Judge Robin Camp was widely criticized for how he handled Alexander Wagar's previous sex assault trial. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Todd Korol

On Tuesday, a Lethbridge, Alberta courtroom will hear closing arguments in the sexual assault trial of 29-year-old Alexander Wagar.

The trial was held in Lethbridge instead of Calgary because of the negative attention surrounding Federal Court Justice Robin Camp, who acquitted Wagar the first time around of raping the complainant, a 24-year-old Indigenous woman identified only as JM.

During the first trial, Camp, you may recall, asked the complainant "Why couldn't you just keep your knees together?" as she testified to being raped in the basement bathroom of a house party in 2011.

Read more: 'Keep Your Knees Together' Judge Robin Camp Is Too Incompetent To Remain on the Bench

He also asked why she didn't sink her "bottom" into the basin of the sink "so he couldn't penetrate you" and advised her that "sometimes sex and pain go together." And in the end, he found Wagar to be credible and acquitted him. But that decision was overturned on appeal, and Camp's place on the bench has since been formally called into question.

The complainant said she was homeless and had substance abuse issues at the time she was raped. Camp's comments "made me hate myself," she testified at his judicial inquiry. And for the last couple weeks, she's gone through the entire process again. From the sounds of it, this time around wasn't much easier.

According to CBC reports, Wagar's re-trial opened with him shouting "it's never too late to tell the truth" while JM testified.

JM, 19 at the time of the alleged assault, said Wagar's brother invited her to the party and that Wagar followed her into the bathroom after she went inside to throw up. She said he told her he was going to "fuck her" then, "he rips my pants open, he pulls my pants down, puts me down on the bathroom counter."

Despite JM telling Wagar he was hurting her, and telling him to stop, "he just keeps going," she said. She testified that Wagar washed her in the shower and that Wagar's brother walked in on them, ending the assault. Later Wagar's brother called her a "slut." The next day, she said she went to a shelter and reported what had happened.

While she recalled this painful testimony, Wagar reportedly blew kisses to a woman in the gallery and "smirked."

He and his attorney Pat Flynn, proceeded to lay out their own version of events. They claim JM, who testified to being attracted to women, consented to the sex. And that she was scorned when she saw him with another woman after they had sex—a woman she was attracted to—and was angry about being called a "slut" by his brother, so she made up the rape.

It gets worse, though.

Flynn, who reportedly grilled the complainant for four and a half hours, also suggested that when Wagar pulled his dick out during the party, JM was into it because he was "larger than most men."

"Is it fair to say you were attracted to Alex when he dropped his pants?"

When Wagar took the stand in his own defence, he noted that he was "pretty fucking bitter" about having to stand trial a second time.

He claimed JM wanted to have sex with him, though he said he didn't receive explicit consent.

Prior to the alleged assault, "she grabbed my penis and complimented the size of it," Wagar said. At one point, he literally acted out the alleged rape for the court.

"Wagar now sitting on the edge of the witness box trying to demonstrate how the sex happened on the bathroom sink," the CBC reported. He also detailed for the court how he showered her.

A CP story said the judge himself, Jerry LeGrandeur, advised Wagar not to be so explicit.

"I can tell you right now it was consensual, this is all bullshit," Wagar testified. "What she wanted was just to get some revenge."

In summary, a marginalized woman says she was raped at a party; she reports it to police the next day; at her first trial, she's slut-shamed and victim blamed by a judge who questions why she didn't stop the rape from happening; at the second trial, she's called a liar by the accused, who appears to be joking around during her testimony; she's questioned for hours by the defence attorney, who accuses her of making up the rape as "revenge"; she's told she was attracted to her alleged rapist's big penis; she has to watch him act out the alleged assault for the court.

At one point, she asked defence attorney Flynn, "why would I want to go through something like this if it wasn't real?"

Anyone who still has trouble believing sex assault victims should be asking themselves the same thing.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

Photo via Flickr user Gage Skidmore

Everything you need to know about the world this morning, curated by VICE.

US News

Trump Promises to Pull US Out of Trans-Pacific Partnership
President-elect Donald Trump outlined his priorities for his first 100 days in office in a YouTube video Monday, pledging to put the word out about US withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership on his first day in the White House. Trump called the trade deal "a potential disaster" and said he would negotiate "fair bilateral trade deals" instead. —The New York Times

Kanye West Hospitalized in Los Angeles
Kanye West has been hospitalized at UCLA Medical Center after reportedly suffering from "exhaustion." Los Angeles police said they responded to a disturbance call on Tuesday afternoon, before the incident was treated as a medical matter. West's remaining Saint Pablo Tour dates have been canceled. —Noisey/CNN

Alt-Right Leader Says America Belongs to White People
Richard Spencer, a leader of the alt-right movement, gave a speech in Washington, DC, in which he quoted Nazi propaganda and proclaimed America is white people's "creation, it is our inheritance, and it belongs to us." Video shows some activists in the crowd lifting their arms in a Nazi salute and shouting, "Heil victory." —VICE News

Driver of Deadly Tennessee School Bus Crash Arrested
An elementary school bus driver has been arrested after five children were killed n a Chattanooga, Tennessee, crash. Johnthony Walker, 24, faces five charges of vehicular homicide. Another 24 children on the bus were hospitalized with injuries.—CBS News

International News

Japan Shaken by 7.4-Magnitude Earthquake
A 7.4-magnitude earthquake hit Japan's eastern coast early Tuesday morning. Only minor injuries were reported after resulting waves were smaller than initially feared, and tens of thousands followed evacuation warnings in anticipation of a possible tsunami. A cooling system at the Fukushima nuclear plant stopped working briefly, but Tokyo Electric Power said it had restarted the system. —BBC News

Egyptian Court Overturns Deposed President's Life Sentence
Egypt's Court of Cassation has overturned a life sentence against former president Mohamed Morsi and ordered he be re-tried in a case centering on accusations of espionage. Morsi, the leading figure in the Muslim Brotherhood, was ousted by military chief Abdel Fattah al Sisi in 2013 after protests against his rule. —Al Jazeera

At Least 141 Civilians Killed in Weeklong Aleppo Bombardment
At least 141 civilians have perished in the past week in eastern Aleppo, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. The monitoring group said hundreds more had been injured and 87 rebel fighters had been killed since Russian and Syrian government forces resumed airstrikes and shelling last Tuesday. —Reuters

Turkish Government Removes Child Sex Bill
Turkish prime minister Binali Yıldırım has withdrawn a bill that would have pardoned men found guilty of raping a minor if they married their victim. Yıldırım said the ruling AK Party would consider ways to find "consensus" on the bill. —AFP

Everything Else

Gigi Hadid Apologizes for Melania Trump Impersonation
The model Gigi Hadid has said sorry for her impression of Melania Trump at Sunday's American Music Awards. "I apologize to anyone that I offended," Hadid wrote in a Twitter note, but also added that she thought "Melania understands show business." —Billboard

Dennis Rodman Charged with Hit and Run
Former NBA star Dennis Rodman has been charged with a hit and run and other offenses in Southern California, according to the Orange County District Attorney's Office. Rodman is accused of causing another vehicle to crash after driving north in a southbound lane. —NBC News

Netflix Drops Obama Biopic Trailer
Netflix has released a trailer for for Barry, a biographical movie about President Obama's time at Columbia University directed by past VICE correspondent Vikram Gandhi. Actor Devon Terrell plays Obama in his undergraduate student days. —TIME

NASA to Light Space Cargo Capsule on Fire
NASA will play with fire in space this week, part of the agency's Spacecraft Fire Experiment (Saffire) mission. The fire safety tests will be conducted onboard on the unmanned Cygnus cargo capsule. —Motherboard

Pope Says Priests Can Forgive Women Who Have Abortions
Pope Francis has written a letter explaining that women who have had abortions can be forgiven by all Catholic priests. It is a continuation of a special dispensation he granted during the "Year of Mercy" that came to an end on Sunday. —VICE News

Nearly 300 Transgender People Killed in a Year
Almost 300 trans and gender-diverse people were murdered in a one-year span, according to Transgender Europe's Trans Murder Monitoring project. Between October 2015 and September 2016, a transgender person was killed every 36 hours, the report says. —Broadly

In Montreal we meet Quebec native Caro Loutfi, the 25-year-old executive director of Apathy is Boring. After growing up in a province known for its political turmoil, Caro noticed a severe lack of youth engagement with the democratic process.

