Apparently the women are sold for "parties" on American ships. via WikiCommons.

Native women, children, and unfortunately even babies are being trafficked in the sex trade on freighters crossing the Canadian and U.S. border on Lake Superior between Thunder Bay, Ontario, and Duluth Minnesota.

Next month, Christine Stark—a student with the University of Minnesota, Duluth, who is completing her Master’s degree in social work—will complete an examination of the sex trade in Minnesota, in which she compiles anecdotal, first hand accounts of Aboriginal women, particularly from northern reservations, being trafficked across state, provincial, and international lines to be forced into servitude in the sex industry on both sides of the border.

Stark’s paper stems from a report she co-wrote, published by the Indian Women’s Sexual Assault Centre in Duluth in 2011, entitled, “The Garden of Truth: The Prostitution and Trafficking of Native Women in Minnesota.” Through the process of researching and penning this report, Stark kept hearing stories of trafficking in the harbours and on the freighters of Duluth and Thunder Bay. The numerous stories and the gradual realization that this was an issue decades, perhaps centuries, in the making, compelled Stark to delve further into what exactly is taking place.

She decided to conduct an exploratory study, “simply because we have these stories circulating and we wanted to gather information and begin to understand what has happened and what currently is happening around the trafficking of Native American and First Nations women on the ships” said Stark, in an interview with CBC Radio’s Superior Morning. “Hearing from so many Native women over generations talking about the ‘boat whores,’ prostitution on the ships or the ‘parties on the ships,’ this is something that… was really entrenched in the Native community and we wanted to collect more specific information about it.”

Through her independent research and work with the Indian Women’s Sexual Assault Centre, Stark interviewed hundreds of Native women who have been through the trauma of the Lake Superior sex trade. The stories she’s compiled are evidence of an underground industry that’s thriving on the suffering of First Nations women, which is seemingly going unchecked and underreported. 

In an article written for the Duluth Star Tribune, Stark describes one disturbing anecdote of an Anishinaabe woman who had just left a shelter after being beaten by her pimp—who was a wealthy, white family man. He paid her bills, rent, and the essentials for her children, but on weekends, “brought up other white men from the Cities for prostitution with Native women…he had her role play the racist ‘Indian maiden’ and ‘European colonizer’ myth with him during sex.”

“The Duluth harbor is notorious among Native people as a site for the trafficking of Native women from northern reservations.” She continues, “in an ongoing project focused on the trafficking of Native women on ships in Duluth, it was found that the activity includes international transport of Native women and teens, including First Nations women and girls brought down from Thunder Bay, Ontario, to be sold on the ships… Native women, teen girls and boys, and even babies have been sold for sex on the ships.” Christine Stark’s complete research paper will be published in September.

The fact that these horrendous crimes are taking place right under the noses of North American authorities is obviously disturbing and somewhat surprising, considering we have a Conservative government that is oh-so-tough on the commercialization of human beings. However, the word ‘trafficking’ can often be a blurry one.

I spoke with Kazia Pickard, the Director of Policy and Research with the Ontario Native Women’s Association based in Thunder Bay. Their organization has also been researching this issue. Kazia told me over email: “People assume that trafficking always takes place across international borders, however, the vast majority of people who are trafficked in Canada are indigenous women and girls from inside Canada and sometimes, as we're now starting to understand, across the US border.”

In an earlier interview with the CBC, she also alluded to the possibility that there was trafficking taking place across borders in Southern Ontario as well. She made it clear to me that the image most people imagine when they think about “human trafficking” often isn’t accurate: “The majority of women who are trafficked in Canada are indigenous women and girls. So it’s not that you have people being trafficked across international borders in shipping containers or something like that.”

In most cases it’s a lot more subtle. “Women may say they [have been pulled into it by] a boyfriend, there have been some reports of family members recruiting women into the sex trade… so it doesn’t appear in this sensationalized way that we may [think it is].”

All that said, there are nearly 600 aboriginal women who are currently missing or believed to have been murdered in Canada, a number the RCMP—who have are being accused of human rights abuses against aboriginal women on a monthly basis—have publicly questioned.

And while it’s refreshing to hear MP’s (particularly Conservative MP’s) such as Manitoba’s Joy Smith show some honest compassion, on the whole, the government’s attitude and response to protecting vulnerable aboriginal women has been one of indifference. In July, the federal government dismissed calls made for an inquiry into missing or murdered aboriginal women by the provinces and territories’ Premiers.

Christine Stark’s report is one that cannot be ignored. If the government is as serious as they claim to be about human trafficking, they can’t dismiss what’s taking place between Duluth and Thunder Bay the same way that they have regarding the 600 missing First Nations women. To ignore this issue would point to an obvious double standard when it comes to the treatment of Aboriginal women, many of which are clearly being taken advantage of.

Follow Dave on Twitter: @ddner

Previously:

The Federal Government Is Surprisingly Blasé about Medical Experiments Conducted on Canada's First Nations

Our Government Is Withholding Documents Concerning the Torture of Native Children

The Wildly Depressing History of Canadian Residential Schools

Welcome to the Trayvon Martin Will Never Really Die edition of This Week in Racism. I’ll be ranking news stories on a scale of 1 to RACIST, with “1” being the least racist and “RACIST” being the most racist.

- Popular fiction often dabbles in what-ifs. What if Superman grew up in Soviet Russia? What if the Nazis had won World War II? What if God was one of us? Just a stranger on the bus? Trying to make his way home?

These are all fascinating questions worth exploring, but Law & Order: Special Victims Unit has decided to ask another, possibly more provocative, question: what if Paula Deen shot Trayvon Martin because she thought he was trying to rape her? I mean, doesn't Paula Deen look like she packs heat?

The show's executive producer Warren Leight explained the premise to Entertainment Weekly:

“[Jeffrey] Tambor is a defense attorney representing a very high-profile celebrity woman chef who thought she was being pursued by a rapist and turned around it was a teenager. And she shot him. There’s a lot of stop-and-frisk elements to that as well... Is racial profiling justifiable? Can self-defense involve racial profiling? We’re diving right into that,”

It appears that Law & Order’s plot generator, which has mixed and matched elements of popular news stories for decades, is broken. This sounds like the absolute worst idea I’ve ever heard. That said, here’s my list of dream casting choices for this upcoming episode!

“Paula Deen”

Melissa McCarthy

Kathy Bates

Kevin Spacey

Seven Midgets Trapped in a Burlap Sack

Natalie Portman

“Trayvon Martin”

Nick Cannon

Chris Tucker

Michael B. Jordan

That Little Black Girl Who got Called a “Cunt” by the Onion

Hopefully NBC picks one of my choices! 3

Photo by Flickr user KOMUNews

- Trayvon Martin isn’t just a character on a salacious TV drama either. He’s also still being used to further the agenda of every pundit you can think of, mostly in the service of an agenda totally unrelated to his actual demise.

The tragic death of Australian baseball player Christopher Lane, who was killed by three teenagers (two of whom were black and one of whom was white, if you're keeping score) has become an excuse to label liberals (including President Barack Obama) as hypocrites. On his radio show, sentient pork rind Rush Limbaugh said, “It’s worse than a double standard. This is a purposeful, willful ignoring of the exact racial components but in reverse that happened in the Trayvon Martin shooting. From Obama on down, didn’t care about Trayvon Martin. All that mattered was that incident offered them an opportunity to advance a political agenda.”

I’m trying to wrap my brain around Limbaugh accusing someone else of taking the opportunity to advance a political agenda, but it’s like trying to understand the time-travel paradoxes in the 2009 Star Trek movie. I’m just not going to bother.

- Nevermind the dubious source—Limbaugh actually might be on to something. The Los Angeles Times reported on Wednesday that one of the shooters, James Francis Edwards Jr., had a history of making racially inflammatory remarks. They specifically refer to a tweet attributed to Edwards that said, “90 percent of white ppl are nasty. #HATE THEM." Also, a member of the church he used to attend claimed Edwards said, "I can't go to your church anymore because my god is black."

Chancey Allen Luna, who was also charged with murder, once had a banner on his Facebook page that said “Black power,” according to the same Times report. Those details make it hard to ignore a racial element to the story. Granted, the third kid to be arrested was white, but you can't deny that the statements reported by the Times are absolutely racist. There is no excuse for any of the rhetoric used by the shooters in this tragedy, and it should be treated with the same scorn that we lob at racism spouted by anyone else. RACIST

- This all makes me think that maybe the conservative media is correct and liberals really are creating a bigger problem by demonizing white people and turning young black males into violent thugs.

I think I finally see the truth of the racial problem in America. Liberals are tearing us apart by blowing events like Trayvon Martin out of proportion! There’s no such thing as racism in America anymore…

Oh God.

Colorado Republican state senator Vicki Marble let loose with a bizarre diatribe against the African American diet this week:

"When you look at life expectancy, there are problems in the black race. Sickle cell is something that comes up. Diabetes is something that is prevalent in the genetic makeup. Although I gotta say, I've never had better BBQ and better chicken and ate better in my life then when you go down South, I mean, I love it. Everybody loves it."

To be fair, I eat tons of fried chicken and BBQ and I look like this:

Ease up on those ribs, tubby!

The Ten Most Racist Tweets of the Week [sic]:

10: @faggitr0n: "CAN PEOPLE DROP IT? shit. just because i was talking about the damn word "n*gger" does not make me racist. goodbye."

9. @ryanwhyte: "I'mnot racist, but if you come to Canada and get a job that involves interacting with people, could you at least ATTEMPT to learn English?"

8. @BiancaaaBiitch: "Could really go for some chink fooodddd rn"

7. @MaleBombshell1: "The trayvon case.. People blew that all out of proportion... Why? Is it because he's black or what. I'm not racist but that seems unfair."

