The start of The Quintessential Gentleman began with Eric

“I started with wanting to just create a blog, a platform, a space for black and brown men to be appreciated and to see their achievements.”

The start of The Quintessential Gentleman began with Eric. He had noticed that there wasn’t really any exclusive platform that shared positive stories for black and brown men. He wanted to see the success stories and the stories that portrayed these men positively. The Quintessential Gentleman had started off as a media platform and has now grown into a quarterly magazine.

The media platform started in 2016, but they didn’t start doing magazines until 2018. The very first cover for The Quintessential Gentleman was the men of the web series called Giants. James Bland who created and starred in  the show is actually one of Eric’s fraternity brothers. When Eric had reached out to James about being on the cover, James helped him get the whole cast on the cover. 

“I never wanted to start a magazine per se…I knew magazines were dying.”

At the time, Eric didn’t really think The Quintessential Gentleman should have a physical magazine, but he accepts that it has grown into one. The Quintessential Gentleman came at a time when there was a gap in the market of magazines for black men. Eric wasn’t the only one who noticed that the positive narratives of black men weren’t being told; but he might have been one of the few to actually do something about it.

And the story-telling that The Quintessential Gentleman takes on is a bit different. “We don’t really care about your workout regimine and things like that.” The Quintessential Gentleman

As a publication, The Quintessential Gentleman is needed because of the conversations they are having. The Quintessential Gentleman doesn’t shy away from conversation just because others aren’t talking about it. “One of the things we really focused on was black fathers…there was this narrative that went around saying that black men don’t want to be in the kids’ lives. It’s just completely false,” said Eric. The Quintessential Gentleman is not just sharing positive stories, it shifting the overall narrative of what it is to be a Black man. When black boys grow up with only one kind of representation for themselves, it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. The Quintessential Gentleman is breaking down the barriers and opening the doors for Black man to choose the life they desire.

“I continue to go on this journey of learning so much more about myself. I’d see how similar black men are, the traumas that we share, the understandings that we have, how we’re also not alone.”