The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle and Readmill users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
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Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle and Readmill users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.
***

For our latest Longreads Member Pick, we’re excited to share early access to a new story by journalist Eva Holland, to be published next week by Pacific Standard.
“The Peacemaker” tells the story of Schaeffer Cox, the 30-year-old activist and founder of the Alaska Peacemakers Militia who was sentenced last year to 26 years in prison for conspiring to kill government officials.
Become a Longreads Member to receive the full story and support our service. You can also buy Longreads Gift Memberships to send this and other great stories to friends, family or colleagues.

Paul Monette | Open Road Media | 1992 | 4 minutes (797 words)
Below is a brief excerpt from Open Road Media’s reissue of Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story, the National Book Award-winning autobiography by Paul Monette. Purchase the book here.
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Everybody else had a childhood, for one thing—where they were coaxed and coached and taught all the shorthand. Or that’s how it always seemed to me, eavesdropping my way through twenty-five years, filling in the stories of straight men’s lives. First they had their shining boyhood, which made them strong and psyched them up for the leap across the chasm to adolescence, where the real rites of manhood began. I grilled them about it whenever I could, slipping the casual question in while I did their Latin homework for them, sprawled on the lawn at Andover under the reeling elms.
And every year they leaped further ahead, leaving me in the dust with all my doors closed, and each with a new and better deadbolt. Until I was twenty-five, I was the only man I knew who had no story at all. I’d long since accepted the fact that nothing had ever happened to me and nothing ever would. That’s how the closet feels, once you’ve made your nest in it and learned to call it home. Self-pity becomes your oxygen.
I speak for no one else here, if only because I don’t want to saddle the women and men of my tribe with the lead weight of my self-hatred, the particular doorless room of my internal exile. Yet I’ve come to learn that all our stories add up to the same imprisonment. The self-delusion of uniqueness. The festering pretense that we are the same as they are. The gutting of all our passions till we are a bunch of eunuchs, our zones of pleasure in enemy hands. Most of all, the ventriloquism, the learning how to pass for straight. Such obedient slaves we make, with such very tidy rooms.
Forty-six now and dying by inches, I finally see how our lives align at the core, if not in the sorry details. I still shiver with a kind of astonished delight when a gay brother or sister tells of that narrow escape from the coffin world of the closet. Yes yes yes, goes a voice in my head, it was just like that for me. When we laugh together then and dance in the giddy circle of freedom, we are children for real at last, because we have finally grown up. And every time we dance, our enemies writhe like the Witch in Oz, melting, melting—the Nazi Popes and all their brocaded minions, the rat-brain politicians, the wacko fundamentalists and their Book of Lies.
We may not win in the end, of course. Genocide is still the national sport of straight men, especially in this century of nightmares. And death by AIDS is everywhere around me, seething through the streets of this broken land. Last September I buried another lover, Stephen Kolzak—died of homophobia, murdered by barbaric priests and petty bureaucrats. So whether or not I was ever a child is a matter of very small moment. But every memoir now is a kind of manifesto, as we piece together the tale of the tribe. Our stories have died with us long enough. We mean to leave behind some map, some key, for the gay and lesbian people who follow—that they may not drown in the lies, in the hate that pools and foams like pus on the carcass of America.
I don’t come from the past, I come from now, here in the cauldron of plague. When the doors to the camps were finally beaten down, the Jews of Europe no longer came from Poland and Holland and France. They came from Auschwitz and Buchenwald. But I will never understand how the straights could have let us die like this—year after year after year, collaborating by indifference—except by sifting through the evidence of my queer journey.
Why do they hate us? Why do they fear us? Why do they want us invisible?
I don’t trust my own answers anymore. I’m too twisted up with rage, too hooked on the millennium. But I find myself combing the past these days, dreaming dreams without sleep, puzzling over my guys, the gay and the straight and the in-between. Somewhere in there is a horror of love, and to try to kill the beast in them, they take it out on us. Which is not to say I don’t chastise myself for halving the world into us and them. I know that the good guys aren’t all gay, or the bad all straight. That is what I am sifting for, to know what a man is finally, no matter the tribe or gender.
Thanks to Open Road Media for sponsoring Longreads. Purchase the book here.
Men from Baltimore’s poor neighborhoods are turning to a family and job training center to keep themselves off the street dealing drugs and rebuild their lives after spending time in jail:
The men are what policymakers euphemistically call a challenging population: Lacking high-school education or formal work experience, they’re the most likely of any group in America to die young and to die from violence. Most of their life experience, the skills that have helped them survive the streets or prison, works against them in the legal world. The biggest problem the center has spent 15 years trying to solve isn’t how to get these guys jobs, or how to encourage them to be more involved in their children’s lives, or how make the streets safer, though those are tough enough. The problem is more profound: How do you give these survivors of the drug wars, men who are criminalized and discarded by society, who are at the bottom of every statistic, hope?

