“You threaten to handcuff me. Man, what are you saying? You can’t handcuff me, you manacle my hands.”—Epictetus, Discourses, 1535
“Bro, no, bro, seriously, I’m telling you, bro, you can’t say that.”—Teenager, D train, New York, 2025
A row of urinals ~ Six receptacles, twelve inches apart, each arrayed with the concealment only of thick, curved porcelain edges. On a crowded day, a penis parade without an audience. Protruding manhoods, one, one, one. But something dithers in the uric air. A spy? Yes, sometimes, among the protuberances, there is an imposter, imitation meat, golden ticket to fraternity—faux-fraternity. For the straying eyes of the feline sodomite, trickling dicks are ends, not means. Under the veil of shaking a smaller veil, of dribbling off dew, the spy permits himself a prolated purview. He surveys the swords that might, on a good day, castrate him, emasculate him, liberate him. Are you this man?
***
Four teenagers on the D train ~ Crammed into three corner seats on the New York City subway: a hormone stew. “Bro, no, bro, seriously, I’m telling you!” the boy sitting across from you says to his friend. He turns to face him, so close they’re almost kissing. “Bro!” his friend fulminates in return, like an air rifle firing rapport. They look sixteen. Their faces are carved, each in its own way, though their winter jackets are fungible, all of them black, puffy, punctuated by small white striations—angular logotype, loomingly sober. Another fusillade of “bros.” You can’t decode a narrative. You can sense torrential affection, filtered through vocative prisms, keyholes of “bro”—bro-holes.
***
A haze of sand on a playground ~ Boys run wild, rumpling grass, roiling gravel, sweating happily. You are six. The weather is hot. “Come on, man,” one boy says to another. They don’t notice you, sitting backwards on the see-saw, hoping to not be noticed. In paintings, said John Berger, “men act, women appear.” On playgrounds, too.
***
Antipholus in Greece ~ “Fear me not, man. I will not break away,” Antipholus of Ephesus assures his jailer in The Comedy of Errors, Shakespeare’s play about two sets of twins, each of whom loses and then rediscovers his counterpart in a tanglement of fumbles. To man—Middle English: “To furnish with a company of men.” A company of men—a polymer. Like atoms, men form molecules. Molecules, like conjoined twins: each man secured to the other. Some researchers suppose left-handedness prefigures a twin who died in the womb. Other researchers say left-handedness is linked to gay men who prefer to bend over and take it up the rear.
***
Your mother’s womb ~ Your twin has died. Now, you float alone in umbilical ether. Before he dissolved, faded away, he held your left hand in his right one. Now, your left hand is fumbling, unemployed; your masculine facsimile has left you open, in need of completion, in want of being filled up. In the future, a few decades from now, an expectant mother weeps. Her obstetrician has just told her, after some second trimester tests, that her left-handed boy will be a hungry gay bottom. Is she weeping with happiness?
***
A middle school classroom ~ You can’t say “Hey, man.” You can’t put your arm around a friend. You can’t wear backward caps. You can’t form fraternal molecules. You have no ionic bulge. You can make solipsisms.
***
A Midtown DoubleTree ~ Three tops share you like a boat. They call each other “man.” They touch each other hardly. Their eyes are on you, the imposter, imitation man. Does your hole make the top whole? Or does he, like his penis, anthropomorphize the unfillable, the inhospitable, the radical inhabitor? Does craving masculinity force masculinity out of you and into him? Are you a eunuch by osmosis? Is this why “Hey, man” feels a bit like saying, “Hey, penis?” Is this why the word has scared you for so long? Maybe worshipping a dick feels like worshipping civilization—you can grip it, ogle it, apart from the face, apart from the personality, because it has its own cocky, primordial life, its own propagative brutalism. Maybe “Hey, man” feels a bit like saying, “Hey, civilization”—“Hey, coarse, choleric, obtrusive, delicious civilization.”
***
Two queens at a bar ~ Arriba Arriba. A silly name for a Mexican restaurant, for any restaurant, but here, in Hell’s Kitchen, the only route to perseverance is to outgay, to outcavort. The queens tell you they’re married. They look to be sexagenarians. They both call each other “girl”; they both are gaudily effeminate. Two bottoms at the bar, two bottoms in love. One drinks a passion fruit margarita; the other, a cucumber margarita. Cucumber wins the day. They eyeball every beefcake who struts through the door. They rinse the frangible from sight. Is this why the lothario secretes masculinity? Is it because he pageants the only penis in the room, desiring none for himself, levying every inch upon the other? For queens, the straight man’s draw is archetypal because it is unilateral. He wears as a laurel his phallic favor, his variegation of the topography, priming the gradient for osmosis: from you to him, from hole to hill.
