Josephine “JoJo” D’Angelo was in a hotel lobby in 1944. An outfielder for the South Bend Blue Sox — a team in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (A.A.G.P.B.L.), founded the year prior — she had dark, curly hair. Even if you didn’t know her last name, her looks hinted at her Italian heritage.

The hotel was likely decorated with muted colors in the modernist style of the previous decade. Thanks to World War II, there were supply shortages and rations, which put a hold on new design in the early ’40s. All available supplies needed to go toward the war effort.

The story was similar in baseball. With most of the Major League Baseball players deployed, executives decided to fill the gap with female players, paving the way for the A.A.G.P.B.L.

But in the hotel that day, D’Angelo was approached by one league executive and told that she was being released from her contract. This was devastating for the right-hander who’d batted .200 in her two seasons with the Blue Sox. She’d been playing since she was a little girl, and had spent her days working in a steel mill in her hometown of Chicago while devoting evenings to playing ball, before attending a tryout for the league at Wrigley Field. That scene was made famous by the film “A League of Their Own,” with hundreds of women traveling from around the country to the brick ballpark with the ivy-covered outfield wall.

Why was D’Angelo being cut from the thing she loved most in the world? When she told the story later in her life, she gave the reason: “a butchy haircut.” It was a haircut she says she never even wanted, one she was pressured into getting by the hairstylist who assured her she would look lovely with her dark curls trimmed into a bob.

D’Angelo had broken one of the cardinal rules of the A.A.G.P.B.L.: “Play like a man, look like a lady.” But she wasn’t the only one. Connie Wisniewski was told she’d be kicked off her team if she chose to get a close-trimmed cut. Multiple recruits were immediately handed tickets home after they showed up to spring training with bobs, and “Dottie Ferguson was warned by her chaperon against wearing girls’ Oxford shoes, because they were excessively masculine-looking,” writes Lois Browne in her book Girls of Summer: In Their Own League.

Players had to attend charm school and wear lipstick on the field. Their uniforms had skirts instead of pants — not great for sliding, but deemed appropriately feminine by league owner Philip K. Wrigley. All of this was chronicled in “A League of Their Own.” But there was one thing the movie left out: the reason for these requirements.

Though it was never explicitly stated, historians and players alike say the rules were in place, in part, to prevent the women from being perceived as lesbians. Many of the women actually were gay, including D’Angelo, which is another part of the story the movie didn’t tell. By not including a gay character’s story in “A League of Their Own,” the film does to the history of the league what the owners tried to do its existence — erase lesbians from the narrative.

* * *

When Terry Donahue met Pat Henschel in 1947, Donahue was a 22-year-old catcher and utility infielder in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. She grew up playing ball with her younger brother, Tom, on their family’s farm in Saskatchewan, Canada. “She claimed that she was five-foot-two. She was about five-foot,” Henschel tells me over the phone from the home she shares with Donahue. “She had dark hair, blue eyes, and was very attractive, and she was wonderfully liked.”

Donahue was in Nova Scotia for the winter when she met Henschel, who was 19 at the time. The two women hit it off, keeping in touch when Donahue moved back to the U.S. to play for the Peoria Red Wings. “She was a utility player, and the catcher on her team broke her thumb or her finger,” Henschel says. “The manager came up to her and said, ‘Have you ever caught?’ And Terry said, ‘no.’ He said, ‘Well, you’re going in tonight.’” The first game Donahue ever caught ended up being a 19-inning game. The next day was her birthday.

“The only things [women] can’t do, we can’t hit as far and we can’t throw as hard, but we certainly can make all the plays that you see in the Cubs’ ballpark. Or the Sox,” Donahue told the Kane County Chronicle in 2010, referring to the Cubs and White Sox, Chicago’s two major-league squads.

Today, Donahue, who has Parkinson’s disease, is 92. Henschel is 89. For seven decades the two told almost everyone, aside from their inner circle, that they were best friends. The Chronicle story calls Henschel Donahue’s “cousin and roommate.” But the truth was much more than that. For 70 years theirs has been a love story, originating in a time when the only love stories we were allowed to tell were those between a man and a woman. Try to ask most former players about the issue and they clam up. “I don’t think it was really even talked about, frankly,” Henschel says.

In the ’40s and ’50s, homosexuality was not discussed much; it wasn’t until 1973 that the American Psychiatric Association removed it from the list of mental illnesses. The players could have lost more than just their baseball careers if they had been open about their queerness. They could have lost their families, occupations, and reputations, too. In those days, “you had to be very discreet, and we were,” says Henschel. “No one was even aware of it because we got so careful and no one would have even imagined anything at all.”

That stigma has carried on for decades. As Ila Borders, the first woman to play for a men’s professional baseball team since the Negro Leagues, wrote in her memoir, Making My Pitch, “I remain certain that my professional career would not have been possible had I come out.” In 1994, Borders, a left-handed pitcher, became the first woman to receive a college baseball scholarship. She was the first to start an N.C.A.A. baseball game and the first woman to get a win in collegiate baseball. She then played for the independent, otherwise all-male St. Paul Saints and Duluth-Superior Dukes.

“In 1994 few in baseball — or in the country — were ready to accept a gay player, male or female,” writes Borders. Indeed, that same year, the book SportsDykes: Stories From On and Off the Field was also published. In her essay, “The Lesbian Label Haunts Women Athletes,” Lynn Rosellini writes, “To most lesbian athletes … coming out is not yet worth it.”

“If a woman plays hardball, people figure she’s likely gay,” writes Borders. It’s why, during her baseball career, she constantly had to answer questions about whether she dated men, and had to reassure the public that, despite the fact that she played ball, she was not gay. She understands today that talking about being a gay athlete is a double-edged sword, in a way. There’s the stereotype that women athletes are all lesbians, which is both inaccurate and unfair. And yet, there’s also the truth that there are many athletes who are also lesbians.

“I was deeply ignorant of my small place in the history of women athletes and the whole gay rights movement,” Borders writes of her playing days as a closeted homosexual.

But this stereotype existed long before Borders was even born. Some A.A.G.P.B.L. players cited masculine clothing or appearances as tipping them off about a woman’s sexual orientation, a stereotype that still exists today and may or may not be accurate. “The lesbians, they dressed like men with those big pants and big shoes, most of them. … [T]hey had boyish bobs,” Dottie Green, a former A.A.G.P.B.L. player and chaperone told Susan K. Cahn in her book Coming on Strong: Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth Century Sports. Or, as Dottie Ferguson Key put it, “tomboyish girls” who “wanted to go with other girls” signaled it with their “mannish” shoes and clothing.

It was this perception of female athletes as unfeminine and unfeminine women as lesbians that led Wrigley, a chewing gum manufacturer and president of the Chicago Cubs, to insist that his players be appropriately feminine in appearance.

But the A.A.G.P.B.L. went even further than that, instituting a policy against fraternizing with other teams. The given reason was “to sustain the complete spirit of rivalry between clubs,” but Browne writes that the real reason that teams imposed stiff fines on players who violated this rule was the fear of lesbianism. When the affair was between teammates, chaperones would refuse to let the suspected couple room together and gauge the reaction of the players to confirm their hunch. In one case, the suspected lovers were so angry about being barred from becoming roommates that team manager Johnny Gottselig considered it proof of the affair. One manager released two of his players because he thought they were gay and was worried they would “contaminate” the rest of the team.

In another case, a married player was rumored to have fallen for one of her teammates. “That player converted this young married woman in just two weeks,” said Fred Leo, who was the League’s publicity director and, later, its president. Another time, Leo said that a married player was discovered to be in a relationship with a woman who was unassociated with the league. Leo claimed he notified her husband, who came and took her home.

“Knowledge of gay women in sport ranged from a hazy, unarticulated awareness to an informed familiarity or personal involvement,” writes Cahn. “Often an athlete’s initial awareness of lesbianism developed from seeing women ‘pairing off’ or getting ‘very clannish’ with each other.”

However, many of the players came to the league quite sheltered. They often arrived from small towns or rural areas and were quite young when they left home. As a result, it was not uncommon for new or younger players to be completely blindsided by the relationships between their teammates. Dorothy Hunter entered the League in 1943, when she was 27. Hunter, who was from Winnipeg, Canada, said she had “never heard of lesbianism,” so her teammates regaled her with tales of lesbian love affairs. “They told me they had wedding ceremonies. Well, I just thought they were giving me the gears because I was a green Canadian.”

But many of the players were unattached. If straight players were married, many of their husbands were off at war or were left back at home on farms or in factories. The players’ grueling schedule and constant travel made dating difficult. It was in many ways the perfect environment for gay women to become involved with each other. But in some cases, the near-inability to date was a welcome reality. It made staying in the closet easier, because there was no time for dating and so there was no need to make excuses. This was something that Borders discovered, too, when she was playing ball in the 1990s.

“Playing baseball allowed little time for dating,” she writes. “When people tried to set me up, it was easy to say, ‘No thanks, too busy.’”

These restrictions kept some women out of the league altogether. One of those women was Dot Wilkinson, often regarded as the greatest softball player of her time — and perhaps all time. Wilkinson was a hard-playing catcher for the Phoenix Ramblers. She joined the American Softball Association (A.S.A.) team in 1933, when she was just 11 years old.

“Softball has meant more to me than I can ever tell anybody,” Wilkinson says in the documentary film “Extra Innings.” “I love that game. I never thought about anything else.”

Wilkinson was recruited to play in the A.A.G.P.B.L. “They came to Arizona to offer us some contracts,” Wilkinson said. “They wanted to give me $85 a week [equivalent to $1,240 today] to catch. I didn’t want to leave the Ramblers and I don’t like being away from home so I didn’t go.”

But it was more than that. Wilkinson didn’t want any part of the curfews, the charm school, the chaperones, or the mandatory dresses. She played in Levi’s or her shiny satin uniform shorts, and she liked it that way. She also knew that the league was actively discouraging players from being perceived as exactly what Wilkinson was — gay.

“Softball was my first love and it still is,” said Wilkinson. But she had another love, too. In 1963, Estelle “Ricki” Caito, a star second baseman, joined the Ramblers. Wilkinson and Caito played together for two seasons, until the A.S.A. disbanded. But they also began a relationship that would last 48 years, until Caito’s death in 2011.

“We were born at a time when we were all in the closet and that was just the name of the game,” Wilkinson said. “And you had to live with it and that’s what we did.”

* * *

It is the obituaries that offer the most publicly available clues to some of the players who spent their lives with other women. The most telling evidence is often in veiled language or titles that are open to interpretation. In at least one case, a player had a “special friend.” In others, their relationships are more explicitly acknowledged.

Mabel Holle played third base for the South Bend Blue Sox, and like teammate JoJo D’Angelo hailed from Illinois. Holle’s father was a semi-professional pitcher and she grew up playing ball with her siblings. She attended the mass tryout at Wrigley Field, becoming one of the original members of the league in 1943. During the season, she was traded to the Kenosha Comets. Her contract was not renewed in 1944, forcing her to try out again. This time, she didn’t make the cut. After leaving the league, she became a physical education teacher. In Holle’s 2011 obituary, written after she died at 91, there’s this: “Holle is survived by her longtime partner, Linda Hoffman.”

Mildred “Millie” Deegan played 10 seasons with the A.A.G.P.B.L., from 1943-1952. She is rumored to have impressed Babe Ruth with how far she could hit a softball, and it is said he squeezed the biceps on her arm when he posed with her for a photo. In 1944 the Brooklyn Dodgers invited Deegan and two other women to their spring training camp. Leo Durocher, the Dodgers manager, told the Daily Oklahoma in 1946, “Deegan spent a whole week training with the Brooklyn Dodgers at their Bear Mountain, NY camp. If she were a man, she no doubt would have been a Dodger.”

Deegan died of breast cancer in 2002 at the age of 82. Her obituary in the New York Times mentions Margaret Nusse, “Ms. Deegan’s companion and her only survivor.” Nusse, known as “Toots,” was a softball legend herself. According to the now-defunct NJ Divas Fastpitch site, Deegan and Nusse were partners for almost 50 years. The two shared their passion for softball: Deegan was the coach for the Linden, New Jersey, Arians and Nusse was the manager. Nusse passed away just six months after Deegan died, at age 85.

June Peppas was a pitcher and first baseman from Fort Wayne, Indiana, who played in the A.A.G.P.B.L. from 1948-1954. The player known as “Lefty” had spunk. Fort Wayne Daisies manager Harold Greiner relates a story in Browne’s book Girls of Summer: “Once there were some men out in the street, and some smart aleck said something. I didn’t hear what it was, they’d watched till I wasn’t nearby. Anyway, all of a sudden I hear ‘Wow!’ I turned around and saw that June Peppas had decked the guy — and I mean she really decked him. He crawled away.”

The A.A.G.P.B.L. meant a lot to Peppas. She was the first chairperson of the Players Association Board and two-time A.A.G.P.B.L. All-Star. Polly Huitt was Peppas’s partner for 46 years before she passed in 2007, nine years before Peppas died at the age of 86. The two operated a printing business in Allegan, Michigan, called PJ’s Printing, from 1975-1988. They sold the business and retired to Florida where, according to Peppas’s obituary, they enjoyed “golf and an active social life.”

One of the best pitchers to ever play in the A.A.G.P.B.L. was Jean Cione. The girl from Rockford, Illinois, played 10 seasons in the league. In that time she threw three no hitters, had three 20-win seasons, and had an unassisted triple play — something that has only happened 15 times in Major League Baseball since 1909. Cione spent her rookie year in 1947 with the Rockford Peaches and finished with an astonishing 1.30 ERA. “She was a lot fun to be with,” Cione’s partner Ginny Hunt told the Bozeman Daily Chronicle after her death in 2010. “If you didn’t ever experience watching a baseball game with her, you really missed something. It was a treat to watch a game with her. She analyzed every play.”

Catcher Eunice Taylor and her partner of 45 years, Diana Walega, owned and operated a pet supply store for 40 years. Outfielder Barbara Sowers was with her “loving companion” Shirley Ann Weaver for 45 years. And there are many more, players with “longtime,” “beloved companions,” whose names I have chosen not to include here out of respect for the fact that they were likely still closeted during their lives. Their obituaries, which are historical documents, offer us glimpses into their lives and are open for us to interpret.

* * *

“Our relationship is one of the best,” Pat Henschel says of her partnership with Terry Donahue. “We’re very lucky and we know it.”

Photos of the women throughout the years give a glimpse of the life they’ve had together. In their younger days, they look like they could be sisters as they pose in front of a Christmas tree in a picture that might have been taken in the 1960s. They each sport short, dark hairstyles and wear sleeveless turtleneck shirts. In another, they are perhaps in their 60s and they dance together in front of a fireplace. They are both laughing. Their hairstyles have not changed in the decades between the two photos except to turn from brown to gray.

They are ready to tell the world the truth about their relationship. Donahue’s great nephew, Christopher Bolan, is working on a documentary about their life together. Another photo shows the two of them doing what they had only ever done behind closed doors: they hold hands, weathered and wrinkled by the years they’ve spent together, and they kiss each other on the lips. Their eyes are closed. It is sweet. It is intimate. But they hid this truth for as long as they did because, for most of their lives, they had too much to lose by coming out.

But today, Henschel says, “They either accept it or they don’t.”

* * *

Fifty years after the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League ended, Ila Borders was making history. She had ascended to a level that no woman ever had before. She was playing — and succeeding — in men’s professional baseball. And then, she quit.

We are sitting together in the stands at JetBlue Park, the Red Sox’s spring training facility in Fort Myers, Florida. We’re watching a group of women play the championship game at the team’s Women’s Fantasy Camp, where Borders is coaching. “It got to me,” Borders says about being in the closet. “It’s why I quit. It’s the worst thing on Earth to hide who you are.”

That, Borders says, is why she ultimately came out — for the next generation of girls who want to play ball, so they can be themselves, no matter who they are, and so history doesn’t have to repeat itself.

Borders looks out onto the field of women whose uniforms are streaked with dirt. “If you are a ballplayer, it’s O.K. to play hard and just be yourself,” she says. And she’s finally at a place in her life where she truly believes it.

The post The Hidden Queer History Behind “A League of Their Own” appeared first on Narratively.

On the day of the shoot, I am ready. I’ve been watching what I eat and exercising for the first time since I was 16. I’ve been spending so many hours on Pinterest that I found a bodysuit so perfect for me that we share the same name. By the time I get to the studio space in Manhattan, I have already survived a frantic morning searching for my wallet, and a Starbucks so crowded I had to leave without my order. I am minus a cake pop, but ready to execute my vision.

By afternoon, I’m in a sparkling pink sequin dress. As I transfer into the white wooden chair I’ll be posing in, I cut my new, barely healed tattoo on the foot tread of my wheelchair. It draws blood that will not stop pouring down my leg. I curse at my chair and cringe thinking about the touchup I’ll have to endure and the extra work the photographer will have to do to edit out the gash.

That fucking chair. Does it have to make everything difficult?

I hate that chair, but I know it needs to be in some of these pictures. I cannot make a photographic statement about being a woman and having a disability without it.

I’m here in this studio to define “sexy” for myself by creating images that will show me as sexy, or at least help me understand what that might feel like. I’m tired of feeling bitter toward magazine photos that show me over and over again that sexy is for able bodies. Sexy is for other girls. Sexy isn’t for me. That message has been ingrained in me from so many places, it’s almost embedded in my physical body.

* * *

By my junior year of high school, I was convinced that when people looked at me, all they saw was a girl in a wheelchair. I was the only one in the whole school. I wanted so badly to somehow make my disability disappear, while simultaneously making my body stand out. Like any teenager, I wanted to be seen. I wanted people to notice my body. But nothing I tried worked. Not bleaching my hair a gross orange color somewhere between brown and blonde. Not the belly button ring that peeked out from under a DKNY t-shirt. Not even starving myself.

Once, I came to on the cold kitchen floor and managed to pull myself up to a seat right as my parents got home. When they came inside, everyone greeted me normally, because nothing was wrong. They saw me sitting on the pew eating Cheez-Its. Not ravenous, desperate and dizzy like I was on the inside. I couldn’t help but wonder how this scene would’ve been different had they got home just seconds earlier, when I was lying unconscious on the floor. Would I have been rushed to the hospital? Would someone have finally noticed I was starving myself? Could “the girl in the wheelchair” be “the anorexic girl,” too?

It would’ve been my proudest achievement at that point. College entrance test pressure was building and I found pro-ana blogs that were encouraging my disordered eating. I was beginning to feel how much it hurt to be different for the first time in my life. I was never going to get a five-minute break from needing a wheelchair or a walker to move around. There was no way to escape my body or transform it into one that society would find acceptable. I was trying very hard to do either one. But no one noticed my pain…or my body. I was just my chair.

Nothing I did got the boys I liked to notice me, or stopped tactless strangers from telling me I should think of a “cooler” story than “I was born like this” to explain why I was a wheelchair user.

The eating disorder diagnosis I coveted never came. Starving oneself is not as glamorous as Hollywood makes it seem, and I eventually grew out of disordered eating behavior. But my desire to be seen before my mobility equipment has never left me.

* * *

The first time I was “seen” the way my teenage self longed to be seen didn’t exactly play out the way I hoped. It was Cinco de Mayo, my senior year of college, and I was studying in my dorm room, wearing Mickey Mouse pajamas and listening to Hanson. “I think I’m gonna have a beer,” I said to my neighbor, Liv. She lived in the next room, but we left our doors open and talked through the walls so much we were essentially roommates. “It’s Cinco de Mayo and I had a rough day. I deserve a beer.”

I turned from my computer and went to my fridge, convincing myself I’d earned it without waiting for her reply. “This room’s a fucking mess,” an unfamiliar male voice said. I whipped my chair around, startled.

I had never seen this person before in my life. He was a drunk stray who had wandered away from the room he was partying in and invited himself into mine, drawn in by the open door and now mesmerized by the mess.

“I know,” I shrugged. There was no point denying it and I wanted some entertainment. “Who are you?”

“What is this thing?” He walked across the room and sat in my walker.

“It’s a walker. I need it to get around,” I said. He hadn’t earned my boring story. “Can you maybe not sit in it?”

He ignored me and my guard went up. Most people don’t understand how complicated the relationship is between a girl and her mobility equipment. I’m dependent on it; it’s always with me. It’s like family: I don’t choose it, I may not even like it sometimes, but I am sure as hell going to protect it from drunk strangers who might puke all over it.

Instead of moving, he said, “You’re cute.” I was almost 22 and it was the first time a guy had ever almost-sincerely expressed attraction to me.

This made me feel a little bit embarrassed and a lot confused. I blinked down at my sequined Mickey pajama top and matching pants. “Thaaaanks…”

And then he said, “We should have sex.” He was matter-of-fact, not threatening. I was amused more than anything else, but he needed to leave.

“I think we shouldn’t,” I said firmly. Liv had ventured out in the hallway to watch the show, which ended rather flatly when I finally got the stray to leave.

“Dude, I would have gone for it,” Liv teased from my doorway. I shrugged and she headed back to her room. She wouldn’t have, and we both knew it.

The nervous butterflies I’d felt throughout the exchange never morphed into real fear, but I was relieved he was gone. I’d imagined the first time a guy paid attention to me many times over the years. As I grew up, my daydreams had matured from a note passed in class – “do you like me?” with the option to choose “yes” or “no” – to being asked on a date while at my locker to being asked on a date anywhere. Rarely did my fantasies ever involve a complete stranger, and he was definitely never wasted. It was at once exciting and devastating. On one hand, it was validation. “I’m not invisible; I am attractive.” On the other hand, he was drunk. I wasn’t sure if he knew what he was looking at, but I doubted it. So, I didn’t know if this counted as attraction, or if it counted as anything at all.

I laughed about it, but it hurt, too. I understood that it wasn’t rare to get hit on by a drunk guy. But most girls had already had some version of both my elementary and high school fantasies happen to them before they got the drunk college dorm proposition. Most girls didn’t have to wonder if the attraction expressed counted for anything at all. All I ever wanted was to be like most girls. I went to bed wondering if that would ever happen for me.

* * *

I stayed late after my 10-year high school reunion to wait for my friend Allison, who had to clean up. I’d been sitting on the same bench all night, drinking French martinis. The room was nearly empty when Isaac sat on the bench next to me. We talked for a while, and then he asked if he could kiss me.

It was nice. I knew he was hot and I was…not. I hadn’t planned on staying long at all, let alone getting trashed and making out with someone. So I’d thrown on a comfortable teal sweater without much thought. I tried to put on some makeup, but I usually get impatient before I achieve much of anything beyond a layer of eye shadow and some lip-gloss.

It was my first kiss, and it was nice. While I was happy to finally check “kiss someone” off the list of life milestones, I knew that the kiss didn’t really mean anything; we were both drunk. It just felt nice.

The next morning, my mind bombarded me with the same questions I’d had in college after the stray left my room: “How much did it count? How much did I count?”

Both times that I’d felt “seen” by men, I’d been left with doubts – because alcohol was involved, and because I felt like I looked bad.

That’s when I got the idea to plan a photoshoot to force myself and others to see me and sexy at the same time. I knew others could achieve that goal while in their wheelchairs, but I wasn’t sure I could, because I never had before. I relished the idea of putting on more than one layer of makeup and dressing up in clothes that were “magazine sexy.” But beyond that, I wondered if putting on “sexy” would actually make me feel sexy.

* * *

The shoot is one of the best days of my life – creating art to help me discover a new layer of myself.

But a month later when the pictures come, I take days to open the email, wanting the sick feeling in my stomach to subside first. When I finally muster up the courage, I am horrified. I had done my best to transcend the “disabled girl” label with these pictures, to scrub it from its place under my skin and just be. But disability is all I see. My legs make weird shapes and my posture sucks and on top of that, the dress makes me look fat.

I write all of this in a panicked email I sent to a friend late that night. She’s achieved a level of success I dream about, she’s gorgeous, and she knows what a differently-abled body feels like. Her opinion matters to me.

She makes me write a list of my favorite things about the pictures. I love the red lips. I like all the clothes. My hair looks good, especially down. I honestly like the art, hate the model. But the more I look, the easier it is to see myself.

I went into this project with a very clear idea of what I wanted to achieve. I thought I’d get dressed up, put on nice clothes, let someone do my hair and makeup, and suddenly feel attractive – instantly make other people see a person instead of a disability. As I stare at my computer screen, I’m not quite sure I’ve reached my goal. All I feel is more human. If I’m looking at the right photo, I see a woman. Disabled people further on in their self-acceptance journey have already had that revelation: You are human, you are a woman. I had not. Until now.

These photos don’t change everything. They don’t erase a lifetime of insecurity and uncertainty. But they do bring me some peace. It’s comforting to know it’s possible to be disabled and not always let that define me. Or to pose oddly in a photo but still feel pretty. And more importantly, I’ve realized it doesn’t matter if other people know that or not. That is not where I thought I’d be at the end of this journey. But it’s a long way from the cold kitchen floor hoping someone would notice me, trying to make the disabled girl disappear.

The post My Wheelchair Glamour Shoot appeared first on Narratively.

My Daughter Is Trapped Under Five Feet of Snow

In the remote mountains of Norway, a father claws himself out after an avalanche….then starts frantically searching for his daughter.

Narratively is thrilled to present the English-language debut of this interactive story, produced by Bergens Tidende newspaper.

Originally published in Norwegian, it was a viral hit and recently won the “Best Storytelling” prize in Scandinavia’s prestigious Schibsted Awards.

The post My Daughter Is Trapped Under Five Feet of Snow appeared first on Narratively.

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The first time I thought someone contaminated my food was at the Paramus Park mall food court when I was 12. As the employee handed me an extra gooey Cinnabon nestled in crinkly tissue, I noticed he had a scab and a Band-Aid crossing his knuckles.

“Thanks,” I said, suddenly feeling like the floor had dropped out from under me.

I walked over to the small table where my friend was waiting. I stared at the Cinnabon. Suddenly, it seemed as though the sweet treat was crawling with disease. I could almost see blood and scabs in the cinnamon, pus in the sugary glaze.

I got up and threw the Cinnabon in the garbage.

“Why’d you do that?” my friend asked.

“I don’t feel so great.”

“I would have eaten it!”

For the rest of the day, I thought about the Cinnabon. Even though I hadn’t eaten it, I had been in close proximity to what I deemed infected food. As my friend purchased Proactiv at the kiosk near the escalator, I thought of flesh-eating bacteria. My heart scrambled in my chest while we sat on the floor of the bookstore flipping through Hit Parader. By the time her mother picked us up, I knew for sure I was dying.

I hadn’t considered tainted food before that day. But afterward, the specter consumed my thoughts at nearly every meal prepared outside of my home. I saw scabs, imagined meat was replaced with human flesh, and assumed someone had pissed, ejaculated, spit, or defecated in my food. I’d take my fork and slowly pick and move food around my plate with a miserable, paranoid meticulousness. I’d stare the food down, dissect it.

“That could be semen,” I would think for no good reason, or “that might have been someone’s fingertip.”

Because I was consuming all of this human waste, I pictured my body as host to myriad viruses and bacteria: HIV, hepatitis, listeria, salmonella, botulism, mad cow, and so forth. I imagined my brain riddled with holes, like the cross-section of a lotus root. I considered my body toxic. I thought of myself as a walking disease.

There have always been cultural myths about contaminated or poisoned food. Growing up, we traded gossip about razor blades in Halloween candy or condoms in fast food hamburgers. But even those urban legends have a slant of truth to them. The razor blade story can be traced back to the 1974 murder of eight-year-old Timothy O’Bryan, who was poisoned by his father on Halloween night via cyanide in a Pixy Stix. In 2007, Van Miguel Hartless bit into a hamburger from a Rutland, Vermont, Burger King and allegedly found an unwrapped condom. He sued and settled out of court. “I know it sounds kind of funny now,” Hartless said, “but I had dreams where I would be doing random things and whatever I was holding would turn into the hamburger or the condom.” In February of this year, a family from Redlands, California, sued Starbucks, claiming they found a barista’s blood in their frappucinos.

But food contamination panic or trauma was not the reason behind this overwhelming fear that I was consuming tainted food. I didn’t know it yet, but this fear was the latest manifestation of my obsessive-compulsive disorder.

* * *

My OCD first manifested when I was eight. I was standing in front of my bedroom door, trying to open it — but for some reason, I couldn’t. I twisted the doorknob to the left and the right, but my brain wasn’t letting me open the door. It was a simple as that; no tangible cause, no connection I could make.

“Count to eight,” my brain said. “If the doorknob twists to the right on eight, and you feel good about it, you can go in.”

My mom found me in the hallway.

“What’s the matter, sweetie?”

