Pod Insights Personally Resurrection, Episode 5: Janet About this episode Janet's side of the story.
The creation of this podcast was made possible thanks to the financial support of the Conseildes arts de Montréal, le Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, and the Canada Council for the Arts.
Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 Hi, I just had to tell you that I think your podcast has changed my life.
0:06 Speaker 01 Season one of Sold a Story hit a nerve. It was about teaching kids to read.
0:11 Speaker 02 We have gotten this wrong in New York and all across the nation.
0:15 Speaker 01 Now we're back with a new season. This time, we go beyond reading.
0:19 Speaker 00 I've literally been told by my district that I should not be teaching math. I should be facilitating math.
0:26 Speaker 01 I'm Emily Hanford. Go to your podcast app and follow Sold a Story.
0:31 Speaker 03 This is a CBC Podcast.
0:34 Speaker 04 Previously on Resurrection.
0:38 Speaker 04 Janet is mentioned in these letters more than anyone else, by far. But who was this woman and why was she important to Daryl?
0:46 Speaker 05 Janet had to work in Long Beach. Janet may have a new lover. Janet and I saw The Muppet Movie Friday night, loved it.
0:53 Speaker 04 I hadn't realized that while Dan and Daryl were meeting, falling in love and writing feverish letters back and forth, that all that time, Daryl was still married, still in touch with his wife, still seeing her nearly every day.
1:06 Speaker 05 My darling, Janet and I, for all practical purposes, are over. She still doesn't want a divorce. But I did get her to admit that she's afraid if we would divorce, I would disappear.
1:19 Speaker 04 Janet, I decide, is the key. I spent hours trying to find her online. There's a program. With no other leads, no other known relatives of Daryl's, I have to abandon the hunt for Janet. Uh, hello, we're in Kansas. Welcome to Kansas.
1:35 Speaker 01 I'm Cindy Lopez, and I grew up as Cindy Allen.
1:39 Speaker 04 There is one thing that happened on my drive with Cindy that I haven't told you up to this point.
1:45 Speaker 01 You know, when he was married, you know.
1:47 Speaker 04 I've told you might have her contact as an information.
1:50 Speaker 01 I know, but Dorothy's friends with her on Facebook.
1:54 Speaker 04 I send her a message that day, while I'm still in Kansas.
1:57 Speaker 01 Dane, Daryl left the rights to all his works jointly to me and the partner he was with when he died, Jonathan Houston.
2:05 Speaker 04 Jonathan died in 2017, so now it's just me. Any project that includes his works could affect the ability to publish those works later. Is Janet telling me to stop? If she does have the rights to Daryl's work, and if she doesn't let me use it, this entire project could be jeopardized. This could be the end.
2:44 Speaker 01 Janet Allen.
2:46 Speaker 04 Hi Janet, it's Dane calling. How are you?
2:49 Speaker 01 Hey Dane, how are you? I'm good. Crazy day.
2:54 Speaker 04 Excellent. Wow Dane, great work. Not awkward at all. Oh, it has been?
2:59 Speaker 01 Yeah, oh, wrestling with healthcare stuff. Claims denied, that kind of stuff, you know, it's like, just let this day be done.
3:09 Speaker 04 Quick, Dane, break the ice. Talk about something casual, talk about, ah, socialized medicine. Oh no. Yeah, I'm sorry, it's a... Yeah, I've been talking to some people down here about healthcare and it's not, it's not like it is in Canada.
3:23 Speaker 01 Oh no, it's a nightmare, it's a broken system. Yeah.
3:27 Speaker 04 Yeah, yeah, I'm sorry about that.
3:29 Speaker 01 Yeah. So you've been, you've been talking with the family, huh?
3:34 Speaker 04 I have been talking with the family, I'm in, I'm in Kansas right now. It's, I honestly can't believe that I'm talking to you right now, like I, this is, this is great.
3:44 Speaker 01 So, um, what?
3:49 Speaker 04 What am I doing, I suppose is the question.
3:51 Speaker 01 Well, no, it's, what's intriguing to me is that out of, out of Danny giving you a, a script, this whole thing evolved and I, I'm curious about what, what spoke to you.
4:02 Speaker 04 Yeah, well, yeah, I'll sort of give you a rundown on how everything happened and I think that will- I explain everything to Janet. My fateful meeting with Dan, going through all of Daryl's letters, traveling to Kansas, meeting his family, visiting his grave, rediscovering his childhood home. I talk about how Daryl's play Mustang 01 captured my- My interest from the very beginning. Uh, I took the play home and I read it. And I mean, I mean, you've read it. It's a great play and there are like some really.
4:33 Speaker 01 I've lived with it. Daryl wrote those plays when we were together for the most part. And he just, I mean, they sort of, they become a part of your world, you know? Daryl's plays are my young. The plays were our children. So that's, that was the reaction in that email. You know, you're messing with my kids. What do you want to do with my kids?
4:58 Speaker 04 Janet needed to protect Daryl, protect his work, their work, their children.
5:04 Speaker 01 We were talking about what drew you to, to working with the material.
5:08 Speaker 04 I think what really drew me to it was sort of almost comparing my own life to the life that Daryl led and thinking about like, just how privileged I have been to have been able to live, lead the life that I have versus like some of the trials that he had to go through simply based on when he was born.
5:29 Speaker 01 You know, if I feel that his, that his work and his life are being honored, then, you know, I'm, I'm open to just about anything. What Daryl asked me to do was to keep an eye on his work, to make sure that the integrity was maintained.
5:49 Speaker 04 And this is how Janet and I arrived at an agreement. I also would love to have a bit of an ethical check in place, someone who knew Daryl and would say like, no, he would not want this on stage.
6:00 Speaker 01 Yeah.
6:00 Speaker 04 You should probably take it out.
6:01 Speaker 01 Yeah. Well, if you're open to that, then I, you know, I would be happy to be that check.
6:06 Speaker 04 Janet agreed to read through every script that I write for this podcast. And so did Dan, Dan Wiley, Daryl's ex-boyfriend, who had given me his letters and the script to Mustang Zero One in the first place. Actually, Janet and Dan have read through every word that you've already heard since the beginning of episode one.
6:24 Speaker 01 Sounds to me like your heart's in the right place. And that's, that was the only thing that would have caused me to hesitate.