***
A high school hallway in 2005 ~ Converse sneakers screak on linoleum floors. “Bro” strafes the slapdash dialogue of deepening voices. The rise of “bro” in the body politic: instantly puckish, momentarily ironic, served with early Kanye and resurrected Mariah, though not with Nickelback—Nickelback is colorless, vanilla, steeping the ears of boys in backward caps who don’t yet wear cologne or gel their hair or find solace in syncopation. But how quickly irony fades. Like eyes adjusting to a higher prescription of glasses or a bearded man at Guantanamo Bay who no longer screams at his steadfast interrogator’s suffocating sadism, “Bro” anneals into the demotic.
***
A World Wide Technology town hall in 2008 ~ President George W. Bush wears a lax gray suit and holds a mic. He’s been speaking for a while. Behind him: three rows of American workers and the company’s dystopically generic red-and-blue regalia. “I ask this partly because I’m hungry, but your thoughts on rising food prices?” queries a querist. “By the way,” George responds, “that’s a polite way of saying, ‘Hey, man, how about cutting it short?’” Laughter follows, quaintly, wholesomely. George, quipster president, canker in buddy’s clothing.
***
Coffee with the girls ~ Sunlight shines through tessellated panes. Red light. Yellow light. Bad service. Good coffee. Potted plants. East Village. Both girls tell you their boyfriends fall to caprice. Caprice is a girl’s name but a boy’s condition. Their moods change, the girls say, without them realizing something’s wrong or even changed. One of the boyfriends has started seeing a therapist. She’s advised him to journal. Journaling will jumpstart ipseity’s voice, she suggested. Journaling gives man’s taciturnity an off-ramp. Journaling coaxes his thoughts into flow and receives them like a urinal. Men live on the outside, for the pleasure of their extremities, intercourse without interlocution, dialectic without solipsism, idle filler of vessels. Exteriorities, like penises. “Man” and “bro”: shots fired between penises, the crackling electrons that bond atoms in ionic matrimony.
***
A Panchatantra issue on your pillow ~ In the children’s comic strips of Indian fables, Manu, first man, progenitor of humanity, looks like a muscular Sadhu: shirtless, black beard, hair bun, saffron dhoti, two strings of rudraksha beads. The only Manu you’ve met is an uncle. Uncle Manu: flabby, bespectacled, balding. When he hugs you, you feel the softness of his belly. Is Uncle Manu an authorial man, wandering saṃsāra? Or, is he why men in midlife scare you less? Because of the softness of their bellies, the recession of their hairlines, the surrogation of first names for “Hey, man?”
***
A Baltimore wharf ~ As G. W. Henry tells the story in 1859, a merchant named Mr. B walks by bobbing vessels. He stops at the sight of an enslaved man sitting at a stern and looking low. “Hey, man, what is the matter with you this morning?” Mr. B calls out. “Ah, massa, I’se in great trouble,” replies the man, for though he is not a free man, he is, yet, a corporal man, answerable to other men who adjoin him to the fraternal order of men who appear as men and can be hailed as “man.” Later, for African-American males, “man” becomes vocative as insignia—“a form of address carrying respect and authority” intended “to counteract the degrading effects of being addressed by whites as ‘boy,’” writes Clarence Major in Juba to Jive, his 1994 dictionary of African-American slang.
***
75 Varick Street, 4th floor ~ A journalist named Ann Friedman sits at her polished cubicle, circled by white walls, crowded views of Tribeca, photographs of stilettos and poodles. Her hair is choppy, her lipstick bright. Michelle Obama is beekeeping in the White House gardens. ISIS is taking over Mosul. Our journalist is writing an exegesis of bro culture, tracing the passage from bro as beer-chugging young dude to bro as “shorthand for the sort of privileged ignorance that thrives in groups dominated by wealthy, white, straight men.” Like “man,” bro slid from general to genial; like “man,” bro diffused popular culture after incubating in African-American patois. “For most of its existence in English, the word bro led a quiet and unassuming life,” writes Oxford English Dictionary. “For centuries, it was merely a graphic abbreviation of brother.”
