[SAFE], AIDS, and What the Wellness Industry Owes to Public Health Failures
Todd Haynes' 1995 masterpiece works less as a 'In a Time of COVID-19' film and more of how one can become under the influence of pseudoscience and alternatives
[SAFE] by Todd Haynes is a film that I cannot tire of talking or writing about. And yet, I find nearly all recent essays with writers earnestly positing that the film captures our pandemic moment to be highly unengaging. I admit to approaching these essays with a level of skepticism and being quite irked that somehow my attempts at pitching on the film whether in the context of ‘guru’ Marianne Williamson running for the Democratic Party’s nomination for President last year or the release of Todd Haynes’ most recent film Dark Waters (a companion film to [SAFE] in a number of ways) or with regard to the wellness industry becoming a pretty unstoppable in the social media age. Those pitches were not what editors sought and what has materialized are pieces that are echoes of each other, uninspiring in their lack of differentiation from one another because it seems every person got tired of calling Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion the film in a time of COVID-19.
Some of these [SAFE] essays might mention how in the film that Wrenwood, the New Age retreat focused on positive thinking and self-help, was lifted from a lot of New Age thought at the time and some might drop the name Louise Hay, since they must have read Dennis Lim’s excellent booklet essay for Criterion mentioning her or a Haynes interview that mentions her, but these pieces really only mention her in passing. None of these new essays bother to really go into who Louise Hay was, what she said, and why her work is intrinsically tied to the AIDS epidemic and why that matters to the film. Sure, people note it is an AIDS allegory and note [SAFE] is a hallmark of New Queer Cinema as they brusquely reapply and re-contextualize a film about a character in Carol White, who never gets better, into our current ‘in a time of COVID-19’ moment without really studying the context for why this film exists the way it does. Imagine writing about On the Waterfront conveying the 1950s Red Scare and how intrinsically involved the makers of that movie were in that period into just a sentence. I say this bluntly: I really think people are looking at [SAFE] in a pretty limited lens that does a disservice to the film and the cultural moments that serve as the film’s foundation. This essay will be on [SAFE] representing why somebody on the margins are the ones often, with very little alternatives, seek to be influenced by systems and charismatic leaders, especially when bereft of identity and agency. This piece also functions as a companion piece to my discussion of [SAFE] on The Film Stage podcast Intermission with Michael Snydel that will be linked at the end of this piece.
HIV/AIDS in [SAFE] lives dual lives in allegory and within the film itself as a disease mentioned obliquely and as a matter of fact at various points. Carol White’s friend Linda, another affluent woman in the San Fernando Valley suburbs, talks about her ‘life-long bachelor’ brother dying of AIDS in coded terms about the disease that was quite of the time as far as not saying the words at all. AIDS is invisible as far as the way AIDS in the film’s 1987 time period portrayed AIDS to be, a homosexual man who has become sickly skeletal and covered in spots. It makes the images of Carol White’s deterioration all the more striking in its connections to the disease be it her arm covered in bruises from injection treatments with her doctors or the very fact she also begins to have spots on her skin that conjures AIDS imagery of lesions. But, quite shockingly in this film, the man with AIDS appears fully healthy-looking in Peter Dunning (an incredibly magnetic Peter Friedman) who is, nonetheless a chemically sensitive person with AIDS who, with his experiences, has a ‘vast perspective’.
Peter Dunning, being the head figure at Wrenwood, does not just embody New Age sensibility in self-help and encouraging positive affirmations, but is packaged as somebody who you would not immediately consign to being untrustworthy. His identity as a gay man with AIDS serves to make him come off as initially a very sympathetic character for viewers. His life experiences are what draw people to Wrenwood rather than drive them away. Peter is a model positive case and not just in that he does not look sick. Peter never yells. At times, he sharpens his tone and can lay out an intimidating glare at somebody’s negativity, but even his work and presentation is a man who smiles, a man who does not wear a tie, and completely charismatic. Peter’s origins as a man with AIDS is significant not just in showing somebody vulnerable being a complete believer and leading the way but, and this is especially the case in how Peter speaks to the groups at Wrenwood, that his language is learned and he is merely passing this knowledge to others. If Peter is a man who speaks of living with AIDS, looking inward at the problem, and being ‘safe’, it is easy to infer without even explicitly invoking her by name, that Peter was likely a man who was influenced by Louise Hay, from her ‘Hayrides’, her books, to her outlook on life. In just one example, the monologue the title takes from, Peter’s affirmation for Wrenwood is this, “We are one with the power that created us. We are safe and all is well in the world.” It is an incredibly good imitation of a Louise Hay affirmation, best known for saying, “We love and support ourselves and each other. And we know we are safe, for it is only change. We are safe. It’s only change.” New Age gurus at the time, many who published books and appeared on TV, but Hay’s rise and her relationship to AIDS, the gay community, and her polarization within the gay community are still touchy and contentious subjects today.
