Helen Palmer Geisel was attending a dinner party hosted by the Johnstons. As the host hugged her, she turned to him and exclaimed, “You don’t know how I needed that!”.

He had suspected her remark was in relation to the increased workload at Beginner Books, a publishing company that she co-founded with her husband, Ted Geisel. Or perhaps, he wondered, there was a more sinister reason. Perhaps her remark was a cry for help, a sign of her increasing loneliness and unhappiness after an almost 40-year marriage that was bound by obligation, rather than love.

Two days later, the Geisels’ longtime housekeeper stumbled upon Helen’s dead body in the bedroom of their La Jolla residence.

A prescription bottle that originally contained one thousand capsules, was now filled with just seven hundred and six. A letter, directed to her husband, was found near her lifeless body. “I didn’t know whether to kill myself, burn the house down, or just go away and get lost,” it read. The morning after, members of their inner circle gathered around the house to comfort the new widower.

Their neighbor and friend, Audrey Stone Dimond, had placed herself in front of the window at the Geisels’ ocean-front property and affixed her gaze into the blurred horizon—perhaps ridden with guilt that their affair, not yet exposed—had contributed to Helen’s untimely demise. Or perhaps she was anticipating the agony that would accompany the accusations of moral corruption that were sure to follow; despite everything, she still loved the man and wanted to be with him.

In less than a year, Dimond divorced her husband, sent her children away to boarding school, and did indeed fulfill her utmost desire—Ted Geisel and Audrey Dimond were married.

The suicide letter that Helen wrote for Ted had been signed off with their secret code. A make-believe law firm named “Grimalkin, Drouberhannus, Knalbner, and Fepp.” If such a playful and rhythmic bouncing of words sounds familiar, it’s most likely childhood nostalgia resurfacing. Helen was the uncredited and largely unknown writer responsible for nurturing the creation of one of the most influential authors and artists of the 20th century.

To the world, he’s an American icon, but to countless children all over the world, he’s better known simply as “Dr. Seuss.”

A published author herself, she was once widely regarded as his “chief editor, chief critic, business manager and wife.” For interviewers who had an exclusive with Dr. Seuss, their go-to question is why a famous (and married) children’s book author doesn’t have any of his own.

“You have ‘em, I’ll amuse ‘em,” he quipped in interviews with The New Yorker and Los Angeles Times—an understandably evasive answer to a perhaps overly personal question.

But behind closed doors, in particular in a conversation he had with his niece, Margaretha “Peggy” Dahmen Owens, he dropped the decades-long façade and revealed, “It was not that we didn’t want to have children. That wasn’t it.” In The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins, the entire book was dedicated to a seven-and-a-half year-old named Chrysanthemum-Pearl.

In an interview with Robert Cahn for The Saturday Evening Post, Ted explained he created an imaginary daughter as a comfort to his wife. This came in particularly handy for after-dinner conversations at their house, when the guests commenced their braggart statements pertaining to their offspring or grandchildren. He would proudly declare that Chrysanthemum-Pearl could “whip up the most delicious oyster stew with chocolate frosting and flaming Roman candles!” and “carry one thousand stitches on one needle while making long red underdrawers for her Uncle Terwilliger!”

For years the name of Chrysanthemum-Pearl had appeared on the Geisel Christmas cards, but then so had Norval, Wally, Wickersham, Thnud and a dozen other fictional infant-like characters. In a conversation between close family members, it was revealed that in the fourth year of their marriage, Helen had been hospitalized in New York due to worsening abdominal pain. The doctors couldn’t diagnose the underlying cause and thus made the swift decision to remove her ovaries, rendering her incapable of ever having her own children; she was thirty-three years old.

Peggy Owen’s son—named Ted after her famous uncle—recently shared his mother’s favorite photograph of Helen with me. Her deep chestnut brown hair is delicately curled in bunches, bordering her warm, softly featured canvas. Her pale blue eyes offer an agreeable gaze, flanked by an authentic, radiant, all-teeth-showing smile—the sweetness intensified by the red hue of her lipstick. To say that Helen was like a mother to Peggy is an understatement.

Peggy’s own biological mother had died when she was only seventeen years old, and the Geisels had welcomed her into their home when she first moved to California. Two years before Helen’s death, Dr. Seuss had dedicated the book, I Had Trouble Getting To Solla Sollew, to her with the inscription, “For Margaretha Dahmen Owens, with love and thanks,” as a token of appreciation for her staying with them while his wife was ill. Helen had struggled for more than a decade with partial paralysis fromGuillain-Barre syndrome, a rare autoimmune disorder where the immune system attacks your healthy cells, which leads to weakness, numbness and tingling.

Two years before Helen’s death, he wrote Peggy, “. . . Yesterday Helen was pretty depressed, but today she’s got her sense of humor back. Besides two baths, she today started Occupational Therapy . . .  starting with lessons on how to dial telephones, unbutton buttons, brush teeth, comb hair, and a first stab at writing.” He solemnly continued,

“Helen sends her love and wants to thank Al for loaning you to us. And so do I. I don’t know how I would have got thru the past two weeks without you. And I can think of no one I have ever met that I would rather have been with during this period. You really took care of everything (including my spirits) . . . and when you left, you left me better organized than I have been since the Spanish American War. Someday I’ll do something for you.”

Before her health had deteriorated, Helen was a talented writer and businesswoman. She graduated from Wellesley College with honors in 1920 and thrived in an environment where the curriculum was focused on languages, literature, and even economics. After graduation, she enrolled in Oxford University, an institution that awarded women degrees for the first time only four years prior to her arrival. Unbeknownst to either of them, Ted Geisel was to also attend Oxford after he graduated from Dartmouth.

In 1925, a young American girl sitting behind a doodling Ted peered over his shoulder and was surprised to see how little he was paying attention to the professor. After being in several lectures with this student, she concluded that he always just seemed to be immersed in his own little world.

A year earlier, she had arrived at Oxford with her widowed mother. Standing at five foot three inches, Helen Marion Palmer, Ted recalls Helen possessing a “certain grace” that was distinctly unique to the other women at Oxford. One day, as she watched Ted illustrate John Milton’s Paradise Lost, she insisted he was on the wrong career path. “What you really want to do is draw”, she said. Her judgment solidified by glancing at another one of his pages, “That’s a very fine flying cow!” University of Cincinnati graduate, Joseph Sagmaster, was also attending Oxford and had introduced the pair having known the both of them personally.

Years later, Ted Geisel would dedicate the book Yertle the Tertle to his friend; legend goes that this honor was perhaps bestowed upon Sagmaster because he introduced Geisel to Helen back at Oxford. Sagmaster himself said this was, “the happiest inspiration that he had ever had.” Their swift romance had all the trappings of Ted’s impulsive nature, with a sharp dash reminiscent of an old Hollywood film. After racing back to Oxford before curfew, Ted proposed to Helen in a roadside ditch after he had taken too wide of a turn on their two-horsepower motorcycle and had accidentally toppled them over.

“So, we became engaged,” Ted said, but for a time it was their secret. Geisel granted his first Saturday Evening Post interview with Robert Cahn, revealing why he became Dr. Seuss, the simple reason he draws the way he does, and the undeniable effect his wife, Helen, has had on his career. Two years ago, a republished article from 1957 had appeared, in which Cahn wrote how the famous author “depends at all times on the level headedness of his wife, Helen” to pull him out of predicaments where his impulse has inevitably led him. Separately, Ted’s sister Marnie had always talked of how Helen had been “a great help to him in his work”.

Around the beginning of 1957, Ted had trouble finishing his Christmas-themed book.

The whimsical tale had featured the “bad old Grinch” who “would try to stop Christmas from coming to Who-Ville.”

In a bid to protest commercialization, the Grinch plotted the sinister mission in destroying any gifts, ornaments, trees and fixings that the Whos had planned for their beloved annual holiday. Then arrived the stumbling block. He wondered how he could wrap it up without injecting a pathetically sentimental ending.

“Helen, Helen, where are you?” shouted Ted from his secluded den into the living room. He planted a sketch and a verse into her lap and continued, “How do you like this?” She shook her head and he was distraught. “This isn’t it. And besides, you’ve got the Papa Who too big. Now he looks like a bug.” Ted rebutted, “Well, they are bugs” to which Helen added, “They are not bugs. Those Whos are just small people.”

Later that fall, How The Grinch Stole Christmas was published.

Seventeen years earlier, he had struggled with another book, Horton Hatches The Egg. At the time, the Geisels were living on Park Avenue in New York City. As Germany began to occupy France, progress on the book was immediately put on hold. Instead, Ted began sketching brutal images of Adolf Hitler, and the benign elephant affectionately named Horton, was momentarily consigned to oblivion. The sudden priority shift didn’t seem to bother Ted, who was quoted as saying, “I didn’t know how to end the book anyway, so I began drawing savage cartoons.” He continued, “I had no great causes or interest in social issues until Hitler.” The conception had originated from an earlier sketch that Geisel had drawn which superimposed an elephant over the branches of a small tree.

He then spent countless days trying to figure out how Horton could have entangled himself in such a way. At that point, Helen swooped in with her creative wit and began brainstorming ways to bring Horton down. In Ted’s words, her pivotal contribution was in the climactic lines that follow the hatching of the egg on which Horton sat on for 51 weeks. Then, suddenly, in an epiphany-like state, Helen and Ted cheered, and cheered and cheered some more.

“My goodness! My gracious!” they shouted. “MY WORD! It’s something brand new! IT’S AN ELEPHANT-BIRD!” Ted claimed his wife is a fiend for a story line and that every idea and every line is worked and reworked until the two of them are happy, coiling into a tight bind their decades-long literary partnership and elevating her contribution as being paramount to everything he’d ever published at that point (14 books in total, including, And To Think I Saw It On Mulberry Street, The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins, Thidwick The Big Hearted Moose, If I Ran The Zoo, Horton Hears A Who! and The Cat In The Hat). In 1959, Helen once told interviewer Peter Bunzel that “Ted doesn’t sit down and write for children. He writes to amuse himself. Luckily what amuses him also amuses them.”

Her husband agreed and also remarked at his own disbelief surrounding the conclusion, especially considering the absence of forethought during the writing process. “Ninety percent of failures in children’s books come from writing to preconceptions of what kids like. When I’m writing a book, I do it to please Helen and me. But when it finally comes out, I take one look and think, ‘Oh, my God!’” As with most successful writers, Ted was eventually approached by Hollywood. For first-time screenwriters Helen and Ted Geisel, their synergistic collaboration had materialized into an original screenplay titled Design for Death, which chronicled the events leading to Pearl Harbor. It went on to win the 1947 Academy Award for Best Feature-Length Documentary.

