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Paul Shaffer and the author in 2015

Paul Shaffer is best known as David Letterman's longtime bandleader and sidekick on Late Show with David Letterman. Shaffer has been with Letterman since the beginning, starting with the show's first incarnation, the riskier, arguably funnier Late Night with David Letterman, which aired on NBC from 1982 through 1993, and continuing through CBS's Late Show with David Letterman, which ends its 22-year run tonight. Combined, the shows have garnered 16 Emmy Awards and 112 Emmy Award nominations. During this time, Shaffer has been not just one, but two aces up Letterman's sleeve, able to liven up the stage with both music and comedy. He's got an impeccable sense of timing, and riffing—whether it's on a joke or on the piano—is his forte.

I didn't meet Paul in person until I was a teenager around 1998, at a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ceremony back when they were held at the Waldorf Astoria in New York City. But, growing up, I always felt like I knew him. I had a habit of snooping through my pop's correspondence, and Paul was one of his buddies. Occasionally I'd find notes in progress to Paul, resting in the clutch of the typewriter. I knew that these letters were going either to Mr. Shaffer or to Mr. (Paul) Simon—men who bore the same initials as my father and who were also small and Jewish. It was a coincidence that fascinated me and caused me to believe they were all of the same pale pygmy tribe of funnymen—one I'd hopefully marry into someday.

In 2009, with only a brief history of polite exchanges between us, I reached out to Paul. I was in bad shape. My dad, Phil Spector, had just been convicted of murder and shuttled off to prison. I got Paul's number from my mother, left him a voice message, and heard back from him within 15 minutes. We had lunch the next day. Our friendship has since grown, as has his avuncular role in my life. He is unblinkingly benevolent. When I got laid off from my job in publishing and was broke, he paid for my dog's emergency surgery. He wrote a funny blurb for my first book, the satirical mash-up, Fifty Shades of Dorian Gray (2012). No matter how unconvinced I am of any success in my career, Paul, like a good uncle, is always impressed.

Rather than going out to eat as we normally would, we recently met in his office on the 11th floor of 1697 Broadway, the Ed Sullivan Theater, which, for the past 22 years has been home to Late Show with David Letterman. To say his office is large, doesn't do it justice—Paul's space is roughly twice the size of the apartment I share in Bushwick with my fiancé. The walls are decorated with framed vintage posters. A Baldwin piano stands staunchly in an oblong corner.

"I think it was Carole King on Tapestry who said where you lead I will follow," Paul said, as I turned on the recorder. And so I led him into "the Dark Ages," as he calls it, when he was a part of Saturday Night Live, from 1975 to 1980.

Julia Roberts with Paul Shaffer and David Letterman on 'Late Show with David Letterman' in 2001

Paul started out on the show as a pianist, and then became a writer of special musical material, a position that, before he claimed it, "didn't even exist." That rare combination of musical acumen and comedic talent must have appealed to Lorne Michaels, too, as eventually Paul was performing on the show, both as a musician and as an actor. It was while working on SNL that he caught the eye and ear of David Letterman, who was planning another project now that his morning comedy show on NBC, The David Letterman Show, had been cancelled.

"[Dave] mentioned specifically the sketches that Bill Murray used to do [on SNL] when he was the sleazy lounge singer and I was playing the piano for him," said Paul. "Dave asked for me to come in for a meeting and claims that he never had anyone else in mind. I believe it. Other people on the staff had other ideas, but Dave's prevailed. We hit it off in this first meeting, and it was really quite as simple as that."

Bill Murray as a lounge singer in 'Saturday Night Live'

Letterman idolized Johnny Carson and set out to make a show in the mold of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, Paul says. Of course, Letterman wound up creating a mold of his own, with one of the most immediate distinctions being the fact that its bandleader and sidekick existed as one person: Paul Shaffer.

"Johnny Carson had his sidekick Ed, and his bandleader Doc, and I used to say, 'I'm a combination of Doc and Ed. You put them together, you get Dead,'" Paul said. "I put the two jobs together and now that's become a standard."

On Noisey: David Letterman's Legacy in Electronic Music Is Small But Real

Paul came to New York right around the same time fellow Canadians Eugene Levy and Martin Short made their way over in the early 70s. The three were best friends then and still are today. It's quite possible that had Letterman not come along with his offer, Paul would have pursued comedic work similar to that which "Marty," as he calls him, and Eugene pursued. But then there's that whole music thing. For Paul, saying yes to an opportunity to combine both comedy and music on a well-paying network TV gig was a no-brainer.

Plus, there was creative freedom—more so than one may expect—not just during the Letterman show, outside of which he had roles in 1984's This Is Spinal Tap among other feature films, but also on the show.

Want to meet the Real Walter White?

"Dave has expressed to me on so many occasions, 'If you have something of comedic value, jump in. I don't care if it's during my monologue, or an interview with a guest, just go for it,'" Paul told me. "What amazing freedom it is. You don't find that anywhere else."

The improvisational nature of the show has intimidated some celebrity guests, Paul admits. There are no rehearsals whatsoever—not after so many failed attempts in the early days.

"Dave used to come to the studio and we would try to rehearse bits, but we weren't good at rehearsing and it was just frustrating, especially to Dave. So he stopped coming to the rehearsals and that's when it really got a lot more fun."

And what fun they've had—especially in the early years over at NBC, when Late Night aired at 12:30 AM.

Comic-book author Harvey Pekar on 'Late Night with David Letterman' in 1987

"I don't know if the stakes were not as high but whatever it was, going on that late gave us the license to go way nuttier than we ever would have at 11:30," Paul said. "Once we came over here and changed to 11:30, things got a little bit more, I don't know, high-powered, and less chances were taken. Recently, we did a show that was really fun, mainly just for us, that we taped at 4:30 AM, just for the hell of it, really."

While Paul will often, without a hint of irony, refer to Letterman as "my boss," when talking about Dave, he'll also allude to the close friendship they've built. Back when they were both single guys, they'd double-date together. Nowadays, during summer, they hang out on Dave's ranch in Montana, and it's more of a family affair. Paul brings his wife, Cathy, and his two kids, Victoria and Will, and everyone goes horseback riding.

Always, Paul will mention how lucky and thankful he is, for this loyal friendship with Dave and this career that has been "an honor and a privilege and a gas." He doesn't hint at any loose ends that need tying, or any regret that the show is retiring. He's less placid when faced with the prospect of his own retirement, however.

"I'm not really a suburban guy," Paul explained, referring to his home in Westchester. "Maybe that in itself is going to keep me working—finding excuses to come into Manhattan. I'll have to figure something out."

Then again, Paul has a sense that in show business, it's not all up to you. "Eugene [Levy] summed it up for me," he said. "He said, 'Listen Paul, if the phone doesn't ring, you're retired.'"

The finale of The Late Show with David Letterman airs tonight at 11:35 PM on CBS.

Nicole Audrey Spector is a weekly contributor to the New Yorker's Goings On About Town section. Her work has appeared in the Atlantic, Salon, and elsewhere. She is also the author of Fifty Shades of Dorian Gray. Follow her on Twitter.

According to a 20-page criminal complaint filed in New York District Court Tuesday, the FBI just uncovered some shenanigans going on right under another federal agency's nose: A former DEA agent and a civilian who works for the agency allegedly lied about not working outside the agency during a background check. Their shady side gig? Owning and managing a strip club in New Jersey.

One of the men, David Polos, was an agent for over 20 years before he stopped working for the DEA just last month. His most recent title was special agent-in-charge overseeing a "strike force" focused on drug trafficking operations within organized crime.

His alleged business partner, Glen Glover, 45, has worked for the DEA as a telecommunications specialist for years; according to the court filing, Polos was Glover's supervisor about a decade ago. Glover has been placed on administrative leave, the New York Times reported Wednesday.

During August and September 2011, Polos and Glover were having their security clearances reviewed and received background checks. When asked if they were working anywhere other than the DEA, they both said no, apparently forgetting their ownership of Twins Plus Go-Go Lounge in Hackensack, New Jersey.

Twins doesn't seem to be a very appealing place, at least judging by Google Street View, and the only Yelp review of it doesn't do it any favors. "Food seems old i guess because i never seen anyone at [sic] there," wrote user Steve B. "The dancers sit with their customers ad [sic] ignore you except for tips and to go in back for lapdances.some come right out with rates for happy ending."

Interested in the lives of dancers? Here's what it's like stripping at a truck stop.

According to the court filing, Glover and Polos owned the club with one other person, and worked there in a management capacity. The Feds allege that the two men knew Twins employed people who "were not lawfully in the United States," and claim that they were watching video feeds from the club while they were on the clock at the DEA. The filing adds that in the course of his job at the strip club Polos showed off his badge and once flashed his ankle-holstered handgun to the wife of a co-manager during an argument.

Related: The Beatking Guide to Strip Clubs

Lawyers for the defendants emphasized to the New York Times that the two men were good at their (government) jobs. As for their guilt, a lawyer for Polos said he's "confident he will be exonerated," while Glover's lawyer just said, "We'll try the case in the courts, not in the press."

Audits of background checks have recently led to prosecutions and jail time in what inside-the-beltway news radio station WFED has called a "crackdown on background check fraud" that began in 2008. In one instance, George Abraham, a provider of background checks for the private firm Kroll, was found guilty of fraud, sentenced to more than two years in prison, and died there.

It's unclear what penalties prosecutors will push for in this case.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

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Samantha "the White Widow" Lewthwaite. Photo via Interpol/Wikimedia Commons

On Monday, reports emerged suggesting that al Qaeda affiliate al Shabaab, which controls large swaths of Somalia from strongholds in the south of the country, is now at least partially led by Samantha "the White Widow" Lewthwaite, a British woman. Drawing on anonymous comments from members of the Somali security officials, one report published in the UK Mirror suggest that the since marrying an al Shabaab commander named Hassan Maalim Ibrahim (a.k.a. Sheikh Hassan) last May, Lewthwaite climbed the ranks, replacing leaders killed in US drone strikes to become the right hand of group leader Ahmad Umar (a.k.a. Abu Ubaidah).

A separate report in the Daily Mail Wednesday alleged that Lewthwaite personally commands a unit of nearly 200 "jihadi widow spies" who pose as street merchants and receptionists at businesses like hotels.

These stories further suggest that the 32-year-old mother of four is responsible for the deaths of over 400 people by masterminding a series of raids and suicide attacks over the past few years, including the April 2 attack on Garissa, Kenya, that killed 148. It's also claimed that the White Widow surrounds herself with British commanders (as her Somali language skills are poor), including a dedicated suicide squad of 15 people, and has led the recruitment of teenage and female suicide bombers using cash and heroin as incentives and means of control.

But despite the apparently juicy idea that a traditionally male-dominated Islamist group features a woman in a senior role, security analysts believe these claims are silly and that most evidence suggests the White Widow is a low-level player at best.

"There is no way she is second in command," Veryan Khan, editorial director of the Terrorism Research and Analysis Consortium, told VICE . "There's no evidence that she's actually in Somalia right now at all."

"I rather doubt [her leadership]," adds Stig Jarle Hansen, an associate professor of religious terror at Norway's University of Life Sciences in Oslo and author of 2013's acclaimed Al-Shabaab in Somalia: The History and Ideology of a Militant Islamist Group. "The only reason [to believe this] is the media attention—an attention that has led to a lot of erroneous articles."

Born in Northern Ireland in 1983, Lewthwaite reportedly converted to Islam at the age of 15. Then, in 2002, she married a man named Jermaine Lindsay. It was through Lindsay that she first achieved international notoriety when he carried out one of the July 7 London subway bombings in 2005—an action that Lewthwaite denied any knowledge of to cops and the press, although subsequent reporting led some to suspect that she had a degree of insight into her husband's intentions, as she had met bombing ringleader Mohammed Sidique Khan with him. Soon after, Lewthwaite reportedly moved to Kenya and then South Africa, where she apparently married a Kenyan al Qaeda affiliate named Fahmi Jamal Salim. But for the most part, she fell off the press radar for a while.

Lewthwaite came back into the spotlight two years ago, when Interpol named her a wanted person of notice for allegedly possessing explosives used in a bombing attack on Mombassa, Kenya, in 2011. Thereafter, Lewthwaite supposedly fled to Somalia to seek refuge with al Shabaab, whose leader Ahmed Abdi Godane (killed by an American airstrike last summer) she'd expressed devotion to. Ever since, security forces have reported sightings of her (despite supposedly great precautions on her part) throughout the region, maintaining that she frequently narrowly avoids raids.

