On Tuesday, Ringer senior staff writer Jordan Ritter Conn published his second book, American Men. Based on more than five years of reporting, it explores the rarely discussed pieces of men’s lives, charting how several men built their own relationship to masculinity and how they’ve navigated that relationship over time. It tells the stories of friendships and relationships they’d built and sustained or lost, of the traumas they’ve suffered and how they tried to recover, of the ways in which they’ve either inflicted or survived violence, of their relationship to sex and their own bodies, and of what they’ve felt as those bodies carried them through the world.
An immersive work of narrative nonfiction, the book interweaves the stories of four men from vastly different backgrounds as they contend with the ideas they’ve inherited about who a man should be and grapple with the reality of who they are. The excerpt below focuses on Ryan, an amateur MMA fighter from the Akwesasne Mohawk territory who is struggling to come to terms with both his sexuality as a closeted gay man and his draw toward barroom violence.
You can purchase American Men here.
I.
The recipe was simple, amaretto with sour mix and Sprite, the perfect drink before the drinks before Ryan first bludgeoned another man’s face. He mixed them in Julieta’s kitchen and passed them around to all their friends, and as they clinked glasses Ryan felt so very adult, more sophisticated than the kids in other dorm rooms, drinking vodka cran or Busch Light. The room was bright and buzzing, full of that Friday energy, and he rocked his head and shoulders to the sounds of Daddy Yankee and Tego Calderón. His hips stayed still, not yet warm enough to move with the rest of him, and he watched his friends sway, a whir of laughter and limbs. He thought about how lucky he was, to be drinking such grown‑up cocktails at the beginning of a night out with such fun and beautiful friends.
In a couple of days Ryan would get on the road back to the Akwesasne Mohawk territory for winter break. It was dark on the reservation this time of year, way up on the Canadian border, and dotted with people who’d tormented Ryan from the first moment he could remember until the last moment before he escaped. But tonight he was still here, in Buffalo, celebrating. The fall semester of their junior year of college had just ended. Ryan passed his last exam in marketing and managed to survive his final turn in front of the class in rhetoric and speech. Now they downed their drinks and piled into his Pontiac Sunfire, and he drove them off campus and toward downtown, all the way to Chippewa Street, where they tore off their coats, rushing through the snow toward the thumping invitation of La Luna, the city’s biggest Latin club.
He wore a black and tan striped shirt, dark jeans that fit perfectly around the thick mass of his butt and thighs. His hair was dark and gelled with fresh blond highlights. The club felt liquid, and he let himself melt inside. A couple of Captain and Cokes got his hips moving, just a little at first, until Julieta grabbed his hand and pulled him onto the dance floor, and that’s where he vanished, lost in the tangle of bodies, imprecise but still perfect, sweating to the beat of salsa and merengue. He scanned the room and saw men move with confidence and grace, all of them. Julieta liked to say that if your man can’t dance he can’t fuck, and Ryan wondered, in the brief moments he let his eyes linger on the men around him, if maybe that was really true.
He never talked to them, of course. He wouldn’t dare. Not unless he was saying “Excuse me” on his way to the bathroom or the bar. He just let himself be passed from Julieta to Maria to female strangers. The mirrors around the room had been warm and flattering on arrival but turned opaque with steam as the night wound on. And then, sometime around 3 a.m., began the rituals of the night’s end. A last‑call announcement over the loudspeaker. A rush of people to the bar, Ryan among them, for one last Captain and Coke, and then back to the dance floor after guzzling his final drink. And then, the hard stop. Music off. Lights on. The room jarred back into focus. An announcement that the bar was closing and all present needed to leave.
He barely noticed the commotion at first, just a few shouts above the hum of voices moving outside. A few heads turned, Ryan looked up and saw the door and the cold darkness just beyond it, and then to the right he saw Julieta’s friend Gloria, short and round and ferocious, and she was shouting at the man who’d been shouting at everyone else just moments before.
