We slipped in the blood that made the linoleum even slicker. It covered my opponent, who could have wrestled in my weight class in high school a few years earlier. If I’d had a hold on him in a double-leg takedown in front of a Saturday night crowd at my Pueblo County, Colorado, high school in 1968, it might have been a draw. But he was shirtless, the blood running out of two wounds on his forearms where he had tried to pull out the veins with a contraband pencil, making him slippery and hard to grab. It covered his face and the walls where he had dragged his hands. He grunted as I lunged forward, trying to grab him by the legs and take him down. It was a move that had become instinctive to me long before my job working as a security guard at the state hospital.

I had become a wrestler growing up on a ranch. “You kids need to get out of my way and get in the pen,” my dad would say to my cousins and me as he and my uncle got ready to brand and castrate the young steers.

“You gotta chase them down, push them down like this,” he’d say as he cornered the young calves and flipped them over onto their sides, their loud cries bringing tears to my eyes as I secured their legs with rope like he had taught me. We used to bottle-feed them, and they became like pets.

I felt so bad for them when I saw the red-hot branding iron come down to burn their skin. I covered their faces with a wet cloth to stop the calves from screaming as he branded them. “Calms ’em down,” my dad would say. When he hit them with the branding iron, they would try to get away. I’d have to reach over to the side of them and grab their fur and lean back and pick their legs up off the ground and jump on them like I watched my dad do.

“I don’t like doing that, Nonna,” I told my grandmother, who lived with us.

“You care a lot and that’s not a bad thing,” she said. “But we have to do this to take care of the animals.” She herself was a healer, known across the rural counties of southeastern Colorado for “laying hands,” as she called it, to cure the sick.

But I had to learn to use physical strength on the ranch and at school. I went to a Catholic school, where I was an outcast because most of the kids were Hispanic or Italian and I was a freckled Irish kid. In fifth grade, a group of kids chased me around for a month until they cornered me. The wall of kids opened up and the ringleader came charging at me. I dropped him down like one of the calves and started pounding his head with my fists. I started crying because of the stress of being chased. They saw how crazed I was. After that, no one bullied me.

By the time I got to high school, being on the wrestling team felt natural. But I still had to hide my preference for defending myself without using my fists. I might not like it, but brute strength was the only language that people around me understood.

So by the time I faced that patient, who I’ll call Thomas, I had learned how to react — how to restrain people and animals that were stronger than me.

After serving in the Army for a year, the uniform and structure of being a security officer appealed to me. In my small town, it was a choice between security at the state hospital or one of the many prisons, or working at the steel mill. But I had always felt drawn to helping others, even if it wasn’t considered manly. The state hospital seemed like the most likely place to be able to help people.

* * *

Thomas had landed in the state hospital after he stole a car and told the cops that he had heard voices telling him to do it. Soon after, he was diagnosed with schizophrenia and sent to our unit.

“I loved playing football in high school, and I had hoped to play in college,” he told me when I had to escort him to the hospital’s surgery unit after the fight. On his meds, he was a gentle and intelligent kid, and he was out of place with some of the older patients whose meds made them shuffle and sleep most of the day or sit in front of the TV without really seeing it. We called it the Thorazine shuffle.

All of the patients in the forensic unit were there because they had committed a crime — murder, child abuse, assault, robbery. Thomas had stolen vehicles idling outside convenience stores and driven them across state lines, later telling the judge that voices made him do it.

“My girlfriend and I and all our friends would go to the swimming hole on weekends,” he told me. “We’d have a bonfire and talk about going to college. I wanted to play football for the University of Alabama. I was a pretty good wide receiver and was invited for a tryout there.” I felt sorry for him, this good-looking kid who’d had such a bright future. If not for hearing voices, he’d be a healthy and productive person. But he was being mentally tortured and striking out. I wished I could help him.

Instead, I had to treat him like an animal. Even though I realized that putting him in a seclusion room or restraining him or any other patient was necessary for their safety and the staff’s, I felt uncomfortable being the muscle behind it. Back then the nurses were all women, and I followed them on their rounds. But I had no gun, no safety button like they do now. Only brute strength and my wrestling skills.

A patient ran down to the nurses’ station across from the security desk where I sat. “You need to come down to the bathroom,” he said. “There’s a fight.”

We ran into the bathroom and Thomas and another patient were punching each other. “You motherfucker, you molested me last night,” Thomas was screaming. “The air conditioner told me you did it.” I stepped between them and pushed them apart. The other patient quit, but Thomas continued to swing at us as we tried to separate them.

“What’s going on, Thomas?” one of the nurses asked. Her calmness made him stop swinging. “Are you hearing voices?” He said yes. He stepped back against the wall and sunk down to the floor. The patients listened to the nurses. They respected them. They knew they were there to help.

We put Thomas in the seclusion room after the bathroom fight. That was when he tried to pull the veins out of his arms, with a pencil he’d snuck into the seclusion room. As blood poured out of his forearms, I lunged for the pencil, which he was holding like a weapon. I did a chop on his forearm, knocking it down between his legs so I could grab his wrists, which were slippery with blood. He was holding the pencil so tight it snapped when I finally got it away from him.

I finally wrestled him into a push-up position. When I pushed him down toward the floor, his shrieks reminded me of the calves who balled and cried out when they were branded. But in the moment, I couldn’t let that interfere with me trying to get control of him; it was only by restraining him that I could help him return to himself. No matter the illness that affected his brain, we were both human beings. I knew I had to subdue him and save his life before he bled out. I could see the blood squirting from the arteries in his arms and knew we didn’t have much time before he died.

Nurses and techs were surrounding us, trying to get control of him, but he was holding on and was so strong that he was able to throw a nurse against the wall. She lost her footing in the blood and fell down hard.

I finally got control and helped the five nurses who’d run into the room get him on the bed and restrain him with leather handcuffs and elbow restraints. He spat at us, trying to bite, so a nurse put a pillowcase over his face to calm him down. His wounds were so deep, he had to be taken into surgery.

I escorted the psychiatrist into his room when she came in to evaluate him afterward. “I was tired of hearing the voices, so I thought if I took more [medication], they would go away,” he said. His arms were bandaged up and he had an IV in to replace the blood he’d lost.

“I felt bad about having to restrain you,” I told Thomas once he was stable and back in the open ward. “But I had to do it for your safety and ours.”

“I understand,” he said. “I feel worse about throwing that nurse down, and I know you were just there to help me.”

Seeing him stable was something I felt good about. I wanted to help others get better. That’s when I decided to become a nurse. As a security guard, I was taught to face aggression with aggression. But that wasn’t who I was. I didn’t like confrontation, even though I had to act the part. In the forensic ward, one patient had killed both of his parents. One had raped and killed a hitchhiker. One had shanked and killed someone. So I had to walk around and show them all that I was the man. And if you fucked with me, I was going to take you down. I had to act that way, because if I showed weakness, they would try to take advantage of me.

But as a nurse, I could be myself. I wanted to help people get better, even if all I could do was clean wounds and change dressings. Growing up on a ranch prepared me for taking care of amputated legs and holding a beating heart.

In my heart, I was a helper. I had been since I was a little boy. I had watched my Nonna lay her hands on the steady stream of people who showed up at the ranch well into the night: cancer patients, pregnant women, farmers with bad backs and pulled tendons. I knew as I watched her that I wanted to help people in pain.

So I went back to school to become a nurse, running the local newspaper press at night and going to school during the day.

* * *

After my training, I returned to the same state hospital, this time as a psychiatric nurse.

“How are you, Austin?” asked one of the patients, who I’ll call Henry. “How was your day off? I missed you,” he said as soon as I unlocked the heavy steel doors. I hadn’t even gone three steps when Henry, a tall thin guy in the same flannel shirt he wore every day, suspenders, and pants that revealed white socks, stuck his hand out to shake mine. Other men, mostly in their 50s and 60s — lifers we called them — got up from their seats in front of the TV or the card table where they played poker and surrounded me like I was a rock star coming off stage. They wanted a handshake, a hand on the shoulder, a hug, and as I walked, I took the crowd of men with me to the nurses’ station where I’d take over the graveyard shift. I knew I’d be supervising many of their showers that evening — I could smell the funk. I had been working with Henry on his daily hygiene, making sure that he brushed and flossed his teeth.

“Hey Austin, look, I changed my socks!” he told me as I got the chart from the departing nurse. Sometimes it was hard to believe that these men were here because they had committed a crime. On their meds, they could be gentle and childlike, like Henry was. Or they could act out for no apparent reason — chairs, tables, and fists flying — requiring restraints and seclusion.

Henry had been in the state hospital on and off for 40 years. Like Thomas, he had started hearing voices in his early 20s and been diagnosed with schizophrenia. His chart was full of crimes he had committed — robbery, breaking and entering, assault — because the voices told him to, he said.

But no matter how stable he was on his meds and how many times he was released, he always found his way back to the unit. At 60, he considered it his home.

“I tell the doctors I’m hearing voices when I rob a store or rip some guy off on the street,” he told me one day during our weekly therapy sessions. “To be honest, I’m not hearing voices anymore. I’m just afraid.”

“Do you think it would help if you came in here once a week to talk to me?” I asked him. “That way you won’t feel so alone out there as you’re getting settled.”

For the next year or so, I continued to see Henry, who was able to get a job at one of the grocery stores in town. I visited him at the halfway house and then at his apartment.

He didn’t return to the state hospital after that. And when I saw him in town, he always came up to shake my hand.

I still see Henry and another guy I’ll call Bobby, who I threw over my shoulder as a security guard as he was bleeding out from a razor blade he had used in the bathtub. Later, I met with him regularly as a psych nurse, to make sure he wasn’t hearing voices. Forty years after that day that he attempted suicide, I see him at Chipotle. We nod at each other. Knowing that I’ve helped these men live out in the world without harming themselves or others is the reward of being a healer. It beats taking someone down any day.

The post Secret Life of a Psych Ward Security Guard appeared first on Narratively.

After a few years of playing in a metal band, I’d seen a thing or two. I’d seen full-grown men go through solid tabletops like they were made out of cardboard. I’d watched a diminutive, bespectacled, ginger-bearded Frenchman get lifted off of his feet and slammed headfirst into a brick wall, his forehead squirting blood like a spigot when he came down. I’d seen a man rush the stage before we even hit the first note: manic one second, passed out and frothing at the mouth the next. But I’d never seen anything quite like what I saw on the night of August 29, 2009, at the rec center in Sai Wan Ho, on the northeastern shore of Hong Kong Island.

My band was playing its first overseas show, at a small death-metal festival. The venue was the basketball court of a rec center called Hang Out. The promoter had set up a stage on one half of the court, stretching from the wall to the three-point line. During the middle of our set, I saw something so startling I nearly dropped the mic: In the center of the circle pit that had opened up during one of our numbers, amid a sea of mostly Asian faces, was a burly, sandy blonde–haired white man, throwing down in the middle of the pit like his life depended on a steady windmilling of his muscular arms and stomping of his heavy feet. Blue eyes, a strong chin wrapped in a close-cropped reddish beard. Every bit a man’s man, from the neck up.

From the neck down, however, this man, who was kicking ass and taking names in the hellmouth of lashing limbs and flying elbows, was outfitted in a greenish-blue thigh-high nurse’s outfit — the kind usually reserved for kinky Halloween club parties, not actual hospital hallways.

I wouldn’t know it until later, but I’d witnessed the first incarnation of a man called Ladybeard — the crown prince, or princess, of kawaiicore.

* * *

Fast-forward nine years. Ladybeard, a.k.a. Richard Magarey — trained stunt performer, onetime bit player in kung fu movies, and erstwhile voice actor for children’s cartoons — has gone from a local curiosity in Hong Kong to superstar status in Japan. He made the move to Tokyo in 2015 after the better part of six years gutting it out in conservative Hong Kong, a city where his cross-dressing pro wrestler–cum–extreme metal vocalist/pop singer character never achieved more than a modest level of underground buzz in the local wrestling and metal scenes.

Upon moving to Japan, however, Magarey, now 35, would take the last of his day jobs, singing Disney songs over the phone to school children to help them learn English.

“Actually, that job was the single biggest threat to Ladybeard, because I thought, ‘Hey, this isn’t that bad. I can come in, do this for six hours, then I can just go get drunk!” Magarey says of his first days in Japan, when success was far from assured.

Since then, kawaiicore, the musical niche he forged, has become a full-fledged global subculture. For the uninitiated, kawaiicore — a mix of the Japanese word for cute, “kawaii,” and the “core” from “hard-core” — combines saccharine Japanese pop and extreme metal. A song with a silken, upbeat intro, set to the strains of a clean and uplifting guitar or keyboard line, will often descend into triple-time blast beats and guttural screaming or esophagus-busting shrieks during the chorus.

If ever there were a niche art form — an evening passion that necessitated a more stable and regularly paid vocation during the daylight hours — this would seem to be it. And yet, Magarey found a way. Day jobs have long been a thing of the past, and the line between where Richard Magarey ends and Ladybeard begins is now lost in 18-month spans of relentless touring, local appearances, social media ops, fan meet and greets, special events and training. This July, performances by Ladybeard had him jetting from Tokyo to Brazil to London to Taipei in the span of two weeks.

This is far beyond what Magarey ever imagined when, as a teenager, he started cross-dressing in his hometown of Adelaide, Australia, first donning his sister’s high school uniform for a theme party at age 14, then wearing dresses to regular parties and rock shows. It was the start of a lifelong commitment to individuality, a personal ethos that started mushrooming into something much bigger when he landed in Japan.

“My initial pop of popularity on the internet in Japan” — when his performance and music videos first gained online traction on YouTube — “it took so much hard work and sacrifice and struggle just to get to that point, along with constant faith that this ridiculous plan could work,” Magarey says. “That initial boom proved that I hadn’t been wasting my time and was actually creating some kind of value in the world.”

Back when he was just a gender-bending kid in Adelaide, putting on women’s clothing made him a target for those who didn’t much like the idea of a man wearing a dress, let alone the sight of it at house parties and rock bars. But few were willing to take him on physically. Often, the outgoing and well-spoken Magarey would diffuse the situation with words — and the fear of being the guy who got knocked out by a guy wearing women’s clothing did the rest.

That’s not to say that there haven’t been strange situations now that Ladybeard is firmly entrenched in Tokyo as a bona fide celebrity, hosting two nationally televised music shows and performing regularly as a wrestler and as a singer. Shortly after arriving, he was signed to a talent agency, assigned a retinue of managerial types, and immediately thrust into a world of idol singers and groups centered around (mostly) underage female performers. One of the first groups Ladybeard joined was a trio known as Ladybaby, which saw him paired with a duo of teenage female singers.

In songs like “Nippon Manju,” the trio heaps praise on the various things they love about Japan, from popular local snacks to the Tokyo Tower.

Ladybeard has seen the darker side of idol culture, where female performers are kept under close watch by management, some even signing contracts forbidding them to date (so that they might appear perpetually available to their male fans, attainable in a fantastic dreamworld way, if always ever so slightly out of reach). For their male fans, the appeal is in the ache of unrequited romance and the knowledge that they may love their idols but never possess them. That doesn’t stop some of the fans, though, from becoming insanely jealous of the brawny foreigner who gets to spend time around the women — their women, in their minds — with whom they can only buy small increments of time in the solo time, or cheki time, after the show. Fans pay extra to line up for cellphone pics and Polaroids with the idols, get a few friendly words in, and buy a signed poster.

“They hated me because I got to spend time around the young girls,” Magarey says. “When I was in Ladybaby, they’d give the girls a present at the signing session, then whisper something like, ‘Eat shit, you dirty foreigner,’ in my ear. Then those same people hated me when I left the group.”

At a meet and greet after a show in Tokyo, “one guy said he was gonna get a gun and shoot me,” Magarey says. He informed his management team, who were used to dealing with obsessive fans, including Ladybeard’s own female fans (one woman, an elderly matriarch from Okinawa, said she was going to move to Tokyo just to be with him). Yet he was taken aback by their response.

“I told the managers, and they said, ‘Oh, that’s just the way [that fan] is,’” he recalls. It wasn’t the first time he had to deal with the ugly side of the idol world, and it wouldn’t be the last. The level of devotion to kawaiicore groups and the larger idol scene, which some say borders on depravity, is a testament to the success Tokyo talent agencies have had in branding the groups, conditioning their fan bases through savvy marketing ploys.

“The machinery is always on display,” says Ian F. Martin, a music journalist and author of the book Quit Your Band! Musical Notes from the Japanese Underground. Over the past several years, he has scrutinized the Tokyo music scene and the various subcultures it has spawned.

“Idol groups are very good at holding onto fan bases. So much of the machinery isn’t about music, it’s about personality. Also, it’s about building and maintaining this kind of sense of intimacy with fans, and finding ways of scaling that without losing the sense of intimacy. It’s very sophisticated, how they do it.”

A couple of years ago, I witnessed firsthand the depths of devotion the kawaiicore idols have to plumb to satisfy the sometimes perverse and masochistic requests of their fans. My family was visiting me in Taipei from Canada, and Ladybeard was in town for a solo show, his first since his initial tour of Taiwan in 2012. Naturally, I decided to drag my family along. During the show, I got a shout-out from the stage, as Ladybeard thanked me and another longtime denizen and staunch supporter of the Taipei underground, Steve Leggat, for “being nice to me when I was just some weird guy in a dress,” earning me a few hearty slaps on the back from my younger brother, Bryce.

After the show, Bryce and I waited for Magarey, planning to head out for a post-show bite and a drink. But he had a bit of business to attend to first, the after-gig meet and greet, or checki time. The merch tables are always piled high with T-shirts, photo books and CDs. Every form of intimacy short of the lewd has a price tag affixed. The idols handle it all with the grace of a flight attendant, honoring most any request with a smile and humble acquiescence. Bryce and I stood back, not wanting to interfere, but Magarey broke away from the line of fans and beelined over to us, looking concerned.

“Do you mind standing just behind me?” he said under his breath. We asked him why. “That girl wants me to headbutt her,” he explained with a shrug, pointing to a bright-eyed young woman with a hint of the unstable in her gaze, adding that he didn’t have his own security, and that it might be nice to have us (more so my brother, who is six feet tall and weighs more than 200 pounds) standing nearby in case things turned weird, violent, or both. And he did it, rearing back his head and ramming his skull into hers, without inflicting serious damage, as only a trained stuntman and wrestler could do.

“She wanted me to headbutt her, so I had to do it,” he says, recalling the incident a couple of years later. “Stuff like that happens a lot. People want me to choke them, put them in wrestling holds. They ask Reika [his partner in another group, Deadlift Lolita] to kick them in the ass. That’s a thing in Japan, getting kicked in the ass.”

“Seeing these groups in Japan is truly something that needs to be seen to be believed,” says Manuel Figueroa, general manager and editor in chief of the Japanese pop culture site A-to-J Connections. “The crowds can be extremely intense one second and then fall completely silent (and I mean silent) when the moment calls for it. These antics also extend to solo time with the groups, where it’s not exactly uncommon to see some idols choke, step on and even bite their fans.”

* * *

Two years after the headbutt incident, Ladybeard is back in Taipei. It’s the summer of 2018, and he has returned as half of Deadlift Lolita, alongside female bodybuilder and champion professional wrestler Reika Saiki. The two of them perform to an adoring crowd, made up, predictably, mostly of otaku — nerds, geeks, mostly men, in their late 20s, 30s, some in their 40s, who immerse themselves in the online realm, the world of anime and comics, and now, in the music of kawaiicore ensembles.

The audience sings and dances along as Deadlift Lolita put themselves through an hour of frenetic singing, dancing, stomping and screaming that would leave even the most seasoned and well-conditioned performers calling for the oxygen canister. It’s a testament to their conditioning — the countless hours spent rehearsing in the dance studio, lifting weights in the gym, and doing lung-busting cardio sessions. All of which makes it easy to wonder why Ladybeard does what he does. Why put yourself through such punishment, day after day?

“One of the reasons I do what I do is I just don’t have the ability to do anything else,” he explains over the phone from Tokyo, a few weeks after returning from Taipei.

It’s after 10 at night. He’s just out of a rehearsal session and on his way to the gym, the muted sounds of the Tokyo metro bleating softly in the background.

“I’ve had jobs before where at the end of the first day I just wanted to kill myself,” he says of his former life. “That’s why I’ve worked so hard to become a performer. I just can’t do anything except this.”

The post Meet Ladybeard, the Crown Prince of Japan’s Strangest Music Scene appeared first on Narratively.

To those in the literary world, it might seem like Reema Zaman just exploded onto the scene. In the past year alone, her work has been featured in Narratively, The Guardian, The New York Times Dear Sugar Podcast, and The Rumpus, earning her the 2018 Oregon Literary Arts’ Writer of Color Fellowship and a nomination for the prestigious Pushcart Prize. Behind the scenes, however, the Bangladeshi writer’s growth has been discerning, and intentional.

Trained as an actress and model, Zaman moved from New York City to Portland, Oregon, in 2013 to write her way to healing. Her goal was to unearth a voice that, through the trials of an abusive marriage, sexual assault and anorexia, had been all but quashed. For one calendar year, she wrote. Through dogged determination and persistence, that manuscript became I Am Yours, her debut memoir set to be published in January 2019 by Amberjack. Bestselling author Lidia Yuknavitch calls the book a “phenomenal triumph of one woman’s body and voice rising up and through a culture that would quiet her.”

Earlier this year, Zaman published “My Perfect Pictures and the Pain Behind Them,” a powerful photo essay detailing her transformation through writing. “I traced my narrative,” she writes, “sutured my lashes, and reclaimed my body from the hands of others. My body is now mine, my voice returned.” After publishing her Narratively essay, the piece was chosen as the debut for Guardian Selects, and has reeled in over 250,000 views and counting. What’s more, it triggered an investigation into the systemic harassment she endured as a student at the International School of Bangkok.

Narratively sat down with Zaman to talk about her rise in the literary scene, the far-reaching response to her Narratively essay, and what it takes to get published as a new author. The interview, and our full “The Narrative Continues” Q&A series, is available exclusively to Narratively Insiders. Read it here.

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The post How This Narratively Piece Triggered an International Investigation appeared first on Narratively.

Everyone in California is waiting for “The Big One,” an earthquake with a magnitude of 8.0 or greater that will destroy infrastructure and cause mass panic. Yet when I moved to the Bay Area from the East Coast, I discovered that since most of the people I knew were making do with small apartments and ever-increasing rent, having supplies on hand for a natural disaster required a space premium that many couldn’t afford. I began to put together an earthquake kit that would not only serve my household (which over the years fluctuated from one to three other people) but also my neighborhood, if needed. Even with all that work, I didn’t consider myself a prepper, just someone who heeded the Red Cross’s warnings.

When the average person thinks about doomsday preppers, they probably think of paranoid right-leaning wing nuts clinging to a small arsenal of guns and stockpiling toilet paper from Walmart in case their conspiracy theories come true. It’s a fair assumption — many television depictions reflect that mind-set, though the fears vary from group to group. Some are afraid of government collapse, others fear a solar flare, still others are preparing for a race war they think is inevitable. When those are the dominant examples, it’s easy to dismiss the practice as absurd and hysterical.

I am a leftist, anarchist prepper, and while we differ politically, I have to admit, the extreme preppers you see on TV are not completely out of their minds.

I used to focus only on preparing for earthquakes and other natural disasters. That changed in 2011 when I went to my first protest, an Occupy Oakland action, with a medic bag. I didn’t know yet that I’d be out there for hours, so I didn’t have supplies I consider basic now — food, caffeine, extra smokes, insoles for my combat boots. I didn’t know how aggressive the police would be, and the handkerchief around my neck was more for a punk look than medical necessity. I hadn’t received formal training to be a street medic; I just happened to know first aid and CPR and wanted to help. I carried a 15-pound bag on my back, full of medical supplies, mainly gauze and tape but also things like tourniquets that I hoped I wouldn’t have to use. I was scared — I’d had rubber bullets shot at me the night before — but I was determined to drop off water to the protesters and make sure that people had sterile supplies.

That night, I tasted tear gas for the first time. You smell it before you taste it, and you taste its strange, bitter sting before it fills your lungs or blinds you. I was alone, and terrified, among a crowd that was shouting and crying and panicked in the streets.

“Disperse!” came the command from the helicopter hovering above us. Every exit point seemed blocked by clouds of tear gas or the loud kapow! of flash-bangs. Every explosion startled me; I felt like I was going to jump out of my skin. Rubber bullets were being shot at us from every direction by cops dressed in SWAT gear, as if this was a war, not a protest. Someone next to me fell to the ground grabbing his face. I saw he was bleeding and scared, and I dropped next to him, telling him he was going to be OK, that I was a medic. It was my first time treating a wound in the street during a fray. Looking down at my hands and seeing a stranger’s blood on my gloves chilled me, but there wasn’t time to feel anything. My legs moved on autopilot, going from person to person to check on them. “Do you need a medic?” I found myself shouting over the noise every time I heard a scream.

I went home, shaken and shaking, all of the adrenaline flooding me at once. I slept uneasily, tossing and turning in my bed. I wanted my partner to sleep next to me, but also couldn’t bear to be touched. I had nightmares that lasted for weeks: dizzying, confusing dreams where I was struggling to breathe or see but could hear pain all around me, and I would wake up panting and sweating.

Despite the trauma, I kept going to protests. I felt grimly determined, and as I kept going, I became more desensitized to the chaos. My medic bag evolved into something more suited for treating the effects of police brutality than simply a place to keep extra snacks and water on hand. I learned from other medics how police often target medics and organizers for arrest in order to destabilize and demoralize the entire group, and I grimly prepared for an inevitable attack or arrest.

I also began to realize that I needed to prep for something that’s increasingly as likely as earthquakes: large-scale civil unrest, which I witnessed a taste of in the streets that night. I began to think of how people act when they’re scared, including and especially law enforcement. I started to think about home security, transportation options if fuel was limited, how to access information without the internet. I studied natural disasters and their repercussions around the world as a way to understand how to keep myself and my community safer.

* * *

While I was beginning to explore the art of prepping, I met my partner, a fellow anarchist who specializes in constructing urban shelters and creating makeshift weapons out of random finds from the local dumpster. Ape is many things I am not — slender where I am curvy, tan where I am pale, easygoing where I am exacting. One of the bonds of our relationship is our enjoyment of teaching and learning from each other. Ape teaches me how to handle and care for knives and guns, while I teach him how to recognize medicinal herbs in an urban setting, how to preserve food, and how to stitch up a wound. Rather than depending on each other to do certain tasks, we’ve worked on becoming capable of filling in for each other in a pinch, leading us to learn new skills that we’ve found useful while camping, when the car breaks down, or during any number of other mundane situations. Our shared nerdy interest in preparing for disaster, combined with our complementary skills, has made casual but constant prepping a core part of our relationship. While other couples may prefer a nice candlelit dinner out, I love poring over the most recent articles in Survival Magazine or seeing what new products knife company Cold Steel has this month.

Ape and I had sex at an “End of the World” orgy on the night of Trump’s election. The crowd was mostly sex workers and queer folks. None of us wanted to face this election alone, so we got together at a friend’s loft apartment to handle the news as best we could — with food, alcohol and sex. What was normally a group of boisterous party animals started off with us tentatively nibbling at cheese and crackers, whispering to each other in corners, and halfheartedly making out, one eye always on the votes coming in. The room was increasingly quiet and depressed as the votes were counted and we realized that our worst nightmare, a United States governed by the pinnacle of toxic masculinity, was coming true.

When it became clear that Trump was going to be our next president, silence descended over the mostly naked crowd. Everyone seemed frozen in place. I felt a sinking in my gut and I knew what we needed to do; my boyfriend and I looked at each other and began to dress without a word.

“I’ll grab my medic bag,” I said quietly to him as I pulled my socks on, and he nodded. We knew we were going out into the streets of Oakland that night.

We arrived at the protest in Oakland’s downtown Oscar Grant Plaza while people were still shouting through megaphones at a crowd pulsating with fury and fear. When we took to the streets, I reached for Ape’s hand, both for reassurance and so we wouldn’t lose each other. We interlaced our fingers when we heard the first flash-bang — I flinched but kept walking. It wasn’t long before the police were throwing tear gas canisters into the crowd. While others turned to run and escape, we squeezed each other’s hands and walked into the fray to find people who needed our help. I didn’t know if we were going to be arrested, or injured, or even killed, but I knew I had to be there as long as I was needed.

We were out there for three days straight. Our lungs took weeks to recover from the gas and pepper spray we inhaled, but we took turns making mullein leaf tea to help the process along.

After that, I began to take my prepping a lot more seriously, even going so far as to make connections with similarly minded leftist survivalists to create a local list of resources, both online and off, covering things like who has what skills and who has extra water or food stored away.

* * *

I was on a forum online a couple of months ago looking for suggestions about bugout bags (prepacked bags you grab when escaping a dire situation) for urban environments, particularly if you’re more inclined to “bug in,” or shelter in place. Every sensible idea was accompanied by conspiracy theories about who or what was going to kill us all — a race war, a solar flare, a nuclear blast. Many of the commenters talked frankly, and sometimes cheerfully, about the need to kill other people in order to protect their families. Many of them wore Make America Great Again hats in their profile avatars, or actively supported the police in their forum signatures. They spoke with disgust about those they deemed “un-American,” particularly protesters who participated in Black Lives Matter or Occupy-type actions. Heather Heyer’s death — the woman who was mowed down by a white supremacist’s car during the Charlottesville, Virginia, protest — was seen as hilarious, not traumatizing.

