Search Results for: Washington Post

The Racist and Sexist T-Shirts of an Inauguration

The StrangerLongreads has teamed up with The Stranger’s Sydney Brownstone and Heidi Groover, along with photographer Nate Gowdy, to cover the presidential inauguration and protests. Below, the latest dispatch from Brownstone in D.C.

***

Donald Trump has just been sworn in as the 45th president of the United States. I’m sitting at a Bolt Burger in Washington, D.C., watching the inauguration ceremony post-mortem play on several flatscreen TVs. A friend is sitting across from me. Her eyes are wide and wet. We have no words.

Last night I watched Trump signs burn at a protest outside the National Press Club, where leaders of the alt-right, a loose conglomeration of people who seek to make racism, xenophobia, and misogyny cool and current, were attending something called the Deploraball. Several hundred protesters were outside the event waving antifascist signs. One protester, a young white man in a black bandana, elbowed his way past me and said, “It was better when there were less media people here.” He didn’t speak for every protester, but I couldn’t help but think that the people attending the Deploraball might agree with him.

Earlier in the evening, Heidi Groover and I wandered down the National Mall, where Trump supporters were listening to Toby Keith. The walk between the Capitol Building and the Lincoln Memorial was dotted with enormous screens echoing Fox News’ Trumpian propaganda. I stopped to bum a cigarette from a guy who was having an argument about feminism with a protester who was broadcasting the interaction on Facebook Live. This man told me that 70 percent of domestic violence attacks are perpetrated by women against men. I asked him for his source. He showed me something called “Newscastmedia.com,” and I told him that wasn’t credible. When the man asked for my sources on rape and domestic violence, I e-mailed him three reports from the CDC, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, and the DOJ’s Violence Against Women Survey. He told me he would read them later, then told me that more women are at risk of being raped because they are not strong enough to fight off men.

Later that night I threw on a dress and a blazer and attended a Young Republicans MAGA ball at Ultrabar. Wealthy young people in ball gowns sipped cocktails and rubbed their bodies against one another. The DJ played Beyoncé. An ambitious 21-year-old told me I was cute. I told him I was a reporter. Trump wasn’t his first choice, he said, but he thought America should give him a chance. I went outside to go bum another cigarette. I got one from a young man with a fashy haircut and an interesting pin showing a “Y” inside an inverted triangle. When I Googled this image later, I found out that it was called the “Dragon’s Eye,” an ancient Germanic symbol depicting the battle between good and evil.

Outside the Bolt Burger, I can hear a group of roughly 50 protesters being arrested, one by one, after being kettled into a street corner by dozens upon dozens of officers of the Metropolitan Police Department. Tear gas has been used, and the protest is growing. When I last saw them, they were holding up a sign that read, “Make Racists Afraid Again.”

But the racists are not afraid in DC this week. At Trump’s Tody Keith concert, one man wore a t-shirt reading “Blacks Make Racial Slurs & Commit Hate Crimes Too!!” The misogynists are not afraid, either. They are buying leftover RNC kitsch that reads “Trump That Bitch!” and plowing through crowds of young queer kids protesting outside security checkpoints. These people are the ones in power now.

A Resolute 2017: A Reading List

Photo: Kevin Cole

In 2016, I published my New Year’s resolutions on Longreads. As 2017 dawns, I thought I’d check in with my old self, dust off 2016’s goals and set some new intentions.

1. Alas, I never did make it to Iceland, but I did a lot of domestic travel in 2016. In Washington State, I touched the Pacific Ocean for the first time and slept on a sailboat. In Asheville, I got a new tattoo and swooned inside Firestorm Books & Cafe. I saw friends and family marry in Richmond and Chautauqua. I saw Deaf West perform Spring Awakening and the one-weekend revival of God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater in NYC. I even visited Foamhenge! (That’s me in the photo above.) I’m returning to Asheville in 2017; beyond that, I have no concrete travel plans. Feel free to sponsor me on a trip to the ends of the Earth and back! I’ll write about it! For now, I’m seeing the world via the following essays from 2016:

Read more…

Longreads Best of 2016: Political Analysis

We asked a few writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here, the best in political analysis.

