Can Elephants Be Persons?

Personhood for Happy would create a legal precedent and framework for granting fundamental rights to nonhumans in the future.

Sarah Kasbeer Dissent Magazine

If Happy the elephant were allowed to live a natural life in the wild, she would likely spend her days roaming miles of tropical forest and plucking fruit and leaves from trees with the finger-like tip of her trunk. She would have grown up as part of a complex social system, in which elephant calves are doted on by older siblings, cousins, and aunts. By age forty-seven, Happy would likely have already raised multiple calves of her own. She would trumpet with excitement at the other members of her herd and call to potential mates using infrasonic rumbles that travel long distances, inaudible to the human ear.\

But Happy does not do any of this. She currently lives alone at the Bronx Zoo. And recently, she has become the subject of an unusual custody battle that could result in her release. In 2018, an advocacy group called the Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP) filed a writ of habeas corpus (Latin for “produce the body”) on Happy’s behalf, and, for the first time, a court heard the case for an elephant’s legal personhood and subsequent right to bodily liberty. Previous habeas petitions by the NhRP, designed to challenge the captivity of chimps, have been unsuccessful. But the arguments have succeeded in furthering the debate around whether animals—especially those proven to have high levels of cognition—should qualify as more than just “things” under the law.

Elephants have a knack for demonstrating that they think, feel, and remember—in a way humans can easily understand. Famous for ritualized expressions of grief, they have been observed covering deceased family members with leaves and dirt, touching their bodies, and even visiting their gravesites. The elephant’s trunk, a combination nose and upper lip that contains 40,000 muscles, is capable of expressing compassion and annoyance in a human-like manner through affectionate touches and playful shoves. An elephant can even apparently communicate an aversion to captivity, by pulling at the rope around its neck or stuffing leaves into the bell on its collar to avoid being easily found for the start of a logging shift.

If Happy could return to the wild now, she would likely face an entirely new set of threats. In the last century, the elephant population in Asia has declined dramatically. Approximately 45,000 remain, many of which have been forced into captivity for the tourism and logging industries, or are used by panhandlers in cities like Bangkok to beg for money or food. Their habitats have been destroyed by deforestation, slash-and-burn agriculture, and human settlements that choke off critical migration routes. Due to the fragmentation of forests and lack of natural corridors connecting them, elephants trample and raid human crops in their search for food and water. Humans retaliate with violence, further squeezing what has already become a dwindling habitat.

In the larger scheme of things, one might argue that Happy doesn’t have it all that bad. Captured in or around Thailand along with six other calves in the 1970s, she was sold to a now-defunct California corporation called Lion Country Safari. She was transferred to the Bronx Zoo in 1977, where she lived with a companion elephant, Grumpy (also named after one of Snow White’s seven dwarfs), for twenty-five years. In 2002, the zoo’s other elephant duo, Patty and Maxine, charged Grumpy, who failed to recover from her injuries and had to be euthanized.

In the wild, Asian elephants spend their entire lives in matrilineal groups made up mostly of females. The males leave during adolescence to form loose bachelor herds. To replicate natural social conditions, the Association of Zoos and Aquariums recommend that females in captivity be kept in groups of three or more. After Grumpy’s death, Happy was then paired with another young female, Sammy—also euthanized after suffering from a liver disease, the third elephant to die at the Bronx Zoo in four years. A week after Sammy’s death, the zoo announced it would phase out its elephant exhibit all together, limiting Happy’s prospects for a new partner anytime soon.

In 2012, the New York Post ran a story about Happy’s lonely predicament, which gained traction with animal rights and wildlife conservation groups. In response, the zoo maintained Happy had “auditory and tactile” contact with the other elephants, and was not—as petitions that had begun circling the internet suggested—in “solitary confinement.” The interest in her plight grew in 2015, when the organization In Defense of Animals placed the Bronx Zoo in its “hall of shame,” listing it among the ten worst zoos in the country for elephants. Happy has now lived alone for over a decade.

In the last quarter of the twentieth century, scientists began amassing evidence about the spectrum of animal sentience. Their findings supported Darwin’s theory of evolutionary continuity, that differences between species were differences in degree—not in kind. In 2005, researchers studying the evolution of cognition gave the elephants at the Bronx Zoo the mark test for mirror self-recognition (MSR), a behavioral indicator of self-awareness. A 2001 study had demonstrated MSR in dolphins, an attribute previously thought to be associated only with humans and primates. Scientists theorized MSR correlated with “higher forms of empathy and altruistic behavior.” Because elephants have large brains and exhibit attentiveness to the needs of others, they were the next logical species to test.

