Click here to read an exclusive extract from The End of Eddy by Edouard Louis

Edouard Louis' first book, The End of Eddy (En Finir Avec Eddy Bellegueule), was a sensation and fired him to the forefront of French literary society. Published in French in 2014, when Louis was just 21 years old, it was ostensibly a memoir about the brutalities of growing up gay in one of northern France's many neglected, impoverished villages. The book's directness about violence, sex, his family, and those in his neighbourhood is stunning. But it is also far more than a just memoir, it is a scathing condemnation of the cycle of poverty and violence inflicted upon those he grew up with, those same people who tormented him for much of his early life. VICE published the first chapter of The End of Eddy in the 2016 Fiction Issue. With the book now released in the UK, we caught up with Louis to discus the pervasiveness of violence, the book's relevance in light of the growing influence of the far-right Front National and its leader Marine Le Pen, and the difficulties of being a working class touchstone for the world's liberal, literary elites.

VICE: The End of Eddy works on two levels. There's the personal side which examines your early life and the violence you endured, then there's the wider implication of that life: the condemnation of poverty and violence in certain sections of French society. Was it your intention from the outset to tackle such broad political and social issues?
Edouard Louis: What I wanted to do, firstly and above everything else, was to talk about these dominated, excluded people whom I describe in the book. It is about this village in the North of France, far from any city, any station, where 20 years ago everyone would work at a factory – which has now closed – where people are now jobless and hopeless. And about how this violence which people suffer from ends up creating more violence. If you suffer from violence all your life, in the end you inflict it upon on others, for example upon gays, upon what people call "strangers", or women.

"Violence is the invisible foundation of our lives"

So from the outset that is what I wanted to talk about – these people who we never hear about and never talk about. I didn't know that the book would be translated into 20 or 25 languages, I thought I would sell maybe 800 copies – so I didn't think about "will it be about the north of France, or something more?" At the same time you could say that William Faulkner wrote about a tiny region in the American South, but all the issues he discussed were universal. And precisely because he focused on a microcosm it exposed all the characteristics of this world we live in, the racism and the violence.

Another thing that's remarkable about the book is that your tone is rarely accusatory. Many people may find that surprising given the litany of abuses you suffered growing up. But the feeling in the book is that it is not the fault of those who persecuted you.
I think violence is at the heart of the book. The fact is that violence is the invisible foundation of our lives. You are born and suddenly people tell you, "you are a n****r", "you are a faggot", "you are just a woman" – you don't even understand language, but you realise that there is already something that labels you, and this label will define your life, your future. And that sort of thing is much more present in the region I grew up in, precisely because of the violence people suffered from, that they then perpetuated. People there are excluded, so they exclude. I could just as well have called the book something like "Sociological Excuses".

When I was a kid I hated my mother, and hated my father. My father would say "we need to put gays and Jews in concentration camps" almost every day and I thought he was talking about me, that I was included in this category of people who were to be killed.

And then in leaving the village and starting to write the book, I realised that the causes of this violence and hate are not in my father, they are much bigger. The book is not saying "my father is poor", but that the system made my father poor. Not that "my father is violent", but the system makes my father violent. There is a chronology to this in the book, and chronology is important. When I first introduce my father I describe his life first, that his father would beat his mother, and then I say my father was violent.

Your decision to use your own life, to name and describe your parents, cousins, grandparents, the people you went to school with and knew from birth to the time you left the village, as all being complicit in this situation must have upset a lot of people? Yet it is the personal aspect that acts as a vehicle for the wider sociological issues. That must have been a hard call to make?
It was sometimes very difficult to write such personal things. Even to expose myself like I have in the book. In the first scene of the book two guys come up to me at middle school and spit in my face. I was scared because I didn't want to be seen as a victim, or only as a victim. Of course I was a victim at one point, like most people are at some point of their life. Who can say, "I was never a victim in my life"? Nobody, except liars. But my revealing these intimate things I would imagine is precisely the interesting thing about the book. The border between what is private and what is public is a historical border and we put in the shadows of privacy what we don't want to address. When Simone de Beauvoir talked about the woman, people (including Camus) would say, "Oh it's not our business to know about women's lives." You have to expose these things.

On top of that I didn't really think about these revelations as a risk because I didn't think I would sell many copies. There were no books in my village, no books in my house. I simply never thought it would reach those people, that it would reach my family.

People tell me, "You didn't think enough about your family", but for me when I write a book I think more about queer people, or people of colour, or women than I think about my family! What is this rebirth of the family values? Be kind to your parents? When I talk about women being beaten, gays being assaulted, or these people voting for Marine Le Pen – more than half my village have voted for her – that is far more important to me than my Mama or my Papa.

As I said, the book's tone is not accusatory, in the wider context it is not these people you are attacking.
Some people have told me that the book is "contemptful". I asked them which part they found to be so, and they said, "For example you say in the book that your father didn't wash every day", to which I said, "I don't despise that. It's your problem if you think it's disgusting. I don't." I am just describing the situation and plus, I explain why this situation takes place.

You mention Marine Le Pen, and clearly the book's vivid depiction of an under-exposed section of French society – the section from which a part of her voter base is likely to come – is very timely, given her growing power.
Of course the way people read or interpret books is always different, but in one way of course the book is about the rise of all this populism, all around the world. When I was reading articles about Brexit for example, those voting for it who were quoted in the media were saying the exact same things that my mother would say when voting for Le Pen: "Nobody listens to us, nobody cares about us, we are worthless…" Those responsible for what is happening are those often left-wing people who have never listened to these sections of society who feel ignored.

The End of Eddy was written out of anger. I had moved to Paris and I would hear these Parisians talking about the working class, well they thought they were talking about the working class, but they were actually talking about the distance between them and the working class. Everything they said just illustrated that gap instead of the subject they meant to discus.

This must have left you in an odd and, at times, uncomfortable situation? You are feted by the left wing, literary crowds around the world – seen as a contact point for that elite with the working classes. Yet you are part of that working class, and are left somewhere between those two worlds?
It was complicated. Part of these elites attacked me when I published The End of Eddy. Some of the liberal left, when they talk about the working class, they like to create a mythology about "the good people", the simple and honest people, who are not "pretending all the time" like the bourgeoisie. Who are these people? Who are they talking about? About white, straight, men? They aren't talking about the poorest, about queers, women, Arabs. They are talking about a minority, the brave white straight working class man, and because of that the others, the majority, suffer.

Lately, some so-called intellectuals have tended to see the class war in opposition with what they call "identity politics". They suggest that, since the end of the 20th century, political movements for emancipation have focused more and more on gender, race, sexuality, and less and less on social class war. But this opposition between class and identity is wrong. I try to point out that every single class issue is an issue of gender and sexuality, as the philosopher Geoffroy de Lagasnerie pointed out.

For example, in the book, to be a working class man means to reject what was perceived as the "feminity" of the bourgeoisie: the men who cross their legs when they sit, the bourgeois who eats small plates in place of the big meals of real men.

Even more, constructing your masculinity in this village means refusing to play by the rules of the education system, to challenge the teachers, and to auto-exclude your self from the possibility of further study and therefore, to be condemned to stay in the same social class as your parents. To read was considered as something effeminate, sexually suspicious, something for "faggots". So, we will never achieve a class revolution without achieving a sexual and gender revolution.

In the same way that the intelligencia, if you want to call them that, have maybe reacted badly to your book, presumably there's also been a reaction from those depicted in The End of Eddy?
Obviously the big problem here is that when you talk about the reaction of poor people – most of the time they will not be reading the book. Mostly they were excluded from school young, they were excluded from legitimate culture… some people want to say that everybody can read.

But it's actually so much more radical to acknowledge that these people are so harassed by their work, and had such violent experiences at school that most of the time they do not read a lot. Of course there are exceptions, but mostly they don't. My father never read a book in his life, my mother neither. So it's hard to address the question of how the book affected those depicted.
I do however think that a book can play a role beyond it's readers, for example the life of black people was changed by the work of James Baldwin or Toni Morrison even for those who didn't read the work. It entered the minds of people who read and made the issues discussed present in the political arena.

And what of those critics from that section of society, those who said it the book isn't a true depiction of that life?
This is the very key to book! I wrote it to find the violence that I didn't feel when I was a kid. If violence is always with you, you just call it life. You think it's normal. When I was a kid, sometimes we ran out of food. My mother would say "just drink some milk for your meal", I was hungry, so I wasn't happy, but I didn't find that to be "violent". I needed to leave the village to understand that that is indeed a sort of violence – for a 10-year-old kid to not have food to eat. So that's another issue, that those from that world who do read the book may just see these things as normal. As a queer person of course I had a different point of view from many of those around me. In the end the book was not so much about homosexuality because I don't have much to say about it. For me being queer was a tool for investigating this milieu. To see things differently. I was excluded for it and that meant I could see that world differently.

Finally, how did the book's success effect your relations with your family, who are so thoroughly examined within it?
There were two very different reactions. With my father I talked to him again after five years of silence. I was 21 when the book was first published so it had been a quarter of my life not speaking to him. He called me and said, "Edouard, I am so proud of you". He stopped saying racist and homophobic things. My mother was angry and went on a campaign against me, saying I had betrayed her. But then again she was manipulated by the media. A very stupid French paper went to the village and took my mother to a house that wasn't hers, and shot her in a more bourgeoisie environment, asked her to dress differently and so on. There was something disgusting about that, these journalists going to see the poor, like on a safari of some sort. And what did they think? Did they think they would go to the village and see crucified gays in the street? Violence is something so much more subtle.