“I can’t open the door,” I said, which was only half true.

“Is it stuck? Let me help.”

This scene played out almost every night, except I learned to be quiet so no one would know I couldn’t open the door because of a mysterious feeling that if I didn’t do it “right” something horrible would happen.

Most people still think having OCD means you’re a neat freak or like your shoes precisely lined up in the closet. Come to my apartment; I’ll show you that’s not true. OCD is not a personality or preference. It’s a mental illness that can have devastating effects on how you live and interact with the world. You might spend weeks of panic wondering if you’re dying of a rare disease and go to at least seven different doctors, never satisfied with an answer. You might refuse to drive a car because you think you will steer it over a bridge. You might miss work because you can’t stop checking if the stove is off. OCD is often called the “doubting disease” because deep down, the sufferer knows the thoughts and compulsions are irrational. However, despite this knowledge, there always remains a terrible “what if.”

Before I started talking openly about OCD, my friends and family had no idea I was suffering because most of the drama was taking place offstage in my head. I was very good at hiding my mental illness. I even took perverse pride in the fact that I moved through the world looking like someone who didn’t think they were being poisoned or fed body parts.

* * *

In high school, I spent a lot of time in Barnes & Noble. While devouring the psychology section for books on depression and anxiety, I found one on obsessive-compulsive disorder.

“Oh,” I thought. “This makes so much sense.”

My parents meant well when they said “everyone has quirks” and “this will pass.” But they were not equipped to deal with a mentally ill daughter and were afraid it would reflect poorly on their parenting. So I struggled, and then I was hospitalized in my 20s for a nervous breakdown triggered by anxiety, depression, and insomnia. I’ve been in therapy and on medication for 10 years, and I still struggle, although these treatments help buffer the panic so I can approach situations more rationally. OCD is chronic. Symptoms wax and wane over the years. They mutate. I add new obsessions to the collection. I get rid of old ones. I adapt. I maladapt. I castigate myself. I try to be more compassionate. It becomes a part of life to vaguely wonder if someone spit in the soup, eat the soup anyway, and then try not to think about the soup later.

Perhaps more than anything, OCD has forced me to confront how I interact with both friends and strangers alike — especially when it comes to asserting my needs and establishing boundaries. I have to navigate how to approach each particular situation with a number of factors in mind: Is this a high-risk situation? Will I be sick about this incident for weeks as opposed to days? What can I tolerate? Will this person be offended?

Imagine having to repeatedly tell friends and family you do not, under any circumstances, share food or beverages. No, you cannot eat from my plate. No, I do not want a bite of your bagel. No, I do not want a sip from your cocktail. This gets old fast, especially if you are a people pleaser like me. OCD is probably one of the most frustrating illnesses to have when you don’t like offending people. And with food-related contamination fears, it’s very easy to offend. I’m constantly navigating how to engage with people in contamination situations.

Recently, my husband and I were walking our dogs when an elderly man stopped us on the street.

“Hi, can I pet your dogs?” he asked.

“Sure!” I said.

“They don’t allow dogs in my building,” the old man said. “I like making friends with them outside.”

Then, looking at my dog, he said, “Do they like lamb lung? I have some.”

Before I could throw out my tried-and-true lie — “No thank you, they have food allergies” — my husband chirped up.

“They love lamb lung!”

The man pulled out a plastic baggie, and I, once again, felt like I was going to die. I stared at my husband with wide eyes, and he realized his mistake. Too late. The dogs were munching away at the delicious treat.

As we walked home, I started sobbing.

“They’re going to die! That was probably poisoned!”

My husband tried to calm me down. He profusely apologized for forgetting my OCD and tried to reassure me that the old man was probably just lonely and loved dogs and that we most likely cheered up his day.

All very reasonable.

I cried all night. I made myself sick. I imagined my dogs foaming at the mouth and convulsing. I monitored them closely.

“Do you think you’re also upset because you weren’t able to tell the old man ‘No’?” My husband asked as we got ready for bed.

I cried even harder because he was right. When faced with what I perceived as a life and death situation, I couldn’t risk offending a stranger.

So, how can I navigate a world in which I’m constantly negotiating and managing so-called life and death situations?

One of the main strategies in OCD therapy is called “Exposure and Response Prevention,” which is a type of cognitive behavioral therapy. ERP “encourages patients to gradually encounter increasing doses of that which is contaminated, while resisting washing, checking, avoiding, or conducting magical rituals.” The goal of ERP is to force sufferers to “stay with the anxiety” and eventually realize they are going to be fine. This is more difficult than it sounds, especially when “staying with the anxiety” means staying with thoughts of illness, death, and your own culpability. And that’s really what’s at the dark heart of OCD — the sense that your choices have catastrophic consequences, that you have more control over your existence than actuality dictates.

Confronting what I think will actually harm or kill me or my loved ones is not a picnic. And contamination fears actually can make sense at times. If you share food with someone who has bronchitis, you’re likely to get bronchitis. No one tells you to go around eating used tissues or licking mystery substances on the sidewalk. It can be hard to draw the line between common-sense hygiene practices and fantastical hypotheses about the mysterious waste lurking in my food.

I live in New York City. I am surrounded by some of the best restaurants in the world. I enjoy spending time eating a big, lazy meal with friends. I like people-watching at fancy venues and quietly tucking in at cozy cafes while I work. For a while, I didn’t think it was possible to do these things without feeling deep anxiety. Now, with medication and therapy, I anticipate what I’m going to order for dinner or what the new menu at my favorite restaurant holds. If I start to pick through my spaghetti Bolognese or arugula salad looking for evidence of contamination, I take a deep breath and force myself to think about how unlikely that is.

“Hey,” my OCD says. “Don’t you think that looks like a blood clot?”

I cringe. Is it?

“No. It’s sauce. Shut up.”

Then, I eat. Does this always work? No. But I refuse to give up on such an enjoyable part of life because OCD tells me I’m eating literal shit.

The post How to Survive When Everything You Eat Is Poison appeared first on Narratively.

In Baltimore, 1878, an eerie silence settled over the crowd in Ford’s Grand Opera House. The boisterous applause for Herrmann the Great’s wondrous illusions, in which the nattily dressed magician in a black velvet suit pulled a rabbit from his hat and levitated a sleeping woman, had abruptly stopped. A net was stretched across the full width of the theater, and the audience knew that the culmination of the evening — the cannon act — had arrived.

A young woman dressed in spangled red tights stepped into an upper stage box where the cannon waited, and was helped into the barrel. When she had vanished from view, Herrmann the Great yelled out: “Are you ready!”

“Yes,” came her muffled response. “Go!”

There was an explosion.

A flash of gunpowder.

And she flew 50 feet through the air.

Only when she landed safely in the net and the smoke cleared did the audience break into a thunder of cheers that lasted on and on as the curtain rose and fell over the bowing Herrmann the Great and the intrepid young woman.

Although the 19th-century audience might not have noticed, she’d also been the evening’s levitating sleeper, the bicycle rider who carried a girl on her shoulders, and the dancer who spectrally swirled in red silk like a pillar of fire. Her name was Adelaide Herrmann, Herrmann the Great’s wife and daring assistant. She was not supposed to be a human cannonball.

She’d taken over that role in Caracas, Venezuela, when their trapeze artists quit halfway through a South American tour, and she described her anxiety the first night “as a condemned man must feel as the fatal hour approaches.” But as she was loaded into the cannon, she showed no fear.

In 1896, Herrmann the Great — a.k.a. Alexander Herrmann — died, leaving his wife responsible for a traveling company, a herd of performing animals, and a lot of debt. If she was frightened, if she was weary, she hid it just as well as she did that night when she was first shot out of a cannon. Adelaide had no choice but to promote herself from assistant to headliner and take center stage.

“Hearts may be torn, bitter tears may be shed, but we of the stage have a jealous mistress in the public, which demands that we be gnawing at the soul,” she wrote.

She would become the Queen of Magic — one of the most celebrated magicians in the world.

* * *

Born in England in 1853, Adele Scarsez pushed the boundaries of Victorian womanhood from an early age, obsessing over aerial acrobatics and dance. After a stint with the Kiralfy family’s dance troupe as a teenager, she learned to ride the velocipede, a 19th-century bicycle, and traveled as a trick-rider with Professor Brown’s velocipede troupe.

Alexander Herrmann arrived in her life with a flourish. The mischievous Frenchman, who had an air of Mephistopheles about him, right down to his goatee and twirled mustache, charmed Adelaide from their first encounter. She was engaged to someone else when a friend invited her to his show at London’s Egyptian Hall. When the magician asked the women of the crowd to lend him a ring, Adelaide raised her hand.

“Without a thought of the significance of the act,” she wrote, “I gave him my engagement ring. Apparently he burned it; but a few minutes later it was returned to me on a ribbon tied around the neck of a beautiful white dove.”

In 1874, they met again on a ship sailing from Liverpool to New York. After two weeks of flirtation at sea, Adelaide agreed to marry him. At their wedding, presided over by New York City Mayor William H. Wickham, Alexander announced that he had no money to pay for the ceremony. As the crowd reacted, he reached into the mayor’s long beard — or his pockets, according to some accounts — and produced a wad of bills. He tossed them into the air and they disappeared.

These stories come down to us from Adelaide’s memoirs, recently rediscovered by magician Margaret Steele and published in 2011 as Adelaide Herrmann: Queen of Magic, and they are worth taking with a grain of salt. The book fails to mention her darker times and scandals — such as her arrest in 1895 for slapping a policeman who attempted to inspect her bag — but contemporary newspaper accounts confirm the matrimonial magic act…and that Alexander did ultimately pay the wedding fee after the sleight of hand.

At the height of their success, they moved into a mansion in Whitestone, Queens. Alexander purchased a steam yacht, several carriages — one pulled by six horses — and a private railcar. And then there was their ever-growing menagerie of cats, dogs, birds, goats, and even for a time a couple of unwieldy ostriches. It was terribly romantic, but the bills mounted fast.

From the beginning of their collaboration, Adelaide starred in many of Alexander’s illusions. In the early days, she dressed in men’s clothing and went by Mr. Alexander. Mainly she handed props to her husband, but one night, as he accepted a strand of six handkerchiefs that she had gathered from the crowd, he winked and said, “Mr. Alexander is now going to perform this trick.” Adelaide ran from the stage in a panic. After a bit of coaxing she came back and performed the trick, blowing on the knots to make them disappear. Her take on the illusion became a fixture in their program.

Later, she stopped being Alexander’s double and emerged a chameleon of feminine characters. In a trick called the “Slave Girl’s Dream,” she donned a white robe, stood on a stool, and pretended to fall asleep. Then, Alexander removed the stool and used four poles to move her body through a series of poses until she was completely horizontal in the air. She played a medium in the spirit cabinet trick, and summoned skeletal ghouls to prowl the darkened theater. All was revealed as a sham when Alexander called “Lights up!” and exposed the spirits as people with ghost puppets — a jab at the spiritualists of the day.

As their popularity grew, they kept innovating. One night in Boston, the Herrmanns introduced the “Cremation” illusion. The stage was set to resemble a catacomb, with a pile of rocks topped by a cross. Torch-bearing guards dragged Adelaide, screaming for mercy, on stage, and wrestled her into a coffin, then covered it with a sheet drenched in alcohol. Alexander stonily took a torch to the fabric, and to the audience’s horror Adelaide’s body was consumed by flames. When just a skeleton remained, Alexander collapsed on a nearby bench, only to be tortured by Adelaide’s reemergence as a series of ghosts and demons, who finally dragged the guilty magician to his death.

Using music, lights, costumes, and a heightened sense of drama, the Herrmanns excelled at transforming theaters into phantasmagoric worlds where anything might happen. Dance was Adelaide’s specialty. She imitated Loïe Fuller’s “Serpentine Dance,” a swirling performance in a voluminous dress that took advantage of new prismatic electric light effects. In “Lily of the Orient,” Adelaide mimed a calla lily in bloom, and in “La Danse de Vesuvius” she spun so fast in a costume of yellow and red silk squares that she looked like a column of fire.

With an ever-growing repertoire, the Herrmanns toured the United States, Mexico, South America, and Europe. In Chicago, on Easter Sunday in 1887, Alexander plucked an egg for each audience member from a volunteer’s hat; in 1896 at Sing Sing in New York, he pulled rabbits from the collars of prisoners. Still these vibrant days were increasingly haunted by Alexander’s waning health. Behind the glamorous spectacles were his increasingly regular attacks. A Chicago doctor, Adelaide wrote, diagnosed him with “the worst kind of tobacco heart, and unless he stopped his excessive cigarette smoking, he could not live more than two years.” She pressed her love to give up the habit, but “he would not, or could not.”

* * *

On December 14, 1896, they arrived by train in Rochester, New York, where a performance was planned at the State Industrial School. Not wanting to disappoint the hundreds of boys, excitedly gathered and dressed in their gray school uniforms, Alexander first attempted some sleight of hand tricks before tiring and inviting them to that Wednesday’s matinee. There he was in such good spirits that “he danced around like a big boy,” Adelaide wrote. That night’s performance was equally lively, followed by dinner with local politicians where he told stories from the road and brought them back to their private train car. According to Adelaide, after they left he quieted, and remarked somberly: “We ought to enjoy these things while we are living, because after we die we are soon forgotten.”

The next morning, Adelaide was washing her hair when she heard someone enter her room. It was Alexander, pale and unable to breathe. He collapsed on her bed. Seeing his glassy eyes and pallor, she attempted to give him some whiskey with water, but he couldn’t drink. She helped him into his own room, where she cradled his head in her arm. After a last attempt to drink some water, his arms fell to his sides, and his eyes stared.

“I knew then that Herrmann was gone,” she wrote. “I closed his eyes and placed him in the natural position. That was the end.”

Alexander Herrmann’s December 20 funeral at Masonic Hall on 23rd Street in Manhattan was so crowded it blocked the streets. After the burial, Adelaide was alone, with the show and its debts. As the Chicago Tribune reported on December 22, she went to the Queens County Courthouse and “declared the property left by the magician to be worth not more than $2,000,” and that the “debts of the dead man far exceeded the amount of the estate left by him.”

She lamented: “It is among the most pathetic aspects of the stage — of which the general public knows little or nothing — that it allows no time for the indulgence of private sorrows.” Even in her immediate mourning, a crew of 16 people, a show with expensive contraptions, and a menagerie of animals were all waiting for her to decide their fate.

“I received an immediate offer [to sell the show]; but to accept it was to throw away all that we had so long worked for,” she wrote.

To keep the Herrmann name alive, she cabled Alexander’s nephew, Leon, whom Alexander had intended to be his successor. With his lithe figure and similar facial hair, he was a perfect doppelgänger for his uncle, but he lacked Alexander’s experience and finesse. On January 28, 1897, just a little over a month after Alexander’s funeral, Leon made his formal debut at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. He was the star, but Adelaide ran the show, and she knew they needed something special. She decided to do one of the most dangerous tricks in magic: the Bullet Catch.

* * *

That night in 1897, after joining Leon in her usual assistant role, levitating and dancing, Adelaide returned to the stage dressed in trousers and a white blouse — the uniform of a magician, not an assistant.

“Poignant memories assailed me as, the overture being finished, the curtain rose to the familiar strains of the lovely Strauss waltz which my husband was accustomed to use for his opening accompaniment,” she wrote. “I began to feel faint; my emotion was almost too much for me.”

There was no time for reminiscing. She had a date with a firing squad. A line of riflemen joined her on stage, as Adelaide asked the crowd to inspect their bullets, each of which had a special mark. The guns were loaded and aimed at Adelaide. The audience held its breath. The guns fired. The smoke cleared, and Adelaide was still standing — the marked bullets, still hot, clutched in her hands. The crowd leapt to their feet and roared.

Adelaide revealed the sleight of hand in her memoirs. A trick serving tray switched the marked bullets out for blanks, while the real bullets were burned backstage and secretly handed to the magician. It was a trick that could easily go wrong. One of Alexander’s former collaborators, William Ellsworth Robinson, who performed as Chung Ling Soo (one of several white magicians to don exoticized and stereotyped Asian identities), died in 1918 when a live bullet accidentally got into the mix of blanks. The sight of a woman performing this notoriously dangerous trick made Adelaide a sensation, and ensured that the Herrmann name would not soon fade.

The duo of Adelaide and Leon was short lived, their personalities clashing so tensely that, after only three seasons, each set off on their own. Adelaide Herrmann, the metamorphic performer who could be both levitated maiden and fearless cannon flyer, was reborn as the solo Queen of Magic. 

Entertainment was at a moment of transition in the late 1890s, as vaudeville took over with short acts that centered on comedy and spectacle. And Adelaide had a keen sense of what would enrapture the vaudeville crowds.

Her favorite illusion was “The Phantom Bride,” which, perhaps meaningfully to Adelaide, had themes of loss and marriage. Through “hypnotism,” she made a bride’s body, draped in white, rise on a brightly lit stage. She passed a hoop over her hovering form, showing there were no wires, then pulled away the white silk — the bride was gone.

And of course, Adelaide danced. In “The Witch,” she stumbled onto the stage dressed as an old woman, trying to reach a fire burning in the darkness. When she finally arrived at the pyre, she dove right into the flames. Unlike the old “Cremation” act, when she returned as a taunting ghost, she emerged reborn and youthful. Smiling, she whirled to the swell of music with a cathartic abandon.

* * *

The Queen of Magic toured for over 25 years as a headliner. As she got older, and was no longer the dancing firecracker of her youth, she mesmerized with illusions that showcased her beloved pets. Her “Noah’s Ark” was her greatest vaudevillian hit. At first an ark was shown empty, then buckets of water symbolizing the flood were poured down its chimney. Soon two cats, one black and one white, climbed from the chimney, while a gangplank emerged over which prowled a parade of birds, leopards, lions, tigers, zebras, and elephants. (All the mammals were dogs in costumes.) A flock of white doves flew from the windows, and the biblical boat opened to reveal a lounging woman dressed in white.

Although successful, she’d given up the Whitestone mansion and stored all her props, illusions, decades of mementos, and trained animals at a theatrical warehouse on West 46th Street in Manhattan. On September 7, her morning was interrupted by a phone call. The warehouse was on fire.

She caught a taxi to the building. Firefighters had pumped so much water onto the inferno that the street was like a river. Adelaide was told that all her animals were lost. Then she heard a bystander yell, “Look! Look!” and point to a fourth-floor window where a little white furry shape, her cat Magic, was crouched. “Magic! Magic!” she called and the cat leapt down, landing safely in the water on the street.

One of the firemen fished Magic from the water, and Adelaide took the wet cat in her arms. Later, in a search of the charred wreckage, her white poodle Mamie and wire fox terrier Nellie were found alive. Aside from these three, Adelaide stated that over 60 of her animals, all part of the “Noah’s Ark” illusion, were gone.

The New York Times blamed the fire on an explosion, possibly from some bootlegger stills. Adelaide’s heartbreak is tangible in her memoirs, particularly for the loss of what she called “the best talent among animal Thespians,” as well as a fellow vaudeville entertainer named Thomas Collins who was found “locked in the embrace of his famous boxing kangaroo.” Gone, too, Adelaide lamented, were her 200 crates of costumes, illusions, and 50 years of life, from wedding silver to ephemera from her journey with Alexander.

Even at the age of 73, Adelaide was not finished: “Summoning all my remaining courage to my aid, I clung persistently to the thought that I should again arise, phoenix-like from these ashes to face another future.”

She rebounded briefly with a pared-down show called “Magic, Grace and Music,” highlighting the three elements at which she’d excelled in her career. The National Vaudeville Artists’ Year Book from 1928 shows Adelaide in her final performing year, still poised, still dignified, her snowy hair coiffed in a bob, her figure dressed in black so she recedes into the darkness. She retired that year, with few possessions, but a lifetime of vivid memories that she poured into the memoirs.

The 2011 publishing of these memoirs has restored some of her fame. Children’s author Mara Rockliff, who wrote the 2016 Anything but Ordinary Addie: The True Story of Adelaide Herrmann, Queen of Magic, says, “I was looking for a book about a woman stage magician for my nine-year-old daughter, and I couldn’t find even one.” She happened upon Steele’s Queen of Magic, and was inspired. Magician Angela Sanchez cites Adelaide’s career as an influence: “Adelaide’s legacy is important to remember because she demonstrates that women — even in the incredibly socially restrictive environments of early 20th-century America — can be stand-alone, single-billing magicians who command their own shows and audiences.”

On February 19, 1932, Adelaide Herrmann died of pneumonia. In Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, a stately granite monument topped by an urn marks the Herrmann plot. Alexander and Adelaide each have a headstone with their names. His is carved with “HERRMANN THE GREAT,” hers simply “WIFE.”

For three decades after Alexander’s death, Adelaide was not just a pioneering woman in magic, she was a major performer who adapted to changing audiences, and overcame loss. In a November 2, 1899 article for Broadway Magazine entitled “The World’s Only Woman Magician,” Adelaide proclaimed, “I shall not be content until I am recognized by the public as a leader in my profession, and entirely irrespective of the question of sex.”

Adelaide performed until she was 74, ever regal, ever transfixing, ever the star of her show.

The post She Caught Bullets with Her Bare Hands — and Made Magic’s Glass Ceiling Disappear appeared first on Narratively.

“Feel free to have children,” the doctor said. “Just know you probably won’t live to see them grow up.”

I stared past him at the sheen of the window. Ice crystals branched along its surface, blurring the slushy traffic of the fading Boston afternoon.

This oncologist had become protective over the years. Though clumsy in his delivery, he intended a kind reminder.

As a 33-year-old with one year of marriage and three bouts of a rare unpredictable cancer behind me, I needed no reminding. Any child I had would develop in my damaged abdomen, stretching its web of scars. This child would then grow up forever linked to my uncertain health. Time and again I wondered – is it fair, wise, or kind to bring a child into the world knowing I may not live long?

Before cancer, parenthood seemed a hazy reverie. My life was saturated with happy hours, graduate school projects, second dates, medical school applications. Blissfully busy, I surged forward with plans for career and companionship. Children were encased in the cozy scene of a snow globe, kept on a closet shelf.

Then, over months, my belly grew oblong and oddly firm. Instead of fluttering with a fetus, it bulged with the dullness of a tumor. The mass pushed all the nearby organs to the periphery. It halted my momentum. The doctors called it sarcoma. I named it The Bastard.

Immaculately conceived by the mutations of my own genes, it was birthed surgically. Weighing more than the average newborn, it greeted the cold operating room silently. No one took its photo or stamped its footprint. A nurse delivered it to the pathologist in a sterile bundle of towels. Its birth and death were one.

A fresh cancer survivor, I began my education as a physician, grateful for a preoccupation. Our professors explained one must understand the well in order to understand the diseased. Eager for all that was vigorous and healthy, I sheltered in the dim medical school library, devouring details of the body’s usual functions, memorizing the cycle of orderly cell growth and mastering the structures of normal anatomy.

Normal only lasts so long. Soon, in the laboratory and on the hospital ward, we witnessed all the ways a body can stall, wither, break and fail. How cells can grow awry, multiplying into malignancy. How brittle the nature of our inner selves can be, how often unpredictable our corporal course. How despite attempts to prevent and heal, we ultimately lose control.

I cared for lives that ended unexpectedly at every stage. The pregnancy lost at 14 weeks, when hope was just beginning. The three-year-old who tumbled out of the upstairs window, head cracked like an eggshell. The 17-year-old at last given a new heart, only to die of complications before his next birthday. The 45-year-old, fresh from celebrating her ten years in remission, whose X-ray for back pain revealed the smudge of metastasis.

Cancer had lifted the veil of control; training in medicine reinforced my sense of the relentless uncertainty of life. My wrinkled white coat was a flimsy barrier, easily exchanged for a hospital gown if any of my every-six-months MRIs found recurrence.

Life on such an edge was too uncomfortable. So when as a medical student I found myself at the threshold of the patient’s room, her distinctive bald head amidst the well-wishing balloons and bouquets, I hesitated.

I escaped to read her chart, thick for one so young. It was a story that started like mine: Cancer diagnosed at 25 – the cause of her bloating not her love of cheese, but a sneaky mass on an ovary. Cut out and radiated and blasted with chemotherapy, it had resurrected, returning after her 28th birthday.

“She won’t make it to 30,” the supervising physician told me. “Sad,” he quipped.

I condensed my morning visits to her room, silencing my usual small talk, leaving only time for the necessary – vital signs, her pain level, any overnight changes. I left little space for the empathy medical school expected. If I let it in, I might disintegrate at the foot of her bed.

How could I hope to help others face fragility when I could barely bear to grasp my own? So I honed my denial, sequestering thoughts of my mortality. I was not like her, I told myself. I was different. I would live far beyond 30. I conjured a boundless future, sustained by years of clear scans.

Then, months before medical school graduation, a reminder appeared. The tumor was a blip, puny and solitary, found before it could damage its surroundings. Telling classmates I was taking an oncology elective, I squeezed another surgery between my final clinical rotations. I rushed to recover, to hide my new scar. I donned my cap and gown, tumor-free, eager to reattempt hope.

* * *

In the next cancerless years, I met the man who would become my husband. We fit our dates in between my long resident shifts at the children’s hospital. One May evening, full of tempura and warm sake, we plotted a life together brimming with dogs, tropical holidays, and children. I moved into his attic apartment, hanging art and buying a new bedspread. We jetted to Spanish beaches, and flew home to meet each other’s families.

Months later he proposed over pancakes. The verdant emerald on my finger became a happy distraction during hospital rounds. Rapt with the flurry of wedding planning, I barely remembered my upcoming scan.

My third tumor was an uninvited guest at our wedding. It hid deep beneath my lace bodice, hugging my kidney and nudging my colon. It waited quietly as I recited vows under the summer sun, ate strawberry rhubarb pie and danced at dusk. It grew slowly as we honeymooned on the Canadian coast, eating steamed mussels and introducing our Labrador puppy to the ocean. It lodged firmly as I sat under an expanding sky, toes buried in the red sand.

I returned to Boston, tan and anxious. I sat in the banal fluorescence of waiting rooms, the September leaves rustling just beyond wide windows. Doctors scheduled another surgery, some suggested radiation. Unable to shield my ovaries from its waves, this therapy would assign my fertility its fate, withering my eggs to empty shells, their potential lost. I envisioned my children, a faint shadow to start, now consumed by darkness.

Yearning for another option, I dissected study after study in the medical school library, disheartened to find so few. I took road trips, my medical records stacked in the backseat, to listen to second and third opinions, sitting in stiff chairs, hearing risks and benefits, lackluster outcomes and uncertain guarantees. No evidence could assure radiation would improve my prognosis, so I chose to fight for my fertility and have surgery alone.

This tumor resisted eviction, glued to the unassuming organs nearby, making surgery prolonged and strenuous. I awoke in the chilled recovery room, my breath shallowed by a chest tube, my mind clouded by fentanyl. Friends and residency colleagues came to distract with gossip and jokes. I suppressed my laughter; it was too painful for my split, hollowed abdomen. Perhaps, I thought, the collateral loss of my kidney, spleen and chunk of colon would leave more room for a baby to nestle? I pushed away such thoughts, distracted by pain and pureed food. 

In the next weeks, as my belly wove itself back together and my single kidney learned to excrete alone, my brain recalled a train ride from Paris to Nantes. With a baguette and Brie and plastic cups of wine balanced on the pull-out tray, my future husband and I had imagined how many children we’d have – two, no three, maybe four?

Now, I wanted to try for even one. But I also wondered if my desire for a child was really a desire to avenge my treacherous body, replacing the monstrosity of malignancy with the magic of new life. Was a child a selfish attempt to perpetuate my genes, a way to eclipse my own death? If my mothering time was cut short, would my child resent me?

Perhaps if my disease had a trusted timeline, a sure statistic, a predictable path, answers would be transparent. When I pressed my oncologist for a forecast, she counseled, “Live as best you can in whatever time you have.”

I wanted an expansive life, one that, even if sparse in years, was saturated in love. Our child would join an ample clan of grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins and, of course, a father. I imagined our child living without me, learning all I wanted to teach her – how to paint, to bargain shop, to prune blackberries, to heal a broken heart – from another. She would not be alone. I could provide only the launch, then entrust others to guide the voyage. We chose to accept the risks and create life.

Soon my belly swelled perceptibly. The weeks marched forward, calmed by the rhythm of a steady heart and the jolts of tiny feet against the ultrasound probe. Friends patted my bump; I welcomed them. I savored my gravid form. It was hope made flesh.

