Photo via VICE Germany

A strange thing is happening within the Bundesliga, the German soccer league that has some of the highest average stadium attendance in the world: Far-right hooligans affiliated to various clubs are putting their differences aside to unite against Islamic fundamentalists.

Sunday saw the biggest gathering yet, when, outside Cologne Cathedral, between 2,000 and 4,000 people turned up to preach hate against Salafists attack police. What’s startling about this is that the previous gathering in Dortmund only drew 400 people. Forty-four police officers were injured, a riot van was overturned, pro-Nazi slogans were shouted, and a loaded hand gun and machetes were confiscated from the crowd. Though a counter-protest of 500 was held peacefully nearby, one policeman told Die Welt newspaper that the police were now facing an unprecedented level of political extremism within soccer hooliganism.

Currently known as Hooligans Against Salafists (or HoGeSa for short) and organized over Facebook (as of writing, at least two of their accounts have been active for a couple of days, already gathering around 2,000 likes each), these groups are indicative of the general growth of far-right extremism not just within football, but inside Germany as a whole.

HoGeSa is a frightening group because they have the power to unite old rivals against a common enemy. At the moment, this is Islamic extremism—the number of Salafist groups in Germany is small but growing, and German domestic intelligence chief Hans-Georg Maassen expressed concern Saturday that such groups may be inspiring German residents to travel to Syria and Iraq to fight alongside the Islamic State.

But what happens if the target of the mob's ire shifts? One slogan boasts that HoGeSa brings together “sworn enemies from various [soccer] clubs,” which by my estimation is about 17. It would constitute "a new phenomenon,” police union chairman Arnold Plickert said, “if previously warring hooligans develop a common structure."

In the context of the last few years, it seems at first a strange thing for German soccer to be associated with. The league system has been rightly and repeatedly praised for getting many things right: ticket pricing, safe standing areas within stadiums, anti-tika taka tactics (try saying that one while drunk), and Shinji Kagawa. Let us not forget, this is the soccer hipster league of choice.

Borussia Dortmund is particularly relevant here; the team is both the poster-boys of cool Bundesliga and one of its most prominent links to extremism. HoGeSa are partly organized by Dortmund fan and neo-Nazi Siegfried Borchardt, who set up hooligan coalition Borussenfront in the 1980s. Although officially banned from the Westfalenstadion stadium, the group has been active again since 2006 and is known to recruit younger fans after matches. During Dortmund’s run to the Champions League final last year, two of their right-wing fans were attacked in Donetsk after reportedly shouting “Sieg Hiel!” and pissing on a statue of Lenin.

Photo via VICE Germany

This dichotomy extends far beyond Borussia Dortmund. As a nation, Germany has been riding the crest of a PR wave for some time now. In 2013, it was voted the world's favorite country. The national team went on to win this year’s World Cup, without its best player. The country is both economically powerful and socially mobile. Twenty percent of its population was born abroad. It basically runs Europe. But internally, the past few years have seen Germany undergo a shift towards right-wing disillusion. With inequality continuing to widen, the German Economic Institute this year argued that the country had the largest wealth gap in the whole of Europe. With an open immigration policy and increased poverty comes far-right extremists: nationalists who blame their situation on people who are almost certainly in a worse position than themselves.

Unsurprisingly, tensions surrounding Islam in Germany are being fed by events abroad. A couple of weeks back, roughly 1,300 police officers were deployed in Hamburg after a peaceful Kurdish protest against the Islamic State’s attacks on the Kobani border was disrupted by Islamic State supporters. Daniel Abdin, imam of Hamburg’s Al-Nour Mosque, described the city as “Hamburgistan.” The same week, a reported 100 people fought in Celle, Lower Saxony, over similar differences.

It’s a perfectly terrible storm. Germany’s support of Kurds in northern Iraq causes tension between Kurds and certain radical Islamic groups in major German cities, and this tension is then manipulated by extreme right-wingers who cite it as evidence of the country's Islamification. Without the presence of the far-right groups, it's doubtful whether or not things would have blown up to this extent—Germany is home to at least 4 million Muslims, a quarter of whom are Kurds, and only 5,500 of whom are Salafists. But insidious far-right organizations like the National Democratic Party know how to infiltrate other causes to draw in supporters—be it soccer, anti-corporate movements, or even Christmas markets. German soccer is just another carrier of the movement, an artificial insemination designed to provide Nazi shitheads with borrowed legitimacy.

Follow David Whelan on Twitter.

Lloyd Kaufman. Photo via Lloyd Kaufmans Tumblr

Lloyd Kaufman's cult classic films are like jazz. Either you get and love the plots about talking Mexican hamburgers coming out of the closet, serial killers with pickles instead of penises, and Lemmy from Motörhead playing the president of the United States, or you'll never understand them.

Kaufman's universe is like a baroque cabinet of wonder made possible by the production company he co-founded in 1974, Troma Entertainment, which went on to spawn films like The Toxic Avenger and Class of Nuke 'Em High. A champion of independent, low-budget cinema, Kaufman is known for being a tad eccentric—but conversation with him is also distinctly more highbrow than one would expect, and I’m not just saying that because he gave me Citizen Toxie: The Toxic Avenger IV on DVD. 

VICE: Hi Lloyd, thanks for taking the time to meet me. Which directors have influenced you the most?
Lloyd Kaufman: I am sorry for being late—I’m supposed to act professional. I went to Yale University and, because I speak French, I had access to Cahiers du cinéma, so I became brainwashed by that philosophy of auteur filmmaking. My heroes were Chaplin, DW Griffith, Fritz Lang, Jean Renoir, Kenji Mizoguchi, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock—the classics, really.

Who was the man for you as far as visual style goes?
Besides all the classics, I guess Stan Brakhage influenced me the most. He’s the greatest visual artist of my lifetime. But Troma has discovered many new mainstream people with unique stylistic vision, too. Take the South Park guys—Trey Parker and Matt Stone—they started with us, and Cannibal the Musical was their first film. Actually, Stan Brackage is in that movie. He was the only professor at their university who gave them any encouragement when they were shooting the film. We helped them finish it 'cause they didn’t have any money. Stan was a good guy. I also brought him to Yale in the 1960s to show students his art and I also interviewed him on the radio.

Lloyd Kaufman, director Ulrich Seidl, and the Toxic Avenger. Photo by Kurt Prinz

Speaking about being in movies, you appeared in the original Rocky movie. How did that come about?
You know, I didn’t go to film school. Instead, I identified a young talented director, John G. Avildsen, and attached myself to him. I worked for free and, when he got a job, he hired me. Troma still distributes one of his early movies called Cry Uncle. It’s a wonderful film.

When Rocky came along they didn’t have enough money to shoot in Philadelphia on location with a union crew, so Troma used a non-union crew to secretly film all the scenes in Philadelphia with Stallone. When the unions found out about it, that was the end. But before that happened, we managed to film for about eight days, so the producers saved a lot of money. And since Troma was involved, I played a drunk in the movie.

Yeah, you’re credited as “Lloyd Kaufman, drunk.”
I was very good at that, of course. In fact, since then I’ve been in maybe 300 movies and the young filmmakers who want me to make a cameo always ask me to be either the drunk or a doctor.

You also had a cameo in Guardians of the Galaxy.
Oh yeah, thanks for noticing that. [Goes into character, changes voice] MURDERER! MURDERER!

Still from 'Poultrygeist'

How did that happen?
[Director] James Gunn was involved with Troma before, he worked for us. Originally, he was a novelist but he needed a paid job as well and so he became my assistant. I was working on Tromeo and Juliette for about five years with other writers and I couldn’t really get a good script that I believed in, so I said, “Here’s $100—go and write a script and come back in three days.”

And he wrote a pretty interesting script, so we worked on it together and made Tromeo and Juliet. He also did other things for Troma—he’s put me in all these movies so far and now he’s the number one guy at the box office! Like that Titanic guy, you know? “I’m the king of the world!” Only James would never say that cause he’s such a nice guy.

Watching Guardians and seeing you in the movie, I wondered if that was the kind of movie you would be making with that kind of budget.
James Gunn says that! He says he’s channeling my directing style in the movie. But I would never do such a big-budget movie. I just couldn’t. I’d rather make 200 movies, or 400 movies for that money! Out of the 400 movies, a small number of them would even be wonderful. But don’t get me wrong, Guardians is a masterpiece. Usually, I don’t like these big movies—I can’t sit through them.

Even the Peter Jackson one, the movie with the ring, it was such a bore! Although I love Peter Jackson and he’s a big Troma fan. But that movie? It’s a clock watcher. Just like a "cock blocker"—you know that term?


Sure. A clock watcher can be a cock blocker, too.
Yeah, you’re right. I know it’s a masterpiece and Peter Jackson is one of our great directors but I couldn’t get it. I don’t even get Star Wars.

Trailer for 'Return to Nuke 'Em High: Volume 1'

Rewatching The Toxic Avenger and Poultrygeist, I had a feeling that those movies were touching on the biggest issues of their respective decade. The Toxic Avenger was about the obsession with fitness and what Hunter S. Thompson called the “Body Nazis” and also about toxic waste. Poultrygeist was about the problem with fast food and media conglomerates, and Return to Nuke 'Em High: Volume 1 is about the lie behind organic food.
Yeah. We're usually ahead of the time. When we made The Toxic Avenger, nobody talked about the environment, but we would go camping and we'd see all that crap in the middle of the wilderness, because McDonald’s wasn't biodegradable in those days. The environment wasn't really a mainstream issue then.

Also, when we made Poultrygeist, people weren’t so critical of fast food. Now they are anti-McDonald’s. But also there are other themes in it, like bullying, which currently is a big issue, and same-sex relationships, or even racism. All those are in Return to Nuke 'Em High: Volume 1 as well. At the moment we're editing Volume 2.

You’re always touching the nerve of social issues.
My whole career is inspired by one book: Power Elite by C. Wright Mills, a sociologist and author who got blacklisted in America during the McCarthy days, even though he wasn’t really a communist. He developed the theory that the military and industrial complex is a conspiracy that controls everything. This had a profound impact on me.

But in my philosophy it's no longer the military. Rather, the corporate, the bureaucratic and the labor elites. The labor leaders in America get millions of dollars while their members are eating dog food. One of the leaders in New York even had an office that was so rich and expensive that he had a second office on a lower floor where he could see the workers. First, people get themselves elected, then they basically work for lobbyists and afterwards, they get a million-dollar business job. It’s like a big revolving door.

Photo via Lloyd Kaufman's website

What’s your take on people who download your movies without paying for them?
Nobody is making money by people sharing art. [But] I want people to take my art and watch it! They can take it for free, I don't mind. We’re even giving away 250 movies on our Troma YouTube channel right now. However, if they’re making a lot of money off it, that's not right. China is disgusting. The generals own the DVD factories and Troma movies are all over China. I've been there, I speak Chinese. Our movies are everywhere and I haven’t gotten a penny.

