S5. E5: Dan Mathews: Like Crazy

“When I moved my mom in, I certainly felt, okay, now I'm off the market. I've got a broken-down house, a crazy mother, a high-pressure job being a vegan activist at PETA… this is not really a good resume for finding Mr. Right.”

– Dan Mathews

Dan Mathews is the Director of Campaigns at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). He’s been there since the 80s when he was hired as a receptionist right after college. Dan’s responsible for PETAs most controversial and outlandish campaigns including the "I'd Rather Go Naked Than Wear Fur" ads.  He’s been arrested more than 20 times, but all for good reason - having changed the world for millions of animals. 

He is also the author of two books, Committed and most recently, Like Crazy: Life with My Mother and Her Invisible Friends, a darkly funny memoir about the hardships and rewards of taking in a mentally and physically fragile parent. It shows the spectacular amount of expansion and growth that results from choosing to do the right thing over the easy thing, from choosing the more beautiful life. Dan is brilliant, extremely funny, and a gift to humans and animals everywhere. I hope that you’re as moved as I was. 

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Transcript:

Dan: [00:00:00] But when I moved, my mom and I certainly felt, OK, now I'm off the market, I've got a broken down house, a crazy mother, a high pressure job, being a vegan activist at PETA. This is not really a good resume for finding Mr Right.

Elizabeth: [00:00:24] Hi, I'm Elizabeth Novogratz. This is Species Unite. We have a favor to ask if you like today's episode and you have a spare minute, could you please rate and review species your night on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts? It really helps people to find the show. Today's conversation is with Dan Mathews. Dan is senior vice president at PETA. He started working there in the 80s, right when he graduated from college. He was a receptionist these days. Then 35 years later, he is the director of campaigns and known for some of the most controversial attention getting campaigns anyone's ever seen, including the I'd rather go naked than wear fur ads. He just came out with a second book. It's called Like Crazy Life with my mother and her invisible friends. Dan, thank you so much for being here. Really happy to have you on the show. So I want to talk about like crazy and the years that you write about in the book. But before we get there, I want to talk about the decision that you made to move your mom in and how that all went down.

Dan: [00:01:51] Yeah, I mean, I should start by saying that I really don't consider myself much of a family man. I moved away from California right after high school, saved up a thousand bucks in Italy, always volunteered for animal rights until I finished college, started at PETA in Washington and I would see my family. My mom and dad split when I was about seven. My brothers remained on the West Coast and my mom was very kooky. She was always involving us in every whatever cause, whether it was marching with immigrants or the grape pickers, just you name it, she was tear gassed, marching against the KKK. When animal rights became my thing, she totally embraced it and she was really a champion of that. Even when I was gay in the seventies and junior high school, which was a kind of a death sentence in that era, she totally backed me up in that as well and and told me it was a part of this really cool subculture. So she supported me. A lot of kids have a lot of problems growing up because their parents don't support them or their parents have other ideas about what they should do with their life. My mom, with all of her quirks and drawbacks and eccentricities, was always solidly in my corner. A few friends contracted aids and their own parents turned them out. She would take care of them, and she was always so great. So flash forward to when I was about 40 years old and my mom was approaching her 70s and I could tell that things were worse with her. She always had these emotional moments. She would move to a different town, change her name all the time. She ended up in the Salvation Army at one point. my brothers and I would take turns getting her apartments. And I finally decided I had to see her out the way she saw me, and we just took a deep breath and moved her into an old, dilapidated 1870 house here right across the harbor in Portsmouth, Virginia. It was my friends who told me it was the worst decision I would ever make, because not only would I have a crazy full time job at PETA, but it's a full time job taking care of a senior with health problems and mental problems, and not to mention the house that was about as broken down as my mom was. But I just knew I would always regret it if I didn't just buck up and do it. So I did and it was really fun at first. As the years went on, I had it for about five years. I would walk home, walk in and she would be having these conversations with people that weren't there. I thought, Oh, maybe this is just how seniors reminisce. It all seemed very good natured and I thought, Well, this is nice, it's pleasant. But then it started getting darker and darker and darker. Then my brother was dead, and then my father was dead, and then our newborn niece was dead and she just thought everybody was dying. She kind of spiraled out of her mind and I got her, lured her out of the house and got her to a hospital. She was admitted and diagnosed with schizophrenia, untreated schizophrenic all the way into her 80s.