To ensure our child had no unwelcome cancerous neighbors, I squeezed my bulging self into an MRI machine, the tech wedging in an extra pillow and wishing me luck. Afterward my oncologist shared the good news – the scan found no sign of recurrence. Then he showed me what had never appeared on any of my other scans: The contour of a nose, the angle of a chin, the curve of a belly – the parts of my perfectly growing child, outlined in shades of gray on the screen. This was no tumor, dull and bleak. It was alive and wriggling, even in black and white.

Soon the baby, prone to flipping, attempted a feet-first arrival. So on a balmy November evening I waddled buoyantly into the operating room. Draped in blue, I waited to greet our child, staring at the striped towels arranged on the infant warmer nearby. As a pediatrician, I’d stood by in hundreds of Cesarean sections, anticipating a lusty cry, that heralding pronouncement of life. My eyes always welled, fogging my sterile mask.

Our daughter emerged, petite and glistening, wailing as my tears surged. She quieted, resting her clasped hands under her chin. Our hands were nearly the same, both long-fingered, hers chubby and dimpled, mine veiny and gnarled. She lay content in her father’s arms as the doctor sewed me up, leaving a short new scar perpendicular to my outstretched old ones. We brought her home in time for Thanksgiving dinner. She weighed less than our turkey.

Sooner than I thought possible, her fingers were picking the frosted raspberries off her first birthday cake. She squeezed their juice with joy. I snapped photos of her wide, stained grin. Amidst the squeals of “Mama!” and the ripping of wrapping paper, I paused, amazed to be there. Here, in the joy and chaos, was the worth of life. And like the bright party confetti fluttering down to cling, sparkling, to our socks, I was sticking longer than expected.

I still tend to measure life in six-month intervals. Such presentness feels safer. Some days I’ll daydream about her second grade concert, her middle school science fair, her college graduation. I will be happy if I am here for such moments, but I do not expect to be. I can only parent in the time my delicate cells allow.

My daughter and I often explore the meadow nearby our home. She stoops to examine the shimmer of frost on a fallen leaf. She rubs the contour of every dug-up rock. She stands transfixed as snowflakes vanish in her warm palm. She pauses, eyes toward the sky, with every bird’s trill or airplane’s hum. Her giggles mingle with the rushing hum of the stream as it courses under the receding freeze of April. She smiles up at me before toddling forward.

With a child, time is fluid. It can surge with a springy quickness – a new word each day, pants abruptly too short, crawling that becomes standing, walking, running all within weeks. Or it can meander with a syrupy slowness, the world captured in a day.

The post After Years of Tumors, Growing a Baby Instead appeared first on Narratively.

Seventeen-year-old Haron sits on a bench in Gezi Park, unsure of what to do next. Night is falling as rain clouds begin to roll over Istanbul. With just $50 in his pocket and no place to go, he finds a nearby tree, unzips his suitcase, and covers himself with jackets and sweaters. Rain hits his face as the magnitude of his journey from Syria begins to settle.

It’s November 2015 and Haron is a refugee who fled duel dangers: the civil war that has torn apart his country, and the constant abuse he received from his community for being gay. Haron arrived in Turkey with hopes of reaching a more LGBTQ-friendly place in Europe. But with little money, his journey is at a halt, and without a plan, he is left stranded and alone.

“I arrived in Istanbul that day and didn’t know anyone,” Haron recounted in a recent interview. “I lived in the park for two months, and every day I’d wake up to police in my face telling me to get up and go somewhere else.” (Like others interviewed for this article, Haron requested that his name be changed because of the ongoing threats he faces.)

Turkey is now home to around 3.6 million Syrian refugees. In 2015, there were approximately 400 self-identified LGBTQ Syrian refugees in Turkey, according to the Organization for Refugee, Asylum & Migration. The actual number is likely much higher because many are too afraid to speak out. They are accompanied by LGBTQ asylum seekers from Iran, Iraq, and other countries throughout the Middle East and North Africa. Homosexuality is illegal in many of these countries—even punishable by death in some—but legal in Turkey, making Istanbul a beacon for queer refugees.

At the bottom of one of Istanbul’s many hills, along a windy road lined with mosques, barber shops and tea gardens, is Istanbul’s only shelter for LGBTQ refugees. Not far from ancient Byzantine walls, Aman LGBT Shelter currently houses 14 LGBTQ refugees, the majority of them from Syria.

On a sunny spring afternoon at the top floor of Aman, a handful of residents sit in their rec room drinking coffee and enjoying sunny views. Residents dance to Lady Gaga tunes, which battle the constant serenade of seagulls, call to prayer, and bread sellers yelling down below. Mary, a 20-year old transgender refugee from Damascus, passes coffee around to her roommates followed by echoes of “Thanks, Mom.”

Each of these laughing residents has traveled long and far for this slice of peace. But they still face an uphill battle. Hostility to the LGBTQ community here in Turkey has risen in recent years. The Istanbul pride parade has been banned the past several years, turning a once peaceful event into an annual clash between LGBTQ activists and the police. Many Aman residents are fearful of going home and fearful of staying here. They see only one path forward: get to a more LGBTQ-friendly country in Europe, or die trying.

* * *

May 2012, Damascus – Haron, 14, has no intention of waking up for school. His mother stands over him, gently nudging him to get up and get ready. When her wake-up call falls on deaf ears, she pulls sleepy-eyed Haron out of his bed. He throws on some clothes and rushes past his father and older brother having breakfast before they head off to work. His three younger siblings are still sound asleep upstairs. Like lighting, he is out the door.

Outside, rebel fighters clash with President Bashar al-Assad’s forces, bringing the frontlines of war to the suburbs. It’s year two of the Syrian civil war, and the Damascus region has seen a slew of terrorist attacks and heavy fighting. Haron and his family are determined to leave Syria.

Moments before Haron is about to take his seat in class, he is thrown off balance by a massive explosion. Classroom windows shatter, sending glass, smoke, and screams into the air. Once the smoke clears and the yells give way to silent shock, another explosion blasts, forcing Haron to retreat under his desk.

Teachers frantically send students home. Damascus is under attack, they say. Haron runs through chaotic crowds. As he turns onto his street, he finds himself standing in front of a pile of rubble, still burning and engulfed in smoke. The home he left less than one hour ago is gone, hit by a bomb. Somewhere under the smoke is his family.

A neighbor recognizes Haron and covers his eyes, but anxious to find his family, he bites their hand and pushes them aside.

“It’s like a dream. A very bad dream,” Haron recalls. “Every sound and image are covered in shadows. People were removing blocks, and getting out the bodies of my family. I saw them.”

Two suicide bombers had blown up cars containing more than 2,000 pounds of explosives in Haron’s neighborhood, killing 55 and wounding 372. Haron has escaped death but lost his entire family in the blink of an eye.

Haron’s family had known he was gay and accepted their son as he is. But now he was left with no family and no support network, on his own to tackle trauma and also vulnerable to neverending rumors and crude remarks from neighbors. A nearby family took Haron in, but he resolved to leave Syria as soon as possible. He quit school so he could work full-time as a cleaner and save enough money to leave.

Traveling between cleaning clients became more difficult as neighborhoods began to establish checkpoints throughout the city. Checkpoint officers would harass Haron, questioning him for hours about his appearance and sexuality, making his commute to work a daily nightmare. Then, verbal abuse became physical, evolving into rape. Hours of detainment turned into days. Haron decided to pack his bags and leave immediately.

“I felt unsafe to go to work,” he says. “I took whatever money I had and left. My friends were going to Germany, so I thought I could, too. I had nothing to lose.”

He hired someone to act as his guardian to sign off on travel paperwork, and then he boarded a plane to Istanbul.

* * *

Justin Hilton, 51, a tall, shaggy-haired Californian, co-founded Aman LGBT Shelter with people like Haron in mind. A happy husband and a father of two, Hilton spent many years working with LGBTQ activists and on natural disaster relief in Nepal. As news of the Syrian civil war intensified, Hilton thought of the LGBTQ community. “If you’ve got this many millions refugees, I imagine some of them are LGBT,” Hilton explains. “So how does that work in the camp? How does that work in the neighborhoods they live in … where people are not crazy about gay people either? How does that all shake down? I don’t know but sounds like a population which needs to be served.”

It started with an extended layover in Istanbul, when Hilton set up meetings with local nonprofits and refugee rights activists who confirmed that many LGBTQ refugees were now living beside those who shared the same hateful beliefs of the community they had fled from. Hilton left saddened by their stories, but determined to do something.

At the age of 15, Hilton was a homeless teen and addicted to drugs. He would go without food for days, unsure of where he would sleep next, dependent on the random acts of kindness from strangers. After being diagnosed with hepatitis, he checked himself into rehab, cleaned himself up, and made his way back to school. Four decades later, he works as a real estate investor and often reassigns portions of his earnings to his volunteer work. A few months after his first trip to Istanbul, Hilton partnered up with Owen Harris, an Istanbul-based refugee rights activist, and together they hatched the plan for Istanbul’s first shelter for LGBTQ refugees. Hilton would work on fundraising from California, while Harris worked on the ground in Istanbul.

In June 2017, Aman opened with 14 beds, a social room, and volunteer-run programs including English and Turkish classes, community outreach, job search assistance, and guidance throughout the asylum application process. They were at full capacity in two days.

“People don’t realize LGBTQ refugees exist, they fly under the radar,” Hilton says. “We really need shelters wherever there are large refugee populations. How we respond to the most vulnerable populations determines our future as a species.”

Haron and his roommates at Aman say a safe space for LGBTQ refugees was direly necessary. Many shelter residents had been attacked and beaten by former roommates when they found out about their sexual orientation. They did not feel safe renting apartments in Istanbul’s Syrian neighborhoods.

“We are getting a certain stratosphere of folks who are being targeted and being trafficked, or who were in communities who are extremely hostile to them,” Hilton says. At Aman, Hilton continues, “We feel safe together, and we feel safe in this building. We feel safe where we are.”

* * *

July, 2016 – Haron sits on his friend’s couch in Istanbul, helpless and unsure of what to do. He wipes the sweat from his forehead as he fights back tears. In the nine months since he has arrived in Turkey, things had started to stabilize, but just took a horrendous turn for the worse.

Haron’s friend Muhammed Wisam Sankari, also a gay Syrian refugee living in Istanbul, disappeared two days earlier. He was found mutilated and beheaded. The next day, Haron began to receive death threats from his friend’s attacker, who trolled through Sankari’s phone contacts. “‘I know where you live,” the attacker said. “I will find you and kill you.”

“I received ten calls a day for a week, telling me he was going to kill me next,” Haron says. He fled to Konya, a city in central Turkey, where he lived for four months until the calls stopped. When he returned to Istanbul, he stayed at an apartment with fellow LGBTQ refugees in a predominantly immigrant neighborhood. But just a few weeks later, Haron’s photo was posted on a Facebook hate group, targeting him for being gay and half-Lebanese.

Haron was referred to Hilton and Harris, and was quickly accepted into the Aman LGBT Shelter. Living here has given him stability and a safe place to plan his life, along with a network of friends who understand the horrors of what he has gone through. For the first time since that last walk to school, he says, he has a family surrounding him.

“Before the shelter, I didn’t have anyone to trust. I didn’t have LGBTQ friends,” Haron says. “When I got here. It changed. … You have someone to talk to when you are nervous or sad. And when I talk to someone, they give me very useful advice, especially Mary.”

Mary is a soft-spoken bodybuilding enthusiast with a buzz cut and perfectly manicured eyebrows. She moves comfortably in her deep v-necks and studded earrings. Her bed in Aman, is surrounded by her drawings of nature and portraits of people from her dreams.

After being sexually abused by a soldier at a checkpoint near her university in Damascus, Mary stopped going to school out of fear of facing her attacker again. To avoid hostility from neighbors, she would cover herself in a hijab. Her parents, supportive of their transgender daughter, sold their house, bought her a passport, and sent her to Istanbul where the plan was to live with her aunt before traveling to Germany.

But just a few days after arriving in Istanbul, Mary’s aunt kicked her out after learning she is transgender. Mary hopped from apartment to apartment, repeatedly beaten and harassed by her roommates. Now, after moving to Aman, Mary no longer has to worry about being unsafe at home, and finally feels free to be herself.

“People call me the mom of the house,” she says. “I immediately wanted to give back when I came to Aman, I want to do many things. I want to be an activist.”

Shelter managers helped Mary find a job working as a social coordinator for Positive Living Association, an organization providing HIV/AIDS services and education for both refugees and Turkish citizens. Her backpack is full of red and yellow flyers which provide information about HIV testing in Turkish, Arabic, Persian, and English. After a long day of work, she spends her nights walking around refugee neighborhoods, passing flyers to local businesses.

Both Mary and Haron, along with the majority of their shelter roommates, are in the process of seeking LGBTQ asylum status through the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Refugees go through an extensive interview process to assess their needs and level of danger. If their application for asylum is approved, they will hopefully be placed in a host country. This process can take anywhere between six months to several years.

* * *

March, 2018 – Haron’s eyes are bright blue today. Ever expressive, he tries to match his outfits to his colored contact lenses. Now 19, he has landed a job as a museum tour guide for Arabic- and English-speaking tourists. It’s his day off and he strolls down the famous Istiklal Street, a long walkway dotted with shops set in 19th-century palaces, live music at every corner and the smell of roasted kebab twirling in the air from vertical rotisseries. A trolley zips tourists up and down, while ice cream sellers taunt customers with their wares.

He takes a seat at a nearby cafe and orders a lemonade. He squirms at how sour it is and laughs. He is still boyish, wide-eyed, and hopeful for the future.

Just shy of the shelter’s one-year anniversary, many residents have found jobs, a sense of safety and connection. Haron now works at a wax museum as a tour guide to Arabic- and English-speaking tourists. Haron has moved to an apartment nearby, where he feels safe being near his Aman family. He’s received LGBTQ asylum status from UNHCR and is currently waiting to be placed in France. “I am ready to start over,” Haron says, “and make a new home.”

Mary and a handful of other residents have already been placed throughout Europe, landing in Germany, Holland, and Norway. “So far we have had 100-percent asylum status approval for our residents,” Hilton says.

Although this is great news for the 14 original residents at Aman LGBT Shelter, it is a much different reality for the countless LGBTQ refugees around the world, stuck in limbo with no support.

Lesbos, an island off the coast of Greece, is known for its beautiful beaches and captivating sunsets. But in recent years, it has also become a center for refugees awaiting placement. The island’s Moria refugee camp houses more than 5,000 asylum seekers in a space originally meant for 2,000.

And just east of Moria is Hilton’s next project. On March 1, he signed a lease on a two-story house, lined with citrus trees and a garden, overlooking the sea. This is his group’s second LGBTQ shelter. With beds for 11, it also acts as a welcoming center for other LGBTQ refugees. 

Hilton and his new nonprofit Safe Place International have also partnered with Athens Housing Collective, a project that consists of 11 separate apartments housing about 30 LGBTQ refugees. They hope to double this number by next year. Hilton and his team also aspire to open a shelter in Lebanon soon.

“We have residents from Cameroon, Uganda, Azerbaijan, Algeria, and more,” he says. “It’s been such a relief to get these refugees in a safe place and help expedite their cases with the UNHCR.”

Lesbos’s new LGBTQ shelter residents have started to paint their new home and plant the garden. Once they’ve settled, residents will help welcome new ships of refugees arriving on the island, while working on their own asylum cases.

“Being in the shelter was a good thing for me. It helped me and it can help people in many places,” Haron says. “It’s not just a problem in Istanbul, we are everywhere.”

The post Where LGBTQ War Refugees Finally Feel Safe appeared first on Narratively.

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When I signed up to spend five days at queer camp, surrounded by 400 other queer people in the mountains of Ojai, California, going to church was the last thing on my mind. Jesus might be a queer witch, as one camp friend said, but my faith was a hollowed-out relic of a past life, left in the dust with a straight marriage and the dozens of friends and family that stopped speaking to me when I came out as a lesbian.

Yet, for all that I don’t consider myself a Christian anymore, here I am, in the middle of church, which is really just a bunch of queer folks who got up early on Sunday morning to read scripture and poetry in a small dining room.

“Where two or more are gathered in my name, there I am in the midst of them,” Jesus says in the Gospel of Matthew. I look around the room and see gorgeous queers with piercings and undercuts and bra straps sticking out, drinking mimosas and talking and laughing and finding room for doubt and praise and prayers, all at the same time.

I was not prepared for this.

* * *

I registered for A-Camp, an exclusively queer camp hosted by Autostraddle, the internet’s leading independent media company for “girl on girl culture,” for the most obvious reason: I liked a girl, and she was going.

That particular flirtation fizzled out long before camp started, but our conversations piqued my interest about camp itself – a community that springs up in the woods, magically, for five days a year. A space where everyone just knows that everyone else is somewhere on the LGBTQ spectrum. For me, a femme-presenting lesbian who refuses to get an undercut or a septum piercing, or to wear most types of clothing that would register as legibly queer, the idea of being someplace where I was immediately seen, where I wouldn’t have to come out to someone new for a whole five days, sounded nearly utopian.

One of my dearest friends signed up to join me. I had other friends from Boston who were going, and a whole host of queer Twitter who I had never met in real life descending on the camp as well.

The schedule was released a few weeks ahead of time and included something for everyone. Among dozens of workshops, there were dance clinics (yes), crafting events (no), Disney Princess singalongs (hell yes), and a Dana Fairbanks Memorial Tennis Tournament (hard pass). There was a Shabbat on Friday for Jewish campers. Also of note? A Gospel Brunch on Sunday morning, hosted by Al(aina), one of my favorite Autostraddle writers, described as a service for those who were faithful, seeking, and “running from” the church.

I reconnect with my Boston friends, and it doesn’t take long for one of them – Erica – and I to end up on the subject of religion. Our conversations always go there. After all, we’re both in the “running from” church category.

“We probably aren’t the only two people at camp who are ex-fundie,” Erica says. “There are definitely more of us. We should put a meetup on the board.”

I scribble a quick note: “Ex-Religious and Fundamentalist Lunch Meetup – 1:45pm Saturday, Cabana,” and pin it to the “Missed Connections” board, where lunch meetups for Saturday are springing up.

By the time I walk into Klub Deer, the unofficial dance party of A-Camp, that night, the religious meetup Erica and I are hosting the next day is forgotten. After all, God isn’t a part of my vacation plans. Sex is.

Deer is spoken about in hushed tones, a “you have to see it to believe it.” But it’s just a party in a big room, really. Deer is held in the one room with a stage, the room large enough to fit hundreds of folding chairs for the performances that take place every night. It has high ceilings and an ugly brown carpet. Picture the lobby of a big Midwestern church. But dim the lights, pump Janelle Monáe through the speakers, and add hundreds of queer bodies pressed up against each other and suddenly, it’s a queer nightclub – which is its own kind of holy.

There’s a woman at Deer who I recognize from some workshops I’ve attended. She’s femme presenting (not my type), with glasses (totally my type), but she has this energy, a rip current that carries you under with a smile on your face.

We’re dancing and before I know it she’s kissing me, saying all kinds of things to me that make me blush, and she keeps playing with the harness I’m wearing. She doesn’t know what to do with all of my lingerie, but she bites her lip and the look on her face is, well…

Later that night, when we’re bracing ourselves in between wooden bunks in an abandoned tent, I come into her hand, and she catches all of it and says, “I’m going to return this to the earth you came from.” We walk out of the tent and listen to it all drip off her fingers into the dirt, the moonlight dancing on her skin.

Sex with language is still a revelation for me, mostly because for years I didn’t know how to express myself sexually, didn’t know how to say yes or no, didn’t know how to articulate my desire, didn’t know how to identify what my desire even was. My suppressed language was tied to God, to purity culture, to the fact that good Christian women are not supposed to have a sex drive, to the fact that, in my marriage, sex was usually not consensual. Sex was something I endured so that my husband wouldn’t sin. “Do you want me to start watching porn again? Do you want to be responsible for my sexual sin?” were explicit questions asked of me when we would go three or four days without sex.

The ability to vocalize desire, and the reality that others could vocalize theirs while asking me if it was O.K. if they touched me, if I wanted more, if I wanted it differently, is still a revelation that knocks me on my ass.

* * *

The next day, Erica and I host a group of ex-fundies in a conversation at a picnic table in the open-air cabana. There are fewer than 10 of us, and a meetup that is supposed to be 45 minutes goes for nearly three hours, all the way through the first workshop block of the afternoon.

We each introduce ourselves by name and pronouns, and immediately launch into detailed retellings of the faiths in which we were raised, of what we’ve experienced, as queer people within faithful families, of what we’ve lost.

“I’m Jeanna,” I say. “I’m a lesbian, but I grew up really conservative and really Christian, and I’ve got an ex-husband.”

“I’ve got one of those,” another lesbian in the circle says, and we laugh, looking at each other in recognition, seeing – really seeing – each other’s pain in a way virtually no one else can.

In spite of having different backgrounds – some from legit cults, some LDS (Mormon), some ex-evangelical Christian (like myself), some ex-Catholic, some ex-Muslim – everyone at the picnic table shares similar traumas around sexual purity, rigid gender roles, authority and authoritarianism, and literal interpretations of religious texts. We’re all wounded, bitter, searching, healing.

None of us are still practicing any even adjacent forms of the religions we have grown up with. All of us have issues with our natal families; many have been cut off and are struggling to find ways of staying connected. Many of us feel too hurt to even try any form of spirituality and are skeptical of the queer community’s embrace of alternative forms of spirituality. I’m one of the few who has embraced practices like tarot and astrology, but more as a form of self-healing, of rebuilding my own identity outside organized religion.

It’s hard to explain to folks who don’t grow up within the constricts of fundamentalist faith just how deep it goes in you. Clean to the bone. It’s not a belief so much as an identity – the identity. You are good because Jesus redeemed you. You are worthy because of Jesus’s sacrifice. Your primary identity is as a child of God.

So what do you do when that doesn’t apply anymore?

Saturday night, I eschew the after parties and stay up talking in the common room with my cabin mates, especially one – Lauren. It turns out that she and her partner are both ex-fundamentalists, that she grew up in the South around the kinds of evangelical churches I had.

“It’s so hard, with our queer community here,” I say to Lauren. “They don’t understand how much of a loss the church is. And of course, I don’t want that community anymore, but that was home, that was my identity. Jesus was everything, and the loss is just so total when you come out and no one here gets that unless you were in it.” It can feel like our LGBTQ community doesn’t take our trauma seriously because we should be glad to be out of the church, because Christianity is so damaging that we shouldn’t mourn its loss.

For hours, Lauren and I talk religion and God and church and family and identity, finishing each other’s sentences, starting to explain the words we’re using and then realizing we don’t have to because we’re talking to another native speaker of our own first language: that of the evangelical Christian church.

* * *

For me, sexuality and faith are intrinsically linked, because coming out and leaving the church were ultimately one and the same. I tried to keep them both, but couldn’t. I tried to keep my marriage, tried to stay straight-presenting, tried to deny my feelings for my best friend.

But I couldn’t do it.

So I gave up my marriage, but tried to keep Jesus. I tried to keep my identity as a child of God, to forgive myself for leaving my husband, for telling God and everyone that Jesus was not enough to fix it – to fix the relationship, to fix my sexuality.

I tried to attend more liberal, progressive churches that allowed women in leadership, and that didn’t think lesbians were going to hell. But that didn’t work, either.

My decision to leave my husband had declared that Jesus was not enough, and for a fundamentalist, that is blasphemy. My brain was too hardwired in fundamentalism. Every Bible verse was a tripwire. I had been raised within a framework that valued biblical literalness (to be read literally and not figuratively or with cultural context) and inerrancy (the Bible is the given, infallible, perfect word of God).

Intellectually, as an educated woman, as a woman who was, at the time, in an English Ph.D. program, it made sense to me to read the Bible within cultural context. But fundamentalism – or what some would call “brainwashing” – is powerful. Even if I could make room for the scripture to embrace LGBTQ folks, what did it have to say about me, a divorced woman? Jesus doesn’t say much about being queer, but he says plenty about getting divorced, and my faith could not reconcile that.

Within the fundamentalist framework, the divorce was the result of my own sin and inability to withstand temptation. This belief drove me to consider killing myself before I considered leaving the church.

Within a fundamentalist framework, God does not make mistakes. Within fundamentalism, there is no grace for someone like me.

So I left the church. I left Jesus, too.

* * *

It’s been five years and I’m still so angry and sad when I walk by a church. I am still mourning this part of me – that was once all of me – that was ripped away, that I had to leave like Lot’s wife, and I couldn’t look back or else I would turn to salt.

The last time I was in church before camp was for my grandmother’s funeral. I was heartbroken. Not only was my grandmother dead, but I was also fresh off a breakup with my partner of nearly four years.

My mother’s side of the family is conservative in that peculiar Midwestern, religious way, and while I knew I was loved, I had no idea how they would respond to me coming out post-divorce. My grandmother’s wholehearted embrace of me and my partner, who she actively emailed with right up until the end of her life, set the tone for how this side of the family would treat me: the same way they always had.

Sitting in church at my grandmother’s funeral, I felt numb. The familiar Episcopal liturgy washed over me without impact. The message was clearly delivered by someone who didn’t know her at all. When the time for communion came, I sat in my seat as others went up to receive, tears dropping from my eyes as I asked Grandma to understand.

After the service, my sister and I snuck out and walked to the freshly dug grave where she had been buried with my grandfather. It was dirty from its recent unearthing.

“Let’s clean this up,” I said, and my sister and I immediately set about to wiping down our grandparents’ headstone with the tissues we had in our respective purses.

Tears mixed with dirt as we scrubbed the grime off, as I traced the letters of their names so that they looked shiny and new.

After we had cleaned it up to our satisfaction, my sister and I just sat next to our grandparents, holding hands, quiet as the sun beat down on us.

I laid my head down on my grandmother’s grave and wept.

* * *

Sunday morning rolls around, and it turns out that I’m not too tired from staying up late into the night with Lauren to go to Gospel Brunch. I show up at the room dubbed the “Fishbowl” with my breakfast plate – mostly blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, and strawberries – and sit at a random table.

The only person I recognize in the Fishbowl is Al(aina), the Autostraddle staff member who is leading the service.

I turn to my breakfast. The feeling of isolation in church is familiar, practically comfortable. But there is orange juice and champagne on the tables for mimosas. That’s different.

A girl at my table sits down with her plate and pauses. “Should we pray before eating?” she asks, the question seemingly directed to all of us. I pause mid-bite. I haven’t prayed before a meal in years, haven’t even stopped to consider the question.

It only then dawns on me that some folks here haven’t lost their faith yet, and have found a way to hold their queerness and God simultaneously. I knew that, intellectually, but now I really know it. Some small engine of anxiety starts up in my stomach, that gnawing feeling that maybe I don’t actually belong here.

Al(aina) is praying, and there are readings from scripture.

Why did I come here? This isn’t me anymore, I don’t believe in sin, don’t believe that Jesus is the only way to God, don’t even know if I think he’s an option on the path to God.

My mind is reeling, and practically on cue, Lauren and her partner come in and sit down next to me. I feel a little less alone because I know they’re in the same category as me, the “running from” God category, even though somehow we ended up here, in church at queer camp.

And then, something happens. Al(aina) starts reading an unfamiliar poem from one of my favorite queer poets, Natalie Diaz’s “These Hands, If Not God’s”:

Haven’t they moved like rivers—
like Glory, like light—
over the seven days of your body?

And wasn’t that good?

And I split open like a seed, tears falling from my eyes uncontrollably. Natalie’s words are balm and Al(aina)’s voice is rainwater. Something starts growing, or maybe something starts healing? What are these words doing in between readings from 1st Peter and Acts? It is magic, indefinable, except it is entirely definable. This is the kind of thing that used to happen for me in church, that I used to call the Holy Spirit – back when I still believed, back before I knew I was queer.

The woman I danced with is here, at Gospel Brunch, because of course she is. These people I end up being drawn to, we just smell the church on each other. Our spirits recognize each other.

The coincidence is amusing. It also somehow strikes me as poetic, because this was taken from me – church was taken from me, my faith was taken from me, for the very kind of desire we acted on so recently, even though I have found that there is more divinity in a dark tent where a woman asks if she can be inside me than in a marriage bed where a husband assumes he’s welcome.

“If you’d like to take communion, we’re going to have it,” Al(aina) says. “We’ve got cinnamon bread and champagne—”

At this, laughter.

“And there is absolutely no pressure. But if you would like to come up, come on up.”

I am out of my seat immediately, instinctually. Lauren is, too. We just look at each other, quietly, and nod.

I stopped taking communion long before I stopped going to church. To me, communion symbolized not only that you were right with God, but that you wanted to be right with God, and even when I was still trying to go to church, I wasn’t sure what I wanted. So I abstained. Depending on where I was attending that week, I passed the communion plates, didn’t go up to receive.

