Search Results for: The Awl

The Erotic Thriller’s Little Death

TriStar Pictures / Netflix

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | May 2019 | 10 minutes (2,585 words)

Who do I have to fuck and kill to get a good erotic thriller? One of the first publicity stills from What/If, the new Netflix series starring Renée Zellweger, had the actress in a white dress, legs crossed, smiling enigmatically, her surroundings moody. It was a transparent reference to Basic Instinct, the vulvular Verhoeven from 1992 that marked the climax of the golden age of erotic thrillers, particularly the titillating cross-examination in which femme fatale Sharon Stone sits in a white dress, no underwear, legs alternating between crossed and uncrossed, smiling enigmatically, her surroundings moody. What/If is a sex reversal of Indecent Proposal, Adrian Lyne’s naughty take on the American Dream about a rich stranger offering a struggling couple $1 million to spend one night with the wife. The series flirts heavily with its soft-core antecedents. “This whole idea was ripped right out of a bad ’90s movie,” says Jane Levy (in the husband role in What/If). “I thought that film was quite decent,” is the awkward reply from Zellweger (as the Robert Redford character).

The difference here is that the 50-year-old actress’ knees remain firmly closed, just as the erotic thriller has ever since its mainstream demise in 1995. Her show is marketed as a “neo-noir social thriller,” presumably because creator Mike Kelley (of Revenge soap) considered the gender flip feminist, but its refusal to fully embrace the genre it’s attempting to be, either sexually or thrillingly, is the latest example of the erotic thriller’s latter-day impotence.

“Erotic thrillers are noirish stories of sexual intrigue incorporating some form of criminality or duplicity, often as the flimsy framework for on-screen softcore sex,” Linda Ruth Williams writes in The Erotic Thriller in Contemporary Cinema (2005). That’s the clinical description, but the most alluring aspect of these films (and, later, shows) was how clinical they weren’t. It was the “flimsy framework” around the saxophoned, vaseline-screened sex that really made them seductive. These films lingered on their characters, teasing out the personalities that were about to be pummelled, entering their layered lives of cutely chaotic homes and old friendships and workplace frustrations, not to mention the texture of the cities — New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco — in which that setup was about to unravel. The stories about these ideal homes being threatened by a sensual interloper served as a metaphor for the sociopolitical climate of the time, in which second-wave feminism and its single career women were wreaking havoc on traditional family values and, more specifically, on the power position that men had secured for so long.    

The hottest time for the mainstream erotic thriller was the 15 years from 1980 until 1995, when multiplexes were flooded with glistening, underappreciated masterpieces like The Last Seduction, starring Linda Fiorentino as the other kind of Queen B, and less successful limpets like Body of Evidence, in which Madonna proved that she can’t act when she’s naked either. Since then, per Williams, “the explicit has become implicit.” Unless you are a foreign auteur, mainstream prurience is sublimated into the supernatural and the traumatic — even the young adult — and the modern adult erotic thriller is stripped of grit to become 50 Shades of Grey, an appropriate title for the interchangeable sterile “intrigues” of the suburban set. What/If rides the trend of ’90s nostalgia, in which the culturally relevant (if not always critically acclaimed) is resurrected for the sake of kitsch, with little consideration for its original milieu. But the erotic thriller is a genre born of a cultural climate that isn’t so different from the one we are in now, so why can’t it make us come?

* * *

You can measure the erotic thriller’s critical reputation by how little it has penetrated academia. Porn has spawned its own journal, and yet the study of titles like Wild Things appears to be relegated to only three books, including Nina K. Martin’s Sexy Thrills: Undressing the Erotic Thriller. She has a predictable explanation for the lacuna: “It’s for women,” she tells me, “and it’s not edgy enough.” It’s true: If you were old enough to masturbate in the ’90s, not only could you watch a young David Duchovny lubing women up on cable (Red Shoe Diaries), you could also Blockbuster and chill (which we just referred to as “renting”). Between the flaming porn and the brooding thrillers at the local video store languished sultry VHS covers with titles like Savage Lust scrawled over images of half-dressed couples embracing against black backdrops. “It gave a lot of people the opportunity to have a one-handed watch that actually had a story,” says Martin, “and that you could watch with someone as a couple and kind of get off.” The last one she remembers — the last good one, I would argue — is 2003’s In the Cut, one of the rare feminist erotic thrillers, which opens with a woman watching another woman going down on a man. But these days you wouldn’t get a major Hollywood star like Meg Ryan appearing in such a film (or behind it — it was a Nicole Kidman production), nor would you get a filmmaker of Jane Campion’s caliber directing it.

The erotic thriller came out of film noir, so it makes sense that one of the earliest neo-noirs, Body Heat (1981), was inspired by Billy Wilder’s 1944 classic Double Indemnity. Kathleen Turner never really washed off the sweat of her debut, in which she plays the wife of a wealthy businessman who convinces her lover, an inept lawyer — “You’re not too smart, are you? I like that in a man.” — to kill her husband. The film was so ecstatically received that it spawned the Body Heat Society, a woman-run film fan club before that was de rigueur. “It’s the perfect story of the perfect seduction,’’ founder Royelen Lee Boykie told The Chicago Tribune in 1987. But it was Fatal Attraction (1987) that really hit the collective G-spot. Producer Sherry Lansing wanted to make a feminist version of the British film Diversion, in which a married man has an affair and gets his comeuppance. “When I watched that short film, I was on the single woman’s side,” Lansing told Susan Faludi for her book Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (1991). “I wanted the audience to feel great empathy for the woman.”

The men who ran Hollywood did not. To understand how the erotic thriller, which could have been a genre that celebrates women owning their sexuality, became its opposite, you have to understand the time in which it arose. This was the 1980s, the decade in which liberated women were trying to mind their own business and start a career and men were interpreting the shift as a direct shot at mankind and the murder of the nuclear family. That’s how Fatal Attraction’s single career woman becomes “the most hated woman in America.” The studio refused to keep Michael Douglas’s cheating husband unsympathetic, going against Lansing to make Glenn Close’s Alex Forrest a crazy-faced psycho killer. To protect the family man, they sacrificed the independent blond who knows what she wants, turning her into a woman-shaped threat to fundamental American values that can only be taken down by the traditional housewife’s phallus — sorry, pistol.

This was, according to Williams’s book, “the perfect erotic thriller blueprint.” And in some ways, Fatal Attraction, which dominated the box office and the cultural conversation, was perfect. Director Adrian Lyne had been chosen off the success of Flashdance, and it was his attention to detail — the authentic discussions between family and friends, the messy homes, the dizzying ambience of New York — that makes the movie a classic. “It adds the seeming irrelevancies that are most important,’’ he told The New York Times. But it was also Michael Douglas. The man who became the face of the erotic thriller — he also starred in Basic Instinct, Disclosure, and A Perfect Murder — was able to be hero and antihero at the same time, both championed and maligned. In Williams’s words, he was “the representation of flawed, crisis-ridden masculinity and the concomitant decline of male cultural and social authority.”

Only five years after Fatal Attraction, the blockbuster erotic thriller blew its load for the last time with Basic Instinct, which not only commanded record earnings, but was popular despite — because of? — the perceived anti-gay sentiment of its bisexual femme fatale. Then the genre died; it’s fitting that the man who brought the erotic thriller to climax with Basic Instinct also killed it with Showgirls. Director Paul Verhoeven had the chance to earn the NC-17 rating designed to bolster now well-established adult fare, but he failed and the erotic thriller became a studio risk. Perhaps this was enough to kill it, considering Hollywood’s increasing need to make bank, but it was buried for good by a political landscape that reinforced America’s growing puritanism, an industry saturated with cheap knockoffs like Fair Game (starring supermodel Cindy Crawford), and the rise of free online porn and graphic auteur cinema.

But it was only a little death. The specter of Beyoncé floats over a new form of mainstream erotic thriller, one which has been scrubbed for its debut. In 2009, Queen B reintroduced us to blockbuster eroticism with Obsessed, which was dubbed “the black Fatal Attraction” — a married man is terrorized by a woman at his office — but had none of its predecessor’s charm. Producer Will Packer is famous for his aspirational black rom-coms (This Christmas, Think Like a Man), and Obsessed shared the same generic aesthetic. The specificity of the best erotic thrillers was thus replaced by an all-encompassing generality — suburban-style wealth with interchangeable houses, offices, clothes, people, even storylines. Here, again, men were in charge (producing, directing, writing), so the politics remained largely the same — the man is castrated by the single woman, the mother is the reigning power who restores order — while Hollywood’s mixed feelings about black intimacy meant the erotic part was cooled way down. A stream of nonwhite erotic thrillers lifted this framework, most recently Unforgettable and When the Bough Breaks, though the genre’s biggest (white) release of the past decade did too.

