“The Obama Portraits Tour” and “Black American Portraits” exhibits at LACMA not only celebrate portraiture, but also queer Black artists and subjects.
In the West Coast presentation of “The Obama Portraits Tour,” Kehinde Wiley’s Barack Obama and Amy Sherald’s Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama are on loan from the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, and on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art through Jan. 2.
“Barack Obama” by Kehinde Wiley, oil on canvas, 2018; “Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama” by Amy Sherald, oil on linen, 2018. (Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald)
Wiley, who identifies as gay, was the first Black artist to paint an official presidential portrait for the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery when Obama selected him in 2018.
Wiley’s “Portrait of a Young Man,” his eagerly anticipated reimagining of Gainsborough’s iconic 1770 painting “The Blue Boy,” is on display at The Huntington. Wiley’s work, which takes the name that Thomas Gainsborough initially used, incorporates the Grand Manner portraiture technique and style, but in a contemporary setting.
“The Portrait Gallery’s official portraits of President Barack Obama by Kehinde Wiley and First Lady Michelle Obama by Amy Sherald are powerful works of art,” Michael Govan, LACMA CEO, said in a statement. “The colors and styles of the paintings are a fresh departure from the history of presidential portraiture, and these have become two of the most recognized artworks in the world.”
To complement “The Obama Portraits Tour,” “Black American Portraits” is an exhibit that reframes portraiture to center Black American subjects, sitters, and spaces. It features 140 works mainly drawn from the museum’s permanent collection.
The picture above it showed several Black men who had been lynched.
Another photo asked what someone should do if their girlfriend was having an affair with a Black man. The answer, according to the caption, was to break “a tail light on his car so the police will stop him and shoot him.”
Someone else sent a picture of a candy cane, a Christmas tree ornament, a star for the top of the tree and an “enslaved person.”
“Which one doesn’t belong?” the caption asked.
“You don’t hang the star,” someone wrote back.
The comments represent a sliver of a trove of racist text messages exchanged by more than a dozen current and former Torrance police officers and recruits.
Through interviews with sources with direct knowledge of the investigation, public records requests and a review of district attorney’s office records, The Times examined some of the contents of the until-now secret texts and identified a dozen Torrance police officers under investigation for exchanging them.
The broad scope of the racist text conversations, which prosecutors said went on for years, has created a crisis for the Torrance Police Department and could jeopardize hundreds of criminal cases in which the officers either testified or made arrests. California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta said Wednesday his office will investigate the department in the wake of the scandal.
The officers’ comments spared no color or creed: They joked about “gassing” Jewish people, assaulting members of the LGBTQ community, using violence against suspects and lying during an investigation into a police shooting, according to district attorney’s office records reviewed by The Times.
Frequently, hateful comments were targeted at Black people. Officers called Black men “savages,”and several variations of the N-word, according to documents reviewed by The Times. The officers also shared instructions on how to tie a noose and a picture of a stuffed animal being lynched inside Torrance’s police headquarters, according to the documents.
While no officers currently face criminal charges in direct relation to the text messages, the racist exchanges have led to the dismissal of at least 85 criminal cases involving the officers implicated in the scandal. County prosecutors had tossed 35 felony cases as of mid-November, and the Torrance city attorney’s office has dismissed an additional 50, officials said.
In total, the officers were listed as potential witnesses in nearly 1,400 cases in the last decade, according to district attorney’s records The Times obtained through a public records request. The officers did not necessarily testify in each case, so it’s unclear how many of those cases could be affected.
Still, in the span of one week in November, the Los Angeles County public defender’s office received about 300 letters from prosecutors disclosing potential misconduct by officers implicated in the scandal, said Judith Green, an office spokeswoman.
Prosecutors are reviewing dozens of additional cases linked to the officers, said Diana Teran, a special advisor to Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. George Gascón. The review will prioritize active cases in which a defendant is still in custody and one of the officers implicated in the scandal was a “material witness.”
“So that could be, for example, a single police officer is in a patrol car and sees an individual on the sidewalk and then says he had a bulge in his pocket and then pats him down and then recovers a gun,” Teran said. “Without that officer, you couldn’t prove that case.”
Since 2013, the group of officers identified by The Times has been involved in at least seven serious use-of-force incidents in Torrance and Long Beach, including three that ended in the deaths of Black and Latino men, according to police use-of-force records and court filings. Although the officers’ actions were found to be justified in each case, experts say those cases should be reexamined in the context of the hateful messages.
“What those text messages revealed was an extraordinarily hostile attitude toward people of color, people who are nonbinary, people who have different sexual orientations,” said Walter Katz, a former independent police auditor in California who now serves as a vice president of criminal justice for research firm Arnold Ventures. “I don’t know that we can take anything they’ve said at face value.”
Two of the officers under investigation as part of the scandal — Anthony Chavez and Matthew Concannon — are also under investigation for the controversial 2018 slaying of Christopher DeAndre Mitchell, a Black car theft suspect they fatally shot while he was holding an air rifle. Chavez and Concannon were cleared of wrongdoing by former Dist. Atty. Jackie Lacey, but the case is one of several that Gascón has hired a special prosecutor to review for possible criminal charges.
Several of the officers have also been named as defendants in lawsuits alleging excessive force, false arrest and wrongful death, court filings show. In some of those cases, the plaintiffs are members of the same ethnic groups the officers espoused hatred for in the texts.
In addition to Weldin, Tomsic and Chandler, The Times has reviewed district attorney’s records detailing racist texts or images shared by six other police officers: Blake Williams, Brian Kawamoto, Joshua Satterfield, Omar Alonso, Christopher Allen-Young and Long Beach Police Officer Maxwell Schroeder, who is a former Torrance police recruit.
