The title and subtitle of Wright Thompson’s "The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi" lay down a marker of its audacity. It’s a work of true crime that, in fact, is a story of land, of global commerce and capitalism, of the Delta blues. Of course, one of the most infamous murders in American history — the lynching of a 14-year-old Black child, Emmett Till — looms over the book. It’s an event of overwhelming notoriety and tectonic consequence.

Bluntly, "The Barn," which sprang out of a story, “His Name Was Emmett Till,” published in The Atlantic in 2021, is the best nonfiction I’ve read in years — maybe ever. And as a writer myself, I am naturally jealous, but also curious. How did Thompson do it? The endnotes of a work of nonfiction provide something of a roadmap: a chronicle of archives, newspapers, and interviewees. But there’s another, less scrutinized repository of clues to a book’s assembly, one decidedly more opaque: acknowledgments.

That is where one encounters the beating heart of the book’s journey to publication. For Thompson, that journey was writing in the Smoky Mountains, on a trip to Dollywood, on Christmas morning. “It just was a constant thing,” he recalled. “I'm just grateful to a lot of people who were patient at dinners while I talked.”

Acknowledgments are a unique window on the writing process. Thompson walked me through who made the cut and why.

***

Gloria Dickerson, director of Emmett Till Academy

Dickerson is one of the central characters in the book. In 1965, at age 12, she integrated the all-white schools of Drew, Mississippi, where Till was murdered.

In some ways, she is the heartbeat of this thing. Gloria said to me at some point, It's important that people understand the history of this one building, because it explains why the Delta is like it is. And to me, that emerging up from the community of Drew felt like, Oh, this is not a history lesson. This is a book that all exists in present tense, regardless of the date on it. I felt like that was just essential. 

Juliet Lewis, widow of witness Willie Reed

Reed was 18 when, from his vantage outside the barn, he heard Till being tortured.

I spent a lot of time with her. She was just grateful somebody was asking about Willie, what he carried with him when he left, and this idea that he chose to do the right thing and paid for it in his sleep. He had nightmares. She had front-row seats to what it cost.

Rev. Wheeler Parker & his wife, Dr. Marvel Parker

Rev. Parker was with Till, his cousin, the night he was taken away to be murdered.

Wheeler is the greatest American I've ever met, and has made me rethink my deep skepticism of the idea of God — because I can't explain in any other way how he could, throughout his life, greet hate with love and fear with openness. I got to know Wheeler while I was reporting the book. The first iteration in my head was the story of the murder, the history of the land, and the story of the murder. The fourth act emerged as I was doing it. I came to realize that these people I'm talking to about 1955, their current experience with this — and fighting for the memory over the forces of erasure — is the project. In some ways, without Wheeler and Marvel’s lives, the whole thing is intellectual. Their daily fight for this is what keeps it from ever feeling like a history lesson. You know, writing the book is just the tax I pay to get to know them.

Annie Wright

Annie is the widow of Simeon Wright, who was sharing a bed with Till when he was abducted.

It's not in the book, because it just felt like a personal moment, but my favorite day of reporting is when I went up to Chicago because Annie Wright told me that I hadn't had a good southern lunch till I’d had hers. They did the whole thing — hog maw and chicken and pork chops. I brought a Sock It to Me cake, which is a real Mississippi thing. Wheeler and Marvel came over, and they just sat around and told stories with Annie and her sister, and it was really beautiful. Annie carries, proudly and militantly, the memory of her husband, who was in the bed with Emmett Till the night he was kidnaped. She is the living carrier of those memories. All of them remain Mississippians in exile, and the deep connections I had to people whom I didn't have anything in common [with] offered the hope that there is some tribe of us out there that could exist. I don't think that's something I fully realized until I knew them really well. Annie’s one of those people who reminds you that time isn't real.

Dave Tell

Author, "Remembering Emmett Till"

I have always thought that the history of the Delta could only be told stripped from the tyranny of time. It always felt to me like a place where the membrane between past and present was really, really thin. Dave Tell’s book really crystallized for me that any history of the murder of Emmett Till must also simultaneously be a history of the memory of Emmett Till. I listed him in the acknowledgments because that book really sharpened how I was thinking about it. I'm not sure I would have been as clear-eyed.

Sven Beckert

Author, "Empire of Cotton"

"Empire of Cotton" is the work of a madman genius. I had to get a new copy because I wore it out. Reading about the scope and scale of the global commodity chain — that was when I first realized that cotton was oil, and that meant Mississippi was Saudi Arabia. And it just allowed me to see that any history of the American caste system that stops at the water's edge, and doesn't deal with this as the inevitable child of capitalism and the need for returns on investment, was fatally flawed. When you stop at the water's edge and say any of this is an American problem, you have ended your ability to go to the well. Like, you've got to get to Manchester, Lancashire, and the first textile mills to understand why this violence happened, where it happened.

Katie Carter King

Researcher

I'm terrified that somebody's gonna come steal her. No, I'm joking. But there wouldn't be a book without Katie. I'd been doing research, not even knowing what it was going to be. And I'd read — I'm making this up — 50 books and done 100 interviews or 200. And I had a hard drive with all of this stuff on it. I got her to come to Mississippi. I drove her through the book over three or four days. We did the square of land, all of it. I basically said, I'm going to give you this hard drive, and I need you to help me come up with an organizational system. She essentially invented a bespoke Dewey Decimal System that allowed her to do an unbelievably invasive fact check at the end. Because if there was something wrong, the whole project would fall apart. The other thing she did was enable me to be really aggressive and complete and transparent with endnotes. It was important to me to show my work and say, This is where all this came from. I am not the first person to write about this murder or this region. I will not be the last person. I am hyper-aware that I exist in a continuum of people, and it is very important to me for whoever comes along next to easily and efficiently be able to strip my thing for parts.

Mickey Hart

Drummer, The Grateful Dead

I wouldn't have had the courage or stubbornness to do the thing I wanted to do if I hadn't watched him in his own sort of creative stubbornness and confidence. His ability to, on one hand, interact with the world in an incredibly commercial way, but also believe that the main thing is the main thing. And he's so protective of his creative process. He just authentically doesn't give a fuck. Like, that was really inspiring. It was a map about how to have a creative life. This is a guy who has so much money you can't even imagine it, and he is in that studio six days a week, 9:30 to 5:30 p.m. every day, making music — the vast majority of which will never be heard until after he's gone, if it's heard at all. It was a reminder that the making of it is the joy, that everything else is sort of bullshit.

Devery Anderson

Author, "Emmett Till"

Devery wrote a book that is also the work of a madman. If you have a question about a timeline — I mean, honestly, there were very few rabbit holes he didn't reach the bottom of. I just had a ton of respect for his reporting and diligence and obsession. Like, nobody thinks this is their story. Everybody understands that they are, however briefly, a steward of it. If you're going to have Emmett Till’s name in your mouth, you better have some purity of heart.

Webb, Tate, Josh, and Brokke

Friends

They are dear friends of mine. Early in this process, before I'd even gotten up with Katie, I had all of these ideas swirling. When I read that Nathan Bedford Forrest had marched his cavalry down the Dougherty Bayou, I started to see this square of land as a place where all of the ghosts coexisted. The big meta idea of the book was starting to form. We were having breakfast sitting around, and they said, Well, tell us about this project. I said it all for the first time out loud, sort of in order, and they didn't roll their eyes or start checking their phones or look bored, and their reaction let me know that I was onto something. The idea that you can make a serious academic case that Manifest Destiny was not achieved out in the West but somewhere else. Greg Grandin makes that argument about the American-Mexican border in "The End of the Myth." Based on maps I have, you can make that argument for the Mississippi Delta. And I think that, if Manifest Destiny is the wellspring of the American identity and all of the good and bad urges, understanding the places where that could have finally been achieved actually offers an alternate history of America that is more accurate than the one that we're taught.

David Black

Agent

Oh, my God. David Black, firmly and demonstrably, has my best interest at heart. He would go kill someone on the town square for me, which I appreciate deeply. He has made a real effort to know everyone in my life who matters to me. He's been to my mom's house. He and my wife are the two people who have access to my Apple account if I die. I mean, he is everything you could ever imagine an agent to be.

I don't like new people. I like real consistency, and I think the good shit happens when you can mind-meld with people and you know their vanities and insecurities, you know their strengths and weaknesses. You trust them completely. I feel much more comfortable around people I have known for a very long time.

Denise Wills

Deputy Editor, The Atlantic

Denise is a fabulous editor. I mean, I firmly believe the best two magazine editors in America right now are Denise and the mighty, mighty Eric Neel. Denise is fabulous, funny, cool and smart, confident, and she did a masterful job. I really enjoyed her voice in my ear. The person in the acknowledgments who probably needs the most credit is Eric Neel, my ESPN editor. His read of this manuscript was incredible. He helped me create the eye of the needle to use during the cut. The rule was, if I can see the barn or any of the people who intersected in it in 1955 from where I am narratively standing, it can stay in. And if I couldn’t, it has to go, no matter how much I like it. That was the system that we came up with.

Rick Telander

Sports Columnist, Chicago Sun-Times

He's got his byline hanging on the wall at the Billy Goat, which is the highest honor a journalist could have. I met him when I was in college. I was covering the Super Bowl the Rams were in, and he took a real interest and offered great writing advice. He was the first person to really express that they believed I could do this. The hardest part, I think, about making it in this business is continuing, despite the industry telling you over and over again that it doesn't want you. The hardest thing when you're young is just to keep going. I look back and I'm not sure I would have the faith to do it again. But there were people like Rick, who just kept saying, You can do this despite all of the rejection. None of this exists without him.

Uncle Michael

My dad had three brothers. There were four of them, and Michael is the last one alive. That felt important to acknowledge.

Sonia

Thompson's wife

Dude, I feel like the whole acknowledgment should just be a repetitive thank you and apology to my wife, because I carried this around in my head for four years. I wasn't a treat, you know what I mean? She's incredible. I feel like the byline is a joint creation of me and her. It's kind of the family business; I couldn't do this without the vicarious confidence and belief, and I mean truly, the rest of it would be impossible.

I was a real mess before we met. I'd probably be dead.

***

Elon Green is the author of "The Man Nobody Killed: Life, Death, and Art in Michael Stewart's New York" and "Last Call: A True Story of Love, Lust, and Murder in Queer New York," for which he won the Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime. He has written for The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker, and appears in "Unspeakable Acts," Sarah Weinman’s anthology of true crime.

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Forty-six minutes into Episode 4 of Ezra Edelman’s epic documentary “O.J. Simpson: Made in America,” the director squares off with Barry Scheck, the defense attorney who discredited--or, at the very least, undermined--the State of California’s DNA evidence tying Simpson to the 1994 murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman.

At the trial, Scheck was eloquent and convincing. “Missing blood. Coincidence? Corroboration,” he tells the jury. “Something is terribly wrong.” Now, more than 20 years later, Edelman wants him to reckon with his accomplishment.

Edelman: Do you believe that that blood was planted by the LAPD?

Scheck: Eh, you know, it’s not my job to believe or not believe…. Could the police officers in Los Angeles have, uh, planted evidence against Mr. Simpson in this case to improve their chances of winning? You know, there was certainly good evidence to support that hypothesis. …

Edelman: Just so I’m clear, you believe that all the blood evidence in the case--

Scheck: You know, you’re asking me this question, Do I believe, think… You know, it is not, not, the...because you’re, you’re…the… as you know from meticulously researching this case—and this has been written about—we presented, you know, sound arguments and evidence to explain each piece of evidence and how it got there. Uh, you know, I’m not omniscient.

Edelman asks Scheck a yes-or-no question and gets a long, rambling answer. It’s one of the great scenes in a nearly eight-hour documentary that’s been called a “masterpiece,” “a feat of tireless research, dogged interviewing and skillful editing” and one of the 50 greatest films by black directors. But it’s also a display of astonishing journalism and storytelling; Edelman so methodically makes the case for Simpson’s guilt that this scene, which is rather quiet, feels charged and climactic.

Not long ago, I talked to Edelman about the film, which gets its TV premiere Saturday night on ABC, with subsequent episodes following next week on ESPN.

(Note from Storyboard editor Kari Howard: Although a Russian correspondent at the L.A. Times once memorably compared me to “a doctor in the third year of the Great War,” able to lop off limbs with ease, I decided to let this go much longer than the standard 5 Questions format. Why? Because the Q&A illuminates not only an Olympian interviewing feat but also the issue of race in America, so vital to the national conversation today.)

You managed to make Barry Scheck, one of the most accomplished, respected defense attorneys in the world, look out of sorts. How and when did this happen? My understanding is you interviewed people for sometimes eight hours at a time.

His interview lasted only a couple hours, and the exchange was in the second hour. I don't really have such a structured style. I know generally what to do or not do, in terms of when I lead up to things, but the whole point is just to get people comfortable enough to talk. I go where the conversation takes me.

When you prepared for the interview with Scheck, you did prodigious amounts of research. Did you also game out possible responses to your questions?

I don’t generally game out interviews. What I understood about Barry is he’s someone who had been reluctant to talk about O.J. and his own involvement with the case. He doesn’t do interviews about this—never has—and he was reluctant to do this one. I understood he was not going to be, let's say, 100% forthcoming on some of the questions I was going to ask him.

Do you have a philosophy of interviewing?

The job of an interviewer is to prompt people to go to a place they didn't even realize they were prepared to go to. I'm going to ask those things in your brain that aren't actually in the forefront of your brain right now. If I don't do that, then I'm just going to fail to get what I need. That's essentially my philosophy. I want to make sure it's conversational, that I’m not sitting there with a bunch of notes or questions in front of me. That just stunts the conversation.

You don't have any questions in front of you?

I will write down pages and pages of questions—my crib sheet—and I will literally be working on them for the couple days before. That's my way of working out my thoughts. I almost memorize them. My brain can go to places on a page and know the things that I wrote down. I have them up until the interview, and then I put them under the chair and I don't look at them.

Was there ever a moment that truly surprised you?

I'll give you an example. One case is [former police officer] Ron Shipp, whom I interviewed for obvious reasons. I didn't know before I interviewed him was that he was a teenage football player who went to see the UCLA-USC game when he was 15 years old and then, a year later, ended up at a banquet where O.J. name-checked him! That just makes his character arc that much fuller. That was a revelation to me.

One thing that surprised me was interviewing Tom Lange, the detective who was in charge of the O.J. murder investigation. When he said, "I don't think the cops who beat Rodney King should have been prosecuted," that surprised me. In a way, that was like, really? Almost to the point of Are you sure this is what you mean? Is that what you want to say? Even if that's what he feels, in his heart. I have no gotcha sensibility. I have no desire. In some ways, it was like, Are you sure that's what you're saying? Because I would like to think it's probably not the best thing. It doesn't make you look great for you to say that.

It made me realize that that's probably representative of what other people in the LAPD felt. At the same time, I'm appreciative that someone is open and honest, and that's what I want. The fact is, the irony obviously is that Lange, more than any other cop, is the one guy who was completely above the fray about everything when it came to the investigation itself. Tom Lange has a spotless record. He's a good guy.

[vimeo https://vimeo.com/169540977]

It seems like you talked to most people who you could have talked to, but obviously there are some exceptions, [including] Simpson. … Is it ever a blessing to not talk to somebody?

I think it's a blessing not to talk to O.J. Because O.J., with everything you know about him—even having watched the film—you know that O.J. is compromised. He's not a reliable narrator. The entire story is predicated upon a guy who has been saying one thing, and may have done another thing. His whole thing is about image. How am I going to penetrate that veneer? I don't think I can. I'm not going to be the one who does that. This guy is 68 years old and he's lived with himself for that long. If he did participate, then it becomes a different story, a different film. It would be you looking at this guy and trying to look at his face and understand what's real or what's not.

The fact is, there is tons of archival footage of him talking. It's not like he's not present in the movie. You get enough of who he is from all the archival footage to make a determination about him.

Did you have any kind of canned questions?

No. At the beginning, I did ask a lot of the people I interviewed, who were black, if they had ever been stopped or harassed by the cops. I didn't know if that was something I was going to inject into the story. I think you feel your way around at the beginning, for things that might be devices, or might somehow work anecdotally. But beyond that, there weren’t, like, five questions I was asking everyone.

It’s not a Paris Review interview.

It's not a Paris Review interview, and frankly, there is the one obvious question [Do you think O.J. did it?] you would think I would ask everybody in this story. I didn't ask people that question. It's almost like, what can you do to make people understand that this is not what you have done before? One way to do that is to not ask that question.

It's strange to ask about a seven-and-a-half-hour movie, but are there any stories you wanted to tell and just couldn't?

Yes, but not because of time. There were always rumors of drugs, cocaine use, and how much of it O.J. used during the '70s and '80s. I had some people talking about it, but not in a substantiated and fleshed out enough way to report in the film. It was more that that was part of his lifestyle during that time, and I was trying to present as full a portrait of him as possible. Could drugs and alcohol have contributed to incidents of abuse, for instance? Very possibly, but I don't have any substantiation in that way. That would have been something that, if I could have just added that in a more real way, I would have.

Did your familiarity with the material enable you to notice when people were lying to you?

I don't know if I got a sense of when people were flat-out lying. You have to be fair to people. Honestly, I don't remember what I did yesterday. When you're sitting with people who are recalling things, what I generally do—because people don't remember details, or they talk very authoritatively about things—and when I know I have to report these things, I will stop them and say, "These are actually the correct details, so if you're going to say this, be correct with your facts."

By the way, if someone vaguely leads me down a path that I think is slightly avoidant and deviates from what I need to hear or that I'm actually trying to question them about, I will absolutely call it out. It's about getting the things out of the people that you need. In some ways, that's massaging versus hammering.

Why was it important for you to do all the interviews and not to delegate?

That's what I do. It's that simple. Everything is in my head. Look, I work with incredibly talented people, but the way I do interviews, it's not structured. I always trust myself in terms of being able to mine the territory I need to mine to get what I know I want to get. And the things that excite me—I don't know what excites someone else.

Frankly, as much as I trust somebody, if I fuck up somehow, that's on me. I don't really want to have to put that burden on someone else if something didn't come back the way I hoped it to be. That's not their responsibility; that's mine.

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Tom Wolfe and I met twice, in his Upper East Side home, and to answer the inevitable question, no: He never wore a white suit. Dark blazer, dark pants, no hat.

We talked for four hours over two days about “Radical Chic,” his New York account of a January 1970 party that Leonard Bernstein held, at his Park Avenue duplex, for the Black Panthers. (The New York Times, whose Charlotte Curtis was in attendance,ran an account the next day.) It’s a delightfully scathing story, which pissed off more than a few New Yorkers. (Bernstein’s wife “fled” a party rather than be in a room with Wolfe’s publisher.) At 25,000 words, “Radical Chic” filled a chunk of the magazine. Wolfe envisioned it as a chapter in a “non-fiction novel,” but his “journalistic instinct overcame any literary instinct,” he told me. My questions and comments are in blue, Wolfe’s responses in red.

Storyboard: How did you get the idea for “Radical Chic”?

Tom Wolfe: It was December of ’69, it must have been, that I learned about this party for the Black Panthers, in the following manner: I was at Harper’s magazine, waiting for my wife-to-be — who was the art director — to get a break so we could go to lunch. And I just started wandering around — everybody was at lunch — poking my nose into other people’s business. And I was in David Halberstam’s office. There, on his desk, was an invitation to this party. And I said, “My God! 895 Park Avenue! That’s one of the greatest Park Avenue buildings.” And I said, “Somehow I have got to go to this thing.” So I copied down the phone number that was on the invitation to call to respond, and took a chance on it being a committee of some kind — which, in fact, in must have been, because there was a security check outside the door to Leonard Bernstein’s apartment. I mean, they put some big desks out there, so you couldn’t get by. There was no way you could sneak by. And my name was on the list, so no problem! And I immediately introduced myself to Felicia Bernstein and to Leonard Bernstein. I didn’t know them. I told them that I was from New York magazine.

Did they know who you were?

I don’t know. They didn’t fall all over themselves, if they did. Well, they might have known. I had done The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

Didn’t they wonder why Halberstam didn’t show up?

They may have. But they really wondered why Homer Bigart hadn’t shown up. They expected Homer Bigart, the No. 1 foreign correspondent for the New York Times — he was the big shot of their political coverage — to come. Instead, they sent Charlotte Curtis, who was a good writer and everything, but she was the social editrix. They assumed if you were there, you were there for the Panthers.

“Radical Chic”

By Tom Wolfe
New York
June 1970

At 2 or 3 or 4 a.m., somewhere along in there, on August 25, 1966, his 48th birthday, in fact, Leonard Bernstein woke up in the dark in a state of wild alarm. That had happened before. It was one of the forms his insomnia took. So he did the usual. He got up and walked around a bit. He felt groggy. Suddenly he had a vision, an inspiration. He could see himself, Leonard Bernstein, the egregio maestro, walking out on stage in white tie and tails in front of a full orchestra. On one side of the conductor’s podium is a piano. On the other is a chair with a guitar leaning against it. He sits in the chair and picks up the guitar. A guitar! One of those half-witted instruments, like the accordion, that are made for the Learn-To-Play-in-Eight-Days E-Z-Diagram 110-IQ 14-year-olds of Levittown! But there’s a reason. He has an anti-war message to deliver to this great starched white-throated audience in the symphony hall. He announces to them: “I love.” Just that. The effect is mortifying. All at once a Negro rises up from out of the curve of the grand piano and starts saying things like, “The audience is curiously embarrassed.” Lenny tries to start again, plays some quick numbers on the piano, says, “I love. Amo, ergo sum.” The Negro rises again and says, “The audience thinks he ought to get up and walk out. The audience thinks, ‘I am ashamed even to nudge my neighbor.’ ” Finally, Lenny gets off a heartfelt anti-war speech and exits.I’m so glad you didn’t actually quote the speech. Why didn’t you? Didn’t have it! Although I don’t know what I would’ve done with it, if I did. This came from a book by John Gruen, who was doing a very complimentary book about Leonard Bernstein. He described this night — it was in Bernstein’s words — that he had spent. He woke up and he had this inspiration, and wrote it down and thought some day he might use it. It was all out of John Gruen’s book. I don’t remember the name of it. It came out, oh my God, a long time ago. Ha! John was not really happy about that. He really worshipped Leonard Bernstein. He thought I was using this to comic effect. Which, in fact, I was.

For a moment, sitting there alone in his home in the small hours of the morning, Lenny thought it might just work and he jotted the idea down. Think of the headlines: BERNSTEIN ELECTRIFIES CONCERT AUDIENCE WITH ANTIWAR APPEAL. But then his enthusiasm collapsed. He lost heart. Who the hell was this Negro rising up from the piano and informing the world what an ass Leonard Bernstein was making of himself? It didn’t make sense, this superego Negro by the concert grand.So, is the second paragraph also from John Gruen’s book? Because it feels like you were in the room with Bernstein, watching him awaken. Oh, no! That was all from Leonard Bernstein telling John Gruen. I think it was a straight, tape-recorded account. I have a question, now that I know where this is from. As I told you, I’d annotated “Frank Sinatra Has A Cold” with Gay Talese, and we talked about a couple of instances where he’d used material from other articles and didn’t mention the sourcing. Now, obviously, the rules for sourcing have gotten much tighter —  Oh, no. I don’t think they’re tighter. You didn’t feel it was necessary to cite John —  Footnote? Oh my God, no. No, just to say something like, “According to John Gruen…” “According to John Gruen” ruins the whole paragraph. See, the idea is to try to get the reader to feel like he’s inside the action, that he’s not getting this secondhand. I don’t even want him to feel he’s getting it from me!

***

Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. How do you go about this? Is the number of M’s important, or do you press the M key until you're satisfied? Is it a structural thing? Does it set up this entire graf of interiority/inner monologue? Anyway, I don’t know what to call it -- an exclamation? It’s more of a hum. Hummmmmmmmm. I didn’t need that many M’s. I guess, at the moment, I just wanted a string of M’s. I should tell you, right off the bat, this is a technique that I call “the offstage narrator.” He’s just off the stage. His mind is the general mindset of the people through whose eyes you begin to see. I’ve done it with stock car racers, during a trial run with “Junior Johnson,” making a wild swing around the curve. Great smokin’ blue gumballs! God almighty dog! There goes Junior Johnson! Well, nobody said that. It’s the atmosphere, it’s the offstage narrator — he’s right there, even though he’s not taking part in the action. If you compare the tone of “Radical Chic” with “Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers,” it’s two totally different voices of narration, but both are trying to make you feel as if you are inside the action, not looking from a distance. And, as far as I know, both of them are absolutely accurate, as far as that goes.These are nice. Little Roquefort cheese morsels rolled in crushed nuts. Very tasty. Very subtle. It’s the way the dry sackiness of the nuts tiptoes up against the dour savor of the cheese that is so nice, so subtle. Wonder what the Black Panthers eat here on the hors d’oeuvre trail? Do the Panthers like little Roquefort cheese morsels wrapped in crushed nuts this way, and asparagus tips in mayonnaise dabs, and meatballs petites au Coq Hardi, all of which are at this very moment being offered to them on gadrooned silver platters by maids in black uniforms with hand-ironed white aprons . . . The butler will bring them their drinks . . . Deny it if you wish to, but such are the pensées métaphysiques that rush through one’s head on these Radical Chic evenings just now in New York. For example, does that huge Black Panther there in the hallway, the one shaking hands with Felicia Bernstein herself, the one with the black leather coat and the dark glasses and the absolutely unbelievable Afro, Fuzzy Wuzzy-scale in fact—is he, a Black Panther, going on to pick up a Roquefort cheese morsel rolled in crushed nuts from off the tray, from a maid in uniform, and just pop it down the gullet without so much as missing a beat of Felicia’s perfect Mary Astor voice. . . .

Felicia is remarkable. She is beautiful, with that rare burnished beauty that lasts through the years. Her hair is pale blond and set just so. She has a voice that is “theatrical,” to use a term from her youth. She greets the Black Panthers with the same bend of the wrist, the same tilt of the head, the same perfect Mary Astor voice with which she greets people like Jason, D.D. Adolph, Betty, Gian Carlo, Schuyler, and Goddard, during those après-concert suppers she and Lenny are so famous for. What evenings! She lights the candles over the dining room table, and in the Gotham gloaming the little tremulous tips of flame are reflected in the mirrored surface of the table, a bottomless blackness with a thousand stars, and it is that moment that Lenny loves. There seem to be a thousand stars above and a thousand stars below, a room full of stars, a penthouse duplex full of stars, a Manhattan tower full of stars, with marvelous people drifting through the heavens, Jason Robards, John and D. D. Ryan, Gian Carlo Menotti, Schuyler Chapin, Goddard Lieberson, Mike Nichols, Lillian Hellman, Larry Rivers, Aaron Copland, Richard Avedon, Milton and Amy Greene, Lukas Foss, Jennie Tourel, Samuel Barber, Jerome Robbins, Steve Sondheim, Adolph and Phyllis Green, Betty Comden, and the Patrick O’Neals . . .

. . . and now, in the season of Radical Chic, the Black Panthers. That huge Panther there, the one Felicia is smiling her tango smile at, is Robert Bay, who just 41 hours ago was arrested in an altercation with the police, supposedly over a .38-caliber revolver that someone had, in a parked car in Queens at Northern Boulevard and 104th Street or some such unbelievable place, and taken to jail on a most unusual charge called “criminal facilitation.” And now he is out on bail and walking into Leonard and Felicia Bernstein’s 13-room penthouse duplex on Park Avenue. Harassment & Hassles, Guns & Pigs, Jail & Bail—they’re real, these Black Panthers. The very idea of them, these real revolutionaries, who actually put their lives on the line, runs through Lenny’s duplex like a rogue hormone. Everyone casts a glance, or stares, or tries a smile, and then sizes up the house for the somehow delicious counterpoint . . . Deny it if you want to! but one does end up making such sweet furtive comparisons in this season of Radical Chic . . . There’s Otto Preminger in the library and Jean vanden Heuvel in the hall, and Peter and Cheray Duchin in the living room, and Frank and Domna Stanton, Gail Lumet, Sheldon Harnick, Cynthia Phipps, Burton Lane, Mrs. August Heckscher, Roger Wilkins, Barbara Walters, Bob Silvers, Mrs. Richard Avedon, Mrs. Arthur Penn, Julie Belafonte, Harold Taylor, and scores more, including Charlotte Curtis, women’s news editor of the New York Times, America’s foremost chronicler of Society, a lean woman in black, with her notebook out, standing near Felicia and big Robert Bay, and talking to Cheray Duchin.

Cheray tells her: “I’ve never met a Panther—this is a first for me!” . . . never dreaming that within 48 hours her words will be on the desk of the President of the United States . . . Here and throughout, the story is packed to the gills with details. How do you do it? Did you tape record anything? Do you use shorthand? I do shorthand, Gregg shorthand. There are two main forms.Okay. I got a lot of dialogue in this. Right, it’s extraordinary. So, you didn’t tape-record any of it? It’s all shorthand. Shorthand. That’s what they do at trials, to this day. Have you always done that, or have you tape-recorded anything for stories? I very seldom tape-record anything, because I was born too early. Same way with Instagram. You prefer to do it the hard way. Well, it’s not really hard and it never turns off on you. They won’t do it in a trial. They will not take the chance with a tape-recorder. There might be a blackout or something. The tape recorder is for lazy people. [uncomfortable laughter] I’m not accusing you of being lazy! So, it seems like you saw everything. Physically, where were you positioned at this party? There were perhaps 30 folding chairs in a big living room, lined up. I sat in a chair on the righthand side, toward the back. That’s where I got most of the dialogue.

This is a first for me. But she is not alone in her thrill as the Black Panthers come trucking on in, into Lenny’s house, Robert Bay, Don Cox the Panthers’ Field Marshal from Oakland, Henry Miller the Harlem Panther defense captain, the Panther women—Christ, if the Panthers don’t know how to get it all together, as they say, the tight pants, the tight black turtlenecks, the leather coats, Cuban shades, Afros. But real Afros, not the ones that have been shaped and trimmed like a topiary hedge and sprayed until they have a sheen like acrylic wall-to-wall—but like funky, natural, scraggly . . . wild . . .

These are no civil-rights Negroes wearing gray suits three sizes too big— I can easily imagine a line like this making an editor uncomfortable. A., things were not as PC as they are now. But they still were. The passage is mocking the attitudes of the people at the party. And so if you’re mocking something that they are saying, does that mean it becomes politically incorrect? I’d say no. Fair enough. If I’d just made a declaration, “Well, these civil rights Negroes in suits three sizes too big” — that wouldn’t have gone over, even then. Right. In general, how much scrutiny did your writing get from the magazine? What was the editing process like? I don’t recall in detail. But I’d written an awful lot for the magazine’s different iterations. And Clay Felker, who was the editor, was the kind of editor who was not a line editor. He’d either say, “Terrific!” or “Do it over!” Nothing in between. So the editing process was not anything like it was at Newsweek, which I’d once made the mistake of writing an article for. Everything goes through so many hands. It’s like being bitten to death by a duck. Everyone has to show that he has some importance, and some stature. But with Clay, we’d worked so much together it was pretty easy. Did Felker edit your two Herald Tribune pieces on The New Yorker? Oh, yeah. The two of us thought up the idea. The New Yorker had done a piece making fun of New York magazine and me and Jimmy Breslin, specifically. And so we decided, Well, they made the first salvo. Let’s respond in kind! I tried to get an interview with (William) Shawn, the editor of The New Yorker. He said, “I don’t give interviews. Here at The New Yorker, if somebody doesn’t want to be profiled” — that was the New Yorker term — “we don’t do it.” I said, “Well, I think you’re too newsworthy not to be written about.” So he put out the word right away to his staff not to cooperate. But this is my one contribution to psychology: There’s something called “information compulsion,” which makes you feel good when you supply information to someone. You got a few little status points because that person needed what you knew, and you gave it to him. On the other hand, if you’re asked something that you can’t answer, you think, What are you coming to me for? Why should I be taxed with that question? But anyway, there were people at The New Yorker who spoke to me. They were not all-knowing, but they gave me some scenes.

—no more interminable Urban League banquets in hotel ballrooms where they try to alternate the blacks and whites around the tables as if they were stringing Arapaho beads—

—these are real men!

Shootouts, revolutions, pictures in Life magazine of policemen grabbing Black Panthers like they were Viet Cong—somehow it all runs together in the head with the whole thing of how beautiful they are. Sharp as a blade. The Panther women—there are three or four of them on hand, wives of the Panther 21 defendants, and they are so lean, so lithe, as they say, with tight pants and Yoruba-style headdresses, almost like turbans, as if they’d stepped out of the pages of Vogue, although no doubt Vogue got it from them. All at once every woman in the room knows exactly what Amanda Burden meant when she said she was now anti-fashion because “the sophistication of the baby blacks made me rethink my attitudes.” God knows the Panther women don’t spend 30 minutes in front of the mirror in the morning shoring up their eye holes with contact lenses, eyeliner, eye shadow, eyebrow pencil, occipital rim brush, false eyelashes, mascara, Shadow-Ban for undereye and Eterna Creme for the corners . . . And here they are, right in front of you, trucking on into the Bernsteins’ Chinese yellow duplex, amid the sconces, silver bowls full of white and lavender anemones, and uniformed servants serving drinks and Roquefort cheese morsels rolled in crushed nuts—

But it’s all right. They’re white servants, not Claude and Maude, but white South Americans. Lenny and Felicia are geniuses. After a while, it all comes down to servants. They are the cutting edge in Radical Chic. Obviously, if you are giving a party for the Black Panthers, as Lenny and Felicia are this evening, or as Sidney and Gail Lumet did last week, or as John Simon of Random House and Richard Baron, the publisher, did before that; or for the Chicago Eight, such as the party Jean vanden Heuvel gave; or for the grape workers or Bernadette Devlin, such as the parties Andrew Stein gave; or for the Young Lords, such as the party Ellie Guggenheimer is giving next week in her Park Avenue duplex; or for the Indians or the SDS or the G.I. Coffee Shops or even for the Friends of the Earth—well, then, obviously you can’t have a Negro butler and maid, Claude and Maude, in uniform, circulating through the living room, the library and the main hall serving drinks and canapés. Plenty of people have tried to think it out. They try to picture the Panthers or whoever walking in bristling with electric hair and Cuban shades and leather pieces and the rest of it, and they try to picture Claude and Maude with the black uniforms coming up and saying, “Would you care for a drink, sir?” They close their eyes and try to picture it some way, but there is no way. One simply cannot see that moment. So the current wave of Radical Chic has touched off the most desperate search for white servants. Carter and Amanda Burden have white servants. Sidney Lumet and his wife Gail, who is Lena Horne’s daughter, have three white servants, including a Scottish nurse. Everybody has white servants. And Lenny and Felicia—they had it worked out before Radical Chic even started. Felicia grew up in Chile. Her father, Roy Elwood Cohn, an engineer from San Francisco, worked for the American Smelting and Refining Co. in Santiago. As Felicia Montealegre (her mother’s maiden name), she became an actress in New York and won the Motion Picture Daily critics’ award as the best new television actress of 1949. Anyway, they have a house staff of three white South American servants, including a Chilean cook, plus Lenny’s English chauffeur and dresser, who is also white, of course. Can one comprehend how perfect that is, given . . . the times? Well, many of their friends can, and they ring up the Bernsteins and ask them to get South American servants for them, and the Bernsteins are so generous about it, so obliging, that people refer to them, good-naturedly and gratefully, as “the Spic and Span Employment Agency,” with an easygoing ethnic humor, of course. This seems like a good time to ask: What was the fact-checking process like? Did that even exist at New York in 1970? Oh, yes. Fact checking has existed as long as I’ve worked on newspapers. But I don’t remember much about this. Did you have to turn over your notes? Oh, they’d never ask me to do that. They would certainly have asked for sources.

The only other thing to do is what Ellie Guggenheimer is doing next week with her party for the Young Lords in her duplex on Park Avenue at 89th Street, just 10 blocks up from Lenny and Felicia. She is giving her party on a Sunday, which is the day off for the maid and the cleaning woman. “Two friends of mine”—she confides on the telephone—“two friends of mine who happen to be . . . not white—that’s what I hate about the times we live in, the terms—well, they’ve agreed to be butler and maid . . . and I’m going to be a maid myself!”

Just at this point some well-meaning soul is going to say, Why not do without servants altogether if the matter creates such unbearable tension and one truly believes in equality? Well, even to raise the question is to reveal the most fundamental ignorance of life in the great co-ops and townhouses of the East Side in the age of Radical Chic. Why, my God! servants are not a mere convenience, they’re an absolute psychological necessity. Once one is into that life, truly into it, with the morning workout on the velvet swings at Kounovsky’s and the late mornings on the telephone, and lunch at the Running Footman, which is now regarded as really better than La Grenouille, Lutèce, Lafayette, La Caravelle and the rest of the general Frog Pond, less ostentatious, more of the David Hicks feeling, less of the Parish-Hadley look, and then—well, then, the idea of not having servants is unthinkable. But even that does not say it all. It makes it sound like a matter of convenience, when actually it is a sheer and fundamental matter of—having servants. Does one comprehend? By 1970 you’d had a bestselling book, you were doing pretty well. Did you have servants?No. I had three bestsellers by then — The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and also, published on the same day as The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, was The Pump House Gang. That was on the New York Times list, briefly, but that counts! But I never had servants. I’ll tell you this: It wouldn’t have occurred to me. A lot of places where I lived, there wouldn’t have been any place for the servant to move around. This place is okay. This place has a lot of rooms.

