January 15, 2026 • 38 mins
Marion and Tony are madly, deeply in love. But there are obstacles to their relationship, namely Tony’s sexual preference. When Tony loses his life to AIDS, Marion discovers just how many obstacles there really were.
This year is the 30th Anniversary of Marion Winik's memoir, First Comes Love.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:03):
This episode contains discussion of suicide listener discretion as advised.
Speaker 3 (00:11):
It is a vertigious 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.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
If something doesn't fit the story, it just gets left
out until it sneaks.
Speaker 3 (00:28):
Back one day, suddenly appears amid the other memories.
Speaker 1 (00:31):
And the simple narrative line is wrecked. The neat explanation
no longer works.
Speaker 3 (00:37):
If there is a truth at all in this world
of overlapping shimbdjectivities, it sometimes seems too complicated to hold
in my head.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
I wish so much sometimes.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
That's Marian Winnick, journalist, author, book critic, and frequent commentator
on nprs All Things Considered. Her memoir First Comes Love
was first published thirty 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,
(01:25):
and the way those secrets tend to nonetheless reveal themselves
in the fullness of time. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this
is family secrets, the secrets that are kept from us,
the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we
(01:48):
keep from ourselves.
Speaker 3 (01:55):
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.
Speaker 1 (02:11):
For my teen years, What were your teeniers like? I
was wild? My sister was too. My poor parents.
Speaker 3 (02:18):
I often reflect on how unbelievably bad and crazy and
wild we were. And I mean it literally seemed like
my entire teen years was devoted to figuring out the
worst thing that I could possibly do and doing them.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
Just in terms of really awful boyfriends.
Speaker 3 (02:36):
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. I had the bad
boy attraction in a very serious way in my teens.
That lessoned somewhat when I went to Brown University for college.
Speaker 1 (02:55):
I was young, just seventeen. There weren't as.
Speaker 3 (02:58):
Many truly people to fall in love with, but I
still managed to have a very obsessive and focused romantic attachments.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
That was a kind of a theme for me.
Speaker 2 (03:12):
So you were excelling academically even as you were blowing
things up.
Speaker 3 (03:17):
Yes, it's rumored that I learned to read before I
was three.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
I skipped of grades when I was young. That's why
I graduated from college so young.
Speaker 3 (03:25):
And yeah, I was a combination smarty pants and mental case.
Speaker 2 (03:32):
So did you know when you were a Brown or
even earlier that you wanted to be a writer?
Speaker 1 (03:40):
Yeah? I started writing when I was eight. I had
a pen name Tracy Beth Richardson.
Speaker 3 (03:45):
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
ten years old, and then I continued with poetry, and
(04:06):
my first two books.
Speaker 1 (04:08):
That in my early twenties were poetry.
Speaker 3 (04:10):
So I was a poet and I was very much
poet personality too.
Speaker 1 (04:15):
Why the pen name. I just didn't think Marion Winnick
was going to make it.
Speaker 3 (04:20):
You know, clearly I might have wanted to be a
wasp since Tracy Beth Richardson is so waspy.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
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 US,
longing for the familiarity of home, as she says she's
(04:49):
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 her visiting a college friend over
spring break. Austin in the late nineteen seventies is small,
scrappy and magnetic, cowboys and hippies, music, Mexican food, and possibility.
(05:12):
Marian 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 nineteen eighties. In
New York, Marian enrolls in the MFA program at Brooklyn College.
(05:34):
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 day's writing
exam questions and even sitting for tests herself. It's there
(05:58):
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 nineteen eighty three,
the heartbreak is fresh and consuming. A close friend, Sandy,
decides what Maria needs is escape, something loud, reckless, and communal.
(06:22):
She insists they go to New Orleans for Marti 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.
Speaker 3 (06:35):
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 Marty Brown in March in nineteen
eighty three. This best friend of mine, Sandy, went to
(06:57):
Lake Placid School of Art. Well, this is while I
was at and you know, Tony was a figure skater
and he was in.
Speaker 1 (07:03):
Training in Lake Placid.
Speaker 3 (07:05):
So Sandy met another artist named Shelley, and Shelley was
friends with Tony. So these people that we were going
down to visit were this, this whole group. Shelley, her boyfriend,
and Tony and Sandy had told me about Tony many times,
Tony the gay ice skater.
Speaker 1 (07:23):
He's so handsome, he's so funny, he's so cool.
Speaker 3 (07:27):
So I knew many many good things about Tony the
gay ice skater, and then one.
Speaker 1 (07:32):
Thing I definitely knew is that he was a gay iceater.
Speaker 3 (07:36):
He answered the door when the car load 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, boy, I just something happened. I really
became instantly attached, enamored.
Speaker 1 (07:58):
I don't know, and I people, you know, saying, well,
I didn't I know he was gay.
Speaker 3 (08:03):
Yes, I certainly knew he was gay, but that kind
of made it easier for me.
Speaker 1 (08:06):
To act the way I did. I was very flirty.
Speaker 3 (08:12):
I sat in his lap within moments of us our arrival,
and I was just.
Speaker 1 (08:19):
Head over heels or something, I don't know.
Speaker 3 (08:21):
And then they said, somebody has to go to the
grocery storre, so Tony and I got to do this
errand together, and he drove me down.
Speaker 1 (08:29):
To the levee so I could see.
Speaker 3 (08:31):
It, and you know, we're like in the car, playing
disco music and smoking cigarettes, and I just knew, like, Okay,
this is it.
Speaker 1 (08:40):
My whole life is changing right now.
Speaker 2 (08:43):
So how long were you there that trip and sort
of what was the feeling that you had of what
was happening between you.
Speaker 1 (08:51):
We were there for about a week.
