Hundreds of English Defence League (EDL) members made a trip to Birmingham on Saturday to continue doing what they love: getting drunk in public and shouting about how much they hate Muslims. 

By 11 AM, around 200 members of Britain's most well known far-right group had gathered at the Bar Risa in Broad Street. More continued to pour in, some waving flags, some just chanting the same poorly-informed Islamophobic invective they've been reciting for the past couple of years. Before long, the march was underway, with the EDL supporters advancing along Broad Street towards Centenary Square. The only real disturbance at this point was one lone passerby screaming, "Fuck off, you fascists!" before being manhandled away by the local police.  

Reaching the square, the crowd gathered around the Cenotaph to listen to their leader. Steve Eddowes—who became EDL chairman after former boss Tommy Robinson decided he didn't want to be a bigot any more—told his "soldiers" about the "Dirty Dozen" issues that had brought them there. Those issues were exactly the kind of things you'd expect an Islamophobic street gang to get angry about: a new mosque being built in Dudley, the existence of Halal food, some other stuff that really doesn't affect them in any tangible way.

One key point was the abuse of English girls by Muslim men in Rotherham and across the country, though speakers conveniently ignored the fact that many of the victims were Muslim themselves, choosing to paint the abuse as an explicit attack on the (white) UK by the evil forces of Islam. 

Taken as a whole, it boiled down to blaming Muslims for pretty much every bad thing to befall Britain over the past several years. 

The rally finished earlier than expected and the police were careful not to allow the EDL supporters to clash with the 300-plus Unite Against Fascism supporters who were holding a counter-demonstration in Victorian Square.

However, it wouldn’t be an EDL demonstration if nobody got arrested—and after a relatively uneventful day several small groups of EDL supporters managed to get embroiled in tussles on the way back to their cars, with ten of them subsequently being arrested for public order offenses.

Follow Nathan Cleary on Twitter

Photo courtesy of 2014 Pennebaker Hegedus Films, Inc.

Attorney Steven Wise of the Nonhuman Rights Project has only met his client once, a year ago. They locked eyes through the bars of a cage inside a dark warehouse in Gloversville, New York. The client, a 26-year-old chimpanzee named Tommy, was conspicuously absent at a New York Supreme Court hearing Wednesday during which Wise argued for his freedom. That hearing was the climax of a crusade Wise started in December 2013, when the lawyer filed a writ of habeas corpus of Tommy's behalf, formally challenging the legality of his imprisonment. In courts throughout the United States, habeas corpus has only ever applied to human beings, but Wise is making the case that an animal sharing 94 percent of our DNA should enjoy the same legal protections that we do, and he's citing over 400 scientific articles on chimpanzee cognition and self-awareness to bolster his point. With a decision expected in a matter of weeks, I figured now was as good a time as any to speak with him about the merits of his case.

VICE: Can you describe the process that you’ve been through so far?
Steven Wise: In December 2013, when we filed a request for an issuance of the writ of habeas corpus on behalf of Tommy. The judge refused to issue the writ on the grounds that Tommy is not a person, which is what we were expecting, so we immediately filed an appeal. [Wednesday] was our hearing in front of the appellate court where we had oral arguments as to whether they would reverse the refusal.

How clear is the law on personhood?
If you look at the statutes of New York, there are probably 30 or 40 different places where “person” is defined in a different way. The common law is very powerful here in New York. That’s the law judges make. Essentially, it’s up to the judges to decide who is going to be a person.

How do you define personhood?
We argue that an entity who is autonomous and self-determined should have that distinction. We’ve worked with animal-cognition scientists who back us up with data on this.

What does the research say?
Swedish researcher Matthias Osvath specifically addressed what he calls “mental time travel,” showing that chimpanzees can remember the past. They can anticipate the future and plan for it.

How does he prove that?
He’s conducted many elegant experiments, but just to give a quick example, he writes about a chimpanzee living on an island in a Swedish zoo. This chimpanzee obviously does not wish to be on the island. He gets up early in the morning to find rocks. Then, he hides them so that the zookeepers cannot find them, because the zookeepers know what he’s going to do. Late in the afternoon, when the visitors are crowding around, he picks up the rocks and starts pelting the visitors. That’s an overt demonstration of someone who is autonomous and planning to do something later on when he’s in a completely different state of mind.

Just to be clear, doesn’t every animal have autonomy in the sense that it’s performing its own functions for its own purpose? What’s the distinction?
One of our experts defined autonomy as behavior that is not the result of instinct or learning. It’s something in the mind where the entity is governing itself. Admittedly, it’s hard for scientists to understand what’s happening in the mind of a being who doesn’t share their language or culture and is separated by millions of years of evolution. It’s hard to figure out what behavior is instinct, and what behavior is an animal understanding time—having an autobiographical self as opposed to someone like a human with Alzheimer’s who is always living now-now-now-now-now.

What stage of human development is a chimpanzee’s intelligence equivalent to? What age?
It’s debatable. In some ways, their cognitive abilities are more advanced than a two- or three-year-old person's. In some ways, they’re smarter than eight-year-olds. And in some ways they’re even superior to an adult. When I was in Japan, I went to Tetsuro Matsuzawa’s chimpanzee cognition lab. There was a grid on a computer screen and numbers from one to nine would flash in the boxes for two-tenths of a second. The chimpanzee’s job is to absorb what the numbers are, to understand how to count from one to nine, and then to touch the grid in the same order that the numbers appeared. They can do that. Their short-term memory is better than ours. I actually tried it, and was unable to do it. They had to slow it down for me. It’s discouraging when you watch how easy it is for the chimpanzee. And, of course, they have the kind of intelligence that would allow them to live in an African jungle, which I obviously don’t have.

You cite another study in your case in which chimpanzees were anesthetized and their faces marked with a red dot. When presented with a mirror, they touch the dot on their actual face, suggesting self-awareness. A similar kind of recognition was recently demonstrated in pigs. Would you ever bring a case against the meat industry for habeas corpus?
When we talked to the judges earlier, they also wanted to know the implications. I said that we’re not seeking personhood on behalf of any other being in the world except for Tommy. It does appear however, that there other species—likely elephants and cetaceans [whales and dolphins]—that meet the criteria.

How would you draw the line?
It’s a complicated question. But, right now, for a judge to determine whether a being should have any kind of legal right, the judge simply needs to know their species. If you’re a human, you’re entitled, and if you’re not a human, you have no rights. What we’re simply saying is that a being’s species is not a rational place to draw the line. Instead, the judge should ask, “What kind of being is in front of me? What cognitive abilities do they have?” We’re asking the judge to take a more evidence-based look.

A few European countries have moved in that direction. For example, Switzerland amended its constitution to categorize animals as beings and not things. How has that played out?
There are a lot of statutes that have been passed. Most of them are rather vague, and it’s not clear exactly what they mean in practice. Are you trying to tell me that a firefly or a beetle has a right? It doesn’t appear to me that that’s true. No court is going to rule that way. Now, if there’s a statute passed that says a chimpanzee shall be a person for the right of habeas corpus—that will actually have an impact.

Is there any precedent for this kind of case in the US?
Well, at one time not all human beings were persons. Human slaves could not seek a writ of habeas corpus in the Southern states before the Civil War. I often talk about the famous case of Somerset v. Stewart. That was a 1772 decision by a London court in which James Somerset, who was a black slave, appealed to common-law habeas corpus. He was able to change his legal status from that of a thing who didn’t have any rights to that of a person, who then became free.

Have there been any recent cases here in the US that are relevant?
The Court of Appeals of New York in a 1972 case actually talked about personhood the way that I am. They maintained that “person” is not a synonym for “human being.” Instead, a “person” is an entity that the legal system believes ought to have legal rights. They specifically say that there is no reason why a nonhuman animal could not be a person. They even say a deity could be a person. In 2000, the Supreme Court of India cited some of the same sources as the 1972 case to say that the holy books of the Sikh religion are a person. In British-controlled India, there were decisions holding that a Hindu idol was a person and that a mosque was a person. There was also a treaty signed between the indigenous people of New Zealand and the monarchy in 2012 in which it was declared that a river is a person.

Have you brought up Citizens United, the US Supreme Court ruling effectively holding that corporations are people?
I think [Supreme Court] Justice [Samuel] Alito asked in the Hobby Lobby case last year, “How can a corporation care about birth control?” And they said that a corporation is basically a bunch of human interests that come together to form a corporation. That’s one way of viewing it. But, obviously that’s not true for a river, a mosque, or a Hindu idol.

I assume that Tommy has to have some recognition as a “being” under animal cruelty laws, doesn’t he?
He actually doesn’t. He’s not a legal person, and that means that he is a legal thing. Under the law, a legal thing exists solely for the sake of a legal person. Tommy can be treated like a chair or an inanimate object. You can kill and you can eat Tommy.

If animal cruelty laws don’t recognize an animal’s “being-ness,” then what are they based on?
The first animal cruelty laws began in England in the 1820s, and they actually were seen as a way to protect people. They wanted to stop cruelty to animals because they believed that it led to cruelty to other human beings. The law slowly evolved with the intention of stopping animals from suffering. But, it’s important to remember, these laws are not enforceable by the animal or by people on behalf of the animal. The crime is against the state. It’s like if someone stole my wallet here in New York. In court, it’s not me versus the person who stole my wallet. It’s the state of New York versus the person who stole my wallet. I’m just kind of like a bystander. The person hasn’t really wronged me—the person has violated the state. So Tommy could be the object of a crime, but he doesn’t have a right to do anything about it.

What would the granting of personhood achieve in Tommy’s case?
It would simply mean that Tommy would have the right of bodily liberty—that he would be able to physically move around. We want him moved to a sanctuary in Florida where there are other chimpanzees for him to play with. Tommy knows that he’s been in a cage, and can anticipate that he will be in a cage for as long as he can see into the future. Putting a chimpanzee in isolation is similar to putting a person in solitary confinement. In fact, the National Institute of Health recommendation is that chimpanzees never be kept in groups of fewer than seven because they’re such social animals. For Tommy to live in a cage by himself with only a little TV for companionship—the only word for that is torture.

