Search Results for: Love

The 19th Century Lesbian Made for 21st Century Consumption

Jay Brooks, HBO / document courtesy of the Pforzheimer Collection at the New York Public Library

Jeanna Kadlec | Longreads | June 2019 | 12 minutes (3,114 words)

When we call Anne Lister, the 19th century British diarist and adventurer reimagined in HBO’s hit series Gentleman Jack, the “first modern lesbian,” what do we mean, precisely? Critics don’t seem to know. The catchy tagline coined by Lister’s devotees and perpetuated by the show’s marketing is good branding, but makes for a slightly confusing moniker: what is it, exactly, that makes Anne Lister a “modern” lesbian, let alone the first?

The answer goes beyond a casual Wikipedia-esque list of Lister’s propensities and accomplishments that most coverage of the show has thus far relied on. To understand what makes Anne Lister unique, you have to understand how lesbianism and identity were understood in the 1830s — and it’s far too simplistic to say that women with women was simply “unimaginable” for the time, that Lister was completely solitary in her pursuit of as public a commitment as would have been socially acceptable.

Lesbian content was not unfamiliar to 17th, 18th, and 19th century audiences. From lesbian eroticism in pornographic texts such as the psuedonymous Abbé du Prat’s The Venus in the Cloister: or, the Nun in Her Smock, published in 1683, to the trope of a “Female Husband” (which had historical grounding in famous figures like Mary Hamilton) to the romantic friendship of Ladies of Llangollen, who were contemporaries of Lister’s, the idea of women loving (and fucking) women was hardly new, if deeply socially unacceptable. Among women of the upper class with means, Lister was hardly alone in forging her own kind of life. The “first”? No.

Lister was ahead of her time, but not in the obvious way: not because of her desire, or even her willingness to throw off norms. Rather, her desire to live what we would identify as an “out” life (or, as “out” a life as possible) was informed by a distinctly Enlightenment-informed conception of her individuality and her psychosexual identity that would have been more at home in 2019 than 1839. In Lister’s time, lesbian wasn’t the distinct identity category it would later become. Lister’s prescient insistence on a cohesion between her public and private personas — an insistence on her sexuality as a vital component of her identity — was remarkable. Thanks to her diaries, we also have unprecedented access to how she herself thought of her identity and sexuality, as well as an explicit record of sexual activity. Ultimately, this means that Lister is a historical figure made for 21st century consumption, onto whose life we can easily project (if anachronistically) ideas like that of the closet and the difficulty of living an “out” life in Regency England.
Read more…

How the Cosby Story Finally Went Viral — And Why It Took So Long

Associated Press, Collage by Homestead

Nicole Weisensee Egan | An excerpt adapted from Chasing Cosby: The Downfall of America’s Dad | Seal Press | 14 minutes (3,614 words)

In October 2014 Bill Cosby was in the middle of a career resurgence. His biography by former Newsweek editor Mark Whitaker had just come out to rave reviews and was climbing the bestseller list. He had a comedy special coming up on Netflix and was in development with NBC to star in a family sitcom. He was about to embark on another comedy tour based on a special that had aired on Comedy Central the year before. The special, Far from Finished, was Cosby’s first stand-up TV special in three decades, and it attracted two million viewers.

It was as if the scandal in 2005 had never happened, as if fourteen women hadn’t accused him of heinous offenses. The book didn’t even mention Andrea Constand’s allegations, let alone her civil suit or any of the other accusers. And no one in the media was asking Whitaker or Cosby why.

The situation was clear: Cosby had successfully repaired what little damage there was to his reputation after Andrea’s case made the news. He slipped right back into his revered status as public moralist and children’s advocate, chalking up even more awards and honors, including his entrée into the NAACP’s Image Awards Hall of Fame in 2006 for being a “true humanitarian and role model.” Read more…

Mama Looks for Melanin

Illustration by
Illustration by Bex Glendining

Harmony Holiday | Longreads | June 2019 | 17 minutes (4,437 words)

The night my mother turned 30 we went to Spago in Hollywood. It was her, me — about 6 years old at the time — and my sister, who was about a year and half, wheeled in, asleep in her stroller. We didn’t have a reservation, and Spago is one of those pathetically coveted restaurants where celebrities go to be seen. I remember my mom walking up to the hostess at the front of a long line and making something up about who her husband was. Or maybe she just offered the truth about who he had been. We were seated right away, like it was urgent. I don’t remember what we ate or if I even did. I can just picture the three of us sitting at our center-of-the-room table and feel the eyes on us like branding irons, because it had to have been rare that a white woman went for dinner and a night on the town at the new Wolfgang Puck haven for the stars with two brown kids, one needing a high chair, and no spouse in sight. Only fame or power could make a woman that bold. Most vivid in my memory are the many glasses of wine and other types of alcohol my mom ordered and how I took on my usual posture of quiet and aloof but insubordinate disbelief, placation, and empathy.

It was her birthday and she was still mourning the death of her husband, my father. Earlier that day when the cluster of foil balloons with the number 30 etched on its centerpiece arrived for her with a card signed by her parents and siblings, I could feel the event become drastically cheerful — cheer to smother sorrow. I could feel her becoming belligerent the way I do now as an adult when I remember that I deserve and want more and set out to take it or just go the club to remind myself that this society’s idea of more, of thrill and intrigue, is perverse and unsatisfying, garish and corny. I was more my mother’s supportive friend than her daughter then. Her grief and resentment and work ethic and frequent breakdowns knew no filter, and I secretly loved the lens it gave me and reveled in witnessing the ridiculous world of those who passed for adults in Los Angeles, up close, inappropriate, and beautiful.

