One of my favorite authors has died. A brilliant writer who penned nine fascinating novels, some of them highly regarded by such well-known literary figures as Patricia Highsmith, Peter Quennell, and John Betjeman. And yet, three weeks after her death, The New York Times has yet to publish her obituary. The fact that she also happened to be the granddaughter of President Theodore Roosevelt makes this all the more perplexing. Her name was Theodora Keogh.

Well, actually when she died this month in North Carolina she was known as Mrs. Arthur A Rauchfuss. Never heard of her? That does not surprise me. She lived in relative obscurity for the last four decades. Very few people in her own town knew she was the granddaughter of T. R. It was something she fought hard to keep secret. She preferred to be known for her own accomplishments, and when they were no longer in the spotlight, she chose anonymity.

I first stumbled across the name Theodora Keogh while researching an article on the Roosevelt family. I was hired to do an overview of the Roosevelts of Oyster Bay; those family members in the Teddy Roosevelt camp as opposed to the Hyde Park Roosevelts of F.D.R.’s side. (photo of Theodora below courtesy of davekiersh).

I’d always preferred the Sagamore Roosevelts. To me they represented strong wills, independence and adventure. So when I began to research T. R.’s son Archibald Roosevelt I learned of one of his daughters, Theodora, who obviously was named for her famous grandfather. But I was hindered in my quest for information since there were scant details published about her, and the family members I spoke to either knew very little about her or preferred not to discuss her. The exception was Melinda Jackson, a beautiful young dancer, who seemed to identify with her strong-minded and exotic relative. She encouraged me to read Theodora’s novels. This was back in the days before the internet and I was not able to find any of Theodora Keogh’s books in print. Nor did the local library have any copies on hand. I had to go to the main branch of the New York Public Library in Manhattan and request copies. As I was under a tight deadline, there wasn’t time to read them all but I managed to skim through one with the intriguing title The Fetish, hoping to find juicy risque sections that would add a little spice to my article. Alas, I didn’t find anything obviously prurient, but I was struck by the marvelous prose and writing style. This woman had a very modern attitude for the time period in which she was writing. I was intrigued, but put it on hold while I finished the article. In time, I forgot about Theodora Keogh.

Then, about ten years later, I read in the New York Times that my favorite bookstore in Manhattan was closing. A Different Light, which catered to the gay and lesbian community, was shutting its doors due to a lack of business. Apparently Barnes & Noble had killed it. They were having a sale of their older gay book collection and I raced down to buy what was left. I found a copy of a novel entitled The Double Door. I was amazed to find that the author of the book was none other than Theodora Keogh. Had she written a gay novel? I was intrigued. I bought the book, raced home and read it from cover to cover. It turned out to be a very peculiar novel about a young woman who finds that her father is keeping a male lover in the townhouse next door.

The “double door” of the title is the special entrance he created so he could visit his lover in secret. The whole story had vague echoes of the infamous Wayne Lonergan case. He had been convicted of killing his cafe society wife, a young heiress who happened to be the daughter of the man who was keeping him as a sort of male gigolo. Others have claimed that Keogh was thinking more of the Marquis de Cuevas, a high society ballet enthusiast married to a Rockefeller, who allegedly kept a male lover or two on the side. Regardless of its sources, the story intrigued me. The Double Door was written in 1950, long before gay novels became the vogue. Theodora Keogh was a generation ahead of her time. It is a book that is mysterious, mystifying and completely original.

The photographs on the back of the dust jacket for The Double Door showed a beautiful, rather fey creature with a dancer’s limber body and an eccentric’s love of posing. At the time, Theodora was married to Tom Keogh, a costume designer and artist. He is perhaps best known for designing the costumes for the Vincente Minnelli film The Pirate, starring Gene Kelly and Judy Garland.

The couple led a bohemian lifestyle in Paris. Prior to that, I learned, Theodora had been a dancer and toured with Alexander Iolas in South America. Salvador Dali had designed her rather outlandish costumes. All one could glean from these glimmers of insight was that Theodora was a maverick who had left her more conservative Oyster Bay relatives in the dust. I couldn’t help but identify with her. She reminded me a bit of her famous relative Alice Roosevelt Longworth, although I was certain Theodora’s views were far more liberal. (Below is a shot of her husband Tom Keogh, at left, perhaps with Leslie Caron, although it is difficult to tell. She starred in Daddy Long Legs, another film for which Keogh did the costumes. Following that is one of his illustrations.)

