Search Results for: D Magazine

Bending the Straight Line of Queer History

 

Manuel Betancourt | Longreads | March 2018 | 8 minutes (2,170 words)

 

Confronted by a historical record that mostly excludes and often disparages them, queer communities have long been forced to write their own histories — or, more often, to scrub them clean. After all, such histories can be dangerous to write, and the act of memorializing can sometimes feel like just another burden to bear.

In Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History, Heather Love warns against this, writing that “given the new opportunities available to some gays and lesbians, the temptation to forget — to forget the outrages and humiliations of gay and lesbian history and to ignore the ongoing suffering of those not borne up by the rising tide of gay normalization — is stronger than ever.”

Three recent novels, all of them decades-spanning narratives centered on LGBTQ characters, are attempts to connect recent queer history with contemporary gay life. Alan Hollinghurst’s The Sparsholt Affair, John Boyne’s The Heart’s Invisible Furies, and Tim Murphy’s Christodora are each expansive visions of post-war queer life. Set in London, Dublin, and New York City respectively, they tell stories about men and women living in the decades before and after gay liberation, through the AIDS crisis, and into the present. They depict everything from restroom cruising encounters and gay conversion therapy appointments to ACT UP meetings and late-night Grindr hookups. And they ask us to consider how past traumas haunt the 21st century.
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The Amateur Investigators of the American West

AP Photo/Dave Martin

Fifty tourists a year get lost in Joshua Tree National Park and find their way back out. In 2010, 66-year-old Bill Ewasko went in and never came out. For The New York Times Magazine, Geoff Manaugh follows the eight-year search for Ewasko and the men who obsessed about finding him.

Search-and-rescue experts have developed lost-person-behavior algorithms to track missing hikers. They use cellphone pings to create a map and timeline, and use past behavior to try to guess their target’s behavior. Technology has also turned amateurs into sleuths and spun web forums devoted to missing people. We live in what Manaugh calls “a golden age for amateur investigations.” For some, missing persons cases become a hobby, a puzzle to solve, a form of salvation, even when wilderness areas thwart their techniques.

To hear Marsland tell it, his inaugural trip to the park, on March 1, 2013, bore the full force of revelation. He purchased hiking gear at a Los Angeles outdoors store, booked himself a room at a nearby hotel in Yucca Valley and set off at 6:30 a.m. He managed to get much farther into the park than he expected. But rather than retreat, he pushed on, walking up the side of Smith Water Canyon. At the top of the ridgeline, he found a curious pit. “It was enclosed by rocks, and you couldn’t really see it from the side,” Marsland told me. “I remember thinking that this is exactly the kind of place where you would expect Bill to be: someplace where he had fallen down, he couldn’t get out and you would never find him. I remember thinking that I had to clear this pit. I had to crawl right up to the edge of it and look down, and I remember being so afraid that I would fall into the pit myself.”

The pit contained no bodies, or even clues, but that moment of possibility was everything. Marsland began drinking less, losing nearly 40 pounds as he reoriented his free time around this quest to find a stranger. “I crossed the line from being somebody who just sat in his room and passively participated in something to being actively involved,” he said. “It was a big moment for me, and it led to a lot of other good things happening in my life.”

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Why I’m Suing Over My Dream Internship

Longreads Pick

Illgner was paid £30 a day for working nine-hour shifts as an intern at Monocle, a magazine based in London — well below the minimum wage. She’s suing for unpaid wages and asking her former employer to start paying its current and future interns the statutory national minimum wage.

Source: The Guardian
Published: Mar 27, 2018
Length: 18 minutes (4,534 words)

Who Does She Think She Is?

Illustration from an 1883 journal, via Getty.

Laurie Penny | Longreads | March 2018 | 23 minutes (5,933 words)

 

Another day at the Telegraph and another attack on Laurie Penny.
— Nick Cohen, The Spectator, 2011

Do you think that red hair and makeup is used for anything other than attention? Her writing? Same. That bitch is a whore who needs to die choking on cocks.
— 4chan, 2016

I think that nice Laurie Penny over at the New Statesman must actually be a conservative mole dedicated to undermining leftism from within.
— Alex Massie, also at The Spectator, 2013

Hang this clown. Hang Laurie Penny.
— Urban75 (British left-wing forum), 2011

Now I don’t want to make light of her depression, but she has probably brought this on herself.
Desert Sun, “We Need to Talk about Laurie Penny,” September 2017

* * *

It’s a clammy summer night. You’re 24, and you call a suicide hotline.

