Bill Bruzy is a counselor, writer, teacher and owner of The Austin Men’s Center. He is currently finishing a memoir titled "The Affliction of Grace," a story about his homeless years and how he got there.

This article comes from a conversation taped over their favorite spinach enchiladas at West Lynn Cafe.

 Bill Bruzy:  John, you and I have known each other for a long time and worked in a kind of parallel. You’ve been doing men’s work at a national level for ten years, publishing, giving workshops and talks around the country. I’ve been here in Austin running the Austin Men’s Center and addressing local needs and concerns.

I would hope the national and local workings could inform each other. Have a conversation about the whole array of needs men present. We don’t do many workshops here anymore but we do a lot of anger management, therapy, relationship counseling, psychoeducational work and even social skills and how to meet people. This all grew out of local needs. On a national level though the work is, I guess, more romantic, less nuts and bolts.

John Lee: There are ways the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing. But it doesn’t mean the right and left hand aren’t doing. There’s no real vehicle and medium to communicate.

Bill Bruzy:  The movement excitement faded from the center. John don’t you think the movement reached some kind of ascendancy and then drifted away?

John Lee: No, but that’s the perception. It looks like it. But remember in 1986 when we started there were six guys doing national events drawing a couple hundred to a couple thousand people.

But beginning in 1986 and 1987 were things like The Austin Men’s Center where local concerns were being addressed. It started, it functioned and it continues to function. In 1988 when the Austin Men’s Center opened there were only two men’s centers in the United States. Now, my conservative estimate is there are at least fifty, and maybe a lot more. People are doing events and local work in a lot of places but more people see smaller groups and don’t get media coverage for it.

Bill Bruzy: I do know a lot of it is quiet work. I know a lot of men in men’s groups that meet for years and hardly anyone ever hears about them because they are self supporting, self sustaining and want to keep it that way.

But in Austin, we had all this hot, very unquiet, stuff you generated going on for a while. The Bill Moyers taping of Robert Bly "A Gathering of Men," International men’s conferences, the center here handled an incredible amount of traffic. The growth was exciting and out of control.

Some forces got wrapped up in the Men's Movement and seemed, to me, to hurt it. One force was the media. Being the hot story of the year almost broke our back with too much attention. You were on every talk show on the air. Then a lot of sitcoms did funny episodes about men’s work scaring away a lot of guys. One man called me a couple of weeks ago wanting counseling and asked, "You’re not going to make me bang on drums are you?" The media made it look foolish.

And the next thing I saw was it tried to crystallize too early into a movement. That looked inappropriate. There wasn’t a political or economic goal like so many other movements. I think there was a mischaracterization of the work in the press. There wasn’t the kind of goal orientation movements have, the goal, or the reach was, and is, an internal reach.

John Lee:  They were using false criteria to measure the success or failure of something that was essentially going on internally. Everyone is saying there is no politics to this, no socioeconomic advantages are being gained. You can’t take a camera and photograph what’s going on inside a mans heart. So by traditional standards the movement is a failure.

But internally now, one woman called in on a show when they were doing the caricaturing of the Men's Movement on national TV. They were lambasting it and making it sound silly and this woman called in and said, look, you can make it sound as silly as you want. You can make these men look superficial and like idiots if you want. But I’m telling you my husband goes to these men’s events and when he comes back he is a better father to our children, a better husband and lover to me, a better member of society. That’s all I have to say. And then she hung up. That show was just trying to measure the externals and it can’t be done.

Bill Bruzy: I see it as a movement of natural history. I don’t like the word evolution because it connotes we aren’t someplace we need to be. As far as I can tell we need to be here. Evolution implies being out of the present and that enlightenment isn’t our natural condition, it’s something we have to gain rather than something we have. But there is change, adaptation, a natural history of development in men.

