It started with a man trying to write his own story.
In 2009, Tom Matlack, a former venture capitalist who was not a writer by trade, sat down to put an honest account of his own life on paper. He continued to send drafts to his old business partner, James Houghton, who was on vacation in France. Finally Houghton tells him, more or less, that he has read enough of Tom’s version and that Tom should find the other men and listen to them.
So he did. And as he collected stories from people who were ordinary, rich and poor, famous and unknown, boardrooms and prisons, he noticed the same pattern appearing over and over again. Almost every man has described a defining moment: a point where he looked in the mirror and admitted that he no longer knew what it meant to be a man or to be good, and to figure it out from there.
That acknowledgment became a book. It eventually became a company. But the company came second, and the order turned out to matter.
The book that became a movement
Stories become collections, The Good Man Project: Real Stories from the Front Lines of Modern ManhoodThirty-one essays by Men of Deliberately Broad, co-edited by Matlack, Houghton, and former magazine editor Larry Bean. The contributors were not lightweights. Among them are a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, an NFL Hall of Famer, a war photographer who reported from Baghdad, and a former Poet Laureate of the United States.
Passed by the publishing industry. According to the founders’ own account, the book was rejected by about fifty publishers, whose arguments amounted to a thesis about men: men don’t read books, they certainly don’t read anthologies, and they don’t read about masculinity at all.
Faced with this, Matlack and Houghton did work that tells you what the project was really about. They paid for it themselves, printing the book through the nonprofit foundation they established, which directs the money to programs for at-risk boys. A man who negotiated a billion-dollar contract decided the more important thing was to get a book about male weakness out into the world, even if he had to fund it out of his own pocket. No one self-finances a book they expect to make them rich. They need a financing they think exists.
What the book was really about
It’s worth being specific about what those fifty publishers rejected, because it wasn’t a self-help manual or a set of tidy lessons on ten-step self-improvement. The compositions were unexplained. They covered war, prison, addiction, divorce, fatherhood, sex and death, written by men describing moments that actually changed them rather than made them look good. An ex-prisoner, a war photographer, an NFL star and a poet were in the same book, on the same terms, which itself was part of the argument.
Matlack tells the story of handing the book to his thirteen-year-old son. The boy read the hardest essays in it, about war and prison and loss, and told his father that they described things he was already trying to work out for himself. That was the whole point. The book worked not because it had answers but because it said difficult things clearly and in doing so gave young and old men alike a more honest vocabulary for their own lives.
The timing was not incidental either. The book came out in 2009, in the midst of a financial collapse and two long wars, at a moment when many of the old scripts of how to be a man were apparently failing. Matlack argued that, in effect, no more pressing questions were available. For a change, the culture seems to agree it’s at least worth asking.
launch, and a book tour that began in a prison
The book was released on November 15, 2009, alongside a documentary film of the same title directed by Matt Gannon, in which ten people told their stories on camera. The two were meant to work together, the film leading people to the book and the book leading back to the film.
The book tour opened in a place that made the point better than any bookstore. Matlack introduced it to Sing Sing, a maximum-security prison, clearly reaching for the image of Johnny Cash walking into Folsom. The argument was that a conversation about masculinity, if it was going to be honest, had to include those men whose gentrified culture usually gets left out of the conversation. That instinct, that discussion is only real if it is uncomfortable and wide, what happened next became the whole editorial personality.
A conversation from a book
A book has an ending. Matlack and his associates didn’t want the thing they started with.
On June 1, 2010, The Good Men Project relaunched as an online publication, and the finished anthology became an ongoing conversation without a final page. Under publisher Lisa Hickey, who built it into a viable media company, it grew into something the book can only hint at: a platform that has published more than a hundred thousand articles from more than six thousand contributors and reached tens of millions of readers, all revolving around the same questions the original men asked. What does it mean to be a good person now?
Along the way it has developed its own vocabulary for problems. The concept of the “man box” was the narrow rules given to boys about how to be men and how these rules connect to wider issues such as violence, isolation and mental health. What began as one man’s essay has become a public argument, which has now been going on for the better part of two decades, with thousands of people joining it.
It’s become a truly different kind of publication in how it works. Rather than a masthead of opinionated staff writers, it has built a broad community of contributors and editors across the US, Canada, UK, Spain, Australia and Asia to drive its conversations. It held and still holds live calls where people talk through difficult topics together instead of just reading about them. That participatory quality makes it more of a movement than a magazine. Early on, a women’s magazine wrote that the site would make you rethink what a men’s magazine could be, and as the old lad-mag model fell apart, The Good Men Project was repeatedly named as something that could replace it. It becomes a website that you read and more conversations you go into.
We invite you to join the conversation
The Good Men Project has always been built by people who are willing to put something honest into words. Some have brought books that are already published and the audience is already waiting. Others have sent us their first drafts for publication. Over the years, contributors have written books and plays, built speaking and coaching careers, taught, led communities, and found readers they might not have otherwise reached.
We cannot promise where an article will lead. What we can offer is a place within a real editorial home, an established audience and a conversation that has been growing for over fifteen years. Sometimes publishing is the destination. Sometimes it’s the first visible step toward something the author hasn’t yet imagined.
If there’s a story, question or hard-earned insight you’re carrying, we want to hear it.
We are more than a website. We are an ecosystem. Good Men Project Two substacks manage publications-Dating: How to Make WOW! factor And Substack of the Good Men Project—as well as eight subject-focused Medium publications, incl Hello, love, Change becomes you, A parent is bornAnd Equality includes you. When we connect with thoughtful authors whose work fits our mission, we can certainly consider syndicating their work across this platform with their permission and full attribution.
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