However, despite their well-deserved high-caliber Hollywood accolade that many spend years trying to obtain, they were driven away by “disillusionment with the film industry” and instead proceeded to make The Tower in La Jolla their permanent home.

The Cat In The Hat was published through the company they co-founded with Phyllis Cerf at Beginner Books (an imprint of Random House). Helen had, perhaps in an act of defiant independence, used her maiden name to publish numerous titles under the Beginner Book banner over the years, including A Fish Out Of Water, I Was Kissed By A Seal At the Zoo, Do You Know What I’m Going To Do Next Saturday? and Why I Built The Boogle House.

During her tenure, she had displayed her natural business acumen by heading up as Vice President at Beginner Books until her sudden death in 1967. Harry Crosby is a 96-year-old award-winning author, historian, and La Jolla resident whose parents knew the Geisels. In addition, he had spent some time on the board of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego with Helen. “She was a wonderful woman,” he told me. “I mean, really, she was very intelligent, and she was very generous and polite.”

In the background of the phone call, Harry’s wife can be heard nudging him to add that there has been, “nothing written to show how important she had been in getting her husband into all of those positions and getting his stuff accepted.” He continued, “he became as well-known as he was, certainly in large part, because of her assistance.”

“Dear Ted, What has happened to us? I don’t know. I feel myself in a spiral, going down down down, into a black hole from which there is no escape, no brightness. And loud in my ears from every side I hear, ‘failure, failure, failure…’ I love you so much…I am too old and enmeshed in everything you do and are, that I cannot conceive of life without you . . . My going will leave quite a rumor, but you can say I was overworked and overwrought. Your reputation with your friends and fans will not be harmed . . . Sometimes, think of the fun we had all thru the years . . . “

Her unconditional love and devotion to her husband was palpably apparent in her written suggestion to falsify reasons behind her death. Her concern—even at the edge of suicide—was to protect his wholesome image to friends, family, and most importantly, the millions of readers all over the world who have come to know and love the paradoxically elusive and magnetic Dr. Seuss. Most newspaper clippings from the date of her death chose to omit the details surrounding her suicide—The New York Times, from an article dating October 24, 1967, noted that “she died in her sleep.” It wasn’t until years later that the truth surrounding the circumstances surfaced and family members—including Ted’s former mistress and second wife Audrey Geisel—began to confirm it. Carol Olten, historian at the La Jolla Historic Society remarked to me, “suicide was a taboo subject back then.”

Nowadays, when accomplished authors, fashion designers, artists or other public figures exit the world through an act of suicide, their namesake artifacts inherently carry a heavier weight of fleeting significance, arguably even more so than when they had been alive. The day after Alexander McQueen’s death, retailers reported a 1400% increase in sales. Similarly, sales had increased by 600% the day after Kate Spade’s suicide was announced. In an over-simplified and economic sense, it’s a practical display of supply and demand. Years after Sylvia Plath’s death, scholars are still dedicating themselves to her work in order to dissect and apply speculative theories on the beloved author. In 2013, The Smithsonian reported, “…cultural fascination with her continues to burn brightly despite—or perhaps because of—her premature departure from this world.”

Perhaps the posthumous and rapid consumption of these works represents a greater human condition: that we, despite modern society favoring atomization and individualization, have an embedded desire to commemorate a person or a group of people who symbolizes a positive impact on the wider community, expressed through groundbreaking contributions in the arts, humanities or sciences. Conversely, it can be safely said that most, if not all humans, have an intent to leave a similar mark when our inevitable mortality arrives.

When I asked a long-time La Jolla resident and bookstore owner, Laurence McGilvery, on whether or not he had any memories of Helen Palmer Geisel, he told me over the phone that she had the most “seductive gaze he’d ever encountered.” The comment caught me off guard and I was confused—the description he gave was inconsistent to other accounts I had stumbled upon at that point. I asked him if I could continue this conversation over e-mail considering my Australian accent can be a little incoherent at times. Over e-mail, he quickly corrected himself, “The first Mrs. Geisel! I was remembering the second. It was Audrey who looked up at me on our first and only meeting with the most seductive gaze I ever had encountered.”

He doesn’t recall ever meeting Helen, although her husband, Ted, frequently visited his bookstore. Thirty years after Helen’s death, Audrey Geisel (who has recently passed away) had given University of San Diego, California a multi-million-dollar donation that assisted in the library’s extensive renovations. As a token of their appreciation, the library—easily one of the most recognizable buildings in San Diego thanks in part to its unique Brutalist architectural design—was renamed after her and her second husband, Ted Geisel. With an additional lump sum gift in 2015 came a new café inside the library named, “Audrey’s.”

Five miles south, at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, lies a small library embedded in its white-walled corridors and in plain black text it reads, “Helen Palmer Geisel Library.” Much like her own demeanor, the space is unassuming, subdued and notably humble. A lack of online search results questioned its existence, but the Communications and Marketing Manager at the Museum had affirmed that there was indeed a small library dedicated to her. No other information could be found pertaining to the library’s namesake. Helen’s work and her contributions to the creation of Dr. Seuss couldn’t be efficiently exploited through marketing campaigns after her death.

Not only was Helen’s death swept under the rug, but that feat could have only been made possible if she publicly claimed title to his revolutionary success, which she never did. Years earlier, with a keen observation over a young Ted Geisel, she nurtured and fostered a man with an undeniable talent that was yet unbeknownst to anyone else but her.

When evidence of his potential came to light to the young married couple, she had effectively made her life legacy about choice, sacrifice and unconditional love. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the choice to stand by her husband’s career and fade into the background was not an easy one.

Dr. Seuss Enterprises has been successfully running their multi-million-dollar global portfolio almost 30 years after the beloved author’s death, thanks in part to his second wife, Audrey Geisel, who passed away this year. She was known for her stringent control of licensing partnerships and fierce protection over their intellectual property. Her unrelenting clutch of some of Ted and Helen’s work—coupled with expertly tailored marketing and public relation campaigns—assisted in a generally accepted wholesome and sunny legacy of the famous children’s book author. It’s only in recent years that his sordid minstrel past has unsurfaced and Geisel’s work has come under fire for racist cartoon depictions.

But even with his arguably sordid personal life and problematic societal stances, his legend and life remain largely unsullied and the Dr. Seuss juggernaut rolls along, celebrated year after year, bookshelf by bookshelf. And that’s in no small part to the sacrifices of Helen Palmer Geisel; her contributions have affected the lives of millions of people all over the world, and have sprawled across three generations.

Their niece, Peggy, called her death “her last and greatest gift to him.”

Happy New Year. Happy first walk around whatever body of water is closest to you, first meditation, book read, friend hugged—happy first everything. I know as well as you do that time occupies an elastic-ly arbitrary shape in the world, but I am not about to deny myself the deeply satisfying reward of closing up one year and beginning a fresh one. And if you’ve got similar neurosis around organization, I empower you to do the same.

“Ooooh, I’m being empowered!” P—my partner—always jokes when I say this. “Thank you for empowering me!”

Still, it’s challenging, isn’t it? The way we come face-to-face with the things we’d like to leave in the last calendar year, the things we expect ourselves to be able to cleanly cut away from just because we scrawled that we would in 2019?

For me, this has been apparent in the savagely unpredictable landscape that grief occupies. It’s truly a wild ride. Even as a person who has experienced a good deal of loss in my life, I find myself caught in the Mariana Trench of it: darkness that abounds and about which we know nothing.

This month, I lost both of my grandmothers. In the same week. I also lost a friend. The details of my friend’s death are still being sorted through, so I won’t publicly talk about them, but I will talk to you a little about my grandmothers.

For those of you who have read my work at The Establishment, you know that I lost my parents at a young age. I was adopted by my maternal aunt, and raised by her, her husband, and my maternal grandparents. We all lived in the same trailer park. My stepdad’s family—the man who had still been married to my mother when she died—I have also stayed close with, including and especially his mother.

My grandmothers were of the Silent Generation, though that is the only thing they had in common: the way their movements were informed by a kind of careful attentiveness and disgust with waste that only economic scarcity can instill. My maternal grandmother, Donleita, was a diva who loved leopard print, fanfare, and Jesus. My step-grandmother, Marjorie, was a dressmaker who out-earned her husband (but never talked about it), couldn’t cook to save her life, and had grown up on a farm in rural Oregon where they kept things cold in a hole dug in the dirt. Her father drove Greyhound buses. Her brothers helped load pianos off ships coming from South America. Both women taught me grace, the love of a good cup of coffee, how to sew, how to use lipstick as rouge, and how to survive in a world full of callousness.

I feel strange around my friends—bone-tired, unable to make small talk, monitor my intonation appropriately, or respond quickly enough to jokes. As I walk them to the door, I know that our visit was not one that included me at my best. That I took too long in moments when I needed to be faster, or was too swift in moments that required reflection.

If you’ve been witness to that, it’s not you, it’s deeply me. Please be patient. Please keep being kind. I am hopeful that it will pass quickly, and I also know that healing takes whatever time it needs, no matter what boundaries I try to enforce upon it.

P and I have an annual tradition that we are unable to make happen this year due to the events that unfolded in December: in January, we go someplace hot. We leave behind the wet, gray sog of the Bay Area in January, trading it in for Joan Didion on the beach in the Yucatan, or a cooking class in Bangkok. We save all year so we can circumnavigate not only the drear of post-holiday come-down, but also so that I, specifically, can hide from ghosts; nearly all of my major death anniversaries occur in January. This is some kind of mercy or some kind of sadism, I haven’t quite decided. The slew of deaths last year, however, happened in December, and the funerals themselves are in January.

As such, we’re home. Wearing forty layers of clothing in our 19th century house that leaks hot air (original windows are beautiful, original windows are beautiful, original windows are beautiful).

Still, we managed to go to Los Angeles for two brief days this last weekend, to meet family for a short trip that brought some levity and kindness to the month. P, always the adventurer, took us to the Marciano Arts Foundation to be blown away by art—Ai Weiwei’s ballooning sculptures of bamboo and silk, namely, that intersect ideas of ancient legend, kite-making, and the refugee crisis. While wandering through the huge, brutalist modernist halls of the Marciano, we encountered work by Bunny Rogers, the 27-year-old who’s making waves in the art community with her work around Columbine.