The nice lady who answers is probably in her seventies. She is very understanding as you explain to her that hundreds of people, thousands of strangers, are saying awful things about you, that some of them seem to really want to hurt you. You don’t know why. You’re just a writer, and you didn’t expect this. But some of them tell you in detail their fantasies of your rape and murder.

The nice lady is very sweet as she asks you if these voices ever tell you to do things. Yes, they tell you to stop writing. You inform the nice lady about this in a creepy whisper because your family is sleeping nearby and you don’t want to wake or worry them. These strangers tell you you don’t deserve to live, let alone have a newspaper column. Do they tell you to hurt yourself? Yes, every day.

The nice lady tells you to hold the line, because if it’s alright, she’s going to transfer you to one of her colleagues with specialist training.

No, wait, you say. You’re not hearing voices. You’re not delusional.  The nice lady can Google you. This is really happening.

* * *

The internet hates women. Everyone knows that by now, and nobody precisely approves, but we’ve reached a point of collective tolerance. It’s just the way of the world, and if you can’t handle it, honey, delete your account. Stop engaging online. Cut yourself off from friends, family, and professional contacts, shut down your business, blow up your social capital, stop learning, stop talking, just stop. Or else.

The U.N. Broadband Commission tells us that one in five young women has been sexually harassed online. Amnesty International’s latest report suggested that over three-quarters of women and girls expected violence and abuse if they expressed an opinion online. “Online” is the least significant word in those sentences. I have been asked enough times if “the internet is bad for women.” And yes, there is reason enough to warn your daughter, your partner, your friend to watch out for herself online, to think twice before “putting herself out there.” You’d warn her in much the same way that you might warn her not to walk through town alone at night, not to wear a short skirt, not to let her guard down, not to relax, ever. And the message is the same: The future, like the past, is not for you. You may visit, but only if you behave.

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California Governor Jerry Brown Is Retiring

AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli

Jerry Brown is a pessimist. He’s in charge of a state with a higher GDP than most countries. He doesn’t believe in legacies. Yet he enacted an unprecedented labor rights law for farmworkers, accrued a $5 billion dollar surplus, and made the state a leader in climate change planning. Previously critiqued for being disorganized, he has become a deal-maker in his old age and learned to prioritize his efforts. He has served as California’s governor for 15 years, and he will soon step down. For The California Sunday Magazine, Andy Kroll profiles California’s hardworking public servant during his final days in office, and he surveys his life’s work (note: not a legacy). He’s trying to start two more controversial projects: twin water tunnels in the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta, and a high-speed rail connecting Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Brown was playing a part many Californians had never seen — the statesman — and there was something poignant about it. Here was a man who had sought the presidency three times and failed, and now he was on a global stage speaking for more than half of the country who were horrified about where Trump was taking the nation and the world. Did people watch him and wonder, What if? Did he wonder it himself? “He has that suppressed gene for a bigger pond which eluded him,” Orville Schell, an early biographer of Brown, says. “Now he’s finding a way to get into it.”

Brown’s trip often felt like the final world tour of an aging rock star. He flew by private jet. Fans met him in every city. Even an E.U. representative from the far-right United Kingdom Independence Party, who had publicly excoriated Brown, later asked him for a photo. “The Brexit guy wants a selfie,” Brown muttered. His wife and his staff tended to his needs, toting his iPhone and ID badge, lint-rolling him before a TV appearance. Still, the trip took a toll, and by the third or fourth day, he’d come down with a cold and was irritable and tired.

At one point, I asked Brown if he enjoyed the nonstop grind of photo ops and public appearances. “No, I hate everything!” he replied. “Do you think at age 79, if I didn’t enjoy it, I’d be doing all this stuff? Why, because I’m a masochist? If you want an accurate reflection of my existential position, it’s always changing. There are certain things you have to do that aren’t as pleasant as other things you have to do, but if it’s something you want to get accomplished, you will do it. And there will be different levels of joy, from zero to 100 percent.”

