The low point of Thursday night's Republican debate came when Donald Trump held up his hands. Marco Rubio, Trump said, "hit my hands. Nobody has ever hit my hands. I have never heard of this. Look at those hands. Are they small hands?" While the crowd laughed, Trump went on: "He referred to my hands, if they are small, something else must be small. I guarantee you there is no problem. I guarantee."

"OK," moderator Bret Baier said, clearly not knowing what to do with that. "Moving on."

But the mogul wasn't ready to move on. After the debate, Trump approached a reporter to compare hands, saying, "My hands are bigger than yours" and insisting that his hands were "good-sized" and "very beautiful."

This obsession with telling people about the size of his hands goes back decades—decades—and apparently began when Graydon Carter, now the editor of Vanity Fair, decided to start an inside joke. He explained it last year in an editor's note:

"Like so many bullies, Trump has skin of gossamer. He thinks nothing of saying the most hurtful thing about someone else, but when he hears a whisper that runs counter to his own vainglorious self-image, he coils like a caged ferret. Just to drive him a little bit crazy, I took to referring to him as a 'short-fingered vulgarian' in the pages of Spy magazine. That was more than a quarter of a century ago. To this day, I receive the occasional envelope from Trump. There is always a photo of him—generally a tear sheet from a magazine. On all of them he has circled his hand in gold Sharpie in a valiant effort to highlight the length of his fingers. I almost feel sorry for the poor fellow because, to me, the fingers still look abnormally stubby."

Trump takes his short fingers golfing in 2013. (Patrick Farrell/Miami Herald/MCT via Getty Images)

Like many topics that consume the public political debate, the size of Trump's hands and the slimness of his fingers is a controversy with two sides, but only one side can be correct: Are his hands the big, beautiful appendages he claims they are, or are they pathetic little stubs?

To get an unbiased opinion, I reached out to Dani Korwin, an agent at Parts Models. Parts does exactly what its name suggests: cast models for jobs that require magnificent parts. The agency has been placing hand, leg, feet, and body models in advertisements and catalogs work since 1986.

Obviously Korwin couldn't examine Trump's hands in person, but I sent her a collection of photos of them and asked her opinion.

She was not kind.

Is this really the hand of a president? (AP Photo/Carlos Osorio)

"They don't look stubby," she said over the phone from her uptown Manhattan office. "But they do look child-sized. Childlike. They are somewhat smaller than what you would expect, certainly from someone of his stature."

"He's not a short man, and you would expect him to have longer, more masculine fingers," she added.

This, of course, echoes what Rubio has been saying to crowds on the campaign trail. "He's like six-two. Which is why I don't understand why his hands are the size of someone who is five-two."

Beyond the size of his fingers, Korwin said that Trump's hands are "severely weatherbeaten" and speculated that he plays lots of golf in the sun between stump speeches. When Korwin casts hand models, she's mostly looking for an even skin tone, she said. A nice shape, good nails, and nice cuticles are also something she considers.

Upon examining one close-up shot, she said, "You can actually see the redness and sun spots. Whatever the underlying problems are, he's obviously been in the sun too much, and hasn't taken care of his hands."

Marco Rubio has reason to be proud of his hands. (AP Photo/Carlos Osorio)

Rubio, on the other, er, hand, has world-class paws. "If he doesn't make it in his political career, he can come work for me as a hand model," Korwin said. "His hands have nice shape to them, his skin looks good, not too vascular. A good-looking hand. If I was going to cast an executive type of hand, his hands I could use."

Ted Cruz showing off his stuff. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)

What about Ted Cruz? According to Korwin, his hands are very slender, "which you wouldn't expect, given his body type." (Burn.) She could cast him for an executive ad as well, she said. His hands "have an elegance to them."

That's no small feat, considering Parts is looking for perfection. "Because we work with the leading advertisers and products in the world, we are highly selective about the models we choose to represent," reads the agency website.

Trump, as you might have guessed, could not get work as a hand model, according to Korwin. "Not unless he was the before in a before-and-after campaign," she said.

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John Podesta in 2010. Photo via the Center for American Progress's Flickr account

Read: An Alien Hunter's Guide to the 2016 Election

Over the last several months, the presidential candidates in both parties have staked out claims on the issues that matter to ordinary Americans. Ted Cruz is the candidate for evangelical conservatives. Bernie Sanders is the candidate for liberals who want the Democratic Party to move to the left. Donald Trump is the candidate for angry Americans who like men who lie about the size of their hands. And Hillary Clinton is the candidate for people who want the government to tell us more about UFOs.

Clinton's campaign manager, John Podesta, underscored that fact earlier this week when he went on local TV in Las Vegas and said that he wants to declassify documents related to UFOs. He's "talked to Hillary about that," he says. "I think I've convinced her that we need an effort to declassify as much as we can so people have their legitimate questions answered."

This is not a joke: Podesta has long advocated the declassification of documents on principal. When he was White House chief of staff for Bill Clinton, he helped set "hundreds of millions" of such documents free, according to the KLAS-TV report, and when he left his gig as an advisor to Barack Obama, he said that his "biggest regret" was not doing more to disclose UFO-related files.

Hillary Clinton once joked to a New Hampshire paper that we might have been visited by aliens before, but her husband Bill might have been a little more serious about the subject—he apparently once asked around to see if the government knew anything about aliens.

Little green men aside, a lot of people believe that the US government

An Instagram post from Annie Goodman during her battle with brain cancer

Everything in your life changes the moment you learn you have cancer. Besides the challenge of, you know, staying alive, there are difficult decisions about how much to share: Do you go dark on social media and focus on taking care of yourself? Or do you return to life's regular programming, already in progress? When I got cancer, I decided to keep 'gramming. If social media is about sharing your life, then I wanted to share my cancerous life too.

To be clear, cancer is not fun. It's not glamorous. In an instant, you go from living a regular life to one full of expensive drugs, inspirational pamphlets, and hyperbole ("You're a fighter. You're a survivor"). It's like an alternate reality, and it's incredibly difficult to explain to people who haven't lived through it.

I was diagnosed with testicular cancer in 2012, and very quickly, talking to people about it became awkward. For reasons I cannot explain, a lot of people wanted to tell me about the person they knew who had cancer... and died. To avoid these kinds of interactions, I started to retreat, only allowing certain people to see me in real life. But I kept posting—on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook—where I could share how I was feeling on my own terms, in my own words, without the need for any explanation.

There, I connected with people like Annie Goodman, another 20-something who was battling brain cancer. Even though I lived in Los Angeles and she in New York City, we struck up an easy friendship, moving from Twitter to email to text effortlessly. Talking to her made more sense than talking to anyone in real life, because unlike anyone in my immediate social circle, she understood what I was going through.

Other young cancer patients have had similar experiences. "Some of my best friends are fellow cancer patients that I met through Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram alike," said Suleika Jaouad, a writer based in New York City who was diagnosed with myelodysplastic syndrome and acute myeloid leukemia in May 2012, at the age of 22. "I don't think everyone needs to blog or post pictures about their illness, but I do think social media can be a wonderful way to connect with a community and to feel less isolated."

In the friendships I made online, I was able to talk about the areas of cancer people don't often think about—like sex, post-traumatic stress disorder, and the loss of teeth (yes, chemo fucks up your teeth). I needed more than buzzwords and touchy feely walk-a-thons. By sharing my experience online, I found others who felt similarly.

"I immediately posted on Facebook and Twitter: 'I have cancer. Who wants to FUUUUCK?'" — Erik Bergstrom

Plus, social media gave us an outlet to be funny. In one of her posts, Goodman captioned a photo: "Don't worry, it's not Ebola."

After Erik Bergstrom, a 33-year-old comedian and cartoonist based in New York City, was diagnosed with stage 4 Hodgkin lymphoma, he turned to social media. "I waited until a biopsy was analyzed showing it was 100 percent cancer," he said. "Once I knew that, I didn't hesitate a second . I immediately posted on Facebook and Twitter: 'I have cancer. Who wants to FUUUUCK?' I use social media frequently and mostly for jokes, so it seemed like the right thing to do."

Throughout his illness, Bergstrom regularly posted on social media. He said the visuals helped his friends, who were young and healthy, understand what he was going through—that "people could read that I had cancer, but I think an actual image of me in the chemo chair makes people actually think 'Oh shit, this is really happening.'"

Lacey Henderson, a 26-year-old Special Olympics long jumper who lost her leg to synovial sarcoma, said she thinks "people identify deeper and more quickly by photos." Posting photos online becomes a way to explain something that's so difficult to understand, and to reclaim your own narrative.

"I didn't post anything publicly about my cancer until I was two months into treatment and bald," said Kelsey Morris, 25, who was diagnosed with osteosarcoma. "Eventually, I started to feel inauthentic in things that I was posting because it started to feel as though I was leaving out such a huge part of my day-to-day life."