Six years ago she joined the team at Apathy is Boring—an organization that encourages youth to become active citizens through innovative and creative tools. Using her background in art history and personal philosophy for change, Caro has initiated massive youth engagement both in Quebec and across Canada.

In this episode of Common Good, we'll find out more about this group inspiring dialogue, choice, and action amongst young Canadians. We will also hear Caro's vision for the future of youth engagement in Canada.

Presented by My Giving Moment

A stock image of a church in Tennessee that is not the author's church. Photo via Getty

It's hard to know exactly when I knew I needed to leave the church I had been attending for nearly two decades. This was the church where my kids were christened, the church where I was bathed in prayers when I thought I was on my deathbed. But I have little doubt, that in this burgeoning era of Trump, I'm fortunate not to be there now, because for all the love and respect those people have shown me—and I've reciprocated—I would no longer feel comfortable there. How could I be, when I know that many in the congregation either voted for or supported Donald Trump?

This is a Southern church led by a white Southern pastor in a deep red state with mostly (but not exclusively) white parishioners and an all-white leadership. It is conservative in its foundational principles: against homosexual sex, staunchly pro-life, in favor of the inerrancy of the Christian Bible, the idea that Scripture is literally the Word of God.

This isn't a screed about a racist church, because that would not only be unfair, it would be a mischaracterization. The church is the opposite of racist. It was founded by a white pastor who believes a central part of the calling God has on his life is to unify people across racial lines. When the church was being created decades ago, he literally spent hours walking in black neighborhoods and knocking on the doors of black residents, inviting them to attend and become members.

I watched him rap with a young black church member to illustrate his deep desire for racial harmony. Countless times I heard him say from the pulpit that white people need to own up to racism. He invited a few black reverends to preach, coordinated cross-cultural exchanges and dinners with mostly black churches and allowed me to lead difficult conversations about race within the church.

He did and said things I didn't see being said and done by most white Southern preachers; that's what attracted me to his church. I respected him then, when I was in my mid-20s, and respect him now as a 43-year-old married father of two.

I don't plan to ask him who he voted for because I don't want to know.

Early in the Obama era, I began noticing a disturbing change in the attitudes of some fellow churchgoers. I'd be accidentally copied onto email chains that included vile and often racist descriptions of the nation's first black president. At first, I reminded myself that the people sending and reacting to these emails weren't racist in the most common sense of the word. They deplore the David Dukes of the world as much as I do, would protest alongside me if the Ku Klux Klan scheduled a rally in town, would march down to the school if I told them a teacher had called either of my kids nigger. I'd respond to the emails by telling them how such messages were not cool and explain why before pointing them to more objective facts.

Initially, this seemed to work. They said they appreciated my intervening without quickly labeling or hating them. But the emails and other such messages kept coming, no matter what I said, until I was eventually taken out of the loop.

I trusted them with my kids, they trusted me with theirs, and yet none of that seemed to matter when it came to their views of Obama and his black supporters.

As time went on, I kept seeing similar sentiments in a variety of settings, not just on social media, but in person. These were the same people who prayed with me on Sunday mornings, who I had over to my house for dinner and fellowship, who had me in their homes. I trusted them with my kids, they trusted me with theirs, and yet none of that seemed to matter when it came to their views of Obama and his black supporters.

It was jarring. It was disappointing. Still, I was convinced the best way to handle such things was to remain in the arena, to provide an example that might break through what I hoped was just a fog they were in. That didn't work. Instead, I began being dismissed as either not really black—because I didn't fit the stereotypes too many of them had begun expressing—or overly sensitive about race, if not blinded by the color of Obama's skin.

Still, I stayed. I remained even after the head of the children's church, where my wife and I had been volunteering to babysit infants or teach basic Bible lessons to kindergarteners and elementary-aged children, took me to dinner to tell me I would no longer be allowed to do either of those things because my work—which included sometimes writing positively about Obama and gay people and their right to first-class citizenship—made people in the church uncomfortable. I wasn't a pedophile preying on their children; I was a man whose views on high-profile issues differed from their own, which made me just as dangerous.

I was told my focus was just race while theirs was rightly on Jesus, as though pushing for racial equality was in conflict with God's word.

I stayed after fellow church members declared that it was perfectly reasonable for George Zimmerman to have shot Trayvon Martin after having stalked and chased him down. Everyone knows, they told me, that young black men commit the most crime—then they were shocked when I said that's why I feared for my own black son more than ever. In their minds, it's not racist to believe young black men are guilty until proven innocent because they are over-represented in crime stats, or to believe black people voted for Obama only because he's black. To them, that's just common sense.

I was told my focus was just race while theirs was rightly on Jesus, as though pushing for racial equality was in conflict with God's word. And even then, I stayed.

I stayed because of the fellowship, stayed because my kids loved kids church, because I knew my wife needed the community she felt there. I stayed because in so many ways and on so many days, love, God's love, was the focus—whether that meant raising money for a poor family that just happened to show up at the church's front door, helping clean up the state park as part of outreach work, or visiting the sick in the hospital or the elderly who lived alone. There is a diversity of opinion and life experience in that place that is reassuring and assures the Biblical principle "iron sharpening iron" is personified. The church, and the people who inhabit it, are wonderful in a thousand different ways.

Nothing could convince me to leave because I thought commitment was more important than any discomfort I felt, because I thought it silly to think I had to have everything my way, because I believed—and still believe—that the bulk of the members of that church, and what they do inside and outside of those walls, is life-affirming and God-honoring. I shouldn't leave because you shouldn't leave good people behind if they are struggling with some ugly tendencies they might not even recognize, I told myself. I wrestle with ugliness, too.

That changed when I confessed to my wife that I had begun feeling a real hatred bubble up in me. That, she said, was too great a cost. And after a few fits and starts, we left about two years ago.

It was gut-wrenching but the absolute right decision, and at the right time. Because what's been revealed about people I love and respect—people who would help me and my family to this day if I asked—during the Obama era and the Trump phenomenon has cut me like nothing else. It would have been easier to take if they really were racist. But they're not.

They struggle daily to walk with God in a way that's best for everyone—and still were able to rationalize their way into participating in some of the ugliness that grew up in the wake of the country electing its first black president, and followed that by proudly supporting a man who ran on a platform of open bigotry. I don't yet know how to process that. I don't know if I ever will.

Follow Issac J. Bailey on Twitter.

When most people think of Halifax, they probably imagine the scenic ocean, the harbour, sailboats, lighthouses, and maybe even the hot greasy mess known as the city's official food. But for Nova Scotian native Carlos Beals, the reality of life is far from the idyllic image of the Maritimes. The section of town he's from, north-end Dartmouth, has for years been equated with violent crime—a stigma he's working hard to repair.

