UPCOMING

Welcome to CRY WITH YOU aka the UNCLES Project (u not crying leaves everyone suffering)

This space was created as a “co-crying” space.

If you need a space to just cry, here it is. If you want comfort, or want to share the story over all you’re grieving, just ask, because you’ve come to the right spot.

Come and Cry. Or just be.

Don’t you think our society doesn’t let us grieve enough?

Especially with everything we are holding : death, climate change, racial injustices, hate crimes, anti-queer bills, mass shootings…

When was the last time you ugly cried?

When was the last time you were comforted while crying?

When was the last time you were comforted by a masculine person who wasn’t your father, brother or lover?

Read Below if you want to know more about the “why” behind the project.

But you don’t have to.

Just come and grieve, or just come and be.

WHY?  (The Short Story)

Pandemic. The Murder of George Floyd. Mass Shootings. US Politics. 

How can we as a society deal with all this shit? We’re losing our loved ones to Covid. We’re losing. And we’re lost. Wound up SO tight that we snap, break, We’re losing our minds. 

And me? I was one of them muthafuxas who got divorced in the pandemonium.

I wanted to cry. Wail. Like we do in ritual. Purge.

But I have a harder time accessing tears now that I’m taking Testosterone.

So I think - perhaps I should cry with someone going through their own pain.

I thought to take it to 3rd street promenade, hold a placard that said 

“if you are having a hard time, I’ll cry with you”. 

But who would trust a brown masc person like me to cry with?

I thought, perhaps if I had some of my non-masc and femme friends with me, like bodyguards, perhaps someone would think I was worthy to share a human moment with. Perhaps even share do deeply that we cry together. 

Then I thought, No. 

It would be even more powerful, for ME, to be a part of a crew of us melanated masc folks of color,

ready to listen and comfort. 

Challenging people to stop putting the emotional labor on women and femmes to comfort you, carry you through, use her labor for your rites into different iterations of self. 

The Short Description - (AI helped me with this count) 

The “Cry with You” (U.N.C.L.E.S. Project: U Not Crying Leaves Everyone Suffering) is a busking initiative where masculine cis/trans people of color (MOC) offer to listen to and share in people's grief. My trans masculine friends and I noticed that we cried more before starting testosterone, highlighting both physiological changes and the emotional suppression expected in patriarchy.

Curious about emotional expression, I asked my cis male friends about their last “ugly cry” and if another man ever comforted them. Most said "no," relying on female partners for support. And many (not all) trans masc individuals, often focused on supporting women and trans femmes and challenging patriarchal norms, neglect their own emotional needs due to societal expectations of masculinity. This issue affects cis men, queer and straight, as well.

Influenced by my own gendered experiences, this project aims to provide all folks with a place to cry, and a place to be comforted by MOC. Using an installed living room with plush sofas and soft fabrics, I want to show that masc folks can comfort each other outside their romantic partnerships, and don't need to be ashamed in receiving or providing comfort.

The project addresses the societal lack of mourning spaces for men and explores the links between emotional suppression, cardiovascular disease, high suicide rates, and the desire for deeper male relationships. We aim to foster a space for comfort, healing, and resistance to societal toxicity.

The Long Story

This year I am working on a performance busking project called “Cry with You” aka the UNCLES Project (U Not Crying Leaves Everyone Suffering), where I alongside other MOC (masculine people of color) offer to listen to whatever pain/grief a person/stranger might be carrying in their hearts and offer to cry with them. 

Since I’ve been jabbing myself with .3 ml of T, what was hard, like surviving, has become easy. Passin. Helping everyone with their groceries bags and moving. Lifting or carryin boxes and bags on my body, walking up flights of stairs, never out of breath. I was already doing these things before, but now my strength is, well - ridiculous. All because of a little prick in my skin.

I realized that what was easy, like PMS crying, has disappeared. I can shut down the urge to cry in a snap. I can’t remember when the last time I cried was. Yes, as an actor I can even ugly cry on cue. But do that off stage? Yeah na. Can’t remember. Perhaps when I got drunk. But that doesn’t really count - because I don’t remember that satisfying feeling of having released. The satisfying feeling of healing. 

I was curious, so I asked a bunch of my masculine friends across the spectrum of gender & sexuality, “When was the last time you ugly cried?”. I also asked them if they were to ugly cry, if they had other masculine people in their lives who could offer them physical comfort if they were to need it. The answers I got mostly were “no”. That they felt most comfortable with their (mostly) female partners (if they ever did need to cry). However, all of them have ugly cried more recently than my trans brothers. My trans masculine siblings all told me that they cried more when they were not on T. But it is not just the T, clearly. Patriarchy is in the atmosphere and we breathe it alongside the smog in this city. 

I worry about us trans masculine bodies and souls, lost in a sea of tending to women, standing up as feminists for trans femmes and non binary folk, and in my case and others who share it - being as reliable as women because of our herstories and queerstories. Further lost in a sea of men, passing as one of them, yet feminists even without schooling. We hate what we see. 