"She is protected in no-go areas by [Sheikh Hassan's] clan and she often poses as a camel herder," an unnamed member of Amison, the African Union's 10,000-strong peacekeeping force in Somalia, told the Mirror. "She is dressed all in black robes and gloves so her white skin does not give her away."

Almost as soon as she absconded in 2013, press outlets and analysts began to claim that Lewthwaite had become a high-ranking member of al Shabaab and a number of other terrorist groups. She was initially cited as a possible participant or mastermind of the September 2013 Westgate Mall attack in Nairobi, Kenya, and an October 2013 Kenyan intelligence report argued that she was a major logistician in a six-person Kenyan terror cell run by al Shabaab leader Abdulkadir Mohamed Abdulkadir. Some media outlets claimed that as of 2014 she was guiding retaliatory killings in Kenya from Somalia as a logistics mastermind and bringing female recruits over to Somalia from Yemen. When al Shabaab commander Zakariye Ismail Hersi turned himself in to Kenyan authorities late last year and offered to turn over information on the White Widow in January, this was seen by some observers as proof of her stature within the al Shabaab machine.

VICE News: The Islamic State

But at the same time that she was accused of masterminding attacks from Somalia, other accounts placed the White Widow in the Ukraine, where she was allegedly killed by pro-Russian rebels after volunteering to serve as a sniper with the Ukrainian volunteer Aidar battalion. Still other accounts placed her in Syria fighting with the Islamic State. Then there's the idea that she was somehow tied to the Islamic State executioner Jihadi John as far back as 2009.

All of which is to say that for the last year and a half, the White Widow has basically become a recurring terrorist meme.

"She has become relatively cognitively prominent," is how Hansen puts it, "a urban legend that many journalists uses when Shabaab performs attacks."

In many of these cases, Lewthwaite's leadership roles have been debunked by subsequent investigations. By the end of 2013, Kenyan officials were denying that she'd had a role in Westgate. Her role in the Ukraine appears to be a complete fabrication. And a detailed BBC documentary on her life and exploits, which aired last summer, made a strong case that at least up until then, there was little to no evidence that she'd ever done more than carry out support functions with al Shabaab.

Given that officials have already tagged other individuals as the masterminds behind the Garissa attack and taken actions against them, it's unlikely the White Widow orchestrated that slaughter. And Ahmed Umar, the man whom she supposedly serves, seems to be against the idea of non-Somali leadership for al Shabaab. He likely supported his predecessor, Godane, in a massive purge of foreign fighters on the suspicion that they might be spies or splintering al Shabaab.

Related: Canada Is Bombing the Islamic State in Syria, and Cyberwar Centers Could Be Next

Ahmed Umar also shows no signs of breaking a global trend among jihadists of opposing leadership roles for women—much less for foreign women—in line with their (selectively) conservative religious doctrine.

"In Islamic militant organizations, we've never seen any women have [so much as] a rank-and-file position," says Khan, suggesting that most reports of the Islamic State training female fighters have been overblown.

Even if al Shabaab were to elevate a foreign woman, Hansen and Khan doubt that they'd be willing to show particular favor to Lewthwaite, given her lack of military experience.

"Al Shabaab has a lot of experienced terrorist and military leaders," says Hansen, "and she is not experienced. Why promote her?"

Khan also points out that al Shabaab is known for quizzing its fighters on their knowledge of the Qur'an to make sure they are devout Muslims—and that given the search history and photos found on the computer recovered from Lewthwaite's house in Kenya, she isn't all that religiously savvy—or at least not until now.

"There were all these Google searches for sun dresses," Khan says, "and pictures of her doing her hair and makeup... You look at the pious women of Islamic State and they don't even take off their gloves to take a picture. She's not that."

For more on terrorism, watch VICE's interview with Abubaker Shariff Ahmed, the highest-profile radical sheik in Kenya

Khan acknowledges that there's some evidence that the White Widow has acted as a courier in the past. And other reports suggest that, at most, she acts as a low-level recruiter, valued for her knowledge of the United Kingdom and English language skills. Khan suspects that she's tolerated in this position in part because she may have money, in part because her notoriety could make her an asset to al-Shabaab, and in part because her son, now a tween, may be a potential future asset undergoing grooming to become a well-trained and famous future jihadi. Hansen believes her symbolism powerful, and suggests that she backed Godane during his internal crackdown, which could have saved her skin.

"But her being anything more than a courier or bagman," says Khan, "is something I can't see."

"Her operative value has not been indicated to be large by any of my sources close to the Shabaab," adds Hansen.

Related: What Is Happening to Former Jihadists When They Return to Britain?

As to why people are so eager to believe reports of the White Widow's high stature in al-Shabaab, IS, or even the Ukraine, Khan thinks that's somewhat common when Westerners join foreign radical movements. The local press almost always gloms onto the idea that their own monster must be in a commanding position, whereas most foreigners usually wind up in low-level posts. Hansen suspects that as a woman especially, the press takes the White Widow to symbolize the dangerous attraction of al Shabaab—that the group can snap up "one of us, even a mother."

But in Lewthwaithe's case, Khan suspects that her evasion of blame and escape from the UK after the London subway bombings probably makes distant observers inclined to inflate her significance.

"She fooled the police," says Khan. "She fooled the UK. She fooled everybody. That hurts."

Follow Mark Hay on Twitter.

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Commuters wait to board the Paris Metro (Photo via YouTube)

This article originally appeared on VICE France

According to a recent report, every single woman who's used Parisian public transport has been sexually harassed in some way or another. The report is quite detailed in their definitions of assault but for some reasons it doesn't list frotters. A "frotter," for those privileged enough not to know, is someone who derives sexual pleasure by rubbing their bits and pieces up against unsuspecting people in crowded public spaces.

Concerned, I headed over to French health and sex forum Doctissimo, where I found a chat room called "Transport Fantasies." It was full of frotter testimonies—the kind of stories that'll make you think twice before taking the underground ever again. Ten minutes of scrolling through the pages made me understand why Japan has introduced women only carriages on some of their trains. An idea that is also currently being lobbied for by some UK politicians.

Curious to find out what this was all about, I reached out to some of the people in the forum. After some rather colorful exchanges—most notably one with a cross-dresser who liked to be photographed without underwear on the train—I was contacted by Maxine, who for obvious reasons didn't feel like telling me his real name. The 38-year-old computer engineer is part of a subway frotting community that he says has been active for roughly 20 years. I gave him a call to ask just what the hell he was up to.

VICE: Hey Maxine, so you are into fantasizing about women on trains. What's the deal with that?
Maxine: Basically, proximity on public transport is something that hugely excites me and has done for years. I get a lot of heat for it on different forums, to be honest. People calling me things like "pervert," "sick," or "disturbed"—you hear those words a lot. But I just want to clarify: I am not a sex offender. I've never made a salacious remark to a girl or touched her breasts or anything like that. I'm not what you'd call a predator.

If you say so. Can you tell me how this fantasy came about?
Until I was 19, I lived in this tiny little village. When I moved to Paris, I discovered the underground and it was really interesting. It was exotic to me: the faces, the hair, the legs, the bra straps. A lot of people see commuting as a chore but I love that physical proximity, the humidity and the way I can see women's bodies right up close, as if I have a zoom lens or something.

It all started with this one businesswoman in a skirt suit—I suppose what you'd call a MILF these days—who was forced to push her breasts up against me on the train because it was so packed. I was a kid and it had a huge effect on me. Ever since that day, I've spent a lot of my spare time on the metro. The winter is no good because of things like flu and heavy jackets—I can't get quite as close to the girls as I'd like to.

The way it works is that I spot a pretty girl and try to sit down next to her. Then I touch up against them very lightly and begin to fantasize about some different scenarios.

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Are you aware of the fact that guys like you are a real nuisance to women?
You shouldn't look at everything as so black and white. Some girls probably get annoyed because they aren't feeling that sexy at the particular time of day. Right after they've finished work for example. They are probably taken by surprise. But some others actually enjoy the attention. I don't rub myself on them like a dog or anything. I go soft and establish a sort of physical closeness, which may—or may not—result in something more.

When I was single, several girls smiled at me in the subway. Sometimes you could see they were interested. Other times, people just give me evils. I'm pretty sure that most people don't even notice me touching up against them. I'm more of a "gentleman" frotter.

Does your partner know about your frottage?
No, not at all. I don't think she'd get it. After the media storm about subway frotters, I've heard her discuss the issue angrily with her girlfriends. But you know, I'm very active on these internet forums and talk a lot with women who have the same kind of fantasies. A lot of guys might cheat on their partners but I've found a way to remain faithful while still being able to live out my sexual fantasy.

Are you aware that what you do is basically sexual assault?
Like I've said, there is a distinction. I've never insulted a woman, shown my penis, or tried to stick my hand up their skirt. I condemn all of those things. As far as I know, proximity in public transport isn't a crime—even if it sometimes results in uncontrolled erections. Look at nightclubs. It's not strange to rub up against a stranger while you're dancing, you know? Guys who do that aren't considered perverts. Why are things on a train different? It's a fantasy, just like doctor waiting room scenarios.

[body_image width='700' height='931' path='images/content-images/2015/05/21/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/21/' filename='interview-man-who-rubs-himself-against-women-876-body-image-1432207776.jpg' id='58417']Photo via Wikimedia Commons. None of these people are frotters.

Well, apart from the fact no one gets felt up without their consent in those scenarios.
I've always acted correctly. Just have a look online, you'll see I'm not the only one interested in this. There's so many kinky videos that start with two strangers talking on a train. It's become a cliché. No one has ever protested, called for censorship or had to apologize for sexual assault. Go on YouPorn, there's a category called "fantasy." Just try and type subway in there and you'll find pages upon pages of videos that start with stroking on a subway train.

Right.

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A little while back, I took it upon myself to compile a list of every annoying person you're friends with on Facebook. I did this for you. Anyway: in an attempt to inject some positivity back into the world, I have now made a list of everyone that you are friends with, period – although admittedly at least 60 percent of them are also annoying pricks. And on Facebook – JG

Us humans with our stupid monkey brains can't actually cope with having more than 150 stable social relationships, is the thing. That's according to British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, anyway. Here's some science about it. Because think about it: You can't, can you? Name your best friend. Name ten more good friends. That's it, you're probably done. Name every one of your Facebook friends. You cannot.

But, you know, friendship is a beacon of light in the dark abyss of existence. And it's a very natural, basic function; we've been learning how to do it since we were kids. Isn't that wild? Next time you're at a party with someone new and you go, "So, uh... do, uh... what are you getting up to this weekend?", just remember that a literal child is better at making instant-connection smalltalk than you. Every time you sweat because you have to make eye contact with someone you don't intimately know, just know that five-year-old children outperform you at this. Making friends is easy. Staying friends – with all the fucking text messaging, all the checking in, all the entire evenings of your life set aside to go to art galleries or pop-up taco vans with them, infinite taco vans, taco van after taco van after taco van, each taco more mediocre than the last – that's the hard part.

But then one of the true pleasures of having friends is categorising them neatly into groups. Your best friends! Your one-bracket-out-of-the-best-friends-category-but-still-quite-good-friends friends! Those people you see annually and hate! Friends of all shapes and sizes, colours and creeds. Friends you're only friends with because they have a car and sometimes you really need a lift somewhere. Friends who have children and you never see again.

Anyway, here's every last one of your friends.

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BEST FRIENDS (NUMBER THAT YOU HAVE IN YOUR LIFE: 1–5)

Come on, dude. You don't need someone explaining to you what a best friend is. It's your best friend. They are probably WhatsApping you right now. "You gotta read this list on VICE, man!" your best friend is saying. "It is so wrong! Again! I hate this guy!" That's you and your bestie: united in love, united in hate, always in touch via instant messaging.

OLD FRIENDS (NUMBER THAT YOU HAVE IN YOUR LIFE: 10)

There's an old friend of mine who – and there's no good way of saying this – who looks like Terry Nutkins died from a toxic shock-type reaction to anti-baldness medicine and somehow, in death, became incredibly hench. That's the good thing about old friends: you can say they look like Bodybuilder Zombie Nutkins, because you know the exact line you cross with them, the exact parameters of their sense of humour, the exact thing you can say before they flex their massive Nutkinesque arms and put you in a slightly-too-tight headlock. Essentially: if you haven't got someone in your life who you can comfortably call a "cunt" to their face, then you haven't really got any good friends, have you? You've just got people who Facebook you when they need the numbers making up for a party.

There's that comfort-level with old friends that is unparalleled, like climbing into a comfortable old grey sweatshirt and just wallowing around in it. And what's great is the upkeep with old friends is so much easier: occasionally text them the punchline from an old shared joke, or some memory of that time you got kicked out of a nightclub because another mutual friend took his trousers down to show two girls his leg tattoos, and boom: your Pal-o-Meter is topped up.

