Search Results for: Gay Marriage

A Risky Proposal

Longreads Pick

Is it too soon to petition the Supreme Court on gay marriage?

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Jan 18, 2010
Length: 44 minutes (11,162 words)

Meghan McCain Will Be Heard

Longreads Pick

The daughter of the former presidential candidate is proving that you can rally for gay marriage and still be Republican.

Source: Out
Published: Jul 1, 2009
Length: 6 minutes (1,556 words)

Deconstructing Disney: Queer Coding and Masculinity in Pocahontas

Illustration by Carolyn Wells

Jeanna Kadlec| Longreads | April 2021 | 2,936 words (11 minutes)

Disney often codes their villains as queer: This is widely known and accepted. First noticed by scholars during the Disney Renaissance of the late ‘80s through the ‘90s, critical observations about characters like Scar (The Lion King) have since disseminated into pithy, viral tweets and TikToks. A quick Google search of “gay Disney villains” will turn up dozens of articles, all repeating the same litany of facts: That The Little Mermaid’s Ursula is based on the iconic drag queen Divine, that Hollywood often uses British accents and effeminate mannerisms in men like Robin Hood’s King John to signal moral decrepitude.

But those are observations without analysis, which is to say: pointing out the obvious without asking why or how. The subtext of these clickbait articles and listicles is often: Disney codes villains as queer because Disney thinks being gay is bad. Which is one way to read it.

However, simply saying “Disney is bigoted” has never sat entirely well with me for one reason: In spite of what the Supreme Court of the United States may rule, Disney is not a person. Disney is a corporation that wields the power of a nation-state, and, consequently, has one central obsession — the preservation and expansion of that power, a theme that is prevalent and evident in every story they allow their employees and contractors to tell. 

If queerness is consistently coded a certain way, it has something to do with how Disney wants power to function — who can wield it, and how. 

***

Millennials are the generation whose childhoods were shaped by the stories of the Disney Renaissance, a period generally considered to have begun with 1989’s The Little Mermaid and concluded with 1999’s Tarzan. It includes favorites like Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, and Mulan — which, incidentally, are at the heart of the corporation’s “live-action” remake strategy, intended to further monetize a now-grown generation’s nostalgia for the stories that formed us, stories we can share with our own children (or group texts). 

The Disney Renaissance was birthed after a decade of HIV/AIDS ravaging queer communities; its height marked by political milestones such as President Clinton’s signing of the Defense of Marriage Act (1996) and the institution of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” for LGBTQ+ members of the military. Divergent, non-normative sexuality was purportedly a threat to society, and Disney, ever the quiet institutional soldier, answered by providing a veritable stable of queer-coded villains who were ill-suited to lead or assume power. 

Indeed, there were so many queer-coded villains in this period that it’s hard to remember them all — let alone the different lessons they taught us. To wit, you probably remember Scar, Jafar, and Ursula, but you have probably forgotten Governor Ratcliffe from 1995’s Pocahontas: the fashion-conscious, social-climbing, crown-appointed governor in charge of the colonizing “mission” to the “New World.”

Pocahontas has one of the top-five highest-grossing Disney soundtracks of all time, but that’s generally where any lingering nostalgia dies. To say that the film itself is problematic is an understatement. While the screenshot of Chief Powhatan, Pocahontas’ father, saying “these white men are dangerous” has found a rich afterlife on social media, the film’s historical inaccuracy and deliberate whitewashing of colonization and its aftermath have cycled it out of many a millennial’s “comfort film” rotation, something that has generally gone unaddressed by the corporation. (The fact that Mel Gibson voiced John Smith hasn’t helped, either.) 

Pocahontas may seem like a strange vehicle for discussing queer villainy. But that’s the thing: Disney gets inventive when they need to circumvent white people’s historical responsibility for genocidal atrocities, and what better way to do that than to displace the heart of the film’s conflict onto contemporary cultural anxiety: queerness and its incumbent specter, masculinity. 

Divergent, non-normative sexuality was purportedly a threat to society, and Disney, ever the quiet institutional soldier, answered by providing a veritable stable of queer-coded villains who were ill-suited to lead or assume power.

Disney’s attitudes toward colonization and queer coding are, it turns out, inextricably linked. By using a queer-coded villain, the corporation entirely elides white responsibility in retelling a historical tragedy, letting the cowboy-type colonizers off the hook for any wrongdoing and, instead, reframing them as the heroes of the story. In Pocahontas, Disney pulls off the magic trick of telling a story about colonization and genocide where the only thing that’s actually punished is the “wrong” kind of masculinity. 

***

Governor Ratcliffe is not set up as the villain because he is a colonizer, or even because he is in charge of the mission to invade the Powhatan nation — or, as Disney has framed it, dig for gold. To criticize him for these positions would implicate and damage the purported “heroism” of every other white character on screen. 

Something else, then, must indicate his villainy, and Ratcliffe violates Disney’s favorite American norms — individualism, hard work, modesty — immediately. He wears bows in his hair and a literal feather in his cap. His twinky manservant, Wiggins, helps dress him, and is even in charge of bathing his dog … and let’s take a moment to discuss the dog. Unless fighting, Ratcliffe is rarely seen not carrying his white pug, Percy, who is always adorned in a collar that is fancier than anything the crew are wearing. Disney villains’ animal familiars tell us something about their personality, and Percy’s taste for luxury speaks volumes about Ratcliffe’s lifestyle. 

Ratcliffe prefers to delegate rather than do physical labor himself, a standard managerial practice, but not something heroes do. He belittles his workers when things don’t go well, seeing his crew as a means to an end and insulting them as “witless peasants” behind closed doors.

The narrative works to align the audience’s viewpoint with that of the other colonizers: in the words of one of the laborers, “Look at us! No gold, no food, while Ratcliffe sits in his tent all day, happy as a clam.” The audience is clearly meant to sympathize with the worker instead of Ratcliffe, the villainous manager, even if that worker is also occupying stolen land and explicitly fantasizing about killing Indigenous people. (What “audience,” exactly, is this for? You already know the answer.) 


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However, it isn’t just that Ratcliffe is a bullying, well-dressed boss in an environment where no one is impressed by designer wares. He’s deeply insecure and concerned about what other people think, as opposed to the naturally popular, carefree everyman that is the Captain of the ship (and Pocahontas’ eventual love interest) John Smith. In fact, we learn that this mission is something of a last-ditch effort to salvage Ratcliffe’s reputation with the king. For him, success means falling in line, trying to do right by the crown, to reap the reward. When he says “it’s not that I’m bitter,” we understand that he is, in fact, deeply bitter.

Ratcliffe’s real fantasy is power — bringing his enemies at court to heel, being so celebrated that “My dear friend King Jimmy will probably build me a shrine” — precisely because he feels so ironically powerless.

This is not the kind of chaotic, burn-it-all-down villain who has been canonized by drag shows. 

***

A casual Google search reveals that Ratcliffe does not even show up on most “Gay Disney Villain” lists. Something about him elides memory and decisive categorization as other, encouraging a certain slippage. 

He isn’t as easy to pin down as the Queer Villains of Excess: the Scars and Ursulas who you can spot by their muchness, their refusal to conform to rigid social structures, their wild desire to usurp the throne. Excess is the singular quality that usually drives queer-coded villains to crave power at all costs, their appetites monstrous and unnatural. 

Ironically, even the most chaotic queer-coded villains are rarely bent on creating their own power structures — they only ever desire the kingdom and, seemingly, the lives of their straight-coded, heroic counterparts. Jafar wants to be sultan, but has no conception of what to do with that power once obtained, to the point he cannot strategize enough to realize that the genie is beholden to others. Scar believes himself to be the rightful ruler of the Pride Lands, only to drive the kingdom into a barren wasteland: The queer failure of reproduction, on which society so purportedly rests, made manifest. “Fuck the social order and the child in whose name we’re collectively terrorized,” queer theorist Lee Edelman writes in No Future — the anthem of Disney villains everywhere. 

Disney gets inventive when they need to circumvent white people’s historical responsibility for genocidal atrocities, and what better way to do that than to displace the heart of the film’s conflict onto contemporary cultural anxiety: queerness and its incumbent specter, masculinity.

The opposite of excess is moderation, and restraining oneself to fit into the boxes society has prescribed — well, this is assimilation. 

Assimilation is when a group of people assumes the values, behaviors, and beliefs of another group — when something core and essential to one’s culture and sense of self and identity is lost in the interest of resembling the social majority. In the U.S., this has had many iterations around the suppression of non-English languages, the forced Christianization of Indigenous peoples, and more. For the LGBTQ+ community, it looks like our communities having been largely underground until the last 50 or so years, because social legibility meant imprisonment, exile, or death 

In many ways, for many people, various forms of assimilation are pure survival in a white, heteronormative, and otherwise profoundly difficult world. But assimilation used against one’s own community, assimilation used to turn the target off your own back and toward communities with less cultural power than yours, becomes an alliance with the oppressor. 

