Twenty-five years ago today, transgender pioneer Christine Jorgensen died of bladder and lung cancer, which she believed was caused by genetics, not the fuck-ton of hormones that rocketed her to stardom as “America’s first transsexual” in the 1950s. In her honor, I made a pilgrimage to the one place I know that bares her name: the Christine Jorgensen Memorial Bathroom, an intimate museum experience inside a Brooklyn duplex apartment. What’s a more fitting way to memorialize a transgender person, who always had issues with restrooms, than to give her a personal bathroom?

The facts of the matter: In 1952, a time before ultrasounds and the Polio vaccine, Jorgensen underwent multiple experimental operations to transition her body from male to female, all while under intense public scrutiny. Tons of journalists showed up at Idlewild Airport (now JFK) to cover her return from Copenhagen, where the surgeries were performed. On December 1 1952, the cover of the New York Daily News blared, “EX-GI BECOMES BLONDE BEAUTY,” and an icon was born.

“Christine's celebrity happened at a very particular time in US history,” said David Serlin, a Professor of Communications and Critical Gender Studies at UC San Diego and the creator of the CJMB. He pointed out, “There was this incredible enthusiasm for science,” and Jorgensen’s transformation was seen as a triumph of modern medicine. The public’s initial response, he said, was, “We are building rockets, we can cure illnesses, and we can take a boy from the Bronx and turn him into a glamorous woman!”

Glamorous is the right word. Standing in the CJMB, surrounded by dozens of portraits of Jorgensen, I was struck by the glam and the glitz, the furs and the crystals, the elegant eyebrows and the perfectly curled lips. The CJMB is a tiny space—maybe 80 square feet of sunshine-yellow tile—and every inch is covered in Jorgensen.

Serlin first became enamored with Jorgensen in 1992, while researching her for a grad class at NYU. Years before the days of Google Image Search, he rented photos from the Corbis Bettmann Archive to accompany his article—his first major academic success. He tacked the images he didn’t use to his bulletin board, where they became a personal talisman. (A few of them still grace the walls of the CJMB.) “Then I started to ask friends of mine about items,” he recalled, and eventually he discovered eBay. “Little by little, I amassed this archive.”

In the late 90s, cash-strapped queer community organizations around the country were digitizing their holdings and selling many original archival objects. Serlin told me that he feels complicated about the provenance of some of his items, but he recognizes that the collectibles were going to be sold regardless. Some objects, like a subway poster advertising a series of articles about Jorgensen in American Weekly magazine, are so ephemeral, it’s shocking they survived at all. Serlin estimates he has nearly 150 pieces of Jorgensen memorabilia and that he installed a third of his collection in the CJMB when he moved to Brooklyn in 2002. 

It’s only once I was inside the CJMB, standing face-to-face-to-face-to-face with Jorgensen, that I began to understand the magnitude of her fame. Every major magazine, newspaper, and radio show covered her transition. Books were written about her, and she later wrote Christine Jorgensen: A Personal Autobiography, which was translated into multiple languages and adapted into a movie in 1970. She also released Christine Jorgensen Reveals, an interview album where she discussed her life with Nipsey Russell, who conducted the interview under the name R. Russell. According to Newsday's obituary, she reportedly made $12,500 a week performing in a stage show in Hollywood. Jorgensen was so famous that a young calypso musician named Louis “Calypso Gene” Wolcott recorded a song about her called “Is She Is or Is She Ain’t?” (Wolcott later changed his last name to Farrakhan and joined the Nation of Islam, but the song is on YouTube.)

This question of realness would end up being Jorgensen’s undoing, Serlin told me. Part of her celebrity had to with America’s love of science, but the rest had to do with how little anyone knew about sex reassignment surgeries. Her peers, even those in the nascent homophile movements of the 50s, had no context for gender transitioning. There was no T in the vague LGB movement, and the word transgender hadn’t even been coined yet. Of course, people with cross-gender desires have always existed, and a few earlier pioneers had also undergone experimental surgical gender reassignments, but they didn’t have a public face in America until Jorgensen, according to GLAAD.

Serlin speculates that at first most Americans “really thought Christine was menstruating and had eggs in her fallopian tubes.” But after six months, the press began to ask more probing questions about what her surgeries actually entailed. When they didn’t like the answers, the country “went ballistic.” Gender panic took over, said Serlin. “They said, ‘He's not a woman. He's just a neutered faggot.’” Reputable magazines like Time stopped using female pronouns for Jorgensen, and coverage of her took on a nasty, speculative air.

