We just wrapped up the third season of VICE on HBO, and we're really proud of how it turned out This year, we've reported on everything from sexual assault on America's college campuses to the rise of dangerous legal highs in America to the Ebola epidemic, and more.

In our season finale, VICE correspondent Simon Ostrovsky reported from the site of the war in Ukraine, while VICE founder Shane Smith met Kremlin officials and American leaders to see just how tense American-Russian relations have become in the years following the end of the Cold War. We sat down with Shane to debrief his trip—check it out above.

The new season of VICE may have ended, but you can still watch episodes on HBO's new online streaming service, HBO Now.

Non-violent resistance can take many forms, from sit-ins to boycotts to the withholding of taxes. And sometimes, civil disobedience comes in the unlikely form of 18 cows on the lam.

During the first intifada—the Palestinian protest movement of the late 1980s—members of the mostly-Christian West Bank village Beit Sahour decided to boycott Israeli milk products as a form of nonviolent resistance. They managed to procure 18 cows from an Israeli Kibbutznik and cheerfully set about learning the art of milking cows, eventually supplying milk to the entire village. But according to a new film, when the Israeli army caught wind of the operation, the cows were deemed a "threat to the security of the State of Israel" and Beit Sahour's villagers were forced to move the operation underground.

The Wanted 18 is a new film that incorporates interviews, dramatic re-enactments, archival footage, and stop-motion animation of some very charismatic talking cows to tell the tale of Beit Sahour and the first intifada's resistance movement.

The film is at turns playful and moving. It's a detailed and often heart-wrenching account of life under occupation, but one which never loses sight of the absurdity of the situation. VICE spoke to the film's director Amer Shomali about political cartoons, growing up in Syria, and the future of Palestine and Israel.

VICE: Where did you first hear about Beit Sahour and its 18 cows?
Amer Shomali: When I was a little kid in a refugee camp in Syria, I was obsessed with comic books—Tintin, Asterix, all of those superheroes. One day I came across a comic book about Beit Sahour, and for the first time, I'm reading a story where the superheroes could be my family, my cousins. It was a very strange feeling.

The only thing that makes it into the media is bombs.

Later on, we got a chance to come back to Palestine, but everything was totally different from what I was imagining Palestine would look like. I was thinking it would be a red community where everybody would take care of everybody and share food, and I find it's like every other place on Earth where everybody is obsessed with consumerism and materialist stuff. One day I met one of the characters of the film, and he told me that whatever I imagined about Palestine and Beit Sahour was true but I came at the wrong time, because I missed the whole action, and people changed after Oslo.

I made this film for a selfish reason, to have a chance to live those moments again. I made it for me and for my generation, to have an idea of how the Palestinians lived at that time. This need was also there for all my characters. They wanted to come to film shootings, they wanted to talk, they wanted to make this film and to let the new generation know about it, and they wanted to live those moments again, even if only during a film production.

When Americans hear the word intifada, they think of suicide bombers blowing up buses full of civilians. What does intifada mean in Palestinian society?
The literal translation of the word intifada means shaking up things, as if you are covered in dust and you are shaking to get rid of the dust. I think the image they have in the States about the intifada comes from the Second intifada, the suicide bombings. During the first intifada there were no suicide bombers. It was mainly a civil disobedience movement, but it wasn't covered by the media so there's no image of it. The only thing that makes it into the media is bombs. But this kind of thing—having cows, planting backyards, not paying taxes—it's not going to be covered.

A nation who can't make fun of its own wounds will never be able to heal.

What were the biggest challenges you faced making this film?
Most of the footage about Palestine from that period was shot by international news agencies. They had their agendas: either they showed the Palestinians as victims, as heroes, or as terrorists. None of those agencies will provide you with footage of a Palestinian milking a cow. We intended to make the film specially to portray the Palestinians in a different way, which is the everyday Palestinian, and we had to recreate those parts in drama and animation. That was the main technical challenge.

The main concern for me was to make an honest and authentic film, because I didn't live in Palestine at that time and I didn't want to be an Orientalist making a film about Palestinians. It took a lot of energy and questioning to make the film I wanted, where those people represented in the film had a kind of ownership of this discourse. It's beyond loving those characters. You have to be one of them.

The film is so optimistic, even though the events portrayed are difficult. Where does that optimism come from?
The comedy came from my background—I draw political cartoons. A nation who can't make fun of its own wounds will never be able to heal.

Actually, the first draft of the film's script was quite pessimistic. But when we started shooting, something interesting happened. People would approach and tell us stories that weren't in the script. We would ask if they have someone in their family, maybe a son or a cousin, who looks like they did 20 years ago. Then we would shoot the scene. Once we needed 50 people for a demonstration scene, but we could only afford ten. We put out a call on the radio, and 200 people came. They asked us to put the shooting schedule on Facebook. They started to call, "We see you are planning to shoot in this location, but the [Israeli] army is very close, we advise you to change the shooting schedule and shoot the next scene," and when the army started to move, they would call and say, "OK, you can come."

This is becoming a strategy for the Palestinians in our generation: to see that you can stop being a victim and reject being a radical and claim back your future.

So they took over the whole film, and for me, that was an indication that the spirit of the intifada was in the film—the minute they saw that they can believe in this film, they jumped back on. I saw I couldn't represent the situation as a hopeless situation. We still have hope.

For more on Palestine, check out Against the Wall:

What do you want people to take away from the film?
I want them to see a different face of Palestinians and a different face of Israel. I want them to have a better understanding of what does it mean to live under occupation. Usually, the maximum Palestinian films ask for is entertainment and sympathy. I want them to have empathy. I want the audience to think, What would I do if I were Palestinian, if I wanted to have a cow and someone prevented me from that? And I want Palestinians to have hope.

Nowadays, Palestinians are stuck between two positions: one is to be an absolute victim—of the occupation, of capitalism, of poverty—and to act based on that. The other is to say, "I reject that and I want to be a radical, a bomber." But there is a third option which was the option of the first intifada, where people rejected both those options. They wanted to reclaim their life, their future, and to build their own community away from those two proposed options. This is becoming a strategy for the Palestinians in our generation: to see that you can stop being a victim and reject being a radical and claim back your future.

To bring a screening of The Wanted 18 to your local theater, visit the film's website.

Patty Hearst before her kidnapping. Photo via Flickr user Simon Murphy

It's a story we were born knowing. In 1974, the year that Chinatown came out and ABBA sang "Waterloo," Patty Hearst was just a rich girl living in Berkeley when the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) kidnapped her. In captivity, she allegedly suffered unthinkable violence and fell victim to Stockholm Syndrome. She became exactly like her captors. She adopted the pseudonym Tania. She robbed a bank. She played with guns. She became a fugitive.

After she got free, pop culture mythologized Patty Hearst—on posters, in Patti Smith songs, and in the movies. The SLA's roots in black resistance were largely erased as she morphed into a tidy white girl myth. She was the subject of Patty Hearst (1988), directed by the man who wrote Taxi Driver, starring Vanessa Redgrave's enormously gifted daughter, Natasha Richardson.

In the movie, Patty Hearst was exactly as we have always imagined her: a woman of many competing faces residing in the same body. She was a newspaper heiress. She was a freedom fighter. She was a terrorist. And she was white.

This is the story of white terrorism in American cinema. It is a machine that affords white terrorists the luxury of sympathy while denying those same privileges to terrorists with skin that's any other shade. White terrorists are gifted the richness of nuance and humanity in the wake of violence we call "senseless." The white killer appears, simply, as a wandering, mistaken deviant, free of context or cause.

One person's terrorist is another person's freedom fighter. And the split is easy to muddy when we go to the movies. Terrorist or freedom fighter, Satan or saint, monster or victim? When they have white skin, they get to have it all.

Terrorist or freedom fighter, Satan or saint, monster or victim? When they have white skin, they get to have it all.

What makes a terrorist in America? The term has most often operated as a catch-all term for a person whose skin isn't white, exacting politicized violence on those who don't deserve any violence at all. The word means everything and nothing. With each mass killing we inch towards a consensus, and suddenly our idea of terrorism goes into a tailspin.

We saw what makes a terrorist in a film like Patty Hearst. Natasha Richardson, before she died tragically young, was an actress whose motor always ran a little fast. She had a face so wide and expressive that she always seemed on the cusp of exploding with emotion: rage, thrill, fear.

In Patty Hearst, we saw in Richardson's alert eyes glimpses of the woman Patty was and the woman she'd become. There was a monster living inside this girl—the granddaughter of William Randolph Hearst, that symbol of the American spirit—and she was waiting to be emblazoned by ideology. She was a victim of ideologies bigger than herself; she also possessed the will and fortitude to make bad, violent decisions. She had no agency and she also had a lot. Patty Hearst—neither here nor there, always with the privilege of being in a limbo—was complicated. Her world was complicated. She was white.

Warner Bros. Entertainment. Photo via Flickr user _nijoker_

Heath Ledger's Joker of The Dark Knight (2008) also lived inside a complicated world. Ledger won a posthumous Oscar for capturing just that. Yet at no point in the storied history of Batman going to the movies had the Joker seemed as charged with feeling, complexity, and disgust as when Ledger played him. His world was off-balance, but what an intoxicating world it was. Ledger worked tirelessly—maybe even worked himself to death—rewiring our naive cultural imagination, showing us a Joker that held new, disturbing shades beyond the old evil.