Louise Hay (who passed away at the age of 90 in 2017) on the surface did not seem like somebody who would immediately be favored in certain circles of gay men. She was a wealthy blond divorcee from Los Angeles. But she had a story. She was also a college drop-out who had survived an abusive household, sexual assault, and ran away from home to become a model. She reinvented herself at fifty with Transcendental Meditation, New Thought, becoming an ordained minister of Religious Science, and a promoter of positive thinking, becoming a lecturer and leader of workshops. Another part of her story is both the most contentious and foundational part about her. She claimed to survive cervical cancer from no medical treatment (like chemotherapy or medical surgery), focusing on alternative methods like talk therapy in which confronted he abuse she suffered in her youth, changing her diet, and zone therapy. This was never verified by her doctors, but print the legend. She stated that her cancer was connected to her abuse and the trauma, resentment, negativity of that manifested and mutated inside her body. These are her own words and if you have ever heard Louise Hay speak and take questions from people with their various anxieties and ailments, she would take leaps and hypotheses about these people and the root of their health issues. A pain on the right hip would be because a woman had a troubled relationship with her father. Never would she answer with, ‘You should speak to your doctor about that.’ She published her first two books You Can Heal Your Life and Heal Your Body: The Mental Causes for Physical Illness and the Metaphysical Way to Overcome Them were released in 1984 where she made these claims and outlined her whole approach. She was not a medical professional or somebody with an education in medicine, but she was spiritual counselor who focused on introspection, self-love, positivity, and ridding negativity. You could easily call her a quack and a pusher of pseudoscience (editor’s note: I am absolutely of that opinion) but, her openness about trauma being related to behavioral disorders had a lot of value and did help people, particularly those with alcoholism, drug addiction, and PTSD. In the year 1985, another illness came into her focus. In her living room in Santa Monica, she began her earliest sessions with six AIDS patients that would propel her into the international spotlight. In her words, these sessions were to focus on these AIDS patients will support each other on a positive level.
1985 was a turning point year for AIDS as far as the fact that ignoring the issue was becoming untenable. Rock Hudson died that year from AIDS which sent shockwaves globally. President Ronald Reagan finally mention the virus publicly. Meanwhile, Elizabeth Taylor, a close friend of Hudson’s, became one of the primarily figures in launching the American Foundation for AIDS Research (that would later become part of amfAR). The first AIDS Conference in the United States was launched. It was becoming a mainstream topic with young children like Ryan White contracting the disease through blood transfusions. Young children from toddlers to infants were being diagnosed along with hemophiliacs with the revelation becoming that this virus was something in the blood. Suddenly, a disease once called GRID (Gay-related immune deficiency) was everywhere. That it happened that way you can most certainly attribute to years of the American government, public health institutions, and the corporate “free” press turning a blind eye and preferring to cast a critical, ‘blame the victim’ characterization of anybody with HIV/AIDS when the topic was ever broached. Congress finally passed an AIDS research funding bill, but did so in a year in which the AIDS in 1985 had exceeded all of the previous years in cases and fatalities of the virus combined since its reporting in 1981. The AIDS story cannot be told other than as a completely calamitous public health failure, something that could have been stopped in its tracks if institutions cared at all about the groups most impacted (the LGBTQ community and people of color among those hardest hit by the virus). Those groups were ignored and just further marginalized from their already disenfranchised standing in the United States. Even with this admittance of responsibility and accountability in some- but not all- sectors of public health and public policy, the deaths continued to skyrocket after 1985 (to bring it back to [SAFE]’s timeframe of 1987, there were 40,849 reported deaths in the United States compared to 1985’s reported fatalities of 15,527). The United States government was behind the eight ball and that only pushed more people to seek alternatives in what was an increasingly desperate, frightening, and hostile situation where ignorance about those infected also manifested into outright discrimination against people with AIDS. In that cultural, social, and political moment, Louise Hay made a public health failure a market inefficiency to exploit and profit from. Her books (including The AIDS Book: Creating a Positive Approach) sold into the millions, her appearances on talk shows went up including appearing multiple times on Oprah, and she built an empire that continues to thrive even after her death. It is difficult not to separate that meteoric rise of her as a public figure without that forged relationship Hay had with the AIDS community.