Speaker 3 (08:54):
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.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
At this point, I was saying things.
Speaker 3 (09:03):
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 I it was obvious, and so my
concept of the situations changed. So I went back to
(09:25):
New York and then we started like 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.
Speaker 2 (09:36):
There was this great detail right where one of your
friends tells you that he has your photo, and he's
like carrying it around with him and propping it up
wherever he goes.
Speaker 3 (09:46):
Right like when they go to a restaurant, he'd prop
me up on the napkin dispenser and order me something.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
So yeah, and we were on the phone.
Speaker 3 (09:54):
This is when there actually was long distance charges too.
We were yell the phones for hours. He came to
New York and helped me move back there. I ended
up finishing my master's degree by mail.
Speaker 1 (10:06):
We lived in New Orleans.
Speaker 2 (10:08):
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.
Speaker 1 (10:23):
It wasn't a question of whether she wasn't gay or not.
And he didn't identify as bisexual.
Speaker 3 (10:28):
That's true, but we did sometimes have set 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 have two
you know, we had two sons, and it just wasn't that.
Speaker 1 (10:54):
I don't think that his love for me.
Speaker 3 (10:56):
I do think it was romantic, but I think it
never was physical in the way or erotic in the
way that we usually are with our romantic partner.
Speaker 1 (11:08):
And you marry. Tell me about getting married. That was
nineteen eighty six.
Speaker 3 (11:14):
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.
Speaker 1 (11:23):
But I had a you know.
Speaker 3 (11:25):
Big mail on in a puffy dress and he was
at a gorgeous suit, and the general outlines of it were.
Speaker 1 (11:33):
Just like a wedding.
Speaker 3 (11:36):
Lots of our friends were there are crazy friends, so
much wild, colorful hair at this wedding.
Speaker 1 (11:43):
It was insane. And then the other half of the
people were my parents' friends from.
Speaker 3 (11:46):
The golf club, and they were like, you know, just
pie eyed at this whole situation.
Speaker 1 (11:52):
It was pretty funny.
Speaker 3 (11:54):
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 wifefriend.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
It was, you know, it.
Speaker 3 (12:05):
Was this really intense gay community and neighborhood and it
was really not going to work out for people.
Speaker 1 (12:13):
Not everyone could have any understanding of what I was.
Speaker 3 (12:17):
Doing there and what was going on with us, and
a lot of people didn't like it, you know, and
so if this time, it's like everything in our life
was so up for grams like should I go to
law school, shouldn't we do this?
Speaker 1 (12:29):
Should I go back?
Speaker 3 (12:30):
And Tony had lived in Austin before, and I had
my long term.
Speaker 1 (12:35):
Love of Boston, so that was something we could agree on.
Speaker 3 (12:38):
The idea was that he was going to hit A
friend of his had offered him a job at.
Speaker 1 (12:42):
The skating rink teaching.
Speaker 3 (12:44):
And when we got there and this guy perceived that
Tony was with me, he evaporated that and you know,
didn't return Tony's clause. This whole job offer disappeared because
the guy was so freaked out that Tony had a girlfriend.
Speaker 1 (13:02):
And so the idea that he was going to teach
bigger skating and.
Speaker 3 (13:06):
Support me while I wrote the Great American Novel or
whatever was did not pan out.
Speaker 1 (13:11):
So I got.
Speaker 3 (13:13):
A job from it at a software company where I
ended up working for ten 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 good choice for me. And
then Tony hairdresser turned out to be a great choice.
Speaker 1 (13:33):
He was really a great hairdresser.
Speaker 2 (13:36):
By nineteen ninety, 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.
Speaker 3 (13:52):
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.
Speaker 1 (14:07):
You know, I pretty much have injected it into my
veins and.
Speaker 3 (14:10):
I don't have and I didn't you know, zero convert
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 nineteen eighty five, it was really pretty
healthy until you know, for another six seven years.
Speaker 2 (14:29):
So this speaks to also the whole idea of like
the secrets that we keep from ourselves.
Speaker 1 (14:36):
Like when he got tested, not every person who had.
Speaker 2 (14:39):
Been you know, knowingly exposed, you know, whether through drugs
or through 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 nineteen eighty five.
Speaker 1 (14:56):
We're planning to.
Speaker 3 (14:57):
Get married and have children, so we didn'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.
Speaker 1 (15:15):
It's transmitted from the blood of the mother.
Speaker 3 (15:18):
So as long as I didn't suddenly get it the
time that we conceived, they would not get it.
Speaker 1 (15:25):
You know. Among the many things I was so.
Speaker 3 (15:27):
Confident about, that was one of them where I was
right at least, you know, so uh yeah, but we
had to know, and you know, the treatments were so
slow and in coming, and the ones there were so
many that did app 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
(15:48):
think of for years, in addition to AZT and whatever
drugs they started having.
Speaker 2 (15:55):
And so there was a shift in those years when
it's so interesting and plinian 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
(16:16):
and have a family. So did that change for you
in those years when you were starting to focus on that.
Speaker 3 (16:24):
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 heroine was one
of the drugs I was involved with.
Speaker 1 (16:37):
But that's exactly what happened.
Speaker 3 (16:40):
So the minute we started trying to get pregnantly, I
just quit everything.
Speaker 1 (16:45):
And I mean not just drugs and alcohol, but caffeine.
Speaker 3 (16:49):
And cigarettes, which I had been smoking for years, and
I wouldn't need food additives, and so I just did
it all like instantly, because the important.
Speaker 1 (17:00):
To me of becoming a mom was everything.
Speaker 3 (17:04):
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.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
Describe Tony as a dad. He was like a wonder dad.
