Baby Daddy: How to Fracture, Collect, & Rebuild - A Memoir in Essays

Date of Award

Winter 2023

Project Type

Thesis

Program or Major

Creative writing

Degree Name

Master of Fine Arts

First Advisor

Jaed Coffin

Second Advisor

Cristy Beemer

Third Advisor

David Blair

Abstract

Seven years prior to writing, I received blessings from Cardinal O'Malley to attend Catholic seminary directly out of high school, set on becoming a priest - one year later, I left the Church. Now I'm on the Production Board of the largest gay leather event weekend in New England. I lived for multiple years as three different people: the student activist, the nightclub-dancer-turned-escort, and the gay leather scene ingenue. Mason, Jamie, Icarus. The first name given and retained, but two others built from my own rib with what remained after everything else felt taken. What happens when a devoutly Catholic young gay man, trying desperately to be himself, falls by force to a man he believed understood him? In my case: a fracturing. Through Baby Daddy: How to Fracture, Collect, & Rebuild - a memoir through eighteen sequential narrative essays over five sections - the telling of my finding community in the gay leather and nightlife subculture after leaving the Catholic faith following sexual and religious trauma presents how shard by shard, we can learn to rebuild. Focusing predominantly on the process of rebuilding, the memoir uncovers what happens after the fall. In recounting the creation and detangling of the tripartite identity I inhabited through my late teens and early twenties, Baby Daddy shares an unflinching, current narrative through queer nightlife subcultures, religious reckoning, sex work, sexual self-expression, and desire for a queer-understanding community - experiences often relegated to assumption or prejudice. Baby Daddy tells my six-year journey of self-rediscovery through embracing the subversive, questioning power, and striving for authenticity no matter the cost. Throughout, the memoir's eighteen essays navigate primary thematic tensions between personal understandings of identity and perceived expectations of behavior. Entwined within, Baby Daddy emphasizes themes of attempting to define home and searching for a sense of belonging, facing isolation both physical and emotional, learning to stand for yourself after trauma and revictimization, and the joyful relief in authentic self-expression with those who understand and fully accept you. By weaving time and perspective, Baby Daddy unveils a rebuilding through denial of holy communion by the family priest, sexual encounters in a darkroom of a Berlin nightclub, performing in a liturgical Christmas choir, meeting the leathermen who became my mentors and guides, skinny dipping in relief of finally leaving an abusive partner, and working behind-the-scenes at New England's preeminent gay leather event weekend. Recent and truthful narratives outside our American cultural norm are desired and necessary, where audiences can empathize with experiences likely far different than their own but recognizable in the ache for belonging and self-understanding. In openly bearing witness to my rebuilding after trauma while rediscovering agency over my body and identity through sexual self-expression, activism, and finding an unlikely community, Baby Daddy operates as an opening for others to begin processes of self-acceptance in that your past does not define your future. Baby Daddy is an exploration of essay-as-story, picking at the vertices of form, function, voice, pace, and presentation. Underlying is an ethos to employ the functionality of prose and the emotionality of poetry, wherever that intersection may lie. Resulting are a number of more traditional narrative-prose essays - including Reasonable, The Congregation Part I, and Baby Daddy Part II - operating in memoir-as-short-story. Fragmentation and pastiche are heavily employed in essays such as Raise Your Hand, Balls Deep, and Learning to Breathe Again to encapsulate memory and the unsteadiness of reconciling with one's past. Further nontraditional forms present themselves through the spacing and voice in Punch, For the Men Who Pay Our Rent, Idle Hands, and Calling for Iron, exploring the boundary between the paragraph and the stanza, leaning into the emotionality inherent in a text's visualization on the page. Baby Daddy: How to Fracture, Collect, - Rebuild - A Memoir in Essays is a reckoning and reconciling of personal truths, community history, forgiveness, and learning to move forward.

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