After studying criminal justice in Toronto, Carlos returned to his community that he believes is a lot stronger and tighter than outsiders would think. As a member of Ceasefire Halifax, Carlos is working toward empowering youth in the area to take control of their lives and to not let the reputation of their city get them down.

In this episode of Common Good, we follow Carlos as he takes us through his neighbourhood and introduces us to some of the people on the frontlines of the issue.

Presented by My Giving Moment

Trent Davis Bailey was seven years old when his father took him to visit his aunt and uncle in the North Fork Valley of Colorado for the first time. He remembers bits and pieces, like eating homegrown heirloom tomatoes, snow peas, and kimchi around a big table.

His seven cousins lived in a tent at the base of a mountain, surrounded by scrub oak and juniper trees. The children spent their days wandering and exploring, jumping into the nearby irrigation ditch, and dreaming of wild animals hiding from view. At night, the tent lit up, and the glow from inside could be seen in the distance.

For almost two decades, Bailey didn't return to North Fork. His father and uncle had a disagreement, and the visits stopped. As an adult, Bailey became a photographer in New York City, but the Colorado landscape tugged at his psyche until at last it demanded he go back to where it all began.

The photographer didn't know what to expect when he made the journey to the town of Paonia, in 2011. In the beginning, he made connections with a local orchardist and then a metal worker who introduced him into the community. He lived mostly out of his car, sleeping where he could: on the river in a tent, in a barn, on couches.

Bailey's stays in Colorado ranged in duration from five days to six months. He ate fresh-picked figs, fell asleep to the rush of the rivers and woke to the movement of wandering deer. During the longer trips, he fed himself by working on the farms during the harvest.

"People here have a very different sense of how time is experienced," Bailey claims. "Rural time is much slower." A single day stretches out for miles; a lifetime lasts an eternity, punctuated by joys and sorrows and unnameable feelings passed down from one generation to the next.

Bailey's own mother, a gardener, died when he was just four years old, and he's found traces of her left behind in the feral Colorado landscape. His personal history is rooted in the mountains, the soil, and the untamed wilderness.

Bailey assumed his family had since left North Fork, but on his third visit, he met his aunt at a local food co-op entirely by chance. "I was certain that I knew her from somewhere," the photographer explains. At first he assumed he must have photographed her and forgotten it, but the memories gradually came back.

Since then, Bailey has reunited with his cousins, who have grown up to make their own lives. One is a goat farmer, another a house painter; there's a musician, an expert in solar energy, and a clerk at a local grocery store. He saw his uncle, now separated from his aunt, and although he didn't recognize him at first, his voice was instantly familiar—the same as his father's.

Bailey admits that the real North Fork is different from the one he imagined for 20 years. It's more gritty and less romantic. But in every way that matters, it's the same. He doesn't have to choose between the facts and the fiction because they're both equally true to him.

"It feels like home," the artist says of North Fork. He met his girlfriend, who now lives with him in California, while foraging for chanterelle mushrooms in the Colorado forest.

Although he has no plans to live there full-time, the photographer's family has invited him to build a place on their property. He doesn't know if he ever will, but he won't leave this place behind again. He swears to keep coming back until the day he dies. —Ellyn Kail

Photo via Flickr user Gage Skidmore

Being made president-elect hasn't tempered Donald Trump's rage against the media.

On Monday, Donald Trump invited TV executives and reporters to a meeting at Trump Tower, where he berated them for almost a half hour about their "dishonest" and "outrageous" coverage of him and his campaign, reportedly whining about—among other things—a photo NBC News ran that showcased his double chin.

The next day, Trump continued his streak of media criticism, taking to Twitter to lash out at the "failing" and "not nice" New York Times and announcing that he'd canceled his Tuesday meeting with the paper, accusing it of wanting to change the ground rules at the last minute.

That was news to the Times, which hadn't heard that the meeting—which was supposed to consist of an off-the-record session followed by an on-the-record interview—was off until reading about it on Twitter with everyone else. According to the newspaper's spokesperson, Trump was the one who had wanted to change the parameters of the meeting, making the whole thing off the record, which the Times wouldn't agree to.

And then, as quickly as it was canceled, Trump decided that the meeting was back on. According to CNN, he will have both a conversation with the newspaper's heads as well an on-the-record interview.

Maayan Ziv was born with muscular dystrophy which she says has helped her build up a sense of resilience. "People assume that I'm a sweet little girl who has nice dreams," she says wryly, "watch me kill that assumption." A passionate photographer and entrepreneur, she is working to change expectations of how people with disabilities access public spaces. Her app AccessNow uses crowdsourcing to collect and share accessible spots around the city, creating a community that works together ultimately trying to give people the freedom to find ways to do what they want.

As Maayan recounts an experience of wanting to go to a bar with some friends, the frustration in her voice is palpable. "You can literally search for how much the beer's going to be that night... You can find out anything you want about that place... You can't find out if it's accessible."

In this episode of Common Good, we follow Maayan and her friends on a map mission around Toronto's Kensington Market to see firsthand how it works, and to meet the people from the community.

"People with disabilities have faced barriers for centuries," she says, "by the nature of creating a conversation and by just literally doing it and succeeding... There's a lot you can do."

Presented by My Giving Moment

Erica Tremblay is a filmmaker and roller derby athlete known as GoGo Gidget. When she began searching for a topic for her next project after completing her first feature documentary, 2012's Heartland: a Portrait of Survival, the merging of her two biggest passions felt like a natural fit for her. The result is In the Turn, "a queer roller derby documentary."

The film follows Crystal, a ten-year-old trans girl from a small town in Canada, as she finds acceptance and empowerment in a queer roller derby collective. For Tremblay, who says the sport helped her find a feminist awakening as well as the safety and security to come out as queer, the opportunity to highlight the community felt like something she had to do. In the Turn introduces us to incredible athletes who have found happiness through living lives authentic to who they are—and it shows this reality through the eyes of a child.

The film has been screened at more than 50 film festivals and won one of the top prizes at the Atlanta Film Festival, achieving the impressive task of a niche film finding success with a mainstream audience. This month, it's available on iTunes, Amazon, and other on-demand players. VICE called Tremblay at her home in New York City to discuss the film, queerness, and why images of marginalized communities are so important. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

VICE: Can you tell me a bit about how this film came to be?
Erica Tremblay: I knew I wanted to around queer culture, so I decided I'd do a film on queer roller derby because I'd been playing for about seven years at that point, and roller derby had a huge impact on my self-actualization. I decided to focus on the Vagine Regime, . Crystal didn't come into play until about six months into shooting. We'd created a Kickstarter video that showcased some of the athletes you see in the film, and one of them was Fifi Nomenon, who is an out trans skater. Crystal was scrolling through [her mom] Karen's feed on Facebook, and she found that video. She went running into the kitchen and was like, "Mom! They're making this movie, and there's this person called Fifi Nomenon who's just like me."

Karen and Crystal sent us an open letter, which you hear read in the film. At that point, we still didn't think we were going to pull Crystal into this film—and then, about six months into shooting, Crystal called me and was like, "Can I be in the film?" She really wanted to tell her story, and Karen ultimately left it up to Crystal.

Filmmaker Erica Tremblay

One of the things in the story, and one of the things I hadn't considered for trans kids, is that she couldn't play sports anymore once she transitioned.
When I was a freshman in high school, I was really into sports, and I remember not even knowing I was queer at the time. These girls were snickering in the locker room, and they wouldn't change in front of me—they were all laughing and said, "You're a dyke." I didn't even know what that was. I was 15, growing up in the Midwest in the 90s. I quit playing sports after that day. I think a lot of people who have been drawn to [roller derby] can relate. So when the community heard this young person talking about how she wasn't able to play sports because of her gender identity, in some way, we were able to identify with that.

