Pod Insights Stuff You Missed in History Class Behind the Scenes Minis: The Tricky Topic About this episode Tracy shares how she went from concern that there wouldn't be enough research material for an episode to developing this week's topic into two. Both Tracy and Holly discuss their family connections to the war.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.
0:04 Holly Frey? A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argentix. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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1:15 Tracy V. Wilson? Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Robert, Mick, Bill, and Jessa strut back down memory lane for season two, sharing lessons on life, love, and loss. These are the kind of insights that only come from experience. So tune in to Silver Linings with The Old Gays on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Workplace chaos. We've all been there. Deadlines are slipping, projects are piling up, and suddenly you realize the missing piece is the right person. That's when you say, this is a job for Sponsored Jobs. With Indeed Sponsored Jobs, your job post gets a boost, so you can connect with quality candidates faster. In fact, Sponsored Jobs posted directly
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2:16 Holly Frey? Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeart Radio.
2:26 Tracy V. Wilson? Happy Friday. I'm Tracy V. Wilson.
2:28 Holly Frey? And I'm Holly Frey.
2:30 Tracy V. Wilson? We spent the whole week talking about the Vietnam War and draft board raids. This was an episode that when I started thinking about it five years ago, and in the times that I've thought about it since, I was like, is there going to be enough information about this? Because it seemed kind of scattered. And a lot of what you find, unless you're going through like news reporting as it happened of every single thing, which I did do, a lot of reading of the news reports of what happened, a lot of times, things are summed up in just a couple of sentences. So it's like, 28 people broke into this place and they did this to the draft records. So I was like, is this really going to work? And then as I got into the Camden 28 story and was like, this is wild. We had these people doing this. They
3:15 Tracy V. Wilson? have their, their friend informing on them. We have this trial that needs its whole section. I was like, maybe it's a whole episode on just the Camden 28. And that felt like it was not doing justice to the fact that it was part of a much bigger movement. And then talking about the much bigger movement needed a lot more explanation of why we were even having this happen, which meant discussion in more detail of the Vietnam War than I think you and I have ever gotten into on the show, on purpose.
3:46 Holly Frey? Yeah.
3:47 Tracy V. Wilson? A topic I have not been comfortable really getting into.
3:52 Holly Frey? Yeah, me there.
3:54 Tracy V. Wilson? My, my dad served in Vietnam. He was deployed to Vietnam in 1971. So during that period that, you know, removal of troops was happening, but people also being sent over there for the first time. I also have more extended member of the family who was killed in Vietnam. And then growing up in the, you know, latter half of the 1970s and into the 1980s and just kind of being steeped in what the culture of the United States was like at that point.
4:27 Tracy V. Wilson? I've always been like, yikes, we have plenty of other stuff to talk about. Don't really need to get into that.
4:32 Holly Frey? Yeah.
4:33 Tracy V. Wilson? But here we are. Here we are.
4:35 Holly Frey? Yeah, I mean, my dad is career military and served in Vietnam. We have never talked about it.
4:42 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
4:42 Holly Frey? That was made very clear to me as a kid that that was an off limits subject.
4:47 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
4:48 Holly Frey? So I don't have a lot of information.
4:50 Tracy V. Wilson? I have one story about my dad's time in Vietnam, and it is about when he was preparing to go home.
5:00 Tracy V. Wilson? Um, and how everyone was, when it was approaching time to go home, people were terrified because it was like, if something's gonna happen to me, now is when it's gonna happen.
5:12 Holly Frey? Right.
5:13 Tracy V. Wilson? Um, and so apparently, uh, he had to pass, everybody had to pass a drug test to be able to go back home. And if you didn't pass your drug test, you could only get as far as Okinawa and you had to wait there for, I don't know what. And so in the midst of just this anxiety about, uh, what was gonna happen, he hadn't really had anything to eat or drink. Um, and so the sample he gave was not valid for his drug test. He had to do it over. Um, and he's not, he has not ever, uh, told me much more about it beyond that, but, um, having been kind of a pacifist person from my early childhood.