Who knows what they said—slurred nonsense, fuck you asshole, shut the fuck up, go home you stupid bitch. Gloria approached the man and kept spewing venom—you fucking loser, get the fuck out of here—and then Ryan stepped in front of her and put his arms around her shoulders, like come on, turn around, let’s go.
They started walking back toward the car when Ryan heard him. “If she’s going to talk like a man, let her fight like a man!”
In the moment, Ryan barely understood what the guy had said. He would piece together the rest of the sentence later, but for now, only a few words stuck out.
She. Man. Fight.
He’s talking about me, Ryan thought. He’s saying I can’t fight. He’s saying I’m a she.
He turned back around, squared up. “The fuck did you just say to me?” He felt his skin prickle, then burn, energy shooting through his body. He took another step, propelled by a rage he’d long felt but never unleashed. He felt a push, two hands to the chest, and he staggered back and nearly fell. He stopped, found his balance. And in the moments that followed Ryan realized something: Violence could be fucking awesome. You just had to be its instrument, never its victim. Ryan had spent years taking beatings. But right now, without thinking, he did what he’d long fantasized but never imagined he’d follow through on. He punched a man in the face.
Out Now From Ringer Books
American Men
By Jordan Ritter Conn
A deeply intimate portrait of four men that examines—in profound and comprehensive ways—what it means to be a man in America.
American Men is available now.
Ryan would remember that the man was tall and thick, but in Ryan’s memory he would have no race, no defining features, no face at all. Just a large casing of human anger, now stumbling backward. The man grabbed Ryan’s collar as he fell, pulling them both to the pavement, and then Ryan kept going, knuckles on skin and bone underneath it, one blow after another, as many punches as he could throw, until the security guards grabbed his shoulders and yanked him upright and Ryan felt his arms go limp.
“We good?” the guard asked him.
“I’m good,” Ryan said.
“Then get the fuck out of here.”
He turned and headed back to the car, Julieta and the others alongside him, all of them whooping with equal parts thrill and horror, Oh my god, Ryan, what did you just do?
“How did he look?” Ryan asked them as he drove back toward campus. “Was he bleeding? Did I fuck him up?”
Bad, they told him. Yes, he was bleeding. Yes, Ryan fucked him up.
Ryan laughed as he drove, dropping the women off at their apartments, and the next morning he woke up and realized that he felt no pain in his hand or body, and he wondered if the fight had been real or a dream.
II.
As a boy, Ryan had seemed like exactly the kind of boy you could fuck with. On a progress report, his kindergarten teacher, a sweet blonde woman named Miss Kelly, once wrote, “I’m very concerned that Ryan likes to play with dolls.” This was true. He loved dolls. In his classroom they kept the toys stashed in different corners, and Ryan tended to float from the dinosaurs to the dollhouse. The dolls were gorgeous, a perfect‑looking Native family, and he liked to make the doll mother tend to her doll baby and imagine the contours of their perfect doll lives. Of all the dolls, he loved the baby the most. The texture of it, soft rubber between his fingers, the fine strands of her dark hair. He could take her in his palm, and he could pet her with his fingers, soothing her when he imagined her crying, delighting in her when he imagined her giggling.
He was six the first time they jumped him. Older boys from his neighborhood. Ryan barely knew them, not even their names. He stepped off the bus and that’s when he felt the first impact, a fist to his face, and then he lost his vision and felt his face burning, the hot rush of tears. Another fist landed immediately after, and then still more, and he crumpled on the ground. Then they kicked him, one after another, until finally they left him there alone.
He stood. He tried to run but felt that his breath had left him, desperate gulps of air going nowhere as his legs struggled to carry him home. He approached his house, with its off‑white siding, sitting just feet away from the St. Regis River, and he felt desperate to fling himself into the arms of his mother. But as he reached home, he saw, instead, his father working in the yard.
Ryan didn’t want to learn to fight. He craved comfort, not instruction. But his father told him to keep going, again and again, and in his voice Ryan heard an urgency, a desperate pleading to hit the bag harder.
