On the maternity ward of California's Kaiser Permanente hospital, John and Jessica Strangis found themselves facing a terrible decision. It was June 1, 2014, and the couple were expecting their first child. Jessica had begun feeling contractions at around 4 AM that morning, so John called an ambulance, waiting for it to arrive before getting in his car to make the 20-minute drive from their home to the hospital.

Jessica had gone into labor five weeks early, but there was another complication: John and Jessica were both HIV positive. They knew the doctors would want to give her drugs to prevent the virus being transmitted to their child, but this presented a problem, because both John and Jessica believed those drugs would kill her.

John and Jessica Strangis were HIV denialists, part of a small community that, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, questions the link between HIV and AIDS. The theories espoused by denialists vary, but typically come down to a few key beliefs: that HIV does not exist or is benign, and that AIDS is directly caused by recreational drug use or lifestyle choices and is not sexually transmitted. As for the vast numbers of people who have died as a result of the disease? It's the HIV treatment that has killed them.

John's introduction to HIV denialism came in 2011, shortly after he received a positive diagnosis. Like many, he stumbled across denialist ideas while searching for information about his condition online. John decided to reject treatment. A few months later, Jessica did the same. John became a vocal spokesman for the movement, making YouTube videos about denialist ideas. When the couple discovered they were expecting a baby, John discussed various options with denialists online—anything that might allow Jessica to avoid taking HIV drugs. Some suggested traveling abroad. Others recommended a home birth. In the end, the baby's premature arrival meant they had no time to carry out these plans.

At the maternity ward, John argued with one of the doctors. The hospital had carried out a blood test and discovered that Jessica could be HIV positive. As a precaution, they recommended using drugs to prevent any harm to the child. John argued with the doctor for half an hour, but he was gradually worn down. The couple became worried about what might happen if they refused. "It came to the point where I'm like, 'If we decide against the treatment, are you going to send someone at gunpoint to take my kid away?'" says John. "The doctor said, 'Not me, but I don't know if someone else might.'"

And so, reluctantly, the couple accepted the drugs.

The roots of the denialist movement can be traced back to a paper published in Cancer Research in 1987, three years after HIV was discovered to be the cause of AIDS. Authored by Peter Duesberg, a biology professor at the University of Berkeley, the paper argued that HIV was harmless and did not cause illness. Duesberg has expanded on this theory in numerous papers in the years since, but his ideas have never gained traction among the scientific community. Nevertheless, they are still used by committed HIV skeptics to lend validity to arguments which occasionally breach the boundaries of mainstream culture.

In 2000, the Foo Fighters played a benefit gig for an organization that denied the link between HIV and AIDS. In 2007, the president of Gambia claimed he could cure HIV with herbs. But the most damaging impact of the HIV denialism movement was seen in South Africa in the years between, when president Thabo Mbeki refused to provide antiretroviral treatment to HIV patients. Harvard researchers have since concluded that the policy caused more than 330,000 premature deaths.

However, even now, the arguments persist. In 2009, theSpectator organized a screening of denialist documentary House of Numbers, only for it to be canceled after protests. In February of 2015, denialist campaigner Joan Shenton held a screening of her film Positive Hell in London.

Much like climate change deniers, HIV denialists claim they represent one side of an unresolved debate. But among the scientific community, there is no serious doubt that HIV causes AIDS. Professor Brian Gazzard is chair of the Expert Advisory Group on AIDS and of the St. Stephen's AIDS Trust. He tells me: "The consensus is totally overwhelming." After decades of arguing against the existence of HIV, denialists have found only a small handful of scientists prepared to lend credibility to their cause—most of them working in fields unrelated to virology. As Gazzard says: "Brilliant people can have bizarre ideas."

In 2000, the HIV crisis in South Africa prompted a letter to be published in Nature, dubbed the Durban Declaration, which declared unequivocally that HIV was the cause of AIDS. It was signed by 5,000 leading researchers in the field. To avoid accusations of bias, scientists working for commercial companies were asked not to sign. The letter described the evidence that HIV causes AIDS as "clear-cut, exhaustive, and unambiguous," adding: "HIV causes AIDS. It is unfortunate that a few vocal people continue to deny the evidence. This position will cost countless lives."

Mike Hersee is a UK-based denialist campaigner. In 2006, he founded Heal London, a website "for people who have questions about their HIV positive diagnoses and the whole HIV/AIDS paradigm." He tells me he has accompanied patients to medical appointments on around 20 occasions, to "challenge the doctor with a few things." These encounters do not always go smoothly. Hersee recalls the first time: "The doctor, who was initially very keen, within a couple of minutes was very agitated. Eventually when he backed himself into a corner and said something stupid, he stood up and screamed, 'Look, he'll die in a year if he doesn't take these drugs.' We were in shock because you don't expect a doctor to do that."

Hersee acknowledges that his medical expertise is self-taught, "but self-taught reading things like quite intense debates between medical specialists." At first, his interest in HIV and AIDS was purely academic. But in 2000, he began a relationship with a young man named Cornelius. Against Hersee's advice, Cornelius took an HIV test and was diagnosed positive. Hersee tells me that Cornelius was given drugs to treat his condition, but decided not to take them after being shown documents which suggested they were dangerous. Hersee continued having unprotected sex with Cornelius and sees his failure to develop the condition as proof of denialist theory. Later in our conversation, I ask Hersee what happened to Cornelius. "He died of heart failure when he was 23," he tells me. "But he had two faulty heart valves. His mother told me he wasn't expected to live until he was 25."

Related: Watch the trailer for CHEMSEX, out in UK theaters on Friday, December 4

Early deaths are sadly not uncommon in the denialist community. The website AIDSTruth has a list of 25 denialist campaigners who have died. Many denialists, like John and Jessica Strangis, are drawn to the movement just after being diagnosed with HIV. As John puts it: "Especially if you're first diagnosed, it sounds pretty good to look at some information that says this condition doesn't exist."

Gus Cairns is a journalist and AIDS activist who tells me: "All the denialists I've known have been driven by a conviction that it's such an appalling thought that it has to be denied and there has to be an escape somehow. Yet, of course there is an escape, and the escape is treatment."

But there are also campaigners without the disease who have nevertheless dedicated their lives to exposing what they believe is an HIV conspiracy. In 2009, psychology professor and AIDS researcher Seth Kalichman published a book, Denying AIDS, in which he explored the roots of the movement. When I ask him about the denialists' motivation, he tells me: "My experience has not been that they are lying or trying to intentionally deceive. The motivating factor for these rogue scientists and journalists, the common thread, is conspiracy thinking around science, the government, industry, and, basically, the establishment."

This view is confirmed by David Crowe, a Canadian journalist who, since 2008, has been president of the denialist group Rethinking AIDS. "There's huge amounts of money, and people's careers rely on this," he tells me. "If you started doing AIDS research in the 1980s or early-90s, that's all you are. These people have a lot of money and status and that would all go away."

After our conversation, it strikes me that the same could be said of the denialists. Their reputations are irreversibly tied to their claims. How many people, once diagnosed with HIV, will have been influenced by their arguments and stopped taking their medication? With so much at stake, could you ever begin to contemplate that you might be wrong?

Five months after the birth of her son, Jessica Strangis fell ill. The birth had gone smoothly and the baby was doing well. The experience had planted seeds of doubt with John about denialist ideas, and he began extricating himself from the movement. But the couple hesitated before resuming treatment. In December of 2014, Jessica developed pneumonia. "I've never seen anyone get sick like that in my life," says John. "I was telling her, 'Forget about all the stuff that we read. Let's just go with what the doctors say. Let them treat you, not argue. Let's try a different route.' Because I didn't want her to die."

After two weeks in intensive care, Jessica Strangis recovered from pneumonia and returned home just before Christmas. Shortly afterwards, she and John resumed their HIV treatment. Their son, Dominic, is now 18 months old. In June this year, the couple gave birth to a daughter, Annabelle. Both children have tested negative for HIV.

Follow Mark on Twitter.

If you or anyone you know is seeking advice about HIV/AIDS, visit the website of the Terrence Higgins Trust.

To read the rest of the articles from our Chemsex Week—a series exploring the people, issues, and stories in and around the world of chemsex—click here.

CHEMSEX will be released in the UK on Friday, December 4.

CHEMSEX will be released on DVD and On-Demand in the UK on January 11.

To read the rest of the articles from our Chemsex Week—a series exploring the people, issues, and stories in and around the world of chemsex—click here.

Image via flickr user jglsongs

There's been a lot in the UK media lately about chemsex. VICE'ss documentary on the subject follows the publication of the British Medical Journal's report on the subject. After years spent hiding away in endless sex parties and chillouts, chemsex is now out in the public consciousness for everyone to observe in all its graphic detail. And it makes a lot of people—gay and straight—very uncomfortable.

Featuring graphic scenes of real sex parties in which guys inject mephedrone, smoke crystal meth, and engage in bareback sex, CHEMSEX makes for challenging viewing. Just when you were ready to tell your mum you met a lovely new guy (on Grindr, though maybe you'll tell her you met in a bar) along comes the chemsex crisis to ruin your picture-perfect wedding.

It has been leading gay magazine Attitude's cover story. Articles have appeared in the Independent and the Guardian. Even the Daily Mail and the Sun ran editorials. Where once it existed in the subculture of gay excess, chemsex is now experiencing the glare of mainstream media attention. But the problems around sex and drug addiction have been the concern of sexual health clinics up and down the country for nearly a decade. It's something the NHS has been dealing with, being the first point of contact when people slip into comas after overdosing on GHB, or worse, when they die. The only organization that doesn't want to address it is the government.

There's even unease from within the gay community. At the Stonewall Awards last month, I was talking with one concerned gay man who told me how he felt it was inappropriate that the media was drawing so much attention to the subject. "It's not exactly the image we want to convey to the world, is it," he said. "The girls in my office would be shocked to hear about that kind of stuff."

Yes, it's true. We don't want to burst their bubble and let the girls in the office think that gay men exist outside of RuPaul's Drag Race finger snaps and witty Sex and the City repartee. Wider society is more accepting of gay men than ever before... but it only really fully accepts us as long as we're shopping and not fucking. Because sex is what technically defines us as gay men. It's not our penchant for pop music, our interest in fashion, and the arts that sets us apart; that's all just window dressing in the appropriation of culture that gay men have stitched together to give us common semiotics. The defining characteristic that differentiates gay men from the straight world is that we have sex with other men.

I know it looks like I'm spelling out the obvious here, but it's got to the stage where it's kind of necessary to do. Chemsex is a very real issue happening all over the UK. It's tearing sections of our community apart slowly, and it's spreading ominously, and won't get better until policy makers acknowledge that sex is an intrinsic part of gay identity.

Here's a fact: Gay sex is immeasurably pleasurable. That's why gay men are at it, a lot. I know this from personal experience. Bad blowjobs aside, I can tell you that the vast majority of gay men who engage in sex enjoy it. While it might not be the most earth-shattering experience every time, the desire is strong enough and the pay-off good enough to have us seek it out again. In this regard, gay men are no different to straight men. Men are men. And men enjoy sex, whether it lasts for an unsatisfying sixty seconds or orgasmic six hours. It's just that for gay men, access to sex is much easier and more accessible than your average heterosexual encounter. Negotiating this sexual minefield is tricky at the best of times for most people. Factor into this that young gay men's sexual identity is virtually invisible in wider society for the most part of their lives and it creates an emotional void in which all manner of problems present themselves.

Of course, these are generalizations and I fully acknowledge that not every gay man is a rabid sex addict. Many gay men are happy in faithful and monogamous relationships. But, comparatively, a considerable number of gay guys do not adhere to those traditional relationship structures. And as much as recent legislation makes LGBT people equal in the eyes of the law, the fact remains that gay men still make up a small proportion of the mainstream. In a YouGov survey of 1,632 adults, just 5.5 percent identified as gay. Purely from a statistical point of view, gay men, and gay sex, will always exist as something that remains on the edge of what society deems "normal." Gay sex and relationships will always be "other." It's a subject that MPs avoid, parents switch the channel away from when it appears on TV, and schools avoid addressing in the open and factual manner that young gay people so desperately need it to be presented.

The school system is where we need to start educating young people about sex and relationships in modern Britain, because it rarely comes from parents. And talking about sex and relationships of other sexualities will not turn swathes of heterosexual young people gay. But it will promote understanding, acceptance, and respect of LGBT people, and also go a long way to tackling bullying. However, ignoring LGBT relationships in schools only serves to further isolate an already vulnerable section of the community.

Researchers at Birmingham City University and Sheffield Hallam University have discovered secondary schools in Britain claiming to incorporate sexual diversity into their sex and relationship education (SRE) are in fact upholding heteronormativity.

"If openly want to discuss homosexuality, I don't think the classroom is the best place to do it. It's something that we say if you have concerns about, we have the drop-in clinic with the school nurse," said one teacher, who has been teaching SRE for over eight years.

Keeley Abbott, lecturer in Social Psychology at Birmingham City University and research lead, said this highlights a lack of understanding amongst teachers around what constitutes real inclusivity within the context of sex and relationship education. "Lesbian, gay, and bisexual students could be being left vulnerable here with a lack of any sex education provision that is relevant for them," she said.

Dr. Sonja Ellis, lecturer in Psychology at Sheffield Hallam University, added, "Teachers also need to be aware of the various ways of imposing heteronormalizing practices through their use of terminology, and should be using words such as 'partner' instead of 'boyfriend' or 'girlfriend.'"

It's this invisibility of gay sex and intimacy in society and the shame that comes with it that feeds into many of the issues around chemsex today. Growing up as a gay man in a world that is dominated by a privileged, white male ideology, in which religious dogma is ever-present, and where men are discouraged from outwardly embracing any emotional and compassionate complexity is perhaps the most depressingly constrictive box to find escape from. It's no wonder so many gay men suffer disproportionately high mental health issues, never mind the myriad issues faced by those from non-white cultures.

