Photography By Howard T. Fang

“We sell these popper things,” says 70-year-old Karen Mason, who gestures toward a Ziploc bag of assorted amber-colored vials atop her paper-strewn desk in a basement office on Sunset Boulevard. Outside the office door, thousands of DVDs with titles like A Rim With a View, Black Gang Bang, and Hole Whores of the Holy Empire collect dust inside boxes that are piled to the ceiling. “I think you’re supposed to inhale them or something,” Mason says, still glancing at the Ziploc.

Mason’s husband, Barry, a tidy 73-year-old clad in a purple fedora and an orange sweater, is seated to her right. He interjects: “I think it’s something related to sex.” 

Mason, slightly nettled, inspects the bag and reads the labels aloud: “ ‘Pig Sweat.’ ‘Rush.’ ‘Blue Boy.’ I don’t know why anyone buys this stuff. Sometimes when they leak, you can smell it. And it smells awful.”

“I don’t like it,” Barry grumbles.

Whether they like it or not, the Masons have been dealing in poppers for more than 40 years. Upon returning to Los Angeles in the early 1970s,
she, a burned-out courtroom reporter for the Miami Herald, and he, a special-effects designer and an inventor who made a mark in the world of dialysis machines, needed work. They spotted a classified ad placed by Larry Flynt, who was seeking distributors for his magazines, like Hustler. After responding to the ad and connecting with Team Flynt, Barry went around to local businesses with newsstands asking if they’d like to get their hands on the often-embattled smut rag. 

“In two days we had orders for 2,500 copies,” Barry says.

On Santa Monica Boulevard, in West Hollywood, one customer, Book Circus, blew through 600 copies a month of another Flynt publication, Blueboy, his gay hardcore title. “When our truck pulled up, the customers would run outside and help us carry the boxes in to the register,” Mason says. “They loved that magazine.” 

Before long, the owners of Book Circus, two gay men, stopped paying their bills — drugs were the rumored cause — and owed the Masons nearly $10,000 for magazines. The Masons, meanwhile, went behind their backs and swiped up the lease from the landlord, reopening the store as Circus of Books. Through their distribution route, they’d developed relationships with several hardcore porn publishers, who felt comfortable selling to them (it was, at that time, tricky to acquire porn), and the couple restocked the store and hired the original staff. They later opened a second location, on Sunset Boulevard, in Silver Lake. 

“The stores had sexually explicit material of all kinds,” Mason says. “Transsexual, bisexual — all very explicit. But it was known for the gays. I find it all very distasteful. I don’t know why anybody buys this stuff.” 

In 1953, as a response to rising oppression of social outliers under McCarthyism, the nation’s first pro-gay magazine, ONE, went into print. It sold alongside pulp fiction and other risqué material at regular newsstands in major cities. 

“The section was covered in a tarp or curtain, and that’s where the naughty bits were,” says Joseph Hawkins, an anthropology and gender studies lecturer at the University of Southern California, and director of the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives. “It was a heady experience because maybe you’d meet someone else who was looking for that same material,” Hawkins says. “Maybe you’d hook up with somebody. Or maybe you’d get arrested by a vice cop, who’d say the material you were taking was indecent.” 

The adult bookstore as we know it — or as we will soon remember it — began to appear a decade later, following an explosion in material previously considered legally obscene. In 1964, the Damron Address Book went into circulation. It was a pocket-sized travel guide for gays modeled after The Negro Motorist Green Book, a resource that helped black Americans travel safely through the South. 

By the 1970s, Book Circus was well-established as a nexus for gay sex in West Hollywood, where, in typical L.A. fashion, men cruised from their cars, ensnaring traffic between Book Circus, on Santa Monica Boulevard, and Drake’s, another adult bookstore down the street. 

Neighbors complained of the nightly congestion, and, to make the cruising block more inconvenient, the city installed odd signs along the cross streets between the two stores, which read, no turns 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. nightly. The regulation and signs remain.

“It was fun!” says a 50-year-old television producer, who wouldn’t give his name. “In the bushes, in every nook and cranny of these sweet little yards on La Jolla Avenue, people were fucking. It was a cruising maze!” he says. “On busy nights, the streets would be packed like a drive-in movie.”

When it came to their children’s teachers, and family and friends, the Masons quickly learned to say they were in the business of real estate.

“We used to say, ‘We have a bookstore,’ and people would say, ‘What kind of bookstore? I love books! Of course we want to come to your bookstore!’ ” Mason’s response would typically be, “No, you don’t want to come to our bookstore. Drop it.” 

When the Masons’ daughter Rachel, one of three children, went away to Yale, she came across a book, One-Handed Histories: The Eroto-Politics of Gay Male Video Pornography.

“I went through the names of the [porn creators] in the book, and my parents had something to say about every person,” Rachel says. “That was my first inkling that they were at the center of this world — and knew everybody.” 

Rachel, a performance artist, is now working on a documentary about the store, titled Circus of Books, set to be released later this year. She recalls spending plenty of time around the store as a kid, thinking nothing of the merchandise, and sometimes darting between the saloon doors into the adult section just to get a rise out of her mother. 

 “I haven’t met a gay man over 50 in the entire world who hasn’t heard about this store,” she says. “Even in Europe, it’s a landmark. I interviewed one man for the film who talked about the store like a church. Then he talked about it like a hospital, during the AIDS epidemic.” 

Many of the employees came to West Hollywood estranged from their conservative, religious families. 

“During AIDS we learned how parents dealt with their children who were gay,” Barry says. “They wouldn’t talk to their kids. We didn’t know that people were like that.” 

“And then their kid would die, and the parents would call me,” Mason says. “I had nothing to say to those mothers. Those were perfectly good kids, and they weren’t talking to their child, over being gay?”

It was a different story for the Masons when, in 2000, at Thanksgiving dinner, one of their sons came out. 

“I was terrible,” Mason says. “I said awful things that night. I didn’t think I was antigay, but when it came to my own child, I was profoundly affected. I had to rethink a lot of my religious beliefs in a different way, and I’ve done that. It wasn’t easy, and I’m not proud of it.”

For nearly a decade, sales have been meager, if not stagnant, at Circus of Books, and the Masons, apathetically, expect to close both stores this year. 

“We’re not interesting. It’s not interesting. Does anyone even care?” Mason says. “What’s going to happen here after we close? Maybe we can rent it to people who will turn it into a coffee shop, or a clothing store, or an art gallery, or something very trendy and modern. That could be nice.”  

In 1946, Scotty Bowers, then 23, had returned from World War II and landed a job as a pump jockey at a Richfield gas station on Hollywood Boulevard and Van Ness Avenue, in Los Angeles. Like much of the U.S. at the time, Southern California was flooded with young men returning from war: penniless, listless, on the make for work or wives or both, with little to fill their days other than hanging around with old military buddies.

Bowers worked the night shift and, just a few days in, the actor Walter Pidgeon propositioned him while he was filling his tank. Bowers got in the car and went home with him, where Pidgeon performed oral sex on him and gave Bowers 20 bucks. 

Bowers had been hustling since he was a child — “on the ball,” he calls it. At 11, when he moved with his mother to Chicago from a small farm in rural Illinois, he became involved with a Catholic priest who lived across the street, he says, getting a dollar every time he performed a sexual favor. 

 “As a little kid, if someone was interested in me, I picked up on it and I was available, whereas a lot of kids would call the law,” he says. “Pretty soon, I was having sex with every Catholic priest in Chicago.”

 He also sold newspapers and worked as a shoeshine boy. One day, when the 11-year-old Bowers was selling the Chicago Tribune for 10 cents a piece, someone asked if he had any condoms to sell.

“The next day, I went to the Chicago River and got a long net with a pole, and I went fishing for rubbers. They came out of the sewer, and I’d scoop them up, wash them off, and hang them on the fucking line to dry. And that’s how I got into the rubber business. One Sunday morning, I had 150 goddamn rubbers hanging on a fishing line drying off,” he says. “Anything anyone wanted, I found a way to get it.” 

At the gas station, Bowers noticed male customers were often eyeing the handsome young vets, sometimes saying things like, “I’d sure like to take that one out to dinner.” Bowers thought to himself, Why don’t you skip the fucking dinner and just give him 20 bucks to suck his dick?

It took little arm-twisting, Bowers says, to get the tricks on board. They were broke and bored, and had little to lose, and soon, as Bowers writes in his book, Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars, “My gas station became the focal point for everyone looking for a trick. It became the crossroads of the city’s sexual underbelly.... Whenever anyone was on the prowl for sex, my gas station was the place to head.”

 He drilled a hole in the washroom wall and charged men $5 to watch guys urinate, or masturbate. An unused trailer, which a neighbor paid to park on the lot, became a place for on-site sex, and a two-story brick motel across the street, where a “sweet, fat old queen” was the night manager, offered hourly rates to Bowers and his boys.

 Bowers says people had been hounding him for years to write a book about his days as Hollywood’s gay Heidi Fleiss. “Finally, I thought, what the hell. Years ago, I would never have written a book with living people, because they were friends. Good, close friends,” he tells me, seated on the back deck of his home, a small bungalow perched high on a hillside in the Laurel Canyon neighborhood of Los Angeles. “Everyone is dead now.” 

Full Service, published by Grove Press in 2012, became a New York Times best seller, and is currently being adapted into a movie by Matt Tyrnauer, director of Valentino: The Last Emperor. Bowers wrote his book in collaboration with Lionel Friedberg, a writer and filmmaker living in Los Angeles who met Bowers at a dinner party in Beverly Hills. According to Bowers, the two were guests at the party. According to Friedberg, Bowers was the hired bartender. 

The book is an upbeat romp through decades of the sex trade during Hollywood’s golden years, with Bowers at the center. He claims to have had a 50-year friendship with Katharine Hepburn, adding that he set her up with more than 150 women. And he says he was a regular in Cary Grant’s bed, at a time when Grant was married to Barbara Hutton. Among the other big names Bowers says he got to know, sexually or by arranging sexual liaisons are Gore Vidal, Cole Porter, Rock Hudson, director George Cukor, Spencer Tracy, Errol Flynn, and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, each with unique sexual tastes, mostly gay or bisexual, that Bowers was consistently able to satisfy.

“Cole Porter’s passion was oral sex,” Bowers writes. “He could easily suck off 20 guys, one after another. And he always swallowed.” 

Tennessee Williams, says Bowers, wrote a short story about him. “He made me look like a mad queen flying over Hollywood Boulevard, leading around all the other queens,” Bowers says, claiming he made Williams tear the story up. “Tennessee actually cried when I asked him to do that.” 

Even at 92, Bowers is an impish old man with dazzling blue eyes and a wash of pearly hair. He likes blue jeans and denim shirts, reminiscent of the uniform he wore at the gas station. He’s personable and funny, and one wants to believe him. Maybe everything he says is completely true. Or maybe not. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and Bowers has none. There are no photos of Bowers with his celebrity friends, no personal letters that can be traced to them, not even a photo of the trailer parked behind the gas station. Although in the memoir he alludes to a little black book of names and phone numbers, he now says that never existed. He did not keep a personal journal or diary. And, of course, everyone is dead. Everyone except for a woman named Barbara, whom, he claims, he set up with Hepburn when Hepburn was in her 40s and Barbara was 17. He says the two maintained a relationship for the rest of Hepburn’s life, but no one investigating Bowers’s story has yet been able to verify if Barbara even exists. 

“Now [Barbara is] married to a guy with a lot of money, and he doesn’t know anything. From time to time, she still gets in touch with me, but I don’t call her because of her husband,” Bowers says. 

The other problem relates to gut instincts. The world Bowers creates comes off as almost too decadent, too Babylonian, too larger-than-life to be entirely true. For all the talk of her tomboyish ways, dozens of biographies were written about Katharine Hepburn with no suggestion she was gay. At least not until 2006, with William J. Mann’s book Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn, which rests a great part of its narrative on that possibility. Mann’s source for this information? Scotty Bowers. Then there are the 150 women allegedly paid to have sex with Hepburn. Oddly, none has come forward with her own tell-all. 

According to Friedberg, Grove Press lawyered up when it signed the book and the text is libel-proof, namely because no one in it is still alive to sue. Friedberg says he never doubted Bowers’s stories, namely because they were so consistent, down to the smallest details. 

“It was clear that everything tied in with people he said he knew, songs that were being made at the time. It became very clear that none of this was fabricated. I went around town and asked, and everyone said, ‘Oh, yes, I remember Scotty telling me that story,” Friedberg recalls. 

“I would not have put anything on paper if I wasn’t absolutely, 100% certain it was true,” Friedberg says. After the manuscript for Full Service was completed, he gave it to  Gore Vidal, a lifetime friend of Bowers. “Gore read it and, sitting at his dining room table here in L.A., said, ‘Everything you have written in this book is 100% true, and I can vouch for that.’”

Vidal also provided a blurb for the book jacket. In 2010, however, Vidal begun suffering the effects of Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome, a brain disorder caused by alcoholism (he was officially diagnosed in 2012). The symptoms include severe memory loss, and Vidal died two years later. 

Other than that, there’s no one to corroborate Bowers’s story besides Bowers. Yet Bowers does not seem completely full of shit. In the introduction to his book, he says he was not motivated by money but wished just to get this part of Hollywood history down on record. “I’ve been reading about this case, and I think skepticism is a good place to start,” says Lawrence Patihis, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Mississippi, who studies memory, particularly autobiographical memory. “When people get older, they get less good at distinguishing whether a memory was imagined or whether it really happened.”

Being able to recount a story verbatim, in exquisite detail, is not necessarily a sign of a true or a false memory, Patihis argues. “In order to get that consistency, you just have to replay the memory many, many times — go over it many times in your own mind. You can have that consistency in your memory even with false memories.”

Michael Cunningham, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hours and, most recently, A Wild Swan and Other Tales, is more sanguine. “We know Cary Grant was gay,” he points out. “Look at all those pictures of him at breakfast with Randolph Scott. But queer history is full of secrets. And there’s no proof about people who are no longer here to tell the tale, and they range from Abraham Lincoln to Marlon Brando. I think our relationship to our own queer history should be what we decide it is.”

Bowers takes me into his Laurel Canyon house to show me around. His wife, Lois, is nestled in the far-left cushion of the sofa, where she’s peeking over her glasses at the television; a rerun of Keeping Up With the Kardashians roars through the room. 

Next to the sofa are several cans of paint, a stack of flashlights, a bundle of unused Priority Mail envelopes from the post office, a bag of wine bottle corks, a pile of Beanie Babies, and a stack of telephone books. To the left, the dining room table is covered in papers; old mail; documents heaped three feet high, nearly reaching the chandelier; and an assortment of Tiffany-glass lamps and decorative blue vases. There is a narrow path meandering through the living room toward the kitchen. On the right, hundreds of magazines and tabloids are piled atop the coffee table in the shape of a desert mesa. On the left side, a mound of umbrellas, picture frames, Christmas ornaments, alarm clocks, and other bric-a-brac frames the pathway. In the kitchen, a towering jumble of aluminum cans balances on a drying rack. Bowers produces one of his favorite possessions, a photo of him and Lois taken 30 years ago. It’s a snapshot blown up to portrait size. They’re sitting at a table in a restaurant, and Bowers looks more or less the same. Lois’s right hand is delicately touching the handle of a teacup; in her left hand she holds a cigarette. They are laughing. She’s looking at the camera; he’s looking at her. His hand is touching her hand. He produces another photo, taken in 1955: Bowers and four other guys sitting in a new Thunderbird. 

“These were all guys from the gas station,” Bowers says. “They’re all dead now.” He glances at his wife, who is unblinking in the same position, glaring at the TV, and lowers his voice to a whisper. “This guy had a prick like this,” he says holding his hands about 12 inches apart. 

We step back out onto the narrow deck. It feels poised to tumble down the hillside at any moment into the Los Angeles basin, where the quiet city stretches as far as the eye can see. The tidy skyscrapers of downtown huddle at the center of the view, veiled in a thin, brown layer of smog that has obscured the snow-capped mountains to the east. A pair of red-tailed hawks hover a few yards out. 

“Those goddamn hawks,” Bowers says, squinting through the sunlight, licking his lips, his right hand bobbing rhythmically. “They never flap their wings. They just ride on the air.” 

Bowers resists commenting on anything other than what is immediately in front of him. He recounts the stories of his life in meticulous, scripted detail. But when I prod him for something deeper–to philosophize–there’s a pause, as though he is searching for the bigger picture, and he comes up short.

I ask: What’s been the meaning of his life?

Bowers stares at the golden sunlight on the concrete, his right hand still dancing. Licking his lips again, he rises and shuffles over to a corner, empties a bucket of stagnant rainwater onto the patio, and shuffles back to his seat. 

“Back at Iwo Jima, in those days, when you were wounded, you’d head back toward the beach by yourself. And then you’d bleed yourself out to death on the beach, alone on that black sand,” he says. “And when you’re dead, you’re dead, baby. I’ve seen too many fucking dead people.”

We like to believe the worst, most tawdry tales of Hollywood, that actors have decadent, scandalous lives, but Cunningham has a different take on his time in the homes of the famous. “They’re actually more guarded than most people,” he says. “You go to all those Hollywood parties, and everybody is so nervous. Everybody knows, somewhere at the party, there’s some producer who might or might not hire them someday. People stay sober. There’s no funny business.”

Bowers may be telling the truth — or it may just be the truth we want. Does it matter?   

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Untitled, 1999

As a young photographer in 1980s San Francisco, Catherine Opie became fascinated by the “X Portfolio,” Robert Mapplethorpe’s visceral portraits of bondage and sadomasochism. After making friends with a gallery owner who represented Mapplethorpe, Opie, a member of the S&M community, visited time after time to privately view the images.

“I took lots of photographs throughout the ’80s, especially black-and-white photographs, and they were never really good enough. They just looked like Mapplethorpe photographs,” Opie says on a recent afternoon at her studio in the West Adams district of Los Angeles, the barn door of which is framed by a pair of orange trees, flung open, with roosters crowing in the background.

In 1999, while fiddling around in the darkroom with some of those photographs, she selected detailed moments of larger photographs. The result, her “O Portfolio,” has a different sort of intimacy than Mapplethorpe’s sharp, full-scale scenes: Hers are grainy, tender fragments of bondage, blood, and needles. 

Now, for the first time in L.A., Opie’s “O Portfolio” is being displayed in its entirety at LACMA. Through September 5, it will complement Mapplethorpe’s “X,” on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum as part of the exhibition, "Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Medium," co-organized by the two museums.

“ ‘O’ is the Story of O,” Opie says, referring to the 1950s erotic novel. “It’s my last name, Opie, and it’s vaginal. And then it’s X and O, like tic-tac-toe, so it’s a game with Mapplethorpe.” 

Also this year, in Los Angeles, Opie is working on a commission for the new federal courthouse downtown. It’s a series of six photographs. Each panel is 8 by 16 feet, and collectively they depict a single image of Yosemite Falls from the top peak to the water below. The photographs will be displayed on six stories, with the bottom two floors capturing the reflection of the falls in the river.

That’s my scale of justice,” Opie says. “People who go into a federal courthouse will often lose their life’s liberty. What is iconic in California? Yosemite Falls. How do I make something work on a metaphorical level in relationship to that iconic weight?”

Opie rocketed to fame in the art world in 1994 with a single photograph. She carved the word pervert into her chest and took a self-portrait. It was shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art. 

“I’m a fan of blood,” Opie says. “The permission to play with blood in the ’80s and ’90s was very much political in relation to the AIDS crisis in our community. Blood became the substance everyone was afraid of.”

Opie says she’s mesmerized by the specificity of community, which she sees as something closer to landscape. 

“When you drive through California and you’re heading up to the mountains, you understand that landscape is innately your experience of what the drive is going to be,” she says. “It’s the same thing with identification in our community. If you’re walking through the Castro in the early ’80s with a leather jacket and some cock rings on your snap lapel, you could identify as queer. I look at it as signifiers and identification in the same way we map out landscape.”

Untitled #1 (Surfers), 2003

That idea, in the early 2000s, led to two more of Opie’s most celebrated works. She was grappling with the question of how to assess the American landscape through photographs. One August, she was visiting her lover’s family in Louisiana.

“It seemed to me, let’s talk about it from the site of a high school football field, because wherever you go in this country, there are going to be lights on, a high school football game during the fall. It is utterly a part of American identity.” 

Opie asked if she could take portraits of her nephew’s high school football team at practice. 

“I began to think about their vulnerability in a way I never thought about with high school football players before, and part of that is being at war. So many of these young men are going to go off to war, and some of the ones I photographed did go off to war and they did die,” she says. “In the same way I was supporting my community in the ’90s, and bearing witness to AIDS decimating that community, all of a sudden I realized somebody like a high school football player is vulnerable as well in so many different ways. But as a culture, we load the politics of masculinity and power and all these things onto them.”

A few years earlier, she shot another series of portraits of young men, this time surfers, but found her subjects were almost too pretty for portraiture. The resulting images were distant and hushed specks of flesh floating on the surface of an abyss, portrayals of a community she describes as temporary, almost nomadic.

“The iconic image of the surfer is the action shot. Just like the action shot of the football player,” she says. “But if we take it as landscape, then how do we think of it in a different way? Can it be meditative? Can we acknowledge space in a different way?”

When Ansel Adams photographed the American West and Yosemite, he received complaints that there were no people in his photographs. In Opie’s work, in a different sense and in a time preoccupied with branding the individual, that could be the appeal. How we think of ourselves would be radically different if more people looked past each pretty surfer, and saw the ocean. 

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You see them marching down Commercial Street in bejeweled armadas—three, four, sometimes 10 deep—sheets of flat-ironed hair slappingat the tiny straps of their backless minidresses, and airbrushed makeup the hue of Easter decorations. As they trot by in their towering heels, horror seeps from the faces of the beach bum locals, who consider whether to call the police, or the Environmental Protection Agency.

It’s a Friday night in Provincetown, in late August, and the mise-en-scène of this delicate ecosystem, plopped atop a sandbar in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, is being threatened by a new and unfamiliar scourge. They are called, simply, The Bachelorettes.

If you ask the P-Town denizens, these bachelorettes are yanked directly from bad reality TV: loud, dismissive, entitled, violent Hummer-dealership versions of human beings. When they’re not skipping out on bar tabs and throwing drinks at the DJ, you might spot them in the waking hours, considerably more docile after a modicum of calm and shame sets in, doing a little shopping around town with an alcohol-meets-gravity-induced black eye or a splintered finger.

Provincetown has never seen anything like it, and now they are coming in, quite literally, by the bus– and boat-loads nearly every weekend from June through September.

“We traced this back to four years ago and an article on Boston.com,” says Tom Yaz, a video jockey at the P-Town haunt Wave Bar. That article listed Provincetown, among other destinations, as a great New England spot for brides-to-be to celebrate with their friends.