Ratcliffe is a queer-coded villain whose trademark is assimilation, not excess. This is why he slips and slides through millennial memory — hard to remember, hard to pin down. He isn’t an outsider, an icon to queer children everywhere, an individualist who has chosen himself at all costs, someone who we grew up both terrified of and wanting to become. No. He is trying desperately to fit in, to use the white supremacist system to his own benefit. But working for the system always comes with a price. 

***

There is a queer anxiety to Ratcliffe, because he knows his attempts to fit in are pretense. This is, as he says himself, “my last chance for glory.” Does he exile himself from the crew of colonizers because he thinks he’s better than them, or because he thinks they’ll see through him? Or both? Captain John Smith can have a beer with the guys. Ratcliffe, not so much.

Holding the title of “governor” in a servile bureaucracy doesn’t guarantee respect. Rugged masculinity and physicality — the kind Smith has — does. On a certain level, Ratcliffe both understands and resents this: “The men like Smith, don’t they?” he asks his manservant Wiggins. Even their voices tell the story: Ratcliffe is the villainous bureaucrat, complete with an English accent. Smith is the heroic adventurer — with Mel Gibson’s American accent intact and unfettered. 

John Smith has swagger — and a reputation that precedes him. “You can’t fight Indians without John Smith!” one of the colonizers declares in his introductory scene, as Smith literally rides a cannon onto the ship. Depicted as a natural leader, he’s respected by his men for his physical prowess and bravery that borders on stupidity. Smith has a martyr-like willingness to put himself in harm’s way for his men that, while not explicitly labeled as Christian, is certainly coded as such. “You’d do the same for me,” Smith says jokingly to his companions, after leaping into the ocean during a storm to save a man who fell overboard. He is, in essence, exactly the kind of leading man that Mel Gibson, the actor who voices him, spent a career playing — the mythic American cowboy and ideal leading man of Hollywood cinema. (Complete with the domestic abuse and antisemitism bona fides.) 

Queer-coded Ratcliffe is trying to earn a place in the system by being its most traditional guardian, but he also represents a kind of masculinity that has long since gone indoors to the Royal Court, concerned with accumulation through relationship and intellect. Americans recognize this as the masculinity of the educated, high-born (or aspirational) cultural aesthete, anxieties about which would soon manifest in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s under the term “metrosexual.” John Smith, conversely, represents the rugged, individualist masculinity that defines itself not by social status but by a cowboy mentality, by connection with God, family, and the land.  

In many ways, Pocahontas is structured like a Western, and John Smith may as well be John Wayne. John Smith saves the man who fell overboard; Ratcliffe is the government lackey in a suit who hunkers down in his cabin and only emerges once the danger has passed, clutching his pug while his manservant shields him with an umbrella. Government intervention is often a primary conflict in Westerns, resented by white colonizers played by actors like Wayne, who have gone west and figured out a way to live (with varying levels of hostility to the local Indigenous community) outside of federal oversight. The men in suits have effeminate mannerisms, a lot of education, and virtually no physical strength (coded as natural, God-given virility), with very little idea on how to practically connect to the world around them. Set aside for a moment the well-documented historical phenomenon of white, Black, and Latino gay cowboys throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, and apply the genre of American Westerns and their ideology of masculinity, expansion, and, consequently, who gets to have what in Pocahontas

What do the colonizers want, respectively, in Pocahontas? (Obvious question, but stay with me.) In Ratcliffe’s villain anthem, “Mine, Mine, Mine” — which is, and I cannot stress this enough, a duet with John Smith — Ratcliffe is singing about the gold allowing him to accumulate wealth and reputation and status, delegating the digging to the crew. Smith is the one actually singing about the land while climbing trees and waterfalls, activities which seem unnecessarily strenuous. But don’t they want the same thing: to take whatever land they land on in the interest of colonial expansion? Haven’t Smith and Ratcliffe already been shown to be very much on the same page about the murder and displacement of Indigenous peoples? But Disney’s edit would have you think otherwise. 

John Smith has swagger — and a reputation that precedes him. “You can’t fight Indians without John Smith!” one of the colonizers declares in his introductory scene, as Smith literally rides a cannon onto the ship.

Beneath the surface, anxieties about all-too-contemporary masculinity and what constitutes manhood are relocated to the center of the driving conflict of Pocahontas — one that allows a corporation to elide reckoning with the violent historical subject matter of the actual plot. 

And therein is the issue: Ratcliffe becomes the villain because Smith, his fellow colonizer, cannot be. 

***

In the end, Ratcliffe’s men turn on him. At first glance, it might seem like they are doing so out of sympathy for Pocahontas and her people, as Ratcliffe had been trying to assassinate her father, Chief Powhatan. But this is not it — the other white men don’t try to stop him when he first aims his gun, not until he accidentally shoots John Smith, who is shown taking a bullet for the chief (which is, please note, a fictional event that did not happen). 

“You shot him!” one accuses. “Smith was right all along!” another cries hypocritically, as all of them had been worked up in a racist war song (“Savages”), fantasizing about genocide only the night before. The white colonizers mutiny in favor of the preferred masculine archetype: The Cowboy. Ratcliffe is tied up, gagged, and set to be tried upon return to England. 

It is deeply satisfying to see the avowedly racist Ratcliffe in chains. But is the colonizing and racist rhetoric what he’s being punished for? No. The other colonizers are still walking free, many of them staying behind to continue to build up their Jamestown settlement. 

Colonizing isn’t worthy of punishment in this film, nor is racism, otherwise every white character — John Smith included — would be in chains. The reality is that Ratcliffe is punished for failing to assimilate within the crew successfully, for not embodying the right kind of masculinity, for not reading the room, and attacking the much-respected cowboy-esque leader who the men ultimately mutiny for. This is his crime: not trying to assassinate Chief Powhatan, but wounding one of his own. Meanwhile, Thomas, a colonizer who explicitly murders an Indigenous warrior, Kocoum, is given … a redemption arc, complete with Pocahontas’ forgiveness. 

How tenuous the conditions of acceptance for white gays doing the bidding of white supremacy. 

***

Ratcliffe is, simply put, a Corporate Gay, a Log Cabin Republican, a Cyrus Bean, the Disney equivalent of (allegedly) that one senator from South Carolina. Ratcliffe has bought into the idea that serving the system will benefit him, and that if only he does its bidding, things will ultimately work out. But queerness renders you automatically suspect within any system of power, even white supremacy. What Ratcliffe, and other white gays like him, fail to realize is that assimilation is not acceptance; it is merely borrowed time. 

There is a savvy to the Queer Villains of Excess like Scar and Ursula, who understand that there is no utility in trying to fit in, who know that there is no box possibly small enough to cram your queer ass into. But, truth be told, even these villains have boundaries they won’t cross, only ever wanting to kill the king and usurp his throne — but never outright abolish abusive systems of power. 

There is no queer revolution amongst Disney villains, see. There is no abolition, no truly radical liberation within the fairy tales that ultimately serve to codify what “happily ever after” means, and for who. In Disney, queerness is only ever an imitation of the hetero original, never a full expression of itself. Gay villains are depicted as the dog who caught the car: Once they get it, what do they even do?

* * *

Jeanna Kadlec is a culture writer living in NYC. Her writing has appeared in ELLE, O the Oprah Magazine, LitHub, NYLON, Allure, and more.

Editor: Carolyn Wells

Binders Full of Men

Jennifer Berney | The Other Mothers: Two Women’s Journey to Find the Family That Was Always Theirs | Sourcebooks | February 2021 | 18 minutes (4,976 words)

 

Becoming Family,” Jennifer’s 2019 essay exploring traditional notions of heredity and paternity, is a nice companion to this piece.

A manila envelope from the country’s largest sperm bank arrived in my mailbox only three days after I had called to request it. I tucked it under my arm and looked around me before returning to my front porch, as if one of my neighbors might catch me—as if there were something forbidden inside. I sat on the step and ran my finger through the envelope seam to unstick the glue. California Cryobank, the catalog said at the top, in white letters on a royal blue background. My wife Kellie and I had already spent months trying to line up a community donor, but no one had come through with a yes. In contrast, this thing in my hands had come to me so easily. I had asked for it and, with the snap of a finger, there it was. Below the company’s name, there was a photograph. I’m not sure what I had expected—maybe a classic image of a baby growing in utero, maybe a mother looking into the eyes of her newborn child. But this photo featured two teenage boys wearing backpacks and smiling at the camera. They stood beneath a tree. It looked like an image I’d expect to see on a college brochure.

Kellie pulled into the driveway with her window rolled down. “Hey, lady,” she said and stepped out of her truck.

“Hey,” I said. My heart sped. I wanted to show her the catalog, but I didn’t want to overwhelm her. I tried to hide my grin.