Concannon, Chavez and fellow Torrance Police Officers Andrew Kissinger and Enrique Villegas are also under investigation as part of the scandal, according to three people with direct knowledge of the case and a review of district attorney’s records. The Times did not independently view documentation of racist text messages sent by any of those four officers, though the newspaper did review a document that showed Concannon sent messages that are part of the investigation.
The identities of all 13 officers named in this article were confirmed by three people with direct knowledge of the case and by reviewing district attorney’s records that detailed some of the officers’ comments. Those people spoke on the condition of anonymity so they could candidly discuss an ongoing investigation.
The text messages were not on one continuous thread, according to two of the sources.Additional officers received the texts but did not interact with them in any way, so they are not considered under investigation,those sources said.
The exact number of officers involved in the scandal is unclear. Sgt. Mark Ponegalek, a Torrance police spokesman, could not confirm or deny the identities of the officers involved, but said 15 have been placed on administrative leave in relation to the scandal.
That number did not include Tomsic, Weldin, or Schroeder, he said. The Times identified 13 officers in its investigation, including Tomsic, Weldin and Schroeder, meaning there are an additional five Torrance officers under investigation whose identities remain unknown to the public.
A Long Beach police spokesman said Schroeder was assigned to desk duty pending the outcome of an internal investigation, but would not say why.
The officers either declined to comment through their attorneys or did not respond to messages left by The Times at their homes or through their union, the Torrance Police Officers Assn., which represents rank-and-file officers. An attorney for the union said the officers were barred from commenting on the investigation.
“The current administrative investigations are confidential. As such, we do not have access to facts of the underlying investigation, or the alleged inappropriate materials. We expect that as police officers, our members should be treated like any other citizen — considered innocent until proven guilty,” the union said in a statement. “Our members have a right to due process and should be protected from illegal and unnecessary intrusion into their private lives.”
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The text messages might have remained hidden if not for the alleged bizarre actions of Tomsic and Weldin in January 2020.
The two officers responded to a report of mail theft in the South Bay city and directed a car linked to the crime to be towed from the scene, authorities said. The pair allegedly spray-painted a swastika and a “happy face” inside the vehicle, according to a criminal complaint.
District attorney’s records reviewed by The Times showed Tomsic sent a slew of racist images and messages, including a picture of former President Reagan feeding a monkey with a caption stating Reagan “used to babysit [former President] Obama.”
Another picture he sent referred to an “African American baby” as a “Pet Niguana,” according to the records, and he also sent a message mocking the fact that he was the subject of a racial profiling complaint.
“So we totally racially profiled his ass, haha … Shopping at 7/11 while Black, he didn’t know the rules lol,” Tomsic wrote, according to the records.
Torrance police officials acquired evidence of the text message threads during their investigation of Weldin and Tomsic, according to Ponegalek, though he declined to give a specific timeline of when they obtained the data.
Gascón said he first became aware of the situation in July, when he was given a briefing about the pending vandalism charges.
“I questioned whether there was any other things that would lead us to believe that this is not sort of a single crime event,” he said. “I actually made some comments about how, generally, when someone does this kind of stuff, there are bigger patterns of behavior. So, I started asking if we had checked for text messages.”
Within weeks, Torrance police provided the district attorney’s office with more than 200 gigabytes of data, which showed the officers had been exchanging racist messages since at least 2018, according to Teran, the advisor to the district attorney. Gascón praised Torrance Police Chief Jeremiah Hart for moving quickly to provide information to prosecutors, noting he met resistance from police leaders when investigating similar scandals involving racist text messages among San Francisco officers.
Gascón said the texts are proof that some Torrance officers hate the communities they were hired to serve.
“It creates a tremendous amount of concern for me. We have a group of officers who, apparently in addition to harboring very biased and racist beliefs, also may be engaging in inappropriate force that could be illegal in some cases,” he said.
In the texts, the officers showed little concern about getting caught and even less about the citizens they were assigned to protect, routinely joking about using force and mocking internal affairs.
“We had to [expletive] her up because we knew he wouldn’t,” one officer wrote in one exchange about an altercation with a female suspect. “Don’t ask me where that lump on her forehead came from though.”
“Sometimes you’ve got to do things your own damn self,” Kawamoto replied, later adding a comment that he wanted to “always make Torrance great again,” a reference to former President Trump’s ubiquitous political slogan.
Kawamoto also referred to Black men as “savages” in the texts, according to district attorney’s records reviewed by The Times.
In another message reviewed by The Times, Alonso complained about the idea of having to work with a gay officer, and said he’d “straight punch” a member of the LGBTQ community, using a common slur for gay men.
Usually, conversations always seemed to circle back to vile insults or depictions of violence against Black people. After one officer shared a news article about someone being arrested for urinating on a Black child and calling them the N-word, Satterfield replied, “what’s the crime?” according to district attorney’s records reviewed by The Times.
From 2016 to 2019, Torrance police upheld just three citizen allegations of police misconduct and zero allegations of racial profiling made against officers, according to data submitted to the California attorney general’s office. Katz, the former independent police auditor, described those statistics as “concerningly low.”
“If citizen complaints are not taken seriously, it does increase the sense of impunity that officers who are inclined toward misconduct have,” he said.
Ponegalek argued that The Times’ analysis was incomplete, as it did not include statistics involving complaints filed by other officers. Torrance police sustained 35 out of 43 internally generated complaints of officer misconduct from 2016 to 2020, Ponegalek said. The department has also hired an outside law firm to conduct a review of the scandal, he said.
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Many of the officers under investigation as part of the scandal also have use-of-force histories involving the communities for which they expressed hatred.