Net neutrality doesn’t necessarily mean more freedom, though.
Unfortunately not. It would be even harder to maintain something like Troma in today’s environment. Back at Yale, I majored in Chinese studies and Taoism was my main topic of interest. It teaches the Yin and the Yang—you know, the oyster that gets a piece of sand stuck in its asshole and it's very painful, but then it creates this beautiful pearl. Pain and pleasure are always intertwined, you can't have them apart. So I guess the Yin is the democratization of making movies. And the Yang is that we can't live off our movies anymore.

Speaking of good and evil, I feel like there are parallels between Troma movies and wrestling. They have the same approach to storytelling, the same larger-than-life characters. Toxic Avenger even sounds like a wrestling name.
Well, he has wrestled in Florida recently. Actually, it was a real wrestler, but he asked us if he could use the gimmick and we said yes. But yeah, there are some similarities I guess. Also the way of how stories are told with bodies and action. In fact, a couple of WWE stars are fans of mine. I’ve talked to both Dolph Ziggler and Chris Jericho. They know my films intimately.

In Return to Nuke 'Em High you have Lemmy from Motörhead playing the president, saying, “Fucking students, they don't write blogs anymore they just like to fuck.” Is that Lloyd Kaufman talking?
Yes. Because they can't read or write, they're ignorant. Go on Twitter and look at what they say. And it’s not even their fault, it’s the American education system that has deteriorated ever since the baby boomer generation. It’s the grand equalizer for everyone who’s not part of the elites. The kids are actually smart, but our system is dumbing them down.

Follow Markus Lust on Twitter.

David Armstrong in Boston, 1973. All photos by Allen Frame

I met David Armstrong through Nan Goldin in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1973. He was 19.

Nan and I were taking classes at a photo school called Imageworks in Kendall Square, and David would join us for lunch at a diner nearby. He had not started photographing yet. He was putting together a portfolio of drawings to apply to the Boston Museum School, where he and Nan enrolled the next year. They came over to my dorm room where I had a suite to myself in a converted residential hotel near Radcliffe that Harvard had just bought, and we started going out together to gay clubs in Boston that Nan and David already knew well—1270, the Other Side, 25 Lansdowne Street.

They had been students at the Satya Community School, a small alternative high school first in Cambrige, then in Lincoln, along with their muse Suzanne Fletcher, who had known David since fifth grade. Nan was the school photographer, working with polaroids. She was influenced mostly by films, which were easy to see then in repertory, and French and Italian Vogue. Suzanne went off to Columbia in New York but returned for a summer to live with them on Boston’s Beacon Hill, where Nan began creating her first body of work, in black and white, depicting her roommates at home by day and then in drag contests and shows by night at the Other Side.

“We would spend the afternoon getting dressed, then go to the Other Side,” remembers Suzanne. After she returned to school in the fall, the apartment building burned down, and Suzanne remembers the picture in the Boston Globe of Nan and David standing outside in their kimonos.

By the fall of '73 when I met him, David had stopped doing drag and was presenting himself as an androgynous, denim-clad boy, not unlike the alluring youths he later made his reputation photographing. At the Museum School, David switched to photography and the “Boston School” of photography was launched. The chemistry between him and Nan and their mutual dedication to the depiction of an American artist bohemia galvanized the Boston photo scene and influenced younger kindred spirits like Mark Morrisroe and Jack Pierson.

Armstrong in the author's dorm room at Harvard, 1973

When I left Cambridge in 1974, David and Nan were living in a duplex at 96 Pleasant Street with David’s ex, the ethereal-looking blonde painter Tommy Chesley, and Laurie Sagalyn, another young photographer. (Nan told me last week that she has recently found a long-lost photo album from those days on Pleasant Street.) This was the era of early disco and retro glamor, Barry White and David Bowie. I remember putting David in stitches with my impersonation of a New Orleans stripper after a trip to Mardi Gras. And when I think of him, I think of his sense of humor, expressed with a nonchalant affect. He found the absurdities of human behavior endlessly amusing.

He loved style and beauty, but his gift was to uncover the vulnerability and tenderness beneath the mask, under the skin of physical beauty. He had been strongly influenced by the great fashion and studio photographers of the first half of the 20th century. It’s satisfying to think of his completing the circle in the last decade with fashion and editorial work worthy of the classic portraiture that inspired him.

Nan Goldin, Boston, 1973

Nan, David, and I all moved to New York around 1977, they from Boston and I from Mississippi. We were all photographing our various talented friends in the downtown scene but with entirely different approaches, Nan with her signature spontaneity, all about context and relationships, and David in a classically posed, formal portrait mode, studio-style but in the subject’s environment. His subjects were young and stylish and he intensified their impact with a brooding, noirish 1940s mood. He photographed Nan herself (his photos of her are the best anyone has taken), and she photographed him in sunglasses reclining poolside glamorously in Provincetown, Massachusetts. He created elegant depictions of some of the iconic personalities of that scene—Cookie Mueller, Sharon Niesp, Rene Ricard, Greer Lankton, Suzanne Fletcher, and others, like artist Christopher Wool and David’s stunning boyfriend Kevin McPhee, who died of AIDS in 1983. (Kevin was the prototype for the procession of nordic-looking models who came David's way in the last decade.)

By 1981 David was being included with a large number of these portraits in the sweeping zeitgeist-y PS1 show, New Wave New York, which also introduced Jean Michel Basquiat. His career seemed set but addiction got in the way, and he wound up going back to Boston and spending years there in sobriety. When Nan followed suit for her first rehab in Boston, he was there for her, and when she moved to Berlin in the early 90s on a grant, she persuaded him to join her and wound up giving him the kick he needed to get back to photography. 

David Armstrong in Boston, 1973

The book they collaborated on in 1994, A Double Life, was a revelation. Their portraits of the same people they had both photographed separately over 20 years, were juxtaposed, hers in color, his in black and white, their different styles in paired pages creating a meditation on time, friendship, and formal issues in photography. David then started making abstracted black and white landscapes, quiet, full of yearning and a sense of solitude, and he began to show them with new portraits in a series of exhibitions at Matthew Marks from 1995 to 2004. He returned to New York in the late 90s and was teaching at the International Center of Photography and living in Bed-Stuy in a rambling old house which he decorated lavishly with an eclectic collection of antique furniture, art, and fabrics. This became his base, his studio, as he also began to do assignments there and to rent out the house for other shoots. Gradually his landscapes and portraits had shifted to color, and now included New York cityscapes and sexy men in hotel rooms whom he had met in his neighborhood or in Time Square near the cheap hotels he used as locations.

He curated a show of photography in 2001 for the Photographic Resource Center in Boston, a set of landscapes he ironically called Rocks and Trees, referring to the genre of traditional landscapes he and Nan had been reacting against when they first started photographing their social milieu in the 70s. He came over to my apartment to select some work for it, and I remember his telling me that he had just been tested for HIV for the first time. He had had to get a checkup in order to apply for a mortgage on a house upstate, and he discovered his T-cell count was dangerously low. All those years, surrounded by friends dying of AIDS, including his boyfriend Kevin, and he had never had an HIV test. He laughed at himself and his own state of denial as he told me; of course, the doctor put him on a strict regimen right away. He died on Saturday in Los Angeles after a battle with liver cancer, far from his home but right in the legendary place that had inspired him with its dreams and fantasies of glamor and beauty.

See David Armstrong's contributions to VICE here.

Allen Frame lives in New York where he teaches photography at the School of Visual Arts, Pratt Institute, and the International Center of Photography. He is represented by Gitterman Gallery.

Carla Valentine, who runs Dead Meet, the dating website for people who work in the "death industry."

If you asked my eight-year-old self what the most romantic film moment in existence was, it'd be any scene with Gomez and Morticia in The Addams Family, disembodied hands down. The weird and miserable sex talk, the death obsession, the graveyard—I still think they're the greatest couple that never existed. 

Mortuary regular Carla Valentine is doing her best to make my ideal couple a reality. By day, she works at the Barts Pathology Museum near Smithfield Market in London, helping to restore it by repotting ancient anatomical specimens so that people like me can peer at them through glass. By night, she's doing what the rest of us are doing: dicking around on the internet.

Dead Meet is Carla’s dating and networking website for people who work in the “death industry," which is basically anyone from gravediggers to medical historians to forensics officers to taxidermists. So far, it has 5,000 members. I sat down with Carla to ask her why people in the business of death have such a morbid fascination with one another. 

VICE: When and why did you start Dead Meet?
Carla Valentine: I started the site in spring this year, although it had been on my mind since Christmas. I started it because of my own career in the death industry. When I was an anatomical pathology technologist [healthcare science staff who work in hospital mortuaries, assist in postmortems, etc.] one of the first things I was told by my manager was the importance of discretion. He said it was frowned upon to discuss the minutiae of my working day unless it was with someone who could be trusted to keep the secrets of the profession and therefore ensure the dignity and privacy of the patients. 

This, of course, makes sense, but there were very few APTs in the UK, and I hadn’t come from a family of undertakers. I just wanted to be able to chat to someone who could really understand me. I wanted more friends in the same profession, not just my co-workers, and perhaps even a partner to talk to in the wee small hours of the night. When asked, “How was your day?” I wanted to be able to say how it really was, safe in the knowledge that uttering sentences not usually uttered by "normal" people wouldn’t send someone packing.

Dead Meet's "about" page

What kind of thing might APTs say when they come home from a bad day?
[Laughs] Well, I can’t be too specific but it could be something to do with decomposition, or it could be something emotionally tough, like the postmortem or funeral of a particularly sad case.

In terms of wanting to meet like-minded people then, do people in the death industry get sick of explaining death to curious non-industry types, or do they just want to talk about it all the time and need someone who’s OK with that?
I can’t speak for everyone, but frequently in my experience, it’s the latter. For example, I was recently at a Morbid Anatomy event at the Wellcome Collection museum. After the event I went for a drink with Morbid Anatomy’s founder, Joanna Ebenstein, and John Troyer from the Centre for Death & Society, as well as my best friend, Lara, who happens to work at the mortuary I used to work at—a cheerful group!

Over a few beers, we enthusiastically spoke of death and related topics all night, and every time we changed the topic, we’d veer back to it again. I’m surprised the people on the table next to us remained there. For me, death is certainly a subject that will come up daily, and I feel it’s important for me to be surrounded by people who are OK with that.

Are there death groupies?
I suppose you could say there are “death groupies," as much as there are groupies for everything else in the world, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Everyone will die—it’s only natural that many people will be curious about the topic and want to know more. And, of course, their support helps various projects I work on become successful, so I’m very thankful for that.

I think it’s more of a problem when people who are groupies begin to tout themselves as experts on social media and via other less stringently regulated avenues. I tweet about mortuary practices and medical education because I teach medical students and I’m still an APT. Even though it’s not full-time, I have both APT qualifications, eight years’ experience, and I'm on a response register for mass disasters.