God, what a flood of taboo thoughts runs through one’s head at these Radical Chic events . . . But it’s delicious. It is as if one’s nerve-endings were on red alert to the most intimate nuances of status. Deny it if you want to! Nevertheless, it runs through every soul here. It is the matter of the marvelous contradictions on all sides. It is like the delicious shudder you get when you try to force the prongs of two horseshoe magnets together . . . them and us . . .

For example, one’s own servants, although white, are generally no problem. A discreet, euphemistic word about what sort of party it is going to be, and they will generally be models of correctness. The euphemisms are not always an easy matter, however. When talking to one’s white servants, one doesn’t really know whether to refer to blacks as blacks, Negroes, or colored people. These sentences are interesting. They betray an assumption about the readership — that it’s comprised of well-off white people. To what extent, if at all, do you write to your audience? Oh, no. That was part of creating this offstage character. All these distinctions about the Running Footman, only a certain kind of person would know about that. Someone who puts a great stress on being social. When I say, “It is a sheer and fundamental matter of — having servants. Does one comprehend?” you know, that’s not me talking. That’s the offstage narrator.When talking to other . . . well, cultivated persons, one says blacks, of course. It is the only word, currently, that implicitly shows one’s awareness of the dignity of the black race. But somehow when you start to say the word to your own white servants, you hesitate. You can’t get it out of your throat. Why? Counter-guilt! You realize that you are about to utter one of those touchstone words that divide the cultivated from the uncultivated, the attuned from the unattuned, the hip from the dreary. As soon as the word comes out of your mouth—you know it before the first vocable pops on your lips—your own servant is going to size you up as one of those limousine liberals, or whatever epithet they use, who are busy pouring white soul all over the black movement, and would you do as much for the white lower class, for the domestics of the East Side, for example, fat chance, sahib. Deny it if you want to! but such are the delicious little agonies of Radical Chic. So one settles for Negro, with the hope that the great god Culturatus has laid the ledger aside for the moment. . . . In any case, if one is able to make that small compromise, one’s own servants are no real problem. But the elevator man and the doorman—the death rays they begin projecting, the curt responses, as soon as they see it is going to be one of those parties! Of course, they’re all from Queens, and so forth, and one has to allow for that. For some reason the elevator men tend to be worse about it than the doormen, even; less sense of politesse, perhaps.

Or—what does one wear to these parties for the Panthers or the Young Lords or the grape workers? What did you wear to Bernstein’s party? I don’t remember specifically, but I can tell you it was not a white suit. In fact, if I’m reporting, whether it’s for a newspaper or a magazine or for a book, I never wear a white suit. It’s asking for trouble. I mean, I don’t want people to feel, “Oh, here comes the big shot.” As far as I’m concerned, they are the big shots. I’m just there to find out what they’re saying. So, it probably was a suit that nobody would’ve looked at twice. At that time, newspaper people wore suits and ties. It was virtually a requirement of the job. I forget when that all stopped. Depending on the publication, it can still be quite formal. Oh, is that so? I know there are law firms that have reformalized. They got a little lax for awhile because they would dress for people from Silicon Valley. They would dress down — it always looked stupid — in hopes of setting up a rapport. If I come to Wall Street, I don’t want a rapport, my way of living. I want somebody who looks like they’re organized and ready to roll — a legal machine. What does a woman wear? Obviously one does not want to wear something frivolously and pompously expensive, such as a Gerard Pipart party dress. On the other hand one does not want to arrive “poor-mouthing it” in some outrageous turtleneck and West Eighth Street bell-jean combination, as if one is “funky” and of “the people.” Frankly, Jean vanden Heuvel—that’s Jean there in the hallway giving everyone her famous smile, in which her eyes narrow down to f/16—frankly, Jean tends too much toward the funky fallacy. Jean, who is the daughter of Jules Stein, one of the wealthiest men in the country, is wearing some sort of rust-red snap-around suede skirt, the sort that English working girls pick up on Saturday afternoons in those absolutely berserk London boutiques like Bus Stop or Biba, where everything looks chic and yet skimpy and raw and vital. Felicia Bernstein seems to understand the whole thing better. Look at Felicia. She is wearing the simplest little black frock imaginable, with absolutely no ornamentation save for a plain gold necklace. It is perfect. It has dignity without any overt class symbolism.

Lenny? Lenny himself has been in the living room all this time, talking to old friends like the Duchins and the Stantons and the Lanes. Lenny is wearing a black turtleneck, navy blazer, Black Watch plaid trousers and a necklace with a pendant hanging down to his sternum. His tailor comes here to the apartment to take the measurements and do the fittings. Lenny is a short, trim man, and yet he always seems tall. It is his head. He has a noble head, with a face that is at once sensitive and rugged, and a full stand of iron-gray hair, with sideburns, all set off nicely by the Chinese yellow of the room. His success radiates from his eyes and his smile with a charm that illustrates Lord Jersey’s adage that “contrary to what the Methodists tell us, money and success are good for the soul.” Lenny may be 51, but he is still the Wunderkind of American music. Everyone says so. He is not only one of the world’s outstanding conductors, but a more than competent composer and pianist as well. He is the man who more than any other has broken down the wall between elite music and popular tastes, with West Side Story and his children’s concerts on television. How natural that he should stand here in his own home radiating the charm and grace that make him an easy host for leaders of the oppressed. How ironic that the next hour should prove so shattering for this egregio maestro! How curious that the Negro by the piano should emerge tonight!

A bell rang, a dinner table bell, by the sound of it, the sort one summons the maid out of the kitchen with, and the party shifted from out of the hall and into the living room. Felicia led the way, Felicia and a small gray man, with gray hair, a gray face, a gray suit, and a pair of Groovy but gray sideburns. A little gray man, in short, who would be popping up at key moments . . . to keep the freight train of history on the track, as it were . . .

Felicia was down at the far end of the living room trying to coax everybody in.

“Lenny!” she said. “Tell the fringes to come on in!” Lenny was still in the back of the living room, near the hall. “Fringes!” said Lenny. “Come on in!”

In the living room most of the furniture, the couches, easy chairs, side tables, side chairs, and so on, had been pushed toward the walls, and 30 or 40 folding chairs were set up in the middle of the floor. It was a big, wide room with Chinese yellow walls and white moldings, sconces, pier-glass mirrors, a portrait of Felicia reclining on a summer chaise, and at the far end, where Felicia was standing, a pair of grand pianos. A pair of them; the two pianos were standing back to back, with the tops down and their bellies swooping out. On top of both pianos was a regular flotilla of family photographs in silver frames, the kind of pictures that stand straight up thanks to little velvet- or moiré-covered buttresses in the back, the kind that decorators in New York recommend to give a living room a homelike, lived-in touch. “The million-dollar chatchka look,” they call it. Did you call up a decorator specifically for this piece, or were you simply knowledgeable of interior decoration? At that time, I was. For the first time in my life I was conscious of it. I had moved somewhere and had started thinking about it. It’s an interesting field because you are creating an installation piece. I was quite familiar. In a way it was perfect for Radical Chic. The nice part was that with Lenny it was instinctive; with Felicia, too. The whole place looked as if the inspiration had been to spend a couple of hundred thousand on the interior without looking pretentious, although that is no great sum for a 13-room co-op, of course . . . Imagine explaining all that to the Black Panthers. It was another delicious thought . . . The sofas, for example, were covered in the fashionable splashy prints on a white background covering deep downy cushions, in the Billy Baldwin or Margaret Owen tradition — without it looking like Billy or Margaret had been in there fussing about with teapoys and japanned chairs. Gemütlich . . . Old Vienna when grandpa was alive . . . That was the ticket . . .

Once Lenny got “the fringes” moving in, the room filled up rapidly. It was jammed, in fact. People were sitting on sofas and easy chairs along the sides, as well as on the folding chairs, and were standing in the back, where Lenny was. Otto Preminger was sitting on a sofa down by the pianos, where the speakers were going to stand. The Panther wives were sitting in the first two rows with their Yoruba headdresses on, along with Henry Mitchell and Julie Belafonte, Harry Belafonte’s wife. Julie is white, but they all greeted her warmly as “Sister.” Behind her was sitting Barbara Walters, hostess of the Today Show on television, wearing a checked pants suit with a great fluffy fur collar on the coat. Harold Taylor, the former “Boy President” of Sarah Lawrence, now 55 and silver-haired, but still youthful looking, came walking down toward the front and gave a hug and a big social kiss to Gail Lumet. Robert Bay settled down in the middle of the folding chairs. Jean vanden Heuvel stood in the back and sought to focus . . . f/16 I love that you mention f-stops without explaining this to your audience. It presumes a certain level of knowledge, right? Why did you use the – for lack of a better word – device? You know, people thought about things like that, when you had no choice. A camera had nothing automatic about it. A lot of people, I think, knew how to focus, how to change the settings. So, it’s the presumption of intelligence?Yes. Also, I’m flattering. I don’t mind flattering the reader. Often I’ll use obscure words and, even if the reader doesn’t know the word, he’ll feel flattered that you assume he knows the word. Like a word I’ve come to hate — eponymous. I mean, I’ve seen it so many times. The eponymous maker of Ralph Lauren clothes… . . . on the pianos . . . Charlotte Curtis stood beside the door, taking notes. And then Felicia stood up beside the pianos and said:

“I want to thank you all very, very much for coming. I’m very, very glad to see so many of you here.” Everything was fine. Her voice was rich as a woodwind. She introduced a man named Leon Quat, one of the lawyers for the “Panther 21,” 21 Black Panthers who had been arrested on a charge of conspiring to blow up five New York department stores, New Haven Railroad facilities, a police station and the Bronx Botanical Gardens.

Leon Quat, oddly enough, had the general look of those 52-year-old men who run a combination law office, real estate and insurance operation on the second floor of a two-story taxpayer out on Queens Boulevard. And yet that wasn’t the kind of man Leon Quat really was. He had the sideburns. Quite a pair. They didn’t come down just to the incisura intertragica, which is that little notch in the lower rim of the ear, and which so many tentative Swingers aim their sideburns toward. No, on top of this complete Queens Boulevard insurance agent look, he had real sideburns, to the bottom of the lobe, virtual muttonchops, which somehow have become the mark of the Movement. Leon Quat rose up smiling:

“We are very grateful to Mrs. Bernstein”—only he pronounced it “steen.”

“STEIN!”—a great smoke-cured voice booming out from the rear of the room! It’s Lenny! Leon Quat and the Black Panthers will have a chance to hear from Lenny. That much is sure. He is on the case. Leon Quat must be the only man in the room who does not know about Lenny and the Mental Jotto at 3 a.m. . . . For years, 20 at the least, Lenny has insisted on -stein not -steen, as if to say, I am not one of those 1921 Jews who try to tone down their Jewishness by watering their names down with a bad soft English pronunciation. Lenny has made such a point of -stein not -steen, in fact, that some people in this room think at once of the story of how someone approached Larry Rivers, the artist, and said, “What’s this I hear about you and Leonard Bernstein”—steen, he pronounced it—“not speaking to each other anymore?”—to which Rivers said, “STEIN!”

“We are very grateful . . . for her marvelous hospitality,” says Quat, apparently not wanting to try the name again right away. Then he beams toward the crowd:

“I assume we are all just an effete clique of snobs and intellectuals in this room . . . I am referring to the words of Vice-President Agnew, of course, who can’t be with us today because he is in the South Pacific explaining the Nixon doctrine to the Australians. All vice-presidents suffer from the Avis complex—they’re second best, so they try harder, like General Ky or Hubert Humphrey . . .” He keeps waiting for the grins and chuckles after each of these mots, but all the celebrities and culturati are nonplussed. They give him a kind of dumb attention. They came here for the Panthers and Radical Chic, and here is Old Queens Boulevard Real Estate Man with sideburns on telling them Agnew jokes. But Quat is too deep into his weird hole to get out. “Whatever respect I have had for Lester Maddox, I lost it when I saw Humphrey put his arm around his shoulder . . .” and somehow Quat begins disappearing down a hole bunging Hubert Humphrey with lumps of old Shelley Berman material. Slowly he climbs back out. He starts telling about the oppression of the Panther 21. They have been in jail since February 2, 1969, awaiting trial on ludicrous charges such as conspiring to blow up the Bronx Botanical Gardens. Their bail has been a preposterous $100,000 per person, which has in effect denied them the right to bail. They have been kept split up and moved from jail to jail. For all intents and purposes they have been denied the right to confer with their lawyers to prepare a defense. They have been subjected to inhuman treatment in jail—such as the case of Lee Berry, an epileptic, who was snatched out of a hospital bed and thrown in jail and kept in solitary confinement with a light bulb burning over his head night and day. The Panthers who have not been thrown in jail or killed, like Fred Hampton, are being stalked and harassed everywhere they go. “One of the few higher officials who is still . . . in the clear”—Quat smiles—“is here today. Don Cox, Field Marshal of the Black Panther Party.”

“Right on,” a voice says to Leon Quat, rather softly. And a tall black man rises from behind one of Lenny’s grand pianos . . . The Negro by the piano . . .

The Field Marshal of the Black Panther Party has been sitting in a chair between the piano and the wall. He rises up; he has the hardrock look, all right; he is a big tall man with brown skin and an Afro and a goatee and a black turtleneck much like Lenny’s, and he stands up beside the piano, next to Lenny’s million-dollar chatchka flotilla of family photographs. In fact, there is a certain perfection as the first Black Panther rises within a Park Avenue living room to lay the Panthers’ 10-point program on New York Society in the age of Radical Chic. Cox is silhouetted—well, about 19 feet behind him is a white silk shade with an Empire scallop over one of the windows overlooking Park Avenue. Or maybe it isn’t silk, but a Jack Lenor Larsen mercerized cotton, something like that, lustrous but more subtle than silk. The whole image, the white shade and the Negro by the piano silhouetted against it, is framed by a pair of bottle-green velvet curtains, pulled back.Up until now, the Black Panthers have been ornamental to the story, almost literally. How come? Up till now, it hasn’t been their show. First, I wanted to establish the nature of the audience, and also something about the Bernsteins — how they treasured sort of golden moments and the tabletop shimmering. Prominent guests and so forth. In retrospect, though, I didn’t remember planning it this way. It was effective to create the audience in some detail. To see what a shock it would be, or might be, if suddenly the field marshal of the Black Panthers is getting up and, in effect, telling them what capitalists jerks they are.

***

And does it begin now?—but this Cox is a cool number. He doesn’t come on with the street epithets and interjections and the rest of the rhetoric and red eyes used for mau-mauing the white liberals, as it is called.

“The Black Panther Party,” he starts off, “stands for a 10-point program that was handed down in October, 1966, by our Minister of Defense, Huey P. Newton . . .” and he starts going through the 10 points . . . “We want an educational system that expresses the true nature of this decadent society” . . . “We want all black men exempt from military service” . . . “We want all black men who are in jail to be set free. We want them to be set free because they have not had fair trials. We’ve been tried by predominantly middle-class, all-white juries” . . . “And most important of all, we want peace . . . see . . . We want peace, but there can be no peace as long as a society is racist and one part of society engages in systematic oppression of another” . . . “We want a plebiscite by the United Nations to be held in black communities, so that we can control our own destiny” . . .

Everyone in the room, of course, is drinking in his performance like tiger’s milk, for the . . . Soul, as it were. All love the tone of his voice, which is Confidential Hip. And yet his delivery falls into strangely formal patterns. What are these block phrases, such as “our Minister of Defense, Huey P. Newton”—

“Some people think that we are racist, because the news media find it useful to create that impression in order to support the power structure, which we have nothing to do with . . . see . . . They like for the Black Panther Party to be made to look like a racist organization, because that camouflages the true class nature of the struggle. But they find it harder and harder to keep up that camouflage and are driven to campaigns of harassment and violence to try to eliminate the Black Panther Party. Here in New York 21 members of the Black Panther Party were indicted last April on ridiculous charges of conspiring to blow up department stores and flower gardens. They’ve had 27 bail hearings since last April . . . see . . .” How did you feel about the Black Panthers, at the time? I was, above all, a reporter who wanted to get a story. And this is not a story about politics; it’s a story about status. Particularly the status of very wealthy people who would find it socially correct to have a really notorious group — I mean, the Black Panthers were perfectly willing to be violent at any moment. Almost like the Hell’s Angels, to that extent. They’ll never be a starker contrast between, to use a fancy word, two sensibilities. So anyway, for the first time you get the tenor of the Black Panthers when the field marshal, Cox, gets up and starts his very kind of Leninist rhetoric.

—But everyone in here loves the sees and the you knows. They are so, somehow . . . black . . . so funky . . . so metrical . . . Without ever bringing it fully into consciousness everyone responds—communes over—the fact that he uses them not for emphasis, but for punctuation, metrically, much like the uhs favored by High Church Episcopal ministers, as in, “And bless, uh, these gifts, uh, to Thy use and us to, uh, Thy service”—

“. . . they’ve had 27 bail hearings since last April . . . see . . . and every time the judge has refused to lower the bail from $100,000 . . . Yet a group of whites accused of actually bombing buildings—they were able to get bail. So that clearly demonstrates the racist nature of the campaign against the Black Panther Party. We don’t say ‘bail’ anymore, we say ‘ransom,’ for such repressive bail can only be called ransom.

“The situation here in New York is very explosive, as you can see, with people stacked up on top of each other. They can hardly deal with them when they’re unorganized, so that when a group comes along like the Black Panthers, they want to eliminate that group by any means . . . see . . . and so that stand has been embraced by J. Edgar Hoover, who feels that we are the greatest threat to the power structure. They try to create the impression that we are engaged in criminal activities. What are these ‘criminal activities’? We have instituted a breakfast program, to address ourselves to the needs of the community. We feed hungry children every morning before they go to school. So far this program is on a small scale. We’re only feeding 50,000 children nationwide, but the only money we have for this program is donations from the merchants in the neighborhoods. We have a program to establish clinics in the black communities and in other ways also we are addressing ourselves to the needs of the community . . . see . . . So the people know the power structure is lying when they say we are engaged in criminal activities. So the pigs are driven to desperate acts, like the murder of our deputy chairman, Fred Hampton, in his bed . . . see . . . in his sleep . . . But when they got desperate and took off their camouflage and murdered Fred Hampton, in his bed, in his sleep, see, that kind of shook people up, because they saw the tactics of the power structure for what they were. . . .

“We relate to a phrase coined by Malcolm X: ‘By any means necessary’ . . . you see . . . ‘By any means necessary’ . . . and by that we mean that we recognize that if you’re attacked, you have the right to defend yourself. The pigs, they say the Black Panthers are armed, the Black Panthers have weapons . . . see . . . and therefore they have the right to break in and murder us in our beds. I don’t think there’s anybody in here who wouldn’t defend themselves if somebody came in and attacked them or their families . . . see . . . I don’t think there’s anybody in here who wouldn’t defend themselves . . .”

—and every woman in the room thinks of her husband . . . with his cocoa-butter jowls and Dior Men’s Boutique pajamas . . . ducking into the bathroom and locking the door and turning the shower on, so he can say later that he didn’t hear a thing—

“We call them pigs, and rightly so,” says Don Cox, “because they have the way of making the victim look like the criminal, and the criminal look like the victim. So every Panther must be ready to defend himself. That was handed down by our Minister of Defense, Huey P. Newton: Everybody who does not have the means to defend himself in his home, or if he does have the means and he does not defend himself—we expel that man . . . see . . . As our Minister of Defense, Huey P. Newton, says, ‘Any unarmed people are slaves, or are slaves in the real meaning of the word’ . . . We recognize that this country is the most oppressive country in the world, maybe in the history of the world. The pigs have the weapons and they are ready to use them on the people, and we recognize this as being very bad. They are ready to commit genocide against those who stand up against them, and we recognize this as being very bad.

“All we want is the good life, the same as you. To live in peace and lead the good life, that’s all we want . . . see . . . But right now there’s no way we can do that. I want to read something to you:I’m amazed that you get so much dialogue. Do you have a worldview or a philosophy about dialogue? Oh, yes! This was not discovered by me, but by a teacher — he may have been a student at the time — at the teacher’s college at Columbia. He wrote a marvelous essay, which turned into a book, called The Art of Readable Writing. And through experiments with students, he discovered that by far the easiest form of prose to read is dialogue. Another very readable device was scene-by-scene construction. Instead of just writing a historical narrative, if you can keep people in the scenes through most of what you’re doing, that’s going to make it very readable. I added one to the list, which is the notation of status details. And that comes from my belief that every conscious moment, except when we’re in danger, we are thinking about our social status: where we rank with other people who are maybe in our social group, or maybe they’re outside. In my opinion, the calculation never stops. Even people alone in the bathroom will become conscious of what kind of soap is there, what kind of shaving cream, and even — if they know that other people will do it differently — going to the toilet. I’ll give you an example. A friend of mine was a girl who was jazz pianist. This was in the 1950s, jazz era, when it was really a hot form of music. So, she started going out with this black guy and seemed to be perfectly comfortable with him — until he went to the bathroom, left the door open so that he could keep talking. In the meantime, this flood is going into the toilet. And this turned her off. Like, it’s one thing for me to be magnanimous — let somebody who, one would think, is at a different social level into my life — but it’s another thing for him to piss audibly in the bathroom. I mean, these things happen all day long.

“‘When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and . . .” He reads straight through it, every word. “. . . and, accordingly, all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.’

“You know what that’s from?”—and he looks out at everyone and hesitates before laying this gasper on them—“That’s from the Declaration of Independence, the American Declaration of Independence. And we will defend ourselves and do like it says . . . you know? . . . and that’s about it.”

You don’t indicate how this speech was received. How come? Well, they certainly didn’t applaud, and they didn’t oooh and aaah. I think they were in the grip of something. Oh, look here, for example. Towards the end of this talk, he says: “Therefore they have the right to break in and murder us in our beds. I don’t think there’s anybody in here who wouldn’t defend themselves if somebody came in and attacked them or their families . . . see . . . I don’t think there’s anybody in here who wouldn’t defend themselves . . .” —and every woman in the room thinks of her husband . . . with his cocoa-butter jowls and Dior Men’s Boutique pajamas . . . ducking into the bathroom and locking the door and turning the shower on, so he can say later that he didn’t hear a thing—Well, that’s a reaction, I think. I guess it’s more of an internal reaction. Yeah, it’s that voice again — the offstage narrator.

The “that’s about it” part seems so casual, so funky, so right, after the rhetoric of what he has been saying. And then he sits down and sinks out of sight behind one of the grand pianos.

The thing is beginning to move. And—hell, yes, the Reichstag fire! Another man gets up, a white named Gerald Lefcourt, who is chief counsel for the Panther 21, a young man with thick black hair and the muttonchops of the Movement and that great motor inside of him that young courtroom lawyers ought to have. He lays the Reichstag fire on them. He reviews the Panther case and then he says:

“I believe that this odious situation could be compared to the Reichstag fire attempt”—he’s talking about the way the Nazis used the burning of the Reichstag as the pretext for first turning loose the Gestapo and exterminating all political opposition in Germany—“and I believe that this trial could also be compared to the Reichstag trial . . . in many ways . . . and that opened an era that this country could be heading for. That could be the outcome of this case, an era of the Right, and the only thing that can stop it is for people like ourselves to make a noise and make a noise now.”

. . . and not be Krupps, Junkers, or Good Germans . . .

“. . . We had an opportunity to question the Grand Jury, and we found out some interesting things. They all have net worths averaging $300,000, and they all come from this neighborhood,” says Lefcourt, nodding as if to take in the whole Upper East Side. And suddenly everyone feels, really feels, that there are two breeds of mankind in the great co-ops of Park Avenue, the blue-jowled rep-tied Brook Club Junker reactionaries in the surrounding buildings . . . and the few attuned souls here in Lenny’s penthouse. “. . . They all have annual incomes in the area of $35,000 . . . And you’re supposed to have a ‘jury of your peers’ . . . They were shocked at the questions we were asking them. They shouldn’t have to answer such questions, that was the idea. They all belong to the Grand Jury Association. They’re somewhat like a club. They have lunch together once in a while. A lot of them went to school together. They have no more understanding of the Black Panthers than President Nixon.”

The Junkers! Leon Quat says: “Fascism always begins by persecuting the least powerful and least popular movement. It will be the Panthers today, the students tomorrow—and then . . . the Jews and other troublesome minorities! . . . What price civil liberties! . . . Now let’s start this off with the gifts in four figures. Who is ready to make a contribution of a thousand dollars or more?”

All at once—nothing. But the little gray man sitting next to Felicia, the gray man with the sideburns, pops up and hands a piece of paper to Quat and says: “Mr. Clarence Jones asked me to say—he couldn’t be here, but he’s contributing $7,500 to the defense fund!”

“Oh! That’s marvelous!” says Felicia.

Then the voice of Lenny from the back of the room: “As a guest of my wife”—he smiles—“I’ll give my fee for the next performance of Cavalleria Rusticana.” Comradely laughter. Applause. “I hope that will be four figures!”

Things are moving again. Otto Preminger speaks up from the sofa down front:

“I geeve a t’ousand dollars!”

Right on. Quat says: “I can’t assure you that it’s tax deductible.” He smiles. “I wish I could, but I can’t.” Well, the man looks brighter and brighter every minute. He knows a Radical Chic audience when he sees one. Those words are magic in the age of Radical Chic: it’s not tax deductible. This is such a viciously funny line. When reporting on something preposterous — as this is — do you believe it’s incumbent on you to push back at the absurdity? I’d written down in my notes, “I’m not sure what you mean by ‘push back.’ ” The way I read it, you seemed to believe that prizing something, simply because it is non-tax-deductible, was kind of stupid. No, I wasn’t saying that. This was part of the thrill! I mean, I’ve given to things that are not tax-deductible. I forget what they were, but not everything is. Sure, but you didn’t give to them because it was not tax-deductible. Right, right, right.

The contributions start coming faster, only $250 or $300 at a clip, but faster . . . Sheldon Harnick . . . Bernie and Hilda Fishman . . . Judith Bernstein . . . Mr. and Mrs. Burton Lane . . .

“I know some of you are caught with your Dow-Jones averages down,” says Quat, “but come on—”

Quat says: “We have a $300 contribution from Harry Belafonte!”

“No, no,” says Julie Belafonte.

“I’m sorry,” says Quat, “it’s Julie’s private money! I apologize. After all, there’s a women’s liberation movement sweeping the country, and I want this marked down as a gift from Mrs. Belafonte!” Then he says: “I know you want to get to the question period, but I know there’s more gold in this mine. I think we’ve reached the point where we can pass out the blank checks.”

More contributions . . . $100 from Mrs. August Heckscher . . .

“We’ll take anything!” says Quat. “We’ll take it all!” . . . he’s high on the momentum of his fund-raiser voice . . . “You’ll leave here with nothing!”

But finally he wraps it up. A beautiful ash-blond girl with the most perfect Miss Porter’s face speaks up. She’s wearing a leather and tweed dress. She looks like a Junior Leaguer graduating to the Ungaro Boutique.

“I’d like to ask Mr. Cox a question,” she says. Cox is standing up again, by the grand piano. “Besides the breakfast program,” she says, “do you have any other community programs, and what are they like?” Who was she? She seems like such an outlier at the party. I wish I had known, and I wish I had gone through the trouble of finding out. I probably could’ve. I didn’t really know what I had, until I transcribed my notes and just saw how many astonishing characters were in here. And then, when she is made fun of by Rick Haynes. He really lets her have it. And she’s gone way out on a limb to be sympathetic. It would have been better to get her name, to find out exactly her status, if I may, in the world. I figured you, like many reporters, didn’t want to needlessly clutter up a story with names.Hmmmmm no, that wasn’t it. I’m sure I would’ve used the name. Some writers are like P.R. people, too. They take it upon themselves to de-stain — to sanitize — the real-life character. In fact, when I wrote The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, I really only pulled my punches once, as far as identifying people. And that was when, at a Hell’s Angels party that Kesey gave for the Hell’s Angels, they started bringing girls into this shack for gangbangs. And one guy was just high out of his mind. His former wife was in there, taking on all comers. And they said, “Have a go at her!” And there, in front of the Hell’s Angel’s, he’s banging away at his own former wife. It was a horrible scene, in a lot of ways. And I knew who both of them were. And I couldn’t bring myself to say. It was Neal Cassady and his former wife, whose name I don’t remember. Years went by before Ken Kesey commented on that book, even though I sent him a copy before publication. Never heard a word, never heard a word! Until somebody else was interviewing him and asked what he thought of me and my reportorial ability, or lack of. And he says, “The only time Wolfe got it wrong was when he tried to be nice.” He went straight to that scene. I mean, this is some years later, maybe three years. And I said, “Goddamn it, how did he know how I felt?” But often writers take it upon themselves to be public relations sieves between the person and the public. Out of good motives, but...

Cox starts to tell about a Black Panther program to set up medical clinics in the ghettos, and so on, but soon he is talking about a Panther demand that police be required to live in the community they patrol. “If you police the community, you must live there . . . see . . . Because if he lives in the community, he’s going to think twice before he brutalizes us, because we can deal with him when he comes home at night . . . see . . . We are also working to start liberation schools for black children, and these liberation schools will actually teach them about their environment, because the way they are now taught, they are taught not to see their real environment . . . see . . . They get Donald Duck and Mother Goose and all that lame happy jive . . . you know . . . We’d like to take kids on tours of the white suburbs, like Scarsdale, and like that, and let them see how their oppressors live . . . you know . . . but so far we don’t have the money to carry out these programs to meet the real needs of the community. The only money we have is what we get from the merchants in the black community when we ask them for donations, which they should give, because they are the exploiters of the black community”—

—and shee-ut. What the hell is Cox getting into that for? Quat and the little gray man are ready to spring in at any lonesome split second. For God’s sake, Cox, don’t open that can of worms. Even in this bunch of upholstered skulls there are people who can figure out just who those merchants are, what group, and just how they are asked for donations, and we’ve been free of that little issue all evening, man—don’t bring out that ball-breaker—

But the moment is saved. Suddenly there is a much more urgent question from the rear:

“Who do you call to give a party? Who do you call to give a party?”

Every head spins around . . . Quite a sight . . . It’s a slender blond man who has pushed his way up to the front ranks of the standees. He’s wearing a tuxedo. He’s wearing black-frame glasses and his blond hair is combed back straight in the Eaton Square manner. He looks like the intense Yale man from out of one of those 1927 Frigidaire ads in the Saturday Evening Post, when the way to sell anything was to show Harry Yale in the background, in a tuxedo, with his pageboy-bobbed young lovely, heading off to dinner at the New Haven Lawn Club. The man still has his hand up in the air like the star student of the junior class.

“I won’t be able to stay for everything you have to say,” he says, “but who do you call to give a party?”

In fact, it is Richard Feigen, owner of the Feigen Gallery, 79th and Madison. He arrived on the art scene and the social scene from Chicago three years ago . . . He’s been moving up hand over hand ever since . . . like a champion . . . Tonight—the tuxedo—tonight there is a reception at the Museum of Modern Art . . . right on . . . a “contributing members’” reception, a private viewing not open to mere “members” . . . But before the museum reception itself, which is at 8:30, there are private dinners . . . right? . . . which are the real openings . . . in the homes of great collectors or great climbers or the old Protestant elite, marvelous dinner parties, the real thing, black tie, and these dinners are the only true certification of where one stands in this whole realm of Art & Society . . . The whole game depends on whose home one is invited to before the opening . . . And the game ends as the host gathers everyone up about 8:45 for the trek to the museum itself, and the guests say, almost ritually, “God! I wish we could see the show from here! It’s too delightful! I simply don’t want to move!!’ . . . And, of course, they mean it! Absolutely! For them, the opening is already over, the hand is played . . . And Richard Feigen, man of the hour, replica 1927 Yale man, black tie and Eaton Square hair, has dropped in, on the way, en passant Do you play chess? I wondered why you brought up chess! I associate that French phrase only with chess. Oh, really? Do you know the move? No! To me, it just means “in passing.” How does it play out? [I take out my phone, pull up Wikipedia entry] — “a special pawn capture, which can only occur immediately after a pawn moves two ranks forward from its starting position, and an enemy pawn could have captured it had the pawn moved only one square forward.” Hmm. “The opponent captures the just-moved pawn "as it passes" through the first square. The resulting position is the same as if the pawn had moved only one square forward and the enemy pawn had captured it normally.” Why would a person go two steps forward if he knows there’s a pawn right there?, to the Bernsteins’, to take in the other end of the Culture tandem, Radical Chic . . . and the rightness of it, the exhilaration, seems to sweep through him, and he thrusts his hand into the air, and somehow Radical Chic reaches its highest, purest state in that moment . . . as Richard Feigen, in his tuxedo, breaks in to ask, from the bottom of his heart, “Who do you call to give a party?” Feigen ended up doing very well for himself. Did either he or others portrayed here like how they came off? A lot of people liked the story. Because I’ve only read accounts of people who complained about it. Well, I got a — I wouldn't call it a congratulations — from Barbara Walters, saying that she liked the way I handled something. It wasn’t her saying, “I liked the way you portrayed me.” She told you this at the time, or years later? Oh, a month later, in a letter. There you had a trend, a fashion, in its moment of naked triumph. How extraordinary that just 30 minutes later Radical Chic would be—

***

But at that moment Radical Chic was the new wave supreme in New York Society. It had been building for more than six months. It had already reached the fashion pages of Vogue and was moving into the food column. Vogue was already preparing a column entitled “Soul Food.” After six pages of the party, you pull back to the 30,000-foot view. The tone becomes almost scholarly. How did you settle on the structure? Well, when writing Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, I had a chapter, a whole chapter, in this mode. And I, just to myself, I began calling it “The Religious Shit Chapter.” I don’t like to use that word out loud, but that was the way I thought of it. It was getting awfully heavy, this explanation of the ways in which Kesey and the Pranksters were becoming religious figures. There were many, many parallels in these acid tests that they gave — they were like the attempts by a lot of religions to bring other people into the movement, not verbally but by feeling the current that was running through them. That was the whole design of these acid tests. They were free, no one had to pay for anything. They were proselytizing devices. I’d compare this to the long cetology chapter in Moby-Dick. It goes on for, like, 50 pages before you get back to the narrative. He says, “This chapter is going to be about whales. It may be a lot more than you care to know about whales. If so, skip it! You’ll pick up the story immediately after the chapter ends.” And, of course, that makes you read it, because, you know, what does he mean? This is a shot in the dark, but did Moby-Dick influence you at all? The fact that Melville was able to do that? No. You know, my real field — after graduate school, I was in something called American Studies. I fell in love with sociology, particularly Max Weber’s theory of status. Incidentally, calling it status instead of status interests me, because when I was at Yale everybody in the American Studies program, if they got on the subject, would call it ‘status theory,’ not ‘status theory.’ Status is what was happening with the boiler down in the cellar. So I thought there was a distinction. And it turns out, they, the professors, got it from British academics, where they commonly called it status, as probably everybody else in England does, too. Status of the esteemed boiler! Okay, so I discovered the source of the pronunciation, but then I didn’t change back to status. What does that say about me? That you stick with what you prefer. Yeah. I wanted to be on the side of the angels, I guess. There’s also the question of identifying a lot of motivations. A lot of people at the party were Jewish intellectuals and entertainers and artists. I mean, enough so that I felt you weren’t telling the story unless you brought that out. And I did a lot of work on that, and finally found Seymour Lipset’s book on that very subject, which I thought was very insightful. So I used it. [“Radical Chic” is] much too long. God, I’ve been reading it, preparing to see you, and I can’t believe it went on this long! Ah! I tried to create suspense with Richard Feigen — who looks like the consummate Yale man but wasn’t — asking, “Who do I call to give a party?” You’re left with that point, then comes the long, sociological treatise, where I was in danger of losing the whole audience. But I was counting on the fact that, if they’d read that far — and up till that point it was like a play; there was so much dialogue... That’s why I told you this was, to me, a real highwire act. You put the reader through the paces a bit. Yeah.

“The cult of Soul Food,” it began, “is a form of Black self-awareness and, to a lesser degree, of white sympathy for the Black drive to self-reliance. It is as if those who ate the beans and greens of necessity in the cabin doorways were brought into communion with those who, not having to, eat those foods voluntarily as a sacrament. The present struggle is emphasized in the act of breaking traditional bread . . .

SWEET POTATO PONE

3 cups finely grated raw sweet potatoes
½ cup sweet milk
2 tablespoons melted butter
½ teaspoon each: cinnamon, ginger, powdered cloves, and nutmeg
2 eggs
salt
½ cup brown sugar
½ cup molasses or honey

Mix together potatoes, milk, melted butter, cinnamon, ginger, powdered cloves, and nutmeg. Add a pinch of salt and the molasses or honey. (Molasses gives the authentic pone; honey a dandified version.)”

A little sacramental pone . . . as the young’uns skitter back in through the loblolly pine cabin doorway to help Mama put the cinnamon, ginger, powdered cloves and nutmeg back on the Leslie Foods “Spice Island” spice rack . . . and thereby finish up the communion with those who, not having to, eat those foods voluntarily as a sacrament.

