What’s in Qu’ran Mann’s basket?
Nineteen-year-old Qu’ran Mann sat in the office of a U.S. Marine recruiter 11 years ago, enthralled by his surroundings. He wasn’t supposed to be there. He had an arranged meeting with an Air Force recruiter who stood him up; the man whose office he sat in invited him in as a courtesy while he waited.
He stared around the room at photos of Marines, a massive mural of the Marines’ logo, a golden eagle perched on a globe that is punctured horizontally by an anchor.
“Who are these people?” Mann wondered.
The recruiter, who in Mann’s words was “fly as shit,” began to notice his interest, occasionally peeking his head around his desktop computer to see Mann looking around the room in awe.
“Finally, he asked. He was like, ‘Hey. Know anything about the Marine Corps?'” Mann said. “The rest is history.”
After eight years as a Marine, Mann, now 31, is a first-year theater student at the University of Maryland, who identifies as bisexual, working toward his dream of becoming a professional wrestler. In the years it took him to get here, he’s been slowly weaving what he calls his basket with a wild variety of life experiences.
Mann grew up in Hempstead, New York, a section of Long Island he described as “less desirable.”
Mann’s mother died when he was 10 years old. Although he maintained a close relationship with his father, his mom’s parents presented a more stable home for an elementary school-aged child, so he moved in with them and his brother Erick Bush who already lived there.
“It was difficult because of his age, leaving his mom’s home where he was the center of attraction,” Mann’s grandmother, Sharon Jeffreys explained. “Going from having his own room and being spoiled, to sharing a room and not being spoiled.”
Mann was artistic; he loved to draw, he loved to sing and in middle school, he formed a rock-and-roll band with his friends.
“Everything I have dedicated my life to in some form or fashion has been an art,” Mann said.
Above all his other pursuits, Mann’s creative side manifested in his love for professional wrestling. Specifically, the World Wrestling Entertainment promotion – growing up in what wrestling fans know as the ”Attitude Era” spanning the late ‘90s and early 2000s.
Mann got into wrestling because of Bush, who was six years older than Mann and 35 when he died of sickle cell disease in September 2024. Mann and his brother would turn their bedroom into a ring.
“Me and my brother used to do the craziest things,” Mann said. “I mean, [we would] drag pots and pans out of the kitchen and just do dumb stuff.”
Jeffreys worked at Hofstra University, a 20-minute walk from their house. When it came time to go to college, she helped him get into Hofstra and receive aid to study sports psychology.
Like many college freshmen, Mann’s newfound freedom was a bit more than he was equipped to handle. At the end of the year, he found himself in the dean’s office, facing the consequences of his decisions.
“You haven’t been to class in like four weeks, for any of your classes. This is just unredeemable at this point,” Mann recalled the dean saying during their meeting.
Mann was forced to pivot.
Through continued casual conversations with his recruiter, Mann revealed that he was bisexual, unaware of the implications that carried in the U.S. military. At the time, Mann had never heard of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” a policy that prevented openly gay people from serving in the military. The recruiter explained that the policy had been repealed three years before he began to be recruited by the military, but the culture it created still permeated many areas of the service.
“If it was two years earlier, I would have had to put up with it,” Mann said. “But [the recruiter explained] that day had passed and though people may still uphold culturally, they have no legal ground to stand on.”
When it came time for boot camp, he packed onto a bus in South Carolina that chugged down the southern highways toward the Marines’ base on Parris Island.
The bus ride was normal until someone at the front of the bus politely stood up and told all the Marines to put their heads down and not look out the windows. He sat like this for 15 or 20 minutes until the bus came to a stop and the drill instructors boarded, then “all hell broke loose.”
“They start yelling and screaming, ‘get out!’ You’re running, you’re sprinting, you’re trying to get on these yellow footprints,” Mann said. “That’s the day the Marine Corps starts for you and it never comes back down.”
Mann’s days during his 13-week bootcamp started around 5 a.m. (he thinks, because nobody is allowed a watch or phone during the process).
“You’re woken up to commotion,” Mann said.
Step one was to make his bed as fast as possible, step two a ten-minute window to shave (perfectly), shower and brush his teeth.
This lasted over two months and culminated in “the crucible,” a 65-hour nonstop training exercise in the woods. Throughout those months, he experienced every emotion in the book: doubt, anger, joy, sadness, but above all, determination.
“In my mind, I had felt that I had already failed, I had screwed up one of the biggest opportunities I had been handed,” Mann said.