Old friends are the bedrock on which your friendship mansion is built: nailed-on best men or maids of honour, they remember how fat you were at school (hella fat), how weird your first girlfriend or boyfriend's nose was (extremely weird), and why you're afraid of the concept of leprosy (particularly harrowing Blue Peter appeal). You have almost certainly pissed yourself in a sleeping bag while staying at their house. You should probably give them a call.

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You can also be friends with a dog

TRENDY NEW FRIENDS (NUMBER THAT YOU HAVE IN YOUR LIFE: 20)

Oh, these trendy new friends with their trendy new ways! Those whirlwind first days of a new friendship. Because it's like dating, isn't it? Dating without erections or the covert handing of a 2-for-1 voucher to a waiter at Zizzi's. You're texting each other – "Should hang out again soon m8!" – you're round each other's houses. Your ex-trendy new friends are texting you, jealously. "Let's go shopping together!" your new pal says, and you do, you end up in GAP watching them try on chinos. Harps play. Angels sing. You two go down the arcade and play fucking Time Crisis together. They introduce you to their existing mates. "Come over!" they say. "Party at mine!" And you find yourself stood in front of the mirror before you leave going: Why do I even care what I look like? I'm going to my mate's house to drink Breezers. You are going: Why did I spend 45 minutes doing my hair? I've lost my mind. And then you see them at the party, dancing with someone else, and your stomach drops through your body like a lift in a Japanese horror movie, and you put down the commemorative edition of your joint favourite film (S Club: Seeing Double), and you storm outside in tears, and you go: actually I should probably have a word with myself, here. I'm meant to be an adult. Then you just end up relegating them to any one of these other fucking categories, and the cycle begins, anew, marching forever onwards.

NIGHT-OUT FRIENDS (NUMBER THAT YOU HAVE IN YOUR LIFE: 5)

Ah, the fragile human tie between two night-out friends. You know a night-out friend: you don't actually really know their surname, but they are in 80 percent of your selfies; you know their drinks order but you don't really know where they work; you have woken up in their bed or on their sofa, platonically naked and covered in your own sick, on multiple occasions. And yet: can you imagine spending a Saturday afternoon with them? You cannot. In fact: have you ever seen them in daylight? You sort of worry that one day you might be doing something semi-embarrassing – routine piss test, buying crotchless underwear, that sort of thing – and then you look up, and lo, who is it you are passing your beaker of (as it turns out) exceptionally infected piss to but your night-out friend, their eyes resolutely not on ecstasy, their work shirt grimly functional, and neither one of you quite knows what to do. "S–see you at Inferno's on Saturday?" But something has broken, something has changed. You can't do greasy tequilas with someone who has held a warm canister of your piss. You cannot watch someone twerk when you know they work for Waterstone's. "No," you think, getting a taxi home, judderingly sober. "Can't see them again."

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SEX FRIENDS (NUMBER THAT YOU HAVE IN YOUR LIFE: 1–2)

Sex friends are great because you get to have sex with them but they are also the worst because you're always too confused to know whether hand-holding or communal breakfast is weird. Can you link arms when you walk down the street, or is that like kissing a prostitute? Like, yes: the sex is explosive, orgasms glitter through your body like fireworks, but you don't really know if you're allowed to leave a toothbrush over so you have to brush your teeth with just a load of toothpaste and your finger. It's confusing, isn't it? On one hand: you're getting it, on the regs. You're getting so hellaciously nailed it's not even fun any more. On the other hand: cavities are bad. Maybe it's time you had a chat.

WATCH: Are your sex friends far away? You can still have sex with them, thanks to the digital love industry

MUSIC FRIENDS (NUMBER THAT YOU HAVE IN YOUR LIFE: 3)

"Do u want to go to gig," the text says. You get this text every six months, like clockwork. "Gig happening. Do u want to go." And so you say yes, to this friend, because you do want to go gig – it is Arcade Fire, or one of those bands you like, you know the ones – and then the long slow dance of logistics unfurl. "Got 2 x tickets, can u send me money." And you ask this friend how much money, and they always say "£75". Can you PayPal it to them? You cannot PayPal it to them, because it is the Year of Our Lord 2015 and somehow they have gone through life without buying anything on eBay. You phone the bank. You transfer the money. You do not see them for six months until the gig is actually happening.

I mean you have forgotten about the gig, is the thing. Because this friend is not a regular friend: this is a gig friend. You actually can't remember where you met this person and you can't imagine an opportunity to bump them from your friend roster, so they are there, on the periphery, swaying slowly in time with an Arcade Fire song. You wore a band T-shirt to the gig. They did not. You meet in a pub next to the venue beforehand and you both drink a pint in silence. "Seen any good gigs lately?" your gig friend asks you. You have to admit that you have not. They wince with empty disappointment. You do not read Pitchfork as often as they read Pitchfork. You do not read popular youth-centric music blog Noisey. Or Thump, which is also a website. "So what," your gig friend says, "what have you been up to?"

Over on popular youth-centric music blog Noisey: Which Top Lad Said It – Finchy from The Office, or Catfish and the Bottlemen?

Do you ever get this with someone so boring – someone so singularly focused, the kind of person who buys records in lieu of having a personality – do you ever get this with someone you have one, thin strand of shared reality with, that when they ask you a straight-up question like "What have you been up to for the last six months", you cannot answer it? Your brain frets at the edges. I mean come on, you had a pregnancy scare. You moved flat. You had both of your legs taken off at the knee in that motorcycle accident, remember. And you look at this person in front of you, and you go: Oh not much, really. They do not mention your tin legs. I mean, not much has been going on. All that rehab, all that physical therapy. All those agonising first steps on the frayed bones of your past. We should probably make a move to get in early, you know how those queues get. And you do, both queuing in silence, checking your respective phones, begrudgingly paying £8 a throw for a gig pint, dancing emotionlessly, walking home in a separate direction from your gig friend even though they live in the same direction, doubling back on yourself 25 minutes later when you are sure the coast is clear, just hoping to get away from them for six sweet little months until they text you again about Sad Boys.

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THE FRIEND WHO DOES NOT KNOW HOW ROUNDS WORK AT THE PUB EVEN THOUGH THE CONCEPT OF ROUNDS IS POSSIBLY THE MOST BASIC CONCEPT IN HUMAN EXISTENCE (NUMBER THAT YOU HAVE IN YOUR LIFE: 1)

"What?" they say, coming back from the bar with a single pint and change from a tenner. "What, you mean you two wanted one?" These men are always called "Shawn". Always. "Yes, Shawn," you say, pointing at your empty glass. "We obviously fucking wanted one." And he turns on his heels and rolls his eyes, making a "Well fine, if you're going to be like that about it, I guess I'll go back to the bar" motion with his arms – even though this is all his fault, even though this is one of the most basic social conventions he has fucked up by coming back with a pint of mild and a single packet of peanuts grasped between his teeth, like: even a monkey can buy a round – and secretly, in your head, in ink instead of pencil, you cross him firmly out of your top 150. When he comes back he does not share his peanuts.

THE ONE WHO CONFLATES GENUINE FRIENDSHIP WITH AN AIRBNB (NUMBER THAT YOU HAVE IN YOUR LIFE: 5)

"Hiya," the text says. "Going to be in [CITY WHERE YOU LIVE] for a few days. Can I crash with you?" And you are young and you are foolish and you have never been hurt before, and so you say: "Yes." You say: "Yes, that won't be inconvenient to me at all." Only there is something hardwired into the brain of people who do not pay for their accommodation that makes it so they need to take a 45-minute shower at scientifically the most inconvenient time for you possible. They say things like, "I ate all those Peperami out the fridge. They were for the house, right?" And you are like – you have taken a 90-minute bus journey from work, and you have had a bad day, and you have been rained on, and all you want and all you have been craving is a sweet, salty-hot chew on a Peperami when you get in, and you sprint to the fridge and find nothing – and you say something like, "No, that's fine." And then you go and make tea and your friend is like: "Oh, I made a lot of tea." There is a towering pile of teabags on your work surface, on the side. There is that tiny bit of milk in the milk bottle that people leave to try to distract you from the fact that they used all the milk. "I made, like, all the tea. Are we going out? Where are you taking me out?" And you think – quietly at first, but it gets louder – and you think: I am the only one who knows he is here. I could kill him right now with a knife and nobody would ever know.

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THE FRIENDS WHO ARE GOOD AT COOKING (NUMBER THAT YOU HAVE IN YOUR LIFE: 5)

Hey, take some advice from a wizened old man who is spinning like a top towards the yawning abyss of death: if one of your friends is good at cooking, never let them go. Never let them go. Because here's how you decide whether you like someone and want to hang out with them, at various different ages:

0–13: Your mum makes you be friends with them;
13–15: They are socially adept and they smoke cigarettes. You want to be friends with this person because you are a nerd;
15–18: They are socially adept and drink alcohol. You want to be friends with this person because you, too, like alcohol;
19–25: They know one or more person you want to have full sex with and there is a constant 40 percent chance that they are carrying some cocaine, and;
25+: Good at making pie.

My god and my christ, you do not know true joy until you've gone round to your mates' house and they have cooked you a pie. Do you know how much fucking hassle it is to cook a pie? You have to fold fat into flour with an icy cold spoon. You have to lovingly cook an entire casserole just for the filling. You have to roll stuff out and dust it and roll it again. You have to buy a special pie tin. You need to make cheesy mash. Has anyone ever made a pie for you? It's like an all-day event. And then they put a big slice down in front of you, and you go: Cheers, I guess. You drink all the wine you bought and go: What's the situation with the pie? Is there any more pie? After 45 minutes in their presence, you go: Welp, probably got to make my way home now. Got to do some damage to the toilet pan with this pie. Fact: Pie only tastes better in your mouth the more you age. If any of your friends offer to cook you anything – a roast, a pie, some fucking buns – hug them tightly and never let them go.

UNIVERSITY FRIENDS (NUMBER THAT YOU HAVE IN YOUR LIFE: 20 – 25)

"Do you remember the fun we had?" they say, over single pints of beer. "Yes," you reply. "I remember that one time we had fun." "Haha," they say. "Wow. Have you heard from [MUTUAL FRIEND] lately?" You have not. "How about [MUTUAL FRIEND]?" You have not. "Did you hear [MUTUAL FRIEND] had a baby?" You heard it but you didn't care. "Remember the fun we had?" You do not remember the fun. The fun is a distant memory now, dwindling down to a fine point. The fun of your past is earth and you are reversing through space past Venus. You have had more fun since and you will have more fun again and both instances of fun have entirely eclipsed your previous benchmark of fun. You do not need to go back and remember the bad haircut you had and all the rice you ate in halls. You do not need to remember that study abroad student who waved a big knife around when the washing up got too bad. That is something you want to actively unremember. And you feel yourself, floating distantly away, on a breeze in the night sky, away from your memories and away from your past, away from that night you bought two-for-£5 cocktail jugs and ended up falling over and splitting both your palms open in a piss-soaked men's urinal, crying – and you were crying, you were weeping – crying at your bloody, pissy hands, going "DO I HAVE AIDS, NOW?" screaming, "DO I HAVE PISS-AIDS?", holding on with a fragile bleeding human sadness to a trainee doctor whose name you cannot remember. You did not have piss-AIDS. And then that voice opposite you chimes in, tugging you back from the memory hole into which you were drifting: "God, we should go back there, for one weekend. Old time's sake." And you look at the wrinkles on their face and their decent adult haircut and the sad quiet note playing behind their eyes that says 'I still pass for 21, right? I still pass as young?' and you lean close and you whisper: no.

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THAT FRIEND WHO KEEPS MAKING PLANS WITH YOU AND THEN ALWAYS CANCELS THE PLANS AND YOU SORT OF WONDER HOW THEY GET ANYTHING DONE IN THEIR LIFE, LIKE HOW DO THEY HOLD DOWN A REGULAR JOB, LIKE WHAT ARE THEY DOING EVERY SINGLE ATOMIC SECOND OF EVERY DAY THAT MEANS THAT CAN'T GO FOR A PINT, I MEAN MY GOD, WHO BOOKS UP THEIR SOCIAL CALENDAR ANYTHING MORE THAN A WEEK IN ADVANCE (NUMBER THAT YOU HAVE IN YOUR LIFE: 2)

I mean come on Jesus Christ I am clearly #149 on your 150-strong friend list stop pretending you like me enough to spend a solid hour in my company.