But I know that here, I want to. Here, no judgment. Here, safety. Here, family. Queer family, full of bisexuals and lesbians and gays and queers and trans folk and enbies and genderqueers, all of whom are coming from their own place of religious trauma or questioning or even, most remarkably to me, groundedness. All beautiful.

We stand in a circle, and Al(aina) starts the prayer chain. I hold Lauren’s hand tight, a lifeline, as people pray aloud. Eventually, the prayers make their way around the circle. Lauren squeezes my hand, signaling that she would rather not pray aloud, that if I want to pray aloud it’s my turn.

Back when I still attended church, I was never the person who passed the prayer, who declined to pray in a group setting. I always had something to say, something eloquent and moving. But here among my family, the truest spiritual family I have ever felt, I have no words.

For the first time in memory, I squeeze the hand of the person to my right, passing it on, still silent. I don’t know their name, and they don’t know mine. They pass the prayer, too, and it is as though we can feel each other’s wounds through our palms, like Christ’s palms, bleeding as we hold each other’s hands. A collection of Lost Boys.

Someone speaks up, a person who I would later learn was also ex-evangelical, the child of Pentecostal pastors: “Hi, God. It’s been a while.”

Then we start communion, improvised with champagne and cinnamon bread, passing it around the circle as we did the prayers.

When it gets around to our side of the circle, Lauren turns to me and says,

“The body of Christ, broken for you,
The blood of Christ, poured out for you.”

We’re both crying as she gives me communion, as I eat the bread and drink the champagne, representative of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. I take the bread and the cup and turn to give communion to the stranger who feels like family on my other side, and I repeat:

“The body of Christ, broken for you.
The blood of Christ, poured out for you.”

And for the first time in a very, very long time, saying these words does not feel false and they do not feel trite; they do not feel forced. Not because I believe, but because I feel something else – whole?

When communion concludes, the stranger to my right and I turn to each other, and we embrace for several long minutes, swaying back and forth. I still don’t know their name, but there was something there between us in spirit.

I hug Lauren. I hug Al(aina).

The woman from Deer approaches me. “Can I hug you?” she asks. Always asking, always checking in. I nod, and we embrace. And what strikes me, immediately, is the complete lack of shame – the fact that I could be in church with a woman I had sex with, outside of marriage or even any intention of a relationship, and that it was fine. That we can stand in a circle together and take communion and feel full of love and joy and spirit, even though I have spent decades hearing that nothing but the contrary would be true.

Haven’t they moved like rivers—
like Glory, like light—
over the seven days of your body? 

And wasn’t that good?

For me, faith is an, “I know it when I see it.” Hear it. Feel it. I feel it when walking along the headwaters of the Mississippi River. I feel it when I’m on the rooftop bar of the Met Museum, sipping a glass of wine, looking out over the millions of people who somehow fit on the tiny landmass that is Manhattan.

I felt it when I was sobbing in the bed I shared with my husband – my sister lying in bed with me, holding me – as I fell apart on Christmas in 2012, when I was in the darkest deep of my coming out.

“I feel like Jesus has left me,” I said.

“I will never leave you,” my sister said.

I feel it when I take communion at queer camp, standing in that circle with Lauren and Al(aina) and the woman I danced with and so many others whose names I don’t know, but whose spirits I would recognize anywhere.

Maybe it’s God. Maybe it’s something else. For now, I’m comfortable settling in the space between.

The post I Found God at Queer Summer Camp appeared first on Narratively.

The flower arrangement was large and gaudy. “Sorry for your loss,” read the note accompanying the blooms. Rob Holmes squinted in surprise at the sender’s name: Ray West. Ray West didn’t exist. He was one of the online personas Rob adopted to hunt counterfeiters. And Rob hadn’t lost anyone. The note was a threat.

It was 2009 and the Russian mob had Rob in their sights. The company he runs with his younger brother Jason was on the trail of a huge counterfeit operation, an investigation that would eventually lead to the downfall of a Russian “spam gang,” a sophisticated group of mobsters responsible for a slew of websites advertising fake watches, handbags and accessories, as well as a third of the world’s spam emails. 

The flowers, which Rob later discovered had been bought with his own hacked credit card, were an unmistakable warning. But the investigator was hardly spooked; he appreciated the theater. “It was pretty cool and dramatic,” he recalls, “like something from ‘The Godfather.’”

Rob, his brother, and their team at IPCybercrime spend their days tracking down knockoffs online, feeding the information back to the name-brand companies who employ them – Louis Vuitton, Disney, Tiffany & Co. – to use in their cases against counterfeiters. It’s a 21st-century version of a skill the brothers first learned while working together undercover as children. In the 1980s and ’90s, their father Robert Holmes worked as a private detective and became a legend in the counterfeit business. Growing up, family outings were weekend trips to the Jersey Shore, expeditions that were part shopping, part work.

“Kids make very good undercover distractions,” Rob says. “My father and stepmother would take us to swap meets and boardwalks up and down the Jersey Shore, and instead of having the grown-up make the purchase of the counterfeit Cabbage Patch doll or t-shirt, they would have one of us do it.”

The boys were paid in ice cream and funnel cake. Strolling the boardwalks, they honed the art of profiling: scanning counterfeits and vendors, writing down licence plates, noting a suspect’s age, hair and eye color, checking for glasses, tattoos or scars.

Their father was a larger-than-life figure to the two boys. A “tough guy” who rarely revealed his feelings, Robert Holmes lost his wife to suicide when the boys and their sister Jennifer were still young, but the former state trooper always presented a staunch, gruff front.

Robert’s firm was employed by big brands, and he led intelligence forays into New York’s Chinatown, checking the stores for counterfeit goods. Each week, they’d work through stacks of court orders, busting open doors along Canal Street and seizing fake goods, which were later used as evidence in counterfeit cases.

Robert’s work earned him the wrath of the Vietnamese gangs who controlled the sale of counterfeit Rolexes on the city streets, and the family lived in a state of watchfulness.

“The mafia had contracts on my dad’s life,” Rob explains. “We lived in a house in the woods in New Jersey, pulled back from the rest of the block. My father had so many stories, like hitmen waiting in front of the house. We always had to keep the doors locked.”

“It was a dangerous time,” Jason seconds. “Once we found a wanted poster in one of the stores we went into in Chinatown.” The boys’ father “had a price on his head.”

Rob remembers the day his father gave him The Talk. “He said, ‘Listen. There might be a time when I’m going to tell you to move, get out of the way, duck,’” he recounts. “‘And you’d better do it, because it’s going to be important.’”

The teenager shrugged off this father-son chat. Rob says he was a “wise-ass” kid with a cocky swagger. His father might have been a star in the world of counterfeit goods, but at home he was Dad – and Rob was never any good at listening to his paternal lectures.

As soon as he could, Rob rebelled, leaving home to pursue his own path. In his family, rebelling meant passing up the family business and going to Bible school. Inspired by his church youth group, Rob wanted to become a youth pastor, so he went off to a religious college in Philadelphia.

He found the structure stifling and quit. “I loved Jesus but I thought the rules sucked,” he says cheerfully. Next, he headed to Los Angeles to become a stand-up comedian, but cracked when lack of funds forced him into a boring day job at a video store. After just a day’s work, he called his father, who found him a job working for a friend in the business.

“There I was again, walking around swap meets buying junk, on a different coast.” He’d wander street markets and comic conventions, convincing vendors to reveal their fake Gucci bags and bootleg “Star Trek” video cassettes.

Meanwhile, on the East Coast, Jason had graduated to high-octane enforcement raids with his dad. Along with a vanguard of off-duty law enforcement officers, the skinny, Converse-footed teen spent his formative years jumping out of vans and busting open locks in Chinatown.

“The ’80s and ’90s was the wild wild west,” Jason says. Shopkeepers would employ “thugs” to protect their stores from street gangs, adding to the tension of the raids.

“We had people coming at us with shanks from behind the register, homemade weapons like you’d see in prison. We had the street erupt during one raid; they were coming at us from all directions, throwing quarter sticks of dynamite under police cars, running at us with chairs. It was a crazy time.”

Despite the chaos, Jason never felt in real danger. Robert was always looking out, even when they weren’t on assignment. Jason remembers a walk the two of them took through housing projects one night as they headed from his father’s office near the West Side Highway to the apartment he stayed in when he worked in the city.

“[Dad] thought somebody was following us,” Jason recalls. “He pulled me behind a barrier and he had his pistol in his pocket pointing out, and we just waited for the guy to pass us. As a teenager you don’t think about that stuff; it’s just your dad.”

Like his older brother, Jason eventually veered from the family way of life in search of regimen and order. Instead of Bible college, he enlisted in the Navy where he spent more than a decade serving in the U.S. and Europe. But on weekends and during vacations he always drifted home, joining his dad for enforcement raids during his downtime.

Jason says this line of work is “in his blood.” When he came to the end of his military career in 2006 and Rob suggested he join the burgeoning company he’d started five years earlier in his tiny Los Angeles apartment, working together again felt right.

Today, Rob, 47, works out of the company’s L.A. office. He’s funny, high-energy, and talks nonstop, like an undercover-world version of Michael Scott from “The Office.”

“I’m a crazy genius,” he says. “When I’m in the office sometimes I take off my pants and I’m carrying a sword. I play country music and I get my creative juices flowing. I get everyone talking and joking.” 

Jason, who Rob calls the “disciplinarian” to his class-clown CEO, runs the firm’s operational side from Dallas, helping oversee the company’s 10 employees and more than 50 operatives worldwide. The company’s been headquartered in North Dallas since 2008 when the economic downturn sent them in search of an up-and-coming city with a strong local economy. A few years later, Rob and his wife moved back to Los Angeles, and Jason stayed on in Dallas.

Six years Rob’s junior, Jason is more even-keeled, weighing each word. “I’m definitely more grounded,” Jason says. “He’s the one that rushes into somewhere and I’m the one who pulls his collar back and says, ‘Let’s look and make sure there’s nothing dangerous there.’” 

When Rob married his wife Nastassia, he’d use a trick from his parents’ playbook, taking her with him to stores where he suspected counterfeit goods were stashed behind the counter. “Having a guy walk in and ask for a Chanel purse isn’t the right profile,” Rob observes. “My wife would come in wearing her fancy clothes, designer this and designer that. She fit the part, and she’d ask if he had anything nicer.”

These days, the sting operations have gone from the streets to the web. Much of Rob’s work is done online and on the phone. His secret weapon is his knack for engaging with people. There’s an art to finding out what people are hiding, he says. “You have to trick them into showing you what’s under the table. For that you need charm.”

He’ll adopt an alter-ego and call up suspected counterfeiters – say, someone hawking designer watches or handbags – tricking them into giving out information about their location, merchandise or other details to help build a case against them. All you need to do is ask the right questions, and keep them talking, he says.

“You come up with a reason to call someone that’s different than the purpose you have; you just chit-chat until the right time comes and bam, you hit them with that question. I’ll bury it in the conversation, and afterwards they’re probably not even going to remember they mentioned it to me.”

Once, hunting down information on an unreleased tech product for a patent infringement case, he turned to Craigslist, where one of the company’s employees was selling his bike. Rob picked up the phone. “Half an hour into the conversation we’re chatting about everything else and I got him to talk about work. He was able to give me enough information to take me to the next level. He had no idea, he just wanted to sell me his bike.”

Once in a while, he gets caught. “When someone gets hinky you can feel the conversation getting away from you,” Rob says. “Bad guys have instincts, too. But that’s O.K., because, being one of the good guys, you can make a mistake here and there. A bad guy can’t make any mistakes.”

Bringing down bad guys means a lot of people loathe Rob. “When you’re in this world your nemeses are everywhere,” he says with relish. While Rob’s online sleuthing takes him on virtual journeys all over the world, sometimes fate takes a hand and information lands right in his lap, which is what happened with the Russian spam gang. 

Rob’s investigation into the gang’s counterfeit ring led him to a key player, a Russian living in Massachusetts. In a twist of fate, he and his target had mailboxes at the same UPS store in Boston. Rob has mailboxes all over the country under different names, undercover identities he uses to buy counterfeit goods. In this case, the fake identity paid off in an unexpected way. “I got his mail once, that’s how I found out” the Russian man’s identity, Rob explains. “It was pure coincidence.” He fed this evidence back to the FBI and the Federal Trade Commission, who tracked down other key players, leading to the downfall of the biggest spamming operation in history.

While Rob admits the funeral flowers spooked him a little, he says most of his enemies are only virtual, and all talk. “The nice thing about financial crimes,” he says, “is that there aren’t a lot of violent crimes as a direct result” of getting caught.

However, his father’s cautious approach has stuck. His condo, in a gated community in the upscale seaside community of Marina del Rey, is stocked with plenty of weapons. “I have nine or ten guns. You don’t need that many, but it’s nice to have a loaded gun in each room. We always have a loaded gun in a drawer here, a drawer there.”

Despite mobster threats and the sense – imprinted in childhood – that danger’s always right around the corner, Rob insists there isn’t much that scares him. “You just don’t have the time to be scared, you’re so busy doing the work, you just keep on doing it,” he says. “Sometimes I think it’s stupidity, but sometimes you’re so obsessed with the case you don’t think of things like that.”

For someone as au fait as Rob about internet security, it seems a little strange that he puts so much of himself out there. His Facebook profile is public, and you can see the articles he’s posted about his work alongside his thoughts like “Why aren’t ghosts in movies naked?” On Instagram, you can scroll through a slew of selfies, pictures of his lunch, and snaps of his dog, Chauncey, on the beach. You can find him on Snapchat, and on LinkedIn, where he blogs about cyber security.

But Rob points out that, while it looks as though he’s an open book, most of the information is superficial. He lives by something he calls the haystack principle, which basically means the more you share, the bigger your virtual haystack, and the harder it is to find the “needles” of critical information. “There are a few things, work and personal, that I don’t want anybody to know. Everything else I let the world see.”

While Rob courts the limelight, Jason is happy to lead a quiet life in his suburban Dallas home, with his wife and three children. “I’m pretty under wraps,” Jason says. “I’m fine with people not knowing who I am. I follow my dad’s play with that one.”

The brothers’ single-minded dedication to busting counterfeiters has helped win some landmark cases, including Chloé v. TradeKey and Louis Vuitton v. Akanoc: two victories that marked a move to prosecute the marketplaces where counterfeiters sell their goods.

Robert Holmes would’ve been proud, but their father isn’t around to see history repeating. Just over two decades after his wife’s suicide, Robert killed himself in 2004. He had lived with a heavy burden, Rob says. “For 23 years, my father had that in the back of his mind, the guilt from that.”

Rob sighs. He doesn’t want to talk about it. “I don’t want to bring out a whole can of worms,” he says, but believes “anybody on the worst day of their life could” go ahead and end it. “If you’re on the ledge and there’s not someone there that one time, that might be the day.”

Thirty-five years after those first undercover stings when their father paid them in ice cream, Robert Holmes is still a larger-than-life figure. “He wasn’t very vocal, but he had that look; he was proud of us,” Jason says. “I know he would be proud of us now.” 

“We keep him alive through our work,” Rob says. “My father’s legacy was always important to my brother and I, so we carry that on.”

Rob doesn’t have children, but he hopes Jason’s kids wil pick up the torch. Jason chuckles at this idea. “We’ll see,” he says. His 18-year-old son thinks his dad’s job is “neat,” and he helps out sometimes, doing online research. If he does follow them into the family business, there’ll always be counterfeiters to hunt.

“If you can make it, they’ll fake it,” says Rob. “There will always be new technologies, new techniques. I’m never going to stop catching counterfeiters.”

The post The First Family of Counterfeit Hunting appeared first on Narratively.

Silvon Simmons gets out of the Chevy Impala, turns and sees a burly police officer coming briskly up the driveway, .40-caliber service revolver drawn. Simmons runs for his life. The cop squeezes the trigger again and again. Simmons falls to the ground. As he lies there, helplessly, the cop towers above him, screaming, threatening to finish the job. To blow Simmons’ head off.

With minor variations, this is the nightmare that awakens Simmons every night. It’s a replay of the evening of April 1, 2016, when he was shot multiple times in his Rochester, New York, backyard by a white police officer in pursuit of the wrong black man.

“The only difference,” says Simmons, “is that in my dreams I don’t feel any pain.”

Sometimes he manages to fall back to sleep; other nights Simmons will get up for a smoke, turn on the TV, and aimlessly flip through the channels.

A deep fear of police follows Simmons, 37, in his waking hours, too, like the morning his father gave him a ride to work and a patrol car whipped out in front of them, cutting them off. His dad immediately slowed, widening the space between his car and the cruiser. But even after the officer drove off, Simmons’ heart continued to pound, his legs itched to run.

The night that derailed Simmons’ life began with a routine trip to the store for beer and cigarettes. He rode alongside his next-door neighbor, Detron Parker, who was driving his girlfriend’s Chevy Impala, the same model car owned by a suspect in the neighborhood wanted for threatening a woman with a handgun. Simmons says it wasn’t until they were pulling back into their driveway that he spotted the white-and-blue patrol car.

“The cruiser was still rocking from being stopped so fast when [the cop] hops out with his gun in his hand, pointing it at me,” recalls Simmons. “All I could think is, ‘He’s here to kill me.’” 

Simmons says he ran because he feared for his life, because “police are shooting black people all the time.”

He tried to reach his unlocked backdoor, but before he could, one, two, three bullets, pierced his back, buttocks and thigh. Their impact drove him further into Parker’s yard. He dove over the fence separating their properties and played dead.

“I believed he would shoot me again if I moved,” Simmons recalls, sitting with his lawyers in the Monroe County Public Defender’s offices. “I thought, ‘Please don’t let me die. This isn’t how my life is supposed to end.’ I said my prayers.”

Simmons says he heard the officer tell his partner about how he’d shot Simmons, got him “real good,” and that he believed Simmons was dead.

“I told him I wasn’t dead,” Simmons says. “He said, ‘Shut up or I’ll blow your head off,’ so I played dead again.”

Intense stabbing pains began to shoot through Simmons’ left foot — a bullet had struck his sciatic nerve, which delivers signals to and from the muscles and skin of the lower body. Now, those signals were going haywire. Simmons also had a collapsed lung.

“I couldn’t yell,” Simmons recounts. “I was going in and out. I woke asking for an ambulance. They told me to shut the fuck up. I asked why they shot me. They said, ‘Shut the fuck up.’”

A kick to his upper torso jerked Simmons back to consciousness. (Hospital X-rays confirmed he sustained a broken rib.) He remembers feeling the cold night air on his skin — an EMT cutting off his clothes. In the ambulance, a woman’s voice reassured him: “You’re going to be all right.”

Simmons underwent surgery that night. When he regained consciousness, he was in the intensive care unit, on a ventilator, handcuffed to a chair. Officers from the Rochester Police Department kept a 24-hour vigil outside his room. No visitors were allowed — not even his parents, Frank and Sharlene Simmons, who came north from their home in Memphis, Tennessee, as soon as they learned that their youngest had been shot. As he recuperated, Simmons kept asking why he was in handcuffs, what the charges were against him, but no one was talking. The police had taken his phone and he was not allowed to watch TV or read the newspaper.

If he had access to the local news, he would have learned that Rochester Police Officer Joseph Ferrigno II had alleged that Simmons fired first and that the officer returned fire in self-defense. At pretrial hearings and at trial, Ferrigno testified that he chased a dark figure into the unlit backyard. At one point, Ferrigno claimed, the figure slowed and turned toward him and shot at him. After taking cover, Ferrigno said, he fired his revolver four times.

Ferrigno and his partner also stated they found a .9-millimeter gun a few feet from where Simmons lay. He denies having a gun. Mike Mazzeo, the president of the RPD union, the Locust Club, says that departmental rules bar Ferrigno from being interviewed about a case he is involved in.

* * *

In the hospital, Simmons’ body began to heal, but his future looked bleak. An indictment was filed on April 26, 2016. A grand jury determined that no charges would be brought against Ferrigno for shooting Simmons.

Simmons had worked 16 years for ABR Wholesalers, a Rochester-based distributor of heating, ventilation and cooling equipment. He’d been raising two sons and a stepson, ages seven, 11, and 15, with his partner of 13 years. He had never been convicted of a felony. Now he found himself facing four felony charges: two counts of criminal possession of a weapon in the second degree (one count of gun possession alleged that he possessed a loaded, operable firearm with the intent to use it unlawfully against another; the other count alleged that he possessed a loaded, operable firearm outside his home or place of business), attempted aggravated assault on a police officer, and aggravated attempted murder of a police officer, which carries a minimum sentence of 25 years to life, and a maximum sentence of 40 years to life.

During the 18 months and 26 days Simmons spent in the Monroe County Jail awaiting trial, his relationship unraveled, he lost his house, his job, and his truck was repossessed.

He doesn’t like to dwell on or discuss the details of what happened in his relationship, saying only, “Most people who go to jail for six months or more, it doesn’t go right. People get lonely.”

Simmons, a broad-shouldered man with delicate features and a neat, closely trimmed beard, says it was his parents that kept him going. “They visited me twice a week. They gave me their prayers, words of encouragement,” he says. “They made sure I didn’t go crazy.”

They bought him a phone card so he could call whenever he wanted. On weekends, they brought Simmons’ sons to visit. They would all pray together for Simmons’ release.

“It was empowering for the boys,” recalls his mother, Sharlene. “Silvon would tell them, ‘Daddy’s just here for a while. I’m coming home. We just have some things to straighten out.’”

Most importantly, says Simmons, his parents never doubted his innocence. “They knew there was no other way it could have went, because they knew me.”

The Simmons’ have several cops in their extended family, including a detective in the RPD. “In my heart I knew he couldn’t shoot at a police officer,” says Silvon’s father, Frank, a 75-year-old Vietnam veteran. “He’s not the type of person who would take a life.”

As Simmons awaited trial, the district attorney offered a plea deal that would knock his sentence down to 15 years.

“We advised him it was a good offer,” says Katie Higgins, one of his lawyers. “Given the charges, it was a huge decision.”

Simmons turned it down.

“I was not going to throw away 15 years of my life for something I didn’t do,” he says. “I didn’t think God was going to let them blame me for it. I had my parents, my children, and all the people who supported me to think about.”

It was a daring move, and it paid off. Heading into trial last October, the prosecution had no physical evidence connecting Simmons to the shooting. Simmons’ DNA was not on the Ruger the officers said they found a few feet from his body. The RPD scoured his house, property and car, but found no signs of criminal activity. Nor did they locate a bullet that could be traced to the Ruger. At trial, Julie Hahn, the Monroe County assistant district attorney prosecuting the case, dismissed the significance of this, stating that a bullet can travel the “length of five football fields.”

The items police found in the front seat of the Impala seemed to support Simmons’ account: beer, two cell phones and cigarettes.

In her opening arguments, Hahn told the jury that Ferrigno acted responsibly, drawing his gun in his belief that he was pursuing a suspect named Ivory Golden, a man known to be armed and dangerous.

Monroe County Assistant Public Defender Elizabeth Riley depicted Ferrigno and his partner, Sam Giancursio, as reckless at best, reactive and deceitful, at worst. She described how they pursued Parker and Simmons without calling in to dispatch or radioing other officers in the area that they might be entering a dangerous situation. Nor did they run the license plates on the Impala before taking chase. And it was not until 22 seconds after Ferrigno fired his fourth and last shot that he called the Office of Emergency Communications to report, “Shots fired.” He made no mention that he had been fired at.

As the powerfully built cop took the witness stand and looked out on the jury, Higgins began to feel hopeful. “When he testified, they were looking at their hands, the floor, anything to avoid eye contact,” she recalled. “He was the victim. You would have thought they’d be captivated by his story.”

In the longest summation of her 18-year career — two-and-a-half hours — Riley pointed to the inconsistencies in the officers’ testimonies, both with each other and in their earlier depositions. Giancursio could not have watched an “exchange of fire” in the Immel Street driveway, as he swore under oath, she said, because the entire incident lasted seconds and he had taken a less direct route than Ferrigno. A neighbor directly across the street testified she saw one patrol car when the gunshots rang out.

If Giancursio was a liar, Ferrigno was a volatile cop known for brutalizing the African Americans on his beat, Riley told the jury. In his eight years on the force, Ferrigno amassed about two-dozen citizen complaints, several for excessive force. He is named in multiple civil suits against the city of Rochester. In 2013, he and another officer were accused of pulling a man from his wheelchair to the ground and striking him repeatedly for resisting arrest. In 2012, Ferrigno allegedly attacked a man, “throwing him to the ground, punching and kicking him.” And in 2010, a Rochester woman alleged that Ferrigno retaliated against her for complaining about him to a 911 operator by “slamming her body to the ground and dragging her about 10 feet, breaking one of her ribs.” All three alleged victims are black.

* * *

On October 26, 2017, after four days of deliberation, the jury acquitted Simmons of attempted aggravated murder of a police officer and attempted aggravated assault of a police officer. He was also found not guilty of one count of criminal possession of a weapon in the second degree – the count requiring the jury to find that Silvon possessed a gun with the intent to use it unlawfully against another. He was found guilty on the other count of criminal possession of a weapon in the second degree, which carries a sentence of three-and-a-half to 15 years in prison. His attorneys surmised the jury might have decided Simmons accidentally discharged a gun, a theory he steadfastly denies. “There was definitely no gun in my backyard until after I was shot.”

Simmons was released on his own recognizance until his sentencing, and tried to resume life as best he could.

Before his arrest, he drove all over Western and Central New York delivering HVAC equipment for ABR Wholesalers. That job was filled while he was in jail. The owners of ABR, Jody and Matthew McGarry, rehired Simmons as a salesman in the company store. The couple has known Simmons since he was a boy, when his dad, then an employee, brought his family to the annual company picnic and Christmas party. Jody McGarry describes Simmons as a hard worker “with a smile that lights up a room.” “The customers love him,” she adds.

When Simmons was arrested, his co-workers took it personally, says McGarry. “There was not one employee who wasn’t pro-Silvon, asking after him, praying for him. We all couldn’t imagine him doing it,” she says. The McGarrys attended the trial as often as they could. One of Simmons’ customers took a week off from work to be there.

“Silvon is greatly loved,” agreed Pauline Muehleisen, who has worked at ABR for 30 years. While he was in jail, she wrote Simmons eight-page letters.

“Pauline knew I was coming back,” says Simmons.

He returned to court January 11, 2018, for sentencing. In addition to his coterie of family, friends and supporters, dozens of uniformed Rochester police officers filled the courtroom, including the chief, Michael Ciminelli.

Simmons’ lawyers had filed a motion for a new trial on the basis that a key piece of evidence — an eight-second audiotape recorded by ShotSpotter, a Newark, California-based company — should never have been permitted into evidence. Pretrial, Riley and Higgins had unsuccessfully attempted to keep the tape out. Now at the sentencing hearing, Monroe County Court Judge Christopher Ciaccio addressed their motion. The jury, he noted, seemed to dismiss the testimony of the police officers, instead listening repeatedly to the ShotSpotter audiotape recorded the night of the shooting. The gunfire detection system tries to locate gunfire through audio sensors placed in high-crime areas. The sensors record abrupt, loud noises. If a potential gunshot is identified by the system, the data is sent to SST employees – usually in real time – to alert the local police department. The analysts try to confirm whether the sounds originated from a gun, or another source, like a firecracker exploding or a car backing up. Some police departments have discontinued the service citing too many false positives — and negatives.

The night of the shooting, ShotSpotter detected several loud noises in Simmons’ neighborhood, but initially determined they were from an overhead helicopter. After the RPD informed ShotSpotter there had been an officer-related shooting, company analysts reviewed the audio again, at first deciding there were three shots, then four, then five shots. The RPD pays $130,000 a year for the use of its technology.

Ciaccio told the courtroom he was troubled that the analysis was subjective, that he didn’t believe the technology was reliable enough to stand as the sole evidence in a criminal trial. But what concerned him most, he said, was that ShotSpotter provided only eight seconds of audio, which began with the first impulse and ended with the fifth. Not knowing what sounds may have occurred before or after those five impulses prevented the defense from conducting a “meaningful cross examination,” said the judge. The defense had also been unable to access key information about the system, such as how often it was maintained.

For these reasons, Ciaccio set aside the verdict. Simmons would have a new trial, this time on the remaining gun charge alone.

Simmons and his lawyers sat frozen in their seats. Then Riley whispered in her client’s ear and the three rose and hugged one another. The only sound that could be heard in those moments was Sharlene Simmons praising the Lord.

“Clear the courtroom,” ordered the bailiff.

As everyone filed out, an officer called, “You should have finished him while he was on the ground.”