Speaker 3 (17:21):
It's so amazing because I don't think he had ever
even dreamed that he would be a dad, as you know,
as a gay man in the seventies and eighties, and
he was such a natural. He spent all his time
with the boys. I have, like, don't have any patients.
Don't want to make macaroni necklaces, you know of course,
I loved my babies, and I loved nursing, and there's
(17:42):
a lot of things I love, but I didn't have
much patience for childcare 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 nineteen
ninety one, I was on the radio maybe two or
(18:02):
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.
Speaker 1 (18:20):
What are we going to do about the holidays? That
would be one topic.
Speaker 2 (18:23):
But it wasn't like I'm straight, Tony's gay, or Tony
has held no yeah.
Speaker 3 (18:28):
Yeah. We didn't even really say that Tony was gay
at this point.
Speaker 1 (18:34):
It was like, it's not that he was trying.
Speaker 3 (18:36):
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.
Speaker 1 (18:45):
There was a lot of prejudice against.
Speaker 3 (18:47):
People with AIDS, and it was not you know, something
that you would want as a hairdresser to have everyone
in town know.
Speaker 1 (18:54):
That you're HIV positive.
Speaker 3 (18:56):
So we didn't talk about it, and we certainly didn't
tell about it on the now sational public radio.
Speaker 1 (19:01):
You know, it's not that we hid it from our friends.
Speaker 3 (19:04):
But it was not something that I would consider publicizing
or thinking 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
(19:28):
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 it's 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.
Speaker 2 (19:51):
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
By nineteen ninety one, Tony's health has declined. Then in
(20:11):
nineteen ninety two 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.
Speaker 3 (20:34):
I know, some people that are Tony's generation of AIDS
are 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.
Speaker 2 (20:53):
Did he just kind of surrender to his addiction once
he knew that he was not going to make it.
Speaker 3 (21:00):
Kind of, I mean, he just he I think he
just wrote himself a permission slip.
Speaker 1 (21:04):
That to do anything he wanted to, you.
Speaker 3 (21:06):
Know, and once he knew he was going to die,
that's kind of what happened. He he just stopped, you know,
worrying about being macrobiotic and all those things. And he
was prescribed tons of opiates because of these all these painful,
horrible things that he had.
Speaker 1 (21:26):
So this is how it really started. He had bottles
of two hundred perkudans and stuff, and that led.
Speaker 3 (21:33):
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, is just
it killed him just as much as Aids did.
Speaker 2 (21:48):
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.
Speaker 3 (21:58):
Well, you know, my sister's husband are very close dear
brother in law, Steve, he died the year before Tony,
so I guess nineteen ninety three, and he told Tony,
you know, the end is it's just too terrible. When
Steve died, he weighed like ninety pounds. He was in diapers.
Speaker 1 (22:19):
It was awful. And Tony was really on the way there.
Speaker 3 (22:23):
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
(22:43):
very hard to arrange the plan because some people that
were opposed to the idea assisted suicide seemed to.
Speaker 1 (22:53):
Find out about the plan.
Speaker 3 (22:55):
And then our doctor who was going to give me
the prescription for sixty and M but 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.
Speaker 1 (23:07):
And then about after a week or two, things kind of.
Speaker 3 (23:12):
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.
Speaker 1 (23:23):
He came home. He died in his bed.
Speaker 2 (23:31):
Marian 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
(23:52):
ask for assisted suicide and her choice to agree. I
wanted to talk about it on National Public READEO. I
felt like I needed to explain how.
Speaker 3 (24:04):
Very justified Tony was in deciding how to make his
exit rather than waiting for the you know, bitter end.
Speaker 1 (24:12):
And I wrote that.
Speaker 3 (24:14):
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.
Speaker 1 (24:37):
And Austin was a liberal city.
Speaker 3 (24:40):
I didn't I was like a minor celebrity known as
a mom of little kids and everything.
Speaker 1 (24:45):
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.
Speaker 3 (24:51):
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 ninety one, so for three years.
(25:14):
And the amount of support and love that I got
in from these letters is kind of was part of
where I got my belief that I should publish the book.
Speaker 2 (25:27):
And I want to make sure that I make the
point that in the mid nineteen.
Speaker 1 (25:32):
Nineties, memoirs were not it was.
Speaker 2 (25:35):
It was very early, and I mean it wasn't early
in terms of the form of memoir, which has been
around since St.
Speaker 1 (25:41):
Augustine.
Speaker 2 (25:42):
But we weren't living in a culture where there was
a lot of transparency where people were telling their stories.
Speaker 1 (25:51):
I thought that First Comes Love would be published as
a novel.
Speaker 3 (25:54):
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,
eighty five years old and Winston Churchill, you know, reflecting
on their long career or something.
Speaker 1 (26:13):
You know, this is where we started having writers.
Speaker 3 (26:16):
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 right in a self revealing,
vulnerable way that had not really been seen before in nonfiction.
Speaker 1 (26:31):
Right, right, yeah, it was.
Speaker 3 (26:33):
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?
Speaker 1 (26:55):
And how did I not get AIDS? And how did
the kids not get AIDS? And how did this like
so many things happened. You know, we're hard to believe.
How did I quit Heroin overnight?
Speaker 3 (27:04):
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?
Speaker 2 (27:20):
When the book, the memoir comes out, Marian 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, Marian's long devoted, monogamous relationship with her
husband Tony, who is gay. But then the producer pauses
(27:42):
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 Marian believed was a settled,
shared understanding of her marriage suddenly fractures a private truth,
(28:03):
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.
Speaker 1 (28:16):
I had given her that guy's number. I mean they
were harassing me to.
Speaker 3 (28:22):
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.
Speaker 1 (28:36):
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.
Speaker 3 (28:42):
And second of all, I don't know how many of
them want to go on OPRAH because they don't.
