Search Results for: Tin House

Bending the Straight Line of Queer History

 

Manuel Betancourt | Longreads | March 2018 | 8 minutes (2,170 words)

 

Confronted by a historical record that mostly excludes and often disparages them, queer communities have long been forced to write their own histories — or, more often, to scrub them clean. After all, such histories can be dangerous to write, and the act of memorializing can sometimes feel like just another burden to bear.

In Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History, Heather Love warns against this, writing that “given the new opportunities available to some gays and lesbians, the temptation to forget — to forget the outrages and humiliations of gay and lesbian history and to ignore the ongoing suffering of those not borne up by the rising tide of gay normalization — is stronger than ever.”

Three recent novels, all of them decades-spanning narratives centered on LGBTQ characters, are attempts to connect recent queer history with contemporary gay life. Alan Hollinghurst’s The Sparsholt Affair, John Boyne’s The Heart’s Invisible Furies, and Tim Murphy’s Christodora are each expansive visions of post-war queer life. Set in London, Dublin, and New York City respectively, they tell stories about men and women living in the decades before and after gay liberation, through the AIDS crisis, and into the present. They depict everything from restroom cruising encounters and gay conversion therapy appointments to ACT UP meetings and late-night Grindr hookups. And they ask us to consider how past traumas haunt the 21st century.
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“We All Had the Same Acid Flashback at the Same Time”: The New American Cuisine

Getty / 123RF images, Composite by Katie Kosma

Andrew Friedman | Excerpt adapted from Chefs, Drugs, and Rock & Roll: How Food Lovers, Free Spirits, Misfits and Wanderers Created a New American Profession | Ecco | February 2018 | 17 minutes (4,560 words)

* * *

He spent his last pennies on brown rice and vegetables, cooking them for strangers who shuttled him around. Just in time, people started feeding him.

You could begin this story in any number of places, so why not in the back of a dinged-up VW van parked on a Moroccan camping beach, a commune of tents and makeshift domiciles? It’s Christmas 1972. Inside the van is Bruce Marder, an American college dropout. He’s a Los Angelino, a hippy, and he looks the part: Vagabonding for six months has left him scrawny and dead broke. His jeans are stitched together, hanging on for dear life. Oh, and this being Christmas, somebody has gifted him some LSD, and he’s tripping.

The van belongs to a couple — French woman, Dutch man — who have taken him in. It boasts a curious feature: a built-in kitchen. It’s not much, just a set of burners and a drawer stocked with mustard and cornichons. But they make magic there. The couple has adventured as far as India, amassing recipes instead of Polaroids, sharing memories with new friends through food. To Marder, raised in the Eisenhower era on processed, industrialized grub, each dish is a revelation. When the lid comes off a tagine, he inhales the steam redolent of an exotic and unfamiliar herb: cilantro. The same with curry, also unknown to him before the van.

Like a lot of his contemporaries, Marder fled the United States. “People wanted to get away,” he says. Away from the Vietnam War. Away from home and the divorce epidemic. The greater world beckoned, the kaleidoscopic, tambourine-backed utopia promised by invading British rockers and spiritual sideshows like the Maharishi. The price of admission was cheap: For a few hundred bucks on a no-frills carrier such as Icelandic Airlines — nicknamed “the Hippie Airline” and “Hippie Express” — you could be strolling Piccadilly Circus or the Champs-Élysées, your life stuffed into a backpack, your Eurail Pass a ticket to ride.

Marder flew to London alone, with $800 and a leather jacket to his name, and improvised, crashing in parks and on any friendly sofa and — if he couldn’t score any of that — splurging on a hostel. He let himself go, smoking ungodly amounts of pot, growing his hair out to shoulder length. In crowds, he sensed kindred spirits, young creatures of the road, mostly from Spain and Finland. Few Americans.

Food, unexpectedly, dominated life overseas. Delicious, simple food that awakened his senses and imagination. Amsterdam brought him his first french fries with mayonnaise: an epiphany. The souks (markets) of Marrakech, with their food stalls and communal seating, haunt him. Within five months, he landed on that camping beach, in Agadir, still a wasteland after an earthquake twelve years prior. He lived on his wits: Back home, he’d become fluent in hippy cuisine; now he spent his last pennies on brown rice and vegetables, cooking them for strangers who shuttled him around. Just in time, people started feeding him, like the couple in whose van he was nesting. Food was as much a part of life on the beach as volleyball and marijuana. People cooked for each other, spinning the yarns behind the meals — where they’d picked them up and what they meant in their native habitats. Some campers developed specializations, like the tent that baked cakes over an open burner. Often meals were improvised: You’d go to town, buy a pail, fill it with a chicken, maybe some yogurt, or some vegetables and spices, and figure out what to do with it when you got back.