The piece of hers that we saw was immersive; you are invited to walk into two rooms that are full of falling snow made of paper. Projected on the wall is an animated video of a girl playing piano on a stage. The description of the piece said the following:

Rogers relies on corrupted memories to piece together a narrative that both mourns its origins and begs for resolution. Her videos, A Very Special Holiday Performance in Columbine Auditorium (2017) and Mandy’s Piano Solo in Columbine Cafeteria (2016) depict rehearsals of ceremonies for mourning.

My mind went wild at this concept of corrupted memory—what is that, I wondered from my required two-foot distance. A security guard eyed me, looking wary.

In Rogers’ case, it seems to be about the intersection between mourning (a public/private thing) and popular culture/media/cartoon. After all, the reason the pieces are so resonant is because the animated videos reek of after-school-special, and yet are heavy-hitting in their emotional resonance: Columbine. Columbine is a beautiful, pansy-like flower that needs special care, yet the first Google search of its name produces articles upon articles about the school shooting. You need to clarify—”Columbine flower”—in order to get results for the thing that came far before 1999.

I know that both collective and personal grief become totemized. I know that we tend to take the fractured pieces of our grief and try to hold them up to everything and everyone to see where they fit — to the sky, to see how or if the light shines through. To the face of another, to see if they match the color of their pupils. To the work we do in the world, to see how our own mortality serves us—if we’re doing this living thing right, or paying appropriate homage to those who have gone.

The reason the idea of corrupted memory is so fascinating to me—and potentially a new lens for looking at the way public and private intersect—is because of the way it relates to the identities of marginalized people. I thought, for example, immediately of Elizabeth Marston saying that femme identity is “an unauthorized copy of femininity.” Disallowed.

The fact of the matter, too, is that public and private lines are even more blurred than they once were; social media knows when I’ve been talking to my friends about menstruation, or celery juice cleanses, or that I’m sad my niece and nephew are growing older. I regularly spill my guts on Twitter, unconcerned with being too much. I write thinkpieces, for heaven’s sake. And while I do believe that visible vulnerability is an evolved strength, I also believe it’s because my concept of myself and the internet have both become less defined as opposite of one another—and in that sense, they’ve corrupted.

We position ourselves as opposites of the virtual world, and that is important, somehow, to maintaining autonomy from the internet. But as free media begins to look more and more like personal narratives (which are nothing new — personal journalism really took off in the seventies, thank you Queen Joan Didion), our information becomes, as Bunny Rogers gestures to, pixelated.

I know that both collective and personal grief become totemized.
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What does it look like for us to embrace this corruption, at least in times of grief? To allow the soft, shape-shifting of these entities to create for us a kind of collective consciousness that we can pull from in order to enhance our experiences of feeling?  

The fact of the matter is that we need more complicated ways of thinking about our reactions, responses, and selves as individuals—and especially how we as individuals become parts of a whole (community/family/nation). We readily offer that kind of generosity of mindfulness to art, but we rarely do that for ourselves.

Perhaps I should think of myself as an exhibit more frequently—one that depicts provocatively and image-istically, and has a juxtaposed title.

Say, Self Inside Self Inside the Tomb of Marie Laveau

Woman in Flannel, Head in Hands, Stonewall Inn

A Portrait of a Dinner Party at Pearl Harbor

How would you title you?

A middle-aged woman roamed the streets with a bag of colorful wax crayons. She stopped at public walls and gates, filling them with what seemed like incoherent sentences, insignificant dates, and fragments of a geography lesson. When the walls were painted to cover her marks, she returned. Scribbling, re-writing, and overwriting on them again and again.

This the story of Deepa Saxena, a former teacher who, for the past ten years, has been inscribing her words on the walls of Meerut; a small town in Northern India. When asked why she continued to do so, Saxena, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia, told the Times Of India in 2014, “I write on the walls for I’ve no one to talk to, nobody wants to listen to my story. I need some way to express my thoughts, which is why I pen them down on the walls.”

A year later, Palak Mittal, a Delhi-based photographer, would decide to listen and tell this narrative of mental anguish through her haunting photo series —The Woman Who Conquered Town. Mital was visiting Meerut, her hometown, for the summer holidays when she first noticed  

Saxena’s writings on almost every street wall in the town’s cantonment area; at times as far as a 5km radius. She found it odd that nobody talked about these writings, and when she asked around the answer was curt if not unconvincing; it’s by the crazy lady in town.  

While the common consensus seemed that Saxena’s mental illness was a result of being abandoned by her husband, Mittal later found that she was never married. As Mittal sifted through urban legends and facts, some part of the truth began to reveal itself. “Her parents were very selfish and dependent on her. She never really invested in her own personal life. When everyone she knew went away or died she became lonely,” says 23-year-old Mittal, who was in touch with Saxena’s family friend. “Though I have never really spoken to her personally because  I don’t think it’s fair for me to bring back her trauma.” She prefers to refer to Saxena as ‘the lady.’

Mittal’s photo series is a heartbreaking revelation of apathy not only towards Saxena but to most people who seek mental health care in India. An estimated 150 million people across India — that is larger than the entire population of Japan— are in need of mental health care interventions, both short and long-term, according to India’s latest National Mental Health Survey 2015-16. The survey also found that, depending on the state, between 70% and 92% of those in need of mental health care failed to receive any treatment. Which further accounts for the reason why in India one student commits suicide every hour.

However, Mittal has stayed away from statistics in her work. “Mental health has always been something that has been going on in somebody’s head and you really cannot see it,” she says. “That is why I think photography is the best medium for this story. Here the suffering is tangible.”

I caught up with Mittal to chat about her experience of capturing these wounded walls of Meerut, the stories she uncovered through them and India’s relationship with mental health conversations.   

Payal Mohta: Did you find that that Saxena’s writings were able to tell her story?

Palak Mittal: The writings on the walls might seem hazy but if you study them closely they are very precise. They state clear bank details, dates and people’s names, in both English and Hindi. The lady is calling those people out who refused to help her and even financially cheated or deserted her. Another theme that recurs is of marriage and divorce. There is this one phrase that she wrote that keeps coming back to me —’Why Indian Girl Must Marry.’ It’s so relatable because women across different sections of Indian society find that marriage becomes more of a regulation that comes with age rather than choice.

What was the most challenging part of shooting the story?

The biggest challenge of this project was to be able to capture and allow the viewers to know the magnitude of it. The lady has written all over town, sometimes as much as through a 500 meter stretch of walls. To show this scale with my camera took a bit of strategizing. I finally decided to do a few panoramic photographs where a wider area can be captured in a single frame.

Did you find yourself drawn to any one particular wall?

Yes, I did. There are these set of walls belonging to a convent school around my home which has verses from the Bible inscribed on it. These phrases are written in English and then translated into Hindi. It is on these walls that the lady has written and rewritten. As a photographer, this was visually very interesting for me because it reflected an ironic juxtaposition; messages from God on selflessness and kindness existing with the lady’s unanswered calls for help.

What did you find most tragic about the story?

The people of Meerut knew that there is this lady who roams the street and writes on walls for years. They treated it like a monotonous activity. Nobody cared or bothered to know more about what troubled her or rather did not want to take any responsibility for it. That is for me the most tragic part of the story.  

Every time I broached the topic of why nobody had tried to help her in the past in Meerut, people had a standard excuse—she didn’t want help herself or nothing seemed to work for her. My town’s mentality became evident; everyone was just so consumed in their lives they didn’t want to genuinely reach out to her. This, of course, represents in many ways the larger perspective of Indian society on mental health — it’s not looked upon like a disease that can be treated with counseling and medicine. The dominant belief remains that people just go mad.

How did the people of Meerut react to your photo series?

Thankfully, I never received any backlash. It was more positive feedback than I ever expected. I became sort of popular in town which made me really happy because that meant that finally people were addressing and talking about mental health, one way or another. So many people from Meerut, including friends, family, acquaintances and complete strangers reached out to me and appreciated my work. Though what was common in all these interactions was a sense of guilt in the locals, of having ignored a story of suffering in their own backyard.

I think why people reacted to my story in this way was also because of its digital reach. Suddenly it was in their newsfeeds and insta stories and as we are on our phones most of the day, people just could not ignore it anymore. For better or for worse at least in this way mental health was addressed and talked about. That was all that was needed.  

Do you continue to photograph Saxena’s writings?

The lady doesn’t write anymore. It’s been a few years since she has recovered and now is completely stable. But if you turn around a corner in Meerut, at times you will still find her writing. It tends to live on.

Feminist comics fans have had quite the year: Wonder Woman broke box office records last year and Captain Marvel is set to premiere the Marvel Universe’s first female lead this spring. Even in bookstores, this year has seen hits like Comics for Choice and Bitch Planet that tackle overtly feminist themes. It’s a far cry from the landscape that feminist comic artists navigated in the ’70s and ’80s, when comics was an insular boy’s club of artists, writers, and publishers, and no one — not even feminists — would publish radical female cartoonists.

In 1972, realizing that no traditional, male-run comic book company would publish them, female comic book artists in San Francisco joined together to publish Wimmen’s Comix. The collective published 17 issues, the last in 1991.

One of the artists that Wimmen’s Comix published was the young Julie Doucet. At the age of 23, Doucet contributed “You know, I’m a very shy girl,” “The First Time I Shaved My Legs,” and “Tampax Again” to Wimmen’s Comix Issue 15.

But Doucet had bigger plans than publishing a few comics; she wanted to write her own strip.

In 1987, Doucet wrote the first comic of her eventual series Dirty Plotte (French Canadian slang for vagina) but due to its unrelentingly raw content — nudity, explicit sex, female carnality, violence, and of course, menstrual blood flooding streets like a rogue river — no one would publish it. She even asked a feminist bookstore to carry a self-published version. But no one would sell it. It was too uncomfortable.

That is until the Canadian comics publishing company Drawn & Quarterly — which describes Dirty Plotte as “quite simply one of the most iconic comic book series to have ever been created” — began printing her work in 1991.

(On October 2 of this year, Drawn & Quarterly published Dirty Plotte: The Complete Julie Doucet, a hardback, two volume collection of the full Dirty Plotte series.)