Kellie sat down next to me. “What’s that?”

I handed it to her. “It’s from that sperm bank in California,” I said. “I called them.”

Kellie didn’t open it. She just held it in her lap.

I reached over and laid a finger on one of the faces on the cover. “Who is this supposed to be?” I asked her. “Are these the babies, all grown up?”

Kellie cocked her head and looked at me to make sure I was serious. “They’re the donors,” she said.

Shit. She was right. My excitement for the packet fizzled. These boys weren’t what I had in mind. Whoever designed the cover must have hoped to convey that these were young men at the peak of their health, but all it highlighted for me was that many of these donors were too young to be making decisions of permanent consequence. They looked like boys, not men. Staring at the picture made me think of factory farming, of dairy cows hooked to milking machines, of chickens dropping eggs in chutes. Were these boys ready to commit to a lifetime of knowing there were children out there that they had helped create? I suspected that most of them just wanted the money for textbooks or beer.

Kellie lifted herself from the step to go inside. I propped the catalog on my knees. Moisture from my skin condensed on the back cover. I flipped through the pages aimlessly, my hope dim.

* * *

My position on sperm—my insistence that a sperm bank was our best and easiest option—was in part based on an assumption I had held since childhood when I first learned of the existence of assisted reproduction. I assumed that the fertility industry wanted to help me, that sperm banks had been designed with lesbians in mind.

I understood that straight couples and single women used sperm banks too, but I had always figured that lesbian couples would make a large share of their clientele, that sperm banks would welcome us, and that our needs would be built into the design of their operation.

I was wrong about this. Sperm banks were not designed for lesbians.

California Cryobank, one of the first commercial sperm banks, opened in 1977 with a very specific purpose: to offer men a way to store their own sperm for future use. This meant that, for instance, a man undergoing treatment for cancer could store vials of semen before starting chemo and radiation, and in doing so could hang on to the option of fathering children someday. Sperm storage was originally envisioned as a niche market for men, available mainly as a safeguard against future infertility. Male sterility, the founders believed, had the potential to be psychologically “shattering”—devastating to a man’s ego.

Few were talking about male infertility as a widespread phenomenon. “Barren” was—and still is—a term applied only to women. Male infertility was seen as so profoundly emasculating that doctors barely mentioned it, even to each other. In the era predating the commercial sperm bank, if a couple had no luck conceiving a child, and if the microscope revealed that the husband’s lack of sperm was at fault, doctors simply recruited one of their male students or staff to donate fresh semen. Sometimes the doctor himself was the secret donor. The arrangement was casual. In many cases, there was no documentation or paperwork. No STD testing. No legal safeguards. No washing, freezing, or quarantining. Just sperm from a source that would always be anonymous to the couple that received it. The prevailing attitude was: Just fix the problem. The less said the better. This approach allowed the husband and wife to carry on as if they’d conceived the child unassisted. Many couples never spoke of the procedure again and never told their children.

It’s worth noting that both this hushed approach to donor insemination and the vision of preemptive sperm banking centered the male experience and ego. It took some time for established sperm banks to identify and fill what now seems like an obvious role: to provide a menu of options to straight couples in need of donor sperm. It took even longer for physicians to cede control and retire the practice of recruiting their own donors.

Commercial sperm banks adapted to help propagate more traditional families—to replace one man’s nonviable semen with another man’s viable semen, and in doing so, fulfill the promise of the normal: a husband, a wife, and children—the American nuclear family.

I assumed that the fertility industry wanted to help me, that sperm banks had been designed with lesbians in mind.

As I was coming of age as a lesbian and considering my future, it had never once occurred to me that the medical industry could legally withhold services from me or anyone else, that they could say yes to straight couples and no to queers, but in fact they did just that. Most sperm banks and fertility clinics turned away any woman who wasn’t conventionally married. Sperm banks weren’t made for lesbians.

It turns out lesbians didn’t need them. Instead, while sperm banks were growing, lesbians were developing networks to support each other. The idea that lesbians could become parents on their own terms was, at the time, revolutionary and connected to the larger feminist goal of giving women full control over their reproductive health. Lesbians and allies organized groups for queer women who wanted to become parents, either as partners or single mothers. They passed out instructions on how to perform inseminations with turkey basters, diaphragms, and needleless syringes. They found clever ways to source sperm.

One way completely avoided any doctor’s office. Several mothers of now-grown children have explained to me how it worked in Seattle in the 1980s.

If you were a lesbian who wanted to get pregnant by an anonymous donor, you needed to find yourself a go-between, a friend who would make things happen for you. The go-between would ask around and find a donor—often a gay man in the larger community. The donor could be a close friend, or a friend of a friend, or a colleague from work. The go-between would know him, but he would be anonymous to the recipient.

In these networks, there was paperwork involved: a survey that asked for basic medical and personal history, not unlike the donor files available to sperm bank clients. The go-between collected this and shared it with the recipients. She kept a separate file with personal information—the donor’s name, his social security number, the recipients he’d been paired with. In theory, this could be shared with the recipient family when the child turned sixteen, and the family could decide if they wanted to track down the donor and contact him. In practice, this exchange didn’t always happen quite like that. Through the course of the interviews I conducted, I heard anecdotes about forms being lost due to illness, death, and human error. However, community and memory are living things, and in some cases those who wanted to find their donors could do so by simply asking around.

Hopeful recipients charted their cycles with the same tools I used to chart mine: a basal thermometer, a chart, and a pen. When it was time to inseminate, the go-between was the emissary. She picked up the ejaculate (two women mentioned artichoke jars as the container of choice) and kept it warm as she transported it to the home of the woman who was trying to conceive. At that point the go-between helped, or bore witness, or got out of the way, but her role wasn’t just functional—it was spiritual. Her presence conveyed the blessing of the larger community.

Someone who was a go-between once would likely be a go-between multiple times. She would have a list of men who were ready and willing and who already knew the drill.

As I learned about these networks one generation later, I was amazed by their efficiency and by how many problems they solved. The network system outsourced the difficult legwork of finding a donor to the go-between, a person who, because she lacked direct personal investment, could more comfortably manage those negotiations. If Kellie and I had employed this approach, it would have spared us some pain. We had just spent two months waiting for an acquaintance to decide whether or not he’d be our donor, and he had ultimately ghosted us. If, say, our friend Dee had been our go-between, then the acquaintance could have delivered his no to Dee without feeling the pressure of our hopes. We wouldn’t have been hurt by his no, because we wouldn’t have even known about it. Instead, we would have simply sent our friend on a mission, and we would have heard back from her once she was successful.

What’s more, the network system preserved anonymity while allowing the would-be parents to rest easy knowing the sperm wasn’t coming from an unknown stranger but a community member who had ties to mutual friends. This system was free and spared recipients from having to medicalize the practice of babymaking.

They passed out instructions on how to perform inseminations with turkey basters, diaphragms, and needleless syringes.

Others have told me stories that capture another mode of conception that was common to lesbians in the ’80s: insemination via feminist health center. These centers—connected to the larger women’s health movement—were established and run by women who sought to empower their peers. This was the generation of feminists who got together in groups and learned how to view their cervixes using a speculum, a flashlight, and a mirror.

Olympia, where Kellie and I lived, had one of these centers, founded by a woman whose name is still legendary among locals: Pat Shively. Pat was a lesbian herself and a mother of three children from an early marriage. (It’s worth noting that heterosexual sex—often the byproduct of a youth spent in the closet—is the oldest form of conception available to lesbians.) When Pat opened the Women’s Health Clinic in 1981, she didn’t do so with the vision of helping fellow queers conceive but with the broader mission of serving diverse populations of women. Her clinic offered abortions, and she made herself available at any hour of the day or night to administer rape kits to women who had been sexually assaulted. I imagine that it must have been a small comfort to those women, in a moment where small comforts mattered, to be seen by someone who was capable of hearing and believing them, by someone who knew how to be tender and also how to fight.

Pat’s role as the local abortion provider made her vulnerable to death threats, and she took to carrying a Glock and wearing a bulletproof vest. In the photos I’ve seen of Pat, she has a small frame, short unkempt curls, and she is always actively holding something: a phone, a pen, a small child’s hand.

So, while Pat Shively may not have set out to make a clinic for the explicit purpose of helping lesbians conceive—while it may not have even been part of her original vision—it’s not hard to see how she wound up filling this niche.

Pat’s inseminations were in some ways similar to the informal inseminations that took place in doctors’ offices behind closed doors before the era of sperm banks. But Pat Shively didn’t have a range of male residents to recruit from. Instead, she looked for college-age men who didn’t smoke pot (studies showed that marijuana use interfered with sperm motility) and paid her donors $30 per specimen. By some accounts, she charged her clients $50 for the inseminations. By other accounts, she did it for free. Either way, it’s clear that she wasn’t getting rich on the practice.