Which speaks to the inclusivity of the Vagine Regime that we see in the film. It has "vagina" in the name, but you don't have to have a vagina to be included.
The Vagine Regime is actually going through a rebranding of sorts—it's now referred to as the VR, to be inclusive of other body parts. When you talk to Injure Rogers, [who founded the Vagine Regime], it started out as a lesbian safe space in roller derby. But over the past 15 years, queer culture has changed, and we realized that needed to expand. The community continues to evolve, and I think this film had a lot to do with opening up people to other experiences.

What do you think the biggest takeaway from your film is?
When you see the impact that discrimination, bigotry, transphobia, and homophobia have on a young person, you can't turn away from it. being able to understand that the things we say, the things that we do, the policies that are enacted, and the people that we vote for really do have an impact on our children. I don't think you have to be queer or from a marginalized group to watch Crystal's story and understand that we need to be listening and inclusive.

I don't think you have to be queer or be from a marginalized group to watch Crystal's story and understand that we need to be listening.

I really felt a sense of palpable joy while watching the film.
We wanted to make a film that celebrates queerness, transness, and these amazing athletes who have a positive story to tell—as opposed to the tragic stories that we hear a lot about from the queer community. We wanted to take all of the tragic sadness and put it in the very front of the film, so we open in this stark region where there's a daily life that this young girl is living. Past the credits, we wanted to show where we go from there and have it be an upward arc. We wanted to humanize these groups of people who have so often been dehumanized.

Did you know that this was going to end up on iTunes and Amazon?
We almost signed a contract with a larger distribution company that probably could've taken our film even further, but in our first meetings, they continued to misgender Crystal. On the day we were supposed to sign the contract, I called my producing partner, Bernard Parham, and was like, "I can't take this film that we've made and put it into the hands of people who don't understand what we're doing." So we walked away from that deal, and it took us another seven months to find a small boutique company that would take us on while really understanding and getting our film. We felt a responsibility to Crystal. It doesn't stop when the cameras are put down: You think you've reached success, and then you find out that these people are rotten all the way up to the top.

Do you know what Crystal is up to now?
She's still very isolated in Timmons, . They screened the film twice in Timmons, so the community got to see it, and she's able to participate in sports now—but these other kids have now been playing sports for four years longer than she has. Even though this film was able to make a positive impact in Crystal's life, there are thousands of kids out there just like Crystal who didn't get to go to the roller derby camp and didn't have Karen as a mother. It's tough to see that even though Crystal has had some progress, there's still so much more she needs.

Follow Britni de la Cretaz on Twitter.

In Crappy First Jobs, we talk to celebrities and other notable people about the strange, funny, and absurd gigs they took before becoming the well-known figures they are today.

From his roles as a scrupulous prohibition officer on Boardwalk Empire to a vindictive villain in Man of Steel, Michael Shannon is bound by nothing—his intensity shatters any notion of what a character should be. Audiences have picked up on Shannon's singular charm as well. He has an inability to be anything but himself: vulnerable, candid, cutting, masculine yet sweet.

When he appeared on screen in both Tom Ford's Nocturnal Animals and Jeff Nichols's Loving at this year's Toronto International Film Festival, the theaters erupted in laughter. The 42-year-old Kentucky native has become one of those immediately identifiable faces in Hollywood—a guy nobody seems to dislike. While some flock to recognizable actors who appear relatable (or likable), people's fascination with Shannon is an anomaly. He's not an everyman; he's not a muscular male lead produced in a lab by film studios; he's not a classically gorgeous movie star, like George Clooney. In fact, he's not like anyone. At times Shannon seems plucked straight out of a Fellini film—his face so expressive, inimitable, that he's able to communicate a range of emotions through a glance (see Take Shelter) or gesture (see Midnight Special).

But films are the furthest thing from his mind right now. "I love this movie, and I'm very proud of it," he recently said, over the phone, of Nocturnal Animals, a violent, enthralling, and layered story within a story about an art gallery owner (played by Amy Adams) captivated by an early copy of her ex-husband's disturbing novel. "But it's kind of hard to talk about movies right now," Shannon explained, with the fate of the country on his mind. "I'm not gonna lie." So, mostly, we didn't.

Instead, Shannon and I discussed some of his early jobs: canvasser, telemarketer, fish-tank cleaner, bookstore clerk. We also discussed the aftermath of Trump's victory, obliviousness, and "the best introduction he's ever gotten in a movie."

VICE: How's your day-to-day right now?
Michael Shannon: It's a disaster. It's a catastrophe. We have to do something. If is left to his own devices, he's going to destroy the world. It's an end-game scenario. We'll figure something out. I'm very moved by all the protesting going on. People are seeming to not settle for this outcome.

Could you see yourself protesting?
I would love to, but I'm in LA. I have my platform, which is the fact that people want to talk to me about stuff, and so I can take advantage of that and tell the world what an asshole I think Donald Trump is. Now, will that change anything? I'm not sure. I have two children, and I'm very scared for them, more than anything.

Given your upbringing in Lexington, Kentucky, did you have an impression that Trump could rise like this?
Here's the thing about Kentucky: There are some fairly urban, cosmopolitan areas. Those areas tend to vote Democrat. Nobody in my family voted for Donald Trump, and we are from Kentucky. They are coal states—Kentucky and West Virginia. I don't know if any of these people who want to go back to coal mining realize that in New Delhi, India, people can't even leave their homes because the air is so dirty that they can't breathe. They've closed down the schools, and people are shacked up in their houses sitting next to air purifiers hoping for the best. The point I always make is that if you can't breathe or drink water, then nothing else really matters.

It certainly puts things in perspective. Can we talk about early jobs of yours? Your appearance in Groundhog Day always makes me smile.
It just goes to show that some people really do start with one line, and they keep going. That's what I did. I am not an overnight sensation, by any stretch of the imagination.

You're a 25-year sensation. What were you doing before that?
I was in Chicago doing non-equity theater, making no money—very small audiences, if any at all. I worked at a pet store. It was this beautiful little pet store in Evanston. It's called the Fish Bowl, on the corner of Dempster and Chicago Avenue. In the entry-level job there, you had to carry big bags of pet food around, do the stocking, and you had to clean the fish tanks. It was one of the worst jobs ever. It's very hard to clean fish tanks because fish basically swim around in their own toilets.

You were 16, 17, cleaning fish tanks.
Yeah, I never lasted super long at any particular job. Super Crown Bookstore was a few years later. It's not even around anymore—not many bookstores are around anymore. That's where I learned about pyramiding. The stacks of books wouldn't all be equal on the table—four books to three books to two books.

What's the worst odd job you had?
Oh, boy. I've had some stinkers. I tried my hand at telemarketing—it's the worst thing imaginable.

I can't see that going well. You strike me as a no-bullshit kind of person.
I can't lie to people. I don't know how telemarketing exists at all. How is anybody good at it? The second that any telemarketer calls me I just hang the fuck up on them. Instantly. I don't let them say anything, and in the moment that I'm hanging up on them, even though I'm hanging up on them, I think back to my days as a telemarketer and very briefly feel sorry for them.

Any other gigs?
Well, I also did door-to-door canvassing for an environmental group—Ralph Nader's thing. You're going door-to-door telling people, "Look we need to worry about air and water quality. It's an issue." And they're like, "No, it's not an issue, and everything is fine." Then they shut the door in your face. It never ceases to amaze me how oblivious people are. It's my least favorite characteristic in human beings. It's like, "Wake the fuck up."

