About
It started with one man admitting a video made him cry.
Everything Legacies of Men is now — the community, the curricula, the rooms — grew out of the response to that one comment.
The founder
Joe Truax
“Masculinity has never been done right. It’s time the world does masculinity right.”
Authority Magazine
- Role
- Founder, Legacies of Men
- Also
- Creator and moderator of r/GuyCry
- Recognition
- Top 100 Innovator, 2024
Joe Truax never set out to build a movement. In November 2022 he watched a video on Reddit, cried, and left a comment about it. The response told him something he had not expected: an enormous number of men had nowhere to put that feeling.
So he made a place. r/GuyCry started as a corner of the internet where men could watch something that moved them and admit that it moved them. Within sixty days it had thirty-five thousand members, and it had already stopped being about videos. Men were showing up to talk about their marriages, their fathers, their debt, their sobriety, and how close they had come to not being here.
Joe is open about the fact that he is not a clinician. He is autistic, he is years into his own sobriety, and he has a past he does not hide. What he has is a decade of being the person other men talk to, and an unwillingness to accept that thirty-nine thousand men a year is simply how it goes.
Legacies of Men is what he built next: the in-person half of the work, structured around two twelve-week curricula and backed by an advisory board of people who do hold the credentials he does not.
“Because I care.”
How it happened
From one comment to a movement, in about three years.
Nov 2022
A comment under a video
Joe watches something on Reddit that makes him cry, says so publicly, and finds out how many men have nowhere to put that. r/GuyCry is created.
60 days later
35,000 members
The subreddit stops being about videos almost immediately. Men start posting about marriages, fathers, debt, sobriety, and how close they came.
Sep 2023
The work goes public
Joe appears on ABIDING, part of the What Heroes Do Podcast Network — the first long-form account of what he is building and why.
Nov 2023
A legal home
A fiscal sponsorship agreement with Global Peace Media gives Legacies of Men 501(c)(3) coverage, so donations can be received legally and published openly.
2024
Top 100 Innovators
Joe is recognised as a Top 100 Innovator of 2024 for building and leading the movement behind r/GuyCry and Legacies of Men.
Now
Rooms, city by city
Two twelve-week curricula, a six-member advisory board, and a plan to open a room in every town that will have one.
The mission
Three goals. Everything else is in service of them.
Prevent male suicide
Men die by suicide at close to four times the rate of women. That number is not fixed. It is the product of isolation, shame, and a script men were handed and told not to question.
Build non-toxic relationships
When a man gets better at being honest, everyone around him benefits — his partner, his kids, his friends. We teach the skills directly rather than hoping they arrive on their own.
Unite communities worldwide
A room of men who know each other’s names is a form of infrastructure. We want one in every town that will have us.
Forever free
No fee, no tier, no upsell. Not now, not later.
Non-religious
No faith requirement, no prayer, no doctrine.
Non-political
No party, no platform, no litmus test at the door.
Anti-misogynist
Building men up has never required putting women down.
Not therapy
We are peer support and triage — a bridge to care, not a substitute for it.
Open to all men
Every race, ethnicity, orientation, age, and male-identified person.
How it is built
Three parts, doing different jobs.
An online community that never closes, rooms you can physically walk into, and work that travels beyond both.
- Live
r/GuyCry
The online front door.
A ~200,000-member community where men talk honestly, at any hour, from anywhere. It works as triage: a place to be heard immediately, and a place that points toward real help when it is needed.
Join r/GuyCry - Rolling out
Legacies of Men
The room you walk into.
Free weekly in-person meetings running two twelve-week curricula, built on eight evidence-based techniques and backed by a six-member advisory board of PhD and Master’s-level practitioners.
See how meetings work - Ongoing
Everywhere else
The work that travels.
Writing, podcasts, speaking in schools, and free books — including the Kindest Kids series, written to teach empathy early enough that it takes.
Browse the library
Ages 7–8
Kindest Kids
A nine-book children’s series that teaches empathy at the age it still sets.
Seniors and their families
Smartphone Survival for Seniors
Anti-scam education for older adults. Free on request by email.
Also underway
The work that is not a meeting.
Some of this is running now, some is in development. All of it answers to the same three goals.
- Ongoing series
Traits of the Desirable Man
A running social series naming the qualities that actually make a man worth being around — the practical inverse of the toxic version.
- 61+ videos
The New Man video series
One burden per video: what society told you, what it costs you, and what to do instead.
- In development
School speaker programme
Training speakers to take this into school auditoriums, on the theory that it is far easier to install empathy at fourteen than to retrofit it at forty.
- 9 books
Kindest Kids
A children’s series built to teach empathy through peers rather than lectures, aimed at ages seven and eight.
What went wrong first
Four things Joe learned the hard way.
From the Authority Magazine interview. Included because a movement that only publishes its wins is not worth trusting.
- 01
Expect resistance
Cyberbullying, attempts to discredit him, repeated platform suspensions. Building something for men’s emotional lives attracts people who are angry that it exists.
- 02
You cannot do it alone
The advisory board, the moderators, the facilitators. Choosing who you build with matters more than how fast you build.
- 03
Do not depend on one platform
A community living entirely on somebody else’s website can be switched off without warning. This site exists partly because of that.
- 04
Suggest, do not prescribe
What worked for one man is not a protocol. The curricula offer options and let each man take what fits.
Money and governance
You can audit this organisation without asking anyone's permission.
Donations are handled through Open Collective, where every contribution and every expense is published publicly. You can audit this organisation’s books without asking anyone’s permission.
Fiscal sponsorship
Legacies of Men operates under a fiscal sponsorship agreement with Global Peace Media, using their 501(c)(3) status to receive tax-deductible donations legally.
Global Peace MediaAdvisory board
The curricula are backed by a six-member advisory board holding PhD and Master's-level qualifications across psychotherapy, trauma response, social work, public health and public policy. Joe is explicit that he is not a clinician — the board is why the programme content is not simply one man's opinion.
Go deeper
Do not take our word for it.
The primary sources this page is built from.