Click here to read an exclusive extract from The End of Eddy by Edouard Louis

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All photos by Edo Chang

Vienna holds over 400 balls a year, and most of them are places of conservatism and tradition. Men and women dance the Viennese Waltz together; debutantes are presented in a tiara and diamonds to a suitor suitably reputable to marry; etiquette, dress code, and family background are paramount values; and any diversion from these somewhat archaic values would have you deemed unsuitable for ball culture. Although traditions are loosening, some of the more elite balls on Vienna's Winter Calendar are, even today, like selective breeding programs for Austria's social elite.

The unwavering commitment to tradition has meant balls in Vienna have historically excluded anything that is not strict heterosexuality. That's kind of baffling, because after attending a Waltz lesson at Elmayer – the most traditional dance school in Austria's capital – and learning about Viennese ball history, I realise these events are pretty much the gayest thing ever. It's ball gowns, fake diamonds, catered mini-food, and the ultimate in high-society glamour. The balls closely mirror the performativity in the Vogueing scenes seen in Paris is Burning, just with a shitload more cash.

At my Waltz class I asked Thomas Schafer-Elmayer (great great grandson to the dance school's original founder) whether same sex couples were allowed to dance at any of the non-gay balls. He gave me a dirty look, which I assumed meant no. Ball culture isn't subculture in Vienna: it is the heart of growing up as an upstanding member of Viennese society. If you're gay, balls are just another central feature of a culture from which you are rejected, from which you are forced to sit out.

In recent decades, a number of LGBTQIA+ friendly balls have emerged. There's the Creative Ball, the Rose Ball and the Rainbow Ball, or the Wiener Regenbogenball, the most traditional and spectacular of the three events. I'm in town for its 20th anniversary.

Arriving at the Regenbogenball, you can see what a powerful and transgressive event it is by nature of its very existence on the Viennese social calendar. Each room was filled with the most fabulous, proud members of the queer community I had seen in one place for such a long time: queens, queers, young gay boys wearing slicks of red lipstick, older lesbian couples spinning each other around across the waxed floor and making out furiously at the end of each song, the most glamorous trans women flirting over a Spritz in the corner of the bar. Unlike so many LGBTQIA+ nightlife spaces, this gathering was remarkably not centred around fucking: there was no intended seediness, or thumping house music and dim red lights. Instead there was an air of celebration, of taking an overbearing patriarchal, exclusively straight, cis-gendered structure and making its content queer.

At 9PM, the real dancing started: "Boys to the left, girls to the right," the compare bellowed over the mic. The usual gendered call to begin the opening ceremony of any ball was laughed at by the crowd, who are all privy to the fact that gender is a lie. Traditional roles of men in black and women in white dancing the Fledermaus Quadrille were shattered, with a massive array of genders and sexualities taking part in the traditional opening number. Drag queens with Sachertorte headdresses (a cake that is arguably Vienna's most famous export) danced the Waltz. Later, Vienna's other most famous export Conchita Wurst took to the stage in cute suit to sing the beloved Eurovision anthem "Rise Like a Phoenix" to an audience full of German yelps and Facebook Live videos.

The party continued until 5AM, unusual for balls which are supposed to finish at midnight, with dancing and DJs in the basement. Deborah Woodson (Google her, she's iconic) joined the lineup to bring the house down with bangers such as "It's Raining Men" and "One Moment In Time" sung in half-German-half-English.

I thought I was going to hate this ball. I usually dismiss tradition, and tend to be a critic of moneyed apolitical gays, it totally proved me wrong. In this space over 2000 people normally excluded from the ball scene came together to make their own queer, beautiful traditions which fly in the face of a society that has branded them with the brush of "failure" in the first place.

@tomglitter

(Top photo: Jeffrey Dahmer's 1982 mugshot)

Good, honest, God-fearing citizens feeling empathy for serial killers is nothing particularly new. We're all human; we all want to understand why people do the things they do. But when it comes to Jeffrey Dahmer – who was sentenced to 15 life terms 25 years ago yesterday – there seems to be an unusual climate of compassion.

Jeffrey Dahmer killed at least 17 young men between 1978 and 1991. Many of these men were African-American or Hispanic, and most were picked up in or around gay bars. Once he got them home, Dahmer would usually drug his victim and, once they became unconscious, strangle them. He would dismember the victim, have sex with the body, occasionally eat bits of the body, and take photos throughout, in a bid to remember the experience as best as possible. Ultimately, what Dahmer wanted most was to keep someone in a submissive state so they could never leave. He said himself: "The only motive that there ever was was to completely control a person [...] and keep them with me as long as possible." In 1991, he attempted to pour muriatic acid into a hole in his victim's head in an attempt to create a zombie – a willing companion with whom he could do what he pleased.

Still, Dahmer is sometimes framed – and viewed – as a sympathetic character, not just by the "fans" who dedicate entire blogs to the serial killer, but by many others, including crime writers, lawyers, psychologists and doctors. Comments below documentaries on Dahmer often ask the question: "Does anyone else feel sorry for him?" And bizarrely, the answer in many cases is "yes".

But why?

"I think it's easier to romanticise him because he genuinely wanted love and closeness."

Sympathy for Dahmer is not a new phenomenon, but it's been popularised recently by the comic book My Friend Dahmer, by Derf Backderf, who met the killer in high school. The book is about the pair's friendship, looking back on times the writer noticed darker parts of Dahmer's personality – his alcohol abuse and tendency to play with dead animals. The book doesn't glamourise Dahmer's crimes, but it does construct Dahmer as a victim, a product of his environment. Mind you, Backderf has made it clear that "Dahmer was a tragic figure, but that only applies up until the moment he kills".

Time and distance could be to blame for the unusual treatment of Dahmer, but even those close to his case treated him sympathetically. Dr Samuel Friedman, a psychologist who was asked to testify at Dahmer's trial, spoke almost fondly of him. He believed it was a "longing for companionship that caused Dahmer to kill", adding that he was "amiable, pleasant to be with, courteous, with a sense of humour, conventionally handsome and charming in manner. He was, and still is, a bright young man." Dr Palermo, a psychiatrist appointed to provide an objective assessment of Dahmer, noted: "Strange to say, he is not such a bad person."

Many who empathise with Dahmer tend to do so because of his shyness – because you could tell he was troubled just by looking at him. There's also the belief among Dahmer enthusiasts that he derived no pleasure from his crimes; that the murders were a means to an end, an accidental byproduct of his quest to create a companion for himself (even though his ideal companion was a zombified human incapable of independent thought or movement).

Abigail Strubel, a mental health specialist who wrote a study on theoretical diagnoses and treatments for Dahmer, told me over the phone: "I have a bit of sympathy for him, because he was such a damaged, diminished person. He showed signs from a very young age that he was not like other people. He seems to have experienced tremendous anxiety [...] he wanted connection and companionship so badly, and he was so unable to connect."

As for why others feel sympathy for him? "He was not a sadist," said Strubel. "Most serial killers enjoy inflicting pain and humiliation on their victims, so by comparison he's a 'softer' serial killer. I think it's easier to romanticise him because he genuinely wanted love and closeness. He just undertook some very odd practices to get [those things]."

"Dahmer murdered 17 people and ate some of them. However you dress it up, there are probably millions of lonely people out there who don't do that."

Researching for this article, and getting wound up in the world of Dahmer sympathisers, it was easy to forget that there are – of course – many others out there who don't feel sorry for the serial killer. Joan Ullman, who was present at Dahmer's insanity trial, wrote a first person account of the discomfort she felt: "The words I kept hearing from lawyers, spectators and forensic experts were 'healing' and 'understanding'. The endless talk of Dahmer's profound mental illness, treatment needs and prognoses made me think of his homicides as almost incidental [...] Jurors said they had found a new understanding of mental illness, which helped them see Dahmer as a person with problems who needed treatment."

Tony Blockley, a senior lecturer in Criminal Investigation at the University of Derby, is also less than sympathetic. "[Dahmer] murdered 17 people and ate some of them. However you dress it up, there are probably millions of lonely people out there who don't do that," he said over the phone. "When you think about Dahmer, between 1978 and 1991, he was killing people. He said he was sorry, but is he actually sorry for the crimes, or is he sorry that he got caught?"

The ways in which Dahmer chose his victims were careful and calculated, and in many cases he went to great lengths to preserve the bodies. "That's quite a calculating mind, isn't it? To actually think like that, and to think, 'I'll choose that victim because...' That's not somebody out of their head and suffering from a mental disorder and not being able to think lucidly," said Blockley. "That is a calculated and specific way of committing a crime."

And he's right: the Dahmer apologists – as if you even have to make this point when you're talking about a man who murdered and defiled multiple human beings – don't really have a leg to stand on.

Strubel sums it up: "Jeffrey Dahmer might not appear as demonic and menacing as other serial killers, but many of his actions were extremely repugnant. That limits what sympathy I'm able to muster for him [...] and certainly doesn't excuse any of the murders and other bizarre crimes he committed."

@marianne_eloise

@Alice.Zoo

Previously:

Edgware
Cockfosters

The cakes they serve at baby showers these days look like something out of an OB/GYN textbook. The old standbys used to be sweets made to look like a baby bump or a rubber ducky. Now, it's not out of the ordinary to see a vagina cake with a crowning doll's head, strawberry blood, toasted coconut pubes, and a chocolate-frosting asshole.

I discovered hundreds of these pussy-inspired cakes when I was scouring the internet for inspiration for my sister-in-law's upcoming baby shower. Of course, vulgar cakes aren't anything new. If you've ever been to a bachelorette party or happen to have a group of friends with a gross sense of humor like I do, you've probably found yourself face-to-face with a cake shaped like a penis, jizzing a load of vanilla frosting. But over the past few years, dicks haven't been the only body parts turned into sweets. Thanks to this emerging trend, cake makers are increasingly using their artistic prowess and culinary talents to depict the female anatomy.