I leaned back in my chair, my eyes scanning the vitriol on the forum, feeling anxious. The sun slowly set while I sat motionless behind the glowing screen, transfixed and horrified, my tea going from piping hot to ice cold. I forgot it was there. I could feel the tension in my gut clench tighter as I read the words of people threatening to spray bleach in the eyes of protesters at the next action. I was trying to figure out how real the threat was.

It was very clear that if I wanted to learn from the people on this forum, I couldn’t say anything about who I was or what I believed. Realizing that I might be chatting with the same people who were wielding guns at the white supremacy rally in Charlottesville was a startling moment, especially when I felt so safe at home in the Bay Area. Here, in my second-story apartment surrounded by an urban herb garden, my two cats weaving around my feet, I was more concerned about the police than my neighbors. But on this forum, I was brushing shoulders with the alt-right. As they regularly and violently vocalized, they were prepping, in part, to protect themselves from people like me.

This had troubling implications for what might happen locally if “The Big One” did hit. Would the people most prepared for life without the internet, hospital care and city infrastructure be the right-wingers who wanted to Make California Red Again? Would my black, transgender and disabled friends have to beg Trump supporters for supplies? That seemed more dangerous to me than the potential disaster itself.

While MAGA-hat wearers believe strongly that leftists and liberals are weak and ineffective in a survival scenario, I discovered that many of us already engage in activities that could be useful in an apocalypse. Knowing how to sew and mend clothes, reuse trash in creative ways, and fix machinery were all things I found among my artsy friends, for example. My witchy friends knew a lot about herbs and urban foraging. And a surprising amount of my Burning Man community not only knew a lot about filtering and recycling water or using alternative energy but also seemed to own and use guns, contrary to the belief I heard on conservative Twitter that a lack of weapons would be the left’s downfall.

Just last week I was sitting at a worn picnic table in the back of my favorite dive bar, drinking a PBR tall can and debating favorite guns with a group of friends. The air was warm even as the sun started to go down, and Edison lights illuminated our faces while we chatted. The conversation was spirited but friendly, all of us bonded by a love of camping, metalworking, and yes, weapons training. I was about halfway through my beer, eagerly discussing my desire to develop my upper-body strength to have a steadier hand with various pistols. The sun set while my friends, mostly in their late 20s and early 30s, continued to argue about which guns would be best in a zombie apocalypse, a thought experiment we used to discuss end-of-the-world scenarios that involve medical crises, hostile attacks, and the total collapse of city infrastructure all happening at once. For some, this might just be a silly conversation, but for us it offered a chance to work through multiple disaster scenarios at the same time and talk through real plans and theories.

By talking about prepping with more and more friends, I began to discover that many of them were also interested in developing skills that would be useful in a serious crisis situation. Several of them were already doing the same thing my partner and I had done — creating bunkers full of supplies and developing networks that could effectively take care of each other if the shit hit the fan. My community includes urban farmers, people who butcher their own meat, people who can and pickle the fruit and veg they get in their community agriculture boxes.

While the prepper movement may seem very right wing on the internet, offline I’ve found a vibrant survivalist society that is adaptable and stronger than they get credit for. Being a leftist prepper is less rare than I expected. We just don’t talk about it as much on the internet. Which, if you’re concerned that people are going to raid your compound for supplies, is probably sensible when you think about it! I also realized that the prepping I uncovered in my communities was less about individual survival and more about creating an alternative infrastructure, since the ones in place are already failing our marginalized friends and family, even without a disaster looming. Mutual aid is the core of our organizing, instead of pure self-preservation. Knowing this, I’m confident that we will not only survive, but heal, rebuild and thrive.

The post Secret Life of a Leftist Doomsday Prepper appeared first on Narratively.

On October 29, 1868, novelist Wilkie Collins sat in a pew at St. Marylebone Parish Church and watched Caroline Graves, the woman who had lived with him as his lover for over a decade, marry another man.

Her reasons for taking such a step are easy to guess. Collins had found a new woman: Martha Rudd, a barmaid 15 years Graves’s junior who had captivated him when he met her on a trip to Norfolk, England. Rudd was now in London, living in lodgings paid for by Collins, just a few minutes’ walk from the home he shared with Graves and her teenage daughter. But rather than trading Graves in for this younger model, Collins had hoped to keep them both.

For Graves, this decision threatened the fragile security she had gained as a famous author’s paramour. And it must have disillusioned her. With Collins, she saw, she would never be more than a mistress. As Graves walked down the aisle of the ornate, high-ceilinged neoclassical church, and said her vows to 29-year-old brewer’s son Joseph Charles Clowe, she must have looked determined. She was giving up a life of excitement and material luxury — after all, Collins was close friends with Charles Dickens and regularly took her on trips to Europe. But she was gaining something all-important for a woman who hoped to be respected in Victorian society: the role of wife.

That role apparently disappointed her. Within two years, Graves would return to Collins and resume her life as “Mrs. Graves,” just as it had been. For the next two decades, the two women would accept each other’s presence in his life; he would split his time between the two households, have children with Rudd, raise Graves’s daughter as his own, and write the two families into his will. After the failed union with Clowe, none of the three would ever marry. All rejected the mid-Victorian imperative of marriage, monogamy and propriety, forming what in 2018 might be called a polyamorous triad, and showing that 19th century England was far from the primly respectable era we often imagine.

* * *

When Caroline Graves met Wilkie Collins, he was in the early stages of what would become a spectacular career. Born in 1824 to an established artistic family, he burst onto England’s literary scene with 1860’s blockbuster The Woman in White, an ambitiously plotted identity-theft thriller in which beautiful heiress Laura Fairlie is imprisoned in a lunatic asylum under the name of a woman who is her exact double.

As would become signatures of Collins’s work, the novel dwells on the secrets that lurk beneath the surface of respectable society, and it portrays marriage as a sinister trap. The book captured the attention of the nation, inspiring product tie-ins ranging from perfumes to popular songs. It also established Collins as the top practitioner of the “sensation novel,” a popular new genre that milked all possible dramatic potential from subjects like bigamy, adultery and illegitimate birth, and which was a forerunner of modern thrillers and soap operas.

In the years to come, Collins would delight readers with a combination of clear-eyed social commentary and ripped-from-the-headlines plots. Critics sometimes disapproved of his heroines: unconventional women who took their fates into their own hands when society gave them few options. (The protagonist of the 1875 novel The Law and the Lady turns amateur detective to clear her husband of a false murder charge; a less lucky bride, the antiheroine of 1866’s Armadale, disposes of an abusive husband with arsenic.) But despite recurring controversies, Collins was respected. The famous critic John Forster called one of his scenes “a masterpiece of art which few have equaled,” and Dickens once referred to himself as Collins’s “obedient disciple.”

The 1860s were his most artistically and commercially fruitful years. His string of hits culminated in The Moonstone, completed in 1868, a few months before Graves’s ill-fated wedding. The book is a country-house whodunit often cited as the first mystery novel in the English language. While exploring the enigma of a diamond theft, it sheds light on secrets and lies at all levels of society, and on the cruelty of the class system. One character, a maid with a deformed shoulder, drowns herself because the upper-class man she loves won’t even speak to her. Addressing him in a suicide note, she writes, “Something that felt like the happy life I had never led yet, leapt up in me at the instant I set eyes on you.”

As Collins would tell it, his first meeting with Caroline Graves was a high-stakes encounter worthy of his fiction. One night in the ’50s, he was walking with his brother Charles and their friend Sir John Everett Millais through “the dimly-lit, and in those days semi-rural, roads and lanes of North London” when the three friends heard a woman’s scream. Before they could act, the garden gate of a nearby villa burst open. From it came “a young and very beautiful woman dressed in flowing white robes that shone in the moonlight,” who wore a look of terror on her face. She bolted into the shadows, and Collins ran after her. He would later tell friends:

he had [caught] up with the lovely fugitive and had heard from her own lips the history of her life. … She was a young lady of good birth and position, who had accidentally fallen into the hands of a man living in a villa in Regent’s Park. There for many months he kept her prisoner under threats and mesmeric influence of so alarming a character that she dared not attempt to escape, until, in sheer desperation, she fled from the brute, who, with a poker in his hand, threatened to dash her brains out.

The story is at least a partial fabrication; there’s no evidence Caroline Graves was ever abducted or held prisoner. (The version above is secondhand, from an 1890s biography of John Millais written by his son, likely based on Millais’s and Collins’s embellished recollections.) Still, it reflected the relationship as Collins liked to see it. He had rescued Graves, if not from a poker-wielding kidnapper, then from more banal dangers. Graves was a carpenter’s daughter from Cheltenham; she had married young and was widowed shortly after the birth of her first child. When Collins met her, she was eking out a meager living running an odds-and-ends shop. As a young single mother in London, Graves was in danger of becoming homeless or turning to prostitution if business dried up. With Collins paying her bills, she was safe.

* * *

Liaisons outside the bonds of matrimony weren’t publicly accepted, but they were common. This fact is reflected in letters between Collins and Charles Dickens, who became friends in the ’50s and bonded over a similarly lax approach to morality. On one occasion, Dickens wrote to Collins with a story about going to a public dance where men could meet prostitutes:

On Saturday night, I paid three francs at the door of that place … and went in, at 11 o-Clock, to a Ball. … Some pretty faces, but all of two classes — wicked and coldly calculating, or haggard and wretched in their worn beauty. Among the latter, was a woman of thirty or so, in an Indian shawl, who never stirred from a seat in a corner all the time I was there. Handsome, regardless, brooding, and yet with some nobler qualities in her forehead. I mean to walk about tonight, and look for her. I didn’t speak to her there, but I have a fancy that I should like to know more about her. Never shall, I suppose.

Picking up “wretched” women for sexual purposes was a routine source of thrills, but Graves was much more than a casual pickup. Collins begins to mention her in his letters in the late 1850s. He tells of trips to Italy, nights in with friends, a visit to an exhibit of paintings by William Holman Hunt. In 1866 a friend wrote of an evening with them: “A capital dinner she gave us. She had cooked most of it herself I am sure, but you would not have guessed it from her very decolleté white silk gown.”

Her role was part hardworking housewife, part bohemian siren. Hunt’s description of the sexy silk dress suggests the powerful erotic appeal that drew Collins to her (and her taste for finery, which he was happy to indulge). Although no love letters from Collins survive, perhaps a flavor of their romance is conveyed in his description, in a letter from 1873, of one of his heroines, “a reclaimed woman from the streets — a glorious creature who requires constant attentions … my beautiful reclaimed woman.”

Collins also made more serious demands of his mistress. In one letter, he complains of gout pain and adds that, “Caroline is to … mesmerise me into sleeping so as to do without the opium!” Chronic pain, and the need for opium to control it, would haunt Collins for the rest of his life. In February 1868, he was on deadline to finish a chapter of The Moonstone and in too much pain to hold a pen. After several male secretaries were put off by Collins’s anguished groans, he enlisted the help of Graves’s daughter, Harriet.

“To her I dictated much of the book,” he wrote, “the last part largely under the effect of opium. When it was finished, I was not only pleased and astonished at the finale, but did not recognize it as my own.” Harriet would act as his secretary for years to come.

Collins was committed to his little family. Still, he took pride in not marrying. He had written in Dickens’s magazine Household Words in 1856 that “the general idea of the scope and purpose of the institution of marriage is a miserably narrow one … narrowing the practice of the social virtues, in married people, to themselves and their children.” And he seemed to feel that avoiding the life of a Victorian husband did him good. In 1864, on turning 40, he wrote, “I don’t feel old. I have no regular habits, no respectable prejudices, no tendency to go to sleep after dinner, no loss of appetite for public amusements, none of the melancholy sobrieties of sentiment which, in short, are supposed to be proper to middle age.”

For Graves, who would have been shunned by Collins’s female friends, the situation must have felt less liberating. Shortly before her wedding to Clowe, Dickens would write to a third party, “For anything one knows, the whole matrimonial pretence may be a lie of that woman’s, intended to make him marry her, and (contrary to her expectations) breaking down at last.” If it was, it failed.

* * *

Martha Rudd became pregnant with Collins’s first child around the time of the wedding, and give birth to a daughter, Marian, in July 1869. By the time Graves returned, around the spring of 1871, Rudd was soon to have her second child by Collins. He would later specify in his will that “half of what I leave behind me to C E Graves and her daughter — and half to Martha Rudd and my two children.” Both women were there to stay. None of their comments on the matter survive; one can only speculate at the combination of love for Collins, disdain for convention and dismay at their other options that prompted them to continue sharing him.

About Rudd, few details are known. She was born in 1845 to a family so humble that her mother signed her birth certificate with a simple X. She left home at 16 and likely worked as a bartender or servant before moving to London.

Collins’s letters give some hints about their relationship. When with Rudd, he adopted the persona of William Dawson, barrister at law, and the pseudonym “Mrs. Dawson” gave her some legitimacy in the eyes of clerks and hotel keepers. His letters repeatedly remind his solicitor of their false identities (“you remember our name — Mr and Mrs ‘Dawson’”), suggesting pleasure in the deception he was putting over on respectable society.

He never mentioned Rudd in letters to his friends; compared to Graves, he saw her as less fit to entertain his cultured friends or appear with him in public outside of trips abroad. In 1856, he had written in the essay “Laid Up in Two Lodgings” of an encounter with a servant girl for whom “Life means dirty work, small wages, hard words, no holidays, no social station, no future. … I cannot communicate [these thoughts] to her: I can only do my best to encourage her to peep over the cruel social barrier which separates her unmerited comfortlessness from my undeserved luxury, and encourage her to talk to me now and then on something like equal terms.” With Rudd, Collins had forged a relationship that crossed the class barrier. But the two would never quite be on “equal terms.”

Rudd gave birth to a boy in 1874, and in 1878 Harriet married Collins’s lawyer, Henry Powell Bartley. By now Collins’s time at the forefront of English literary life was over. He would continue to write, but as his plots became more outlandish and focused on pet social causes, readers felt his talent had declined. He used opium in increasing quantities and struggled with its side effects — including bizarre hallucinations. As his health declined, his blended family remained an unlikely source of stability.

The depth of Collins’s love for his family is suggested by a letter he addressed to his adopted daughter in the wake of a family tragedy: In 1888 Harriet’s newborn daughter — her fourth child with Bartley — died of whooping cough. In Collins’s words, “I only venture to write to you when the worst that affliction can do has been done. … No man, let him feel for you as he may (and I have felt for you with all my heart) is capable of understanding what a mother must suffer who is tried as you have been tried.”

Further trials were ahead. In July 1889 Collins suffered a severe stroke that confined him to his house for six weeks. He tried to rally, but the recovery was short-lived. In September 1889 he was struck down with bronchitis and took to his bedroom, scrawling a note to family friend and doctor Frank Beard that read simply, “I am dying old friend.” Beard rushed to the sickroom and joined Graves in a hushed and anxious two-day vigil by Collins’s side, as they watched him sink for what they knew would be the last time. An unnamed New York Herald journalist penned a vivid account of his final moments: “He was leaning back with his head buried in the pillow of the chair” in his bedroom, and “From time to time the doctor felt the fluttering pulse, whose throbs were growing weaker and more irregular … there was a slight convulsive movement and his head sank back.”

There was no weeping crowd of relatives to grieve with Graves; the journalist noted that the great man “died alone. … By his side was only Dr F. Carr Beard, his life-long friend[,] and the old housekeeper, who for thirty years had looked after her master’s comfort with the care and devotion of a slave.” Even at this moment, Collins’s life partner could be publicly known only as a housekeeper.

She would play hostess to his many mourners at their Wimpole Street home. Meanwhile, Rudd and her children kept a respectful distance. They likely watched from the street as his simple oak coffin was carried out to the hearse. At the funeral, a cross of white chrysanthemums was on display, credited to “Mrs Dawson and family.”

The two women would live out their lives in obscurity. Unlike Collins’s fictional heroines, they never rose to the level of scandal or public sensation. But like those women, they had made daring choices in pursuit of their own happiness and freedom.

The post This Novelist’s Female Heroes and Brazen Polyamory Shocked Victorian England appeared first on Narratively.

My husband, Pablo, doesn’t want me to be a firefighter. “I’ll leave,” he threatens.

I see anger in his eyes, and betrayal. He must envision my squad as buff Playgirl models whose main mission is posing for the firehouse calendar. I imagine the thoughts that must taunt him — secret affairs, late-night talks and sultry rendezvous, all sponsored by the station.

He doesn’t understand how my heart rate quickens when the station alarm sounds. How I fight to slow my breathing when the deafening tones blare, filling every space. How the acrid scent of smoke causes an adrenaline rush I can only quell by jumping from the truck and running to the hoses. He wouldn’t understand my fear of screwing up.

My fellow firefighters are the only ones I can talk to.

* * *

When I was a 6-year-old trauma-nurse wannabe, I played hospital and pretended to treat patients. I wanted to help people, but the danger and excitement also drew me in. I craved the rush of saving someone on the verge of calamity, on the edge of living or dying. In high school, I worked as a co-op student at a family doctor’s office and studied health care. I was psyched about my future.

My plan derailed when I got pregnant at 16. My parents demanded I quit school. The baby had to be my priority. “Get your GED later,” they told me. But I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. Who would I become if I didn’t finish school? A high school dropout with a baby on my hip — a label I couldn’t live with. Besides, I needed the education to get a good job to care for him.

Pablo (the baby’s father) and I would stay together. He would help me as I juggled being a mom and a student.

Unfortunately, I wouldn’t have to juggle. Two days after my 17th birthday, at 33 weeks into my pregnancy, fate once again mauled my plans. I hadn’t felt the baby move in a while. “Don’t worry,” my mom told me. “Babies just get quiet. It’s normal.” But it wasn’t. At the hospital, the gigantic sonogram machine verified what the nurses and doctors had whispered among themselves — my baby was gone. They induced labor, and after suffering the excruciating pain of childbirth I was handed a perfect, beautiful baby boy who would never take a breath. We buried Matthew at a cemetery down the street from our house, along with my happiness. My world would never be the same.

I graduated high school and signed up for college, still dreaming of nursing school, with Pablo still by my side. But an insatiable emptiness permeated every cell. I adopted a playful gray kitten, Gravy, naively hoping he would somehow satisfy the hollowed-out place that losing Matthew had left. But loving a kitten wasn’t the same as loving a baby. I had to fill the hole in my heart, and I didn’t know any other way but to get pregnant again.

After only one semester of college, I gave birth to another son, Gabriel. Now that I had a child to provide for, I put school on hold and focused on my job as the receptionist at a local urology practice. At least I was still in the medical field, but my plans to become a nurse would have to wait. MarcAnthony was born five years later, and shortly after that I was hired as office manager at my obstetrician’s office. After two more years, our daughter, Alex, was born. I had a job and a family, but I didn’t have the career I longed for.

When Alex was 4, I went back to college part-time, taking online classes while running a doctor’s office and meeting the demanding needs of three young kids. My educational progress was like a slow drip, but I kept at it. And finally, 17 years after starting college, I was ready to apply to nursing school like I’d always dreamed. But a realization hit me like a punch in the face when I researched the schedule — nursing school would require me to work after-hours shifts for my clinical rotations. I knew being a nurse would require the night shift, but nursing school? How in the hell would I do that when Pablo was a truck driver — frequently working nights, sometimes working weekends, on the road for days at a time? Who would watch the kids? Who would welcome them home from school, help with homework, comb the tangles out of Alex’s thick auburn hair that had grown almost to her thighs? That was my job.

So, I put my plans on hold. Again. But inside, I was antsy and frustrated. I was a dutiful wife and a diligent mom, but I craved a purpose of my own.

* * *

Then one day last January, four years after I gave up my dream of nursing school, I toyed with my longing by browsing the internet for jobs, like the exciting rush of online-car-shopping when there’s no way you can afford a new car. I felt a spark as I came across a Facebook page advertising a class to train volunteer firefighters. Surely divine intervention had guided my fingers over the keyboard. I called the department — training was only one night a week and a commitment of only 36 hours a month. This could work. I completed my application and sent it to the volunteer fire department, intoxicated by its promise.

My family talked about my opportunity over breakfast-for-dinner at IHOP. My little princess, 8-year-old Alex, smiled and giggled when I told her I might become a firefighter. Gabriel, now 16, grunted a “cool,” and my 10-year-old, MarcAnthony, told me how neat it was. Together, we planned — who would cart the kids to softball and soccer practices, and who would make their dinner. But Pablo’s words lacked the enthusiasm and emotional support I needed. He said all the right things — “Oh, yeah, that’s great” — as he scrolled through his phone without even looking at me. But his words were flat, like cardboard cutouts of what I wanted to hear. Was he just placating my crazy desire?

The first night of training hurled toward me like an ominous storm, making me want to duck-and-cover for protection. I called my mom. “I don’t know if I can do this. I’m not in shape. What if I’m so much older than everyone else?” Anxiety sloshed around in my stomach. My brothers laughed about my upcoming physical agility test. Walking and mowing the grass had been my primary exercise for years. “You’re gonna die,” they assured me as a red wave of embarrassment made its way up my neck and into my cheeks.

When the night finally arrived, I drove up to the station and parked the car, but I couldn’t make myself get out. I lurked and watched. Were the other candidates young? Were they muscular and fit? Were there any other women besides me? What was I up against? I shook my head at the lunacy of this stupid plan and put the car in reverse — my age (34), the extra pounds I hadn’t been able to shed, and being out of shape all screamed at me to speed away with gravel flying.

But I didn’t.

The image of Alex’s excited little face raided my brain. She would be so disappointed in me if I didn’t at least try. “I want to be a firefighter too when I grow up,” she told me. Get your ass in there and do what you came to do, the voice inside my head commanded. I needed to show my little girl that all things are possible. I needed to show myself.

So, I stayed.

Embarrassment filled me up as I tiptoed to the only empty chair — in the front row. No sneaking to the back. All eyes focused on me as the instructor stopped mid-sentence. “Are you here for the candidate class? I’m Dan. What’s your name?”

“Yes, Amy Murillo,” I croaked, then slunk down into my seat, trying to make myself invisible.

I discovered that those eyes staring at me when I came in late belonged to average people — an 18-year-old senior in high school, a 45-year-old air-conditioning technician. And other women. After talking to them, I realized that we were all there for one purpose: to help the community when it needs us — fighting fires, rescuing people, and watching out for each other.

On the way home, I called Pablo. My voice bubbled with excitement as I told him: “I loved it!” He seemed surprised at my words, then silent. As if he’d hoped I would hate it, that I would fail.

In the following weeks, I grappled with heavy hoses, learned the equipment on four different trucks, and practiced using ventilation techniques while lugging heavy chainsaws. I even wrestled the 209-pound Rescue Randy dummy, dragging his dead weight up and down the bay drive to prepare me for a real rescue. I crawled my way through multiple consumption drills, learning how to breathe in an SCBA (self-contained breathing apparatus). I hated the fact that I dreaded Wednesday classes — I didn’t know what surprises the chiefs would have for us and whether I would survive them. “Sixty seconds!” they randomly screamed at some point each night, giving us only one minute to get “bunked out” from head to toe.

Once during a rescue drill, I got wedged underneath my favorite truck — Engine 1. “What if I get stuck?” I joked with the chiefs before crawling under. I wore full gear and a blacked-out facemask that both simulated a smoke-filled room and prevented me from freaking out under the engines. My mission was to crawl along the bay floor by following the massive hose laid out through a maze of fire trucks, rescue dummies, and other hoses intertwined like snakes. When I went under the truck, I knew where I was — I could smell hot oil and feel heat. Although already exhausted, I was making progress, my fingers scrabbling around the floor for a way to get through. But the strap of my breathing apparatus got tangled in the grating on the bay floor. The more I pulled and wiggled, the tighter it got, until my arm almost twisted from its socket. On the edge of panic, I forced myself to breathe deeply — one, two, three — to keep calm; to save my air. Two chiefs crawled under the truck to untangle me. “That’s never happened before,” they said. I was both relieved and embarrassed by my rescue. I now tell everyone I have a special relationship with Engine 1.

On Burn Day, we spent nine hours simulating rescues in a “burn building.” They set the building ablaze; I could feel the heat of it as I dragged the hoses, crawling in on my hands and knees to rescue simulated victims — high-rise hoses wired together to mimic the heft and weight of a man. Rivulets of sweat wet my body, the inside of my suit a sauna. Blisters and bruises covered my swollen legs, but I kept going.

I have never been prouder of anything I’ve ever done in my entire life. But I foolishly believed my toughest battles would be fighting fires. How could I have known my biggest obstacle would be in my own home?

* * *

I had to work a night shift unexpectedly and couldn’t reach Pablo, so I left the kids home alone, after talking with them all and making sure they knew what to do in every possible scenario. They’re now 9, 11 and 16; shouldn’t they be all right?

“Why would you leave the kids by themselves? How would you ever think that’s OK?” Pablo raged later. He ignored my explanation, what I’d done to make sure the kids were taken care of. Pablo thinks I’m a bad mother, that firefighting is not a mother’s job.

He also uses the “it’s too dangerous” argument when his other protests fail. I don’t disagree. It is dangerous. But we’re trained to be as careful as possible, and those firemen he resents are there to save me. I remind him of this, and his resentment goes full circle again.

My husband never asks about my day. He’s too angry. He doesn’t want to hear how I learned to propel out of a window, or what grass fires we battled, or whether I had to extricate a crash victim. My new happiness threatens him.

Pablo can’t comprehend that my co-workers are just normal people with spouses and children. He doesn’t understand that these men and women, my clan, would give their lives for me.

Or maybe he does understand. Maybe that’s the bigger threat — I’ve found a new family. They would crawl through thousand-degree heat and breathe in toxic smoke to save me. I think my husband wants to be the man who rescues me if I need saving. He doesn’t want to abdicate that job to anyone else.

At dinner one night, I told the kids how I moved the engine. “Wow, that’s cool,” they all answered, excited that their mom got to drive the huge red monster of a machine. But not Pablo; he said nothing. I don’t think he wants people looking at his wife behind the wheel of a fire truck, with so much power right under her foot. I can no longer share with him. Words between us are now only the most mundane of inquiries — “What do you want for dinner?” “Can you pick up more milk and cereal?” — superficial statements to carry us along with our daily lives.

Alex supports me; “I still want to be a firefighter,” my little girl whispers, as if sharing an important secret. Although my boys still support me, they are now frustrated. The cool factor has worn off, replaced by my absence. They don’t want to do things for themselves that I’d always done. Now it’s more work for them. But they will learn to be more independent. Isn’t that a good thing?

And shouldn’t they be there for me now?

My husband and kids are not the only resentful ones. I am too. Bitterness bubbles under the surface, with my shame at having to explain to my chief how my husband wants me home. It’s now the station joke: “Time to leave, Amy. You don’t want to miss your curfew.” We laugh about it, although it’s not funny. How can my family want me to give up something I love so much?

I won’t give up the energy that fills me when I run to the scene of a car crash. I feel complete — I have a purpose other than motherhood. Is it selfish? I don’t think so, but my family feels otherwise. So, I’m caught in the middle of my own raging fire — a woman’s struggle to be both wife and mom while also living her dream.

Pablo and I have been through so much in the last 19 years, but we’ve survived. We have a beautiful family and a comfortable home. A stable life. Surely, we can work through this new test of our dedication to each other? I want Pablo to realize, like I have, that joy breeds joy. I want my kids to know this, to feel it. My newfound happiness will spill over into the rest of my family’s lives.

* * *

“I’ll leave,” Pablo says again, bitterness coating his threat. “I can’t be married to a firefighter. You need to choose between those guys you work with and me.”

Both hurt and anger fill me up. How can he give me this ultimatum?

“No. I won’t. The choice is yours,” I tell him. “You’re the one with the problem, and you have to decide if you’re going to stay or leave. But if you leave, you have to explain to the kids why you broke up our family. It is your decision.”

Right after we’d each stood our ground, Pablo went on a two-day trucking job. Good. He needed time to think this through. I didn’t call him or answer his calls and texts. I wanted him to feel what it was like without his family.

When he got home, he admitted he’d spoken too soon. He shouldn’t have told me to choose. He grudgingly realized that the choice was his, not mine. Is my dream worth the disintegration of my family? I don’t know. Hopefully it won’t come to that. I want both.

I will not give up my passion, but I will make concessions. No more overnight stays, and I won’t volunteer for weekend shifts. I won’t apply for full-time firefighter jobs because of the after-hours scheduling.

I call Pablo while he’s on the road to tell him I’m leaving for my shift. He doesn’t argue with me — he’s past that. Now he’s just indifferent, saying nothing. I’m trying to compromise, but does he notice? Does he care? He still doesn’t want to hear about my job, what I have planned, what happens during my shifts. If I came close to dying in a house fire, he would never know. But he’s agreed to bring the kids to a football game I’m working at as an emergency responder. A good sign? I think so. Baby steps.

“You are a totally different person,” Pablo tells me.

He’s right. I am.

The post My Husband Doesn’t Want Me to Be a Firefighter appeared first on Narratively.

Every Wednesday evening in Manhattan, a small group of addicts gather in the basement below a shop where the front window display features a male mannequin decked out in a blonde wig, pink corset and matching tutu. Posted on the door is a sign warning that you must be 21 years or older to enter. A second mannequin in the entryway wears a black latex harness and holds a riding crop. Down a staircase tucked behind the colorful array of condoms and lube, past the collection of leather collars and shoeboxes filled with thigh-highs and stilettos, is a set of sliding French doors. Don’t let the St. Andrew’s Cross bondage mount or vintage photo of men in assless chaps fool you: This is a recovery meeting. Only it’s held not in a church basement, but the basement of a fetish shop.

Around 6:30 p.m., the meeting chair sits down at the head of the table, opens a white binder and clears his throat.

“Welcome to Recovery in the Lifestyle,” he announces. “My name is John. I’m an alcoholic and a kinkster.”