Marder might as well have been on another planet. “This was so un-American at that time,” he says.
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Who Does She Think She Is?

Illustration from an 1883 journal, via Getty.

Laurie Penny | Longreads | March 2018 | 23 minutes (5,933 words)

 

Another day at the Telegraph and another attack on Laurie Penny.
— Nick Cohen, The Spectator, 2011

Do you think that red hair and makeup is used for anything other than attention? Her writing? Same. That bitch is a whore who needs to die choking on cocks.
— 4chan, 2016

I think that nice Laurie Penny over at the New Statesman must actually be a conservative mole dedicated to undermining leftism from within.
— Alex Massie, also at The Spectator, 2013

Hang this clown. Hang Laurie Penny.
— Urban75 (British left-wing forum), 2011

Now I don’t want to make light of her depression, but she has probably brought this on herself.
Desert Sun, “We Need to Talk about Laurie Penny,” September 2017

* * *

It’s a clammy summer night. You’re 24, and you call a suicide hotline.

The nice lady who answers is probably in her seventies. She is very understanding as you explain to her that hundreds of people, thousands of strangers, are saying awful things about you, that some of them seem to really want to hurt you. You don’t know why. You’re just a writer, and you didn’t expect this. But some of them tell you in detail their fantasies of your rape and murder.

The nice lady is very sweet as she asks you if these voices ever tell you to do things. Yes, they tell you to stop writing. You inform the nice lady about this in a creepy whisper because your family is sleeping nearby and you don’t want to wake or worry them. These strangers tell you you don’t deserve to live, let alone have a newspaper column. Do they tell you to hurt yourself? Yes, every day.

The nice lady tells you to hold the line, because if it’s alright, she’s going to transfer you to one of her colleagues with specialist training.

No, wait, you say. You’re not hearing voices. You’re not delusional.  The nice lady can Google you. This is really happening.

* * *

The internet hates women. Everyone knows that by now, and nobody precisely approves, but we’ve reached a point of collective tolerance. It’s just the way of the world, and if you can’t handle it, honey, delete your account. Stop engaging online. Cut yourself off from friends, family, and professional contacts, shut down your business, blow up your social capital, stop learning, stop talking, just stop. Or else.

The U.N. Broadband Commission tells us that one in five young women has been sexually harassed online. Amnesty International’s latest report suggested that over three-quarters of women and girls expected violence and abuse if they expressed an opinion online. “Online” is the least significant word in those sentences. I have been asked enough times if “the internet is bad for women.” And yes, there is reason enough to warn your daughter, your partner, your friend to watch out for herself online, to think twice before “putting herself out there.” You’d warn her in much the same way that you might warn her not to walk through town alone at night, not to wear a short skirt, not to let her guard down, not to relax, ever. And the message is the same: The future, like the past, is not for you. You may visit, but only if you behave.

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Uncomfortable Silences: A Walk in Myanmar

Myanmar, photo courtesy the author

David Fettling | Longreads | March 2018 | 19 minutes (5,019 words)

Now what I remember most about him is what he said about the Rohingya: that they were troublemakers, not really citizens of his country, undeserving of sympathy, that he hated them. He had said it standing under a banyan tree, and I had noticed, again, his dress: he was wearing a longyi, a Burmese sarong, and with it, new-looking, Western hiking boots. His longyi’s knot was tied impeccably. His boots appeared to me to not quite fit him.

But I spent three days and walked 50 kilometers with him before he said this. Through a trekking agency I’d arranged to meet him in Kalaw, in hill-country in central Myanmar, and took an overnight bus there from Yangon. The bus was ultra-modern, air-conditioned, and near-empty. Arriving at dawn, I disembarked into cold air and a fog that obscured the tops of pine trees. I found the café where we were to meet, ordered a tea. Every few minutes a man sidled up to me and asked if I needed a guide. When I said I had one already they looked not merely disappointed but resentful; slinking away, I saw them lingering on the café’s margins.