For that reason I’m wary of dilettantes who don’t have real expertise, academic qualifications, or vocational experience, but are reinventing themselves as authorities on topics like this because death has become popular.

How many members have you got so far?
5,000 on the site.

Jeez! Have you had any problems marketing it?
Yes, I’ve had a couple of problems marketing the site—I’m sure many people think it’s a joke and don’t take it seriously when they see it. At the other end of the scale, I had an article taken down from a website because the board members thought the idea of Dead Meet was too macabre. You can’t please everyone.

I realize there have been huge advances in ensuring careers like those in the mortuary are regulated and are more professional—APTs want to be represented in a certain way. But at the same time, I really think people are afraid to have a sense of humor in this sector due to fears of seeming “insensitive,” particularly after the Alder Hey scandal and subsequent formation of the regulatory body the Human Tissue Authority.

What jobs count as "death industry" jobs that we might not have thought about?
Perhaps nurses? People forget it’s usually the nurses’ job to "lay out" the deceased in hospitals, so as an APT I used to teach about decomposition and viewings on the nurse induction days for new starters. They spend more time with the dead than, say, doctors do.

Are there any reasons why a funeral director would make a better boyfriend or girlfriend than someone who works in administration or writes shit on the internet for a living?
I’m sure that some funeral directors would make great boyfriends because the likelihood is they are fairly strong, able-bodied, and their jobs may have imbued them with a sense of patience or respect. Perhaps embalmers would make better boyfriends because they use cosmetics on the deceased and they’d understand why it takes many women so long to get ready. But at the same time, people are all different and those who work in the death industry don’t all have the same personality—although many of us have a great sense of humor.

So what’s a date with a mortician really like?
Again, it depends which mortician, but a date with me can range from something simple like a bite to eat and a bottle of wine, to a night at an immersive horror film experience, or a trip to the Science Museum during the day. The best way to find out what a date with a mortician is like is to go on Dead Meet and find yourself one. 

Follow Hayley Campbell on Twitter.

Dictator Ceausescu on New Year’s Eve, 1976. Photo via Fototeca online a comunismului românesc. Collage: Mircea Topoleanu

According to a 2010 report carried out by the Romanian government's anti-discrimination agency, 84 percent of Romanians would refuse to drink from the same glass as a gay person. The country has a long history of being unfriendly to gays; in 1968, when dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu finally recognized that homosexuality existed, he immediately deemed it illegal. Throughout Ceaușescu's reign, the government persecuted same-sex couples by sentencing them to years of hard time in prison.

Abortions were declared illegal at about the same time, giving the regime the excuse they needed to raid people's privacy. According to a report conducted by Human Rights Watch, IGLHRC, and the LGBT NGO Accept, since 1970 communists used the anti-gay law to get rid of anyone they considered to be rebellious.

Understandably, this forced homosexuals underground, which made documenting human rights violations against them in Romania very difficult. These days, it’s hard to find gay people who lived through those times and are willing to talk about what happened. So, when Accept organized a meeting about Romania's gay history, I knew I had to go.

It was there that I met Daniel Iorga, one of the founders of Accept and a man who, in 1990, was the first person to ask for the dissolution of Article 200, the section of Romania's penal code that criminalized same-sex relationships. He told me all about what it was like to be gay in the 1980s. I also met a journalist, who did the same thing but preferred to remain anonymous.

VICE: How could you tell you were gay, if nobody knew what that was?
Daniel Iorga: People wouldn’t have known about it even if you asked. I figured out what was happening to me at 14, when I discovered The Book of Young Newlyweds in my house, in which they talked about birth, sexual relationships, and STDs. The last page was about sexual perversions, among which was homosexuality. The sentence that stood out to me was: “This is punished by jail time from one to five years.”

Anonymous: I heard about prison at 17. I went to a cinema, without knowing that it was a pickup spot. Some guy asked me to go to a small hotel, where he wanted to have sex. I didn’t “cooperate” with him, but I was dumb enough to ask the woman at the reception who the guy was (the receptionist had told me he was a recently released prisoner) so I went along in order to tell on him. I was a member of the Communist Party’s Youth Organization, so I felt like I was doing a good deed, an act of cleaning up society. I was lucky because the officer that was meant to handle the case was too busy to do so, and I eventually gave up on it, saving me from an act I would have regretted all my life.

Gabriel Popescu was the first male ballerina in the Romanian Opera, but he was forced to leave the country in 1959, after he was beaten up and accused of “sexual inversion.” He killed himself nine years later in London. Photo via

Was there anyone you could you speak to about your feelings?
Only to others “like us." If our friends or family found it, it would’ve been a disaster. For them it was something abominable. The first cure they would prescribe was a fast marriage, thinking that having children solved everything. I have some friends who went through this and leading a double life was hell. Another solution was to kick you out of the house. That still happens nowadays. Or they simply tell you that you need to see a shrink.

Daniel: I went to see a psychiatrist on my own. There were no psychologists or counselors back then; the schools training them had been closed down. There was nobody to talk to about this. How could you ever begin to tell your parents? What did they know? So I simply fell into depression.

How did the psychiatrist treat you?
He was a kind, elderly doctor. I told him I was frustrated, that I wanted to be different. He gave me a ton of antidepressants and sleeping pills and kept me in the hospital for over a month and a half. He suggested that I never think of being “different” again, that I read some books, that I study, and that I have fun with my friends—but he wouldn’t explain what was happening to me, because it was forbidden to talk about it. He couldn’t tell me whether it was good or bad. A year later, we repeated this treatment, after I went through another bout of depression.

Did being committed help?
Only in the sense that it helped me move on. I told my parents, and my mum cried for many weeks for the drama her child was going through. Dad wanted to take me to a prostitute, but I refused. I only got over the depression when I started having relationships. That's when I really understood what was happening to me.

The "Bermuda Triangle" of Bucharest

How did you go about finding sexual partners?
There was a public toilet in the main square of the city of Brasov, which was a cruising spot. Train stations and parks were also good for picking up dates. Most of the people you met refused to give their real names, because it was too risky.

Anonymous: In Bucharest we had the Bermuda Triangle, formed out of three public toilets in the middle of the city. Those who wanted to hook up walked this triangle a few times a day. People also hooked up at the train station, at the opera, and around Cișmigiu Park. At the Opera, the theaters, and at exhibitions, you would meet more "high-class" people—those who didn’t frequent the parks and the toilets. There were also circles of gay intellectuals, artists, and writers, who saw each other in a more intimate circle, into which you could get only if somebody brought you in, after you had won their trust. There were parties and… canasta nights, usually followed by “games” in the bedroom.

I've heard people hooked up at the seaside a lot.
It was paradise. In the seaside town of Mamaia, near a hotel called Dorna, there was a tanning salon where we all became nudists. Gays throughout the country went there, as well as tourists from other socialist countries—mostly Germans, Hungarians, and Czechs. You felt safe knowing the other guy was not from the same city or country as you.

So there were gay people who were out of the closet?
Mița Baston, a doctor specializing in rectal surgery, had his back covered. His dad was one of the doctors in the Central Committee of the Communist Party. His mom had allowed him to wear a dress in high school and college. At the hospital where he worked everyone knew he was queer. He was effeminate, bright, colorful, and it was a pleasure talking with him in private, but it was good not to be seen walking with him on the street.

How did you manage to stay out of the military police's way?
Daniel: I had proof from the hospital that I tried to get help. Plus, you weren’t punished for being gay, but for having sexual relations with a person of the same sex. And nobody could give my name to the officers of the militia, because I only had flings in other towns.

Anonymous: I was called into the police station once. A student had been denounced and when they searched his house, they found a notebook with the names of all the guys he banged, along with their phone numbers. Plus, he had them arranged by social status: students, officers, professors etc. I denied having sex with him and said I knew him through work. But at that time I thought of suicide, too, because if I had been found out there, it would have all been over. I would have been fired, thrown out of the party, and possibly my home.

What was the interrogation like?
There were two interviews: one with a nice cop and one with a bad cop, but I was lucky to only go through the first one. That officer was also a psychologist and told me he wanted information on “the phenomenon”—that he was looking to make a report to prove that gay people were not hurting the state, that they exist in all layers of society, and that some of them are valuable citizens.

He tried to convince me he was working in support of gay rights. He showed me some pictures—some were from documents, others were from stakeouts—so I could identify other gays, who they could pick up from the public toilets of Bucharest after the undercover officers hooked up with them. I denied knowing anyone.

Lesbianism was easier to hide, because most women were married young. But there were cases, even after the fall of the regime, when women of another sexual orientation were persecuted, hunted, and jailed.

Did denying anything helped?
Not at all. They only needed two denouncements to put you in jail. When they wanted to blackmail you for not cooperating or when they wanted to stop your career, to hurt you, they convinced two gays to say they slept with you, even if it wasn’t true. The ones who denounced you didn’t have to go to jail. At the end of the interrogation the bad cop showed up and said, “Alright, if he won’t cooperate, I’ll take care of him,” and I knew what would happen. The student who denounced me was brought to confront me—I could see he had been tortured.

Did they beat you up?
No, but they called me into the precinct for a year, once every few months. Their interest waned after a certain point though, I don’t know why. Investigations would sometimes end because they led to somebody very high up in his field, some party leader or somebody’s son. The student who denounced me was sent to prison, though.

What happened to those who were sent to jail?
They sat in a cell with common prisoners. The warden made it clear what they were sentenced for and… they became a lightning rod for all the other prisoners. Basically, you were dead if they found out you were gay. I have friends who went through it, and were traumatized by it; they left the country and never came back.

Daniel: With this method the police were trying to gather informants: "Want to be let go? Then you have to work for us." It was an ideal blackmail method, because it was hard to choose jail over being an informant.

What happened to these people after they were released from prison?
Anonymous: They had to start from nothing. Their families didn’t want anything to have to do with them. And with a police record like this you could never have a career.

Daniel: A friend of mine who was a math teacher did two and a half years and when he got out, he had to work as the doorman at a hospital. He had a degree in economics. Then he sold his house, moved to another city, and got a job as an economist. It was OK, but he had to work for it.

Nicolae Ceaușescu, his wife Elena, and their favorite son, Nicu, at the dictator’s birthday 26 January 1980. Photo via Fototeca online a comunismului românesc

In most of Europe, sexual orientation wasn’t punished with prison time. Why was the Ceaușescu government so inflexible on this subject?
Anonymous: After the Revolution, people started saying that his homophobia was meant to hide some homosexual adventures of his own from his youth, when he was only a young apprentice recruited by the communists. Some spoke of a relationship with one of the founders of the Communist Party, others say that while he was imprisoned at Doftana he had relationships with the other communist dictator, Dej. But none of this was proven. For all his dreams of a new man, homosexuality had no room in his social scheme.