Follow Roc’s latest project collecting dreams from around the globe at World Dream Atlas.

Check back next week for E to H.

Are we going to see any accountability for America's drug warriors? Photo via Flickr user Ryan Lackey

Back in 2010, Sondra Arquiett was arrested in connection with her boyfriend’s cocaine ring. She eventually got five years of probation after cooperating with the cops, but before her sentence came down, she granted DEA agents permission to search her phone. What she did not do was tell them they could use photos—some a bit sexy, some that included her niece and nephew—and information from that device to make a new Facebook page under her previous name, Sondra Prince. But that's exactly what happened, and now she's suing DEA Agent Timothy Sinnigen for violating her privacy and endangering her safety. 

Everyone seems to agree that the feds violated something here—definitely Facebook’s terms of service, and probably the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. But let’s be honest: They won’t be punished for it. With parallel construction, ICREACH, and their weird commando squads that tear through foreign countries, the DEA is as secretive and lawless as the CIA or the NSA is at this point. What happened to Arquiett is disturbing, but it’s a grain of sand on the beach of the war on drug's overwhelming awfulness.

So far the Department of Justice is defending Sinnigen’s actions as legitimate law enforcement. US Attorney Richard Hartunian says that Arquiett "implicitly consented” to the use of information on her phone, including the photos. And it's true that she was trying to help the investigation—but clearly she didn't want her identitiy used as part of a weird social media sting operation. It doesn't seem like it's too much to ask that the authorities don't impersonate us online just because we briefly turn over our phones to them, but that sort of violation of privacy is routine in the war on drugs.

Now onto the rest of this week’s bad cops:

-In the past week, videos showing three different incidents of of the New York Police Department (NYPD) behaving horribly were released. The deluge came right on the heels of Police Commisioner Bill Bratton declaring, “We will aggressively seek to get those out of the department who should not be here... The brutal, the corrupt, the racist, the incompetent.” Looks like he's got his work cut out for him!

Along with two young men who got beat up (one was pistol-whipped) for doing next to nothing, the incident that looks the most flagrantly like corruption involved 35-year-old Lamard Joye. He claims to have been out celebrating his 35th when an unnamed officer took $1,000 from his pocket before pepper-spraying him in the face. Reportedly, someone in the area had a gun, which provoked the police presence. Internal Affairs is now investigating the officer's conduct. 

-Speaking of missing money: The Washington Post is continuing its epic investigation into the horrors of civil asset forfeiture. Nearly $2.5 billion has been taken since 2008, and more than 80 percent of that came from people who were never indicted for anything. The whole story is worth reading, and it includes a defensive Ohio police chief who told the paper, “The money I spent on Sparkles the Clown is a very, very minute portion of the forfeited money that I spend in fighting the war on drugs.”

-According to a ProPublica deep dive into the (incomplete) data on police shootings black males are 21 times more likely to be killed by police than whites. The investigation looked at 12,000 incidents between 1980 and 2012, making this no small sample. Explanations for why this has nothing to do with race are probably circulating on certain conservative websites as we speak.

-On October 6, a grand jury decided not to indict any of the officers involved in the May drug raid that left a Georgia toddler with severe facial burns. The Habersham County SWAT team conducted a no-knock entry into the home of Wanis Thonetheva on May 28, after a confidential informant reportedly bought meth from the place. Unfortunately for 18-month-old Bounkham Phonesavanh, who was sleeping in his playpen in front of the door, police decide to use a flash-bang grenade. Phonesavanh, whose parents were staying in the house after their own burned down, went into a medically-induced coma. The photo of the tyke lying in his hospital bed made the media rounds and provoked more than your average amount of outrage and horror. But the family has had to raise the money for their $800,000 medical bills themselves.

Habersham County Sheriff Joey Terrell has admitted that, had his officers bothered to find out if a child was in the house, “We might have gone in through a side door. We would not have used a flash bang." Federal authorities are investigating to see if charges should be brought against the cops.

-Also last Monday, police in North Carolina pepper-sprayed a black teenager because they assumed he was breaking into his foster home. A neighbor called the cops after 18-year-old DeShawn Currie went into the house, and three members of the Fuquay-Varina Police Department found the front door slightly ajar. Police claim that when they asked Currie for evidence that he lived in the house, which presumably was full of photos of white people, he became profane and belligerent and wouldn’t sit down, and therefore had to be pepper-sprayed and cuffed. No charges were fired, and police swear—swear!—that racial profiling was not a factor.

-There’s community policing, and then there’s pro-cop propaganda. The University of Texas at Austin’s “Cop Day” sounds an awful lot like the latter. The October 8 event was described by the student paper as being all about what cops do in their typcial workday. At least these students will be able to address the members of the next SWAT team that kicks in their door in by name.

-On October 3, Emmett Township, Michigan Public Safety Officer Ben Hall admirably proved that he is a human being, and not a law-and-order robot. Our Good Cop of the Week got a call that a five-year-old was riding in a car without a booster seat. Her mother, Alexis DeLorenzo, said that her car had been repossessed, and the seat was lost in the process. Instead of ticketing DeLorenzo, Hall bought her a new booster seat. DeLorenzo was touched, suggesting the officer went “above and beyond.” And Hall gave us all the takeaway lesson: "A ticket doesn’t solve the situation.. .it was the easiest 50 bucks I ever spent.” Good dude.

Follow Lucy Steigerwald on Twitter.

Photos by George Nelson and Cat Allen

On October 12, Latin America celebrated "Day of the Race," the region's equivalent of Columbus Day, which has evolved into a celebration of resitance against colonialism. So it's no surprise that this Sunday, the indigenous Mapuche people demonstrated their distaste for the arrival of Europeans on the continent by storming into Santiago for a demonstration, after which all hell broke loose. 

Indigenous rights supporters came to Santiago riding a wave of fury after the murder of a Mapuche activist called José Mauricio Quintriqueo Huaiquimil, on October 1. They surged up from the south of the country to demand the return of ancestral lands stolen by the young Republic of Chile over a century ago. 

Last year’s march exploded in a blizzard of tear gas, arson, and mayhem as opportunist hooded vandals known as encapuchados unleashed carnage. These hooligans are a common feature of protests in Chile and often appear toward end of student and indigenous rights demonstrations to carry out arbitrary attacks on police in an effort to bait confrontation. This year was no different.

Huaiquimil’s death—“run over two of three times” by a tractor-riding farm worker during conflict between Mapuches and landowners—was untimely to say the least. Two policemen were seriously injured after authorities descended on the Bío Bío Region to quell the violence that followed the murder. One copped a slug in the leg while another’s face was severely disfigured by a shotgun blast.

Given these recent events, there was a tangible undercurrent of hostility as the march began. There was an ominous inevitability to proceedings underscored by a heavy police presence.

Chile has been in a protracted battle with its indigenous inhabitants since the 1882 annexation of Mapuche land in Araucanía. The government promised to return much of the territory but progress is slow, leading to occasionally fatal exchanges between indigenous communities and authorities. Many Mapuches are incarcerated as a result. “We are here to rise up against the government and claim back land rightly belonging to us,” one Mapuche demonstrator told me. “We are here to secure the immediate release of all indigenous political prisoners.”

Thousands gathered in Providencia’s Plaza Italia and despite the march starting peacefully, simmering tensions soon boiled over as the procession rumbled down Liber Bernardo O’Higgins towards La Moneda: the Presidential Palace.

Armored “Carbineros”—Chile’s uniformed police—and heavily reinforced riot waggons awaited protestors a few blocks before the government building. Seemingly out of nowhere an angry hoard of people wearing masks attacked, pelting police with anything they could get their hands on including jagged hunks of concrete and homemade Molotov cocktails. A scrum of gas-masked photographers instantly gravitated towards the ruckus as police retaliated with a hailstorm of teargas and muscular jets of water laced with irritant. This was the first of many skirmishes. 

One guy picked up a metal barrier and hurled it at the police. As he did so, his friend was telling me to, "Get that fucking camera out of my face.” With stinging bloodshot eyeballs and a throat full of teargas, I bolted up into a doorway where a charitable Chilean handed me a bit of vinegar soaked cotton wool to sooth my irritated eyes – it was agony.

Meanwhile, the majority of Mapuche protestors stayed out of trouble and continued to chant the names of fallen activists and dance to the dull, heavy thud of drums. One of them confronted the encapuchados for sullying the indigenous cause, only to be bombarded with stones and bottles. The encapuchados soon turned their attention to defacing public property, leaving uprooted traffic lights, shattered shop windows, and burning bus stops in their wake.

After two hours of fighting, the authorities swarmed the area in front of La Moneda, dispersing crowds with water cannon and yet more tear gas bellowing from armored vehicles. Police also arrived on foot from all angles to break up the party.

The Mapuches weren't going anywhere. They had set themselves up in front of the palace, commanding President Michele Bachelet to hurry up and give them back their ancestral land, much of which is occupied by large timber companies.

Previous governments have vowed to return indigenous land only for these promises to stagnate. In June, Bachelet announced a plan to buy disputed ancestral land from forestry companies and local farmers and return it to better incorporate indigenous communities into Chile’s political and economic development.

Meanwhile, when conflict flares up, the Mapuche—who make up roughly 10 percent of Chile’s population—continue to be charged under the controversial 1976 anti-terrorism law, which allows for the use of secret witnesses and prolonged prison sentences. Following a 39-day hunger strike by indigenous prisoners in May, politicians pledged to review the legislation.

For the Mapuche, this is only a first step, and they will continue to fight to get their land back. “Columbus Day is not a reason to celebrate,” the protestors shouted. “We defended our lands against European invaders and now we will defend them against the government.”

The defining image of the Scottish independence referendum campaign was the Yes supporters gathering in Glasgow's George Square in a blur of flag-waving fervor and hopeful idealism that turned into despondency as the results were announced. On Sunday, thousands of independence supporters flocked back to the square in a bid to recapture the Yes spirit. Unfortunately, the rally was a vehicle for the career of a dodgy politician and a fair amount of conspiracy theorists.

