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Buzz Feed
10-05-2025
- Health
- Buzz Feed
Breaking The Silence: My Father's Hidden Secret
Family secrets are nothing new. It's safe to say that almost every family has probably hidden something from others, and maybe even one another, out of fear, shame, self-protection or even love. Not everyone feels the press of those reasons so acutely that the silence threaded into the secret-keeping lingers long after the secret has been revealed and becomes a crushing burden, eventually too difficult to carry. But I did. In 1985, when I was just 13 years old, my 42-year-old surgeon father underwent a quadruple bypass after suffering a heart attack. Eight months later, he received the news that the transfused blood he'd been given during surgery was contaminated with HIV and he'd contracted the virus. Almost 40 years later, those who contract HIV can live long, healthy lives with the help of medication. But in 1985, being diagnosed with the disease was nothing less than catastrophic — a nearly certain death sentence. AIDS was still a mystery back then. Misinformation, ignorance, bigotry and stigma fueled people's views. We lived in a frightened society — one that largely believed people diagnosed with HIV were responsible for their own infection. In a feature piece in the fall of 1985, Time magazine called people with AIDS 'The New Untouchables.' Inconsistent and conflicting messages about how HIV spread made people afraid to even come into contact with someone infected with the virus. Many individuals known to be HIV positive or to have AIDS lost their jobs, their homes and the support of their friends and neighbors. Making matters worse were members of the evangelical Christian right who were among the loudest voices about AIDS in the 1980s and early '90s, claiming it was a weapon of God's wrath. Jerry Falwell, an influential Southern Baptist preacher, televangelist and founder of the Moral Majority political organization, declared, 'AIDS is not just God's punishment for homosexuals; it is God's punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals.' Conservative commentator Pat Buchanan, a close adviser to President Ronald Reagan, called AIDS 'nature's revenge on homosexuals.' This harmful theology played a considerable role in the way my father coped with his diagnosis. As a devout Christian who'd grown up in a fundamentalist church tradition that believed homosexuality was a sinful lifestyle choice, he struggled to reconcile his situation with society's and the evangelical church's stance on his disease and its causes. He feared for his personal reputation. Though he was an accomplished physician, he felt disempowered by the limitations of his — and the greater health system's — knowledge about the facts of HIV. The only certainties were that the disease spread at a rapid rate and there was no cure. He expected, like most patients he knew or knew about, that he could die at any time in any number of terrible ways. My father was unwilling to chance infecting his patients, and he made the painful choice to end his medical practice, taking an advisory position in a national medical legal association. He refused to allow my mother, brothers or me to endure any form of ostracism because of his HIV status. His illness would be a secret. When my parents first found out about Dad's infection, they didn't tell me. They did, I know now, tell my two older brothers, but they left me and my younger brother out of the conversation. Trauma researchers say that our brains can hide experiences to protect us from having to relive them. To protect us from overwhelming fear or stress that is tied to them. Sometimes those experiences remain hidden forever. Maybe this is what happened to me, because even though how I knew remains a baffling hole in my memory, I knew Dad had AIDS within days of his diagnosis. As I felt my world being upended with this unwanted knowledge, I took inventory of the facts: The news was flooded with stories of people, mostly gay men, developing horrible illnesses because of the virus. Magazine covers on newsstands described AIDS with words like 'plague' and 'epidemic' and 'threat.' Parents picketed outside schools carrying signs with hateful slogans to keep away children who'd tested positive for the disease. A group of boys in my eighth-grade class had started bullying other kids on the playground with the taunt, 'Careful not to get too close to him. You might get AIDS!' Some people at church had said God was using this disease to launch his revenge on sinners. AIDS had no cure. Since no one was talking about any of it with me, I understood I couldn't talk about it either. I couldn't talk about this thing that had stolen my sense of security and safety. I couldn't talk about how sad I was. How alone I felt. How confused. Terrified. I couldn't tell anyone about the nights when sleep refused to come and I'd sit with my back pushed into the wooden headboard of my bed, my knees squeezed against my chest, clutching my bedspread to my chin. I stared into the darkness, my eyes burning with the strain of trying to glimpse the thing hiding just beyond where I could see. The thing hovering over everything. I tried, but failed, to shut down the blur of frightening thoughts and images that cartwheeled through