[body_image width='1100' height='1686' path='images/content-images/2015/03/05/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/05/' filename='cannibals-zombies-and-hexes-on-hitler-the-life-and-times-of-william-seabrook-body-image-1425595911.jpg' id='33478']

Photo via Flickr user alittleblackegg

Upset that the Guéré chief had kept him from partaking in ritual cannibalism and had instead served him gorilla meat, William Seabrook turned to a friend with hospital privileges in order to satisfy his intimate desire to taste human flesh. After procuring the thigh of some recent victim of a nondescript accident, Seabrook threw a dinner party just so others could observe him eating. In Jungle Ways, which purports to be Seabrook's true account of his travels among the various tribes of the Ivory Coast and what was then called the French Sudan, Seabrook devotes an entire section to the specifics of cooked human:

The raw meat, in appearance, was firm, slightly coarse-textured rather than smooth. In raw texture, both to the eye and to the touch, it resembled good beef. In color, however, it was slightly less red than beef. But it was redish. It was not pinkish or grayish like mutton or pork.

According to Seabrook, human flesh tastes like "good, fully-developed veal," and in fact, "no person with a palate of ordinary, normal sensitiveness could distinguish it from veal." Although only a small part of Jungle Ways, Seabrook's plunge into one of the world's greatest taboos came to define him and his career, which by that point was already strange enough.

In life, William Seabrook was both a man and a caricature: the king of wacko travel writing. Since his death, William Seabrook has remained mostly out-of-print and little appreciated. This September, Dover Publications will attempt to bring him back by reissuing his long-neglected books. The first, Asylum, will be released in September.

Born in Maryland in 1884, Seabrook began his life as a somewhat respectable man. He went to college, took a reporting job with the August Chronicle, traveled through Europe, then returned to America in order to marry the daughter of a Coca-Cola executive and establish an ad agency. Such respectability soon became a separate sort of hell; Seabrook didn't wait for the United States to officially join the Allies and signed up with the French Army's American Field Service as an ambulance driver in 1916.

After the war, Seabrook made a serious attempt at penning big "L" literature and moved in the same circles as other Greenwich Village bohemians. One such bohemian was the puppeteer Tony Sarg, who introduced Seabrook to "Deborah Luris," the woman who would unlock Seabrook's hidden lust for bondage and sadism. But for the most part, he was rejected by the highbrow art set for being a mere reporter with a taste for niche stories about sex crimes and the supernatural. In one instance recounted in Emily Matchar's excellent The Zombie King, the novelist Theodore Dresier made a point of snubbing Seabrook at a party by referring to him as a "yellow journalist."

Although his excursions in Greenwich Village proved emotionally devastating (according to his second wife's memoir, Seabrook was incredibly sensitive to criticism and would get drunk whenever someone of importance put down his prose), Seabrook's time in New York City did allow him to meet Daoud Izzedin, a Lebanese student at Columbia who loved to dazzle his American friends with elaborate stories about the Arab world. Izzedin's stories got a hold of Seabrook, and when Izzedin extended an offer to travel to Beirut, Seabrook accepted. A few weeks later, Seabrook was living among the Bedouins in the Arabian Desert, partaking in ceremonies involving Turkish dervishes, and wandering among the mountains of northern Iraq.

As the years continued and Seabrook's fame increased, he came to be seen as some sort of expert for the common man or the basic middlebrow reader. Seabrook, who made a career out of traveling to countries where white faces were rarely seen or appreciated, wrote of himself as the white American adventurer who, through his open mind, managed to go deep inside the mysterious worlds of African folk religion and Haitian voodoo.

But most importantly, Seabrook got to hear about zombies. Zombies had originally been a part of folk traditions in West Africa and were later imported to the Caribbean during the colonial slave trade. On the fringes of Haitian voodoo, there are many different types of zombies. Zombies could be disembodied spirits or dead humans who had been transformed into animals. But for Seabrook, the only zombie worth studying was the walking dead—the zombi cadavre. Through a mulatto tax collector named Constant Polynice, Seabrook heard a rumor that a group of zombies and their living masters had come down from the mountains in order to work for the American Sugar Company. The zombie masters were a couple, Ti Joseph and his wife Croyance, who had personally dug up the recently dead from their village. They worked their zombie slaves day and night for the company and kept the group's wages for themselves. This scheme would've kept going if Croyance hadn't taken the zombies to a city festival out of pity. There the zombies tasted salt, which had been previously forbidden to them because it had the ability to remind them that they were indeed dead. Once aware of their decaying flesh, the zombies rushed back to their graves while their loved ones busied themselves with murdering Ti Joseph.

Seabrook at first dismisses Polynice's account. Then, while on the isolated island of La Gonave, Seabrook came face-to-face with what he considered to be a zombie. Whether or not this "zombie" was a mentally challenged villager, a drugged servant, or an actual corpse, Seabrook does not say. In The Magic Island, Seabrook oscillates between being rational and prone to mysticism. He brings up the supernatural only to scientifically question it. Then he concludes by iterating that sometimes science cannot explain everything, and that he personally will not fully discount the supernatural. This is the Seabrook style.

When released in 1929, The Magic Island became a bestseller. It directly inspired one disastrously bad play (simply called Zombie) and it helped to inspire an independent horror film called White Zombie. Although he's often falsely credited with bringing the word "zombie" into the English lexicon, Seabrook did more than anybody else to make zombies fodder for horror films and literature in the 1930s.

Ultimately, The Magic Island swallowed Seabrook. By 1933, Seabrook's life of adventure, which included flying across Africa with the French Desert Air Corps and posing in sexually explicit photographs for the avant-garde artist Man Ray, had become the tawdry spectacle of a middle-aged man in decline. His S&M affair with Deborah Luris cost him his first marriage and many friends, while his alcoholism slowly ate away at his remaining powers as a writer. In order to stop this decline, Seabrook volunteered to be committed to the Bloomingdale Asylum, where he was subjected to hydrotherapy and psychoanalysis for seven months. In between, he went through serious withdrawals and a battle with delirium tremens. At the end of it all, he had a new book, Asylum, and a cocktail recipe consisting of "grenadine, Pernod, and London dry gin, which Seabrook described as looking like "rosy dawn" and tasting like "the milk of Paradise."

Asylum was an early example of the celebrity memoir genre, and it proved to be Seabrook's last gasp of greatness. F. Scott Fitzgerald, one of Seabrook's idols, made fun of the book in The Crack-Up. Seabrook was devastated and returned to drinking. His next four books sold poorly and by the 1940s, readers had tired of Seabrook's hocus-pocus-meets-hard-bitten-science formula. Before committing suicide in 1945 via a drug overdose, Seabrook retreated into his obsessions, which included studying ESP, putting hexes on Adolf Hitler, and tying his mistresses up in chains for days on his New York farm.

With zombies in vogue and his books coming back onto the market after decades out of print, maybe old Willie Seabrook, the lost king of the weird, can finally get the recognition and infamy he earned.

[body_image width='1000' height='800' path='images/content-images/2015/03/07/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/07/' filename='queen-sabrina-flawless-mother-body-image-1425706579.jpg' id='33969']^{Still life from the Flawless Sabrina Archive, 2015. All photos by Rachel Stern for VICE}

Towards the end of her* X-rated 1968 documentary The Queen, Flawless Mother Sabrina takes the stage at New York City's Town Hall. Not-quite-thirty (but already America's doyenne of drag), she wears the gown, make-up, and breasts of a much older woman. The room is filthy with fame, both on stage and at the judging table: Andy Warhol, International Chrysis, Terry Southern, Jerry Lieber, Mario Montez, Crystal LaBeija, George Plimpton. They're gathered for the finale of the Miss All-America Camp Beauty Pageant, the cross-country drag pageant that Flawless started in 1958, when she was a nineteen-year-old psych major at UPenn. Tonight, all eyes are on her.

"There can only be one queen," Sabrina intones, quieting the function.

She's not in the competition; there are other girls vying for the title. One even wins. But Sabrina's right; there can be only one queen.

Historical significance is like pop stardom: some folks are one-hit wonders, their fame just a momentary blip on their larger journey toward becoming something you Google while stoned at 1 AM. Mitt Romney, say.

A precious few are hit machines, unforgettables like Ben Franklin, who invented everything and farted everywhere.

And then there are those poor "musician's musicians," who are destined to dwell in oxymoronic obscurity: thanked in all the liner notes, inspiring all the greats, standing just to the left of every spotlight, providing a lick on this track or a verse on that, but always "underappreciated" and "ahead of their time." This is the liminal world of the unsung superstar, the mantle of near-fame that Flawless Mother Sabrina wears like a second-hand mink.

[body_image width='1000' height='1500' path='images/content-images/2015/03/07/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/07/' filename='queen-sabrina-flawless-mother-body-image-1425706119.jpg' id='33966']

Rarely do these people get recognized, and almost never while they're alive. To be honest, I'd heard Flawless's name bandied about for years, but I never really knew who she was. So when I received an email last fall from performance art star Zackary Drucker announcing a funding campaign for the Flawless Sabrina Archive, my first thought was "Shit, she's dead," followed by "Does she really need an archive?"

I quickly discovered two things. First, that Flawless was alive and kicking it on 72nd Street, right off Central Park, where she'd been since the late sixties. And second, that she wended through the last fifty years of American history like a queer Forrest Gump, touching Edie Sedgwick and William Burroughs, Bobby Kennedy and Jackie O., L.A. in the 70s, Paris in the 80s, and New York always and forever. It wasn't she who needed the archive, I realized, but rather, we who needed an archive devoted to her: the poor Jewish kid from "coal dust South Philly" whose legacy was as important as it was invisible.

[body_image width='1000' height='800' path='images/content-images/2015/03/07/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/07/' filename='queen-sabrina-flawless-mother-body-image-1425707835.jpg' id='33978']

To begin to understand Sabrina's place in history, I called Joe Jeffreys, professor at NYU, drag historian and the creator of Drag Show Video Verite, a project that documents, preserves, and shares historical drag footage.

Jeffreys first noticed Flawless in a blink-and-you've-missed-it cameo in John Waters' cult classic Pink Flamingos. As Divine licks her way through the house of her nemesis, a poster for The Queen hangs on the wall behind her. Jeffreys, in college at the time, hunted down a VHS copy and "was blown away by this unexpectedly beautiful film with this incredible narrative."

The documentary followed the contestants of the 1967 Nationals, which were the annual culmination of the more than 50 smaller pageants that Flawless put on every year. In order to make it, she approached Andy Warhol, who had attended a few of her events in the past. He agreed to be one of the judges, connected her with some financiers who put up $10,000 in seed money, and brought on Hollywood talent like producers Lewis Allen (Lord of the Flies & Farenheit 451) and Sy Litvinoff (A Clockwork Orange & The Man Who Fell to Earth). The film took over a year to make and edit, during which time Flawless left Philadelphia for New York City, where she's remained ever since.

[body_image width='1000' height='667' path='images/content-images/2015/03/07/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/07/' filename='queen-sabrina-flawless-mother-body-image-1425707709.jpg' id='33977']

In 2008, Jeffreys received a grant from The Jerome Foundation to study some outtakes from The Queen that had been unearthed at the University of Texas. There, he discovered a reel taken at the after party, in which luminaries like Erica Jong can be seen dancing with the queens. Midway through, a knock on the door revealed a passel of NYC's finest intent on raiding the party (this was pre-Stonewall, after all), until a smiling pixie appeared from the crowd, talked them down, and slammed the door behind them.