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This Is How They Saved Me

Getty / Photo courtesy the author / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Neda Semnani | Longreads | March 2018 | 20 minutes (4,986 words)

August 8, 1982. It was nearly five in the morning when my uncle Kavoos woke up my six-year-old cousin Laleh to say goodbye. He left her his calligraphy pen and asked her to keep it safe for him until he could come back for it. She nodded sleepily and promised that she would. She kissed him before falling back to sleep. In the other room, my mother, aunts, and uncles were gathering the last of our belongings and arranging them in the trunk of the car, while Laleh’s older brother, my cousin, Asef, wailed.

Why can’t I come? he asked, tears streaming down his face. At eight years old, he knew a long road trip meant picnics, and picnics meant freshly grilled kabobs.

I want to come too! he screamed, inconsolable. I want to kabob!

For goodness sake, his mother said. No one is going to eat kabob without you.

***

When my father’s eldest brother first contacted the smugglers to get us out of Iran, they promised we would make the journey to Turkey by car. It would be a long trip, but a relatively simple and straightforward one: an eight-hour drive from Tehran to Tabriz, a city in the north near the Turkish border. From there, a five- or six-hour drive by Jeep or Land Rover to the border. Once at the border, another car would pick us up and we’d drive three hours to Van, a border city in Turkey.

My mother was seven months pregnant and worried that the car rides would be dangerous. She wouldn’t agree to the plan until her doctor assured her that, as long as she took breaks whenever possible, both she and the baby would be fine. If the pressure in her legs became too painful, he prescribed Valium to help relax her muscles. My mother’s fears assuaged, she agreed that she and I would leave the country. My mother then convinced my father’s father to send his youngest daughter, Astefe, over the border with us. She promised him that she would be safe with us. She told my father’s youngest brother, Kavoos, he must come too. His place, my mother insisted, was with his wife and daughter, not waiting for the Revolutionary Guards to find him.

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David Chang’s ‘Ugly Delicious’ Pushes Food TV in the Right Direction

David Chang with South Philly Barbacoa's Cristina Martinez in 'Ugly Delicious.'

There’s no denying that David Chang’s new Netflix docuseries, “Ugly Delicious”, is aesthetically gorgeous. The show’s underlying concept—”ugly” food like tacos, barbecue, and fried rice all have intrinsic values that surpass its creation born out of necessity and a lowly legacy—is a sui generis angle for a well-worn genre that has long shifted to food porn rather that pursuing and examining the cultural and geopolitical value that food possesses.

In a recent interview with Grub Street, “Top Chef” judge and chef Tom Colicchio mentioned the rise of “unfussy” food on the program’s 15th season: “The chefs were doing more, I wouldn’t say rustic, but a much more conventional style of food.” Translation: This shift isn’t occurring in a vacuum.

As the New Yorker‘s Helen Rosner explains in her review of the eight-part series, “What makes “Ugly Delicious” compelling, ultimately, is Chang’s commitment to rejecting purity and piety within food culture…In food culture, particularly American food culture, the concept of authenticity is wielded like a hammer…[and] the problem with such rigid categorizations, according to “Ugly Delicious,” is, for one thing, creative stagnation.”

This certainly makes for a thoroughly interesting viewing experience; before I realized it, I had binge-watched four episodes. This sort of programming is also refreshing—Chang has subverted a genre. For a generation that has been bred on the gluttony of glossy networks and competitive cooking, “Ugly Delicious” throws up a middle finger, and instead asked questions that are relevant to how we should be thinking about food (and not just consuming for its sheer shock value). Read more…

It’s Time for Real Talk About Aliens

AP Photo/Roswell Daily Record, Mark Wilson

This December, The New York Times ran a front page story about the Pentagon program that investigated unexplained aerial phenomena. The US military recently had three prominent, documented encounters with unidentified flying objects. And the Chinese just built the world’s largest radar facility to listen for extraterrestrial life. What the hell is going on? I mean, Trump’s presidency seems like a dystopian sci-fi novel, but when did UFOs move from the Art Bell fringe into the mainstream?

At New York Magazine, a group of seven journalists dive deep into the realm of Ufology. Cataloguing the past and Ufology’s key players, they make a case that no time in human history has presented clearer, more compelling evidence that something unexplained is buzzing our skies, missile silos and nuclear facilities, if not aliens, then certainly things we have not yet identified. “In December,” the article says, “the Pentagon confirmed the existence of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program.”