my brain as I imagined all of the possible ways Dad would die. Dad lived for 10 more years. With no road map for these circumstances, my parents were desperate to keep life as normal as possible for my brothers and me, and they hoped, I think, that not talking much about Dad's illness would protect us (even after it was clear to them that I knew). I understood that not talking about the pain I was feeling would protect them. So we all learned to pretend. Pretending was easy. Even though Dad developed AIDS after five years and suffered (I learned much later) one opportunistic infection after another, until the final year of his life, he didn't look sick. He didn't look different from any other dad I knew. Most days he could get up, put on a suit and go to work. He mowed the lawn and weeded the garden on weekends. He downhill skied and ice-skated and swam and boated. He took our golden retriever on long walks. Life moved forward, and we moved with it. Just beyond the façade, though, the anguish of our circumstances hung heavy in the air. I could see my beloved dad, the man whose charisma and brilliance had always made him seem larger than life to me, shrinking beneath the stigma and shame of his illness. My dear mom, who shouldered the bulk of Dad's physical and emotional care on her own, bent with the burden. We were all suffering, but the culture of silence created by the secret kept us from sharing in that aching grief together. Instead, we each traveled our own lonely paths of coping. Two years before he died, Dad started writing a book. It began as a personal, therapeutic attempt to try to understand the mess of what had happened to him. As his narrative took shape, he read passages to my mother, and she added thoughts of her own. An idea bloomed between them: Maybe they had something to say. Maybe their experience living with HIV and AIDS could help someone else. Maybe their unique story could dispel some of the myths that swirled in the AIDS climate of the early 1990s and add a different voice to the mix. Maybe, as Christians themselves, they could call out the Christian community for its destructive and narrow-minded views toward victims of this devastating illness and encourage a more loving, Christ-like response in the face of suffering, no matter what form it takes. Maybe their story mattered enough to break a nine-year silence and spill their secret. Our secret. I treaded carefully around the concept of the book. I knew how risky writing it was for Dad. To me, the endeavor felt precarious, like a fragile cord being woven together, thin thread by thin thread, to create a lifeline that might finally pull us out of our isolation. The book was published in 1995, six months before Dad died. My parents had broken free of the secrecy, experiencing the relief of finally talking to others about what they'd endured. And when it ended up on the Globe and Mail's bestseller list for a couple of weeks, they were met with an outpouring of support from friends and strangers. Support that bolstered them in the final months of Dad's life. Ironically, though, the book's contents remained largely unspoken within my family circle. By then I was newly married and living a thousand miles away. Lost somewhere in that distance and physical separation was the permission I believed I needed to break free, too — the new set of family rules that would help me navigate a world where the secret was no longer necessary. I packed away the fear, the grief, the loss, the anger, the confusion, the shame, and I kept on pretending. My silence hung on for two more decades until I just couldn't carry all of those stored emotions anymore. Pretending wasn't doing me or anyone else any good. I wasn't OK, and I hadn't been OK for a long time. So without having any idea where the tandem endeavors might lead, I started therapy and I started writing. The road to finding the answer to what happened to me was a long and painful one. I had to look back at that moment that divided my life into a before and an after. I had to dig into memories of living in the after that sometimes felt too hard to face. Felt too frightening to reveal. That sometimes made me feel like looking at them would actually kill me. I had to pull back the curtain on the shame and fear that were still embedded in me and give them words. With the careful guidance and support of writing mentors and an excellent therapist, I finally figured out how. Until then, I realized, I had never truly been myself. All those unspeakable things stood directly in the way. Replacing that long-held silence with an honest recounting of the experience helped break down that barrier. My path to processing and finding meaning in my family's experience is carved in words. For my mother and brothers, it has taken different shapes. Two of my brothers are physicians, following in Dad's footsteps and making his calling to caring for others in their times of suffering their own. My oldest brother is the president of a global relief organization that works specifically with marginalized communities around the world, many of which have been devastated by HIV/AIDS. After my father died, my mother changed careers and worked for a time as a family therapist, channeling her compassion and lived experience of loneliness and isolation to offer companionship to