Saturday, July 01, 2023
Pornhub Blocks Access in Virginia
Virginians will likely be disappointed the next time they try to access Pornhub. The popular pornography site has blocked users with Virginia-based IP addresses in response to the state’s legislature passing a law that requires users to submit government identification to verify their age before watching their adult content. The new law, passed in May, goes into effect Saturday.
Users will be met with a message opposing the legislation, accompanied by a video featuring porn actress Cherie Deville reading it.
“As you may know, your elected officials in Virginia are requiring us to verify your age before allowing you access to our website,” the statement reads. “While safety and compliance are at the forefront of our mission, giving your ID card every time you want to visit an adult platform is not the most effective solution for protecting our users, and in fact, will put children and your privacy at risk.”
When asked ahead of signing the bill in May whether he was concerned about Pornhub making such a move, Gov. Glenn Youngkin told The Pilot that he would take the bill’s ramifications into account when making his decision. “I believe that children should be protected from pornography and I want to make sure that we do that,” Youngkin said at the time.
Virginia is the second state to get the cold shoulder from Pornhub. Utah passed a similar law in March, and the site blocked access to users in the state in the days before the law took effect in May. Free speech advocates have come out against this legislation, arguing that personal data related to pornography usage could be vulnerable to hacks as a result.
The Virginia Mercury piece has this on the new legislation:
In Virginia, the law will allow people to sue pornographic websites that don’t use proper age and identity verification methods “for damages resulting from a minor’s access to such material.”
However, Beth Waller, attorney and chair of the cybersecurity and data privacy practice at Woods Rogers Vandeventer Black law firm, said technology limitations could make it difficult for pornography websites to follow the requirements. She also questioned Virginia’s ability to enforce the law in the first place.
Waller said Louisiana, which has a similar law, allows adult content websites to access the state’s central driver’s license online database to verify age and identity. Virginia, she said, doesn’t have a similar system.
That means websites will have to use third-party verification methods from other companies that don’t have access to a central state database, she said, raising questions about how identification will be processed and verified.
“It’s not like walking into a bar where somebody can take the ID and use an ID reader to see if it’s valid,” Waller said.
Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares’ office did not respond to multiple requests from the Mercury for information about how officials plan to enforce the new law.
Free Speech Coalition Executive Director Alison Boden said the laws in Louisiana and Utah haven’t been enforced despite going into effect months ago.
“Because the laws are so poorly written, it’s impossible to know whether a site could be held liable for violating the law even when it’s made a good-faith effort to comply,” she said. “Website owners certainly worry that even though they’re following the law as they understand it, they could still end up being sued because young people understand technology like VPNs much better than politicians do.”
Uploading personal information through non-state verification methods also runs the risk of the information being exposed in a cybersecurity data breach, said Waller.
“The intention behind the law is good,” Waller said. However, she added, “I do think that anyone who wants to bypass a law like that, they are properly motivated and tech savvy and will find a way to do so.”
SCOTUS Creates License to Discriminate
The Supreme Court’s decision in favor of a Christian web designer in Colorado who refuses to create websites to celebrate same-sex weddings out of religious objections will have a far-reaching impact on other minority groups and could open the door to a slew of cases seeking to further chip away at civil rights protections in the US.
In a 6-3 opinion delivered Friday by Justice Neil Gorsuch that was joined by the court’s five other conservatives, the justices said that the First Amendment’s free speech protections permitted the web designer, Lorie Smith, to refuse to extend her services for same-sex weddings.
The ruling was rooted in free speech grounds and could create a massive hole in state public accommodation laws for businesses who sell so-called “expressive” goods, allowing for companies that provide customized, expressive products and services to pick and choose who they work with.
The idea of ‘customized’ or ‘expressive’ services are not categories,” said Elizabeth Sepper, a University of Texas Law professor and expert on public accommodations laws. “So I think the category of businesses that will be able to claim free speech rights against anti-discrimination laws is not at all clear. But it’s not small,” Sepper added. “There’s going to be a relatively large range of businesses who can lay claim to free speech rights against anti-discrimination laws.”