“Before that, we were getting June brides,” Yaz says. “They were mostly well-behaved. Now we are inundated by menacing packs of them.”

There was a time not too long ago when mainstream acceptance of gay people stopped short at marriage equality and, at least in more civilized parts of the country, a hen party wouldn’t dare invade a gay bar, where flaunting your upcoming nuptials in front of a crowd that didn’t have the same right was inarguably offensive. I once witnessed a hen party get tossed from a gay bar in Brooklyn for precisely that reason. The bartender called them “disgusting idiots” for even trying. But now, it seems, with gay marriage the law of the land, all bets are off for the bachelorettes.

“They walk into a gay bar and grope gay men old enough to be their fathers,” Yaz says. “They think they’re their best friends, just because they’re gay.”

They usually head straight to Yaz’s DJ booth with music requests, “straight-up ghetto hip-hop, Top 40, or completely odd requests,” Yaz says. “One time, this bridesmaid wanted me to play Phil Collins’s, ‘Take a Look at Me Now.’ I’m playing high-energy dance music, and I have a packed room. Why would I want to do something like that?” When Yaz rejected her request, she pulled her cocktail back as if she was about to throw it at him. 

“Later that night, it was reported, she did throw a drink at a bartender at the A-House,” Yaz says.

I’m chatting with Yaz outside his DJ booth at Wave Bar when a hen party gyrates through the door. Now Yaz has a simple solution to get rid of them. “I just immediately put on gay nightclub classics. Classic disco and show tunes are the audio equivalent of Mace to those people.”

Yaz puts on “Go West” by the Pet Shop Boys. “Watch,” he says. “There’s no ghetto, there’s no girls, there’s no pitchy voices. They can’t relate.” Sure enough, as though something is jamming their radars, the bridesmaids immediately slow down, and their faces grow long. They take out their phones. One approaches Yaz to request Britney Spears.

“We’re brides-to-be,” she says. “You can’t play one song for us?”

“Do you know where you are?” Yaz scolds. “You are in a gay bar with men in their 40s, and I’m playing to my demographic.”

“Fuck you,” the bridesmaid says. The group leaves. Yaz says they’ve noticeably hurt his business. On Yelp, a month earlier, multiple reviewers wrote about this, including one named Mark F.: “EGHHH full of bachelorette parties. There are better places in P-town that won’t treat the gays like zoo animals. Was there this past Saturday and there were about 60 straight girls there with all their annoying antics! I wish Wave took this into consideration and did not allow organized bachelorette parties. It’s disruptive and doesn’t make people feel comfortable.”

Outside the A-House, where the doormen do their best to keep the bachelorettes away (although, legally, they can’t discriminate), a local waiter tells me that last weekend a hen party skipped out on a $300 dinner tab.

“I don’t know why there are so many this year,” the doorman at the A-House tells me. “They take over the dance floor and scare all the guys away.”

(On the A-House’s Yelp listing, one reviewer named Jessica B. wrote: “Was there for my bachelorette party last night.… [The door woman] took one look at us and said we’re not allowed to come in. She said there’s not enough security to handle us. What does that even mean? If this is the best place to go out I suppose you have to look a certain way to get in. Discrimination much?”)

Determined to find some bachelorettes who will let me spend the night bar-hopping around Provincetown with them, I go to MacMillan Pier on Saturday morning to await the first boat from Boston. Immediately, I encounter a sextuplet of blondes wearing team bride tank tops. Maid of honor Stacey will not shake my hand. I ask if I can hang with them tonight.

“I don’t think so,” Stacey says. “Girls only.”

I am completely befuddled. “In Provincetown?” I ask. She is standing only feet away from a gaggle of bearded men sipping Muscle Milk and talking about Beyoncé.

“Sorry,” Stacey says in a smug, dense way.

On the 3:30 boat, I encounter four other packs of bachelorettes, and despite my hollow attempts to earn their favor by gushing "congratulations!” and “who’s the lucky fellow?” and “wow, look at that rock!” they seem suspicious of me. 

I get the impression they already think that just being here in itself might constitute a slightly immoral choice, and they only want to brush the thought aside and plow onward and downward for the next couple of days before returning to Falmouth, or wherever, where at least they will have plenty to talk about with their hairdressers.

That night, I stop by the Underground and run into my friend Justine in the DJ booth. I ask if she’s seen any bachelorettes.

“The foreboding girls with the blow-up penises?” she replies. “You just missed ’em. They went east,” she says.

Back at Wave Bar, I find a foursome from the Boston suburbs: bride-to-be Amber, getting hitched next month to a man she met in the first grade, and her bridesmaids—Caroline, Katie, and Sarah, all in their mid-20s.

“Oh my God, we love it here. It’s so much fun, right?” maid of honor Sarah exclaims, slurping on a bowl of fruit floating in an electric-blue liquid. “We didn’t consider anywhere else.”

I ask if they’ve encountered any hostility from locals.

“Oh my God, no,” says Sarah. “Is that, like, a thing?”

I say some people are offended by the bridal party takeover of Provincetown, that they feel a bit gawked at, like animals in the zoo.

“This interview is over!” Sarah shouts as she takes Amber by the shoulders to lead her away. “We’re just trying to have a good time,” she says, telling Caroline and Katie, “Don’t talk to him.”

I go next door to the Vault, one of Provincetown’s hardcore-porn, red-light, sex-pig bars. David, the bartender, has had enough.

“This has been the worst year yet, and it has been worse every year,” he says. Earlier in the season, a bunch of women came in, took out their phones, and began recording men in heavy cruise mode and the porn on the TVs. “I told them, ‘Ladies, there’s no recording in here,’ and they said, ‘Fuck you.’ I had to call security and make them erase their phones.”

I call up Jenn Harris, stage and screen actress, writer, and star of a new Web series, New York Is Dead, for a gal’s perspective.

“I think I know these girls from my hometown,” Harris says. “I think it comes down to comedy. They think they are putting themselves in a comedic situation. And it’s a night where you’re going to have a blast, so you go where the fun is. And where is the fun? Gay men. That is true. But just because it’s a gay bar doesn’t mean there are going to be people in drag who are super-excited to play with you. You kind of have to earn your acceptance.”

It’s probably no fault of their own that these young women aren’t the most sensitive creatures inhabiting the Eastern Seaboard. 

“Generally,” Harris continues, “women are caring people. Women feel terrible when they think they’ve hurt someone. If a drag queen or a bar manager plopped down with these women and actually talked to them, and said, ‘I feel like you’re objectifying us and you make me feel uncomfortable,’ here’s how that would go down: One girl would be a bitch — only because she was confused. One would yell about it. And the other three would feel terrible. And the sixth one would bawl her eyes out, and not leave until everyone was friends again. The next day, she’d be the one to send an Edible Arrangement.”

She adds, “Women are way more dynamic than the cages people put them in, and this one just happens to be a hen cage.”

I pop back over to Wave Bar, where Mikey the bartender is serving a group of women in team bride tiaras.

“I love them,” Mikey says. “I’m a Buddhist now, and I believe in karma. It’s revenge for all those Gay Pride parades. You want equal rights? Fine. But don’t expect Satan’s legion, i.e., the bachelorettes, not to show up eventually.”

I check in on Yaz and find that another group of girls has approached the DJ booth.

“We’re here, and you’re gonna hate us!” one says.

“OK, ladies. Here come the show tunes. I’ve got an old Angela Lansbury medley coming your way!”

The girls request something else.

“A little Angela Lansbury goes a long way,” he says.   

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One afternoon long ago, Sara Simone, who was raised as a boy, threw on some of her mother’s clothes and headed out to the playground to be with the other kids. She didn’t think much about the blouse or the long skirt she was wearing. Rather, she thought the other kids might find it interesting, cool even. Instead, they laughed and ridiculed her, called her a “faggot” and “queer.” It would be a long time before Simone donned women’s clothing in public again. 

Hers was the only black family on the block in white, blue-collar Allentown, Pa. Her father was a religious zealot who beat his wife. Sensing something out of the ordinary about their child, Simone’s parents sent her to therapy and then to Catholic school, where she was pressured to join the football team and became a star athlete before heading to college. There Simone had her first sexual encounter with a man.

OK, I guess I’m gay, she thought. That’s cool, but it still doesn’t seem exactly right. These issues of identity eventually led her to drop out of school and join the armed forces.

“I went into the military trying to be what everyone wanted me to be. That was the most macho thing I could do. I was really trying to hide the gender that I was,” she recalls over margaritas at a restaurant in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of Washington, D.C. 

Slideshow: Meet 7 Trans Soldiers Who Served Our Country

Around 1980, at age 20, Simone was stationed in Panama in close quarters with her hyper-masculine Army buddies and would covertly, on occasion, cross-dress. 

“There was no YouTube. There were no role models,” she says. “There were no words for what I was feeling, so I thought I was the only one in the world who felt that way.”

This was an era when even “don’t ask, don’t tell” would have been a radical step forward. Simone was part of the military police, “so I was supposed to be upholding military law,” she says. “If anyone found out what I was doing, I would have been court-martialed, or beaten up, or killed.” 

On the weekends, the young privates would head into town, Panama City, with a fresh paycheck to get drunk, take drugs, and hire prostitutes. “I wasn’t into women, so that didn’t interest me much,” Simone says. On such an excursion, walking down the street, Simone spotted a young Panamanian who caught her eye. 

“There was something interesting about her, something different. I thought she had just a wee bit of masculine features. This was the most interesting-looking person I’d ever seen in my life.” The woman was about 19, with bronze skin and long, straight black hair. She wore denim overalls, one side unhinged, over a small T-shirt and, Simone noticed as she got closer, light, barely noticeable stubble along her jawline. Simone approached, barely speaking Spanish, while the woman knew only rudimentary English, and ended up at her apartment, where a group of the woman’s friends came over to party. 

“One of them started to change clothes in front of me, and when she took her pants off, I thought, Oh! OK, look at her! For some reason, I didn’t feel shocked. It was like a revelation. I started thinking, This is who I am. I felt like I was around people like me. It was the happiest night I had in Panama.”

Simone never saw the bunch again. In fact, it would be another 30 years, when Simone began to transition into living full-time as a woman, before she would knowingly meet another trans person. To this day, she still thinks about the young Panamanian. Back at the base, it was a different story. Simone sank deeper into depression and attempted suicide. She remained in the military for another decade and left with an honorable discharge. Today she works for a VA contractor, helping to connect recently returning vets with social services. 

By one estimate, there are 12,800 active-duty trans people in the U.S. military. Recent research suggests that transgender people are more likely to have served in the U.S. military compared with the rest of the population. A 2014 study by UCLA’s Williams Institute estimates 15,500 active-duty trans people and another 134,300 who have served—amounting to a rate of participation of 21% compared with about 11% for the general population. 

At present, the condition of gender dysphoria disqualifies people from serving openly as trans in the U.S. military. Last July, however, Defense Secretary Ash Carter issued a de facto moratorium on dismissing transgender people from the armed forces. And on May 27 this year, the ban is set to end, according to a draft timeline circulated among officials last August—with ramifications possibly including a pilot program to provide leaves of absence for surgery or hormone therapy. 

In 2013, Kristin Beck (born Christopher Beck)—a member of the elite Navy SEALs who completed 13 tours of duty in places such as Iraq, Afghanistan, and Bosnia and received a Purple Heart, a Bronze Star, and a Joint Service Commendation decoration—made a splash in the press when she came out as trans. She’s currently running for the House of Representatives in Maryland’s fifth Congressional District. 

The highest-ranking openly transgender official in the Obama administration is Amanda Simpson, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for operational energy, the equivalent of being a two-star general. Her office, according to its web page, sets policy with regard to the “energy required for training, moving, and sustaining military forces and weapons platforms for military operations,” including “energy used by ships, aircraft, combat vehicles, and tactical power generators.” 

The current ban, which applies to those in uniform, does not affect Simpson, who is a civilian employee of the Department of Fefense. She began working there in 2011 and transitioned many years before. 

“I was the first [openly trans person] in a leadership role, and in the Pentagon,” Simpson says from her office. “I got my job because I’m the best at it. As far as being trans and open, it has never been an issue for me in this building.” 

Simpson doesn’t see many special issues arising after the ban is lifted in May. She says the change is no different from when black Americans, women, or gays and lesbians were integrated into the military. 

“It’s an ongoing evolution that has always made our military forces stronger. The department and the mili-tary want to be as effective as possible, and the way to achieve that has always been through more diversity,” she says. “Contrary to most beliefs, the military is not about brute force. When ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ was repealed, there was not the social upheaval in the military that some people thought was going to happen, and I don’t see much of a difference here. As always, the military will soldier on.”

Slideshow: Meet 7 Trans Soldiers Who Served Our Country

Robin, 40, is a former Air Force officer who left active duty in 2002 and now works as a technical director for the Department of Defense. She began to transition on the job last March. She also has warm things to say about the professional atmosphere at the Pentagon.

“It’s a great place to work. Everybody has been very helpful and nice. There are a few outliers, but that’s society,” she says. 

The lift on the ban, however, may be too broad and does not address many of the particulars that will go along with allowing people to serve openly as transgender. 

 “They’re still not going to cover surgery. It’s questionable if you can even have surgery while in the military,” she says. “And what standards will these people be held to, if they are one gender when they came in and now they are another? How will the military merge male and female standards? Dress, hair—that’s where people continue to struggle.” 

Under current protocol, trans women, for example, would still be held to male standards for hair, dress, and bathroom use. “I have trans friends in the military now, and they struggle with hair stand-ards and bathrooms,” Robin says. “Are all the policies changing in May, or are they just saying ‘It’s OK to be trans now’? They’re officially going to say you cannot get kicked out for being trans and you can get mental health services, but that’s all I’ve seen that they are going to do.”

A stone’s throw from the Pentagon, in Arlington, Va., Kimberly Moore has invited me to her birthday party at Freddie’s Beach Bar, which is decorated in Barbies and looks a bit like a restaurant from The Golden Girls if you were on acid. 

Moore is a former marine. She (then he) led a 300-person unit in Iraq—it turned out that five of her soldiers ended up being transgender. 

There are about 35 current and former military people here, with a stark age divide. Those around Kimberly’s age, middle-aged, are mostly married to women they met before they came out. Many of them dress only on select occasions. Sometimes their wives know, and sometimes they don’t. A few have begun to fully transition. At one table sit the younger generation, in their 20s. They are decidedly more blasé about the whole thing. 

Moore says she began dressing when she was around 8 years old. In the Marine Corps, just out of college, sometimes she would sneak out of the barracks, drop $200 a night on women’s clothes, and then throw them out the next day. 

“My wife hates it,” Moore says. “The fact I’m out here tonight — she wouldn’t even talk to me when I was heading out of the house. She told me as soon as our daughter gets better, we’re headed for a divorce.” The couple has three children. The youngest, 5, is battling leukemia. 

“We went to go get her hair cut, because it was falling out in clumps. And she said, ‘I don’t want to be confused as a boy,’ and I said, ‘I know exactly how you feel.’ ”

Moore’s friend Lisa, an NSA contractor, approaches with news that, six months ago, she began to fully transition.

“I’m chicken,” Moore says. She has a sweet accent carried from her native Texas (her father, who she calls a “Huckabee conservative,” played for the Texas Longhorns). “I can’t make that decision. I’m still balancing that.”

“It’s not a choice,” Lisa says. “That’s what it comes down to.”

“My wife has this deal: ‘If I give you an inch, you will take six or seven miles.’ And she’s right,” Moore says. “So she won’t be accepting of any part of it. She won’t talk to me for three or four or five days after this.”

Moore sees challenges ahead once the ban is lifted. “I think the lower ranks are OK with it. Like when ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ was repealed, they were able to assimilate more easily than the higher ranks. But we’ve had women in the military for 60 or 70 years now, and sexual assaults are on the rise. There was compatibility for 60 years, so what’s different now?” she says. 

“The military is really driven by this binary mentality, where you have to be either-or. There’s no place for this opera stage of ambiguity,” Moore adds. 

Yet the military often has been ahead of the rest of society on social issues, such as desegregation. 

“I have found on average the military is more accepting of the people you work with,” Robin says. “Once you’ve worked alongside somebody and put your life in their hands, they do tend to take care of their own in a way you can’t explain to those who’ve never experienced that.”

The language coming out of the Department of Defense is unwavering in its support for a more open, diverse armed forces (“Transgender men and women in uniform have been there with us, even as they often had to serve in silence alongside their fellow comrades in arms,” a July statement from Carter reads. “We have transgender soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines—real, patriotic Americans—who I know are being hurt by an outdated, confusing, inconsistent approach that’s contrary to our value of service and individual merit”). 

Slideshow: Meet 7 Trans Soldiers Who Served Our Country

However, the situation among the rank and file might prove more prickly. Not only are reports of sexual assaults in the military on the rise, but as the Defense Department has moved toward allowing more females to be ground troops, there’s been a backlash of resentment from male soldiers who claim their female counterparts are getting pregnant while on deployment, in order to go home. 

Simone recalls the racism and sexism of her fellow, mostly white, soldiers back when she was stationed in Panama, though it was not even during wartime. The soldiers referred to Panamanians with racial slurs. “They didn’t respect the women,” she says. “They just wanted to have sex with them.” 

Recently, at her job, she was doing intake on a homeless veteran. When she looked at his information, she realized they had served together, in Panama. 

“Usually, you would say something about that. You’d bond with them,” Simone says. “But at the time there were only a couple of women on the base. So what was I going to say? He would have remembered me. I couldn’t bring myself to get into all of that.”

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Photography by Doug Inglish. Styling by Grant Woolhead.

While planning my rendezvous with Nick Jonas, I am hell-bent on getting him to do something totally, apocalyptically gay. Comeuppance, I think, for him jamming my social-media feeds with all those sexy photos. I suggest we take a flower-arranging class. His handlers kill that idea. Makeup lesson? Nope. Runway-walking course, in heels? Uh-uh. Nude male life drawing? Not a chance. Antiquing? Wings at Hooters? Getting shitfaced and eating steaks at a strip club? We settle on mini golf.

“What did you get up to last night?” I ask him after we meet and shake hands on New York’s West Side Highway, hoping to get the dish on some next-level hotel-room depravity — a dish that is, unfortunately, not on the menu. 

“I was doing a listening session for my new music,” says Jonas, dressed in black skinny jeans and a black hoodie. Then he had a cigar—he loves cigars—and met friends at a dive bar. 

Nick Jonas is quite laid-back. Vulnerable, even. In person, his charm—and that smoky, devastating gaze—actually comes off as shyness. Sometimes he seems a bit sorrowful, or shell-shocked. 

We arrive at the mini-golf counter at Pier 25, in the TriBeCa neighborhood of Manhattan, where a nice, old, suspiciously overdressed Russian man asks what color balls we’d like. 

“Hot pink!” I shout. “Nice,” Jonas says. He chooses orange, and when the Russian man asks if he can hold my balls as I fumble with my wallet, I make a sex joke. Jonas giggles. We’re off to a good start. 

Jonas is an avid golfer back home in Los Angeles, where he shares a place with his brother Joe. The 23-year-old has a second home in Mammoth, Calif., a ski town where he enjoys snowboarding. He’s a bit of a jock. If he weren’t in entertainment, Jonas says, he would have pursued professional sports, probably baseball. 

Like Persephone descending into the underworld, Jonas raises his hand and signals to his handlers—they call themselves Team Jonas—to remain outside the gates of the course. They obey, retiring behind black sunglasses to pound things into their phones. At the second hole, with another graceful flourish of his hand, he dismisses a pesky photographer who’s been buzzing around us.

Slideshow: The Complex World of Nick Jonas

Jonas was born in Texas and grew up in New Jersey. His father was a pastor with the Assembly of God church, his mother a sign language teacher. They met at Bible college in Dallas, where together they ran a sign language ministry called Signs of Love. 

The actor-singer effectively launched his career at age 6, when he was in a salon with his mother and she prompted him to sing a ditty for the customers. A woman with her head in the shampoo bowl predicted that he could be a star and recommended an agent named Shirley. “It’s strange how clear that memory is,” Jonas says of that afternoon. “I was always singing. It was my favorite thing to do—still is, it turns out.”

He learned some show tunes, and within a couple of years was auditioning on Broadway. By age 10, Jonas had landed the role of Gavroche in Les Misérables. The idea of him playing a gruff, foulmouthed character on stage before thousands of spectators a night raised some eyebrows in his father’s congregation, which was staunchly conservative. (His parents have since left the church—his father initially resigned from the ministry to become Jonas’s manager. Jonas is no longer religious, but he maintains a strong relationship with God. “God is real to me,” he says.) 

From Broadway he became a star on the Disney Channel, where he met his longtime close friend Demi Lovato, who, while working with him and his brothers on the Disney movie Camp Rock, dated his brother Joe. In 2005, Nick, Joe, and their older brother, Kevin, formed the Jonas Brothers. They toured with the Backstreet Boys, Miley Cyrus, and Avril Lavigne, and, before breaking up in 2013, recorded four studio albums and sold more than 17 million copies worldwide. Their last tour, in 2010, grossed $95 million.

“I loved music at an early age,” Jonas says. “[My parents] had no intention of pushing us to do it.” Still, he adds, “They were really open-minded and supportive.”

Jonas was pulled out of school in the third grade to focus on his career in entertainment and, while touring with the Jonas Brothers, had a teacher accompany him on the road. “It was a weird way to grow up, but I think I maintained some sense of normalcy,” he says. 

Before he and his brothers formed the group, Jonas’s first single, “Dear God,” was played on Christian radio stations nationwide. The Jonas Brothers later gained popularity as a Christian band, though not an especially preachy one, playing bubblegum pop that appealed primarily to young girls. They wore “purity rings,” which they promoted to their fans, signs they’d taken a vow not to have sex before marriage. Their nonthreatening, squeaky-clean image appealed to parents, too—sometimes to a fault. 

“The funny thing is, back in the day it used to be the parents who would be really aggressive,” Jonas says. Mothers and daughters were known to jump into the back of the brothers’ tour van. One time, a mom and daughter snuck into Jonas’s dressing room. He was a good sport: They ended up hanging out with the singer for more than an hour, pretending to be friends of a friend while Jonas played along. 

As they grew older and looked to gain a broader audience, the brothers stripped their boy-next-door facade. In December 2013, two months after the band announced they were splitting up, Joe wrote in New York magazine that he’d had sex at age 20. 