It's little surprise that when gay men find ecstatic, joyful, pleasurable release during intimate physical contact with each other it becomes something that is sought out again and again. When recognition of any emotional intimacy has been starved of you during your formative years, buried beneath layers of social pressure to conform, gay sex becomes that briefest of moments when those constraints evaporate. Throw drugs into that mix and you can have a recipe for disaster.

In the summer of 2014, I met with the National AIDS Trust to ask for their support on an initiative I devised to raise the issue that ignoring LGBT-inclusive SRE in schools was not only destructive to the future mental health of hundreds of thousands of young people, it was also irresponsible not to educate them about protecting their sexual health.

Related: Watch the trailer for CHEMSEX, released in theaters in the UK on Friday, December 4.

Good SRE for young people regardless of sexual orientation makes them aware of the pressures that are all too present in an increasingly connected world. In a society dominated by social media, where the perfect selfie sits alongside pressures of body image, and easy access to porn all means the lines between sexual fantasy and reality blur. MPs are so unbelievably out of touch with the problems facing young people today, from issues of consent to revenge porn.

Most parents haven't a clue about the kind of pressures their kids face. Good quality SRE should be taught within a framework of Personal, Social, Health, and Economic (PSHE) lessons. A Parliamentary Committee that took evidence from a huge range of professionals, teachers, and experts in the field came back with an overwhelmingly pro-PSHE report in February 2015. It identified that SRE in schools was inadequate and the government should look to implement a statutory system in all English schools. It took Education and Equalities Minister Nicky Morgan five months to respond, sidestepping every recommendation the Committee made.

Ironically, it was Neil Carmichael, Conservative MP for Stroud, who had the most damning words for Morgan. As Chair of the House of Commons Education Committee, he said, "The response made by the Government is disappointing. Ministers entirely sidestep the call made by MPs in the closing months of the last Parliament to give statutory status to PSHE. They also reject or brush over nearly every other recommendation made by the previous Education Committee in their key report published five months ago."

It's not enough to give gay adults the right to marry, when we aren't educating young gay people about the importance of constructive relationships and the value of intimacy. It's not enough to be preaching to gay men about regular sexual health check-ups and to be aware of the facts around HIV, when we aren't even giving all young people basic information about safer sex.

Education is the key to breaking the perpetuating cycle of chemsex, which is only getting worse. It's time to let young gay people know that their sexuality doesn't need to tear them apart.

Cliff Joannou is Deputy Editor at Attitude magazine.Follow him on Twitter.

To read the rest of the articles from our Chemsex Week—a series exploring the people, issues, and stories in and around the world of chemsex—click here.

All photos and drawings from the archive of Stefan Ruiz, photographer and illustrato unknown

Stefan Ruiz first discovered photography in the early 1990s. He was working as an art teacher at San Quentin State Prison, California, and started taking pictures of the inmates who came to his classes. Crime had always fascinated him. The son of a Mexican lawyer, he grew up with dinner table stories of trials and arrests. But it was the characters behind it all that really grabbed him; his work as a portrait photographer has taken him around the world, shooting everyone from patients in Cuban psychiatric hospitals to Mexican "Cholombiano" street kids, and big names like Bill Clinton and James Brown.

But for his latest project, he's put his own lens down to bring to light a haul of lost photographs from Mexico City's scattered police archives. It started in 2010, when he came across a box of dusty mugshots in a flea market in Las Lagunillas. The owner, he discovered, had a whole load of police images taken throughout the 1950s to 1970s—from stills of armed robbery and artists' impressions of stolen possessions to portraits of the most notorious criminals of the age. Brown and frayed, the photographs were an alternative insight into life and crime in mid-century Mexico. So, Stefan set about making them into a book.

The book's mugshots are mainly of thieves, who were idolized by the country's poor. It also features mugshots of famous murderers such as student-turned-serial-killer Gregorio Cárdenas Hérnandez, brothel-owners and mass-murderers Delfina and María González, as well as scrapbooks of political radicals who were labeled as terrorists like 1960s teacher and civic leader Genaro Vazquez.

While the 20th century guerrillas and highway bandits may have been largely replaced by drug cartels and organized gangs, the entrenched and violent criminal culture that Mexico is so often associated with by outsiders is still very much present—figures show that over 7,400 intentional homicides took place nationwide between January and May, while some analysts have estimated that 80,000 organized crime-related killings have taken place in Mexico between 2006 and 2015.

We caught up with Stefan to discuss the motivation behind his book and what he thinks these images tell us about Mexico today.

VICE: Tell us how you found all these pictures.
Stefan: I go to flea markets a lot and I often buy photographs. I used to teach in a prison and I've always been a bit obsessed with crime photos. I like mugshots because I take portraits and in mugshots the portraits are pretty good—by the time the picture is taken, the person is obviously screwed. But the thing that I found interesting about these photographs was that they weren't just mugshots, they were so random. There were so many of them, too. I asked the guy at the stall if he had any more. The next time we met, he showed up with two black plastic bags full of them.

Why did you decide to publish these photographs now?
I showed the photos to a friend who works in publishing. You know, there's always crime in Mexico so it seemed relevant. Also, I wanted the photos to get out there because I thought they were good enough to share and bring up different ideas. We found this professor, Benjamin Smith, who teaches Latin American History so together we looked at different photos, trying to find connections with the photographs I had. I had already found some; I knew that one of the guys who is labeled as a terrorist in the country was teaching at the University of Mexico and was an expert in Mexico's leftist movement. And then we found some of the other people, like the American guy Joel Kaplan who escaped from prison in Mexico with a helicopter, and all of that was great because it just added a whole other level to the project. Also, the photographs talk of how crime in Mexico has changed over the years so we thought it was important to publish.

What do you think these photographs say about contemporary Mexico?
I guess what I wanted to do was to tie into the idea that everything is different but the same; things have changed but they haven't really. I mean, now in Mexico you have Narcoterrorism, which is different from the leftist terrorism of the 60s and what's going on with ISIS, but the problem is still incredibly real. Probably the difference with Mexico today is that at the time some of the crimes were maybe a bit more innocent. In the 1950s the most popular form of crime in Mexico was robbery, which is why most of the mugshots I have are of thieves. But right now with all these beheadings and bodies hanging off the bridges it's really gone to a whole other level.

Last year 43 student teachers went missing and nothing happened. The government keeps saying everything's fine and things are getting better but the druglords like Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán seem to be more powerful than the government sometimes.

Your family are Mexican migrants, and you go back there pretty regularly. Are we getting a true picture about what it's really like in Mexico from the mainstream media?
There has definitely been a clampdown on the media; it's pretty common knowledge that the government right now has been a little less friendly toward any critical media and the PRI has always been close to some of the established media. But then also the cartels have been much harsher, they've been killing journalists in Mexico like crazy.


What's it like as a photographer there?
When I was shooting the Cholombiano series in Monterrey, it was pretty hectic. There was a lot of violence in the neighborhood and it was very sketchy. Nobody goes there unless they're part of the military. There were a few times when I could feel the energy going bad, which is when you just pack your equipment up as quickly and calmly as possible, put it in the car and go.

I remember shooting there and people coming up to me saying, "Do you realize how crazy it is here?" I mean, you have police driving around in pickups with masks on, they're not showing their faces. I've been pulled over by the police a few times over the years, trying to get bribes. Especially if you rent a car, the police will know and pull you over and hold you up for a while and fish for money. I have Mexican friends who if they get pulled over by the cops and asked for their driving license, they keep the windows up and show it through the glass. Because if you hand it to them, they'll say, "If you want it back you'll need to come to the police station and pay a big fine. Or you can pay me $20 and we'll just settle the ticket here."


So what do you want your work to achieve?
I'm trying to do things that are at least a little bit informed and respectful. I try to deal with Mexico in a slightly nuanced way and I like the idea of commenting a little bit on the political situation without taking it overboard.

Follow Giulia Mutti on Twitter.


Mexican Crime Photographs from the archive of Stefan Ruiz is out now, published by GOST Books.

Photo of the University of Otago via Wikicommons

Read: Male Brains and Female Brains Look Pretty Much the Same, According to Science

Last month, students across several subjects at Otago University in Dunedin, New Zealand, were asked to re-sit their end-of-year exams. It was reported that there had been issues with completed exams being stolen, but while rumors bubbled on campus the incident passed with minimal wider news coverage.

That was until this morning, when a 23-year-old woman appeared in in Auckland District Court and the bat-shit crazy truth came out.

On November 7 the woman took an exam but aroused suspicion when she repeatedly asked to go to the toilet. When staff checked the bathroom they found handwritten notes, decided she'd cheated, flagged her exam, and took it away. So later, the woman—whose name has been withheld—hid in a cleaning cupboard in the university building until everyone went home for the night.

After everyone went home for the night, she emerged from her hiding place in dark clothes, a hoodie, rubber gloves, and a balaclava. Carrying an axe, she proceeded to live out every university student's late-night Red Bull–fueled exam fantasies.

Intent on finding her paper, the woman used the axe, along with a steel bracket, to smash through wood and glass. During the spree, she stole 98 completed exam scripts across a range of subjects including dentistry, politics, English, and sports medicine. One was hers, and we assume she took the other 97 because she'd already gone to the effort of axing her way in.

Not surprisingly, smashing up a public building triggered several silent alarms—one of which was set off when she tried to lift an office door off it's hinges with a hand truck. The police spent eight hours investigating the scene, and initially reported having no leads beyond being able to conclusively say the burglar appeared to have knowledge of the building.

The university is understood to have later provided electronic data, including emails and web search history, to help the police in their investigations. The woman was arrested a few days later, and the exam papers and the clothes she was wearing during the break-in were later found dumped in Otago Harbour. The university reported that despite being recovered, the scripts were in an "unusable state."

The woman will be sentenced on February 10. In the meantime, a university spokeswoman has said they are reviewing their security systems.

Follow Wendy on Twitter.

The late End Times preacher Harold Camping. Photo: copyright 2012 Universal Life Church Ministry via Wikipedia

We should all count ourselves lucky. This century alone we've already survived at least 20 raptures, with our latest narrow escape coming just over a month ago. On October 7, the world was supposed to have been consumed by flames, the majority of the global population burnt to cinders, what with God being notoriously picky when it comes to dishing out his golden tickets.

This cheery PSA was delivered by Chris McCann, leader of the Philadelphia-based religious group eBible Fellowship, who told the Guardian: "According to what the Bible is presenting, it does appear that the seventh of October will be the day that God has spoken of: in which the world will pass away."

Sure enough, the seventh rolled around and there were no all-engulfing flames. No ghostly horsemen plucking bad souls from their commutes and dropping them into Hell. Just a reminder that pregnant women should avoid alcohol and the announcement of this year's Bake Off winner.

To most, these failed doomsday predictions are just Twitter fodder—thousands of people making the same joke, then forgetting all about it, and just getting on with their lives. But for those who genuinely thought they'd said their last goodbye to their closest loved ones, before finding they've once again been denied entry to the pearly gates, it surely can't be such an easy thing to forget. So what actually happens to these believers? How can they continue to believe in the aftermath of a very publicly failed prophecy?

The rapture, like any good party, requires a lot of preparation. First, there must be the handing out of the invitations. In 2011, for instance, End Times preacher Harold Camping used his radio station, Family Radio, to spread the word of the impending doomsday on May 21 that year—a date he then revised to October 21 when the hellfire failed to materialize.

Then, depending on your preacher, there might be a practice run. David Berg, founder of the religious movement Children of God (later rebranded The Family International after a series of controversies and allegations of child abuse within the sect), took a more hands-on approaching to getting his followers prepped for the various apocalyptic events he had predicted.

Flor Edwards as a child, when she was part of the Children of God movement

Flor Edwards grew up as part of the CoG in the 1980s and 90s, so I emailed her not long after McCann's failed prediction to ask her more about life before and after a failed prophecy. She told me that, in preparation for the end of days, men from the camp where she lived would storm her dorm unexpectedly as she slept.

"The Rapture would be preceded by the Great Tribulation, or 'The Last Days.' The men coming in were part of the Antichrist's army, I think," she said, explaining that the people running into her room with guns and batons were mimicking this supposed military force.

I suggested that it must have been terrifying to face the prospect of an early death from such a young age. "Of course it was terrifying," she said. "We thought we'd be saved, but the threshold to get there would be death, and perhaps we would have to meet our fate as martyrs. By the time came, I was a young preteen living in America. I was no longer scared of death."

Inevitably, there are a number of obstacles that a group might face in the wake of a failed prophecy: First comes rationalizing the big apocalypse-shaped elephant in the room. What one must remember, though, is that God is never wrong—a doomsday misjudgment is solely down to a human error, not a godly one. (Deuteronomy 18:21-22: "You may say in your heart, 'How will we know the word which the Lord has not spoken?' When a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord, if the thing does not come about or come true, that is the thing which the Lord has not spoken. The prophet has spoken it presumptuously; you shall not be afraid of him.")

So what may sound like a dodge to you and I is an honest mistake on the shoulders of a prophet. The prophet will return to the Bible to find more clues of when the doomsday will actually occur, although many—including Matthew the Apostle, who kicks of the New Testament—say it is a mistake to try to determine one. (Matthew 24:36-44: "But about that day and hour no one knowns, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.")

Once that's been cleared up, out comes the damage control. Admitting outright failure threatens a group's ability to continue, so many prophets will just move the rapture date along a bit, making sure to keep it vague. According to Flor, after 1993 passed without a single doomsday, Children of God founder David Berg began distributing newsletters to followers entitled, somewhat ambiguously, "It Could Happen This Year."

Was this was the start of the group's unravelling? I asked Flor. "This was definitely the 'unravelling of the group,'" she said. "There was almost a sense of humiliation that the predictions 'the prophet' was making were not coming to pass. That was the hardest pill to swallow for most of his followers."