6. @chelsiesey: "I'mnot racist but hey little black boy out my way #freshman"

5. @jasminnWright: "By all means I'm not racist , but some white people are stupid."

4. @angelaahalili:  "I have problems with all the mexis at my work n I told this be*ner I was gonna call immigration on her n she went on hush mouth so quick"

3. @hideousthougts : "some n*gger just ran in the middle of the freeway gotta love Los Angeles"

2. @MericanMainer: "I'mnot racist but if you're not white I hate you."

1. @whiiteeboiiii: "Attention everyone: I am not a racist, I have a black person in my family tree and he's been hanging there for a while"

Last Week in Racism: Orson Scott Card Is Officially the Most Racist Sci-Fi Author

@dave_schilling

Back in October 2012, we covered a protest staged by the Free Pass Movement (abbreviated as MPL in Portuguese) for the National Free Fare Fight Day in São Paulo city. Earlier this year, we aired a documentary about the first round of demonstrations, where folks warned that the MPL was going to bring São Paulo to a halt.

Demonstrations this past June started up again after the bus fare went up R$ 0.20 (eight cents) in the city. For the first protest called by the MPL, on June 6, 2013, thousands of people joined in. Things got out of control after the police reacted to demonstrators who blocked the 23 de Maio Avenue, a major highway in the city. Not really understanding what had happened, a lot of people called the whole movement a group of punks; “vandals” and “troublemakers” were the most common adjectives used to describe the MPL. Trying to use the publicity to become stronger and pressure even more the state and city administrations, the MPL promptly called for a another demonstration.

For the third protest, on June 11, a small crowd marched in heavy rain from Paulista Avenue to downtown. São Paulo had been brought to a halt for sure, and the fare would have to go down. Or, so they thought. But Governor Geraldo Alckmin and Mayor Fernando Haddad would not go back in their decision and would not negotiate transportation fare reductions. On the contrary, Alckmin told the police to be even tougher on, well, the vandals.

Which brings us to the fateful fourth protest, on June 13. While the mainstream media in Brazil continued to call for more violence against demonstrators, more people than ever joined the protest in front of the Municipal Theater. Going up Consolação Street, the masses stopped as they were blocked by the police. Before they could negotiate their route, the police hit hard, with rubber bullets and tear gas. What had been so far a symbolic battle for one of the city’s most iconic spots turned out to be a massacre. Police officers cornered everyone, arresting tons of people, and shooting rubber bullets aimlessly. Dozens were hurt, including people who were just passing by. Among the injured were over 20 journalists from different outlets who were just doing their job. The police’s brutal reaction was widely documented and helped turned around public opinion about the movement.

This documentary, produced by VICE Brazil, tells the whole story of how a small protest movement grew bigger and fought to lower a city's bus fare.

More about the bus fare protests in São Paulo:

Teenage Riot - São Paulo

The Battle of Consolação

A Hundred Thousand People Marched in São Paulo Monday

Special thanks to Antônio Jordão and TVT.

A couple of weeks ago, we ran a piece by Jonathan Daniel Brown about the time he interned for Pauly Shore. As you would expect, the article was about how Pauly is a douche and interning for him was miserable. 

A couple of days after the post was published, a video called "More Disgruntled Pauly Shore Interns" was uploaded to YouTube.

The video, which I've embedded above, was uploaded with this description: "Thank God finally someone let the cat out of the bag. Pauly Shore is the worst boss and I truly think he's crazy. I am currently one of Pauly's interns. After I post this hidden camera video of Pauly (being who he truly is) that another intern and I did I'm sure we will both be let go, which will be a relief. We are sick of his abuse! Thank you so much Jonathan for letting everybody know: Pauly Shore truly is an asshole."

I've only watched the clip once, but here are the things that, immediately, suggest it's fake:

1: In Jonathan's article, he wrote about how Pauly made him go buy him a burrito and never referred to him by his name, only as "Intern." In the video, Pauly asks his intern, who he never refers to by name, only as "Intern," to go and buy him a burrito.

2: The YouTube account that uploaded the video was made a couple of days after we ran the article and has only uploaded one video.

3: Pauly, obviously, is a fucking horrible actor: "What did I ask you to do yesterday when I was out... fucking around?"

4: The kid who Pauly is yelling at is also a horrible actor: "Sorry about that merchandise—want me to go ahead and pack it...?"

5: Speaking of, couldn't he have picked a more believable thing to talk about than Pauly Shore merchandise? The existence of such merchandise would imply that there is a market for it. There is not a market for Pauly Shore merchandise. 

6. Just fucking look at it. It's definitely fake. 

I'm sure there are more red flags, but I don't have the energy to watch it again and check. 

Presumably, Pauly made it so that we would write a thing about what a terrible human being he is. I guess, for Pauly, any kind of attention is better than nothing. Like when reality stars make intentionally awful rap songs, or mothers kill their children to make people feel sorry for them. 

Well, here you go Pauly. Have some attention. Look, I just spent an entire five minutes writing about you. That's five whole minutes you spent occupying my thoughts. 

And the two interns who are in this clip, if you're reading this, what the fuck are you guys doing? Just quit. Go and do something more honorable. Like people trafficking or drug dealing or something. You are wasting your youth. 

@JLCT

For the fourth feature in our screening series with Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation at Nitehawk Cinema, we present Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Red Shoes: an exquisite classic of British cinema that may very well be the most sumptuous color film ever made. It’s also one of Mr. Scorsese’s personal favorites.

To get you prepped, we asked a few folks to chime in with their impressions on the film, along with an essay about the incredible restoration work done on the film by the UCLA Film & Television Archive. —Introduction by Greg Eggebeen

CARYN COLEMAN – FILM PROGRAMMER, NITEHAWK CINEMA

My dear Livy, not even the best magician in the world can produce a rabbit out of a hat if there is not already a rabbit in the hat. —Boris Lermontov

The Red Shoes is an exquisite tale of obsession that simultaneously encourages and cautions against that obsession. This duality is told in the film’s famous two-fold storyline: one through Victoria Page’s real-life devotion to her craft in spite of her growing relationship with composer Julian Craster and the other through her performance of the ballet, The Red Shoes. These narratives weave together into the inevitable conclusion that prioritizing one’s obsession will only lead to a fatal downfall. Of course, the act of failure is an inherent part of the creative process that must be embraced and accepted. The Red Shoes offers a sensationalized vision of this commitment, this pact with the devil, in the purest representation of magic and madness that exists in cinema. If you’re fortunate enough to be the type of person who is compelled to create, there is no better experience than watching (and relating to) the explosion of color and passion that Powell and Pressburger bring to big screen.

The dynamism produced by British filmmaking partners Michael Powell and Emmeric Pressburger (a.k.a. the Archers) and the universality of the subject matter—love, work, life, death—makes a film made in 1948 eternally modern. Like Melies’ ghosts and fantastic voyages, Powell and Pressburger exploit the liberties of movie magic to create their breathtaking ballet within the movie that’s at once parallel to the movie’s plot and its own individual hyperreal state of being. Dancers fly, demons leep, seasons change, the world is traversed before our very eyes because this performance is made and lives solely within the world of film. And it’s precisely this magical representation of unattainable desire that establishes The Red Shoes as an utterly unique and timeless cinematic experience.

ROBERT WEISS – ARTISTIC DIRECTOR, CAROLINA BALLET

The Red Shoes is by far and away the best movie about ballet ever made. Although loosely based on a fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen, the film couldn’t be more authentic about the reality of what goes on behind the scenes in a ballet company.

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, the film’s directors/writers/producers took great care to make sure every detail was correct, from a very early scene at the start of the film showing the nonentity status of the mothers to the young apprentice dancers to one of the last scenes where the directors—knowing Vicky Paige would be starting the ballet in the pink shoes but has to die in “the red shoes”—contrived a scene in which she is warming up in “the red shoes” to break them in before the performance begins (the most natural thing in the world for a ballerina).

The movie has such a deep love and respect for the world of ballet that it includes a complete 20-minute ballet of The Red Shoes within the context of the story. No other film about dance has been that bold before or since. Other things that make the film a classic are its early use of Technicolor which transports one vividly to the lush semitropical paradise of the south of France and its use of staged magic to convey the poetry of the emotional turmoil the ballerina goes through when she opens a bureau drawer in the middle of the night to see a profusion of pointe shoes including a pair dyed red. This doesn’t take place in a real room, but the emotional resonance that Vicky Paige feels and the audience feels with her at that moment is hyperreal.

The Red Shoes is as relevant today as the day it was first screened.

ROBERT GITT – PRESERVATION OFFICER, UCLA FILM & TELEVISION ARCHIVE

UCLA Film & Television Archive and the Film Foundation worked on the restoration of The Red Shoes from the fall of 2006 through the spring of 2009. Earlier, in the 1980s, the film had been optically copied from flammable nitrate to safety acetate film by the BFI and Rank Film Distributors, using the best celluloid technology then available. In undertaking this new restoration, our goal was to build upon these past efforts, utilizing modern techniques to produce digital- and film-preservation elements of the highest possible quality.

We were provided access to more than 200 reels of 35mm nitrate and acetate materials, including vintage Technicolor dye-transfer prints, nitrate and acetate protection master positive copies, original soundtrack elements, and—most important of all—the still extant three-strip Technicolor camera negatives. For quality reasons, we chose these original negatives as our starting point even though they were afflicted with a daunting number of problems: 65 percent of the film had bad color fringing caused by differential shrinkage and sometimes by misadjustment of the camera during shooting; 176 shots contained color flickering, mottling and “breathing” because of uneven development and chemical staining; 70 sequences contained harsh optical effects with excessive contrast; and throughout there were thousands of visible red, blue, and green specks caused by embedded dirt and scratches. Worst of all, mold had attacked every reel and begun to eat away the emulsion, leaving behind thousands of visible tiny cracks and fissures.

