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VICE MAGAZINE VOLUME 14 NUMBER 1

@MUNCHIES | MUNCHIES.TV

THE WE MISSED YOU ISSUE 2016

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

VOLUME 14 NUMBER 1 FEATURES

32 ON THE RUN Uganda’s infamous anti-gay law forced hundreds of LGBT people to flee to Kenya, a country nearly as inhospitable as their home. What can the UN do to protect them? BY JACOB KUSHNER

50 ‘BLOW JOBS ARE REAL JOBS’ Thai Sex Workers Fight for the Right to Earn a Living BY JEAN FRIEDMAN-RUDOVSKY

60 SISTAAZ OF THE CASTLE Cape Town’s Transgender Sex Workers Dream of Drugs, the Statue of Liberty, and Weddings PHOTOS BY JAN HOEK

BRIEFS

FIELD NOTES

NEWS / STATS / CULTURE

REVIEWS / COMMENTARY / EPHEMERA

12 MASTHEAD

69 REVIEWS

14 EMPLOYEES OF THE MONTH

72 VOICES 82 BEHIND THE COVER

Broad City’s Straight Man Hannibal Buress

22 HOT SPOTS Kraków, Kabul, Rio de Janeiro, Melbourne, and more...

24 HOW DOES IT WORK? Keeping the Masses in Check

26 Q&A Rights Under the Radar

28 TRAVEL Day of the Drunk

Photo by Elizabeth Renstrom, see page 19

19 PROFILE

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Founders Suroosh Alvi Shane Smith

Co-Presidents Andrew Creighton James Schwab

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General Manager Hosi Simon Publisher Mchael Slonim Commercial Director Alex Light Sales & Marketing Director AU/NZ Jamie Brewer Strategic Planner Alice Kimberley Sales Director, VIC Philip Normansell Sales Cain Collins James Forbes Scarlett Smout Miles Readman Lachie Wallman Marketing & Business Development, NZ David Benge Sales, NZ Georgia Cherrie Digital Producer Todd Andrews Head of Communications Josh Gardiner Communications Asst. Lucy Brown Ad Operations Micah Greenwood Simon Keck Stephanie Winkler Project Management Damien Miller Georgia Field Renee Helena Designer Benjamin Thomson

Marketing Manager Leah Consunji Operations Manager Reuben Ruiter Project Coordinator Jemma Cole Senior Producer Katy Roberts Producers Anu Hasbold Ramona Teleçican Story Developer Andrew Kavanagh Post Production Manager Greg Cooper Video Editor Jamie Snyder Finance Warren Rodrigues Finance Assistant Yujie Nie Web Development Jesse Knight Brady Bryant Interns Ash Beks James Davis Miriam Koslay Greta Levy Chelsea Sullivan May Tusler

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Cover Photo Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari

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Words Bruno Bayley Kristin Dombek River Donaghey Jean Friedman-Rudovsky Jacob Kushner Andrew Martin Derek Mead Alice Newell-Hanson Lauren Oyler Nathan Schneider Rachel Syme Alex Traub Briana Younger Photos Liz Cowie Jan Hoek Heather Lighton Paul Matthews Amanda Mustard Jake Naughton Kevin Wilson Illustrations Haisam Hussein Adam Mignanelli Kitron Neuschatz

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EMPLOYEES OF THE MONTH

AMANDA MUSTARD See BLOW JOBS ARE REAL JOBS, page 50

JACOB KUSHNER See ON THE RUN, page 32

RACHEL SYME See ONE BOWL OF RAMEN AND THREE DUMPLINGS WITH HANNIBAL BURESS, page 19

MADDISON CONNAUGHTON See MEDICAL MARIJUANA MUMS AND DADS, page 72

Amanda Mustard is an independent photojournalist based in Bangkok. Selected as one of Photo District News magazine’s “PDN 30” in 2015, she is also a founding member of the Koan Collective and a member of the editorial board at Makeshift, an independent quarterly magazine about grassroots creativity and invention around the world. Mustard is also a Frontline Freelance Register board member, where she advocates for the protection and sustainability of the freelance community and gender equality in the media industry.

A proud native of Wisconsin, writer Jacob Kushner lived in postearthquake Haiti before moving to Kenya, where he covered the Westgate Mall terrorist attack for the Associated Press. He’s reported on LGBT refugees in East Africa, stateless people in the Dominican Republic, and corruption in global aid. His e-book, China’s Congo Plan, won the Atavist Digital Storymakers Award and was favorably reviewed in the New York Review of Books. He has written for the New Yorker, Foreign Policy, Wired, and National Geographic.

Rachel Syme is a cultural reporter whose work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, GQ, Matter, Rolling Stone, T, and a bunch of other places, both virtual and hardcover. She is currently writing her first book, a biography of an adventurous lady gossip columnist in old Hollywood, for Random House. For this issue of VICE, Syme interviewed the comedian Hannibal Buress over bowls of ramen. The two talked about touring, conspiracy theories, and his onstage look for 2016.

Maddison Connaughton is a journalist who lives and works in Melbourne. Before landing at VICE, she drank cocktails for a living at Broadsheet, and got up at 4AM every morning to report for the Australian. Her work has also appeared in publications including Monocle, the Age and the Saturday Paper. Now she’s with us full time, talking about drugs, politics, and crime. For this issue, Connaughton talked to the Australian mums and dads who fought to let their chronically ill children access medical cannabis.

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THE DEBUT ALBUM ‘Aa’ FEATURING

M.I.A - G-DRAGON - PUSHA T - FUTURE - RUSTIE LEIKELI47 - NOVELIST - TIRZAH - TT THE ARTIST INCLUDES THE SINGLES GOGO! - DAY ONES - KUNG FU - TEMPLE

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NOISEY and JD Future Legends have been travelling the country this summer presenting the NEXT ON TOUR, a series of free gigs that showcase some of Australiaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s rising musical talent. From Fremantle to the Gold Coast, Melbourne, Adelaide, Ballarat and Manly, the wild shows have included Sampa the Great, Power, Tempura Nights, Baro and West Thebarton Brothel Party. These photos capture only a fraction of the high energy hi-jinx that went on stage (and off) when the NEXT ON TOUR rolled into town.

DRINK RESPONSIBLY

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PHOTOS BY MATT SCHEMBRI & ALAN WEEDON

CHECK IT ALL OUT HERE

NOISEY.COM/NEXTONTOUR

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BRIEFS One Bowl of Ramen and Three Dumplings with Hannibal Buress

BY RACHEL SYME PORTRAIT BY ELIZABETH RENSTROM

n the age of on-demand-all-streaming-instant everything, we all have our comedy cures, the clips we have bookmarked for when the mid-afternoon melancholy rolls in and we need an injection of joy straight into our bloodstream. Here’s my prescription for a blue funk: a GIF of Hannibal Buress dancing down the rampway at Grand Central Station in a suit and tie, doing a jerky cabbage patch motion with his arms and a wobbly shuffle with his feet. Even though the clip lasts only a few seconds, Buress’s daffy, jerky strut (which comes from a scene in Broad City, when

the gang rushes to get to a destination wedding) has brought me near endless delight. This has much to do with the element of surprise: Buress’s character, a typically restrained dentist named Lincoln—Broad City’s one and only straight man, in all senses of the phrase—rarely breaks the goofball barrier. If Abbi and Ilana are always turned up to ten, Buress keeps Lincoln simmering at a constant three; seeing him cut loose is so rare it’s like a shock when it happens. Some of the most generous comedy comes out of deep restraint, and Buress knows this—he keeps so

much to himself that when he finally does give something more, it feels cathartic. I felt this same slow-burning generosity when I met Buress for lunch at Ramen Yebisu in Williamsburg, where he lives, on a recent grey afternoon. On the kind of day that zaps you of your life force just by walking around in it, both Buress and I arrived at the ramen place chilly and low-energy. But then, the break: We sat down, and my recorder immediately stopped working. That sickly pall of “oh shit, this is a nightmare” broke across my face. Buress, sensing the panic, did the

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BRIEFS / PROFILE

kind thing. He laughed. And when Buress laughs, as he does often during his own stand-up sets, he does it with his whole face and a full-throated cackle. We were going to be OK. However, as I learned throughout our lunch, the clouds I felt hanging over Buress extend a bit beyond just a touch of seasonal-affective disorder. On the one hand, he has reached a point in his life, and in his career, where things are going better than ever: On February 5, the day after his 33rd birthday, Netflix released Comedy Camisado, Buress’s new hour-long stand-up special. For a comedian, a Netflix release is the new Big Dream: thousands of comedy fans streaming in glorious unison, all within reach of their bongs and bags of Doritos. As far as stand-up goes, Buress, who started out in his native Chicago, has reached the upper echelon—the only thing he has left to do is play Madison Square Garden (a goal he intends to achieve, by the way). Then, there’s his television work. He is one of the best parts of Broad City—a show full of best parts—and he chews up every scene of the absurdist Eric Andre Show as the laconic sidekick who will put up with anything. Last year, he debuted Why? with Hannibal Buress, his own show on Comedy Central, a major victory after four previous television development deals had not panned out. He is also making the transition to film; in December, he killed in Daddy’s Home, and he appeared in the indie action flick Band of Robbers, which saw wide release in January. And he has more IMDb credits coming: He has a role in the Baywatch film, starring Dwayne Johnson and Zac Efron, but he told me he doesn’t take his shirt off. He travels everywhere with a DJ and a roving posse of friends and musicians, packs big rooms across the country, and sometimes uses “an Uber for jets” to get from place to place should he miss a flight (which he does, a lot: “I miss like, two out of every five flights I am scheduled for,” he told me). When we met, he had just come back from Tokyo, where he played a last-minute show that sold out in less than a day. And yet, there’s always the other hand. As Buress fiddled with his chopsticks and tried to spear slippery dumplings (“Man, I’m really struggling with these. Might have to call in a fork.”), I asked him how excited he feels on the eve of so many big developments—and was surprised when he admitted to feeling less happy than he had been in a while. “I think I was my happiest right before my other special [Live from Chicago] came out,” he said, a bit wistfully. “ I just remember being in good spirits. I did this podcast called Champs with Neal Brennan and Moshe Kasher, and I just remember being in such a good mood when I did that. I think it was fewer responsibilities, a lighter time.”

What he didn’t mention in this spiel, and what I am even loathe to mention here, because Buress seems so keen on moving past it, is that March 2014, when Live in Chicago came out, was also seven months B.C.: Before Cosby. If you haven’t heard about the connection between Hannibal Buress and Bill Cosby (and have been living in a cave... in which case, are you OK?), here it is in brief: In late October 2014, grainy footage of a joke Buress had been telling on the road about Cosby’s history of sexual assault hit YouTube. The bit began with Buress chastising Cosby for telling young black men how to behave when he has no real moral ground to do so: “Yeah, but you rape women, Bill Cosby... You leave here and google ‘Bill Cosby rape.’ It’s not funny. That shit has more results than ‘Hannibal Buress.’” The internet circulated the footage in a frenzy until cable news picked it up, at which point the story tipped into actual real-world results. Women

Almost overnight Buress became the face of comic vigilante justice, a role he never asked to play. began coming forward. Cosby lost an NBC show, and Cosby Show reruns disappeared from cable. Almost overnight Buress became the face of comic vigilante justice, a role he never asked to play. He certainly has more Google results now. When I asked him about googling himself, he pulled out his phone and clicked one of the results, an article claiming he has a secret Zionist agenda. “I did a gig for the Young Jewish Leadership in Chicago last month,” he said, referring to a performance for the Jewish United Fund’s Young Leadership Division. “And here is one of those goofy-ass conspiracy sites that thinks I’m some secret agent.” All the conspiracy theories that sprang up in the wake of the Cosby affair still amuse and shock Buress. “People think I got my TV show because of that,” he said. “But that would be impossible. The TV deal was locked in July 2014 and that came out in October. But after that, I almost didn’t want to do my show anymore.” Buress pressed ahead despite his reservations with Why?, a half-hour showcase that was part man-on-the-street interviews, part variety

show—but admitted that his heart wasn’t fully in the eight episodes he made. He decided against returning for a second season. “It was uneven, unfocused,” he said of the show. “I was having angst. It was just having this weird media attention that I didn’t like.” This is the catch-22 of having a bit go viral in the era of modern stand-up. The way the business is set up, it only has room for a handful of stars at any given time. There are the working comedians you’ve heard of—Aziz Ansari, Amy Schumer, Louis CK, Chris Rock—and then there is everybody else. It’s a profession full of hoofers and grinders, playing showcases and guesting on podcasts and trying to fill a room and get on a marquee until they break big. Buress, because of his extremely rare stand-up talent, was already on the brink before any of the headlines happened. But it’s understandable how the attention can affect a person on the road to success. As he slurped down his miso ramen, Buress reflected on the fact that he almost quit doing comedy altogether in the wake of Cosbygate. He worried that the notice he was getting was more about the web traffic than his actual act. “People interject it unnecessarily,” he told me. “I remember seeing a review of Daddy’s Home that called me ‘Cosby outer Hannibal Buress,’ and I was like, really? But it is what it is.” So Buress is moving on. As with his gleeful little jig in Grand Central, he keeps finding new ways to harness the electric power of abrupt surprise; he’ll be soft-spoken, low-key, and measured during a set, ambling slowly across the stage, and then all of a sudden, he’ll explode, delighting his audience. In that wedding episode of Broad City, Buress’s character stops inside the train station, looks up at the celestial ceiling paintings, and says, “Holy shit, this place really is majestic.” He is a vessel for unexpected revelations; you often don’t know what he is going to say next, but you know that it will be incisive, startling, and true. Of course, Buress still nods to the strange turn his life took in late 2014, and likely will for a while. He knows it has become funny. His Netflix set includes a bit in which he talks about how distrustful he is of strangers. He punctuates this riff with, “Did Cosby send you?” His other new material, which contains his trademark mixture of incisive social observations and absurdist revelations, focuses more on his fears about aging and moving past his hard-partying 20s (though he told me he still goes out until 3 or 4 AM every night when he is out on the road). His main criticism of his own act now is that he appears too sweaty doing it—“I don’t know why I look particularly sweaty in this special,” he said. “Watch me get older and sweatier.”

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BRIEFS / HOT SPOTS

THE WORLD ACCORDING TO VICE A roundup of the latest cultural reports and the biggest international news stories we’re covering on our digital platforms this month.

ARIZONA On a road trip across the state, rodeo queens, biker-gang members, and spirit guides prove to models Natalie Westling and Molly Bair that the American woman can be anything she wants. VICE’S FASHION CHANNEL

PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI: THE VODOU HEALER

RIO DE JANEIRO A Vodou priestess prepares for a ceremony that will unite her community and fellow Vodouisants as the country continues to recover from the 2010 earthquake.

The city is dealing with the pollution of Guanabara Bay ahead of the 2016 Olympics slated to take place there.

VICE’S WOMEN’S INTEREST CHANNEL VICE’S SPORT CHANNEL

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POLAND: KRAKÓW’S CAVE RAVE

LONDON FIELD studio debuts Spectra-3, a futuristic sculpture that takes inspiration from space and technology. VICE’S ARTS AND CULTURE CHANNEL

Recently, the Unsound music festival went literally underground—into a centuries-old salt mine. VICE’S ELECTRONIC MUSIC CHANNEL

KABUL The work of Shamsia Hassani, a young feminist graffiti artist, challenges the role of women in Afghan society.

PARIS Aomi Muyock, the Swiss actress whose signature toothless grin recently appeared in Gaspar Noé’s erotic film Love, doesn’t want to be labeled a pornographic actress.

VICE’S ARTS AND CULTURE CHANNEL

BURMA

VICE’S FASHION CHANNEL

The Rohingya have become the most persecuted minority in the world, according to the United Nations, but how? VICE’S NEWS CHANNEL

LIBYA The Tuareg people, a nomadic population living mostly in North Africa, are fighting for survival.

