A still from 'Northern Soul,' a new film from director Elaine Constantine

Northern Soul changed English club culture forever. Instead of venue owners recruiting cover bands to slog through a set of Perry Como covers, young Britons began to take control of their nightlife, hiring out clubs, booking the DJs, and recruiting guys in brogue shoes and bowling shirts to master the speed that kept everyone dancing all night.

Elaine Constantine is a photographer and filmmaker who grew up in the Northern Soul scene. Tomorrow marks the UK release of her film, Northern Soul—which tells the story of two working-class boys and their experience of soul music, love, drugs, and death—so I thought I’d call her up for a chat.

VICE: A lot of the film is based on your experiences, right? Do you remember the first time you heard a Northern Soul record?
Elaine Constantine: I grew up in a large industrial town called Bury, on the outskirts of Manchester. I went to this massive youth club, which was in the town hall, and I remember hearing this weird record come on. It was quite strange sounding—a bit old fashioned, with lots of reverb, and just really heartfelt.

Suddenly these guys came out on to the floor and cleared it.They were doing fast spins and high kicks and drops and this amazing footwork, but they were each dancing on their own and they were locked into the track. Normally when you’d see boys dancing it would be to Status Quo, with a denim waistcoat on, and doing the air guitar. These guys were so amazing; it was such a spectacle. I just thought, Oh my God, what is this? And then my older cousin said to me, "This is Northern Soul."

Elaine, left, with her then boyfriend Rob in the early 80s

British singer Tracey Thorn has argued that Northern Soul was primarily a masculine movement. How does that relate to your experience?
A lot of people have asked me why I haven’t done a women’s story of Northern Soul, but I wanted it to be very real—a truthful representation. Men collected records. Men wanted to be DJs. The people who took the roles in driving the music forward—the DJs, the promoters, the collectors, and the drug dealers—were all mostly men. But then that doesn’t mean there weren’t a lot of women following it, and collecting, and driving that dance floor passion. So I’d say it was kind of 50/50, but that the main movers and shakers were men.

You’ve said that you wrote the script about observations of young men you knew "collecting vinyl, dancing, DJing, taking drugs, and generally being degenerates." Can you tell me a little bit about the real people behind your characters?
The two main leads are based on my experience of being married to a DJ, my husband—who I met when I was 30—and my first boyfriend, who I was engaged to and was with for years, but who is unfortunately dead now. I was absolutely in love with him. He was the whole package. He was the most amazing dancer you could ever see: he had the rhythm, he could do the acrobatics, he looked amazing, he dressed amazing... you know, he was the coolest guy I had ever met in my life.

I kind of based the character Sean on him. I remembered watching him floor three big guys right in front of me without warning: Bam, bam, bam! That fight scene in the film is from my own real experience, and when the lead, John, goes, "Oh, I didn’t have time to react," that was me, because I felt bad that I hadn’t helped him.

A still from 'Northern Soul'

How did soul music first infiltrate British culture? And why do you think black American music took off up north ahead of down south?
Well, I think a lot of white musicians from the 1960s, like the Stones, got into blues mainly because they wanted to listen to more authentic music than what was in the pop charts, and the BBC wouldn’t play American music. So they had this tradition of finding black music that was real and earthy, and that became a staple throughout the 50s and 60s. That’s how the mods evolved; they were into the blues, R&B, reggae, and stuff like that. And then the younger siblings became the suedeheads and the skinheads. Northern Soul was just an offshoot from that.

I think it developed specifically outside of London because, by the late 60s, psychedelia had caught on big with people down south and the middle classes. But hippie culture totally didn’t appeal to the working classes. They wanted to look smart when they went out on weekends, because they’d looked like shit all week, in the factories or the mines or whatever. They were hitting on soul music because it felt more real.

There was also the fact that the media—like NME, for example—was driving the music output in London, and all the music magazines were pushing popular acts. So London was caught up in the modern-day music of the time, and soul was being embraced by the suedeheads, the skinheads, and the post-mod communities.

Yeah, you get the sense in the film that there was a lot of giving the finger to the status quo.
Yeah, there was definitely a real sense of snobbery about the charts. The ethos was, "I’m not swallowing that. I’m doing my thing." That might have been a sort of trade union spin off or something, but it bled into the subculture in a big way.

Elaine with friends in the early 80s

How do you think Northern Soul played into modern club nights as we know them?
In the 50s and 60s, prior to the Northern Soul scene, a lot of the big events that people were going to on Saturday nights would be either a band covering popular chart music, a DJ that the brewery or license company had hired to come in and play popular music, or stuff like waltzes. When Northern Soul happened it was the first big club culture where the actual punters took control of the night, so they hired the venue and they put on the DJs. So it was the first example of how we understand club culture today, where these promotions are put on by the people who are directly involved in the scene rather than official organizations.

In the film, the main excitement stems from discovering new songs that haven’t been heard before, which were sometimes called "cover ups." Can you tell me a bit about that?
Back then you'd have a DJ or record collector, and they'd go to America and find a track that they knew wasn't in the scene yet. Let’s say the guy selling them says, "OK, there’s only five of these records. I have three and there’s another two floating around somewhere." The collector will buy all three, cover up the title on each record with a white label and call it something else. So no one knows the real name of the record; he's the only person who has possession of that song.

If that song’s good—if it fills the floor—then it becomes that DJ’s song: it’s his cover up. And everyone knows it’s a cover up because they can’t see the label, and everyone’s looking at the decks the whole time. And then if someone finds one of those other two records, then the DJ is exposed, and the song is known by it’s original title from then on.

An exclusive trailer for 'Northern Soul'

Are you hoping the film will revive an interest in Northern Soul? This sense of what’s important about music: the lyrics and the passion behind it.
I don’t want to get all moral on it because people just do what they do and like what they like. It’s not up to me to dictate. But if you think about it, what’s not to like about Northern Soul? I was listening to the radio the other day and there’s this guy singing, "I think I want to marry you." And I just thought, Why the fucking hell do you think that? Why even write about it if you only think that?