* * *

Kiese Laymon
A Professor of English and Creative Writing at University of Mississippi, and author of forthcoming memoir, Heavy.

The Trouble With the Liberal Arguments Against Third-Party Voters—and What to Do About It (Josie Duffy Rice, The Daily Kos)

I got tired of reading about Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in 2016, especially when most pieces could be lumped in the For or Against piles. But Josie Duffy consistently managed to make me think and feel not just what I hadn’t thought or felt, but what I tried to avoid thinking and feeling. Her piece, “The Trouble With Liberal Argument Against 3rd Party Candidates …” is amazing in its scope. Josie is easily one of the most amazing young long-form essayists in the country. In between evocatively presenting autobiography and political analysis, she dropped three sentences that made music out of American Presidential noise. “Listen,” she wrote, “I am a firm believer that in a country like America you should vote for your opponent. Who do you want to fight against for the next eight years? Who do you want to push left?” The piece, like most of Josie’s writing, welcomes us in, cares for us and asks everything of us when we leave. I can’t share this piece enough. Read more…

Unprepared: The Difficulty of Getting a Prescription for a Drug That Effectively Prevents HIV Infection

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Spenser Mestel | Longreads | December 2016 | 23 minutes (5,642 words)

 

I’m sitting on the examining table at Student Health in Iowa City, digging a nail into the cuticle of my right thumb, waiting for Robin, the physician’s assistant. Over the course of my grad school career, she’s walked me through a half dozen of these STI checks—swabbed my throat and rectum, handled my urine, drawn liters of blood, and sat patiently to answer my many questions.

She opens the door and sighs. “I’ve got good news and bad news.”

I hold my breath. My ex-boyfriend, Zac, has been my only partner since the last test a few months back, at the beginning of summer, while I was still in New York City. We both tested negative and always used condoms, but I’m remembering a conversation we had while eating in bed about a guy he’d gone on a couple of dates with a few months earlier. Zac was staring at the TV and fumbling with his hands.

“We were starting to hook up, and he told me that he’s HIV-positive.”

I’d dropped my samosa. “What?”

“No, no, no. He told me before anything happened. He said that him and his boyfriend had a threesome once, and the condom broke.”

A threesome and the condom broke.

I look down at my hand. At this point, I’m digging my nail into my knuckle.

“The good news is the tests came back negative.”

I exhale.

“The bad news is I can’t prescribe you Truvada.”

There is no rational reason for me to think I have HIV. I would have avoided this stress altogether if I weren’t interested in Truvada, a pill approved in 2012 to help prevent the contraction of HIV, also known as Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis, or PrEP. I’d heard about the drug at a party in New York and immediately looked it up on my phone. Of the 657 San Francisco residents the study followed for 32 months, zero tested positive for HIV.

“I want to prescribe it,” Robin says, pulling out a prescription pad, “believe me, but the doctor I work under won’t allow it, not until we have the right protocols.” She writes down a name and hands me the paper: “Try Dr. Nisly at River Landing. She runs an LGBT clinic on Tuesday nights.” In the past three years, she’s never referred me to the LGBT clinic, never even mentioned that there was one. As I fold the paper, I remember the first time I met Robin, right after I’d moved to this Midwestern college town from New York. I’d been on guard when she asked if I had sex with men or women or both. “Men,” I said, scanning her face for twitches, her voice for stutters. I waited for a loaded question or curt tone. They never came. Read more…

Why We Resist: Seven Stories About Protest

I’ve found it hard to think of little else other than our country’s future, by which I mean the futures of my friends of color, my queer friends, my disabled friends—the list goes on. I am grateful for Twitter, where writers and activists I admire remind me that what is happening is not normal, that we must resist as long as it takes. There are stories here about the Native-led protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline, folks standing up to Donald Trump and his white supremacist cronies, and prisoners striking against their miserable living conditions in a racist system. As journalist Masha Gessen writes, “The citizens have posted guard.”