Wasn't Travis Bickle a terrorist, too? Someone who had a political agenda and would sharpen the means for getting that point across with violence, all cresting in that blood-soaked dream of a finale?

The same was true of Derek, the white supremacist of American History X (1998) played by Edward Norton, who went on to nab an Oscar nomination for the part. Norton was a fresh talent back then. He could hide his anger, frustration, and torched pain in the clench of his jaw better than Keira Knightley. He forced us to run our fingers through the pathology of a man we would never like to know: a neo-Nazi.

You could argue that that Travis Bickle, the anti-hero of Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976), was a terrorist. He had a goal, but we got so deep under his (white, white) skin that his goal seemed noble. As Robert de Niro played him, Travis Bickle is an intoxicating enigma. He was consistently on the verge of unbalance, his mind like a child learning how to walk. It is a masterpiece of a performance. But he had to have been a terrorist, right? Someone who had a political agenda and would sharpen the means for getting that point across with violence, all cresting in that blood-soaked dream of a finale?

Travis Bickle. Photo via Flickr user annie_is_okay

What is most frightening and unsurprising is that these white terrorists of American movies have absorbed themselves into a cultural lexicon of "cool." Aged 16, was there anything cooler than worshipping the art Heath Ledger created in The Dark Knight? It's passé to declare that you just don't really like Ed Norton in American History X, or to shun Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver. These terrorists are tied to American notions of masculinity. We marvel over its contours. But could we criticize the "newspaper heiress" Patty Hearst, the woman whom Patti Smith spit out applause for in one of her songs? The mother of a now-famous model? We have venerated her, too.

The white terrorist remains a cipher in the media. The minute a new one strikes, the leaders we trust find themselves in an unending refusal to know why he or she did it, even when the reasons are obvious. Dylann Roof was not born in a vacuum. Neither was Michael Page, the man who shot and killed six people at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin a few years ago. Nor was Craig Hicks, the guy who murdered three Muslims in Chapel Hill four months ago.

To be a white terrorist in American cinema is to enjoy a very basic right: to be complicated, to be messy, to be human.

We lament that we will never understand what drives these men even when it is clear: the canker sore of white privilege. We will stump for the death penalty because, we claim, one-offs like Roof are not worth our tax dollars. We foolishly believe we won't see their kind again. And then the next one arrives. The white terrorist is an apparition who just sort of happened, allowing white America to absolve itself of its culpability in creating him. The movies reflect this, humanizing white terrorists so poetically that their cases seem unique, uncommon, beautiful.

Look at Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty (2012), where the terrorist exists as an abstract brown whisper. We hinge our expectations on Maya, the woman who looks like Liv Ullmann with a less amorphous face. She is rapt with the disease of pursuit, searching for her terrorist.

Who is this terrorist? He's an unseen, mythical menace who presides in the Khyber Pass or in the bazaars of Abbottobad. Maya appears relentless in search of this beast. Jessica Chastain's face wears American obsession and entitlement beautifully: It's the face of a woman looking for the right dress in a department store during the holiday season. The search is burdening her. You can see it in the way her spirit deadens even after he's killed. And in the end, when that weight finally lifts off her, she is just... exasperated.

Jessica Chastain's irritated stare in Zero Dark Thirty. Annapurna Pictures

Zero Dark Thirty hinges on what well may be, as Seymour Hersh provocatively suggested last month, a great lie: that our country is great and mighty. The film's climax, in which American personnel raid bin Laden's compound, reveals Bigelow's great tricks. Her camera focuses solely upon the soldiers breaking in. We hear faint, ailed cries of children screaming in the background. Her camera avoids these children. To her, they are just collateral damage to the necessary heroism that is the American military. But when they scream, it is the sound of real terror.

In the wake of the terrorist attack in Charleston, the word terrorist and its many meanings were thrown into flux. Some, like Glenn Greenwald, wrote of the word's increasing meaninglessness; many others wrote about the urgency of classifying Roof as a terrorist. BuzzFeed's Joshua Hersh posed an idea that seemed remarkably radical when it really shouldn't: that we should consider terrorism "in its full cultural and human context."

American cinema accomplishes the feat Hersh speaks of, infusing the demon with humanity. But that terrorist? That terrorist is almost always white. To be a white terrorist in American cinema is to enjoy a very basic human right: to be complicated, to be messy, to be human.

RELATED: The Female Fighters of Kurdistan

Who will play Dylann Roof in the biopic that will inevitably be made of his life? The question is nauseating to think about so soon. Perhaps the man who plays him will be a skilled and trained actor. Perhaps he will just be playing dress-up, cutting his hair into the shape of a decorative bowl and adopting that man's crazed, monstrous gaze as an affect.

He will probably win an Oscar for it, because that is the machine of the spectacle of white terrorism in America. White terrorism is always human, because plum roles go to white actors, and that is the nature of this brutal game. In the movies as in the larger media landscape, white terrorism always clamors for our deep attention into the individual psyche that owns it, rather than the pressures that have created it.

And what about those actors who play the victims: Cynthia Marie Graham Hurd, Susie Jackson, Ethel Lee Lance, Depayne Middleton-Doctor, Clementa Pinckney, Tywanza Sanders, Daniel Simmons, Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, Myra Thompson? Our perverse fascinations do not extend to the victims. They rarely get a nod.

Follow Mayukh on Twitter.

Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras after the announcement.

Late last night, Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras gathered his cabinet and called a referendum for voters to decide whether to accept a bailout deal that includes, what he calls, "unfair" austerity demands from foreign creditors. The referendum, set to take place on Sunday July the 5th, was announced just after midnight Greek time.

"After five months of tough negotiations, our partners unfortunately resorted to a proposal-ultimatum to the Greek people," Tsipras said. "I call on the Greek people to rule on the blackmailing ultimatum asking us to accept a strict and humiliating austerity without end and without prospect."

Right after last night's meeting, many Greek ministers claimed that people would vote "no" and reject the bailout demands—further cuts in pension and taxes, among other things.

Leaders and MPs from opposition parties are rallying against the move, saying that a referendum will destroy the country. Jeroen Dijsselbloem, President of the Eurogroup (an informal body of the finance ministers of the eurozone), told reporters that he thought it was a "sad decision" for Greece.

"The Greek government has apparently rejected our last proposals... that is a sad decision for Greece because it has closed the door for further talks where the door was still open in my mind."

Following the historic news, Saturday morning saw many Greeks running to banks, supermarkets and gas stations to stock up and prepare themselves for the unknown. Tsipras' surprise announcement, which was the result of five long months of counterproductive negotiations with the country's lenders, is a dramatic moment in Greece's modern history and one that may lead the country to default on its massive loans.

Watch our documentary 'Teenage Riot: Athens':

It's unclear how the next few days will play out. Some protests have been announced and anarchists threw a couple of Molotov cocktails in Exarcheia. What is for sure is that Greeks seem to be taking no chances and are withdrawing their money while they're still sure they can.

In Photos: Four Years of Greek's Great Depression

Carroll Spinney (left) and Kermit Love. Photo courtesy of Debra Spinney

Like any good American millennial, I grew up on Sesame Street. As an only child in the 90s, I was transfixed by that giant talking bird and his posse of garbage can-dwellers and diabetic monsters. So it was, needless to say, a dream come true to interview Big Bird—THE Big Bird, Carroll Spinney.

Spinney is tasked with playing a giant, six-year-old bird for generation after generation of viewers. He's taught us arithmetic, new vocabulary words, and how to make friends. He's served as the steady voice of American childhood while almost everything else about the nation has changed. In honor of the award-winning documentary about Spinney's life, I Am Big Bird, I spoke with the talented actor and puppeteer about Jim Henson, almost dying on the Challenger, and his goal of spending half a century as America's childhood companion.

At the end of our conversation, Spinney told me that someone had been listening. "Big Bird," he said, "Big Bird wants to say hello." Immediately, Spinney switched on the voice that kept me entranced for the better part of a decade. "Hello, Jennifer!" "Hello, Big Bird!" I was giddy and melancholic and overwhelmed, giggling uncontrollably at how close childhood still was, and how quickly Spinney could take me back.

VICE: I want to start off by saying thank you. I'm part of a generation that grew up loving Sesame Street, and you brought us all a lot of joy.
Carroll Spinney: Well, it was fun for me too!

How did you end up in this industry to begin with?
At eight years old, I tried giving a puppet show with one puppet and a stuffed flannel snake. I had enough of an audience to make me feel like, I want to this when I grow up. My mother saw the show and she made me a [set of] Punch and Judy [dolls]—because she was born in England. That gave me a puppeteer's background. I gave shows through my youth and teens and put myself through art school. I worked hard to get into television, and [ended up] on a TV show in Boston, but I wanted to do something more important. Then I made a very elaborate show that Jim Henson came and saw. He was looking for someone to play Big Bird and Oscar.

