Category: Good Men Project

Hi, yes, I’m here to turn in my Man Card. I’m not planning to use it anymore. What’s that? An exit survey? I thought I could just, you know, turn it in and that would be that. Well, okay, I do understand that there are processes that need to be followed. I mean, that’s a…

Twice in my life, I had a conversation with my father that I worried might end in my ostracism. In one case, I spent an entire meal beating around the bush, but ultimately lost my nerve. The meal ended without the big reveal. Hours after I’d gotten home, my spouse convinced me to just call…

When I was a child, I had a bed full of stuffed animals. I did not have a happy childhood. I lost my left eye when I was a toddler. According to my father, that delayed my talking for months; I would communicate with grunts and pointing, and refuse to talk. It was only when…

I have a prosthetic eye; I lost my left eye when I was a toddler. I was recently given a copy of a new Young Adult book, “The Speed of Objects Falling,” by Nancy Richardson Fischer. The protagonist lost one of her eyes as a child, and the person who gave me the book wanted…

November 20th is the Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDOR). This year marks the 20th Anniversary of the original TDOR, established in the memory of Rita Hester, who was killed in 1998. The week before TDOR is Transgender Awareness Week. And while awareness of transgender issues has improved dramatically since 1999, several recent events demonstrate that…

I am a public school teacher. As a result, I have experienced what is becoming a frequent event in public schools: The Active Shooter Lockdown Drill. I will begin by pointing out that there is not a single drill; it is a spectrum event, from the relatively boring to the downright terrifying. On the boring…

I was a child in the 1970s and a teen in the 1980s. These days, LGBTQIA characters have a solid, increasingly even-handed presence in mainstream entertainment. In my childhood, they didn’t. I can remember three TV shows in particular that shaped my perspective on gay and transgender men: All were sitcoms, and only one featured…

International Pronouns Day is the third Wednesday of October, which was October 16th this year. My pronouns are they/them. But more on that later. ◊♦◊ I’ve been thinking a lot lately about why, of all the LGBTQ+ issues, the matter of using declared pronouns seems to upset so many people. As I wrote recently, I…

Last week, the LGBTQ+ community had three significant stories. ◊♦◊ One was Friday being National Coming Out Day, a day for LGBTQ+ persons to tell whomever they please about their sexual orientation and gender identities. A lot has happened since the first NCOD in 1988. The Supreme Court has ruled that both same-sex marriage (Obergefell…

Full disclosure: I have not seen “Joker.” I have no immediate plans to. As Grandpa says in “The Lost Boys,” “Read the TV Guide, you don’t need a TV.” Honestly, part of me doesn’t even want to write this, because it will give the movie more attention. But ultimately, this movie itself doesn’t really matter….