1. “Why We Must Protest.” (Masha Gessen, LitHub, November 2016)

Masha Gessen is one of the writers I’m thankful for. Yesterday I read her essay in the New York Review of Books, “Trump: The Choice We Face.” Gessen writes about her great-grandfather, a member of a Nazi-appointed Jewish council in his home ghetto, relating his position to the complicity we Americans may come to understand sooner than we think. I cried as I read. The NYRB essay led me to the one I’ve highlighted here, where Gessen examines and defends protest for the sake of protest. Read more…

Ruback

Fellow firefighters carry the flag-covered coffin of Paul Ruback outside St. Patrick's Church in Newburgh, N.Y. (Photo by Howard Earl Simmons/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images)

Michael Brick | Longreads | September 2016 | 16 minutes (4,136 words)

 

In December, two months before cancer killed him, our friend Michael Brick sent a few pals an email.

“I’m entrusting to your care these two unpublished works,” he wrote. “I’m proud of them both. My great hope, of course, is to share them with the world someday.”

One was a manuscript for a fantastical picture book called “Natalie Had a Bicycle” that he had written with his son, John-Henry. He said it had been roundly rejected by every agent in America. That’s a damn shame.

The other was a word doc called, simply, “Ruback.”

It’s a long-in-the-making memoir of the failings of newspaper journalism. Or a newspaper journalist. Or, really, of one tiny story: a “Portraits of Grief” dispatch on the life of a New York firefighter. What Brick had written in 123 words, in an effort to efficiently encapsulate the life of a 50-year-old man who died on Sept. 11, came to haunt him. This piece is his effort to correct the record, and maybe find peace.

“All lives end unfinished,” he writes in the story. How true.

“I don’t have any specific instructions for you,” he wrote to his friends. “You may read them, of course.”

Originally slated for Harper’s September issue, the piece never ran. We’re pleased to share it with the world here.

Ben Montgomery Read more…

Letter to an Ex, on the Occasion of His Suicide

Illustration by: Katie Kosma

Masha Hamilton | Longreads | August 2016 | 24 minutes (5,851 words)

 

It was morning, after another rough night. You’d barely slept on the floor in Bill’s cave of an apartment, where you’d spent the last three nights watching the hour of the wolf stretch to become every hour that was dark or semi-dark. Now, though the apartment remained as stale and murky as it had been at 1 a.m., then 2 a.m., then 3, you knew it was light outside. A long way from the kind of light you loved, when clouds turn pink from the rising sun, water-coloring men who make coffee in tin kettles with long handles over an open fire. That was Africa—Rwanda or the Congo or maybe Madagascar. This was Manhattan. Fucking Manhattan.

You ate plenty, like a man with plans: two lemon drop cookies, a lemon yogurt and half a pint of strawberry ice cream. That’s what Bill had in his kitchen. You watered the mix with coffee. Then you spilled out the bullets to reduce your payload to two. One was all you truly needed, but somehow you thought it right to have a spare. On any op, the best-laid plans turn to mush once it starts, you’d often said. Contingencies were critical.

You set off, walking toward the East River where dumped bodies, grim blossoms, push their way up each spring once the water thaws. It took only five or six minutes to reach Sutton Place Park, even moving slowly as you do now—did then—with the pain in your hips and feet. You passed East Side professionals on their way to work and the ornate, obscenely expensive brownstones built by Effingham Sutton, who raked it in during the 1849 California Gold Rush. I can imagine you making fun of his first name.

The river drew you first, the park only secondarily. You’d been talking for days about going to the river, though it seemed metaphorical and was never clear what you meant. You chose a bench with a view, not because it mattered, but because, legs cemented in place, they all have views.

Did you take it in? No; you moved too quickly for that, your mind too focused on its end goal, and besides you were way over the city, way beyond wanting to appreciate light cast by an urban sun, the oily shine on the river, the trees insisting even here on renewal. Screw the miracles of life. Yes, you were one; you had been one. That was then. This was now. Read more…

The Case for More Female Cops

Betty in uniform for the Wichita Police Reserve, 1977. (Photo courtesy of Sarah Smarsh)

Sarah Smarsh | Longreads | July 2016 | 20 minutes (4,886 words)

 

Betty was in the bathroom dyeing her platinum hair black while the kids played with her teenage sister down the hall. Betty had recently left Bob. He’d beaten her, which was officially a crime, but there wasn’t any use in calling the cops. A hometown boy and typesetter for the Limon Leader, Bob knew everybody in their small Colorado burg on the plains, from the police station to the butcher. Betty, my future grandma, was a 23-year-old outsider from Wichita—a social challenge likely not helped by her unapologetic wearing of miniskirts in 1968.

