Search Results for: Veterans

The Queering of the Baby Bells

Getty, Collage by Homestead Studio

Carlos A. Ball | an excerpt adapted from The Queering of Corporate America: How Big Business Went from LGBTQ Adversary to Ally | Beacon Press | 2019 |  23 minutes (6,272 words)

 

In the years following the Stonewall riots, LGBTQ rights supporters chose corporations as targets for activism. At the time, some corporations had explicit anti-LGBTQ policies and practices for everyone to see. In 1970, for example, a Los Angeles bank made clear in its job application forms that it would not hire alcoholics, drug users, or “homosexuals.” At around the same time, the Pacific Bell Telephone Company, the largest private employer in California, announced that it would not hire open “homosexuals,” because doing so would “disregard commonly accepted standards of conduct, morality, or life-styles.” Until 1978, the Coors Brewing Company routinely asked job applicants, while attached to lie detector machines, whether they had engaged in same-sex sexual conduct and denied them jobs if they had. (The company’s testers also inquired whether applicants were thieves or communists.)

One reason why post-Stonewall LGBTQ activism focused on large corporations was that the firms’ interests in promoting and protecting their brands made them particularly sensitive to the negative publicity that came with exposing discrimination. Large corporations spend millions of dollars every year developing and marketing their brands and are, as a result, highly sensitive to criticisms that might tarnish those brands. Interestingly, the need to protect corporate brands from negative publicity made companies more willing to change explicit anti-LGBTQ policies than government entities. Indeed, it was more likely, during the 1970s and into the 1980s, that a large corporation targeted by queer activists would cease explicitly discriminating against sexual minorities than, for example, a government agency would stop discriminating against queer people or, just as important, a state or local legislative body would adopt sexual orientation anti-discrimination laws. To enact such laws, queer activists had to persuade a majority of elected officials in a given jurisdiction to support adding sexual minorities to civil rights laws; outside of a few liberal municipalities, this was an extremely difficult task for the embryonic LGBTQ rights movement to accomplish in the years following Stonewall.

Additionally, the fact that corporate America had tens of thousands of LGBTQ employees (most of whom were, admittedly, firmly in the closet) made corporate workplaces obvious and natural targets of LGBTQ rights activism. Whether they knew it or not, corporate leaders and heterosexual co-employees were already working alongside sexual minorities and transgender individuals, in many cases developing the cooperative bonds, mutual trust, and even lasting friendships that the pursuit of common objectives, including corporate ones, frequently engenders. In this sense, LGBTQ individuals, as a group, were not outsiders and “strange others” to corporate America; instead, they were integral members of corporate workplaces. And many of them were likely to come out of the closet and share the joys and challenges of their personal lives with their fellow workers (as heterosexual employees did all the time) if they could be guaranteed a modicum of job security and protection against discrimination. Read more…

They Were Extortionists and the Calls Came from Inside the Prison

Razor wire protects a perimeter of the Lee Correctional Institution in Bishopville, South Carolina. (AP Photo/Sean Rayford)

Jared Johns, a former soldier and father of two, thought he was swapping text messages with a pretty girl from a dating site. After getting calls from a spoofed police number and texts from outraged “parents” wanting to press charges against him for allegedly communicating with an underage girl, Johns — despite the fact he had done nothing wrong — was terrified that any resulting legal troubles could prevent him from seeing his two young sons. As Vince Beiser reports at Wired, what Johns didn’t realize was that he was the victim of a scam that would cost him everything.

Jared could never have been prosecuted for propositioning Caroline, for the simple reason that she didn’t exist. The pretty teenage girl Jared thought he was flirting with was, according to charges later filed by local authorities, two thickset, middle-aged, male inmates working contraband cell phones. Jared, it turns out, was just one of hundreds of US military service members and veterans suckered by a massive wave of catfishing scams launched from South Carolina correctional facilities over the past few years.

In May, Greenville’s chief of police convened a press conference to announce they had cracked the case: They were charging Dobbins and Smith with the blackmail and extortion of Jared Johns. Those charges could get each of them an additional 10 years behind bars. In a video posted to Facebook later that day, Kathy said through tears, “He may have been holding the gun, but it feels like they were the ones who took his life.”

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Made in America

Longreads Pick

White House veterans helped a Gulf monarchy build a secret surveillance unit that was used to target human rights activists, journalists, and dissidents. It was called Project DREAD.