As my treatment progressed, and I grew weaker, I came to need the support from the strange little internet community liking my posts. Besides Goodman, I began corresponding with people from all over, some who had gone through similar things, others who watched their friends and family go through it. Cancer has a way of breaking down barriers between people, bringing people together in a way that normally would never happen.

After I finished chemo, I visited New York City and met Goodman in person. We talked everything: dating with cancer, working with cancer, living with cancer, Instagramming with cancer. It was a digital connection that buffered into a lovely human connection. The power of social media created our friendship, and it keeps some people alive longer—in some ways, forever.

Less than a year after I met Goodman, she died. In some of her final days, she was still Instagramming, and up until the end, she kept it real, honest, even funny. By choosing to share her life online, Goodman left behind an incredible history of her reality with cancer: She lived with humor, light, and honesty, and her social media is a testament to that life. Because of the internet, she lives on—her own way of surviving.

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The first few minutes of ADR1FT, once you're past an essential controls tutorial, are both awesome and terrifying. You're alone, more than 250 miles above sea level, attached to what's left of a space station, the Northstar IV, by a rope wrapped around your ankle. You, as Commander Alex Oshima, carefully untie it and pull yourself toward a jagged chunk of what used to be your safety from this vacuum, your home away from home spinning once around the world every hour and a half. All around you is chaos and beauty.

Torn metal dances above an Earth so instantly mesmerizing that for just a moment you forget yourself, your predicament, and the warning sounding from inside your helmet. Move. If you don't, you're going to suffocate inside your leaking suit. You push yourself forward. You find a canister of oxygen. You breathe again. And you snap out of the trance. The view can wait. You need to fix this mess, starting with your own damaged equipment. And you need to do it fast.

"The beginning of the game is supposed to be, 'Holy fuck, this is the worst possible scenario,'" says Adam Orth, ADR1FT's director and writer at Three One Zero, the Santa Monica studio he co-founded after leaving Microsoft in 2013. This is a game with a strong narrative focus, but it's not like bad things can't happen to the player. You can die. "We debated a lot about whether or not you should be able to die in the game. But once we got our head around the oxygen mechanic, where you need to initially be constantly topping yourself up, it made a lot of sense to allow that to happen. The stakes are very high."

To look at preview footage of ADR1FT is to be immediately captivated by its visuals, its massive scale, and the affecting nothingness that exists so few miles above where we lead our lives. And to play the game in VR—I take a spin using Oculus Rift, which ADR1FT is a launch title for—is to become even more consumed by its stunning aesthetics, assuming you can stomach the zero-G maneuvering. This is an incredibly immersive VR achievement, and spending just five minutes with it will make the room around you give way to a blanket of stars, and your legs turn to jelly.

Article continues after the video below

Related: Watch this episode of Daily VICE, where we go inside NASA's Mars simulation mission

"We always wanted to make VR, from the beginning, but we didn't want to abandon everyone else," Orth says—while ADR1FT works wonderfully in VR, it's every bit as captivating as a 2D experience playing out on a regular monitor or TV. Which is fortunate, given this is how most will play it. "We really wanted to give people options—you can play it on PC, through the Oculus Rift, or on your PlayStation or Xbox. We want the game in everyone's hands, but VR is definitely special."

Orth's a believer in the potential of VR to change much more than how we play video games—and ADR1FT is very much a complete game, so far from the tech demos previously used to showcase VR's potential. "It's so compelling to go to work, every day," he tells me, visibly lighting up at the topic. "Everything that we've done for decades, that we've become accustomed to and take for granted, in video games, is new again. The simple act of opening a door, you have to rethink that, from every angle. And it's super fun. It's like starting over, almost. We hit this refresh button, but with decades of experience behind us, so we're not dumb newbies at the beginning of something."

'ADR1FT,' Clair De Lune trailer

"I don't think VR is a fad, and that it'll fall off. I think this is a really powerful tool. And I don't think games will be the thing to break it open—it'll be something like Facebook or Instagram. A company like either of those will prove to the world that VR is amazing, necessary, and needed. It's too big to stop at this point."

Rather like another great narrative success of 2016 so far, Campo Santo's Firewatch, ADR1FT uses a grand canvas to paint a quite personal story. You'll find out exactly who Alex is through the scattered memories of her crew mates who didn't make it, learning about their relationships with you before this horror unfolded. Some information will be delivered via the genre staple of the audio log, but you needn't seek out every single story beat if you'd rather just blaze a path homeward.

"We didn't want to constantly have dialogue going," Orth explains. "We wanted to have space, in space. You can experience the game in a really minimalist way, ignoring the logs entirely. But the idea, hopefully, is that you're getting these seeds, and growing your own little narrative about these people, filling in the gaps and making the experience more unique to you. We could both play the game, and have a very different take away from it, and I hope that comes through."

Somewhere along the way, you'll (hopefully) uncover the truth of the catastrophic accident that has devastated your station, leaving only you breathing, barely. That "1" in the title is symbolic: There really is nobody else alive out here. Though that doesn't mean you can't relax a little.

"There's definitely less stress after the first section of the game," Orth says. "So there will be some time to just look at stuff. But this isn't about hanging out for an hour and then getting back to the serious situation at hand—it's always pressing. You have to get home. It wouldn't feel right to just let the player look at the scenery, but we worked really hard on setting it up so that everything is beautiful, all of the time."

And sometimes that beauty can get in the way of, basically, saving your skin from being nothing more than a tiny lifeless satellite barely worthy of a blip on the biggest radar. Get inside and get in shape—as lingering in ADR1FT, in the cold reality of a low Earth orbit, will quickly lead to the saddest moment of your life.

ADR1FT is released on March 28 on Oculus Rift and Steam. PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions will follow later in 2016. Find more information at the game's official website.

Follow Mike Diver on Twitter.

Right on. Photo via Dead North.

In February, Yellowknife can drop below -45 C. The capital of Northwest Territories is a confusing amalgamation of diamond money, young professionals, and poverty. Twenty-nine to 44-year-olds make up 30 percent of the population. Young professionals abound, but the city doesn't reflect the average family income of almost $150,000 per family. Average rents hover around $1,700 per month for a two-bedroom apartment and vacancy rates are low. Downtown is virtually abandoned—a mall there has more vacant shops than leased, and as the economy continues to slow, it's unlikely that more shops will move in.

People wear Kings-era Marty McSorley jerseys with zero irony. I saw a lady carrying an open Red Bull into a coffee shop to get a latte. If you hear Nickelback in a cab (and you will), there's a strong chance that it's a CD and not the radio. It's against this backdrop and resting on the northern edge of Great Slave Lake that a film festival unlike anything in the north has emerged.

All photos by Cannon Show

On the eve of International Sex Workers' Rights Day, March 3, I found myself half a bottle of dépanneur wine deep in a $12-an-hour Montreal sex motel with all my dildos stuffed into a tote bag. I was about to embark on what looked like a cheap porno shoot. You may ask how I got here, or may already be forming in your own mind a sad story of what could drive me to such a low and grimy place. But if you knew me a little better, you would know that this is just what I do for fun.

Photo via Facebook.

If you were watching the Republican debate last night, the realization that one of the four men onstage might end up being the leader of the free world might understandably have filled you with a pending sense of doom.

Obviously, it will be remembered for Donald Trump talking about his yuge dick only seven minutes into a debate, a bar that only vintage Rob Ford could pass under.

Right on cue though, Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is weighing in to give our neighbours to the south some sound advice.

Trudeau, asked about Canada's qualms with the US in soon-to-be-aired 60 Minutes interview, replied, "it might be nice if they paid a little more attention to the world." And by world, he meant: us hosers.

According to the Associated Press, Trudeau, playing the role of the neglected younger sibling, pointed out Canadians "must be aware of at least one other country, the United States, because of its importance."

"I think we sometimes like to think that, you know, Americans will pay attention to us from time to time, too."

Thing is, Americans do pay attention to the rest of the world. They pay quite a lot of attention in fact. And you know what sometimes happens when America "pays attention" to a country? They spend trillions of dollars bombing it. And then they never leave.

According to this handy Time magazine infographic, there are 1.3 million US military personnel currently stationed in 150 countries around the world.

Japan—a country the US hasn't been at war with since 1945—still has almost 50,000 American military personnel stationed there; Germany isn't too far behind with 37,000.

During the foreign policy segment of last night's debate, Florida Senator Marco Rubio, who has previously said he wants foot soldiers in Iraq and Syria, was questioned on the increasing ISIS presence in Libya. Would he send troops there too, he was asked? His answer was more or less, why the hell not?

" need to be targeted wherever they have an operating space," Rubio said, advocating for American special operators and air strikes. Added Ohio Governor John Kasich, "We have to be there on the ground in significant numbers... And we have to be in the air."

Meanwhile, Donald Trump, championed waterboarding and "stronger" methods of torture—an idea that received loud cheers.

"Can you imagine these people, these animals, over in the Middle East that chop off heads, sitting around talking and seeing that we're having a hard problem with waterboarding? We should go for waterboarding and we should go tougher than waterboarding."

