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Photo by Ben Bentley

This post originally appeared on VICE UK

It's good to keep an open mind about the kind of shit that people in badly paid jobs go through so you don't have to. Have you ever spared a thought for the people who work in the cheap pubs of Britain? Cheap pubs with nothing but horse-racing and BBC News 24 playing on mute on a flat screen? With sick on the carpet and blood on the urinal walls? Well: do.

Because cheap pubs need cheap workers. And for these workers, the internal music player in their heads is the thudding sound of their life repeatedly hitting a brick wall. Having been a pub worker myself, I can tell you that it's isn't the drip trays that do you in, or the late nights, or the dropping a stack of pint glasses on the floor so everyone shouts "WAYYYYY!"—it's the slobbering bastards who prop up the bar.

Unfortunately though, these people are the self-proclaimed foundations to your income, so you're sort of handcuffed to the radiator of their love. They are both the carrot and the stick. So you have to be nice to them even if they ask for Guinness last after reeling off a round of lagers.

Photo via WikiCommons

The Victim
Of all the methods of getting my attention at the bar—the clickers, the leaners, the blokes who jitter in place behind a wave of other customers, bobbing their heads over the crowds and putting one pathetic finger on the bar to hold their space—it's the victims who are the worst. And they seem to come in waves; all clucking to themselves, all checking their watches whenever they make fleeting eye contact, all making that little strangled "O—!" sound when they think they are going to get served ahead of anyone else. They've got a bill slowly growing damp in their fist and they're not afraid to flutter it about like a handkerchief of surrender. They are in the crowd without being aware of the crowd. They are infantile and they are pathetic.

If you're in an evil bastard sort of mood, victims can make your shift quite fun. Think about it: You are the sole controller of their immediate happiness. You bear the goods and they're screaming for it in their own helpless way. A touch of hate stirs up a counter effect to the guilt. Take your time with these ones—they may seem restless, but they will wait. That is their answer to life: wait, complain, wait some more, and then have a pint. A true Brit.

The Brat
Cheap pub or not, a Saturday night will always bring out those with more disposable income than brain cells. As much as big-spending partygoers can be the life of the night, the Brat is a subcategory of those who in this brief moment of expense will think they're a local celebrity. They weren't borne from a womb; they were made when a wizard dropped a plastic champagne flute on a rented suit at a shitty wedding reception. They have $40 of cheap coke in their pocket and they are not afraid to let you know about it. They will click their fingers at you so hard it must cause them joint pain.

But when they are buying three bottles of marked-up Moet and a grimy tray full of Jameson shots, they may as fucking well be famous. That's the hardest thing: Watching the kind of twats who probably think custom number plates are the height of sophistication waft around the bar like they own the place, while people stand there and resolutely don't punch them. That's the way to deal with Brats: quickly and efficiently. A tight smile that says, "If your card gets declined I'm sending the CCTV footage of your crestfallen face to all my mates."

Incomprehensible Girl and Her Wife-Beating Escort
Probably the least fun. The girl will hate you before she even reaches the bar. He will too. Don't smile at them. The guy will think you're flirting and so will she. Their worlds are governed with paranoia. These two-headed dragons will cook you alive at the first opportunity. She will be beyond trashed, and to deny either of them service will be like telling a rabid dog to sit down. "I wan' threee samboo-cahs... no, no... four samboo-cahs... six shots of Fosters... err."

The dickhead by her side will stand there eyeballing you like you don't understand the universal language of assholes. "Didn't you hear her, mate?" he's saying. "ZAM-BOO-CAH." She will be staggering like a tranquillized deer on stilts, caught in unfortunate circumstances that have doomed her to be miserable. He'll just stand there like some ex-KGB officer with his chest pumped and eyes fixated on you. No smiles, just the desperation to black out and forget their night together. Insecurity and misogyny have a troubled past together. His sturdiness and smile-less face could by all means indicate just one of those bad nights. But there's an air to these kinds of couples, one that gives you the answer to why she is so wasted. An air that says, If someone is using the slot machine when he decides he wants a go on it, we're going to have to call the police.

The Greaser
Pick-up artists get a bad rap these days, and that's because they're among the worst people alive. Shit pubs have their own versions, which are a trifle less peacocking and have more stains on their pants than their club counterparts. But don't be fooled into thinking these men are in any way innocent or lovable—these vulturous bloodsuckers are constantly on the hunt. You can spot them because they will do magic hand tricks over the glasses of Bacardi-Cokes they are buying for girls. They are true evil shrouded in a cloud of body spray.

Photo by Nick Meares

The Nutcase
Problematic and unsolvable. These cretins want your blood. Whether metaphorically or physically, they are merciless at what they do. A rare strain of prick as they will just appear at any time of the day and come at you with persistence—without the need of alcohol. Clear and audible insults will be made in the manner of this: "You're so slow at your job. Are you a fucking robot or something?" They like to repeat rhetorical questions too, like they're asking something deeper within themselves. They leave. Next customer—yet something is hovering in the corner of your eye. It will be him. "Isn't he just a fucking robot? Look at him. He needs new batteries." Their influence among others is heavy and they will try to turn the pub against you if they can. Manipulative but clumsy. The Nutter's bursts of anger will indicate a lack of control. Also, they always seem to pay with large, hot handfuls of change. If need be, work with their stupidity and get them kicked out. Change that battery, you cock.

The sad truth is that people are stuck in these positions, working their asses off for a wage that covers the essentials to stay alive. There are so many contradictory terms in Britain at the moment, like: living wage; higher paid jobs in London; customer is always right. Britain is a cruel, unforgivable place at times. Instead of getting excited about a minute pay rise we should be putting focus on trying to make people somewhat happy about that large factor of they life they spend laboring away.

Follow Steven Bradbury on Twitter.

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Photo via Flickr user Mark Wyman

December saw New York City on edge to an extent it probably hasn't been since 9/11. Ignited by the decision to not indict Officer Daniel Pantaleo in the chokehold death of Eric Garner, the city has been swallowed protest, counter-protest, death, and despair, culminating in what has become a political showdown between Mayor Bill de Blasio and the NYPD, with the rest of us in the middle unsure of what to do.

The murders of Detectives Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos in mid-December was when things really started to get weird, a validation of many of the sentiments I heard at the pro-cop rally the night before it happened: that de Blasio is a menace to the city's police force, that his "defense" of the protests has been dangerous, and of course that he should resign, effective immediately. Now that the two officers are dead, the mayor is to blame; he has "blood on [his] hands," as Patrick Lynch, the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association chief, said the night of Liu and Ramos's death, arguing the mayor stirred the pot of protest that eventually led to the deaths of the two officers by acknowledging he'd talked to his black son Dante about the cops.

