Men Together

​I suppose my first men’s group of sorts was elementary-school recess. It wasn’t a real group so much as little boys’ apartheid from the great other, the girls! They just couldn’t or, more likely, wouldn’t play rough and tumble like us. Somewhat similar but for a better reason were participation in segregated team sports, which were of course all-male or all-female, or single-sex sleepaway summer camps. Perhaps my first real community-forming boys group, however, was Boy Scout Troop 3 in Scarsdale, New York. When my family moved back to New York City and I went to a boarding school in New Jersey, that was the end of my brilliant Scouting career: at 12 I was already a Life Scout, a mere five merit badges away from Eagle. The boarding school, Peddie, had no troop. I suppose I could have joined one in town and arranged to be driven to meetings, but for whatever reason, I never made the effort. Still, mine was a boys school in 1951-56, so I was at least in an all-male environment. Yale, especially for undergraduates in the later 50s, was also an all-male institution, although that changed in graduate school despite the fact that my roommates stayed all-male, sometime to my regret.

After a hiatus of some years when I lived as the lone male in an all-coed family, work situation, and church—even our cats if male were in that euphemistic phrase “altered”—I discovered adult-male groups, first during a 1979-80 sabbatical in Honolulu through a men’s group started at my church by our charismatic Lutheran pastor, Doug Olson, who had been an early participant in the national men’s movement and had attended workshops led by Robert Bly and others. From that time to the present, 2025, I have always been involved in men’s work. These days, as an 85-year-old, I am a member of three men’s groups: two church-related and the third, a secular one which a male friend and I started some 15 years ago. Concerning the latter, my wife, Cedar, would occasionally have her women’s peace circle meet at our house. Upstairs in my home office I could hear the ladies’ periodic laughter and thought how I missed getting together and having such group laughs with other men. It turned out that my friend Bruce, whose then-fiancée was in the same group as Cedar, had a similar experience. Somehow we found out about each other’s similar reaction and decided to “take revenge”—how macho!—by starting a similar group for men. From the beginning we set a precedent of meeting weekly like the ladies, though we’d sometimes have a Sunday-evening theme meeting at someone’s house. Otherwise we met in a series of coffee shops or restaurants and simply had a timekeeper which insured that every man had the same amount of time to share what was current and important for them. My other two all-men’s meetings were a church-related weekly get-together called Bagels and Bible, in which we’d discuss the assigned readings for Sunday worship, and a twice-monthly breakfast for six-to-eight fellow male parishioners, sometimes with a priest or two, again to share whatever.
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All these adult groups have been therapeutic for me over the past half century. I can’t imagine life without them or other similar ones, whether religious or secular. When it comes to these activity, I am reminded of the Hawaiian pidgin saying, “Mo’ beddah togethuh!” and “Yo bro!”

Men’s group pioneer Robert Bly (1926-2021)

Rev. Doug Olson (1933-2010), Sr. Pastor, Calvary By The Sea Lutheran Church, Honolulu