Should We Do This?

This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human. This is Special Agent Regal, Special Agent Bradley Hall. In 2018, the FBI took down a ring of spies working for China's Ministry of State Security, one of the most mysterious intelligence agencies in the world. The Sixth Bureau Podcast is a story of the inner workings of the MSS and how one man's ambition and mistakes opened its vault of secrets. Listen to The Sixth Bureau on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. of my chart. Listen to the Spirit Daughter podcast starting on February 24th on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. I'm Nancy Glass, host of the Burden of Guilt Season 2 podcast. This is a story about a horrendous lie that destroyed two families. Late one night, Bobby Gumpright became the victim of a random crime. The perpetrator was sentenced to 99 years until a confession changed everything. I was a monster. Listen to Burden of Guilt Season 2 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On the Adventures of Curiosity Cove podcast, when peanut butter disappears from school, Ella, Scout, and Layla launch a full detective mission. Their search leads them back in time to meet a brilliant inventor whose curiosity changed the world. And this Black History Month adventure, asking questions, thinking creatively, can lead to amazing discoveries. Listen to Adventures of Curiosity Cove every Monday from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. This episode contains discussion of suicide. Listener discretion is advised. It is a vertiginous feeling. trying to reconstruct the past, realizing how much my memories have been revised to fit my later understandings of and rationalizations for what happened. If something doesn't fit the story, it just gets left out. Until it sneaks back one day, suddenly appears amid the other memories, and the simple narrative line is wrecked. The neat explanation no longer works. If there is a truth at all in this world of overlapping shimmy activities, it sometimes seems too complicated to hold in my head. I wish so much sometimes he could come back and tell me everything, fill in all the blank, exactly what happened, and when, and why. I think maybe we could be straight with each other now. I know he would want me to get this right. That's Marian Winnick, journalist, author, book critic, and frequent commentator on NPR's All Things Considered. Her memoir, First Comes Love, was first published 30 years ago and is just out in a new anniversary edition. Marian's is a story of love, loss, and the secrets our hearts silently instruct us to bury, and the way those secrets tend to nonetheless reveal themselves in the fullness of time. I'm Dani Shapiro, and this is Family Secrets. The secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves. I was born in Manhattan, and when I was two and my sister was about to be born, we moved to the Jersey Shore, which was my father's hometown. and it was a wonderful place to grow up, right by the beach with lots of employment opportunities on the boardwalk for my teen years. What were your teen years like? I was wild. My sister was too. My poor parents, I often reflect on how unbelievably bad and crazy and wild we were. And I mean, it literally seems like my entire teen years was devoted to figuring out the worst things I could possibly do and doing them, Just in terms of really awful boyfriends, you know, who would steal my guitar and then get busted and have to be bailed out of jail. And I don't know what the hell was wrong with me, but it was like I had the bad boy attraction in a very serious way in my teens. That lessened somewhat when I went to Brown University for college. I was young, just 17. seeing there weren't as many truly delinquent people to fall in love with. But I still managed to have a very obsessive and focused romantic attachments. That was kind of a theme for me. So you were excelling academically, even as you were blowing things up. Yes, it's rumored that I learned to read before I was three. I skipped grades when I was young. That's why I graduated from college so young. And yes, I was a combination smarty pants and mental case. So did you know when you were at Brown or even earlier that you wanted to be a writer? Yeah, I started writing when I was eight. I had a pen name, Tracy Beth Richardson. I still have the works of Tracy Beth Richardson that my father had his secretary type up. And I wrote these rhyming poems that were against the Vietnam War. and all kinds of, you know, emotional drama. And Tracy Beth Richardson lasted for, you know, probably till I was almost 10 years old. And then I continued with poetry. And my first two books in my early 20s were poetry. So I was the poet. And I was very much poet personality, too. Why the pen name? I just didn't think Marion Winnick was going to make it, you know. Clearly, I might have wanted to be a wasp since Tracy Beth Richardson is so waspy. After college, Marion imagines a life abroad. She travels to Berlin with a plan to attend film school. But the plan soon dismantles when she doesn't get accepted and becomes incredibly homesick. After just three months, she returns to the U.S., longing for the familiarity of home. As she says, she's dying to see the New Jersey Turnpike. Back in the States, Marianne's life begins to orbit Austin, Texas, a city she discovers almost by accident after visiting a college friend over spring break. Austin in the