Extensive digital restoration was the only practical solution. Warner Bros. Motion Picture Imaging and Prasad Corporation Ltd. were chosen to undertake the immense task of digitally scanning 579,000 individual frames directly from the three-strip camera negatives, reregistering the colors, removing visible specks and scratches, mitigating color breathing, solving contrast issues, performing shot-to-shot color correction, and finally recording all 134 minutes back to 35mm Eastman color internegative stock. To obtain uniformly high-quality results, 4K resolution was employed at every stage of the digital picture-restoration work. Digital techniques were also employed by Audio Mechanics to remove pops, thumps, crackles, and excessive background hiss from the film’s original variable density optical soundtrack.

In the restoration process, the entire film was turned into ones and zeros, repaired, and then converted back into a motion picture again. In order to achieve a proper film look, we compared the new digital images with those in an original Technicolor dye transfer print and in a new Eastman color test print struck by Cinetech Laboratories directly from the YCM camera negatives. Careful adjustments were made in the finalized digital version to combine the best qualities of modern color film (greater image sharpness, more sparkle in highlights) with the most pleasing attributes of vintage Technicolor dye transfer prints (bold colors, deep blacks, gentle contrast with a pleasing range of tones in actors’ faces). We have even retained the familiar Technicolor changeover cues, with their distinctive magenta circle surrounded by a bright green ring. The end result is a restoration that combines the best of the past with our digital present.

Restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive in association with the BFI, the Film Foundation, ITV Global Entertainment Ltd., and Janus Films. Restoration funding provided by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, and the Louis B. Mayer Foundation.

Print courtesy of Park Circus Limited and the Film Foundation Conservation Collection at the Academy Film Archive.

For tickets, click here. Complimentary drinks will be available from Larceny Bourbon after the screening in Nitehawk’s downstairs bar.

@nitehawkcinema

A screenshot of a photo Kirill recently tweeted.

In the last few months, Russia has become notorious for its anti-gay stance. Vladimir Putin’s regime has passed “gay propaganda” laws that effectively ban people from discussing anything in support of LGBT people, and now gay people and their allies live in fear of prosecution and attack—especially from the neo-Nazi anti-gay group Occupy-Pedofilyay, a group led by former skinhead Maxim Martsinkevich, which uses online personal advertisements to lure gay boys to buildings where they detain and humiliate them. The group films the boys being harassed and then uploads the videos onto the internet. 

Russian queers cannot run to the police for help, since most likely, none would be given. Few gays are able to leave Russia, so they live within a country that hates them. Apart from activists protesting in Moscow and Saint Petersburg, most gays have either gone into hiding or attempted to mask their identity, making it difficult for Westerners to know what it’s really like to be gay in Russia. But one brave gay Russian teenager is changing this with @ru_lgbt_teen, a Twitter account about being a gay teen in Novosibirsk, the third most-populated city in Russia.

Like most teenagers, Kirill tweets about his personal life, with short sentences about his recurring depression and minor updates on what he does in his free time. In recent tweets, he has discussed bullying at school and his inability to seek asylum. His avatar is a simple "SOS," and he often posts news about Russia and images of boys in homoerotic situations that could also be seen as tragic—such as the 19th century Russian painter Ilya Repin's Barge Haulers on the Volga, which shows over-worked men falling on each other as they drag a barge across a river. 

Barge Haulers on the Volga, a picture the Russian painter Ilya Repin painted 140 years ago in 1873, via Wiki Commons. 

Via email, Kirill was kind enough to speak to VICE about his Twitter account, how he meets other gay teens, and his plan to escape Russia. For his protection, Kirill has asked us to only use his first name.

VICE: What's it like being a gay teenager in Russia?
Kirill: Generally speaking, you have a gay teen being seen as a “disenfranchised deviant” in the eyes of society and the state. People are different, but the male members of society are trying to avoid having anything to do with gays, [because they don’t want anybody] to think that they are gay. In Russia, gays are not people.

Has being gay in Russia always been this difficult?
There have always been problems. Personally, I came across homophobia when I was 11 years old. People began to mock me just because my first literature teacher offered me the female lead in the Autumn Festival of Russian Language and Literature in the fifth grade, citing the fact that in Japan, women's roles are played by men. But I'm not in Japan. Because this snowballed into bullying around my sexuality, at some point the whole school became aware that I was gay.

My homeroom teacher is a biology teacher. This is why when she heard rumors about my sexuality and bullying in 2008, she explained that homosexuality is normal. Many people argued with her in class. Today, she would be charged under the “propaganda” law. She changed her views and does not protects gays, because this year in class she openly joked about children in same-sex families. Perhaps, this really is funny. Personally, I was sad to hear that.

Do any of your friends or family members know you're gay?
I live in a single-parent family. My mother pretends not to know. One day she found my journal, where there was one very gay entry, after which there was a big scandal. She said to me, “If you're sick, I'll treat you.” I haven't had friends since July 22, 2010, in part because of my sexual orientation. Now I’ve finally turned into a “problem” teenager. No psychologist can help me, and I need to see a psychiatrist. 

Have any anti-gay attacks happened near you or even to you?
I am not a victim of Tesak [Maxim Martsinkevich's Russian nickname, which means “The Cleaver” in Russian] or his followers. However, I have experienced the unimaginable limits of school homophobia, where you are constantly humiliated, insulted, and almost beaten during recess and by the school, while teachers act like they do not notice.

Do you know any other gay teens?
In real life, I do not know of any other LGBT teens. But on social networking sites, I talk with several kids from other cities. I would not say that their problems are drastically different from my problems. Not all of them know what it means to be an outcast at school, but they know firsthand what it means to be an outcast in society as a whole.

Do you want to leave Russia?
I would very much like to leave Russia. I would say that for me, it is a kind of an obsession at the moment. I can't be granted asylum, because I cannot prove school bullying, and I do not have the mental health or the mental capacity to protest to help the gays. But that does not mean that I am not doing anything to leave Russia. In the fall I will start learning German, and I plan to study for a few years in Germany. For me, this is one of the most accessible options in terms of my financial situation.

Have you been involved in any protests?
I remember August 31, 2011. In the central square of the city of Novosibirsk, there was a rally in support of LGBT teens. I myself decided not to take an active part in it, but I walked around where the action was.

How do you feel about the West boycotting the Sochi 2014 Olympics and Russian vodka?
I believe that the boycott will not improve the situation with the rights of gay people in Russia. The main Russian TV channels represent the state propaganda. When France passed legislation on same-sex marriages, there were rallies and protests against them. Our television stations talked about it for several days and just said, with such theatrical pathos, that “in France there is gay censorship and dictatorship.” This was followed by measurements of public opinion polls about how the country's homophobia is growing. And then a few weeks later, Russia adopted the anti-gay law. While at the same time, personally for me and for the majority of gays whom I know, our last hope is the West.

Photo via Wiki Commons.

There are certain fundamental things that scream “I just moved to New York.” Things like eating cheesecake at Junior’s or heading out to Coney Island to ride the Cyclone. Or getting fucking bedbugs.

In late 2004, I left my much-maligned home state of New Jersey for the supposedly greener pastures of Astoria, Queens. I’d finally be in the mix, living off the subway line, able to go from audition to audition during the day and from late night show to late night show in the wee hours of the morning. I was finally going to chase the comedy dream for real, and I shacked up with two friends in a three-bedroom apartment that was right next to Astoria Park and owned by a nice Greek family.

For the first six months, said dream was being lived. It felt good to finally feel like I was committing hardcore to going for it. My confidence was higher than it had been in years. I booked my first national commercial. I even landed a girlfriend. Everything was looking up.

Then my girlfriend started getting weird red bumps all over her body. It only happened when she stayed at my place. We figured it must be the detergent I used on my sheets; no bumps were appearing on my body. I switched detergents. It kept happening.

One afternoon I casually mentioned this to Jamie, the roommate whose bedroom shared a wall with my room. 

“Weird,” he said. “The same thing is happening with me and my girlfriend.”

This was a real head scratcher. How did both of us wind up dating such highly allergic women? We pondered this for a few minutes and then surmised that it must actually have something to do with our apartment.

I walked into my room and pulled the bed away from the wall. I kneeled on the mattress and looked over the side. I noticed black dots on my box spring where it met the bed frame. I got up and lifted the bed and saw a handful of red bugs attached to the underside of the box spring. They scurried away from the light as I did. I had bedbugs. Even worse, my roommate and I didn't have an allergic reaction to bedbugs. This meant the problem had gotten bad, and the situation only revealed itself when we got girlfriends.

This was in 2005. I was an O.G. “bedbugs aren’t a well known plague around town yet” bedbug victim. I’m not bringing this up to try and claim that I had bedbugs before they were cool. Bedbugs have never been cool, and bedbugs will never be cool. I’m bringing this up to show I had bedbugs before it was a known thing that bedbugs were back in force, which is to say that I had bedbugs when having bedbugs meant you were regarded as fucking scum for having them.

“Why do you look so tired?” friends would ask me.

“I can’t sleep right anymore,” I’d tell them. “I have bedbugs.”

“That sucks,” they’d say. But their faces would say so much more. The sentiment that showed in their eyes was I didn’t realize you were human dirt.

Even today, New Yorkers treat bedbugs like they’re bubonic plague. And that’s with the understanding that famous hotels have had them, celebrities have had them, and that they’ve become a reviled and unfortunate chance one takes when signing up to live in New York. Now there are laws, specialists, and trained dogs that can help you solve the problem relatively quickly, but New Yorkers still boil with revulsion and rage at the idea of bedbugs.