In a way, there's a performative element to those jobs—telemarketer and canvasser.
There is, but I found absolutely nothing attractive about the telemarketing job whatsoever. It was a job that was easy to get. I did not keep it very long. In terms of the environmental job, that was something I was hugely concerned about and really wanted to do something about it. I've always been concerned about the environment.

Did you cry when Trump was giving his acceptance speech?
I didn't watch his speech. I'm not going to. Part of the reason the guy has been elected president is because he's entertaining. So one of my protests is that I'm simply not going to watch anything he does. I feel like you're just feeding the demon when you do that.

You mentioned obliviousness is something you especially don't like in humans. I'm wondering, with this election, has your understanding of people radically changed?
Well, yeah! It makes the last eight years seem like a lie. I was so happy with Obama. It was such a beautiful thing. It really was. But now, it's like, Oh, this whole time there's been this racist, sexist, despicable underbelly teeming underneath that's now been given permission to come out and flaunt itself. Everything feels false now. We have to keep trying to find constructive ways to carry on.

In that regard, how did you sustain hope when you were washing fish tanks?
Oh, you know it was really easy for me because here's my deep dark secret: I never gave a shit whether I made any money at this or not. I wasn't a careerist. I had no aspirations to come to Los Angeles and do movies. I was quietly happy doing plays in the basement of a coffee house for five people. I enjoyed that because I'm weird. You come out to LA, and it can be a very sad place. So many people who so desperately want things that they can't get. I didn't suffer from that. If it happens, it will be interesting. If it doesn't happen, I'll do something else.

At what point did you feel it happened?
I did this play in New York called Killer Joe. I did it in Chicago and London. One night after the show, this guy approached me and said, "Uh, you know, I want to be your manager." I never had a manger. I didn't even know what a manager did. The next day, I went to his office, and he said, "Look, I'll show you what I can do." And he picked up the phone and made a phone call and said, "I just got you an audition. You go to this audition tomorrow, and you're going to get this job, and then you're going to come back here and say, 'Gee, you're a great manager.'" He got me an audition for Jesus's Son, and I went out and booked it. And I was like, "Jesus, this guy is right." That was a fella named Lee Daniels, who we all know now as the producer and director. Before that, he was a manager, and he was my manager. Once I finished the play, Lee said, "You gotta go to LA." I said, "Lee, the last place on Earth I want to go is LA." He said, "Just trust me. You gotta go to LA, and I'm going to crack this open for you." And he did it.

How did you reconcile with LA?
The reason I didn't want to go to LA was because I had a lot of friends in Chicago who were great actors, who were worried about making money and being successful. They would do a few shows and get great reviews, and then they would move to LA and deliver pizzas. To me, going to LA was like sticking your face in the fan. Why go? Don't do it. You're going to chop your face off. I was here less than a month and Lee had me in front of Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael Bay for Pearl Harbor.

How do you feel about your place in film right now? There's like a growing cult of Michael Shannon.
Look, back in the day, before I had kids and was working 20 hours a day, I used to go to movies all the time. And I remember people who inspired that in me. The thought that I would have that effect on someone else is very humbling. At the end of the day, it's so many people who contribute to that. For example, when we were doing Nocturnal Animals, Tom came up to me and said, "I'm going to give you probably the best introduction that you're ever going to get in a movie. Ever." I got this shot. It's low-angle. He said, "Right now, all I need you to do is stand here, and you don't even have to do anything." That's a gift.

Do you worry that there's an audience expectation to deliver the same role in each film?
I see every single character that I've ever played as a separate, distinct entity. There may be a certain intensity to some of the things I've done, but that's because of the way I'm wired. Sometimes I resent when people lump what I do into a convenient shape. There's nothing convenient about it.

Are you an intense person?
I'm a hypersensitive human being. Ever since I was a little boy. I take in everything very extremely. I can't help but regurgitate that a little bit, whatever is happening around me. I'm a very sensitive person. I think a lot of actors are. It's ironic—that intensity stems from that sensitivity. Usually when you think of the word "sensitivity," you think of a shy, quiet person in their bedroom playing violin.

Follow Sam Fragoso on Twitter.

Nocturnal Animals is in theaters now.

Coming In creators Graydon Sheppard (r) and Kyle Humphrey. All photos via CBC

Five years ago the words "can you pass me a blanket" launched Graydon Sheppard and Kyle Humphrey and their project Shit Girls Say into viral infamy. The Twitter account (and eventually YouTube series) was part of a specific brand of online comedy, popularized by accounts like, Shit My Dad Says and its many imitators. The appeal was universal but uncannily accurate (I mean who hasn't solemnly muttered the words, "should I get bangs" deep into the unblinking void?). Sheppard and Humphrey spent a few years trying to shop the series into something bigger, but as the William Shatner-helmed Shit My Dad Says series proved, Twitter success doesn't always translate beyond 140 characters. Now, Sheppard and Humphrey have taken that same humorous approach to a new, much more controversial subject. The web series Coming In launched on November 21 and is a comedy about a gay man who wakes up one morning to find out he's straight. The first season follows his journey to "come back in." I talked to the creators about the courage to come out, finding universality in gay stories and the need to sometimes play it straight.

Sometime around 2010, Forrest Fenn—an octogenarian millionaire who'd made his fortune as an art dealer— hid a treasure chest full of gold and jewels somewhere in the Rocky Mountains, north of Santa Fe. He then self-published a memoir, The Thrill of the Chase, complete with a poem believed to be full of clues leading to the loot's resting place.

While some believe it was a hoax, tens of thousands have become obsessed with finding the bounty, worth an estimated 2 to 3 million dollars. A handful have gone missing in the pursuit, and last January, one searcher was reported dead. This past August, Fenn announced that, to his knowledge, the treasure has not been found, but that's not for lack of effort on behalf of the searchers.

With his new documentary, The Lure, British documentarian Tomas Leach employs a quiet lyricism to compose a portrait of these fanatic treasure hunters and their relationship with Fenn, the wizened old man with a twinkle in his eye pulling the strings on their feverish quest. The film, which premiered at DOC NYC this month and was executive produced by Errol Morris, brings together awe-inspiring vistas of the Rocky Mountains with character sketches of a handful of the men and women engrossed in finding Fenn's gold and jewels—from a terminally ill husband and father whose wife rolls her eyes at his hobby while admitting it gives him something to live for, to a pair of women whose first priority after finding the treasure is to get on Ellen.

I recently caught up with Leach to talk about the The Wizard of Oz–like journey he paints, and shooting the Rocky Mountains by drone and Micro Lite.

VICE: How did you first hear about this story?
Tomas Leach: I first read about it in a British paper, so I started reading about it more and started going on some of the treasure hunters' blogs. I thought it sounded really bizarre and possibly magical, so I went out to Santa Fe to meet Forrest Fenn and some of the treasure hunters and just to spend some time in that part of the world.

I'd never been to New Mexico, so I wanted to see what the place was like, as well as the American Southwest in general. The film's treasure hunters spread out through the Rockies, but Fenn lives in Santa Fe and a lot of the hunters are from northern New Mexico. It's pretty much the only place in the world where someone can say, "I've hidden a few million dollars of gold and jewels," and people say, "Great!" and go out looking for it. Anywhere else, there would be cynicism and anger about it.