"That," Jeffreys grinned like a cat stealing cream, "was Edie Sedgwick," the Warhol superstar.

Despite its X-rating, The Queen and its stars made a splash at Cannes, and Renata Adler described it as "extraordinary" in her review in the New York Times. But it was pilloried for its content—not just the queens, who spoke frankly about marriage, gender identity, and coming out, but smaller moments that are almost invisible to the modern viewer: the mumbled "fuck" in the background of an argument, the peck on the cheek between the white winner and the black runner-up. In an era before Miss America was integrated, Flawless's pageants were open to all.

In fact, the Nationals were unprecedented in many ways. "There'd always been drag mock weddings and local pageants," Jeffreys said, "but Flawless made a circuit of it, which still exists today" in the form of Miss Gay America and other nationwide competitions. Crystal Labeija, a runner-up in The Queen, would go on to be the first to invoke the "House of" language that is now common parlance in the ballroom scene. And while traveling drag shows like The Jewel Box Revue had been popular in America since at least the turn of the century, most were put on for slumming straights, often in venues controlled by the mob. Flawless's events were for queers, by queers. If a local city had a charity devoted to what we would today call transgender issues—usually some kind of small-scale, communal pot for emergency housing or medical needs—Flawless would donate a portion of her proceeds. In this way, the Nationals helped create the very community that supported it. At their height, it's estimated that the Nationals employed nearly 100 people around the country, making Flawless quite possibly the biggest LGBT employer of the 1960s.

Sadly, Jeffreys said, a confluence of factors made The Queen disappear from our consciousness: neither Flawless nor Frank Simon, the director, went on to make another film, meaning there's no body of work for film buffs to fit this into. Disputes over the rights kept it from being widely available commercially, and its rating kept it out of most libraries (including, for many decades, the New York Public Library). And while the film was, for most of the world, their introduction to Flawless and The Nationals, for Flawless herself, The Queen marked the end of her career as a drag pageant organizer.

When I asked Jeffreys why, he scribbled a Manhattan phone number on a piece of paper. "Ask Flawless," he told me.

[body_image width='1000' height='800' path='images/content-images/2015/03/07/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/07/' filename='queen-sabrina-flawless-mother-body-image-1425707117.jpg' id='33974']

Sitting across from me in a mustard yellow blazer with a Clinton campaign button on the shoulder (Hillary, not Bill), Flawless served up history as one hot dish.

"Bobby Kennedy was what you'd call a tranny-chaser," she shook her head and thought about it for a second, "or.... Whatever." With a flick of one delicate, wrinkled wrist, she dismissed the word 'tranny' and all the debates around it. Flawless doesn't stand on ceremony, and isn't gender, as a social construction, just a lot of ceremony – primp and circumstance, if you will? She's not particularly fussed about pronouns or names, either, reflecting her long history in a world where the boundaries between gay, drag, and trans were not as well demarcated as they are today. When I asked if she had a pronoun or name preference for the purposes of this article, she told me "No—at your pleasure."

It was Kennedy who, in 1967, secured one of the snazziest venues the Nationals had ever visited: The Ritz Carlton in Boston. It was a disaster.

"The first two rows were all these fancy kids here to see these monkeys dressed in dresses," Flawless harrumphed. "I knew the bloom was off the rose."

That's when she decided to make The Queen and get out of the business, she told me. For a hot second she almost went to Broadway. David Merrick, the producer of Hello, Dolly!, was looking to shake up the show, and for a while, he considered an all-drag cast with Flawless in the lead. Among the things destined for the Flawless Sabrina Archive is a telegram from Jackie Kennedy telling her not to give up hope, that she, Jackie, was still pulling for Merrick to cast Flawless. Instead, Merrick went with Pearl Bailey, who won a special Tony for the role in 1968. Flawless went to Hollywood.

As we spoke, the front door to Flawless's apartment swung open and two of her legendary granddaughters walked in bearing groceries: artist Zackary Drucker and writer Diana Tourjee, the minds behind the Flawless Sabrina Archive. After some cooing, kissing, and making of tea, they joined Flawless behind the big wooden desk that dominated her impressively cramped living room, where every surface was covered in art and ephemera. In the room's dim close quarters, their hands and words twined around each other: Drucker giving Flawless tea, Flawless asking Tourjee to furnish this name or that date. Together, like the three fates, they spun Flawless's life story for me.

[body_image width='1000' height='800' path='images/content-images/2015/03/07/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/07/' filename='queen-sabrina-flawless-mother-body-image-1425707514.jpg' id='33975']

As the sixties cascaded to a close, the same wave of change that brought the brat pack to her Boston pageant sent Flawless to L.A. "I became an expert on homosexuality for the film industry," she told me, "because every homosexual in the world seemed to call me three times a day."

Tourjee, who is writing Flawless's biography, helped list the films she worked on: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Myra Breckenridge, Sunday Bloody Sunday, The Anderson Tapes (in which she even had a small role), and Dog Day Afternoon. Some directors wanted to make sure they got the gay details right; others wanted help avoiding any whiff of faggotry. Regardless of what they wanted, Flawless said she did the same thing.

"Nothing," she laughed. "As a point of fact, I was instructed by my agent to find myself a place where the light was in their eyes and keep my mouth shut."

After five years of bicoastal living, she left the consultation business to team up with her good friend Rona Jaffe, who had dedicated her 1969 novel The Fame Game to Flawless. Together, they worked on "various things," like selling the film rights to the musical Hair. By this point, the 70s were in full swing and Flawless found herself at the intersection of two of its biggest trends: disco and skin.

"I produced a porn," she recalled, for which her half-brother Gregg Diamond wrote and produced a song called "More, More, More." Breathy and erotic, the song hit #4 on the 1976 Billboard Top 100. Because her brother was nervous that the porn connection might tank the song, Flawless set about learning how to sell music rights separately from film. This brought her back to Cannes, where she had connections, and eventually landed her on the doorstep of the French diplomat, novelist, and pederast, Roger Peyrefitte, who was looking for help turning his boyfriend's boyfriend into a pop star. And so Flawless became Peyrefitte's amanuensis, his gay Girl Friday.

[body_image width='1000' height='800' path='images/content-images/2015/03/07/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/07/' filename='queen-sabrina-flawless-mother-body-image-1425707646.jpg' id='33976']

Peyrefitte was so rich that when Flawless worried about losing her apartment in New York, he simply bought her building.

"I was some hick from South Philly," Flawless shook her head, still wondering over it all. "I qualified really well for being a slum bunny, but this was all new for me."

Peyrefitte jetted her around the world (forty-six countries in ten years, by her estimate), but he didn't pay particularly well, and after decades of being her own boss, working for someone else chaffed. "He collected weird people and put them in strange situations" as a kind of entertainment, walking a line perhaps a little too close to the gawking that had compelled Flawless to leave pageants behind. By the late 1980's, she was ready to return to the States, a decision cemented by meeting the love of her life, the artist Curtis Carman, who was working at the time in the catering department of the Hyatt Hotel.

[body_image width='1000' height='1400' path='images/content-images/2015/03/07/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/07/' filename='queen-sabrina-flawless-mother-body-image-1425707988.jpg' id='33979']

But Flawless returned to a changed New York. Pleasure was out and AIDS was in. "My peer group was dying like flies," she mumbled, her voice pitched barely above a whisper. "So much genius evaporating. Awful. And then wondering why I wasn't dead..."

For a moment, Flawless seemed to fall back into the past. Half closed, her eyes moved rapidly, as though watching a spectral parade slip by. She leaned slightly to the left, her thin, bird-like body resting against Drucker's shoulder, unintentionally mimicking a photo on the wall behind them, in which Drucker and Flawless cuddled while in showgirl regalia. The two are a matched set; sisters separated by some fifty years. They've been twinsies ever since Drucker moved to New York to study art in 2000. In the years since, they've collaborated on many projects together, including She Gone Rogue, a film that was in the 2012 Whitney Biennial.

One hand on Drucker's shoulder, Flawless inhaled deeply and put her game face back on. "The decision had to be made whether I was going to go with the elders or the kids," she told me. Amidst all the doom and gloom of queer New York at the time, one group seemed determined to maintain the mantle of extravagance in the face of mounting tragedy: club kids.

[body_image width='1000' height='1500' path='images/content-images/2015/03/07/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/07/' filename='queen-sabrina-flawless-mother-body-image-1425708074.jpg' id='33980']

"Nightlife in New York at that moment was just wonderful," Flawless grinned, recalling weeks spent creating costumes for esoteric theme parties at Mother and Crisco Disco. This was the era of Party Monster and monster clubs, Manhattan's last gasp as the nightlife center of America before it all got priced out and moved to Brooklyn.

It was at one of these parties—a Susanne Bartsch event at the midtown nightclub Bentley's—that Flawless met Ceyenne Doroshow. Now a public speaker, author, and advocate for homeless youth, Doroshow was a teen living in Central Park at the time. How she'd slipped past the velvet rope and into the party, she couldn't remember. But she'll never forget Flawless.

"I had no idea who she was, but I guess she could see I was down," Doroshow told me. Flawless took Doroshow upstate to stay with Flawless's mother for a while, to get some TLC while they developed a plan for Doroshow to take control of her life.

"When I tell people I've had a couple of parents, I really mean it," Doroshow said to me over the phone. "Without Flawless's guidance, I would have been one of the fallen." Doroshow got a job, finished her education, and now works for the largest food bank in New York City and as a public speaker and activist for trans issues and homelessness.

But the first time Doroshow was invited to address an out-of-state conference, she realized something: her birth name had so much baggage connected to it, she wanted to leave it behind. So she called Flawless.

"I said 'Ma, I want to know if I can use your name. I want to be Ceyenne Doroshow.'" (Doroshow is Flawless's birth name.)

The "Mother" moniker that Flawless had taken on as a joke in the 50s—a way to make it clear that she wasn't in competition with the girls in the pageants—had now become her true identity. Doroshow would be the first of many daughters and granddaughters that Flawless would mentor over the decades.

When I recounted this story to Flawless, she downplayed her part, insisting that if anything, Doroshow had rescued her by keeping her young and connected to the world. But Drucker, still seated next to Flawless, fixed me with a gimlet eye. "Flawless is the single most influential person in my development as an artist and a human," she said point blank. Beside her, Tourjee nodded.

Creating the Flawless Sabrina Archive, they told me, was their way of saying thank you to someone who helped so many queer young people. It was also Drucker's way of protecting Flawless, of mothering her own mother when disaster struck in the form of an eviction letter sent last summer. Flawless' former boss Peyrefitte had died years before, and ownership of the property had reverted to a Swiss bank that wanted to bounce Flawless and up the rent (a shockingly common situation facing queer elders in this country today).

Tapping a long, thin More brand cigarette against the desk in front of her, Tourjee couldn't help but sigh in frustration as she recounted the story.

"They were trying to frame this like she was a hoarder," Tourjee's cigarette traced a dismissive semi-circle in the air, encompassing the entire room and its possessions in one louche gesture. Thanks to a pro-bono lawyer from the New York Legal Assistance Group, the eviction proceedings never manifested, but they catalyzed the idea to create a protected repository devoted to Flawless's life.