“What happened?” his dad asked.
Ryan was too lost in his own tears to get out a full sentence, but his father could see the scrapes and cuts on his skin.
“Come with me,” his father said.
Ryan followed him inside the house and down to the basement. His father picked up two boxing gloves and held them out to Ryan. They swallowed his hands, but he tried to hold them upright. His father grabbed him by the shoulders and squared him up to face the heavy bag.
“Hit it,” he said.
Ryan hit the bag. His father told him to hit it again, harder, and to shift his weight onto his back foot and explode forward with everything he had. To hit with his right and his left and then his right again, faster now, and harder too, until Ryan stopped—and his father told him no, he could not stop, because when he stopped hitting other boys, they would not stop hitting him.
Ryan didn’t want to learn to fight. He craved comfort, not instruction. But his father told him to keep going, again and again, and in his voice Ryan heard an urgency, a desperate pleading to hit the bag harder, and he felt, then, that his father’s concern came not from a fear of what might happen to his son if left unprotected, but from shame at seeing up close the utter weakness of the boy he’d tried to raise.
The next time they jumped him, he wilted again. And then again, and then again. The beatings came wrapped around the same word: faggot. From white boys and Mohawk boys, from women and girls, too. The word followed him through adolescence, through high school, all the way to college, when he moved away to Buffalo. It echoed in his mind even after he came out as gay, even as he found friends and community, all the way until he first discovered that maybe he had learned something that day his father strapped on those gloves, that maybe he could be the menace, the man who made other men wilt.
III.
There was so much, Ryan learned as a single twenty‑something in Buffalo, that one man could do with another man’s body. You could take an arm in your hand and apply the faintest weight of your fingers, sliding over the slope of the forearm’s muscles and tendons, feeling each strand of hair. You could taste the sweat on a neck or back, smell the skin before or after or even while it’s being washed in a shower, hear the way a heartbeat thumps when your hand moves off a forearm, down a torso, up a thigh, all of the movements, both yours and the other body’s, carried by animal force. You could feel the way the body softens, undone by pleasure. How it lays on a bed, fully open, inviting you in.
More things Ryan learned one man could do with another’s body: Square up outside a bar, shoulder facing shoulder, studying the venom on its face and contorting your own to match. Move closer to the body, voice raising, your volume meant to provoke, because you tell yourself that you do not start fights but you end them, and that this, for reasons you can’t explain, is a code you absolutely must keep. You could stand and wait for the impact of the body’s fist against your face, could stagger backward assessing the pain, before you exploded forward, carried by that same animal force, and hear the dull crunch of your knuckles on cartilage and bone. You could feel the way the body softens as it falls, undone by violence. How it lays on pavement, fully open, begging you to stop.
It would be nice, perhaps, if coming out as gay had dulled Ryan’s pull toward barroom violence. If he had come into his own identity and found that he no longer held onto long‑dormant anger, if he had found himself embraced and loved by those around him, and then released all that he’d held inside. But that didn’t happen. If anything, he felt a thrill in owning both his sexuality and his violent impulses simultaneously. In squaring up against the kind of men who unironically called themselves “alphas,” who joked with limp wrists and put‑on lisps about men like Ryan.
After that first fight outside the Latin dance bar his junior year of college, it took a few years before the next one. He graduated and moved out and spent many months on dates with men from Gay.com, which felt thrilling in some moments and tender in others. He had boyfriends, if only for brief spells. He joined a gay men’s volleyball league and for the first time felt like he could finally unleash his competitive hunger without hiding pieces of himself.
Some parts of gay Buffalo, though, remained alien to him. He found himself shrinking into the background when he went out to gay bars. Those men wanted skinny and he was thick; they wanted tall and he was short; they wanted white or Black and he was Mohawk. But still, if he lingered near the bar long enough, someone handsome and interesting would eventually approach him. If he left his photo up on Gay.com, he got daily messages from men who wanted to meet him. He made gay friends and found his place in the community.