“Uh, oh, uh, oh, uh, oh, oh, no, no,” sang Beyoncé over and over in 2015 leading up to the release of 50 Shades of Grey, for which she recorded a heart-pounding version of “Crazy in Love.” E.L. James’ S&M “book,” I suppose you would call it, which started out as Twilight fan fiction, was a phenomenon among housewives and the biggest mainstream erotic thriller in a decade, attracting an audience of mostly women who were so desperate for some hot sex on-screen that they were willing to pay $13 to see a movie based on a story that read like its writer had never actually had sex. 50 Shades of Grey is potentially the least foxy film of all time — wooden acting, wooden script, wooden directing, but absolutely no wood. “Are You Curious?” the marketing kept asking us. Don’t be: It basically looks exactly like Obsessed, except in a farcical display of our current conversation around consent, the heroine has to sign a contract before she can fuck. This was two years before we started talking about how men in Hollywood have abused their power, which could be why the two men who produced this cock-up thought it made sense to have Dakota Johnson play a woman who is willing to sign a paper in order to have Jamie Dornan’s rich, dead-eyed white man bore the pants off her (we can get that for free!).

* * *

“Your pants are on fire.” “You have no idea.” Within the first five minutes of Indecent Proposal, Demi Moore and Woody Harrelson are having flaming sex — various positions, various body parts — on their kitchen floor. This is frenzied makeup fornication after a fight that resulted in his boxers landing on the boiling stove. In What/If, the analogous couple takes four episodes to get seriously steamy — like, in a shower. OK, they also have sex, but it is so pure it involves garters and is artfully shot through the slates in a banister. This is the erotic thriller now, a pale imitation of its white-hot heyday, in which romance is an afterthought and the thrill is gone. That clinical uptightness that was missing from the originals, which made them so seductive, has me wondering why they even bother anymore. But then again, it tracks that a culture steeped in nostalgia but fixated on box office performance would strip the erotic thriller, a once lucrative genre, down to its superficial parts — a gesture at sex, a glance at intrigue, the broad strokes of a vague threat to patriarchy — to sell it out to the widest audience possible. This would in part explain why the new films and shows have been denuded of their specificity — in character, in location, in aesthetic — though that also aligns with how aspiration is framed now, a time of sporadic employment in a digital (not that kind) dictatorship, as a sterile McMansion in which the comfort of wealth has replaced the comfort of relation.

Then there’s the sex. While men don’t want women to own their sexuality and are skittish in the wake of so many of their male peers screwing up, women don’t want to be objectified or reduced to their sexuality anymore either. Even if Fatal Attraction would make sense coming from a man right now, Martin thinks actresses, awakened to gender parity and intimacy standards, would be unlikely to take on the role. “It’s such a loaded grey area now,” says Martin, observing that sex is either problematized within a relationship as in Sex Education and Gypsy, or it’s associated with trauma as in Top of the Lake (another Campion) and Sharp Objects. That the rare erotic thriller comes from auteurs out of Europe (François Ozon) or Asia (Park Chan-wook) is unsurprising considering their divergent approach to sex and gender. In America, meanwhile, the spectacle has taken over the sexual — women are more concerned with saving the world than in exploring their sexuality. And, sure, I’m all for women solving the climate crisis, but we also have sex lives. And all the talk around consent suggests that it’s the perfect time for cinema to explore the nuances of sexuality (not to mention the widespread panic over millennials having less of it — I mean, would you in this economy?)

Instead, any prurience that threatens to limit the largest possible impact has been folded into the supernatural, since Twilight, which also introduced sensuality into the YA world, culminated in series like You and Riverdale. All of this is not to say that you can’t still find erotic thrillers, just that they have retreated to the margins. What was once a mainstream film — A-list actors and filmmakers — about a queer femme fatale, is now a queer erotic thriller — unknown actors and filmmakers — that only surfaces on streaming sites like Netflix for niche audiences whose algorithms call it out. You can get free porn online, you can pay for a good thriller in the cinema, but you can’t get both together. No wonder I found myself nodding along to the last two words of What/If, a scene in which Zellweger’s femme fatale orders a martini, perhaps to distract her from all the sex she’s not having. “One olive,” she says. “Very dry.”

* * *

Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

How Refugees Die

AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris

John Psaropoulos | The Sewanee Review | Spring 2019 | 17 minutes (3.361 words)

 

This essay first appeared in The Sewanee Review, the oldest continuously published literary quarterly in the country, which you can subscribe to here. Our thanks to the author and The Sewanee Review staff for allowing us to reprint this essay at Longreads

* * *

I met Doa Shukrizan at the harbormaster’s office in the port of Chania, in western Crete. She sat with her back to a balcony overlooking the street, and the strong morning light enveloped her delicate figure, so that there appeared to be even less of her than there was after her ordeal with the sea. Doa’s face had peeled from extreme sunburn; she spoke softly. Between the cavernous ceiling and polished concrete floor, the only furnishings were tables, chairs, and ring binders, so that voices, however slender, resounded. There were no secrets in this room. During the hour that we spoke, three coast guard officers sat at their desks not doing any work, transfixed by what she said.

Doa and her fiancé had been among some five hundred people who boarded a fishing trawler at the port of Damietta in the Nile Delta on September 6, 2014. Many, like Doa, were Syrian. Others were Palestinian or Sudanese. All were fleeing war and had paid smugglers to ferry them, illegally, to Italy.

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Total Depravity: The Origins of the Drug Epidemic in Appalachia Laid Bare

Getty / Black Inc. Books

Richard Cooke | Excerpt from Tired of Winning: A Chronicle of American Decline | Black Inc. Books | May 2019 | 21 minutes (5,527 words)

They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.

Mark 16:18

One night John Stephen Toler dreamed that the Lord had placed him high on a cliff, overlooking a forest-filled valley. He had this vision while living in Man, West Virginia, where some of the townsfolk thought he was a hell-bound abomination; he countered that God works in different ways. The mountains were where he sought sanctuary, so he felt no fear; but as he watched, all the trees he could see were consumed by wildfire. It was incredible, he said, to see ‘how quick it was devoured’, and the meaning of the parable was clear. The forest was Man and the fire was drugs, and when the drugs came to Man, that was exactly how it happened – it was devoured ‘so fast, that you didn’t even see it coming’, he said. We were in Huntington, West Virginia, and by now John Stephen Toler was in recovery.

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Odetta Holmes’ Album One Grain of Sand

David Corio/Michael Ochs Archive/Getty Images

Matthew Frye Jacobson | One Grain of Sand| Bloomsbury Academic | April 2019 | 19 minutes (3,117 words)

 

When twenty-year-old Odetta Felious Holmes — classically trained as a vocalist and poised to become “the next Marian Anderson” — veered away from both opera and musical theater in favor of performing politically charged field hollers, prison songs, work songs, and spirituals before mixed-race audiences in 1950s’ coffeehouses, she was making a portentous decision for both American music and Civil Rights culture. Released the same year as her famous rendition of “I’m on My Way” at the March on Washington, One Grain of Sand captures the social justice project that was Odetta’s voice. “There was no way I could say the things I was thinking, but I could sing them,” she later remarked. In pieces like “Midnight Special,” “Moses, Moses,” “Ain’t No Grave,” and “Ramblin’ Round Your City,” One Grain of Sand embodies Odetta’s approach to the folk repertoire as both an archive of black history and a vehicle for radical expression. For many among her audience, a song like “Cotton Fields” represented a first introduction to black history at a time when there was as yet no academic discipline going by this name, and when history books themselves still peddled convenient fictions of a fundamentally “happy” plantation past. And for many among her audience, black and white, this young woman’s pride in black artistry and resolve, and her open rage and her challenge to whites to recognize who they were and who they had been, too, modeled the very honesty and courage that the movement now called for.

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Becoming Family

Illustration by Tom Peake

Jennifer Berney | Longreads | May 2019 | 16 minutes (4,486 words)

 
“He’s really cute,” my partner Kellie whispered to me, moments after our first son arrived. He had a head of black hair and a pug nose. His eyes were alarmingly bright. Kellie rested one hand on the top of his head as he lay across my chest. “So cute,” she said.