6:31 Speaker 04 Janet and Dan read through each episode and they give me their feedback. If they'd like anything removed or more context added, anything like that. And I do my best to honor their memories of Daryl.
6:41 Speaker 01 You know, it's hard, it's, in a way, it's a little hard for me because this reaffirms for me that he's actually dead, you know? And. He was, he was a major part of my life. I wouldn't do, I wouldn't be doing the things that I've done in my life if it hadn't been for him.
7:00 Speaker 04 Me either, Janet. Daryl's dead. That's a fact. It's impossible to know for sure what he would want included and what he wouldn't. But by consulting with two of the people who are closest to him, I think I've given it a good effort.
7:18 Speaker 01 Oh, dang. Wow. Did you have any idea when you first got excited about this, the way in which it could take over your life?
7:27 Speaker 04 I am, like, I'm standing here in Independence, Kansas, and I am talking to Janet Allen, and I had no idea that, I could not have foreseen this happening. And, but you know what? I have never felt, I've never felt like, like I've had, like, I've been handed a story that's as important as this story. And I feel like it can be meaningful.
7:57 Speaker 01 Mm-hmm.
7:58 Speaker 04 And I, I want to give it my all to, to get it out there. Now that we've got Janet on board, it's time for the next chapter of the story. Up to this point, we've learned about the end of Daryl's life, from when he met Dan in San Francisco up until his death in 1991. And we've learned about his childhood, what it was like growing up in small-town Kansas in a little farmhouse with eight siblings. But, there's a gap in the middle. Daryl's early adulthood, his twenties and thirties, well, today, we're going to fill that gap. And there's a lot to get through. This episode's going to be a little bit longer than the others, but trust me, it's worth it. This is Janet's side of the story, told in five acts. Act One, The Chameleon.
8:54 Speaker 04 Janet and I did extensive interviews through the end of 2019 and early 2020.
8:58 Speaker 01 I live in the wine country of California.
9:01 Speaker 04 She lives in Sonoma County, just north of San Francisco.
9:04 Speaker 01 I was born in Pasadena, California, but my dad was military and so we only lived here for 18 months before we moved. I then, you know, lived in many, many, many states and countries. And as an adult, wound up going to school back in Northern California and that has become my home.
9:26 Speaker 04 She ended up staying in California after Daryl moved away. She's in her 70s. I look at pictures of her on Facebook. She has a youthful smile and empathetic eyes. You can tell she's a person who feels deeply, who's also gifted with the ability to articulate those feelings. All of this becomes apparent when we begin the longest set of interviews I did for this entire podcast. And it was a lot of jumping around, moving around due to your father's military service?
9:56 Speaker 01 Yeah. He was in the Air Force and I was, just to give you an example, in one year of high school, I was in four different high schools. By the time I graduated, you know, from kindergarten through 12th grade, I had been in 13 schools. It's hard for an introvert to travel that much and have to meet new people.
10:16 Speaker 04 Yeah. How do you feel that impacted your childhood?
10:21 Speaker 01 You know, it forced me to learn how to engage with people in as authentic a way as I could. You know, I was always kind of quiet, but I learned to make friends because you had to.
10:32 Speaker 04 Could you tell me what you were like as a kid?
10:35 Speaker 01 Yeah, I was...
10:38 Speaker 01 This doesn't go counter to what I said about really kind of being an introvert, but I was also a performer. I was the neighborhood organizer. I would put shows together for all the kids in the neighborhood to do. Before I ever studied ballet, I got a book out of the library and set up a ballet class on my driveway with all the neighborhood kids. I was a storyteller. That's what led into acting in high school was because it was about storytelling and I didn't, you know, I got to be somebody else. I had a boss once who referred to me as a chameleon because I could fit in anywhere. I could talk to anybody. I could communicate with anybody. And so he referred to me as chameleon.
11:21 Speaker 01 And I think I learned that from moving around the way I did and from being that kid who always looked around her and kind of created story out of wherever she was and whatever she was doing.
11:33 Speaker 04 Janet's family moved around, bound to her father's job in the air force. Her, her dad, her mom, and
11:40 Speaker 01 I have one brother.
11:41 Speaker 04 David.
11:41 Speaker 01 Who is four years younger than I am. We were really close because we traveled so much that we were always having to make new friends. So we were the constant friend in each other's lives.
11:53 Speaker 04 When Janet was 17, the family was living in Washington State. This is where Janet and Daryl meet. And let me just say, this is a very different version of Daryl than I'm used to. He was 26 when they met, a few years at a college and in the air force himself. And I'd just like you to take a minute and guess where Janet and Daryl met. Just take a guess. And now, I present Daryl in his 20s.
12:22 Speaker 01 He was a substitute Sunday school teacher for my mother, who was the Sunday school superintendent at the McCord Air Force Base Chapel in Tacoma, Washington.
12:36 Speaker 04 Daryl Allen, Sunday school teacher.
12:39 Speaker 01 She called him to come teach one Sunday and that's how we actually met him. And he just connected really well with all of us. You know, my brother was like 14, I was 17.
12:51 Speaker 04 And Daryl did what Daryl does best. He came into the lives of Janet and her brother as a mentor, someone to nurture them when they really needed it.
13:00 Speaker 01 And he took us under his wing because my dad was in Vietnam at the time. He was in some ways I don't want to call him the third parent because that makes it far too creepy that we got married. There are real, real, real parallels in the relationships that were important to Daryl. He took younger people in hand and didn't tell them what to do, but just helped them understand how to be their best self. He did it with my brother. He did it with other people.
13:36 Speaker 04 He did it with Dan, too.
13:37 Speaker 01 He just kept an eye on us, you know, just made sure that we were okay, you know. The reason that I, I think the reason our relationship could evolve as it did later was because he was, he was a friend first.
13:51 Speaker 04 I think about Daryl in this new light. A Sunday school teacher, an air force officer, a supportive presence to a family struggling with a father in Vietnam. And then I think about the Daryl in Dan's life. Sleeping on the theater floor in San Francisco, bar hopping gay bars in New York, going to underground gay clubs filled with bathtubs and Kingsters. To me, there's only one word that describes his ability to move so smoothly in different circles. Chameleon. As a bisexual man and as a playwright, he was inevitably a chameleon. It's not just that he could observe people, understand them and interact with them, but
14:31 Speaker 04 in order to understand himself, throughout his life, he had no choice but to cross between communities, between worlds, experiencing the gay life and the straight life, trying to unpack his own in-between-ness at a time when that in-between-ness wasn't even recognized by most of the world. I wonder if this chameleon nature, something that Janet had in herself too, I wonder if this is one of the things that connected her and Daryl. By the time Janet was 19, things had started to grow between them.