Then you put a record on by someone like Johnny McCaul, from the Northern Soul vault, and it says stuff like, "I'd like to hold you tight / baby you're my guiding light / like holding on to my last thread of life / scald my hand to make me understand I need you." I mean, there are fucking lyrics like this out there and people want to listen to that Bruno Mars shit. I mean, "I think I want to marry you"? How long did it take the guy to come up with that line? If you only think it, then why mention it? Why even write it in a record?

Northern Soul is out tomorrow, Friday October 17 

Follow Georgia Rose on Twitter.

In the first episode of Talking Heads, Orville Schell discusses his New York Review of Books essay, "China Strikes Back." Schell recently joined Jimmy Carter on a visit to China, where the former president received a less-than-warm welcome by the country's leaders. Schell argues that this reflects a dramatic shift in US-China relations.

In his years of public service, Jimmy Carter is arguably best known for his work in establishing diplomatic relations with China. But 35 years after the creation of these ties, how close are the US and China?

VICE News sat down with Schell to discuss the significance of the diplomatic slight against Carter, and how the US might benefit from better understanding the "Chinese Dream."

Electro chaabi stars Oka and Ortega featured in the "Underground on the Surface" film

You can hear it from the sandy streets of El Salaam City on the desert outskirts of Cairo all the way to London. This is a diesel-powered new sound, carried afloat by one thousand rave sirens, cracked copies of FruityLoops and Auto-Tune, 75 years of Egyptian chaabi wedding music tradition, digital dancehall, grime, R&B, and the updraft caused by several hundred whirling tea towels. And it’s coming out of the traps like an atomic racehorse. This is the Church of the Cairo Liberation Front and you are called to prayer. Don’t blame me if you end up drinking vodka from the barrel of a huge gun and are reduced to dancing in your underwear. But I’m getting ahead of myself, so please just let me just rewind the clock back to one and a half years ago…

Figo (left) and Sadat. Photo by Al Overdrive

In April 2013, in the lull between the revolutionary protests in Tahrir Square, my good friend Joost Heijthuijsen and I went to Cairo and El Salaam City to try and track down the astounding Keyboard King of Egypt, Islam Chipsy, after seeing some mind-blowing YouTube clips of him in action. His playing style was unreal. He would attack his keyboard with punches, karate chops, and slaps, deploying hyperfast tonal clusters in a blur of hand movements, flanked by two drummers playing dancehall and soca rhythms at about 160 beats per minute.

By the time we got there we realized we’d stumbled across the birth of a brand new musical form that was, to put it mildly, blowing most of everything else out of the water in terms of originality and energy. There were scores of young producers, such as Figo and Diesel, and MCs, such as Sadat and Alaa 50, producing a thrilling new sound called "electro chaabi" or mahraganat (meaning "Festival"). All of these young musicians essentially earned their living playing wedding parties—the best of which were giant street raves by any other name. We got invited to the engagement party of the greatest Electro Chaabi MC, Sadat—something that will remain probably the most exciting night of my life.

Dancers at Sadat and Samer's wedding

The musicians produce tracks using cracked copies of software programs such as Logic, Acid Pro, FruityLoops, and Auto-Tune. Mainstream vocalists in Egypt have to have their lyrics subjected to a very thorough vetting process by government officials but as electro chaabi operates outside of the mainstream, the rising stars of the scene can say whatever they want. (One of the earliest chaabi hits was called "Fuck! I’ve Lost My Slipper!" which was apparently the first ever Egyptian song to contain swearing.) They distribute their tracks for free via MediaFire and YouTube, sidestepping the censors and these act as adverts for their skills as wedding entertainers. This is the way they earn their money. Most of the tracks have little to do with the country’s recent revolutions but they are allowing young working-class people to give widespread and loud voice to their everyday frustrations for the first time ever and they are doing it in the form of a brand new musical style controlled by and for themselves—this is revolution enough in itself.

Joost took a love for electro chaabi back to his hometown Tilburg, in the Netherlands. Not only has he had a hand in Sadat and Alaa 50's music becoming legally available in the West for the first time, via the progressive label Generation Bass, but he’s managed to help stage a couple of electro chaabi events in the Lowlands. (This is harder than it sounds, as most Egyptian men can’t leave their country until they’ve completed National Service in the army.)

The Cairo Liberation Front. Photo by Tom Roelofs

He passed his enthusiasm on to local DJ Yannick Verhoeven and MC Joep Schmitz, who formed crack dance party unit the Cairo Liberation Front. Taking the scene’s revolutionary sound and smashing it together with a no brow, post-everything, go-hard-go-home, crowd-surfing-in-nightclubs ethos, they have become fearsome party starters of the highest stripe. I went to see them DJing recently in the Netherlands and it was a brutal experience and, to be honest—for a sensitive man in his middle years—also pretty terrifying. There were a lot of people taking their t-shirts off and whirling tea towels round their heads, giant pump action water rifles full of vodka, people dancing on the bar and jumping off furniture... that kind of thing.