The experts also warned that the decision in 303 Creative v. Elenis is just the opening chapter in what will likely be years of litigation from people looking to push the limits around state and local laws providing civil rights protections for various minority groups.
The vast majority of Americans live in an area where state or local public accommodation laws exist. As of this month, 22 states, the US Virgin Islands and Washington, DC, had laws on their books that explicitly prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity, according to the Movement Advancement Project, a nonprofit think tank that advocates for LGBTQ rights, while another five states interpret “existing prohibition(s) on sex discrimination to include sexual orientation and/or gender identity.”
The Supreme Court’s three liberal members dissented from Friday’s ruling, with Justice Sonia Sotomayor writing that the majority was giving businesses a “new license to discriminate.”
She suggested that the decision’s “logic cannot be limited to discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity,” and wrote that it “threatens to balkanize the market and to allow the exclusion of other groups from many services.”
[L]egal experts believed that Sotomayor was not crying wolf in her dissent in that the opinion could open up other minority groups to be subjected to the same type of behavior for which Smith sought approval.
“The worry is that this provides a green light to any business owner that they can refuse service to any person on the basis of their identity, whether they’re gay or lesbian, or Jewish or Black, or anything, because they have an objection to those sorts of people being in their business,” said Katherine Franke, a professor at Columbia Law School.
“There was nothing in the opinion that limits it to objections to same sex marriage,” Franke added. . . . . this opens the door to race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, national origin discrimination – any kind of discrimination,” she said.
Meanwhile, Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser said in a statement Friday that the decision promises to “destabilize the public marketplace” enabling all types of businesses to have “a first amendment right to refuse customers because of who they are.”
LGBTQ advocates and experts cautioned that, far from settling the issue at the center of the case, the ruling will likely embolden opponents of LGBTQ rights and spur a fresh wave of litigation that could strip away civil rights protections in other areas of life.
The column in the Post gets to the real motivation of the majority: Giving special privileges to those they like and harming those they dislike. Here are excerpts:
The U.S. Supreme Court has been very busy lately making clear which kinds of people it truly values. By striking down Roe v. Wade, the justices showed us how much they value the opinions of women who want a say in their own health care. By striking down affirmative action, they showed us how much they value White over Black and Brown students. By striking down student loan forgiveness, they demonstrated how much they value those who don’t have enough money to avoid the Ponzi scheme called student loans. And today they essentially legalized the unequal treatment of LGBTQ people by holding that discrimination is a small price to pay if it lifts up just one kind of love.
This Supreme Court has become a conservative dreamland: Out of touch with the country and determined to satisfy conservatives who think they win only when someone else loses.
This need by conservatives is not about faith, really. It’s about ensuring that Americans they don’t know and don’t like will suffer. They consider it a win for White people when Black and Brown people suffer. A win for men when women suffer. A win for older, richer people when younger, poorer people suffer. Everything in their minds is binary. We win. You lose. Black and white. And our current Supreme Court has become the favored weapon in their arsenal to bring about heartache for those they don’t like.
And it won’t end here. Because whatever lines the justices may think they have carefully drawn during this term, their benefactors in the deep conservative world are just getting warmed up. Get ready for more: More behavior on your part that they will essentially outlaw. More things we’re not allowed to teach. More roads for access unceremoniously cut off. More rights trampled on, and more barriers to discrimination lowered. Because the main priority of our conservative Supreme Court is to keep the status quo secure. Solid. And that means keeping certain people down.
These "conservatives" are not nice and decent people and the sooner the rest of the population wakes up to this reality demands an enlargement of the Court, the better.
Friday, June 30, 2023
The Very Dangerous "Moms for Liberty"
Before the Hamilton County, Ind., chapter of Moms for Liberty achieved national notoriety this month for quoting Adolf Hitler in its newsletter, it was already at war over education in the schools of Indianapolis’s suburbs.
School board meetings blew up over “critical race theory” and “social emotional learning.” A slate of conservative school board candidates endorsed by Moms for Liberty faced off last year against a slate opposed to the group’s efforts to commandeer the school system. The diversity, equity and inclusion coordinator of Carmel Clay Schools was under attack. Transgender students, or the theoretical threat such students could pose, were suddenly front and center.
