My grandfather was raising me, and in many respects, I was trying to understand what it meant to be a man. He was my role model.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
My dad was a real man's man, and so were my brothers, in a small town where hockey is king. It's a masculine culture. It made me really attentive to what it meant to be a guy.
The male role models I had all seemed to have been in the military. My father served in the army. My uncle was in the Marine Corps. Both of my grandfathers served in WWII. There weren't any career soldiers in my family, but when I was young it seemed like a way of arriving at adulthood.
I used to think I needed a man to define myself. Not any more.
I've had to be a man since I was 12 or 13. I had a job. And I was playing the piano for people twice my age. Handling responsibility is what makes a man a man.
My father was a man of few words.
My old man tried to force on me a notion of what it was to be a 'man.' And it destroyed my dad.
I became a man. Before that I was a little boy.
I think that even though my father wasn't there, in his death and in his memory, he has been a mentor to me in my manhood because my mom couldn't teach me how to be a man.
I always knew I was a man, always felt that I was a man, always wanted to be a man.
When I was born, there was a very isolated idea of what it meant to be a man or a woman, and you belonged to one gender or the other.