Though I didn’t know the word “sexism” at the time, I recall experiences of it in my youth in the early 1960s. While girls received left-handed compliments about being good at math and science… “for a girl,” I heard that I was good with babies… “for a boy.” The cultural project of opening new vistas and life options for girls and women was getting underway without much attention being paid to the effects of sexism on boys and men. Correcting that imbalance became my life’s work.

In 1982 I was on a co-ed softball team. Two weeks in a row, at our post-game bar, I had separate conversations with two women teammates in which they told me tales of woe about their boyfriends. Both ended with the same question: “And so he’s a real jerk, don’t you think?” I replied both times with “Well, maybe he’s a jerk, but from my point of view as a man, I can tell you that maybe to him the situation looks like this...” Both times I offered a possible alternative to male jerkiness that was perfectly clear and obvious to me. Both times the women answered, “Omigod, I never thought of that.” 

So in 1983 on WCVT (now WTMD) at Towson University, north of Baltimore, I launched a radio show on male-female relationships. The first — and still most influential — book I read on my new topic was The Hazards of Being Male: Surviving the Myth of Masculine Privilege, published in 1976 by California psychologist Herb Goldberg.​

It didn’t take long for me to realize that serious social problems are connected to society’s lack of awareness of male gender issues and the sexism that creates them. The show ran until 1989. The management of WFBR liked it and wanted to program it, but the station’s ad sales team said advertisers would never buy it for fear of making women unhappy.

That only convinced me all the more that male gender issues needed attention.

In 1985 and 1986 I worked with the late Maryland Congressman and Black Caucus Chair Elijah Cummings when he was a Maryland state delegate in the effort he sponsored to have Maryland establish a task for force on men to study the connection between male social issues and problems of crime, violence, educational underachievement, unpaid child support and others. The idea was derided in the Maryland General Assembly as “The Wimp Bill,” but privately several delegates confided that they recognized and understood the need for the proposal but said they could never support it because “it would upset the women.”​

Again, I took that as indication that we had a cultural taboo — recognition of sexism against men and boys — that needed to be broken.

In 1994 St. Martin’s Press published my book Good Will Toward Men: Women Talk Candidly About the Balance of Power Between the Sexes, a collection of interviews I conducted with twenty-two women, most of whom identified as feminist, all of whom were ready, willing, able and even eager to talk not just about women’s disadvantages as women, but also their advantages, and not just about men’s advantages as men, but also their disadvantages.

In perhaps one of the earliest examples of what has come to be known as Cancel Culture, members of St. Martin’s sales and marketing staff expressed displeasure with the book’s challenge of hegemonic feminism; at their insistence all sales and promotion efforts for the book ceased.

Good Will Toward Men was essentially left to die; it went nowhere, except to bookstores’ remainder bins. 

My determination to find an opening, a forum, a platform for unabashed, uncensored consideration of the social implications of male gender issues only continued to grow.

In 2007 and 2008 I served as a facilitator for the Alternatives to Violence Project, an intense, exhausting, exhilarating weekend workshop conducted in prisons around the globe. My main impression was how little support and encouragement we give to men’s need to give and get love, and how that lack drives them to prison and often unspeakable, desperate, loveless acts along the way.​

Hoping to find a way to be part of Maryland’s social services program design, I entered the dual-degree MSW/MBA (social work and business) program at the University of Maryland. After getting my Masters in Social Work in 2008, I found no opening for my aspiration. To stay close to the situations of Baltimore’s and Maryland’s most unfortunate men, I did a year as a Correctional Officer (AKA Jail Guard) in the infamous Baltimore City Detention Center. I followed that with a year as a Parole & Probation Agent in central Baltimore. Then I went to work for National Fatherhood Initiative (NFI) as a trainer for various state corrections systems to teach prison staff how to run NFI’s “InsideOut Dad” program for incarcerated fathers.

In 2007, while pursuing the Masters in Social Work, I researched and wrote an entry in the Abell Foundation Award in Urban Policy titled “Asking the Right Questions about Baltimore’s Marginalized African-American Men and Boys.” It did not win. One of the judges, former Baltimore City Councilman Jody Landers, told me the judging panel was afraid women would think we were “blaming them.”

In 2009 and then in 2017 with a 2nd Edition, I wrote Heroes of the Blue Sky Rebellion, a book for boys and young men age 13-23 who are unhappy about the ways men and boys are often treated, especially in comparison to the encouragement and support girls and young women enjoy, but who want an alternative to the darker sentiments of the manosphere.

In 2012 I was named Outstanding Recent Graduate of the University of Maryland School of Social Work. I gave presentations on the Social Work profession's gender bias at the National Association of Social Workers state conferences in New Mexico (2010), North Carolina (2011) and Maryland (2015). An emblematic piece of feedback came from New Mexico: “The presentation and the presenter pissed me off, but it all made me think really hard and made me realize that I need to keep these kinds of ideas in mind.” I also presented at the First and Second (there was no Third) National Conferences on Social Work With and For Men in 2008 and 2009.

In 2013 I started a social work consultancy called Working Well With Men whose mission was to provide “tools and training for the Social Work profession to help men give and get all the love they can.”

Also in 2013, at the age of 62, I married for the first time. My wife is a world-class genome scientist who opened the field of microbial genomics and found a specialty in studying the importance and complexities of the gut microbiome.