The program was co-founded by then–Majority Leader Harry Reid, who tweeted, “We don’t know the answers, but we have plenty of evidence to support asking the questions.” It’s a convincing point. The funding supposedly ended in 2012, but sources say the program is going strong. Some of this information will be familiar to those of us who enjoy reading about unexplained phenomenon. The sense that some of this is just nuts-o is also familiar. What’s new is the Federal government’s transparency and mounting the burden of proof. Here’s the tip of the extraterrestrial iceberg as a teaser:

So much of what the program uncovered remains classified, but what little we know is tantalizing. Based on data it collected, the program identified five observations that showed mysterious objects displaying some level of “advanced physics,” also known as “stuff humans can’t do yet”: The objects would accelerate with g-forces too strong for the human body to withstand, or reach hypersonic speed with no heat trail or sonic boom, or they seemed to resist the effects of Earth’s gravity without any aerodynamic structures to provide thrust or lift. “No one has been able to figure out what these are,” said Luis Elizondo, who ran the program until last October, in a recent interview.

Elizondo has also talked about “metamaterials” that may have been recovered from unidentified aerial phenomena and stored in buildings owned by a private aerospace contractor in Las Vegas; they apparently have material compositions that aren’t found naturally on Earth and would be exceptionally expensive to replicate. According to a 2009 Pentagon briefing summarized in the New York Times, “the United States was incapable of defending itself against some of the technologies discovered.” This was a briefing by people trying to get more funding — but still.

Some of the accounts Elizondo and his team analyzed supposedly occurred near nuclear facilities like power plants or battleships. In November 2004, the USS Princeton, a Navy cruiser escorting the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz off the coast of San Diego, ordered two fighter jets to investigate mysterious aircraft the Navy had been tracking for weeks (meaning this was not just a trick of the eye or a momentary failure of perspective, the two things most often blamed for unexplained aerial phenomena). When the jets arrived at the location, one of the pilots, Commander David Fravor, saw a disturbance just below the ocean’s surface causing the water to roil around it. Then, suddenly, he saw a white, 40-foot Tic Tac–shaped craft moving like a Ping-Pong ball above the water. The vehicle began mirroring his plane’s movements, but when Fravor dove directly at the object, the Tic Tac zipped away.

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Use and Abuse

(Getty/alicemoi)

Amy Long | Ninth Letter | Fall/Winter 2017-18 | 25 minutes (6,753 words)

1

Ryan and I are groping each other on Layne’s older sister’s bed. My sisters crouch at the foot so their bodies won’t block the light. Layne surveys her scene. She’s lined my eyes in thick kohl. I wear a black slip she cut so short my underwear shows if I move either leg at all. Ryan wears what he always wears: white T-shirt, Levis. His feet are bare. I never see his feet bare. We are high on methadone and Xanax, barely aware of Beth and Chelsea or even Layne. We act out our own little movie, everything black and white like the film in Layne’s camera. She’d asked us to pose for her, and I said we would because I wanted my friends to like my boyfriend, and I wanted the 4-by-6-inch still images that would say This really happened in case Ryan and I unraveled like my slip threatens to do when he teases a thread. Layne instructs Ryan to kiss me: on the mouth, the neck. “Put your hands there,” she says and points to my waist. She says, “Amy, move in closer. Ryan, smile.” Ryan smiles. Layne snorts out a laugh. “Not like that,” she says. “Like a person.” A genuine grin spreads across his face. Layne snaps a photo. I’m so close to Ryan I can feel the heat coming off his body. I smell the tobacco and Old Spice that linger on his skin. I don’t know what to do with my hands. I’m still learning what people do in bed together. Simulating sex we’ve never had is like when people ask me how it feels to be a triplet, and I can’t answer because I don’t know how it feels to be otherwise. “Like this?” I ask. Layne shrugs. “Just do what you usually do.” I don’t tell her that we don’t yet have a way we usually do things. Ryan slips me a second methadone pill. He takes two. Under the opiate euphoria, it’s easy to pretend we really are just making out and not being photographed, that this moment is real instead of orchestrated. We don’t forget Layne’s there, but we are good models. We do what she asks. We play ourselves, fucked up and infatuated. Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

National Geographic magazine in 1975
Reading a copy of National Geographic magazine in 1975. (Jorgen Angel/Redferns)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Susan Goldberg, Leslie Jamison, Jacqueline Keeler, Max Genecov, and Ryan Bradley.

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