Over the years, I made a point of buying Theodora Keogh’s books whenever I found them. Prior to the mid 90s, it was nearly impossible. But then the internet was launched and suddenly one could simply type her name into Bookfinder.com or Amazon and come upon dozens of her tomes. My particular favorite is The Tattooed Heart, a marvelously atmospheric novel about a young boy and girl living in the Hamptons. Abandoned by their high-flying, distracted parents, they create their own universe amid the sand dunes and privet hedges of the East End. I found a copy while book-hunting in Charlottesville, Virginia — a first edition signed by Theodora Keogh herself.

I also enjoyed the racy pulp versions of her novels. As her fame grew, it seemed to me in hindsight, her books were marketed with even more salacious blurbs. Her tales were hyped as being laced with forbidden love, perversion and subterranean sex. The Fascinator delved into the dark world of “irresistible temptation”. The Fetish was a “dynamic novel of desire and damnation”! Meg tackled the mind of a young girl who was raped. The Double Door became “a throbbing novel of innocence and evil”. Gemini delved into the tragedy of incest: a forbidden love between twins! The Mistress (the American name for the novel The Fetish) described a seductress’s “haunting beauty” which “drew men to her. Her twisted desires consumed them.” The trend culminated in the strangest tale of all, The Other Girl: “The shocking story of a twisted love in the never-never land of Hollywood misfits.” That novel, inspired in part by the notorious “Black Dahlia” murder (of Elizabeth Short) had dark lesbian overtones and was marketed with the figure of a nude girl on the cover covering her face in shame.

Who wouldn’t want to read these “sordid” pulps? Well, perhaps the reason Theodora Keogh is not better known is that these books are not sordid, nor are they salacious. While they are certainly unusual and at times bizarre, they never were written to be “one-handers” as some vintage sleaze titles were. Keogh’s writing is refreshing and quite modern. Her purple prose was a light shade of violet. Yes, some of it is quirky and self-indulgent. She might have benefited from some more effective editing. But name one writer who wouldn’t? What works in the world of Theodora Keogh is her magical and insightful imagination. At a time when most books delved only glancingly at adolescent sexuality, homosexuality, lesbianism, fetishes and childhood abuse, Theodora Keogh explored them with a sophisticated, revelatory, and entirely unsentimental eye.

After completing my collection of Keogh titles, I kept looking for information about her. I reasoned that she must be in her 80s and perhaps had died. I thought of contacting Melinda Jackson again, but I had not been happy with the way my piece on the Roosevelts had been edited (chopped up, is a better word), and was concerned she would react negatively to any further inquiries. So I combed the internet constantly, hoping to learn more about her. The only person I ended up making contact with was an artist named David Kiersh, who has amassed an impressive archive about her, including photographs and books, as well as paintings by Theodora Keogh’s handsome husband, Tom. He did the cover art for many of her books, including Street Music, a touching, odd little novel about a man who befriends a child criminal.

Then out of the blue I got an email from a wonderfully helpful writer named Robert Nedelkoff who had noticed a tiny mention of Theodora on my relatively new MySpace page. He told me that Theodora Keogh had died and sent me links to her obituary in the Charlotte Observer. We then struck up a conversation about Theodora Keogh and other neglected authors that has been fascinating and lively. He also told me that Hugo Vickers, who penned the brilliant biography of Cecil Beaton, among many other achievements, has written a full-length obituary about her in the Telegraph. (see link here). How ironic that it is the British press which goes to the trouble of writing about this granddaughter of one of the most popular and beloved American Presidents while the New York Times, the newspaper of record in the United States, completely ignores her passing. One has to ask why has-been movie stars and long-forgotten opera singers get immediate coverage in the Times when they die, but a writer of nine ground-breaking novels does not? Theodora Roosevelt Keogh O’Toole Rauchfuss deserves much better.