Ferrigno, walking behind Simmons, told him, “You’re lucky. You’re lucky.”

Ferrigno’s father, a retired member of the RPD, asked Riley, “How do you sleep at night?”

Simmons turned to face the men, but Riley guided him back into his chair. By the time he faced the TV cameras set up outside the courtroom, Simmons was composed enough to smile for the reporters.

“This has all been nonsense from the beginning,” he told them. “Ferrigno shot me in the back for nothing and the judge saw through it.”

* * *

As he awaited a second trial, scheduled for June 11, Simmons laid low, his life consisting of work, watching cooking shows on PBS, and spending time with family. He kept a journal to “encourage himself that everything will be all right.”

As the trial date neared, Judge Ciaccio held several hearings to determine what prosecutorial evidence would be admitted. Ultimately, the judge ruled he would not allow any police testimony that the officers saw a gun flash, heard a gunshot or saw a “dark figure” holding a gun. Such testimony would be “extremely prejudicial,” he said, because it crossed over onto crimes Simmons had already been acquitted of.

On May 31, more than two years after Simmons was shot in his backyard, his case was dismissed. “Without testimony that a shot was seen or heard, there was no evidence that the gun had been loaded, a necessary element of the remaining charge,” says Riley.

The moment was oddly anticlimactic. There were no whoops of joy. No shouting cops. Simmons slipped out of the courtroom to gather himself. While his family and lawyers waited for him to return, his mother began to weep. “I’m overwhelmed with joy,” was all she could say.

When Simmons rejoined his family about 10 minutes later, he was subdued, incredulous.

“I don’t have any words right now,” he said. “It’s still sinking in.”

There remains one last legal hurdle for the Simmons family – the district attorney’s office filed an appeal last winter challenging Ciaccio’s decision to overturn the jury’s verdict.

Even if the appeal fails, Simmons carries physical reminders of the shooting: he has one bullet lodged in his pelvis, another in his chest. “When I grab a box or something, I can feel the bullet pressing against my chest and bones.” The toes of his left foot no longer bend and a portion of that foot is always cold.

With freedom, Simmons quickly realized it was time to consider his future, now that he has one. “I need to clamp down – get a lot of things done,” he says. At the top of his list are his finances – he lost 18 months’ salary while in jail. A local lawyer has already filed a civil suit on Simmons behalf against the city of Rochester.

Simmons has begun saving for a car – Rochester is not a place you can easily live without one. “If I could drive, it would make everything better for me,” he says. “I could do more with my kids.” Before the shooting, Simmons would take his sons on day trips to amusement parks, hiking, whatever they wanted to do.

“I’m super cool to my boys,” he says, smiling. “They just want to be around me all the time.”

Sharlene and Frank Simmons are ready to stop living out of a suitcase and in one room of a relative’s home.

“The shooting changed our lives so drastically – financially. We gave up our freedom; we gave up our friends in Memphis and family, vacations,” says Sharlene. “We were in crisis mode for a long time. We didn’t know what was going to happen or how long it would last.”

What got them through was their firm belief in their son’s innocence and their deep faith. They prayed before and in court during the two-week trial. They prayed for the judge and their son’s lawyers. “Our faith didn’t change. It made us have more faith.”

Despite being cleared of all charges, Simmons still lives in fear of the RPD – that one night he could be stopped by the wrong cops. “They are supposed to be the law in this city,” he says. “I have to be very careful.”

It is a fear that has been transmitted to his children, his parents. “Every time I go out, my mother tells me she is worried the police will mess with me,” he says. “I don’t want to hear it every time. It’s kind of scary. They shot me, but they put fear in my parents.”

Simmons is not interested in counseling to heal from his trauma, at least not right now. Instead, he manages his anxiety by limiting the size of his world. He’s become a homebody and when he does go out, it’s to places he feels safe, family functions, the state fair.

“I don’t want to leave my comfort zones,” he says. “It’s a fear I have to get over.”

He tries to focus on the good stuff, like his sons and work.

“I take a lot of deep breaths,” Simmons admits. “I smoke a lot. I do a lot of praying. It’s the only thing I can do.”

His emotions are a complex mix of relief, happiness, and anger. He tries to keep it all in perspective.

“This isn’t the time to be angry. It’s the time to be grateful. I could be in prison. I could be dead. I could stay angry the rest of my life, but where would it get me?”

The post He Was Shot in the Back By a Cop…Then Spent 18 Months in Jail appeared first on Narratively.

Patrick Ganio had lived to see his country invaded, its defenses smashed, and his comrades fall on the battlefield. But he had lived, and that was no small feat – not after the Allied surrender and the torturous march that followed, 60 miles inland from their defeat on the Bataan peninsula, all the way to the Japanese prisoner-of-war camps. Battered, wounded and starving, the soldiers who stumbled along the way were swiftly dispatched, run through with the blade of a Japanese bayonet. There would be no slowing down. To falter meant certain death.

Still, Ganio had survived. In a war that claimed nearly 57,000 Filipino soldiers and untold numbers of civilians, Ganio lived to see the dawn of the Philippine liberation. He was freed, allowed to go home to his family and rejoin the fight on behalf of the Philippine resistance. By 1945, three years of Japanese occupation were at a close, and the end of World War II was mere months away. All it would take would be one final push to effectively expel the Japanese Army from the Philippine Islands.

That’s how Ganio found himself once again in the battlefield, this time pinched between two mountain ranges on the rugged slopes of Balete Pass. Sniper fire whistled down from the peaks, where enemy fighters had barricaded themselves inside caves and pillbox bunkers. Control over Luzon, the Philippines’ main island, was at stake.

Patriotism had first motivated Ganio to enlist back in 1941, fresh out of school at age 20. At the time, the Philippines were a United States territory — spoils from its victory in the Spanish-American War — and Ganio took to serving the United States military with zeal.

His father, a poor farmer, supported his decision to fight. He had always harbored high hopes for his bright young son. Ganio distinguished himself at an early age by learning to read using papers from the local Catholic church, and when it finally came time for Ganio to start school, his father cheered him on, carrying him to class atop his shoulders. He dreamt Ganio would escape the poverty that plagued the family. Ganio would have an education, a career, a future.

But the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, hit the Philippines like the opening blow in a one-two punch. Barely 10 hours later, as the U.S. scrambled to muster its defenses, the Japanese arrived on Philippine shores, ready to invade.

None of that shook Ganio’s resolve. He was convinced the Allies would win, never wavering, not even after their defeat at Bataan and his imprisonment and torture.

And yes, the war would be won. The battle in Luzon would prove to be a decisive victory, the last major battle in the Philippines and a crucial step toward Japan’s surrender. But it would not mark the end of the struggle for Philippine soldiers.

They would continue fighting for decades to come — only this time their goal was to reclaim the recognition stripped from them.

In 1946, barely a year after the war’s close, the U.S. government would repeal all the “rights, privileges, or benefits” given to Filipino soldiers like Ganio, essentially denying that they had been active in the U.S. military at all.

But as he scrambled through the rubble and brush of Balete Pass, Ganio could not know what was to come. His future, as far as he saw, was as bright as the one his father had envisioned for him. He had a career as a teacher waiting for him, and his wife had just welcomed their first child.

Amid the bloodshed and fire, Ganio could not even be certain of how the day would end. He couldn’t know that a bullet was barreling in his direction, destined for the back of his head, just millimeters from his brainstem. The war would re-shape his future in ways he could not yet comprehend.

* * *

The old man’s body contorted before her, assuming every painful position he had been subject to during his torture by the Japanese. Jimiliz Valiente-Neighbours, a Ph.D. student, was visiting Filipino veterans of World War II, hoping to answer a question: What did it mean to have served under the American flag? And now she was getting her answer, carefully reenacted before her, right down to the screams.

Five mysterious letters had launched her into this line of research: U-S-A-F-E. Valiente-Neighbours first noticed them etched on her grandfather’s grave during a 2008 visit to her family in the Philippines. As Valiente-Neighbours later discovered, the letters were a misspelling: for USAFFE, or the United States Army Forces in the Far East. No one had ever told her that her grandfather had served in World War II. That slice of family history felt hidden, and she was determined to find out why.

Before the Philippines’ independence in 1946, its citizens were U.S. nationals, and in the lead-up to America’s entry into World War II, U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt made a proclamation. He ordered “all the organized military forces” of the Philippines to serve the U.S. military.

Approximately 260,000 Filipino servicemen were mobilized — soldiers, nurses, recognized guerilla units and more. But after the war, the financial obligation of that mobilization loomed large. With the Philippines on the verge of independence, the U.S. Congress started to reconsider its commitment to Filipino veterans.

In February 1946, it issued the first of two Rescission Acts, both of which denied Filipino veterans the right to be recognized as active service members in the U.S. Armed Forces. In exchange, the U.S. offered the Philippine Army a sum of $200 million. It also paid compensation to Filipino soldiers disabled in the war and kin of those who were killed — sometimes at half the rate of their American counterparts.

Ultimately, Filipino servicemen were left stripped of their pensions, educational stipends and medical care under the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). Just as important was the fact that the legislation seemed to negate any sacrifices the veterans made on behalf of the U.S.

President Harry Truman issued a statement re-iterating that Filipinos had “fought, as American nationals, under the American flag, and under the direction of our military leaders.” Yet, despite asserting that the U.S. had a “moral obligation” to the veterans, he signed the Rescission Acts.

As Valiente-Neighbours learned about these events, she started reaching out to Filipino veterans, and was surprised to hear some of them insist that they were U.S. citizens, even though they had never even set foot on American soil. But as they saw it, they had sacrificed life and limb for the U.S. What could be more American?

Valiente-Neighbours, now a professor at Point Loma Nazarene University, ultimately met with 83 Filipino veterans. Many of them were heartbroken by the lack of recognition they received.

One leaned close to her tape-recorder and spoke to it as if talking to America itself. “I gave you my best years. You had my youth,” she recalls him saying. “And now, in my old age, you don’t recognize me.”

Valiente-Neighbours says the anguish was even more acute for the veterans who eventually immigrated to the U.S. “They could immediately see the difference in their treatment compared to American veterans, particularly their white counterparts.”

But for some of the veterans, the rejection they felt was also fueling a push to action. She remembers one veteran telling her, “I fought before, and now I’m fighting again.”

* * *

The moment Eric Lachica decided to act was the moment he saw his quiet, dignified father in a state of anguish. A Filipino sharpshooter during the war, Lachica’s father had approached the VA healthcare system for a check-up. He was turned away.

“That’s when I felt I should get involved,” Lachica says. And a few years later, at a reception inside the Philippine embassy in Washington, D.C., Lachica got his opportunity.

There, he spotted a man he recognized as a leader in the Filipino-American community: a World War II Purple Heart honoree, standing in a corner of the room, his hair conspicuously topped by a veteran’s hat.

His name was Patrick Ganio, and he had survived his near-fatal injury to become one of the most prominent activists in the fight for equity between Filipino veterans and their American counterparts.

“We fought the same war. We fought with the same lives there. There’s no reason why we should not have equal benefits,” Ganio says. To this day, he can still recite the Japanese military songs he was forced to learn as a prisoner: Miyo, tokai no sora akete…

Ganio immigrated to the U.S. in 1979, and by the time he and Lachica met, Ganio had succeeded in pushing for the passage of a law that gave Filipino World War II veterans a path to American citizenship. Lachica, a community organizer himself, was impressed, and eager to join the fight.

Together, they successfully lobbied for benefits like healthcare, disability assistance and burial rights — a bittersweet victory for Lachica, who was able to bury his father in California’s Riverside National Cemetery when he passed away in 2002.

But there was always the question of compensation: Could a dollar amount ever reimburse the veterans for the years of disenfranchisement they endured? Lachica says that was the subject of bitter debate, with some advocates pushing for an absurdly high dollar amount — and others reluctant to ask for anything at all.

Then there was the problem of getting politicians to sign on. In 2007, Lachica was angling to get the support of a rising political star, Illinois senator Barack Obama, but felt Obama was reluctant. He was venting his frustrations to a meeting of expat Democrats in the Philippine capital of Manila when a woman raised her hand. She introduced herself as Georgia McCauley — a family friend of Obama’s from his childhood years in Indonesia.

Lachica and McCauley arranged to meet again in Washington, D.C., to confront the senator face to face. And as they made their way up to Obama’s seventh-floor office on Capitol Hill, Obama himself entered the elevator and was startled to see his old friend.

“He got kind of flustered,” Lachica says with a laugh. He suspects their visit left an impression.

Shortly after his election as the 44th president of the United States, Obama signed into law the Filipino Veterans Equity Compensation Fund. It awarded a one-time payment of $15,000 to the veterans who had become U.S. citizens, and $9,000 to those who had not. Ganio considers it one of his crowning achievements: “The final conclusion of my mission,” he calls it.

But the battle was not yet over.

* * *

A bill passes, a problem gets solved. It’s a tidy narrative, but one that rarely lines up with reality, as Cecilia Gaerlan was about to find out.

Her home state of California had taken its own steps to honor Filipino World War II veterans, amending its education code in 2011 to encourage schools to teach their stories.

But “encourage” turned out to be the operative word. Nothing actually compelled school districts to follow through. So Gaerlan, the daughter of a Filipino veteran, felt obliged to act.

“I realized that nobody was going to do it,” says Gaerlan, founder of the Bataan Legacy Historical Society. “And I had to do something. I could not wait for chance to happen, especially because the veterans were dying.”

The last veterans are now in their 80s, 90s, even 100s. Some, as Gaerlan discovered, had felt pressure not to speak about their wartime experiences. The post-war years were a time to rebuild, not rehash old wounds.

Even Gaerlan’s own father, who died in 2014, downplayed the suffering he endured. As a child, Gaerlan remembers him turning his war stories into slapstick and farce, complete with rat-tat-tat sound effects for the guns.

One story began with a Japanese guard trying to steal her father’s toothbrush — he had mistaken it for a fountain pen — and ended with her father being beaten on the head. But the way her father told it, the story unfurled like comedy. “Us kids, we thought it was funny,” Gaerlan says.

Only later, as an adult, did she discover the grim reality that her father survived the gruesome Bataan Death March. “And I cried. I cried. I didn’t really know,” she says. “He never told me about these things. I never knew what happened, and when I asked him — ‘Dad, how come you never told me? Is this true?’ — then he choked up, and yeah, he broke down.”

What happened in the Philippines hadn’t been easy to talk about. It was defeat. Invasion. Torture. Nothing like the triumphant narrative that emerged from America’s World War II experience of a rising superpower that faced the forces of injustice, and won.

Instead, Filipinos had long been dismissed as Americans’ “little brown brothers” — too primitive, in the words of one U.S. president, to develop “anything resembling Anglo-Saxon political principles and skills.” That perspective had filtered its way into the wartime accounts Gaerlan read, some of which depicted Filipino servicemen as lazy or cowardly.

Little had been written from the standpoint of the Filipinos themselves — something Gaerlan set out to rectify. She collected their stories and petitioned the California State Board of Education to actively teach the “shared history” the U.S. had with the Philippines.

Timing was on her side. California was in the midst of revising its state curriculum, and in July 2016, it approved a plan to integrate the veterans’ stories into 11th-grade history classes. That decision will likely have wide-ranging impact. Since California is one of the largest textbook consumers in the country, changes to its curriculum are often reflected in books across all 50 states, Gaerlan says.

And Gaerlan started to hear firsthand how her work was changing the narrative for the state’s Filipino population. At one event at the University of California, Berkeley, a young man approached her to share his family’s experience. “He told me, ‘You know, my grandfather used to dress up in his uniform every April, and I thought he was so weird. But now that I know his story, I have such great respect for him.’”

* * *

Celestino Almeda has a hard time sleeping at night. He is now 101 years old, contending with arthritis in both knees, prostate cancer and other ravages of age. But as he told one judge who heard his case, he cannot rest. Not until he gets recognition for his sacrifices.

Almeda’s lawyer, Seth Watkins, believes Almeda must have been one of the first Filipino World War II veterans to apply for the compensation offered by the Obama administration. Having received his U.S. citizenship in 1996, Almeda should have been entitled to $15,000.

His was one of 42,755 applications submitted to Veterans Affairs as of December 1, 2017. Less than half were accepted. Almeda’s was not one of them.

“You know, when a person’s dignity is violated, you become resentful,” Almeda explains. He says what bothered him most wasn’t not having the money. It was that, once again, the U.S. had denied his service.

In many ways, Almeda’s case is an anomaly. Fighting the VA’s rejection is a luxury afforded to only a few. Official statistics indicate that less than 28 percent of the veterans’ appeals are granted. “There aren’t very many lawyers out there who are willing to put the time into [these appeals], because they can’t make any money on it,” Watkins, his lawyer, says.

Watkins might never have approached the issue himself, had a Filipino veteran’s case not “dropped” into his lap as a pro bono project. That first case, on behalf of a female guerilla named Feliciana Reyes, forced him to investigate how the VA evaluates Filipino World War II veterans. What he discovered was a maze of historical documents, some of which may be perpetuating age-old discriminations.

According to Watkins, the government verifies a Filipino veteran’s service by first looking for the affidavit they had to sign at the end of the war. The affidavit is then cross-referenced with a second document, an official army roster. That’s where things get tricky.

“Basically, the original rosters were lost or destroyed,” Watkins says. The VA mostly relies on duplicates or revised copies, created at a later date. For Watkins, that raised the possibility that the rosters are incomplete. But then he stumbled across a report that suggested something even more damning: some names had been left off intentionally.

The once-classified report, “U.S. Army Recognition Program of Philippine Guerillas,” explains how Army personnel determined which Filipino veterans to include on the rosters, and how practical problems, like the language barrier, resulted in incomplete records.

One of the most stunning revelations was that certain veterans were disqualified using arbitrary standards. Some U.S. personnel, for instance, held the belief that, “excepting nurses, no women should be recognized.”

Despite what Watkins sees as evidence of gender discrimination, Reyes’s appeal continues to wind its way through the courts. Watkins fears that Reyes, now in her 90s, may never get the benefits she is owed. With no living spouse, if she dies, her claim dies with her.

Watkins did, however, manage to give Celestino Almeda some much-needed resolution. Though Almeda continues to fight for the release of documents related to his case — documents he and Watkins hope will help other rejected veterans — the VA agreed to settle Almeda’s compensation claim out-of-court, awarding him his full $15,000.

It was not an admission of wrongdoing, but it was a step in the right direction. It came just as Almeda was about to go to the U.S. Capitol to accept the Congressional Gold Medal in honor of the Filipino war effort. He could now do so as an officially recognized veteran of the United States.

“I am an American soldier,” he declared in his speech, reciting the opening lines of the U.S. Army Soldier’s Creed. Though his microphone was too tall, though his feet were unsteady, though he faced some of the most powerful people in the country, his words rang out strong: “I will never quit.”

The post They Fought and Died for America. Then America Turned Its Back. appeared first on Narratively.

When I heard a yelp followed by sickening thuds, I rushed to the bottom of the stairs where I found my four-year-old, Brandon, sprawled on the tile floor sobbing. My nine-year-old, Devon, stood watching from the top of the stairs as I ran my hands frantically over Brandon’s body checking for injuries. My other kids rushed to tell me they’d seen Devon sneak up behind Brandon and, with one big shove, send him hurtling through the air. As they spoke, Devon began shrieking, “They’re lying on me! I didn’t do it.” I knew with icy certainty that he had.

My husband and I adopted Devon (whose name has been changed here for his protection) and his sister Kayla out of foster care when he was four and she was three. At the time, we had two other sons, Sam, who was ten, and Amias, three. Brandon, our youngest, wasn’t born yet. Even though Devon’s behavior was concerning – throwing tantrums, hoarding food, urinating in odd places, and lying – we were confident that with the love of a forever family he would overcome these vestiges of early childhood abuse and neglect.

Over the years, Devon’s tantrums grew longer and more intense. He gorged and threw up, and played with his feces. I tried one parenting strategy after another but nothing worked. Particularly challenging was his uncanny ability to “play” adults with his big, brown puppy dog eyes. Even as a kindergartener, he was convincing teachers I hadn’t fed him breakfast despite his full belly. He could switch off his tantrums at the approach of another adult, leaving outsiders perplexed by my seemingly exaggerated concerns. Once, when Devon pulled a fire alarm at school, he almost convinced even me that it was an accident. But, of course, it wasn’t. Both the victim and arbitrator of Devon’s fibs, I grew wise to his tricks.

That morning, with Brandon sobbing on my lap, I listened to Devon shrieking and slamming his bedroom door over and over. When had the tantrums of a toddler turned into dangerous rages? Brandon could have been seriously hurt or even killed. I was out of my depth. One more reward chart, one more consequence, one more month of being consistent wasn’t going to be enough. We needed help.

Over the following months, Devon received intensive outpatient therapy and was hospitalized twice. When his behavior deteriorated further he was admitted to a psychiatric residential treatment facility. He was 10. There he was diagnosed with reactive attachment disorder (RAD), a result of early childhood trauma. Although the disorder is considered rare for the population at large, many adoptive and foster children struggle with attachment issues. Due to the effects of early trauma, these kids’ brains get “stuck” in survival mode. They exhibit various symptoms, including violent outbursts, superficial charm, and manipulation in an attempt to manage their surroundings and the people around them to feel safe. They struggle to form meaningful attachments and often actively reject love and affection from their caregivers. This description fit Devon to a T, and with a diagnosis that seemed to explain his extreme behaviors, I was optimistic he would finally get the help he needed.

But after a year in his first placement, Devon had made no progress. Over the next few years, due to Medicaid length of stay guidelines, Devon bounced between psychiatric residential treatment programs, therapeutic foster care, and group homes. With each move he grew bigger, stronger, and more violent. He punched kids in the backs of their heads and stabbed them with pencils. When desperate for attention he made halfhearted attempts to hurt himself, like stuffing socks into his mouth and making paper cuts across his wrists. He attacked workers, too, even dislocating one woman’s thumb.

Devon was a boy who cried wolf. On several occasions, he claimed workers had purposely hurt him. Once, as I examined his handsome and unblemished face, I’d asked, skeptically, “A grown man punched you in the face and you have no bruises, no red marks, no swelling?” He nodded emphatically.

Other times, Devon would brazenly tell workers, “I’m gonna get you fired,” and then smack himself in the face or claw at his arm to create damning marks. His accusations were investigated while the accused workers were put on unpaid administrative leave. With no consequences for false allegations, he made them whenever he wasn’t getting his way, was mad, or just bored.

By the time Devon was 14 and at his sixth placement, Thompson Child & Family Focus, a Carolinas-based childcare and education center, my dwindling optimism had been replaced by stoic pragmatism. These programs weren’t helping Devon, but with him not living at home, at least his brothers and sister were safe.

* * *

It was a cool day in October when Ellen, the therapist at Thompsons, called to notify me that Devon had stripped naked and run around masturbating in front of staff and his peers for two-and-a-half hours earlier that afternoon. As usual, there was no apparent trigger that set him off.

When Devon called me during his scheduled phone time a few hours later, I braced myself for tiresome excuses and blame shifting:

“Hi, Mom. It’s me. Devon.”

“What’s up?”

“Ummm, I had a hard time today. The kids was annoyin’ me.”

“And that’s a reason to run around naked? That’s not an excuse.”

“But staff was teasin’ me. They was makin’ me do it.”

I’d heard enough. “That’s unacceptable, Devon. When you’re ready to take responsibility for your actions call me back.”

I hung up and he didn’t call back.

The next morning, I sipped my coffee and stewed over the years of treatment and thousands of hours of therapy Devon had received. Nothing had worked. I understood that RAD was particularly difficult to treat, but surely there must be effective therapies. Had we just not found them yet? I worried too that he’d become institutionalized – adept at gaming the system and sabotaging his treatment. Would he ever be well enough to move back home?

Then my phone rang. It was Thompsons again, this time the nurse. “I’m calling to notify you of a second incident Devon had yesterday. This one was at about 10 p.m.” I shook my head, exasperated, as the nurse continued. “He hit a worker in the eye with a plastic toy then became agitated and had to be restrained. He accidentally hit his head. We took him to the ER last night and he got seven stitches, but the CT scan was clear.” Before hanging up, I told the nurse I’d come by to check on Devon.

These calls were nothing new. Devon was physically restrained, for self-harm or aggression toward others, every few days – except during the weeks leading up to his birthday and Christmas when he hoped to parlay good behavior into more presents.

A sturdy teenager, mature enough to have the shadow of a mustache, Devon usually fought back when he was restrained. Once, when he went AWOL, workers had to restrain him on the pavement as he ran down the road. His forearms and palms were scored with bloody scratches which he, of course, claimed they inflicted on purpose. It had only been a matter of time before he got seriously hurt.

When I arrived at Thompsons less than an hour later, Ellen met me at the door. As we walked down the hall, she told me the worker Devon had injured, Mr. Myron, had a scratched retina but was expected to make a full recovery. I flushed with shame and embarrassment. Since Devon had been hurt too, they were conducting an investigation and Mr. Myron had been placed on administrative leave.

Before opening the door to the conference room, Ellen paused and turned to me. “I want to warn you, Devon’s had a rough night and doesn’t look so good.”

Devon didn’t raise his head when we entered. I pulled a chair up next to his, reached out for his chin, and lifted his face. In shock and horror, I gaped. His cheeks, normally honey-brown, were a garishly swollen purplish black under his freckles. His lips were swollen too. Red bruises dotted his throat and blood caked inside his nose. A gash near his hairline was tracked with black stitches.

Devon mumbled about Mr. Myron beating him up. My stomach churned not knowing what was true, what was exaggeration, and what was an outright lie. It was hard to imagine a worker beating Devon, but not hard at all to imagine Devon accidentally hitting his head during a restraint. I was pretty sure this was somehow Devon’s own fault, and that the investigation would bear that out, but were those fingermarks on his neck? How could that be an accident? Unsettled and afraid for my son, I insisted he be immediately transferred to a new facility.

* * *

After Devon was safely admitted into a new program I requested his records from Thompsons, and was startled to find they’d scrubbed the entire incident from his file. What was going on? It took months to get access to the findings report from the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services (NC DHHS), which included 17 witness statements and media transcripts of the surveillance footage. As I sat reading the report, Devon’s version of the story – once unimaginable – unfurled vividly in my mind.

That October afternoon Devon was bored, so he stripped to his underwear – always good for a laugh – and trotted into the common area. The other boys hooted as he flapped his arms like bird wings. The fun didn’t last long though because the workers called for backup to take the other boys off the unit.

The NC DHHS report referred to the on-duty workers as Staff #5 and Staff #6, but I recognized Staff #5 as Mr. Myron, a burly man with a mustache. I hadn’t met Staff #6, a woman Devon called “Miss Piggy,” and didn’t know her real name.

Sauntering to a window, Devon pulled down his underwear and shook his naked bottom at the boys outside. Barking a laugh, Mr. Myron imitated Devon shaking his own clothed bottom. Miss Piggy laughed.

“You stop it!” Devon shrieked.

In an effeminate voice, Mr. Myron mimicked, “You stop it!”

When Mr. Myron didn’t stop, Devon began masturbating. Mr. Myron took the unspoken dare – dangling his lanyard between his legs, gyrating his hips, and moaning.

According to the report, a case manager and a quality assurance specialist were watching a live surveillance feed from a nearby office and did not intervene.

Then, with Mr. Myron egging him on, Devon mimed pushing a pencil up his rectum. Would Mr. Myron take this dare? Grinning, Devon gingerly lowered his bottom flat onto the bench.

It was at that moment that Mr. Mike, Staff #7, strode in and told Devon in a firm voice to get dressed. Devon immediately complied. I gasped in relief, not realizing I’d been holding my breath while reading. Finally someone intervened on Devon’s behalf.

Mr. Mike took Devon outside for a walk to burn off some energy. After that, the evening was peaceful with dinner, phone calls home, and Devon and the other residents watching “X-Men.” Later, in his bed and unable to sleep, Devon caught his name in a few snatches of conversation from the common area. Enraged, he rushed out of his room. “You! You stop talkin’ about me!” He pointed a shaky finger at Mr. Myron, who grinned.

“Let. Me. Call. My. Mom!” Devon punched out.

“Nope.” Mr. Myron’s eyes narrowed in a Cheshire grin. “Phone-time is ova.”

“I’m gonna fuck you up, bitch!” Devon screamed, throwing a laundry basket then a trash can. “Stop makin’ fun of me!” he screeched. Grabbing a plastic art stencil, he flung it toward Mr. Myron who was now advancing on him.

Yelping and clutching at his eye, Mr. Myron fell to his knees. Blood seeped between his fingers as he growled, “I’m gonna kill that little boy.”

