The Men's Institute

By Robert Carroll

(I made the following presentation at The Braided Dialogue Plenary as the representative of The Men's Institute.)

When I first joined AFTA almost twenty years ago, I was in my late thirties. As an AFTA member, I felt very green. I remember coming to the meetings each year and being welcomed by the women. The men were more solitary beasts. They seemed less personally accessible, and they certainly didn't introduce me around to their friends. This was normal. This was the early eighties. Men ran the organization. Women held the social milieu together. I wasn't even conscious of it until it changed.

Feminism brought a growing gender awareness into our lives, our families, and our organization. It was almost entirely created and fueled by women. Although a few men attempted the beginning of a male gender based awareness in the Men's Interest Group, I remember attending those meetings, and most of the people there were women.

Some of us took responsibility for creating a dialogue among the men as both a direct reaction to feminism and then, increasingly as a way that we men could explore our own identities. The organizers of the original Men's Institute included Rob Pasick, Joel Eichler, Morris Taggart, Richard Meth, George Sargent, Frederic La Belle and others. The Men's Institute became a place where we came together each year, and where each man in turn shared what was personal and, invariably, touching.

Topics of discussion and formats for discussion varied from year to year, but what remained constant was the willingness of men to add testimony and bear witness to each other.

Our first meeting was in Philadelphia. My memory of that meeting is that we were confused about why we were assembling. However, we managed a show of faith that whatever emerged would be good enough. A wooden staff was passed which became known as the talking stick. If a man wanted to speak he would pick up the stick, say what he had to say and then return it to the center of the circle. What was astonishing to me was the number of men who said they had never sat in a group of men to talk about anything personal, and then one by one we all did just that.

Within a year or two we dropped the stick and had our communion Quaker style, as the spirit moved us, or sometimes we went around the circle. Every man had the opportunity to speak and be heard.

The instructions by the facilitators were to wait until the previous man was finished, and then not to respond to that person directly with probing or critique, but instead to listen to one another's voices—and to add our own voice in our turn. Sometimes men had something in particular they wanted to say, but more often we said what we were moved to say by the other men's testimony. The premium was on listening, not on speaking, and the extraordinary power of bearing witness was in hearing and being heard.

Formats changed from year to year. Sometimes we would meet in the large group as a whole. Sometimes we would break up into smaller dialogues sitting around tables, eating dinner. There was very little posturing or challenging, competition or dominance displays. Status was not about hierarchy, but about who we were becoming to each other. We were there for something important, and our willingness to engage personally changed AFTA. You could see it in the way we greeted each other at the Annual Meetings. Our relationships became personal. We came to care about each other. We were forming identity. We were the men.

The gender dialogue at AFTA was heating up. In 1991, AFTA had The Violence Plenary. The defining moment of this plenary was when men were identified as perpetrators and women and children as victims. Every man in the room had to confront whether or not he believed he was one. I remember thinking, "Hey, I'm a man. They're talking about me." This was a formative experience. For the first time, I could feel the contextual variables of gender and violence as running through me. It was not enough for me to think of "those men out there" who commit acts of violence. I knew I had to see myself as one of the men we were talking about, and I committed myself to the truth of how this ran through me and was enacted by me.

At AFTA, there were plenty of opportunities to do just that. There was the Men's Institute, Men's and Women's Interest Groups, round tables, Gender dialogue interest groups, and other gender awareness events. This increasing gender based awareness was the hot topic. The Men's Institute was drawing 60 to 80 men each year. We had a newsletter. We called it The Talking Stick. Men submitted letters, poetry, stories, and responses. We talked about work, we talked about family, we talked about competition, we talked about sex. Even the use of the word we, to mean We Men, took on a special significance. I remember writing an editorial for The Talking Stick in the mid-90s. I was using the collective pronoun we, and I became suddenly aware, that in the context of the Men's Institute and through The Talking Stick, the we I was talking to was Men, not women, and this felt liberating. I had found the men and they were us. It gave a whole new meaning to being a man among men.

That's when George Sargent died at the age of 52. In that same year, Dick Auerswald and Neil Jacobsen also died, also unexpectedly, but George's death was more deeply felt in the Men's Institute. He was one of us. He was a founder and organizer, and his presence and absence affected us deeply. Issues of illness and aging, death and dying came more to the fore.

In the last few years, attendance has dropped. Last year only 25 men attended. When issues of diversity came to the forefront at AFTA, we began to talk about whether our homosocial Men's Institute was even relevant anymore. We've been talking about whether to continue in our current form or to evolve into something else or to just bag it. Nevertheless, for some part of the evening, we still came together in communion and shared what it was to be a man amongst men.

This year fewer than twenty men participated, but in the end we decided to meet again next year in Miami. We also decided that meeting would be thematic: Men over the course of the life cycle. We felt we owed it to the younger men.

There are very few places in AFTA where we have the time and space to speak from our heart. The Men's Institute has been that for me.

Robert Carroll is a Family Psychiatrist in private practice in Los Angeles. He is Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at UCLA. He is also a poet and storyteller, and he has toured nationally as a member of The Los Angeles Performance Poetry Slam Team. He has been working with therapists and other health care professionals helping them to write their own narratives about their lives and the work we do.