Source: Reuters
Published: Dec 10, 2019
Length: 22 minutes (5,500 words)

What Shattered My Mother’s Mind

Yaroslav Mikheev / Getty, Illustration by Homestead Studio

Winston Ross | Longreads | December 2019 | 21 minutes (5,290 words)

A week before Thanksgiving last year, I got a call from an officer with the Berkeley Police Department. As I’d suspected, it was about my mother.

My mom, who was 73, hadn’t lived in Berkeley for 28 years. In early November, she told a neighbor she was headed from her home in Springfield, Oregon, to California, to see some old friends. She’d be back, she said, in a year. A couple of days after that, she showed up in our old neighborhood in south Berkeley driving a white Toyota Prius inexplicably decorated with decals of children’s handprints. She then began walking casually into strangers’ homes and refusing to leave.

As the largest wildfire in California history drove tens of thousands of people from their homes and from the Golden State altogether in search of refuge from pernicious levels of smoke and ash choking the skies, my mother headed straight towards the inferno, her car loaded to its ceiling and her loyal dog, Bosley, at her side. And I was powerless to stop her.

When the cops called, I had a pretty good idea why. When the officer said she’d been sleeping in this strangely appointed Prius on the streets of my hometown, I wasn’t surprised. My mother had a home but refused to live in it, convinced I had bugged it as part of a nefarious plot I’d conceived to create a Truman Show out of her life. She traded in her three-year-old car for another one because she believed I’d somehow hacked and disabled her keys. She was homeless by her own making, or at least by the paranoid conspiracy that had overtaken her mind.

The root of this conspiracy is a syndrome as old as medicine. It is a condition an alarming number of health providers, psychiatrists and others who can both inflict and treat it know too little about. That condition is called post-operative delirium, and it afflicts as many as half of elderly patients who undergo surgery, or two million older Americans, each year. As measured in longer hospital stays and follow-up care in nursing homes, delirium’s estimated costs have reached more than $143 billion annually. When you consider that the country’s fastest growing population segment is people over 65, those numbers are certain to grow.

“We should anticipate we’ll see more of it. We’ve always had a problem,” Karin Neufeld, clinic director of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins Bayview in eastern Baltimore, told me. “My colleagues haven’t paid attention to it at all, for many, many years.”

As I learned last year, post-operative delirium can quickly plunge an otherwise normal person’s life into chaos.
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Why Lhasa de Sela Matters

Lionel FLUSIN/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images

Fred Goodman | Why Lhasa de Sela Matters | University of Texas Press | November 2019 | 27 minutes (5,471 words)

 

A sorceress of the soul, the multi-lingual singer Lhasa de Sela captivated music fanatics around the world with her spellbinding songs and other-worldly performances. Yet ten years after her tragic death from breast cancer in Montreal at 37, America’s first world music chanteuse remains largely and inexplicably unknown here, an under-the-radar icon in her own country. Why Lhasa de Sela Matters, her first biography, charts Lhasa’s road to musical maturity. —Fred Goodman

 

The slowest nights for bars and clubs come early in the week, which is why many clubs are closed on Mondays, leaving Tuesday as the lightest night of the week. As a result, Lhasa de Sela didn’t waitress on Tuesdays. Instead, she found local Montreal bars that would let her sing a set a cappella. Wearing a black dress and a long knit hat, she cut a figure that was both striking and subdued.

Working on assorted standards and the Billie Holiday songs she loved, Lhasa was primarily focused on two tasks: overcoming her own shyness and learning how to hold a listener’s attention. She had a ways to go.

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The Final Five Percent

Illustration by Glenn Harvey

Tim Requarth| Longreads | October 2019 | 27 minutes (6,723 words)

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

When the motorcycle accident dealt my brother’s brain an irreversible blow, he and his wife were living in their newly purchased farmhouse on the fringes of suburban Chicago. Conway* had been waiting to move out of the city’s inner-ring suburbs for years, and each morning on the forested property he woke up exuberant. Shortly after moving in, he built an extraordinary tree house some 60 feet in the air, spanning two trees, with sliding joists under the floor to accommodate sway and a hammock to lie in during sunsets. He loved riding his motorcycle, and before work he’d sometimes take his bike out for a spin on the open roads just a few miles away. His wife, Caroline, loved antiques, and the area was full of shops. They were in their 50s and living in a house they planned to grow old in together. Then, after dinner on a fall day in 2007, Conway hopped on his Harley Softail Classic to go buy ice cream and cigarettes. A drunk driver barreled into him. Conway’s left femur snapped and his skull struck the traffic-warmed asphalt, splattering blood all the way to the road’s shoulder. 