John Lee:   When a man moves inside from his brain to his heart, from his testicles to his stomach, that’s movement. Nobody is making a documentary about a man who says he has as much right to be in the delivery room as his wife does. In 1955, 65 and 75 they say ‘please sir, leave now, we’ll let you know when you can come in.’ That’s a great movement to be able to say no, I’m going in there. That’s my right. I know what I feel. I know what I want. I didn’t in 1955 but now I know what I feel. I know what is right and where I should be. That’s quite a movement, from the waiting room into the delivery room. It’s a movement.

Bill Bruzy:  Let’s talk about the Austin experience. As you’ve pointed out the Austin community deserves a lot of credit here for supporting and generating men’s work around the country.

John Lee:   What we proceeded to do had never been done before. It started with the book. In 1986 I asked Dan Jones to join me in doing the first men’s group in Austin. We did emotional work with men. No one had done this before in this way. From that we decided to form an ongoing men’s group. We met at my house and every two weeks fourteen guys would show up. Then we went to another group when more men heard about it. That grew into a third group.

We outgrew my room and started looking for a space. But I didn’t have anything to model this on. So the Austin Men’s Center became the first place in the country that had in-house, on staff, therapists, counselors, from a wide variety of backgrounds and interests. I decided to open this because I wanted a place I could go and be with like minded people.

Austin was one of the most receptive cities in the United States to this kind of thing. Why? Who knows, but it is a progressive, liberal, health conscious place. Other cities have tried men’s centers and failed.

Bill Bruzy:  I want to shift gears here for a moment and talk about something I have mixed feelings about with men’s work. It’s tribalism. At one level I love the tribalism. You and I have drummed together. I’m an amateur percussionist and I love entraining with a group of musicians. That’s a very good feeling. At the same time I have a conflict about it.

Holding up an image of tribal ways of relating as a model is going backwards. The drum circles and sweats and vision quests and rites of passage might be good experiences to have, I’ve done all of them. But as a metaphor to move towards it feels backwards.

Connection is right. We have been too disconnected. The tribal way of relating though is encircled. There is an inside and an outside to the tribe. But we are living in a whole new world with connection in a zillion directions. We have a kind of Internet of the soul and body. Connection is much wider than just one’s tribe. We have to be, we are, connected globally.

John Lee:   I think that’s right. Emerson said "The I is the first circle. And from that circle all circles proceed." I would say maybe the drum and the drumming circle is the first circle. From that circle does all else proceed. That doesn’t mean that it’s the last circle.

Bill Bruzy:  Let’s look at this. I want to go a little deeper here. When we’re talking about men we are not only talking about gender, a psychological, emotional, spiritual experience, we are talking about what has been the structure of westernized civilization. Men occupied a certain position in relation to everything else. So now were talking about change here.

In our efforts to organize we’ve had a constant struggle between normal concerns like paying the bills while living with more open hearts. It’s a difficult fit at times. You have to have a certain level of success to keep the doors open. The question generalizes to a larger question for the western world and that is, how do we live our lives, deal with day to day reality, without dulling our souls?

John Lee:  The Men's Movement essentially started with, not sociologists, mathematicians or businessmen but a poet. The way of the poet infuses the Men's Movement. You can’t measure the success of men by how poetic they’ve become. This is a very important piece to get that there is more poetry to men’s work than there are organizational kinds of things. That’s one reason why some people say it’s failed. You take the coach of the Promise Keepers who understands business, marketing, and you see him getting 95,000 men in a stadium. They know how to do all that.

Bill Bruzy:  But that’s interesting. The impulse is in all these men who go to men’s work, the Promise Keepers, the Million Man March. There is this hidden river in us popping up in different places.

John Lee:  But this hidden river the Million Man March is sailing in, and the Promise Keepers, are basically rivers that are outdated. They’re mainly regressive, going backwards, not forwards. The Promise Keepers is the prime example. They’re going backwards to the way things were done in the 50’s and 60’s, not towards the way things are going to be done in the year 2,000.

So they are saying they don’t know what to do but they offer a structure that is not very dissimilar from the structure their father’s and grandfather’s knew. They say you should be happy with this structure because they see elements of it that work. They say, go back home, take over the family, read them the bible every night just like they did a hundred years ago and there will be some better outcome than this total chaos of not knowing what the role for each gender is. It’s a movement backwards.