What I find so brilliant about electro chaabi is that it’s the exact opposite of "world music"—heritage dressing up culture for tourists on expensive package trips. This is the utterly inauthentic but utterly brilliant party music of young working-class and underclass Egypt, seen one step removed through the cracked prism of two lunatic Dutch Nicki Minaj and Shaggy fans. And it sounds something like this:

The Church Of The CLF Mix by Cairo Liberation Front

1.     Mozmar Ahla Bel – El Ghmrawy (CLF Bootleg)
2.     Oka & Ortega – Na Na
3.     Natasha Zahma – Kel Elomar
4.     الشجاعه والآصول
5.     اوعى الاحلام بيوجع
6.      فرحة ابو الدردار_فريق الاحلام
7.     unknown – Hobba Lala
8.     واقف وفـ وسط الحاره
9.     مولد الدمار (CLF Bootleg feat. Juicy J & Nicki Minaj)
10.   El Bam Sena - مهرجان البم
11.   DJ Ramy feat. Laba & Tito - El Tramdol (Da7y Remix)
12.   مولد الفنش (CLF Let’s Go Dancing Bootleg)
13.   El Bam Sena – مهرجان الضربه الاولي
14.   مولد الجياره vs Mötorhead
15.  Oka & Ortega – Ana KdaB
16.  مهرجان اللعبه الكسبانه
17.  مهرجان على الشط
18.  Pharrell – Happy (Oka & Ortega Remix)

DOWNLOAD HERE

Cairo Liberation Front and Polygrains are playing Birthdays in Dalston in London on Wednesday, 22nd of October with DJ, John Doran of the Quietus in support. More details and tickets here.

Photo by Maggie Lee

I’ve always considered myself to be mostly homosexual. Whenever I watched scrambled porn on my parents’ pirated satellite dish as a child, my eyes would invariably dart toward the delectable mounds that hung from the fairer sex. Whenever I watched old movies, I longed to be the matinee idol, not the ruby lipped ingénue, because the idol got to kiss her. I’ve spent decades lusting over female friends, acquaintances, and rock bassists. And yet, in my 31 years on this Earth, I have done nothing about it. Because I’m scared.

When I was in high school, I was in love. Well, whatever a person whose brain isn’t fully developed can consider love. Her name was Melissa, she “only listened to early Billy Joel,” and she had a waterbed. We’d lie on said bed, beneath her Romeo and Juliet movie poster, and spend hours talking about how much we hated our peers. Her glasses were huge, her nose huger, her malaise huger still. I was obsessed.

I broke into art class to steal photos of her, looking pained while standing below one of her mediocre paintings, to save for my archives. I shot my own photographs of her, which I blew up into 8x10s, ensconced in glass and lovingly placed on the windowsills of my childhood bedroom. I thought, for sure, she was gay. I mean, she exuded it, body and soul.

One day, unable to further deal with the psychic angst of my unspoken feelings, I wrote an epic declaration of juvenile love and sent it to the nondescript ranch home she inhabited with her absentee parents. She was my Alice. I was her Gertrude. Soon she would see how wonderful our creative connection, our Sapphic bond, could be. Or so I thought.

I vividly recall the afternoon I knew she had received my letter. In between class periods, she ignored my formerly accepted and excitedly embraced eye contact. Whenever I approached her, she silently walked away, unspeakably informing me of the worst. I had, apparently, misjudged the extent of her homosexuality. Perhaps she was unwilling to accept her true self. Perhaps I was wholly in the wrong. Regardless, I spent the rest of my high school career eating M&M’s alone in the library during lunch hours.

Faced with this crushing defeat, I did the only thing one could do—pushed my feelings down, ignored them, and spent the next ten plus years bouncing from male suitor to male suitor (because, as everyone knows, there are only three ways to solve problems—prayer, violence, and avoidance).

Photo by Jamie "Lee Curtis" Taete

I accepted heterosexual attention as gospel and did my best to be a good, decent, straight gal. The alternative was being made a fool of, an injustice I was not willing to suffer again. The ghost of Melissa, of her rejection, hovered over me, preventing me from even thinking about trying. And so, for years, I ignored my Sapphic feelings and the scrambled pornography of my childhood.

Until now. Finally, at the age of thirty fucking one, I’m willing to accept the way I am, and to embrace this facet of my sexual character, because I’m too old to be so shit scared. The fact that I am so old, however, and so wholly inexperienced, puts me at a loss. Now what?

I have plenty of female friends who tell me they’re bi, but I’ve never seen them with women. Are they lying in an attempt to attract the male gaze? Or are they scared as well? I don’t fucking know. All I know is that I feel uncomfortable talking to them about our shared interest in pussy. And asking them out? Out of the question.

Not only am I bad at being a bisexual, I’m bad at identifying as one. I feel uncomfortable whenever my friend Guy, a card-carrying homosexual American, implores me to embrace the label of “queer.” In much the same way I don’t feel comfortable self-identifying as an alcoholic (because, y’know, the state never took away my kids because I couldn’t stop drinking Bud Light Lime-a-Ritas), identifying as queer when I’m not entirely gay (earlier I made it seem as though I begrudgingly dated men, but I assure you I truly do love dick) feels disingenuous.

Queer, to me, seems like a title you earn—not one you're given. And me? I’m just some fucking coward. I’ve never been gay bashed. My family has never ostracized me because of how I am. Nor have I ever emotionally struggled with it. It wasn’t falling in love with Melissa that made me feel awful, it was the sting of her rejection. I’ve never felt any guilt or shame about my semi-homosexuality. Which, combined with the fact that I’ve never done anything about it, makes me feel like a fraud.

It’s not a competition, I know, to be as gay as humanly possible in order to keep up with the Cleve Joneses. But it would be nice to be at least a little competently gay. A friend invited me over for dinner the other night exclusively to, I quickly found out, inform me she was “into me.” Upon receipt of this information, my eyes bugged out of my head like a Tex Avery cartoon, I internally “hummina-hummina-humminaed,” and immediately commenced to drinking an entire bottle of wine.

I ultimately got the fuck outta Dodge before shit got real. Why the hell did I do that? That broad wanted me! I wanted her! Rejection wasn't lurking around the corner. It wasn't even in the building! And yet, still, I was terrified. Presumably because I didn't know what the hell I was doing? Because I'm a 31-year-old amateur? Christ. If only acting queer was as easy as being queer.

Follow Megan Koester on Twitter.

