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Queens of Infamy: Joanna of Naples

Illustration by Louise Pomeroy

Anne Thériault | Longreads | July 2018 | 23 minutes (5,932 words)

From the notorious to the half-forgotten, Queens of Infamy, a Longreads series by Anne Thériault, focuses on badass world-historical women of centuries past.

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Looking for a Queens of Infamy t-shirt or tote bag? Choose yours here.

Are you the sort of person who loves a high court drama with plenty of devious intriguing? Is learning about grisly murders one of your guilty pleasures? Do you get a voyeuristic thrill out of tracking the rise and fall of royal romances? What about plagues? Do you like plagues? If you are currently clutching your chest and muttering “yes, yes, a thousand times yes,” then: a) sick, and b) keep reading. We’re about to take a deep dive into the life of Joanna I of Naples, and shit’s about to get really, really real.

Joanna — or Giovanna, as she was and still is known in her mother tongue — was born in 1326 to Charles, Duke of Calabria and heir to the Kingdom of Naples, and Marie of Valois. Although she was Charles and Marie’s fourth child, Joanna was predeceased by her three older siblings and became second in line to the throne at birth. A member of the Angevin dynasty, Joanna was the great-great-great-great-great granddaughter of Eleanor of Aquitaine. Like Eleanor, she would prove to have a knack for ruling. Also like Eleanor, her ambition and capability would threaten the powerful men around her. Perhaps unsurprisingly, both queens found themselves having to run for their lives. Joanna’s flight — which involved escaping her besieged castle under the cover of night and then undertaking a dangerous journey across plague-ridden seas (all while pregnant, mind you) — might be less famous than that of her predecessor, but it’s arguably an even more incredible story.

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Forced to Perform As Aretha Franklin

AP Photo

In movies, the music industry’s shady opportunists are often cast as overly tan white men with heavy gold chains, who wear their dyed hair teased high. In 1969, a shady opportunist with an actual six-inch pompadour fooled singer Mary Jane Jones into playing what she believed would be a string of shows opening for Aretha Franklin. Instead, this man forced her to perform as Aretha Franklin.

For Smithsonian, Jeff Maysh tells the dramatic story of this wildly talented mother of four and how she fit into the once thriving economy of celebrity impersonators and legitimate soul singers. I don’t mean impersonators hired to perform like celebrities at parties or corporate events. I mean people hired to fool large audiences by acting like the real thing. Even though Jones’ career got sidetracked slightly, her talent offered her redemption. The original scam seems too preposterous to have worked. But it did for a little while. How?

According to newspaper reports, Hardy’s “Aretha Franklin Revue” played three small towns across Florida. After every performance, “Aretha” dashed to her dressing room and hid. On the strength of these smaller shows, Hardy eyed bigger towns and talked of scoring a lucrative ten-night tour. Meanwhile, he fed Jones two hamburgers a day and kept her locked inside a grim hotel room, far from her boys, who were being cared for by her mother. Even if she’d been able to steal away to call the police, she might have felt some hesitation: In nearby Miami just a few months earlier, a “blacks only” rally had turned into a riot where police shot and killed three residents, and left a 12-year-old boy with a bullet hole in his chest.

In Fort Myers, the promoters booked the 1,400-seat High Hat Club, where the $5.50 tickets quickly sold out. Hardy’s impostor had fooled a few small-town crowds, but now she had to convince a larger audience. He dressed Jones in a yellow, floor-length gown, a wig and heavy stage makeup. In the mirror, she looked vaguely like a picture of Franklin from the pages of Jet. “I wanted to tell everybody beforehand that I was not Miss Franklin,” Jones insisted later, “but [Hardy] said the show promoters would do something awful to me if they learned who I really was.”

When Jones peered out from backstage she saw an audience ten times larger than those she’d seen at any church or nightclub. “I was scared,” Jones recalled. “I didn’t have any money, no place to go.”

Through the fog of cigarette smoke and heavy stage lighting, Hardy hoped his hoax would work.

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How to Be Single

Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Shelly Oria | Longreads | July 2018 | 11 minutes (2,799 words)

 

Some skirts are more promise than fabric, a whisper to yourself that one day you will have sex again. You know you own one, and you know it’s red. Dig in your closet. Dig some more. Don’t lose hope now: It’s waiting for you under a pile of jeans that need to be donated. Wear the red skirt at least once a week until otherwise stated.