Despite this essay dedicated to heavy skepticism and criticism to Louise Hay’s unqualified and dangerous statements about health and the human body, she stood out and became a figure for her going against the common misperceptions of the virus. Her sessions with AIDS patients (that became known as ‘Hayrides’) was her work to have an open door for AIDS patients that was going against public opinion and a time when national polls favored quarantining all people who were HIV positive. She not only destigmatized the virus but also visibly showed affection for these men at her Hayrides. In the VHS taped film Doors Opening: A Positive Approach to AIDS, she is seen touching these men at several points. Not many people would have done that then. And she was not touching them as to transparently make a point that she would not be infected; she was just be a source of comfort. There was a maternal and nurturing facet to Louise Hay and she played it so well until the end of her life. She was often the oldest person at these Hayrides that put her naturally in the position of playing a role somewhere between teacher and mother, with a group who often found conflict and strife with authority figures and their own parents but she was telling them to focus on finding good than telling them they were depraved and sick in the head. It was like the other side of Ronald Reagan’s whole appeal with his cadence and language directed at his base brought comfort in a fatherly, traditional nuclear family package. Reagan and Hay succeeded because their messages connected to those who most needed to feel something. One can imagine if you tested HIV positive and were living with AIDS at that time, to see that video or read about these Hayrides or read Louise Hay’s books, that doing so would make you feel like there was a place for you with a community that found comfort and common experiences at these sessions. The weekly Hayrides grew into the hundreds, moving out her living room into a packed auditorium in West Hollywood Park every Wednesday. To quote The Los Angeles Times on the Louise Hay phenomenon in 1988, “…Hay’s drawing power is such that other AIDS-related groups and organizations [in the area] schedule around her.”
The Hayrides themselves were somewhere in-between late 1960s group therapy and The Oprah Winfrey Show. Louise held court sitting atop a pillow on a stage while the predominantly male audience sat on the floor or in folding chairs waiting to ask questions to Hay on microphones that Hay’s associates would pass around. On occasion she would get down into the group members sitting area to embrace one person breaking down or join the group, holding their hands to do sing-a-longs. Next to these group members would be oversized stuffed animals that some group members would squeeze and hold in security. The men, or at least the men I got to see in the Doors Opening video, ran the gamut of emotions during those Hayrides. Nobody seems ‘programmed’ but also nobody is captured on the film- remember, this is coming straight from Hay’s media arm- as seeming left out of the group. Whoever shot that video made sure to get shots that show these men being supported by other people around them through hands on their shoulders and rubbing their backs. In Doors Opening, the Hayride session is intercut with testimonials of men with AIDS and this is where one can envision the character of Peter Dunning. One man in particular actually only came to a Hayride after hearing another man with AIDS covered in lesions denounce Hay’s ‘feel good’ atmosphere. But when this man entered this space the dying man screamed about, he felt at home in seeing people he knew and feeling genuine love that he never had as a child. Hearing that he could survive and not immediately get a death sentence turned his perspective around. Another man, in one of the more shocking moments of whole video, recalls replying to an intrusive question of if he knew who gave him AIDS. He would say, “Yeah.” They would ask in intrigue, “Who?” His reply was, “From myself.” The man would state that his lifestyle, thought patterns, behavior, and environment he created for himself was like a loaded pistol that made AIDS possible to enter him because he pulled the trigger. The man defends his position, as though he has had to give further explanation for this pretty problematic reading of his diagnosis before, stating it is actually empowering to reach this realization, “If I could give myself AIDS,” he declares, “Well, take it one step further, I could take it away.”
