Saeed Jones for the "Everyman"

I recently read an article about a writer named Saeed Jones, a queer person of color who focuses on his struggle with masculinity as a queer man and how he has experienced masculinity through his own experience and from others. In this interview, he discusses how he isn’t entirely sure what “acting like a man” is supposed to look like, and how his “queer masculinity” differs from hegemonic masculinity where men are stereotyped as violent and show a lack of empathy. He touches on the topic of internalized homophobia, and how his desire to acclimate to traditional masculine norms, he encounters men who don’t love themselves and demonstrate various forms of masculinity. He talks about how the women in his life were the biggest influence on his masculinity, he feels that he is more “effeminate” than most heterosexual men and this is because of his close relationship between his mother and his grandmother. With Jones being a black, queer man, society attempts to put certain pressures and stereotypes on his person and there is this inherent threat that is constant to black men in this country not only in terms of physical violence towards them, but continuous objectification of their bodies. He explains that his memoir We Fight for Our Lives, the use of “we” and “our” is pointed and encompasses the idea of the "everyman," specifically black men trying to grapple with the threat to their livelihood while exploring what it means to be a man in America.

https://www.thenation.com/article/saeed-jones-how-we-fight-for-our-lives-interview/