Do not have sex; when the heart is in pain, the body can get you in trouble. Count the months. Feel a tremble in your stomach, in your chest, in your fingertips. It’s what happens when a woman embodies the full strength of her will: The force of it makes her shake.

If you’d like, you can brag to your friends. Do this in moderation. Sip your wine slowly before you speak. Hold the liquid in your mouth until all you feel is alcohol; close your eyes on the swallow. Say, three months, four months, five months. Say, Sex no longer holds power over me.

You will occasionally wonder if you are too old to wear the red skirt. Wear it anyway. Finger the seams. Stretch the fabric, then release. When times are rough, it’s important to wear clothes that remind your heart it’s a muscle.

Work 16-hour days. You’ll be teaching creative writing at a school infamous for underpaying instructors, so the only way to get by will be to take on way too many classes. At a party, you’ll meet a writer who will tell you he screamed at the dean of that school when he offered him a job and told him the pay. That doesn’t get me across the street, he told the dean. You’ll want to tell that writer that you’re in no position to be picky, because you’re on your own for the first time in your life. You’ll want to explain to him that you left a man who loved you with all his heart — and had a heart more pure than most — but who seemed to know you less every year, every month, every morning. You’ll want to tell him about the woman you spent the past year loving, about how the loss of your marriage hurts so much worse now that she’s gone too. Instead, you’ll nod. “Let me know if you hear of any good opportunities?” you’ll say.

There’s no point having sex with this writer. You will eventually learn that you need bed partners to be less language, more body. If you make the mistake of sleeping with him, tell no one; certain events can be undone by silence.

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Pay the Homeless

Santanu Majumdar / Getty

Bryce Covert | Longreads | June 2018 | 10 minutes (2,546 words)

He was standing on the median of a busy road one morning in the dead of a Massachusetts winter. With bare hands, he clutched a sign asking for money. I was a freshman in college driving to CVS, warm in my car.

I grew up in a rural beach community, where I hadn’t encountered many panhandlers. My experiences with people asking strangers for money came from a few family treks into New York City. Still, I had somehow absorbed a lesson—either spoken or implied, I can’t quite remember—about how to react: Don’t give any money when people ask for it. Doing so will only lead to bad things. The bad things weren’t specified, but drugs and alcohol were likely culprits, with the idea being that giving money to an addict hurts more than it helps. So when I passed that man asking for change, I wasn’t sure what to do.

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The Road to Asylum

As dawn arrives, Marfil Estrella looks out the window of the bus that will take her from San Salvador, El Salvador to Guatemala City, Guatemala. Photos by Danielle Villasana.

Alice Driver | Longreads | June 2018 | 21 minutes (5,300 words)

DISPONIBLE EN ESPAÑOL

“I want to finish elementary school.” — Karla Avelar, 40, founder of the Comcavis Trans Association, which advocates for LGBTI rights in El Salvador

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“Women, don’t be deceived,” boomed the weary, yellow-eyed preacher, his sombrero tipped forward with a drama fitting for his bus-ride sermon, one that would last all the way from San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador, to Guatemala City. As he made his way down the aisle of the bus, he stopped to touch women and girls on the head or the arm. “Don’t let men trick you,” he shouted, holding his bible up so high its well-worn pages brushed the roof of the bus. He didn’t touch Marfil Estrella Pérez Méndoza, 26, whose chosen name translates to Ivory Star. As she rested her round, hopeful face on the bus window, dark eyes peering out into the rainy grayness of early morning, the preacher passed by without laying a hand. “How do you say asylum in English?” she whispered.

Marfil Estrella was born in Cuscatlán, El Salvador, in a body that never felt like her own. She was assigned male at birth, and at 15, she came out as gay to her family. Their response was to disown her. “They told me that I brought shame on the family, that I should forget about them, and that I needed to leave,” explained Marfil Estrella. Like many members of the LGBTI community in El Salvador, her family forced her onto the street, and her schooling ended abruptly at ninth grade because she had no money to continue. She fled to San Salvador and slept in a park where she met other gay boys. “I saw a transsexual, and I said, ‘I want to be like her! I want to be like her!’” she recalled. She lived on the street, grew out her hair, and began to dress in women’s clothes, but she had no way to earn a living and consequently became very thin. Eventually she started to do sex work, one of the only options available to trans women in El Salvador to earn money. Read more…

Sometimes a Coat Is Just a Coat, and Sometimes It Ruins a Kid’s Life

A black trench coat hangs on a mannequin against a light gray background
Photo by Housing Works Thrift Shops (CC BY 2.0).