He also said he had "no problem" with the US torturing and killing the families of terrorists, known, in layman's terms, as murder.

(It being Trump, however, he completely changed his stance Friday, realizing even a US president should pretend to respect international law.)

Trudeau isn't wrong—Canadians know far more about America than they do about us. It's the largest superpower in the world and we barely qualify as a middle power. And let's face it, 99 percent of our pop culture references come from there (the other one percent being Drake or The Tragically Hip depending on your age and some combination of Kids in the Hall reruns and the Trailer Park Boys. That's about it.)

But really, America's ignorance of Canada (also known as not having a good reason to pay attention to us) is a good thing. When the US does notice Canada it's usually because our border is being blamed for letting 9/11 terrorists pass over it (which never happened), we are being asked to invade somewhere, or they're petitioning to send Justin Bieber back here.

This presidential election campaign has already seen one American politician suggest building a wall across the Canada-US border, so it's not as if they are entirely ignoring us.

We'll find out the rest of what Trudeau has to tell America on Sunday (something about Keystone and the environment and hair gel, likely) but for now it seems quite fitting that our national spokesperson has voiced our tremendous inferiority complex. Not that anyone in the US noticed.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

Saleem Haddad was born in Kuwait. He currently lives in London, where he works as a conflict and security advisor, specializing in the Middle East. His first novel, Guapa, will be published by Other Press on March 8, 2016. It takes place over the course of a single day, and is about an unnamed man in an unnamed Arab country. But the lack of names is not vague; rather, it is intimate and particular. The voice is that of a speaker telling a story to someone he knows—names aren't necessary, because you already know. The novel opens with the speaker's grandmother, who has raised him since he was a child, walking in on him having sex with a man. He's humiliated, leaves the house, and is scared to go back home. He also needs to find a friend who has been put in jail. And so what follows in a single day is a sort of tour of the city—high and low—and of the narrator's memories, as he comes to terms with being seen by his grandmother (Teta). In this excerpt, he remembers his first sexual encounter with a stranger. The writing, as you will see, is simple and direct and honest and a little bit gross, in a good way.

The Long Way

The memory returns to me so vividly I feel I am back there, at 14, in the backseat of that taxi. At the time my father had been dead for 18 months, my mother had vanished the year before that, I was magically sprouting hair in places I was not expecting, and I was still sharing a bed with Teta.

I was returning from a history lesson at Maj's house. We were both struggling with the material. Our school followed the British curriculum, which meant we had to study the history of Europe and the World Wars: the Kaiser, the Treaty of Versailles, then Churchill and Stalin. It all seemed like another universe to us, so Teta and Maj's mother agreed to share the costs of a private tutor.

I hailed a taxi outside Maj's house and got into the backseat, as Teta directed me to do when riding in taxis alone. The man behind the wheel was young, though I couldn't make out his age: perhaps 18, maybe 20. He was wearing a tight red T-shirt that gripped his body. He drove without speaking. A familiar pressure inside me began to build. It was a terrible choking sensation that had been growing in the months since I lost my parents. I had no control over my destiny, and everything around me could suddenly die or run away.

I rolled down the window and pressed the back of my head against the leather seat. The crisp November air felt cold against my face, releasing the pressure somewhat. Through the streetlights, which lit up the inside of the car in recurring waves, I saw that the driver's forearms were potholed with scars. I admired the way his T-shirt stretched tightly against his chest. His arms broke out in large goose bumps.

"Shut the window, it's cold," he said. I rolled up the window, feeling the choking sensation close in on me once more. I watched the muscles in the driver's arms tighten as he shifted gears. The large veins running under his skin awoke a sensation inside me I had never felt before. I wanted to connect with him in some way, to be closer to him somehow.

"Is this your taxi?" I asked.

"My brother's," he said. His jaw clicked as he chewed a piece of gum. He sighed and put one arm behind the passenger seat while steering with the other. I looked at the hand resting behind the seat. His fingers were decorated with gold and silver rings. Dark black dirt was wedged underneath his fingernails. I glanced down at my own fingernails, which Doris had clipped earlier that day.

I tried to imagine what this man's life was like, outside of this taxi. His rough accent meant he probably lived in al-Sharqiyeh, maybe in a tiny room that smelled of fried onions and cigarettes, because that's what I imagined al-Sharqiyeh would smell like. How much did we have in common, he and I? If I knew then what I know now, I would have put our differences down to a complex algorithm of class and culture. But back then I did not know about any of that, so I stuck to what we had in common: the car we were both sitting in.

"Do you drive this taxi often?" I asked.

"One or two nights a week," he replied, making a turn into the side street that took us off the highway and toward my new neighborhood downtown.

"Do you enjoy it?"

"Enjoy what?" His eyes flicked up to look at me through the rearview mirror. His eyes were a cool gray, almost silver. "Driving the taxi," I said, holding his gaze as I played with the dog-eared corners of the history books on my lap.

"It's just a job," he said, turning back to the road. "Well what do you like doing when you're not driving the taxi? Do you watch television?" Teta fed me on a diet of dubbed Mexican telenovelas, American television shows, and an endless stream of news. Perhaps his television set also showed those channels.

"I don't have spare time. When I'm not driving, I work on a construction site."

The next turn would take us to my street. I felt a sudden panic. I wanted to spend more time with this man. We were moving closer to something new and exciting. I wanted to be his friend. And not just any friend, not like Maj or Basma, but a friend who would always be around, someone I could hug and be close to. My insides were buzzing. I wanted him to keep on driving, to take me out of this sad town, far away from that empty apartment with Doris and Teta.

"Is that why you have big muscles?" I scrambled to find a way to delay our separation. He glanced at me, studied my face for a while, clicked his chewing gum. Then his lips turned to form a crooked smile.

"Come up here and sit next to me," he said.

I hesitated. It would be eib to say no, although it also felt eib to say yes. Stuck between two eibs, I left the books in the back and climbed into the passenger seat. We drove past Teta's apartment. He took a right into a dark street and parked the car between two large trees. He unzipped his jeans and pulled out his thing. It stood between us, hard, like an intruder to an intimate conversation. Instinctively, I reached out and grabbed it, and he let out a slight moan. I studied the thing in my hand, feeling it grow in my palm.

"Yalla," he whispered as his eyes scanned the area. "Huh?"

"Put your mouth on it," he said impatiently.

I swallowed and bent down. He smelled sour and hot. I put his thing in my mouth and looked up for further instructions.

"Wet your mouth, wet your mouth," he hissed. "Your tongue is like sandpaper."

I swallowed a few more times until my mouth was wet, and this time the process went more smoothly. He seemed happy with this and sighed. He pressed down on my neck but he remained alert, his head darting back and forth as if following a game of tennis. I was down for a few minutes when my excitement began to disappear, replaced with a strong sense of guilt that I was making a terrible mistake.

I struggled, concentrating on breathing through my nose and not gagging each time he pushed my head down. I wasn't sure how long this would last. He groaned. My mouth filled with salty slime. The warm hand at the back of my neck disappeared.

"Get out now before someone sees," he said, zipping his trousers up. I wiped my mouth, took my books from the backseat, and got out of the car. The man started up the engine, reversed out onto the road, and sped off.

I looked around. There was no one. The awkward feeling slowly disappeared, and the memory of what happened seemed sweeter. I stored bits of it for later: the warm hand on the back of my neck, the sour smell, the shape of his thing in my mouth. I relived those memories as I walked home. Teta looked up when I came through the door. I was terrified to face her. She always seemed to know everything. This was something she should never know. She was sitting in her nightgown, cracking roasted sunflower seeds between her teeth. On the television the news showed footage of bombs dropping on a busy neighborhood.

"You found a taxi?" she asked, picking at bits of seed lodged between her teeth.

For a moment I thought she might be able to tell just by looking at me, or that she would smell the taxi driver on my clothes and face. I swallowed hard, feeling the salty slime slide down my throat. It felt scratchy, like I was coming down with a cold.

"Yes, but he took the long way," I said, trying to look as natural as I could. I took a deep breath. This was the first lie I had ever told Teta, and as I said this a part of me split from her forever. The gooey liquid in the back of my throat felt far away from the words coming out of my mouth. I was two people now, in two separate realities, where the rules in one were suspended and different from those in the other.

Follow Saleem Haddad on Twitter.

Excerpted from Guapa by Saleem Haddad, published by Other Press on March 8, 2016. Copyright © 2016 Saleem Haddad. Reprinted by permission of Other Press.

Some punks from the north of Holland during a party at a squat in the Spuistraat in Amsterdam, April 30, 1986.

This article originally appeared on VICE Netherlands

Punk came to Amsterdam around 1977, and the epicenter of the first punk wave was on the Rozengracht, where No Fun—a record store founded by Hansje Joustra —was located. Joustra had visited CBGB in New York, and he returned to Amsterdam with the hunch that punk was going to be huge. He decided that his record store would be the place where it should happen, so he founded the first Amsterdam punk labels—Plurex and No Fun.