Founded in 2005, Recovery in the Lifestyle (RiTL) is a nationwide fellowship that welcomes all recovering addicts who identify as kinky (also known as being in the BDSM “lifestyle”), irrespective of their drug of choice. While the vast majority of members are recovering alcoholics, others hail from Overeaters Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, Debtors Anonymous, etc. The only requirement for membership is a desire to be in recovery in the lifestyle.

RiTL is the brainchild of a recovering alcoholic in South Florida who went by the name of Stormy (in keeping with the Alcoholics Anonymous tradition of anonymity, people in this story are identified by the “scene name” they use among kinksters, or by a pseudonym). Stormy was a member of the BDSM community and a mistress, or domme.

“For months I had gone to my local A.A. club, where I realized I couldn’t share fully about my double life,” Stormy writes on RiTL’s website. “I knew others in the lifestyle couldn’t share their problems.”

A major tenet of recovery in A.A. is being “rigorously honest” with oneself and others. For many, kink isn’t just a sexual preference; it’s an identity. While a 2005 study by Durex found that 36 percent of American adults have practiced some form of BDSM, including using masks, blindfolds or other forms of bondage, people in “the lifestyle” consider it to be a defining aspect of their relationships.

“It’s not just about sex. It’s about how we live our lives,” says a recovering alcoholic and RiTL member who goes by the scene name Brother Wolf. “In addition to being a dominant and leatherman, I’m polyamorous, and my submissive is essentially the equivalent of my spouse. My kids and her sons are like brothers, everybody knows what’s going on.”

For kinksters, there are real risks involved with publicly outing oneself. One study conducted by the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom found that 37.5 percent of BDSM practitioners had experienced some form of harassment or violence due to the social stigma attached to their sexual behavior. Parents risk losing custody of their children, others put their jobs on the line.

“Everyone shares about their wives and family members in A.A. meetings,” Brother Wolf continues. “I can’t talk about my two partners. I love A.A., but I also need fellowship with people who understand what being a part of an alternative lifestyle is about.”

Stormy, and others like her, felt that not being able to share openly in meetings compromised their sobriety. It wasn’t that kinksters were especially prone to addiction, but rather that A.A. meetings alone couldn’t meet the needs of her community. So she approached another sober kinkster and proposed that they create a group based on their two commonalities: recovery and BDSM.

The need for special-interest A.A. meetings is nothing new. As early as the 1950s, the queer community in Boston sought to start their own meetings, but A.A. would not list them in their meeting pamphlets. Some recovering alcoholics feared being associated with those they considered “sexual deviants” or “undesirables.”

In the mid-1970s, sober members of the gay community lobbied to have their meetings added to the A.A. world directory. The issue was brought up at the 1974 General Service Conference. As Audrey Borden details in The History of Gay People in Alcoholics Anonymous, there were arguments, and things got heated.

“If we list queers, what are you going to do next year, list rapists?” someone in the crowd yelled. “Then child molesters?”

A board member stepped in and took the mic.

“I understand that when you listed young people’s groups, you did not go through these shenanigans. Is that right?”

The crowd acquiesced. No one had protested listing women’s groups either.

“Well, what in the world are you picking on these guys for?” he said, and then took his seat.

The issue went to a vote. Out of 131 members, 128 voted in favor of listing gay groups. Shortly afterward, a new resolution was proposed: No A.A. group, anywhere, of any kind, should turn a newcomer away from a meeting. It passed unanimously.

Today there are special-interest recovery groups for artists, atheists and even lawyers.

Stormy contacted A.A.’s General Service Office in New York City and asked permission to reprint and adapt the 12 steps and 12 traditions for a new, BDSM-friendly fellowship. RiTL held its first meeting five months later at a dungeon in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Thirty-six recovering addicts and their supporters attended. Like other 12-step recovery meetings, the group opened with the Serenity Prayer, followed by each person introducing themselves by their first name or scene name only, their specific recovery program (A.A., N.A., etc.) and their identification within the lifestyle. There were dominants, who prefer to take control; submissives, who give up control; sadists, who derive pleasure from inflicting pain; and so on. After the meeting, there was an optional play party, where attendees could engage in BDSM.

Stormy and her friends organized a campaign to send promotional information to A.A. groups and fetish shops around the country. Today, meetings are held in 18 cities across 12 states, in addition to recurring kink conferences and three online meetings per week.

Like the New York City chapter, most groups meet in BDSM-friendly spaces such as dungeons or sex-toy shops — though, to be clear, the meetings themselves do not include any kind of play. Some people choose to share about BDSM-related issues, while other just talk recovery.

At one recent meeting in New York City, people took turns reading out loud from a chapter in the Big Book (the A.A. bible, originally published in 1939) about eighth-step amends. “Chances are that we have domestic troubles,” it read. “Perhaps we are mixed up with women in a fashion we wouldn’t care to have advertised.” At this, everybody paused, then erupted in laughter.

* * *

It’s a Friday night, and a crowd of Brooklynites are lined up around the block outside of Williamsburg art gallery Lucas Lucas for the unveiling of an interactive exhibition curated by local sex workers. Inside, men and women carrying plastic cups of wine mill between watercolor paintings and nude portraits. Toward the back of the room, John stands barefoot, staying within earshot of Neena, his mistress for the night. He is wearing nothing but black briefs, a Lycra ski mask, and a leather collar padlocked at the center. Mistress Neena parades past him in knee-high boots to greet another domme, the key ring to John’s collar looped into her belt. Tonight, John and a handful of other male submissives serve as human easels; some wear artwork hung around their necks, others “bottom,” or receive sensation, during public floggings. At some point, an old friend of John’s from A.A. shows up, but he doesn’t recognize John in the mask. Despite the curious onlookers, John appears at ease, sipping water and occasionally dashing to the bar to refill Mistress Neena’s glass. It’s a far cry from the timid and fearful drunk he once was.

John can’t remember a time when he didn’t fantasize about getting tied up. As a child, he was drawn to games of cowboys and Indians, and later to depictions of medieval torture. He carried a secret shame about this fetish into adulthood, enough so that even once he was old enough to enter the kink scene, he couldn’t imagine visiting a dungeon without getting wasted first. John couldn’t imagine drinking normally, period.

This was the mid-1980s, long before the New York Department of Health instituted safe-sex guidelines for bars and clubs. Underground S&M clubs like the Vault and Hellfire were infamous for their back rooms, glory holes, urine-stained bathtubs and cages. John would drink at home or at a bar. Once he had worked up the courage, he would take a private car to the Meatpacking District, lest someone recognize him on the train and ask where he was headed.

“The clubs were scarier then than they are now,” John says. Eventually, John escalated from drinking and smoking pot to binging on crack. He’d lose multiple days in a paranoid frenzy, covering his door frame with tape to keep the vapor from escaping his apartment.

“I’d get paid, cash a check, try to pay bills and buy food, then go on a run” to get more drugs, John says. Between temp jobs, John scraped together just enough money to survive, often falling behind on his rent. When he couldn’t afford proper booze, he bought Goya cooking wine from the grocery store. He drank until he passed out or threw up, whichever came first.

John lost multiple jobs for showing up late or not all. Eventually he hit bottom and got himself into an outpatient program, then started attending A.A. meetings and found a therapist. But when he confided in her about his submissive fantasies, she told him that they were unhealthy.

“When people hurt each other, that’s dysfunctional.” She suggested he attend meetings for sex addiction in addition to A.A.

“I decided then that I didn’t want to be kinky,” John says. He threw out his studded collar and rope collection, along with the S&M pornography he’d collected over the years. In A.A. meetings, he would allude to his familiarity with the sex industry but never said a word about dominatrices.

“I was less ashamed of saying I’d smoked crack than telling people I was kinky,” he says. “I thought I was sick.”

During his first five years of sobriety, he pieced his life back together while remaining disengaged from kink. Sometimes he racked up a high cable porn bill, but he couldn’t imagine integrating BDSM into his sobriety. He’d never been to a bondage club sober; how could he manage it now?

* * *

A.A. has no set policies or guidelines about sex, and the Big Book clearly states that members “are not the arbiter of anyone’s sex conduct.” Still, many kinksters wouldn’t feel comfortable sharing details of their lives in a Methodist church basement.

“Say you’re polyamorous,” says Aarkey, a longtime RiTL member, “and your master is spending more time with the other slaves and you’re feeling neglected, but [you] don’t want to jeopardize [things] and just wish you could get another beating every once in a while, to feel connected. Try explaining that to your sponsor, and they’ll look at you like you’ve got two heads.”

Kat, a newly sober 30-year-old in New York, encountered similar issues when she first joined A.A. For six years, she’d been in a master/slave dynamic, where one party cedes total power and obedience to the other for the duration of their relationship. Though she and her master did not live together, he guided her in every aspect of her life: She texted him first thing in the morning and before bed, and she sent him daily journals tracking her gym, career and mental health progress. The only thing she hid from him was her drinking.

“My drinking was always problematic, but at some point the physical symptoms got so bad that I couldn’t hide it anymore,” she says. She was bruising constantly for unknown reasons and couldn’t keep food down.

She came clean to her master after a co-worker found a Coke bottle filled with whiskey that Kat had forgotten at work. She assured her master that she could quit on her own, but months later she blacked out and ended up in the emergency room. He decided Kat needed to take a break from their relationship to focus on her recovery. She agreed but was devastated.

A few months after joining A.A, she heard about Recovery in the Lifestyle. “I was so excited,” Kat says. “At the end of the day, we all want our tribe.” But when she told her A.A. sponsor about the group, the sponsor expressed discomfort.

“She thought it would be a better idea if I waited until I’d gone through the 12 steps in A.A. I think she misunderstood and assumed it was some sort of singles meet-up.”

Kat attended her first RiTL meeting anyway, against her sponsor’s recommendation. When it came time to share, she opened up about her ex.

“I’m in my first few months, and I just ended a six-year master/slave dynamic,” she told the group. It was the first time she’d ever publicly outed herself. “It’s hard. He definitely was my higher power,” she continued, tearing up. “I realize now how unhealthy that was.”

Others around the table nodded, as if to acknowledge the gravity of their breakup. The master/slave dynamic is a commitment most in the lifestyle take seriously; ending it can be a difficult adjustment.

“In an A.A. meeting, if I share that my boyfriend and I broke up, people don’t think it’s that big of a deal,” she says. Listening to other people’s stories helped her reconsider her own relationship to kink. “Hearing other people share about living this lifestyle in a healthy way gave me hope.”

* * *

Though RiTL maintains an active discussion group on Fetlife, a social network for kinksters, the stigma attached to both addiction and kink prevents many people from disclosing, and therefore from finding fellowship.

“To say we’re fringe would be an understatement,” says Brother Wolf, who now runs the Long Island chapter of RiTL. While a regular A.A. meeting in the East Village might have 50 people, an RiTL meeting might have only four. Many groups also struggle to locate and maintain meeting spaces.

“Finding a venue is harder than you think,” Brother Wolf says. “The local LGBTQ center doesn’t understand why we needed our own meeting. Churches are out. Diners are difficult because some people are afraid of breaking anonymity.”

Wolf found a local dungeon that volunteered their space for meetings, but when the dungeon unexpectedly closed, the group went on hiatus. For now, they meet twice a month in the private area of a restaurant.

Despite these setbacks, Wolf believes that providing a space for kinksters in recovery to embrace who they are helps him, and others like him, avoid picking up a drink.

“I like to hit people,” Wolf says. “There’s a difference between causing hurt and causing harm.” For people in recovery in the lifestyle, learning to differentiate between the two can be life-changing.

“I never felt fulfilled getting wasted,” Wolf continues. “Coming away from a hot, communicative scene? There’s a fulfillment that no drug or alcohol can touch.”

* * *

Back at the art gallery, the crowd has gathered around Mistress Neena, careful to stand beyond the striking distance of her rubber flogger. One of Neena’s other submissives is off to the side, regaining his composure after an intense impact scene. Neena twirls her cat o’nine tails and scans the room.

“Anyone else?” she calls out to the crowd.

“Mistress Neena!” John shouts, waving his hand in the air.

Neena gestures for John to get down on all fours in the center of the crowd, then she stretches her wrists. “My arms are worn out!” she jokes.

She warms him up, letting the endorphins build over the span of a few minutes. At first, the flails carousel softly against his upper thighs. Then Neena begins to move the flogger in a figure-eight pattern, each strike against his bottom more aggressive than the last. At one point, John moves into downward dog, playfully leaning into the blows. At this, the crowd laughs. A loud snap, and he groans. Her flogger leaves black stains on his sweaty back.

After a few minutes, the scene is finished. Onlookers move along to the interpretive dance in the next room, while John catches his breath along the back wall. Neena crouches down to meet him at eye level. His face falls into her palm; she cradles his chin and speaks softly to him.

It’s a tender public moment that John couldn’t have imagined a decade ago. Five years after tossing his collar, he had an epiphany en route to meeting his A.A. sponsor. He was on the train when he spotted a billboard for a bar. “The drink signal came back, bad,” he recalls. Something about that moment made him realize that he hadn’t been fully honest in the course of his recovery. “I’d done step work with my sponsor before, but always left kink out. I knew I had to clear house.”

When John finally did bring up the subject of kink, his sponsor recognized his humiliation. It was, perhaps, the toll that suppressing secrets takes on every person in recovery. “Look,” his sponsor told him, “I can’t drink safely. But maybe some people can do S&M safely.”

“Something changed,” John says. “I walked out of there not feeling ashamed.”

Today, John sees a kink-aware therapist who encourages him to embrace his lifestyle. At a BDSM conference two years ago, he attended his first RiTL meeting. Soon after, he decided to organize the first New York City chapter.

The night after the art show premiere, John bumped into the A.A. friend he’d seen at the gallery. To his friend’s surprise, John outed himself as a kinkster.

“I don’t care about that,” the friend told him. “Just don’t stick a needle in your arm.”

“That’s sobriety for you,” John jokes. “Do what you want — just don’t drink.”

The post This 12-Step Group Meets in the Basement of a Fetish Shop appeared first on Narratively.

I was about to turn 36, sitting in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, wondering about the next stage of my life, when I noticed a father and daughter walking under a line of trees together. They had a similar gait, their figures turning into silhouettes in the fading afternoon light. An emotional wave washed over me, and I started crying, right there on the bench next to an old Chinese lady reading the paper. Was there a male biological clock? Was there a gay male biological clock? If there was, my alarm was going off.

I’d had some professional success in my 30s, a second novel published, a record deal. Fatherhood now felt possible. I could make it work. I could watch a part of myself grow, love and impart wisdom on a little creature who would surprise me and make me laugh and challenge me. A child would be a way to make better sense of my life, to become a better man. I had always imagined what it would be like to be called “Dad.” The only thing that was nagging at me was how people would react. It was one thing to be out; it was another to be a gay parent, especially a single one. It was 2005, and a friend of mine joked, “Gays are doing it everywhere.” But it didn’t feel that way.

A few days later, I went on a small tour, opening for a well-known folk artist. Katrina, a fan of mine who had also become a friend, came to the show in Hartford. When I finished my set, we were hanging out backstage in the dingy greenroom. After a couple of vodkas over ice in plastic cups, I told her about the park, how I had just started bawling. She knew how much I loved kids; I had even spent time admiring hers — a spirited girl and an adorable boy who were in middle school then but whom I’d known since they were toddlers.

The stage manager came in and asked us if we needed anything. We said no, and what followed was a weighted silence, with only the muted sound of the folk singer through the wall. In a larger sense, we did need something. There was something missing.

Kat said, “I could have your child,” like she was offering to make me toast or something. I looked at her, sipping from her cup and smiling. She was beautiful, with her perfect Cape Verdean skin, and she had a very sweet demeanor, if maybe a little overzealous (when we first met she brought me a homemade scrapbook with a collage of pictures and my lyrics in it). I smiled at her, my brain turning. She was gifted with kids; I’d seen it firsthand. She had this way of talking to them on their level. Most important, it was clear that she had instilled in both of her children the difference between right and wrong, and how to be kind to people.

“Really?” I said, feeling my heart in my throat.

Her face turned serious, and she nodded. We poured another drink and talked some more about it. She wanted another kid, and I knew I couldn’t do it alone. We could share custody, it would be an ideal situation. Later that night, in my room at the aging Sheraton with beige walls and bad artwork, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Most gay guys adopted or used surrogates, usually as couples, but this would be something entirely different.

A few days after the tour, Kat started instant messaging me about it. I was at my temporary job at the front desk of a spa, and there was a lot of downtime. I wasn’t supposed to be messaging, but everyone did. Our chats were playful at first. Me: We could get the cutest baby outfits! Her: What would we name it? Then they got a little deeper. Me: As long as the child would be surrounded by love. Her: With my two kids we’d have built-in babysitters! Until finally, logistics: Me: I could do three weekends a month. Her: What number could you afford for child support?

As our messages continued, the whole idea started to come into focus for me. I pictured myself in the park pushing our baby, playing peekaboo. I looked into setting up a monthly bank transfer for child support. I dorkily practiced saying the words “my son” and “my daughter” in the mirror. I confided in my photographer friend, who was all for it. Why shouldn’t gay people be parents, whether they’re in a relationship or not? I started convincing myself that this could be real. I noticed all of the parents on the streets and imagined what situations they were in. Surely, they weren’t all traditional. Then, one Friday, an instant message came in right as I was checking a woman (and her tiny dog) in for a glycolic facial. It was from Kat, and it read: The time is now. The dog yapped. The woman scowled. I knew that Kat’s fertility window was diminishing. I typed a simple okay, but my hand hovered over the keyboard before I eventually hit send. Even though I had thought it all through as much as one can (which was probably not enough), it felt like I was jumping off a cliff.

“You’re all set, have a seat,” I told the woman, my voice cracking. She had no idea I was freaking out.

My boss walked in the front door, and I quickly minimized the chat screen.

“Is everything all right?” she wanted to know.

“Of course,” I replied.

Everything was not all right. I was dizzy with possibility, knowing that this would change everything, but also fueled by some uncontrollable impulse. It was like eating a pot edible, but instead of saying, “There goes the next few hours,” it was “There goes the next 18 years.”

So our plan was set in motion. We would meet at her friends’ house in Nantucket the following weekend, when Kat was ovulating. Though a lot of people tried to talk us into it, we never signed any kind of agreement. We simply shook hands on the child support number and how much custody I would have. She agreed to be the primary caregiver.

Kat wanted to go about it the old-fashioned way, but I wasn’t up for an awkward Big Chill moment. The first night at her friends’ beach house, she whispered to me that they were unaware of our plan. She hadn’t seen them in a while and didn’t want to be like, “This is my gay friend and he’ll be impregnating me in your house this weekend.” But the ovulation window was closing quickly, so it was either do it then or wait a couple of months, since I was scheduled to go back on tour. I excused myself during dinner, the little plastic cup bulging in my pocket.

I stood in the unfamiliar bathroom that smelled of cheap soap and mildew and balanced the cup sideways on the sink so I could aim into it. I tried not to concentrate on the faded floral-print shower curtain in a hideous shade of orange. When I was done, giddy and thrilled, my first martini kicking in, I looked in the mirror. Was this the face of a dad? I returned to the dining room and discretely passed the cup to Kat under the table. She faked a yawn and excused herself to complete the process. While talking with our hosts, I wasn’t even hearing their words. This was happening. We were creating a human.

* * *

Three weeks later I did a reading in the West Village, and there was a man in a suit in the back asking a lot of questions. He was handsome and fit, with kind hazel eyes. He looked like he could run a board meeting but also fix your sink and cook you a steak. I gave him a double take before I left, but we never spoke. The next morning, I woke to an email from him in my inbox. He explained he’d had to go to the bathroom because he’d been drinking too much Diet Coke at the reading. It was a weird fact to lead with, but I responded in turn, suggesting we should get together for something stronger than Diet Coke. We arranged to meet later in the week.

From the first moment, Steve was someone I felt comfortable around. We had tapas and laughed about the book reading, the one jerk in the front row. He asked me about my writing process and talked about his own impressive corporate job in radio. It was so good, I didn’t want to potentially ruin it by sleeping with him right away. Also, impending fatherhood was distracting my thoughts. When I got home that night, I immediately checked my email, and there was one from Kat: a picture of four pregnancy test wands in a spiral, each one showing a pink line. I literally gasped, my heart smashing against my chest. I looked out my window into the darkness, images flashing in my mind. A beautiful child with Kat’s dark hair and my blue eyes, singing with me, like in one of those viral YouTube videos. The child would be musical and athletic, just like me and my siblings and cousins. I’d watch their talent shows with pride, cheer at their games from the sidelines, chatting with the other parents. I’d get a reality show called something like Dad Reinvented.

A friend threw me a baby shower, and everyone drank wine out of repurposed baby bottles. I got the most beautiful presents, including a yellow-and-blue blanket with stars on it that I still have today. It seems like all of those beautiful things are really for the adults anyway.

As the day got closer, so did Steve and I. He came to one of my gigs, and even though I tried to make it universal, it felt like I was singing every song to him. After the show, he confessed that he was married to a woman but had been separated for two years, finally coming out after choosing the life he thought he was supposed to have. He kissed me at the top of the subway stairs, and for a second I lost track of the city, the people around us, the stoplights, everything.

I went on a trip to Spain with a friend, and while I was there, Steve and I emailed about what was happening with Kat and me. I tried to get a sense of his reaction, half-expecting him to run in the other direction. But he was excited for me. He had two kids of his own and loved being a father — he understood, and wasn’t judgmental, and I hoped that wouldn’t change once reality set in.

I got back from Spain and went to Kat’s town in western Massachusetts, waiting for the due date. When the doctor informed us that he was going to induce labor, I rushed to the hospital, bringing champagne and my guitar. I paced the hallways, fielding texts from my family and friends. I asked the nurse if she had any flutes, and she just laughed and walked away. Steve drove three hours from New York City and even brought a knockoff Chanel baby suit. I came out into the hallway to hug him, and he had a look on his face like all of this was completely normal, which was one of many signs that he was a keeper. Our fourth date ended up being the day my daughter was born, and still he didn’t run.

“Is this a bit much for you?” I asked.

“I think it’s great you’re having a kid. I think everything about you is great.”

He kissed me, and a nurse who was walking by blushed.

“You can say it’s great in two months when she’s projectile vomiting.”

My plan was to stay behind Kat during the birthing process, but when Rowan started to come out, I got right in on the action. The doctor let me cut the cord, and my whole body shook with excitement. I played a song for her right away, and everyone in the room was crying except for Rowan, who just stared upward at the heat lamp, mesmerized.

            I can only imagine what’s in store for you

            A life of wonder, a world brand new

* * *

The beginning was blissful, and she brought so much joy to our lives, as babies do. She squirmed and cooed and wiggled, and it seemed like there was a permanent smile on my face. She started to see, to eat real food, to say her first word (“juice!”). Still, in the back of my mind, I was thinking, Is this right? I’d decided from the get-go to be a part-time dad. When I explained it to people, it sounded horrible coming out of my mouth, like Rowan was my side project. Or like I had something to prove to my family. Not only will the gay guy have a child, it will be a mixed-race child! Take that, WASPs!

One time I booked an event for writers who were parents. It was a fine affair, in the lobby of a sleek hotel, and I was on a panel of writers I really admired. I was asked how I was able to juggle parenting and writing. I looked around at the crowd, mostly intellectual types, urban sophisticates, academics. When I explained that I was only a part-time dad, it sounded wrong coming out of my mouth. As if I wasn’t a real parent, and was merely phoning it in.

After the event, I schmoozed with some of the attendees. Most of them were genuinely intrigued and seemed to approve, but some did not.

“I think it’s great what you’re doing,” a woman said, even though it felt like something she was supposed to say, her smile stapled to her face.

Rowan was the flower girl when I married Steve, and to her it was an entirely natural thing. Of course, not many kindergarteners know about the years of struggle to legalize gay marriage, but still, she’s an evolved child. She has two siblings on Kat’s side, and two siblings on Steve’s side, and no, nothing about her life is conventional.

Eventually, she started to pick my brain and work it all out. One day, when she was about 10, she asked, “So, you and my mom are just friends?” We were walking our French bulldog, Oliver, who looked up at me, almost like he knew it was complicated.

“Yes.”

This seemed to appease her. When I think of all the kids affected by divorce, it appeases me too. She’ll never have to live under that cloud. As we kept walking, she started to veer into my path, like a toddler or a goofy Labrador. I kept stopping so that I could move around her. It drove me a little insane, but if there’s one thing that kids know, it’s how to push buttons.

“So is Steve my stepdad?”

“Yes.”

“And I have four brothers and sisters?”

“Correct.”

“OK. Can I have a cookie?”

That was it. If only we could all have the pure outlook of a 10-year-old. It got me thinking. If Rowan was OK with it, why wasn’t I more proud about telling people?

I spoke to Steve about my doubts, and he told me to just “do me,” which was simple advice, but kind of perfect.

I started to accept my unique situation, but I still struggled with the picture I had seen in my head versus the one that was unfolding before me. Rowan is not athletic, blue-eyed or musical; in fact she’s a little (ahem) tone-deaf. But she’s funny and gorgeous, goes to trapeze school, and raps Hamilton songs. It’s become about giving up my expectations and simply loving her and everything that makes her who she is. Also, being OK with the fact that I’m not doing it the “normal” way. What’s normal these days anyway?

Someone asked me recently if I feel the love that mothers feel when they garner superhuman strength to lift a car off of their child. I wasn’t sure. But Rowan and I have a lot of fun together. We do improvisational dance and we make up our own languages. I laugh harder with her than anyone else in my life. One time she told me, “Michael Jackson is God’s sister.” You can’t make this stuff up.

A few months ago, I took her on an errand to the jeweler. I have a bracelet on which I engrave a small star every time I publish a novel. When she saw that there were six stars, she said, “Dad, you’re gonna need another bracelet” for all the books she believed I’d publish eventually.

It was the sweetest thing anyone’s ever said to me, and my love for her swelled, like maybe I actually could lift a car.

We got ice cream and walked down by the river. She started doing that thing, veering into my path again. But instead of getting frustrated, I just thought, Let’s swerve. She didn’t start on a straight line. In fact, neither one of us are straight-line people. We’re swerving our own path.

The post What’s a Baby Between Friends? appeared first on Narratively.

“You say that he raped an actress,” Cicero told the court. “And this is said to have happened at Atina, while he was quite young.”

There was a low, subdued chuckle from the crowd. They were all men — women weren’t allowed inside the courtroom — most from the town of Atina themselves. They’d made the 80-mile trip to support a man they respected, whom they believed had been unfairly accused.

His name was Gnaeus Plancius, and in the year 54 B.C., he was one of the most powerful men in Rome.

It was more than 2,000 years before the #MeToo movement, but a scene similar to the ones we’ve witnessed so often lately was already playing out. A prominent politician was on trial for corruption and bribery, charges bolstered by dirt his enemies had dug up from his past: the violent sexual assault of a young girl.

Those charges of corruption and bribery were a serious matter, but to the men in the court, the rape charge was nothing. It was harmless boys-will-be-boys misbehavior — something half the men there were guilty of themselves.

His lawyer, Cicero, didn’t even bother to deny it. He just threw up his arms in a mock flourish and, to the gleeful delight of the men who surrounded him, declared: “O how elegantly must his youth have been passed! The only thing which is imputed to him is one that there was not much harm in.”

And that was it. Nobody bothered to bring it up again.

Raping an actress, as Cicero assured them, was nothing more than following “a well-established tradition at staged events.”

It was hardly a crime, every man in the courtroom agreed. It was mudslinging; a cheap attack on a decent man’s character, bogging down the process of something that actually mattered: a trial over bribery.

“But please,” Cicero said when the chuckling had died down, “let us at last come to the merits of the case.”

The case moved along. The men all but forgot she’d ever even been mentioned. And life went on for everyone but her: that actress, still back home in Atina. The only hint she’d ever lived would be in Cicero’s speech. It would live on for thousands of years, studied by politicians and law students as a brilliant piece of oration — a perfect demonstration of how to shut down people who threw meaningless slander at a decent man.

Her name has been lost to time — nobody bothered to write it down. To the Roman Republic, she was just some whore in Atina who’d flaunted her skin on stage and then acted surprised when a red-blooded man couldn’t control himself.

* * *

The woman from Atina knew well what the men thought of her. She was an actress — and in Rome in 54 B.C., that made her little more than a prostitute.

It wasn’t a secret. The men didn’t hide how they saw women on the stage. They even worked it into poetry.

“[What] you have with actresses, you have with common strumpets,” the poet Horace wrote. A few years later, the moralist Plutarch would add that consorting “with actresses, harpists, and theatrical people,” was a “mode of life” that would leave them riddled with diseases.

Even the men who loved the theater saw the women on stage as little more than sex objects — like the poet Martial, who, after watching a troupe of actresses dance on stage, ran home and wrote a rave review that said: “They would have caused Hippolytus himself to masturbate!”

Women, in those days, weren’t allowed to perform in respectable Greek tragedies on glamorous stages — the female roles were usually played by young boys. Instead, there were mimae: women who put on silent comedy shows, usually stripped down to next to nothing, performing over the jeers of horny men yelling for them to take off the rest of their clothes. And plenty of the girls — if they knew what was good for them — would do just that.

To the men of Rome, these were filthy women — “the lowest level of life,” they were called, right in the nation’s code of law. They got on the stage because they loved to show off their bodies, and they wanted nothing more than to be ogled, harassed and violated by strangers.

That, at least, was how the men saw them — but these women hadn’t chosen their lives. Some had been forced into it when they were still just children, by starving parents with no other way to pay their bills. Most of the rest were slaves.

* * *

She was just a little girl when Plancius attacked her.