Her declaration meant something to me. Because the baby wasn’t of her body, because he was of my egg and my womb and a donor’s sperm, I’d been haunted by the worry that she’d struggle to claim him as hers — that he’d seem to her like a foreign entity, like someone else’s newborn, red-faced and squirming.

Hours later, in the middle of the night, a nurse came into our room, tapped Kellie on the shoulder, and asked her to bring our newborn to the lab for a routine test. Kellie cradled the baby as the nurse poked his heel with a needle and squeezed drops of his blood onto a test card. Our baby, who was still nameless, wailed and shook. In that moment, she tells me, she was overwhelmed by biology, by the physical need to protect a tiny life.

* * *

In the fourth century BCE, Aristotle proposed a theory of reproduction that would persist for thousands of years. It’s a theory that, while scientifically inaccurate, still informs our cultural thinking about parenthood.

According to Aristotle, the man, via intercourse, planted his seed in the woman’s womb. The woman’s menstrual blood nourished that seed and allowed it to grow. She provided the habitat, he supplied the content. The resulting child was the product of the father, nourished by the mother.

When it came to parenthood, the woman’s essential role was to nurture what the man had planted within her. To father was simply to provide the material — a momentary job. Fathering was ejaculating. But mothering was nurturing. This job was ongoing, never-ending. Her care began at the moment of conception and continued into adulthood and beyond.

* * *

When Kellie and I came home from the hospital with our newborn, our house felt strangely quiet and bare. In the days preceding delivery, Kellie had cleaned and organized as a way of getting ready for the baby, and our house was now unusually tidy. We sat on the couch with our sleeping baby and admired him. We smoothed his hair so that it crested at the center of his forehead, Napoleon style, then we smoothed it to the side. We said his name — West — over and over, trying to teach ourselves the word for this new being. Every so often he twitched. I had the sense that our world was about to transform, that the quiet of the first newborn days was temporary.

In the days that followed, I roamed the house in mismatched pajamas and snacked on casseroles that friends had brought over. I nursed the baby and rocked the baby and watched the baby while he slept. Meanwhile, Kellie, wearing her daily uniform of work pants and a worn-out T-shirt, built walls around our back porch to create a mudroom for our house. In the months leading up to our baby’s birth, we’d agreed that our dogs would need such a room, a place set away from a baby who would one day be crawling and drooling and grabbing, and so we called Jesse — a carpenter acquaintance whom we had once, long ago, asked to be our donor, and who had considered it for two months before turning us down. He wasn’t game to donate sperm, but he was game to bang out some walls. All day, I heard Kellie and Jesse’s hammering and muffled conversation.

In this way we entered parenthood. I was the full-time nurser and the guardian of sleep; Kellie was the builder, the house-maintainer. At night, the baby slept between us.

* * *

The idea that paternity is primarily a genetic contribution, that a father’s role is simply to provide the seed, is a very stubborn one. An absent father is still considered a father. When we use father as a verb, we usually mean the physical act of conception, while to mother more often describes the act of tending to. When a father takes on some of the active parenting, when he drives the kids to school or makes them breakfast, we often refer to these acts as “helping,” as if he were doing tasks assigned to someone else. “He’s a good father,” I’ve heard people say, bemoaning a wife’s lack of gratitude. “He helps.”

“Who’s the dad?” is a question friends of friends ask at parties when they learn that my children have two mothers. It’s a question that distant relatives ask, eager for the inside scoop.

The idea that my son doesn’t have a dad, that it is indeed possible to not have a father, is a hard thing for people to wrap their minds around. They may understand the process of donor insemination, but still, they think, because conception requires sperm, every child must have a father. Even for me, it creates a kind of cognitive dissonance. When I say that my child has no father, I feel like I’m not telling the whole truth.

“Why doesn’t West have a father?” a wide-eyed boy asked me one day as he sat at a classroom table with West and three other first graders. I was helping them make illustrated pages, and somehow the topic of our family had come up. West looked at me anxiously.

“He has two moms,” I told the boy.

“But why?” he insisted.

Of the kids I knew in West’s class, one was being raised by grandparents and several more had stepparents or were being raised by a single mom. But I could see that our situation was the most confounding.

“That’s just the way our family works,” I said before rattling the crayon box and offering it around the table. The curious boy did not look satisfied, and West remained steady and silent.

* * *

* Some names have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals.

By the time our donor, Daniel*, met our baby, he and his wife Rebecca had a baby of their own and had resettled on the other side of the state. We met them at a pizza place on a weekday afternoon. It was spring in the Pacific Northwest and the sun glared on fresh puddles. They had come to town to visit family and meet with longtime friends who wanted to meet their new child. At the time, our relationships with one another were still undefined, and we counted more as friends than family.

I remember that meeting in fragments, like bits of color held up to the light: Trays of half-eaten pizza. Plastic cups filled with ice water. Rebecca holding her newborn, Wren, against her, a burp cloth draped over her shoulder. Wren’s bare baby feet and the creases in his chubby ankles. My own baby, old enough to crane his head, looking around with wide eyes and a two-tooth smile. All of us in constant motion — standing to rock the baby, sitting to feed the baby, slipping into the bathroom to change the baby’s wet diaper. We passed our babies from one parent to the other, then across the table. We lifted the babies, assessing their heft, then tried to meet their eyes so that we could bombard them with smiles.

I remember it this way: We were neither distant nor close, neither awkward nor easy. We’d all been remade by parenthood, and it was like we were meeting for the first time.

I had wondered before our meeting if West, at 6 months old, would connect to Daniel especially, if there really was some magic carried in their shared DNA, if our son would recognize him, cling to him, fall asleep against his chest. But he didn’t. West greeted Daniel with joyful curiosity, the same way he greeted any stranger, and then returned to my arms to nurse.

* * *

Several months later, Kellie and I drove six hours across the state — baby tucked in his infant car seat in the back — to meet Daniel and Rebecca again, in their new home.

The fog of new parenthood had lifted, and this time, the ease between us was instant. Rebecca and I each claimed a spot at her kitchen table, sat with coffee, and watched as our children chewed on toys and pulled themselves across the wood floors. Conversation between us was continuous. We found a rhythm of interrupting one thought with another, then picking up where we left off, all the while tending to our babies as needed — rising to lift and nurse them, to change a diaper on the floor, to pull a board book from a mouth. Time with Rebecca was a respite from the solitude and repetition of early motherhood, a dose of medicine I needed.

So I found something deeply healing in having an extended family that was at once chosen, but also truly family, tied by blood.

Kellie and Daniel found their places just as easily. They spent their time rewiring Daniel’s carpentry studio, or salvaging beams from a nearby teardown, or driving to the forest to cut up fallen trees for firewood. Each of them, I imagine, had experienced their own kind of solitude as they watched their partners devote themselves fully to another human, and they both, I imagine, felt relief in working side by side.

We became parallel, symbiotic. Two families on either side of the Cascade Mountains. Sometimes they traveled to us; other times we traveled to them. Our boys knew and remembered each other. They splashed each other in a steel trough in Daniel and Rebecca’s backyard, climbed trees that had grown sideways over the shore of Puget Sound, built forts together out of cardboard in our kitchen.

The beauty of our new extended family had little to do with anything we had asked for or planned. Two years earlier, a friend had suggested that Kellie and I ask Daniel to consider being our donor. We had met him only a handful of times, but we knew that we liked him. He was strong but soft-spoken, handsome but unassuming. We were nervous to ask him. We’d explored the prospect with several men already — with Jesse the carpenter, with a coworker, with other peripheral friends — but two ghosted, one said no, and another seemed to think that the resulting child would be his own. Daniel turned out to be different. When he and Rebecca showed up at our house to discuss the possibility, it seemed he was already clear. “What kind of involvement would you want?” he asked us. We had agreed only to stay in some kind of touch over the years, to not become strangers to one another.

And yet we wound up with something I’d never had and never would’ve thought to plan for. I grew up with cousins, but none my age. They were five years older, or 12 years older, or three years younger, or 20 years younger. They were also scattered far and wide across the country. My brother was seven years younger than me, and my half-siblings were so much older that they were almost like aunts and an uncle. So I found something deeply healing in having an extended family that was at once chosen, but also truly family, tied by blood.

Or was it even blood that tied us? In theory, we wanted to know Daniel forever because questions might arise about the DNA he’d shared with us. We might someday need to ask him about some rare disease or mental illness, to probe beyond the brief set of questions we’d asked over dinner that first night we talked. And then there was the way we’d been trained to see blood as a legitimizing factor, trained to understand that blood equals family. Like many queer families, Kellie and I, while challenging this notion, unconsciously embraced it. Daniel was blood-tied to our children and therefore he was kin.