For The Oregonian, Bethany Barnes takes an in-depth look at the experience of 16-year-old Sanders, an autistic high school student put through an extensive “threat assessment” (aka, “We think you might be the next school shooter”). Are threat assessments effective? What happens when the behaviors flagged for a threat assessment overlap the symptoms with totally separate physical or neurological issues?

It was easy to figure out why the teen’s attire worried people. Sanders’ signature piece of clothing was a big black trench coat.

Years ago, Mark gave Sanders the riding coat he picked up on a youthful adventure in Australia. Sanders loved the weight of the coat. As a person on the autism spectrum, he welcomed the heaviness. It provided comfort in a world that often overwhelmed him. He wore it no matter the weather. With pride, he would note that when it gets above 85 degrees, it will be 104 degrees inside the coat, a fact he learned in science class. He was so associated with the coat that one time he didn’t wear it, he was marked absent by mistake. Sanders eventually wore out Mark’s old coat and his grandma got him a new one for Christmas.

Now, what had begun as a beloved hand-me-down, an armor that made Sanders feel secure and protected from the world, made him vulnerable.

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Your Best Work Comes from Scaring Yourself

Photo by Ryan Lowry

Ryan Chapman | Longreads | June 2018 | 16 minutes (4,419 words)

Several of the sentences in Chelsea Hodson’s debut Tonight I’m Someone Else radiate with the epigrammatic wisdom of Kelly Link or Maggie Nelson. There’s just something about her lines — “How lovely to be young enough not to know any better” or “I once loved so hard I almost lost everything, including his life, including my own” (both from “Simple Woman”) — that demands furious underlining and exclamation points in the margins.

These essays span the writer’s life in Tuscon, Los Angeles, and New York as she investigates what it means to have a body, to be an object, to run away, to look for answers in strangers, and to chase danger. As in, let’s tie a butcher knife to the ceiling fan and sit beneath it until someone gets hurt (“Near Miss”).

With praise from Miranda July and Amy Hempel, Tonight I’m Someone Else is a book that delights and disturbs and — in its deep dive into the performance of female identity — feels very now. Hodson is an essayist with one foot out the door, and she’s holding the keys to someone else’s car, asking if we want to drive into the ocean. Read more…

Making Peace with Selective Reduction

Getty / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Amber Leventry | Longreads | June 2018 | 11 minutes (2,805 words)

 

December, 2012. I shifted my gaze to my partner and away from the snow hitting the windshield of our SUV, coming at us fast and dizzying like those moving star screen savers we used on our desktops in college.

My partner was asleep in the passenger’s seat. Hours earlier, her pregnant belly had been home to three living fetuses. It now held two beating hearts and one that had stopped after being pierced with a needle full of potassium chloride.

My knuckles were white from gripping the steering wheel. I took a sip of my Diet Coke and ate a cheddar-filled pretzel Combo. Even with a snowstorm hitting the East Coast, we left right after the procedure. We didn’t want to stay another night in Boston, three hours from home and too far away from our 20-month-old daughter, who was in the care of friends. We knew we were driving right into the heart of the storm, but our journey had never been easy, and it seemed fitting to be pursuing comfort in difficult conditions.

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November, 2012. “Are you religious?” the doctor asked as we stared at the flat-screen television mounted to the wall.

Two weeks after undergoing intrauterine insemination (IUI), Amy took a home pregnancy test and it was positive. At seven weeks we went back to the fertility clinic to have our first ultrasound.

The black-and-white picture on the screen was a projected image of my partner’s uterus. Joined by two nurses, the OB-GYN checked that there wasn’t a fourth fetus in my partner’s belly. He maneuvered the ultrasound wand with one hand and labeled the image with the other. I watched him manipulate the machine, looking for life as if he were playing hide-and-seek. He found three. My partner was pregnant with triplets.

I grew up in a Christian church, under the eyes of God and in a congregation full of hypocrites. My partner went to Hebrew school and was raised on Jewish traditions and family poker games.

“No,” we both answered. He seemed strangely relieved.

Before I could ask why he cared, he wanted to know if we knew the term selective reduction. We didn’t. He suggested we make an appointment to return and talk with him about our options. Unless religious reasons prohibited us from considering it, he wanted to provide the pros and cons of aborting one or two of the healthy fetuses.