“Chill… Chill…” Mr. Mike intervened, leading Mr. Myron away.

Devon called after him, “And don’t you come back neither or I’ll hurt you worse.” Then, Mr. Myron bolted after Devon, who raced for his bedroom. He threw Devon onto the bed and slammed his fist into his face; then again, before Mr. Mike managed to drag him off and away. Calling for backup, Mr. Mike urged, “He’s not worth it. Think about your family.”

Mr. Myron visibly calmed. “O.K. I’m O.K.” Standing, he turned toward the door as if to leave. When Mr. Mike relaxed his hold, Mr. Myron twisted away and hurtled after Devon again. Screaming, Devon ran, but tripped. Mr. Myron shoved him into the bathroom, slamming him into the bathtub. Grabbing a fistful of hair, he cracked Devon’s head against the faucet and blood gushed from the wound. Mr. Myron’s strong hands squeezed around Devon’s throat. He couldn’t breathe. Panic stricken, he kicked his legs, but Mr. Myron was bigger and heavier. He couldn’t escape. Couldn’t breathe.

Finally, Mr. Myron was pulled away and locked out of the unit. Someone helped Devon change out of his blood-soaked t-shirt. Laying on a bench, he held an ice pack to his head and cried, “I need the police. Call the police–”

“Hush now.” The nurse patted his arm. “We’re going to take you to the ER, honey. That cut needs sutures and we’ll get you checked for a concussion.”

“I wanna call my mom first,” Devon croaked and someone gave him a cordless phone. Holding it for several long seconds, he stared at the glowing numbers before handing it back. “She won’t believe me anyways.”

Putting down the report, my hands trembled. Devon was right. I hadn’t believed him until then. How many other times had workers been unnecessarily rough when restraining him? Feeling nauseous, I thought back to the bruises and scrapes I’d seen on Devon over the years and realized this probably wasn’t the first time I’d failed him. This was just the first time his injuries couldn’t be explained away. How many times had staff smirked instead of soothed? Deliberately provoked him? If they’d been sabotaging his treatment, that would explain why he hadn’t gotten better. I was deeply disturbed, and knew there were no easy answers.

* * *

Thompsons was fined $5,000 and given 23 days to implement corrective measures. Miss Piggy resigned. The case manager and quality assurance specialist received disciplinary write-ups. Thompsons fired Mr. Myron and, only at my insistence, filed a police report. Eighteen months later, the arrest warrant has yet to be served.

These nominal penalties have not made Devon or kids like him any safer. Residential treatment facilities claim they can handle juveniles with a propensity for violence while providing them with effective treatment and keeping them safe. In truth, they’re chronically understaffed and lack effective therapeutic interventions. Layer in kids, like Devon, who are manipulative and incentivized by policies that allow them to wield false allegations with impunity. Sprinkle in a few rogue workers, like Mr. Myron, who abuse their power and lose their cool. These treatment facilities are dangerously simmering pots.

Because Devon still cries wolf, it’s nearly impossible to sort out the truth from the lies. Impossible to protect him. Our goal has always been for Devon to move back home, but as long as he continues to be a danger to himself and to his siblings, residential treatment facilities are our only option. Unfortunately, I can’t simply move him to a new facility every time he makes an allegation, because availability is very limited in these types of programs, even more so for kids who have a history of making false allegations.

Since leaving Thompsons, Devon has been in a string of residential placements and his violent behavior has only escalated, punctuated by allegations he’s being mistreated. Not long ago, he called me with a familiar refrain: “Mom, they restrained me. I didn’t do nothin’. And, they was stranglin’ me!” Hours later, the staff called and said Devon threatened to get the workers fired and twisted his shirt around his own neck to leave red marks.

I knew it was possible – I’d seen Devon do this very thing before with my own eyes. Still, I erred on the side of caution and made every possible inquiry. Witnesses – both workers and Devon’s peers – all stated that he had been the one to twist his shirt around his neck. I was told surveillance footage showed this as well. Regardless, Devon tearfully insisted the worker who restrained him had tried to strangle him. Ultimately, I had to make a tough judgment call: this time Devon was just up to his old tricks.

Or was he?

The post The Boy Who Cried Abuse appeared first on Narratively.

I’m on a hike with my husband along the C&O Canal in Washington, D.C., when he leaps off the path, slides down an incline, and begins digging through the dark, wet leaves near the water’s edge. As oncoming hikers approach he surfaces with a rusty can, dirt clinging to its sides.

“Black Label, about 1965!” he exclaims, walking up to the path from the muck.

The hikers pass. I cringe and avoid eye contact.

“The can has ants on it,” I say. “Is it coming in the car with us?”

“Of course.”

Inside the Ziploc bag, ants crawl in and out of the holes in the old can. That Black Label specimen will become his “gateway beer can” to reclaiming 1,000 cans from storage and diving back into the weird world of beer can collector conventions.

As I have since learned, beer can collectors meet up in hotels across America at “canventions” to trade, sell, and buy cans. The Brewery Collectibles Club of America (BCCA), one of the main membership organizations for breweriana collectors, consists of 100 chapters with members in all 50 states and 27 other countries. At one point in the 1970s, the BCCA claimed 12,000 members. According to the group’s website, interest declined and then grew again as microbreweries became popular, and collectors from the ’70s and ’80s, like my husband, rejoined the hobby. And while they connect online, the internet has not replaced the thrill of meeting other obsessive collectors in-person.

* * *

We’re at the Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, Park Inn by Radisson. Collectors from around the United States have gathered to trade, buy and sell beer cans at the annual Spring Thaw Brewery Collectibles Show — also referred to as “Spring Thaw,” “Canvention,” or “Crownvention” — crown being slang for a beer bottle cap. When I ask a group of collectors why caps are called crowns, one tells me that the answer is obvious: “It looks like a crown.”

As the collectors arrive at their hotel rooms, they spread items for sale across the beds, TV stands, desks, and windowsills. Collectors stroll by looking for open doors and anything they “need” to add to their collections.

Although some women collect breweriana, most of the collectors and attendees at this show are men of a certain age. “It’s the most diverse group of over-50 white men you might ever find,” jokes Matt Menke, who began collecting as a kid when he discovered he could sell aluminum cans to buy candy.

The diversity Menke mentions refers to professions and political views. In a time when America is increasingly divided, a shared interest in collecting draws together Republicans and Democrats, and people from all walks of life. Those I met include a plumber, an ex-Army drill sergeant, an engineer, a subway track mechanic, a pawn shop manager, a retired Army colonel, an eco-entrepreneur, and a banker. My husband is a novelist and English professor.

All of them eagerly talk of how collecting drew them in, and how the community keeps them showing up, even as the depth, breadth, and specialization of their collections varied.

Steve Savoca, a crown collector, attended Spring Thaw for the first time 15 years ago. He stayed in the hotel across the street to be on the safe side, because he found the idea of buying and selling crowns in hotel rooms strange. Since then, he’s warmed up to the community.

“A lot of people have become friends,” he says. “It’s such an odd hobby and there are few collectors.” He’s stayed in the main hotel ever since.

As evening falls, neon beer signs hanging in the room windows color the sidewalk blue and red. In the hospitality room, men in sweatshirts and jeans stand around the beer kegs and eat chicken wings, sausages and chips from paper plates. The main show floor is only open Saturday morning, but on Thursday and Friday, the trading is room to room. I walk until I find an open door. Inside, five men stand around a bed, looking down at an array of shallow rectangular frames filled with colorful bottle caps. They are crown collectors. They’re deep in conversation, so I circle the other bed and take photos of the crowns. They are clean, unused.

Kevin Kirk introduces himself. He began collecting in 2011 while on disability. He’d been scrolling through eBay and found someone selling a batch of 1,000 crowns. He couldn’t imagine who would want them, but an internet search led him to collectors.

Curious and bored, he bid on the collection, which he won. The crowns appeared a few weeks later. He noticed others online selling unused crowns and figured breweries must provide them. He visited the Flying Fish and River Horse breweries in New Jersey. To his great surprise, workers at each happily gave him a large bag of crowns to take away. When other collectors told Kirk he’d better focus his collection to keep it from getting too big, he told them he’d specialize in animals. But today he admits to collecting “more than just that.”

Like many of the collectors, he jokes that he has a problem. “I have to downsize,” Kirk tells me. The collection has taken over too much of his house. But he’s here at the Crownvention and, as far as I can tell, shows no signs of stopping.

“Do you want some bottle caps?” he asks.

“Really?” I ask.

“Sure. My wife would be grateful!”

I’m tempted to accept. They’re bright, shiny, tastefully designed. But I decline and say goodbye to the room of crown collectors. Before I leave, Joe Roberts asks Kirk to add me to their Facebook group, because “you never know who might be able to help you get good crowns.”

Between crownventions and canventions, collectors stay connected via online forums, eBay, and Facebook. Some of them meet in person at informal “can nights” held in private homes. Others meet up around the country to dig in wooded areas looking for cans or other antique items, like old car hood ornaments.

Jeff Lebo, a Pennsylvania-based entrepreneur and co-organizer of the show, began collecting when he was a teenager. With more than 89,000 cans of all different types, he has the largest known collection in the world. Most of it is housed in the Brewhouse Mountain Eco-Inn, which Lebo built with help from his dad, other family members, and friends, specifically to house the beer cans. He and his wife now rent out the can-lined rooms to travelers visiting Pennsylvania attractions.

Outside his hotel room here in Mechanicsburg sits a two-wheeled auto trailer with “I Want Your Old Beer Cans” written in large gold letters along with photos of Meister Brau, Horton Beer, and Scheidt’s Rams Head Ale cans.

One of Lebo’s favorite finds came from a website lead. An 85-year-old New Yorker had 300 cans to sell. He’d worked for the Continental Can Company in the 1950s, and would pull unusual cans off the line to keep. In time, the man had 600 cans.

After several years, his wife persuaded him to get rid of them. He threw out most of them, but he searched the internet before throwing out the last box and found Lebo’s website.

Lebo bought them all, including a rare Malta Dukesa flat top.

“I collect because I am a collector,” Charlie Bacon says. “It’s a genetic thing.”

Savoca, one of the crown collectors, mentions an article that stated people collect whenever there’s diversity in a group of objects: coins, rocks, beer cans.

“The collection becomes a mini-museum,” he says. “You see this with can collectors. It’s about the history.”

“When you go to a digger’s house, you pull a can off the shelf and get a story with it,” Glenn Pasquinelli says.

* * *

The can collectors I’ve met love to share stories of the hunt. Steve Gordon, who runs the website BeerCanMan.com and, as a pawn shop manager, has developed an eye for good deals, spent several years trying to acquire another collector’s vintage 1930s cans.

Gordon vacations in New York, where the seller lived, and would contact him before each trip. They met up once and Gordon tried to buy the cans, but the seller didn’t want to accept a check. Gordon left forlorn. On future trips, the seller could never make time to meet him — out of town, sick kids, too busy. No deal. A friend of Gordon’s even sent the seller a custom-made postcard to express Gordon’s ongoing interest, to no avail.

At the five-year mark, Gordon mailed a batch of crab balls with a note that he’d be happy to buy the collection. The balls did the trick. The seller called to thank Gordon and told him he was ready to strike a deal.

This time Gordon stuffed his pockets with cash — no checks — and took Menke along as security. The wind turned out to be more of a criminal than any human. It blew some of the money out of his pockets, so Gordon had to chase $100 bills around a parking lot. Eventually, he walked home with the cans, which he says looked even better than they had the first time.

* * *

Dave Larrazolo, an ex-Army drill sergeant, is wearing a bumblebee costume and adjusting his antennae when I speak with him at the canvention. He explains that he doesn’t bother with “rust,” which refers to rusty beer cans. Another collector tells me Larrazolo’s collection is known to be “squeaky clean.”

Despite the group’s communal nature, friendly divisions exist: rusty cans versus clean, new crowns versus old, plastic-lined versus vinyl-lined crowns. Other collectors specialize by geography, brand, or type — West Virginia or California, Ballantine’s Beer or Hamm’s, quarts or 12-ounce size. There are accessories, too, like can openers referred to as “I-7s.”

Alan Paschedag, an engineer and former president of the Brewery Collectibles Club of America, currently focuses on collecting Rheingold cans, and has acquired almost 300.

“If you’ve been doing this a while, you collect too much,” he tells me.

He says he’s collected baseball cards, soda cans, and wives. “I still have some,” he quips.

One collector, who specializes in the I-7 “church-key” openers, made to punch triangular drinking holes in the earliest generation of beer cans, tells me he has an example from nearly every brewery that made them.

“What will you do when you get them all?” I ask.

“Oh, I’ll find something else to collect,” he says. “There’s always something else.”

For the past two years, Pasquinelli has met up with collector friends from Virginia, Florida, and Pennsylvania to search for dumps around old summer cabins in Maine. A favorite find was a pre-war Krueger can.

Pasquinelli notes that, as a plumber, he spends his workdays traveling to jobs in heavy traffic in the city. When he’s in the woods digging, he enjoys the break from regular life.

Spring Thaw allows collectors to leave normal life behind, too, and it’s sometimes hard to return.

“I’m always depressed after these shows,” says one collector.

“Why?” I ask.

“You can come here and be yourself. Now I have to return to work.”

The post They Meet Up in Motels Across America…to Trade Old Beer Cans appeared first on Narratively.

I walked past the stage and sat down at the bar, the neon lights illuminating my pink teddy, shadowed eyes, and crimson lips. I ordered my first drink of the night and took inventory of the club. There were a few listless customers scattered around, hunching over bar stools, and a dancer circling the pole.

I waved over a colleague, a transplant from Manchester with hair extensions that kissed her velvet garter belt. We grumbled about how slow business was until I spotted a paunchy man at the bar. He was short, with a tuft of gray hair and a slight smile that crinkled his eyes. He was also more animated than the others.

“Do you want to try?” I asked her out of a sense of politeness.

“You go,” she said, waving her hand.

I started off light, asking about his day and his job. His smile widened across his face as my eyes met his. I silently counted to 10 and reminded myself to look away for a second – best not to terrify him. After three minutes, I transitioned to more personal questions, moving steadily through the formula I’d perfected to curate conversation with customers.

He started complaining about his recent breakup, but it didn’t feel genuine, his eyes twinkling with eagerness. I switched my gaze to the top of his nose to put a boundary between us.

I could tell he was interested in spending money, but he’d be hard work. It was time to either close the sale or walk away. He’d take advantage of my time otherwise.

“Ready for fun?” I whispered in his ear to avoid his eyes.

I didn’t bother mentioning the private rooms. After two years in the industry, I knew which customers were worth investing in – not this guy. So, I led him into the corner, which opened up to the club like the bow of a ship, public and safe, for one quick dance.

* * *

Before working in strip clubs, I struggled to read people’s emotions through cues like facial expressions, postures, and tone of voice in real time. I processed events after the fact with tenuous evaluation, like peeling off layers of old wallpaper. At the time, it was not something I had words to explain, so I turned the blame on myself. Whenever I struggled to understand if someone was angry or bored, I went home and berated myself for being lazy, ditzy, and dumb as I obsessively evaluated the night. I just needed to try harder to be more present, I told myself.

One time, I went to a dinner party my sister hosted. A few of her colleagues and friends sat around her table while we snacked on hummus and bread, and someone asked about my recent trip to Europe. I rambled incessantly, illustrating the nightclubs, the hostels I stayed in, even how I bled through my powder-blue dress because I forgot to change my tampon. My voice was loud, a  pitch you use at a concert, not inside. I can see their faces now, wide-eyed and uncomfortable, but at the time they coalesced into one indistinguishable figure, Dave Matthews playing in the background taking precedent. Their distaste didn’t register until my sister pulled me aside and asked as kindly as possible to keep to “lighter” topics.

After dinner, we dispersed to the living room and I attempted to talk to my sister’s colleague, but I forgot to break eye contact, continuously staring wide-eyed while she spoke.

“You’re certainly a character,” she remarked, exiting the conversation. I didn’t realize until later that I’d made her uncomfortable.

I didn’t know what slow processing was then, but I was aware I felt embarrassed a lot, and lonely. Facial expressions, body language, and eye contact are the bones of communication and it’s quite difficult to build and maintain relationships without the ability to read them.

So, I meticulously designed a persona who nodded at the right time, rehearsed lines, smiled when appropriate, monitored personal space, spoke quietly. Before going out, I crafted notecards, scribbling how long to talk about acceptable topics and which to stay clear of altogether, like my period, in small talk. The persona was a mask that helped me appear to interact in the moment, but in reality I crept by, three paces behind everyone else.

* * *

I had just celebrated my 24th birthday in Australia when I started dancing. I settled temporarily in a bustling beach town at the edge of Melbourne and needed money to pay off my student debt. I considered a bar job, but decided to try stripping simply because it meant fewer hours.

When I walked into a club to ask for a job, to my surprise, I realized it was just a bar with the usual roles reversed: women approaching men. I was intrigued, but confused – how did they convince customers to spend money off-stage?

The manager looked at my petite frame and nervous smile, pointed her manicured hand to the dressing room and listed the rules: “Go get ready in there. You get one free drink. Don’t be late for stage. No sex. No drugs on the floor.” Simple enough, but nothing on how to monetize my time. I handed over my $40 house fee and walked into the sea of hairspray and naked bodies.

Hundreds of customers came and went during the 10-hour shift, sitting on plush couches and crowding around the bar. I approached 10 guys, mirroring my colleagues’ coy smiles, suggestive body language and light conversation starters, but I couldn’t tease out who wanted to spend. All but one dismissed me.

I sat at the bar to observe, sipping my free champagne. One dancer particularly stood out with her naturally frizzy curls and tattered black bra. She wasn’t the most glamorous, but every guy she spent more than a few minutes with agreed to get a lap dance, like she had sprinkled them with fairy dust. A few times, she walked away from customers within seconds, once even waving her hand in a man’s face to dismiss him.

From the bar, I saw her sitting alone on one of the upholstered couches that lined the back of the club. She was taking a moment’s respite after a dance to count her money before securing it around her wrist with an elastic band. I took a deep breath and approached her, brushing aside the fringe curtain separating the lap dance room from the bar. It was getting late, two hours before closing, and I was exhausted and frustrated. So far I’d brought in just $50, meaning a $10 profit after the house fee. I thought about packing up and never coming back, but I needed this to work out. My student loan wouldn’t magically go away.

She took one look at me and asked, “Your first time?”

“Yes. I’m struggling,” I said shyly.

She stared at me with a bored expression, so I got right to it.

“How do you know who wants to spend money?”

She turned around and outlined her lips with a beige pencil in the smudged mirror, advising in her Bulgarian accent: “I don’t always know, but here are a few things I’ve learned after five years in the industry: Don’t spend more than 10 minutes with them if they haven’t spent money. Five minutes if it’s busy. You’re not a free therapist. Make them pay big bucks if they want to dump their shit on you. Walk away from customers who want to get to know the ‘real you’ right away. They’re usually creeps.”

Before she left the lap dance area, she turned around and said, “And quit this nice girl bullshit. You sound like a child. Don’t try so hard to be someone you’re not, just be a hyped-up version of yourself.”

As she sauntered off, she looked back once more, “I’m Claire by the way.”

Her words wounded me, but I was impressed. She saw right through my mask. The rambling girl at my sister’s house was a distant memory, but, strangely, Claire must have seen who I was before I tried so hard to appear normal.

After we spoke, I didn’t reincarnate my older self, but I did carve another persona, Piper. I learned to showcase different parts of my persona based on the customer. It seemed practicing social skills paid off – I became a deft conversationalist, sometimes earning my night’s wage just from talking. I moved beyond the foundation I hid behind, laughing, smiling, and chatting more brazenly than before, enjoying eye contact with customers I trusted, dismissing ones I didn’t. Performing felt strangely comfortable, even though the job was foreign and challenging.

That conversation lasted minutes, but the advice made for a successful career. Slowly, Claire’s rules taught me how to read customers for signs of interest by attaching meaning to their words and actions, something most people learn unconsciously, but that I’d always struggled with.

The club gave me a controlled space to decipher the crinkle around people’s eyes for eagerness or raised eyebrow for arrogance, as if I was reading a script from a teleprompter. And when I was unsure, I had her original rules to catch me. Are they asking for my real name? Are they relaying problems in their life without buying a dance first? On the floor of the club, I spent hours practicing each weekend, and for the first time in my life, I learned how to cut through layers of language in real time, just like Claire, until it became effortless.

* * *

Eventually I moved back home to New York and started stripping full time. After two years of practicing by trial and error in the world’s most social job, the tricks I learned in the club seeped into my social life outside of work, and it got easier to notice social cues and use the same formula I used with customers to make small talk with anyone.

Most people I met outside of work told me I was a great listener, unaware of how much time I spent in my room practicing the correct reactions. I didn’t want anyone to know how much I struggled, so I let very few people get close to me – better than anyone finding out that I couldn’t really socialize, that I was a fake.

Nearly two years after I started dancing, my friend Sarah invited me to her birthday party. My least favorite social situation: a dinner party with unknown people. True, I was better at picking up more obvious cues like eagerness and anger, but group settings were strenuous – too many subtleties to keep track of. But I hadn’t seen my friend in a while and I missed her. I packed up my lace teddy and Red Bull into a discreet bag and headed over to the restaurant before work.

The hour and a half crawled by. There were six of us around a small table. I can’t remember the other people’s faces or even what anyone spoke about. I prayed no one would ask me personal questions.

“Sarah tells me you just got home from Amsterdam,” my friend’s brother said politely, turning in my direction. His words mixed in with the background conversation and it sounded like another language. I broke out in sweat.

“I am sorry, what?” I asked.

He repeated himself. A second later the words clicked. I smiled and looked at his nose instead of his eyes while chewing over my words and length of speech, trying to offer the version of my trip they wanted to hear.

Sarah got up to go to the bathroom. I quickly walked over to her and asked: “Were people bored when I spoke?”

“Not at all. What’s wrong?”

“Nothing, nothing. But I have to go. I’m sorry, I have work.”

She looked confused as I hurried out the door. I didn’t really have to go to the club. I’d made enough that week to warrant a night off with my friends, but work felt easier than this social performance. I let out a sigh of relief as the taxi plowed across the Williamsburg Bridge.

I walked under the familiar lights to the dressing room. I squirted a dollop of foundation on my hand and painted the dark circles under my eyes. For a brief second, I wondered, Is something wrong? Surely work shouldn’t be more comfortable than a night out? But then I swallowed those thoughts and walked onto the floor to escape from myself.

I sat down at the bar and ordered a Hennessy on the rocks. The birthday was successfully buried, and I was buzzing from the bliss of escape.

I spotted a man at the bar – alone, tall, bald with a kind smile and a glass of whiskey in his hand. I ran through the formula and we connected right away.

“Hennessy is a strong choice,” he commented.

“It’s an underrated drink.”

“I’ll take your word for it. Can I get you another one?”

Ten minutes passed. I suggested the private room and he agreed. The private rooms were where I connected with customers, sometimes in a way that was more intimate than my relationships outside the club.

There I massaged their shoulders, let them touch me, expressed vulnerability. I bantered for hours – something I was never able to do before. With fewer stimuli around, it was easier to focus and converse back and forth in a way that felt less strenuous than at the restaurant hours before.

“You have a strange rhythm about you,” he remarked, smiling as I cradled him. Customers who spent money like water didn’t care if I was odd; they wanted an experience. My weirdness was worth their paycheck.

After two hours, I excused myself for a moment to go to a bathroom where I got a message from Sarah: Miss you. Wish you didn’t have work. It’s not the same without you.

Below the message was a picture of the dinner crew, laughing with their arms wrapped around each other. I felt such a pang of loneliness and regret that I broke down in the doorless toilet stall, my eyeliner smearing like watercolor on canvas.

Why am I only alive at work? Why can I give so much of myself to my customers and so little to my friends? Maybe I was just being stupid because I was drunk, but I wanted to be an active participant in my life instead of walking around confused all the time, experiencing my days after they’ve happened, passive from the sidelines. I wanted connection.

Work was a temporary balm, but the interactions there were fleeting, not enough to sustain my longing for people. The force of my rotting loneliness hit like a tidal wave as the reality of how much I struggled to navigate social settings outside settled in.

I allowed myself just one sob before I fixed my face and performed for the last half hour. When I got home, I couldn’t get out of bed for days, my sheets disheveled with self-loathing.

Desperate for answers, I started scrolling through an online forum for women with ADHD, wondering if I might have an attention disorder, looking for an explanation. I started asking for advice, addressing some of my other issues first like getting lost in obsessive thought.

Within minutes, responses flooded that my symptoms resembled ASD.

“What is ASD?” I asked.

“Autism Spectrum Disorder.”

I scoffed, but after I read articles on how autism manifests in women, there wasn’t room for doubt – the evidence was clearly outlined in the bullet points on my laptop.

Central to autism is a difficulty experiencing life in real time. Many autistic people can’t filter out information, which makes it difficult to zone in and focus. All those years, I couldn’t read people’s cues because I struggled to cancel out the world around me. At my sister’s house, the background music, the forks scraping on plates, the blue walls, all swam in front of people’s facial expressions.

But in the private rooms at the club, there were no outside stimuli. The rules were clear, the distractions minimal, so I could focus and interact.

Women in the ADHD forum invited me to the group for autistic women and there I saw myself a hundred times over. Scrolling through were women like me: sex workers, performers, artists, writers, all struggling to make sense of our invisible differences in our own socially awkward, wacky, and beautiful way.

I gradually pulled the blame away from myself and labeled the things about me that were naturally different, not defective. I stopped punishing myself when I got overwhelmed in conversations, stopped beating myself up when bright lights blanched out facial expressions and background noise canceled out people’s words. I took a deep breath and resisted pretending to listen and asked: “Can you say that again?” without apology. I forgave myself when I slipped outside of social norms and said something weird.

No more being sorry for things I can’t help. People would love me or not – frankly I was okay with the risk.

* * *

A few months later, I stood outside the club with a cigarette in my hand, looking over the busy highway at the deserted factories.

“Piper, you leaving?” my bouncer nudged in his Queens accent.

“Yes. I made enough tonight. I’m going out,” I said, smiling back at him.

He waited outside with me until Sarah pulled up in a rideshare.

“This is where you work?” she asked incredulously, her mouth ajar in the window of the car.

I laughed. She knew I was a stripper but had never been to the club. From the outside, it looked grim: tattered brown building on the edge of town. But it was home to me.

“I never said stripping was glamorous.”

I kept the window open as the club disappeared, letting the cold air whip my face, feeling a mixture of relief and excitement. Forums for autistic women advised pulling off masks that many develop to pass as non-autistic. The effects of camouflaging are toxic, they warned. I wasn’t sure I could go back to who I was. The rambling autistic girl at my sister’s house was dead, buried under years of performance.

“Did you have a good night?” Sarah asked.

“Yeah. I’m ready for a night off though.”

Who could I have been if I didn’t try so hard to pass? I’ll never know, but stripping provided a portal to who I might be without fear of rejection – a rare glimpse of the affectionate, brash, and funky edges of personality. But I still had so much to learn. There was vast, dormant space to grow into beyond my work persona.

The twinkling lights opened the doors to Manhattan, my body still moving from the music of the club. The possibilities of the night unrolled in front of me and I intended to savor them.

The post Secret Life of an Autistic Stripper appeared first on Narratively.

The night of June 7, 1929 seemed destined for trouble in Gastonia, a textile hub some 20 miles west of Charlotte, North Carolina. For two months workers had been striking at the Loray Mill over low wages, long hours, perilous working conditions, and decrepit mill-owned housing. Although the mill management had refused to make any concessions, and most townspeople sensed that the strike was on its last legs, the die-hards were unwilling to give up the fight.

The strike’s leader, Fred Erwin Beal, arranged for the night shift to walk out one more time, hoping that the new action would breathe life into the movement. A 33-year-old organizer with the Communist Party-affiliated National Textile Workers Union (NTWU), he had arrived in North Carolina to establish Southern affiliates and lead laborers to challenge mill owners’ abuses. Although usually modest and reserved in private, he came to life in front of a crowd, and now he stood up in front of the remaining picketers at the union hall, urging them to march on the factory to encourage the night shift strikers.

When they returned, bruised and ragged, they told stories of police beating them away.

Minutes later, a car rumbled to a stop outside. Five policemen, including Chief Orville Aderholt, approached the headquarters. Four union guards met them and asked if they had a warrant. Beal would later say that one of the officers tried to seize a guard’s gun, while another, evidently drunk, tried to enter the building. Aderholt, in a black suit and 10-gallon hat, grabbed the drunken man and began to lead him away. Then shots rang out.

