I tried to work that angle, and then I couldn’t anymore.” Mac thinks that now, living as a queer man, he is actually more comfortable with his boy-band-loving femme side, as he no longer has to maintain a forced masculine posture in order to pass.
I tried for a long time not to transition and thought I could live comfortably as this gender-neutral person who didn’t need to change their body. “I felt less and less attached to my body and unable to be called ‘she’ or be seen as a girl or even a boyish woman. But I definitely didn’t feel like a girl.” Mac decided to transition genders about five years ago. But at the same time, I was really into boy bands. “Growing up, something separated me from my female friends,” Mac says. Part of being young and queer is you don’t need to put yourself into boxes.” It’s juvenile to have a fear of biological woman parts and this idea that they make the gender of a person. “They’re masculine and often very attractive. “What I like about transmen is the same thing I like in other men,” says 26-year-old law student Ben Riskin, who has gotten together with a few. Williamsburg’s Metropolitan, in particular, counts many pool-playing transguys among its clientele, and they’re not unheard of on gay hookup sites like Manhunt. But those who identify as gay men are becoming increasingly evident in New York, especially in the Brooklyn bars where they’re helping raise the already high mustache quotient. Transmen have always been out there, and many prefer women. “It’s a very personal project,” Mac says. Mac is the founder and editor of the quarterly ’zine Original Plumbing-he got the title from a term transmen employ to refer to their anatomy in Craigslist personals. They don’t have to be gay, but they can be queeny. I was drawn to the community of gay men, and that’s how I embody myself.” And although he’s dated women, “I’m attracted to guys who have a bit of flair to them. “When I was a woman or girl or whatever,” Mac says, “I very much identified as a fag. He’s an exemplar for a new generation less concerned with gender boundaries. And yet Mac also identifies as a “queer guy,” which means he often finds himself attracted to, and dating, gay men.
Mac doesn’t really see himself as a guy, but as a “transman,” someone who started out female and then shifted to the masculine side of the gender spectrum. He has no desire for any below-the-belt surgery it’s not necessary for him or anyone he dates. Every ten to fourteen days, Mac’s roommate gives him a shot of prescribed testosterone, or “T,” as it’s known in FTM (female-to-male transsexual) parlance. Underneath it are two large pink scars, like half-moons, from his double mastectomy. A large chest tattoo peeks out from his low-cut tank top: It reads identity. His black hair is short on the sides with an unruly mass of curls on top. His wispy boyish mustache and baby face belie his 30 years. Sipping coffee at Williamsburg’s Variety café, Amos Mac looks like a typical hipster gay guy.