The first Dutch punk bands—like Tits, the Helmets, Meccano Ltd., Mollesters, and Subway—all signed with these labels, which was the start of a brand new punk scene in the Netherlands. This was before the mohawks and safety pins. A leather jacket was considered pretty punk at the time.

That first wave didn't last very long. Soon most of those bands moved on to genres like post punk and new wave, and Plurex and No Fun started putting out more experimental stuff. No Fun ended up changing its name to Torso.

The pictures below are from the archives of Martijn de Jonge—one of the photographers who showed at a recent Amsterdam exhibition honoring No Fun, Plurex, and Torso. Some of his pictures were taken during the first punk wave. Others are from a later period, when Amsterdam punks started wearing a lot more studs, safety pins, and buttons to express themselves.

Over the past seven days, America has seen three mass shootings, all of which occurred last weekend. The violence left three dead and ten wounded.

In the first shooting on Saturday evening, a domestic dispute in which a man apparently shot his wife to death in Woodbridge, Virginia, escalated when he allegedly opened fire on responding cops, killing one and wounding two. In the second, police investigating a shooting call early Sunday morning found four men shot in a parking lot in Jurupa Valley, California, one of whom later succumbed to his injuries. In the third, an altercation involving a patron at a Detroit strip club late Sunday escalated when the ejected man returned with a gun, shooting five individuals, including a female performer he'd allegedly tried to touch inappropriately.

These tragedies bring the tally of mass shootings in America in 2016 up to 36 incidents, which have caused 52 deaths and 137 injuries.

By most standards, three mass shootings with 13 casualties in a week is a bloody toll. Europe, by comparison, had zero such incidents this week—and has had only seven mass shootings that left six dead and 27 injured this year. But by American standards, this qualifies as a mercifully calm week. It's not the least violent week of 2016; the week bridging the end of January and beginning of February saw just one mass shooting in the US, with only four injuries. But compared to last week, which saw 12 shootings (including two high-profile random public rampages) that left 20 dead and 41 wounded—over six times as many deaths and over four times as many injuries as Americans experienced this week—the contrast is a stark one.

There's probably no rhyme or reason for this "lull." Experts have noted in VICE's previous coverage of mass shootings how random they are; the types of shooting situations that usually lead to mass casualties can wound almost no one or large groups—depending on a host of incidental factors. We may have been one block, one hour, or one argument away from a much deadlier or a completely bloodless week. It all depends on the vagaries of or around an individual with a gun, which are all but impossible for observers or officers to predict or control in favor of peace.

All Americans can do is embrace a respite from last week's more serious mass violence. Yet observers ought not allow this comparative calm to dull their awareness of the obscene scale and frequency of mass shootings in the United States. The fact that Americans now have to consider 13 senseless mass shooting casualties (relatively) palatable is appalling—especially given the example offered by our European counterparts.

Rather than tune out, America might best use this refractory period to meditate on the difference between a calm week here and a standard week in Europe—and the ways in which we might learn to mirror that continent's consistently lower mass shooting casualties.

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When my brother and I were kids, my parents used to take us to Gran Canaria, an island residing within Islas Canarias, a Spanish archipelago just off the Moroccan coast. The island has been largely visited and inhabited by Scandinavians since the 1960s, but had its heydays in the 1990s when "charter vacations," or low-budget resort vacations, became affordable for the working and middle classes.

I recall many blithe childhood memories from our time in Gran Canaria: Long days at the beach, poking jellyfish with a stick, hours spent in front of an aquarium at our go-to restaurant, all in service of escaping the darkest months of Norwegian winter back home.

Last month, I returned to Gran Canaria with my parents for the first time in almost 15 years, curious to see see what had become of the place. As we drove along the coast, I lost count of the "for sale" signs standing guard outside the empty lots and hotels. The whole town seemed to be crumbling to dust. The architecture—all cheap materials with color schemes of washed-out pink, bright yellow, and baby blue reminiscent of the 60s—seemed all the more dated with the absence of tourists, who, I was told, favor AirBnB over resorts these days.

Maybe unsurprisingly, Gran Canaria left me feeling weird. After leaving the once-familiar place, I flew straight to Switzerland for a photo shoot. While there, I decided to drive to the village of Andermatt, the first Swiss skiing resort I found on Google Maps. As I drove through the small village, I felt surprised by how the tone and mood eerily paralleled my previous destination, despite it being my first time in the Alps (and the drastic change in climate): Empty luxury apartments and hotels, guest houses, local diners... even the slopes were empty, despite the ideal skiing conditions.

Both Andermatt and Gran Canaria struck me as crumbling vestiges that signify a dying generation of tourism—the type of vacation destinations that present-day visitors still book through a travel agent. While shooting at both, I aimed to document the objects and moments that inspired the same type of spooky hollowness I felt at the two distinct locales.

For more of Tonje's work, visit her website and Instagram.

All images courtesy of Ido Mizrahy

Antonio Barrera is not a great bullfighter. As the Spanish bullfighting critic J.A. del Moral puts it in Ido Mizrahy's documentary Gored, he has no "aesthetic grace." In other words, he isn't one of the "artist" matadors with an "aesthetic purity...from another galaxy." Barrera never reaches the point where the spectacle stops being "a mere fight" and becomes "a tragic ballet of extraordinary beauty."

But he makes up for these failings with unflinching bravery. Barrera is proud to "offer his life 100 percent" every time he enters a bull ring; and, with 23 cornadas, he is the most gored bullfighter in modern history. Gored gives us glimpses of his near-death experiences: On his knees in front of a thousand-pound bull in the pouring rain; hopping around the ring with a makeshift tourniquet around his bloody upper thigh; staggering, bare-chested, bare-buttocked, bleeding from various wounds, his "suit of lights" split open at the seams by the bull's horns; on a stretcher being rushed to the ringside infirmary unable to breathe. His wife is desperate for him to give it up, but when they first fell in love she promised to never ask him to retire.

Gored tells the story of the run-up to Antonio Barrera's planned retirement from bullfighting and his final fight against a beast, aptly-named Bienvenido. After making the festival rounds last spring (including a slot at Tribeca Film Festival), Gored is now available for the public to watch online. We talked to director Ido Mizrahy about his bloody doc, and why he doesn't expect bullfighting to die out anytime soon.

VICE: How did you originally find out about Antonio Barrera? Were you a fan?
Ido Mizrahy: No, not at all. My writing partner had become interested in this ancient spectacle of bullfighting. He met Antonio Barrera in Spain, and did a profile on him. They stayed in touch, and when Antonio mentioned he might retire, we thought it might make an interesting short film. Once we started filming, however, we realized it was a much fuller story... it wanted to be a feature-length documentary.

By all accounts, Barrera is not a particularly gifted bullfighter. What was it that drew you to him as a subject?
What was interesting to me is that he wasn't one of the gods of bullfighting. He didn't have the artistry, the duende that's expected from the great figuras, but rather he was just a human being trying to do this. His destiny was set in motion for him: his father was a failed bullfighter and put Antonio in front of the bulls when he was 7, but he just didn't have the goods. So he created his own brand of bullfighting that was really more about coming back from the dead, and became famous for it. And he had to keep that style because that was what drew people to see him.

Barrera is Spanish, but his career seems to have played out mainly in Mexico. Why is that?
Antonio felt much more welcome in Mexico for a variety of reasons, but mostly because Mexicans really appreciated what he put out there. The Spanish affición get pretty snarky about bravery. They tend to think, Of course you're supposed to be brave, that's a given. The big deal is to be an artist while you're doing it. Whereas in Mexico they seemed to be saying, We know you're not a great artist, but give us everything you've got anyway. We want to see you put your guts out there, and we'll respect you for it. Antonio could offer that.

Bullfighting is obviously a controversial subject. Were you confident audiences and critics would see beyond any debates about its morality?
We knew we were walking into fertile ground, but, in a way, that's what you want as a filmmaker. The choice of having Antonio Barrera as the protagonist, rather than bullfighting in general, was a good way of not hiding from the subject, but rather putting it at eye-level. Especially as Antonio isn't a poster-boy for bullfighting and doesn't exhibit that artistry, so you never get swallowed up by the romance. We're not trying to justify bullfighting, which is why I think lots of people who are anti-bullfighting have loved the movie, because it doesn't feel like a bullfighting film. It's about obsession, life and death, broken dreams, family.

But, as Antonio Barrera emphatically says at the end of the doc, "I am a bullfighter." He's not just "any man" dealing with these issues. Would someone like Antonio, or many of the themes arising from his story, even exist outside of bullfighting?
No, and that's exactly why bullfighting still exists. There's still a really visceral need to be around death in a controlled environment. Today news channels feed us death all the time, but that's very different. That's driven by politics, conquest—lots of other things. For us to be able to go into a controlled environment and see man try to submit nature in that way, and share in that incredibly difficult task, I think that's what keeps bullfighting relevant. Which is why there's so much pushback against it. If it was just fading away, people would let it be. But I think it still has so many fans and still exists because it satisfies something really primal.