While we don’t practice religion, it has hugely impacted our life together. Religion was the reason my mother chose not to come to our 2001 civil union ceremony in Vermont. When we were still just girlfriends, college students living together illegally in an off-campus condo, my partner and I used to tell each other, “I’m going to marry you someday.”

In 1999, we were still in college and knew the post-graduation ceremony we wanted to have would only be valid in the eyes of friends and some family. We knew the only ones who would consider our love sacred would be us. Homosexuality was against my mother’s beliefs. She loved me but wouldn’t support my “mockery” of marriage.

Religion was what slowed the momentum behind states beginning to recognize gay unions, and religion was why marriage still hadn’t been recognized by the federal government.

Religion was something used to limit us and our ability to be respected and considered equal as queer individuals and as a same-sex couple. Religion was not a sounding board my partner and I used to make decisions.

When the doctor seemed happy that faith did not prevent us from thinking about the next steps, religion was no longer a limiting factor in our lives. Our lack of religion was suddenly opening up our options as a couple.

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Could Kratom End the Opioid Crisis?

(AP Photo/Mary Esch, File)

At BuzzFeed, Azeen Ghorayshi reports on kratom, a plant-based substance that has helped some opioid abusers to overcome addiction. When users ingest kratom, it latches on to the same brain receptors as heroine and fentanyl, blocking the crippling withdrawal symptoms that prevent many users from breaking their habit. The problem is, because it does latch on to those same receptors, the US government’s not sure if they should classify it as an opioid and restrict it as a Schedule I controlled substance, even though it comes without a high.

By the time Courtney True found the Reddit thread about kratom in December 2016, she hadn’t touched an opioid for 48 hours. She was in bad shape — stomach cramps, diarrhea, jitters, hot sweats, cold sweats, and body aches that made even her teeth hurt. Sitting at her kitchen table hunched over a laptop, she recalled, “I felt like I wanted to rip my skin off and step out of it.”

True had been dependent on opioids since she was a 14-year-old growing up in Mississippi, when a doctor prescribed her Percocet to treat chronic migraines. By the age of 24, she was shooting OxyContin. A decade after that — after moving to Maine, becoming a nurse, and having two kids — the Drug Enforcement Administration cracked down on sketchy online pharmacies that sold pills, and True started on heroin.

Her husband drove her a half hour to a smoke shop in downtown Portland. She bought a little of everything: a small bag of crushed kratom leaves, some capsules, and two tiny bottles of extracts, all for about $100.

Back in the car, heater blasting, she swallowed some of the capsules and downed a bottle, then sat waiting, skeptically, to feel something like a high. She never did, but within 20 minutes her withdrawal symptoms had faded away. “It was like a fog had cleared,” True said. “They were just gone.”

Now 18 months have passed, and True has been heroin-free for 17. She drinks a murky kratom-grapefruit juice mix several times a day, and credits the plant for saving not only her own life, but also her family’s.

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On Mourning, Learning a More Sober Fandom, and Letting Go

DEERFIELD BEACH, FL - JUNE 23:Hip-hop mourns rapper XXXTentacion after fatal shooting at roadside memorial. The Rapper Jahseh Dwayne Onfroy, who performed under the name Xxxtentacion was shot, June 18, 2018 on June 23, 2018 in Deerfield Beach, Florida. Credit: Hoo-Me.com / MediaPunch /IPX

Jahseh Dwayne Onfroy, the singer-rapper known as XXXTentacion, died after an apparent armed robbery on June 18. He was 20 years old. His first album, 17,  debuted at number two on the Billboard 200 last August, and a follow-up, ?, landed the number one spot in March. The popularity of his emotionally raw lyrics and sparse, cutting beats did not wane when allegations of strangulation, head-butting, kidnapping and other forms of physical and sexual abuse were made public last September.  In fact, XXX’s appeal only grew; fans as well as music industry insiders seemed to double down on their support. When the streaming service Spotify announced a plan to classify XXX and R. Kelly’s music as “hate content” and curtail promotion of the two artists, representatives of established hip-hop acts and label heads protested. Spotify abandoned the policy less than a month later, citing its “vague” language as one of the reasons for retracting.