America didn’t have a huge problem with someone switching between two discreet and very separate sexes, but the suggestion of some middle ground, of a spectrum between male and female, made people fearful and angry. Jorgensen’s existence and acceptance as a woman implied that gender and the body were not necessarily connected, that gender was something one worked to create. If this were true, the sex-segregated ideals of post-war suburbia would have been out the window. In the eyes of the public, Jorgensen was no longer a man-made woman, but a gender terrorist in a blond bouffant.

Though haircuts have changed, America has viewed transgender people this way ever since. What fascinates me about Jorgensen—and what the CJMB, with its reverent air of mid-century majesty, captures perfectly—is the suggestion that it didn’t have to be this way. For six months, Americans decided not to be assholes about gender. Maybe we were too ignorant to act ignorantly, but for a brief moment we decided that it was possible to become a woman. Perhaps this wouldn’t have been the case if Jorgensen wasn’t pretty (couldn’t pass, as it were), or if she wasn’t white, ladylike, and well spoken—but she was, and America loved her. Sure, we’d set the bar on womanhood almost prohibitively high—expensive experimental surgeries, massive doses of hormones—but Jorgensen proved that the game itself wasn’t rigged the way it is now.

Standing inside the Christine Jorgensen Memorial Bathroom, I saw America poised on the threshold of acceptance, and then watched us slink away, afraid to take the plunge. We’ve spent the last 60 years trying to paper over the hole Jorgensen smashed in our gender binary system, but inside the CJMB, it’s easy to imagine an America that went in another direction, where Jorgensen taught us that gender is what Americans make of it and that our bodies are not our destinies.

In the end, the CJMB isn’t only a monument to Christine Jorgensen, but also to the world that accepted her as she wanted to be seen. Visiting helps me remember that our awe came first and our hatred came after, that America stumbles towards every new thing like a delighted (but dangerous) toddler, and that our present moment is just another moment waiting to be changed.

Follow Hugh Ryan on Twitter. 

In an effort to suppress May Day protests, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan shut down all public transportation and roads around Taksim Square. But clashes broke out all over Istanbul after a reported 40,000 riot police officers used tear gas, water cannons, and rubber bullets to crack down on protesters.

On the morning of May 1, Ukrainian forces—reportedly Right Sector members—attacked a pro-Russia militia guard post on the outskirts of Krasnoarmeysk, taking 11 local militia men with them. Soon after, a crowd from Krasnoarmeysk gathered in front of a Right Sector base, where they tried to find out their friends' fate. Having no luck, the crowd decided to return to Krasnoarmeysk and storm the local police building to show their protest towards police negligence. 

Photos courtesy of the Lucy Flores campaign

Being in a Las Vegas street gang and having an abortion usually aren't things you want on your resume, but don’t tell that to Lucy Flores. The Nevada state assemblywoman did both during her misspent youth in a low-income, predominately Hispanic neighborhood in the shadow of the Las Vegas Strip. By age 17, Flores had dropped out of high school and been arrested for driving a stolen car on a beer run, but after a stint in juvenile detention, she turned things around. She attended college and law school and got elected to public office. Now she is running for lieutenant governor of Nevada as the most interesting candidate in the most important race that you have never heard of.

As far as campaigns go, the Nevada lieutenant governor’s race is about as unsexy as it gets, ranking somewhere between a city council runoff and an American Samoa delegate selection on the list of political events that interest people. This year’s race has national implications that could reverberate into 2016, because Nevada’s Republican Governor Brian Sandoval is his party’s best shot at beating Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid when the Nevada Democrat comes up for re-election in two years. But Sandoval is cruising to a second-term victory this fall, and he's unlikely to vacate the governor’s mansion unless there is a Republican lieutenant governor to take his place. Reid, who is like Kevin Spacey’s House of Cards character in the body of Grampa Joad, is fully aware that he needs a strong candidate in the lieutenant governor race if he wants to keep Sandoval, Nevada’s most popular conservative, off his back in 2016. 

Enter Flores. At 34 years old, the Las Vegas attorney doesn’t look like most politicians. For one thing, she’s a woman—a Latina one at that. She's kind of a babe, which basically makes her a unicorn in the powered halls of white, fleshy jowls and lady pantsuits.