Very nice! In fact, this sort of nostalgie de la boue, or romanticizing of primitive souls, was one of the things that brought Radical Chic to the fore in New York Society. Nostalgie de la boue is a 19th-century French term that means, literally, “nostalgia for the mud.” Within New York Society nostalgie de la boue was a great motif throughout the 1960s, from the moment two socialites, Susan Stein and Christina Paolozzi, discovered the Peppermint Lounge and the twist and two of the era’s first pet primitives, Joey Dee and Killer Joe Piro. Nostalgie de la boue tends to be a favorite motif whenever a great many new faces and a lot of new money enter Society. New arrivals have always had two ways of certifying their superiority over the hated “middle class.” They can take on the trappings of aristocracy, such as grand architecture, servants, parterre boxes and high protocol; and they can indulge in the gauche thrill of taking on certain styles of the lower orders. The two are by no means mutually exclusive; in fact, they are always used in combination. In England during the Regency period, a period much like our own—even to the point of the nation’s disastrous involvement in colonial wars during a period of mounting affluence—nostalgie de la boue was very much the rage. London socialites during the Regency adopted the flamboyant capes and wild driving styles of the coach drivers, the “bruiser” fashions and hair styles of the bare-knuckle prize fighters, the see-through, jutting-nipple fashions of the tavern girls, as well as a reckless new dance, the waltz. Such affectations were meant to convey the arrogant self-confidence of the aristocrat as opposed to the middle-class striver’s obsession with propriety and keeping up appearances. During the 1960s in New York nostalgie de la boue took the form of the vogue of rock music, the twist-frug genre of dances, Pop Art, Camp, the courting of pet primitives such as the Rolling Stones and José Torres, and innumerable dress fashions summed up in the recurrent image of the wealthy young man with his turtleneck jersey meeting his muttonchops at mid-jowl, à la the 1962 Sixth Avenue Automat bohemian, bidding good night to an aging doorman dressed in the mode of an 1870 Austrian army colonel.

At the same time Society in New York was going through another of those new-money upheavals that have made the social history of New York read like the political history of the Caribbean; which is to say, a revolution every 20 years, if not sooner. Aristocracies, in the European sense, are always based upon large hereditary landholdings. Early in the history of the United States, Jefferson’s crusade against primogeniture eliminated the possibility of a caste of hereditary land barons. The great landholders, such as the Carrolls, Livingstons and Schuylers, were soon upstaged by the federal bankers, such as the Biddles and Lenoxes. There followed wave after wave of new plutocrats with new sources of wealth: the international bankers, the real-estate speculators, the Civil War profiteers, railroad magnates, Wall Street operators, oil and steel trust manipulators, and so on. By the end of the Civil War, social life in New York was already The Great Barbecue, to borrow a term from Vernon L. Parrington, the literary historian. During the season of 1865-66 there were 600 Society balls given in New York, and a great wall of brownstone missions went up along Fifth Avenue.

In the early 1880s New York’s social parvenus—the people who were the Sculls, Paleys, Engelhards, Holzers, of their day—were the Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, Huntingtons and Goulds. They built the Metropolitan Opera House for the simple reason that New York’s prevailing temple of Culture, the Academy of Music, built just 29 years before at 14th Street and Irving Place, had only 18 fashionable proscenium boxes, and they were monopolized by families like the Lorillards, Traverses, Belmonts, Stebbinses, Gandys and Barlows. The status of the Goulds and Vanderbilts was revealed in the sort of press coverage the Met’s opening (October 22, 1883) received: “The Goulds and the Vanderbilts and people of that ilk perfumed the air with the odor of crisp greenbacks.” The Academy of Music is now a moviehouse showing double features, although it did enjoy one moment of eminence in 1964, when the Rolling Stones played there, live, with Murray the K as M.C.

By the 1960s yet another new industry had begun to dominate New York life, namely, communications—the media. At the same time the erstwhile “minorities” of the first quarter of the century had begun to come into their own. Jews, especially, but also many Catholics, were eminent in the media and in Culture. So, by 1965—as in 1935, as in 1926, as in 1883, as in 1866, as in 1820—New York had two Societies, “Old New York” and “New Society.” In every era, “Old New York” has taken a horrified look at “New Society” and expressed the devout conviction that a genuine aristocracy, good blood, good bone—themselves—was being defiled by a horde of rank climbers. This has been an all-time favorite number. In the 1960s this quaint belief was magnified by the fact that many members of “New Society,” for the first time, were not Protestant. The names and addresses of “Old New York” were to be found in the Social Register, which even 10 years ago was still confidently spoken of as the Stud Book and the Good Book. It was, and still is, almost exclusively a roster of Protestant families. Today, however, the Social Register’s annual shuffle, in which errant socialites, e.g., John Jacob Astor, are dropped from the Good Book, hardly even rates a yawn. The fact is that “Old New York”—except for those members who also figure in “New Society,” e.g., Nelson Rockefeller, John Hay Whitney, Mrs. Wyatt Cooper—is no longer good copy, and without publicity it has never been easy to rank as a fashionable person in New York City. I’m trying to imagine a story today that begins as rollicking as yours and then takes a long, scholarly digression with no quotes. It works beautifully. Did you have to fight for this? Did Felker think you were crazy? No, he didn’t. I don’t remember anybody really bringing that up. An entire issue of the magazine was devoted to this. And it may have been New West, which he had set up on the West Coast. And I remember the cover — there were some very social-looking women with their fists in the air. Right on! But nothing was cut. They just ran it. It’s long. It’s not enough to fill the well of a magazine. 25,000 words. I didn’t know it was that long. Gosh. I hope this isn’t boring for you. No. I rediscovered things like the interminable dissertation in the middle, but I’m glad to hear it seemed to work. I never had anyone complain about that passage.

The press in New York has tended to favor New Society in every period, and to take it seriously, if only because it provides “news.” For example, the $400,000 Bradley Martin ball of 1897. The John Bradley Martins were latecomers from Troy, New York, who had inserted an invisible hyphen between the Bradley and the Martin and preferred to be known as the Bradley Martins, after the manner of the Gordon Walkers in England. For the record, the Bradley Martins staged their own ball in 1897 as “an impetus to trade” to alleviate the suffering of the poor. Inflamed by the grandeur of it all, the newspapers described the affair down to the last piece of Mechlin lace and the last drop of seed pearl. It was the greatest single one-shot social climb in New York history prior to Truman Capote’s masked ball in 1966.

By the 1960s New York newspapers had an additional reason to favor New Society. The Seventh Avenue garment trade, the newspapers’ greatest source of advertising revenue, had begun recruiting New Society in droves to promote new fashions. It got to the point where for a matron to be photographed in the front row at the spring or fall showings of European copies at Ohrbach’s, by no means the most high-toned clothing store in the world, became a certification of “socialite” status second to none. But this was nothing new, either. Forty years ago firms flogging things like Hardman pianos, Ponds cold cream, Simmons metal beds and Camel cigarettes found that matrons in the clans Harriman, Longworth, Belmont, Fish, Lowell, Iselin and Carnegie were only too glad to switch to their products and be photographed with them in their homes, mainly for the sheer social glory of the publicity.

Another source of publicity was aid to the poor. New York’s new socialites, in whatever era, have always paid their dues to “the poor,” via charity, as a way of claiming the nobility inherent in noblesse oblige and of legitimizing their wealth. The Bradley Martin ball was a case in point. New money usually works harder in this direction than old. John D. Rockefeller, under the guidance of Ivy P. Lee, the original “public relations counsel,” managed to convert his reputation from that of robber baron and widow-fleecer to that of august old sage philanthropist so rapidly that small children cried when he died. His strategy was to set up several hundred million dollars’ worth of foundations for Culture and scientific research.

Among the new socialites of the 1960s, especially those from the one-time “minorities,” this old social urge to do well by doing good, as it says in the song, has taken a more specific political direction. This has often been true of Jewish socialites and culturati, although it has by no means been confined to them. Politically, Jews have been unique among the groups that came to New York in the great migrations of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Many such groups, of course, were Left or liberal during the first generation, but as families began to achieve wealth, success, or, simply, security, they tended to grow more and more conservative in philosophy. The Irish are a case in point. But forced by 20th as well as 19th century history to remain on guard against right-wing movements, even wealthy and successful Jewish families have tended to remain faithful to their original liberal-left worldview. In fact, according to Seymour Martin Lipset, Nathan Glazer, and Kenneth Keniston, an unusually high proportion of campus militants come from well-to-do Jewish families. They have developed the so-called “red diaper baby” theory to explain it. According to Lipset, many Jewish children have grown up in families which “around the breakfast table, day after day, in Scarsdale, Newton, Great Neck and Beverly Hills,” have discussed racist and reactionary tendencies in American society. Lipset speaks of the wealthy Jewish family with the “right-wing life style” (e.g. a majority of Americans outside of the South who have full-time servants are Jewish, according to a study by Lipset, Glazer and Herbert Hyman) and the “left-wing outlook.”

This phenomenon is rooted not only in Jewish experience in America, but in Europe as well. Anti-Semitism was an issue in the French Revolution; throughout Europe during the 19th century all sorts of legal and de facto restrictions against Jews were abolished. Yet Jews were still denied the social advantages that routinely accrued to Gentiles of comparable wealth and achievement. They were not accepted in Society, for example, and public opinion generally remained anti-Semitic. Not only out of resentment, but also for sheer self-defense, even wealthy Jews tended to support left-wing political parties. They had no choice. Most organizations on the Right had an anti-Semitic or, at the very least, an all-Christian, cast to them. Jews coming to the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries saw little to choose from among the major political parties. As to which party seemed the more anti-Jewish, the Democratic or the Republican, it was a tossup. The Republicans had abolished slavery, but the party was full of Know-nothings and anti-immigrant nativists. Even the Populists were anti-Jewish. For example, Tom Watson, the famous Populist senator, denounced the oil cartels, fought against American involvement in World War I as a cynical capitalist adventure, defended Eugene Debs, demanded U.S. recognition of the Soviet Union shortly after the Revolution—and was openly anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic and was laid out in the shadow of an eight-foot-high cross of roses from the Ku Klux Klan at his funeral in 1922. These are beautiful details. What sort of research did you do for this section? Who did you talk to? I cannot remember how I picked up that. Unless ... Seems to me I had done some research on IBM for something. But I can’t remember exactly what for. No, that’s something I must have had somewhere in my kit bag because you wouldn’t go looking for it. What is that? Like a clip file? A kit bag — just something I must’ve remembered from somewhere. As a result, many Jews, especially in cities like New York and Chicago, backed the socialist parties that thrived briefly during the 1920s. In many cases Jews were the main support. At the same time Jews continued to look for some wing of the major parties that they could live with, and finally found it in the New Deal.

For years many Jewish members of New Society have supported black organizations such as the NAACP, the Urban League and CORE. And no doubt they have been sincere about it, because these organizations have never had much social cachet, i.e., they have had “middle class” written all over them. All one had to do was look at the “Negro leaders” Why is this in quotes? By that time, it was an old-fashioned term because, as I wrote in a piece about the poverty program — I wish I could think of the name of it — the Negro leaders were made fun of because they were in business suits, like their white political opposition. They wanted to be accepted in that world. I mean, this is the way they came to be looked at. And so, the poverty program was very consciously having to bypass those people because they obviously could be compromised. That’s not me talking, that’s them talking. So you looked for real gang leader types who might be politicized. I mean, that’s why the Black Panthers were brought into that world. They organized in the North Oakland Poverty Center. Not by chance; that’s what the government wanted them to do. And so, after that, it made the old, elected black leadership look very almost Uncle Tom-ish, even though they weren’t. involved. There they were, up on the dais at the big hotel banquet, wearing their white shirts, their Hart Schaffner & Marx suits three sizes too big, and their academic solemnity. By last year, however, the picture had changed. In 1965 two new political movements, the anti-war movement and black power, began to gain great backing among culturati in New York. By 1968 the two movements began to achieve social as well as cultural prestige with the Presidential campaigns of Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy; especially Kennedy’s. Kennedy was not merely an anti-war candidate; he also made a point of backing Caesar Chavez’ grape workers—“La Causa,” “La Huelga”—in California. On the face of it, La Causa was a labor union movement. But La Causa quickly came to symbolize the political ambitions of all lower-class Mexican-Americans—chicanos, “Brown Americans”—and, by extension, that of all colored Americans, including blacks.

The black movement itself, of course, had taken on a much more electric and romantic cast. What a relief it was—socially—in New York—when the leadership seemed to shift from middle class to . . . funky! From A. Philip Randolph, Dr. Martin Luther King and James Farmer . . . to Stokely, Rap, LeRoi and Eldridge! This meant that the tricky business of the fashionable new politics could now be integrated with a tried and true social motif: Nostalgie de la boue. The upshot was Radical Chic.

From the beginning it was pointless to argue about the sincerity of Radical Chic. Unquestionably the basic impulse, “red diaper” or otherwise, was sincere. But, as in most human endeavors focused upon an ideal, there seemed to be some double-track thinking going on. On the first track—well, one does have a sincere concern for the poor and the underprivileged and an honest outrage against discrimination. One’s heart does cry out—quite spontaneously!—upon hearing how the police have dealt with the Panthers, dragging an epileptic like Lee Berry out of his hospital bed and throwing him into the Tombs. When one thinks of Mitchell and Agnew and Nixon and all of their Captain Beef-heart Maggie & Jiggs New York Athletic Club troglodyte crypto-Horst Wessel Irish Oyster Bar Construction Worker followers, then one understands why poor blacks like the Panthers might feel driven to drastic solutions, and—well, anyway, one truly feels for them. One really does. On the other hand—on the second track in one’s mind, that is—one also has a sincere concern for maintaining a proper East Side lifestyle in New York Society. And this concern is just as sincere as the first, and just as deep. It really is. It really does become part of one’s psyche. For example, one must have a weekend place, in the country or by the shore, all year round preferably, but certainly from the middle of May to the middle of September. It is hard to get across to outsiders an understanding of how absolute such apparently trivial needs are. One feels them in his solar plexus. When one thinks of being trapped in New York Saturday after Saturday in July or August, doomed to be a part of those fantastically dowdy herds roaming past Bonwit’s and Tiffany’s at dead noon in the sandstone sun-broil, 92 degrees, daddies from Long Island in balloon-seat Bermuda shorts bought at the Times Square Store in Oceanside and fat mommies with white belled pants stretching over their lower bellies and crinkling up in the crotch like some kind of Dacron-polyester labia—well, anyway, then one truly feels the need to obey at least the minimal rules of New York Society. One really does.

One rule is that nostalgie de la boue—i.e., the styles of romantic, raw-vital, Low Rent primitives—are good; and middle class, whether black or white, is bad. Therefore, Radical Chic invariably favors radicals who seem primitive, exotic and romantic, such as the grape workers, who are not merely radical and “of the soil,” but also Latin; the Panthers, with their leather pieces, Afros, shades, and shoot-outs; and the Red Indians, who, of course, had always seemed primitive, exotic and romantic. At the outset, at least, all three groups had something else to recommend them, as well: they were headquartered 3,000 miles away from the East Side of Manhattan, in places like Delano (the grape workers), Oakland (the Panthers) and Arizona and New Mexico (the Indians). They weren’t likely to become too much . . . underfoot, as it were. Exotic, Romantic, Far Off . . . as we shall soon see, other favorite creatures of Radical Chic had the same attractive qualities; namely, the ocelots, jaguars, cheetahs and Somali leopards.

Rule No. 2 was that no matter what, one should always maintain a proper address, a proper scale of interior decoration, and servants. Servants, especially, were one of the last absolute dividing lines between those truly “in Society,” New or Old, and the great scuffling mass of middle-class strivers paying up to $1,250-a-month rent or buying expensive co-ops all over the East Side. There are no two ways about it. One must have servants. Having servants becomes such a psychological necessity that there are many women in Society today who may be heard to complain in all honesty about how hard it is to find a nurse for the children to fill in on the regular nurse’s day off. There is the famous Mrs. C-------- Who is this? Um, I’ve jotted in the margin, “Can’t recall.” I wondered if perhaps you’d originally put the name in and New York lawyers made you take it out... I don’t remember it being excised. What the hell is it? It shouldn’t be that hard. I can’t even enlighten myself., one of New York’s richest widows, who has a 10-room duplex on Sutton Place, the good part of Sutton Place as opposed to the Miami Beach-looking part, one understands, but who is somehow absolute poison with servants and can’t keep anything but day help and is constantly heard to lament: “What good is all the money in the world if you can’t come home at night and know there will be someone there to take your coat and fix you a drink?” There is true anguish behind that remark!

In the era of Radical Chic, then, what a collision course was set between the absolute need for servants—and the fact that the servant was the absolute symbol of what the new movements, black or brown, were struggling against! How absolutely urgent, then, became the search for the only way out: white servants!

The first big Radical Chic party, the epochal event, so to speak, was the party that Assemblyman Andrew Stein gave for the grape workers on his father’s estate in Southampton on June 29, 1969. The grape workers had already been brought into New York social life. Carter and Amanda Burden, the “Moonflower Couple” of the 1960s, had given a party for them in their duplex in River House, on East 52nd Street overlooking the East River. Some of New York’s best graphic artists, such as Paul Davis, had done exquisite posters for “La Causa” and “La Huelga.”

The grape workers had begun a national campaign urging consumers to boycott California table grapes, and nowhere was the ban more strictly observed than in Radically Chic circles. Chavez became one of the few union leaders with a romantic image.

Andrew Stein’s party, then, was the epochal event, not so much because he was fashionable as because the grape-workers were. The list of guests and sponsors for the event was first-rate. Henry Ford II’s daughter Anne (Mrs. Giancarlo Uzielli) was chairman, and Ethel Kennedy was honorary chairman. Mrs. Kennedy was making her first public appearance since the assassination of her husband in 1968. Stein himself was the 24-year-old son of Jerry Finkelstein, who had made a small fortune in public relations and built it up into a firm called Struthers Wells. Finkelstein was also a power in the New York State Democratic party and, in fact, recently became the party’s New York City chairman. His son Andrew had shortened his name from Finkelstein to Stein and was noted not only for the impressive parties he gave but for his election to the State Assembly from Manhattan’s Upper West Side. The rumor was that his father had spent $500,000 on his campaign. No one who knew state politics believed that, however, since for half that sum he could have bought enough of Albany to have the boy declared king.

The party was held on the lawn outside Finkelstein’s huge cottage orné by the sea in Southampton. There were two signs by the main entrance to the estate. One said Finkelstein and the other said Stein. The guests came in saying the usual, which was, “you can’t take the Fink out of Finkelstein.” No one turned back, however. Were you at this party as well? How many radical chic parties did you attend? No! In fact, I’m glad you mentioned that. I was not aware of it. It happened in, it seems to me, the late fall. Maybe late summer? In any case, I said to myself, Damn, I wish I’d gone to that. I wish I’d known about it! It would have been much easier to crash than the Bernsteins’ party. Where did you get the details of the Finkelstein party? Oh, I started talking to people who had been there. And they would tell me about the wind, and how the women were holding down their Pucci dresses, and how Andrew Stein had his hands on his head, so the wind wouldn’t blow his hair all over the place. I mean, there were people there who realized it had a funny side to it. From the beginning the afternoon was full of the delicious status contradictions and incongruities that provide much of the electricity for Radical Chic. Chavez himself was not there, but a contingent of grape workers was on hand, including Chavez’ first lieutenant, Andrew Imutan, and Imutan’s wife and three sons. The grape workers were all in work clothes, Levis, chinos, Sears balloon-seat twills, K-Mart sports shirts, and so forth. The socialites, meanwhile, arrived at the height of the 1969 summer season of bell-bottom silk pants suits, Pucci clings, Dunhill blazers and Turnbull & Asser neckerchiefs. A mariachi band played for the guests as they arrived. Marvelous! Everyone’s status radar was now so sensitive that the mariachi band seemed like a faux pas. After all, mariachi bands, with those Visit Mexico costumes on and those sad trumpets that keep struggling up to the top of the note but always fall off and then try to struggle back up again, are the prime white-tourist Mexicans. At a party for La Causa, the grape workers, the fighting chicanos—this was a little like bringing Ma Goldberg in to entertain the Stern Gang. But somehow it was . . . delicious to experience such weird status thrills . . .

When the fund-raising began, Andrew Imutan took a microphone up on the terrace above the lawn and asked everybody to shut their eyes and pretend they were a farm worker’s wife in the dusty plains of Delano, California, eating baloney sandwiches for breakfast at 3 a.m. before heading out into the fields . . . So they all stood there in their Pucci dresses, Gucci shoes, Capucci scarves, either imagining they were grape workers’ wives or wondering if the goddamned wind would ever stop. The wind had come up off the ocean and it was wrecking everybody’s hair. People were standing there with their hands pressed against their heads as if the place had been struck by a brain-piercing ray from the Purple Dimension. Andrew Stein’s hair was long, full, and at the outset had been especially well coifed in the Roger’s 58th Street French manner, and now it was . . . a wreck. . . . He kept one hand on his head the whole time, like the boy at the dike . . . “eating baloney sandwiches for breakfast at 3 a.m. . . .”

Then Frank Mankiewicz, who had been Robert Kennedy’s press secretary, got up and said, “Well, all I know, if we can only raise 20 percent of the money that has gone into all the Puccis I see here today, we’ll be doing all right!” He waited for the laughter, and all he got was the ocean breeze in his face. By then everyone present was thinking approximately the same thing . . . and it was delicious in that weird way . . . but to just blurt it out was a strange sort of counter-gaffe.

Nevertheless, Radical Chic had arrived. The fall social season of 1969 was a big time for it. People like Jean vanden Heuvel gave parties for Ramparts magazine, which had by now become completely a magazine of the barricades, and for the Chicago Eight. Jules Feiffer gave a party for the G.I. coffee houses, at which Richard Avedon, America’s most famous fashion photographer, took portraits of everybody who made a $25 contribution to the cause. He had his camera and lights set up in the dining room. As a matter of fact, Avedon had become a kind of court photographer to the Movement. He was making his pentennial emergence to see where it was now at. Five years before he had emerged from his studio to take a look around and had photographed and edited an entire issue of Harper’s Bazaar to record his findings, which were of the Pop, Op, Rock, Andy, Rudi and Go-Go variety. Now Avedon was putting together a book about the Movement. He went to Chicago for the trial of The Eight and set up a studio in a hotel near the courthouse to do portraits of the celebrities and activists who testified at the trial or watched it or circled around it in one way or another.

Meanwhile, some of the most prestigious young matrons in San Francisco and New York were into an organization called Friends of the Earth. Friends of the Earth was devoted to the proposition that women should not buy coats or other apparel made from the hides of such dying species as leopards, cheetahs, jaguars, ocelots, tigers, Spanish lynx, Asiatic lions, red wolves, sea otter, giant otter, polar bear, mountain zebra, alligators, crocodiles, sea turtles, vicunas, timber wolves, wolverines, margays, kolinskies, martens, fishers, fitch, sables, servals and mountain lions. On the face of it, there was nothing very radical about this small gesture in the direction of conservation, or ecology, as it is now known. Yet Friends of the Earth was Radical Chic, all right. The radical part began with the simple fact that the movement was not tax deductible. Friends of the Earth is a subsidiary of the Sierra Club. The Sierra Club’s pre-eminence in the conservation movement began at precisely the moment when the federal government declared it a political organization, chiefly due to its fight against proposed dam projects in the Grand Canyon. That meant that contributions to it were no longer tax deductible. One of the Sierras Club’s backstage masterminds, the late Howard Gossage, used to tell David Brower, the Sierra Club’s president: “That’s the grea-a-a-atest thing that ever happened to you. It removed all the guilt! Now the money’s just rolllllllling in.” Then he would go into his cosmic laugh. He had an incredible cosmic laugh, Gossage did. It started way back in his throat and came rolllling out, as if from Lane 27 of the Heavenly bowling alley.

No tax deduction! That became part of the canon of Radical Chic. Lay it on the line! Matrons soliciting funds for Friends of the Earth and other organizations took to making telephone calls that ended with: “All right, now, I’ll expect to see your check in the mail—and it’s not tax deductible.” That was a challenge, the unspoken part of which was: You can be a tax deductible Heart Funder, April in Paris Baller, Day Care Center-of-the-roader, if that’s all you want out of your jiveass life . . . As for themselves, the Friends of the Earth actually took to the streets, picketing stores and ragging women who walked down the street with their new Somali leopard coats on. A woman’s only acceptable defense was to say she had shot the animal and eaten it. The Friends of the Earth movement was not only a fight in behalf of the poor beasts but a fight against greed, against the spirit of capitalistic marauding, to call it by its right name . . . although the fight took some weird skews here and there, as Radical Chic is apt to do.

Those goddamned permutations in taste! In New York, for example, Freddy Plimpton had Jacques Kaplan, the number one Society furrier, make her a skirt of alley cat pelts (at least that was the way it first came out in the New York Times). Not for nothing is Jacques Kaplan the number one Society furrier. He must have seen Radical Chic coming a mile away. Early in the game he himself, a furrier, started pitching in for the embattled ocelots, margays, fitch and company like there was no tomorrow. Anyway, the Times ran a story saying he had made a skirt of alley cat hides for Freddy Plimpton. The idea was that alley cats, unlike ocelots and so on, are an absolute glut in the ecology and end up in the ASPCA gas chambers anyway. Supposedly it was logical to Kaplan and logical to Mrs. Plimpton—but to hundreds of little-old-lady cat lovers in Dickerson Archlock shoes, there was some kind of a weird class warp going on here . . . Slaughter the lowly alley cat to save the high-toned ocelot . . . That was the way it came out . . . and the less said about retrieving decorative hides from the gas chambers, the better . . . They were going to picket Jacques Kaplan and raise hell about the slaughter of the alley cats. The fact that the skirt was actually made of the hides of genets, a European nuisance animal like the ferret — as the Times noted in a correction two days later—this was not a distinction that cut much ice with the cat lovers by that time. Slaughter the lowly alley genet to save the high-toned ocelot . . .

Other charitable organizations began to steer in the direction of Radical Chic, even if they did not go all the way and give up their tax-deductible status. I’m going to say status from now on. Don’t get caught in that draft. For example, the gala for the University of the Streets on January 22, 1970. The University of the Streets was dedicated to “educating the ‘uneducatables’ of the ghetto.” The gala was a dance with avant-garde music, light shows, movies, sculpture, and “multi-sensory environments.” The invitation said “Price: $125 Per Couple (Tax Deductible)” and “Dress: Beautiful.” This was nothing new. What was new was that the ball would not be within the grand coving-and-pilaster insulation of a midtown hotel but down on the Lower East Side, East Seventh Street and Avenue A, at Tompkins Square, in the heart of Radically Chic Puerto Rican & black & hippie territory. The invitations came in a clear plastic box with a lid, and each had the radiant eye of a real peacock feather inside; also a flower blossom, which arrived dried up and shriveled, and many wondered, wildly, if it was some exotic Southwestern psychedelic, to be smoked. One matron on the invitation list gave the peacock feather to her daughter to take to her school, one of the city’s most fashionable private grammar schools, for her class’ morning game of “Show and Tell,” in which some unusual object is presented, wondered over, and then explained. When she returned home, her mother asked her how the feather had gone down, whereupon the little girl burst into tears. Seven other children in her class had also brought the radiant eye of a peacock feather that morning for “Show and Tell.” Where did you get this story? It came from a friend, a woman who had a child in this situation. And her child came home, upset about the whole thing because she felt like a copycat. Do you remember her name? I do, but I’ll spare her that. I remember there was a lot of speculation that these flowers, which had dried up, were dope. Why they [thought] an organization would put its name on a box like that, I don’t know. But of course, it was just dried flowers.

Soon—just a few weeks after his first big Radical Chic party—Andrew Stein was throwing another one, this time for Bernadette Devlin, the Irish Joan of Arc. Not to be outdone, Carter Burden, his chief rival, developed what can only be termed the first Total Radical Chic lifestyle. In 1965 Burden, then 23, and his wife Amanda, then 20, had been singled out by Vogue as New York’s perfect young married couple. They had moved into an ample co-op in the Dakota and had coated and encrusted it with a layer of antiques that was like the final triumph of a dowager duchess in an Angela Thirkell novel. They were described as possessing not merely wealth, however, but also “enquiring minds.” To clinch the point,Vogue pointed out that “Mrs. Burden, with the help of a maid, is learning how to keep house.” Just a year after their Dakota triumph, the Burdens moved to River House, flagship of the East River co-op gold coast from Beekman Place to Sutton Place. They set up house in a duplex and hired Parish Hadley, interior decorators to Jacqueline Kennedy, Jay and Sharon Rockefeller, the Paleys, the Wrightsmans and the Engelhards. “Gossip has it,” said Town & Country, “that a cool million was invested in Carter and Amanda Burden’s River House apartment alone, just for backgrounds. Most of the art and furniture were already there.” But in a couple of years the Burdens went Radical Chic. True, they did not give up their River House showplace. In fact, they did not disturb or deplete its treasures in the slightest. But they did set up another apartment on Fifth Avenue at 100th Street. This established residence for Burden in the Fourth Councilmanic District and qualified him to run for the New York City Council; successfully, as it turned out. It also gave him the most exquisitely poised Total Radical Chic apartment in New York. And now Amanda Burden dates Charlie Rose. How do think this story has aged? Is it kick to see the career trajectories of the people you write about? Well, it’s interesting to see her. The last time I saw her in action, so to speak, she was the head of the Landmarks Commission, or something like it. I was testifying on behalf of the Huntington Hartford Museum on Columbus Circle. I have been involved in political things, but pretty much of that nature. Oh, I did a lot with my block association, trying to keep certain skyscrapers from being built, and so on. No success, though it looked like I was successful at the block association because the building never went up. But that was the economy! Not me! And I really went all out for Columbus Circle. But that’s another story.

There was genius to the way the Burdens gave visual expression to the double-track mental atmosphere of Radical Chic. The building is perhaps the scruffiest co-op building on Upper Fifth Avenue. The paint job in the lobby and hallways looks like a 1947 destroyer’s. There is a doorman but no elevator man; one has to take himself up in an old West Side-style Serge Automatic elevator. But . . . it is a co-op and it is on Upper Fifth Avenue. The apartment itself has low ceilings, a small living room and only five rooms in all. But it does overlook Central Park. It is furnished almost entirely in the sort of whimsical horrors—japanned chairs, brass beds, and so on—that end up in the attic in the country, the sort of legacies from God knows where that one never gets around to throwing away . . . And yet they are . . . amusing. The walls are covered in end-of-the-bolt paintings by fashionable artists of the decorative mode, such as Stella and Lichtenstein . . . the sort of mistakes every collector makes and wonders where he will ever hang . . . and yet they are Stellas and Lichtensteins . . . somehow Burden even managed to transform himself from the Deke House chubbiness of his Early Vogue Period to the look known as Starved to Near Perfection. It is within this artfully balanced style of life that the Burdens have been able to groove, as they say, with the Young Lords and other pet primitives from Harlem and Spanish Harlem and at the same time fit into all the old mainline events such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 100th anniversary gala and be photographed doing the new boogaloo. I often wonder why a powerful person agrees to talk to a journalist. There’s so much potential downside, and the upside is fleeting publicity. How did you pitch this to Burden? I didn’t know them, but I remember going to that apartment, and marveling at how close to the people it was, even though it was on Fifth Avenue. It was a very rundown place. As I read this, I thought, Why did Amanda Burden agree to let Tom Wolfe — Somebody agreed to let me come in there. I think it goes back to this information compulsion. It makes people feel good. Do you think that’s why powerful people, despite it not being in their best interest, will talk to journalists? Yeah, I think so. I remember talking once to Abe Ribicoff. When I was a graduate student, they have these weeks where distinguished people come and make themselves available to all kinds of student organizations. We had a little thing called the American Studies Club. During the course of the week, Abe Ribicoff agreed to come. I asked him, very naively, “What is it that motivates politicians? Is it the money, the power? What is it? The publicity?” And he said, “Well, it’s certainly not the publicity. You get so used to it that you just expect it.” And then he said, “Unless you’re an idiot, it’s not the money.” And he says, “You find out that even at the federal level, you don’t really have that much power. There are very few people who you can point to, and say, ‘You do this and you do that.’ ” But, he said, “The real kick is seeing them jump.” I said, “Seeing them jump?” “Yeah,” he said. “You come into a room and everybody jumps up! Everyone offers you whatever seat you want. If you even hint that you might be hungry, 10 people want to go out and get you something from the restaurant.” He said, “Seeing ’em jump. That’s what it’s all about.” Of course, this was a student organization, and there was no one there with even an interest in publishing it. But he was really letting you in on something there, and you could really get a kick out of your own sophistication, if you say something like that.

So . . . Radical Chic was already in full swing by the time the Black Panther party began a national fund-raising campaign late in 1969. The Panthers’ organizers, like the grape workers’, counted on the “cause party”—to use a term for it that was current 35 years ago—not merely in order to raise money. The Panthers’ status was quite confused in the minds of many liberals, and to have the Panthers feted in the homes of a series of social and cultural leaders could make an important difference. Ideally, it would work out well for the socialites and culturati, too, for if there was ever a group that embodied the romance and excitement of which Radical Chic is made, it was the Panthers.

Even before the Bernsteins’ party for the Panthers, there had been at least three others, at the homes of John Simon of Random House, on Hudson Street, Richard Baron, the publisher, in Chappaqua, and Sidney and Gail Lumet, in their townhouse at Lexington Avenue and 91st Street. It was the Lumets’ party that led directly to the Bernsteins’. A veteran cause organizer named Hannah Weinstein had called up Gail Lumet. She said that Murray Kempton had asked her to try to organize a party for the Black Panthers to raise money for the defense of the Panther 21.

The party was a curious one, even by the standards of Radical Chic. You use “radical chic” repeatedly. It was a good call, obviously, but if it hadn’t caught on the repetition would seem strange. What made you so confident about your coinage? Because it’s a perfect oxymoron. ‘Radical’ and ‘chic.’ Radical things are almost never chic in this world. Did you come up with that before you sat down to write the piece? I think I’d already thought of it, because I was thinking about the party Andrew Stein had given in Southampton. There were a lot of luminaries there. As I mentioned, I always regretted not having known about it and gone to it, somehow. I think it came to me before I started writing “Radical Chic” itself. Many of the guests appeared not to be particularly “social” . . . more like Mr. and Mrs. Wealthy Dentist from New Rochelle. Yet there was a certain social wattage in the presence of people like Murray Kempton, Peter Stone, writer of 1776, the Lumets themselves, and several Park Avenue matrons, the most notable being Leonard Bernstein’s wife, Felicia.

Anyway, the white guests and a few academic-looking blacks were packed, sitting and standing, into the living room. Then a contingent of 12 or 13 Black Panthers arrived. The Panthers had no choice but to assemble in the dining room and stand up—in their leather pieces, Afros and shades—facing the whites in the living room. As a result, whenever anyone got up in the living room to speak, the audience was looking not only at the speaker but into the faces of a hard front line of Black Panthers in the dining room. Quite a tableau it was. It was at this point that a Park Avenue matron first articulated the great recurrent emotion of Radical Chic: “These are no civil-rights Negroes wearing gray suits three sizes too big—these are real men!”

The first half of the session generated the Radical Chic emotion in its purest and most penetrating form. Not only was there the electrifying spectacle of the massed Panthers, but Mrs. Lee Berry rose and delivered a moving account of how her husband had been seized by police in his hospital room and removed summarily to jail. To tell the truth, some of the matrons were disappointed when she first opened her mouth. She had such a small, quiet voice. “I am a Panther wife,” she said. I am a Panther wife? But her story was moving. Felicia Bernstein had been present up to this point and, as a longtime supporter of civil liberties, had been quite upset by what she had heard. But she had had to leave before the session was over. Each guest, as he left, was presented with a sheet of paper and asked to do one of three things: pledge a contribution to the defense fund, lend his name to an advertisement that was to appear in the New York Times, or to make his home available for another party and fund-raising event. By the time she left, Felicia was quite ready to open her doors.

The emotional momentum was building rapidly when Ray “Masai” Hewitt, the Panthers’ Minister of Education and member of the Central Committee, rose to speak. Hewitt was an intense, powerful young man and in no mood to play the diplomacy game. Some of you here, he said, may have some feelings left for the establishment, but we don’t. We want to see it die. We’re Maoist revolutionaries, and we have no choice but to fight to the finish. For about 30 minutes Masai Hewitt laid it on the line. He referred now and again to “that M ----- F ----- Nixon” and to how the struggle would not be easy, and that if buildings were burned and other violence ensued, that was only part of the struggle that the power structure had forced the oppressed minorities into. Hewitt’s words tended to provoke an all-or-nothing reaction. A few who remembered the struggles of the Depression were profoundly moved, fired up with a kind of nostalgie de that old-time religion. But more than one Park Avenue matron was thrown into a Radical Chic confusion. The most memorable quote was: “He’s a magnificent man, but suppose some simple-minded schmucks take all that business about burning down buildings seriously?” Who said it? That was my way of saying that people of that confirmed Park Avenue social status thought that. I remember talking to a lot of people, but I couldn’t pin down one.

Murray Kempton cooled things down a bit. He stood up and, in his professorial way, in the tweedy tones of the lecturer who clicks his pipe against his teeth like a mental metronome, he summed up the matter. Dependable old Murray put it all in the more comfortable terms of Reason Devout, after the manner of a lead piece in the periodicals he worshipped, The New Statesman and The Spectator. Murray, it turned out, was writing a book on the Panthers and otherwise doing his best for the cause. Yes, Masai Hewitt may have set the message down too hard, but that was of little consequence. In no time at all another party for the Panthers had been arranged. And this time in the home of one of the most famous men in the United States, Leonard Bernstein.