In the pages of her comic, Doucet’s self-inspired character “Julie Doucet” draws comics, masturbates with a cookie, dresses as a man, castrates one, cuts off her breasts, and sews a penis onto herself.

Julie skips cleaning her house, but pays special attention to her vaginal hygiene in the bath. She stresses about purchasing the perfect bra in a dream, even though the actual Julie never wore one.

For drawing such loud, provocative and seemingly vulnerable scenes, Doucet herself is rather quiet and measured.

This past November, she spoke on a panel at Comic Arts Brooklyn, an annual comics festival at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.

The event—standing room only—was filled with an audience keen to hear Doucet speak with cultural critic Anne Elizabeth Moore, who recently published a book-length analysis of Doucet’s work, life, and contribution to the world of feminist comics called Sweet Little Cunt: The Graphic Work of Julie Doucet.

Several times during the panel, Moore tried to complement Doucet’s work and place her in a canon of influential comic creators — a woman from the audience even stood up to tell Doucet that the comic about Doucet’s first sexual encounter had a profound impact on her own coming of age — but Doucet shyly shrugged off the attention. Moore told Doucet that her art had fundamentally changed the world of comics; Doucet quietly laughed, “I wasn’t aware.”

It’s difficult to know whether Doucet is genuinely modest, or is keen not to take up too much space as a female artist exhausted by the dominance of men in the comic world. But it seems more likely to me that she was being honest: in the middle of the ‘90s, trying to draw comics about gender and sexuality as a woman, Doucet was just trying to get by. She didn’t and couldn’t know her comics would have such a profound effect on comics culture, and it seems, she might still not believe it.

Following the panel, the energy was palpable. I approached artists selling copies of Comics for Choice, prints of feminist figures, or zines about their or their female family members’ own experiences, and asked them who they looked to for inspiration. Many named Doucet.

When I interviewed Doucet over email however, she wasn’t sure if people like her comics more than in the ‘90s, but she was sure that the resurgence of feminism had an influence: “People seem interested in the gender theme comics in a whole different way, that’s for sure.”

Despite her celebrated success and rippling influence, Doucet stopped producing comics in the mid-2000s. She credits the comics “boys club” and the unreliable income with pushing her away from the medium.

And although Doucet recognizes the landscape has shifted for feminist creators, she doesn’t see herself reentering the comics world anytime soon:  “It feels like I don’t have any stories to tell,” she wrote me. It’s a strange phrase to hear coming from Doucet. After all, if her work was about almost everything—it was predicated on exploration. Her comics explored gender identity, sexuality, womanhood, power, and violence—what stories didn’t she have to tell?

Doucet hasn’t quit creating however. Instead, she turned away from text and towards images. She returned to printing—linocuts, woodcuts, and silkscreen printing—which she has originally studied at university. She published a book of collage and poetry called Elle Humor in 2006 and another titled A l’Ecole De L’Amour in 2007.  She even designed a cover for the Penguin Classics Little Women that looks like it could be a page from one of her comics. 

Doucet has shirked off the weight of the comic world, but her work continues to draw attention and glean recognition.  In 2006, she had a solo exhibition of her print work at the Galerie B-312 in Montreal; in 2007, she participated in the Biennale de Montreál; and in 2008, she appeared at the Triennale québécoise at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. Most recently, in 2017, her comic work was featured in a retrospective exhibit at the Fumetto Comic Festival in Luzern, Switzerland.

“It was the first time I got to see the extent of all my comic and non-comic production,” said Doucet. “It was huge, I couldn’t believe my eyes. I hadn’t realized how much work I’d done in my life. That was very overwhelming.”

Julie Doucet's comics explored gender identity, sexuality, womanhood, power, and violence—what stories didn't she have to tell?
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Doucet remains a force in the comic’s world, especially now that Dirty Plotte has been republished. And she’s proving that female artists can be more than one thing. Just as her comics depicted Julie-the-lover, Julie-the-man, Julie-the-artist, Julie-the-woman; so her life is revealing Julie-the-cartoonist, Julie-the-print-maker, Julie-the-poet.

She wrote me that she’s started drawing again this year and has been working on a series of geometric cardboard structures, although she admits, “I’m not sure where I’m going with that.”

Doucet’s work continues to explore the infinite permutations of womanhood and artistry, but her role as Julie-the-publisher is perhaps the most radical to date. She started her own publishing house in 2013, Le pantalitaire, to publish her own work and has found herself full circle: from unpublished to publisher—from powerless to powerful.

Even with a heavy video camera I couldn’t resist walking straight into the aggressive waves with her.

I was filming Jalobayu (climate in Bengali), Monica Jahan Bose’s collective performance piece, at Select Art Fair in Miami Beach.  The performance started indoors with a group of women who all quietly carried 216 feet of sari to a ritual site outside on the beach. After a series of symbolic activities on the sand, Bose eventually wraps herself in a red sari and enters and battles the ocean in a breathtaking statement on climate change.

Bose uses the sari—18 feet of unstitched handwoven fabric that is commonly worn by women in South Asia—to represent women’s lives and the cycle of life on our planet.  The sari is perhaps the real star of the show. But not just any sari. The sari she uses in the show is written on and worn by the coastal women in Bangladesh. “JALOBAYU juxtaposes women’s words and their worn saris against the backdrop of the rising ocean in Miami Beach,” says Bose. “The intent is to raise awareness of climate change and link Miami Beach to coastal Bangladesh, both of which face devastation due to climate change.”

Bose uses the sari—18 feet of unstitched handwoven fabric that is commonly worn by women in South Asia—to represent women’s lives and the cycle of life on our planet.
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I was trying to do the math on how Bose went from 18 feet of fabric to 216 feet for the performance, and found out the sari that was communally carried is made up of 12 saris worn for 8 months by 12 women from her ancestral village—Katakhali Village in Barobaishdia Island.  “Those saris were covered in woodblock and handwriting done collaboratively by the 12 women and myself back in 2013. After they wore them and used them, they were brought to the US and my daughter, Tuli, helped me sew them together to make this massive sari,” she explained. This just made me even more curious how she got the sari over to the states. “The worn saris were actually transported from the village to Dhaka by boat, and then my mother brought them to me in the US in her luggage.”  That same 216-foot sari has been in performances at DUMBO arts festival (called Sublime Virtue), (e)merge art fair DC (Unwrapped), and more.

Bose was born in Britain to Bangladeshi parents, and uses participatory installation, film, printmaking, painting, advocacy, and performance to speak to women’s experiences, recently around the disparate impacts from climate change. It’s part of a larger collaborative art and advocacy project called Storytelling with Saris. Bose’s maternal roots are in Katakhali, an island community in Bangladesh on the frontlines of climate change. She collaborates with a dozen women in the community who have acquired literacy and climate adaptation skills to share their personal stories. These women have lost repeated homes to cyclones.  

The idea is by seeing and hearing these stories, via saris, people in the US and Europe will be inspired to act on climate change.  “Americans are learning about climate change through the project and making written commitments on saris to reduce their carbon footprint in an act of cross-border solidarity. The U.S. climate pledge saris will be returned to Bangladesh and worn by the women of Katakhali.”  Storytelling with Saris engagements have taken place in California, Hawai’i, Iowa, Maryland, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Washington, D.C., and Wisconsin in the U.S.; Dhaka and Katakhali in Bangladesh; Paris, France; and Athens, Greece. But of course the real power is connecting these stories back to the women’s lived experiences in Bangladesh.

The effects of rising sea levels disproportionally falls on the shoulders of poor, marginalized communities of color. According to a MercyCorps piece, one-third of the planet’s land is no longer fertile enough to grow food, but more than 1.3 billion people live on this deteriorating agricultural land. And they’re also the same communities facing more disasters than ever. The number of people affected by natural disasters doubled from approximately 102 million in 2015 to 204 million in 2016, although there were fewer natural disasters.

Women in these communities are particularly affected. We can see this in the climate survivors of Bangladesh Bose connects us with. Women disproportionately suffer the impacts of climate change because of cultural norms and the inequitable distribution of resources and power, especially in developing countries. One study also found that 90% of the dead from the 1991 cyclone in Bangladesh were women. Women also at risk of sexual assault and trafficking after extreme weather events where they are rendered homeless.

Likewise, women’s leadership is also critical to addressing climate. The project presents and preserves women’s stories from a remote community (with negligible carbon footprint) that may disappear unless we take action. The project both informs and empowers them to be those leaders. One of the women in the community, Noor Sehera said, “Yes, it made us scared to hear about why the planet is hotter and why there is so much rain.  But we are glad to know, so that we can decide what to do about it. We have a right to know what is going on.”

Often under recognized in the climate change movement  is how artists are contributing to advance awareness of environmental issues.  Monica’s work around saris and climate change embrace symbols: the sari represents the female body, and women’s place in the world, and water speaks to life and renewal.  She also incorporates wind, sand, rice and water into the performance to represent cyclones, sea level rise, and the loss of heritage and food caused by climate change. They also reference narratives: Jaloboyu references the Indian myth of Draupadi, the eternal virgin who was married to five brothers, as well as the true story of Bose’s grandmother who was married at age seven and years later swept away by a cyclone.

Women disproportionately suffer the impacts of climate change because of cultural norms and the inequitable distribution of resources and power, especially in developing countries.
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One of the most impressive parts of her art is her ability to move across media and disciplines and incorporate science and policy into her work.  Her performance art makes a direct statement on the current state of climate change with the specific perspective of marginalized communities of color.  Since 2015, Bose has started making saris with women (and a few men) in the US, France and Greece as part of Sari Climate Pledge Workshops. The participants work on a sari with her for two hours while they learn about climate change and how women in Bangladesh are impacted.  She teaches woodblock technique and her participants make specific promises that will reduce their carbon footprint. The saris are first exhibited and then returned to Bangladesh for the women in her village to wear. 

While I will continue to be mesmerized by Bose’s ability to master so many different art forms and connect them to today’s issues, I’m most touched by how she’s been able to give a space for her community in Bangladesh to connect to this global issue. Like one of her participants, Zakia, said:  “Coming to the cooperative and working on the sari art and the performance is what I love most. We want to do more and more of it. It was the greatest joy of my life to be part of the performance by the Darchira River.” And that’s the only way we’ll ever be able to confront climate change—working cooperative with communities across the world.

Brazil holds the world’s highest LGBTQI murder rate. Here, a LGBTQI person is brutally murdered or commits suicide every 19 hours. Every. 19. hours.