Less than a year later, the youngest Jonas all but nuked his chaste image. In September 2014, to promote his first post-group solo album, Nick Jonas, he made an appearance at the gay nightclub BPM in New York City and engaged in a partial striptease, unbuttoning his shirt for a crowd of adoring, half-naked, leather-clad patrons. Jonas also underwent an intense and rapid physical transformation for his role as a sexually conflicted wrestler on the Audience Network series Kingdom, consuming 4,200 calories a day to bulk up into the beefcake sex symbol of Instagram fame. He unveiled his new, jaw-dropping physique in a photo shoot for Flaunt magazine that October, his trousers around his knees while he grinned and grabbed his crotch in homage to Mark Wahlberg’s 1992 Calvin Klein campaign, one of the most famous underwear ads of all time.  

As an album of R&B and pop, NickJonas received mostly positive reviews from critics, one of whom declared it as filling “the hole currently vacated by Justin Timberlake and Robin Thicke.” However, that same reviewer, echoing the sentiments of many, accused Jonas of taking “a page out of the James Franco playbook, courting the LGBT community, aggressively working both the gay press and New York City’s club circuit.” 

The accusations of gay baiting and opportunism have left Jonas a bit wounded. “It’s not the majority, but a large handful have a negative opinion for whatever reason,” he says, “and I think it’s really quite sad.” Still, regardless of whether he’s playing footsie with the LGBT community, his work is starting to speak for itself. 

In Ryan Murphy’s Fox horror satire Scream Queens, Jonas played closeted frat boy Boone Clemens. It was a goofy role—and Boone was killed off—but Jonas’s charisma and comedic timing were undeniable. 

Meanwhile, Nate, his character on Kingdom, is a man grappling with masculinity and a conservative family. In the finale of the first season, Nate has sex with a man in an alley behind a gay bar. Jonas’s performance on the show was surprising—absorbing and complex. 

 “It’s been a great character to play,” says Jonas, “one that I try to be respectful of and take myself out of. He’s on his own path.” 

To prepare for the part, he spoke to some of his closest friends, some of whom were raised in conservative families, about their coming-out experiences. “It was a good way to research,” says Jonas, “to kind of build the character with some elements of real life.”

Playing Nate has been a springboard for his career, earning him newfound credibility. At one time, perhaps during those Disney days, this seemed unlikely. Agents told him he’d never be taken seriously as an actor because he was a Jonas. 

But that’s changing. Jonas returns for the second part of Kingdom’s second season in June. He’ll also star in the upcoming James Franco–produced indie Goat, a coming-of-age film in which he plays a member of a fraternity whose hazing rituals become increasingly violent. The movie is a study of male aggression, carnal and testosterone-filled. Homoerotic, even. 

Slideshow: The Complex World of Nick Jonas

A few weeks after our golf date, Jonas is back in New York and hosting a private listening party for his new album, Last Year Was Complicated, at the Dream Hotel, near Times Square. A couple dozen people are in attendance, the guests skewing heavily to young gay men of a certain boyish ilk. 

Carmen Carrera, a transgender model and former RuPaul’s Drag Race contestant, glides into the room like a gazelle. Like Jonas, she has a magnetic, wounded-bird vibe about her. The two met the previous week at the GLAAD Media Awards, where Jonas presented Demi Lovato, his tour mate this summer, with the Vanguard Award, and Lovato made an odd joke about her dick being bigger than his. Jonas brings this moment up to the panting onlookers at the party, then throws them a bone, assuring them that, since Lovato dated his brother, she should know he’s doing just fine in that department.

Carrera doesn’t view Jonas’s flirting as insincere or self-serving. “I think he’s very humble and an amazing ally,” she says, leaning against the bar. “We need more people like him in the music industry—someone who’s willing to come out and say that he supports the entire LGBT community and embraces fans from all walks of life. And maybe he might have a trans love interest in one of his music videos. Let’s open up that conversation!” She pauses. “Also, we’re both from New Jersey, so we have a ton in common.” 

Jonas continues to address the audience. “When I was working on this album, Jay Z asked me what it was about,” he announces. “I said it was about the past year of my life, and that the year was complicated. Jay Z said, ‘That’s the name of your album: Complicated.’ ”

The singer says that Last Year Was Complicated, out in June, is mostly about his split a year ago with former Miss USA Olivia Culpo (of Rhode Island). They were together two years. 

“With this one I made a real point to tell stories as honestly as I could,” Jonas tells me. “It became very clear what it was going to be about, after the breakup. I just dove in headfirst and wrote about all of it. I think it was the most meaningful relationship I’ve ever been in, and it was the longest.” 

He’s no stranger to having his romantic life dissected in the media. “It definitely sucks. It sort of feels like, on top of dealing with the situation with the person, you have to be thinking about other people’s opinion about it, and without all the information.” 

When he was younger (and still a Jonas Brother), he found this attention rather creepy. “The fact that people were intrigued by a 14– or 15-year-old’s relationships was strange to me,” he says. “Now I think it makes a bit more sense. I think it’s kind of amusing, people’s interests. But it’s funny, because I think I live a pretty low-key life.” 

One of the songs on the album, “Unhinged,” is about his inability to make decisions and commit. He had considered it for the title of the album before Jay Z intervened. But he thinks his wavering can also be a blessing: “It forces me to be as honest as I can in my lyrics.” 

Because of his teen stardom, Jonas never went to college, something that seems to bother him. Had he gone, he would have liked to have studied English. “I’m not a huge reader,” he says sheepishly. “But I love to write. I guess writing lyrics is kind of like poetry.” 

At the listening party, Jonas works the room, his baseball cap pulled down low over his eyes, his hands in his pockets, a swirl of middle-aged men in black whispering in his ear; twinks rows deep are pawing at him, demanding a selfie, trying to make an impression. 

He seems sort of exhausted and lost, as if someone has always led him around by the shoulders and pushed him through doorways. As if now, with his rocketing solo career and him well on his way to becoming the next Justin Timberlake, something is coming to a head. It’s as if he’s in the middle of a realization, an acknowledgment, like he’s gaining true insight into his ridiculously bizarre and fortunate life and the role he’s had—or hasn’t had—in shaping it. 

So where does Nick Jonas go from here? 

Slideshow: The Complex World of Nick Jonas

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On the cover: Vigil for Orlando outside the Stonewall Inn in New York City, June 13, 2016.

Additional photography by Yannick Delva. Additional reporting by Michael Lambert and Natalia Barr.

Brett Rigas and his boyfriend of three years, Frank Hernandez, woke Saturday morning, June 11, to a SWAT team encircling the gated community in Orlando, Fla., where the two shared a home. 

A gunman had led police on a chase and entered a neighbor’s home, taking hostages. He faced down police in a standoff. After the SWAT team arrived, officers arrested the man.

Shaken, Rigas and Hernandez still started the weekend. They went shopping at the local mall. By nightfall, they planned on a quiet night in. Rigas was in bed when he heard the hair dryer going in the other room.

“C’mon, we’re going to Pulse,” Hernandez told him. “Just for one drink.”

They stayed out at the gay nightclub on South Orange Avenue until 1:30 a.m. The two closed their tab and walked toward the door. But a generous friend working at Pulse corralled them back to the bar.

“Come over here and I’ll get you a drink,” the friend said. “Get Brett whatever he wants.”

The scene on Orange Ave. toward Pulse nightclub on June 13, 2016

By 2:02 a.m., the Orlando Police Department received the first report of shots fired at Pulse. 

Omar Mateen, 29, of Port St. Lucie, Fla., had begun his rampage — the deadliest single-person mass shooting in American history.

A day that had started with gun violence would now end in more gun violence — and one of the two men who had just come for a quiet drink would not make it out alive.

Mayhem at Pulse

Rigas and Hernandez dropped to the floor. Many at Pulse thought the shots from Mateen’s handgun and assault rifle were part of the music. Then, the music stopped.

Rigas lost Hernandez in the confusion. He crawled behind the bar and hid under the well along with a friend and a bartender, Juan, who had been shot in the leg. Bullets flew over their heads, shattering liquor bottles. 

Mateen’s attack claimed the lives of 49 people at Pulse that night. He wounded 53 others. He holed up in the bathrooms for hours, and there he called 911 to pledge loyalty to the Islamic State. He texted with his wife while his victims said goodbye to their loved ones for what they believed would be the last time.

Orlando police killed Mateen at 5:15 a.m. Sunday, June 12, after a three-hour standoff, when he fired on authorities. A SWAT team officer posted a picture on social media of his helmet, where one of Mateen’s bullets had grazed the surface.

When officers finally escorted Rigas out of the bar, he looked for Hernandez among the bodies scattered across the dance floor. All were face down. He looked for the white and blue shirt Hernandez had been wearing. 

Hernandez’s name would later appear on the list of the 49 victims killed during the assault.

“I hope that it happened fast,” Rigas says. “I just hope that he wasn’t just hurt a little bit and then — maybe he got stepped on or trampled on by people trying to get out of there. I hope he didn’t suffer there, because I wasn’t able to get to him. I don’t know where he was. I looked for him.” 

Three days after the attack, on Wednesday, June 15, Rigas sits in the apartment he shared with Hernandez, fighting through tears. Hernandez’s body is on a plane to Texas. Rigas was shot in the arm, but he has not yet been to the hospital. Shoe boxes are stacked high in the living room. Both men loved shoes, especially Hernandez. 

“He wasn’t the cleanest person. And I think he left all this because he knew something was going to happen, so now I have to pick up everything,” Rigas says, choking out a joke. 

Rigas picked out the outfit in which his boyfriend was to be buried: “Some sparkly shoes he bought that are tacky, but I think he would want to wear,” he says. “He’s a little goofball. I mean, he was always making people laugh. Everybody loved him. You have to make sure that the people in your life know that you love them.” 

He breaks down in tears.

‘I’m Going to Kill You’

Inside Pulse, while Rigas lay under the bar well, Answai Bennett — his friends call him Swizzy — ducked into a nearby bathroom. He crowded into a single stall with 15 others. The people argued frantically. They called and texted friends, loved ones. The noise attracted the gunman, who flung open the bathroom door and sprayed the stall with bullets. 

Bennett was with one of his closest friends, Paul Henry. He watched him get shot, his body falling headfirst into the toilet. 

Mateen shouted, “If you guys come to the door, I’m going to kill you!”

In the stall, Bennett tried to calm the crowd, telling everyone to be quiet. 

“I was praying the whole time, bargaining with God,” he says. “I was begging him that if he gets me out of here, I’ll live a certain way or I won’t do this, I won’t be in a club again.”

The gunman would return to the bathroom a second time to fire more rounds. Six of those huddled in the stall with Bennett died. Bennett was shot three times in the hip and leg, a bullet tearing through his femur. 

At the hospital, he received 60 staples and a metal rod in his leg. He is learning how to walk again. 

The Making of a Madman

From the moment he fell dead in a hail of gunfire on South Orange Avenue, the world knew the name Omar Mateen. But the young man’s story stretches back across a violent, discontented life, across moments in which family, friends, and coworkers now wonder if they could have seen this attack coming. 

Born in New York to Afghan immigrants Seddique and Shahla Mateen, Omar and his parents moved to Port St. Lucie when he was 4 years old. He acted out in the younger grades but settled down in high school. He worked odd jobs as he attended community college studying criminal justice. He hoped one day to work in uniform and received a glowing recommendation from St. Lucie County police for corrections officer training.

When he washed out of training in 2007 after joking about bringing a gun to class, he landed a job as a guard with the private security firm G4S.

He beat his first wife, Sitora Yusufiy, who fled soon after in 2009. He married Noor Salman in 2010. The pair had a son, now 3 years old. Salman has cooperated with federal investigators, claiming she tried to talk her husband out of the attack.

Mateen fell in the G4S ranks after making affirmative comments about terrorist groups. He began working the front gate at the PGA Village golf resort. He expressed support for Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, ISIS, and the Taliban; it was a slow-burning anger with little discernment among the conflicting Islamist groups. He was investigated by the FBI twice but deemed not to be a threat.

In early June, he purchased the firearms that he would later unleash on the innocents at Pulse. His father, Seddique, claimed he may have been triggered by the sight of two men kissing — Omar said at the time that his own young son should not have to see that. 

After he died, Pulse regulars, classmates, and acquaintances began to whisper. He had been seen by several at the bar before — always quiet, always isolated. Gay men recalled seeing his profile on dating and hookup sites like Grindr and Jack’d. A past classmate, now a drag queen, claimed he had known Mateen and could not believe he had done it. The FBI is investigating whether the young gunman was motivated by extremist ideology or something entirely different: life in a restrictive cultural upbringing as a closeted gay man. 

Picking Up the Pieces

In the days following the attack, Orlando has clearly proved to Mateen and to the world that the city’s LGBT community would not cower in fear.

Less than 24 hours after the attack, members of the Orlando LGBT community gather in solidarity and to comfort one another at Parliament House, a nightclub and resort about three miles from Pulse. 

Javie White typically dances on Saturday nights at Pulse. But that weekend he had given up his dancing shift to bartend at another nearby club. The young go-go dancer wasn’t on his box next to Pulse’s entrance when Mateen came in and opened fire.

“I’ve been crying home alone for seven hours,” he says at the impromptu gathering. But he is resilient. “Orlando is the most tightly knit gay community I’ve ever been in. We are here to support each other, and we are not afraid.”

White hugs a friend, Tyler Block, who is barely holding together. Block found out only an hour ago that one of his closest friends was killed. She had a 2-year-old son with her partner. 

“For someone to come into my home and murder my family, it’s beyond anything you will ever feel,” Block says, trembling. Block fled his conservative home in Wisconsin and came to Orlando two years ago. He had yet to come out as gay to his parents, but they knew he hung out at a place called Pulse. 

“So, now they know,” he says.  

In a room behind Block, the midnight drag show continues as scheduled. The performers encourage the thin crowd to be strong. They joke about getting drunk to cope as many in the audience embrace. 

Kai’Ja Adonis performs at Pulse. The drag queen and mother of House of Adonis acknowledges that she lost a friend in the early-morning shooting. But she has pulled herself together with grace for younger people in the community.

“I cried all day. I’m done crying. I’m ready to be myself again,” Adonis says. “I’m trying to be my funny, catty self for the kids.”

Moving forward, she knows that safety will be a priority for those left behind.

“Everything’s up in the air. [The police] don’t want us to do things that put us all together,” she says. “But no one is going to break us. No one is going to break this community.” Adonis smiles. She laughs and cackles as friends and bartenders pass by. But the shock of losing her friend is still there. “I had known him for years,” she says. “I just hung out with him last weekend. All I can think is, ‘God, I just saw you.’ ”

Vigil organized by Equality Florida at the Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts in Orlando, June 13, 2016

‘We Are Here to Stay’

On Monday evening, June 13, the city of Orlando hosts an official vigil for the victims of the massacre. News helicopters and armed police stationed on rooftops afix their steely gazes on the more than 7,500 mourners gathered on the lawn in front of the Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts. 

Natasha Claudio, 21, stands toward the back with a companion. She lost Peter Gonzalez-Cruz, a friend she had known since elementary school. “He was fun-loving and had a lot of friends. He was an amazing person,” she says. “It’s going to be hard. It won’t be easy to heal.”

City and county officials follow religious leaders on the stage, thanking police and first responders to an outpouring of cheers from the crowd. Orlando mayor Buddy Dyer confirms to the thousands gathered that all 49 victims have been identified and next of kin notified. 

“There’s an Orlando not everyone sees,” he says. “It’s a growing city that feels like a small town. It’s where we call home. It’s such a painful irony that a city of joy and love now has to wear the title of the worst mass shooting in U.S. history.” 

The mostly somber crowd erupts in cheers as Pulse manager Neema Bahrami walks to the stage, flanked by the nightclub’s staff. “We are not leaving,” he says. “We will not be defeated. We are here to stay.”

Equality Florida’s Nadine Smith echoes that sentiment— that Orlando and the LGBT community at large will grow stronger after the tragedy. “When we say we’re in a ‘culture war,’ it’s no longer metaphorical,” she says. “Nothing good will come from this. We will make good come from this.”

At the end of the vigil, the bell from First Methodist Church tolls 49 times, once for each victim. Each toll resonates longer than the last in the sultry air. Framed between the sterile edifices of downtown Orlando, sherbet-colored thunderheads loom on the horizon.

Later, people remark that the bell tolls seemed to go on forever. When they thought, surely, this must be the last one, they weren’t halfway there. And when the final bell did ring out, the mourners silently raised their candles in unison, like a single, swift fist into the tropical night.

The following Sunday, approximately 50,000 people gather around Lake Eola for another vigil — by far the largest of the week’s vigils held in New York, London, Paris, Berlin, and elsewhere throughout the world. Each victim’s name is read aloud once more, with the crowd chanting “We remember them!” after each name. 

As if in response, a rainbow appears in the skies over Lake Eola. 

Mourners at the makeshift memorial at the Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts in Orlando, June 13

Deadliest, But Not the First

Mateen’s assault may be the individual deadliest in U.S. and LGBT history, but the attack at Pulse certainly was not the first time lives were lost in a gay nightclub. 

Pride has become a month of parades, celebration, and corporate pandering — but that’s not how Pride started. LGBT people remember June every year for the 1969 police raid on the Stonewall Inn in New York City, where brutal arrests erupted into the modern gay rights movement. Despite how far that movement has gone, the bloody history of LGBT liberation began with an attack on a gay bar and nightclub — and now begins again with a new attack.

Although there is no evidence of a connection, Mateen was not the only armed man targeting the LGBT community the June 12 weekend. Police in Santa Monica, Calif., arrested James Howell after locals called about a prowler. Officers discovered three assault rifles, ammunition, and explosive chemicals in the Indiana man’s car. He told the officers that he was headed for the LGBT Pride parade.

In May, seven died and 12 were injured after gunmen opened fire in the gay nightclub La Madame in Mexico. About 180 people were in the club in Xalapa, Veracruz, when the attack started.

Almost two weeks after Pulse, the LGBT community recognized the 43rd anniversary of the UpStairs Lounge arson in 1973. Flames engulfed the New Orleans gay club, killing 32 and injuring 12. That was the deadliest attack on a gay bar in American history — until Pulse. 

The word Orlando has now entered the country’s lexicon as an antigay byword. Only days after the mass shooting, a man made a threat at Happy Fun Hideaway bar in Brooklyn that he would “come back Orlando-style” after the bouncer threw him out for arguing and saying “you fucking faggots.”

The nation may eventually write off Mateen as a lone wolf, but the LGBT community knows better. As insurmountable as the loss feels, the Pulse attack is just another bloody chapter in a long history of attacks on gay nightclubs — the longtime sanctuaries from a world of fear and rejection and bigotry. 

 

Clockwise from upper left: Brett Rigas (left) and Frank Hernandez,  Frank Hernandez, Answai Bennett (left), and Paul Henry.

‘It’s Just so Beautiful’

By Wednesday, the Orlando gay club Southern Nights is packed with people who have gathered to celebrate their community — even so soon after this tragedy. The club is hosting a benefit for the families of survivors and victims. By 10 p.m., the police begin turning people away. There are too many people inside already.

A crowd amasses on the street. Inside, more than 40 drag queens perform to a packed house. The queens sing to laughter, tears, and laughter through tears. In the next room, a pair of men dance the merengue. 

The patrons yell and kiki, as many there and mourners elsewhere wonder how they will ever be able to say goodbye.

As the evening ends at Southern Nights, the drag queen Sassy Devine sings John Lennon’s “Imagine” while the faces of the 49 victims fade in and out on the television screens. 

“This is the most people we’ve ever had in here,” says Jared Cardona, a bartender. “It’s just so beautiful.” 

Vigil organized by Equality Florida at the Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts in Orlando, June 13, 2016

Saying Goodbye

Rigas had never met his boyfriend’s family. 

“I was very afraid to meet his mom. I wasn’t even sure I’d be invited to the funeral,” Rigas says. 

He was invited to the service, held on Saturday, June 18, almost a week after the attack. On the plane from Orlando to Texas, a man sitting next to Rigas recognized him from television. He emptied his wallet and said he wanted Rigas to have the money to buy Hernandez some flowers. The man’s name was also Frank.

At the service in Weslaco, a mariachi band played in the 105-degree heat. Rigas says that about 500 people attended the funeral. The family draped a rainbow flag over the casket. Hernandez’s mother held a seat in the front row for Rigas, but he could not bring himself to approach the casket. 

Hernandez loved Beyoncé, and Rigas had a lyric, “Always in formation,” stitched inside the lining of the casket. The family wore T-shirts that read love has no gender — words from Hernandez’s tattoo.

After the service, the family had a barbecue at an aunt’s house where they shared stories about Hernandez. He was always the life of the party and always wanted to go out. His mother told Rigas, “I’m glad that he died doing something that he loved doing.” 

She didn’t know they were a couple. She had chosen over the years to simply not ask any questions.

“I regret that now,” she told Rigas. 

Rigas was swept away by the love around him. 

“His grandmother doesn’t even speak English,” he says. “But she told me that she loves me, and that we are going to be in each other’s lives forever.” 

Photography by M. Sharkey.

It’s a rainy Thanksgiving night in Brooklyn, and a friend has invited me into the home of strangers for supper. Laid out on the kitchen table is a spread of bacon-wrapped squash, honey-baked ham, turkey, green beans, brussels sprouts, and all the fixings. In the living room a dozen men are seated in a circle on sofas and folding chairs, plates neatly placed squarely on their laps. Curiosity strikes their faces when one of them rises to his feet. 

“I think he’s choking,” says one guest, a doctor, who looks across the room at his boyfriend, also a doctor, who returns the look with a shrug. 

The choking victim is our host, and he’s stumbled into the middle of the circle with his face switching patriotically from red to blue to white. 

“Are you choking?” asks another guest. The men look around the room at each other. “Is he choking?”

“Yeah, he’s definitely choking,” says another guest.

All the men here have two things in common: their homosexuality and their deep love for sailing. They’ve crossed land and sea, traveling from their houseboats — anchored in New Jersey or Long Island — or their Manhattan apartments, to be together for the holiday.  

One person is missing. A great cannonball of a man, who was carving the bird in the kitchen with one hand and holding his lap dog with the other, has picked up on the bother in the adjoining room. He crooks his neck around the corner, tosses the dog and the carving knife, and barrels through the hallway.

“Step aside! I’m a flight attendant!” he shouts. “I save lives!” 

He thrusts the host’s head toward the ground, and, with a great, flat-palmed whack between the shoulder blades, a brussels sprout launches from the host’s mouth onto the floor, where our hero’s lap dog scuttles over and devours it.

“Happy Thanksgiving, Dingy,” says the host to the dog through gasps and coughs, the dog still licking up the gooey spot on the carpet. 

Uncomfortable laughter and a golf clap cut the tension. The host will live, and he takes his seat. 

“Why didn’t you use the Heimlich?” asks one guest.

“No one uses the Heimlich anymore,” says the flight attendant. “It’s outdated.” The doctors nod. 