Two years prior, Betty had blown into Limon, 90 miles west of the Kansas border, with her four-year-old daughter, Jeannie, and a pair of go-go boots. Her mom, Dorothy, and little sisters, Polly and Pud (as in “puddin’”) were along, too. Betty and Dorothy both had just washed their hands of Kansas men. Back in Wichita, Dorothy’s third husband, Joe, had strangled her. Betty’s jealous first husband, my biological grandfather, routinely beat her up and, Betty suspected, had paid someone to throw gasoline on her male friend’s face and set it on fire. So Betty and Dorothy piled the kids in a jalopy and headed west, destination unknown, to start over.

“Why Limon?” I asked her once.

“It was where our car broke down,” Betty said with a shrug.

Betty and her daughter Jeannie at City Park in Denver in the mid-1960s, when she worked as a highway-diner waitress in Limon, Colorado. (Courtesy of Sarah Smarsh)

Betty and her daughter Jeannie at City Park in Denver in the mid-1960s, when she worked as a highway-diner waitress in Limon, Colorado. (Courtesy of Sarah Smarsh)

Betty and Dorothy took jobs working in diners along the highway that cut through town. Betty waited tables, her mom cooked specials. Before too long, Betty hooked up with a customer named Bob. Then she got pregnant. She drove past the chapel the first time and left him at the aisle, but on the second try they got married. She gave birth to a son, Bo. Then Bob hit her and snapped his belt at Jeannie one too many times. After just a couple years of marriage, she moved out and filed for divorce.

Now Betty had a 6-year-old daughter with a dangerous Kansas man, a 2-year-old son with a dangerous Colorado man, and a divorce decree pending at the courthouse. Custody of their child, Bob had assured her, would go to him. He’d make sure the judge knew what kind of woman she was.

She had the dye worked into her hair when the phone rang. A voice warned that Bob was on his way over, and he was mad. There wasn’t time for Betty to rinse her hair. She wrapped a towel around her head. Dark dye dripped down her neck as she and Pud put the kids in the car. They rolled through town until the road turned into a highway.

Then, sirens and flashing red lights. Read more…

Little Government in the Big Woods

Illustration By: Katie Kosma

Mary Pilon | Longreads | July 2016 | 8 minutes (2,061 words)

 

Last May, and much to the disappointment of many “Little House on the Prairie” fans, Melissa Gilbert announced that she would be ending her bid for a congressional seat in Michigan’s 8th district.

Best known for playing Laura in the 1970s television adaptation of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s iconic series of books, Gilbert, a Democrat and former president of the Screen Actors Guild cited health problems as her reason from stepping away from the campaign.

But during her short-lived bid for elected office, many Michigan voters and fans of the “Little House” television show and books may not have realized that politics is far from anything new for the franchise. In fact, they’ve been integral since the books’ Depression-era genesis.

Given the wholesome, all-American image of “Little House,” the political history of the books may surprise some readers. Wilder, who was born in 1867 and published the first “Little House” book in 1932, was an impassioned hater of Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal policies. In a letter, she once called Roosevelt a “dictator,” and like her journalist and politically-active daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, Wilder also maintained strongly anti-government views. Lane, along with Ayn Rand, is noted as one of the pioneers of the American libertarian movement. Read more…

Black Lives Matter: A Reading List

This week’s reading list has three parts. Part One features Black authors writing explicitly about anti-Black police brutality. Part Two features Black authors writing about subjects other than police brutality, because maybe it’s in your best interest not to subject yourself to more mental anguish than is necessary, and because Black people deserve to write about so much more than their deaths at the hands of police. Finally, I grouped together resources for non-Black POC and white people who want to stand in solidarity against police brutality and violence against the Black community. Read more…