Thus the baronial John Evelyn in 1637 noting in his diaries, “I accompanyd by Eldest Bro (who then quitted Oxford) into the Country.” And thus Dingbat in Saul Bellow’s 1953 The Adventures of Augie March warning, “This kid is a buddy of mine and he works for my bro.” By the end of the 20th century, bros had become buddies, buddies had become bros—hypothetica hominus, molecular man, “a conventional guy’s guy who spends a lot of time partying with other young men like himself,” as Oxford English Dictionary sees it. After losing its valence of preemptive self-satire and widening its fraternal parameters, bro was open for business. Those vanilla laddies with backward caps on their heads and Nickelback in their ears were now invited. So were all the portmanteaus that could fit inside a red Solo cup. Before long, “bro” sounded very much like “man’s” impish younger brother—wider smile, waggishly wagging tail, ribaldry at the ready. “Bro-y elements can be tough to eradicate,” Friedman reports. Her article’s title is an ode to a popular picket line: “How Do You Change a Bro-Dominated Culture?” But wouldn’t this be like changing the air? Like catching molecules in a butterfly net?
***
The Bowery ~ The bar on your block is a beehive of bros, because bros today come in 98 flavors. They are no longer only loutish or light, fratty or phobic, though you do occasionally see a Dave Matthews type, plaid shirt over white T-shirt, walking around the East Village, studying at NYU, a fading breed, like a gonzo journalist or member of the British royal family. Oxford English submits that the latter-day bro becomes a bro by saying “bro.” “A bro in isolation is barely a bro at all,” writes our Ann Friedman. She agrees with you on this: a bro must depose himself. You do her one better. A bro, whichever the flavor, must resonate with kin. He must buoyantly butt extremity against extremity—fist against fist, surface against surface, assertion against assertion—whether he forages one from the zeitgeist and thrusts it before his soliloquy or squeezes one from the shoulder of a fella in the flesh. Between bros, there are no questions, only answers: the ontological sham sword fight to the sweaty, sniggering end.
***
A bro on the toilet ~ He pulls at the paper—one square, two squares, three squares, four. Bros love bro-holes but fear their own assholes. The asshole, writes Andrea Long Chu, is “a kind of universal vagina through which femaleness can always be accessed.” When stripped down of protrusions, conquests, and booty, all that is left is interior.
***
A gay on the A train ~ He spreads his legs. Looping videos sibilate from his phone. He taunts our ears, our space, with his excrescences. He leers at you. He therefore must be gay. He therefore must be a gay bro. Alas, no longer shall gayness adumbrate delicacy. No longer shall it incur a higher credit score. For there too are gay mutants, gay bros. They come as institutions and freelancers. Institution: the 460,000-strong r/gaybros subreddit—“a place for guys to get together and talk about, well, guy stuff. Sports, video games, military issues, grilling, gear, working out, gadgets, tech, TV, movies, and more.” Books, it seems, don’t make the hairy cut. Freelancer: the profile on Grindr that reads “XL for XL,” beseeching fellow men to extrude rampantly forth so they can feast, spar, evince, effectuate. Unlike the mimetic oinking of gay horseplay—bro as drag—Gaybro-ism isn’t parody; it’s transplantation. The theater in which straight men teeter on the brink of trespass becomes real life; “the potential for a loving identification with the gay man’s enemies,” rendered by Leo Bersani in “Is the Rectum a Grave?,” becomes a loving incarnation of this enemy. And not merely enemy of the gay man—enemy, too, of the hole, the voice, the hospitable, the space-conscious, the appearer, the inhabited, the interiority, the coddler of ipseity, the atom.
***
Grindr at 2:55 a.m. ~
DL Aggressive, 32
Masc verbal and dom top. Just be chill we’re all guys, get straight to the point bro. Messaging me means you ready to fuck and ride dick
6’0’’, 165 lb, Toned
Top
Man
Black
Single
***
Gilded lobby, Riverside Drive ~ “Hey, man,” you say to the doorman. You’re wearing a singlet. He rises from his seat. You feel him thinking, Mendicant, be gone! Aloud, he says, “Deliveries are left here.” He points to a table in the corner. “I’m house sitting, remember?” you say. For the summer, you are the co-op’s only brown-skinned resident. Even the doormen look white. But how peculiar to walk by a uniformed guard six times a day, in and out of palace gates near which birds chirp, trees rustle, and felicity nests. You decide to wear more clothing, to gussy up your salutations.
***
Pret a Manger, Astor Place ~ Today, you are a patrician. You play the part. All the village’s a stage. You wear pants, not jeans, the Italian gray pea coat you got as a gift, instead of a sweatshirt or puffer jacket. “Good evening,” you greet the cafe attendant. At once, you see you’ve erred. His face hardens. He says nothing. He doesn’t need to. You’re awash in the spleen of your differences, even though you’re only playing a part, even though you were serving tables months ago. The emotional soot of menial work, hitherto suppressed, huffs into the air. You should have said, “Hey, man,” as you always do. Then he would have received you in peace, a fellow jailbird, or at least a fellow vicenarian. Yet you did not wish your velvety mood, your inner pomp, as a plague upon mesocracy! You wanted only to find salvation in mannerism, to rise to the patrician’s impossible hauteur by magic rather than the gore of revolution. To say “good evening” was to be, if for only a few minutes, Oscar Wilde, prancing through your city, penniless but prosperously grandiloquent.