If you've searched "de Blasio" on Twitter since then, you'll find that he was (and still is) being accused of everything from direct to indirect murder. The NYPD is reportedly looking into 63 threats made just this week against the mayor and the police. It's a grim scene, for sure. But more than anything else, this past week will go down as when the cops shifted from symbolic protest—turning their backs on the mayor—to actually packing it up and not doing their jobs.

A quick glance at the numbers tells the story. As Rocco Parascandola of the New York Daily Newsreports, citywide summons issued this past week numbered just 2,128, compared to 26,512 a week earlier. In that period, exactly one summons was issued in the 84th Precinct, where Liu and Ramos were stationed—just one.

The most logical culprit here would be Lynch, the police union provocateur who unsuccessfully talked with the mayor as recently as Tuesday. It was rumored that a memo was passed around NYPD precincts this week, advising rank-and-file officers to join in on the slowdown. However, the union has denied any involvement, and, from what I've heard, this may be more about fear than politics.

"[There's] just not motivation," one police officer told me. "I'm not writing people summonses if I have a chance of getting my head blown off." When asked if this was his own choice or a precinct-wide initiative, the officer added, "Seems like the entire department is on the same page."

(I've reached out repeatedly to the NYPD and the mayor's office, but they have not yet responded.)

Regardless, the NYPD is no longer arresting people at the rates we are used to, particularly when it comes to low-level infractions. So once we put the politics aside, what we're left with is a protest of the mayor who defended the Black Lives Matter demonstrations inadvertently meeting one of those very demonstrators' central demands: pausing " broken windows" policing and its emphasis on quality-of-life crimes like selling illegal cigarettes. In other words, this temporary cessation of force, whether it's political or not, provides us with a momentary glimpse into what New York City would look like with a modern approach to crime, one that reflects NYC's turnaround since the 1990s.

In Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn—the neighborhood where Detectives Liu and Ramos were gunned down—that difference has been felt in real-time. As Batya Ungar-Sargon reports in the Daily Beast, residents have noticed a far different NYPD, one that's less intrusive and more observational. "They just walk around, they ride in their patrol cars, and they just pass by," one resident told the reporter.

"The reported offenses they aren't enforcing as much are [mostly] not criminal offenses: parking violations, urination in public, public intoxication, as well as some marijuana possession. Do we really want over 4,000 people a week locked up for peeing behind a dumpster?" Marc Krupanski, a program officer at the Open Society Justice Initiative, asked me. "The police sources have stated police are not making 'unnecessary arrests.' This should be a good thing!"

Krupanski also argues that this is why he believes it is a union-backed effort; these arrests are key to NYPD Commissioner William Bratton's ideology, so why would he order them to stop? In a statement, Bob Gangi, the head of the Police Reform Organizing Project, made the case that some police officers actually enjoy the work stoppage because they no longer have to make arrests that disrupt communities. Which begs the question: Why are they making those arrests in the first place, especially if those same arrests can be reduced by 66 percent without—from what it seems in these early days—much in the way of Mad Max–style chaos?

"We speculate, though we have no hard evidence, that some officers are pleased to engage in this ostensibly anti–de Blasio protest because they have never been comfortable with having to enforce 'broken windows' law enforcement," Gangi added. "It engenders anger and distrust in the community and puts their physical well-being at risk."

However, unlike Gangi, other reform groups were not as welcoming to the work stoppage. Joo-Hyun Kang, director of Communities United for Police Reform, one of the main organizing groups behind the recent protests, sees the move as an attack rather than an alternative universe for New York City. And the culprit? Lynch's police union.

"Unfortunately, police unions have a long history of personalizing attacks on mayors and blocking police reform that many New Yorkers support. This apparent work stoppage is part of a larger effort to obstruct and oppose much-needed change to the NYPD," Kang said in a statement. "By continuing to obstruct and oppose necessary changes at the NYPD, the police union leadership's divisive tactics are making it clear that they are not acting in the best interests of New Yorkers, including police officers. These tactics will backfire. In fact, they already have."

But this era of lesser law enforcement is almost certain to be short-lived; if coordinated, it's hard to imagine the work stoppage will last much longer into 2015. As the editorial board of the New York Times(and plenty of other prominent local voices) instructed, the cops will eventually go back to their jobs. Once they do, Gangi hopes change can come the good ol' fashioned way, rather than via hatred of the mayor.

"While we welcome the drop in petty arrests and summonses, we greatly prefer that it came as a result of lasting, meaningful, and systemic reforms put into place by Mayor de Blasio and Police Commissioner Bratton," he said. "Such a step would enhance safety and justice in our city and provide benefits to our police officers and all New Yorkers."

Follow John Surico on Twitter.

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The fresh, dewy start of a new year brings with it a myriad of delightful possibilities: the chance to start over, begin again, and gaze hopefully into the future. But what if this "future" we're talking about includes an increase in interracial dating, immigration "amnesty," and a Chinese lesbian president who advocates an amendment to the Constitution protecting the right to free hugs?

For the average racist, the changing of the calendar means another baby step toward a multiethnic, polyglot America where the "white race" has been reduced to a faint memory. Goodbye, Lawrence Welk Christmas specials! You will be missed, white wine spritzers! Au revoir, casual uses of French words for the purposes of showing off! What will you do for a living in this dystopian nightmare, Larry the Cable Guy?

Being terrified is kind of the point of being racist though. If your every waking hour isn't spent wondering if a bus full of Mexicans is going to take your job or if Barack Obama is going to force-feed your children malt liquor, then all of the fun of being racist is pretty much gone. But just because prejudice is innately rooted in pessimism, it doesn't mean that racists can't work on bettering themselves just like the rest of us. Here are just a few New Year's resolutions that white power advocates have already started to work on.

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Kids love it

Improve Communications Skills

Every single year, I promise myself I'm going to stop grunting and drooling all over myself at dinner parties. There's just something about interacting with other human beings that turns my entire body into one of those gyrating sprinklers that looks like a snake ODing. I have to take a sedative just to drive home (not a good idea, by the way). How can I ever hope to be popular with my peers and acquaintances if I can't form coherent sentences? This is the same problem racists have, metaphorically speaking. If they're not belching up insane rhetoric about white supremacy, then they're mangling the historical record to prove their ludicrous point.