Elena Ceaușescu, his wife, was very passionate about stories from the homosexual scene, isn't that right?
Daniel: Stories of sex in general. Former general Pacepa writes in his memoir that she had placed microphones in the houses of the members of the Central Committee of the Party so she could know all about their sexual exploits. There was also a story about their eldest son, Valentin—he had a suspicious friendship with a gay actor named Doru Popescu, who in the end was forced to leave the country. Their friendship was known in the press and art scenes. Elena found out and to protect her boy she made a passport for the actor, sent him to France, and forbade him to return.

But it was also about the influence the Russians had on Ceaușescu.
Yes. They also put you in prison. The Poles, Czechs, Hungarians and Bulgarians also belonged to the Russians but they all eliminated the article incriminating same-sex relationships in 1968. Even Boris Yeltsin removed the Russian one in 1992. Romania, on the other hand, increased the punishment to somewhere between two and seven years in 1997 and outlawed gay “propaganda." The European Council forced us to eliminate the sentence, but the other article was only removed in 2001, which only happened so we could get into the EU and NATO.

Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan speaks to some of the Chibok schoolgirls who escaped Islamist captors and relatives of the hostages during a meeting at the presidency in Abuja on July 22, 2014. Wole Emmanuel/AFP/Getty Images

Back in July, Nigeria got some strange new allies in its war against Boko Haram: witches and wizards. At the height of the pitch and fury of the summer news cycle, an organized union of traditional healers, juju practitioners, and other varied mystics and mediums calling itself the Association of Nigerian Witches and Wizards (or WIZTAN) caught local headlines by boldly predicting that, before the year’s end, Boko Haram’s leader, Abubakar Shekau, would be captured and paraded through the region. They offered their self-avowedly substantial powers to help make that a reality. (However, in a perhaps hedging note of pessimism, they predicted that not every kidnapped girl would return.) When the Nigerian government announced a ceasefire and the impending release of the schoolgirls earlier this month, it seemed for a moment that WIZTAN might have been onto something. But after yesterday’s news that 30 more children were abducted in a town in Borno state, it seems they’ve still got their work cut out for them.

At first blush WIZTAN seems like a one-off what the fuck story: a mysterious alliance of witches and wizards pops up out of nowhere to do some voodoo on the terrible evils of the day. Crazy meets crazy in a clash of oddities. But while the organization might be news to us in the States, the Association of Nigerian Witches and Wizards isn’t a flash-in-the-pan group. They’ve been around for several years now, weighing in on the politics of the nation from time to time. Nor are they the first group of witches and wizards to organize politically. Although they are unique in the world of organized wizarding insomuch as they promote the rehabilitation of the magical arts’ image by channeling their powers to aid the state and its citizens. 

And it’s definitely an image that needs rehabilitating, especially in Nigeria, where traditional practices known as juju are (often wrongly) equated with cannibalistic rituals meant to extract the power from a sacrifice. The stereotype is a pervasive indictment of the profession in much of Africa—think the scenes with the Nigerian gangsters in District 9. Belief in the dark and vindictive powers and purposes of magicians in Africa has led, even within the last decade, to the murder-by-burning and lynching of hundreds to thousands of witches in Tanzania alone—usually members of poor and marginalized communities—to say nothing of the stigma and knee-jerk reactions across the continent. In truth, while the Association acknowledges the existence of some harmful wizards, most work in herbal healing, predictions, or the removal of curses. These more innocuous fields too face sharp criticism from modern educators and doctors, though.

It’s this sort of more benign encroachment that has inspired limited collective action amongst other witches and wizards in the world. Take for instance the case of southern Romania’s witches, who in 2011 faced the prospect of legal recognition of their trade, and with it taxation (at a 16 percent self-employment rate) for the first time ever. Later that year, another law threatened to impose fines or prison sentences on witches who gave false predictions. According to Tataran Alexandra, a young academic specializing in Romanian traditional beliefs and practices, although she’s never met a southern witch she understands that they usually like to operate alone, left to their own devices. But faced with this creeping imposition on their professions, says Alexandra, “the ‘witches’ themselves went to the Parliament building to protest.” Accounts of that protest refer to their chucking cat shit and mandrake roots about, and cursing Romanian President Traian Basescu before the Parliament eventually balked at the logistics and effort required by the bills and rejected them. Their concerns satisfied, the organization of Romanian witches, if it ever even was that, disbanded.

Although it’s all a bit hazy, Nigeria’s union appears to be a longer-lasting and higher-minded body, formed sometime around 2010 under the leadership of one Dr. Okhue Iboi, a man in his mid 50s who maintains he’s a wizard by birth. In interviews he’s described his own magical background as such: “I was born a witch. I inherited witchcraft from my mother when I was in her womb, from the age of seven I started seeing unborn babies in my mother’s womb, and I could predict with precision of sex an unborn child … and starting at the age of five, I started healing people like a grown-up herbalist.” Four years into what he indicates is a seven-year spokesman position for the organization, he is the liaison communicating the predictions and resolutions of the witches and wizards at their bi-annual and occasional extra emergency meetings. One of those emergency meetings was held in the north in July at the behest of members from regions where Boko Haram are most active. Speaking about that meeting to the Nigerian website Today's Gist, Iboi said "Witches and Wizards in Nigeria are deeply worried by what is going on in the country especially Boko Haram insurgency. As stakeholders in the Nigerian project, we can no longer afford to fold our hands while the nation burns. Enough is enough”

Iboi claims that in addition to making predictions about Boko Haram, WIZTAN is committed to retooling the image of juju to show that it can work with the people and for the best interest of the elected government. “Some people look at us as if we are evil minded people,” Iboi has mused in interviews. “Not all witches are bad. Our own type of witchcraft is progressive. We are willing to intervene in the affairs of the country anytime the government decides to seek our counsel. We have the solutions to bring lasting peace to the country. Witches and wizards in the country are ready to help restore Nigeria’s lost glory.”

To those ends, the association regularly comments on state politics, giving their own version of endorsements to candidates in the form of predictions as to who will win a race. More than just spew political opinion in spiritual garb, they’ve also put boots on the ground to keep the peace, for instance deploying 500 members to the capital of Abuja during the contentious 2011 elections to help mediate and head off any electoral violence through whatever authority they could muster. They also claim to be working with witches and wizards in India and Tanzania to invoke magical powers to prevent the breakup of the nation and keep it strong through future tense political ordeals. They’re making every public indication that they want to be on board with the modern state and that they’re willing to prove they have a place in it.

Given the image of juju, this assertion of a prominent role in the modern state understandably makes quite a few people nervous. Upon hearing of the wizards’ predictions on Boko Haram, one Christian minister issued his own prediction that these sinister magicians would themselves disappear before the end of the year. But it shouldn’t raise such hackles. Whether one believes juju is real or not, traditionalists still carry some weight in the world. And their power, whether magical or social, can influence the world they inhabit. So when an organization comes along offering to use that power to harmonize itself with the ever-changing world, rather than oppose all change and promote its own self-interests, that’s nothing to balk at. Hell, that’s probably as close to the beneficent wizards of Hogwarts as we’ll ever come, and we can only hope we’ll be so lucky as to see more such unions in the future. 

Former CBC Radio host, Jian Ghomeshi. image via Facebook.
Every time some charming famous man is accused of rape or assault—so, let's say on average about two or three times a year—the same chain reaction plays out all over the internet. First, the allegations come out. Next, practically before anyone else can get a word in edgewise, the let's-not-be-hasty-here folks jump out of whatever dark corner they've been hiding in since the last time a nice guy was accused of doing something bad. These people, who apparently don't sleep or have jobs because they seem to be able to spend 24 hours a day on social media arguing with anyone willing to engage them, have two favourite phrases: “you can't try someone in the court of public opinion,” and “innocent until proven guilty.”

The events surrounding Jian Ghomeshi's termination from the CBC and the subsequent allegations about him published in the Toronto Star have resulted in a textbook example of everything described above, and I swear to god if one more person says “presumption of innocence” to me, I'm going to flip a table. At this point, the words have ceased to mean anything other than, “stop talking about this thing that I don't want you to talk about.” And as for the concept of the court of public opinion, I'm side-eyeing the hell out of anyone criticizing folks for pre-emptively speaking out about the possibility that Ghomeshi might be guilty. Because in my experience, the people crying about this imaginary court (which, by the way, can't actually put anyone on trial or send them to jail) are hypocrites who take no issue with the people publicly supporting Ghomeshi.

None of this is to say that the public's view of an event can't have powerful consequences; studies have shown that, in fact, popular opinion can influence the outcome of real court cases. However, I've found that the only time the so-called court of public opinion is brought up right now is as a way of silencing those who are critical of Ghomeshi, specifically women.

The fact is that Ghomeshi has spent the last three days doing his utmost to gain the public's sympathy and pity. Posting that Facebook status was a calculated move on his part; it was no accident that he managed to work in references to his recently-deceased father, his grieving mother and, perhaps most absurdly, his talent as a radio host. For the past few days, Ghomeshi has been hard at work trying to create a bias against his as-yet-unnamed accusers—and so far, he seems to be succeeding. Yet very few people seem to be concerned about the effect that publicly accusing women of crying rape for revenge or profit will have on “public opinion.” No one seems to care about how supporting Ghomeshi will influence other women who want to come forward about being raped or assaulted.

Consider this: before we knew anything about the women accusing Ghomeshi, before we were even aware of what their allegations were, we knew that Jian was calling at least one of them a manipulative liar. A full 12 hours before the Toronto Star had published the accusations against Ghomeshi, he had already cast himself in the role of a victim. Ghomeshi's public Facebook page has tripled its number of fans since his post about the allegations went up; over 100,000 people have liked this post, and nearly 50,000 have shared it. A petition to “BAND TOGETHER AND SHOW THE CBC HOW MANY PEOPLE ARE IMPACTED BY THEIR IRRATIONAL DECISION” (whatever that means) has over 4,000 signatures. This isn't to say that there haven't been any detractors—if you comb through the comments on his post, you'll see people questioning the veracity of his story—but it's safe to say that Ghomeshi has generally enjoyed a fair amount of popular support.

Now tell me who's been trying to sway public opinion here.

Jian Ghomeshi is, in the eyes of the law, innocent until proven guilty. This is an important part of our judicial system, and it should be respected. However—and I can't emphasize this enough—the presumption of innocence should extend to all parties involved. The presumption of innocence does not mean that you should assume that these women are lying about being assaulted until proven otherwise.

Here is the plain truth: Ghomeshi is alleging that a group of women, at least one of whom he describes as a “jilted ex-girlfriend," have fabricated a story specifically to discredit him. Ghomeshi wants us to believe that these women will somehow profit off of this, when in fact it's pretty clear that the opposite is more likely. According to the Toronto Star, the reason that these women have not come forward before now, and the reason they are still withholding their names, is because they're worried about what the public's reaction will be—and considering that in the wake of Gamergate several of the women involved felt threatened enough by the online backlash to leave their homes, these concerns aren't unfounded. Ghomeshi was afraid of losing his job; these women are afraid of losing a great deal more than that.