Schroeder used a carotid restraint hold — sometimes referred to as a blood choke — to subdue a homeless Black man in a park in November 2018, according to Long Beach police records The Times obtained through a public records request. Schroeder initiated contact with the man because he was sleeping in a park after it closed, the records show, and used the choke to take him down after an altercation.
Long Beach police officials determined the use of force was justified, the records show. The homeless man was booked on suspicion of resisting arrest, being in the park after dark and possession of drug paraphernalia, according to a Long Beach police spokesman. Long Beach City Prosecutor Doug Haubert did not respond to repeated calls and e-mails seeking information about the criminal case against the homeless man.
According to the district attorney’s records reviewed by The Times, Schroeder sent one message in the texts reading “No Jews, No Blacks,” and made racist remarks about a child eating a watermelon.
Several of the Torrance officers under investigation as part of the scandal have also used serious or deadly force against Black and Latino men while on duty in recent years, according to district attorney’s records.
Chavez, Williams, Satterfield and Tomsic all opened fire on Michael Lopez in 2017 after a vehicle pursuit that started in Palos Verdes Estates. Lopez had been fleeing police in a truck, and the officers said he attempted to ram them when they opened fire, according to a district attorney’s office memo that determined the fatal shooting was justified.
One year later, Tomsic was one of several officers involved in a deadly altercation with Deautry Ross in the Del Amo Fashion Center, according to district attorney’s records. The officers were responding to calls from a mall employee who said Ross was walking through the building with a knife, muttering to himself. Ross fled from Torrance police when they responded, and became violent when they tried to arrest him, district attorney’s records show.
During the struggle, Tomsic said, Ross tried to gain control of his gun, according to a district attorney’s office memo clearing the officers of criminal liability. The officers hit Ross with a Taser and handcuffed him, but he continued to struggle, according to the report, which then described two officers kneeling on Ross’ shoulders.
Another officer then sat on Ross’ legs before others were able to “bind Ross’ arms and legs with a hobble restraint.”
Minutes later, firefighters on scene noted Ross’ pulse was beginning to weaken. He eventually went into cardiac arrest and was pronounced dead at a hospital a short time later. A knife was recovered at the scene.
Medical examiners ruled Ross died of cardiac arrest resulting from methamphetamine use and his struggle with the officers, according to autopsy records.
The most controversial incident involving officers linked to the racist text scandal is the 2018 shooting death of Christopher DeAndre Mitchell. The incident sparked significant protests — including one inside Torrance’s City Council chambers that led demonstrators to file excessive-force lawsuits against several of the officers The Times identified in this article — and remains under review by Gascón.
Mitchell, who was Black, was suspected of driving a stolen vehicle when he pulled into a Ralphs parking lot in Torrance in December 2018, according to a district attorney’s office memo clearing the officers of wrongdoing. Concannon and Chavez pulled in behind him, exited their vehicle and yelled “police!” Mitchell initially placed his hands on the steering wheel, according to the memo, but when the officers approached him, they noticed his hands move toward his lap where Concannon saw what he believed to be a firearm.
The officers repeatedly ordered Mitchell to get out of the car, but he did not comply, according to the report. The officers described the weapon, later determined to be a “break barrel air rifle,” as “pinched” between Mitchell’s legs, though neither alleged he grabbed it or pointed it at them before they opened fire.
Lacey cleared the officers of wrongdoing in all three deaths, but Gascón has reopened the investigation into Mitchell’s killing . He declined to offer a timetable on that review and would not say whether the officers involvement in the text scandal would affect that probe.
Katz said the text messages call into question the credibility of the officers’ accounts of any past use-of-force incidents involving Black or Latino suspects.
In the Mitchell case, that could be especially concerning. According to district attorney’s records reviewed by The Times, Concannon once sent a troubling text message referring to a deposition he gave in an “officer-involved shooting.”
“They believed our lies. Good job sticking to the script,” he wrote. “LMAO, that’s what they call a W.”
According to a Times review of public records, Concannon has shot only one person during his career: Christopher DeAndre Mitchell.
The bestselling “LGBTQ+ Book” on Amazon is Johnny the Walrus — a hateful picture book by The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh that compares the gender identities of trans youth to a young boy who imagines he is a walrus. Amazon mislabeled the book into its LGBTQ+ Books section and, as a result, is promoting harmful anti-trans views to its consumers interested in LGBTQ stories.
Walsh is a prominent podcast host at The Daily Wire, a right-wing media outlet and a cesspool of bigotry and hatred which frequently targets the LGBTQ community. Walsh himself has a longrecord of espousingextremeanti-LGBTQrhetoric, including falsely comparing best practice medical care for trans youth to “molestation and rape” and calling doctors who serve trans youth “pedophiles” — and now he has used Amazon’s mislabeling to claim he is an “LGBT author” and “one of the leading LGBT voices in the country.”
Johnny the Walrus is a gross misrepresentation of the experiences of trans youth
Johnny the Walrus is an anti-trans allegory that compares a child imagining that he is a walrus to society affirming and accepting trans youth, including by providing lifesaving, best practice medical care when kids go through puberty. In reality, research shows that transgender youth are best able to succeed when their teachers and families accept and affirm their gender identity, which has been proven to reduce their risk of experiencing depression, homelessness, and suicidal ideation.
The description for the children’s board book claims that it is about “a little boy with a big imagination” named Johnny who “forced to make a decision between the little boy he is and the things he pretends to be.” The book depicts Johnny first pretending to be a walrus by using wood spoons as tusks and socks as fins, then going through the process of trying to become a walrus by eating worms, putting on gray makeup, and visiting a doctor who offers a “simple procedure” to cut his “feet into fins!”