Among such crushing hostility, it would appear there should be little room for LGBTQI artists to exist at all. The reality, however, is quite the opposite: the queer music scene of Brazil is exploding.

The current aural landscape is comprised of incredibly diverse performers whose work ranges from rap, rock and R&B to soul, indie music, Brazilian funk and even K-pop.

Together, artists like Gloria Groove, Linn da Quebrada, and Pabllo Vittar have founded a brand new paradigm in Brazil’s music scene. The moment they dared to go up on the stage, a revolution began. And there’s no turning back.

“You Either Resist Or Die”

Refusing the second option, five rappers from the edges of São Paulo decided to found Quebrada Queer; they self-describe as the first LGBTQI cypher in Latin America.

Cyphers — singing as a group — have become very popular in Brazil’s music scene. For Quebrada Queer members, rapping as a cypher is their weapon against invisibility and prejudice.

“Once we gathered, we became the first openly gay rap group in Latin America,” says Guigo, a member of Quebrada Queer. “We are queer, black, peripheral artists, singing one of the most homophobic music genres of all. And that means resistance and representation.” 

Only a month ago, Quebrada Queer (‘quebrada’ is São Paulo slang for ‘periphery’) launched its very first single, “Pra Quem Duvidou” (which means, “For those who doubted”). Turning the traditional rap aesthetics upside down, the music video has already amassed over half a million views on YouTube.

“It’s fucking cowardice/To say it’s opinion, when it’s homophobia!/ (cut this shit) They threaten to kill my fellows/ When did it all get lost?/Can you see how contradictory it is to kill in the name of God?” demand the lyrics of “Pra Quem Duvidou”.

Guigo believes it’s time to kick in the doors that have always been closed; being celebrated in these traditionally excluding systems, however, is a whole different story. But Quebrada Queer is ready to fight: “We want to make sure that future queer artists will be welcomed with a red carpet,” says Guigo.

“Half Drag, Half Rapper”

This is how Gloria Groove defines herself. And it is this exact same duality that deftly puts Gloria — a 23-year old queer singer — beyond any stereotype: “When I sing, I can be girl and a boy. This makes my music unique.”

Groove is exemplary in her versatility, signing a whole range of genres from Soul to Trap, to R&B and Brazilian funk music. In her latest R&B single, “Apaga a Luz” (“Turn off the light”), Groove explores her vocal duality, singing both as a “male rapper” and a “female queer”.

Launched in 2016, Groove’s very first hit, “Dona” (“Owner”), is a sarcastic criticism to how queer people are portrayed in society: “Oh My Lord / What animal is that? / Nice to meet you, my name is art, darling”.

Groove is considered one of the most influential queer musicians in Brazil: her hottest hits, such as the Brazilian funk track “Bumbum de Ouro” (Golden butt) and the Reggaeton-like song “Muleke Brasileiro” (Brazilian dude), are present on every dance floor across Brazil — not just within the LGBTQI community.

But behind all the humor and glamour involving Groove’s music, her lyrics are an effort to shed light on the oppressive and dangerous reality of being queer in Brazil. “My music hopes to signify the existence of thousands of LGBTIQ people—our music becomes a platform of love and self-acceptance.”

Gender Terrorist

Linn da Quebrada is another performer who is busy proving rap can be queer as hell.  Once a Jehovah’s Witness, the singer believes she has broken free from an “overdisciplined, self-repressed body,” to finally belong to herself.

The 28-year-old artist — who helped to found an NGO for trans people in São Paulo — calls her last album, “Pajubá” (2017), the “transgender Lemonade”. Highly politicized, the afro/Brazilian funk/vogue album “Pajubá” sounds as rough as the battlefield they find themselves warring on.

“Transvestite faggot/ of a single breast/ the hair dragging on the floor/ And on the hand, bleeding, a heart,” says “Bixa Travesty” (Transvestite Faggot), one of the most lacerating songs from the album, depicting the everyday violence against trans people in Brazil.

Calling herself a “Gender Terrorist,” Linn da Quebrada believes this boom of queer musicians in Brazil can work as a fundamental game changer: “Haven’t we been harmless for too long? Maybe it is time for us to scare those who are afraid of losing their position of power.”

Trans Pop Star Changing The Course Of History

Coming from one of the poorest states from Brazil (Maranhão, in the Northeastern region), Pabllo Vittar has taken LGBTQI representation to a whole new level. This month, Vittar became the first Brazilian artist to put land all the songs from one album — “Não Para Não” (Don’t Stop), Vittar’s second and latest album — on Spotify’s Top 40.

Having debuted in the music market with a well-humored parody of Major Lazer’s “Lean On,” Vittar’s career skyrocketed in late 2017, when she recorded with Brazilian singer Anitta and Major Lazer himself.

A constant victim of fake news (rumors ranged from Vittar being the new owner of Apple to the artist being canonized by the Vatican!), Vittar says the album aims to soften the dark days in Brazil.

A couple of weeks ago, Vittar broke professional relations due to political reasons. She was the sponsor of a shoe brand whose owner publicly supports Jair Bolsonaro, the far-right newly-elected president known for controversial LGBTQI-phobic statements.

Hacking The Process With Art

Like Vittar, Rico Dalasam doesn’t hesitate to speak out against political regression now, when Brazil’s democracy is under serious attack. Along with Brazil’s most prestigious rappers, Dalasam, an openly gay and black artist, recently signed a petition against Bolsonaro, which alleges the presidential candidate represents a “mortal threat” against poor, marginalized people from Brazil.

Having recorded “Todo Dia” (Everyday) — one of the greatest hits from Carnival 2017 — with Pabllo Vittar, Rico Dalasam currently sings about being a black, gay, peripheral man in society.

For him, Brazilian queer music arises as an art of emergency, from the need to narrate a silenced story: “queer art is unbeatable, it is relentless in the pursuit of finding a way out, in hacking this oppressive process,” he says.

Queer Invasion Of The Indie Scene

Following quite a different path from pop star Pabllo Vittar is the “As Bahias e a Cozinha Mineira” band. More popular in the alternative music landscape, “As Bahias” stands out for their politically engaged rock and MPB (a generic term used to refer to Brazilian popular music) songs. The band is composed of three cis male instrumentalists and two transgender vocalists, Assucena Assucena and Raquel Virgínia.

Placing the trans issue at the core of their lyrics wasn’t exactly what Assucena and Virgínia had been looking for. However, the transgender vocalists couldn’t see any other option: “being silent about this issue would feel like denying something that is in eruption inside me,” says Virgínia.

Having started her career in music as a cis man, Liniker self-identifies now as a trans black woman and activist of the LGBTIQ rights. One of the most prestigious singers from the contemporary R&B and black music scene in Brazil, Liniker highlights the importance of taking sides. “This is the moment we have to resist through art. We can’t stay in the margins any longer.”

Find more amazing queer artists who are transforming the music culture of Brazil right the hell here:

Lia Clark

Aretuza Lovi 

Mulher Pepita

Johnny Hooker

Jaloo

Here’s something that won’t surprise you—it’s not easy being an indie, female musician of color.

Actually, it’s really, really, really hard. A U.S.-based study of popular songs found that those nominated for a Grammy Award between 2013 and 2018, 90.7 percent of those were men, while 9.3 percent were women. The same study found that 79 percent of the most popular artists of color from 2012-2017 were male and 20 percent were female.

Canadian vocalist Rosina Kazi told TVO that although the country’s musician pool is very diverse, the musicians promoted by mainstream platforms are not. “It ends up being very white,” she said.

Indie female musicians of color find themselves caught in a difficult intersection.

They look up to woman of color who enjoy unprecedented success (like Beyonce, Cardi or MIA), while struggling to pass through the many gates that will lead them to that point. The obvious solution? Remove the gatekeepers.

Enter music platform SoundCloud, which snubs mainstream decision makers, and instead empowers musicians and music-lovers. “As the world’s largest open audio platform that enables anyone to upload, SoundCloud’s audience, reach and diversity of content is unmatched,” says Megan West, Vice President of Content and Community from SoundCloud.

Indie female musicians of color find themselves caught in a difficult intersection.
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Available in 190 countries, SoundCloud should theoretically burgeon the musical careers of women of color. But does it?

According to TechCrunch, “Spotify is primarily a reseller of music inventory owned by record labels.” Alternatively, SoundCloud’s content is not gained by licensing deals, it’s uploaded by the platform’s users. This bypassing of major labels is particular useful to women of color; it means the bypassing of exploitation that women of color are typically exposed to and undermined by.

Dominican singer-songwriter Maluca Mala told Billboard, “[White men] have made millions off black, queer and marginalized peoples and paid them dust in return.” This practice dates back to the fifties, where instead of paying royalties, (oft white) labels would pay black artists a flat fee per song. Industry ignorant musicians would agree to this contractually, and lose all ownership rights in the process.

Over 60 years later, Prince told the National Association of Black Journalists, “record contracts are just like—I’m gonna say the word—slavery.” And of course, there continues to be a host of modern day allegations involving financial and/or sexual exploitation by record label bosses.  As labels have limited access to SoundCloud, uploaders have more financial and personal agency.

White men have made millions off black, queer and marginalized peoples and paid them dust in return.
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The limited influence of labels also means that an artist’s fan base dictates how well they do. “If people like [my music], then I’m doing something right,” Indonesian rapper Ramngvrl tells me. Influenced by the likes of M.I.A and Tyler the Creator, Ramengvrl sent demos out to a few labels before finding greater success on SoundCloud. She thought to herself, if I don’t find success on my own, “well, those labels are right, and I should probably try something else.”

Fortunately, the labels were wrong. After uploading “I’m Da Man,” a track about breaking Indonesia’s male-heavy hip-hop scene, on SoundCloud, Ramengvrl’ went viral.

The song pricked the ears of local hip-hop players, and Ramengvrl has since worked with the Indonesian rappers like Dipha Barus, Matter Mos, and Ariel Nayaka.

Lady Donli, a Nigeria-based artist, also attests the power of SoundCloud listeners. Through uploading her blend of RnB, jazz and hip-hop, the Abuja resident noticed that she had far-flung admirers of her sound. “When I started asking for music pledges, I actually had people from Tokyo donate to my music, which I thought was really cool.”

Unlike rival platforms Apple and Spotify, SoundCloud encourages musicians to network and meet like-minded industry professionals. This freedom to choose gives women of color agency, despite them being a minority in their industry. For instance, SoundCloud brought Ramengvrl together with her current management, indie collective Underground Bizniz Club.