***

"Who do you call to give a party!” says Richard Feigen. “Who do you call to give a party!” Why is this line, which you repeat, so significant? It was probably to emphasize how unusual this was, to have somebody dropping by to invite some radicals to a party.

And all at once the candid voice of Radical Chic, just ringing out like that, seems about to drop Don Cox, Field Marshal of the Black Panthers, in his tracks, by Lenny’s grand piano. He just stares at Feigen . . . this Yale-style blond in a tuxedo . . . And from that moment on, the evening begins to take on a weird reversal. Rather than Cox being in the role of the black militant mau-mauing the rich white liberals, he is slowly backed into a weird corner. Afro, goatee, turtleneck and all, he has to be the diplomat . . . He has to play that all-time-loser role of the house guest trying to deal with a bunch of leaping, prancing, palsied happy-slobber Saint Bernards . . . It’s a ball-breaker . . . And no wonder! For what man in all history, has ever before come face to face with naked white Radical Chic running ecstatically through a Park Avenue duplex and letting it all hang out.

One of the members of the Panther defense committee, a white, manages to come up with a phone number, “691-8787,” but Feigen is already pressing on:

“There is one candidate for governor,” he says—quite an impressive voice—“who feels very deeply about what is going on here. He had hoped to be here tonight, but unfortunately he was detained upstate. And that’s Howard Samuels. Now, what I want to know is, if he were willing to come before you and present his program, would you be willing to consider supporting it? In other words, are the Black Panthers interested in getting any political leverage within the System?”

Cox stares at him again. “Well,” he says—and it is the first time he falls into that old hesitant thing of beginning a sentence with well—“any politician who is willing to relate to our 10-point program, we will support him actively, but we have no use for the traditional political—”

“But would you be willing to listen to such a candidate?” says Feigen.

“—the traditional political arena, because if you try to oppose the system from within the traditional political arena, you’re wasting your time. Look at Powell. As soon as he began to speak for the people, they threw him out. We have no power within the system, and we will never have any power within the system. The only power we have is the power to destroy, the power to disrupt. If black people are armed with knowledge—”

“But would you be willing to listen to such a candidate?” says Feigen.

“Well,” says Cox, a bit wearily, “we would refer him to our Central Committee, and if he was willing to support our 10-point program, then we would support that man.”

Feigen muses sagely inside of his tuxedo. Dapper. A dapper dude in pinstripe suit and pencil moustache in the rear of the room, a black named Rick Haynes, president of Management Formation Inc., an organization promoting black capitalism, asks about the arrest the other night of Robert Bay and another Panther named Jolly.

“Right on,” says Cox, softly, raising his left fist a bit, but only as a fraternal gesture—and through every white cortex rushes the flash about how the world here is divided between those who rate that acknowledgement—right on—and those who don’t . . . Right on . . . Cox asks Robert Bay to stand, and his powerful form and his ferocious Afro rise from out of the midst of the people in the rows of chairs in the center of the room, he nods briefly towards Haynes and smiles and says “Right on”—there it is—and then he sits down. And Cox tells how the three detectives rousted and hassled Bay and Jolly and another man, and then the detectives went on radio station WINS and “lied about it all day.” And Lefcourt gets up and tells how this has become a pattern, the cops incessantly harassing the Panthers, wherever they may be, everything from stopping them for doing 52 in a 50-mile-an-hour zone to killing Fred Hampton in his bed.

The beautiful ash-blond girl speaks up: “People like myself who feel that up to now the Panthers have been very badly treated—we don’t know what to do. I mean, if you don’t have money and you don’t have influence, what can you do? What other community programs are there? We want to do something, but what can we do? Is there some kind of committee, or some kind of . . . I don’t know . . .”

Well baby, if you really—but Cox tells her that one of the big problems is finding churches in the black community that will help the Panthers in their breakfast program for ghetto children, and maybe people like her could help the Panthers approach the churches. “It’s basically the churches who have the large kitchens that we need,” he says, “but when we come to them to use their kitchens, to feed hot breakfasts to hungry children, they close the door in our faces. That’s where the churches in the black community are at.”

“Tell why!” says Leonard Bernstein. Hardly anybody has noticed it up to now, but Leonard Bernstein has moved from the back of the room to an easy chair up front. Why go from ‘Lenny’ to ‘Leonard’? That’s something I can’t answer. I don’t know why. It could’ve been Lenny. He’s only a couple of feet from Cox. But Cox is standing up, by the piano, and Lenny is sunk down to his hip sockets in the easy chair . . . They really don’t know what they’re in for. Lenny is on the move. As more than one person in this room knows, Lenny treasures “the art of conversation.” He treasures it, monopolizes it, conglomerates it, like a Jay Gould, an Onassis, a Cornfeld of Conversation. Anyone who has spent a three-day weekend with Lenny in the country, by the shore, or captive on some lonesome cay in the Windward Islands, knows that feeling—the alternating spells of adrenal stimulation and insulin coma as the Great Interrupter, the Village Explainer, the champion of Mental Jotto, the Free Analyst, Mr. Let’s Find Out, leads the troops on a 72-hour forced march through the lateral geniculate and the pyramids of Betz, no breathers allowed, until every human brain is reduced finally to a clump of dried seaweed inside a burnt-out husk and collapses, implodes, in one last crunch of terminal boredom. Mr. Pull! Mr. Push! Mr. Auricularis! . . . But how could the Black Panther Party of America know that? Just now Lenny looks so sunk-down-low in the easy chair. Almost at Don Cox’s feet he is, way down in an easy chair with his turtleneck and blazer on, and his neckpiece. Also right down front, on the couch next to the wall, is Otto Preminger, no piece of wallpaper himself, with his great head and neck rising up like a howitzer shell from out of his six-button doublebreasted, after the manner of the eternal Occupation Zone commandant.

“Tell why,” says Lenny.

“Well,” says Cox, “that gets into the whole history of the church in the black community. It’s a long story.”

“Go ahead and tell it,” says Lenny.

“Well,” says Cox, “when the slaves were brought to America, they were always met at the boat by the cat with the whip and the gun . . . see . . . and along with him was the black preacher, who said, Everything’s gonna be all right, as long as you’re right with Jesus. It’s like, the normal thing in the black community. The preacher was always the go-between the slavemasters and the slave, and the preacher would get a little extra crumb off the table for performing this service . . . you know . . . It’s the same situation in the black community today. The preacher is riding around in a gold Cadillac, but it’s the same thing. If you ask a lot of these churches to start working for the people instead of for The Man, they start worrying about that crumb . . . see . . . Because if the preacher starts working for the people, then the power structure starts harassing him. Like we found this one minister who was willing for us to use his church for the breakfast program. So okay, and then one day he comes in, and he’s terrified . . . see . . . and he says we have to leave, that’s all there is to it. The cat’s terrified . . . So we say, okay, we’ll leave, but just tell us what they said to you. Tell us what they did to intimidate you. But he won’t even talk about it, he just says, Leave. He’s too terrified to even talk about it.”

Bernstein says, “Don, what’s really worrying a lot of us here is the friction between groups like the Black Panthers and the established black community.”

No problem. Cox says, “We recognize that there is not only a racial struggle going on in this country, but a class struggle. The class structure doesn’t exist in the same way in the black community, but what we have are very bourgeois-minded people”—he uses the standard New Left pronunciation, which is “boooooooozh-wah”—“petty bourgeois-minded people . . . you see . . . and they have the same mentality as bourgeois-minded people in the white power structure.”

“Yes,” says Bernstein, “but a lot of us here are worried about things like threats against the lives of leaders of the established black community—”

Suddenly Rick Haynes speaks out from the back of the room: “This thing about ‘the black community’ galls me!” He’s really put out, but it’s hard to tell what over, because what he does is look down at the Ash-Blond Beauty, who is only about 10 feet away: “This lovely young lady here was asking about what she could do . . .” What a look . . . if sarcasm could reach 550 degrees, she would shrivel up like a slice of Oscar Mayer bacon. “Well, I suggest that she forget about going into the black community. I suggest that she think about the white community. Like the Wall Street Journal—the Wall Street Journal just printed an article about the Black Panthers, and they came to the shocking conclusion—for them—that a majority of the black community supports the Black Panthers. Well, I suggest that this lovely young lady get somebody like her daddy, who just might have a little more pull than she does, to call up the Wall Street Journal and congratulate them when they write it straight like that. Just call up and say, We like that. The name of the game is to use the media, because the media have been using us.” This is an incredible quote. If you didn’t record it, how were you able to document the emphasis — like on lovely young lady. If you’re taking notes, how do you record that emphasis? I don’t.Was that from memory? It’s meant to sound like an interior monologue. What he next says is sarcastic: Well, I suggest that she forget about going into the black community. I suggest that she think about the white community. It’s really in anticipation of the sarcasm. That would be running through the guy’s mind. This lovely young lady, she’s asking what she could do. I mean, that’s obviously what was running through his mind. But that’s something he said, right? No, no… Oooooh. It’s supposed to be the thinking that would lead to what he immediately says. I probably should not have used the quotation marks around “This lovely young lady.” That’s what confused me. That would be an example of the offstage narrator.

“Right on,” says Don Cox.

Curiously, Ash Blonde doesn’t seem particularly taken aback by all this. If this dude in a pin-stripe suit thinks he’s going to keep her off The All-Weather Panther Committee, he’s bananas . . .

And if they think this is going to deflect Leonard Bernstein, they’re all out to lunch. About five people are talking at once—Quat—Lefcourt—Lenny—Cox—Barbara Walters is on the edge of her chair, bursting to ask a question— but it is the Pastmaster who cuts through:

“I want to know what the Panthers’ attitude is toward the threats against these black leaders!” says Lenny.

Lefcourt the lawyer jumps up: “Mr. Bernsteen—”

“STEIN!” roars Lenny. He’s become a veritable tiger, except that he is sunk down so low into the Margaret Owen billows of the easy chair, with his eyes peering up from way down in the downy hollow, that everything he says seems to be delivered into the left knee of Don Cox.

“Mr. Bernstein,” says Lefcourt, “every time there are threats, every time there is violence, it’s used as an indictment of the Black Panthers, even if they had nothing whatsoever to do with it.”

“I’m hip,” says Lenny. “That’s what I’m trying to establish. I just want to get an answer to the question.”

Lefcourt, Quat, half a dozen people it seems like, are talking, telling Lenny how the threats he is talking about, against Whitney Young and Roy Wilkins, were in 1967, before the Panthers were even in existence in New York, and the people arrested in the so-called conspiracy allegedly belonged to an organization called Revolutionary Action Movement, and how the cops, the newspapers, TV, like to aim everything at the Panthers.

“I think everybody in this room buys that,” says Bernstein, “and everybody buys the distinction between what the media, what the newspapers and television say about the Panthers and what they really are. But this thing of the threats is in our collective memory. Bayard Rustin was supposed to be here tonight, but he isn’t here, and for an important reason. The reason he isn’t here tonight is that he was warned that his life would be in danger, and that’s what I want to know about.”

It’s a gasper, this remark. Lefcourt and Quat start talking, but then, suddenly, before Don Cox can open his mouth, Lenny reaches up from out of the depths of the easy chair and hands him a mint. There it is, rising up on the tips of his fingers, a mint. It is what is known as a puffed mint, an after-dinner mint, of the sort that suddenly appears on the table in little silver Marthinsen bowls, as if deposited by the mint fairy, along with the coffee, but before the ladies leave the room, a mint so small, fragile, angel-white and melt-crazed that you have to pick it up with the papillae of your forefinger and thumb lest it get its thing on a straightaway, namely, one tiny sweet salivary peppermint melt . . . in mid-air, so to speak . . . just so . . . Cox takes the mint and stares at Bernstein with a strange Plexiglas gaze . . . This little man sitting down around his kneecaps with his Groovy gear and love beads on . . . This is a beautiful thing, the way you puncture the tension with a mint. How do you do this? The party host giving a guest a mint isn’t intuitively something a reporter would notice, and yet you do. Is this simply a matter of instinct? Talk about a visual oxymoron. Here you are, talking about life and death, and he has a mint! Why the hell did he even…? It really does, as you say, puncture everything that he’s said before. Does being a great journalist or a great observer require a certain peripheral vision? No. It requires turning on your focus. I can go through some interesting event. If I’m not there as a reporter, later on I realize I haven’t caught half the things people said. And something like this, you really have to be, as I think of it, on. This is what you’re doing. You’re just here to record what’s going on. You also have to be thinking, spotting trains of thought. But mainly it’s just giving yourself totally to the event. You’re not thinking about anything else.

Finally Cox comes around. “We don’t know anything about that,” he says. “We don’t threaten anybody. Like, we only advocate violence in self-defense, because we are a colonial people in a capitalist country . . . you know? . . . and the only thing we can do is defend ourselves against oppression.”

Quat is trying to steer the whole thing away—but suddenly Otto Preminger speaks up from the sofa where he’s sitting, also just a couple of feet from Cox:

“He used von important vord”—then he looks at Cox—“you said zis is de most repressive country in de vorld. I dun’t beleef zat.”

Cox says, “Let me answer the question—”

Lenny breaks in: “When you say ‘capitalist’ in that pejorative tone, it reminds me of Stokely. When you read Stokely’s statement in The New York Review of Books, there’s only one place where he says what he really means, and that’s way down in paragraph 28 or something, and you realize he is talking about setting up a socialist government—”

Preminger is still talking to Cox: “Do you mean dat zis government is more repressive zan de government of Nigeria?”

“I don’t know anything about the government of Nigeria,” says Cox. “Let me answer the question—”

“You dun’t eefen listen to de kvestion,” says Preminger. “How can you answer de kvestion?”

“Let me answer the question,” Cox says, and he says to Lenny: “We believe that the government is obligated to give every man employment or a guaranteed income . . . see . . . but if the white businessman will not give full employment, then the means of production should be taken from the businessman and placed in the community, with the people.”

Lenny says: “How? I dig it! But how?”

“Right on!” Someone in the back digs it, too.

“Right on!”

Julie Belafonte pipes up: “That’s a very difficult question!”

“You can’t blueprint the future,” says Cox.

“You mean you’re just going to wing it?” says Lenny.

“Like . . . this is what we want, man,” says Cox, “we want the same thing as you, we want peace. We want to come home at night and be with the family . . . and turn on the TV . . . and smoke a little weed . . . you know? . . . and get a little high . . . you dig? . . . and we’d like to get into that bag, like anybody else. But we can’t do that . . . see . . . because if they send in the pigs to rip us off and brutalize our families, then we have to fight.”

“I couldn’t agree with you more!” says Lenny. “But what do you do—”

Cox says: “We think that this country is going more and more toward fascism to oppress those people who have the will to fight back—”

“I agree with you one hundred percent!” says Lenny. “But you’re putting it in defensive terms, and don’t you really mean it in offensive terms—”

“That’s the language of the oppressor,” says Cox. “As soon as—”

“Dat’s not—” says Preminger.

“Let me finish!” says Cox. “As a Black Panther, you get used to—”

“Dat’s not—”

“Let me finish! As a Black Panther, you learn that language is used as an instrument of control, and—”

“He doesn’t mean dat!”

“Let me finish!”

Cox to Preminger to Bernstein to . . . they’re wrestling for the Big Ear . . . quite a struggle . . . Cox standing up by the piano covered in the million-dollar chatchkas . . . Lenny sunk down into the Margaret Owen easy chair . . . Preminger, the irresistible commandant of the sofa . . . they’re pulling and tugging— I understand Bernstein and Cox were not too happy with you and Charlotte Curtis. Did you ever hear directly from either of them? Yeah, they were disappointed in Charlotte Curtis. I think they thought they’d get more support. She did a very good reporting job, but it didn’t go beyond it, emotionally. She was on their side, really. But she was a good enough reporter to not let that sway her. What about you? Did you hear from either Bernstein and Cox after the piece ran? I never heard from Leonard Bernstein at all. And Cox? Years later, I think it was Cox, he was wanted for some crime in this country, and he couldn’t return. He ended up in Algeria, as an emigre. He was in a place where he would not be extradited, in other words. Immunity. And I heard from him, and I had the feeling that he was not happy in Algeria. He wrote me a letter, in a kindly tone. He didn’t say, “Could you help me?” Somewhere I’ve got that letter filed away... Interesting. Have I told you about Kathleen Cleaver? No. Cleaver was also abroad, I think, perforce. This was years afterward. She was on the faculty of University of Georgia. I was there, and she was invited in, wherever I was being entertained. And far from being antagonistic or accusatory, it was more as if we had been through the same war. Hmm. I suppose American veterans and Vietnamese veterans, after all is said and done, get along fine after the fracas. I’m just guessing. It was far more like nostalgia than resentment. She had a nice personality.

—whereupon the little gray man, the servant of history, pops up from beside the other piano and says:

“Mr. Bernstein, will you yield the floor to Mrs. Bernstein?”

And suddenly Felicia, serene and flawless as Mary Astor, is on her feet: “I would just like to quote this passage from Richard Harris, in The New Yorker,” and she is standing up beside the other piano with a copy of The New Yorker in her hand, reading from an article by Richard Harris on the Justice Department.

“This is a letter from Roger Wilkins to Secretary Finch,” says Felicia. This is Roy Wilkins’ nephew, Roger Wilkins, former head of the Justice Department’s Community Relations Service, and now with the Ford Foundation. “‘A year ago of the question, because black leaders—even the most militant of them—knew that all they would accomplish was to get themselves and their followers killed.’” Felicia looks up at the audience, as during any first-class reading, and her voice begins to take on more and more theatrical lift. “But I think that the despair is far deeper now. You just can’t go on seeing how white men live, the opportunity they have, listening to all the promises they make and realizing how little they have delivered, without having to fight an almost ungovernable rage within yourself.” Felicia’s voice has taken on the very vibrato of emotion. And in the back room, standing close to Gail Lumet, is Roger Wilkins himself. “‘Some black children in this country,’” recites Felicia, “‘have to eat dog food or go hungry. No man can go on watching his children grow up in hunger and misery like that with wealth and comfort on every side of him, and continue to regard himself as a man. I think that there are black men who have enough pride now so that they would rather die than go on living the way they have to live. And I think that most of us moderates would have difficulty arguing with them. The other day, an old friend of mine, a black man who has spent his life trying to work things out for his people within the system, said to me’”—Felicia looks at the audience and sets up the clincher—“‘“Roger, I’m going to get a gun. I can’t help it”’.”

“That’s marrrrrrr-velous!” says Lenny. He says it with profound emotion . . . He sighs . . . He sinks back into the easy chair . . . Richard Harris . . . Ahura Mazda with the original flaming revelation . . .

Cox seizes the moment: “Our Minister of Defense, Huey P. Newton, has said if we can’t find a meaningful life . . . you know . . . maybe we can have a meaningful death . . . and one reason the power structure fears the Black Panthers is that they know the Black Panthers are ready to die for what they believe in, and a lot of us have already died.”

Lenny seems like a changed man. He looks up at Cox and says, “When you walk into this house, into this building”—and he gestures vaguely as if to take it all in, the moldings, the sconces, the Roquefort morsels rolled in crushed nuts, the servants, the elevator attendant and the doorman downstairs in their white dickeys, the marble lobby, the brass struts on the marquee out front —“when you walk into this house, you must feel infuriated!”

Cox looks embarrassed. “No, man . . . I manage to overcome that . . . That’s a personal thing . . . I used to get very uptight about things like that, but—”

“Don’t you get bitter? Doesn’t that make you mad?”

“Noooo, man . . . That’s a personal thing . . . see . . . and I don’t get mad about that personally. I’m over that.”

“Well,” says Lenny, “it makes me mad!”

And Cox stares at him, and the Plexiglas lowers over his eyes once more . . . These cats—if I wasn’t here to see it—

“This is a very paradoxical situation,” says Lenny. “Having this apartment makes this meeting possible, and if this apartment didn’t exist, you wouldn’t have it. And yet—well, it’s a very paradoxical situation.” Bernstein comes off like a buffoon. When you create a portrait like this, are you at the mercy of your notes, or do you let your personal feelings color the writing? To me, it was just funny. To me, it had nothing to do with my feelings about the subject or the people. This was just great material.

“I don’t get uptight about all that,” says Cox. “I’ve been through all that. I grew up in the country, in a farming community, and I finally became a ‘respectable Negro’ . . . you know . . . I did all the right things. I got a job and a car, and I was wearing a suit and getting good pay, and as long as I didn’t break any rules I could go to work and wear my suit and get paid. But then one day it dawned on me that I was only kidding myself, because that wasn’t where it was at. In a society like ours I might as well have had my hair-guard on and my purple pants, because when I walked down the street I was just another nigger . . . see . . . just another nigger . . . But I don’t have that hate thing going. Like, I mean, I can feel it, I can get uptight. Like the other day I was coming out of the courthouse in Queens and there was this off-duty pig going by . . . see . . . and he gives me the finger. That’s the pig’s way of letting you know he’s got his eye on you. He gives me the finger . . . and for some reason or other, this kind of got the old anger boiling . . . you know?”

“God,” says Lenny, and he swings his head around toward the rest of the room, “most of the people in this room have had a problem about being unwanted!”

Most of the people in this room have had a problem about being unwanted. There it is. It’s an odd feeling. Most-of-the-people-in-this-room’s . . . heads have just spun out over this one. Lenny is unbeatable. Mental Jotto at 3 a.m. He has done it. He has just steered the Black Panther movement into a 1955 Jules Feiffer cartoon. Rejection, Security, Anxiety, Oedipus, Electra, Neurosis, Transference, Id, Superego, Archetype and Field of Perception, that wonderful 1950s game, beloved by all educated young men and women in the East who grew up in the era of the great cresting tide of Freud, Jung, Adler, Reik & Reich, when everyone either had an analyst or quoted Ernest Dichter telling Maytag that dishwashing machines were bought by women with anal compulsions. And in the gathering insulin coma Lenny has the Panthers and 75 assorted celebrities and culturati heading off on the long march into the neural jungle, 1955 Forever. One way or another we all feel insecure—right? And so long as we repress our—it’s marvelous! Mr. Auricularis! The Village Explainer! Most of the people in this room have had a problem about being unwanted—

Cox looks at him, with the Plexiglas lowering . . . But the little gray man, the servant of history, jumps in once more. He sends a lovely young thing, one of the blondes in the room, over to whisper something in Lenny’s ear. “Livingston Wingate is here,” she tells him.

No slouch in such situations, Lenny immediately seems to dope this out as just an interruption to shut him up.

“Oh, why don’t I just leave!” he says. He makes a mock move as if to get up from the chair and leave the room. “Noooo! Noooo!” everybody says. Everybody is talking at once, but then Barbara Walters, who has had this certain thing building up inside of her, springs it loose. Everybody knows that voice, Barbara Walters of the Today Show, televised coast to coast every morning, a mid-Atlantic voice, several miles east of Newfoundland and heading for Blackpool, and she leans forward, sitting in the third row in her checked pantsuit with the great fur collar:

“I’m a member of the news media, but I’m here as an individual, because I’m concerned about the questions raised here, and there has been a lot of talk about the media. Last year we interviewed Mrs. Eldridge Cleaver, Kathleen Cleaver, and it was not an edited report or anything of that sort. She had a chance to say whatever she wanted, and this is a very knowledgeable, very brilliant, very articulate woman . . . And I asked her, I said, ‘I have a child, and you have a child,’ and I said, ‘Do you see any possibility that our children will be able to grow up and live side by side in peace and harmony?’ and she said, ‘not with the conditions that prevail in this society today, not without the overthrow of the system.’ So I asked her, ‘How do you feel, as a mother, about the prospect of your child being in that kind of confrontation, a nation in flames?’ and she said, ‘Let it burn!’ And I said, ‘What about your own child?’ and she said, ‘May he light the first match!’ And that’s what I want to ask you about. I’m still here as a concerned person, not as a reporter, but what I’m talking about, and what Mr. Bernstein and Mr. Preminger are talking about, when they ask you about the way you refer to capitalism, is whether you see any chance at all for a peaceful solution to these problems, some way out without violence.”

Cox says, “Not with the present system. I can’t see that. Like, what can change? There’s 750 families that own all the wealth of this country—”

“Dat’s not tdrue!” says Preminger. “Dere are many people vid vealth all over—”

“Let me finish!—and these families are the most reactionary elements in the country. A man like H. L. Hunt wouldn’t let me in his house.”

Barbara Walters says: “I’m not talking about—”

“I wouldn’t go to his house eef he asked me,” says Preminger.

“Well I almost—”

“Vot about Ross Perot? He’s a Texan, too, and is spending millions of dollars trying to get de vives of prisoners of war in touch with the government of North Vietnam—”

Cox says: “I would respect him more if he was giving his money to hungry children.”

“He is!” says Preminger. “He is! You dun’t read anyt’ing! Dat’s your tdrouble!”

“I’m not talking about that,” Barbara Walters says to Cox. “I’m talking about what’s supposed to happen to other people if you achieve your goals.”

“You can’t just put it like that!” says Julie Belafonte. “That needs clarification.”

Barbara Walters says: “I’m talking as a white woman who has a white husband, who is a capitalist, or an agent of capitalists, and I am, too, and I want to know if you are to have your freedom, does that mean we have to go!”

Barbara Walters and her husband, Lee Guber, a producer, up against the wall in the cellar in Ekaterinburg.

Cox says, “For one person to be free, everybody must be free. As long as one whole class is oppressed, there is no freedom in a society. A lot of young white people are beginning to—”

“Dat eesn’t vat she’s asking—”

“Let me finish—let me answer the question—”

“You dun’t even listen to de kvestion—”

“Let me finish—A lot of young white people are beginning to understand about oppression. They’re part of the petty bourgeoisie. It’s a different class from the black community, but there’s a common oppressor. They’re protesting about individual freedoms, to have their music and smoke weed and have sex. These are individual freedoms but they are beginning to understand—”

“If you’re for freedom,” says Preminger, “tell me dis: Is it all right for a Jew to leave Russia and settle in Israel?”

“Let me finish—”

“Is it all right for a Jew to leave Russia and settle in Israel?” What’s Preminger talking about? I, frankly, don’t know what he was talking about.

Most people in the room don’t know what the hell Preminger is driving at, but Leon Quat and the little gray man know right away. They’re trying to wedge into the argument. The hell with that little number, that Israel and Al Fatah and U.A.R. and MIGS and USSR and Zionist imperialist number—not in this room you don’t—

Quat stands up with a terrific one-big-happy-family smile on and says: “I think we’re all ready to agree that the crisis in this country today comes not from the Black Panthers but from the war in Vietnam, and—”

But there is a commotion right down front. Barbara Walters is saying something to one of the Panther wives, Mrs. Lee Berry, in the front row.

“What did she say to you?” says Lenny.

“I was talking to this very nice lady,” says Barbara Walters, “and she said, ‘You sound like you’re afraid.’”

Mrs. Berry laughs softly and shakes her head.

“I’m not afraid of you,” Barbara Walters says to her, “but maybe I am about the idea of the death of my children!”

“Please!” says Quat.

“All I’m asking is if we can work together to create justice without violence and destruction!”

“Please!” says Quat.

“He never answered her kvestion!” says Preminger.

“Please!”

“I can answer the question—”

“You dun’t eefen listen—”

“So—”

“Let me answer the question! I can deal with that. We don’t believe that it will happen within the present system, but—”

Lenny says: “So you’re going to start a revolution from a Park Avenue apartment!”

Right on!

Quat sings out desperately: “Livingston Wingate is here! Can we please have a word from Mr. Livingston Wingate of the Urban League?” Christ, yes, bring in Livingston Wingate. You talked recently about how excited you were about New Journalism. Was one upside of New Journalism that you could — as you do here — be candid with your exasperation about what you’re covering? I do not recall, at least in my mind, that ever coming up. With all these things you really have to focus on what you’re doing, which is a piece of journalism. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been characterized as “right wing” and, when I ask, “What is my agenda?,” nobody can ever tell me what my agenda is. In fact, as I’ve always thought, there’ll be an agenda when the Huns get to the city limits. I’ll start very definitely taking sides.

So Livingston Wingate, executive director of the New York Urban League, starts threading his way down to the front. He hasn’t got the vaguest notion of what has been going on, except that this is Panther night at the Bernsteins’. He apparently thinks he is called upon to wax forensic, because he starts into a long disquisition on the changing mood of black youth.

“I was on television this morning with a leader of the Panther movement," he says, “and—”

“That was me”—Cox from his chair beside the piano.

Wingate wheels around. “Oh, yes . . .” He does a double take. “I didn’t see you here . . . That was you . . . Hah . . .” And then he continues, excoriating himself and his generation of black leaders for their failures, because non-violence didn’t work, and he can no longer tell the black youth not to throw that rock—

In the corner, meanwhile, by the piano, Preminger has reached out and grabbed Cox by the forearm in some kind of grip of goodwill and brotherhood and is beaming as if to say, I didn’t mean anything by it, and Cox is trying to grab his hand and shake hands and say that’s O.K., and Preminger keeps going for the forearm, and Cox keeps going for the hand, and they’re lost there in a weird eccentric tangle of fingers and wrist bones between the sofa and the grand piano, groping and tugging—

—because, says Livingston Wingate, he cannot prove to the ghetto youth that anything else will work, and so forth and so on, “and they are firmly convinced that there can be no change unless the system is changed.”

“Less than 5 per cent of the people of this country have 90 per cent of the wealth,” says Lefcourt the lawyer, “and 10 per cent of them have most of the 90 per cent. The mass of the people by following the system can never make changes, and there is no use continuing to tell people about constitutional guarantees, either. Leon and I could draw up a constitution that would give us all the power, and we could make it so deep and legitimate that you would have to kill us to change it!”

Julie Belafonte rises up in front and says: “Then we’ll kill you!”

“Power to the people!” says Leon Quat . . . and all rise to their feet . . . and Charlotte Curtis puts the finishing touches in her notebook . . . and the white servants wait patiently in the wings to wipe the drink rings off the Amboina tables . . .

***

Still wound up with the excitement of the mental Jotto they had all just been through, Lenny, Felicia and Don Cox kept on talking there in the duplex, long after most guests had gone, up to about 10 p.m., in fact. Lenny and Felicia knew they had been through a unique experience, but they had no idea of the furor that was going to break the next day when Charlotte Curtis’ account of the party would appear in the New York Times.

The story appeared in two forms—a preliminary report rushed through for the first edition, which reaches the streets about 10:30 p.m., and a much fuller one for the late city edition, the one most New Yorkers see in the morning. Neither account was in any way critical of what had gone on. Even after reading them, Lenny and Felicia probably had little inkling of what was going to happen next. The early version began:

“Mrs. Leonard Bernstein, who has raised money for such diverse causes as indigent Chileans, the New York Philharmonic, Church World Service, Israeli student scholarships, emotionally disturbed children, the New York Civil Liberties Union, A Greek boys’ school and Another Mother for Peace, was into what she herself admitted yesterday was a whole new thing. She gave a cocktail party for the Black Panthers. ‘Not a frivolous party,’ she explained before perhaps 30 guests arrived, ‘but a chance for all of us to hear what’s happening to them. They’ve really been treated very inhumanely.’”

Felicia herself couldn’t have asked for it to be put any better. In the later edition it began: “Leonard Bernstein and a Black Panther leader argued the merits of the Black Panther party’s philosophy before nearly 90 guests last night in the Bernsteins’ elegant Park Avenue duplex”—and went on to give some of the dialogue of Lenny’s, Cox’s and Preminger’s argument over Panther tactics and Lenny’s refrain of “I dig it.” There was also a picture of Cox standing beside the piano and talking to the group, with Felicia in the background. No one in the season of Radical Chic could have asked for better coverage. It took up a whole page in the fashion section, along with ads for B. Altman’s, Edith Imre wigs, fur coats, the Sherry-Netherland Hotel, and The Sun and Surf (Palm Beach).

What the Bernsteins probably did not realize at first was that the story was going out on the New York Times News Service wires. In other cities throughout the United States and Europe it was played on page one, typically, to an international chorus of horse laughs or nausea, depending on one’s Weltanschauung. The English, particularly, milked the story for all it was worth and seemed to derive one of the great cackles of the year from it.

***

By the second day, however—Friday—the Bernsteins certainly knew they were in for it. The Times ran an editorial! on the party. It was headed “False Note on Black Panthers”:

“Emergence of the Black Panthers as the romanticized darlings of the politico-cultural jet set is an affront to the majority of black Americans. This so-called party, with its confusion of Mao-Marxist ideology and Fascist paramilitarism, is fully entitled to protection of its members’ constitutional rights. It was to make sure that those rights are not abridged by persecution masquerading as law-enforcement that a committee of distinguished citizens has recently been formed [a group headed by Arthur Goldberg that sought to investigate the killing of Fred Hampton by Chicago police].

“In contrast, the group therapy plus fund-raising soiree at the home of Leonard Bernstein, as reported in this newspaper yesterday, represents the sort of elegant slumming that degrades patrons and patronized alike. It might be dismissed as guilt-relieving fun spiked with social consciousness, except for its impact on those blacks and whites seriously working for complete equality and social justice. It mocked the memory of Martin Luther King Jr., whose birthday was solemnly observed throughout the nation yesterday.

“Black Panthers on a Park Avenue pedestal create one more distortion of the Negro image. Responsible black leadership is not likely to cheer as the Beautiful People create a new myth that Black Panther is beautiful.”

Elegant slumming . . . mocked the memory of Martin Luther King . . . Black Panthers on a Park Avenue pedestal . . . the Beautiful People . . . it was a stunner. And this was not the voice of some right-wing columnist like William Buckley (although he would be heard from)—this was an editorial, on the editorial page, underneath the eagle medallion with “All the News That’s Fit To Print” and “Established 1851” on it . . . in the very New York Times itself. When did you decide to write your own story on the party? Immediately. I intended to do a nonfiction novel. This has great potential because it has Black Panthers, it has Leonard Bernstein, Park Avenue. And so that was my intent all along. I figured it would make a hell of a chapter. At the time, “nonfiction novel” must’ve meant In Cold Blood. I had that kind of thing in mind, yes. In Cold Blood put that term into play. It was a matter of developing something, not only longer, but with more depth than a magazine story. I had the term vanity fair in my mind, as a concept. Vanity Fair, if you look back at it, is not a novel that stars the characters so much as it stars the social scene in England. And that’s what I had in mind. But when the time came to do it in novel form, I thought, “In New York, you simply can’t have just the people at the high end of the social ladder.” Vanity Fair is a novel about people at the high end of the social ladder. Some succeed, some of them fail miserably. I think one of the main female characters’ father goes bankrupt. But it was all the upper orders. Was Bernstein aware that you were working on the story? Well, I talked to him after Charlotte Curtis’s piece came out. He objected to this being called a party. Why? He said, “A party is an occasion on which you invite people you don’t know.” The unspoken message being, you give a party to impress people that you don’t know. He viewed it as a fundraiser? No, a show of support. More of a morale-raiser.

Felicia spoke to Charlotte Curtis, and Charlotte Curtis agreed with her that the Times was wrong to characterize the party as “elegant slumming.” The following week she wrote a story testifying to the sincerity of many Society figures, including Felicia, who had worked diligently for the less fortunate. But she stood by her original story down to the last detail. Felicia seemed to accept this in good grace. But Lenny was not so sure. The whole thing sounded like a put-up job. Look at it this way: they held a meeting—not a party, but a meeting—in his home on one of the most important issues of the day, and the Times chose to run a story not by Homer Bigart or Harrison Salisbury, but by a Society writer who puts in a lot of “hairbrained” details about his Black Watch pants and a lot of sappy quotes he never uttered—right? This sets him up like a dummy for a roundhouse right from the cheap seats—the editorial about “elegant slumming” and the mockery of the memory of Martin Luther King. Not only that, he himself was already beginning to be mocked in New York in the old word-of-mouth carnival. It was unbelievable. Cultivated people, intellectuals, were characterizing him as “a masochist” and—and this was the really cruel part—as “the David Susskind of American Music.”

Felicia sat down that very day, Friday, and wrote an aggrieved but calmly worded letter to the Times:

“As a civil libertarian, I asked a number of people to my house on Jan. 14 in order to hear the lawyer and others involved with the Panther 21 discuss the problem of civil liberties as applicable to the men now waiting trial, and to help raise funds for their legal expenses.

“Those attending included responsible members of the black leadership as well as distinguished citizens from a variety of walks of life, all of whom share common concern on the subject of civil liberties and equal justice under our laws.

“The outcome of the Panther 21 trial will be determined by the judge and jury. That was not our concern. But the ability of the defendants to prepare a proper defense will depend on the help given prior to the trial, and this help must not be denied because of lack of funds.

“It was for this deeply serious purpose that our meeting was called. The frivolous way in which it was reported as a ‘fashionable’ event is unworthy of the Times, and offensive to all people who are committed to humanitarian principles of justice.”

Felicia delivered the letter in person to the Times that afternoon. The Bernsteins picked up Saturday’s paper—and no letter. In fact, it did not appear until Wednesday, after the publication of a letter from someone named Porter saying things like “we shall soon witness the birth of local Rent-a-Panther organizations.” This fed the conspiracy theory, at least in the Bernstein household. By now columnists all over the place were taking their whack at the affair. Buckley, for example, cited it as an object lesson in the weird masochism of the white liberal who bids the Panther come devour him in his “luxurious lair.”