Photos by Oliver James

When I arrived in Brighton, in southern England, as an 18-year-old, I expected to find some sort of queer paradise: the kind of place where rainbow flags lined the streets and poodles and gimps crawled interchangeably on leads in the hands of beautiful drag queens. Or, at least a bit more of that kind of stuff than what the urinals of a drab Doncaster shopping center had to offer. 

However, after a few weeks as a student in the city, the honeymoon was over. Paradise begins to look a bit less fabulous when your friend gets beaten up on his way home with another man. Brighton, like everywhere else, is home to bigots.

Four years later, things haven't changed that much. When I arrived at work on Monday morning and saw the lead story in the local paper—that two young women were told they’d be chucked out of a Sainbury's chain grocery store if they continued to “display public signs of affection”—it stirred a familiar sickness in my gut. 

The couple’s eviction from the supermarket was a result of a customer complaining that the couple’s light peck on the cheek was a serious risk to the safety of her child—that it was “disgusting.” Relatively speaking, being asked to leave a store is nowhere near as frightening as a savage physical attack that leaves your life in ribbons, but it’s a small example of the day-to-day experiences many LGBTQ people face, little reminders that we're still a way from being on equal footing with straights. 

Protesters pouring into Sainsbury's in Brighton last night

Inspired in no small way by Supermarket Sweep, I suggested that a bunch of us go and stand inside the Sainsbury's in question and stage some sort of love-in. People were really up for it. It rained, but around 1,000 people showed up regardless.

After we ran out of songs with "kiss" in the lyrics (One Direction and Seal were top of the rotation), local drag queen Lydia L'Scabies did a bit of spoken word. "I do not want to see anyone be hated for the way they live their life," she said. 

Lydia L'Scabies

Local activists busied themselves talking to the crowd, so I took the opportunity to ask the bemused customers—those who hadn't come down for the love-in, but were just filling their baskets with grocies—for their thoughts.

One shopper, who called himself "fuck off," asked me what was going on before I had a chance to say hello. Before giving me the opportunity to explain, he eyed a couple guys making out in the produce section, repeated his name again, and disappeared. I asked him for a kiss, but he wasn't up for it. 

Pretty soon after this, an overexcited attendee tried (and failed) to start a karaoke session with Holly Valance's "Kiss Kiss." To her right, I spotted two teenage boys staring at each other awkwardly, shuffling from foot to foot by the magazines. And then it happened. One grabbed the other's arm, whispered, "I love you," and they kissed. I steadied myself on the tampons. 

The store was at maximum capacity in quite a short space of time, and after a while the manager asked me to start moving people on, but the party was starting to pick up out the front. A couple of passing commuters on their way home joined in the protest. 

A love-in at a local market might not seem empowering, or particularly big deal, to anyone outside of our community, but it's something. It meant something to us. Last night, we came together and said a big "fuck off" to homophobia in a place where it had occurred.

Yes, it may have been the actions of one security guard in one branch of a supermarket chain. And yes, it's unreasonable to expect them to have a tight grip on every single one of their employees' morals at all times. But the incident represented the quiet hum of discomfort many gay people feel on a day-to-day basis, simply for showing (in this case, not even R-rated) affection to a person they love. 

The mobilization of so many people, in such a short space of time, is testament to the fact that a large part of the community knows only too well the experiences of these two young women. We’ve a long way to go until LGBTQ people no longer face discrimination in society. And with over 40 percent of gay school pupils in UK having contemplated or attempted suicide, there’s a generation of kids for whom the fight is just beginning. 

Follow Michael Segalov on Twitter.

Allison Brainard is a Brooklyn-based artist who blends experimental dance, theater, comedy, and multimedia together to create spontaneous performances that forgo traditional choreography. She's performed at venues like e-flux, Madison Square Park, and the Abrons Art Center and has worked on projects with the likes of Ryan McNamara, Rachel Feinstein, and Marina Abramovic. 

Tonight she'll be bringing her latest work, Ex-Boyfriend Show, to Dixon Place on New York City's Lower East Side. The show is a celebration of the comedy of errors that sex, love, and dating have come to entail in 2014. We live in a time when it seems impossible to get a clean break after the end of a relationship, since the option of dredging up old ghosts from your romantic past is just the tap of a touch-screen away. In Ex-Boyfriend Show, Brainard will walk the audience through a carefully curated cemetery of her romantic failures. The painful memories are awash with new embarrassment since the development of the show brought forth a fresh round of rejection from her exes. In preparation for the performance, she asked each of her former lovers to take part in the act. Most of them didn’t even text her back. 

Ex-Boyfriend Show is meant to deconstruct the barriers we place between ourselves and others and question the place that honesty and selfishness have in our interactions. I gave Allison a call to talk about the issues behind her upcoming performance and what we can expect to see tonight.

VICE: Hey, Allison. What can you tell me about your new show?
Allison Brainard: Ex-Boyfriend Show comes from this show I did at e-flux. My friend Chloé Rossetti invited me to perform in an event with an "unrealized projects" theme. AUNTS had invited me to apply to do a project at the New Museum and I didn’t get it, and that made me really sad. So in the performance at e-flux, I decided to talk about my rejected application and do my rejected act live on stage. My proposed project consisted of me trying to make a dance video, but I would use a lot of body doubles to make myself look, like, really good. At e-flux, I just explained everything to the audience and then I did the piece onstage and had people dance in front of me. That kind of honest approach and discussion of the concept as the performance is really interesting to me.

And that approach inspired Ex-Boyfriend Show?
Coming off of that, two days later, my boyfriend and I broke up. And then a week after that, I found out that I got this show at Dixon Place. I decided, well, now is probably the best opportunity to make my worst nightmare come true on stage. My idea was to invite all of my ex-lovers to be in a performance and be on stage at the same time. I texted and emailed everyone that I had had a serious or casual relationship with. I even emailed some crushes that didn’t materialize into relationships. A lot of them didn’t text me back. The ones who did were all like, “Hey, this is weird. I don’t want to do it.” I talked to one guy about it and he was like, “My current girlfriend really doesn’t want me to do this. It sounds awful.”