Louise Hay was accused promoting the ‘blame the victim’ perceptions for those who were infected. But Hay had a hard and fast rule that universally applied to all of her teachings was that she did not want people in the mindset of being a victim and often never wanted people in the headspace of a victim. She contended victimization leads to being controlled by other forces on some level. This idea that victimization has to be avoided as a concept and mindset when that is often the truth for many in marginalized groups is a core problem with Hay. A generous criticism of Hay is that her approach was too often a ‘one size fits all’ model on self-love and dealing with trauma. But even so, if you found her message to just be a refashioning the concept of victim blaming, the ‘the blame the victim’ mindset was in the ether from the media to the very top of governments more powerful than her. The thing about the Reagan administration on AIDS was that even when they were finally tackling the virus, their approach had immense negativity and damage because many of the people Reagan entrusted were prejudiced and homophobic. And if you found the Reagan administration to be unjust, untrustworthy, and worthy of criticism and shame, the setting to express that was not at the Hayrides. Sure, these were in group settings and often at these Hayrides there was some networking that promoted other AIDS groups and get-togethers for people to take part in beyond these meetings. But AIDS activism was also occurring around this time and for many, the dire consequences of AIDS in human cost had to be confronted and presented to make those at the top accountable. A group like ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) emerges in 1987 led by writer Larry Kramer that is about as in your face as it can get with die-ins, sit-ins, civil disobedience, direct action, and various campaigns against the media, governments, big pharma, powerful special interests, and corporations for their inaction or framing AIDS as not being a mainstream concern. The enduring image to ACT UP was the reclamation of the Pink Triangle used on the homosexuals during the Holocaust and the bold letters ‘SILENCE= DEATH’. As you can imagine, such a group was deeply at odds with Louise Hay and other New Agers who would find their whole approach feeding into a ‘doom and gloom’ frenzy during the AIDS crisis.
ACT UP was imperfect, by its members’ own admission. Even though it is now looked at with respect and admiration, not to mention still an active organization, the first wave of the group had gone through the motions during the height of the crisis. There were splinters and cliques that emerged, and an overall exhaustion in their group activism, with the loss of life taking a toll on everybody involved. “Our lives were so defined by that kind of death and fear,” independent film producer and then ACT UP member Christine Vachon recalled. “It felt like we were constantly going to memorial services.”
Vachon’s longtime creative partner Todd Haynes was an ACT UP member (and part of Gran Fury collective in the ACT UP that specialized in media campaigns and responsible for ACT UP’s now famous ‘SILENCE= DEATH’ campaign), and while he had not explicitly done an AIDS film work, his allegory of the virus in the “Horror” section with the seminal New Queer Cinema film Poison (a B-movie horror pastiche about an arrogant scientist who becomes a monstrous leper after drinking his own sex drive elixir that only makes him castigated and feared) put him into the spotlight by winning awards at Sundance. That section of Poison was a deliberate AIDS allegory genre film coming off a time where disease films of the past and present started to be codified in the eyes of film critics and viewers with representing AIDS as a metaphor. But unlike those other films, Poison was deliberately exploring how genre films can go ‘queer’ and how the larger public panic around a disease and virus puts the onus on the infected, a personified public menace. With [SAFE], Haynes wanted to expand on those ideas, focusing on the way some people with AIDS responded to their illness by believing if they were accountable for their illness they could assert control over their illness. But in Haynes’ worldview, the body is a chaotic vessel and at the same time, he saw people who would rather accept responsibility and blame than the chaos of the virus. Haynes himself did characterize Hay in a 1995 interview in Filmmaker Magazine as somebody who did place the onus on those who were sick and that they can become better through self-love. But he was less interested though in studying figures like Hay as a central character in his film, and more interested in the people who wanted to be under their influence and follow their advice. Enter Carol White.
Carol White in [SAFE] is a deliberate enigma and almost feels a reverse engineered construct as if not just confound audiences but New Agers whether the fictional New Agers at Wrenwood or the real-life New Agers as Louise Hay. How can there be trauma if there is a past this blank? Her backstory is barely touched upon beyond a moment of Carol calling her mother on the telephone or a brief voice-over of a letter she writes of her story that fills in almost no blanks beyond the fact she was raised in Texas, a shock to anybody who heard Julianne Moore’s perfectly airy California upspeak before that moment. There is so little given about her to crack her as a character. We know her as an affluent housewife whose only chores or work she seems to having any enjoyment on is working outside in her garden. She returns to that garden once at night, looking her most serene (until disturbed by local police doing a neighborhood check), but in that earlier scene in the garden she is desexualized, wearing work pants and no makeup. It stands out all the more in that respect.