late 1970s is small, scrappy, and magnetic. Cowboys and hippies, music, Mexican food, and possibility. Marianne falls in love with the city and builds a life there, bringing her sister and close friends along for the ride. For nearly two decades, Austin becomes her center of gravity, even as she briefly leaves to attend graduate school in New York in the early 1980s. In New York, Marianne enrolls in the MFA program at Brooklyn College. She begins in poetry but switches to fiction, where her deeply autobiographical stories are met with encouragement, an early step toward the personal essays she will eventually write. At the same time, she works for the Stanley Kaplan Test Prep Company, surrounded by other Ivy League graduates, spending her days writing exam questions and even sitting for tests herself. It's there that she falls deeply in love with a co-worker. It's an intense, destabilizing relationship that ends painfully, compounded by her escalating drug use and chaotic lifestyle. By 1983, the heartbreak is fresh and consuming. A close friend, Sandy, decides what Marianne needs is escape, something loud, reckless, and communal. She insists they go to New Orleans for Mardi Gras, hoping the city's excess and celebration might offer relief. She also tells her about a young man who will be there, a man named Tony. It was a bit counterintuitive since part of what was ailing me is that I was getting high and drinking all the time. but they just wanted to get me out of New York City. And then my sister and her boyfriend also came. A whole bunch of us went in a car to Mardi Gras in March of 1983. This best friend of mine, Sandy, went to Lake Placid School of Art. This is while I was at Brown. And, you know, Tony was a figure skater and he was in training in Lake Placid. So Sandy met another artist named Shelly and Shelly was friends with Tony. So these people that we were going down to visit were this whole group, Shelly, her boyfriend, and Tony. And Sandy had told me about Tony many times. Tony, the gay ice skater. He's so handsome. He's so funny. He's so cool. So I knew many, many good things about Tony, the gay ice skater. And one thing I definitely knew is that he was a gay ice skater. He answered the door when the carload of us from New York pulled up in front of the house. And it was up in the Garden District. And I took one look at him. And I really, you know, it was like, I just, something happened. I really became instantly attached, enamored. I don't know. And people, you know, say, well, didn't I know he was gay? Yes, I certainly knew he was gay. But that kind of made it easier for me to act the way I did. I was very flirty. I sat in his lap within moments of our arrival. And I was just head over heels or something. I don't know. And then they said, somebody has to go to the grocery store. So Tony and I got to do this errand together. And he drove me down to the levee so I could see it. And, you know, we're like in the car playing disco music and smoking cigarettes. And I just knew like, OK, this is it. My whole life is changing right now. So how long were you there that trip? And sort of what was the feeling that you had of what was happening between you? We were there for about a week. Tony was working at a gay bar in the French Quarter. And I would basically sit there in the gay bar the whole time he was working. At this point, I was saying things like, I must be a gay man in a woman's body. I'm going to get a sex change so I could be Tony's boyfriend. Things were so different then. There was no gender fluidity. But he started falling in love with me too. And it was obvious. And so my concept of the situations changed. So I went back to New York. And then we started having this long-distance phone call relationship. and it just was clear that he was getting just as obsessed with me as I was with him There was this great detail right where one of your friends tells you that he has your photo and he like carrying it around with him and propping it up wherever he goes. Right. Like when they go to a restaurant, he'd prop me up on the napkin dispenser and order me something. So yeah, and we were on the phone. This is when there actually was long distance charges too. We were on the phone for hours. He came to New York and helped me move back there. I ended up finishing my master's degree by mail. We lived in New Orleans. So at this point, you and Tony are a couple. Yes. Right? And you describe it as, or at several points, you describe it as you knew that he was gay and you knew that you were straight, but you were together. It wasn't a question of whether she wasn't gay or not. And he didn't identify as bisexual. That's true. But we did sometimes have sex. It was never a big part of our relationship. In the early times, I was, you know, really, really focused on it and very hoping to make it happen frequently. we tried. And it wasn't a total disaster. I mean, we had two sons. And it just wasn't that... I don't think that his love for me, I do think it was romantic, but I think it probably never was physical in the way or erotic in the way that we usually are with our romantic partner. And you marry... Tell me about getting married. That was 1986. We went to New Jersey and got married at my parents' golf club. And it was performed by a mayor, so it wasn't like traditional in a religious sense. But I had a, you know, big veil on and a puffy dress, and he had a gorgeous suit. And the general outlines of it were just