She was the dark queen of early pulp fiction. The mistress of suspense. The “poet of apprehension.” Patricia Highsmith was above all an artist. I wrote the following appreciation of the author of the vintage bestseller Strangers on a Train immediately after her death in 1995. Back then most people I knew had never heard of her. The article appeared in Out Magazine and some people at the time pointedly criticized me for “outing” Highsmith, confusing a frank discussion of a writer’s sexuality with a politically motivated expose. Since then of course, several biographies have come out exploring Highsmith’s lesbianism and her earlier very open lifestyle without any circumspection. After this piece appeared, there have been two more Ripley movies. The Talented Mr. Ripley starring a painfully miscast Matt Damon; and the amusing John Malkovich thriller, Ripley’s Game. Her reputation has grown. And today her books are selling more than they did when she was alive. Some of her more obscure works have been reissued. And two collections of her short stories have been published. For me, however, Patricia Highsmith remains one of the great writers of postwar American fiction whose literary influence is still not fully recognized. I only wish that I had had a chance to meet Highsmith. I think we would have hit it off despite my dislike of snails.

The Talented Ms. Highsmith

“Sometimes I think that the artistic life is a long and lovely suicide, and I am sorry that is so.” This quote, from Oscar Wilde’s personal letters, was used by Patricia Highsmith in a foreword to one of her 21 extraordinary novels. It might as well have been her epitaph (she died at age 74 in Switzerland on February 4, 1995), for the statement sums up so simply the eerie melancholy that colored her lifework.

From her first novel, Strangers on a Train (immortalized, if bowdlerized, in Hitchock’s classic thriller), to her last, Small g: A Summer Idyll, about a bizarre gay bar in Zurich (published in London, just days after her death), Patricia Highsmith probed the dark depths of paranoia, delving into the minds of homicidal psychopaths and their victims. Very often, in her world, crime did pay. Her short stories were horrifying, frequently grotesque: A rat devours the nose of a small child; a snail-lover is smothered to death by millions of his slimy pets; a man saddled with a deformed baby strangles an innocent passerby in a sudden act of revenge. One treads gingerly in Highsmith’s troubled universe, never knowing what waits around the corner. Graham Greene called her “the poet of apprehension.” But she was also haunted by her own demons.

Pegged early on as a suspense writer, Highsmith transcended the genre, gaining cult status even as she was ignored by most American literary critics. Those who did pay attention compared her to Henry James, Dostoyevsky, and Poe. Immensely popular in Europe, her books were filmed by Wim Wenders, Rene Clement, and Claude Miller, and garnered numerous awards. But she never caught on with the American public, no doubt because she didn’t portray them in flattering terms and had little patience with middle-class conceptions of good versus evil. To her, justice was a man-made conceit. Novelist and director Michael Tolkin says, “She was one of the best writers in the world. I have never read a review of her work where there wasn’t some hedging on the part of the critic, a slightly superior tone because she was a girl or writing in this genre. But she was a great writer, the last turn of the dial to unlock my novels. I don’t think I could have written The Player without her.”

Few people, know, however, that Patricia Highsmith, by all accounts a passionate, yet very private lesbian, was also an important figure in gay literature. In 1952, fresh from her success with Strangers on a Train, she wrote the groundbreaking novel The Price of Salt. Perhaps fearful of being branded a “lesbian author” as she had been a “mystery writer,” Highsmith wrote under the pseudonym Claire Morgan. Or perhaps she could not reconcile her lesbianism with her public profile. For decades this heartfelt romance, one of the first lesbian novels with a happy ending, was required reading for young women (and many men) eager to overcome their isolation and loneliness. Reissued several times, most notably by Naiad Press, the book is still in print. Eventually, Naiad publisher Barbara Grier convinced Highsmith to use her own name on the book. “I worshipped that book,” Grier says, recalling the thrill of discovering it in 1952 in a department store in Kansas City. “It was a very upbeat, pro-lesbian book, which in itself was a miracle.”

Highsmith’s representative Anne Elisabeth-Suter estimates The Price of Salt has sold hundreds of thousands of copies worldwide, so its impact cannot be ignored. But none of her major obituaries mentioned it, except for a personal piece by Tolkin in the Los Angeles Times. In fact, the New York Times’ obituary did Highsmith another disservice by erroneously calling her “Ms Ripley,” confusing the author with her more diabolical creation, Tom Ripley, an engaging American psychotic living abroad, who continually gets away with murder. No doubt Highsmith, master of irony, was laughing in her grave. She often said that Ripley, not she, had written the first of the five books in which he appears. That novel, The Talented Mr. Ripley, was later developed as a project for Paramount Pictures by Sydney Pollack and William Horberg. “Highsmith was one of the great postwar novelists,” Horberg says. “Her books are impossible to put down. The Talented Mr. Ripley is a profound love story. Ripley loves Dickie Greenleaf but can’t have him, so tragically, he destroys him.”