MELBOURNE: THE FUGITIVE BOXER

VICE’S NEWS CHANNEL

Ten years ago, Tanzanian boxer Omari Kimweri fled the 2006 Commonwealth Games and evaded police for nine months—in hope of calling Australia home. Now, he’s training for his last shot at a World Title. A loss means the end of his career. VICE’S SPORT CHANNEL

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BRIEFS / HOW DOES IT WORK?

Crowd Control BY HAISAM HUSSEIN

O LI N

M 1. 3

3 E

M O R

R A B

YC N

On this day, the largest protest event in history took place in 600 cities across the globe. People filled the streets in a coordinated effort to express their opposition to the imminent war in Iraq.

FEBRUARY 15, 2003

Police converge on protestors and confine them to a certain area, sometimes for hours, allowing exit only for medical emergencies. This tactic is most often used in the UK, and it has been unsuccessfully challenged in court.

KETTLING

RANGE: Varies

40mm (1.6”)

12 gauge (0.73”)

Constructed or coated with rubber or plastic, these rounds are designed to inflict minimal harm. They’re meant to be fired from a safe distance, at the legs or body, but are often misused, causing serious injury.

Plastic body

LESS-THAN-LETHAL ROUNDS

Foam nose

Rubber shot

RANGE: 100 feet

Battery delivers 20 seconds of electrical shock

When used with 12-gauge shotguns, electrodes on the projectile’s nose deliver an initial shock. On impact, the base detaches but stays tethered to the nose by an electrified wire. More electrodes on the base unfold to deliver a second series of shocks.

Fins unfold for in-ﬂight stability

PROJECTILE TASER (XREP)

Taser unit in shotgun shell

RANGE: 150 yards

Aluminum alloy body. On contact, aerolized irritant is emitted from one or both ends of the canister.

Tear gas has long been banned in warfare, but its use is permissible in protest and riot situations. It causes coughing, choking, excessive tears and mucus, and sometimes vomiting and diarrhea.

122–203mm (4.8–8”)

TEAR GAS

40mm (1.6”)

In the late 19th century, police in Singapore pioneered the use of non-lethal ammunition by firing broken broomsticks at rioters. Since that time, security forces have developed a variety of tools and techniques designed to control crowds, violent or otherwise, while inflicting minimal harm. At least that’s the idea. As the number of protests for human rights and economic justice has increased in recent years, and police forces have become more militarized, officers have been criticized for misusing crowd-control weapons that have, in some cases, led to serious injuries and death.

GLOBAL TURNOUT 14 MILLION

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LONG-RANGE ACOUSTIC DEVICE

ACTIVE DENIAL SYSTEM

SKUNK SPRAY

This device emits shrill, high-pitched tones at levels of up to 152 decibels (32–37 decibels over the pain threshold). Anyone within 300 meters can experience severe headaches, and those within 100 meters can suffer extreme pain. Permanent hearing loss can occur at close range. It was first used in Pittsburgh in 2009.

Also known as the “Pain Ray,” this truck-mounted device uses millimeter wave technology to excite the water and fat molecules in the body, delivering instant heat. Though relatively safe (the waves only penetrate 1⁄64 of an inch), it has never been used outside of testing and demos, due in part to its 16-hour boot-up time.

A foul-smelling liquid, described as “worse than raw sewage,” is sprayed from a standard water cannon. The stench can last for days and may cause nausea and vomiting. It was first used by the Israeli military in 2008 and has reportedly been purchased by some US police departments.

RANGE: 1 mile

RANGE: 115 feet

RANGE: ½ mile

THE MAIN TARGETS OF WORLD PROTESTS (2006–2013)

LOUDER STILL The Arab Spring and the Occupy protests of 2011 helped contribute to the steady rise in the number of protest actions around the world over the past years.

100

NUMBER OF PROTESTS

PROTEST DEMANDS

GOVERNMENT

672

POLITICAL/ ECONOMIC SYSTEM

366

CORPORATIONS/ EMPLOYERS

241

INTERNATIONAL MONETARY FUND

168

ELITES

141

GREATER REPRESENTATION RIGHTS 60

NUMBER OF PROTESTS

ECONOMIC JUSTICE

20 SOURCES: Initiative for Policy Dialogue and Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung

2006

2007

2008

2009

2010

2011

2012

2013

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BRIEFS / Q&A

Rights Under the Radar The Australian Non-Profit Providing Vulnerable Women Abortion Pills by Mail Is Run by This Man BY ISABELLE HELLYER, PHOTO BY HEATHER LIGHTON

he CEO of Australia’s only federal abortion provider, Marie Stopes, is a guy from Johannesburg. Alexis Apostolellis knows this is surprising to some, but it doesn’t stop him from doing his job. In country as large as Australia, where abortion laws vary from state to state, it’s a big task. Marie Stopes is governed by pragmatism. It stays out of politics and does its best to keep quiet. This way, it avoids having a target on its back—like the one Planned Parenthood has right now in the US. The approach works, but it means you don’t hear much about the work they’re doing for the reproductive rights of women in Australia. Which is a lot. Over the past decade, Marie Stopes has changed the way Australian women can access abortion. Because of them, the medical abortion pill mifepristone can be delivered straight to a woman’s mailbox. Now, those in remote areas can safely terminate their pregnancies without travelling to their nearest clinic—which can be hundreds of kilometres away. It’s a hard-won reality, but plenty of women and doctors still don’t know about it. VICE met with Alexis to talk about reproductive health’s quietest revolution.

VICE: Alexis, would you say your job is tough? Alexis Apostolellis: It’s a great responsibility. Our mission has always been to give all women access to abortion. To do so, we run certain regional clinics at a loss—like our Rockhampton and Newcastle clinics. Women in rural Queensland wouldn’t have access to abortions unless we operated there. Then there are the women who can’t even access those sites—I know that for them, you’ve introduced another option: sending the medical abortion pill out by post. We do, but it’s taken us a long time to get here. The drug used in these medical terminations is mifepristone, or RU486. Marie Stopes brought that pill to Australia in 2012. It was actually legalised here in 2006, but none of the pharmaceutical companies would touch it: it was a political hot potato. Finally, our colleague Maria Deveson Crabbe said “Well, we’ll have to

do it ourselves. We’ll become a pharmaceutical company.” And we did. You created a non-profit pharmaceutical company just so women could get this drug? Yes, and over 500 doctors signed up almost immediately. Every doctor that wants to prescribe mifepristone has to go online and do a course with us. In 2012, all these doctors registered, but guess what: they weren’t prescribing. We’d encountered another barrier. Medical indemnity providers had categorised medical abortions with mifepristone as surgical procedures: forcing doctors to increase their insurance premium between eight and ten thousand dollars. GPs just couldn’t take the hit. We lobbied for almost 15 months to change that

“The abortion debate was had, it’s gone—it’s legal. It’s horrifying that people still want to bring abortion up for debate.” classification, because it really is just tablet, not a surgery. In January of 2015, two major insurers dropped the premium: that was big. Was that when mifepristone started getting out? When the insurance problem disappeared we really thought we were there. We weren’t. In regional areas, towns with just one GP, there was a still a barrier. Often, that GP wants to help women, but just doesn’t feel qualified to provide an abortion because it involves specialised counselling. That’s when we created the telehealth model, to say “Doctors, we can help you.” And telehealth refers to pills by post? Yes, but it’s a more rigorous process than that phrase implies. We work alongside a local GP—they’ll do the ultrasound to make sure the

woman is within the gestational limits for a medical termination—then we take it from there. All counseling is done with us over Skype, which enables a woman almost anywhere in Australia to have an abortion without having to drive 600 kilometres. We launched in November. From the legalisation of mifepristone to the telehealth launch, that was almost a decade. We know. It’s a long time, but it’s really paying off. We’ve had around 50-odd telehealth appointments so far—that’s 10 women each month who otherwise probably wouldn’t have had access to an abortion. Are there women in Australia who Marie Stopes still can’t reach? Yes. The Northern Territory is still the absolute worst: you need two practitioners to sign off on the procedure, and it has to be done in a hospital—our telehealth consults are illegal there. It’s awful. We’re also restricted by good clinical practice: when women take mifepristone at home, they must be able to reach an emergency department within a reasonable time. In the most remote areas of Australia, that’s not always possible. There are rural towns with one GP, where that GP has an anti-choice stance—that’s more common than we’d like. There’s women who have limited English and women in abusive situations. Really, there are vulnerable women everywhere in our community: every story is different. It can get under your skin. Speaking to the women working with you, many are driven by their own experiences with termination. Without that personal story, what is it pushing you to fight for women’s health? Anything which is stigmatised that shouldn’t be, that’s what I’ll fight against. Honestly, I just don’t understand how this is an issue. The abortion debate was had, it’s gone—it’s legal. It’s horrifying that people still want to bring abortion up for debate. In a sense, it’s actually good to have a male CEO at Marie Stopes—it shows you don’t need to be a woman to support women’s rights. If I can somehow correct an inequality that shouldn’t exist, I will.

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BRIEFS / TRAVEL

Day of the Drunk Riding into Town for a Traditional Rager BY RIVER DONAGHEY, PHOTOS BY LIZ COWIE

Locals gather along the dirt track to watch a horse race during the annual Skach Koyl festival. As the event customarily involves a lot of alcohol, the ride tests perseverance more than speed. Riders simply try not to fall off their horses.

very year in Todos Santos Cuchumatán, Guatemala, the Mayan townspeople throw the local equivalent of a harvest festival. Except it’s not the average harvest festival: Harvest festivals don’t usually involve drunken horse races where villagers cry, bleed, puke, and pass out wasted on the streets. They don’t normally end in dislocated shoulders, or broken collarbones, or people trampled to death on the racetrack. That’s how they do it in Todos Santos, though. The local women say a racer’s death is good for the next year’s harvest. Last October, I flew from New York to Guatemala, set on making it to Todos Santos in time to drink and race with the locals. I prepared for my trip by taking exactly one horseback riding lesson in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. The festival, locally known as Skach Koyl, memorialises a hero from a dark part of the town’s history. In the early 1500s, the Spanish conquistadors swept through Guatemala, slaughtering or enslaving the

Mayans in their path. The conquistadors had swords and chain mail; the Mayans didn’t even have wheels for their carts. They died fast, by the conquistadors’ hand or by diseases brought from Spain. When the conquistadors finally made it to Todos Santos around 1525, they planned to do what they had done to every other Mayan town. But this time, according to local legend, a brave villager stood up against the colonialists. He stole one of their prized horses and raced it around the mud streets until he was caught and killed. On November 1, every year since he died, the villagers honor this unnamed horse thief’s memory. They drink and race and sometimes die—but they die with their freedom, as he did. Todos Santos, 8,000 feet up in the mountains, is just 100 miles from Guatemala City, but the trip can take an entire day depending on the mode of transportation. You can rent a car and drive yourself, but good luck following road signs—there aren’t any. You can waste hours trying

to find your way through the streets of Huehuetenango, the town at the base of the Cuchumatanes Mountains. The directions to get through Huehue read like a cheat code you’re supposed to mash into a Game Boy Advance: left, two rights, another left, right again, and so on. On October 31, near the outskirts of Guatemala City, I paid a few dozen quetzals—less than five dollars—to squeeze myself onto a northbound bus of smiling locals holding chickens on their laps. These chicken buses, as the locals refer to them, are retired school buses brought over from the US. Wild DayGlo and pastel stripes cover the faded yellow paint jobs. They look like something the Merry Pranksters might have driven if Ken Kesey had never come back from Mexico in the mid-60s. A kid I met in Guatemala City told me to look for buses with the most chrome detailing on their rims. If the owner could afford all that shine, the boy said, he could probably afford working brake pads too.

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The bus only took me as far as Huehue, since the last 16 miles of serpentine roads into Todos Santos are too remote and too dangerous for many bus drivers. I flagged down a pickup truck, kicked the driver a couple of quetzals, and spent the last few hours with my tailbone bouncing against the rusted-out truck bed, trying not to look over the road’s 400-foot cliff-side drop. I was let off near the center of town, which consists of squat, painted stone buildings with flat façades and a modest square. The villagers were dressed in the same basic outfits—the men in blue and white shirts with embroidered collars and redstriped pants, the women in conservative, dark blue dresses. Little boys peeked out from second-story balconies dressed like miniature versions of the men, whispering “buenas” as I passed. It felt as though I’d been transported back in time, to Todos Santos’ distant past, save for the men in machine-made boots carrying plastic cups of Quezalteca, a Guatemalan cane liquor that tastes like watered-down moonshine.

Around 3,000 people live in Todos Santos year-round, herding livestock or manning storefronts or farming potatoes and coffee and corn in the hills, but its population swells during Skach Koyl. While some visitors came from other countries and other parts of Guatemala, the majority were men who grew up in Todos Santos, and now, in their 20s and 30s, support their families by working in the US. They’re also the ones who race, since most of the town’s permanent residents are too poor to afford horses. These expats keep the town’s tradition alive, footing the bill for food, liquor, and horse rentals, even though they spend most of the year working for American contractors around Grand Rapids, Michigan, or Stockton, California. Twenty-eight-year-old Gildardo Ranferi Ramirez Mendoza has raced since he was 14. He returns from Stockton every year for the festival, and he corrected me when I asked him about moving away from Guatemala.

“I didn’t move,” he said. “I went to California to make some money, but my culture is in Todos Santos.” That night, the dirt plaza next to Mendoza’s family’s house filled with people drinking and dancing to a live marimba band. The other racers pulled me into their dance, a loping forwardand-backward step meant to mimic the trot of a horse. They passed me endless shots of Quezalteca. Proud to share their culture with me, they said I was brave to race with them, and though they “hoped there were no accidents or deaths,” they reminded me that deaths are good for the crops. People kept telling me that. The next morning, after drinking through the night, we threw back our final shots and prepared to race. The locals dressed me in the traditional clothing of Todos Santos and topped my outfit off with a feathered hat, tied under my chin with a ribbon so I wouldn’t lose it while I rode. A few old women spat mouthfuls of the cane liquor over us, mumbling blessings, praying

LEFT: The author, right, decked out in the festival’s traditional riding outfit, prepares to race with the locals. RIGHT: Todos Santos is in the Cuchumatanes Mountains, the tallest non-volcanic mountain range in Central America.

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BRIEFS / TRAVEL

Traditions of Todos Santos’ Freedom Ride MAYAN BEAUTY QUEEN Nine of the town’s young women compete in a beauty contest during Skach Koyl, dancing and giving speeches until one is crowned queen. MARIMBA The marimba is a fivefoot-long, xylophone-like wooden instrument played by three guys simultaneously. They play variations of a single song for the entire festival. RADIO STATION The radio station in Todos Santos is dedicated to keeping its Mayan heritage alive, primarily broadcasting in Mam, the native language. EMBROIDERED SHIRT COLLARS The broad, colourful collars on the men’s shirts take up to a month to weave by hand.

that if someone had to die, it wouldn’t be someone from their bloodline. I sat on my horse, thinking about the daylong ride on a rickety bus to the nearest hospital, and hoped it wouldn’t be me either. The race had already begun by the time I made it to the starting line. The adrenaline had sobered me up a bit, but locals continued to pass shots up to me on my horse. I watched the racers run in packs of five to eight, up and down a halfmile stretch of dirt road, as the spectators cheered from behind wooden fences. It wasn’t so much of a race, really—it was an endurance test. No one kept tabs on which horse made it to one end of the track first. The winner was the guy who fell off last. Someone on the ground whipped my horse into a gallop, and I was off. I reached the other end of the track in seconds. “Fucking fast,” one of the other riders yelled to me, waving. I blinked and nodded because I couldn’t make my hands release their grip on the pommel and wave back. Then my horse was running again. The waving rider and I stayed head-tohead until the middle of the track, when he fell back. I was winning, I thought, until I realised the other racers had slowed their horses to a stop. Mine ran full speed into the next waiting batch of riders and didn’t stop until he hit the fence separating the crowd from the track. I flew over his head, into the crowd, and landed hard on the packed dirt. I skinned my knuckles almost to the bone. An old woman pushed her way through the onlookers, grabbed my hand, and upended a bottle of Quezalteca over the cuts. She pointed me back to my horse. “Fucking fast,” the rider said again, staring down from his mount. I climbed up for another lap.