This was a year ago, so Myanmar was still in-vogue: after decades of oppressive military government and isolation internationally, it had begun to ‘open’ and appeared to be moving toward democratization. A perception of the country as a dramatic ‘good-news story’ — a newly-liberated populace, pursuing long-denied opportunities — was drawing increasing international interest. I badly wanted to see Myanmar and Kalaw through this lens; but those sullen, hands-in-pockets-would-be-guides kept straying into my field of vision.

He arrived fifteen minutes late. He looked extremely young: early twenties, I guessed. He introduced himself as Thomas — I blinked, asked him to repeat it. Thomas was at once exuberantly friendly and palpably nervous: as he met me he profusely apologized. “I’m sorry, sir” — I never got him to stop calling me sir — “I am running late. I still have to get some things from the supermarket. I am running late, I am sorry. I think maybe you will write this on TripAdvisor.” I told him it was no problem, and we walked two streets over, not to a supermarket but to a small, dowdy grocery store. Thomas disappeared; I waited outside. Next-door was an internet café. Young men played computer games, their faces near-expressionless. The fog was clearing to a powder-blue sky, yet I felt a sense of anti-climax: this, apparently, was Myanmar’s transformation in actuality. Thomas reappeared; walking quickly, he continued to apologize. “I am sorry about this,” he said, into the chilly blue morning. “I am sorry about this.”
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Area Man Knows All About Fake News

Bodybuilder reading the Paper Upside Down
Harold W Nall Jr / Getty Images

Funny fake news is fake. But what’s news?

When readers are unfamiliar with the old-school characters and local news stories that satirical newspapers send up, humor sites that specialize in fake news headlines aren’t reading as funny. Now social media algorithms are treating them like any other fake news source and throttling their traffic.

In “Dying Laughing” at The RingerAlison Herman and Victor Luckerson examine how fake news crackdowns are hurting satirical news sites, along with so many lost points of shared reference that make their humor work:

For The Onion in particular, divorcing an article from its context can prove troublesome. The outlet began as a satirical newspaper, and still hews to the stylistic conventions of old-school journalism as a mainstay of its dry, faux-factual house style. In an era when fewer people than ever read newspapers, that’s a problem. “The reference point is becoming lost for some people,” Nackers acknowledges.

And in an era when fewer people are aware of a site as a persona rather than the other side of the occasional Facebook link, decades-long in jokes can get lost, too. “We’ve been doing Area Man stuff for the entire existence of The Onion,” Nackers observes, but recently he’s encountered more and more readers who don’t understand that the banality of The Onion’s observational humor is the point — probably because they’re not regular readers. “It’s the classic local news story, but instead of it being about something more important, it’s just about some mundane thing in life that happens. Some people get it, but the other half is like, ‘So they’re just doing real articles now?’”

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The Death Row Book Club

AP Photo/Seth Perlman, File

Anthony Ray Hinton | The Sun Does Shine | St. Martin’s Press | March 2018 | 14 minutes (3,745 words)

The books were a big deal. Nobody had books on death row. They had never been allowed, and it was like someone had brought in contraband. Only six guys were allowed to join me in book club, but every guy on the row was now allowed to have two books besides the Bible in his cell. Some didn’t care, but others made calls out to family and friends to let them know they could send in a book or two. It had to be a brand-new book and be sent directly from a bookstore to the prison. It was like a whole new world opened up, and guys started talking about what books they liked. Some guys didn’t know how to read, others were real slow, almost childlike, and had never been to school beyond a few grades. Those guys didn’t know why they were on death row, and I wondered about a world that would just as soon execute a guy as treat him in a hospital or admit he wasn’t mentally capable of knowing right from wrong.

The very first book club meeting consisted of Jesse Morrison, Victor Kennedy, Larry Heath, Brian Baldwin, Ed Horsley, Henry, and myself. We were allowed to meet in the law library, but we each had to sit at a different table. We couldn’t get up. In order to talk to everyone at once, you had to kind of swivel around in your seat so no one felt left out. If someone wanted to read something out of the book, we had to toss the book to each other and hope that the guy caught it or it landed in reach of someone because we weren’t allowed to lift our butts up off the seats. The guards seemed nervous when they walked us to the library. We weren’t planning a riot or an escape; we were five black guys and two white guys talking about a James Baldwin book. Perfectly normal. Nothing to see here. Read more…

Growing Up Around Funeral Homes Didn’t Prepare Me for Death

Jodie Briggs | Longreads | March 2018 | 16 minutes (3,925 words)

I have never been afraid of dead bodies. Their frequent appearance in my family’s funeral home quickly normalized the sight of motionless limbs in elegant steel caskets. We were the lone proprietors of death in my childhood home of Denton, North Carolina, and my familiarity with the end of life led me to assume a certain ease with mortality. Or so I thought.