Speaker 1 (28:46):
You know, have some product to promote.
Speaker 3 (28:48):
But this guy Carry, he had a very close, very
very close woman friend, and I thought.
Speaker 1 (28:54):
Maybe that something like that, or maybe he would know
someone else.
Speaker 3 (28:58):
I just, you know, I was trying to give I
gave him a few different kept contact and he was
one of them.
Speaker 1 (29:04):
So I actually told them to call.
Speaker 3 (29:06):
Carry Jaggers, and yeah, Carry 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
(29:26):
immediately told the producer I need to get off the phone,
and I called Carry Jaggers and he said, but Marian,
you knew, and I was like, no, I didn't know.
Speaker 1 (29:37):
I never knew.
Speaker 3 (29:38):
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 buck buddies.
Speaker 1 (29:51):
So this was a big shock to me.
Speaker 3 (29:55):
And I was also so embarrassed because I had just
published this book about my monomon, I mean, his relationshipship
with me gay and I mean, you know, I felt
very bad.
Speaker 2 (30:05):
There's a concept that comes up a lot on this
podcast that is a psychoanalytic term that I came across
when 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,
(30:26):
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
(30:48):
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.
Speaker 3 (30:57):
One of the things that happened early on, right around
the 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.
Speaker 1 (31:13):
And they all looked at me and said, but I
thought that was in the book.
Speaker 3 (31:19):
They actually were able to guess and interpret that this
that Tony was probably having other relationships.
Speaker 1 (31:26):
Just because I gave all the evidence.
Speaker 3 (31:29):
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's it was just like that I must have really
kind of known, because how did I.
Speaker 1 (31:48):
So eloquently to convince all my readers. But actually, when
I went back and.
Speaker 3 (31:52):
Read the book, now, I mean, I see where I'm
saying Tony must have become a sexual, And you know,
I try to make up all the these crazy reasons
why this was going on.
Speaker 2 (32:03):
But you know, no, It's now thirty years since the
publication of Marian's memoir, with an anniversary edition about to
come out. There's never been an audiobook, so Marian's invited
to narrate her own story. But in the three decades
that have passed, the story has changed. As stories do,
(32:26):
Marian 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.
Speaker 3 (32:41):
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 sixty seven year
(33:01):
old me to visit with twenty six year old me
and thirty year old me. I mean, I think you
can hear in my voice on the audio that I've
you know, I'm short of laughing at myself. I'm very
dimused 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
(33:23):
assertions about Tony's asexuality, and I just stopped, and I
asked the director, can I like saying something about this?
Speaker 1 (33:32):
And she said, sure, go ahead. So I break the
fourth wall and I say, okay, readers.
Speaker 3 (33:37):
Remember I told you that there was parts that I
underline in my books, Well, this is this is one,
you know. And I talked a little bit about how
I just didn't know, but I was, you know, gonna
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.
Speaker 1 (33:58):
Think this foolish thing.
Speaker 3 (34:00):
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.
Speaker 1 (34:09):
And that I maintained for years was like hurt and betrayal.
Speaker 3 (34:13):
But now I think Tony was making our life work
the only way he could figure out to do it.
Speaker 1 (34:22):
One of the good.
Speaker 3 (34:23):
Reads reviewers that hates the book said, if not actually
said woman, she forced this man back into the closet.
Speaker 1 (34:30):
When I read that sentence, I thought, you know, You're
not wrong. You're not wrong.
Speaker 3 (34:35):
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, heterostexual couple
that I didn't.
Speaker 1 (34:47):
Leave any room for what was the truth. And so
I've really lately come to a big.
Speaker 3 (34:55):
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
(35:16):
made it through this ten year long relationship without a
secret life because he did not turn asexual.
Speaker 1 (35:25):
You know, that's not what happened. And our sex life,
which always was poking.
Speaker 3 (35:31):
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.
Speaker 1 (35:43):
On and off over the years.
Speaker 3 (35:45):
Were there are other people, you know, I wouldn't doubt it,
But it's not like I've found out he had like
fifty 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 waving the standard about it.
Speaker 1 (36:08):
It's too bad. But you know, if Tony had not died,
what would have happened is.
Speaker 3 (36:14):
That we would have split up and been best friends,
you know, and raised and co parented these kids together,
and he would have got They would have had probably
two daddies and you know.
Speaker 1 (36:25):
Well three daddies if I remarried.
Speaker 3 (36:27):
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've
really changed how I think about this, and I'm.
Speaker 1 (36:41):
So glad that I did. I wish that I had seen.
Speaker 3 (36:44):
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.
Speaker 1 (36:53):
But I wish I could have gotten it while he
was still alive.
Speaker 2 (37:01):
Here's Marian reading a brief passage from her new introduction
to First Comes Love.
Speaker 1 (37:11):
Dear, dear, beautiful Tony.
Speaker 3 (37:13):
It is my pleasure to introduce him to you as
I write this. His sons, Hayes and Vinced, are thirty
seven and thirty five, and he has two grandchildren, and
perhaps someday we will take them to see his square
on the Aids Quilt.
Speaker 1 (37:29):
It is terrible to think of what we.
Speaker 3 (37:30):
Lost when this generation was decimated, but it is also
very sweet to bring back the long lost.
Speaker 1 (37:36):
World of the nineteen eighties.
Speaker 3 (37:38):
With the weather Girl's reigning men, the Pointer sisters jumping
for their loves, Tony right before my besotted eyes, and
Stilmester asking do we want to funk?
Speaker 1 (37:49):
Please go right ahead.
Speaker 2 (38:06):
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly Zuacour 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 one eight eight
eight Secret zero. That's the number zero. You can also
find me on Instagram at Danny Ryder. And if you'd
(38:30):
like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast,
check out my memoir Inheritance.