[body_image width='1000' height='667' path='images/content-images/2015/03/07/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/07/' filename='queen-sabrina-flawless-mother-body-image-1425708231.jpg' id='33982']

What exactly that means, they're still working out. The online campaign was fully funded and raised over $20,000, but that's far less than would be necessary to hire an archivist and purchase or rent a permanent home. For now, they have a storage space in Manhattan, and Tourjee is cataloging Flawless's belongings as they move them into it. This includes everything from the treatment for a proposed talk show featuring Flawless, John Waters, and Divine, to a set of tarot cards given to Flawless by her ex-boyfriend Bill (AKA William Burroughs). The more time you spend looking at Flawless's history, the more connections you find; the more times she's in that spot right next to the center of it all.

But cataloging this stuff for posterity's sake, or as a kind of memorial to Flawless, is the last thing Drucker and Tourjee want. "We're not interested in establishing this archive in and of itself," Tourjee told me, "We're interested in how it is useful to people today." They hope to find a way to bring the Archive around the country before giving them a permanent home.

For her part, Flawless seems somewhat embarrassed by all the attention. "If it's something that's useful to people, and there's a way for it to generate income for kids to travel or to give artists a place to work..." she trailed off and shrugged. Not for me—that was the clear message. But if it could help someone else, if it could continue to give to the community she had nurtured and nourished—fuck, the community she had created—she'd go along.

[body_image width='1000' height='800' path='images/content-images/2015/03/07/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/07/' filename='queen-sabrina-flawless-mother-body-image-1425708510.jpg' id='33983']

"That's Flawless," Drucker smiled with the air of someone apologizing for a beloved older relative. "She's really a producer. And producers are not the visible people, they're the people who make things happen."

And what is history but a record of things that happened, one that, in this case, has been set a little too straight?

In researching this story, I ran into an endless number of dead-ends: records not kept, lives not valued, stories that died with the people who lived them. And every time, all I could think was: If only there was someone, somewhere, who had saved this stuff.

The Flawless Sabrina Archive won't patch all of the holes, but in preserving one gorgeous glittery thread of history, it suggests all the others that we've lost, or just haven't found yet. This last century has defined what it means to be gay or trans; a massive social upheaval that happened over the course of a single human lifetime. Let's not allow the queers who changed history to sink back into the very erasure they rescued us from.

*I've chosen to use female pronouns and the name Flawless Mother Sabrina throughout this piece. The people I spoke to and interviews I read with Flawless varied widely in how they referred to her, and she herself was agnostic on the matter. Perhaps the best explanation for this was given to me by her biographer, Diana Tourjee, who said: "People refer to Flawless by the way in which they identify with her."

Follow Hugh Ryan on Twitter.

The third season of VICE on HBO just debuted with a report about the devastating effects of climate change. In the premiere episode, Shane Smith took us from the melting glaciers in Antarctica to the climate change deniers' conference to the decision makers at the United Nations and finally face-to-face with Vice President Joe Biden. It's a pretty sobering look at the irreversible changes facing our world today, and Shane saw the effects first-hand. Recently, he sat down to debrief on the recent episode and reflect on his time in the Antarctic. Check it out above.

If you—like us—want to help put the brakes on global warming, or just want to learn more about what you saw in tonight's episode, check out these groups and get involved: Climate Central, Bangladesh Center for Advanced Studies, Environmental Defense Fund, National Science Foundation, Ralph J. and Carol M. Cierone Endowed Chair and Fellowship Fund in Earth System Science, and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

Watch VICE Fridays at on HBO at 11PM, 10PM Central.

[body_image width='741' height='489' path='images/content-images/2015/02/25/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/25/' filename='why-a-white-girl-writing-about-rape-got-kicked-out-of-india-body-image-1424878668.png' id='30810']

Photo courtesy of Sabrina Buckwalter

It was just another rape story. In September of 2006, a mother and daughter belonging to an "untouchable" lower-caste family in a small, rural Indian village were raped, ceremoniously paraded around the village naked, and savagely murdered by over 30 members of a higher-caste mob. The mother's two sons were subsequently murdered as well. The mob's motives remain disputed to this day. Some say that the mother of the family had been carrying on an affair with the local village cop, prompting the violence; others claim the killings were the product of a land dispute between members of the upper caste and the slain family.

Sabrina Buckwalter's story in The Times of India was the first feature to do the Khairlanji massacre justice. Infatuated with India, she was a young American reporter who dropped out of Georgia State University and moved to Mumbai to report for the country's largest daily newspaper.

According to Buckwalter, only one other news outlet had covered the massacre, an afterthought in the nation's cultural memory. The lack of coverage wasn't surprising. The case dealt explicitly with two of India's quiet cancers: the caste system and rape.

For an American, Buckwalter possessed unique insight into the hyperlocal tensions that played out in this village. It was a story consistent with India's narrative of paradox—why can't the world's largest democracy teach its men not to rape? And why does it still have pockets that cling to the caste system, that rigid social structure that tells kids that they can only dream so big? Her reporting was detailed, humane, and sympathetic.

That was the problem.

In May 2007, nearly eight months after her story was published, her visa was denied. In July, policemen came to the lobby of her office. Supplying her with paperwork, they gave her a diplomatically firm nudge to get out of the country within the next 72 hours.

"Imagine losing everything that means anything to you in one moment," Buckwalter told VICE. "Your home, your job, your boyfriend, your sense of right with the world, your idea of the future. It is traumatic."

Though nearly a decade has passed, Buckwalter's ordeal feels more relevant than ever. Even now, she is barred from traveling to India. Today, both the Indian government and influential figureheads within Indian society have become quiet enemies of free expression, particularly as it applies to foreign writers. It's a country where the privilege of the offended reigns supreme, and, to many Indians, the mere acknowledgment of India's hard social truths feels like some flagrant assault on national character. It's doubly egregious to them when that kind of news is delivered from a foreigner. Who are they, as strangers, to comment on how India can cure its many social ills?

[body_image width='700' height='1052' path='images/content-images/2015/02/25/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/25/' filename='why-a-white-girl-writing-about-rape-got-kicked-out-of-india-body-image-1424878998.jpg' id='30836']

Photo via Flickr user Abhishek Shirali

Now, Buckwalter lives in New York. At a bar in the East Village, she told me about the things she loves about India. She adores Indian literature. She loves bharatanatyam, the dance my sister was trained in. She's a big fan of classical Indian music.

Like many young Americans, Buckwalter fell in love with India. After studying abroad in the country during her freshman year of college, she moved to Mumbai to pursue an internship with the Times of India. It was an internship that had no promises attached to it, but she didn't care. She said she'd make it work, and she did. Within three months of her internship, she became a full-time features reporter.

Unlike most young Americans, though, Buckwalter wasn't stupid. Her view of India was tough and clear-eyed. She knew that India, like any other country in the world, had corners that were a special kind of hell.

It's a hell she witnessed firsthand after she traveled 17 hours by train, and two more by bus, to reach Khairlanji. The tiny 200-person village was the site of a grisly massacre most Indians pretended didn't happen.

"As a journalist, you're supposed to be someone who's impartial, reporting the facts," she told me. "You're supposed to extract yourself from the emotion of the story. But when you've seen dead bodies that are strewn about like rag dolls, you have a hard time maintaining composure."

Buckwalter showed me the pictures she was given during her visit. In them, the bodies don't look human. They've been beaten to a pulp. Their lips are almost comically swollen; their limbs are charred. The images alone are enough to inspire outrage. With added context, they're numbing.

So I understand why, after all these years, Buckwalter's eyes started to well up when she talked about what she saw. Her voice became violent when she recalled interviewing the neighbors, who said they didn't see anything on the day of the murders. She still can't bear that an entire village could work together to cover up something so inhuman.

At the time, Buckwalter became so incensed that it bled into her reporting. Her trail of interviews took her to the chief investigator of the case. When she spoke to him, she was obviously infuriated. She talked back to him. They fought. She made sure he knew that his handling of the case was piss-poor, and he didn't take kindly to it.

"Do I think that he's behind a phone call?" she asked me. It's been over eight years, and she still hasn't been given a clear reason why she was forced to leave. "I do. I think that there's a good possibility that he made a phone call to somebody he knew within the state government, so that they could make a case about me, leading to the non-renewal of my visa," she said.

Buckwalter's return to the US wasn't an easy one. She had been making the equivalent of $300 a month in India, so she barely had money for a plane ticket back to the States. When she got there, jobless and homeless, she struggled to find her footing. Her determination eventually won out. Ultimately, she went back to school, obtaining Bachelor and Master's degrees from Columbia University alongside stints at Al-Jazeera English and ABC News.

As we spoke a little more about the bureaucratic hurdles she had to dance through, Buckwalter told me that her story isn't that bad. It's nothing compared to the many non-Indian writers who've suffered fates far worse than hers when working in the country. Unlike them, she got the diplomatic treatment—the kind exit.

Though freedom of expression is enshrined within the Indian constitution, journalists working within India are given little protection by way of Indian law. According to Freedom House's latest Freedom of the Press report, blasphemy, defamation, and hate speech laws have effectively bulldozed that bedrock principle. Among the laws that chill journalistic expression is Section 124A of the penal code, also known as the sedition law, which criminalizes any expression that causes "hatred or contempt, or excites or attempts to excite disaffection towards the government." Section 153A of the penal code criminalizes language "promoting enmity" between groups; Section 295A outlaws any speech "intended to outrage religious feelings." Section 66A of the Information Technology Act punishes any sender of electronic communication deemed to be "grossly offensive," of "menacing character," or "for the purpose of causing annoyance or inconvenience."

In India, offense has become the primary ground for censors to shut up the kind of speech they just don't like, especially when that speech comes from the mouths of foreigners. One year ago this month, noted Indologist Wendy Doniger had her book, The Hindus: An Alternative History, pulled and nearly pulped by Penguin India due to protests from right-wing Hindu groups. It was a project that Doniger, a woman who obviously knows her stuff, had worked tirelessly on. But no matter—she was a white woman.

[body_image width='716' height='480' path='images/content-images/2015/02/25/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/25/' filename='why-a-white-girl-writing-about-rape-got-kicked-out-of-india-body-image-1424878734.jpg' id='30816']

Photo via Flickr user Jordi Bernabeu

And that's just in the past year. Some other high-profile cases include that of Andrew Buncombe, the British journalist barred from covering the 2012 Delhi gang rape trial for reasons we still don't quite know. In 2011, David Barsamian was deported from the country for reporting on Kashmir's political tensions. In 2009, Der Spiegel correspondent Hasnain Kazim was denied a visa because Indian authorities deemed his articles "overly critical and biased." In 2002, British journalist Alex Perry was threatened with deportation after penning articles for Time magazine suggesting that the reigning Prime Minister liked whiskey and fell asleep during cabinet meetings.

The condition isn't exactly hunky-dory for native Indian journalists, either. In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks, for example, Shirin Dalvi, an editor of Urdu-language newspaper Avadhnama, was arrested and went into hiding because she republished satirical cartoons of Mohammed, offending Muslim religious sentiment. In September of last year, Jaikhlong Brahma, a broadcast journalist for a privately-owned news channel called News Live, was thrown in jail after interviewing the commander of an outlawed separatist group for the purposes of a story, accused of conspiring with the group's rebels. Hartosh Singh Bal, the former editor of Open magazine, received a letter of termination in November 2013 after publishing articles critical of two highly revered political leaders. In January 2011, Sudhir Dhawale of Marathi-language monthly Vidrohi was arrested and jailed for 40 months after reporting on abuses on lower-caste peoples by state officials.