One of those friends was Jared. Jared was Mohawk, too, but he’d grown up in Buffalo, a “city Indian,” as Ryan called him. He had barely ever been to a reservation, but he seemed at home in any room he entered. They met on Gay.com but never considered dating. Instead, they became roommates and friends. Jared pulled Ryan out to bars and parties, often on nights that Ryan wanted to hide alone at home. One night, Jared took Ryan to a house party hosted by a friendly acquaintance. It promised a good crowd and free booze, and Ryan ignored most of the crowd but took full advantage of the booze—until the moment, just as they were getting ready to leave, when he found himself hammered and talking shit.
He felt a thrill in owning both his sexuality and his violent impulses simultaneously. In squaring up against the kind of men who unironically called themselves “alphas.”
As he walked behind Jared on their way to the exit, he heard yelling, the words indiscriminate but aimed vaguely in his direction. He asked Jared, is that fucking guy yelling at me, and Jared laughed and said oh my god I think he is. Ryan turned around and saw that yes, indeed, a very large and drunk man was yelling in his direction, was in fact pointing at Ryan, shouting you fucking pussy, you bump into people and aren’t man enough to say anything, and now Ryan felt that this was it, the moment he’d been imagining ever since that night at La Luna, and now he stepped back toward the guy and they were both shouting, and Ryan would barely remember the next morning what they were yelling about, could barely understand the words as soon as they left his mouth. But still. The large man shouted and Ryan shouted back. You big dumb motherfucker. Shut your ass up you little bitch.
Jared grabbed his arm and Ryan said no, I gotta find out what this guy’s fucking problem is, and he walked toward him with his arms spread wide and his chest puffed. The man was about six‑two and white, with a thick body and thicker beard. He looked like he could be the older brother of the kids from just off the rez, who used to jump Ryan at school. Ryan looked up at his burly enemy and thought I’m gonna get my ass kicked, and somehow that thought propelled him closer, until he felt the guy push him, two arms to the chest, and Ryan fell backward, held up only by the crowd of people around them.
Technically, Ryan threw the first punch this time. Later he’d tell himself he’d been pushed, he’d been insulted, he didn’t start it, he had no choice. A few seconds passed, fists rocketing back and forth between them, and then Ryan grabbed the big guy’s shirt, pulled it nearly over his head, and was punching him again and again, until the guy shook loose and began pummeling Ryan in return. All around them voices shouted what the fuck is wrong with you two, stop it, stop it please, and now arms of strangers pulled Ryan backward until the two were fully separate, and Ryan looked up and saw that the big guy was splattered with blood.
A voice shouted.
“Somebody get a towel!”
“Yeah!” Ryan yelled. “Get that motherfucker a towel!”
But then Jared grabbed Ryan’s arm and said no, Ryan, you’re the one who needs a towel, and Ryan touched his face and found his hand covered in blood, and he realized that actually he was bleeding from everywhere, so he took the towel and wiped himself off, and then he and Jared finally left and drove home, and Ryan felt no pain then or for the rest of the evening. Instead, he found himself floating. Jared told him I’m gonna take you with me everywhere, you’re my bodyguard now, I’m gonna talk so much shit until I make someone call me a slur, just so I can watch you kick some guy’s ass.
Months later, that happened. Kind of. He and Jared and a few others were out at a bar called Q. Inside, there was a man sitting alone at the end of the bar, hunched over and talking to no one. He would glance around the room every few moments before returning his eyes to his drink. Jared and Ryan noticed him but had no reason to think much of it. Later, after they moved outside to the patio to smoke, the same man walked by and asked for a cigarette. “Sorry,” Jared said.
“These are our last three.” The man looked stung. And drunk.
“Fuck you,” he said. “You fucking faggots.”
This was the first time Ryan had heard that word, uttered with that intention, since his childhood. But here, coming from the mouth of a stumbling drunk who’d just spent hours sitting alone in a gay bar, it didn’t sound menacing. It sounded pathetic and hilarious.