15:02 Speaker 01 He and I had sort of become a couple, but not...
15:08 Speaker 01 He was going overseas.
15:09 Speaker 04 Daryl was being deployed to Thailand to fight in the Vietnam War. And he didn't want to tie Janet down while he was gone.
15:15 Speaker 01 He had said before he left, you know, you're young. You need to see what your life is about.
15:20 Speaker 04 And so, Daryl deployed with the US Air Force. And while he was overseas, the two realized that they missed each other. A lot. And in an attempt to deal with those feelings, Janet got married. Unfortunately, it wasn't to Daryl.
15:36 Speaker 01 I don't think he thought that I'd do anything as stupid as marry somebody that I'd known for four months. Which I did.
15:43 Speaker 04 And while Janet was struggling back home, Daryl was struggling overseas.
15:47 Speaker 01 And he had changed. He was always a
15:52 Speaker 01 He was always a guy that thought deeply about things, could go into some pretty deep depressions. But when he came back from Vietnam, or Thailand, from that whole war experience, he was even more fragmented, if that's the right word. A little more volatile, a little more, um, moody.
16:13 Speaker 04 Once Daryl was back from Thailand, it became clear to Janet that her marriage had been a mistake.
16:19 Speaker 01 We were able to pick up in conversation exactly where we left off. Do you have a friend that you can fall out of touch with? And when you have a phone call, you pick right back up where you were? That's what it was. We knew within hours that we were going to have to untangle everything just so that we could be together.
16:43 Speaker 04 I like to imagine that Janet was a bit of an anchor for Daryl. She helped him find the parts of himself that had fragmented during the war and put them back together again. So Janet ended up divorcing her partner so that she and Daryl could be together. And once the divorce was final, Janet and Daryl finally meet to spend a night together. But before they can be with each other, there's one more thing Daryl has to share.
17:08 Speaker 01 The first night I was with him, before we ever did the deed, he said to me, there's something I need to tell you.
17:19 Speaker 01 I, I think I'm bisexual.
17:24 Speaker 01 And I
17:29 Speaker 01 I broke down.
17:31 Speaker 04 This happened in 1968. This was before Stonewall, before most of gay liberation. And it's not like Daryl and Janet were in the left-wing activist scene. Janet was from a military family, and Daryl was still in the air force. I cannot overstate the ramifications of coming out at this time.
17:51 Speaker 01 I broke down, not because I judged the behavior, but because I thought it meant he couldn't be with me.
18:00 Speaker 01 And so we sat up all night talking. That's when he told me that, you know, his first experience with a woman was, or a girl, was when he was 14, and the next day or night, he was with a boy, and it had been back and forth, and it was eating him up, and he didn't know what to do with it.
18:20 Speaker 04 Daryl was a chameleon from the very beginning. But Janet understood his chameleon nature. She didn't judge. She stuck by his side.
18:29 Speaker 01 He found a psychiatrist near where we lived.
18:35 Speaker 01 This will date everything. This was like 1968, I think. He goes to this psychiatrist. He has three sessions with the guy. The guy asks to meet me. I go in. I meet the guy. He asked me to wait in the waiting room. When Daryl comes out, he's just shaking his head. And I said, OK, what's going on? He said, "Well, he says I'm really lucky to be with you because you'll cure me."
19:03 Speaker 01 God, yeah. And even I know, I mean, as naive as I was, I knew that was, that was wrong. It was false. It was, it was treating it like a disease. It's not a disease.
19:17 Speaker 04 So Janet and Daryl decide that's enough psychiatry. They'll figure it out on their own. Well, on their own, but together.
19:27 Speaker 01 And we didn't want a big wedding. I had done a big wedding the first time, and look how that worked out. So we knew that we just wanted to be married at my parents' house, and that's what we did. It was June 18, 1969.
19:41 Speaker 04 And that brings us to Act Two, The Marriage.
19:49 Speaker 04 There's a play that Daryl wrote called Persephone Rising. It's about two women, neighbors, who live in apartments side by side in San Francisco. One of the women is a few years older, more experienced, grounded. The other is younger, just escaping a mistake of a marriage she made in her youth. I cannot help but imagine that some of the inspiration for these characters came from Daryl's marriage to Janet. As much as they were partners, they were also friends. And as much as they were husband and wife, he was also her mentor. The play opens with a monologue from the older woman, the one I imagine, at least in some ways, to be Daryl.
20:27 Speaker 05 I believe life is a series of gates. You instinctively know when you approach one. Some inner sense rises up around you and your very life reeks of change. You have a choice. You can stay on this side of the fence and never go through. The adventuresome always go, knowing full well that the gate will immediately slam shut and you can never go back. Things are never really the same.
20:55 Speaker 04 Daryl and Janet's decision to be together, their marriage, it's a gate that they crossed through together. And in the first few years that followed, the two continued walking through these life gates together, arm in arm, the adventuresome.
21:10 Speaker 01 So, we were married in June. I, uh, let's see, by the end of the summer, he had orders to go back to the Air Force Institute of Technology for his masters.
21:24 Speaker 04 What did he do his masters in?
21:27 Speaker 01 Logistics management, which to a creative mind was kind of like the kiss of death. But it was a masters, you know?
21:37 Speaker 04 Remember, this is the same guy who, in the 80s, would never stick with a job for too long, would never put down roots, would live in cheap rooming houses in New York. Does that sound like someone who could last long working in logistics management for the US? Air Force.
21:52 Speaker 01 So nights and weekends, I mean, even when he was in the graduate program, he wrote plays at night. He wrote plays on the weekend. You know, we didn't have a table that really worked for his typewriter. And so he put the typewriter on top of the dryer, the clothes dryer, yeah, and sat on a big stool. And, you know, he'd come home from, he'd come home from classes and sit down to start writing. And I would cook dinner. And often, we wouldn't eat dinner till 10:00 at night because he'd be on a writing streak. So he continued to do that when he began to work in logistics management. But he really
22:32 Speaker 01 was miserable. I mean, every Sunday, I knew the drill, he would look at me and say, "Oh, God, I hate to go to work tomorrow."