Sabrina's case is buried somewhere in this growing mountain, and it's depressingly easy to understand why her Khairlanji story could be construed as "offensive." By now, India's unfortunate status as the world's "rape capital" is well known. It's a pejorative, not entirely unearned, that's been gifted to the country in the wake of the 2012 Delhi gang rape. It's a shitty badge to wear, which is why so many Indians are trying in earnest—and often defensively—to shake it off.

As social movements to reduce sexual and caste-based violence across India have intensified, the press has played a vital role in bringing these issues to light. This kind of violence, and its unfortunate prevalence, has come to command a public conversation both within and outside of India. It's ignited activists who want to see the injustices perpetuated by such systems rectified.

But even this breed of activism can turn counter-productively violent. So, predictably, government officials in India have begun attacking the press, seen as the messengers who report truths so brutal that this reporting leads to social unrest. And, to officials, that civil disobedience risks undoing the fabric of the nation itself.

It's an unfortunate theme throughout the subcontinent: the idea that the press should be tightly wound, so as to protect some imagined national unity by quelling discontent. India's direct neighbors, Bangladesh and Pakistan, have become similar enemies of the free press, predicating expressive restrictions on people's tolerance for offense. In Pakistan, the killers of journalists often go unpunished due to lax protections afforded to those journalists, especially if they report on politically-sensitive issues. In Bangladesh, journalists can routinely be hit with the accusation that they've "hurt the feelings of the nation." It points to the tensions that have stayed with the three countries since the 1947 Partition of India, a break that's opened historical wounds that are still mightily sore.

But these historical wounds—and the cultural sensitivities they've produced—can't serve as apologia for the injustices that Buckwalter and her peers have endured.

"My story bears being told because this shouldn't be happening in the world's largest democracy," she said. "You should not be able to make a phone call and bar a reporter from doing her job because of a personality conflict."

I can tell, though, that it was more than a personality conflict. Her reporting exposed a profound cultural rift. If there is an untouchable within Indian society, perhaps it's that delicate national psyche that chooses to cover its ears when told that it's done wrong.

And it's for this very reason that foreign writers working within India are at a special kind of risk. If these foreigners point out the hypocrisies they've seen with their own eyes, they risk being silenced. After all, they're perceived as outsiders to India's storied, rich cultural vocabulary. Thus, critics may claim that white girls like Buckwalter are unequipped with the requisite knowledge to begin remedying the country's systemic problems. They're problems that have roots deep and firm in India's bruised history.

Follow Mayukh Sen on Twitter.

[body_image width='1350' height='759' path='images/content-images/2015/03/06/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/06/' filename='trans-history-101-body-image-1425663053.jpg' id='33826']

Still image from Dallas Buyers Club, Voltage Pictures

Over the course of the past several years, transgender individuals have inched their way into mainstream consciousness. Trans people typically face high levels of unemployment, increased risk of contracting HIV, discrimination—in housing, employment, restrooms, and access to medical care—and a host of other challenges unique to their struggle for equality. As GLAAD notes, less than one in 10 Americans actually know a trans individual, making the media the public's primary source of education on trans issues.

For more than half a century, from Glen or Glenda to Dallas Buyers Club, the entertainment industry has tried to get a handle on how to accurately and respectfully portray trans people. Unfortunately, it sometimes appears that the creators wind up using trans characters less as people and more as props, to be used for comedic effect or to shock the audience.

2014 saw the debut of trans-centric series like Transparent, The T Word, and True Trans with Laura Jane Grace. These shows—created with trans people in either starring or consulting roles—are a sharp departure from trans media of years past and instead paint trans individuals as real, non-sensationalized people. While these series are examples of success in documentary, comedic, and dramatic portrayals of trans people, they are far from the norm.

Over the past half-century, the entertainment industry has portrayed transgender individuals hundreds of times.

[body_image width='580' height='867' path='images/content-images/2015/03/06/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/06/' filename='trans-history-body-image-1425660696.jpg' id='33799']

In 1953, writer and director Ed Wood released Glen or Glenda, a film centered around society's disdain for those who deviate from traditional gender norms. At the time of the film's release, it was illegal to be caught publicly cross-dressing in a number of states. Glen or Glenda became a cult sensation and was later re-popularized in Tim Burton's 1994 film Ed Wood in which Johnny Depp plays the titular character coming to terms with his own compulsion to wear women's clothing. Wood did not identify himself as transsexual; the term "transgender" wouldn't make its way into the cultural lexicon for another couple of decades.

In 1970, director Michael Sarne released Myra Breckinridge, a film based on Gore Vidal's 1968 novel of the same name. Sarne's adaptation features Raquel Welch as Myra Breckinridge, and looks at someone caught between genders. The film opens with Myra about to undergo surgery, and ends with the character reverting back to their former male self. As with Glen or Glenda, critics panned the film. In 1974, Vidal published Myron, a sequel centered on Breckenridge's struggle to establish his true identity.

1975 saw the release of Dog Day Afternoon, a film inspired by the story of real life bank robber John Wojtowicz and his transgender wife Elizabeth Eden. The film starred Al Pacino as bank robber Sonny Wortzik; Chris Sarandon played Leon Shermer, a character based on Eden. The film won an Academy Award for best original screenplay and received nominations for Best Picture, Best Director (Sidney Lumet, the famed director of such films as 12 Angry Men, Network, and The Verdict), Best Actor in a Leading Role (Pacino), Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Chris Sarandon), and Best Film Editing. Dog Day Afternoon marked one of the first times a mainstream film featuring a prominent transgender character received critical acclaim. Sarandon's nomination for playing a trans individual signaled the start of a trend that would eventually lead to Oscar wins for straight actors Hilary Swank (Boys Don't Cry) and Jared Leto (Dallas Buyers Club).

The 1980s featured films like Brian De Palma's critically praised Dressed to Kill, in which Michael Caine plays Dr. Robert Elliott and his murderous, female alter ego Bobbi; 1982's The World According to Garp, which earned John Lithgow an Oscar nomination for his role as Roberta Muldoon, a transgender woman; and 1983's Sleepaway Camp, in which a transgender woman goes on a homicidal rampage.

For better or worse, the 1990s featured some of the most iconic depictions of transgender and gender non-conforming characters Hollywood has ever produced. From Silence of the Lambs's Buffalo Bill to The Crying Game's Dil and Ace Ventura: Pet Detective's Lt. Einhorn, it slowly became more commonplace to use gender variance as a plot device in mainstream Hollywood, even if it wasn't always done in a particularly accurate or flattering light.

[body_image width='1280' height='720' path='images/content-images/2015/03/06/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/06/' filename='trans-history-body-image-1425660891.jpg' id='33802']

Still image from Boys Don't Cry, Fox Searchlight Pictures

In 1999, Hilary Swank portrayed transgender man Brandon Teena in the award-winning film Boys Don't Cry. The film depicts the tragic, true story of Teena and his death at the hands of two former friends. The film brought mainstream attention to the devastating reality of violence that transgender individuals. Swank took home an Oscar for Best Actress in a Leading Role, and co-star Chloë Sevigny was nominated for Best Actress in a Supporting Role at that year's Academy Awards. Sevigny would later go on to play a transgender woman in the 2012 British TV series Hit & Miss.

In 2001, John Cameron Mitchell directed and starred in Hedwig & the Angry Inch, an adaptation of his 1998 stage musical of the same name. Hedwig tells the story of an East German gay man named Hansel Schmidt who falls in love with American soldier Luther Robinson. Schmidt learns that if he were to marry Robinson, he would be able to travel home to America with his new husband. Unfortunately, same-sex marriage was not a reality in East Germany or the United States at the time, so Schmidt decided to subject himself to sexual reassignment surgery in order to be able to marry Robinson. Despite the sacrifices made by Schmidt—now going by the name Hedwig Robinson—the marriage falls apart, leaving Hedwig to reconcile with her new reality, all the while performing in a glam rock band. The film explores these gender-related themes, focusing on what it means to be a man or a woman, and finding oneself.

In 2003, Showtime produced Soldier's Girl, a story based on the lives of transsexual performer Calpernia Addams and her boyfriend, U.S. Army Private First Class Barry Winchell. In 1999, Winchell was murdered by his fellow soldiers after they learned of his relationship with Addams. This tragedy ignited criticisms of the military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy, instituted just five years earlier. Congress would repeal the policy in 2011, granting gay, lesbian, and bisexual individuals the right to serve openly in the military. As of this writing, transgender individuals are still prohibited from serving in the military.

In 2005's Transamerica, Felicity Huffman plays Bree, a trans woman who learns just a week before undergoing sexual reassignment surgery that she fathered a son years earlier. The film follows Bree's journey across the country with her newly found teenage son, and focuses on the complexity of human relationships and what it means to be a family.

[body_image width='1200' height='794' path='images/content-images/2015/03/06/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/06/' filename='trans-history-body-image-1425661427.jpg' id='33807']

Felicity Huffman in Transamerica, The Weinstein Company

The portrayal of transgender individuals has frequently been defamatory, inaccurate, and based on outdated stereotypes. In a review of more than 100 episodes featuring a transgender character over a 10 year span, LGBT media watchdog GLAAD found that in more than half of surveyed TV episodes, trans characters were portrayed in a negative or defamatory light, and only 12 percent were deemed "groundbreaking, fair, and accurate." The organization went on to highlight specific instances of negative trans representation on TV, which included shows like CSI, The Cleveland Show, andNip/Tuck.

The past few years have seen a rise in the number of positive portrayals of trans characters. Even more importantly, there has been an increase in the number of trans actors and actresses cast in mainstream shows.

From 2007 to 2008, transgender actress Candis Cayne had a recurring role on ABC's Dirty Sexy Money, in which she portrayed a woman named Carmelita, the mistress of a high-profile politician. Cayne's performance illustrated some of the pain and shame trans women and their straight male partners often face, as well as the elevated risk of violence these women face. From 2013 to 2014, Cayne appeared in three episodes of CBS' Elementary, a modern take on Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes.

In 2013, Netflix premiered Orange Is the New Black, a comedy/drama about life inside a women's prison. The show features transgender woman Laverne Cox in the role of Sophia Burset, one of the inmates at the prison. Prior to appearing on OITNB, Cox had appeared on a couple of reality TV shows, as well as episodes of Law & Order, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, and HBO's Bored to Death. For the most part, these roles embodied many of the problematic elements outlined in GLAAD's study. Her role on OITNB, however, broke from many of those stereotypes, and while not perfect, has done much to bring trans awareness to the mainstream. Last year, Cox became the first out trans individual to be nominated for an Emmy in an acting category.

In June of 2014, The Matrix creators Lana and Andy Wachowski unveiled the cast list for their upcoming Netflix sci-fi drama series Sense 8. Among those cast is Jamie Clayton, a transgender actress who had previously appeared on HBO's Hung and TRANSform Me, a makeover reality TV show featuring Clayton, Cox, and Nina Poon; all transgender women. Lana Wachowski, herself, is a transgender woman, having come out publicly in 2012.