Democrats love her. In the weeks since Flores announced she was running for Nevada’s number two executive job, she has built up a surprisingly veteran campaign team, including Brandon Hall, Harry Reid’s 2010 campaign manager. Reid himself has gushed that she is the “perfect” candidate. In March, she co-headlined a fancy (as in $5,000 a head) Palo Alto fundraiser for the Ready for Hillary super PAC. “Lucy Flores is exactly the new kind of leader Nevadans are looking for,” said Stephanie Schriock, president of EMILY’s List, which helps pro-choice, Democratic women get elected. “She’s just getting started.”

Despite the praise in Washington, Flores is still a long-shot to win in November. Republicans won’t pick her opponent until the primary next month, but a recent poll shows both of the top two GOP candidates beating Flores in the general election. Apart from this rags-to-riches elevator pitch, Flores hasn’t said much about what she actually wants to do if she's elected. (At this point, her campaign website is just a plug to donate to her campaign, sign up to her email list, and follow her on Facebook.) With Reid’s seat in play, the campaign is bound to get fierce, especially if Republicans start digging around Flores’s colorful past. I called up Flores to talk about what she expects from the campaign, why she thinks she can win, and why she refuses to cut her hair.

VICE: You have a pretty unusual background for someone in politics. Do you think that it has helped you, or do you think your opponents will use it against you in this race?
Lucy Flores: I think that it’s maybe one of the reasons people are so excited about this race. I think oftentimes they feel like their elected officials don't understand them. They don't identify with them. They feel like their elected officials live in an entirely different world—and that is really the antithesis of who I am. I am proud to represent the district where I grew up. It's not an affluent community. It's a very low-income community—and I did experience a lot of challenges there.

When I had problems growing up in this district, there wasn't a support system for me. There weren't any resources available to me, and I did very quickly fall through the cracks. My mom left my family when I was nine, and we were very poor—I come from a very large family. At the time, there were only four of us in the home, but my youngest brother was three years old, so as you can imagine, my dad was just trying to keep us clothed and fed. I started to experience a lot of problems. I was doing very well in school, but that didn't make a difference. As soon as I started failing my Advanced Placement exams and doing poorly in school, that didn't raise any flags—no one noticed, and I literally just fell through the cracks. There wasn't any support at home, so I did fall in with the wrong crowd, and I did end up on juvenile parole by the time I was 15, and I did end up a high school dropout at 17. There wasn't any indication at all that I would end up where I am now based on the circumstances I was in.

That's really the gist of what I stand for. The outcome of your life should not be determined by your circumstances or the zip code that you grew up in, and that's very much the situation for so many of our young people. Their circumstances very much determine the outcome of their lives, and it just shouldn't be that way.

I think it's also a demonstration that when you do invest in people—and when you do invest in education, and mentorship, and the resources that are necessary to really break the cycle of poverty and pull people from that cycle—that it pays off. It literally pays off. You have people who are self-sufficient, who are good community members.

That's where I came from, and why I do what I do. At the beginning, when I first started talking about my challenges and where I came from, it was really scary. I think it's human nature to be concerned about being judged, or about having people think about you differently. I definitely went through that, and to a certain extent sometimes I still do. I don't like it when I'm described in the media as a reformed gang member or criminal, but at the same time, it's my reality. It's my truth. There's nothing I can do about it, other than be honest.

Young Lucy Flores with her father and brother 

You’ve also talked about getting an abortion as a teenager, and you even received some death threats when you mentioned it in a state assembly hearing last year. Are you worried that this will be an issue in the campaign?
To a certain extent, I cannot control what people say about me. Abortion is not one of those things you come to a consensus on. There is no happy agreement—you are either for it or against it. Luckily, I have not experienced the level of vitriol that I experienced after I said that in my testimony. I still receive really hateful, vile, just really disturbing messages on social media, but they are always immediately deleted. That's really the only thing I can do, is just kind of tune that stuff out.

But at the end of the day, I am not ashamed of my testimony. I am not ashamed of talking about it in public. This is about a larger issue for me. I want to talk about how we can prevent other young women from having to make that difficult decision, but at the end of the day, it is settled law, it's a settled issue. Women have the right to choose to have an abortion or not in this country. In terms of my stance as a pro-choice elected official, that is what it is. If others are going to bring that up in this campaign, then there is really nothing I can do about it.

