YOU ARE NOT ALONE - A companion online community discussion board for The Mental Illness Happy Hour podcast with Paul Gilmartin

This young lady is wonderful....

I had a thought listening to her as if I were god writing her a letter. It would start something like....

Dear Gladis,

I am so sorry. Along the assembly line of your creation, we accidentally gave you about four times the brainpower and "IT" that makies humans awesome. It was too late in the process for a running change, so we had to give you some emotional baggage to even things out and give the rest a chance.

We just could not have had a 14 year old version of you running the entire world.

sorry,

god

Yeah, this young lady seems super intelligent, and had a great vocabulary, and expressed herself well. Paul skirted the edges of creepiness asking her about the "technical" details of escorting, though.

Nothing personal, Paul... I guess you just were asking some questions about the escort sex that I, personally, would not have been comfortable asking, but I'm sure many of us want to know.

I'll admit to being curious and titillated by all the sex-work stuff, and I listened all the way through. But I also had the icky feeling of this interview being something of a variation on the work Gladys had done--i.e., she was getting attention (if not exclusively, in large part) because of her sexuality, in a situation that involved ambiguous boundaries of intimacy and exploitation. Have we ever discussed anyone's work in this detail? How central was all of it to her personal struggle? We touched on adoption, racism, class animosity, family dynamics but passed those by and zoomed in with a high-powered microscope on all the sex stuff. Do we know what she's been writing about, what the plays she wrote in college were about? About the quality of her friendships, her (real) intimate relationships? Her current relationship with her family? I don't want discussion of sexuality to be limited on this show--openness about sexuality is one of the cool things about MIHH--but I think we need to keep an eye on what purpose is being served by what's being discussed. And I'm not simply pointing a finger--I mean, I listened all the way through and was fascinated aplenty, as I said. And there were plenty of real moments that were true to what the show is about. But it all centered around what amounted to Gladys undressing for an audience yet again.

Hi-

I feel that Gladys did a great job expressing what SHE wanted to share with the world. There is shame in this society about being an escort and it is great how unashamed and unapologetic she is.

Being that I have a past of being a john I take a big issue with the posters who said that Paul is being creepy. No, he is not. This was a great interview.

Elmer68

I "enjoyed" listening to the gladys A episode but i kept waiting for the "how did she actually transition out of it" moment. Unfortunately it just ended cryptically with her inexplicably happy - she just suddenly was free of doing sex work with no explanation but with the clear understanding that now her life was good and free of terrible sex work. After so much lead up of detailed ugly narrative, and then left with no explanation, I cynically assumed she ended up being saved by a man of means (since otherwise, it seems it would have been explained). Assuming it was otherwise, it would have been empowering for other women in like-situations to hear how she extracted herself out of her terrible situation and on to a more gratifying life that she (and everyone) deserves. It's also annoying how Paul tended to cut her off with questions or tangents when she's right in the middle of a thought that ends up never being realized because he cut her off and then the new direction of conversation ends up vaporizing whatever she was about to say.