In this arrangement, Pat acted as both medical professional and community member, a variation on the go-between. She taught her clients how to chart their ovulation and timed the inseminations accordingly. Since hers was a small-scale operation, her donor sperm was fresh, not frozen, and she often performed the insemination on the recipient’s sofa.

In both of these systems—network-facilitated insemination and women’s clinic insemination—family-making became a community act not limited to a bedroom or a clinic. Instead, they combined, to varying degrees, personal and clinical elements: the living room couch as the site of insemination, the needleless syringe as the conduit, the friend or partner as the inseminator, the documents that may someday be lost. Both methods centered the humanity of the recipient and allowed her to feel she was the agent rather than the patient.

And, in both of these scenarios, sperm was mainly a means to an end. Between the go-betweens and the recipients, between the clinician and her clients, there was sometimes discussion about what health issues they wanted to avoid or what aspects of someone’s ethnic or religious background they might prefer their donor mirror. Parents-to-be often sought donors who shared their religious or ethnic heritage. But in general no one had the leeway to insist on blue eyes, or a certain height, or an engineering degree, and it seems that no one obsessed over these details. The attitude that drove these systems was that DNA mattered a little, but not a lot. For the most part, women wanted to make a baby, and they wanted sperm from a donor who was reasonably healthy. That was all.

And, in both of these scenarios, sperm was mainly a means to an end.

Contrast this approach with that of the typical sperm bank customer in our current climate. Today’s commercial sperm banks exclude potential donors not just for issues like low sperm count or heritable diseases, but also for height (donors that are five foot eleven and over are strongly preferred, and many banks won’t accept donors who are under five-nine) and weight. Gay men, who were so essential to the lesbian insemination networks of the 1980s, are to this day effectively banned from donating at all commercial sperm banks—a policy that is ostensibly to protect recipients from an increased risk of HIV, but makes little sense when one considers that all donors are tested and retested over a six month period while their sperm is quarantined and that there are no bans on other high-risk sexual behaviors. Straight men can engage in unprotected anal and vaginal sex with multiple female partners and still qualify as donors, while gay men—even those in long-term monogamous relationships—need not even apply.

Most banks actively recruit on college campuses and require their donors to prove that they have earned, or are in the process of earning, a degree from a four-year college, and some banks charge an extra premium for sperm from donors with an advanced or Ivy League degree.

Sociologist Amy Agigian points out that clients are the ones demanding this approach, citing a study where women “placed the highest value on the sperm donor’s education, ethnicity and height.” Agigian goes on to point out that any belief that a donor’s college education is somehow “transmissible through a man’s semen is further evidence of magical thinking about semen that abounds in our culture.”

To put it another way, sperm banks aren’t simply optimizing their samples for the potential child’s future health. They are optimizing to meet demands for children who will conform to societal norms around race and attractiveness. What’s more, they are selling a myth that an advanced degree confers heritable traits, that the Ivy League can be encoded into a child’s DNA.

Lesbians are now among the consumers driving these demands, and yet I can’t help but think back to the early days of lesbian low-tech inseminations and how, for the most part, they were driven not by eugenic ideologies but by personal connections. When it came to alternative insemination, lesbian recipients weren’t focused on making genius babies or maximizing genetics. They simply wanted families, reached out for community support, and received it.

I didn’t know any of this as I sat on my front porch, holding the Cryobank brochure. I didn’t know it, but for the first time, I sensed that Kellie wasn’t wrong—that buying sperm was complicated, that it was fraught with ethical dilemmas, and that the story behind the sperm we were getting was actually a story that mattered.

* * *

That night, as Kellie slept, I went online. When I Googled “sperm bank,” California Cryobank topped the list, and the rest of the first page was filled with companies that looked nearly identical to the brochure I’d already viewed. Their web pages featured chubby, smiling babies, welcomed by straight couples who looked more like J. Crew models than actual families.

I tried variations. “Sperm bank small” and “sperm bank gay friendly.” I didn’t get anywhere. With each search, the same corporations showed up. It was just before midnight when I finally added the word lesbian to my search and, bingo, the top result linked to a website that featured a woman, alone, holding a baby. She wore a hooded sweatshirt and a loose ponytail; she looked less like a J. Crew model and more like a person I might actually know in real life. Just above the picture was the tagline: “A trusted resource for women planning alternative families.”

Pacific Reproductive Services, it turned out, was a lesbian-centered cryobank founded by Sherron Mills in 1984. Mills, like Pat Shively in Olympia, had been helping lesbians get pregnant out of a community-run clinic. But as demand for inseminations grew, and as the AIDS crisis swelled, Mills wanted an actual donor insemination program that would meet FDA standards—no more fresh ejaculate on demand from a couple of handy donors.

The issue with mainstream sperm banks, as Sherron Mills saw it, wasn’t just that they refused to serve lesbians. Mills also believed that lesbians deserved medical care tailored to their specific needs. In a world where the medical model so often assumed heterosexuality, lesbians deserved a place where they could be at the center of the practice, not floating on the periphery.

Over twenty years later, I hadn’t known I would need this. I had expected, always, that so long as I lived in a progressive community, I’d be effortlessly folded into the larger system. But here I was, already longing for inclusion, seeking a place that had been designed with me in mind.

In a world where the medical model so often assumed heterosexuality, lesbians deserved a place where they could be at the center of the practice, not floating on the periphery.

As I clicked through the site, I learned that PRS was a comparably small operation and that, besides their alternative demographic, they distinguished themselves from larger commercial sperm banks by offering a catalog of what they called “willing to be known” donors.

“Willing to be known” didn’t mean what Kellie would have wanted it to mean. We couldn’t take these guys out for coffee and interview them about their life histories and their politics. We couldn’t even learn their names. But they did come with a promise—an unenforceable promise—that when our future child turned eighteen, they could access their donor’s name and contact information. It struck me as uncomfortable—a little scary even—that my child upon turning eighteen could make a call and add a stranger to our family. But in other ways it seemed preferable to a closed-door policy, our baby’s DNA a mystery that could never be unlocked. My personal stance on secrets was this: I only liked the ones that included me.

I didn’t know it at the time, but the “willing to be known” program was a variation on the Identity Release Program, which was developed and trademarked by the Sperm Bank of California in 1983. Today, in the era of DNA testing, all major sperm banks offer a similar open identity option, and many argue that it’s unethical to offer donors the anonymous option, since it is likely that any donor can now be tracked down, with or without their consent.

PRS was based in San Francisco where, coincidentally, I would be traveling soon. In just a few weeks, my mother would be attending a work conference there, and I planned to join her to visit a city I’d never seen before and eat good food, walk through neighborhoods, and shop for books.

Oh, and visit a sperm bank. Is that something people actually do? I wondered. I recognized the feeling of getting swept up in my own excitement and leaving my level head behind. I tried to talk myself down. There was no reason to make sperm the focus of the trip. Before this moment, I had been looking forward to San Francisco as a distraction from all of this. As I climbed into bed and spooned against Kellie, I could hear my own pulse where my ear pressed against the pillow. People typically ordered sperm online, I told myself, trying to settle my brain towards sleep. There was no real reason for an in-person visit. Certainly I shouldn’t let it become the focus of my trip. Maybe I wouldn’t even visit it while I was in town.

* * *

“I’m thinking of visiting a sperm bank while we’re here.” I said this within ten minutes of greeting my mother in the hotel lobby. Within an hour, we were searching for the address on a map. She wanted to come too. Her eagerness fed my own.

My mother, when traveling, resembled Big Bird; already tall, she seemed to gain another two inches and hover above any crowd we moved through, taking in the sights with a kind of transparent awe. Like Big Bird, my mother was trusting and curious, and would start conversations with anyone we came into contact with. By this, I don’t just mean that she made small talk with the hotel clerk or the cab driver, although she did. But I mean that she also sought chances to chat with the family standing outside the native plant exhibit and the couple seated at the neighboring table.

The sperm bank was less than two miles from the hotel where my mother and I stayed. Together, we walked through a neighborhood of restaurants and bookstores, and then took a left down a hill and descended into a district that was gray and industrial. I kept my eyes fixed on the numbers, and stopped when I spotted the address, 444 De Haro Street, outside a monstrous building built of concrete, glass, and steel. It was a Friday afternoon, and there was no one in sight, though the corridor was vast, with high ceilings and potted palm trees. I felt like an interloper in the corporate world, snooping around with my mother, looking for sperm. I was afraid that a roaming security guard might stop us and ask what we were doing.