Photo courtesy of Debra Spinney

Did you have to audition for Jim?
No, he just decided that what I had was what he needed. Everything went wrong in my show, but I was very funny because I was very desperate. I was desperate because I knew he was in audience. After the show I was quite depressed, because I didn't know if he'd like it. Then he said, after the show, "I liked what you were trying to do."

Is it a strange kind of fame, being Big Bird for 45 years?
I plan to do 50 or more years of the show, which is kind of a unique thing: playing a six-year-old for 50 years!

I think it's amazing that [ Sesame Street] crosses such a distance to please the whole audience. There's a lot of children's shows that little kids may like, but it's hard for grown-ups to watch.

Whoa, is Big Bird six years old?
Yes. It means he can be a child, and not just a know-it-all bird.

I read in the New York Post that you were meant to go up in the Challenger.
NASA wanted me to go up [in the Challenger]. They wondered if I would orbit with them, so they could show Big Bird up there to help children become more interested in the NASA space program. It was pretty hard for them to compete with Star Wars and all the rocket ships [on TV]. I think it would have been good if I could have gotten up there and the ship didn't implode.

It turns out, Big Bird couldn't fit on the plane. I even thought of a way I could do it and make [the outfit] fit, but I'm glad I didn't tell them, because I don't think I'd want to be on that ship.

For more American obsessions, check out our video on Cabbage Patch dolls

What was it like for your children to see their dad play Big Bird on TV?
My son Ben was nine when his classmates said, "We don't watch your father's television show because it's a baby show and we're not babies." He said, "I don't care." Then I took him to New York and he was on the show one day, he was riding a bike up and down the sidewalk while Big Bird was saying goodbye for the day. After that show went on the air, the kids in school said, "Hey Ben, we saw you on Sesame Street, that was real cool!" And Ben said, "I thought you didn't watch that baby show."

My daughter Jessie, when she first hit 12, she said, "Daddy, some friends are coming over, but please do me a favor and don't do the voices or anything, I don't want them to know what you do." I said, "OK." Then when she was 14, she said, "Daddy, some friends are coming over, will you do the voices for us?" [ Sesame Street] had jokes for grown-ups. [Jessie said,] "My friends are watching the show and we're getting the jokes we didn't get before." That was good because now she realized it's not just a baby show.

What is it about Sesame Street that makes it so special, and has allowed it to go on for nearly 50 years?
I think it's amazing that [Sesame Street] crosses such a distance to please the whole audience. There's a lot of children's shows that little kids may like, but it's hard for grown-ups to watch. It's all "goody goody, we'll have such fun today, just jump up and down and clap your hands together!" Grown-ups don't care, and I can't blame them.

But [ Sesame Street] always keeps their finger on the pulse of America, and it shows. They have young writers, and they research a great deal. That's what my wife was doing when I met her, she was in the research department, making sure the children understand the show and like it. It's truly educational. One of the genius [ideas] of Sesame Street is that it should be just as funny as it is educational; it should be fun to learn.

Is it ever difficult to deal with the children on the show?
Well, the way the show is now, there are fewer children on. But I loved having the children there. There was only one time, one boy kept messing up a scene deliberately, shouting out. It was very annoying because it was a physically demanding scene for me: Big Bird was trying to be a ballet dancer!

I was surprised I knew the song and I sang the words all right and I was able to have other thoughts, like, My god, I'm singing and this is the ceiling of Carnegie Hall, this has to be one of the top moments of my life.

What has been the high point of your career as Big Bird?
One of the [moments] that is really in my mind is singing at Carnegie Hall. I sang at Carnegie Hall! I was aware of Carnegie Hall my whole life—as a child, they had a radio show every Sunday, it started with, "The best tunes of all come from Carnegie Hall" and there was all kinds of music. I was asked to be in the show. It was Big Bird and Bob Hope, An Evening with Bob Hope and Big Bird. The piano was played by Julie Stein, who wrote "People who love people are the best people of all," so I sang that song as Big Bird and I tried out for [Hope] and I sang, just standing there by the piano.

I never really thought of myself as much of a singer, and during the song there's a peak part where you really get high and loud. I was standing beside the concert grand piano on the stage, and I hopped backwards and ended up sitting on the piano. I lounged on the piano and leaned my—Big Bird's—head way back. I could see the ceiling of the famous theater, and I was as high as the song took me. I stayed in pitch and all. I was surprised I knew the song and I sang the words all right and I was able to have other thoughts, like, My god, I'm singing and this is the ceiling of Carnegie Hall, this has to be one of the top moments of my life.

I've had some other really fabulous times, like receiving the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Emmys. They only give one a year! That was pretty wonderful.

Is it hard for you to transition from being Big Bird to being Carroll?
It's just another part of life for me. I've been doing puppets all my life now, so there really isn't any transition. I just pick up the puppet and start talking.

Check out I Am Big Bird and follow Jennifer on Twitter.

"I need to go back and get a fisting kit," said a bearded gentleman in a black leather harness to his friend, similarly attired, as they walked past me, sipping frozen cocktails from plastic penises at the 18th Annual Folsom Street East street festival this past Sunday.

Folsom Street East is the largest outdoor fetish street festival on the East Coast, inspired by San Francisco's Folsom Street Fair, which started in 1984. On a fine Father's Day in New York's Chelsea neighborhood, the length of 27th Street between 10th and 11th Avenues was filled with people in all manner of leather, latex, and rubber attire. There were chainmail jockstraps, corsetry, latex helmets, leather leashes, chaps, and so much more. Festival goers visited booths celebrating kink in all its forms, from purveyors of leather harnesses to bondage clubs to motorcycle groups. Health and activist organizations also handed out condoms and lube, urging attendees to "fuck smarter," as ACT UP said at their booth. And this year, the festival benefitted the New York City Anti-Violence Project and Visual AIDS charities (FSE has donated more than $250,000 to a myriad of charities since the festival began).

Eager participants were whipped, spanked, paddled, and tied up by those who were more than happy to oblige them. Though no genitals could be exposed, and complete nudity and sexual activity were forbidden in public, I saw many bare butt cheeks and a diverse mix of sexual interests. Here are some photos from the festival.

Follow Elyssa Goodman on Twitter.

All photos courtesy of Alyssa Salazar, from her Tumblr page

On a warm day in Southern California, 25-year-old Alyssa Salazar arrives at Starbucks wearing a blue chiffon dress printed with cupcakes, soft pink knee-high boots, and a heart-shaped purse. Neither of us orders anything to drink, because it's the holy Islamic month of Ramadan so we're both fasting. As we talk, she fidgets with the bow affixed to her headscarf, which is cut from the same cupcake-printed material of her dress.

This is an everyday uniform for the Lolita enthusiast. She's part of a well-established subculture of girls who enjoy dressing as Lolitas—a style of dress originating in Japan that borrows inspiration from the aggressively fussy aesthetics of Victorian-era clothes. But Salazar, a convert to Islam, has distinguished herself within the Lolita community with her Tumblr, The Hijabi Lolita, where she posts photos of her daily outfits, paired with her headscarves. The word "hijabi" is used to describe Muslim women who wear the hijab, or headscarf, as a form of daily religious practice.

Over the past two years, Salazar has amassed more than 10,000 followers on her blog. As her fame grows, she's become exposed to the highly critical and discerning tastes of the Lolita community. But as a Muslim, she's used to people scrutinizing and criticizing the clothes she wears. VICE spoke with Salazar about Vladimir Nabokov, Islamaphobia, and how she navigates the margins of both the Muslim and Lolita communities.

VICE: What is Lolita fashion, for people who are unfamiliar with it?
Alyssa Salazar: Lolita fashion started in Harajuku, Tokyo. It's based off Rococo and Victorian fashion, just modernized a bit. It's not cosplay. It's not Living Doll. It's actual fashion with its own rules and its own style. Lolita has over a thousand different dresses and prints. There are different sub-categories of Lolita. There's Sweet Lolita, Classic Lolita, and Gothic Lolita. Then you have your Punk-Goth Lolita. You have Otome, which is extremely casual Lolita. You can even do Pirate Lolita, or Witch Lolita.

The creepiest thing a guy has said to me is, "Little Bo Peep, where's your sheep?"

What are the guidelines to dressing up like this? It strikes me very much as an art.
We don't call our outfits "outfits." We call them "coordinates," or "cords," because you coordinate everything to your outfit. There's a lot that goes into an outfit. There's a petticoat, which you wear to keep the poof. There are socks, boots, blouses, head bows, accessories, bags. If you're not a hijabi, there are wigs and bonnets.

How did you get into it?
My friend was selling one of her skirts so I just decided to buy it. I didn't know if I could get into it, because I wear hijab. My friend told me about SugarNoor, another hijabi Lolita, and I was like, OK, this is possible.

How do you adapt the Lolita style to hijab? What's your process?
There's really no difference, because Lolita is fairly modest to begin with. I could wear this without a scarf.

Do people automatically associate it with Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita?
Sometimes people do associate it with the book, because there are some Lolitas who do age play in Lolita. Age play is a fetish, where you like having sex dressed up as a baby. That's not what Lolita is. Not all Lolitas are into age play. But some of them are, and it makes people who don't know what Lolita fashion is have that type of expectation when they see a Lolita.