Elizabeth: [00:04:46] How old was she when she got diagnosed?

Dan: [00:04:48] Eighty two.

Elizabeth: [00:04:49] Does that happen?

Dan: [00:04:50] It does happen, but it's extremely rare and it's never written about when she was diagnosed. I read all the other memoirs about schizophrenia and the most recent one from, I think, 2012 or something like that had said that all of the memoirs, all of the books, all the scientific data on schizophrenics come from those who have gotten treatment fairly early on in their teens or their 20s and were observed in clinical settings. There has never been a book about how the untreated disease would manifest in a person who made it into old age. So I thought about studying here in a clinic, I lived with the bitch for five years. I can tell you everything you want to know. So I really felt it was my obligation to write a book that was shattering stereotypes. Luckily, my mom was a very, very witty, hilarious individual. So this was able to be a funny book, even though it's about mental mental illness. But it took me a good five years to write it and finish it after she passed, and now it's been getting a really, really terrific response.

Elizabeth: [00:05:59] Schizophrenia gets such a bad rap. It's all dark. It's all just violence, and that's all you hear about it and see about it. One of the things about your book, I thought was so incredible was it's this very real story of what life can look like. I'm sure it was dark times. But there's a lot of good times as well and on top of that, because we live in a culture where it's so easy to put people away when they get old or they get sick that you made the choice not only when everyone was telling you not to, but It really didn't fit in your life at all. So what was it then that ultimately made you decide, Yes, of course I'm going to take her in?

Dan: [00:06:43] Well, life does not make a plan.You might make plans, but life doesn't make a plan. I wrote the book not only for people suffering mental health or people dealing with those who are suffering mental health, but also as something a different take on a parent child relationship. Would I have gone to such great lengths to bring her in if she hadn't inspired my animal rights work when I was just a child and she was urging me to look up for animals if she had defended me so staunchly when I was gay and gay bashed. I don't know. I don't know the answer to that. But the fact is, I didn't. I know a lot of people that have to reinvent themselves, not just gay kids, but people have to reinvent themselves after they leave home, after they get out of college, when they're away from the shadow and influence of their parents expectations. That can drive a wedge that lasts a lifetime between some people. I mean, you're good friends with your parents, but it's still like an arm's length, and I didn't have that excuse to fall back on it, which is why I listen to my heart and move to her in.

Elizabeth: [00:07:48] What you've done with your life, what you've done with what you've done with animal rights, gay rights versus a lot of kids growing up in that same position with a different kind of parent who knows how you would have turned out? Do you think a lot of this came from your mom's influence, her pushing you to just be who you are?

Dan: [00:08:04] That’s true. It's totally true. There were drawbacks when I was a kid. Schizophrenic’s don't have a great track record at managing money or maintaining human relationships. So we would have to move apartments a lot one time in shopping carts because we had no car. But when you're living in that situation, it doesn't seem pathetic. It seems like a game, and it seems kind of funny, especially when we had to move the piano for blocks in the middle of the night, up and down curbs and speed bumps. My first memoir is called Committed, and that's all about what happened that compelled me to devote my life to animal rights. My mom is a significant character in that book, especially in the early parts. She was everybody's favorite character, despite there being, you know, Pamela Anderson and Calvin Klein and Pink and Paul McCartney, whatever. My mom was the person that everybody asked about the most because of her outlook and her hilarious quotes. So when it was coming time to figure out a second book, it seemed like this could be an extension of committed but really just about her, and especially because it coincided with all of these things coming into clarity at the end of her life and all these answers our parents often don't tell us the things that happen to them in their early life because they don't want to load us down with their baggage. It's important for us to learn, especially if what happened explains the way that they're, you know, a little bit damaged.

Elizabeth: [00:09:26] I suppose when you were growing up, did you know something was up? I mean, clearly she was different, but she hadn't been diagnosed with anything.