Guitar-pop extraordinaire Nabihah Iqbal, also made a meaningful connection via SoundCloud. “I was discovered through that platform by Kassem Mosse, who subsequently put my first release out via his label Ominira,” she says. That was five years ago. Since then, the British Asian musician has put out two EPs and an album.

Where SoundCloud excels in creating networks, platforms like Spotify and Apple music primarily push latest releases and inventories owned by labels. As TechCrunch points out, “Most of the songs on Spotify you could find on Apple Music, Pandora or another streaming service.”

Because SoundCloud has the most unique content, it follows that the platform’s listeners are also the most prone to trying new things. A comparison by Forbes found that in contrast “many of Spotify and YouTube’s users (just to name two) are utilizing the platform to listen to old favorites, not necessarily discover new music.”

Therefore if a woman of color is limited by human listening habits coupled with systemic—and immediate—structural forces, SoundCloud may help them find spaces where these forces are weaker. “In Nigeria, we have about two or three women that are on the charts, and that’s it,” Lady Donli tells me. At the time of writing this article, only two Nigerian (Tiwa Savage and Simi) women populate Nigeria’s top 25 (the other women are Ciara, Jennifer Lopez and Camila Cabello). According to Lady Donli, it’s even harder to find success in Nigeria if you’re a woman that doesn’t do afrobeats/afropop.

Despite this boundary, Lady Donli’s SoundCloud has gained her recognition in the UK as well as Japan. “When I was in Nigeria, I’d get people in England messaging me and trying to get me to come for gigs down there,” she says.

Lady Donli continues: “I enjoy SoundCloud because it’s seamless. [You] record a song and post it. The internet does the rest for you. However, there’s a downside: SoundCloud’s struggles to monetize it’s content. “When money comes into play things become a lot more complicated, but the money is necessary. Everyone needs it to expand.”

And while these musicians enjoy a platform for sharing their work with voracious music lovers boasting an adventurous aural palette, at the end of the day, these women need to eat. Women — especially those hailing from ethnic minorities — are paid less in several sectors across the world. Of the 50 highest paid musicians in 2017, seven were women, and only one was a woman of color (what’s up Janet Jackson)!

Women of color systemically earn less, and focusing their efforts on SoundCloud could perpetuate this ongoing injustice despite increased visibility.

SoundCloud’s business model is precarious, and potentially puts the musicians at risk who use it as their main platform. After all, SoundCloud nearly died last year. Investors considered pulling out after finding that that the platform had raised over $230 million in funding with little monetzsation progress to show for it. During this period of uncertainty, Lady Donli tweeted, “SoundCloud wants to give me hypertension…really if SoundCloud shuts down I’m done releasing music.”  

“When money comes into play things become a lot more complicated, but the money is necessary. Everyone needs it to expand.”
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Many other musicians showed panic and deep concern as well — if the platform went, so would its huge archive of uploaded music. Happily SoundCloud managed to secure rescue funding and has lived to see another year. However, the company is still at risk. Via its 2017 annual report, Twitter wrote off the $66.4 million it invested in SoundCloud, because that money is “not expected to be recoverable within a reasonable period of time.”

SoundCloud gives indie women of color the agency and recognition that is harder to find with mainstream outlets. However, it’s focus on free sharing is a double edged sword, so for these women, relying on SoundCloud isn’t an option.

Although she credits the platform as being instrumental to her career, Iqbal recognizes that, “it’s not the only platform, and so I don’t think its collapse would have too much of an impact on my career. People can find alternative ways through which to listen to my music.”

Likewise, Ramengvrl is determined not to go down with the ship if it sinks. “I’d still find a way to get my music out there. Either through YouTube or through Instagram, or probably the old school way (sending mixtapes to local collectives),” she resolves. “You gotta do what you gotta do.”

When she was seven years old, Nike Davies-Okundaye lost both her mother and her grandmother. It was left to her great-grandmother—the head of the craftswomen in a village in Ogidi in southwest Nigeria—to bring her up and teach her the craft of adire. Ogidi is one of the major centers of adire production in the entirety of the country.

Adire is a resist-dyed fabric which is created by applying wax, string or rubber bands to keep the dye from penetrating the exposed, open areas. Traditionally worn and produced by Yoruba women of southwest Nigeria, adire is a delicate and time-consuming process that can be traced back to the nineteenth century.

Primarily a female domestic craft, adire derived from two Yoruba words—adi (to tie) and re (to dye). It’s not unlike the methods used by its hippie-modern sister-fabric known as tie-dye. But unlike it’s psychedelic brethren, producing just five yards of adire is painstaking work and can take up to three weeks or more.

Every day after school, Okundaye’s great-grandmother would teach her how to separate the cotton from the seed, how to make cassava paste—called adire elekois—and using a chicken feather, apply that paste onto the fabric to create the intricate patterns of Adire that are passed down from one generation to the next.

Adire was originally produced to make use of old hand-woven materials (kijipa); when a garment or wrapper grew faded, it could be redyed. When the missionaries came to Africa, they brought imported calico and it was used for adire, explains Professor Dele Layiwola in their book, Adire Cloth in Nigeria. These days craftsmen buy (mostly imported) cotton and apply the adire patterns onto the existing fabric.

“But no one wants to do it anymore,” sighs Okundaye—now 67 years old—on a sunny weekend afternoon. She is sitting across from me at her gallery, which is located on a peninsula close to the lagoon in the bustling city of Lagos.

“It’s just too much work and the money is too small.” Hailed as the “Queen of Adire” Okundaye is the most famous proponent of this Nigerian textile tradition, credited for making it known—and celebrated—by the outside world. But despite its creeping popularity in the West, its future remains uncertain. 

In the afternoons, Nike Art Gallery—West Africa’s largest gallery and a center of Lagos’s buzzy art scene—spreads quietly across four floors, boasting more than 15,000 paintings, sculptures and textiles all crammed together; it’s more a museum than a gallery.

But by evening, a steady stream of visitors, tourists, artists, and her protégés come to learn the art of adire from “Mama Nike” and the space thrums with voices and laughter. Weekends at Nike Art Gallery are unique and draw people from all over the city.

With Mama Nike presiding, young artists from Lagos and surrounding towns share stories of their work over food and drinks; it’s a way of dipping into Nigerian art and culture, with performances of music, dance and masquerades unfolding throughout the evening in the large gallery.     

“I was born into this tradition,” says Yemisi, a 25-year old adire artist from Lagos whose grandmother is a master artisan. “It was easy for me to pick up the technique, but I’m also training in painting as I can’t sustain myself on adire alone.”

Though the history of the craft is difficult to trace, adire—originally prepared only with locally grown indigo—is thought to have started in the 1800s. The tradition of using indigo for dyeing cloth however is thought to be at least a thousand years old in West Africa, according to scholar Jane Barbour whose book from 1971, Adire Cloth in Nigeria, remains an authoritative text on the craft.

While adire flourished in the first half of the twentieth century, it started to decline in the 1950s along with Nigeria’s indigenous textile industry, which was wiped out when cheaper imported cloth flooded the market.

The decline of adire is often linked to the rise of ankara, the hugely popular, brightly colored wax prints that have come to symbolize African fabric around the world. Ankara has a troubled colonial legacy, and ironically is not African at all.

The wax prints came into the African continent from the Netherlands in the nineteenth century, when the Dutch created a mass-produced version of Indonesian batik. These days, cheap copies of ankara are primarily produced in China.

Okundaye is warm and energetic, and always dressed head to toe in wrappers and headscarves emblazoned with the exquisite and striking adire patterns created by her own hand. A vital part of her craft she explains, is the sharing of its methods.

Okundaye has trained thousands of people in the art of adire by holding free community workshops at her art centers in Oshogbo, Ogidi, Abuja and Lagos, for the last two decades.

“I see it as a way of saving the art, so it’s not something our grandmothers once did,” she says.  “I also think of it a means of solving poverty. People who have no means of livelihood can be taught adire to make a living for themselves.”

But all of this is not possible, she explains, without creating proper infrastructure to support the industry; the government needs to actively invest in its future.

Despite Okundaye’s dedication to passing along the adire artform and its burgeoning presence on the more conventional fashion scene, she remains skeptical about the future of the textile tradition and has slowly modernized her methods to accommodate the lagging interest.  “When I saw that people weren’t buying adire fabric anymore, I started transferring the patterns on the fabric to the canvas, using pen to make the same designs that we used to paint with feathers.”

While adire is largely a forgotten and dying form in its country of origin, the ancient craft from Nigeria is making itself known in Western fashion spheres. In April this year, noted author and feminist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was invited to address graduating seniors at Harvard College, and she boasted her adire excitement on Instagram, heralding a newfound cache for this Nigerian handiwork:

“Honored to be the Harvard University Class Day Speaker 2018. And I felt fully like myself in this lovely Adire dress by The Ladymaker.”

For Adichie, wearing adire is a conscious choice and part and parcel of her activism; she launched “Wear Nigerian” last year to support local designers from her homeland.

Until just a few years ago, not many had heard of adire outside of Nigeria, but that’s slowly changing. Today adire is enjoying a coming out moment and boasts global icon enthusiasts including Michelle Obama, Lady Gaga, and Lupita Nyong’o.

For a clutch of young Nigerian designers catering to the fashion conscious around the world, adire’s rich history is a compelling selling point to consumers; the craft is indigenous, difficult to produce, rare, and every pattern is a unique form of storytelling.

“Adire was once dying out due to the cheap textile alternatives coming from the east,” says Niyi Okuboyejo, founder of the menswear label Post-Imperial. “But many young Nigerian designers are now embracing it. The method appeals to several global markets as we have several retail doors in Japan, France, England and the US.” 

Okuboyejo is of Nigerian-descent and based out of the United States, where he has found a following for his adire-inspired formal and office wear.

“A lot of the symbols in adire have meaning and when put together could serve as a platform for storytelling,” he writes me in an email. The patterns in adire are a tapestry of the rich old stories of Yoruba culture, the myths, the history, the folklore, and the rituals.

“It is just one of the many traditional textiles that we still have. As it has done for Post-Imperial, it can serve as a tool to create narratives for the Black designer (especially one of Nigerian descent). Africa is the last frontier of new ideas due to so much untapped concepts and narratives within it, and adire is part of that.”