By the time everything had quieted down, one union guard and four police, including the chief, were wounded. Aderholt died the next day. No one was ever able to definitely prove who shot first, or who fired the gun that killed him, but soon Beal had been arrested and held without bail on murder charges along with 15 others.

Aderholt’s death marked the turning point in Fred Beal’s Communist odyssey. Because of the events of June 7, 1929, he would be convicted, flee to the Soviet Union, and eventually return as an outspoken opponent of Communism. After that night, Beal always seemed to consider himself a defendant, fighting against the mill interests, the courts, and, increasingly, the Communist organizations in which he eventually lost faith.

* * *

At first glance, Gastonia seemed an unlikely site for labor militancy. Gaston County was mostly rural and conservative, and even in the growing mill towns that dotted the landscape, owners cultivated a paternalistic relationship with employees. Strikes were rare and brief, usually unconnected to larger labor movements.

Fred Beal, in contrast, fit the profile of a leftist strike leader. Journalists described him as “boyish” and “heavy-faced,” with “absolutely no pose, no front whatsoever.” Even his hair, which was perpetually combed to flop over his right brow, was red. Originally from Lawrence, Massachusetts, he began working in mills when he was 14, and turned to activism two years later, in 1912, when the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) came to town to organize a strike. He grew more involved in activism and radicalism through the years, and in 1928 he led a strike in New Bedford, joining the Communist Party and the newly formed NTWU in the process.

By then, trouble was brewing in southern mill country, especially in Gaston County. In response to economic pressures, manufacturers attempted to cut costs by improving efficiency, firing workers, slashing spending in mill villages, and implementing what their employees called the “stretch-out,” where workloads increased drastically, while salaries barely rose or even decreased.

In March 1929, Beal arrived in Gastonia and began organizing an NTWU local. On April 1, he called for a strike vote, which was approved unanimously. Soon picketers took to the streets, clashing with officers. Advertisements started to appear in the local paper paid for by the “Citizens of Gaston County,” with headlines like “Red Russianism Lifts its Gory Hands Right Here in Gastonia.”

The growing involvement of Communist cadres only heightened the strike’s association with the Soviet Union. Party affiliates like the NTWU, the International Labor Defense (ILD), and the Young Communist League sent representatives to the Loray strike. Beal, for his part, thought it best to avoid rhetoric about class warfare, focusing instead on working conditions in the factory. In his memoir, “Proletarian Journey,” he writes that he told one Party activist not to discuss Communist ideology with the press during the strike, since “the struggle in Gastonia was to win the strike for its immediate benefits and not for forming Soviets.”

Although he considered such tactical debates a hindrance, he was more worried about the violence perpetrated by the mill owners’ allies. In the early hours of April 18, a mob destroyed the strike headquarters, and picketers began to tell each other stories of harassment and intimidation. The union was able to secure another plot of land to reconstruct the building and erect a tent colony for evicted strikers, yet the threat of an attack still loomed.

By May, everyone except Beal and his core union members believed that the strike was dead. After the first few days of marching, workers had petered back into the Loray Mill, and the strikers numbered only a tenth of their former strength. Yet Beal believed that the scabs remained sympathetic, and he planned a walkout on June 7.

The shot that hit Orville Aderholt extinguished that hope.

* * *

Fifteen defendants crowded into the corner of the balmy Gastonia courthouse on July 29, 1929. The close air, the dark wooden seats, the galleries packed with mill workers — some of whom still wore their overalls — and the broad, bare desk of Judge M.V. Barnhill crowded in on Beal as the attorneys presented arguments about moving the trial to nearby Charlotte. Defense lawyers explained that it would be impossible to find an impartial jury in Gaston County, where tensions still ran high. Barnhill agreed and decided to move the proceedings to Charlotte, adjourning the trial until August 26.

It had been almost two years since Sacco and Vanzetti, Italian immigrants and anarchists convicted of murder in Massachusetts, were executed amid worldwide protests. Just as leftist groups rallied around the anarchists, similar liberal groups came together for the Gastonia defense, including the ACLU and attorneys who had participated in the celebrated Scopes “monkey trial.” On the Communist side, the ILD launched its own campaign, and papers like the Daily Worker publicized the case. But while outside groups cooperated in advocating for acquittal, the defense was riven by internal divisions.

In Charlotte, most of the defendants’ attorneys preferred to argue that their clients had been framed, that they only fired back in self-defense after the police shot at them, and that Aderholt’s death was an unfortunate accident. But another faction, headed by the ILD, called for a strategy of “mass defense,” pairing courtroom arguments with protests and propaganda.

William F. Dunne, editor of the Daily Worker, belonged to the latter camp. In a pamphlet he published in September — “Gastonia: Citadel of the Class Struggle in the New South” — he depicted the night of June 7 as an “armed struggle” between workers and a conspiracy of mill interests. The other defense lawyers must have recoiled in horror while reading the pamphlet, which declared the defendants to be victims “whom the ruling class is trying to railroad to the electric chair in a futile but murderous attempt to stem the tide of working class revolt.” Such inflammatory language may have pleased Communist hardliners, but it did nothing for the people on trial.

Beal was reluctant to embrace the ILD’s strategy. “It was just like during the strike,” he told the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) 10 years later. “I was always at loggerheads with the idea, why we should have to put in things about Soviet Russia when it was strictly a strike issue, for better conditions in the mill.”

But the defense did not anticipate the prosecutors’ most audacious tactics. Barely had the trial begun when, during the presentation of medical evidence, the attorneys wheeled in an effigy of Aderholt wearing the same clothes he had worn during the shooting. Apparently, their stunt was inspired by a popular film, “The Trial of Mary Dugan,” which had been playing in local theaters and featured an identical stratagem that won the protagonist’s case. At the appearance of the bloodstained garments in Charlotte, the courtroom exploded, and Judge Barnhill ordered the effigy taken away.

However, Aderholt continued to haunt the courtroom. On the first weekend after the trial began, one of the jurors, a newspaper vendor named J. G. Campbell, appeared to lose his mind. Officials confined him to a cell, where he cried out and banged a tin cup on the ground. Barnhill visited the hapless juror and concluded that the only option was to declare a mistrial. Years later, as former jurors and attorneys revisited the case, it became apparent that Campbell probably already suffered from chronic mental health problems, which were likely exacerbated during the trial, during which the other jurors incessantly pranked and bullied him. In the heat of the moment, though, the defense blamed the effigy.

After the mistrial, some jurors informed reporters that they had been leaning toward an acquittal. But the prosecution did not intend to make the same mistakes twice, and when Beal was back in court for the new trial, they had regrouped, charging the strike leader alongside six others. Prosecutors, barred from asking Beal about his party affiliation, instead interrogated him about his political beliefs. In response, he portrayed himself as a moderate. He disavowed such revolutionary values as the overthrow of government by force, and he avoided responsibility for articles published under his name in Communist publications like the Daily Worker and the Labor Defender. In short, he did everything that his attorneys asked of him, and as he returned to the other defendants, he noticed, they “seemed pleased.”

Their optimism quickly died when the next witness took the stand. Edith Saunders Miller, the wife of Beal’s codefendant, Clarence Miller, testified that she had taught the children in the strikers’ tent colony to strive for a Soviet-style government of workers and farmers. Then she denied believing in God and avowed almost all of the Communist principles that Beal had carefully avoided. As Beal wrote bitterly in his memoir, “Comrade Edith Miller was addressing the Court, but she was anticipating the commendation of Stalin’s lackeys in New York and Moscow.” Dunne, the Daily Worker editor, was in the courtroom that day and congratulated her.

It took less than an hour for the jury to decide that all seven defendants were guilty. Judge Barnhill then delivered the prison sentences, and Beal suddenly was facing 17 to 20 years.

He could still appeal to the state Supreme Court. But there was another promising alternative: skipping bail and fleeing the country. After the trial, Dunne approached them, proposing that they escape to the Soviet Union. Edith and Clarence Miller enthusiastically supported the plan. And although most other leaders in the American Communist Party — not to mention the North Carolina authorities — expected Gastonia defendants to stay in the country, the Millers, Beal, and three other codefendants secretly raised funds and secured fake passports. Soon, Beal was boarding a ship in New York City under the assumed name of Jacob Katz. Disguised in horn-rimmed glasses, he crossed the gangplank and watched America fade away.

Bitterness still nagged at him. After he was convicted, he sensed that he and his codefendants had been betrayed for the sake of an abstract, revolutionary goal. That feeling never went away; if anything, it would intensify over the following years. However, even if he believed that the American Communists had undermined his defense, Beal hoped that the Soviet Union would fulfill the dream of a state where the kinds of injustices he had witnessed in the textile mills would be a thing of the past. “I had in mind to see Soviet Russia,” he explained to the HUAC later, “and see for myself what was going on there because I had always told the workers in North Carolina and in New Bedford and everywhere that Soviet Russia was a paradise.”

* * *

When Beal disembarked in Leningrad, the first thing he saw was a crowd of peasants begging travelers for money. His Soviet hosts explained that the poor were merely capitalists who would not work for the new system, but he was struck by the contrast between the lives of the Russians with the treatment of foreigners like himself. In his memoir, he remembers frequenting a special dining room for international guests situated in the middle of a sprawling workers’ restaurant. In the “visitors’ room,” he was served hearty meals of meat and borscht by a starved, haggard waiter. Outside, the other patrons waited in line for thin soup.

Then he learned that he was not allowed to leave. The Comintern, which oversaw international Communist movements, declared that Beal and the other Gastonia defendants were to remain in the U.S.S.R. indefinitely. He traveled to Moscow with another Gastonia codefendant, K.Y. “Red” Hendricks, to try to reverse the decision, but their request was summarily denied. Instead, Beal was sent in the opposite direction, on a speaking tour of Uzbekistan.

In the surviving photographs of Beal in the Soviet hinterlands, he seems out of place, crouching in a circle among Uzbek peasants to discuss the injustices of American capitalism, or sitting like a mill boss in the back seat of an unwieldy black convertible motoring down a dirt road in a rural village. Once, he visited children on the way to pick cotton in one of the region’s collective farms. He woke up early and joined the group, marching to a brass band and arriving at the field that night. The next day, the children began picking, growing so tired that they started sitting under the cotton plants, while organizers admonished them to help fulfill the Five-Year Plan.

Around the same time, news arrived in America that several Gastonia defendants were in Russia, and the North Carolina Supreme Court denied their appeal. But Beal was looking for a way out. In August 1930, he wrote to Roger Baldwin, then the head of the ACLU, requesting assistance. “I think no one ever fought harder to get in jail than I just now,” he drily observed.

Word reached the United States, and on September 20, the New York Times wrote about his efforts to return, reporting inaccurately that the Comintern had already approved his departure and that he and some of his codefendants would turn themselves over to the North Carolina authorities imminently. At the same time, Baldwin and the ACLU secured funds to cover Beal’s travel home. Comintern officials summoned the Gastonia defendants and, apparently persuaded by the unexpected turn of events, suddenly announced that they were free to go.

Beal secretly arrived back in America in March 1931. His attitude toward the Soviet Union, he admitted later, remained mixed after his trip. The grim realities of Leningrad, Moscow and Uzbekistan had disappointed him, yet he continued hoping for the promises of a workers’ utopia. He had not forgotten that fellow Communists had undermined his trial, but now they urged him to return. Additionally, Beal later admitted, “Now that I was no longer in Russia, the twenty-year prison sentence in North Carolina did not seem so tempting.”

Together, these influences quickly convinced him to reverse course. Six months after arriving in the United States, he was back in the U.S.S.R.

* * *

Upon his return, he was assigned to the Kharkov Tractor Plant, in Soviet Ukraine, where he was given charge of propaganda and relations among the sizable corps of foreign workers. He also edited the English-language paper at the plant, the Tempo, and even authored a pamphlet, aptly titled “Foreign Workers in a Soviet Tractor Plant.”

Much of the pamphlet consists of optimistic propaganda, with statements like “the Kharkov tractors are as good, if not better, than the tractors imported some years ago from America.” An entire section is devoted to a tally of donations to a government loan program. Yet hints of discontent break through. One passage notes that “complaints began to pour in that many of our tractors broke down too soon,” and Beal describes worker campaigns against scrap metal and to promote rising production quotas, evidence of underlying difficulties at the factory.

In reality, life at Kharkov was harsh, and Beal writes in his memoir that his job consisted of “a continuous effort to keep the foreigners from rebelling against their living conditions.” Foreign workers were cold and hungry, toiling for long hours to meet production quotas and living in factory housing. Thousands of miles away from Gastonia, Beal realized that he was still a labor organizer, facing Soviet versions of the same issues that had prompted the North Carolinians to strike, only now he was urging workers not to demand better conditions.

The natives had it even worse. If they failed to keep up with production quotas or complained, they could be thrown out to join the masses of starving, unemployed peasants. In “Proletarian Journey,” Beal describes trekking through the Ukrainian countryside around the factory, passing desiccated, famine-stricken collective farms and villages filled with emaciated corpses. Back in the factory, he says, peasants would be rounded up periodically and shipped away to die, so that visitors wouldn’t notice the starvation. After two years of this, he knew he would have to get out for good.

* * *

While in Kharkov, Beal received word that Red Hendricks, his Gastonia codefendant, had independently made his way back to the United States, where he had been arrested and extradited to North Carolina to serve out his sentence. This time, no legal aid came from the American Communists, since Hendricks had fled the Soviet Union without permission. According to Beal, Hendricks began writing him to ask for assistance, and when it became clear that no one else was going to help, Beal decided to return to America himself.

He requested an exit visa from his local Communist Party committee to travel to Poland, supposedly in order to renew his passport. However, once he crossed the border, he made his way to Germany, hoping to get into the United States. Quite by chance, one of his defense lawyers from the Gastonia trial was in Berlin with his daughter, working for the defense in the Reichstag fire trial. Beal convinced the two to provide enough funds to secure passage across the Atlantic. Finally, in January 1934, he docked in New York City. For the next four years, he kept moving, steering clear of the police and North Carolina authorities, while becoming an increasingly vocal critic of Communism.

Beal never ended up helping his incarcerated comrade; it is unclear whether he ever thought he could, or if he even intended to do so. Maybe he was simply retrospectively casting his return in a more heroic light. In fact, much of “Proletarian Journey” is clearly embellished. Beal repeats dialogues from decades ago, frequently editorializes, and mixes anecdotes from his experiences with diatribes about his enemies within the Communist movement. In his 1949 book, The Red Fraud, these inconsistencies are even more pronounced.

Nevertheless, when he returned to the United States, he made a full break with the Communist Party. As he explained to the HUAC in 1939, “I knew that when I came back over to this country and told the workers over here of the horrors, of what was going on over in Soviet Russia, that I would lose a lot of my old-time friends — so-called friends — that were with me in the Communist Party at that time when I was in this country.” By that time, he was serving his sentence for the Aderholt murder, having turned himself into the North Carolina authorities in February 1938. He was paroled in 1942 and had his citizenship rights restored in 1948.

The Loray Mill building remained throughout all of Beal’s trials and afterward. The structure still stands in a corner of Gastonia, but now, rather than discontented millworkers, it houses loft apartments and an athletic club. There’s a pool outside, where there used to be pickets. There’s a history center, and there’s plenty of exposed brick, punctuated by windows with views of the nearby mountains. Although 80 percent urban, Gaston County remains conservative — almost all of the Republican candidates for federal office in recent history have received more than 60 percent of the vote, including Donald Trump. It’s not the kind of place where you’d expect to see a Communist. But then again, it wasn’t in 1929, either.

The post This Crusading Socialist Taught America’s Workers to Fight. Then He Lost His Faith. appeared first on Narratively.

I felt the cold metal of the tool through my shirt as she checked my spine for deformities. I was filled with panic, and a certainty that I had scoliosis. I pictured my spine twisted. Would I need a back brace? Eventually a wheelchair? I got lightheaded and said I needed to stop the test.

The article I’d been assigned to write on a new scoliosis clinic didn’t require in-person interviews. But I’d just earned a graduate degree in journalism, and I was eager to prove myself to my Pulitzer Prize-winning professors. So here I was at the clinic. When I’d suggested to the physical therapist that she test me for scoliosis so I could describe the exam in my article, she’d been pleased.

After prematurely ending the exam, I still felt like I was about to pass out. For a minute, I couldn’t even see. I was led to a chair and handed a glass of water. As the dizziness subsided and my vision returned, I thought, Shit, shit, shit. This has never happened in public before. Soooooo fucking unprofessional.

I apologized to the woman with a lie: “I’m getting over the flu.” The truth was, I was having a panic attack because of childhood abuse, and I didn’t even know it.

* * *

Nearly two decades before I was tested for scoliosis, I sat on a plastic exam-ro­­om table with my t-shirt off. Dr. Wirtz, who also happened to be our neighbor, felt my left breast, then my right. I was 10 years old and more nervous than embarrassed. Dr. Wirtz was the fourth doctor I’d been to in our small Wisconsin town, and I hoped he wouldn’t say my barely grape-sized left breast made me too sick for school.

My mom was always saying I was too sick for school. When I was six and my parents divorced, I missed half the first grade because she was convinced my stomach pains were caused by something deadlier than lactose intolerance. To her, a cold was pneumonia… unless it was actually pneumonia, in which case it was something worse.

As Dr. Wirtz poked my nipples, my mom filled him in on my paternal history of breast cancer. The disease had killed my grandma, great grandma and great-great grandma. I thought about my grandma’s open coffin. She was the first dead person I’d ever seen. But the fact that she was dead didn’t frighten me. What scared me was how, two years earlier, a doctor had chopped off one of her breasts and made her wear a wig.

A week or so after the appointment with Dr. Wirtz, my mom asked my babysitter to look at my breast. I’m sure my babysitter, a popular high-schooler named Shauna, thought it was a weird request. My mom had a charismatic way of getting people to do stuff, though. She called me over and lifted my t-shirt. “Look at this; isn’t it strange?” she asked Shauna, touching my breast and getting her to do so as well. Shauna shrugged her shoulders and played it cool. “Nope,” she replied. “I was uneven at first, too.”

Dr. Wirtz wasn’t worried either. He’d told her I was just growing, and the ultrasound backed him up. No cancer. But the fact that babysitters and doctors can never be 100-percent certain is unbearable to people like my mom. She hired another babysitter, found yet another doctor, and frantically and forcefully prayed over my breast in tongues every night before I fell asleep.

The next doctor – a specialist, this time – agreed with Dr. Wirtz: my development was right on schedule. At my mom’s insistence, he and his team ran lengthy tests, but didn’t find anything wrong. My mom was still sure I had cancer, and by this time so was I. The specialist told her to bring me back in six months if my other breast didn’t start growing.

I trusted my mom and prayed God would heal me. In the name of Jesus, please take away my breast cancer, was on a constant loop in my head. I assumed I’d drop dead if I went too long between prayers.

When my other breast eventually started to grow, my mom took me back to the specialist anyway. The cancer was clearly spreading.

This time, my dad met us at the hospital. He was very concerned. When the doctors saw my breasts matched in size, they weren’t surprised. Two little grapes. They ran one more set of x-rays to confirm that I was cancer-free – and that they were free of my mom.

I sat in the waiting room with my parents for the final-final result. I knew I had cancer. My mom knew. My dad nervously clenched his fists. Someone came out and gave us the news, and I almost cried out of desperation. I had thought I wanted to be healthy, but when I found out I was, I felt alone and confused. I wanted to be sick because sick people get more love and attention. I sighed in disappointment. My dad noticed my negative reaction and yelled, which he rarely did, “You want to be sick? Marisa, what’s wrong with you?”

He was so happy I wouldn’t die the way his mother had. He was so happy I’d live a long life. And he was so happy my mom was wrong. But after having prayed nearly non-stop for six months that cancer wouldn’t kill me, I would have preferred it if my mom was right. Realizing I couldn’t trust my mom was scarier than cancer ever was. If she was wrong about breast cancer, what else was she wrong about?

* * *

When I was 14, my mom wouldn’t even let me walk the dog around the half-mile residential circle we lived on. I could only go halfway around or I’d get kidnapped. Or the dog would get kidnapped. I don’t even know. I’d stopped arguing with her, even though I’d begun to realize she was wrong more and more. She still believed I’d had breast cancer a few years earlier. It was gone by this time, of course, because God had healed me one night as televangelist Pat Robertson’s voice boomed from our upstairs radio.

When I was at my dad’s every other weekend, I didn’t have to take on my mom’s paranoia. I got to be a regular kid who hung out with cousins and watched MTV. I told my dad I wanted to live with him, and that’s all he needed to hear. We took my mom to court for primary placement.

I was introduced to my very own court-appointed guardian ad litem. I nicknamed her “The Shark” because her job was to fight for my best interest, and only a blood-thirsty animal could defeat my mom. The Shark interviewed me several times to make sure living with my dad was what I really wanted. Once, she asked me to confirm this in my mom’s living room. I sat tensely on the designer couch, knowing my mom was listening from the other room, ready to pounce. But I didn’t waver. Eventually, The Shark was so confident my dad would win that we decided I didn’t have to testify at the hearing.

The morning my parents went to court, I went to school – expecting to be picked up and packing for my dad’s by the final bell. But that’s not what happened. I don’t remember who broke the news to me. I just remember my mom smiling self-righteously and gloating about successfully representing herself. Even though my dad, grandparents and my guardian ad litem sided with me, the judge sided with my mom. He said I was doing so well in school and needed stability. I felt powerless and blamed myself. I should’ve gone to that hearing.

Near the end of my senior year of high school, my mom discovered I’d been plotting to attend the small university in Michigan where my grandparents taught. She lost it. She wasn’t going to let me go ­– especially not to people who’d testified against her in court. She thought she could stop me, and the level of control she had over me disgusted me. I rebelled by not eating at the dinner table. I’d take my plate to the living room and eat while watching bad sitcoms. My mom decided this new behavior – combined with my sometimes finicky eating habits – was similar to that of eating disorder patients we’d seen on “Dr. Phil.” She tried to convince my latest doctor that I’d die without immediate in-patient treatment.

Dr. Locascio’s Band-Aids were Sesame Street-themed and he treated me like a little kid, even though I was 17. He was nice and funny, but he never talked to me without my mom present. When my mom abruptly announced my “eating disorder,” I rolled my eyes, but Dr. Locascio didn’t notice. He was already looking at my medical history and realizing I’d always been a bit underweight. Maybe there was something to my mom’s theory.

Seeing she had a chance, my mom started blabbering on about how I didn’t drink soda or eat pork or seafood. I liked salad more than any kid she knew, and I ordered a small cone at ice cream shops. And then there was the foot thing. Sometimes the outer edges of my feet were cold and red. “Poor circulation is a sign of anorexia, right?”

I began to zone out. This wasn’t happening. I wasn’t here. By now, my family, friends and I had started referring to my mom as “overprotective” and “a hypochondriac” because she took me to the doctor for every little thing. But my mom was so good at combining fact with fiction that even I got confused what was real sometimes. I started to get dizzy. Almost passed out. Dr. Locascio helped me lie down while my mom continued talking. He didn’t realize my lightheadedness was one of countless panic attacks I’d have in my life when dealing with medical-related stuff. Instead, he thought I didn’t eat enough for breakfast – just like my mom said.

Although Dr. Locascio agreed I had an eating disorder, he didn’t admit me to a clinic. My mom found a way around that. She formulated a plan to keep me under her control. She’d fly me to some eating disorder clinic-of-the-stars in L.A. and watch over my shoulder as I checked myself in. This plan wasn’t a secret, and I slammed doors and yelled until my throat burned every time she brought it up. We always kept our windows open in nice weather, and the neighbors called the cops during a particularly bad fight. Two uniformed men came to our door, annoyed to be making a house-call for a mother-daughter dispute. There was no use trying to explain what we’d been fighting about. My mom was charming, and I had no bruises. They left.

I wanted to run away, but I knew I couldn’t. My mom would just send those cops after me. She’d once called the police on my dad when he forgot to call her and tell her we’d made it to his place safe. Their tactical flashlights had scared me awake.

At the California clinic, I could barely speak because of all the screaming. It was my 18th birthday. Legally, I was an adult and it was up to me; but it didn’t occur to me I had a choice. Saying “no” had never worked in the past. Why would it now?

After checking in, I was in shock. Then, crying uncontrollably. Out of protocol, a friendly nurse confiscated my shoelaces and sweatshirt drawstring so I wouldn’t kill myself.

The doctors were good in Los Angeles, though. They sent my mom home right away. They knew I didn’t have an eating disorder. The head physician invited me into her office, and from behind her large wooden desk, she told me I didn’t have to have contact with anyone I didn’t want to have contact with – including my mom. She was the first person to ever tell me this, and the anger I felt about the whole disaster was suddenly vindicated.

Two days later, I left the clinic in an airport shuttle with a $10,000 clean bill of health. This was the first time I’d ever been on my own. My dad had paid for my flight to my grandparents’ over the phone. I was free. I boarded the plane wearing my recently de-draw-stringed sweatshirt. I was so sure of myself. But then I spent the entire four-and-a-half-hour flight clenching my armrest, trembling and worrying I’d go into cardiac arrest, like Dr. Phil said sufferers of eating disorders were doomed to do. Maybe my mom was right. Maybe I was the crazy one. Or maybe I was just as crazy as my mom. These were the thoughts I’d struggle with for years to come.

* * *

My panic attack at the scoliosis clinic convinced me I needed help. I found a therapist named Katie – 40-ish with short, red, choppy hair. The artwork in her office was hung too high. I told her this, and she didn’t take it personally. She knew it was just my anxiety talking.

When I first described my mom to Katie, I used the words I grew up with: “She’s just one of those really overprotective moms,” I said. “She loves me too much.”

But when Katie heard the details of my childhood “illnesses,” she gave me another term.

“Have you ever heard of Munchausen by proxy?” she asked.

I laughed out loud. “That’s where the parents poison their kids, right?”

Katie didn’t laugh. Instead, she explained that Munchausen syndrome by proxy – classified under “factitious disorder imposed on another” in the latest American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – doesn’t always, or even usually, involve poison. It’s a rare form of child abuse where a caregiver (usually a mother) invents or exaggerates illnesses in a child for sympathy and attention. The caregiver wants to be seen as a hero – fighting to save the child – and views the child as an extension of him or herself, instead of as an individual.

Katie said it was pretty clear to her that I’m a survivor of this form of abuse. I didn’t want to believe her.

I crossed my arms and legs tighter and picked at the cuticles of my ring fingers enough to draw blood, rationalizations and denials racing through my mind: Abuse? How could this be true? My mom loves me! It’s obvious. Maybe my memory is wrong. Maybe there weren’t so many doctors’ visits and tests. Maybe I’m the exaggerative one.

I left Katie’s office and ordered my childhood medical records. Within two weeks, a three-quarter-inch stack of papers confirmed my memories and forced me, at least momentarily, to accept the truth.

I was never seriously ill growing up. Never even really had symptoms. I leafed through photocopied pages of typed and handwritten medical notes – some with recommendations that my mom see a therapist. The doctors’ words are concise, objective and unemotional. Holding physical evidence of emotional abuse is rare – often impossible – yet this was what I was doing.

I was furious – not only with my mom, but with all the adults of my childhood. Why didn’t my teachers question my absences? Why didn’t the fucking doctors stop testing me for stuff they knew I didn’t have? Why didn’t anyone call my dad? I was also angry with myself. How didn’t I know this was happening to me?

After a few years of therapy, the anger is gone, but my self-doubt and anxiety remain.

My mom is now “dying,” and our monthly phone calls revolve around her sharing detailed and opposing descriptions of her countless, incurable physical ailments. I usually let her talk because I know she’s sick – just probably not sick in the way she believes. Confronting her with the idea that she’s mentally ill and has exaggerated her physical symptoms – as well as those of my childhood, of course – has gotten me nowhere. I’ve never used the word “abuse” with her. There’s no point. Doctors who aren’t on her side are wrong. Anyone who isn’t on her side is wrong.

When it comes to my body, I still catastrophize any physical imperfection. Now I just have journaling and breathing exercises to calm myself down and remind myself that I’m probably not sick.

But sometimes I forget to journal or breathe. I have a small mole on my left cheek that my dermatologist generously calls a beauty mark, but I believe it’s a precancerous growth that will have to be removed. I regularly picture an absurdly large area encompassing the mole being sliced out of my cheek like a piece of pie. After the surgery, I’m still sick and suddenly sickening to look at – left with large, railroad-track scars and a lopsided eye from a haphazard stitch-job. I kill myself rather than go through chemotherapy.