When this kind of thing happens, some, like Flor and her family, will leave. After 1993, Berg had insisted they move back to America from Thailand, where they were living at the time, to continue evangelizing. But they felt jaded, and in 1996 Flor. "You have to understand that Father David didn't dump these ideas on followers from the beginning," she told me. "It started as a very innocent, hippie love-shack kind of movement. Young people looking to make the world a better place and create change."

But for those who decide to leave, there are always more who stay. Believers don't lose faith easily. Like Abraham, many followers believe they're being tested by God, so every failure is an opportunity to demonstrate their loyalty. So they carry on: they campaign, proselytize and pray harder than before. There will always be a new rapture date, because if there is nothing to look forward to then the group will fall apart. This glimmer of hope, no matter how vague, allows prophets to continue their work without eliciting too much pressure.

Look at Camping: He somehow predicted six failed doomsdays without being hailed a fraud, and even after his death Family Radio lives on.

Chris McCann himself is a follower of Camping's teachings. His eBible Fellowship—which he has pointed out is an online organization, not an actual church (though it does hold monthly meetings)—has also managed to retain large numbers of its followers after its October 7 mis-prediction.

The eBible Fellowship declined to speak to me for this article, emailing me the following response when I asked them what they do when the world fails to end: "I'm afraid we would be too boring for your story. We simply return to the word of God, the Bible, and keep studying it. That's it."

Viktor Vasnetsov's 'The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.' Image via Wikipedia

However, their site, oct7thlastday.com, states: "E Bible Fellowship tends to view a 'passed date' for its end as some sort of victory and celebrates it as though it means it will never end. And yet, the truth is that the world is in its death throes... It's just a matter of when that remains in question."

At the time of writing, predicting the world's end has a perfect failure rate of 100 percent. But as Lorenzo DiTommaso, a Professor of Religion at Concordia University, tells me, it isn't as simple as followers of these End Times preachers just seeing the light. "Like any deeply held worldview, a person's theological worldview is an expression of one's core views," he said. "Persons usually don't choose or change belief systems like they're buying fruit at the market."

Religion and a person's relationship to it is complex and resilient, and so doomsdays will continue to be set and believed. And while it's easy to dismiss those who believe so fervently, even in the face of such strong social antagonism, there aren't many of us who can put our hands up and say that we haven't once done something vaguely similar. Everyone has believed something absurd; I once spent $27 on a batch of Kony 2012 posters in the belief that it would somehow impact the ethical decisions of Ugandan guerrilla armies. Embarrassing in the aftermath, yes, but I survived.

And despite the predictions of these doomsday prophets, it looks like their followers will, too.

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Photos by the author

It was cloudy and chilly outside the Mitchell Courthouse in Baltimore on Monday morning at the opening of the trial for William G. Porter, one of the six police officers charged for the April death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray. The other five implicated officers will have their own trials over the next several months; the prosecution reportedly sees Porter as a "material witness" who could be useful against the others. Baltimore State Attorney Marilyn Mosby charged the six officers in May after weeks of protests and riots that upended the city.

The trials begin at a fraught time for the city, as Baltimore has seen a dramatic spike in homicides this year, with 311 murders so far in 2015—100 more than the city saw in all of 2014. Meanwhile, police killings of people of color continue to generate outrage across the country, leaving Baltimore activists to wonder exactly how much they've accomplished since Gray's death and the tumult that followed.

The "Baltimore Uprising"—as local activists call it—began just over a year ago, on November 25, 2014. That's when protesters gathered downtown to protest Darren Wilson, the white police officer who shot and killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, not getting indicted. Local activists recognize that the death of Freddie Gray carries as much significance for the national Black Lives Matter movement as other high-profile killings, and on Saturday, they held their own rally in solidarity with activists in Minneapolis and Chicago.

Looking Back at the Chaos That Followed Freddie Gray's Death

"The people from West Baltimore's poorest communities are still reeling from how the Freddie Gray incident was handled by the powers that be," says Perry Hopkins, an organizer with Communities United, a local grassroots organization. "The majority want justice, but openly say if officers only get a slap on the wrist, this city had better be prepared to experience another thwack on the hand. They mean it."

When I asked Hopkins if he thinks that means the community will begin protesting again if the officers are not convicted, he said, "Yes they'll protest...and in many different fashions."

A few handfuls of activists convened with signs and banners at the courthouse Monday, where metal barricades blocked off the areas protesters typically use to congregate. Some grew angry at what they felt were attempts by city officials to thwart their First Amendment rights. Still, those within the courtroom could hear protesters' chants from the street.

Sharon Black, a leader with the Baltimore People's Power Assembly, told me that it feels like there's a great deal of confusion right now, even among some of the most committed activists in town. "We've been phone-banking, and our sense is that people are a little bit confused about what's actually going on," she said. This makes sense given the complicated legal process, and the fact that the presiding judge imposed a strict gag order last month on the lawyers involved in the case.

"People are sort of saturated with news, and there's a bit of wearing down in terms of energy," Black said. "The bigger response from the public may only come after the trials have concluded."

Legal experts have expressed doubt that the officers will be convicted, and city officials are preparing for the likelihood that residents could revolt if they feel justice isn't served. Police Commissioner Kevin Davis says his department has spent nearly $2 million on new police riot equipment—including vans, protective gear, shields, and helmets—since the unrest over Gray's death this spring. Davis replaced the former Baltimore police commissioner, Anthony Batts, and the police department underwent a significant reorganization over the summer.

Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake told the Baltimore Sun that city officials are having "constant conversations and planning sessions" to prepare for, and prevent, potential riots. "Community members certainly don't want the city to erupt in violence again," she said. More than 250 businesses were damaged after the April protests, almost 150 vehicles were burned, and roughly 60 buildings were set on fire.

"People in Baltimore still want to see justice for Freddie Gray, that has not changed one bit since April," said Andre Powell, a protestor who stood outside the courthouse Monday morning. "Yes the mood was much more heightened directly after the incidents but people are closely watching what's going on."

Porter, the first officer on trial, has been charged with manslaughter, second-degree assault, reckless endangerment, and misconduct in office. Officer Porter reportedly asked Gray if he needed a medic while traveling in the police van, but thought he might be lying to avoid going to jail when Gray said yes. The officer is a 26-year-old Baltimore native who's been on unpaid leave from the Baltimore Police Department since posting his $350,000 bail earlier this year.

A spokesperson for the Baltimore police union on Monday told VICE they were unavailable to comment on the trial. In general, however, the union has expressed outrage at the indictment of the six officers, and has called on State Attorney Marilyn Mosby to recuse herself from the case. The president of the union, Gene Ryan, called the city's $6.4 million settlement deal for the family of Gray, approved in September, "obscene."

On Monday, the court proceedings were focused on selecting a panel of impartial jurors for the case. Porter's attorneys have argued that finding a truly fair jury will be impossible in Baltimore, and that the trial must be held elsewhere.

There is new evidence to suggest that Marylanders outside of Baltimore hold rather different views on the Gray protests than those who live within the city. A recent poll found that Baltimore voters are more likely to say that racism and the lack of jobs are the biggest reasons for the unrest after Gray died. Voters across the state, on the other hand, are more prone to saying it was due to residents' "lack of personal responsibility." The same poll found that 63 percent of Baltimore voters supported Mosby's handling of the case, compared to 38 percent of voters statewide.

The presiding judge, Judge Barry G. Williams, a black man who previously prosecuted police misconduct for the federal Justice Department, said he would reconsider moving the trial out of town only after the court makes a serious effort to find a fair crop of jurors within the city. Williams made clear that he thinks it's important for people to be tried by "their peers." And trying the officers within the city, many have noted, should help lend the court proceedings greater legitimacy. "One way to ensure that a community accepts a jury's verdict is for the jury to reflect the entire community's diversity," University of Maryland law professor Douglas Colbert told the Sun.

Residents and civil rights leaders will closely monitor the proceedings, and the local NAACP chapter plans to have a court watcher in attendance for the full duration of the trial. A great deal is riding on the outcome of these trials, and for better or for worse, everybody in Baltimore knows it.

Follow Rachel M. Cohen on Twitter.

James Moore. Photo via Flickr user Heather

Students and faculty at the University of Northern BC are fighting the appointment of former Conservative MP James Moore as chancellor of the school, claiming that he's basically the antithesis of everything they stand for.

More than 1,000 people have signed a petition opposing the recent decision to have Moore step in as ceremonial figurehead of the school.

"His own actions are decidedly inconsistent with many of the core values and principles embodied in UNBC's mission statement," reads the petition.

Located in Prince George, BC, UNBC has dubbed itself "Canada's Green University" due to its commitment to sustainability. It seems the UNBC community is having a hard time overlooking Moore's 15-year tenure as MP "in a government that did not celebrate diversity or the free and open exchange of ideas."

Specifically, they have beef with the former government's tendencies to muzzle scientists, make any kind of meaningful policies to address climate change, stifle democratic dissent, refuse to order an inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women, and invoke racist, wedge politics.

They also brought up that time Moore, former Industry minister, was a dick when asked a question about poor, hungry kids. "Is it the government's job—my job to feed my neighbour's child? I don't think so," he said at the time.

The petition closes with a strong anti-endorsement.

"It is our firm conviction that Mr. Moore's installation as Chancellor would do grave damage to the reputation and the long-term welfare of this institution, and for this reason that we firmly reject his appointment by the Board."

Ryan Matheson, chair of the school's board of governors, told the Vancouver Sun it's "unfortunate" Moore is being judged by his previous political associations (which he never made any attempt to distance himself from).

Matheson said the appointment stands.

"He has 15 years of incredible experience in public service, has a passion for the university, and he wants to give back in this way."

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Is there a sweeter sight to the harried server than crumpled bills at the end of the day? No. Photo via Flickr user Carissa Rogers

A bill that will ban employers from taking part of their employees' tips in Ontario is likely set to become law before Christmas.

The provincial bill, which has been introduced on four different occasions over the past five years, is looking to make it illegal for employers to require their workers to hand over a portion of their tips, according to the according to the Ottawa Citizen.

As of right now, employees in Ontario—from tattoo artists to servers—can have a percentage of their tips seized by their boss to either be pooled and divided amongst staff (you probably know it as "team gratuity"), or to help pay for other expenses such as broken dishes and credit card transaction fees.

Since cash tips aren't usually recorded, most employees can hang onto them with little suspicion, but digital transactions—such as with debit or credit—are the most heavily hit. These transactions often go directly to the employer's bank account, and the tips are only levied out after the fact.

The damage from this is compounded by the fact that server's wage in Ontario is only $9.80—a whole $1.45 per hour less than the regular minimum wage of $11.25. Then there's the competitiveness between employees that this creates, especially when there are both tipped and non-tipped employees working at that same business.

The bill was first introduced in 2010 by former NDP MPP Michael Prue, and at the time, it only consisted of a single line: "An employer shall not take any portion of an employee's tips or other gratuities."

The bill does cause problems for certain business, however. In the case of an indie coffee shop, for example—the owner of that place probably relies on the tips to help pay themselves, despite not necessarily being the one tipped all the time. Other places, such as unionized business, might have the tipping agreement inked firmly into their contract.

The bill was last seen before Queen's Park shut down for the 2014 provincial election, and although Prue is no longer an elected official, his successor, Liberal MPP Arthur Potts, brought the bill back to life.

There is still a chance the bill might be heavily revised, as the bill is part of a large programming motion proposed by Queen's Park, which means the entirety of the legislation it's contained in will be under heavy scrutiny before being passed.

Follow Jake Kivanc on Twitter.

Photo via U2Soul

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

"Another fun e-petition." It's all I can say now. It's the year 2016 and I have been sideways-promoted to being VICE's Head of e-Petitions. We have a new site dedicated to news stories recounting the existence of unsuccessful e-petitions, and I am the head of it. It's called SiGNED. Our most successful story is an e-petition to rename Prince Charles "the Prince of Shit." It got 96,000 signatures and a push campaign on Facebook but Prince Charles still refuses to change his name. "I will not change my name," Prince Charles is saying, in a hastily arranged press conference with Sky News, "to 'The Prince of Shit.' These petitions mean nothing." But he is wrong. In 2016, e-petitions are all that matter. It is everything we have, the only news available to us. It caps off a trend that started two years ago when the government launched that website, and culminated with Britain locked in a sort of emotional void where the only way we can now communicate opinions is via e-petitions. This is all Kanye West's fault.

Trace your finger back through the timeline back until now: There is an e-petition to change the train station "Canterbury West" to "Kanye West." This is because of the word west—if you look closely, you will notice it is both a key component part of Kanye West's name (Kanye West) as well as the location of the Canterbury West (West) station. This is a humorous joke. The petition was actually first created in March, but nobody noticed it, and then about 900 people did and signed it, and that's when it became a news story. Hold on, I just need to check against my "writing up an e-petition as a news story" flowchart:

Oh, right, OK. "Sadly, Kanye (wealth be upon him) has been not always been afforded the respect he deserves," said Mark Kilner, age unknown, when describing the petition, which is about changing the train station name "Canterbury West" to "Kanye West," and which also yes has attracted some 900 signatures so far. "We cannot undo past wrongs such as retroactively giving Taylor Swift's Grammy Award to Beyoncé any more than we can save Jesus from crucifixion (although technically God kind of took care of that), but we can show our appreciation in other ways, and what better start than renaming Canterbury West Station to Kanye West Station?" Also nearly 1,000 people have signed it.

