 Hi, welcome to the All Things LGBTQ interview show where we interview LGBTQ guests who are making important contributions to our communities. All Things LGBTQ is taped at Orca Media in Montpelier, Vermont, which we recognize as being unceded indigenous land. Thanks for joining us and enjoy the show. Everybody, it is my great honor to be joined today by Linda Villarosa, a distinguished figure in the literati and a little bit, well, certainly in the New York Times and in essence before that. And before we begin, let me just read a quick biography for those who among you who don't know about Linda. Linda Villarosa is a journalist, an educator, and a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine. She covers the intersection of health and medicine and social justice. She is a journalist in residence and professor at the Craig New Mark School of Journalism at CUNY and teaches journalism, medicine, and black studies at the City College of New York. Her book, Under the Skin, which we'll show you now, was published in June. Not only was it published, it was widely acclaimed. It was nominated for an NAACP Image Award. It was listed as one of the 10 best books by the New York Times of 2022. I mean, this is really fabulous. Linda has appeared everywhere talking about the book and we're especially happy to have her here with us today. So welcome, Linda. Thank you. I appreciate your interest and being here with you. It's a really fabulous book, but before we get to that, I hope you might indulge me in the little reminiscence of my engagement with your work. In the middle 90s, early and middle 90s, I was able to teach lesbian literature at the University of New Orleans, where I assigned F for Keats, this wonderful collection edited by Catherine McKinley and L. Joyce Delaney, to which you contributed. I have my copy here and I see that I assigned your essay and so I re-read it in preparation for this interview and it strikes me as the ideal kind of essay that an undergraduate in the Deep South needed to read in the 90s. It's a refutation of all the religious bigotry surrounding homosexuality and it's really inspiring. So thank you for writing it and my students loved it. Thank you. I appreciate that was a very important moment for me to talk about the way religion is used against people, not just LGBTQ, but often and the way, you know, religion at its core spirituality is and should be about love. Exactly. And it's funny as I was going to teach that class that morphed into gay and lesbian literature in later years. I was walking down campus and a heterosexual couple was ahead of me and the guy said to his female companion, it's not that they're bad people, it's that they're sinners. Let's move forward. I was privileged to be involved a little bit in the form of an interview with Julianne Cernolani-Grose who wrote this wonderful collection outright. The speeches that shared LGBTQ that shaped LGBTQ with the religion culture and of course I read your essay. You gave a keynote in 1995 and you made a lot of very important points about yourself as a writer and exhorting the audience to write no matter what and talked about the importance of writing and that was very inspiring and then I was able to attend on Zoom their book launch at the LGBTQ Center in New York where you were in attendance and in that book launch you spoke about the mother-daughter articles that you and your mother wrote for essence in which you talked about coming out to her and so forth. So I was wondering if you could start by telling the audience a little bit about that experience? Well in the I guess the early 90s my mom I was an editor at Essence Magazine and we were talking about articles for Mother's Day and I had come out, I was out at you know among the staff at Essence and they were saying oh be nice if there was sort of like a mother-daughter lesbian article among the other articles so I thought oh my mom could write something and she agreed to which was really lovely and then I realized that the editors really wanted me to talk about my part like how I came out to her, how it was fraught at first and how we healed our relationship. That article and we had our photos taken, we did this really intense interview with each other and then when it was published it became at the time the most responded to article in the history of the magazine. We followed up with a sort of the letters that came with it so we talked about how we felt about the letters that we received and then I think it was I don't know 10 or 15 years later we did another follow-up to it was like a sort of Essence did the most famous articles in the magazine's history and they followed up with us and by then I had children so it was me and my mom and my two children in the photograph and I talked about being a parent partially because I had such a good mother. That's fabulous and we're are these available? We probably can look them up in the archives or yeah you can there yes Essence is well archived. That's wonderful so let's fast forward I happened to be in Provincetown for the Provincetown Book Festival and I saw that you were a roster so I was able to attend your book conversation there and it was really an interesting experience for me because the audience was racially mixed and you know you talked about your book and one of the women from the audience talked about being a doula in her experience with racism in the medical system and so it was really an interesting moment because the audience participated and does this often happen that people give testimonials when you go around on your book tour? I know a lot of it has been on the media but when you do it in person. You know what's interesting is you know my book is about you know race and medicine and racism in medicine and when we think about it you know we think about this history often there's a discussion of the Tuskegee experiment which happened in the 1940s where black men with syphilis were not given treatment to see the course of the disease by the public health service so this is