But if the Bernsteins thought their main problem at this point was a bad press, they were wrong. A controversy they were apparently oblivious of suddenly erupted around them. Namely, the bitterness between Jews and blacks over an issue that had been building for three years, ever since Black Power became important. The first inkling the Bernsteins had was when they started getting hate mail, some of it apparently from Jews of the Queens-Brooklyn Jewish Defense League variety. Then the League’s national chairman, Rabbi Meir Kahane, blasted Lenny publicly for joining a “trend in liberal and intellectual circles to lionize the Black Panthers . . . We defend the right of blacks to form defense groups, but they’ve gone beyond this to a group which hates other people. That’s not nationalism, that’s Naziism. And if Bernstein and other such intellectuals do not know this, they know nothing.”

The Jewish Defense League had been formed in 1968 for the specific purpose of defending Jews in low-rent neighborhoods, many of which are black. But even many wealthier and more cultivated Jews, who look at the Defense League as somewhat extremist, Low Rent and gauche, agreed essentially with the point Kahane was making. One of the ironies of the history of the Jews in America was that their long championship of black civil liberties had begun to backfire so badly in the late 1960s. As Seymour Lipset has put it, “The integrationist movement was largely an alliance between Negroes and Jews (who, to a considerable extent, actually dominated it). Many of the interracial civil-rights organizations have been led and financed by whites, and the majority of their white members have been Jews. Insofar as a Negro effort emerged to break loose from involvement with whites, from domination of the civil-rights struggle by white liberals, it meant concretely a break with Jews, for they were the whites who were active in these movements. The Black Nationalist leadership had to push whites (Jews) ‘out of the way,’ and to stop white (Jewish) ‘interference’ in order to get whites (Jews) ‘off their backs.’” There’s an astonishing amount of facts, quotes, research, etc. throughout – how do you approach the organization of all this material? Any piece I work on, I first try to read anything I can about it. Of course, there’s nothing specifically about the party, but among the cast of characters there was a very strong racial and ethnic quality there. On the ethnic side, Leonard Bernstein himself. A great number of the people there were Jewish. And the liberal support for radical movements much more tended to come from Jewish intellectuals than other intellectuals in general. You mention the religious factor. Did the fact that Bernstein was gay —  I didn’t know that. I hadn’t heard that. So that wasn’t something that was an open secret. I was totally surprised when that — and to this day, I don’t really know it’s true. But I’ve heard a lot of people say that.

Meanwhile, Black Power groups such as SNCC and the Black Panthers were voicing support for the Arabs against Israel. This sometimes looked like a mere matter of black nationalism; after all, Egypt was a part of Africa, and black nationalist literature sometimes seemed to identify the Arabs as blacks fighting the white Israelis. Or else it looked like merely a commitment to world socialism; the Soviet Union and China supported the Arabs against the imperialist tools, the Israelis. But many Jewish leaders regarded the anti-Zionist stances of groups like the Panthers as a veiled American-brand anti-Semitism, tied up with such less theoretical matters as extortion, robbery and mayhem by blacks against Jews in ghetto areas. They cited things like the August 30, 1969, issue of Black Panther, which carried an article entitled “Zionism (Kosher Nationalism) + Imperialism = Fascism” and spoke of “the fascist pigs.” The June, 1967, issue of another Panther publication, Black Power, had carried a poem entitled “Jew-Land,” which said:

Jew-Land, On a summer afternoon, Really, Couldn’t kill the Jews too soon,
Now dig. The Jews have stolen our bread
Their filthy women tricked our men into bed
So I won’t rest until the Jews are dead . . .
In Jew-Land, Don’t be a Tom on Israel’s side
Really, Cause that’s where Christ was crucified.

But in the most literate circles of the New Left—well, the Panthers’ pronouncements on foreign affairs couldn’t be taken too seriously. Ideologically, they were still feeling their way around. To be a UJA Zionist about the whole thing was to be old-fashioned, middle-class middle-aged, suburban, Oceanside-Cedarhurstian, in an age when the youth of the New Left had re-programmed the whole circuitry of Left opposition to oppression. The main thing was that the Panthers were the legitimate vanguard of the black struggle for liberation—among the culturati whom Leonard Bernstein could be expected to know and respect, this was not a point of debate, it was an axiom. The chief theoretical organ of Radical Chic, The New York Review of Books, regularly cast Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver as the Simón Bolívar and José Martí of the black ghettos. On August 24, 1967, The New York Review of Books paid homage to the summer urban riot season by printing a diagram for the making of a Molotov cocktail on its front page. In fact, the journal was sometimes referred to good-naturedly as The Parlour Panther, with the -our spelling of Parlour being an allusion to its concurrent motif of anglophilia. The Review’s embracing of such apparently contradictory attitudes—the nitty-gritty of the ghetto warriors and the preciosity of traditional English Leavis & Loomis intellectualism—was really no contradiction at all, of course. It was merely the essential double-track mentality of Radical Chic—nostagie de la boue and high protocol—in its literary form. In any case, given all this, people like Lenny and Felicia could hardly have been expected to comprehend a complex matter like the latter-day friction between blacks and Jews.

To other people involved in Radical Chic, however, the picture was now becoming clear as day. This was no time for Custer’s last stand. This was time . . . to panic. Two more couples had already agreed to give parties for the Panthers: Peter and Cheray Duchin and Frank and Domna Stanton. The Duchins had already gotten some of the static themselves. Peter had gone to Columbus, Ohio, with his orchestra . . . and the way some of the locals let him have it! All because Charlotte Curtis’ article had quoted Cheray saying how thrilled she was at the prospect of meeting her first Black Panther at Felicia’s. Columbus freaking Ohio, yet. Nor did it take the Stantons long to put two and two together. Frank Stanton, the entrepreneur, not the broadcaster, had a duplex co-op that made Lenny’s look like a fourth-floor walkup. It had marble floors, apricot velvet walls, trompe l’oeil murals in the dining room, the works. A few photos of the Panthers against this little backdrop—well, you could write the story yourself.

On Saturday evening, the 24th, the Duchins, the Stantons, Sidney and Gail Lumet, and Lenny and Felicia met at the Bernsteins’ to try to think out the whole situation. Sidney Lumet was convinced that a new era of “McCarthyism” had begun. It was a little hard to picture the editorial and women’s page staffs of the Times as the new Joe McCarthy—but damn it . . . The Times was pushing its own pet organizations, the NAACP, the Urban League, the Urban Coalition, and so on. Why did it look like the Times always tried to punish prominent Jews who refused to lie down and play good solid burghers? Who was it who said the Times was a Catholic newspaper run by Jews to fool the Protestants? Some professor at Columbia . . . In any case, they were now all “too exposed” to do the Panthers any good by giving parties for the Panthers in their homes. They would do better to work through organizations like the NAACP legal defense fund.Do you labor over your sentences? Is writing easy for you? Occasionally, yes, I do. Because I’m so hipped on the sound, even though it’s inside your head, of what you’re reading. And sometimes I’ll make really amateurish blunders because I want there to be alliteration, I want a rhyme. Rhymes are verboten, strictly speaking, in prose. Oh, every now and then I can’t resist.  Do you have a favorite sentence or paragraph from your own body of work? I never thought of that. Let me think. The one that sticks in my mind is a short piece I wrote for New York magazine when it was part of the Herald Tribune, and it was called “The Voices of Village Square.” It starts off with unseen voices yelling ‘Harry.’ We don’t know yet who is yelling, but I suddenly take their voice and say, “You! You, down there!” As if I’m up there -- it turns out to be a women’s house of detention. I always liked that, for some reason. There was also a piece that began with the word ‘hernia.’ I counted how many words would be on the lead of the page -- I think I wrote this one for Esquire -- and just to get people to turn the page I repeated the word ‘hernia,’ I think it was 157 times. I figured anybody, certainly I would, if they saw ‘hernia’ repeated so many times would turn the page to see what the hell is going on. David Newman, I think, wrote the title. The ‘hernia’ was the sound of the croupier. Hernia hernia hernia hernia hernia hernia. With slight variations on ‘hernia’ just to show it wasn’t a list of hernias. So writing is not easy for you. No, I find it’s very hard. Only on the rare occasions on which you think you really have written a mellifluous sentence — the rest of it is very hard work. It doesn’t matter how much you write, it doesn’t, at least for me, get any easier. When a writer tells me he’s enjoyed writing something, I say to myself, “It can’t be very good.” Recently, John Updike’s biographer said, “I don’t think he suffered for his art. I think he worked for his art.” Well, a mistake that editors make is in thinking that they should be not as rough on an established writer as they are on a nonestablished writer. Because when all is said and done, those deadlines are your best friend. Are your editors rough on you? No. At first, yes. [laughter] And then they got progressively lighter. And that was too bad. Has writing gotten harder for you or easier for you as you’ve gotten older? Or is it about the same? Honestly, it’s about the same. I’d be kidding myself. I keep waiting for age to tell in the writing, as told when I do dips and pullups. Which always were very important to me. If there were any muscles, no one could ever see them, but nevertheless it was part of my vanity. Do you still do pullups? Yes. I just can’t do as many. How many can you do? I can do about five. But I don’t remember ever doing more than 12. So I don’t feel all that bad. So there hasn’t been that much of a drop! It’s big enough.

***

Lenny couldn’t get over the whole affair. Earlier in the evening he had talked to a reporter and told him it was “nauseating.” The so-called “party” for the Panthers had not been a party at all. It had been a meeting. There was nothing social about it. As to whether he thought because parties were held in the homes of socially prominent people simply because the living rooms were large and the acoustics were good, he didn’t say. In any case, he and Felicia didn’t give parties, and they didn’t go to parties, and they were certainly not in anybody’s “jet set.” And they were not “masochists,” either.

So four nights later Lenny, in a tuxedo, and Felicia, in a black dress, walked into a party in the triplex of one of New York’s great hostesses, overlooking the East River, on the street of social dreams, East 52nd, and right off the bat some woman walks right up to him and says, “Lenny, I just think you’re a masochist.” It was unbelievable.

The panic turned out to be good for The Friends of the Earth, somewhat the way the recession has been bad for the Four Seasons but good for Riker’s. Many matrons, such as Cheray Duchin, turned their attention toward the sables, cheetahs and leopards, once the Panthers became radioactive. The Stantons, meanwhile, dropped their plans for a Panther party and had one instead for the Buddhists, and Richard Feigen dropped his plans for a party because of the Panthers’ support for Al Fatah. Leonard Bernstein went off to England to rehearse with the London Symphony Orchestra for an already scheduled performance in the Royal Albert Hall. He couldn’t have been very sorry about the trip. Unbelievable hostility was still bubbling around him. In Miami, Jewish pickets forced a moviehouse to withdraw a film of Lenny conducting the Israel Philharmonic on Mount Scopus in celebration of Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War.

In general, the Radically Chic made a strategic withdrawal, denouncing the “witchhunt” of the press as they went. There was brief talk of a whole series of parties for the Panthers in and around New York, by way of showing the world that socialites and culturati were ready to stand up and be counted in defense of what the Panthers, and, for that matter, the Bernsteins, stood for. But it never happened. In fact, if the socialites already in line for Panther parties had gone ahead and given them in clear defiance of the opening round of attacks on the Panthers and the Bernsteins, they might well have struck an extraordinary counterblow in behalf of the Movement. This is, after all, a period of great confusion among culturati and liberal intellectuals generally, and one in which a decisive display of conviction and self-confidence can be overwhelming. But for the Radically Chic to have fought back in this way would have been a violation of their own innermost convictions. Radical Chic, after all, is only radical in style; in its heart it is part of Society and its traditions. Politics, like Rock, Pop and Camp, has its uses; but to put one’s whole status on the line for nostalgie de la boue in any of its forms would be unprincipled.

Meanwhile, the damnable press dogged Lenny even in London. A United Press International reporter interviewed him there and sent out a story in which Lenny said: “They”—the Panthers—”are a bad lot. They have behaved very badly. They have laid their own graves. It was the Panthers themselves who spoiled the deal, they won’t be rational.” The next day Lenny told a New York Times reporter that the UPI story was “nonsense.” He didn’t remember what he had said, but he hadn’t said anything like that. At the same time he released a statement that he had actually drawn up in New York before he left. It said that there had been no “party” for the Panthers in his home in the first place; it had been a meeting, and “the only concern at our meeting was civil liberties.” “If we deny these Black Panthers their democratic rights because their philosophy is unacceptable to us, then we are denying our own democracy.” He now made it clear that he was opposed to their philosophy, however. “It is not easy to discern a consistent political philosophy among the Black Panthers, but it is reasonably clear that they are advocating violence against their fellow citizens, the downfall of Israel, the support of Al Fatah and other similarly dangerous and ill-conceived pursuits. To all of these concepts I am vigorously opposed and will fight against them as hard as I can.”

And still this damned nauseating furor would not lie down and die. Wouldn’t you know it—two days after the, well, meeting, on the very day he and Felicia were reeling from the Times editorial, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, that renegade, had been down in Washington writing his famous “benign neglect” memo to Nixon. In it Moynihan had presented him and Felicia and their “party” as Exhibit A of the way black revolutionaries like the Panthers had become the “culture heroes” of the Beautiful People. Couldn’t you just see Nixon sitting in the Oval Room and clucking and fuming and muttering things like “rich snob bums” as he read: “You perhaps did not note on the society page of yesterday’s Times that Mrs. Leonard Bernstein gave a cocktail party on Wednesday to raise money for the Panthers. Mrs. W. Vincent Astor was among the guests. Mrs. Peter Duchin, ‘the rich blonde wife of the orchestra leader,’ was thrilled. ‘I’ve never met a Panther,’ she said. ‘This is a first for me.’”

On February 29 someone leaked the damned memo to the damned New York Times, and that did it. Now he was invested, installed, inaugurated, instituted, transmogrified as Mr. Parlour Panther for all time. The part about their “cocktail party” was right in the same paragraph with the phrase “benign neglect.” And it didn’t particularly help the situation that Mrs. Astor got off a rapid letter to the Times informing them that she was not at the “party.” She received an invitation, like all sorts of other people, she supposed, but, in fact, she had not gone. Thanks a lot, Brooke Astor.

Fools, boors, philistines, Birchers, B’nai B’rithees, Defense Leaguers, Hadassah theatre party pirhanas, UJAviators, concert hall Irishmen, WASP ignorati, toads, newspaper readers—they were booing him, Leonard Bernstein, the egregio maestro . . . Boooooo. No two ways about it. They weren’t clearing their throats. They were squeezed into their $14.50 bequested seats, bringing up from out of the false bottoms of their bellies the old Low Rent raspberry boos of days gone by. Boooooo. Newspaper readers! That harebrained story in the Times had told how he and Felicia had given a party for the Black Panthers and how he had pledged a conducting fee to their defense fund, and now, stretching out before him in New York, was a great starched white-throated audience of secret candystore bigots, greengrocer Moshe Dayans with patches over both eyes . . .

. . . once, after a concert in Italy, an old Italian, one of those glorious old Italians in an iron worsted black suit and a high collar with veritable embroideries of white thread mending the cracks where the collar folds over, one of those old Europeans who seem to have been steeped, aged, marinated, in centuries of true Culture in a land where people understood the art of living and the art of feeling and were not ashamed to express what was in their hearts—this old man had come up to him with his eyes brimming and his honest gnarled hands making imaginary snowballs and had said: “Egregio maestro! Egreggggggggggio maestro!” The way he said it, combining the egregio, meaning “distinguished” with the maestro, meaning “master” . . . well, the way he said it meant a conductor so great, so brilliant, so dazzling, so transported, so transcendental, so—yes!—immortal . . . well, there is no word in the whole lame dumb English language to describe it. And in that moment Leonard Bernstein knew that he had reached . . .

***

Boooooooo! Booooooooo! It was unbelievable. But it was real. These greengrocers—he was their whipping boy, and a bunch of $14.50 white-throated cretins were booing him, and it was no insomniac hallucination in the loneliness of 3 a.m.

Would that black apparition, that damnable Negro by the piano, be rising up from the belly of a concert grand for the rest of his natural life? The concluding couple of pages feel like an epilogue. I never thought of it that way, but it probably is. I think you’re probably right. Why did you end it this way? Because by the time I wrote this piece, there was a lot of aftermath that had occurred. As I said, Bernstein was disappointed the minute Charlotte Curtis walked in instead of Homer Bigart. And you walked in instead of Halberstam. Yeah, but I — that’s true. Incidentally, how do you think Halberstam would have written the story? Gosh, I have no idea. Seems to me that David Halberstam and a Leonard Bernstein Black Panther party is an odd mismatch of temperaments.Well, David was not as concerned about style and effects. He was much more concerned with being a really solid reporter. In a way, he was the ultimate New York Times reporter, although he finally left the Times. One last question: Do you have the notes that you took for this piece? It’s conceivable that they’re at the New York Public Library. I just gave them my papers. As far as I know, they won’t be available til the summer. I kept a lot of notes, but a lot of times I didn’t do things in an organized sense. So you do not share Talese’s archival personality. Oh, Gay keeps his notes? Oh God, have you ever been in his basement? I have been in it, but I never looked around. He’s got huge file boxes for every story with collages on the outside. Everything is archived. It’s amazing. If he were not an organized person, he would be a Collyer brother. [laughter] Oh, God. Mentioning Gay’s name takes me back to my more or less youth in New York. What great times. Were you guys friends? I know you were rivals. You don’t live that far away from each other. I haven’t seen Gay nearly as much as I used to. We used to live really close to each other. I was on 62nd, he was on 61st. We were good friends.

Elon Green is a regular contributor to Annotation Tuesday!, and writes for The Awl, Longform.org and NewYorker.com. Follow him at @elongreen. For the full Annotation Tuesday! archive, go here.

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Last week, on the eve of the Sochi Olympics, GQ published "Inside the Iron Closet," a Jeff Sharlet story that revealed disturbing details about what it's like to be gay in Russia. The timing dovetailed with Human Rights Watch's renewed admonition that Russia address the "deteriorating situation" of LGBT harassment and violence. Sharlet, author of the bestselling The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism in the Heart of American Power, C Street, and Sweet Heaven When I Die, is Mellon assistant professor of English at Dartmouth. He worked on the story with support from the Investigative Fund of The Nation Institute. He took us through the piece line by line, covering big-picture questions as well as grace notes about craft. Our questions are in blue, Sharlet's responses in red.

Storyboard: How did this story come to be?

Jeff Sharlet: A young editor at GQ, Eric Sullivan, called and asked if I was interested. Actually, he was assistant to the editor in chief, Jim Nelson. This was his first full feature, I believe, and he’s since been promoted. He was involved at every stage. I like working with young editors, because they care about the story as much as you do. Eric had read an earlier essay of mine for Harper’s, “Straight Man’s Burden,” which is a report from Uganda on the men behind that country’s so-called “Kill the Gays” bill. After that, I told myself I wasn’t going to do that kind of story anymore. (I’ve been reporting on hard-right movements for years.) They’re important, but they can poison you, and I felt pretty poisoned. But it had been a few years, and here was this important and fascinating story. It felt like an opportunity to revisit these issues from the other side. I don’t mean anti-gay! I mean that in Uganda, I’d really focused on the homophobes, what they believed and why they believed it and what it felt like to be consumed by hate. In Russia, I wanted to know what it felt like to be on the wrong side of an official, state-sanctioned crusade, especially after things had been slowly improving for years. I was interested in fear, and, of course, fear’s corollary, courage.

What were the challenges particular to this assignment?

Time. I went to Russia for two weeks in early November and knew I’d have to file in December to get the story into the February issue, while the world was paying attention. I’ve never worked so fast in my life. Two weeks wasn’t a lot in Russia — I slept about four hours a night, trying to experience as much as I could — but even more crushing was the turnaround. I like to do most of my own transcribing, so I can hear conversations with plenty of time to pause and think about them, but with this schedule I needed help. I hired students and young journalists to help me, and together we transcribed about 80,000 words in a week. At the same time, I was deciphering my notes, following up by phone and Skype and library research. Normally I’d like about a month for this phase, followed by a week to just stare at it all and think, then maybe a month to write, revise, let it simmer, and another long spell to work it all out with the editor. Instead, we did it all in about three sleepless weeks. It may be better for the crunch. I had to make the kinds of decisions I normally brood on very quickly, and I think the story reflects that sense of urgency. Maybe a more interesting challenge was one of structure. I knew there wasn’t going to be a resolution to the story. I also knew that I didn’t want to do some kind of policy story with anecdotal illustration. What felt right to me was a story about a mood, or moods. Increasingly, I think this is something that literary journalism can do in a way most fiction — either dependent on plot or defying plot, but always in relation to plot — can’t. Poems can, of course, but there are other things poems aren’t as good at, like information. Literary journalism can give you information and mood at the same time.

Had you ever reported from Russia before? How did you set everything up — or did you simply show up and start reporting?

No, but I had a couple of advantages. My reporting on LGBT rights and homophobic crusades in Uganda, Kenya, and the U.S. had provided me with a lot of contacts in international activism, and they’d liked the Uganda work, in particular, so they were eager to help. Most crucial was Mark Gevisser, a South African journalist who I knew by reputation through his status as an Open Society Fellow. Mark is writing the book — literally — on global LGBT activism, and he’d just come back from Russia himself. He was incredibly generous with insights, connections, and, most importantly, his brilliant young translator, Zhenya Belyakov. Zhenya’s a “character” in my story, and I really wish I could have written more about him. He’s from Vladivostok, got out to escape the homophobia and beatings of his youth, lived happily abroad for five years, and came back after the anti-gay law passed, to fight it. He’d been an LGBT activist abroad, and he had a lot of connections in Moscow, but he was fairly new to the city, and new to how much worse things had gotten since he’d left the country. So we kind of explored together. He wasn’t a fixer in a traditional sense — he was a great and thoughtful translator who knew a lot of interesting people and was as interested as I was, for his own reasons as an activist, in finding more.

I can imagine some more traditional journalists saying “What!? You hired an activist as a fixer? That skews everything.” That’s fine. I didn’t go to Russia to be objective in that sense. You know, “On the one hand, homophobia is terrible; on the other, why do they have to be so gay?” But it was a pragmatic decision, too. In Uganda, I had a straight fixer, a journalist, and he made a lot of underground queer people very nervous.

I had another advantage — my father is a retired “Sovietologist,” a profession that doesn’t exist anymore. He was a political scientist who specialized in the Soviet Union, studied law at University of Moscow, spent his whole working life thinking about Russia. He’d also been very involved with Amnesty International for Eastern Europe. So while he didn’t know anything about the LGBT situation, he was able to give me some context for thinking about human rights and law in Russia. That reference in the story to the similarity between Article 6.21, the gay propaganda law, and Article 70, was his insight.

What is your procedure when you’re out in the field? Do you report all day and write at night? Or report, report, report and write when you get back?

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="225"] A club called Secret (photo by Jeff Sharlet)[/caption]

I always mean to report all day and write at night. Usually I report all day, and as long as I can into the night, return to wherever I’m staying, and fall asleep in my clothes with my notebook on my face. Maybe that helps me absorb what I’ve learned. In Russia, the day tends to start late. (Sun doesn’t rise till mid-morning at this time of year.) So I’d start midmorning or later, usually with one or two meetings lined up, and let them lead from one situation to another. Then, at night, I went to gay clubs. It’s a measure of how limited the once-vibrant scene in Moscow and St. Petersburg has become that I could cover almost all of it in two weeks. Most of that’s not in the story, but I went to talk to people, to immerse myself in one aspect of queer life in Russia, to contextualize the people I really wanted to write about dozens of smaller conversations. So, same method: report, report, report, off to the clubs, back to hotel, collapse with my notes. Phrased like that, it’s incredibly dorky. I don’t know any other way.

On Friday, you posted this on Facebook:

Earlier today Elena Kostyuchenko, hero of my GQ story on being gay in Russia, no shit one of bravest human beings I've met, was arrested with three others for singing Russian national anthem in Red Square. (Video below.) Word is police took Elena & another out of cell, into room, told them to give them head. If you read my story, you know what Elena gave them. She weighs 50 kilos; but you don't fuck with this woman. Also today, another activist I met, Anastasia Smirnova, was arrested w/ 3 others in Sochi for holding a banner that declared Olympic Principle 6, equality. Meanwhile, NBC Sports has called Putin a man of peace. We can't hold Putin accountable, but we can hold NBC accountable.

What’s the latest? And what is it like, watching your story subjects go on to make news?

Elena’s English isn’t great, so I can’t have a phone conversation, but Zhenya tells me she was released, she’s ok, and she’s making more plans. If you’ve read the story, that shouldn’t surprise you. I have to say, when I saw the video of the arrest, I was very upset, even though I knew this was par for the course for Elena. I think it was a reminder of how little my story here in America can accomplish for these people I came to know and admire tremendously. My original ending for the story is pretty close to what it is now, but it was addressed to “Peter,” the little boy of the final scene: “All I have for you, Peter, is this toy airplane on my desk waiting to be mailed; and this story. It is not enough.” I didn’t end like that because there’s more truth in ending with the greatness of Peter's heart than my own sense of failure, but that failure – the inevitable failure of stories – is true, too. That’s what I felt watching Elena get arrested, going down singing: This story, it’s not enough, not even close.

“Inside the Iron Closet: What It's Like to Be Gay in Putin's Russia”
by Jeff Sharlet
GQ

Strangers at the Gate

Sunday nights in St. Petersburg are Rainbow Tea Party time. If you're young and queer and hopeful, it's the happiest way to end a weekend. An actual tea party.There are also cookies and—at LaSky, the HIV-awareness center that often hosts the event—more brightly colored giant beanbags than chairs, plus a lot of posters of hunky bare-chested men with floppy hair. There are many, many rainbows, on stickers and pins and brochures, and a rainbow curtain covering a strange little door in the corner. Visual and symbolically rich lede — how did you arrive at it?I didn’t – my editors did. I originally began with the story of Pavel and Emma, below. I wanted the first page or so of the story to be this utterly ordinary domestic life, except that everybody involved was hiding their true identity for fear of losing what they had. But “if it bleeds, it leads” isn’t just a maxim for TV news. GQ wanted to start with this more immediately dramatic scene of Dmitry’s shooting, and although we argued about it, I came to think they’re right, and I’m glad I did it. I don’t think nearly as many people would have read the story if it had started as slowly as I wanted it to. I love slow ledes, where you don’t quite know what’s happening, and if I include some version of this essay in a book – where you don’t have to “grab” a reader – I may shuffle it again. What we came up with, though, is sort of a compromise – it still starts kind of sweetly banal, but there’s this mysterious door, which leads to a maze, and kind of symbolically through the maze you come out into the darkness of violence which is a steady, simmering fact of life for queer Russians. This is a picture I took with my phone of the door. What I found moving about this was how modest a space LaSky was. Here it is, what Putin and his allies deem the looming threat to Russia’s “sexual sovereignty.”

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="225"] The door to Bunker. (photo by Jeff Sharlet)[/caption]

The door leads to a club called Bunker, which is really a maze, twisting through the rest of the building's vast basement. It's dark; you have to feel your way through. The men who go to Bunker—many or maybe most of them "straight" men, married men, says the bartender—are looking for bodies, not faces. Poignant use of quotation marks. That’s all it takes to imply the risks of life outside the closet in Putin’s Russia.Yeah, and they’re factually accurate, too. To call these men straight, or “straight,” is to quote their representations of themselves, not to assert those representations as facts. The single word in quotes is of course a Didionism.They don't want to see or be seen, only to touch and to be touched in a place where nobody knows them.

Those are the choices: light or dark, tea or poppers, a well-lit game of charades or a grope in the dungeon. Sweet or sordid, it doesn't matter: In Russia now—in the throes of a fever stoked by the Kremlin—both must be hidden. They are not hidden well enough.

One evening in November—the city center like a bowl of pastel candies, Orthodox onion-domes rising above it like spun sugar—two strangers found their way to LaSky. They walked down a long street between a busy road and a canal until they came to an arch in a building. They went through the arch and down a dark alley before they arrived at an unlit empty parking lot, blacktop crumbling. Here they may have stopped to put on their masks. They crossed the lot toward a stand of scrub trees and weeds and took a left down a narrow path, then down an even darker set of uneven stairs to an unmarked steel door. The strangers stood at the threshold. This is beautifully observed. This is also strikes me as a difficult environment in which to take notes. How’d you do it?Oh, I didn’t observe it. I recreated it. I interviewed Dmitry Chizhevsky, first in his hospital room, and then later I went to hear him speak at LaSky. I spent a lot of time at LaSky while I was in St. Petersburg, attending activist meetings, another Rainbow Tea Party, and using a little side room they had for conversations. I knew how hard LaSky was to find, I knew about its security (I attended a meeting on security measures), I knew about the LGBT taxi activists use to get there and leave. I interviewed, I think, four other people who were there. And then I met Timur Iasev, who appears much later in the story. Timur is a rightwing activist who’d been staking out LaSky. He showed me extensive surveillance photos, said he had blueprints of the building, and talked at length about how difficult the attack would be to pull off — which is why, he said, he knew that LGBT activists had done it themselves to make people like him look bad. Normally, I would have also sought out the police investigating this, but given the police track record of investigating hate crimes in Russia, that seemed like a dead letter and a good way to get in hot water for being in the country on a tourist visa.

It was Rainbow Tea Party night. A woman named Anna asked who was there. "We're looking for our friend!" replied one of the strangers. They shoved past her. In the hall, a man named Dmitry Chizhevsky was looking for his jacket. Why “a woman named,” “a man named”? What does the distancing signal to the reader?That they could be anybody. That they’re just ordinary activists – ordinary people with ordinary lives, enjoying a very ordinary social evening. It could be a man named Dmitry, it could be you. I wanted this to be both very specific to the moment and also abstracted. I love the metaphor mythologist Wendy Doniger uses to describe how myth has a sort of double vision, that of the microscope and the telescope. The microscope, here, is represented by the very minute details. The telescope is represented by the abstraction of the victims.Behind him was a girl I'll call Rose, a few weeks shy of her eighteenth birthday. Rose glanced toward the door: two men wearing ski masks.

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="225"] Dmitry. (photo by Jeff Sharlet)[/caption]

"Then," she says, "they started shooting." Chizhevsky: "The first bullet came into my eye. The first, the very first." Rose: "I had a thought in my head—maybe I should do something, maybe I should scream." Chizhevsky: "I can remember more closely what was audio." Pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, he recalls hearing. Five, he thinks. He says he remembers the sound of the bullet hitting his eye. Where did you conduct these interviews?In Dmitry’s hospital room and at LaSky. I took snapshots. (I always take as many snapshots as I can, as notes. I also draw pictures to try and capture a sense of gesture and physicality.)

Dmitry went down, and Rose ran, and Dmitry crawled. The men followed, kicking. One of them had a bat, "a baseball bat, yes," says Dmitry. They were screaming. "Faggot, faggot, faggot." The bat came down. And then the faggots in the other room charged the men with the gun and the bat and the masks, and the men ran away. Dmitry and Anna, who'd been shot in the back, inspected their wounds. An air gun, they determined. Thank God.

They say you can shoot an eye out with an air gun, but that's not exactly what happened. The pellet, a round metal ball, lodged behind Dmitry's eye.

"They tried with a magnet to take it out," says Dmitry. "But, uh, they failed."

What did they try next?

"A hook." Do you speak Russian? Did you use a translator?I don’t. In addition to Zhenya, mentioned above, I worked with two other translators in St. Petersburg and one at home who helped me read documents. The two in St. Petersburg — Anton and Tatiana, first names only — weren’t activists in the same sense as Zhenya. Anton is gay, but his activism, as such, is religious — he’s connected to a little underground LGBT church in Russia, and since I’ve written a lot about religious issues, we connected really well. That’s important, because while the translator does their best on the spot, you need to be able to have a candid conversation after the interview to get a better sense of the nuances of languages. I was lucky, too, in that Anton is an aspiring writer — he understood why I cared about expression as well as meaning. My other St. Petersburg translator was Tatiana, a straight woman who’d recently attended her first LGBT rights demonstration, motivated by a sense of justice and concern for her mother, a lesbian who would unquestionably lose her job if she was outed. Both were brilliant linguists, but Tatiana’s “American,” in addition to her English, was remarkable — she was a devoted fan of Aaron Sorkin, and spoke in the fast, smart patter of wordplay familiar to fans of The West Wing. So while Anton was good at giving me the heart of a conversation, Tatiana was excellent with irony. Good translators are, in a sense, collaborators. I was very lucky to work with these people, both of whom helped me at some real risk to themselves.

The doctors told him he was lucky; a little farther, it would have entered his brain. All he'd lose would be his vision. How did you arrive at the structure for this piece? How do you handle structure generally? Generally, I come up with a rough outline, start writing the pieces in order, wake up in the middle of the night or pull over on the side of the road to write something that’s been stewing, chop and dice the outline, keep going, start making files labeled “fabric,” and “fabric 2,” “3,” etc., then “outtakes” then “cut (or not).” Once I have a big mess, I look at it all and settle on the major pieces I want. Then I start shuffling them like cards. There’s usually a sort of instinctive structure, that’s half formula – here we have the action lede followed by the second act of context – and half impression. I mean that in the same sense a comedian does impressions. The structure approximates some gestures I found essential to the character of the story as I found it. It’s more concerned with mood than with argument. At some point, I lay out the major pieces on the floor and just stare at them for awhile, trying them out in different arrangements to make sure that the one I’ve settled on is what I think is best. I used to have a writing studio in an old industrial building in Brooklyn, but since I’ve moved to the country, I use one of the special libraries at Dartmouth College, where I teach. Here’s a picture of that final stage – at which it all looks pretty tidy -- with another recent story:

***

I went to Moscow and St. Petersburg for two weeks in November because the Olympics were coming to Russia, and for a brief moment it seemed possible that the outside world was interested in the unraveling of civil society in one of the most powerful countries on the globe. Did you have any trouble getting a visa? What was the process? Now that the story has appeared, do you think you would allowed to return?On the advice of several friends who’d reported in Russia, I went with a tourist visa. Which isn’t hard to get. A journalism visa would have been more problematic, but it probably would have worked. Some journalists covering LGBT issues had already been deported, but they were walking around with big cameras. I’m a pretty inoffensive character, shuffling around Moscow with my little notebook. And although I talked to a few “officials,” I wasn’t really interested in the usual journalistic paths. So I didn’t come into contact with the kinds of people who could make trouble with visas. (Though, on my second-to-last day, some anti-gay nationalists spent a lot of time bragging about their “visa activism,” demanding investigations of visas of people they didn’t like.) Go back? Probably. Never underestimate the incompetence of bureaucracy. I mean, there are some people — further down in the story — I wouldn’t call up to say, “Hey, I’m here!” but it’s not like Uganda, where one of the leaders of the ruling party told me — in what he genuinely meant as a friendly way, I think — that he’d have me arrested if I ever returned.Books are being banned—Burroughs and Baudelaire and Huxley's Brave New World—immigrants hunted, journalists killed, a riot-grrrl band, Pussy Riot, imprisoned for almost two years for playing a "Punk Prayer" in a Moscow cathedral; blasphemy is now illegal. Civil society isn't just coming undone; it's imploding. I wanted to visit the bottom of the heap. The golubye. The blues, which in Russia is another word for queer—any way of being other than "Russian," which, under President Vladimir Putin, has become a kind of sexual orientation. I wanted to see what ordinary LGBT life was like in a nation whose leaders have decided that "homosexualism" is a threat to its "sexual sovereignty," that "genderless tolerance," in Putin's words, is a disease of the West that Russia will cure. Why is it important establish why you undertook the story?You know, I didn’t think it was, but my editors thought differently, and now I’m glad about that. To me, the suffering, and the perversity of the persecution, are pretty self-explanatory. This could be in Russia, this could be in Kampala, this could be in Manhattan, and wherever it is, it’s a story. If you’re a 17-year-old kid turning tricks because your parents kicked you out, if you’re a young professional like Dmitry, getting shot and beaten because you went to a tea party, it doesn’t really matter to you what country you’re in. But if you’re a reader, maybe it does. One response I’ve had from generally liberal people is, “Why Russia?” I’ve been getting it so often I even wrote a little blog post about it. The medicine is that of "traditional values," a phrase, ironically, imported from the West, grafted onto a deeply conformist strain of nationalism. In Russia, that means silence and violence, censorship, and in its shadow, much worse.

One of the first men I met was Alex, a gay police officer who'd recently quit his job rather than enforce Russia's new anti-gay law. How did you find your story subjects?Zhenya introduced me to Igor Iasine, a really fearless activist — I mean, you meet this guy and you get an inkling of why the Germans never captured Leningrad — who told me about Alex. Alex, his boyfriend, and a friend of theirs, a gay teacher from the Moscow suburbs, talked with me and Zhenya for a few hours in a café, and thereafter Alex helped us with some further connections. On the one hand, since I was looking for ordinary people, finding subjects was easy. “Do you have any friends I should meet?” On the other, it was tricky, since so many people were frightened, with a great deal at risk. I doubt Alex would have talked to me if he hadn’t already quit his job as a cop. And maybe not if he hadn’t vacationed abroad, if he wasn’t aware that there were places in the world he could be himself without fear. He wasn't always so principled: One of Alex's early assignments on the force was snooping through a fellow officer's computer for evidence of homosexuality. "I was just lucky it wasn't my computer," Alex said one night at a café on Arbat Street, Moscow's main thoroughfare of consumer hipsterism.