22:40 Speaker 04 And then, just like Daryl writes in his script, a gate emerges, one of those big life gates. If you go through it, everything will change.
22:50 Speaker 01 And at one point, he just said to me, this would have been in 1972, he would have said to me, "How would you feel if I got out of the Air Force?" And I said, "Okay, what are we going to do?" And he said, "Well, I thought we'd go to Northern California and start a theater company."
23:10 Speaker 04 This is where I see the Daryl I know from Dan's letters start to emerge. It feels like he finally stopped living his life according to what he thought other people wanted from him, and instead started living for himself. And Janet thinks there might be more behind Daryl's decision to move to California.
23:28 Speaker 01 I'm not sure the extent to which his re-energizing bisexuality had something to do with it. Because during that time he was in the service, he, as much as said this to me more than once, it kept him on the straight and narrow because he could have been court martialed. He could have dishonorable discharge, you know, that kind of thing.
23:53 Speaker 04 Leaving the Air Force and moving to California, it let Daryl and Janet have the chance to pursue their theater dreams. But it also put Daryl in a position where he could explore his bisexuality. Janet and Daryl walked through this gate, hand in hand. They moved across the country to Sonoma, the same town Janet would return to later in life, the same town where she's talking to me from now.
24:17 Speaker 01 And both of us fell in love with it. It's a small town, 10,000 people, that's it. And so, we came here to start a theater company. And a friend of ours had a barn, basically, that was built out of redwood. I mean, it was really solid, that hadn't been used in years. And we, and the group of people we put together, scrubbed it from top to bottom with cold water to clean it up. And we began doing stage readings for invited audiences, because we were gonna need to raise money to do this thing.
24:54 Speaker 04 Janet and Daryl's love was often expressed through the art they created together. He was a writer, she was an actress, playwright and muse.
25:03 Speaker 01 The plays he wrote always had a role for me.
25:07 Speaker 04 Janet was his muse. She showed up as a character in every play.
25:10 Speaker 01 That's what he did with, he really anatomized people. He would watch them and kind of, you know, take mental notes and then use pieces of them in different characters. And so, when he would write a play, he would write a particular role for me, but I would show up in other characters, because he knew me so well. He had watched me for so long.
25:35 Speaker 04 As Janet has told me already, the plays they created together, they were their children. But Janet and Daryl's time in Sonoma, with their barn converted to a theater, it was their first try at being artists. And they had wonderful times together, writing and acting. There was just one problem with their plan.
25:55 Speaker 01 Well, now, understand, this was 1973. Sonoma was such a small town, for us to think in, at that time, that this tiny community could support a theater company, was absolutely ludicrous. I mean, that's where, that's where the creative imagination gets in our way.
26:19 Speaker 04 So, what it sounds like you're telling me is that the theater company did not succeed commercially?
26:25 Speaker 01 Oh, well, that would be one way of putting it. You know, we all had a hold-down, full-time job. It was a non-starter from the beginning and we couldn't see it.
26:36 Speaker 04 And then, another gate emerges. Walk through the gate and change your life forever.
26:44 Speaker 04 Janet and Daryl spent this year together in Sonoma. But when the theater company collapsed, Daryl felt the pull of the nearby city, San Francisco. San Francisco's thriving gay community called to him. And so he walked through that gate. But this time Janet didn't come with him.
27:04 Speaker 01 He moved into San Francisco and began living the life that he had put on hold all the time he was in the Air Force. And all the time. See, Daryl always took on responsibility. He took on responsibility, you know, within his family, took on responsibility within the Air Force. And then as we start this theater company, none of us knew what we were doing. He was the oldest one. And he was the one who kept us organized, you know? So I think all at once, he was just done.
27:35 Speaker 04 For his entire life, Daryl had muted his attraction to men. Sure, he'd been with men before. He'd explored, but he'd never lived it deeply. And now he was ready. Which brings us to Act Three, The In-Between. We'll be back with Act Three right after this break.
28:03 Speaker 06 Hi, I just had to tell you that I think your podcast has changed my life.
28:10 Speaker 01 Season one of Sold a Story hit a nerve. It was about teaching kids to read.
28:14 Speaker 02 We have gotten this wrong in New York and all across the nation.
28:18 Speaker 01 Now we're back with a new season. This time, we go beyond reading.
28:22 Speaker 00 I've literally been told by my district that I should not be teaching math. I should be facilitating math.
28:29 Speaker 01 I'm Emily Hanford. Go to your podcast app and follow Sold a Story.
28:36 Speaker 04 Daryl Allen was not a saint. Sometimes I have a tendency to put him on a pedestal. It's honestly a pretty easy thing to do with the dead. But Daryl was not perfect.
28:54 Speaker 01 Daryl had a real dark side. He would hit real blue stretches where he would go off backpacking by himself for three weeks at a time. You know, I'm thinking that the bisexual pull was not always easy for him. The understanding that he was, in some ways, two different people. It would be like, you know, if you have a limb that's bothering you, you don't cut it off. You function, you work with it. He would be really down and really down and really down. And I'm talking about the times where he did not go off backpacking. He was just depressed.
29:37 Speaker 01 And he would kind of smile and he would not talk much. And then, all at once, two or three weeks later, it was like a cloud lifted. And whatever he was struggling with, he made sense of. And then, the optimism returned. But it wasn't there all the time.
29:55 Speaker 04 Do you have any idea of what he did to make sense of it?
30:01 Speaker 01 He wrote.
30:03 Speaker 04 When Janet and Daryl were living in Sonoma, trying to start their theater company, they got in a fight. It was this fight that inspired Daryl to move to San Francisco on his own. But it wasn't the end of their marriage. And it wasn't their last fight. It was the beginning of a pattern of breaking up and getting back together.
30:22 Speaker 01 We broke up and got together and broke up and got together. We went through that for, well, we were married for 12 years. I mean, that's a long marriage. And we did that break up and get back together thing for probably six or eight of those years.
30:38 Speaker 04 When Daryl left Sonoma for San Francisco, Janet followed him a few months later.