Years from now, it's entirely possible that Cox, Cayne, and Clayton will be heralded as pioneers of the golden age of trans media representation in scripted television, a format in evolution. As these women and other trans people find themselves part of the entertainment industry, they will be better suited to mold coverage, and reduce inaccuracies and stereotypes.

[body_image width='800' height='1200' path='images/content-images/2015/03/06/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/06/' filename='trans-history-body-image-1425661983.jpg' id='33815']

In theory, documentaries are the one format where individuals can most directly tell their own stories. Unfortunately, in both long- and short-form documentaries, trans lives have been portrayed in similarly sensationalistic ways as they are in scripted endeavors. Many of these tropes—trans women shown putting on makeup, a laser focus on surgical procedures, and other common themes of trans documentaries—have become so prevalent that they've prompted viewers to create their own "Trans Documentary Drinking Game."

Nonetheless, there are documentaries that have been done right, such as 2007's Red Without Blue, which focuses on a pair of identical twins, one of whom eventually comes out as transgender. The film manages to avoid more stereotypical tropes and keep the focus on some of the struggles many trans people face in navigating familial relationships after coming out.

Other films, such as the 2011 Chaz Bono documentary Becoming Chaz or 1990's Paris Is Burning, have received critical acclaim. In the case of Paris is Burning, success came mostly in the form of its cult following. Paris is Burning stands apart from many of the other trans documentaries, by focusing not only on trans individuals, but on the larger, LGBT culture found in New York City's mid-to-late 1980s ball scene.

Last year, Laverne Cox and Laura Jane Grace each released their own trans documentary series, titled The T Word and True Trans with Laura Jane Grace, respectively. One only hopes these seres will pave the way for more relatable, human representations of trans people in both documentaries and broader pop culture.

Last April, it was announced that actor and recent Oscar winner Eddie Redmayne (My Week with Marilyn, Les Misérables, The Theory of Everything) would be playing the role of Lili Elbe in the upcoming film adaptation of The Danish Girl. Elbe was a transgender woman who, in the early 1930s, underwent one of the first documented sexual reassignment surgeries. While Redmayne's work has been consistently well-received, his casting in The Danish Girl raised concerns. Will he be able to accurately portray the film's subject.

In an interview with E!, Redmayne is quoted as saying, "Even though it is period and under completely different circumstances than today, I'm meeting many women from the trans community and hearing their experiences. I have put on dresses and wigs and makeup. I'm beginning to embark on that and trying to find out who she is."

Few question the value of speaking to trans women about undertaking the role, but Redmayne's comment set off red flags. Does he think gender identity is nothing more than "dresses and wigs and makeup?"

This statement harkened back to Leto's Dallas Buyers Club acceptance speech at the Golden Globe Awards, where he said, "I'd like to use this opportunity to clear up a few things. I did not ever use any prosthetics in this film. That tiny little Brazilian bubble butt was all mine. It was a very transformative role, and I had to do a lot of things to prepare. One of the things I did was wax my entire body including my eyebrows. I'm just fortunate that it wasn't a period piece so I didn't have to do full Brazilian."

This idea, that appearance and adherence to gender norms are intrinsically linked to one's gender identity, is one of the very stereotypes that advocates for trans rights frequently look to dispel. While having trans characters and trans themes featured in Hollywood is seen as a generally positive development for trans people, casting actors who don't seem to have a real grasp on the characters they portray can be a cringeworthy experience to watch.

Will Redmayne do Lili Elbe justice? It's certainly possible. Would it have been nice to see a trans actress in that role, or for the film's script to have been written by a trans woman? Absolutely. But progress, here as everywhere, is incremental.

As we enter 2015, the question of whether modern day portrayals of trans individuals will be remembered as accurate or offensive remains an open question. As portrayals of trans individuals become more accurate, so does trans perception in the public eye. Progress is invariably linked to portrayal, and upcoming years will prove pivotal to the state of trans rights in the immediate future.

Follow Parker Molloy on Twitter.

[body_image width='1990' height='2904' path='images/content-images/2015/03/06/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/06/' filename='stop-calling-it-a-vagina-body-image-1425659037.jpg' id='33773']

Illustration by Brian Evans/Getty Images

The other day I was sitting in an MA-level class on Gender and Queer Blah Blah and my young professor said, "The penis and the... [cautionary pause] the female genitals." My classmate immediately responded, "There's a name for that," although he didn't dare say it. Later, in a private conversation, my professor, a man with a Ph.D. who's teaching graduate courses on feminism and sexuality, did the thing that most people do. He used the misnomer "vagina" instead of "vulva."

But a vagina does not a vulva make.

The vaginal opening is just one part of the vulva. The vulva makes up everything you see on the outside: the visible part of the clitoris (this is only the tip of the clitoris iceberg, the much larger part of the clitoris is found inside the body), the labia (inner and outer lips), the urethral opening (for urination or ejaculation), and the entry/exit point of the vagina.

"Vagina" is used incorrectly so often that it should come as no surprise that my highly educated professor used the wrong term. Even feminist texts and artworks, like The Vagina Monologues and The Great Wall of Vagina, fall into the same trap. Pretty much every time you see "vagina" in the media, it's misplaced for vulva.

Female sexual anatomy, something considered a natural fact, is actually socially constructed. Studies have shown the way the clitoris has gone in and out of medical anatomies throughout Western history. Danish anatomist Casper Bartholin's illustrations of the female "lust organs" from the 17th century showed the clitoral erectile tissue and the crura similar to the way they're depicted today. In the 1840s, German anatomist Georg Ludwig Kobelt drew an enlargement of the shaft of the clitoris similar to a penis, as it's known today. In the 1901 edition of Gray's Anatomy, the clitoris is labeled and somewhat prominently featured. Then, in the 1948 edition: POOF! The clit disappears in both label and graphic illustration. The primary organ of sexual arousal and orgasm for females was deleted from the staple textbook on human anatomy. Because the clitoris and the female orgasm aren't necessary for reproduction, they've been exceedingly ignored by science, in stark contrast to the penis.

[body_image width='574' height='526' path='images/content-images/2015/03/08/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/08/' filename='stop-calling-it-a-vagina-body-image-1425837020.png' id='34046']

Drawing courtesy Laura Merritt

When we say vagina, we're collectively ignoring the visual aspect of female anatomy, the clitoris and the labia, with language. The vagina is the way that guys who have sex with girls come. Since Kinsey's 1953 landmark book Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, we've known that most women need direct clitoral stimulation (by a hand, a mouth, or some other object) to have an orgasm. And yet, how many times do we still see, in movies or television, the depiction of a woman's orgasm as a result of cock-penetration alone? That we call the female gentials "the vagina" speaks volumes about the politics of sex. "Vagina" keeps the focus on straight male pleasure.

Dr. Mithu Sanyal, author of VULVA, a cultural history of the vulva, believes ideas about the body are marshaled through words. "Language is connected to our perception of the world. What we can't name, we can't talk about, and ultimately, can't think about," she writes. Clinical psychologist Dr. Harriet Lerner calls this phenomenon of disregarding the clitoris and the labia "psychic genital mutilation." According to her, "Language can be as powerful and swift as the surgeon's knife. What is not named does not exist."

Today, many women, and even girls as young as 16, are taking this idea a step further and making their genitals invisible for real. Labiaplasty (slicing off part of the labia minora to make them smaller) is one of the fastest growing cosmetic surgeries in the UK and the US. Female genital mutilation is the ritual act of removing part or all of the external female genitals. It's performed in many African countries and is usually framed as incomparable to Western cosmetic genital surgery. Interestingly, the World Health Organization defines FGM as "all procedures that involve partial or total removal of the external female genitalia, or other injury to the female genital organs for non-medical reasons." Both vaginal rejuvenation and labiaplasty fall under the definitions provided by the United Nations for mutilation.

[body_image width='1024' height='768' path='images/content-images/2015/03/06/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/06/' filename='stop-calling-it-a-vagina-body-image-1425657867.jpg' id='33770']

Photo via Flickr user Philippa Willitts

In Berlin, a city famous for its progressive sexual values and history of gay rights campaigning, people are trying to counter this trend. Dr. Laura Méritt, owner of Sexclusivitäten, the German capital's longest running feminist sex shop, is currently collecting "pussy profiles" to demonstrate the diversity of vulvas and show that there is no general norm. You can contribute by filling out her survey online or in person. "Any university would be jealous! We have over 2,000 participants and what we found is incredible," Méritt said.

The results will be published in March as part of Mösenmonat ("Cunt Month"), an annual celebration where the vulva is honored in art exhibitions, performances, films, and workshops at Sexclusivitäten. This year's theme is "The Clitoral Truth." Méritt also edited the German version of the classic feminist anatomy text, A New View of a Woman's Body. The photographs in this book make clear that vulvas vary dramatically in shape, color, texture, and size.

Maybe, at the end of the day, the word "vulva" is too clinical for you. No problem. How about "pussy," "yoni," or a list of other words? Personally, I've always gone the reclaiming route. I say "cunt." The word "cunt" shares an etymological root with queen, kin, and country. Cunt shouldn't be the most offensive word in the English language. Cunts are great! They should be celebrated, not denigrated. Don't use the word "vagina" unless you're talking about a vagina. Using the word "vagina" incorrectly obscures women's sexual pleasure and continues the myth of The Mystery of Female Sexuality. Mysticism should not be confused with ignorance or censorship. Viva la vulva!

[body_image width='2048' height='1365' path='images/content-images/2015/03/05/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/05/' filename='the-new-occupation-of-paris-body-image-1425594367.jpg' id='33473']

Photo via Flickr user Nick Harris

There have been soldiers stationed outside my front door for the past eight weeks. It started with two, and now there are sometimes four.

Immediately following the Charlie Hébdo shootings on January 7, 10,412 soldiers were stationed at "vulnerable locations" across the city. I live in an ordinary building in a residential and populaire (meaning working-class and ethnically mixed) neighborhood in northeast Paris. My backyard is the Parc de Belleville, not the Champs Elysées. Before this, I had no idea my neighborhood was considered "vulnerable."

France's national security alert system is called Vigipirate. I can't be totally sure of how this term sounds to a native French-speaker from France, but as a nearly-native French-speaker from Canada, to me it sounds like a kid's cartoon on YTV. Since the shootings, the Vigipirate rating has been at the highest level—"attack alert"—across the Ile-de-France region that encompasses Paris and its suburbs.

On January 12, the French Defense Minister, Jean Yves le Drian, said, "This is the first time that our troops have been mobilized to such an extent on our own soil." He admitted that the deployment involves "almost as many men as we have in our overseas operations."

Enter the Vigipirates. I can't remember them arriving, but all of a sudden, they were here.

At first, I came home from the grocery store making sure my hands were visible, not concealed in my pockets, and tried to make eye contact with one or both of the soldiers before sharply diverting my gaze. Sometimes we'd exchange a quick bonjour or bonsoir, but that depended more on proximity than disposition.

I felt confused as to why they had been stationed outside my front door. I felt afraid of why, too. There was even some defensiveness: We don't need you, I thought. We get along fine without you.

But as the weeks passed, and it became clear that these 20-year-olds with guns were my new neighbors, my defensiveness abated. The confusion and fear were still present, but I had questions, and I wanted answers. I ventured a conversation. I realize now that it was the sort of conversation that parents have with stubborn toddlers asking why the sky is blue.