others coping with difficult circumstances. These days, I stand directly in front of readers of my story, speaking with a confidence I've never felt before. Sometimes it's to a room so packed that extra chairs are needed. On other nights, just a single soul shows up. But each time, I feel a deep sense of connection to those in attendance. I have no idea the specific stories or suffering carried by those who read my book or who raise a hand at an event and nudge the topic of spilling the secret. I can only know what I've carried and speak authentically about how good it feels to put it down. I can only hope that my words might help someone else put their unspoken burdens down, too. Melanie Brooks is the author of 'A Hard Silence: One Daughter Remaps Family, Grief, and Faith When HIV/AIDS Changes It All' (Vine Leaves Press, 2023) and 'Writing Hard Stories: Celebrated Memoirists Who Shaped Art From Trauma' (Beacon Press, 2017). She teaches professional writing at Northeastern University and creative nonfiction in the MFA program at Bay Path University in Massachusetts. She holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of Southern Maine's Stonecoast writing program and a Certificate of Narrative Medicine from Columbia University. Her work has appeared in The Boston Globe, Psychology Today, Yankee Magazine, The Washington Post, Ms. magazine and other notable publications. She lives in New Hampshire with her husband, two children (when they are home from college) and a chocolate Lab.
USA Today
06-02-2025
- Entertainment
- USA Today
American counterculture movements: where the past meets the present
American counterculture movements: where the past meets the present | The Excerpt On a special episode (first released on February 5, 2025) of The Excerpt podcast: From conservative social movements such as those tied to prohibition, the Moral Majority evangelicals, and the Tea Party, to liberal social movements focused on Civil Rights, Women's Liberation and LGBTQ+ Rights, America is no stranger to social dissent. But what makes a social movement a counterculture movement? And what have been some of the unique intersections between counterculture movements and the arts, money, and even violence? Alex Zamalin, professor of Africana Studies and Political Science at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, joins The Excerpt to explore how counterculture becomes the culture. His new book 'Counterculture: The Story of America from Bohemia to Hip-Hop' is out now. Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text. Podcasts: True crime, in-depth interviews and more USA TODAY podcasts right here Dana Taylor: Hello and welcome to The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Wednesday, February 5th, 2025, and this is a special episode of The Excerpt. From Conservative social movements such as those tied to Prohibition, the Moral Majority, Evangelicals and the Tea Party, to liberal social movements focused on civil rights, women's liberation and LGBTQ+ rights, America is no stranger to social dissent, but what makes a social movement a counterculture movement, and what have been some of the unique intersections between counterculture movements and the arts, money and even violence? Here to help us explore how counterculture becomes the culture is Alex Zamalin, professor of Africana Studies and Political Science at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. His new book, Counterculture is Out now. Thanks for joining me, Alex. Alex Zamalin: Thank you for having me. Dana Taylor: Before we dive into just a few of the counterculture movements that have helped shape who we are, you wrote about revolutionary freedom. What did you mean, and is that a key tenet of a counterculture movement? Alex Zamalin: Absolutely. So the book begins with a survey of movements from the 1830s and 1840s, specifically Bohemians in New York, and extends all the way to anarchism, the Beat Generation, the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement, and more contemporary iterations with graffiti and pop art in the 1980s. I think the core aspect of any counterculture is that it's guided by at once, a desire to break off from the mainstream, to push against the mainstream, but also to articulate a vision of freedom, which I call revolutionary freedom. And what distinguishes revolutionary freedom from other forms of freedom is that it aims to make its own rules. It aims to work through the idea that somehow the world can be transformed into a more utopian space that's based in ideals rather than reality. And so when we look at all of these movements, the guiding principle is this notion of freedom that allows citizens and people to explore their lives, to reflect on the world, to create, to act politically in ways that know no bounds, in ways that are ultimately connected to a utopian ideal. American counterculture movements: where the past meets the present America is no stranger to social dissent, but what makes a social movement a counterculture movement? Dana Taylor: It's interesting to follow the thread of something like the Transcendentalist movement that started in the late 1820s to the environmentalism and climate activism we see today. Can you tell us about the Transcendental Club and how they challenged the status quo? Alex Zamalin: So