By day, he was “Paper Kutz the Barber,” known around town for creating sharp lines. By night, he was Earnest Wayne Threets Jr., a 36-year-old divorced father who lived in the back of the shop.
In 2024, he was enrolled in barber school and working at HAIRitage in Sacramento. But another breakup, some time in jail and an eviction notice had left him homeless for the second time in eight years.
“The shop owner said, ‘We got a back room. You can stay there,’” Threets recalls. “I was still making money, thousands, but I wasn’t used to filling out housing applications. Being alone gave me time to think.”
For six months, he woke up early, opened the shop, then listened as men opened up about breakups, custody battles and sleepless nights. They talked about the pressure to hold it together. They had no idea their barber was barely holding on himself.
Two years later, Threets stands in that same shop, the air thick with aftershave and talc. Marble tiles gleam under ring lights at each station. “What Kind of Man Would I Be” by Mint Condition plays beneath the steady buzz of clippers and the low roar of hair dryers. Wearing a black apron, a barber’s pole tattooed on the right side of his face, Threets smiles, pointing past the wooden chessboard toward a set of doors.
“I used to sleep back here,” he says one chilly morning in January, leading me outside to a backyard with two sheds and a few strips of turf.
For many Black men, the neighborhood barbershop feels like home. It is a sanctuary spanning generations and styles: the straight presses of the early 20th century, the Afros of the 1970s, the high-top fades of the ’80s and ’90s, and the tapers of today. This is where men get fresh, talk sports, and debate politics. Hollywood has been known to peek into these sacred spaces, from the iconic scenes in Coming to America to the Barbershop film franchise. But what the movies don’t show is how the masks slip off once the clippers switch on. For many Black men, the barber’s chair becomes their version of a therapist’s couch or a confession booth, one of the few places where they feel safe enough to let their guards down.
Power of Touch
What makes the barber’s chair feel so comfortable for men?
Part of it is physical: reclining vinyl cushions with arm and foot rests put the body at ease. Part of it is psychological: side-by-side positioning with minimal eye contact lowers the social threat, making it easier for men to disclose what they might never say face-to-face. Part of it is cultural, says Bryant Keith Alexander, dean of the Loyola Marymount University College of Communication and Fine Arts.
“There are so many different messages about what it means to be a Black boy, what it means to be a Black man, and performances of masculinity,” he says. “But I think the barbershop is one of the first essential cultural spaces of invitation to a set of possibilities in our community.”
In 2003, Alexander described the Black barbershop as a “discursive space” for ritualized activity and the exchange of cultural currency, a place where Black boys and men show care and compare who they are both as brothers and in relation to society.
“But the thing that I don’t want to lose sight of is that the barbershop is also a contested space,” he says. “We’re not just loved and supported and encouraged. We are also challenged. It’s a space of healing, but also a space for confronting the realities of everyday life and how they hit our bodies. It’s a space I enter freely, but I don’t enter blindly.”
As a gay man, Alexander has seen how issues of sexuality intersect with the performance of Black masculinity in ways that can sometimes feel uncomfortable.
“Does it deter me from going to the barbershop? Hell no,” he says. “Because the issue is not exclusively about sexuality. It’s about all those other things that tie us together in the historicity of our beings. So we have to be guarded but open to the possibilities of knowing ourselves anew.”
Alexander remembers trips to the barbershop with his father. Back when Ebony or Jet magazines lay around and paintings of Martin Luther King Jr. or a Black Jesus hung on the wall. Even as a boy not conforming to traditional ideas of masculinity, he felt connected just by showing up and surrendering to the vulnerable ritual of men grooming men.
“Most Black men that I’ve done interviews with won’t admit that component of touch that’s essential to the process,” he says. “Another man touching you, bodies pressing against bodies to get the work done—I don’t want to sexualize it, but the intimacy of that is critical.”
Over time, he understood this ritual as a transcendent act of care for the self through another man’s hands. That closeness opens the door for men in the chair to reveal hidden truths, says Robert Brown, co-owner and CEO of Mixed Institute of Cosmetology & Barber, who also co-owns Another Look Barbershop and Salon with his wife, Tracy, in Sacramento.
“I believe most men are so closed off,” he says, “once they allow you to touch them, to physically put your hand on their head, they say, ‘I am now open to you. We now have a closeness I won’t have with another human, especially another man.’ It’s that closeness. I would even go as far as saying it’s spiritual.”
Heavy is the Hand
Brown has been a barber for 30 years. When COVID hit, he thought he might lose it all. Business loans helped him survive. Six years later, he says, the shop is “finally back to normal.”
“It’s like our country club,” Brown adds.
And barbers play a vital role in this club, holding their clients’ deepest, darkest secrets.
“From what I’ve seen over the years, Black men talk to their barbers about things they can’t talk to their girlfriends or wives about,” Brown says. “When they’re hurting, when they’re in a bad mental space, they talk to us.”
He tells his trainees that they’re not just cutting hair. They’ll be mentors, counselors, and guides, whether they want to be or not. Brown has counseled many struggling clients: some dealing with separation or divorce, some married but missing intimacy.