The Arkansas branch of the Ku Klux Klan wants to change all of that and freshen up their talking points a bit. In the small town of Harrison, the Klan has erected a billboard that features a girl holding a puppy (awww) next to text that reads "It's not racist to (love) your people." (Instead of actually writing out "love," they drew a heart.) As you all know, the first rule of effective propaganda is "fewer words, more puppies." The billboard is designed to promote a website called "WhitePrideRadio.com." That URL redirects to KKKRadio.com, an online station dedicated to shows such as "Sword of Truth," "White Woman's Perspective," and "Bob's Prepper Show." I can tell you one thing, Bob is not prepping for a dinner party at Al Sharpton's condo.

It's going to be hard for the KKK to make people forget about their history of grunting and drooling all over the 19th and 20th centuries in America, but through a commitment to deception and obfuscation, they just might dupe a few fence-straddlers to go full racist in the new year. The KKK is well on their way to winning (white) friends and influencing (white) people.

Get Involved in Politics

I know how easy it is to get disillusioned by the political process in this country. It's all big money influence, unchecked patronage, and rampant corruption. Fortunately for the hateful, there are folks who have resolved to use their influence to make our world significantly whiter.

The new House Majority Whip, Louisiana Republican Steve Scalise, admitted to speaking at an event hosted by local racists in 2002. The event was organized by a group called EURO, which stands for "European-American Unity and Rights Organization." It was founded by former head of the KKK David Duke and is affiliated with a variety of hate groups. Rep. Scalise claims he was unaware of EURO's racist leanings because he was a young politician with a small staff who just wanted to reach out to his constituents. The speaking engagement was first reported on by a blogger named Lamar White, who characterized EURO as another attempt by the KKK to rebrand. Of course this one failed, because, like... where are the puppies?

Kenny Knight, a former David Duke advisor who organized the events at the hotel on the day in question, claims that Scalise did not actually speak to EURO, but to the Jefferson Heights Civic Association, which had an event two-and-a-half hours before the white pride meet-up. That didn't stop Scalise from apologizing for his speech anyway.

No matter what actually happened, hate groups just received tons of column space next to one of the most powerful elected officials in the nation. Even if you are an unrepentant hatemonger, you can still be active in the American system of government (as long as you effectively take advantage of an inexperienced politician's disinterest in research or record-keeping). You can vote, and it's a hell of a lot easier for you than blacks, Latinos, and Asians in some states!

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The KKKRadio schedule is full of culturally enriching programming

Learn About Art and Stuff

When I was in high school, my favorite period was the one spent banging sticks together and screaming inside a closet. Thanks to budget cuts in my home state, this was the only music program we could afford. As such, I don't know much about culture, which doesn't make me terribly different from your average racist.

It's really not easy to be a white supremacist in America today, because many of the popular arts are dominated by minorities. As much as the garden variety hillbilly loves car chases and violent imagery, they're going to have a hard time getting past all the brown faces in the Fast and Furious movies. Sure, there's plenty of old-timey music and reruns of Amos & Andy to be had on KKKRadio.com, but Ian Donaldson isn't going to be a judge on The Voice any time soon.

That's why it's time for racists to get more interested in modern forms of artistic expression. The new year is a perfect opportunity to make that a priority. Plucky racists hoping to get a jump on their resolutions vandalized the Limestone County, Alabama, home of Terry Turner on New Year's Eve. They threw rocks through her windows and spray-painted the phrase "Move Nigger Now" on her garage door. The sentence construction could use some work (did they consider the revision "Move Now, Nigger"?) but the effort was there. Not only did they dip their toes into the choppy waters of the hyper-competitive Alabama street art scene, they also added a taste of performance art with the rocks.

The KKK has been looking for their own Marina Abramovic, Ryan Trecartin, or Matthew Barney, and these sloppy backwoods motherfuckers just might be the answer. If the Klan can have a radio station and host politicians, then they can do anything if they just believe in themselves. Who knows, by the end of the year, you might be able to buy Terry Turner's "Move Nigger Now" garage door at Art Basel.

Follow Dave Schilling on Twitter.

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Saudi Arabia's Ministry of the Interior. Photo via Wikipedia Creative Commons.

Saudi Arabian authorities recently announced that they have hacked and disabled about 9,000 Twitter accounts associated with the publication of pornographic materials and arrested many of the handles' owners. The Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice (a.k.a. Haia, the Saudi religious police) organized the sting, sweeping up many Saudis and expats accused of organizing alcohol- and gambling-fueled parties. But in an apparent first for the Kingdom, Haia acknowledged that it did not act alone, instead relying upon a group of "ethical hackers" to access users' accounts and personal information, leading to physical arrests.

Saudi Arabia has been cracking down hard on all manner of ill-defined immorality online for at least the past six years. Like gambling or blasphemy, many in Saudi Arabia like to link porn to social ails such as spiking divorce rates and label its viewers as social misfits. But maybe because they're irked about findings claiming their citizens are among the world's top porn consumers , they seem to devote special and highly visible efforts to stamping it out.

They've been known to conduct random searches of laptops, disks, and flash drives at immigration . And in 2013 alone, the state's Communications and Information Technology Commission (CCITC) blocked 400,000 porn sites, a process requiring the review and repression of one page at a time with over 2,000 censorship requests made every day. Those caught producing or disseminating porn, like the detainees picked up in yesterday's raid, face up to five years in prison and a fine not to exceed 3 million Saudi Riyals (roughly $800,000).

Yet Saudi authorities have been particularly consternated by porn on social media sites like Facebook (with 7.8 million local users) and Twitter (5 million). The state does not feel it can block these sites in full and outright. But it also has trouble playing whack-a-mole with content generators who can just pop up under a new name if authorities report their accounts for deletion on a case-by-case basis, and whose true identities are not easily ascertained. As of March 2014, Haia, the CCICT the Ministry of the Interior (and its cybercrimes division), and the Audiovisual Commission, with advice from the National Center for Youth Research, an affiliate of King Saud University, announced they were collaborating on new strategies to address this dilemma. Nothing in these reports indicated an intention to employ hackers—much less ethical hackers

Ethical hacking (also known as Certified Ethical Hacking [CEH] or White Hat Hacking) is actually a respectable and recognized profession. They're skilled hackers, often with certification and training in cyber security, employed by corporations or governments to monitor traffic on and attempt to hack their own networks, helping to predict breaches and beef up security.