His boyfriend wasn't as glib: "It's Germany in the '30s," he declared. "Hush, hush," Alex said. "Not so loud." It's not Germany in the '30s, he said; it's Russia now. And that's a subtler problem.

Yes, there are killings. In May, a 23-year-old man in Volgograd allegedly came out to a group of friends, who raped him with beer bottles and smashed his skull in with a stone; and in June a group of friends in Kamchatka kicked and stabbed to death a 39-year-old gay man, then burned the body. There's a national network called Occupy Pedophilia, whose members torture gay men and post hugely popular videos of their "interrogations" online. There are countless smaller, bristling movements, with names presumptuous (God's Will) or absurd (Homophobic Wolf). There are babushkas who throw stones, and priests who bless the stones, and police who arrest their victims. Are these horrific anecdotes based on previously reported work, or did you hear about this during your two weeks in Russia?Both. I met a leader of God’s Will and VK’d (Russian Facebook) with Homophobic Wolf while I was there. Actually, it was an underground gay activist, working in the heart of the Russian Orthodox Church’s intellectual apparatus, who told me about Homophobic Wolf — one of its members had attended a screening of an LGBT friendly film he’d shown. I knew about Occupy Pedophilia and the Volgograd killing before I went — those became international stories — but I learned about the Kamchatka killing while I was there, along with a number of other killings and violent attacks, by talking with activists who are pretty careful about documenting these things. (There are videos of the stones.) In my first draft, this paragraph was about twice as long or more, a real horror show of sadism and murder and diabolically creative violence. But violence is like dialect and accent — a little goes a long way. I realized that most readers, upon coming upon this sort of flat recitation, would imagine the rest. They’d imagine nightmares. And their imagination would be as accurate as reality.

But such people exist everywhere, said Alex. The difference in Russia now is who's standing behind them.

The Russian closet has always been deep, but since last June, when the Duma began passing laws designed to shove Russia's tiny out population back into it, the closet has been getting darker. The first law banned gay "propaganda," but it was written so as to leave the definition vague. It's a mechanism of thought control, its target not so much gays as anybody the state declares gay; a virtual resurrection of Article 70 from the old Soviet system, forbidding "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda." Then, as now, nobody knew exactly what "propaganda" was. The new law explicitly forbids any suggestion that queer love is equal to that of heterosexuals, but what constitutes such a suggestion? One man was charged for holding up a sign that said being gay is ok. Pride parades are out of the question, a pink triangle enough to get you arrested, if not beaten. A couple holding hands could be accused of propaganda if they do so where a minor might see them; the law, as framed, is all about protecting the children. Yelena Mizulina, chair of the Duma Committee on Family, Women, and Children's Affairs and the author of the bill, says that it's too late to save adult "homosexualists," as they're called, but Russia still has a chance to raise a pure generation. Did you interview anyone from the Russian government? What were the preconditions of being allowed to research your story? Did you have a minder?No minders, because I didn’t tell anyone what I was doing. I wasn’t “allowed” to research my story; I just did. Anatoly Artyukh, down below, is technically an aide to one of the key regional politicians, Vitaly Milonov, responsible for the law going national. And I went out to an empty restaurant in the suburbs, accessible only by highway, to have what felt like a very paranoid and clandestine meeting with Dmitry Gudkov, a prominent opposition politician, who has been dubbed “Russia’s Rand Paul.” His big dissent was skipping the vote on the gay propaganda bill, because he considers it an unconstitutional distraction. Of course, he also told us a bunch of gay jokes to make sure we didn’t get the wrong idea.

Mizulina's dream isn't old-fashioned; it is, as one fascist supporter told me, "utopian." Why was this anonymously sourced? This isn’t exactly a controversial opinion, right?It’s Anatoly Artyukh, below. In a news story, I might ID him here. But in a piece like this, I don’t want to ID someone until we’re going to spend some time with him, as we do below.He meant that as praise. And the Russian dream is not alone. Liberal Americans imagine LGBT rights as slowly but surely marching forward. But queer rights don't advance along a straight line. In Russia and throughout Eastern Europe—and in India and in Australia, in a belt across Central Africa—anti-gay crusaders are developing new laws and sharpening old ones. The ideas, meanwhile, are American: the rhetoric of "family values" churned out by right-wing American think tanks, bizarre statistics to prove that evil is a fact, its face a gay one. This hatred is old venom, but its weaponization by nations as a means with which to fight "globalization"—not the economic kind, the human-rights kind—is a new terror.

In Russia, the process is accelerating. In 2006, a bill similar to the law was laughed out of the Duma, dismissed by the then deputy prime minister as "a row of mistakes." In June it passed, 436-0. Alex the cop says 2010 was the best year, a new club or café opening every other weekend. New LGBT groups were forming all over. "It was like a party," one activist told me. What happened between then and now has as much to do with the unstable price of oil and Putin's eroding popular support as it does with actual queer people. The less prosperity Putin can deliver, the more he speaks of holy Russian empire, language to which the Russian Orthodox Church thrills. Putin, says Patriarch Kirill, the church's leader, is a living "act of God." Forget about the price of bread and what you can't afford. Putin has come to save the Russian soul.

Article 6.21, the law's official designation, has proven to be the Duma's most popular social initiative of the year; according to one poll, only 7 percent of Russians firmly oppose it. Another new law requiring nonprofits that receive support outside Russia to register as foreign agents has been used to justify police raids on the country's leading LGBT organizations. In July, Putin signed a law banning the adoption of Russian children by gay parents abroad.

And in October, the Duma started to take up a law to remove children from LGBT parents in Russia. It's been put on hold, but it's expected to return once the Olympics and international scrutiny have passed.

"The problem is bigger than laws," a gay activist named Igor Iasine told me, tracing a line through his beard where neo-Nazis had broken his jaw. The last third of this sentence is so casually violent — all the more powerful for its concision.I included that in one of my early drafts for that very reason. Then, when it came time to fit the story to the space, I thought about cutting it. My editor said keep it, even though we were desperate for lines to cut. Another one of Eric’s good calls, I think. “The law is icing on the cake."

For Dmitry Kiselyov, the director of Russia's massive new state media corporation—created in December to swallow up state media entities that show any hint of autonomy—laws are not enough. He's concerned about organ donors, the possibility of a queer heart beating in a straight body.

When homosexuals die, he says, "their hearts should be burned." Did he say this to you? And how did you react? For his part, Buzz Bissinger says that, when a source tells you something crazy, “you have to remain calm, as if what you have just heard is of no particular moment at all.” Do you agree?Oh, no. I think if I’d interviewed him on my little tourist visa, my trip would have ended before I got to St. Petersburg. This is well known in Russian LGBT circles. But yes, I’ve been reporting on and spending a lot of time with people who hold very extreme and often violent views for years. I’d say you want to be more than calm; you want to be engaged. Usually that’s okay — people with extreme or violent views will often accept what they perceive to be disagreement if they’re taken seriously, as they should be. I mean that — your job as a writer is not to police the boundaries of reason and good taste, it’s to understand something of what it feels like to be, to think like, someone else. If that someone else is violent, what’s needed is empathy — not sympathy — for the devil. And then, sometimes, as with the Cossack below, you just nod politely and smile if you can, and start figuring out how to get out of there.

***

"I haven't heard of these laws, but I think it's fine," a kid named Kirill tells me at a hidden gay club called Secrets. "We don't need gay pride here. Why do we need to show our orientation?" He shrugs. He has heard of the torture videos popular online, the gangs that kidnap gays, the police that arrest gays, the babushkas with their eggs and their stones. But he hasn't seen them. He prefers not to. "Everybody wants to emigrate, but not me." He shrugs again; it's like a tic. "I love Russia. This is their experience, not mine." He says he does not know what the word closet means.

***

"Something Is Coming"

In an upper-middle-class neighborhood close to Moscow's city center, two apartments face each other. Two families, two daughters. They leave the doors open to allow easy access from one to the other.

Pavel met Irina not long after he moved to Moscow twelve years ago, and almost immediately he knew that someday he'd start a family with her. Irina felt it, too. They agreed on it one night over vodka, after a night of clubbing. The party had moved back to an apartment, where they kept drinking, Irina teasing Pavel, Pavel marveling at Irina's bold friends. She was a Muscovite; Pavel had come from one of those distant eastern cities, 4,000 miles from Moscow. Irina was six years younger, but she was his teacher, teaching him how to be silly and modern and free. They drank and danced, Pavel discovering his hips, until they both collapsed around a kitchen table and, over more vodka, Pavel tried to be funny and Irina thought he was, so she said, "Someday I would like to have a child with you." Pavel said, "I feel the same." This is so interesting. It’s all true, obviously, but stylistically it reads like the beginning of a short story, a fairy tale. Am I reading too much into this?That’s exactly how it should read. As I wrote above, this was my first idea for a lede. I wanted it to be a fairy tale. And I wrote a fair bit more than what’s here, because I was so enchanted with it, the perfection of appearances, the tragedy of hiding. To me, the story is even more painful than what’s here. Imagine this guy, 13 years old in his little provincial city, thumbing through a Russian Joy of Sex book his worker parents left for him to learn the birds and the bees, and he finds the brief little section on homosexuality, and thinks, “Good. I’m in the book.” And then, “So I’m normal. Which means I can be a dad.” And then he systematically organizes his life to make that dream come true. It’s a dream story, which is another way of saying a fairy tale, and it’s a nightmare story. Kind of like the great novelist Angela Carter’s dark fairy tales in The Bloody Chamber.

Suddenly they were sober, giddy but clear: They knew it was true. But they had to wait. To have children is a great responsibility, Pavel thought. You have to have a place to live. You have to earn. You have to have a partner you can rely on. In 2010, they were ready. Their best friends, Nik and Zoya, were having a baby, too, and they lived right next door. Their children would grow up together. Two little girls: Nik and Zoya's Kristina, and then Pavel and Irina's Emma.

Now they are one big happy family, inseparable. Pavel has always been great with kids. He likes to read the girls Russian fairy tales, and he buys DVDs of old Russian cartoons, the ones he was raised on. They watch them together. The girls toddle between the apartments through the open doors. Pavel thinks little blonde Kristina looks like an angel. Emma's darker, serious like her father. Both girls call him Papa. The children share a nanny, too, who helps the parents with light cleaning, dishes, and dusting, making sure all the family pictures are in place.

"Nobody would suspect us," Pavel says. Not even the nanny. Was there any hesitation on Pavel’s part about talking to you? What steps did you take to ensure that the details you disclose aren’t sufficient to identify him and his family?Yes, a great deal of hesitation, which I try to suggest below through the sort of skulking, Cold War spy meeting measures I had to take to get to him. But he’d reached his breaking point. My plan was to go to his house, to just sit there and watch an ordinary day unfold, but then he got called away to Siberia for his work. I wanted to stay longer so I could go, but then I wouldn’t have made my deadline, this would have missed the February issue, and probably we wouldn’t be talking about this at all. But, of course, fact checkers verified everything. We discussed ground rules at our first meeting, then, after I wrote, I checked some details with him for safety, and fact checkers double-checked and checked some more.

Pavel's secret isn't that he's gay. It's that they all are, the adults: Pavel and Nik and Irina and Zoya. Both girls have two mothers, two fathers; they have beds in both apartments. Their life together was, until recently, the fulfillment of all that Pavel had wanted, an ambition that had come to him at almost the same moment he'd realized he was gay: to be "normal." If he were normal, he thought, then he could be a father. "That," he tells me, "has been my precious dream." How did you find Pavel and his family? If through a fixer, how did you find and/or decide on a fixer? Alex the Cop’s boyfriend mentioned him, and Alex the Cop put us in touch. As for deciding on the fixer, this wouldn’t have been possible without Zhenya, about whom I wrote above.

***

Pavel agrees to talk to me because soon, he fears, the laws that have passed and the laws to come may make it impossible to hide. I'm told to meet him at a metro station. When I arrive—with my translator, Zhenya, a gay activist—no one is there. A phone call from a mutual friend directs us through the empty station, around a corner, and down some stairs to a basement restaurant, Georgian cuisine, a man in a corner with a bottle of white wine. Is this—? Yes. He smiles. We sit down.

"Something is coming," says Pavel. Why the present tense? Is this your choice or GQ house style?I don’t know if it’s GQ house style, but here it was definitely their preference. In general I almost always prefer past tense, because I can be literal-minded. But I can live with the decisions of a great editor who knows his or her readers.What it will be, he's not sure. He's worried about "special departments" in local police stations, dedicated to removing children from gay homes. He's worried about a co-worker discovering him. He is worried about blackmail. He is worried, and he does not know what else to do. He wishes he could fight, but he doesn't know how. Sign a petition? March in a parade? Pavel would never do that now. "My children," he murmurs.

"This law," he says, referring to the ban on "propaganda." "If something happens, it touches only me. And I can protect myself." But the next law: "This is about my child. My baby." If the next law passes, they will leave. The two women are doctors and Nik works in higher education, careers that will require new certification. Which means that only Pavel, a manager for the state oil company, will be able to work right away. They will be poor, but they will leave. They might have to separate, Pavel and Irina and Emma to Israel, where Irina can become a citizen, Nik and Zoya and Kristina to any country that will take them. They might have to become the couples they pretend to be. This is heartbreaking. Reminds me of that Vonnegut line — "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." — except, of course, this family has no choice.Man, you made it bleaker than Vonnegut at his bleakest. That’s about right.For now, they are staying. "We're going to teach them," he says of his two little girls, Emma and Kristina. "How to protect themselves. How to keep silence."

This is how the law really works: It's the little things that break first. Like a child who wants to call her father Papa. "Father can be only one," Pavel tells Kristina. She can never call him Papa again. If someone overheard her... No, not even at home. She must forget that was ever his name. "I can be anybody but Father," he tells the girl he used to call daughter.

***

A Dangerous Pride

In 2006, an activist named Nikolai Alekseyev organized Russia's first pride parade. Moscow's mayor forbade it; he called for "concrete measures" to stop it. On May 27, Alekseyev and a few comrades approached Russia's Tomb of the Unknown Soldier with flowers. The tomb is a memorial to the millions of Soviet troops killed in what Russians call the "war against fascism."

The little group found the gate closed. Before it stood a line of police and squads of the OMON, elite riot cops in boots and blue camo and black berets. And a crowd, chanting, "Russia without faggots!" One man, in a fit of apparent generosity, screamed, "You have your nightclubs!" Another began shouting about his grandfather, who had fought in the war. Alekseyev shouted back that his own grandfather died fighting. Then the police arrested Alekseyev, and the crowd took the others, and the Tomb was preserved, safe from gay roses.

In 2007, about three dozen pride marchers tried to deliver a letter signed by more than forty members of the European Parliament to the mayor of Moscow, asking for permission to hold the parade. The mayor called it a "work of Satan." Among those beaten was an Italian parliamentarian.

In 2008, activists applied to hold marches across the city, all denied, and then assembled as a flash mob for moments in front of a statue of Tchaikovsky.

They tried the same trick in 2009, but the police were ready.

2010: Success! Thirty marchers marched for ten minutes before they were captured.

2011: Three minutes, maybe four.

2012: Moscow officially banned gay-pride parades for one hundred years. I love this stripped-down timeline. The less information you provide, the more powerful it is. How did you arrive at that mini-structure?I spent a long time learning as much as I could about the history of queer activism in Russia. But here’s the thing: As important as activism is, I find it a little boring. I support it, admire activists, etc. — but the story tends to always be the same. So I thought about how I could capture the stunted experience of trying to be an LGBT rights activist in Putin’s Russia, and it occurred to me that I could represent it in stunted form. I love these kinds of lists, as a literary device. Sort of like listing prose poems. And I mean both sense of the word listing. This section, to me, falls down, sputters out, which is what I wanted to convey.

Last year: The police were waiting. They brought trucks fitted with metal cages.

***

At Bunker one night, a fat man named Yuri, pink-cheeked and furry-chested, leans in close, over my notebook. Not threatening; frightened. "No more parades!" he says. "No more marches!" Yes, he would like to have rights. "But this is Russia!" He's shaking an open palm on either side of my face, making sure I write this down: "I will be beaten!" He points to a teenager. "He will be beaten. All of us will be beaten! And we will go to the police, and they will just smile." At what point in the writing process did you decide to include these short, italicized interludes? And what prompted this?Really, the constraints of space. All these club scenes were sections of their own. But I had to cut a lot. The story had been commissioned short, at 5,000 words. It’s closer to 8,000. But I wrote around 14,000. So before we even started editing seriously, I had to get rid of a lot. The club scenes went. But then I realized we had lost what I saw as an essential aspect of the story, the way oppression actually, you know, oppresses. Some people, like Pavel, maintain their dignity even as they hide; others, like Elena, below, are genuine heroes. But not everybody can be strong all the time. Some, like Yuri, are broken. I met a lot of those people at the clubs. So as we were approaching the end, already in pages, I said, “Hey, these guys have to come back.” But there was no room. Then we hit on a solution: We cut a sidebar timeline (apologies to the editor who’d spent time compiling it) and studded the piece with these little vignettes. I think of them as a kind of countercurrent, a reminder that such struggles come at a terrible cost, and not everybody survives them intact. Structurally, I like that kind of fragmentation, that kind of subtle disagreement within a story. That feels truer to life than a seamless narrative.

***

Elena Kostyuchenko knew she would be beaten. It was how hard she went down that surprised her. Not immediately. When the fist connected with her skull, she fell, yes, but then she stood again and raised her rainbow flag. The crowd was silent. Their mouths were open as if screaming, but there was no sound. Her hearing was gone. Then the police grabbed her, and Elena's first gay-pride parade was over.

Elena is 27. "I'm not very tall; I weigh fifty kilos. I can't overthrow this world," she says. But she is trying. It took months, hospitalizations, five medications "to widen the veins in my brain," but most of her hearing is back now, and there's an app on her computer that allows her to jack movies up to 150 percent of what you might consider tolerable volume. She wears her hair in a short black shag with high spiky bangs, and she has big pale blue eyes that lighten in to the pupils. Her voice is droll, her manner deadpan, her presence at first unassuming; I talked to her for a couple of hours before I learned how much violence she's endured since that first pride event in '11, and she never did get around to telling me that when she was 9 she was given up for dead, warehoused in a cancer ward for kids her provincial hospital deemed "unlikely" to survive. So when did you learn this?She has a Livejournal where she records thoughts more personal than those of her journalism (see immediately below). When I got home I spent an afternoon reading it with a Russian translator here in Vermont: Tatyana Bills. She’s a liberal-minded person, writing a masters’ thesis on modern Russian history, but even she was stunned by the suffering that came through Elena’s prose, never for an instant self-pitying. We were both moved to tears by her account of her time in the cancer ward, which she wrote after one of her beatings, to remind herself of the Christian children who would bring her flowers there. She wanted to remember not to hate the people who’d beaten her and her girlfriend in the name of Christ.

She and Zhenya and I meet at a dull little café near her metro station. Grayish pink walls, two TV screens playing Western pop videos from the '80s and '90s—there's a lot of Wham!—and a fluorescent-lit smog of cigarette smoke. Elena's a reporter, hard-nosed. "Prostitutes, addicts, these are my people," she says. She has fainting spells, but she wills herself to keep standing: "A journalist shouldn't faint." In the nine years she's been working for her paper, Novaya Gazeta—the last major opposition publication—three of its reporters have been murdered, including Anna Politkovskaya, shot four times in her apartment elevator in 2006, the killer still unknown. "I'm lucky," Elena says. She means alive.

She knows some English, but she speaks mostly in Russian. Explaining her view of Russia's rising homophobia, she dictates to Zhenya: "Putin needs external enemies and internal enemies. The external enemies are the U.S. and Europe. Internal enemies, they had to think about. The ethnic topic is dangerous. Two wars in the Caucasus, a third one, nobody knows how it would end. Jews? After Hitler, it's not kosher. We—" she waves a hand at herself and Zhenya—"are the ideal. We are everywhere. We don't look different, but we are." She inhales. She's one of those smokers who hold your eyes when they're smoking. Cigarettes disappear into her lungs. She says, in English: "It's our turn. Just our turn." Was this opinion shared by anyone else you interviewed?A lot of people were even more fatalistic than that, but I have to admit I never asked anybody whether they felt it was their turn.She exhales. She has a pleasant smile.

She met her girlfriend four and a half years ago, at a lesbian movie night in a club. The movie was Lost and Delirious, translated into Russian as They're Not Gonna Get You. Mischa Barton, prep-school lesbians. They both thought it was a little childish. Elena liked Anya's seriousness and her broad grin; she liked her earnestness and her calm. Their love was quick and deep and strong. Soon Elena was thinking about a home together. "Then I was thinking, ‘I have health issues. I'm hospitalized once in a while. I can be unconscious—who will come and make medical decisions for me?' Then, at one moment, I realize Anya is the one I want to have my children with." That's when she got scared. "Before that, I didn't feel like I was discriminated against. Then Anya appeared."

She'd reported on pride events in 2009. She found it pitiful: a handful of queers. "Why does nobody want to defend my rights?" she'd ask. "Why does nobody want to fight for my happy future?"

The morning of the pride demonstrations in 2011, Elena wrote a post on her blog that would, in the days that followed, go viral. It was very simple: "Why I Am Going to Gay Pride." She was going for Anya. They would wear silly T-shirts—i love her, with arrows. Elena made a sign that said hate is boring. She put on a black raincoat, Anya an olive green one, to hide their shirts until they got there. "I was scared that at the moment I wouldn't be able to unzip my raincoat, that people would somehow feel we were lesbians, that we would be beaten before raising the flag."

There is video of the man attacking Elena. His name is Roman Lisunov. Not an activist—a family man. Did you attempt to interview Lisunov?Yeah, without luck. After I went home I got in touch with Elena’s lawyer, who sent me a few legal and medical documents, which Zhenya translated for me. Then I wanted to talk to Lisunov, but it didn’t work. I felt confident in this, though, because it’s represented in legal documents and in video and in multiple accounts."Just a simple Russian guy," as homophobes here like to say. Elena's flag flickers, and then hurtling from behind comes Lisunov's fist, taking Elena's skull flat across his knuckles, just above her left ear. In his defense, he will tell the police that he is baptized. That's it. Good enough! The detective assigned to the case will ask her lawyer, "Why would she go to the street? What protection does she want now?"

***

They caught Anya on the metro. "They know our faces really well," says Elena. They know all the activists. "They know Anya is my girlfriend." Three surrounded her on the escalator going down. One put Anya in a headlock to hold her still, then smashed his fist up into her face once, twice, three times, four, five. Anya counted.

This was after a kiss-in protest at the Duma last winter. It wasn't like they hadn't been warned. Some neo-Nazis had posted instructions online: "The guys, we beat them until they can't stand up anymore. The women, we break their faces." But the men in the metro weren't Nazis. Their leader seemed to be a man named Dmitry Enteo, a one-man would-be Pussy Riot of the right who leads an "action art" group called God's Will, linked to the Russian Orthodox Church. Like performance art, Enteo will tell me later, only, you know, more real. He's kind of a hipster.

The kiss-ins were Elena's idea. She'd been complaining to a friend. "I am tired of standing there with a poster," she said. Well, said her friend, what would you rather be doing? Easy question! "Kissing Anya."

Announcing the event on her blog, she wrote: "A kiss only concerns two people.... It does not need permission from deputies of the Duma." And: "How long should you kiss? However long you like."

Anyone was invited to join them. "I don't like being an activist," she says. But what choice does she have? "It's a long time until there will be some kind of magical Russian Harvey Milk who will defend my rights. I have been waiting, but he is not coming."

The LGBT movement splits along two philosophical lines, she says. "One of them says we need to work through education and enlightenment. The other says we should stop trying to get everyone to like us. I respect the educational approach. It takes a lot of time. I don't have so much time. We want to have children. I need my rights now." Her demands are modest: marriage, kids, a mortgage. Also, if possible, she would like not to be murdered. This is a perfect, horribly funny sentence.Thanks. I struggled with it, because to me it sounded so much better if I wrote “…she would like not to be killed.” “Murdered,” with its wobbly syllables, kind of stepped on the joke. But I really wanted her great Harvey Milk point below, too, and she said “killed.” Your subject always has first dibs on the best words.She doesn't want to be Harvey Milk: "Harvey Milk was killed!"

"Take a plane," her mother begs her. Emigrate. "Two hours, you will be in another world, where you will be loved and needed." But Elena can't leave. So now her mother calls her after every action. "Are you in a police van?" she asks. "If I say yes, she says, ‘Thank God.' " Better a jailed daughter than a dead one.

***

The day of the fourth and last kiss-in, the day the law passed, June 2013, the haters tried a new weapon. It gives even Elena pause. She stubs out a cigarette, starts a fresh one, and begins to speak. Zhenya listens. "The homophobes...," he says, starting his translation. Then he stops. "Zhenya?" I ask. Elena continues. Zhenya is nodding, but he says nothing. His face is flushing.

He's 26, grew up in Vladivostok, was beaten, saw his straight friends beaten for trying to protect him. He became an exile at the first chance, living abroad for five years. He worked for a human-rights organization, writing reports on the escalating violence in Russia. It wasn't enough. After the law passed, he came home. "To fight," he says.

"Zhenya?" I say again. He's staring at the wall. Elena says, "He is crying." Have you ever stopped an interview because of the emotional toll it was having on a source? What do you generally do when a source becomes emotional?No, I’d never stop an interview, though I’d respect it if a subject did. It’s not my place to tell people what they can handle, especially when it’s with regard to their own lives. If a source doesn’t become “emotional” — in some sense — then I look for a way to end the conversation. Data I can get over the phone. The problem here wasn’t that Zhenya was crying. I broke down, too. I’ve never done that before. Ever. I struggled with writing about it for a long time, and while I’m proud of that struggle — I’ll paste it in, if it’s of interest as what you work on for a long time and then cut — I think for the context of this 7,600-word story, it was right to end it where we did. But this is what I wrote, to speak of my own tears, and where they came from, and to recover:

“The homophobes--” he says, starting his translation. Then he stops. Elena continues, very calmly

“Zhenya?” I ask. He takes out his cigarettes, fiddles with them, puts them down, and looks away.

Zhenya grew up in Vladivostock, learned English from Madonna videos—he began memorizing her songs when he was seven--was beaten, saw his straight friends beaten for trying to protect him, cried “this fucking country, this fucking country,” and left at the first chance. He lived abroad for five years. He met Igor working for an organization called Frontline Defenders, writing reports on the escalating violence in Russia. Not enough, said Igor. Come back, he told Zhenya. You’re needed. To fight. “For the motherland,” Igor joked, ironic and earnest at the same time. Zhenya returned. To fight; for Igor. Maybe it was love. So hard to say. They never did. Instead they spoke of the struggle, of demonstrations, of crooked noses.

Elena has stopped talking. Zhenya is still looking away.

She laughs quietly.  I realize we’ve been listening to this soft laugh like this all night. What is it? It is not unkindly. It’s stoic, absurd; generous and sheltering. When I think back to this moment I will I have an image of Elena putting her hand on Zhenya’s, but that’s not possible; he’s cupped his around his temple, and Elena sits with one arm folded around her, holding her cigarette with the other.

Zhenya takes a deep breath. With no inflection, he resumes his translation, telling me the story that had stopped him. On the day of the last kiss-in, the day the law passed, the mob tried something new. Action art. A mockery. A lesson. They brought their children. Not rocks; their children. The children were their weapon. Even Igor, who always fought, who maybe likes fighting, was helpless. Who would hit a child? The children, adolescent boys, 12, 13, moved in packs from activist to activist, one by one. It was a day of beatings.

It takes me a moment. “Their kids?”

Elena smiles. “Yeah.”

“We couldn’t fight them,” says Zhenya, finishing his translation. And that’s it; he’s done. Because everybody knows 12-year-old boys can be real shits, these are the same fights they have with each other in the schoolyard, but the hope is that they’ll grow up, that their parents will teach them. The hope is always that it will get better. He moans and starts to shake. Elena speaks to him quietly. The only word I understand is “Igor.” Zhenya looks up. He snorts a little laugh. “She says, ‘Igor does not cry.’” It’s not a rebuke; it’s permission. Because maybe we need some permission, after all, people do, from each other. Elena looks at me. She says in English, “You are crying, too.” She smiles. “I think it is because music.”

At which point I should mention that Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” the long, haunted version Jeff Buckley recorded before he drowned, has been playing throughout this account of the fourth Duma kiss-in. It’s a real weeper, that song. “Wit and jaundiced comedy,” Salman Rushdie describes it, “desire and loss.” Buckley said it was about an orgasm. I remember when I moved in you, / and the holy dove was moving too, /and every breath we drew was Hallelujah!  Say it softly four times. Hallelujah, that’s the refrain. You’ve heard it before; it’s in a lot of movies and it’s popular at weddings and funerals. If we had chosen this song, you’d have to roll your eyes. But there it is, Buckley’s high lonesome tenor and that quiet guitar like light breaking on water, the song we listened to between the words Zhenya could and could not say. I wish you could have heard it with us. Because hymns—and standards, which is what this really is, like “My Funny Valentine,” or “I Will Always Love You”—the way they work, when they work, is that they sound like they’ve always been there, waiting, only suddenly they’re breathtakingly, perfectly intimate to you. They change the way you feel time. There’s a word for this, kairos: a moment that returns again and again and yet is its own with every passing. A moment that is always becoming.

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="300"] Elena and Zhenya (photo by Jeff Sharlet)[/caption]

Sort of like this: I’d asked Igor who he’d been kissing with his bloody lip and his broken nose, and he’d said, “I don’t know! It doesn’t matter.”

Or like this, something Elena’s friend said on the way to the Duma for a kiss-in, considering not the stones or the fists but the fact that she did not know who she would kiss, she did not have an Anya: “Kissing there is like praying,” she decided.

Or this: At the last kiss-in, the day the law passed, an activist named Alexey Davydov wrote Elena to ask if it might be possible to push the kiss-in from noon to one. Davydov was one of the founders of Moscow Pride. At a 2011 protest, police shattered his arm so completely that he spent a month in the hospital. There, say his friends, began an infection that would lead to kidney failure. That was just the problem, Davydov wrote Elena; he had dialysis that morning from nine to noon. To attend he would have to turn off the machine an hour early. Elena wanted to help. “But noon is when the deputies will be there.” He understood. He went to the kiss-in, and the Duma passed the law, and then he became the first person charged with breaking it. For holding a sign outside a school that read, “Being gay is normal.” He hoped to take the case all the way to the Constitutional Court. This past December, the Court ruled in favor of the law. Davydov wasn’t there; he died of complications in September, 36 years old.

Who did he kiss that day in June? What did it feel like? We cannot ask him; that moment is gone.

He composes himself and continues the translation of the story that overwhelmed him. On the day of the last kiss-in, the mob tried something new. They brought their children. Action art. A mockery. A lesson. Not rocks; the children were their weapon. Who would hit a child? Adolescent boys, 12, 13, moved in packs from activist to activist, one by one, throwing fists, kicking. It was a day of beatings.

It takes me a moment. "Their kids?"

Elena smiles. "Yeah."

"We couldn't fight them," says Zhenya, finishing his translation. He moans and starts to shake. And that's it; now he's broken. Because everybody knows 12-year-old boys can be real shits, these are the same fights they have with one another in the schoolyard, but the hope is that they'll grow up, that their parents will teach them. The hope is always that it will get better.

***

At a club called Ice, I befriend Why “befriend”? Was this a different relationship than with your other sources?They’re all my friends! Well, not really. But some are – Zhenya’s a friend, and I certainly hope to see Elena again – and some are for the duration of our time together. I’m not a news reporter. There is no “view from nowhere” for me. I talk to people until I find someone I can talk with. “With” is the operational term, there. As subjects I’m looking for people with whom I can have a conversation that’ll engage us both, not someone I can lob questions at. This was another long scene I cut, but we spent a long evening, at two clubs, with Nikolai, mainly because for awhile we enjoyed each other’s company (and I was paying for beers). He liked telling stories, he liked bragging, and, it turned out, he liked interviewing other people, too. At Secrets, where I met Kirill, above, Nikolai got into the process, recruiting people to come and sit at my table with me and interrupting when he felt they weren’t being honest with me or with themselves. a long-necked hustler with bright green eyes, wearing a white NYPD cap. His name is Nikolai. He says he kissed his first boy at 14 but that it took him until he was 17 to realize he was gay. He was small in school and he fought often, but he was perhaps a little slow to grasp his social condition; he didn't understand why other boys beat him. By the time he got it, he'd learned how to beat them. Such was his coming-out story.

He was happy being gay, though. He liked knowing what he wanted. The problem was his mother. Gay she could handle, but she wanted grandkids. She made him a deal: an apartment in exchange for grandchildren. Plural. Minimum two.

So Nikolai did what he had to do: "I married a woman. I am a father!" He beams. He has delivered the goods: a girl, 1½ years old; a boy, 4 months. His mother rewarded him with the apartment, and he came out to his wife.

"I don't think there is homophobia in Russia," he says, "because I always carry a gun."

The logic takes me a moment. He means they can't hurt him, because he will hurt them first. His father, a "criminal," he says, found Nikolai on a Grindr-like app once. He said he was coming to kill Nikolai. Nikolai wrote back: "I'm waiting for you." His father never came. Nikolai is waiting. He taps one side of his head and then the other, to show the path of the bullet he'll put through his father's skull. Did you ask Nikolai what his father was doing on Grindr?Right! That’s the big question. Yeah, I asked. Who can say?

***

"Violence Is Acceptable"

There are three faces of homophobia in Russia: that of the state, that of the Orthodox Church, that of the fringe. A fringe in what sense? With backing of the state and the church, the homophobia seems awfully mainstream.Thugs who aren’t officially sanctioned even as they’re winked at by the state and the church and given leeway in which to operate. Obsessive people. For that matter, you might call them the true believers – for the state and the church, homophobia is a useful political tool; for these “fringe” enforcers, it’s a cause, a way of life. And yet they're one—a kind of Trinity. The state passes laws; the church blesses them; the fringe puts them into action. The state is the mind of hate, the church, now, its heart; the fringe is made up of its many hands. Some use the courts; some use fists. There are street fighters, and there are polished men and women who attend international conferences on "family values."

Timur Isaev uses cameras. He likes to watch.

That's how his activism began, he tells me one night in St. Petersburg. As young men, he and his friends liked to hunt and beat gays. "For fun," he says. But then he became a father. Like many parents, he worried about the Internet. Late at night, he studied it. He watched YouTube. "Girls," he says, "young girls, undressing themselves." Using a special "tool for developers," he says, he was able to discern that the other people watching these videos at 2 a.m. were homosexual men. "The analysis of their accounts," he says, "showed that they also watched young boys." That's when Timur realized he must become an activist. For the children.

Timur bought a video camera, a very good one. He began documenting LGBT life. At first, demonstrations; then he began idling outside activists' offices, filming and photographing people coming and going. He showed me one of his galleries: dozens, maybe hundreds of faces. Some he has photographed himself, others he finds online. He is a great policeman of VK, Russia's version of Facebook. These days he stays up late at night searching for homosexual teachers. It's kind of his specialty.

I've sought Timur out to confirm a story I'd been told the night before at LaSky, from a former schoolteacher named Olga Bakhaeva. She said she'd lost her job because Timur, posing as a concerned mother, had outed her.

"Is Olga's story true?" I ask Timur.

"Yes!" he says, flattered. In fact, he is working on another teacher now. She's going to be fired next week, he hopes. "We usually fire good shots—good informational shots," he says. Olga was his sixth. He takes out his tablet to shows me the others. He loves social media. He poses for a picture, holding up a photograph of Olga he found online. It's a trophy.

How does he do it? He has connections. In my notebook he scribbles a list of names and numbers, a Who's Who of right-wing St. Petersburg, including Vitaly Milonov, the author of the city's anti-gay legislation. Timur makes calls when he senses something suspicious. Just last night he had another success. There was a support group for LGBT families. He'd been stalking it online. He had information that there would be a minor there. He'd arranged a raid.

It was true. As it happens, I had been at that meeting. The police had been right outside the door, held at bay because they didn't have the right warrant. Inside, there was a 17-year-old boy talking about coming out to his mother. For this, we all could have gone to prison. What were the security concerns for you as a journalist? What precautions did you take? I’m not too big into precautions, because I generally figure if someone wants to spy on you, they can. When I was reporting on similar issues in Uganda state surveillance was really helpful — I’d talk to one official, and some rival would call and say, “I hear you’ve been talking to so-and-so! Come to my office in the morning and I’ll tell you the real story.” Once, a guy broke in by accident on a phone call home. “Don’t mind me,” he said. “Just go on as if I’m not here.” And if people really want to hurt you, they can probably do that, too. So the best precaution is to keep people talking, which is what I try to do. That said, I also wasted a couple hours photographing every page of my notebooks and emailing it to myself, in case my notebooks were taken. They weren’t. If I had known what the meeting at the end of the story was going to be like, I probably wouldn’t have gone, and I definitely would not have asked my translator, Tatiana, to come. In the end, it was fine, but it definitely could have gone another way, and I’m no hero. The stories I’m most interested in revolve around the nuances of expression, not my ability to dodge bullets. (Which is nil. I’d make a terrible war correspondent.)

