Hate: The Tired American Response to Exposure
The Threats, Name-Calling, and Intimidation Behind the Wine Wars and the Reality of Freelance Journalism
My first foray into the public eye as a writer was in 1996, the year Insight Books, an imprint of Hachette and one of the largest publishing houses in the world, published my book “AIDS and HIV-Related Diseases.” It was an honor, but it was also the culmination of years spent trying to understand how a viral disease had become a referendum on who deserved to live. Much of the hate, isolation, and cruelty I documented was not new to me. I had lived through the HIV-related deaths of people I knew. I had watched the indifference of our body politic.
Fear and homophobia became inseparable. Warped interpretations of Christian scripture hardened into pejorative legislation, and the spotlight on LGBTQ people had never been brighter. In that light, two things grew simultaneously: a movement demanding equality and a hatred determined to crush it. The growing awareness that more aggressive HIV research and public health interventions could have saved lives was a hard pill for many to swallow.
Over the following few years, as cable media continued to grow and online news through America Online rang in a new era, small-town news and hate crimes became more widely known. News coverage of violent murders of gay men like Matthew Shepard, and the hollow defense of his killers with an invented psychological condition called “gay panic,” as though bigotry were a diagnosis, brought a new urgency to securing gay rights as a framework for understanding how disease prevention was undermined by fear.
While my book received almost universal praise, there were detractors. Almost all of them seeing AIDS and HIV as a deserved disease, a punishment from God. Gay men, sex trade workers, and IV drug users weren’t victims; their recklessness had brought the disease to the real victims: hemophiliacs like Ryan White and those who contracted it through blood transfusions, like Elizabeth Glaser. My message of AIDS as simply a transmissible viral disease was, to them, wrong. My writing was described as the useful tool of evil.
But to get that message to me in 1996 took effort. A person had to write a note, stamp it, and drop it in the mail. It went to my publishers. The noise seemed faint, almost quaint. There was no Josh Powell footprint on Facebook or LinkedIn. These platforms did not exist. Hate required postage.
When I returned to full-time writing a little over a year ago, it was to pursue a passion project about my family history. Writing a book about your own family is profoundly difficult. Trying to parse what is “your” story versus the shared stories, and keeping the narrative moving, is daunting. To cut this heavy diet, I started writing about current events. Sometimes innocuous things: does tart cherry juice and magnesium help you sleep? Sometimes heavier: the right to die when facing a terminal illness.
It was last March that I started to pen essays on our national politics and some of Trump’s appointments, much of it focused on health policy. I posted them on Medium and Substack. My readership grew with a steady drip, drip, drip. I had frustrations with Medium, but at times my articles got real traction. I enjoyed Substack for the control and civility it afforded writers.
Then I wrote a sarcastic article about Tiffany Trump. I thought it was funny. I never thought it was my best writing. But it was the essay that took off.
The Tiffany Trump piece led to a contract with NewsBreak, where I've had far more exposure than on Substack. Like Substack, I get paid. Like Substack, I choose what I write. But I also share the stage with mainstream media, which is different. I think of it this way: Substack is my Cartier and NewsBreak is my Costco. My readership is now in the hundreds of thousands, and my articles have been seen well over two million times. Sounds exciting, doesn't it? All that glitters is not gold.
Much like that Tiffany Trump piece, my coverage of a plastic surgeon trying to shoehorn his multimillion-dollar estate into a commercial venue in New York’s Hudson Valley has blown up. The Wine Wars series started as a story about a wealthy, showy couple upending a historic neighborhood, a place where the money is as quiet as the dirt road everyone shares. But like many stories that unfold in real time, it grew. It became a story about small-town politics, self-dealing officials, and corruption.
And for me, it is becoming a story about hate and threats.
It started almost immediately. One woman launched a campaign claiming she knew me and that I was universally despised. More than a few people noted her favorite term for me: “bitchy queen.” Fine. I can take that.
But then came the emails. One called me “more a faggot than that guy on the Hollywood Squares.” Another referenced the town where I owned property, where I lived until 2022. One said they can’t wait for me to die. Yesterday, I received more.
This is not 1996. These messages don’t arrive on stamped envelopes from strangers with no way to find me. They reference my home. They reference my history. They are menacing and deliberate. One works as a critical care nurse, a person entrusted with saving lives. Most come from anonymous email servers. I report all of them.
I know they are meant to intimidate me.
And they do.
They know where I lived. They use slurs designed to dehumanize. They hide behind anonymity. In an era when radical users on social media routinely transcend the fiber optic filaments with fists and bullets, it is not difficult to understand why people in small towns tolerate corruption and cronyism. The alternative, speaking up, writing it down, putting your name on it, is too frightening. That is the point. That has always been the point.
In today’s world, where CBS News is now the plaything of a billionaire’s boy child, where independent newspapers are exceedingly rare, and where venerated ones like The Washington Post have been chewed from the inside out by greed, the ground is fertile at the local level for more corruption than ever.
More and more legitimate journalists have migrated to online venues. In areas where newspapers have folded and local TV coverage has vanished, this is how news reaches people now. It has always been the job of the press to hold and point the bright light, but the new world of free-agent journalism is under attack by our government, and those like me face more risk than ever. There is no in-house counsel. No big publishers to have your back.
Posting examples of the threatening emails and my growing statistics is not meant for sympathy or boasting. No. Both serve as notice. Hate is on the record, and while I have no publishers or security, what I have are readers.
This is my insurance policy, and I’m sharing it. Public officials and bullies, often two sides of the same coin, fear one thing: exposure.
Welcome to the new normal. It feels old and new at the same time.
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