History doesn’t record her age, but a mimae would hit the stage as soon as she was 12 or 13. Cicero calls her “little,” which suggests she wasn’t even a teenager. She was young, but in ancient Rome, 12 was old enough for a woman to get married. Or, if she was a mimae, to be defiled.

As far as men like Plancius were concerned, just getting on stage was proof that she was asking for it. He had no understanding of poverty and the fight to survive. His father was the wealthiest man in the town, a prefect who was personal friends with Julius Caesar himself.

But for all that good breeding, Plancius had a reputation for being sexually aggressive. By the time he saw his day in court, the girl from Atina was only one of many women accusing him of sexual assault.

She wanted it. That was how he saw it. She wouldn’t have been up there if she didn’t.

It must have been brutal. She was thrown to the ground, her clothes were torn off, and she was likely pinned down while Plancius forced himself into her. And all she could do was lie there, screaming for help, while he abused her.

If this was true, he probably didn’t even wait until the show was over. As Cicero said, attacking a mimae while she was still on stage was a “well-established tradition” that Roman writers would continue to describe for at least another 300 years.

When he finished, he climbed off of her, leaving her like a piece of rotten meat he’d spat onto the ground.

But it wasn’t over. The attack is sometimes described as a “gang-rape.” When he was done, his friends took their turns, brutalizing a young girl while a crowd cheered like it was all just part of the show.

* * *

There was no justice. Mimae, by law, were legally prohibited from testifying in court. Even if she did accuse him of the crime, she wouldn’t have been allowed to tell her own story.

Nothing happened to Plancius. He moved out of Atina and became a powerful politician in Rome. In a twist of cruel irony, he would eventually be made an aedile: the man in charge of the festivals where mimae performed.

Plancius didn’t change. As an adult, he openly cheated on his wife, and once was caught dragging a woman miles out of her hometown so that he could violently rape her in the comfort of his own home. When Plancius was accused of buying votes, his political opponents dug up the old story of the assault in Atina to use as dirt. The actress’s story was told for the first time, but only because she was a convenient way to smear his character.

She was barred from the courtroom, unable to confront her attacker, but the men of Atina went. Cicero rounded up every friend Plancius had and filled the courtroom with people who supported him. Some of them may have been the men who’d cheered while he attacked her; some may even have been those who joined in. Those men came home with smiles on their faces, singing songs and laughing, and she would have known as soon as she saw them that Plancius had once again walked away a free man.

* * *

She lived with that memory to the end.

It was a cruel reminder that, no matter how much horror a man put her through, nobody would do anything to protect her.

But she’d done something. There’s no way she could have understood the significance of what she did, but she’d changed history.

Countless Roman actresses went through what she’d endured before her, and countless more suffered through it long after she died. But her story is the oldest one we’ve found of a woman like her standing up to a man like Plancius.

She didn’t get justice, but she lived to have her story told, and history remembers that she said no.

The post When #MeToo Came to Ancient Rome appeared first on Narratively.

When we arrived at the neurologist’s office, I ran to the bathroom and pretended to have a seizure. For the past two months, I’d been faking seizures to get out of chores and high school, so it was a habit — when I had a problem, I had a seizure. Today, I had a big problem: Mom had taken me to the neurologist for tests, and in minutes the doctor was going to hook me up to a machine that would tell her I was a liar who should be sent to some sort of facility for the disturbed.

“Help!” Mom yelled out the bathroom door. “She fell by the toilet! Somebody help me get her back up!”

I could have gotten back up myself since I hadn’t really fallen, but I stayed put, crying in the fetal position and hoping Mom’s theatrics would prove that I had too much epilepsy to be here and needed to go home right away.

The receptionist, Vanessa, who had long, brown hair she liked to flip when she moved, ran down the hallway to help Mom haul me off the floor. She led us back to the waiting room.

“Have a seat over there, and we’ll be with you shortly!” She gestured to two empty seats surrounded by toys and sticky toddlers.

As we wiggled ourselves into the tiny plastic chairs, I asked Mom again why she brought me here.

“What’d you want me to do? Let you go without a doctor or medicine, falling down every day until you knocked your teeth out?”

Mom knew all too well what untreated epilepsy looked like — my older brother Shawn had it, and for years they’d struggled to get him on the right medicine.

“I meant why’d you bring me to the kiddie neurologist? I’m almost 15!”

Mom shrugged. “She had an opening.”

“That’s because this isn’t a real clinic!” I hissed, loud enough to make the other parents gawk. “This is a house! There’s carpet in the bathroom! This waiting room is a living room!”

I quit while I was ahead because Mom was giving me the look, the one that said if I didn’t be quiet, she’d slap me in the head.

When she finally called my name, we followed Vanessa’s white coat down another carpeted hallway.

“The doctor’ll be with you soon!” she said, backing out the door.

Mom tightened her mouth. “I don’t even know why this damn place bothers to take appointments.”

I could tell she was getting angrier the longer we waited. Normally, this would’ve calmed me. Mom had a wrath burning inside her like a pilot light that could leap into a bonfire. We fought often, and since most of our fights ended with me on the ground getting whacked around the legs with Dad’s belt, I’d say she won most of them. I wasn’t brave enough to hit her back, but I’d learned how to direct her attention at others — if Mom was mad at them, whoever they were, it meant she was too busy to be mad at me.

Today was different — I just wanted to confess. If she was in a good mood before the doctor showed up, maybe I could tell her I’d only been pretending because of all the perks. Shawn’s doctors had told Mom that stress aggravates the condition, and Mom knew that beatings were stressful. The fighting had stopped, no matter how much school I missed, how many chores I skipped, or how much I “sassed.”

But for all her willingness to save me from the epilepsy, if I told her I’d made it up, Mom would kill me herself — especially if she was already pissed at the doctor.

You should be ashamed, Sherry Marie! is what I knew she’d say. Your poor brother damn near swallowed his tongue last year! I should beat you to death!

“Quit kicking that damn table!” Mom said in real life.

I’d gotten nervous during our imaginary confrontation and had begun thwacking my legs on the exam table. I stopped just in time for the doctor to open the door. She was tall and thin and looked like a woman who’d be offended by how much I sweated, if she knew about it. She had short blonde hair and a perfect family she mentioned three times in as many minutes.

Then she and her clipboard started with the questions.

“Do you get headaches a lot?” she asked.

“Yes.” Shawn had headaches a lot.

“That’s very common,” she said, scribbling.

Ding ding ding! 

“Do you ever lose consciousness?”

“No.” My first truthful answer. Loss of consciousness occurred most often during grand mal seizures where the person passes out and convulses. Shawn only had these more severe seizures once every two years or so, and I knew from watching him the rest of the time that the seizures I pantomimed were called juvenile myoclonic jerks. I’d started practicing falling like him one morning when I hadn’t wanted to go to school, after Mom, fresh off raising one teenager with epilepsy, had imagined she saw me twitching.

“Are you jerking?” she’d asked me, the same question she used to ask Shawn.

I’d told her yes. There was no decision — the word just popped out of my mouth one moment, and I’d thrown myself facedown in our kitchen the next.

“What do the seizures feel like?” the doctor asked.

Like I have a superpower. Like when Mom comes at me with the belt for missing school or, in a knockdown-drag-out with Dad, promises to crack his head open, that I can fix it by just falling down. Like skinned palms, and kneecaps that’ll ache for the next 12 years. Like it’s worth it.

“They feel like … tingly?” I said. I glanced at the doctor’s face and saw frowning. I started again. “Not tingly! More like a jolt?”

She nodded and asked me to perform tricks. While she stood along the wall and wrote fast and hard on her clipboard, I walked for her, on my heels and on my tippy toes, forward and then backward.

“All right, all done!” she said, clicking her pen. “All that’s left is the EEG, and that’s a breeze!”

“What does the EEG feel like?” I asked, hoping I could claim it hurt too much and demand they turn it off.

She smiled. “The whole thing is painless! Vanessa will perform the test, but I’ll see you afterward.”

The door slammed behind her, and I climbed back onto the table and curled into the fetal position. I imagined Mom’s face when the doctor told her I had a normal brain scan with no extra electrical activity. I wondered if she’d beat me in the doctor’s office or wait until we got back to the car. I hoped the car — getting hit in front of people was so embarrassing.

Vanessa opened the door, pushing a cart full of rubber caps and wires. I sat up and stared longingly into the hall — if only my tubby body would let me run farther than 15 feet, I could make it into traffic and pretend to get hit by a coal truck.

“We’re going to fit this on your head,” she said, holding up a shower cap with holes in it. “And we’ll hook these through the holes.” She held up jumper cables. “And then I’ll be able to see inside your brain over there on my screen!” She pointed to her cart as if she were a magician about to perform an act of telepathy.

Once she’d attached the nodes to my scalp, she held a metal square up to my face. “This is a strobe light,” she said. “Make sure you keep your attention right on it because that’s what’ll make your seizures come out!”

The light flashed slow and then faster. I stared into it as hard as I could, crying openly and hoping for some sort of liar’s miracle.

“Wow,” Vanessa said.

I stopped breathing. Mom asked, “Do you see anything?”

“Yep,” Vanessa said. “There they are!”

“Where!?” I jerked my head toward her.

“Don’t move!” she scolded. “Dr. Goulde will have to confirm, but I see unusual activity.”

* * *

Dr. Goulde prescribed 200 milligrams of Zonegran daily. Mom stood over me each night to make sure I swallowed the pills, but even if she hadn’t, I still would’ve taken them. I’d dreaded being found out, but only because I’d been too stupid to dread being believed. Pretending to be sick is sick, and some days I couldn’t stand how lonely I felt. Some days, I tried to believe I really needed the pills.

I knew I had to stop, but I let months pass because I was afraid of getting better too fast. Mom, as godly as she was angry, asked her church to pray for me. I let her think it worked — gradually, as my dosage of Zonegran went up alongside the neighbors’ prayers, I quit falling. A year later, against the advice of Dr. Goulde, I stopped taking the medicine.

Afterward, I disappeared from rooms like smoke if Mom tried to tell a neighbor about how Jesus and modern medicine had joined forces to heal me. I wanted everything to go back to normal, and it did: Mom and I once again became enemies.

It was a Friday evening in December in the holler where I grew up, and I’d been seizure-free for almost a year. The snow was coming down in big, wet flakes, but Mom was sopping wet with sweat, cooking dinner in the kitchen. Dad sat shirtless in the living room, rubbing his hands together enjoying the heat from our woodstove while Mom slammed dishes and called us a bunch of lazy motherfuckers.

Since I wasn’t having seizures all the time anymore, I got to be a nerdy teenager again. I was sitting cross-legged in my bedroom between my boyfriend, Tim, and my best friend, Mary, playing Magic: The Gathering.

“Dead!” Mary yelled as one of her worm creatures took out my shadow demon.

My bedroom door flung open. “Get out!” I screamed. It was my 6-year-old niece, my sister’s kid. I needed her gone because I was an asshole teenager who wanted to curse and talk about blowjobs while I played my game.

“Gran says let me stay!”

I rolled my eyes. Her Gran was my mom, and I was positive “Gran” had sent Hillary in to prevent the three of us from being alone — she was certain we were having an orgy or using the cards to summon demons.

That’s because something weird had happened after the seizures stopped. One day while Tim and I were playing, Mom had spotted a Magic card called “Disembowel.” The card’s illustration was gruesome — a forked-tongued demon being bent over and gutted by a metal rod. Mom decided the Magic cards had caused my seizures.

“I wish you wouldn’t bring them demon cards in the house!” she’d yell every time she saw me with the cards sprawled in front of me. “Them things is probably what caused your seizures in the first place!”

Even though the theory was batshit and the timelines didn’t add up, Mom’s rage toward the cards and me had been building ever since.

“You’re stepping on the cards!” I told Hillary. I stood up and grabbed her by the shoulders, steering her back toward the door. She went dead weight and screamed bloody murder.

Mary tried to pull me away by reminding me of Mom’s temper, already flared up because of the heat, but it was too late. Mom had already heard the commotion and came charging into my bedroom.

“Hillary’s ruining all the cards!” I yelled. Mary pinched my leg.

“Good!” Mom said, kicking a pile of my cards so they went flying across the room.

“Could you be any more of a psycho?!”

Mom grabbed me by my hair. “What did you say to me, you little bitch!” She yelled in my ear so loud it rung for hours.

“Let me go!” I was bent backward and squirming. I could see Tim getting up and putting on his tennis shoes, fleeing. His car was in our driveway, and I resented him for not taking me with him.

Mom let go of my hair and shoved me onto the bed, then looked down at the rest of my deck still on the floor.

She grabbed a handful of cards, gritting her teeth and attempting to rip the pile in half, but she’d grabbed too many, so she only mangled them into irreparable folds. It’d taken me months to put together that deck and I screamed like she was twisting up my organs instead of a few pieces of cardboard.

“You’re totally fucking crazy!” Mary said.

My jaw dropped, and I looked up from my internal pity party to see Mary shoving past Mom into the living room. Her family lived a mile away, and she planned to leave and walk it. Mom chased her the rest of the way out, screaming.

“All you know how to do is scream like a banshee,” Dad told her as he leaned sideways to try to watch television around her.

Mom stomped off to call the neighbors and tell them her side of why she sent a 16-year-old home on foot in a dark blizzard. Dad waited until Gunsmoke was over, then drove up the road to find Mary and give her a ride the rest of the way home.

I stayed slumped against my bed crying and feeling like I always did after Mom and I had a fight — like I wanted to rip her into pieces but didn’t have arms. I glared at Hillary, but inside, I didn’t blame her half as much as I blamed myself. I knew it was all my fault — if I hadn’t pretended to have seizures, everything would’ve been fine.

* * *

As a grown-up, I looked back at this story with shame, unable to understand why I’d faked an illness. I buried the story deep in my head in a box marked Weird Shit You Did as a Teenager: Don’t Open, and I left the box molding until a year ago when I took up writing. Even then, I’d only crack the lid, grabbing pieces of the story and skittering away. A few months back, I shared some of these scraps with a therapist, bits and pieces at a time until I was sure she wasn’t going to have me locked away.

Instead, she assured me behavior like this was common in children who are emotionally and physically abused.

“It was a survival tactic,” she insisted, leaning forward in her chair.

I nodded, wanting to believe her, but inside, I couldn’t. Abuse is too strong a word, I told her, and I shouldn’t let myself off the hook for doing something so awful.

“It’s not awful; it’s clever! The child is refocusing the mother’s attention as a defense mechanism!”

“What about the EEG?”

“People make mistakes.” She shrugged. “Maybe someone over-read the test, or maybe you just have strange brain waves.”

She didn’t have any fancy machines scanning my brain to back up her diagnosis, but that’s not the only reason I resisted this explanation. The word “abuse” made me sick to my stomach, and I hated how in order to absolve myself of guilt, I had to indict Mom.

I’d wanted to leave home when I was 16, but Mom promised she’d call the cops — since she was the adult and I was the kid, I assumed they’d believe her and haul me right back. I waited until I turned 18 and moved out the same month. Still, we talked on the phone almost every day because she insisted on it. When she can’t see or hear me, she assumes I’m dead, like an infant who cries during peekaboo.

“My mom loves me too much,” I used to tell my friends when I was 13 and they asked why I wasn’t allowed to go swimming or spend the night at their house because Mom worried it might burn down with me in it.

“Mom just loved me too much,” I repeated to my therapist that day. “We just fought a lot. It wasn’t abuse.”

I wish I could say I know that isn’t true now and that I see it like everyone else seems to, but I’ve been in therapy for a couple years and I still struggle with the A-word. Slowly though, I’m realizing that even if Mom did abuse me, that doesn’t mean she didn’t love me. It’s just what happened; just like me faking an illness to avoid it is just what happened.

I moved to California and put a continent between us. We don’t talk every day anymore, or even once a week. I miss her, so we usually spend an hour catching up once or twice a month in addition to my weekly texts that say things like, “Still alive!”

During one of our phone conversations, I didn’t know how to ask her if she thought she’d abused me. Instead, 12 years after the fact, I blurted out that I’d faked the epilepsy.

I expected yelling or sobbing, but got neither. Mom just didn’t believe me.

“They saw them on that damn machine!” she said. “You can’t fake that, Sherry Marie!”

The post I Faked Epilepsy as a Child to Get Attention appeared first on Narratively.

The partygoers with swastikas and Iron Cross tattoos began to arrive at the ranch-style home in Costa Mesa, California, one summer evening in 2000. Pete Simi looked around the crammed living room as it quickly filled with around 50 racists clapping and swaying to the guitar and drum music of a white-power band, Hate Train, which belted out lyrics about “Aryan pride.” The color of Simi’s skin allowed him to blend in. He’s a husky guy, with sand-colored hair, who can down beer after beer without losing his faculties, a practice that gives him cred with this crowd. He caught eyes with an intoxicated skinhead, who stared at him suspiciously and then said to a friend next to him: “That’s the guy who wants to study us.”

Simi had come not as a follower of the ideology but as a sociologist seeking to understand white-power groups. It was a distinction that his hosts did not intend to let him forget. Earlier that day, an Aryan Nations member told him a story about a reporter who was invited to a party with a white-supremacist group in Texas, and how the invite took a dark turn when members beat him bloody and left him in a ditch. Simi did not know if the story was true, but he took it as a warning.

On the ride to the party, a skinhead who served as Simi’s entrée to their world told him that the group never gave outsiders such intimate access. The skinhead had invited Simi into his home and introduced him to various white-power members. “We only wish you were one of us,” he said to Simi, then added: “Just keep in mind, if it turns out you’re a cop, I’ll personally hunt you down and slit your fucking throat, after I kill your family.”

* * *

Few researchers have dared to venture as deeply into white-power organizations as Simi, now a professor at Chapman University in Orange County. Simi has spent the last 20 years studying their motivations, lifestyles, psychology and behavior. He has embedded with hate groups, getting to know the secret worlds of the White Aryan Resistance, Nazi Lowriders and Public Enemy No. 1, and in recent years, newer, younger groups that use social media to recruit, such as R.A.M: The Rise Above Movement, which this year had four of its neo-Nazi members charged by the FBI in connection with violence at rallies, including in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.

Simi has grown accustomed to the threats on his life. They often follow the same theme: If he identifies members or reports something they don’t think is fair, he will be murdered. Simi is more sensitive, however, to the ways he’s had to compromise his own nonracist beliefs in pursuit of his research — what he’s had to do, see or say (or withhold from saying) to gain access.

Simi has sat in living rooms and watched hours of television with Aryans as they discussed race wars and taught their kids to point out “darkies,” “faggots” and “Jewbags.” He’s seen parents give their kids G.I. Joes that have been turned into “G.I. Nazis,” with swastika armbands and SS insignia on the dolls’ foreheads. He’s gone on car rides filled with racist rants against minority drivers. Through it all, Simi has had to remind himself that he is not there to sway or disrupt, but rather to observe and study. “I felt like the only way I would be able to develop relationships with folks, and have them allow me to be around them, was that I had to laugh at the jokes,” Simi says. “I had to nod in approval.”

Many people have asked Simi over the years: Why does he put his safety — and psyche — at risk? Before Charlottesville, and before white-power groups began becoming more visible, throwing their support behind President Trump, Simi says many academics and members of the public wrote off or simply ignored research on such groups, because they considered them “fringe.” He was made to feel like his work “was a pointless, futile effort. Because in academia, people don’t often study it. They’re studying Islamic terrorism, right? So [they thought I was] just off in la-la land — like why are you doing this?”

That has changed. Today, Simi fields dozens of calls, messages and emails weekly from journalists, researchers, students and members of the public inquiring about his work. Since 2014, the number of active hate groups in the United States has jumped 20 percent, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. After events like the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, the public has increasingly recognized the need to understand what drives people to join — and leave — these groups.

Simi, 46, is a chummy-looking professor who prefers button-downs and khakis, the kind of compassionate, low-key researcher who students and strangers feel comfortable confiding in. The methods of collecting information that he employs often draw on techniques from immersion journalism — and are accompanied by similar ethical quandaries: Like how do you walk the line of being too friendly, when you are not really a friend at all? Or how do you encourage people to speak candidly, even when you vehemently disagree with their views?

   *  *  *

Simi grew up in a suburb of Sacramento, on a street that he says included African-American, Asian and Hispanic families. His mom was a feminist and anti-racist. She would watch PBS documentaries about the Ku Klux Klan with him so that he could understand racism. His father, who suffered from heart disease, died when Simi was 9.

The neighborhood kids played football, baseball and basketball together. Simi began to look up to an older boy, Ken, who was African-American. One day, Ken did not show up for a game. The white boys in the neighborhood started making comments about Ken and his brother behind his back. “Spear chucker, jungle bunny, jigaboo, that kind of stuff,” Simi recalls. “I just remember being really shocked. Like in my mind, he was my role model.”

At 10, Simi started keeping notebooks documenting racist behavior whenever he encountered it. He was a child engaging in his own form of ethnographic fieldwork. It started as a collection of moments of “everyday racism,” he says.

His family moved to Portland, Oregon, around the time that Mulugeta Seraw, an Ethiopian immigrant, was beaten to death by three local skinheads. “It made a huge impression on me,” Simi remembers. “I wanted to understand this world of extraordinary racism.” By college, he knew he wanted to study extremists up close. While doing his master’s thesis at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, he found an Aryan Nations organization, which was listed in the phone book as the Church of Jesus Christ–Christian. “When you called the church, you were really calling Aryan Nations.” Simi explained that he was a student who wanted to do research.

“Well,” the woman who answered asked him, “are you white?”

Simi told her yes.

“You’re more than welcome to come up anytime you want.”

Simi knows that his whiteness has provided him a passport into worlds prohibited to most outsiders. He does not lie about who he is, or why he is there. But he has found himself in distressing situations, like tagging along with a huge gang of tattooed, leather-clad skinheads and people in Aryan Nations uniforms, as they stopped off at a brick-oven pizza parlor. Everyone in the restaurant stared at the group. Simi was not dressed like them, but it didn’t matter. He realized in that moment, “Oh God, people think I’m a neo-Nazi. What have I got myself into?”

*  *  *

On a recent afternoon, Simi showed up to the Fullerton Public Library in Orange County to meet a man who recently left a white supremacist gang. The library was full of people, with no quiet place to talk. The man suggested that they meet inside a nearby garage where he’d been crashing since getting released from prison. Simi knew that the man had killed someone and had pistol-whipped people on the street. He asked himself how safe it was to follow him into this garage.

Simi went along for the interview anyway, quickly realizing that the crash pad was also a drug-dealing hotspot and warehouse for stolen property. He learned about the man’s ongoing heroin addiction, his horrific childhood traumas, including witnessing the rape of his mother by his stepfather. As a sundry of rough-looking roommates strolled in and out, Simi asked the man why he had left the white-power group and whether he still believed in its hateful rhetoric. For example, “What would you do if your 22-year-old daughter were dating a black guy?” Without hesitation, the man answered, “I would disown her. And if she had a baby with him, I’d have to disown the kid too.”

Simi is practiced in his response to comments like this: Nonchalance. Indifference. It can be, he says, exhausting, “constantly having to put on a poker face.”

Simi tried to connect the man with a drug treatment program, but he would not go because he was afraid he would lose contact with his girlfriend and kids while admitted.

Simi has interviewed more than 100 “formers,” individuals who have left hate groups. He has found that people usually leave white-supremacist groups for self-serving reasons (divorce, legal problems, rifts in the family, abuse), not because they have had a sudden change of heart. But “regardless of what gets them away from the group — [they] can’t change as a person until they get away from the group,” Simi says. “As long as they’re connected to the group, there’s not much hope.”

Simi’s work combines sociological, anthropological, scientific and journalistic techniques, reminiscent of the tradition of immersive nonfiction writers who have put themselves in jeopardy to gather information, such as Nelly Bly (a pioneering undercover journalist who in 1887 had herself committed to an asylum to write about the treatment of the mentally ill), Ted Conover (who went undercover for a year as a prison guard in New York) and Suki Kim (a journalist who went undercover in 2011 as a missionary and teacher in North Korea).

In Conover’s guidebook for those who want to do such work, Immersion: A Writer’s Guide to Going Deep, he speaks directly to the ethical dilemma of acting like “someone else” to establish rapport. “Getting what you need,” Conover writes, “may simply depend on your capacity for forbearance, and toleration. In other words, how well can you put up with being around those not quite like you or your friends? How much ‘otherness’ can you stand?”

In many situations, Simi has tried to be a fly on the wall — unobtrusive, easy to ignore or forget. “Silence,” Conover writes, “is sometimes okay. Where it gets tricky is over time, in the long term: you can’t just keep listening without responding … if the person asks your opinion, you may need to tell him. Hedge if necessary, but don’t pretend to agree.”

Simi agrees with this approach. He is driven to understand white supremacists in order to prevent hate — not to nod in agreement. Yet at times he has used deception to gain access. In the footnotes to his book American Swastika, Simi admits: “I snickered at racist jokes that I found appalling or nodded vociferously in agreement when Aryans talked to me about white racial genocide.” Group members frequently tried to recruit him, and it angered some of them when he refused. To ease their aggravation, particularly in situations where Simi felt in danger, he would reply: “We’ll see,” implying that maybe one day they would be successful in persuading him. These are the moments that have caused him anguish and guilt over the years.

They’re also the moments that have led him to deeper understanding. Once, after spending a long day with a white supremacist, Simi was again asked to join. This time, Simi says, “I felt oddly flattered, kind of like when you gain acceptance by a group of peers you seek approval from.” Simi could see how “someone who didn’t fully embrace their beliefs could still fall in with them.” He could feel how the power of wanting acceptance was so compelling.

He has also developed empathy for former or current group members, connecting with his research subjects through basic human universalities like grappling with family or parenting issues, abuse or a need to belong. Such humanistic approaches can also be tricky. Last year, The New York Times was criticized for “normalizing” white supremacists in an article that profiled Tony Hovater, a white nationalist and fascist. The writer bookended the piece with details about Hovater and his wife’s wedding registry at Target (“On their list was a muffin pan, a four-drawer dresser and a pineapple slicer”) and a scene of Hovater cooking pasta with his cats. Many readers questioned the purpose and tone of the article, arguing that it gave a microphone to a white-power movement that wants the public to believe that they are normal, everyday people.

These kinds of true stories, and this kind of research, Simi knows, is complicated, unsettling and sometimes messy. Once, Simi got to know a woman he calls Bonnie, who left a white-power group due to a group feud. It was around that time that her daughter was shot (by a family member, but the incident was not directly related to the hate group). Bonnie told Simi how two black doctors helped save her daughter’s life. From then on, Bonnie and her husband tried to retrain their minds, free themselves of racist views. They lived among black and Latino families in Southern California, enrolled in a community college, and tried to respect their new neighbors. One day, Bonnie went to a local drive-thru at a Jack in the Box restaurant, and when she came out she realized the clerk had gotten her order wrong. When she went inside to request the tacos she ordered, the clerk refused.

“They’re all Mexican. They hardly speak English, and she’s like accusing me of coming back for free food, and I got pissed off,” Bonnie told Simi. Bonnie explained how she grew more enraged. “She was really rude, and so I told her, ‘Fuck you, you fucking beaner, get the fuck out of my country,’ and I told her, ‘white power,’ and I walked out and I threw a heil up [Nazi salute], and I don’t usually do that shit anymore but I was so angry … all I saw was red, and I saw her and I wanted to fucking beat the piss out of her.”

After that eruption, Bonnie collapsed in her car outside of the restaurant, crying, asking herself why she did that. Why had she reverted to a state of hate that she had been trying to push away? It was clear to Simi that she felt shame about how she had reacted. Simi believes that for many, being part of white-power groups becomes like an addiction. Those who try to quit hating usually will relapse, because racism burrows deep into the psyche, and merely leaving the group cannot expunge it. Simi calls this “the hangover effect.” He has tried to get mental health services for some white supremacists who are on the fence about leaving, or have already left, their hate groups. But few counselors will agree to take them on. Their response, Simi says, is: “We’re not qualified.” But he knows there is also a deeper reluctance, as one counseling director told him: “She was like, ‘I just don’t think any of my therapists are going to want one of these people in their office, you know?’”

Simi shares his insights and research findings with groups like Life After Hate, which is working to pull white supremacists out of the movement and help those who have left recover. Many individuals need a multipronged therapeutic approach involving cognitive behavioral therapy and psychoanalysis, Simi says, because for some the brainwashing began when they were kids, and many came from abusive or neglectful homes.

Simi once spent time at the home of a Southern California couple who were raising their son to become a neo-Nazi. On the boy’s fifth birthday, the parents gave him a cake decorated with swastikas. Simi did not observe physical abuse, but he was present during instances of corporal punishment and verbal exchanges that made him “very uncomfortable.” Some would argue that the white-power brainwashing constituted a kind of abuse on its own. Simi did not report the conditions to authorities, though he says if he had witnessed physical abuse he would have been required to report it to child protective services and his university’s institutional review board.

This reporting process is reminiscent of a 1997 Los Angeles Times series on childhood hunger, in which reporter Sonia Nazario described vivid, intimate scenes of hungry children in Los Angeles, and photographer Clarence Williams snapped a photo of a man brushing a little girl’s teeth with the toothbrush of the child’s HIV-positive mother, but they did not step in to ease the children’s hunger or alert child services. The intention of the Times’ research was to instead alert the public to the horrendous conditions. The series ultimately had institutional and social ramifications, and the children were taken into protective custody by social services after it ran.

Simi believes that there is value in researching white supremacy at its deepest levels without intervening, especially with the resurgence of hate groups and hate crimes in recent years. “A growing segment of the white population, at this point and time in history, seems to be embracing a politics of resentment, of anger and frustration,” he says. “It’s an evolving problem, and as we now confront the role of social media, there are still a lot of unanswered questions.”