like a wedding. Lots of our friends were there, our crazy friends. So much wild, colorful hair at this wedding. It was insane. And then the other half of the people were my parents' friends from the golf club. And they were like, you know, just pie-eyed at this whole situation. It was pretty funny. After the wedding, we moved to Austin. And we could not live in the French Quarter anymore. Because everyone in the whole French Quarter seemed to be Tony's ex-wife friend. It was, you know, it was this really intense gay community and neighborhood. And it was really not going to work out for people. Not everyone could have any understanding of what I was doing there and what was going on with us. And a lot of people didn't like it, you know. And so at this time, it's like everything in our life was so up for grabs. Like, should I go to law school? Should we do this? Should I go back? And Tony had lived in Austin before and I had my long term love of Austin. So that was something we could agree on. the idea was that he was going to a friend of his had offered him a job at the skating rink teaching and when we got there and this guy perceived that Tony was with me he evaporated and you know didn't return Tony's closet this whole job offer disappeared because the guy was so freaked out that Tony had a girlfriend and so the idea that he was going to teach figure skating and support me while I wrote the great American novel or whatever did not pan out. So I got a job at a software company where I ended up working for 10 years. I wrote all the software manuals and I wrote all the marketing stuff. And it was this time of the tech boom in Austin. So this was a good choice for me. And then Tony, hairdresser, turned out to be a great choice. He was really a great hairdresser. By 1990, you have two sons, and you're living in Austin, and Tony's doing well as a hairdresser, and you're working for the software company. There's also this specter out there of AIDS. We knew he was HIV positive when we got married, and we knew that I wasn't. and we had had so much contact of unsafe kinds that I felt, okay, well, if I don't have it, I'm not going to get it. You know, I pretty much have injected it into my veins and I didn't, you know, seroconvert, as they say. So, you know, I thought I would never get it. I thought there would certainly be a cure pretty soon because Tony, even though we knew we had it in 1985, it was really pretty healthy until, you know, for another six, seven years. So this speaks to also the whole idea of like the secrets that we keep from ourselves. Like when he got tested, not every person who had been, you know, knowingly exposed, you know, whether through drugs or through sex, went and got tested. A lot of people buried their head in the sand. What made Tony and you get tested in 1985? size. We're planning to get married and have children. So we couldn't really stick our heads in the sand. We had to find out what the situation was. And, you know, a lot of people don't know that our children could only have become HIV positive if I had become HIV positive. It's transmitted from the blood of the mother. So as long as I didn't suddenly get it the time that we conceived, they would not get it. You know, among the many things I was so confident about, that was one of them where I was right, at least, you know. So, yeah, but we had to know. And, you know, the treatments were so slow and incoming and the ones, there were so many that didn't do much at all, but we were macrobiotic and did all kinds of new age health things and, you know, tried everything that you could think of for years, in addition to AZT and whatever drugs they started having. And so there was a shift in those years when it's so interesting and poignant. On the one hand, the hard partying and all of the wildness and all of the dangers and all of the risks, and the two of you in falling in love know that you want to do this very traditional thing, which is get married and have a family. So did that change for you in those years when you were starting to focus on that? Of course. I mean, I had always thought, well, when I get ready to be a mom, I'll just quit all this. And a lot of people would think, well, it won't be that easy, especially since heroin was one of the drugs I was involved with. But that's exactly what happened. So the minute we started trying to get pregnant, And I literally, I just quit everything. And I mean, not just drugs and alcohol, but caffeine and cigarettes, which I had, you know, been smoking for years. And I wouldn't eat food additives. And so I just did it all, like, instantly because the importance to me of becoming a mom was everything. Tony supportively, you know, stopped doing a lot of things too, though it wasn't as firm a decision for him. and he ended up kind of getting sucked back into a lot of partying. Describe Tony as a dad. He was like a wonder dad. It's so amazing because I don't think he had ever even dreamed that he would be a dad, you know, as a gay man in the 70s and 80s. And he was such a natural. He spent all his time with the boys. I don't have any patience, don't want to make macaroni necklaces. You know, of course, I loved my babies and I love nursing and there's a lot of things I love, but I didn't have much patience for child care in the early years or at least not compared to him. He just was born to, you know, be a daddy. so starting in May 1991 I was on the radio maybe two or three times a month