By evening, the races were done. No one had died, though a few fell worse than I did. To celebrate the end of another year’s race, some of the men cut the heads off live chickens and rode back to their houses, spilling blood as they went. The marimba band started up again, and we drank until I forgot about my bloody hand. Sunrise the next day, November 2, welcomed Todos Santos’ Day of the Dead: one final marathon of drinking and dancing. We loaded the marimba into a truck and drove it to the cemetery, to celebrate among the villagers’ deceased relatives. The Day of the Dead honors the villagers’ lost loved ones—and not just those who took a nasty spill from their saddles or those who died when the conquistadors came. Almost two-thirds of the villagers were killed in the 1980s, when the president of Guatemala launched a quiet genocide against the Mayans. His militias destroyed 440 Mayan villages and murdered up to 75,000 mainly indigenous people. When the army came to Todos Santos in 1982, it left 2,000 townspeople dead. The villagers of Todos Santos carry the pain of a people systematically slaughtered. Even the clothes they wear each day immortalise the dead. The red on their pants symbolises the spilled blood of their ancestors; the white and blue on their shirts stand for the spirits in the sky. The memories of their lost loved ones are especially present during Skach Koyl. Some years, when a rider dies during the race, the grief is fresh. But after centuries of murder at the hands of conquerors, dying drunk and free on a horse might not be the worst way to go. At least it means good crops for next year. Watch the drunken horse race this month on VICE.com.

Sashes and feathers are sewn onto riders’ outfits. They don’t change clothes until the festival ends days later.

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ON THE RUN Ugandaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s infamous anti-gay law forced hundreds of LGBT people to flee to Kenya, a country nearly as inhospitable as their home. What can the UN do to protect them?

BY JACOB KUSHNER PHOTOS BY JAKE NAUGHTON

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A gay man who fled Ugandaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s anti-gay law in February 2015 awaits his initial interview with the UNHCR to determine whether or not he qualifies as a refugee.

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etifa was 16 when her best friend Sharon kissed her in the dormitory of the private girls’ school they attended in Kampala, Uganda. The two had grown up together in the city’s Mutundwe district, but Ketifa had never felt romantically attracted to her, or any other woman, before. The only child of a conservative Muslim sheikh, Ketifa had long been taught that same-sex relations violated the laws of Islam. The kiss overwhelmed her, and her gut told her it was bad. She refused to talk to Sharon for the next week.* In that time, she couldn’t get the kiss out of her head. “I was taken by surprise,” she said. “But I realised I enjoyed what she did.” Eventually, she went back to Sharon and told her she wanted to kiss her again. It never occurred to Ketifa that two women could have a relationship, but she wanted to do what felt good. Because Sharon was a prefect, she had her own private room. While the other girls spent their Sundays watching movies in the shared dorm, Ketifa and Sharon would stay in bed together. They knew the risk. Homosexuality had been against the law in Uganda since the days of British colonial rule, and it carried a potential 14-year prison sentence. Ketifa’s father taught her that Islam prescribed 100 lashes for a first offense and a beheading for the second. “In Uganda, you grow up knowing being a homosexual is bad. It’s like how you learn being a thief is bad,” Ketifa said. “If you are a homosexual, you are a curse to the world, to the nation.” For many months, Ketifa and Sharon’s relationship deepened, and they talked about finding a place to live together after they graduated. In class, they passed love notes pressed into the pages of textbooks. One day, Ketifa left a note Sharon had written her inside a book, and a classmate discovered it that afternoon. “She came and confronted me,” Ketifa said. “I told her it was just a joke, but she started talking about it and people started making their own conclusions.” Rumors had already been swirling that Ketifa and Sharon were spending time alone in Sharon’s room, in violation of school rules. So when news of the note reached the dorm’s matron, the school’s administration didn’t hesitate in making a decision: Both were immediately expelled. Ketifa went back to live with her uncle, her sole guardian since the death of her parents a few years earlier. Sharon returned to her childhood home nearby. The pair didn’t see each other for days. “Her parents were very strict,” Ketifa said. “They locked her in the house.” A few days after returning to Mutundwe, Ketifa heard the drumming of the local community council’s messengers:

* Names have been changed throughout this article to protect the identities of subjects who face threats of homophobic violence.

They were holding a meeting at Sharon’s parent’s homestead. Curious, Ketifa disguised herself as a man in a T-shirt and a baseball cap and went to see what it was all about. The council leader announced the reason for the gathering: Sharon stood accused of having homosexual relations. They did not announce the accuser, but the reason for her expulsion had reached town. The council leader never mentioned Ketifa by name, but some of the people in attendance began eyeing her. She suspected that some of them could recognise her; it was well known that she and Sharon were best friends. Sensing danger, she decided to return to her uncle’s house before the meeting concluded. Hours later, Ketifa’s uncle reported how the meeting had ended: Sharon was beaten to death. Ketifa was shocked. The council generally punished people with forced labor or, at worst, a caning. She ran over to the family’s yard, but it was too late. She could just make out the shape of Sharon’s body lying uncovered in the darkness. Ketifa’s first thought was to flee for her own safety, but since her parents were dead, she didn’t have anywhere to go. What’s more, her uncle was a wealthy man—a respected member of the community, someone not to be challenged. So long as he didn’t out her to the community council, Ketifa figured she’d be safe. She tried to keep a low profile while mourning Sharon, and in time, she began studying at a new high school, graduating four years later. In 2013, she enrolled in one of Kampala’s most prestigious universities to study law. Her uncle paid her tuition, and she moved into a private dormitory near the school. Soon, Ketifa began dating a classmate of hers, a girl. It was her first relationship since Sharon. On Valentine’s Day 2014, Ketifa’s roommate walked in and discovered the two having sex. The roommate screamed, and with her voice sounding throughout the halls, the entire dormitory came to witness the excitement. The dorm’s caretaker paraded Ketifa and her girlfriend away as their classmates jeered. This time, Ketifa had more reason to worry. Homophobia was at an all-time high in Uganda. Two months earlier, the country’s parliament had passed its notorious Anti-Homosexuality Act, dubbed the “Kill the Gays” bill in the Western media for an early provision that prescribed the death penalty for some people who engaged in gay sex. A slightly modified version of the law eventually passed. It called for seven years in prison for those found guilty of attempting to participate in a same-sex act; actually completing the deed came with a 14-year prison sentence. The law also created the crime of “aggravated homosexuality” for same-sex relations between serial offenders, sexually active HIV-positive people, and others. It carried a potential life prison sentence. The debate over the law, which had been before Uganda’s parliament for nearly five years, brought out some of the most extreme homophobia the region had ever seen. Newspapers published front-page photo spreads of “Uganda’s 200 Top Homos Named.” Attacks ensued, and gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender Ugandans increasingly went into hiding.

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Like many other LGBT Ugandans, Ketifa found herself uprooted during these months. That Valentine’s Day, with nowhere else to go, she reluctantly returned to her uncle’s house in the neighbourhood where her first love had been murdered. It was the worst decision of her life. By the time she arrived, the owner of the dorm had already called her uncle to tell him she’d been caught having sex with another woman. “When I walked in, he grabbed me by the hand, took me to the room, and tied me to the bed,” Ketifa said. “He brought some of his friends into the room and told me, ‘Let me see what men can do that women can’t do.’ He said to them, ‘Show her what you can do.’ He locked the men in with me, and they took turns raping me.” Each did “two rounds,” she said. The rape lasted an hour. Ketifa’s uncle kept her tied up until the morning. After he finally released her, he ordered her to do housework. She was

cleaning when she saw them coming: the same members of the community council who had murdered Sharon. Ketifa ran out the back gate and fled by bus straight for Uganda’s border with Kenya, believing nowhere in the country would be safe. At the border crossing at Malaba, she learned that to get to Nairobi, Kenya’s large capital city, would be expensive, and to live there even more so. Ketifa recalled how, as a child, a Kenyan classmate of hers had mentioned that Kenya accepts people who are chased out of other countries, letting them live in large camps. Along the side of the road, she spotted a food vendor; she lied and told him that she was on her way to visit a friend in one of these camps. Could he direct her? He asked if she was referring to Kakuma—a large refugee camp in northern Kenya that opened in 1992 to house refugees fleeing Sudan’s civil war, and that has since become home to

Below is a street scene from the Eastleigh neighbourhood of Nairobi. A number of LGBT Ugandans made the dangerous trip to Kenya’s capital after the passage of the AntiHomosexuality Act.

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nearly 200,000 refugees fleeing all manner of strife. The man described how she could get to Kitale, a town in the northern Rift Valley. From there, she could take a bus through Lodwar and on to Kakuma. Ketifa had no money, so the vendor offered her a job: To earn enough for a bus ticket, she could wash dishes for a few hours. Three days later, Ketifa arrived at Kakuma, a refugee of Uganda’s violent homophobia.

ith the anti-gay fervor growing in Uganda, Ketifa wasn’t the only one to leave the country. A few weeks later, on March 11, a group of 23 LGBT Ugandans appeared on the front lawn of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ (UNHCR) office in Nairobi. They wished to register themselves as lesbian, gay, and transgender refugees. Most were in their late teens or 20s, and most were men. They came from all over Uganda—some were working

had been successfully resettled each year. It was a rate far lower than the rate of new arrivals. When the 23 Ugandans showed up outside her office that day, she brought them to a conference room to hear their stories. As they shared the terror they had experienced, De Langhe became worried about how safe the group would be in Kenya. They had come to a country that remains deeply homophobic and still punishes same-sex activity with up to 14 years in prison. The homophobia extended to the refugee camps as well. While most of the other refugees in the country had successfully escaped the conditions that had upended their lives, these gay refugees were entering an environment that posed many of the same threats of violence. “I thought, This is a special group,” said De Langhe. “They were very young and very desperate. The majority of them were actually targeted by their own family, which I think makes it extra hard.”

In March 2014, a group of 23 LGBT Ugandans showed up outside a UN office in Nairobi, Kenya, seeking refugee status. They had come to a country that remains deeply homophobic and still punishes same-sex activity with up to 14 years in prison. class, others were university educated. A Ugandan priest and LGBT ally in Kampala had directed them to the office. The priest had been a secret adviser to the gay community since 1999. After local newspapers reported that two men had married each other in Kampala, he published an op-ed condemning the wave of homophobia erupting in Uganda. At the end of his article, he listed his phone number. LGBT people started calling, and his home soon became a haven for Ugandan gays. “It was a safe place where people could speak about their orientation in a way they never could before,” he said. “My approach was to help people to accept who they were and to be aware of homophobia in society and ensure that they didn’t get themselves lynched.” In the wake of the passage of the Anti-Homosexuality Act, the priest led some LGBT people hiding from their families and the police to shelter. But when the funding for the hideout dried up, many, fearing for their safety, said they wanted to leave the country. The priest told them that he didn’t think Kenya would be any better, but they felt that they had no other choice. When they arrived in Nairobi, he counseled them to go to the UN to seek help. On the second floor of the UNHCR building, a blond Belgian woman named Inge De Langhe sat in her small office. As the senior resettlement officer, De Langhe had arrived in Kenya in 2012 to help find new homes for the luckiest among the country’s 550,000 refugees. Since she took the job, only a few thousand

In Kenya and across the globe, the UN routinely gives priority to asylum seekers who are extremely vulnerable and have immediate protection needs, such as unaccompanied minors and people with life-threatening diseases. Given this precedent, there are many reasons to hastily register people who might face grave danger while awaiting asylum. With some guidance from the UN’s Division for International Protection in Geneva, De Langhe and her colleagues decided that this group needed special protection. They moved to expedite their asylum claims—to get them through Kenya as fast as possible. But fast-tracking some refugees comes at the expense of others. There are 24,000 people in Kakuma and 8,000 in Nairobi on the waiting list for an appointment to determine whether or not they even qualify for refugee status—a six-month backlog. And sitting around for your turn is just the first step in a process that normally takes several years. Most refugees wait months or even years for consultations, but De Lange and her staff began interviewing the 23 LGBT refugees within weeks. They also contracted a partner NGO called HIAS to provide safe houses to live in and small stipends to live on. “To be perfectly honest, we’ve never had a group that received such support and attention,” said De Langhe. If it is a difficult time to be a refugee seeking resettlement out of Kenya, it is a difficult time to be doing so anywhere. Last year, there were more than 60 million refugees across the world—more than at any time since the end of World

A lesbian refugee from Uganda poses in one of the LGBT compounds at Kakuma Refugee Camp.

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War II. And even though requests for asylum are at an alltime high, the number of refugees who successfully resettle is in decline: Only 73,000 were resettled in 2014, down from 98,400 the previous year. Despite the unique threats against LGBT refugees from Uganda, did they deserve a disproportionate number of these slots? And how could they be protected while they waited?

fter the decision to expedite the refugees’ claims, the UNHCR, in partnership with HIAS, placed some of them in apartments in a poor neighbourhood of Nairobi, where they lived in small rooms and sometimes shared beds. The ability of refugees to remain in Nairobi depended on the traditionally lax enforcement of Kenyan law, which requires all refugees to live in either Kakuma or Dadaab, another large refugee camp in the north. But the Ugandans arrived at a time when refugees in Kenya were in the crosshairs of the country’s security forces. After al Shabaab terrorists sieged Nairobi’s Westgate Mall and killed more than 60 people in September 2013, the Kenyan government needed to at least appear to be taking steps to root out the group. Refugees became the easiest targets for the country’s war on terror. In April 2014, the police swept hundreds off the streets in the Somali quarter of Nairobi, temporarily detaining them in the Moi International Sports Center, a soccer stadium built in the late 80s for the All-Africa Games. Soon, the refugees were relocated to the camps. In late March 2014, police raided the apartment holding the LGBT refugees and jailed them. The UNHCR negotiated their release before they could be shipped out of the city, and with no other choice, placed them briefly in an upscale hotel. It wasn’t long, though, before the police discovered them. The officers threatened to deport the whole group back to Uganda. Once again left with limited options, the UNHCR persuaded the cops to bus the refugees immediately to Kakuma, the refugee camp in northern Kenya Ketifa had fled to. Kakuma sits in Kenya’s Turkana region, not far from the border with South Sudan. It is a flat, sprawling city of 184,000 people from Sudan, Somalia, and neighbouring countries. The UN provides monthly food rations, access to public water taps, and rudimentary medical care. Kakuma is large. Hundreds of miles of semi-arid desert surround the camp. Twelve square miles of people live cramped together in single-story huts. It’s an inhospitable place—next to nothing grows in the dry, hard ground, and temperatures regularly reach well into the 100s. Situated only a few hundred miles from the Equator, and with most of the area’s trees long ago chopped down for firewood or to make charcoal, there’s little escape from the sun. Most of Kakuma’s inhabitants spend their days with nothing to do. Aside from reselling food rations or charcoal for cooking, not much work exists. A couple lucky ones find jobs with the UN, its partner agencies, or NGOs active in the camp. When Ketifa arrived at the camp in February, UNHCR officials asked her reason for fleeing, and she told them the story of Sharon’s beating. A UNHCR official introduced her to a few other LGBT refugees from Uganda who had arrived directly to the camp in the previous months. When the 23 Ugandans who had been living in hiding in Nairobi arrived, they joined the small group. “I was so happy to find people coming from the same country—some even the same village—and all the same orientation,” Ketifa said. They had been given their own sleeping quarters in the camp’s warehouse-like reception center, though all that separated them

from the other refugees were some curtains and sheets hanging from the ceiling. Speaking with the others, Ketifa realised she might get out of the camp before long. “When I went to the UNHCR officials, they told me the maximum stay would be a year, and then I’d be given my status and get resettled,” Ketifa said. The LGBT refugees became a close group and consequently a target for harassment. They would mostly keep to themselves, but brawls would often break out when they crossed paths with straight refugees during mealtimes. “I figured, OK, for one year I have to live in this place where people discriminate against you, but then I’ll leave.” One day, Ketifa saw job postings looking for teachers at a secondary school for children in the camp. She had never worked as a teacher, but having gone to secondary school and one of Uganda’s top universities, she was more qualified than most. “I knew that I needed a way to survive in the camp, but on the other side, I was scared that people would at one point find out I was an LGBT,” she said. “How would they react? How would I defend my position?” Despite her fears, Ketifa applied for the job and was accepted. She hadn’t planned to build a life in Kakuma, but she was slowly making one.