“It was bad,” said Carmella Sparrow, the principal at a charter school in Indianapolis who had moved to suburban Carmel for the public schools but found herself doing battle with Moms for Liberty and its supporters at local school board meetings. “They were screaming and yelling at the top of their lungs. You could not conduct any meaningful business.”
The group’s reputation for confrontation and controversy is very much intact, but as Moms for Liberty convenes on Thursday in Philadelphia, it is doing so not as a small fringe of far-right suburban mothers but as a national conservative powerhouse — precisely because of chapters like Hamilton County’s and their energized members.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, a left-leaning human rights organization, deemed Moms for Liberty an anti-government “extremist group” this year. But five Republican presidential candidates, including former President Donald J. Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, will be addressing its Joyful Warriors National Summit.
The group draws power from its diffusion — 275 chapters in 45 states with nearly 115,000 members, it claims — and the social issues that animate it. These include the teaching of L.G.B.T.Q. issues, critical race theory, and school books that it considers pornographic — all of which have captivated the base of the Republican Party.
Moms for Liberty almost certainly would not have been formed in January 2021, by three Florida mothers, were it not for the coronavirus pandemic. Disparate parents’ groups on the right had for years tried to cajole, harangue or even take over school boards, but the pandemic galvanized parental rage — first over school shutdowns, then over mask mandates and finally over curriculums that parents could see firsthand through the computer screens their children were glued to.
Conservatives who flocked to school board meetings in places like Carmel, Ind., and Franklin, Tenn., either on their own or under the auspices of local groups like Unify Carmel, soon formed chapters of Moms for Liberty, whose funding sources remain mysterious but seemingly plentiful. As the pandemic receded, issues of race, gender and sexuality rose to the fore among these parents, just as they did in the Republican Party.
Critics of these groups saw their activism as demagogy, violent threats and opposition to public education masquerading as parental concern. At one meeting of the Carmel Clay Schools board in Indiana, a conservative protester was arrested after a handgun fell out of his pocket.
Diane Hannah, a Rutgers religion professor and a parent in the school district battling the Hamilton County chapter of Moms for Liberty, said many of the members showing up at school board meetings were not parents of children in the public schools. . . . “The problem is they have an audience of people who watch Fox News, who read the sensationalist reporting and who don’t have kids in the schools,” she said, . . .
Beyond Mr. Ziegler and the Florida G.O.P., the ties that bind Moms for Liberty, which is ostensibly nonpartisan, to the Republican Party, are tight. Mr. DeSantis has long been a supporter of the group hatched from his home state, but more moderate Republican voices like Ms. Haley and Asa Hutchinson, the former governor of Arkansas, will also be in Philadelphia to lend their support.
The candidates who are going were undeterred by the negative attention the group received when its Hamilton County chapter published a quotation from Hitler in its newsletter: “He alone, who owns the youth, gains the future.” After initially defending the quote, the chapter was forced to apologize.
This organization and its lapdogs in the Republican Party need to be stopped by Voting Democrat across the board in November, 2023, and November, 2024.
Thursday, June 29, 2023
What's Fueling the GOP's Anti-LGBT Hysteria
It was a Sunday like any other in the 1960s New Jersey bedroom community where I lived. That morning, as I dressed for church, I realized the world would never accept me if people learned the truth. It had been a rough week. The kids at school had found out that I had a crush on a boy, and the bullying that followed convinced me that I would have to change. I’d have to be less myself. Less sensitive. Less girly. More of a man. But deep down, I knew that wasn’t possible. I sat down on my bed and decided I had only one option: to kill myself.
I was 13 years old.
Somehow, I managed to survive and move to New York to become a playwright and performer. And 20 years later, on another Sunday, I happened to hear a story on the radio about suicide being the second-leading cause of death among young Americans. Even more disturbing, the report said that gay and lesbian teenagers were four times more likely to attempt suicide than their straight peers. Those statistics have remained basically unchanged for 30 years.