The rest of Carol White’s time in the San Fernando Valley suburbs has her dressing, and more disturbingly, acting at a level of domestic repression that feels uninformed and untouched by Second Wave feminism that occurred a decade earlier in the film. There is no agency. She feels alien to her spaces and surroundings, married but her husband’s second wife and with a stepson where there is no maternal bond whatsoever. She entered a space that was not her own and where she came from is shrouded in mystery for the viewer. Carol tries, oh how she tries, to fit into group settings. She is highly observant, more fly in the wall than presence, and makes impulsive decisions that are not what she wants but are about the expectations of the setting and station she is in at that moment. Her appearing to be sensitive to chemicals and toxins and inhalation of those chemicals is so confounding to medical professionals and her meeting with a psychiatrist goes so poorly that all sense of trust that she can give herself over as far as institutions, immediately gets thrown out the window. Still, Carol remains searching and drawn finding ways to diagnose her problem. But, what becomes apparent is that this search also runs closely in scratching a consumerist itch. Carol finds her first support group on television and in ads, ‘Are you allergic to the twentieth century?’ regarding Environmental Illness and chemical sensitivity. Then she sees Wrenwood promoted on television. Reaganism in [SAFE] is not just about mentions of the War on Drugs or AIDS in cryptic terms that seem so far away from rich white San Fernando Valley, but Reaganism in what you saw on television. Carol is never seen watching her favorite television shows, but television proves to be a vital component and window into her life. She gets sold hook, line, and sinker on the informercial that would not have been possible without Ronald Reagan. Reagan deregulated broadcast television that gave networks free reign to sell time to the highest bidder. Hucksters emerged and fortunes were made from this decision with desperate people like Carol White finding their false hopes on-screen in their homes.
[SAFE] is prophetic not so much for the cultural moment of pandemic but the cultural moment of influencers and wellness culture. Granted, a 1995 film portraying 1987 is still tied to mass media as analog. The proliferation of wellness culture is deeply intertwined with the rise of the internet. Even if a Louise Hay was never about selling vitamins or supplements (she preferred promoting intaking bone broth), her disciples and colleagues in wellness made it a cottage industry about every facet of living from vitamins to shakes to essential oils to crystals. Wellness has gotten so big- it is a trillion dollar industry- that tackling wellness wholesale is a fool’s errand. The exploration should be, rather, that the reason wellness, as an alternative method, is so huge, vast, and popular can be traced to how individuals feel marginalized and mistreated by the healthcare industry. Haynes knows this. He shows Carol feeling not taken seriously at all my the male dominated medical establishments for both her physical and mental health. Almost everything that Carol overhears listening to her chemical sensitivity support group after a meeting is shown with a lot of empathy. It all sounds right to Carol hearing it on the side with these women (and that this is a group of only women is intentional) being self-aware in being taken as crazy or dumb about what ails them. Haynes shows these people extremely aware of their marginalization and trying to deal with their problem, but that resolution remains an open question because there is a failing as their trust of those institutions are eroding. It feels real because of seeing these people in the flesh hash out their problems and frustrations. Today, it looks different. This support group would not necessarily exist in physical form, for one thing.
In our era of algorithms, pop-up ads, and social media, the personalization is now online with support groups, websites for your ailment, and videos showing people being paid to test out products. That does not mean the old New Agers are dead or were left in the analog dust. Louise Hay had a podcast of her daily affirmations and meditations before she died. You can still be put on a mailing list to receive her affirmations or download the app of Hay House to your smartphone. Or you can do the same for several people, including those under the Hay House umbrella like Suze Orman and Marianne Williamson. Or somebody more contemporary like GOOP. Or really any Instagram influencer doing sponcon. Pandora’s Box has been opened.
To finally approach the ‘in a time of COVID-19’ matter that some people who made it this far in the essay want to at least see approached with more respect: It can be said that how the wellness industry is approaching the virus in the imminent future is something to observe. There are going to be large masses of people who due to lack of faith in the United States government who will want structure and a regimen to face the horrors of the world around them. Hell, people want that now. People are imagining an end because they want structure than the chaos of now. People have gotten screwed over by this virus and institutional faith is at an all-time low. It is a perfect cocktail to cause more people to seek alternative methods that offer them something else from this waking nightmare.