On NOISEY: We Ranked The BBC 'Sound of 2016' From Worst To Best

This is not the first time Kanye West has inspired an e-petition: You will recall, in March, that kid you went to school with who was really into Kasabian because "Serge is a lad" and it is "proper rock music" started a petition to ban Kanye from playing Glastonbury because, for the first time ever, he had bought a ticket. "Kanye West is an insult to music fans all over the world," Neil Lonsdale said, before clicking 'Like' on a "Jeremy Clarkson = LEGEND" Facebook page and playing exactly one chord on an acoustic guitar. "We spend hundreds of pounds to attend glasto, and by doing so, expect a certain level of entertainment. Kanye has been very outspoken on his views on music... he should listen to his own advice and pass his headline slot on to someone deserving!" 136,000 signatures.

I want to be upfront and tell you that I am extremely pro-Kanye. Not because of his music or his personality or anything like that. Kanye is an enormously powerful man who still, on the downlow, manages to rock a goatee, and he should be respected for that. Like, seriously: Did you ever really notice Kanye had a goatee? He could be directly standing in front of you, and you'd barely even notice it. Kanye West, every day of his life, shaves his neck and 80 percent of his chin in the exact same way your dad did after the marriage wobble in 1998, the same way Wayne Lineker shaves his face before his gooch. Kanye West is married to a woman so attractive she has essentially transcended humanhood and become instead a work of art, and he is doing this with a beard that is positively Spakian. We need to respect him for that and that alone. Everything else is just extra.

On VICE Sports: Luca Zidane and the Curse of a Genius Father

But Britain does not know how to deal with Kanye West, because he is bombastic and self-proud and so arrogant it is art, and only ever really wears big T-shirts and a surprised-but-also-sad expression, and that jams against every uptight principle Middle England holds dear. Kanye West would find it impossible to be British. Imagine Kanye West eating a Yorkshire pudding: You can't. Kanye West refusing to pay 30p at a motorway services to take a shit because "your nan's house is only 50 minutes away, Kim." Kanye West grimly trying to enjoy an overcast day on a beach in Cleethorpes. Being British is an endurance sport, sometimes, and Kanye West is not fit enough for it. He is American in a massive, cartoonish way, and so we can only react to him with extreme polarity, emotions as e-petitions.

I think it says a lot that, e-petition-wise, there are more of us inclined to tear Kanye West down for being good at what he does than elevate him to the name of a train station for being iconic. That neither end goal of the two Kanye West-flavored campaigns were ever likely to happen—why would Glastonbury listen to headline booking slot suggestions from someone who calls it 'Glasto' and has been literally once? Why would Canterbury West change its station name to make it actively less helpful to travelers?—but they are both revealing insights into how the base British mind tries and ultimately fails to comprehend the diamond-complexity of Kanye West and all his facets. Is Kanye West good? Name a train station after him. Is Kanye West bad? Politely stop him from singing at a singing show that you are in no way obliged to attend. Fundamentally, we do not know how to deal with Kanye West. The only way Britain can edge close to understanding his complex goatee'd genius is through the medium of e-petitions. We are simple cell-structures bobbing in a complex sea; we are dogs trying to use a TV remote. We are cavemen throwing rocks at a magnificent sun; we are Britons trying to comprehend Kanye.

Follow Joel on Twitter.

The framed photo of Stephanie that Michele keeps on her mantle. Photos by Jane Gerster

Michele Pineault remembers the phone call she received in the summer of 2014. It was a Victim Services worker, telling her the Coroners Service of British Columbia needed to talk to her, that they would be calling.

Michele remembers sitting at home for hours, days, then weeks, waiting for the phone to ring. All that time, she was going crazy wondering what it was they needed to tell her. Her first thought? They had made a mistake. That the DNA of her daughter, Stephanie Lane, had perhaps not been found at a crime scene—the devastating end to a six-year search.

Finally, Michele got fed up and made the call herself.

"You cannot do this to a mother," she remembers telling the person at the other end of the line. She thought the investigation into her daughter's disappearance had come to an end—a painfully unsatisfactory end, but an end nonetheless. But now this? "You're torturing me all over again... I don't know what the hell's going on."

Michele remembers the call from the Coroners Service that came shortly after.

It was a man—she doesn't recall his name—who told her that they had remnants of Stephanie in their possession. They'd found pieces of Stephanie's bones on infamous serial killer Robert Pickton's farm.

That fall, Michele received two of Stephanie's vertebrae and an inadequate explanation: the RCMP and then the BC Coroners Service had kept the pieces of bone in a storage facility from 2002 to 2014. Why had it taken more than a decade for them to be delivered to Michele? There was no answer, just a statement that the delay could not be explained.

At first, Michele wasn't sure what to do with her daughter's remains and she couldn't think clearly enough to process what she'd been told about why it had taken so long for her to receive them.

It was not until January 2015—18 years after Stephanie's disappearance, and nearly half a year after Stephanie's remains were delivered—that Michele felt she had to speak out.

Michele and Stephanie

Stephanie Lane was born in the spring of 1976 and disappeared in the winter of 1997. Her mother Michele Pineault, who was just 17 when she gave birth to Stephanie, remembers that day and the days that followed. "We grew up together," Michele recalls.

Stephanie was a mercurial child, but a solid achiever through grade school: she won solos in the church choir and starring roles in school performances, and she was a straight-A student. Years later, when Stephanie's younger brother attended his sister's alma mater, a teacher told Michele: "You know, in your lifetime you're lucky to one gifted child... I had that in Stephanie."

But in high school, something changed; a switch was flipped. To rouse Stephanie from bed in the morning, Michele often had to dump water on her.

"She was so, so smart," Michele recounts, but, "she missed the most classes in the school's history."

Stephanie switched schools twice, but her apathy endured.

At 18, she asked her mother if she could go on a weekend trip to Kamloops with a friend—a friend Michele knew was stripping to save money for school. Michele didn't want her to go, but ultimately agreed: "If I said no, she'd go anyway."

Before that weekend was out, Stephanie called home to say she had started stripping. Michele was shocked, but also resolved to maintain the open relationship she'd always enjoyed with her daughter. And she did: as Stephanie began dancing in Vancouver under the stage name "Coco," Michele would make sure her daughter ate.

"Coco," they'd announce over the speakers, "your mom's here with your dinner."

In high school, Stephanie had been an occasional pot smoker. Now, she drank. She started doing heroin. And at 19, she got pregnant.

Stephanie was 20 when her son was born, her boy slightly addicted to heroin. She had planned to put the baby up for adoption, but Michele—who held him and named him—asked for custody. She worried that the boy's adoptive parents might give up on him, and that she might lose track of him in the system, never to find him again.

A framed photo Michele has of Stephanie with her son before she disappeared

"You have these illusions of white picket fences, and that he's going to get adopted by a rich family," Michele cajoled her daughter. "That may not happen. So, please, please, please let me have him and I'll take care of him."

The boy entered foster care, but after less than two months, he came home to Michele on a temporary basis. Whenever Stephanie came by for a visit, she would lean in, swinging her long hair in front of his face, telling her little boy he was "mummy's baby, mummy's baby, mummy's baby." He would raise his little hands to grab the dark strands of his mother's hair.

Michele would simply watch. "It was just the joy of my life," she says.

When Stephanie's son was five months old, Michele gained full custody. There was no more talk of adoption now. Michele believed her daughter would eventually come home for good to raise the boy herself.

But months later, in January 1997—with Michele just days into a new, tough-love style of parenting—Stephanie disappeared, never to return.

"The guilt that I feel..." says Michele, almost two decades later.

Read more: She Was 16 When She Went Missing, But the RCMP Didn't Tell Anyone for Three Years

It wasn't until six years later, following a major break in 2002 during the police probe into the disappearance of 50 women—including Stephanie—from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside district that Michele received the news that broke her heart. Victim Services came to tell Michele that her daughter's DNA had been found on Robert Pickton's farm

On February 5, the RCMP searched Pickton's farm looking for illegal firearms. Pickton was arrested and released in the morning—but while searching his farm, officers discovered one of the missing women's inhalers.

In the days following, as police combed the farm, stories began to appear in the press: the discovery of DNA on the farm and allegations that police ignored the case for so long because many of the women were sex workers or used drugs.

Pickton was arrested on February 22 in connection with the disappearances. Police escalated their search of his farm in the months to come.

After the arrest came the phone calls. Michele grew to hate reporters. She got one phone call, then another, always asking the same question: Did the police call you about your daughter?

She realized the reporters were following a process of elimination, "phoning everybody to find out who they actually found on the farm."

After the visit from Victim Services, Michele changed her phone number and stopped reading the newspapers.

"I just totally shut myself off," she says, "and I relied quite heavily on the bottle to get through."

Searchers: Highway of Tears

Michele outside her new home in Surrey, BC, with a photo of Stephanie

Robert Pickton's trial began on January 22, 2007, almost five years after his arrest. He would face only six murder charges, though he stood accused of 20 more—the trial judge having separated the six from the 20, reasoning that to try that many cases simultaneously would be unmanageable for the jury.

Pickton did not face trial in Stephanie's case.

During the trial, the Crown called 98 witnesses; the defence 31. The process lasted nine months. Michele only managed to sit in court for one week; it was simply too hard.

On Dec. 9, the jury found Pickton guilty on six counts of second-degree murder in the deaths of Sereena Abotsway, Mona Wilson, Andrea Joesbury, Brenda Ann Wolfe, Georgina Faith Papin, and Marnie Frey. The judge sentenced him to life in prison with no chance of parole for at least 25 years. The 20 outstanding murder charges were stayed. Pickton had already received the harshest sentence possible—at the time—under Canadian law.

Read more: 27 Years of Silence: The Family of Missing Alberta Aboriginal Woman Is Still Searching for Answers

Shortly after Pickton's final appeal was denied in the summer of 2010, the government of British Columbia announced The Missing Women Commission of Inquiry. It was tasked with probing the police investigations into the disappearances of the women in the Downtown Eastside, and with investigating the charges stayed against Pickton for assaulting a sex trade worker years before his final arrest.

The Commission uncovered many problems, including: barriers for families reporting loved ones missing, gaps in investigations and families kept uninformed throughout, systemic bias, and multijurisdictional investigation issues.

But despite these nods to the victims and their families, the Commission's focus was squarely on the police: their investigations and changes that they should make when conducting investigations.This focus was evident long before the final report was delivered. Indigenous groups withdrew from the process and the independent lawyer appointed to represent indigenous interests following the withdrawals later quit, saying that while a disproportionate number of missing murdered women were aboriginal, she regretted that she "could not find a way to bring the voices of the missing and murdered aboriginal women before the commissioner."

In 2012, as the Commission delivered its final report, the BC Civil Liberties Association, West Coast LEAF, and Pivot Legal Society published a report of their own. Blueprint for an Inquiry concluded: "If nothing else, this Inquiry demonstrates what should not be done in conducting a public inquiry involving marginalized communities."

For Michele, who attended the inquiry even though she didn't want to, the low point of the experience was the revelation that the commissioner, Wally Oppal, spent one of his weekends during the inquiry filming a role in a movie about a serial killer.

"That's the most disgusting thing I've ever heard," she says,"I think I came out of there more traumatized than I was going in."

Her words are a potent reminder about all that could—but must not—go wrong as the new Canadian government begins discussions about the much-anticipated national inquiry into the epidemic of missing and murdered indigenous women.

The Butterflies in Spirit drum next to Stephanie's photo

Fay Blaney is the co-chairwoman of the Women's Memorial March Committee. She is Xwemalhkwu from the Campbell River, but works in the Downtown Eastside.

It's partly the failure of the BC inquiry that has her worried. Little was gained from that inquiry, she says. BC's Auditor General is now investigating the status of the implementation of the inquiry's recommendations.

For a national inquiry to be done right, she says, it needs to start with the women and it needs broad terms of reference fleshed out in consultation with indigenous women and organizations of all shapes and sizes across the country.

"We really do need to address root causes," Blaney says. "The ones that will know what the root causes are, are the Indigenous women."

She'd like the inquiry to be explicit in its terms of reference: this is about violence against women, specifically Indigenous women. Colonialism and racism are issues, she agrees, but problems have often been framed as such at the expense of talking about gendered violence.

Blaney is now waiting to see whether—and with whom—the government consults ahead of the inquiry. That, she says, will be the first indication of its eventual success or failure.

The government is currently consulting with Canadians about the pending inquiry and the Department of Indigenous Affairs says, "we hope to make an announcement about the process for the design of the inquiry shortly."

Regardless of the "design," the government needs to follow through on the inquiry's recommendations, says Kendra Milne, director of law reform with West Coast LEAF, which co-authored Blueprint for an Inquiry.

"It's crucial that the federal government commit at the outset to act on any recommendations that come out of the inquiry," Milne says. "What will not be useful is another lengthy and expensive process that develops recommendations that are then just ignored."

Michele was so happy to receive this gift because it was black (which Stephanie also was) and had sunflowers (Stephanie's flower).

On January 28, 2015, wearing a T-shirt with her daughter's smiling face and the words "Am I Next?" written above it, Michele spoke to members of the media assembled in Vancouver. Through tears, she recounted more than 15 long, bitter years.

She said she'd been told in 2003 that Stephanie's DNA "was found on the Pickton farm, it was found in a significant spot and if there had been more it would have been enough to charge him with, so I accepted that."

But now, having received Stephanie's remains, she says: "Two pieces of her vertebrae was certainly enough to charge him... There is evidence to prove that he murdered my daughter and I want Robert Pickton charged with my daughter's murder."

In a January statement, the B.C. Coroners Service said the remains weren't new evidence. There have been no new charges.

"The sole issue is the unfortunate delay in returning the remains," the statement reads. "The Coroners Service regrets it cannot explain this delay as none of the current senior management team were in their positions at the time, and those who were involved are no longer employed by the Coroners Service."

Even if Pickton isn't charged again, Michele wants to know why it took more than a decade before she received Stephanie's remains.

"They call it an oversight," she says of her correspondence with the department in the months since, all in the hope of more robust answers. "I call it a fuck up."