That news report prompted me to write and perform a solo theater show about a 13-year-old boy named Trevor, a Diana Ross fanatic who develops a crush on Pinky Faraday, one of the most popular boys in his school. When Trevor’s classmates find out, he tries to kill himself by taking an overdose of aspirin but survives and discovers newfound hope. The stage show became the short film “Trevor,” which won an Academy Award in 1995 and led me to co-found the Trevor Project.
It never seemed necessary to say that publicly before, but I also never thought that in 2023 there would be more than 500 anti-LGBTQ bills introduced across the country targeting young people, particularly those who are transgender and nonbinary. Many of these bills are trying to erase the existence of LGBTQ+ youth and prevent their stories from being told. So far, 75 have been signed into law, banning books that tell LGBTQ stories, preventing educators and students from discussing sexuality in schools, outlawing performances by drag queens, and criminalizing lifesaving health care for transgender people.
I think the reason anti-LGBTQ activists are so obsessed with preventing queer storytelling is that they know how powerful it is in winning acceptance. History has proved that the most effective strategy in the fight for gay rights has always been telling our personal stories. It was our love stories that changed the minds and opened the hearts of millions of Americans to marriage equality. It was the coming-out stories of so many sons and daughters, cousins, uncles, aunts, teachers, and artists over the previous decades that convinced society that we are fully human and that love is love. By courageously coming forward to speak our truth and live out loud, we have shown our friends and families what it looks like to be authentically oneself.
The wave of anti-LGBTQ legislation is paradoxically a response to how much more comfortable young people are today in expressing themselves than I ever could have dreamed 60 years ago. I know as well as anyone the sobering statistics about LGBTQ youth in crisis, but on the ground in places such as Alabama, Indiana and Texas, the kids are telling a different story. They are meeting in church basements, classrooms and youth centers, building networks of connections, finding each other online and in person, insisting on equity and inclusion, and redefining what it means to be queer.
Though it is still undeniably difficult for LGBTQ+ youth, many have grown up exercising the right to be themselves, and they are not about to forfeit that freedom. Despite the obstacles — depression, self-harm, bullying — many young queer people are busy living lives of quiet determination. Politicians and preachers may regard them as aberrant, misguided or just plain evil; they might even call for their total eradication from public life — as happened at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference — but this generation of queer youth know who they are, and they will not be swayed from the business of becoming.
Visiting a middle school in Kentucky shortly before the pandemic, I was astounded to find a group of students so out and proud in a state so publicly non-affirming. When asked how they came to be so sure about who they are, one sixth-grader replied without skipping a beat: “Your heart just tells you, and you obey.”
LGBTQ+ young people are writing a new story, one in which everyone is free to be themselves.
All of this absolutely terrifies the hate merchants and their political whores in the GOP.
Wednesday, June 28, 2023
SCOTUS Rejects Republican Effort to Hijack Elections
In a hugely significant opinion on Tuesday, the Supreme Court rejected the “independent state legislature” theory pushed by Republicans that would have given state legislatures virtually unchecked power to draw new redistricting maps and pass restrictive voting laws with little to no review by state courts or other entities. “The Elections Clause does not vest exclusive and independent authority in state legislatures to set the rules regarding federal elections,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the 6-3 opinion in Moore v. Harper.
The case had huge national implications. Voting rights experts said the Republican position would eviscerate checks and balances in state government, giving state legislatures enormous power to rig state and national politics, and could have even emboldened them to attempt to overturn future election results, like Trump wanted them to do in 2020 but now with the veneer of legality.
The decision could have immediate ramifications in key battleground states like Wisconsin, where a new liberal majority on the state Supreme Court could strike down the state’s gerrymandered congressional map under the Wisconsin Constitution once a new justice is seated in August.
The Moore case was filed by Republicans in North Carolina, who argued that “the power to regulate federal elections lies with state legislatures exclusively.” They were backed up by the powerful dark money network of Federalist Society co-chairman Leonard Leo, who founded a group, the Honest Elections Project, that doggedly advocated for the “independent state legislature” (ISL) theory in briefs and other forms of advocacy before the courts. Thanks to these efforts, a position that was once considered fringe and extreme even in Republican circles was put squarely before the Supreme Court. Key figures involved in Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election amplified these claims, such as Trump lawyer John Eastman, who aggressively made the case that state legislatures could not be constrained by state constitutions or other actors during and after the 2020 election.