Private actors in Saudi Arabia have trained and employed ethical hackers since at least 2011 . In 2013, Saudi Aramco, the largest company in the Kingdom and the world's leading energy giant, put out a major call for their own White Hats. This was likely prompted by an attack the previous summer by a hacker collective called the Cutting Sword of Justice who stole data from and disabled 30,000 Aramco computers, taking down the company's computer systems for ten days.

In May 2014, almost one year after hackers defaced government websites, the Saudi Ministry of the Interior's National Information Center announced that it too would train and recruit ethical hackers—all ex-average hackers, but none with a record of striking out against government sites. But they gave no indication that these new cyber allies would be used for moralistic purposes, or against Saudi citizens, or really for anything other than security building.

Most nations, from the USA to North Korea , maintain a dedicated and government-controlled force of cyber security experts—basically hacker armies. Whether these armies move against national or international targets is usually well hidden. And whenever hackers do operate openly on behalf of a government—like the pro-Assad Syrian Electronic Army and Syrian Malware Team , or the Twitter-hacking pro-regime N33 group in Venezuela —the nature of their connection to the governments involved is obscured, likely because hacking is widely illegal, and it'd be a huge fiasco to be implicated in such activities against your own countrymen.

(A Saudi, self-styled Wahhabi [the brand of Islam practiced and promoted by the royal family] hacker collective called Group-XP waged one major attack, leaking tens of thousands of Israeli credit card details in 2012. But this group never claimed connection to the Saudi state. There does not appear to be a correlate to the Syrian or Venezuelan groups in the Kingdom.)

Right now we're not sure who the ethical hackers involved in the Haia Twitter sting were. We just know that they helped finger real-life users behind handles. They could have been members of the government, or the cadre of ex-hackers hired this spring by the Ministry of the Interior, or some other group of unaffiliated hackers roped in to aid the religious police. Either way you slice it, openly admitting that your regime has used hackers against your own citizens is a unique and questionable tact. But that just seems to be how they roll down in the Kingdom of House Saud.

Follow Mark Hay on Twitter.

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On Friday nights, people around the world leave their offices to fill their innards with cheese fries and booze to put the pain of the working week behind them. This makes for plenty of photo-worthy moments, so we've decided to send photographers to the planet's finest cities and towns to capture Friday night as it unfolds. For this week's installment, we sent photographer Robin Hinsch to Hamburg's Reeperbahn. Every weekend thousands of people flock to the area to enjoy its historic wonders, bars, and red light district.

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Photo courtesy of Magnum Books

What do Truman Capote, Christopher Isherwood, and Gore Vidal (allegedly) have in common? Denham Fouts.

Fouts (or "Denny," as the boys called him) was a professional bon vivant, a serious opium addict, and the companion to a veritable who's who of pre-1950 homosexuals. Isherwood succinctly called him "the most expensive male prostitute in the world," though that makes his relationships sound more transactional than they actually were. Fouts wasn't a "leave the cash on the nightstand" kind of trick, but rather a trophy boy that the boys kept around as long as they could afford to. Men (women too, but mostly men) desperately sought Fouts's attention, and gave him anything he desired just to be near him. Most of his pursuers were older—he once asked author Glenway Wescott how to get and keep the attention of sugar daddies—but some were nearly of an age with Fouts himself. His longtime lover Peter Watson was born just six years before Fouts, but that didn't prevent Watson from gifting him with Pablo Picasso's painting Girl Reading.

Fouts lived every Downton Abbey–esque Anglophile fantasy you've ever daintily jerked off to. He was the life of every party, right up until he snorted all the coke and left with the host's boyfriend, or son—Fouts had a well-deserved reputation as a chicken hawk. A few of his affairs with teen boys are chronicled in the biography The Best-Kept Boy in the World, by Arthur Vanderbilt.

Vanderbilt assembles Fouts's life from a few facts and a lot of fiction. Born in 1914 in Jacksonville, Florida, Fouts became the model for several iconic characters created by his famous suitors: Paul in Isherwood's Down There on a Visit, Elliott Magren in Vidal's "Pages from an Abandoned Journal," and "Denham Fouts" in Capote's unfinished magnum opus, Answered Prayers.

Despite his outsized effect on American literature, Fouts left precious little record of himself. He died of a heart attack at 34, leaving behind a letter on animal cruelty—published in Time magazine when he was 12—an unfinished novel that he started during the time he lived with Isherwood, and a memoir whose sole copy was burned by his mother.

Reconstructing the life of someone we mostly know through his literary analogues is no easy task. In each chapter, Vanderbilt explores Fouts through a look at one of his more famous lovers, or by a close textual analysis of a story Fouts inspired. Thankfully, Vanderbilt is an experienced historian, having previously published several nonfiction books, and doesn't get too carried away by the mythology of his subject. Recently, I spoke to the author about Fouts, separating fact and fiction, and the differences between being a gay boytoy in the 20th and 21st centuries.

VICE: What made you want to write about Denny Fouts?
Arthur Vanderbilt: Right after World War II, the young authors who would become the famed literary lions found their way to Europe. And as I started reading about that period—memoirs, diaries, correspondence, biographies—the name Denham Fouts kept popping up in always the most intriguing, tantalizing bits and pieces. I started connecting the dots and found that Christopher Isherwood, Gore Vidal, and Truman Capote had all used Denny as a character in their novels and short stories. At that point, following Denny's story became an obsession for me.

He was beautiful, sure, but lots of guys are beautiful. Why did so many famous men become obsessed with Fouts?
Clearly Denny was projecting a considerable sexual magnetism which drew the attention of many to him, but I think his appeal was much more than that. Neither Isherwood, Vidal, nor Capote was sexually attracted to Denny, though they could understand how others would be. Isherwood, who lived with Denny for a number of years and considered him at the time to be his best friend, once said that he had never met someone who was so much fun to be with, that Denny had a genius for enjoying himself, that even going to a store and buying vegetables with Denny was an adventure. Denny was one of those rare individuals who truly sense the wonder of life.

But he seems to have passed rather lightly through the world—touching a lot of people but not leaving marks. How do you write the biography of someone we mostly know from fiction?
I tried to find out everything I could about Denny, following every lead, scouring archives, tracking down every scrap of evidence, even using the Freedom of Information Act to see if the FBI had a file on him. For anything presented as a fact in my book, I had to have at least two reliable sources. What I found so interesting is how accurate Isherwood, Vidal, and Capote were in portraying Denny.

Of course, Isherwood is known for his "I am a camera" style of writing, and I tried to show how his contemporaneous diaries about Denny matched—in many cases almost word-for-word—his portrayals of Denny in his prose. Vidal and Capote certainly captured the spirit of Denny and I think, with one exception, captured the facts about his life. The exception of course is the start of Denny's journey—how he made his way from Jacksonville, Florida, to the beginning of his life as a kept man. And here the problem is, I believe, that Denny himself was playing around with the story with different audiences. Certain elements of this story appear in different "gospels," and those are the only ones I relied on.

Are there men like Denny around today? It seems like the public face of gay life, combined with the paparazzi now surrounding the rich and famous, might make being a serial trophy boy more difficult.
I think Denny was a "type" which still very much exists today and always will. Imagine the young Brad Pitt, the young Ryan Phillipe—men who clearly projected a sexual energy felt by many. Now assume that they did not end up having successful film careers, but rather perhaps did a bit of modeling and then, as hard as they tried, they couldn't push their careers to the next level. They would have attracted wealthy admirers who promised them the world and all of a sudden they fall easily into the role of kept men. I always loved that interview Truman Capote had later in his life when he was asked what he would have been if he hadn't been an author. A lawyer, he immediately responded, and then thought for a moment and said he would have liked to have been a kept man, but that he had never found anyone who wanted to keep him for more than a week.

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A week's worth of pay in a subarctic strip joint. Photo courtesy of Miranda

When one of my porn industry sources (let's call her Miranda) told me she had traveled over ten hours north of Montreal by bus to strip at a strip club in Fermont, a mining town in North Quebec, I thought she had gone insane. Then she texted me a photo of how much money she makes during her annual trip: roughly $5,000, and I began to understand.

Fermont is not an ordinary town. Due to the freezing cold climate, most miners and their families live in a single giant building that includes apartments, a grocery store, a bowling alley, schools, and a bar that serves as an after-work hangout, a first date spot, and a strip joint. Strippers like Miranda can come to Fermont and make a mint dancing, but hardly anyone else has reason to visit.

In between her hectic dancing schedule, Miranda skyped me to discuss stripping in a small town, how to travel to Fermont, and the similarities between miners and sex workers.

VICE: How did you become a stripper in a mining town?
Miranda: I've been coming here for about eight years. When I started stripping when I was 19, I heard that it was really good money here because they only send very few girls at a time—it's an agency that takes care of everything. They pick us up at home, they drive us here, and then they pick us back up. Every week they bring different girls. They try to have variety because there's only so many people here.

How did you hear about the agency?
I heard about it from strippers. I contacted this agency, and the reason why it's a really good place for us is because, first of all, there's only one bar. So even the few women that live here, if they want to go out on a Saturday night, they have to go out to the strip club. And then, there's about—I don't know the actual statistics—but there's, like, eight men for every woman here because everybody is related to the mining industry. Anybody from a mechanic to a welder makes about $45 an hour. They have a lot of financial resources and very little to do during their time here—everybody comes here to make money, including the strippers.

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Fermont, Quebec. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Do some of the girls marry guys they meet in Fermont?

Does it get weird at the club?

Where do you live when you work here?

Does it just look like a regular hotel?

Does staying inside make you go crazy?

Is it awkward when you run into him when you're in town?

Is stripping in a mining town purely a business decision?

Follow Mitchell Sunderland on Twitter.

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Photo via Wiki Commons

Sometimes being a homo and reading the news can feel like being strapped to a chair and made to watch your own snuff film on loop. The stories of persecution seem endless. Despite our shared love of leather, shaved heads and moustaches, in 2014 it seemed that fascists and gays still couldn't see eye to eye.

It's a familiar standoff that led to all manner of fresh abominations. There was Putin's anti-gay propaganda law and the consequent effect it has had on the lives of Russia's LGBT population. And imagine how it felt to be an LGBT person in Uganda when the country's "Kill the Gays" bill was overturned in August, only to find out, last month, that another, even more draconian law was in the works. Merry fucking Christmas.

It's important not to forget the localized news stories and everyday bullshit
faced by gay people everywhere last year, but, for the sake of not giving homophobes the time of day, here's a breakdown of all the good things that happened in the world of gay in 2014.

WE GOT MARRIED

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Photo by Jake Lewis

Lots of gay people don't want to get married because it's quite heterosexual and reminds them of their parents, but many do, and it's really only fair that they should be allowed to. In March last year that became a possibility in the UK and I was lucky enough to get drunk and cry at the first ever gay wedding. Despite not knowing a single person there (I was "reporting"), I ate till I felt sick, did the Macarena with the guests, and completely rinsed the free bar. Turns out that for all the perverse sex they have, gay people are really accommodating.

For now, same-sex marriage is legal in only 16 countries (there are 196 countries, to put things into perspective) and 35 states within America. Thankfully, some gay people found ways around that. An honorary mention should go out to the lesbian couple who managed to get married in Russia last year, right under Putin's nose. Then there was the determined gay couple who went right ahead and married each other in Egypt, despite presumably knowing what kind of dire consequences they would later face. (Both grooms and five other wedding attendees were jailed for three years for "angering God.") And finally, shouts to Grace Gelder, the woman who married herself.

CAMP HAPPENINGS

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Photo via Wiki Commons

Because gay people are smarter than straight people, they have a whole other cultural currency, and it's called "camp." Lots of camp things happened last year – things that meant absolutely nothing to most people but made up landmark events in the gay calendar. Here are some of them:

• Lindsay Lohan was in a West End play
• Drag sensation Conchita Wurst won the Eurovision Song Contest
• Nick Jonas became the king of the twinks
• All Saints played one reunion gig at G-A-Y then broke up again
• Joan Rivers died and everybody paid her respect where due
• Cher continued her reign as queen of Twitter and the world
  
• Dolly Parton headlined Glastonbury
• Andrew Logan's Alternative Miss World drag pageant came back to the UK
• Britney ruled Las Vegas and has created a range of haircare products exclusively for Lidl
• Taylor Swift ~ arguably ~ won over gay audiences
• And LGBT people everywhere found themselves a new leader:
[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/v9PNcS9lztU?rel=0' width='640' height='360']
[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/I-xexf6Y7C4?rel=0' width='640' height='360']


TRANS PEOPLE RECEIVED POSITIVE MEDIA ATTENTION. FINALLY.
And no one is a bigger attention seeker than VICE columnist Paris Lees, so I'll leave it to her to fill you in on what happened in the world of trans last year.


GAY PRIDE MARCHES RAGED ON


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Several European countries held successful Pride events. Serbia's capital Belgrade held its first in four years. Back in 2010, violence broke out after the interference of nationalists, but last year the parade returned with the biggest turn out to date—even if police did outnumber those actually marching.

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In London, gay pride seems to be getting less gay. I used to like gay pride when it was full of terrifying South London studs and badly dressed gays peeing behind thin layers of foliage in Soho Square. Now, it's become so all-encompassing that it resembles a hen party destination more than a gay club: a tourist rite of passage replete with straight, middle-aged women wearing feather boas and drinking Cava out of plastic cups.

In the same vein, last year's LA gay pride was appropriated by American artist Demi Lovato for her music video "Really Don't Care," featuring Cher Lloyd. Without going down the rabbit hole of how or why Cher Lloyd is big in America, let's just acknowledge that it's a rarity to see pop stars aligning themselves with gay pride. Similarly unexpected was Burger King's decision to cash in on San Francisco Pride with this viral video campaign featuring the special "Rainbow Whopper"—the punchline being that despite its name, it was no different to a normal burger.

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Photo from New York Dyke March 2014.

Probably the best example of gay and straight solidarity in 2014 though, was the global outrage triggered by Putin's anti-gay propaganda law. At street level, protests against the law popped up across the West. One man, Pyotr Pavlensky, even nailed his balls to the floor of the Kremlin in a violent act of indignation toward the police state.

The UK government isn't known for tough intervention when it comes to LGBT foreign policy, and refused to boycott Russia's Sochi Winter Olympics and Paralympics in order to put pressure on Putin. The US, however, did boycott, with Obama refusing to attend and sending gay athletes to compete as a middle finger to Putin. Credit where it's due.

Overall then, we should all take a bit of pride in the fact that in 2014 gay and straight people came out, en masse, to support equality together.


A BUNCH OF CELEBRITIES CAME OUT AND MADE US FEEL MORE NORMAL

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Talking of coming out, 2014 was a big year for gays in the media. Tom Daley told us nothing his tan hadn't told us already when he came out last December, and continues to talk openly about his sexuality. Likewise: Sam Smith. Does no one kind of think he looks like Divine? Meanwhile, in the US Apple CEO Tim Cook came out in October, highlighting just how few openly gay CEOs there are working in business and tech in the process.

And finally, Cara Delevingne became the world's much needed try-sexual icon. From her fairytale romance with Michelle Rodriguez, to her bad snapbacks, she gave LGBTQI-don't-really-know-I-just-want-to-get-on-everything girls everywhere a role model who was unapologetic about her sexuality. (Though of course she is afforded the status of being open about her sexuality by her social privilege, and a lot of women across the world aren't so lucky.)



SCIENCE
Here are the important bits:




• Scientists identified what is probably the biggest evidence yet that sexual orientation is genetic.
• Another study found that homosexuality may help us bond, and that when people have higher levels of progesterone in their saliva – a hormone linked to bonding – they're more likely to be up for sleeping with people of the same sex. The experiment reinforces the idea that, for humans, on a base level, sex is about more than just reproduction. Basically, it's natural that we have sex for a bunch of reasons beyond the evolutionary, and that's OK.

That's the year in gay! Cheers, and Happy New Year.

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@MillyAbraham

The sanctions, which President Obama announced Friday, were an "appropriate" consequence of North Korea's aggression, South Korea said today.

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Buy Gilbert's books from Fantagraphics and Drawn and Quarterly.

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Read more of John F. Malta's comics on his website.

Throughout the past several months, Jerusalem has been a scene of clashes and violent attacks. Silwan, a Palestinian neighborhood just steps away from Jerusalem's Old City, has been at the heart of the unrest, and the area is becoming one of the most contentious neighborhoods in the most contested city in the world.

As settlement expansion into East Jerusalem continues, Israeli authorities have ramped up their practice of demolishing homes built without proper permits—permits which are nearly impossible for Palestinians to acquire. In addition to the demolitions due to lack of permits, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced in early November the reinstatement of the policy of demolishing terrorists' homes, which Palestinians claim is a form of collective punishment.

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Photo courtesy of The Worst Idea Ever

Sensory bombardment is a form of torture commonly used on prisoners to extract information. Authorities strip prisoners down to their underwear , chain them to a wall, and subject them to the same song at full volume for days—sometimes even weeks. By the 24th hour of "...Baby One More Time," brain and body functions start to slip away, melting the senses into a puddle of nothingness.

Guy Montgomery and Tim Batt probably understand this idea very well. Every Monday, the two New Zealanders wake up at 9 AM to watch the Adam Sandler ensemble comedy Grown Ups 2. They've done this every week. For 47 weeks. After each viewing, they talk about the experience on a podcast, appropriately entitled The Worst Idea of All Time. They need to see the movie five more times to hit their goal of watching it every week for a year.

When the duo started the project a year ago, they shared a healthy but reasonable dislike for the critically panned movie. But over the last few months, they learned to hate the movie, while also losing their minds. What started out as 30-minute long discussions about the film's comedic pitfalls and plot holes turned into extended bouts of maniacal laughter, existential reflections, and self-loathing.

I recently caught up with Montgomery and Batt to discuss why two people would voluntarily watch an Adam Sandler movie 52 times.

VICE: Why did you choose this movie?
Tim Batt: That's a good question. We thought of the concept first—of the ludicrousness of watching a single movie and reviewing it over and over again—and then decided on what the movie would be. We kicked around a few ideas early on. One of the ones we floated originally was Con Air, but we decided it was too good. I briefly toyed with the idea of The Room, but that's so bad that it's enjoyable. Then we thought of the Grown Ups movie because it's such a weird movie. So many funny people are in it, but it wasn't very well received.

Guy Montgomery: We thought, Well, if we're gonna do a movie that shouldn't have been made, wouldn't it make more sense to do a sequel to that movie?

Batt: Neither of us has seen the first.

Would watching the characters' origin story help you appreciate the sequel?
Batt: I posited to Guy that maybe Grown Ups 2 is the funniest movie ever made but it's all callbacks to the original—though I don't think that's all that likely.

Montgomery: Grown Ups 1 is now the movie that we crave. You're watching the movie—and this is kind of the definition of insanity—but you're waiting for one of the actors to say a different line or someone else to walk into a scene or just some variation.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/YhOWtVElqfw' width='640' height='360']

What effect does watching the same movie 52 times have on your brain?
Batt: The first effect I've noticed recently is that I find it impossible to watch what is in the focus of the shot now. I can't draw my attention to what the filmmakers designed me to be looking at. I'm looking at extras, I'm looking at a product that's been placed on the table. Even if I try now, I can't look at the main action. I've seen it too many times, and my mind simply can't take it, so I look at the peripheral.

Montgomery: It's given me quite intense mood swings. I'll fluctuate wildly between watching a joke they've written, and five minutes later, I'll be in the pits of despair. We've been doing this weird roleplaying where we are the film producers. We maintained character for an hour and then I just snapped.

On the podcast, you've often expressed concern about going legitimately insane. Do you think that could happen?
Montgomery: It certainly gives us access to insanity and flashes of it. Every occasional watch, the whole concept and project come crashing down, and you're like, "What the fuck are we doing?"

How does it feel to know you've seen this movie more than anyone involved in making it probably did?
Montgomery: That feels fucking fantastic, Dan Ozzi!

Batt: I feel so honored to be one half of the world record–breaking people.

Montgomery: I don't envision anyone breaking this world record that we've set. I think it's safe.

If you could go back and talk to yourselves before you first saw Grown Ups 2 , what would you say?
Montgomery: I would say, "Guy, before you do this, what do you really think about Tim Batt? Because you are going to spend a lot of time with this guy in a really weird way."

Batt: I don't think I'd tell him anything. I think the funniest thing to do in that situation would be to tell him nothing, because there've been some real moments of psychological, almost philosophical pain for me watching.

Do you wonder what you could have achieved if you had put your time and efforts into a more useful activity?
Montgomery: I've spent 42 weeks running from that thought.

Batt: Here's the irony of that: Our total downloads since we've started are approaching around the 200,000 mark. I totally accept that we spend a lot of time doing the podcast and that's a fucking stupid way to spend three hours, but it's probably gained more notoriety than any other thing I've ever done in my life.

What's the movie for season two?
Batt: There is no season two.

Montgomery: We've got a fanbase now, so it'd be stupid to throw it away.

Batt: But that's why we must!

Montgomery: There's got to be some sort of podcast.

Batt: You're doing it on your own, buddy. I want to burn it to the ground.

Follow Dan Ozzi on Twitter.

Welcome back to the Fear Digest, the weekly top ten countdown of the terrors transfixing America. Read last week's column here.

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10. Not Being Able to Find Friends on Netflix
It felt like a much lower-key week, fear-wise, than usual. Maybe that can be chalked up to some residual good cheer from the holidays, maybe it was that everyone was just staying indoors as much as possible to gorge on chocolate, meat, and sex acts—or maybe we were all just consumed with watching Friends. The beloved, much-reran 90s show, about six attractive people who spend their days on a variety of couches reciting jokes, hit Netflix on January 1—except, uh oh, for a few hours no one could find it. The situation was so dire out there in twentysomething-land that some blogs ran posts explaining how to search the streaming channel for the sitcom equivalent of comfort food. Fortunately this all got cleared up and today you can gorge yourself on 200-plus episodes documenting the gang's adventures having sex with one another in unrealistically large Manhattan apartments.
Last week's rank: Unranked

9. Our Own Fat Asses
Another New Year, another spike in gym memberships across the country, meaning that everyone has yet again resolved to finally get into fucking shape. It's a promise a lot of us make periodically, to improve ourselves; to not just work out and eat healthier and drink less, but to be the sort of people who do those things. We want less procrastination, less aimless web surfing, less time wasted searching PornHub for extremely specific fetishes. We may end up bettering ourselves in some small way, but we will almost certainly not start pumping iron and running on treadmills—in fact, the economic fortunes of the gym industry depend on people buying memberships and then not following through. As usual, we can expect people's fear of obesity to subside into guilt at not doing something about it before returning to the usual apathy.
Last week's rank: Unranked

8. Bad Luck
Implicit in all New Year's resolutions is the idea that if we started running and drinking kale juice instead of malt liquor we could keep some of the nastier sorts of death at bay. Except that's not exactly true; for example one recent study by researchers at John Hopkins found that "bad luck" was at the root of many cases of cancer. A lot of media reports about the study were wrong about what the researchers' numbers meant, but the fundamental point here, that sometimes terrible things just sorta happen, remains depressingly true.
Last week's rank: Unranked

7. Being Shot by a Random Person
Speaking of bad luck, there were a couple horrific gun-related accidents in the news this week. First, a two-year-old boy accidentally shot his mother at an Idaho Walmart after removing a 9mm handgun from her purse on Tuesday. Then, early in the morning on New Year's Day, a police chief in suburban Atlanta shot his wife while apparently moving the loaded gun that was in their bed. The moral of the story is, obviously, don't keep a gun in your bed—and, more broadly, maybe you don't need to take a deadly weapon with you everywhere you go?
Last week's rank: 4

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6. The Islamic State
The most famous extremist group in the world is now attempting to seize some Lebanese border towns to secure their positions in Syria while the US continues to bombard them with airstrikes. In the militants' fantasy world (as revealed by a bunch of images floating around online), however, they were setting fire to Big Ben and the US Capitol, flying sophisticated fighter jets, and, most bizarrely, galloping away (in horse form) from a pack of wolves.
Last week's rank: 8

5. The NSA
If the Islamic State appeared a bit impotent this week, so did the NSA—a report in Der Spiegel based on documents leaked by Edward Snowden showed that the spy agency was having trouble in 2012 tracking users who used Tor and reading emails that were encrypted using PGP. You can still hide from the government, it turns out. It's just increasingly tricky.
Last week's rank: 7

4. The FBI
If privacy advocates were cheering when they heard that the Man couldn't crack every code known to humankind, no doubt they were groaning at the reports that when the secret court that is supposed to oversee FBI surveillance refuses to give the G-men a warrant, they just circumvent that decision and spy on their target anyway. That sorta sucks.
Last week's rank: Unranked

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3. The Weather
More alarming than abstract fears about the national surveillance state were the very real fears about the snow and ice currently being dumped on most of the country. At least five people were killed as severe winds hit California this week, and terrible road conditions led to a massive multi-car pileup in New Hampshire that involved dozens of vehicles.
Last week's rank: 3

1a. The Cops
1b. People Who Hate the Cops
For the second straight week the antagonism between the police and the people who hate them tops this list. New York City remained the center of this suddenly intense conflict, with NYPD officers barely arresting anyone in protest of what they see as a lack of support from Mayor Bill de Blasio. It's at the point where Police Commissioner William Bratton has to tell his cops not to turn their backs on the mayor at a funeral today for Wenjian Liu, who was shot to death along with his partner a couple weeks ago—a request which the rank and file ignored. Since that shooting, nearly 20 New Yorkers have been arrested for threatening the police; in St. Louis, a man was detained for tweeting about killing officers; Durham, North Carolina, has seen two separate incidents where the cops were fired at.