***
A pretty woman at Doc Holliday’s ~ She leans on the bar, even though it’s sticky. She smiles at the bartender, a woman, older, chewing gum, tank top, camouflage cargo pants. “Hi,” the young woman says. That’s it. She doesn’t say “Hey, dear” or “Hey, dearie” or “Hey, dahling” or “Hey, miss,” because it’s not 1952. Nor does she say “Hey, man,” or “Hey, dude,” or “Hey, bro,” or “Hey, brother,” or “Hey, son,” or “Hey, sonny,” or “Hey, bud,” or “Hey, buddie,” or “Hey, fella,” or “Hey, kid,” or “Hey, lad,” or “Hey, laddie,” or “Hey, Mac,” or “Hey, Buster,” or “Hey, guy,” or “Hey, bloke,” or “Hey, neighbor,” or “Hey, friend,” or “Hey, pardner,” or “Hey, mister,” or “Hey,
sir,” or “Hey, pal,” or “Hey, cap’n,” or “Hey, ace,” or “Hey, slick,” or “Hey, mate,” or “Hey, chap,” or “Hey, tiger.” She just says, “Hi,” and the “Hi” ends confidently. Rather than teetering into another word, it decisively plunges into expectancy. “Hi,” the bartender responds: a meeting in the middle, in the open, out of rhetoric’s dusk. Individual meets individual, woman meets woman, and though there’s no presumption of sorority, humanism streams through the equanimity of this leap of faith.
***
A gas station in Athens ~ Georgia, not Greece. A trucker holds a nozzle like it’s a pizzle. A dusty, white Subaru pulls in. The trucker nods at the incomer. The incomer does nothing. Gas station melts to jungle. Air thickens, instincts tauten, birds fall quiet. Between men, danger fills the absence of obeisance; obeisance palliates the primate’s territoriality. Nods, smiles, and vocatives supplant growls, snarls, and guns. Otherwise, the will to create yields to the will to battle, homo faber to homo bellum. Finally, the incomer raises his hand and gives a wave. Guns are lowered, anomie abates. “Hey, penis”: two nozzles at a gas station. “Hey, civilization”: sine qua non of collectivism.
***
A bathroom in Jeddah ~ You haven’t been here. You’ve only heard about it from a friend who grew up in Saudi Arabia. In high school, he told you, he had to hold in his urine, certainly his ordure, for as long as he could manage, for treacherous was a trip to the bathroom. Horny boys lurked there, sequestered from the second sex, sequestered from the very subsistence of sex, stimulated to transubstantiate liable boys into dispensaries for bottled up affection. They waited near sinks and urinals for prey whom they would drag back to their stalls like tarantulas ambushing baby lizards. The sounds of muffled objections, muffled elation, and rattling steel doors soundtracked hasty trips to pee by those deft or lucky enough to escape capture. “You’d avoid the bathrooms?” you ask him, stupefied. What a wastrel!
***
A world without “bro” ~ Three men pee side by side. Owls hoot. Moonlight beams off cap bills. A crepuscular campsite. The men suffer together, a shared condition. Something else, then, dithers in the uric air: the force and fury of biology, chemistry, physiology—the phenomenology of testosterone; the testosterone bomb. Peeing together, each holds the musky soul of anarchy between thumb and finger. A guilty synergy stirs. Oh, how men suffer! Gays, at least, can ask What? Who? What are we going to do? Who will triumph? Who will kneel? But these men, stranded outside the tent of coitus, must ask Whether. If. Will we? Can we? They withhold themselves from the trinity. Women, they must inveigle. Self, they must journal into ignition. Men, they must palter, filtering torrential affection, hot hormone stew, through bro-holes: quipster mercenaries, cultivating peace, muzzling war. Uneven is the love of brothers, skittish the shape of fraternity, thin the brink of trespass. In a world without “bro,” without freighted deflection, without receptacle for excess eros, without spittoon for messy spasms, our three men, shoulder to shoulder, fall upon each other, an accidental orgy. In a world without “bro,” gradients shrivel, atoms lose their stability, outsides and insides mash like polygonal swords. Bro—American English, 2000s: “I’m horny but don’t know what to do about it.” Bro—American English, 2000s: “Let’s fuck, but we can’t.” Bro—American English, 2000s: “Birth control between men, catching surfeit concupiscence, like a urinal.”