30:41 Speaker 01 When we were together, it was still really, really good. We were...
30:48 Speaker 01 I don't know. We were a fit. And, and then something would happen and it would go off the rails again.
30:58 Speaker 04 The way I see it, society wasn't ready for the type of relationship Janet and Daryl needed. Yes, they were together and they were in love and they had a deep connection, but Daryl needed to connect with men, too. He needed to explore that part of himself. And as much as Janet understood that intellectually, a part of her was still hurt by it.
31:20 Speaker 01 As far as he was concerned, it was perfectly understandable that he should remain married to me, but see men when he wanted to. And I can remember some nights where I was just in physical pain because he called and said, "I'm not coming home tonight." And I was not, it was not, it was not a happy thing for me.
31:44 Speaker 04 Janet and Daryl were exploring a queer, polyamorous relationship in 1973. Daryl's sexuality was grounds for dismissal from many jobs. Psychiatrists called him diseased. A lot of the vocabulary that we use to understand these types of relationships today, it just didn't exist yet. I've been in poly relationships before, and my saving grace has been the ability to read blogs and articles online to understand how other people have navigated these non-normative relationship structures. Daryl and Janet, they didn't have that option.
32:17 Speaker 01 And, you know, one of the ways I dealt with it, I decided, well, if he could see other people, so could I. And made him crazy, made him absolutely bats. He could understand, he knew that if he didn't have the bisexual pull, he would, he would have been faithful to me. I mean, he as much as said that.
32:41 Speaker 01 But he had this pull going on, right? So in his eyes, my going out with another guy was betraying him. Um, there was no way that I wanted him to deny being who he was. That's not who I am. And at the same time, I didn't want to be miserable, you know?
33:02 Speaker 04 Daryl was no saint. I think this double standard makes that apparent enough, but I can't help imagine that in today's world, they might have been able to create a relationship framework that could have worked. Instead, they fought.
33:16 Speaker 01 Oh, this will give you a visual of what the arguments were like. Both of us had really good lung power. We could both shout pretty well. And, you know, there was one time he was being, I don't know, in my estimation, a real jerk.
33:32 Speaker 04 Probably, probably he was.
33:35 Speaker 01 So I flung, I flung myself on him and tried to strangle him. Yeah. Now, understand, I'm five foot three. You know, my weight is always hovered between 100 and 110 pounds. And he was 5'9" and a stocky guy. And as we processed it later, he said it was like being attacked by an angry hummingbird.
34:01 Speaker 04 And Janet wasn't the only one to get dramatic.
34:04 Speaker 01 He, you know, we broke up, we broke up so many times, so many times. And at one point, he's, the end of a letter, he said very dramatically, "Run, Jan, run like hell." It's like, yeah, that wasn't vitriolic, but it was a little bit of a drama queen. He could be impossible, you know? He's a Sagittarius, he's mutable.
34:25 Speaker 04 But in the end, it was Daryl who ran.
34:29 Speaker 01 Finally, it went off the rails one too many times. And he actually left San Francisco, and I think that's when he went to Albuquerque, I think, maybe. And what would happen is when he would come back to town, he would stay with me. And things would just be dandy. I mean, we were, we were close to each other's best friends.
34:49 Speaker 04 They stayed married, but Daryl left San Francisco. First, he went to New York. Then he went to Albuquerque. I know this because he started writing letters to Janet. Also, just an aside before I get into these letters, Janet actually had lost them. When we first started chatting back in 2019, she lost them, had no idea where they were. It was about a year and a half later that she stumbled upon them tucked inside another folder in our house. She found them the same week that I sat down to start writing this episode. It was almost like Daryl was saying, wait, don't forget about these.
35:24 Speaker 05 January 4th, 1977. Dearest Janet, how are you? I hope things are going well with you and that you had a good New Year's. And I love you. I'm sorry that things so often get so bad between us. I know I must be atrocious to live with, but I miss you. I miss being able to talk to you. Hope you miss me. But what I wanted to say with this is to vow that no matter what happens to us personally, you will always have first crack at any of my roles you may want, including all the future ones that will be written for you.
35:54 Speaker 04 Even in this letter from 1976, it's clear that the marriage, it might not last. Daryl leaves a clue, too, explaining what's happening to him, deep under the surface. This is from a letter he wrote to Janet in 1977.
36:09 Speaker 05 But the most exciting news is I attended a lecture under the stars at the U last night.
36:13 Speaker 04 Daryl attends a public lecture from a humanities professor. The professor was disabled physically.
36:18 Speaker 05 From having polio at the age of 11, after having started to set records at 10 years old as a baseball player. I immediately, in my own mind, substituted being bisexual.
36:28 Speaker 04 Daryl substitutes bisexuality for disability, and he listens to the man's lecture.
36:33 Speaker 05 There is an expansion of yourself that is difficult for those who haven't approached life this way to comprehend.
36:39 Speaker 04 Daryl's bisexuality, his chameleon nature, his in-between-ness, it always made him feel misunderstood.
36:47 Speaker 05 Those who have gone through it seem out of touch to others.
36:51 Speaker 04 He felt people couldn't relate to him. I think this is the reason Daryl left his stable job in the Air Force. He felt misunderstood. I think it's why he became so engaged with the gay community. And I think it might be the reason why, in 1982, he and Janet divorced.
37:10 Speaker 01 But we loved each other in a way that I can't even, I can't even define. I can't put words to. We were essential until we weren't anymore.
37:24 Speaker 01 So long as there was that, I'll call it marital bond. So long as that bond was there, we never even discussed divorce. It just wasn't an issue. He went off and traveled and lived in other cities and would be back in touch. And finally, at the point at which I had moved on enough that I was claiming my own life, at that point, he came back into town, where I was in LA by then, and I brought up divorce. I remember him. He put his hand on mine and he said, "Thank you. I think it's time."
38:07 Speaker 04 And that brings us to Act Four: Two Pandemics.
38:13 Speaker 04 So, we're caught up. This podcast started looking at Daryl's life in 1979 when he met Dan in San Francisco, just before Janet and Daryl's divorce. We went to Kansas, we filled in his early life, and now Janet has filled in the gap, his 20s and 30s. Now we have a timeline, a version of the whole story of Daryl's whole life. But that's not how life works. Our lives aren't one single timeline. They're many timelines of the different people we touch, of the different stories we write. And Janet and Daryl's story continued, even after the divorce in 1982, after Daryl was living mostly as a gay man.