Do you ever get creepy comments from men when you're dressed in Lolita?
Actually, no, I haven't yet. I'm waiting for it, though, because I will pepper-spray them. Sometimes people will lift up my friends' skirts to see what's holding it up. My friends told me that this has happened to them. The creepiest thing a guy has said to me is, "Little Bo Peep, where's your sheep?" But it's mostly women, who might say, "That's cute," or try and snap pictures without my permission.

You must get more comments about your scarf then.
I get drive-by haters that say, "Take it off, it's not Iraq." But when I'm in Lolita, it's different. People think it's a costume.

I saw a Facebook page you recently posted called "Ban Lolita Muslims," and they were using your photo as the main profile picture. You didn't seem angry about it!
They were just trolling. I guess they didn't realize that most Muslim Lolitas don't wear hijabs. It should have said "Ban Hijabi Lolitas" instead of "Muslims."

It's funny, because they used my profile picture but [they also use] all of SugarNoor's pictures. There was all this mean stuff written, like, "This is so sad, this girl, in this dress, getting married at eight years old and getting beaten by her husband." Or, "Such a pretty dress to get covered in blood."

I feel more welcomed into the Lolita community than in the Muslim community. They actually wanted to get to know me.

How have other people in the Lolita community responded to your hijabi Lolita coords?
I haven't received any hate from my community. They're very open to it. People come from a lot of different backgrounds into Lolita. And they're very welcoming. They've accepted me, and they don't judge. They think it's pretty cool.

But since I do wear the scarf, I feel like I have to try to coord better than everyone else who doesn't wear a scarf. Since I cover my hair, and cover a little more of myself, I have to try harder. I don't want to be known as an Ita. "Ita" comes from the word "Itai," which means "ouch." It means that your coord is so terrible that it burns me to look at it.

It seems like you have to fulfill two very high standards of dress, and modesty, from two very different communities—both your Muslim community and your Lolita community. But you're pulling it off! At what point did you decide you wanted to blog your outfits?
I was kind of nervous about putting myself out there. There's this website called Behind the Bows, and it's pretty much where Lolitas talk crap about each other. SugarNoor was attacked a lot on that page, when the blog first opened. You'd pretty much see her every week, or every few weeks, being ridiculed for wearing her scarf in Lolita. That's why I was nervous, because I was afraid that would happen to me too.

Check out our documentary on Iran's bourgeoning fashion scene:

Was it Islamophobic or was it just people who were upset she wasn't wearing Lolita correctly?
It was Islamophobic. Even though the Lolita community is very open-minded, there are still some close-minded people.

You've said that you're not as active in the Muslim community as you were before. Is there a reason for that?
Honestly, as a convert, I wasn't very welcomed. I felt like I was the token convert. At the [Muslim community functions], I felt more comfortable being in the corner with my phone.

So the Lolita community has been more accepting?
I feel more welcomed into the Lolita community than in the Muslim community. They actually wanted to get to know me. They invite me to stuff, and they interact with me at those functions. I met my best friend through Lolita.

Follow Tasbeeh on Twitter.

Brasília is an urban closet! Mildly fabulous gays, like Boy George, for instance, or Michael Alig—in his Club Kid times—would hate to live in such a gray and geometric city, clearly planned by old straight men for middle-aged straight people.

Kissing in public is social suicide. Outside of wooded parklands—Brasília's urban park is the biggest in the world—and away from the corridors of the University of Brasília (UnB), heteronormative values rule. In the evening, either for the envy or delight of attentive passersby, the gyms turn into showcases of Barbies (Brazilian gay slang for hunky homos) with an Adonis Complex. Casual sex apps like Grindr are a sigh of hope for the "straight-acting and exclusively top" to have a sweet escape from their deluded homes. Fair enough.

On the other hand, Brasília is not limited to the wings of the Central Plateau, where being gay is wonderful. Around lakes and monuments, the scorching sun also illuminates families whose reality bypasses the sanitized archetypes. If, in downtown BSB (another name for Brasília), both homophobia and queerness are well disguised, in the outskirts the game changes: There have been several complaints of violence against gay men and lesbians in the Federal District, not to mention the long forsaken trans people, who get ostracized with no apology by, essentially, every "good citizen" on a daily basis.

—Weudson Ribeiro

Photo courtesy of the author

Patton Oswalt has a routine about the first time he ever realized one of his parents was full of shit. "When you're growing up, up to a certain point, no matter what an adult says it's just gospel," he says, "and then there's that first thing where you go, 'I think that's fuckin' bullshit.'" For most of us, I imagine, that moment happens early.

For me, it hit well into my teens. And the realization was a lot harder to swallow.

This is the last time I'll mention this, so take it as a disclaimer: I'm going to talk about my experience of my father, Gene Simmons, plainly. That means I will, inevitably, talk about what he does for a living. I'm not going to avoid mentioning it, but I'm also not going to dwell on it needlessly. I'm going to talk about him as a human being separate and unique from his reputation, his persona, and the character he plays in daily life. I find that, generally speaking, rebellion for the sake of rebellion is as much a form of slavery as conformity. The magnet that pushes manipulates as much as the magnet that pulls—either way, an outside force is doing the moving. So I'll ignore whatever the expectations might be, and just talk about my dad.

Dad had this great big baritone voice. If he wanted me to do something, he would "make a deal" with me and shake my hand roughly, as though I were an equal partner in a business venture.

At 6'8', I tower over my father today, who stands a measly 6'2". But before I hit puberty, my father was monolithic. I remember feeling his physicality in my bones, and it was terrifying and comforting, all at once. When I heard that voice roll down the hall like a boulder, and those big boots smack against hardwood floors, it felt like the first time I saw the T-Rex in the original Jurassic Park.

Dad had this great big baritone voice. If he wanted me to do something, he would "make a deal" with me and shake my hand roughly, as though I were an equal partner in a business venture (that venture being something like 'don't hit your sister and you can have rainbow marzipan cookies later'). He would never use "baby talk." He would wrap us in fatherly platitudes at every possible moment—cliché's like, "every day above ground is a good day," and, "you only get the respect you demand." There's something to be gleaned from these, of course, even if they are endlessly repeated clichés. It's a good record, even if it is broken.

I also remember how all the other adults used to bend to his will. He was famous, he was successful, and everyone always listened when he spoke. People would kneel down to my eye-level and tell me, with sincerity, "You know your dad's a legend, right?"

RELATED: Read Noisey's interview with Gene Simmons

All in all, I thought everything my father said was written in stone, and wrought from ages of experience and trial. But as I grew and he began to shrink, I started to see the cracks. I started seeing his pores, his grey hairs—those small flaws that made him human. I realized that he was a man, and like all men, he had (as Dr. Steven Novella put it), "a distorted and constructed perception, both of which are subservient to whatever narrative [his] brain is operating under."

This epiphany came to me in high school, when I started learning about drugs. My father prides himself (read: brags about it to anyone who asks) on never smoking, drinking, or getting high in his life—save for one incident when some "special" brownies were mistaken for... well, normal brownies.

He is still, to this day, profoundly anti-drug. Perhaps due to stressful encounters with drug addicts in the rock n' roll scene of the 70s and 80s, he resents drug addicts as people. In his experience, they made his life, and his work, more difficult than they should have been.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Nathan Rupert

He has often spoken, and misspoken, about this topic. I remember watching the news with him in the kitchen as a teen, seeing tragic stories of drug addiction and violence, VH1 behind the music stories, and things like that. He would get quite emotional, always exclaiming something like, "Those idiots. They should be [insert medieval punishment x, y, and z]." My mother, ever the voice of reason, will smack him with a magazine or throw an Altoid at him for these outbursts.

And it is hyperbole, of course, but he does believe in harsh drug laws, and he has no sympathy for drug addicts. From talking at length with him about it, I know now that this often-misunderstood resentment is not a reaction to real, tragic, medical victims of drug addiction. He resents more the people they were when they made that first choice: the choice to do that first hit, plunge the first needle, to take the first snort. He cannot empathize with that first decision to gamble with what is, in his immigrant's eyes, a life in the land of opportunity. He believes the responsibility lies with the drug addict for trying it first, knowing everything we know in this age of information. To take that risk is to forfeit his sympathies. The man that gets killed by a bear after poking it with a stick deserves his fate. This is, more or less, his philosophy on drugs—if I can speak for him. And I admit, it sort of makes sense.

But like many of his philosophies of life in general, my father takes this premise to an absolutist extreme, and makes liberal use of hyperbole. This has gotten him in trouble—and my family and I have lamented the resulting tabloid fodder he sometimes becomes.

It was during one of these situations that I realized that I disagreed with my father. There was a soundbite passed around, on television and the internet, and people were taking shots at him for his rough, often non-literal way of speaking. I realized that, though I wanted to defend him as a son, I agreed with his critics. Not a very profound sentiment on its face, but this realization carried a huge moment of cognitive dissonance. I hadn't considered disagreement an option.

My dad taught me, accidentally, that our heroes can be wrong.