Michael Kaz, the founder of Erotic Baking in New York, said he has been making vagina cakes for the past ten years. While the vagina has yet to catch up to the popularity of dick and ass cakes, he has noticed a recent increase in requests for events like baby showers, where people will shell out $200 for a vagina cake to feed around 15 guests. The trend has even been embraced by celebrities like Christina Aguilera and Jersey Shore's Nicole "Snooki" Polizzi.

"When a vagina cake is requested for a baby shower, it is always a design related to childbirth," he told me. "I think the friend or family member who orders the cake is trying to bring a sense of humor to the horrifying experience of childbirth." Kaz recalled one request for extra slime to represent the discharge and another where the husband wanted twin baby heads, with one wearing a pair of glasses.

Last summer, Johanna Nagan was surprised with a vagina cake before giving birth to her second child. In lieu of a traditional baby shower, Nagan's friends threw her a vagina-themed party and celebrated with the detailed sweet—a large pink vagina cake covered with brown sprinkles and strawberry blood with a baby's gooey head sticking out. A photo taken of the cake that was shared online and was quickly picked up by several different media outlets.

"The experience of having a vagina cake is liberating," Nagan told me over email. "Having a graphic cake opens the door to talk about all this stuff. What surprised me the most was no one told me about so much of what happens with pregnancy and motherhood. No one tells you that your vagina may tear to your butthole and you may not have a clean wipe for three years."

Nagan said there was another similar cake at the party that said "I tore mommy a new one" in chocolate script. "Instead of cringe about my upcoming birth, I laughed," she added. "Because the cake was funny and true."

While the vagina cake might seem like a trivial trend, these depictions can help open up discussion about a subject that, even with our pussy-grabbing president, is still considered taboo. Not to mention the fact that, plenty of women are pretty unfamiliar with their own genitalia. A survey of 1,000 British women conducted in 2016, found that only 44 percent could correctly identify the vagina on a medical illustration and less than one third of participants could label the six different parts (ovaries, cervix, vulva, fallopian tubes, vagina, uterus).

Midwife and author Ina May Gaskin has written extensively about the paradox of female genitalia in today's culture, pointing out that it is constantly exposed in pornography, yet remains off-limits in terms of childbirth.

"In ancient cultures, the sight of a vulva of a goddess was a sacred image—our culture has made it taboo," writes Gaskin in her book Birth Matters. "Why aren't people in society allowed to see what this looks like? I think it would be good for women to learn that nature provides the goods for such work. Seeing is believing, after all."

British professor Emma Rees, director of the Institute of Gender Studies at the University of Chester and author of Vagina: A Literary and Cultural History, agrees that vagina cakes can be a positive phenomenon that can help foster discussion.

"We are denied the terminology, so we're silent, and so abuse from female genital mutilation (FGM) to rape carries on," said Rees. "If a vulva cupcake or an episode of a TV program makes someone think about this and speak the truth about women's bodies, then that's progress—but we have to be prepared to confront millennia of accumulated misogyny and disgust to do this."

As I dove deeper into vagina cake images on the internet, I noticed that some of the dessert depictions of childbirth were done with the intent to shock, instead of educate or celebrate. That is something Rees finds problematic.

"They run the risk–quite literally–of sugar-coating the very real abuses that women and girls
endure around the world," warned Rees. "If you serve up and eat a vulva cupcake, imagining you're terribly edgy, but then do nothing about the fact, according to the WHO's latest statistics, that 200 million women are living with FGM right now, then you're virtue signaling and far from engaging in an empowering act. You're actually contributing to the fractures that run through feminism, nullifying its status as political movement, and making it nothing more than a fashion."

In today's political climate where women's reproductive rights from abortion access to birth control are under attack by the Trump administration, it's true that slapping a vulva on a cake isn't enough when it comes to fighting the powers that be. But it's something. For Nagan, the cake was just the beginning of her teaching her daughter about the power of the vagina.

"I took my seven month baby to march in the Women's March in DC where I wore a beautiful vagina pin in my hair that was made for her baby shower," said Nagan. "Because vagina is not a dirty word, it is a powerful, priceless, life-making part of humanity and I am raising a daughter to know her own power, and not be ashamed of a vagina."

Follow Erica Euse on Twitter.

Lead photo by Chuck Johnson.

Members of Congress are set to return to their districts this weekend for their first week-long recess since Trump's inauguration. Heading home during legislative breaks is nothing new, but this year most Republicans are foregoing a hallowed recess tradition: holding in-person town halls in which lawmakers take questions from constituents in a high school gym, local restaurant, or college classroom.

After outpourings of rage at some early town halls—including "Do your job!" chants yelled at Rep. Jason Chaffetz near Salt Lake City—Republicans are ducking in-person events altogether, opting instead for more controlled Facebook Live or "tele-town halls," where questions can be screened by press secretaries and followups are limited—as are the chances of becoming the next viral meme of the left.

Read more on VICE News

Joel Plaskett hasn't aged a bit. His voice hasn't lost any of its youthful lilt since I first interviewed him back in 1995, when we were both teenagers. He's still as rhapsodic and talkative as he was when he was touring Smart Bomb with his old band Thrush Hermit. And even though there are a few greys poking out of his hair, he even looks as though time has not yet caught up with him over all these years.

Of course, Joel Plaskett has in fact aged. Duh. And the way that it's most obvious is the extensive set of recordings he has amassed. Plaskett has proven himself to be one of Canada's most reliable songwriters, both in quality and frequency. In 1999 alone, he released Thrush Hermit's swan song, Clayton Park, the debut album by Neuseiland, his side-project with Super Friendz members Charles Austin and Drew Yamada, and his debut solo album, In Need Of Medical Attention. Subsequently, he has steadily released at least one album of his own every other year, not to mention produced recordings by Two Hours Traffic, Al Tuck, Sarah Slean, Old Man Luedecke, Mo Kenney and Shotgun Jimmie, while running his own label, New Scotland Records. Along the way, he has also rounded up a handful of Juno nominations (including a win in 2010 for Adult Alternative Album of the Year) and a couple of Polaris Music Prize shortlists.

Read more on Noisey

Last night, hundreds of Canadians turned up for an event thrown by The Rebel (aka. Breitbart North) at the Canada Christian College in Toronto, in what was described as a protest against anti-Islamaphobia bill M103. Reporters from VICE and VICE News were there - you can read about the event here. You can find a full photo gallery of the tense rally below.

A member of the crowd holds her hand up during the national anthem.

Candidate for the Conservative Party leadership race, Kellie Leitch, delivers a speech during The Rebels's rally against Billy M103.

A man who had been filming since the beginning of the event. I see you, too!

A member of the crowd waves a large Canadian flag as the crowd erupts into cheers.

A man wearing The Rebel's signature Make Canada Great Again hat.

Him too.

A member of the crowd holds up a sign that seems to equivocate Mel Gibson in Braveheart with the fight against Bill M103.

After Faith Goldy's closing remarks, the crowd gave a standing ovation. One man, pictured here, threw up what appears to be a three-fingered salute. 

Another member of the Conservative Party leadership race, Chris Alexander, addresses the audience about the "threat" of M103.

The Rebel's Faith Goldy brings around a donation bucket after Ezra Levant tells the audience that The Rebel does not have the funding of "big media," such as the CBC, and needs the money to pay for security.

A man hands two $20 bills to Faith Goldy.

Faith Goldy addresses the audience.

Conservative Leadership candidate and Saskatoon MP Brad Trost gives the final speech of the night before closing remarks.

On a warm July day in 2008, Vince Li says he heard the voice of God.

Li—now known as Will Baker—was sitting on a bus making a 14-hour journey from Edmonton to Winnipeg when the voices came for him. A few seats away from him sat the sleeping figure of a young carnival worker named Tim McLean who was on his way home to Manitoba.

While Baker sat there the voices in his head continued to speak, telling him that McLean was the man he must kill. Baker, following these orders, shuffled over to sit next to McLean's sleeping frame and pulled out a large knife.

What happened next was one of the most horrific Canadian crimes of the last decade.

Now, nine years after Baker killed, dismembered, and cannibalized McLean on that Greyhound bus outside of  Portage la Prairie, Manitoba, he has been granted full release. Baker at the time was suffering from undiagnosed schizophrenia and plead not criminally responsible to the charges.

The court accepted his plea and he sent to the Selkirk Mental Health Centre to start what would be nine years of treatment. Over time, Li was granted more and more freedom as the treatment progressed, this culminated in his full release on Feb. 10. Prior to his full release, Baker was living on his own but supervised when he took his schizophrenia medication. With the full release, that supervision has been lifted.

Will Baker, formerly Vince Li, pictured in Portage La Prairie on August 5, 2008. Via John Woods/The Canadian Press.

In their written decision the Manitoba Criminal Code Review Board, who were in charge of this decision, wrote that they had considered all the evidence and testimony carefully and trust fully that Baker will continue to take the medication that holds the voices at bay.

In their decision the review board said they are "of the opinion that the weight of the evidence does not substantiate that Mr. Baker poses a significant threat to the safety of the public."

It's a decision that, while may have infuriated a large portion of the public, has the support of many who work in the mental health field.

"From what we can see from this case, is that he does have one of those illnesses that is fully treatment responsive so that the risk goes away when he receives treatment,"  Dr. Alexander Simpson, the chief of forensic psychiatry at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, explained to VICE. "Despite the horrendous nature of what he has done, his ongoing risk to the public as seen by the review board is seen as being low."

The Not Criminally Responsible (NCR) program, which Baker went through, is not one that's well known by the Canadian public, unlike the more straightforward justice system for non-mentally ill patients. While each case is treated differently, in general, the NCR program is a long, carefully thought-out process, which begins with the acute treatment of the illness while the trial is still ongoing.