Speaker 1 (38:39):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:03):
This episode contains discussion of suicide listener discretion as advised.
Speaker 3 (00:11):
It is a vertigious 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.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
If something doesn't fit the story, it just gets left
out until it sneaks.
Speaker 3 (00:28):
Back one day, suddenly appears amid the other memories.
Speaker 1 (00:31):
And the simple narrative line is wrecked. The neat explanation
no longer works.
Speaker 3 (00:37):
If there is a truth at all in this world
of overlapping shimbdjectivities, it sometimes seems too complicated to hold
in my head.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
I wish so much sometimes.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
That's Marian Winnick, journalist, author, book critic, and frequent commentator
on nprs All Things Considered. Her memoir First Comes Love
was first published thirty 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,
(01:25):
and the way those secrets tend to nonetheless reveal themselves
in the fullness of time. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this
is family secrets, the secrets that are kept from us,
the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we
(01:48):
keep from ourselves.
Speaker 3 (01:55):
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.
Speaker 1 (02:11):
For my teen years, What were your teeniers like? I
was wild? My sister was too. My poor parents.
Speaker 3 (02:18):
I often reflect on how unbelievably bad and crazy and
wild we were. And I mean it literally seemed like
my entire teen years was devoted to figuring out the
worst thing that I could possibly do and doing them.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
Just in terms of really awful boyfriends.
Speaker 3 (02:36):
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. I had the bad
boy attraction in a very serious way in my teens.
That lessoned somewhat when I went to Brown University for college.
Speaker 1 (02:55):
I was young, just seventeen. There weren't as.
Speaker 3 (02:58):
Many truly people to fall in love with, but I
still managed to have a very obsessive and focused romantic attachments.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
That was a kind of a theme for me.
Speaker 2 (03:12):
So you were excelling academically even as you were blowing
things up.
Speaker 3 (03:17):
Yes, it's rumored that I learned to read before I
was three.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
I skipped of grades when I was young. That's why
I graduated from college so young.
Speaker 3 (03:25):
And yeah, I was a combination smarty pants and mental case.
Speaker 2 (03:32):
So did you know when you were a Brown or
even earlier that you wanted to be a writer?
Speaker 1 (03:40):
Yeah? I started writing when I was eight. I had
a pen name Tracy Beth Richardson.
Speaker 3 (03:45):
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
ten years old, and then I continued with poetry, and
(04:06):
my first two books.
Speaker 1 (04:08):
That in my early twenties were poetry.
Speaker 3 (04:10):
So I was a poet and I was very much
poet personality too.
Speaker 1 (04:15):
Why the pen name. I just didn't think Marion Winnick
was going to make it.
Speaker 3 (04:20):
You know, clearly I might have wanted to be a
wasp since Tracy Beth Richardson is so waspy.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
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 US,
longing for the familiarity of home, as she says she's
(04:49):
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 her visiting a college friend over
spring break. Austin in the late nineteen seventies is small,
scrappy and magnetic, cowboys and hippies, music, Mexican food, and possibility.
(05:12):
Marian 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 nineteen eighties. In
New York, Marian enrolls in the MFA program at Brooklyn College.
(05:34):
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 day's writing
exam questions and even sitting for tests herself. It's there
(05:58):
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 nineteen eighty three,
the heartbreak is fresh and consuming. A close friend, Sandy,
decides what Maria needs is escape, something loud, reckless, and communal.
(06:22):
She insists they go to New Orleans for Marti 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.
Speaker 3 (06:35):
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 Marty Brown in March in nineteen
eighty three. This best friend of mine, Sandy, went to
(06:57):
Lake Placid School of Art. Well, this is while I
was at and you know, Tony was a figure skater
and he was in.
Speaker 1 (07:03):
Training in Lake Placid.
Speaker 3 (07:05):
So Sandy met another artist named Shelley, and Shelley was
friends with Tony. So these people that we were going
down to visit were this, this whole group. Shelley, her boyfriend,
and Tony and Sandy had told me about Tony many times,
Tony the gay ice skater.
Speaker 1 (07:23):
He's so handsome, he's so funny, he's so cool.
Speaker 3 (07:27):
So I knew many many good things about Tony the
gay ice skater, and then one.
Speaker 1 (07:32):
Thing I definitely knew is that he was a gay iceater.
Speaker 3 (07:36):
He answered the door when the car load 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, boy, I just something happened. I really
became instantly attached, enamored.
Speaker 1 (07:58):
I don't know, and I people, you know, saying, well,
I didn't I know he was gay.
Speaker 3 (08:03):
Yes, I certainly knew he was gay, but that kind
of made it easier for me.
Speaker 1 (08:06):
To act the way I did. I was very flirty.
Speaker 3 (08:12):
I sat in his lap within moments of us our arrival,
and I was just.
Speaker 1 (08:19):
Head over heels or something, I don't know.
Speaker 3 (08:21):
And then they said, somebody has to go to the
grocery storre, so Tony and I got to do this
errand together, and he drove me down.
Speaker 1 (08:29):
To the levee so I could see.
Speaker 3 (08:31):
It, and you know, we're like in the car, playing
disco music and smoking cigarettes, and I just knew, like, Okay,
this is it.
Speaker 1 (08:40):
My whole life is changing right now.
Speaker 2 (08:43):
So how long were you there that trip and sort
of what was the feeling that you had of what
was happening between you.
Speaker 1 (08:51):
We were there for about a week.
Speaker 3 (08:54):
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.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
At this point, I was saying things.
Speaker 3 (09:03):
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 I it was obvious, and so my
concept of the situations changed. So I went back to
(09:25):
New York and then we started like 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.