Has making the film changed your view of bullfighting?
I find myself much more interested. A film takes a long time to make, so you have to be submerged in the subject. You have to learn to understand your subject without judging it. It didn't turn me into a fan, but I am not a protestor. To my sensibility, I don't necessarily enjoy it, but there's something about it that I totally understand now, and which tells me why it's still around.

How did Barrera respond to the film?
I have no idea. So here's the other reality about trying to make a movie about a matador: they are really tricky to pin down. He's like a bull; if you're not within his peripheral vision, you cannot reach Antonio Barrera. As close and as intimate a time as we had with him, when he's not in front of us physically, we can't reach him. As soon as we finished, I wanted his take on it before I even locked picture, but he never responded.

Was it difficult filming such crucial moments in his life?
We met him when he was making the most painful decision he's ever made. Getting gored over and over again wasn't painful for him anymore, but to make the decision to walk away from the bulls? That was really painful. To film his family in the days leading up to his final bullfight... they couldn't care less about us. We're filming people dealing with life-shattering decisions. And everyone had a stake in it: his wife, his daughter, his father-in-law. Everyone was so invested, and the camera was so low on their priority list, that we filmed the real stuff. It's a very privileged point of view, real access to something, which is incredibly rare in documentaries.

'Gored' is out now on iTunes, Netflix, and Amazon. For more information, visit the documentary's website here.

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK

It's enough to make you miss the M&S ad lady. Her low, moaning voice and the supermarket's slow-mo shots of rump steak kebabs or lettuce leaves bouncing on top of a spotless worktop surface are like heaven when compared to the rigidly constructed food porn that now fills social media feeds and blogs.

Instagrammed food has progressed from shitty flash-on photos in restaurants to pristinely arranged healthful bowls, always—always—photographed from above. And now we've come almost full-circle, to food like the freakshake: an oozing, aggressively layered ice cream milkshake, first "invented" at a bakery in Australia last year. It's the latest food trend to send giddy bloggers and lifestyle sites (and Scroobius Pip) frothing at the mouth.

"I wanted to do some really great shakes, and so ridiculous and over the top that people just had to take a photo of it before they ate it," original freakshake creator Gina Petridis told Mashable, without a hint of sarcasm. Predictably, it wasn't long until the shakes came to Britain. Now you can get them in Bangor, in Newcastle—where they've been christened "geet big shakes"—and from a bakery and cafe in east London.

When I first walked into Molly Bakes, the Dalston freakshake café run by husband and wife Olly and Maria, it was with a feeling of trepidation. I'd seen photos and the milkshakes were massive. Like, huge in a way that looks uncomfortable. Large on a scale that slots into the trend of food items that barely hold together, from glisteningly greasy Dirty Burgers to the Great British Bake Off "showstoppers." I was terrified. Olly, who looks after the running of the café while his wife manages their bakery down the road, told me that often people walk into the café, take one look at the menu and walk straight out.

Others stay, obviously, and the freakshake's debut at the café in January saw a queue outside that apparently ran halfway down the street. "We had to turn about 200 people away," Olly tells me excitedly. This, a queue of people standing outside a food vendor for a bite of the latest trend, is a fairly regular occurrence in London and other cities driven by money spent on things that people don't really need.

Usually it's for overly indulgent meat-based food—mega-burgers and the like. But hype food has a sweet tooth, too. See: the Creme Egg pop-up café that opened in Soho in January, or the kaleidoscopic and largely unnecessary rainbow bagels that travelled from New York to east London in the space of a few months in February.

But back to the freakshakes. I chose the caramel option because it looked the sickliest. The staff told me that everyone has their own way of eating the freakshake, but I decided to drink the liquid first then work my way through the rest. My favorite part was weirdly the decorative rim of the milkshake's glass. It was covered in little crunchy chocolate balls mixed with chocolate sauce and biscuit crumbs, and a small slice of honeycomb. As far as a dessert goes that could make you vomit, it tasted delicious. Still, I couldn't finish it.

On Munchies: This Fast-Food Cricket Milkshake Might Save the World

Nutritionist Carolina Brooks asked me if I was "OK after that milkshake" when I told her I'd sampled one—which I am, I think. Like most people in the business of monitoring how people eat, she thinks that a diet free from refined, non-natural sugar is the best way forward. That might explain her freakshake-related concern.

"We are programmed to enjoy sugar—our brain runs on glucose," she said. "So we do need the sweet taste in our lives. But once you cut out the crap," read: refined sugar, "you really notice your taste buds change, and you start wanting to eat better things anyway."

Unfortunately for sugar-free crusaders, the freakshake isn't just another gross-looking food trend that may quickly disappear; it's much more complex than that. Dr Morgaine Gaye, a food futurologist at the food trend forecasters Bellwether, told me about the significance of the freakshake to the future of food.

"Right now, we're seeing a lot of people getting involved in the anti-sugar campaign—and they should, as it is really important—but there is always a counter-trend," she said. "And this is it. Everyone is trying to be better and more successful and more beautiful. The reality is that no one can really maintain that."

"The freakshake is a rebellion against trying to cram in perfection, and says 'fuck it' to the idea that people can maintain hyper-healthy lifestyles. Slop it all on, put as many ingredients as you can in and stop trying to make a piece of perfection with a little bit of drizzle around the edge."

The freakshake definitely doesn't just have "a little bit of drizzle around the edge."There is a lot happening in this lactose intolerant's nightmare—but was it worth the "queueing down the street" hype?

At £7 each and considering that you have to travel to Dalston, north-west Wales or Newcastle to drink one, I don't think these glorified milkshakes pose a serious threat to the health of the nation. If you buy into them and their marketing technique, they could do wonders for attracting the kinds of Instagram followers still using Pinterest. If not, you're faced with a complicated sundae that costs more than a pint—but maybe imagining the M&S lady huskily saying that would make it worthwhile.

Follow Amelia and Jake on Twitter.

Journalist Rebecca Traister's new book All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation was published this week, but the book already feels like it has the potential to become a seminal text on female identity in the West.

In roughly 350 digestible pages (or, in her recent book excerpt-turned-cover-story for 'New York'), Traister will convince readers that the 2016 election will come down to a maybe-surprising demographic, and then make you feel foolish for ever thinking otherwise. As the title suggests, we're talking about unmarried women in America, a group that is growing at an exponential rate. "Wherever you find increasing numbers of single women in history, you find change," writes Traister.

"The expansion of the population of unmarried women across classes signals a social and political rupture as profound as the invention of birth control, as the sexual revolution, as the abolition of slavery," the author explains. In other words, if history is any indication, we should expect dramatic change in America now, and Traister details why through a mixture of historical analysis, heavy research, personal anecdotes, and interviews with academics, social scientists, and both non-famous and prominent single women, such as Anita Hill and Gloria Steinem.

While rates of unmarried women are at a new high (single women outnumbered married women for the first time in 2009, and today only 20 percent of Americans aged 18 to 29 are wed), they aren't a new phenomenon, and, historically, whenever women were given options beyond early heterosexual marriage, significant societal change followed. Most of the women who led the fights for abolition and suffrage, against lynching, and for secondary education, were unmarried—as were the women who pioneered new fields such as nursing and medicine.

All the Single Ladies also dispels myths about unmarried women, from Newsweek's infamous claim in 1986 that single women at age 40 were more likely to be killed by terrorists than get married, to the notion that women have achieved true equality in the 21st century. A New York Magazine writer-at-large and ELLE contributing editor, Traister expertly paints a modern portrait of American life and how we got here, with an intersectional approach that accounts for class, race, and sexual orientation. Even more impressive is how Traister pushes a feminist agenda without the book ever feeling like it has an agenda, or that it's pointing the finger at the reader to make him or her feel guilty. VICE talked to Traister about All the Single Ladies over the phone and through email in light of its release.

For more on marriage, watch our doc on America's lucrative divorce industry:

VICE: What was your initial goal in writing All the Single Ladies and how did it change or evolve during the research process?
Traister: My initial idea was that the book would be mostly contemporary journalism—mostly the interviews with single women, across ages, backgrounds, races, religions—about their experiences of being single. As I started researching, I became much more interested in the history of single women in America, and how profoundly they'd shaped the set of possibilities now open to today's single women.

What were some of the most interesting experiences you had during the research process?
I think that coming across some of the published commentary of the 19th and early 20th centuries—from Susan B. Anthony's Homes of Single Women speech, to a 1904 newspaper column railing against the inequities of marriage, published by a "Bachelor Maid"—opened my eyes about how long these issues and questions and tensions have been in play, and how out in the open they've been. I still think of questioning marriage's primacy as a contemporary and rebellious act, but women have been doing it for centuries in really bold, funny, resonant ways.