Also - not all trans masc people are feminists, or stand up for femmes/women/trans femmes.  My very dear trans friend & artist comrade J Mase said: “Part of our duty as transmasc people is to show up for femmes/women/trans femmes, and in order to do that we must understand ourselves, our gender journeys: the way we have been consensually and non-consensually gendered by cis norms.”

What is most hard, as a queer person, is having my lived experience - that of being socialized as female - be erased. It’s odd to say, but as J Mase also said, “Even queer people have a very binary understanding of gender”. This understanding shows up when a queer person says, in jest or otherwise, things that clump or conflate my masculinity into that which has been socialized male since birth. 

My very boy-looking ass started menstruating at 11 years old. I was devastated. And yet, I cried in silence. That night, my older sister Krishani, seeing my sad face, decided to cheer me up by telling me how I was a grown-up now. To drive it home, she explained what sex was, that I indeed had 3 holes and not 2. I thought she was nuts until I found the 3rd.

4 years older to me, Krishani was wiser than most 15 year olds, probably wiser than my parents in unashamedly making sure I knew what was happening in my body, and that it was more than just “age attainment” or a cause for a Tamil rites of passage. A rites I would not fully cry at, but tear up, straight through to the end. 

My pinocchio-ass prayed hard that I would miraculously turn into an actual boy. I was 11, too young to bleed and too young to understand how prayers worked. Even with miracles, there has to be some probability of possibility. There was no reversing the clock on the blood… no matter how hard I prayed.

I tried to start dressing, walking and performing as a girl. The more I bent away from my truth, the sadder I got. But since there was no room for tears outside of the closet, the funnier I got. 

And 2 years later, when my sister dies in a tragic accident, I couldn’t cry. I teared up... 

I didn’t see my Appa cry. I figured he did, and he told me a couple years back that he did, but I didn’t see it. For many reasons that are related to the subconscious understanding of masculinity, he hid it from me. Perhaps my Amma too. His simple thoughts about displayed tears were taught to him in lessons passed on by other simple-minded, complex-living Tamil and immigrant men. 

Except for the luxury of PMS allowing first class seats to sobfests, it would mostly be 10 years later in my early 20’s that the stigma around masculine tears had no place - in the streets of Brooklyn, deuce upon deuce of Coronas, Henny, flowing through my system, drunk biking through potholed Prospect Heights, tears flowed freely for the first time, because I didn’t care… about anything. My gender, my melanin, cars, cops, death, grief, family fights over my queerness. Nothing mattered. I figured no one at an organizing meeting could say, “did I see you that other night biking near the bridge ugly crying with no helmet?”. 

Neuroscientist William H. Frey II, Ph.D said: “Crying is not only a human response to sorrow and frustration, it's also a healthy one. It is a natural way to reduce stress that, if left unchecked, can have negative physical effects on the body, including increased risk of cardiovascular disease and other stress-related disorders.”

Leo Newhouse in Harvard Health Publisihing Article wrote: From early on, boys are told that real men do not cry. When these boys grow up, they may stuff their feelings deep inside and withdraw emotionally from their loved ones, or self-medicate with alcohol or drugs, or even become suicidal. 

The suicide rate among males in 2020 was 4 times higher than the rate among females.I know that this statistic has plenty to do with community and not having enough. Another fact that I hope to write about more while in conversations with other artists is that firearms are the #1 leading cause of death by suicide. 

According to the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE) regarding trans and non binary folks: 40% of respondents have attempted suicide at some point in their life, compared to 4.6% in WHOLE of the U.S. population. Lifetime suicide attempt rates were higher for transgender men (45%) than for transgender women (40%) and non-binary respondents (39%), and crossdressers had a substantially lower rate of attempted suicide in their lifetime (15%). Lifetime suicide attempts were also higher among people of color.

Like I did in queer women/feminists spaces, I made family with my peers. As I was trying to show up better to my life, a younger Brown trans guy, a beautiful soul, saved my ass... by just being my brother. After over 15 years of knowing him, last year he, who has more compassion in his eyes than anyone I know, was 21 weeks along when he had to give birth to his baby due to complications. There was no clear reason as to why his child couldn’t survive, and trust me, my brother scoured to find at least one - one that would bring him an understanding as to why his first child died. I flew to be with him if he needed, because even though I couldn’t know the depth of his pain, or the way the medical industrial complex couldn’t show up for his decision to bear children with a bearded face, flat chest and womb, I knew that I was the closest in existence and experience to his - I was his brother. And yet it wasn’t enough either.

How do you console someone who is going through the death of their baby? If they are trans? If they are trans and had more hopes for the family he was creating, to possibly right wrongs done by his family of origin? 

I came over to his house, and held him. For 5 hours straight as he cried and I cried, and his partner cried. Tucked and curled up into me, there was no way I could fathom the enormity of his pain. And yet I might’ve known it on a different level than his partner. And on top of her own pain, she knew it differently than me. And yet we couldn’t put ours both together to come close to knowing his. Our mutual friend Alicia said, “We will never know someone’s experience, unless we have gone through it ourselves”. Which is why so often, many of us say the wrong thing to someone in mourning, or we pull back because we are afraid to say the wrong thing.

