A book on the invisible threads of emotion that organize our lives
One Big Thing is a literary memoir about emotion, attachment, and gay identity across a period of historical change, from a time when homosexuality was a crime and a psychopathology to the era of marriage equality.
Spanning the seminal events of the past half century (AIDS, 9/11, the opioid epidemic, gay marriage, MAGA), the author uses his lived experience as a gay man as the crucible for understanding the organizing force emotion has played in his life.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Author, researcher and activist, Dr. Tracy J. Mayne has had a 40-year career spanning academia, public health and biotech, with 80 scientific publications as well as the best-selling Insider’s Guide to Graduate Training in Clinical and Counseling Psychology (1990-2012, >200,000 copies sold) and Emotion: Current Issues and Future Directions (2001). In his spare time he is the food writer for the Napa Register. He has been an AIDS and gay rights activist (ACT UP and Gay Men’s Health Crisis) since the 1980s, recently spearheading anti-hate initiatives in Napa, CA.
Born in 1963, the 8th of nine children in a suburb of Buffalo, NY, Tracy grew up in a time when being gay was considered not just a psychopathology, but a crime. He came out during his clinical training at Rutgers University and Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, where he focused his research on understanding the intersection of emotions and medicine. He finished his clinical training at the University of California San Francisco in the early 1990s, conducting groundbreaking work on the role of depression in the progression of HIV. Afterwards, he accepted a research fellowship at the Institut Nationale de la Sante and de La Recherche Medicale and the Centre National de la Recherche Scientific, the NIH and CDC of France. There he designed and executed the country’s first national study of HIV in injection drug users.
Dr. Mayne returned to the US as an adjunct professor at NYU and Columbia University while also working at Gay Men’s Health Crisis doing HIV prevention with young black transgender men in the House Ball community of Harlem. This led to becoming Director of HIV Epidemiology and Surveillance at the New York Department of Health during the height of the AIDS epidemic. He conducted the largest study of gay male sexual behavior in New York, featured on the front page of the New York Times. That article led Pfizer to recruit him into pharmaceutical research becoming the lead economist for Lipitor, one of the top-selling drugs of all time.
His life unraveled after 9/11. A narrow escape from the WTC led to addiction and tragedy, forcing Tracy to reinvent his life in Thousand Oaks, CA. There he met Brett McCarthy, a film editor, and lived a fairytale life straddling Hollywood and biotech. But a return to New York ended in tragedy as his husband lost his battle with depression and addiction, taking his own life and leaving Tracy to put the pieces back together.
Tracy reinvented himself again in California, meeting his current husband Cody Hart, becoming active in local politics and gay rights, and spearheading the fight against hate in Napa, CA. They live with their two mini-dachshunds, Franklin Shepard and Charles Kringis, and are on their fifth vintage of Viognier which they grow on their home vineyard.
LINKS
https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/video/same-sex-napa-couple-counter-neighbors-intolerance/
https://substack.com/@tracymayne?r=2bi5y7&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=profile