Before the vote, many were convinced that the referendum was already won by the Yes campaign, such was its domination of social media and Glasgow’s streets. When it turned out that wasn’t the case, sadness turned to anger, with the days after the result seeing a flurry of protests and tribal “we are the 45 percent” (referring to the percentage that Yes polled) social media campaigns.

There were calls to get organized, with a mass uptick in membership of pro-independence parties. It was fertile ground for conspiracy theories too, with a captive audience of people who were pissed off, disillusioned with the media, and looking for answers. As ever, they were easily found in the form of questionable YouTube footage from users with names like like “Elite NWO Agenda.”

Sunday was the biggest gathering of independence supporters since the referendum, with thousands returning to George Square for a “Hope Over Fear” gathering over the afternoon.

Tommy Sheridan

The rally was  fronted by Tommy Sheridan, a former poster boy of the Scottish left who fell from grace. Over the last decade, Sheridan has torn a successful left-wing unity party in two because his comrades wouldn't lie to protect his image as a family man in court, spent a year in jail for perjury, appeared on Celebrity Big Brother, and been embroiled in a “swinging sex” scandal.

Numerous groups are jostling for position in the post-indyref landscape, and this rally appeared to be Sheridan’s bid to seize some of the momentum. Despite his crimes and misdemeanors, he retains a sizeable fan base. But having been frozen out of much of the independence movement, he’s also keen to have his reputation rehabilitated, presumably with an eye on future elections.

Lining up alongside Sheridan were a disparate mix of Scottish soap stars, acoustic acts playing "Caledonia" for the sixth time that day, a band called ISIS, a gangland enforcer turned celebrity crime writer, and an endless stream of local tubthumpers who could rile up the crowd for a few minutes at a time. Usually, people impatiently mill about at rallies like this for half an hour before finding an excuse to go to the pub, but this was a full-on five hour thrill fest of defiant rhetoric, flag waving, conspiracy theorizing and, just for the kids, a fairground ride or two.

Playing to his audience, Sheridan  decided to rename the area “Freedom Square” for the day, just to firm up his nationalist credentials and keep the Mel Gibson references coming even after the referendum is over.

Naomi Wolf

Also making an appearance was Naomi Wolf, the American feminist writer and activist. Wolf’s public Facebook page is a curious place, an unrestrained stream of consciousness where she offers up her unconventional take on current events. In recent weeks, Wolf has been publicizing allegations of irregularities in the referendum, becoming a conduit for those who think they had their votes stolen from them by the long arms of the British state, which in some way fixed the electoral process.

This primarily involves the notion that thousands of ballot papers didn’t contain a Unique Identifying Number (UIN),  a barcode on each ballot that links back to individual voters on the electoral roll as a method of preventing fraud. However, hundreds of people are now claiming that their ballots were “blank” and missing a UIN. Weirdly no one seems to have realized until after the referendum results came out, and no ballots were rejected at the counts for this reason.

A placard held by someone who doesn't believe the voting results were accurate

Wolf arrived in Scotland to hand over a dossier of nearly 500 names she’s collected of people who are certain that they cast a vote without a UIN. As it happens, I know my ballot paper did have a barcode, but I can’t remember many other details about voting, like what color the wallpaper was or the kind of pen I used. People generally go to the polling station to vote rather than play tedious memory games, so it seems astonishing that lots of voters have suddenly remembered a fairly minor detail about what the reverse of their ballot looked like.

I spoke with Wolf just after she had made her intervention at the rally, and she was adamant that this remains a live issue, despite her claims being written off by the Lawyers for Yes group as “an impressive collection of misunderstandings, conspiracy theories, and legal howlers.”

“I’ve got some pretty incredible people self-identifying as having these ballots. People are reporting that police officers are saying their ballot was blank. Multiple members of the same family got blank ballots, and couples where one got a blank ballot and the other not,” she told me. “What’s odd to me is that everyone who is supposed to be looking into it just isn’t willing to. What’s the big deal? Open them up, then we’ll know quickly.”

Wolf was also keen to stress that she’s not prejudiced towards a particular outcome in the referendum, and is acting out of concern for the democratic process and for those who feel they’ve been disenfranchised. “I’m not a Yes supporter. I’m not a Scottish voter," she said, "I love Scotland but this is not about Scotland. I would be as upset if it was any other country or any other issue.”

She was also willing to brush off criticisms that have been made of her uninhibited investigative style in recent months. “If there’s evidence it doesn’t matter what people say about me personally. If there are stories that need to be investigated based on the evidence, that’s my decision.” When it comes to the blank ballots, however, few are interested beyond the fringes of the Yes movement—Wolf said that she’s had little success getting either the Electoral Commission or police to pursue the claims.

A diverse crowd of several thousand kept spirits high throughout Sunday’s rally, with impromptu speeches from people hauling themselves up onto statues. However, if the plan was to recreate the buzz around the square in the run up to polling day, it was a losing battle: Scotland isn’t on the verge of going independent anymore.

Nevertheless, some of the biggest cheers throughout the day were reserved for speakers who gave increasingly zany predictions of how quickly Scotland can become independent. Breaking ranks with his party’s official line, one Scottish National Party councilor, Pat Lee, was adamant that if enough SNP members of parliament are returned at the general election, the party will have a mandate to simply declare Scotland’s independence unilaterally. There’s no point in even getting into how insane this idea is, because it’s simply not going to happen.

Tens of thousands of people have been brought into politics for the first time through the referendum and their desire for change is still palpable. But I can’t help thinking that an obsession with Unique Identifying Numbers and unilateral declarations of independence is, at best, a distraction and a dead end. But the thousands who showed up at “Freedom Square” on Sunday are likely to stay energized for a while yet, and it’s anyone’s guess where that goes.

Follow Liam Turbett on Twitter.

Nicole: Bluse von COS; Valerie: Parka von Christian Wijnants; Steffi: Cardigan von Sacks, T-Shirt von American Vintage

PHOTOS BY KURT PRINZ
STYLING: PIGEON DISCO

Makeup: Anita Obi
Models: Ben, Billie, Boris, Dalia, Florian, Gisa, Joli, Maria, Mira, Natascha, Nicole, Nora, Ron, Stefan, Steffi, Valerie, Vincent, Walter

Ben: Vintage-Overall, Schuhe von Adidas; Steffi: T-Shirt von American Vintage, Cardigan von Sacks, Hose von Base Range, Schuhe von Reebok; Vincent: Vintage-Overall, Schuhe von Wood Wood; Valerie: Vintage-T-Shirt, Parka von Christian Wijnant, Rock von Fabrics Interseason, Schuhe von Converse; Nicole: Vintage-T-Shirt, Bluse von COS, Hose von Mango, Vintage-Schuhe

Valerie: Vintage-T-Shirt, Parka von Christian Wijnant, Rock von Fabrics Interseason, Schuhe von Converse; Gisa: T-Shirt von American Vintage, Vintage-Latzhose, Schuhe von Nike; Steffi: T-Shirt von American Vintage, Hoodie von American Apparel, Hose von COS, Schuhe von Reebok; Nicole: Vintage-T-Shirt, Bluse von COS, Hose von Mango, Vintage-Schuhe; Dalia: T-Shirt und Hose von American Apparel, Schuhe von Reebok

Steffi: T-Shirt von American Vintage, Cardigan von Sacks, Hose von Base Range, Schuhe von Reebok; Valerie: Vintage-T-Shirt, Parka von Christian Wijnant, Rock von Fabrics Interseason; Nicole: Vintage-T-Shirt, Bluse von COS, Hose von Mango

Mira: Parka von Monki; Nora: Kleid von Wood Wood, Hoodie von American Apparel; Ron: Longsleeve von Schiesser by Kostas Murkudis, Hemd von COS, Vintage-Hose; Joli: Bluse von Femme Maison, Rock von New Page; Boris: Shirt von Schiesser by Kostas Murkudis, Longsleeve von Indigo Fera, Gilet von Pike Brothers, Shorts von H&M

Natascha: Vintage-T-Shirt, Latzhose von Mango, Vintage-Tuch; Nora: Kleid von Wood Wood, Hoodie von American Apparel; Ron: Hemd von COS, Vintage-Tasche

Dalia: Bluse von COS, Shorts von Nike; Steffi: Shirt von Nanushka, Vintage-Longsleeve, Hose von Base Range

Valerie: Vintage-T-Shirt, Parka von Christian Wijnant, Rock von Fabrics Interseason

Mira: Parka von Monki, Schuhe von Vans; Joli: Bluse von Femme Maison, Rock von New Page, Schuhe von Top Shop; Natascha: Vintage-T-Shirt, Latzhose von Mango, Vintage-Tuch, Schuhe von Vans; Nora: Kleid von Wood Wood, Hoodie von American Apparel, Schuhe von Nike; Boris: Boris: Shirt von Schiesser by Kostas Murkudis, Longsleeve von Indigo Fera, Gilet von Pike Brothers, Shorts von H&M, lange Unterhose von Schiesser; Ron: Longsleeve von Schiesser by Kostas Murkudis, Hemd von COS, Vintage-Hose, Vintage-Tasche

Valerie: Bluse von Diptych, Jacke von Femme Maison; Gisa: Bluse von Femme Maison, Haube von Post

Vincent: Longsleeve von Kostas Murkudis, Baseballshirt von American Apparel, Hose von Diptych; Stefan: T-Shirt von American Apparel, Regenjacke von Stutterheim, Hose von American Apparel

Natascha: Vintage-T-Shirt, Latzhose von Mango, Vintage-Tuch; Boris: Shirt von Schiesser by Kostas Murkudis, Longsleeve von Indigo Fera, Gilet von Pike Brothers, Shorts von H&M; Ron: Longsleeve von Schiesser by Kostas Murkudis, Hemd von COS, Vintage-Hose, Vintage-Tasche; Mira: Kleid von Lous Basic, Parka von Monki; Joli: Bluse von Femme Maison, Rock von New Page

Natascha: Vintage-T-Shirt, Latzhose von Mango, Vintage-Tuch; Nora: Kleid von Wood Wood, Hoodie von American Apparel; Ron: Longsleeve von Schiesser by Kostas Murkudis, Hemd von COS, Vintage-Hose, Vintage-Tasche; Mira: Kleid von Lous Basic, Parka von Monki; Walter: Vintage-Overall; Billie: Kleid von Cult; Maria: Sweater von Diptych, Hose von COS; Joli: Bluse von Femme Maison, Rock von New Page; Boris: Shirt von Schiesser by Kostas Murkudis, Longsleeve von Indigo Fera, Gilet von Pike Brothers, Shorts von H&M; Florian: Vintage-Overall

Natascha: Vintage-T-Shirt, Latzhose von Mango, Vintage-Tuch, Schuhe von Vans; Joli: Bluse von Femme Maison, Rock von New Page, Schuhe von Top Shop

Valerie: Bluse von Diptych, Jacke von Femme Maison; Gisa: Bluse von Femme Maison, Haube von Post

Photos by Luke Overin

Nobody was born a tourist. It's an accidental, temporary state of being, something that happens to normal people in foreign cities. Yet for some reason it's totally fine to rip them to pieces. We mock them, we malign them, we huff at them at Times Square or on the Piccadilly Line, we kick their massive fucking backpacks and we give them the wrong change. Even OG cultural theorist and equality firebrand Fran Lebowitz recently said she thinks tourists should just "stay home." But we've all been one at some point.