Speaker 2 (09:36):
There was this great detail right where one of your
friends tells you that he has your photo, and he's
like carrying it around with him and propping it up
wherever he goes.
Speaker 3 (09:46):
Right like when they go to a restaurant, he'd prop
me up on the napkin dispenser and order me something.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
So yeah, and we were on the phone.
Speaker 3 (09:54):
This is when there actually was long distance charges too.
We were yell the phones for hours. He came to
New York and helped me move back there. I ended
up finishing my master's degree by mail.
Speaker 1 (10:06):
We lived in New Orleans.
Speaker 2 (10:08):
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.
Speaker 1 (10:23):
It wasn't a question of whether she wasn't gay or not.
And he didn't identify as bisexual.
Speaker 3 (10:28):
That's true, but we did sometimes have set 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 have two
you know, we had two sons, and it just wasn't that.
Speaker 1 (10:54):
I don't think that his love for me.
Speaker 3 (10:56):
I do think it was romantic, but I think it
never was physical in the way or erotic in the
way that we usually are with our romantic partner.
Speaker 1 (11:08):
And you marry. Tell me about getting married. That was
nineteen eighty six.
Speaker 3 (11:14):
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.
Speaker 1 (11:23):
But I had a you know.
Speaker 3 (11:25):
Big mail on in a puffy dress and he was
at a gorgeous suit, and the general outlines of it were.
Speaker 1 (11:33):
Just like a wedding.
Speaker 3 (11:36):
Lots of our friends were there are crazy friends, so
much wild, colorful hair at this wedding.
Speaker 1 (11:43):
It was insane. And then the other half of the
people were my parents' friends from.
Speaker 3 (11:46):
The golf club, and they were like, you know, just
pie eyed at this whole situation.
Speaker 1 (11:52):
It was pretty funny.
Speaker 3 (11:54):
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 wifefriend.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
It was, you know, it.
Speaker 3 (12:05):
Was this really intense gay community and neighborhood and it
was really not going to work out for people.
Speaker 1 (12:13):
Not everyone could have any understanding of what I was.
Speaker 3 (12:17):
Doing there and what was going on with us, and
a lot of people didn't like it, you know, and
so if this time, it's like everything in our life
was so up for grams like should I go to
law school, shouldn't we do this?
Speaker 1 (12:29):
Should I go back?
Speaker 3 (12:30):
And Tony had lived in Austin before, and I had
my long term.
Speaker 1 (12:35):
Love of Boston, so that was something we could agree on.
Speaker 3 (12:38):
The idea was that he was going to hit A
friend of his had offered him a job at.
Speaker 1 (12:42):
The skating rink teaching.
Speaker 3 (12:44):
And when we got there and this guy perceived that
Tony was with me, he evaporated that and you know,
didn't return Tony's clause. This whole job offer disappeared because
the guy was so freaked out that Tony had a girlfriend.
Speaker 1 (13:02):
And so the idea that he was going to teach
bigger skating and.
Speaker 3 (13:06):
Support me while I wrote the Great American Novel or
whatever was did not pan out.
Speaker 1 (13:11):
So I got.
Speaker 3 (13:13):
A job from it at a software company where I
ended up working for ten 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 good choice for me. And
then Tony hairdresser turned out to be a great choice.
Speaker 1 (13:33):
He was really a great hairdresser.
Speaker 2 (13:36):
By nineteen ninety, 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.
Speaker 3 (13:52):
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.
Speaker 1 (14:07):
You know, I pretty much have injected it into my
veins and.
Speaker 3 (14:10):
I don't have and I didn't you know, zero convert
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 nineteen eighty five, it was really pretty
healthy until you know, for another six seven years.
Speaker 2 (14:29):
So this speaks to also the whole idea of like
the secrets that we keep from ourselves.
Speaker 1 (14:36):
Like when he got tested, not every person who had.
Speaker 2 (14:39):
Been you know, knowingly exposed, you know, whether through drugs
or through 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 nineteen eighty five.
Speaker 1 (14:56):
We're planning to.
Speaker 3 (14:57):
Get married and have children, so we didn'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.
Speaker 1 (15:15):
It's transmitted from the blood of the mother.
Speaker 3 (15:18):
So as long as I didn't suddenly get it the
time that we conceived, they would not get it.
Speaker 1 (15:25):
You know. Among the many things I was so.
Speaker 3 (15:27):
Confident about, that was one of them where I was
right at least, you know, so uh yeah, but we
had to know, and you know, the treatments were so
slow and in coming, and the ones there were so
many that did app 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
(15:48):
think of for years, in addition to AZT and whatever
drugs they started having.
Speaker 2 (15:55):
And so there was a shift in those years when
it's so interesting and plinian 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
(16:16):
and have a family. So did that change for you
in those years when you were starting to focus on that.
Speaker 3 (16:24):
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 heroine was one
of the drugs I was involved with.
Speaker 1 (16:37):
But that's exactly what happened.
Speaker 3 (16:40):
So the minute we started trying to get pregnantly, I
just quit everything.
Speaker 1 (16:45):
And I mean not just drugs and alcohol, but caffeine.
Speaker 3 (16:49):
And cigarettes, which I had been smoking for years, and
I wouldn't need food additives, and so I just did
it all like instantly, because the important.
Speaker 1 (17:00):
To me of becoming a mom was everything.
Speaker 3 (17:04):
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.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
Describe Tony as a dad. He was like a wonder dad.
Speaker 3 (17:21):
It's so amazing because I don't think he had ever
even dreamed that he would be a dad, as you know,
as a gay man in the seventies and eighties, and
he was such a natural. He spent all his time
with the boys. I have, like, don't have any patients.
