Photo: Marcos Paulo Prado
Bill Hawley, a "prevention specialist" in Wyoming believes too many men are unwilling or unable to talk about their feelings, and he approaches each day as an opportunity to show them how. His approach is at once radical and entirely routine. It often begins with a simple question. How are you feeling? He talks to other men about that brokenness we all feel inside, about whole health: mind, body and soul. He is unnervingly unafraid to be sappy. Some men respond with uneasy, unblinking stares. But, perhaps improbably, some respond to his earnestness by talking about their addictions, about their problems with middle-aged bullies who still taunt them about acting gay, about their search for scarce therapists in rural America who can help them heal. Bill is just a man living in America in 2022, one of 162 million, caught between old standards for American masculinity and a new world where such ideas are in rapid flux. Here he sees an opportunity -- to help men be better to others by helping them be better to themselves. If the myth of the American cowboy was forged in frontier towns like this one, why can't it be broken apart and put back together here as well?
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