I knew people who smoked pot. Most people I knew drank. But I could not bring myself to conclude, as he did, that any negative health impacts of those choices were deserved. Life is risk, after all. I realized that I don't believe marijuana and alcohol should be treated the same as heroin and cigarettes. To group them as altogether harmful is a baby-and-bathwater situation. I believed, and still do, that most drugs should be decriminalized, and should be treated (for the most part) as a medical issue, not a criminal issue. I believe that if we own nothing else, we own our own bodies, and should be free to do with them what we wish, as long as we don't harm others. I knew my father would never agree, and I knew why: it ran against the narrative he was operating under. That had been my narrative, too—until I changed my mind and wrote a new one.

Whether you agree or disagree with my opinion on drug use is irrelevant—the larger point is that he taught me a more valuable lesson, in disagreement, than he had ever taught me when we agreed: that no belief is sacrosanct. He taught me, accidentally, that our heroes can be wrong. If I had heard his opinion about drug addicts at a younger age, I would have agreed simply out of emotion, and because I considered him wise, and because he was my dad. It was the appeal to authority fallacy, and I was living within it, at least up until that moment. Even if I do turn out to be wrong about this, that feeling—that the authority mightjust be wrong—was an important moment in my development. If this godlike authoritarian figure could be wrong about something, then no one else, no matter how qualified or powerful they seem, could possibly be on such a pedestal either. It was the evidence that mattered, not the authority.

Once I caught sight of this chink in the armor, the rest fell away easily. He was no longer Superman to me.

Photo via Flickr user mollyali

I remember the first year I passed him in height. He looked up at me, then down at my shoes, then up at me again, and said, "This is ridiculous. I don't like this." I've only gotten taller, and our interaction has only gotten more comical. If I sit across from him at a restaurant, we will inevitably bump feet. And he'll slam his forehead on the table and say something like, "Unbelievable. I can't escape." The T-Rex, the colossus, is long gone. He is just a man, and more interesting for it.

I used to take my father's lessons as an eager student, wide-eyed and receptive. We never used to argue. Today we do, and sometimes things get heated, especially when it comes to politics or social issues. But through it all, I've found that he respects me more in the end, even if we never come to terms, than he did when I just passively agreed.

My disagreement with my father has also made his occasional chafing with the press much easier to digest. It happens at least once a year, and it simply doesn't bother me anymore. Strong opinions are just that—and no matter what you say, there will always be someone with a middle finger cocked and loaded in response, whether from the mob or from an individual.

It's important to kill your heroes. And, sometimes, you have to kill your father. Kill him so you can love him, and his flaws, better than one can love a hollow archetype.

This lesson applies as much to my father's professional legacy as it does to his fatherhood. He is worshipped and surrounded by yes-men almost constantly now. But his greatest achievements, arguably, were during times of friction, before the yes-men. When he formed the band Kiss, he was a gangly, awkward kid in New York. No one said "yes" to him. He didn't do well with women. People thought he was stupid because he couldn't speak English well. My father and Paul had to fight for every deal and every concert, had to fight against bad reviews and debt and day jobs, had to fight everything, in order to achieve what they did. They had to disagree with everyone. They had to believe that everyone else, every authority, was wrong.

So, it's important to disagree. It's important to kill your heroes. And, sometimes, you have to kill your father. Kill him so you can love him, and his flaws, better than one can love a hollow archetype. The most important thing he taught me is that—just like everyone else—sometimes, he is full of shit.

Happy belated Father's Day, Pops.

Follow Nick on Twitter.

This guy isn't Will. Photo via Flickr user See-Ming Lee

Will laughs to himself while he watches the bouncer sift through his backpack, knowing he'll only find lube and condoms. A thick crowd of Chinese men check each other out in a courtyard removed from the street. The bass from one of Beijing's most popular gay clubs pulsates. The bouncer ushers us in, saying, "Maybe don't tell any Westerners about what goes on in here." The heavy brass doors part, and the club sucks him in.

One week earlier and over 1000 miles West, in Sichuan province, I'd first interviewed Will (not his real name) underneath the dust-filtered glow of a lamp-lit highway overpass. He'd just finished sparring Tai Qi with his master, whose door he had prostrated in front of for 12 hours before being accepted. The three of us—Will, his 60-year-old, chain-smoking, impressively nimble Tai Qi teacher, and me—talked about a sentiment that's increasingly popular in China these days: an appreciation for the coexistence of the old and the new, tradition and breakthrough. The Tai Qi teacher and I both looked at Will, nodding.

In 2001, when Will was nine, the Chinese Society of Psychiatry removed homosexuality and bisexuality from the official list of mental disorders in the Chinese Classification of Medical Disorders. Notably, they cleared Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual (LGB) but neglected to strike Transgender (T) from the list of psychological diseases.

Today, China is home to what is speculated to be the largest LGBT community in the world. Grindr, with 5 million global users, was heartily beat out by China's gay geo-social app Blued, now with 15 million users, 12 million within China's borders. The government, on the other hand, remains quiet on the issue. "They neither condone or condemn us, which is frustrating but livable," William says.

Will is a 22-year-old Chinese student from Beijing, currently finishing up his undergraduate degree in Chengdu, Sichuan, the so-called "gateway to the West" of China. Will self-identifies as gay, and has taken part in demonstrations in Mainland China and Taiwan. Next year, he'll study at China's most prestigious university, Tsinghua, to earn his masters in philosophy.

My sex ed teacher brought up homosexuality once. All he said was that it was a psychological disease.

Will's goal is to "modernize Chinese thought," part of which means proving the compatibility of rigid traditional dogma unique to China. Compared with the Christian or Islamic world, Will believes China can be among the most progressive countries on the planet on LGBT issues if awareness is built into the education system.

VICE spoke with Will about coming out in Chinese society, the trickiness of being a gay male heir, and normalizing gay sex.

VICE: Growing up in the 90s in China, when did you first realize you were gay? What was your first exposure to the concept of being gay?
Will: When I first realized there was such a thing as "gay"—when I realized there was such a concept—I was 11. It was often brought up casually in society, movies, the media; they all would mention '同性恋,' tóng xìng lìan, but I didn't know what that was. No one ever defined it, so I made guesses just by looking at individual characters.

The Chinese word for gay and lesbian is the same: 同性恋，tóng xìng lìan. The first character means "same." The second character primarily means sex. However, its pronunciation and tone is the same as 姓, xìng, which means family name, as opposed to 性, xìng, which means sex.When first meeting someone in China, it is polite to ask them what is their xìng. You aren't asking "What is your sex?" but rather, "What is your family name?"

Right, so instead of understanding it as "same sex love" I thought people were talking about "same family name love," two men of the same '性,' xìng, the same family name. Because they had the same family name, they would date. We would joke around with other male classmates, "Your family name is Wang. My family name is Wang. We are tóng xìng lìan!"

It wasn't until I was 11 that I wandered across a website called Friend, Don't Cry. Now the site is ancient, but I think it still exists. It has a lot of small stories and novels, forums, pictures of guys. The forum describes gay lifestyle. I saw those and was like, "Oh, I've been gay this whole time."

Some chill guys at the first gay pride event in China. Photo via Flickr user kk

You don't need to hop the Great Firewall to access the site?
Nope. Anyone could access it. I know a lot—a lot, a lot—of young and even older Chinese guys who found this site, or sites like it, and finally realized they weren't perverts or weirdos.

What did you do when you realized you are gay?
Experimented. I had the information—I knew what a blowjob was—but [I didn't have] education on the emotional side of relationships. I was only 12. Next came anal sex. He was older than me by ten years. It was consensual. Actually, it was me who seduced him. Now it is probably illegal. He probably shouldn't have done that. I was 13.

It wasn't good. I was not emotionally mature enough. I was lacking a good understanding of the emotional side of sex. I lacked a sex education altogether. There was no moralizing sex between men like [there is] with women, no "no sex before marriage" or "first time should be about love" type of stuff. If you're only looking at the websites or the book, you wouldn't think that sex with a man is a taboo concept, you wouldn't think that we should wait until later to try it. There was no need to think twice.

What was sex ed like in China? Did your teacher bring up homosexuality?
In elementary school, we had a class called "Pubescence Education." It was with our school doctor. He was also the biology teacher. He just made us watch a movie called The World of the Human Body. At that time, he brought up homosexuality once. All he said was that it was a psychological disease.

When people online comment about gay people, people will fire back, "What are you using to comment right now?" Alan Turing was gay. No gays, no computer.

Have you come out to your family?
For the average Chinese gay guy, the hardest part is always going to be coming out to your parents, but not for the same reasons as you guys in the West. Chinese people really emphasize 孝道, xìao dào, [most often translated as filial piety]. Opposition to homosexuality is mainly based on 不孝, so not being filial, not being a good son.

This concept is Confucian, right? Can you explain the connection between being a good son and having children?
Confucianism isn't religion in the Western sense, but it is the bedrock of Chinese tradition. It creates a moral system.

China's issue with gays goes like this: sleeping with a guy makes it impossible to have offspring. The guy part isn't necessarily bad, but the no offspring is 不孝, not filial. There is a line central to Confucianism engraved on the hearts of most Chinese people, either consciously or socially coded: "不孝有三，无后为大." It means, "There are three main ways of being unfilial, the worst of which is not providing descendants."