Notably, Amazon has faced backlash for selling anti-trans books in the past. The company continues to sell the book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters by anti-trans author Abigail Shrier, even though Amazon employees filed an internal complaint in April claiming that the book violates the company’s policy against selling books “that frame LGBTQ+ identity as a mental illness.”
Johnny the Walrus’s position atop Amazon’s bestselling LGBTQ books list comes at a time when right-wing advocates and Republicanofficials are seeking to ban LGBTQ books in schools. These critics have targeted LGBTQ books for their so-called “sexually explicit” material, including falsely claiming that one promoted pedophilia.
On Fox News, Walsh gloated that he is “an LGBT author” and “one of the leading LGBT voices right now according to Amazon”
During the December 7 edition of Fox News’ The Ingraham Angle, Walsh promoted his book and stated that Amazon “did this on their own. They listed it as an LGBT book.” He also noted that his book is “the top-selling LGBT book. So I’m an LGBT author” and “one of the leading LGBT voices in the country right now according to Amazon, and I embrace that.” Video fileVideo Player
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Numerous other right-wingmediaoutlets have promoted Walsh’s anti-trans picture book. The Daily Wire has hyped the book and bragged about its labeling as an LGBT book in severalarticles and videos, including a video of Walsh reading the book to a group of children. The outlet is also selling Johnny the Walrus t-shirts.
Nikai David, a “sweet”, spirited Black trans woman, has been shot dead in the US. She was 33.
The model, described by those who knew her as a “happy, fun person”, was killed in the early hours of Saturday (4 December) in Oakland, a port town in California.
Local law enforcement responded to a report of shots fired at 4am on Castro Street, West Oakland. David was found suffering from a gunshot wound only to die at the scene, FOX KTVU2 reported.
The Oakland Police Department said that there is no evidence of a hate crime.
An aspiring social media influencer who hoped to one day open a clothing boutique with her best friend, David had only the week before turned 33.
Friends had hoped to celebrate her birthday with her soon – a celebration that will now never happen.
David was a “beloved community member”, the Oakland LGBTQ Community Center said in a Facebook tribute Saturday. The group said it planning to honour her life with a memorial.
‘Nikai David was a young person with so much life ahead of her’, says activist
David is at least the 50th trans, non-binary or gender non-conforming person violently killed in the US this year, according to the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), a queer rights group which has been documenting the slayings since 2013.
“Learning about Nikai David’s death is disheartening and alarming,” Tori Cooper, director of community engagement for HRC’s Transgender Justice Initiative, told PinkNews.
“In the year that we’ve marked as the deadliest year on record for our community, we continue to see a frightening rate of fatal violence against transgender and gender non-conforming people.
“We must all continue to demand that the violence cease.”
Cooper added: “Nikai David was a young person with so much life ahead of her.
“For her future to have been violently taken away from her serves as a reminder that we remain with so much work ahead of us to ensure a safe and loving world for all.”
A protester in Times Square, New York, in support of Black Women. (Ira L. Black/Corbis via Getty Images)
The full death toll is likely to be far higher, the HRC has long warned. Almost three-quarters of trans homicide victims are misgendered and deadnamed by the police and local press, the group has found.
Hundreds of residents in Hastings, Minnesota, took to the streets over the weekend to rally in support of LGBTQ youth after an official’s transgender child was publicly outed.
The demonstrations in support of the child come after Concerned Parents of Hastings, a Facebook group for conservative parents, publicly outed Kit, 8, in the wake of a bitter school board election, KARE-TV, an NBC affiliate based in Minnesota, reported.
The child’s mother, Kelsey Waits, was running for re-election to the town school board in November when opponents of her campaign outed her child, who is nonbinary and uses gender-neutral pronouns. In light of the rally, Waits said she is proud that the community is denouncing the harassment.
“Seeing so many people rally behind a child is particularly meaningful. … It meant a lot to [Kit],” Waits told NBC News on Monday. “It was amazing. I would not have expected almost a thousand people to come out for my kid.”
The rally highlighted dozens of LGBTQ speakers, groups and elected officials who rallied in support of transgender children. This comes as transgender youth face a wave of anti-trans bills limiting their participation in school sports and use of bathrooms and locker rooms that align with their gender identity.
In a tweet on Saturday, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz voiced his support for the Waits family.
“Everyone deserves to live in a state that values them for who they are — especially our kids,” Walz, a Democrat, wrote.
One of the participants at the rally, Ren Olive, a 30-year-old transgender person, said they want Kit to continue being themself even in the face of transphobic bullying.
“My message to Kit is to don’t give up,” Olive told KARE-TV. “We’re here, we’re loud, we’re queer and we have your back.”
Before her child’s gender identity was publicly disclosed, Waits said her family “spent years trying to be incredibly private.” Following the incident, Kit has been misgendered by classmates and is experiencing more anxiety and fear, Waits said in a statement.
Waits said this is the latest in a string of harassment facing the family. She hopes the demonstrations can hold the harassers accountable and prevent future incidents.
“If we moved away and didn’t say anything, the bullies would have won,” Waits said. “What does that teach? That teaches that they can do all of these things and that there are no repercussions and that no one is going to push back against them, and that just makes them bully harder for the next person.”
One of the administrators of the Concerned Parents of Hastings Facebook group issued a statement on Tuesday denying that they harassed the family.
“Many members were confused about why they were mentioned in relation to the harassment that the Waits family had received in this town,” the administrator wrote in a Facebook post, according to a photo Waits shared with NBC News. “Many of them said they had no idea Kelsey has a transgender child, let alone bullied her or her child.”
The administrator added that the controversy stems from Wait’s position on the school board.