I regularly conduct a poll during my stand-up sets that goes like this: “New York has a bedbug registry. You can punch in your address, and it will tell you if your apartment or any nearby have had bedbugs. New York also has a sex offender registry. It’s a similar thing but for sex offenders. You can see anyone who lives in your zip code who’s registered as a level two or three sex offender. Now, let’s say your bedroom shares a wall with a neighboring apartment. By a round of applause, who would rather find out that they share a wall with an apartment that has bedbugs? Now, who would rather find out they share a wall with a registered sex offender?”

If you don’t live in New York, I bet you think maybe 60 percent of the audience chooses a sex offender and the rest pick bedbugs and that it’s a funny and enlightening reaction.

Wrong. Every time, over 95 percent of the audience would rather choose the sex offender. More often than not, 100 percent of New York audiences tell me they’d choose to share a wall with a sex offender than with bedbugs. It’s only on very rare occasions that a few good souls would take the hit on bugs. That’s so fucked up. That means almost all of New York City, when faced with those options would rather hear the muffled cries of a child through their bedroom wall then have to put all their shit in a dryer. As a culture, this city thinks to itself, Let him touch who he wants, I have a one bedroom for $1,500.

And that’s in 2013. I had bedbugs in 2005. I felt like a leper. Worse than a leper. At least lepers had a colony they could go and live in with other people who empathized. I instead had friends stand up from tables and walk out of restaurants when I told them I had bedbugs, because they were afraid I’d transfer the bugs to them.

Even worse, when I had bedbugs, the laws hadn’t yet been nailed down on how to handle them. Now it’s accepted that your landlord pays for extermination. Back then, there was still debate. Should landlords be punished if people brought infected furniture into their own homes? How would the source of the bedbugs be proven? To be clear, I had brought nothing sporting bedbugs into my home—it later turned out my entire building was infested. But I had to deal with these up-and-down laws and a landlord who was previously a lovable Greek man but was now a rage fueled slumlord who didn’t want to pay thousands of dollars to clean out my apartment.

His nephew lived below me. “Try to clear them out yourself,” he told me. “If it takes more than a month I’ll convince my uncle to pay to get it done.”

I found one exterminator in New York who at the time sold a bedbug kit. It was somewhere on the Upper East Side. When I went to pick it up, he handed me a bunch of aerosol cans, powders, and one of those old timey powder blotter things that you squeeze, causing it to spray powder around. 

“Go in the cracks,” he said, with the tone of a grizzled veteran who has seen too much horror in his life. “In the edges of your carpets where they meet the walls. Look inside books, under picture frames. They thrive in the dark. In the small cramped spaces we can’t go.”

I thanked him and turned to leave. “One more thing,” he said. I turned around. “To defeat bedbugs, you have to think like a bedbug.”

I went home and started thinking like a bedbug. How would I go about completely ruining someone’s fucking life? I thought to myself. 

And that’s no exaggeration. My life was being ruined. Here are just some of the experiences I had with bedbugs: 

I woke up in the middle of the night, because I felt a bead of sweat on my chest. While sleepily wiping the sweat away, I felt it explode. I turned on the light and saw my chest was covered in my own blood and a bunch of bedbug parts. Goodbye, sleep.

One time at a Cuban restaurant with my girlfriend, I saw a bedbug crawl off the sleeve of my shirt and onto the table. I guess those friends who fled restaurants had a point. Goodbye, social acceptability.

Multiple times, I woke up to the terrified sobs of a lady who was on the verge of dumping me over this. Goodbye, comforting relationship. (Also, goodbye sex—you try comfortably having sex on a mattress where you know you and your partner are mashing your bodies into dozens of bugs filled with your own blood.)

I tried to think like a bedbug and spent hours every day spraying chemicals all over the room I slept in. I have no doubt I shaved years off my life inhaling the sprays and powders specifically designed to kill life that I coated my own bed in on a daily basis. Usually, they’d work for a few days, then I’d find more bugs. Or bug shells. Or dots where the bugs had crawled inside the mattress.

I eventually took to Craig’s List, where I posted a shady ad looking to buy the banned pesticide known as DDT. The only responses I had were concerned emails from environmentalists telling me that DDT was banned for a reason. 

One guy wrote and said that if I used DDT and was untrained to do so, I risked killing myself. I wrote back, “Sorry dude, I have bedbugs. I need DDT.” And he responded, “Holy shit, those are still a thing? Yeah, find DDT.”

Ultimately, my landlord did solve my bedbug problem. Not by exterminating them, but by trying to raise my rent about three months into the unsolved bedbug scourge. I calmly explained to him that if he thought I was going to pay him even one more dollar to live in an apartment infested with vermin that he staunchly refused to take care of, he was out of his fucking mind. He caved and said, “OK. I won’t raise the rent.” I asked, “Will you pay to take care of the bedbugs?” He said “No.” I said “Peace, stereotypical Astoria Greek landlord!” (I didn’t actually say that.)

We moved out the next week. We had about 30 garbage bags full of shit we were absolutely not going to bring into another apartment, which we had to leave in the living room, because there was no garbage area on the property and it would be impossible to fit 30 garbage bags into the one garbage can provided by my landlord. He later withheld our security deposit due to the garbage he had to clear out, and I happily took him to court over it. He showed up wearing a hat that said, “9/11 I SUPPORT THE NYPD”; the hat looked like he had it made at a mall kiosk. He also demanded a Greek translator, although he spoke English. The judge heard us out and immediately awarded me my security deposit plus interest. My landlord went nuts, turning bright red and cursing the judge in Greek while his wife muttered and gave the arbiter of justice the evil eye.

I haven’t had bedbugs since, and I pray I never will. I still can’t sleep right. Every time I feel sweat on my body, I wake up in a panic—eight years later.

Despite being bedbug free, I wouldn’t necessarily say things got better. I moved to Woodside, where for the next six years I slept in a room with no closet in a structure my friend Don Fanelli referred to as a “man sized dog bed.”

@ChrisGethard

Previously - Philadelphia Is the Scariest Place to Do Comedy 

All this talk about human rights can get slightly boring, don't you think? I mean activism is important and all, but all the having to defend your community stuff leaves less to time to celebrate it.

Legendary Children is such an attempt: a photographic exhibition about to take place in Atlanta themed around the city's flourishing drag scene headed by Brigitte Bidet, Cayenne Rouge, Edie Cheezburger, Ellisorous Rex, Evah Destruction, Jaye Lish, Kryean Kally, Lavonia Elberton, Mo'Dest Volgare and Violet Chachki and captured by photographers Blane Bussey, Jon Dean, Blake England, Kevin O and Matthew Terrell.

I spoke to Jon Dean, Edie Cheezburger and Cayenne Rouge about it all.

VICE: Oh man, I expected full-on drag queens, you're wearing pants and shirts.
Edie Cheezburger: It's too early for that. It's 7AM over here. Bear in mind that it takes a couple of hours to get dressed.
Cayenne Rouge: I think it takes me about an hour to paint now, but maybe that's because I shaved my eyebrows so it's quicker.

Left to Right: Edie Cheezburger, Jon Dean, and Cayenne Rouge.

Thanks for the tip. How do you guys explain the flourishing drag scene in Atlanta? Would you say its more tolerant than other American cities?Jon Dean: I think Atlanta has become a sort of Mecca for the gay community, especially in the South. Gay people just kind of come in from other cities in the state—they may not stay long, but it’s made the community grow a lot. There is a lot of gay history in the area. You always hear stories from the 1960s and 70s about groups of gay women and men getting together at Piedmont Park, smoking pot and staging Pride parties.

Is this the first time you’ve put on a photographic exhibition focused on the life of the drag community?
Jon Dean: Yeah, it’s the first time I have worked on this scale. The last I did was my senior show at SCAD [Savannah College of Art & Design], and that was just a small student show. Undertaking this—getting all the girls together, getting all the photographers together… It's definitely been a challenge working with this many gay men.
Edie Cheezburger: There is so much drama when you deal with gay men's egos.
Cayenne Rouge: Gay men and drag queens in one room? No!

Left to Right: Edie Cheezburger, Jaye Lish, and Violet Chachki, as photographed by Kevin O.

Why did you even decide to work on this?
Jon Dean: A lot of the work I did at university involved putting on wigs to create these larger-than-life characters for cinematic schemes, so I just thought, “Why don’t I work with drag queens?” I also moved here recently and the drag scene was so big and everybody was so creative, I couldn't really escape getting involved. I've known Cayenne for a long time, and as she was starting to get into drag, we started talking about some kind of art collaboration that would involve photography and drag queens. We met the rest of the girls, started going to the shows—went to Edie's show and at some point it transpired that the city was the base for this great group of creative and inventive queens. We just thought that it would be better for us all to work together instead of trying to compete.

That’s nice. How big a part of the scene is competition, then?  
Jon Dean: I think it's a natural part of it, as we are all attracted to the same group of people. I started noticing other photographers like Matt Terrell, Blake England, and Kevin O hanging around the same places I did, and I think it made sense to ask, "Who's this person shooting the queens?" I mean, the overall feeling in Atlanta is quite competitive, especially within people our age.
Edie Cheezburger: There’s lots of attitude.

Cayenne Rouge photographed by Jon Dean

A couple of months ago, I interviewed Tom Bianchi about how the gay community in America dealt with the onset of HIV in the 80s. He said HIV forced gay men to grow up and come together, under this one common cause. Would you say we are past that now? Are people finally allowed to focus more on their identity as artists, rather than the social aspect of their sexuality in America?
Cayenne Rouge: I honestly think that a lot of gay men have kind of deluded themselves, because we have been making a lot of progress stateside. But we forget that we’re creating this avant-garde art in Georgia, which isn't all that progressive. Atlanta is this weird liberal bastion in the middle of a relatively conservative state. A few miles from here, people would probably shoot you for pulling in the wrong driveway. I feel like in Atlanta we’re so enslaved by the illusion we’re free to do whatever we want, that we forget to be a community.