No matter how worldly you think you are, how thorough your research has been, how well you think you know the local customs and train lines, I guarantee some native has spotted your lost, sitting-duck ass ambling around with a crappy map and a burnt neck. Sometimes it's possible to notice ourselves becoming tourists, having out-of-body experiences as we ask, in broken Spanish, if they're showing our team's playoff game at this tapas restaurant. Yet, despite this common bond between us, we Britons still treat the people who come to visit our country with a kind of gleeful inhumanity, determined to send them home with tales similar to the ones we have about rude Parisian waiters and crazy NYC taxi drivers.

But what is it like to live like a newcomer in a city you know as well as your own PIN number? To forget everything you learned about your hometown and instead place total trust in travel pamphlets that haven't been updated in five years?

Intrigued to see what my city looks like to those who've just arrived, and perhaps in search of a lost sense of wonder, I spent a day searching for the tourist London, the one the rest of the world discovered via US sitcoms and Richard Curtis films, rather than teenage night bus journeys. As a London native, it's a world I've only ever seen from the outside looking in. But it was time to wade into it and hope no German exchange students started crying in the process.

It was only right that we started our day where so many tourists start theirs: the Victoria metro and bus station. Getting into character, VICE photographer Luke Overin and I imagined ourselves in the frayed moccasins of a pair of young foreign lads who'd just bowled off an EasyJet flight, eager to make the most of a short break to the city of William Blake, Nell Gwyn, plague pits, Danny Baker, and Newham Generals.

Arriving at the shiny-floored purgatory that is the station's main concourse, the first thing I noticed were an abundance of UK flags and a massive advertisement for the Harry Potter books—two Great British icons in varying degrees of health. The flag, or Union Jack, is just about clinging on for life after 1.6 million people actively voted to leave it behind, while Harry Potter, amazingly, is still A Thing. It was a strange vision of London to be welcomed into; I half-expected Stephen Fry to be reading the platform announcements in an attempt to make the Catford loop line sound a lot more magical than the miserable commuter wagon it is. 

Gathered together in this huge, celestial shed that smelt of burned cheese was a small tribe of daytrippers, homecomers, jet-setters, and potential street robbery victims. Their bags bulged at the seams, threatening to spill out their Esperanto cargo of unwashed pants, wet wipes, and David Nicholls novels all over the station. Today, these were my people.

Starting our journey into the heart of the British tourism industry, a.k.a London, we went looking for divine guidance from Transport for London. Luckily, Victoria station is geared toward people who have no fucking idea what they're doing, and soon we were making our way to Westminster, the bedrock of two British institutions: Parliament and the Church. 

Walking out onto Victoria Road, I was met with a familiar feeling of transient, end-of-my-tether misery. I realized that I'm never in Victoria unless I'm going somewhere else, that I've never known anyone who's actually from or lived in the area. Pneumatic drills, Upper Crust kiosks, dying West End musicals—the whole zone seemed to scream, "Just passing through, no reason to stop here!" to the crowds hulking their luggage round like crucifixes in some pilgrimage to the next shit sushi outlet.

In terms of selling the London experience, Daniel Craig and the Queen parachuting out of a Union Jack helicopter it is not, but I was hopeful it was going to get better. 

I wasn't wrong. The drab main drag of multinational corporate headquarters and Caffè Neros opened up into a kind of grand utilitarian boulevard, and I caught sight of the first grand landmark: the London Eye. 

Personally, I've always found these moments—the ones where the London you only usually see on postcards suddenly appears in front of you—somewhat reassuring. As tacky and as temporary looking as the London Eye is now, it's a reminder that you are, after all, in one of the world's great cities, and that as much as it might seem like it in this post-Uber universe, London isn't just a smattering of small backwaters that you shuttle between on the edge of Zone 1—it's an icon in itself.

Putting myself into the shoes of somebody who was coming here for the first time, it was undeniably impressive.

Eventually I reached Westminster Abbey, where I saw these guys milling about outside. Dressed in canary yellow jackets and dog collars, I couldn't figure out if they were some obscure branch of fashionistas or a bachelor party about to drop a banging group selfie. 

Speaking of selfies, as I made my way into Parliament Square—once the temporary home of Brian Haw, the now deceased, very committed, slightly mad antiwar campaigner who seemed determined to guilt trip Tony Blair into an early grave—I quickly became aware of a slew of photographic soloists. As is tradition now, all were in the process of adding to the vast canon of YouTube slideshows of world cities set to Green Day's "Time of Your Life" that no one ever watches.

This guy was using something that I had no idea even existed until this moment: the selfie stick, a simple yet effective item that's perfect for people who don't care about looking crazy in person if they look presentable on the internet.

But it wasn't just selfies. Everywhere around me people were taking photos, almost as if something had actually happened. This green and pleasant patch of British democracy had become a version of the Countryfile photo challenge, except with stuff that literally everyone else on Earth has seen before: people squeezing Big Ben, pretending to push Big Ben, posing with cops, grinning inanely with a funny hat on. Essentially, people were just inserting themselves into stock images.

I've long wondered what the point of this constant documentation is. An occasional cursory flick through on a Facebook album? A toekn Instagram heart? Who and what are these photos for?

I guess wedding photos kind of have a point to them, even if none of your friends or family seem to be there, and even if there's a massive truck in the background of every shot.

But hey, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. I suppose after all these years of living in London, I've finally got something to show for it other than a missing tooth, a media job, and a Schwarzschild wormhole of an overdraft.

As I reached Westminster Bridge, it was clear I was now on the frontline of the war for tourists' cash. On every corner came a new opportunity to be ripped off. Rows upon rows of die-cast crap and weather-unresistant hats, models of Big Ben for £20 ($32), and Union Jack paraphernalia going for not much less.

I felt like a window-shopper at a street market that nobody would ever return to. As passersby languidly felt up the fridge magnets before walking on with a polite "No thanks," I realized I was at the garage sale of a nation that, on this evidence, has little to offer beyond its past and an incredible lack of scruples. Not that this is unique to London—Rome, Paris, Barcelona, Bruges; you could probably say the same about any of Europe's big tourism cities.

Putting myself into the distressed denim jeans of a visitor, I tried to figure out what kind of country I had wound up in. A country where Mr. Bean, a man who can't talk properly and crashes his car a lot, is enough of a cultural export to have masks of him sold alongside The A-Z and postcards of the Queen? I mean, for fuck's sake, he's not even Rowan Atkinson's best character.

Behind him lurked Del Boy and Boris Johnson, two hyper-capitalists at either end of the social spectrum who do little to suggest that London is anything other than a big everything-must-go sale. It seemed depressing, but I guess Paris has its knock-off Chat Noir posters, Madrid has its racks of Ronaldo shirts, Amsterdam its weed-leaf hoodies, etc.

At least, unlike some other European capitals, London is still very much a "working city"—it has a huge financial base, and one foot in the Shanghai-led future world. But it was recently named the world's most popular tourist destination, with visitors spending over £3 billion ($4.8 billion) annually. Intrigued to see what it is that makes London so enduringly popular, I carried on over Westminster Bridge, the democratic highway (or "The Bridge of Cocks") that connects the power bases in the north to the people in the south.

Now, surely this man is a functioning, intelligent, capable member of society wherever he hails from? He would never buy a novelty hat, let alone accidentally leave the tag on it and walk across one of the most heavily peopled places in Europe, right? Yet here he was, in London, doing exactly that. A momentary moron, an ambling duck, a victim of his own misplacement—the confused tourist that at some point every one of us has been.

Then I came across this patriotic siren of the Thames, a young lady dolled up like Johnny Adair's downstairs toilet who was advertising a nearby fish 'n' chip megastore.

Because I'm British, I don't eat fish 'n' chips; I know that it is invariably terrible, even if you go to one of those posh ones. But I was here to sample British culture in its most flagrant form only, and eating Union Jack fish 'n' chips by Westminster Bridge seemed about as "London" as things could get without having to pay a protection fee to the Bombacilar gang. 

That said, it wasn't cheap. We'd already resigned ourselves to getting ripped off on this day out, but at £18 ($28) for two Cokes, a sausage, chips, and a fish, we were already testing our generous budget and we hadn't even hit any attractions yet. 

Still, at least we made the most of our money. A single piece of chicken in here is £3 ($5). I mean, you could feed an entire family at Morley's grocery for that.

The restaurant itself was laid out like a prison canteen—a long, narrow passage in the grand confines of the old County Hall. It used to be the headquarters of the Greater London Council, but is now the home of a McDonald's, the Enter The Void-esque future nightmare that is the Namco Funscape, and this place (a handy distillation of modern London history if you needed one).