hen I visited Kakuma last October, De Langhe, who was transferred from the camp to Nairobi in May, greeted me in an open-air room filled with old wooden benches. Every asylum seeker arriving at Kakuma in the past two decades had passed through that room. De Langhe led me to a small office. Covering the walls, shelves held fat, three-ring binders. Inside, they contained the names from a 2011 census conducted to determine who, among the tens of thousands of people qualifying for food rations, actually still lived in the camp. “Most of the population of Kakuma will be here for life,’” De Langhe said. Even the 1 percent who win a ticket to a new life will usually have to wait several years before they are authorised to leave. There’s been an uninterrupted backlog of asylum seekers since the day the camp opened. Preceding the backlog for resettlement is another backlog entirely: registering the camp’s mass of immigrants as refugees. De Langhe has been tasked with triaging between the two lagging processes. “I wish we could submit more for resettlement, but I’m more disturbed by the fact that people are waiting for years to get the basic determination on their refugee status so they can move on with their lives,” she said. From Monday through Friday, De Langhe works to keep the process moving as best she can. She volunteers her Saturdays to listen to different elders and ethnic group leaders. They complain about the harsh environment, about attacks from other refugees. They say the Kenyan police seem to do nothing about it. There are more than 20 nationalities and numerous ethnic factions living side by side in the camp. Every Saturday, De Langhe visits representatives from two of them. Usually they sit outside in meetings that last several hours. “They always start very aggressively,” she said, but understandably so. The camp is a horrible place to spend a life. De Langhe considers their concerns intently, and she quickly takes steps to remedy them as much as possible. Despite the fact that De Langhe is the face of the agency that stands between them and a new life, most refugees have nothing but unconditional praise for her. De Langhe, one refugee told me, “is the one woman I most respect in this world.”

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ABOVE: A gay refugee from Uganda poses for a portrait in the apartment he shared with his boyfriend in Nairobi. Six months earlier, seven men wielding machetes had broken into their home and nearly killed him. LEFT: Records of people in the Kakuma refugee camp line the walls of UNHCRâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s processing office. There are 182,000 refugees in the camp, and most will never be resettled.

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s De Langhe and her team worked through the asylum claims of Uganda’s LGBT refugees, she expected that their arrival was just a brief anomaly in her refugeeheavy corner of the world. But soon, more LGBT refugees arrived—one or two each month at first, then at least a dozen at a time, fleeing not only Uganda’s anti-gay legislation but also homophobia in Burundi, Ethiopia, and elsewhere in East Africa. By last spring, more than 200 LGBT refugees had ended up at the UN’s doorstep, all demanding swift asylum. Speaking to a researcher with the Global Philanthropy Project, one new arrival said, “I expect to be in Kenya for three months and be resettled to the West.” Suddenly, De Langhe found her staff overwhelmed by LGBT refugees, and she worried that her own decision to prioritise these LGBT refugees over others was partly to blame. By giving LGBT refugees expedited processing and small cash stipends, the UNHCR and its partners may have created a pull factor that enticed even more people to flee to Kenya. Some people also sought the advice of Western allies as to how to seek refugee status in Kenya. One was Isaac, a 25-year-old

such people escape to neighbouring countries, to Europe, to the Middle East, and even to North America. Other refugees were encouraged by the social media postings of their friends who had been successfully resettled in the Global North. Even those who hadn’t been relocated encouraged those still behind in Uganda to come to Kenya. According to a July 2015 report from the Global Philanthropy Project, “many respondents described how LGBT Ugandans in Nairobi encouraged their friends and partners to join them, sharing information about the asylum process and stories of a freer life.” In contrast to refugees from South Sudan or Somalia, most of whom are extremely poor, the Ugandan refugees came from a variety of financial circumstances. Many came from Kampala. Some worked jobs at restaurants, while others held university degrees. There were students, and some of the youngest ones hadn’t even completed high school. As more and more started to make the journey to Kakuma, the American Jewish World Service and a small Kenyan NGO set up a transit house in northern Kenya, located about halfway between the country’s border with Uganda and the camp.

There are 24,000 people in Kakuma and 8,000 in Nairobi on the waiting list for an appointment to determine whether or not they even qualify for refugee status—a six-month backlog. And sitting around for your turn is just the first step in a process that normally takes several years. gay man living in Kampala. In April 2015, a local paper outed Isaac for “sodomising” another man—his boyfriend, Patrick. Afterward, unsure of what to do, he sought advice online. He came across some articles on a human rights blog written by Melanie Nathan, a South African lawyer and activist who moved to the United States in 1985 to open a clinic that advocated for the rights of LGBT immigrants. Nathan had been following the Ugandan Anti-Homosexuality Act and the wave of homophobia that ensued, and by 2014, she was in touch with numerous LGBT Ugandans. She began blogging about their plight. Sometimes Nathan would advise Ugandans who had decided to flee for their own safety. When Isaac emailed Nathan, she responded immediately. Later that month, he and Patrick left for Kakuma. Nathan wasn’t acting alone. Many LGBT rights advocates based in the United States were actively encouraging Ugandans to flee, sometimes even sending money to help them make the journey. The Friends New Underground Railroad, a Quaker group that sprang up in Washington state to help ferry vulnerable LGBT Ugandans to safety, says it helped more than 1,300

The goal of the transit center was to intercept LGBT refugees coming from Uganda and give them shelter for five days while they considered what to do next. On one of these days, the prospective refugee would be bused to Kakuma, given a tour, and then brought back to the transit house. There, he or she would spend another day or two contemplating the challenging conditions and homophobia he or she witnessed. Many opted for an illegal life in Nairobi instead. A few turned around and went straight back to Uganda.

omophobia is an ingrained part of life in the camp. Not long after Ketifa began teaching at the school, rumors spread about her homosexuality. Although she wasn’t out, she could be seen living with people who appeared stereotypically gay, and she didn’t have a husband or boyfriend. “We hear students say ‘shoga! shoga!,’” which means gay, she said. “Some of them come to your face and say, ‘Mwalimu (teacher), you’re not going to teach me! Because my parents told me a shoga cannot teach me because shoga is bad.’”

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In November 2014, parents, most of whom Ketifa said were Somalis, called a meeting to complain to the school’s principal. Soon after, the principal called a meeting with Ketifa and two other gay Ugandans. “He said either we have to change from who we are, or we will lose our jobs,” she told me. Three weeks later, the teachers received letters from the school: They had been let go. “People have very strong religious convictions,” said Muthee Kiunga, the UNHCR’s associate protection officer under De Langhe at Kakuma. “The Somalis, even the Christians, they strongly believe this is something wrong. So it was very difficult for these people, these 20 people. It became very difficult for them to integrate in the camp.” The discrimination sometimes erupted into violence, threatening the lives and homes of the gay refugees. Somali and Sudanese men attacked the LGBT refugees, sometimes even throwing rocks and injuring them. To avoid conflict, LGBT refugees would wait until all the other refugees had eaten to go get their own meals. Fearful that they’d face even worse violence if they were released into the general camp population, the entire group refused to leave the reception center that was meant to hold them only briefly.

Kiunga recognised that he couldn’t change the attitude of 180,000 refugees overnight, and there was no way to guarantee the protection of the LGBT group in the camp. “We had a very difficult time trying to figure out where we could put them,” Kiunga said. “Will they be attacked? How do you prevent a Somali from throwing a stone at them?” So Kiunga and his staff devised a plan: In order to persuade the LGBT refugees to join the camp’s general population, the UNHCR would find them a plot of land where they could live together as a small community, within shouting distance of a police station. Instead of following Kakuma’s custom, giving the refugees construction materials (or money to buy such materials) and telling them to build their own houses, the UN directed a partner organisation to build small huts, with mud walls and tin roofs for the LGBT community. Workers placed thorny shrubs along the perimeter as a makeshift border for protection and privacy. When the huts were completed in July 2014, more than 20 of the early LGBT arrivals, those who had spent two-plus months hiding out in the reception center, reluctantly moved in. Ketifa was among them. As more LGBT refugees arrived, they settled into a second compound built right next to the first.

A gay refugee gestures toward one of the huts that are standard issue in the Kakuma camp. A hole in the wall, one of many in this particular building, is partially covered by a UNHCR tarp.

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THIS SPREAD: Fearing for the safety of the LGBT refugees in Kakumaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s general population, the UNHCR built them a compound near a police station where they could all live together.

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The collection of huts is by no means luxurious. Inside there are mattresses on the ground and opened suitcases spilling with clothes. Mosquito nets along with shorts, dresses, and underwear dangle from the ceilings. Outside a few small chickens wander around. On windy days, a tarp hung between two houses to create some shade blows about softly. The compound also came with its own water tap, so Ketifa and the others wouldn’t have to suffer harassment when they went to get water. But the tap has become a major privilege, as LGBT refugees aren’t the only people who get turned away at the public ones. In Kakuma, discrimination is a universal phenomenon. “It’s within tribes, within the Sudanese community too. Nuers don’t want to give to Dinka to drink. Children are being beaten because they are Hutu or they are Tutsi,” said Kiunga. “Water is a very precious resource. It is not only LGBT.” As other camp residents noticed the special privileges given to the LGBT refugees, some became envious. “The LGBT group, as small as it is, receives so much attention from everyone that sometimes we get complaints,” Kiunga said. “‘How can you treat these people so special? How come they stay here for six months and they’re gone? I’ve been here for six years. I have problems. How come these people get to go so quickly?’” An LGBT activist in Kenya’s Turkana region who goes by Brian was an early advocate for LGBT refugees arriving in Kakuma, but he was also an early critic of the UNHCR’s decision to give them special treatment. “We went there and I met Muthee, and we told him, ‘What you are doing is not good,’” Brian said. “You build them nice houses, and you bring a police force close to the house, and you give them a gated compound, and you give them water inside this compound. All these are good things. But what do you expect to happen when these other communities begin asking questions?” It’s no wonder, he said, the LGBT refugees face discrimination by other residents. Even after the compound was built, threats of violence continued. Once a month, on food distribution day, each resident visits the distribution center to collect his or her rations. On at least two occasions, when the LGBT refugees went to collect their food together, they returned to find the shrubs that surround their compounds ablaze. Last September, some of the LGBT refugees formed a soccer team, but the other refugees forbid them from competing in the camp league. When a few LGBT players joined other teams instead, those teams also were suspended. One day in September, posters handwritten in Kenyan Swahili surfaced around the camp: your children are going to be transitioned to gay behavior. if you see somebody with your child, please run to the police for assistance. let’s join hands and erradicate this homosexual behavior. “It was like a warning,” said Kiunga. He and his colleagues studied the handwriting and took turns guessing the author’s nationality. But it could have been anyone. De Langhe brought the letters to the attention of the police, but the signs continued to appear near the LGBT complex for weeks. Despite this, Brian still thinks that the preferential treatment has contributed to the pull factor. “If someone gives you an opportunity for greener pastures,” he said, “you will go.”

t’s not just in Kakuma that LGBT refugees receive certain privileges. While some of them, by choice or from force, settled in the camp, the majority opted to live in Nairobi. Particularly for Ugandans who grew up in metropolitan Kampala, the city was a logical choice over a refugee camp.

A gay, HIVpositive refugee from Uganda poses outside his house near Nairobi. As a refugee, he receives a small stipend each month from the NGO HIAS, but he often can’t afford enough food to take with his antiretrovirals.

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A man overlooks a street in the Nairobi neighbourhood of Eastleigh, where many LGBT refugees have settled temporarily.

Those who went to Nairobi received help that other refugees did not: cash. HIAS, the international refugee resettlement agency, secured funding from the UN to offer LGBT refugees in Nairobi monthly stipends of 6,000 shillings—about $60. It was barely enough to pay the rent, much less purchase food or cover the transportation back and forth from resettlement interviews. But it was better than nothing at all. Those stipends were, in many ways, exceptional. HIAS offered them seemingly without limit, whereas traditional refugee stipends are only offered for a prescribed period of time. Even unaccompanied minors usually received only four months of financial assistance. But the level of giving wasn’t sustainable. According to the Global Philanthropy Project, one UNCHR partner spent its entire 2014 budget for refugee stipends in just two months. The privileges offered to LGBT refugees may be part of the reason why the UN has had to worry about the issue of fraud. LGBT refugees claim to have seen people collecting money under a false pretense: They pretend to be gay. Aaron Gershowitz, who oversees global operations for HIAS, finds the idea of widespread fraud unlikely. Last year, when he spent several weeks in Nairobi improving the process of distributing stipends, he didn’t hear anything from his staff about fakers. HIAS only serves people

who have already completed their initial UNHCR registration as refugees. So if it’s true that some imposters receive assistance, it isn’t the fault of HIAS. Still, the idea that some people might fake being gay to get assistance or to get resettled abroad spread fear inside the UNHCR last February, when more than 76 people claiming to be LGBT refugees showed up at the Nairobi office on a single day. The mass arrival conjured worries of an organised trafficking ring. De Langhe said she received a tip from the Ugandan priest who had ushered the first group of refugees to be careful about the newcomers. “When you have 70 people at your door in one day, something is happening,” De Langhe told me. This newfound anxiety about imposters made the UNHCR’s work even more challenging. De Langhe delayed the processing while her staff sorted the legitimate LGBT refugees from the posers. “These 76—there may be genuine cases among this group, but their cases may be jeopardised because of the false cases among them,” she said. If there are fakers among the hundreds of people applying for refugee status and claiming to be LGBT, De Langhe said she wouldn’t entirely blame them for trying. “Why do we have

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fraudulent cases? Because we have a pull factor. We have to admit that,” she said. “If you are a poor single man living in Uganda in difficult conditions, and you hear about LGBT cases from your country going quickly to North America, you could take your chances and represent yourself as an LGBT. I think that’s normal.” “It’s a very sensitive issue, very personal sometimes,” said Kiunga. He knows of at least two cases in which people asserting to be LGBT had their refugee status rejected because they didn’t seem credible. Verifying a refugee’s claim of being LGBT has proven tricky for the UN. You can’t simply judge it based on an applicant’s sexual history. For one thing, not everyone, especially the young people, will have had a sexual experience. In addition, the lack of a past relationship may even “be an indication that he or she has been seeking to avoid harm,” according to guidelines by the UNHCR. For some refugees, these interviews can be jarring. Natah, a lesbian from Kampala, recalled breaking down in tears as she recounted how her mother disowned her and her father

fter Ketifa was fired from her teaching job, she waited in agony to be resettled. She hadn’t bothered applying for another position. “They don’t care how you’re performing,” she said. “All they care about is your sexual orientation.” With little to do but sit and chat with the other LGBT refugees, Ketifa considered moving to Nairobi. Her friends insisted that she could lead a less boring life and more easily avoid discrimination. In order to move, though, she needed to obtain permission from Kenya’s Department of Refugee Affairs, which was a nearly impossible task. She knows a few LGBT refugees who have run off illegally, but she remains too frightened to follow them. Indeed, Nairobi offers some obvious advantages over the camp. As a large city, it has many gay and lesbian inhabitants. Although some refugees say they’ve met gay Kenyans, most live apart from the gay social scenes that exist here. Some have gone to a downtown gay club—one that perennially gets raided by police. But for most, their communication with Kenya’s LGBT community is primarily digital—they message over WhatsApp, share