Conway’s body was battered, but the real threat, the injury warranting a helicopter ride to the closest hospital with a neurosurgeon on call, was a hemorrhage beneath the subarachnoid membrane, a thin sheath of triple-helixed collagen fibers intertwined with blood vessels that protects the brain’s private chemical harbor of cerebrospinal fluid from the open waters of the body’s blood. The sons of a doctor ourselves, my brother and I had heard stories about neurosurgeons called in at midnight, and those stories didn’t have happy endings.

In the weeks after the accident, I watched Conway wake, recognize familiar faces, and begin to walk. Some signs of progress were cause for celebration; other developments were more worrisome. He’d rarely ever raised his voice at Caroline, but now he called her a “worthless cunt” and a “bitch.” He was lewd to the nurses, exposing himself and laughing. When a speech therapist gently reminded him that she would return for another session later that afternoon, Conway retorted, “No you won’t, because I’ll be fucking you in my van outside!”

At first, the doctors assured us that this inappropriate behavior was a passing recovery phase of traumatic brain injury, or TBI. The lewd remarks eventually subsided, but his behavior took another ominous turn. “He always had a wild streak,” Caroline told me. It’s true that before the accident, Conway had loved flouting the rules. He’d cut across an empty park on his motorcycle to avoid traffic, or build a towering bonfire in his backyard for kicks. “But there was no violence,” she said. After the accident, Conway flew into rages so vicious the hospital staff put a cage over his bed to contain him. When he finally left the hospital, Conway attempted to return to his former life, but he struggled to run his business and pay the bills. He and Caroline’s marriage began to fray. Hopes for a full recovery waned, and eventually Conway’s neuropsychologist confirmed our fears that the personality change might be permanent. “He’s recovered 95 percent brain function,” she said, “But the final 5 percent, it might never return.” Read more…

Downsizing the American Black Middle Class

Illustration by Neil Webb

Bryce Covert | Longreads | September 2019 | 13 minutes (3,448 words)

Yvonne Renee Evans has been a nurse for more than 30 years, and she has spent most of them in the private sector. It was difficult to get ahead. “I put in multiple applications and never got a chance to advance,” she said. “The opportunities might be there, but I was always given a reason.” As a black woman, she wondered if it “could have been a racial issue.” But it was difficult to prove, even when people who had been there for less time or that she had even trained herself were promoted above her. And “they could remove you at any time,” she noted. Once when she managed operating room scheduling at a hospital with a young, white woman, the hospital decided it wanted to downsize the team to one person. Evans was the one removed from the role, demoted to a lower-level position with a pay cut. “I could have fought it, but it wasn’t worth it,” she said. “You pick your battles, and that wasn’t one I chose to pick.” 

But then, after retiring from two different private sector jobs, she took a position at the John D. Dingell Veterans Administration Medical Center in Detroit in 2008. She didn’t need the work — she could have gone into full retirement — but her husband is ex-Army, and she wanted to serve veterans. She quickly found out it was also a rewarding place to work — very different than what she’d encountered in private hospitals. “The advancement here was wonderful,” she said. “You could move up the professional ladder in leaps and bounds as long as you did the work, you had the credentials. You could get to higher levels than you could in the private sector.” 

She now runs a podiatry clinic. “Every year I get appreciation awards,” she noted. She’s also been awarded for being an exemplary employee at the VA. “I never would have gotten awarded like that in the private sector. Never.” The money doesn’t make her rich, she said, but it does allow her to save for retirement and help her grown children if they need it. “I am truly the middle class,” she said.

Evans wouldn’t have always found a welcoming workplace in the government. As late as the turn of the 20th century, letting black workers into the federal government was seen as “akin to bringing down the federal service,” explained Frederick W. Gooding, assistant professor of African American studies at Texas Christian University and author of American Dream Deferred. Under President Woodrow Wilson entire departments within the federal government were segregated, with literal barricades separating black and white workers in some agencies and extra bathrooms installed so they wouldn’t have to share the same facilities. But then World War II hit. The government needed a lot more employees — both for the war effort and to staff up President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s vast expansion of the government. “Because there’s all these new positions, managers can hire people of color without displacing white workers,” said Jennifer Laird, assistant professor of sociology at Lehman College. By the 1960s, that expansion “gave African American workers a foothold in the public sector.” Black people were fleeing “vitriolic racism in the private sector,” Gooding noted. But the racism they once found in public employment was mediated by need. “It’s not because the federal government woke up one day and said, ‘I’m feeling quite altruistic, let’s give blacks opportunities,’” Gooding said. “They needed bodies, it’s simply a supply and demand equation.”