This is my unofficial introduction to a handful of the roughly 150 members of the Knickerbocker Sailing Association, a gay sailing club serving the New York metropolitan area. Gay sailing clubs proliferate around the globe, and there are two other clubs, Boston’s Yankee Cruising Club and the Open Seas Yacht Club in Annapolis, Md., on the Eastern seaboard. What makes Knickerbocker different, members say, is the club’s openness and egalitarian approach to membership. The club consists mostly of crew, rather than being mostly or exclusively made up of boat owners. It welcomes different types of sailors, too: those who go out for leisure and those who race. Its members also span ages, economic backgrounds, sexual identities, and race — sort of.

“Let’s face it, sailing is generally pretty white,” says Steve Kelley, a Knickerbocker member. “But we really want that to change.” 

One effort to diversify sailing in New York City involves a nonprofit called Hudson River Community Sailing, which teaches underprivileged children how to sail, focusing on the mathematics and physics of the sport. Knickerbocker’s annual Pride weekend regatta, in which members race J/24s up the Hudson, is a fundraiser for Hudson River Community Sailing. Last year, 50 Knickerbocker members competed on 10 boats, their most to date. 

Slideshow: All Aboard! Meet the Gay Boaters

Runaway sleeps six, though to say comfortably would be a stretch. But, Weichert says, “You need a crew of six to race it.” 

According to Weichert, competitive sailing is experiencing a surge in popularity, thanks mostly to advances in broadcast technology. 

“Sailing is less known than some of the other sports because up until very recently it was impossible to get good footage of sailing, because it happens out on the water,” says Weichert. “But now, with drones and the Internet, that’s really changing,”  

Earlier in the month, New York’s Hudson River hosted a race in the prestigious America’s Cup series, which has been around since the 1850s. But, Weichert says, “that’s a billionaires’ club.” Those who participate in America’s Cup events have their boats disassembled and shipped around the world to compete. “They were probably just in Dubai,” he says. (As with most sailing clubs, when Knickerbocker competes, boats are provided on site or rented.) 

At the 2014 Gay Games in Cleveland, Knickerbocker placed sixth out of 13 entrants.

Sailing requires strength — particularly for the grinders, the crew members who use the pulleys to hoist the sails — the ability to make split-second decisions, a knowledge of physics, and an instinct for the water, the wind, and the handling of one’s boat. What might seem like a gentleman’s pursuit often turns deadly. Weichert once had a crew member get knocked overboard during a strong wind. He wasn't injured, but as Weichert recalls, “The scary thing about that is in the night, trying to retrieve someone in the ocean — forget about it.” 

He says this most often happens when men are urinating off the back of their boat. “There is a noted thing in the sailing community. After a man pees, his blood pressure drops, and some people become dizzy and fall off the back of the boat with their wanger hanging out. And if they’re alone and it’s nighttime, the boat keeps sailing away from them.” 

Weichert’s most frightening moment at sea occurred several years ago. He was anchored in Rhode Island when a hurricane came through. As he pulled up the anchor, the windlass broke and his hand went through the chain. The wind was blowing 60 or 70 miles an hour. 

“It’s howling around you. And we can’t get the anchor up, and we’re going into the rocks, and the shit’s hitting the fan. And that makes many people more scared and more timid and makes them shy away from boating. It made me a stronger sailor and a better sailor,” he says. “A powerboater thinks he's in control of the weather. He’s not. A sailboater knows he’s not in control of the weather.” 

Slideshow: All Aboard! Meet the Gay Boaters

On shore, the cold facades of some of the nation’s most expensive homes glower back at us suspiciously. I climb onto Bill Helmers and Steve Kelley’s boat. The couple lives here year-round aboard the vessel they named the Michael Leslie, after Kelley’s brother who died in a boating accident at age 19. 

“Here we are in the backyard of gazillionaires, and we’re like, ‘Eh, who cares,’ ” says Helmers. 

Knickerbocker was founded in 1994 by Braden Toan. From an ad in the back of a sailing magazine, he learned of a gay club in London, and he wrote to them for advice on forming a club in New York. The 60-year-old Broadway and opera conductor recalls: “They sent me a couple of their newsletters. They sent me their burgie, which is their little flag; and they were just like, ‘Go do it.’ ” 

While anchored in Fire Island he began knocking on doors to see if anyone had interest in joining a gay sailing club. The first year he found 12 members. 

For many, it seems, life on the sea is hereditary. Toan grew up sailing on the Hudson. His mother, since childhood, would sail around Lake George. His father, in adulthood, had a boat. 

“My father was a very technical sailor and was always trying to teach me about the physics and teaching me about navigation. And my mother was a very visceral sailor who was always talking about how it felt,” Toan says. “You get people who are very technical and others who are more visceral. And that is very important in sailing. If you’re too much of either, you’re unaware of what’s happening around you. Either you’re unaware of what’s happening physically or you’re unaware of what’s happening emotionally.”

Many in Knickerbocker, like Toan, live on their boats year-round or at least for several months of the year. 

“It’s just like a Manhattan apartment, in terms of space,” says Helmers. Perhaps a Tokyo apartment, or a Foxconn dormitory, might be a more accurate comparison. But, like Manhattanites, you really have to accept being crowded and on top of people all the time (one of the nice things about the gay sailing life). Each boat’s captain is responsible for the entire crew’s well-being and making sure everyone is fed and comfortable. 

The sailors settle down with cocktails and finger foods, but terror on the low seas encroaches. A yacht several yards away has become unanchored and is drifting slowly and ominously toward us. 

Helmers is the first to take notice. “I got a stinkpotter over there with no one on board that’s dragging!” he shouts. The sailors run to the bows of their crafts and begin to yell at the yacht as it ceaselessly glides their way. 

Kelley and another sailor hop into a dinghy and speed over to the yacht. They jump aboard — but not before the craft lurches into a Knickerbocker boat and smashes a light. An attractive young woman and a much older man come running out. 

“Don’t start the engines!” yells Helmers to the yacht occupants. “It will take our chains. You’d be surprised how often that happens.” 

It takes several minutes for the sailors to assist the yacht owner in maneuvering his boat away from the flotilla; then, once the yacht is a safe distance away, they take the dinghy back to the flotilla. 

“They were having sex,” Kelley says. “They were throwing their clothes on when we got aboard. Condoms are a huge problem at Liberty Landing,” he adds, referring to a marina in Jersey City. “They get sucked in and clog the pump.” 

Stinkpotter is a derogatory slang term for a powerboat. Knickerbocker welcomes them into the club, but not everyone approves — even though the current commodore of the club, Mark Whitman, drives a powerboat.

“Motorboating is not a sport,” says 43-year-old Matt Kapp, a writer and filmmaker. I think they should be [allowed in Knickerbocker] because it’s still navigating your boat, whether it sails or not. You still have to work a GPS, you still have to understand how the engines work, you’re still hosting a group of people on a little vessel that you’re responsible for. Motorboating is a skill, but sailing’s a sport.” 

“The guys driving the new-y plastic-y shiny douchebag motorboats are the ones that go right by you,” Kapp continues. “The guys that have the classic old trawlers or the nice powerboats, they’ll slow down when they go by, so as not to wake you. And then they wave and it’s nice.”

Kapp was meant to be joined by a friend this weekend, a fellow Knickerbocker named Robert who is in the hospital. 

“He got crushed by a fat lady who fell on him on an escalator,” he explains, “and he’s in rehabilitation for another month.” The Knickerbockers have been sending their warm wishes and get-well-soons. 

For Toan and most members of Knickerbocker, and for the sailing community at large, the sport aspect of sailing is only half the appeal. 

“I will tell you what's so amazing about sailing,” says Tom. “All my life I've taken people who have been relative strangers. When you take someone out on a boat, you get them away from shore and out on the water, and all of a sudden people you think you know a little bit, they suddenly wax philosophical and start talking to you about what they think of life, what their dreams are, or what their regrets are about life,” Toan says. “It’s really interesting how it changes people in this sort of magical way.” 

Slideshow: All Aboard! Meet the Gay Boaters

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On a recent afternoon at Callen-Lorde, the LGBT community health center on Manhattan’s west side, a half dozen trans women waited anxiously on line at the prescription drop-off window.

“We’re only point one percent of the population. How could they run out?” one woman asked aloud.

“I’ve been on injectables for 16 years. I started my transition on injectables. This is not good,” said another.

The United States is in the quiet grip of a national shortage of two drugs administered to trans women that medical providers call “life-saving.” Earlier in the summer, doctors became aware of increasing difficulty securing Delestrogen and its generic counterpart, Estradiol Valerate, at the 20mg dosage, both injectable estrogen hormone therapy used by trans women. Then, in mid-July at Callen Lorde, none arrived in that week’s drug shipment. Pharmacists were told by suppliers the shortage will last until at least October.

Some doctors who treat trans women are skeptical of the October date. Injectable estrogen is manufactured in three dosages: 10mg, 20mg, and 40mg. 18 months ago, injectable estrogen at the 40 mg dosage—the highest dosage and the most frequently prescribed to trans women—went on shortage and never returned to market. Doctors have made due since by prescribing doubled-up dosages of the 20 mg injectables. While the 10 mg dosage remains available, most doctors won’t prescribe it. The process involves injecting such a large volume of liquid into a patient’s muscles every one to two weeks—four times as much liquid as they were administering with the 40 mg dosage—that it can be extremely painful for patients, according to Anthony Vavasis, director of medicine at Callen Lorde.

For now patients at Callen Lorde and across the country are being prescribed estrogen pills or patches. Although the medical community can’t point to any significant benefits in using injectables over other forms of estrogen therapy, many patients swear by them, claiming more benefits and a smoother transition when using injectables.

“At Callen Lorde, it’s just under 900 patients who are affected by this,” Vavasis said. “If you can imagine for those 900 people, if you’re told a medication that is a life-saving intervention—and experience the pill as a second-tier option—is no longer available, how would you feel?”

According to Heather Zoumas Lubeski, a spokesperson for Par Pharmaceuticals, which manufactures Delestrogen, the company was forced to find a new manufacturer after its original supplier stopped producing the material. Par is awaiting FDA approval on the new drugs.

“They have batches manufactured (10mg, 20mg and 40mg) but cannot distribute until they receive FDA approval. Once that happens, they can begin to ship immediately,” she wrote in an e-mail, adding that information was not available on how long the Food and Drug Administration approval might take. Perrigo, the company that manufactures Estradiol Valerate, did not respond to requests for comment.

Vavasis says the issue goes beyond one of individual care and sees the potential of a public health crisis should the scarcity persist.

“We’re worried about safety implications. If you look at the history of trans medicine, hormones were readily available on the street, but you never knew what you were getting. Patients would report how they felt on [street] injections and it was very suspicious that it may not have been what they thought it was. We are really concerned at Callen Lorde that patients, in the short term, out of desperation, may go back to try to find injections that they believe to be the same thing they received here and, by using those injections, would be putting themselves at risk,” he said. “The trans community has faced so much marginalization, historically, that we don’t want this to become another way that happens.”

Charlene Incarnate, a Brooklyn-based performer, was taking weekly injections of the 20 mg dosage.

“All the girls are freaking out,” she said. “The doctors and pharmacists swear up and down that [pills and patches] are the exact same thing with the exact results. But everyone knows that if you go from pills to injections, that’s when you really start noticing changes. Everyone more or less prefers the injectables.”

The shortage only affects the domestic U.S. market. The FDA prohibits such drugs from being imported. On the black market these drugs might come from other countries, like Germany or Canada, and ordinarily be safe, except dealers are known to dilute or add other ingredients, some potentially harmful, to increase their bottom line.

The shortage also appears to be context-specific to the trans community, or cis women on fertility treatment. Menopausal women, according to Vavasis, most likely would not be prescribed estrogen injectables in dosages as high as 20 or 40 mg.

“It speaks to the disparity of how we as a community understand the importance of hormones for trans people,” Vavasis says. “What if tomorrow we announced, ‘there’s no more insulin available for diabetics?’ How would that play?”

Incarnate calls injectable estrogen for hormone replace therapy a “matter of life or death,” particularly for trans women who’ve undergone sexual reassignment surgery.  

“The FDA and the manufactures don’t seem to think this drug is imperative,” she said. “And it is.”

Courtesy of Instagram.

Kyle Krieger’s Herculean pectorals come at you from a block away. His silken black hair would make a mink blush. He has a bit of a daffy walk, speaks in a meandering tenor, and smiles often. In person he’s a grainier version of the meticulously fine-tuned sexual god he plays online, like a photocopy of a photocopy, more rough in some places and less defined in others.

“Say I’m smoking crystal meth, and I take a hit and it feels really good,” says Krieger, a recovering addict who’s been sober for nine years. “It’s similar to that feeling when you post a photo and you’re getting all these ‘likes.’ You’re like, Wow, this is great. Then your photo starts to lose engagement. Then, the next day, it’s like a lull in your validation. And the lowest you will ever feel is right before you take that next hit. Right before you post that next photo.”

Krieger, 33, an object of so much online lust and adoration, is taking a lunch break from his day job. He sits at a café table in a salon in New York’s SoHo, where by day he cuts hair, scrolling dead-eyed through his endlessly buzzing smartphone. He joined Instagram five years ago and is now approaching 500,000 followers, or roughly the population of Atlanta. To subscribe to his account (with the handle @kylekriegerhair) is to buy into an airy fantasy of one man’s body, accompanied by earnest attempts at humorous or self-deprecating captions. Today, his most recent selfie was taken on the beach, as he stood shirtless in knee-deep water looking toward the pastel heavens, the flesh canyons of his miraculous physique catching shadows in the waning light. It gets 29,000 “likes.”

Related | Slideshow: Meet the Instahunks

 

The only thing covering my face today.. is airbrushing.

A photo posted by Kyle Krieger (@kylekriegerhair) on May 27, 2016 at 2:41pm PDT

“I like to joke that when I was using, I had no self-esteem. Now I have low self-esteem,” he says. “People telling you online you’re handsome or you have a great physique, yeah, that feels good for a moment in time. But it’s empty, and it doesn’t last.”

He calls it “inauthentic validation,” and yet he continues to post, each selfie generally taking one to two hours to compose, shoot, and edit.

Instagram, like all social media, has given rise to its own breed of pseudo-celebrity, in this case the so-called Instahunks, an amorphous battle charge of selfie factories fueled by posting daily, repetitive, half-naked photos to unanimous digital encouragement. These accounts often amass more followers than some cable news networks have viewers.

The social media site was launched in 2010 by two Stanford grads, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger (no relation). In 2012, when Instagram had more than 27 million users, it was acquired by Facebook for $1 billion. Today it boasts 500 million accounts globally that upload 95 million photos a day. The company was valued at $35 billion at the end of 2014, and revenue for 2016 is estimated to reach $3.2 billion.

But there are signs that Instagram’s popularity may have plateaued. Snapchat, which launched in 2011 and recently surpassed Twitter in number of daily users — 150 million — is quickly taking over and currently valued at $20 billion. Snapchat recently turned down an offer from Facebook to buy it for $3 billion, $2 billion more than Facebook paid for Instagram.

Jesse Fox, an assistant professor of communication at Ohio State University, has studied men’s use of and self-presentation on social media and found a strong correlation between selfie-taking and a not-too-pleasant cluster of personality traits known as the Dark Triad: narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism.

“What we saw in terms of how many selfies men were posting was driven by narcissism and psychopathy,” says Fox, who is not on Instagram. “Narcissism, it’s important to note, is not just being an egomaniac. It’s also being insecure. And psychopathy is really associated with impulsivity. They truly don’t care what other people think, and they behave in very impulsive fashions.”

According to Fox, self-objectification is the other major determiner associated with obsessive selfie-posting in men. This also predicts, along with narcissism, how likely a man is to edit and manipulate photos before posting.

“Self-objectification is the idea of yourself as an object," she says. “So, I don’t see myself as a person. I’m not interested in many aspects of my personality. I only see myself as something to be looked at and my value is in my appearance.” She adds, “The bottom line is, some of those people are so sad. They are truly mentally unhealthy people.”

On social media, self-objectification quickly becomes a grim feedback loop. Often when Instagram models attempt to use their vast platform to dabble in the political or philosophical, they received immediate backlash and lose followers.

“When you objectify yourself and put yourself in this state where you are treating yourself like a piece of meat, people are then expecting you to behave like a piece of meat,” Fox says. “When you try to humanize yourself, that’s ruining the fantasy for them. It’s like, ‘Thanks for the Zen quote, dude. Now take your shirt off again.’ ” (A recent post from Krieger, in which he’s sporting a Black Lives Matter T-shirt, received mixed reviews in the comments section, one user posting a snarky “all likes matter.”)

Anton Antipov, a 32-year-old bodybuilder, is familiar with this sort of response. We’re scheduled to meet at a health-food café in South Beach. He’s an hour late. (Extreme tardiness is a theme with the Instahunks I meet over the next four days.)

 

6 weeks out - 196lbs - I've been on my own since I started this, still on my own today, win or lose I don't have 17 people to praise or blame when I walk out on stage in 6 weeks. When I was new to this, I wish I did, I couldn't afford a coach, so I taught myself. When the coaches did start coming around, they wanted to coach me for the wrong reasons, or wanted me to be on teams for the sake of being on the team and be just another name on their roster. If you do choose to work with someone, make sure they are genuine about trying to help you and don't just use you and your name for their own benefit. Another thing, try to ask questions and learn from them instead of just taking orders, you'll never learn if you just do something you're told without asking why. Have a great weekend everyone, may the gains be with you! #selfmade #stillnatty

A photo posted by Anton Antipov (@maiseu) on Aug 6, 2016 at 3:38pm PDT

Antipov (@maiseu, 185,000 followers), despite being among the most terrifyingly veiny brick shithouses on Instagram, surprises with his warmth and likability. He moved to the United States from his native Belarus in 1997 and will be competing for the fourth time this year in Mr. Olympia — the crown jewel of bodybuilding. Previously, he was a fashion model and, though he’s straight, worked in gay bars in New York.

“A picture of a cat gets so many likes,” he says. “But if I post something meaningful, like about equal rights, nothing. But I understand that sex sells,” he adds, a bit broken. “I like wrinkles, I like gray hair. I’m cool with all of that. I don’t need friggin’ Photoshop. It tells a better story. If you hide something, it means you don’t accept yourself for who you are. If you can’t even accept yourself, how are you going to send a good message to everyone else?” 

Perhaps that’s easier said than done on Instagram. Most famously, in 2015, Australian teenage model Essena O’Neill, who had 580,000 followers, deleted more than 2,000 photos and began manipulating captions of old posts to talk about her acne and how much makeup she had to wear. On one selfie, she edited the caption to read, “Happiness based on aesthetics will suffocate your potential here on earth.” She lost countless followers and became the target of vicious online bullying. Soon after, she announced she was quitting social media.

“When people write to me, they write for the wrong reasons,” says Antipov. “They want money, fame, followers. About 30 people a day tag me in photos of their salads.” 

Since Antipov started posting photos of himself online, originally on a forum for Russian-speaking Americans, gay men have been stealing them and pretending to be him on dating sites and hookup apps. At one point, it seemed so overwhelming that Antipov nearly had a breakdown. To this day, men will approach him in restaurants or on the street and and say, “We’ve been talking on Grindr.”

“I have to explain to them, ‘Listen, it happens all the time. It’s not me. Somebody is using my pictures.’ And they’re like, ‘Oh, right, sure,’ ” he says. “I’ll be in some random city in Europe and some guy will give me this knowing look on the street, and I know he thinks he’s been talking to me online.”

After lunch Antipov heads off to rollerblade around South Beach (he’s using rollerblading to raise money for a disabled-athletes nonprofit) and then off to get a new tattoo. His existing tattoos skew toward the sentimental — a mandala, a quote that reminds him of a trip to Paris with his fiancée, a Keith Haring on his middle finger.

Across Miami Beach at another health food café, Max Emerson (@maxisms, 513,000 followers) is also an hour late. Had it not been for his pastel green hair, I wouldn’t have recognized him; he admits his selfies are highly edited. Flamboyant hair color seems common with the Instahunks. It feels like a play from the Tyler Oakley handbook, perhaps a way to be more recognizable out in the flesh-and-blood world.

Related | Slideshow: Meet the Instahunks

 

#iWokeUpLikeThis last month in #chiTown with @andrescamilo___ and @stevegrandmusic. Please watch the video at YouTube.com/TheMaxVicious @cricketnation

A photo posted by Max Emerson (@maxisms) on Jul 19, 2016 at 6:52am PDT

Emerson never wanted to join social media. When his friends began to sell their souls for “likes,” he scoffed.

“I was like, I want to kill these people. But then my agent called and said, ‘You’re in your 20s and you model — be fucking relevant,’ ” he says.

Emerson got into modeling at 18 years old. A year later, when he came out as gay, his father cut him off financially. “Because I model, I already know what you’re buying isn’t what is being sold,” he says.

Does he think people understand this, or are they still striving to achieve these impossible standards of beauty?

“Kids are killing themselves because they can’t take the perfect frickin’ selfie,” he says. “That’s why I used drag queen Trixie Mattel to do a Facetune tutorial, to show everyone how ridiculously fake we all are.”

Adults are also killing themselves in pursuit of the perfect selfie. Several governments have begun to treat the selfie, which only became a word in 2013, as a public-safety hazard. Across the globe, people have fallen off mountains, tripped onto train tracks, and shot themselves in the face, all in mid-selfie pose. Russian authorities launched a “safe selfie” campaign last year in response to scores of picture-takers who had died trying to capture the perfect shot. Russia also has a support group for selfie addicts.

After lunch, Emerson dashes back to the Dream Hotel. “I owe them another post. I’ll probably wear these underwear, too. Kill two birds with one stone,” he says, referring to his corporate sponsors. Most of the Instahunks I met with have brand sponsors. Using a modest, common online metric called the CPM, or Cost Per Thousand, a user in the range of half a million followers, like Emerson, could charge between $2,500 and $3,500 to promote a brand in a post. Companies usually give Instagram models creative control over the content of these posts. Instagram doesn’t make money directly from users’ content, in the way YouTube might, but instead earns revenue by embedding other ads in newsfeeds. After a brief experiment in licensing users’ photos to advertisers received a large backlash, the company now claims that users own the rights to all their photos.

“I think we are becoming a culture of narcissists,” Emerson says. “But have we always been like that, and do we now just have an outlet? I don’t know.” 

In West Hollywood, Calif., I meet with Murray Swanby (@murrayswanbyla, 378,000 followers, purple hair) who’s out with an entourage on Santa Monica Boulevard on a Sunday afternoon. He’s a nightlife promoter, and his Instagram tells the story of a Mr. Party Boy through selfies. 