"Then there is a long and careful process of understanding what occurred and why," said Simpson. "This is not simply understanding that one becomes unwell, but the particular way in which illness manifests in this person that gives rise of this very particular risk occurring and what are the things in life that have given rise to that situation."

"It's a complex and nuanced process," he added, "working at many levels with the person, observed by multiple people in multiple ways and multiple settings and putting all of that together over years is the process for recovery in something like this."

The program looks at broader issues in the offender's life like the nature of someone's lifestyle, their attitudes towards the illness, and their stability to live well and safely. The patient will be treated by psychiatrists, psychologists, psychotherapists and social workers slowly and progressively. Over time the patient, if responding well, will slowly be allowed more freedom.

Perhaps the thing that Canadians know least about in the process is the slow, careful, and complex moral journey that comes with rehabilitation.

"Rehabilitation involves not simply getting well and understanding your illness, but it's a moral journey of one's own accountability of wellness, that 'I cannot live my life ever again in a way that gives rise to risk occurring to others,'" said Simpson.

The CEO of the Schizophrenia Society of Canada, Chris Summerville, has worked with Baker for the majority of his treatment. Summerville told the CBC he is confident that Baker will remain on his medication and engaged in his treatment.  

"We're confident he is going to stay engaged," said Summerville. "He has expressed a desire to stay engaged with his doctor, with me and with some other mental health organizations."

Many, including McLean's family members, have spoken out against his release. On Facebook McLean's mother released a statement asking people to contact elected officials and shared a petition to overturn Backer's release.

"How do I feel? I feel that a great injustice has occurred. I feel most people agree. I'm grateful that Timothy's death has shed light on the issue," she wrote.

"It's time for all people to take care of each other or what kind of a world are we leaving for our children. I'm one voice, I used it, please use yours."

In the political sphere, Li's treatment and McLean's death have become tokens for a cheap pop from a party's base—Rona Ambrose, the interim leader of the federal Conservative party, in particular, has been very vocal on Baker.

"In 2008, Tim McLean was brutally murdered by Vincent Li on a Greyhound Bus. He is now free with an absolute discharge," reads a Facebook post by Ambrose. "Tim's mother has to live with this hell for the rest of her life and that just doesn't seem right".

The severity of someone's crime while suffering from mental illness is not a direct correlation to the severity of the ongoing risk. While that correlation may be true for non-mentally ill offenders, it's not the case for those who offend on the basis of mental illness. That said, Simpson said he sympathizes those who oppose the release of Baker.

"When something is as horrendous as his offence was, understandably people will struggle to understand how and why somebody like that will truly recover," he said. "The hideousness of what they did colours people's judgement going forward."

"It's also hard to give up that punishment paradigm from the accountability paradigm and I think that's what some commentators and people experience from it. I don't agree with it but it's an understandable reaction to the situation."

Furthermore, the way the NCR program handles victims is not ideal. The formal outlet that the victims have is through a victim impact statement and all other participation is voluntary.

"Somehow the NCR process needs to be informed by, and offer an ability for, the victims to have a voice and involvement that is more effective than the victim impact statement process that exists at the moment," said Simpson.

Tim McLean. Photo via MySpace

Simpson says that the process lacks in many ways and at times can leave the victims fearful and could benefit from a directional move towards restorative justice—a justice theory that focuses on cooperation from all impacted and works to rebuild what has been broken by the criminal act. This would increase drastically the inclusion of the victims in the process. The system is far from perfect, in general many aspects of the way we deal with and treat mental health in Canada is lacking drastically.

"The mental health system is under-resourced here and in Vincent Li's case, and many others, people who commit criminal acts while mentally ill have often been failed by the general health system and better care earlier has to be the long-term answer to reduce the number of these cases," said Simpson.

In the end, while Will Baker's treatment and release may seem to be the right decision, it's hard to view this in any way as a "good thing" or even a "success" because of the positive connotations that come with the words.

It cannot be forgotten that while Baker was let down by Canada's mental health system, in a far larger way, so was Tim McLean.

Lead Image: The bus on which Vince Li attacked and dismembered fellow passenger Tim McLean. Via The Canadian Press/John Woods

Follow Mack Lamoureux on Twitter

I'm sitting inside the "dungeon" at a hotel in Niagara Falls. It's really just a nondescript meeting room, a washout of grey and beige, but no one's thinking about the backdrop right now.

In front of me, a woman with a bright turquoise mohawk named QueenEh is whipping her sub—a blindfolded man tied to a stripper pole—with a purple leather flog. His skin reddens then raises with angry looking welts. Directly to my left, Lindsey*, a blonde with a lopsided tiara on her head, is on her knees giving a blowjob to her partner; her arms and hands are crocheted behind her back with candyfloss pink rope. Towards the far end of the room, across from me, a woman lying atop a table is having hair mousse sprayed on selective parts of her body and set on fire. And to my right there's a lady suspended in the air by a red harness.

"Now that's what you call a swinger," whispers a spectator.

QueenEh. All photos by Melissa Renwick

The hotel, generic by any measure, has been transformed into a den of hedonism for the Niagara Falls Lifestyles Convention, a swingers' Valentine's event now in its 10th year. It's thrown by a company called TABOTA, which also runs The O Zone Swingers Club in Toronto, and this year has drawn 400 people.

Walking inside, we immediately see all the kitschy fixings you'd expect: artificial roses, lacy hearts, condoms, menstrual sponges, and heart shaped candies that dot the hallways. To keep outsiders from knowing what's taking place inside, entranceways have been haphazardly papered over. But me and a photographer—both virgins to "the lifestyle" as swingers say—were granted full access to document the weekend's shenanigans. As part of the deal, we are not identifying the hotel.

Immediately, we head out to the poolside courtyard, which has an all-inclusive vibe—there's a buffet, bar, even a salsa dance teacher—except some people are naked. The outfits range from Hawaiian shirts and sundresses, to tight black mesh and PVC.

The first couple we hang out with, Kevin, 49, and Morgan, 50, have been swinging for decades; they take us into their room to give us a historical perspective and tell us what to anticipate. The rules haven't changed much over the years, they say. Primarily: no means no, ask before you touch, and practice safe sex.

"You get so many people who go to the club and think they can just have sex," says Morgan, who has shoulder-length ashy blonde hair and is leaning against her headboard in a bikini. "People need to make connections."

The couple is celebrating their 14th anniversary, and say they only started swinging together a year and a half into dating. Morgan, who is bisexual, says it didn't work with her ex because they didn't have a good relationship to begin with.

"We loved playing apart," she says, noting that prior to joining the lifestyle with her husband he had cheated on her.

"A lot of couples think 'Oh, let's try swinging, it'll fix whatever problem we have' and no, it makes it worse," adds Kevin, whose shirt features sideways bold-faced type that says "If you turn your head to read my shirt you owe me a blowjob."

Lindsey's hands are crocheted behind her back.

The pair always "play" together, often looking for other couples, which actually sounds quite complicated.

"We're looking for chemistry for all four us."

They say they don't feel pressure to hook up; they're just here to chill, and if they end up "playing" with others, that's just a bonus. Having said all that, these two are definitely down to fuck.

"Do you wanna know how many people I've slept with? I have no idea," says Morgan. "If I've fucked the husband, I've fucked the wife. Hundreds."

With that in mind, we head to the pool for the wet t-shirt contest, swinger style.

"Let's see some titties shaking!" screams a guy behind me, who quickly gets his wish.

It starts out with 15 women in white tank tops and 10 dudes in black boxer briefs (which doesn't seem fair), who, after getting sprayed by water guns and dumping water in their own underwear, gyrate, strip, and hump pool railings. One man starts doing pushups, letting his dick touch the ground each time.

They're narrowed down to five couples based on audience cheering, which is when the host asks, "Have you heard the term human sundae before? It's gonna be absolutely delicious."

Each woman lays on the ground while her male partner covers her body in ice cream and sundae toppings. Dick push-up guy sprays whip cream on his partner's vagina and appears to be eating her out, while another dude places a banana over his partner's ladyparts. I think the former is going going to win, but in the end it goes to the pair who makes the biggest mess, which includes Lindsey, the sub I later see giving head with her winning tiara.

Lindsey wins the wet t-shirt contest.

At this point, we're hungry, so we pop into the restaurant next door. The American couple next to us at the bar asks why we've been taking photos. When we tell them we're on assignment for VICE, the wife, Tracy*, gets super excited. 

"(My husband) always says I should've been a porn star," she says, with a slight upstate New York drawl.

Tracy is a petite brunette dogwalker who looks a lot younger than her age—40—especially with her pigtails. Her husband Craig*, a banker, is stocky and speaks with a hint of gruffness.

Tracy is saccharine sweet, and quite honestly, not someone I'd expect to be a swinger. Maybe it's the pigtails but she just seems way innocent. Her words reveal otherwise.

Tracy, a mom from upstate New York.

"I ate my first pussy last night," she says, giggling. "It was amazing."

The couple, high school sweethearts who've been married 22 years, are on a paid swingers' website that costs them about $150 a year, which is how they found out about the Niagara event. They have two kids, aged 18 and 22, and say no one in their family or friend circles can know about their pastime.

They've only been in the lifestyle a year, their interest in it was sparked when they had sex on the beach in Aruba next to another couple.

"We talked but didn't touch… It was so hot," says Tracy.

Craig is straight and enjoys watching Tracy have sex with other women and men as much as he likes engaging in it himself. As for Tracy's preferences, she tells us she is very drawn to "black dick."

Craig says he and his wife use destination swinging as an excuse to get away for weekends, which also allows them to avoid potential clingers.

Afterwards, "you're kind of on a high for three days."

US army veteran Jason.

As we wander back into the hotel, we run into dick pushup man, a US army veteran named Jason. He's quite clearly drunk and immediately takes us back to his room, gives us some sloppy kisses, and encourages me to cup his balls. (I obliged—when in Rome etc.)