For all their psychological intrigue, Highsmith saw her books merely as entertainments. Favoring emotions over style, she wrote in a spare, declarative tone that weaves a terrifying spell. The monotony of quotidian details lulls the reader into a false sense of security. Her protagonists are always cooking, drinking, or making their beds, so that when a murderer suddenly acts, the horror is infinitely more dramatic, raw. In The Boy Who Followed Ripley, one of her most peculiar novels, Highsmith grippingly depicts Ripley’s growing affection for a handsome young man who has murdered his invalid father in Maine by pushing his wheelchair off a cliff. He turns to the notorious Ripley for support. Later, Ripley dresses in drag for a rendezvous at a gay bar and commits murder to save the boy’s life.

What was behind Highsmith’s fascination with death and murder? One can only suspect it stems from her private obsessions. She was born Patricia Plangman in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1921. Her parents, commercial artists, had divorced before she was born. Patricia lived with her maternal grandmother until age six, when she was moved with her mother to New York. Her mother remarried a man named Highsmith, who later adopted Patricia. Highsmith didn’t meet her natural father until she was 12. In interviews she hinted that her childhood was less than happy. Emotional turmoil was constant. A clue to her feelings may be gleaned from her early writings, odd little stories about homicidal children. She was inspired by a clinical text her family owned called The Human Mind by Dr. Karl Menninger, filled with vivid case studies about pyromaniacs, sadists, and kleptomaniacs. Highsmith used it throughout her career as a character bible. “The Terrapin,” for example, concerns a lonely boy whose mother dresses him in children’s clothes. Alienated from his peers, in particular a bully next door, the youth grows increasingly hysterical until he stabs his mother to death after she boils a turtle alive. One wonders, with a chill, if Highsmith’s mother ever read that story.

Highsmith attended Barnard College, where she edited the school literary magazine. There she met journalist Kate Kinglsley Skattebol, who corresponded with Highsmith the rest of her life and remained a devoted friend. Skattebol recalls Highsmith as a droll, impish wit fond of practical jokes, scatological humor, and bawdy limericks. “Her writing talent was evident in college,” she says. One of her earliest tales, “The Heroine,” about a deranged nanny who sets fire to a house where she works, was rejected by the Barnard magazine, Skattebol says, because it was “too unpleasant.” It later appeared in Harper’s Bazaar and the short story collection Eleven, regaining notoriety decades later during the scandalous Swiss nanny murder trial. Some thought the alleged killer (later acquitted) might have been inspired by Highsmith’s story.

An early friend, Truman Capote, championed Highsmith, helping her to get into Yaddo, the writer’s retreat, where she rewrote Strangers on a Train (it had been rejected by six publishers). Over the years, Highsmith also developed lasting friendships with writers Graham Greene, Gore Vidal, and Paul Bowles. When not writing fiction, Highsmith found odd jobs, writing scenarios for Superman comics, or toiling at Bloomingdale’s over Christmas. She used that stint as background for The Price of Salt: Therese, the main character, whose dark features and shy, dreamy demeanor bear more than a passing resemblance to the young Highsmith, meets her love, Carol, at a New York department store.

“Every adult has secrets,” writes Highsmith at the novel’s end. And throughout her life she seemed to enjoy harboring her own. “Pat was nothing if not unobvious,” says Gary Fisketjon, her editor at Knopf, her last American publisher. “She was not particularly troubled by the fact that she was gay. She couldn’t give a shit — she was Texan until the fucking end.” But she preferred leading a private life.” Barbara Grier, who corresponded with her frequently, says Highsmith suffered acutely from “internalized homophobia,” which was not surprising, she adds, considering the era in which she was raised. Highsmith’s own attitude is put rather succinctly in a postscript to The Price of Salt, in which she states, “I like to avoid labels.”