like the most infamous moment in history as far as medical racism but what I find is that people aren't thinking about that what they're thinking about is what happened to them and what happened to how they've been treated or how their loved ones their family their mothers their fathers their children their cousins their neighbors have been treated so I get that a lot where people are sharing their negative experience in the health care system and it breaks my heart and you know I think it's so common that it's sort of like it seems like something from the past but what I get is that people are saying this is what happened to me yesterday or the day before who was the audience for the book well it was funny because I thought when I was writing it that the audience would be for people in the medical field right so it would be like medical students professors at med schools and administrators and my daughter who's very smart said to me mommy stop stop saying stop limiting yourself to that because when she would go with me she would hear these stories of people telling what happened to them like we were just saying and then she said part of the value of your book is lifting up the stories of people who have been harmed by the medical system and making them feel you know like I think we're often blamed when we're sick and making them feel like it's not your fault it's not that something's wrong with you the system is broken and so lifting up those stories and validating and making people feel less quote unquote crazy is a good you know part of your book and is a natural audience I know it I mean you certainly have a general audience as evidenced by the wide acclaim that you've reached that the book has received how long did it take you to write it well I was supposed to write it in a year and a half and then this pandemic happened so I got waylaid because part of my part of what I was doing was writing about COVID and African Americans and then the 16 night I mean and even before that I was involved in the 16 19 project so that was a big deal so I'm getting pushed farther and farther behind so I say it took about three years plus 30 years if you count how long I've been researching reporting and thinking about these issues and I'd like to I'm watching the 16 19 project what a fabulous production that is I just saw Nicole last week and she's she was really afraid at first about how the Hulu special would go over and now she's she said she's really proud of it and has enjoyed the you know the sort of the response to it and it is reaching a wide audience we subscribe to Hulu to watch it oh excellent one thing that you talk about in the book kind of a through line is the evolution of your thinking about racism equality and the health of the nation in 1994 you wrote body and soul the black woman's guide to physical health and emotional well-being with a forward impressively by Angela Davis and June Jordan and you talk about how your thinking gradually progressed from that point I think you were you working at essence then yes and I think the the goal of essence in general as a publication as an institution was uplift and it was about teaching people women mostly to like have better lives and that at each turn whether it was about health for me wealth sort of even cooking everything was about relationships it was about beauty hair making your you know like lifting yourself up to be a better person and in doing so it would lift up the race so for me as a health editor there I thought if you know better you'll do better and if everyone does better and takes care of themselves and their children and their family members then the whole race will lift the health outcomes of the race will live there's never been a time where there's been equality in black health outcomes we've always had higher levels of infant mortality maternal mortality and certainly lower life expectancy and but I kept thinking if I just keep teaching this and I give people information then they will do the right thing and then these health outcomes will change but no matter what I did that wasn't doing it individual people would thank me and say oh thank you for telling me about how to take better care of myself but it wasn't changing the health outcomes of our demographic because that wasn't the solution individual behavioral change is not the solution to structural inequality and you tell the anecdote of your pick up soccer mate who alerted you to an important thing that galvanized your work on this book can you tell us about that at the time Katrina Anderson was working at the center for reproductive rights and we play soccer together on the weekends so she was 2018 this was 2017 and I had just written about HIV AIDS for the New York Times magazine so she knew that I was a contributor so she said I've got a story for you and you can imagine how often that kind of happens where people go hey I've got a story for you so I was like okay I just want to play soccer let's dial it down and she said did you know that maternal mortality is a crisis here and we're the only country the United States is the only country where the number of birthing people who die as a result of pregnancy and childbirth is rising so I was like I didn't know that but okay and in my mind I'm thinking oh it's because we have these pockets of extreme poverty in the United States and that's what's happening and then she said it's worse for black women the black women are three to four times more likely to die or almost die and be related to pregnancy and childbirth and I'm still kind of like well maybe it's because again we have income inequality and it's a lack of access to health care or or something like that and then she said did you know that a black woman with a college education even a graduate degree is more likely to die or almost die than a white woman with an eighth grade education related to pregnancy and childbirth and then she turned to me and she said don't you have a master's degree and that's when I started listening to her because it