This TEDx talk is from earlier this summer - it's short but it makes some good points. Varieur uses fairy tales to illustrate the traditional processes by which boys become men.

Boys to Men: Myth and Masculinity | John Varieur | TEDxLongwood

Published on Jul 7, 2014


Have you ever considered where fairy tales come from and what their real meanings are? In this talk, John uses a well known children's fairy tale to explain the process of how boys become men.

John Varieur is an in-home therapist for Arbour-Fuller Hospital in Attleboro, Massachusetts. He is also a member of Lead Now, a locally based leadership company. A jack of all trades, John has been a high school teacher, a roofer, a bartender, and a banker.

Between bartending and psychology, John has heard more fairy tales then all of us combined.

When he was 20 years old, Shaun McCoy became one of the rare people who acquired cat scratch disease (CSD) and ended up in a coma. Appalled by his physical condition afterward, he began to train and found himself interested in cage fighting.

His experience in the cage taught him a lot about taking risks, competition, and his ideas of what danger entails.

What I learned while cagefighting: Shaun McCoy at TEDxColumbiaSC

Published on Feb 26, 2014


A writer at an early age, Shaun penciled out his first full-length novel in middle school. At age 20, Shaun was struck with CSD, which put him in a coma and hospitalized him for two weeks.

Gender Fluidity: Gabrielle Burton at TEDxColumbus

This is a nice, though TED-style brief talk on one of my favorite gender-related topics - gender fluidity. Burton explores the notion that gender is fluid, revealing insight into a culture that makes us question social roles and assumptions we may not even be aware we are promoting.

Gabrielle Burton: Gender Fluidity (TEDxColumbus)

At one point a few years ago, Gabrielle’s worlds of being a filmmaker, conscious observer and parent collided. Fueled by her upbringing by thoughtful, feminist, and creative parents and being in business with her four sisters, her current project has put her ‘out there’ in ways she’d never imagined. By challenging presumptions and misunderstandings, Gabrielle will explore the notion that gender is fluid, revealing insight into a culture that makes us question social roles and assumptions we may not even be aware we are promoting.

Gabrielle Burton
Filmmaker. Writer. Activist.

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About Gabrielle:

Gabrielle is a writer/director/actor whose current project is as director of Kings, Queens, and In- Betweens, a documentary about the fluidity of gender identity as seen through the window of drag queens and kings in Columbus, Ohio. Her feature and short film credits include: Manna from Heaven (MGM/Sony), Temps (Netflix), Just Friends (AMC/We Channel), The Happiest Day of His Life (MTV/Logo), Letting Go of God (Showtime), as well as nationally released commercials and PSAs. As a director, Gabrielle got her training in film school at the Ecole Superieure d’Audio-Visuel in Toulouse, France, where she received a DEUP degree with High Honors. Gabrielle worked on the television program Law and Order in their director training program. After an Isobel Briggs scholarship to study music at Berklee College of Music, she won a Rotary Scholarship to study film in France. Her short, Sage and Time, was selected for the La Corrida International Film Festival in France, and Gabrielle was invited as the opening night speaker to show Manna from Heaven at La Corrida’s 10th film festival. A graduate of Harvard/Radcliffe, Gabrielle is a published poet, and also wrote and directed the full length plays Sage and Time and Club Venus at the ART’s Loeb Ex theater. She was featured on the Voice Of America program and in the Harvard CRIMSON. She just received the Thomas A. Milhelmus Editor’s Award for an essay she wrote on the giant turtles in Malaysia, which will be published this fall by the Southern Indiana Review.

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Ms. Burton's next project, Kings, Queens, and In- Betweens (see here for more about the film), also looks very interesting and fun.

Kings, Queens, and In-Betweens (to be completed this year) is a documentary on the fluidity of gender identity as seen through the window of drag queens, kings, and transgender performers in Columbus, Ohio. Perhaps surprisingly, Columbus has one of the most imaginative, diverse drag scenes in the country, set in the middle of Ohio as a complex, politically important swing state. Drawing on interviews and performances by entertainers (from those who only do drag as a form of show business to those who use drag for personal exploration), KQIB challenges common assumptions about drag and gender.

KQIB will be the first film to include the whole gender performance spectrum — queens, kings, and transgender performers.

Twenty years since the groundbreaking film “Paris is Burning” was shot, this is a chance to move the conversation forward, showing how drag both entertains and pushes the envelope — making us question binary categories of male/female, gay/straight, butch/femme. KQIB captures how these terrific performers tackle the complexities and pathos of gender expression, personal identity, and human rights — all with humor, great music, big hair, and duct tape.