The end of the film mentions there are 65,000 of these treasure hunters. What made you select the few that you focused on in your film?
I really wanted this film to not just be about the treasure hunt—I wanted it to have a universality to it that touched people. So the characters who are in the film looking for the treasure all have a reason for searching that isn't just finding gold and getting rich. There's depth and fragility to them all. I knew if it was going to be a feature-length film, each of the characters had to have an arc; each of them had to be developed.

"The story, to me, was about everything else that was going on and about this game between Fenn and the searches, about this universal theme that we are all looking for something to complete us."—Tomas Leach

Over what period of time did you film?
We filmed over 2014 and 2015. I went out five times and knew from the start that if it was about people finding the treasure, then it would be a reality show—so I had to believe there was no chance of finding the treasure. The story, to me, was about everything else that was going on—this game between Fenn and the searches, the universal theme that we're all looking for something to complete us. Whether it's yoga, collecting, music, or filmmaking, we throw ourselves into something to understand and complete ourselves.

Treasure planter Forrest Fenn in 'The Lure.' Photo courtesy of Moxie Pictures

Tell me about Fenn's memoir that the searchers all read for clues.
The book is quite simple—it's just a set of stories from Fenn's childhood, each with a picture or image. It's his own homespun view of the world. A lot people try to decipher it and read more into it—but, for me, it's just simple stories from his youth. I don't think he ever set out to be a writer, but he likes telling stories. Then there's this poem at the end, which on a literary level isn't particularly deep—but because it's attached to , it's brought thousands who decipher everything in it, right down to the numbers of letters in words.

Fenn's project reminded me of the concept of Modernist literature as a movement—that authors like James Joyce would imbue texts with hidden meaning and the reader would be charged with interpreting them.
The treasure hunt—and my film—is better without the answers, if everyone completes it in their own way. The film is about as many things as we can throw in the mix: Somebody thinks it's metaphor for finding God, somebody thinks it's an exchange with Satan where if you find the gold, you swap souls. I think documentaries too often give you too much fact and decisive point of view.

I always reference Robert Altman when I talk about this film, because his stories are so slight, but they end up being about everything because you can complete them with your own emotional engagement. The characters become these surrogates for you. In McCabe & Mrs. Miller, the story is so slight and contradictory to what you might expect from a Western. It draws you with its lyricism and its unwrapping of itself.

Treasure hunter Katya in 'The Lure.' Photo courtesy of Moxie Pictures

There was one searcher, Randy Bilyeu, who died looking for the treasure.
We were editing when the searcher went missing. At the time, he was missing and presumed to be in great danger. We talked about it in the edit, but it seemed like it would be both sensationalist and reactionary to include it in the film, which isn't a hagiography of Forrest Fenn anyway. It has enough dark elements and shade that it's not just glorifying him. It would've been cynical to go out and film the story of the missing searcher when the event wasn't in the time frame of the film. It would've been clutching at newsworthiness.

Do you think Fenn has any responsibility for this death?
It's such a harsh landscape and, obviously, full of dangers. If you get stuck somewhere, there are really simple dangers of getting lost. The Rocky Mountains are huge, and they're cold. It's hard to say that that's responsibility, but I do think he's wrapped this story around himself, and it was inevitable that somebody would die at some point. I wonder whether he was aware of that.

You had so many beautiful overhead shots. Were those captured with a drone?
We shot a lot with drones, and I went up in a Micro Lite as well, a powered glider that you sit with a pilot. Essentially, it's like if we turned these two chairs around, one in front of the other, and then we put a hand glider on top of us and an air-conditioning fan at the back. You're sitting there open, so you can just shoot below you. It's terrifying and great at the same time!

I hemmed and hawed a lot how much to include these landscape shots, because it's such a trite thing for filmmakers to say, "Landscape is a character in my film." But this film actually is about the land. If you know nothing else about the story, it's that there is gold hidden somewhere in the Rocky Mountains north of Santa Fe, so we had to show a sense of scale.

Your last documentary was about Saul Leiter. How do you feel having done two documentaries about these types of older men?
Someone else was asking me if I was looking to finish a trilogy about weird old eccentric men with hoards of things, and before that I hadn't even thought about it. After I made that film about Saul Leiter, I thought I was definitely not going to make a film about an old man again, but I don't think it's really about Fenn. It's as much about him as The Wizard of Oz is about the Wizard. For me, this film is about Dorothy and the Scarecrow and the Tinman. It's about the characters' search.

Follow Whitney Mallett on Twitter.

Chippy Nonstop's parents (photo via the author)

When it comes to relationships, I can't commit to anything other than the "Hoe Lyfe." My first boyfriend was a homeless man who serenaded me with a Boyz II Men ballad on the streets of San Francisco, and for some unfathomable reason I thought it was a good idea to get wifed up by him. My second boyfriend was scammed into dating me when I trolled his Instagram and Facebook and commented on every single picture (even the ones he wasn't in) "hot" and sometimes the occasional "HOT." So to put it mildly, I really, really, really, really suck at dating or maybe I'm wiser than I think and have given up on the social construct everyone else seems to be hopped up and overdosing on.

Photo via Flickr user Gage Skidmore

During his canceled-and-then-quickly-uncanceled meeting at the New York Times on Tuesday, President-elect Donald Trump said that alt-right white supremacists are "not a group I want to energize," and disavowed them.

The Times asked the president-elect specifically about the alt-right conference that took place in DC this past weekend, where white nationalists and Tila Tequila gathered. Some threw up Nazi salutes and discussed the "burden of the white man." Trump, apparently, can't quite grok why they'd be stoked on his winning the White House.

"If they are energized, I want to look into it and find out why," he continued.

Trump faced a similar query during his interview on 60 Minutes last week, when he was asked about the outpouring of hate crimes that have occurred since his election. Trump responded roughly the same way in that case, offering a terse "stop it" to any violent fans like a guy trying to train his dog to quit peeing on the rug.

The president-elect also told the paper that Steve Bannon—the former head of Breitbart whose wife claimed he once wanted his kids to change schools over an excess of Jewish students—is "having a hard time" with the negative uproar surrounding his appointment as White House chief strategist.

On an all new episode of CYBERWAR, we investigate how the small nation of Israel became one of the world's cyber super powers and try to find out who it's directly targeting.

CYBERWAR airs Tuesdays at 10:30 PM ET/PT on VICELAND.

Want to know if you get VICELAND? Head here to find out how to tune in.

Me, wearing a curse. All photos by Sean Foster

This article originally appeared on VICE Australia

Fedoras used to be cool. Didn't they? I mean, Indiana Jones wore one, not to mention 90 percent of prohibition era gangsters, and all the suave leading men of pre-war Hollywood. Then there was Michael Jackson circa "Smooth Criminal" and the great fedora renaissance of the early 2000s, as championed by the likes of Pete Doherty and Johnny Depp.

But right now, in 2016, fedoras may be the single most-hated fashion accessory money can buy. What happened? Why is "neckbeard" the top recommended search when you Google fedora? Why has society turned so viciously against a simple hat?

To find out I went and bought one.

And almost instantly, everything started going wrong.

Saturday

The best way to get into a cold pool is to just jump in. The fedora was my cold pool. I really didn't want to wear one, so I figured it'd be easier to jump in drunk. That's why Saturday afternoon, before a big night, I Googled "hat store Melbourne" and went to the first result.

I walked in and found a great classic little black fedora. After adding a few feathers and a 90s Rugrats themed ribbon thingy, the monstrosity was ready to get acquainted with my head.

A few hours later I was on my friend Sean's balcony smoking a cigarette. Usually Sean would join me but today he wouldn't because I was wearing a fedora. More friends started to arrive and there were more snickers of "nice hat." For the most part though the fedora was politely ignored, just like I was. It genuinely seemed like my social standing had been lowered a few notches.