For designers like Okuboyejo and Amaka Osakwe (named “West Africa’s Most Daring Designer” in a New Yorker profile)—her label Maki Oh is entirely inspired by adire and a favorite with celebrities—the fabric represents pride in African and black heritage.   

Okundaye, meanwhile, is planning for the future in case adire’s current en vogue moment begins to fade like so many fashion trends tend to do. She plans to open a textile museum in Lagos later this year; she has already collected all the fabrics she wants to exhibit. “It will be the first of its kind,” she says, “a place to see all the textiles of Africa.”

She pointed towards her adire paintings.

“You can put this on your wall and remember the vanishing art.”

Bianca Xunise is a Black goth and describes herself as “unapologetically hood.” An artist from the Southside of Chicago, her work is incredibly diverse, exploring anti-blackness, the reappropriation of problematic personas like Josephine Baker, beauty, gender, and of course, her love of goth icons. She was awarded the coveted 2017 Ignatz award for Promising New Talent for her comic Say Her Name, which took aim at the silence surrounding Black women killed by police violence.

My first exposure to Xunise’s work was at Pitchfork Music Festival 2017 in Union Park. I was looking through the book vendor area, when a print of Poly Styrene—the Somali-English frontwoman for the ‘70s jazz punk band X-ray Spex—caught my eye.

X-ray Spex was a band from that era that actually had a member of color, and seeing her iconic lyric, “Some people think little girls should be seen and not heard, but I think, oh bondage up yours!” memorialized in Bianca’s art warmed my heart.

I bought the print right then and there and continued to follow her work.

From her meticulously chosen outfits—made up of leather harnesses, berets, and ’70s-inspired high-waisted pants—to her unrelenting love of The Craft, and her penchant for singing along to songs by the Damned or David Bowie, Xunise is part and parcel of a very Chicago Goth experience.

As a Chicago transplant, Bianca Xunise seems to be an all knowing insider of the city. I was lucky enough to meet up with her recently to talk about nightlife in Chicago, her unique experience as a Black goth and comic, and the political importance of going out and dancing.

How do you identify your taste in music? I ask because I tend to use the words “new wave,” “post-punk” and “goth” interchangeably.

I use those terms interchangeably too and I feel like a lot of times people misunderstand what I mean by goth. When I say goth, they’re probably like, ‘oh she likes Evanescence and new goth from like the mid 2000s or early 2000s.’ But when I say goth I mean something older—bands like Batcave and Darkwave, The Cure and Siouxsie Sioux and stuff like that.

Sometimes I use the Pitchfork video to inform people. It’s been really helpful…

That video was really helpful! Again, cause I feel like people misunderstand what it means and in our modern society with the internet and everything else, all cultures have begun to be kind of melted into one. A good example of this would be like Lil Uzi [Vert]. He like does trap rap, but he’s also sort of goth and sort of emo at the same time—it all blends together. And say if you’re like 15, 16, 17 and if you think Lil Uzi’s goth, then what you understand as goth is not going to be where it actually came from. You’re gonna have a whole new understanding of what you think goth is.

Often, as far as they want to go is Evanescence or Avril Lavigne, but you gotta keep going further and further back. I just started listening to some older goth music like Virgin Prunes—that’s from the ‘70s—so I am exploring how goth intersects with my Blackness and listening to bands like Screamin’ Jay Hawkins.

Why did you start drawing about these experiences with the goth subculture? I saw one of your comics—Saturday at the Goth Club—where it’s just a little ‘slice of life’ comic where you’re just at the club and you have poison written on your shirt?

One of the reasons is I was just trying to find something to write about. A lot of my work is political. But when I first started out as a comics artist, much of my work was kind of simple—about everyday life—and I missed writing about those things. My work was getting so heavy.

I wanted to bring some more lightness to it. I thought it’d be fun to show people a window into this world—there’s a lot of misconceptions about it, ‘like what do you guys do all day, hang out under the highway underpasses and dance?!’ I think people don’t understand a lot of it is just a bunch of nerds hanging out ’cause we like the same music—we’re all pretty dorky.

What are your favorite goth clubs/nights in Chicago?

I go to Late Bar, which is a big one for me. I used to go to the old Neo when that was still open. RIP. Not everyone agrees with me on this, but I feel interested in what has been happening now, ‘cause I feel like everyone is splitting up and making new safe spaces—like a lot of things happening at Berlin now. And that would be more Wax Trax! [the industrial music label based in Chicago]. Exit is another place that does ‘80s music either on Thursdays or every other Saturday.  

And then there’s the new Neo. That was really rough at first. People were very against it. Actually, one of the things I really like about “Deboneo” as they call it, is how queer it’s become. There’s been a lot more black and brown queer faces showing up there. So for me seeing the goth culture blend with the club kid culture and become this one safe space of, like, weirdos and queers and drag queens and awesomeness—that’s super important to me. That’s when it gets to the best place—when it’s come as you are. No matter how weird. This is a place for you. Let’s all dance to this old shitty song.

What about them makes them feel safe?

Not all the clubs have done this, but I know Late Bar made a statement that they’re a safe space—I think this happened maybe during the election last year. Or maybe even the year before when we heard that Trump was gonna be running. They released a press release and they said, ‘we want to be known as a safe space. This is not a space for discrimination.’ They definitely upped their security after that. There’s always people on the floor.  

But I’ve seen it misunderstood as though they were being predatory—like, ‘there’s this man and why is he coming up and taking my drink away from me. Get away from me.’ But a lot of times when they do that, it’s cause they saw something put into your drink or something like that and they’re trying to make sure that you get home safe—they filter people out all day. And make sure that it stays a place that people can feel comfortable going to.

The best place is when it’s 'come as you are. No matter how weird. This is a place for you. Let’s all dance to this old shitty song.'
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The people there are of every race and gender and you know it’s grown to be a really great thing. I’m not really sure where the crossroads is of different cultures come together, but I think it’s just about the music. A lot of it is being borrowed from each other. Like punk has always been influenced by like the ballroom scene and the ballroom scene in turn is influenced by punk, but it’s all counterculture.

The goth community is a blend of everything.

Also it’s no longer just old white dudes anymore. Brown kids want to be a part of it and you should be allowed to identify with multiple things—you may be into goth music and goth culture but you also may be really into feminism and witchcraft. You might be really into drag and you’re also really into punk rock—you can pick and choose whatever you want. You shouldn’t have to choose what you love. Take it all in and make a new culture out of it.

It’s like, everyone else is kind of shitty, so like why be shitty here?

So your impression of goths and the goth community is pretty positive?

Yeah, I think that’s one of the reasons why I find goths to be pretty nice—they’re so used to everybody else treating them poorly. That’s how I felt about the older goths who set up the bar. They’ve always been kind of kind to me, which I’ve always kind of been a little nervous coming into the scene as a black woman who is used to—especially in like my comics world—white guys pushing back when they see me come and take up space. But in the goth community I see, ‘You’re weird. I’m weird!’ That’s all that matters.

I actually drew a comic about how the goth community is one of the few that I feel I’ve been able to be a part of and the first thing people don’t register about me is that I’m black. In every other space that I take up people think as soon as they see me—Black woman. And then with that they have all these other ideas about me in their head about black women and who they are.

But when I enter a space like Late Bar or Exit or Neo—I don’t feel like people see that right away, they just see somebody that’s just like them and they accept me.

That’s beautiful. Have you had any negative and racist experiences in the scene?

Oh yeah. I have racist experiences everywhere.

I think you mentioned an incident at a Nine Inch Nails show…

I was at a Nine Inch Nails show—actually this was before Nine Inch Nails—it was New Order. I was at New Order and this woman grabbed my hair because I was dancing—as you would—to New Order and apparently my hair touched her face and as I was bouncing or whatever and it brushed her face. So she dug her hand into my scalp and tried to rip my hair out. She grabbed my hair and said, ‘I grabbed your hair because I didn’t like it!’ That was her reasoning.

It was really upsetting and frustrating, but I don’t really attribute that to the community as much as being at a concert. I’ve always had pretty bad experiences at festivals and concerts in general. I’ve gotten into a few fist fights at concerts. It kind of goes hand-in-hand for me there.

In my comics world, white guys pushing back when they see me come and take up space. But in the goth community I see, ‘You’re weird. I’m weird!’ That’s all that matters.
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You try to reason with it and then you realize that racism is the only reason that’s going to work here. I wasn’t the only person there. It wasn’t just me being rambunctious in a group of people sitting quietly on the ground. It was me and bunch of other white dudes that were all dancing. But I’m the one that she decided to attack. I confronted her about that and when I called her out, the dudes that I was dancing with were like no need to call her that. [A racist]. That was really frustrating. And then what was weird was that the two dudes she was with ended up apologizing to my boyfriend and I was like, why isn’t anyone apologizing to me.

But it hasn’t gotten to the point where it’s made me feel unsafe—I also know the punk and goth community have done a lot to combat racism and fascism. I don’t feel like the first person I’m going to meet [in those spaces] is going to be a racist.

You try to reason with something that happened and then you realize that racism is the only reason that’s going to work here.
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I was working on a piece on if you want to check it out, about Rock Against Racism. A lot of the bands that I like—the Clash, X-Ray Spex and stuff—they did what they could do in the ‘70s to try to combat racism.

Going back to going out and goth nights as safe spaces. I’m going to reference your tweets. “I’ve been trying to figure out the point in society where we deemed going out and dancing a sinful thing to do.” I was hoping you could elaborate on this perspective. Why do you think it’s looked down upon and why is it so special and important that you are able to go out and dance? People obviously shit on it, right? Like, ‘you’re just going out and you’re drinking!,’ but to you it’s important. What is it that makes it important, in terms of your identity and your interests?

I definitely got a lot of feedback on that tweet and people brought some stuff up to me that I hadn’t considered before—especially us being a country founded on puritan beliefs and how that’s still affects American society—even in terms of our movies where it’s OK to show violence, but it’s bad to show sex.

We like to market things as sinful and I think that’s where it’s confusing to me—how is it sinful to have community and feel uplifted by this community and feel safe? Where is the sin in that? The drinking part is not super important—you can add or remove alcohol. Yes that exists there, but I also have friends who are sober and still go out to the goth club because it’s not about the drinking. It’s about being around your friends. It’s a chosen family. It’s a family you only want to be around so long and then you want to go back home.