38:52 Speaker 01 The first time I flew back to see him in Boston, we were walking somewhere and one of us had just read that when you get through a sticky divorce and come out the other side, it's like two survivors of a shipwreck. They recognize in each other what they've been through.
39:13 Speaker 04 After the divorce, Janet and Daryl stayed friends, just like Daryl stayed friends with Dan after they broke up. And as the 80s ticked by, Daryl started to get sick.
39:24 Speaker 01 I knew that he'd been really sick, and I flew back to Boston.
39:29 Speaker 04 Janet wanted to help.
39:31 Speaker 01 You know, I got to the apartment and the kitchen was a disaster. And I was gonna cook dinner, so the first thing I did was clean the kitchen, of course. And Daryl sat on a chair and we just talked. We talked and we talked and we talked. And I think by then, he knew about the lymphoma. And that was enough of a slam. But I remember I was standing at the sink and I said to him, I turned around and I said, um, well, there's not, you know, there's not any possibility of AIDS or anything, is there? And his eyes locked on mine, and he didn't say yes or no, he just did this kind of half smile.
40:12 Speaker 01 And I went over and knelt down next to him and hugged him.
40:19 Speaker 04 In the years that followed, Janet continued to support Daryl and Jonathan. She still lived in California, but when she could, she'd fly to Boston to stay with them and help.
40:29 Speaker 01 Even the last time I saw him, which was only three weeks before he died, I was there about a week, and he was really not well when I first got there, to the point that he came out of the shower, one time Jonathan was at work, Daryl came out of the shower and went into his bedroom and I was, I was doing things in the kitchen. It's what women do. I don't know. Oh, I know what it was, because he went in and out of memory problems at that point. I was reorganizing the cabinets and labeling them so he knew where everything was.
41:02 Speaker 04 Once the lymphoma had crossed the blood-brain barrier, Daryl started to lose parts of himself.
41:09 Speaker 01 And he was in, back in his bedroom a really long time, and I just went to the door, I said, "Are you okay?" And the door was open, and he was sitting on the edge of the bed, and he said, "I can't remember who I am." It was one of those times where you say to yourself, you have got to stay calm. This can't, you can't make a drama out of this, you know? And so I went and sat down next to him and I said, "Okay, do you know who I am?"
41:40 Speaker 01 Yes, you're Janet.
41:44 Speaker 01 You're visiting from California? Yes, yes. Do you know who you live here with? Yes, I live here with Jonathan. We talked him back.
41:54 Speaker 01 And then, after I'd been there two or three days, he, um...
42:01 Speaker 01 It seems like he kind of came back fully to himself and felt strong. And he and Jonathan and I took the ferry over from Charlestown into Boston, and we went and had lunch at a pub, and we just laughed. And it was fun.
42:19 Speaker 04 Janet had to go back to California.
42:22 Speaker 01 When I had to come back, because I had to go to work,
42:26 Speaker 01 you know, I hugged them both and I stepped out the door and started to walk away, and I turned around and looked back, and Daryl was standing in the doorway, smiling at me, the way he used to smile encouragingly at me when I first knew him. It's like, "You can do this, you can do this."
42:49 Speaker 01 And I knew that was goodbye.
42:52 Speaker 04 And she was right.
42:54 Speaker 01 I got the actual phone call early the morning after he died. Now, he was in Boston, I was in LA. However, the night before, I was in a hot bubble bath in my home, meditating. And, all at once, I wasn't thinking about Daryl. All at once, in my mind's eye, he was lying on a bed, and he sat up, and he was his old, healthy self. Because when I saw him, he had lost a ton of weight, he was gaunt, and all of this. He was his old, full-faced self, and he smiled at me. And I knew he was dead. I knew he had died.
43:40 Speaker 01 And when Jonathan called and told me the time of death, it was that moment.
43:46 Speaker 01 That's when he passed. And, um...
43:53 Speaker 01 It was the same encouraging smile that he had given me at the door when I left.
44:01 Speaker 05 You can do this. You can do this.
44:07 Speaker 04 And she did. In the years that followed, Janet pursued her passions. She got her MBA. She worked for some huge corporations, worked her way up to executive level positions. And then she returned to what she loved, her passion, storytelling. Janet discovered deep meaning collaborating with a psychologist. Janet became a storyteller for therapeutic clients, writing metaphorical stories for clients who needed help understanding their problems. And then, three decades after Daryl died, Janet got a message from me, a 28-year-old kid in Montreal saying that he wanted to tell Daryl's story.
44:50 Speaker 04 Now I understand why Janet was so hesitant at the beginning. But despite this, she spoke with that kid for hours. We did nearly eight hours of interviews from November 2019 to February 2020. And then, we were finished. And that's when the world changed.
45:08 Speaker 02 Breaking news tonight, the coronavirus forcing millions more Americans into virtual lockdown. Over 75 million people in New York, California, Illinois, and Connecticut ordered to stay at home.
45:18 Speaker 04 I called Janet once I heard California was put into lockdown. I knew she lived alone, and I knew that she was in a high-risk age group for COVID. What I didn't know, at least not then, is that both of us really needed each other at that time. March 5, 2020. Hi Janet, I'm just listening to a podcast about the coronavirus in the US right now. Yeah, it really does seem like the healthcare system and public health officials weren't as well-prepared as they should have been.
45:47 Speaker 01 March 15, 2020. Hey Dane, I hope you and your loved ones are doing well in the middle of the current health crisis. So far, we're all okay.
45:57 Speaker 04 Cases are increasing around us, but we're all consistently keeping social distance and washing hands nonstop. Let me know how you are, okay? Janet and I started off as interviewer and subject, as Daryl's ex-wife and the nerd, piecing together their story. But as the pandemic started raging, that changed. Janet and I started putting together our own collection of letters, well, emails technically, back and forth. April 12, 2020. Janet, thought you might enjoy this. It's just very enjoyable storytelling that's not COVID-19 focused. Ira Glass is such a great interviewer, too. He always brings it back to the theme.