Animals with MSR tend to pass through four stages: 1. Social response (which can be aggressive displays), 2. Physical inspection of the mirror itself (checking behind it), 3. Self-directed behavior (examining parts of their own bodies), and 4. The mark test, in which a mark is painted on an otherwise imperceptible area of the body to see if the animal will spontaneously touch it in front of a mirror. None of the Bronx Zoo elephants fell for the illusion of “another elephant,” but only Happy passed through the final stage. When faced with her reflection, she used the tip of her trunk to touch a white “X” that had been painted on one side of her head, while ignoring a clear “X” painted on the other, demonstrating that she was responding to the representation of herself and not something she felt or remembered.

Because Happy passed the litmus test for MSR, her species was added to a growing list of animals capable of demonstrating self-awareness. In front of the mirror, self-aware species act a lot like humans. Chimps groom parts of their body they could not see without a mirror; dolphins have been observed examining their genitals. Maxine the elephant pulled one of her ears forward to look at it from different angles. The implications of self-awareness, however, could extend beyond visible, physical aspects to include an ability to reflect on private thoughts and autobiographical experiences. If Happy is lonely, she may have the ability to dwell on it.

Renowned conservationist Daphne Sheldrick, who helped rescue and rehabilitate over 150 orphaned African elephants over the course of her lifetime, called them the most “emotionally human” of all land mammals. They possess strong social bonds and have been known to console each other with reassuring touches. In a gesture that may be akin to handholding, an elephant will place its trunk in a companion’s mouth. They experience affective empathy and emotional contagion, responding to the distress of another with distressed symptoms of their own: standing with their tails pointed straight out while vocalizing rumbles, trumpets, and roars.

It has long been said that to anthropomorphize—ascribe human characteristics to animals—while intuitive and enjoyable, is unscientific and misguided. But given the recent research into animal consciousness, what was once considered a cardinal sin of ethology has since returned to favor, so long as it’s implemented responsibly. Some scholars now argue that we can use our human experiences to create testable hypotheses about animal behavior. Anthropomorphic empathy has been a driving force in improving conditions for zoo animals—granting them more space, companions, and “enrichment” toys.

The urge to anthropomorphize is a common psychological tendency, triggered by experiences such as recognizing the existence of a face, perceiving movements as lifelike, and making eye contact. We are predisposed to identify with the objects of our anthropomorphism, whether animal or robot, and only through a subsequent cultural judgment do we “correct” this impulse and downgrade their moral standing. While we cannot rely solely on intuition to make inferences about why animals behave the way they do, to ignore it entirely would amount to “anthropodenial.” The term was coined by Frans de Waal, primatologist and co-author of the MSR study at the Bronx Zoo, to describe the pervasively harmful idea that animals do not have inner lives worthy of our consideration—an idea that has allowed their brutalization and inhumane treatment to continue for centuries.

A few years ago, I sat in an off-road vehicle in Masai Mara, Kenya, watching a family of wild African elephants trek down a hill toward a stretch of grassland. In the background, a rocky escarpment dotted with pine-colored acacia trees rose above the savannah. Two elephant calves were traveling side by side, but when they got to a small embankment, the larger one climbed easily down while the smaller one stood atop it and squealed. The calf’s mother seemed to hear his cries, but kept browsing for food, plucking up clumps of greenery and stuffing them in her mouth. Two other females came to the aid of the baby instead, guiding him down with their trunks.

There was something relatable about this scene—the desire to do what your slightly older cousin is doing while your exasperated mother ignores your pleas. In an ideal world, this is the kind of behavior zoos could show us. It could cause us to become more empathetic toward our nonhuman neighbors. But zoos rarely have the resources to give animals like elephants the space or companions they need to move and socialize as they would in the wild. The education that zoos claim to provide the public is inaccurate at best. The editors of Scientific American argued in 2014 that elephants don’t belong in zoos at all.

Inappropriate climate aside, the Bronx Zoo, operated by the Wildlife Conservation Society, should be one of the better zoos for elephants. The facility receives over 2 million visitors a year to its well-maintained 265 acres. It was the subject of The Zoo, a documentary series that aired in 2017 and 2018 on Animal Planet and explored what it takes to care for over 6,000 animals. One episode highlights how they’ve modernized their elephant husbandry practices from a circus-style “free contact” method to “protected contact,” in which the animals are separated from keepers by barriers and motivated with positive reinforcement.

In the episode, which has been criticized by animal rights groups for whitewashing Happy’s conditions, Bronx Zoo director Jim Breheny admits that the future of ethical captivity for elephants is to keep them in multi-generational herds. Although captive breeding may create a healthier social environment, it also raises new ethical considerations. Who will actually benefit from forcing entire elephant families to live out their lives in confined spaces, never knowing the freedom or hardship of the wild?