In America, I'd dismiss Timur as a crank. In Russia, he seems everywhere to be at the center of events. He scrolls through his photos to show me something special—LaSky, the site of Dmitry Chizhevsky's shooting, with multiple views of the area outside. Timur says the gays did it to themselves. To make Russia look bad. See, he says, "thirteen surveillance cameras." He has documented them. "Here," he says, pointing to a picture, "there is a very good camera. You couldn't have gone unnoticed." He points to another. "Can't get past this camera...." It is impossible, he says. "No sane person would go there with a gun. You would have to go there without a mask and put it on there." Which is what happened. He knows how it could have been done: "I have blueprints of the building." Seems like a good time to ask: How was this fact checked? Did the checker speak Russian?They worked with Russian translators, as I understand it. The fact checking seemed very solid and nimble to me. I love fact checking, even if it’s not always a pleasurable experience. I teach it to my students as not only a pragmatic practice but an aesthetic one, one that forces you to think more deeply about what you mean by “nonfiction.”

He moves on, showing more pictures. He slides the tablet across to me, reaching over and flicking through the images, talking about men "who are not worthy of the nationalist name. People like this..." He looks down at the tablet. It is not a picture of a person; it is a picture of an air gun, a pistol, still in the box, on top of it a jar of little metal balls. "Ah," he says. He didn't mean to show that one. I'm just as stunned. "A gift for my son," he says quickly, searching for photographs of the boy. He wants to prove the innocence of the gun.

Timur knows what I'm thinking. He says, "If I wanted to shoot someone, I would think of my safety first." Proof, he claims, that he is not the man who shot Dmitry Chizhevsky in the eye. Too risky.

Besides, says Timur, he is a peaceful man now. He giggles.

***

At St. Petersburg's biggest gay club, I meet a bartender in tight jean shorts and a skimpy turquoise tank top who whispers to me, "I'm not gay." He pretends, for the job. In fact, he says, "I'm a homophobe." He struggles not to hit his customers. But he wishes he could change. "I don't want to hate anymore," he says. He glances at a man who's been giving him the eye. He shudders. "It's not working." How did this come up in conversation? I assume you didn’t ask a bartender at a gay bar if he was gay.I think he wanted to hit on my translator, Tatiana. This was another big scene, and one I thought was pretty funny. He was trying to hit on Tatiana. Just to unsettle him and see what he’d do, I hit on him. Here’s what I couldn’t fit in, right before this vignette:

…He has heard that there were several straight bartenders before him. “They were turned gay,” he says, bringing us another round. It’s not inevitable—he points to the other bartender, a beautiful femme man named Igor, with icy blonde hair and slinky abstract black ink tattoos winding around his lithe, mostly naked torso—and says he’s straight, too. Igor is sucking on a red lollipop. He smiles at Tanya. Igor and Pasha are standing strong. But it can happen. There are so many of them, Pasha says, waving to the crowd, just starting to build at around 1:30. Sober, nobody bothers him. But then they begin drinking. “It is hard to keep calm and not hit when they are caressing me.”

I stroke his arm. To test him. “Like this?”

Pasha twitches. “Joker,” he says. “Tonight I am not free.”

I tell him that if his customers knew he was straight, he might get bigger tips. Some might see him as a challenge. “Forbidden fruit,” I say.

“Too risky,” says Pasha.

“Tell him I think he’s tempted,” I say to Tanya.

“Nyet!” he says, rearing back. “I feel aggression toward them.” He pounds the bar. Then he remembers himself, cocks his hip, and flips his wrist for safe measure. He could never be gay, he goes on, and offers as evidence the facts that he has two older brothers who wouldn’t speak to him again if he was, and that in a school play he was forced to play the part of a girl and he hated it, and that on a vacation to Thailand he thought the ladyboys were the prettiest of all but he never touched one. Plus, he has a girlfriend.

“What’s she like?” I ask.

“Blonde,” he says. “B cup.” He doesn’t love her, he confesses, but he has needs. She doesn’t satisfy them. They are needs of the heart, he says. That’s why he works in Central Station.

“Wait,” I say, “so you are gay?”

No, he says, shaking his head, tired of explaining. He means he wants, in his life, to be tender. He thought he might learn here…

***

We are walking down a long dark street on the outskirts of St. Petersburg on our way to a meeting Timur has arranged with Anatoly Artyukh—pronounced "R-2." Artyukh is the big man in Timur's circles, the founder of the St. Petersburg branch of Narodny Sobor—"People's Council"—a national umbrella group for hundreds of organizations dedicated to preserving Russia's "traditional values." It accepts all kinds: skinheads, Cossacks, veterans, Orthodox crusaders, scary squadrons of angry mothers, and more than a few politicians—Artyukh himself is an "aide" Why is this in quotes?Because it seemed to me to be a title of convenience to explain the back-and-forth between a public figure and a controversial guy like Artyukh, who in disposition is not an “aide” to anyone – it’s hard to imagine a room in which he’s not the alpha.to Vitaly Milonov.

When we get to the backdoor apartment-block address we've been given, we're taken into the basement, a rec room that is filling up for a meeting. On the agenda: developing "new tools" to defeat the homosexualists. A lot of old guys, sour with broad pickled faces. Some young guys in track pants; a couple of babushkas in leather. There's a man dressed like a Cossack, like an extra from the big pogrom number in Fiddler on the Roof. One of the last to arrive is Artyukh, a gray-black widow's-peaked buzz cut squaring off a face like Sean Connery plus fifty pounds. Leather jacket, shoulders padded, black suit beneath, black shirt unbuttoned to air out a few iron curls. He says this is a private club but he'll receive us upstairs.

Two floors up, Artyukh settles behind a giant desk. One of Artyukh's lieutenants, exceedingly friendly despite the boss's open hostility, directs us to our seats.

Artyukh leans back, fat fingers knitted across his stomach. Over his right shoulder there's the double-headed-eagle flag of czarist Russia; on his desk there's a bouquet of four flags from the old Confederacy. "Gift from American friends," he says. "We consider them brothers." In fact, many of the People's Council's initiatives—including the "research" in which the anti-propaganda law is rooted—are taken from the curdled theories of the American right. "When people read it, they are shocked! They understand the gays are not some harmless people."

Artyukh says he is afraid blood will be shed. That's why he's for the full criminalization of homosexuality: "to protect the people from being hurt. The homosexual people." They have a choice: let the law walk them back into the closet, or war. He will accept either. "When there is war, you can see the enemy."

Violence is justified?

"Yes, of course violence is acceptable."

"What about actions like Timur's?" I mention the incident at LaSky. "You know about this?"

He does a perfect Tony Soprano, that little pressed-lip half smile with a head nod. "Yes," he says.

"Was it the right way to fight?"

Artyukh glances at his lieutenant and arches an eyebrow. "Timur is Muslim," he says. "Muslim people are heated guys." He thumps his chest. "Fire in their hearts. Cruel men."

He nods. He feels he has said it well. "I only pray for him not to cross the line of the law. I would not want to have to get him out of jail. But we support his activities."

"This confrontation," I say, referring to the shooting, "is that crossing the line?"

"It is," says Artyukh. But only slightly. "If the government doesn't act, other methods will be used. There are going to be fists, and then there are going to be shots." This is good because the exchange not only documents attitude but also spins the story forward — we get a hint of what’s to come. How do you generally approach section kickers? Feel? That’s a lame answer, I know, but you write and write and write and at some point you get to a line and you say, “there.”

***

The last man we talk to that night is the Cossack. Or rather, we listen. Artyukh's lieutenant fetches him for us. He's a big man with sallow eyes and a mighty mustache, his head shaved on the sides and a sweep of black hair falling over his shoulders in a style traditional to Cossacks for hundreds of years before Canadians invented the mullet. Is that true? I see here that mullets may date back as far as the sixth century.Sigh. You can’t trust a Cossack in a uniform. (In fact, I know nothing of mullet history. It’s true that he claimed his hairstyle was ancient, but I included this detail, and Canadians, because I thought it was funny.)His uniform is black with red piping, cinched at the cuffs and above his big black boots.

"Homosexualism is a war against Cossacks," he tells us. So by rights homosexuals should be slaughtered. He recounts some of the ways Cossacks murder homosexuals. Historically speaking. "Of course, I cannot say this officially." He cracks his first smile. "Cossacks," he says, "are known for their humor." For instance, gay men "like to put their cocks in the ass, so we put the shit on their cocks for them." In fact, he says, sometimes they hold a man down and smear shit over his whole body. He chortles, waits for me to laugh. Do I not think this is funny? What were you feeling at that moment?Cold. My whole body was sweating. This is a very truncated scene — by this point we’d been there for I think close to five hours, and we were exhausted, which probably helped us keep our calm. We were numb. But scared, too. I’m not brave. My strength as a reporter, if I have one, is being aware of my fear and using it to be more alert.

"Tell me about your outfit," I say brightly. He shows me his whip, weighted with a sharp lead block. He puts its thick wooden grip in my hand.A strength of this horrifying detail is that you constrained it to one line — you didn’t tell the reader what it was like to hold the whip. How did you arrive at that choice?]Fear. Writing this felt deadening. As in a real, awful, deadening sense, not like, “Oh, man, this is boring.” It was flat and I knew it should be flat because that’s what I could salvage from it intact. The flatness, I knew, might convey the fear."Feel," he says. He unsheathes a wide black blade as long as my forearm. He says nothing about the handgun at his side.

"What kind of gun is that?" I ask.

"A good one," he says. He releases the clip to show me it's loaded. He pushes the clip back in. He points the gun at me. Very casual. Just in my direction. Cossack humor. Do I not think this is funny? I lift my notebook off the table. It's time to go. He reaches across and thumps it down. "Pishi," he says. "Write."

***

The Future, Vandalized

In Russia, things are not falling apart, they're coming together, isolated attacks developing into a pattern, the id of the street ever more in line with the Kremlin's growing ego. My last day in Russia began with the news that Cossacks had vandalized two theaters in the night, neither of them gay but guilty of showing plays with homosexual characters. One got graffiti; the other got a bloody pig's head at its door. Humor. Russia's first queer film festival was to open that night—Gus Van Sant was coming to show Milk—but it was shut down by a bomb threat. In the afternoon, Artyukh just happened to be having a coffee at a café next to the theater. He got into an argument with a gay activist. Artyukh ripped out the man's earring.

By then I was with Timur again, pressing him about the picture of the gun and about Artyukh's words. Were they true? Was he a "heated man"? Timur was furious. He called Artyukh and put him on speaker phone. Artyukh declared Timur innocent. He declared me a liar. He said he had never heard of the attack at LaSky. Timur grew angrier. What right did I have to dispute him? "Whoever did this"—shooting Dmitry—"it's not your place to judge!" He said I was a guest in his country; he said I have no rights. A warning. My flight was midmorning, but I left and went back to my hotel and packed and went to the airport. It was 4 a.m.What was going through your mind? What kind of conversations did you have with your fixer about what you should do?Oh, my fixers were all queer or queer-friendly translators — none of them had ever met people like this before. They were freaked out. I didn’t think Timur or his friends would try anything, but I wasn’t as confident as I usually am, and my “precaution” — keep ’em talking — had come to an end because I’d decided to press Timur to see what he’d reveal. So I thought it was time to go. When I got off the plane in New York, I found a whole bunch of text messages from Timur, threatening lawsuits and sending me disturbing pictures. So I think on balance it was good call.

I tried not to think about Timur. Instead, I thought about a boy I'll call Peter. He's 8 years old, the son of a lesbian activist, Sasha, and her partner, Ksenia. I'd met Sasha at the LGBT organization where she worked. Peter was watching a cartoon, waiting for his mother. He invited me home with them. Peter's skinny and pale, with rosy lips and big bright eyes, and he does not like to stop moving. As we walked, he bounced back and forth between us, a game he called "white blood cell." At what point in the reporting did you meet Peter?Toward the end. He really saved my soul.

He was born HIV-positive. He's healthy, but when Sasha met him, volunteering at an orphanage, he weighed half as much as a 3½ year-old boy should, and his hair was falling out. The only word he knew was Russian for "Don't do that." How did you verify this?I didn’t. I love fact checking, but I find repugnant the kind of fact checking that challenges children to “prove” stories on which nothing but their memory is riding.The nurses told Sasha not to touch him. Not because of the HIV. It was love they were concerned with. If he received any, he'd want more, and none would be forthcoming. He was aging out of the ward, and now they were going to send him to another one, more hopeless still, where he would be thrown in with lost causes of all ages. And there he would remain, as long as he remained.

So Sasha took him. She lied to the orphanage, claimed she was single, and took him home to Ksenia, and they hugged him and told him they would love him, even though they didn't know him. Six months later, he said the second word of his life: his name. He has a name. It breaks my heart that I can't tell it to you. Tell us about this line. It’s one of the lines that’s been quoted on Twitter and perhaps elsewhere. I can tell you where and when I was when I wrote it. It was December 11, around 9:30 pm. I was exhausted, physically and emotionally, and there wasn’t time to tell Peter and Sasha’s story in the fullness that I wanted, so I decided to take a break and see the premiere of The Desolation of Smaug. I’d pulled over to get some gas when I got a text from my pal Quince Mountain, with whom I talk about writing a great deal. I’d been reading him and his girlfriend Blair Braverman, also a writer, sections as I worked on them. For me, every big story needs a listener. I like being that person for friends, and I like friends who’ll be that person for me. Anyway, Q wrote that he was really interested in a line about how, to the Cossack, either you whip the gays or you are gay, and he wondered whether I was going to tell the reader whether or not I’m gay. Not in the story — that seemed obnoxious. But when threatened by fascists, I could and did talk about my wife without having to lie. And yet that’s not true: If you say something just to save yourself, is that really true, regardless of the facts? That’s the problem with fascism: It makes truth impossible. Because to the fascist, you’re not saying it because you want to talk about somebody you love but because you’re afraid. The real truth was that I wish I had the courage to be queer in the face of that Cossack. I wish I had the courage of Elena Kostyuchenko, always defiant. I have the excuse of the story — I have to get the story — but the truth is I’d have liked to have told the truth, which is that I don’t whip gays, so yes, I’m gay. But I was afraid of the whip. Anyway, this all came out in conversation with Q — by text! — and then I decided I wasn’t going to go watch some hobbit movie. I turned around and started driving back up Route 10, thinking about Elena, and Peter and Sasha, and just how fucking brave they are. I was pretty upset, and frustrated at the thought that I might not be able to convey that: the courage of Elena, the goodness of Sasha and Peter. Which is when that line popped into my head. I pulled over on a little overlook above a dam and sat there in my car in the dark writing that line, and the last lines of the story.

My last day, in between the pig's head and the bomb threat, I met Sasha and Peter at the park, where Sasha told me about growing up in a city without a name, one of the Soviet Union's secret closed military cities, left off the map and known only by a number. Sasha is built like an elf, with freckles and red hair pulled back in a ponytail. She was a shy and dutiful girl until she saw Ksenia on the day of her college exams. They marveled over each other. Neither of them knew what to call this feeling. They had never heard of lesbians. Literally—they did not know the word. When they kissed, Sasha wondered if they were inventing something new and wonderful. They knew they could tell no one.

But Sasha's mother confronted her one night. "What do you have with this girl?" Sasha, who had never defied her parents, who had never defied anyone, was speechless for a moment. She had no words. Then she found one. "Everything."

Peter knows his mothers are lesbians. What he does not know is that people hate them. Soon, says Sasha, they will have to tell him. Maybe sooner than they had planned. One law has passed; another is coming. They are thinking about Finland, so they can stay close to Russia. They are thinking about Russia, and about how they don't want to leave.

Peter is thinking about faraway places. Over dinner, he asks me if I'll send him a card from America. I can do better than that—how about a present? "Yes!" he says. He knows what he wants. He asks if he can borrow my notebook. He'll draw it for me.

It's an airplane. A big one, so there's room for his whole family. Everyone who loves him, he says happily, drawing the wings. Why did you end the story this way?I could not end it with darkness. I just couldn’t. And I don’t think it does — here or in the real world, either. This is the picture he drew:

For more installments of Annotation Tuesday!, go here.

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Buzz Bissinger’s “The Killing Trail” — his unremittingly bleak 1995 account of “fag-bashing” in Texas — was his first story for Vanity Fair. (He is still a contributor, and has a story in the February issue.) Bissinger took on the story after an editor approached him. From start to finish, “The Killing Trail” took about three months to do. “The piece was written nearly 19 years ago, according to my math,” he told me. “I am glad to report I am still alive.” (For more Bissinger, read about how his Nieman year inspired his narrative nonfiction bestseller Friday Night Lights; revisit his 2012 appearance at Lippmann House, for the Nieman Narrative Speaker Series; and check out Pulitzer winner Deborah Blum's "Why's this so good?" analysis of another Bissinger story, about the fabulist Stephen Glass, who was in the news yesterday after the California Supreme Court denied his request to practice law there.) Bissinger annotated "The Killing Trail" via email. My questions are in blue, his answers in red.

“The Killing Trail”
By Buzz Bissinger
Vanity Fair
February 1995

THE PARK. Each section starts this way — with the setting. Why?Because the story switches back and forth and locations change. I thought it was important to help ground the reader a little bit. Otherwise you might have trouble figuring out where you are in the story because there are a variety of different locales. Some stories just tell their own narrative; this was more of a puzzle where are you trying to fit together different stories. And throughout the story I come back to the park several times. I could have written about what happened at the park in one section but I felt it was more dramatic to break it up: Just when you think the worst has happened, something even worse occurs.

With its lush grass and gently sloping hill, the park spread open like a satin scarf against the hard angles of Dallas’s oil-boom architecture. But Hugh Callaway knew that he and his friend shouldn’t go to Reverchon Park. Word that the place was a meeting point for gay men had already seeped out among the teenagers who had discovered a new Texas pastime: Friday nights, it was high school football; Saturdays brought fag-bashing in Oak Lawn, where the queers lived. This sentence is jarring; the use of “fag-bashing” and “queers” is not the usual "objective," reportorial language. You, more or less, took the slurs out of the hands of the bigots.I suppose you could call this "magazine" license, although what I like about magazine writing is the ability to use your own voice. I wasn't trying to shock the reader. But I guess I did want to jar, get the reader's attention right away, and also set up with language the horrid and visceral world we are about to enter. Using the word "gay" just doesn't get the violence across. It is too gentle, too nice. These predators don't "gay bash." They "fag bash." That's a major difference, one that you can get across with the use of language.

Three years earlier, an 18-year-old from over in North Mesquite–a high-school kid on a fag-bashing expedition with some of his buddies–killed two gay men in Reverchon Park. Later he bragged about it, how he had stuck the gun in one victim’s mouth before shooting him, how he had stepped on the other man’s leg and shot him as he tried to crawl away. Where did you get these details? Court documents? With a story like this, what are the most valuable sources?Court documents. Clips. And in this particular instance an interview with Hugh Callaway, who obviously was there. Given that there was a conviction in the case, Callaway was, in my mind, a great source for this. And what he said did match up with court documents although he gave much more detail. The use of a primary source is of course the best. Court documents can always corroborate, and they can be a treasure trove of detail if you read every single word of them. Twice. No matter how obscure they might seem, don't scan over them. Getting a thick and juicy court file that no one else has found is better than sex. Hugh Callaway also remembered, what every gay person across the state remembers like a brand on the arm, What convinced you that the sentence made such an impression on the gay population?There was enormous outcry over the judge's comments so I extrapolated from clips. Interviews I did with gay leaders in the state also confirmed this. was the sentence the killer had received–30 years from a state district judge named Jack Hampton, who had previously been known around the courthouse as a hanging judge. It didn’t make sense to Callaway, until Hampton, in an interview with the Dallas Times Herald, unburdened himself:

“I don’t much care for queers cruising the streets picking up teenage boys,” said Hampton. “I’ve got a teenage boy. . . . These two guys wouldn’t have been killed if they hadn’t been cruising the streets picking up teenage boys,” the judge added, despite the fact that testimony never clearly showed that the two victims had solicited the murderer, Richard Lee Bednarski, for sex.

But 35-year-old Hugh Callaway and the man he called his partner, Thanh Nguyen, 29, went to the park anyway that October night in 1991. Perhaps they didn’t want the night to end. Perhaps the glow of dancing was still with them after the Wave, over on Maple, closed. Maybe what propelled them was simply the impulse to be outdoors on a beautiful night. Why did you use “perhaps” twice and “maybe”? Why the (illusion of?) uncertainty?I wanted to get in more atmosphere, set the stage a little more. I went to the Wave to just hang out so I knew obviously about the dancing. The second sentence was a device to get across in a writerly way that it was a beautiful night. On the other hand, I could not be 100 percent sure that they were feeling these things, although I did know they had gone to the Wave that night. I also knew, based on the interview with Callaway, that it was a beautiful night.

It was Nguyen’s idea to go. Still in the closet, he savored those moments when he could step out. And Callaway, despite his reservations, did not protest. Did you ever interview Callaway? It’s not clear.I did interview Callaway. I constantly see in stories in such august publications as the New Yorker where the writer says "...told me." I assume it is put in there so the reader knows where the information is coming from. But there is also a certain amount of chest beating — you're a journalist for fuck sakes, people are supposed to "tell" you things — and it completely fucks up narrative. It is also why I try to use as few direct quotes as possible in narrative pieces. Nonfiction writers fall in love with their quotes: Most quotes are really not that good, hardly showstoppers. They are terribly utilized. As a young reporter I, like everyone else, came back to the newsroom to tell my editor I got some great quotes. Until I realized the quotes weren't great but (for) the information contained within them. Stories need to move forward and quotes can be horrible clunkers: A piece is really moving well and then the writer decides to use a bunch of quotes and the momentum stops dead. So I tend to very carefully paraphrase except in the rare instance you will see below where to paraphrase would squeeze all the juice out of what was being said.They stopped at McDonald’s to buy some food and then found a picnic table, where they began to eat. Before they finished, Callaway, with his coiled eyes and tightly wound body, noticed the men, three of them. They suddenly surrounded him and his friend. Then they robbed Callaway and Nguyen, and two of the assailants started pistol-whipping them while the other took ravenous bites of the burger and fries still lying on the table in the light of the full moon. All the while Callaway heard energized chants of “sissies” and “queers” and “faggots” and “gooks” going round and round in the night air.

The beating went on for about 20 minutes. From Nguyen, the assailants took an expensive gold necklace. Then they ordered the two friends to stand against the wall of a nearby park building.

Hugh Callaway heard one of the members of the trio turn to Corey Burley, then 19, and say, “Go ahead and shoot ’em. It ain’t that hard to do.” When Callaway stared into the faces of his persecutors, what he saw was a look of intense anticipation. He remembered how Vietnam vets had talked about “eye-fucking” during the war, and that’s what he believed the trio was doing, eye-fucking Callaway and Nguyen, dressing them up and down, relishing and reveling in each fearful movement, feverishly waiting to see how the two queers, the two faggots, would react at the pull of the trigger. Callaway could hear Nguyen move his lips, as if he was praying.

Then there was an explosion and a huge flash of light beneath the swollen moon.

•••

[caption id="attachment_24058" align="alignright" width="275"] Buzz Bissinger[/caption]

THE TRAIL. On a frigid night in east Texas in 1993, just a few weeks before Christmas, a 23-year-old gay man named Nicholas West is abducted from Bergfeld Park in Tyler. He is taken to a hilly isolated area of red clay nicknamed the Pits, a place where pleas for mercy evaporate under the cold shine of the stars. He is punched, kicked and slapped across the face with a .357 magnum. When he falls to the ground, utterly alone and helpless in that marrow of darkness, blood oozing out of his eye, his three abductors gather around him with their arsenal of loaded weapons. Then the shooting begins–so many entrance and exit wounds that by the time of the autopsy, West’s body looks like a stickpin doll. There are at least 9 bullets, the first in the abdomen, then several through the arms and hands, then at least 4 up the back in a pattern as neatly spaced as the buttons on a shirt. Eight shots at that point, but Nicholas is still alive, his breath reduced to a tiny gurgle, until the final shot is fired into the back of his head. Then he is left on that field of red clay, face down, without shoes or pants, his arms by his sides and his legs spread apart like those of a sleeping child, the bottom of his socks red from the clay, and his underwear soiled by a fear that none of us could ever know. How deeply do you report your story — here and generally — and your attitude toward the reporting phase? What’s your methodology?The story was written nearly 19 years ago, so my memory ain't so great. But the story was deeply reported — interviews with one of the killers on death row, the investigators (who showed me crime scene pictures such as the socks), court documents, going to the actual scene at least twice, autopsy report, clips, court transcripts if available and needed (at Vanity Fair we pay to have them transcribed if they have not been already), dozens of interviews, spending three weeks in Texas and crisscrossing the entire state. It seems to me that you have to work the reporting of a story as much as the writing, probably more so. If a story is wonderfully written but with little reporting, you can smell the holes and so can the reader. It has no weight. It feels insubstantial. Vice versa, with great reporting and okay writing, you can still come away with something terrific. I mean none of us are fucking Faulkner for chrissakes. What is key in the writing is knowing how to tell a story, not to get in the way of it, learning to let go of material that may be sublime but only slows down the engine. It has taken me nearly 40 years but what you leave out is just as important as what you leave in.

After the murder, one of the killers rides around in the red Mazda truck that West had driven to the park that night. Impressed by the power of the truck, he squeals the tires the way the drag racers do it. Then he goes on over to the laundromat on Troup Highway in Tyler to do a load of wash. The previous section is written in the past tense. This is written in the present tense. Why?It was simply a stylistic choice. I am always looking for honest drama and I just think the present tense works well in this section. Certainly an argument could be made to match up the tenses. But I think you have to go with your instincts.

The trail leaves the Baptist belt of east Texas and stretches its fingers for 400 miles into the mesquite and dry dust of west Texas, where an 18-year-old named Ramsey Blake Harrell is tried in Midland in February, 1994 for the killing of a 48-year-old gay hairstylist named Tommy Musick. Musick was shot four times in the back of the head. Harrell’s defense, according to testimony in the case, is that he went insane after Musick allegedly made persistent sexual advances toward a friend. During the trial, much is made of Musick’s lifestyle, the way he carried a “purse” and the fact that he had a lover. A jury finds Harrell guilty of shooting Tommy Musick, then sentences him to 12 years, meaning that he could be in prison as little as three years, less than one year for every shot fired.

The trail leaves the west Texas prairie and moves 300 miles southeast over oil fields and high school football fields and the thick bluebonnets of the Hill Country to San Antonio, where the newspaper, the Express-News, decides to publish the names of men who have been arrested in city parks on misdemeanor charges such as public lewdness and indecent exposure. One man on the list is suddenly fired from the job where he has worked for 13 years. Another is hauled into court by his ex-wife, who succeeds in changing their custody agreement so that he is allowed only supervised visitation with his children. Another man named by the newspaper, Benny Hogan, has just started a new “dream” job in San Antonio as an insurance adjuster. All his life, until June 2, when his name is published, Hogan has kept his sexual preference private from family and close friends. On Sunday, June 5, as nearly 12,000 people celebrate Gay Pride in San Antonio, Benny Hogan hangs himself in his garage. This is an extraordinary paragraph, packed with such detail about the region, the action of the paper, a sketch of Hogan and, finally, his suicide. How long would you, and do you, spend on something like this?I can't really say. I know that some of the scene-setting, such as the "thick bluebonnets of the Hill Country," came from being there when I wrote Friday Night Lights and also seeing pictures. Obviously I got all the clippings associated with the newspaper's outing. I also interviewed Hogan's brother and sister-in-law at length.

The trail moves 200 miles east to Houston, where on a July night, a 29-year-old gay man named Michael Burzinski has just come out of a bar. Four teenagers abduct him as he is unlocking his car in the parking lot. In the parlance of the street, they are looking “to get paid”. They have picked Montrose because it is the gay area of town, and they assume that homosexuals carry lots of cash and are easy targets. Burzinski is beaten until he reveals the password for his cash card, then is driven to an A.T.M. facility to withdraw $400. There is some brief discussion about whether to kill him or not kill him–until DeMarco McCullum, the admitted triggerman, a 19-year-old former high school quarterback on his way to junior college on a football scholarship, takes out a .380-caliber pistol and shoots Burzinski in the back of the head. When he is arrested, McCullum tells investigators he felt “like a judge” when he pulled the trigger.

For more than a year, a 29-year-old woman named Dianne Hardy-Garcia has traveled this trail, crisscrossing the entire breadth of the state from Tyler in the East to the languid Rio Grande Valley in the South, to the desert mountains of El Paso in the West. How did Hardy-Garcia become so integral to the story? Was she a part of it from the outset?There had been previous stories about Hardy-Garcia's essential role, including a very good but still-thin story in the New York Times. So I knew she was the glue that held the piece together, the narrator so to speak. She was the common denominator in all the murders.  Through a variety of sources–family members, the police, gay support groups–she has gathered information on the killings of eight gays across the state since April of 1993. She has also examined other cases in which murder suspects used the claim of a sexual advance made against them as a defense. These include a situation outside San Antonio where a 16-year-old, after shooting the man in the head and dumping him off a bridge, explained his actions by claiming the victim had come on to him.

As horrifying as the violence against gays has been in Texas, it may not be unique. “Brutal murders and harassment of gay men and lesbians is a problem of epidemic proportions in this country,” says Beth Barrett, a spokesperson for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force in Washington. The task force does not keep overall statistics on the number of gay-related homicides nationwide, but anti-gay violence has increased 127 percent over the past six years in the six cities (Boston, Chicago, Denver, Minneapolis-St. Paul, New York and San Francisco) monitored by the group.

In the past four months alone, there have been two nationally publicized incidents involving the killing of gays. In October, 16-year-old Marvin McClendon was arrested for the murders of two gays in the small Mississippi town of Laurel. McClendon claims that the two men tried to sexually assault him, an oft-used defense in the killing of homosexuals. What is novel–and chilling to gay activists–is that McClendon’s attorney has been allowed by the court to test the victim’s blood for H.I.V. in an attempt to prove that seeking sex while carrying H.I.V. would be akin to carrying a loaded gun. And in November, 32-year-old Gary Ray Bowles was arrested in Jacksonville, Florida and confessed to killing six men whom the FBI said he had hustled in gay bars in Maryland, Georgia and Florida.

Part of what has driven Dianne Hardy-Garcia has been her job as the Executive Director of the Lesbian/Gay Rights Lobby of Texas. By pursuing the killings, she hopes to convince state lawmakers, who are currently in session, of the urgency for a stronger hate crimes law. But that alone doesn’t explain her pursuit, which has been met with resistance not simply from straights, but also from the gay community, who prefer to focus on other issues such as health insurance for AIDS patients and domestic-partner benefits. “I’ve been told by lesbians and gays, ‘I wish you wouldn’t talk about this anymore,’” said Hardy-Garcia. Did you talk to anyone who had a problem with her work?I don't remember but I don't think so. If the subject is willing to raise questions about their own work, I'm down with it. I spent a lot of time with her and it was clear that she very much had her own style and priorities. And the story is not about her conduct; it's about the conduct of these motherfuckers who kill gays for fun.

The deeper the trail takes her, the more apparent it becomes to her that this wave of killings is the product of something invidious. The murders have an unremitting quality to them–they echo and overlap–but they are not the work of a single serial killer. The perpetrators in each case are different. But there is a startling pattern. In the six cases where arrests have been made, 10 of the 13 arrested are teenagers.

“I started to see very clearly there is a pattern,” said Hardy-Garcia. “The teenage-boy syndrome.”

When the eight killings investigated by Hardy-Garcia are coupled with those that occurred previously in the state–the killing of two gays in Reverchon Park in 1988 by the teenager who joined friends for a fag-bashing expedition because they were “bored”; the killing of Paul Broussard in Houston in 1991 by a gang of teens looking “to beat up some queers”–it is hard not to wonder if some new kind of Klan has emerged. In this new fraternity of hate, the words “fag” and “queer” and “sissy” have been substituted for “nigger” and guns for rope. At the time you reported this, did you view Texas’s anti-gay animosity as singular? Have you changed your mind since then?Texas is Texas. Everything is bigger there, whether it's high school football or fag-bashing. But is it unique to Texas? Hell no. Some of the new gangs are certainly more impulsive and less organized than their predecessors, but the similarities are startling, for like the old boys who roamed the quiet, bygone nights, these youngsters relish the obvious terror they create in their victims and are emboldened by the firm conviction that the Bible and their Lord Jesus are on their side. So sure are they of the heroism and rightness of their cause that they do not even bother to wear hoods to preserve their anonymity.

The killings don’t necessarily start out as killings. More often than not, the original motive is robbery. But then, as the crime progresses, a fury of resentment seems to take hold, as if robbery alone weren’t enough of a crime against these fags who swagger around like princes with expensive jewelry and cash cards and late-model cars. The use of “fags” seems designed to allow you to show the hatred these men faced without having to actually quote their assailants.That is a very good point, although I saw them use the word in court documents (see confession below). And I did interview one of the assailants who did use the word. He was on death row. He has since been executed. Good.

Anti-gay rhetoric has been preached from the pulpits of Texas for years. What is new, what is terrifying, is the degree to which it has become a part of the mainstream as the state moves in a direction that is increasingly conservative and increasingly subject to the powerful influence of the religious right. When you take the rhetoric and combine it with the macho culture of a state where the cowboy and six-shooter still hold powerful sway, it makes the trail of death seem not aberrational but inevitable.

Does the anti-gay rhetoric explicitly encourage violence against gays? The answer is usually no. But does such open virulence help to create an atmosphere in which a robber or would-be murderer, operating in an escalating frenzy of violence, goes further than he might have because he believes the person he is killing isn’t a human being at all? The answer is self-evident.

“I do not like homosexuals. . . . I do not care for them,” said a 29-year-old convicted felon named Donald Aldrich in the confession he gave to investigators in the murder of Nicholas West in Tyler. “And a lot of times, homosexuals are known for carrying quite a bit of money on them. So that’s where it comes in with hitting them. Kind of more or less like a vengeful type thing. And then a lot of kids, a lot of teenagers, they’ll tell you, well, let’s go fag-bashing.”

Last August in a courtroom in Kerrville, where Aldrich was on trial for capital murder, Hardy-Garcia listened to the testimony of a 15-year-old boy who had been part of a group that liked to go fag-bashing in Tyler. What she saw was a child, a “baby boy” who was scared to death, and she became convinced that what he felt in his heart for homosexuals was the product of an environment in which gays are depicted over and over again as perverts, predators, and pedophiles. Do you agree with this? Did you believe something like this when you began reporting? How did your perspective/opinions change as you worked on this story?I think I did agree with this but never articulated it until the story. It became clear during the reporting that certain people felt justified in killing gays because they perceived them as predators and sexual deviants.

Mel White, the dean of the Cathedral of Hope in Dallas, the largest gay church in the world, has come to the same conclusion. White knows about the heat of anti-gay rhetoric from a unique perspective. Raised in a conservative Christian home and educated in conservative Christian schools, he went on to become a ghostwriter of books, autobiographies and speeches for such religious-right figures as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. But White is also gay, and in 1991, after he received a fundraising letter from Falwell asking for $35 to help fight the war against homosexuality, he came out of the closet. I keep tripping on this sentence. After working in the belly of the beast, he was persuaded by a fundraising letter?This, once again, is going back a long time, but I think what upset him and got to him was Falwell trying to brazenly profit on the basis of anti-gay rhetoric. It was the very openness of what Falwell was doing and asking people to financially support him in the cause. In other words, basically bashing gays for his own profit motive.

Last fall, White attended a seminar sponsored by the Dallas Eagle Forum, a conservative, “pro-family” group determined to “expose the facts about the homosexual lifestyle and explain how homosexuals are promoting their lifestyle in public schools.” During the meeting, White remembered the speakers citing statistics claiming that gays have killed 68 percent of the victims of mass murder. At different times, White has heard other supposedly authoritative statistics used about gays: 17 percent of all gays ingest human feces, 29 percent urinate on their partners, 37 percent engage in sadomasochism. He is positive he knows the source of them–a psychologist expelled from the American Psychological Association for breaching its code of ethics. Did you confirm this with the psychologist in question? Why is he or she unnamed?I honestly do not remember. My guess is that I was able to tie a specific name to the specious statistics, but the lawyers felt we did not have enough to name him.

“We molest, we recruit, we abuse, we eat shit, we’re not fit to be in the military. All this rhetoric goes on and on and they wonder why kids are beating the shit out of us,” said White. But in the state of Texas during the past 14 months, the anti-gay fervor has gone beyond rhetoric. This is a great, vivid quote. Did you record your interviews and/or take notes?I recorded this. It is also an example of when to quote. This is vivid and visceral and precisely what a quote should do in a story — smack you in the face. There was a time (when) I did not record. I sometimes think it makes you lazy because you sit back and think the recorder is going to do all the work for you. You don't ask follow-up questions like you do when you are taking notes. You also spend 75 percent of the interview paranoid that the fucking tape recorder isn't working. But as a protection against litigation you pretty much have to record now. Which means you have to transcribe interviews, which is a modern definition of Hell. Almost any interview is 1 percent breathtaking and 99 percent May I Be Struck Down with Lightning So I Don’t Have to Listen Anymore.

November 1993: Williamson County commissioners vote down property tax abatements for Apple Computer’s proposed $80 million office complex because of the company’s policy of granting health benefits to their unmarried employees’ partners. Said Commissioner David S. Hays, who cast the deciding vote, “If I had voted yes, I would have had to walk into my church with people saying ‘there is the man who brought homosexuality to Williamson County.’” Under enormous pressure from then governor Ann Richards, the commissioners later approved the project.

