I’ve been thinking a lot about the pressure to be “man enough”. Even writing the phrase feels exhausting. What does it even mean to be man enough? And man enough for what?
I pulled myself apart for not being man enough; for being gay, for being trans, for having interests that aren’t typically viewed as masculine. All because society said that if I was going to be a man I had to tread extra carefully because I wasn’t born into the male world. Maybe I don’t want to be man enough. Maybe I just want to be the man that I am.
Maybe, instead of asking ourselves if we are man enough, we should ask ourselves more important questions: Are we kind enough? Are we generous enough? Are we honest enough? Do we love ourselves and each other enough?
I set out to explore my relationship to queer masculinity, photographing my body in nature as a way to show queerness as a natural state of being. I inhabited these spaces, focusing on my internal experience and how I demonstrate this to the outside world.