“This is a theory with big consequences,” Justice Elena Kagan said during oral arguments. “It would say that if a legislature engages in the most extreme forms of gerrymandering, there is no state constitutional remedy even if the courts think that that’s a violation of the constitution. It would say that legislators could enact all manner of restrictions on voting, get rid of all kinds of voter protections that the state constitution in fact prohibits. It might allow the legislatures to insert themselves and to give themselves a role in the certification of elections and the way election results are calculated. So in all these ways, I think what might strike a person is that this is a proposal that gets rid of the normal checks and balances on the way big governmental decisions are made in this country.”
The case originated from the most recent redistricting cycle in North Carolina, when the GOP-controlled state legislature passed a heavily gerrymandered new congressional map in 2021 that would have given the GOP between 71 to 78 percent of seats in a state where Trump got 49.9 percent of the vote in 2020. The North Carolina Supreme Court struck down the plan and ordered independent experts to draw new congressional lines. . . North Carolina Republicans then appealed to the Supreme Court.
But Republicans also flipped control of the state supreme court in the midterms and earlier this year a new conservative majority overturned the court’s decision striking down the congressional map, ruling that the court did not have the power to police partisan gerrymandering. That gave Republicans a green-light to pass a new congressional map that will take effect before the 2024 election and could give Republicans four new seats in the US House.
The Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that the case was not moot and rejected the most extreme version of the independent state legislature theory outright. Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Clarence Thomas dissented, arguing that the case should have been dismissed as moot. Only two justices, Thomas and Gorsuch, fully endorsed the independent state legislature theory pushed by North Carolina Republicans.
The case hinged on an increasingly contentious battle over how the court interprets history. . . . . leading historians of the founding era called that argument completely ahistorical, noting that the federal Constitution was adopted in large part to counter the power of the states after the disastrous early tenure of the Articles of Confederation. And as my colleague Pema Levy reported, one of the key historical documents cited by North Carolina to support its position was widely considered to be a forgery. Justice Sonia Sotomayor remarked at oral argument that North Carolina Republicans and their allies could only prevail “if you rewrite history.”
In the end, six justices agreed with that position. “Historical practice confirms that state legislatures remain bound by state constitutional restraints when exercising authority under the Elections Clause,” wrote Roberts.
Roberts, who 10 years ago wrote the majority opinion gutting the Voting Rights Act, surprisingly authored two decisions this term protecting voting rights, in Moore v. Harper and Allen v. Milligan, where the Court struck down a racial gerrymander in Alabama that deprived Black voters of fair representation.
Tuesday, June 27, 2023
Is Too Late to Save the Republican Party
Donald Trump this month became the first former or incumbent American president to be charged with crimes against the nation that he once led and wishes to lead again. He cynically calculated that his indictment would ensure that a riled-up Republican Party base would nominate him as its standard-bearer in 2024, and the last few weeks have proved that his political calculation was probably right.
The former president’s behavior may have invited charges, but the Republicans’ spineless support for the past two years convinced Mr. Trump of his political immortality, giving him the assurance that he could purloin some of the nation’s most sensitive national security secrets upon leaving the White House — and preposterously insist that they were his to do with as he wished — all without facing political consequences.
Indeed, their fawning support since the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol has given Mr. Trump every reason to believe that he can ride these charges and any others not just to the Republican nomination, but also to the White House in 2024.
In a word, the Republicans are as responsible as Mr. Trump for this month’s indictment — and will be as responsible for any indictment and prosecution of him for Jan. 6. One would think that, for a party that has prided itself for caring about the Constitution and the rule of law, this would stir some measure of self-reflection among party officials and even voters about their abiding support for the former president. Surely before barreling headlong into the 2024 presidential election season, more Republicans would realize it is time to come to the reckoning with Mr. Trump that they have vainly hoped and naïvely believed would never be necessary.