 

Finally in bed for the night.. goodnight world! Busy week full of amazing things. Cant wait. #netflixandsnacks #movietime #cuddlesession with my #tvremote #marcomarco

A photo posted by Murray Swanby (@murrayswanbyla) on Jul 26, 2016 at 1:17am PDT

The key to getting lots of followers, most agree, is to have a simple, pared-down message and post with extreme regularity.

“It’s Sunday fun day!” Swanby’s friend Shirleen shouts through the legs of a go-go boy at the Abbey while raising her vodka tonic. The two snap a selfie.

Swanby fled to Tinseltown seven years ago from Montana. He estimates that in the five blocks between his home and the Abbey (the bar where he spends about five nights a week), he’s stopped a dozen times on the street by people who recognize him. He’s also starring in the upcoming E! reality show The Abbey Diaries, set at the bar.

We go bar-hopping around West Hollywood, where the entourage grows larger with each stop. Swanby would appear to stand proud, but his voice quivers when he speaks, and there’s a skittishness to him.

“I know I have body dysmorphia. I always compare myself to other people. I don’t know if this is a winnable thing,” he says. “I see myself as, I need to work on my stomach, I need to work on my arms, my chest, my abs. I don’t think it’s healthy, but most of my friends who are underwear models have the same complex. They’re never happy.”

“I’ll just be at the gym for the rest of my life,” he says, laughing nervously.

I’m struck by how bland and retro the Instahunk universe seems. Even the fashion industry today scoffs at such a tired aesthetic. There was a time, in the early 2000s, when the gay community by and large began to embrace nontraditional standards of sexiness, most prominently with the rise of BUTT magazine and its countless echoes. This young, overwhelmingly white, hairless, and svelte muscularity feels very 1990s.

Women, on the other hand, have long been under the heel of fantastical standards of beauty but in the past decade have made astounding strides in changing the narrative, by calling out Photoshopping in magazines and embracing celebrities like Gabourey Sidibe, Lena Dunham, and Broad City stars Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson.

I ask Swanby’s agent if she has any other hunks to send my way, and she points me to Billy Reilich, who she says is Ellen DeGeneres’s gardener.

I suggest meeting him at Huntington Gardens in Pasadena. The agent reluctantly confesses that Reilich doesn’t know anything about plants. He’s been on Ellen’s show about 30 times playing the fictional role of her gardener. He’s just a hunk. A hunk in Hollywood chasing a dream.

Reilich (@billreilich, 56,000 followers)  is also straight and a bodybuilder, and he also works at the Abbey and will appear on the forthcoming E! reality show. He takes me on a hike in Griffith Park on a blazing afternoon. He’s 25 and from Ohio and has seven meals a day, beginning at 5:30 a.m., when he wakes up, eats, and goes back to bed before meal two, at 8:30. He is gargantuan, with a face straight from Central Casting. He looks like a cornfed Midwestern football hero. 

 

Getting some ring work in today! Been eating like a slob for 3 days and I'm up 11 lbs... so I'm ready to get sweaty!

A photo posted by Billy Reilich (@billreilich) on Aug 4, 2016 at 2:15pm PDT

His Instagram account is an orgy of frightening muscularity, and, immediately following a workout, his face appears to age by 20 years.

“I get a lot of comments that are like, ‘Why are you wearing clothes?’ he says. “I like the idea that people follow me because of my physique. But when people treat you like a piece of meat, it doesn’t make you feel great. It makes you feel like a piece of shit.” 

He cringes when he looks back at those first times on Ellen, two years ago.

“I just look underdeveloped,” he says.

He continues, “Having gay followers is awesome, but a lot of the time I have to restrict what I post because I don’t want to come off as a gay guy. A lot of the fitness guys will shy away from following me. So, no more underwear selfies.” 

We pause just below Griffith Observatory to take in the view. The L.A. basin is cast gray through the marine-layer haze that crept in overnight, and the city looks cold and abandoned.

“I’m doing the grind. I’m trying to make it in fitness, in acting,” he says. “I drive a $4,000 car,” he adds with a sigh. “You see these guys around town who have a $400,000 car, all because of Instagram.”

He spots some of those other Insta-celebs at his job at the Abbey. “It’s not even close to how they look online. But people will follow them because they think it’s reality. It’s anything but.”

Reilich’s quest for fame is uphill, but he sees Instagram as the perfect place to start. He returned recently from New York, where he met with modeling agents.

“They all told me to lose 50 pounds and call them back,” he says. “But my size is all I have — it’s who I am. If I lose 50 pounds, I’m just another skinny-whatever guy.”

W. Keith Campbell, author of The Narcissism Epidemic and a professor of psychology at the University of Georgia, has studied narcissism for the past 30 years. He says the personality trait appears in two forms — one more grandiose and outgoing, the other marked by vulnerability and self-consciousness. Only in cases, when self-obsession leads to severe negative effects on one’s life, would it be classified as an actual mental disorder: narcissistic personality disorder.

“It’s fascinating the way people regulate themselves," he says. “Showing a selfie is a good example of that, how people use their social world to change how they see themselves,” he says.

From a biological perspective, scoring high in narcissism is good for mating behavior.

“People who are narcissistic can have more sexual partners. They’re very likable when you first meet them,” he says. “But that goes away. You have these shallow relationships, but you’re not so good at commitment or caring. And you’re willing to exploit people to get ahead. You can be manipulative, uncaring, and callous. If you’re good at it, if you’re charming enough, you can make it work. But if you’re narcissistic and kind of ugly, it’s going to be much harder.”

Unsurprisingly, the U.S. scores very high in narcissism, and those numbers appear to be on the rise. Still, Campbell is optimistic about the future.

“The Internet was built on porn. Virtual reality will be built on porn,” he says. “But then it’s going to turn into really cool stuff. For me, that’s the more positive spin. These Instagram models are trailblazers in this new world, and hopefully something good will come out of it.”

Back in New York, I comb through a flurry of Instahunk profiles. On one, a white dude who looks like he’s carved from marble posts a selfie taken fresh from the shower, sticking his tongue out at the camera.

“Still trying to get back in shape after a period of eating too much chocolate LOL,” the caption reads.

On another, a hunk with 12,000 followers writes an unusually involved caption to accompany his most recent selfie: “Social media has bred a society of selective listeners. People follow you for showing your tits and ass and unfollow you for showing your heart and mind. I’ve decided to use my internet presence for LGBT activism […] because silence equals death.” 

These words accompany a completely nude selfie. He’s crouching in a hallway with his arms raised and his flexed physique angled so that his abs catch the right shadows. His flowing hair is tousled meticulously over come-hither eyes as he stares directly into the camera. His left leg is positioned just so to cover his genitals while showcasing a neat tuft of pubic hair. The photo has 907 “likes.”

In this case, an ambition to change the world appears to have been only a passing blip. 

“Listening to Florence and the Machine!” reads a caption accompanying the next selfie. It’s a shot of a perfect chest, perfect abs, perfect hair, on what we can assume was another perfect afternoon. 

Related | Slideshow: Meet the Instahunks

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Illustration by Jill Dehaan

Bill Leap, perhapsthe world’s most respected scholar in the field known as lavender linguistics, talks in a Southern drawl and cusses like a trucker’s wife. 

“Let me tell you what it is, honey,” he says on a Monday afternoon from his home in Tampa, Fla. “Miss Piggy’s English is so queer.” 

Leap, an emeritus professor of anthropology at American University in Washington, D.C., is writing a book, Language Before Stonewall. 

“Back in the ’20s and ’30s, there was this massive use in some social sets in gay America of French as the quintessential gay language, and that continues to the ’70s,” he says. “Honest to God, Miss Piggy spoke fluent gay English. The way she slips in these little French things, the use of ‘moi’ and the hand gesture to the bosom, this is so 1930s gay.” 

In 1993, Leap created the Lavender Languages and Linguistics Conference, now in its 24th season. The two-day event draws about 150 attendees from all over the world and is the longest-running LGBT-studies conference in the U.S., and the only one dedicated to language issues, according to Leap. In 1993, much like today, the community squabbled over language politics, starting with what to call the field of study — queer language? Gay and lesbian language? Leap went with lavender. 

“I thought, Let’s use that ancient term ‘lavender’ and let’s offend everybody,” he says. Lavender, he points out, has been associated with the occult and mysticism, with women’s power in Africa, and with forms of power in the West in the Roman Imperial Court and the Catholic Church. 

“It surfaces in the 20th century with a lesbian women’s movement in England, which was marked in public by women who wore lavender-colored rhinoceros pins on their lapel,” he says. 

In his current research, Leap is looking at Harlemese, the language of the Harlem Renaissance, where he cites a rich and dynamic queer presence and a manner of speaking that, while being not exclusively queer, has influenced both gay and mainstream language to this day. 

“Harlem was the site for internal colonialism. Its sexual value was there for the convenience of white folks. But it had its own identity and formation in spite of the fact that white folks were intruding,” he says. 

Words like “hot” and “hunk,” when describing an attractive person, came from the clubs and after-hours parties of Harlem, he says. 

Around the same time, in Britain, Polari, what scholars call an anti-language, was at its peak among gay men, but the jargon would be completely unrecognizable to most English speakers today. 

“Nada to vada in the larda, what a sharda,” says Paul Baker, the world’s pre-eminent Polari scholar, when asked about his favorite phrase. 

Translation: What a shame, he’s got a small penis. 

“I like the rhyming,” he says. 

In the early 1990s, Baker stumbled upon Polari while looking for a thesis topic and soon found himself in a gay-run hotel in Brighton where the innkeepers recalled some phraseology. He talked to several old-timers in the area who helped him amass a small dictionary of words, numbering around 500 today and available on a new app called Polari, and wrote transcripts of dialogue from two popular British radio characters in the 1960s named Julian and Sandy, who spoke Polari. (Not coincidentally, the two actors playing the roles — Kenneth Williams and Hugh Paddick — were gay themselves.) 

Polari has roots in 1600s England and is a mixture of Molly slang (Regency England men who dressed in drag and coined words like “bitch” and “trade”), thieves cant (the Elizabethan rigmarole of criminals, circus travelers, and other undesirables), East London cockney slang, and Italian brought home by sailors in the Mediterranean. 

Other colorful Polari terms include: “pastry cutter” (a man’s oral sex technique), “naff” (meaning either tasteless or heterosexual), “cleaning the cage out” (cunnilingus), “tipping the ivy” (tuchus lingus), “tipping the velvet” (oral sex), “he’s got nanti pots in the cupboard” (he’s got no teeth), your “mother’s a stretcher case” (I’m exhausted), “vogue us up ducky” (light me a cigarette), and Hilda Handcuffs, Betsy Badge, and the orderly daughters (terms for the police). 

“It doesn’t always have to do with secrecy and protection,” Baker says. “I think it also has to do with forming an identity as an affected group, as marking yourself as different, or maybe a bit superior in some way, a mind-set of evaluating mainstream society as somehow inferior to the Polari speaker’s point of view.” 

Unsurprisingly, Morrissey was versed. The title of his album Bona Drag means “nice outfit.” In his song “Piccadilly Palare,” he sang, “So bona to vada, oh you, your lovely eek and your lovely riah.” (So nice to see you, oh you, your lovely face and your lovely hair.) And in the song “Girl Loves Me,” on his 2016 album Blackstar, David Bowie sang,

Cheena so sound, so titty up this Malchick, say

Party up moodge, nanti vellocet round on Tuesday

Real bad dizzy snatch making all the omies mad, Thursday

Popo blind to the polly in the hole by Friday

Translation: 

Women, I trust you, fix up this boy, say

Make your own fun, man, no drugs around on Tuesday

Really naughty airhead, making all the men mad [on] Thursday

Don’t care about the money spent by Friday

Polari was rife with “she-ing,” an academic term that refers to the linguistic practice of feminizing people and things. She-ing appears almost universally and across centuries in gay language, from Peru to the Philippines to South Africa (where gay slang is called Gayle), to Israel (called oxtchit, derived from an Arabic word meaning “my sister”), to Soviet-era Russia. It was initially practical, enabling gay men to talk about sex and lovers in public without fear of arrest or persecution. 

“You can she anybody,” Baker says. “You can she your father or the police. It’s inverting mainstream society’s values so that everybody is potentially gay and everybody is potentially feminine.” 

In the West, the gay lexicon dried up after Stonewall, relatively speaking. But in Putin’s Russia, where the environment remains extremely hostile for LGBT people, the website Gay.ru, according to a paper by researcher Stephan Nance, lists a course on how to speak present-day Russian gay, a slang called goluboy— from a word related to the bluish color of a dove — presumably to help gay Russians identify one another. The site addresses readers as devachki (“girls”), discusses misgendering, and provides instruction on gay tonal inflections when saying words like “sister” (“sestraaaa!”). Gays in Putin’s Russia have also Russo-fied Western terms such as queer (“kvir”) and coming out (“kaminaut”). 

In 1880s St. Petersburg, men cruising for sex with men were called “tëtki,” or “aunties.” (In polite society, they might be said to be getting up to “barskie shalosti,” or “gentlemen’s mischief.”) 

Denis Provencher, department head of French and Italian at the University of Arizona, has yet to identify a similar argot as Polari or research into gay-specific slang in French, where discourse, in typical French fashion, operates as more waltz than stride. Recently, however, many of Marcel Proust’s personal correspondences came to auction at Sotheby’s and revealed he used Latin as a secret code when writing to his lovers. 

“The closet is really an American social construction based on a narrative of Judeo-Christian ideology — death and resurrection,” Provencher says. “Coming out of the closet is like being reborn. In French, we are talking about living in good faith and in bad faith, being authentic in society.” 

The verb assumer is used, he says, and operates beyond talking of one’s sexuality. 

“When you say, ‘je m’assume,’ it means, ‘I assume my social role.’ And in France you would never come home and say, ‘Mom and Dad, I’m gay and this is my boyfriend Frank.’ You’d say, ‘This is Frank and we love each other.’ ” 

Provencher’s forthcoming book, Queer Maghrebi French, looks at LGBT North Africans living in France and their relationship to language. 

In Arab societies, “the harem is this enclosed space that we think of as a feminine space. The harem is also the house of the father. So if you’ve ‘come out of the harem,’ you’ve come out of the patriarchy. Young North African men use the harem as an analogy of the closet. There’s also this analogy of dropping the veil. Women who drop the veil in Western society are seen as sexually progressive,” he says. “You also get these strange narratives where men talk about wandering through the city looking for sex, but they’re also wandering toward Mecca as well.” 

While vocabulary might be the most fun part of lavender linguistics for the layperson, scholars are concerned with aspects such as tone, inflection, and gesturing, as well as the political and cultural implications of language — how the press write about LGBT issues, for example, or how queer people communicate with each other privately and at work, or how gay language is learned.

“All this talk about assimilation and acceptance still requires a certain kind of conformity, and, despite your group that’s all in favor of the heteronormative, many same-sex-identified persons are not comfortable with that mold,” Leap says. “And so you’ve got to let off some frustration. You’ve got to let off a certain amount of steam and anger. And talking gay is one way of doing that.” 

That raucous gay tongue of yore perseveres most strongly in American drag culture, and, for word lovers today, it might be the only bright spot of innovation. The film Paris Is Burning centers entirely on the lexicon of 1980s drag balls, where terms like “realness,” “house,” “mother,” and “shade” flash on-screen and move the narrative. (Those terms are so mainstream now that, in May, the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign accused the Democratic National Committee of “throwing shade.”) 

“[The participants on RuPaul’s Drag Race] have quite a clever use and attitude toward slang. There’s a celebration of language and a joy and a humor which feels like a successor to Polari,” says Baker. “Even though it’s American.” 

Online, where most evolution in the lavender lexicon occurs today, one might say there’s a bit less joy. 

“It’s more utilitarian and based around hookup culture when you’re typing away on Grindr,” Baker says. “Shorter phrases that have more to do with sexual things. Gay people on the Internet don’t want to come off as funny or showing these rather creative uses of language. They want to show themselves as being as masculine as possible. There’s a sort of performance there.”   

That performance, like she-ing before, crosses the East/West divide. On hookup apps in Russia, you’re bound to see users protesting “bez korony.” That means “without a crown,” or, in gayspeak, not a queen.    

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Photography by Jill Greenberg. Styling by Michael Cook. Prop Styling: Greg Garry. Hair and Makeup: Angela DiCarlo.

Editor’s Note: It should not need saying that the views expressed by the subject of this piece in no way represent the opinions of this magazine, but in this era of social media tribalism, the mere act of covering a contentious person can be misinterpreted as an endorsement. If LGBTQ media takes its responsibilities seriously we can’t shy away from covering queer people who are at the center of this highly polarized election year, and we ask you to assess Milos Yiannopoulos, the focus of this profile, on his own words without mistaking them for ours.  

It’s a humid, cloudy August afternoon in London, and the Internet’s greatest supervillain is having a spa day. After a few minutes in the tanning bed, Milo Yiannopoulos blithely trots to the shampoo sink for a deep conditioning treatment and blow-dry.

In the waiting room, sipping a latte, his personal trainer and traveling companion, Will, a 22-year-old jacked Alaskan in gym shorts and a tank top, sits giggling over his laptop. For the foreseeable future the two are on the road, a month here in London, a week in New York, then a four-month, 26-stop jaunt across American college campuses, for a project called the Dangerous Faggot tour.

When Yiannopoulos arrives on campus, there’s a potential for all hell to break loose. Many appearances are canceled because of student petitions. At others, protesters amass outside the auditorium. Women smear red paint on themselves. Attendees sound air horns to block out his voice.

In May, at DePaul University, activists stormed the stage where Yiannopoulos was being interviewed and snatched the microphone, threatening to punch him in the face while security stood idly by.

Once, he says, a man leaped from the audience, shouting “Go take a bath with a toaster!”

“That was really good. I was like, solid nine,” Yiannopoulos says.

A professional mischief maker and provocateur, he loves a grand entrance. Wherever Yiannopoulos goes, the Loki from London swoops in with rapid-fire talking points delivered in a playfulness so foreign—and intoxicating—to most journalists and Americans that they are left standing in the rubble, dumbfounded.

At universities across the country he has paraded into hissing crowds of students accompanied by a mariachi band and wearing a poncho while shaking maracas. He once ascended to the stage on a throne hoisted above the shoulders of a dozen young white men in Make America Great Again hats to chants of “USA! USA!” He sometimes dresses in a policeman stripper uniform.

At one event, claiming he feared for his safety from feminist activists, he hired as his bodyguard a porn star rumored to have the largest penis in the industry.

This year, Yiannopoulos skyrocketed to become one of the leaders in the cultural movement known as the alt-right, and one of the most reviled and perplexing figures to those on the left. He’s been called the Internet’s biggest troll, and his singular mission is to destroy what he sees as the progressive left’s culture of victimhood, identity politics, political correctness, and social justice.

“Nobody should be playing the victim,” he says. “Nobody should be doing this grievance, oppression bullshit malarkey. Everyone should just get on with achieving everything that they can in their lives.”

This summer, Yiannopoulos made headlines when following a sensationally bad, anti-feminist review of the new all-female Ghostbusters movie, posted on the conservative site Breitbart News, where Yiannopoulos is employed as tech editor. Online, he referred to one of the stars, Leslie Jones, as “a hot black dude.” (On CNBC, in September, he went a step further: She looks “remarkably like one of my ex-boyfriends,” he told reporters.) A Twitter war ensued. Yiannopoulos’s followers took his insult as permission to descend into racist and violent threats. Trolls posted memes comparing Jones to a gorilla, tagging her with the caption, “I know you only wanted to protect that kid.”

Twitter found itself in a no-win situation: allow Yiannopoulos free rein and be perceived as condoning trolling, or silence him and become a lightning rod for the frustrations of the alt-right. On July 19, Twitter permanently suspended Yiannopoulos’s account, which had around 350,000 followers, for violating terms of service that prohibit inciting targeted attacks against other users.

“I’m only responsible for what I say,” Yiannopoulos says. “I am held to a totally arbitrary, unique, hypocritical double standard because people don’t like my politics.”

Overwhelmed by the deluge, Jones briefly left Twitter, after tweeting, “Ok I have been called Apes, sent pics of their asses, even got a pic with semen on my face. I’m tryin to figure out what human means. I’m out.” A month later, her Web site was hacked and personal photos were published online.

One might wonder if the escalating tirade of abuse targeted at Jones would give pause to some of Yiannopoulos’s devotees: What purpose do such personalized attacks serve? What had their infantile campaign against a movie contributed to the greater sum of human happiness? Instead, the incident merely served to convince many of Yiannopoulos’s followers that the system was rigged by the liberal left to censor and shut down the right. The fact that the only other high-profile people to face permanent suspension were also Trump supporters (the rapper Azealia Banks and the right-wing troll Chuck C. Johnson) was grist for the alt-right mill. 

Back in the barber chair, a waifish young stylist lifts a strand of Yiannopoulos’s bleached hair and frowns. “You’ve got a lot of breakage from the dye,” he says. “I can give you extensions. I get them all the time.”

“Let’s schedule that for next Tuesday,” Yiannopoulos says. He’s not looking into the mirror. Instead, he is pounding away into his smartphone, held inches from his nose, as the blow-dryer purrs, making the final touches on his latest article for Breitbart News. The story is titled “How Donald Trump Made It Cool to Be Gay Again.”

“Like it or not, Donald Trump is bringing subversion, decadence, and troublemaking back to gay life,” he writes. “The domestication of the homosexual has been a disaster for leftists: Not only did the boring and stupid gays retreat into conservative institutions like marriage, but the fun and creative ones like me...are rebelling against the language policing and authoritarianism of the modern left and feeling ourselves drawn to the trollish chaos of the Republican frontrunner.”

Yiannopoulos considers himself a culture crusader, and rarely talks straightforward policy. His silver-tongued tirades madly skip over the surface, leaving in their wake a stunned armada of agape liberals. He is the right’s Kanye West, the NRA’s Kim Kardashian. 

When the alt-right throws support behind issues that flatly contradict his professed core values, he finagles reasoning to uphold the party line. So when prominent gay Trump supporter and PayPal founder Peter Thiel retaliated against Gawker Media for outing him as a gay man by funding a fatal lawsuit against the company, Yiannopoulos heralded it as a victory for free speech. Gawker’s trolling silenced people, he says.

That, of course, is exactly what Yiannopoulos does. (I witnessed this firsthand. Several people declined to be interviewed for this article for fear of getting harrassed by Yiannopoulos and his supporters.) 

Yiannopoulos is among Trump’s most prominent and gleeful supporters. “Donald Trump is such an obvious gay icon,” Yiannopoulos says in the salon. “He’s brassy, he’s outrageous, his taste in interiors is gaudy and exhibitionist. He’s a heavy-handed caricature of a billionaire. Everything about him is at once fantastic and camp. He’s the drag queen you can vote for.”