Over the course of his research, Simi established a close rapport with the California boy’s neo-Nazi father, whom he calls Seth. Once, Seth invited him to a white-power music festival in Georgia, where Simi watched from the sidelines as festivalgoers in Klan robes and hoods burned a cross, holding each other’s shoulders and singing together in front of the fire. A young skinhead with their group asked Simi: “So you’re a researcher? So what do you think about us racists? I mean, do you think we’re all crazy or what?”

Simi knew it was a simple question that could have led to him getting beaten and thrown into a ditch. But Seth interrupted before Simi could reply: “Hell, he’s more racist than I am. He knows we’re right.”

In that quick save, Seth had shifted attention away from Simi and signaled to the group to back off. He was protecting him, and Simi was grateful. “Yet I was also worried,” Simi would later explain. “I knew that Seth wanted me to be racist. He wanted all white people to be racist. I wondered whether I had accidentally crossed a line somewhere.”

 *  *  *

In 2000, Simi also got to know Seth’s roommate in California, a man named Wade Page. “It was often just the two of us, as Seth would typically be working on the weekends during the day,” Simi explains. “That left Page and I to hang out together watching TV around the house, grabbing lunch, going to bars and shooting pool.”

During one interview, Page explained to Simi how he was indoctrinated into the white-power movement during his time in the Army. “We spoke at length about his views, his ideas,” Simi says. “We attended music shows together, house parties.” In one photo, which Simi snapped himself, Page is standing to the side of a mosh pit with a beer in his hand. Simi remembers that he and Page shared a late-night Denny’s breakfast after that concert. In all of Simi’s time with Page, he never worried about him having tendencies toward violence, as he did with other members he had met.

Twelve years later, Simi tuned into the news and saw a familiar face on the screen. It was Page. He had murdered six people in a mass shooting in a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, injuring four more before shooting himself in the head. Simi asked if he could have done more to prevent the killings. “In a culture of violence and hate, determining which person is going to be the one that ultimately [commits an act of terror or crime],” Simi says, “is very difficult.”

After the shooting, Simi was interviewed by the media about Page. Some people accused Simi of not wanting to prevent the attacks, “so that I could capitalize on the violence,” he remembers. “Now, that was hard and certainly bothered me a lot but again the comments came from a place of misunderstanding and were quite irrational.”

Ethnography “is about documenting behavior in an accurate manner that helps improve our collective understanding of something that may seem ‘strange’ or ‘unfamiliar’ or something seemingly mundane or so familiar that we lose sight of its underlying social significance,” Simi says. When it comes to documenting hate, “the question is how to make change and I think this is where research can be extremely powerful — it sheds light on what is driving a problem like this and it allows us to test ideas about potential solutions.”

This year, Simi has closely followed the murder of 19-year-old Blaze Bernstein, a gay, Jewish University of Pennsylvania sophomore who was stabbed to death while home for winter break in Orange County, not far from where Simi lives and works. Bernstein’s former high school classmate, Samuel Woodward, who trained with and joined an armed white-power terrorist group, Atomwaffen Division, was charged with the murder.

In recent weeks, Simi watched in horror as news unfolded of a gunman who opened fire in a synagogue in Pittsburgh, killing 11 people and wounding six more. The shooter, 46-year-old Robert Bowers, had frequently made anti-Semitic threats online.

It is exhausting, Simi says, to think about the work still left to do: “I do feel like I could use a break from thinking about this problem. Of course, the victims of this violence don’t have that luxury.”

The post Secret Life of the Professor Who Lives with Nazis appeared first on Narratively.

A framed photo of American fascist Francis Parker Yockey glared down at me from a wall in my two-room studio in Boston’s North End. Next to me was a 50-pound bag of ammonium nitrate and other materials that I planned to make into package bombs and hand deliver to the offices of a short list of organizations I felt were at war with my culture.

Below me was the naked, athletic body of my 21-year-old comrade in arms. We’d just had sex, and I was as consumed by the tattoo covering her back as I was with the girl herself. Four black hatchets, bound together at the handles, formed the most beautifully rendered swastika I’d ever seen.

I hadn’t told her I was black. In a few months, though, she would learn my secret — along with the rest of the world — and I would begin my trip out of the most batshit-crazy ideological corner anyone has ever painted themselves into.

* * *

I’m 46 percent African, 41 percent European and 13 percent American Indian, according to the DNA test I took a few years ago. I’m black, but sometimes I use the term “beige.” Growing up in a bougie suburb of D.C., I hadn’t faced the kind of bare-knuckled racism that a beige person might’ve faced elsewhere. No one ever burned a cross on our lawn or tried to stuff me into an oven. Still, it wasn’t perfect, and being one of only a few African-Americans in my overwhelmingly white community had meant friction with other kids my age that my (white) mother wasn’t well-equipped to handle without my (black) father around after their divorce. So she stuck me in a series of institutions, beginning at age 10 and on and off through age 17.

As a teenager, I was drawn to the unedited energy of the D.C. punk rock scene. I went to my first show at 14 and was never the same. I became a skinhead, but not a neo-Nazi. My homies were black, brown and white. Most of our activities revolved around girls, beer and shows. We hated frat boys.

In 1989, I was in New York City for a show and got into a fight with a cab driver on the way home. I was falsely accused of hitting him in the head with a lug wrench. Though three of my friends were with me and testified as to what happened, after a sham trial I got convicted anyhow and went up north to the state system with a three-year bid. Rikers Island had been a lot of drama, but up north the shit was on 10 at all times. Blood, guts, hate. And you didn’t have the option to abstain. You went with the flow or you got ground under someone’s boots.

Everything in prison is about some racial shit. For me, this was a problem, because I wasn’t about anything racial.

On the first day, a kid asked me, “What nationality are you?”

“I’m black and white,” I said.

“You can’t be both.”

At the time, I thought he was insane, but he understood prison culture. Everyone there is on a side, and if you don’t pick one, then it’ll be picked for you. In my case, you can’t necessarily tell what side I’m on at first glance. Could be black, Hispanic or white. And so it began.

The only tribe I’d ever identified with was the punk rock scene. The few kids up north I had punk rock in common with also happened to be white, and soon I was the half-white kid who hung out with the whites. I’d been mistaken for Italian in New York and New Jersey before, and I’d always corrected whoever said it. I had read about Creoles, who must have looked like me, and I thought about how nice it must have been to live somewhere where everyone around you wouldn’t question what you are, because you’re all the same thing. Here, in prison, I was accepted as white, and as time went on, I seemed unable or unwilling to correct anyone on it, thinking it would complicate things. I was tired of the ambiguities my appearance presented and decided I wouldn’t tell anyone anymore about “my dark side.” If W.E.B. Du Bois could call himself black, then I could be white. Fuck it.

Over time, my three-year bid turned into 11, mostly for fighting. I started reading a lot about race and theory, embracing neo-fascist literature, Odinism, and the writings of Yockey to the point that I no longer felt like I was from Maryland, but rather from Europe, from Hyperborea — the mythological Indo-European place of giants “from beyond the North Wind.”

Since I could always draw, I started tattooing myself, and then others for extra money. I found myself tattooing “White Power” onto the skin of one new homie. I had someone else ink the Nazi eagle on the back of my left forearm. It was bold, but I understood what the National Socialists had been fighting for 50 years ago. I had some qualms with it, but I believed in the laws of natural selection and felt that the West was something worth fighting for — and I didn’t care who knew it.

By the time I got out, I was nuts. I bought into the ideal of Western culture with all the zeal of a jihadi, and I meant to give my life in its service. Now I characterize it as plantation psychosis. At the time, I called it Destiny. Someone from the National Alliance contacted me about publishing another edition of my comic book, Knight of the Cross, a story about a skinhead who does time and goes off on some terrorist shit. Then I hooked up with Thomas Strauss, a friend of a guy I knew from prison, and told him I wanted to blow up the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and Anti-Defamation League offices, then do a suicide mission at the Simon Wiesenthal Center or some place like that. Strauss was on the same page.

* * *

A few weeks later, a cop picked me and my girlfriend up in East Boston for trying to pass a fake bill in a donut shop. I was ultimately convicted of “conspiracy to make and possess a destructive device, counterfeiting, and possession of a firearm during and in relation to a crime of violence,” but at the time I felt like I was really on trial for my beliefs. In the complaint, they made a big deal out of mentioning two Nazi flags a friend-turned-witness had taken from our apartment. I tried appealing the 27 year sentence, to no avail.

I hate the government, but I don’t hate them for having intervened against me 17 years ago. Much of what they alleged was false, but I was out of my mind, and short of being locked up or run over by a bus, I would probably have done something awful in the name of something abominable.

When the government told the press that the neo-Nazi they’d just arrested was half-black, I cut my jugular veins with a broken razor blade in my cell in the middle of the night. Life had suddenly become more trouble than it was worth. I survived, but my detour into whiteness did not. I saw that my whole ideology — the idealized picture of the West, the neo-fascist political cause — had been a bad case of tunnel vision. I’d fucked off my whole life and hurt those closest to me for the sake of a prison-induced hallucination.

I wasn’t sure how people would accept me back in prison. I didn’t even know where to sit at lunch. Some white dudes from Boston invited me to sit with them, and everything was cool for the moment. I knew the simplest thing for me to do would be to just switch sides — that is, to just get on some black shit. To a certain extent, that’s eventually what happened but it wasn’t that easy.

I have been moved around to prisons all over the country, which means starting over, again and again. By 2008, I got all of the relevant parties on the black and white sides of the issue together in one place and tried to make my crossing back over to “the dark side” official.

“He’s your problem now,” one of the white homies said.

We all laughed, and it seemed settled. I just needed a black cell to move into and that was that. Then, on Christmas day a few years later in another joint, I was exercising in the yard with some Deadmau5 thumping in my ears when three neo-Nazis jumped me. They came at me from the front, and we fought for a few chaotic seconds before the COs came running over and sprayed us with pepper gas, cuffed us and took us to the hole. These guys somehow didn’t get the memo and didn’t want me riding with my own people.

Since then, I’ve refocused my center of gravity on the non-Western parts of my background. A patrilineal DNA test indicated my Y-chromosome descended from the Yoruba in Africa, so I legally changed my last name to reflect this. After learning about Ogun and Ifa, two Yoruba deities I identify with, I drew images of them for future tattoos to cover the half-lasered “SKINHEAD” tattoo still on my head. I’ve had to straighten out a few of my other tattoos, since some might see me and still think “Nazi.” Those who know me know I’m not. I will never repeat the mistake of investing my race or ethnicity with transcendent value.

Now Trump calls himself a nationalist. It’s hard to imagine any kind of “moderate” response to the current political moment of homicidal white racism. The anti-fascist reaction to the Trump regime’s white supremacist movement seems like a good start. As someone who has seen militant neo-fascism from within its depths, I can’t help but feel like people misunderstand the threat posed by this current iteration of organized white racism. This shit isn’t a game. These people will kill you. For my own part, if I remain in this country when I get out, I would feel compelled to help stop them.

The post I Was a Black Nazi Skinhead appeared first on Narratively.

More than 12 years after Jannie Duncan walked off the grounds of a mental hospital and into a new identity, Debbie Carliner opened a newspaper and got the shock of her life. She was lying in bed in her home in Washington, D.C., on a Sunday morning, thumbing through The Washington Post. It was January 5, 1975. Carliner flipped to the Metro section, where the top story was headlined “Fugitive’s Friends Call Her ‘Beautiful Human.’”

Carliner’s eyes widened as she scanned the photos accompanying the article.

“That’s Joan!” she screamed.

Her husband looked over, confused. Carliner showed him the layout, which included five snapshots of a middle-aged black woman looking radiant in various settings. There she was smiling, surrounded by friends in one image, resplendent in a wedding gown in the next.

The woman was Joan Davis, 54, a kindly and beloved former family employee. In the 1960s, when Debbie Carliner was a teenager and her mother decided to go back to work, her parents had hired Joan to make the beds and help with the cleaning. Joan was an excellent worker, and she was warm and unfailingly trustworthy — so much so that when they left on family trips, the Carliners asked her to watch after their home in Chevy Chase, Maryland. Debbie’s mother had often said that Joan was highly intelligent — “too smart to be a maid” was how she put it. All of which made reading the story that much more bewildering.

The article reported that Joan’s real name was Jannie Duncan. And that was hardly the only revelation: In 1956, Jannie had been arrested for the murder of her husband, Orell Duncan, whose savagely beaten naked body had been buried in a shallow grave near Richmond, Virginia, the story said. She stood trial, was found guilty of murder, and sentenced to 15 years to life in prison. After a few years, she was transferred to St. Elizabeths Hospital, a mental institution in Washington.

That’s when the story went from shocking to surreal. In November 1962, Jannie had walked off the hospital grounds and vanished for more than 12 years. After she was finally arrested again, on January 2, 1975, the story that emerged was as straightforward as it was unbelievable: She seemed to have simply melted into the streets of Washington, mere miles from the hospital, taken on a new name, and plunged into a new life.

Over more than a decade, Jannie had populated her new existence with a bustling community of adoring friends and employers who were oblivious to the considerable baggage of her old life. Even more strikingly, when her secret was revealed, every one of these acquaintances stood by her. The Post story was filled with the kinds of adulatory tributes usually reserved for retirement parties. Friends and former employers described her as a “high-class woman” and someone “of the highest character, the most honest person.” In an article in the Washington Evening Star, former employer Lewis Stilson held nothing back: “She’s astute, intelligent, vivacious, sincere, honest, and unquestioningly loyal to her employers.”

Like everyone else, Debbie Carliner was incredulous. Neither she nor her parents could imagine that the woman they knew as Joan could murder anyone. If she had, the Carliners figured there must have been a plausible explanation. “We did not believe the story about Joan,” Debbie told me this summer. “We certainly believed he deserved it, assuming it happened.”

I stumbled across the story of Joan/Jannie earlier this year while researching politics in the 1970s. I was so fascinated that I spontaneously abandoned what I was doing to look for other articles about her. The more I found, the stranger and more interesting the story became. For example, she told authorities that she couldn’t remember anything of her life from before she was Joan Davis — but she believed she had been kidnapped from the mental hospital.

The more I found out about her in the weeks that followed, the more I became consumed by a question: What was the truth about Jannie Duncan?

Her twin narratives diverged so sharply that there seemed to be only two possibilities: She’d been railroaded on a murder charge and slipped free of a punishment she didn’t deserve. Or she had killed her husband, escaped, and fooled everyone, cleverly concealing her status as a fugitive who had engineered a great escape.

She was a model citizen who had been wronged, or she was a con artist. I decided to find out which.

* * *

The woman the Carliners knew as Joan Davis was born Jane Waller on February 9, 1920, in Gravel Hill, Virginia, a tiny unincorporated community outside of Richmond. Public records indicate that she was the fourth of seven children. She dropped out of high school after the 11th grade, and, after turning 19, married Thomas Bowman, her hometown sweetheart.

The marriage was likely an act of heedless teenage passion. She left her husband after a few months, lighting out for Washington. There she worked as a clerk and maid during the day and plunged into the city’s boisterous nightclub scene by night, according to the Post. The divorce became official a few years later when Jane, whose friends called her Jannie, married a comedian named Telfair Washington in 1944. He died of a heart attack in 1946.

“He was the love of my life,” Jannie told Post reporter Maggie Locke decades later. “I think that’s when my problems started; after he died I was trying to find a man with his same beautiful qualities.”

Jannie took over Washington’s 17-room tourist home (essentially a boarding house) at 1622 7th Street NW. In 1950, she married again, this time to a gambler named James Terry. She divorced him about two years later, but the turbulence in her personal life didn’t seem to inhibit her business acumen. Within a few years, she employed a handful of people and owned a full-length mink coat and a 1955 powder-blue two-tone Cadillac Fleetwood.

In 1954, she met Orell Duncan, 37, a member of a gambling syndicate run by kingpin Henry “Piggy” Leake. In 1952, Orell Duncan had been arrested and convicted of operating a lottery and possession of number slips. Jannie married him in March 1955, but within a few months, they were living at different addresses.

There are conflicting accounts of what happened while she was working at the boarding house on 7th Street during the early-morning hours of March 11, 1956. What’s clear from court records and newspaper reports is that Orell turned up around 12:30 a.m. and a confrontation took place, and she pulled a gun on him. Orell disarmed her and again began struggling with her. Two of Jannie’s friends, Edward James and Calvin Simms, joined the fray on her behalf. Orell was later found dead from multiple contusions to the head.

Within a span of three days, police in Virginia and Washington arrested Jannie Duncan, James and Simms, and introduced a motive: Jannie’s estranged husband was snitching on her to the IRS. That detail became a staple in newspaper reports about the killing.

She was charged with first-degree murder, which carried a mandatory death penalty. At the trial that autumn, the government’s star witness, 25-year-old Carl Winchester, a friend of one of Jannie’s employees, testified that Jannie had pointed a gun at Orell and pulled the trigger several times, but it never fired.

The crux of the trial centered around the post-fight drive in Jannie’s Cadillac. The prosecution claimed that the three defendants finished him off in the car, while Jannie and the others testified that they were talking calmly when the men began arguing and struggling with Orell, and he fell out of the car and died from his injuries.

After a full day of deliberation, the jury found Jannie and James guilty of second-degree murder. Simms was convicted of manslaughter.

Her incarceration at Occoquan women’s prison initially passed without incident. One then-inmate later told the Post that Jannie was quiet and tidy and kept to herself, studying law books. After three and a half years, on November 14, 1960, Jannie was moved to St. Elizabeths. Almost exactly two years later, she walked off the grounds and vanished.

* * *

Reconstructing a life from decades past takes time and effort. To dig deeper than the newspaper stories went, I filed Freedom of Information Act requests with the police, St. Elizabeths and the FBI. I asked a relative who specializes in genealogical research to dig into Jannie’s family history. I wrote letters and called the people connected to the story who were still alive. (There weren’t many.)

Over time, I assembled the jigsaw puzzle that was her life. Once out of St. Elizabeths, Jannie began quietly reinventing herself. She replied to a classified ad in the newspaper for a job as a domestic helper in Potomac, Maryland, then procured a driver’s license and Social Security card under the name Joan Davis. She spent about two years working for that family, according to newspaper accounts.

After she proved herself a solid and reliable worker, she parlayed strong references into subsequent jobs with the Carliners and others. David Carliner, Debbie’s father, was a prominent Washington attorney whose work, according to his New York Times obituary, “helped define modern immigration law.” (He died in 2007.) He described Jannie in the Washington Evening Star as “a lovely, warm, responsible person.”

Jannie never left the Washington area, except for the year she spent in Detroit with her new husband, Wilbert Lassiter, a Michigan native whom she married in 1972. Eight of her friends flew from Washington to attend the wedding. The Lassiters returned to the nation’s capital a year later.

In September 1963, about 10 months after Jannie’s escape, the FBI, frustrated in its attempts to find her, had issued a wanted poster: “Duncan is an escapee from a mental institution. participated in a vicious assault which resulted in victim’s death. Considered dangerous.” The document shows all 10 of her fingerprints and her mugshot. In the photo, her face is tilted just to the right, her mouth slightly downturned; her hair is closely cropped and forms a little wave on the right side of her head. She is listed as 5-foot-6 and 150 pounds.

Jannie made no attempt to leave the area; rather, she doubled down on Washington, steadily building a community there. Irene Carroll described her friend in the Post as fun-loving and generous. “She was a lover of children,” Carroll said. “She would get us all together and take us on picnics to Lake Fairfax. She’d say, ‘Don’t bring nothing. I’ll take care of the food.’”

But cracks eventually began to show in the foundation of her immaculately rebuilt life. She and Wilbert Lassiter separated around May 1974. By December 1974, he had taken up with another woman named Jannie — Jannie Dodd, according to the Post. That month, Dodd complained to the police that Joan Lassiter had made threatening phone calls and left menacing messages at her house. One such note, Dodd said, read: “Have a merry Christmas. This will be your last.” Dodd filed harassment charges.

Public records show that the Lassiters were officially divorced nearly a year later, after Wilbert learned that his estranged wife had been “convicted of an infamous offense prior to marriage without knowledge of defendant.”

That infamous offense came to light in a remarkable way. Police in Arlington, Virginia, arrested Joan Lassiter on the harassment charge on December 31, 1974. She was fingerprinted, processed, and sent home. As her paperwork was being filed — the sets of prints placed among about 310,000 others — a clerk noticed something surprising: The fingerprints of Joan Lassiter, housewife, perfectly matched the prints on the FBI wanted poster for Jannie W. Duncan, escaped murderer.

On January 2, FBI agent Stanley Niemala drove to Magnolia Gardens, the apartment complex in Arlington where Jannie Duncan lived. She was a convicted murderer on the lam, so he brought along two other agents as backup. They watched the building for a while, and when a light popped on in her second-floor two-bedroom unit, they moved upstairs.

When Agent Niemala told Jannie that she was under arrest, she “kind of froze,” he says. He saw astonishment in her expression; after 12 years of freedom, she clearly hadn’t expected to hear the name Jannie Duncan again. “When you’re out that long and somebody suddenly steps up and puts cuffs on you, it’s not easy,” he says.

She stood stiffly, eyes wide and blank, as Niemala handcuffed her. The now-retired agent describes her as “almost catatonic.”

The other two agents each took a shoulder, gently lifting her, for the walk to the car. She was still so immobilized that when they reached the FBI office in Alexandria, Niemala brought the fingerprinting equipment to the car rather than haul her up to the third floor where she would normally have been processed.

Then Jannie Duncan was returned to St. Elizabeths Hospital. After about three weeks of evaluation, officials there declared that she had no mental issues and shipped her back to prison.

* * *

Con men and women have been around for at least as long as humans have traded currency, and everyone who has received emails from a Nigerian prince promising a share of his just-out-of-reach fortune knows they’re still thriving. As I learned more about Jannie, I began to view her exploits more cynically. Several elements of her story fed into this.

For starters, Jannie’s explanation of leaving the hospital sounded fantastical. She told Margot Hornblower of the Post that she had no memory of anything prior to her life as Joan Davis. She said her mind was “like a blank.”

But during that same interview with the Post, she did recall that rather than having escaped from St. Elizabeths, she was actually kidnapped by Orell’s relatives, who were intent on killing her. “I remember being choked into unconsciousness by a heavyset, light-skinned man,” she told Hornblower. “I remember waking up and this lady told me to call her ‘Mama.’ She said I had been very sick and I didn’t know who or where I was …. She said, ‘I’ll find out who you are and everything will be all right.” (Hornblower, whose name is now Margot Roosevelt, said recently that she didn’t remember any further details about the interview.)

The threats leveled by Jannie in 1974 suggested that “Joan Davis” was invented to help perpetuate her escape. Those menacing notes offered evidence of her old, true self leaking out.

Most significant was another Post article that focused on Jannie’s connection with Ernestine Delaney, an Occoquan inmate whom she met in 1958. Delaney (who is deceased) relayed that she was contemplating trying to escape, but Jannie talked her out if it, saying she would only end up with a longer sentence. One passage near the end stands out. “She mostly listened to others and never talked about herself — except her plans to get transferred to St. E’s,” Delaney is quoted as saying. Jannie “wanted the transfer to St. Elizabeths Hospital because she thought it would be easier to receive a parole from the mental institution.”

When I contacted St. Elizabeths, a spokeswoman told me she was permitted only to confirm the dates that Jannie entered and left the facility. The law prohibited her from discussing Jannie’s diagnosis or care.

But the Post passage suggested the possibility that Jannie had planned the whole thing: She had engineered the transfer not because it would be easier to be paroled, but because it would be easier to escape.

* * *

I felt I had a firm handle on Jannie’s exploits by the time I scored my most significant research breakthrough. After calling the federal courthouse in Washington to ask about her murder trial, I learned that the case file is stored in the National Archives. I drove to Washington to see what I might learn.

In the research room, I flipped open the first box, which contained the first few hundred pages of a 3,000-page trial transcript on thin onion-skin-type paper. Though I would eventually read everything, I jumped straight to Jannie’s testimony.

What I read stunned me. It began with a description of her life over the previous year — the entire duration of her marriage to Orell. She said that her husband drank almost daily, and that when he did so, “he would act like a crazy person. He couldn’t remember the things that had happened when he was drinking.”

She testified that a month into their marriage, he came home from a night of partying and “started beating me and picking me up and throwing me back down on the bed and knocking me about,” she said. “He finally knocked me on a table that was sitting beside the bed and it cut me up here with my eye.” She fled to the bathroom and called her mother-in-law, who took her to the hospital.

Soon after that, she was at Russell’s Barber Shop selling tickets to a church event, when Orell “came in and jumped on me and struck me about the head, picked me up and pushed me out of the shop and pushed me into his car …. I had a knot on my head and bruises on my leg.”

Jannie soon moved out but didn’t divorce Orell, and in May 1955 they were in a bar and he wanted to leave just after she’d put a quarter in a jukebox. When she said she wanted to hear the music, he began “striking her about the head.” She fled, but he jumped in their car just after her, pushing her into the passenger seat. After driving a short distance, he reached over, opened her door and pushed her out, then exited and began hitting her while she was on the ground.

The violence escalated. In one instance, he believed that she’d put sugar in his gas tank. When she denied it, “he pulled his gun out and put his gun right up here and he pulled the hammer back on his gun and said, ‘Well, yes, you did put sugar in my car.’”

She escaped that situation, but another time he threatened to stab her to death. She made several hospital visits. At Freedmen’s Hospital, the staff closed a laceration on her left arm with eight stitches; at Farragut, she was treated for a one-inch laceration over the right eye, abrasions on her legs, and multiple contusions to the head.

Then she took his gun one night when he had passed out from drinking, and on February 18, he came into the boarding house at 2:30 a.m. and demanded it back. She said she’d turned it in to the police; he punched and kicked her. This time the district attorney put through an arrest warrant. “I have an open cut on my left knee and bruises all over my body and I am still in pain,” she was quoted as saying in the warrant. “Also my husband has phoned since and said he was going to beat me to death before Monday morning.”

When Orell learned about the warrant, he threatened to have her killed if she didn’t have it withdrawn. She refused, but still, Orell was never once arrested for any of the attacks. (The warrant and hospital reports were introduced at the trial, and other witnesses testified to seeing Orell abuse Jannie.)

All of this culminated with his arrival at the boarding house just after midnight on March 11, 1956. Jannie had finished fixing up Room 7. “Duncan met me in the small little hallway, and he grabbed me by the throat and he started choking me,” she testified. “So he said, ‘I could kill you right now. No one knows I’m in the building.’”

Just then the doorbell rang, and he pushed her back toward the hotel’s entrance. Afterward, he sat her down at the dining room table and said, “I can come up here any time I get ready. You’re still married to me.” He wanted his gun back. When she said she didn’t have it, he “hit me upside the head …. Then he kicked me, and I fell out of the chair. And when I got up, I pulled this gun on him. He said, ‘Oh, so you do have it.’”

She had gone to the bedroom and retrieved the handgun she’d taken from him a month earlier. She held it on him as he walked into the kitchen, then she gave the gun to an employee while she called Edward James. A few minutes later, James and Simms arrived.

Carl Winchester was the key witness against Jannie. In his testimony, he said Orell reached for the gun and struck Jannie — “he lunged at her and almost knocked her down” — when she pulled the trigger. But the employee had removed the bullets when she called James.

James and Simms began scuffling with Orell, but eventually they stopped. Several bystanders broke up the altercation, and the four of them cooled down, settling into a temporary détente. Orell asked Jannie to give him a ride home, and she agreed on the condition that the two other men came along. They headed outside and climbed into Jannie’s car, witnesses said.

A postmortem toxicology report in the file showed that Orell was heavily intoxicated. Given what a sloppy drunk he was, the defendants’ testimony about how he fell out of the car suddenly sounded more plausible: Simms testified that they were arguing and scuffling in the back seat, and at one point Orell said, “Well, I ain’t going to stay in here.”

“And just before I noticed it,” Simms testified, “the door was open and he was out.”

* * *

This was the 1950s, and the nation’s high tolerance for violence in the home at that time has been well documented. While some states began to criminalize domestic violence as early as the 1800s, those laws were rarely enforced, and cases of physical and sexual assault were largely viewed as marital issues best worked out within the domicile. One study published in the Archives of General Psychiatry as late as 1964 posited that a husband beating his wife was a positive development, because it served as “violent, temporary therapy” that “served to release him momentarily from his anxiety about his ineffectiveness as a man.”

Jannie Duncan’s testimony about Orell’s abuse was vivid, detailed and substantiated by witnesses. Yet none of it seemed to register with anyone: not the judge nor the jury nor the reporters covering the drama. There was no mention of it in newspaper coverage. At one point, the prosecutor, Assistant U.S. Attorney Frederick Smithson, said of Jannie: “I believe this woman to be that type of individual that … they call accident prone.” He defined that as someone who “make[s] claims against her paramour or husband for the purpose of harassment and to get various pieces of property from him.”

Smithson also questioned whether Orell was capable of beating Jannie in the ways she described, noting that he only weighed marginally more. He wanted the jury to ignore Orell’s obvious physiological advantages—and that in some cases he was wielding weapons.

I was also struck by another aspect of the transcript: It raised serious questions about Jannie’s purported motive for killing Orell. She clearly had issues with the IRS; court records showed that she owed $26,369 in back taxes. But she testified that she’d been on the agency’s radar for years, and her lawyer, James Laughlin, argued vehemently for permission to introduce evidence that “would show an investigation was underway long prior to her marriage or contact with Orell Duncan.” Laughlin, in fact, had represented her during the IRS proceedings.