Despite having lived in New York City for over a decade, I had never been to the Bronx Zoo until I learned about Happy and decided to visit her. I started in the JungleWorld exhibit, where I felt a familiar tinge of shame at the casual cruelty on display. Both children and adults pounded on the cracked glass to provoke reactions from the small monkeys inside, who looked back intently from their perches, their tails hanging down from tree branches. A grizzly bear meandered about in an outdoor habitat nearby, enjoying the September sun. I stopped to watch his shaggy brown outline before breezing by a family of giraffes, almost missing the orange head of a tiger peeking up through the shrubbery.

To see the elephants, you take a twenty-minute monorail ride that overlooks their single-acre enclosure, open from May to October. As my car approached a grassy incline, I could make out a lone brown elephant at the top of the hill. From afar I couldn’t identify her, but the conductor confirmed the solitary pachyderm was indeed Happy. The edges of her ears were pink, as if they’d been dipped in Easter-egg dye, with blotches of brown skin peeking through like oversized freckles. The monorail doesn’t stop, so my eyes scanned the trees, hoping to get a good look at her through a clearing. She appeared almost childlike standing next to an oversized log, flapping her ears and swinging her trunk. My on-demand access to a fifteen-second glimpse of Happy’s captive existence hardly seemed worth a lifetime of her freedom.

Two days after my visit, the NhRP filed a writ of habeas corpus on her behalf, asking a judge to recognize her “personhood” and subsequent common-law right to bodily liberty. Personhood, their attorneys argue, should be interpreted not as a synonym for human being, but as a container for civil rights. Even U.S. corporations have achieved some of the privileges and duties associated with legal personhood, including the ability to sue and be sued, to own property, and to enjoy some First Amendment protections.

Happy’s circumstances cannot be rectified with animal welfare statutes, which mostly only prevent “unnecessary suffering.” And since she’s not a legal person, she lacks the standing required to become the plaintiff in a lawsuit. If granted, a habeas petition requires the agent of the detainment to show up in court and defend its legality—a method that has been previously employed to force the issue of personhood. In Somerset v. Stewart, attorneys successfully used it to challenge slavery laws in eighteenth-century Great Britain.

Over the last two hundred years in the United States, the definition of legal personhood has expanded to include slaves, indigenous people, women, and children. Could certain animals be next? Although the NhRP is only asking the court to recognize one right for Happy—bodily liberty—neither full nor partial rights for a nonhuman would be entirely unprecedented. In 2017, courts in two U.S. states began considering the well-being of cats, dogs, and other animals in divorce proceedings, blurring the lines between person and property. The same year, New Zealand granted the Whanganui River full legal personhood, including all of the “rights, duties, and liabilities of a legal person.” Two legal human guardians were appointed to advocate on its behalf. And in 2015, a court in Argentina declared a zoo orangutan named Sandra “una persona no humana” and ordered her released into the custody of a sanctuary.

Success in Happy’s case would require finding a judge sympathetic enough to be the first in the United States to grant personhood to an animal. Although her guardianship would be determined by the courts, the NhRP has recommended Happy be released to the Performing Animal Welfare Society (PAWS) in San Andreas, California, a sanctuary that could provide care for her on a property of more than 2,000 acres, where ex-performing and abused elephants forage freely and choose their own social partners.

According to the Bronx Zoo, Happy shows no signs of physical or emotional distress and is closely bonded with her human caretakers. Zoo spokespersons have suggested that she also might not get along with new elephants, and that a cross-country move poses risks to her health. But an affidavit filed by the preeminent research scientist Joyce Poole lays out examples of half a dozen elephants—some with noted “aggression” issues likely due to captive circumstances—who have been successfully moved long distances and integrated into sanctuary populations. Poole noted that some of Happy’s behavior, like the trunk swinging I observed, was likely a stereotypical response to an environment that doesn’t meet her physical and emotional needs.

A 2016 study of over fifty Asian elephants in sanctuaries in Thailand, most of whom had previously been used for captive performance, riding, or work in the logging industries, found that between one-third and one-half exhibited symptoms of human-like PTSD, including mood disturbances (anxiety and aggression), tension-reducing repetitive behaviors, and fear of the trauma-related stimulus. Scientists have long reported an epidemic of PTSD in wild African elephants, stemming from decades of violent culling, poaching, maternal separation, and capture for captive trade. Slaughtering the adults is the easiest way to separate a calf from the herd, and elephants that suffer formative traumas during the first year of their lives have shown a reduced ability to handle stressful situations later on.

A court in Orleans County, New York, heard oral arguments for Happy’s right to liberty in December 2018. The case stalled when the judge granted the zoo’s motion to transfer proceedings to Bronx County, which could prove less sympathetic. At the time this article went to press, the courts had not yet announced whether they would hear the petition. Since Maxine was also euthanized in November, after suffering from an illness for a year, Happy’s situation feels even more urgent.