- Why are you here?
- Because it's a vulnerable zone.
- But why?
- Because there's a nursery school.
- Is it a special nursery school?
- There could be some Jewish kids.
- So it's a Jewish nursery school?
- No. There could also be some Muslim kids.
- So it's a normal one.
- [Nod.]
- How long will you be here for?
- We don't know.
- When will you know?
- We don't know.

And I believe that's the truth: they don't know the answers any more than I do.

During the first Iraq War, an anthropologist named Emily Martin conducted a study of how we think about immunity. Her research showed that "popular publications depict the body as the scene of total war between ruthless invaders and determined defenders."

As Eula Biss points out in her recent book, On Immunity, many scientists even deny that this military imagery is a metaphor. It is, they insist, simply "how it is." Biss continues: "The body employs some cells as 'infantry' and others as the 'armored unit,' and these troops deploy 'mines' to explode bacteria, while the immune response itself 'detonates like a bomb.'"

If we imagine the immune system as a war zone, how do we imagine a war? It seems clear that the soldiers have been stationed across the city largely for show. The French government understandably wants to display that it's doing everything it can to protect its people, though it is a risk to make it seem as though the people need protecting.

Maybe not everyone feels protected, though. I'm a 27-year-old white woman, and while the soldiers' presence made me feel uneasy at first, I am part of the demographic that is likely to feel safeguarded. But I wonder how my neighbors feel—the teenagers, many of whom come from North Africa, who attend the high school across the street; the Senegalese family who run a local print shop; the man from Algeria who runs the community theater. Do they feel the soldiers are watching out for them? Or do they worry that they're being unfairly observed as targets?

The fact that the three terrorists—the Kouachi brothers, who gunned down 12 people in the Charlie Hébdo editorial meeting, and Amedy Coulibaly, who murdered the police officer and hostages in the Kosher supermarket—were all born and raised in France was particularly difficult to come to terms with. The press tracked their childhood and upbringing, mapping it out for the public: born in the 10th arrondissement, radicalized in the 19th; met in the beautiful Buttes Chaumont park to perform military-style training exercises. It's as if the geography offered a way of both understanding their outlooks, and isolating the place where their vision mutated. If it happened to them, we wanted to know, could it happen to anyone?

[body_image width='1024' height='688' path='images/content-images/2015/03/05/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/05/' filename='the-new-occupation-of-paris-body-image-1425594497.jpg' id='33474']

The Parc de Buttes Chaumont in northeast Paris. Photo via Flickr user Jean-Francois Paris

The definition of "homegrown terrorism" reminds me of how malignancy is described: these men were considered a cancer that had grown in the country; our own body had turned against us.

The comparison to the immune system goes further. One idea that Biss develops throughout On Immunity is that "we owe each other our bodies." She's speaking of vaccination, but I'm thinking of the monumental Marche Républicaine, where it seemed as though all of France took to the streets—giving our bodies to the body politic, even though many of us were afraid—to prove that we outnumbered those who threatened us. That seems more like an immune system to me. We marched nearly four million strong, united against something that was both inside and outside of ourselves.

For weeks, it seemed as though the soldiers just transformed from one pair to another. I never saw how the handover happened. Then, in the early hours of pre-dawn when my partner was getting a taxi to the airport, I saw it go down. The whole thing was so swift, so sudden, that by the time R had taken the elevator from the sixth floor to the first, the camo-print truck had come and gone. The soldiers finishing their shift had climbed in the back of the covered pick-up and the new ones had taken their place.

"Did you see that?" I called down to R.

"See what?"

The next time I saw the truck was several weeks later, in the middle of a weekday afternoon. The truck stayed for several minutes this time, and the group of soldiers talked for a while. A few were sitting in the back of the truck, two were leaning against the side of it, and the pair stationed on the stoop had adopted a casual attitude. An elderly man with a cane and a white flat-cap walked by slowly, not even looking, as if this was the sort of thing he saw every day.

Now I sometimes see the soldiers at the grocery store, or taking out their iPhones to give people directions. I no longer worry about making it clear to them that I come unarmed. How quickly we adapt.

It's been a cold winter, and I often think of the soldiers standing outside of the blue gates to the nursery school next to my apartment on the long, rainy February nights. They never seem to talk to one another; I wonder what they think about to pass the time.

(A confession: I've not quite lost that childhood fear of people breaking into my room in the night, and lately, when I've woken up with that mild, vague anxiety, I've felt relief in remembering that the soldiers are outside my front door.)

One night, when I was coming home in the early hours of the morning from a party, I climbed the bridge that crosses the disused train line behind my apartment—the petite ceinture, where kids from the social housing block play in the day, and homeless people sleep at night—and was surprised to notice that I felt grateful knowing the soldiers would be waiting there for me. But when I came down the other side, they were not there at all. I almost felt abandoned.

When I went out the following morning, though, they were back. As if nothing had changed. Over the past couple of weeks, while they sometimes disappear again for a day or a night, they always come back.

But when will it be OK to stop, for real? When will it be the right time to let the guard down? I'm speaking of both the government and the individuals it governs. If you made your profile picture JE SUIS CHARLIE, when did you, or when will you, feel it's appropriate to switch back to you smiling on a beach?

Oddly, the soldiers' presence makes that brief period of terror more distant in my mind. I rarely think of them as a consequence to the Charlie Hébdo attacks; at this point, they seem like their own thing. A new reality. And one that, against all evidence, no longer scares me.

In Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag says that the clearest and most truthful way of thinking about diseases is without recourse to metaphor. Maybe this is the way we have to think about war, too, and of the soldiers that are still standing on thousands of front doorsteps across Paris. But I don't think I know how to do that.

Follow Harriet Alida Lye on Twitter.

[body_image width='1688' height='2550' path='images/content-images/2015/02/23/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/23/' filename='failure-of-male-societies-869-body-image-1424710904.jpg' id='30042']

In June of 2011, the Wall Street Journal published a pearl-clutching jeremiad against the new darkness oozing from the genre of young adult fiction. "A careless young reader—or one who seeks out depravity—will find himself surrounded by images not of joy or beauty," warned the author, Megan Cox Gurdon, "but of damage, brutality and losses of the most horrendous kinds." God forbid the children of 9/11, endless war, and the worst economic depression since the last one should read about damage, brutality or loss, eh?

In high dudgeon, the first author Gurdon examines is Andrew Smith, whose 2011 novel, The Marbury Lens, told the story of a teenage boy who escapes a brutal kidnapper and finds a pair of glasses that allow him to see an alternate world of constant warfare: a symbolic exploration of the duality that many American children were experiencing at the time, growing up relatively safe in a world that was said to be falling apart / at war / on fire. If the volume on the violence in The Marbury Lens is turned up, that's because everything in adolescence is set to eleven.

And eleven is where Smith's books begin. In Grasshopper Jungle, an Iowa teenager's joyful sexual confusion plays out against an apocalyptic backdrop of man-made super insects that hatch from the bodies of the boys who beat him up. In Smith's new novel, The Alex Crow, a young Syrian refugee finds himself the newly adopted son of a deranged (though well-intentioned) scientist who works on reanimating dead species for the US government to use as living spies. Then the kid goes to summer camp. Smith's books are like that: zany without being whimsical, of-this-world without being limited by its conventions.

At times, Smith's books can be uneven. One of the less developed bits in The Alex Crow follows a "melting man" driving cross country in a U-Haul truck packed with a homemade dirty bomb; the payload of the bomb far outweighs the pay off of the plot line. But female characters are Smith's real Achilles heel: he doesn't have many of them and they tend toward the stereotypical.

Yet despite these real issues, Smith's work shines. In a market oversaturated by trends (Vampires! Zombies! Cancer!), his novels are fresh and exciting. His male characters are allowed to explore sexuality in all of its positive and negative implications, a breadth of experience that goes beyond gay or straight and into something like Freud's idea of the polymorphously perverse. And for all its adolescent humor, his prose is excellent. The Alex Crow features some of the best euphemisms for masturbation I've ever read. (See: "upload some streaming data.")

With The Alex Crow coming out next month, VICE sat down with Smith to talk about the book, his inspiration, and the state of the world today.

VICE: Where did the idea for The Alex Crow come from?
Andrew Smith: I teach a group of high school students, who are non-English speaking, from all over the world. A few years ago I started getting kids coming in from Syria, during probably the worst of the Syrian civil war. The first boy was 15. His family had left everything they owned in Syria, went across the border into Lebanon, into refugee camps, and then to the United States. And within days he was taking high school classes with thousands of Californians.

I wanted to tell a story like that, about somebody who found himself here, and then was confronted with all of the strangeness that is so pervasive here.

Your villains are often big corporations with military ties. Coincidence or anti-capitalist conspiracy?
Definitely not a coincidence. I think we're getting to the point—we're maybe even past the tipping point—where as a species, human beings have chosen to do things with little concern for their long-run effects. I think there are plenty of people out there who sit back passively, shake their heads and say, as is so often said in Grasshopper Jungle, "That's probably not a good idea." And yet we just keep doing those things over and over. So it's a really important element in the things that I write.

You also don't seem afraid to explore the sex lives of teen boys—everything from the confusion of being attracted to your gay best friend to the trauma of sexual assault during war.
There are an awful lot of things that people are, for whatever reason, timid to talk about, and sexuality in adolescence is one. Kids ask me about that all the time. Especially boys. They'll quietly say things like "Wow, you wrote about this. How do you feel about that? How do your kids feel about this stuff?" They're trying to feel out some kind of an answer, because they're curious. I think these are natural experiences during adolescence. So I tell them I'm not afraid of words, of talking about anything that I think is real or pertinent.

On the flip side, it sometimes seems like there isn't much of a way into your books for female readers. Where are all the women in your work?
I was raised in a family with four boys, and I absolutely did not know anything about girls at all. I have a daughter now; she's 17. When she was born, that was the first girl I ever had in my life. I consider myself completely ignorant to all things woman and female. I'm trying to be better though.

A lot of The Alex Crow is really about the failure of male societies. In all of the story threads, there are examples of male-dominated societies that make critical errors, whether it's the army that Ariel falls in with at the beginning, or the refugee camp, or Camp Merrie-Seymour for boys, or the doomed arctic expedition, they're all examples of male societies that think that they're doing some kind of noble mission, and they're failing miserably.

Follow Hugh Ryan on Twitter.

[body_image width='630' height='879' path='images/content-images/2015/03/06/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/06/' filename='scapo-by-berliac-body-image-1425667802.jpg' id='33874']

[body_image width='630' height='879' path='images/content-images/2015/03/06/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/06/' filename='scapo-by-berliac-body-image-1425667816.jpg' id='33876']

[body_image width='630' height='879' path='images/content-images/2015/03/06/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/06/' filename='scapo-by-berliac-body-image-1425667824.jpg' id='33877']

[body_image width='630' height='879' path='images/content-images/2015/03/06/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/06/' filename='scapo-by-berliac-body-image-1425667832.jpg' id='33878']

[body_image width='630' height='879' path='images/content-images/2015/03/06/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/06/' filename='scapo-by-berliac-body-image-1425667840.jpg' id='33879']

[body_image width='630' height='879' path='images/content-images/2015/03/06/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/06/' filename='scapo-by-berliac-body-image-1425667847.jpg' id='33880']

[body_image width='630' height='879' path='images/content-images/2015/03/06/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/06/' filename='scapo-by-berliac-body-image-1425667856.jpg' id='33881']

[body_image width='630' height='879' path='images/content-images/2015/03/06/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/06/' filename='scapo-by-berliac-body-image-1425667912.jpg' id='33884']

[body_image width='630' height='879' path='images/content-images/2015/03/06/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/06/' filename='scapo-by-berliac-body-image-1425667919.jpg' id='33885']

[body_image width='630' height='879' path='images/content-images/2015/03/06/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/06/' filename='scapo-by-berliac-body-image-1425667926.jpg' id='33886']

For more Berliac, check out his website and blog, and follow Berliac on Twitter.