wasn't just this question of poverty which in itself is terrible it's not the question of lack of access to health care which is wrong and we should have universal health care in this country but it's something else that even that education doesn't protect you from and even income and wealth don't protect black women from having poor pregnancy outcomes and that's what got my attention you know it's interesting too because I have a friend in Germany and we were talking and she said did you know and she repeated that exact thing with that African-American women with advanced degrees have lower in higher infant mortality than a white woman with an eighth grade education so your work is really important in circulating I think from my anecdotal experience one of the most persistent myths that you address in your book is that it's class and not race that seems to be what people think even now so your book is really important in redressing or in responding to that yes and I don't want to minimize that class in America is a certainly a problem and that people who are impoverished have it worse but we still have to discuss that race in and of itself separate from class also affects negatively health outcomes for black people in this country and that brings me to my next question because you have a chapter on West Virginia chapter seven and I visited Morgantown briefly so I was really drawn into the I mean it's a riveting chapter but it focuses on white people so tell us why in this book about racism inequality and the health of a nation we have a chapter about white people well I think it's two reasons one is kind of tongue in cheek as I said when I first got the book deal I said to my editor you know this is like a black book there so this is a black book this is about book about black people sometimes other people color but mainly black people what do I do I deal with white folks and she said you know when you're reading a regular book the normal kind of book that you're kind of reading then there's that one chapter about black people why don't you just have that one chapter about white people so I knew she was kidding but then later I started thinking about weathering which is one of the one of the concepts that I discuss in the book it was coined by Dr. Arlene Geronimus of the University of Michigan and it speaks to mostly around black people is her area of research who are have to face discrimination day in and day out so much that it creates a kind of it raises our allostatic load which means our heart rate goes up too often our blood pressure our stress hormones and creates a kind of premature aging that she calls weathering and the way she the how I know her is it helped explain those poor birth outcomes among educated black women so if you're battling discrimination in your body is prematurely aging then that means when you get pregnant which is like a stress test to your body that's when it shows up that's why some of the reason we have poor birth outcomes among you know black women okay so I understand all that I know Dr. Geronimus and I remember having breakfast with her and I said Dr. Geronimus do you isn't only black people who are weathered and she said no weathering isn't about race it's about being treated badly black people have been treated badly for a really long time for centuries and have had to battle to survive have been blamed for our problems have been called genetically inferior all these things they're stereotypes so it's created this weathering of black people but anyone who is treated badly or marginalized will be weathered so I started thinking oh what about white people in West Virginia because that is a place where there's you know it's one of the I think it's maybe the the largest concentration of it's the whitest state or maybe the second whitest also has it's a place where there was an industry that supported it coal mining which was very dangerous which was a dirty and bad for your health then that kind of went away the resources were extracted and then people were blamed for their illness people are ill there it's very poor because of a lack of economic opportunity so I said let me go there and see if her look what does her weathering hypothesis look like among black white people who have been treated really badly and that's why I went to West Virginia and at the time and even now they were suffering from an outbreak of HIV they related to inject injecting drug use so that in you know like in New York City we certainly have syringe exchange we've lowered the you know HIV transmission so why in West Virginia of all places is there an outbreak of HIV going on now so that was interesting to me so when I went I totally understood it I saw this homelessness I saw people blaming themselves for their own health problems and what I saw was honestly as an observer and a journalist I saw people looking a lot older than their biological age and I remember there was the one man I asked Mr. Scotty I said Mr. Scotty you know I've been talking to him this older white guy I thought and I said how old are you and I was thinking to self he must be like 70 and he was four it was like 48 and he just looked terrible because he had such a terrible hard life and he was he felt bad about his life he felt like a failure because that was the storyline it's like people especially white people are poor because they don't try hard enough and black people are poor or something's wrong with us because we're not trying hard enough and so I included that and one thing I drove down there in like 2020 during the I think it was 2020 during the pandemic and in you know a state that is real if you don't mind me saying Trumpy but I really I felt like the people were kind I felt like the people many of them were broken and you know I felt a great compassion for them and I wanted to make sure to include them in my book and it does verify Arlene Geronimus's weathering theory yes and she has a book coming out she has a book called weathering coming out in a couple of weeks I'm really happy for