5:58 Holly Frey? Yeah.
5:58 Tracy V. Wilson? Generally feeling that war is bad. And then growing up through the years of stuff like Operation Desert Storm. And, uh, like people's responses about that still being colored by what had happened with the anti-Vietnam war movement.
6:19 Tracy V. Wilson? Uh, which, as we said in the episode, way broader than hippies and college kids.
6:25 Holly Frey? Yeah.
6:25 Tracy V. Wilson? Anyway, it was just a, it was a weird time to, to grow up.
6:30 Holly Frey? For sure. And I, I feel like part of the reason that it was always off limits in my family for discussion was because not just of my father's service, but my mom, who I would not say was anti-war or a pacifist, although I don't really know, we never talked about it, uh, was very Catholic. And so I wonder if there was some like, just like, we don't want to start peeling this onion. It is too complicated. There are too many issues in play.
7:04 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
7:05 Holly Frey? Like, I think it was just a, let's not have a potentially tricky conversation. I'm making, you know, the following items for dinner.
7:19 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah. Yeah.
7:21 Holly Frey? Not, not necessarily a fan of nuance, my mom.
7:27 Tracy V. Wilson? Right.
7:27 Holly Frey? Yeah. I think that was part of it too. So for all I know, my dad would have been like, yeah, I'll talk about it. My mom was like, let's not. I don't know. I could still ask my dad, but you know, I kind of don't want to bug a dude in his eighties about stuff like that.
7:42 Tracy V. Wilson? Right. Right.
7:43 Holly Frey? Yeah. He's never volunteered anything. So.
7:46 Tracy V. Wilson? Right. Yeah. My dad also worked in a motor pool, so he was not in a like frontline kind of combat position.
7:54 Holly Frey? Gotcha.
7:55 Tracy V. Wilson? Anyway, I had a couple of things that came up in the research for this that didn't have just a good place to go in the episode. So I kind of wanted to talk about them and behind the scenes, now that I have talked about my profound discomfort of trying to talk about Vietnam on the show. One, the flower power image.
8:13 Holly Frey? Mm hmm.
8:14 Tracy V. Wilson? I, I love that photo. I really do. Uh, the person in the photo, uh, George Harris, really George Harris, the third, later known as Hibiscus. So I think he was, uh,
8:28 Tracy V. Wilson? 18 or 19 when that picture was taken, had a theater background from childhood, like theater family. And like doing plays with the siblings and all of that. After the war, uh, went to the San Francisco Bay area and helped found an avant-garde drag performance group called The Coquettes.
8:52 Holly Frey? Hmm.
8:54 Tracy V. Wilson? Other Coquettes include Divine.
8:56 Holly Frey? Yeah, I know of The Coquettes. I did not realize this was the connection, though.
9:00 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah. Um, so Hibiscus, one of the founders of The Coquettes, also one of the founders of, um, The Angel of Light Theater Troop. One of his fellow performers in all of this, uh, in an article about him in the New York Times, described him as, quote, "He came out of the closet wearing the entire closet." I love that so much. It's also very clear that, uh, that his gender was, was pretty fluid, but everything that I have read about him has used he/him pronouns for him. He had a relationship with Allen Ginsberg, like a, like a relationship.
9:37 Holly Frey? Right.
9:38 Tracy V. Wilson? Like a, a physical slash romantic relationship. So tragically. He died of AIDS-related diseases in 1982. That was so early in the AIDS crisis that the terms "human immunodeficiency virus" and "acquired immune deficiency syndrome" had not even been coined yet to describe it. Uh, he was only 32. I'd want to go back in time and with his consent, hug him.
10:07 Tracy V. Wilson? That was thing number one. I just, I wanted to talk more about Hibiscus and all of that and kind of, uh, you know, where his life went from being in this famous picture.
10:19 Speaker 03 First thought is like, wow, how are we going to do all this?