He toys with the idea of becoming press secretary in a Trump White House and says he’s met the candidate twice. The rise of the New York billionaire to the top of the Republican party has, to say the least, baffled many Americans. They view his ascent as a reflection of the groundswell of racism, xenophobia, and nationalism that he’s managed to tap into. But Yiannopoulos, who prefers to label himself as a “cultural libertarian” or “classical liberal,” does not believe these things exist on any measurable scale. Instead, in order to accurately see the Trumpian soul, one must accept the Trump movement’s defining philosophical point: that the media has become lazy and arrogant and suffers from a pathologically liberal bias.

“The whole Trump project, the alt-right project, Breitbart, we recognize the media as public enemy number one,” he says. “Is the media then going to report nicely about us? Of course not. At Trump rallies, the press pen is raised and at the back of the room and he’s pointing at them, saying ‘Look at this garbage, these slimeballs.’ And the whole crowd is cheering. You think those people are going to report accurately on what happened? Of course they won’t.”

He continues, “At least politicians recognize the fact that everyone hates them and nobody trusts them. Journalists haven’t yet worked out that everyone hates them. When people are ridiculing them and correcting them and calling them out on their bad behavior online, they dismiss it as trolling and abuse and harassment and they close their comments sections. They don’t stop and think, If 80% of the comments on 80% of our pieces are blisteringly negative, should we perhaps reflect on whether we are getting it right? The internet doesn’t bring out the worst in people—it reveals people for how they are. This is the nice, polite, politically correct middle classes at war with the working classes, who speak in a far more vulgar, direct, and explicit way. It’s a class thing.”

The alt-right is far from alone in a backlash against political correctness. In July, a Pew Research poll found that 59% of Americans agree that “too many people are easily offended these days over the language that others use,” although less than a majority of Clinton supporters agreed with the statement.  

The alt-right did not spring out of thin air. A decade ago, it was called the Tea Party. And while many would characterize the movement’s values as racist, xenophobic, and nationalistic, Yiannopoulos sees himself as standing up for the nation’s most oppressed. If one is to accept his view on the movement, the core philosophies are those that have always defined the right: small government, personal accountability, and a deep distrust of sweeping social movements and political correctness. Only now, thanks largely to Internet trolling culture and a swelling backlash against a culture predicated on “trigger warnings,” has the extreme right seemed to grab hold of its own identity and run with it.

Enter Milo Yiannopoulos, a 32-year-old shamelessly gay, British Catholic of Jewish descent, who now lives in Los Angeles. He stands over 6 feet tall and has a lanky, soft build. When he’s not dressed in tailored English suits, he’s usually sporting tank tops, flowy textiles, straight-leg jeans, and $1,000 Nike basketball shoes (“I wear these because the guys I want to fuck know what they are but can’t afford them”), dark sunglasses, his signature strings of Bahaman pearls around his wrist, and a pair of gold crucifixes about his neck. He has poor eyesight and is constantly reaching for his glasses. When he speaks, he lowers his chin and leans in intently, fixing a gaze with dark eyes that are at once doelike and cutting.

Yiannopoulos was born and raised in Kent, a mostly rural county outside London. He attended good schools, which likely helped polish up his accent. When he was 6, his parents divorced. He continues to know very little about his father, whom he compares to Tony Soprano, and who ran pubs and nightclubs in Essex and Kent. At age 11, Yiannopoulos worked the door at some of those clubs but lived with his mother and stepfather.

“I was admiring and also terrified of my dad, which is exactly the relationship you should have with your father—and your boyfriend. You should look up to them but also be very worried,” he says, giggling, as we stroll through a mall en route to lunch at Tiffany’s in London’s Canary Wharf. Perhaps, also, it’s a relationship one should have with one’s presidential candidate. His preferred pet name for Trump is “Daddy.”

Yiannopoulos has said his mother never accepted his homosexuality. At home, his stepfather was abusive, often physically, and left not-so-subtle clues that he wanted Yiannopoulos out of the house. When the subject of his childhood comes up, Yiannopoulos displays a rare moment of vulnerability. His posture shrinks and he folds his arms.

“Everybody has bad shit happen to them, and you either use it to turn yourself into a star or you become a victim. And I don’t have time for victims,” he says. “If you allow the bad things in your life to define you, you will only ever be a parasite.”

In his early teens, he went to live with his grandmother, whom he compares to Oscar Wilde’s Lady Bracknell—she always had fabulous, older gay men around. She died in the mid-2000s. He went on to university in Manchester and then Cambridge, dropping out of both in order to develop technology properties, where he made most of his money. In 2011, he launched the technology news site The Kernel, which quickly became embroiled in lawsuits from contributors seeking compensation. In 2014, the property was sold to The Daily Dot. Former employees complained of harassment from Yiannopoulos, one telling The Guardian that he threatened to publish an embarrassing photo and personal details about her.

Yiannopoulos went on to write technology columns for The Daily Telegraph. Around that time, Steven Bannon, the executive chairman of a small conservative news site called Breitbart News, was scouting for talent. Yiannopoulos had just thrust himself into the Gamergate controversy that erupted in August 2014 when male online gamers launched a trolling campaign to target women in the video game industry, including developers Zoe Quinn and Brianna Wu, under the banner of pushing back against feminist intrusion in gamer culture and undeserved media applause of women in gaming.

The campaign escalated into widespread death and rape threats. Quinn’s personal information and home address were posted on the site 4chan. Her former boyfriend published a 9,000-word personal attack online filled with intimate details of their relationship, including full conversations over text. 

Bannon says Gamergate had little to do with his reaching out to Yiannopoulos. The two arranged a meeting at the Ritz-Carlton in Miami.

“I looked up at the bar, and there was a flamboyantly dressed guy, and he had been sitting there for a while. You know, I didn’t know if he was working the hotel or not!” Bannon says, laughing.

In August, following the resignation of his campaign chief Paul Manafort, after it was revealed that he had questionable ties to the Kremlin, Trump hired Bannon as his new campaign CEO.

“What I love about Milo is he is such a hard worker,” Bannon says. “Milo has such a big heart that even people he disagrees with, he can get along with. That’s why I think that he’s going to have real longevity.”

He adds, “[People’s] sexual preference doesn’t drive everything, and I think that’s what Trump is saying. Trump offers up a vision for America where everyone can kind of work together. I also think he takes very seriously things like radical Islam, which, to me, is the number one threat to gay people in the world, that we cover extensively at Breitbart. There’s been no broader acceptance of Milo than the readership at Breitbart. I mean, they love the guy. But that’s how change is made. You know why they love Milo? He’s a fighter. He’s absolutely fearless.”

Christina Hoff Sommers, a former philosophy professor and senior analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, came across Yiannopoulos’s writing during the Gamergate controversy. The two quickly bonded over their similar views on modern feminism. They appeared on panels together—twice forced to evacuate because of bomb threats—to defend the gamers. The pro-gamer camp argued that, while the press focused on the sociopaths at the fringes, reasonable gamers saw video game culture, violence in gaming, and, ultimately, male sexuality under threat by feminists.

“Shit-talking is a part of gamer culture,” Yiannopoulos says. “Feminists have been telling us for 30 years, treat them like we treat each other. Trust me, ladies, you do not want us to speak to you how we speak to each other. Taunting is how men bond. Men can shake it off—women can’t. They’ll cry in the corner and complain about abuse and harassment.”

“Milo is a lot of fun to be around during a bomb threat,” Sommers says. “During that time he was getting death threats constantly. He got an impaled mouse sent to him in the mail.”

On another occasion the two were leaving a discussion in Miami when Milo checked his phone and found an email from someone threatening to come in with a machine gun. “I said to him, ‘Are you afraid?’ ” Sommers recalls. “He said, ‘No, I just think I should tell them—don’t send an email to a busy person! If you’re a mass murderer, we’re going to get it too late!’ ”

Sommers describes her relationship to Yiannopoulos as mothering, if not mentoring, adding that he never listens to her advice. She regrets he’s in Trump’s corner. 

“He doesn’t understand American politics,” she says. “For him, it’s all theater and camp and funny—and it is, but up until a certain point. We are fighting something very serious on the campus—the censorship, the humorlessness. And it’s not even Trump that bothers me so much, but he’s insufficiently critical of the alt-right. It’s more dangerous than he seems to know or understand.”

She says Yiannopoulos is in denial about many of his followers’ behavior and needs to call them out for inappropriateness. 

“He is so smart and witty and intelligent,” she says. “He could be a model for how to confront the campus puritanical cult—that it’s much more effective to do it with evidence and humor. You don’t need vulgarity and personal assaults. He needs to work on it. If you’re going to be a Joan Rivers, you need to practice. He’s a lovely boy, except he can be deplorable!” 

At the Republican National Convention in July, Yiannopoulos held a “Gays for Trump” rally where he appeared in a bulletproof vest to discuss gun rights and his support for open carry laws.

“You know what, love doesn’t win,” he says, referring to one of the many rallying cries after the massacre in Orlando in June. “An AK-47 wins.” At the Trump rally, the elephant in the room was the issue of radical Islam.

When Yiannopoulos announced he was moving to the United States, Bannon asked him to reconsider, believing his voice resonated more powerfully from the other side of the Atlantic. But Yiannopoulos told Bannon that he was concerned by Muslims in London becoming radicalized. As a visible gay man and an outspoken critic of Islam, he feared for his life. 

Daayiee Abdullah is a gay imam and the director of the Mecca Institute, a nonprofit that spreads progressive Islamic theology. He says the widespread finger-pointing at Islam benefits media and oil profits and cites Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim state, as an example of the plurality and progressiveness of Islam.

“The problem stems from an internalized fear, and that fear quite often brings about radical political views,” he says. “When we give magic-bullet answers, you wind up coming up with false ideologies on how to deal with a much more complex situation. I think all the interfaith action since 9/11 shows that, yes, we can work together and it doesn’t have to be a hatefest.” 

In London, Yiannopoulos is speeding across town in the back of a Mercedes en route to his favorite tailor, Gieves and Hawkes, in Mayfair, to purchase a suit for his trainer, Will.

“Gays are smarter than anyone else,” Yiannopoulos says. “They’re overrepresented as artists and inventors, and there’s a reason for that. On average they have higher IQs, but also we have license to experiment and push boundaries where others don’t.” He is less generous toward the transgender community. “On the one hand, you have the trans lobby that’s all about control and oppression and misery and victimhood and grievance culture. And then drag queens, which is about taking the same kind of pain and expressing it through gender-defying comedy and transgression and subversion. I’m very much in the second camp.”

With a sigh, he gazes out the window. He says he wishes more people appreciated the everyday humor in life. “You really expect me to believe that I shouldn’t laugh about trannies? It’s hilarious. Like, dude thinks he’s a woman?” He bursts into a fit of laughter, struggling to catch his breath. 

“I’m not saying I want them to be locked up or castrated or God-knows-what. I want the opposite. But we can’t admit that it’s funny? Being gay is funny! Lesbians are fucking hilarious.”

In another era, might Yiannopoulos have been on the left, on the side of the civil rights movement or the Vietnam War protests?

“Yes, I think so,” he says. “And in the 1990s, when the religious right was oppressive to culture, I would have been against them, too. But today the left is a very powerful enemy that is entirely antithetical to gay culture. I find nothing more tiresome than people talking about their own identity endlessly.”

In the summer of 2015, when Shaun King suddenly became the nation’s top trending topic on Twitter, he had never heard of Milo Yiannopoulos. King was new to journalism. The previous year he was working for a green energy nonprofit in California when a friend emailed him a link to a video of a police officer choking a man on Staten Island. King had never seen anything like it. He wasn’t even sure if it was legal for him to be watching it. The man in the video was Eric Garner, and by that point, it had amassed only a few hundred views on YouTube. King decided to share the video relentlessly on social media. Two weeks later, in Ferguson, Missouri, Michael Brown would be gunned down by a police officer, followed in succession by the deaths of Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, and scores of other unarmed black men murdered by police officers.

King got involved with social justice activism. By the beginning of 2015, in his new role as a writer for the liberal site DailyKos, King was receiving death threats and racial slurs on a nearly hourly basis through social media. Doctored photos of his five children being murdered were posted. Then a series of bizarre events unfolded, beginning with the strange case that spring of Rachel Dolezal, a white woman in Spokane, Wash., who ran the local NAACP chapter and had been posing as a black woman. King, who is biracial and identifies as black, began seeing occasional online comments questioning his own ethnicity, but thought little of it. For months trolls had been making outlandish claims about him—questioning the number of children he has, accusing him of lying about recent surgery—though none had caught traction.

Then a troll named Joshua Goldberg contacted Yiannopoulos with a tip: Social justice warrior Shaun King is actually white. Yiannopoulos ran with it. (Later that summer, Goldberg was arrested by the FBI on the grounds he told a would-be terrorist how to make a bomb for a 9/11 anniversary attack. It also was revealed Goldberg had multiple, fake online personas, ranging from an Islamic radical to a feminist.)

The claims against King were untrue but leapt to the top of the news cycle. Appearing on MSNBC, correspondent Joy Reid revealed one of the most intimate parts of King's life: that both his parents are listed as white on his birth certificate because he doesn’t know the identity of his biological father, a black man.

“A lot of people follow what Milo does. When he decides to attack somebody, thousands of other people join in. He’s aware of that,” King says at his home in Brooklyn. “And so it then became not just a thing of Milo or Breitbart, but then thousands of other people just doing it because, hey, Milo must be right.”

King says Yiannopoulos continues to go “in and out” of posting harassing content about him, sometimes lying dormant for months and then reappearing with fresh menace. “I don’t respect him. I don’t know a lot of people who respect him, because he kind of lacks just basic human decency in the way he harasses and attacks people.”

King, now on staff at the New York Daily News as senior justice writer, has since become a superstar journalist of the progressive left and a sort of photo-negative version of Yiannopoulos.

“Milo is not a free-speech crusader,” he says. “What he does is consistently ugly. It’s often very bigoted and racist. He almost exclusively attacks people of color, people who he somehow has decided are enemies of the things that he believes in. He’s so far removed from the pain that he causes people that he doesn’t even believe that it’s real. He’s just so desperate for attention. It’s like a bad circus act.”

Yiannopoulos attempts to dismiss claims of his being racist by saying that he has sex only with black men. Might that simply be fetishism, and therefore dehumanizing and racist?

“If I were an artist creating fetishized images of black bodies, like trying to compare them to animals in some way, yeah, that could be racist,” he says. “Let’s have that conversation. But the fact is, I just like fucking blacks and, ergo, [am] unlikely to be a racist.”

He calls the Black Lives Matter movement “hugely destructive and counterproductive for black people,” saying it perpetuates negative stereotypes in American culture of black people as violent, irrational, and angry.

“It has achieved nothing else but to divide people and to fuel racism,” he says. “It’s just not the right response. If you have a community with a reputation of being aggressive and obnoxious and unreasonable and wallowing in victimhood, that’s the last thing you do. They should be getting under people’s skin. Get under the skin of conservatives, make people uncomfortable and do it by being better-looking and funnier and smarter and more interesting than everybody else. That’s how I do it, and that’s how to win in culture.”

King scoffs at the criticism. “Black folk are not playing roles in a show,” he says. “Milo thinks that because he is an actor. He’s a clown. It’s a role he’s playing. And so he thinks everyone’s playing their role. Everyone’s faking their part, because he lives that every day pretending to be this man. But there are real victims in this. He hasn’t experienced the pain or seen it to understand it.”

At the tailors, Yiannopoulos picks out a blue suit for Will. He has virtually no close friends left in London, he says, and it’s difficult to imagine, with his relentless travel schedule, he’s made many new ones in Los Angeles.

When he interacts with his staff, almost entirely comprised of young men (one is like a twink carbon copy of him, decked out in identical dark sunglasses with a string of pearls around his wrist), a gentle fatherly, or drag-motherly, side to Yiannopoulos emerges. He admits to being a nurturer, perhaps even with a bit of a Christ complex. 

“I’m more of a nuanced character than people realize, because I play an asshole in my columns,” he says. “My work comes out of a deep compassion for human beings who I think are being lied to and lied about.”

When they leave the tailors, Will—a sweet young straight man who had never left the United States before this trip—asks if they can go shopping for souvenirs. Yiannopoulos hails a cab. They’ve spent the month indulging Will’s desire to sight-see. The last thing one could imagine, despite his reputation, is Yiannopoulos ridiculing someone like Will.

“I’ve never cared about having the hottest, or trendiest, friends,” Yiannopoulos says. “Most of the people I write for and who like me are not particularly fashionable. They may not be the hottest people in the world, they might not be the sexiest or the most socially fluid, but I like them. They’re decent, real people, and they are being shat on by everyone else.”

The following week, at a sun-drenched table at Cecconi’s in London’s Mayfair, Yiannopoulos is having breakfast. He is feeling particularly high on himself. Fewer than 24 hours before, Hillary Clinton, at a speech in Reno, Nevada, in which she castigated Trump’s decision to hire Bannon to lead his campaign, read aloud two of Yiannopoulos’s headlines published on Breitbart News: “Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy” and “Would You Rather Your Child Had Feminism or Cancer?”

“According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups, Breitbart embraces ‘ideas on the extremist fringe of the conservative right.’ This is not conservatism as we have known it. This is not Republicanism as we have known it,” Clinton said in the speech on August 25. “These are racist ideas, race-baiting ideas, anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, anti-women—all key tenets making up the emerging racist ideology known as the alt-right. The de facto merger between Breitbart and the Trump campaign represents a landmark achievement for this group, a fringe element that has effectively taken over the Republican party.”

Later that day, in his response on Breitbart News, Yiannopoulos wrote, “This is precisely what the alt-right is responding to. They post offensive memes because they know it’ll wind up boring, grouchy grannies like Hillary.”

His next story posted to the site is headlined “How to Make Women Happy: Uninvent the Washing Machine and the Pill.” He calls himself a feminist, but a second-wave feminist, believing in a clear and equal division of the sexes, and lists Camille Paglia, alongside Christopher Hitchens, as the thinkers who have influenced him the most. Madonna and Mariah Carey are among his role models. His favorite female icon in popular culture is Buffy the Vampire Slayer. “She saves the world over and over again, and female vulnerability is part of her strength,” Yiannopoulos says. “That’s why Ghostbusters failed, because women aren’t like that. In the opening 10 minutes they’re making queef jokes? Women don’t behave that way. And none of the women men want behave that way. Ghostbusters didn’t fail because men hate women—it failed because these were inauthentic caricatures of lesbians, basically.”

Among his most trolled public figures are Lena Dunham and Amy Schumer. Dunham recently came under fire for comments perceived as racist about New York Giants wide receiver Odell Beckham Jr. in which she suggested that, at a recent event, the reason he didn’t want to have sex with her was that she was wearing a tux.

“The people that we are encouraged to think of as complex and interesting on the left, aren’t,” Yiannopoulos says. “Amy Schumer and Lena Dunham are intensely dull, boring people, but we are required to look at them from a million different angles from a million different profiles in saturated media coverage. But things are starting to change. And I am one of the primary engines of change in American culture because I’m demonstrating that someone sassy and silly and gay and flamboyant who loves RuPaul’s Drag Race and sucks black dick doesn’t have to vote Democrat. That matters. That’s really important.”

I question to what extent his assertions about the mission of the alt-right are based on reality, or if he may be projecting a nonexistent, nuanced politics onto an amorphous, disgruntled mass. Yiannopoulos, with the stilted morning light of late summer filtering through the window, considers this for a moment. Finely groomed men in suits march on the sidewalk outside. A woman in full burka kneels to tie her son’s shoe.

“I see things happening first, because I’m on the edge of culture,” he says and takes a sip of his coffee. “I’m the canary in the coal mine.” 

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Photography by Gavin Bond. Photographed in Brooklyn, NY on October 3, 2016. Styling by Michael Cook. Grooming by Amber Amos for The Only Agency using Sisley Paris. All clothing by Bottega Veneta.

Javier Muñoz — devastatingly charming, 41 years old, openly gay, openly HIV-positive — grew up in a Puerto Rican household in Brooklyn’s East New York neighborhood at a time when it was among the most violent places in America.

“That neighborhood was a pocket of tension and aggression,” Muñoz says. “My parents did their best to protect me and my brothers, and we got out of there alive. Ultimately, the street smarts it gave me, the toughness it gave me, is how I’m able to survive so many things, so many transitions.”

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Photography by Gavin Bond. Photographed on the High Line, New York, on July 22, 2016. Styling by Thomas Carter Phillips for The Wall Group. Groomer: Amber Amos for The Only Agency using Sisley Paris. All clothing by Bottega Veneta.

In the late 2000s, after years of struggling to be a professional actor, Muñoz had all but given up and was working in a restaurant as a server while performing in a small off-Broadway musical, All Is Love, penned by a friend. That performance led to a role in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights and eventually to him becoming the understudy to Miranda himself in the wildly successful Broadway hip-hop musical Hamilton, about the life of American founding father Alexander Hamilton. While the show was in previews, in the winter of 2015 — and in the wake of a cancer diagnosis (he is in remission now) — Muñoz performed for the Obamas. Six months later, he assumed the titular lead role full time.

This year Hamilton was nominated for a record-setting 16 Tonys and won 11. The waiting list for tickets extends well into 2017.

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Sitting in a beer garden in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District, Muñoz says, “If I can be a new face that people see that is HIV-positive and healthy and performing seven shows a week and kicking ass, then let that stand as a positive example for the person who is still living with that stigma and fear. Or for the person living in a country or situation in which they are not supported, let that be a fire in their belly to keep fighting the good fight for themselves.”

But as Muñoz quickly learned, fame has its drawbacks. One night after taking over his new role this summer, Muñoz left the theater and jumped on the subway to go home, as he’d always done.   

“That’s the Hamilton guy,” someone whispered. The smartphone cameras covertly clicked away. Muñoz played it cool. 

“I was like, Deal with it tonight, and now you know,” Muñoz says, laughing. “It’s crazy, man. This is sort of beyond what I’d hoped and dreamed. I always wanted to be the actor that could work consistently but still ride the train. I can’t do that anymore.” 

Note: Since this article was published, the trans military ban has been lifted.

One afternoon long ago, Sara Simone, who was raised as a boy, threw on some of her mother’s clothes and headed out to the playground to be with the other kids. She didn’t think much about the blouse or the long skirt she was wearing. Rather, she thought the other kids might find it interesting, cool even. Instead, they laughed and ridiculed her, called her a “faggot” and “queer.” It would be a long time before Simone donned women’s clothing in public again. 

Hers was the only black family on the block in white, blue-collar Allentown, Pa. Her father was a religious zealot who beat his wife. Sensing something out of the ordinary about their child, Simone’s parents sent her to therapy and then to Catholic school, where she was pressured to join the football team and became a star athlete before heading to college. There Simone had her first sexual encounter with a man.