her another chapter that is particularly heartbreaking or was for me is chapter five about environmental justice in fact at the end I did I confess I teared up it's about the story of Danielle Ailey Lash and in it you make some startling revelations that were startling to me but after I read them they make perfect sense would you mind just telling us a little bit about um Darlene Ailey Lash and her circumstance well I met her I went to the climate reality conference that was put on by Al Gore and believe me when I went to that conference it's probably 2000 people in Atlanta I could count the black people on one hand so and if I exclude myself I'd barely need the hand so there was a panel and Ms. Bailey Lash was on the panel and I was like oh look it's a black woman this is really cool so I heard her speak she's from North Carolina and she was wearing a turban over her head and she was speaking about having a brain tumor and that she was blaming herself because she didn't realize that the water she was swimming in drinking um you know using for recreation was poisoned by Duke energy and there was a coal ash problem that she later learned about she learned about it from her best childhood friend who is a white woman who had moved away from the area had read about the coal ash problem and then warned her friend that you need to get out of there but it was too late she was ill so she told her story and really beautiful in this huge audience with and Al Gore was interviewing her and then afterwards I saw Caroline her friend run up to her and took really good care of her and was just accompanying her so because she had the brain tumor so I interviewed the both of them because I was struck by their you know interracial friendship and just the love that they had and then I kind of stayed in touch and then Caroline called me and told me her friend had died of the brain tumor so then I felt bad that I hadn't really done the kind of work with those two that I usually do so I went down and saw Caroline took me introduced me to her her friend's family to the showed me where she lived we went to Duke the Duke we saw Duke energy we saw the pollution she showed me the landfills in the community and I included their story and what moved me is one that you know this is an environmental justice issue why what why did the why did the black folks live closer to the polluting facility but that is usually the case in America where black people are 75% more likely to live near an incinerator near live near a refinery live near a landfill live near a dump and so I understood that I think what I also did in that chapter was look at the history of the environmental justice movement so sometimes now we think of sort of ecology and environmental rights around Al Gore and other sort of activists like that but really the real environmental justice movement started years ago and it was one of necessity and it was people whose lived experience was living in polluted areas who finally got mad and you know it it sort of was around the time of the civil rights movement so they were protesting against this dumping in their communities unfortunately it still exists but I really wanted to lift up and celebrate that early environmental justice movement where people have been speaking about it black people and other people of color and complaining about our communities being dumped on and apropos of this story you tell there was a protest against Duke energy and Benjamin Barber was involved and if I may quote you to yourself on 112 you say the homogeneity of the mainstream environmental establishment spurred the emergence of a black led environmental justice movement in 1990 with the media spotlight on the protests in warren county north carolina and the evidence from the united church of price study proving that african americans suffer most from pollution activists on the ground got little support from organizations like greenpeace the national autobahn society the national wildlife federation the national resources defense council the nature conservancy the sierra club and the world wide wildlife fund in march 1990 more than 100 grassroots activists signed a letter accusing the 10 most prominent environmental groups of racism this is such a revelation and so important such important information you continue on the next page a 2018 survey conducted by Yale university professor dorsetta taylor found that white people made up 85 of the staffs and 80 of the boards of 2057 environmental nonprofits despite making up 60 of the population a 2019 report released by green 2.0 a working group that examines the intersection of the environment and race showed that people of color make up only 4 of the senior staff of 40 environmental foundations that's shocking and awful so i think it's important that viewers learn that fact although they absolutely should read the book too and i think it's important also what i tried to do is lift up the people who are doing work and i highlight a guy named bob bullard dr bullard who is in a works out of houston and he's written so many books his most famous one is called dumping in dumping in dixie and i was telling him i said i had dinner with him and i said he's considered like the father of the environmental justice movement i said to him you know i read a lot of your books you have like over 20 books they're really similar are you just writing the same book over and over and he just laughed and laughed and laughed he said kind of because i feel like i have to keep doing this until something changes and i get that a lot with the people who are my you know experts especially those in this sort of inequality racial health disparity space writing these studies writing these books just trying to make a dent in this problem this national problem that we have in america well one of the strengths of your book i think is that you include all the information in this statistics but you interweave it with personal stories which is so compelling you know and you mentioned that one of your friends was