Jason, 36, is charming and seems harmless, but he's also a bit of a frat boy—his belligerence stands out in the crowd. His wife, who goes by the pseudonym Jessie Jewel, enters the room to see what's going on and I immediately feel awkward, especially because he keeps kissing me behind the ears and trying to touch my ass.

His wife seems used to it. "He's a fucking maniac. We think he's done but he's never done," she says.

It turns out she's a doctor; she offers us samples of a drink with nitric oxide that supposedly "stimulates your sex organs." (I grab a few but have yet to try them.)

Jessie Jewel tells us about one of the rooms occupied by a guy with a BDSM toy chest, including wands used to electrically shock people. We rush to find it. It does not disappoint.

Liam*, the toy master, walks us through each of his many gadgets—flogs, whips, vibrators, paddles.

Liam shows us his toys and pours candle wax over QueenEh.

"This is one is called evil motherfucker," he says about a horsewhip.

This is where we meet QueenEh, the woman with the blue mowhawk, and Lindsey, the wet T-shirt winner. They take turns being Liam's subs.

QueenEh strips and lies on a bed and has Liam whip her with a leather flog. Asked if it hurts, she says, "I've had a baby with no drugs, this is like 20 percent of that." Later, he lights two candles and dots her body with blue wax. Her partner, who is observing all, later scrapes the wax off and stimulates her with his hand until she squirts, crying out loudly.

I tell QueenEh I don't know where my G-spot is and then I compare my small vibrator (which I brought along) to the giant wand she has. "I feel ashamed," I say.

"Oh honey," she replies, looking a bit sad for me.

Next, Liam gives us a crash course in electrical play. Basically, he has a portable electrical generator that he turns on and holds to his body, so the currents are running through him; using a bunch of attachments he can then transfer electricity to another person (even onto their clit). Of the charged pompom, he says, "someone once described this as a thousand mosquitoes."

Using a low setting, he tests a couple of glass attachments on our arms. It feels a bit prickly, and makes a buzzing sound, but it's not intense by any stretch. But then Lindsey, whose arms have just been crocheted behind her back by another woman, bends over on the bed and Liam demos some of the stronger settings on her.

Liam shocks Lindsey with his electrically charged pompom.

"You wanna see something cool? Turn the light off," he says. When we do, all we can see is the purple glow of the electrically charged toy, and hear Lindsey squealing in pain (and pleasure?).

As the night wears on, we meet new parents who are just taking a break from their baby (and later observe them in a foursome), a young married couple who say they're here to flirt more than anything else, and pass by a game show, karaoke, and a full on dance party playing 2000s hits like Nelly's "Hot in Herre."

Dance party.

There are also a lot of people fucking, obviously. Fucking in the pool; fucking on picnic tables; fucking upstairs in the "playroom" where there are three different beds to accommodate gang bangs. Even the people hooking up in their rooms mostly leave their curtains pushed aside, so everyone else can get a peek.

People fucking.

The openness seems to be as much of a draw as the sex.

Morgan, the cam girl we started the day off with, is one of the few who said she'd be OK with us using her real name. But even then, she believes her friends would treat her like a "leper" if they find out she swings.

"We're no different, it's just something we like to do with consenting adults," she says. "I'm gonna be in a walker being like 'do me from behind.'"

*names have been changed to protect privacy

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

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On Thursday, Washington's Supreme Court ruled unanimously that Barronelle Stutzman, a local florist, couldn't deny service to a gay couple because of her religious beliefs under the state's anti-discrimination law, CBS News reports.

Although Stutzman had sold flowers to the couple before, she refused to sell flowers for their wedding back in 2013, claiming that it would go against her Christian beliefs. Lower courts ruled against her and Stutzman was fined, but she and her lawyer took the case to the Washington Supreme Court. The court sided with the lower courts in a 9-0 landslide, saying that refusing to sell flowers to a gay couple is discrimination and not protected under free speech laws.

The court sided with the couple's lawyer, Michael Scott, who argued that providing flowers for a same-sex marriage isn't the same thing as an endorsement of the practice: "She's selling what she sells."

"As Stutzman acknowledged at deposition, providing flowers for a wedding between Muslims would not necessarily constitute an endorsement of Islam, nor would providing flowers for an atheist couple endorse atheism," the opinion said.

Stutzman now plans to take her case in front of the US Supreme Court.

"It's wrong for the state to force any citizen to support a particular view about marriage or anything else against their will," Stuzman's attorney wrote in a statement. "Freedom of speech and religion aren't subject to the whim of a majority; they are constitutional guarantees."

A new report by the Southern Poverty Law Center explores the numerous white nationalist groups attempting to gain footing in colleges around the country. These dapper, organized, and optics-optimized hate groups are the fresh, young faces of fascism, and their message of hate is one they purport as a rational and sober championing of "nationalism" or "cultural identity." Aghast pearl clutching and "um, actuallys" usually await anyone naïve enough to wander into their digital domains bandying about terms like "racist" or "Nazi."

As I visited the sites of Identity Evropa, American Vanguard, and the other groups of shook white men mentioned in the SPLC piece, I was forced to finally grapple with a hard truth that's been hounding me for months: All these guys have my haircut, and I need to figure out what I'm going to do about that.

Richard Spencer. Screencap via YouTube channel American Renaissance

Sometimes, I would jokingly refer to my cut as a "Hitler Youth," still blissfully unaware of the real neo–Hitler Youth movements burbling up in message boards and economically depressed towns around the country.

The clean, crisp look complemented my burgeoning minimalist aesthetic, required little upkeep, and was hard to really fuck up. This last feature of the cut was particularly helpful as I moved around a lot, so shopping around for a primary haircut provider or getting a cleanup when they were overbooked was never too much of a dice roll.

This isn't to say that my time sporting the undercut has been an entirely conflict-free experience. Before the ascent of the Fourth Reich, my haircut was pegged to another group of deplorables: hipsters.

The definition of a "hipster" is an entirely different conversation and one that has been explored to death, but before "millennial" replaced it as the de jure blanket insult, hipster haters typically pointed to this haircut—MY haircut—as proof positive of one's hipsterdom. Now, I'm sure the very nature of this platform is enough needed for many of you to sign off on poking me with a "HIPSTER" branding iron, but that misses the point. Where I fall on the hipster spectrum is neither here nor there. What is important is that my haircut and I weathered the storm until the style became so ubiquitous that assumptions about the type of person its owner might be became pointless.

As Trump's popularity grew in the latter half of 2016 and more of his prominent undercut-sporting alt-right underlings gained notoriety, my beloved haircut was once again under attack. This time, things were different. Where hipsters are relatively harmless, passive annoyances, here we had people championing for "peaceful ethnic cleansing," or worse, while rocking my unimpeachable, TV-ready cut for their evil machinations.

Screencap via YouTube channel TYT Politics

This new racist wrinkle wasn't just happening in America, either. Cabals of hard-right nationalists had been popping up like weeds across Europe during the same time period, most sporting variations on my undercut.

My haircut dilemma wasn't as simple as the New Balance brouhaha, where I could simply stop supporting the retailer with my money and instead wear products from one of the many other shoe companies out there. (New Balance has explicitly denounced white supremacy, by the way.) By the very nature of it being attached to us, a haircut can be simultaneously both as utilitarian as a pair of socks and as intimate as a tattoo. It's the primary convergence of our given bodies and chosen identities. And with these Nazis biting my shit, I have spent the past few months feeling societal pressure to change how I present myself to the world.

Reading the SPLC's report finally crystalized things for me. After months of hemming and hawing, I realized that to cave and change my haircut simply because I don't want to be associated with white supremacists is to forever cede the undercut to the enemy. The Nazis stole and forever stained the beautifully geometric Hindu swastika and then they co-opted the whimsical and peaceful Pepe. They have no birthright claim to a cut their forbearers had originally plucked from the Edwardian era. I'm not going to just roll over and let them attempt to reclaim this haircut simply because they want it.

This goes beyond digging your heels in and refusing to let the enemy take from you. These white supremacists foolishly believe that, once the global race war they so clearly want kicks off, the sides will be easily identifiable. After all, surplus melanin is all it takes to make one an enemy combatant in their reality. Should such a dystopian hypothetical ever manifest (and it won't), that bias would be their undoing as droves of guys in haircuts like mine preyed on their assumptions of "race loyalty" and undermined their efforts from within.

I'm not forever marrying myself to this haircut. My style has changed over the years, and I reckon it will continue to morph and evolve with the times. But when it does change, it will be on my terms, and not because some bigot shit-poster has graduated from a complete disregard for personal hygiene to pomade.

I encourage those of you like me out there—few other coif options, but an aversion to being lumped in with neo-Nazis—to soldier on, keep your cut, and fight bigotry wherever you see it, drawing power from the confidence that comes with knowing you're looking your most sharp.

Follow Justin Caffier on Twitter.

Of all the musical genres, rock 'n' roll has remained the most defiant and experimental. Infused with blues, gospel, jazz, and country, at the very root of its inception is the sound and rhythms of the black female voice. With an impact not recognized by history, black women's spines hold stories books have never had the strength to carry. And within the pages of these encyclopedias is a narrative that pays homage to the foundational legacy of the black women who crafted the rock 'n' roll force.

The legacy of black women in rock, when dutifully researched and studied, is omnipresent. Their names, however, are erased from the forefront because sexism and anti-black racism would have you believe that rock 'n' roll was created by a down on his luck, raspy-voiced white man. Elvis is largely regarded as the "King of Rock 'n' Roll," Eric Clapton has been inducted into the rock 'n' roll hall of fame three times and Queen's Freddie Mercury is the name many throw into the ring when discussing unparalleled vocal pitch, control, and skill, paired with an unmatched stage presence. Yet before these men, at least two decades earlier, there was Big Mama Thornton, Sister Rosetta Tharpe jamming on the electric, and Bessie Smith channeling the Blues that would become one of the pillars of rock. These black women were making waves when the world would have rather seen them drown.