***

Every day after school, I walked to the funeral home with my older brother. My grandmother, who was 79 when I was born, lived in the apartment above the business with her two sisters, and our octogenarian babysitters delighted in feeding us Little Debbie Zebra Cakes and teaching us to play card games. When my brother got too old to play, I began slipping downstairs to practice my dance routines in the empty layout rooms.

The funeral home meant everything to my dad, who had grown up poor in an even more rural town 15 miles from Denton. Raised in a house that lacked indoor plumbing and forced to use an outhouse until he was in high school, my dad vowed to make something of himself. He tore a ruthless path through his teen years, raising hogs for slaughter for family income, risking teen ridicule by driving the school bus for a small stipend, and eventually making it through college and working his way up in the funeral business from summer intern to owner.

Our life ran on death. The entire family was recruited into the business even at tender ages. I was 8 or 9 when my dad asked me to catch the phones while he stepped out. He assured me that we probably wouldn’t get a death call but that if we did I only needed to take down the name of the dead, the phone number, and the next of kin. So, naturally, that’s exactly what happened, except that I got nervous and told them to call back.

As teens, my brother and I worked in the funeral home answering the phone, moving flowers, sneakily reading books (me) and washing cars, picking up bodies from the morgue, and observing embalmings (my brother). Two decades into her school-teaching career, my mom also joined the business. But no one could outwork my dad, who prided himself on working up to 12 hours per day, seven days per week, well into his 70s.

While my brother joined my parents in the business after college, I was eager to leave our town of 1,100 and eventually settled in New York, where I reveled in the anonymity, the public transportation, and the seemingly endless array of bookstores. But I was close to my family and visited often. Each visit brought the same barrage of questions from my parents’ friends, funeral home employees, and, usually, whoever was sitting in the neighboring booth at lunch: Was I married? (No.) Did I really feel safe living in New York? (Yes.) And wasn’t I glad to be out of the city for a few days? (Um, no. That’s why I lived there.)

We were the lone proprietors of death in my childhood home of Denton, North Carolina, and my familiarity with the end of life led me to assume a certain ease with mortality.

The shape of my visits depended on how busy the funeral home was. Dinner plans were contingent upon whether or not local characters like Flossie McDowell, a frequent funeral home visitor, made it through the night. I’d often wait around the funeral home until my dad felt content to leave. “Who’s on call?” he’d shout to the entire office, although he likely knew the answer. The employees rotated being the designated remover of bodies that died in the night. My brother had sometimes gone with my dad on these calls of duty when we were kids but I never joined in.

“Your daddy’s getting mighty old to clock in all these hours, ain’t he?” someone would inevitably say with a wink toward me and a nod toward my dad. Dad might let a good-natured curse word slip as he jumped into the air and, even in his late 70s, click his heels together before landing with a laugh.
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Are The Teens All Right?

Matt Deitsch and Ryan Deitsch, students from Parkland, FL's Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, are pictured during a panel held to discuss changing the conversation on guns at the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum at Harvard University's Institute for Politics in Cambridge, MA on March 20, 2018. (Photo by Barry Chin/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)

Danielle Tcholakian | Longreads | March 2018 | 14 minutes (3,629 words)

Over the past several weeks, many of us have been familiar with the voices and faces of the students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, the school in Parkland, Florida, where 17 people were murdered on February 14. The students appeared to quickly shunt away their grief, giving adults across the U.S. a schooling on effective activism, taking to Twitter and effectively employing media outlets to push for policy change so that other teenagers won’t have to experience the terror they did.

In turn, many of the adults that other adults have elected to positions of power — adults we apparently decided were such worthy and good decision-makers that we would pay their salary out of our own pockets — have shown us what very small people they are, and how terribly unqualified they are to be people in the public eye, let alone leaders.

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This Is How They Saved Me

Getty / Photo courtesy the author / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Neda Semnani | Longreads | March 2018 | 20 minutes (4,986 words)

August 8, 1982. It was nearly five in the morning when my uncle Kavoos woke up my six-year-old cousin Laleh to say goodbye. He left her his calligraphy pen and asked her to keep it safe for him until he could come back for it. She nodded sleepily and promised that she would. She kissed him before falling back to sleep. In the other room, my mother, aunts, and uncles were gathering the last of our belongings and arranging them in the trunk of the car, while Laleh’s older brother, my cousin, Asef, wailed.