That’s interesting.
Cayenne Rouge: It’s almost like a double-edged sword. You get freedom and equality but you lose that common thread that makes you a community. I feel like that’s one of the reasons why drag has re-emerged. It’s become a really popular form of expression.
Edie Cheezburger: I dunno. You put a bunch of gay men in one tiny place, and they’re gonna compete against each other. Everybody wants something greater and bigger and more amazing than the next person. Jon, I like that you guys hold together as photographers, but in drag it's different. All these people are just competing to have a show. There are only so many venues and only so many nights a week to have one, so for people to actually get together and put on something decent—that’s sort of amazing. Everybody’s hungry. There’s only so much spotlight to go around.

Violet Chachki photographed by Blake England

You mentioned you face fewer problems when it comes to homophobia in Atlanta specifically.
Edie Cheezburger: Yeah, especially in midtown Atlanta we’re such a small bubble of a community. Of course we’re not separated from gay bashings or homophobia or anything like that. We just know what’s safe for us.

So what are you expecting to come out of the exhibition?
Jon Dean: Ideally, I would like to sell some work—maybe break even. It's already brought this group of people together in a really cool way, so the important thing is out of the way. Now, we're sort of talking about taking the show further.
Cayenne Rouge: I like the idea of giving drag to straight people. It's really fulfilling when people that have no other connection to the drag scene learn to appreciate it.  
Jon Dean: We definitely don’t want to just create this little exclusive bubble. We’re trying to open it up. It'd be great if loads of queens come to the exhibition but it'd be even better if other kinds of people come, too. We are trying to be careful not to make the show so focused on these specific queens that it scares people away.

If you happen to be in Atlanta any time between September and October 1st, you should pass by Gallery 1526 (1526 Dekalb Avenue Northeast) to check out Legendary Children. Bear in mind that all of the girls will be performing live at the closing reception on September 28th.

Also, visit their website.

Follow Elektra on Twitter: @elektrakotsoni

Previously:

Tom Bianchi Photographed His Gay Paradise Before it Disappeared Forever

It's Not Easy Being Maxime Angel

Photographing the Loving Gays of Vietnam

Image via Wikipedia.

The American Quarter Horse Association is “the world’s largest equine breed registry.” Now they’re going to get even larger, because a court has ruled they must accept cloned horses' applications to join their exclusive club. 

The saga began last August when horse owner Jason Abraham and two of his companies, Abraham & Veneklasen Joint Venture and Abraham Equine Inc., filed a lawsuit against the AQHA in Amarillo, Texas, because they had rejected cloned pets' AQHA applications. Last month, US District Court Judge Mary Lou Robinson ordered the AQHA to allow cloned horses to register among other elite animals. Predictably, the wealthy horse owners are pissed. 

“Clones don't have parents.  Cloning is not breeding,” the AQHA said in a press release. “There is a fundamental, shared belief among AQHA members that the art and science of breeding is the way to improve the breed.”

86 percent of the association's members strongly oppose allowing clones into their midst. Although they don’t believe cloning is up to their strict breeding standards, there’s a possibility they might reconsider their opinion if there was a test to distinguish the difference between a clone and a naturally bred animal—the organization is known for performing DNA tests on registered horses if their heritage is called into question. However, right now there is no genetic difference between a clone and her source. 

The process of cloning is simple enough. In order to clone horses, a company called ViaGen takes a small tissue sample from an animal, and then inserts the DNA into an egg that has had its past genetic material removed. The embryos are kept in an incubator for several days, and then moved into a surrogate female animal. Although these clones are genetically identical to regular animals, the AQHA believes clones’ origins and largely unstudied health problems make them inferior to naturally bred horses.

The controversy about clones' health goes back to the first cloned animal, Dolly the sheep. After Professor Keith Campbell created Dolly in 1996, both he and his creation came to tragic ends—Dolly died of lung cancer, which was the result of a virus and not a genetic defect, according to researchers, and Professor Campbell tied a belt around his neck and hanged himself from a ceiling beam when he was drunk. 

For this week's Mahal, I caught up with skate life photographer, Marco Hernandez. A native of Staten Island, home to one of the world's largest landfills, Marco shoots photos both on and off the island: pics of skateboarders, bums, dead animals, girls, and anything else that catches his 21 years old eyes. Did I mention he also likes the Gonz, listens to Morrissey, and does hip skate tricks at Tompkins Square Park? Well, he does. He's cool and talented as hell, and this week, I was lucky enough to see his sick photos and talk to him about how he became a photographer and why he loves fellow Staten Island natives the Wu-Tang Clan. 

VICE: What was it like growing up in Staten Island?
Marco Hernandez: Boring. There's really not much out here for anyone to do. It's a small island where everybody knows everybody. Most of the kids out here become potheads; you don't really hear much from this borough at all. It's always been known as “The Forgotten Borough.”

How far are you from where Wu-Tang is from?
Oh man. Growing up my brothers always had Wu-Tang tapes playing throughout my home. I was born in Mariners Harbor; I think some of the members were from that area. It was too dope listening to them and knowing the words to their songs when you're 6 years old. I was raised on that, and I still listen to Wu Tang Clan on the daily. I'm down with them for life. They pretty much put Staten on the map and are still killing it to this day.

Which came first for you: skateboarding or photography? 
I got into skateboarding first. I was 8 years old watching older kids on the block doing shit off curbs, and I just knew I wanted to try that. It wasn't until I was ten that I got my first skateboard. Now fast forward ten years, and here I am still skating. I got into photography around two years ago. I was just going through some tough shit, and I just wanted something that was therapeutic for me. I always looked through mags growing up, ripping pages out of Thrasher and throwing them on my wall. I knew I wasn't going to make it pro, but I still wanted skateboarding to be a part of my life always, so I picked up photography. I can honestly say it's one of the best decisions I ever made. 

Do you prefer taking pictures of your girlfriend or skate life?
I get the same satisfaction out of both. It's fun shooting photos of skateboarding—plus she is always hype on all the photos we get when we shoot together. She is one of the easiest people to shoot with, because she is down for anything and I find that awesome about her.

How does one make a career out of skate photography nowadays?
I honestly don't even know. I think it's just about who you know and how good you are. It's a competitive field, and I knew exactly what I was getting myself into. I first started shooting with NY Skateboarding as a contributing photographer for a while. While I was doing that, I was always out shooting photos with homies that were heavily involved with skateboarding, so it worked out pretty well. I got an opportunity to do a board graphic for a board company out of Long Island called The Northern Co. I am really stoked on it. If I can't make it pro but still get a board graphic with my photo, I'm still really hyped! I have also made photo zines for two years with Blood of The Young, from Canada, and Nighted from California. I am still working on new projects to this day.

Thanks, Marco. Looking forward to seeing the board!

@RedAlurk

Previously - The Amazing Falcon Bowse T-Shirt Transformation Program
 

Image invoking 'N Sync's pain via the author's father.

Rumors are flying that 'N Sync will be reuniting tonight at the MTV Video Music Awards at the Barclay’s Center in Brooklyn. It’s been a while since we’ve heard about most members of the band, so I wrote fan-fiction about what they’ve been doing with their lives since Justin Timberlake broke up 'N Sync to sing duets with Timbaland. 

Image of Lance Bass having a bro-sesh via Wiki Commons.

Lance Bass awakens, crushed under a sea of naked women. He wonders how he will be able to hustle these nubile bitches out of his condo; if the paparazzi catches wind of their sleepover, they might catch onto the fact that he’s straight. Extracting himself with a yawn, he goes to the kitchen and sits down for a conference call with his management team. The topic, as always, is how they are going to gay up Lance's image when he is a beacon of masculinity. (All Lance wants to do is listen to the Dave Matthews Band and leave dishes “soaking” in the sink, but years ago it was decided that the only way to keep him relevant was if he pretended to be a homosexual.) His agent and publicist begin throwing out ideas:

“Lance, what if you bought an albino tiger? Gays love big cats.”

“I heard that Wentworth Miller just came out. We could arrange a photo-op.”

“We need to get you back on Andy Cohen's show. We could have Diana Ross come out to surprise you, and you could cry.”

Lance sighs, scrolling through the previous night's basketball scores on his case-less iPhone. His hairdresser is going to be over soon to bleach his roots, and he knows he’s going to be in a world of pain.

Photo of Joey Fatone at a Robot Chicken panel via Flickr user Zengrrrl.

Joey Fatone’s wife and children have left him. They were driven away by his singular focus, a ray gun he had bought from an aging Soviet physicist and had installed in the basement of their Orlando, Florida mansion. When fully functional, the gun can be loaded with a variety of dangerous chemicals, which can be shot at targeted populations around the globe. Yuri, the Soviet physicist, gave Joey a list of possible substances he use: radium, mercury, Agent Orange, mustard gas—the list went on and on. But Joey has different ideas. He plans to shoot animal fat at the population of the entire world, causing a global epidemic of extreme obesity. He will be the only living man spared. Staring at the hundreds of drums of hamburger patties he’s stockpiled for his master plan, Joey mutters to himself, “We'll see who's the fat one now…”

Photo of the former judge of America's Next Best Dance Crew via Flickr user cityyear.

JC Chasez is checking out at the supermarket, waiting to scan his savings card on a six-pack of yogurt and a carton of strawberries when the cashier looks up at him, a startled look of recognition dawning on her face. “Wait a minute, aren't you…” He blushes, waving his hands in false modesty. “You're that guy from Trishelle’s party who drank all the pickle juice. Dude, you were totally wasted.” He yanks his groceries out of her hands, dropping cash on the counter. He rushes to the parking lot.