It was almost midnight when I met up with my girlfriend who saw my fedora and was visibly disgusted. She spent most of the night trying to knock it off my head and leaning away from me whenever I got close. I eventually convinced her to try it on and although she totally pulled the look off, it turned out to be a bad idea.

Mere minutes later she face planted into the pavement, the result of a piggy back gone wrong. Here's a photo we took of the damage the next day.

We spent the rest of the night in the emergency room. Day one had ended, although the curse of the fedora had only just begun.

Sunday

I woke up to find my girlfriend's cat, Sanchez, glaring at the fedora with genuine disdain. It was pretty much the same look I'd been getting from strangers all the night before.

To cheer my girlfriend up, I took her out for some ramen—her sporting a massive black eye, and me, still wearing my incriminating hat. Strangers suspected the worst.

I began to wonder why people hate fedoras so much. I mean they're just hats, right? Yet it was already having way more of an impact on my life than nearly anything else I'd tried. Joining a gym had nothing on the fedora. Deciding to travel, deciding to study, deciding to chase a certain career—I can honestly say, all of these things had the same, or maybe even less of an impact than wearing a fedora.

It seems to me the fedora has become the symbol for the "nice guy." And by nice guy, I mean creepy neckbeard university socialist club meninist weirdo. I don't think it's the fedora itself that the problem. Rather, it's who the fedora aligns you with.

Monday

I spent Monday morning reading, before realising I hadn't seen my dad in a while. So I headed over to his place—he opened the front door, glanced at the hat, and asked if I'd been beaten up yet. He seemed disappointed when I said no.

Dad and I were sipping coffee when we heard a crash. A mirror had fallen off the wall and knocked over a glass vase filled with flowers on its way down. That mirror had been hanging on that wall for years.

At that moment, I genuinely felt a bit weirded out. I'd walked past that mirror only moments earlier, wearing the fedora. Still sleep deprived from a night spent in the emergency department, it started to seem kind of possible. Was I wearing a black cat on my head?

Later that night, I walked past a restaurant and made eye contact with a guy carrying a crate full of porcelain bowls. Moments later, he dropped them. Fuck. What is this? I looked at the fedora and felt only evil. Something was definitely going on.

Tuesday

I really didn't want to face the day. Everywhere I went shit was breaking. Could a hat really make that much of a difference? I decided to hit the gym and think about it.

Every step I took in that place was agonising. Nobody seemed to look at me directly, but gyms are full of mirrors and I constantly caught glances of disgust and intrigue. Mostly disgust.

I headed to a show on Tuesday night, did some drugs, and forgot about the fedora. I basically spent the entire night feeling super confident, walking around tipping my fedora, and saying "good day sir" to total strangers. Some even wanted to wear it, like this guy. That gave me a pretty solid data set on how strangers respond to guys in fedoras.

Responses can be split into two categories: Get the hell away from me you freak, and, cool hat man! The split is about 70-to-30, favouring the former. Monday's speculation was right—people actively hate dudes in fedoras.

Wednesday

I awoke on Wednesday thinking the worst was behind me. I was wrong. The world was wrong.

That day, by about 4 PM Melbourne time, it became clear Donald Trump would be President of the United States. People around the world scrambled for explanations, How could this happen? The poor fools were oblivious. I looked in the mirror and a rainbow spangled demon stared back at me.

I did this.

Thursday

It will all soon be over. This is what I repeated to myself as I headed off to lunch with my friend Clare. She also brought along her Shiba Inu, Tofu, aka the world's cutest dog. Don't believe me? Check out his Instagram.

Tofu wore the fedora better than me.

Friday

I had a big Friday night planned but barely made it out before I was hit with intense stomach pain. I spent the next two days throwing up and writhing in agony as the full effects of food poisoning ran their course. I don't know what I ate, but I'm certain it was the fedora.

My girlfriend looked after me through the food poisoning, setting me up in her living room. I was struggling to keep anything down but it gave me time to pause and reflect.

I don't really give much of a shit about fashion. I also don't usually care what people think, but the glares and giggles were hard to ignore. I knew the fedora was almost universally disliked, but I never predicted the extent of how it would affect my standing among others.

And then there's was all the weird shit that kept happening. I'm not really superstitious but that fedora was absolutely, definitely, scientifically cursed.

As I pondered this I glanced around the room, searching for the fedora. It was nowhere to be found. Aimee had thrown it out that morning.

The curse was lifted.

Follow David on Twitter or Instagram

Read more of David's attempts to ruin his life:

I Ate Nothing But Nutella For a Week and Found My Inner Darkness

Being in the Audience For 'Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?'... On Acid!

I Bummed a Cigarette at a Festival and Traded Up to Cocaine

Illustration by Alex Jenkins

There's a good chance Miranda Kirsch has one of the most painful dating stories. When she was 18, she and her new beau Steven went to the movies to see Interstellar. Steven loved it, turning to Kirsch to get her every reaction.

"He's like, 'Aha, that's so great!' And I just kind of smiled," Kirsch told me. What she didn't tell him was that her face was burning with excruciating pain—"like a hot rod being stabbed in your eye while your face is being burned off with chemicals"—triggered by the movie's flickering lights and explosions.

This wasn't a random occurrence. It was a feeling Kirsch had felt off and on since she was three years old—a symptom of trigeminal neuralgia, a chronic pain disorder that's considered to be one of the world's most painful diseases.

Kirsch, now 20, is part of a small club of young people living with the disorder, which more commonly affects people over the age of 50. Although it's excruciating to live with at any age, the absence of a cure makes it especially disheartening for young patients who can expect a lifetime of pain ahead of them. Going through puberty, trying to date, or even just studying for the SATs can be hard enough without having jolts of knife-like pain pulsating through your face.

"Growing up, I was bullied a lot because of it," Kirsch told me. "The kids would be like, 'Why is she screaming?'"

Trigeminal neuralgia involves damage to the trigeminal nerve—the one used for eating, talking, and other facial functions. The nerve loses its protective covering, essentially acting like an exposed wire. Because TN is such a rare disease, with only 12 out of every 100,000 people diagnosed each year, doctors are still unsure why this happens in some people and not others.

What they do know is that simple activities like brushing one's teeth, putting on makeup, or sometimes doing nothing at all can set off shocks throughout the face, in the forehead, cheeks, jaw, teeth, and gums. Others experience a constant burning sensation, and some feel both.

Patients have likened the pain to repeatedly being stabbing with a carving knife, getting hit by lightning, or having a screwdriver jammed in your eye. Dr. Mark Linskey, a neurosurgeon who specializes in TN, told me the sensation is "worse than childbirth, if you ask any woman who's done both."

And if you google it, you can easily find TN's morbid nickname: the suicide disease.

"I had to turn to my mom and ask what suicide was," said Katie Rose Hamilton, who heard the nickname directly from her doctor when she was diagnosed at age 11. "It wasn't a fun night."

"There are people who commit suicide over trigeminal neuralgia, but they're rare," said Linskey. "We lose more patients during their course with trigeminal neuralgia from drug overdoses than anything else."

Whether those overdoses are intentional or accidental is unclear. Many of the drugs prescribed to TN patients are anti-seizure medications, which can affect memory, causing some to lose track of how much medication they've taken.

What is clear is that the medication, while helpful (and sometimes life saving), can have immediate effects on patients' daily lives, profound and small. Even when Jamie Parroco, 27, takes the lowest possible dosage, it's still enough to affect her lifestyle.