OK, I guess I’m gay, she thought. That’s cool, but it still doesn’t seem exactly right. These issues of identity eventually led her to drop out of school and join the armed forces.

“I went into the military trying to be what everyone wanted me to be. That was the most macho thing I could do. I was really trying to hide the gender that I was,” she recalls over margaritas at a restaurant in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of Washington, D.C. 

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Around 1980, at age 20, Simone was stationed in Panama in close quarters with her hyper-masculine Army buddies and would covertly, on occasion, cross-dress. 

“There was no YouTube. There were no role models,” she says. “There were no words for what I was feeling, so I thought I was the only one in the world who felt that way.”

This was an era when even “don’t ask, don’t tell” would have been a radical step forward. Simone was part of the military police, “so I was supposed to be upholding military law,” she says. “If anyone found out what I was doing, I would have been court-martialed, or beaten up, or killed.” 

On the weekends, the young privates would head into town, Panama City, with a fresh paycheck to get drunk, take drugs, and hire prostitutes. “I wasn’t into women, so that didn’t interest me much,” Simone says. On such an excursion, walking down the street, Simone spotted a young Panamanian who caught her eye. 

“There was something interesting about her, something different. I thought she had just a wee bit of masculine features. This was the most interesting-looking person I’d ever seen in my life.” The woman was about 19, with bronze skin and long, straight black hair. She wore denim overalls, one side unhinged, over a small T-shirt and, Simone noticed as she got closer, light, barely noticeable stubble along her jawline. Simone approached, barely speaking Spanish, while the woman knew only rudimentary English, and ended up at her apartment, where a group of the woman’s friends came over to party. 

“One of them started to change clothes in front of me, and when she took her pants off, I thought, Oh! OK, look at her! For some reason, I didn’t feel shocked. It was like a revelation. I started thinking, This is who I am. I felt like I was around people like me. It was the happiest night I had in Panama.”

Simone never saw the bunch again. In fact, it would be another 30 years, when Simone began to transition into living full-time as a woman, before she would knowingly meet another trans person. To this day, she still thinks about the young Panamanian. Back at the base, it was a different story. Simone sank deeper into depression and attempted suicide. She remained in the military for another decade and left with an honorable discharge. Today she works for a VA contractor, helping to connect recently returning vets with social services. 

By one estimate, there are 12,800 active-duty trans people in the U.S. military. Recent research suggests that transgender people are more likely to have served in the U.S. military compared with the rest of the population. A 2014 study by UCLA’s Williams Institute estimates 15,500 active-duty trans people and another 134,300 who have served—amounting to a rate of participation of 21% compared with about 11% for the general population. 

At present, the condition of gender dysphoria disqualifies people from serving openly as trans in the U.S. military. Last July, however, Defense Secretary Ash Carter issued a de facto moratorium on dismissing transgender people from the armed forces. And on May 27 this year, the ban is set to end, according to a draft timeline circulated among officials last August—with ramifications possibly including a pilot program to provide leaves of absence for surgery or hormone therapy. 

In 2013, Kristin Beck (born Christopher Beck)—a member of the elite Navy SEALs who completed 13 tours of duty in places such as Iraq, Afghanistan, and Bosnia and received a Purple Heart, a Bronze Star, and a Joint Service Commendation decoration—made a splash in the press when she came out as trans. She’s currently running for the House of Representatives in Maryland’s fifth Congressional District. 

The highest-ranking openly transgender official in the Obama administration is Amanda Simpson, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for operational energy, the equivalent of being a two-star general. Her office, according to its web page, sets policy with regard to the “energy required for training, moving, and sustaining military forces and weapons platforms for military operations,” including “energy used by ships, aircraft, combat vehicles, and tactical power generators.” 

The current ban, which applies to those in uniform, does not affect Simpson, who is a civilian employee of the Department of Fefense. She began working there in 2011 and transitioned many years before. 

“I was the first [openly trans person] in a leadership role, and in the Pentagon,” Simpson says from her office. “I got my job because I’m the best at it. As far as being trans and open, it has never been an issue for me in this building.” 

Simpson doesn’t see many special issues arising after the ban is lifted in May. She says the change is no different from when black Americans, women, or gays and lesbians were integrated into the military. 

“It’s an ongoing evolution that has always made our military forces stronger. The department and the mili-tary want to be as effective as possible, and the way to achieve that has always been through more diversity,” she says. “Contrary to most beliefs, the military is not about brute force. When ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ was repealed, there was not the social upheaval in the military that some people thought was going to happen, and I don’t see much of a difference here. As always, the military will soldier on.”

Slideshow: Meet 7 Trans Soldiers Who Served Our Country

Robin, 40, is a former Air Force officer who left active duty in 2002 and now works as a technical director for the Department of Defense. She began to transition on the job last March. She also has warm things to say about the professional atmosphere at the Pentagon.

“It’s a great place to work. Everybody has been very helpful and nice. There are a few outliers, but that’s society,” she says. 

The lift on the ban, however, may be too broad and does not address many of the particulars that will go along with allowing people to serve openly as transgender. 

 “They’re still not going to cover surgery. It’s questionable if you can even have surgery while in the military,” she says. “And what standards will these people be held to, if they are one gender when they came in and now they are another? How will the military merge male and female standards? Dress, hair—that’s where people continue to struggle.” 

Under current protocol, trans women, for example, would still be held to male standards for hair, dress, and bathroom use. “I have trans friends in the military now, and they struggle with hair stand-ards and bathrooms,” Robin says. “Are all the policies changing in May, or are they just saying ‘It’s OK to be trans now’? They’re officially going to say you cannot get kicked out for being trans and you can get mental health services, but that’s all I’ve seen that they are going to do.”

A stone’s throw from the Pentagon, in Arlington, Va., Kimberly Moore has invited me to her birthday party at Freddie’s Beach Bar, which is decorated in Barbies and looks a bit like a restaurant from The Golden Girls if you were on acid. 

Moore is a former marine. She (then he) led a 300-person unit in Iraq—it turned out that five of her soldiers ended up being transgender. 

There are about 35 current and former military people here, with a stark age divide. Those around Kimberly’s age, middle-aged, are mostly married to women they met before they came out. Many of them dress only on select occasions. Sometimes their wives know, and sometimes they don’t. A few have begun to fully transition. At one table sit the younger generation, in their 20s. They are decidedly more blasé about the whole thing. 

Moore says she began dressing when she was around 8 years old. In the Marine Corps, just out of college, sometimes she would sneak out of the barracks, drop $200 a night on women’s clothes, and then throw them out the next day. 

“My wife hates it,” Moore says. “The fact I’m out here tonight — she wouldn’t even talk to me when I was heading out of the house. She told me as soon as our daughter gets better, we’re headed for a divorce.” The couple has three children. The youngest, 5, is battling leukemia. 

“We went to go get her hair cut, because it was falling out in clumps. And she said, ‘I don’t want to be confused as a boy,’ and I said, ‘I know exactly how you feel.’ ”

Moore’s friend Lisa, an NSA contractor, approaches with news that, six months ago, she began to fully transition.

“I’m chicken,” Moore says. She has a sweet accent carried from her native Texas (her father, who she calls a “Huckabee conservative,” played for the Texas Longhorns). “I can’t make that decision. I’m still balancing that.”

“It’s not a choice,” Lisa says. “That’s what it comes down to.”

“My wife has this deal: ‘If I give you an inch, you will take six or seven miles.’ And she’s right,” Moore says. “So she won’t be accepting of any part of it. She won’t talk to me for three or four or five days after this.”

Moore sees challenges ahead once the ban is lifted. “I think the lower ranks are OK with it. Like when ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ was repealed, they were able to assimilate more easily than the higher ranks. But we’ve had women in the military for 60 or 70 years now, and sexual assaults are on the rise. There was compatibility for 60 years, so what’s different now?” she says. 

“The military is really driven by this binary mentality, where you have to be either-or. There’s no place for this opera stage of ambiguity,” Moore adds. 

Yet the military often has been ahead of the rest of society on social issues, such as desegregation. 

“I have found on average the military is more accepting of the people you work with,” Robin says. “Once you’ve worked alongside somebody and put your life in their hands, they do tend to take care of their own in a way you can’t explain to those who’ve never experienced that.”

The language coming out of the Department of Defense is unwavering in its support for a more open, diverse armed forces (“Transgender men and women in uniform have been there with us, even as they often had to serve in silence alongside their fellow comrades in arms,” a July statement from Carter reads. “We have transgender soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines—real, patriotic Americans—who I know are being hurt by an outdated, confusing, inconsistent approach that’s contrary to our value of service and individual merit”). 

Slideshow: Meet 7 Trans Soldiers Who Served Our Country

However, the situation among the rank and file might prove more prickly. Not only are reports of sexual assaults in the military on the rise, but as the Defense Department has moved toward allowing more females to be ground troops, there’s been a backlash of resentment from male soldiers who claim their female counterparts are getting pregnant while on deployment, in order to go home. 

Simone recalls the racism and sexism of her fellow, mostly white, soldiers back when she was stationed in Panama, though it was not even during wartime. The soldiers referred to Panamanians with racial slurs. “They didn’t respect the women,” she says. “They just wanted to have sex with them.” 

Recently, at her job, she was doing intake on a homeless veteran. When she looked at his information, she realized they had served together, in Panama. 

“Usually, you would say something about that. You’d bond with them,” Simone says. “But at the time there were only a couple of women on the base. So what was I going to say? He would have remembered me. I couldn’t bring myself to get into all of that.”

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Photography by Lucy Sparks.

Sunday afternoon at the Old Ship is descending glassy-eyed into evening. Granny dances an old-timey jig while flipping off drag queens. Her children, middle-aged and ruddy, and two grandchildren sit around a corner table throwing back pints, paying no mind. The drag queen on the mic cracks a joke about the dancing old woman’s impending death. 

She lurches back, staggers. “Oh, fuck off!” shouts the small, round octogenarian in a lacy, white sundress. She then slides her pink satin panties down to her ankles, bends over, flips her dress up, and moons the stage, cackling like a witch.  

Behind the bar, a stone-faced blonde in a pale blue blouse pulls pints between cigarette breaks in the courtyard. A scrawny fellow with a popped collar approaches the old woman to dance. “Fuck you,” she says, laughs, turns around, drops trou again, and moons another drag queen. 

Three years ago, this 130-year-old pub in the East End neighborhood of Limehouse nearly sank. Given the state of the pub business in London—and the gay-pub business in particular—the closure would have been unremarkable. Real estate development and skyrocketing rents have forced the closure of a dozen beloved, decades- and centuries-old gay establishments in recent years, including Camden’s The Black Cap (established in the 1700s) and Chelsea’s The Queen’s Head. In Shoreditch alone, a once-gritty neighborhood north of London’s financial district, three popular gay pubs—The Joiners Arms, The George and Dragon, and The Nelsons Head—all closed in 2015, along with the city’s largest gay sauna, Chariots, in 2016 (to make room for a 200-room hotel). This effectively scrubbed the entire neighborhood, in a single year, of its once-vibrant gay nightlife. 

But a rare bright spot occurred last year. When the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, in another gay enclave across the Thames, was purchased by a developer, the community banded together in getting the pub national historic landmark status (the venue has hosted cabaret acts since the 1800s). This was a first for a gay establishment in the United Kingdom. 

Still, the situation remains generally dire for local pubs, once a mainstay of British society. A 2016 study found that local pubs—usually defined as neighborhood joints offering in-house brewed beer—are shutting their doors at the rate of about 27 per week across the U.K. 

The Old Ship lies in the London borough of Tower Hamlets, among the poorest areas of the country, where today the largest ethnic group consists of conservative Bangladeshi Muslims, and racial tensions run high. The Limehouse neighborhood was named for the medieval-era lime kilns used for the production of seafaring pottery. When Tower Hamlets Council, the borough’s governing body, which owned the lease for the building that houses the Old Ship, tried to sell it off, it looked like Granny’s mooning days were numbered. But the pub’s owner, John Fell, came out of retirement to take over the pub and battle the council. He started a petition that in six weeks gathered 2,500 signatures. The gay actors Ian McKellen, who lives in Limehouse, and Michael Cashman wrote letters of support to the council.   

“At that time, the pub was like a neglected old lady,” Fell says. “I’d drunk there for 10 years under the old regime, and I knew what had to change.” Ultimately, Fell and the community were victorious in getting the pub’s lease extended for 15 years. “Now it’s unrecognizable from four years ago,” Fell says. “We’ve got two gay football teams, a straight ladies’ dance team, and we raise money for the local hospice and for gay homeless youth.” 

With its Tudor facade, floral wallpaper, gaudy chandeliers, stacks of tchotchkes, and hordes of drag queens, the Old Ship feels like a John Waters film set in Middle-earth. But like any great ol’ boozer, particularly in the East End, it’s all about the locals. 

“It’s primarily gay, but everyone comes along,” Fell says. “The pub was a place for everyone in the community to come together. Elsewhere, it might have been a problem, but not here in the East End. The actual community is very open to new ideas and taking it all in.”  

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In late July, Travis Goldtooth, who also goes by Buffalo Barbie, took a 900-mile road trip from her home in small, conservative Farmington, N.M., to Blacktail Ranch, a lonely homestead perched high in a valley in Wolf Creek in a part of Montana even locals refer to as the middle of nowhere. The drive from the south meanders along the eastern edge of the Continental Divide through a complex landscape that follows Montana’s golden prairies racing into the Rocky Mountains. Roadside biker bars and one-horse towns rise and fall from view in the same undulation as the mountains. Seen from the distance through the thin light in the north country, some of these mountains look hellish and jagged, others fat, grassy, and long, like giant, sleeping, yellow dogs flecked with pine trees.

Goldtooth works as a server at the IHOP in Farmington. With a striking, Frida Kahlo–esque brow, flowers tied in her ponytail, and a light wash of makeup shimmering alongside traditional stone jewelry, Goldtooth has an impish spirit and elegant, jutting shoulders.

“My own kids ask me what they should call me, pronoun-wise,” Goldtooth says. “And I say, whatever comes to mind first, you call me that. I feed off that. If you see me as a man, say ‘he.’ If you see me as a woman, say ‘she.’ I’m not going to tell you what to call me. It’s however you see me.”

At work, where she’s a local celebrity, it seems all the female customers call her “sir” and all the men, “ma’am.”

“I love it. And the kids love me. They always want to sit in my section to see what I’m wearing,” Goldtooth says. “And the old people call me ‘Sweetbread.’ ”

Montana remains very much a land of cowboys and Indians. Whites make up about 90% of the population, and Native Americans — mostly Blackfeet, Chippewa Cree, Crow, Northern Cheyenne, and Flathead — are, at just less than 7%, the state’s second most visible ethnic group.

This weekend, Goldtooth is among 70 Native Americans from tribes across the continent — from Alberta, Delaware, Georgia, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Montana, Idaho, and Washington — who are converging for the Montana Two Spirit Society’s annual gathering.

In the language of the Navajo, Goldtooth’s tribe, she is called a nadleeh, from a word that refers to a constant state of change, or something with an unknown beginning and end. We’re sitting in a large group beneath a pair of quaking aspen trees, and a studly woman decked out in beads, with cascading gray hair, speaks up.

SLIDESHOW | Photos of Montana Two Spirit Society Members

“The medicine wheel represents men on one side and women on the other,” she says, referring to a core concept of spirituality in many native tribes, often represented in stone structures and jewelry. “But there’s a space in between that is for the two spirits. We join the men and women and complete the circle. That is our place in life. That is the Creator’s purpose for us.”

French explorers in the 17th and 18th centuries encountered individuals whom they could not classify as either male or female and called them “berdache,” a slur that refers to a “passive homosexual,” or even a male prostitute. In the 19th century, the most famous — among the white Americans anyway — was a Zuni two spirit named We’wha. She reportedly met President Grover Cleveland, who thought We’wha was no different than any other woman.

The particulars of two spirit history are varied and obscure. Much of what is known relies on oral tradition, hearsay, and documentation from white settlers. The umbrella term “two spirit” was coined about 25 years ago in an effort to unify the tribes and raise awareness. It is estimated that of the 567 tribes recognized by the federal government (which are, at least in theory, sovereign nations within the United States) at least 150 of those tribes acknowledged something like what we now call two spirits. Each would have had their own word for these individuals or, in some cases, no word at all because they were so seamlessly part of the community.

These gender-variant individuals, which have been documented in aboriginal people in this hemisphere as far south as Chile, were often highly respected — particularly in matrilineal societies like the Cheyenne and Navajo — and took on roles such as foster parents, storytellers, potters, artisans, matchmakers, name-givers, and spiritual leaders.

“Natives who are over, say, 70, and not Christian are very accepting and supportive,” says Wesley Thomas, a researcher at Navajo Technical University who studies the nadleeh. “The younger generations are in states of denial.”

SLIDESHOW | Photos of Montana Two Spirit Society Members

Seventeen of us pile into the Suburban, and Jake’s yellow Lab, Trig, runs alongside us. “Just like going to town on the res, ain’t it?” says Joey, a slight Cheyenne from Oklahoma with silver braids and a thick Southern twang.

It’s a 20-minute drive, and Jake helps each of us into the small opening below an ancient pictogram. The limestone cave runs five miles deep. He shows us places where they found evidence of cooking fires, beds, a garbage dump, and ceremonial altars calling the buffalo. There’s a bear skull next to one.

It’s 41 degrees in this cave year-round, and each type of Clovis point and arrowhead found here can be traced to a different tribe, going back millennia. A thousand feet in, Jake tells us to hold on to something sturdy. “You might lose your balance when this happens,” he says. “But I like to imagine what it was like for the people living here among the rocks when they didn’t have light.”

Jake flicks off the lights. Catcalls erupt in the pitch darkness; then silence falls. Jake asks if everyone is ready to leave, but there is no response. We linger a few minutes longer where it is 
black and old.

The Space Between: Native American Two Spirit Culture

Photography by Ethan Hill.

At the age of 13, Olivia Loving considered coming out as a lesbian. It was not a happy thought. Only the year before, she had developed her first crush, on a boy, and it had filled her with the same nervous excitement of any preteen girl in love. She fantasized about holding his hand, maybe even kissing him. But now Loving was plagued by graphic sexual fantasies about her female classmates. It began in September, volleyball season, with her obsessing over thoughts of grabbing their breasts. She was overwhelmed with crude mental images of performing oral sex on them. And at the same time her brain rattled with other disturbing thoughts about committing violence against people, harming children, and murdering her mother.

She retreated into her Catholicism, believing it was the only way to control her dark thoughts, and prayed each night that she wasn’t gay, and that she wouldn’t kill anyone.

“I think so many people, especially kids, are suffering silently across the country,” says Loving, now 24 and a writer who works at New York’s Strand bookstore. “It’s not that I was afraid to be gay — when I was 10 years old I wrote a paper supporting gay rights — it’s that I was resigned to a life I felt I would get no pleasure out of.”

At 18, Loving finally told someone the detailed nature of her violent and sexual thoughts. She attended a private, conservative high school in North Palm Beach, Fla., and confided in a teacher with whom she was close. Fearing she was a threat to students’ safety, the teacher reported the conversation to the school’s administration. (Loving says the school had also, at the time, banned an LGBT club from forming.) Loving was suspended, but allowed to return to school days later with a note from a therapist.

Three years later, while she was living in England, Loving learned that she was neither homicidal nor a lesbian. She had just been diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder, and during a Google search she came across a strange acronym: HOCD, or homosexual obsessive-compulsive disorder, also called gay OCD, or SO-OCD, as in “sexual orientation OCD.”

In the United States, about one in 40 adults and one in 100 children — roughly 1% of the population — suffers from OCD, a condition characterized by debilitating obsessions and mental and physical compulsions that consume at least one hour a day, and often more. The public’s misconceptions of OCD are staggering, largely due to the way the condition is treated in popular culture — the highly organized neurotic, the obsessive hand-washer. And although there are no hard data, some suggest that HOCD and other sexual obsessions are common types of OCD. According to Dr. Fred Penzel, a psychologist on Long Island, N.Y., and author of the book Obsessive Compulsive Disorders, it might afflict as many as 10% of OCD sufferers. 

“OCD, in the 19th century, used to be called the ‘doubting disease,’ and that’s really at the heart of many people’s OCD: extreme doubt and uncertainty,” says Penzel, who has treated OCD for 35 years and is a leading specialist in HOCD. “OCD can also make people doubt their sexual identity. It’s a real phenomenon that affects a lot of people, and no one has any idea how many people are affected by this. I get e-mails from India, China, Saudi Arabia, Africa — all over the place. The overwhelming majority of e-mails I get are on this particular type of OCD.”

For a 26-year-old California man, who asked to be identified only as Michael, it began at age 16 while he was sitting next to another student in class in high school. “The thoughts I think I had were, Why is my leg so close to his leg?” he says. “And it just spiraled from there.” At the time, Michael says, he was homophobic and began to compulsively search the Internet for coming-out stories and anecdotal online quizzes that test “How gay are you?” He evaluated his attraction to women constantly. He soon developed an out-of-control obsession with watching gay pornography to check if it could arouse him. He says it did not, but the uncertainty remained and became so extreme he considered suicide. He adds that, once or twice while watching gay porn, he did have an orgasm.

“That was a terrible, terrible choice on my part,” he says. “I gave OCD a massive weapon to fight against me, and I suffered for it. I went further down the rabbit hole. I knew I always wanted to go back and look at women. Women got me more excited than men did.”

This behavior is known as “checking,” which is essentially no different from the person who flips the light switch repeatedly. Michael never attempted to have sex with another man, but, like watching porn, many experiencing HOCD do engage in sexual activity as a form of checking, behavior that throws their doubt into overdrive. Even if a person is certain they didn’t enjoy the sex, the relief is short-lived, and doubt soon creeps in that, perhaps, the next time will be enjoyable, or the next.  

When psychologist Dr. Monnica Williams moved to Kentucky five years ago, she says she was the only mental health practitioner in the state who specialized in OCD. She opened the Louisville OCD Clinic, one of only a handful of outpatient clinics in the country specializing in OCD. Until fairly recently, some online forums for OCD prohibited people from posting about HOCD because of the overwhelming skepticism as to whether it was real.  

“There’s a lot of misunderstanding,” Williams says. “Some folks say, ‘It’s not really OCD — these people just need to come out of the closet.’ Others say, ‘[Treating HOCD] is no different than reparative therapy.’ It was really hard to combat some of the criticism because there was nothing in the scientific literature about this form of OCD.” 

“That’s not really the case,” Williams says. “Some people are homophobic, because of their religious concerns or how they were brought up. But we see plenty of people who don’t have anything against being gay — they just aren’t gay. Yet they keep having these unwanted thoughts about it. I think a lot of people commit suicide. I’ve had a number of people tell me, ‘I was getting ready to kill myself before I found you.’ ”

In a paper published in 2008, which she says was the first of its kind on HOCD, Williams interviewed an unnamed young man.