telling stories about my life with Tony and the boys mostly and whatever other topics caught my fancy so listeners of all things considered had you know a little window into our life one of them was about I'm Jewish Tony's Catholic what are we going to do about the holidays that would be one topic but it wasn't like I'm straight, Tony's gay, or Tony has AIDS. Hell no. Yeah. We didn't even really say that Tony was gay at this point. It was like, it's not that he was trying to hide that he was gay, but it didn't play a big role in our life as parents. So it never would have come up. At this time, there was a lot of prejudice against people with AIDS. And it was not, you know, something that you would want as a hairdresser to have everyone in town know that you're HIV positive. So we didn't talk about it. And we certainly didn't tell about it on the national public radio. You know, it's not that we hid it from our friends, but it was not something that I would consider publicizing or making part of my writing. I had a pretty good sense of Tony's, you know, agency and privacy. I'm just, this is like when I'm beginning to become a personal essayist and really explore my own boundaries of how vulnerable and honest I'm willing to be in writing. But, you know, for him, he didn't have to explore that. You know, I could give him a zone of protection. So in my first book, which preceded First Comes Love, which is a collection of essays called Telling, I referred to Tony once as a sexually ambiguous ice skating bartender. And that's the closest I come to saying anything. We'll be back in a moment with more Family Secrets. I'm Nancy Glass, host of the Burden of Guilt Season 2 podcast. This is a story about a horrendous lie that destroyed two families. Late one night, Bobby Gumpright became the victim of a random crime. He pulls the gun, tells me to lie down on the ground. He identified Jermaine Hudson as the perpetrator. Jermaine was sentenced to 99 years. I'm like, Lord, this can't be real. I thought it was a mistaken identity. The best lie is partial truth. For 22 years, only two people knew the truth. until a confession changed everything. I was a monster. Listen to Burden of Guilt Season 2 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if mind control is real? If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have? Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car? When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed. with such good feelings. Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you? I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused Can you get someone to join your cult NLP was used on me to access my subconscious NLP aka Neuro Linguistic Programming is a blend of hypnosis, linguistics, and psychology. Fans say it's like finally getting a user manual for your brain. It's about engineering consciousness. Mind Games is the story of NLP. It's crazy cast of disciples and the fake doctor who invented it at a new age commune and sold it to guys in suits. He stood trial for murder and got acquitted. The biggest mind game of all? NLP might actually work. This is wild. Listen to Mind Games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What do you do when the headlines don't explain what's happening inside of you? I'm Ben Higgins, and if you can hear me, it's where culture meets the soul. a place for real conversation. Each episode, I sit down with people from all walks of life, celebrities, thinkers, and everyday folks, and we go deeper than the polished story. We talk about what drives us, what shapes us, and what gives us hope. We get honest about the big stuff, identity when you don't recognize yourself anymore, loss that changes you, purpose when success isn't enough, peace when your mind won't slow down, faith when it's complicated. Some guests have answers. Most are still figuring it out. If you've ever felt like there has to be more to the story, this show is for you. Listen to If You Can Hear Me on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In 2023, a story gripped the UK, evoking horror and disbelief. The nurse who should have been in charge of caring for tiny babies is now the most prolific child killer in modern British history. Everyone thought they knew how it ended. A verdict, a villain, a nurse named Lucy Letby. Lucy Letby has been found guilty. But what if we didn't get the whole story? The moment you look at the whole picture, the case collapses. I'm Amanda Knox, and in the new podcast, Doubt, the case of Lucy Letby, we follow the evidence and hear from the people that lived it to ask what really happened when the world decided who Lucy Letby was. No voicing of any skepticism or doubt. It'll cause so much harm at every single level if the British establishment of this is wrong. Listen to Doubt, The Case of Lucy Letby on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. By 1991, Tony's health has declined. Then, in 1992, it declines much more steeply. Tony is diagnosed with AIDS. Once he has the dreaded diagnosis, his drug addiction goes into overdrive, because it's not going to matter, after all. He's been given a death sentence. He lives for a year and a half, until he succumbs to the disease, when his sons are six and four. I know some people that are Tony's generation of AIDS patients who have made it. There's not many. But unfortunately, at this point, drug addiction was taking such a toll on him and kind of eating away at his life force. Did he just