The job of lieutenant governor in Nevada hasn’t been very interesting—it’s mostly just pumping up tourism and watching over the state Senate. Do you have any plans to expand the role? What do you want to do if you’re elected?
I think it's considered that way because of the way that office has been utilized by the people who have been there. A lot has been made of the fact that the governor [Sandoval] moved over much of the economic development duties that were part of the lieutenant governor's office into his own economic development shop, but you know, I think that's just short-sightedness on the part of the people who have been in that [the lieutenant governor] position.

Any job is what you make of it. You can do so many expanded things with this office. I mean, you're the number two in the state of Nevada! You have a platform. You have a budget. You have the ability to be a facilitator, to bring people together. Whether that's around education issues or economic development and tourism, you have a convening power. You can accomplish so many things that people have not done in the past, but this office is only as limited as the people in it. So I do have a lot of ideas about how to make the office more visible, how to make it more active.

You have a pretty unconventional look for a politician. How often do consultants try to make you cut your hair?
It was pretty often, but I said, “The most I will do for you is get a trim.” I threw a fit. I was like, “There is no way.” I have managed to get this far all by myself—how I look, how I dress, how I speak, and how I put myself forward. If I've made it this far, I can certainly make it a little bit further.

I'm not opposed to tweaks and to improving, but absolutely not. I'm not changing who I am, and if that means I don't get elected, well, that means I don't get elected, but I felt very strongly about that issue. 

Follow Grace Wyler on Twitter. 

This is the medical ID booklet the Soviet Union assigned to people exposed to radiation in the Nuclear Testing Polygon, but wouldn't it make a much better thrash zine called Passport to Annihilation?

Are you scared of getting nuked? If you asked me that now, I'd say, “Not hugely.” But if you had asked me that when I was around ten, I would have been sobbing before you even finished the question. 

I don't know what kids are afraid of these days—if it's just kidnappers and internet pedophiles or they still think Al-Qaeda is going to blow up a middle school in Evansville for some reason. When I was a tyke in the early-90s, though, the big three were killer bees (hand at knee), drive-by shootings (hand at collarbone), and nuclear annihilation (hand way the fuck up here). Didn't matter that the Cold War was effectively over and all those hydrogen bombs, which had been trained at my head since birth, were still out there and possibly in less reputable hands than even the Russians. Besides, I had an entire back catalog of prime nuclear-proliferation cinema to learn my fate from. As soon as the NORAD computer would freeze up during chess and mutually assure the destruction of Omaha, my friends and I would see a flash brighter than a thousand suns, and those of us who weren't turned into disintegrating skeletons would swell up like Akira monsters and slosh like chili across the windshield of the first car that hit us. That's how we were going to go out. Provided, of course, we hadn't already died from AIDS. 

It didn't help learning that the actual results of a for-real nuclear explosion are way worse than Hollywood has the special effects to depict. A lot of mainstream accounts of Japan's bombings, like those in John Hersey's Hiroshima, sort of soft-pedal the body horror that acute radiation poisoning causes, but they are nevertheless full of preteen nightmare fodder. Melty-faced Jason Robards doesn't hold a candle to trying to guess what it feels like turning into a shadow, a permanent shadow, tattooed on the side of a building. 

Once you dig a little deeper, you realize the human shadows were the lucky ones. Scope your peepers on some of this eyewitness testimony from Robert Jay Lifton's Hiroshima classic Life in Death: Survivors of Hiroshima:

A blinding flash cut sharply across the sky. I threw myself onto the ground in a reflex movement. At the same moment as the flash, the skin over my body felt a burning heat. Then there was a blank in time—dead silence, probably a few seconds—and then a huge “boom,” like the rumbling of distant thunder. At the same time a violent rush of air pressed down my entire body. I raised my head, facing the center of Hiroshima to the west and saw an enormous mass of clouds which spread and climbed rapidly into the sky. It took on the shape of a monstrous mushroom with the lower part as its stem—it would be more accurate to call it the tail of a tornado. Beneath it more and more boiling clouds erupted and unfolded sideways.

Boiling fucking clouds. I remember seeing a mushroom cloud for the first time on TV and being chilled to the sweatpants boner when I realized what it meant. Try to imagine seeing one for the first time IN FRONT OF YOU ON EARTH and having no fucking clue what its deal was. And that's just what the bomb does to the sky…

The appearance of people was… well, they all had skin blackened by burns. They had no hair because their hair was burned, and at a glance you couldn't tell whether you were looking at them from in front or in back.