I know I’ve mentioned this a few times but there’s so much happening in the world. I’ve noticed that I’ve gone dancing more this year probably than any other year because I just need that place, a place to not have to hear about Donald Trump, and not have to uplift all the hate that’s going on.

Every time I go to Late Bar they always play this song, “(We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thing.” It’s a place be around people who are gonna give you love. Every time I’m there people ask me, ‘how are your comics? What’s going on in your life? How’s this art show going?’ We know each other enough to know what’s going on in our families and stuff like that. It’s never like a place of hate.

How is it 'sinful' to have community and feel uplifted by this community and feel safe?
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I’ve gone to normie clubs that everybody else goes to and I can see why people hate them. I feel like it’s a different experience. When you add “club” to something then people have this idea that’s it’s going to be this bump and grind, overly sexual, predatory space. In fact, I was at the Owl last Saturday and I was there for half an hour and I think I got groped like 8-10 times just from walking back and forth. Someone put their hands on my butt; they put their hands on my shoulder and tried to put their hands in the curve of my side. And I was like, I don’t want to be here.

Most dudes that I’ve dealt with at the goth club ask permission to dance with you or they have the nice Catholic school space between each other—where it’s just enough room for the holy spirit.

It’s good exercise too. I think everybody needs a space to be able to turn their brain off and just exhale. It saddens me that I try to explain this to my parents and they think I’m out living this life of sin when I’m really just sitting around with a bunch of nerdy people and we’re talking about Stranger Things.

What songs are a must for a perfect new wave night?

Love Will Tear Us Apart — Joy Division

Ant Music — Adam Ant

Girls on Film — Duran Duran

Spellbound — Siouxsie and the Banshees

I Know What Boys Like — The Waitresses

Let’s Go To Bed — The Cure

DISCLAIMER: Never share or distribute scenes or movies involving child pornography of any sort. Distributing these scenes to raise awareness can cause further victimization of children and may have legal consequences. Report child pornography to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

My husband accidentally showed me child pornography.

It happened a couple of years ago, when we first started dating. We were in that “getting to know you” stage and would frequently choose our own favorite movies to show the other when we went on dates. My husband decided on Moonrise Kingdom, thinking it would be right up my alley since I love coming-of-age stories. I understand why: Moonrise Kingdom is a poignant, critically acclaimed, visually stunning movie that paints a very realistic portrayal of the complicated emotions children experience when they are in the process of exploring their own growing independence. I was captivated by Wes Anderson and Roman Coppola’s skillful storytelling, until the scene.

The two lead actors, Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward, were both twelve years old at the time of filming. I didn’t know this at the time. All I knew is that there were two children stripping down to their underwear on camera and French kissing each other. The young girl says that the boy “feels hard,” but that she likes it. The boy gropes the girl’s chest and the girl says she thinks they’re going to grow more.

I have post-traumatic stress disorder partly from childhood sexual assault. When I saw that scene for the first time, I felt like someone was sitting inside of my ribcage. I felt like I was suffocating under the weight of what I had just witnessed: two children being exploited in a public and permanent way. I sobbed so hard that we had to stop the movie.

“Anderson would have to get their parents’ permission, first,” my husband said. “He wouldn’t be able to do it without their consent.” My husband has always been incredibly sensitive and supportive toward my PTSD. He checks movies with me before we watch them to make sure they don’t have sexual content or nudity that might trigger a panic attack. When we decided to watch Moonrise Kingdom, he told me that I would have no problems watching it: since the main actors were children, the film contained no sex or nudity. I felt furious at my husband for showing me two children involved in a sexually exploitative scene. But beyond that, I couldn’t understand why he didn’t see anything wrong with it.

When I saw that scene for the first time, I felt like someone was sitting inside of my ribcage.
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Maricsa Evans, a licensed marriage and family therapist, explains that “Introducing children to sexualized behavior at an early age causes a lot of problems later on developmentally, emotionally, and mentally.” According to Evans, the children’s lack of ability to fully understand the situations they are being exposed to can lead to serious developmental problems, such as engaging in reckless sexual behaviors from a young age. “If they feel traumatized or violated from experiences like this, it can lead to dangerous behaviors such as drug addiction or emotional distress where they need to have mental health services,” Evans said. Later on, if the children become uncomfortable or feel that they were unable to truly consent, it can cause them to have a troubled or negative relationship with their own sexuality or even lead to disorders such as PTSD.

Considering that children are not able to consent to these scenes, their parents shouldn’t have the right to consent on their behalf. “It’s exploitation of your children,” Evans said. “That in itself is child pornography.”

Federal child pornography laws, as specified in 18 U.S.C. § 2258 (b), apply to “any parent, legal guardian, or person having custody or control of a minor who knowingly permits such minor to engage in, or to assist any other person to engage in, sexually explicit conduct for the purpose of producing any visual depiction of such conduct or for the purpose of transmitting a live visual depiction of such conduct.” Child pornography is defined as any visual depiction of sexually explicit conduct involving children under the age of eighteen. According to federal law, the scene in Moonrise Kingdom falls squarely under child pornography. Why, then, were no lawsuits filed over this movie?

Nobody Told Me My Son’s Camp Counselor Was Accused Of A Sex Offense
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When it comes to pornography, many people still subscribe to Justice Potter Stewart’s statement, “I know it when I see it.” In the case of Moonrise Kingdom, people fail to question whether the film constitutes as child pornography simply because it seems so “artistic.” Anderson relies on his signature storybook cinematography to entice viewers to feel detached from reality. Due to the soft fairytale aesthetics in Moonrise Kingdom, people are reminded that it is just a movie—thus, “art” and not pornography. Furthermore, people rarely question the scene because the children are engaging in exploratory behavior. “There is a normal developmental curiosity with children when it comes to sex,” Evans said. However, this behavior is never something an adult should facilitate—especially not for a film.

People are now opening up the discussion of films that include child pornography after Netflix began streaming Diego Kaplan’s 2017 film Desire. Viewers were outraged by the opening scene of Desire, which features two girls under the age of ten playing with pillows while watching a cowboy movie. One of the girls, mimicking the cowboy riding on a horse, begins to masturbate on the pillow. She eventually reaches orgasm. After Netflix’s choice to stream the film sparked such controversy, Kaplan released a statement defending the scene:

The girls never understood what they were doing, they were just copying what they were seeing on the screen. No adult interacted with the girls, other than the child acting coach. Everything was done under the careful surveillance of the girls’ mothers.

This defense misses the point entirely. If the children are too young to understand what they are doing, they are too young to consent to these behaviors. “Children involved in these situations might start questioning themselves: ‘What does that mean? What does that mean about me?’” Evans said. “A lot of doubt and questioning about themselves is going to happen, which is why certain things shouldn’t be introduced to kids too early in their life. It can impact their ability to trust their parents later on if they feel like their parents made the wrong calls protecting them, they’ll have a hard time trusting anyone.” This situation can be damaging to the young actress if she grows up and feels violated by what she was asked to do for the film.

In the case of Moonrise Kingdom, people fail to question whether the film constitutes as child pornography simply because it seems so artistic.
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These consequences become even more disturbing when I considered what Anderson was actually trying to accomplish with the kissing scene in Moonrise Kingdom. Gilman stated that in the month before filming began, Wes Anderson wanted him and Hayward to exchange letters in the style of the “Dear Sam”/”Dear Suzy” letters. He also said that they did not rehearse the kissing scene beforehand. The scene was both of the actors’ first kiss and, as Gilman explained, “Wes wanted it to be authentic.” Hayward further noted, “Wes wanted it to be these two kids’ first kiss. So that’s how we did that.” Gilman also noted that, for the sake of their privacy, they were given a closed set for filming.

Closed sets are used for actors who are filming scenes that involve nudity or sexual activity that they might want a greater deal of privacy for. A child actor should not need a closed set because a child actor should never be put in the same position adult actors are in when they require closed sets.

It is clear from the beginning that Anderson wanted to foster a certain kind of relationship between the two children. Gilman stated that he e-mailed Hayward at first, but then Anderson decided that the actual act of writing letters was important to help the actors get in character. Anderson did not want the children to act out a scene of two characters’ first kisses: he wanted to create and capture a real sexual experience between these two children. And regardless of whether parents or filmmakers intended on pressuring these children, the pressure of this being a job can make it even more difficult for the children to feel comfortable about the decisions their parents made for them.

How, then, can filmmakers responsibly tell coming-of-age stories? The rules are pretty simple. “Filmmakers have a moral and ethical responsibility to protect children from scenes involving touching, nakedness, and implications of sexuality,” Evans said. “I feel they have a higher call to prevent this type of thing from happening. Children should never be in real sexual situations for these movies.” Parents have an even greater responsibility to protect their children by not consenting on behalf of them for scenes that can be developmentally damaging.

“Parents should not let anything slightly related to a sexual encounter guide them to do anything but protect their children and others that are out there,” Evans said. “If no one else, your own children.”

Even In Art, ‘Free Speech’ Can’t Override Consent
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However, there are ways of telling stories about childhood sexuality without harming children. Gregg Araki’s film Mysterious Skin tells the coming-of-age story of two boys, one of whom is molested as a child and becomes a sex worker as he grows up. It’s a graphic, NC-17 rated film that has no issues depicting adult sexuality—but the filmmakers were careful to protect children when shooting scenes that had to imply child sexual abuse. In one scene, it is implied that an adult man is about to engage in sexual acts with a young boy. In order to accomplish this, the scene relies on close-ups of the actors faces that imply physical contact that is never actually depicted. This technique approximates intimacy between the actors without involving any actual interactions between them. By approaching the scene this way, the filmmakers ensured that they would not have to compromise their artistic expression when treating the scene—and the young actor—with the sensitivity they deserve.

Recent movies Love, Simon and Edge of Seventeen also create beautiful coming-of-age stories without featuring scenes of sexuality. The use of clever dialogue and imagery capture the relatable conflicts growing up. Teens in these movies experience the excitement and awkwardness of growing up, and struggle with trying to embrace an adult world they aren’t quite ready for while learning how to assert their independence and autonomy. Much of the beauty in these movies lies in the dialogue, which expresses the teens unique experiences with love, fear, and confusion in ways that are raw and nuanced.  

Dialogue, imagery, and point-of-view narration are just three tools that filmmakers can use to create poignant and realistic coming-of-age stories. Children should never have to be in legitimate sexual situations on camera. “It’s child pornography,” Evans stated. “No one should be able to consent to children doing sexual acts on camera.”