sick and i thought i hope it isn't somebody from the book because i feel like i've gotten to know all these people that you have interviewed and interacted with um let's turn to your friend and i think the women's movement mentor audrey lord who um was you asked her about racism ever improving and you asked her before she died in 1992 and she said racism doesn't just fade away it goes out ugly and we have to look or if we look around today at quotation is certainly valid so let me ask you if you had uh if you've had a lot of pushback on the book i have had some i haven't you know it's interesting because my book came out on the heels of the 1619 project and i think nicole hannah jones took the brunt of the you know of the harshness um and i didn't get that my book also came out after the murder of george floyd and our so-called racial reckoning where people were much more open to hearing these ideas i occasionally get pushback with where people don't i mean like i'm going to be honest physicians assume because i'm not one and i'm a journalist that i don't know as much as i do but you know i can like play a kind of a smackdown around research and around studies and around the information that i am sure about there is something going on and i and i'm it isn't an individual you know blaming doctors or nurses or people who go into the healthcare field it is a broken system and it is a system that is based it's in this country specifically that still has stereotypes of black people that have not been erased totally that have not been resolved that have been floating around in order to justify slavery and the economic you know riches that came with it since 1619 so until you know it's interesting that you know there's so much pushback in general around you know so-called critical race theory which has completely been misused in this argument and it feels like this is a time when we're this is kind of the going out ugly i am hoping this is the going out ugly because it is so ridiculous to deny the truth of what is going on in america and in the american medical system and in the country to people who really should and deserve the information and we cannot be a good country or a fair country or just country or a healthy country unless we tell the truth absolutely what particularly surprised you in your research i think what surprised me over time was i thought that if we just make health care better then things would get better and i think about this there's a quote by dr martin luther king that talks about i'm going to paraphrase that all forms of inequality any unfair injustice in health care is the most inhumane okay that isn't even correct what dr king actually said was injustice in health not health care health itself and he didn't say inhumane he said inhuman inhuman is worse so i think about that and i think a lot of times when we try to solve the problem of these you know it's not just among black people but our country has the worst health outcomes compared to other wealthy countries we have the worst in infant mortality all the way to life expectancy and then we have this inequality these racial health disparities that are really frightening and terrible um but it's not just about giving people better health care because our health care system doesn't work that great it's about changing our society to look at these stereotypes that are harming people to look at the way people are being weathered because of ill treatment and to look at communities that have been destroyed and made less healthful by centuries of segregation so that was surprising to me that just giving more health care wasn't enough and it took me a minute to sort of sort it all out and i'd like to ask you to talk for a minute about the work of mary bassett and the use of the word racism um mary bassett was wonderfully our commissioner of health in the new york city for many years and um she wrote in 2015 a new england journal of medicine essay that said if you want to treat it when you treat black patients you can't just treat people's bodies you have to also fight anti-black racism and that was a huge deal being in the new england journal of medicine the other thing she did was because she was the commissioner of health she mandated that all of the employees at the commission of health which is 7 000 people in new york city they must be go through some kind of implicit bias training and also to look at the communities that are suffering the most and put those resources there it seemed simple but that was a big step for her she then went to harvard she was for a while until recently the commissioner of health for the state of new york now she's gone back to harvard um so i'm very curious to see what she does next because she's a doctor that is a leader in sort of anti-racism isn't she um your resource who said it's important to use the word racism yes she said use the word anti-black racism and i appreciate that and to also you know not just think that you if you're a good doctor and treat people you you know you'll cure these ills without also fighting anti-black racism and calling it out yes and you've got some pushback in um in a couple of articles where a white male doctor said there's no such thing as structural racism let's leave the word racism out remember that yes and that doctor is no longer at the new york at whatever the journal of the america medical association for saying that and i think you know i don't it isn't my place or my even i feel no joy in saying you're racist i never say that okay and i certainly don't think physicians go into the practice of you know their actual oath is do no harm they don't go into harm people but if the racism or discrimination or whatever we want to call it is implicit and it's buried and it's just part of our landscape and our institutions here in america you can't help it but i don't think it's about individuals the same way i don't think it's individual blame of people from being ill i don't think it's individual blame for people who are harming people it's a