The most impressive thing I saw was some girls, very young girls, not only with their clothes torn off but with their skin peeled off as well. My immediate thought was that this was like the hell I had always read about.

I saw women, one corpse with the flesh removed from the bones, then about 100 people, mostly women and children, none of them with clothes on, lying on the asphalt pleading for help. I was reminded of leprosy patients. And one thing that has never disappeared from my mind, even today, a miserable thing was a girl in the rain of about 18 or 19 years old. She had no clothing on her body except half of her panties, which did not cover her. She took a few steps toward me but as she was ashamed of her situation, she then crouched on the ground and she asked me for help—putting her hands in a position of prayer. And when I looked at her hands I saw the skin was burned off as if she were wearing gloves.

It's like reading the source code for every Suehiro Maruo drawing ever made. 

This is a cartoon the Japanese used to show schoolchildren every year on Hiroshima Day to remind them exactly what happened to their countrymen—twice. Which I agree is insanely harsh, but I guess that's Japan for you. Anyways, behold—Enola Gay kicks things off a little before the four-minute mark if you're antsy.

Very fucked, right? If you haven't already gone to the bathroom to slit your wrists, tonight's episode of VICE on HBO covers the second major population intentionally exposed to atomic radiation—the Kazakhs living around the Semipalatinsk Testing Polygon, where the Soviet Union tested 456 nuclear bombs. While they weren't close enough to the blasts to experience the sort of immediate deformities the Japanese at Hiroshima and Nagasaki did, the 20 year bombardment did something even worse. It deformed their genes. Sorry it's a bit of a bummer. 

Follow Thomas Morton on Twitter and Instagram. 

If there's any British city that can lay legit claim to paradisiacal status, it's probably Manchester.

We asked our Manc photographer Chris Bethell and his friend Bekky Lonsdale, to put together a photographic love story to the city for us. It didn't disappoint. Let's hear it for Chris's angels with displaced jaws, everyone (a greying Bez included).

Here's what Chris had to say:

"Manchester's got everything except a beach," said Ian Brown once upon a time.

He neglected to mention dignity, however – something a lot of us lose in our youths when we dress in pantyhose and lose control of our jaws on a quiet night in.

Think your town or city qualifies for paradise status? Send pitches to ukphotoblog@vice.com.

Welcome to the newest weekly strip in our ongoing mission to ramp up the number of comics on VICE.com. Thanks to the efforts of Nick Gazin, the man who lurked around the office giving us back rubs for so long we decided to make him art editor, we now have a recurring comic almost every day of the week! Today we are proud to present Megg, Mogg, and Owl, a new comic by Simon Hanselmann that will run on this website every Monday for forever.

Photo via Flickr user eggrole.
In early 2012, a woman approached a Vietnamese grandmother and offered her a stable job in Europe as a nanny. The grandmother accepted, delighted at the possibility of earning enough money to pay off her heavy debts and support her family.

But she had been tricked. Instead of taking care of children, she says she was kept as a slave in a marijuana grow op on the outskirts of Dublin and forced to care for the weed plants. According to her lawyer Aine Flynn (who I spoke to recently), this woman was starved, had her documents confiscated, and was threatened with violence by the men in charge if she disobeyed. She was arrested in November 2012 during a police raid, and has been in prison awaiting her sentence ever since.

This Vietnamese woman—whose name is being withheld since Flynn is requesting that the High Court in Ireland grant her anonymity as a human trafficking victim—is just one of hundreds of trafficking victims, mostly from Vietnam and China, being forced to work as “gardeners” in marijuana grow-ops across Europe, human rights groups claim.

What’s more, they say, these gardeners are often charged and convicted with the crimes they were forced to commit.

“They’re coerced and manipulated from the start. They’re misled. They don’t believe they’re coming here to work in grow houses,” Flynn said.

There’s limited data available on the problem, but media and NGO reports (here, here, here and here) have been documenting human trafficking into the marijuana industry in the U.K. The latest assessment by the U.K.’s Serious Organized Crime Agency says the number of people trafficked for marijuana cultivation “increased by 130% from 2011 to 2012… 56 (81%) were children.” Much less is known about the problem outside of the U.K.

