i'm about to rip my hair out (access masks question)

[lxianc]

I have applied access masks to a few users so that they can see a subforum. here's the setup:

Hidden Forums
>>Admin Forum
>>Moderator Forum
>>Trash Cas
>>Reported Threads
>>Reported Users
>>Christian's Friends

Now, there's a bunch of people I want to give access to the "Christian's Friends" forum but when I set their access mask to "Yes" for just that forum, they can't see it. But when I set their access mask to "Yes" for that forum and the "Hidden Forums" category, they can see all of them, which is obviously not ideal. Is there a way to give them permissions for one subforum without creating a new usergroup?