But eventually I found it, up one flight of stairs and tucked around the corner. Inside Suite 222, the decor changed dramatically, from bank lobby to massage therapist’s office. The hall smelled of essential oils, of lavender and eucalyptus. A long-haired receptionist sat just beyond the entrance and greeted us. In an effort to keep my mom from talking first, I introduced us right away. “I called last week about visiting,” I explained. “I’ve been trying to settle on a sperm bank, and I just figured since I’m in town—”

“Of course,” she said, nodding. “You might want to spend some time in there,” she suggested, indicating a private room that featured houseplants, a round table, and two wicker chairs with floral-print cushions. “That’s where we keep the donor profiles.” She explained that there were two special binders that held childhood photographs of every willing-to-be-known donor. Each photograph had a number that corresponded to a profile in a separate binder. “Settle in, take as long as you want, and let me know if you have any questions.”

I reached for one of the photo binders first, and my mother took the other. They were wide three-ring binders stuffed with crisp sheets of plastic that shined beneath the light. Each page held two photos, one above the other. On blank sticker labels, someone had handwritten each donor’s number. Some of the photos featured newborn babies, red-faced and swaddled in blankets. Those weren’t so helpful. Others were school-issued photos from first or second grade. They had big smiles with missing teeth, or corduroy jackets, or Afros.

My mother and I sat side by side, studious. Each time one of us turned a page, there was the soft sound of plastic unsticking. Occasionally my mother would chuckle and tap my arm. I’d crane my neck to view her binder. Her choices were different than mine: boys with tidy hair, bow ties, and sparkling teeth. I liked the boys with the shaggy hair and awkward smiles.

What struck me about the binders was this: throughout my twenties I’d been paying attention to my feelings about individual children. Though I liked children in general, and though I was sure that I wanted to have my own, there were plenty of kids whom I could take or leave. They were the boys with buzz cuts and truck T-shirts who begged for toy guns at Target or the girls in faux-fur coats belting out pop songs I barely recognized. Certainly these children were adorable to someone, but they sparked nothing for me. There were plenty of adults I had no interest in or didn’t connect with. Why should kids be any different?

Then there were the kids I wanted to take home with me, the girl with long brown hair and freckles who leaned off the side of her father’s shopping cart. Or the boy with the wide eyes and gap between his teeth who drew pictures while waiting for his food to arrive in the restaurant. After recognizing one of these kids, I always told myself: my kid will be one of the loveable ones. As I looked through the binder of photographs, I had an instantaneous reaction to each one. Some of the photos didn’t interest me at all, but others tugged at my heart. It may have all been an illusion—a crooked bow tie or a Snoopy shirt may have signaled to me, erroneously, that this child felt like kin. The photographs in all likelihood could not predict how I would have felt about the donor as a grown man. But even if my intuitions were illusions, I appreciated them. The photos gave me a sense of control, a sense that I was choosing a person rather than a number.

I felt like an interloper in the corporate world, snooping around with my mother, looking for sperm.

My mother lost interest in the photographs eventually and let herself out of the room. As I pored over donor questionnaires that matched some of my favorite photos, I could hear her chatting with the receptionist, explaining that I had a partner, Kellie, who lived with me in Olympia. “You must get quite a few lesbian couples here,” she said. When she began offering the details of our lives, I hurried to join my mother at the desk.

As I approached, my mother put her arm around my waist. “I was telling her about your situation,” she said. I felt my cheeks grow hot.

The receptionist laid her hands on her desk, as if she had no other tasks to attend to. “Do you have any questions I can answer?” she asked me.

I had just one. I wondered where their donors came from. “Are they all in college?” I asked.

“We get some college students,” she said. “But, actually, we advertise on Craigslist. That’s how most of our donors come to us.”

I let out a laugh. I wasn’t quite sure what to do with this information, that the sperm at this clinic came from the place I associated with free couches and unwanted cats. It seemed that I could have chosen to be troubled by this. But, more than anything, I liked it. I liked the idea the donors were invited rather than recruited, that the call for them went out to the community at large.

“We get a better range of donors that way,” she explained. She was right—from the profiles I’d looked at, most of them listed actual professions rather than majors; I’d seen a doctor, a fireman, an electrical engineer.

That night, in the hotel room, my mother and I each sat on our own bed, each with a bedside lamp on, reading. As she read the book she brought, I spread open the folder that the receptionist had sent me home with. The files didn’t contain much information that was new to me. There was a FAQ page, a handout on how to chart your cycles, and some specifics on shipping and ordering, but I read every word carefully as if I were studying blueprints for a home I would soon build. 

This chapter has been adapted for publication on Longreads.

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Jennifer Berney writes to explore the human state of longing. Her essays have appeared in Tin House, The Offing, Brevity, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and many other publications. You can find her on Twitter at @JennBerney.

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

Longreads Best of 2020: Profiles

All Best of Longreads illustrations by Kjell Reigstad.

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Visible Men: Black Fathers Talk About Losing Sons to Police Brutality (Mosi Secret, GQ)

At GQ, Mosi Secret offers a moving portrait of Joe Louis Cole, Larry Barbine, Rev. Joey Crutcher, Selwyn Jones, Jacob Blake III, and Michael Brown Sr., who are the fathers and father figures of Michael Brown, Terence Crutcher, Daniel Prude, Rayshard Brooks, George Floyd, and Jacob Blake — all Black men who were killed by police brutality.

Their lives were transformed by the worst kind of news, a blow that left everything that followed so suddenly and painfully different. Not only have they suffered the abrupt and traumatic loss of their loved ones, but often just hours after being stunned by tragedy, they grieve before news cameras. They are transformed from ordinary people into symbols of this country’s injustice, symbols onto which so much meaning other than their own is projected. How easily could that parent have been me, grieving my child, the thinking goes. And yet these fathers endure such moments in uneasy juxtaposition with the mythical assumption that they don’t even exist.

These fathers and father figures, in just being present, fight against a myth of the absent Black father, one that began in 1965, when “Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an assistant secretary of labor, delivered a report to the Johnson White House, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, arguing that the plight of Black American communities was in decline due to a simple factor: the crumbling of the family unit and, in particular, children being raised in fatherless homes.” What Moynihan’s report failed to convey was the way in which social structures meant to assist actually penalized the nuclear Black family.

Just weeks after the study’s release, riots broke out across the Watts neighborhood in Los Angeles and critics latched onto the report to blame the ensuing violence on what Moynihan called “the deterioration of the Negro family.” The number of fatherless families, Black and otherwise, would rapidly grow in the following decades—a trend partly driven by the nation’s primary welfare program, in which for a period some states considered families ineligible for benefits if an adult male was a member of the household. The legacy of that policy and Moynihan’s report continues, and the notion of troubled, fatherless Black men has resurfaced after each national reckoning with racial injustice, including in the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing.

N.K. Jemisin’s Dream Worlds (Raffi Khatchadourian, The New Yorker)

“John Scalzi, the former president of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America, heralded Jemisin as ‘arguably the most important speculative writer of her generation.’” (Edit, mine.) Jemisin’s fiction is imaginative, original, and immersive and I’ll just say it: I’m an unabashed fangirl.

In this portrait by Raffi Khatchadourian at The New Yorker, we learn about the personal dreamscapes that inspire Jemisin’s fiction and the critical influence that Noah, her artist father, had on her development as a writer. We get a glimpse into the systemic racism Jemisin has experienced in her career and into some fantastic writing that offers hope amid the chaos of a failed civilization.

Accepting her third Hugo, Jemisin stood at the lectern, with the rocket-shaped award beside her, and declared, “This is the year in which I get to smile at all of those naysayers, every single mediocre, insecure wannabe who fixes their mouth to suggest that I do not belong on this stage, that people like me could not possibly have earned such an honor, and that when they win it’s ‘meritocracy,’ but when we win it’s ‘identity politics.’ ” Holding up the award, she added, “I get to smile at those people, and lift a massive, shining rocket-shaped finger in their direction.”

“How Long ’til Black Future Month?” includes one of her earliest published stories, “Cloud Dragon Skies” (2005), in which an ecological disaster has caused most of humanity to abandon Earth for a ring-shaped space colony, built from crushed asteroids, beyond Mars. “Old foolishness lay at the root of it,” notes the narrator, a young woman named Nahautu, one of the few who stay. The planet has rebounded, except for the atmosphere. The toxic chemicals it has absorbed combine to form a new kind of life:

One morning we awoke and the sky was a pale, blushing rose. We began to see intention in the slow, ceaseless movements of the clouds. Instead of floating, they swam spirals in the sky. They gathered in knots, trailing wisps like feet and tails. We felt them watching us.

Ozark Life (Terra Fondriest, The Bitter Southerner)

Terra Fondriest’s ode to Ozark life in text and visuals at The Bitter Southerner is firmly set in the before times, when you could safely hold a wedding without masks, and when you could mix with more than members of your household without fear. What I loved most about his piece is how it exalts in simple joys — the best kind. This piece cleanses your mental palate not only with words and images, but with its grace.