Now, for the first time, a report entitled “Trafficking for Forced Labour in Cannabis Production: The Case of Ireland” from the Migrant Rights Centre (MRCI) provides insight into the situation, which appears to be happening across the European Union. This report is part of an ongoing project by Anti-Slavery International that’s researching human trafficking in Europe.

Grainne O’Toole, MRCI’s project coordinator, told me the police have been “finding people locked into cannabis grow houses in squalor conditions, malnourished, not receiving any money for what they were doing and living under threat.” She said even though the police are trained on human trafficking, they still do not identify them as victims.

This includes a Vietnamese man—called “Mr.B” in the report to protect his identity—who says he thought he was going to work in law, but instead was forced to garden marijuana plants in a barn. B said he was brought food once a week. When the police raided the barn, he told them he had been kept as a slave and threatened with violence. He was charged with possession, and now faces a sentence of ten years in prison.

Risks to gardeners working in grow-ops are outlined in another Anti-Slavery International report, and include being exposed to noxious fumes, constant heat and light, and the risk of fire and electrocution from shoddy wiring and energy supplies.

MRCI is reviewing 21 cases currently before the Irish courts they believe might be cases of human trafficking and not drug crimes, O’Toole said.  

I spoke with Klara Skrivankova, trafficking coordinator at Anti-Slavery International, who told me the trend of slavery in the marijuana trade across Europe is “a significant problem” that requires further investigation, adding that the MRCI report is a good first step.

She mentioned that even though Vietnamese people represent a significant group of trafficking victims in countries such as the U.K. and Ireland, it’s not perceived as a big problem by the Vietnamese government. “They have a much bigger issue with trafficking of Vietnamese within the region, Vietnamese trafficked to China, Cambodia, and elsewhere,” she said.

Skrivankova warns law enforcement and courts in Europe against prosecuting the low-level gardeners without first considering they might not be there by choice. She said governments need to have protocols to identify victims trafficked for illicit activities so they can bring the traffickers themselves to justice.

“Countries are perpetuating the crime. If you have a victim that is prosecuted, it’s very easy for the trafficker to just replace that particular victim,” she said. 

A press officer for the national police in Ireland sent an email to me saying they couldn’t comment on this issue, because it might prejudice cases currently before the courts.

Officers at EUROPOL and INTERPOL told me they’ve noticed a trend of undocumented Vietnamese migrants working in marijuana grow houses connected to Vietnamese gangs in Europe, but that it’s difficult for law enforcement to tell the difference between trafficking victims and those working there by choice.

“Some of them are illegal immigrants and this might be a way that they pay off some of the costs in connection with the fare of being smuggled into the EU. So that’s not necessarily human trafficking, that’s illegal immigration.” Soren Pedersen, a spokesperson for EUROPOL, told me.

Jesper Lund, an officer with INTERPOL’s Human Trafficking and Child Exploitation Unit, told me that when Vietnamese workers are found during grow op raids, they’re typically arrested and charged with drug-related offences. He said that while some might be trafficked, others might claim they’re victims to avoid charges after they’re caught. But he says law enforcement’s approach is gradually changing.

“I’ve seen several other European countries where they are identifying the workers as victims of trafficking,” he said. He told me he heard from officers in Denmark the other day that they had raided a marijuana grow house and identified “a couple of victims of trafficking in human beings.”

“The trend is going towards a recognition of Vietnamese organized crime groups using Vietnamese victims. I believe we are moving there.”

All photos by the author

1983

We fly into Cairo around 11 in the morning and take a cab to a hotel in a funky section close to a hub of activity. We get a room with two single beds and then head out for food. We go to a restaurant with a dirty floor and cracked Formica tables. Dick orders, and then I order whatever he ordered, and five minutes later the waiter brings out two bowls of green slime. It smells like cum, so I skip the nutrients and opt for coffee and cigarettes.

We walk along dirt and rubble footpaths through neighborhoods that look like Bible-school pictures. Barefoot little kids and old men in biblical hand-me-downs. I photograph a group of kids who chant, "America, America, America. Reagan, Reagan, Reagan."