Beijing LGBT Center. Photo via Flickr user maltman23

So the issue with being gay in China isn't about being somehow "unnatural" or somehow sinful, as it is out West. The problem is logistical: how to have a son.
Exactly. There are other issues in terms of family structure, but at the core of the issue is that line. More or less, the worst moral transgression is to not be a good son, and not having a child of your own is the worst way to commit that transgression.

How did your parents react when you came out?
My dad didn't say anything, just leaned back and kept looking at the ceiling. My mom said, "If you're sure, we can only accept this." Three days later, my dad and I sat down to talk about the important details.

Why not your mom?
It wasn't related to her. It was my dad's and my issue.

What kind of details did you discuss?
I have a pretty heavy role in the family. I am my dad's only son. Frankly, with the One Child Policy, he's lucky he had a son. His brothers only have daughters. The passage of the family name needs a son, and it is my duty.

There are a lot of modern options that sort of skirt the male/female aspect of having a son. In vitro fertilization, for instance, is a way to pass on the bloodline without marrying a girl. Making a type of agreement with a lesbian is a thing that is happening more in China, too, which I know might not be received well back West. All consensual, obviously.

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Does traditional Chinese thought have anything to say about homosexuality specifically?
Ancient China looks at homosexuality as a type of personal hobby. By that I mean, you could marry your wife, have your son, and also get down with another beautiful guy. There are some literary works and songs that extoll gay virtues, and there are also some that make fun of this sort of gay tomfoolery, but all in all there is no serious or deep discussion of homosexuality.

Now, though, homosexuality, particularly male homosexuality, is a major topic in Chinese media. How have attitudes changed toward homosexuality since you were a kid?
Now there are a lot of popular jokes involving gays. There are gay characters in TV shows, even if they don't come out and say it. There are viral Chinese gay videos made by Zank. Sometimes it is negative, sometimes it is positive, mostly it just includes it.

Gays sometimes are portrayed under the rigid stereotype of "thirsty," always looking for opportunities to have anal sex.

In a way, it is like being seen. We exist now. Jokes or not, it can make young people's attitude warm up to the idea of homosexuality.
More and more people are realizing homosexuality is genetic, which has of course not been proven definitively, but still it shifts blame toward [genetics] instead of the child or his upbringing. People also understand the maxim, "We should respect homosexual lifestyle choices."

Still, prejudice exists everywhere. Gays sometimes are portrayed under the rigid stereotype of "thirsty," always looking for opportunities to have anal sex.

Who is the biggest gay role model in China right now?
Bizarrely, Tim Cooke. His coming out did a lot for people's perceptions with the craze around Apple products. If people say gays are gross online or anything, people will reply, "Are you using an iPhone to write this?"

More intense even is when people online comment about gay people, people will fire back, "What are you using to comment right now?" Alan Turing was gay. No gays, no computer.

What do you think is the most important issue for the LGBT community here in China?
Without a doubt, sex ed. Marriage is a later consideration. Right now, [many] people don't understand the basics of being gay.

Most importantly, beyond the physical safety aspect, is the psychological aspect. Being homosexual in this society, how should you protect yourself? How do you handle your sexuality? Who should you tell, who shouldn't you tell? How much should you tell who? If you have feelings toward a straight boy, how should you handle that? Because no one ever told me any of this, I went down a lot of dark and sometimes dangerous paths before things cleared up for me.

Follow Zak on Twitter.

I was four years old when my dad bought a wolf. We named the cub Dusty and gave him a pen at the edge of our basketball court, in front of the garage. Our lives were already extremely weird by suburban Pittsburgh standards: My dad owned almost two acres of land and six huskies, and dogsled racing was his hobby. He raced in the Pennsylvania tri-state area, and as my older brothers and I grew up, he bought more dogs and structured our lives around the sport.

He dreamed of training a wolf to pull a sled. That dream failed, and today, when I remember the tragedy that unfolded, I look past his alpha-male façade and see a man who just wanted to give his boys the childhood he didn't have.

The author and Dusty. Photo courtesy of the author

Dusty bit me the day we met. It was spring, 1985. My brothers, TJ and Aaron, were eight and six, respectively, and Dad had gathered us in Mom's backyard to play with the cub. Mom lived on a hilltop overlooking Allegheny River, and the yard sloped gradually. At three months old, Dusty wobbled and fell, but once he got going, he charged. "Don't run!" Dad warned me. Ignoring his command, I tried to flee and Dusty chomped down on my ass. Mom, who believed her ex-husband when he said the cub was half-German Shepard, rubbed the bruise. Dad wasn't as moved by my tears.

"I told you not to run," he said.

People envision Paul Bunyan when I tell them about my dad. The opposite is true. He was a clean-shaven math teacher, who, at his peak, stood five-foot-eight. Since retiring, he's shrunk a couple inches and lost most of his hair. Once, as an adult, I watched his feet dangle off the couch and thought: This is the man who squeezed my neck when I made an error in little league?

I resent fearing him as a boy. Back then, he was big and strong. Every dog obeyed him—even the wolf was his friend. Dusty became the first in the family to stand up to him, though. The rebellion started on the trail. Dad lined him up with several teams, and when Dusty pulled the sled, he was stronger than all the dogs combined. But unlike our huskies, who instinctively wanted to run, Dusty usually trotted, and afterward, he'd tear his harness to shreds. Dad finally gave up when Dusty dragged an entire team into the woods after a bird. After that, Dusty's life was confined to a large pen and the enclosed basketball court, where Dad played with him every morning.

I was in kindergarten when Dusty bit me again. Dad and one of his many girlfriends stood inside the garage while I played on the snow-covered basketball court. I stuck my gloved hand through Dusty's fence. He sniffed and then chomped. I ripped back my arm, leaving the glove in his mouth. There wasn't a struggle, nor a scratch, but I felt the pressure from his vise-like jaw. Shaken and scared, I walked inside the garage. I was a fast-talker who was often yelled at for interrupting adults. Afraid of angering Dad, I stood silent, waiting for my turn to speak. Eventually, he looked down.

"Where's your glove?"

"Dusty has it."

Dad ran into Dusty's pen and tore the glove from the wolf's mouth. While reprimanding me for not speaking up sooner, he duct-taped the glove back together, and made me wear it until he bought a new pair. That wasn't the last time he patched Dusty's handiwork with duct tape. I used to joke about these anecdotes, but there's one incident that seems too alarming to make wisecracks about.

It was summer, 1988. TJ, Aaron, and I were shooting hoops in the driveway. We had just finished a game of two-on-two, and Dad had run into the house to get Pepsi. Three years old and now as tall as me, Dusty rubbed his ribs along the fence. I stuck my fingers through the chain links and scratched him. I was afraid of Dusty after the glove incident, but I hadn't learned my lesson. He was so beautiful. The way he howled at the moon was art, and I wanted him to love me like he loved my dad. I would have settled for how he let my brothers pet him through the fence, sometimes even licked them. But the wolf didn't feel the same way about me.

I both feared the wolf and wanted him to love me, which is more or less how I felt about my dad.

Dusty froze, and in a flash, I was thrown onto my back. There was a six-inch gap between the fence's bottom rail and the concrete, and my foot had gone inside his pen. Dusty clenched my sneaker and, shaking violently, began pulling me under. We owned 14 huskies at the time, and their pens wrapped around Dusty's on the driveway's edge. While the dogs went berserk, Aaron tugged my arms. Dusty's fangs pierced the shoe and I screamed. I realized he was going to eat my foot.

Dad kept a shovel by the garage door. He used it as a dustpan for pine needles on the court. TJ grabbed the shovel, ran over, and drilled Dusty's head through the fence. The wolf jumped back with my shoe, and I shot backwards, toppling Aaron. Dusty retreated to a corner and began mincing the Nike high-top. Dad ran into the driveway, dropped the Pepsi cans, and hurried into Dusty's pen. He jammed his knee into the wolf's neck and pounded his head until he let go of the sneaker. The huskies tapered into silence with each blow. A few jogged in circles, unable to control their excitement. Shoe in hand, Dad backed out of the pen. A husky barked.

"No!" Dad's face and neck were red. "No bark!"

The dog whimpered and then stopped. I stood there, tube sock half off, too shocked to speak. TJ explained what happened and, patting down his thinning hair, Dad ordered me into the garage. I followed him to a workbench in the back. He clicked on a light, picked up a roll of duct tape, and began repairing the shoe. He grumbled about Nike prices, and thinking I was in trouble, I began to cry. Dad ordered me to stop.

It's not that he was unable to handle emotions. He hugged us and kissed us and said "I love you" on a daily basis. But he sprinted away from vulnerability. And so, instead of acting concerned, he tried to turn the attack into a life lesson: "How many times do I have to tell you to be more aware of your surroundings?"

Watch: VICE Sports head to Alaska to meet the champion dogs of the Iditarod.

The next day, he wired additional fencing to close the gap, and then everyone acted as if I hadn't been viciously attacked. I became terrified of the wolf and prayed for the day when he would go away. But then he'd howl at a fire whistle while I was shooting free throws, and my heart would fill with love—for the animal and for my dad. I feared the wolf and wanted him to love me, which is more or less how I felt about my dad.