Read more on Noisey

On Wednesday, the Environmental Protection Agency posted a mirror of its website capturing the way it looked on January 19, 2017—the day before Trump took office.

Trump has proved himself to be delete-happy when it comes to the web presence of federal agencies. He's already axed big chunks of the Department of Education and the USDA sites, and his White House website is significantly more stripped down than Obama's. The EPA's move will allow for an archive of its site to exist long after Trump eventually guts the main one.

Gizmodo points out that the mirror site follows in the wake of FOIA requests filed by people worried that Trump may cripple or try to completely do away with the governmental agency.

That's not completely far-fetched—he's already nominated a climate-change denier whose heart pumps crude oil to lead the EPA, and staff members are bracing themselves for a string of executive orders that may massively reshape the agency. Trump has also, of course, said that climate change is a Chinese hoax and expressed a desire to reverse Obama's emissions restrictions, so he probably won't have much of a problem deleting the federal data the Environmental Protection Agency currently has collected on its site.

The EPA's new mirror site does have some limitations—links and some pages may break at some point, according to a warning at the top—but it will make Trump's goal to scrub the agency's information off the web a little harder, so there's that.

A Winnipeg bus driver who was stabbed to death Tuesday morning was reportedly facing multiple charges relating to sexual assault, the Winnipeg Free Press reports.

Irvine Fraser, 58, stabbed multiple times by a passenger early Tuesday morning, was set to face trial in January 2018 for multiple counts of sexual assault and sexual interference with a child.

According to the Free Press, Fraser ducked on a trial that was set in October 2016, and a warrant was put out for his arrest. In January, he turned himself in, and the date was rescheduled. Officials from Fraser's union, ATU Local 105, told reporters that they were not at all aware of Fraser's history, nor were they aware of the warrant for his arrest last year.

"We know nothing about it," John Callahan, president of the union, told the Free Press. He also noted that employees are supposed to notify their superiors if they're charged with a crime, which now raises questions of whether Transit—Fraser's employer—knew about Fraser's case but chose not to tell the union.


"Any time (an employee) is charged, they have to make it known to the employer and we have to represent them."

Although Fraser denied the charges at his preliminary hearing, the woman involved in the case said she had been molested by him from 1983 to 1991—with the assaults beginning when she was five years old. Fraser was released on conditional bail, with a stipulation that he could not have any contact with the victim.

The man who killed Fraser—22-year-old Brian Kyle Thomas—has a lengthy criminal history of violence: previously being charged after assaulting his ex-girlfriend while under the influence of alcohol.

On the night Fraser was killed, police say Thomas was reportedly with a group of friends on the bus, but they left him behind. When Fraser got to the end of his route and tried to escort Thomas off the bus, Thomas asked Fraser where his friends were. Fraser then tried to physically grab him, which prompted Thomas to pull out a large knife, and began stabbing and slashing the driver.

Winnipeg Police told VICE Thursday that investigators are still trying to determine if the killing was at all motivated or connected to Fraser's charges.

Follow Jake on Twitter.

Head image via Facebook.

Right now close to 70 galleries and special exhibits are setting up wares at Art Palm Springs, an annual desert art fair that attracts a host of eager buyers and collectors. Where Miami is host to a trendier, party atmosphere, Palm Springs has a lower key vibe, designed for an older crowd. There's generally not much Instagram or Twitter action taking place at APS, but this year is different. Suddenly a growing social media storm has pushed one of its showing galleries into a controversy involving allegations of fraud, deception and profiteering. Rebecca Hossack Gallery and one of its artists have found themselves in the middle of a strange story that starts in Vancouver, winds its way to New York and ends up in the middle-of-nowhere Kansas with international reputations, ever-precarious art world money and budding careers at stake.

Andy Dixon is a Canadian punk singer turned visual artist whose bright, pop-y works have won him international acclaim and a loyal following on the west coast. Collectors of his work are drawn to his eclectic use of colour and his ability to skewer the trappings of the worlds of luxury and leisure. Not that long ago he was represented by Rebecca Hossack, an art gallery with offices in New York and London. Dixon left Hossack just over a year ago and while neither Dixon nor Hossack would tell VICE why, friends of Dixon's suggested it was under less than amicable terms. But that is often the case when an artist leaves their representation—it's rare in the small, competitive gallery world to have a happy split. In January of this year Hossack signed a 32-year-old painter from Topeka, Kansas named John Holcomb. Holcomb considers himself an "outsider" artist whose vividly coloured works focus on figures from his rural surroundings, what he described to me as "peasants and Depression-era survivors." Both artists have publically credited Matisse as an inspiration, something that's clear in their bold use of colour and the purposeful simplicity of their figures. But friends and collectors of Dixon's think the similarities between their works are a little too close. Over the past weekend those thoughts culminated in a widely-shared Facebook post by Graeme Thomas Berglund, a fellow Vancouver artist who laid out an emotional case against Holcomb and Rebecca Hossack.

"I feel personally compelled to come to the aid and defence of my friend and fellow artist Andy Dixon. There is an artist named John Holcomb who has been replicating Andy's distinct subject matter, colour palette, process, systems of distinct mark making, themes, and ideologies that Andy has spent years developing on his own. In the case of John Holcomb, he has literally been following every turn that Andy makes with near precision. Andy Dixon paints a high end dinner party scene from the turn of the century. John Holcomb paints a high end dinner party scene from the turn of the century. Andy paints a Ming Dynasty vase with an explosion of flowers brimming out of it. John Holcomb paints a Ming Dynasty vase with an explosion of flowers brimming out of it. In a recent ironic twist, [Holcomb] is now being represented by the same gallery that Andy was working with just a year ago, selling work to their client base without explaining the inspiration or better stated, the near forgeries, that they are hawking to their clients," reads part of Graeme's statement.

It's a powerful and provocative post that has elicited intense support from artists in Vancouver and across the country, including internationally-renowned photographer Jessica Eaton, who called the situation, "absolutely crazy," in her Facebook post sharing Graeme's status.

Viewed side by side there's no doubting the closeness of Holcomb's paintings to Dixon's. The bright colour palette, the references to historical and classical works, even the evolution of subject matter, Dixon's flower-filled vases, echoed down the line by Holcomb's own paintings of vases.

Andy Dixon's work on the left, John Holcomb's painting on the right.

Of course it's plausible in theory that two artists, one in Vancouver and one in Kansas could be inspired visually by similar movements and end up with canvases that share that sensibility. "Jackson Pollock was the most famous of his time but was he the only splatterer of paint? No. Were those other artists ripping him off, well no but perhaps they were overly derivative," Michael Prokopow, a professor of Art History at Toronto's OCAD, told me.

Where does inspiration become derivation or replication? "If there's a sequence chronologically that Dixon did this work first and Holcomb did it after then, yeah maybe Holcomb's work isn't all that original," Prokopow suggests. And with the influx and wide availability of images across social media, the origins of intellectual and particularly visual property can become skewed.

"The abundance of easily accessible digital imagery creates the possibility of seeing things that you subliminally register and then find yourself doing unwittingly later on. The thing about how culture moves through any time and space, the idea of a zeitgeist or a will to form, can manifest in any number of ways. It may well be that two artists one in Vancouver and one in Kansas, inspired by Matisse can have strikingly similar works," says Prokopow.

But do these similarities constitute fraud or theft?

When I talked to Holcomb on the phone from Kansas earlier this week he was very emotional about the accusations of creative robbery.

"I've just been going through all the emails of people calling me 'a piece of shit' and 'a worthless loser.' These people started messaging my family, my friends. My uncle got one the other day that said I was a fraud and a hack," he said.  

When I shift the conversation to the works themselves, he quickly lists off his inspirations, naming everyone from Matisse, Gaugin and Warhol, to well, God.

"Anybody who ever paints, we owe everything to Matisse. He is like the dad I never had. At our core, I believe that those of us who are meant to be creative and those of us born to be creative, that is just a gift that comes from, however you want to describe it, I personally describe it as God." Not mentioned in the slew of visual guides is Andy Dixon. "I don't know Mr. Dixon. I've never seen his work in person," he says. Though he does admit to some similarities once pressed, particularly when I inquire whether he looked at Dixon's work more closely once there was a possibility he could be represented by his former gallery. "Well I am familiar with his work. Yeah, I saw similarities with his earlier stuff. I haven't seen any of his stuff in the last year or so. We're talking about in 2014, I had seen the similarity."

John Holcomb's work top and bottom left, Andy Dixon's work top and bottom right.

So what about the gallery itself? Surely, Rebecca Hossack, a gallerist who has been in the art world for decades would have noticed that a painter from Kansas had a remarkably similar aesthetic to an artist from Vancouver she herself represented just a year ago?

Holcomb claims he visited Hossack's space in January of this year on a personal trip, his first time in New York City. Rebecca happened to be working in the gallery that day and after talking about art and his work, Holcomb pulled up some of his paintings for Hossack on his phone.

"She's the one that brought up Andy. She said that it makes her very angry when people rip off her artists. And I said, 'I agree.' I understand that concept because I've lived it. I worked as a printmaker for so long and I had someone rip off my ideas directly," he said emphatically.

He then says Hossack asked him to send the gallery some of his pieces so they could evaluate them in person. "It's only when I got to New York that they said that my stuff looks completely different in person and again, I'm only trusting their opinions, I have not seen his work in person and I don't think you can grasp how many different two-dimensional and three-dimensional, tactile experiences there are."