But, even more than blood, it was fate that tied us. It was like that film cliché where one stranger saves another’s life and they are therefore bound to each other forever. Rebecca and Daniel had agreed to help us build a family, and their choice had a moral weight. Gratitude would forever bind me to them. The love that I felt for West contained a love for them. I couldn’t imagine it any other way.

So it made sense to me when, four years after we’d first shared a meal and talked about becoming family, three years after our sons were born, Rebecca called us to ask if we’d considered having another baby. We had.

“Do you guys want to get pregnant again?” Rebecca asked me that day on the phone. “Because, you know, we are.”


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We went to visit them two weeks later and stayed in a motel two miles away. On our first morning, Kellie woke up before me and left in search of coffee. She came back with two paper cups filled with coffee, and also a small mason jar that held a quarter inch of semen. Later she showed me the text that Rebecca had sent: “Good morning! Donation is ready. Cum on over.”

Rebecca delivered a second son, Ryan, in November. I delivered a second son, Cedar, in January.

* * *

I am a gestational and biological parent. Kellie is an adoptive parent. We come to our roles differently.

That I gestated and breastfed my sons carries immediate, clear meaning for me. When they were babies, my smell, my voice, my touch meant sustenance. Kellie held them and bathed them and changed them, but she did not offer milk. In the middle of the night, it was my body they reached for. My role as gestational parent had immediate consequence: for the first three years, my children’s need for me was more urgent, more connected to their survival.

The other difference, the difference of biology, is far less clear. What does it mean to my family that Kellie shares no DNA with our children? Does it mean next to nothing? Or does it mean more than I want to admit?

In the 10 years that Kellie and I have raised children together, I’ve avoided asking her how she feels about being the adoptive parent. I’ve avoided it because I was afraid — afraid that she would confide that our children never fully felt like her own. I’ve been worried she might say that they felt more like small people she lived with and cared about, but that if our own relationship ended she wouldn’t know exactly where they fit.

In my own community of lesbians, there’s a legacy of loosely defined second parents. I know a number of women who conceived in the ’80s (back when artificial insemination was just beginning to be available to lesbians) and planned to be single parents. But then, during pregnancy or early in the child’s life, a partner entered the picture, stayed for a year or two, then left. The partner had no legal claim to the child, but in many cases continued to parent from a distance. I’ve spoken to some of their children — grown now — who have trouble defining their role with a single term. “She’s certainly my other parent,” one of them told me over beers, then went on to explain that the word Mom doesn’t feel right when her gestational mom “did every load of laundry, packed every lunch, and cooked every meal.”

“We had no blueprint,” she told me. “She was kind of like a weekend dad.”

Though Kellie is much more than a weekend dad, I’ve long worried about the ways in which her role as other-mother remain ambiguous and undefined.

“I feel like they’re mine” is the first thing Kellie told me when I finally summoned the nerve to ask her. But sometimes she worries that if I died, the world would not recognize her as a parent, and that our own kids might reject her. She feels secure in her own attachment, but the role the world assigns her is a tenuous one.

What does it mean to my family that Kellie shares no DNA with our children? Does it mean next to nothing? Or does it mean more than I want to admit?

In her book Recreating Motherhood, Barbara Katz Rothman writes that the value our society places on genetic relationships is inherently patriarchal, tied to our initial false belief — based in Aristotle’s “flowerpot theory” — that men were the sole genetic contributors. Because the child was of the man, he belonged to the man. Once we recognized that mothers contribute half of the genetic material, we began to see mother and father as having equal claim to their child. Rothman asserts that this is still an inherently patriarchal position, one in which blood ties indicate a kind of ownership, and one in which the work of nurturance is not accounted for.

In our own contemporary culture, we may sometimes act as though we value nurture over nature. These days I see the truism “love is love” everywhere I turn — on signs, in social media, spoken aloud by celebrities and friends. The statement suggests that love alone is the element that legitimizes a couple or a family. Still, we track our ancestry and meet new genetic relatives — strangers whom we’ve been told are family — through services like 23andMe, and we marvel at the overlapping traits and mannerisms of close relatives raised apart from one another.

We’ve learned to be careful, when speaking of adoptees, to use terms like “birth mother” instead of “real mother,” acknowledging that genes and gestation are not the only thing that make a parent real. And yet, when someone does say “real mother,” we know exactly what they mean.

“Kellie’s not your real mom,” a neighborhood kid once told Cedar, who stood there agape because he had not yet thought to wonder too hard about his origins. At the time, he already understood that his family was different. When other people asked about his father, he had learned to explain, “I have two moms.” But as far as I could tell, this was the first moment someone had invited him to wonder about the actual legitimacy of his family — its realness.

* * *

Rebecca and I are tied by blood tangentially, but not directly. Our children are blood-related. She and I are not. Still, she feels more like family than many of my actual blood relations. Rebecca’s sister and nieces feel like family too, though they are not tied to my family by heredity. We live in the same community, so when Rebecca and Daniel come to town we have large family get-togethers: picnics at parks and birthday celebrations at restaurants. Sometimes Rebecca’s mom joins us too. When we meet she always hugs me and says my first name sweetly. She knows about what ties us, and so she feels tied to me too.

Meanwhile, Daniel’s family of origin is a mystery to me, for reasons of geographical distance and family culture. I see pictures of his relatives on Facebook and have to remind myself that his kin are also my children’s blood kin. My children’s faces may grow to bear resemblance to the faces I see in these photos: the long jawline, the aquiline nose. Or, pieces of these relatives’ histories may give clues to my own children’s futures — special talents and obsessions, illnesses and struggles. Even when I remind myself of this, it feels distant, hard to reach.

Why do I look so hard to find my reflection in blood kin, as if seeing myself in my ancestors will somehow legitimize me?

Kin: Your mother who birthed and nursed you, your father who bore witness to your childhood. Your grandmother who let you sleep beside her in the bed when you came to visit. Your aunt who drove you to her home for long weekends, where you lay alongside her golden retriever and looked at the forest through her windows.

Kin: The grandfather you never met who was a ne’er-do-well, whose legacy is a stack of letters and a rainbow painted on a barn. The uncle who joked around with you in childhood, but became distant as you got older. Your second cousin who discovered you online and now sends you a Christmas card every year.

Kin: Your brother who you speak to only a few times a year, but who you carry in your heart. Your aunt by marriage (then lost through divorce) who delighted you with her easy brand of sarcasm.

Kin: The cousins you’ve only met once or twice in a lifetime. When you see photos of them, some of them look like people you might easily know. Others look like strangers, like someone you might pass in a grocery store and immediately forget.

* * *

Kellie told me once that she hesitates when telling our kids about her family’s history. It’s not quite clear to her: Is her history their history, or is it something else? Long before she spoke this aloud to me the same question hung in my mind. Does her history matter to our kids because it’s their mother’s history, or because it is, somehow, their own?

When I look at my own ancestral family photos, I seek clues to who I am, traces of a self that predate me. Are these connections real, I wonder, or are they lore? Why does ancestral connection hold a sense of magic? Why do I look so hard to find my reflection in blood kin, as if seeing myself in my ancestors will somehow legitimize me?

And yet it turns out that some of my ancestors are not related to me genetically any more than Kellie is genetically related to our sons. Over the course of generations, our genetic ties to individual ancestors dissolve. Geneticist Graham Coop writes that if you trace your genetic heritage, after seven generations “many of your ancestors make no major genetic contribution to you.” In other words, your cells carry no trace of their DNA. They are no longer your genetic relatives, and yet they are still, of course, your ancestors. “Genetics is not genealogy,” he writes.

What if, more than heredity, families are really a collection of stories, some of them spoken, some of them withheld? Kellie’s ancestors were pioneers. My boys spent the first years of their lives in a house that her grandfather and great-grandfather built together. Kellie spends most of her free time splitting wood, building fences and sheds, capturing bee swarms. Cedar can now spot a swarm from a great distance. West is learning to measure wood and use a chop saw. They may one day raise their own families on the same land they grew up on. They may add new walls, new buildings, new fixtures. They do not require Kellie’s genes to carry on her legacy.

* * *

Four years after West was born, he asked me where he came from. It was a bright summer day and his brother — a baby then — was on a walk with Kellie, strapped against her chest. We were staying at a ranch in Colorado and the land was expansive: trails that went over bare hills and into forests, rocks and brush under wide blue sky. That afternoon West and I were inside our dark cabin, with light streaming through the windows and making patches on the floor.