I photograph a couple of soldiers showing off their weapons. I photograph a golden alley of women and their children. Two kids peek at me through curtains, and I make an exposure. We enter a dusty mall of shops where barkers vie for our attentions. I check out a funky little perfume shop, and the proprietor comes out with a snap-top case of unique little bottles of scented oils. He tells me my wife would love this, and I can’t disagree. I pay him his asking price in dollars then I take his picture. Dick thinks I should have haggled for a lower price, but it’s only money.

We grab a cab and head for the Giza Necropolis. Traffic is dense, and everyone is speeding, weaving, and turning without regard for life or limb. There are no seatbelts, and the driver corkscrews his body all the way around to talk to us. He asks whether we’re from America. I tell him yes and he says, "President Ronald Reagan," and when he doesn’t expound on that I say, "Yeah, well, we all make mistakes." He says it again—"President Ronald Reagan"—and then asks me if I’m a cowboy, and I say, "Yeah, get along, little doggie, and maybe you should be watching the road." By the time we get to the pyramids my brake foot is cramped from pushing it to the floor.

I once saw the Alamo in Texas while high on LSD. It was dirty and boring, but I had a good time and laughed a lot. I wish I had a tab of acid now because this place is dirtier than the Alamo and almost as boring. I know it’s the oldest man-made thing I’ve ever seen, but I just don’t give a shit. It’s hot and humid as a wrapping of steamy toilet paper. The gift shop is like the tourist traps on Route 66 in the 50s. I buy a sphinx T-shirt. I wander around and take pictures of people taking pictures. I like the pictures more than I like the place.

Back at the hotel bar, I ask the bartender for something cold and indigenous. He brings me a glass and fills it halfway with clear liquid from a bottle: arak. He adds icy water from a pitcher, and it turns milky. It taste like anise, and it kicks like a huff of ether. I get another, which I take to my room, where I shower and change. In the hotel restaurant I eat a few spoons of vegetable stew and drink another glass of arak.

Out to the street we go, bar-hopping. Some of the joints have dancing girls, and they all have arak. At the last bar I’m beyond drinking responsibly and feel a full-moon howl coming on.

On stage a harem girl is doing a disco belly dance. Each new glass of arak is a ceremony. Between songs I hear the dancer talking to the barkeep, and she’s an American girl. My double vision has gone triple, and people surround me like a kaleidoscope. When the girl walks by, Dick flags her and asks where she’s from. She says she's from San Diego and tells him she used to dance at a place where all the sailors go, and he tells her he’s been there. She says she likes it better here, in this part of the world. She says she likes the way the men treat the women, and I ask her if she’s fucking insane. The bouncer comes over and sends her to the other side of the stage to talk to a group of locals. The bouncer is big and flabby and tells us we are not allowed to talk to the girls. I’m spinning in place and ask him why the fuck not and how come those guys over there can talk to her? He says Americans aren’t allowed to talk to the girls. It’s the law. I tell him I can talk to whoever the fuck I want to talk to, and he tells me no, I can’t.

Dick is trying to calm me down, asking why I care—she’s not all that great. I tell him it’s about principle, and he says, "Yeah, right." I take my arak and stagger over to the group of men talking to the American girl, and I shove in front of them and say to the girl, "Hey, how’s it going?" She tells me I’m making a mistake, and when I open my mouth to explain myself, I regurgitate a gallon of milky bile. I disconnect into dream segments of being dragged outside and kicked to the curb. Next time I open my eyes it’s hours later, and I’m still dressed, and I’m in bed at the hotel. I’ve overslept and need to get to the airport as quickly as possible to catch my flight to London. Dick tells me I nearly landed us both in jail, and I tell him, "Well, yeah, I guess I had a pretty good time."

Scot's first book, Lowlife, was released last year and his memoir, Curb Service, is out now. You can find more information on his website.

Photo courtesy of Dapper Dan of Harlem

Floyd Mayweather Jr. has a reputation for being boxing’s pretty boy—just like his fights, his ring wear is always an extravagant spectacle. For the $32 million match he had against Marcos Maidana on Saturday, Mayweather once again called on the skills of hip-hop’s fashion godfather, Dapper Dan, to design him some stunning new gear. Dapper Dan is known for creating iconic and luxurious bespoke leather garments out of his Harlem boutique in the 80s for legends like Run DMC and Mike Tyson. So Dan was the perfect designer to craft an attention-grabbing look for “Money” Mayweather, who ultimately took home the win.