Michele outside her new home

Michele moved into a new home in Surrey, BC a few months ago.

On a mantel near her door, she has placed her photo of Stephanie and her drum from Butterflies in Spirit—a dance troupe that raises awareness about missing and murdered indigenous women. She has placed a photo of mother and daughter together, taken when Stephanie was a toddler, and next to a photo of Stephanie with her own toddler son. In the photos, everyone looks content.

In the cabinets behind the dining room table, Michele has placed a black angel with a bouquet of sunflowers. It was a gift from a friend to honour Stephanie—half black, half Indigenous and gone too soon—and to acknowledge the last perfume she wore: Sunflowers by Elizabeth Arden for Women.

It's been more than a year since Stephanie's vertebrae were returned to Michele. They wait in their clear tubes in their clear plastic bags in a purple box decorated with butterflies.

Michele's grandson, Stephanie's only child, has a plan to say goodbye. They'll go to the Vancouver park where there's a memorial bench with Stephanie's name on it. It's where they've gone every year on Stephanie's birthday. Sitting on the bench, they'll release little lanterns into the sky.

Not yet. Michele is hesitant: there have been so many mistakes, who's to say there hasn't been another? What if the vertebrae she received aren't actually Stephanie's?

"There is absolutely no doubt about the identification," said a spokeswoman for the BC Coroners Service via email, adding that this has been explained to Stephanie's family.

But Michele's continuing her fight to have the remains reexamined and the details of how and where and when mistakes were made released.

"There are too many errors," she says, "and I took them at face value. I trusted everything they told me as truth and now it wasn't."

So Michele and her grandson wait for a sign that may never come.

Follow Jane Gerster on Twitter.

Photo via Flickr user JohnPickenPhoto

After weeks of anticipation and subsequent outrage over the release of the video of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald being shot 16 times by a Chicago cop, the city's police superintendent was fired early Tuesday, the Chicago Sun-Times reports.

Garry McCarthy, who was previously the top cop in Newark, New Jersey and an operations chief in New York City, has overseen Chicago police since well before McDonald's death at the hands of Officer Jason van Dyke last fall. Van Dyke, who's been charged with first-degree murder for the incident, was freed on $1.5 million bail Monday. Apparently, between that case and the tragic video of a local nine-year-old being brutally murdered, allegedly by a gang that had beef with his father, Mayor Rahm Emanuel decided a head needed to roll.

"Now is a time for fresh eyes and new leadership," Emanuel said at a morning news conference, where he acknowledged the public's trust in his police force "has been shaken and eroded."

Critics are pointing out that Emanuel and Cook County Prosecutor Anita Alvarez did everything they could to delay the release of the McDonald shooting video, as the mayor faced a re-election campaign shortly not long after the incident in October 2014. It's fair to ask why McCarthy is the only one paying any kind of price. But if nothing else, in a city where police accountability is virtually nonexistent, that Van Dyke has been charged and the police leader is gone suggest that the city government is not totally blind to the problems activists have been shouting about for years.

Check out more from Julian Glander at his Twitter, Instagram, and blog.

When Epicly Later'd started, one of the first things I wanted to do was an Ali Boulala episode. I imagined doing a whole season just on him. He was the perfect subject of the show—hilarious, amazing at skateboarding, infectious to be around, yet also a bit of a mystery. Where and how did he become how he is? There couldn't be anyone else on Earth quite like him.

This was before the drunk driving accident that killed Australian pro Shane Cross and put Ali into a coma. At the time, it was all way too dark and depressing for us to cover—back then, we were doing episodes about Dustin Dollin shopping for pants.

Fast forward to a year or so ago. I posted a photo on my Instagram of Stevie Williams, where Stevie said "I want to do an episode your show, but I don't want any of that depressing bullshit..." Ali Boulala commented on the photo, "I'll do an episode, but I'm sure it will be all depressing."

I contacted him to see if he was serious, and was soon on a plane to Stockholm to visit him. He hasn't done too many interviews since the accident, so I wasn't sure what I would find—but staying with Ali for a week was nice, and most of the trip was full of laughs and good food.

You can see that he has not shut the door on the past, though. There is a picture of Shane Cross on his living-room wall, and it always hangs in the air. But Ali is moving towards putting his life back together, and I'm proud of him for that. This is a heavy episode, and I want to thank Ali for his honesty.

–Patrick O'Dell

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

This World AIDS Day, VICE is exploring the state of HIV around the globe. Watch our special report, "Countdown to Zero," tonight on HBO at 9 PM, and to get involved visit red.org and shop (RED).

By 1982, AIDS deaths in America had reached 853. At a press conference at the White House with President Ronald Reagan that October, a journalist named Lester Kinsolving raised his hand to ask Reagan's Press Secretary, Larry Speakes, about the epidemic—and whether or not the President had made a statement about it.

"I don't know a thing about it," said Press Secretary Speakes. The reporter noted that one in three people who have contracted AIDS have died from what had been called "the gay plague"—and the press pool, in turn, erupted into laughter.

"I don't have it," said Speakes, as the crowd laughed. "Do you?"

The next year, the death toll from AIDS would nearly triple. Kinsolving would continue to ask the same question in press conferences over the course of the next three years—to the same mocking and laughter. (At one point, Speakes called out his "abiding interest" in "fairies.")

The recordings from these press conferences are the centerpiece of a new short film by Scott Calonico, When AIDS Was Funny (which you can watch here). Calonico, who formerly worked at the State Archives in Austin, Texas, applied his historical research background for the documentary-style film, which incorporates the unearthed recordings, memos, and transcripts.

Read our other stories relating to World AIDS Day here.

"Mother Jones did a fantastic story last year about the conferences and the transcripts," Calonico told me. But while the story about the press conference was out there, as well as chronicled in the book Shots in the Dark, the audiotapes had yet to be uncovered. Intrigued, Calonico started digging.

"Because I've done so much research with presidential libraries, I started wondering if there was any videotape coverage. So I consulted the Reagan library and started speaking to the archivists there. It turns out there wasn't any video footage—but there was audio... and a lot of it."

"They were referring to this epidemic as 'the gay plague.'" — Scott Calonico

Calonico found that each press conference stretched on for about an hour, led by Press Secretary Speakes, whose career would eventually be scandalized by admitting he fabricated quotes attributed to President Reagan. Each was a fairly standard White House daily briefing, where the press secretary would clarify the President's statements and positions, outline the traveling schedule, and so on.

To obtain this never-heard-before audio from the Reagan library, Calonico simply filled out a standard form and paid for the copy. "I knew I was onto something when the archivist told me that he had to digitize the tapes for me—which means nobody had requested them in a while."

The result was chilling. It's eerie enough to read the transcripts, but to actually hear the recordings is infuriating.

"As the newspaper clipping in the film shows, one of the ways were referring to this epidemic was 'the gay plague,'" says Calonico.

Watch the trailer for our HBO special report "Countdown To Zero," premiering tonight on HBO.

Kinsolving, the reporter in the tapes, had been a long-time White House fixture. His career began at the San Francisco Examiner, where he was one of the first writers critical of Jim Jones and The People's Temple, years before the mass suicide in the jungles of Guyana.

"By the time he got to the White House pool, Lester had moved to writing for local magazines. His daughter told me that during the time frame covered in the film, he was making something like $200 a month," said Calonico. "For most of the other people in the press pool, he was considered something of a crackpot. However, in this case, he was eerily prescient."

On VICE News: Americans Are Still Being Imprisoned For Being HIV Positive

It wasn't until 1985, when over 5,000 people had died from AIDS, that Reagan first mentioned AIDS in public. The Reagan administration—which had until then been more or less indifferent to AIDS—called the epidemic a "top priority," according to a report in the New York Times.

"This is where it kind of gets complicated," said Calonico. "It's easy to paint Reagan as the bad guy, but in real life he did speak out in support of non-traditional lifestyles." Calonico mentioned that, in 1978, while Reagan was still Governor of California, he spoke out against Proposition 6, which would've prevented gays and lesbians from teaching in public schools.

"So I don't know if it was Reagan who didn't want to make a statement or his people who thought it might damage his reputation," said Calonico, adding: "I think it's pretty telling that his first statement about AIDS comes in 1985—when he's safely back in office for a second term."

Follow Harmon Leon on Twitter.

Welcome to Netiquette 101, in which we use cyber-case studies to teach you basic but valuable cyber-lessons in how to be a better cyber-citizen. Today, we talk the terrible crap that presidential candidates were trying to sell you on Cyber Monday.

Greetings, fellow netheads! Yesterday was Cyber Monday, which is the internet equivalent of the famed Black Friday, the annual shopping holiday that, over the years, has morphed into an extended commerce extravaganza in which big-box retailers and e-commerce sites slash prices in an attempt to get consumers to spend as much money as their credit cards will allow, both online and in what we in "the biz" like to call "IRL."

Rest assured, I have cybersex every Monday, so every Monday is "Cyber Monday" for me. But for the rest of you, it seems like it was a pretty big deal: online sales from yesterday are expected to top $3 billion. Even before the fateful day, it was revealed that Americans spent more money online than they did in stores over this Black Friday weekend. Hell, both Target and PayPal went dark yesterday due to the unfathomable influx of web traffic.

Still, if you looked around the ol' World Wide, you could find a few Cyber Monday deals that were worth your clicks. Many presidential candidates, for instance, offered discounts that shocked and awed scores of online shopping enthusiasts (I don't actually know if these people exist, or if anyone has bought campaign merchandise ever, but for the sake of this piece, let's assume they do).

Take Florida Senator and Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio, who celebrated Cyber Monday by lowering prices on campaign merch, making shipping free, and throwing in a free window decal with every purchase. This meant you could buy what I like to call the "Marco Rubio Dad Joke Pack," comprised of a "Freedom of Espresso" mug, a "Water Great Nation" water bottle, the "Marco Polo," and the "Let Freedom Ring" cell phone case, all for the low, low price of $155. When you look at the sheer number of shitty puns in Rubio's webstore, you realize that despite his campaign's aching desire to make voters believe otherwise, Marco Rubio is the least cool dude in the universe.

A Jeb! guacamole bowl! Image courtesy of Jeb2016.com

Of course, you could also have moseyed on over to Jeb!'s campaign site, where the other Floridian was offering all merch at 20 percent off. That means you would have gotten deep, deep discounts on a "Jeb! Impotence Starter Kit," including a hooded sweatshirt that Jeb! doesn't know how to put on, a mason jar (because, as the product description explains, "every drink tastes better in a cute mason jar."), an apron, and a goddamn $75 guacamole bowl .

If for some unfathomable reason you'd wanted all of this useless shit, on Cyber Monday, you could have owned a whole heap of useless stuff for a mere $145. Now, because you failed to act, all of this Jeb! swag will cost you $182.

On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton offered what amounts to a pretty shitty Cyber Monday sale—free shipping on all orders of $75 or more. Then again, Clinton's merch is kind of sweet, in a "Flash Sale at Urban Outfitters" way. Or at least it's the least embarrassing of all the crap political campaigns would like to sell you (The Ted Cruz ugly Xmas sweater notwithstanding). There's this five-panel cap that is very "Justin Bieber concert" (in a good way), a wool cap that's very "J. Crew outlet" (in a less good way), a "Grillary Clinton" spatula, and an embroidered pillow that says "A woman's place is in the White House." They're even selling a bandana for your dog.

It's not all good though—her campaign is also hawking "YAAAAS HILLARY" t-shirts, and, uh, this:

Donald Trump and Ben Carson, the improbable leaders of the GOP's 2016 pack, apparently opted not to hold Cyber Monday sales. Then again, when you're Ben Carson and your campaign is selling stuff like Lands' End v-necks, branded scrubs (?), and cat collars (??) with your name on it, that stuff sells itself, y'know?

As for Trump, his "Make America Great Again" hats have become the must-have campaign accessory of this batshit election cycle. Between the inherent popularity of his merchandise (both among honest-to-God Republicans and people buying the hats to make fun of Trump), and the fact that his campaign isn't lacking for money, Trump has no need for Cyber Monday. Plus, campaign merchandise is generally terrible and dumb, so the less attention candidates draw to it with online sales and free shipping, the better off we'll all be.

Follow Drew Millard on Twitter.

The author with Ezra Levant. Photo courtesy the author

In consecutive washroom visits, two elderly men using urinals adjacent to me let go wet farts. The first quietly apologized after eying my brand new Dreamy Trudeau Sweater. The second fella muttered about how maze-like the venue was, to which another urinal-occupant responded by joking that he should carry around a GPS in case he was found still wandering the halls at next year's event. The presumably grumpy old man quipped that he won't be coming next time, but wanted to attend this year's event "to hear what the young speakers had to say and they were damn good."

Such a scenario wasn't exactly what I'd pictured while catching an 8:29 AM bus to Mount Royal University (my alma mater) on a Saturday to attend Generation Screwed, a nine-hour conference organized by the Canadian Taxpayer Federation intended "to inform and mobilize young Canadians who want to save their economic future." While trudging through Calgary's shitty excuse for a winter on my way to catch an even shittier excuse for public transit, I considered what it might mean to be a member of "Generation Screwed." Perhaps it had to do with the rabid planned obsolescence that denied my phone's battery the ability to simultaneously listen to Grimes and send a text to my mom. Or maybe it referenced the fact that, like most of my friends, I've never held a salaried position longer than a few months. Could Generation Screwed be a shout-out to catastrophic climate change that will very likely destroy any semblance of ordered life by the end of the century? I had to find out.