46:40 Speaker 04 A queer Montreal kid in his 20s and a divorced Californian writer in her 70s. Janet wasn't the person I expected to support me through the loneliness and isolation of the pandemic. But we started talking all the time. We'd chat on the phone almost every week for an hour or so. I'd pour a liter of red wine into a water bottle and walk around my neighborhood late at night listening to Stephen King audiobooks. That, my friends, is what we call a healthy coping mechanism. When I had a good buzz going, I'd call Janet and we'd just talk. We'd talk about everything and nothing. She'd tell me stories about Daryl and I'd tell her stories about my love life. We were there for each other in a time of separation. Janet supported me after there was a mass shooting
47:25 Speaker 04 in my hometown in April 2020.
47:27 Speaker 06 Good evening and thank you for joining us. We begin tonight with breaking news out of Nova Scotia, where a gunman went on a shooting rampage.
47:34 Speaker 04 April 23, 2020. Hi, Dane. I am truly sorry that you and your family and close friends are going through that awful experience on top of the world pandemic chaos right now. And I supported her when the skies turned orange in Sonoma as California was consumed by wildfires.
47:58 Speaker 04 August 20, 2020. Hey, Janet. I'm listening to the news right now and a reporter in Sonoma is talking about some intense fires and evacuation orders in your area. You doing all right?
48:09 Speaker 01 I'm fine, Dane. So far, my friends and family are not in direct line of fires, but they are spreading fast.
48:17 Speaker 04 We had fun calls, too. For a while, we'd chat while cooking pizzas, and we had a running email thread of our homemade pizza photos. Hi, Janet. Lovely speaking with you. I'm attaching a couple photos of pizzas.
48:29 Speaker 01 Attached is a picture of my most recent creation. It was tasty.
48:33 Speaker 04 Oh, that's a beautiful pizza. Well done. I didn't bring my sourdough starter back to Nova Scotia with me, so I actually haven't made a pizza in a little while. Together, we helped each other through as best we could. So what can a story actually do? Well, it helped me and Janet become friends, and I like that.
48:59 Speaker 01 Hello?
49:00 Speaker 04 Hello?
49:01 Speaker 01 Hi, Dane.
49:03 Speaker 04 Hey, Janet.
49:04 Speaker 01 Ooh, you sound very close.
49:06 Speaker 04 Do I? Do I sound too close? I give Janet a call in November 2020. It was actually the first call I recorded between us since the pandemic started. Um, well, Janet.
49:19 Speaker 01 Yes, Dane.
49:20 Speaker 04 Do you know why I wanted to record our call this week?
49:25 Speaker 01 No.
49:26 Speaker 04 It's because it was one year ago this week that we talked on the phone for the very first time.
49:35 Speaker 01 Oh, you're kidding.
49:37 Speaker 04 No.
49:37 Speaker 01 I, oh, that's so great. I thought about, you know, the other day, I thought, I wonder how long we've been doing this. And I thought, well, it's been maybe a year. I don't know. I should look at the calendar. But, oh, that's great. Wow.
49:49 Speaker 04 And what a year it's been.
49:53 Speaker 01 We had no idea when we talked last year. Wow. Wow.
49:58 Speaker 04 And we reflect on our first phone call. One year earlier. Yeah, and I remember I was really stressed because I sent you a Facebook message and then you sent me an email that was like, hello, I, I actually have all of the rights to Daryl's plays and written material.
50:16 Speaker 01 Well, I had no idea who you were, no idea. And as you have probably come to figure out, I am very protective of Daryl and his work. You probably figured that out.
50:30 Speaker 04 I, I have an inkling of that now. We're comfortable with each other now. It feels easy.
50:37 Speaker 01 Well, now, I'm talking to a friend, a friend I've never seen in person. There's a different rhythm to the way we speak to each other.
50:50 Speaker 01 The initial conversations were, um, well-intentioned.
50:58 Speaker 04 But by this point, Janet and I trust each other. In fact, she trusts me enough to let me know a secret about Daryl's writing, about all the plays he wrote.
51:08 Speaker 01 In the same way, your having, in a sense, resurrected Daryl's work has all kinds of psychological impact.
51:18 Speaker 01 So.
51:19 Speaker 04 Do you mean psychological impact for, like, on you specifically? That you've been?
51:25 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah, of course. Yeah. Because, um, because as I said, all, for all those years, I, I had thought to work with Jonathan and, you know, pull all the plays together for publication.
51:42 Speaker 04 Reminder, Jonathan was Daryl's partner at the time he died.
51:46 Speaker 01 And Jonathan dropped off the map. So I wasn't in touch with him. He had half the plays, and so I only have half the plays.
51:56 Speaker 04 Daryl probably wrote 20 plays or more in his lifetime, but Janet only has half of them.
52:02 Speaker 01 And so, yeah, there's a psychological thing of, you're doing this great work.
52:08 Speaker 01 Bringing Daryl's work back to life and his, his, his, his life back to life in a way. And yet, part of that work is lost somewhere. I mean, I had no idea Jonathan was gonna go and die on me. I'm sorry. You know, it was like, well, I'll get to that soon. I'll find him soon and we'll, we'll pull together all the, all the plays. And so when I got online and found out that he had died, what, 2017? It was like, oh, I missed that, you know? Now, I have to cut myself a little slack.
52:49 Speaker 01 I was, I was really sick for like 15 years, so you gotta kinda, cut me a little slack here. But no, I felt, I felt in a way like I'd let Daryl down because I hadn't, hadn't been able to tie those ends together, you know?
53:05 Speaker 04 So, there's a box out there in the world somewhere. A box that has half of the plays Daryl wrote in his life, the only copies of those plays. And this box has been lost, or worse.
53:18 Speaker 01 Once Jonathan died two years ago, I'm guessing his family just, you know, anything they didn't, didn't have, have a connection to, they would've just tossed.
53:27 Speaker 04 What Janet doesn't know is that at one point, during one of my crazy internet stalking moments, I found Jonathan's entire family. I had already found out that Jonathan was dead, but I also knew that he had a twin brother who was very much still alive. I've just pulled up the, the message that I have. Jeff, Jeff is Jonathan's twin's name. Jeff Houston? Houston?
53:54 Speaker 01 Houston.
53:55 Speaker 04 Houston.
53:56 Speaker 01 Houston, yeah.