When we finished that imitation of a convivial family dinner and left Spago in our wobbly trio, we entered the agitating momentum of the Sunset Strip. The dazed energy of that evening possessed everything with its ridiculous blunted shimmer. We were really in Hollywood. Our cinematic migration and everything that had led to it felt complete that evening. On the way back to the car my mom started sobbing on the sidewalk, then the raging torment I had sensed pretending it was entitlement or cheer spilled forth and she started screaming at the passing cars, tears streaming down her face — Fuck you! Fuck all of you! — for what felt like an eternity of shame and glory, overcoming, ever coming. A little catatonic, I asked: Can we go back to the car now, and so we stumbled, me, her pushing my sister in the stroller, back to the Chevy my grandparents had given her after my dad died and his cars disappeared with him. Here was repossession, my dad having been another black entertainer who refused to organize his death by the laws of the West. Those were the days when you had to look at actual paper maps to determine where you were if you didn’t know for sure, and in L.A. there was a huge book of street maps, a rite-of-passage atlas that everyone kept in their glove compartment, and since we had wandered far from home, my mom took hers out to study it and find our route back.

The blurry amber light on in the car was soothing. My sister was asleep in the car seat, and the street outside was quiet — it felt like we might be shown the safest way back to composure. I watched my mom intently for signs of recovery from that stupor of outbursts on the sidewalk. And then two men got into our car on either side of her, as if the car was theirs and she was too, as if this was a planned meeting, and they pushed her between them. They had guns, they held them to her temples and started driving. They drove aimlessly like they were looking for their third man and he could be anywhere, like they were prepared to make this a caravan, and the first question they asked before they could even focus on their crime was why do you have these black kids? My sister started crying the shrill guttural way distressed infants cry, I sat in silence. I had seen a gun before. I had seen one held to my mom’s head. I had seen a black man I loved, my father, hold a gun to my mom’s head in the same way, while threatening to kill her, like it was a routine checkup on fidelity, and I didn’t believe in villains or heroes even then. If these two petty thieves thought they were gonna frighten me into hysteria, I would do what I had done with my own father: unnerve them with my calm. That’s how I felt as I watched my mom beg take me, but please don’t take my babies repeatedly. They kept driving in some performative frenzy of deliberation, busy deciding what kind of theft this was gonna be, what kind of reparations, what kind of Hollywood ending. Eventually, after what felt like a marathon or a scripted relay, they left us on the side of the road. My mom still had the book of street maps in her hands. She had been squeezing it tightly as she pleaded for our lives. She called the police from a phone booth and we were picked up and taken the to nearest station. This was familiar, too. We’d been to precincts time and again after dad’s episodes, only to go home as one happy family as if nothing had happened. We would do that on this night, too: Go home, sleep off our black secrets. What I didn’t realize at the time, as drunk and distraught as my mother was that night, is that maybe those men saved our lives. Now when I think back on that carjacking, I’m thankful.


Kickstart your weekend reading by getting the week’s best Longreads delivered to your inbox every Friday afternoon.

Sign up


* * *

My mom is a starkly direct embodiment of the “be careful what you wish for” adage. Or, be careful that you don’t get caught in a loop of brutalization and self-brutalization on the road to healing or understanding. Be careful that the refrain on that road isn’t finding new ways to be a victim and survive. That night at Spago and every night, it seemed, she was unconsciously looking for Jimmy, my father, and she found the very version of him we had been forced to escape time and again. We would go to my grandparents’ house in San Diego and recover from the patterned domestic violence, only to return, both of us, to Iowa, to be with my father again. Waterloo, Iowa, where we fought our losing battle of love and justice. In a particularly misguided moment of emotional blackmail, my mom even told me she went back the final time so that I could have a brother or sister, and maybe she even believed it, such is the drugged-out effect of that kind of tortured love.

When my parents first met it was as if the American promise was giddy with the buzz of perfection: an idyllic cross-pollination. A young woman, a girl really, raised in a Chicago suburb, having gone to Catholic schools all her life, matriculating at University of Iowa with dreams of becoming a writer, meets a famous songwriter returned home to live near his mother and siblings, who had left a life as sharecroppers in the Mississippi Delta for Waterloo, Iowa, during the second wave of the Great Migration. The girl, naive but serious, had gone to Iowa in hopes of finding a kind of creative freedom that she hadn’t experienced at home. The man had returned to Iowa from Hollywood after a messy divorce from his first wife and a mental breakdown that found him hospitalized and mega-dosed with the later-illegal drug Thorazine. Home was where he could be stable, take his requisite prescription of lithium, sing in church on Wednesdays and Sundays, feel protected from the trappings of celebrity culture as a black man.

When my parents first met it was as if the American promise was giddy with the buzz of perfection: an idyllic cross-pollination.

