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TI: And so when you started coming out with your story and your writings and talking, what reaction did you get from the family?

JM: Oh, they basically ignored it. So my mother never read anything I wrote. And her husband probably did, but I would say that whatever he went through, and I know that he had a hard life also, and he served in the army, and I think he was terribly mistreated by white soldiers. And he was the oldest and his other two brothers achieved greatly. One became a judge, one became a lawyer, doctor, and he was a farmer. So I think there was bitterness in his life. And I'm not making excuses or being co-dependent about that, but as a woman of color -- and I think people need to hear this -- as women of color, and Asian people particularly, the worst thing you can do is disgrace your family. And the worst thing you can do is to harm your mother or to cause your mother hat kind of pain. And so I was threatened, and I was told, "If you tell your mother, you will kill her." So the silence became like a wall. It was like a wall. And I analogize that to the silence that the Japanese Americans felt that they had to keep during the war, after the war, because of the shame. And I really feel shame is a killer. It kills people of all colors.

TI: And so how did you break through? How did you break through that wall of silence?

JM: Well, I worked with Cecil for a very long time, from 1965. And in 1980 he began recovery programs for people with AIDS and people particularly in the African American community about crack cocaine, which had been just glutted into their communities, and it was ripping apart the black family. So they came to us and they said, "Please, please, we need a culturally sensitive, racially sensitive program for African Americans." And I became involved with women, particularly, and they were telling me their stories in recovery, and I realized oh gosh, ninety-eight percent of them had been molested during childhood, or somehow abused, or beaten or raped during childhood.

And so in 1982 when Cecil and I got married, he said, "Do you mind if I talk about being married to a woman who had experienced incest?" And I said, "It'd be easier for you, I think, if I told my own story." I was terrified. I thought, "Oh god, nobody will ever talk to me again." And I told it to the congregation, and at that time, they were strangers to me, two thousand people. And I talked about it, I read a poem about it, feeling like an impaled insect. In fact, the poem was about that. And after I finished telling my story, people were weeping. Cecil said, "Well, is there anyone else who has been through that experience?" And to our amazement, sixty people stood up, and they started to get in line to tell their story. We said, "Oh, we don't have time, let's start a group." So we started a group right then and there for survivors of incest and abuse. And that's how we did a lot of organizing grassroots-wise. So people would come to us out of need, and we don't have money to start a program, we started with the people, we started with volunteers. When we started our feeding program in 1968 or whatever, we started with volunteers.

TI: But going back to you, when you broke through and told that story to the congregation, how did that change you?

JM: It freed me; it freed me. It was like this, you know, when they talk about addiction, they talk about crack cocaine, it's like the gorilla on your back? Well, it was like that. It was like I'd been carrying around a cement wall, and it just helped me crack through that wall because I realized I wasn't alone. And that telling, there's a certain part, there's a certain thing about telling, talking, telling someone else. There's a certain thing about poetry, about writing, that there's a liberating aspect to it. It frees you to then become more of yourself, who you really are. Because half the time -- I can only speak for me -- but half the time I was hiding. I was hiding behind this exotic mask. I thought nobody would look at me, they would look at me but they wouldn't see me, so I didn't feel visible. I felt only accepted for my exoticism or from my physical being.

TI: But then with Cecil you had someone who knew the story.

JM: When I first met Cecil, I told him, and he said, "I believe you and I love you unconditionally." And so when we started the recovery groups, it was very much part... you know, shame, you talk about shame, shame is something that everybody shares. I don't care what color you are, I don't care what culture you're from, I don't care if you speak English or not, the point is, that shame is always there, whether you're poor... poor people feel ashamed of being poor. People think they're just freeloaders, they're crazy. Many, many people are really, really poor because they're mentally ill or they have physical problems or they have mental problems. The issue is shame causes you to become invisible or to hide. And when you break through that, there's a liberating aspect of it which says, "I can be myself."

TI: One of the things that you said that helps break through that was unconditional love.

JM: Yes. And I knew he meant it, and he did not exploit me. Most men would exploit me. Every job I worked at, I swear to god, every part-time job I had because I was working my way through college, the bosses, the co-workers, would exploit me. They'd want to date me, they'd want to sleep with me, whatever. In fact, I got raped by one of my bosses and I never told anybody, and he was a white guy. And that story about being sexually aroused on your job, I have talked to my staff, and I said, "How many of you as women have been sexually harassed?" I was shocked. Fifty percent of our staff, maybe more, of our women's staff, and we had a small staff at that time. But when we started the recovery programs, they participated. Because, again, there's something very liberating in being able to trust a community, being able to say, "This is who I am," and being applauded for your story, being applauded for telling the truth. That is very rewarding. So I just want to say that to the younger generation, I just want to say that to people of all colors, all backgrounds, that if you can tell who you really are, the truth of it, that's the beginning of pride, that's the beginning of self-worth, that's the beginning of saying, "This is who I am," and everybody needs to say, "This is who I really am." When the AIDS epidemic broke out and so many people of color, so many men, particularly, of color, who were afflicted with AIDS and HIV, were shunned by their parents and by their churches, and so they came to Glide and asked for help. And we started right then and there, by a volunteer who himself was suffering from HIV, we'd go to the hospitals, we'd invite them to join the choir, we would invite them to the church, we would pray with them, we would let them know they were accepted, that this was not God's punishment for being gay.

And I think that that truly... I mean, so many of these things are connected, you know what I'm saying? Whether you're afflicted with a disease that is, quote, "shameful," or whether you're afflicted with an addiction that's "shameful" or whether you were beaten up, which is "shameful," that connects us. That connects us. And there are so many people in our community who are respectable-looking, etcetera, who says, "Oh, I have been in recovery from alcohol for ten years." And when they get up there and they do that, it's not just liberating for them, it's liberating for everybody.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright (c) 2016 Densho. All Rights Reserved.