An expatriate, Highsmith traveled constantly, moving first from New York to Mexico, then to Italy, England, and France, before finally settling near Locarno, in Switzerland. Often cold and closed-mouthed with reporters, Highsmith disliked publicity. “She hated to come out of her house,” says her Swiss publisher Daniel Keel. On more than one occasion she walked out in the middle of interviews. But her sense of humor was well-known. Larry Ashmead, executive editor at Harper Collins, recalls Highsmith telling him how she once smuggled live snails into France by hiding them under her breasts.

At the end, Highsmith lived alone with her beloved cat, Charlotte. She was, by most accounts, a loner who drank and smoked to excess. As a young woman, according to Fisketjon, Highsmith was a “staggeringly beautiful woman.” But as she aged, her sturdy masculine features became more exaggerated, almost forbidding. Duncan Hannah, a New York artist, recalls meeting Highsmith at a book-signing. “She was like a Mandarin, almost Buddha-like,” he says, “with a dilapidated, very still quality. Being under her gaze was like being under a microscope. It was spooky.”

Highsmith seems to have exorcized her demons with her final and most openly gay work, Small g: A Summer Idyll. Sweetly sentimental, with gothic undertones, this dark romance harks back to the young-adults-in-love theme of The Price of Salt, but lacks its focus. In fact, Small g was rejected by Knopf and poorly reviewed in England. But it has unmistakable Highsmith touches: a club-footed homophobe, a bisexual beauty, a dandy diagnosed as HIV positive, and a clever circus dog named Lulu who upstages evevyone else. One wonders what Highsmith might have achieved had she brought her literary villains and herself “out” decades ago. But maybe, for her readers, it’s better she didn’t. For then we might not have experienced the full rewards of her strange, macabre genius.

Today is an important milestone for me. It’s been 25 years since I gave up alcohol and drugs. I have not had a glass of wine, a Wild Turkey on the rocks (my favorite), a hit of a joint, or even a valium in a quarter century. That’s twice as long as I drank. I first started drinking at 15 and by the age of 25 had nearly killed myself because of it. I joined AA and quit cold turkey. I was one of the lucky ones.

Shortly after my third anniversary, around the time of AA’s 50th anniversary, I was invited by the Village Voice to write a personal essay about my experiences in Alcoholics Anonymous. I debated it at the time since I was a firm believer in AA’s principles which includes remaining anonymous at the level of press and film. Of course, times have changed dramatically since 1985 when I wrote the piece that follows. Thanks to celebrities such as Betty Ford and Elizabeth Taylor, AA has been dragged out of the closet. And society no longer shuns recovering alcoholics. In fact, there’s a case to be made that going public with one’s disease can be a tremendous help to others suffering from the same affliction.

When I wrote this article, I decided to use a pseudonym. But today in honor of my 25th anniversary, I am going to republish it under my own name. Keep in mind while reading it that I wrote it many, many years ago and it was one of my first published pieces. Today, I probably would have written it much differently. But I think it stands up over time. And I hope it helps someone else out there who might be wrestling with the same issues I was way back when.

Living Sober

by Brooks Peters

(This article first appeared in The Village Voice, July 23, 1985)

A psychiatrist once asked me if I was gay. I replied jokingly, “No, I’m worse than that.” Making light of my homosexuality was a clever way of rising above it. Today, I don’t condescend to my gayness. I embrace it. Four years ago, my alcoholism had progressed to such a degree that I had no self-esteem left. At 24, I had given up any hope of having a successful and meaningful life. I was willing to die.

Homosexuality played a major role in my drinking story — or perhaps I should say, I used gayness as a reason to drink. For many gay alcoholics our first drink and our first homosexual experience occur about the same time. Liquor gave me the courage to act like a “man” — or at least what I supposed a man was.

When I drank, feelings of isolation and fear disappeared. I became outgoing, outspoken, and outrageous. Since I could drink more than anyone I knew — more even than the largest football player — I not only felt like one of the guys, I was treated like one of them.

Drinking was my entree into the Gay World… a world that seemed to me to be one never-ending, sizzling, cocktail party. I only met gay men in situations where there was booze: bars, discos, parties, etc. By the time I learned about the baths and the parks, I had no interest in them because liquor wasn’t served.

I went to my first gay bar on Independence Day, 1976. It was the Bicentennial in Boston, my freshman year in college. I cruised a man at the Boston Pops concert at the Esplanade and ended up in 1270, a popular gay disco on Boylston Street. Thus began a love affair that lasted six years — a love affair with gay bars. Lots of gay men describe how they needed a drink just to go to a gay bar. I needed a gay bar so I could get drunk.