I asked if he wanted to know who his donor was. “Do you want to guess?” I asked him. I was curious to see if he already had a sense.

“JoAnn?” he said, referring to a close family friend.

“The person who helped us is a man,” I said.

“Oh right,” he said. He thought and guessed some more, until I finally told him.

“It’s Daniel,” I said. “Wren’s dad.”

I watched him closely to see how he’d respond, but I detected neither joy nor surprise nor disappointment.

“Did Daniel help make Cedar too?”

“Yes,” I said.

He smiled. It didn’t surprise me that this was the thing that mattered to him — that he and his brother had the same origin story, that he wasn’t alone in the world.

* * *

We tend to understand our DNA as a simple blueprint for who we are and what we might become. We see experience as the tool that can push a person toward or away from their full potential, yet we see the potential itself as innate and fixed.

But in truth DNA and experience interact with each other. The field of epigenetics tells us that genes are turned on and off by experience, that the food we consume, the air we breathe, and how we are nurtured help determine which genes are expressed and which ones are repressed. Our DNA coding isn’t static. For instance, drinking green tea may help regulate the genes that suppress tumors. A sudden loss may trigger depression. And the amount of nurturing and physical contact a child receives in the early years may help determine whether or not he’ll suffer from anxiety as an adult. Currently researchers are investigating to what degree trauma in one person’s experience can cause a change in DNA that is transmitted from one generation to the next. Experience might become a legacy carried in blood.

Frances Champagne, a psychologist and genetic researcher, writes that “tactile interaction,” physical contact between parent and child, “is so important for the developing brain.” Her research shows that “the quality of the early-life environment can change the activity of genes.”

When Kellie held our newborn sons against her chest, when she bounced them and rocked them until they slept, she was not simply soothing them in the moment. She was helping program their DNA, contributing to their genetic legacy. Parents, through the way they nurture, contribute to the child’s nature. There is no clear line between the two.

* * *

In her memoir on adoption, Nicole Chung discusses the concept of family lineage and writes that she has been “grafted” onto her adoptive parents’ family tree. The graft strikes me as an apt metaphor. The scion is not of the receiving tree, and yet it is nourished and sustained by the tree. In the process of grafting, the tree is changed. The scion is changed. Through a process called vascular connection, they become one body.

The rootstock does not automatically reject the scion. The human body does not automatically reject an embryo conceived with a donor egg and sperm. A baby is comforted by warm skin, a smell, a heartbeat. A body loves a body. The baby may care that the source is familiar, but not that the DNA matches his own.

When Kellie’s mother visits with us, she often compares our boys to other members of her family. “It’s funny how Cedar’s blonde just like Noah, and wild like him too,” she’ll say, or, “West’s eyes are that same shade of hazel your grandpa’s were.”

I used to think she was forgetting that our children are donor conceived, or maybe just being silly. Now I realize it’s the opposite. Kellie’s mother doesn’t forget. She knows. She’s claiming them: tying her family’s present, past, and future, like stringing lights around the branches of her family tree, affirming that we belong to one another.
 

Jennifer Berney’s essays have appeared in the New York Times, The Offing, Tin House, and Brevity. She is currently working on a memoir that examines the patriarchal roots of the fertility industry, and the ways that queer families have both engaged with and avoided it.

* * *

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Copy editor: Jacob Gross

The Fraught Culture of Online Mourning

Illustration by Homestead

Rachel Vorona Cote | Longreads | May 21, 2019 | 15 minutes (3,975 words)

 

My mother died shortly after 4 a.m. in the pitch black of a November morning. By roughly 8:30 a.m. that day, the 29th, I had alerted my Twitter and Instagram followers, as well as my Facebook friends. I copied and pasted a few lines across the three platforms, words hastily cobbled together in something akin to a fugue state, accompanied by stray photos of my mother that I had saved on my phone — I had posted about her frequently as her condition worsened, particularly after she arrived at that grim point at which death became imminent death.

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The Ways of a Wandering Spirit

Aaron Gilbreath.

It’s summer. Don’t you want to get in your car and drive? I do. Since I can’t, I reread Marya Hornbacher‘s travel essay from Nowhere, a reliable publication for a range of travel stories. Starting in Minneapolis, her road trip begins in a world of motels that overcharge, restaurants that serve bad coffee, and cities that fade into vistas that, as she writes so beautifully, feature “no motels, no Walmarts, just the American landscape sprawled out in all directions as the sun went down.” Then she travels back in time through memories of past trips, where she examines the reasons she travels at all.

I don’t know why I come and go. Why not? Is there any reason or reasoning behind it? How can I ascribe motive to a thing I simply do by habit or nature or flawed design? Once I asked a friend, “Why are you a Buddhist?” We were walking. He answered, “Why not?” I laughed so hard I had to sit down on the sidewalk, it just struck me as so unbelievably funny. He looked at me, puzzled, waiting for me to explain the joke. I didn’t understand his logic; there was no reason for him to be a Buddhist. But then, he was right—no reason why not. At the time, I too must have believed in motive, and reasons for things happening, impetus, choice. Why do I leave? Why do you stay? Maybe I do it by instinct, like a bird flies south, knows how to get where he’s going, knows how to get back. I wrack my tiny brain, but there is no motive, no real choice for or against a given place. A body in motion tends to stay in motion. It’s nothing more than the way you’re aligned. You maybe have a tendency to drift, a habit of wandering off.

As she travels through America and her memories, she keeps trying to understand her desire to keep moving.

I like the in-between places, the pauses, caesuras in space. The places between points, places you pass through, maybe stop for a moment, en route. They have a satisfying sameness, a beige-ness: airports, McDonald’s, rest stops, truck stops, chain hotels. The air in these places buzzes with fluorescence and an acute sense of time. Your body is hyper-alert: you are a body in motion, never a body at rest, and because a body in motion tends to stay in motion, your muscles remain slightly flexed, even in sleep, as if you might suddenly need to sprint. You are always just about to leave. Who uses the drawers in hotels? Some hotels don’t even bother with drawers. Sometimes you don’t even bother to bring your bag in from the car. You just pop the trunk, dig around for underwear and socks, stuff them in your pockets and unlock the door to room 112 or 203 or 1768 or whatever it is, wherever you are. You close the door behind you and sit on the end of the bed, in your numbered nook, tucked neatly into place. You remain at the ready, wearing your coat, ears attuned to any ambient sound.

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The Psychiatrist in My Writing Class and His ‘Gift’ of Hate

Illustration by Olivia Waller

Rani Neutill | Longreads | May 2019 | 11 minutes (2,723 words)

It is day three of the writing workshop. I sit in a small room with a table fit for ten. The chairs, blue and plastic, are uncomfortable. The table, smooth. The walls, buttercream. I cram writing, reading, and workshopping into four hours a day. Each morning a slight wind breaks through the New England summer heat and wafts salt through the air. It reminds me that the ocean is not far away. I am grateful to have five days away from waiting tables and teaching so I can learn and write.

Covered in greens, reds, and orange, I wear tank tops that expose my tattoos, that make eyes follow the lines of my decorated arms. My skin has grown into a deep brown from the sun’s finesse, from the batches of melanin that lay under my flesh, from my mother’s Indian blood.

All my classmates are white.

I have meticulously selected this date, smack in the middle of the week to present my work. I wanted time to get acclimated, to know my fellow classmates, to feel comfortable around them. When I walked into the room on the first day, I felt my difference, my race, my arms marked with color. I knew my story would be different. How questions of racism and immigration might not pertain to the other members of my class. The eight pages I workshop are from the memoir I’ve been writing for three years about my mentally ill Bengali immigrant mother and the way she tragically died. A memoir about the silence around mental illness within South Asian communities. A memoir about the costs of beauty defined by racism, a quintessential Bengali story about the impact of the forces of migration and colonialism.

The teacher is intelligent and kind and has encouraged helpful criticism, beginning with an author’s strengths. She does not like the Iowa Workshop type of annihilating appraisal. Students talk about what they like. Then a fellow workshopper says,

“I guess I’m the only one who hated this piece.”

I recoil.

My skin combusts into tendrils from the force of his statement. My back sharpens. Eyes wide, I turn towards this man. I am thankful there is a student between us so I don’t have to be near his translucent skin, his bald head shimmering under the fluorescent lights. Sweat beading on his brow. His long grey and red beard, his attempt to look distinct. His small silver earrings, his attempt to look edgy.

The class takes a quick breath, exhaling after two Mississippi seconds. It is a pause and silence that registers what was said. That impenetrable word, hate.