Ghomeshi will be just fine. I can almost guarantee you that he'll be overwhelmed with offers to host other radio shows at various stations. He'll do a few weepy interviews on a few daytime talk shows. He'll probably get a book deal or two. Whatever happens, he'll land firmly on his feet. Men in his position very rarely suffer any real and lasting consequences for these types of allegations—look at Roman Polanski, or Woody Allen, or Chris Brown. Even when there is plenty of solid evidence and a conviction has taken place, men who abuse and rape manage to come out on top.

So don't worry about how Jian Ghomeshi will fare in the court of public opinion—many people decided that he was innocent before they had any clue what the allegations were. Instead, worry about how women—all women, not just the women accusing Ghomeshi—will be affected by the discourse surrounding this.

@anne_theriault

Photo by Jan Ainali via Wikicommons

Ever been to an honest-to-goodness Catholic Mass? Well, you should—especially now that it's Halloween season. The amount of incantations, candles, robes, and terrifying imagery at your local Mass will put any haunted house to shame. But it's nothing compared to the old-timey Masses that were the norm before the Second Vatican Council of 1962. Before that mini-reformation, Masses were done entirely in Latin, and the priest would face away from the congregation as he spoke toward the altar. Imagine a cloaked old man mumbling all sorts of weird nonsense into a wall as smoke from nearby candles slowly curls around the whole scene. Just gave myself the heebie jeebies.

But why turn away from the congregation? Why all the secrecy? Because that's how magic works. 

Priests have always been the gatekeepers in Catholicism. They're the holy translators between Earthly peons and the Man Upstairs. Other religions have their own gatekeepers: Jews have rabbis, Muslims have Imans, Scientologists have OT VIIIs. These people are a vital part of the business model. Without them, who collects the money? 

But as informational democracy expands, power becomes less centralized. Just look at Martin Luther back in the 1520s. He took advantage of the invention of the printing press and cut the legs out from under the Catholics. Today, the internet is democratizing everything. CNN is being swapped out for Twitter. Pirate Bay's being used in place of cable. So the big question is, Do religions need gatekeepers anymore?

Syntheism, the first “open source” religion, thinks not. 

“Just take whatever you want and make it your own thing,” says Tom Knox, one of the religion's founders. “Whatever works for you... do it. You don't need to ask anybody's permission.”

That's the ethos of the new atheistic religious movement. Syntheism originated from Alain de Botton's 2011 TED Talk entitled Atheism 2.0, which wondered how atheists could achieve the same feelings of community and awe that religious believers experience. As de Botton summarized the paradox, “I can't believe in these doctrines, I don't think these doctrines are right, but I love Christmas carols.”

To Knox, that message hit home. “I came to see the particularities of god as unimportant to any religion.” With de Botton's words leading the way, Knox and other atheists from around the world created a Facebook page to debate and construct their own religion, one that non-believers could latch onto.

“We can freely steal/borrow whatever ritual or concept we want, from any religion, or even fictional religion from books we like,” Knox says. “It's not like any god is going to punish us for it.” 

That was last January. There are now 1,332 members of Syntheism on Facebook. “It spread fast,” says Knox, “even though it was literally nothing.”

Just how nothing? When you try to find a set of core beliefs for Syntheism, it becomes painfully clear.

According to their Facebook page, Syntheism is “the art of nonknowledge.”

If that's no help, the page also attempts to describe the Syntheist deity: “So while Jehovah may be the god of unpredictable mood swings, Allah the god of obedience and reward, and Jesus the god of masochism and mercy, Atheos is the god of utter and complete silence from which Agape springs.” 

Alexander Bard, a musician and philosopher who makes regular appearances as a judge on Swedish Pop Idol, is one of Syntheism's founders and most famous members. He has spent a great deal of time thinking about the religion and trying to break down the faith's core concepts. 

To that end, in an interview with the Guardian, he came to the conclusion that, "Religion is first practiced, then formulated. Saint Paul wrote his letters after Christianity was being practiced across the Roman Empire. I firmly believe that Syntheism is already being practiced and we are just formulating it." 

In other words, the Syntheists are looking to see what works first, and then forming a religion from it. 

At its core, the main thing that ties every Syntheist together is the belief that there is no main thing. As a review of Syntheism – Creating God in the Internet Age—Bard's book on Syntheism, which he wrote while “lying next to a beautiful naked actress at Burning Man”—puts it, “The Syntheism god is the swarm.” 

“We decided early against any universal principals all members had to submit to,” says Knox. “The Syntheist mass is very open to change. And does change from time to time. We see it as constantly evolving. With the internet today, leaders aren't necessary. Any crap can be spontaneously crowd-sourced in no time.”

But can a religion without central leadership actually work? 

“It's a very interesting experiment in what you might call post-modern skeptical religion,” says Dr. Stephen O'Leary, a USC professor who focuses on studying religious communication. “But it seems to me, this is an experiment bound to fail.” 

To O'Leary, the fact that the group doesn't have any central beliefs is where it loses steam. “There's that joke about herding cats—how do you get people like that to come together on anything.” Other religious groups have tried to use consensus to form rules, the Quakers being among the most notable. But there's a reason you don't know any Quakers. “It's anarchistic, and how much do anarchists actually cooperate.”

More vital to O'Leary's skepticism is the lack of mystery, which is inherently woven into the fabric of hierarchy. “Mystery is an integral part of the religious experience, even if it's experienced purely objectively,” he says. “Magic, mystery, it all goes to support authority.” 

The cloaks, candles, incantations, crucifix... they all get their power from—and in turn, grant their power to the authority overseeing the religion. The priest chanting in Latin, the Talmudic rabbi consulting the Torah, the cult leader looking into the stars and finding the spaceship that'll whisk everyone away. It's the fact these gatekeepers exist to tell their followers that the symbols or rituals are important that ultimately makes them important, which in turn makes the gatekeepers more important, and back and forth it goes.  

“If you're trying to have a religion where everyone is equal and everyone has an equal voice, it's admirable,” concludes O'Leary. “But I've never seen it work.” 

One theory for the origin of the phrase “hocus pocus” is that it began as a parody of the Latin phrase, “Hoc est corpus meum.” This is what Catholic priests used to say, back in the day, during the most important part of the Mass, when they were magically turning their torn pieces of bread into (according to the Scripture) actual pieces of Jesus Christ's body. If you translate “Hoc est corpus meum," it means something like “This is my body.” Which, sure, is still full of odd poetry. But it ain't magic. 

Magic can't exist when you know what the magician's doing. Syntheism is trying to make some without a magician at all. 

Pope Francis hangs out. Photo via the Catholic Church of England and Wales's Flickr account

Yesterday, Pope Francis told the Pontifical Academy of Arts and Sciences that it’s cool to believe in both evolution and the Big Bang, adding that they prove the existence of a creator. “When we read about Creation in Genesis, we run the risk of imagining God was a magician, with a magic wand able to do everything. But that is not so,” the Pope said. “He created human beings and let them develop according to the internal laws that he gave to each one so they would reach their fulfilment.”

Since he became the Catholic Church’s 266th leader in March 2013, the Argentinian has earned the reputation for being both progressive and divisive. Although many Catholics and the media have celebrated his relatively liberal stances on divorce, homosexuality, and now science, critics say that he’ll alienate conservative Catholics with his liberal views. As Ross Douthat wrote in the New York Times on Sunday, this approach has resulted in internal tensions among church officials and might very well lead to a schism.

Douthat says that the path toward reconciling Western mores about sex and science with the church’s traditional doctrine is “dangerous” because it stands to alienate staunch supporters who are more likely to join the priesthood or donate money to the Church. But that’s a rather the-glass-is-half-empty way of looking at it: A Pew poll from earlier this year showed that 85 percent of young Catholics are “accepting” of homosexuality, and what’s more, a majority of all Catholics believe in evolution. Some of the old guard may recoil at Francis’s emphasizing of a more tolerant version of Catholicism, but membership in the priesthood and the sisterhood is already in sharp decline; why not try to appeal to young Catholics and try to get them excited about their church?  

While Francis’s latest declaration is making headlines, it shouldn't be surprising to see him embrace science. After all, it was a Catholic who initially suggested the Big Bang theory (the theory, not the show) in 1927—Georges Lemaître, a Belgian priest and physics professor, was the first to hypothesize that a primordial atom once contained all the matter in the universe. And Francis’s remarks don’t constitute any change in doctrine: In 2012, the Vatican’s chief astronomer affirmed belief in the Big Bang and evolution was compatible with the Catholic faith.

There’s a fairly long history, actually, of pontiffs giving the OK to evolution: Pope Pius XII, who took over the post in 1939 and is now consecrated as a saint, reluctantly accepted evolution back in 1950, so long as the process of creating a soul was left to God. Almost 50 years later, Pope John Paul II went a step further, calling it an “effectively proven fact.”

In other words, most of what the Pope is saying is relatively uncontroversial, at least if you’ve kept your “what Catholics can believe in” handbooks up to date. Most of the Christians debating the age of the Earth and whether we came from monkeys are Protestant Evangelicals. Secular liberals are welcome to praise Francis, of course (you can practically hear the sound of a bunch of desktop backgrounds shifting from Bill Nye the Science Guy to the pope), but we should remember that more Americans today consider themselves Evangelical than Catholic. For the vast majority of those who deny accepted scientific theories, Pope Francis’s endorsement of those theories just proves that both he and science are wrong.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

Photo via Flickr user Adam Meek

In July 2010, a homeless street preacher named Marvin Booker was being processed in a Denver County jail when a guard directed him toward a cell. Booker walked in the opposite direction, indicating he needed to grab his shoes. An officer grabbed his arm and Booker resisted, pushing her away. Three more officers jumped on top of him, tasing Booker in the thigh before placing him in a sleeper hold. When the officers stood up, they found Booker limp on the ground, unconscious. He was dead. 

Earlier this month, a federal grand jury awarded Booker’s family $4.65 million, the largest police settlement in Denver history. “The fight leading up to that verdict was exhausting,” says Darold Killmer, the Booker family attorney. “The city spent millions defending themselves against charges of excessive force."

Over the past four years, a number of protests were carried out in Booker’s name, some of which resulted in clashes with police. A 2011 march ended with the explosion of a firecracker, resulting in a 20-year-old protester being charged with attempted murder of two police officers for lighting the fuse. Killmer’s other clients include the family of Emily Rice, a woman who bled to death in a Denver jail in 2006 after her wounds from an alcohol-related car accident were left unattended.

The Denver Post recently estimated that the city has paid out nearly $13 million over the past decade in settlements involving misconduct from the police and sheriff’s departments—and that number doesn't include the nearly $10 million they’ve been ordered to shell out in the last few months. This follows a trend seen in other law enforcement agencies around the country. Chicago has paid nearly half a billion dollars over the last ten years, and New York has paid a similar amount over the last five.

But do massive payouts actually make people trust the system, or just remind us of all the awful things cops have been up to lately while normalizing the process of making amends after law enforcement crosses a line?