As he approaches his car, a gaggle of teenage girls run towards him. He puts up his arms, ready to submit to their tween adoration.

The tallest girl begins to scream, “You! It’s really you! The guy who’s been parked in that handicapped space without a sticker for two hours! Shame on you!”

The others nod in approval and spit on his leather shoes. He breaks away and manages to make it to his SUV. He’s on the brink of tears when he hears a voice behind him.

“Excuse me, are you JC Chasez?”

He spins around excitedly, facing a balding fan in a brown suit. “Yes. Yes, I am.”

“Great!” The fan looks excited, pushing a pack of papers into JC's hands. “You’ve been served.”

Photo of Justin Timberlake having crazy eyes at a Marine Corp Ball via Wiki Commons.

In a quiet moment, Justin Timberlake breaks away from his bland wife Jessica and heads towards his library—the only room he trusts that Jessica will never visit. He approaches a bookshelf and pulls back a copy of Spinoza’s Ethics (again, Jessica) and the shelf swings away from the wall, revealing a glowing shrine to his one true love—Britney Spears. A life-size oil painting of the fallen child star wearing a denim dress hangs above two eternally burning Yankee Candles; Justin checks the candles wax levels, crumbles a few Cheetos onto an offering dish, and then pours a libation of Starbucks frappuccino on the floor. He looks up at the painting, and Britney’s crusty, macarra lined eyes stare back. Justin turns away. When Britney was held on a 5150 at UCLA Medical Center several years ago, Justin asked her father if he could control her conservatorship, but Papa Spears just laughed at the suggestion until cheese grits came out of his nose. For now, Justin has to wait to be reunited with his love. He cries softly, singing out in a perfect falsetto, “I guess I need you, baby.”

Photo of Chris Kirkpatrick going H.A.M. with the ladies via Jerrit Clark.

Sitting on a street corner about 60 feet from the Salam Mosque in the Al-Mina district of Tripoli, 21-year-old Yasser looked sorrowfully into the distance. His head and left hand were wrapped in bandages. A line of dried blood snaked its way down from his temple to his chin. Fragments of glass and small chunks of concrete covered the concrete around him next to a pile of tomatoes rotting under the summer sun. Further up the road surrounding a crater, about ten-feet in diameter and six-feet in depth, the carcasses of burnt out cars lay at unnatural angles across the tarmac. The windows of surrounding buildings were blown out.

“I had just finished my work for the morning and was in the Mosque praying,” said Yasser, who moved to Lebanon from Damascus two months ago in an attempt to flee Syria’s on-going civil conflict.

“I spend a lot of time here at the mosque, not just to pray but sometimes to sleep,” he continued explaining that he has no fixed abode.

“I remember I was kneeling to pray and then suddenly I opened my eyes and I was in a hospital ward.”

“Sometimes I just feel like there is no escape.”

During Friday prayers, Tripoli—Lebanon’s second city—was rocked by two car bombs, placed strategically outside mosques frequented by Salafist preachers who have been vocal in their support of the Syrian opposition and critical of Hezbollah’s military intervention across the border on behalf of the Assad regime. In total at least 45 people were killed and over 500 were injured. Only last Thursday, a car bomb intended as a warning to Hezbollah to discontinue its activity in Syria left 30 dead and over 300 injured in Ruwaiss, an area in the Dahiyeh, the southern suburbs of Beirut.

While Lebanese politicians and the international community were quick to condemn the attack in Tripoli, local MPs and religious leaders debated whether “private security” measures should be adopted to prevent further violent acts. The attacks came on the same day that the Israeli Air Force conducted a retaliatory air strike near the base of an armed Palestinian faction south of Beirut after rockets from south Lebanon were fired into Israel on Thursday.

Unrest is intensifying in Lebanon, as Syria’s civil war continues unabated next door.

On Saturday morning a large crowd stood congregated outside the Salam Mosque. Locals, foreign media, Lebanese Red Crescent workers, volunteers cleaning up debris, and even a couple taking a selfie with their camera, all moved freely around a site that a small team of military investigators were trying to scour for evidence. The attitude of the Lebanese Army at checkpoints approaching the area seemed a touch more laissez faire than it had in the Dahiyeh the previous week where locals under the employ of Hezbollah and Amal had stood at regular intervals along the road.

Ahmad Majdi, 51, a former municipality representative of the Tripolitan district of Bab al Tabbaneh stood surveying the damage. Clashes between inhabitants of Bab al Tabbaneh who support the Syrian opposition and the adjacent mainly Alawite, pro-regime neighborhood of Jabal Mohsen have become commonplace over the course of 2013. Majdi interpreted the twin blasts as further evidence of Syria’s civil war spilling into Lebanon. He was quick to point the finger of blame at the Syrian regime.

“The Syrian regime is responsible,” said Majdi matter-of factly.

 “They know that Tripoli is the heart of the Syrian revolution here in Lebanon, so that is why they target us here.” In the background a Red Crescent aid-worker placed what appeared to be a charred, severed limb, into a black plastic bag.

“When Hezbollah started fighting in Syria, these attacks became inevitable.”

Though Majdi described the twin explosions in terms of their relationship with Syria’s current civil war he was also quick to draw reference to the state of Lebanese-Syrian relations over the last 50 years. He spoke of both Syria’s 30-year occupation of Lebanon and the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafic Hariri (Syrian involvement is widely suspected) that brought it to an end.

In Majdi’s eyes the twin explosions represented an attack on Lebanon’s sovereignty.

“It’s as if the occupation never finished,” concluded Majdi with a shake of the head. 

Others at the scene expressed fear that such attacks could become increasingly common.

Zacharia Nasr, 40, usually attends Friday prayers at the Salam Mosque but found himself caught up with work and had decided instead to pray at home. Upon hearing the blast he rushed to the scene, where he was struck by falling glass, resulting in a 25-stitch head wound.

“I am very worried that this could happen again,” said Nasr. “Whoever did this is trying to spread sectarianism in Lebanon.”

The conversation was interrupted by a passer-by in a baseball cap with a well-coiffured Salafist beard who shouted ominously:

“The fitna  (an Arabic word for chaos that also carries deeper religious and apocalyptic connotations) is coming to Lebanon.”

A thousand feet away in the Emergency Ward of the Islamy Al-Khor Hospital where many of the blast’s victims were treated, a doctor who requested anonymity stated that the treatment of victims was ongoing.

“We had over 200 people coming in yesterday. The working conditions, treating so many at one time, were incredibly pressurised. But now the situation has stabilized.”

Across town beside the neighborhood of Bab al-Tabbaneh, the façade of the al-Taqwa mosque appeared less damaged than the Salam mosque. However nearby shops had been reduced to burnt-out shells. When I arrived there a group of men on motorbikes carrying Salafist flags paraded around the adjacent Abu Ali roundabout firing Kalashnikovs in the air.

The first of Friday’s explosions occurred outside the al-Taqwa mosque at 1:30 PM followed by the second explosion seven minutes later outside the Salam Mosque. At the time Salafist Sheikhs Salem Rafei and Bilal Baroudi, staunch opponents of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and leading figures in Lebanon’s Salafist movement, were delivering sermons. Neither was hurt.

“This is the work of Hezbollah and the Assad regime,” said Mohammed Zabi, 32, standing beside a charred Peugeot. Zabi expressed a complete lack of faith in the Lebanese army’s ability to keep the peace.

 “What army? There is no army, and there is no security. We will have to defend ourselves.”

Beside the al-Taqwa mosque men cleared rubble from shop fronts whilst a bulldozer attempted to clear rubble from around the massive crater ripped open by the 220-pound bomb. Mohammed Amin, 35, stood outside the entrance to his convenience store. Surveying the damage he tried to strike an optimistic tone.

“I don’t have insurance but at least the damage here isn’t as bad as next door. We will rebuild it again and make it better,” said Amin before reflecting on measures the Lebanese state could take to prevent further escalations of violence.

“Well, you could try and bring all of Lebanon’s political groups to the dialogue table and then establish a plan whereby all militias disarm,” said Amin, before cracking a wry smile.

“But I’m not optimistic that will happen. We don’t even have a government.”

Departing Tripoli my colleague and I parked up near the center of town to get a bite to eat before heading back to Beirut. Returning ten minutes later a man looking apoplectic with rage stood outside our car. As we got closer we realized what the problem was. The man had spotted an unfamiliar car parked outside his shop and feared the worst.

Times are tense in Lebanon.

@ScotinBeirut

More from Lebanon:

Renegade Clerics Are Battling in Lebanon

No Smoking in Lebanon

Hezbollah Stronghold in Beirut Bombed
 

Via Wiki Commons.

Being young wouldn't have been the same if it were not for the struggles I faced while trying to find weed. Although I have been waiting for the (inevitable) legalization of weed for years, I know that the kids who grow up with legalized pot will have one less arduous life experience to bond over with their peers. They'll never know the merciless boredom of waiting for the phone to ring—or in my case, waiting in a diner booth for the translucent, green pager to buzz with 420 somewhere in the numeric message. My high school buddy Jummy was often the face across from me in the diner during these trying moments, and he and I grew closer each time we faced it.

In retrospect, my mom was probably right about Jummy being a bad influence on me. He had a mohawk and was perpetually getting kicked out of school. The oldest of three brothers, he was something of a black sheep in his family, and more than once I heard his parents lecturing him about being a better role model. But all that mattered to me was that he was there to share the strife with me—we were truly dedicated to our cause.

We would pool our cash, hit up every kid who could potentially be holding, and impatiently wait for a response from those unreliable bastards. Whenever we got some, we'd rejoice and sneak past Jummy's unsuspecting parents up to his room and smoke it all at once. When weed was unavailable, neither of us handled the stress well—that's why I was suspicious when Jummy wasn't very concerned one summer.