He met my mother while performing near the college. There is a tacit tradition of interracial coupling that begins with black performers having to enter white spaces and endure, from Sammy Davis Jr. to Jack Johnson to Billie Holiday and Orson Welles. There are codes and levels and degrees of longevity and conflict, but once you enter that tradition it has a momentum of its own. There’s a sense of newfound autonomy in the alienation that I could always sense between my parents. They were married within two weeks of meeting, and I was born the following spring. Besides my maternal grandparents’ initial objection and suggestion that they put me up for adoption to avoid the confusion this chiaroscuro child could cause, besides the mutual rebellion it became in that way, everything was beautiful and new. An interracial couple was still a rare thing that deep in the Midwest, but they made the best of it. My grandmother taught my mom to cook greens and how to comb and braid black hair, my dad already knew plenty about the white world from his travels, his career, his first wife, his affairs, and he was unfazed, besides, this was his world.

Peace reigned over their union and our house for a while, but naively. Wanting to inspire his creativity, my mom suggested that my dad cut back on the lithium, a drug which flipped a switch in his spirit, made him comatose at times, but gentle and at ease. He obliged her and the raging talent and the rage and jealousy and militancy in all directions that accompanied it unleashed and that was that. Once he remembered who he really was, pacifying him with that blue pill was no longer an option. The cyclical violence began: the nights they spent up all hours writing and singing and fighting until it was difficult to differentiate between conflict and collaboration. I could really see firsthand the role-play of it all. I could sense the inevitability of a dynamic that’s so electric it charges itself, propelled by a longer and much more vicious history, how it almost has to be tumult and tenderness vying for dominance until the final curtain to be at all. And so it was. If you leave me I’ll die were the last words I ever heard my father say as he was taken away by police. We moved to a battered women’s shelter where we slept on cots and had aliases and I felt safe and missed him and dreamt of a happier era. Then we moved to California.

* * *

Looking for someone like my father to fall in love with was asking for trouble and disappointment and more and more hagiography of him as each imitation failed to live up to the magic or the danger that he exclusively possessed and represented for us both. His resounding aura as he rehearsed on the piano or sang at home is the most protective energy I’ve ever known. It made us forget the suitcase full of guns in the closet. And his ability to flash a smile and crack a joke when hearts got too heavy, even if he was the one imposing the weight, made it hard to remember his fits of anger. His knack for style and his rhythm meant he could turn swarm into swoon, pain into reprieve, at will, that he was easy to forgive and impossible to forget, and kind of god in our eyes. He was a man whose torment and rage always promised they were in the name of love. Tall and spellbinding and towering over our memories with the gauntlet of his spirit even now as the standard of charisma I’ve inherited. I can tolerate its shadow side without realizing it. Some men rule by becoming the rules, the unlikely rubric of the heroic and anti-heroic. The search for someone like dad, like Jimmy, in part my mom’s natural inclination, in part because she wanted my sister and me to know exactly who we were, and be proud, was relentless. After Spago, there was nothing we couldn’t fathom Los Angeles presenting, nothing too cinematic. And mom set out to find her happy ending.

First, she had an affair with singer and songwriter Willie Hutch that lasted several years. I remember feeling the urge to scoff when I’d see him at our house, or when she’d pick me up from school, and instead of heading home we’d wind up in his Inglewood studio where I’d dismissively do my homework amid the samplers and booths. Willie was kind and loving, but he wasn’t my dad, and I always reminded him of that. My mom had enrolled me in a dance studio run by two black former Alvin Ailey dancers, Ted and D’Shawn, and they too became peripheral father figures, surrogate black dads. I spent more time with them training in ballet and other forms than I did at home, and I preferred it that way. The dance studio reminded me of life in Iowa, where I had had cousins, aunts, and uncles around at all times, and I felt most like myself while dancing and being taught new steps and techniques by iron-fisted Ted, who would turn off the music and use the tapping of a yardstick on the studio floor to keep rhythm when we messed up the barre exercises, and who tapped our legs lightly but sternly with the same yardstick when they weren’t high enough in routine extensions. That was the kind of enforced discipline my DNA recognized and craved. The dance community was a mecca, and I could escape into and be excused from some of my mom’s searchlight escapades.

Not too long after the Spago incident, I remember coming home from dance class to find a copy of the National Enquirer on our coffee table. On the cover there was mention of mom’s close friend Bridgette, along with Eddie Murphy and Arsenio Hall. Eddie Murphy and Arsenio Hall lured me for sex. They watched, then laughed as guards beat me, the cover read. By my mom’s account, one night while my she and Bridgette were out at a comedy club, Eddie’s body guard invited them back to his mansion in the Hollywood Hills. While my mom says she was upstairs being wooed by Charlie Murphy, Bridgette ended up getting into a fight with Eddie, shaming him for the swarm of white women he had around him. She ran up to get my mom and leave, but as they drove away drunk in Bridgette’s Fiat, Eddie’s security guard drove past them, blocked the car, walked out and grabbed Bridgette by the hair. He slammed her into the car window repeatedly while my mom watched. Gloria Allred ended up defending Bridgette, and I believe she won a large sum. Suddenly Bridgette had a nicer house and an air of retribution about her. My mom never testified because she was afraid of retaliation, had seen too much of that kind of violence. She also fancied Charlie.

His resounding aura as he rehearsed on the piano or sang at home is the most protective energy I’ve ever known.