“What you are doing is not good,” said an LGBT activist from Kenya’s Turkana region. “You give them a gated compound, and you give them water inside this compound. All these are good things. But what do you expect to happen when these other communities begin asking questions?” attacked her when they found out she was gay. “The interviewers gave me a pen and paper and told me to write something about myself,” she said of her first UNHCR interview. “I wrote that I lost my family because of what I am.” During the second interview, “I almost lost it because I thought about my mom. I started crying. I was like, ‘My mom found out what I was—and she asked me to leave.’” Slowly, painfully, she gave them her story. To keep from unnecessarily forcing applicants to relive their trauma, the UN offers some no-goes: “Detailed questions about the applicant’s sex life should be avoided.” “Medical ‘testing’ of the applicant’s sexual orientation is an infringement of basic human rights and must not be used.” “It would also be inappropriate to expect a couple to be physically demonstrative at an interview as a way to establish their sexual orientation.” Without such hints, the UN must rely almost entirely on an applicant’s testimony and the consistency and logic of his or her story. Friends and family members can’t usually be called for verification: For many LGBT refugees, these are the very people who chased them away in the first place.

photos and videos on Facebook, seek relationships on Grindr. Somewhere on the city’s southern outskirts, 30 LGBT refugees shared a large house along a rocky street. They spent their days inside listening to music, cooking, and eating together. Outside they played netball, a team sport that resembles basketball. They only left the compound to buy food or attend meetings and interviews at various resettlement agencies, government offices, and foreign embassies. At least, though, they lived in relative safety in a community of their own. Until late last year, that is, when threats by homophobic neighbours became so severe that they decided to abandon the house altogether. The LGBT refugees in Nairobi are perennially being chased out of their homes. One sunny Saturday in February 2015, a group of LGBT refugees gathered at a house in a densely packed neighbourhood for a celebration. One of them was leaving. Francis, a gay man from Uganda, had been granted resettlement in Sweden less than a year after he arrived in Kenya. His good fortune gave hope to the rest. Among the 50 or so guests at the send-off was Natah, the lesbian from Kampala who had fled to Kakuma in early 2014.

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Natah had eventually left for Nairobi, where she met and became friends with Francis. For the party, Francis dressed in a skirt. Normally Natah would tell him off for such behavior: “Sometimes I would go say hi to him, and I would find him in a skirt, a dress, makeup. I’d say, ‘You’re in Nairobi, remember? They are homophobic here.’” But that day, with Francis on the brink of freedom, she decided the skirt could stay. The party was going strong, with Ugandan music playing and lots of dancing. But Natah, who didn’t drink, decided to head home a little after sundown. She bid a final farewell to Francis, who insisted she give him one last, loving goodbye slap on the ass. Fifteen minutes later, Natah was standing at a bus stop when her phone rang. It was her friend Josephine, another Ugandan lesbian, who was still at the party. “She said, ‘The police have come. They’re going to arrest us.’” After Natah had left, she learned, Kenyan police stormed the apartment complex. Josephine had locked herself in a room. Over the phone, she described to Natah how the officers were coming for them—room by room, digging through their clothes, checking under the mattresses. They seemed unsure of what they wanted to find. The officers herded everyone into the center of the complex. They ordered the group to sit. “They were like, ‘You’re holding a party without permission,’” recalled Raj, a gay teen from Uganda attending the celebration. He said Francis, as the host, pleaded with the officers, declaring that he did have permission. One officer yelled at him to keep quiet, and another slapped him, according to Raj. “They were like, ‘This is no joke—this is Kenya. This is not Uganda.’” Police insisted that they should all be sent to Kakuma, as the law required. The cops arrested them, taking 35 to jail. There, the police divided them into two small, dirty cells. It was late at night, but nobody slept—there wasn’t enough space for everyone to lie down on the cold floor. Some decided to take turns; others sat or squatted. The next morning was hot. Some of the refugees removed their shirts to stay cool. One man fainted, and the others persuaded the police to let him go to a hospital down the road. The day passed slowly into another night. It wasn’t until dusk the following day that UNHCR officials persuaded police to release them. They were never charged with a crime. As soon as the LGBT refugees got out, some headed for the hospital to check on the friend who had fainted. There, they found Natah, who had rushed to the hospital to care for the man. He had recovered quickly, but the nurses wouldn’t let him leave: They insisted that he clear the bill first. Natah spent a day making phone calls to friends and advocates—anyone who came to mind. She needed to raise 2,300 shillings—about $25—to pay the bill. Finally, the gay-friendly priest from Uganda donated the money. As the group of LGBT refugees left the hospital that night, Natah said they seemed relieved to be free. But the ordeal reminded them that they were still “prisoners,” in the words of one Kenyan police officer. They lived as outcasts in a foreign country—gay in a place where to be gay is to be a criminal. Natah saw Francis that evening outside the hospital. He was hours away from flying to a country where he would be free, but he didn’t say much. “It was not a happy moment,” said Natah. The refugees returned to their apartment to gather their belongings. Clearly, the neighbourhood was not safe. Over the next couple of days, they would scatter to different parts of Nairobi.

rancis was still one of the lucky few. Though LGBT refugees had been expecting swift processing of their asylum claims, not many saw the kind of attention that the initial group of 23 refugees had received. With more refugees arriving, the process slowed, and people like Ketifa, who had been among the first LGBT people to flee Uganda, were forced to wait. “Right now I’m not aware of my refugee status,” she said one day last fall. “I’m still in doubt.” By the end of 2014, the UNHCR couldn’t expedite all the cases, so De Langhe’s superior, UNHCR Assistant Representative for Protection Catherine Hamon-Sharpe, decided to consider each of them individually. The UNHCR simply didn’t have the time or resources to expedite so many claims. Africa’s LGBT refugees would no longer be on the fast track to resettlement. Last March, some of the refugees who had been expecting swift resettlement protested outside the UNHCR office. A group wrote a letter saying that long delays for interviews “have resulted in several life threatening challenges to the LGBT migrants living in Kenya.” If the UNHCR thought ending special treatment might put a swift end to the pull factor that was drawing Ugandans to Kenya, it was wrong. The transition was slow. Even though Uganda’s high court struck down the anti-homosexuality law on a technicality in July 2014, “nothing changed immediately,” said the Ugandan priest, who had continued to help dozens of Ugandans find temporary shelter in houses on the outskirts of Nairobi while their cases lingered. He said it wasn’t until late 2015 that the pull factor began to decrease. Whereas the success stories of early refugees had enticed other Ugandans to follow their lead, the new tales of harassment and violence—of stagnation and disappointment— “had a dampening effect,” he said. “People thinking of going out think twice or thrice before they up and go. Now with the long-term wait for interviews, people are just not willing to wait so long.” Finally, this January, Ketifa received the decision she’d waited two years for: Her refugee status was approved. “We held a prayer. We prayed thanking God for the good news and praying others will get theirs too,” she said. Now she’ll begin the long process of security and medical checks at the embassy of whatever country agrees to consider resettling her.

n a hot Sunday morning in Kakuma last October, a group of about 20 people gathered in a makeshift church in the gay refugees’ compound. The humanitarian tarps that cover the ground between two of the huts looked pristine. Four thin pews had been crafted from mismatching planks of wood. As they took their places along the benches, the churchgoers sang a Ugandan hymn. Eventually the priest, Solomon Mugisa, joined them. Born to a Pentecostal pastor father and a studious, Anglican mother, Mugisa attended Christian schools and Bible colleges his entire life. He knew well that the Anglican Church has a reputation as one of the most homophobic in all of Africa. But somehow that fact didn’t stop him, a gay man, from becoming an Anglican priest. “I know that God doesn’t discriminate,” he said. “He loves you whoever you are.” The same cannot be said of the Ugandan police. In March 2014, photos began circulating on the internet that depicted Mugisa celebrating at the 2012 World Pride Festival in London—a momentary indulgence he had made during two years he spent on a Christian exchange program in the UK. But back in Kampala, police arrived at his home one evening. Officers took him to jail, where he spent the next five nights. On the sixth morning, he was

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let out on bail. He immediately fled to Nairobi, and the UNHCR soon bused him to Kakuma, where he became a leader of the group of Ugandans—both practically and spiritually. At first, on Sunday mornings, Mugisa would take the refugees to the existing churches in Kakuma to pray, but they were always chased away. So Mugisa decided to create a church of his own, within the homestead the LGBT refugees share. If Christianity and homosexuality were ever at odds, you wouldn’t know it from the Sunday morning service at the gay Ugandans’ compound in Kakuma Camp 3. On this particular Sunday, people gave thanks. One woman thanked God for helping her complete “medical”—that is, the medical portion of the resettlement process to get to the United States. One man said he was thankful for having a church where he can pray. (“He never could have imagined he’d attend a church that accepts him,” Mugisa explained. “He even started to hate God.”) Another man stood up: “I thank God for my protection. Last night I was walking by some shops and I was attacked. But thank God I survived them.” Even Ketifa, a Muslim who had never stepped foot inside a church before arriving at Kakuma, attended. She said the local

mosques refused to accept her because she is a lesbian. Standing attentively in the back row, she joined the Christians around her in the singing. More than an hour into the service, after the songs and the prayers ended, Mugisa gave his weekly sermon. “God has a book of life,” Mugisa told his worshipers. “He remembers your name. But to be written in this book you need to do good.” Mugisa turned to his congregants. “Mulondo, Lujja, Kasule, Nansamba: You want to be able to say, ‘God, I served you when I was in Kakuma camp.’ You want to be able to say, ‘I served you in Uganda. Remember me. This is what I have done, remember me.’” Suddenly, Mugisa stopped. During the unexpected silence, one could hear screams of “amen” coming from the yellow church down the road—one of the churches that had chased out the LGBT refugees before they started their own. Mugisa glanced around his congregation of LGBT worshipers, catching the eyes of a few of them. Unable to ignore the trepidation on their faces, he comforted them. “Trust me—one day we will be out of this place.”

Natah, a Burundian lesbian refugee, and her Kenyan girlfriend share an apartment building with other refugees in Nairobi, Kenya.

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‘BLOW JOBS ARE REAL JOBS’

Mai Jakawong is a member of Empower, an organisation of 50,000 sex workers who hope to decriminalise prostitution in Thailand.

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Thai Sex Workers Fight for the Right to Earn a Living BY JEAN FRIEDMAN-RUDOVSKY PHOTOS BY AMANDA MUSTARD

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O Mai Jakawong standing in front of Empower’s headquarters in Chiang Mai, Thailand

ne evening in Chiang Mai, Thailand, toward the back of a modest two-story building in one of the city’s 17 unofficial red-light districts, a handful of sex workers primped. They pinned back straight hair with small barrettes and applied various hues of rose blush. Occasionally, an iPhone would ding, prompting the women to check who had received a text from a client. On the wall, a poster read: “It’s not what we do… it’s how we do it.” Graffiti scribbled in pink and purple on another wall nearby was more direct: “Blow Jobs are Real Jobs!” “We are workers, not victims,” Lily Hermarratanarapong, who wore tight turquoise capris and a shirt speckled with sequins, told me. She and her colleagues belong to Empower, a sex-workers’ rights organisation with an estimated 50,000 members. Since the group’s founding in 1985, it has fought to improve the working conditions of women in the sex trade in Thailand, where

prostitution is illegal, but widely tolerated. Empower members advocate for the decriminalisation of sex work; they want the industry treated like any other profession. Empower’s headquarters, where I met the women, serves not only as a dressing room but as a library, schoolhouse, and drop-in center for thousands of sex workers throughout the city. (Empower is short for “Education Means Protection Of Women Engaged in Recreation.”) The building houses the organisation’s nightclub as well. In the Can Do Bar, women are employed as waitresses and receive social security benefits and vacation and sick days. Hermarratanarapong turned me from watching her friends preen to face a large cabinet with glass doors. Inside were T-shirts that read “Good girls go to heaven, bad girls go everywhere,” flash drives disguised as lipsticks (for easy access to labor law documents), and handwoven condom-carrying cases. There was an anthology of autobiographical vignettes written by group members, a history of sex work in Chiang Mai, and something called the Bad Girls Dictionary—a self-published book full of feisty definitions for more than 200 words relevant to Empower’s mission. I flipped through, jotting down a few:

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Bad girl: Any woman who behaves or thinks outside the space society maps out for women. Dignity: The feeling we have when we do a good job, with professionalism and skill; the feeling we have when we pay off our debt… when our daughters graduate from university… when we put a new roof on our family home. Raids [of brothels]: A hero or rescuer’s job, action taken by police with TV cameras, reporters, where many women are shown sitting on the floor and hiding their faces… or with their eyes inked out like criminals—when the job [is] done, most of us end up in debt and return to work to pay it off after [we] are released. Raids are a primary tactic for curbing the sex trade in Thailand and worldwide. They are part of what critics call a “criminal justice” approach toward stopping prostitution, whose adherents believes all aspects of the trade should be illegal. In part, the strategy grew out of a consensus formed in the early 1990s among some human rights groups, religious fundamentalists, national governments, and agencies like the United Nations that considered a prolific sex industry antithetical to civilised modern society. Raids of brothels and clubs, followed by the detention and prosecution of traffickers, and therapy and skills training for victims, became the norm. In Thailand, Hermarratanarapong and her colleagues believe this approach has created problems for those who willingly enter the profession. According to Richard Howard of the Bangkok office of the International Labor Organisation, less than 10 percent of sex workers in Thailand are “trafficked”—duped, tricked, or forced into their circumstances. “Ninety percent are there because they made the decision to do it,” he said. A 2012 research report compiled by Empower details a host of abuses related to treating these women as trafficking victims, including widespread police entrapment, wrongful detention, extortion, invasive medical examinations, and unjust deportation. It concludes: “We have now reached a point in history where there are more women in the Thai sex industry who are being abused by anti-trafficking practices than there are women being exploited by traffickers.” Empower has pushed the Thai human-rights community to reconsider its reliance on raids, rehab, and criminal prosecution as the go-to approaches to combat trafficking, fundamentally questioning whether the sex industry ought to be deemed illicit. The organisation has become one of the leading voices in Southeast Asia and throughout the world, advocating decriminalisation of the trade as the best option for the people involved in it. Empower wants the Thai government to start treating trafficking and exploitation as aberrations rather than the norm, and it hopes to rout out abuse as you would in any other industry. This stance has put Empower at odds not only with the Thai government but also with many Western feminists. In January 2014, a draft proposal by Amnesty International advocating decriminalisation of the sex trade was leaked, and in the following months, the Twitter-sphere was ablaze with censure, including from the likes of Lena Dunham and Gloria Steinem. “Why would [Amnesty] call on the decriminalisation of exploiters of [the] most marginalised human beings on the planet?” said Taina Bien-Aimé, the director of the Coalition Against the Trafficking of Women (CATW), a US-based nonprofit. Her organisation penned a letter denouncing Amnesty’s position; more than 100 celebrities, world dignitaries, and human rights advocates signed

it. When asked about the fight between those who consider all people engaged in commercial sex to be victims, and those who consider them to be workers, Bien-Aimé replied: “It’s a war.” On that night in Chiang Mai, the women didn’t take the time to ruminate on whether their ideas would soon cause such a highbrow kerfuffle. Despite their activism, those in Empower say they are, above all, hardworking professionals who spend most of their time focused on their jobs. Now dark outside, their workday was about to begin. Around 8 PM, some went off to pre-arranged meet-ups with clients; others hedged their bets and sought customers by hanging around one of the city’s hundreds of bars, karaoke joints, and massage parlors. I watched as the women grabbed condoms from a basket on their way out the door. Left behind was Mai Jakawong, a slim, elegant woman with an angular face and jet-black hair. That night, she would be working in Empower’s Can Do Bar, where she planned to meet customers. “If you’re a sex worker,” she said when I asked her about the controversy, “you’re seen as either a sad girl or a bad girl. ‘Sad’ if you’ve been forced into this. ‘Bad’ if you choose to be here.” She paused, watching her friends saunter out the door. “But what if we aren’t either?”