Killmer had originally asked the jury to award Booker’s family $15 million, determined “to send a message” to the Denver Police Department. “Denver would perversely claim victory if it was ‘only’ a million dollars,” he told me. “This city has quite a history of brutality in its law enforcement agencies. Marvin’s death was a tipping point for community tolerance of this behavior.”

So why does Mary Dodge, a criminology professor at the University of Colorado Denver, think police payouts can actually increase tension between cops and civilians?

“Rather than looking at the police department positively, [citizens are] paying out lots of money,” she told me in an interview. “One incident a year can cost the city millions of dollars, and it can take years for the public to regain trust.”

Dodge thinks city resources might be better spent on preventative measures to keep police from harming the public in the first place. And she's hardly shocked that jails are the sites of some horrific incidents.

“If we see a lot of excessive force cases in jails, it’s because they don’t have a lot of structured oversight like you do with police departments.” she said. “Jails are often ignored. It’s difficult to find high-quality employees for correctional officers—they’re not paid very much. It’s an area that’s often ignored by research and by the public until something tragic happens.”

That helps explain the tragic case of Jamal Hunter, who endured beatings and the burning of his genitals with boiling water while an inmate of a Denver Corrections facility in 2011. Hunter argued that the incident was carried with the approval of the jail’s guards and in August, the Denver City Council voted to give him a $3.25 million settlement.

Tales of misconduct by Denver law enforcement aren’t exactly hard to come by. In 2009, a pair of local cops were videotaped beating and macing four women—who showed no evidence of criminal activity—outside of the Denver Diner, resulting in a $360,000 settlement. That same year, 19-year-old Alex Landau was pulled over for an illegal left turn, and while his car was being searched he asked to see a warrant. Instead, he was given a broken nose, a concussion, and 45 stitches across his face. The City Council agreed to pay him $795,000 in 2011.

“I was beaten almost to death with fists, a radio, flashlights, and I had a gun put to my head,” Landau said, speaking into a microphone at a protest against police brutality in Denver last Wednesday, only a few blocks from where the incident took place. “After I regained consciousness, the police laughed, saying, ‘Where’s that warrant now you fucking nigger?’ and, ‘You don’t know how close you were to getting your fucking head blown off.’”

With only around a hundred people in attendance, Denver’s contribution to a national day of action against police misconduct amounted to a therapy session for trauma victims. The sun was setting over the mountains, and the chilly air made everyone huddle close together as one story after another involving death at the hands of cops unfolded.

Jack Jacquez Jr., 27, was shot in the back only ten days earlier in by local police in Rocky Ford, Colorado. In a written statement read aloud at the police protest, his father said the police officer was off-duty at the time of the shooting (in happened at 2:30 AM, in Jacquez’s home), and that he believes the officer had a personal vendetta against his son.

“We expect our officers to act in a respectful and professional manner at all times,” a Denver Police Public Information Officer wrote in an email response to my inquiry about this pattern of violence. “If a situation happens when an officer does not act as he/she is expected to, we will be transparent about the situation.”

The officer added that the department is currently in a pilot stage of an officer body camera program, and have “asked Denver City Council for a budget expansion for the 2015 budget so that we can purchase 800 cameras for all patrol and traffic officers.” Police departments around the country are moving toward camera programs. Some early indicators suggest cameras make a real difference, but it remains to be seen if they can change the policing culture in big cities like Denver and New York.

But a lack of transparency isn’t the primary grievance lobbied against the Denver cops, or police nationwide. Instead, it's the paucity of accountability. Very few of the officers involved in these stories have lost their jobs, and distrust tends to linger. The Emily Rice settlement was supposed to include new training procedures for cops, but all her family has seen so far is the money (they recently called a videotaped police instructional video mandated by the court a "whitewash" ). Landau's case was referred to the FBI, but the Department of Justice decided there wasn't enough evidence to pursue charges for civil rights violations.

Ultimately, cash settlements make for splashy newspaper copy, but don't seem to produce any lasting change.

“When they do settle, they put a price on your life,” Landau told me at the police brutality event. “That’s the city saying, ‘This is what your life is worth to make this injustice go away.’ Colorado sets money aside to settle these disputes out of court, because it’s business as usual.”

Follow Josiah M. Hesse on Twitter.

Vintage dress from Route 66

PHOTOS BY GIBSON FOX (FEELTHEFUTURE)
STYLING: RENEE WARNE (FEELTHEFUTURE)

Hair: Nina Ratsaphong at Prema
Makeup: Emma Bartik
Models: Chandra and Harrison at Jaz Daly Management, Henry at The Agency

Amerian Apparel T-shirt


COMME des GARÇONS shirt, Levi's jeans


Vintage dress from Route 66; Calvin Klein T-shirt, Dickies pants


Vintage dress from Route 66


American Apparel thermal


Lover dress, vintage earrings; Karen Walker dress, vintage necklace


American Apparel thermal, vintage mechanics suit from Route 66; Lonely lingerie
 
American Apparel sweater and skirt


Calvin Klein T-shirt, Dickies pants
Follow FEELTHEFUTURE on Instagram.

Illustrations by Penelope Gazin

Crushes are immense but ultimately pointless feelings for someone you barely know, and I’ve had plenty of them. In the past, some of my crushes were so intense I felt like I was bordering on mental illness. I was obsessive. I memorized intricate paths to get to classes that would ensure I could catch a glimpse of the boy I liked. I would stalk him much like a lion stalks a gazelle, except I never pounced. I would force my friends to make our regular lunch spot wherever my crush and his friends ate. I would attempt to eavesdrop on his conversations, to find out what he'd be doing that weekend or whether he had a crush on someone (preferably me). I would try so hard to stare at him in class yet make it seem like I wasn’t staring at all. My one wish in life was to find out that he was doing the same non-stare stare back at me. Crushes are fucking pathetic. However, as pathetic as they are, they also made me the person I am today. For better, or worse. I’ve learned from my crushes some harsh truths about myself, and also about life. Let’s look at some examples.

ANTHONY

Anthony was the first boy I had serious fantasies about. I pined for him most of elementary school. He had thick, blond hair and big, blue eyes. He was pretty much Hitler’s wet dream. To a self-loathing Jewish girl like myself, this was a match made in heaven.

I got my big break in the fourth grade. Anthony and I were the biggest talkers in our class, so our teacher, Mrs. Laskin, gave us our own table to sit at, away from the other kids. What was meant to be punishment turned into the happiest time of my childhood—and probably my adulthood too. I was sitting next to Anthony. I thanked God, who at the time I genuinely believed in after being forced to go to Hebrew School three times a week.

Secluded away together, we became friends. One day, during class, something major happened. Anthony gave me a Jar Jar Binks toy from a kid’s meal. Anthony thought of me outside of school, got a toy that was meant to be for him, and wanted me to have it. Did I care that it was Jar Jar Binks? No way. At that moment, Jar Jar Binks was the greatest Star Wars character of all time. At that moment, I loved Jar Jar Binks because Jar Jar Binks was the symbol of a new love that was bound to flourish. How could anyone hate Jar Jar Binks?

Fast-forward a few weeks. I was playing with my friends at lunch when Anthony tapped me on the shoulder and asked if we could speak in private. Finally, it was happening. He was moments away from confessing his love for me, and I was moments away from telling him I loved him too. We walked to a bench and sat down. I asked him what he wanted to talk about. He said, “Do you know if Shirley likes Britney Spears?”

Shirley was my best friend.

On the inside, I was freaking out. On the outside, I played it cool. I replied, “Yeah, I think so.” Honestly though, what a stupid question. Of course she did. This was the early 2000s and Britney Spears was the biggest pop star in the world. We were far too young to form real opinions about art and culture outside of what our favorite television channels and radio stations selectively fed us, so we had to conclude that Britney Spears made the best music ever to exist.

He continued: “Cool. I want to buy her a Britney Spears CD and ask her to be my girlfriend. Do you think she’ll say yes?”

At that moment, everything clicked. Anthony didn’t give me that Jar Jar Binks toy because he liked me. He gave me that Jar Jar Binks toy because it was a Jar Jar Binks toy. He sure as hell didn’t want it. Instead of throwing it away, he thought to himself, Why not give this to the human equivalent of trash in my life? That trash being me. This tragic incident taught me a lot about dating. It taught me to never make assumptions when it comes to men and their intentions. If a boy likes you, he’ll probably tell you. I also learned that Jar Jar Binks is definitely a piece of shit and that there is no God.

MATT

Looking back, I didn’t have a crush on the first boy I kissed. I didn’t even have a crush on the guy I lost my virginity to. They were just there when I decided to finally get it over with. When I had my first kiss, my real crush was on a boy named Matt. This was in the seventh grade, although, I liked Matt all of sixth grade too. Why did I like Matt so much? Well, he wore the same Misfits shirt to school every day and looked a lot like the lead singer of Sum 41. That was all I needed to be in love with someone. My first kiss, Shawn, liked Weezer and did not look like any member of Sum 41. At the time, Shawn was an embarrassment to me because children are stupid.

In the seventh grade, Matt and I were seated next to one another in English class. Behind me was a kid named David who made fun of me constantly. (At the time I hated him, but recently realized that maybe he just had a crush on me.) During class one day, David called me a dildo. Matt heard this and started laughing, because dildos are hilarious. I had no idea what a dildo was (though now, I am very familiar with them), and thought he was calling me a “dodo.” I replied, “Shut up, I’m not a dumb extinct bird!” In my mind, this was a funnier thing to say than the word "dildo." I still had a lot to learn about comedy. David and Matt let out an even harder laugh. Matt then asked, “You don’t know what a dildo is?” To prevent further embarrassment, I decided to be honest and said no. I then pleaded with him to tell me what it was, but he wouldn’t do it. This was the most we had ever talked during the whole time that I loved him, and it was enough to keep me going for the rest of that school year.

Shawn and I are friends on Facebook. By looking at his pictures, it seems to me that he is in a happy relationship and really likes wearing V-necks. Matt, on the other hand, does not have a Facebook. I found his sister and his brother, but not him. This means that Matt either has grown up to be even cooler than he already was or he is dead.

Both Matt and Shawn taught me that I have a tendency to not be attracted to the people that are attracted to me. I'm stubborn with my feelings, and probably missed out on a lot of good opportunities because of said stubbornness.

JAMES

James was the first guy I had a serious crush on after high school. I met him at the beginning of sophomore year of college. We clicked in that stereotypical I love that movie too sort of way. We hung out nearly every day. One weekend, he took me to his hometown to meet his best friends and even his mom. We talked on the phone when we weren’t together, something I rarely do because I am a sad product of the “just text me” generation. In my mind, we were a couple—a couple without any of the physical parts, which is the real meat and bones of a relationship.