In The Paris Review Daily, Colin Dickey searches for a house among foreclosed properties, and finds uncanny forces at work:
Photo: US National Archives, Flickr
Communication Management Units, or CMUs, are cloaked in secrecy. They segregate prisoners accused of terrorism, stripped of rights and held in isolation:
We sat together on her couch, her small, eight-year-old hands clutching a photo of her father, Yassin Aref. “My daddy only held me twice before I was five,” Dilnia told me. For the first five years of her life, she only knew him as the man on the other side of a plexiglass window in a communication management unit in an Indiana federal penitentiary.
Prisoners describe the communication management units, or CMUs, as “Little Guantánamos.” In 2006, the Bureau of Prisons created two of these units to isolate and segregate specific prisoners, the majority of them convicted of crimes related to terrorism. The bureau secretly opened these units without informing the public and without allowing anyone an opportunity to comment on their creation, as required by law. By September 2009, about 70 percent of the CMU prisoners were Muslim, more than 1,000 to 1,200 percent more than the federal prison average of Muslim inmates.

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle and Readmill users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
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The Twisted Saga of Jailhouse Boxer James Scott’s Battle for Redemption:
Prison inmate No. 57735, accused of murder and serving a 30-40 year stretch inside Rahway State Prison for armed robbery, introduced himself in a letter to reporter Beth Schenerman at The New York Times on Dec. 17, 1978, writing, in a rare moment of understatement, “This is a unique story.” After returning to prison three years earlier, the former professional boxer had long since been recognized as one of the most feared and dangerous of the 1,150 inmates then living behind the walls of New Jersey’s most notorious maximum-security prison, a place journalist Ralph Wiley described “as if the world had dropped the sum of its sores into one of New Jersey’s gritty smokestacks, then chose not to watch as the results of the experiment filtered down into place.”
Three Americans recount their experience of being held captive in Iran’s Evin Prison after unknowingly crossing the Iraq-Iran border while out on a hike. An excerpt from A Sliver of Light, a co-written book about their ordeal:
SHANE (October 2009)
Solitary confinement is the slow erasure of who you thought you were. You think you are still you, but you have no real way of knowing. How can you know if you have no one to reflect you back to yourself? Would I know if I was going crazy? The longer I am alone, the more my mind slows. All I want to do is to forget about everything.
But I can’t do it. I am unable to keep my mind from being sharply focused on one task: forcing myself not to look at the wall behind me. I know that eventually, a tiny sliver of sunlight will spill in through the grated window and place a quarter-size dot on the wall. It’s ridiculous that I’m thinking about it this early. I’ve been awake only 10 minutes and I should know it will be hours before it appears.
They take everything from us—breezes, eye contact, human touch, the feeling of warm wet hands from washing a sink-load of dishes, the miracle of transforming thoughts into words on paper. They leave only the pause—those moments of waiting at bus stops, of cigarette breaks. They make time the object of our hatred.
I try not to look for the light.

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle and Readmill users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.
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