Dan: [00:09:34] She would refuse to go see a psychiatrist. She turned her nose up at the whole thought of it. Of course, years later, she died. My dad said I didn't know what exactly this was, but she refused to see anybody and it's what drove us apart. It's what drove her apart from her previous husband in the 50s and from a few boyfriends here and there. Schizophrenia is a very simple disease in that it is a surplus of dopamine in your system. When you've got too much dopamine in your system, you get a blocked signal, the signal from your ears to your brain about what you heard or what you thought can get all muddled, especially in times of emotional tumult. So when somebody who is schizophrenic hears a plane crash outside, they didn't think they heard a plane crash. They heard a plane crash. There was no exterior speaker. It was their own self that conjured that up through the mixed signals in the brain. I learned early on the big mistake is to say you didn't hear a plane crash. Look outside. There's no plane. All of those times it would end in fights and slam doors and more misery. I learned that you just say, Oh, how awful? God, what do you think we should have for dinner? You just have to acknowledge it and move on.

Elizabeth: [00:10:54] When she got the actual diagnosis, were you relieved? 

Dan: [00:10:58] I was shocked. I was. It was. It was one of the biggest, maybe the number one shocks of my life because my brothers and I, all three of us are college graduates. We watched the news and we grew up with her and we knew something was really wrong. But we chalked it up to damage from her growing up in orphanages and foster homes during the depression all those years that she wouldn't talk about, we just assumed some awful thing happened, and that's why she's kooky. So we just don't press the subject, really. The diagnosis, it all made such sense, and then I went and reread my first book and the descriptions of her are all the descriptions of somebody suffering schizophrenia. I can't believe I didn't recognize that schizophrenia, even though it's simply too much dopamine in your system, it's a very complex disease with how it manifests. Some people hear voices, other people see images. My mom heard herself singing more than she heard other voices. She couldn't turn off her own poor voice, singing Christmas hymns or whatever. So it drove her nuts, and it's all slightly different. There's dozens of different versions of schizophrenia, so there's not really one true disease, although there's the one true cause, which is the surplus of dopamine, causing just your system to go haywire with internal communications.

Elizabeth: [00:12:20] It had to have been just a crazy shock to hear after this many years.

Dan: [00:12:24] She stopped recognizing me at one point when she was in the psych ward, that was a really terrible thing. But then with minimal meds, the voices disappeared, they turned into, I think, faint echoes. For the last several months of her life, she lived at home, died at home. That's why I bought the house for her to die in it, rather than in some antiseptic hospital ward or awful senior place. So I was most proud the day she died. It's like, I think this book is very much about helping somebody that you love into the grave. When you're raising a kid, it's all about their first walk, their first word, as you can sense that your parent is going to be gone. It's their last Halloween. It's their latest and you really want to do it right. I've never had hangups about death. I guess having grown up in the AIDS era, I was never overwrought by the idea. You just want to make it as pleasant as possible and be strong for the person that's actually dropping. That's another reason why I think the book has so many funny elements, even though it's darkly comic is because I've always thought that when you're the person who's kind of taking care of somebody, if you show that you are a wreck, that's only going to make it worse for them, I think. I'm not saying you have to ignore bad things are happening. I certainly don't do that. But at the same time, you have to laugh at the absurdity of life. I mean, to give you an example, on her deathbed, my mom there was a hospice nurse who came in every day and at one point she said, Have you two had a discussion about the inevitable? My mom with the oxygen mask on said, Oh yes, when my time comes, I'm going to hold on to Thursday because on our street, they take away the trash on Fridays.

Elizabeth: [00:14:12] So it certainly didn't get boring. Well, and you thought of that by bringing her in and moving her. You're like a lot of your parts of your life were kind of done for a while at least. 