January 1994: Early in his successful gubernatorial campaign, George W. Bush says that he would veto any attempts to repeal the state’s “homosexual conduct” law prohibiting sodomy. Bush calls the law, which is rarely enforced, “a symbolic gesture of traditional values.”

March 1994: The Galveston County Republican party passes a resolution supporting the quarantine of H.I.V.-positive people.

May 1994: Austin voters overwhelmingly repeal domestic-partner insurance benefits for the partners of unmarried city employees. An ad sponsored by a group known as Concerned Texans calls the benefits package “a direct slap in the face of the Christian values [which] corrupts the very fiber of our city and further establishes Austin as a morally crippled metropolitan area!”

June 1994: A plank in the state Republican Party platform reads, “Homosexuality should not be presented as an acceptable alternative lifestyle in our public schools. No person should receive special legal entitlements or privileges based on sexual preference. We oppose marriages between persons of the same sex and homosexuals obtaining the right to adopt or obtaining child custody.”

August 1994: After three conservative Christian members join the Plano School Board, the board ends its long-standing policy of allowing condom demonstrations as part of its AIDS-education curriculum. It also passes a resolution in support of “traditional moral values.” School boards in Irving and Cedar Hill approve similar resolutions.

August 1994: At a rape trial in which the victim is a lesbian, a bailiff with the Dallas County Sheriff’s Department remarks, “If it was me [on the jury], I’d only give him 30 days for raping a lesbian.” The bailiff is suspended for 10 days.

November 1994: The student government at Stephen F. Austin State University votes to cancel funding for the school’s gay-and-lesbian student association on the grounds that members of the group, by virtue of their sexual preference, are in violation of the state’s anti-sodomy law. “We didn’t want to have a group on campus that might in some way champion violation of Texas law,” said student senator Bryan Simmons. “What if [a national pedophile club] wanted to start a campus pedophile club? That’s as much against the law as homosexual conduct.” University president Dan Angel then steps in to announce that the group will still be officially recognized, despite the vote. This is so interesting. You’re marshalling evidence in support of White’s quote. I guess all great reporting does something like this, but you’re unusually up front about it.I pretty much never make a big secret of where I am headed when I write something that I believe to be true based upon the research I have done. There is also no question that a magazine is going to grant you much more leeway than a newspaper. Although that gap is closing, which I think is a good thing.

In such a climate, asks Dianne Hardy-Garcia, is it any surprise that certain teenagers feel the comfortable womb of church and state support when killing gays? “These kids aren’t born to hate. They are taught to hate.”

Warren Chisum, a state legislator from Pampa, who is also the president of the largest government coalition in the state, the Texas Conservative Coalition, says that any link between anti-gay sentiment and the recent spate of killings of gays is ridiculous. “I don’t agree with their lifestyle,” he concedes, “but I don’t think they should be executed for it.” This is an incredible quote. I think if someone said this to me I wouldn’t be able to contain my excitement. How do you maintain your composure when sources say outrageous things?You are trained not to get too excited and never play your hand. I really learned this when doing Friday Night Lights. When various people started using the N word, I obviously knew they were saying something horrific that spoke volumes about the embedded racism of the town. What I was more conscious of was never entrapping them by using the word myself. And you have to remain calm, as if what you have just heard is of no particular moment at all. Otherwise people no longer feel the comfort zone to say what they really feel. If someone says something incredible and you get up and start doing a one-man wave, it's pretty much a guarantee that the subject will shut down. In some cases I have quickly changed the subject when something outrageous is said so as not to draw any attention to it, then circle back.

During the last legislative session in 1993, Chisum and the Conservative Coalition worked against the enactment of a strong hate crimes bill. They apparently succeeded. The bill that did emerge from the legislature was considered by activists to be vague and difficult to enforce. Given the killings that have taken place, Hardy-Garcia is hopeful–despite the recent right-wing electoral victories nationwide–that most Texas legislators will now see the need to strengthen the bill. But she expects a major fight from Chisum and the coalition, particularly on the issue of including sexual orientation as a category deserving special protection against violence. Chisum says he is totally opposed to any legislation that will make gays and lesbians a “protected” class similar to minorities. He describes homosexuality as “demeaning to the natural nature of man. I mean, animals don’t do that.” This is incorrect, obviously. So I wonder: When a source is quoted saying something fallacious — in this case, that same-sex attraction doesn’t exist in nature — do you ever find it necessary to correct/offset the statement in, say, a parenthetical?The whole point of the quote is how outrageously sick it is. You don't need a parenthetical for that and it would be a pretty bizarre one in any case ("...there are in fact certain species of opossums that do engage in what would commonly be equated with homosexual practices....") But as much as Chisum is disgusted by the homosexual lifestyle, he also profits from it.

A year ago, The Dallas Morning News reported that Chisum had invested $200,000 in the buying up of AIDS patients’ insurance policies. In these investments, the investor purchases the life-insurance policy of the patient at a discount. The investor is then the beneficiary and profits when the patient dies. Because the investor pays the insurance premium for the patient, his margin of profit increases when the insured party dies quickly. The inherent risk of these so-called “Death Futures” is that the patient will survive for a long time.

The Morning News, while noting that advocacy groups support such investments because they mean desperately needed cash for AIDS patients, also pointed out obvious ethical concerns. Chisum, who described the investments as humanitarian and financially sound, seemed delighted by the margin of profit, though he did acknowledge that he found the whole thing “ghoulish” when he first got involved two years ago. “I don’t know how else you’re going to get money to these people,” he says. And he notes, his return, about 17 percent so far, hasn’t been bad either. “It’s been better than some things I bought.” Were you repulsed by this guy? Is it difficult to interview someone if you’re repulsed by them?In demeanor he was not a repulsive guy saying repulsive things. He was actually a seemingly nice man saying repulsive things, which in some way was more abhorrent. The most disturbing thing was how comfortable he was saying these things, in front of a reporter taking notes and recording him. But if you make people feel comfortable, in particular by keeping your own mouth shut (too many reporters think the point of an interview is to show off how much they know and therefore interrupt all the fucking time), people will say remarkable things. But you also have to remember something: In his own mind, Chisum did not feel he said anything remarkable and most of his constituents, the ones who reelect him, likely felt the same way. Which is the most sickening thing of all. I don't think he had any qualms seeing what he said in print.

•••

THE PARK. Thanh Nguyen fell to the ground as soon as the first shot was fired in Reverchon Park. Then the gun was aimed at Callaway, who, remembering what he had learned in the military, turned to the side just before Corey Burley fired. The bullet exploded into the upper part of Callaway’s femur, shattering it, but he avoided a fatal stomach wound.

The trio, their orgasm of violence against the fags complete, moved back down the hill of the park. Nguyen, able to sit, pulled up his shirt and in the glow of the moonlight saw the bullet wound in his stomach. In shock, he got up and started running down the hill, holding his bleeding stomach, looking for help. This is such a horrifying image. Where did this come from?This came from the interview with Callaway. Callaway wanted to stop him, because he knew the assailants were still in the park. But with the condition of his shattered leg, there was little he could do except listen and piece together what happened next–how the trio seized upon Nguyen once more and dragged him up the hill, how they pulled his shorts to his knees, how they beat him again, and how Nguyen, before he died, whispered Hugh Callaway’s name. This seems like a good point — about halfway through — to note how painful and progressively difficult it is to read this story. Was it hard to write? I’m just imagining this being a thoroughly depressing process for you.The stories were wrenching. You could feel the sadness coursing through Callaway as well as the guilt that he somehow should have done something. But this process wasn't the least bit depressing. It was exciting to know you were onto something that was powerful and real and could really resonate with readers and honestly show just how fucked up segments of this country are. Journalism is fundamentally morbid. It should be morbid. Life is fucking morbid. Is there really a good journalist out there who likes the fucking sun? I will take rain any day of the week. When you get material like this you feel energized, pumped up, and you only want to go out and get more because you see the power and potential of what you might be able to do. Depressing is sitting down to write and looking at your notes and seeing the only thing you have a preponderance of is the syrup they use to make canned fruit cocktail. It would be like Breaking Bad in which Walt decides to make bubble bath instead of meth and has hemorrhoids instead of cancer and lives in suburban North Jersey instead of Albuquerque and takes the GW into work until Christie shuts it down.

THE TRAIL. Behind the impenetrable windows of the prison waiting area, where death-row inmates in the state of Texas entertain all visitors until they are executed by lethal injection, Donald Aldrich tries to explain some of the psychology that went into the killing of Nicholas West that November night in 1993. Aldrich’s features are flat and bland: narrow lips, a high crown of a forehead leading up to a thinning crust of hair, frozen blue eyes that, like a broken clock, send nothing out and take nothing back.

Some of what he says is eminently predictable: the way he regrets what happened on that field of red clay, how there wasn’t supposed to be shooting that night (“The guns were there to stop the violence,” he says in a surreal parody of an N.R.A. slogan); the sorrow he feels for Nicholas West’s family; his own never-ending bad dreams.

And yet Aldrich holds back little on the subject of gays. His resentment at how their rights seem to take precedence over his is palpable as he invokes God and the Bible in calling homosexuals sick and unnatural. He notes that some of the teenagers he hung with hated gays even more than he did. He says they made fun of the way gays talked, and called them “queers,” “fags,” and “dick suckers” when they weren’t plotting ways to rob and beat them.

In Donald Aldrich’s view, the queers had everything. He had only his life in a trailer park over in Rockwall, his 10th-grade education and a bad marriage. He had only his go-nowhere restaurant jobs at places like Popeyes to fill the time between the burglary sprees and the prison stints.

“I work all my life tryin’ to have something nice and make something of myself,” he says. “About the best job I can get is working in a restaurant makin’ minimum wage or just barely over it, and it’s like, I get no breaks. From the time I was a kid, it seemed like there was a lot against me, and yet here they are, they’re doing something that God totally condemns in the Bible. But look at everything they’ve got. They’ve got all this nice stuff. They’ve got all these good jobs, sit back at a desk or sit back in an air-conditioned building not having to sweat, not having to bust their ass, and they’ve got money. They’ve got the cars. They’ve got the apartments. They’ve got all the nice stuff in 'em. So yeah, I resented that.” How did you set up this interview? What were the restrictions? Was his lawyer present?I went to his lawyer first and made the pitch that I wanted to hear his client's side. The lawyer was a very nice man but told me he was going to advise Aldrich not to talk to me. So I wrote Aldrich on death row and the first thing I said was that his lawyer had advised him not to talk to me. I also said I understood why his lawyer might advise that but that lawyers are not always right and that his explanation for what happened might be valuable to him and worth getting in print. Aldrich wrote back agreeing to the interview. Setting up with the Texas DOC was easy. A great photographer named Dan Winters and I went down to Huntsville and interviewed him across a glass partition on death row. The first thing he told me is that he agreed to talk to me because I had been up front about his lawyer. We had an hour, more than enough time for Aldrich to make himself look even worse than he already did and reaffirm that he somehow felt justified in killing. He wrote me back afterwards saying he wasn't pleased. Which is always what happens when people have hung themselves.

But Aldrich also says that it wasn’t all fags he hated, just the ones he called the perverts, the ones who prey on children the way he says he was preyed on by an older relative. Aldrich can offer no independent corroboration but he says he was repeatedly forced to perform oral and anal sex on a relative for three or four years from the time he was nine years old. Aldrich describes himself as being defenseless because of a seven-year age difference. but he also paints an image of himself as a raucous and wild fighter at the time of the alleged abuse. (Aldrich says that on one occasion, when he was 11 or 12, he was in a fight with two twins who lived in the same trailer park in Rockwall, then squared off with the twins’ father and used a baseball bat to break his collarbone, his arm and seven of his ribs.) Did you have any empathy for him? Have you found that, as you’ve gotten older, it’s easier or more difficult to empathize with your subjects? And how does this affect your writing?I have empathy for victims who have been abused and then turn that abuse on others. Sometimes. But I had no empathy for this motherfucker. I was delighted he thought he was smart, which in turn caused him to talk a blue streak and say all sorts of self-incriminating things. I was not sympathetic to him but I did lend an ear willing to listen to anything he had to say. And look, he was on death row: He loved the attention and that's why I figured once I leveled with him about his lawyer's advice, he would talk to me. Which is why whenever you are trying to set up a sensitive interview, do not SEND A FUCKING EMAIL. Emails are impersonal. They require no effort because there are so many billions of them. WRITE A LETTER. A long letter. Take time to do it. It shows thought and consideration. And maybe you will get lucky. I find that as I get older I have less empathy for people who use their own troubled childhoods as an excuse for crimes of violence (or for why they went into politics). It has become cliché.

Turning to the subject of the murder of Nicholas West, Aldrich begins by explaining that he didn’t have a phone where he lived in Tyler, so he liked using the one in the middle of Bergfeld Park between the picnic tables and the restrooms. He used it to make late-night calls to his fiancée. He loved to call and croon his favorite Garth Brooks lyrics while she played the CD at home. But in the middle of his calls, those damned fags would often come on to him. Sure, Aldrich knew, as just about everyone in Tyler knew, that the park had become a meeting place for gays after dark. But this was a matter of principle.

“It got to where I wanted to carry a gun up there and every time one of 'em came near me I was gonna shoot 'em for coming near me. You know, here I am, I’m not gay. I’m in a public park using a public phone and yet I’m going to get harassed by these homosexuals, but when I do something against them, I’m breakin’ the law.”

Aldrich says that the whole idea of fag-bashing for fun and profit wasn’t his, but was first suggested by the 13-year-old sister of one of the Tyler teenagers whom Aldrich had hooked up with after his release from prison. Did you attempt to identify this child? Was age an issue?I made no attempt to identify the child. It did not seem necessary.  Once the suggestion was made, it seemed too damned good to pass up, given the general reluctance of queers to report crimes to the police.

The group, according to Aldrich, started its spree of gay-bashings in Tyler sometime before the spring of 1993, when he became involved. More often than not, Aldrich acted as the lure who reeled in the victims under the pretense of a pickup. In some of the fag-bashings, the primary motive was robbery. In others, it was bodily harm, like the time Aldrich and his gang went out with baseball bats, clubs and crowbars, or the time they held a man at bay in a freezing lake for several hours while they fired shots over his head, as if they had created their own human version of duck hunting. The intention, Aldrich says, was to install fear, to see that pure, unadulterated look of terror on the victim, who didn’t know if he was going to live or die or get tortured. Why didn’t you name the victim and say whether he survived?My recollection is that we wanted to protect him from further recrimination. Don Aldrich isn’t shy about describing what he felt at these moments. “You could say I got a little bit of pleasure out of it.”

Then came the Nicholas West incident. Aldrich had been working that night with two teenagers named Henry Dunn, then 19, and David McMillan, then 17. According to Aldrich, the two teens, interested in West’s red Mazda truck with its pulsating stereo system, had been trying all night to get their potential victim into Bergfeld Park under the guise of a pickup. But he just wouldn’t take the bait, says Aldrich. Then something wonderful happened. I just want to note how unusual it is — and powerful — that you embodied, rather than quoted, this sentiment. It’s sickeningly effective.I was trying to use a quote in artful way. This was one of those quotes you had to use — it was so incredible for somebody to say this. This was true of much of the Aldrich interview so I did break my narrative rule and quoted heavily. “West clearly came on to me after I got off the phone with my fiancée. When West came on to me, I’m like, Why, don’t this just make it easy?”

Then the true fun began.

Aldrich says the two teens pushed West into the car they were driving and put a shotgun on him while Aldrich took the Mazda pickup. Then the little caravan headed off in the direction of the Pits. On the way there, Aldrich stopped and started ransacking the truck. Then the other car showed up, and Aldrich began questioning West about how much money he had, and said he better not be lying to him, because if he was, he was going to tie him to the damned bumper of the car and drag him the remaining 15 miles to the Pits. But hell, it wasn’t really 15 miles, just a mile or so, and from the vantage point of Aldrich, it was all kind of good-intentioned at that point, just a little game of Scare the Fag. The very worst he had in mind was tying West to a tree with duct tape and leaving him until someone found him. And just to be kind about it, Aldrich wasn’t even going to make him strip all his clothes off.

Once they got to the Pits, West was forced out of the car and told to start walking up a little hill. And this is where it got really good for Don Aldrich, when he discovered that West was so scared that he had defecated in his pants. “I thought it was hilarious,” he says. “When you scare a man so bad that he literally shits on himself, that man is scared.” He described the sensation as like being on drugs. “I enjoyed it,” he says. “I really did.”

But after this “adrenaline high,” things began to go haywire. West was ordered to remove his pants and shoes, and when he did so, Aldrich discovered a $10 bill, meaning that West hadn’t been dealing straight with him on the money issue. And that set Aldrich off, because it meant the queer had lied to him, so he “bitch-slapped” West across the face with the .357 magnum. And then, according to Aldrich, Henry Dunn decided he wanted to fight Nicholas West, but West didn’t want to fight. So Dunn set West’s hands in a fighter’s stance, but still West wouldn’t fight. So Dunn hit him anyway with his ring-filled fist. But West still wouldn’t fight and investigators believe this pissed off Dunn even more, just the kind of fag-assed behavior you would expect from a queer. So Dunn hit him a few more times and kicked him and then said, “To hell with this,” and took the .357 magnum and shot West in the stomach. At this point, the other shots followed–two by Aldrich, one by McMillan, and five more by Henry Dunn, including the final bullet in the back of the head.

“It wasn’t going as smooth as it was supposed to,” says Aldrich. This quote, following the prior paragraph, is perfect. It’s also morbidly, uncomfortably funny, in a “the war did not turn in Japan's favor” kind of way.It was such a shocking thing to say that I had to use the quote in juxtaposition to the victim being shot eight times.

Roughly a day later, investigators arrested Aldrich, Dunn and McMillan, and the three were indicted on charges of capital murder. So far only Aldrich has gone to trial, and it took the jury an hour and 17 minutes to sentence him to die. In his confession to homicide detectives, which filled 103 pages when it was transcribed, This is a great detail. Unrelated: What surprised you about the story? And what didn’t make it into the piece?I could have used more, but you do reach a point where it becomes numbing and repetitive if you use too much. I don't think too much was left on the table. The length of the confession was interesting to me because, just like my death row interview, he clearly enjoyed talking about it and saw nothing wrong with what he had done. and was the key piece of evidence against him, Aldrich wrongly assumed that the more cooperative he was, the easier he might get off. Aldrich also decided to openly express his feelings about gays, in part because of a calculated assumption that “if I produced the right air or the right attitude, knowing how a lot of the cops felt towards gays in Tyler, that it might get some of the charges dropped. . . . I thought it might help me get a lesser sentence or a lesser charge.”

He miscalculated, and as investigators listened to Donald Aldrich, as they heard his laughter over Nicholas West’s humiliation and suffering, and watched Aldrich’s body language, they saw not a man who was posturing but a man who truly had difficulty understanding why the victim really was a victim.

“He thinks he’s a good guy,” said Jason Waller, an investigator on the case for the Smith County Sheriff’s Department, recalling what he believed to be the mind-set of Aldrich as he confessed. “He’s not perceiving he’s doing anything wrong, because this is a fag. This is not a store owner or a preacher. This is a fag.”

•••

THE PARK. The case against Corey Burley for the killing of Thanh Nguyen went to trial in April 1992 in a sixth-floor courtroom in the Frank Crowley Courts Building, just west of downtown Dallas. It was hard for anyone to truly understand how Hugh Callaway felt about Nguyen, but several months before the trial, he had tried to explain his feelings in a letter to the judge hearing the case. “Thanh Nguyen was born into war and hardship in South Vietnam and he endured hardship to come here for freedom, a better life, and opportunity,” Callaway had written while still in a body cast from his own injuries. “Thanh worked from 10 to 14 hours a day in his own business. Always he was an honest and loyal friend.”

“He truly loved this country and our way of life. . . . He was full of love, kindness and joy, which he gave unselfishly to everyone he knew. Now he is gone because of Corey Burley and his heart full of hate.” How did you get a copy of the letter? Had it been made public?I read it but I am not sure if it was public record or if I got it from Callaway. As a rule I always ask people I am interviewing if they have written anything on the subject matter at hand.

In the presence of the jury, Callaway pointed to Corey Burley as the one who had killed Thanh Nguyen in Reverchon Park. It took a jury roughly an hour to find him guilty of capital murder. He was sentenced to life. Did you attend the trial?The trial took place before I started working on the story. This probably came from clips.

But so was Hugh Callaway, without a trial.

•••

THE TRAIL. The killing of Nicholas West was barely a month old in January 1994 when Dianne Hardy-Garcia received information about a killing in San Antonio in which the victim had his throat cut by someone he apparently had never met before. That same month, she received reports out of the Dallas suburb of Irving about Larry Leggett, who had been found dead in his one-room apartment with multiple stab wounds. In February, there was the disturbing 12-year prison sentence for the Midland teenager charged in the fatal shooting of Tommy Musick.

The next month, she gathered information about an El Paso man named Jose Trevino, who police said had been strangled and bludgeoned to death inside his home by two teenagers. In April, she received the report of the other San Antonio killing–the one in which John Anthony Burwell had been shot to death by a 16-year-old and dumped off a bridge into a mass of rocks.

In May, she went down to the valley around Harlingen and was told about the killings of four gays, but the homosexual community there was so closeted and so fearful that gathering together any substantial information was impossible. “I was getting the feeling that all my life could be spent on murder,” said Hardy-Garcia. Then in June, she was told about Benny Hogan.

Over and over, Bessie Hogan called her son Benny and left messages on his answering machine. From the way he had sounded earlier in the day when they had talked, she knew something was wrong. His crying, so deep and painful, like nothing she had ever heard before, had scared her.

“Benny, this is Mama. I’m just calling back to see if you’re O.K. Call me whenever you get the message, O.K.?”

“Benny, this is Mama again. As soon as you get the message call me back. O.K.?”

“Benny, this is Mama. When you get the message call me back. O.K.?”

“Benny, this is Mama again. Call me as soon as you get the message.” Did you listen to the recording, or get a hold of a transcript?His brother had kept the recording so I was able to listen to it.

He said he was going to take a nap, but why would he be asleep this long? So she kept on calling from her home 400 miles away in Lubbock, trying so hard to sound strong and resolute, not wanting to panic him.

“Benny, it’s me again. Call me when you can. . .”

“It’s me again, Benny. Call me. . .”

“Benny, it’s Mama. Call me. Call me.”

Didn’t he know how much she loved him? Didn’t he know how proud she was of him for all he had accomplished? So she tried one more time, her voice slipping away to a whisper, as if she were making a futile prayer. Did you talk to Mrs. Hogan?I interviewed her.

“Benny, this is Mama. Call me. I’m worried about you.”

Benny Hogan had come from Lubbock, in West Texas, where the very idea of homosexuality was akin to communism or pissing on the flag. So when you look back on it, it seems little wonder that Hogan, 41, was always so afraid to tell virtually anyone that he was gay, not his close friends, not his own family.

Instead, he went on with his life, quiet, private, determined to make something of himself. His father died when he was 3, and at the age of 16, Benny started working to help support his family. He got a degree from Texas Tech University in Lubbock, worked for several years as a supermarket manager, and then moved to Midland. He ultimately went to work for the Trinity Universal Insurance Company, first in Odessa, then in San Antonio, after he was transferred there in 1990. In the spring of 1994 he got what he termed to family and friends as his dream job, a position as an adjuster at U.S.A.A. insurance in San Antonio.

Shortly before he started in the new post, Hogan was arrested in a San Antonio park on a misdemeanor charge of indecent exposure involving an undercover police officer. His arrest was not an isolated one, but rather part of a sweep of city parks by the San Antonio police for alleged homosexual activity. He was handcuffed, and placed in the Bexar County jail, and even then, in his efforts to make the $800 bond, he refused to call members of his family, because he didn’t want them to know what happened.

After his release, Hogan met with an attorney named Blair Davis, who specializes in such cases. Hogan was scared and nervous when he came in, almost bashful, Davis remembered. But as Hogan recited what had happened that day, Davis felt that there was a very strong entrapment issue and that it might well be worth it to go to trial. Hogan, however, said he was reluctant to do that because he was still in the closet. He also asked Davis if he thought his name would be published in the newspaper. Davis, who handled public lewdness and indecent exposure cases all over the state, did not think so. He knew of no paper of any significant size that printed the names of people arrested on misdemeanor charges as minor as this. But there was one.

Unbeknownst to Davis, the San Antonio Express-News had already published a list of names of men arrested as part of the police crackdown. On June 2, another list was published in a little box on page 2B. Juxtaposed with a larger, general story about the crackdown, it looked like a basketball box score. It contained nearly 50 names of men arrested on charges including public lewdness and indecent exposure, and there, seven lines from the bottom, was the name Benny Hogan.

A month earlier, he had widened the driveway of his home. So proud was he of his work that he put the completion date, “5-4-94,” in one of the concrete corners with a small flourish. He had bought a new convertible, as well as plants to put in his exotic garden. He got in touch with a siding company to have the house redone. “This wasn’t a man thinking about suicide,” said Christy Goodman, who along with her husband, Brad, was Benny’s closest friend in San Antonio. Did you uncover anything to suggest Hogan was thinking of suicide?I did not, prior to the outing by the San Antonio newspaper.

They had gone skiing together and on river trips, and the Goodmans thought they knew everything about Benny, when of course they did not. He never told them he was gay, and they never saw his name in the newspaper. They wish so much now that he had come to them and talked to them, because they still would have loved and embraced him. But Benny Hogan couldn’t bring himself to do that.

Was it shame that drove him to silence? Or was it an understanding of the culture of the state in which he had grown up and lived? He had lived in Midland, where a teenager several months earlier had gotten a 12-year sentence for shooting a gay hairstylist four times in the back of the head. He was living in San Antonio, where a teenager just weeks earlier had told police that he had shot a man in the head because he had made a sexual advance. He must have known, as any gay in the state must have known, about the brutal killing of Nicholas West in Tyler. When you spent time in Texas years before — during the reporting of Friday Night Lights — did you get a sense that circumstances for gays were such a nightmare?Yes, I did, when kids in high school talked about going fag-bashing with a baseball bat over the weekend. Plus I heard anti-gay rhetoric during interviews. Plus, other people interviewed talked over and over about how hard it was to be different in a place such as West Texas. Plus there was my own personal experience in that once the book was published and people in Odessa hated it, the whispers came out full force that I was Jewish. West Texas will never be known for tolerance and I can't think of anything more difficult than being gay there.

After the publication of Benny Hogan’s name in the newspaper, the issue of his sexual preference was no longer private. In seven-point type, it was now there for everyone to see so they could laugh at it or be disgusted by it.

Over the next three days, he paid all his bills and mowed the lawn of his tidy red-shuttered home on Rangeland Street. He made sure his dogs would be taken care of, and he wrote out a series of notes. “I’m sorry to do this to you but I have nowhere else to turn,” he wrote to the Goodmans. “This is best and it is what I want so please try to understand.” In another he asked them to contact his mother.

“She is 78 years old so be careful how you tell her.”

And then he went to the garage. How did you piece together how Hogan spent his last days?I do not remember. Most likely from interviews with his brother and the Goodmans. I may have interviewed his partner as well.

It has been more than six months since Benny Hogan died, but a day doesn’t go by when Hogan’s brother Bill and his wife Sandra don’t think about it. Is this a Citizen Kane reference?Not intentionally.Sadness, guilt, anger–they all meld together. Every so often Bill Hogan takes out a sheet of paper and writes down his feelings, emotionally charged and slightly garbled. It makes him feel better for a little while, and then the anger rises up again. The Hogans take no issue with the newspaper’s writing articles about the crackdown in the parks, but why the names? What reason was there for publishing them other than disgrace and humiliation? Weren’t they aware of the ramifications of labeling someone gay in a place such as San Antonio, a place that one of the editors himself described as “conservative, fundamental and unchanging”?

Subsequent to Benny’s death, the Hogans met with various representatives of the newspaper. It was explained that all aspects of the crackdown in the parks were considered newsworthy because it was an out-of-the-ordinary police activity. As proof, the Hogans were handed a sheaf of articles from over the years showing how the names of suspects had been printed in other police sweeps, although none of these involved alleged homosexual activity. The whole explanation seemed utterly transparent to the Hogans, given the fact that the newspaper, in its regular police reporting, did not print the names of people suspected of such crimes as sexual assault and wife-beating.

The explanation apparently seemed transparent to the newspaper as well, because it has since changed its policy on crime reporting and, according to managing editor Robert Rivard, no longer prints the names of any individuals arrested on misdemeanor charges unless they are public officials.

“It was not a good policy for the paper to print those names,” said Rivard, who indicated that the policy was changed to reflect a greater understanding of gays by the newspaper. But he also conceded that without the death of Benny Hogan, there might have been no change in the policy at all.

“Embarrassment, humiliation, debasement,” said Sandra Hogan in listing what she believes to be the motives of the Express-News in publishing the names of Benny and the other men. “What else would there be? This is not a public service.” Both Rivard and executive editor Jim Moss vigorously deny that this was the motive. But off the record, someone very familiar with the newspaper and the kinds of people who work inside it confirms Sandra Hogan’s suspicions that the list was intended to be exactly what it turned out to be–a homosexual blacklist.

“A lot of editors knew exactly what they were doing.” Was this a source inside the paper? Why was he or she granted anonymity? And why is the quote included if this is supposed to be off the record?You make a good point and I don't have a good answer. It may have been that I meant to say that the person quoted wished to remain anonymous. Or else I did something I should not have. In re-reading the story this kind of anonymous quote is useless. It adds nothing. Which is true of most anonymous quotes. I wish I had taken it out. It is obvious to the reader without it that the conduct of the paper was malicious.

When Bessie Hogan kept getting no answer that June afternoon, she called her son Bill in desperation. He also started calling Benny, sensing, like his mother, that something was terribly wrong.

“Benny, this is Bill, your brother. Call me when you get home. Why don’t you come on back up here and be around people who love you?”

He called again.

“Hello, anybody there? Please, somebody answer the telephone. Please. Hello, this is Bill, Benny’s brother. I need to talk to somebody. Please somebody answer.”

“Hello, who’s this?”

“This is Bill. Is Benny there?”

“Uh . . .” This is the most horrible moment in the story. It’s just a syllable — not even a full sentence. But it implies so much.That's why reporting and finding firsthand documents is so effective. That single syllable explains both the horror of what happened and the futility of trying to explain what has happened.

“This is Bill Hogan, Benny’s brother.”

“O.K, my name is Officer Aguirre from the San Antonio Police Department. We’re out here at Benny’s. . . O.K., sir, Benny’s . . . uh . . . we’re over here investigating a suicide.”

“Did he kill himself?”

“Yes sir.” Did you encounter any resistance from the SAPD, or were they cooperative? Dealing with law enforcement is often a tight-wire act.I made an attempt to contact them but it was more obligation. The detectives in the Nicholas West case in Tyler were very cooperative but frankly that is a rarity in my experience. I don't spend a lot of time trying to get cops who don't know me to talk to me. They are big enough pricks when they know you.

•••

THE PARK. For a period of time after the trial, Hugh Callaway found a productive way to channel all that still burned inside him. He wrote letters and articles and was instrumental in getting letters placed in the parole board files of inmates who had been implicated in the killings of other gays. But the effect was only temporary. The same demons that had enveloped Callaway after Thanh Nguyen’s death–guilt, sadness, the horrible feeling of helplessness that night–re-emerged.

Callaway first started drinking, and when that didn’t provide him with the relief he sought, he started shooting cocaine. “I just didn’t care about life no more,” he said. “I didn’t care about nothing.”

Callaway told his story in a meeting room of a hospital in the Dallas suburb of Garland, where he was undergoing drug detoxification. Is this where you got his quotes?Yes. He has been on cocaine for a year, and this is the second time he has been here. In some ways, he has made improvement–he no longer breaks into sobs when he talks about Nguyen–but his voice goes low and his eyes fruitlessly search for peace, and it isn’t just guilt that he feels but the sense of loss. He had come to depend on Nguyen. In many ways, the two men were exact opposites–and Callaway, after discovering that he was H.I.V.-positive, had always assumed that Nguyen’s quiet presence would be there to steady him and give him strength.

Callaway’s memory of what happened that night in Reverchon Park is photographic. Of all the details, it is easy to pick out the one that is the most vivid. It was that look of intense, wide-eyed anticipation, of unbridled pleasure, on the face of Corey Burley as he prepared to shoot the two gay men huddled before him on a perfect October night in the park.

The image haunts him.

It always will.

•••

THE TRAIL. About three weeks after the suicide of Benny Hogan, Dianne Hardy-Garcia read news accounts about 29-year-old Paul Quintanilla, whose body had been found under a triangle of trees in a deserted field in Irving. He had been found nude, with his hands tied behind his back with nylon rope. He had been stabbed 39 times, and part of his genitals had been cut off. No arrests have been made in the killing, and police have no leads.

In the beginning of August, Hardy-Garcia went to Kerrville to observe the murder trial of Donald Aldrich in the Nicholas West killing. And while she was there, she read of the murder of Michael Burzinski in Houston. Later that month came news that Larry Allen had been stabbed to death in a motel room in Irving in a spray of blood that splattered the bathroom, the television, the ceiling and the carpet. A 33-year-old drifter named Edwin Perkins was arrested by police and formally charged with murder. Do you know if gays were being killed at a uniquely high rate during the period covered here? Without hard numbers, it’s hard to tell if this climate is unusual or par for the course.I tried to get hardcore numbers but was unsuccessful. Whether it was statistically high or not, what was happening was still shocking and astounding.

Toward the end of the year, Hardy-Garcia received through the office mail a white envelope with no return address. She has become wary of mail without a return address, because that often means it’s hate-related–a nasty letter or a used condom. She opened the envelope carefully, and out tumbled clippings from the local newspaper in San Angelo. The clippings were neatly cut and squared, but the story they described was messy and brutal, one in which the victim, a veteran of Desert Storm named Jose Rubio, had been stabbed almost a hundred times by 28-year-old James McCartney.

According to the clippings, there were two 16-year-old teenagers with McCartney that night, and they both testified that the original intention had been to pick up a homosexual from a local park and then rob him. But the clippings also showed that when the issue of Rubio’s homosexuality was raised by the defense attorneys, the prosecutor in the case vigorously protested because she thought such information would prejudice the jury against the victim. The judge agreed, and the jury ended up convicting the defendant and sentencing him to two life terms. So perhaps the strategy of downplaying homosexuality as an issue was correct.

But also included in the packet of clippings was an article from one of the high school newspapers in San Angelo. The headline on it read, STUDENTS DECLARE WAR ON HOMOSEXUALITY, and portions of it read as follows:

In the dark of night after homework is complete, teenage students scurry to their vehicles to stalk male homosexuals in San Angelo. “I want them to die when we do it,” Bob, a student, said.

Bashers claim part of the fun is from the adrenaline rush they receive. “A couple of friends and I were driving down the “fag drag” when we noticed there was a whole carload of them sitting in the car just kissing, so we got out our baseball bats–most of us carry baseball bats anyway–shattered their windows and dragged them out of the window and just literally beat them,” Ray said, a member of the bashing group.

“After we are done, they are on the ground in a bloody heap.”

It’s been a wrenching time for Dianne Hardy-Garcia, because each of the killings that she has looked at brings layers upon layers of sorrow that can never be healed. There have been important breakthroughs, such as the death-penalty sentence for Donald Aldrich. There were also the rallies for gay rights in Tyler and Midland, places where the very word “gay” had virtually never been uttered in public before. What words or phrases would be used in its place?Normally it would have been "queer" or "fag." But how much was the consciousness truly raised? How much understanding was there that the inevitable extension of the rhetoric of hate is the violence of hate? Or was there just a sigh of relief when the parade of queers packed up their posters and their angry speeches and all that raucous self-pity and took their perverted circus somewhere else?

Dianne Hardy-Garcia knows that she will one day go to San Angelo. Unlike some of the other figures, we don’t get a backstory of Hardy-Garcia. Why?The story was winding down to its climax. Giving her backstory would have slowed things down. It was a judgment call, maybe not the right one. But if I was to give her backstory, it would have occurred when I first mentioned her, not here.Working through a church, she will make contact with the small cell of gays who live like a secret society in the west Texas town, fully aware of the enormous risk they will take if they decide to come out of the closet and help her expose the seeds of hate that exist there. She has now spent more than a year on the killing trail across Texas. She knows the uncomprehending horror of it and the basic indifference to it. She knows she must have a rest from it, get away from it. And then comes a plea in an unmarked envelope as tiny and poignant as the whisper of a frightened child. The work won’t be easy for her in San Angelo, just as it wasn’t easy in Tyler, or Midland, or El Paso, or the valley of the Rio Grande, but that won’t matter. It cannot matter. In a story like this, in which there are many victims and a single hero, what made you decide to conclude with the latter and not the former? Is this meant to be hopeful?I ended with Hardy-Garcia because as I said earlier, she is the unifying element in the piece that ties all the murders together. Having said that, I always hated this last paragraph. It was just too melodramatic. And that refrain of "...that won't matter. It cannot matter," was far too partisan. You don't need it. If the reader cannot at this point comprehend the horror of what is happening, then fuck 'em. In hindsight I wish this graf had been completely cut out and the story ended with the previous graf. That would have been abrupt, but it still would have been better.

Elon Green's last installment of Annotation Tuesday! was with Lillian Ross, on her famous New Yorker profile of Ernest Hemingway. 

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