But by all appearances, it certainly hasn’t occurred to them yet that any reckoning is needed. As only the Republicans can do, they are already turning this ignominious moment into an even more ignominious moment — and a self-immolating one at that — by rushing to crown Mr. Trump their nominee before the primary season even begins. Building the Republican campaign around the newly indicted front-runner is a colossal political miscalculation, as comedic as it is tragic for the country. No assemblage of politicians except the Republicans would ever conceive of running for the American presidency by running against the Constitution and the rule of law. But that’s exactly what they’re planning.
[T]hey have managed to convince themselves that an indicted and perhaps even convicted Donald Trump is their party’s best hope for the future. But rushing to model their campaign on Mr. Trump’s breathtakingly inane template is as absurd as it is ill fated. They will be defending the indefensible.
On cue, the Republicans kicked their self-defeating political apparatus into high gear this month. Almost as soon as the indictment in the documents case was unsealed, Mr. Trump jump-started his up-to-then languishing campaign, predictably declaring himself an “innocent man” victimized in “the greatest witch hunt of all time” by his “totally corrupt” political nemesis, the Biden administration. On Thursday, he added that it was all part of a plot, hatched at the Justice Department and the F.B.I., to “rig” the 2024 election against him.
From his distant second place, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida denounced the Biden administration’s “weaponization of federal law enforcement” against Mr. Trump and the Republicans. Mike Pence dutifully pronounced the indictment political. And both Governor DeSantis and Mr. Pence pledged — in a new Republican litmus test — that on their first day in office they would fire the director of the F.B.I., the Trump appointee Christopher Wray, obviously for his turpitude in investigating Mr. Trump.
It fell to Kevin McCarthy, the House speaker, to articulate the treacherous overarching Republican strategy: “I, and every American who believes in the rule of law, stand with President Trump against this grave injustice. House Republicans will hold this brazen weaponization of power accountable.”
If the indictment of Mr. Trump on Espionage Act charges — not to mention his now almost certain indictment for conspiring to obstruct Congress from certifying Mr. Biden as the president on Jan. 6 — fails to shake the Republican Party from its moribund political senses, then it is beyond saving itself. Nor ought it be saved.
There is no path to the White House for Republicans with Mr. Trump. He would need every single Republican and independent vote, and there are untold numbers of Republicans and independents who will never vote for him, if for no other perfectly legitimate reason than that he has corrupted America’s democracy and is now attempting to corrupt the country’s rule of law. No sane Democrat will vote for Mr. Trump — even over the aging Mr. Biden — when there are so many sane Republicans who will refuse to vote for Mr. Trump. This is all plain to see, which makes it all the more mystifying why more Republicans don’t see it.
When Republicans faced an 11th-hour reckoning with another of their presidents over far less serious offenses almost 50 years ago, the elder statesmen of the party marched into the Oval Office and told Richard Nixon the truth.
Such is what it means to put country over party. History tends to look favorably upon a party that writes its own history, as Winston Churchill might have said.
Republicans have waited in vain for political absolution. It’s finally time for them to put the country before their party and pull back from the brink — for the good of the party, as well as the nation. If not now, then they must forever hold their peace.
Monday, June 26, 2023
Putin: Caught In His Own Trap
The Wagner Group mercenaries marched 800 kilometers across Russia, shot down planes and helicopters, took over a regional military command, provoked a panic in Moscow—troops dug trenches, the mayor told everyone to stay home—and then stood down. Yet in a way, the strangest aspect of Saturday’s aborted coup was the reaction of the people of Rostov-on-Don, including the city’s military leaders, to the soldiers who arrived and declared themselves to be their new rulers.
The Wagner mercenaries showed up in the city early Saturday morning. They met no resistance. Nobody shot at them. One photograph, published by The New York Times, shows them walking at a leisurely pace across a street, one of their tanks in the background, holding yellow coffee cups.
Yevgeny Prigozhin, Wagner’s violent ex-con leader, posted videos of himself chatting with the local commanders in the courtyard of the headquarters of Russia’s Southern Military District. Nobody seemed to mind his being there.