I know I imagine things like this because I was abused, but I don’t always feel like I was abused. Too often, I still think the way my mom trained me to think. It’s hard to feel something you can’t physically see or describe without hauling around medical records. Sometimes, I wish she’d just poisoned me and eliminated any doubt.

The post For My Entire Childhood, My Mom Convinced Me I Was Dying appeared first on Narratively.

It’s mid-January, harvest time in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. The village of Alanganallur is buzzing, festive, rowdy with excitement. Today is devoted to jallikattu: a form of bull riding that is one of the most dangerous and controversial sports on earth.

In an arena in the heart of the village, wearing a neon green number 11 jersey, Vinothraj Navaneethan half-crouches behind a painted coconut stump at the bull’s gateway. His knee is strapped for support, and he’s sharp with adrenaline. He is not alone in the arena. Unlike American bull-riding, in jallikattu, each animal is released into a tangle of men who jostle for a chance at a ride.

The bull charges like a detonation of brawn and color. Behind lowered horns, his body is a hill of muscle roiling beneath a slippery hide. His hump, the fleshy pinnacle at the wither — marking him as a bos indicus, an Indian native — billows a steam cloud of decorative pink chalk or pale ash. He might glitter all over. His horns might be painted blue or ochre. He might be haloed in a burst of blossoms, like a swarm of butterflies, as the garland of flowers ringing his horns is ripped by fingers seeking purchase.

Hands grasp at him as he surges; men leap onto his back. He rises, parries with his horns, bolts, sometimes slips and falls. If he dips past the exit corridor and circles back to chop his horns at his aggressors, the packed crowd and the voice on the loudspeaker holler, “Super! Super!”

There will be another bull, and another — a new bull every few minutes. By day’s end, 571 bulls will have been launched into this scrum of riders. There will be many injuries. On this particular day, in this particular arena, there will be no deaths. But when the three days of the harvest festival called Pongal, the peak of jallikattu season, are up, at least five men will have lost their lives to bulls.

Vinoth — as the wiry, hollow-cheeked, moustached rider is known — is not nervous. At 32, he has nearly 20 years of jallikattu experience, and he’s one of the best.

But he’s focused, waiting for the right bull — the big scary one, the one whose reputation the announcer hypes in the moments before the charge. When that bull blasts through the vaadivassal — the gateway — Vinoth will lunge. He’ll enfold the bull’s hump in his arms, hug tight and try to ride out the fireworks to follow. With any luck, he’ll fall clear of the animal only after it has turned and leapt three times, or dashed out into the wide corridor that exits the field of play. If Vinoth is tossed prematurely, the triumph belongs to the bull and his owner.

A successful ride brings prizes, but Vinoth would be here even if it didn’t. Men like him have been making their reputations clinging to the backs of bulls, and breaking open their bodies in the effort, for over a thousand years — since long before a win ever meant money, foreign cars or airline tickets.

In fact, for most of their history, jallikattu tournaments have resembled lively local fetes more than glamorous rodeo spectaculars. Until recently, few outside of a smattering of southern agrarian districts took much notice.

But that was before jallikattu was outlawed, before it was saved by a massive, unexpected popular uprising. Now the ancient Tamil bull-wrangling sport is in the heat of an unpredictable renaissance.

Vinoth would be out here regardless; he would have played the last three seasons, too, if it hadn’t been for the ban. But only in a moment like this one, in which jallikattu is electrified with new political meaning, does a man like Naga Ananth, a software engineer with soft hands, decide to make his debut.

* * *

Ananth, 29, is not a bull man. He’s a Royal Enfield motorbike man, a whiskey and cigarettes with friends man, a pressed collared shirt at the office man. He dreamed of a career in the navy, but when the entrance exams refused to go his way, he settled into the busiest highway of New Indian aspiration: a career in corporate IT, an urban life.

He’s also ardently Tamil, and during the last year of Ananth’s life, Tamil “sub-nationalism” has become powerfully identified with jallikattu.

It’s no stretch to say his decision to enter the arena at Palamedu, the second of the three big tournaments of Pongal, was more about politics than sport. Palamedu is his ancestral hometown, but his family isn’t the kind whose sons wrangle farm animals, so Ananth’s jallikattu “experience” is limited to a tentative dangle from the hump of a tied-up bull.

In the medical tent with his brother Bhubhanesh, a trainee chartered accountant, he jitters excitedly as he waits for their heat of 50 ridersto be shuffled into the ring. He shakes out his limbs and flickers timorous grins. When he finally treads out into view of the thronged bleachers and the television cameras, he is kicking himself for leaving it so late.

“I’ve wasted so much time,” he’ll say later.

When it is over — and it is over quickly, without glory or incident — he posts a photograph of himself and Bhubhanesh in their yellow jerseys on Facebook. He writes this caption: “Jallikattu fever of 2017 over… thanks to all youngster[s] and people who brought back our ultimate cultural game: JALLIKATTU.”

* * *

The first legal challenge to jallikattu’s existence came in 2006. A man named A. Nagaraja, whose son was killed in the arena, brought a case against the sport to the Madras High Court. In the years that followed, various animal welfare concerns took up the petition, and the case migrated to the Indian Supreme Court in New Delhi. But until 2014, the petitioners’ victories were piecemeal: ramped up regulation, restrictions, temporary halts — never yet an outright abolition.

In January 2013, Dr. Manilal Valliyate, a veterinarian and PETA India staffer based in Delhi, was sent down to southern Tamil Nadu as part of an Animal Welfare Board of India (AWBI)-authorised investigative team. His wasn’t the first such delegation, but the 2013 report, says Valliyate, “was the one that really made the difference.”

Valliyate, now CEO of PETA India, had never been to a jallikattu event before. “It was horrendous,” he recalls. In the snaking, sun-baked chute leading to the gated vaadivassal stall, bulls were force-fed fluids he believes were alcoholic. Bull handlers beat animals, even bit their tails to force compliance. Inside the stall of the vaadivassal, nose ropes, laced through a tender, manmade piercing in the bull’s septum, were yanked before they were cut, and bulls reared in pain. Irritants were rubbed into the mucosa of the eyes. Bulls weren’t meant to die, but sometimes, in the chaos of it all, they did.

The jallikattu lovers I’ve spoken to don’t rule out the existence of cruelty in their sport, but they say it’s rare and aberrant; abusers are bad apples. Valliyate disagrees. Torment is intrinsic to jallikattu, he insists. “We have prey animals and predator animals. Bulls are prey animals. There is no such thing as an aggressive bull.” What passes for aggression in the ring, he says, is an expression of mortal terror.

When the team compiled their report that year, they took “more of an animal perspective,” according to Valliyate. Rather than simply indexing death and injury, their document made the case for the bulls’ psychological suffering.

Another harvest-season cycle of jallikattu passed before the new evidence was considered at the Supreme Court. At Alanganallur, Vinothraj rode better than ever. Newspapers reported that he defeated 11 bulls (he remembers 16) to claim the “man of the match” title and a brand new Hero motorcycle. He was in his prime.

And then it was over.

On May 7, 2014, the Supreme Court ruled that jallikattu caused unnecessary suffering, violating India’s 1960 Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act. Valliyate, who was present in the courtroom that day, remembers: “The best part of the judgement was that it went beyond jallikattu. The court reiterated the rights of animals and expanded the scope of the PCA Act.” For PETA it was another forward step on a long road.

To the jallikattu aficionados, it looked like a dead end. Raja Marthandan, a bull-owner and pro-jallikattu campaigner said later, “We had no hope of jallikattu coming back, that’s the truth.”

* * *

The revival began in 2017. It was Pongal time, and at Alanganallur’s abandoned arena, students and villagers gathered to agitate against the ban. Their protest caught and spread like fire. Within days, thousands were crowding the waterfront of the state capital, waving placards that read “Ban PETA” and “Save Jallikattu.”

“I couldn’t see the beach,” remembers Marthandan. “There were just people.”

It was a turbulent time in Tamil Nadu. Six weeks earlier, the state’s long-time leader, a powerhouse of Dravidian politics and former film star, Jayalalithaa Jayaram, had suddenly died. “Amma,” or “Mother,” as she was known to her reverent fans, had no natural successor — a leadership vacuum threatened. Then, just a week after Jayalalithaa’s death, Tamil Nadu was hit by a cyclone that caused an estimated $1 billion worth of damage.

Amid uncertainty, jallikattu was a rousing symbol. Diaspora protests sprang up as far away as London. PETA’s office in Norfolk, Virginia, was picketed. But it was Chennai’s Marina Beach that would give its name to the uprising.

Eventually, the protests would fracture into violence. Fake news swirled in the crowd — some protestors declared vegan PETA the agent of multi-national dairy corporations, seeking to corner the Indian market. PETA staff, including then-CEO Poorva Joshipura, became targets of online abuse, including threats of rape, a fact which shored up Joshipura’s conviction that jallikattu represents a crystallization of toxic masculinity.

But as Marthandan remembers it, the nearly weeklong, leaderless protest had the character of a carnival. People played traditional instruments, chanted slogans, held impromptu seminars. Marthandan trucked in an unusually docile pulikulam bull named Ramu, splendid in full tournament regalia, and led him from cluster to cluster, tent to tent, thanking protestors until his voice was raspy.

By the Friday, Naga Ananth and his friends had given up on going home at all. They spent the weekend nights bedded down by the beach. The microphone roved democratically: someone sang a folk song about farming, a group of trans women extemporised on the importance of Tamilness, a couple stood and asked the crowd to name their newborn. “I felt that energy,” Ananth says, “I’d never seen Tamil unity like that, in all my decades.”

The sport appeared to swell into a metonymy for Tamil identity — something that many felt was threatened by the Hindu-nationalist-led central government in New Delhi. Lose jallikattu, some seemed to fear, and the whole tapestry of Tamil culture could come apart.

“Tamil cultural heritage is not like groceries in a basket where you can pick some out and leave some,” says Manuraj Shunmugasundaram, a lawyer at the Madras High Court and spokesperson for the DMK, a major Tamil Nadu political party. “It’s more enmeshed than that.”

That Monday, January 23, 2017, the government of Tamil Nadu passed a new law — an amendment to the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act, exempting jallikattu. The bull sport was back.

But one year later, something unexpected is now threatening to destroy the sport anew: its own popularity.

* * *

It’s the day after Alanganallur 2018, and Vinoth is at home with third-place certificate and a limp. “Full body ache,” he grins.

Home is a chunk of flat, pale-earthed, palm-studded country near the city of Madurai, in the jallikattu heartland. Two generations ago, the family property spanned 60 acres of farmland, but over the years it has been nibbled down to just two.

It’s a familiar story: Tamil Nadu is pulling away from the land. A 2011 census classed nearly half of the state’s population as urban; just 20 years earlier two-thirds were rural. Now the suburbs reach toward the Navaneethan house. The family no longer work the fields; both Vinoth and his eldest sister are police officers in Madurai.

But the Navaneethan clan still think of themselves as farmers; they valorise what grows on this earth, perhaps most of all the hump-backed native cattle. Five or six bulls stand tethered on the family’s two ancestral acres now, and eat up most of Vinoth’s salary. He doesn’t care.

“He is my family member,” he says, of each animal in turn.

That Vinoth would ride bulls was more or less pre-ordained. His father, Navaneethan, a six-foot-two boulder of a man with a white handlebar moustache, displays his scars like a hieroglyphic record of his own achievements in the ring. Vinoth holds his toddler nephew, Aruth, who expertly barnacles, when lifted, to the hump of a roped, young bull. Vinoth jokes that the boy must take his place. In the Navaneethan family, jallikattu is a long-haul relay race.

It’s also an articulation of identity. On this diminished farm, bull riding is an act of fidelity to tradition; an antidote to anxieties about what has been lost.

There are consequently mixed feelings about the fact that the farm outbuilding is choked with a supermarket sweep of jallikattu prizes: steel shelving units, ceiling fans, cookware, stacked plastic chairs (beneath which snoozes Ricky Ponting, the pug), three bicycles still swaddled in card and plastic. Proud as he is of his many victories, Vinoth would be happier without the trinkets, a modern addition to the sport. He says he rides “for name only — and for passion.”

But the “jallikattu fever” that surfed in on the tide of the Marina protests turned out to have commercial power, and the sponsored prizes at Alanganallur this year — including a Renault Kwik, a Hyundai, and tickets to Singapore — were more valuable than any before.

Vinoth worries that money and hype are twisting the heart out of the sport. “Inside jallikattu our unity is gone,” he says. He’s not alone in noting incipient schisms in the jallikattu community; the unifying enemy of the ban is gone. There’s a chance that the salvation of the sport always carried inside it the seed of the tradition’s demise.

* * *

Marthandan’s newest bull does not yet have a name, but naming on the jallikattu scene tends toward the predictable, so “Blackie” is a reasonable projection. His black is that dense, untarnished black that flummoxes depth perception; tethered in the shade, he looks like a stenciled ideal of a bull, the kind that the protestors wore across their t-shirts on Marina Beach.

“His bone structure is awesome,” says Marthandan, scratching the bull’s rump. His foot-long horns are “beautifully shaped; actually, perfectly shaped.”

He is not tall, but burly, with a powerful neck split into two compact loaves of muscle along a central line. His hump, high and conical, deviates from stud standard, Marthandan notes, now exercising his breeder’s eye. Strictly speaking, it shouldn’t taper front-to-back — though the hump’s shape will mitigate its competitively disadvantageous jut. A more prominent hump is easier to grab, but a tapered one is tricky to keep hold of when the bull begins to buck. And this bull should really “play” — some months ago he gored a man to death.

Although the bull is being readied for his first tournament, his regimen is gentle. He grazes a scrubby, sun-patterned paddock, is taken swimming in a nearby pond to build muscle. He eats a bespoke feed, blended of legumes, cotton-seed, and bran. He doesn’t earn his keep, and he isn’t expected to. He’s unlikely ever to win back his hefty purchase price: 1.1 lakh rupees ($1,636) in cash, with a bull-calf from Marthandan’s pulikulam stud herd thrown in.

Marthandan isn’t complaining. Like Vinoth, he’s a purist who flinches at the prospect of a commercialised “entertainment jallikattu.” Marthandan believes jallikattu has no business making good business sense.

But high prices mean breed survival. During the years of the ban, Marthandan’s male pulikulam weanlings, aged four or five months, only found a market at the butchers, where they sold for around $20. Since the ban was lifted, these arena-bound purebreds have fetched upwards of $133 — the cost of a life worth keeping.

Once, south Indian draught cattle, good for muscle but bad for milk, were valuable for their labor and the fertilizer they produced. Bull sports were secondary — “only a celebration of their might,” Marthandan explains. Then came machines and chemical inputs. Now jallikattu is the last rationale for their existence, and its potentially abrupt end risks ushering in the slower end of these humpbacked breeds. The bulls’ future is hitched to what many call an unjustifiable cruelty.

* * *

The ban has been lifted, but the court battles are far from over. Manuraj Shunmugasundaram describes jallikattu as currently existing on “some sort of legislative life support.”

PETA India and other groups have appealed the Tamil Nadu law re-legalizing jallikattu to the Supreme Court. Late last year, it was decided the challenge should be heard by the Supreme Court’s Constitution Bench, which will determine whether the bull sport qualifies as a “cultural right.”

When that will happen and what the outcome will be is difficult to judge. Suhrith Parthasarathy, a lawyer who practices at both the Madras High Court and the Supreme Court explains, “There’s nothing to suggest on a reading of our Constitution that animal rights stand on a greater footing than cultural rights. Intuitively, we might feel it should be so, but you can’t get there without interpreting the Constitution in a certain manner. I hope they are able to achieve the right result. But this is a very hard case to resolve.”

Dr. Manilal Valliyate, who says that PETA’s 2018 investigation revealed unchanged levels of cruelty, is convinced that the last victory will “belong to the animals.” What “victory for the animals” means remains contested — both sides say they are fighting for the bulls.

The future of jallikattu hangs in the balance, but one thing is sure: the bull boys of southern Tamil Nadu know how to hold on tight. That said, even the best among them don’t always last the course.

The post The Fight to Kill (or Save) One of the World’s Deadliest Sports appeared first on Narratively.

One bright day in May, standing near the front door of The Phluid Project, a new, gender-neutral clothing store in Downtown Manhattan, founder Rob Smith greets customers with a warmth on par with the weather. Tall, fit and soap-star handsome with bright eyes, sculpted salt-and-pepper hair and a flawless grin, Smith repeatedly extends his glittery-nail-polish-clad hand, asking prospective buyers their names, how they heard of the place, and what they might be shopping for. The showroom floor behind him is dotted with pink, mustachioed blowup bunnies, gold backpacks, camo pants, and rainbow-lettered tees offering “FREE HUGS.”

Smith, 52, sees The Phluid Project as part retailer, part community space. He exudes immense pride in the business he built himself this past year, after taking out a loan against his retirement savings and pouring $40,000 into the space’s renovation. A 30-year veteran of the commercial retail industry, Smith dreamt up The Phluid Project while on an excursion of self-discovery in South America. As a gay man who struggled with his identity throughout most of his life, he fancies the store as his chance to give back to the nonbinary and LGBTQ communities, to cultivate a place for people — anyone — to simply be themselves.

“I had this person come in last week,” Smith begins one story, carefully observing broad pronouns. Initially, this customer seemed reticent to interact with Smith, shyly asking about the clothing selections. But over the course of about an hour, they settled in, freely modeling clothes. “They didn’t end up buying anything, but I didn’t care,” Smith says. “It was such a rewarding experience to watch them try on things.”

“When you’re gender nonconforming, shopping in retail stores feels like a risk most of the time,” says Jacob Tobia, a gender nonconforming LGBTQ activist, producer and writer. It was Tobia who, after meeting Smith through mutual acquaintances, was the first to tell him about the challenges nonbinary clothing shoppers face. “The doubts can be endless: Will I be respected? Will I be misgendered? Will I be stared at? Will I be safe?”

At The Phluid Project, Tobia adds, “We can shop in full knowledge that this space is for us, that we’ll be safe, and that we’ll be treated with respect.”

* * *

Smith was raised in the upscale Detroit suburb of Grosse Pointe Farms, Michigan. He says he was an introverted, supersensitive perfectionist and teacher’s pet who dressed to the nines for school and didn’t have any friends.

“I think kids realized around fifth grade what ‘gay’ was,” Smith says. “They were on to me.”

He felt alienated, was picked on, and got into fistfights. At home, when Smith was around 13 he’d steal away to his bedroom with the latest Sears catalog to survey the men’s underwear section.

Seizing the chance at a fresh start in high school where fewer people knew him, he began going by “Rob” instead of “Robert,” and tried out for football — a sport his father played as a young man.

“I decided to manifest this new person,” Smith says. “He was going to be popular.”

Smith was an abysmal football player at first, but by the time he graduated he was a star on the varsity squad. He joined the crew team, too, and lettered in track and field.

His first sexual experience with a boy occurred when he was about 15, but he continuously dated women, “passing as straight.”

“Kids’ main mission is to survive,” Smith muses. “You start to conform to the subtle or overt messaging you’re getting.”

At Michigan State he studied marketing and became president of the fraternity system, once earning Greek Man of the Year honors. He did keg stands and planned epic parties. Maybe the most extreme place Smith’s super-bro persona took him was into the bedroom of one of his female professors, a place he says he only went because he “didn’t want to study that hard.”

Underneath the facade, however, he remained tortured, his depression manifesting itself during a freshman art class in which he drew a picture of someone blowing their brains out with a gun.

“My art teacher pulled me aside, and she asked me, ‘Are you thinking about this?’” Smith says. “I said I wasn’t, but I had. I thought at that time killing myself would be the better option [than] coming out to my family as gay.”

After college, Smith moved to Miami, taking a job as an assistant store manager at Burdines department store — a Florida-based chain under the Macy’s Inc. umbrella. Within a few months, he was promoted to assistant product buyer. “I somehow fell into this thing that I knew how to do,” he says. “It was easy for me.”

Living in the relatively gay-friendly confines of Miami, Smith came out to people in his immediate social circle there first, and eventually to his family, who, as it turned out, were completely supportive.

As his career in fashion continued, he shuffled around the country, overseeing Macy’s markets everywhere from Hawaii to San Francisco to New York City, where he’s lived for the past 15 years. (Thirteen years ago he started dating Rod Grozier, who develops real estate for nonprofits like the YMCA. The pair married in 2008, and they live together near the High Line in West Chelsea.)

In the mid-2000s, Smith says Macy’s had him on the C-level executive track and assigned him a speaking coach to refine his handling of public speeches and media. The coach also showed Smith photos of other Macy’s bigwigs, spotlighting their uniform hairstyles and accouterments — think full-body tailoring à la Patrick Bateman in American Psycho.

“She said, ‘Well, look at you,’” Smith recalls. “‘You’re wearing a skinny suit, pointy shoes, a hot pink shirt.’” C-levelers at Macy’s didn’t dress like that.

“I figured I’d maxed out there,” Smith says.

He worked for Victoria’s Secret for a year and a half in the merchandising department, taught at the Fashion Institute of Technology, and later worked for a childrenswear company. But he found something closer to a calling in his volunteer work with the Hetrick-Martin Institute, an outreach and advocacy group for LGBTQ youth. He served as a fund-raiser, event planner and eventually chair of the board of directors.

“I was able to go back and help young people be themselves,” he says of his time with the group. “They’re honest and courageous in a way that I wasn’t.” Supporting those young people, Smith says, “was a way to, without really being aware of it, address the kid that I was — and wasn’t — and give them a space to be authentic.”

About that time, Smith sought a more altruistic path. He had sessions with an energy healer and a psychic. Both told Smith he’d experienced great pain in his life, and had much more to achieve.

Then, in 2016, he went to Burning Man.

* * *

In the Black Rock Desert of Nevada, “Nobody knew who I was, how much money I made, what my title was, none of that shit,” Smith says. “People just like you for you. It opened up my mind a bit. It put me to another place in my life.”

Burning Man has a reputation for inspiring people to hastily quit their jobs. Even though Smith had been warned about such an impulse, he did just that, and then backpacked alone through Guatemala and Peru in early 2017.

“I thought there would be such value in his being removed from the experiences he was having,” recalls his husband, Grozier. “So I tried to keep the interface to a minimum.”

While on the journey, Smith booked a weeklong retreat in the Peruvian jungle, taking part in an ayahuasca ceremony. (Ayahuasca is a plant-based brew that, when ingested, has psychoactive effects. It’s been used in spiritual ceremonies for thousands of years.) “I don’t know if it’s real or if it’s just your subconscious releasing itself and telling you what want you want to know, but you get answers,” Smith says of his experience. “I guess whenever you want advice, you go to the person who you know will give you the answer you want, right?”

During his ayahuasca trip, he says, “This big feminine power came in, and I said, ‘Hey, I’m Rob,’ and she was like, ‘I know who you are.’”

Smith surrendered to the spirit. As he traveled deeper into his mind and reexperienced childhood events, he could understand the words of the shaman, even though he was speaking in Shipibo the entire time. “He passed along all this knowledge,” Smith says, about “how to not make people like me, but just be me.”

He left Peru thinking, “Fuck, I’ve gotta adapt my life.”

Just prior to returning home, he wrote in his travel journal: “Consider opening a nonbinary, gender-free shopping space.” In quote marks he also jotted down “Phluid.” On his mind was the work he’d done with young people at the Hetrick-Martin Institute, and his conversations with Jacob Tobia, the nonbinary activist.

Back in New York, he began scouting locations for his venture, settling on the 3,000-square-foot space at Broadway and Great Jones Street. He hired Kristina Keenan, a gay woman, as director of design, as well as a team of mostly queer and gender-nonconforming people through referrals from acquaintances. He attended myriad trade shows, convincing brand manufacturers to sell to his store before it even had a name. Eventually, Smith went with “The Phluid Project.”

“Phluid” is a nod to “gender fluidity,” with the spelling twist referencing “the power of hydrogen” — a measurement of the hydrogen ion concentration in the body, the balance of which is said to be essential to good health.

* * *

At the store, there’s a coffee and kombucha bar, as well as conference rooms downstairs, all of which are in place to spur connections and conversations. Smith also hosts the Tuesday Talks series — Q & A sessions that once recently featured Desmond Napoles, the 10-year-old drag performer who goes by “Desmond Is Amazing.” With his parents looking on from the audience, Desmond dished out fashion tips while scoffing at the broad misconception that drag queens are typically transgender. He also reminded the crowd he’s still just a fifth-grader, declaring, “I’m against homework.”

“I love the store because anyone is allowed in here,” Napoles says. “I think that Rob has created something no one in the world would think of. So I would call him a genius.”

In one of his more eyebrow-raising moves, Smith trademarked the phrase “The World’s First Gender-Free Store” for use in The Phluid Project’s promotion — a statement that was picked up by press outlets but has been disputed. Lisa Honan, the owner of Gender Free World, a single-brand clothing store on the southern shore of England, commented on a Phluid Project Instagram post: “Brilliant stuff guys. However sorry to disappoint. We have been trading since February 2016 and have a store in Brighton. We are the world’s first gender free store :)”.

In a recent interview, Honan told me, “The more stores that address the ridiculous gender nature of what’s going on in our shopping malls, the better. But to say that they’re the first means that they haven’t really had a look at what’s out there.” (I also found a now-defunct space billed as a gender-fluid clothing store in Yukon, Canada, and another nonbinary single-brand store in Amsterdam called Nobody Has To Know.)

Despite her initial chagrin, Honan say she has no ill will toward Smith, and she is open to selling her clothes at The Phluid Project, which Smith told me he’ll look into. Smith asserts his “intention was never to scam anybody,” that he’d scoured the Internet looking for other gender-fluid clothing stores and, to his surprise, came up empty. He also notes that The Phluid Project is unique in its size, scope and the variety of brands on sale — both its own and many others. “Nobody’s made a commitment the way we have,” he says.

Smith wants The Phluid Project’s platform and mission to remain amorphous, but he also wants to get the concept “right.” On Twitter, Reddit and other online forums, I read comments from potential shoppers who are hopeful that The Phluid Project will not fit their clothes based on default men’s sizes or be too expensive or monochromatic like some other attempts at gender-fluid styles from companies like Zara and H&M.

The Phluid Project has its own sizing system that splits the difference between men’s and women’s sizes, and you’ll find a gray hoodie among their wares, but there are plenty of items in yellow, pink, blue and other colors. There are high-end selections, but Smith says that prices at The Phluid Project reflect the general financial standing of their ideal, young shopper. “The concept is that if someone has a hundred dollars you can come into this space and buy four pieces,” Smith says. “A t-shirt, a hat, a pair of socks and something from cosmetics.”

In wanting to better understand how to appropriately interact with gender nonconforming individuals, Smith has been tutored by Aaron Rose, a diversity and inclusion consultant who says he “helps companies create cultures where people of all identities can thrive.”

“We’ve been working to bring language to his lived experience,” Rose says of his work with Smith. Such exercises result in new behavioral norms, like asking people what their identifiable pronouns are instead of presuming they’re gender conforming, and understanding that gender is “not in the body, it’s in the mind, the soul, the heart,” says Rose.

Such planning may help Smith avoid the kind of bad press Vogue got when the magazine put Gigi Hadid and Zayn Malik on the cover, championing them as leaders in the nonbinary fashion movement. In the article, the pair playfully seeks out clothing from each other’s closets, but this activity alone doesn’t certify a gender-fluid identity. Vogue issued an apology after it drew criticism on social media. In addressing the question of whether or not Smith should be the one to found a gender-free clothing store, given the fact that he cis-male, he says, “I didn’t wear junior dresses when I was a junior dress buyer.”

“I don’t want to be the front man,” Smith continues. “I think people could easily turn away from The Project because they see me as a cis white man, [but] I say to people, ‘Use me, use the space; this is the place for everybody.’ Would it be ideal if I was gender-fluid myself? Sure it would. But I’m not, and I’m not gonna apologize for it.”

That said, he has drifted away from his somewhat traditional cis-male style, opting to wear at least one or two clothing items from The Phluid Project virtually every day. He says he feels “much more comfortable” in them.

An unseasonably cold spring in the Northeast might have contributed to a slow sales start at The Phluid Project, but Smith says that the store is still finding its customer base, and with the weather growing warmer, there’s been a sizable uptick in foot traffic.

“Every morning, I wake up and read emails to the store, and it’s like: Thank you for existing, thank you for creating this space,” Smith says. “People have come back now for the fourth or fifth time; they’re bringing friends, and this community is getting bigger and stronger. They know now there’s a place to be.”

Perhaps most important, personally, to Smith, “I’m living my authentic self right now,” he says. “And I love it.”

The post The Renegade Fashion Guru Who Wants to Change the Way We Think About Gender appeared first on Narratively.