At the same time as this partying and discovering L.A., my mom was teaching at a private Lutheran school by day, a haven for celebrity kids where Lakers player Jamaal Wilkes’s children and the likes were among her students. Of course mom and Jamaal were friends. She had also taken up meditation with a coach. I would sneak and watch Beverly Hills 90210 during her weekly Wednesday night sessions. This was far from the prayer meetings of our life in Waterloo, an example of how healing from trauma tends to threaten a kind of estrangement from one’s roots that makes even the most resilient souls reluctant to overcome themselves. Nothing seemed to work to quell my mom’s deepening anxiety and alcoholism and desire to fall apart and be put back together as darker and safer than she was before. Some days this desire would show up as praise for my skin color that felt too close to envy and made me uncomfortable. Sometimes cold misappropriations like yelling wake your black ass up many mornings before school. In other ways her desire to experience black culture showed up as pure appreciation. We would go see Debbie Allen or Alvin Ailey or local black theater companies perform regularly. Exposing us to the arts, to Black Art, in this way, compensated for some of the trifling social incidents we had witnessed. The arts deepened our understanding of what we were seeing play out in our lives, gave us a means to name it in code and tone, and find some beauty there.  

Mom had almost exclusively black friends, all of our babysitters were black. Everyone around us but her. From the outside but also close to the inside, it seemed like her soul had suffered so much, had been so shocked by the contrast between her suburban upbringing and her adult life, that she couldn’t relate to the white world she came from in the same way anymore. It was driving her crazy, how she tried to transcend that schism and appease the white world at the same time as the black one. Watching her then was an excellent lesson in how all-or-nothing rebellion must be if you expect to survive it. You have to pick a side.

After several years looking for love or thrill or validation or escape on the L.A. scene, my mom ended up in a long-term relationship with a man who looked a lot like my father. He was also a musician. They had a child together, my youngest sister, and then they separated, but not without their share of turmoil and untransmuted rage as they enabled one other’s pathologies and addictions. I kept escaping to dance and academics, kept shaking my head in incredulity that humanity could be so many contradictions. I kept a laugh in my muted scream at them. And then the first summer I spent home from college, my mom introduced me to the legendary jazz musician from Chicago she’d fallen in love with, maybe her last affair. She’s been with him since. It’s been turbulent, tender, familiar. It would be through him that I would meet the hip-hop musician and first man I dated who reminded me of Jimmy, who won my heart for a long while with scraps of my father’s sublimated charisma. And so the cycle goes.

My mother’s affinity for black culture and black men comes with its share of perks almost equal to the dilemmas. My mom can cuss out as effectively as a black mom, maybe even more effectively, because she’s backed by white privilege, her built-in (even after all the upheaval) sense of entitlement. She’s used that skill in my defense with reckless abandon. And because of her choice of company, her taste in lovers and friends, I was surrounded by black women when I needed them most a kid and teenager. Women who stepped in and made sure my hair was done right, clothes were ironed, spirit was high and unbroken. While Mom was unraveling, I had surrogate mothers. Barbara, my dance friend Gloria’s mom who treated me like a daughter during long rehearsals, did my eyebrows for the first time, and had a sparkle in her eyes that taught me what light can never be dimmed. Our babysitter Katherine, originally from Kenya, whose house smelled more like home than home did and stayed up nights with me while I finished strange book reports I’d obsess over. Debby, my older sister from my dad’s first marriage, who was close to my mom in age and able to make me feel both cool and safe in her presence, like my dad without the violence. While my mom was looking for her renewed identity, mine was being tended to by forces that felt ancestral, as if my own biological needs were driving some of her exploits. This is repossession. And when she finally wanted to try and get sober, it was videos on holistic healing by renowned but marginal black thinkers like Dr. Sebi and Dick Gregory that I’d sent her that inspired the turnaround. I knew my audience. I knew that learning the science of melanin and not just the scene surrounding it might be enough to tempt her to regain her health and will to live. It was time to remind her that she was not an outcast, that she had cast herself out, that loving blackness does not mean courting dysfunction, but rather a pursuit of reparations starting with the self, rescuing the body from its labels, letting it finally triumph, being careful what you wish for.

* * *

It takes bravery for a white woman to admit she wants to be black in America, bravery, insanity, and the transfigured genius of brokenhearted compassion. It requires the specific kind of indomitable courage furnished by creating black bodies and realizing you’ve been charged with their safety and set up to fail and as forever changed by their doom as by the glory and beauty that overrides it every time. It’s exceedingly risky and taboo, letting your kids in on your confusion and hoping they transmute it into clear-minded self-actualization. Hoping they reject you and become who they are, embracing the tenacity but not the destruction. It’s the gambling with black lives that makes America break again and again, that makes the perfect broken family we call home a country, a bliss and abyss of contradictions. Even as the bludgeon of it being a fetish for the exotic never quite leaves. Even as I know it’s more of a calling for my mother, an awakening that cannot be reversed, an act of love and self-abnegating longing, there’s something comforting about knowing she would give up some of her good old-fashioned white privilege for a chance at the wholeness and healing she associates with blackness. And it’s healthy to have learned that even the desire to relinquish white privilege doesn’t diminish it at all. When the police pulled her over, she could still start crying and get off with a warning. When those men saved our lives by taking our car that night, we still went back to the precinct a couple weeks later and identified them in a lineup, and two more black men went to jail.

I felt most like myself while dancing and being taught new steps and techniques by iron-fisted Ted, who would turn off the music and use the tapping of a yardstick on the studio floor to keep rhythm when we messed up the barre exercises, and who tapped our legs lightly but sternly with the same yardstick when they weren’t high enough in routine extensions.