Why can’t I come? he asked, tears streaming down his face. At eight years old, he knew a long road trip meant picnics, and picnics meant freshly grilled kabobs.

I want to come too! he screamed, inconsolable. I want to kabob!

For goodness sake, his mother said. No one is going to eat kabob without you.

***

When my father’s eldest brother first contacted the smugglers to get us out of Iran, they promised we would make the journey to Turkey by car. It would be a long trip, but a relatively simple and straightforward one: an eight-hour drive from Tehran to Tabriz, a city in the north near the Turkish border. From there, a five- or six-hour drive by Jeep or Land Rover to the border. Once at the border, another car would pick us up and we’d drive three hours to Van, a border city in Turkey.

My mother was seven months pregnant and worried that the car rides would be dangerous. She wouldn’t agree to the plan until her doctor assured her that, as long as she took breaks whenever possible, both she and the baby would be fine. If the pressure in her legs became too painful, he prescribed Valium to help relax her muscles. My mother’s fears assuaged, she agreed that she and I would leave the country. My mother then convinced my father’s father to send his youngest daughter, Astefe, over the border with us. She promised him that she would be safe with us. She told my father’s youngest brother, Kavoos, he must come too. His place, my mother insisted, was with his wife and daughter, not waiting for the Revolutionary Guards to find him.

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With a Rent-Stabilized Lease, Finding the Line Between Luck and a Life Sentence

East 13th Street in New York (AP Photo/Ed Bailey)

Eryn Loeb | Longreads | March 2018 | 16 minutes (3,988 words)

 

The whole reason I had the rent-stabilized apartment on East 13th Street was because my aunt lived in it before me. Leslie first rented the place in 1981, when she was 23, for $345 a month. In the early ’90s she left and moved to Seattle, but kept the lease in her name. When I was looking for a place to land after college, she was quick to kick out a random subletter and turn the place over to me. The subletter, a tiny Japanese woman who was running an illicit hair salon out of the kitchen, had staple-gunned bed sheets up throughout the place as makeshift room dividers. The effect, when I first came to check out the place and negotiate her exit, was a kind of diaphanous claustrophobia.

The apartment was a dingy, naturally repellent kind of place that set me on edge even as it sucked me in. But it didn’t even occur to me not to seize on it: Here was a place in New York that could be mine, alone. All of a sudden I was one of those lucky people who inherit something that’s otherwise impossible to get, and have an easier life because of it. (That last part, though, didn’t strike me at the time.) I was 22 when I lugged my boxes in on a stormy-sticky July day in 2004. The rent by then was $775.

It was a railroad apartment, somewhere around 300 square feet — a long, awkward space, cave-like and crooked, in a deep funk of cracking and peeling and generally breaking down. Horizontal surfaces sloped dramatically; all the furniture on the west wall had to be propped on blocks to keep it from toppling over. The light fixture in the tiny, sink-less bathroom was half-detached from the ceiling in a way that might have seemed dangerous if I thought about it seriously. Early on I chipped some paint off the bathroom door, exposing cross-sections of something like a dozen layers of paint beneath the most recent coat: turquoises and taupes alternating with the layers of white that signaled periodic fresh starts.

The kitchen floor — cloudy, black, sticky linoleum tiles Leslie told me she had laid over plywood some 20 years ago — was coming up in patches, ragged chunks of it breaking off and clinging to my bare feet. The only sink was in the kitchen, and so it was the site not only of always overdue dishwashing but also of twice daily toothbrushing. I paced as I brushed, returning to the wobbly sink cabinet to spit mouthfuls of spent paste without regard for any plates and utensils blocking the way of the drain. A heel-sized hole formed in a spot right in front of the sink, exposing an archaeology of the floor: layers of wood and particle board and laminate laid down and covered over and then covered over again.

The whole building was like that, a place of pilings on, of covering up, of semi-smoothing over, of barely acceptable surfaces coming undone. Five stories that were safe in the ways that mattered, and sketchy enough to confer some cred. Along the narrow stairways the walls were covered with proof of comings and goings, arced scuffs and deep abrasions from thousands of oversized objects being dragged up and down, in and out.

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