[body_image width='1024' height='683' path='images/content-images/2015/03/06/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/06/' filename='monopoly-body-image-1425682438.jpg' id='33950']

Photo via Flickr user Dave Rutt

Board games are making a comeback. With cafes catering to analog gamers popping up around New York and titles like Settlers of Catan gaining a certain amount of trendy cache, it's safe to say that people are returning to the great American pastime of staring at pieces of cardboard and trading fake money. The greatest of all pieces of cardboard, of course, is Monopoly: the classic board game that takes six hours to finish and teaches children the pleasures of ruthless capitalism. Mary Pilon, a former sports reporter for the New York Times and business reporter for the Wall Street Journal, spent five years looking into the weird history behind Monopolyand found that, contrary to popular belief, it wasn't invented during the Great Depression. Also, it was created by an anti-capitalist feminist poet.

Out now from Bloomsbury, Pilon's The Monopolists is a deep-dive into the past century: from controversies surrounding the game's creation to recent Hasboro lawsuits. I spoke with Pilon to learn more about Monopoly's anti-capitalist roots, the weird world of patents, and the rightful inventor of America's favorite game.

VICE: How did you end up writing about Monopoly? Are you a big fan?
Mary Pilon: I'm a big games nerd. I grew up playing a lot of video games and board games. But this whole project came about by accident. In 2009, I was writing about the economy at the Wall Street Journal, which was—as you can remember—really depressing. In one piece, I thought I'd just have a throwaway line about Monopoly being invented during the Great Depression. Then I started to do research and came across Ralph [Anspach]'s lawsuit. I reached out to him and said I was a reporter at the Journal, trying to learn about Monopoly. I wrote about his legal battle, and kept researching. So much business coverage is so technical—you're writing about derivatives and investment banks—so to get involved in the board game world was great.

Wait, what was the Monopoly lawsuit about?
In the early 1970s, this guy Ralph was living in the Bay Area. He was very left wing, politically. He made a game called Anti-Monopoly, trying to teach people about the evils of Monopoly. It's not long before he hears from Monopoly's attorneys, saying that he couldn't make Anti-Monopoly. Ralph, like me—like everybody—thought this man Charles Darrow had invented the game, but [over the course of his lawsuit] he unearthed this whole scandal, that this woman had invented Monopoly in 1904.

Hs legal battle hinged on proving this, what he called the " Monopoly lie." I originally started researching his lawsuit because any time you have a source you want to make sure their story checks out. But this was the first time where I finished a story and I had way more questions. I was spending my weekends at the the New York Public Library, and I used my vacation days to fly out to San Francisco and meet with Ralph in person. He had boxes of documents and photographs that I began to report off of; his case hatched open all these historical records. I shipped all of those to New York and just started with that.

[body_image width='900' height='598' path='images/content-images/2015/03/06/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/06/' filename='monopoly-body-image-1425682526.jpg' id='33952']

Photo via Flickr user MTSOfan

What was the most surprising thing you came across in your research?
I was surprised that the game wasn't just invented so long before the Great Depression, but by a woman. Female inventors a century ago were often overlooked and the fact that one was so pivotal in creating an economic game was highly unusual for her time. The more I learned about Lizzie Magie, the more strange and unusual the story of Monopoly became. Its creation came from what many historians would deem an unlikely source.

Who was Lizzie Magie?
I actually thought I might write a Lizzie Magie biography! She was a feminist. She had these really outspoken views about how women were being treated at the time, how they were being paid. She wrote short stories and poetry, and over and over again in her writing these themes of justice and inequality kept coming up. The idea that she would make this board game to teach the evils of monopoly and spread her political views made a lot of sense.

I didn't set out to write a feminist book, I set out to write a book about the game. But the fact that that's the direction it took is fascinating. Since [ The Monopolists] has come out, I've heard a lot from women in tech. More and more of these stories are coming out; whether you're a woman or a persecuted ethnic minority, there are all sorts of inventions and things that were created by a more dynamic group of people than we realize, because often they just got erased by history. Lizzie Magie, if you think about her time period and women then, it makes sense that she would have been mostly forgotten. One of the last traces we have from [Magie] is on the 1940 US Census, where she listed her occupation as "Maker of Games"—even though she had so many other occupations—and her income is zero.

Why do we think that Monopoly was invented by Charles Darrow, then?
For years, the Darrow story was the commonly told one. Even if it isn't accurate, it's a really romantic tale. It's a classic Cinderella, Horatio Alger, rags to riches narrative. I think we're all intoxicated by that because on some level, we want to relate to it ourselves. Who doesn't want to dream that they can have a "eureka!" moment and become a millionaire instantly?

What was the message behind Magie's version of the game?
The Landlord's Game, ironically, was devised to teach people about the evils of the monopolists of her time. In a 1902 issue of the Single Tax Review, [Magie wrote], "It might well have been called the Game of Life, as it contains all the elements of success and failure in the real world, and the object is the same as the human race in general seems to have, i.e., the accumulation of wealth."

So is your next book on Settlers of Catan?
I love Settlers but I'm still in recovery from my first book. Maybe Clue. I have no idea. This took five years. I don't regret it for a second, but this book took longer than any game of Monopoly I've ever played.

Buy The Monopolists, out now from Bloomsbury.

Follow Jennifer Schaffer on Twitter.

On VICE we went to Antarctica to explore climate change in the premier episode of VICE on HBO Season 3. In the latest edition of THUMP's explorative SUB.Culture series, we delve into Montreal's thriving dance music scene. On NOISEY, legendary filmmaker and music documentarian Lance Bangs went on tour with New Brunswick trio Screaming Females to record the band's life on the road. This is the latest on VICE.

[body_image width='1126' height='724' path='images/content-images/2015/03/05/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/05/' filename='strange-bedfellows-shiite-militias-and-the-future-of-syria-and-iraq-body-image-1425582453.jpg' id='33436']

Photo by Ali Mohammed/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

In the fight against ISIS, the front lines are etched by blood-stained sand and the calculations of strange bedfellows. The same Shiite militiamen who partner with the United States to battle ISIS in Syria and Iraq might also wish us harm, when we're not converging on the same target.

Not all of these militia groups pledge allegiance to Iran, the Shiite stronghold trying to position itself as a champion for Muslims and minorities against Sunni jihadists like ISIS. But the influx of Shiite fighters reveals the tendrils of Iran's influence. Shiite militias that aid us in a pragmatic, Machiavellian way also help sustain the Assad regime in Syria and, through retribution against Sunnis, feed the entrenched, sectarian animus that defines Iraqi society. As more forces are activated to combat ISIS, many scholars have argued that Iran stands to gain, on the ground in Damascus and Baghdad and in the zoomed-out power game.

Among them is Phillip Smyth, a researcher at the University of Maryland and adjunct fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. In an in-depth study on Shiite militarism, Smyth argues that the militias represent a mobile army of Iran's bidding. VICE spoke to Smyth about the future of Iraq, Iran's foreign policy, and the consequences of sectarian war.

VICE: You believe that the US should reaffirm its commitment to a unified Iraq. Can you elaborate?
Phillip Smyth: The United States has pushed that we wanted a more inclusive government in Baghdad, one that would be accepting of Sunni, Shiite, and the multitude of minority groups. Frankly, the Iraqi government has become a Shiite-dominated institution. Don't get me wrong; many of these Shiites were democratically elected. However, there is a project going on where certain ministries, in almost a feudalistic form, have taken control through very sectarian Shiite parties, and Sunnis feel very, very left out. This allows for the growth of ISIS. I think a lot of people tend to ignore that factor.

Think about this: Iraqi Sunni tribes normally would not have gone over to what was then AQI, Al Qaeda in Iraq. They fought alongside them, but then they got sick of them and joined the Sahwa Movement (the "Sunni Awakening"). Then, all of a sudden, ISIS is gaining lots and lots of popularity because there are these grievances in the Sunni community with the Shiite government. And those were never really addressed.

The US needs to firmly keep coming out and saying we support an inclusive government that doesn't make Sunnis feel isolated. As a state, we have generally supported the rights of many different groups living under the national banner.

You argue that what appears as an organic flow of Shiite fighters into Syria is really an orchestrated effort by Iran.
There is no way anyone can deny that Iran has not only guided but controlled the flow of fighters for the most part, and it doesn't mean they weren't working with Assad. They altered the narrative of the war. I mean, how do you get Shiite jihadist foreign fighters to go to Syria? First, they manufactured a need for this holy war, where Iran was very big on promoting a defensive jihad, of defending Shiite holy sites in Syria against Sunni extremists, in particular the golden-domed Sayyeda Zainab shrine. And it resonated with a lot of people. They understood the romantic pull it would have on many.

Then there is the Hezbollah influence. And you have Iraqi Shiite forces that have direct ties to other Iranian proxies: Ketaib Hezbollah; the Badr Organization; Asaib Ahl al-Haqq. All of these fighters were showing up and it's most certainly not an organic move. I think there is some level of genuine volunteering. But we are talking about a recruitment program that is huge. Iran is in the background leading this, filtering in fighters not just from Iraq, but from Afghanistan and other "exotic" locales.

The real way to kind of tell the sectarian war was getting hotter was to look at the funerals. In Iraq they would send the bodies to Iran first. It's a highly organized effort by Iran and they manage it so fluidly and so well and we are seeing the effects today.

We've seen the threat of ISIS. What threat do Shiite militias pose?
It depends on the Shiite militia. But if we are talking about these Iranian direct proxy groups, it's a monumental threat. And I say that because they demonstrated a very sophisticated manner of being able to attack American and coalition forces when they were still occupying Iraq. They have advanced weaponry, advanced tactics; they have a state backer. Beyond that, they have their own radical extremist ideology, which is highly anti-American. But then there is another long-term goal. If American policy is to build a more inclusive Baghdad and pull Sunnis out of the clutches of ISIS, what happens when the main forces on the ground executing attacks against ISIS, and by extension the Sunni community, are these radical and sectarian and extremist Shiite groups? That doesn't really build much consensus. It hurts the long-term policy.

[body_image width='2464' height='1494' path='images/content-images/2015/03/05/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/05/' filename='strange-bedfellows-shiite-militias-and-the-future-of-syria-and-iraq-body-image-1425582493.jpg' id='33437']

Photo by Ali Mukarrem Garip/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

What is the alternative to relying on Shiite militias if Iraqi security forces are inadequate?
This is a huge problem. And I think it goes beyond Iraq just having a functional security force. Because you have to remember, when we are talking about Shiite militia groups, many of them have not only infiltrated but now control large sections of the security forces.