Made up of plastic tables, pictures of Minis, and miserable-looking people tucking into their fish lunches, the atmosphere was somehow kitsch, sterile, and utterly bleak all at the same time—like a community theater production of Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery at Broadmoor Hospital. 

The food itself was just as wonderfully disgusting as you'd imagine; the chips tasted like the inside of a fly-tipped couch, and the fish tasted worse. Not only that, but the plastic cutlery failed to fulfill any of its intended purposes, shattering on impact like a cheap ruler and further adding to the sense that you were in some kind of institution where metal forks were something you earned through good behavior. 

After leaving our half-eaten lunches, we quickly found ourselves outside the London Eye, which not long ago had been just a distant vision from Victoria. Up close, it resembled something more like a battery farm or a Border Agency Control zone, with hundreds of sweaty sightseers rammed backpack-to-backpack in a maze of plexiglass.

Stopping to admire it, I wondered what kind of purpose it will serve in the London that's being built up around it. In a city that now houses so many nightclubs with "rooftop" terraces, the Shard's viewing gallery, and with more skyscrapers to come, merely "being high up" doesn't seem enough.

That said, on the evidence of the line, the Eye still seems to be a roaring hotspot.  

The original grand vision of the South Bank was provided by the GLC, a group of pioneering architects determined to bring a touch of Le Corbusier to London, as well as a few forward-thinking Labour politicians keen to haul postwar Britain into the future.

The South Bank came along in the era of the Westway, the Barbican, the Festival of Britain, Roy Jenkins, and the Beatles. It was meant to be a glimpse of a new Britain designed for the people. But now it's been taken over by people who put Mexican restaurants in shipping containers and elitist Arts Council types who want to kick all the skaters out.

Now, that original utilitarian vision has been replaced by kitschy consumerism, hundreds of stalls, kiosks, and glass-fronted piri piri emporiums, turning the South Bank into an expensive food court. All around me seemed to be people buying snacks—high-fat, high-price edible baubles; the food equivalent of toys.

Yes, some of London's most valuable institutions, like the Royal Festival Hall, the Tate Modern, and the BFI, are on South Bank. But then so is this, the Snog bus, a piece of London's public history painted luminous pink.

The brutalist behemoths still stand, but they do so awkwardly alongside the landmarks of this new, infantile, post–Keep Calm London, like the ruins of an unrealized future. Looking on at these "stone dreams," as J.G. Ballard called them, looming quietly over the Snog bus and the Wahaca containers, was like watching Cabaret Voltaire quietly go through a soundcheck in the background of an episode of The Great British Bake Off.

And whose fault is it all? This guy: London's Papa Doc in reflective cycling gear. The man who's trying to get us all to move to Maidenhead as he turns the South Bank from a brutalist dream into a burrito nightmare. 

The Clink looms large in London's folkloric history, one of the darkest parts of a very dark age. It was Britain's most notorious prison for over 500 years, a living hell where society's least wanted were detained, tortured, and generally left to rot in disease-infested shallow waters. It's a pure slice of grim London; a world that we're equal parts fascinated with and ashamed of. A reminder of the long and indelible history of cruelty and disease that haunted this city right up to the 20th century. 

But now, it's a tourist trap par excellence where you pay your £7.50 ($12) to the one visible member of staff (a friendly part-time student in a chambermaid outfit, who doubled as both prison guard and gift-shop cashier) to go and experience this shoddily rendered version of medieval inhumanity.

It's easy to laugh at crappy museum exhibits, but despite the fact this guy's arms seem to start somewhere behind his own shoulders I began to feel a kind of affinity with him. As we peered deeply into each other's eyes, I felt a bond forming between my waxy friend and I, realizing that I too am a bit-part player in other people's vacations, condemned to looking on as guys in basketball shoes wander past taking selfies, just about keeping my head above the shitty waste water of the city.

My Clink souvenir photo still warm in my hand, I found myself outside the London Bridge Experience, another tourist attraction that is based on the horrors of the old city.

I wondered what tourists really thought of London and its history. Did they just come here to experience grimness, in the same way they might go to Rome for buildings, Paris for paintings, and Barcelona for seafood? Was our history of violence and deprivation actually the main selling point? Looking at these attractions—the London Dungeon, the Ripper tours, "Mad" Frankie Fraser's gangland London tour, the Blitz Experience, the Tower of London's torture exhibit—it struck me that London might be the world's misery capital. The Vatican with thumbscrews and shit weather; the Rive Gauche with the ghosts of disemboweled sex workers. 

As for the tourists, can you really blame them for their vanity? If they do seem vain, surely it's just in response to a city conceited enough to believe it can sell off the tackiest, most basic version of itself for a grossly inflated price. They're just behaving the same way people from London do when they go to Blackpool.

As the daylight began to fade, I felt no closer to understanding why it is people come to visit London. Was it for the ghosts, the crime, and the misery? The Cool Britannia dream? Or is there a more exciting, more modern reason they evidently flock here in their droves? Cara Delevingne? Brick Lane? Dr. Who? Street art tours? Food vans?

Rather than call it quits, I decided I had to prolong this exploration of Boris's new London, to go after the one just across the water. The London of Paul Raymond, shitty steak houses, indie discos, "models upstairs," and illegal cabbies: The West End.

Would I find the beating heart of a new London, or just more fro-yos and medieval wax martyrs? There was only one way to find out.

The second installment of Clive's adventure in tourist London will run at VICE.com tomorrow.

Follow Clive Martin on Twitter.

Finding an apartment in a big city like New York is just the beginning. Photo via Flickr user Kevin Case

If there's one thing people in our broadly tolerant, mostly liberal society love, it's publicly casting judgment on peers. We’ve locked up the ne’er-do-wells in the town square’s gallows, plastered DUI drivers’ ugly faces all over local newspapers, and told everyone which houses belong to the sex offenders.

These days, when it comes to shady landlords, New York City is leaning on a much more visible town square: the internet.

Take, for example, a woman named Robin Shimoff, the latest star of NYC's Landlord Watch List. Launched by the then Public Advocate (and current Mayor) Bill de Blasio in 2010, this nifty database lets any New Yorker search for the worst landlords on his or her block, ranked by the number of violations they’ve accumulated.

Shimoff’s properties in the Bronx have racked up a grand total of 3,352 violations over the years. When Public Advocate Letitia James, the architect of this year’s edition of the list, announced the landlord's name at a press conference in front of City Hall last week, shouts and boos of “Shame!” reverberated through the crowd.

"I wanna begin with the top worst landlord in the City of New York," James said. "And that award goes to—roll call—Robin Shimoff! And so, Ms. Shimoff, congratulations, you have the distinction of being the worst landlord in the city, and I would urge you to clean up your act immediately.”

Bizarrely, James promised her audience that “it’s really not my intent to shame landlords." After all, even if she had the noblest of intentions, it’s safe to say some New Yorkers had already grabbed their torches and pitchforks. But do landlords actually care when people get pissed off at them on television?

“I think it’s clear that a lot of them don’t,” Michael McKee, the treasurer of the Tenants PAC, a housing advocacy group in New York, told me. “The profits are too great. Landlords are driven by quick turnover and enormous profits.”

That’s why, to McKee, it was no surprise that Shimoff’s tenants told the New York Daily News tales of rats, gas leaks, and collapsing leaks in her properties, just days after she was declared the city’s slumlord-in-chief. 

“We’re not going to suddenly see those buildings change,” McKee argued. “Unless you change that incentive, you’ve got yourself a gold mine.” 

That incentive, which, in most of America’s major cities, exists in some form or another, is a lesser-known policy called "vacancy deregulation." It’s a free-market concept that arose in the 1990s, when high-speed housing bubbles paralleled economic expansion; the idea is that landlords are able to free their properties from rent control or rent stabilization by holding them vacant for a specified period of time. After that, the property owner can rent the unit at market rate, which is of course much higher than what tenants were previously paying. (Since landlords have this incentive to evict renters, it's more difficult for them to remove tenants who have some form of rent regulation.) Partly as a result, people across the country are putting more of their incomes toward rent than they were in the Reagan era.

McKee pointed out that James’s office has offered a list of resources out there for tenants with shitty landlords. But he doesn’t think the Watch List is addressing the core issue of financial payoff. “Yes, it’s great we have a spotlight on them now," he said. "But is it going to change their bad behavior? No.”

Aja Williams, a spokeswoman for James, told me that the Landlord Watch List—and public shaming, for that matter—is “the first step in a larger (and coordinated) effort to improve housing conditions in primarily low-income communities.” Since James took office last January, Williams argued that the Public Advocate has taken a more defined role in protecting tenants against slumlords by joining them in court.

In one case, in which a Brooklyn property owner was accused of attempting vacancy deregulation by kicking tenants out, James told reporters that the city’s Housing of Preservation and Development is legally allowed to repair the building and bill the landlord later. If matters worsen, HPD is also entitled to a tax lien, which effectively places the landlord in debt.

“The most effective way to ensure safe, quality housing is to pass fair and strong laws that are strictly enforced,” Jamie McShane, a spokesman for the Real Estate Board of New York, which has no landlords on the Watch List, said.

But public shaming is all about who holds the information. In my neighborhood of Astoria, Queens, Joseph Pistilli at 28-07 38th Street has racked up 53 violations with his residents, and he hasn’t done anything about them since last year. In other words, what this chart is trying to tell me is that Pistilli is a downright shitty guy. Got it.

The idea here is that these assumed-to-be assholes—over 5,000 of them in New York alone—might get their act together once a prospective renter looks them up on the Watch List and decides to steer clear of them. But as anyone who has ever gone apartment hunting in New York knows, tenants don't always have the luxury of staying away from a building just because its owner has a bad reputation.

Since New York’s Landlord Watch List went live, Williams would only tell me that “at least one” landlord had reached out to her office to clean his or her act up.

One down, 4,999 to go.

John Surico is a Queens-based freelance journalist. His reporting can be found in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Village Voice, among other outlets. Follow him on Twitter.