He continues.

“I found myself furiously crossing things out and correcting grammar, fixing sentences and wondering when this writer learned to speak English.”

I wonder if he has British blood. I was a professor of postcolonial literature for sixteen years. I am familiar with the white man’s interrogation of colonized peoples’ ability to speak English. I read and taught Freud and Lacan to analyze the white man’s words; Kipling, Macaulay, EM Forster all come to mind.

I am livid. I was born in the United States. English is my first language and I speak it fluently, but am embarrassed because my relationship with the language is fraught. My mother’s English was fractured. Her accent muddled white people’s perception of her. She tried hard to rid herself of that accent, to sound like a “real” American. As she grew older, her Indian accent crept back in and her English became broken.
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‘Give It Up For My Sister’: Beyonce, Solange, and The History of Sibling Acts in Pop

Frank Micelotta, Frank Leonhardt, Evan Agostini, Chris Pizzello, Jordan Strauss, Hubert Boesl / AP, Illustration by Homestead

Danielle A. Jackson | Longreads | May 2019 | 10 minutes (2,597 words)

Houston-born sisters Beyoncé and Solange Knowles couldn’t be more different. They emit different energies, seem to vibrate at different frequencies. Solange is the emo Cancerian who lunged at her brother-in-law in an elevator. Beyoncé, the preternaturally polished Virgo, clung to the corner and fixed her dress. Lately, I’ve been hung up on how they’re similar. I think it’s because, for people who’ve paid attention, it’s their differences that got drilled into us over the years. By the time Solange released her first record in December 2002, Beyoncé, with Destiny’s Child, had released four albums, earned three Grammy Awards, and was in the final recording sessions for her solo debut. Focusing on their differences was probably a strategic move dreamed up by their father, and, at the time, manager, Matthew Knowles, to maximize the commercial viability of the two artists. Yet, seventeen years later, in the spring of this year, both siblings released albums and accompanying films with musings on “home.”

The two projects are like fraternal twins—individually interesting, but fun and compelling to think about in relation. Both follow albums that were career highlights. Both build their foundations on rhythm, the voice, and vocal harmony. Both marry light and sound and knit their soundscapes into images. Both depend on the improvisational skill of a cohort of contributors. Beyoncé’s project, the live album companion to her Netflix documentary “Homecoming,” documented her two headlining sets at last year’s Coachella and layered the visuals and sonics of HBCU pageantry atop references to a specific, Southern emanation of blackness. Solange’s fifth studio album, When I Get Home, traveled the exact same terrain, but in a far-out, deconstructed way, with references to cosmic jazz and psychedelic R&B, black cowboys, undulating hips and mudras, and the skyscrapers and wide, green lawns of the sisters’ hometown.

It’s logical that if two people share a childhood home, they grow up to be into the same things. But it’s taken time — for us, as audiences, to widen our perspectives enough so that we can see, in the same frame, how they’re similar and how they’re not. It’s taken time for the two sisters to grow comfortable enough being themselves while publicly navigating the music industry as black women. To differentiate herself from her sister’s glamorous pop image, Solange initially emanated an alterna-vibe that resonated with those who may have liked Beyoncé, but felt hemmed in by her R&B fantasy, lead-girl-in-a-video perfection. While Bey rocked the trendy low-slung denim of the early aughts, went blonde, and mostly kept a huge mane of loose, blown out curls, Solange wore red box braids, and in her first video, a floor length patchwork skirt. She was the earthier sister, positioned in alignment with the diasporic neo soul scene of the late 90s. She had a baby, got married early, and lived with her young family, for a while, in Idaho. Then she sheared her long locks and quietly rented a brownstone in Carroll Gardens.


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We didn’t linger on or make much meaning from Solange’s time as a background dancer for her sister’s group, or how she’d replaced Kelly Rowland in the lineup for some tour dates when they opened for Christina Aguilera in 2000. But it did raise eyebrows when, during Solange’s Brooklyn years, Beyoncé began showing up at concerts of indie acts her sister put her on to.

Solange’s first album Solo Star covered a lot of musical ground, but didn’t make much of an impact commercially or otherwise. She was then 16. Between 2001 and early 2003, a number of female R&B vocalists made big Top 10 pop albums: Alicia Keys, Janet Jackson, Ameriie, Ashanti, Mya. Beyoncé’s 2003 debut (coupled with the rapid deterioration of the recording industry) seemed to flatten out the pop-R&B landscape like a grenade. Five years later, Solange released the Motown-influenced Sol-Angel and the Hadley Street Dreams, then left her label. She independently released the 2012 EP “True.” Its lead single “Losing You,” a buoyant breakup bop, was a breakthrough. A Seat at the Table, with spoken word interludes that include interviews with her parents about black history and family, came out in the fall of 2016. It was Solange’s first album to debut at number one on the Billboard 200. By then, Beyoncé was talking about her mama’s and daddy’s roots, too, most explicitly, on Lemonade, her sixth studio project as a solo artist, which, just five months before, earned the same chart placement.  

* * *

According to Billboard, besides the Knowles sisters, in the history of the chart there have been only two other pairs of sibling solo artists in which each sibling has earned a number one pop album: Master P and Silkk the Shocker during a run of releases in the late nineties, and Janet and Michael Jackson. The Jacksons’ older brother, Jermaine, The Braxton sisters, Toni and Tamar, and the Simpson sisters, Jessica and Ashlee, have all earned albums in the Top 10. But the only solo siblings to earn number ones during the same calendar year have been Janet and Michael, Solange and Beyoncé.

The two projects are like fraternal twins—individually interesting, but fun and compelling to think about in relation.

Michael famously got his start in a band of brothers, The Jackson Five. After signing to Motown in 1969, their first four singles — “I Want You Back”, “ABC”, “The Love You Save”, and “I’ll Be There” — all went to number one. Their father, Joseph Jackson, a former boxer and steelworker born in Arkansas, managed the band with reportedly horrid methods. Jackie, Tito, Jermaine, and Marlon all became capable musicians individually. But it was Janet, born eight years after Michael and too young to join her brothers’ band, who truly absorbed their ascent. She performed in the family’s variety show and TV sitcoms throughout the 70s, and beginning in the late 80s, released music that, arguably, approached Michael’s impact. Control, Rhythm Nation, Janet., and The Velvet Rope are gorgeous, singular statements that define pop-R&B and still sound alive.

Janet has earned more number one albums than Michael (seven to his six) and her singles have been in the Top 10 for more weeks than his (“That’s the Way Love Goes” was the longest running number one for either of them). For a while, the fiasco of Super Bowl 2004 derailed Janet’s career. She lost endorsement deals and had a long, marked decline in album sales. “Nipplegate” angered then CBS chairman Les Moonves so much that he’d reportedly ordered MTV and VH1 to stop playing her videos. Janet’s black fans always suspected something sinister at play. Last year, the New Yorker and New York Times published sexual assault allegations against Moonves, and his pattern of derailing women’s careers became public knowledge. Janet got inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame this past March, and while that’s somewhat palliative, it doesn’t give back the lost years, or acknowledge her sprawling, multi-medium contributions to entertainment. Still, her reputation hasn’t had the kind of epic blemishes Michael’s has, and our current ferment of empowered, black women singers owes everything to her.

Though they’re starting to, Solange and Beyoncé haven’t leaned all the way in to their shared origin in the way of Michael and Janet in the ”Scream” video, where their charisma and similar, long-limbed, open hip-jointed athleticism is foregrounded in nearly every frame. We got glimpses at Solange’s set at Coachella in 2014, when Bey joined in for a dance break, and its reprise in Bey’s sets, a highlight of the 2019 film. Solange has, like Janet, who sang backup on Thriller, been all over Beyoncé’s catalog. And while coverage of black pop has evolved from the 90s and early 2000s, when Janet got blackballed and Beyoncé and Solange seemed to represent poles on a restricted continuum of what a black woman in pop could be (the glamorous diva vs. the earthy bohemian), it still hasn’t gone far enough.