Also, learning the stories of women who came up with ingenious ways of expressing their ambivalence about marriage, from Amelia Earhart, who wrote this incredibly ambivalent letter to her husband on their wedding day, to Lucy Stone, who published a proclamation of her ambivalence about marriage and its gender inequities and had the pastor at her wedding read it out loud. It's just so bracing and remarkable learning about women who have done remarkable things to evade the traps that marriage historically set for them.

You make the point that most American women, across all racial and ethnic groups, do eventually marry; they are just marrying later. How is late marriage benefitting women and society on the whole?
It gets us a lot close to egalitarian marriage. I think the bigger patterns means that men and women live independently in the world, often alongside each other as colleagues, peers, and friends. By the time they join in marriage, you wind up with a far greater likelihood that they both know how to do their laundry and use a drill and have some economic stability. So when they do , the pattern of responsibility won't fall on these old patriarchal lines that cut men off from being domestically involved.

But we are constantly fed the narrative that high-achieving, successful women—particularly black women—will have a harder time finding a mate, when in reality, these high-achieving women are most likely to marry. Why is that?
That's a very old trope. We've had women be dependent on men in this country and if there is this shift, it can be destabilizing. As a result, we send a lot of messages that it's a very bad thing. The message that you're going to "independent" your way to singlehood, especially to black women, is designed, consciously or not, to herd women back into more traditional emotional and legal setups. The point is to make you doubt the things you're doing independently, whether it's going to graduate school or having a baby on your own. The message is: get back.

Staying single or marrying late can be hugely empowering for women, but what are some of the challenges these women experience, particularly poor women and women of color?
Single women and single mothers, in particular, are much more likely to live at or below the poverty line than their married counterparts and single life in working class and low income communities is intensely hard. We have such a low minimum wage and no kinds of protections like paid leave or high-quality subsidized day care. We have a criminal justice system that incarcerates and kills black men at such higher rates.

There are all kinds of systemic things that make life, including married and family life and childfree life, dramatically more challenging and difficult for low-income women and men. The idea that marrying someone, anyone, is going to help—and conservatives push this all the time—is wrong. One of the most economically devastating things in life is divorce. The solution is not marriage. Rather, we should be providing paid leave, a higher minimum wage, subsidized day care, a better health system, and lifting some of the limits on reproductive freedom. Marriage by itself does not address what is so grindingly difficult [about being poor] and may exacerbate it.

The message that you're going to "independent" your way to singlehood is designed to herd women back into more traditional emotional and legal setups...The message is: get back.

As people are marrying later in life, a trend we're seeing in many parts around the globe, do you think we are evolving out of marriage, especially as women gain economic and sexual equality?
I think we're evolving out of it as a norm and an expectation, and evolving into a world in which there are a number of romantic, sexual, and familial configurations, and that hetero marriage will be one among them. I also think we're evolving very, very slowly into an era in which marriage, and hetero partnership in general, becomes more egalitarian. As Susan B. Anthony predicted 150 years ago, part of that evolution is going through a stage in which women stop marrying men in the numbers that they used to.

Later marriage means lower divorce rates. After doing the research, how do you feel about your own "late" marriage at 35?
It's so funny that my marriage is 'late' by any historical standard; in New York City, I was amongst the first of my friends to marry. The fact that I fell in love with this guy is the most shocking part of my life, more than that I'm married. I just feel immensely lucky to have been unmarried when I met my husband. I had a lot of opportunities in front of me because I come from a fairly privileged population where I went to college and had the ability to pursue a career that I loved writing about subjects I loved living in a city I loved. This is how privilege accrues and expands for people.

In the book, you cite sociologist Bella DePaulo, who says there are more than 1,000 laws that benefit married people over singles. Now that we have marriage equality in the US, do you think "single equality" will be next?
I hope so. Bella DePaulo is absolutely indispensable on the variety of penalties paid by Americans who live outside of marriage. And I would love to see a move toward "single equality," which I think we get closer to by pushing for a lot of social policy fixes like the ones I outline in my appendix [such as stronger equal pay protections, a higher minimum wage, government-subsidized or funded daycare programs, and paid family leave for women and men, among other policies].

Do you expect any backlash toward the book? How do you hope the book ages?
I don't think that there's been much controversy yet, but I do expect conservatives to push back at my insistence that marriage is not the cure for poverty. And I expect some backlash from people who see this as a glorification of single life over married life, which it's not meant to be. I hope that the book ages as one of the many documents that chronicles the massive social, economic, sexual shifts women have made over their centuries of living in and pushing toward a more equal set of opportunities in America.

In 2012, unmarried women—who are more politically engaged than their married counterparts—made up 23% of the electorate. What role will they play in 2016?
They could play a totally determinate roll if they vote in the numbers that are possible. There are a lot of structural impediments to single women voting whether it's voting times curtailed, the hours polls are open, places to register or having to get special IDs to bring to voting places. These are things that take time that plenty of single parents and women do not have. Finally the Democratic platform is dealing with some of the fixes that single people need. Nobody talked about the Hyde Amendment until Hillary Clinton did in this election; no one has made paid leave central to a campaign—all these things are relatively new. Unmarried women could be determinative this election, but so much depends on their ability and enthusiasm to vote.

'All the Single Ladies' is out now on Simon & Schuster. Purchase a copy here.

Follow Victoria on Twitter.

All photos: Michele Sibiloni, 'Fuck it,' Edition Patrick Frey, 2016

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

There's a lot that you can't officially do in Uganda. You can't legally fuck people of the same gender. You can't "promote" weed smoking. You can't "promote porn"—and that can mean images or videos featuring women in miniskirts, or ones where you can see thighs, boobs, or bums, whether or not people look like they're having sex.

The east African country's restrictive laws are great for convincing outsiders that repression is the norm in a part of the world still largely associated with negative stories. Every time news of this conservatism dominates coverage of Uganda, it does little to help us understand what life is actually like there.

But stifling people who want to have a good time may not be working out that well. Italian photographer Michele Sibiloni moved to Uganda about six years ago, started documenting the nightlife in capital city Kampala, and found a bunch of people willing to party in the face of restrictive laws. From the night guards who watch over people getting pissed beyond their limits to the pasty ex-pats, sex workers, and wasters who fill the city's bars, he pointed his lens at scenes that would look familiar to anyone who's been blackout drunk, but may not be what first comes to mind when someone says "Uganda."

Some of Michele's favorite photos from the project are collected in book 'Fuck It,' out this month. We asked him about spending most of his waking hours in the part of Kampala once apparently described as "Tijuana on acid," and what it taught him about sex, class, and stereotypes.

VICE: Hi, Michele. You seem to thrive out on the streets, as your hard news reporting on drug use and armed rebel groups shows. But how did you transition from covering heavier stuff to parties?
Michele Sibiloni: After a couple of years in Uganda, covering news in the Great Lakes region—including DRC, Rwanda, Uganda, and Burundi—I had quite good pictures and I was happy that I was learning, but something was missing. I wasn't always satisfied with my pictures and I wanted to add something personal, and more related to my life, into my work. I realised that one of the reasons I loved living here was to have the chance to be out at night.

How did the nightlife series take shape, then?
It all stemmed from one photo I took of a night guard, which is also the first picture inside the book. From that picture, I decided to do a series of portraits of these night guards. I was taking my camera out with me here and there, but not in as obsessed a way as this.

How were people reacting to your camera when you were out? Club photography's pretty normalized, but not everyone loves having a flash gun in their face at 1AM.
It depends. Some people didn't mind much, some asked for an explanation. Others also got pissed off—it was all different. But the more I did it, the more I got comfortable with it, and started to believe that it was my right to take pictures. I had to hide my camera a lot, because they check you at the door and once you're in and have taken a photo or two, people may come over and ask you to leave. Sometimes I'd have to wait, find that moment for a good picture, then take it and see whether I was going to get asked to leave.

After doing my night guard series I started to go out a lot, to bars, to parties, and out onto the streets to capture every aspect related to Ugandan society at night. The more I did it, the more interested I became, because I started to get new kinds of photos that I hadn't taken before. I didn't have a book in mind or anything. I just wanted to go out and document that part of Ugandan society, and one aspect of my life here.

What kind of places were you going to? Was that affecting your access?
It was every different place, from house parties with ex-pats to bars and clubs in Kabalagala—sort of Kampala's red light district. There are bars and clubs there, people cooking in the streets, small hotels where people would take their girls to have sex. And in a few of those bars you'd find the middle-aged white men looking for younger girls. There were smaller, more local bars too, in areas that would be considered more like slums or ghettos. By now it feels as though I've been to every pat of Kampala—maybe not every bar, but every part of town.

What was that like? What sort of people did you encounter?
I found that the special thing about Kampala is that in certain places you can find every sort of person inside a bar, from rich to poor. It's unique; there isn't that much class-based discrimination. I mean, of course, if a beer costs £1 in one bar or 75p in another, then people may tend to go to the cheaper place. But there aren't strictly places "just for rich people." Also, the same sex workers tend to go to the fancy places as to the poorer places. When I was moving around, I found that at night there was a sort of democracy where social classes didn't matter that much anymore, and people were mixing and using each other in different ways. It wasn't like what I've seen in Kenya, where there were places for rich people and others for poorer people.