By the time I realized that my mom harbored some pent-up racism like every white person in this country does on some level, by the time the echo of comments like wake your black ass up that I’d thought regular as a child formed into a consciousness of my own mother’s love/hate relationship with her idea of blackness, by the time I was ready to let myself be aware of this, I had to reconcile the love of black bodies with the contempt and envy that often comes with it. I had to trace those tendencies in my own mother back to the earliest incentive to steal us and ship us here in the first place, and through my parents’ fraught love and my mother’s transparency, I am able to understand the U.S.’s blatant love affair with its idea of blackness as the true source of the history of this nation, and the hinge on which its soul rests to either be redeemed in atonement or annihilated in denial. My mom is not just looking for melanin, as she once put it literally, she’s looking for saviors, for heroes, for kings and queens, for regular everyday negroes and black people, for allies in her pursuit of her own wholeness. For me and my sisters and our fathers to accept her into the cypher from which she feels excluded, to help her survive America, to remind her that neither uppitiness nor self-sabotage will make her better or safer or blacker or more like who she is meant to be. I don’t blame her for being so intent, for knowing that we are the ones who can help her, as well as make her laugh it off. I don’t blame her for knowing we have.

There is no more real way to be a mother than to become the child, to want to know what it’s like, just like there’s no way to oppress without becoming oppressed, just like there’s no way to be black without being black. But in an era where just being real — battle wounds and questionable obsessions and all — is becoming obsolete, I couldn’t ask for a more surprising and empowering and achingly honest version of an American matriarch. What’s most shocking as I’ve knocked down pillars of judgement about my mother’s choices along the tally in my mind through the years, forgiven them and come to understand, is that never once did she malign my father or anyone black no matter how badly she’d been hurt. My sister and I grew up thinking dad was the hero of the family and that being black in America was valiant and irresistible. We grew up knowing the truth. And we watched our mother grow up with us, wake up from the stupor of white liberal fragmentation with a clearer sense of the boundaries between skin and words, body and soul, our blackness and her idea of it. My mother has learned to just love what she loves unapologetically, naturally. She stopped apologizing to the white world she rejected through self-destructive acts. She stopped punishing herself as severely. Because of my mother, America’s haunted love affair with blackness, its desire to be reborn in a kind of noir armor, in almost exactly the way Get Out depicts, seemed so obvious that I thought everyone knew. I thought we all understood this self-hypnosis, this two-way trance. The happy ending will be this: In real life, it’s not that bad.  

* * *

Harmony Holiday is the author of four volumes of poetry, most recently HOLLYWOOD FOREVER and A JAZZ FUNERAL FOR UNCLE TOM (July 2019). Her collection of poems MAAFA is forthcoming later this year. And her collection of essays on reparations and the body, LOVE IS WAR FOR MILES, will publish in 2020. In addition, she runs an archive of jazz and diaspora poetics and is working on a biography of jazz singer Abbey Lincoln.

Editor: Danielle A. Jackson

Fact checker: Ethan Chiel

Copy editor: Jacob Z. Gross

Kristen Arnett on Taxidermy, Memory, and “Mostly Dead Things”

Creative Touch Imaging Ltd. / NurPhoto via Getty Images / Tin House

Tobias Carroll  | Longreads | June 2019 | 18 minutes (4,707 words)

The writings of Kristen Arnett are a beatific study in contrasts. In her fiction — namely, the 2017 collection Felt in the Jaw and her new novel Mostly Dead Things — she grapples with unruly bodies, complex emotions, and relationships both familial and romantic that have gone awry. Arnett is among a cadre of contemporary authors, such as Karen Russell and Eleanor Kriseman, who remind readers of what a stunning backdrop Florida can provide for works of fiction. And she is quite possible the only writer to ever hold a book release event in a 7-Eleven.

Jessa-Lynn Morton, the protagonist of Mostly Dead Things, has not had an easy life when the novel opens. She’s dealing with the aftermath of her father’s suicide, and is endeavoring to keep the family taxidermy business in operation while also contending with her mother’s artistic ambitions and a burgeoning relationship with Lucinda, a gallerist whose perspective on taxidermy is very different from Jessa’s more quotidian understanding of it.

Arnett’s fiction perfectly captures unruly family dynamics, the way that the same person can take on very different roles in the eyes of those closest to them, and the subtle ways in which class and economics can reshape a community over time. I spoke with Arnett about her fiction, the role of Florida in her work, and the messy line between fine art and the lowbrow. Read more…

The Gymnast’s Position

Illustration by Homestead

Dvora Meyers | Longreads | June 2019 | 25 minutes (6,257 words)

More than two decades ago, a billboard went up in Salt Lake City near the 600 South exit of the I-15. It featured a young woman in repose clad in a sleeveless black leotard, her back to the viewer and her head tilted up. The weight of her upper body rested on her right arm, which was extended behind her; her left arm lay languidly on her bent left knee. Her right leg was extended straight in front of her, its foot arch, creating the appearance of a straight line from hip to toe.

The angle of the woman’s head seemingly bathed her face in light, her long curly blonde hair falling freely down her neck. The pose was reminiscent of Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, only inverted.