To return to Wrenwood, how [SAFE] mimicked Louise Hay is not limited to Peter Dunning. In fact, perhaps the most effective scene, one that comes across as so genuine and believable even as you are hearing something completely tragic, it shows how canny Haynes is in showing just how ‘good’ New Agers can be at doling out their spiel. Carol is breaking down outside in the after hours in Wrenwood only to be comforted by Peter’s underling Claire Fitzpatrick. Claire grew up in Michigan, impacted by the chemical spillage that regularly happened in the area. She is not presenting vulnerability or victimhood despite circumstances (even though her biography of unfortunate circumstances aligns closely with the people chemically poisoned by DuPont in Haynes’ later film Dark Waters) but a highly determined resilience. She tells Carol that she looked at herself in the mirror and would say, “Claire, I love you.” ‘Mirror work’ is a Louise Hay trademark. It was a ‘gift’, an act of ‘love’ to yourself. It is one of the last acts in the film with Carol finally taking up Claire’s advice, now pail, emaciated, and covered in lesions looking into the mirror and giving a declaration of self-love. If we had not seen everything before, it might read as something ‘magical’, but Carol White still has not reached revelation or self-actualization. This moment of, “I love you,” is anti-catharsis. She wants to believe it and she will probably die trying to do so.
Few films are this angry, sobering, and empathetic all at once. Haynes is often dogged for his clinical filmmaking, that rendering Carol White into a, to borrow a phrase from Dennis Lim, ‘terminal blankness’ feels more representative of a device than a person. Yet, Carol is fully oriented as an outsider even in her own spaces, rarely probed because she is unremarkable, rarely a concern until her body rejects…. something. She remains an open question because she has not been forced to confront herself, something that perhaps lies in the past (as Michael Snydel put it, it is quite remarkable how ‘trauma’, that has never been a topic as prominent as now in culture writing is not at all present in the film). She cannot be read as having anything, but there is something recognizable in the fact that many people can be so repressed and avoiding their problems for years, some never reaching a catharsis at all. That they may reach a conclusion, but not the correct conclusion, because it gives them comfort and structure, they keep telling themselves they are cured even as they waste away like Carol White even as she insists to her husband she is safe. That there might not yet be a vocabulary available for them to finally confront their problem. That due to systemic and cultural expectations of your class, race, or gender, you are completely beholden to the norms and can never imagine anything beyond what is expected of you based on where you have been assigned. This is to say, as a trans man, Carol White’s lack of true introspection, blankness, repression, and finding ‘easy’ salves when there are no words at her disposal to describe what she is feeling makes perfect sense to me.
To talk about [SAFE] in 2020 is to not lose sight of the fact it was the product and reaction to the AIDS crisis. The legacy of Louise Hay has mutated into an unstoppable force that if anything does need to push people to pay closer attention to how the film presents Hay and other New Age gurus (and the number of other names and titles we call them now). These people are persuasive, Haynes is almost too good at showing the seduction of their words and ideals (after the film’s Sundance premiere, Haynes added a shot of Peter Dunning’s house to show his wealth and privilege as to show Peter was making money from this effort and cast suspicion upon his motivations). These people are most persuasive and powerful in a time of crisis, uncertainty, and picking up the pieces in the failure of others. Institutional and government failure in the realm of public health are why AIDS happened and why what emerged was not a uniform resistance in holding the government accountable, but controversial alternatives that still was something to many people. People died believing they had conquered their illness because they felt love and a purpose for the first time under Louise Hay’s teachings. She is celebrated in some corners for that even if she, in my estimation, does deserve to be reviled. [SAFE] is the widest and most visible piece of media that skewers her teachings and perhaps in tribute to my gay elders and blood relatives who succumbed to this virus, my anger in seeing this film’s context and history removed for the sake of a cheap culture writing du jour was my primary motivation in writing this.
Companion works:
My podcast appearance with Michael Snydel about the film on The Film Stage.
United in Anger: A History in ACT UP, a documentary by Jim Hubbard from 2012
Dennis Lim’s accompanying essay for [SAFE] for the Criterion Collection
A critical piece on Louise Hay shortly after her death on Slate.
A 2008 piece in The New York Times piece on Louise Hay that dubbed her the ‘Queen of the New Age’.
Choire Sicha being well ahead of everyone in finding the reemergence of New Agers to be disconcerting in the social media age back in 2012 for The Awl.