I reached out to the gallery myself and was told they had no comment on the situation and suggested I get my answers from Holcomb. Where Hossack may be able to say that up close the two artist's pieces have enough tactile differences to warrant signing Holcomb despite the similarities, would a buyer understand these subtle nuances? Would a novice collector in Palm Springs this week instantly recognize a Holcomb from a Dixon? Strangely enough Rebecca Hossack's info page on the Art Palm Springs website still lists Andy Dixon on their roster.

A screengrab of Rebecca Hossack gallery's info page on the Art Palm Springs website.

And the business side of this curious case of potential artistic duplication is perhaps what's most alarming to some of Dixon's supporters.

"I think that's possibly, arguably the craziest part about it that he's being represented by the gallery that Andy had just left. Inspiration is a crazy thing but I think on the business side is where the true shock is for this case," Greg Adams, a friend of Dixon's told me.

There is always a precarious nature to the business of art. The market can cycle from boom to bust quickly and behind every big purchase are whispers of a looming bubble. A commercially viable artist with an aesthetic that is attractive to buyers is an enviable prospect for an international gallery. Dixon's work can sell for tens of thousands a piece and has popular appeal. And so does Holcomb's it turns out.

A recent Instagram post from the Holcomb shows one of Hossack's employees holding up a painting with a caption proclaiming he sold all of his latest works at a recent art fair.  

Screengrab from John Holcomb's Instagram.

And that is where perhaps, a weird story about a possible creative copycat becomes a test for the commercial art world in general. For Andy Dixon, it's no longer an issue of an artist whose homage has fallen too close to the line. It's now become a legal battle for the preservation of an aesthetic and commercial career he says is years in the making. "Our client is deeply concerned, there is a line between on the one hand paying homage or legitimate appropriation, and on the other willful taking of someone's entire way of painting. The line is crossed when there is imitation that is substantially similar to the original," Dixon's lawyer Paul Bain wrote me.

With Dixon having hired legal representation, it may ultimately be up to the courts to decide whether Holcomb and Hossack are willfully profitting from an artistic deception. In the meantime, Holcomb appears to have expanded some of his cultural inspirations. Yesterday, he put up an image on Instagram with a long caption that credits a list of artistic heroes like Warhol, David Hockney and Basquiat for inspiring his work.

At the bottom of that list? Andy Dixon.

Lead image: Andy Dixon's work on the left, John Holcomb's work on the right. 

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On an all new episode of our VICELAND series Nirvanna the Band the Show—which follows two lifelong best friends as they plan the greatest musical act in history—the guys try to get a float into the annual Santa Claus parade.

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Someday we will have all of this Russia stuff sorted out. There will come a time when documents will be unclassified, officials will spill the beans, and things that once were powerful secrets are just history. Truth has a way of worming its way out horribly into the light, inch by inch. But for now, it feels as if we know nothing, and learn less every day. Michael Flynn, Donald Trump's former national security advisor, has resigned, apparently because he talked to a Russian ambassador about sanctions then misled the rest of the administration about it. Members of Trump's presidential campaign reportedly had contact with Russian intelligence officials, a notion that's especially distressing because Russian hackers are widely assumed to have hacked and then leaked damaging emails written by Democrats, helping tip a close election to Trump.

The wildest theories paint a hysterical picture of the president as a Russian mole, groomed for years and blackmailed by operatives with footage of his depraved, urine-tinged sex life. On the other end of the spectrum there's the idea that Flynn and Trump and his crew are actually honest, reform-minded leaders—the problem is the corrupt "deep state" leaking inflammatory information out to a liberal media primed to gleefully publish anything that makes Trump look bad, no matter how sketchy. Conspiracy theories about Russian oil companies and potential coups and spies holding information back from the White House are all floating around, and all plausible to those in the right mood—the right mood being a couple drinks in and half-watching a six-way CNN splitscreen where the guests are debating who should be in jail and for what.

In an effort to sort out some simple, widely reported truths from eyelid-twitch-inducing "just asking questions" Medium posts, I've compiled a (likely not quite complete) timeline of Trump's history of ties to Russia and the resulting controversies that spun off from that. Here we go:

1987: Trump visits Moscow and Leningrad, his first trip to what was then the USSR, to explore expanding his hotel empire to those cities. This was Trump before the bankruptcies of the early 90s wiped him out—at the time he was a flashy, successful real estate developer who had just come off an under-budget renovation of Central Park's Wollman Rink, arguably his most successful project in New York. Putting buildings in Russia would have been a relatively logical move.

1988: Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev comes to New York, and eager to get himself involved in a major news story, Trump circulates a rumor that Gorbachev is going to visit Trump Tower. That doesn't happen—instead, a Gorbachev impostor showed up and shook hands with Trump. Though the mogul later said he knew it wasn't the real Gorbachev, a TV producer who helped out with the gag said he was fooled.

1996: Trump, recovered from his bout of embarrassing failure in the casino business, visits Moscow again in hopes of working with a tobacco company to build a hotel. This never happens.

1997: Trump talks with a Russian artist about putting a huge statue of Christopher Columbus with "$40 million worth of bronze in it" in the Hudson River. This never happens.

2005: Trump partners with a company called the Bayrock Group to again attempt to build a hotel in Moscow. This never happens.

At this point, it's pretty unfair to characterize Trump as doing much business in Russia, especially since none of his planned ventures ever got off the ground. But he was still reportedly doing a lot of selling to Russians. Trump's image of ostentatious, almost retro, luxury appealed to Russians who probably both liked that aesthetic and saw a chance to invest in American real estate. "Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets," Donald Trump Jr. said at a conference in 2008, remarks that became widely reported once journalists dug into Trump's business. "We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia." An ABC News investigation from last year found that "Trump-branded developments catered to large numbers of Russian buyers," especially when it came to condos in South Florida.

September 2007: Trump opens Trump SoHo, a new building in Manhattan that he developed with Bayrock and another company. The idea is that buyers will live in condo units for part of the year (because of residential zoning restrictions) and rent them as hotel rooms the rest of the time. One of the Bayrock partners is a Russian immigrant with ties to organized crime who was also an FBI informant; the project has investments from various entities with ties to the former Soviet Union. (Details about Trump SoHo are all from this great New York Times story published last year.)

October 2007: Trump tells Larry King on CNN that Russian President Vladimir Putin is doing "a great job in rebuilding the image of Russia and also rebuilding Russia period." This is the first on-the-record praise of Putin from Trump, though it's less political than it is one branding expert recognizing another.

2011: Trump and his partners in Trump SoHo are sued by buyers who claim that Trump wildly exaggerated how many units had been sold, making the project seem more successful than it was. (They would be refunded most of their money and the building is now a regular Trump-branded hotel.) Also that year a former Bayrock employee sues the company (a suit Trump wasn't involved in), claiming that there was all sorts of shady business going on, including unexplained payments from Kazakhstan and Russia. Trump would later say that he barely knew the Eastern Europeans he partnered with, though one of them—the one with mob ties—worked for Trump as an adviser and dealmaker even after the SoHo mess.

2011: In Time to Get Tough, Trump says that he "respects Putin and Russians" and blames Barack Obama for being soft on them.

2013: Aras Agalarov, a Russian oligarch, talks to Trump and gets him to bring the Miss Universe pageant, which he's owned since 1996, to one of Agalarov's venues in Moscow. Trump brushes off criticisms about Russia's recently passed landmark anti-gay law, and reportedly talks about building properties in Moscow, though no deal ever gets made. Trump does tweet about wanting to be friends with Putin and appears in a music video with Agalarov's son, a wannabe pop star:

October 2013: Trump tells Larry King that Putin is "outsmarting" the US. It's worth noting that Trump isn't the only right-winger praising the Russian leader. Pat Buchanan, among others, admired Putin's defense of "traditional values," though other conservatives denounced these views.

November 2015: Now a Republican candidate seeking the presidential nomination, Trump says during a primary debate that he "got to know [Putin] very well" when the two men were on 60 Minutes—even though they were interviewed in different countries in that episode. Trump would later clarify that he never met Putin.

December 2015: When asked on MSNBC's Morning Joe about Putin's praising him as "very talented," Trump says he appreciates the compliment. When pressed about Putin's abysmal human rights record and killing of journalists, he replies, "I think our country does plenty of killing also."

This sort of thing happens several times during the Republican primary, with Trump being given opportunities to strongly denounce Putin and refusing to take them, instead insisting he'd rather get along with Russia.

March 2016: Trump says that a man named Carter Page is one of his foreign policy advisors. Julia Ioffe later reports in Politico that though Page is supposed to be an expert on Russia, few prominent people have any idea who he is—though his new proximity to Trump was helping him get meetings with VIPs.

April: Paul Manafort, a longtime political operative who worked for the pro-Russian Ukrainian leader Viktor Yanukovych, takes charge of the Trump campaign in advance of the GOP convention.

June: It's reported that Russian hackers gained access to the Democratic National Committee email system, stealing opposition research files on Trump, among other things. Russia denies this, and Trump bizarrely claims that the DNC invented the story in order to distract from other issues.

Early July: As reported later by Yahoo News, Page goes on a visit to Russia where he meets with government officials, which worries some people in US intelligence. (When asked by Yahoo about this in September, the Trump camp said Page had "no role" in the campaign.)

Later in July: During a GOP platform committee meeting, Trump's representatives move to strike language about providing weapons to Ukraine so it could defend itself against Russian-backed rebels. This was notable, NPR reported, because Trump's people didn't ask for much else on the platform. (Obama was also against providing weapons to Ukraine on the grounds that it would escalate the conflict, but many Republicans were in favor of it.)

Also late July: Wikileaks publishes emails stolen from the DNC, the most damaging of which paint a picture of a Democratic party that was backing Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders, making it more difficult for Clinton to unify the party after a contentious primary campaign.