Motor down just one dirt road, and you’ll begin to collect moments that are unique to this part of the South we call the Ozark Hills. Up and down hills and across creeks, maybe stopping in the middle to listen to the water flow and then heading back up, you’ll pass vistas of seemingly endless peaks dotted with cattle pastures. You’ll see wild turkeys dash across the road in front of you on their way to the acorns and hickory nuts in the forest on the other side. If your windows are open, you might hear waterfalls cascading down the drainage ways after a hard rain, or the interior might fill with dust and the smell of oak leaves burning during a dry spell. You might meet a truck coming at you on the narrow road and see how it pulls off near the edge of the woods to let you pass.

And if it so happens you decide to put roots down and call these hills home, you might start to develop relationships with certain parts of the creek or different bends in the road. You might start to become familiar with the people nestled in the hills who have been here for generations and those who arrived recently, just like you. You will slowly become part of the cadence of everyday Ozark life.

While Fondriest is new to the area, she understands that the only way to find her place is to get to know her neighbors and to earn their trust.

I am still the same introverted girl who grew up in the suburbs. Getting to know new people makes me more nervous photographing for this project. It’s a challenge that is daunting on most days, but the camaraderie built by pushing through that with my subjects yields the intimacy I strive for in my storytelling. Some of the folks I photograph are friends and neighbors, but others are people I meet through circumstance, whose everyday story I find interesting and a good piece for my Ozark Life story quilt. But I approach them. I might talk to them right away about my project, or I might let it simmer a bit and get to know them over days, months, even years before I bring up my project and my request to photograph them. Building a relationship is important, because it makes the pictures secondary.

Death and the All-American Boy (Kitty Kelley, The Washingtonian)

In 1974, Joe Biden had just lost his first wife Neilia and his daughter in a car crash and as the youngest person in the Senate at age 31, it is the sum of these things that make him “good copy.”

Joseph Robinette Biden, the 31-year-old Democrat from Delaware, is the youngest man in the Senate, which makes him a celebrity of sorts. But there’s something else that makes him good copy: Shortly after his election in November 1972 his wife Neilia and infant daughter were killed in a car accident. Suddenly this handsome, young man struck down in his moment of glory was prey to scores of hungry reporters clamoring to write soul-searching stories.

What intrigued me about this piece at The Washingtonian is the pure swagger Biden displays for reporter Kitty Kelly. Oh 1974, you were a different time, indeed.

In his office in the New Senate Office Building surrounded by more than 35 pictures of his late wife, Biden launched into a three-hour reminiscence. It wasn’t maudlin—he seemed to enjoy remembering aloud. He was the handsome football hero. She was the beautiful homecoming queen. Their marriage was perfect. Their children were beautiful. And they almost lived happily ever after. “Neilia was my very best friend, my greatest ally, my sensuous lover. The longer we lived together the more we enjoyed everything from sex to sports. Most guys don’t really know what I lost because they never knew what I had. Our marriage was sensational. It was exceptional, and now that I look around at my friends and my colleagues, I know more than ever how phenomenal it really was. When you lose something like that, you lose a part of yourself that you never get back again.

“My wife was the brains behind my campaign. I would never have made it here without her. It’s hard to imagine ever going through another campaign without her. She was the most intelligent human being I have ever known. She was absolutely brilliant. I’m smart but Neilia was ten times smarter. And she had the best political sense of anybody in the world. She always knew the right thing to do.

“Let me show you my favorite picture of her,” he says, holding up a snapshot of Neilia in a bikini. “She had the best body of any woman I ever saw. She looks better than a Playboy bunny, doesn’t she?

“My beautiful millionaire wife was a conservative Republican before she met me. But she changed her registration. At first she didn’t want me to run for the Senate—we had such a beautiful thing going, and we knew all those stories about what politics can do to a marriage. She didn’t want that to happen. At first she stayed at home with the kids while I campaigned but that didn’t work out because I’d come back too tired to talk to her. I might satisfy her in bed but I didn’t have much time for anything else. That’s when she started campaigning with me and that’s when I started winning. You know, the people of Delaware really elected her,” he says, “but they got me.”

Some detractors accuse him of shrouding himself in widower’s weeds, of dredging up his late wife in every speech. But Biden prides himself on being candid and honest—”That’s the only way I could be with the wife I had.” He understands the accusations: “I’m not the kind of guy everyone likes. My personality either grabs you or it doesn’t. My sister says I almost lost the campaign because ofmy personality, and my brother-in-law says you either love me or you hate me. I’m not an in-between type.

Feeling Bullish: On My Great-Uncle, Gay Matador and Friend of Hemingway (Rebekah Frumkin, Granta)

Speaking of intriguing men in very different times, at Granta we have Rebekah Frumkin’s portrait of her uncle Sidney Franklin. Discontent with the prospect of a potentially hum-drum existence as a teacher or an accountant, Franklin, armed only with persistence, self-confidence, and a desire for fame, ditched his Brooklyn-based identity in 1922 to fashion himself into a matador on a dare. What’s more, he became very good at it.

On 26 April 1976, after suffering a stroke that robbed him of the ability to walk and speak, the matador Sidney Franklin died in a nursing home in Manhattan, roughly thirteen miles from his native Brooklyn. Fifteen years earlier, on 2 July 1961, Ernest Hemingway donned his ‘emperor’s robe’ and shot himself in the head with a double-barreled shotgun. As young men, the two had split bottles of brandy in Spain, had traveled through the countryside together (a remarked-upon odd couple, one clean and effete and the other greasy and unshaven), had watched bombs explode in Madrid during the Spanish Civil War. The New Yorker journalist Lillian Ross had said theirs was a friendship between a great man and a lesser one. I am the grand-niece of the lesser one.

After six years of touring successfully in Mexico, Sidney fought his way to the central stage of the bullfighting world: the Plaza de Toros de la Real Maestranza in Seville. On 9 June 1929, Sidney would acquit himself expertly in the ring, earning praise from Spanish aficionados and major newspapers. Again, adoring fans would flood from their stadium seats to lift Sidney up on their shoulders. Again, they would tear his traje apart, but these would be Spanish hands tearing, the hands of people who considered their arenas too good for Mexican toreros. Sidney would be carried back to his pension and strangers would crowd him – they would even join him in the shower. ‘I enjoyed and savored what I had done with an intensity almost sexually sensual,’ Sidney wrote, and later: ‘All the sexes seem to throw themselves at you.’ The Brooklyn Eagle, which had been covering Sidney’s story in lavish terms since his debut in Mexico, would publish headlines such as ‘Brooklyn Bullfighter Wins Great Ovation in Brilliant Spanish Debut’ and ‘Ten Thousand in Seville Arena Cheer Him as He Dispatches Bovine Foe with Single Stroke.’

Sidney was more than a novelty, a weird American who’d decided to try his hand at a foreign sport: he was a bullfighter in his own right, el único matador, and to his extreme satisfaction more than a little Spanish. He fashioned himself as a sort of cultural ambassador to Spain, singularly capable of introducing bullfighting to his American countrymen. ‘I shall not return to my hometown, Brooklyn, until I have gained fame throughout Spain,’ he told the Eagle. ‘I am sure that as soon as Americans are able to understand the beauty of this art, they will take to it, the same as they have taken to other sports.’ He joined an elite group of Spanish bullfighters whose company he continued to keep for decades.

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Read all the categories in our Best of 2020 year-end collection.

Longreads Best of 2020: Arts and Culture

All Best of Longreads illustrations by Kjell Reigstad.

All through December, we’re featuring Longreads’ Best of 2020. In an unprecedented, strange, and chaotic year, we’ve leaned on writers’ reflections and commentaries on the world around us to help us make sense of moments, of our lives. We revisited a wide range of arts and culture stories featured by the team this year and selected eight favorites that resonated with us.

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I’ve always loved how Teju Cole observes and moves through our world: a flâneur of modern life, always with a notebook or a camera in hand. Here, we follow Cole on a pilgrimage to Italy as he chases the life of Caravaggio, an artist (and fugitive and murderer) whose emotionally charged, often violent scenes and chiaroscuro technique I studied closely in my AP Art History class. In Rome and Milan, Cole revisits Caravaggio’s paintings “to learn the truth about doom” — to sit with unease, and to experience the artist’s pain and turmoil (“I would find in him the reprieve certain artists can offer us in dark times”).

Cole then travels south, to Naples and along the coast of Sicily, and later to Malta, to the places where the painter spent his exile; he captures both the mundanity and intimacy of encounters with guides and strangers, like his meeting in Syracuse with D., a young migrant who arrived by boat from Libya eight months earlier. (They share a silent, beautiful moment with “The Burial of St. Lucy.”) Part-travelogue, part-profile, part-art criticism, and part-commentary on the ills and horrors of our world, it’s a stunning piece with masterful scope, but also turns inward — a read you’ll likely sit with quietly long after you’ve finished.