the Transcendental Club was founded in New England, and among its most famous figures was Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson's ideal was rooted in this notion of self-reliance. He was a poet, he was a professor, he was a theologian. And one of the things that Emerson argued early on in his texts was that it was crucial for Americans to practice the ethic of self-reliance. For this, he meant Americans needed to practice moral conscience, and as a consequence, he was a devoted suffragette. He was a devoted abolitionist, and he was concerned with economic equality. And so when you look at the Transcendental movement and the Transcendental Club, you see echoes today with the environmental movement, partly because it too tries to push moral conscience and this idea of freedom as self-reliance into the mainstream to challenge injustice. Dana Taylor: And are today's environmentalists a part of that club? Have we moved on to a different counterculture movement, or is the original movement no longer counterculture, but simply part of the culture? Alex Zamalin: The original Transcendental Club was rooted in a particular moment, in a particular time. That era was an era in which we had racial slavery. It was an era of early capitalism. It was an era of the disenfranchisement of women and poor people. And so the Transcendental Club at the time tried to articulate a set of demands and goals and ideals that would create for a freer and more just world. Today, the conditions have changed, but I think in many ways, the ethos that inspired the first counterculture in the United States is still with us in the sense that you have young people today who are calling for action now with regard to climate, you have young people who are calling for racial justice or thinking about the ways the world can be fundamentally transformed. The conditions may change, but ultimately, the spirit that drives counterculture, the spirit that moves us in a more utopian direction is with us still. Dana Taylor: The Village Bohemian counterculture movement in the late 19th century and early 20th, with its artistic creativity and alternative lifestyles feels very current. However, this was a largely anti-capitalist bunch. In what ways were the Village Bohemian counterculture and the Harlem Renaissance counterculture which emerged during the 1920s similar? Alex Zamalin: There were a lot of similarities. The first thing is that there were many who were involved in both scenes. For example, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Emma Goldman loved to go to Harlem and to visit the various jazz clubs and discuss politics. There was a certain kind of resonance in terms of trying to create a world that was both artistically free, but also free from the cruelties of capitalism, of racism, of injustice. So when you look, for example, at the Harlem Renaissance, figures like Langston Hughes over the course of their career become increasingly interested in questions of capitalism. By the 1930s, Hughes is at the forefront of talking about the ways in which economic inequality during the height of the Great Depression is ruining American society in a way that affects both black citizens and white citizens. At the same time, when you look at the Village Bohemians early on as they're writing, they're concerned with issues related to the progressive era, control and regulation over corporations and so on. They move in the direction of racial equality as it becomes clear that events in the world, such as, for example, the various race riots in 1917 in St. Louis, the Chicago Massacre in 1919, there's a pronounced increase in white supremacy and racism, which forces the Bohemians, many of whom are white, to begin to consider these questions of race. Dana Taylor: Some counterculture movements become a violent clash between advocates of a movement and those who crush them. I'm thinking specifically about the Stonewall riots and the LGBTQ+ community. What happened there? Alex Zamalin: What happened, especially in the late 1960s, Stonewall was in many ways a reflection of the Gay Liberation Movement and the Women's Liberation Movement, which had been percolating for many years. And Stonewall in particular saw many of the folks who were involved in the uprising also involved in the Civil Rights Movement. So you see the intersections between various movements throughout American history, but there at the same time is always the pressure that comes from the state, which tries to maintain order, which tries to police dissent. And in the case of Stonewall in particular, it was met with crushing force. Just like in the 1960s, many of the civil rights activists were met with crushing force. Just like many of the anti-Vietnam activists, the antiwar activists were met with crushing force. In many ways, the state does not like for there to be a counterculture in the sense that it offers an alternative way of being to what is acceptable and mainstream. Dana Taylor: Whether someone chooses to engage or not, we're all living in a digital age defined by algorithms. What do you think the Beat Generation would make of not only social media, but the web as a tool of self-expression? Alex Zamalin: That's a great question. Part of the things that made the Beat so interesting was that they used certain