“I have a gentleman whose wife told him she doesn’t want him anymore,” Brown says. “I remember cutting him up for his wedding. And now the wife says, ‘I’m not happy. I talked to my counselor, and I want a divorce.’ That’s hurtful for a man who goes to work, takes kids to baseball, doesn’t go out at night, to come home and your wife says she doesn’t want you anymore. Who are you going to talk to?”
Other clients come in worn down by jobs, finances, or family crises. One had a child bring a gun to school, which forced him to choose between spending time in jail, taking a deal suggested by a public defender, or paying for an attorney. Others have passed away or even committed suicide.
Brown has a therapist he speaks to when he needs to unload. He often suggests counseling to his clients, but many don’t feel comfortable with counselors, he says.
“It’s surprising because they say they can’t talk to everybody about certain things, but they can trust their barber,” he says. “As a barber, I take on so much from my clients, sometimes it’s hard to talk when I get home.”
Partners in Health
If the barbershop has long been an outlet for the mind, researchers have begun testing its power as a hub to heal the body.
The late Dr. Ronald G. Victor, a cardiologist at Cedars-Sinai, ushered barbershop-based health care into the scientific spotlight. He once described barbers as “an indigenous workforce of community health workers,” recognizing the influence they already hold.
In 2018, Victor and his colleagues recruited 319 Black men with uncontrolled high blood pressure from 52 Black-owned barbershops across Los Angeles. Barbers encouraged clients to meet with pharmacists who visited the shops every two to four weeks. They checked blood pressure and worked with primary-care physicians to adjust medications.
After six months, nearly two-thirds of men in the intervention group had lowered their blood pressure to healthy levels, according to results published in The New England Journal of Medicine. After a year, the improvements held up, as reported in Circulation.
A follow-up modeling analysis by researchers at Columbia University and the University of California, San Francisco, estimated that scaling similar programs nationally could prevent nearly 40 percent of heart attacks and strokes among participating Black men. Roughly 63 percent of Black men in the United States are living with some form of cardiovascular disease, according to a 2026 report from the American Heart Association.
Researchers know that chronic illness goes beyond biology. Income, living conditions, access to care shape outcomes before a patient enters a clinic. Trusted community spaces can help bridge those gaps, especially for men who don’t trust or avoid traditional health systems.
Newer programs build on earlier barbershop-based outreach. For example, ShopTalk, a community initiative based in Lakeland, Fla., brings free health education, screenings and connections to clinicians into barbershops and salons.
Writing in American Heart Journal Plus: Cardiology Research & Practice, Dr. Aqeel Khanani and Dr. Daniel Haight shared a story about a barbershop owner who partnered with them. His brother had been diagnosed with prostate cancer. Learning that cancer ran in his family pushed him to get screened, which he talked about in the shop.
“Though he was initially apprehensive about the testing,” they wrote, “within weeks the conversations within the barbershop turned to lively discussions and jokes, ultimately inspiring five additional clients to pursue similar health and cancer screenings they may have otherwise delayed.”
Points of Contact
Over the years, he’s partnered with programs like Fades for Grades, helping kids get haircuts if they couldn’t afford it, and The Confess Project, which trains barbers to recognize signs of depression, anxiety or suicidal thoughts, and connect clients with clinicians.
“I can ask a couple questions that will tell me if a guy is in need of some help or if he’s just having a rough day,” Brown says. “We’re not doctors, but we can guide them in the right direction.”
At his shop, HAIRitage, barbers refer clients to partner organizations like Turning Point, where clinicians offer free talk sessions. He has seen firsthand what a difference this can make.
“One guy, his wife just left, he had problems at work, lost a child,” Brown says. “I called up Turning Point, put him in direct connection. He came back a month later and you should’ve seen how everything had turned around. He was thankful. He talks about how expressing himself in the barbershop and feeling it’s a safe space, then to have somebody who could connect him with a clinician helped save his life.”
Brown taught Threets at Paul Mitchell The School at Campus (formerly MTI College). He recommended him for his first barber job, then brought him on board at HAIRitage.
It took some time for Threets to open up about his personal life when they first met. He didn’t talk about being originally from Kansas City, Mo., raised by women with no real male role models. Or that he was 15 when his older brother was murdered by the police, he says. Or that he’d been fired as a chef at a restaurant for spilling milk when he was homeless the first time.
All Brown knew was Threets needed a place to stay, so he gave him one. Since then, Threets has been consistently showing up, and even got a therapist two years ago for his mental health.
“I’ve never been the type of person to talk to anybody,” Threets says, “but I was so invested in getting my life together, so I go in and next thing I know, I’m crying about things that happened when I was five years old.”
In the past six months, he lost his grandmother and his aunt, two of his favorite people. But through all the turmoil, the barbershop remains his refuge.
“This is home,” Threets says. “Even when it’s nobody in there, it still carries that feeling of family love. Ain’t nobody gonna creep up on me. It’s safe.”
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Brotherly Love is a six-part digital series about the emotional and social lives of Black men through the science of love.
Funding for this series was provided by UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, as part of its “Spreading Love Through the Media” initiative, supported by the John Templeton Foundation, Acton Family Giving, and Unlikely Collaborators.
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