kind of surrender to his addiction once he knew that he was not going to make it? And kind of, I mean, he just, I think he just wrote himself a permission slip to do anything he wanted to, you know. And once he knew he was going to die, that's kind of what happened. He just stopped, you know, worrying about being macrobiotic and all those things. And he was prescribed tons of opiates because of all these painful, horrible things that he had. So this is how it really started. He had bottles of 200 Percodans and stuff. And that led, as it does, you know, to so many people, to street drugs, which he already knew about. And this drug thing really took over. And in my opinion, it killed him just as much as AIDS did. So in the end, Tony, he's suffering and he's in pain and he wants to end his life. And he asks you to help him? Well, you know, my sister's husband, our very close dear brother-in-law, Steve, he died the year before Tony. So I guess 1993. And he told Tony, you know, the end is, it's just too terrible. When Steve died, he weighed like 90 pounds. He was in diapers. It was awful. And Tony was really on the way there. He was very, very, very skinny and very, very sick. And he was in a really wonderful hospice that they have in Austin called Christopher House. And what he wanted to do is come home from the Christopher House and do an assisted suicide with me helping him. It was very hard to arrange the plan because some people that were opposed to the idea of assisted suicide seemed to find out about the plan. And then our doctor, who was going to give me the prescription for 60-nambutal, he said, you know, please, you can't do this. People know about it. Don't fill the prescription. So we had to pause on the whole thing. And then about after a week or two, things kind of died down, and we were able to arrange it another way. So he did get his big dream. He got out of hospice. We went to the Four Seasons Hotel for lunch. He came home. He died in his bed. Marion goes on the radio shortly after Tony's death. This is what she does, after all. She tells raw, unvarnished stories by herself in a sound booth that are then broadcast into the wider world. She wants to tell the whole of her story, the truth about Tony and what happened to him. She wants to defend his choice to ask for assisted suicide and her choice to agree. I wanted to talk about it on National Public Radio. I felt like I needed to explain how very justified Tony was in deciding how to make his exit rather than waiting for the, you know, bitter end. And I wrote a piece that was about explaining this. and NPR legal department said, you probably should not run this. You know, assisted suicide is a felony in the state of Texas. You could have protesters coming to your house. All kinds of things could happen. But I thought, once again, I thought I know everything. So I thought that wouldn't happen. And Austin was a liberal city. I was like a minor celebrity known as a mom of little kids and everything. I just didn't see it. I didn't think they would come get me. And they didn't. The Houston Chronicle ran a front-page story. And part of the reason I ended up writing First Comes Love was the response to this commentary. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say I got hundreds of letters from people who heard this essay. And they were people who had been following our life story for, you know, since 91. So for three years. and the amount of support and love that I got in from these letters is kind of what's part of where I got my belief that I should publish the book. And I want to make sure that I make the point that in the mid-1990s, memoirs were not, it was very early. I mean, it wasn't early in terms of the form of memoir, which has been around since St. Augustine, But we weren't living in a culture where there was a lot of transparency, where people were telling their stories. I thought that First Comes Love would be published as a novel. Most things of that, you know, really, really personal, vulnerable type of material was published as fiction. But this was in the same period where people who were not, you know, 85 years old and Winston Churchill, you know, reflecting on their long career or something. You know, this is where we started having writers put the focus on maybe a smaller part of their life, not even their whole life, their childhood or some, you know, their marriage or whatever. And write in a self-revealing, vulnerable way that had not really been seen before in nonfiction. Right. Right. Yeah, it was a pretty radical shift. And so Random House said, my editor said, when I said, well, it'll be fiction, right? And they said, no, it can't be published as fiction. Because this story has so many unbelievable elements that we need the assertion of truth. You know, like, how did this gay man stay with this straight woman? And how did I not get AIDS? And how did the kids not get AIDS? Like, so many things happened that, you know, were hard to believe. How did I quit heroin overnight, you know? And so it had to have the assertion of truth to make it interesting. Otherwise, it would just be like, you know, how does this woman think we're going to read this ridiculous novel? When the book, the memoir, comes out, Marion receives an invitation no writer can really refuse. Oprah. As she prepares for the appearance, a producer calls to clarify the story they'll be telling. Marion's long-devoted, monogamous relationship with her husband