By sophomore year, it took just one drink to set me off on a steeplechase. Blackouts became a common experience, terrifying but unpreventable. I began to take drugs and to use sex as a form of self-abuse, where quantity was more enticing than quality. After college, I drank my way across the country, using gay bars the way travelers once used inns.

I came back to New York, drank around the clock. Within a few months, I was drinking alone. Not even gay bars would have me. I started stealing money, panhandling, taking speed to stay awake to drink more. I started hallucinating, shaking uncontrollably, and crying involuntarily. I became more erratic and violent. I was slugged a few times and once landed in jail. My liver was so enlarged, I gave it a name, Larry. My kidneys hurt so much sometimes I couldn’t stand up. I started to vomit blood and lose control of my bladder. By the end, I was sleeping with bums on street corners because I wanted to be one of them.

Perhaps few of you can relate to my experiences, but maybe you can identify with the feelings of hope and faith I discovered upon joining the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous. When that psychiatrist I mentioned earlier suggested I go to AA to stop drinking, I told him that I didn’t think I could make it unless I went to a gay meeting.

The first AA meeting I went to was the gay group, Live and Let Live, on the Upper East Side. The speaker that night was a handsome bartender — the kind I used to kill for. He’d been sober over a year then and as I listened to his story — how as a gay man he knew no other life than that of bars and sex, I identified. He was not only telling his story, he was telling mine. One of my reservations about quitting drinking had always been, what does a gay drunk do other than drink, get down and do drugs?

What I discovered changed my life. I learned that gay men have much more to offer each other and the world than simply living it up, partying, and camping out. I had to get over my own self-hatred before I could possibly contribute anything of value. Once I was satisfied to play the clown, laughing with the crowd, at myself. The gay groups of AA have taught me that I am not a joke. I no longer have to say– I’m worse than that.

The last three years and eight months have been the most exciting times of my life. Anyone who thinks that AA is boring has never been to a gay meeting. The same humor and attitude that often make gay life so enjoyable are in play in the program, only the goal is different. You don’t need to be drunk to have a good time. In AA, we’d laugh and carry on just as much as in a bar, only we do it around a coffee urn or a jug of lemonade.

Here in AA our sole purpose is to stay sober and help other alcoholics achieve sobriety. What they don’t tell you when you first come in is that sobriety means more than just not picking up — it means a complete reevaluation of your life and your self. Sobriety is a positive approach to reality.

Getting better doesn’t happen overnight. It took me almost three years to open up enough to let other members of AA even have my telephone number. I went to New Group, a gay meeting in the Village, regularly every Sunday for three years, refusing to go to other meetings or any group functions, dances or the yearly convention for gay alcoholics called the Big Apple Round-up. I was finally brought out of my shell by a very patient fellow member who became my sponsor.

There’s an expression in AA, “Don’t drink before the miracle.” I never understood that expression, only thinking of miracles in religious terms. But miracles occur daily in minuscule ways, some hardly noticeable. The miracle happened for me when I told this fellow alcoholic that I did not want to have sex with him. His reaction surprised me. He didn’t become defensive or bitchy, or analyze me. He didn’t even judge me. He simply wished me well. What he wanted, even more than me, was my sobriety. As a recovering alcoholic, he needed me to be sober too. It was the first instance in my life when I felt I could really open up to another human being.

Since then I have taken part in the program, working the 12 steps suggested as a means to recovery, and helping to form a new gay group on the Upper West Side called Lambda West. I have also reached out to other alcoholics, attending a weekly schedule of non-specifically gay meetings. To me it is just as important to be accepted and to accept “straight” people as it is to embrace my own sexuality. I don’t think I could have become so tolerant and comfortable if it weren’t for the support and affection demonstrated by all rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Now I see that I was a prisoner of alcohol and that my homosexuality had nothing to do with it. It was my conception of gayness that was negative, not gayness per se. Society at large encourages the gay alcoholic to keep drinking by condemning homosexuality, but it is our choice to drink.

Many gay people come into the fellowship of AA confused by our conflicting needs and our place in society. What we have been lacking has been there all the time, but we’ve been too busy trying to establish an identity that we’ve overlooked it. The answer lies in our inherent humanity.