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12:26 Holly Frey? We've all done it. Tumble down an internet rabbit hole trying to self-diagnose. And sometimes doing our own research can leave us more anxious than informed. Your feed is packed with wellness trends telling you to cold plunge, protein max, detox, track your sleep. But what's actually real? What's exaggerated? What's just wrong? That's exactly what Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association and iHeart Media's Ruby Studio is here to find out. Each episode, Emmy-nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez, who's racked up billions of views across PBS, Discovery Channel, and YouTube, talks to doctors, influencers, and real people trying these trends.
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13:30 Tracy V. Wilson? Guess who's back in the house? The old gays return for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jess A. have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane, navigating life, love, loss, and everything that shaped them along the way. And as usual, someone just might break into song. From leather bars to bathhouses, dance floors to drag brunch, nothing stays off limits. These are the kinds of insights that can only come from experience. So listen to your elders, honey, and discover the silver linings you can take with you. All sass, zero filter, and decades of perspective from four friends proving that queer joy
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14:35 Tracy V. Wilson? The other thing. Father Michael Doyle.
14:38 Holly Frey? Yeah.
14:39 Tracy V. Wilson? Uh, this requires a little bit of context. So in a number of Christian denominations, on Ash Wednesday, there is some kind of like observation or service.
14:53 Holly Frey? Right.
14:53 Tracy V. Wilson? That is usually done with the palms from Palm Sunday the previous year. So Palm Sunday commemorates, Jesus coming into Jerusalem and people waving palm branches. And there's usually something with palm branches at the church service. And then those branches are saved. The next year, they are burned to make the ashes for Ash Wednesday. And then on Ash Wednesday, there's something that often involves a person getting some of the ash on their head, often on their forehead, in the shape of a cross.
15:25 Holly Frey? Yep.
15:26 Tracy V. Wilson? A lot of different, uh, like I was, I was raised Methodist. We didn't really do this.
15:30 Holly Frey? Oh, yes, I've had, I've had the ash face many times.
15:33 Tracy V. Wilson? Yes. Catholics do. I think Episcopalians do. Um, not just broadly speaking, I'm not saying every single Catholic in the world has done this. You do you. I'm not, uh, giving commands here. So, Michael Doyle, at some point during all of this, I think it might've been after the trial, made the ashes for Ash Wednesday by burning a copy of the Pentagon Papers.
16:02 Holly Frey? Yeah.
16:04 Tracy V. Wilson? Um.
16:05 Holly Frey? I had heard that, but I did not know if that was true or not.
16:08 Tracy V. Wilson? I think there's a picture of it. He's burning.
16:11 Holly Frey? Oh, I believe you. I just mean, I never looked it up. Like, I heard it like, uh, um, a non-verified source was like, oh, yeah, that happened. And I'm like, did it?
16:18 Tracy V. Wilson? Um, burned the Pentagon Papers in an army helmet. Uh, and then, you know, told the congregation about like this. The, this Ash Wednesday, Ash was like a peace demonstration of, he did get in trouble with the, you know, the, the more, the higher up church authority in the Catholic Church for doing this. I don't, I didn't write down like what specifically, whether he was reprimanded, exactly what happened, but I was like, man, the, the Ash Wednesday ashes out of the Pentagon Papers. I don't want to step on anyone's religious convictions,
16:59 Tracy V. Wilson? but I was like, I am behind this actually in just a philosophical way. I cannot speak to it from a religious way because again, it's not part of my religious tradition.
17:09 Holly Frey? Right. I will say this, right? Although he may have gotten in trouble for that, he was a monsignor when he died.
17:16 Tracy V. Wilson? Okay.
17:17 Holly Frey? Which is a title that you get, that's bestowed on people for extraordinary service by the Pope.
17:24 Tracy V. Wilson? Okay. Yeah.
17:25 Holly Frey? Uh, the, the bishop, you know, the hierarchy of the church is very political, but the, the, the priest bishop has to recommend them, but then the Pope typically is the one who gives them the actual title of monsignor. So while he may have had brushes with, um,
17:46 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
17:47 Holly Frey? Um, being reprimanded, ultimately he was recognized for his service.
17:52 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
17:53 Holly Frey? He died only a couple of years ago.