He also knew that his grandmother was disappointed by what happened at Hofstra.
“I was a little hurt because of everything I had done to get him in there,” Jeffreys said. “And I was hurt because he had not talked to me about it ahead of time.”
The determination, combined with physical and mental gifts, made him a successful marine. After boot camp, Mann quickly rose to leadership positions, all the while remaining firm in his identity.
“I almost made it a mission to stand defiantly in who I was as a person, and not allow myself to get swallowed into the position where I felt like I needed to hide,” he said.
During the interview, Mann wore an anime t-shirt over a sweater, long-flowing, floral pants, and large black boots. When asked how he expressed his identity in the military, he laughed, gesturing to his outfit and said, “like this.”
One of the Marines that served under Mann was Jordan Imbody, now 26, who worked on Mann’s squad during an assignment when he was 19 in Okinawa, Japan.
“I come from a place where I don’t know a lot of bisexual people,” Imbody said. “For the longest time, we didn’t even know [his sexuality]… I never had an issue with him; nobody did. He was just a great guy. His sexuality never mattered.”
For Marines working under Mann’s leadership, his clothing or identity outside of work was much less important than his military prowess. Mann led by example; any time the team had “PT” – physical training– Mann did all of it with them. Unlike most of Imbody’s leaders, he saw the members of his squad as individuals; he’d meet with them and check in on how they were doing professionally and otherwise.
“A lot of [leaders in the Marines] want to go there and mess you up,” Imbody said. “Nobody wants to help you grow as a man.”
Mann pointed to a solid cinderblock wall we were sitting next to during our conversation.
“If I was like ‘run’, they’d give it their all to try and break through this fucking wall,” he said. “That only came because they knew I gave them everything I had… my identity, my sexuality, who I went home to, they could give less of a fuck.”
Marines in Mann’s unit developed strong fidelity to him. Imbody remembered a night where he was out drinking with his platoon, and a couple of Marines from another unit made a disparaging comment about Mann being bisexual.
“You’re going to stand up for [him] like your own brother,” Imbody said. “There [were] a few guys from a different company that wanted to say something, and we all got pretty hype about it.”
As American politics began to shift with the first election of President Donald Trump and the identity of service members became a topic again, Mann felt his identity started to become increasingly “incongruent” with his career. He found himself being asked to speak for all Black or LGBTQ+ Marines about issues of discrimination.
“When this past election season happened, I knew it wasn’t going to be anything good for me,” Mann said. “So, I took my ball, and I went home.”
After completion of his second contract, it was time to return to his oldest goal: professional wrestling. Mann went off to Atlanta to attend World Wrestling Entertainment Superstar Cody Rhodes’ wrestling school.
Toward the end of Mann’s tenure, Rhodes came to talk to the class in person – he advocated that, beyond stuntwork and acrobatics, students get formal acting training.
“I’m already at a disadvantage, being about 10 years older than [most new wrestlers], and what do they usually lack… acting,” Mann said.
That’s how he ended up a theater student at the University of Maryland. Again, Mann stood out, landing the principal role in Maryland’s theater professor Kenyatta Rogers’ rendition of “Home” in his first semester.
“It’s great to have technique, that’s what we teach here; it is sometimes hard to teach curiosity,” Rogers said. “As a director and educator, you can sort of see questions forming in [Mann’s] eyes, you can see the hypothesis.”
The story revolves around Mann’s character Cephus Miles’ life as he suffers heartbreak, is jailed for being a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War, and eventually returns to his rural home. Mann’s charisma shines on stage.
His voice booms off the theater’s walls, and he stares into the audience’s eyes when he monologues as Cephus. When he’s in jail, he looks broken and desperate, sitting on the floor. When he’s in love, he stares into his co-star’s eyes, feet dangling off the edge of the stage like a teenager on his first date.
Mann is trying to continue to improve as a wrestler while he works toward his theater degree, but hasn’t been able to as much as he hoped. He’s a perfectionist, something his grandmother says she urges him to let go of.
“I’ve always had a special place in my heart for him,” Jeffreys said, “and he knows I’ve always had a special place in my heart for his mom, my daughter… I could never separate either one of them. My story is that my love for both of them is one and the same.”
In difficult moments, Mann wonders if he’s wasted time in the service or previous attempts at school, but he knows he didn’t.
“It won’t be for nothing, because that basket, it gets to go in there,” Mann said. “All the things I’ve done will find their own level of reverence in it. Nothing will get left behind.”