FRIENDS YOU DON'T REALLY LIKE (NUMBER THAT YOU HAVE IN YOUR LIFE: 1–5)

You'll have these: one day, you'll realise, you've never been alone in a room with this person even though they've been there, at the edges of your vision, for years. You always see them at parties. Always smiling and leaning into group conversations. And then, one day, everyone goes outside to smoke or get drinks or go home, and it's just you two, in a room, and there is a lull in the music, and suddenly – and you didn't even know it – suddenly you don't like this person. Because you know nothing about them. And then you look into their eyes – deep, familiar, animal-like eyes – and you forget entirely how to make friends. It is too late to make friends. This is the sound you make: Euhhhhhh? They look at you. You look at them. You do not like each other, and yet you are friends. You have at least five of these, and you might have ten. If you don't have one: you are someone else's.

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RICH FRIENDS (NUMBER THAT YOU HAVE IN YOUR LIFE: 1)

Here are some things rich friends say: "No, fuck that, let's get a cab. I'm not fucking waiting for a fucking bus"; "God this Wetherspoons is like inhaling a warm bucket of turds, I'm taking us to a champagne bar"; [ SOUND OF SOMEONE INHALING SOME VERY EXPENSIVE COCAINE AND THEN OFFERING SOME TO YOU] "Ahh, gak." But sometimes they go missing for a really long time with one of those well-bred pedigree posh people who you will never, never have sex with, and you are milling around some posh person party where everyone is wearing £6,000 cream tuxedos and weird masks, and then a waiter comes up to you with a bill – the bill is served on a silver tray, is how expensive this is going to be – and you have to stand outside in the rain on the phone to NatWest asking to extend your overdraft so you can buy these three peach bellinis that somehow cost £130 while your rich friend is off somewhere having honking loud rich person sex on some pillows that cost more than your house.

PISSHEAD FRIEND (NUMBER THAT YOU HAVE IN YOUR LIFE: 1–2)

"OH WEY OH WEY," your pisshead mate is saying. You are balancing six pints across two hands. "OH WEY OH WEY, OH WEY OH WEY, OH WEY—" and then they pause, and look at you. "Feeling hot," you say. You're still holding the pints. "Feeling hot, hot, hot." They shout "WEYYYY!" again and flip the pints into your face. It's 20 minutes until you can get served again at the bar. Three separate people ask you if you've pissed yourself. "Do you really think," you say, "do you really think that I piss out six pints of urine at a time?" They stare at your clothing. "Do you really think I piss up as well as down? Do you really think I was moving my dick in a frenetic and pendulous north-to-south motion while I was taking that last piss just then?" When you get back to the table your mates have all been kicked out for smuggling in cans of Grolsch and not even pouring them into pint glasses before drinking them. Ah, pisshead mates: so much fun.

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FRIEND WHO CONSTANTLY HAS A BIG SET OF SHELVES THAT NEEDS MOVING, EITHER FROM ONE SIDE OF THE FLAT TO THE OTHER OR OUTSIDE ONTO THE CURB, OR IN RARE CASES, FROM THE HOUSE OF A GUMTREE SELLER TO THEIR OWN HOME, AND YOU APPARENTLY ARE THE ONLY PERSON PHYSICALLY CAPABLE OF HELPING THEM MOVE THESE SHELVES – THEY ARE SLIGHT, THIS FRIEND, SLIGHTLY BUILT AND ALONE – AND SO YOU FIND YOURSELF, ONCE EVERY HALF-YEAR OR SO, WITH THE CORNER OF A SET OF SHELVES IN YOUR FACE, PIVOTING AROUND A STAIRCASE, THINKING: HOW MANY FUCKING SETS OF SHELVES DOES ONE PERSON NEED TO HAVE? THINKING: GOD HOW MANY PILES OF HIGH-QUALITY PRINT MAGAZINES AND LITTLE CACTUSES IN SPECIAL PLANT POTS DOES ONE PERSON NEED, AND NEED TO STACK VERTICALLY? (NUMBER THAT YOU HAVE IN YOUR LIFE: 1)

A man and a van only costs £20-an-hour and doesn't require the flimsy pretext of friendship, Shelley.

SERIOUS CONVERSATIONS AT 5AM FRIENDS (NUMBER THAT YOU HAVE IN YOUR LIFE: 1–5)

For some reason there are some people who you end up outside in the smoking area of some house party with at 5AM, hunkered on a doorstep in that way that mums say gives you piles, and you both have your arms huddled around in front of your knees, and they go – they say something innocuous, like, "So, how's it going? Been ages since I've seen you" – and you suddenly break and get all serious – you go on and on about that leg accident you had, how you can't sleep any more without the revving of a motorcycle engine screaming in your ears, how you miss the way your feet feel in slippers – and they just quietly nod and say "ahuh" and "ahum", and then they go: Hey, mate, and give you a big weird one-armed hug, and you walk away – clinking, remember, on your robo-legs – you walk away as the sun rises in the east and the birds flock into the sky, and you go: Hold on. You go: I don't even know that fucker's name.

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Some of your friends will not like you

HARD FRIENDS (NUMBER THAT YOU HAVE IN YOUR LIFE: 1–3)

Hard friends, you think, are good: because look at you, right? It's a wonder you don't get beaten up more. You need hard friends for the next time someone lunges at you for your bad opinions, or the next time you misjudge the mood of a pub and legitimately say "totes". But truly hard friends have a certain soft fragility inside them, and before they die for your cause, you need to show them that they are actually your mate. Like, yes: they might be 80 percent ready to bottle someone at literally any given minute of the day, but you need to check in with them a minimum of once a week before they turn that misplaced, clumsy brutality on you. I once spent an hour of my life at a bar cornered by a 6'5" bloke I'd only otherwise met twice who was on the verge of tears because I hadn't accepted his Facebook request. Like, I think if I had said: "I hate you, mate. You look like a big prawn," he would have sobbed. Is it worth the protection having him around gives me? It is not. Do I have to deal with a lot of Farmville requests and angry updates about the parking situation outside ASDA ("How many fukin ppl what park disabled spaces? no?")? Yes I do. Life is about giving and taking, and hard mates are rarely worth the tug 'n' pull. Plus: way more likely to, for absolutely no reason, step on your head.

WORK FRIENDS (NUMBER THAT YOU HAVE IN YOUR LIFE: 10–15)

Thing with "work friends" – and I wouldn't know, because I work at VICE, and everyone keeps saying to me, "No, we don– we definitely don't hang around at the pub. No, we don't all sneak out when you've left and congregate together to laugh at you behind your back. Nobody is friends here, Joel. Go home." – but the thing with work friends is they are a grey-to-black spectrum that goes from "someone you nod at in corridors" through "person you're pretty sure you spoke to at the Christmas party and now have to make small talk with in the kitchen while waiting for the kettle to boil" to "people you actually think are alright". And it's tough, because there's always the doubt in your mind: Do I actually like this person?, your mind is saying, Or am I just really desperate for the warmth of human company, and also someone to go eat lunch with?. You just don't know. Are you friends? Or do you both just hate the same printer? You don't know. You'll never know. Work friends: the doubt that never goes away.

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Night! Out! Friends!

FRIENDS WHO ARE FRIENDS WITH YOUR BOYFRIEND OR YOUR GIRLFRIEND (NUMBER THAT YOU HAVE IN YOUR LIFE: 5–10)

The reason sports were invented is to give boyfriends something to talk about with the boy mates of their new girlfriends. That is all sports are. "So, what about that Rooney, eh?" every man in Britain has said at some point or another, staring at a screen mounted high in the corner of a busy pub, while a man slowly chewing gum and crossing his arms watches rapt at a Norwich game. "Yes," the other man will say. "Left peg." And then the new girlfriend will turn and say: I cannot believe how well you two are getting along! And then she will say: You two should be friends! And then, later, alone together and after the sex has happened, she will go: Kent wants you to be his best man and you are like Kent? and she is like Yes and you are like Fucking REALLY? and she is like Yes, he doesn't have any other friends, and then you realise you have been used: that you are not really in love, you have just been seduced into being this man's best friend because his girlfriend is best friends with your girlfriend, and you are stuck with him forever now, and in the best man's speech you start: "If there's one thing I know about Kent, it's that he likes football!" and then you just sit down again, and his dad shakes your hand and says it's the best speech he's ever seen and/or heard.

I mean, for girls it's different. All a girl needs to do to adhere herself to a group of boys is to quickly drink one beer and burp. They will all then cheer and someone called Lee will pronounce that she is an "honorary lad". He has a trophy. Does he always carry a trophy around with him? Does Lee constantly have a trophy on hand for these moments? The point is: Men are essentially chimps and drinking beer is their version of bum sniffing. But it's still a special ordeal new girlfriends have to go through.

The thing about the strata of friends who are friends with your boyfriend or your girlfriend is that they are changeable: when you dump or get dumped, you will lose 30 friends in an instant. They will ebb and they will flow. But there will always be a silent, gum-chewing man called Kent – the kind of man who "doesn't like texting" so just phones you when he's bored, as though phoning people on the phone isn't a sign of mania – and he will always be your friend, and he will never let you go, ever, and he will wait outside your house, and he will ask you what you are doing on Sunday, and he is always there, everywhere you pivot, everywhere you look, every day, forever.

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THAT FRIEND WHO THINKS THE GYM IS AN ACCEPTABLE PLACE TO HANG OUT (NUMBER THAT YOU HAVE IN YOUR LIFE: 1)

12:43:03: yo sup what up sup yo u wanna hang out today
12:43:47: yes good that sounds fun
12:43:48: yo ok cool meet at fitness 1st in like one minutes time?
12:43:59: what
12:44:00: yeah it's cool we will lift weight and talk in strained voices while we lift weights and I will run like literally 15 miles on a treadmill while you just sit on a rowing machine drinking one of those weird little triangular paper cups of water and panting like an exhausted dying dog
12:44:21: have you heard of pubs. have you heard of cafes.
12:44:22: yo I am outside your house already somehow! even though I live a 45 minute drive away! I am wearing a vest today
12:44:37: please
12:44:38: I bought you a protein shake! we are going to have some fun today while lifting things up and sweating!
12:44:48: please no

FRIENDS WHO KEEP FALLING OUT WITH YOU, MAINLY BECAUSE THEIR LIVES ARE QUITE BORING (NUMBER THAT YOU HAVE IN YOUR LIFE: 5)

You ever been in a social situation – a party, you know, a big fun meet up at a pub, hanging outside work while you wait for the fire alarm to stop going off – and you see someone you know from a distance and they give you a tight little smile and then turn to the person they are talking to like: no. You ever get that? Those people are mad at you. And they are always mad at you for some perceived slight, rather than a real reason. You forgot to wish them happy birthday on Facebook even though you said it in real life with your mouth, that sort of thing. You didn't invite them to something. You said their grandma is "an extremely old and smelly-ass old bitch" and that the biscuits she made were "exceptionally shitty". That sort of thing.

I have a theory, and it is five people I know are mad at me, constantly. The people who are mad at me change, but they switch in and out like K'Nex pieces: someone is mad, then their anger cools because it was never based on anything anyway, and then someone else gets mad. In and out, like a sewage pipe, a constant energy of anger. Turds flowing into the sea. That is my theory, and if you don't like it, you just became one of the five.

ALL YOUR OTHER FRIENDS (NUMBER THAT YOU HAVE IN YOUR LIFE: 14, CONVENIENTLY THE REMAINING NUMBER OF FRIENDS YOU NEED TO MAKE UP 150, AS IN LINE WITH THE MAJOR CONCEPT OF THIS ENTIRE LIST)

Oh, you know the ones. They do those things. You know. Those things you don't like. Dreadful, those ones. Ughhhh, right? The worst.

@joelgolby

More stuff from VICE:

Here's Every Type of Annoying Person You're Friends with On Facebook

How This British Generation Will Actually Grow Up

Here's What Happens to You Immediately After You Graduate University

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From Guidance. Photos courtesy Inside Out Toronto LGBT Film Festival

David Gold is a former child star and an alcoholic, broke, failed adult actor. When he's fired from his latest job doing self-help voice-over work, he cons his way into a gig as a guidance counsellor at Grusin High. He's an actor after all; he can do anything. He's also a closeted gay man. But in Guidance, Pat Mills' hilarious first feature, David's sexual identity isn't the sole focus of the film. It's not shied away from or ignored in any way—he's fired from the voice-over job because "female customers want the voice of a heterosexual man feeding them their affirmations"—but it's also just one aspect of his character.

"I wanted to make an anti-coming out film—that story that we're all so familiar with," Mills explains over the phone from Seattle, where Guidance was screening at the Seattle International Film Festival.