July 26: In response to a lot of stories about Trump's Russia-friendly statements, the hacking stories, and his staff's ties to Russia, the Republican nominee takes to Twitter:

August: Manafort resigns from the Trump campaign as a series of stories breaks about his ties to pro-Russian politicians. The most salacious of these involves Yanukovych secretly paying Manafort $12 million, an allegation he denies.

September 26: At the first presidential debate, Trump continues to insist that no one knows who is behind the DNC hack: "She's saying Russia, Russia, Russia. Maybe it was. It could also be China, it could be someone sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds. You don't know who broke into DNC, but what did we learn? We learn that Bernie Sanders was taken advantage of by your people."

Early October: Wikileaks begins publishing emails stolen from the account of Clinton campaign chair John Podesta, a slow drip of stories that will dog Clinton until Election Day. Later reporting and investigations indicate that the same group that hacked the DNC also targeted Podesta—Russian-backed hackers, in other words.

October 30: As the campaign heads into the home stretch and the media focuses on a statement from FBI head James Comey about the continued investigation into Hillary Clinton's improper email procedures, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid writes an angry letter to Comey:

"It has become clear that you possess explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisors and the Russian government — a foreign interest openly hostile to the United States, which Trump praises at every opportunity... The public has a right to know this information."

What Reid is talking about isn't immediately apparent, but Mother Jones reports the next day that it probably has something to do with a dossier of explosive allegations against Trump that's been circulating in DC political circles for some time. The public won't know what's in that dossier until after the election, however.

November 1: The FBI reveals that it looked into ties between Trump and the Kremlin and found nothing concrete.

November 8: Trump beats Clinton in an election that comes down basically to mere thousands of voters scattered across a few Midwestern states. With a result like that, it's possible to point to a lot of factors as being decisive, but the spread of anti-Clinton stories based on Wikileaks-provided emails surely had an effect.

November 11: Russian officials say they had contact with Trump's team in order to push for a favorable foreign policy from the candidate. Trump's camp denies this.

December: The FBI and CIA agree that Russian efforts to influence the election were specifically targeted in order to help Trump win, and were not just an attempt to delegitimize America's democratic system. Trump refuses to believe this, igniting a public spat between the president-elect and the intelligence community. Meanwhile, some members of Congress from both parties are calling for an investigation into the matter.

December 29: Obama announces new sanctions on Russia in retaliation for the interference in the US election.

Late December: Michael Flynn, Trump's pick for national security advisor—who has his own ties to Russia, including a paid appearance at a state-sponsored media event—calls Russian Ambassador Sergey I. Kislyak.

From here on out, uh, things happen pretty quickly.

January 10: Remember that report that Reid and Mother Jones alluded to? Well, after CNN revealed that Obama and Trump had been briefed on its existence, Buzzfeed went ahead and published the whole thing, even though it contained explosive and imposslbe-to-verify allegations, like that Russia had been cultivating Trump for years, and that Trump had been filmed by spies watching prostitutes piss all over a bed the Obamas had once slept in.

January 11: In his first press conference since the election, Trump finally admits that Russia was behind the email hacks, though he stops short of really saying that it was a problem. "Hacking's bad, and it shouldn't be done. But look at the things that were hacked, look at what was learned from that hacking."

January 12: A Washington Post column by David Ignatius reports that Flynn may have talked about sanctions in his call to Kislyak, potentially a violation of an obscure law against private citizens conducting diplomacy. The Trump administration denied that Flynn talked sanctions, starting a wave of denials:

January 13: White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer says that Flynn never talked sanctions.

January 15: Vice President Mike Pence says the same thing on several TV shows. So does Reince Priebus.

January 26: The Justice Department tells the White House that Flynn actually did talk about sanctions to the Russians, and that since he misled the public about the call he might be vulnerable to blackmail. Trump doesn't do anything with this information, later saying that his legal team didn't believe that Flynn violated the law during that call.

February 9: The Post drops a bombshell report revealing that Flynn talked about sanctions during the call—contradicting all those denials.

February 10: Asked about Flynn, Trump said he wasn't aware of the Post story and brushes aside the question.

February 13: After a few confusing days of conflicting information from the White House, Flynn is asked to resign.

February 14: Members of Congress call—again—for an investigation into ties between Trump and Russia. Meanwhile, it's reported that Trump campaign officials did have some contact with Russian officials, which Trump continues to deny.

February 16: Trump holds a press conference clarifying that Flynn was let go not because of anything he did during the call to the Russia ambassador, but because he misled Pence about that call. Flynn was "doing his job" during the call, Trump said, but the president "was not happy" about the conversation he had with Pence. He also repeatedly denounced the leaks that have plagued his administration, called the resulting stories "fake news," and mused that "it would be great if we could get along with Russia."

Then, a few minutes later: "Does anyone believe that Hillary Clinton would be tougher on Russia than Donald Trump?"

Last October, porn studio Reality Kings released a scene with the nondescript title "Rock Hard," in which Phoenix Marie—a ten-year industry veteran in her mid-30s—decompresses after a workout only to be distracted by her "stepson" loudly jamming on his guitar in the garage. She stomps off to chew him out—a seemingly by-the-numbers MILF porn premise.

There we find Conor Coxxx (link NSFW)—a shaggy-haired, extremely pale, rail-thin 20-something—standing about a head shorter than the five-foot-nine-inch Phoenix. After berating the compliant Coxxx, Phoenix realizes he's turned on by her verbal abuse and strips him down, manhandling him and whipping his body around like a rag doll while—in an inspired, athletic bout of role reversal—holding him upside down in a standing 69 position. It's an attention grabber.

Coxxx doesn't look like the typical male porn star, something he readily admits: "I knew I didn't have the height or the looks that other guys had, and I've always looked several years younger than my actual age," he says.

Indeed, his tiny body implicitly breaks age-old porn tropes: He doesn't tower over his co-star, he doesn't exude normative masculinity, and he's dominated because he's a tiny man in the arms of a woman of average stature. He's not alone, either: male porn stars with similar frames have grown increasingly popular in the industry of late—there's Jordi "El Nino" Polla, Sam Bourne, Buddy Hollywood, and a fair number of lesser known actors who spring up often on BBM and MILF specialty sites. This is thanks in part to the changing economics of porn production, which as of late favors featuring more diverse body types.

There's never been absolute homogeneity in male body types in porn—but an archetypal image of the male porn star still exists in American culture, enough so that academics have cited it as a cause of poor self-image amongst men. Logan Pierce, a fairly popular contemporary male porn star, acknowledges that because mainstream porn caters to mainstream male fantasies, "Male performers are usually there to embody the male projection of 'masculinity.'" He tells me that the ideal has shifted over the years from 'roid-raging muscle men to slimmer but still well-defined and conventionally handsome men like himself.

Conor Coxxx with Charlee Chase. Photo from Conor Coxxx

Coxxx first considered entering the porn industry after six years playing guitar in a band called the Last Relapse. Facing yet another impending rent check, he decided to give porn a shot. He went in knowing full well the ideal he was up against, but says that "I was hoping that my endowment could draw enough interest to get steady work." His Hail Mary pass at solvency turned into a career—partially because he started in Atlanta, Georgia, where male talent is relatively scarce. But even in talent-saturated Los Angeles, where he's now based, Coxxx and those with his body type have been able to find a ton of work in recent years.

Stella Cox—one of the biggest female performers of the moment—has performed with a few of these smaller male porn stars; she says the emerging trend comes down to producers searching for new, shocking scenarios. As the ability to profit off of traditional porn plummets in a rapidly changing x-economy, the industry is especially open to twisting norms or shocking sensibilities.

MILF porn, especially, has created an entrenched and reliable market for skinny, non-traditionally masculine men like Coxxx. He's heard from many male fans who tell him they find scenes featuring a non-idealized body type like his more relatable and engaging. Cox adds that she's personally not a huge fan of traditional ideal masculine types, and is confident diversifying bodies and the scenarios ushering them in will engage more women too.

Dr. Roberto Olivardia, a Harvard psychologist who studies male body image in relation to cultural norms, agrees the average male consumer finds porn featuring non-ideal bodies like Coxxx's more appealing—as it's easier to project themselves into. "It benefits the porn industry to feature a diversity of men," he says. "You want as many men to project themselves into the fantasy and see themselves as more similar to them" as you possibly can.

Even if traditional male body types continue to dominate mainstream porn, or at least it's major scenes, performers like Coxxx and Polla and the like have let the genie out of the bottle. Scrawny dudes are now just as sexualizable as the ideal masculine form in the pornographic world. The fact that they can exist alongside the traditional masculine ideal as a regular facet of mainstream studio productions bodes well for a more diverse and interesting porn world.

"I am pretty sure this is only the tip of the iceberg," adds Cox of this shift and the diverse porn future to come.

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On Thursday, Rhode Island congressman David Cicilline rolled up to work with a Bernie Sanders–size poster board that read "Trump Things" and launched into an immediately legendary speech on the House floor that compared the Trump administration to the shadow dimension from Netflix's Stranger Things.

"Like the main characters in Stranger Things, we are now stuck in the Upside Down," Cicilline said, standing in front of an image he definitely made with an online Stranger Things logo generator.

"Mornings might be for coffee and contemplation, but Chief Jim Hopper is not coming to rescue us," he continued, going hard on the show references. "Like Mike, Lucas, Dustin, and Eleven, we must remain focused on the task at hand and hold this administration accountable, so we can escape from our own version of the Upside Down."

If it wasn't already evident, Cicilline confirmed to io9 that he's stoked for the show's new season. But if he were a true Stranger Things fan, he should have melted everyone's brains on CSPAN by bringing in a giant Christmas light alphabet to spell "WE ARE FUCKED." Maybe next time?