“I have been diagnosed with OCD for a while now. The therapist I was seeing told me that I should try to be with a man, and that everybody is bisexual,” he says. “It really freaked me out, and I was suicidal for five months thanks to what she said. The thoughts grew even stronger. Eventually, I couldn’t be with any person of the same sex alone in the same room, watch TV, read the newspaper, or listen to music with male voices. I’m amazed that I’m still in this world after that experience.” 

Dr. Richard Montoro, a psychiatrist at the McGill University Sexual Identity Centre in Montreal who specializes in helping LGBT people come to terms with their sexual orientations and gender identity, saw his first case of HOCD two decades ago; a man came to him convinced he was gay because of the shape of his eyebrows. By the end of the session it was clear to Montoro the man was suffering from OCD. 

Since then, he’s seen only a handful of similar cases at his clinic. “We might encourage them to spend a night in the Gay Village here in Montreal, or have dinner with same-sex-identified people — that intervention would be to reduce the anxiety around the possibility of being gay,” Montoro says, a technique that would coincide with other therapies. “You need to undo the avoidance. The checking behavior usually isn’t about other gay people, it’s about the individual.”  

Therapy proved successful for Michael, the 26-year-old Californian who learned to control his HOCD. He considers himself an ally of the LGBT community, namely because of this experience. “I think it’s important to know that anxiety or emotion is like gravity,” he says. “What goes up must come down.”

But from time to time he relapses into other types of sexual OCD, including, and among the most anguishing forms, pedophile OCD, or POCD, characterized by a debilitating fear of harming or molesting children. “There’s been almost nothing written about pedophile OCD,” Williams says. “People who have it are very frightened. I had a patient who was suicidal, and when his spouse brought him to the emergency room and he opened up to a clinician about what he was experiencing, the doctor called social services and he wasn’t allowed to be around his child.”

It is unknown why people with OCD develop the obsessions they do, but most are characterized by intrusive negative thoughts. Gay people, however, are also proportionately affected by what might be called straight OCD, consumed by thoughts they might be heterosexual — Penzel has treated several such patients, including one lesbian who had a wife and children and came close to ending her marriage. 

In all cases, symptoms tend to develop rapidly, triggered by a precise moment, such as seeing an attractive actor in a movie, having bad sex with your spouse, reading a news item about gay rights, or learning of a friend or family member coming out of the closet. 

Paradoxically, psychologists believe increasing acceptance and an explosion of LGBT people in media and pop culture are making HOCD harder to treat. Many well-intentioned but uninformed therapists, believing their patients are merely in the closet, will encourage them to get out there and try it.

“I’ve seen people sent through all sorts of inappropriate therapies to help them explore and discover their true sexual identity when, in fact, it was never the case,” Penzel says. “It makes the person even more doubtful and does a lot of damage. Some people have this thought that they’ll never know their true sexual identity, and it can affect their ability to have relationships. They become reclusive.”

OCD occurs on a spectrum of severity. For most, a mixture of cognitive and behavioral therapy is the most effective treatment because it forces patients to mentally engage with their fears until reaching the point where those fears begin to feel benign. Antidepressants and SSRIs are often effective in treatment. In the most severe cases, brain surgery may be required.

So-called gay-reparative-therapy camps, which have been outlawed in some states, may be getting a spike in business from youth and adults suffering from HOCD, many of whom come from conservative, religious backgrounds.

Mark-Ameen Johnson, 51, an openly gay man and an English-language professor at New York University, has experienced many types of OCD, beginning in childhood, that included natural-disaster OCD, extremist-religion OCD, and health OCD.

“The wackiest one is when I assumed something was wrong with my brain because, without any training, I should be able to read Latin,” he says. “This makes no sense. People with OCD are aware it makes no sense, but it feels real.” 

We’re sitting on a bench in New York’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center, and Johnson tells me that on his way over, his OCD crept in. What if he doesn’t show up? he thought. What if this is all a joke? Before sitting, he checks the bench for bedbugs.  “But that one is not really unreasonable,” he says.  

In 2004, while searching online for a support group for gay people with OCD, he stumbled upon a message board where users relentlessly questioned their sexual orientations. He found the posts odd, and then it struck him: This looks like OCD, and this is what they are obsessing about.

He wrote a response along the lines of “I’m a gay man, and I have OCD, and it doesn’t sound like you’re gay to me.” He received a dozen replies, and people continue to contact him today. He estimates he’s written to at least a thousand people, the vast majority with undiagnosed HOCD, and only three or four who were actually gay and wanted to come out. He’s clear he’s not a psychologist and only gives people information about the disorder and links to resources.

“It’s as if there’s one man and one woman writing to me because they all say the exact same thing,” Johnson says. “I say, ‘Here’s how I can tell this is HOCD. You told me when this began — six months ago, you saw a movie, and a character came out, and suddenly you were afraid, What if I’m gay. A real gay person doesn’t suddenly turn gay in a second. The person has always been gay.’ ”

One Muslim woman in the Middle East was nursing false fears of being a lesbian. “She was a student in gynecology, so now she’s looking at women’s private parts all day — not the best thing for her to be doing,” Johnson says. Another man’s gay paranoia began while he was using a public restroom in which he overheard two men talking. Looking down, he noticed a small amount of pre-cum and jumped to the conclusion that it was induced by the men’s voices. 

“A lot of people have dreams about their OCD content,” Johnson says. “I definitely do. So what do you think they dream about when they have HOCD? Oy vey!”

The case that affected him the most was a high school football star from the Deep South who moved Johnson to tears over the course of their long correspondence. “He would say, ‘How can I be gay when I’m a football player?’ I didn’t want to tell him there was a gay football league, because that would have been the worst thing for his HOCD.” 

At one point, the young man’s mother contacted Johnson to say her son was crying every night, locked in his room. At Johnson’s encouragement, the man sought therapy and overcame his HOCD. The two remain friends.

“Finally, he’s over his HOCD, and how does he celebrate?” Johnson asks. “He has a threesome with two women.” 

Like what you see here? Subscribe and be the first to receive the latest issue of Out. Subscribe to print here and receive a complimentary digital subscription.

The immaculate Kim Chi is still a virgin, and that’s just fine by her. 

“It’s, like, someone who hasn’t had a taste of Chipotle isn’t going to crave Chipotle,” says the 27-year-old season eight finalist of RuPaul’s Drag Race. 

Related | Ruveal: Meet the Queens of RuPaul's Drag Race Season Nine

After a candid moment on the show in which she spoke about her recent weight loss, the world learned that the Chicago-based, avant-garde, anime-inspired performer had never so much as been on a date with a boy.

“Maybe someone will see the beauty in me, one of these days,” Kim Chi said wistfully on episode two while painting her face in the mirror. Fellow contestant Bob the Drag Queen then responded to the camera, “I don’t think Kim Chi knows what she looks like. She’s still a virgin because she’s not aware that she’s a good-looking, 6-foot-4 man.”

During the season finale, a fan asked Kim Chi which member of the Pit Crew — RuPaul’s scantily clad, hunky assistants — she’d most like to lose her virginity to. “None,” she flatly replied, because she didn’t want to “catch anything.”  

“People said I was STD-shaming,” she says. “That’s not what I was trying to do. I was just trying to make a joke out of it,” she says. 

Related | 100 Most Eligible Bachelors, 2017

On the show, Kim Chi’s endearing lisp, inability to dance, and constant struggle to walk in heels — all of which RuPaul found thoroughly amusing — earned her a legion of adoring fans. On one episode she proclaimed, “Shady gays believe in no fats, no fems, and no Asians. As someone who is all of the above, I understand your pain.” She took it a step further on the finale, performing an original song titled “Fat, Fem, and Asian.” 

Her enigmatic backstory was also a draw. Chi, who grew up in South Korea, revealed on the show that her parents, divorced and living in Chicago, did not know she was appearing on Drag Race, or that she was a drag queen at all, or even that she was gay. That remains true today. 

Yet newfound drag superstardom has not translated into warm sheets for Kim Chi, despite her landing on a global drag tour after the season aired.    

“A lot of drag queens, they go on the show, they travel all over the world, and they get what they call ‘road trade,’ but I don’t think a lot of people see me as a sexual being,” she says. “I don’t think I’m asexual. The idea of sex is just not something I’m familiar with.” 

Kim Chi gave hookup apps a try, once, to immediate dismay. “When I signed on, everybody’s like, ‘Oh, my god, is that Kim Chi? You’re my drag mom!’ And I’m, like, you know, this is just not going to work out.”  

When she returned to Chicago after taping the show, she was shocked to learn that all her closest friends had jumped into relationships, seemingly overnight. 

 “Society’s always asking, ‘Are you dating anybody?’ ” she says. But I don’t think dating is everyone’s thing. If you’re happy being single, then just be you.” 

Like what you see here? Subscribe and be the first to receive the latest issue of Out. Subscribe to print here and receive a complimentary digital subscription.

Photography by Ethan Hill.

At the age of 13, Olivia Loving considered coming out as a lesbian. It was not a happy thought. Only the year before, she had developed her first crush, on a boy, and it had filled her with the same nervous excitement of any preteen girl in love. She fantasized about holding his hand, maybe even kissing him. But now Loving was plagued by graphic sexual fantasies about her female classmates. It began in September, volleyball season, with her obsessing over thoughts of grabbing their breasts. She was overwhelmed with crude mental images of performing oral sex on them. And at the same time her brain rattled with other disturbing thoughts about committing violence against people, harming children, and murdering her mother.

She retreated into her Catholicism, believing it was the only way to control her dark thoughts, and prayed each night that she wasn’t gay, and that she wouldn’t kill anyone.

“I think so many people, especially kids, are suffering silently across the country,” says Loving, now 24 and a writer who works at New York’s Strand bookstore. “It’s not that I was afraid to be gay — when I was 10 years old I wrote a paper supporting gay rights — it’s that I was resigned to a life I felt I would get no pleasure out of.”

At 18, Loving finally told someone the detailed nature of her violent and sexual thoughts. She attended a private, conservative high school in North Palm Beach, Fla., and confided in a teacher with whom she was close. Fearing she was a threat to students’ safety, the teacher reported the conversation to the school’s administration. (Loving says the school had also, at the time, banned an LGBT club from forming.) Loving was suspended, but allowed to return to school days later with a note from a therapist.

Three years later, while she was living in England, Loving learned that she was neither homicidal nor a lesbian. She had just been diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder, and during a Google search she came across a strange acronym: HOCD, or homosexual obsessive-compulsive disorder, also called gay OCD, or SO-OCD, as in “sexual orientation OCD.”

In the United States, about one in 40 adults and one in 100 children — roughly 1% of the population — suffers from OCD, a condition characterized by debilitating obsessions and mental and physical compulsions that consume at least one hour a day, and often more. The public’s misconceptions of OCD are staggering, largely due to the way the condition is treated in popular culture — the highly organized neurotic, the obsessive hand-washer. And although there are no hard data, some suggest that HOCD and other sexual obsessions are common types of OCD. According to Dr. Fred Penzel, a psychologist on Long Island, N.Y., and author of the book Obsessive Compulsive Disorders, it might afflict as many as 10% of OCD sufferers. 

“OCD, in the 19th century, used to be called the ‘doubting disease,’ and that’s really at the heart of many people’s OCD: extreme doubt and uncertainty,” says Penzel, who has treated OCD for 35 years and is a leading specialist in HOCD. “OCD can also make people doubt their sexual identity. It’s a real phenomenon that affects a lot of people, and no one has any idea how many people are affected by this. I get e-mails from India, China, Saudi Arabia, Africa — all over the place. The overwhelming majority of e-mails I get are on this particular type of OCD.”

For a 26-year-old California man, who asked to be identified only as Michael, it began at age 16 while he was sitting next to another student in class in high school. “The thoughts I think I had were, Why is my leg so close to his leg?” he says. “And it just spiraled from there.” At the time, Michael says, he was homophobic and began to compulsively search the Internet for coming-out stories and anecdotal online quizzes that test “How gay are you?” He evaluated his attraction to women constantly. He soon developed an out-of-control obsession with watching gay pornography to check if it could arouse him. He says it did not, but the uncertainty remained and became so extreme he considered suicide. He adds that, once or twice while watching gay porn, he did have an orgasm.

“That was a terrible, terrible choice on my part,” he says. “I gave OCD a massive weapon to fight against me, and I suffered for it. I went further down the rabbit hole. I knew I always wanted to go back and look at women. Women got me more excited than men did.”

This behavior is known as “checking,” which is essentially no different from the person who flips the light switch repeatedly. Michael never attempted to have sex with another man, but, like watching porn, many experiencing HOCD do engage in sexual activity as a form of checking, behavior that throws their doubt into overdrive. Even if a person is certain they didn’t enjoy the sex, the relief is short-lived, and doubt soon creeps in that, perhaps, the next time will be enjoyable, or the next.  

When psychologist Dr. Monnica Williams moved to Kentucky five years ago, she says she was the only mental health practitioner in the state who specialized in OCD. She opened the Louisville OCD Clinic, one of only a handful of outpatient clinics in the country specializing in OCD. Until fairly recently, some online forums for OCD prohibited people from posting about HOCD because of the overwhelming skepticism as to whether it was real.  

“There’s a lot of misunderstanding,” Williams says. “Some folks say, ‘It’s not really OCD — these people just need to come out of the closet.’ Others say, ‘[Treating HOCD] is no different than reparative therapy.’ It was really hard to combat some of the criticism because there was nothing in the scientific literature about this form of OCD.” 

“That’s not really the case,” Williams says. “Some people are homophobic, because of their religious concerns or how they were brought up. But we see plenty of people who don’t have anything against being gay — they just aren’t gay. Yet they keep having these unwanted thoughts about it. I think a lot of people commit suicide. I’ve had a number of people tell me, ‘I was getting ready to kill myself before I found you.’ ”

In a paper published in 2008, which she says was the first of its kind on HOCD, Williams interviewed an unnamed young man.

“I have been diagnosed with OCD for a while now. The therapist I was seeing told me that I should try to be with a man, and that everybody is bisexual,” he says. “It really freaked me out, and I was suicidal for five months thanks to what she said. The thoughts grew even stronger. Eventually, I couldn’t be with any person of the same sex alone in the same room, watch TV, read the newspaper, or listen to music with male voices. I’m amazed that I’m still in this world after that experience.” 

Dr. Richard Montoro, a psychiatrist at the McGill University Sexual Identity Centre in Montreal who specializes in helping LGBT people come to terms with their sexual orientations and gender identity, saw his first case of HOCD two decades ago; a man came to him convinced he was gay because of the shape of his eyebrows. By the end of the session it was clear to Montoro the man was suffering from OCD. 

Since then, he’s seen only a handful of similar cases at his clinic. “We might encourage them to spend a night in the Gay Village here in Montreal, or have dinner with same-sex-identified people — that intervention would be to reduce the anxiety around the possibility of being gay,” Montoro says, a technique that would coincide with other therapies. “You need to undo the avoidance. The checking behavior usually isn’t about other gay people, it’s about the individual.”  

Therapy proved successful for Michael, the 26-year-old Californian who learned to control his HOCD. He considers himself an ally of the LGBT community, namely because of this experience. “I think it’s important to know that anxiety or emotion is like gravity,” he says. “What goes up must come down.”

But from time to time he relapses into other types of sexual OCD, including, and among the most anguishing forms, pedophile OCD, or POCD, characterized by a debilitating fear of harming or molesting children. “There’s been almost nothing written about pedophile OCD,” Williams says. “People who have it are very frightened. I had a patient who was suicidal, and when his spouse brought him to the emergency room and he opened up to a clinician about what he was experiencing, the doctor called social services and he wasn’t allowed to be around his child.”

It is unknown why people with OCD develop the obsessions they do, but most are characterized by intrusive negative thoughts. Gay people, however, are also proportionately affected by what might be called straight OCD, consumed by thoughts they might be heterosexual — Penzel has treated several such patients, including one lesbian who had a wife and children and came close to ending her marriage. 

In all cases, symptoms tend to develop rapidly, triggered by a precise moment, such as seeing an attractive actor in a movie, having bad sex with your spouse, reading a news item about gay rights, or learning of a friend or family member coming out of the closet. 

Paradoxically, psychologists believe increasing acceptance and an explosion of LGBT people in media and pop culture are making HOCD harder to treat. Many well-intentioned but uninformed therapists, believing their patients are merely in the closet, will encourage them to get out there and try it.

“I’ve seen people sent through all sorts of inappropriate therapies to help them explore and discover their true sexual identity when, in fact, it was never the case,” Penzel says. “It makes the person even more doubtful and does a lot of damage. Some people have this thought that they’ll never know their true sexual identity, and it can affect their ability to have relationships. They become reclusive.”

OCD occurs on a spectrum of severity. For most, a mixture of cognitive and behavioral therapy is the most effective treatment because it forces patients to mentally engage with their fears until reaching the point where those fears begin to feel benign. Antidepressants and SSRIs are often effective in treatment. In the most severe cases, brain surgery may be required.

So-called gay-reparative-therapy camps, which have been outlawed in some states, may be getting a spike in business from youth and adults suffering from HOCD, many of whom come from conservative, religious backgrounds.

Mark-Ameen Johnson, 51, an openly gay man and an English-language professor at New York University, has experienced many types of OCD, beginning in childhood, that included natural-disaster OCD, extremist-religion OCD, and health OCD.

“The wackiest one is when I assumed something was wrong with my brain because, without any training, I should be able to read Latin,” he says. “This makes no sense. People with OCD are aware it makes no sense, but it feels real.” 

We’re sitting on a bench in New York’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center, and Johnson tells me that on his way over, his OCD crept in. What if he doesn’t show up? he thought. What if this is all a joke? Before sitting, he checks the bench for bedbugs.  “But that one is not really unreasonable,” he says.  

In 2004, while searching online for a support group for gay people with OCD, he stumbled upon a message board where users relentlessly questioned their sexual orientations. He found the posts odd, and then it struck him: This looks like OCD, and this is what they are obsessing about.

He wrote a response along the lines of “I’m a gay man, and I have OCD, and it doesn’t sound like you’re gay to me.” He received a dozen replies, and people continue to contact him today. He estimates he’s written to at least a thousand people, the vast majority with undiagnosed HOCD, and only three or four who were actually gay and wanted to come out. He’s clear he’s not a psychologist and only gives people information about the disorder and links to resources.

“It’s as if there’s one man and one woman writing to me because they all say the exact same thing,” Johnson says. “I say, ‘Here’s how I can tell this is HOCD. You told me when this began — six months ago, you saw a movie, and a character came out, and suddenly you were afraid, What if I’m gay. A real gay person doesn’t suddenly turn gay in a second. The person has always been gay.’ ”

One Muslim woman in the Middle East was nursing false fears of being a lesbian. “She was a student in gynecology, so now she’s looking at women’s private parts all day — not the best thing for her to be doing,” Johnson says. Another man’s gay paranoia began while he was using a public restroom in which he overheard two men talking. Looking down, he noticed a small amount of pre-cum and jumped to the conclusion that it was induced by the men’s voices. 

“A lot of people have dreams about their OCD content,” Johnson says. “I definitely do. So what do you think they dream about when they have HOCD? Oy vey!”

The case that affected him the most was a high school football star from the Deep South who moved Johnson to tears over the course of their long correspondence. “He would say, ‘How can I be gay when I’m a football player?’ I didn’t want to tell him there was a gay football league, because that would have been the worst thing for his HOCD.” 

At one point, the young man’s mother contacted Johnson to say her son was crying every night, locked in his room. At Johnson’s encouragement, the man sought therapy and overcame his HOCD. The two remain friends.

“Finally, he’s over his HOCD, and how does he celebrate?” Johnson asks. “He has a threesome with two women.” 

Like what you see here? Subscribe and be the first to receive the latest issue of Out. Subscribe to print here and receive a complimentary digital subscription.

The immaculate Kim Chi is still a virgin, and that’s just fine by her. 

“It’s, like, someone who hasn’t had a taste of Chipotle isn’t going to crave Chipotle,” says the 27-year-old season eight finalist of RuPaul’s Drag Race. 

Related | Ruveal: Meet the Queens of RuPaul's Drag Race Season Nine

After a candid moment on the show in which she spoke about her recent weight loss, the world learned that the Chicago-based, avant-garde, anime-inspired performer had never so much as been on a date with a boy.

“Maybe someone will see the beauty in me, one of these days,” Kim Chi said wistfully on episode two while painting her face in the mirror. Fellow contestant Bob the Drag Queen then responded to the camera, “I don’t think Kim Chi knows what she looks like. She’s still a virgin because she’s not aware that she’s a good-looking, 6-foot-4 man.”

During the season finale, a fan asked Kim Chi which member of the Pit Crew — RuPaul’s scantily clad, hunky assistants — she’d most like to lose her virginity to. “None,” she flatly replied, because she didn’t want to “catch anything.”  

“People said I was STD-shaming,” she says. “That’s not what I was trying to do. I was just trying to make a joke out of it,” she says. 

Related | 100 Most Eligible Bachelors, 2017

On the show, Kim Chi’s endearing lisp, inability to dance, and constant struggle to walk in heels — all of which RuPaul found thoroughly amusing — earned her a legion of adoring fans. On one episode she proclaimed, “Shady gays believe in no fats, no fems, and no Asians. As someone who is all of the above, I understand your pain.” She took it a step further on the finale, performing an original song titled “Fat, Fem, and Asian.” 

Her enigmatic backstory was also a draw. Chi, who grew up in South Korea, revealed on the show that her parents, divorced and living in Chicago, did not know she was appearing on Drag Race, or that she was a drag queen at all, or even that she was gay. That remains true today. 

Yet newfound drag superstardom has not translated into warm sheets for Kim Chi, despite her landing on a global drag tour after the season aired.    

“A lot of drag queens, they go on the show, they travel all over the world, and they get what they call ‘road trade,’ but I don’t think a lot of people see me as a sexual being,” she says. “I don’t think I’m asexual. The idea of sex is just not something I’m familiar with.” 

Kim Chi gave hookup apps a try, once, to immediate dismay. “When I signed on, everybody’s like, ‘Oh, my god, is that Kim Chi? You’re my drag mom!’ And I’m, like, you know, this is just not going to work out.”  

When she returned to Chicago after taping the show, she was shocked to learn that all her closest friends had jumped into relationships, seemingly overnight. 

 “Society’s always asking, ‘Are you dating anybody?’ ” she says. But I don’t think dating is everyone’s thing. If you’re happy being single, then just be you.” 

Like what you see here? Subscribe and be the first to receive the latest issue of Out. Subscribe to print here and receive a complimentary digital subscription.