That summer, he somehow always had weed. It wasn't great weed—some bushy homegrown, outdoor crap that looked like it was out of Dazed And Confused—but it certainly did the trick. He never had tons of it—just a couple of scrappy grams in a cellophane cigarette pack wrapper. Any time I mentioned my worries, Jummy would either have weed on hand or be able to disappear for 20 minutes and return with some pot. As long as I didn't ask him where he got it, he said I didn’t have to smoke him out in return. I complied, but our other friends caught on and began to question where he got his supply.

There were a bunch of woods behind Jummy's house, so the immediate assumption was that he had plants back there—the buds’ poor maintenance supported this theory, because Jummy definitely didn't know how to properly grow weed. Pressed for an answer, Jummy made up a tenuous story about a cousin hooking him up. We gave him shit for it, but no one pushed him too hard, because he could always diffuse the conversation by immediately smoking us out with his weird weed.

One day, we were all sitting on our friend’s porch playing the pager game. Without a single response, we hopelessly looked to Jummy. He was empty-handed, claiming that the magical cousin was out of town. Spoiled by a stream of weed that seemed endless just a day before, the crew grew somewhat hostile. The group’s collective frustration weighed on Jummy, who was obviously hiding something. Finally, he broke.

“Fine! Fine! I’ll fucking tell you! I’ve been stealing that weed from my parents!”

We were all shocked to learn that Jummy’s prim and proper parents were actually massive stoners who had a consistent supply hidden in the house. Jummy told us how he was rooting around in the basement one day and found a garbage bag filled with bud that was pretty much still on the plant. He deduced that they were getting it from an old friend who had apparently been growing weed the same way since the early 70s—that was why it was never the kind of bud we were used to. He was amazed to learn that his parents were total hypocrites who admonished him for his weeded out lifestyle when they were just a couple of stoners too. (At the time, Jummy didn’t factor in the myriad of other traits that made him a bad kid worthy of punishment.)

Jummy had to benefit somehow from this catch, but he knew he couldn’t go the open route and tell his parent that he had discovered their secret. Instead, he turned it into his own stash, chipping away a couple of grams each day so his parents wouldn’t notice. It worked well for the first several weeks, but then Jummy got greedy—or rather, he got generous. Once he started sharing it with the guys and me, he had to sneak away more and more at a time to keep the jig up. The day before we all went in on him, Jummy’s mom had finally noticed that their stash was shrinking more rapidly than usual. She told Jummy's dad, and both of them confronted Jummy about it, concerned that he was not only smoking their weed, but consuming it at such a rapid pace. The poor kid took the fall, never revealing we were his accomplices, but perhaps impressing his parents with his consumption abilities. 

The jig being up, Jummy no longer had access to the mother-load, but at least his parents didn’t punish him—even they realized there was no justice in reprimanding him when they smoked pot too. That’s why he wasn’t grounded and was instead sitting with us on the porch unloading the weight of this secret. He hadn’t spoken a word of his discovery until that moment, and verbalizing it really drove the reality home for him. “My parents are fucking stoners, man. I can’t believe it,” he said. We all looked on in silence. We couldn’t believe it either.

Before long, Jummy actually started sneaking trees from his parents' stash again, but this time he was reasonable about it and so were his parents. They had reached a silent understanding—we no longer had to act paranoid when we spoke to them when we were stoned, and we no longer had to sneak past them when we were dashing to Jummy's room to smoke.  It may not have been the most predictable route to peace between them, but it worked for them—plus it got me high like ten million times. Thanks, Jummy and Jummy’s mom and dad. 

@ImYourKid

Previously - Life's Weed Bonuses

From left: the author, Chelsea Manning, and Lady Gaga. Image by the author. 

I didn’t know who Chelsea Manning was until she told everyone who she was. I don’t really follow current events outside of what I find on art, fashion, and queer interest blogs. I knew about WikiLeaks, but that’s it. The last time I had heard from Julian Assange was when he had tea with Lady Gaga last year. 

Chelsea got a lot of press on Thursday, so I jumped online eager to learn more about a trans* person who was getting more press than I was—I’m a trans* person, and I thought I was getting a lot of press lately for my work as an artist and it girl. (The asterisk stands for all kinds of queer, including those like mine which lie outside of the gender binary.) The trans* community  is a smallish and semi-tightly-knit community. From a distance, this Chelsea Manning seemed like a big deal.

I did some research on Chelsea, and I discovered I relate to her a lot. Reading through her leaked chat log with ex-hacker Adrian Lamo, I found that she—like myself, countless other LGBT people, and her colleague Julian Assange—is a Lady Gaga fan. Or was at least a Lady Gaga fan in 2010 when she sent this to Adrian Lamo, her online confidant [sic]:

(02:14:21 PM) bradass87: listened and lip-synced to Lady Gaga’s Telephone while exfiltrating possibly the largest data spillage in american history

I kept reading, and it grew clear to me that the queer community—the trans* community in particular—had an icon on its hands. A stealthy, angry, t-girl had “exfiltrated probably the largest data spillage in american history” while giving shows to her faves by Mother Monster, and we were just hearing about it now. We knew about “Bradley,” but now we know about Chelsea.

A headline from The Week reads: “What happens now that Bradley Manning is Chelsea Manning?”

My answer is that we sit down, shut up, and take a moment to look at what people do when they’re young, smart, powerful, trans*, and American.

Here’s how Chelsea described herself to Adrian:

(10:59:07 AM) bradass87: <– [this person is kind of fragile]

(10:59:29 AM) bradass87: :’(

She discussed her gender dysphoria with the only person who would listen:

(03:04:05 PM) bradass87: its clearly an issue… i mean, i dont think its normal for people to spend this much time worrying about whether they’re behaving masculine enough, whether what they’re going to say is going to be perceived as “gay”… not to mention how i feel about the situation… for whatever reason, im not comfortable with myself… i mean, i behave and look like a male, but its not “me” =L

(03:04:34 PM) bradass87: its… odd

(03:04:40 PM) bradass87: or at least painful

Oh. And by the way, it sucks to be queer in the US military:

(11:49:02 AM) bradass87: im in the desert, with a bunch of hyper-masculine trigger happy ignorant rednecks as neighbors… and the only safe place i seem to have is this satellite internet connection

(11:49:51 AM) bradass87: and i already got myself into minor trouble revealing my uncertainty over my gender identity… which is causing me to lose this job… and putting me in an awkward limbo

Chelsea, however, had a secret weapon and a really crazy choice to make:

(12:15:11 PM) bradass87: hypothetical question: if you had free reign over classified networks for long periods of time… say, 8-9 months… and you saw incredible things, awful things… things that belonged in the public domain, and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington DC… what would you do?

I read this last part, and I instantly understood everything. When you’re a young, smart, and powerful trans* American—that is to say, when you’re “kind of fragile,” experiencing abnormal amounts of “odd” pain, surrounded by “ignorant rednecks,” and generally at risk of “losing” your job—there’s this feeling you get. I don’t think there’s a word for the feeling in English, but I get it all the time, because I am a young, smart, and powerful trans* American. This feeling—it’s a vindictive, Dionysian kind of venom, coming in torrid waves when you least expect it. It’s a thrill that you are where you are despite what you are—that comes first—and then there’s this throttling shriek in your head telling you to tear it all down and tell everyone why. Suddenly, the only way to right the myriad wrongs which have befallen you for being who you are is to bash back as hard and fast as you possibly can, wailing and gnashing your teeth as the blood splatters up into your face.

I felt this feeling after a Skype interview for an internship when someone thought the camera was off and said, “Oh my god! Nice earrings! Where were his eyebrows?” I felt it after I explained my pronoun choice (I use “they/them/their”) to a family member and he asked me if I thought it was all “a little much.” I felt it after somebody from Columbia, where I'm a student, posted on the Columbia University Insults page that I was “a disgrace to men everywhere.”

Chelsea “saw incredible things, awful things” which, if exposed, might topple oppressors. She was losing her job and lost in her body and in great pain, so what did she do?

She cranked up the Gaga and tore the federal government 750,000 new assholes.

I couldn’t possibly tell you how many angry trans* people there are right now across the United States holed up in their bedrooms listening to Mother Monster and feeling very fucking angry about a whole lot of shit. Like Chelsea, “rednecks” and “Washington D.C.” happen to be at the top of my list, and we’re not alone in that.

“What happens now that Bradley Manning is Chelsea Manning?”

I cannot speak for Chelsea, but I see her formal declaration of womanhood as a seminal moment for the trans* and queer community. Chelsea Manning is a young, smart, and powerful trans* American, and proof that—if given an inch—we will take 750,000 fucking miles on a lip sync.

@HariNef

More about Chelsea Manning:

Hey Conservatives, There’s Nothing “Delusional” About Being Trans

Free Chelsea Manning

Three Whistleblowers Talk About Snowden and Manning

Illustration by Anette Moi

In order for crops to grow, you need shit—literally, agriculture requires some sort of fertilizer. Traditionally, farmers have used cow manure because it contains tons of life-giving nutrients, including phosphorus. However, these days there are not enough cow chips to go around, so some places, including Sweden, have taken to replacing it with sewage sludge, which is the cleaned-up version of the gross slurry containing everything we flush down our toilets—cleaning products, medicines, puke, and so on. That’s convenient, because Sweden produces 250,000 tons of this type of sludge a year, and mixed in with this icky garbage is (literally) tons of phosphorus.

“By returning the phosphorus in the sludge to the fields, we can replace 40 percent of Sweden’s use of chemical fertilizers,” is how Mattias Persson, an engineer who works for the local government in Örebro, phrased it in a press release.