You met a lot of people along the way, who have turned into characters in your photos. Tell me more about Sandra, whose tattoo of a dick (below) gave your book its name.
She's a person I know, who I've filmed and interviewed. She wrote a couple of stories for the book for me, about being a prostitute and working in Kabalagala, about HIV/AIDS. The stories were very interesting, but I didn't feel comfortable putting them in the book because I wanted the viewer to have his or her own journey through the photos. I didn't want to focus their attention on the matters of HIV or prostitutes or whatever.

The book isn't just about that, but is something that I don't want to be attached to any stereotype. When I first arrived in Africa, I had so many stereotypes in my mind that had been lodged there by news reports or stories I read in the media, and I wanted to make Fuck It feel completely different. That's why I wanted to mix as many people in the book as I could: my friends, ex-pats, sex workers, every sort of person I was encountering.

Do you think the average European consumer, who hasn't left the continent before, will understand that message, with captions or information to guide them?
I don't know... I hope so. I believe it's quite a unique story. When they saw the book, some of my friends here in Uganda even asked me when I started to hang out with "these sorts" of people. It was something new for them, too.

Did it feel weird photographing people who were wasted? Do you have pictures that you wouldn't use?
Of course. For a couple of the pictures I had to ask people if they'd be alright with being published looking a bit worse for wear. Maybe it wouldn't be one of their best moments ... but they understood the project, and agreed. And I did the edit after choosing the book title, so some pictures that I took wouldn't fit that certain attitude. A lot of people living here are maybe running away from something, and going out at night to forget about their responsibilities—they say "fuck it," and live a little recklessly. That's why the edit's turned out like this.

What were the best parties?
It wasn't about the parties for me. Or even when it was a good party, I was always just passing through on my way somewhere else. I was on a different type of journey—but of course I was partying, too. I was more comfortable being out in certain places, because when I was younger—18, 20—I raved a lot. But I wasn't in it for the parties, I just wanted the encounters and the pictures that came from them the parties. One of my goals when I started this project was to see my experience—I wanted to do something personal, like personal documentary.

Of course, it'll reflect on aspects of society, but sometimes the more you try to tell, the less you convey. So I think this tells you about one part of Ugandan society at night in Kampala. It's a politically repressed and traditionally conservative society—with anti-gay laws, a recent anti-pornography bill and laws pushed by American evangelical churches feeding people lies about sexuality—but behind closed doors, people don't really care. They party here the way they would in London, Paris, or New York.

Thanks, Michele.

Fuck It is out on Thursday March 10, via Edition Patrick Frey.

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All images courtesy of Gengoro Tagame, photos by the author.

Gengoro Tagame makes gay manga, and it's some of the best out there. His stories often involve characters in homoerotic settings or participating in BDSM scenes where the macho main character is transformed into a sub and finds his true calling in chains or fetish-gear. Tagame is not afraid of touchy subjects and taboos, writing stories featuring Nazi prisoners, bestiality, incest, scat, permanent body modification and Japanese WWII soldiers captured and tortured by Chinese liberation groups. Yet, his manga goes beyond illustrated fan fiction or quick masturbation fodder, and often feels more like it's depicting a quest for an existence beyond pain.

Tagame realized his own BDSM fetish when he was a child. After watching the scene inPlanet of the Apes where Charles Heston is dragged by a leather collar, he felt an indescribable sensation inside him, leading the artist into further research about S&M. While studying art in college in the 80s, he started publishing queer illustrations under a pen name, and continued writing erotic stories throughout his twenties while supporting himself with a job as a graphic designer. Over the next 30 years, he published more than 20 books in four languages in addition to selling hundreds of fine art prints and illustrations. Today, at 51-years-old, the illustrator continues to expand his creative horizons, and recently serialized a queer story called My Brother's Husband in Monthly Action Comics, an otherwise-hetero magazine. The manga was then collated into a book with the same title, which is now in its fifth printing due to overwhelming popularity.

One of Tagame's most notorious stories is Shirogane no Hana (Silver Flower), a historical drama set at the start of the 20th-century about a spoiled son who's turned into a sex worker before exploring his own passion for S&M. The epic, three-volume story totals 900 pages—the 1Q84 of niche, queer manga. His latest, My Brother's Husband shares the same focus on identity, despite the text being young adult-friendly and safe for work, unlike his most famous work. Both stories affirm that we should be proud of who or what we love no matter how different or extreme it may appear to be.

This past November, My Brother's Husband received the Excellence Award from the Japan Media Arts Festival by the Agency of Cultural Affairs, one of the highest recognitions in Japanese pop culture. VICE spoke with Tagame about his life and what it means to be a queer artist in Japan.

VICE: When did you first begin to understand your own sexuality?
Gengoro Tagame: Naked and bound men have excited me since I was in elementary school. I remember getting excited watching Italian Hercules movies and Hollywood science fiction films like the original Planet of the Apes. I liked the scene where Charlton Heston was ordered to take his stinky human clothes off in front of the ape's assembly, then dragged by a leather collar.

Later, I found a copy of SABU [a queer Japanese magazine] at a bookstore when I was in middle school. I got excited reading any S&M stories, including heterosexual ones, as long as the men in the stories got abused. In contrast, I was not turned on by love stories where two men make love to each other. I was confused about my sexuality, both about being gay, as well as being into S&M.

By high school, I started to question why I couldn't be honest with myself. I realized I didn't have to suffer while hiding my true emotions if I was up front about my sexuality from the very beginning. This led to me coming out during my freshman year of college.

How did you start submitting work to gay publications?
I started to submit my work during my college years under different identities. All of the work was based on BDSM; dark stories, incest, sons murdering fathers, a high school student turning a teacher into his slave, abduction, confinement, and so on... Some were just stories and others were illustrations and manga.

During this same period, I had my first trip to Europe and discovered the American hardcore S&M gay magazine DRUMMER. It featured a drawing by Bill Ward, who made a strong impression on my art. Bill had an exceptional quality beyond what I found in Japanese gay art at that time. American magazines also featured masculine gay men and guys with beards—which was unheard of in Japan. With that influence, I developed KUMA-KEI, or a "bear type," in the Japanese magazines I was contributing to.

Then, when I was working on the magazine G-Men, I made an effort to change the status quo of gay magazines. I wanted a strong emphasis on machismo, and also to make it scary, have no text on the cover, no smiles, and include bearded, tough-looking guys.

Tagame, photographed by the author

You've been creating erotic art for decades. What is it about erotic and pornographic work that keeps you interested?
Since college, I've been especially interested in religious art. I am not a Christian, but I'm moved by Christian art as well as Tibetan Buddhist art. Religious painters do not draw to express themselves. Rather, the act of creation is the highest form of respect, creating a symbol of their belief. That emotional strength comes from purity. I believe pornographic art has the same characteristic. Porn is a search for the perfect erotic expression. It's not necessarily self-assertiveness, nor a status symbol, but uncontrollable desires. Pursuing such pure pleasure is less complicated. In such pursuits, pornographic art is pure, fine art. My goal is beyond manga or porn, but to aim for the level of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio.

Cover for his new manga series 'My Brother's Husband' by Futaba Publishing Ltd.

Your newest series "My Brother's Husband" is a big hit in Japan. Tell us what made you decide to publish your gay story in a non-gay manga.
A publisher approached me and was very supportive, so the project took off quickly. At the time, gay marriage was becoming a worldwide trend, but in Japan gays are still invisible to society and the gay rights movement does not resonate with many. Manga is a part of pop culture and may be an interesting tool to spread gay rights issues to larger audiences, so I came up with a plot where the main character is heterosexual but his twin brother is gay and married to a man. This set up was easier for straight people to accept.

Do you expect Japan to change its attitude towards homosexuality in the future?
Same sex marriage is moving fast and I cannot predict what will happen next in Japan. There was no term "same sex marriage" when I started to write this latest manga, but now the SHIBUYA district in Tokyo passed "partnership recognition" and the SETAGAYA district passed a same-sex marriage bill . Reality is moving faster than the pace of my manga.

However, I don't think there are any good role models in Japanese gay society. I wrote My Brother's Husband with my known identity, hoping that sends the right message. I'm a gay artist and I don't have to hide my identity to make a manga for straight people. I'm hoping younger gay artists can see there are options here.

For more info about Gengoro Tagame's, visit his website here.

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A mom larging it, with someone who might be her daughter barely in the frame. Photo: Jay Greinsky via

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

Moms put up with a lot of bullshit from us, their children. They not only have to stagger through three-quarters of a year with another living being growing inside their bodies but then have at least two decades of housework to look forward to once that person is born—and yes, even working moms in Britain are still expected to waste the most hours of their lives cleaning up after everyone.