“You know you’re in the gay part of town, right?” said Ryan. “If we’re faggots, then what does that make you?”
The man swung, wild and searching, and his fist glanced Ryan’s chin, just barely. Ryan took a step back, then returned with a right and then a left, sending the guy to the ground, and they all laughed while he fell, and then the man got up and moved to throw another punch before deciding against it. “Fuck y’all,” he said, stumbling into the dark.
Here was the thing. Now that Ryan was out of the closet, he wanted someone to call him a slur. He imagined it sometimes when he went out, eyeing the men who reminded him of his bullies back home. But in Buffalo, other than that one man at Q, no one ever did. He was chasing imaginary revenge on bullies who didn’t exist.
In total, Ryan only had a few proper bar fights. Four, maybe five, depending on which altercations truly counted. They all seemed to fit the same pattern. Alcohol, rising tension, a few words and then blows, repeat. They were mostly with bigger guys, the ones Ryan called “corn‑fed,” guys Ryan knew believed they could kick his ass. Most were white, and almost all were straight, or at least seemed so to Ryan. Once, he hit another gay man after last call at a gay bar, some skinny white boy loudly mocking Ryan and his friends for the way they looked. Ryan delivered an open‑hand smack to the face, and then, as the man fell to the ground, surrounded by gasping friends, Ryan yelled, “Keep talking, bitch!” What the fuck is wrong with you, Ryan’s friends said as they helped the guy up, that’s not fucking cool, man, why would you ever hit some helpless little twink? Ryan felt ashamed after that one.
And then there was the one that revealed to Ryan the ugly depths of his impulses. He was out with coworkers for an official work mixer at a private club one of his colleagues belonged to, drinking at its members‑only bar. A drunk man tried to force his way in, though he didn’t have a membership or an invitation. A couple of the employees, both older men, politely explained that he needed to leave, but the man refused. Then he put his hands on them and started trying to push his way in, and that’s when Ryan stepped forward. The man grabbed him by the shirt, pulling them both outside onto the sidewalk. He swung at Ryan and clipped him twice in the chin. That was all the permission Ryan needed.
They wrestled to the ground, Ryan on top but the man still clinging to his shirt, and Ryan grabbed his head, lifted it, and pounded it on the pavement, and the man did not let go so Ryan did it again, and now Ryan felt blood on his fingers, pouring from the man’s skull, and he stood and saw the man sprawled there motionless. Oh, my god, Ryan thought. I’m going to jail. They’re going to lock me away for what I just did.
His coworkers told him to leave and so he did, shaking as he walked through the city, and he heard sirens and thought surely police were coming to arrest him for assault, but the cars sped past him and eventually he made it home. He spent the weekend waiting for the police to show up at his doorstep, too ashamed to call or text his colleagues and ask what had happened, and whether the man had gone to the hospital or died there in the street. Ryan realized, even after his coworkers told him the guy had gotten up and walked away without assistance, that he could no longer say he didn’t start fights. He could no longer tell himself he abided by some unfailing code. His was no longer some inspirational story of a tough gay man defying stereotypes, standing up against bullies. Ryan was a fucking menace. “You need to stay away from us for a while,” one of Ryan’s colleagues told him that next week back at work.
Years earlier, after his very first fight outside La Luna, Ryan had lay in bed replaying the night over and over again in his mind. He’d thought about it many times since, and his memory had stretched back further, all the way to his childhood, when he’d get jumped by older kids. But now when he thought of those moments, he realized something. His mind shifted to a new perspective. He thought now about the boys who had pummeled him on the pavement and felt his bones crack against their fists.
Oh, he thought to himself. Now I know why they did it. They wanted to feel the way I feel right now.
This piece has been lightly edited to fit the excerpt format.
Excerpted from the book American Men by Jordan Ritter Conn. Copyright © 2026 by Jordan Ritter Conn. Reprinted with permission of Grand Central Publishing, a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