Of course, I'd assumed prior to the trudging that such considerations would be erroneous given the organization's self-described infatuation with "debts, deficits and unfunded liabilities," not to mention the event's roster of speakers, which included Ezra Levant, Wildrose MLA Derek Fildebrandt, and Stephen Harper's former chief-of-staff, Tom Flanagan. That's why I carried copies of Ayn Rand's The Virtue of Selfishness and Vladimir Lenin's pamphlet The State: A Lecture Delivered at the Sverdlov University in my jacket pocket—the first serving as an emergency item to prove my pseudo-conservative stripes and the latter as a garlic bulb of sorts to repel actual conservatives who accurately outed me as a communist. Yet it wasn't until an older conference attendee used the word "Orientals" while asking me for directions that it fully sunk in that I was going to spend a very long day in a snake pit of not-so-covert racists while operating on three hours of sleep. At least I'd brought a full flask of gin and recently shaved off my straggly facial hair in an attempt to fit in with all the other pale-faced young conservatives who look exactly the same.

What Canadian conservatism needs is definitely a shot of racist populism à la Donald Trump! Photo via Facebook/Generation Screwed

Of the 120 or so participants—constituting a sold-out crowd, according to the organizer who strolled around in a red Donald Trump-inspired "Make Alberta Debt-Free Again" ball cap that I absolutely would have bought if it wasn't $20—it seemed that maybe a dozen belonged in the college-aged bracket. Only two of the dozens of white men who asked questions throughout the course of the day were under the age of 30. One of those two was a student who lamented about "liberal garbage" at universities and how he felt he was "going against the grain" and was often degraded and insulted for being a conservative and how he feared that other students of a similar ideological disposition will have their degrees stripped if they don't "toe the line." So at least there was some young talent on the rise for the performance art collective that is the Wildrose Party to tap.

The event's Twitter hashtag, #gscalgary, was used a mere 40 times throughout the day. A lonely three tweets coming from people not directly involved in organizing or speaking or covering it for Ezra Levant's TheRebel.media. The very first older gentleman to ask a question requested a "young person" to fix the mic, which required a switch being turned from "off" to "on." A Mount Royal nursing student Snapchatted my sweater during a break and noted she expected there to be far more young people at the event given its title and supposed mandate. Speakers nevertheless insisted there were "a lot" of young people in the room. The speakers themselves were exclusively white; only three of the 17 were women. The precise demographic of Generation Screwed was thus tricky to define without resorting to obvious phrases like "Aryan" and "ancient" and "penile."

The subject matter was just as uniform. I attempted to keep a count of how many times Ralph Klein's limp carcass was metaphorically circle-jerked, but lost count after a dozen name drops within the opening hour. Debt was almost immediately classified as "immoral and unethical." The province's new climate change policy framework was consistently described as a "cash grab." Rob Breakenridge—a local radio host who very awkwardly made a Wu-Tang reference and paraphrased the subsequent rhyme as "inappropriate language about bodies outlined in chalk"—suggested the NDP have no plan to pay back the debt and that even if interest rates were zero (which they basically are) we'd still be passing on liabilities to our children. This point confused me as I then wasn't sure if the screwed generation was mine or my children, of which I have none and plan to have none. Flanagan reminisced about the good old days when he washed dishes for $0.75 an hour and moved to working in a grocery story for $1.12 an hour although he admitted he was living at home at the time and his father paid most of the bills.

I guess the two outcomes are that we dock safely on the shores of balanced budgets, or we careen into the iceberg of deficits. Sure, makes sense. Photo via Facebook/Generation Screwed

Moaning about debt continued courtesy of Paige MacPherson of the Canadian Taxpayer Federation—the group that organized the event and (likely) scored whatever profit came from the $60-per-head ticket price—who talked about how we should ignore the advice of "academics" and "people in the media" and "elites." She noted debt interest payments are a "terrible use of money" and that we "get nothing for that money" although such a suggestion seemed to ignore the entire premise of multiplier effects, in which investments in infrastructure projects such as public transit or subsidized housing can result in long-term fiscal benefits that far outweigh the upfront costs. Amber Ruddy of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business asked "who owns businesses in the room?" because that was obviously a highly relevant question for students. MacPherson, who previously worked for Sun News, said in the Q&A period that "haters are always going to hate."

Such rhetoric largely underscored the essence of the conference: there was no dissent, no desire to understand what or why the opposition believes what they do, no intent to find out if there were potentially other interpretations of what it meant to be a member of screwed generation like incarcerated Indigenous youth or maybe homeless trans teens. Two consecutive speakers later asked everyone who supports oil and gas to raise their hands. All attendees in the room raised their hand, as if the debate over the energy sector's incredibly positive aspects (cheap energy, plentiful jobs) and tremendously harmful aspects (greenhouse gases, rapid inflation) could be reduced to such overtly didactic terms.

After lunch, Fildebrandt—the Wildrose MLA and petulant child of a finance critic—strutted to the stage. He immediately suggested there might be a hidden NDP camera in the crowd while looking in my direction, and pompously stated that he made up the "Make Alberta Debt-Free Again" slogan featured on the red hats and thus deserved royalties, something the crowd seemed to have trouble reading as a joke. He rounded out his rambly anti-NDP sermon by dubbing the government's fiscal approach "voodoo economic theories" and representative of "socialist zeal" and that "it's time for conservatives to stop apologizing for conservatism." I racked my brain for the last time that a conservative apologized for being a conservative. There was much more clapping. By then, everything started becoming a tad hallucinatory. Old people continued to frown at my sweater. I laughed and applauded along with everyone else.

Generation Screwed in action. Photo via Facebook/Generation Screwed

I mixed a gin and ginger ale in a vacant washroom at lunchtime. Ezra Levant, the self-described Rebel Commander and professional petition maker, had been typing furiously on his laptop behind me for most of the afternoon. I approached him during a break and nervously asked for a picture. We had a surprisingly amicable conversation given the content of my clothing: I truthfully told him I'm a "big fan" (I check his website every day) and suggested he buy up Trudeau paraphernalia for his crew, a recommendation that he seemed into at the time. Other random young conservatives congratulated me on the sweater upon witnessing the engagement with Ezra. I certainly didn't vote Liberal, so the joke worked both ways. However, Michelle Rempel—Conservative MP for Calgary Nose Hill—swerved out of my way while we were walking in opposite directions. Maybe it was too soon for her to appreciate the sweater given the recent decimation of her party by the young prince.

Three points had became exceptionally clear by that point. Firstly, that the conference was a full-blown revival meeting, combining cults of personality, an utter lack of ideological contrast, shitty coffee, and so many old white people. Secondly, that no one in the crowd had any idea what "socialism" actually was, despite it being referenced constantly by speakers and participants: to these people, "socialism" appeared to mean slight increases in tax for alcohol and cigarettes and train fuel, even though such policies do nothing to address ownership of the means of production or the distribution of surplus value which are fundamental tenets of socialism. Lastly, attendees would do anything they can to screw over other demographics and/or generations if it meant they don't have to pay slightly higher taxes.

Rempel's talk following the break was solely interesting because she used phrases like "flying fig" and "poop hits the fan" in substitute for actual phraseology used by a generation under the age of 30. She also made the second comparison of the day between Alberta and Greece, called NDP leader Thomas Mulcair a "socialist," slammed a Huffington Post article, and repeated that deficits are bad and should be avoided at all costs because deficits are bad and should be avoided at all costs. After an intensely dull lecture by John Carpay, a lawyer who decried atheism and hedonism and environmentalism, it was time for Ezra. Whoever was tweeting on behalf of Generation Screwed wrote, "Finally, here's the speaker we have all been waiting for...," which seemed kind of disrespectful to the 16 speakers who preceded Ezra but the observation was probably on point given three speakers had specifically shouted him out in the previous 90 minutes.

The creaky crowd was so ready for it. And Ezra delivered. Perhaps it was my extreme tiredness combined with a still-elevated blood alcohol content but by the time he was done talking in his characteristically new-wave Pentecostal preacher-like inflection about everything from Justin Trudeau's chief of staff's critique that the tar sands has grown too fast (a suggestion that former PC premier Peter Lougheed and Wildrose leader Brian Jean had previously forwarded), or that Notley lied about her desire for market access for petroleum products, or that the robocall and Afghan detainee scandal were "hoaxes," or that The Rebel was operated out of an abandoned daycare in Toronto (which he said anyone is welcome to visit), I was borderline onboard. I'd watched dozens of hours of Rebel videos. Witnessing the Rebel Commander speak in the flesh was a nearly transcendental experience.

A free drink was offered at the "networking social" upon the conclusion of the conference. It was the first time I'd turned down alcohol in recent years. For while I felt like I could pass as conservative within the parameters of the conference room, I started to suspect my cover would be blown after a drink or two, at which point not even Lenin could save me. The last thing I need to do in life is to get chased out of my old university by a pack of farting white men. I still didn't know why my generation was screwed, or whether I was even part of the generation, or if such a generation even existed. But I dreamt about Ralph Klein that night, so I guess that's something.

Follow James Wilt on Twitter.

Dwight Ball, Newfoundland and Labrador Liberal leader, is cheered by supporters after winning a majority government in the 2015 provincial election. Photo courtesy The Canadian Press/Andrew Vaughan

Here's a joke for you. Once upon a time—1933 to be precise, as the Dominion of Newfoundland is in its death throes—a well-known St. John's lawyer is giving a keynote speech to the Canadian Bar Association. The meeting opens with a rousing performance of "O Canada."

"That's the difference between our countries," he quips as they finish. "In Canada, you can earnestly sing 'we stand on guard for thee.' Back home, we have to sing 'God guard thee, Newfoundland' because nobody else is up to the job."

This is a gem you can bust out for any provincial election, but it's especially relevant now. We've just wrapped up one of the most vacuous election campaigns in recent memory at a moment when Newfoundland and Labrador is bracing for a fiscal, economic, social, and demographic storm. Dwight Ball has led the Liberal party to one of the largest majorities in Newfoundland history by demolishing one of its most unpopular governments. We're either in for A Stronger Tomorrow or A Stranger Tomorrow and it's not totally clear which is which.

Unlike the last two elections in this country—the upset in Alberta or the marathon federal slog to depose Stephen Harper—there was very little drama or excitement. The only uncertainty involved was the size of the Liberal blowout and, thankfully for the province's fragile democracy, we avoided a complete sweep of all 40 seats. But the election has basically been a foregone conclusion since January 2014.

The real suspense now is figuring out what the fuck we've just done.

Kathy Dunderdale. Photo via Wikipedia

KATHY'S CURSE

How did we get here?

Like most things in 21st century Newfoundland and Labrador, the story starts with everyone's favourite real estate mogul/local oligarch, Danny Williams. When he abruptly bailed on his premiership in 2010, he left a power vacuum at the heart of the Progressive Conservative party. The entire edifice of party politics in Newfoundland is built around a bargain-basement führerprinzip, and without its strongman at the centre, the party couldn't generate any new forward momentum.

But coasting worked fine enough in the last election for Williams' chosen successor, Kathy Dunderdale. She lead the Tories to a third majority government, helped in no small part by the fact that the Liberals were a complete trainwreck after eight years under Danny, while the NDP were still a non-factor. The Liberals managed to cling to official opposition status despite picking up less than 20 percent of the popular vote (which was actually less than the NDP got—isn't our electoral system fun?!), and the province got a semi-functional opposition for the first time in almost half a decade.

(Full disclosure: I was a Liberal candidate in both the 2007 and 2011 provincial elections, and my behaviour in the latter landed me on Wikipedia under "Controversies.")

At root, the problem is that the Tories were fully aware they were the only game in town, and they let it go to their heads.

Dunderdale's government inherited its mandate, resources, and organization from Williams. It also inherited all his arrogance and none of his charm. The government's first act in office was to shutter the House of Assembly until well into 2012, openly declaring that debate in the legislature was largely a waste of time. Dunderdale also nixed a meeting with the family of Burton Winters, a teenager who perished that winter, potentially as a result of a mishandled search and rescue operation. Not a particularly endearing start.

Then came the Muskrat Falls Affray. In a nutshell, Muskrat Falls is a hydroelectric project in central Labrador that will pump electricity across the Strait of Belle Isle into the island's electricity grid, then further down across the Cabot Strait into Nova Scotia so that electricity can be sold to other North American markets.

But gentle Mother of God. Given the tone of provincial discourse, you'd assume it was a religious war. If we could harness the outrage generated on Twitter alone, we could power the whole eastern seaboard until the end of days.

It would take too long to recapitulate the entire ordeal here. But the long and short of it is that the government decided on a plan before the 2011 election, commissioned a slew of studies to back up their position, and told everyone who disagreed with them (including a joint federal-provincial environmental review panel, the province's Public Utilities Board, Innu elders, energy market analysts, and the lead singer of The Irish Descendants) to go fuck themselves. They marginalized regulatory oversight more or less out of spite, and now we're stuck with a questionable resource mega-project that's growing slowly and steadily behind schedule and over budget.

Then there was Bill 29. Bill 29 was the government's attempt to dramatically restrict the public's access to information. Among other things, the law vastly expanded the scope of cabinet secrecy and gave the government the ability to ignore any requests it deemed "frivolous and vexatious." Virtually everyone who wasn't a Tory MHA at the time described it as regressive garbage. The opposition attempted to filibuster the law but the government—perhaps feeling that such criticism was itself frivolous and vexatious—invoked closure and shut down debate.

Between these two things—the government shutting down valid debate over a very (politically, economically, emotionally) fraught mega-project while at the same time vastly expanding its power to restrict public access to information—the Progressive Conservatives reached a tipping point. By the time the 2013 budget dropped and lawyers all over the province flipped the fuck out, everything was too far gone.

After "Dunderdale Boo Hiss" showed up on a roadside sign in CBS, everything the premier touched suddenly turned to shit.

This came to a head in January 2014. Despite knowing full well that the province's infrastructure was well past its best-before date, the island's power grid failed spectacularly during a completely predictable winter storm—an event immortalized as #DarkNL. Thousands of people were stranded without power for days and it precipitated several medical emergencies and at least one death.