Andreas Mogensen. All photos via Andreas Morgensen's Flickr.

Most kids dream of being astronauts, and for pretty much all of them that's as close as they'll get. But out of all those hundreds of thousands, there's one who will actually end up getting picked to eat dehydrated ramen while floating around in an astronomically expensive tin can.

Andreas Mogensen is set to be that guy. If all goes to plan, in September of 2015 he'll be leaving for a ten-day expedition to the International Space Station (ISS), making him the first ever Dane to travel to space. 

I called him up to discuss what it takes to become an astronaut, life on other planets, and the tax benefits of space exploration. 

Andreas on a NASA SEATEST mission, 47 feet below sea level

VICE: Hey Andreas. What are you up to? 
Andreas Mogensen: I'm in Star City in Russia, about 30 miles outside Moscow, where I'm training. It's a city that was founded in the 1950s with the sole purpose of training the Soviet cosmonauts. Normally, I live in Cologne, Germany, but most of our training takes place here in Russia, or at NASA in Houston. 

How do you train? 
We do a lot of different things. Right now, I'm training for next year's mission. A lot of it is just like school. We need to learn how to use the computer systems on the International Space Station and on the Soyus rocket, which is what's taking us to space and back. We need to be able to fix everything, because if something breaks down in space, we're the only ones who can do anything about it. I'm taught to fly the Soyus rocket in a simulator. We take space walks in a big underwater tank and we learn how to use the big robotic arm. I also need to learn Russian and extended first aid. We really need to learn a lot of things before being sent to space. 

What kind of background do you need to be an astronaut? 
Most astronauts are either engineers, doctors, pilots, or come from the military. I have a background in engineering with a focus on space travel.

Is travelling to space something you've dreamt of for years?
Definitely. It's what I always wanted to do. I just thought that being an astronaut was the most awesome job in the world. The thought of being shot into space on a rocket and exploring the moon, or some other planet, was so cool. It's insanely difficult to become an astronaut, though, and I knew that. That's why I focused on space travel during my engineering studies. So even if I couldn't be an astronaut, I could still work with space travel.  

So how did you manage to actually become an astronaut?
In 2008, the European Space Agency announced that they were looking for new astronauts. The last time that happened was in 1992. So I applied, along with 8,500 other people. Then, slowly over several years, they decimated the number through a series of tests. I didn't think I'd passed the first test, but I kept on passing them and, in the end, I was one of the final six guys. 

They chose six people out of 8,500 applicants?  
Yes. 

Andreas during winter survival training

Wow. What were the tests like? 
The first test was about our ability to focus—multi-tasking and stuff like that. The test took eight or nine hours. Then they tested how strong we were psychologically. Later, we were given a full medical check, where they looked for any possible reasons we may be unable go to space. 

So you're incredibly healthy.
Yeah, I guess. Finally, we had to do two interviews in front of all the bosses of ESA. 

What are you going to be doing in space? 
I'm going up in a Soyus rocket to the ISS for ten days. The primary goal of the mission is for an American and a Russian to live on the ISS for a year, in order to see how the body reacts to being weightless for a prolonged period of time. We need this knowledge if we're going to send people to Mars. That trip would take two to three years.

The problem is that the Soyus rocket can only handle being in space for six months. So I'm taking one Soyus up when they're halfway through their mission, and then I'm taking their Soyus back to Earth. 

Andreas during Soyus training in Star City, Russia. Photo via.

How long does the career of an astronaut last?
I'm 37 now. You age out in your mid-fifties. So obviously I'm hoping to get another mission, but right now I'm completely focused on this one. 

How do you feel about being the first Dane in space? 
It's a big honor, of course. But for me personally, it's never been a goal. I really don't care if I'm the first or the 15th Dane in space. 

Are there any big breakthroughs happening in space travel at the moment? 
The big goal right now is the ISS. But recently two American companies started sending supplies into space, so that's pretty exciting. NASA also just handed a contract for manned space travel to Boeing. NASA are also working on a new type of space capsule for sending people to space. To Mars, for instance, or an asteroid. But they are still talking about that.

Do you believe we can send people to Mars? 
I think we can send people to a new place in 2030. Whether it's Mars, an asteroid, or to the moon again, I don't know. But if we choose to send people to Mars, then we could easily do it. We are so much further ahead than when the US sent people to the moon. We can do it, but it's a political decision. 

Andreas during ISS EVA Ops training

Do you think there's life in space? 
There are two further questions to that question. The first is: is there life on Mars? It looks like there's been liquid water on the surface, which is the key to life. It also looks like the climate used to be warmer. That's why we're so interested in exploring it. We want to look for bacteria or microorganisms. If we find that, it would be huge, as it would be the first time we'd seen evidence of life on other planets.

Moreover, in the last 15 years we've been able to locate planets around other stars. Until 15 years ago, we only knew about eight or nine planets in our own solar system. Today, we've found 1,000 planets in orbit around other stars. What we want to do is to have powerful telescopes in orbit to look at all these planets that are very far away from Earth. Light years away. Then we can see if their atmospheres have oxygen and water, which is what a planet needs to sustain life. It could get very interesting in the next 50 years. 

Does it pay well to be an astronaut? 
Yeah, it does. I'd say we're paid pretty well. We're employed full-time by the ESA, so we have the same employment terms as everybody else here. 

Last question—I don’t suppose there are any tax benefits to working in space?
No, not really. But since we're working for an international organisation like the EU, we actually don't pay taxes. But that's not because we're in space.    

Cool. Good luck up there.

Nonviolent female prisoners. Image courtesy of Last Gasp

In 2011, under mounting pressure to decrease the prison population, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) created the Alternative Custody Program (ACP). It's a program designed to forge a path for low-level female inmates to return home (under electronic surveillance), care for their children, and reintegrate into their communities. The policy is currently the subject of a lawsuit claiming that it discriminates on the basis of sex, but in theory, it seems like a prison authority might have finally gotten something right.

That’s what Cynthia thought when she appeared before the panel (called an Institution Classification Committee in CDCR lingo) after applying for ACP. After getting her paperwork straightened out and applying three times, she was told she was denied. She needed a teeth cleaning before her application could be processed.

Another woman was denied because of a computer error: Her dentistry was up to date, but a bureaucrat hadn’t changed her status, so she remained behind bars.

In the offices of California Coalition for Women Prisoners (CCWP), letters (which you can read here) have piled high from women who want to return home to their families and repent for their crimes. But very few of the eligible inmates are given a real chance to take advantage of the opportunities that ACP promised. In one of the letters, an inmate named Anna wrote: “I know I’ve made mistakes in my life, but I’m ready for a change. Yes, I’ve been in and out of prison, but don’t only look at my record, look at what I did and all my programs.” Anna is currently in prison for identity fraud. She has not been released.

Michelle, who has four children at home, was denied ACP because of a mistake in classification—her crime was embezzlement, but it was mistakenly classified as “violent,” rendering her ineligible. Misty Rojo, the program coordinator at CCWP, has received reports from women who were denied release because they had a pit bull as a pet and because they received medication for a treatable medical condition like high blood pressure.

Before the women are released under ACP, they're subject to a pre-release interview that includes sensitive questions about their histories of abuse and other mental anguish. The Justice Department has determined that at least half of all female inmates have been victims of physical or sexual abuse and one-third have been raped prior to incarceration, and appearing to harbor lingering psychological trauma from this abuse can prevent release. Even worse, the people asking these questions aren’t licensed therapists, according to Rojo, and they intentionally ask questions that cause the women to break down into tears and then accuse the women of being “mentally unstable,” which means they are not eligible for release. 

That's what an inmate named Theresa claimed happened to her in a letter she wrote to CCWP explaining that she “was not prepared for what took place in my ACP classification hearing.” Theresa met all of the criteria for ACP and had no disciplinary actions. She participated in programs like Alcoholics Anonymous and anger management. But in her hearing she was asked about her suicide attempts as a minor as well as her childhood and adult molestation and rape. She felt blindsighted by the process and dejected at the result, which was a denial of her ACP application.

These stories help to illustrate why out of the estimated 4,000 women eligible for ACP, only 420 have been released in the three years the program has been active. (The CDCR told me that it did not keep track of how many ACP petitions were denied.) California's prisons are overflowing—so why is the state trying to keep its women inmates behind bars? 

Women are one of the fastest-growing segments of America’s prison population, and more than half of these women—at least in California—are non-violent offenders. Women, along with gender-nonconforming inmates, are also some of the most vulnerable inside prison; rates of inmate-on-inmate sexual violence are higher among women than men. Even further, it's estimated that 75 percent of incarcerated women are the primary caretakers of their children, meaning that their imprisonment leaves a trail of disaster for their families.

In the policy debates over California’s deplorable prison system, women’s prisons have frequently fallen by the wayside. Overcrowding leads to a range of obvious problems, from overuse of solitary confinement and more frequent lockdowns (since there are too many inmates for the staff to control) to a lack of basic supplies and unsanitary conditions. But perhaps the most severe indirect consequence of overcrowding is poor medical care for the inmates. In December 2013, a court-appointed panel of medical experts issued an independent report condemning the conditions at CCWF citing a litany of institutional deficiencies.

More shockingly, an investigation this summer by the Center for Investigative Reporting discovered that nearly 150 female inmates were given unauthorized sterilizations between 2006 and 2010 at CCWF, CIW, and Valley State. A new bill just signed by Governor Brown last month supposedly outlaws the practice once and for all.

CCWF and CIW have been the target of scrutiny for poor medical care for nearly two decades, but instead of releasing female prisoners who are unlikely to pose harm—thus, potentially alleviating some of these issues—Governor Jerry Brown recently signed a contract worth $9 million a year with GEO Group, the second-largest private prison contracting company, to take over a prison facility in McFarland, California that will house about 260 women (with an option to double its size). Press releases for the prison claim that the facility will boast services like job training, drug programs, and other therapeutic interventions, although there is no guarantee that transferred inmates will be able to continue any of their current programming.