I called up Dapper Dan to find out more about Mayweather’s outfit, Sugar Ray Robinson's influence on fashion, and how a man's balls can survive a 12-round fight inside a pair of leather shorts.

Photo by Conor Lamb

VICE: Why did Floyd Mayweather want you to design a custom ring-wear outfit?
Dapper Dan: Floyd is like the Sugar Ray Robinson of his time. He is very flamboyant. He likes to incorporate the street look into the ring.

How did you incorporate his Pretty Boy persona into your designs?
He is known as "Pretty Boy" Floyd, but he is also "Money" Mayweather, so the ring wear has to be very rich and not accessible to the average guy. Floyd reminds me so much of Sugar Ray Robinson because Robinson had that street and ring appeal. There is a picture of Robinson with a pink Cadillac, blazer, trousers, and alligator shoes on in Harlem on 125th Street. He was surrounded by men his age, but they were dressed conservatively, like on Wall Street. It all goes back to what I try to do, which is the Africanizing of Western dress. When you see Robinson around all of the other black men of his time, it’s the same cuts, but it’s Africanized. Wall Street would never do that. [Robinson and Mayweather] have that thing that we brought to America. That is like our flag, so to speak.

Can you tell me more about Saturday’s outfit?
Every element that he really likes is present: the motorcycle jacket, the skins, and the colors. Floyd likes to incorporate the colors of his opponent. He wanted the Mexican colors this time because I think he was under the impression that since Maidana was fighting in Mexico, he is Mexican. But Maidana is actually Argentine. Floyd brags a lot and attacks his opponents, but that’s just show business.

Leather seems to be an interesting choice for athletic wear.
Mayweather likes ostrich, alligator, crocodile, and python. It looks amazing, but movement and overheating are a serious matter. I tried to keep it very lightweight. You will see the alligator, python, and the ostrich coming down the sides as opposed to in the crotch area. The rest of the shorts are made of very lightweight lamb leather.

You previously designed for Mike Tyson. How is Mayweather different?
Floyd has a pretty-boy, you-can’t–touch-me style. Tyson might just cut a hole in a towel and come in the ring. Tyson looked bestial to intimidate his opponents. Tyson came along during the birth of hip-hop, so I used to make him all of these elaborate outfits, the same things I was making for LL Cool J and all of the early rappers. Also, Mike Tyson would sweat enormously. He used to tell me that his shorts started feeling like lead. So Tyson would not be a good candidate for wearing Mayweather's stuff. Floyd can wear leather, alligator, even mink shorts in the ring.

Were you always a boxing fan?
Yeah, I grew up during the boxing era. Boxing was very significant because we could run up to the TV and watch our champions, like Joe Louis. There was a lot of prejudice early on in my era, so we were denied opportunities in sports. Boxing was one of the early color barriers that we broke. To see black guys get in the ring and knock people out, it was like we were winning, just for that moment. For those rounds, we were on top of the world. 

Why do you think the popularity of boxing has declined?
It’s not as big as it was back in the day because, with the exception of Floyd, the talent is no longer there. Where as in basketball or baseball, there is so much more room for that talent. With boxing there is just one guy here and one guy there. I am inclined to believe that boxing is the greatest challenge of all of the sports. Somebody could be very talented in boxing, but never get the right fight. I think that hurts the industry a lot.

Do you hope to work with more boxers?
To be honest with you, a lot of up-and-coming guys have been calling. Floyd set a format that could help boxing a lot. The kind of excitement he creates with the way he dresses is starting to attract other fighters for personal and financial reasons. Brana is trying to follow in Floyd’s footsteps. He needs a few more pointers from Floyd in and out of the ring. I think it would help out the industry, so I am working with a few guys. You will be seeing something soon. I have been trying to feel out what the major design companies are doing. I wonder who is going to be wearing Dolce & Gabbana or Louis Vuitton shorts in the ring. I wouldn’t be surprised by that at all. Remember, back in the day, nobody would have dreamed up the way that design companies eventually embraced hip-hop.

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In August of last year, campus preacher Brother Dean Saxton caused outrage after preaching at the University of Arizona and holding a sign that read, "YOU DESERVE RAPE."

This is typical behavior for Dean, who believes, among other things, that women shouldn't be allowed to attend university, that feminism is evil, and that immodestly dressed women are asking to be raped. 

VICE went to Arizona to meet up with Dean as he was preparing to protest the screening of a documentary about a rape survivor.