Using sludge to grow crops has dredged up a lot of controversy in Sweden. Scientists disagree about the long-term effects the substance has on the environment—some studies in the US have shown that people who live near land fertilized by sludge have suffered symptoms like burning in their eyes and rashes, and activists claim the chemicals left in sludge cause cancer. Switzerland and the Netherlands have banned using sludge to grow crops, while the USA’s EPA is totally cool with it. Sweden is on the fence. 

“Heavy metals are already stored up in our soil,” said Urban Boije af Gennäs at the Swedish Chemicals Agency, a government organization. “We should avoid adding more.”

Others are concerned about the residue of drugs that stays in sludge even after it’s been cleaned at treatment plants. Removing some of these highly soluble chemicals from wastewater is notoriously difficult, and they can have negative effects on wildlife. For instance, a study done this year by researchers at Umeå University in Sweden found that fish are more erratic and vulnerable to predators because of antidepressants and sedatives that get into waterways via sewage.

Hans Winsa, a scientist who studies the use of sludge as a fertilizer in forests, thinks that some of those concerns are overblown and that, though there are still tests to be done, so far it’s “100 percent safe” to use cleaned-up waste to grow trees. 

There’s also the argument that Swedish sludge is better than other European waste. “We have Europe’s strictest requirements for recycling,” Lisa Osterman, an Örebro government official, said.

Even if sludge isn’t as safe as its proponents say, treatment plants have to do something with it. “The only resources big cities produce are crap and children,” Hans told me. “Both are very important resources that need to be part of the major cycle of things.”

More from The Hox Box Issue:

I Left My Lungs in Aamjiwnaang

The Ghost Rapes of Bolivia

Babysit My Ass

Image via YouTube

Giuliano Stroe is probably the strongest nine-year-old on the planet. The Romanian boy started lifting weights when he was two and has set world records for doing push-ups without letting his feet touch the ground and running on his hands with weights tied to his legs, along the way acquiring about 15,000 YouTube subscribers and more than 150,000 Facebook fans—and flexing his muscles on Romania’s Got Talent. All of this is thanks to his dad, Iulian, who is known for pushing Giuliano and his younger brother Claudiu (who’s also a mini strongman) hard while asking for donations from fans so he can make his sons more “pumped up.”

Eventually, all the hype got the attention of the Romanian equivalent of child services, which frowns on little kids working out for hours at a time. (You can see the chiseled physique that worried some people in the image above.) Social workers asked the courts to place the children under their care and filed a complaint against Iulian. Since then, the father has been going on rants on Facebook and YouTube against journalists, doctors, his neighbors, and the social workers, to whom he supposedly said, “Oy! I’ll beat you so hard that your ass will jump out of your mouth!” (I reached out to him, but he refused to speak to me.) 

In June, Iulian won back custody of his boys in court, partially thanks to a document signed by neurologist Naie Niculina that claimed Giuliano is “well developed from a psychomotor point of view.” But when I spoke to Naie, she clarified that she wasn’t really on team Stroe. “I only said he doesn’t have any mental illnesses,” she said, “not that I agree with those absurd workouts he’s been through.” 

Ra˘dit¸a˘ Piros¸ca, the president of Child Services Olt, said that the government wasn’t trying to take the muscled kids away from their family, just make sure that they were healthy. “We only wanted to oblige [the parents] to cooperate with us,” she told me. “Even if we won, or if we will win the appeal, we just want to make sure, without being stalled by the parents, that the results from the children’s medical tests show they are normally developed, physically and mentally.”

As of this writing, one of the latest posts on Giuliano’s Facebook page was a message in Romanian thanking the court and the judges for their decision, but Iulian or whoever wrote it couldn’t resist a shot at his detractors: “Shame on you know who,” it smugly concluded.

More from The Hox Box Issue:

I Left My Lungs in Aamjiwnaang

The Ghost Rapes of Bolivia

Babysit My Ass

Randel (left) and I between interrogations at the police station. At this point we still thought the ordeal would be over pretty quickly and were treating it as more of an adventure than a living nightmare. (All photos by Sebastian Backhaus)

It's a relief, realising that you're not going to burn to death in the back of an Egyptian prison van. However, witnessing an attempted rape moments later brings you straight back to the immediate reality of the situation, which – for me – was being held prisoner in Cairo during the bloodiest fighting in Egypt's recent history.  

When we'd first arrived, the guy showing us to our apartment had greeted us with, "Welcome to Cairo". He'd quickly followed this up with the kind of sarcastic smile you'd expect from someone welcoming two foreigners to a city on the day the army decided to massacre 600 of its own people.

Not all Egyptians hate the police, but because of their brutal methods they are constantly criticised. Here, a policeman is paraded triumphantly in Tahrir Square one day before the military coup.

Despite the day's events, my friend Randel – who was travelling with me – desperately wanted to take a walk to Tahrir Square before calling it a night. We actually made it to Cairo's de facto mass protest point without a hitch, but weren't quite so lucky on our way home. Just before we were about to reach our beds we were picked up by the police for violating the curfew imposed that day and being in possession of a flak jacket, gas mask and helmet, as well as lacking the requisite press credentials you apparently need to walk the streets of Egypt without being arrested.      
   
On our way to the police station I got a call from someone at the German embassy who assured me that they would check on us the next morning. That's when I realised we probably wouldn't be returning to our flat before the night was over. At the station our phones were taken from us and I managed to negotiate bottled water instead of tap. Then, we were given our rations for the next 20 hours: a minuscule piece of cheese with a side of marmalade. We stayed awake all night chain-smoking, plotting elaborate escape plans and listening to the screams coming from the basement.    

Disappointingly, the next morning a representative from the German embassy was nowhere to be seen. After realising that we wouldn't be getting the assistance we'd been promised, Randel asked to go to the bathroom and I was told to join him. However, it quickly transpired that we weren't being led to the toilets, but pushed down some stairs towards the basement and the screams we'd been forced to listen to all night. 

We were made to stand in an anteroom, surrounded by four doors that acted as a pretty ineffective barrier between us and the ferocious stench of sweat, rubbish and excrement fusing together in the air. Suddenly three of the doors opened and we were able to glimpse into the 15-square metre cells beyond them, each full of countless prisoners in absolute darkness – none of the cells had any windows.   

Prisoners were called upon one by one and shoved into the anteroom, most having great difficulty opening their eyes as they were exposed to the light. Some had large bruises on both their eyes, while others nursed open and festering wounds on their feet and legs. The police aggressively handcuffed us and threw us to our knees, before doing the same to the other 30 people they'd ushered through. We were then extensively screamed at and beaten, before the guards shoved us back up the stairs. On the way, I caught a glimpse into the fourth cell through a little slit in the door; behind it was a woman cradling a baby in her arms.

After being herded outside we were crammed into a prison transport vehicle, where I had a brief chat with a Syrian prisoner. He'd been locked up for 20 days, hadn't been given any food for the first three and was unable to get in touch with his family to inform them of his whereabouts. He told me that, before he'd been arrested by the Egyptian police, he'd travelled to Cairo with his wife and son to shelter them from the war devastating his own country.

At some point our van got stuck in traffic and rocks started banging against its metal sides. Suddenly there was the sound of shots being fired and we threw ourselves onto the floor of our mobile prison, the elderly man next to me beginning to sob and chant the shahada – the confession of faith to Allah. But religion didn't factor into the situation for me; the only thing racing through my mind was that, if somebody managed to hit the van with a Molotov cocktail, we would probably all burn alive.  

In a bid to escape the mob, our driver slammed the van into parked cars, and drove over curbstones. The floor began to shake aggressively and we were hurled from one corner to the other while the handcuffs started to penetrate our wrists. I wasn't sure what exactly was happening outside at this point, but we somehow got back onto a smooth surface and managed to slip through the turmoil and head onto another police station.



We were later told by the German embassy that it was a group of Muslim Brotherhood supporters who had attacked the transporter. They had stormed the van from a nearby morgue, where the bodies of some of their fellow protesters – who'd lost their lives in the eviction – were laid out in rows. 

We weren't to stay in the second police station for too long. Randel and I, along with nine others, were quickly loaded into a different prison transporter. Before I was shoved into the back I managed to take a brief look at the attacked vehicle; the front windows were completely smashed in and I saw a policeman tending to a gaping wound in the middle of his face. 

A Muslim Brotherhood supporter being thrashed by the mob.

After being thrown on top of each other in the new vehicle, I noticed that a young woman was also among us. As soon as we began to move the young man sitting across from her started trying to grab at her body. Randel and I, still handcuffed, protested loudly, but to no avail. As the time passed he became increasingly aggressive. He groped her legs and breasts, held her face firmly, pressed her against the wall and tried to pull off her burqa, before eventually just starting to hit her in frustration.

I'd half noticed this guy during our first ride; he was wearing bandages on his arms and legs, but he wasn't handcuffed and was the only person allowed to speak to the policemen without being punished afterwards. Another man sitting next to the woman tried to fend off the groping hands, but the bandaged man pulled a small knife he'd been hiding under the gauze on his leg and stabbed the helper right through his hand. Streams of blood started to flow out onto the floor and, understandably, the victim began screaming in distress. This continued until an elderly prisoner begged him to try to relax. 

Finally, the car stopped in front of a court building and Randel and I were dragged out. I spotted two friends of ours waiting outside, who yelled out that German diplomats were already in the building. After numerous hearings by the prosecution service our accusations were cleared. The intervention by the German embassy was definitely a crucial factor for our release. None of the other prisoners were German. I have no idea what happened to them.

More on the crisis in Egypt:

Protests Continued in War-Torn Cairo

Is Egypt Doomed to a Civil War?

Video from the Muslim Brotherhood's "Day of Anger"