Women working at the Can Do Bar, where sex workers receive social security benefits and sick leave.

he origins of Thailand’s sex industry go back centuries, but the Vietnam War gave it the greatest boost. In 1967, in an attempt to raise morale among American soldiers, the US and Thailand signed a pact to allow troops stationed in neighbouring Vietnam temporary leave in Thailand, which was relatively safe and stable. Thailand used financing from Chase Manhattan and Bank of America to set up “Rest and Recreation” sites, where brothels were the main attraction, according to Casting Stones: Prostitution and Liberation in Asia and the United States. Over the course of the war, it’s estimated that at least 700,000 US soldiers visited R&R sites as a reprieve from the stress of combat. When the war ended, vacationing soldiers disappeared, but the sex industry did not. It thrived throughout the 1980s, while

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ABOVE: Saturday night at the Can Do Bar BELOW: A sex worker gets ready for work in the back of Empower headquarters.

the country’s blossoming tourism industry was creating new job opportunities in cities for impoverished migrants from the countryside. The country’s north was poppy farming territory, and new government opium eradication programs destroyed many families’ livelihoods, including those of the young women who worked the fields alongside men. Poverty was exacerbated by the fact that half of the country’s ethnic minority groups did not have citizenship, making it harder to get formal employment and preventing them from owning land. For many young women, says David Feingold, an anthropologist who has studied rural Thailand for decades, “the best option was to get involved in sex work.” Promising glamour and riches, pimps lured in thousands, and they took many of the women to dilapidated brothels in Bangkok, Chiang Mai, and the beach haven of Phuket. Often with financial arrangements akin to indentured servitude, the women were prevented from leaving the premises and could not communicate with family. The pimps also frequently raped their employees. When the HIV epidemic emerged, the effect was staggering. According to multiple local studies, in the late 1980s in Chiang Mai, an estimated 44 percent of sex workers were HIV positive. It was around this time that a Thai woman named Khun Chantawipa Apisuk, who’s known as Pi Noi, moved back to

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Bangkok from Boston, where she had relocated with her husband a few years earlier to study sociology. She settled near Patpong, the city’s burgeoning red-light district, and started hanging out in some of the bars. She struck up friendships with the women there. Since Pi Noi spoke some English, they asked for lessons, so they could better communicate with their customers, many of whom were American or European. Pi Noi held the classes on sidewalks; the students would pull bar stools out during the day and learn useful phrases. The English classes, she told me recently over Skype, were “to help minimise exploitation.” Pi Noi chafed at the idea that the women were powerless victims just because they had been forced or sold into their current situation. The sex workers, independent and tough-minded, were already accustomed to thinking of themselves in this way—Pi Noi simply helped them find a language to assert their independence. Even with minimal English, she says, women “could express what they wanted and didn’t want, how to say yes or no. This is the basis of human rights.” As women gathered, they started conversing about other issues like the brothels’ deplorable conditions, disease, and debt. In 1987, in cooperation with a local doctor, Pi Noi created a sex worker clinic in Bangkok to provide women with reproductive health workshops and free condoms. (In 1994, Empower officially became an NGO and a foundation itself.) Pi Noi reached out to the brothel owners directly, asking that they let their employees come to learn about HIV prevention and to offer Thai language classes to migrants. Many owners assented. Even though Pi Noi was radicalising their employees, brothel owners were more than happy to receive help trying to keep their workforce alive. By the late 1990s, the sex industry in Thailand was again shifting dramatically. The brothel as the hub for activity was dying out. The economy had improved, meaning there was less desperation driving women into unknown and often dangerous situations. The Ministry of Health instituted a mandatory condom policy in brothels, threatening to close them down or extort high fines if STD rates didn’t diminish. Feingold, the anthropologist, says that this began to chip away at the formerly lucrative brothel model that was based on flagrantly ignoring worker welfare and safety. “The sex business didn’t become unprofitable,” says Liz Hilton, an Australian volunteer who’s worked with Empower for more than 20 years. “Exploitation became unprofitable.” By 2002, business had moved to “entertainment zones,” or defacto red-light districts. Even though prostitution was still illegal, the economy depended on it, and that year, the Thai government allowed for the legal establishment of massage parlors, karaoke bars, and billiard halls that clandestinely doubled as places for men to meet prostitutes. Each zone normally spans several city blocks, where sex workers are employed as servers, masseuses, and dancers. Customers know to look here for sex, and the sex workers take clients off-site. By the early 2000s, the entertainment zones accounted for about 7 percent of the country’s GDP. The sex industry generated $4.3 billion annually. Today, an estimated 10 percent of all tourist dollars are spent on sex. ne evening in Chiang Mai, Hermarratanarapong, Jakawong, and two other Empower members tried to explain their lives to a group of US college students on a semester abroad program in Thailand who were studying

local economic issues. “When you are a sex worker, you always start with the police,” Hermarratanarapong told them, as they sat in a circle on the dance floor at the Can Do Bar. “Most of the dangers in sex work come from the law,” she said. There was the constant threat of raids, but that wasn’t all. According to Thai legislation, in order to be fined or jailed, prostitutes or their clients must be caught in the act of soliciting, advertising, recruiting, arranging—or engaging in—commercial sex. In practice, according to Hermarratanarapong, this means police officers bide their time—and supplement their salaries— through entrapment schemes. To avoid government fines, she claimed women’s salaries are regularly siphoned off to pay the cops. If the sex worker is an undocumented immigrant, she said, the bribe price is doubled or tripled to prevent deportation. Perched on a bar stool in a pink dress, a woman named Neung told the group “because there is no labor protection, working conditions are made up by the employer.” These “bar rules,” as they’re known, include sex workers being docked pay for weighing more than 110 pounds, arriving late for a shift, or falling behind in male clients. There are also drink quotas; each worker, Neung said, has to have “so many drinks bought for you every month. It doesn’t matter if you are pregnant or don’t drink.” I was later told it’s possible for quotas to reach as high as 150 per week. The presenters said that’s the main reason Empower started its own place: the Can Do Bar. The students seemed embarrassed at being prompted to take in their surroundings, which included a lot of phallic art, posters of almost-naked women, and abrasive graffiti. (“For a long time, we had been making suggestions to the government,” Jakawong had told me about the bar. But “nobody was getting it. So we built it ourselves.”) The students were curious how each of the women started in sex work. Jakawong told them she had worked a number of jobs, most recently in a bakery, where she was bored. Neung, in the pink dress, had done knitting and sewing. She said she had been to “all of the factories I could go through.” Hermarratanarapong, too, had worked in factories, but she admitted that her motivations weren’t purely economic. “My generation was the first to have TV,” she said of her childhood in Chanthaburi, a city in southern Thailand. “Seeing the exciting lives on the screen made me start to ask, ‘Why? Why are we following all these rules?’” When she moved to Bangkok, she found work in factories, as a pole dancer, and in a bar where she was a paid escort. She made more money in a week from being a flirtatious companion for men, she said, than she had in a month at the factory. It took her years to finally sleep with a client, and when she did, she thought, What’s so bad about this? She added: “Being a sex worker isn’t about lack of choice. If I really had no choice, I’d be working in a garment factory.” According to the International Labor Organisation, only 10 percent of human trafficking victims in Asia are trafficked for commercial sexual exploitation. “The claims of millions of new [trafficking] victims annually are bogus,” says Ronald Weitzer, a sociologist at George Washington University who’s an expert on the sex trade. Many people enter the industry for financial reasons. Thailand’s legal minimum daily wage is approximately $8.40 per day, and many women in the informal sector are paid even less. The sex workers I spoke with in Chiang Mai said that while their income ranges considerably, even on a bad night they make at least $14. On a different day, I watched Hermarratanarapong as she led one of Empower’s English classes. On a dry-erase board,

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“If you’re a sex worker,” Mai said, “you’re seen as either a sad girl or a bad girl. ‘Sad’ if you’ve been forced into this. ‘Bad’ if you choose to be here.” She paused, watching her friends saunter out the door. “But what if we aren’t either?”

she wrote the words “need,” “want,” “meet,” “drink,” “end,” and “stop.” Then she added sentences: “You can call me tomorrow,” “I will wait until the bar closes to go,” and “I have to send money to my family.” “If we can speak a little [English], we have a better chance of having a good night,” Hermarratanarapong told me. Over the course of the following hour, two students went through the vocab and sentences, reciting each aloud. (They asked for my help with pronunciation but said they normally rely on an iPhone app). They also tried a conversation in English, which didn’t go particularly well. Before class ended, Hermarratanarapong assigned homework: transcribing and translating a favorite American pop song. Empower also helps sex workers finish their Thai schooling by providing tutoring, study space, and contacts for continuing education programs. At least several thousand women have gone through Empower’s classes, including Hermarratanarapong, who got her high school equivalency through the program. At last count, 67 were currently enrolled in alternative high school programs, and there are more than 100 college graduates now—women who may or may not continue with sex work. “We don’t ask,” Hilton, the Australian woman who’s worked with Empower for more than two decades, had told the US study abroad students. “That’s their decision. Empower isn’t about changing sex workers. It’s about sex workers changing society.”

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e always tell each other about the bad ones,” a tiny woman with clear braces named Wan explained on a different day. It was noon, and we were in the Empower library. Wearing a pink and white sweater, Wan picked at a packaged chocolate chip muffin. She said that word about abuse spreads quickly, and this helps keep workers safe. Once, Empower made posters with a picture of the face of a man who raped one of its members and circulated them in the city’s bars. Wan added, “There are often signs in the bar. If he pinches or smacks you in public, he will be worse in the room.” I tried to tease out what happens when there are no warning signs. But Empower members are reluctant to admit that sex work entails dangers not typically encountered in, say, a garment factory. As we spoke, six other Empower members arrived and prepared a shared lunch; they all said they had only one or two

truly scary situations. When I pressed for details, the room grew tense. Wan told me that when one of her customers stole her purse and clothes and took off without paying her, she wrapped a towel around herself and asked the hotel staff to pursue him, but they refused. Others didn’t want to recount specific horror stories because, they said, that’s all journalists ever report on. They pointed me toward the book of autobiographical vignettes, which contained some troubling incidents. In one chapter, the author (all entries are anonymous) went to a hotel with a customer, and when she emerged from the shower, she found four other men in the room demanding group sex. She refused. When one man moved to grab her, she quickly picked up the TV and threatened to throw it, saying they’d be charged for the damage. The men backed down. In another case, a high-ranking military officer brought a gun into a massage room and raped two women. According to Empower’s critics, these situations make abuse of prostitutes fundamentally different from other kinds of worker exploitation. “There would be no commodification of women in an equal world,” CATW’s Bien-Aimé told me via Skype after I returned from Thailand. Prostitution, she believes, can never be just work, so decriminalisation is a flawed premise. “Prostitution [is a] cause and consequence of gender inequality.” When I asked Bien-Aimé about the evidence that women who choose to sell sex outnumber those who are forced into the trade, she was skeptical that those lines could be so neatly drawn. “How would you distinguish between someone with absolute negotiating power with clients and the majority of individuals who enter [the sex trade] before [the age of] 18” and are “sold into it by intimate partners?” She added: “We don’t want this to be a numbers game. Let’s listen to the survivors.” The way for journalists to speak with trafficking survivors— those who, unlike the Empower members I met, did not willingly choose to enter the sex trade—is typically through nonprofit organisations that work directly with this community. In Chiang Mai, three organisations refused my request for interviews. Back in the US, Bien-Aimé tried to facilitate this connection for me with two more groups. One did not respond to repeated requests, and the other said no because, in Bien-Aimé’s words, it had a policy to “not provide interviews to any media platform that endorses or appears to endorse prostitution as ‘sex work’ or the sex trade as a viable occupation.”

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LEFT: Sex workers at Empower play a homemade, educational version of Jenga to practice their English. BELOW: Empower team members fold origami during downtime before the Can Do Bar opens.

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Interior of the Can Do Bar

Before Bien-Aimé and I ended our call, she added that her opposition to decriminalisation is based in both theory and practice. “It’s a total failed experiment,” she said. Germany, New Zealand, and Australia have all decriminalised the industry, she explained, listing the problems this has wrought. After we spoke, she sent me an email full of links to studies backing up these claims, including a lack of improvement in the earnings of sex workers and testimony from law enforcement officers who say they struggle to contain trafficking, violence, and organised crime in the new environment. In Germany, doctors who work with sex workers in the decriminalised industry say their clients are so severely damaged that a German physicians’ association has formally asked parliament to repeal the law. She and others in the anti-trafficking movement, including New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, have embraced what’s known as the Nordic model, which criminalises anyone who buys or enables the buying of sex. “[It] looks at the sex trade as another system of violence and oppression,” explained Bien-Aimé. Research and reporting on this model, like that in favor of decriminalisation, is contradictory. For almost every study that lauds the Nordic model, there are testimonies, often from sex workers themselves, who rebuke the policy as problematic.

To Hermarratanarapong, the lock-up-the-johns approach is irrational. “Why would we want to criminalise our customers?” she said. “They are our business. We don’t need more punitive measures. [The Nordic model] is based on the idea that the sex industry is something that should eventually be eliminated. We do not agree.” efore I left Chiang Mai, Hilton set up a laptop in front of me and clicked play on a loaded video: “Last Rescue in Siam,” a black-and-white silent satire that Empower members made several years ago. Set to a Charlie Chaplin–esque sound track, the film depicts an anti-trafficking raid carried out by three awkward characters: a policeman, a social worker (a conservatively dressed woman with glasses and

a clipboard), and a “hero NGO” (a woman in a cape). The three, plus a pickup truck full of bumbling cops, descend on a bar where sex workers are amiably flirting with potential clients. Chaos ensues. Rescuers manage to nab only one woman, who says she’s 19 but who the authorities believe is 16. She’s subjected to a dental exam—a common but dubious method used to determine age—and then locked in a room labeled rehab. With the sewing machine she’s been provided, she sews herself an escape ladder and runs directly back to the bar. She’s greeted with cheers and hugs from the other sex workers. “We hope that’s the end,” the screen reads. Empower’s criticism of raids and rescues is not just directed toward the Thai government. It is also focused on a global framework—personified by the “hero NGO” or Bien-Aimé’s CATW—that detractors call the “rescue industry,” an unlikely alliance between anti-prostitution feminists and the religious right forged to fight the commercial sex industry. Critics believe the rescue industry has purposefully conflated sex work and sex trafficking, with “a crusade against the former [being] seen as synonymous with a victory against the latter,” according to Feingold, the anthropologist who’s researched the sex industry for decades. Since Bill Clinton’s Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000, vast public resources have been made available to groups loosely claiming an “anti-trafficking” agenda. This money has led to the creation of NGOs throughout the world, including several in Thailand. Organisations that refuse to take an “anti-prostitution” pledge are ineligible for US financial aid. From 2001 to 2010, almost $1.5 billion US taxpayer dollars went to the global anti-trafficking fight, and in 2014 the government distributed $18 million to groups fighting sex trafficking. Empower made “Last Rescue in Siam” to draw attention to the fact that many women have no desire to be rescued. Jakawong, who had been polishing glasses as I watched, told me that although the film is humorous, raids are no laughing matter—especially for migrants. Jakawong is originally from Burma, and her family emigrated from there when she was a child. But when she started doing sex work many years later, she was still undocumented. Her biggest fear at the time was being caught in an anti-trafficking rescue. Had this happened, she would have likely been carted off to a government shelter named Baan Kredtrakarn, which is located on an island off the shores of Bangkok. Officially, the site provides safe haven for potential trafficking victims. Residents are given rehabilitation therapy and offered classes, including literacy and yoga. But a team of Empower members toured the facility in 2012 and criticised several aspects of the shelter. According to Empower members, women are prohibited from leaving, and they are not allowed to communicate freely with friends and family. There are many migrant women being housed there, and Empower claims to have received reports that some are not allowed visitors. I was not able to tour the facility, and the government did not respond to questions about the shelter. But Phensiri Pansiri, a representative of Focus Thailand, an anti-trafficking group that works to remove women from the facility, confirmed some of Empower’s findings. She said shelter residents are not allowed to leave the premises until prosecutors figure out if she is a trafficking victim or if she can be of use as a witness in an anti-trafficking case. This process, said Pansiri, normally takes between one and two years. If the woman is a migrant, regardless of how the investigation pans out, she will be deported—because she is either

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guilty of breaking Thai anti-prostitution laws or because Thai policy for trafficking victims is to send women home, regardless of where home may be. (I tried to locate former residents of the facility but was unable.) It’s estimated that there are upwards of 3 million migrant workers in Thailand. Around half are women. There are no official numbers on how many end up in the sex trade, but the fact that many of them do has led Empower to also advocate for immigration reform. According to Empower, the average rate to get across the border into Thailand from neighbouring countries is $2,000 in bribes and fees to smugglers. While I was at Empower one day, I asked how decriminalisation would help the women and men who are forced into the trade. The group is adamant that bringing the industry out from clandestinity will help even trafficking victims, though the members don’t like using that label. “Once you are ‘trafficked,’ you don’t own your own problem,” said Hermarratanarapong. “Someone decides everything for you, and that’s not right.” Empower’s argument boiled down to the idea that extreme exploitation in the sex industry ought to be combatted just as it is in any other line of work. A comparison I heard frequently while reporting this story was: You don’t make fishing illegal just because there is rampant human trafficking in the industry.