53:57 Speaker 04 So I've got his name and number here. I had never tried to get in touch with Jeff before. I'd found his contact information and added it to my research folder, holding on to it in case I ever needed it. I feel like I'm like on a roll. I might try to just call him today.
54:12 Speaker 01 Okay.
54:13 Speaker 04 Is that crazy?
54:14 Speaker 01 There could be an Inge box in the attic.
54:17 Speaker 04 Just like the playwright, William Inge, whose archival box still sits in a library in Kansas. Maybe Daryl has a box too. There could be an Inge box in the attic. Sure, I, maybe I'll just do it.
54:28 Speaker 01 We could actually look in that box, if there is one.
54:33 Speaker 04 And so, I called Jeff. But you're gonna have to wait to hear what happens in that call. I gotta move on to a different part of the story for now, but just don't forget about that box because it's gonna be important later. For now, Act 5: Therapeutic Stories. When we talk, sometimes Janet brings up her own personal philosophy of time. Yes, we are about to get philosophical. Janet believes that it's possible we could all be living the past, present, and the future, all at the same time.
55:07 Speaker 01 There is a train of thought that has research behind it, and I can't quote anything to you, but that we see ourselves as living in a linear paradigm. We start in the past, we move through, and we go to the future, and then we die, right? But there is, in quantum physics, there is a perception and research going on of our past, present, and future selves all existing simultaneously.
55:38 Speaker 04 This resonates with me, too. I'm not a religious person. I'm not even really a spiritual person. I don't believe in fate, so I find it hard to write about this project, about my encounter with Daryl and his work and his friends. I find it hard to write about it as something meant to be, as something fateful. But what if I took a little bit more freedom in my writing? What if I took a page from Janet's book and wrote a story like the ones that she writes these days for her therapeutic clients?
56:08 Speaker 01 I teamed with a neuropsychologist-
56:11 Speaker 04 Dr. Diane H. Engelmann.
56:14 Speaker 01 -to create metaphorical stories of people's lives.
56:18 Speaker 04 A fictional story based on a person's actual life.
56:21 Speaker 01 There's always a mentor advisor, and that's taken out of the person's life somehow, who helps them plan out what the next step in their life is going to be.
56:33 Speaker 04 A fictional story based on a person's actual life with an important mentor advisor figure taken from their life. A story of hope to help them see what their next step is. Let's give this a go, then.
56:54 Speaker 04 There was a man named Daryl, a man who lived in-between. And his in-between-ness was a blessing, because it allowed him to see other people for who they were, to really see them and to help them feel seen. But it was also a curse, because it meant most people could only see one half of him. But Daryl used his in-between-ness. He used it to help those who needed guidance. He was a guardian for them. He also used it to write. He wrote stories, stories about people living in the in-between, stories about what he saw in life, farming families, unnecessary wars and grungy gay clubs. He wrote these stories to help others understand,
57:39 Speaker 04 to help others see him and see those like him. But then, he got sick.
57:47 Speaker 04 Before he could share these stories with the world, he got sick with cancer, lymphoma.
57:54 Speaker 04 A few months before his body died, the lymphoma crossed the blood-brain barrier in Daryl's head. And parts of his consciousness, parts of his essence, started to drift away. He started to forget himself, forget who he was. But in this story, consciousness never dies. It always finds a new vessel. As it drifted from his body like a mist, a part of Daryl's consciousness caught in the wind and was carried through the air. It floated high in the sky, above the city of Boston, and caught on a jet stream flowing east, over the salt spray of the Atlantic Ocean, over the gray seals and the humpback whales
58:39 Speaker 04 afar cry from the plains of Kansas.
58:43 Speaker 04 And it was only when the wind slowed and the air thickened that this consciousness floated down from the sky over one of the last islands on that side of the world. That part of Daryl's consciousness drifted down and through the open window of a young family's busy home. And that mist settled down on someone new. Someone whose own consciousness hadn't settled yet. A child who'd just been born. A child who had come to have struggles of his own with his own in-betweens. A child who would come to need Daryl's support and his guidance. A final chance for Daryl to become a guardian. And a kid who, in the end, could finish what Daryl started.
59:27 Speaker 04 He could share Daryl's stories with the world. And so, a little bit of Daryl's consciousness, just a little bit, it latched on to this kid. And they set out on a new adventure. In-between. Together.
1:00:01 Speaker 04 In this episode, we've connected the timeline. We have a clear picture of Daryl's whole life. It's almost time to share the stories Daryl wrote. But we're not there quite yet. First, there's one chapter that defined Daryl's life, one chapter that we need to dive into a little deeper. And to do that, we're going to turn to someone you heard about very briefly in today's episode. David.
1:00:28 Speaker 01 Dane, you mentioned not having a strong grasp of the whole Vietnam War dynamic. If you want to talk to someone who was in Vietnam as a young man, who also has done research on the politics and military aspects of the war, and who knew Daryl and knows about the work he did there as reflected in Mustang, my brother would be glad to have a phone call.
1:00:50 Speaker 04 In the next episode, we're going to hear from Janet's brother. We're going to hear from David. Sirens go off, flares start being dropped from aircraft and shot up from artillery. You get into bunkers. You drop, you hug the ground, you just get down. And for the 19 and 20-year-olds that had just come into country, we just kind of looked at each other like, oh, God, what would we do? Next time on Resurrection: What Happened in Vietnam?
1:01:40 Speaker 04 Matthew Rogers is our editor and sound designer and wrote all of the original music in today's episode, except for the acoustic guitar, which came from Ethan Soil. Davide Kietseze is the voice of Daryl's letters and scripts. Hannah Song is our executive producer. Our outro track is called "Easy to Love," written for us by Clara Jones. Special thanks to Michelle Soicher, Isabel Deluce, Katie Hill, Roger Galvez, and Amanda Puleci. Matthew Kerrietsimeri is the platonic love of my life and my co-producer. Resurrection is written, researched, and hosted by me, Dane Stewart. The creation of this podcast was made possible thanks to the financial support of the Conseil des Arts de Montréal, le Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec, and the Canada Council for the Arts.
1:02:25 Speaker 04 Thanks for listening. See you next time.
1:02:43 Speaker 03 For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca/podcasts.
Previous Resurrection, Episode 4: Kansas (Part Two) Next Resurrection, Episode 6: What Happened in Vietnam Page updated November 1, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated