Every morning, my workday begins with a selection of stories. "Human Rights Advancing in China," is a typical headline. "Building Prosperity in Tibet" or "A Step Up for Chinese Democracy" are other possibilities. There is usually at least one blistering denunciation of Japan, along with a few promising economic forecasts.

I am a journalist, and not for the Onion. The magazine I work for is one of several foreign-language rags published under the eminent leadership of the Communist Party of China. Along with dozens of other "foreign experts" at the Death Star—as an English colleague nicknamed the gray block of concrete cubes on the west side of Beijing where we work—our job is ostensibly to introduce the realities of China and its socialist democracy to the rest of the world.

The Death Star is just a small patch in a constellation of foreign-language propaganda outlets. The Communist Party controls newspapers, magazines, book publishers, websites, wire services, television and radio stations. Some are explicitly state-owned; others are nominally independent but rely on government funding. Together they employ hundreds of foreigners as writers, editors, performers, and news anchors. All of them share the patriotic duty of broadcasting the truth about New China.

My career in the propaganda machine began during the annual scramble for a work permit. I had already drunk my way through a few years in the Chinese ESL-industrial complex when I chanced across an ad for a job in the media. The pay wasn't great, but at least I wouldn't have to supervise children. After wowing the managers with my journalistic credentials (two articles in a high school newspaper) and a very perfunctory interview, I was duly furnished with a work visa, desk, computer, and a stack of business cards that identified me as a "Copy Editor/Reporter."

Reporter, I thought. Damn right.

I was following in the cobwebbed footsteps of a long tradition of pro-Chinese cheerleaders. Beginning in the 1950s, Communism's Caucasian admirers founded journals like mine to refute the lies of the capitalist media. Paradise was within reach, but you couldn't trust the bourgeois Western papers to share the good news. Reporters were gladly taken around on stage-managed show tours, where they reported bulging granaries and happy peasants. "More Crops with Co-ops," the Peking Review announced cheerfully in 1958, on the eve of China's greatest famine. When the Serfs Stood Up in Tibet was Anna Louise Strong's glowing account of that province's joyful liberation.

Today the job is rather less exciting. The "foreign experts" at the Death Star spend most of their time editing and proofreading the translated work of Chinese writers. Occasionally we might write something on culture or music, as long as we keep a safe distance from politics. I find it disappointingly non-Orwellian.

"I usually read a piece once, and then I look it up on Google to find out what actually happened."

But there are plenty of catch-22s. My editor once asked me to write an article about Mark Zuckerberg after the billionaire broke the internet by publicly conversing in Mandarin. "We'd like you to write a feature about Mark Zuckerberg's career," she said, "but try not to talk too much about Facebook. You know it's blocked here."

Then there was also the need to maintain political correctness—a phrase which takes a much more literal meaning in China. As an expat I already knew better than to mention the four forbidden 'T's—Taiwan, Tibet, Tiananmen Square, and the Muslim province of East Turkestan, formally known as Xinjiang. But now I had to learn a whole new vocabulary of political euphemisms. China's political system is a " consultative democracy"—the government asks for opinions before it makes a decision. By the way, it's also not a one-party system: ours is a "multiparty system of democratic cooperation." There actually are other political parties, but their activity is limited to encouragement and helpful suggestions. Taiwan is usually referred to as "China's Taiwan" and Tibet is very often "China's Tibet"—just in case you were wondering about who owns those masses of land.

Worse than the euphemisms are the bureaucratic clichés—my job is sometimes like a Chinese version of Office Space. "I'm so sick of reading words like innovation and win-win mutual cooperation ," said Alex*, who works for the Beijing—formerly Peking—Review, one of communist China's first English-language magazines. "Sometimes you see the word cooperation four times in one sentence."

I remember finding one especially painful example in an article about "the new-type model of major power relations between China and the United States," a phrase that was duplicated in its entirety at least once in each paragraph. In every revision I mercilessly slashed it out, only to find in the next draft that some variation of "the new-type model of major power relations" had somehow crept back in. "It's a set phrase," my chief editor explained. "We're not supposed to change it." This what you get when you let bureaucratic functionaries set your editorial policies.

I quickly realized that most of us work with our fingers crossed behind our backs. "It's just propaganda," a Chinese colleague shrugged dismissively. An American coworker was even more blunt. "I usually read a piece once, and then I look it up on Google to find out what actually happened."

Once in a while, we get a taste of proper 1950s-style agitprop. Japan is a favorite target, and it is a rare month that there is not at least one article on Japanese war crimes. There are also plenty of shrill polemics against the United States for trying to steal Taiwan and on the Philippines for encroaching on the South China Sea.

Usually these accusations are tone-deaf, like when the authorities think they're insulting someone by comparing them to the Dalai Lama. More recently, China used the Snowden revelations as ammunition against the United States, which was accused —without any sense of irony—of violating human rights.

Show tours are still a thing, too. Sometimes foreign colleagues are brought on guided trips to other provinces or ethnic minority areas, where they "report" on festivities by the happy locals. Last summer they took us to a carefully manicured model village at the edge of Beijing, where we were treated to an excellent lunch and a droning sermon from the village leaders. I could not help noticing that, besides the hotel staff and politicians, no one actually seemed to live there.

I met Richard* on one of these media field trips. He works in publishing, writing textbooks for foreigners studying Chinese abroad. Even the language students, he says, get their share of doctrine.

"One of the biggest problems [with our books] is the propaganda," he says. "They sneak their territorial claims into the textbooks. They know that no one's ever going to believe it, but they still send it overseas."

Some of the material Richard has seen wandered into tinfoil-hat territory. "There's all kinds of ultra-nationalistic nonsense and mythology. I edited a chapter once about how the original Buddhist scriptures were written in China. It's a complete myth." Another article, he said, claimed that Tiananmen Square had "the longest history of peaceful gatherings."

"Some of the foreign staff smoke pot at work. I've seen people come in to meetings high."

Richard attributed the organizational inertia to one of communism's most famous shortcomings. "There's no incentives," he said. "You don't have to work hard here. For every person who busts their ass, there are four or five who are just moseying along. Most of this company is losing money because people have no sense of business. We spent at least a million dollars on a really high-end teaching course—professional actors, directors, everything. It's sitting in a warehouse now because they won't bother to market it."

It wasn't just the Chinese, either. "Some of the foreign staff smoke pot at work. I've seen people come in to meetings high."

Richard and I got into the habit of spending our lunch breaks in the mezzanine of the Death Star's sumptuous European-style café. It's a relaxing place to escape from Beijing's noise and toxic air. That's where I met Alex and Chris*, who sat for coffee and told me about their jobs.

"I hate it when they call us language polishers," Chris told me. "It's as if the articles were finished, and they just need us to buff out the rough bits. Like it's just cosmetics. Sometimes we have to rewrite whole articles. What we do isn't makeup, it's reconstructive surgery."

Unlike the rest of us, Chris seems to take his job seriously. "There's no sense of art," he said. "There's no style. There's no incentive to improve the writing."

Chris had held workshops to improve the quality of his colleagues' writing. "We all know that we're propagandists. We can't change the facts we use, but at least we could improve the style," he said. "What we write is a hard sell for any Western reader, but at least we don't have to keep boring them."

Of course, the journalistic standards are weaker, too. "We've got a big problem with sources," Alex said. "They don't bother with quotations or sources or anything. Sometimes they telepathize their subjects. They'll say, 'He felt deeply moved,' or, 'The people were inspired by the speech.' I bring this up with the writers and they say, 'It was like that in the original' or, 'I don't see why this is a problem.' In the States you'd get fired for that."

As China develops into a country of smartphones and cappuccinos, the duties of propaganda are going beyond conventional media. Our bosses know that, like all expats , their foreign employees depend on Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) for daily essentials like porn and Google. And we're not the only ones who need them.

As it tries to rebrand, the government is looking to social media—despite the pervasive censorship, colloquially known as the "Great Firewall of China," which keeps the best parts of the internet inaccessible. Like computer-illiterate grandparents, the Communist Party needs our help posting to Twitter and Facebook.

"It's like they want all the benefits of social media, and none of the consequences," Alex says. "I write the tweets for our magazine every week. But instead of just posting them, I have to send them to the web editor, who passes them on to the North American bureau."

"I only realized after a couple of days that I was expected to just use a VPN," Alex continued. "They also expect us to promote the magazine on our own Facebook profiles. They want to use us for advertising, but they won't pay $60 for a VPN."

Alex wasn't the only one. Richard was also assigned work editing his company's Facebook profile. "I said, 'How am I supposed to access Facebook? Are you going to pay for a VPN?' They replied: 'Just use your own.'"

Of course, Chinese officials could not keep face if they paid for a VPN—that would mean acknowledging censorship exists.

It was like a Monty Python sketch—a government-owned company was ready to pay for illegal software to circumvent government censorship.

The situation got more Kafkaesque last June, when the government celebrated the Tiananmen anniversary by adding Google to the block list. Several offices, including mine, depended on Google for their everyday operations: not only for the search functions, but also Google Translate (which is far superior to China's Baidu), Google Drive, and Gmail. The sudden clampdown caught us all by surprise.

"If this goes on much longer," my boss sighed after the second week of using Bing, "I think we might have to get that software."

It was like a Monty Python sketch—a government-owned company was ready to pay for illegal software to circumvent government censorship. Part of me secretly hoped that they would keep up the censorship, just to see that happen, but that irony must have been too overt even for the dimly-flickering bulbs of the internet police. Google Translate and some other functions were eventually unblocked, but search and mail remain inaccessible.

West of the Death Star, in Babaoshan, stands the headquarters of China Radio International—China's answer to the BBC. Founded amid the bombs and shells of the War of Anti-Japanese Resistance—World War II to the rest of the world—the radio station is older than the People's Republic. Today CRI employs voices in dozens of languages.

Alan* used to work in the English section. Unlike some of my colleagues, he can call himself a journalist with a straight face. With 15 other regular broadcasters, his job was to keep China on the air, in English, for 24 hours a day— ventriloquizing the government with a polished British accent.

"They don't actually lie," he confided. "It's not that kind of propaganda where they change the news. But some stuff they simply won't talk about.

"I was in the newsroom during the umbrella protests [in Hong Kong] and we were talking about which stories to cover," he continued. "The protests simply didn't come up. The same thing happened during the 25th anniversary of Tiananmen—no one even suggested it."

I asked what would happen if he'd suggested those stories. "It's not that they'd shut you down," he answered. "They won't say, 'We're not allowed to talk about those subjects because it's politically sensitive.' But they'd blow you off. They'll say something like, 'We've covered that before,' or, 'I don't think this story sounds very interesting.'"

Still, we have very little to complain about. Life is pretty easy in the Death Star, and most of us work at the level of efficiency for which Chinese bureaucrats are famous. After a disgracefully late arrival to the office (generally between 9:30 and 10), we try to find some time between cigarette breaks to edit a few articles before retiring to the cafe for a two-and-a-half hour lunch break. At two, we return to the office to study Chinese, work on freelance projects, or—if especially weakened by the day's toils—watch videos on YouTube through our illegal VPNs.

As the Russians used to say, "They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work."

Whenever I meet with foreign colleagues we usually share a laugh about the silliness we put in print. We reassure ourselves that it's just muscle-building for our serious careers in "real journalism." Sometimes we even believe it.

All countries use propaganda, of course. A great deal of my time is spent wondering if the Western media is any better. Once in a while I feel a slight twinge of bad conscience, and wonder if I should feel a bit more uneasy about working in a giant authoritarian lie factory. But at least I have the consolation of knowing that the product is defective.

"For a propaganda machine," Richard told me, "they're not that good at it."

*Several names in this article, including that of the author, have been changed to protect those still working in China.

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Reigning Hurling the Silver Ball champ Marco Ciarleglio, holding the eponymous silver ball, being carried into the pub

Come Shrove Tuesday, the day before Ash Wednesday which some countries celebrate by eating pancakes, St. Columb Major has far more important stuff to do than gorge itself on breakfast. Instead, the residents of this small, Cornish town are busy battering down the hatches, boarding up windows, and bracing themselves for a bizarre and brutal tradition that sees a mob of sweaty men tearing through its narrow streets and punching each other in the face.

Dating back to before the 16th century, "Hurling the Silver Ball" is considered to be the county's official sport (alongside Cornish wrestling) and involves the Townsmen and Countrymen engaging in what's probably best described as a lawless game of street rugby. The objective is to place a specially made silver ball in one of the goals set two miles apart at opposing ends of the town. But as I'd garnered from a couple of pretty violent stories, it's never that simple.

Once played all over Cornwall, only the towns St. Ives and St. Columb Major host the event today, so I recently headed to the latter to witness Cornish culture in all its belligerent glory.

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A heavy expectancy loomed large in St. Columb Major on the day. The winding alleyways and numerous greasy food joints were bare, save for a few people shuffling along outside. Wooden planks and chicken wire covered shop windows. A storm was coming.

The "throw-up"—when the ball is lobbed into the crowd in Market Square to start proceedings—wasn't until 4:30 PM, so I hit The Silver Ball pub for a pint. On the walls, black and white photos of flat-capped, thick-armed Cornishmen in the act of hurling looked disappointingly civilized. The landlady assured me the afternoon would be nothing of the sort.

Out of nowhere, the mob gathered in the square. The serenity of the spot was quickly transformed into a bustling hum of simmering tension, with a police presence stoking the atmosphere as hundreds of hurlers turned out in rugby shirts and tracksuits. An olive-skinned guy sporting a fresh skin-fade haircut was holding the sacred ball and posing for photos.

Townsman Marco Ciarleglio, the 22-year-old son of a half-Italian fish and chip shop owner, was the reigning champion—the winner of the previous three events, in fact—and in no mood to relinquish his crown. As tradition dictates, he had "called up" hurling veteran and the 1977 titleholder Philip Tremain to do the honors. Being the champ is a big deal in these parts.

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"I'd like to thank Marco very much indeed for inviting me to throw up the ball this afternoon. It's a great privilege and I'm very proud to do so," Tremain told the crowd from a stepladder after the town crier had rung his bells. "I hope we have a good hurl. Town and Country do your best, but in this parish I must rest. Hip hip, hooray!"

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Tremain then tossed the silver orb—no larger than a cricket ball, but weighing in at just over a skull-shattering pound—into the cheering horde of young and old. It was chaos immediately, with bulging arms and white knuckles clawing into the scrum. Dull, fleshy smacks resonated as fully-grown men were obliterated onto the cold, harsh tarmac under the weight of the jostle. Somewhere buried inside all those protruding guts and grimacing expressions was the prized silver ball.

The game is over when a member of either Town or Country crosses a parish boundary with ball in hand, but for entertainment's sake players keep it in the town for at least an hour. The scrimmage slowly shifted south. Occasionally someone would break free with the ball, only to be collared and crushed beneath countess bounding bodies. At one point the free-for-all was fiercely condensed into a red phone box.

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Throughout the action, play often came to a halt while the ball was gently passed to bystanders. The custom is meant to bring luck and increase fertility. Onlooking OAPs and children also touch the ball intermittently.

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Despite these gestures, however, tempers flared. During an off-the-ball incident, an ageing hurler clocked a straight left square in the mouth from a stocky, irate Townsman. The old timer was staggered, his eyes glazed over as he swiped at the air in a dazed attempt at revenge.

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Not long after, a young spectator no more than 12 years old picked up the loose ball and inadvertently launched it into an unfortunate girl's head. The sound of dense applewood encased in 4mm silver striking skull at high velocity will stay with me for some time. The girl collapsed to the ground as blood streamed down her face, and was soon ushered into a nearby house for an emergency A&E job before being rushed to hospital. The culprit appeared strangely calm and unapologetic, as if he'd simply flung a rock at a watermelon.

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Just before the hour mark the commotion spilled onto the town's playing fields. Ciarleglio, who up until now had maintained a low profile for much of the event, edged into the fray and hovered with intent.

"The hour has passed!" someone shouted, like a medieval wizard. With that, Ciarleglio zoned in on the ball the moment it became loose and snatched it. He exited like a Tuscan greyhound. Jeering Countrymen looked on in despair as Ciarleglio disappeared down an alleyway, sprinting the two miles to the parish boundary goal and declaring a "Town Goal." I caught up with him during his victory march back into town as the light faded.

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Ciarleglio holding the silver ball.

"I'm now hurling champ for the fourth time—I believe the record is 19 times in a row, so I've still got a way to go," he beamed. "Now we're going to put the ball in a gallon of cocoa to make Silver Cocoa for the kids to share, to spread luck. Then, from 8 PM onwards, we go to every single pub in the town and put the ball in a gallon of ale donated by Townsmen and Countrymen alike, to make Silver Ale, to share more luck. We'll have a good sing-song later on."

Ciarleglio also explained that he could buy the ball as winner, but he wasn't permitted to reveal its worth: "A hurling secret."

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After changing out of their battle outfits, Ciarleglio and his hurling crew assembled in Market Square for a few triumphant chants. It was then onto his dad's chip shop to dip the ball in the cocoa for a few grateful kids, and plenty of slaps on the back for the champion.

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A while later, two-time winner James Rogers and a Townsman lifted Ciarleglio onto their shoulders outside The Ring O Bells pub, singing joyously.

"Oh we rule, we rule / Town Ball we rule and we rule / we rule Town Ball, we rule / Oh we rule Town Ball and we all go marching on! / Hip hip, hooray! Hip hip hooray! / Tooooown Baallllll!"

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The wide-eyed victor was carted into the pub and venerated long into the night. Silver Ale flowed freer than the river of blood that was spilled earlier on. Ciarleglio was king of Cornwall once again.

Lucio Fontana, Spacial Concept, 1959. Westphalian State Museum of Art and Cultural History, Münster, Germany. © The Gallery Collection/Corbis

that records our hero's
unbound freedoms
From my future perspective, I guess I was not as in control of events as I believed. And yet it did not seem that way. After two or three bottles of bourbon our choices became freer—whether borrowing my parents' car to deliver fresh peanut-butter cookies to friends and local stores, or accompanying people to their employment tribunals and addiction treatments after Hiro had befriended them on the street. That's the beauty of the mind-altering and the world-historical. One minute you're in a peignoir, the next you're on the metro with your replica gun in a canvas bag, just one of your many possessions—even if admittedly you're also enjoying this new accessory, but only the way you might enjoy a new sneaker or mascara. In that way we visited the city's sights—the parks and avenues, the museums of banking and heavy industry—and felt very gleeful that with us was this object, like our surreptitious pet. Or we simply visited the stores and monuments of our locale and barriada, supplementing beer with various bottles of vodka, sometimes smoking 14 or so joints while strolling with the dog in a happy small miasma. This really is the beauty of the mind-altering—it alters everything in the picture. For in non-real life you always would have the option of transforming into a zombie or some other animal or superfreak. Whereas in life what happened previously continues to happen, just maybe worse—like watching a movie, where all the fascinating business of getting from scene to scene is the seamless concern of someone else. Elsewhere, the season was at last beginning to disintegrate. Remote-controlled bees were being flown clumsily among the lavenders and other bushes. In the background you could ever so faintly hear the old dialogue continue: Mrs. Death! Mrs. Death! The sky was heavy and gray, as if the sky had some consciousness of its own farewell, and although I had written back and asked them to stop, sometimes I still received odd messages on my phone. But I insisted on feeling carefree because it's so easy to delete a message, it's as if it never happened, and so I did. And if I suddenly had this purchase on the world, I think only the hardest-hearted reader will begrudge me at least a small amount of exhilaration. I would not be downcast, even if among the bird reserves and estuaries the general monsoon murder rate was very high.

beginning in a café
The place we were in was one of the cafés beside the ice wharf and the canal. We had ordered blueberry clafoutis with cardamom ice cream on the side, or other delicacies. In my cup there was coffee, and beside us light illuminated the narrow perspective. There was one solitary person writing in a notebook, and I looked indulgently on her, for I had my own small experience of her tribulations, scribbling signs and messages everywhere. But otherwise this place was empty. Peacefulness was everywhere. And for a while this was how I liked it. You could hear the barges and the bicycles drift past with their different noises, and then the sound the general noise made, too, the surrounding noise of the city. There was a waiter who seemed to be loitering, just doing nothing but observing the general scene. But the problem with feelings is how quickly they develop, and I think that at this time a general time pressure and impatience was something I could feel almost every day. We were talking very gently about what we might do next, because as I said, the need for ready money was very present. We had been talking about this recently very much, and in Hiro there was a worry that our criminal mobster antics were no future.

—Is no career, said Hiro.

—What? I said.

—Stealing from people, said Hiro. —As a life.

And while I understood that perhaps we did not have the heart for it, to make the criminal a way of life, since to do that you need to use the most severe aspects of your personality, and also encourage a will to succeed that it was possible we did not quite have, still, I was more in favor of this pursuit and wanted to convince him. Because really—when you've done something once, then the possibility just becomes much easier. And so while I was always ready to follow Hiro into whatever endeavor he wanted, I also tried to encourage him into thinking that the street could still be a place for moneymaking. And I was pleased because he was not totally opposed. If I had this passion, he thought, then it was important to respect it. And yet to decide which precise location to apply our energies next was not so easy, for there were many competing options, either repeating the same exploit, or venturing into more recondite territory, like warehouses or factories, and as always we tended to lose ourselves in these reflections, like this lackluster afternoon, watching the way the light developed on the stagnant metal water.

Lucio Fontana, Spacial Concept, 1961. © Christie's Images/Corbis

with a waiter in the background
Late Capitalism! Late! It had only just got started! The atmosphere was definitely lacking—like the city or epoch had just remembered another appointment and had left you alone with its distracted PA. I mean, did anyone ever choose the café culture? I do not think so. I think the whole bohemian vibe is just what happens when nothing else is happening, when you would much prefer there to be great events and meetings and appointments. The bohemian is a very noble aspect of making do. And so the sudden sense of freedom I now possessed was very enticing. More privately, perhaps, I was stuck—

(—But what can I do? I said.

—Well, said Hiro. —You need to be with Candy, or with Romy, or with someone else like—

—But I can't do any of those, I said.)

—but this only meant that the general inner freedom I now possessed was all the more welcome and convincing. The problem is in finding ways to express this inner freedom, in imposing your effect on the world at large, and this seemed to be a problem for me now. We had been waiting in this restaurant for a long while, and still there was no sign of our blueberry clafoutis. There were only these coffees that were making me as always just a little hyper. I tried to catch the eye of the waiter but he did not acknowledge me, he was just texting or talking to the barista, just lost in his little social cloud. And I thought this showed a problematic lack of respect—for if you are to work in this business, where your job is to serve other people, I think you should be pleased to do that, and take pride in your subservience. Whereas it was obvious that he wanted to signify to me that he felt humiliated, that he did not feel this was a worthy job for him—and even that he wanted to prove to me that in a moral duel between us, he was the higher being.

—Hey, cool, man, said Hiro, or other soothing words.

But I did not want to be soothed. When it concerns a matter of principle, I don't think one should be ashamed of making a scene. I learned this very early from my mother. I was only small, she would tell me, but that was no reason why anyone should ignore or overlook me. I had to stand up for what was rightfully mine. And so I always wanted to, but with maybe little success. Now, however, I felt more in charge of my own person. For why in the end should one always be made to feel guilty? I mean, guilty for being served? Always we had people cleaning our house, as well as the people in restaurants and department stores who were there to help me in my choices, and that always felt very natural. For the point of employing someone isn't for them to hate you; the point is to form an extra family, to have people around you who care for you and admire what you strive to do. That's certainly how it was when I was growing up. Always there were people in the background—and definitely without background you are lost, or are nothing—people who wished me well, and wanted me to fulfill my entire potential. Whereas here there was this man who did not care about me at all, as if he were animated by some much grander sense of privilege than I had ever known, and it distressed me very much.

who frightens our hero
with his disregard
At first therefore I tried to wave at him, without too much wanting to make it look like I was trying, since I did not want to be observed by the girl writing in her notebook—I mean, observed in failing to make my presence felt. I could think of nothing worse. In the sycamore and orchid trees, pigeons were hiding their faces under one silvered wing. The world was as paused as that, and kept on pausing. I tried staring, or then ignoring him. It was as if the entire principle of a café as a place of refreshment had been just ever so calmly abandoned. Yes, this pause in which we waited was lasting longer than I had ever known, and it was making me almost frightened. That always happens for me if anything is just not the right size. I see in this nothing unusual. In the end everything we think is dependent on length and size. Meerkats for instance might seem very charming, but you only need to think of them enlarged to the size of even a cow or flamingo to realize how this charm is very much a category of their reduced dimensions. In the same way, a pause in a café that is not the right length can become debilitating or even worse. It can make you very fearful. And fear, I think, has this way of making everything seem different, so that all the usual behavior seems less available when you maybe need it most.

Lucio Fontana, Spacial Concept, c. 1949. © Christie's Images/Corbis

which leads to improvised
violent decisions
For instance, in my sense of disorientation, I decided to confront the waiter directly. I walked up to him and asked if we could have the bill.

—You don't want the food? he said.

—We did want the food, I said.

—But it'd be terribly sad if you left without eating, he said.

I suppose I should have not let myself be persuaded, but I always do want to see the good in people. So defeated I went back to my table, where Hiro was waiting for catastrophe. Then behind me came the waiter, with two plates of food. Except this was not the food we had ordered. Where we had wanted blueberry clafoutis and cardamom ice cream, there was instead a tempura of market greens, and mint sorbet—or roughly that, the precise details are not important. And it seemed to me that this was not at all something we should have to bear without any redress. To be insulted in this way was very sad. And absolutely, in retrospect I do now see these ugly feelings as not just pure, but also caused by other things, I mean not just the waiter's rudeness or indifference but also for instance the desolation I was trying not to think about when alone in the house with Candy. But then, this is the problem with motivations, they are free-floating and difficult to locate, or locate at the true location, which is why it's always important to be super-vigilant like a desert patriarch alone in his monastic cell observing all his reflections—because if you don't reveal all your thoughts to yourself at every moment then they can rise up against you. To be super-vigilant is basically to be super-vigilant of all the demons ranged against you, like inside your little self there are pupae with their individual moths folded up inside, waiting to unfurl, like pale umbrellas. And then these things do unfurl, after all. And one of these, I think, was this worry about my machismo and general influence. I was perhaps never as sure of my machismo as I might have liked—and I think that was visible in what happened next. As I looked at my tempura or mint sorbet, and thought that this was not at all what I had ordered, not at all what I had been excitedly imagining, I also remembered that, as usual, in our bag under the table was a very convincing gun. That's definitely a way of offering you more options in your everyday interactions. Also it seemed to me, when we had been discussing our future options, that everything we did should be done as morally as possible, because if you don't act like that, why bother? And here, it seemed, was one such opportunity. To take action against this locale was not at all an immoral act: It was instead a way of defending a certain ideal, for a world where niceties are not observed is not a world worth inhabiting. And while certainly I wanted to propose this to Hiro as a suggestion for him to approve, I also thought that there was very little time to act, since if the moment was lost then it would necessarily be lost forever.

but improvisation is
a difficult method
Unsteadily therefore I stood up with our gun. It wobbled in my grasp unsteady too, like a divining rod. I was not sure I was the man to choose for such a moment, being as it was devised without the meticulous planning we had previously employed. Still, one thing my schooling offered me was to put everything into the fight. I stood there with the gun and with much ferocity stared at the waiter, and did the usual thing of demanding money. And yet as I did so I was also aware that first there was the problem of what to do with the girl who had been solitary and engrossed with her scribbling and her notebook, since at this moment she was moving to the door, and I was not sure we should be allowing her escape, considering the possibility of police and other security measures. And yet I had no prepared way of forcing her to sit down, since I had no wish to harm or even scare her. Therefore I offered her more time.

—I'm going to count to three, I said, —and by three you need to be sitting back down.

It seemed a reasonable offer, but she said nothing to me. She just looked at me, and I found that unnerving but I continued to count to three, nevertheless, since if you have made a threat you must always try to fulfill it, that's the basic rule of society, whether gangster or gallerina, and I was relieved to see that as I did so she began to sit back down.

—No, said the waiter to her. —You should go.

I admit I was definitely surprised. He had such assurance, and I would have been full of admiration, had it not been also such a delicate moment, and also had it not been one more moment where my authority was being questioned. It made the situation, I thought, much more difficult than was necessary, and wistfully I considered once again how onerous is any form of work. There's no end to the complications. The same feeling must occur everywhere, not just for me or the editor of some local diario besieged by a violent mob but also the collector of rare spiders and the assistant in a hospice. No one is exempt. But most of all I felt a righteous rage. Here was this man, without any sense of duty, with no sense of respect, and once again he was treating me as if I posed no threat. So that, as if to contradict him, I found myself close to him, and pointing the gun in his face. And this was a very different feeling to what I had felt before, in the nail salon, where I had been anxious as much as possible to preserve everyone's calm, and not invade their moral space, the transparent envelope that I had assumed enveloped everyone. It was as if I had previously thought that everyone had this moral space around them, like in the grandest cable car or Ferris wheel, but what—this was the question now being presented, in a very violent form—if that wasn't true? What if everyone's available to everyone? I don't mean that's a world I love but that may well be the only one that exists, or at least that was how it seemed, with this sudden invasion I was performing of another person. As I said, I think that I was less in control of events than I might have thought. I could see the gun shaking in my hand and I knew that I was running out of methods to assert myself.

Lucio Fontana, Spacial Concept, c. 1949. © Christie's Images/Corbis

if it is to end well
But to be in a duo is always very restful—it enables each person to help the other out, and in many ways this duo I formed with Hiro was the best society I ever knew. He always moved very deftly, and behind me I could sense him moving with purpose and a gentle grace toward the counter. I was trying to hold the eye of the waiter. I had no idea if other people were present, presumably there must have been a chef to produce the mismatched food, but I could not see him. There was just this Wild West idyll, while Hiro took the money and beckoned me to follow him to the door. Just for a moment I still paused, however, because I was momentarily shaken by the violence of my feelings and was in a stalled confusion. The woman's notebook was open on her table with the pen beside it, and I imagined it soon to be dark with her panicked writing. I think I wanted to apologize or at least show that I could calm down and was not a monster, because the expression on this man's face was not an expression I ever wanted to see, it was sickly and with all the pain of something melted or gone awry, the way a shoulder looks awry when it's been dislocated. I knew that I had caused this kind of pain and I wanted to assert that to do so was way beyond anything I had ever intended, but of course in these situations you do not get the opportunity for interviews and retrospective summations. Do the clothes you wear express you, as the underwear models and character actors believe? Do your actions prove anything at all? I had never quite thought they did—but now that I was outside in the fluorescent light it did seem I might have been wrong. And yet I wanted to still maintain that I had only meant very well. The ideal, and it was an ideal, was of a noble restitution—where we would assert our variety of justice, with no violence done to anyone. And should one really abandon an ideal, just because of local problems? I know my rages very well. They're like a pet that people fear, but where the owner smiles encouragingly to other people—because she knows it will not scare, will do no harm. But also I can understand the arguments against that.

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Photos by Holly Falconer

Do you know any asexuals? It's a question that can seem baffling. Until recently, it probably provoked little more than a dim recollection of middle-school biology. But that began to change about 15 years ago, when a student named David Jay established the Asexuality Visibility and Education Network, otherwise known as AVEN.

David was frustrated at the lack of information his college's LGBT office was able to provide about people who don't experience sexual attraction. What he hadn't expected was how rapidly this basic website would grow into a sprawling online hub for people like himself. With AVEN, an online community of asexuals began to coalesce, and with the website came the journalists and academics—curious people like me.

Research suggests you might know some asexual people, even if you don't realize it. It's estimated that around 1 percent of the population is asexual, even if they don't (yet) define themselves as such.

The criterion? Never feeling a sexual attraction to anyone at all. Ever.

I'm a sociologist based at the University of Warwick and first conducted research into asexuality in 2009. Finding the work fascinating, I've been exploring issues related to asexuality ever since. My research was initially concerned with asexual identity, asking how someone might come to identify as asexual, but I soon realized that we can't understand why the identity "asexual'" has emerged without looking at broader cultural attitudes relating to sex.

When I conducted a research study into the thoughts and feelings of asexuals, it surprised me how similar the experiences were of the roughly 200 people who took part. They were all different in so many ways, but were united in having been made to feel there was something fundamentally wrong with them because they didn't experience sexual attraction. They felt "weird," "broken," or "fucked up"—phrases that came up time and time again.

Often, it was people who genuinely cared about them who made them feel that way. Ben (photographed below) explained how his parents laughed at him when he told them he was asexual and how they still, to this day, don't seem to believe it.

In other cases, people described deliberate cruelty. One person who took part in my research described how other students in her college dorm put sex toys in her breakfast cereal. One man, Vincent, says he was reluctant to tell people he was asexual because of his unwillingness to "endure people trying to tell me I'm wrong, too young, or just haven't met the right person yet."

Too many people see asexuality as "alien," something that needs to be fixed. Vincent believes this partly stems from the media. "Asexuality is horribly represented in TV and films," he says. "Most people will cite Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory as their first example, but I don't consider that character to be asexual. In fact, most "asexual" characters in TV actually have some kind of disorder."

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Often, people act in hurtful ways because they simply can't comprehend how someone can be asexual. Gareth—an asexual man from Northeast England—says that, since coming out in 2011, he's only met one person who has been knowledgeable on asexuality to the point that they "don't think it is someone who can spontaneously reproduce with themselves or that it is someone who is incapable of having sex." He adds that "repeated questions about masturbation" are a common experience when trying to explain asexuality, too.

Michael from Coventry explained how, prior to coming out as asexual, he often found himself "hugely embarrassed whenever the topic of sex or relationships came up" because of the "lingering question of why I was not and never had been in a relationship, and why I never showed any interest in sex." He was acutely aware of the assumptions that people were making—that he was gay, confused, or just couldn't get a girlfriend—which made being comfortable with who he was even harder.

The problems faced by asexuals have more to do with invisibility than they do with phobia, though. It's painful to feel like society doesn't believe people like you exist. Ben—who finds it "difficult" having to regularly explain himself—doesn't think the general public has very much knowledge of asexuality at all. "It seems to be getting more mainstream, in that more people I talk to have heard of the term, but generally not that much beyond that," he says.

Encountering asexual people for the first time calls into question a basic assumption that most of us hold: that everyone experiences sexual attraction. In fact, many of us don't realize this is even an assumption—it's just that evidence to the contrary seems utterly incomprehensible. It's precisely this sense of bewilderment as to how anyone could live without sexual attraction that has fascinated and frustrated me in equal measure.

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Jenni, photographed in Oxford

The asexuals I've met live just fine, making their way through the world much as any other person does, with all the usual ups and downs. And the coming out experience isn't traumatic for everyone.

Jenni, an MA student in Bristol, had a straightforward experience. She says after starting college and telling people she was asexual, that was pretty much that. "It wasn't a big change to anyone," she explains. "It was just who I was. It was great being able to be confident in approaching relationships knowing that they knew who I was, and if they didn't like it, it wasn't my fault. All of my friends are super open-minded."

Ben thinks there's a tendency for press coverage of asexuality to lean toward a look-at-the-freaks sensationalism and that visible asexuals in pop culture are few and far between. "Really, there's only Sherlock, who is a psychopath and only ambiguously asexual," he says. "And Doctor Who, who is rather inconsistent on the issue." He thinks it might be because asexuality is perceived as too, well, boring. "Being asexual doesn't create conflict," he says.

Asexuality, when actually discussed, is painted as a dramatic departure from the norm. But the idea of what it means to be "sexual" is left weirdly undefined in our culture today. For instance, what do we call people who aren't asexual? I've tended to switch between saying "non-asexual people" and "sexual people," despite the former feeling clunky and the latter strangely broad.

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Gareth, Newcastle

Asexuality is still dismissed by many as a "confused" phase, and yet I've become more and more convinced that it's actually we non-asexual people who are confused about sexuality. We find it much easier to talk about actually having sex—with whom, in what way, how often—then we do about actually being sexual. As the psychologist Leonore Tiefer puts it, there's now a widespread belief that "sexual functioning is a central, if not the central, aspect of a relationship."

We see sex as the defining feature of romantic relationships and struggle to imagine how those relationships could exist without it. But they do, all the time. It's our hyper-sexual culture that has led people to view a sexless relationship as something that has gone wrong and needs fixing, which is where online communities like AVEN come in. So many of the asexual people I talked to agreed that talking to other asexual people helped them to accept who they were. Gareth, from Newcastle, would encourage "any asexual, whether they are young or old, confused or content, to take a look at what AVEN does," and believes it changed his life.

Gareth also found coming out overwhelmingly helpful. "Don't pick a time, don't pick a date, just let it be organic," he says. "It can be a very stressful process, and the "right" moment with the "right" people may never come. You'll know when the time is right. You will feel relaxed, and you'll realize that this is the opportunity. It is then that you should let it out."

Michael agrees. "To anyone thinking of coming out, do it in your own time and in an environment where it's safe and comfortable. If it's difficult talking to close friends or family first, try it with other acquaintances." He recommends connecting with other asexual people first, for tips from people who are going through or have been through the same thing, and says the only time he'd recommend coming out "for definite" is when starting a new romantic relationship. "It's only fair to both parties to let them know where the relationship stands."

Follow Mark and Holly on Twitter.

Scroll down for more of Holly's portraits

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Michael, photographed in Coventry: "I identify as asexual and aromantic. I recently gave a talk on asexuality to a group composed mostly of pensioners. I was a little nervous about it because of the stereotype that older people are less interested in sex so simply wouldn't care about asexuality and would see it as a non-issue—but I was completely wrong. They found it fascinating and wondered why there wasn't much more coverage. I think we need to reach out to all ages, including middle-aged people and pensioners, though it would be fantastic to get some proper asexuality education into the schools."

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Mark, photographed in Reading: "The best reaction was from my (heterosexual) brother, who said, "You lucky bastard." He was going through a relationship breakup at the time, though. The majority expressed curiosity, wanting to know more about asexuality. I haven't had a negative reaction thus far. Being able to tell others was the icing on the cake to the epiphany I experienced when discovering the actual existence of others like me."

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Gareth, photographed in Newcastle: "I hear more and more stories about sensitive doctors, nurses, and therapists, and stories of people nervously coming out and being met with words of understanding. That understanding and knowledge is certainly spreading, but it may take a while longer before it's something that most people can accept."

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Christof, photographed in Liverpool: "Knowledge about asexuality is a bit more widespread among those who are interested in sexual rights and sexual/gender equality, but it's a bit of an internet bubble. The large majority of the population would still likely just say, What?"

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Vincent, photographed in Plymouth: "I still prefer the label demisexual—it's very specific and matches how I experience attraction. However, I just tell people I'm asexual or not interested when I don't fancy explaining myself. I haven't really gone out of my way to tell people, so only the few people I'm close to actually know. My sister is gay, so she was open to the idea of orientations that aren't hetero, although I don't think she fully understands it. My mother can't seem to wrap her head around it, or thinks it's just a phase (even though I'm 28 now). My ex was confused about it, as that was a core component of a relationship for her. I've told a few friends, and it's mostly the straight ones who find it weird."

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Jo, photographed in Camden Town: "I currently define myself as asexual, aromantic, agender, and trans. People react differently when I tell them I'm asexual. I've had both positive and negative experiences. Recently, I interned for a queer-theater organization that knew next to nothing about asexuality. Everyone there was curious, and I ended up giving an office-wide 101. Around the same time, I also came out to my dance teacher, and her response was to recommend a whole bunch of relationship-advice books. I haven't figured out how to respond to that yet."

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Thick eyebrows are the new facial hotness. Photo via Flickr user Archie McPhee

I am a woman with fat, thick, bushy eyebrows, the result of a Portuguese father and a Lebanese mother, and the world wants me to fucking pay for it. These demons burning a hirsute path across my face have been the target of racist comments and also a focal point for exoticism. At worst, I've been told, "When you were born, God thought your face was your cunt, so he put hair all over it." At best, I've been told, "You look like you're from a race that hasn't been invented yet. I mean that as a compliment." It's like an eyebrow circle-jerk.

There is a seemingly innocuous exoticism we fix upon women of mixed ethnicities—one precipitated by a shift in beauty standards and expectations." In the 90s, the thing was to have super-thin eyebrows, so I plucked mine to within an inch of my life. The right one ended up looking like the long division symbol, and the left looked like the square root symbol. There was also the expectation to be waif-thin. Remember Calvin Klein's heroin-chic campaigns? Somewhere since the millennium, triggered by J.Lo's butt, Beyoncé's thighs, and Shakira's truth-telling hips, there has been a push for the inclusion of ethno-cultural minorities' features within Dominant Culture.

The intentions here are debatable: Was this done to reflect the diversity of North American culture in a fashion industry that was previously dominated by whites? Have we tried to expand the definition of beauty, from rail-thin to butt implants? "Real women have curves," they cried. Valid arguments could be made there, but all I know is the effect it had on me. In the 90s, I hated my boobs and I hated my brows. I was bullied and terrorized for looking like a dirty non-white. My full brows and breasts were the bane of my existence. Now, dudebros think they are my greatest asset.

Kim Kardashian has "power brows," which, while it sounds like a Gatorade flavour, has prompted mainstream white actresses to join the "thick eyebrow trend." Toronto makeup artist Jessica Myers even blogged about getting eyebrow extensions (yup, that's now a thing) at a Yorkville salon. But bushy eyebrows are simultaneously used against women of colour to remind them that they are "exotic," they are "other." Is this really inclusion or just good, old-fashioned cultural appropriation?

These aren't Trophy Eyebrows. They just came with the body. But I get it, you guys. You think "exotic" is a super-kind compliment. It is, in fact, THE WORST. You think you're telling me I'm unique, but you're really telling me I'm not Canadian enough. Like you can't talk to me the way you would other Canadians. You wouldn't even know how to unless you categorized me first.

If you look up "exotic" in the dictionary, you'll find "not native; introduced from abroad." For the record, I was born and raised in Quebec, I speak French and English like a good little Canadian, and I own my own pair of figure skates and a toboggan. Calling me "exotic" for my eyebrows, or any other arbitrary physical feature for that matter, tells me that I do not belong here. Stats Canada says that over six million people in this country are visible minorities, and 30 percent of them were born in Canada, so it's not like you've never seen the likes of me before. You've seen lotsa bushy-eyebrowed gals from your grade two class all the way to your first-year English tutorial in university. So, what the fuck? Stop reminding me that I am just an ethno-cultural minority. Stop telling me that my ethnicity is my identity, when it is in fact just my identification. My identity is a many-splendored thing, including backpacking, bookwormism, and hunting for street art. My identification is just a box I tick on an Equal Opportunities Monitoring Form.

And worst, you are also sexualizing me, since the only other time "exotic" is used as a descriptor is when it is placed in front of "dancer" or "massage." I am not going to give you an exotic dance. Hell, I'm afraid of having sex standing up just because it might lead to dancing. I once saw the word exotic used to describe the essential oils found in a hand moisturizer. I'd like to think I'm a step above toiletries.

Yet without fail, those who emphatically insist "exotic" is harmless praise are, invariably, white people. The four most recurring sets of dialogue I have had with white people are, in no particular order:

#1 "Where are you from?"
"Trois-Rivières."

"No, where are you really from?"

#2 "Oh, so you're half and half?"
"Half and half is what you put in your coffee."

#3 "So which side do you identify more with?"
"Neither, because I'm both."

#4 "I didn't know the Portuguese and the Lebanese got along."
"They don't, my parents are divorced."

And I'm not even allowed to get mad at them for their drive-by fuckery because of the "I mean it as a compliment" line that's always tacked on to the end like some form of emotional blackmail. They're all like, "I'm paying you a compliment, and you will accept this compliment whether you like it or not."

When I was pursuing my Master's degree at York University, my professor Daniel Yon suggested I read his book Elusive Culture, a study of Race and Racist Discourse. In it, a student named Margaret (not her real name) says,

"At one point I thought of myself as a Black person and that limits me because as a Black person there are things that I am suppose[d] to be. So I had to shed that. I am not just Black. I am a woman, and that limits me as well. [But,] if I think that I am limited then I don't dare risk anything or try to do anything. So 'bust' being Black and 'bust' being a woman."

Margaret's concerns rang especially true for me and my eyebrow conundrum. For my entire life, I had changed my looks and myself in every way a person can change themselves, just because I wanted to be a part of this Brow Game that everybody else seemed to innately understand. But then one day I realized that I could create The Game.

I decided to grow these suckers in, and if anybody thought I was ugly or, the double-edged sword, "exotic," simply for my bushy eyebrows, then screw 'em. I'm awesome, and if you don't want awesome in your life, that's your problem. Do I think my brows are my greatest asset? The short answer is, "No."

The long answer is, "Fuck no."

I have many assets, the least of which is kiboshing racial, backhanded "compliments." To that end, just this past summer a guy stopped me on the street to say, "Hey. Sublime eyebrows," and his drunken, Mr. Brojangles–like buddy added, "You look like a Mexican whore."

To which I replied, "If you want my comeback, you'll have to scrape it off your Mum's teeth."

I'm don't always shut down racist comments with such charm and finesse, but at least my Brow Game is tight.

Follow Christine Estima on Twitter.

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Since 2009, Haruhiko "Photographer Hal" Kawaguchi has made a career out of asking couples he doesn't know to come home and get in the bag. Not many people could pull something like that off, but the Tokyo native is something special—his series Flesh Love and Zatsuran are globally lauded for their claustrophobic depictions of love. He's also (hysterically) sponsored by Condomania.

"When you embrace your lover," he tells me, "sometimes you wish to melt right into them. To realize this wish, I've been photographing couples in small, cramped spaces. Soon I reached the point of photographing couples in vacuum-sealed packs. As my work has become more and more intense, I've noticed that communication is indispensable."

VICE: Why do you go by the professional name Photographer Hal?
Haruhiko Kawaguchi: When I'm taking a picture, it's very important to me how the subject comes out. I take it just like a machine, and I'm conscious of A Space Odyssey as a mechanical symbol. I am HAL, not as a murder machine but as a computer, a pure machine.

So where do you find people willing to be vacuum-sealed inside plastic bags?
Nightclubs, bars, wherever, anytime. I always take a sample of Flesh Love to show couples I ask to model.

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You just come out of nowhere as a complete stranger?
Everyone is surprised. Their reactions to my work are extreme. Some parties agree to model easily. Sometimes it does not work. No matter how hard I persuade, some couples are not interested.

But how do you convince a stranger to let you do this? If you didn't know your work it's pretty dangerous-looking.
I assert the significance and safety of shooting in good faith.

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But you're asking them to maybe suffocate on the floor of your kitchen.
I just persuade the couples sincerely. When shooting, I have an assistant ready to open the bag if there is an emergency. And an oxygen sprayer and gel to cool people off if anyone starts feeling sick.

How long can people last inside those bags of yours?
In Zatsuran, 40 minutes. In Flesh Love, ten minutes. In total, about 400 couples have participated, and each shot takes around two hours.

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Anyone ever been hurt doing this?
Never. In most cases, the only problems are when a model can't enter a bag because they're large-built. The bags are very specific to certain poses. Before taking a picture, everyone seems to feel scared. But when the photography is finished, everyone seems to be excited and enjoying themselves. I think that's similar to the way people enjoy an ride at an amusement park.

Do you pay them?
I give them a print.

Have you ever received criticism for this?
There are pros and cons. However, risk haunts a challenge.

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Why are some of the couples naked, and why are some of them wearing costumes?
I have to respect how they like to be themselves. They bring a variety of their own costumes to the shooting location. Naked is one of several varieties.

How do the shoots work, exactly?
After the couple get in the vacuum pack, I suck the air out with a vacuum cleaner until there's none left. This gives me ten seconds to take the shot. In this extremely limited time, I can't release the shutter more than twice. I've been in there myself (see the last image below), and the fear I felt was overwhelming.

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It kind of sounds horrible.
As the shooting continues over multiple takes, the pressure of the vacuum seal grows stronger. At the same time, the two bodies start to communicate, and whether through unevenness of limbs or the curve of joints, they begin to draw a shape of what they want to express. The two lovers draw closer until they finally transform into a single being. Looking at these vacuum-sealed packs of love, we can imagine a more peaceful world. For me, the vacuum pack is only a means to an end. The important thing is connecting to someone.

I can't decide if all this is more about intimacy or more about trust.
As you say, the couples seem to come together, to "stick" until they reach the limit. I'm seeking the possibility that they can stick more. To transcend togetherness.

Words by Toby McCasker. Follow him on Twitter

Conversion therapy is the practice of "curing" gay people by trying to turn them straight through counseling and lifestyle restrictions. The practice dates back to the early Freudian period, when homosexuality was considered pathological and attempts to treat it were deemed appropriate. Today, however, homosexuality has been removed from the American Psychiatric Association's list of mental disorders, and conversion therapy is considered ineffective, harmful, and potentially deadly.

Regardless of a nationwide battle toward the acceptance of same­-sex marriage and equal rights for gay people, conversion therapy is still a problem, and it's being practiced every single day in the United States and throughout the world.

In this special report, VICE gets exclusive access to one of the hundreds of gay-conversion-therapy organizations, groups, and sessions in the United States. At the Journey into Manhood program, men pay more than $600 to attend a weekend retreat where they participate in exercises and activities the staff members claim will help them battle their same-sex ­orientation. The only qualification to become a staff member is to have successfully completed the program.

The report meets with the founder of reparative therapy, Dr. Joseph Nicolosi, who is illegally practicing on minors in the State of California, and investigates the controversial legal battle to fight conversion therapy for individuals under 18 years of age. We also travel to the annual Gay Christian Network Conference, speak with former "ex-gay" leaders including John Smid of Love in Action, who is now married to his gay partner, and hear the grueling stories of the individuals who have survived this brutal practice.

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If you really sat down and tried, you could turn a lot of pages in the space of 30
days. While we've spent over a decade providing you with about 120 of those pages every month, it turns out there are many more magazines in the world other than VICE. This new series, Ink Spots, is a helpful guide on which of those zines, pamphlets, and publications you should be reading when you're not staring at ours.

By day, Lee Crichton is a London-based hairdresser. However, having been a longtime fan of The Face, he decided that he wanted to revive the spirit of the now-defunct classic British culture magazine and publish his own photography journal.

The result is a Collection of Documentaries, a gathering of work that sets out to explore modern British society and challenge what people think of as "Real Britain." Through concise writing and candid photography, it looks to explore the UK's influence on youth culture worldwide.

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Photo by Sonya Kydeeva.

We talked to Lee, the editor, and Adam Evans-Pringle, who designed the magazine, about the project and their rejection of advertising and social media.

VICE: How did C.O.D come about? I heard there was some trouble with funding it?
Lee Crichton: Firstly, the desire to create my own magazine came about because of my love for holding a print publication. After watching the world become so obsessed by social media—and the industry becoming so saturated as a result—I really wanted to strip things back to basics.

If you think of rave culture—real rave culture—there were no mobile phones; people lived in the moment. Whereas nowadays, people are too bothered about taking a picture and writing the best caption when they should be losing control. It's these moments that I really wanted to celebrate and document.

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Photos by Sonya Kydeeva.

Together, myself, Winter [Vandenbrink, the photographic curator], and Adam wanted to create something that looked different on the shelf. With regards to funding, obviously the nature of print is far more expensive and less accessible, which is why online media seems the more obvious option nowadays and print the elusive option. We had potential funding from an outsider who backed out at the 11th hour, so let's just say I cut a lot of hair! But it was so worth it. And hopefully we will have more openings when it comes to the second issue.

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Photos by Sonya Kydeeva.

What inspired you when putting it together?
It's a British-led magazine—there's not much more to it than that. Being British myself in London, I was always interested in so many other creatives who have moved here, and of the ways our culture affected their cities and their youth while growing up—something that is happening now more so than ever. Our photographic curator, Winter, is from Amsterdam and sees Britain through different eyes to me, and this sparked so many interesting ideas in itself. It took many wine-fueled cultural debates to realize that our difference in opinions and viewpoints could create something really beautiful.

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The design is very streamlined, with lots of negative space. What was the idea there?
Adam Evans-Pringle: The white space in an art gallery is equally as important as its content, so we directed it in this way to hero the work. Also, because of the contributors' diversity, it was proving difficult to select the right cover shot, so we didn't.

As a full time advertising creative I am always compromising creativity for function and marketing purposes—trying to shoehorn in anything and everything, everywhere, and usually against my recommendation—so it was nice to be able to break away from this suffocation and create minimal beauty. We started C.O.D to go back to basics and produce something to hold on to, so that's what we have done.

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Why did you choose to have no advertisements in the magazine?
Lee: This was more of a rebellion than anything else at first; the pages of many publications are swamped with advertisements that are often not remotely connected to the content of the magazine itself—something we reference quite explicitly in the numerous repetition of the same image at the start of issue one. Of course, we fully appreciate that we cannot survive several future issues without some help from advertisements, so it's not something we're consciously ruling out.

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Photos by Stuart Griffiths.

Who is the magazine for? Is there a preferred audience?
Lee: I'm not looking to pigeonhole anyone—the content of C.O.D is already so vast that it would be difficult to pinpoint a specific audience. We're a community in the way we built the magazine; it's something we want to be discovered and explored. The really interesting thing about a lack of online presence is that it's actually really difficult to target a particular type of person—aside from an influence on where it's stocked—meaning we rely solely on word of mouth or secondary sources to spread the word. So chances are I'll have no idea who's reading it, either.

How did you connect with the contributors?
That was mostly Winter's job. Being a photographer himself, he has a real connection with new talent across Europe and really held his own on that. He sourced the photographers, and the writing was sourced by me.

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Photo by Winter Vandenbrink, originally shot for GRIT magazine.

When I went through the book I felt like an overriding theme was the loss of innocence. Was that intentional, or was there another message that you wanted to convey?
This was kind of a natural progression. The really raw element of all of this was that the brief was so indefinite. So the theme you mention was a cultural comment as a result of the wholesome view that our contributors had on British culture. We added to this with a lack of sub-editing, especially in Stuart's writing. It exudes innocence because his writing has a real childlike quality, in the best of senses. And this is something we didn't want to disguise.

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Photo by Winter Vandenbrink

What's your favorite collection in the magazine and why? Do you have some favorite shots that you love the most?
I think Sonya's connect most with me. Perhaps because it has the most obvious British connection and reminds me of 80s football culture, which is something I've always been fascinated by visually.

My favorite shot is this one by Winter (above). When I first saw it, it reminded me of myself; that feeling when you're a kid and buy yourself a piece of sportswear you love... For me, it was a pair of Adidas shiny tracksuit bottoms; for him, it was this top. I suppose innocence comes to the forefront again. He, the child, won't be like that forever.

What are your plans for your next work?
Myself and Winter are putting issue two together as we speak. Issue one will hit shelves worldwide in March, and issue two in September, and then the same the following year. It's all about taking C.O.D to the next level now—getting the right people involved but keeping it niche.

Check out more images from C.O.D. below.

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All photos from the EGL's "Battle of Europe" by Lewis Farley

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

I've been playing video games for 30 years, but while I'm well aware that e-sports is a rapidly growing offshoot industry, branching from the core business of gaming and establishing roots on every continent, I'm a complete noob to the ins and outs of it all. But with an ever-growing schedule of massive annual tournaments, and prize money for winning teams reaching into the millions of dollars, it's probably time to pay some attention.

So I am. And to help me, I got on the phone to a pair of e-sports experts. Glen Elliott is the founder of the European Gaming League, a network ( "set up by gamers, for gamers") promoting e-sports tournaments in Britain and on the continent, as well as numerous online events. The company's slickened itself up in recent months, now rivaling the glossy looks of Far Eastern and American peers. Alex Buck, a.k.a. "Buk20," is a professional Halo player and a member of the continent-covering Epsilon Sports team, launched in 2008.

I spoke to both ahead of the EGL's recent Halo Championship Series "Battle of Europe" showdown, where the top Halo teams on this side of the Atlantic competed not just for a $11,300 prize, but also the chance to enter the Stateside Halo Championship Series finals held in Boston on March 7 and 8.

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The Epsilon team on stage at the "Battle of Europe"

VICE: What's the European Gaming League all about, then?
Glen Elliott: I founded the EGL five years ago. I was in the finance industry, and I got bored. I've always been a gamer, and I've followed e-sports for years. So I saw an opportunity—nobody in Europe was running console e-sports events. It was getting quite a lot of momentum in the States, with Major League Gaming, so I invested some money, and we held our first EGL event in July 2010. We've since grown into Europe's largest console e-sports company, in terms of team numbers, and we did that on almost zero budget, with no full-time staff. Last year, I decided I wanted to start taking it more seriously, and raise capital to take us where we want to go, and a chance meeting with (ad agency) Bartle Bogle Hegarty led them to invest in us. And we haven't looked back since.

These eSports events aren't as big here in the UK as they are in the Far East or United States. Why's that?
Alex Buck: There's just more public interest in e-sports in America, and more big gaming companies that work out there. There's Major League Gaming, and a bunch of PC-platform organizations. So they get more sponsors, which means more money, which means more financial backing for teams and players. There's more incentive out there for people to commit to playing a game full time.

Which still sounds funny to me, the very idea that you can play a video game, full time. What was the reaction of your family and friends, Alex, when you told them that you can make money this way?
It was very frowned upon when I started, because I was still in secondary school. I played in my first Halo tournament when I was 15, coming second in the XLEAGUE.TV playoffs. I got $930 or something, as the team won over $3,000. Both of my parents came to look after me on the day, as I wasn't old enough to be there by myself. I think once they saw that, and the events that I played in afterwards, they realized how big this could be, and how it's worth investing time in. I could be out on the streets, hanging around shops and stuff—they preferred that I played Halo.

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Team Epsilon plays Team Vibe at the "Battle of Europe"

I've seen footage of e-sports tournaments out east, and some of those players get absolutely swamped by fans. Is that what we need in Europe for the competitions to grow in public appreciation—a standout megastar performer?
Elliott: Yes, 100 percent. We need that face—a David Beckham of gaming, or something like that. Someone who's massively successful in gaming, but really relatable. Scotland actually produced one of the best-ever League of Legends players, "Snoopeh" (a.k.a. Stephen Ellis). He went to America to play professionally. He was a great personality in the scene, and did very well—but if you ask anyone on the street if they've heard of him, they'll be like, "What, the cartoon dog?" He's now a presenter for League of Legends tournaments, and an analyst, and he retired from playing aged just 23. Crazy. We need one of the top players to be the face towards the mainstream. I think that's coming, and we'll see it in time.

Does the press in the UK play any part in holding e-sports back, too? It's not like it's reported on in the mainstream media, really.
Well, it doesn't help with the mainstream media approaching e-sports as it does, sometimes. The BBC did a report on an event, in the summer, and the presenter looked like he didn't want to be there. He was sort of poking fun at the gamers, rather than understanding why there were so many thousands of people there. But on the flipside, I've seen other, more positive things, where they're trying to make eSports sound great. There are a lot of old-school journalists who just don't get it, and that might be because they're scared of the subject, or that they simply don't care.

What kind of commitment do you need to exhibit, to make it as a professional e-sports player?
Buck: I work in the daytime, at the moment, so I generally play in the evenings, online. In the lead up to a regular tournament I'll be playing for at least three hours every night after work. Building up to the "Battle of Europe," I've been playing a lot more—I'll get back home from work at seven, and start playing straight away and go on through until midnight. So it's quite demanding, but hopefully it pays off. It's weird to speak about e-sports like "normal" sports, because it's not a sport as such, but it's about practicing, and playing the game a lot. And one of the main things is that you have to play against top-level opposition. It's all well and good practicing every day, but if you're not playing against the best, then you're not going to improve.

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Team Vibe emerged as the winners of "Battle of Europe"

And when you're playing online, are you able to really develop that team bond you need, when it comes to the big day?
Most of the time when I'm playing online it's as part of my team, as that's the more beneficial practice. Halo teams are a bit like football—players swap between squads over the years. But I've known one of my teammates for six years now, through gaming, and the other two, I've known them for about a year and a half. For general practice we'll just play online, but as we get nearer to an event, we'll meet up to play in the same room, or participate in a warm-up tournament. So our team was in Paris the other weekend, and we won a tournament there. The best French teams were there, and we beat them, so that was good practice for the EGL tournament.

Do you put a lot of research into the teams you're going to be playing, in the tournaments?
We're always thinking about how other teams will play the game, as there are several different play styles you can adopt. Last night we spent a few hours going through recent games against other teams, to see how they played against us. We watch footage back after we've had a match, so we can see what went wrong, what we can do better next time, and analyze what other teams are doing.

Do players stick just to their one game, all the time? And I mean that in the sense that it's all they play, ever, regardless of competition—like, you don't have to be into gaming culture to be an e-sports contender, if you're dedicated enough to just that one game?
Elliott: That happens, all the time. Again, it's rare that you get a player who can cross over, and be good at a few games. Gaming can be really tribal, and "e-sports" is just a general term, with each game within that its own, individual sport. Fans are tribal, too—sometimes a Call of Duty e-sports fan will be up in arms because we're running a Halo event, so they'll be online saying how rubbish Halo is. There's a lot of one-upmanship, even at events where there are multiple titles on show. Fans of one game will stick to their own pods, and they'll socialize with just those people. It's difficult to get people to cross over, but it'll be interesting to see how these fan bases branch out as e-sports grows.

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The audience responds to some "Battle of Europe" drama

Are there any barriers between someone who's good enough to play professionally, and them getting that opportunity? Do you feel there's any discrimination in the scene, as when I look at photos I see a lot of dudes playing these games.
With e-sports, there should be no discrimination. The news that came out of Asia regarding the restriction of gay and transgender players, that's so ridiculous. We have girl teams entering our tournaments, and mixed teams too. I see gaming as being equal, with no restriction on being able to compete beyond if you're good at the game or not. There are some great female e-sports role models out there—they just need to be publicized more. For example, there's a nurse in Northern Ireland, a maternity nurse, who is a kickass Battlefield player.

Buck: I think that some girls are put off attending events because they might be seen as being there purely to attract attention to themselves. But when they're playing well and competing properly, taking it seriously, of course they're totally accepted.

Is there any ceiling, do you think, in terms of how big e-sports can become? It's huge online, but mediums like TV aren't touching it.
Elliott: Education is the important thing, here. And if we get a couple of big brand names involved in European e-sports, we'll see more recognition, outside of the online audiences. If a couple of brands come in, that'll really help stabilize things. And we need to make sure the e-sports companies are run professionally—you don't want Coca-Cola coming in to sponsor an event, and then that event falls flat on its face. We've had to pick up those pieces before. It's a very young industry, so there are very few companies run by people with business experience, with a mature head. That's held e-sports back a few times over the past couple of years—companies have promised big prize pots and then disappeared without a trace. And the bigger sponsors won't come into an industry run by a bunch of cowboys, basically.

Buck: I don't know whether TV is the right place for e-sports, but coverage that reaches a mainstream audience would help people to appreciate what these games are, and how they're played professionally. People just don't understand the level that pro-players are at—they're playing in a way that nobody has ever seen before. There's much more to it than just sitting down and playing a game for an hour or two—this takes so much practice, so much determination, and you have to be a part of a team as much as you are individually skilled. So there's a lot of educating to be done.

Follow Mike on Twitter.

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'Bomb Hugger' in its original state. Photo via Flickr user Walljet

This article originally appeared on VICE Germany.

An unidentified person has "destroyed" the only remaining Banksy piece in Germany. The piece Bomb Hugger in Hamburg got marred by the word GRAFITTI [sic] painted in blue paint, and now the stencil of a little girl hugging a bomb is essentially illegible now.

Between 2002 and 2003 the world's most famous street artist visited Hamburg and left four pieces in the wake, but three of them were eroded in the following decade. Of course, at this point Banksy's art has become so popular that his images can be found in museums, books, and overrated movies; you might argue that the original premise of street art—its transient nature, its democratic and anarchic aspects—doesn't apply to his work any more. Which is why the Spiegelberger foundation decided to cover Bomb Hugger with a piece of acrylic glass two years ago: the possibility of some drunk idiot defacing this criticism of war with a tag or a penis doodle must have been too serious.

Unfortunately, that wasn't enough to save it from being vandalized. According to newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung, there's currently a discussion concerning the different ways of restoring Bomb Hugger to its original state and better protecting it in the future.

If you're fond of street art and graffiti you should be more than irritated by these ideas. Even Banksy himself is known to reject the commercialization and idealization of his art. He shows up, paints, and disappears into anonymity—like most of his fellow street artists. If the artist himself doesn't seem to mind that his work will be modified, copied, painted over, or reinterpreted, why should outsiders turn his pieces into museum installation? Does the Spielberger foundation not get street art, or is it merely trying to maintain its status as a tourist destination?

Some people on Twitter suspect Banksy's behind the whole thing. Indeed, you can't really help asking yourself if the offending graffiti is an artistic statement in itself. Graffiti—normal graffiti, the sort put out by non-Banksys across the globe—is supposed to be accessible and visible to everyone, part of the urban landscape. And if someone who's not even part of the process decides to cover street art up with a pane of glass just because it's made by someone whom people actually make money off now—while other writers' work is classified as criminal damage—then let's spray all over it and let the paint run down behind the protective glass pane.

By now the blue letters have reportedly been removed. The question of whether the restoration or, any of it for that matter, makes any sense remains. Twitter user @oma_kazi sums it up nicely: „glaube [sic!] banksy hat sich selbst zerstört, kunst im käfig—wollte der garantiert nie sein!" ["I think Banksy has destroyed himself, art in a cage—he certainly never wanted that."]

Follow Lisa on Twitter.

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This article was originally published by VICE Romania

After watching the first episode of the new Channel 4 documentary series The Romanians Are Coming, a handful of offended Romanians gathered outside the network's headquarters in London on Sunday to protest. The miniseries follows a group of immigrants trying to make a life for themselves in the UK—but protesters felt that the show is biased and could have potentially catastrophic consequences for the already negative image of Romanians maybe Britons have.

Two petitions have been appeared on Change.org since the first episode aired last Tuesday. Both demand the show's cancelation, and one of them wants Channel 4 to publicly apologize. Combined, the petitions have collected nearly 10,000 signatures.

As a Romanian living in London, I felt the first episode of the show was sad and cheap, but heartfelt. I watched it with George, an English friend of mine who weirdly said that he sympathizes with the main character, Sandu—a Romanian gypsy who's got nine kids and no income. George says he realizes that not all Romanians are like Sandu, but "if I had watched the show without previously having met any Romanians, I would have thought that Romania is a ghetto country and that everyone lives with ten other people, all crammed up in one room."

The Romanians I know in London are divided into two categories: those who just refuse to watch the show, and those who do but have a lot of questions. Why did they choose to focus on Romanians in particular? Why is there an entire series dedicated to a single nation? Why didn't they do an episode for every EU country? Or about Eastern Europe? The least they could do is include the Bulgarians!

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The program is indeed full of negative stereotypes—or at least embarrassing ones—but it also often squeezes in some numbers and statistics that show the truth isn't exactly as dark as anecdotal evidence might have you believe; out of 100,000 Romanians in the UK, only 2,500 Romanians are on public assistance, for example.

As expected the show is also causing a stir in Romania—following its premiere, Romanian Prime Minister Victor Ponta pledged solidarity with the Romanians who live in the United Kingdom. Meanwhile, Bristol's Romanian consulate issued a statement saying that local Romanians feel humiliated, and Romania's foreign minister wrote to his counterpart, Philip Hammond, to complain that the show is biased.

The Telegraph also seems to believe that the program is prejudiced, but the other way around: Apparently "the show painted a picture of Romanian immigration that was pretty much the opposite of what it claimed." The Guardian on the other hand, appreciated the fact that the narrator is also an immigrant, as it gives the show a sense of authenticity. That sentiment was also shared by many of my British friends.

One of them, Andrew, got bored watching the show. "I watched about ten minutes and then I changed the channel. They said things that have already been said about poverty and gypsies—they used the same stereotypes." Just like George, Andrew felt he was "lucky" to have met Romanians that work in the UK, don't claim benefits, and have become his friends. "It's a shame that some Romanians come here with less than noble intentions, because they give the entire nation a bad name," he said. "Those who haven't met nice Romanians will believe in stereotypes."

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Over 700 people confirmed that they would be attending Sunday's protest on Facebook, but less than 10 percent of them turned up. There I met Dragoş, who has been in the UK for about 18 years. He said he felt the show was "unfair and offensive. People in the UK already dislike Romanians and these kinds of programs only make matters worse. The question of where you're from is always followed by a moment of awkward silence when you say you're Romanian, here."

Cristian, the father of one of the students who organized the protest, was way angrier. He told me that, the day after the first episode aired, he went to work and all his coworkers gave him a pitiful look. "Their faces read 'God, you poor bastard, you crawled out of a hellhole. Thank God you came here.' They asked me: 'Is it true that you live with 20 other people in one room and that there's no electricity?' I tried telling them that I don't come from a cave nor a desert.

"I believe and hope in the power of the Romanian people's reaction," he went on. "The number of people gathered here today isn't important. What matters is that we're determined. A mother and her child were shivering in the cold for about two hours standing right here earlier, when they could have been sat at home watching TV. We respect the British, so we want them to respect our national identity too."

I stumble upon a young girl carrying a Romanian flag. Her name was also Anamaria and she came to the protest because "Romanians that are on the poor end of the income distribution are portrayed as average Romanians. But the images show a third world country. Channel 4's selection of characters is too narrow." Anamaria thinks this kind of discourse depends very much on the British political climate and that it will ease down after the general elections in May. "After all, all the studies claim that migration has a positive effect on British economy," she says.

The ugly truth is said by one of the show's protagonists: "We came here to take their jobs. But only the shitty jobs." Isn't that the case with immigration everywhere?

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Photos by Brianna Alysse

There are very few 19-year-olds who are touring the country performing at sold-out shows, but I guess that's further proof that Kehlani is special. She's come a long way since she was a top four finalist on season six of America's Got Talent, where, during her audition with her band, Poplyfe, Piers Morgan told her, "You are a very good singer... I think you've got real talent, but I don't think you need the group." In true mythology-making fashion, 16-year-old Kehlani defiantly responded: "We thought we'd show our talent by giving it an acoustic setting, but when we get into an electric set, you won't say what you just said," to the approving roar of the audience. Sharon Osbourne, another one of the judges, told her, "I think you're a star."

Five years later, Kehlani is making good on that prediction. Off the strength of a single mixtape ( Cloud 19, which Complex named one of the best albums of 2014) she's gotten co-signs from G-Eazy, PartyNextDoor, and Chance the Rapper. She just finished her first national tour. Her Soundcloud recently surpassed 10 million plays. She's a regular fixture in the top ten of Billboard's Emerging Artists chart. And her movement—the "Tsunami Mob," which has its own apparel and aesthetic—is growing by the day.

Her appeal is refreshingly old-school: a voice that doesn't need Autotune; lyrics about happiness, love, and anti-materialism, and an unmanaged image—she has Star Wars tattoos, loves Backwoods-brand blunt wraps, and flaunts no-makeup looks on social media.

Her story is uniquely American. Her ancestry is black, white, Native American, Hispanic, and Filipino. (She's also openly bisexual.) She was born to a drug-addicted mother, and ultimately taken in by her aunt, who had to sacrifice being the first person in her family to graduate from college to raise her.

I met up with in Kehlani during her four-day tour stint in New York City and we talked about her tour, how she's dealing with success at such a young age, and her next project.

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VICE: How's tour going?
Kehlani: Tour's super crazy. I've never experienced anything like this. Getting to do what I love to do, every day, back to back to back. It's crazy what can happen every day from just being in a van with the same eight people 24/7. It's cool too, because I'm becoming a businesswoman.I'm learning how to work out budgets. And I enjoy paying people. I enjoy saying, "You worked hard, let me give you this envelope today." I'm being forced to have self-discipline. I don't go to the afterparties, because I don't want to lose my voice. After the show, I don't want to watch the set and yell because I'll lose my voice. And I try to just maintain a better diet in general for my career.

My schedule is ridiculous though. I feel like the down time I have now, I just sleep. Today, I just had a chance to just walk outside. We got food and walked around the city. It was really refreshing. It was beautiful. It makes you really appreciate a simple day of vibing and smoking.

Have you been working on your next project? What can people expect?
My next project is dropping in spring. It's called, You Should Be Here (YSBH). This is my first time saying any of this [to the media], but the whole inspiration behind it is that a lot of people are coming into my life and a lot of people are leaving my life. I'm at a point where I'm on this consistent upwards path. There's a lot of times where I'm just like, Damn, this person should be here to see this. Whether that's family, people I just met, people relationship-wise, whatever. It's like, You should be here right now. You should've been here, you could be here.

Production wise, I got a little bit more cinematic. It's a little bigger. Less samples. And I think as a woman, I'm just in a different state of mind. When I made Cloud 19, I was getting to be in a situation where I was attempting to love somebody when I didn't love myself. It was me desperately trying to get you to understand my feelings, 'cause I can only say it in song.

With this new project, I'm learning myself and loving myself. I'm making songs that have more insight to me, rather than just being dedicated to someone else. And it's about moving on. Making sure I'm fully present with who I am now, as I'm going up. 'Cause a lot of people just get crazy and lose themselves. I just want to remain grounded.

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How are you navigating your success?
I stay around solid people and I talk to solid people and I pray every day.

Are you religious?
Yeah, I am. I definitely believe in God. I'm very spiritual too, so I wear a lot of healing crystals at all times. In general, I think it's just about keeping yourself in check. You can have the right people around you, and they can check you all you want, but you have to be mature enough to be receptive. Like if someone's telling you that you are being crazy, you are being cocky, you have to be mature enough to be like, "Are you serious? What did I do? Let me chill."

I'm getting really good at that. Like someone will be getting attitude, and I'll be like, "Hey, you know this is a blessing? This tour is a beautiful thing. Yes, it's going to get stressful, but we're doing things that 19- to 20-year-olds won't ever get to do at some point." I know niggas who never left Oakland. They never left the Bay. So to be traveling across the country in a van and then going to Canada? Like, that's just crazy.

How was Canada?
Beautiful as fuck. Everyone's incredibly nice. Everyone's super beautiful. The architecture is inspiring. Artists out there, in Toronto, they have a tastefulness about them. They're like the tastemakers right now. And also, I'm legal there. So we went to the club, I got my first table, I bought my first bottle. It was tight, even though I'm not a big club person.

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How are your relationships with people changing as you're experiencing success?
I think people weed themselves out. This is what [my mentor] Nick Cannon told me when he first linked up with me. He said, "You're going to get in this position where all your shit is right here in front of you. And you can literally watch what's going on. Because you're in a position of controlling it." I have my own brand now, I have my own shit now. People work for me now. So it's like, fuck. I literally have to run everything in my brain. I can't freak out about it. I have to remain completely under control at all times.

I can just peep people. They start being extra friendly. They start wanting to bring up memories on Twitter all the time. They will tweet you things they could be texting you. It's like, don't tweet me that, you have my number!

I've had dudes who told me I was ugly and all type of shit in high school, and now they're like, "Damn you so fine, I wish I knew." I'm like, "You are so crazy!" I think with things like that you just have to think, I'm so glad this happened. This is God just shedding light, just opening my eyes. Because what if those people did come along with me, and then they'd do all type of crazy, thirsty, weird shit when things got popping.

Because this is nothing right now... Don't get me wrong, all this means the world to me. But I don't have plaques or major credits yet. I got on the Kevin Gates project, I wrote one of those records. But I need a movie placement, or something that's bigger, that's hitting the charts, that's selling X amount of copies when I drop my album. Just stuff that's factual and written down in the music world.

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Have you been getting recognized on the street at all?
Yeah, it's been happening since America's Got Talent, so it's been past the weird factor. But now it's just on heavy. Lately people have been crying when they meet me. It feels good, but it makes me cry every time. It makes me cry because they're whispering in my ear some crazy story about how I saved their life. Like, last night: This girl walks up to me, she hugs me, she starts crying on my shoulder. And then she's like, "I just want to let you know that I'm struggling with my sexuality. I thought about committing suicide. And then you came along as a singer who's making bisexual music..." And she was like, "Your mixtape gave me hope and taught me what I deserve, taught me my self-worth... I can't thank you enough cause it really saved my life..."

I was in tears. I gave her my email when I signed her poster and said, "You can email me if you want to talk. Coming out is a hard process, but I'll walk you through it." I was fortunate that my auntie was very accepting.

How does your aunt feel about what's been going on?
She's so excited, because my auntie is the reason I'm anything. She's the reason I'm alive. Like, I'd be in some foster care wilding out if it wasn't for her. She put me in all the art classes. She told me I could do whatever I wanted to do in life. She's not extremely financially stable and she's not able to provide a bunch to all her kids, and sometimes she's like, Damn what's my purpose? And I'm like, "You realize you gave birth to me and you raised me and you trained me to go to against the world?"

Without her, I probably wouldn't even be writing these songs. I wouldn't be able to see the world how I see it if she didn't give me the glasses. The effect I have on other kids, the fact that they can look at me like that, is how I looked at her when she was teaching me these lessons that I'm using directly in my songs. Everything comes from her.

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