Did anyone react positively?
I wanted them all to write a monologue about me. The only one who would do anything for it was my most recent ex. He made a video for it. So what the performance is going to be is actually just me onstage with a PowerPoint presentation, describing the process and going through all of my ex-boyfriends. Each one is going to get a slide, if not a couple slides. I also documented all of the text messages and everything. It’s going to be weird.

Kind of like more unrealized dreams…
Contacting everybody was so difficult and embarrassing. Not because I still love all these people, but because they were from a different time in my life. I learned that I don’t want them around anymore. They remind me of when I was a different person. It’s been really crazy and I’m really nervous.

Nervous to open up old wounds, or to over-share?
Certain people, they know your story—your personal relationships and the things that happened, good and bad. But rarely do people share that with an entire audience, because strangers don’t really need to know. Why would they care, really? So my challenge has been, why share any of this? I’m also using PowerPoint, which is very familiar to anyone who’s been in a meeting or sat in a lecture. So, I’m working with the tropes of the PowerPoint presentation with this really intensely personal material. 

What do you hope to get out of performing the Ex-Boyfriend Show?
I always like to approach performances like, What can I learn from this? And I think one of the good things about heartbreak is that you can use all of the energy and intense emotion that is generated to make better art. In the past, I’ve referenced my feelings and my mental state in performances, but this time I was curious to see what would happen if I took a really direct approach and literally made a work about heartbreak and the actual people in my personal life. In my most recent relationship, complete honesty between my partner and I became very important to me. I had the theory that if neither of us ever lied to each other, no one would ever get hurt and there would always be a bond of trust keeping us together. Obviously the relationship didn’t last, but I’m still stuck on this concept of radical honesty: Does it hurt more or less to know the truth? Who does it serve? Is it sometimes selfish to be honest? I want to know what will happen when I share the material of my life with an audience and whether or not it will be a successful performance. I’m really terrified to do it, but I think that’s a good sign.

Check out Ex-Boyfriend Show tonight at 7:30 PM at Dixon Place, which is located at 161A Chrystie Street in New York City. Tickets for the event can be purchased online or at the door.

Photo by David Shankbone via Wikimedia Commons

Actor Ezra Miller has been cast as the Flash in Warner Brothers’ eponymous movie, which is slated to premiere in 2018. That's big news even for those who aren't diehard DC Comics fans, because Ezra Miller is also openly queer, making it the first time a non-heterosexual has played the lead in a superhero movie.

Let's get one distinction out of the way: The 22-year-old Miller identifies as queer, not gay. Though the word can mean different things to different people, it’s often used as an umbrella term to mean “somewhere on the spectrum of sexuality that's not 100 percent straight.” In a 2012 interview, Miller told The Advocate “I’m queer... I have a lot of really wonderful friends who are of very different sexes and genders. I am very much in love with no one in particular." 

It may seem ridiculous that we’re talking about this in 2014, when it feels like there is no shortage of openly non-heterosexual actors in Hollywood. But the casting choice of a queer man as the lead in a big-budget superhero, the embodiment of traditional American masculinity, is inarguably a huge deal. Queer actors are still up against the surprisingly pervasive idea that a non-straight actor can’t play a straight character. This has historically been true not just of superhero roles, but of all types of straight roles in mainstream American films.

That’s probably because acceptance of open queerness in Hollywood is still a relatively recent development. In the early days of the film industry, people who would today be considered queer actors simply remained in the closet for the most part. A notable exception was William Haines, who is often cited as Hollywood’s first openly gay actor. Haines rose to fame in the 1926 silent film Tell It to the Marines, in which he played a Marine nicknamed “Skeet.” (Despite—or maybe because of—its modern association with semen, Skeet is the manliest old-timey nickname other than Butch.) So the character of Skeet was smitten with a beautiful Navy nurse, while off-screen, Haines was living with his longtime partner Jimmie Shields. Haines was not in the habit of denying his orientation, which rubbed his bosses at MGM the wrong way, and eventually, faced with the decision to enter into a sham marriage or quit acting, Haines chose to quit.

Over the next few decades, gay actors remained largely closeted—though under increasing scrutiny from the press and the public—and continued to play the manly men of the silver screen. You’re probably familiar with the cartoonishly macho Rock Hudson, whose square-jawed masculinity won the heart of every woman alive. Hudson was out to some of his close friends, but publicly maintained a carefully curated image of heterosexuality, even entering into a “lavender marriage” with Phyllis Gates, who was also secretly gay.

Today being an openly gay (or queer) actor is no longer the incomprehensible scandal it once was. It won’t ruin your reputation. However, there’s still a chance it could ruin your acting career, due to the ever-persistent perception that gay men can’t play straight characters.

You may remember when Bret Easton Ellis tweeted that openly gay actor Matt Bomer wasn’t fit for the role of Christian Grey in the movie version of Fifty Shades of Grey. Ellis opined that “Fifty Shades of Grey demands an actor that is genuinely into women." That's a stubbornly persistent attitude: We love and applaud straight male actors for portraying gay characters, but we apparently don’t trust queer actors to be able to do the reverse. 

“In these days of Neil Patrick Harris and Matt Bomer, among others, we are seeing that the fallacy of ‘audiences won’t believe an out actor playing straight’ is just that—a fallacy,” said Marc Andreyko, an openly gay comic writer and screenwriter who told me that geek culture—the milieu out of which superheroes come—has been accepting of queerness for a long time.  

“Geek culture has always been way ahead of the curve on acceptance,” Andreyko said. “The fans and my publishers have been actively supportive of gay themes and characters for as long as I can remember.

“So much of nerd-ism (for lack of a better term) has been about finding a safe place to be yourself and celebrate the things you love,” Andreyko added. “And the rest of the world is gradually catching up.” 