Passersby unable to make out the words printed in small text beneath the image would be forgiven for not knowing what exactly the billboard was advertising. Was it selling a dance performance or was it an ad for workout apparel or a photography exhibit at a local gallery? Visually, there were few clues.
Read more…

True Roots

Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images

Ronnie Citron-Fink | True Roots | Island Press | June 2019 | 34 minutes (5.655 words)

 

How’d You do it? Are you doing that on purpose? Are you okay? Ever since I stopped coloring my silver hair, I’ve gotten a lot of questions. One of the most common during my hair transition was Why are you letting it go gray? While my roots didn’t ask permission before they stopped growing in dark brown, it was a complex mix of fear and determination that rearranged my beauty priorities. The question of why — why, after twenty-five years of using chemical dyes, I gave them up-is something I’ve thought about a lot.

My world began to shift four years ago. I was sitting in a meeting about toxics reform in Washington, DC, when an environmental scientist began to describe the buildup of chemicals in our bodies. As she rattled off a list of ingredients in personal care products-toluene, benzophenone, stearates, triclosan — my scalp started to tingle. “We’re just beginning to understand how these chemicals compromise long-term health,” she concluded.

Read more…

Talk Like an Egyptian

Illustration by Homestead

Cary Barbor | Longreads | June 2019 | 14 minutes (3,384 words)

My new husband Mike reached into the suitcase open on the bed. He picked up my olive green cotton jacket between his thumb and forefinger. Worn and soft from many washings, it was a favorite. I liked its Mao collar and faux-wood buttons.

“You can’t wear that with these people,” he said.

Mike learned English as a teenager and sometimes uses odd and distancing phrases like that, like “these people,” to talk about people very close to him. The people closest to him.

“What people?”

“My mom; my stepfather. They are formal,” he explained, placing the jacket on the bed. I would need the proper clothes to fit in.

Seurat’s “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jatte” flashed in my mind. Men with top hats and women with parasols. Formal like that? I didn’t have clothes for that. I had met his parents briefly at their apartment in Cannes, in the south of France. I thought I had passed muster. But now I wasn’t sure. And now I was packing for a long stay with them in Cairo, their real home, where I would be even more of an alien.

I grew up in a suburb of Philadelphia, and not one of the fancy ones. My father was a chemical engineer for an oil company and my mom, a homemaker and then a secretary. My two older brothers, my older sister, and I went to public school and Catholic church every Sunday. We were certainly never hungry. But there was always a whiff of “not enough” in the house. If we wanted new shoes, we had to show our mother the old ones with actual holes in them. I realized later that was more about her childhood home, with a mentally ill and unemployable father, than the financial status of ours. Still, that feeling hung in the air, getting into the fabric like smoke.
Read more…

The Artificial Intelligence of the Public Intellectual

morkeman / Getty

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | May 2019 | 8 minutes (2,228 words)

“Well, that’s a really important thing to investigate.” While Naomi Wolf’s intellectual side failed her last week, her public side did not. That first line was her measured response when a BBC interviewer pointed out — on live radio — that cursory research had disproven a major thesis in her new book, Outrages: Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalization of Love (she misinterpreted a Victorian legal term, “death recorded,” to mean execution — the term actually meant the person was pardoned). Hearing this go down, journalists like me theorized how we would react in similar circumstances (defenestration) and decried the lack of fact-checkers in publishing (fact: Authors often have to pay for their own). The mistake did, however, ironically, offer one corrective: It turned Wolf from cerebral superhero into mere mortal. No longer was she an otherworldly intellect who could suddenly complete her Ph.D. — abandoned at Oxford when she was a Rhodes Scholar in the mid-’80s, Outrages is a reworking of her second, successful, attempt — while juggling columns for outlets like The Guardian, a speaking circuit, an institute for ethical leadership, and her own site, DailyClout, not to mention a new marriage. Something had to give, and it was the Victorians.

Once, the public intellectual had the deserved reputation of a scholarly individual who steered the public discourse: I always think of Oscar Wilde, the perfect dinner wit who could riff on any subject on command and always had the presence of mind to come up with an immortal line like, “One can survive everything nowadays except death.” The public intellectual now has no time for dinner. Wolf, for instance, parlayed the success of her 1991 book The Beauty Myth into an intellectual career that has spanned three decades, multiple books, and a couple of political advisory jobs, in which time her supposed expertise has spread far beyond third-wave feminism. She has become a symbol of intellectual rigor that spans everything from vaginas to dictatorships — a sort of lifestyle brand for the brain. Other thought leaders like her include Jordan Peterson, Fareed Zakaria, and Jill Abramson. Their minds have hijacked the public trust, each one acting as the pinnacle of intellect, an individual example of brilliance to cut through all the dullness, before sacrificing the very rigor that put them there in order to maintain the illusion floated by the media, by them, even by us. The public intellectual once meant public action, a voice from the outside shifting the inside, but then it became personal, populated by self-serving insiders. The public intellectual thus became an extension — rather than an indictment — of the American Dream, the idea that one person, on their own, can achieve anything, including being the smartest person in the room as well as the richest.