17:55 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah. Yeah. So a lot of the people who were involved in this some way died in the period, sort of between the 1990s and now, and some are presumably still living, especially the younger people who were part of these demonstrations. So, so many, like, were already living a life that was really focused on service and was focused on social issues and went on to continue to do that after the war for the rest of their lives. The book that I mentioned that recently came out about the Camden 28, kind of talked
18:40 Tracy V. Wilson? a little bit about the Catholic left movement and some of the things that happened in the years after this, like people who had been part of the Vietnam,
18:50 Tracy V. Wilson? The anti-Vietnam protests and really dedicated to that work were not necessarily of the same mind about things like abortion.
19:01 Holly Frey? Right.
19:01 Tracy V. Wilson? And then also there was the massive, you know, sex abuse within the Catholic Church that came to light after all of this. And so like, all of those things played a part in, you know, how people continued to do work or demonstrations and all of that afterward. I sure do find the Barragan Brothers fascinating.
19:27 Holly Frey? Utterly fascinating.
19:28 Tracy V. Wilson? One of them, I do not remember which, went on to get married to a former nun, but still called himself a priest afterward, apparently. They just did a lot of very dramatic work related to a number of causes, including the anti-nuclear weapons movement after all of this. And there's a, I think, fairly recent book just about them also.
19:53 Holly Frey? That seems correct.
19:55 Tracy V. Wilson? So yeah, this episode was about stuff that's a little more recent than we often talk about. I sort of have realized recently, I'm turning 50, which means stuff that happened before I was born happened more than 50 years ago.
20:16 Holly Frey? Uh huh.
20:17 Tracy V. Wilson? And I know that seems obvious.
20:23 Holly Frey? It does, but it's also charming.
20:25 Tracy V. Wilson? But, you know, having, having started working on this podcast more than a decade ago, it feels a little different. Stuff that happened 40 years ago versus stuff that happened 50 years ago in terms of like, how much historical remove do we have on this at this point?
20:42 Holly Frey? Right.
20:43 Tracy V. Wilson? So yeah, anyway.
20:44 Holly Frey? Yeah, I was, I was alive during this, so.
20:47 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, yeah. I was, I was born in 1975, so just afterward. But I still feel like the Vietnam War really dominated so much socially and politically.
21:04 Holly Frey? Oh, yes.
21:05 Tracy V. Wilson? Through my whole upbringing.
21:06 Holly Frey? Oh, yeah.
21:07 Tracy V. Wilson? So anyway.
21:08 Holly Frey? Yeah. We're old. I don't know what to tell you.
21:11 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah. Aging, aging is happening.
21:15 Tracy V. Wilson? It was really working on this episode that I, uh, I kind of like, we don't, it's not like we have a demographic survey of our entire audience.
21:25 Holly Frey? Right.
21:26 Tracy V. Wilson? We do have some indications of a little bit of like the demographic trends of our audience. And I was like, we really are at a point where most of the audience probably did not live through the 60s, 70s and 80s.
21:42 Holly Frey? Yeah. I mean, one of the things that I have loved seeing about our audience, and we have heard it from people when we've done live shows and whatnot, is how many of them, you know, started listening to the show as part of like school curriculum.
21:56 Tracy V. Wilson? Oh, yeah.
21:57 Holly Frey? But then continued to listen after they had finished their education. So they're aging up, but that still means that they were much younger. When we were, you know, initially talking to them. And yes.
22:14 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
22:14 Holly Frey? Way outside the, the time window.
22:17 Tracy V. Wilson? Right.
22:18 Holly Frey? When this would have been really actively going on.
22:21 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah. Yeah. So whatever is happening on your weekend, boy, do I hope it is as great as possible. If you're able to take a little time for yourself, have a moment, take a breath, maybe take a walk outside, if the weather's nice, maybe just a look outside if the weather's not nice, or if you don't want to go out there. We'll be back with a Saturday classic tomorrow and something brand new on Monday.
22:55 Tracy V. Wilson? Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
23:10 Holly Frey? A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx, listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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25:14 Speaker 00 This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.
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