Mills describes Guidance as a film about a "weird guy who's kind of fucked up" who encourages teenagers (often with shots of vodka) to be themselves—even if that's not who society wants or expects them to be. And in doing so (but in none of the usual, cliched ways), he learns about himself. In that sense, then, Guidance, which is screening at the upcoming Inside Out Toronto LGBT Film Festival, is more of a coming-of-age than a coming out story.

And as Andrew Murphy, Director of Programming at Inside Out, explains, many queer films today are telling stories that aren't driven by characters' sexuality or gender identity.

"You're getting stories [where] LGBT people have just worked themselves into the narrative. There's stories where the person's sexuality, or however they identify, is just incidental," says Murphy. "It's more about telling a good story."

The Inside Out Toronto LGBT Film Festival launched in 1991, around the same time that the New Queer Cinema was emerging. Film critic B. Ruby Rich coined that term in 1992 to describe a wave of radical, energetic, and acclaimed films that eschewed "politically correct" or "polite" images of the queer community. (Todd Haynes' Poison, Gus Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho, and films by producer Christine Vachon are just a few examples.) Fresh out of the Reagan era and in the midst of the AIDS crisis, the New Queer Cinema was made in reaction to the political disenfranchisement, social ostracization, and stigma the LGBT community was facing.

"These movies were getting created because there was that sense of urgency and there was a need and an outcry to have their voices be heard on screen, because they just weren't seeing their stories reflected in the Hollywood fare that was out there. And so, I think, they started to push back and create these [films], [in] what became a movement of sorts," says Murphy.

Scott Ferguson, Executive Director of Inside Out, attended the first Inside/OUT Collective Toronto "Lesbian and Gay Film and Video Festival" in 1991. Back then, he says, "There wasn't any place for the community to gather together and access queer film."

One of the films he saw at that festival was Jennie Livingston's 1990 documentary Paris is Burning. "It was at the Euclid Theatre at the corner of College and Euclid, which is now a Starbucks with a condo on top of it. I remember getting there and climbing the staircase and entering just a big room that wasn't really a cinema and there were just fold-out chairs, and when the fold-out chairs were full, everybody sat on the floor," he recalls. "It was a totally different festival from what it is today."

Twenty-five years later, the festival calls the swanky TIFF Bell Lightbox home, features nearly 150 films from around the world, and draws tens of thousands to its screenings. And just as the festival has evolved, so have the films it screens. Whereas New Queer Cinema celebrated the outsider and marginalized communities, in the last few years, Murphy says, "post-gay" films have moved to the forefront.

"You have films where the LGBT story or the character, it's all part of—it's not a coming out story any more. Even if there is a coming out within that, the film isn't seen as a movie about coming out," he explains.

In many queer films today, sexuality and gender identity are reflected as just one aspect of a character's life. "It is not like, 'I work in the gay store, and have gay friends and I'm gay 24 hours a day,'" says Ferguson. Murphy adds that while those stories used to be celebrated within the queer community, "Now it's like, 'No, we're all part of a larger picture here.'"

Of course, for some, "coming out stories" are still vitally important and need to be told, say Murphy and Ferguson. Because, depending on who is telling these stories, or where they're from, coming out can still be an extremely dangerous decision. In North America, transgender women and queer people of colour face much higher rates of hate violence than the white queer community, for example. The latest National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs (NCAVP) annual report on hate violence against LGBTQ and HIV-affected communities in the US found that there were 18 anti-LGBTQ murders in 2013. Of these homicide victims, 89 percent were people of colour and 72 percent were transgender women. And in other countries around the world, queer filmmakers are still struggling for their rights. For example, the art collective behind Stories of Our Lives, a film from Kenya playing at this year's festival, has been prohibited from exhibiting, selling, or distributing their film in Kenya because of its queer content.

Overall, activism still plays an important role in queer cinema, but as many countries creep toward a more equal society, the issues in queer films are changing. "A lot of the same things that were prominent or important back then are still important today, it's just we've diversified in terms of what's being produced, how the stories are being told, how we're representing our selves and our identities and our lives, but within all that, activism [still] plays as big a part," says Ferguson. "You see just as many films about whatever issues are topical at the moment. In the States right now it's gay marriage. You see a lot of documentaries coming out about that. In other parts of the world it's about human rights struggles.

"Like any art, it's kind of a reaction to the time we're living in."

Many countries might be inching toward legislative equality too, but that in no way means all people are treated equally—and this is something queer cinema continues to highlight.

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In The Turn

Erica Tremblay's beautiful documentary In The Turn, which is also screening at Inside Out, tells the story of Crystal, a ten-year-old transgender girl living in northern Ontario who is not allowed to participate on sports teams because of her gender. While there are many devastating aspects to this story—by age five Crystal was voicing suicidal thoughts, she's bullied relentlessly at school—Tremblay focuses mainly on the positive effect that the Vagine Regime, a queer roller derby collective, has had on Crystal's life.

"I think that in LGBT film, we've seen and we've heard a lot of sad stories—and especially for trans individuals. I think it's kind of started to change when it comes to your lesbian story or your hetero-normative gay story, but in terms of trans cinema, I think we're all really used to seeing that story of someone really depressed in their mom's basement," she says. "I think those stories are super important to talk about because we have to talk about the sadness, but we were really hoping with our film to talk about some of the celebration as well."

Tremblay says that, as a cisgender queer person, she didn't see full representations of herself on screen when she was growing up. But, she adds, "certainly not to the extent that I think a lot of trans people don't see themselves represented in an accurate way in the media."

So she brought on several trans filmmakers and editors, and in doing research for the film and in conversations with trans colleagues and friends, Tremblay says she was overwhelmed with requests for her film to show everyday things like "going to the grocery store."

In one scene in the film, Fifi Nomenon, a member of the Vagine Regime, says, "There is a very boring life at the end of the rainbow."

"That strikes true to so many of us who are not represented in the world that we see outside of ourselves," says Tremblay. "We felt a really strong responsibility to show that side."

Many filmmakers today are working to bring more queer stories to audiences. And Netflix, Amazon, HBO, and even the occasional cable TV show are making strides in terms of representation on television. But, in mainstream Hollywood cinema, LGBT stories are still largely ignored. GLAAD's 2015 Studio Responsibility Index reportfound that, of the 114 films released by the seven major studios in 2014, only 20 (17.5 percent) had lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender characters. Furthermore, of those 20 films, ten contained fewer than five minutes of screen time for their LGBT characters.

Statistics like this prove why festivals like Inside Out are so vital—to the LGBT community seeking more of their stories on screen, and also to the broader community as a whole.

"Film is such an easily accessible medium for people and a populist medium for people and, again, you have that opportunity to, within a film, to both entertain somebody and to inform and educate and raise awareness," says Ferguson. "There aren't many things that are that accessible and have that ability. You can have a really light, easily digestible film, but it might introduce you to a trans-person or a trans character that you've had no real-life experience with."

Believe it or not, there are films out there that aren't about "some white guy with pecs in a superhero suit," as Mills says. While your local multiplex might not always reflect this, there are alternatives. But you have to look. Audiences still have to seek these stories out.

"I feel like all we can do as queer storytellers," says Tremblay, "is to keep telling our stories because they're gripping, and they're wonderful, and they're beautiful, and they are honest, and have soul and they are stories that need to be told."

The Inside Out Toronto LGBT Film Festival runs May 21 to 31 at the TIFF Bell Lightbox.

Scott and Andrew's top picks for the festival:

Andrew Murphy: Eisenstein in Guanajuato, Peter Greenaway; You're Killing Me, Jim Hansen; Monster Mash, Mark Pariselli.

Scott Ferguson: Butterfly, Marco Berger; The New Girlfriend, Francois Ozon; Guidance, Pat Mills.

Follow Regan Reid on Twitter.

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Walk around Cannes during the film festival and you'll encounter a strange mix of creatures. The legitimately super wealthy, those who bathe in Moët and holiday in big game hunting reserves; the wannabe wealthy, who split their rented Ferraris over two credit cards and minesweep leftover martinis; and the chancers, who stand outside screenings with handmade cardboard signs, constantly on the prowl for premiere tickets, slamming into the free bar any opportunity. These are our people.

We had a chat with a few of them to pick up some tricks of the trade. For example, here's how—on the off-chance you have two spare weeks to pack everything in and hustle your way into Cannes—you get into an after party where you can stand near Salma Hayek for a bit: lock a chair to some railings near some high-traffic red carpet events, wear a suit or ball gown in the warm Cannes heat, and write on an envelope in French that you'd take any spare invites. Surprisingly, this occasionally works.

Here's what else we learned from some of Cannes's chancers.

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VICE: Hi. Where are you from?
Guy in horse's head: I'm originally from Peru, but I grew up in San Francisco.

How long have you been here trying to get a ticket for?
I just got here ten minutes ago.

Have you been out most nights doing this?
No, I'm here for Sicario, and this is the only movie I really, really want to watch, and I'm wiling to wear this for it.

Who are you wearing tonight?
JC Penny.

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Where have you traveled from?
Marilyn: The States. I'm out here with a student project that brings student filmmakers to Cannes.

How are you enjoying the festival?
It's really great—I just watch movies all day and then go to the parties, sleep two hours and then go to more movies the next day. It's a totally unsustainable lifestyle but it's really fun for two weeks.

What good parties have you been to?
I went to the after-party for Tale of Tales [Italian fantasy film by Matteo Garrone starring Vincent Cassell, Salma Hayek, and John C. Reilly] and everyone was about 15 years older than me, but it was an open bar, so it was still fun.

Did you bump into anyone interesting?
I was right next to Salma Hayek for a while, and we got a photo taken with the ogre [Guillaume Delaunay] from the film, but that was about it.

Have you been out here every night hunting for premiere tickets and holding up your sign?
Yeah. Sometimes you get tickets through a lottery, but not very often. And even if I don't do this then I would still have to wait in line for other movies, so I've found that this is better and quicker than waiting in line. When I first started doing it I felt too proud and I was uncomfortable, but I just do it every day now so it's fine.

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Where you from?
Both: Cannes.

How long have you been here?
We first put our things here over a week ago, a day before the festival began, and we've been here today since midday.

You've been coming down every day since last week?
Yes.

What attracts you to this whole event?
It's everything. For sure the celebrities because we are fan girls and we have a blog and we share everything we see and we feel for our friends who can't be here.

OK. Do you have to take time off work to come and sit here all day long for nearly two weeks?
We are students and we're on vacation, so it's our way of taking a vacation.

Cool. What's the most interesting thing you've seen so far?
We saw our favorite French actor, which was great, and also Colin Farrell—he was such a cutie.

How early do some of the other guys who chain their chairs to the railings get here?
The people right in the centre will start putting their things there two weeks before the festival—they sleep here. We just came the day before because we didn't have the time or energy.

Any other celebrities you're very keen to see?
Oh yeah, Michael Fassbender and James Franco!

Follow Daniel on Twitter.

Scroll down for more photos from Cannes.

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Photos by the author

The most humans I've ever seen having sex at one time numbers somewhere between six and nine. Once you get enough flesh capsules and mush them up on one vinyl couch, things get confusing, and the memory passages connecting to the time when you learned to count become difficult to access. It's Monday night on Victoria Day weekend at Oasis Aqua Lounge, Toronto's upscale, water-based sex club, and I'm feeling overdressed while sipping bourbon and creeping the tangle of bodies in the next room with detachment.

It's my friend's friend's Uncomfortable Birthday Party, and all weekend I've been helping my pal pick out his costume, from the dress to the clutch, for the little bathhouse rave that could—partially because I'm a great friend, a little because I was flattered to be considered feminine/stylish enough for the task, and mostly because I love birthdays almost as much as I love dedication. And this dude—who is straight, never having ventured into drag beyond letting girls paint his nails once in a while—was nothing if not dedicated.

On Saturday at Value Village, after witnessing a spectacular ditch-bra-from-shopping-basket move that I hope was as funny to any staff who saw it as it was to me, I browsed sunglasses and jewelry while photo texts came in from the changing room. "Too Monty Python" I replied, or, to the winning faux-velvet leopard-print minidress you had when the Spice Girls were a thing, "hott, like John Waters trashy" (we were clearly going basic). Then there were the long-winded explanations about not wanting to look like his mother at the party.

"I'll come by for ten minutes. Maybe. Later." That was what I'd been saying until the budding debutant came over Monday evening to have his makeup done, complaining that most of his friends had bailed on the sex club soiree. He's carrying a long blonde wig my exact hair colour—the ash white blonde it took me five years of home bleaching experimentation to achieve—and size 13 red stilettos that he bought at a specialty store on Yonge. With the help of some friends, he'd already learned to walk competently in the shoes, which was shocking and seemed unfair—it took me years to master a four- or five-inch heel.