Frustrated by my boneless and meatless love life, I decided to confront him about it. To my surprise, he was surprised that I was under the impression we might have romantic feelings for one another. “We’re just friends,” he said. He asked me why I thought he might have feelings for me. I brought up the mom thing. Apparently, I was crazy for thinking that meant anything. He wasn’t attracted to me. I was upset, obviously, but did the emotionally mature thing and buried my sadness deep down into the pit of my stomach and acted like everything was just fine. Either I was a good actress or James was the perfect masochist to my sadist, but we continued our close friendship as if nothing has happened.

James and I eventually did end up having sex the following year, on Valentine’s Day. After watching the movie Kids. That’s right, I had sex after watching Kids. That’s how much I liked him. He still didn’t have feelings for me, yet the guy wanted to have sex after watching Kids. In case you didn’t think this could get sadder, this is still probably the most romantic Valentine’s Day I have ever had.

With James I learned that I’m good at repeating mistakes, and will probably keep doing so. Not sure if you noticed, but this incident was basically the Anthony incident. This time there was just some sex involved, and James's mom played the part of Jar Jar Binks. At least now I know to never watch Kids ever again.

As agonizing crushes can be, they're important to have. Also, incredibly unavoidable. You can't stop yourself from developing deep feelings for people. If you can, you might be a serial killer or a banker. I am working on being better at all this. In recent years, I've put effort into being forward, and making my feelings clear upfront. Not only that, but I've been going on real dates. The kind of dates where you both say to each other, “Let's go on a date." Not, “Let's hang out” or “lLt's grab some drinks.” These convoluted phrases have given me far too many thought spasms. I'm done dissecting the 38 different definitions of “hang out.”

I don't doubt that I'll fall for another Anthony, Matt, or James. As said earlier, I'm good at repeating mistakes. At least now I am somewhat aware of them as they're happening. That kind of helps soften the blow when things ultimately fall apart. I am also far more open to giving the Shawns in my life a chance. A few times, this has turned out well. That's improvement right? I still haven't been in a relationship for longer than six months, but I'm working on it. Baby steps, Alison. Baby steps. OK, maybe this baby is still in the crawling stage, I don't know. What the hell am I doing with this baby anyways? That's a question for another time.

Follow Alison Stevenson on Twitter.

A sign painted onto a building in Freston Road, Notting Hill, marking the Free Independent Republic of Frestonia. All photos by Tony Sleep

In 1977, squatters in Freston Road, Notting Hill, in London, declared independence from the British state. Facing eviction by the Greater London Council (GLC), the community figured the best way to evade the constraints imposed on them was to just free themselves of those constraints altogether. So they lobbied the UN and established a 1.8-acre microstate—“The Free and Independent Republic of Frestonia”—complete with its own postage stamps, visas, and passports.

The 100-odd citizens of Frestonia varied from actors, artists, and addicts to normal working class Londoners and assorted bohemian flotsam. Playwright—and one of London’s first graffiti artists—Heathcote Williams was Ambassador to Great Britain. David Rappaport (the actor who starred as Randall, King of the Dwarves in Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits) was the Minister of Foreign Affairs. A two-year-old child named Francesco Bogina Bramley was the Minister of Education.

If the same thing happened today (which it probably wouldn’t, because squatting in residential buildings is now something you can go to jail for), police would likely move in with eviction papers and battering rams. But back then, living in abandoned buildings apparently wasn’t seen as the abhorrent transgression we now know it to be. In fact, even Tory Member of Parliament Geoffrey Howe—Margaret Thatcher’s longest-serving Cabinet minister—wrote to the Frestonians expressing his support, saying, “I can hardly fail to be moved by your aspirations.”

Photographer Tony Sleep—who documented the period in his Frestonia photo series—was one of the microstate’s very first residents.

"I was working with an alternative work agency called Gentle Ghost at the time," he tells me. "Notting Hill was full of all kinds of nascent counter-culture projects, which was why I moved there. I’d split up with my girlfriend and moved into one of the squats on Freston Road as it was opening up."

Before Notting Hill became a byword for gentrification—and the stomping ground of a weird mix of fund managers, Italian tourists, and artisanal candle designers—it wasn’t exactly a desirable area. Now somewhere a holistic pet spa could conceivably turn a profit, it used to be a hash-scented expanse of dilapidated buildings and barren yards—the perfect breeding ground for a countercultural scene.

"Notting Hill was incredibly lively in those days," says Tony. "The whole area was in a political turmoil of minority rights, race hate, pressure groups… you name it. People wanted to experiment with different ways of living. It was so far away from the gentrified place that it is now, full of merchant bankers. A lot of Notting Hill was a slum.”

"Frestonian entertainers would always attract hordes of kids from the local estates," writes Tony. "Mostly they despised the squatters, but they loved fire. Every few days some would set fire to dumped tires or cars or rubbish just to watch the fire brigade turn up."

The 1960s public housing boom, and accompanying high-rise buildings, saw entire streets of condemned terrace housing sitting empty throughout the rest of the decade and into the early 70s—a situation that helped to facilitate large-scale squatting in the capital. However, as social problems from failed new housing estates took hold on the area, so too did tensions between squatters and the recently shifted long-term residents.

‘‘With the local community, it was difficult,” recalls Tony. “Many of them were not happy—the dream didn't work out with those 60s estates, as we well know. Yes, it was nice to escape the damp and the horrible housing that we then squatted, but I think people were put out to see a ‘bunch of freeloaders’ come in and take over their old homes. We had communal gardens. We were on the ground floor. They were 20 storys up in a broken lift, looking down on their old homes.’’

"There was also the class thing," he continues. "The area surrounding Freston Road back then was poor and very working class. It was an industrial area full of breakers yards... a lot of gangsters. There was dereliction and poverty everywhere. There was a big cultural difference between us and people who thought we’d come in and stolen the housing that—in some ways—they would have preferred to stay in."

Houses in Freston Road were squatted for four years before the idea for a declaration of independence was floated. Drawn up by Nick Albery—a cultural agitator and, later, a Green Party candidate—the inspiration was the classic 1949 comedy Passport to Pimlico, in which an unexploded WWII bomb detonates, exposing an old document that declares Pimlico to be part of Burgundy and its residents honorary “Burgundians”—an identity they take to with determined, drunken relish.

David Rappaport, the Frestonia Minister of Foreign Affairs, lived in Frestonia before making his name as an actor

"The GLC decided that they were going to kick out all the dirty squatters, knock down the housing, and leave a field of rubble,” says Tony. “We weren’t very happy about that. There was no plan, no greater scheme for building alternative housing. They just wanted to clear the site.

"Nick was the father of the whole idea, along with David Rappaport and Heathcote Williams. There was also a chap called Mick Saunders who wrote Alternative London, a countercultural compendium of all the stuff that was happening in the 1970s. Those four cooked up the idea. They rented a 16-mm copy of Passport to Pimlico, set up a local screening for anyone who wanted to watch it, and said, ‘Shall we do this?’ And everybody said, ‘Well, yes, I suppose we could.’ It was an expedient response, one that came out of threat. But it was also a great bit of theater, and fantastic PR.”

On October 31, 1977, independence was declared. Thanks to the subsequent media attention, the GLC found it more difficult than ever to broach the subject of full-scale demolition. The head of the GLC, Sir Horace Cutler, wrote a letter to the residents stating that “if you didn’t exist, it would be necessary to make you up.” Nick Albery responded, “Since we do exist, why is it necessary to destroy us?”

"Miss Nazi were a local punk band who made the Sex Pistols seem sophisticated and restrained. They made little pretenze of musical ability, but were cutting edge when it came to upsetting people."

There are certain things that every sovereign state needs, and the Frestonians were quick to get themselves up to international standards. They introduced postage stamps, for instance, that replaced the Queen with “Gary the Gorilla.”

"There was a visa stamp, there were postage stamps, there was a little table on the entrance to Frestonia that would stamp passports,” recalls Tony. “People managed to send letters around the world using Frestonia stamps. God knows how, but they worked... they were actually recognized by the Post Office.”

Frestonia’s cultural scene was equally industrious. The “Frestonian National Theatre” (at the Peoples Hall, Freston Road) ran the London premiere of Heathcote Williams’s The Immoralist, while the “Frestonian National Film Institute” held regular movie screenings. In 1982, as Frestonia celebrated its fifth anniversary, the Clash recorded much of Combat Rock at Peoples Hall.

Richard Adams, a Frestonia resident, invented a coat of arms for the community, bearing the motto: “Nos Sumos Una Familia,” or “We are all one family.” Like in any extended family, however, a certain amount of tension between residents was inevitable.

"It created a dynamic kind of friction,” says Tony. “Everyone had an equal right to be there, so in a way you just had to get along. Generally, what we all had in common was that we were under threat of being chucked out and made homeless—exactly the psychology you had during the Blitz. You end up with a community forging itself because of external threat.

“The thing about squatting is that there are no gateway requirements. There was no homogeneity to it at all; it was a complete spectrum of people. I suppose you could say that there was a dominant hippie element to it because of what squatting was at that time, but you also had people who were homeless for all kinds of reasons. There were a lot of people with drug and alcohol problems; there were a lot of people who had a history of mental illness; and there were ordinary working-class people who just needed somewhere to live.”

"The Apocalypse Hotel. Definitely far out along the punk axis, the inhabitants were compulsively creative, even though it usually meant wrecking things. The frontage of the hotel changed almost weekly, from camouflage to spattered blood-red, to detritus collage. Inside, staircases vanished overnight, walls were purely provisional, and it was a dangerous place for the careless."

Residents were consistently harassed by both the police and criminals in the area, the former wanting to bust people for drugs and the latter wanting to steal the supply. In fact, break-in attempts were so frequent that Tony resorted to stacking bricks next to his bed in case he ever needed a midnight projectile.

Despite that aggro, the community forged on. By 1982, Frestonia encompassed 23 houses containing 97 residents, and the GLC had abandoned plans for a demolition—though it was still determined to redevelop the site. 

In a bid to keep a hold on their home, residents set themselves up as Bramley’s Housing Co-Op (all Frestonia residents adopted the surname Bramley, the idea being that the GLC would have to move them all as one family if they eventually kicked them out) and negotiated a deal with the Notting Hill housing trust.

That step towards legitimacy essentially spelled the end of Frestonia, with a number of new residents moving in who were unable to stick to the ideals of the Frestonian “nation.” However, as Nick Albery wrote in 1983, it was still a small victory for the community, which had spent the better part of a decade battling the GLC and had now saved “a small part of West London from a bleak future.”

It’s a sentiment that Tony echoes: "The spirit of Frestonia is still there in a sense, because Bramley’s is still there. And because we formed the co-op, we were able to have some input into what got built. So an echo of the old Frestonia exists… culturally, it’s different down there.”

Follow Harry Sword on Twitter and see more of Tony Sleep's photos on his website.

