Lost Friendship: The Era of Trump Reveals What’s Behind the Curtain

I always knew she believed those things that she never said. There were signs. There was a dinner party for twelve at my apartment with H2 (husband #2) in the mid eighties and AIDS was just becoming a topic of dinner party talk. The left wing international set around our table were all talking about the horror of it, and about the long-term possibility of the annihilation of those we love. You have to have been a thirty-something during that time to understand the enormity of it, and the terror and sadness it left in its wake.

We were all getting up to go to the living room, and there was a moment of relative quiet, and my old roommate and best friend said, “Well the gays are getting what they deserve. It’s their punishment for being gay.”

Silence. Everywhere. Everyone. Silence.

H2 looked over at me as if to ask, “Your friend? Are you going to take care of this?”

I was born in 1953, and as a girl I had “the disease to please”; that is, I was taught never to be confrontational. I said, “I’m sure you don’t mean that. Freshly squeezed orange juice and chocolates await us all in the living room.” I really don’t know if that is what I said. The truth is, I’m not sure I ever said anything to her about what she said. But I didn’t see her for a number of years after she said it.

History matters. And we had a long history. We were roommates in the 70s, and there were signs of her bigotry then too, but I ignored them.

Then Obama was elected president. My friend and her sister came once a year to stay with me, and the tension was palpable his last year in office. One night after she’d had a few, her sister explained to me that Obama was personally buying all the ammunition in the country so that those who wanted guns — who had the right to them — would have no bullets to use.

“Where did you hear that?” I said. “I need to call you on this one. You cannot believe that what you’re saying is true.”

“I heard it on the radio. I don’t remember which program, but I know it’s true.”

It got heated, and I went to bed angry and sad and regretful. Regretful, you ask? I was upset at what the harsh words we’d spoken to each other that…