"You have to come with us. We need a girl in the posse. You're our ticket to get in."

I knew this wasn't true—all cisgender men had to do to get into the party was pay $20, never mind the fact that the "posse" as it stood was to be three guys in drag, two of whom formed a loving couple, and the other looked Divine enough to compensate for his unfortunate heterosexuality. What I'm actually being asked to provide is moral support—more moral support, on top of shopping for a drag ensemble with a straight guy raised in a small town. I relent. My pal keeps pouring me drinks while I trim the synthetic bangs on his new wig, give fishnet advice, and dig out a pair of falsies. "These are going to hurt like a mother coming off," I schadenfreude as I finish gluing on the last lash onto his expansive eyelid and begin lining them with black.

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The guy who's birthday it is runs a dungeon in a former coffin factory's basement in Toronto's west end, but we're going to be partying at the place of his regular employment tonight: a multi-floor "upscale adult playground" with a heated pool and a reputation for being kind of unfun. The night, heralded as "An Uncomfortable Birthday Party," is an attempt to "queer up the fucking place to an uncomfortable level."

To enter Oasis, we have to sign up to become members, which appears to be how the club navigates the legalities of running a sex club. Glad to have a guide, I type my name, birthdate, and gender on the screen while the shirtless door guy goes over the club rules: no means no, no touching without permission, no judgement, no sex in the pool. The membership signup doubles as a waiver where I agree that I won't be offended by nudity or live sex acts. It's all pretty professional.

Inside, the club smells innocently poolside-like (chlorine masks all other disinfectants), and though passageways lead in various mysterious ways, the bar is directly to the left of the front entrance, anticipating the anxiety of newbies. Drinks in hand, we meander from the small, sparse dance floor through the locker room past the hot tub to the poolside, and immediately back to the dance floor. I've already seen nearly two dozen people naked, or wearing only towels, which is pretty much how the rest of the night goes. Most naked guests appear not uncomfortable, but at ease—here not to rave, but to fuck. It's a holiday Monday at Oasis.

At the tiny, porn-vid-adorned DJ booth, Sebastian V-c and Peg Zilla redeem the club's foreseeable audio shortcomings with internet-wave house music, and dancing around a barren stripper pole with my misfit posse, a few other queens who showed, and sometimes a one girl in a bikini or another, I begin to feel oddly relaxed, finding myself in a rare place in Toronto: a place where people can come to be silly, or at least a place where I can be. An older guy wearing a towel who's been trying to make eye contact for a while finally asks me to "join him," and I grin and say, "No thanks." He disappears back into the steam. Guided by the club's strict policies, it's one of the least intrusive sexual advances I've ever fielded.

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This isn't my first trip to a bathhouse or a bathhouse rave—the first was an all-night rager at Berlin's Kit Kat Club. Aside from the presence of the pool, the party inside Oasis is pretty much the opposite of that massive Euro bash: it's intimate and slow-moving; a lot of guests bailed or opted out. When the birthday guy finally makes an appearance downstairs, naked except for a leather jacket, we all sing, and there's cake. His girlfriend tells my pal that his drag is "passable," and I thank her.

When the subject of exploring other floors is broached I'm eager to see what there is to see. Climbing the metal stairs by the poolside, I realize that my impossibly tall friend has been wearing five inch heels since we left my apartment, and I commend him on the accomplishment, and advise him to walk toe first on the stairs. My stilettos are just as tall, but, like, he's a dude. I'm the best big sister I never had.

Single men aren't allowed alone on the floors upstairs, where it's women and couples only (Oasis actually has a pretty complicated pricing/accessibility chart), where the scene is a little more than what I was prepared for. The lighting is bright, which I assume is a safety thing, and the air is punctuated by female moans. Some naked guys and girls are hanging out and chatting in the hallway at the mouth of the stairs, while immediately in the next room a mass of bodies are piled on a large vinyl couch, moving lazily as a homogeneous blob that I immediately feel I'm not supposed to look at, though the aim of engaging in an orgy in a well lit open space is clearly not privacy. I duck through the room quickly, unsure whether to stare a lot or stare a little.

Across the way, another massive vinyl couch is empty, as is the fully stocked, and cheerily lit, dungeon and the "Shaggin Waggon" (a bed and pillows inside a van adorned with hippy stickers that seems completely out of place but is commendably campy), but in the second bar room a girl is moving upside-down on the stripper pole before the (90 percent curtained) street facing windows while a (90 percent naked) crowd watches and mingles. She's clearly just goofing around and the mood is ultra chill, until I realize there are tiny windows on the wall offering views through one-way mirrors to the couple fucking in the next room. Again, they seem enticingly intimate, shrouded in warm light and red fabric, but ultimately lazy, barely moving at all. No wonder mainstream porn is so silly: (hopefully) pleasurable public sex appears to be the drone music of physical activity. For a moment, I'm the kid at the zoo who expects the animals to be chasing each other and leaping from tree to tree and instead finds them de-licing each others' backs.

I realize I'm far beyond voyeur here: I'm a sex tourist—um, not in the phrase's contemporary definition, but in a much more traditional and, uh, pure way—due to random and untraceable paths of fate, the physical act of sex is one of the least interesting subjects in the world to me. At Oasis, sexual dynamics intrigue me: older dudes wearing towels struggling to make eye contact with women from the bar or poolside over their drinks; a female costume giving my straight, male friend a passport to a world he otherwise would have needed a woman to enter; how, in a space where nakedness is standard, nudity becomes both an equalizer and a divider as clothing is lost as a signifier of possible identity (a no judgment clause is impossible to enforce); or, personally, what is up with my total detachment. Then there is the club's existence at all. Oasis is a type of religiously disinfected, safe space for sex as an interest, hobby, and/or lifestyle to dwell within that I will never truly comprehend or immerse myself in (literally—pool water or otherwise).

I'll never forget the Pasolini-esque sight of at least a half dozen people having sex with each other; I'll never forget feeling the sensations of boredom and mild repulsion in a forward-ish thinking sex club and of wondering what the opposite reaction would be like. The difference between peering in to another world and actually being of that world has rarely been so encapsulated to me.

So, to anyone who opens up the possible/probable uncomfortable corners of their lives to strangers and tourists: thank you, and happy birthday.

Follow Kristel Jax on Twitter.

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Mike Bonifer teaches an improv workshop in Los Angeles. All photos by the author

Dressed-down CEO Clint Schaff and his team stood in a circle chanting "bunny bunny." They giggled, self-consciously, while another man, corporate consultant Mike Bonifer, told them to pay attention to one another. "Look into one another's eyes," he said between the chants.

This giggling circle was comprised of employees from DARE, theLA-based advertising agency, which calls blue-chip mega-corporations like Procter & Gamble a client. They're theoretically supposed to let loose, be unusual in the hunt for trends. But what they're not supposed to do is look stupid, which is exactly how they appeared at the moment.

Later, they were asked to "invoke" their own company. They proffered some dull adjectives—"alien, unexpected, quixotic, vibrant, youthful, hip, bold, authentic"—the usual buzzwords. Then they blew it out into the abstract. Parkour, freedom, "no choice but bold," Bonifer called out. They'd improvised their way into a slogan fit for an advertising agency. They looked pleased. Bonifer was an effective corporate consultant.

Bonifer didn't invent these exercises out of whole cloth. He's an improv teacher, and he's been leading the advertising execs in the classic improv warm-up games. First, bunny bunny. And then invocation, wherein an object is, in turn, described, personified, exalted, then deified, to explore its various facets and popular interpretations. It can be done with anything: a comb, a shoe, or in this case, an advertising collective in Southern California's Silicon Beach tech hub.

Traditionally, invocation picks apart the mundane to find answers to the universal question, "what is true?" But in seminars like Bonifer's—which have increasingly gained in popularity in modern corporate strategizing—instead of finding some kind of truth in the human condition, invocation is used to find an answer to a business's universal question, one Bonifer states explicitly: "What's most likely to return an investment?"

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Improv has long been a classic art form, in that the career end game for practitioners has usually been teaching classes in that art form. To be sure, scores of improvisers have found fame in ancillary showbiz professions—writing, acting, directing. But from when educator Viola Spolin devised the first modern improvisation games in the 1920s, to the current highly developed long-form UCB/Second City/iO renaissance, making a living with improv has always been a tough go.

However, improv has steadily gained in popularity, especially among millennials. And even if they move out of comedy and into white-collar work, they carry with them the cognitive and organizational techniques of improvisation.

Chris Sams, a Bay Area improvisers who's been teaching corporations to "yes-and" since 2004 (he counts Google, Facebook, Cisco, eBay, and Dropbox as clients), cites the millennial-stacked tech industry as leading the charge. "I've found that the more a leader within the organization has done improv before, the more likely a company or division within the company is likely to embrace improv." As millennials age into higher and higher position of power, improv theory will continue to shape corporate thinking.

Improv is getting to be less of a hard sell to the Fortune 500. Considering over 10,000 people will take an improv class this year (with the vast majority being under 30), the odds are getting better and better that a future CEO will have done their time in the improv trenches.

By selling improv theory to big business, Bonifer and his corporate consultant peers have found another option for ardent improv practitioners, and a very lucrative one at that. With consulting, improvisers can make a mint performing the art they love.

Well, sort of. As Bonifer asserted at the seminar, improvisational consulting is about using the lessons of improv—listening, world-building, being selfless—to get everyone on the team on the same page. But then, to use that to build a brand narrative, and ultimately make sure that, in his words, "brands and customers' stories connect."

It's a popular idea in advertising. As Forbes asserted back in 2013, "Stories are the perfect catalyst to building brand loyalty and brand value."

After word association spitballing, Bonifer asked the ad team a classic question: What purpose do stories serve? While an advertising agency's answer to that question should always be "to sell a product," they were speaking as people. So they offered other answers: "story teaches," "story explains," "story explores." Bonifer offered his own definition: Stories give context to information, and stories help make sense of the world.

Turning a slide on the PowerPoint, Bonifer pointed at a picture of Shrek. "Without story, Shrek is just data," he said.

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Mike Bonifer of DARE

Mike Bonifer's career is an unusual one. In 1982, Bonifer was responsible for co-writing the wonderfully bizarre Disney short film Computers are People Too! After leaving, he went into the tech world, and saw how high-level players assembled their own brand narratives.

Around 2000, he started taking improv classes around LA. Coincidentally, this was when improv first made its inroads into the corporate world, mainly with its classic teamwork-building exercises. By 2012 Duke, UCLA, MIT, and Stanford's business schools were all offering improv classes.

Bonifer said to sell corporate America improv, they had to rebrand. "We call it 'improvisation,' not improv," Bonifer told me. "They don't want to be painted with the comedy brush. Like, 'Oh, they're bringing the clowns in over there at advertising. They're doing comedy.'"

Want to see VICE editor Harry Cheadle attempt stand-up comedy? Of course you do.

Bonifer told me that improvisation skills start influencing business by rewiring how they approach risk. Not throwing everything against the wall, but finding a methodology.

"'Structured vulnerability' is what we call it," he explained. "No businessman in his right mind is just going to wing it. I believe in structure. It gives you the parameters of play."

The term "play" especially is telling. It's lifted straight from Improv 101. But in this sense, it's not "play" in the joyous sense. It's play in service of a point.

"The point is there are numbers that people have to hit," Bonifer said. "The CEO has promised Wall Street. The head of sales have promised the CEO. And those numbers are the lifeblood of the organization. The point is it's not the only thing that's going to happen. The growth doesn't come from successive linear objectives, but all the other opportunities that crop up along the way. Improvisation allows for serendipity."

Improvisation, in this sense, takes all the tenets of modern improv and places them into the corporate world with new language. One framework on another. Improvisers become businessmen, the relationship becomes the deal, and play becomes the profit motive. And as the popularity of branded content has proven time and time again, story unites the two.

After a round of tried-and-true improv exercise like zip-zap-zop, Bonifer told us another story about brands using improvisation for serendipity. When the Chilean miner disaster of 2010 happened, Oakley improvised. They supplied every miner with special sunglasses that, upon exiting the mine, would help the miners adjust to outside light. Every single Chilean miner came out of the mine in Oakleys. From the stunt, the brand netted $41 million in "earned media." For Oakley, that's a damn good story.

Bonifer saw a bigger picture than using improv exercises to get executives to "yes/and" each other. Improvisation could influence a company's entire identity. In the case of an advertising firm, it could influence how effectively they tell stories, and thus how deeply imbedded into the public consciousness those stories could be.

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Bonifer asked the group to start thinking about where stories originate. For a brand, it starts at the data, or "big data," to use the fashionable term for the vast terabyte sea of information marketing companies have on the public. Call it a suggestion from the audience.

