Interview With John Mark Clubb

Boys Cry Too — A Navy Commander's Fight to End Child Abuse and Its Silence

#BoysCryToo #JohnClubb

Hi, and welcome to the show!

On today's show I have the pleasure of welcoming retired U.S. Navy Commander and Marine John Mark Clubb, author of the memoir Boys Cry Too, to talk about childhood sexual abuse, survivors' rights, and the push to make it a federal crime with no statute of limitations.

From the outside, John Clubb's life reads like a success story built on discipline and grit. Underneath it was a secret he carried for nearly fifty years. John enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps at seventeen, straight out of a childhood in segregated Louisville, Kentucky. The military gave him what home never had: structure, purpose, and a way out. He went on to attend Aviation Officer Candidate School, earned his wings as a Naval Aviator, and rose all the way to the rank of Commander in the U.S. Navy. On paper, it's a career most people would call remarkable.

The turning point came slowly, then all at once. In his twenties, fragmented memories of childhood sexual abuse by his father, and physical abuse by his mother, both devout Southern Baptists, started surfacing. He pushed them down for years inside a military culture that had no room for vulnerability. Then, on a flight to San Diego with his own children for his fiftieth birthday, an overwhelming body memory forced him to finally face what had happened to him as a boy.

What John built from that moment is Boys Cry Too, a memoir written with Jacqueline Robotham and published by Palmetto Publishing. The book doesn't just tell his story. It makes the case that male survivors of childhood sexual abuse have been left out of the conversation for too long, and it's become the foundation of his advocacy for two concrete changes: making child sexual abuse a federal crime, and eliminating the statute of limitations that still lets many abusers run out the clock before their victims ever get a shot at justice. Kentucky, his birth state, is one of only a handful that has already abolished that time limit. John wants the rest of the country to catch up.

Boys Cry Too speaks directly to men who've built successful, high-achieving lives while privately carrying shame and self-doubt they've never said out loud. It's also for the families and partners of survivors who've watched someone they love struggle without understanding why. John isn't a therapist or a policy wonk. He's a retired Commander who spent decades proving himself in rooms that didn't allow for weakness, and who's now using that same discipline to fight for survivors who don't have his platform.

His story has already reached readers through Boys Cry Too, available now on Amazon and Barnes & Noble, and his advocacy is building momentum around a cause that affects far more families than most people realize.

To learn more about the topics discussed, click the link below.