But the move is not an auspicious one. While the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) doesn't have the best track record, it looks like a luxury hotel compared to GEO Group, which is the subject of hundreds of lawsuits for violence, mistreatment, and poor medical care in its facilities.

In 2010, the ACLU filed a lawsuit on behalf of an epileptic Texas man who died from an untreated seizure while in solitary confinement. GEO Group was called out for the abysmal conditions in a Mississippi juvenile facility by a federal judge, who held that the private company allowed “a cesspool of unconstitutional and inhuman acts and conditions to germinate.” On top of concerns about privatized prisons, the latest outcry over the proposed McFarland facility crystallizes the ongoing problem of California’s women’s prisons, facilities plagued by scandals and problems that remain largely out of the public eye.

While the GEO contract might temporarily alleviate overcrowding, it doesn't solve the real problem, which would be to allow the release of non-violent offenders and maintain the programs that help these women reintegrate into their communities. (ACP, by the way, provides no assistance for women seeking employment or housing.)

The popularity of Orange Is the New Black has drawn attention to the plight of women in prison. When I talk with people about prisons, I often hear how difficult it is for these women to speak up about their treatment because they have felt so consistently ignored by prison authorities who operate in a system dominated by hyper-masculine principles. The CDCR, like all prison regimes, lacks accountability because their decisions are always shrouded under the guise of “public safety,” something no politician seems bold enough to question.

Women inmates are less likely to riot or institute hunger strikes, which emboldens the CDCR to ignore them because they are less in the public eye—contrast, for example, the very public hunger strikes at Pelican Bay with the relative silence at CCWF. These women suffer from what is called a “double invisibility,” hidden from the public’s eyes because no one will take the time to listen.

Follow Jessica Pishko on Twitter.

A panoramic view of the pit in the middle of Cerro de Pasco, Peru. Photo by the author.

When we arrived in Cerro de Pasco, a medium-size city in the high Peruvian sierra, it was night. We inched through the crowded, twisting streets past a large statue of Daniel Carrión, a legendary medical student who stands there with a syringe in his hand, injecting himself with the disease that’s named in his honor. In the colonial quarter, we abruptly came to a wall, painted alternately with graffiti and the words private property. I could sense a great emptiness on the other side, like when you’re by the ocean but cannot quite see it.

I climbed a rock and peeked over. All around in the distance the city was aglow. Plunging out before me was the hole, void of light but for the tiny headlights of trucks crawling around its sides. This is El Tajo: the Pit.

In Andean cosmology, Earth is Pachamama—Mother Earth—and this massive polymetal mine is the locus of a literal penetration. It is 1.2 miles wide and as deep as the Empire State Building is tall. All day and all night, the rock-grinding machinery produces a low mechanical groan, which is amplified tremendously by the pit’s speaker-like shape. It is the sound of the city being eaten alive.

Photo by the author.

Cerro de Pasco is an environmental and urban catastrophe. The pit, which opened in 1956, is in the middle of the city—not beside it but in it. As it grows, thousands of families have had to move into unplanned urban developments, most of which lack basic sanitation. Now the city is running out of space. In 2008, Peru’s congress passed Law No. 29293, calling for the resettlement of the entire population of 67,000. But the law has gone unheeded.

“I imagine that in very developed countries, this sort of thing doesn’t exist,” said Jhames Romero, a mechanic who maintains mining machinery here.

The pit hasn’t grown in two years, but lately, Volcan, the company that currently runs it, has resumed buying houses around the periphery and painting them a fluorescent green. As more of the city—including what remains of the colonial quarter—changes color, everyone is wondering what’s going to happen next, and nobody I spoke to seemed particularly optimistic.

Cerro de Pasco has always been a mining town. The Spanish found silver here in 1630, and throughout the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, Cerro de Pasco was an important source of colonial revenue. In 1902, the US Cerro de Pasco Corporation bought the city’s numerous small shaft mines with money from J.P. Morgan, Henry Clay Frick, the Hearsts, and the Vanderbilts—among other robber barons of the Gilded Age—consolidating the majority of the mining activity under a single enterprise. When the company opened the pit, it opted not to move the population, which had lived directly on top of the mines and had grown significantly during the first half of the 20th century.

The suburb of Carhuamaca—playground and elementary school and all—sits at the foot of a giant heap of poisonous rock tailings. Photo by the author.

Cerro de Pasco has also always been an utterly wretched place to call home. In 1831, a visitor named Alexander Cruckshanks wrote that Cerro de Pasco “looks as if a neutral tint were passed over the whole landscape.” He added, “The houses are small and dark, and the mass of people squalid and miserable.”

Proud locals insist that this place is a land of the hardy, not the many. It is bracingly cold, and at 14,000 feet above sea level, it is one of the highest cities in the world (water in Cerro boils at 186 degrees Fahrenheit). The physical effects of being this high up are similar to those of a very bad hangover. Because of the mining, it is about as unhealthy a place to live as you’ll find anywhere on the planet.

“The pollution in Cerro de Pasco is absolute,” said Zenón Aira Díaz, 70, a longtime resident and historian. A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study from 2007 reported that 60 percent of soil samples from houses in Cerro and the surrounding towns had more than 1,200 parts per million of lead—three times what the US Environmental Protection Agency considers safe for children. A soil sample from a heavily used footpath clocked in at 20,000 parts per million.

Much of the pollution comes from tailings—a heavy-metal-laden mixture of rock and earth produced by this kind of mining—which are formed into giant (and colorful) man-made hills around the city. When left open to the air, tailings leak pollutants such as cadmium, mercury, and arsenic into their surroundings. One pile is right beside the hospital, and another encircles the entire suburb of Carhuamaca, towering above the houses, the elementary school, and a dilapidated playground. When a passing car or herd of cattle kicks up a bloom of dust, you can taste metal. In the 1920s, the mining corporation started dumping tailings into nearby lakes, which remain untreated and open to the air above and the aquifer below.

The Cerro de Pasco hospital is located across the street from another tailings mound. Photo by Maxim Holland.

In May 2012, the Peruvian government declared the area around the tailings lakes to be in a state of environmental emergency, and allocated $20 million for health programs to mitigate lead poisoning, which is common, particularly among children. To date, none of this money has actually been spent.

“It’s like telling someone, ‘You have tuberculosis,’ and then telling him to piss off,” said Denis Cristóbal, a 29-year-old obstetrician who’s also the fiery mayor of the town next to Quiulacocha, one of the poisoned lakes. While her son slept on her lap, she told me about how children suffer from high rates of cirrhosis and developmental delays. We were a five-minute walk from the lake, which she calls “ex-Lake Quiulacocha.”

When we drove past the water, it was purple. I stopped to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating. “This is what we call progress,” said my travel companion Elizabeth Lino, the Cerro-born writer, artist, activist, and self-proclaimed Last Queen of Cerro de Pasco. Her ironic campaign to declare the pit a cultural heritage site has garnered national admiration and notoriety.

“The situation in Cerro de Pasco doesn’t make me sad. It makes me angry,” Lino told me as we shared a flask of pisco on the drive from Lima. “There is no solution. That hole isn’t going to turn back into a piece of land, and that tailings lake isn’t going to turn back into a natural lake.”

A densely populated section of the city surrounds a lake contaminated by mining residue. Photo by the author.

At the entrance to Volcan’s sprawling base, a gigantic sign reads, safety is non-negotiable. neither is your life. But in small communities like Quiulacocha, the company negotiates leases with male-dominated agricultural collectives that own the land, bypassing elected officials like Cristóbal. “In the participatory processes,” she explained, “we’re not respected.” (The company declined to speak to me, as did the miners, who walk along the streets in orange jumpsuits, looking sullen. When we visited a mining camp, we were followed by an unmarked, silver SUV.)

Meanwhile, the state and national governments have been feckless in regulating resource extraction. “The mining companies and the government are bedfellows,” Calmex Ramos, an environmental engineer and activist, told me. The municipalities build lavish stadiums and things like a proposed “monument to the pisco sour.” (“Malversiones,” Lino calls them, as in “bad investments.”) Meanwhile, projects like the resettlement, or an ambitious but mismanaged $45 million water system, have failed. Corruption remains a serious problem. In May, the governor of Pasco was arrested after his aides were taped receiving a $100,000 bribe for a public-works contract.

So the mine grinds on. After 400 years, it would be hard to imagine life without the pit. Romero, the mechanic, told me he’s appalled by the environmental degradation, but he and his neighbors can earn $500 a month working for the mine, much more than they would as cattle farmers. There are monuments to mining everywhere, and in the souvenir shops, everything is somehow mining-related (the exception is a nearby rock formation that looks like a llama).

But this pride is tinged with doom. “What hope do we have for the future? Absolutely none,” said Pablo Melgarejo, a university professor I hung out with at a food festival in one of the municipal stadiums. I asked him what he feels when he sees the pit. “It’s kind of a disaster, and I think, Hell, where are we headed? If this devours us, where will we end up?”

The morning I left, the pit was filled with a thick, gray cloud. Along the roadway out of town, someone had painted in large black letters, in Spanish, long fucking live cerro de pasco.

Samahar Masalmeh holds baby Karim and a picture of his father, Nabil, who is in an Israeli jail

In her home near Hebron in the West Bank, Palestine, Samahar Masalmeh lifts her new baby and holds him like a trophy. Karim was born two weeks ago, and there’s no doubt he’s a small victory for the Masalmeh family: His father has been inside an Israeli high-security prison for the past 14 years, and he and his wife have had no physical contact since then.

His mother says Karim was conceived through IVF (in vitro fertilization), using a sperm sample smuggled out of prison.

“My two other children wanted a little brother or sister, and by the time my husband gets out of jail I will be 47 and too old to bear children,” says Samahar, whose four previous attempts at the procedure failed. Samahar’s two other children, who are 15 and 16, were born before Nabil Masalmeh was jailed for his involvement in clashes with the Israeli military during the Second Intifada.

“When we came up with the idea we consulted the doctor and we were told that it’s normal," says Samahar, "we’d just have to bring the sample.”