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Illustration by Chris Harward

Ever feel inexplicably sad after an orgasm? I don’t mean the abject horror of realizing your roommate has silently walked in and out of your room while you were getting to know yourself—really gunning for it, laptop open, pants off, socks on. That’s called embarrassment, and can subsequently make it very hard to look that person in the eye.

The sensation I’m talking about is subtle. It’s the fleeting despair that occasionally accompanies even the least noteworthy climax. Not everyone experiences it, but if you have you’ll know exactly what I mean.

Called post-coital tristesse (PCT) by people who know about such things, the melancholy one can feel after an orgasm is actually a very well documented phenomenon, with references dating back to the Roman Empire. Sometime around 150 AD, in fact, the prominent Greek physician Galen wrote, “Every animal is sad after coitus except the human female and the rooster.”

Mind you, as prominent as he was, Galen didn’t have it all figured out; both sexes are affected by PCT and the experience can differ radically from person to person. It’s also not to be confused with post-orgasmic illness syndrome (POIS), a rare condition that could be due to anything from a lack of progesterone to a semen allergy. The syndrome can cause sufferers to experience a wide range of symptoms, including apathy, itchy eyes, and weeping, for up to several days after an orgasm.

My personal experience of post-coital blues has been nothing more than the occasional feeling of despondence for a couple of seconds before I move on and heat up a pizza, or whatever. But when I asked around online, some who replied complained of intense feelings of gloom that lasted for hours.

“I get post-coital sadness a minority of the time after I orgasm,” said one female sufferer. “Maybe 15 to 20 percent of the time after I have sex, and no more than 5 percent of the time after I masturbate. I tend toward feelings of depression at times already, and sometimes bouts of post-coital blues lead to hours of sadness or despair.”

But, she added, “The feelings are easily assuaged by extra cuddle time and lovey-dovey shit.”

So what’s to blame? Evolution? Neurochemistry? An innate sense of misery, peeping out to kick us in the brain while we’re supposed to be feeling all elated and satisfied?

I wanted to know how human beings relate to sex existentially. After all, it's such a fundamental part of life—if it wasn’t for sex, none of us would have been born. According to London-based psychiatrist Anthony Stone, the momentary despair may—for men, at least—have something to do with a perceived loss of purpose.

“When clients come to me and want to talk about sex, I immediately think power,” he said. “Men are often at their most ‘powerful’ when being sexual. Just think about young men and [their] seduction routines—displaying their feathers like peacocks. Post-sex, men can feel powerless, a spent force; they’ve lost the ability to impregnate. In some cases, this can feel like depression or a desire to die—sometimes like ‘maleness’ has been lost.”

A bust of Aristotle, who had a lot to say about post-coital sadness. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Aristotle, Nietzsche, and the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza all accepted the phenomenon as having to do, in part, with the expenditure of the “life force.” Problem is, it’s not only men who suffer from post-coital sadness.

Freud wrote in depth on the overwhelming nature of the human sex drive. He claimed one of the fundamental reasons we crave sex so voraciously was more than the mere fulfillment of a biological need. Rather, he believed it was the closest someone could come to escaping the intrinsic isolation of human existence—by literally being inside another person (or vice versa).

So when sex is over, you can’t help but realize that—as “together” as all the fondling, kissing, and mutual involuntary leg cramps might have made you feel—you’re really always alone.

“We are talking about loss,” said Stone. “Much of life is made up of living and dying, saying hello and goodbye, being born and bereaving. How we manage these transitions is essential to our wellbeing.”

And the same theory applies to sex. “Do you feel sad at the end of an amazing film, wishing it could have gone on forever? Nothing lasts forever—we are always in the presence of our demise,” he added, ominously.

In 2009, American psychiatrist Richard Friedman investigated possible biological explanations for post-coital sadness. He wanted to prove that the phenomenon was, in some cases, the result of a rebound in the amygdala—the part of the brain that deals with fear and anxiety. During sex, the amygdala “dampens” fear and anxiety. Thus, post-coital sadness could be explained as amygdala function sharply returning to normal levels.

Taking that into account, those temporary feelings of depression could be compared to what you feel like the day after deciding to drop another pill as the birds started singing, only on a smaller scale. What goes up must come down.

Sigmund Freud photographed by Ferdinand Schmutzer. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

To test his hypothesis, Friedman conducted a somewhat unorthodox experiment. A number of test subjects were given selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), drugs normally used to treat depression. The anti-depressive qualities don’t kick in until the medication has been taken for a substantial amount of time, but the physical side effects begin almost instantly. One of these side effects is a decrease in sexual pleasure, and as Friedman predicted, this minor loss of enjoyment correlated with a marginal drop in reported feelings of sadness after sex.

To me, this seemed to carry a pretty depressing implication: If you want to stop getting post-coital sadness, you need to have worse sex. That clearly isn’t an attractive, or particularly pragmatic, option. But luckily, in the majority of cases post-coital negative feelings aren’t intense or long-lasting enough to warrant medical attention.

So as is the case with all psychological ailments, the best course of action is to visit a psychiatrist or psychotherapist if the feelings do become overwhelming.

For an opinion on how the problem would be treated if it got to that level, I spoke to Dušan Potkonjak, an associate specialist in psychiatry at Goodmayes Hospital in London. “Human reaction is not segmental,” he told me. “I would explore the whole history of [a patient’s] sexual encounters and their pattern of human relationships. Our potential for intimacy can be badly affected if our first experiences were humiliating or we experienced rejection—it’s like Pavlovian conditioning.”

However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that those who experience post-coital sadness have had a rocky relationship history. “Every human being is totally different and accumulates experiences and attachments differently,” added Potkonjak. “In any encounter we have all kinds of immediate responses to people—conscious and unconscious. We always make links with our memories, and it can complicate the here and now.”

Ultimately, then, the causes of post-coital sadness are elusive and invariably subjective. It can be a chemical problem for some and an existential one for others. Or it could simply come down to an unfortunate romantic incident in your past.