“The only reason Kelsey’s parental decision was a concern to the members was because she was not just an average mom, but someone who was running for a position where she would be in charge of making decisions for other parents’ children,” the administrator wrote in the same post. “Most parents in the group believe that a child needs to be mature enough to make life-altering decisions.”
Following the demonstrations, Waits said residents are reckoning with the community’s lack of action on this issue.
“It’s woken a lot of people up to their silence,” she said. “A lot of leaders in the community were aware of what was happening and did not say anything because they didn’t want it to impact them. Now they are seeing the damage that silence can cause.”
While it’s unclear whether Waits will seek legal action, she is weighing her options with the support of the Minnesota-based advocacy group Gender Justice. As a result of the alleged harassment, Waits said her family is fleeing the city.
“We need to keep this work moving forward in this community for everyone who does not have the option to leave,” Waits said. “This was the final event for us, but really this neighborhood, this house, there is a lot of trauma here. A lot of negativity has been brought into our home, and we need a fresh start for our own mental health.”
Georgia’s prison system on Monday agreed to pay $2.2 million to the parents of a transgender inmate who hung herself in her cell in 2017.
The settlement came four years to the day since Jenna Mitchell, 25, died after being in a coma for two days before life support was withdrawn.
A lawsuit filed by Mitchell’s parents in 2019 said she had been approved for gender reassignment surgery but was being held at Valdosta State Prison, a men’s prison.
Valdosta State Prison in Georgia.Google Maps
While at the prison, she had been in and out of solitary confinement for months. Before hanging herself on Dec. 4, 2017, she had been housed in solitary confinement for more than two weeks, according to the lawsuit.
When Mitchell was placed in solitary confinement, the prison staff told her she was “being moved to the compound for transgender inmates,” the suit said.
Mitchell’s mother had called the prison on Dec. 2 after receiving a letter from her daughter saying she was going to pull a “suicide stunt” at the prison. She took the threat seriously because Mitchell “had a history of mental illness, was suffering from gender identity issues, and had engaged in a pattern of suicidal and self-harming behavior,” the suit said.
Mitchell’s mother told the woman who answered the phone at the prison about the threat and asked that her daughter be put on suicide watch. The woman said Mitchell was already “in medical” for attempting suicide and that she was “okay,” the suit said.
The warden of the prison was made aware of the call, according to the lawsuit.
But Mitchell was placed back into solitary confinement, and on Dec. 4 told a corrections officer that she was about to hang herself. The officer didn’t wait with Mitchell or try to prevent her from hanging herself, but rather left to alert others about the threat, the suit said.
Mitchell hanged herself while alone. The suit said it took too long to cut her down because officers couldn’t find a cutting tool nearby and had to travel to and from the medical unit for scissors.
Following Mitchell’s death, according to the suit, the supervisor of the corrections officer who left Mitchell alone “prepared a false incident report to cover up” the officer’s conduct so that he and other staff members would avoid discipline, an investigation or a lawsuit.
This cast of five features Alexander Howard as Casey, the Elvis impersonator whose career goes awry, whose life falls apart, and who ends up needing to learn how to work in drag.
Joey Abrego is the fabulous Miss Tracy Mills, who teaches Casey how to do it.
The following is a slightly edited interview I conducted with Joey, who arrives next week from LA to begin rehearsals on the show.
CK – In The Legend of Georgia McBride, you teach Casey how to perform as a drag queen. Did you have mentors when you entered the world of drag performance?
I truly am a believer in the idea that it takes a village. I have been fortunate enough to have a variety of mentors in and out of the drag community that have influenced, inspired, and shaped me. I started out in theater here in Santa Rosa and then continued to study theater in college down in Southern California. After graduation, I was working in regional theater in the area, and during that time, I would go out with some friends every now and then and I met a couple of drag queens. One of them convinced me to participate in a fundraiser as a drag queen and they put me in drag and let me prance around to some music. It was an absolute BLAST! From that moment on, I dove headfirst into drag and tried to soak up as much knowledge as I could.
I’ve had mentors who helped me figure out makeup, hair styling, performance for drag, outfits, business relationships, etc. In addition to these queens who have helped me in those areas, I also have to acknowledge all my theater teachers and mentors who gave me the foundation upon which I develop my drag. I try to bring theatricality and all the training that goes with that into my drag in order to make it feel more unique and like myself.
CK – What were your greatest strengths or challenges?
I felt like my strengths always resided in my performance and connection to the audience. Of course, I have learned and continue to learn to refine and improve, but I’ve been lucky enough to have the instincts to work a crowd and perform.
Challenges have been PLENTIFUL! Drag is FAR from easy and takes a while to get used to and to feel grounded and comfortable in. Of course, learning to style hair or do your make-up is challenging, and being in tights and heels for hours upon hours is difficult. But the most challenging part of drag for me has been discovering what I bring that makes my drag special and allowing myself to sit in that instead of comparing myself to others. Which is a WASTE of time. Haha!
CK – You participated in our Applause Gala virtual performance earlier this year, and wowed the audience with your performance. What have been the high points of your experience performing in Sonoma County?
Well, thank you so much for saying that! It was very fun to get to actually sing for a change! It really was such a well-executed fundraiser and I was so lucky to be part of it!
I started out doing the youth theater summer programs at 6th Street under the brilliant Holly Vinson. I did Music Man and Oliver! with her and she really opened me up to the wildly fun world of theater. I also did RENT, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, and Producers with the Playhouse before I left for college. In addition to those productions, I also assisted with the Playhouse’s School of Drama and helped direct and teach in a couple of youth productions. I love love LOVED being at 6th Street. It always felt like a safe, warm home for me through my teen years and I am forever grateful for the love I felt and the freedom I had to explore and learn there.