system that needs to be repaired and um i had an incident my partner went in for a a mole cancer is a mole removal and the doctor is very was is cuban and he's very chatty so he said what are you reading and i was reading your book and so i presented him with some of your arguments and first he went into this whole thing i'll take out a mole for many colors skin and so forth and hypertension came up and i used the word racism and he said no it's genetic at which point my partner said can we please have my surgery um but so he was just triggered by that and that's crazy you know because i think you're it's important to use the word because people need to get used to it because it's occurring hypertension is the reason black people have higher levels of hypertension is not genetic obviously and i'm alarmed that a physician would think that and in the it's been so well um disproven because there used to be this medication that was specifically for black people because under the assumption that our hypertension our high blood pressure was genetic so obviously if we have this genetic um problem then there must be a solution in medicine well that was disproven like 20 years ago so that's ridiculous um but what is less um looked at as far as the hypertension of black people is the link to stress including institutional racism and other forms of discrimination and that could be you know the you know the problem so it's uh sad that he thinks so that he's thinking so off base and it's such a no brainer yeah so what encourages you i remember when we were in Provincetown i asked you how do you keep going with all this awful stuff you're writing about and you replied that you have a lot of resources and what encourages you and i think the most encouraging thing for me has been you know i'm i even despite what my daughter says about who my audience of my book is i've been to probably 20 medical schools since and nursing schools and i was it i'm wearing my columbia nursing school t-shirt that i got last night after my lecture um and these nurses and midwives were so working to be better healthcare providers these are students they were assistant professors they're teaching the idea of the ideas in my book they raffled off they bought copies of the book and gave it to students to read but they were already thinking about these issues what was really encouraging even just last night was this idea that an institution like columbia or whatever medical school is not just this you know closed door one way it's there's got to be more community engagement with the community that's i mean if communities like you know columbia is in washington heights which isn't exactly you know that's a that's a community that was red line that's not a rich community but there must be some kind of ongoing partnership with the people who you serve and those people that came to my lecture last night understood that and around the country when i speak to medical students and nursing students and midwifery students and public health students i hear that they are trying to do something different and often change comes from the ground up if you will so it's the students who are pushing back and saying i don't want to use this outmoded textbook or one of the people last night was an instructor and she said she has to use this textbook and what she does is cross out the things that don't make any sense and said don't look at this there is no genetic difference in lung function between black and white people that is old and crazy and based on a racist doctor from the past and so i'm encouraged by that movement i'm also encouraged by our you know the number of people who are being trained as doulas wherever i go i mean just recently i was in montgomery alabama and one of my daughter's friends was so happy she goes i just got trained as a doula and what a doula is is you know is someone who is with a birthing person it could be not even a round berth it could be someone who's with an ill person someone who has cancer and they have this helpful person who is the link between our medical system which we know isn't always great and is often cold and harsh and clinical and technical and the person who is afraid and needs some kind of personal touch so i love the sort of increase in social justice oriented doulas community health workers we know in other places we see community health workers used as part of the institution of medicine here community health workers aren't paid that great they're not always part of the institution they don't even have a consistent name and so i i see that as a growth area and a place where we can show that even though we have the most expensive medical system we still need human beings to help each other and you mentioned apropos doulas latona is a giwa giwa yes um and how she does such wonderful work especially with some simone landrum um and only got six hundred dollars after hours and hours of care and work so yeah and i think part of my work has been to um the the NAACP image awards i ran into iyana presley and have my picture taken with her so with this wonderful congresswoman who supports the bill that is trying to lessen black maternal mortality and one of the one of the happy outcomes from my um 2018 america's black mothers and babies story was um the expansion of medicaid to cover doula services in new york and also in louisiana um that's fabulous um one more question and then i'd like maybe we have a little more time we can talk about some some stories that you know include but what's next for you um i'm trying to um i'm still talking about my book a lot which has been really fun um i teach um uh feature writing this semester last semester i taught pre-med which was really fun and interesting and valuable to me i'm kind of thinking marinating on another new york times piece um and i'm just um really enjoying the you know the kind of happy outcomes of this book i work so hard to complete no kidding um what was your process of writing in your outright speech you talk about confronting the blank