We have exposed a wide array of men (and women & children) to THE GOOD MEN PROJECT content over the last two weeks, including the premier of our film and reading from our book. We started at Sing Sing, moved to the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, then to Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, and finally just yesterday The Belmont Hill Boys School with NFL Hall of Famer and Good Men contributor Andre Tippett. Life long inmates, high brow Boston society types, college students, and high school boys. It's way too early to make any grand conclusions but it's interesting to note what we have seen so far.
Everyone has a stake in this question. I was originally surprised by how quickly my 13 year old son grasped what we were doing, and was dying to talk about the issues. I have been equally surprised by the way women are dying to know what men actually think. In the end this is a men's project intended to help men figure out their lives, but we have invited everyone to the party.
Diversity allows us to see our shared humanity. The boys at Belmont Hill asked the best questions. Because they simply wanted to know. One asked, "if you do something really bad, can you still be a good man?" That allowed me to talk about the men I had met at Sing Sing and how despite the awful things they had done, each was attempting to wrestle with what it means to be a good man. And how one man who spent 12 years inside, Julio Medina, is my personal Hero for how he has turned his life around. "It's not how you fall in life," my grandmother told me, "it's how you pick yourself up that counts." That's true if you are rich, poor, black, white, gay or straight.
Men are dying to know they are not alone. Men at all the events, and just walking down the street, have approached me to let me know not only how much they love our book and film but really how important it was for them to know that they are not alone with the issues we are talking about. They say they thought they were the only one who had no answer on how to navigate the impossible trade-offs of being a man in 2009. But now they know that we all face this same challenge and it's really okay to talk about, even laugh about, and get honest about.
Everyone wants THE answer. Every interview, every event, the question comes up. "So, what does it really mean to be a good man?" To me it means loving my wife passionately, taking time for my three kids, and doing something for someone other than myself in my work life. But that's just me. And something I arrived at after a ton of heartache and bad choices in my life. Our hope is that men will read our book and watch our movie and be inspired. I sure have just getting to know these guys. They are all heroes. The one thing they each have in common is brutal honesty. You can't get very far towards your own definition of manhood when you are lying to yourself or the people you love. So dig deep and keep asking, "What is a good man?" And even more important, "What men do I admire and why?"