Tony, who is gay. But then, the producer pauses and tells her something else. The producer was just on a call with a man in San Francisco, someone who insists that he and Tony were lovers for years. In that moment, the ground shifts. what Marion believed was a settled, shared understanding of her marriage suddenly fractures. A private truce, a secret that was kept from her, threatens to become public television. And the story she thought she was going on Oprah to tell, the story she told in her book, begins to unravel. I had given her that guy's number. I mean, they were harassing me to help them find other examples of gay men who had relationships with straight women. Because the show wasn't really about my book. The show was about relationships between straight women and gay men. And so they needed more. They wanted to have a whole bunch of guests that were like this. You know, first of all, I was like, well, I don't know how many people like this there are. And second of all, I don't know how many of them want to go on Oprah. if they don't have some product to promote. But this guy, Kerry, he had a very close, very, very close woman friend. And I thought maybe that's something like that, or maybe he would know someone else. I just, you know, I was trying to give, I gave them a few different kind of contacts, and he was one of them. So I actually told them to call Kerry Jaggers And yeah Kerry Jaggers told them that he had had you know a sexual relationship with Tony that went on through the whole time of our marriage You know, including the early parts and when I was pregnant and all this stuff. And I was totally shocked. And I immediately told the producer, I need to get off the phone. And I called Kerry Jaggers. And he said, but Marion, you knew. And I was like, no, I didn't know. I never knew. I mean, I don't know if he actually believed I knew or what, but he said he thought I knew the whole time. And he also tried to reassure me. He said, you know, it's not like we were lovers or something. We were just fuck buddies. So this was a big shock to me. And I was also so embarrassed because I had just published this book about my monogamous relationship with the gay man. And I mean, you know, I felt very bad. There's a concept that comes up a lot on this podcast that is a psychoanalytic term that I came across when I was writing my memoir about my father and learning that he was not my biological father, which is the unthought known. And it's something that we know, like the sort of we know in our bones, but is too dangerous to allow ourselves to think. And I'm wondering whether you think that that was going on for you on any level and also what it felt to you to be sort of almost doubly exposed where your book is just out, which is exposing as hell. And you're being sort of exposed to yourself in a way of like you're learning something that you really, truly did not consciously know. One of the things that happened early on, right around this time, I went to some campus and gave a lecture to a room full of students who had just read First Comes Love. And I told them about this happening and me finding out that, you know, suddenly getting this shocking news. And they all looked at me and said, but I thought that was in the book. They actually were able to guess and interpret that this, that Tony was probably having other relationships. just because I gave all the evidence, you know, he's out overnight, he's this, that. And they were surprised that I was so surprised because somehow in writing the book, I let them know. So I think you're very right about it being the unthought known because it was just like that. I must have really kind of known because how did I so eloquently convince all my readers? But actually, when I went back and read the book now, I mean, I see where I'm saying, Tony must have become asexual. And, you know, I try to make up all these crazy reasons why this was going on. But, you know, no. It's now 30 years since the publication of Marianne's memoir. With an anniversary edition about to come out, there's never been an audiobook. So Marianne's invited to narrate her own story. But in the three decades that have passed, the story has changed as stories do. Marion knows more now. And so as she sits in the soundproof booth, a familiar landscape for her, she finds herself wanting to clarify, to edit, to rewrite her own story in real time. When I was rereading the book in preparation for doing the audio, I mean, I was like underlining all the parts that were completely embarrassingly wrong. So I set that up in the introduction. And then reading the book in general was like an amazing opportunity for 67-year-old me to visit with 26-year-old me and 30-year-old me. I mean, I think you can hear in my voice on the audio that I'm sort of laughing at myself. I'm very demused by myself. My reactions are very much in my voice. But then when I got to about the third or fourth occasion where I was making one of these insane assertions about Tony's asexuality, and I just stopped and I asked the director, can I, like, say something about this? And she said, sure, go ahead. So I break the fourth wall and I say, OK, readers, remember I told you that there was parts that I underlined in my book? Well, this is this is what, you know. And I talked a little bit about how I just didn't know. But I was, you know, going to know pretty soon, but I didn't know yet. And, you know, let the reader experience with me my little