page but you don't really have the leisure do you from what i've read of your process in this latest book you don't have the leisure to uh sit down and confront the blank page so much because you're so immersed in what you're reporting on i um i'm very slow as a writer and really have to i i take a long time to and do a lot of reporting more than i need to to make sure that i understand everything i'm talking about i'm not a scientist i'm not that even good at math and um and science but i spend a lot of time trying to learn and understand that allows me to have more confidence as a writer so that i can say things and make statements without having to worry that it's either wrong or i have to have so much backup you know and and kind of research to show that what i'm saying is right so i'm slow um i also am disciplined so i don't i'm not a night person i get up early i you know read the paper i have my coffee i sit down i write for several hours i stop i exercise i take my dog out um i do another shift i stop at six i don't do anything past six because i know i'll sound start to sound not so good because i'm a morning person and that's what i do and i um i mean sometimes i'll say oh my god why am i a writer i should have my mother wanted me to be a lawyer i could have done that i could have had an easier plate while i'm writing and then i finished something and then i'm like oh my god i'm such a good writer i love this i love my byline so i have a kind of a sort of a crazy relationship with writing but it you know i i know this is my life's work and i know that it does come easier to me than it does to other people especially sort of long form and big ideas and you know link fee the articles and books let's step back in 1986 you wrote the first story about age for an ethnic magazine in essence and you have a relationship with a gentleman gentleman named cedric shirt event who's with my brother's keeper can you tell us a little about that um i read in the new york times in 2016 that if no the statistic that if um nothing changes the lifetime risk of a black queer person a man or trans woman will be 50 so 50 of all of that community will be living with hiv in 2016 we have we know that there's you can take medication get your viral load down to zero not be ill not pass it on so why would that be why is this still happening and then i looked at where it was worse and it was jackson mississippi my family my you know was part of the great migration came from mississippi and i was like what is happening there it's not new york it's not san francisco so i ended up going there to look at to understand what is happening in that place and i realized it wasn't a lack of health care um they have really good health care there's an amazing clinic that is open to everyone they figured out that Medicaid expansion didn't happen there they figured out how to make it work they use the system one of the most talented hiv doctors ran a clinic there but it was the infrastructure of the city of jackson which was redline which was you know erased it's hard to get around there i waited for an hour for a bus to come it never came but i gave up after an hour and so but what mr sedrick did it was this patient navigator who worked for one of the clinics was using his car and using his love to help people on the ground to get tested to get treated to get help to get um support and that was the story i ended up writing um called uh america's hidden hiv epidemic and he ran an organization called my brother's keeper my brother's keeper and i i started to think about how many of the organizations around black health have something like my brother's keeper or our our people our problem our solution or saving ourselves symposium and things like that um uh we're the ones we've been waiting for and it's kind of like well actually no we don't have to save ourselves this is a national problem this is the responsibility of a country that we have supported on our backs for 400 years that to take better care of us in and out of the health care system absolutely um i hate to uh well there's so many i when i started preparing for this interview i thought it'd be like brian lamb member book notes and he throw out these names and you know the person via interview where you would respond but there were so many people in this book uh that i had to let go of that strategy but if you could maybe tell us about latashia rouse that's a really gripping story that you tell in the book and it's shocking yes and she was telling her story in order for people to understand and stop doing that so she was a very brave person who told a terrible story and she was in such pain and and so fearful about so much blood loss but to be treated like she was seeking drugs was you know simply cruel and she was hemorrhaging and they said well walk it off like yeah she we noticed the operation of racial stereotypes writ large in the episodes as you say she goes back and talks to um other health care providers and describes her experience and i think that you know it's called co-design sometimes it's called that and i think that is very good um we just can't rely on people to tell the same dramatic story over and over but we certainly can use those stories as learning experiences to to change um people's treatment in the system well let me uh i have a possibility of ending for our interview i'd like to go back to your outright speech and i quote you to yourself if i may you say we have to write the truth with courage and with conviction she you say to the audience ask yourself one question how am i going to use my special voice and my unique experience to create change and i have to say linda you have accomplished that goal in this wonderful book so thank you for writing the book thank you for joining us today thank you i really appreciate the work you do and it's been great meeting you um and you know i say to your audience um thank you for um allowing me this time with you and for listening thank you for joining us and until next time remember resist