Dan: [00:14:26] Like I certainly loved having a boyfriend here, boyfriend there traveling with PETA. I was all over the place and it was fun. I loved being a loner, traveling all around and having a little tiny apartment based here in Virginia. But then all of a sudden I passed 40 and I didn't feel any great need to, you know, find a partner or anything like that. I think it just has to happen or it doesn't. But when I moved, my mom and I certainly felt, OK, now I'm off the market. I've got a broken down house, a crazy mother, a high pressure job, being a vegan activist at PETA. This is not really a good resume for finding Mr Right. But who cares? I didn't do it for this and this is now a different part of my life. I kind of decided I'm no longer going to be the wild gadabout that I was because I've got different priorities right now and that could change. That could change. She might last five years, she might last 15, just who knows. But the strangest thing is that only seven eight months after I moved to Iran, I met this guy, Jack, at last call at a total dive bar here in Norfolk, and he had just separated from his wife of 19 years, had four teenage kids.

Dan: [00:15:45] He was my age, but he had four kids and he was just entangling himself from that and hadn't really even come out to his broader family yet and was really depressed and really struggling and felt that he was past the sell by date himself. So we both met at the most vulnerable, desperate moment in each of our lives. He came over and I was wary of introducing him to my mom at first. They instantly clicked. He had been an orphan as well, and so they had the orphan bond. My mom was so pro-gay that she ended up becoming his like, surrogate, pro-gay mother, and he just instantly fell into the routine at our house and because he's a production designer for indie films and reenactment TV, he was actually able to help pull the house together in ways that I could never have done. Then within a year or two, he moved in, and then we had the base of the book. Is this great, bizarre new modern family of me, my crazy mother, my freshly out of the closet husband, his Latina ex-wife and their four kids. We weren't all living together, but me and Jack and Perry were, but we all got together quite a lot on holidays, and that was the ongoing thing.

Elizabeth: [00:17:00] Yeah, I mean, what a lesson, and you'd make this change, and it looks like it's going to be so hard. It was hard, but it's such a life changer in the other way and how much it just blows your life up in the most incredible ways.

Dan: [00:17:13] Yeah, I think it's like, you know, whatever the if you follow your heart and doing the right things, other good things will happen if you go derail from your path that you're supposed to take or for self-interest or greed or something like that, it might. Keep you from getting the life that you should be leading, and, Jack was not even vegetarian, he was Mr. Ham and cheese when we met and my mom and I were. I've been vegan since the 80s and she has since the 90s. He got so into the wild dinners that we would cook, that he is like, I'm going to make all the things that I used to make for my kids. But the vegan version, spaghetti and meatballs. So his whole thing was like recreating all these meaty dishes, but with the vegan versions, and we just had these wonderful dinner parties. Then because we live in a big ship town, a big navy town, we have a lot of friends. A navy town has a lot of tattoo artists and tattoo parlors and a lot of strip bars and a lot of rough and tumble people that are here, you know, working on a ship for a month before they ship out again. A lot of them in the Navy, PTSD victims at the Naval Hospital around the corner. So we have a pretty eccentric town, and our dinner parties reflect that.

Dan: [00:18:22] You would not think it was a pita senior vice president having this, these dinner parties with tattoo artists and strippers and and sailors and my mom at one end of the table telling dirty jokes and and you know, Jack and I turning all these people onto vegan things that had never even considered it before. It's rare, I think, especially in this day of such a fragmented society. We're so divisive right now. This country we somehow thrive on everybody being a bit different. We had a hunter come over for a vegan Thanksgiving after he had hunted that morning, and he didn't tell us that until later. I knew he had. I knew he hunted once in a while, but he didn't tell us that till later. Now the same guy is posting about vegan this and vegan that and inviting us all to his parties and to make things so that his friends can learn more about it. It's just it feels like this is the way it's supposed to be. You can have friends from all different persuasions, political persuasions, different sexualities, different in our house. We just don't care, you know, everyone. It's a true melting pot. We're very involved with the NAACP and the Black Lives movement over there. We successfully toppled our Confederate monument this summer. I'm very, very happy to say.

Elizabeth: [00:19:36] Congratulations.

Dan: [00:19:37] Jack and I were there helping lead the charge on the first night with Onyx and Bob and Louis and all the others from the NAACP. So, yeah, and now they've learned more about PETA and we're doing this food desert veggie giveaway together. It's just cool.

Elizabeth: [00:19:50] What a beautiful life. Go back for just a second because I want to hear about how, like, specifically animal rights became that she had this influence on your life and animal rights.