That NYPD officers would apparently stop doing their jobs out of pique is pretty shameful, but the truth is that a lot of people would rather cops take it easy and not hassle people for minor bullshit like illegally selling cigarettes—and anyway, the argument goes, if they can cut back on arrests without endangering public safety, they should already be doing that. But it's hard to have a conversation about reforming police practices when there's so much distrust in the air. In New York, the cops don't trust the mayor, much of the public doesn't trust the cops, and the anti-cop protesters don't listen to the mayor. In that sort of climate, maybe fear is a rational response.
Last week's rank: 2 and 1

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Photo via Flickr user Thomas Hawk

For the past few years, American health insurance companies have been hard at work studying a loophole in the Affordable Care Act—a.k.a. Obamacare—that allows corporations to evade the law's effort to keep people from going broke when paying for basic medical services. Insurers like UnitedHealthcare have created insurance packages known as "skinny plans" that give employers the ability to peddle strikingly shoddy health insurance to their workers. Existing in a regulatory gap that only applies to large businesses, these insurance plans do not cover basic health necessities like hospitalization or emergency-room care but still allow employers to avoid the largest automatic fine under Obamacare, which, beginning this week, requires large businesses to provide insurance to all full-time employees.

Skinny plans often cover only preventative care like going to see the doctor for a routine check-up—hardly the type of medical attention that racks up huge bills.

One "Webinar" presentation delivered in part by UnitedHealthcare—a subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group, America's largest health insurance provider—marvels almost incredulously at the loophole. Employers "can offer preventive care benefits like doctors visits and generic drugs without offering much in the way of care," states a portion of the joint presentation given by Crawford Advisors, a benefits consulting and brokerage firm, "and they are considered to be offering insurance coverage." The Crawford Advisors portion of the presentation is explicit about the fact these plans can be marketed to low-wage workers who might take the skinny plans because of their price. In some cases, low-wage workers who take these skinny plans will be passing up either subsidized insurance on state insurance exchanges or more robust employer-sponsored insurance that is considered affordable by the standards of the new health law.

Workers' advocates worry that companies may fail to adequately warn employees of the deficiencies of such plans.

"These are dangerous because I can see workers taking the coverage thinking it's full coverage, assuming it is because of the ACA [Affordable Care Act]," says Sara Flocks, the public policy coordinator at the California Labor Federation, "and then getting hurt or getting sick and going into medical bankruptcy—which is exactly what the ACA was supposed to eradicate."

Earlier this year, labor groups in California lobbied for a bill that would have banned skinny plans in the state. The bill passed the state legislature but was opposed by the insurance industry and vetoed in September by Jerry Brown, the state's Democratic governor, who expressed concern it violated federal law.

That veto could have had a real effect on workers in the state. A survey released in August by the National Business Group on Health found that nearly one in six large employers in the United States are considering offering these plans. And anecdotal accounts suggest a high level of demand for the shoddy insurance packages among employers.

"There was definitely more interest than we anticipated there would be, " Scott Thompson, an advisor at Indianapolis-based business consultancy called FirstPerson, told me of skinny plans. He identifies typical low-wage sectors as those most interested in the cheaper plans: "There are staffing firms, restaurant, hotel, tourism, those industries where [previously] managers were only provided benefits and now you've got to provide it to everybody working [at least] 30 hours."

A description within the joint presentation with Crawford Advisors and also a separate PDF available on UnitedHealthcare's website describe the insurance giant's own skinny plan, the most basic form of which offers only preventative care.

"This is really bad stuff," says Beth Capell, a lobbyist who represents Health Access California, a statewide health care consumer advocacy coalition, and who reviewed both documents. "This is what [the law Brown vetoed] was aimed at outlawing in California."

Under Obamacare's employer mandate, there are two categories of fines that large employers face for not providing adequate coverage to their workers. The first and most severe penalty is triggered when a large employer does not offer any insurance at all; in this case, the IRS slaps it with an automatic, across-the-board fine of $2,000 dollars per employee beyond the first 30. The second type of penalty kicks in when a large business does offer an insurance plan that meets a number of basic criteria (known as minimum essential coverage) but does not meet the law's standard of affordability, thereby making it possible for employees at the company to go get subsidized insurance on the state healthcare exchanges. For each employee that does so, the company gets fined $3,000. (New regulations issued by federal agencies in November make clear that plans not covering hospitalization cannot be considered affordable.) Thus employers who offer only skinny plans to their workers are likely betting that most employees will simply take the barebones company plans rather than seeking more robust—and potentially even cheaper—insurance on the state exchanges.

Another skinny plan approach—and what might prove to be the most popular route—shields employers from both types of penalty under the health law. Businesses can offer both a skinny plan and at least one other insurance plan that does meet the ACA's affordability standard. Because employees have the option of taking affordable, ACA-compliant healthcare, they are not technically eligible for subsidies to buy insurance on the state health exchanges. For those employees who take the cheaper, skinny option, it's a boon to the employer, who gets let off the hook for offering real insurance.

UnitedHealthcare did not respond to a list of questions sent by VICE regarding this story, but said in an email, "We work with clients to identify plans that comply with the Affordable Care Act and that meet their needs." This suggests that UnitedHealthcare is advising clients to take this latter, less risky route to offering skinny plans, and some of its publicly available literature suggests the same.

When asked whether some employees might mistakenly sign up for skinny plans, Reagan M. Crawford, the founder of Crawford Advisors, told me that because skinny plans, too, are considered a form of health insurance, firms offering the plans are required by law to be clear to employees about what they cover. "Do I think there might be an unscrupulous employer? Absolutely," he says, "but if they are, they're violating all kinds of rules.

"If there are things that will accomplish specific needs," adds Crawford, "why not explore those as alternatives as long as they don't break the law?"

Although UnitedHealthcare has marketed its own skinny plan, Capell, the California healthcare lobbyist, says that larger insurers have generally stayed away from offering the plans. (In October, the Wall Street Journal reported that Cigna was also offering a skinny plan.)

"Most of the major insurers did not oppose the legislation because they're not selling the junk insurance," Capell said in reference to the vetoed California bill, which she says she will push legislators to reintroduce in next year's legislative session. "But where there's a market for bottom feeders, you'll always find some corporation bumping along the bottom."

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