The Men's Movement that we’re talking about that I, Robert Bly, Robert Moore, you and others participate in, is an attempt to go forward. But without a full tool box. Not knowing how to do it.

Bill Bruzy:  Exactly, uncertainty is part of it.

John Lee:  That’s poetry. You can measure demographics, plan marketing. Sociology is certain. Poetry is uncertain.

Bill Bruzy:  So is this what the soul of men is coming to? To live in and recognize the beauty of this kind of uncertainty, to get up every day and not have everything nailed down and organized to death. To look at life and say, I don’t know what the hell is going to happen but isn’t this a great adventure!

John Lee:  That’s right. We started the men’s work and don’t know where the beginning, middle or end is. We don’t know if it’s going to take five years or five lifetimes for it to ever be fully realized. Men are not traditionally comfortable with a poetic approach to life.

Bill Bruzy:  Right, but we have to get uncomfortable because the world is uncomfortable. It may sound odd but I tell men who are reluctant to see any benefit in opening up a little that this work is an actual survival skill. Being survivable as a pilot or working in a corporation this work helps keep hearts from blowing up and blood vessels from exploding in our head. It increases our awareness of what’s going on around us. It helps us intuitively read situations and pick up on what’s happening inside of us but also happening around us. It is a survival skill.

John Lee:  I have a poem in the book, Too Much Talk or Too Little. The poem was partly written from my grandfather who barely talked at all. When he would say something everybody stopped and paid attention because you didn’t know when you might hear him talk again. It was kind of like an occasion.

Now women say to men, sit down and talk to me. We either talk too much or too little or say things we’re going to regret later because we are just now learning. Poets have been teaching mankind how to speak clearly, precisely and spontaneously for thousands of years. Again that’s why I say the credit belongs to the poets and the poetry implicit in the Men's Movement. Wordsworth said poetry is the spontaneous outpouring of emotion. That’s what men’s work is.

So Bill, how did you get involved in this work?

Bill Bruzy:  The truth. I had no intention to do this work. It is natural for me to have men friends but something happened over the years. As a kid, an adolescent and even into early adulthood I had good friendships with men that nurtured and supported me. I’d substituted friends for the family I didn’t have. But growing older, developing professionally, that all faded into the background.

After working in Women’s Health at St. David’s I moved to the center. I soon had more people to see and quickly got into an administrative role at the center. My life got very involved with the place. So I started going to people’s talks, men’s events, the tickets were free.

It has been a part of my path but I didn’t come in looking for something. The universe drafted me. I’d done a lot of tribal stufft already. I played drums and lived outdoors for months at a time. I’d been to Native American ceremonies led by Sioux and Cherokee medicine men. I spent time camping with Navajos from The American Indian Movement. All of that also came in a long stretch of incredible poverty and struggle in my life. I didn’t have any desire to go back to that. I was just a little allergic to that, but I saw the value in it for a lot of guys. For me though, it had a whole different meaning.

I participated in what felt right for me and didn’t in what didn’t feel right. So I’ve been with a group of guys now, for around five years, who meet every Wednesday and just talk about what’s going on in our lives. That works for me. I didn’t get involved in the national work though.

John Lee:  I didn’t see you that way. What I saw was the center would have closed in 1991 from our inability to keep up with it. With all the energy and enthusiasm I brought to the men’s center it was your energy and enthusiasm, dedication, organization, sincerity and follow through that kept it an ongoing entity that is still in operation.

You’ve taken it to another level which is a metaphor for what we’ve been talking about. We did draw national attention but you took it to the next level and in a way you and I are symbolically the right and left hand.

Because I’m gone all the time and you’re busy working in the day to day reality we don’t have much time to talk. But that’s what I said men have to get better at, taking the time to learn how to talk so the right and left hand, the right and left brain, the yin and the yang, the Beavis and the Butthead, know what each other are doing.