In Interview, Beyoncé asked her younger sister where she got her inspiration, and she answered,“For one, I got to have a lot of practice. Growing up in a household with a master class such as yourself definitely didn’t hurt.” She also namechecked Missy Elliot, who produced and provided vocals for some of Destiny’s Child’s finest tracks. In other words, she claimed her proximity to her older sister’s career, as nourishment, cultivation, as part of what undergirds her artistry. When Solange’s latest album launched, the NPR music critic Ann Powers made a playlist of its antecedents called the “mamas of Solange.” It included Alice Coltrane, Minnie Riperton, Tweet, Aaliyah, and TLC. It did not include Beyoncé or Destiny’s Child, contemporaries of some of the women who did make the list. Maybe it’s taken for granted? Stevie Wonder’s ambient album The Secret Life of Plants is brought up a lot in relation to When I Get Home, but The Writings on the Wall and Dangerously in Love are also important building blocks of the music Solange and most contemporary pop and R&B artists make. It feels incomplete to not say so. Similarly, when talking about Beyoncé, something’s missing when we don’t acknowledge how indebted she is to the cluster of women around her. Perhaps that’s leftover residue from the marketing machine of the late 90s and early aughts, too — an overemphasis on singularity.

* * *

When I Get Home’s interlude “S. MacGregor,” named after an avenue in Houston’s Third Ward, contains snippets of Phylicia Rashad and Debbie Allen performing a poem their mother, Vivian Ayers-Allen, wrote. Rashad and Allen make up another culturally significant sibling pair. There’s Fame!, The Cosby Show, and A Different World, but also the stage — Rashad is the first black woman to win a lead actress Tony, and Allen was nominated for Tony Awards for West Side Story and Sweet Charity.

Both sisters also had short-lived recording careers. Rashad released a tribute album to Josephine Baker in 1978 and an album of nursery rhymes in 1991. She memorably sang on multiple episodes of The Cosby Show. Allen released Special Look in 1989. It was a pop, dance-R&B concoction that sounds like a harder edged Paula Abdul, whose blockbuster Forever Your Girl had come out the year before. Today, Allen directs for TV and runs Los Angeles’ Debbie Allen Dance Academy, while Rashad directs for the stage.

Allen’s younger than Rashad by 2 years, and they have two older brothers: the jazz musician Andrew Arthur Allen, and Hugh Allen, a banker. Their parents’ nasty divorce in the mid-’80s got covered in Jet. I often wonder about the dynamics in high-intensity, high-achieving households like theirs. Some accounts say Solange felt neglected for parts of her childhood when her older sister’s group became the family business. The five-year age difference is too wide for straightforward competition, but not so for resentment. Some of my earliest memories are the legendary fights between my two older, high-achieving siblings. It still annoys me to think about how much time and energy their rivalry took up (and continues to take up) in our family. In an interview with Maria Shriver last year, Tina Knowles Lawson said she deliberately taught her daughters not to be intimidated by another woman’s shine and sent them to therapy early on to learn to protect and support each other. From the perspective of an outsider, it seems to have worked.

While coverage of black pop has evolved from the 90s and early 2000s, when Janet got blackballed and Beyoncé and Solange seemed to represent poles on a restricted continuum of what a black woman in pop could be, it still hasn’t gone far enough.

Family dynasties are neither new nor newly influential in pop. My mother adored the voice of Karen Carpenter, who’d gotten her start in a duo with her brother, Richard. The LPs of the Emotions, the Pointer Sisters, the Jones Girls, and Sister Sledge were in my  mother’s racks, too, — all vocal groups with at least one pair of siblings. The early years of rock and roll, the doo wop era, is full of crews of schoolmates, like the Chantels, the Marvelettes or the Supremes, or sibling groups like The Andrews Sisters, the Shangri-Las, and the Ronettes. Later, there’s DeBarge, the Emotions, The Sylvers, the Five Stairsteps, Wilson Phillips, the Winans, Ace of Base, Xscape, the Beach Boys, the Bee Gees, the Isley Brothers. Part of me wants to say it’s because of the genre’s origins in domestic spaces like the living room or the stoop, a refuge of creativity against the backdrop of chaotic 20th century urban life. Music education in schools provided training, as did the subtle rigor of the church, where troupes, quartets, and choirs led worship. When describing what’s special about “that sibling sound,” in 2014, Linda Ronstadt told the BBC: “The information of your DNA is carried in your voice, and you can get a sound [with family] that you never get with someone who’s not blood-related to you.” What a voice sounds like, in large part, depends on biology and anatomy—the shape of the head, chest, the construction of the sinus cavities. It makes sense that the sweetest, most seamless harmonizing could happen between people who share DNA. And as audiences, we like being witness to the chemistry of our performers. It can feel fun and somewhat uncanny to watch people who look a little bit alike sing and dance in formation.

None of this completely explains how much popular music has historically been “A Family Affair” (a number one in 1971 for Sly and the Family Stone, a group comprised of Sylvester Stewart and his siblings Freddie and Rose, with baby sister, Vaetta, in charge of the backing vocalists). Or how much, aside from the Jonas Brothers, the top 40 of the past few months is absent sibling groups, or, really, groups of any kind. Haim, the trio of sisters Este, Danielle, and Alana from the San Fernando Valley, had Top 10 albums in 2013 and 2017, and will co-headline this year’s Pitchfork’s festival with the Isley Brothers and Robyn. They sing in effortless three-part harmony, are aggressive on guitar, bass, and percussion, and write their own songs. A New York Times critic called them proudly “anachronistic,” because their sound is a throwback to earlier eras and bands like Fleetwood Mac and Destiny’s Child, whose Stevie Nicks-sampling “Bootylicious,” was the last pop number one from a girl group. In a 2011 piece for The Root, Akoto Ofori-Atta attributed the decline of vocal groups to, among other factors, reduced record label budgets and the “me-first” narcissism of social media. She also suggested the cyclical nature of music trends could mean that audiences will want to hear tight vocal harmonies again. I’d think that was impossible since digitization has meant that people don’t have to sing together anymore. But singing itself has gotten new life from young R&B artists like Ella Mai, Moses Sumney, and H.E.R., so who knows.

In 2015, Beyonce signed the sister duo Chloe+ Halle to her record label. She’d seen them on YouTube performing covers and accompanying themselves on keys in their living room.  The young women sing ethereal, soul-inflected harmonies, play multiple instruments and compose and produce their own music. They’re also actresses with recurring roles on “grown-ish.” Their first studio album The Kids are Alright released last year and earned the group two Grammy nominations. They performed at the ceremony, memorably, in the tribute to Donny Hathaway, and at the Grammy’s tribute to Motown, they performed the Marvelette’s “Please Mr. Postman,” Motown’s first number one. None of the singles from Chloe + Halle’s record have made much of a commercial impact or stuck with me yet, but, based on history, the incubation potential of the vocal group, the sibling group in particular, bodes well for longevity.

 

 

On “Art Heroes” and Letting Your Idols Be Human

Sarah Morris / Getty, Markus Schreiber / Invision / AP, Illustration by Homestead

Alex DiFrancesco | Longreads | May 15, 2019 | 8 minutes (2,099 words)

As I type this, the blackened letters tattooed on my hand flash across the keyboard. BAD SEED is inked down my middle finger. It can be read as juvenile; I’m sure it is by many. It’s one of my homage tattoos. I got it the day I signed a contract for my second novel, a few months after I had seen Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds in concert for the first time, after more than a decade of fandom and made the decision that I had to, uncompromisingly, unabashedly, dedicate my life to art. Nick Cave’s sprawling career is a testament to such dedication, from his baby post-punk days in the Boys Next Door and the Birthday Party, to his decades with the Bad Seeds. Cave’s music, which vacillates between the aggressively abrupt and the mournfully introspective, has carried me through some of the most intense periods of my life. It’s the kind of music that saves you, if you happen to be the sort of person that music can save. It gives you the ability to grit your teeth and spit on your enemies, or weep while walking down the street with your headphones, as needed. You can play it at a wedding or a funeral (though it’s not a big hit at karaoke); you can lull yourself to sleep with it, or wake up fighting to it. It would be easy for me to call Nick Cave one of my heroes.

But this essay isn’t really about Cave’s music, as important as it is to me. It’s about The Red Hand Files.

In September 2018, after the tragic death of his young son Arthur, after his mournful album Skeleton Tree, Cave started a newsletter intending to answer fan questions as honestly as he could. I was elated and a little terrified. The softer, gentler Cave of modern days, any long-term fan knows, is a newer development. Many of us vividly remember Cave’s brief and doomed “ask me anything” that happened on Twitter in 2013, when he responded to every question with condescension and barely contained rage. “What would you recommend for young musicians hoping to be as great as you, Nick Cave?” one fan asked in the experiment. “Lower your expectations,” you could practically hear Cave growl through the internet. What would we learn about the inner workings of my hero through these letters? Would it be a similar (hilarious, in character, and utterly beloved) disaster?