As it's Mother's Day in the UK, and to say thanks for all that, we decided to find out whether you can be mates with your mom or not, by talking to a guy really close to his ma and another who loves her but isn't about to go down to the pub with her on a mad one.

YOU CAN BE MATES WITH YOUR MOM

I didn't realize that most people aren't as close to their mums as I feel to mine. We speak about three to four times a week, and can talk about anything from a typical 20-minute "mom" chat about Tracey from down the road to an hourlong, detailed conversation on whether Mom can successfully pull off Beyoncé's Formation choreography in a club. She once sent me money-making ideas, including a list of escort agencies for me to join. And she wasn't joking.

This is a stock photo because the author said his mother "avoids cameras like the plague." Photo: Dawn Arlotta via

She'll pop in for a cup of tea if she's in town, or we'll go shopping together and have lunch, arguing about how I'm spending money—and what she wants for her birthday, Christmas, or Mothers' Day, depending on the visit. She also asks to be treated on Fathers' Day, for doing both jobs; this year she said she wants the ability to twerk.

She once sent me money-making ideas, including a list of escort agencies for me to join.

To quote Mean Girls, "She's not like a regular mom: she's a cool mom." The golden rule was, and still is, to never lie to each other about anything. We're very similar in a lot of ways but I think we're close because we respect and admire each other. She managed to raise me as a single parent, and managed to turn her life around. Mom was determined to make sure I wasn't another single-parent-living-in-a-council-house statistic.

Mom still looks young, and can get away with telling people that she's 36 now—I'm 28, so the math really doesn't add up. Because she looks so young, when they saw us together people assumed we were brother and sister, or boyfriend and girlfriend. That made holidays with just the two of us weird for years.

I used to get called a 'mommy's boy' a lot as a teenager and I hated it. But if it means being as understanding of each other and mom and I are, I'll take it. I love her dearly, and unfortunately I don't tell her enough. — Troy Ezra

YOU CAN'T BE MATES WITH YOUR MoM

There is something about my mom that has always seemed detached from her own self. When my sister and I were growing up, mom spent her days working for the NHS as an occupational therapist and her nights and early mornings feeding us, ferrying us to activity after activity (she was keen on occupation) and getting us off to school. She was dedicated, selfless, and sometimes hard to reach. She wasn't our mate, she was our mom.

Mini-Oscar, with his mom. Photo: the author.

There were things I kept from her—most things, perhaps. She didn't know I'd been bullied at school until I wrote about it in a newspaper. But just when I find myself thinking that we've lost touch with each other, she will say or do something that reminds me she is paying attention, which reminds me she knows me.

We've never sat in the pub sinking pints and singing our sorrows together, but we've been around each other in all sorts of states—I still remember her plying my friend Johnny with Special Brew, until he sat on the front steps of her house, throwing it all up into the street. In these social moments, these moments when we poison my friends together, there's an unspoken comradeship running between us.

I don't really have any inclination to rack up the lines with my ma—I just want to have half an idea of what's going on in her head.

Only children believe in grown-ups. The idea that we will one day arrive at a station marked "adulthood" is a fallacy, but that doesn't mean we have to treat our parents like our pals if we don't want to. I don't really have any inclination to rack up the lines with my ma—I just want to have half an idea of what's going on in her head. There's a photo I recall, but which I can't find now, where I'm a few months old, clinging to my impossibly young-looking mother for dear life.

A lot has happened since then and there are times where I think we don't talk enough, that we could hang out like mates and get to understand each other better in that way. But then I think of the photo and of what passes between us unspoken and I know that we're OK really. — Oscar Rickett

'Skadoo' (2014) by Matthew Leifheit

It's hard to pinpoint exactly when semen became the focus of so much erotic fixation in the gay community. Maybe it had something to do with AIDS activist Tony Valenzuela coming out on the cover of Poz magazine in 1999 as an HIV+ gay man who enjoyed condom-less sex. "The unprotected sex ... was beautiful, intimate, satisfying. I didn't shower afterward," he told the magazine. "We slept with his come inside me." Or maybe the threshold was crossed in 2004 with the release of the seminal porn flick Dawson's 20-Load Weekend, in which a strapping, virile bottom has unprotected sex with a score of men. Or maybe it came earlier, when treatments for HIV/AIDS developed in the 90s made the disease more manageable and convinced many gay men not to think of semen as potential life-destroying poison.

Whatever the case, semen is everywhere these days. You can find it at CumUnion, an international "pro-choice" (a.k.a. bareback or condom-less anal) sex party series where sharing fluids is embraced. You can find it all over the porn industry, where more and more studios are producing bareback films rather than condom-only stuff, according to the blog Str8UpGayPorn. You can even find fake semen, in the form of FT Cum Lube, a sex product that bills itself as "the closest thing to jizz in a bottle." A few years ago, the Centers for Disease (CDC) control reported that bareback sex between men had increased 20 percent between 2005 and 2011—and with the advent of PrEP, or the practice of taking a pill that makes it much more difficult (though not impossible) to contract HIV, it seems safe to assume that more men are going out in the world unprotected.

Watch our doc 'The Truvada Revolution' about efforts to end the HIV epidemic:

For 15 years, Steve Gibson has been a leading figure in San Francisco HIV prevention for the gay community, as well as a member of the SF AIDS Foundation. As someone working in the trenches of sexual health, Gibson does not see the pro-cum choice attitudes I've recently noticed as isolated incidents.

"Yes, there are groups of men who identify as cumpigs," says Gibson. "I don't think this is a unique phenomenon. It shows the power of male sexuality."

Gibson says that a second major shift in semen relations is happening right now as PrEP is breaking down more barriers between HIV+ and HIV- men. "For so many years, semen was feared. The most intimate expression of gay sex was lethal," Gibson adds. "But for the first time people aren't afraid."

There are also many sociological reasons why gay men might want fetishize bodily fluids—to be cumpigs, in other words. Since the 1970s, Dr. William Leap, currently a professor at American University, has studied the ways gay people use language to express sexual identity. Leap says the language surrounding bareback sex, including words like "breed and seed," imply the transmission of power from one man to another. Leap cites a puberty ceremony of the Sambia people of Papua New Guinea as an example of how semen can take on mystical qualities; part of the ritual involves boys ingesting the semen of tribal elders to absorb a life force and fully become men. The idea that gay men might be recreating such rituals in the bedroom may not be that far off.

Adult entertainment insiders echo Leap's notion. According to Leo Forte, a director and videographer for Kink.com: "In porn, we worship this image of guys with the biggest dicks. The bigger the cock, the bigger the load, and the more masculine the man whose seed will be inside of me."

Leap thinks it may not be just the literal viscous semen that is desired, but the feelings of transgression surrounding the act of transmission. And, like many sexual taboos, these feelings become something to fantasize over, fetishize, exploit, or even be addicted to.

"Real queerness means pushing boundaries of what is forbidden," says Leap. "Semen transmission is a form of personal contact that normative society says is wrong for gay men to do. The idea that there is risk is what makes gay sex attractive; it's illegal, condemned, and justice may come crashing down on you at any moment."

"Cum is glorified so much because it contains the essence of taboo," agrees Forte. "Look how it is spraying all over this guy's face. It's going near his asshole, oh no!"

"Semen transmission is a form of personal contact that normative society says is wrong for gay men to do." — Dr. William Leap

There's evidence that these taboos around semen have loosened since PrEP was approved by the FDA in 2012. One 32-month study of PrEP users released by Kaiser Permanente in 2015 found no new HIV infections among participants—but 41 percent of them reported using condoms less often.

It's probably simplistic to attribute the rise in barebacking simply to PrEP. This week Howard Grossman, a gay doctor in New York who sees a lot of LGBT people, wrote that he has observed spiking STI rates in patients who are on PrEP and not on PrEP, both HIV+ and HIV-. This dovetails with CDC reports that syphilis, a disease that disproportionately affects men who have sex with men, is on the rise.

Grossman suggested that PrEP wasn't the culprit in all this. "The real problem, in my view, is that adequate screening and treatment for STIs is often not available, and education about STIs in the United States sucks (to put it mildly)," he wrote. "For the last 30 years, the only message about sexual health that many young people received was either to practice abstinence only or, in more liberal venues, to wear a condom every time to prevent HIV."

Despite these problems, there are reasons to be hopeful—today many gay men have more open attitudes toward sex and semen than they once did, but more importantly they are not forced into the shadows as previous LGBT generations were. Queer rights and acceptance have given us freedoms that were unimaginable in the immediate post-Stonewall era—we're in a place where the first known man to get HIV while properly using PrEP can tell Poz, "I believe in personal accountability and responsibility for your own health. I'm open and upfront with all sexual partners, from my status to my dislike of condoms."

Maybe the recent rise of unprotected sex is an aberration; maybe the pendulum will swing back the other way and condomless sex will once again be regarded as practically a crime. But for now, I can't get cum out of my head, or off my face.

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