When I pushed for specifics, Hermarratanarapong told me, “It’s not our job as sex workers to fix exploitation in the sex trade.” She said sex workers deserved a seat at the table for discussion on these matters, but they should not be responsible for coming up with all the answers. Then, Hermarratanarapong added with uncharacteristic severity: “This work, it isn’t for everyone.” She told me about a friend who went through a bad breakup, needed money, and approached Hermarratanarapong to get her a job at a bar. She told her friend to think about it first. “I am who I am, but you are who you are,” she said. Just as everyone isn’t cut out to be a teacher or a scientist, Hermarratanarapong told her friend, everyone isn’t right for sex work. “You need a lot of skills,” she said. “You have to be outgoing and good with languages and people. You have to be patient and a good listener. Sex work is only 10 percent sex.” Hermarratanarapong told me she didn’t get involved in Empower to be a cheerleader for the sex industry, which she knows has faults. Instead, she joined the group because she was tired of judgment from the world. She was tired of being forced into the “bad girl” or “sad girl” boxes. “I feel a sense of unfairness and frustration at how people treat me and others,” she said. “And I like a fight.”

Empower workers eat dinner with friends and clients at the Can Do Bar.

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SISTAAZ OF THE CASTLE PHOTOS BY JAN HOEK

These photos are an ongoing collaboration between two Dutch artists—28-year-old fashion designer Duran Lantink and 31-yearold photographer Jan Hoek—and members of Sistaazhood, a group of trans sex workers affiliated with the Cape Town advocacy group SWEAT. The collaboration began last year when Hoek documented Lantink’s fashion project with members of Sistaazhood. It then evolved into an expanded series where they interviewed the workers about their dreams. Hoek,

Lantink, and the women worked together on outfits and sets to bring their dreams to life. “We were really excited to showcase the creative ability of all the girls we worked with and give them a different story that focuses on their fashion rather than their hardship,” Hoek said. “The pictures weren’t really about sex work. There’s so much more to their lives.” The next leg of the project will be a fashion show with the girls that will take place in Cape Town in 2017.

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GABBY, 29: “My dream would be to have a luxurious Victorian-designed brothel for street workers and sex workers from agencies called the Lady Marmalade, where they can fulfill their own dreams. I hope that one day they can look back and say ‘that’s were I found my dream.’ Nobody did that for me. I did that for somebody.”

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SULAIGA, 30 (THIS PAGE): “I want to sell drugs and make a lot of money. I want to sell cocaine, crystal meth, and heroin. I want to have big cars, live in Las Vegas, and hang out with the mafia and be happy.” FLAVINA, 22 (OPPOSITE PAGE): “I want to become an African supermodel. I want to be different, so that people can see I am trans and a supermodel, so that I can be an example for others.”

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JOAN, 57 (THIS PAGE): “My dream was always to marry and wear a really big, beautiful white wedding dress. I don’t think that will ever happen, so this project will be the last chance for me to still wear one.” COCO, 25 (OPPOSITE PAGE): “I want to go to New York and be the flames of the torch of the Statue of Liberty. I want to see countries all over the world and be the whole universe.”

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CLEOPATRA, 23 (THIS PAGE): “I want to become the new Cleopatra, a female ruler of an African country. I want to have a lot of power and have everybody listen to me. Besides that, I want to earn a lot of money, so I can buy a tiny house or maybe a mansion for my mother.” OLIVIA, 44 (OPPOSITE PAGE): “The egg is the symbol of the rebirth I had when I came out the closet as trans.”

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rising up i-DEAS, FASHION, MUSIC, PEOPLE

i-D.co the original fashion bible THE NEW LUXURY ISSUE

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FLINEISY MONTERO PHOTOGRAPHY HARLEY WEIR

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FIELD NOTES EVICTED: POVERTY AND PROFIT IN THE AMERICAN CITY Matthew Desmond Crown Publishers, 2016

BY KRISTIN DOMBEK

A family home on Milwaukee’s South Side, late in the afternoon, the house warm and fragrant from cooking done in a well-built kitchen. The little girl’s bedroom—the princess sleeps here reads the sign on the door—is painted pink, the office disheveled from five years of homework. A toddler’s toys blink and beep underfoot. A mover turns to a mother. “In our truck or on the curb?” “Truck” and it’s all taken to a storage facility with fees so steep she may never get it back; “curb” and her new homelessness is piled high for the neighbourhood to see. Impossible math or visible shame—it’s a double bind that plagues the catastrophically broke, and the kind of harrowing choice Matthew Desmond renders vividly and repeatedly in his extraordinary new book Evicted, a lyrical and exhaustively researched ethnography of eviction’s effect on the poor in America. A century ago, evictions were so rare in the United States that crowds—sometimes in the thousands—would gather to witness them. People rioted, fought the police, tried to move the family back in. But now evictions are a regular ritual. In Milwaukee, where Desmond’s book is set, more than one in eight renters were forced from their home between 2009 and 2011, a number typical in mid-sized American cities. In New York City, 80 households are evicted a day. While we tend to think of eviction as a symptom of poverty, Desmond argues it is actually a cause, one of the most important ones. Eviction, he writes, “sends families to shelters, abandoned houses, and the street. It invites depression and illness, compels families to move into degrading housing in dangerous neighbourhoods, uproots communities, and harms children.” And its perpetuation is in the interest of a lowincome housing industry that is booming. Over the last 20 years, median rent has risen 70 percent, wages and public assistance have stagnated, employment has dropped, and low-income housing landlords have professionalised—forming associations, lobbying for friendly policies, and capitalising on a market

that increasingly favors them. A rat-ridden two-bedroom with shot-out windows rents for as much or more than a safe and clean two-bedroom, but low-income tenants, Desmond proves, particularly black women with children, are forced into the former. If they complain about their living conditions, it is cheaper to evict them than to make repairs. When they fall behind (and they likely will; it is common for

low-wage workers to spend 70 percent or more of their income on housing), eviction is better for profit margins than losing a month’s rent; there are always tenants to take their place. So there are designated eviction moving teams, storage facilities, and data-mining services to help landlords keep tenants moving. Desmond, a professor of social sciences at Harvard, spent 2008 and 2009 living in

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FIELD NOTES / REVIEWS

a white trailer park on Milwaukee’s South Side and a rooming house on the AfricanAmerican North Side. He studied court records and 911 call transcripts and sent interviewers door to door. Evicted weaves this quantitative research through the stories of two landlords and eight Milwaukee renters, who struggle to find and keep homes. Scott, a nurse who slipped a disc at work, got addicted to painkillers, and fell into an eviction cycle; Arleen, whose eviction cycle started with her son’s errant snowball, and who, by the end of the book, ends up applying for 89 apartments: They are people whose tenacity and despair are hard to forget. When Desmond published a paper showing Milwaukee women must often choose between reporting domestic violence and getting evicted, the city changed its policy. His proposals here—the right to free legal counsel in housing court and federal housing vouchers—should invite debate, as he hopes. But the book, if you can bear to read it, does something deeper than that. THE SOUTH SIDE mother chooses “curb.”

At first, she rushes to meet the disaster, gathers things, and calls people, but then she slows and slumps, appears sleepy. Her face has “that look,” one the sheriffs and movers know well—the look of a “mother who climbs out of the cellar to find the tornado has leveled the house.” We meet her only briefly, and she’s a homeowner, while the subjects Desmond follows are tenants. But that’s why her face stayed with me: It bears the look of someone reckoning with the odds Evicted teaches, someone on her way from working-class home ownership to the low-income rental and eviction nightmare Desmond describes. It’s the look of someone “undone by a wave of questions,” and one that is difficult, once you’ve read Evicted, to forget. Where will you go? What will you take? What will you do? The poverty of others brings up terrible questions of there-but-for-the-grace-of-God and what if, were your circumstances or skin colour or gender different, that could be you. Your gaze pulls away. But Desmond writes so powerfully and with such persuasive math that he turns your head back and keeps it there: Yes, it could be you. But if home is so crucial a place that its loss causes this much pain, Evicted argues, making it possible for more of us might change everything.

THE PEOPLE V. OJ SIMPSON: AMERICAN CRIME STORY FX

This new ten-episode series opens with footage of Rodney King’s beating by police officers and the 1992 riots in LA that followed, seeming to promise a consideration of the Simpson trial as part of the larger question of racism and the American criminal justice system. But The People v. OJ Simpson, produced by Ryan Murphy, the creator of Glee and American Horror Story, doesn’t take a clear stance on the way race affected the trial, on Simpson’s guilt or innocence, or on anything much at all. Instead, it’s an engrossing costume pageant of clichés: Sarah Paulson and Sterling K. Brown as the prosecutors Marcia Clark and Christopher Darden are noble but outmatched pros, drinking tequila and bantering at the office late into the night like Don

Draper and Peggy Olson; Steve Pasquale, as Detective Mark Fuhrman, lovingly polishes his Nazi memorabilia. As in Oliver Stone’s reenactments of recent history, the novelty casting and the idiosyncratic hair and makeup decisions take precedence over everything else. John Travolta inexplicably channels a lizard with Botox to play Robert Shapiro, one of Simpson’s defense attorneys, while Cuba Gooding Jr. and David Schwimmer, as OJ Simpson and his confidant Robert Kardashian, might as well be playing themselves for all the effort expended to make their portrayals plausible. Maybe it’s all in the service of a kind of metaphorical verisimilitude: As in the trial itself, with distractions this fun, who needs justice? ANDREW MARTIN

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THE ASSOCIATION OF SMALL BOMBS: A NOVEL Karan Mahajan

TIME AND REMAINS OF PALESTINE James Morris

Viking

Kehrer Verlag

“People say 9/11 was the worst terror attack of all time—was it? I think the small bombs that we hear about all the time, that go off in unknown markets, killing five or six, are worse. They concentrate the pain on the lives of a few.” This is the claim of Tauqeer, a terrorist in Karan Mahajan’s second novel, The Association of Small Bombs, and it furnishes his darkly incisive book with a timely subject: the worlds created and destroyed by small-scale terrorism. The novel depicts a fictional aftermath to the 1996 bombing of the Lajpat Nagar market in Delhi, one of many such attacks in India. Mahajan follows a group of characters whose lives are inextricably bound to the bombing, including the Khuranas, a Hindu couple whose two boys are killed in the blast, and the Ahmeds, a Muslim family whose son Mansoor survives the attack but suffers an injured wrist. As the Khuranas struggle to cope, Mansoor pursues computer programming, only to be stymied by his lingering wounds. In Mahajan’s riveting and intricate story, the aftershocks of small bombs are as inescapable as their explosions. ALEX TRAUB

The British photographer James Morris is best known for his work on the interplay between man and the environment. From townscapes in Wales to Antarctic explorations, he documents the way we change the world around us. However, his new book, Time and Remains of Palestine, deals with a more explicit conflict. The photos collected here show the ghostly remains of Palestinian settlements razed or abandoned in the 1948 Nakba, when an estimated 700,000 or more Palestinians fled or were expelled from their villages. Since then, the Israeli government has actively obscured many of these sites, replacing some, as Morris’s photos show, with playgrounds and parking lots. Another photo of Israeli developments encroaching on contemporary Palestinian settlements in the West Bank seems to emphasise the precarious position of Palestine, which after the Oslo Accords failed to develop into the functioning independent state many had hoped for. In less careful hands, Morris’s book could have felt tubthumping or partisan. But introduced with a sensitive yet impassioned foreword by the Palestinian lawyer and writer Raja Shehadeh, the photos, which are serene, eerie, and often unnaturally still, have more a feeling of impartial witnessing than outraged finger-pointing. BRUNO BAYLEY

FOSSIL FUELS Lloyd Stubber

WATERHOUSE Empty Gallery EP

Perimeter Editions and Bloom Publishing

Decisions

Time stands still in Fossil Fuels. In his fourth book, photographer Lloyd Stubber offers an endearing tribute to a longstanding Stubber family tradition: attending the annual Phillip Island Classic—a track meet for vintage racecars. For almost 20 years, his father Ray and uncle Paul have nursed their prides and joys across Australia for the race: a 1982 Royale RP31M and a 1969 Brabham BT29 are family favourites. From the stands, Lloyd quietly captures the community coming together. At its simplest, a photo of gleaming metallic paint—so bright that it casts off glitter in the light—documents of the aesthetics of racing. It’s also a testament to the love and energy needed for an old machine to shine for one weekend a year. To us outsiders, it’s curious dedication. But there’s something beautiful at work here. While the adage ‘the car is the star’ holds true, for readers, the real magic is in the owners’ ritual devotion to the annual event that gives their prized possession purpose. Lloyd captures it all with the joy of a fan—these images could easily come from an enthusiast’s photo album. You might have even found them stashed in your parents’ garage. Thankfully, we don’t have to go digging, because they’re in a book not a box. INGRID KESA

In a small corner of YouTube, you’ll find the web’s kindest community. Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) is a pseudo-medical term for the tingles certain sounds send down your spine. Video creators and their fans rally around the sensation. A woman softly whispering affirmations, fingers tapping a table, simulated massages and haircuts all evoke the feeling. It’s part physical pleasure, but on a purer level, these videos exist to ease loneliness. With her debut release Empty Gallery, Melbourne producer waterhouse rehouses the central sentiments of the digital subculture—intimacy and care—in eight electronic compositions. Blending ASMR with the brutality of club musici s difficult territory, but waterhouse navigates it with ease. The restrained, delicate vocals—recorded directly through her laptop microphone—mimic the whispers of ASMR. It floats between impressionistic strings and soft percussion, evoking cathedrals, museums, bedrooms, and churchyards. There is peacefulnes, but the serenity is compromised by an underlying melancholy. This is where Empty Gallery differs from the whispers of ASMR: both suggest intimacy, but waterhouse never puts you at ease. Unlike ASMR’s anonymous therapeutic come-ons, these songs are suffused with a personal narrative of sadness and exile. In the empty gallery, alienation is the price of admission. JAMES STEELE

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There’s this one memory Lucy Haslam comes back to: it’s a stinking hot day in Tamworth, April 2014, and her 24-year-old son Dan has dragged himself from chemo to MADDISON watch NSW Health Minister Jillian Skinner CONNAUGHTON open a cancer centre. “Dan looked terrible, — like a ghost,” Lucy says, but after the cerWEED emony wrapped, he introduced himself to the minister. “Hi, I’m Dan Haslam, I just wondered if I could talk to you about medical cannabis?” Dan told Minister Skinner how he’d started using cannabis to manage a violent illness called “anticipatory nausea” brought on by his chemo. He’d get physically sick just thinking about a session.