I wrote about the accusations XXX’s former partner made against him in a post last month on Kelis, Nas, and hip-hop’s #MeToo problem. At the time, I hadn’t yet spoken to enough people younger than me, like my 16-year-old nephew, to try to understand the hold XXX’s music had on them. I hadn’t thought enough about how, when I was 15, I’d lose myself on the dance floor to 2pac’s “How Do U Want It,” finding respite from everything going on at home. Pac had already been accused and convicted of sexual assault by then, and though I didn’t yet have the language of feminism to help me process things, I have enough faith in my own intelligence to believe there was more to my love of Pac than simply ignorance or self-hate. He had a ferocious creativity and communicated a sense of striving and overcoming, and he was defiant of the hypocrisy of respectability. I needed to tap into all that to survive those times. Like XXX, Pac often toyed with the possibility of his own early death, and he lived racing towards it. At 15, I read this, too, as defiance.

Still, adult-me is resolutely angry about the harm these and other hip-hop men have caused. I am also curious about what it is in XXX’s desperately sad body of work that his fans cannot bear to part with. I can wager guesses, because we live in desperate times. This is a burning house with a weaponized high court, menacing ICE agents, screaming toddlers at the border and the killing of innocents in our interior. We want our heroes to transcend these circumstances, but often, they simply reflect our own horror right back at us.

Reporter and critic Stephen Kearse tries to make sense of XXX’s enduring appeal in a thoughtful essay for Pitchforkfor which he speaks to some of XXX’s listeners.

I sought out XXXTentacion fans expecting to meet reactionaries and trolls mired in bad faith and adulation—a cult, essentially. Instead I found folks who make the same choices and suspensions of disbelief as other fans and listeners, consumers enthralled by and navigating the same badlands of treacherous content as the rest of us. These fans’ relationship to XXXTentacion was—and, perhaps more than ever, is—entirely based on the music and its importance to them, and everything outside of that was dismissible hearsay. For them, “the charges” against him took the form of a vague stigma without a particular origin.

I was alarmed by their skepticism, but the way XXXTentacion’s fans conflated newsgathering, rumors, and #inspiration was no different from radio DJs or Reddit users opinionating into the void. Stigma is the opposite of prestige, but it functions the same way, providing a readymade lens for interpreting art regardless of new terms or information. This doesn’t mean that XXXTentacion and his fans were beyond reproach or that the widespread reluctance by the press to embrace his music was unwarranted. But it does reveal the limits of music being treated as a lifestyle—to embrace or reject wholesale—and artists being worshipped rather than engaged with, challenged, doubted.

If our current cultural moment is predicated on a more honest reckoning with who we idolize and who is harmed by that idolatry—the abused, the assaulted, the discarded, the ignored—perhaps we should also consider the how just as emphatically.

Kearse says a large part of our problem is the nature of fandom itself — how we adore our favorites so unequivocally. He wonders how we can love what we love soberly. By the end of the essay, Kaerse describes how his own approach to listening to and critically engaging with music has changed.

Taking abuse allegations seriously has altered how I discuss music, professionally and personally. I don’t leave artists’ controversies out of reviews or shy away from the hard questions in interviews. I don’t mount convoluted defenses for questionable lyrics, even for dead or respected artists. I respect and acknowledge the apprehension of other listeners when a song or line or tweet grates. Above all, I no longer stan, for anyone. I realize this could never be the universal approach to ethical consumption—contrary to the saying, not everybody’s a critic. But it’s a system of constant engagement, with artists, with their actions, and with myself. Even for my faves, finality never comes.

Is this sober approach to fandom enough of a stand? Kaerse’s piece reminded me of the work of Pearl Cleage, whose essay “Mad at Miles” from a now out-of-print  volume of the same name, grapples with the crimes jazz innovator Miles Davis admittedly committed against actress Cicely Tyson. Certainly, the fans of Davis occupy a more rarefied space in the American imaginary than those of any Soundcloud rapper. It’s nearly impossible to conceive of a world where Kind of Blue isn’t heralded. In her piece, Cleage spends time with Davis’ music and takes care to consider its utility, asking, “Can we make love to the rhythms of ‘a little early Miles’ when he may have spent the morning of the day he recorded the music slapping one of our sisters in the mouth?”

While Kearse gives us a blueprint for ethical consumption of the work of artists who cause such harm, Cleage suggests there can be none.

XXXTentacion’s death has caused another surge in his music’s popularity. I listened to “SAD!” for a while on a trip last week. On the track, the rapper threatens suicide if a lover leaves. That’s an abuse tactic, and it me hurt to listen. I wondered if my nephew, who makes beats and had been mournful of the late rapper’s death, was okay, so I reached out. That is all I know to do.

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