Actually, that's exactly what Bonifer calls big data. In his book GameChangers, he explains: "The suggestions you get—in the form of market research and other types of feedback—become the basis for building your market and your brand." And thus, your brand's stories.

Bonifer is teaching corporations that preconceived goals are out. What's in is the process of creation—and it starts with an invocation grown from that audience suggestion, without a stated, linear, "on message" end point. "Get out of repetitive storytelling and into co-creation with the market, co-creation with customers" Bonifer said.

The Bay Area improv consultant Sams echoed this sentiment. "The brand is not just how we want it to be perceived; it is jointly constructed by how our audience interprets it based on their own experiences. This conversation takes place in large part on social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.), though it's not limited to that realm. I guess the lesson here is that companies need to get better at being co-creators of their brand, learning how and when to share control (the dance of both taking and ceding control) in order to create a richer, inclusive, and personally-relevant story."

How will this type of thinking influence thinking on advertising? Consider the brand stories of yesteryear. Joe Camel was one-dimensional—he was cool. The next Joe Camel will be more Shrek-like, more complex. A flawed character: surprising, sometimes infuriating, human. An endearing brand everyone can root for.

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Near the end of the seminar, Bonifer tells the advertising execs a story about a story. There was a society who had buried toxic waste in a series of containers. Problem was, the containers would break down in 10,000 years and the waste would seep into the ground, poisoning it. The society struggled to figure out how to transmit the warning to the future. What if, in ten millennia, language changes? How would they warn their descendants?

They devised a way to pass the information down: They would breed a blue dog to put near the site, and they would create stories that the blue dogs symbolized "danger." And the story of the dangerous blue dogs would outlast them all.

Maybe through improv, brands can let go enough and get creative enough to do the same. Create branded stories that outlast entire civilizations. Maybe 10,000 years from now, long after the brand is dead, people will be inspired by great stories to buy old bottles of Coke, and they won't even know why.

Thumbnail photo by Flickr user Improv Boston.

Follow Jacob Harper on Twitter.

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Leg shaving: something feminists still hate, apparently. Image via YouTube.

Feminism has been judgy over the years. We can probably all agree on that. For a long time, entering into any kind of discourse about what being a feminist really means has felt a bit like a Tough Mudder course—take a "wrong" turn, and you'll end up face-down in the dirt, surrounded by people hell-bent on setting you "right"—either for your own good, or so you don't get in their way.

Only, there has been a shift. Again, we can probably agree on that. With people like Roxane Gay and her brilliant Bad Feminist manifesto now out there, spreading the "do what you want, we've all got the same goal here" gospel, we—I—no longer believe there is a right or wrong way to be a feminist. If you believe in social and political equality, you sort of just... are.

In 2015, you'd like to believe that the F-word has been beckoned from its ivory tower and flattened, steamrolled like tarmac so everyone and anyone can walk on it. You're pretty much buzzing to not have to talk about hair removal, skinniness, men, and the color pink in the same conversations about equality all that often. You'd like to believe the hairy, plaid-wearing dyke caricature of feminism had collapsed and been carted off to the morgue.

But has it?

According to a new book out today by Times writer Polly Vernon, maybe not. Hot Feminist is, its foreword says, an "eight-chapter trip through feminism, fashion, the righteous pursuit of a sexy vibe, and what it means to be a woman when you're on the receiving end of modern media's hilariously/bizarrely/insanely contradictory/restrictive/reductive/sometimes just straightforwardly revolting notions of ladyhood, delivered from the hopelessly biased, grudge-inclined, wayward, party-line-eschewing, gratuitously naughty perspective of Britain's most provocative columnists."

Phew. Vernon and her friends have a problem with modern feminism, see. Crippled with guilt, they are, whenever they part their legs for a bikini waxer or tuck into a nice Caesar salad ("feminists don't eat salad"). "Feminism is increasingly defined by what you can't do, shouldn't say," Vernon writes, before basing her entire thesis on an exhaustive list of negatives, on things she's not offended by, including: wolf-whistling, being called "babe" by a boss, women being photoshopped in magazines, all-male panels on TV shows, and bitchy media headlines about what female politicians are wearing in public.

"Hot Feminist," as a title, sounds quite hot. It does. The "righteous pursuit of a sexy vibe" sounds like it should be purred with an arched eyebrow over dinner-party-volume David Guetta and a naughty bottle of Mr. Grigio. It's nice. But the book's "revolutionary" roar is so silent it's deafening.

Why? Because these things just haven't been at the forefront of feminist debate in years. No one gives a shit.

Today, positioning a book about feminism within the confines of stereotypes your old dad might have once held feels baffling. Literally no one— no one—says you can't shave your legs, have bald a labia, be thin, diet sometimes or—Jesus fucking Christ—"fancy men" and not be a feminist any more. Where are those conversations happening? Who is having those arguments?

Related: 'Why Is the British Government Taxing Periods?'

Feminism has, as others have pointed out, never really been about making women feel good or getting behind every single thing they do between waking up and going to sleep. There are no hidden networks of CCTV cameras spying on our salad eating; there is no plain-clothes policeman ready to peer up our skirts and say, "Oh, you shit! You've done it again! That's another six points on your feminist license!!!!" every time we decide to remove some pubic hair.

It all reminds me a bit of "Squeeze," an episode of The X Files that scared me shitless as a teenager and revolved around a very nasty person crawling through ventilation shafts and spying on Scully in the shower. Yes, Hot Feminist isn't talking about mutant serial killers, but its undertone speaks of—warns of, even—a pernicious kind of surveillance that isn't really there. Except, perhaps, in the author's head.

"What kind of feminist am I now?" Vernon asks. "The shavy-leggy, fashion-fixated, wrinkle-averse, weight-conscious kind of feminist. The kind who, at 43, likes hot pink and men." This would be such a great message if the word "feminist" was simply replaced by "woman."

If the book were positioned as a woman wondering if she should remove all the color and lust from her life as she moves through her 40s, it would be quite powerful. But it's not. It's framed around feminism, a social and political movement for equality. It's telling us that caring about being hot and thin and flirting with hot men is a revolutionary political statement.

Vernon's overwhelming message is that it's not worth getting angry about being sexy, or, as the foreword continues, having an "ongoing pursuit of hotness." She's right when she says we're "flesh creatures" and are therefore "dealing with an inside/outside continuum situation where existence is concerned; one informs the other, they're on a loop" and that "pretending anything else is just unmitigated bat shit." Of course it's bat shit. But being image-conscious is not written anywhere as a Deadly Sin of Feminism. And when Vernon says she's saving her rage for "real" issues like rape, abortion, and wage inequality, is it not a dangerous message, in a highly-publicized book aimed at other women, to remove the link between the issues she thinks are silly and those that are "important"?

The soft, airbrushed hips of women in magazines might not piss everyone off, but those hyper-real images are—whether we like it or not—presenting women as some sort of uniform creature. A herd of peach pixels. They're part of a wider culture that positions women as pleasure objects and ignoring that is, to borrow Vernon's words, bat shit. If female politicians are far more likely than their male counterparts to push pro-choice politics to the fore, do we really want them overwhelmingly judged on their skirts throughout the media? Do we really not care about how women are—or are not—represented on political television panels? Do millions and millions of people across the world not watch television?

So often we're led to believe that any discussion about feminism and inequality is a good one, that any debate is a good debate, and that might be true. But it all feels quite exhausting and, increasingly, like semantics are spoiling the good conversations. They're whittling things down into tinier and tinier boxes until, one day, there'll just be individuals with their own "movements."

More plainly, though: how, in 2015, did we get to the point where we're once again talking about lettuce and feminism in the same breath?

Follow Eleanor on Twitter.

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Damien Echols awaits trial, 1993. Photo by Joe Berlinger. From 'Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills.' All rights reserved.

If you're familiar with the case of the West Memphis Three, you'll be aware that attempting to condense the complexity, length, and injustice of it all into a few paragraphs is near impossible. If you're unfamiliar with it, then watching the excellent Paradise Lost trilogy of documentaries—as well as Amy Berg's equally fantastic West of Memphis—serves as a good introduction to this astonishing story.

In short, the West Memphis Three are Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie Misskelley, Jr. They were three boys from West Memphis, Arkansas, aged between 16 and 18, who in 1993 were arrested and convicted for the murder and sexual mutilation of three eight-year-old boys—Steve Branch, Michael Moore, and Christopher Byers. Due to the apparent acts of mutilation it was accused that what had taken place was in fact a satanic ritual—human sacrifices. The pressure on the police to solve the heinous crime was huge, which, combined with the town having a history of supposed witchcraft and satanic practices, left a community shattered and in terrifying fear. Echols, Misskelley, and Baldwin were picked up as they were known friends and were into what a lot of alienated teenagers were into: heavy metal, wearing black, being left alone, and doing their own thing.

Misskelley had profound learning disabilities and was interrogated, almost entirely off-record, for what varying reports put between two to 12 hours. After that period he gave what the lawyers for the defendants claimed to be a coerced confession on tape. An expert witness was called to make the case that the confession was forced, but was unable to present all of his prepared testimony. Echols was painted as the ringleader and, when convicted, was sentenced to death, with the other two receiving variations on life sentences. There was no physical evidence, and beyond Misskelley's allegedly coerced—and, in many places, factually inaccurate—confession, there was nothing to justify their convictions bar a "they look the type" mentality.

What came next was 18-plus years of incarceration as they fought to prove their innocence. They were finally released in 2011, but as they were waiting to introduce new exonerating DNA evidence to a Federal Court Appeal (something that could have taken years; years they didn't have, as Echols's execution was getting ever closer) they were offered a very rare form of plea know as an Alford Plea. An Alford Plea is a guilty plea of a defendant who proclaims he is innocent of the crime but admits that the prosecution has enough evidence to prove that he is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Essentially, it meant that the three were allowed to be released based on time served, but were, in the eyes of the law, still guilty. This is problematic for numerous reasons, not least in the fact that after two decades on, most of it spent on death row, Echols is still classified as a guilty man (he cannot legally contest the case or sue the state). But it also covers up all the injustice that led to this situation in the first place.

It's a horrendous case, and the above really is only a snapshot of the horror of it all. However, Damien Echols is now free, happy, and in love. In fact, he's been the latter for quite some time. He met his wife, Lorri Davis, after she started writing to him after seeing Paradise Lost. A new paperback book, Yours for Eternity (due out on May 26 through Penguin Random House), is a collection of their letters throughout the prison years. I spoke with Damien about the letters and the case.

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From left to right: director Bruce Sinofsky, Damien Echols, director Joe Berlinger, 2009, during the filming of 'Purgatory: Paradise Lost 3.' Photo by Bob Richman, courtesy of Joe Berlinger. All rights reserved.

VICE: What was it like rereading the letters and reliving those memories?
Damien Echols: Honestly, it was painful. The only thing I can compare it to is if... imagine that today you found a journal that you had written when you were 14 or 15 and started reading it, and had to see how much you had changed and grown as a person, and look back on them. It's kind of embarrassing.

In some letters from 1996 you express a real sense of optimism about getting released after the screening of Paradise Lost. What are your memories of that period and the impact of the film?
I started to feel like they weren't going to be able to get away with this because so many eyes were watching what they were doing—that they weren't going to be able to carry this out in secrecy and sweep it under the rug. So that was part of where that [optimism] came from, but part of it also came from just being young and naïve. When you're that young you don't have that much experience of the system, and pretty much everything you've been taught about the justice system comes from TV and movies: innocent until proven guilty; the good guy always wins; the truth always comes out. You've been fed this lie your whole life until you really believe it, so I think part of me was just still young and naïve and had been brought up on that mental diet of optimistic crap, and the other part of me was just seeing the results of Paradise Lost when it was having an effect on the world.

Related: Watch our film 'Young Reoffenders,' about a group of young men from Oxford who are trapped in a cycle of crime and self-abuse.

And I suppose, with always maintaining your innocence, you must have just presumed that it was only a matter of time until everyone else was on your side?
Yeah. While I was going through the trial I was just thinking, Surely this is going to come out OK. Surely, at any minute, somebody is going to fix this. I was thinking that these are adults I'm dealing with—surely one of them has enough intelligence to realize what's been going on here, to put a stop to it. And you keep thinking that all the way up until the point when they come back into the room and say, "We're going to kill you."

Your original execution date would have actually been yesterday, wouldn't it?
Yeah, that's right. I was sentenced on May 5, 1994. If they would have had their way, I would have been dead yesterday. It was a weird thing, because one of the directors of Paradise Lost, Bruce Sinofsky, passed away, and I was speaking at his memorial yesterday and it had me thinking just how big an impact he had had on my entire life in general, and how I would have been dead 21 years to that date yesterday if it were not for the ball that he set rolling.