Independent proof suggests that this was almost certainly true. On April 4, 1956, a few weeks after Orell’s death, the IRS ran a classified ad in the Evening Star announcing an auction for Jannie’s mink coat to recoup unpaid taxes. The IRS typically auctions off property only after expending significant effort, often over the course of several years, to extract back taxes.

But Judge Joseph McGarraghy refused to allow testimony or evidence about Jannie’s IRS history, and the jury apparently accepted the contention — introduced by the police within days of Orell’s death, repeated frequently in newspapers, and advanced by the prosecution — that Jannie was furious at Orell for snitching.

In light of all of this information, it was jarring to see her story so casually dismissed. It was as if the alleged abuse didn’t matter — like it couldn’t possibly have been a factor, even in a crime of passion like Orell’s killing.

But even a casual reading of recent American history reveals that none of it is particularly surprising. The idea that a black woman’s version of events would be ignored in a trial in the 1950s, and that the word of the police and a white prosecutor would prevail: Of everything about this strange story, that was the shortest leap of all.

* * *

Viewed through the lens of the trial transcript and the information the jury never heard, everything about Jannie’s story looks different. Orell died from a result of Jannie’s acts of self-defense during a series of drunken brawls. He could easily have killed her, and probably would have eventually.

Seemingly minor details suddenly take on new significance, like the physical description on Jannie’s wanted poster: “scar in right eyebrow, small scar under left eye … scars on left arm, left shoulder, left side of chest and on right shoulder.” All of them correspond to injuries she described.

The transfer from prison to St. Elizabeths? It could have been her scheming, but one document among the court papers shows that she was moved to St. Elizabeths after being diagnosed with “severe depression, catatonic withdrawal with auditory hallucinations.” Which would be understandable, given what she’d been through.

As for the memory loss, that could potentially be explained by dissociative amnesia. That’s a condition in which a person blocks out certain information, often associated with a stressful or traumatic event, leaving them unable to remember important personal information. A 2007 study published in The Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law noted that the disorder “is associated with crimes that are committed in a state of extreme emotional arousal and in which the victim is known intimately by the offender. Frequently, the crime is unplanned and no motive is discernible.”

The alleged threat to kill Jannie Dodd in 1974? That charge was dismissed, and it appeared Dodd had exaggerated or even fabricated their interaction. U.S. Attorney Earl J. Silbert, in responding to Jannie’s parole application, noted that because of the way the charge was abruptly dropped, the incident “could not have been particularly substantial.”

Then there was her public support. Given all of the above, it suddenly seemed far more plausible that she’d simply been a genuinely good person caught up in a horrible situation who had navigated her way out as best she was able. In February 1975, a group of 30-plus people formed the Jannie Duncan Freedom Committee, raising money and circulating a petition seeking her release; they collected 5,000 signatures. Friends recruited the support of D.C. Councilwoman Willie Hardy and Walter Fauntroy, a prominent politician, pastor and civil rights advocate. More than 20 friends and employers offered to provide character statements in court on Jannie’s behalf.

Silbert was the U.S. attorney in Washington then, so he wasn’t necessarily in the business of letting people out of prison early. His response to her parole request is a pitch-perfect coda to Jannie’s uncommon odyssey. It’s obvious, reading between the lines, that he struggled to reconcile the particulars of her story, which he characterized as “a somewhat singular case.” Her interactions in her jobs over her 12 years as Joan Davis “reveal someone in whom these employers have complete trust and confidence and even more — as a person. In addition, this office has had contact with other members of the community who also demonstrate an equally high regard for Ms. Duncan. These comments cannot be lightly ignored. To the contrary, they are most persuasive.”

Jannie was released in April 1977. The Post showed up to cover her departure from prison, taking her picture for a front-page story headlined “The Saga of Jannie.” The subhead is notable for its Martin Luther King Jr. echo: “‘Lady in the Dark’ Is Free at Last.” She said she hoped to one day seek a presidential pardon and write a book about her ordeal. The friend who fetched her from prison suggested a title: “The Case that Rocked the Nation’s Capital.”

But after this brief bit of fanfare, she was never heard from publicly again. It was as if she dissolved into her post-prison life with all the anonymity and quasi-invisibility of her years as Joan Davis.

Her family is content to let her story fade out of memory. Jannie’s sole remaining close relative, a daughter now in her 60s, at first denied that Jannie was her mother. Shown evidence to the contrary, the woman replied that she preferred not to participate in this article. I subsequently sent her a draft of this story. “All I can say is WOW! She had more alias’ [sic] than ‘Mission Impossible,’” the daughter emailed back to me. “All this just explains a lot. I must commend you on the great details you uncovered. However this still does not change my mind. I’d rather remain silent and not open up old wounds.”

But one friend filled in Jannie’s final chapter. Lorraine Sterling, a friend from the Joan Davis years, kept in touch with her by phone after Sterling moved to North Carolina in the early 2000s. Sterling says Jannie lived quietly in Maryland after her release from prison, working and spending time with friends. She evinced no interest in garnering further attention. “She was a very loving and giving person,” Sterling says. “She had friends, but she kind of stayed to herself at times too.”

When Jannie became frail, her daughter moved her into a nursing home. She died in May 2009, at age 89, in Chevy Chase, Maryland. Her relatives held a quiet ceremony at Scott’s Funeral Home in Richmond on a warm May afternoon, then wended their way to the Washington Memorial Park and Mausoleums in Sandston, Virginia, near her birthplace, for the burial. The circle of her life was complete.

I understand her daughter’s impulse to pat down the earth over this complex tale. But as I exhumed Jannie Duncan’s full narrative, two things stood out. The first was that initial assumptions about people are often wrong. Mine were in this case — and in a time when we’re seemingly growing more alienated from each other, I was reminded to look deeper for the complexities inside all of us, our shared humanity.

And second: Jannie’s story is more relevant in 2018 than ever. She was a black woman who lacked power or standing while facing a justice system dominated by white men aligned against her. She was easy to brush aside; her telling was easy to dismiss and distort.

There are some lingering questions that may never be fully answered, but this much is now clear: Jannie was a survivor. And we know, after these last couple of years, that there are countless survivors today facing the same systemic hostility, the same biases, the same obstacles arrayed against them.

Finally, then: This is the story of Jannie Duncan, survivor. For her sake, and the sake of others whose lives were damaged by what happened one night in March 1956, it’s tragic that no one listened then, more than six decades ago. For the rest of us, it’s not too late.

The post Jannie Duncan: “Beautiful Human” or Fugitive Killer? appeared first on Narratively.

“I have decided to leave the convent. I’m pretty sure I’m gay,” I announced to my mother over lunch at a quaint Victorian restaurant in Cape May, New Jersey. The year was 1990, and I had made this pilgrimage to deliver what I knew would be jarring news.

“You can’t be a lesbian.” My mother’s piercing green eyes welled up as I stumbled through my announcement, explaining that I would be taking a leave of absence from the Sisters of St. Joseph. I imagine the daughter she saw sitting across the table didn’t match her stereotypical image of a lesbian, if she had one at all. I studied her face. Was it shock? Even worse, disgust? Or perhaps the shame I myself had grappled with over the years. In our Irish Catholic family, we were raised to believe that gays were perverts. I was not that, I had told myself countless times. I could not be one of them.

Similar revelations to each of my brothers and sisters, the same well-rehearsed speech in hand, were met with support, encouragement, and just a few quizzical looks. I’m sure they wondered how I could come to this conclusion after spending 21 years as a Catholic nun. I didn’t go into detail.

“Trust me,” I said. “This is just a leave of absence — I need to figure out who I am.”

If I had gone into detail, I would have started in 1969, in Chestnut Hill, Pennsylvania, when I was 18 years old.

Our family’s 1968 Buick LeSabre slowly made its way up the tree-lined driveway in this pause between seasons; leaves were just edging toward change and more muddled in hue than vibrant. It suited the mood of our travel as we approached the old ivy-covered gray stone building called Fontbonne Hall, where I would spend the next nine months as a candidate, or “postulant” as they called it, to be a Sister of St. Joseph. My required two full-length black gabardine habits had arrived at our home a week earlier. The outfit, the only one I would wear for the foreseeable future, felt foreign and otherworldly. Perhaps the novelty also made me feel special — my opaque black stockings, shoes that looked like men’s oxfords but with a short heel, a black bonnet.

The main reason I gave for entering the convent at such a young age was that the civil rights movement and themes of social justice were a rallying cry to serve. Nuns in our parish school not only taught me but also often invited me and a few friends to the convent on Friday afternoons to help clean what they called their “charges.” I was mesmerized by their friendly back-and-forth banter, their laughter, a side of them heretofore unseen in our strict fifth-grade classroom. Later, I volunteered with my high school friends at a poor parish in West Philadelphia where the nuns worked. They were young, and fun, and committed. Here was my chance to be part of this historic period. And I’m sure I believed this. But gnawing just below the surface was a fear that I would, at some point, be expected to marry. I was overweight and liked my girlfriends much more than boys. I didn’t date; I’d much rather be with my friends. The convent felt safe. It offered a more-than-acceptable way to avoid big questions I didn’t even realize I had.

Just a few days before this car ride, I’d returned to my old high school, with two others from my graduating class who were also entering the convent, decked out for our first public appearance in religious garb. This annual ritual was our chance to see our high school teachers and some of our younger schoolmates, but also a way to encourage the rising juniors and seniors to contemplate their own potential “vocations.”

Being back at my old high school, I remembered the hockey team, my leadership positions, the nuns who taught me, special friends. And Carol, my “big sister” in a school-designed coupling organized to help freshmen get acclimated. A junior and star athlete, Carol had chosen me to be her little sister. I adored her. She drove a cool Cutlass to school, and I knew her parking space and typical time of arrival. I memorized her class schedule and the exact moment we would pass in the hall on our way to geometry or history. She’d nod and smile, her straight blonde hair framing an inviting face, her shoulder sometimes brushing mine as we jostled through the crowded corridor. She’d grin sheepishly and apologize. I never minded.

The Christmas of my freshmen year, a few of us had taken our big sisters to Center City Philadelphia to see Gone with the Wind and go out to eat at Wannamaker’s Crystal Tea Room. I could hardly sleep the night before, in anticipation of our time together. At the end of the day, Carol gave me a small box wrapped in silver and blue paper.

“A signet ring!” I squealed as I opened the leather case and spotted the shiny gold oval with my initials scrolled in the loveliest script. I fumbled to remove it from the satin fold. It slipped on easily; I stretched my arm, holding my hand up to admire its glint and style.

Carol looked at me shyly, her brown eyes searching. “I wanted to get you something special. After all, you are my little sister. I wanted you to know how much that means.”

At the time, I’m sure the ring conjured images of going steady, although I didn’t recognize the romantic edge to my feelings for Carol. Now, despite the directives we had received from convent supervisors to leave all jewelry at home, the ring was still with me.

* * *

I was fortunate to enter the convent when I did. In 1969, the impact of the Second Vatican Council, a worldwide gathering of Catholic bishops and cardinals, was influencing American Catholic rituals, with many of the trappings of the old church being abandoned for more spiritual religious practices. In Fontbonne Hall, we new postulants welcomed these changes joyfully, but the older sisters with whom we lived seemed less enthusiastic, their displeasure on display with big sighs and a grunt or two from the back pews. Instead of saying the rosary, we postulants studied the tortured journey of the great mystics: St. John of the Cross’s Dark Night of the Soul scared us; Teresa of Ávila’s Interior Castle gave us hope that we too could become brides of Christ.

But another side of myself, the sexual side, tugged me in a different, more troubling direction. Early in my career, our superiors cautioned against “particular friendships.” We called them “PFs”— a sister we took walks with or confided in. But we had them anyway, furtively, a confirmation for us that such intimacy was wrong. As postulants and later novices, expressions of endearment took the form of making our PF a gift, a favorite of which was a stitched, personalized burlap cover for our morning and evening prayer book.

As years went by, however, my illicit encounters intensified. I became grateful for the long, carpeted hallways, a buffer to my light step as I tiptoed past bathrooms, the empty room used for ironing, the sisters’ bedrooms, all tight and secure, each resident long settled in for the night.

It was late, and 6:00 a.m. morning prayer was not far off. As I passed one room, I heard intermittent snoring. I paused and held my breath, careful not to stir the snorer or any nearby sister who might be sleeping lightly or not at all. A passerby so close to morning would certainly raise questions. I slowly continued my steady progress to the end of the corridor, and carefully tapped twice on the room to my right. I waited. The door cracked open. Anna had been waiting for me.

“You look tired,” I whispered. “Maybe tonight is a bad idea.”

“No,” she replied quickly, taking my hand and leading me to her bed. She crawled under the covers and held them high for me to join her. In the narrow twin bed, the light cotton blanket covered us both easily. I laid still, her warm body close, leaning in.

She lifted herself to look at me, head resting in her hand, elbow bent. In the quietest of voices, she shared details of her day: her fourth-graders’ antics, the parent-teacher conferences that followed. I nodded and took her hand, quietly massaged her fingers, one by one. I had learned over time to commiserate without saying a word.

The darkness of her room felt safe. I’d never liked my body, and her probing hands felt body parts, attached to me but out of sight, just the way I wanted it. No lights, I had asked. Her finger traced my chin, my nose, my lips. She leaned in to kiss them lightly, then more forcefully. I felt the jump inside my gut, the ache. She knew how to do this.

I wore a light-blue cotton nightgown, which she tried to tug up. Not yet, I murmured. Instead, through the gauzy fabric, she gently circled my breast, moving from center and out, then slowly, deliberately, back to center. My back arched. I wanted to moan but couldn’t. Everything must stay quiet. The sisters were asleep.

In my mind, I heard the taunts of the neighborhood kids back in my Philadelphia suburb, racing by our next-door neighbor’s house, ridiculing the rumored “homosexual” out washing his car. Never in a million years could I imagine myself as one of them.

* * *

In January of 1991, I stood in the middle of my small bedroom at a convent in the Georgetown neighborhood in Washington, D.C., where I lived with five other sisters while studying in a doctoral program in American literature at George Washington University. I gave one last look for any items left behind. The desk, minus the computer that had produced countless academic papers over the last 18 months; the bed stand with its small reading lamp, no longer home to the photo of my mother and father and my vanilla-mist candle; and the closet, where only a few hangers dangled on the rod, absent blouses or slacks to anchor them. My mind was made up: I was taking a leave of absence from the Sisters of St. Joseph.

Why now? I was about to turn 40, and somehow that had become a threshold I could not cross without coming to terms with questions about my sexuality, grappling with the reality that I could be gay, and facing my dread about my Catholic family’s reaction. The vows I had taken, poverty, chastity and obedience, were colliding with a sexual desire I was ashamed of; my admiration for the sisters and my commitment to a higher purpose were at odds with my clandestine encounters and sexual transgressions; my external persona that represented integrity and honesty belied an interior life plagued by guilt at my deception. Having never experienced adult life outside of the convent, I needed to leave to figure out who I really was. The thought of leaving the sisterhood, my community, was terrifying, but also liberating; no more secret rendezvous. No more duplicity. No more guilt.

It took months of therapy and prayer, long discussions with dear friends, and meetings with the general council and superior general of our congregation to reach my decision. I even had to write a letter to the pope, explaining my need for this separation. On the day I received the letter of dispensation from my vows, I was at the Motherhouse in Chestnut Hill in my final meeting with our superior general. She was sensitive and understanding, and she thanked me for my years of service. I relinquished the cross I had received when making my first vows, and the congregational pin I’d worn for years, identifying me as a Sister of St. Joseph.

My 1989 Honda, bought for $1,500 just a week before, was packed and ready. I had arranged a house-sitting job at a retirement home called Leisure World, in a Maryland suburb about 40 minutes outside of D.C. Not exactly the hip lesbian pad I was hoping for, but the “no rent” factor won out over style. Through my assistantship at George Washington, I would continue as a teaching assistant and receive a small stipend. The reality of paying bills and taxes for the first time was daunting.

Leaving the convent to discover “who I am” meant experiencing the world in entirely new ways. I distinctly remember the day I joined the queue at Bank of America’s ATM machine, long with impatient customers, their coats pulled tight against the crisp January air. ATMs were ubiquitous at the time, but this was my first attempt to tackle the machine that would spit out $20 bills from who knows where. I was panicked. What if I held up the line? Or the directions weren’t clear? With palms sweating and card out and ready, I approached the window with verve, hoping my feigned confidence would calm my shaking hands and pounding heart. A small thin slot looked like the best place to start, although it took a try or two to insert the plastic in the right direction. Like magic, the window with directions brightened; with this positive turn of events, my mood did as well. After a press here and a tap there, I walked away with three crisp twenties in my hand and a sense of triumph.

Even more intimidating was dating women for the first time. In high school, I had attended the occasional school dance or prom with a boy, but being out and open as a lesbian was terrifying and exhilarating at once. Determined to get my new life started, I picked up a copy of the Washington Blade, D.C.’s gay newspaper, and found a listing for a lesbian happy hour at a bar in Dupont Circle.

Approaching the bar, I began to have doubts. Why did I think this was a good idea? I had worn a denim dress purchased at the Junior League thrift shop in Georgetown, and I decided on arrival that the outfit was all wrong. I should have worn jeans and a T-shirt. What was I thinking? That crisis became another. Who would be there? Would I fit in? I walked around the block a few times pondering next steps. It’s just a happy hour, I said to myself. One hour. I can handle that. But each time I rounded the circle and saw the bar ahead, I passed it, continuing to mull over my options. After three or four of these roundabouts, seeing the same boutique shops and trendy restaurants, I decided to bite the bullet. I pulled open the heavy wooden door and walked in.

The inside of the old tavern was dark, and I asked the first person who looked official about the “women’s group” meeting for a happy hour. I simply couldn’t get the word “lesbian” out of my mouth. A young gentleman led me through the narrow hallways of wide-planked wooden floors and low ceilings to a back room, cozy and inviting. A group of about 10 or 12 women of all ages sat at a long wooden table, tall benches on one side and captain’s chairs on the other. Sipping wine, beer and fruity concoctions, snacking on chips and pretzels, they were laughing uproariously over a remark someone had just made. I wanted to quietly slip in, grab an inconspicuous spot at the end of the table, and gradually acclimate. No such luck. Someone decided it might be fun to go around the circle and hear a little about each one of us. Oh no, I thought to myself. What would I say? I wasn’t sure I even was a lesbian. How to give an abbreviated version of my current status? I dreaded my turn.

Playing with the cocktail napkin in front of me and sipping my white wine, I heard how each had met her partner, reasons for moving to the D.C. area, and sad stories from a couple of single folks about recent breakups. My turn, finally.

“Well,” I began. “My story is a bit different.”

I recounted my recent leave-taking from the Sisters of St. Joseph and explained that I wanted to explore the lesbian lifestyle in D.C. This new social club looked like a good fit, and I was anxious to meet women in comfortable settings like this. I must have been looking at my napkin at this point because when I finished my little speech, I heard nothing. Silence. I glanced up to see faces that looked surprised, even stunned, but at the same time completely welcoming and delighted.

I was immediately bombarded with questions: How long were you a nun? Why did you enter? What made you leave? Did you wear a habit? (As I would discover in subsequent encounters like this, the habit question was a favorite, especially among gay men). The rest of the happy hour flew by in a whirl of nun-related stories. I remember exchanging phone numbers with Michelle and accepting an invite to Sunday brunch at the home of two women who lived in Chevy Chase. My lesbian life had officially launched.

In the years to come, I often found my 40-something professional self at odds with my rather stunted 18-year-old emotional capacity, but over time I found my footing. Perhaps most gratifying, I felt grounded in and accepting of who I had become, never hedging in new job pursuits or introducing my spouse, Connie, as a “special friend.” In 2005, we celebrated a civil union, and later marriage, when it became legalized for same-sex couples. Together we have weathered life’s major challenges, like my mother’s death and her father’s, and a diagnosis of breast cancer. And all the day-to-day moments in between: her patient tech rescues when I am befuddled (a lot); the “Be careful!” she sings as we navigate uneven sidewalks; her arm that curls around mine as we explore the city; routines, like packing light and getting to the airport early; the joy we both feel at green spring leaves on barren winter branches; the smell of rosemary and thyme as her favorite soup bubbles on the stove; the utter delight we feel each and every time our dogs squeal their “welcome home.”

My life is rich and full. And, perhaps most importantly, honest.

The post Confessions of a Lesbian Ex-Nun appeared first on Narratively.

“Do it, Kenny! Kill her! Do it, Kenny!”

I look up to see a slight foam in the corner of my mother’s mouth as she shouts these words at me. Funny the small details we focus on at the strangest times. Electric shocks from the Taser Mom fires into Irene bring me back to the task at hand. My hands are around Irene’s neck, and I can feel the electricity pulsing through this tiny woman as I strangle the life out of her. I am terrified, but I keep my hands around her throat. I don’t want to do this. I want to run. I want to jump on a plane and get as far away from New York City as I can, but I stay committed. Focus, Kenny. Remember. Family is everything. Always.

There is a thick tension forcing all the space out of the room as I feel her life slowly leaving. Then it is over, and there is silence. Irene lays dead in my hands. She is so fragile. While my hands commit murder, my mind wonders if my father is with us now — if he will meet Irene on the other side and hang his head with shame.

Mom tells me to put Irene’s body in the bathtub, and I do as I am told. We are in a desperate race against time, and I find comfort in familiar feelings of chaos and panic. I’ve been trained since childhood to shut it all out, push it away and react only to each moment as it comes. We have a plan, and it needs to be executed.

We put on gloves and bring bags. Irene owns the mansion we are standing in. After the death of her husband, she converted it to apartments, then made the costly mistake of renting me a unit across from her own. Her key ring has like a hundred keys on it. It takes forever to find the right one for her front door. When we are finally inside, my mother begins rifling through everything in Irene’s apartment. She looks for identity information, her Social Security card and passport: all the things needed for my mother to become the owner of the building. First, we took her life. Now Mom will take her identity and assume ownership of Irene’s multimillion-dollar Manhattan mansion.

Once we find everything, we return to my apartment across the hall. The body remains where we left it. It does not escape my mind that she has already become an it. My mother directs me to put the body in a duffle bag. Her tone reminds me of how she spoke to me as a child: “Kenny, get to bed. Kenny, brush your teeth. Kenny, put the body in the fucking duffle bag.” I do as I am told. The obedient son. Always.

Only after I maneuver around the numerous surveillance cameras to put the duffle bag with the body into the trunk of our stolen car do I exhale, and then only for a moment. I go back inside and find Mom running around the crime scene scrubbing it clean with rubbing alcohol. When she is satisfied that it is spotless, we finally leave. Once outside, in the fresh air, we wander the city. With Irene’s body secure in the trunk of the car, we head over to Trump Tower in Midtown to get something to eat at Trump Café.

We sit at a table drinking coffee and eating pastries. How fucked up is this? A woman was murdered by the same hands now wrapped around a cup of coffee. I stare out the window and watch an unaware city rush past as if nothing has changed. Can they not sense that something horrible happened a few blocks away? Do they not feel it in the air? When the girl gave me change for the coffee, her hand touched my own. Would she have recoiled if she knew what these hands were capable of?

Finally, my mother breaks the silence by reaching across the table and pushing the hair from my face. She tells me she is proud of me for killing Mrs. Silverman.

“You did good, Kenny,” she says.

* * *

My name is Kenneth Kimes Jr. Throughout the years, I have been known by a variety of names. The press called me a grifter, the Richie Rich Murderer, the Green-Eyed Devil, and half of the crime duo Mommy and Clyde. But before I was those things, I was simply Kenny. I lived a life of privilege and great wealth, but things aren’t always as they appear to the outside world. As a small boy, I would play hide-and-seek with myself, and when I couldn’t find me, I would lay down and take a nap. Money can’t stave off loneliness.

The Bible says, “Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee.” I think God must have never met my mother, or he wouldn’t say such a terrible thing.

Although I loved both my parents fiercely, as all children do, even at a young age I also understood that my mother could be frightening. There was a deep melancholy living in our home. It clung to our maids, moving with them from room to room as they dusted, swept and cooked. Being with them made me sad, and I didn’t know why. I was too young to understand that these young women took care of us against their will.

My mother brought the women from Mexico with promises of a better life, telling their families they would be treated as daughters. Once they arrived, Mom held the women without pay, unable to contact their families. They were isolated in a foreign country with no way out, and no one to help them. I heard them crying behind closed doors, and saw the loneliness in their sad, brown eyes as they made me lunch or tucked me in at night, but I couldn’t fix it. I absorbed the secrets hiding in our house but could not identify them — and then, one late afternoon in 1985, the secrets of my family finally blew up when the FBI arrested my mother and father on charges of slavery.

* * *

I am 10.

We sit in the living room watching a sketch comedy show on television. I am in Dad’s lap on the floor, while Mom is behind us on the sofa. Light pours in through the window blinds, slicing our tan shag carpet into strange geometric patterns. It looks like a bunch of little cages.

On the television, a man is making a fruit salad. He starts with an orange, and every time he peels the skin from the flesh, the orange screams. With each strip of peeling, it howls in pain. The screaming won’t stop. Next, the man moves to a banana and an apple. The pieces of fruit beg for their lives, wailing and crying. The camera shows his hand using a knife, then a peeler. It feels as if the torture will never end, and the empathy I feel is unbearable.

My parents laugh so hard they are crying, but the images scare me. I want to know if it is true that fruit can feel pain but feel too stupid to ask such a thing. My dad sees I am upset and tickles my stomach, trying to get me to laugh. He says, “Oh wow! That’s the funniest thing I’ve ever seen!” Like all children, I look to my parents to understand the proper way to act in certain situations. They laugh, so I make myself laugh too. Family comes first. Always.

A loud bang breaks our laughter. Men in blue jackets with guns kick in our front door. They yell for us to get our hands up and lay on the floor. My parents do as they are told, but I don’t understand what is happening. I do my best to listen to the scary men by putting my small hands in the air and scooting my body to a corner of the sofa. They push their guns into the sides of my parents’ faces. One has his boot pressed into my mom’s back. I start to cry and realize that my parents have told the truth. You cannot trust the world outside. Bad people want to harm us.

I look toward the television — I’m not sure why — maybe to distract myself, but the fruit is still being sliced, still screaming. Now my mom joins the horrible noise.

“You son of a bitch!” she shouts. “You motherfuckers! You love doing this in front of my baby, don’t you! Makes you feel like big men!”

I want to cover my ears, but I’m afraid to put my hands down. I’m scared the men will shoot me. If I can just cover my ears, I can stop all the screaming. I want silence, but true silence never comes. Not in my mother’s world, and in time, I will learn, not in mine.

As the years pass, I realize that asking my mother to stop doing anything is pointless. Other people’s feelings have zero effect on her. The only way to experience even a little peace is to constantly agree. “Yes” becomes the magic word — the only thing that can buy temporary silence. Syed Bilal Ahmed needs to die. Yes, mother. David Kazdin needs to die. Yes, mother. Irene Silverman needs to die. Yes, mother.

* * *

After my parents’ arrest on charges of slavery, life changed forever. Years of a lengthy trial, where a few of the maids testified, resulted in Mom being sentenced to five years in prison, while Dad pled to a lesser charge. He admitted that he was aware of what was going on and did nothing to stop it. He received probation. The trial was all over the papers. By the time it was over, I was 13 years old and aware that everyone knew our secrets. I was humiliated, but under that, when they carted Mom off to federal prison, I was relieved.

My mother worked in what I call peace deprivation — a constant influx of drama and insanity until you think you might be the crazy one. With Mom gone, Dad and I entered a period of rest. For the first time, I went to school and made friends. I glimpsed normal life and embraced it with everything I had. My father became my whole world. We were happy.

It wasn’t to last.

Dad promised repeatedly he would leave her, but when the time came for her early release, he welcomed her home and the insanity continued as if not even a day had passed. Prison served two purposes for Mom: It taught her to be a better criminal and cemented in her mind that she would do anything to never return. It was as if someone turned up the volume on our lives, making it unbearable.

As soon as I could, I escaped to college, pushing my parents away and trying to carve out a life of my own. In 1994, it all collapsed during a visit home. Wearing a suit on the plane, I hoped to impress my father with my newfound maturity, but it was only Mom at the airport. When I asked about Dad, she told me he had died two months ago.

With my father gone, a part of me died too. The side that valued human life, and cared about right and wrong, shrank to nothing. Life quickly devolved into me blindly following along with my mother’s cons, swindles and murders. She was in a free fall, scrambling from one half-cocked plan to another, in a desperate attempt to rebuild the life my father’s money had once provided. I lived in the gap between life and death. The space of nothingness became my comfort zone. When Syed Bilal Ahmed became suspicious of some shady accounts in the Bahamas, he had to go. When David Kazdin figured out an arson con, mom sent me to kill him. And then there was Irene, whose only crime was to exist as a person my mother could never be. She had to go too.

Thirteen short years after the FBI broke down our door, I was in New York at my own murder trial, listening to a judge describe my mother: “The most diabolical excuse for a human I have ever seen in my courtroom.” The jury foreman read 165 felony counts, each one followed by the judgment of guilty. The judge handed down a sentence of 125 years. I don’t remember much about that day. I just remember being angry: at the world, at my lawyers, at myself. The only person I wasn’t angry at was my mother. At that time, I still felt it was my duty to protect her. Family first. Always.

I still had another murder to answer for, and soon I was extradited to California to face the death penalty for killing David Kazdin. To escape the death penalty, I cut a deal and confessed. My mother would not cooperate, even to save my life. She insisted that we carry on with our lies of innocence, so I testified against her to save us both. After two days of confessions, I went back to my cell and wrote in my journal:

Tattle Tell, Tattle Tell, too bad you’re going straight to hell. I am no longer the son who will do anything for his mother, but I’m still a murderer. Only now I get to live. I am the Narc who escaped the Needle. The Piece of Shit Who Doesn’t Get to Walk the Green Mile.