I also have to say that being a student under board member Sue Byrne in the Montgomery High School Drama Department was also a HUGE and vital part of my upbringing. Sue really was and still is one of the most wonderful, encouraging, supporting, and loving humans I know. I was very lucky to be a pupil of hers.
CK – I can’t help noticing, in your drag photos, that you have some amazing and beautiful cleavage. I can’t find a clue as to how you do that. Is it a trade secret?
AH YES! My boobies! Haha! I get this question all the time!
It’s honestly just a heavy silicone bib that wraps around my neck. I usually cover the line around my neck with a necklace so it looks seamless. I’ll let you try them on when I see you! I just made my aunt try them on about 20 minutes ago! It’s a great laugh!
CK – How long have you been doing drag performance? Where do you usually perform?
I have been doing drag since the fall of 2017—so a little over 4 years now! That feels so long, yet so short. I have friends who have been doing it for 30 plus years… which is to be applauded because I don’t think my body will last that long! Haha.
I perform all around Southern California! I can be found from Long Beach to West Hollywood to Palm Springs! It is my full-time job and I couldn’t be more fortunate for that.
CK – You mentioned that you’re not yet in rehearsals, so your portrayal of Miss Tracy Mills will be evolving, under Carl Jordan’s direction, but what are your thoughts about her so far?
At this current time I would say that Tracy is motivated by her love for drag and performance. And on the other side of that she is also motivated by fear of failure. She spends a great deal of time saving the show, and helping it grow and blossom. I think the great deal of love and joy she has for drag really pushes her to not only improve the show but also allows her the opportunity to impart knowledge and teach Casey/Georgia all about it.
I also think that a fear of what she considers to be failure motivates her to keep the show going and make sure that employment is steady for herself. I truly think she’s afraid of not being able to work as a drag queen. I see that drive and that same quality in a lot of not only drag queens but performers in general. I completely relate to all of that. It’s an incredibly human quality that is so universal, yet laid into a very specific being. That’s part of the brilliance of Matthew Lopez’s characters.
I think what I love MOST about Tracy is that while she is sassy, fun, and can be frank or serious, she leads with kindness and compassion. I don’t get to see that quality reflected in drag queens very often on TV or in movies.
CK – Is there anything else about your preparation for this role that you’d like to share?
This is the first theatrical production I’ve done in a few years! So I am equal parts excited and terrified! I’m excited to dive into the play with everyone, collaborate, discover, and play! Terrified that I forgot how to do all of that! But I suppose the only difference between fear and excitement is if I’m breathing or not. Haha!
Federal prosecutors arrested a man Monday who they said threatened to attack this year’s New York City Pride March with “firepower” that would “make the 2016 Orlando Pulse Nightclub shooting look like a cakewalk.”
Officials from the FBI and the New York Joint Terrorism Task Force announced that Robert Fehring, 74, was charged with mailing dozens of letters threatening to assault, shoot and bomb LGBTQ-affiliated individuals, organizations and businesses, including New York City’s annual Pride festival.
After executing a search warrant at his home in Bayport, New York, last month, law enforcement agents recovered photographs from a Pride event on Long Island this year, two loaded shotguns, hundreds of rounds of ammunition, two stun guns and a stamped envelope addressed to an LGBTQ-affiliated attorney containing the remains of a dead bird, federal prosecutors said.
“Fehring’s alleged threats to members of the LGBTQ+ community were not only appalling, but dangerous, despite the fact he hadn’t yet acted on his purported intentions,” Michael J. Driscoll, the assistant director-in-charge of the FBI’s New York Field Office, said in a statement.
A criminal complaint released Monday said Fehring had sent more than 60 threatening letters to members of and organizations affiliated with the LGBTQ community since 2013 and as recently as September.
In many of the letters, he describes LGBTQ individuals as worse than the “bottom of the pig-pen” or states that “even animals know better” than to engage in same-sex activity, according to the complaint.
Notably, the complaint stated that Fehring threatened that there would “be radio-cont[r]olled devices placed at numerous strategic places” at the 2021 New York City Pride March with “firepower” that would “make the 2016 Orlando Pulse Nightclub shooting look like a cakewalk,” referring to the massacre at the gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, which left 49 people dead and dozens injured.
NYC Pride, which runs New York City’s Pride march, “received threatening letters earlier this year and reported them,” the organization’s executive director, Sandra Pérez, told NBC News in an email.
“We are cooperating in any way we can, and we remain committed to the safety and well-being of the LGBTQIA+ community,” she added.
Prosecutors also detailed an incident in which Fehring allegedly sent a letter threatening the organizer of the Long Island Pride event in East Meadow, New York. The letter called the organizer a “freak” and stated, in part, “You are being watched. No matter how long it takes, you will be taken out…. high-powered bullet…. bomb….knife…. whatever it takes.”
Last month, Fehring waived his Miranda rights and allowed federal prosecutors to interview him, according to the complaint. During the interview, he acknowledged that he authored certain letters under investigation and that he had a general animosity toward the LGBTQ community, according to the complaint.
There is “a sick overdose of that stuff being shoved down everybody’s face on the paper, on the TV and all over the place and I’m not a fan of any of the homosexuality, homosexual thing,” he said.
Fehring is expected to make his initial appearance in court Monday afternoon.
Harriet M. Welch, the titular character of Louise Fitzhugh’s iconic children’s book Harriet the Spy is eleven years old and determined to write everything down. As training for one day becoming a famous novelist, she ventures on a daily “spy route,” stalking a handful of brownstones on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, secretly watching her friends and neighbors, chronicling their business in a private notebook using a tone so deadpan and factual it borders on cruel. Readers young and old, however, sixty years ago as much as today, find in Harriet a cathartic release and creative permission. Now Harriet’s author, Louise Fitzhugh, is the subject of a biography—Leslie Brody’s Sometimes You Have to Lie: The Life and Times of Louise Fitzhugh, Renegade Author of Harriet the Spy, a succinct and readable portrait of the short-lived and charismatic lesbian writer and illustrator.