Dan: [00:20:01] So that only hit me when, after her diagnosis and when reading about the traits of schizophrenia, I just thought she was a loner. She worked for temp agencies, quit jobs, pretty, routinely moved to a different town, changed names just like it was just odd. But I learned that that's just a hallmark of schizophrenia, as you cannot maintain long term relationships with humans. However, she maintained long term relationships with animals because every cat on the street who was stray, we would take in and get them vet care, and usually they would stay. One time we took in. A pregnant cat who was being attacked by kids under a bush, had six kittens in the closet and my closet that night. This was a white trash apartment where there were no animals allowed. So she just taught us at such a young age that animals are these pure spirits. They have not only different kinds of sophisticated, intelligent, but different ways they can communicate in different ways that you can really consider them a friend and they'll consider you a friend if you just really treat them like an individual with respect and. So that was drilled into me. That's the only thing I've ever known. I never had to unlearn disregard for animals. Of course, back in those days, it was before PETA's, before animal rights really was seen as a movement. I would still go fishing with my dad the few times a year I would see him until I finally renounced fishing when I was about 12 and decided then and there that I was never going to eat fish again. I was so embarrassed that I had actually killed an animal just from peer pressure going fishing with my dad. Then slowly but surely, of course, I know what stopped eating pigs and chickens and cows. Then I went vegan in eighty five, the year that I started at PETA. Right after college and thirty five years later, here I am.

Elizabeth: [00:21:49] Still and what made her go vegan?

Dan: [00:21:51] She always thought it was sensible. It was just not really practical. When we were growing up in the seventies, we would get a hamburger helper. It just wasn't. It really wasn't on the radar aside from some hippies. But you just didn't really hear that much about it. As soon as I decided that that was me, she totally encouraged it. She wasn't one of those parents who said, Oh, you're going to get anemic, you better. Well, as long as they're under this roof, you're going to. None of that at all. She's like, Oh, that's great, I'm going to do it, too. Why did we ever eat meat in the first place? So this is all when I was in Junior High High School. So it started. Then we were both vegetarian and then. After I started working at PETA, I became vegan, and then as soon as she learned more about the dairy trade, she became vegan as well quite easily. This is all in the seminal years of PETA, so it's kind of interesting to see. There's a lot of PETA in the background of this book on different trips for different campaigns and with our stray cat situation and the wonderful it ends with our cat Cilantro, who was a stray. She's a Manx, a giant cat like a bobcat who roamed the streets of Portsmouth after a neighbor moved and left her behind. My mom was constantly trying to get this cat in. The cat would go near nobody. But after my mom died, all of a sudden this Manx reconsidered. It's now part of our family. Still love it. I love it. Twenty five pounds and believe me, she's on like the local kibble and she doesn't need that.

Elizabeth: [00:23:18] That's awesome. Dan, thank you so much. Thank you. Everybody should read this book. It's incredibly funny and incredibly good, but it's also, I mean, there's so many lessons. It's just how to live and how to really create a beautiful life.

Dan: [00:23:34] I really appreciate that.

Elizabeth: [00:23:35] Thank you for the book. Thank you for your work at PETA. Thank you for all of it.

Dan: [00:23:39] My pleasure. See you next time.

Elizabeth: [00:23:51] To learn more about Dan, about PETA and to order either of Dan's books, go to our website Speciesunite.com We will have links to everything. If you like today's episode and you have a spare minute, please do us a favor and rate and review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. It really helps people find the show. We are on Facebook and Instagram @Speciesunite, and if you'd like to support the podcast, we would greatly appreciate it. We're on Patreon, its Patreon species unite. I would like to thank everyone at Species Unite, including Gary Knudsen, Caitlin Pearce, Amy Jones, Paul Healey, Santana Polk, Gabrielle, Isabelle Scott and Anna Connor, who wrote and performed today's music. Thank you so much for listening. Have a wonderful day!


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S5. E6: Melanie Joy: Why We (still) Love Dogs, Eat Pigs and, Wear Cows

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S5. E4: Ryan Bethencourt: This Is The Future Of Dog Food