With my little brother, I didn’t say a word, but purposefully. Yes, I was grieving too. Yes over my nibling’s death, but over my little brother’s loss mostly. I remembered 15 years from that day, pre-testosterone for both of us, he told me he couldn’t “do this” anymore. At that point in my life, I just thought that suicidal thoughts were a part of everyday life for gender non-conforming people and that community and love were what kept you from attempting. I remember also somewhere around that time, I massaged his body, knowing exactly where his pain was lodged, knew how the chest-binding contorted our bodies and caused breathing problems, hardening muscles that would take a decade to unwind post top-surgery. And how even as I massaged him, I had to tell myself that it was not gay for me to offer touch and salve to my brother. And he now, a brilliant psychologist and still activist, fully free in his beautiful queerness, was not shown up for in the hospital, in this world, in the ways he shows up for so many. 

I pause here because there are people who swear they are my friends saying they are tired of trans stories. Questioning - why a trans person would want to birth a baby in that body? I pause because it’s one’s judgment that creates the confines around his or any trans person’s desire for family. If you had the chance to be around my brother, you might give yourself a chance at throwing your opinions out the window. But if you had a chance to hear his grief, you would understand more about trans people in general. Connecting with grief outside of your own neutralizes the acid of judgment.

“Thambi, how do you want people to show up for you?”

He responds, “I don’t know”.

Sometimes when you’ve only learned how to fight for others, for causes, for freedom, you’re unable to know your own needs unless they are tied to the needs of your community. That night we accidentally broke down what showing up was in a conversation he led while trying to articulate what he desired. He cobbled up words to explain a vision - that he understood that people couldn’t support him in the way that he craved, but that knowing that, he didn’t need anything more than someone to just sit with him. 

Stare at the wound of pain. Really look at it. In Silence. While sitting next to him. That’s it.

This is what I try to offer him. Until the time is right to work through more.

My friend Claudia holds an annual event called “Dearly Departed” where she invites friends and adjacent community folks to eat and remember their dearly departed. A chance to share story about the ones we are still grieving, or a space to pause and tap into our grief. Though we are genuine, Claudia and I joke about our bond being that we both love a good funeral. Funerals are the place where all of us, with our stories of deceased loved ones, the stress and depression of these 3 pandemic years, food and job insecurity, the unjust killings of Black folks, the bans on Muslims and folks crossing the border, the climate, the bigotry, anti-Asian, anti-trans and anti-women bills, mountains of microaggressions we have to traverse, Can just Wail. And no one will get in the way, and we will be comforted by the fact that ugly crying here is unquestioned and unjudged.

Our society doesn’t let us mourn enough. Instead we are taught to walk in this world like we’ve got it all put together, hiding our pain and grief.                                                                              It was a year after the March madness of 2020 that I thought about how much grief and pain people were still holding. I know I was. I was in the middle of a separation, with hopes of salvaging our relationship of 10+ years. I was shuffling from my parents house to friends’ houses to sublets, carrying bags of grief to each location and not feeling like I could unpack and unleash.

If I was hurting this bad, there must be so many folks who are suffering from loss of beloveds, from break ups and divorces, from isolation, from fear of contracting covid as an immuno-compromised person, from increasing hate-crimes, and mass shootings.

I wanted to cry and I couldn’t. And so I thought, that if others felt the need to cry but couldn’t as well, perhaps we could just allow for a space to cry together. Like WeWork, but WeCry: a co-crying space, if you will. 

I initially wanted the UNCLES project to just be me, like it is today on May 20th, (mostly because it’s a hard thing to ask - for someone to shed tears for a stranger), but then I thought it would be better to do this with some femme friends, because the average person is usually suspicious about men of color. And as a trans person, I also understand why. Men are beautiful, I love all my brothers. But I also know that many of the men I love, are also suspicious of other men. So, I figured if my femme friends were there vouching for my participation, then people might be able to let their guard down and be at ease to choose me, rather trust me - someone who is South Asian, but often racially profiled to be a Latinx or Black male - to cry with. 

As a human who had historically put myself last oftentimes, anticipates others’ needs, tries to work against the stereotypes placed on my body but being overly accommodating, I desperately want to be seen as well. And so, my final choice in “how” I wanted to go about this project was to do the opposite of remedying any potential pushback to or distrust of my body. I chose to do this, still with strength in numbers, but with other masculine “male” passing individuals, because I wanted to flip the narrative. I want to show that masculine bodies can be places of comfort and safety - not just to other people and strangers, but to ourselves. This is paramount - that this space actively works against any one member of our society to carry the burden of labor. WE already know the burden women and femmes carry by being expected to be the safe place for masculine people to unburden themselves without reciprocity. It is my desire to provide a healing space for UNCLES by UNCLES just as much as I hope that UNCLES can provide and be a healing space for others. And I want to offer this space for all of us, women, femmes & nonbinary and trans folks and men of all kinds, to sit with each other, and look at each others’ wounds as our collectives’. Letting our tears be our resistance to the toxicity of American Life.