I never talked about how the attack affected me—I was too afraid—and now my dad and brothers don't believe that it was traumatizing. Whenever I bring it up today, they roll their eyes. There were other violent incidents in my childhood; I once saw a dog's intestines torn out by other dogs. But my dad and brothers usually refuse to talk about any of that. When one of them does, their memories differ starkly from mine, and sometimes they don't even remember events that seem vivid to me. These conversations end with me being told to "leave it in the past" and "just move on."

Dusty turned against Dad because he was a wild animal in a cage, but for a while, Dad was a badass who wrestled a wolf while he stared into its eyes, just like Ethan Hawke in White Fang.

Deep down, my dad is a good man and, at times, a great father. My brothers beg me to embrace that side of him. He instilled the values of hard-work and responsibility. He raised us to love the environment and practical jokes. He encouraged us to watch the news and read the newspaper, and he took us whitewater rafting and horseback riding. He taught us to play poker, and when I watched him shave as a young boy, he'd cover my face, too, scraping down his cheek, and then skimming mine with the back of a comb. Zzzzip!

But even the good times had a hyper-masculine theme, and the negative moments overshadow them because my dad and I have never gotten along. Now, we hardly even talk. He has shown me nothing but indifference for over a decade because I don't live up to his standards of adulthood. I've had several careers and apartments, and nearing my mid-30s, I'm in grad school with no money. He thinks I'm selfish, and I'm the idiot who thinks he has the ability to change, suddenly have an open mind, and show unconditional love. I struggle to realize this is who he is, and he's trying his best.

I usually keep the daddy issues hidden. Some close friends don't even know about Dusty or the dogs. I once let it all fly, though, on my first and only OKCupid date with a woman who had interned at a Yellowstone National Park wolf habitat. Her name was Laura, and we met at a dive bar that smelled like chew spit and skunked beer. She wore a brown sweater and an army cap, and tucking strands of brown hair behind her ears, she asked:

"How old was the wolf when he snapped?"

"Four," I said, surprised. Most people ask questions, like: How did he die? Is it even legal to own a wolf in Pittsburgh? But these were afterthoughts for Laura. I told her how, after trying to drag me under the fence, Dusty went after Aaron and TJ, but didn't bite them.

"Pretty standard wolf behavior," Laura said. "Go up the pack's food chain."

On the psychology of wolves: Motherboard says wolves howl for more than just their friends.

She asked if my brothers or I had dogs now. I didn't have one—still don't—and the excuse I clung to was a lack of money. But the truth was I couldn't stand to see another dog die. TJ owns a Bichon Frise and a Havanese. Aaron bought two Irish Wolfhounds, which seems like overcompensating for TJ's ankle-biters. I admitted to Laura that I love shadowboxing the beasts in the backyard. It reminds me of the way Dad used to play with Dusty.

"He roughhoused the wolf?" Laura asked, incredulous. "Jesus Christ! No wonder the wolf attacked everyone. Your dad's an idiot."

For years, I believed a different narrative, one where my dad was a tough guy to be feared. Dusty turned against him because he was a wild animal in a cage, but for a while, Dad was a badass who wrestled a wolf and let it gnaw on his arm while he stared into its eyes, just like Ethan Hawke in White Fang.

Related: VICE gives an inside look at the exotic animal trade.

The morning Dusty bit Dad is ingrained in my memory. After feeding the dogs, Dad let Dusty into the enclosed basketball court to eat and play. TJ, Aaron, and I watched from the dog pens. They were shadowboxing as usual when all of a sudden, it became real. Dusty sliced the top of Dad's hand. Dad jumped back and wagged his finger at the wolf.

"That's not how we play!"

Dusty's hair stood straight up and he growled. Dad ran to the garage door and grabbed the same shovel that TJ had used to free me two years earlier. He spun and jabbed Dusty before he lunged. Dusty had trapped Dad in a corner. The dogs jumped onto their doghouses and barked in excitement. Dad tried to jab with the shovel and escape the corner, but Dusty pinned him back. I hugged one of the dogs and started crying. Aaron yelled at me to shut up, and I forced back tears. TJ ran into the house and returned with a beef knuckle and a steak. Beef knuckles were Dusty's weekly treat, and TJ threw that into his pen first. When the wolf looked away, Dad jumped from the corner. Dusty spun back and followed Dad. TJ hung over a fence, waving the steak in the air, while Aaron banged on a doghouse. When Dusty looked back, TJ tossed in the steak, and Dusty ran into his pen after it. Dad closed the gate and locked it. Dusty never left his pen again.

Later, in a rare moment of candor, Dad admitted that he shouldn't have gotten Dusty. But he said he didn't regret the decision.

Dusty. Photo courtesy of the author

"I really loved him," Dad justified. "He was so beautiful."

In his voice, I could hear the little boy inside him. His childhood was much worse than mine—a controlling mother, an austere household. He wasn't allowed to have a dog. Dad stopped talking to his parents when I was a boy, and while he rarely spoke about his mom, he often criticized his own father for caring more about hunting and fishing with his friends than spending time with his son.

To Dad, dogsled racing with my brothers and me made him better than his father. His intentions were good. He just never addressed his emotional baggage. A well-adjusted adult would not have seen buying a wolf as liberating. A well-adjusted adult would have stopped and thought: What will I do if I can't tame the wolf?

After the basketball incident, Dad tried to find Dusty a new home. He called zoos and habitats, but no one wanted our wolf. Their wolves wouldn't accept him, which would be a death sentence. Like the thousands of other Americans who buy exotic pets, Dad agonized over what to do. He didn't want to kill Dusty, but keeping him locked in a cage was torture, and Dad had a nightmare about the wolf getting loose and attacking someone. Finally, almost two years after Dusty bit him, Dad mixed tranquilizers into his food and dumped it over the fence. Dusty ate every scrap, walked around as if drunk, and then lay on his side and closed his eyes. He breathed slowly for a while before dying.

My brothers and I stood in a line next to Dad as we looked down at Dusty's lifeless body. Dad began to cry.

"This is the hardest thing I've ever done," he said, wiping away a tear.

Follow Gavin Jenkins on Twitter.

Beams of cathedral light illuminate the empty innards of overgrown warehouses on the outskirts of Mumbai. For most of the locals, the abandoned, British-colonial-era buildings serve as a latrine. But for Kali (not her real name), stepping carefully among piles of excrement, it is a workplace.

The 30-year-old is a hijra, the pan-Indian term used to describe cross dressers, naturally intersex people, or transgender women. Stats on hijras are limited, but their numbers have been estimated to be as high as 6 million. The word itself originates from the Semitic root hjr, meaning to leave one's tribe. It is an apt etymology, as hijra live on the edges of society, outcast by their kin.

"I am a ghost," Kali lamented. "I cannot be part of my family. It's against their reputation, what I am today."

Her gender awakening began at nine, but she lived as a male for years to protect her four sisters. "If I had become hijra," she explained, "it would have been difficult for them to find a good marriage proposal. So I opened up myself late."

The only regular family contact she currently maintains is with her mother. "Maybe once a month I dress like a man and go to stay the night with her," Kali said. "I leave in the morning. The neighbors ask about me, about my long hair and why I look different nowadays."

I told Kali that I was working on a project collecting dreams from around the world, and asked about her own.

"Often, I dream of being at a family celebration. I am wearing a sari, but they accept me as I am. They are happy with me, sharing all the joys of life. When I wake up, I am alone."

Paradoxically, for hijra like Kali, the same gender ambiguity that makes her a social pariah also grants her a holy status among some Hindus. Hijra are associated with Shiva, god of destruction, who is often worshipped in lingam form—as a stylized fusion of male and female genitalia. This coupling of the masculine and feminine symbolizes an inseparable cosmic unity. Hijra are also associated with the mother goddess Yellamma. Their intersex status is widely attributed to spiritual possession, a perception that allows hijra to perform blessings in exchange for money or goods.

The most lucrative blessings—at births, weddings, and business openings—are conducted by a small number of well-known (and usually elderly) hijra. These established hijra, known as gurus, charge hundreds of dollars for their services. Hijra like Kali, who almost always work under the authority of a guru, make far less. She told me her usual income is 10 or 20 rupees per blessing—the equivalent of about 15 to 30 cents. Even so, she is unable to keep most of her earnings, as her guru requires a payment of 5,000 to 6,000 rupees per month from each of her 80 hijra.

One of the warehouses Kali passes through on the outskirts of Mumbai.

Kali lives in the shade of the broken warehouses. She moves slowly throughout the day, following the shifting shadows. In addition to offering blessings, she works as a prostitute to supplement her meager income. When a man approaches from the road, Kali never knows whether he has come for a blessing or for sex.

Sometimes, he asks for both.

"I used to work for an AT&T international call center," she recalled. "It was a nice salary—21,000 [rupees] in hand. But I always felt I'm not the person that I am. I was pretending to be one of them in a false body."

"I don't like this job," she continued, referring to her sex work, "but I like the lifestyle. I'm free to dress the way I want, free to wear makeup and jewelry."