So if you do find yourself in an brief emotional black hole after an orgasm, don’t fret. Picture it this way: You’re just part of quite a large club—featuring esteemed alumni such as Spinoza and Freud—who feel a little bit shitty after sex.

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As his avatar prepared to engage in deadly combat, Cosmo Wright panicked. The 25-year-old with pale skin, androgynous features, and an amorphous haircut could almost pass for the real-life version of Link, the hero of the Zelda video game franchise and the elfin character that the professional gamer spent eight hours a day controlling. Wright minimized the chat window on Twitch, the live-streaming video platform that sponsors him. He didn't want the 7,000 people watching—and going ape-shit—to flip him out.

He had tried 1,200 times over the course of almost a decade to get to this point, but knew it could easily be another 1,200 before he got another chance to achieve his dream. “I spent most of the time before the Ganon fight practicing the infinite sword glitch input on the control over and over and trying to relax and have pure focus,” he would later explain in a YouTube commentary that's racked up 450,000 views.

The “infinite sword glitch”—known in the speedrunning community as ISG—is just one of the more than 300 glitches that diehard Ocarina of Time fans have sussed out in a decade worth of hardcore research. And it's also a crucial tool that allowed Wright to condense dozens of hours worth of Ocarina gameplay into 18 minutes and 10 seconds back in July. As the end-credits rolled after his breath-taking run, the gamer laughed and held back tears.

Ocarina of Time has sold 11 million copies since 1998, and is one of the most beloved games ever. But now, 16 years later, Wright is making a living by pulling back the curtain on its coding flaws. Come November, a 24-year-old rival from Sweden hopes to become the next guy to turn a childhood obsession into some serious cash flow.

There are about 50 people in the world—the vast majority of whom are male, 20-something, and white—who focus on playing Ocarina of Time at the highest level. They congregate at streams like Twitch and SpeedRunsLive, as well as on the forums of ZeldaSpeedRuns.com. Cosmo got interested in the game again in 2003, when it was re-released for GameCube. Two years later, he stumbled upon Speed Demos forums, which was the beginning of the speed-running community. “I guess really the first person who started this crazy adventure was a guy from Finland named Kazooie,” explains Wright. “He figured out how to do things like get into the Shadow Temple before you were supposed to, get the Requiem of Spirit as child Link—basically play the game out of order.”

Cosmo Wright's infamous Ocarina of Time speedrun 

Back then, Wright learned Zelda tricks by trying to emulate pictures he'd find on the forums. Once he'd learned to exploit certain glitches the community had found, he could make Link go through walls or access areas that were typically off-limits, sometimes fooling the game to transport the character through time and space. Today, though, speedrunners have technology that eliminates the guesswork. Software exists to read Link's precise coordinates when performing the tricks, which means you can then commit certain maneuvers to procedural memory. “First you solve the puzzle,” he told me. “And then you practice.”

This elimination of guesswork is exactly why some people are critical of the speedrunning community. They say it takes the mystery and joy out of games. But tens of millions of people disagree, and they're starting to see gaming as not only a legitimate athletic endeavor, but one that's worthy of spectating. When Twitch launched in 2012, it allowed players to stream live on the site and vie for sponsorships based on popularity. A sponsored gamer's page would have a subscription option and advertisements. Sensing that it could come to rival YouTube, Amazon bought the site for $970 million this past August.

That's the same month that Joel Westerberg, a soft-spoken Swede who vaguely resembles Jesse Bradford, started both speed-running and streaming. He came across Wright's video online and felt inspired to take on a remarkably difficult schedule, attending medical school from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. and then playing Zelda from 4 p.m. until midnight.

“I don't really do much else,” he told me. “And I don't sleep much, either. Never have.” He has a long-distance relationship with a girlfriend who he sees about once per month and says he couldn't handle much more than that, with his streaming responsibilities and all. “I basically have to have a very strict schedule, and if I'm gonna do stuff outside of school or streaming, I have to know far in advance. I've lost some friends because they don’t really approve.”

And even though Wright has been practicing for nearly a decade, this dedicated newcomer is the champion's closest competitor. He's only 10 seconds away from Wright's world record, and the two will be competing in a live race on November 27 in Sweden. If Westerberg claims the title—or even just beats Wright—it'll be a huge step toward becoming a full-time streamer. But more than the advertising money, Westerberg says he cares about the rush.

“It's the most intense feeling I've ever experienced,” he says. “I can get so filled with it that it's pretty hard to stay focused, because you know you might not get a chance to get like this again. But when you pull it off, you feel like a god.”

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

Tom Cotton, a Senate candidate in Arkansas who has made the Islamic State sound like a batch of G.I. Joe villains. Photo via Flickr user Gage Skidmore

“I believe that the Islamic State is an imminent threat to our nation.” Thus proclaimed Colorado Republican Senate candidate Cory Gardner in a televised debate Wednesday night. Gardner apparently felt no need to provide evidence for this assertion, as if the reality of the imminence of an IS attack on the United States homeland should’ve been manifestly obvious to all viewers. Naturally, his opponent, Democratic Senator Mark Udall, didn’t bother to challenge the claim, presumably because doing so could’ve opened him up to charges of displaying insufficient aggression toward the Big New Scary Terrorist Group. The moment passed essentially unnoticed; after all, why would anyone question the idea that Colorodans might all die in a terroristic fireball at any moment?

And so continued the national trend of politicians hailing from rural America trumping up the danger supposedly posed by the Islamic State to farmers, ranchers, small business owners, and other denizens of the heartland.

In watching a slew of US Senate debates for the upcoming midterm elections—an activity I recommend to no sane person—I’ve concluded that candidates running for office in places extremely unlikely to ever be targeted by jihadists seem to be the ones most riled up about the Islamic State. Perhaps because these candidates often are laughably unschooled in the realm of foreign policy, being local legislators and such, they typically have no damned idea what they’re talking about.