The power failure was one thing, but the failure of power was another. Dunderdale was silent for days as the situation wore on, and most of her first public appearance was spent arguing with the media over the technical definition of the word "crisis." The rest was a marketing pitch for Muskrat Falls electricity.

It turned out to be one condescending communications disaster too many. People lost their shit and in the ensuing clusterfuck, Paul Lane—the Tories' most hyper-partisan, poll-rigging troll—jumped ship to the Liberals after a sudden jolt of conscience and/or opportunism. The writing was on the wall. Dunderdale resigned in disgrace and the PCs got their chance at renewal.

Naturally, they immediately fucked it up.

Beautiful St. John's, Newfoundland. Really! What a beautiful city. Shame about the politicians. Photo via Flickr user anne beaumont

THINGS FALL APART

The Tories called a leadership race that spring, and every sitting MHA balked at the job offer. The establishment aggressively promoted Frank Coleman, a grocery-store magnate from the west coast with no political experience, as the appointed successor. They went out of their way to squeeze out his competition, foul-mouthed fishmonger Bill Barry and erstwhile Newfoundland separatist Wayne Bennett.

The coronation proceeded as planned until the summer, when Coleman abruptly decided he didn't actually want the worst job in the province and instead that he'd prefer to fuck off from politics forever. Presumably, this was completely unrelated to accusations that one of his companies, Humber Valley Paving, was involved in a conflict of interest. This prompted the party to call yet another leadership race for the premiership nobody wanted, and that's how Paul Davis got stuck with the job.

Not that it mattered. They could have elected the Pope and it wouldn't have made a lick of difference to public opinion. Davis immediately appointed an unelected cabinet minister who refused to run in any of the multiple by-elections on the go—for some weird reason, Tories kept resigning. He passed a very poorly conceived redistricting plan (cutting the House of Assembly from 48 to 40 seats) that has not only further battered local democracy but also vastly amplified the size of the red tide that just drowned most of his party. He also presided over an extremely sketchy incident last Easter in which a disabled activist was shot and killed by a member of his security detail after someone in the premier's office misread a tweet.

The only unequivocally good thing to result from his tenure is new Access to Information reforms, which basically came out of a judicial review committee forcing the government to go back on its own garbage legislation. When the best part of your record in office is undoing your own laws, it's probably a good sign that you're fucked.

Dwight Ball visits Atlantic Canada's largest sea urchin-processing plant. Photo via Facebook/Liberal Party of Newfoundland and Labrador

THE LAST MAN STANDING

This election was decided almost two years ago and it's less about the Liberal party building a triumphant machine than it is about being the only sensible-looking alternative as the government steadily imploded. As you can imagine, outside the garden-variety surrealism of Newfoundland and Labrador politics, this made for a pretty boring campaign.

Given the political landscape, most of the election was eaten up with candidate drama and anxiety over the exact size of the Liberal landslide. And this year, for once, it was the Tories and not the Liberals who were bogged down in candidate catastrophes.

This started before the writ even dropped when freshly-defeated NDP MP Ryan Cleary torched every bridge he built over the last four years by becoming a provincial PC candidate less than a fortnight after losing the federal election. A legend in his own mind, Cleary felt compelled to run for the Tories in a bid to stem the Liberal tide. Instead, this grand crusade ended with him frantically shouting at a poster of Dwight Ball in a darkened bus stop and coming in more than 40 points behind Liberal Cathy Bennett.

Meanwhile, local guru Tina Olivero came into the campaign with a mission to spread peace, love, and positive vibes to the legions of haters lurking behind the keyboards of #nlpoli. Naturally, being spiritually empowered by universal joy proved no match for the sheer strength of Newfoundland pessimism. The unwashed masses were unprepared for her liberating message that "self-awareness" can help cure cancer and (possibly) epilepsy. Inevitably, she was overwhelmed by our small-minded negativity, like questions about her documented hyperexploitation of a Filipina nanny, and not even an intercessionary prayer to Our Lady of Oprah could salvage her campaign.

The Liberals ran a candidate in Mount Pearl who lost his job hosting Open Line after an on-air racist meltdown, but this never stirred up as much smoke as the other two. Political momentum works miracles, I guess.

Which brings us to the other great debate of the provincial election: how big would the Liberal majority be? Would they take all the seats, or just the vast majority of them? This was a legitimate concern, since it's been difficult to pin down where the Liberals actually stand on a lot of issues. Dwight Ball used to be for public service cuts, until he was against them. They also waited until the day before advance polling to actually release their platform, which I can only hope is a preview of the brilliant cynical audacity we can expect over the next four to 12 years.

Various analysts have tried to figure out what the Liberal economic plan actually is. By the party's own account, they will commission a slew of panels, committees, and studies to come up with a plan at a later date. No one is entirely sure how their economic projections are supposed to work, and their expectations of revenue growth from "economic diversification" are Smallwoodian in scope (even if they don't share in the grand, delirious vision that building random factories everywhere will solve all of Newfoundland's problems).

To say that there are questions about what a Liberal government will actually look like in practice is an understatement. But the problem is that none of the other parties have a single leg to stand on when they raised any of these concerns. After four years of almost non-stop fuck-ups, the Tories have absolutely zero credibility when they point out holes and problems in the Liberal plan. No one could trust a goddamn word out of the premier's mouth. It may very well be that Dwight Ball will cock everything up and blow up the island or whatever but there is no way he could possibly do any worse than the detritus of the Dunderdale bloc.

As for the NDP, God bless them for trying, but they barely survived themselves for the last four years. They had their strongest showing ever in 2011, but after a botched leadership coup in 2013, a two-year slide into irrelevancy, and a demoralizing federal collapse, there was very little poor Earle McCurdy could do. No one believed the party was capable of accomplishing anything in its current state. Which was a damn shame, because of the three leaders he was the only one who actually seemed like he bothered to study policy briefs instead of talking points, even if he did have all the personal magnetism of a wilting fungus.

But what are you gonna do? Newfoundlanders and Labradorians love to back a winner. Got to get on the government side if you want your roads paved.

GOD GUARD THEE, NEWFOUNDLAND

Despite the fact that so much of the airwaves were tied up in the horse race and spectacle of a tedious campaign, this was probably one of the most pivotal elections of our generation. Newfoundland and Labrador is at a crossroads. By Paul Davis' own admission, we are staring down a crisis.

A lot of things are falling the fuck apart. As the oil slump drags on, the economic future looks pretty grim. There is a good chance we will slide back into "have not" status again with little to show for our decade of relative prosperity except for St. John's semi-gentrified downtown core and a drug abuse epidemic. We need new hospitals, schools, and prisons, and we need new approaches to mental and physical healthcare, education, and justice. We also need a government that will actively start giving a shit about climate change. If there is anything positive to come out of this otherwise bullshit election, it's that these issues actually appeared on the public radar.

On top of all this, we desperately need democratic and institutional reform. The House of Assembly has no parliamentary committees to speak of and provincial governments, no matter what the stripe, will always end up balls deep in arbitrary power, patronage, and graft if you give them enough time.

It's easy to be cynical about the incoming government, but they have made some legitimate promises. They're going to call public inquiries into the province's search and rescue services, the shooting of Don Dunphy, and whatever sketchy shit went down with Humber Valley Paving. They're at least nominally committed to legislative reform, and if Justin Trudeau is serious about fixing democracy at the federal level, it will also put pressure on Dwight Ball to follow suit. And the Liberals are emphatic about tearing down the archaic Waterford Hospital and finally giving the province a 21st century mental health hospital, even if no one has any idea how they're actually going to do it.

But most of these plans are just reactions to the heat of the moment. There is a real danger that the Liberals will repeat the same cyclical problems that have plagued Newfoundlad since we got responsible government in 1855. The central problem of the province's politics is that no one can think further than five minutes into the future, except for that rare Great Statesman who can see to the next election.

People treat the Newfoundland state like it's the Edmonton Oilers. Everything is a problem of management. If the team is underperforming, we bring in a new set of managers, swapping blue for red and red for blue, back and forth forever, in the fevered hope that Wayne Gretzky or Connor McDavid will show up and solve all our problems so we never have to deal with the complicated problems of building institutions or a functional civic culture. But all this approach will get you is a cozy spot at the bottom of the league.

If there is one positive lesson to draw from the dying days of Tory rule, it's that the government can be scared into obedience if they're legitimately worried they'll be voted out. Fortunately for the rest of us, there are enough PC and NDP members left in the House to at least put up the pretense of accountability. These won't be as dark as the Danny years—praise the risen Christ.

It's been more than two decades since the cod moratorium and the accelerated grind of the mainland brain drain. The oil boom might be over. We have nothing else now but to hope that Dwight Ball and his Liberals will be the government that finally breaks the chain and rights the ship of state.

But the ghost of Amulree is calling, b'ys. How much faith do you have that Newfoundlanders and Labradorians can govern ourselves?

Follow Drew Brown on Twitter.

Last month, I went to a teen drug summit that was organized to fight the local heroin problem some fear could become a scourge in the suburbs of St. Charles County, an affluent area outside St. Louis. The event was organized by CRUSH (Community Resources United to Stop Heroin), an initiative spearheaded by County Prosecuting Attorney Tim Lohmar, a tall and determined gentleman who's quick to flash a smile. There were judges present, a lot of men in suits, fully uniformed law enforcement officers, and DEA agents armed with pistols.

With white suburban America increasingly attuned to the heroin problem, it quickly became clear that this wasn't your run-of-the-mill Scared Straight–style terror fest, but a genuine attempt by local law enforcement to combat drug use.

"We've had 25 overdose deaths just this year and 30 last year, so we're on pace for about the same number," Lohmar told me. "Only five years ago, if you asked people in the community whether heroin was a problem, they would just look at you with a strange look on their face, but nowadays it's something different. People do realize that it is a big deal, and that's the first part of trying to get to the bottom of the issue is just making people aware."

Hundreds of sixth- through eighth-grade students from 15 different local public schools were bussed in for the event. They were all wearing Drug Summit T-shirts, and outside the ballroom where the event too place, local organizations and agencies invested in fighting the problem lined the hallways giving out Stop Heroin bumper stickers and bracelets. There was a plethora of literature and resources to inform the youngsters about drug use and a bevy of business cards and contact numbers for the kids to call in time of need.

Every table had an offering of candy and treats, too, a sort of pseudo Halloween, and the kids in their colorful T-shirts lined up to talk to the vendors and get a chance to grab some candy. Jude Hassan from Bridgeway Behavioral Health was manning one of the tables. A former addict himself, he was a featured speaker at the event.

"I think it's critical to reach kids at this age especially," Hassan told me. "A lot of schools are hesitant to have people come in and talk to kiddos that are this age because they don't want to offend the parents, they don't want the parents to be upset. They think that it's not happening at that age, but it is. It's so important to send that message to them that this is out there and at one point or another they are going to be approached."

Seeing all the kids reminded me of back when I was at that tender age. It was as a seventh grader that I first got involved in the drug world by smoking a joint. I quickly progressed to LSD, mushrooms, and cocaine. But I never got into heroin. Back in the 1980s, when I was a teenager, heroin was this dangerous thing that you had to go into the inner city to get. It involved shady characters and hypodermic needles and injections. It was just something altogether different and you didn't see it much in the suburbs.

Gee Vigna and another volunteer at the summit. Photos by the author

Heroin was for the hardcore drug addicts, I thought then, but now it's a different story. Opiates are quite accessible in the suburbs in capsule-like pills that are called "beans" and "buttons" and go for $5 to $10 apiece. I talked to DEA Task Force Officer Juan Wilson, an engaging and charismatic agent who grew up in St. Charles and was there giving presentations on the dangers of heroin to the kids, to get the inside scoop on the bean and button trade in the suburbs.

"I think with the capsules and the beans and the buttons in the powder form, it's making it more socially acceptable, because when you had intravenous use or with a syringe it was considered a dirty drug and it was more so secluded," Wilson told me. "Heroin isn't considered a party drug—but the usage of it, ingesting it and snorting it is more acceptable to people in society versus injecting. I think it is appealing to more and more people in the suburbs because you can snort it or even smoke it."

And with the purity levels of heroin way higher now than in the 1980s, more people, especially kids, are overdosing even when snorting it . There were 8,620 heroin-related overdose deaths in 2013, triple the number from 2010, and in St. Charles County there were zero heroin overdose deaths in 2010, but 30 in 2014, according to a DEA presentation at the event.

"We really had no idea heroin was in our community," said Gee Vigna, a middle-aged suburban mother whose daughter Nicky died of a heroin overdose in 2013. "We tried all the things that we thought were the right things to do, but we really didn't understand the possession that heroin has on a person. When we look back now there is really so much that we didn't know. When they say what you don't know will hurt you, that is pretty much the case in this particular heroin use."

Watch: Stopping HIV? The Truvada Revolution

Despite her loss, Vigna has decided to push ahead by founding Walking for Wellness in memory of Nicky Vigna and all other families who have lost a child, sibling, parent or friend to heroin. The group takes walks through their communities neighborhoods to raise awareness to prevent what happened to Nicky from happening to anyone else.

"We decided to start Walking for Wellness really not having any idea what to expect," Vigna said. "And it just took off with social media and now it has a national presence. We began to get requests from all over the United States. Help us, help us, help us. This is killing our kids. What do we do? How do we take care of this? And we kind of just sat back for a minute because here we are grieving the loss of our child and all of a sudden people think you're the expert on heroin. And we really weren't the experts on heroin. We learned step by step. One thing we did know was that if we didn't know this was in our community and we didn't know that this was in our house, I guarantee you that everyone else out in this community doesn't know that either."

I found myself wanting to speak out and share my story, having seen the dark side of drug use in America and spent over two decades behind bars for it.

"Kids are very, very impressionable," the DEA Agent Wilson tells me. "Kids today are so much more smart than they use to be, they are so curious and they start drug use at a very young age. Their brain isn't fully developed until they are 21. But the brain is constantly seeking more and more and more , and it's easy to target a brain that wants more. They target people in our county because people kind of have money and more time on their hands. So they start to target users out this way for those reasons."