People shook their hands, brought them food, took selfies. “People are bringing pirozhki, apples, chips. Everything there in the store has been bought to give to the soldiers,” one woman said on camera. In the evening, after Prigozhin had decided to stand down and go home (wherever home turns out to be), he drove away in an SUV with crowds filming him on their cellphones and cheering him on, as if he were a celebrity leaving a movie premiere or a gallery opening. Some chanted “Wagner! Wagner!” as the troops emerged into the street. This was the most remarkable aspect of the whole day: Nobody seemed to mind, particularly, that a brutal new warlord had arrived to replace the existing regime—not the security services, not the army, and not the general public.
The response is hard to understand without reckoning with the power of apathy, a much undervalued political tool. Democratic politicians spend a lot of time thinking about how to engage people and persuade them to vote. But a certain kind of autocrat, of whom Putin is the outstanding example, seeks to convince people of the opposite: not to participate, not to care, and not to follow politics at all. The propaganda used in Putin’s Russia has been designed in part for this purpose. . . . If you don’t know what’s true, after all, then there isn’t anything you can do about it. Protest is pointless. Engagement is useless.
But the side effect of apathy was on display yesterday as well. For if no one cares about anything, that means they don’t care about their supreme leader, his ideology, or his war. Russians haven’t flocked to sign up to fight in Ukraine. They haven’t rallied around the troops in Ukraine or held emotive ceremonies marking either their successes or their deaths. Of course they haven’t organized to oppose the war, but they haven’t organized to support it either.
Because they are afraid, or because they don’t know of any alternative, or because they think it’s what they are supposed to say, they tell pollsters that they support Putin. And yet, nobody tried to stop the Wagner group in Rostov-on-Don, and hardly anybody blocked the Wagner convoy on its way to Moscow.
Who will respond if a more serious challenge to Putin ever emerges? Certainly the military will think twice: Perhaps a dozen Russian servicemen, mostly pilots, died at the hands of the Wagner mutineers, more than died during the failed coup of 1991. Nobody seems particularly bothered about them.
One day after this aborted coup expect more repression as Putin tries to stay in charge, more chaos, or both. . . . it is too early to speculate about Prigozhin’s true motives, about what he was really given in exchange for standing down, about where Putin really spent the day on Saturday—some say St. Petersburg, some say a dacha in Novgorod—or about anything else, really. But the flimsiness of this regime’s ideology and the softness of its support have been suddenly laid bare.
Sunday, June 25, 2023
Coming Out Late — Finding a New Life in Midlife
“I’m from Harlem. Born, bred, toasted, buttered, jelly-jammed and honeyed in Harlem.” That’s how Audrey Smaltz, a former model and fashion industry veteran who turned 86 this month, introduced herself to me years ago at a Midtown Manhattan reception. It was her catchphrase.
“I had fabulous men in my life,” she told me recently, but in 1999, the Olympic basketball star Gail Marquis, 17 years Smaltz’s junior, asked her out to dinner. Smaltz didn’t think of it as a date and said she had no interest in women at the time. But when Marquis kissed her good night, Smaltz recalled, “it was like kissing a man.” She said, “I couldn’t believe myself,” then laughed, punctuating the thought: “Whoa!”
Smaltz’s story defies the contemporary norm: A decade ago, Pew Research Center found that “12 is the median age at which lesbian, gay and bisexual adults first felt they might be something other than heterosexual or straight” and “for those who say they now know for sure that they are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender, that realization came at a median age of 17.” Last year, Gallup found that about one in five Gen Z adults identifies as L.G.B.T.
Today, we can lose sight of the people on the other end of the plank: people like Smaltz — and me — who, for a variety of reasons, come out later in life. I’ve recently spoken to several people from across the country with similar experiences, and their stories were not only illuminating and educational but also uplifting.
[M]ost of the women I spoke to professed no previous same-sex attraction, instead explaining that they fell in love with a woman, not that they were seeking relationships with women in general.
The film and TV star Niecy Nash-Betts recalls being out to dinner with someone she simply considered to be a female friend, the singer Jessica Betts, when “something happened between the crab claw and the Whispering Angel.” Nash-Betts continued . . . I was like, ‘Wait a minute.’ I usually only ever feel like this for boys when I like them.”
In 2020, at 50, Nash-Betts married Betts, then 41. Nash-Betts calls Betts her “hersband.” When I ask Nash-Betts, who has had two different-sex marriages, how she identifies in the L.G.B.T.Q. community, she responds quickly, “taken,” and laughs, explaining, “I have found my person, and it has absolutely nothing, for me, to do with age or gender.”