(Such rhetoric doesn’t appear to be nearly as heated in places like New York City or Washington, DC, which are presumably more at risk for a terrorist attack.)

Republican Senate candidate Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Congressman who routinely touts his military service in Iraq—and is one of the few Republicans still willing to openly praise George W. Bush’s incomprehensibly stupid war as “just and noble”—has taken to portraying IS as basically Cobra from G.I. Joe.

“They're the most well financed organization potentially in modern times,” Cotton declared this week on the debate stage, dubbing the group a “terrorist army.” Now, the Islamic State has certainly demonstrated the capacity to wreak destruction on Kurds, Yazidis, Christians, Shiites, and others, and its fighters are undoubtedly fierce, but Cotton’s implication—that these men with guns two continents away are somehow a danger to the security of average Americans—is patently absurd.

For good measure, Cotton threw in a jab at his opponent, Democratic Senator Mark Pryor, for supposedly neglecting to safeguard the public from Ebola; a classic one-two scaremongering punch.

These guys know exactly what they’re doing, as if following a sordid script. Political science literature shows that people generally become more conservative when they perceive their community to be under threat from foreign infiltration, whether by terrorists or communicable disease. So when Pat Roberts, the geriatric Republican Senator from Kansas, said that he “stood up to the president, keeping terrorists out of Kansas,” you could practically hear the dog-whistle cry of I’m the only one who can keep the Big Scary Terrorists from suicide-bombing your cattle. Never mind that he was likely referring to his ludicrous effort, in 2009, to prevent Guantanamo detainees from being transferred to Fort Leavenworth, one of the military’s securest facilities. (Guantanamo remains open due in part to the work of Roberts and his colleagues.)

Across the nation, cynical candidates—mostly Republicans, but not exclusively—have taken to tailoring the amorphous Islamic State threat to fit their localized political needs. Mike McFadden, a hapless Minnesota GOPer almost certain to lose to incumbent senator and former comedian Al Franken, announced, “In Minnesota, we've become the number one recruiting area for terrorists.” What does this mean, exactly? Who cares! All McFadden wants is for voters to believe that there’s some undefined Terrorist danger out there, and Franken hasn’t done enough to aggressively combat it.

(Franken has engaged in a bit of anti-terrorist chest-thumping himself, having written a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder last month calling for an investigation into possible Islamic State recruitment activities in Minnesota.)

The most ridiculous terrorist-related ballyhoo, however, has come from Thom Tillis, the Republican trying for Senator Kay Hagan’s seat in North Carolina. In a recent debate, Tillis alleged that President Obama “gives strength to the terrorists” by way of his wayward foreign policy—a charge that enlivens elements of the electorate which already suspect that Barack Hussein Obama harbors some bizarre ulterior motives in his dealings with the Islamic State. Tillis needs these folks to come out to the polls.

Hagan responded by positioning herself as even more stalwartly anti-terrorist than Tillis, deriding him as “spineless” with respect to this foreign menace, and being insufficiently “decisive about taking out [the Islamic State].” Hagan then went a step further, accusing Tillis of also failing to recognize the danger of what she termed “the Khorosan.”

Hagan was referring to “The Khorosan group,” a much-hyped but now discredited threat lurking in Syria—and not only did she get the name wrong, she acted like it’s still a Serious Thing long after it's been revealed as more or less a fabrication. Clearly, better to get your facts wrong while banging the drums for war than risk coming off as a wuss.

Last on this tour of terror is Iowa, where Republican state senator and former National Guard Lieutenant Colonel Joni Ernst outlined her criteria for what constitutes an acceptable US foreign military intervention. Such an endeavor would require a “clearly defined mission, credible threat, and what is the withdrawal plan [sic].” Ernst went on to declare her support for the current anti–Islamic State campaign.

The only problem is that thethat campaign fails to meet her stated criteria. There is no “clearly defined mission” other than to “degrade and destroy” IS—so we’ll know we win when we win, or something—and there’s no withdrawal plan. In fact, US officials are fairly open about the war entailing an open-ended, multi-year commitment. Ernst’s rhetoric unravels upon even the slightest examination.

Her Democratic opponent, Bruce Braley, hasn’t been much more reasoned. “Any time American citizens are attacked by a terrorist group, they need to be brought to justice or to the grave,” he inveighed, which makes no sense. Americans are regularly assaulted the world over by people who might be characterized as “terrorists,” but that doesn’t mean the US all the sudden goes to war against them. Americans have been attacked by vicious Mexican drug cartels without a full-scale military conflict breaking out. Israeli Police reportedly beat an American teenager over the summer, but this didn’t lead to a war against Israel. And so on and so forth.

As usual, with an election coming up soon, logic has been tossed aside in favor of doing whatever it takes to seize power. IS using Ebola as a weapon against America? Sure, why not. The only thing that’s impossible to suggest in our present political climate is that we end this idiotic war.

Follow Michael Tracey on Twitter.

Cambodia's aggressive anti-trafficking campaign is designed to rescue and rehabilitate sex workers. But many women say authorities there are actually forcing them into a trade where conditions and pay are even worse: making clothing for Western brands.

VICE News traveled to Phnom Penh to speak with former and current sex workers, officials, and labor organizers to investigate what is happening to those swept up in the country's trafficking crackdown.

When Islamic State jihadists launched a major offensive on the majority Kurdish town of Kobane in September, more than 180,000 people fled across the border into Turkey. Local authorities struggled to cope with the influx at first, and thousands of refugees were forced to sleep on the streets of the Turkish border town of Suruc. Now camps are being set up to provide shelter and other assistance.

With the borders closed and thousands unable to leave Kobane, VICE News visited one of six refugee camps in the town to find out how refugee families—some sharing tents with up to 14 other people—are coping with leaving their homes and livelihoods behind.