I sat on a bench in the middle of the room, the two paintings set at a right angle to each other. I was awe-struck, out of breath, caught between these two immensities. The very act of looking at an old painting can be so strange. It is an activity that is often bound up with class identity or social aspiration. It can sometimes feel like a diverting, or irritating, stroll among white people’s ancestors. It can also often be wonderful, giving the viewer a chance to be blessed by a stranger’s ingenuity or insight. But rarely, something even better happens: A painting made by someone in a distant country hundreds of years ago, an artist’s careful attention and turbulent experience sedimented onto a stretched canvas, leaps out of the past to call you — to call you — to attention in the present, to drive you to confusion by drawing from you both a sense of alarm and a feeling of consolation, to bring you to an awareness of your own self in the act of experiencing something that is well beyond the grasp of language, something that you wouldn’t wish to live without.

He was a murderer, a slaveholder, a terror and a pest. But I don’t go to Caravaggio to be reminded of how good people are and certainly not because of how good he was. To the contrary: I seek him out for a certain kind of otherwise unbearable knowledge. Here was an artist who depicted fruit in its ripeness and at the moment it had begun to rot, an artist who painted flesh at its most delicately seductive and most grievously injured. When he showed suffering, he showed it so startlingly well because he was on both sides of it: He meted it out to others and received it in his own body. Caravaggio is long dead, as are his victims. What remains is the work, and I don’t have to love him to know that I need to know what he knows, the knowledge that hums, centuries later, on the surface of his paintings, knowledge of all the pain, loneliness, beauty, fear and awful vulnerability our bodies have in common.

Read more…

Longreads Best of 2020: All of Our No. 1 Story Picks

All Best of Longreads illustrations by Kjell Reigstad.

All through December, we’ll be featuring Longreads’ Best of 2020. Here’s a list of every story that was chosen as No. 1 in our weekly Top 5 email.

If you like these, you can sign up to receive our weekly email every Friday. Read more…

Queens of Infamy: Lucrezia Borgia

Lucrezia Borgia
Illustration by Louise Pomeroy

Anne Thériault | Longreads | May 2020 | 33 minutes (8,371 words)

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

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Mention the Medieval period and people free-associate themselves right into visions of plague, violence, and shit-covered peasants. The term “Renaissance,” on the other hand, conjures up stuff like humanism, science, and paintings of people that actually look like people. But late 14th-, 15th-, and 16th-century Italy consisted of more than just painters with Ninja Turtle names wanking their way from one Tuscan villa to another; it was also full of intrigue, murder, and complex intergenerational family drama. If there was one family that featured heavily in some of the most violent and licentious stories of the period, it was the Borgias — even today their name is a by-word for depravity. And at the center of many of the wildest Borgia stories was the beautiful, wily, thrice-wed Lucrezia.

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People have called Lucrezia many things over the years: seductress, murderess, femme fatale of the Borgia cabal. The attributes assigned to her didn’t come out of nowhere; as we shall see — and as Lucrezia noted herself — many of the men around her came to unfortunate ends. In portrayals where she escapes the villainess role, she’s often made out to be another hapless aristocratic daughter traded off into various political marriages, someone with no agency or ambitions of her own. The reality, of course, is much more nuanced. While Lucrezia was indeed married off several times to further her family’s agenda, as an adult she proved herself to be a skilled ruler loved and respected by her subjects.

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The Danger of Desire

Photo courtesy of the author / Getty / Photo illustration by Longreads

Faylita Hicks | Longreads | April 2020 | 28 minutes (7,041 words)

I was late. Even though the album dropped in 2018, I didn’t know about the track until June of the next year. Which was tragic, because the first time I heard Teyana Taylor’s “WTP (Work This Pussy)” — I went off.

The command hit my speaker and I dropped the washrag I had been using to clean the dishes, into the soapy water. Splashing it all over the frail kitchen counter, I leaned forward over the sink. Gripped its metal edge in instinctive obedience, desire trickling through my body electric. Throwing my head back, I left behind the part of my day that had been filled with judges, sheriffs, the DA. I turned the music up, grinding my pelvis to the tempo, shuddering in spasmodic rhythm to twerk.

I wanted to shake out the fear I had carried since that afternoon’s Criminal Justice Committee meeting with the county officials. Forget all about the Black and Brown bodies that slept in a small metal box less than five miles away from me. Swaying from side to side with my eyes closed, I let guiltless memories of pleasure snap neon through me. Let holographic echoes of my past life — the time before I was an activist and after I was a Christian — fill to the brim the dusty corners of my small and empty Central Texas apartment. Hot, I rode the hum that rolled out from my bluetooth speakers, ignoring the sound of my phone vibrating with updates from the group chat about bail. All I wanted was to make my lower back flinch as I rolled my hips and popped to Teyana’s simple instructions — work this pussy, work this pussy, work this pussy.

But I must’ve been too tired. Too tight in the shoulders to flex and hold the pose. Too thick in the thighs now to dip low and pounce back up with ease. Too heavy with the backhanded comments about criminals and “bad decisions.” Too dizzy from the tight, bone-straight lace front that had made me feel more pretty in a room full of white. Too distracted. Too hurt. Too tired. Like trying to shake molasses off of me, I rotated my hips in place. But nothing moved as easily as it used to. My rhythm was off — and it made me wonder. How long had it been since my back was blown out?
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Waiting for Alice

Jasmin Merden / Getty, Illustration by Homestead Studio

Leslie Kendall Dye | Longreads | January, 2020 | 9 minutes (2,577 words)

Alice is destroying my marriage. It began unexpectedly and accelerated quickly, and now we’re in the thick of a potentially ruinous interpersonal struggle. Kerry (my husband) sees it as a contest between my passion and his pragmatism. I do too, but not in a bad way. I look at it this way: Our marriage is like a seesaw, which fulfills its function by rocking back and forth. Alice, at the moment, is the teeter point. As such, she’s complicated. She is also the most gorgeous creature who ever lived.

Alice has curly hair, the color of oatmeal. Mornings she can be found basking in the sunlight that floods the two front rooms of our apartment, either on my daughter Lydia’s bed or on the living room carpet. In summer, the ash tree blooms and fills the windows, and our city apartment looks like a country house. Alice looks like a duchess, curled on the hearth. She knows that at 5 p.m., when I bring my radio into the kitchen and start making dinner, Lydia will be home soon. Our front door is thin enough that we hear everything in the outside hall — goodnight kisses, lovers’ spats, newspapers landing at our neighbors’ front doors. We are one floor above the lobby, and Alice’s ears flatten against her head when the downstairs doors squeak. Lydia often pauses in the vestibule between the first and second door to inspect the packages that the postman has dropped. Alice holds her breath in that pause, listening for what comes next, which is Lydia banging up the stairs to our door. She is a small child, but very bangy; each step announcing her after-school weariness. Alice, having been trained not to bark, stands at our door with barely constrained poise. She quivers. When the knob turns, she backs up, paws the ground, and emits a single yip. Lydia’s backpack crashes to the ground — it gets heavier every year — and the rituals of reunion commence. Alice licks Lydia’s face, Lydia massages Alice’s ears. Alice turns in circles, Lydia says, “OK, Alice, OK! ” She picks her up and cradles her, rubs Alice’s nose with her own. Lydia’s father comes up the stairs. Lydia gets Alice’s leash. When the three of them return from the park, we will eat.

People often make fun of small dogs like Alice. She is a teacup toy poodle, she is under 10 pounds, and people say, “That dog is the size of a rat.” Yes, I want to say, and you are the size of a Great Dane. So what? In an interview, President Obama once said something unkind about “little yappy” dogs and Michelle shut him down. All dogs are dogs. All dogs look silly and mournful when wet; all dogs have urgent ears. A small dog is as likely to sniff or cuddle or growl or bark as a large one. Across all breeds, there is a common dogness. People think big dogs express salt-of-the-earthness in their owners, something that speaks of mud and skinned knees and free-range parenting. They think little dogs, on the other hand, reveal their owners to be tacky, or frivolous, or worst of all girly, as if delicacy is the province of only one gender. Alice feels no pressure though; she doesn’t care how she looks. She can be both graceful and awkward. She is ethereal when she lifts her paw; she is clumsy when she roots in the wastebasket. When we catch her, she looks up, her jaws clenched around a tissue stained with lipstick or an emptied bag of kettle corn. “Drop it, Alice,” we say. She narrows her eyes. “Alice, drop it.” She places her treasure on the floor, as though it were a wounded sparrow. Then she slinks away, a little angry. Alice also likes to chew toes; she stations herself at the foot of the bed while we watch TV. She brings her kibble from the kitchen to the dining room table, eating it from the floor while we eat. She will lick the inside of your nose if you let her. She is a dog’s dog. She’s a little girl’s dog. She is our dog.