Just this past summer in St. Charles County, a task force arrested 54 people and took 34,000 doses of heroin worth about $900,000 off the streets. But the problem hasn't gone away. The Teen Drug Summit is meant to be the other piece of the puzzle, an offensive launched by St. Charles Country officials to combat the problem not through arrests, but education. It's a relatively modern approach, one that makes for a contrast with the DARE of decades past.

"Some of the crimes that we've charged have led to more public awareness," County Prosecutor Lohmar said. "Events like this have led to more public awareness. We want to get to a point so that when people here in the community hear about heroin they look at it like the plague. That it's something that's not sort of a mystery anymore. It;s a real thing and something that people want to avoid like the plague."

With the cartels pumping heroin into the United States like never before thanks in part to marijuana decriminalization in some states, it's going to be a tough battle indeed. But educating and informing kids is the best course of action. After all, if you educate them now, you don't have to lock them up later.

Follow Seth Ferranti on Twitter.

Photo by Jim Goldberg/Magnum Photos

This World AIDS Day, VICE is exploring the state of HIV around the globe. Watch our special report, "Countdown to Zero," tonight on HBO at 9 PM, and to get involved visit red.org and shop (RED).

Today is World AIDS Day. Started in 1988, World AIDS Day has been bringing people together in the fight against HIV while raising awareness and education. According to the World Health Organization, over one million people died from HIV-related causes last year, bringing the total to more than 34 million lives globally so far. The WHO estimates that 36.9 million people across the world were living with HIV at the end of 2014. Sub-Saharan Africa is the most affected region, with approximately 25.8 million people living with HIV in 2014. The region accounts for a disproportionate 70 percent of the estimated two million new cases each year worldwide.

I was diagnosed HIV-positive in 2011. Today I'm 25. I find that a lot of people my age are pretty detached from the realities of HIV, so I thought I'd share my personal experience and point of view of being a young and positive American in 2015. Here's my A-to-Z list of what it's like being HIV-positive.

AIDS Jokes

When I first found out that I was positive, in March of 2011, I was inundated for weeks with pamphlets, articles, and YouTube videos that were all very sterile and sad. Without levity, without smiles, it was hard not to feel drained. Then I went on Twitter and read some AIDS jokes and actually managed to laugh.

For so long after my diagnosis—weeks, months—my brain was stuck on my status. I couldn't think about anything else. AIDS jokes allowed me to stay in that headspace but experience something besides dread. I was able to think about my status, my body, my life, in a way that didn't make me feel awful. I don't have AIDS; I may never have AIDS. But AIDS jokes, for as terrible and dark as they are, allowed me to find humor in what I assumed was my fate. AIDS jokes are cruel and wrong and, in truth, shouldn't even be a thing. But they made me feel like a person during the saddest point in my life.

Boning

Being positive doesn't mean that I'm celibate—I have a healthy sex life. I'm young, gay, and I live in New York. I'm surrounded by gay men who are either positive or are on preventative medication (A. K. A. PrEP). Because I'm upfront about my status, there's always a precedent of safety, honesty, and forwardness before any clothes come off.

Cure

Every day it seems there's another article being published along the lines of " A Cure for AIDS: Scientists Say It's 'on the Horizon,'" or "Oregon Researcher: On Doorstep of HIV Cure?" To me, all of these articles are little more than clickbait. Articles and news stories proclaiming that a cure is on the way have been coming out for decades now. If I actually got excited every time one of these types of pieces came out I would be sorely disappointed all the time. That said, I do have hope that one day a cure will happen; just not any time soon. When/if a cure does come about, my guess is that it'll be in the form of a shot, or a series of shots. I like to imagine that when it becomes available I'll be in my mid 40s, that I'll have the day of the last injection marked on my calendar with a big smiley face. When/if I am finally cured, I'll cry. I'll eat cake and drink champagne and start planning a trip to Taiwan, a place that I'm barred from entering because I'm positive. Still, I'm not holding my breath.

I remember when I first came out as gay, my mom made me promise not to catch HIV. When I had to come out to her as positive, she just hugged me.

Dating

In the past year everything has changed in my dating life, thanks to PrEP, a new daily medication that negative people can take to prevent HIV transmission. Before PrEP, I would never think of giving out my number, meeting someone at a party, or going on a date from Tinder. I was 100 percent in on sero-sorting—only dating someone with the same HIV status as me. However, with PrEP, there are so many negative guys who are open to dating someone positive that my dating life is exploding. My sea has five times as many fish in it all of a sudden.

Education

Holy fuck, you do not realize how uneducated people are about HIV until you become positive and have to learn everything yourself. It's as if society stopped paying attention in 1991. From what I can tell, most of the general population is completely oblivious to the modern realities of HIV. People are still ignorant and scared; they have no idea how far we've come. Fortunately, there's the internet.

Family

I remember when I first came out as gay, my mom made me promise not to catch HIV. When I had to come out to her as positive, she just hugged me. The only family members I've told about my status are my parents, and they've been nothing short of completely supporting and wonderful. I love you, Mom and Dad.

Going on a Trip

There are some countries in the world that I can't travel to because I'm HIV-positive. Their legal guidelines say that I should be barred from entering. But it's not like I was dying to go to Singapore anyway.

Health Care

Before learning my status, I was 100 percent trusting of doctors, nurses, and health-care professionals in general. It wasn't until I had a doctor that made me feel like a complete failure of a person that I realized a stethoscope is essentially the same as a priest's collar—something that's meant to inspire trust, but is not a guarantee. Now, I have a gay doctor who's married to a man who's HIV-positive. It's amazing how impactful it can be to go to the doctor and hear your status spoken and see a smile on the speaker's face, to have nurses touch you without flinching, to be in a space where you know you'll never be judged or treated like a specimen. Having the right health care is extremely important. (If you need help, GLMA is a great resource.)

Insurance

I had no idea how big of a deal insurance is until I found out that I was positive. Insurance companies are essentially Satan incarnate, but they're also the only reason that I can afford to take a medication that costs around $3,000 a month. So at least Satan is on my side.

Jail

Here's a theoretical situation: Let's say I meet someone; we click, and I tell them that I'm HIV-positive. They understand, they're cool with it, and we get it on. They develop feelings for me; I'm not into them and cut it off. But what if they're vengeful? They can go to the police, tell them that I never disclosed, that I had unprotected sex with them, and that I endangered their life. Without any physical evidence, I can be arrested, sent to trial, and it's their word against mine. Let's further imagine I'm faced with a judge who doesn't know anything about HIV, who is biased against me based on stigma and stereotypes. Meanwhile, I'm publicly defamed, my family, friends, and employer all become aware of my status, and I risk losing everything. This is part of why Charlie Sheen had to go on the Today show and make his status public: He was being blackmailed by people threatening to use HIV criminalization laws against him. These laws say that if you have sex with someone and don't tell them that you're positive, they can press charges against you in a court of law and you can go to jail. Although HIV criminalization laws are meant to "protect" the public, these laws can be harmful because they de-incentivize HIV-negative people from getting tested and HIV-positive people from disclosing their status.

And on the topic of jail, HIV remains a serious issue. Inmates in federal and state prisons are disproportionately affected by HIV, along with other health problems, and there were over 20,000 inmates with HIV/AIDS across America—a little over one in a hundred inmates are affected.

VICE on HBO: Watch the trailer to 'Countdown to Zero':

Kids

I can still have kids being HIV-positive. It may cost a bit more, but it's still definitely doable. Women living with HIV can greatly reduce the risk of passing HIV to their babies by taking a combination of medicines (called antiretroviral therapy or ART), and individuals or couples seeking to adopt cannot be legally discriminated against for having HIV.

Labs

I get my blood drawn every six months. The phlebotomists at the lab are really nice and tape vampire cartoons to the wall so I don't have to watch the blood being drawn. It can be a bit of a hassle, but it's nice knowing that my health is being monitored so well.

Medication

I have a gay magazine from 1983 framed in my bedroom. On the back cover is an ad for a multi-vitamin called "Vita-men." The tagline for the ad? "Fight Back!" AIDS was close to its peak in 1983, and the only defense anyone could come up with was a vitamin sold through the mail.

Every morning I take a giant mauve pill called Triumeq, a powerful medicine consisting of three different HIV-fighting drugs. With this one pill, I'm essentially being kept alive indefinitely. The medicine prevents the virus from multiplying and helps my body kill off almost every copy of the virus in my blood, which keeps me healthy (see: section U/V below). My expected lifespan is close to that of a negative person while I'm on this medication.

If I were religious, I would build a shrine to Triumeq. In my view, it's an incredible feat of human engineering, on par with the moon landing and the internet. Nonetheless, I remain worried about how this crazy powerful drug is affecting my body, how it'll affect me as I age. Will I have caved-in cheeks and a huge stomach from lipodystrophy, a side effect that has been associated with some HIV medicines? Will my kidneys shut down? Will I need a new liver in 20 years? I figure Elon Musk will have some way of 3D-printing new body parts in the future, and I'll be good to go. That's my only hope, seeing that I'm barred from ever receiving an organ transplant because of my status. Still, whatever happens, I'm lucky to be able to take medication in the first place, as these life-saving treatments in other parts of the world, such as Africa or Asia, are drastically less accessible. So I really can't complain.

Photo by the author

I never know if they're going to silently judge me, pity me, fear me, or just flat-out reject me. If I tell someone my status, it's because I'm fairly confident that they're a reasonable, educated person whom I can trust.

Nonprofits

Amazing people doing hard work just because they feel like making the world a better place for people like me. It's really touching. There are so many HIV/AIDS non-profits out there filled with really well-intentioned people— GMHC, Callen Lorde Community Health Center, and Lambda Legal, to name just a few. When I first found out my status, I was approached by a local nonprofit that helped me set up doctor visits, offered me free counseling, and helped me educate myself about HIV. That same group was also the lead sponsor of sex education, free condoms, and open testing in my city. Any time there's an AIDS walk or a fundraising initiative, I give. These people are saints.

PEP and PrEP (post-exposure prophylaxis and pre-exposure prophylaxis)

PEP

Not many people know this, but there is essentially a Plan B for HIV. If you have unprotected sex and you suspect that you may have been exposed, you can go to the emergency room and be given a series of medications that will essentially prevent you from getting HIV. It's not a sure bet by any means, but it can change the game. Had I known about PEP when I was younger, there's a good chance I could be negative right now.

PrEP

For those who don't know, PrEP (A. K. A. Truvada) is a daily medication that a negative person can take to prevent becoming HIV-positive. When taken correctly, it essentially acts as an immunization. If you "hook up" and/or have sex without condoms, you should talk to your doctor about getting on PrEP right away.

On VICE: 'Stopping HIV? The Truvada Revolution':

Quick Testing

Getting tested for HIV can take as little as 20 minutes. There's no reason you can't find the time to get tested. GMLA is a great resource for this, too.

Rejecting Shame

I'm combining R and S here. HIV inflicts the most damage before you're even infected. The most pain you feel being HIV-positive comes from when you first find out your diagnosis, being slammed to the ground with all of the shame and stigma society has surrounding the virus. I only was able to feel healthy and sane when I finally realized that most of the struggle was coming from worrying about other people's opinions about me and how I'll function in a world of HIV-negative people.

Telling People

That said, I keep being HIV-positive private. Not because I'm ashamed—it's just that it's easier and safer. I never know a person's attitudes, political beliefs, or education levels surrounding HIV. I never know if they're going to silently judge me, pity me, fear me, or just flat-out reject me. If I tell someone my status, it's because I'm fairly confident that they're a reasonable, educated person whom I can trust. The few times I've told someone, I'm usually the first positive person they've ever met. Most times I'm greeted with respect, but a few times I've inspired tears and long questioning sessions. Which is chill—I'm glad to be able to expand someone's view. But I'm also not trying to be a Lifetime original movie.

Undetectable Viral Load

Here I'm combining again, this time U and V. The term viral load refers to the number of copies of the HIV virus in your blood. The higher the number, the more copies of the virus in your system, the worse it is for your health, and the more likely you are to pass it on. With medication, your body can kill off copies of the virus to the point where it's not even detectable by modern testing techniques. When you're undetectable, your body doesn't have to fight so hard against HIV, leaving it free to take care of other things, like a cold or the flu. Also, when you're undetectable, it's very difficult to pass on the virus.

Who Gave It to Me, and Am I Mad at Them?

Fortunately, I know when and how I was infected. I had sex without a condom. It was with someone I had been hooking up with on and off for around two years. I felt really comfortable with him, and when it came time to go for the condom we just sort of bypassed that step. At the time, he had no idea that he was positive. That's how it usually goes. The majority of HIV transmissions occur via people who don't know their status.

And no, I am not mad at him at all. I can't hold anger at someone for failing what was ultimately my responsibility. No one was responsible for protecting me from HIV but me. I chose to have unprotected sex; it wasn't forced upon me. I can't harbor any negative feelings toward him. That would just perpetuate this false predator/victim mentality around HIV, this idea that it's always the positive person at fault.

Explaining Myself

Only about one in five straight people say they used a condom the last time they had sex. Plan B is sold over the counter. Besides test tube babies, every single person on Earth was created via unprotected sex. I had unprotected sex; just like most sexually active people have at some point. But because I was infected with HIV some would have you believe that I'm dirty, evil, insidious, stupid, and deserve to die. These are the same people who think because I'm HIV-positive, I should be segregated from the rest of humanity, shunned, and pitied. I'm really over being demonized and stigmatized. I hate having to explain myself, to justify wanting to be treated as a person instead of as case study or a monster.

Zero

The number of new infections coming from a recent trial of PrEP users. Seriously; if you have sex, get educated about PrEP and PEP.