Just spent the last 10 minutes vomiting. I ratted my mom out. If I didn’t, we would both go to death row. Now we get to live. I feel dead already … God have mercy on us. No one else will.

* * *

In 2014, I made a phone call to a woman named Traci Foust using a contraband cellphone. Traci was a writer (Nowhere Near Normal), whom I had been corresponding with via letters, about telling my story. My mother was dead, the dark cloud of chaos had finally cleared, and my obligation to remain silent was relieved. I no longer had to protect her.

Traci had initially been interested in talking to me, but when my letters became overly flirtations, she told me to “fuck off.” I called her to apologize.

“Hello?” she said.

“Would you be willing to talk to Kenny Kimes?”

“I would be, yes.”

“You’re talking to him.”

That was our beginning.

Traci and I spent the next two years sharing the deepest parts of ourselves through letters, phone calls and visits. As we worked on my story, it soon became our story and over time the heaviness in my heart and soul lifted. I began to smile more, laugh at the ridiculous and most of all look forward to the next day. Although I was in prison, I had never felt so free. I was falling in love, and this spectacular, creative and talented woman loved me back.

I didn’t think anyone would ever love me, and many people would say I don’t deserve it, but with Traci in my life, I finally had the peace I’d longed for since I was a boy. It wouldn’t last. On January 13, 2018, Traci died from complications of the flu and pneumonia. When we spoke on the phone, I begged her to go to the hospital; she sounded so sick. It was the last time I would talk to my love.

I know now what real love feels like and understand what I took from the families and friends of Irene, David and Syed. I hold this feeling to my chest as if it is my most prized possession. The closer I pull it to me, the deeper it cuts to my soul, but I will not let go. I can’t. I took from them the most precious gift. I stole the one thing we can never return.

Prison has not reformed me. The system did not help me seek out absolution. Love did. I learned my morality through writing about my immorality, and it is in sharing my life story, serving my time, that I hope to prevent someone else from going down the same path. I say this to anyone in a painful situation that seems impossible to get out of: You don’t have to be broken by your suffering; you can be awoken by it if you are willing to block out the noise and fight your way to peace. The big difference between us isn’t that you’re free and I’m not. I know I created my loneliness. I have no one to blame but myself, because I took innocent lives. Everything is a choice, and my choice was to willfully throw it all away. Don’t let it be yours.

* * *

Kenneth Kimes Jr. is currently serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole at the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility in San Diego. He hopes to use his life story as a cautionary tale to help others.

The post My Mother Taught Me To Kill appeared first on Narratively.

One fall day in the early 1990s, in the basement of an old Staten Island home, 8-year-old Ashley Portman was electrocuted. A combination of factors were to blame: the faulty wiring of an old house, the curiosity of a child left to her own devices, the intrigue of endless rooms, and the lure of unfamiliar odds and ends belonging to a distant family friend.

Portman had gone exploring. In the basement, she found a treadmill, and for fun, she began to walk in step. The machine faced a high bar top, upon which a small television set was perched. When she turned the knob, the screen filled with the gray fuzz of television snow, so she reached to adjust the metal rabbit ears. She managed to scream before her body went as rigid as a pole. Her hands burned, and she could not release her grasp on the antennae. Decades later, the memory of the electrocution is like swimming through a dream. It remains unlike anything she’s ever felt — “an indescribable, invasive pain.”

Portman suspects she would have died, if not for some inexplicable force — “a higher power” — that intervened, knocking the television set from the bar top. As the television fell, the plug was pulled from the socket, and the electrical connection cut. She collapsed onto the floor.

For hours that night, as she lay in a guest bed on the top floor of the house, she says she felt waves of electrical energy starting at the top of her head and running down through her legs. Two and a half decades later, she believes that her childhood electrocution caused a condition that plagues her to this day.

* * *

On another fall day, this one in 2018, a few dozen people gather in the basement of a Tucson, Arizona, public library. Portman, now a co-founder of the newly formed Pima County 5G Awareness Coalition, stands up front and addresses the audience. “Thank you so much for your presence,” she says. “Our intention is to educate and to inspire change, from a place of love and empowerment, not fear.”

Portman is green-eyed and pigtailed. She looks younger than her 34 years, yet she speaks with seriousness and urgency, as though she’s just emerged from a storm. She is wearing a pair of dangling earrings shaped like owls — “They see through the deception,” she replies to an audience member who compliments the earrings.

Portman’s collaborator today is Elizabeth Kelley, who has been on a two-decade mission to build awareness of issues surrounding the wireless technology revolution — and to “get the facts” about the health, environmental and constitutional consequences of the multibillion-dollar telecom industry. A former federal government public policy analyst, Kelley is now the executive director of the nonprofit Electromagnetic Safety Alliance and manages an international appeal brought by 244 scientists from 41 countries “urgently calling” for the international community to “address the global public health concerns related to exposure to cellphones, power lines, electrical appliances, wireless devices, wireless utility meters and wireless infrastructure.”

Kelley, 72 and soft-spoken, asks the attendees to turn off their phones, then she requests a show of hands from those suffering from electromagnetic field (EMF) hypersensitivity. Around the room is a flutter of hands.

Several attendees report having developed DIY methods for blocking frequencies, including abstaining from technology altogether. One mother says her family doesn’t have any wireless technology at home — no cellphones or even a computer. The kids use the school or library computer, or handwrite their homework. Someone else describes how he manufactured metal screening for his windows to block frequencies from neighbors’ Wi-Fi networks and smart meters. One woman holds up her Android phone, which she keeps wrapped in foil like a baked potato. Her kids foil their laptop, she says, and charge their electronics between two metal cake pans.

A man in a Hawaiian shirt speaks up, noting that “people go to such great lengths to try to protect themselves from their phones, instead of just turning the dang thing off.” He pulls out his own aging flip phone. He feels fortunate not to be able to afford a smartphone, he says, because he doesn’t want one. “I feel threatened enough with my flip phone.”

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), electromagnetic hypersensitivity (EHS) is characterized by nonspecific symptoms that vary depending on the individual, running the gamut from fatigue, difficulty concentrating, and dizziness to heart palpitations, nausea, and tingling or burning sensations on the skin. While the WHO maintains that “the symptoms are certainly real and can vary widely in their severity,” and that “whatever its cause, EHS can be a disabling problem for the affected individual,” the organization also states that “EHS has no clear diagnostic criteria and there is no scientific basis to link EHS symptoms to EMF exposure. Further, EHS is not a medical diagnosis, nor is it clear that it represents a single medical problem.”

Portman and Kelley say they’re used to people discounting EHS, and sufferers are often told it’s all in their heads. In “The Hidden Marginalization of Persons With Environmental Sensitivities,” Pamela Reed Gibson, a professor of psychology at James Madison University, writes that although “substantial numbers of persons report having ES [electric sensitivities] in several developed countries, many persons, and particularly health-care providers, remain ignorant regarding the conditions. Thus persons with ES are marginalized and extruded from access to modern resources in their own communities.” Patients, writes Gibson, often report “highly negative” contact with mental-health practitioners, who often assume the root cause of the disorder to be psychological in nature.

But increasingly, and in correlation with the rise of new technologies, there are no shortage of people like Portman and Kelley who remain steadfastly convinced that their symptoms stem from exposure to electromagnetic frequencies. And they believe that things are only going to get worse.

“I spend a lot of time analyzing how this industry behaves,” says Kelley. “This is just huge coming at us, like a big train.”

Curiously, Kelley has inherited a 100-year family legacy built on the advancements of the electrical industry. Her maternal great-grandfather worked for Thomas Edison. Her great-uncle sold electricity throughout China, and her grandfather sold electricity by steamship up and down the West Coast. In the 1930s, Kelley’s father spent summers as a lineman in the Mojave Desert, repairing the high-power transmission lines that brought electricity from the Boulder Dam to the city of Los Angeles. He would eventually spend 45 years working for the L.A. Department of Water and Power as the chief electrical engineer and acting general manager. As a child, Kelley was fascinated by her father’s work.

Kelley, who describes herself as “moderately electrically sensitive,” says she began experiencing symptoms after buying her first mobile phone in 1993. She had recently left her job as a policy analyst with the Department of Health and Human Services and was selling real estate in Washington, D.C. Immediately after beginning to use the phone, she says her brain became foggy, and she couldn’t complete her thoughts. Her heart raced, and headaches came on so intensely that she had to pull over while driving. When she got rid of the phone, her symptoms disappeared.

Three years later, Kelley and her family were living in the San Francisco Bay Area when the pastor of their church — where Kelley’s 3-year-old son attended preschool full-time — announced that the church had signed a contract with Sprint to install wireless antennas in the church cupola. Kelley was concerned that the antennas would emit radio waves above the heads of the churchgoers, and that the preschool children, with their still-developing brains and bodies, would be exposed for hours each day.

Months earlier, the Telecommunications Act of 1996 had been signed into law by President Clinton. The federal legislation made it easier for corporations to consolidate the media and digital landscapes, and it also limited oversight in the development and deployment of new broadband technology.

As a former policy analyst, Kelley was used to reading the fine print of policies. Curious, she pored through the new law, and was shocked by Section 704, which effectively barred municipalities from denying an antenna permit based on health concerns. “I’d never seen a law like that,” Kelley says. “A federal law that would preempt the responsibility of states and local municipalities to look after our health. If there’s a problem and it’s about our health, then this is a rapid and massive deployment of technology that could be very harmful.”

Kelley investigated further and began attending industry conferences. “They were selling the idea of speed and connectivity and interoperability and all of the wonderful magic of wireless technology,” she explains. “So I went.” She listened to presentations, spoke with scientists, studied industry PowerPoint slides and reading material — and then she went back to her church pastor, who convened a meeting of church leaders to discuss the contract. The church invited Sprint, who brought in a team of experts. “We had a lot of questions about technology and health, and we were not satisfied by their answers,” remembers Kelley. “We all left that meeting feeling: No, this is wrong.”

The church leaders voted to cancel the contract with Sprint, and Kelley became an EMF activist. Five years later, in part seeking a smaller town that would be slower to adapt to new technology, Kelley and her family moved to Tucson.

* * *

Ashley Portman stands in the kitchen of her Tucson apartment, gently running her fingers through her 3-year-old daughter’s curly mop of hair and rattling off a list of daily herbs and supplements she takes to counter what she describes as the “degenerative nature of radiation.” She wears a shungite mineral pendant around her neck, which she believes helps shield her from EMFs. She practices dance and meditation. She works with crystals. Beneath her mattress is a wooden board with three hand-sized magnets, meant to ground electrical frequencies.

The living room window is covered with a layer of shiny tinfoil to block EMFs. If she were wealthy, she says she would “deck out her house” with EMF-resistant paint and screens, wear shielded clothing, hire a professional to read exposure levels, and invest in various EMF-blocking devices. But for now, she’s broke, and tinfoil is her best option. “It really does work,” she says, though she jokes that it probably makes her look crazy.

Portman says her symptoms began while in graduate school in 2007 in Pennsylvania, during the time that wireless technology began to be deployed at a more rapid pace. She experienced frequent headaches and panic attacks, heart palpitations, vertigo, brain fog, and a tingling sensation all over her body.

Propelled by what she calls a “gut feeling” that she needed to leave the city, she moved with her young son to the woods of Vermont, where they lived off the grid in a solar-powered house. Her symptoms dissipated, but when she ventured into town, they would return. She remembers feeling like a human antenna. She could touch electrical appliances — a refrigerator or a toaster — and feel a spark. It was in Vermont that she first met someone who was actively shielding their house from EMFs.

By the time her daughter was born in 2015, Portman was living in Virginia and was overwhelmed by health issues. She was diagnosed with Lyme disease, which she likely contracted in Vermont. She lived near an electrical power station and says she would feel sick when she passed by on walks with her dog.

She hired a “geopathic stress expert,” who measured various energy levels around her home and told her she was being exposed to significant levels of EMF. Portman came to the conclusion that she was sensitive to electricity — and that this hypersensitivity had likely been triggered by her electrocution as a child.

“For years, I just wasn’t putting it together,” says Portman. “I went to doctors, had blood work. I thought I was dying. But then I started to connect the dots — and looking back, Wi-Fi is what really started to shake the hornet’s nest for me and for many others.”

Kelley, Portman and others believe that the rapid approach of 5G is the most serious and terrifying development in wireless technology yet. First generation (1G) wireless technology appeared in the 1980s, along with with the first mobile phones. 2G allowed the introduction of mobile texting, 3G brought data capabilities and smartphones, and 4G brought it all to us faster. Today, we’re on the precipice of 5G, which promises to supercharge the internet of things: self-driving cars, toothbrushes, pet feeders, and millions of other smart devices designed to communicate with each other, gather user data, and personalize their functionality.

On March 31, 2017, Arizona Governor Doug Ducey signed House Bill 2365, streamlining the permitting process for faster wireless networks, and the state became the first to pass legislation in preparation of 5G, which will use millimeter radio waves — shorter, more direct radio waves on higher frequencies. While much faster than 4G technology, millimeter waves are less agile. They can’t easily permeate buildings, and they are more likely to get disrupted by foliage or rain. Thus, the deployment of 5G depends on large-scale infrastructure development in the form of thousands of additional small cell towers.

“This is coming to your neighborhood at some point. They’re going to be putting up poles, up to 50 feet high with boxes on top, and they’re going to put them in the right-of-way right on your property, right in your front yard,” says Kelley, “They are forcing the installation of this technology.”

* * *

Ninety miles east of Tucson, the Dragoon Mountains bisect the desert. Rocky outcrops line Interstate 10, and the hillsides are dotted with the sporadic green of grasses and cacti, as well as tall plumes of white yucca flowers. The area is sparsely populated with small rural towns and agricultural operations, and the pace of life is quiet and slow. Out here, it’s easy enough to find pockets without cellphone reception, and Wi-Fi is still relatively uncommon.

Portman had intended to move to the Dragoon Mountains with her children. She planned to stay with a friend on his farm, or work-trade for lodging at a retreat center. Anything, she thought, to get away from the electrical assault she experienced in the city. But her teenage son didn’t want to leave his friends. And her 3-year-old daughter lives part-time with her father, who doesn’t want her to move out of town. For now, Portman says, she’s stuck in the fight.

Kelley, meanwhile, did significant research before moving into her current Tucson home, evaluating its proximity to cell towers and neighbors’ homes, “to ensure that whatever came through the air would be as minimal as possible.”

For years now, Kelley has received phone calls from all over the world, often from those too sensitive to work or leave their homes. “They can’t participate in normal life activities,” she says. They may have difficulty working or living in grid-connected neighborhoods. Some seek out communities made up of others with similar electrical, environmental or chemical sensitivities. The town of Snowflake, Arizona — four hours north of Tucson — has become one such haven, due to its isolated geography. Others have flocked to Green Bank, West Virginia, which is located inside the National Radio Quiet Zone, an area protected by law from cellphone and Wi-Fi signals, for astronomical purposes.

But Kelley says, “Moving out to the middle of nowhere isn’t necessarily the solution.” She notes that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is currently working on infrastructure for rural broadband deployment. Essentially, she says, even if you move, it’s likely to follow you.

With the further saturation of cell towers, smart meters, high-voltage train tracks, high-frequency radio stations, and above all, the deployment of 5G wireless technology, Portman and Kelley believe that the number of EHS sufferers will skyrocket. And they maintain that those already experiencing EHS symptoms are the canaries in the coalmine, being overlooked by the rest of us.

In October, the FCC voted to limit the control of local municipalities over public rights-of-way, in order to allow tech companies to deploy the infrastructure necessary for 5G deployment. On October 31, several municipalities and organizations, including the League of Arizona Cities and Towns, sued the FCC for the “unlawful pre-emption of local and state government authority.” The U.S. Conference of Mayors and dozens of cities and counties across the United States are also challenging the FCC’s decision.

“With the advent of 5G, it is clearer than ever before [that] since the start of the wireless revolution in the 1990s, the FCC and telecommunications industry [are] promoting wireless tech at the expense of public health and safety,” Kelley says. “The public is not protected.”

Back at Portman’s apartment, sunlight streams through the side door, bouncing off the tinfoiled window and making shapes on the wall. Portman perches on a living room chair, and her daughter clings to her like a tiny koala. It’s nearing naptime, and like most children in 2018, her daughter has begun whining for the phone. “You don’t need that. It’s not good for you,” says Portman, gently wrapping her in a hug. “Let’s get you some tea.”

When I ask about her biggest fears, Portman glances down at her daughter. “One of my greatest fears is that we are marching toward a future that’s really dangerous. And my fear is that I have no power or control over the choices we’re making collectively as humanity.”

She pauses and looks me in the eye. “But we don’t have to choose this path.”

The post Inside the Great Electromagnetic Resistance appeared first on Narratively.

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I knew I was in trouble by the way Mami said my name. For 14 years, she usually called me “Georgie” — anglicized with a thick Puerto Rican accent — but on that summer day in 1996, my mother pronounced it in Spanish. I followed her voice into my bedroom, where she told me to shut the door. And the instant I saw my unsent, unfolded note in her hands, I knew our relationship was about to change.

“¿Que es esto?”

I feigned having no idea what it was. But her unwavering glare convinced me to look again. Given that my native tongue had stunted seven years earlier when we left the Island of Enchantment, I stumbled over the vocabulary of a first-grader. “Solo una nota para Amaya.”

I was certain, with her limited English, she couldn’t understand what I’d written, which was about a boy in my school. Then she mentioned Ricky by name, inquiring why this note was insisting that I loved him. I couldn’t answer. I didn’t know how, in either language, at least not out loud. The words had only ever existed on paper, meant for the eyes of an open-minded friend — not for my mother, who stared as she waited for a response, nor my father, who stayed out of sight that evening, unable to look at me altogether.

Mami said my name as she had before: the “Jor-” harsh as a hurricane’s breath in whore. She then asked, “Tu eres gay?”

The question stunned me. I had no clue that the Spanish word for “gay” was gay. It was never said, not in my house. After all, Miami as a whole was different than its portrayal on TV — a closed city of open beaches and open minds; the place that had recently allowed both Gianni Versace and The Birdcage to come out. Only 20 miles beyond that mirage, however, lay a scorching land saturated by a melting pot of devout Hispanics. True, we were first to embrace metrosexuality in pop stars like Ricky Martin — my mother’s idol — but the only homosexuals presented on Telemundo were flamboyant fortunetellers and feisty jesters. Caricatures. And there my mother was, asking if I was one: un gay.

I couldn’t deny the evidence. I wouldn’t. Plus, she wasn’t asking if I was gay so much as how. I assured her it wasn’t my choice, that it was just the way I turned out, that neither she nor Papi did anything to cause this — clichés by today’s standards, but at the time, I was on my own. No one ever taught me what to do if my parents found out I was gay. I wasn’t ready.

I explained myself delicately in what proved to be yet another language foreign to her. Still, no matter how much thought I put into each answer, she kept jumping to the next, until I realized it wasn’t that my responses were being ignored; they simply weren’t what she wanted to hear. I became disengaged, then defensive, on autopilot by the time she posed a question that blended in with the others. Was I OK with this “situation,” Mami wanted to know, or did I want to change it?

Given how much it would determine the next few years of my life, I should have considered my answer with greater care. But her interrogation had become so unbearable, I would have confessed to murder if it meant getting me out of that room. So, to the question of whether or not I wanted to change, I shrugged — a defeated, indifferent shrug that condemned me to my sentence. It was the mere promise to receive treatment that would effectively revert me back into isolation.

* * *

And so it was set for later that week: my first “therapy” session. Eight p.m. Thursday night. The 30-minute car ride ended as Mami pulled into someone’s driveway — a private residence with the lights all off. Dragging my feet toward the porch, I stopped when I read the sign by the door: “Welcome to the Wild House.”

We were soon greeted by a married couple who kept the place lit by candle. They were in their early 40s, and I was as much struck by the woman’s assertiveness as I was her husband’s handsome face and salt-and-pepper hair. The four of us had a short conversation before the man took me into another room, while his wife stayed with my mother. As I imagined the details of this treatment, my heart skipped at the idea of us being alone in a dark room. There, he warned me of the personal questions he was about to impose, so I braced myself to talk about Ricky Gonzalez, the boy in the note that started all of this. Instead, the man asked, “Who do you think of when you masturbate?”

I thought of John Stamos and Jonathan Taylor Thomas immediately, but I pretended to mull it over before answering. Which made him smile, what could’ve been labeled a seductive grin, frankly. He did this all throughout his sexually explicit questionnaire, and as I wondered whether this man’s marriage was a sham, he said, “Can I be honest about what I think? Of you?”

Gulp. “Of course.”

“See, I don’t think you’re really gay.”

“I’m not?”

“No. But I know why you think you are. Follow me so I can show you.” He put his large hands on my shoulders, and I gulped again, my imagination way ahead of us.

He guided me into another room, this one brightly lit, bare and windowless. There, he told me to stand in the middle of the room, then he proceeded to open the walls, which were actually accordion-style closet doors. At once, I was surrounded by eyes, dozens of eyes belonging to porcelain statues — religious figures with rosary beads over their shoulders. I had no idea who these people were, but the anonymous faces unnerved me, as did the already-lit candles.

The man explained that I was to kneel in front of one statue in particular and close my eyes and think about the “question” of my sexuality. “If you remain still, you are who you say. But if you lean forward, it means the saint is moving your body to confirm that you’re confused.”

I was dubious, but I humored him, and after a few minutes of kneeling, I was indeed wobbling to and fro. Once we finished, the man boasted how the saint had shown my true self despite my resistance. And he was right; my body had continued to rock back and forth. It had nothing to do with my knees endlessly pressing against the tiled floor. Nothing to do with aching muscles throwing off my balance. Absolutely nothing to do with my eyes remaining shut as I waited for this ridiculous test to be over. No, the spirit had proven that I was, in fact, a fauxmosexual.

That still didn’t explain why — something he waited until we’d rejoined my mother to reveal. My being confused, he told us, and the reason the saint had been able to move me around, was because I had a gay demon making me believe I liked men.

Luckily, his wife added, the two of them happened to know how to get rid of it. She didn’t divulge what that entailed, but she insisted we take our time before deciding whether to proceed. “But remember,” she said, “the longer it’s in you, the harder it’ll be to get out.”

Once we were alone, I expected Mami to scoff along with me at the ridiculous idea. Instead, she asked if I would do it. As far as I was concerned, this exorcism wasn’t to keep me from going through this “situation,” but so that she wouldn’t have to. Still, even then I knew: For Mami to see my truth, I’d have to rule out their lie first. “Si remedio no tengo,” I said, and meant it; I really had no choice.

And a few weeks later, we returned to the Wild House.

I came dressed in an old shirt and shorts and brought a change of clothes, as instructed, still having no idea what would happen. The couple greeted us as if my mother and I were the first to arrive at their dinner party. But the only thing they would serve, we soon learned, were a pair of birds I could hear cooing and clucking as I was escorted into another dark room, made to stand beside two covered cages.

The ceremony began once I’d stripped down to my shorts, bare feet against the cool floor. I had agreed to keep my eyes closed the whole time, no matter what I heard or felt. As the birds’ protests increased, so did my suspicions. They’re not really about to—

Then came a tickling on my arms and neck. Feathers.

Oh, crap, they’re totally about to—

And suddenly, the loud crack inches above me expelled every thought from my body. One shock was replaced by another: the surprising warmth on my scalp, pouring down my neck and shoulders like heated massage oil; the rasp of his chanting; the silence of the birdcage.

The next thing I knew I was scrubbing the red off my body, in their shower. Before we left, the couple handed us a paper bag — leftovers from the Wild House, including their fruitless offering, my bloody clothes, and the responsibility of their disposal. Mom and I found an undeveloped street on our way home, where I threw the doggie bag behind some trees before returning to the getaway car. We shared a morbid laugh, afraid of the alternative. Still, the drive back was long, quiet, awkward — as if we had buried a body. Maybe just part of a body. Part of me.

No. For that to be true, I would have felt different. Which I didn’t. Guilty, yes, like a fraud, for helping the couple con my mother. For staying quiet as they took advantage of her desperation. But nothing else had changed.

When we pulled up into the garage, Mami used the Spanish pronunciation of my name again. But this time, I didn’t feel like I was in trouble. Instead, she told me not to tell anyone the details of what happened, not even my father, who apparently still believed I was seeing an after-hours psychologist. I wasn’t sure whether she knew beforehand what was going to happen, but it was clear that either way, her regret was immediate. I figured this would give me relief; instead, my guilt grew stronger.

During my follow-up interview a few weeks later, the couple discovered my demon was still lusting after Uncle Jesse and JTT — and I threw in Urkel just to spite them. They concluded that the failure was my own fault, that I’d lied about wanting to change. The man explained this to my mom while sneaking glares at me, his demeanor that of a sore loser, as he lost the flirtatious charm ironically meant to seduce me into turning straight. He acted as though I’d gone back on our understanding. The only thing I went back on was what I should have embraced all along: my “situation.” Because I wasn’t confundido. I wasn’t poseído. I was proud to be un gay once again.

* * *

Of course, just because the whole experience gave me affirmation didn’t mean it changed my mother’s view. Horrified by the animal sacrifice, she decided on a more practical cure: a Catholic priest willing to perform what was tantamount to a back-alley exorcism.

Again, I was instructed to keep my eyes closed, but the only thing to be spilled on me this time was holy water. Sure enough, just minutes into the priest screaming in-the-name-of and by-the-power-in, the droplets came. Ongoing, tiny random ones that made me peek. Apparently, that wasn’t actually holy water I’d felt. It was spit — sprayed all over my face by the overzealous priest. Holy as his saliva may have been, it was not enough to rid me of my gay demon.

Two botched exorcisms later, Mami admitted that the whole possession thing was a stretch. That was not, however, an indication she had given up on trying to “cure” me. For the next attempt, I was taken to a real psychologist during real office hours. This time it was my father who took me. He waited outside during my preliminary session with this doctor, with whom I felt much more comfortable answering questions. Half an hour later, she had “heard enough,” and called my father in to join us. She seemed disturbed while sharing her diagnosis with him: “You came here with your son, saying you needed help, so he can become straight again. Which is why I propose we schedule an appointment, so that I can help — help you accept him for who he is.”

For some reason, we never saw that psychologist again.

In the years that followed, the extent of our progress was to not discuss it. I never told Mami about my first boyfriend, and I introduced my second only as “mi amigo.” Meanwhile, that three-letter interlingual word continued to go unmentioned in our household. In fact, it would never be mentioned again until long after I had moved out.

By the spring of 2010, I was 28, which meant I had been out to my parents for exactly half of my life. I was in my Greenwich Village apartment when Mami called to ask if I had heard the shocking news.

“Ricky Martin?” I asked. I had indeed, though my surprise wasn’t about his sexuality, simply that he had finally made it public.

“¿Puedes creerlo?” she gushed, like a gossiping schoolgirl. She, apparently, was flabbergasted that a heartthrob of such high status — whom she’d had a crush on, no less, and a Puerto Rican to boot — could be “¿Gay? ¿Ricky Martin?” She wasn’t upset by the news. I think she was stunned that she had blinded herself to what had been obvious all along. Again. But while I responded to his coming out with a shrug, the best part was Mami’s reaction. She became obsessed, proceeding to watch and read every interview on the subject. She even bought his autobiography, in which he explained that it wasn’t a choice, how hard he struggled coming to terms with it, what it took for him to do so at last — basically everything I had told her a decade and a half earlier. Hearing it from me was listening to the rants of a demon-possessed 14-year-old. But Ricky Martin’s words on paper were scripture.

Ultimately, that’s how Mami came to accept homosexuality, and by extension, me — because of Ricky fuckin’ Martin. Suddenly gay was part of her vernacular, and she often asked about my new boyfriend: before they met, after they met, and after we broke up. All this thanks to a man neither of us had ever met.

And that’s precisely what I told him a few years later, when I attended his book signing: Thank you for being an inspiration — not to me so much as my mom, to whom I couldn’t get through the way he had. I rambled quickly and vaguely, yet he understood right away, seemed genuinely touched. While signing the book, he even indulged me in saying hello in a video, which moved Mami to tears. But it was in the book I had yet to send her, within those handwritten words, “Love, Ricky,” that it came full circle — a journey that began all those summers ago, when my mother found the unsent note professing my feelings toward a boy with that same name.

But that was her journey; mine was still in progress. Because ever since that night at the Wild House, my resentment escalated, until I stopped trying to stop it. In all those years I waited for my mother to accept me, I never once considered doing the same for her. Yes, some of her actions may have been misguided and ignorant, but neither hate nor ill will were ever factors. She never abandoned me or made me feel she’d stopped loving me. And just as I’d never been taught what to do if Mami found out I was gay, neither had she.

Eventually I found the empathy I needed to embrace her wholeheartedly. Only then could I cleanse myself of that destructive demon called bitterness, and the real exorcism occurred.

The post My Coming Out Story, Starring a Priest, an Animal Sacrifice and Ricky Martin appeared first on Narratively.

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“And now call the dog,” said Judge Edward Kimball to the bailiff. Did he smile when he said it? Did he look embarrassed? Judge Kimball was a serious man — a graduate of George Washington University and Harvard Law, appointed to the District of Columbia municipal court by President Wilson in 1914. He was a well-respected judge and a fixture of D.C. society. So why was he putting a dog on the stand?