It's a freedom that puts hijra like Kali at least partly outside of the law. She said the police are reluctant to be involved with her community, and disputes are usually handled by gurus, though the Indian Supreme Court did recognize hijras as a "third gender" and protected class last year.

"The authorities know that we that we are shameless people," Kali elaborated. "People are very fearful to talk to us because we're not from a good background. They know that we don't talk respectfully. Here in India, we never even pay tolls when we cross a bridge. We just clap our hands and they let us through."

Anita, Kamla, and Lakshmi

At a busy intersection in downtown Mumbai, a group of hijra flit gracefully among the rows of halted cars, knocking on windows. Lakshmi, Kamla, and Anita work for a guru they called Shamila. Periodically, a window will open for a quick blessing in exchange for a tip.

"We each do 300 or 400 blessings per day," Anita explained.

Check out our documentary, Prostitutes of God, on the ancient system of religious sex slavery in remote stretches of southern India.

Unlike Kali, Anita and her crew did not identify as female growing up.

"We became transsexual because of poverty," Anita told me. "At 14 or 15, we had little to eat and few friends or family so we came here and joined this society. It was not by choice. After we were here for a while though, we started feeling transsexual. Most of the people you see wandering around under the traffic lights have the same story."

I asked for a blessing and they spoke a few words before touching me with the edge of their saris.

Kali had done the same earlier that day.

"Does this blessing work?" I asked.

"I'm not so sure," she replied. "I have always believed that God has given each and every human being equal power. It's not that we are born something special. We eat the same thing that you eat, so how can we be so different?"

Follow Roc's project collecting dreams from around the globe at World Dream Atlas.

Vince Vaughn as Frank Semyon in 'True Detective.' All photos courtesy of HBO

Warning: Light spoilers ahead.

The second episode of True Detective 's second season opens with Frank Semyon (Vince Vaughn) lying awake and gazing at a water stain on the ceiling. "Everything is papier-mâché," Frank says. Lest you think this means everything is a fun craft activity for kindergarteners, Frank launches into a meditation on the pointlessness of life and a history of his childhood traumas. When Frank was six, his alcoholic father accidentally trapped him in a room for five days until a rat started chewing on his fingers. Kiddie Frank took the rat and "just kept smashing it until it was nothing but goo in my hand!" If only he'd been able to combine that goo with some strips of newspaper, he could have made a papier-mâché mask to hide his pain.

Plot-wise, True Detective barely advances this episode, at least until the final minutes. We learn that the state wants to use the case to probe Vinci's corrupt officials, but otherwise—barring the cliffhanger ending—we're left in same spot we were at the end of episode one: Frank's real estate deal is collapsing, the dead Casper was into weird sex stuff, and the three detectives have a mutilated body and not much else to go on. This episode instead focuses on the internal conflicts of the four leads.

Taylor Kitsch as Paul Woodrugh

If True Detective season two has a theme so far, it's the inability of the characters to escape their pasts. "We get the world we deserve," Colin Farrell's Ray Velcoro says in episode one, and that world is determined by the evils the characters have perpetuated as well as those their family has perpetuated on them. Frank can't get out of his father's basement or leave his criminal history behind. Ani Bezzerides (Rachel McAdams) can't separate herself from the hippie/cult upbringing her father foisted on her. Ray Velcoro's life has spiraled ever downward since he murdered his wife's rapist as an LA police officer. And Paul Woodrugh (Taylor Kitsch) is haunted by his years as a mercenary with some organization called Black Mountain. It's clear these are characters can't move forward with their lives because of lingering and residual pain.

The problem for True Detective is that, not just the characters, but the entire show feels trapped in the past. Last Friday, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of marriage equality to widespread celebration. Yesterday, Paul Woodrugh—who is hinted at being a self-loathing homosexual who takes Viagra before scowling through hetero sex—relates a story about "almost clocking" a "fag at the bank." In an era where the calls for diversity in entertainment are louder than ever, True Detective remains committed to the struggles of angry white men, doling out only the most minor roles to actors of color—a one-scene coroner or a corrupt cop with a handful of lines. Knife-loving detective Ani Bezzerides, in this context, feels less like a solution to the feminist critiques of last season than the most masculine caricature of a "Strong Female Character" that the show could muster. In this episode, she watches hardcore porn while sipping whiskey, but not masturbating or revealing any sexuality of her own.

Rachel McAdams as Ani Bezzerides and Colin Ferrell as Ray Velcoro

Wealth inequality, climate change, #blacklivesmatter, high unemployment—basically no pressing issue that you can think of is touched upon by this season of True Detective. The anachronism may be by design. After all, the new season is 100 percent hardboiled noir, a genre whose literary form was perfected by Raymond Chandler in the 1940s and whose film version reached its apex in the 50s. In fact, there's very little in the show beyond the occasional e-cigarette that couldn't exist in a noir from over a half a century ago. Art doesn't always need to touch on politics, but there is something odd about a show whose central plot is about political and police corruption, yet feels lifted from an era that didn't even have color TV.

On the Creators Project: 'True Detective,' Serial Killers, and Art House

Then again, perhaps the show's obsession with struggling white masculinity is what makes it relevant in an era when men issue death threats to women who critique video games and conservative politicians lament that the entire country is ruined because two men can now marry each other. True Detective's men—and, for that matter, women—are literally rendered impotent even as they project an aura of badassery. Frank struggles to produce a child. Velcoro is terrified that his "fat pussy" child was fathered by his wife's rapist. Woodrugh requires Viagra to get erect around his girlfriend. Even Bezzerides alternates between bad sex and joyless porn-watching. Moreover, the characters are threatened by modern life—Velcoro hates the aforementioned e-cigs because they feel "like sucking a robot's dick." True Detective is hardboiled where Philip Marlowe is a moping loser and Sam Spade has erectile dysfunction.

Want to watch The Real 'True Detective'?

I'm not suggesting anything at all about creator Nic Pizzolatto's personal political positions, and the writing shows some signs of self-awareness about the glum nonsense of its male characters. This episode even features season two's first joke when Velcoro tells Bezzerides, "Just so you know, I support feminism. Mostly by having body-image issues." Just how much self-awareness there is remains to be revealed by following six episodes. Even though these characters are shown to have their masculinity in crises, the show wants to remind us that they are at their core tough guys: Frank beats rats into goo, Velcoro beats his child's bully's father to a pulp, Woodrugh is only happy riding a motorcycle at fatal speeds through the night.

Last season, Pizzolatto was upset by the claims that his protagonists were anti-heroes:

I think both of these men are straight-up heroes—they're flawed men, but they're not corrupt. They're kind of throwbacks, for better or worse, to a different kind of masculinity. They're real men.

Does Pizzolatto feel the same way about this season's characters? Is Velcoro, a man who defends the murder of his wife's alleged rapist against her wishes by saying "by any natural law, I had a right," merely a throwback "real man" who unfortunately exists in the wrong time? Are these violent losers characters we are supposed to root for?

Vaughn

I realize I'm inviting a swarm of comments about Social Justice TV Critics and #TrueDetectiveGate or some nonsense, but the problem with True Detective is not a lack of political correctness. Many of my favorite TV show are equally as lacking in representation and political relevance, and anyone who has seen Breaking Bad, Mad Men, or The Sopranos knows that violent, suffering white males can easily be the centerpiece of transcendent TV.

But a key difference between those shows and True Detective is that they gave us fleshed-out characters—often wives and children—with different values and outlooks to contrast and complicated the actions of the anti-heroes. In the first season of True Detective, contrast was provided by the seemingly supernatural horrors that the show ultimately ditched in the final episodes. So far in season two, True Detective has offered nothing new to a well-worn genre and has given us no relief from its smog of suffering white masculinity. True Detective is still a decent show that features the baseline quality of production, acting, and cinematography that you can expect from HBO, and perhaps last night's shotgun-shocker cliffhanger portends a more exciting plot for the rest of the season. But through two episodes, this hardboiled show feels a little undercooked.

True Detective airs on Sundays at 9 PM on HBO.

Lincoln Michel's writing appears in the Believer, American Short Fiction, Buzzfeed, and Oxford American. He is the online editor of Electric Literature and the coeditor of Gigantic magazine. His debut story collection, Upright Beasts, is forthcoming from Coffee House Press. Follow him on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Saturday was London Pride, the capital's annual big gay day out. Central London was heaving, with over 250 groups involved in the march and thousands more lining the streets to party, be proud, show support, show the outline of their testicles in very tight budgie-smugglers, and, in some cases, be massive kill-joys by waving Bibles around and reciting scripture to a captive audience of absolutely no one.

The biggest story of the day was probably that CNN mistook a spoof ISIS flag decorated with dildos and butt plugs for a real ISIS flag. Or that the US had legalized gay marriage nationwide the day before, giving many even more cause for celebration. Or that the entire thing went off without a hitch, that everyone had a great time, and that there were a bunch of really well-dressed dogs in attendance, again proving Pride to be one of London's best street parties.

We sent photographer Lily Rose Thomas along to get excruciatingly close to a load of lube, butts, penis sweets, and judgy evangelizers. Have a look at her photos below.