A Queer Heroine in Childhood
With her matter-of-fact tone and acerbic humor, Harriet the Spy is the quintessential story of a tomboy—a queer heroine in childhood. Harriet is unstoppable: she eats cake and egg creams in the afternoons, argues with grown-ups, climbs onto buildings and into dumbwaiters to spy, all while filled with that kind of youthful rage one can only find in children. It is hard to tell whether Harriet’s influence on queer writers comes from her insufferable writing ambitions, her gender-agnostic bearings, or that she finds her world incomprehensible and repressive.
Much of the humor and intrigue of Harriet the Spy is the heroine’s own interior monologue, a relentless string of crude, or, as we say today, very real observations, externalized by the notes she takes: “DOES PINKY WHITEHEAD’S MOTHER HATE HIM?” She writes about a boy in her school, “IF I’D HAD HIM I’D HATE HIM.”
With her matter-of-fact tone and acerbic humor, Harriet the Spy is the quintessential story of a tomboy—a queer heroine in childhood.
Sometimes You Have to Lie
When Harriet’s classmates, without Harriet’s consent, obtain and read her notebook—which spells out PRIVATE on the cover—they are horrified and start a campaign against her. Following the lead of the school bullies, even Harriet’s closest friends turn on her. Finally, after bravely resisting mob rule, Harriet manages to make amends by following the advice of her beloved former nanny, who suggests using white lies to save Harriet’s friendships: “Sometimes you have to lie,” goes the moral truism of the novel, “but to yourself, you must always tell the truth.”
Published in 1964 into an undersaturated book market of children’s literature, Harriet the Spy’s idiosyncratic eleven-year-old protagonist instantly hit a nerve. The book spoke to its readers as complex people and not as inferior creatures, changing the tone and sophistication of children’s and young adult fiction for generations to come.
“Sometimes you have to lie,” goes the moral truism of the novel, “but to yourself, you must always tell the truth.”
A Kind of Detective Work
And yet Harriet’s popularity and household name eclipse that of her creator, whose larger-than-life persona remained out of the public eye. For the length of her career, Louise Fitzhugh minded her privacy. She never made public appearances or gave interviews to promote Harriet. After her sudden death, at forty-six, Fitzhugh’s estate and friends worked to retain Fitzhugh’s evasive nature according to their own terms. Only very few photographs were circulated of Fitzhugh: one, from the cover of Harriet the Spy, shows the intrepid Fitzhugh sitting on a swing with an unreadable, if mischievous expression. Even to children (or at least to the author of this text) she seemed somehow readably queer. Gamine, with short brown hair and lively, discerning eyes, the person depicted in this photograph was all that many of us ardent readers knew of her, including the fact that she was born in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1928.
Brody likens her biographical research to a kind of detective work, setting different chapters to key terms of “spy language,” using words like snoop and detect. The metaphor seems just a little too obvious: in order to reveal Fitzhugh’s hidden life, Brody had to do some sleuthing of her own. With Brody’s storytelling, Fitzhugh’s personality resonates distinctly, deliciously, to a degree that the reader falls in love with Fitzhugh as much as with the heroine of any good novel. Privacy, after all, does not equal shyness.
[..] the Fitzhugh that emerges comes across as a charmer, the kind of person you would want at your party, vibrant, contradictory, and extremely creative.
Quite the opposite actually: the Fitzhugh that emerges comes across as a charmer, the kind of person you would want at your party, vibrant, contradictory, and extremely creative. Wherever Brody’s research hits the sealed lips of former lovers or estates, the biographer leaves spaces alive and lets secrets and omissions speak for themselves—she paints a distinct enough character of Fitzhugh for the reader to fill in the blanks. What she does end up uncovering of Fitzhugh’s life story, Brody seems to suggest, like many queer histories, was never truly hidden. It was just kept slightly out of the spotlight of a hetero-centric world.
The Ultimate Resistance Facing a Hypocritical World
In the same way Louise Fitzhugh never appeared to be actively closeted—just simply never put in the limelight—so too are her politics of justice and resistance consistently overt. Harriet the Spy and her two best friends—wily Janie, an aspiring mad scientist, and gentle Sport, who looks after his bohemian father—can just as easily be read as queer by virtue of not behaving according to gender expectations. Beyond the obvious non-conformity Harriet displays in her behavior and attire (a tomboy of the mid-sixties, Harriet’s comfort clothes consist of sneakers, old jeans, and a hooded sweatshirt), she is an outspoken observer, the ultimate resistance facing a hypocritical world.
Her dilemma, or a good deal of it before the novel’s dramatic disaster strikes, consists of puzzling over how to fit into society and retain her dignity as a powerless eleven-year-old, but also in her identity as a spy. With the help of her nanny, Harriet devises ways of passing in straight society: she will, for instance, go to the revolting dance classes her mother wants her to attend, because spies, like Mata Hari, need to know how to dance in order to deceive people. Harriet needs to be a spy to fit into a world of dishonesty and deception while the rest of the world simply bows to injustice.
This unsentimental, humorous, and political attitude towards childhood runs through all of what is published of Louise Fitzhugh’s creative output: from her illustrations in the Eloise-parody Suzuki Beane (Fitzhugh drew the barmy ink illustrations featured in Harriet the Spy, as well) to the advocacy towards children’s political agency in Nobody’s Family is Going to Change, children strive for autonomy and fairness in Fitzhugh’s work.