* * *

I accuse the Age of Enlightenment of being indirectly responsible for 12 Rules for Life. The increasingly literate population of the 18th century was primed to live up to the era’s ultimate aspiration: an increasingly informed public. This was a time of debates, public lectures, and publications and fame for the academics behind them. Ralph Waldo Emerson, for one. In his celebrated “The American Scholar” speech from 1837, Emerson provided a framework for an American cultural identity — distinct from Europe’s — which was composed of a multifaceted intellect (the One Man theory). “The scholar is that man who must take up into himself all the ability of the time, all the contributions of the past, all the hopes of the future,” he said. “In yourself slumbers the whole of Reason; it is for you to know all, it is for you to dare all.” While Emerson argued that the intellectual was bound to action, the “public intellectual” really arrived at the end of the 19th century, when French novelist Émile Zola publicly accused the French military of antisemitism over the Dreyfus Affair in an open letter published in  L’Aurore newspaper in 1898. With  “J’Accuse…!,” the social commentary Zola spread through his naturalist novels was transformed into a direct appeal to the public: Observational wisdom became intellectual action. “I have but one passion: to enlighten those who have been kept in the dark, in the name of humanity which has suffered so much and is entitled to happiness,” he wrote. “My fiery protest is simply the cry of my very soul.”

The public intellectual thenceforth became the individual who used scholarship for social justice. But only briefly. After the Second World War, universities opened up to serve those who had served America, which lead to a boost in educated citizens and a captive audience for philosophers and other scholars. By the end of the ’60s, television commanded our attention further with learned debates on The Dick Cavett Show — where autodidact James Baldwin famously dressed down Yale philosopher Paul Weiss — and Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr. (also famously destroyed by Baldwin), which would go on to host academics like Camille Paglia in the ’90s. But Culture Trip editor Michael Barron dates the “splintering of televised American intellectualism” to a 1968 debate between Gore Vidal — “I want to make 200 million people change their minds,” the “writer-hero” once said — and Buckley, which devolved into playground insults. A decade later, the public intellectual reached its celebrity peak, with Susan Sontag introducing the branded brain in People magazine (“I’m a book junkie. … I buy special editions like other women shop for designer originals at Saks.”)

As television lost patience with Vidal’s verbose bravado, he was replaced with more telegenic — angrier, stupider, more right-wing — white men like Bill O’Reilly, who did not clarify nuance but blustered over the issues of the day; the public intellectual was now all public, no intellect. Which is to say, the celebrity pushed out the scholar, but it was on its way out anyway. By the ’80s, the communal philosophical and political conversations of the post-war era slunk back to the confines of academia, which became increasingly professionalized, specialized, and insular, producing experts with less general and public-facing knowledge. “Anyone who engages in public debate as a scholar is at risk of being labelled not a serious scholar, someone who is diverting their attention and resources away from research and publicly seeking personal aggrandizement,” one professor told University Affairs in 2014. “It discourages people from participating at a time when public issues are more complicated and ethically fraught, more requiring of diverse voices than ever before.” Diversity rarely got past the ivy, with the towering brilliance of trespassers like Baldwin and Zora Neale Hurston, among other marginalized writers, limited by their circumstances. “The white audience does not seek out black public intellectuals to challenge their worldview,” wrote Mychal Denzel Smith in Harper’s last year, “instead they are meant to serve as tour guides through a foreign experience that the white audience wishes to keep at a comfortable distance.”

Speaking of white audiences … here’s where I mention the intellectual dark web even though I would rather not. It’s the place — online, outside the academy, in pseudo-intellectual “free thought” mag Quillette — where reactionary “intellectuals” flash their advanced degrees while claiming their views are too edgy for the schools that graduated them. These are your Petersons, your Sam Harrises, your Ben Shapiros, the white (non)thinkers, usually men, tied in some vague way to academia, which they use to validate their anti-intellectualism while passing their feelings off as philosophy and, worse, as (mis)guides for the misguided. Last month, a hyped debate between psychology professor Peterson and philosopher Slavoj Žižek had the former spending his opening remarks stumbling around Marxism, having only just read The Communist Manifesto for the first time since high school. As Andray Domise wrote in Maclean’s, “The good professor hadn’t done his homework.” But neither have his fans.

But it’s not just the conservative public intellectuals who are slacking off. Earlier this year, Jill Abramson, the former executive editor of The New York Times, published Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts. She was the foremost mind on journalism in the Trump era for roughly two seconds before being accused of plagiarizing parts of her book. Her response revealed that the authorship wasn’t exactly hers alone, a fact which only came to light in order for her to blame others for her mistakes. “I did have fact-checking, I did have assistants in research, and in some cases, the drafting of parts of the book,” she told NPR. “I certainly did spend money. But maybe it wasn’t enough.” Abramson’s explanation implied a tradition in which, if you are smart enough to be rich enough, you can pay to uphold your intellectual reputation, no matter how artificial it may be.

That certainly wasn’t the first time a public intellectual overrepresented their abilities. CNN host Fareed Zakaria, a specialist in foreign policy with a Ph.D. from Harvard — a marker of intelligence that can almost stand in for actual acumen these days — has been accused multiple times of plagiarism, despite “stripping down” his extensive workload (books, speeches, columns, tweets). Yet he continues to host his own show and to write a column for The Washington Post in the midst of a growing number of unemployed journalists and dwindling number of outlets. Which is part of the problem. “What happens in the media is the cult of personality,” said Charles R. Eisendrath, director of the Livingston Awards and Knight-Wallace Fellowship, in the Times. “As long as it’s cheaper to brand individual personalities than to build staff and bolster their brand, they will do it.” Which is why Wolf, and even Abramson, are unlikely to be gone for good.