Dan Haslam with his mother, Lucy, and father, Lou.

There were also the powerful and addictive painkillers he’d been prescribed: Endone and OxyContin. The struggle to get off them left him suicidal. Then, in October of 2013, encouraged by a friend, Dan sat in his backyard and smoked a joint for the first time. His dad Lou—a former undercover drug cop—had to roll it for him. Afterwards, Dan was hungry for the first time in months, and hadn’t been sick from chemo since. After hearing Dan’s story, Minister Skinner was quiet for a moment. “You know,” she said, placing her hand on his arm, “Smoking will give you lung cancer.” Of course, Dan already had cancer—terminal adenocarcinoma—that started in his bowel four years earlier, and had since spread to his liver, bones, and lungs.

Lucy was dumbfounded by the minister’s response. “You’ve got a young man who’s dying standing in front of you, vomit bag in one hand, chemo pump around his neck. He’s pouring his heart out to you and that’s all you’ve got to say?” she wonders. Looking back, that was the moment the gloves came off. Ask anyone on the inside how Australia—a country otherwise resolutely anti-drug—moved so quickly on medical cannabis, and they’ll point to Lucy and Dan Haslam. They were the tipping point. In just over a year, the former nurse and her son from a tiny regional town built a network large enough to storm the halls of power in Canberra. First there was the massive Change.org petition started in early 2014 calling for legalisation of medical cannabis, each signature triggering an email to Jillian Skinner. In June 2014 came the pair’s interview with Alan Jones, which turned the conservative shock jock into an unlikely ally. Somehow, they even won over now-Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce and Liberal NSW Premier Mike Baird. The pair had humanised the national debate in a way decades of campaigners had failed to. In November 2014, Baird addressed the medical cannabis symposium that Lucy organised in Tamworth. There, Lucy and Dan were joined by another parent who’d soon become a key figure in the push for legislation. Michael Lambert had started giving his two-year-old daughter Katelyn cannabis oil just months before the symposium to manage her Dravet syndrome, a severe form of epilepsy which causes hundreds of seizures a day. One night after coming across a video of a young girl in the US with Dravet who’d dramatically reduced her seizures using the oil, Michael typed “cannabidiol oil for sale” into Google. “I just ordered it

thinking, ‘This will never come through customs, I’m going to get in trouble for this,’” he told VICE, but his daughter had run out of options. The oil did arrive, and the effect was instant. “It seemed like all of the noise in her head had gone quiet,” Michael explains. Katelyn’s grandparents, businessman Barry Lambert and his wife Joy, also saw the impact cannabidiol oil had on their granddaughter. So, in June 2015, they gave the University of Sydney $33.7 million— the institution’s largest ever donation—to support cannabis research. Because of the Lambert’s donation, researchers in Sydney are set to start clinical trials this year: treating everything from severe childhood epilepsy to chemotherapy nausea, and pain with cannabis. Professor Nick Lintzeris says that if medical marijuana is going to be offered like any other drug, it needs to be researched like one—something government and pharmaceutical companies alike neglected have to do for decades. Dan passed away in February 2015, and hundreds of people traveled from Australia, and around the world, to pay their respects. Premier Baird spoke at the memorial, telling those gathered that every step towards medical cannabis was built on what Dan had left behind. A year later Narcotic Drugs Amendment Bill 2016 passed unopposed through Parliament, paving the way for the legalisation of medical cannabis in Australia. However, while legislative fine-tuning and clinical studies remain incomplete, many Australians will continue to seek DIY workarounds. Just like Dan, who had to boil down his own cannabis oil in the back shed using a rice cooker because the law made it so hard to get. Lucy Haslam continues the fight she and Dan started, selling the family business to start her own affordable medical cannabis company, United in Compassion. As the government drafts regulations over the next six months, she’ll be there advocating for patients. “You know, mums would walk over hot coals for their kids. I would’ve done anything for Dan,” she says. “I still feel like it helps me keep connected to him. I’m still doing this for him, even though he’s gone.”

Photo by Paul Matthews

The Australian Mums and Dads that got Medical Marijuana Over the Line

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Helen Oyeyemi’s Major Keys LAUREN OYLER — WOMEN

In January, the notoriously nomadic novelist Helen Oyeyemi moved to Lexington, Kentucky, for a residency at the university there. “I find it quite hard for the place I’m physically in to make a dent on my mind,” she told me by phone. “It might actually be because I read so much that I’m already in other places, so it’s just a difficulty in even knowing where I am at any given time.” Oyeyemi’s first book of short stories, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, will be published by Riverhead this month. The collection’s stories revolve around the theme of keys. Although the essence of a key seems fixed,

defined by a singular purpose, it’s as elusive as locations are in Oyeyemi’s mind. “They have this power. They almost seem to have a will to circulate. You’re always losing them and finding them, and I think it’s a good way of talking about realms and things we think that we have control of.” For Oyeyemi, the same is true of the written word. Her book proposal started with a line she thought came from one of her favorite books, Kornel Esti by the Hungarian writer Dezsö Kosztolányi: “There’s something I must tell you all, and it’s something about keys.” When

“I find it quite hard for the place I’m physically in to make a dent on my mind. It might actually be because I read so much that I’m already in other places, so it’s just a difficulty in even knowing where I am at any given time.” she went back to find the quote, it wasn’t there. “I was like, the line got lost!” she said. “I reread the entire book looking for this line. That’s when I knew that I would have a lot of trouble with keys.” Oyeyemi said she thinks slowly but writes fast, which explains how she’s on her seventh book at age 31. Whether this, along with the constant moves and interest in keys, signifies a personal quest, the answer may be both yes and no. “I’m not convinced that I know how to write,” she said. “When it comes to writing, I’m still very much learning on the job, which is OK.” | VICE’S WOMEN’S INTEREST CHANNEL

The Case for Carpooling Earlier this year, a team of 24 researchers presented evidence that the Anthropocene—an entirely new geological epoch DEREK marked by human impacts— MEAD has started within the last few — centuries and that vehicle emisTHE sions played a significant role in FUTURE making 2015 the hottest year on record. There is little doubt that humans have indelibly changed the fundamental processes that govern our Earth, generally for the worse. So what do we do? As unsexy as it sounds, I posit that efficiency is our path to salvation—and the journey starts with us, people.

7.3 BILLION

70 PERCENT

2016

22 HOURS

2025

The current population is nearly triple the 2.5 billion people there were on Earth in 1950. More people use more resources. Unless we get more Earths, it’s unsustainable. Cars account for roughly 70 percent of non-foot travel in countries that are members of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. Reducing the number of cars on the road, while still letting people have personal transportation is this year’s hot train of thought from Tesla’s Elon Musk, Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick, and the CEO of General Motors, Mary Barra. The answer lies in automation. For 22 hours a day, a normal person’s car sits in parking lots, on the street, or in a garage. Multiply that across more than a billion cars—that’s a ton of space wasted for the sake of convenience. It’s realistic to think that by 2025, car ownership will mean using an app to have a Ford delivered for a few hours, not having one parked outside your house. Congestion would go down, and factories would churn out fewer cars. | VICE’S TECHNOLOGY CHANNEL

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NATHAN SCHNEIDER — ECONOMICS

Chances are, if you live in the United States, you hate your internet service provider. The American Customer Satisfaction Index reports that no industry in the country is more disliked than the ISPs. Many of us have no real choice: It’s either spotty service from a gigantic monopoly or nothing. The fee structure reads like a ransom note; customer support makes the seeker feel like the one bound and gagged in a car trunk. We usually think of consumer choice as a matter of isolated individuals transacting with faceless companies and trying to do so cleverly; too rarely do we consider the choices we can create for one another. At a cafe in the middle of a blizzard this winter, I met Rick Cobb—a few decades my senior, seated behind a formidable laptop—and he told me about his ISP. His. Way back when, he said, he probably would have been satisfied if Comcast or CenturyLink or whatever else had served his neighbourhood in the mountains between Boulder and Nederland, Colorado. But as his needs out-grew dial-up, the companies didn’t come. So, about 15 years ago, he and a group of neighbours decided to bring the internet in themselves. With experience among them in software engineering, the cable industry, and ham radio, they began by tinkering. With a 40-foot mast held up by a car tire or cinder blocks, they tested different antenna locations to optimise the reception at their houses. They pooled their money for a good T1 connection and spread it across the neighbourhood through the thin air. Soon, other neighbours came knocking. “We tapped into this huge, unmet demand for higher-speed internet connectivity,” Cobb told me. The connection speeds still aren’t great by city standards—they’re no longer considered “broadband” by the FCC’s new definition—but they’re good enough for most people. In December 2001, Cobb and his neighbours formalised their experiment as the Magnolia Road Internet Cooperative, named after the main road along their side of Boulder Canyon. (They refer to it by its acronym, MRIC, pronounced “em-rick.”) The cost has always been a flat $50, plus

some equipment. There are other small wireless ISPs in the area, but this is the only one cooperatively owned, governed, and operated by its more than 300 members. One of them, Aaron Caplan, moved to Magnolia Road in 2004 and joined MRIC. He gradually became more and more involved. At the time, member-volunteers were doing the work of installing new antennas and troubleshooting problems, and he took part. Without much previous knowledge of internet infrastructure, he learned

skills from other members and became one of the network’s go-to technicians. Caplan enjoyed helping so much that he cut back hours at his day job for a passport-and-visa company and started working part-time for MRIC as a paid contractor. He has kept that role even after moving his family into town, out of MRIC’s range. He now works with a handful of other contractors to maintain the network’s antennas. This is a totally different way of transacting for your internet service, a way in which it is more truly yours. Tech support

is someone you know, someone who lives nearby and relies on the same service you use. MRIC members don’t have to help out with troubleshooting if they don’t want to, but the option is there. Those who are so inclined get to tinker under the hood and can feel that much more wholesome and DIY-chic each time they fire up their web browsers. They can also join the board of directors if they want—or not. Unlike many other local wireless providers, there are no fixed usage caps, so members are free to use whatever bandwidth is available at a given time. But that also means they’re responsible to one another not to use up more than their share. The neighbours might complain. “We’re all sharing the bandwidth, so I think there is some additional awareness,” Caplan told me. “Versus it’s some company and you don’t care about them at all.” Boulder County is a mecca of “conscious” lifestyle; it’s the home of Slow Money, and Slow Food is so omnipresent that non-organic produce can feel like a rare treat. MRIC’s kind of slow computing, therefore, seems perfectly at home. But MRIC is just one of the country’s many cooperative ISPs. Mostly in rural areas, they’re often built atop old telephone cooperatives that, in the past, filled the gaps left by hegemonic utilities with democratic enterprise. Others are much larger, covering whole regions and crossing state lines. If more of us could trust our ISPs in this way, we might think differently about big policy questions like net neutrality, in which the debate is premised on unaccountable providers. There’s no need to reiterate the dependence the economy has formed on perpetual internet access. But it seems incongruous that we should have to hate the ISPs that bring us this wondrous thing. An item worth adding to our collective to-do list, as we press further into the science-fiction future furnished by the internet, is for more of us to take responsibility for owning and running it. Some of us might band together with neighbours, or some of us might pass municipal wireless in city hall. If we’re going to depend on the internet, we should be able to trust where it comes from.

Photo collage by Kitron Neuschatz

Zen and the Art of Internet Maintenance

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Why We Wear It: Tie-Dye ALICE -NEWELLHANSON —

about Woodstock, he funded artists to make several hundred tie-dye T-shirts to be sold at the festival. Rit became the official hippie dye. The arrival of a generation of young people interested in psychedelic patterns saved the company from bankruptcy. Ann Thomas, a former Capitol Records copywriter later known as “Tie-Dye Annie,” and Maureen Mubeem, an artist, both believed in tie-dye’s spiritual potential. Frequently collaborating, they became tie-dye gurus. Informed by astrology and colour theory, Mubeem made custom pieces for the Rolling Stones and Michael Butler, the producer of Hair. “For a Virgo, I’d make a more intricate pattern,” she told counterculture magazine Rags in 1970. Choosing colours, she said, “has to do with your sensitivity or your absorption rate of other people’s vibrations.” Tie-dye far outlasted the Summer of Love. Rit ushered the look into high fashion, encouraging designers to incorporate tie-dye fabrics by Rit-approved artists Will and Eileen Richardson into their collections. Model Marisa Berenson posed in a tie-dyed kaftan by Halston in Vogue in 1970, and Ali McGraw was spotted in a tie-dye blouse while walking down Fifth Avenue the following year. Soon, kids were hosting tie-dye parties in suburban backyards across America.

Tie-dye had another wave of popularity at the tail end of the 1980s, in Manchester warehouses during the Second Summer of Love (substitute MDMA for LSD, Soul II Soul for Jefferson Airplane). But by July 1992, Kurt Cobain was telling the publication Melody Maker, “I wouldn’t wear a tie-dyed T-shirt unless it was dyed with the urine of Phil Collins and the blood of Jerry Garcia.” Tie-dye’s lasting association with the flower children was a mixed blessing. For Cobain, tie-dye symbolised the failure of the hippie generation—“they gave up,” he once said. For an awkward teenage Chelsea Clinton, who appeared in several baggy tie-dye garments that same year, it was the opposite: a symbol of idealism to hold on to. That’s the power of tie-dye: More than any one movement, it represents individualism. Rayanne Graff wore it in My So-Called Life, so did Garth in Wayne’s World, and Kanye West in the video for “Bound 2.” During recent shows at New York Fashion Week, I’ve seen it on the runways of Alexander Wang and Rodarte. And if you’re a Deadhead, it never went away. Tie-dye is the most Tumblr of fashion trends: It’s nostalgic, iconic, endlessly variable, and for $4 you can DIY. | VICE’S FASHION CHANNEL

Photo collage by Elizabeth Renstrom, Kanye West photo via AP Images, all other photos via Getty Images

FASHION

Like Birkenstocks, tie-dye was once a fashion exclusively owned by your Deadhead cousin. But recently, like your cousin when he first discovered Jerry Garcia, tie-dye has been reborn. I’ve spotted it on models, on emerging surf-pop musicians, and on downtown New Yorkers who eat California-inspired health food. How did the crunchiest look around go from granola to genuinely cool? Janis Joplin is the spiritual mother of tie-dye as we know it. Along with Joe Cocker and John Sebastian, who tie-dyed his own underwear, Joplin played Woodstock in August 1969 wearing garments covered in kaleidoscopic swirls. While tie-dye has its roots in ancient forms of “resist-dyeing” (see: traditional West African textiles, pre-Columbian Peruvian fabrics, and Japanese shibori), Woodstock made it a countercultural icon and a lifestyle choice— specifically, one that involved drugs, free love, and music parents hated. In the early 1960s, Rit Dye, the supermarket dye still used today, was about to go out of business when Don Price, a marketer at the company, saw an opportunity to introduce the brand to some creative types he’d located in Greenwich Village. He advised Rit to replace its boxed powders with squeezable liquid dyes, better for creating multicolour designs. And when he heard

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BURNER PHONES IN THE US-MEXICO BORDERLANDS