Now that you’ve gone West, young man

I INHERITED THE KEYS to the kingdom on the day I was born into my white and male American body. Every day since then, my success as a man has been determined by how well I’ve grown into my power. Prowess in sports and recreation, check. Titles and letters, check. Ownership of land and property, possession of another through marriage, accumulation of wealth, check. This process felt like work to me, but never impossible.

Before I was a man, I was a boy learning how to be one in St. Louis, Missouri. One of my earliest sacred places was the Gateway Arch, that glorious neo-futurist national monument to Thomas Jefferson’s dream of Westward Expansion. I was drawn to its shining spectacle, its enormity and promise. I begged