To be honest, we want them around. Media output hasn’t contracted along with the industry, so it’s easier to follow an individual than a sprawling media site, just like it’s easier to consult a YouTube beauty influencer than it is to browse an entire Sephora. With public intellectuals concealing the amount of work required of them, the pressure to live up to the myth we are all helping to maintain only increases, since the rest of us have given up on trying to keep pace with these superstars. They think better than we ever could, so why should we bother? Except that, like the human beings they are, they’re cutting corners and making errors and no longer have room to think the way they did when they first got noticed. It takes significant strength of character in this economy of nonstop (and precarious) work to bow out, but Ta-Nehisi Coates did when he stepped down last year from his columnist gig at The Atlantic, where he had worked long before he started writing books and comics. “I became the public face of the magazine in many ways and I don’t really want to be that,” he told The Washington Post. “I want to be a writer. I’m not a symbol of what The Atlantic wants to do or whatever.”

* * *

Of course a public intellectual saw this coming. In a 1968 discussion between Norman Mailer and Marshall McLuhan on identity in the technology age (which explains the rise in STEM-based public intellectuals), the latter said, “When you give people too much information, they resort to pattern recognition.” The individuals who have since become symbols of thought — from the right (Christina Hoff Sommers) to the left (Roxane Gay) — are overrepresented in the media, contravening the original definition of their role as outsiders who spur public action against the insiders. In a capitalist system that promotes branded individualism at the expense of collective action, the public intellectual becomes a myth of impossible aspiration that not even it can live up to, which is the point — to keep selling a dream that is easier to buy than to engage in reality. But an increasingly intelligent public is gaining ground.

The “Public Intellectual” entry in Urban Dictionary defines it as, “A professor who spends too much time on Twitter,” citing Peterson as an example. Ha? The entry is by OrinKerr, who may or may not be (I am leaning toward the former) a legal scholar who writes for the conservative Volokh Conspiracy blog. His bad joke is facetious, but not entirely inaccurate — there’s a shift afoot, from the traditional individual public intellectual toward a collective model. That includes online activists and writers like Mikki Kendall, who regularly leads discussions about feminism and race on Twitter; Bill McKibben, who cofounded 360.org, an online community of climate change activists; and YouTubers like Natalie Wynn, whose ContraPoints video essays respond to real questions from alt-right men. In both models, complex thought does not reside solely with the individual, but engages the community. This is a reversion to one of the early definitions of public intellectualism by philosopher Antonio Gramsci. “The traditional and vulgarized type of the intellectual is given by the man of letters, the philosopher, the artist,” he wrote in his Prison Notebooks — first published in 1971. “The mode of being of the new intellectual can no longer consist in eloquence, which is an exterior and momentary mover of feelings and passions, but in active participation in practical life, as constructor, organizer, ‘permanent persuader’ and not just a simple orator.” It doesn’t matter if you’re the smartest person in the room, as long as you can make it move.

* * *

Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

The Year of the Cat

Illustration by Homestead

Elisabeth Donnelly | Longreads | May 2019 | 14 minutes (3,392 words)

In an old photo from when I lived in a house in Catskill, New York, on the edge of the Hudson River, I am asleep on the couch with a small cat curled up on my chest. The casual observer would be forgiven for thinking that it was my cat in this still life tableau: snoring woman, mouth wide open, head flung to the side, a red plaid blanket, and a cat in a circle as if it is right at home.

But the thing was, she wasn’t my cat. I didn’t feed her, I didn’t scoop her poop, I didn’t consistently provide her with a home and shelter. She was like a weedy, persistent, besotted lover who wouldn’t listen to the word “no,” who spent every night outside my house with a boombox in the air, playing “In Your Eyes.” Yet to explain it properly — my relationship with my fake cat — we have to back things up slightly.
Read more…

I’ve Done a Lot of Forgetting

Getty / Illustration by Homestead

Jordan Michael Smith | Longreads | May 2019 | 10 minutes (2,744 words)

If someone spits bigotry at you while you’re a kid, you’re unlikely to forget it. You’ll remember it not because it’s traumatic, though it can be. You’ll remember it not even because it’s degrading and excruciating, though it is certainly those things, too. No, you’ll remember it because it instills in you an understanding that people are capable of motiveless evil. That humans can be moved to hate because they are hateful. You aren’t given a reason for why people hate you, because they don’t need a reason. You’re you, through no fault of your own, even if you want desperately to be anyone else. And that’s enough.

I am a Canadian. I was born in Markham, which is a small city about 30 kilometers northeast of Toronto. That distance meant a great deal. Markham was a large town of middle- and working-class families when my newlywed parents moved there, in the late 1970s, with a population that hovered around 60,000. It was pretty mixed demographically, I recall, though containing a white majority. My older sister and I were the only Jews in our elementary school, except for one other family who arrived after we did and seemed not to attract much ire; I imagined it was because they were beautiful and popular (we were neither).

We were one of the minority of Canadian Jewish families living outside Toronto or Montreal. More than 71% of all Canadian Jews reside in these two cities, according to Allan Levine’s serviceable but unexceptional new book on the history of Jewish Canada, Seeking the Fabled City. Levine describes a familiar story of an immigrant group gradually gaining acceptance (and some power) in a once-largely white Christian country. For the first half of the 20th century, Jews in Canada were arguably detested to a greater degree than in America. By the 21st century, Canadian Jews felt as safe as Jews anywhere felt safe. Levine quotes a Toronto rabbi as saying, “Living in Toronto, my children don’t know that Jews are a minority.” Read more…