mediums experimentally. So for instance, William Burroughs tried to fuse film, music, and poetry. One of his major achievements was to create the idea of the cut-up, where he would put newspapers together in various ways, a kind of collage of sorts. Alan Ginsberg would repurpose certain snippets of conversation that he heard on the street to make it into high art and high poetry. I think the resonance here is that just as the Beats tried to take everyday life and tried to make what was profane sacred, social media takes many things that we put in the realm of low culture and tries to experiment with it. When you think of TikTok, when you think of the various ways that young people are engaging with these platforms, they're repurposing ordinary life and everyday life in a way that can be creative and can be serviceable for action and reimagining. Dana Taylor: Alex, you wrote that for many young people, their first encounter with politics is through counterculture. How so? What might that look like? Alex Zamalin: I think many young people understand the visceral response of listening to a song or reading a poem that moves them, reading a great novel that completely transforms the way that they see the world. And this is an emotional experience. It's a lived experience. It's not necessarily a political experience because politics is about understanding institutions. It's about understanding power structures. But at that moment, when you're exposed to something different, when you're exposed to something that is unique and moving, you begin, I think, to foster a sense of idealism and a sense of desire to understand the world at large. And I think it then moves you into a space of thinking about your own convictions, your own moral attitudes. All of this ultimately moves in a political direction because you are asked to consider larger questions about life, about community, about society, and about freedom. Dana Taylor: And finally, do you think there will always be counterculture agitators? Do these movements represent necessary growing pains in the pursuit of what you call revolutionary freedom? Alex Zamalin: I do. I think the one through line throughout the book and throughout the history of the counterculture is that as much as counterculture is always incorporated and co-opted by the mainstream because it's fashionable, it's exciting, it's much easier to sell products when they have flashy things and titles affiliated with them. I also think that counterculture from the beginning has always wrestled with this process of co-optation, precisely because the people who found these cultures, whether it's the Bohemians, whether it's the Harlem Renaissance, whether it's black feminists in the 1960s, all of these figures and movements have something they want to say and say differently. And to the extent we have a society, which on some level creates space for dissent, there will always be countercultures that refuse to be co-opted by the mainstream. Dana Taylor: Alex, thank you so much for being on The Excerpt. Alex Zamalin: Thank you so much, Dana. I really appreciate it. Dana Taylor: Alex's new book, Counterculture, is out now. Thanks to our senior producers, Shannon Rae Green and Kaely Monahan for their production assistance. Our executive producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to podcasts@ Thanks for listening. I'm Dana Taylor. Taylor Wilson will be back tomorrow morning with another episode of The Excerpt.
Yahoo
31-01-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Review: A Podcast Exploring the History of Immigrant Sanctuaries (opinion)
When you think about Christianity in the 1980s, you likely picture televangelists and the right-wing Moral Majority. But across the country, hundreds of congregations formed a very different movement: sheltering undocumented people in direct defiance of the federal government. Historians Sergio González and Lloyd Barba, of Marquette University and Amherst College, respectively, explore that movement's history in the podcast Sanctuary: On the Border Between Church and State. "What we find in the sanctuary movement is one of the most dramatic and successful challenges to state power perhaps in the history of the United States," González says in the first episode. As the U.S. government refused to protect Central American asylum seekers in the 1980s, houses of worship took up the task. The work of sheltering undocumented immigrants, while informed by genuine religious beliefs, violated federal law. Some sanctuary activists paid the price: Operation Sojourner, under which government agents embedded themselves in church meetings, led to the prosecution of nuns, priests, and other volunteers. The movement didn't die; it evolved to meet different challenges over the next several decades. In an increasingly secular nation, the podcast asks, what is the role of sanctuary? The proliferation of "sanctuary cities" and "sanctuary states"—and the development of nonimmigration applications, such as "Second Amendment sanctuaries"—proves that sanctuary, and the challenge to state power it represents, remains an important practice, especially as the second Trump administration brings a renewed threat to undocumented immigrants. The post Review: A Podcast Exploring the History of Immigrant Sanctuaries appeared first on