Like several prolific female writers of the 20th century still known today, Louise Fitzhugh came from generational wealth that allowed for relative financial independence. And though she could live quite comfortably off her inheritance and royalties, Fitzhugh never turned her work away from people; instead, she fueled her writing with a subversive political will: “Her response to any kind of assertion of supremacy,” Brody writes, “was to oppose it.”
Liked to Consistently Reinvent Herself
Fitzhugh also liked to consistently reinvent herself and turn her own life into a tall tale. This comes to her biographer’s aid. Brody’s portrayal of Fitzhugh’s tempestuous life takes on the shape of those figures within 20th century literary genres where famous lesbian authors were starkly prevalent: Fitzhugh’s childhood, situated in what sounds like a gothic Memphis mansion, surrounded by an eccentric grandmother, a disturbed uncle living in the attic, various nannies, as well as a wealthy father extorting Fitzhugh’s working-class mother for money, recalls the kind of lonely child narrator by the likes of someone like Carson McCullers or Harper Lee.
Once Fitzhugh dropped out of Bard college to join her first girlfriend in bohemian 1950’s Greenwich Village, she resembled a pulpy heroine not unlike those by Ann Bannon and Vin Packer. Popular, charismatic, and energetic, Fitzhugh hung out in gay bars and galleries, painted and wrote, travelled to Europe, and entertained and collaborated with her long list of lovers as well as many well-connected friends. (Harriet the Spy’s neighbor and subject Harrison Withers lives with two dozen or so cats named after many of Fitzhugh’s close friends.)
Among these were the likes of Lorraine Hansberry and James Merrill, as well as pulp writers such Sandra Scoppetone (the author of Suzuki Beane), with whom Fitzhugh both collaborated and romanced, and through whom Fitzhugh befriended the grande dame of lesbian pulp fiction, Marijane Meaker—aka Vin Packer—who spent several years in a relationship with Patricia Highsmith, later penning a whole book about it.
Lost Manuscript
One of the more tragic and mysterious sections of the biography is the plot surrounding Louise Fitzhugh’s lost manuscript. The contents of this manuscript were rumored to be the re-telling of Fitzhugh’s first own secret teenage romance with another well-off Memphis girl, Amelia. Fitzhugh and Amelia had been each other’s first true loves in the South, later successfully eloping to New York to make it the home of their artistic pursuits. Amelia would become a reporter for the Times and a good friend of Fitzhugh’s, before her tragic and disturbing death in a freak accident. The manuscript containing the story of this teenage courtship, which some friends claim to have read excerpts of, would have been one of the first lesbian young adult novels ever published in the U.S.—years ahead of what is known of the first of its kind, Sandra Scoppettone’s Happy Endings Are All Alike (1978).
The existence of this manuscript, its content and disappearance, remain a mystery. It is possible Fitzhugh lost the manuscript by accident, or by her own mechanization? What would a book of Fitzhugh’s lost manuscript have looked like? Was it more literary than the lesbian pulp novellas of her day, or was it meant for a younger audience? Would it have been a kind of forerunner of historical young adult LGBTQ+ romance fiction, not unlike Malinda Lo’s recent, and powerfully moving, Last Night at the Telegraph Club (2021)?
The manuscript containing the story of this teenage courtship […] would have been one of the first lesbian young adult novels ever published in the U.S.
The mysteries at the heart of this biography, alongside its depictions of various eras of queer literary New York City, only make for an even more compelling read. And Brody’s complex depiction of Fitzhugh, with her contradictions and idiosyncrasies, her tireless work and quest for artistic fulfillment, becomes a refreshing study of the arduous process and pay-offs of creativity itself: its fits, its dead ends, its blinding inspirations, leaving behind a vast and complicated legacy that might, in the end, emit one truly great achievement, a single character and her unforgettable name—Harriet the Spy.
Sometimes You Have to Lie
by Leslie Brody
Seal Press
Hardcover, 9781580057691, 352 pp.
December 2020
After four years of debate, New Zealand has unanimously passed a self-ID bill for trans people, voting “in favour of inclusivity and against discrimination”.
The self-ID bill was introduced in 2018, and was finally passed by New Zealand’s parliament on Thursday (9 December) after its third reading.
It will remove the requirement for medical intervention to change legal gender marker in favour of a “statutory declaration”.
The changes will come into force in 18 months time, allowing for consultation with the LGBT+ community on how the process should work, how young people can access correct gender markers, and how to be inclusive of non-binary people and different cultures.
According to the NZ Herald, Green Party MP Dr Elizabeth Kerekere, a cisgender lesbian and longtime trans ally, said: “This bill recognises that those who need to amend their birth certificate can do so, that the courts do not have the right to make that choice for them, that parents do not have that right, that cisgender people who don’t even know them or care about them do not have that right.”
“As a takatāpui, cis-lesbian fem ally to our takatāpui, trans and intersex non-binary whānau, I am very proud to commend this bill to the house,” she continued.
Internal affairs minister Jan Tinetti described the passing of the bill as “a proud day in Aotearoa’s history”, and added: “Parliament has voted in favour of inclusivity and against discrimination.”
She said that trans folk and those who supported the bill had been “hurt, mocked, belittled and discriminated against” during the course of the years-long debate, and continued: “A lot of discussion was aimed at trans women. As a cis woman I am proud to stand alongside my sisters.
“Trans misogyny is still misogyny… We are changing legislation that is truly a step closer to an inclusive Aotearoa New Zealand.
“Keep proudly being you.”
Lagging shamefully behind New Zealand, in the UK, self-ID for trans folk seems like a distant dream.
While the Tory government conducted research as far back as 2018 showing broad public support for reform of the gender recognition, under Boris Johnson, the government announced last year that it was scrapping plans for reform completely.