“Normal” takes on a whole new meaning in the West Bank, where the reality of the occupation affects every aspect of Palestinian life, from freedom of movement to whom residents can marry and where they can build their homes. Unlike other detainees, “security prisoners” do not have the right to conjugal visits, and although a few Jewish Israelis have been imprisoned under similar provisions, the conditions of their confinement tend to be negotiated on a case-by-case basis. For instance, Yigal Amir was allowed to father a child through in vitro fertilization while serving a life sentence for the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995.

After Dallal Ziben pioneered the procedure in August 2012, other women were emboldened to do the same. On the same day Karim was born, Roula Muhammad Adb al-Ghani gave birth to twins in Nablus using the same procedure. According to Dr. Salim Abu Khaizaran, director of the Razan Center—a fertility clinic that has been performing the treatment—so far 21 women have conceived using sperm smuggled out of Israeli jails.

“I don’t know how they do it and I don’t want to know. When they come to us, we cannot deny them treatment,” says Abu Khaizaran. Samahar and other women have been equally secretive about how they manage to get the sperm through prison security. “Once they bring the sample, we demand that two first-degree relatives on both the wife’s and husband’s side confirm where the sample comes from," says Abu Khaizaran. "If the sample is good, we freeze it. It can last for 24 hours or even more, depending on the person."

“The idea of in vitro fertilization is not widely accepted,” says Samahar. “At the beginning my family didn’t support me, they were worried of what people would say if they saw me pregnant while my husband is in jail. But then one family did it because they couldn’t have babies, and things became easier. Now even those who criticized us support us.” The Palestinian Supreme Fatwa Council approved the procedure last year.

Due to restrictions on Palestinians’ freedom of movement, visiting relatives in jails located in Israeli territory is not an easy undertaking. They have to apply for permits from the Israeli authorities through the International Committee of the Red Cross, which Israel has been known to revoke or deny on security grounds—as during the Gaza offensive, when family visits to members of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine were forbidden.

“When my husband was in Nafha prison, I used to visit him every two weeks, then when they moved him I started seeing him every month,” says Samahar. “Now with the baby it will be even more difficult.” The families' journeys are often long and they are subjected to humiliating searches. Only first-degree relatives are allowed to visit, normally for 45 minutes every two weeks, and physical contact is usually only allowed with children under the age of eight. All prisons except one are located within Israel, in violation of international humanitarian law.

Palestinians demonstrate against the re-arrest of prisoners who had been released under the Gilad Shalit exchange

A framed photograph of Nabil Masalmeh hangs on a wall in the living room, marking the date when he was imprisoned in October 2000. Political prisoners are seen as national heroes by Palestinians, and the Palestinian Authority pays a stipend to the wives of those who are serving sentences longer than five years. According to Israel Prison Service figures published by human rights organization B’Tselem, as of the end of August, 5,505 Palestinian detainees and prisoners were held in Israeli jails; 473 were administrative detainees, held without charge or trial. The number of administrative detainees is at the highest it has been in five years—it more than doubled from 196 in May, when Operation Brother’s Keeper was launched in the West Bank in response to the abduction and murder of three yeshiva students.

Administrative detention is only permitted in international law in exceptional circumstances and not as routine practice. According to prisoner support association Addameer, administrative detainees are not told the reason for their detention, which in practice has no time limit—although each detention order can last up to six months, it can be renewed indefinitely.

Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails are also often used as bargaining chips. In 2011, 1,000 Palestinian prisoners were freed in exchange one Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, who had been held in captivity by Hamas for over five years. The deal ended up bolstering both Hamas and the Israeli government. Seventy-two of those freed under the Shalit deal were re-arrested in the summer as part of Operation Brother’s Keeper. In late September, Hamas announced another possible prisoners' swap deal, not confirmed by the Israeli government.

The Razan Medical Center for Infertility and IVF has been offering the procedure for free for women with husbands who have long jail sentences, although the costs associated with medication and aftercare are to be borne by the family. Dr. Abu Khaizaran denies that there’s a political agenda behind what they do. “We really do it for humanitarian reasons, so that these women don’t waste their whole life waiting for their husbands, so that life can go on.”

Follow Ylenia Gostoli on Twitter

Photo via Flickr user Artur Potosi

Business has not been good lately for bathhouses, the urban meeting places for gay men who enjoy using steam rooms and saunas or getting blow jobs from complete strangers in them. The Hollywood Spa, a long-time haunt in LA, closed its doors this year after decades in business, and the Associated Press recently looked at the decline in the importance of these fabled sex dens.

Now the North American Bathhouse Association (NABA) is using a combination of awareness-building, steep discounts, and social media outreach to entice a new generation of young dudes to put down Grindr and Scruff (the apps that are basically a bathhouse in every gay’s pocket), pick up a towel, and channel the 70s spirit of cavorting with the hottest bods in town. It might be an uphill battle, but it’s one that Dennis Holding, NABA's 75-year-old president, says that they’re winning.

I recently chatted with Holding, who has invested in bathhouses all over the country since he opened his first club in 1972, about the past, present, and future of the industry.

VICE: How did you end up in the bathhouse business?
Dennis Holding: I worked in the automotive industry at the time on the racing side, selling parts. I was in Indianapolis for the qualifying for the [Indy] 500 and it was raining, so I went out and met somebody. We went to a brunch the next day with his friends and they got talking about how Indy needed a gay bathhouse. I looked at the demographics and realized there wasn’t one for 100 miles in any direction. And that’s how it came to be. A couple weeks later, I met the principals of the Club Baths chain [which had 42 bathhouses in its prime]. At that time, six or eight guys would throw in some money and one guy agreed to go build it and that’s how they were built. It was the 70s, so things were going great guns.

When did you build your next club?
An opportunity came in Houston because I met some guys who they said they needed a bathhouse. I went down and we found a building and property and we bought it and we’ve been on that property for 40 years. We tore the original building down, and we built a $1.8 million new structure about 12 years ago.

Were you visiting the bathhouses a lot back then?
I had just come out a few years before. So yes, I was. I was running amok. I traveled constantly for business for several years before I settled down in one city. Every city I would look at bars and bathhouses and see what was going on.

Were the clubs busy? Were the guys having tons of sex?
They were busy, and it depended on the person—some were fairly promiscuous and some were picky. One of the by products was the number of couples that first met in a bathhouse. Two of our principal partners met in the club in Cleveland in the late 60s. A lot of people, even to this day, say, “Oh, the Club Baths. I met Leroy there. We’ve been together 27 years.”

What was the atmosphere like in the clubs?
It was a social place then. That’s what I believe our function is even today. Yeah, there was sex, of course, but the clubs we were building had swimming pools, gyms, they had a lot to offer. We have people who have been going to one of our clubs for 20 years, 30 years. It’s part of their social thing. There are plenty of people I know just by there being there so much. It’s part of their routine.

Why do you think young guys aren't into bathhouses?
We did a forum with a couple of guys who were very active in gay marketing and promotion in Las Vegas and they came in and both of them said, “No, we’ve never been to a bathhouse.” There are two bathhouses in Las Vegas and neither are shining examples of what they could be, but they were judging and hadn’t been.

So, how are you going to get young guys to show up?
We’re finding out. We’ve done various promotions where 18 to 24 get free entry. Pretty soon someone would come by and he would try the bathhouse and he would tell his friends and we’d get three or four guys. As long as they don’t cluster and giggle they enjoy themselves. We’ve seen these promotions skew our age much younger. Now our age is about mid 30s rather than late 40s.

Back in the day were the clubs just full of super hot young guys?
There was a club in LA called The 8709. It was on the second floor. In its day, there would be a line down the stairs to the street and you’d wait and you’d climb all the way up and if the attendant didn’t like your looks, he wouldn’t let you in. I got rejected there once, but I got let in three or four times, and I remember the process quite well. But if they thought they weren’t attractive enough they wouldn’t let you in.

So, in the age or Grindr, how are you going to convince young guys bathhouses are better?
Let’s say you’ve met Sam Stranger online. That’s cool. You want to bring a stranger into your apartment? Maybe not. You want to go to his place, which is far out in Queens or wherever? Maybe not. But if you had a place to go on the East Side or West Side that you thought was clean and pleasant and welcoming, why not meet there?

But then you have to compete for your guy with everyone already at the club!
Well, you may. But you may find out that Mr. Ripped had torn a picture out of a magazine and was Mr. Saggy and think, “Whoa this isn’t for me,” and you want out. Then you’re not trapped at his apartment.

At first we thought [Grindr] was going to be the end of it. Now we attract business using social media. We’ll put four or five Facebook blasts an evening on Friday and Saturday and we’ve created the buzz and a lot of that goes to Twitter and what have you. It keeps the pot stirred. In Miami, probably 50 percent of our people live at home with a mother or a wife or kids or partner or some combination and they can’t play at home. We see pairs and couples meeting up and using the club, that’s how it works. The bisexuals are another ingredient. Bisexual folks are still very much a part of our business and they need a discreet place to go. That’s not going to change.

I was at Der Boiler in Berlin this spring and they had a bar and a café and tons of hot young guys hanging out. Would having bars and restaurants help the bathhouses here?
It would be a godsend. It would be wonderful. But it’s just not possible. I have gone through the paces of trying to get a beer and wine license but it never works.

Why not?
It’s the old Puritan way. You can’t have sex on the premises where food and beverage is served. There are cities where you can’t even have a bathhouse or sauna or social club, whatever. Statutes were written in the 80s by [men] who were gay who had HIV issues and were angry. The bathhouses were blamed or all sorts of things that weren’t true. They wrote statues in Boston, Minneapolis, a number of cities that are just airtight.

Do you have a really funny story from all your years in the bathhouses?
The only story is funny is a guy years ago in Dallas. I was living there at the time, and [we] met in the Club Dallas and we had a nice time. He was working overseas, but when he came back to town, we'd bump into each other again and we have a nice time. Six or nine months later, I go by a back-room bar that was pitch black and my hands were roaming around and I said, “Oh, hi, you’re back in town!” I happened to grab his member and recognized him immediately. But I couldn’t see anything!

Follow Brian Moylan on Twitter.