The case was a pet ownership battle. The plaintiff, Maj. Gen. Eli Helmick, said that the dog was Buddy, purchased in 1920 from Brockway Kennels in Baldwin, Kansas, which had advertised 75 “white, intelligent, shaggy, handsome trick Eskimos.” For almost two years, the family raised the pup, until one day in November 1921 it went missing. Months later, Florence Helmick visited Keeley Morse’s hat shop, where customers were greeted by a fluffy, friendly white dog that Florence insisted was her Buddy. She demanded Morse hand over the animal. When he refused to surrender the dog, which he called Prince, the Helmicks brought him to court.

Animals and the law have been linked since the Code of Hammurabi declared, “If the ox gore a free-born man and kill him, the owner shall pay one-half a mina in money.” Throughout the medieval period, similar laws were made to govern animals as property, and courts even punished animals accused of hurting humans. It was not until the 1860s, however, that the law began to view pets as something separate from livestock. On April 12, 1867, due to the lobbying of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, the New York legislature passed an act “for the more effectual prevention of cruelty to animals,” which forbid unnecessary “maiming” and banned cockfighting and dogfighting. This law set the legal framework for pets, now protected from unnecessary violence, to be seen as the legal property of their owners.

However, “there is no distinction between a companion animal and any given piece of inanimate personal property,” writes Tabby McLain, a lawyer specializing in animal custody disputes. When pet owners sue to recover an animal, judges consider the same things they would for any piece of property: purchase records, market value, as well as expenditures made on its care. But that is starting to change, as states pass laws to take the animal’s well-being into account in these decisions — an attempt to treat pets in the courtroom with the love we give them everywhere else, which has its roots in the day the dog was called to testify.

* * *

After they purchased Buddy from the breeders in Kansas, the Helmicks entered their Eskimo in a show, where he won three blue ribbons. General Helmick testified that on November 6, 1921, he attended a service at Arlington National Cemetery. When he returned home, the dog was missing.

The family distributed posters in local newspapers and other locations, but they turned up no leads — until Mrs. Helmick saw the dog in Morse’s shop. She recognized him immediately “by his eyes which are exceptionally bright; by the brown color of his nose; by a slight discoloration of his back; and by a fluffy erectness of the hair on that portion of his anatomy.”

 

When Morse insisted that the dog belonged to him, General Helmick turned to the law, attempting to have Morse arrested. When Detective Sgt. Bradley arrived at the F Street millinery, he was unable to determine who owned the dog, so he impounded it. Rather than pursue a criminal case against Morse, General Helmick followed the advice of the family lawyer and filed a writ of replevin — a legal means of recovering “wrongfully detained” property.

When the case reached Judge Kimball, General Helmick attempted to prove ownership of the dog he called Buddy through photographs and purchase records. He presented the court with receipts and also gave additional evidence attesting to the dog’s pedigree. His case was persuasive, but Morse argued that it didn’t matter who owned Buddy, because the pet in question was a different dog.

Morse claimed he bought Prince on October 24, before Buddy went missing, for $62 or $72 — he couldn’t remember which — at the corner of 34th Street and Fifth Avenue in New York City, not far from Penn Station. He did not have a receipt, but he brought four witnesses to testify that the dog was in his shop before November 6. Additional witnesses stated that the dog seemed happy there.

Morse called the general’s account into question by pointing to the certification documents that accompanied the blue ribbons, wherein the dog-show judges reclassified Buddy as a Samoyed not an Eskimo. Neither pet could be his Prince, he said, who was a simple mutt.

He called an expert witness who testified that the dog in question “was not an Eskimo dog but was a dog,” meaning a mixed-breed dog, going on to say that while “bright eyes were a characteristic of [Eskimo] dogs, that brown color of nose and discoloration of back were common traits of mongrels of this type; mongrel dogs have brown noses as a general rule, whereas well-bred dogs have black noses; and erectness of hair on the back was usual in Eskimo dogs of mixed pedigree.”

The court was baffled. With no other means to resolve such a conundrum, Judge Kimball turned to a method that has since become a cliché in movies and books: He invited the dog to testify. The court officer exited through the back doors and walked the dog to the stand. They did not bother trying to swear the animal in, nor did they need to. Almost immediately, the dog leapt out of its chair.

“With a turn of his head and a swish of his tail, the animal bounded to the chair where Mrs. Helmick sat,” wrote The Washington Times, whose account provides the best narration of the scenes in the courtroom. Greeted as Buddy by the Helmick family, the Times writes, the dog “wag[ged] his tail with enthusiastic joy.”

 

Judge Kimball required no other testimony. He immediately handed the dog over to the Helmicks.

* * *

Helmick v. Morse is one of the first documented examples of a judge giving such agency to a pet. Such scenes are becoming more common. Encouraged by animal advocates who argue that pets should be granted special status, similar to children, the law has started to change. During Hurricane Katrina, some judges allowed a pet’s response to its name to be considered when determining ownership. In 2016, the Alaska legislature amended its marriage and divorce statutes with reference to pets, such that the court ought to “[take] into consideration the well-being of the animal.” Illinois and California followed suit this past year with their own versions of these laws. Although animals do not have civil rights, courts are now starting to recognize what Judge Kimball knew instinctively in 1922: Pets are a unique form of property, with feelings all their own.

And what happened with poor Keeley Morse? After his Prince was taken away, Morse filed a writ of error calling the judgment into question on several grounds, most notably that the service at Arlington Cemetery actually took place five days after November 6. His lawyer appealed to a higher court, but the response has been lost to history.

By late November 1922, Morse owed nearly $7,000 in debts and had lost his business. An ad in the Washington papers noted that “the assignee will sell by public auction … the Fourteenth of December 1922, ladies trimmed and untrimmed hats, hat frames, display stands, dressing-tables, plate-glass tops, etc.” He’d lost everything, and the dog too.

The post The Dog Who Took the Witness Stand appeared first on Narratively.

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“I paid your father the bride price for you, so you have to sleep with me whenever I want,” my husband, Karim, who was several decades older than me, told me when I refused to have sex with him. Perhaps it was the dismissive laughter that followed that was the trigger, or perhaps it was an idea I had considered before, subconsciously. No matter which way I look at it today, I can’t recall the exact moment that I decided to end my life by setting fire to my body to escape the physical and mental violence I had endured for six years.

It just happened.

I was on my way to the hamam (public bath), since we didn’t have a bathroom in our small house outside the city of Herat in Afghanistan. I saved money to be able to afford the luxury of bathing once a week at the public baths. As I was about to leave our tiny one-room apartment, Karim stopped me. He was of a much larger build and girth than I was, and a seasoned albeit unemployed martial arts teacher, and he was able to easily overpower me. And he often did, when he needed to satisfy his urges. He used to call it sex, but to me it was an extremely painful and horrifying violation of my body. Over the years, I had learned to block the trauma out, and eventually I even started to refuse him, at the risk of being severely beaten. On this day, he was angry at me from the night before when I had refused him sex. “I can’t sleep with you anymore, brother,” I told him. I hoped calling him “brother” would disgust him and discourage his advances.

“I do not consider you my husband, and I am not your wife. There is no relationship between us,” I said, which just made him angrier and more violent. I had been beaten and abused every day that I was married to Karim, whose name I’ve changed here for my safety.

He started calling me names and accused me of being unfaithful. “Why do you need to go to the hamam? Did you have sex with another man? Are you going to meet another man, sleep with him?” He shouted expletives loud enough for the neighbors to hear. He was trying to taint my character in the community. An Afghan woman’s reputation is everything, and without it she is vulnerable to all of the evils of the society. Women in Afghanistan have been stoned to death for much less, especially in the more remote and conservative parts of the country where the local tribal laws take precedence over women’s rights. Even within more developed urban parts of the country, the justice system does not favor women, and many women have been sent to prison on charges of moral crimes.

The accusation of being unfaithful and having to prove my innocence after everything I had been through was the final straw. The rage I felt, I hadn’t felt before and haven’t felt since. “You are not a man, you are not a woman, you are an animal,” I screamed at him, and he just laughed at me.

I grabbed the canister of cooking fuel from the kitchen and poured it on myself. He realized what I was about to do and grabbed the matches. The neighbors, who had so far been eavesdropping from a polite distance, barged in to our house. They tried to calm me, but I was wailing as they told me, “Don’t break your home.”

I was still crying when they left. Not speaking a word to Karim, I once again gathered my chador to go wash the fuel off of me. Once again, he pulled me back. I was shaking with anger and still covered in kerosene, and I didn’t think twice about picking up the box of matches from where he’d left it — and lighting one.

I must have caught fire quickly because the hot anger I had felt moments ago soon translated into hot searing pain that took over every particle of my being. I don’t remember much after that.

* * *

I don’t remember much of my wedding day, but I remember being excited in the week before it. I was only a kid, 13 years old, and the idea of wearing lipstick, something that was otherwise forbidden in my house, was all that mattered. I didn’t fully understand the concept of marriage, but the idea of a wedding was thrilling to me. I never once thought of objecting to it. It was only when my husband’s family took me to their house that I understood what all of this meant. I couldn’t stop crying, and I pleaded to my mother, “I wanted to come back home. I don’t want to live here, please.” But it was done, and it couldn’t be undone.

Karim used to be a martial arts teacher in Herat, but now he couldn’t find any work. He was full of hate and anger, which I found out the first night after our wedding. When I was younger, I was told never to let a man touch me; if I did, I would have committed a sin. So on the first night, I cried a lot when he touched my body. I was sent back home the next day, and I complained about him to my mother, because I thought she could save me from him. Instead, she told me that he would touch me again, and that I should let him. On the third night, when I was back with Karim, he tried again. When I resisted and tried to scream, he pinned me down with his body, caught my hands with one of his hands and held my mouth shut with the other. He inflicted me with so much pain that I passed out. I was so sick for the next few days, I had to be taken to the hospital. But as soon as I got better, it happened again. And again.

I begged my father to take me back home — to get me divorced. A woman in Afghanistan cannot initiate a divorce. If a woman even mentions the word divorce, the whole society will come together to convince her to stay with her husband. “Don’t break your house,” people will tell you. They didn’t know that the “house” was killing me.

When I got pregnant the first time, I was still a child and didn’t know that I was carrying a child. Karim beat me for being sick. Then one day we were at his sister’s house and he complained about how lazy I had become, that I was lethargic and had been vomiting. That’s when his sister recognized the symptoms of pregnancy. But if I thought I could expect some compassion from his sister and mother, I was wrong. The women of his family locked me in the shed and took turns beating me for hours to “toughen me up” for motherhood.

Later, in the moment right after I set myself on fire, I remember the neighborhood women who came to my rescue telling me, “Don’t destroy your house with your own hands.”

To everyone, I was destroying a home, not escaping a prison.

* * *

When I woke up in the hospital, covered in burns and writhing in pain, Karim was sitting next to my bed, with my youngest child in his arms. I screamed at the sight of him. “He did this to me! Take him away from me,” I yelled with what strength I could muster. He quietly whispered into my ear that he had told the doctors I was injured in a kitchen accident. But I told them the truth, and the hospital staff helped me contact my parents, who had not been informed of my condition.

I had suffered burns to 70 percent of my torso, hands and legs. I couldn’t walk, and the doctors were certain I would be immobile for the rest of my life. The doctors were kind and treated me even though I had no money. I later found out that the degree of burns I suffered had made my chances of survival very low.

I was broken. I couldn’t picture a future, good or bad. I might have been saved from the fire, but I wasn’t alive. I was between death and life. Setting myself on fire was a defiance, a way for me to take control of my life by ending it. But it seemed to me that I had lost even that battle.

Over the course of many months, the burns started to heal. I went through intensive treatments, and doctors from the U.S. worked on my burns. My bandages were changed several times a day, and I was given an assortment of medications to avoid infections. I couldn’t move much and needed assistance for every small task. It was months before I was even able to sit up straight on my own. Eventually, with the help of physiotherapy and the nurses, I was able to stand up and take my first steps in a year. But as I healed and learned to walk again, I had very few options, and for the sake of my three children, I decided to go back home with Karim. My father offered to fight to get me a divorce, but I couldn’t go through with it because I knew I would lose my children. I had wanted a divorce when I was first sent to live with him, but it was too late now. A divorced woman in Afghanistan has no rights over her children.

Once again, I was at the mercy of the man who had inflicted the most pain on me. If there had been any amount of cordiality between us before, it was all gone now. We lived under the same roof but didn’t talk at all.

A few months later, while I was still recovering, barely able to walk and still in need of medications, Karim took the children and me to India, with the hope of seeking refugee status from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). However, he made it clear that he would not support me or our three children, the oldest of whom was only 7. He would rather we beg outside of mosques to survive.

I spent the first few days in Delhi walking slowly, with great pain and difficulty, around the city looking for work. I was unsuccessful, mostly because I didn’t fully speak the language. We were living on charity; we ate only when someone took pity on us and gave us food. I had no medicine to help with my burns or the pain, and my children barely had a roof over their heads.

While I was out looking for work, Karim made my sons sit outside the mosques and beg for money. He would dress the oldest son in old clothes and make him carry the toddler wrapped in rags to attract compassion from the pious. I was furious when I found out and screamed at him for exploiting our children like that. He beat me in response, but he also never took the children back to the mosque.

He did, however, tell them awful things about me. It was painful to watch him pull my children away from me. He would make sure they didn’t spend time with me, and while I was away working, he would tell them vile things about me — like that I was doing wrong, immoral things when I went to work.

But then, with the help of a few neighbors, I started to learn Hindi, the local language. I already knew a little bit from watching movies while growing up. But as my skills improved, I figured out a way to make some money. A lot of Afghans travel to the Indian capital to seek medical attention, and the majority of them speak no Hindi or English. With my nascent language skills, and having already learned how to navigate Delhi, I was in a position to help them with logistics and translations, for a fee. I reached out to the Afghan community and would assist Afghans visiting Delhi with their needs, such as booking hotels, making doctor appointments, buying medicines, helping them commute using public transport, and even taking them sightseeing and shopping.

It is surprising how you can find strength when you least expect it. When you think you are at your weakest point, you find you can be the strongest you have ever been. There is something spiritual about that experience.

Within a couple of months, I was making up to 2,000 rupees ($30) a day. As my skills improved, my reputation as an Afghan guide spread. I would also take any additional work I could find, like laundry service and providing Afghan meals. Within six months, I was making close to one lakh Indian rupees every month ($1,500). I even bought a small scooter to help me commute around the city so I could save some money.

I was making more than Karim ever had in his life, and I paid for it with daily abuse. But I was determined to make a better life for my children. He would take most of my money away and beat me at the slightest provocation, but being the breadwinner for my family was an empowering feeling. It gave me strength to do what I couldn’t have imagined before.

An argument we had about the money I had been saving, unknown to Karim, quickly escalated into violence. He kicked me in my stomach and tried to strangle me with my own scarf; this time though, I fought back. I screamed for help, and someone called the police. I filed a complaint against him, and the Afghan embassy in Delhi got involved. When the embassy officials came, I told them I wanted to divorce him. They discouraged me from doing so, and once again I was told, “Try to make things work. Why do you want to break your house?”

However, the UNHCR was now aware of my case. They rejected Karim’s appeal for refugee status and registered my case independently. Not long after this incident, my children and I were granted asylum. Karim was furious when he found out, and he went on a rampage at the U.N. office, breaking their windows. The U.N. case workers called me to tell me not to come to the office that day because they feared for my life. This was enough to have him deported.

The final battle with Karim was the hardest. He wanted to take my children with him back to Afghanistan, and within the Afghan law there was nothing to stop him.

I offered him five lakh afghani ($6,600) — all that I had saved and borrowed — in exchange for my children; he asked for 10 lakh afghani. “I spent money on you! I own all of the kids,” he said, trying to argue with me at the embassy. I told them what he had put me through. “The torture, the scars from the burns on my body, and the years of sexual abuse — you should be paying me for that,” I said. I know that the embassy staff, unaccustomed to seeing an Afghan woman talk like that, were shocked. But no one stood up for me.

“Five lakhs for two of them,” I offered. He refused. In the end, with the best efforts of the UNHCR, which provided me with legal counsel to help negotiate with Karim, I only got to keep my youngest son, at a price of four lakhs. I lost two of my children that day, and I haven’t seen them since.

The authorities held Karim in custody long enough for me to escape. Once I left India, he was sent back to Afghanistan. Since then, he has harassed my family every day. He threatened to kidnap my younger sister when my parents refused his proposal of marriage. He has also defamed me to the extent that even if he were to die, I could never go back to Afghanistan without fear of losing my life.

But finally, at the age of 21, I was divorced and free of him.

* * *

That was eight years ago. I have built a new life in a whole new place with my son.

I took up a job as a translator with a refugee center in the country I now call home, my location unknown to Karim and his family. I was able to rent us a small apartment and start our life fresh. I enrolled my son in preschool, and also signed up for evening classes myself, studying English and other subjects. Eventually, I took up two more jobs, one at a laundry service and another as a waitress. I want to earn enough to give my son the life I never had in Afghanistan.

I also learned to drive a car and recently purchased a new Toyota Corolla to drive myself to work and school. As a young girl in Afghanistan, I would fantasize about driving a car, and it seemed like an impossible dream. But now, I drive everywhere I go, and I don’t have a single traffic ticket.

Today, I live in a country where women have so many rights. It has been many years now, but the freedoms I have here still surprise me. I am empowered and more confident than I have ever been. But all the freedom in the world can’t take away the pain of losing my two sons.

I yearn for them every day. The oldest is 13 and his little brother is 9. I am waiting for Karim to die so I can be reunited with my children again. But I imagine he has told them many terrible things about me. They probably think I abandoned them and ran away with the youngest son. I think about the conversation we will have when we meet again. I think of things I will say to convince them that it was never my idea to leave them behind.

Most of the scars on my body have healed nicely. There are hardly any my marks on my face, and the ones on my hands and torso have grown faint. The emotional scars remain, but they remind me that I am stronger. My scars remind me of my loss, my sons who aren’t with me today. They also remind me of the many women who couldn’t escape their tormentors like I did, or those whose only escape was succumbing to the same fire I burned in.

The post The Day I Set Myself On Fire appeared first on Narratively.

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Figures draped in hooded black silk robes disappear through guarded doors, and wardens armed with swords ensure that no intruders will make it inside. Tonight, a ritual will be performed in the Fraternitas Saturni lodge, one of the oldest magical occult orders in Germany — and what goes on behind its doors is a secret.

An air of solemn silence permeates the space, as members prepare for the ritual in the antechamber and the initiates find their appointed seats in the main lodge room. Candles are lit as apprentices begin to gather on the left side of the room. Master fellows can be found on the right, and the master of the chair claims the space behind the altar at the front. Once all of the members have congregated in the main atrium, they form a magical chain of brotherhood, performing a rhythmic breathing exercise as they prepare to summon the energy of Saturn. A hammer strikes the door three times.

“The lodge is opened!” the Second Warden declares.

Music, possibly a classical composition from Mozart’s Magic Flute, plays as the First Warden addresses the brothers and sisters of the order, inviting them to meditate before incense is burned throughout the room.

The Master of Ceremonies begins to chant:

“The primeval serpent

The great dragon

Who was and who is

And who lives through the eons of eons

He is with your spirit!”

Three black candles of Saturn are set ablaze, and the Master of Ceremonies uses a magic dagger to trace the planet’s sigil — which looks like two intersecting Vs split down the middle with a straight line — three times in the air to begin the magical work. The room fills with the sounds of chanting and the steady banging of a gong, and the brothers and sisters eventually take their seats and begin working to mentally transmit Saturnian energy to those members who are not physically present.

The ritual ends with the summoning of the spirit of the Thelemic god Hadit. The candle of Hadit, a symbol of eternal regeneration, burns on the altar as members use the light of the small flame to cultivate internal power. Together they chant, “It works in our spirits! It works in our hearts! It works in our deeds! RA-HOOR-KHUIT!”

That was how they opened the lodge in the early days — before Hitler, before the war, before the founder died. Founded in 1928, at the tail end of an occult revival that swept through Europe in the late 19th century, Fraternitas Saturni is now one of the oldest and most revered magical lodges in Central Europe. Since its founding by Gregor A. Gregorius, it has devoted itself to invoking the dark energy of Saturn and honoring Lucifer, the embodiment of enlightenment and reason.

Banned by the Nazis, riven by internal conflicts following its founder’s death, and written off as little more than a sex cult by its detractors, its influence can be felt everywhere. As the trappings of New Age spirituality are rebranded for the sake of a billion-dollar wellness industry, this mysterious occult group, which did so much to define 20th century mysticism, remains more important than ever.

* * *

At the end of the 19th century, the Second Industrial Revolution ushered in rapid urbanization and the growth of industries like railroads, coal and textiles. Germany and the United States finally caught up to Britain, both in terms of industrialization and in the alienation that comes with life in modern societies. It was in this environment of overwhelming change that occult and pagan doctrines took root.

“They were frustrated with the disenchantment of the world,” says Eric Kurlander, a professor at Stetson University who specializes in German history. “In response, you have a lot of educated people and some scientists, like William James, experimenting with parapsychology, and spirits, and theosophy as ways of reinscribing enchantment into their everyday lives, because traditional religion isn’t working anymore.”

Fraternitas Saturni was conceived out of this mystical, magical brew. In 1925, after the catastrophic First World War, a group of magicians met deep in the dark forests of Germany to discuss the fate of the Law of Thelema, which at its core emphasizes individualism and calls upon adherents to live by their own True Will. The Law of Thelema had been developed by famous occultist Aleister Crowley, who was also a leading figure in the influential Ordo Templi Orientis secret society. The Weida Conference, as this meeting in the forest came to be known, was organized by the leader of the German Pansophical Lodge, Heinrich Tränker, as an exploration of the possibility of uniting the multiple occult groups under Crowley’s leadership, and to establish either the acceptance or rejection of the Law of Thelema. Lodge secretary Gregorius, a member of Crowley’s entourage, was there to uphold the Crowley line.

Born Eugen Grosche, Gregorius was raised in Riesa, Germany, by relatively poor parents. His interest in literature inspired a move to Berlin, where he became an editor of periodical magazines before eventually opening his own bookshop. Deemed a narcissist by many historians, his personal letters shine light on a more nuanced character, one that is equally power-obsessed and concerned with humble matters of family and friendship. Gregorius took an early interest in the occult, but he was not directly involved in it until he met Tränker, who was also a bookseller. As the secretary of the Theosophical Society, an organization formed to promote the study of mysticism, Tränker gave Gregorius the task of building a Pansophical Society in Berlin.

The Weida Conference didn’t go as planned. As Crowley demanded that each attendee accept him as the “World Savior,” the magicians found themselves pontificating well past sunset. During a break, Crowley took an unusual walk through the forest, greeting various natural elemental spirits and tree souls, or so Gregorius reported. In the end, Tränker had a change of heart and disputed Crowley’s claims of supreme leadership, causing a portion of the Pansophical Lodge to openly turn against him. Crowley left Germany, and a great schism formed between these two magic societies, which eventually led to the collapse of the Pansophical Lodge. Out of its ashes, Gregorius formed the Fraternitas Saturni, a magic society that would accept Crowley’s teachings but would not answer to him.

Crowley cuts a powerful, controversial path through history with his stubborn, flamboyant personality. Although Gregorius admired his teachings, his desire to remain independent of the erratic, larger-than-life Crowley was not an unusual one. Gregorius was adamant that his lodge would answer to no one. That desire for independence aligned with his belief that Saturn, “the highest planetary intelligence of this solar system,” not Crowley, was the ultimate spiritual leader, and it served as motivation to form the Fraternitas Saturni brotherhood.

One spring afternoon in 1928, Gregorius sat behind his typewriter drafting a letter to Crowley, choosing his words carefully, walking a careful line between asking for support from his mentor and making it sound like he was asking for permission. The convoluted prose style common to the occultists of the day, which may read like gibberish to the uninitiated, worked in his favor.

“We are fully aware that it is a grave undertaking to revive the old Saturnlodge of the Middleages, which is disappeared (not known, disappeared below the surface) since centuries. We also know that — on steep path, through hard ordeals — we will have to face Saturnus the (guardian) of the Threshold,” he wrote, before coming to the tricky part. “Now we ask, you, highly honoured Master, to lend us your benevolence and to let us have your spiritual support.”

There is no evidence that Crowley actually responded to this letter, but Gregorius claimed to have received his approval. On Easter Saturday, 1928, the Fraternitas Saturni lodge officially opened, probably using a similar ritual to the one described at the beginning of this article, which is drawn from Stephen E. Flowers’s The Fraternitas Saturni. It would soon change the course of European occultism.

Gregorius’s lodge was a unique blend of Scottish Freemasonry, Luciferianism, astrological mythology and Indian yoga systems, with an emphasis placed on the unique power that its adherents believed could be drawn from the dark side of Saturn. Using Gregorius’s Berlin bookshop as its base, lodge members experimented with the magical effects of high-frequency sound and electromagnetic fields — techniques they used to develop an instrument known as the Tepaphone, which they believed capable, when powered by sufficient magical will, of killing people from a great distance.

Its members were some of the first Europeans to dabble in practices that are today considered bedrock principles of spirituality: meditation, astrology, working with chakras. But the most lasting legacy of the lodge has been its belief that the benefits of magic have to be earned through the rigorous application of traits like self-discipline and hard work — what today is known as self-help.

“The point is, whatever you dislike can actually be quite important to you,” says longtime member Ralph Tegtmeier. “So, you have to address it, because if you don’t it will keep controlling you, whether you realize it or not. This realization is really actually what the [Fraternitas Saturni] is about.”

That realization is also what Fraternitas Saturni members mean when they talk about Saturn Gnosis — the ability to draw on the power of a far-off planet in order to steel oneself for the difficult things in life. It’s a “strict, severe principle,” in Tegtmeier’s words, and it is what kept the group going even when it ran afoul of the Third Reich.

It is no secret that the Nazi party was devoted to the occult. SS leader Heinrich Himmler used his power to create a religion intended to rival Christianity, complete with its own wedding rituals and a mythology based on a hodgepodge of Norse myths and pagan symbolism. He frequently consulted his personal astrologer, Wilhelm Wulff, on war strategy, and he founded the Pendulum Institute, which employed astrologers and pendulum dowsers on behalf of the German navy to locate enemy ships at sea.

Those occultists who were able to charm their way into the inner circle of the Reich found power, money and respectability. Those on the outside had a simple choice: collaborate, flee or die. Hitler had banned all occult organizations by 1937, and Gregorius closed his bookstore and fled, first to Switzerland, and then to the picturesque lakeside town of Cannero, Italy. In 1943, he was arrested, repatriated to Germany, and held in detention for a year before being released without charges, which could mean that he chose to collaborate — or that the Nazis simply didn’t see the dark side of Saturn as an appreciable threat. When the war ended, Saturn was waiting. Gregorius set about rebuilding his lodge from scratch.

Delayed by the Soviet occupation of Germany, it took another five years for the Fraternitas Saturni to officially become active again. Once Gregorius made it back to West Germany, the group resumed its frequent publication of occult papers and formed smaller lodges in many German cities, marking a period of considerable growth.

* * *

The lodge gathers before the altar, and the members watch as the master of the chair invites a woman, the Priestess, up on stage. They have sex while the other members watch, waiting for the pivotal moment when a live black rooster will be killed, its blood caught and smeared over the master of the chair’s body.

This is the Ritual of the Five-Fold Alpha, a sex magic ceremony inspired by the teachings of Crowley, as described in Flowers’s book, which follows the history of the Fraternitas Saturni from its founding through the late 1960s. Although the details are salacious, they are accurate. Flowers’s book is no trashy expose, but rather a scholarly work based on leaked Fraternitas Saturni documents and informed by interviews with members of the group, including Tegtmeier. It describes a group at a crossroads between the Victorian occultism of an earlier era and the low-key spirituality that would become a hallmark of the 1970s. Current members are encouraged to make the rituals their own — substituting wine for chicken blood, for instance — as they find their own path to harnessing the power of Saturn Gnosis.

“We have a different kind of membership [now], because people change,” says Tegtmeier, who describes the modern Fraternitas Saturni as a progressive organization, molded to the needs of its members. “There’s a very welcome contribution of Americanism to international and global culture, of this ‘do it yourself spirit,’ which wasn’t around in the 1920s.”

Nearly 100 years after its founding, Fraternitas Saturni remains at the forefront of modern occult spirituality. It is still a distinctly European organization (you have to speak German to join), but its influences are felt in the work of influential occult authors and thinkers throughout the world.

Only six people are publicly known members, making it difficult to trace any particularly powerful individuals, but the Fraternitas Saturni has acted as a rite of passage of sorts for numerous influential occultists. Some have had a brief membership in the lodge before moving on to other groups, while others have simply engaged in discussion or disputes with Fraternitas Saturni members. Either way, its beliefs and practices trickle into art, literature and conversation, to be passed on to the next generation of occult movers and shakers.

“You have subcultures in America that are into ritual magic, chaos magic, ceremonial magic, and they’ve been heavily influenced by the European occult revival,” says Mitch Horowtiz, author of Occult America, who believes that spirituality as it exists today wouldn’t be possible without the influence of groups like Fraternitas Saturni and the 19th century occult revival that preceded it. Tegtmeier believes that the most lasting influence of the group is its emphasis on empowering members to use Saturnian energy for what can only be called self-help.

“Getting in contact with Luciferian or Saturn Gnosis may be a life changer,” he says “It was for me.”

And so, Gregorius’s founding belief in the power of Saturn, in discovering that the darkness contains light, continues to impact lives today.

“When the ego has reached the dark gate of Saturn in its spiritual development, it is considered ripe to cross the threshold to higher realizations lying in the spheres behind it, he writes. “Then Saturnus the guardian of the threshold, the Lord of Karma, lowers the torch of death.”

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