Don't want to make macaroni necklaces, you know of course,
I loved my babies, and I loved nursing, and there's
(17:42):
a lot of things I love, but I didn't have
much patience for childcare 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 nineteen
ninety one, I was on the radio maybe two or
(18:02):
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.
Speaker 1 (18:20):
What are we going to do about the holidays? That
would be one topic.
Speaker 2 (18:23):
But it wasn't like I'm straight, Tony's gay, or Tony
has held no yeah.
Speaker 3 (18:28):
Yeah. We didn't even really say that Tony was gay
at this point.
Speaker 1 (18:34):
It was like, it's not that he was trying.
Speaker 3 (18:36):
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.
Speaker 1 (18:45):
There was a lot of prejudice against.
Speaker 3 (18:47):
People with AIDS, and it was not you know, something
that you would want as a hairdresser to have everyone
in town know.
Speaker 1 (18:54):
That you're HIV positive.
Speaker 3 (18:56):
So we didn't talk about it, and we certainly didn't
tell about it on the now sational public radio.
Speaker 1 (19:01):
You know, it's not that we hid it from our friends.
Speaker 3 (19:04):
But it was not something that I would consider publicizing
or thinking 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
(19:28):
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 it's 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.
Speaker 2 (19:51):
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
By nineteen ninety one, Tony's health has declined. Then in
(20:11):
nineteen ninety two 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.
Speaker 3 (20:34):
I know, some people that are Tony's generation of AIDS
are 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.
Speaker 2 (20:53):
Did he just kind of surrender to his addiction once
he knew that he was not going to make it.
Speaker 3 (21:00):
Kind of, I mean, he just he I think he
just wrote himself a permission slip.
Speaker 1 (21:04):
That to do anything he wanted to, you.
Speaker 3 (21:06):
Know, and once he knew he was going to die,
that's kind of what happened. He he just stopped, you know,
worrying about being macrobiotic and all those things. And he
was prescribed tons of opiates because of these all these painful,
horrible things that he had.
Speaker 1 (21:26):
So this is how it really started. He had bottles
of two hundred perkudans and stuff, and that led.
Speaker 3 (21:33):
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, is just
it killed him just as much as Aids did.
Speaker 2 (21:48):
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.
Speaker 3 (21:58):
Well, you know, my sister's husband are very close dear
brother in law, Steve, he died the year before Tony,
so I guess nineteen ninety three, and he told Tony,
you know, the end is it's just too terrible. When
Steve died, he weighed like ninety pounds. He was in diapers.
Speaker 1 (22:19):
It was awful. And Tony was really on the way there.
Speaker 3 (22:23):
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
(22:43):
very hard to arrange the plan because some people that
were opposed to the idea assisted suicide seemed to.
Speaker 1 (22:53):
Find out about the plan.
Speaker 3 (22:55):
And then our doctor who was going to give me
the prescription for sixty and M but 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.
Speaker 1 (23:07):
And then about after a week or two, things kind of.
Speaker 3 (23:12):
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.
Speaker 1 (23:23):
He came home. He died in his bed.
Speaker 2 (23:31):
Marian 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
(23:52):
ask for assisted suicide and her choice to agree. I
wanted to talk about it on National Public READEO. I
felt like I needed to explain how.
Speaker 3 (24:04):
Very justified Tony was in deciding how to make his
exit rather than waiting for the you know, bitter end.
Speaker 1 (24:12):
And I wrote that.
Speaker 3 (24:14):
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.
Speaker 1 (24:37):
And Austin was a liberal city.
Speaker 3 (24:40):
I didn't I was like a minor celebrity known as
a mom of little kids and everything.
Speaker 1 (24:45):
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.
Speaker 3 (24:51):
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 ninety one, so for three years.
(25:14):
And the amount of support and love that I got
in from these letters is kind of was part of
where I got my belief that I should publish the book.
Speaker 2 (25:27):
And I want to make sure that I make the
point that in the mid nineteen.
Speaker 1 (25:32):
Nineties, memoirs were not it was.
Speaker 2 (25:35):
It was very early, and I mean it wasn't early
in terms of the form of memoir, which has been
around since St.
Speaker 1 (25:41):
Augustine.
Speaker 2 (25:42):
But we weren't living in a culture where there was
a lot of transparency where people were telling their stories.
Speaker 1 (25:51):
I thought that First Comes Love would be published as
a novel.
Speaker 3 (25:54):
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,
eighty five years old and Winston Churchill, you know, reflecting
on their long career or something.
Speaker 1 (26:13):
You know, this is where we started having writers.
Speaker 3 (26:16):
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 right in a self revealing,
vulnerable way that had not really been seen before in nonfiction.
Speaker 1 (26:31):
Right, right, yeah, it was.
Speaker 3 (26:33):
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?
Speaker 1 (26:55):
And how did I not get AIDS? And how did
the kids not get AIDS? And how did this like
so many things happened. You know, we're hard to believe.
How did I quit Heroin overnight?
Speaker 3 (27:04):
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?
Speaker 2 (27:20):
When the book, the memoir comes out, Marian 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, Marian's long devoted, monogamous relationship with her
husband Tony, who is gay. But then the producer pauses
(27:42):
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 Marian believed was a settled,
shared understanding of her marriage suddenly fractures a private truth,
(28:03):
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.
Speaker 1 (28:16):
I had given her that guy's number. I mean they
were harassing me to.
Speaker 3 (28:22):
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.
Speaker 1 (28:36):
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.
Speaker 3 (28:42):
And second of all, I don't know how many of
them want to go on OPRAH because they don't.
Speaker 1 (28:46):
You know, have some product to promote.
Speaker 3 (28:48):
But this guy Carry, he had a very close, very
very close woman friend, and I thought.