I would argue that there has been an active move by the militias to keep the Iraqi military weak. Why is that? One: it allows them to project power more effectively. Two: It means that the country is reliant upon them for their own security. And three: there are elements of the Iraqi military who don't like the Shiite militias, who may be Shiite themselves or are Iraqi nationalists—and this is a good way to keep them in check.

I don't believe that one of these solutions is to ally yourself with the lesser of two evils. Iran plays 3D chess and we are still learning how to get the checkers board out of the box. I don't think anybody wants ISIS to exist or to fester, but then again, do you want the replacement for that to be a hyper-radicalized sectarian militia-apparatus with revenge on its mind?

Many Shiite militias are believed to have committed human rights violations.
I have a number of social media profiles where I follow Shiite militias. In the past month and a half I don't think there's been a single day where I've not seen a video or a photograph showing some kind of abuse, what we'd call a human rights violation, or possibly a war crime going on on camera. And most would respond: Who cares. It's happening to an ISIS guy and he deserves it. But we don't even know who that is. We don't know if it's an ISIS guy. It could be some Sunni villager.

How do the West's Sunni Arab allies view the rise of the Shiite militias in Syria and Iraq?
They view this as a long-term regional power struggle. And it's eroding our alliances with them. They are scared about what's going to happen when the militia guns eventually turn on them.

Follow Hamza Shaban on Twitter.

I first met Martin Slepcik and his family while taking photos in Cliftonville, England. I would see them out and about almost every time I visited the coastal town, and they became one of the focal points of the project I was working on. Then one day, without any warning, they disappeared.

Neighbors told me the family had returned to Slovakia. Hoping to visit them and continue the photo series, I asked around town for an address or phone number. All I learned was that they'd gone to a place called Lunik IX, and that I shouldn't take my dog there, as he'd be eaten. Some people I spoke to said the area was straight out of District 9.

Lunik IX is built into the hills and woods outside Kosice, a small, picturesque European city. It has everything you could ask for in the way of shopping, entertainment, and infrastructure, which makes Lunik IX even harder to wrap your head around once you arrive.

I'd done some basic online research about Lunik IX, though a lot of articles were a couple of years old and claimed it had been demolished. But it's very much still there. The project was originally built in the late 1970s to house Roma alongside soldiers and policemen, a grand social experiment typical of Communist-era Czechoslovakia. Eventually all but the Roma moved away, and today much of the neighborhood lacks running water, electricity, and heating. Roma experience extreme prejudice in Europe, and opportunities in the ghetto are nil.

Even from a distance you can tell this place shouldn't be standing, let alone occupied—or over-occupied, as it's been for decades. Lunik IX looks bombed out. Burns and smoke stains mark its walls, and household rubbish is stacked well over a story high. Most streetlights and windows are broken, and at night people roam with flashlights and phones to see where they're walking. There's a direct line of sight to Optima, a shiny modern shopping mall that taunts Lunik IX from across a highway intersection.

Over two visits to Martin and his family, I took photos of the project and gave Martin disposable cameras to capture his own experience of this strange, dystopian ghetto. Here's what we saw.

[body_image width='1205' height='802' path='images/content-images/2015/03/09/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/09/' filename='my-mate-the-opium-lord-036-body-image-1425897096.jpg' id='34108']

Edward Follis (left) and Hajji Juma Khan (Photo courtesy of Edward Follis)

Before balloons of stepped-on smack reach the pockets of users in Liverpool or Berlin or Oslo, 80 percent of the world's heroin passes through the hands of a very rich group of Afghani opium traders. By financing the Taliban—which still has a lot of influence over much of the country, especially in the south—these men operate with near impunity, preserving the opium poppy as the lifeblood of Afghanistan's economy.

Naturally, these enigmatic opium traders are targeted by the DEA, intelligence agencies, and the military. Between 2006 and 2008, undercover DEA man Edward Follis spent two years hanging out with Hajji Juma Khan, then one of the world's biggest opium merchants and a billionaire Taliban financier. Follis was briefed to gain Juma Khan's trust, tap him for info, and then take him out of action.

The Dark Art: My Undercover Life in Global Narco-Terrorism is a memoir of Follis's experiences chasing down opium traders and infiltrating drug gangs across the world. Amid all the action in his book, however, the time Follis spent targeting Juma Khan stands out the most, mostly because his target eventually became a close friend.

I called Follis, who describes himself as "an Irish boy from St. Louis," to tell me more about the brotherly relationship he developed with the powerful opium king, a man he would ultimately have to screw over.

[body_image width='1538' height='2315' path='images/content-images/2015/03/09/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/09/' filename='my-mate-the-opium-lord-036-body-image-1425897841.jpg' id='34115']

A counter narcotics team burning a heroin stash house in Afghanistan

VICE: Juma Khan was a powerful opium trader and clearly not stupid. How did you cajole yourself into his world?
Edward Follis: We were introduced through a mutual confidant as people who could help each other. I was upfront about who I was—the head of the DEA in Kabul—but I suggested to him that I was a pliable man with whom he could work, a relationship he could benefit from. I told him I was very aware of his competitors and they were of great interest to me. He saw me as a value-added figure in his empire. He could feed me information about his rivals. In turn, I implied the US would focus on targeting his competition. Although, all the time, it was Juma Khan who was the real target.

We first met in his favorite Persian restaurant, an upmarket place called Shiraz. He dwarfed me. He was in his fifties, six-foot-five tall and weighed about 26 stone [350 pounds]. I remember he had trouble fitting through doors. Apart from his size, he looked like any other Afghan businessman. He was dressed in simple clothes: a battered pinstriped jacket over a shalwar kameez. He constantly played with a string of prayer beads. He was a huge eater and, as I found out, he would often devour about 20 kebabs at each sitting, while I'd nibble on one or two. He was extremely personable and charming.

So this wasn't a brief encounter?
It's common courtesy in business in central Asia that you do not pursue your goals immediately. There has to be, for want of a better word, "foreplay" before a business relationship can be formed. It took time to reach an implicit understanding. I had to maintain the courtship for two years, much longer than usual, as he had to trust me and we needed to build evidence for the indictment over his links to the Taliban. Luckily for us, as his business machine worked so well, he had time on his hands. We spent a lot of time together.

I'm intrigued to know what an American DEA agent and an Afghan opium trafficker talk about over dinner.
He didn't want to talk about the opium trade at first. Most of what we discussed was about our families, our lives and our fates. He had 14 wives and 29 children. We talked a lot about religion. He was a very religious man. He knew the Quran off by heart and had been on seven hajjis. He sometimes took me to the mosque to pray, although I prayed to God and he prayed to Allah. We watched The Passion of the Christ together. One thing he could not understand about Christianity was why God had to put his son through so much suffering.

He was certainly not a fundamentalist. He sympathized with the US over 9/11. He told me it was wrong and that Bin Laden—who he knew—should never have been allowed to carry out the attack. His heart went out to the innocents who died.

What kind of man was he?
He's almost exactly the same age as me: I was enlisting in the Marine Corps when he was in the trenches fighting Russians laying waste to his land. He was a magnificent businessman who grew up in poverty. He survived the Soviet occupation, civil wars, the Taliban, al Qaeda—he survived them all and profited the entire time to build his empire.

He was a leader, but not a dictatorial leader. He had dignity; people had a lot of respect for the way he handled his competitors, enemies, and his friends. I never heard a disparaging word out of his mouth about anybody. He didn't have to commit violence to maintain control over his turf.

He saw himself as the emperor of his tribe. He was a strong, proud man in the community and he valued that. His face beamed when he talked about his people, his family, and his underlings. He loved being praised—he glowed with it—and he was generous. I never paid for a meal, and even though it was haram, he would make sure waiters served me up some Johnnie Walker Black Label at the end of a meal.

You said in the book that you felt like brothers. You even flew him out to see a cancer specialist in Washington DC to get him checked out.
To be honest, the time I spent with HJK was a source of solace for me, away from all the spooks and the embassy staff in Kabul. I was more at ease with HJK compared to with my colleagues at the embassy. Some of the spooks didn't trust me—they accused me of knowing rocket attacks were being planned on the embassy, but failing to alert them.

It was a kind of intimate relationship. One day I noticed he had a growth on his chest. I thought it might be cancerous as I had previously had a melanoma cut out, and showed him my scars. I offered him treatment in DC and we went, although it was a false alarm. I was helping a friend, but also it was a way of building trust. At that time we did not have enough information from him to arrest him, so he was returned to Afghanistan.

How productive was your friendship in terms of your undercover DEA work?
His power base was in the Baluchistan region of Afghanistan near the Iranian border, although his network and inordinate wealth spread across central Asia to Dubai and Pakistan, where he had property and businesses.

He had close friends and relatives in the highest ranks of the Karzai government. His was a "total enterprise"—from the poppies at the farm gate, processing in clandestine labs, wholesale dealers at bazaars, importing precursors to process from morphine base, trans shipment across Iran to Turkey. He was a major player in the global heroin trade and our aim was to cut off the supply of money from opium kingpins like him to the Taliban and terrorists such as al Qaeda. He was an unofficial spy in the end. He gave us useful information that we passed onto the military.

[body_image width='800' height='533' path='images/content-images/2015/03/09/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/09/' filename='my-mate-the-opium-lord-036-body-image-1425898049.jpg' id='34117']

An anti-poppy propaganda poster in Afghanistan. Photo by Todd Huffman via

And then you had to shop him.
In 2008 I offered him the carrot that was needed to get him out of Afghanistan; it was too dangerous to arrest him there. I told him I had been promoted to a counter drug mission in Iran and we would mutually assist each other over there—he would boost my cred in unchartered waters and he'd benefit from having people in high places to smooth his path shipping heroin across Iran.

We arranged to meet to discuss this in Jakarta in Indonesia, although in truth we would rendition him and fly him to the US. At the airport, when he arrived off the plane, he picked me up like rag doll and kissed me on the cheek. He was arrested before being flown to US, where he's been in jail charged with funding terrorism since 2008. He will never see the light of day again. His attorneys decided against a trial because HJK is more concerned for the welfare of his family than the survival of his business empire.

Did you feel guilty at turning in a man you had grown to respect so much?
Well, there was an ulterior motive to getting him out of Afghanistan. I saved his life. He was on what we call the "kinetic list," a list of people to be targeted by a drone attack. His time was coming soon and I decided to take away his comfortable, contented life in order to save it.

I had many emotions at the airport. I spotted him after his arrest and our eyes met. He had an expression of disbelief and I felt ashamed. I ran behind a pillar and hid behind it. I didn't want to look back at him—I felt like a little boy. But if I didn't feel this way about a target, I'm not human; and if I'm not human, I'll never be able to carve my way into their soul and convince them to do my will.

What I had to keep remembering was that the Taliban and al Qaeda are developing weapons using money provided by people like HJK. That kept me going. Tackling the financial network behind the terrorists is the bottom line.

Will you ever see him again?
I can't visit him. If I did it would precipitate resentment—I took him from an unbelievable existence where he was the king, and I convinced him to give everything up. My wife knows I've had restless nights about this, and yeah, it messes with me. I've not had a chance to explain to him about the drone attack. One day it will go to trial and I will see him there.

I still have the Kmart cell phone I used to call him on; it's right here in front of me. He always picked up. Even though he had 20 phones, he always carried it with him and answered it.

The Dark Art: My Undercover Life in Global Narco-Terrorism by Edward Follis is published in the UK by Scribe Publications

Follow Max Daly on Twitter.