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Damien Echols on Arkansas Death Row, 2009, during the filming of 'Purgatory: Paradise Lost 3.' Photo by Bob Richman courtesy of Joe Berlinger. All rights reserved.

I read a quote of yours that said, "Studies say that one out of every ten people executed by the US is innocent. If one out of ten planes crashed, would you have faith in airlines?" Now, if one in ten are innocent, the percentage of those people who get documentaries made on them, receive celebrity support, public funding, etc., must be even smaller. What was it about you and your case that drew people to make a film about it if there are so many other cases of injustice out there?
Actually, when [filmmakers Bruce and Joel] initially started this project they heard about it via an article in the New York Times from someone who worked at HBO, and they said, "There's this case down in Arkansas and it's really interesting—it's about kids killing kids, and there's all this weird satanism and human sacrifice involved. We want you to go down and film this trial because this is going to be horrible but interesting." So when they arrived in Arkansas they presumed it was an open and shut case, that we were guilty and they were just coming to film the trial of these three guilty kids who had killed three other kids. Then, when they got here, they realized, Oh, this isn't what's going on here at all. So what drew them to us was the sensationalism of it all; everything the prosecutor said—orgies, human sacrifice, devil worship—because that was the only way they could convict because there was no physical evidence against us whatsoever. It was garbage like that, and that's what they used to scare people and to convict us, but in the end it was also what their undoing was because people were like, "Wait a minute, these are some outrageous stories, so we want to see what is going on here." It was the very same thing that they tried to murder us with that blew up in their faces.

In one of the documentaries you say that you feel like you would have just been executed in secret if it were not for the public and media interest in the case. Do you still feel this way now?
Absolutely, 100 percent. I don't think all the people who were involved in the case could be that incompetent and all believe they could be doing the right thing. I believe 100 percent with all my heart that they knew we were innocent and they just didn't care. They knew they had to make this go away and they figured we were an easy target. This would take away the problem and they could use it to move up the political ladder, and nobody would have to think about it ever again. I honestly believe the only reason why I'm not dead today is because people started watching what they were doing, and that's all they cared about. In the US the justice system is based on politics: All the prosecutors and judges and attorney generals, they are elected officials. They know that if they come out and have to admit they can't solve a crime or that they sentenced an innocent person to death, they know their political career is over. So they would rather kill me and sweep it under the rug and keep advancing than make a mistake and lose that political career.

READ ON VICE NEWS: The Mass Incarceration Problem in America

One of the main arguments for reducing prison sentences for nonviolent, first-time offenders—or, say, people who have just made a mistake while intoxicated—is that they enter the prison system as someone who has just made that mistake but come out as learned criminals. Being someone that was completely innocent and being surrounded by murderers and criminals of the worst kind, did you ever worry that a criminal mentality may seep in?
The first day I walked into prison, there's no mistaking the fact that you are walking into a whole new world. It doesn't feel the same; it's the coldest, most empty place. You look into people's eyes—and I don't just mean prisoners and criminals, I mean the guards, too; you're dealing with some of the most sadistic elements of humanity there—it's almost like you're dealing with... I can't even articulate how bad it is, how vile and revolting it is. Even from a young age—18, 19—when I went in, I saw that and I thought, I don't want to be like you. I don't want that inside me. I don't want that to infect me. So I consciously had to make the decision that I wasn't going to allow this kind of energy to take root in my life. Lorri and I speak at criminal justice classes and law schools, and one of the things I always tell people is that, in the almost 20 years that I was in prison, I did not see one single shred of anything that could be remotely considered a rehabilitation project, any kind whatsoever. The point of it is this: you're sending these people to prison and almost everyone who goes to prison is going to get out one day. The number of people who are in there to be executed or to stay in there their entire life is minuscule. Almost everyone is going to get out, and these people are going to be back in your churches, your schools, your grocery stores, your apartment building—so it's probably not the best idea to drive them insane with torture. Eventually it's going to blow up in your face.

You mention the guards, and there's a quote from your diaries that says, "In the movies it's always the other prisoners you have to watch out for. In real life it's the guards and the administration." But you also say in some of your letters that, after Paradise Lost aired, that some of the guards then believed you were innocent. Was your relationship with the prison guards up and down a lot?
I would say it was just down. Even the ones who think you're innocent, they're not going to go against the ones that don't. I mean, a lot of them just don't care—they don't care whether you're innocent, they don't care if you're guilty; some of them are just incredibly sadistic individuals who like to hurt people. They literally enjoy hurting people. I had to deal with a lot of those individuals, and even if a guard thinks you're innocent they're not going to go up against the ones like that. They know if they do that it's going to make their lives more miserable. The best you could hope for is them turning a blind eye. If some of the sadistic guards are beating you or starving you, the best you can get out of that situation is for the others not to join in on it. They're not going to put a stop to it.

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Damien Echols awaits trial, 1993. Photo by Joe Berlinger. From 'Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills.' All rights reserved.

Did you ever have time to feel pain or sympathy for all the other numerous victims involved in this horrible ordeal?
During it, the only thing you can focus on is trying to survive. It takes everything you have to put one foot in front of the other and make it through one day at a time. When you're being beaten and starved and in misery and being abused every day, having to look out and make sure nobody is going to murder you the next minute, you don't have a lot of time to sit around philosophizing and thinking about things in the outside world. When you're in there it's almost like a daydream or a fairy tale, something that may exist somewhere, that someone told you once that existed. You don't have anything other than the cold, brutal reality that you're spending every ounce of energy you have to get through.

Is this case still open? I know the situation in regards to the Alford Plea, but is it something that you are still pursuing and spending time on, or is it now something you are trying to put behind you?
Both. We'll never be able to completely put it behind us until it is reopened and we are exonerated, until the person who belongs in prison is in prison and the people who did this to us are held responsible for what they did. But I mean, just look at how long it took us until we got this far. The Alford Plea didn't happen overnight; it took nearly two decades of gut-wrenching struggle. So I don't think this is going to happen overnight, either.

Do you have any faith left in the justice system at all? And what needs to change?
I have no faith in the justice system whatsoever. I've seen how corrupt it is from a firsthand perspective, from the inside out. I saw how brutal and sadistic and money-driven and corporate and politically-driven the whole system is, so I have no faith in it whatsoever. I honestly don't know what it would take to fix—it's gone on so long and got so bad that I honestly don't know. I think it will one day reach a better point, just because I think there will come a time when people won't stand for it any more. When it becomes so blatantly obvious how bad it is, I think people will stand up and demand some sort of change, but it may have to get a lot worse before we start to see it get better.

Follow Daniel Dylan Wray on Twitter.

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Photo courtesy of Ryan O'Connell

If you have used the internet in the past five years, you have probably read about Ryan O'Connell's personal life. In blog posts like "A Conversation with My Closeted 17-Year-Old Self" and "Having a One-Year Stand," the gay writer has chronicled his day-to-day exploits on Thought Catalog, the New York Times, and this very website, among other publications. But in O'Connell's soon-to-be-published memoir, I'm Special, he reveals a secret his fans—and even most of his friends—never knew: He has cerebral palsy.

Like a younger, gay version of Mary Karr's Lit, the book earnestly details the complexities of the situation while also making the kind of hilarious politically incorrect jokes you rarely hear thanks to today's outrage culture. Most importantly, O'Connell knows how to tell a story—in this case, the journey from being an insecure gay kid with cerebral palsy to a writer in New York and Los Angeles following his dream. His journey represents a specific experience, but it's also relatable; I'm Special is a very unique book that manages to seamlessly cover cerebral palsy, homosexuality, drug addictions, failed teenage relationships, and overcoming insecurities.

There's something for everyone, but if you've read O'Connell's work online, this isn't surprising. O'Connell gets lumped in with the wave of young writers who started becoming internet famous in 2010 thanks to Twitter and Tumblr, but he's always stood out in that scene. He's one of the few gay writers to honestly write about gay sex (pooping on dicks and all), and he invented the twentysomething blog post way before Lena Dunham launched Girls. Unlike most of the internet, he has also always focused on telling stories instead of discussing identity politics through the lens of "Rihanna's Bad-Ass Fur Coat She Wore While Performing a Song About Cash That's Really About the Recession" or whatever the fuck is trending on Facebook these days.

Like the best personal essayists, he also possesses the rare talent of making the most obscure personal event relatable to any reader, and he writes like he talks. (In articles and in person, he says the word babe constantly.) Hollywood has already taken notice of this. O'Connell recently left New York for Los Angeles, quickly becoming a staff writer on the MTV sitcom Awkward, and Jim Parson and Warner Bros. have already optioned I'm Special to turn it into a TV show. The same day this news broke, I met with O'Connell over chopped salads in Los Angeles to talk about his book, cerebral palsy, and pooping on dicks.

VICE: Why did you wait so long to write about being gay and having cerebral palsy?
Ryan O'Connell: Babe, it was really shameful for me. I can write about literally shitting on [a guy's dick] or what it feels like to be fucked in the ass but God forbid I talk about having a limp—that everyone can see. It made no sense, but the things that you don't like about yourself often don't make sense.

But growing up with this disability was really painful and hard. My life was just sort of weird because, on one hand, I was on the playground with my friends, able-bodied, and then I'd like go to physical therapy and have some woman named Jandy stretch me into a pretzel. I never felt disabled enough and I never felt able-bodied enough, so it gave me a total complex.

Then being gay? Nice twist to life. I was literally in the shower, coming to Ryan Phillipe in Cruel Intentions , thinking, Are you fucking kidding me? This is the rudest thing that's ever happened to me. I was like, Well, there is no way that I will ever get laid or find love as a gay disabled person, there's just no fucking way. And then I got hit by a car, when I was 20, and then I was like, "Psyche! Just kidding! I'm an accident victim!" Then, I started omitting things, like, "Oh yeah, I got hit by a car, that's what this is all from." Then it just became way out of control. I just felt like I was living this giant lie. Even all my closest friends [in New York didn't] even know about my CP.

I didn't know until I read the book.
I had to come out to my friends, like coming-out-of-the-closet-style while I was writing the book. I had to send a chapter to a friend being like this is what the whole book's about. Some agents had no idea about it. I sold this basic bitch version—like, How to Be a Twentysomething. It was so basic. I remember writing this being like, LOL, no one's gonna buy it. And then somebody was interested, and I was like, Oh fuck, and then I realized there's no way I can write this without shooting myself in the head. I came to Simon & Schuster, and they're like, "I have a good title for your book." And I'm like, "What is it?" And they said, "I think it should be called I'm Special." And I'm like, "Funny you should say that, babe, cause I am special in more ways than one," so of course they ate that up because it gave the story more depth and whatnot. It kind of elevated it from like this Urban Outfitters darkness where it was kind of circling before. But, I don't know, babe: Why does anyone hate anything in themselves? I think being gay didn't help—at all.

Homophobia is everywhere, but things are especially hard for young gay people in Russia:

Did you think gay guys would judge your appearance since gay guys can be so superficial?
It made things muy complicado for me. Looking back at it now, that was definitely the reason why I was on drugs and that's definitely the reason why I didn't get laid for a year at a time. I didn't have sex! I would go on dates with people, and I would be like, "Oh my God, they're going to find out." Then I'd I'd make sure that they walked in front of me so they never knew. It was sick, the tricks that I would play.

Did those tricks work?

Would it bother you if someone called this a gay book?
No. I don't mind that. I think there's still, in a weird way, a lot of stuff missing from gay stories. Honey, there's not that many of us. It seems like there is, but there's not. I've never read a story about someone shitting on someone's dick. I don't know why people aren't talking about that. That's like a thing that happens sometimes, and people need to talk about that and not feel weird about that. Call me a gay writer. I don't give a shit. I'm really glad. Did you read Andy Cohen's book, [The Andy Cohen Diaries]?

I loved it.
I fucking loved it. And you know why, hon? Cause we are fucking Starvin' Marvin for like any material about gay shit. That was our Dancer from the Dance, which is so dark, but it is what it is. We are so thirsty for anything reflecting our reality.

Unlike other memoirs, this book has a realistic ending: Not every problem is solved. Was that on purpose?
I didn't want to write a fucking book that was like, "You guys, I went through a really hard time and now I'm like totally fine and OK," 'cause I hate reading, like Eat, Pray, Limp. I didn't want that. I wanted to write something that felt very of the moment and immediate and relatable, I hate reading books that are like, "I was a binge drinker who drank like ten bottles of vodka a day but now I'm totally fine, and I jog every day!"

Follow Mitchell Sunderland on Twitter.