But the Cave of 2013 has been softened by grief, loss, and mourning — he spoke extensively in many interviews around his Skeleton Tree tour of feeling connected to the world around him — and his fans — in a way that he hadn’t before then. In the first edition of The Red Hand Files, he writes, “I kind of realized that work was the key to get back to my life, but I also realized that I was not alone in my grief and that many of you were, in one way or another, suffering your own sorrows, your own griefs. I felt this in our live performances. I felt very acutely that a sense of suffering was the connective tissue that held us all together.”

Cave’s musings on grief are, as they have always been, profound. The Red Hand Files, which usually arrive early in the morning, here in Eastern Standard Time, often feel like letters about all that make being human worthwhile to me — art, love, loss, tenderness, and introspection. I read them at 5 or 6 a.m., often reveling in the gift this artist is giving us all.

Except for when he’s not.

Because there have also been times when I’ve been so disappointed with Cave and the project that I wanted to unsubscribe.

We live in a cultural moment when many fans are (often understandably) “canceling” the work of many artists. In cases like Woody Allen and Harvey Weinstein, I think this urge is 100 percent justified. Those who commit crimes against others and use their star status to stay free of consequence are villainous. But the cultural moment we live in also seems to expect perfection from people, lest they be canceled as well. It seems to allow little room for people to fuck up, be messy, or be flat-out distasteful. Cave, in his letters, has proven himself imperfect, often frustrating, not, perhaps, the way people wish him to be. The Red Hand Files has been a lesson, for me, in the intricacies of fighting the urge to hit the buttons that, in the digital world, cut us off from someone else, delete them, disappear them, make them virtual ghosts whose traces we have to look for to find, rather than have delivered to us.

The Red Hand Files has been a lesson, for me, in the intricacies of fighting the urge to hit the buttons that, in the digital world, cut us off from someone else, delete them, disappear them, make them virtual ghosts whose traces we have to look for to find, rather than have delivered to us.

One of the most disappointing moments for me, as a Cave fan, came when he announced that he would play Israel on a recent tour, despite being urged not to by Brian Eno and many other artists promoting a cultural boycott of Israel. Cave’s response, publicized in a press conference on the issue, showed him to be things I found repulsive — arrogant, self-centered, an artist who could appear to claim that the deaths and torment of the Palestinian people were less important than Eno and company trying to “censor” artists like him. I was disgusted that someone I held in such high regard could be that blind to the issues facing the people of Palestine.

But, I learned through an early edition of The Red Hand Files, that was not the entire case. Cave provided nuance to the discussion in his December 2018 letter when a fan asked about his stance on Israel and the Brian Eno–supported cultural boycott. The Cave in this letter (and perhaps some of it has to do with being a man more comfortable at a typewriter than a press conference?) provided context that coverage of the issue had not. Cave was not quite as he’d been painted in a few broad strokes by the media. He said, in the response to his fan’s questions, “I do not support the current government in Israel, yet do not accept that my decision to play in the country is any kind of tacit support for that government’s policies. Nor do I condone the atrocities that you have described; nor am I ignorant of them. I am aware of the injustices suffered by the Palestinian population, and wish, with all people of good conscience, that their suffering is ended via a comprehensive and just solution.” I felt my own activist rage — I am a firm and longtime supporter of the Palestinian-lead Boycott, Divestments, and Sanctions [BDS] movement — soften as Cave described his nuanced feelings on the subject via the newsletter. Cave went on to express an ambivalence that had been utterly absent from the arrogant stance in press conferences: “Occasionally, I wonder if The Bad Seeds did the right thing in playing Israel. I cannot answer that question. I understand and accept the validity of many of the arguments that are presented to me.” I felt my anger lessen even more when he described Brian Eno as a force that had taught him to make music, a hero. Cave saying no to his hero, with obvious anguish and deep thought, reinforced what these letters were doing for me in terms of the allowances for our heroes not to replicate our own selves, our own ideals. In letting ourselves disagree with them, be upset with them, sometimes revile them, and still acknowledge that their place in our own patheon is enormous, regardless, is an act of understanding and allowing for nuance in a world that often feels black and white.

I certainly came close to reviling Cave when the letter about women, consent, and #MeToo appeared. “As to the recent ‘cultural sea changes’ affecting women,” Cave wrote, “I feel that they are in danger of eroding those bright edges of personhood, and grinding them down into monotonous identity politics — where some women have traded in their inherent wildness and sense of awe, for a one-size-fits-all protestation against a uniform concept of maleness which I’m not sure I recognize.”

As a lifelong feminist and a transgender person who believes that gender identity is of deep importance to understanding one another, I find it hard to explain how much this particular letter disgusted me. I felt like I was listening not to a hero who had once written a gorgeously vicious song about a woman who was gang-raped, then murdered all of her assailants, but someone’s curmudgeonly old grandfather who was holding forth about women in his day. I almost canceled my subscription to the newsletter. I seethed with rage. I talked to anyone who would listen about how disappointing it really is to see the inner workings of the people who make the art you love. But I hung on.

Ultimately, I’m glad I did. While Cave’s politics and views on gender may not be anywhere near what I wish to see coming from someone I’d consider a hero, there has frequently been reminders of the reasons I adored Cave to begin with. When he speaks of deeply human sentiments — love, loss, art, beauty — there are few who can parallel him. His own recent (and enormous) losses, have provided fodder for many of the more poignant essays. These things, as he has frequently said, are what tie humans together, and it has seemed to me from his music and now from these letters that he had somehow tapped into the epicenter of these human links.

A few months ago, my first love, who had been ill with multiple sclerosis for some time, passed away. I wasn’t quite ready for the enormity of the feelings I would experience around his passing. I kept thinking — this person I once loved, who was gone now — there were so many moments, long ago, that only the two of us had shared. I was the sole caretaker of those moments now. It seemed unfair to hoard them. I wrote a letter to his mother, attempting to share some of them. As I did, I pulled up Issue #6 of The Red Hand Files, in which a fan writes to Cave about losing many loved ones, and Cave writes back his awe-inspiring meditations on grief.

As I wrote the letter to my once-love’s mother, I added the line, from Cave’s letter, “It seems to me, that if we love, we grieve. That’s the deal. That’s the pact. Grief and love are forever intertwined. Grief is the terrible reminder of the depths of our love and, like love, grief is nonnegotiable.”

Becoming softer and more tender by watching that which you love show its cracks is an act of generosity and love in a world that seems to increasingly want to draw strict lines of perfection.

I come from a background staunch in its refusal to allow others slack. I came up as a militant anarchist and activist, I watched people excommunicated from social circles, artists “canceled” all through my formative years. I have gotten older since then, I have softened; I am not the proponent of the one-and-done approach to ideological difference this background might portend. Reading Cave’s series of letters has helped me soften further. I’ve developed the specific term “art-hero” to reflect my adoration of someone who’s work I can find no fault in, yet who is terrifyingly, mundanely human just the same. An “art-hero” is not the same as a hero, sweeping in, perfect, saving the day, sweeping out. An “art-hero” is human in all respects but the glorious works they create. An “art-hero” is perhaps tapped into the divine and inscrutable place that I romantically believe art comes from, but they breathe, they bleed, they are messy, and they are not all the things we wish they could be. The room I allow the creators of the works that move me has seeped into my personal life, as well, giving the people I love more room to fail, to fall, to fuck up. Becoming softer and more tender by watching that which you love show its cracks is an act of generosity and love in a world that seems to increasingly want to draw strict lines of perfection.

I’m talking about the prickly, the imperfect, the difficult. I’m talking about letting your heroes fall — and fail — and still hold the unique place in your heart where they were before they revealed themselves as all too human.

There is, in art and, I suspect, life, a richness in letting people be themselves, as flawed or different in ideology as that person may be. I’m not talking about forgiving the willfully hateful or obtuse (we must still draw lines). I’m talking about the prickly, the imperfect, the difficult. I’m talking about letting your heroes fall — and fail — and still hold the unique place in your heart where they were before they revealed themselves as all too human.

***

Alex DiFrancesco is a writer of fiction, creative nonfiction, and journalism who has published work in Tin House, The Washington Post, Pacific Standard, and more. Their first novel, an acid western, was published in 2015, and their essay collection Psychopomps (Civil Coping Mechanisms Press) and their second novel All City (Seven Stories Press), in 2019. Their storytelling has been featured at The Fringe Festival, Life of the Law, The Queens Book Festival, and The Heart podcast. DiFrancesco is currently an MFA candidate at Cleveland State University. They can be found @DiFantastico on Twitter.

Editor: Krista Stevens
Copy editor: Jacob Gross