"Life before TN was really exciting," Parroco told me. She'd just finished her master's degree, gotten a new job, and was enjoying a vacation in Italy when she first felt the pain of TN. Now, the fear of another attack is a constant stress.

"It just completely turns my social world upside down and my social identity," said Parroco. "I don't want to be that sick person."

Arguably more importantly, she's had to put future plans on hold: Her doctors have told her she can't start a family while taking her medication, even though having kids has always been part of her plan.

The side effects of medication, and the need for higher and higher doses to dull the pain of TN, lead many to consider surgical options. The most effective procedure has an 80 percent success rate, but the risks—infection and excessive bleeding, to name a few—are substantial.

For Hamilton's parents, surgery became an increasingly obvious choice when their daughter's medication was so strong she couldn't count to ten—a problem when you're an 11-year-old.

So they took her to one of the most well-known pediatric neurosurgeons, Dr. Ben Carson. (Yeah, that Ben Carson.) At first, it worked—but like many patients, the pain returned eight months later. A second surgery has made her pain-free for the last two years.

"I'm free to ride roller coasters and jump on the trampoline," said Hamilton, now 16. Despite a small amount of phantom pain as the nerve heals, Hamilton feels like a normal teenager, running around outside and riding on her skateboard. Although she's optimistic the full pain of TN won't come back, she's aware it's still a possibility.

Kirsch also decided to have surgery this year. She celebrated being pain free with the same enthusiasm (she also jumped on a trampoline), but a month afterward, the pain came back.

"It was soul crushing," Kirsch told me. "I think I cried for two days straight."

The complications from surgery have prompted a nonprofit volunteer organization, the TNA Facial Pain Association, to find a cure by 2020. The project, led by the Facial Pain Research Foundation, consists of more than 30 scientists working on a range of solutions, including injections to fix genetic causes, insert therapeutic cells, and repair the nerve's protective covering. These advances could have important impacts on other neuropathic pain conditions, too, according to the association's trustee, Michael Pasternak, a former TN patient recently appointed to the Interagency Pain Research Coordinating Committee, a federal advisory committee under the National Institutes of Health.

"When we fix the trigeminal nerve, we'll be able to fix phantom nerve pain," said Pasternak, referring to neurological pain not caused by an outside stimulus, and most commonly associated with phantom limb pain. "We'll be able to fix nerves that have been damaged by chemotherapy."

Until a cure is found, however, the young people who suffer from TN continue to face the challenges of their disease.

"Being 27, this is the time of your life," said Parroco. "But so many things change. It puts a stop on a lot of those plans. You have to re-arrange them."

Follow Áine Pennello on Twitter.

The Wolf Pack teaches a bondage class at the Eagle London before it was refurbished earlier this year. Photo courtesy Victor Hensel-Coe

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Back in June 2013, porn star Dolan Wolf was teaching a class of 20 gay guys the basics of entry-level bondage at the Eagle, a gay bar in London. In attendance was Or*, a 27-year-old freelance writer. Or had recently moved to London from Tel Aviv and joined the workshop hoping to meet likeminded guys. He liked what he saw and made himself a fixture of Wolf's classes. Later that year, he became one of Wolf's apprentices.

When Wolf moved from London to marry his partner in San Francisco in 2014, Or, along with three other apprentices—Victor, Eddie, and Craig—inherited the night. They formed the Wolf Pack, in honor of their founding member, and pledged to continue his tradition of teaching beginners the intricacies of fetish and kink. For more than two years, they hosted masterclasses at the Eagle London, teaching students the arts of immobilization, electrostimulation, flogging, safe bondage, pressure points, and everything in between.

Their night stood as a regular part of the city's fetish calendar until recently, when the Eagle was "completely refreshed," rebranding itself as something more vanilla. The refurb has left little room for its sex nights, leaving the Wolf Pack without a permanent home. It follows a wave of closures for other gay venues in an increasingly expensive and gentrified city. But what the Wolf Pack is offering—an introduction to the sexual underground for the unacquainted, who may be otherwise intimidated by the rules and exclusivity of the scene—has become more invaluable than ever.

It is by no means this year's biggest casualty on the capital's fetish scene. In October, the Hoist, a gay bar and mainstay of London's fetish community, announced it would be permanently closing its doors by the end of the year.

Without the Hoist, only the Underground Club and Backstreet can bill themselves as permanent kink-friendly spaces in London. The usual toxic mix of high rent, gentrification, and gay dating apps like Grindr and Recon have made venue survival harder, even as more young people become interested in kink.

"I think, by the numbers, that the community itself is growing—you see this in the amount of younger people on Twitter or coming to events," said Or, who himself first navigated the larger kink and fetish scene with the help of social media. "I don't know if I would say trendy, but has definitely become more acceptable."

A Wolf Pack member during a demonstration. Photo courtesy Victor Hensel-Coe

The next generation of kinksters may be more social media savvy, but the scene's barriers to entry remain high. Getting into a fetish like leather or bondage often requires mentorship to navigate the finer points of its culture and etiquette. To boot, leather harnesses and gear are not cheap, and high price tags may leave newcomers reticent to get involved. Through their unique, unrefined demonstrations, the Wolf Pack aims to provide such mentorship, preserve the kink scene's tangible social community, and stoke excitement in novices that outstrips idle curiosity—thus sustaining their fetishes for generations to come.

"From equipment malfunctions to us blacking out on explanations, which is always slightly awkward, the best part of the Wolf Pack is that we consider ourselves no better than any student," said Or. "We are not big authorities, so things like that happen and we all laugh about it."

Another Wolf Pack member, 24-year-old Victor, is something of a fetish scene stalwart, with a full time job at a sex shop and freelance photography work for gay weekly QX magazine. Like Or, he's worried about the kink scene's lack of permanent spaces.

"Considering the size of London and the amount of kink and fetish people in this town, the fact that we have a grand total of three ... that's not really great," he said. "This is the largest city in Europe... compare us to Amsterdam, which has a similar amount of clubs and eight times less people—it's kinda disappointing."

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According to Victor, apps have undeniably changed London's fetish community, much like they have the wider gay scene. Shyer members can use the anonymity they offer to ease themselves in, while the ability to find nearby private parties makes exploring the scene simpler cheaper and more instant. As successful as they are, their convenience has, at least in part, supplanted the need for physical kink spaces.

"We are in this generation where a variety of sexual ideas are always open to you and you can experiment with them," says Victor. "But people aren't necessarily going out on the scene because we do have apps and also Scruff or Recon." Whether those apps can replicate the depth of interaction and community sustained by the physical spaces they're supplanting, however, is a different story.

Despite the scene's diminishing number of permanent spaces, larger one-off events (which often repeat monthly, quarterly, or annually) are still attracting huge crowds. The Wolf Pack itself has already been hired this year at London Fetish Week, Amsterdam Fetish Pride, the Sexpression Conference, and Manchester Leather Weekend.

The positive feedback the Wolf Pack has received for its demonstrations is an indication of just how important concrete communal spaces are to such an underground community. Dedicated kink venues—actual safe spaces free from stigma and hostility—cultivate a less insular, more sociable scene than social media or dating apps ever can. They deconstruct cliques and dismantle echo chambers, as Craig puts it.

"I definitely think people should make the effort to go to what few kink venues remain," says Craig. "The big one is Backstreet; that's a wonderful bar, very friendly, very well run—a great space. The Wolf Pack taught in it last Fetish Week and it would be a real shame to see it go. If these spaces disappear, it's incredibly hard to get new ones. They're needed not just for sex but beyond that, to nurture the sense of community and friendships and education spaces."

*Last names have been withheld to protect the privacy of Wolf Pack members.

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