outrage at having let myself think this foolish thing. But, you know, I used to think that I should be like mad at Tony about this. Like I was hurt and betrayed. And that was all my initial reactions that I maintained for years was like hurt and betrayal. But now I think Tony was making our life work the only way he could figure out to do it. One of the Goodreads reviewers that hates the book said, it's not just a woman. She forced this man back into the closet. When I read that sentence, I thought, you know, you're not wrong. You're not wrong. I was just so, you know, convinced that we had to have this, like, certain pattern of our relationship. We had to fit the picture of the monogamous heterosexual couple that I didn't leave any room for what was the truth. And so I've really lately come to a big change in how I feel about this. Like, I think, thank you, Tony. Thank you for making it work as long as you did. I didn't make any space for Tony to be who he really was, or at least sexually. And I think there was no way he would have made it through this 10-year-long relationship without a secret life. Because he did not turn asexual, you know? That's not what happened. and our sex life, which always was poking along in one way or another the whole time, was not really his jam. And, you know, I'm not saying, we really don't know too much of what happened. We know Tony had a relationship with Kerry Jaggers on and off over the years. Were there other people? You know, I wouldn't doubt it. But it's not like I found out he had, like, 50 lovers or anything like that. And he probably did do his best to live up to this standard that we both sort of, I feel like we dreamed it up together at the beginning, but after a while, I think I was the one waiving the standard about it. It's too bad. But, you know, if Tony had not died, what would have happened is that we would have split up and been best friends, you know, and co-parented these kids together, and they would have had probably two daddies and, you know, well, three daddies if I remarried. But I think if he didn't die, he would have returned to his previously scheduled programming. I mean, when I said, thank you, Tony, I felt something. You know, I really changed how I think about this. And I'm so glad that I did. I wish that I had seen this earlier and that I didn't feel so betrayed and humiliated and, as you said, double because of the book having all these assertions in it. But I wish I could have gotten it while he was still alive. Here's Marion reading a brief passage from her new introduction to First Comes Love. Dear, dear, beautiful Tony, it is my pleasure to introduce him to you. As I write this, his sons Hayes and Vince are 37 and 35, and he has two grandchildren, and perhaps someday we will take them to see his square on the AIDS quilt. It is terrible to think of what we lost when this generation was detonated, but it is also very sweet to bring back the long-lost world of the 1980s with the Weather Girls reigning men, the Pointer Sisters jumping for their love, Tony right before my besotted eyes and Sylvester asking, do we want a funk? Please, go right ahead. Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly Zakour is the story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer. If you have a family secret you'd like to share, please leave us a voicemail and your story could appear on an upcoming episode. Our number is 1-888-SECRET-0. That's the number zero. You can also find me on Instagram at Danny Writer. And if you'd like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast, check out my memoir, Inheritance. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. This is Special Agent Regal, Special Agent Bradley Hall. In 2018, the FBI took down a ring of spies working for China's Ministry of State Security, one of the most mysterious intelligence agencies in the world. The Sixth Bureau podcast is a story of the inner workings of the MSS and how one man's ambition and mistakes opened its vault of secrets. Listen to The Sixth Bureau on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, it's Joe Interstein, host of The Spirit Daughter podcast, where we talk about astrology, natal charts, and how to step into your most vibrant life. And today I'm talking with my dear friend, Krista Williams. It can change you in the best way possible. Dance with the change, dance with the breakdowns. The embodiment of Pisces intuition with Capricorn power moves. So I'm like delusionally proud of my chart. Listen to the Spirit Daughter podcast starting on February 24th on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. I'm Nancy Glass, host of the Burden of Guilt Season 2 podcast. This is a story about a horrendous lie that destroyed two families. Late one night, Bobby Gumpwright became the victim of a random crime. The perpetrator was sentenced to 99 years until a confession changed everything. I was a monster. Listen to Burden of Guilt Season 2 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On the Adventures of Curiosity Cove podcast, When peanut butter disappears from school, Ella, Scout, and Layla launch a full detective mission. Their search leads them back in time to meet a brilliant inventor whose curiosity changed the world. And this Black History Month adventure, asking questions, thinking creatively, can lead to amazing discoveries. Listen to Adventures of Curiosity Cove every Monday from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.