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Chris Christie and Andrew Cuomo recently decided to quarantine medical workers who have come in contact with Ebola, despite many doctors and health experts telling them that their strategy is dumb. Ted Cruz and Rick Perry have also advocated for more fear-based isolation strategies. Doctors keep stressing calm, and explaining that American medical workers need to be able to travel to and from places like Liberia freely in order to fight the epidemic, and politicians keep getting itching to start quarantining everyone who has ever coughed.

Still, holding centers and isolation zones are are a fact of life in places like Liberia, and they need to be used carefully and correctly. I talked to Dr. Susan McLellan, a professor of both clinical and tropical medicine at Tulane University’s School of Medicine, who has also worked extensively in both Haiti and Rwanda. She told me what deceptively simple but effectively things can be done, and why those things aren’t so simple in developing parts of Africa. She also told me about how fear can make everything worse.

VICE: What can holding centers in developing parts of the world can do to help stop the spread of infectious diseases? 
Dr. Susan McLellan: In less developed parts of the world, it’s particularly difficult because copious running water, paper towels, and things like that are not necessarily easily available, so that makes a real difference. What places that are establishing treatment units are trying to set up is availability of heavily chlorinated water for cleaning as well as lots of personal protective equipment, and that ends up being the basics, as well as a way to feed people who are being admitted. 

Are the Centers for Disease Control's new guidelines about medical workers not exposing skin around Ebola patients necessary? 
A great deal of misinformation continues to be spread about the level of protection required. The science tells us that this is a disease that is spread by contact with infectious bodily fluids, not through the air air or by skin that is exposed to the air around an Ebola patient. I know from personal experience that one can take care of many Ebola patients with skin exposed and not become infected. 

Why'd they change it?
There’s two reasons. One is the level of care that may be offered in United States institutions may include more procedures, which could potentially result in some kind of “spray,” which could reach exposed skin. Now, we don’t think the virus typically gets in through exposed skin but any contamination on exposed skin increases the risk that one could transfer that contamination to one’s eyes or mouth.

And the other reason?
A simple acknowledgement that fear trumps science. Because of a great deal of fear, individuals in situations where the bare minimum personal equipment was provided felt necessary to add on to it in ways that may not have been safe or may not have allowed for safe removal (of the equipment).

Extra layers of gloves or things that are taped on are difficult to remove in a controlled and careful fashion. In that sense the risk of contamination may be [increased]. The more layers one puts on the more there is a chance for exhaustion, which leads to the inability to move  in a controlled and careful fashion. And that puts not only the healthcare worker but also the patient at risk. 

Why has Ebola been so efficient in spreading throughout Africa? 
This is a disease that is spread between human beings because human beings care for each other when they’re sick. In Sub-Saharan Africa, families care for their families in the home until they are extremely ill or until death, as opposed to bringing them in at the first sign of fever. That is for a multitude of reasons, including the fact that healthcare facilities are not that good to start with, and they (families) have to pay for it and that may break them for a long time. They also may not be able to access a healthcare facility easily or they may mistrust the healthcare providers—all kinds of reasons. 

So a disease that is spread by close contact of bodily fluids—and which produces manifestations of vomit and diarrhea and production of a lot of unpleasant fluids—can be easily spread by the kind of care that is done in the household. 

I should reiterate that these are households, usually, which do not have running water, electricity, paper towels, and flush toilets. The likelihood that infectious materials will get on somebody’s skin and be there for a long time is hugely greater than in even the poorest households in the United States. In West Africa there is a very dense population, and these three countries are in the lowest on the Human Development Index. 

Is it just poverty, or is there anything else making it hard to fight Ebola in the region?
They have been ravaged by years of civil war, and are barely coming out of that, and they have a history of not entirely ethical governments. They also do not have well-established healthcare infrastructure to respond to any health threat, including the ones that existed in the past. With the density of population, also comes the fact that there are wonderful roads in that area, making transportation easy. And that has all combined to make this a spectacularly successful epidemic from the side of the virus. 

Are US hospitals properly equipped to deal with some of the more granular details in regards to infectious disease protocol? 
Hospitals’ levels of preparedness are, of course, varying. I think we’re all a lot further along now, having had our unfortunate sentinel chicken get hit in Dallas. That really brought it to many peoples’ attention that, in fact, somebody could walk into any hospital and that mistakes can easily be made if people don’t have a plan and are not prepared. I think preparation is much further along now. 

Follow Mason Miller on Twitter. 

Illustrations by Sally Klann

The nightmares began shortly after I turned in the final draft of my book. My body was asleep in California, but the dream-me was standing inside the Western State Hospital for the Insane in Tennessee. That’s where she was: my murderess.

Alice Mitchell, a young woman who was buried over 120 years ago, only appeared to me at night. They were vivid dreams: When I looked around it was only me and the creeping vines. There were shards of white plaster and dirt scattered across the floor, slowly shifting as the wind danced across the room. There were shelves of suitcases stacked every which way against the wall, varying in size and shape. I looked at the woven wicker and worn leather canvasses, their brass locks sealed. A small valise with decorative roses caught my eye, and I reached for the manila cardstock hanging from the half-detached, broken handle.

“Patient 319” was written in plain print on the front. I knew whom that number belonged to, but I turned the tag over anyway: Alice Mitchell.

In 1892, 19-year-old Alice pilfered her father’s razor and slashed the throat of her ex-fiancée, 17-year-old Frederica Ward. A sensational courtroom inquisition followed, in which Alice’s left-handedness was proposed as an early sign of the violence to come, and her tendency to nosebleeds expertly diagnosed as “vicarious menstruation,” a gendered symptom of madness. The presiding judge was a renowned egomaniac and a founding member of the Tennessee Ku Klux Klan.

This wasn’t a murder trial. The court could not possibly impugn the honor of a well-bred young lady by branding her a criminal. The defense argued that Alice’s desire to marry her same-sex lover was clearly the action of an insane person, and no medical expert in the state of Tennessee dared to disagree. “An impossible idea,” they called her love for Freda, before deeming Alice incurable and remanding her to the asylum. There was no hope of getting it out. It was as good as a life sentence.

There’s a dearth of information about the years Alice spent in the Western State Hospital for the Insane. Whether by her own volition or not, Alice gave few interviews, and they’re wildly inconsistent. The Bolivar Bulletin, the asylum’s own publication, reported that “her insanity is progressive, and it is only a question of time when this victim of erratic [sic] mania will be a driveling idiot through the decay of brain tissue.” At the same time, Alice was described as a “bright, happy, laughing girl.” I doubt the veracity of both claims.

By the time Alice arrived in the three-year-old asylum, it was already overcrowded, which meant multiple patients shared rooms meant to hold far fewer, and would be eventually “warehoused” in larger rooms. It also meant the staff was overworked. They were supposed to facilitate Alice’s “moral treatment,” which should have entailed some of kind of work to occupy the mind, regular exercise, and a healthy diet. But what “progress” could she actually make? Patients rarely “recovered” in 19th-century asylums. Many were treated no better than prisoners in medieval torture chambers.

I feared the worse for Alice. I worried that she’d been abused in every way by the staff, and that someone had justified the assaults as a kind of treatment. As a writer and historian, as the narrator of her story, I was deeply unsettled over the lack of information. I felt somehow complicit in silencing a part of this woman’s history.

And there was the most vexing mystery of all: Why did Alice die at the age of 25? The 1898 patient rolls list no cause, and the previous years’ records suggest she was in good health. The local papers cited consumption, but that could mean starvation as much as tuberculosis.  

As with almost everything in this heartbreaking saga, there’s another layer, a twist. Thirty-two years after Alice died, an attorney named Malcolm Rice Patterson told a reporter, “Those closest to the case knew… she had taken her own life by jumping into a water tank on top of the building. But that story was never printed.” Patterson, who went on to become governor of Tennessee, was, in 1892, employed at the same law firm that had represented Alice, and was often seen assisting in her defense.

I was inclined to believe the governor—but cautiously, as there wasn’t much evidence. My unconscious, however, harbored no doubts. One night, I felt that terrible sensation of falling down down down, until I was met with a shattering splash. My body quickly hit the bottom of a dark container of water, but I felt no pain—only sheer panic. I began violently kicking, hoping to get to the surface, but my bed was a tank of heavy water that constrained my movements, springing my limbs back every single time. I stopped trying. My body had wearied and my heart was threatening to break through my chest. I understood that it was a lucid dream, even as I sensed Alice floating around me in the water tank. I squeezed my eyes shut, blocking out the macabre scene and willing myself to wake. Why was I trying to make myself witness that?

The next day, my shins were bruised. I began self-medicating before bed. I took valerian root and melatonin. I drank wine. I took NyQuil. It often worked, but a couple of nights a week, there I was, back in the asylum.  

By chance, I drove past the Robert Louis Stevenson State Park in Calistoga. I remembered that Stevenson had suffered from nightmares, which was how The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde came to be. As a child, he was plagued by terrifying dreams that did nothing to foster creativity. It was only after he learned to exert control over the nightmare’s narrative that it became an area of exploration. Similarly, Jonathan Franzen told the Paris Review, “More and more, I think of novel writing as a kind of deliberate dreaming.”

But I wasn’t writing fiction. Alice was a real person, and a real murderess. I couldn’t make up her story as I pleased. As sympathetic as I am to her life before the murder, her cold family and Freda’s many infidelities, half-hearted apologies, and broken promises, I make no excuses for her: Alice had committed an unconscionable act. She ended the life of a perfectly healthy 17-year-old. She’d confessed, and there were witnesses. She deserved to be tried for murder while Freda’s family looked on.

Maybe that was it. What if I imagined that Alice had been tried before a jury of her peers, who delivered a just verdict? If I engaged in a little fiction-making—just for myself—perhaps I would find some peace.

“What if there wasn’t a crime,” a writer friend suggested, as we walked along Ocean Beach in July. “What if you gave Alice a happily ever after, at least for yourself?”   

Every night for the next few weeks, I got into bed a little earlier than usual. I laid in the darkness and imagined different outcomes, layering details and creating scenarios. I kept going until my vignette was complete, and Alice and Freda lived happily ever after. Or, at least, lived.

It became my bedtime story, my Goodnight Moon. I tried to open myself up, like a child, to all possibilities. I allowed myself to act infatuated, I demanded repetition. But I wasn’t buying it. I’d seen Alice the night before, chained to a wall in a sunless room.  

And on it goes, though far more infrequently since the book came out. I’ve begun to see, quite hopefully, these harrowing dreams through the lens of one my favorite childhood books, Lois Lowry’s The Giver. Jonas was burdened by the memories he received, but once he shared them with the community, there was some relief. I’ve been carrying Alice and Freda around with me for years, but as the hardcover makes its way in the world, I’ve begun meeting readers who are engaging with the story. They find moments of relief in wry humor, and when they experience the many injustices and heartbreaking moments, they do alongside other readers. Alice and Freda’s story isn’t mine anymore. I’ve done as much as I could.  

Alexis Coe's first book, Alice+Freda Forever, is a New Yorker "Books to Watch Out For" selection and an Amazon "Best Book of the Month for History."