you become a boy in his boxers running out to sea, running out to the lingering sunshine.
I had swam shirtless so few times in my still-early transition, but when he bounded out, I couldn’t help it—I stripped off my clothes, scars and everything free, and I followed, and I wasn’t afraid, I kept running until I was deep enough to plunge my head under the ocean, and it was too cold, it was too cold, it was so cold that it didn’t matter how cold it was, nothing mattered except that I had plunged my whole being under that golden stripe, and I came up for air and Jamie was shouting in joy and cold-pain a few feet from me, drenched and full all at once of hope and delight and ache, and we were boys, playing in our boxers in the sea, we were boys under the setting sun.
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Maybe the Slappy Man-Hug can’t be taught. Maybe I will learn by doing. Maybe I’m too in my head. Maybe I need to stop thinking about whether I actually want to be perpetuating these weird gender norms, or where they come from, or whether these super-straight hugs mean these men don’t even realize I’m gay much less trans, or whether meeting these huggers where they are in all their slappiness is the path toward more vulnerable masculine intimacies. Maybe these morning hugs don’t have to be about all that gender theory shit all the time.
MAYBE I JUST HAVE TO GET HYPED!!!!!
I am determined to show up for these guys. I don’t take for granted that they already recognize me, four weeks into volunteering, and they are all smiles and hugs whenever I show up. I am here to be of service, and for that purpose at least, I want to participate in the mode of male friendship being offered to me. I will not let my ineptitude signal a fear of male hugging any longer; I will blend into this social dynamic for once, if only for the purpose of creating a pathway to how each of us, with ten years clean or ten days, just keeps trying to be a better man today than he was yesterday. Here, this gendered connection is a means to an end, not passing for the sake of passing but for the sake of addict mutual aid. I need to be ready!
Let’s review the rules of the Slappy Man-Hug, as I understand them:
- Your bodies should touch as little as possible.
- If you must make contact, try to make sure it’s a hard part of you—your shoulder, or your rib, or your hipbone, bonking toughly against the other guy’s hipbone. Try not to let your bellies touch; try not to let anything press against anything else.
- The purpose of this hug is VIOLENCE. You are not delicately placing a hand on the other man’s back. You are SLAPPING it.
I think I can handle this.
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Tuesday morning. Ready to run. It’s 8am but it’s already hot in Los Angeles; today will be a day for our matching tank tops to drench with sweat, for us to attempt chatter around our huffing and puffing. I enter the rehab, ready.
Here comes Andile—he’s passed his thirty days, he’s starting with a handshake first, and I do it! I know the handshake was just the preface! I move with him, my shoulder approaching his shoulder, not crushing our hands between our tummies because I’ve accidentally gone for a full hug, but just shoving my shoulder right into his, swinging my spare hand around to give his back a few appreciative slaps. I even manage a, “Hey, man!” without my voice getting too high.
Next comes Connor—sweet Connor, there’s no handshake offering here, he comes at me with his two arms out, but I am ready, I know that this doesn’t mean we should actually press our bodies together (the tummies will not touch!!), I make a big circle with my arms and he fits inside it and we both pat each other’s backs without really touching.
Perfection.
The last test—Josué. Here he comes, and we’re all too excited because he’s back for a second week in a row after graduating, and I am ready, I am blending, it’s like I’ve been doing this my whole life in locker rooms and sports fields and wherever the hell else men go, and Josué says hello and he opens his arms and—
My hand knocks into his hand, right in the middle of the air.
Maybe I could still save it, but then I do the unthinkable: in all the kerfuffle of the awkward arm placements, I let our tummies touch.
He seems to survive the encounter—he gives me an extra smack on the shoulder, and doesn’t look at me as he goes to the next person.
Alas. Progress, not perfection, as we say in our program. Maybe the same is true of the Slappy Man-Hug.
Or maybe next week, I’ll nail it.