Speaker 1 (28:54):
Maybe that something like that, or maybe he would know
someone else.
Speaker 3 (28:58):
I just, you know, I was trying to give I
gave him a few different kept contact and he was
one of them.
Speaker 1 (29:04):
So I actually told them to call.
Speaker 3 (29:06):
Carry Jaggers, and yeah, Carry 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
(29:26):
immediately told the producer I need to get off the phone,
and I called Carry Jaggers and he said, but Marian,
you knew, and I was like, no, I didn't know.
Speaker 1 (29:37):
I never knew.
Speaker 3 (29:38):
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 buck buddies.
Speaker 1 (29:51):
So this was a big shock to me.
Speaker 3 (29:55):
And I was also so embarrassed because I had just
published this book about my monomon, I mean, his relationshipship
with me gay and I mean, you know, I felt
very bad.
Speaker 2 (30:05):
There's a concept that comes up a lot on this
podcast that is a psychoanalytic term that I came across
when 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,
(30:26):
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
(30:48):
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.
Speaker 3 (30:57):
One of the things that happened early on, right around
the 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.
Speaker 1 (31:13):
And they all looked at me and said, but I
thought that was in the book.
Speaker 3 (31:19):
They actually were able to guess and interpret that this
that Tony was probably having other relationships.
Speaker 1 (31:26):
Just because I gave all the evidence.
Speaker 3 (31:29):
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's it was just like that I must have really
kind of known, because how did I.
Speaker 1 (31:48):
So eloquently to convince all my readers. But actually, when
I went back and.
Speaker 3 (31:52):
Read the book, now, I mean, I see where I'm
saying Tony must have become a sexual, And you know,
I try to make up all the these crazy reasons
why this was going on.
Speaker 2 (32:03):
But you know, no, It's now thirty years since the
publication of Marian's memoir, with an anniversary edition about to
come out. There's never been an audiobook, so Marian's invited
to narrate her own story. But in the three decades
that have passed, the story has changed. As stories do,
(32:26):
Marian 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.
Speaker 3 (32:41):
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 sixty seven year
(33:01):
old me to visit with twenty six year old me
and thirty year old me. I mean, I think you
can hear in my voice on the audio that I've
you know, I'm short of laughing at myself. I'm very
dimused 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
(33:23):
assertions about Tony's asexuality, and I just stopped, and I
asked the director, can I like saying something about this?
Speaker 1 (33:32):
And she said, sure, go ahead. So I break the
fourth wall and I say, okay, readers.
Speaker 3 (33:37):
Remember I told you that there was parts that I
underline in my books, Well, this is this is one,
you know. And I talked a little bit about how
I just didn't know, but I was, you know, gonna
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.
Speaker 1 (33:58):
Think this foolish thing.
Speaker 3 (34:00):
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.
Speaker 1 (34:09):
And that I maintained for years was like hurt and betrayal.
Speaker 3 (34:13):
But now I think Tony was making our life work
the only way he could figure out to do it.
Speaker 1 (34:22):
One of the good.
Speaker 3 (34:23):
Reads reviewers that hates the book said, if not actually
said woman, she forced this man back into the closet.
Speaker 1 (34:30):
When I read that sentence, I thought, you know, You're
not wrong. You're not wrong.
Speaker 3 (34:35):
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, heterostexual couple
that I didn't.
Speaker 1 (34:47):
Leave any room for what was the truth. And so
I've really lately come to a big.
Speaker 3 (34:55):
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
(35:16):
made it through this ten year long relationship without a
secret life because he did not turn asexual.
Speaker 1 (35:25):
You know, that's not what happened. And our sex life,
which always was poking.
Speaker 3 (35:31):
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.
Speaker 1 (35:43):
On and off over the years.
Speaker 3 (35:45):
Were there are other people, you know, I wouldn't doubt it,
But it's not like I've found out he had like
fifty 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 waving the standard about it.
Speaker 1 (36:08):
It's too bad. But you know, if Tony had not died,
what would have happened is.
Speaker 3 (36:14):
That we would have split up and been best friends,
you know, and raised and co parented these kids together,
and he would have got They would have had probably
two daddies and you know.
Speaker 1 (36:25):
Well three daddies if I remarried.
Speaker 3 (36:27):
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've
really changed how I think about this, and I'm.
Speaker 1 (36:41):
So glad that I did. I wish that I had seen.
Speaker 3 (36:44):
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.
Speaker 1 (36:53):
But I wish I could have gotten it while he
was still alive.
Speaker 2 (37:01):
Here's Marian reading a brief passage from her new introduction
to First Comes Love.
Speaker 1 (37:11):
Dear, dear, beautiful Tony.
Speaker 3 (37:13):
It is my pleasure to introduce him to you as
I write this. His sons, Hayes and Vinced, are thirty
seven and thirty five, and he has two grandchildren, and
perhaps someday we will take them to see his square
on the Aids Quilt.
Speaker 1 (37:29):
It is terrible to think of what we.
Speaker 3 (37:30):
Lost when this generation was decimated, but it is also
very sweet to bring back the long lost.
Speaker 1 (37:36):
World of the nineteen eighties.
Speaker 3 (37:38):
With the weather Girl's reigning men, the Pointer sisters jumping
for their loves, Tony right before my besotted eyes, and
Stilmester asking do we want to funk?
Speaker 1 (37:49):
Please go right ahead.
Speaker 2 (38:06):
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly Zuacour 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 one eight eight
eight Secret zero. That's the number zero. You can also
find me on Instagram at Danny Ryder. And if you'd
(38:30):
like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast,
check out my memoir Inheritance.
Speaker 1 (38:39):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Family Secrets News
Host
Dani Shapiro
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