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For my husband, the problems with Alice are many. She is expensive and she requires too many walks — Kerry, being the most responsible member of the household ends up taking her for most of them. She wrecks midday carnal relations. She stares. When we lock her out, she whines at the bedroom door. Someday she may get sick, so sick that we can’t afford her care, and it will be two — three if you count Alice — against one, in favor of deepening our debt to save her. Kerry would of course want to save Alice, but Kerry also wants to pay our rent. Alice annoys approximately one half of the 12 or so tenants in the building — the French woman who receives right-wing mail and the guy who works out of his home as a medium are most likely the ones who have called management about her paws skidding on the hardwood floor at all hours. The gray-haired couple upstairs barely tolerates children; potentially incontinent creatures don’t mix with carpeted hallways. Our downstairs neighbor does like Alice, as does her cat Bubby, who glides up the stairs routinely to request stomach rubs from Lydia. When Alice came, Bubby knew he’d better make friends with her. We don’t know how the FBI agent on the fourth floor feels, because that’s her job.

She will lick the inside of your nose if you let her. She is a dog’s dog. She’s a little girl’s dog. She is our dog.

Kerry fears neighborly rage, our one-year lease, and NYC’s scarcity of affordable housing. Kerry is cautious, Kerry is careful, Kerry is against extra spending, which is something Lydia and I are very much for. Lydia and I like new paperbacks and take-out burritos and postcards from the museum gift shop. We like bringing flowers when we visit friends, and chocolate, too, and tea. We are not good with margins and austerity, though when we got Alice we promised to be better. I have taken on more work and Alice doesn’t eat the finest dog food or anything. We frequently have scrambled eggs for dinner. Still, Kerry worries.

For Lydia and me, there is only one problem with Alice: She doesn’t exist. Actually, she might, but if she does, we don’t know her yet. We might have seen her picture online, at one of the rescue sites we frequent, but maybe none of those dogs was Alice.

The other night, we fought over Alice. Lydia, to my pride and shame, moderated. “I understand how Daddy feels, because you told him Alice wouldn’t be for a while, and then you and I started in right away. I understand how Mommy feels, because Daddy can never be persuaded of anything, and it’s not like we can compromise and get only half a dog.”

In our wedding vows, Kerry promised we could get a dog. “Two dogs, we’ll have to talk about,” he added, meaning one dog was OK, I reminded him.

“I didn’t know about the wedding vow, Daddy,” Lydia said.

Kerry looked abashed. But then he said: “Someone has to worry about the routine responsibilities. Mommy does housework on impulse, whereas Daddy does all the scheduled events, like laundry. I don’t want to be the dog walker because I am the only one who can keep a schedule.”

“Won’t Alice ever pee on impulse?” Lydia asked.

“You’re not helping,” I said.

Alice has become a dark cloud for Kerry, a constant pre-ulcerous stomachache. He never used to worry about our desire to get a dog because there’s a big clause in our lease: NO DOGS. It’s on a separate page. NO DOGS gets its own page, stapled at the back.

But two weeks ago, Lydia asked me to ask, just to be sure. Kerry said good, that will be an end to it. I wrote to building management. They wrote back the following:

“Dogs are decided on a case-by-case basis. Tell us your plan and we’ll let you know.”

I started in my chair. For so long, we had sighed and complained to our friends: “Our building won’t allow dogs. We want one so badly!” Now, it was a case-by-case decision and suddenly, Alice appeared. Kerry’s face clouded, his shoulders tensed. “Don’t tell Lydia right away,” he pleaded. I told him I wouldn’t, I understood the pressures of a dog, I was not as gung ho as he thought, I wanted to be measured, to wait until we had more security, to wait until Lydia could walk a dog by herself. I thought I meant it. I did mean it. But Alice kept looking at me. She looked at me from my lap, and she looked out from Lydia’s arms where the two of them lay snuggled on a Saturday, sleeping in. She looked at Kerry too, with love in her eyes, teaching him how to love her back. She looked at me so much that I gave in and began looking too, not just at her, but for her.

Here’s why.

Last year Lydia’s first grade class did a months-long unit on families. The three of us almost ended up in therapy as a result. All the kids brought their parents and their siblings on their presentation days. Baby brothers crawled on the floor in diapers, big sisters described middle school. Lydia came home scowling. “Angela doesn’t have siblings,” I said. “Neither does Riley.” It was no use. It seemed that all other only children went on lots of vacations or were devoted to sports that kept them busy or lived in high-rises with lots of other kids who came over all the time to watch movies. I stopped reading books to Lydia that had siblings in them. Meet the Austins, Cheaper by the Dozen, The Saturdays, all these large-family books disappeared into my closet.

It festered through winter. I explained to Lydia again why she is an only child. Mommy suffered a near psychotic depression during pregnancy, we can’t afford a second child if we want to stay in Manhattan, or if she wants to go to a weekly ballet class, or for us to replace her shoes as her feet grow. The choice to have one child makes sense.

I asked other parents of onlies how they handled the pleading; most people said that it hadn’t come up, that their onlies liked their situation just fine. Meanwhile, my daughter had mastered pathos at a Dickensian level. The vortex of her longing sucked up small pleasures, blotted out the sun, made me ache for a pregnancy that I knew could do me in. With sudden clarity, I realized I was a failure at homemaking, for what is a home without lots and lots and lots of kids? There had to be noise and crashes at unexpected times, and club meetings on the stairs, and walking a scrappy little sister to school. My life was a sham, it was not full, it was a cruelty inflicted on my one precious child. I began taking antidepressants.


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Eventually, winter let up. Lydia attended dance camp and learned inappropriate songs. Friends slept over. They built forts and they fought and out of sight things crashed to the floor. We had dinner parties and the house got messy. I worked to keep our apartment as full and gay as possible. It became a habit. We became hosts. We threw a Christmas party and a New Year’s dinner. Then I googled successful only children. Daniel Radcliffe is an only child. So too, Cary Grant and Carol Burnett. I felt better, even triumphant.

In The Woman Upstairs, Claire Messud writes about how a family of three never looks like a real family when they sit down to dinner. When I read that, I recognized the sentiment, and I felt worse.

Then, on a bus one spring day last year, I sat next to a woman who was holding a black poodle on her lap. She massaged the dog’s head with her thumb. We got to talking. I told her my child loved dogs, and I wanted to get her one. The woman replied that her daughter was an only child, and the dog was the best compensation she could think of. Indeed, she said, the dog had worked wonders.

In the play The Member of the Wedding, there is this line, distilled and poignant. Lonely Frankie says it about Janis and Jarvis, her brother and soon-to-be sister-in-law. “They are the we of me.” The three of us are already three, but a vision flared: Alice could make us three even more of a “we.”

Kerry said the other night that he married me partly because I don’t think things through and I married him partly because he does. He was angry that I had told Lydia the building said “maybe.” I had promised to keep it under my hat. I was angry because he doesn’t understand how much we need Alice. He said: “I thought you were a grown-up.” I said: “I thought you loved me.”

The three of us are already three, but a vision flared: Alice could make us three even more of a ‘we.’

I do wonder if I should have my head examined. Alice is obviously something more than a dog to me, she is some sort of promise, some dream deferred onto which I can project realization. She is the anti-lonely, the kinetic and frenetic to energize the quiet world of three, she is also peace at bedtime, Lydia maybe falling asleep at a normal hour. There is a time in life when our parents shape and define it, they set the terms of what is both normal and possible. Alice is a way to expand my powers, to convince myself that I can stretch our universe, place one more star inside its boundaries. I remind Kerry we could not afford Lydia, either. I remind him how much we had to adjust to walking her in the park, too. He reminds me that dogs and people are not the same, and I shoot back that that’s the point — we are not making another baby, we are merely adopting a dog. There is always a counterresponse; it is a fight between two equally sane points of view. That’s why Alice is pushing us apart. To Kerry, she’s the sword of Damocles. To me, she’s the final click on the lamp’s dial, the one that brings us to the brightest wattage possible for our home. We are both right. The domestic seesaw rocks.

For as long as I’ve known him, Kerry’s had a plan. He runs the numbers, he thinks ahead. Where we’ll eat dinner and what time the movie is playing and whether the bus or the subway will be faster today. He uses calendars and maps and software. He is calm and efficient and brainy. He has tried to teach me to stick to a plan, too, with some success. I, in turn, have coaxed him to surrender, to trust that even unpredictable pleasures can be counted on: I am forever changing the plan, but I am always here. Little dogs yip and run around in circles and confuse the situation of your life. But they also build their world around you, and if you can endure the noise and motion, you get all those lovely kisses. To me, this is the perfect plan, the stable and the kinetic, forever in pursuit of each other. That’s us. That’s family. That’s Alice.

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Leslie Kendall Dye is a writer and actress in New York City. Her work has appeared at The New York Times, The Washington Post, Salon, Vela, Electric Literature, SELF, The LA Review of Books, and others. She is at work on a memoir about mothers, daughters, drugs, and show business.

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Editor: Krista Stevens
Copy editor: Jacob Gross