Among those who came out later in life and who had been in heterosexual marriages, many of which had produced children, another recurring theme is concern about how their families could be affected.
Pierre Lagrange, an investor and a former hedge fund manager, was married to a woman for more than two decades before, at age 48, realizing during therapy that he was attracted to men, an attraction that he believed he’d had for a while but had ignored and suppressed.
Before coming out to his wife and children, he worried about the possibility of “breaking an amazing family.” But when he did and his wife and children responded with love and understanding, that burden was lifted. . . . Lagrange married Ebs Burnough, a filmmaker, the board chair of the Sundance Institute and a former White House adviser, in 2019.
Coming out takes different forms. Some people burst out; others spiral out, gradually. Some tell everyone all at once, perhaps on social media, while others tell people in successive, ever-widening rings, from the closest circle of friends and relatives to casual acquaintances and the general public.
Most of the people I spoke to were spirallers, like Lagrange, Satin and me, with their top-of-mind issue being the responses of spouses and children.
Throughout my conversations, the people I talked to said that their families surpassed their expectations, rising in love, circling in solidarity. But clearly, that isn’t everyone’s experience. While some are met by acceptance, others are entangled in acrimony. And in all these circumstances, it’s important to consider the journeys, sometimes the pain, of the spouses of those who’ve come out.
Only then did Henderson conclude that he and his wife had to part ways, realizing then that he couldn’t have “the best of both worlds.” So, he told me, he sat down with her and said, “You know, we both deserve a chance to have a fuller relationship, romantic relationship, and this is not going to happen as long as we’re married and living together.”
These conversations can be wrenching. I know: Telling my wife about my one same-sex encounter — which took place during my 20s, before our marriage — was one of the hardest conversations I’d ever had. One night as we returned from dinner, I told her that there was something I needed to say. As the tears began to streak my face, I told her that if we were going to stay together, she had to know the whole of me, and that included the fact that I had been intimate with men.
I told her that if she wanted to leave, I would understand. She said that she didn’t, that she wanted to be with me. We sat in the hallway that night, in the darkness, and cried together.
And that is the thing: We can fret so much about people reacting out of their biases that we withhold from them the chance and the choice to transcend those biases. We lock our closets from the inside to shield ourselves from the possibility of trauma that our fears inflate, robbing ourselves of the life-affirming opportunity to be brave.
I thought that in these interviews I would hear more about pain and regret. Instead, I heard more celebration and excitement. There was less a sense of escaping from closets and more of emerging from cocoons.
Of course, there were the more familiar stories of people who understood their queerness early in life but hid it, those afraid for their physical safety and economic security, those who run away, in a sense, to hide their truth from their families and in order to live more openly and freely.
Lucius Lamar, a 55-year-old fine artist and interior designer from Oxford, Miss., who eventually “married the first boy I ever kissed,” said that when he and his husband lived in California, they maintained two apartments to conceal their relationship from visiting family.
Lamar explained that he’s “a product of this, you know, exotic, colorful Bible Belt,” where shame, guilt and “a lot of that psychic garbage” did “a little bit of a number on me.” He didn’t come out to his family until he was 45, he said, but the night he told them, he “slept like a baby.”
I heard this sense of victory in the voices of most of the people I interviewed. I think it was the grace and wisdom of age pushing through, of souls who in many cases had finally found their mates, who knew that time was fleeting, that much of theirs was behind them and that wasting any of the rest of it was an affront to the gift and joy of living.
As Lagrange said about realizing he was gay and coming out, “I remember this being an amazing opportunity to live a second life after a fabulous first one.” He added, “How lucky am I that I can have this whole new set of experiences, this completely new life discovered at 50.”
Smaltz echoed the idea of coming out later in life as a rebirth, telling me about falling in love with Marquis, “It was brand-new. It was like I was 21 or 23.” She continued: “It’s the best thing that ever happened to me. I’m so happy.”
My heart is with those struggling to come out later in life. Despite the pain of the journey, I would do it again.
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