The Great Migration helped take care of the supply. As black families moved en masse from rural Southern areas to urban cities in the North, they found employment with the federal and local governments when they arrived. That movement from the private sector to the public sector built a black middle class across the country, one that to this day is sustained in large part by public sector employment like the job Evans was able to secure at the VA. Those gains, however, are tenuous, and they are particularly threatened as President Trump and his fellow Republicans strive to severely reduce the size of the federal government.  Read more…

Flagrant Foul: Benching Teen Moms Before Title IX

Illustration by J.O. Applegate

Britni de la Cretaz | Longreads | August 2019 | 27 minutes (6,922 words)

Before the pregnancy, before the ineligibility, and before the lawsuit, Jane Christoffer was one of the best basketball players in the basketball-loving state of Iowa. As a freshman in 1968–69 at Ruthven Consolidated High School, a school of just 106 students located in northwest Iowa, the 5-foot-11 Christoffer averaged 35 points per game, leading Ruthven to the state tournament for the first time in more than a decade. She upped her scoring average the next season to 47 points, and was named third team all-state, which prompted Richard Barber, her coach at Ruthven, to say, “Jane’s as good a player as we’ve had in the 20 years I’ve been here.” Read more…

Nashville contra Jaws, 1975

Paramount Pictures, Universal Pictures, Illustration by Homestead

J. Hoberman | An excerpt adapted from Make My Day: Movie Culture in the Age of Reagan | The New Press | July 2019 | 30 minutes (8,492 words)

June 1975, six weeks after Time magazine headlined the Fall of Saigon as “The Anatomy of a Debacle” and wondered “How Should Americans Feel?,” brought two antithetical yet analogous movies: Robert Altman’s Nashville and Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. Each in its way brilliantly modified the cycle of “disaster” films that had appeared during Richard Nixon’s second term and were now, at the nadir of the nation’s self­-esteem, paralleled by the spectacular collapse of South Vietnam and the unprecedented Watergate drama.

In fact, in their time, Jaws and Nashville were regarded as Watergate films and, indeed, both were in production as the Watergate disaster played its final act in the summer of 1974. On May 2, three days after Richard Nixon had gone on TV to announce that he was turning over transcripts of forty-­two White House tapes subpoenaed by the House Judiciary Committee, the Jaws shoot opened on Martha’s Vineyard with a mainly male, no-­star cast. The star was the shark or, rather, the three mechanical sharks — one for each profile and another for stunt work — that, run by pneumatic engines and launched by a sixty-­five­-foot catapult, were created by Robert Mattey, the former Disney special effects expert who had designed the submarine and giant squid for the 1956 hit Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.

Brought to Martha’s Vineyard in pieces and cloaked in secrecy, Mattey’s sharks took longer than expected to become fully operational, and Jaws was further delayed by poor weather conditions. Accounts of the production routinely refer to the movie itself as a catastrophe only barely avoided: “All over the picture shows signs of going down, like the Titanic.”

In late June, a month when Jaws was still unable to shoot any water scenes, and while Nixon visited the Middle East and Soviet Union in a hapless attempt to, as the president wrote in his diary, “put the whole Watergate business into perspective,” Altman’s cast and crew arrived in the city of Nashville. They were all put up at the same motel, with everyone expected to stick around for the entire ten­-week shoot.

There is a sense in which Nashville represented a last bit of Sixties utopianism — the idea that a bunch of talented people might just hang out together in a colorful environment and, almost spontaneously, generate a movie. Even by Altman’s previous standards, Nashville seemed a free­form composition. It surely helped that neophyte producer Jerry Weintraub’s previous experience lay in managing tours, for Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley among others, and packaging TV specials. Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Attorney Alan Dershowitz speaks during an interview on May 18, 2010 in Jerusalem, Israel. (Photo by Lior Mizrahi/Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Connie Bruck, the San Francisco Chronicle Staff, Justin Heckert, Kent Babb, and Rob Harvilla.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox. Read more…