Although personhood seems like a good option to those who believe animals should have fundamental rights, it is a fraught legal and philosophical concept—with implications for reproductive rights and ethical issues with artificial intelligence. What level of consciousness qualifies a “person” as such? Self-awareness in humans only begins at around age two, and some theories of personhood based on cognitive, emotional, and psychological capacities would actually include select animals while excluding some humans, such as infants and comatose adults. Even the court’s definition of who constitutes a legal person is vague and can seem arbitrary.

The NhRP’s first client, a retired performing chimp named Tommy, was found living alone in a cage in a cement shed on his owner’s used trailer lot. Fulton County courts ruled that Tommy could not be a legal person entitled to habeas relief because: 1. A chimp is not human, 2. A chimp cannot participate in the human social contract, and 3. A chimp cannot bear the responsibilities and duties associated with personhood. (The NhRP disagreed that any of these were prerequisites for legal personhood or even accurate premises.) Although Judge Eugene Fahey of the New York Court of Appeals upheld the ruling, he conceded that “the issue whether a nonhuman animal has a fundamental right to liberty protected by the writ of habeas corpus is profound and far-reaching. Ultimately, we will not be able to ignore it.”

Personhood for Happy would create a legal precedent and framework for granting fundamental rights to nonhumans in the future—a step in the right direction for those of us who believe animals deserve more than just protection from unnecessary suffering. As our understanding of the animal psyche evolves, so must our definition of what ethical treatment looks like.

In 1982, the Bronx Zoo held a birthday party for Patty’s newborn calf Astor, whose floppy ears and rambunctious behavior had already endeared him to zoo patrons. Back then, Happy and Grumpy regularly gave rides and performed for shows that a keeper at the time referred to as “strictly educational.” At the party, Grumpy lost a tug-of-war to the Fordham University football team. There was a special birthday cake for Astor made from Italian bread, apples, carrots, and flowers. A few months later, Astor, the three-foot elephant calf, died from a heart condition.

It’s unlikely that, say, an arachnid would have been given such an impressive birthday celebration, or been memorialized in the New York Times as “mischievous” and “inquisitive.” One of the downsides to anthropomorphism, besides self-indulgence, is that it tends to favor those like us—mammals and other vertebrates. Ironically, “speciesism,” a form of discrimination often cited by animal rights groups that assigns a different value to different species, also serves as a basis for an argument against personhood for nonhumans. If we give an elephant rights, what does that mean for the rest of the animal kingdom?

There will always be resistance to recognizing the need to rethink our relationship to the world around us—to admit we got it wrong before we got it right. Personhood as a legal concept may not be appropriate for all beings. But to deny it to one simply because we do not wish to grant it to all is illogical. We are already engaging in an extreme form of speciesism by placing our own need to dominate the planet’s resources above of the rights of other species to exist. The least we could do is use our ability to navigate complex ethical dilemmas—our so-called human exceptionalism—to address injustice by whatever means possible. There is no one-size-fits-all solution, only the best option in a given situation. For Happy, it’s an elephant-

shaped container for civil rights.

Sarah Kasbeer lives in New York and writes about humans and other animals.

An Interstellar Probe 93 Billion Miles!

An Interstellar Probe 93 Billion Miles!

Sarah Kaplan Washington Post

LAUREL, Md. — One of the top prizes in the March 1970 Fort Worth Regional Science Fair — a slide rule and a free dinner in Dallas — went to a high school junior named Ralph McNutt, who had written 30 pages on the question “Interstellar travel: Is it feasible?” and built a cardboard scale model of the spacecraft he said could be the first to visit another sun. 

Humans had landed on the moon the previous summer, the 16-year-old noted in the treatise his mother transcribed for him on her Royal No. 10 typewriter. Soon, he was sure, we would venture to all the other planets of the solar system. Then it would be time for the next step: “Going to the stars.” 

On a sweaty summer afternoon, McNutt sits in his office at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, a 65-year-old with a Mickey Mouse wristwatch and thinning hair. On his computer screen is the latest draft of his boyhood dream: a plan for a probe that would travel 1,000 times farther than Earth is from the sun, leaving behind the safety of our solar system to explore the wilds of interstellar space. 

From that far-flung vantage point, Interstellar Probe will help humans finally see ourselves for what we truly are, McNutt says: citizens of a galaxy. Our home planet will be just one world among many, and the sun that gives us life just another pinprick of light in the endless dark. 

It’s an audacious proposal, even by space travel standards. The probe would take 50 years to reach its destination, by which time nearly everyone currently involved in the project will be dead. 

Nevertheless, McNutt and a cadre of fellow dreamers hope to get an important endorsement in a few years, when the nation’s space scientists release a list of their top research priorities. To get Interstellar Probe on the agenda, its supporters must convince their colleagues that its goal is scientifically valuable, not to mention politically viable, when there are so many questions inside the solar system still unanswered and so many Earthly squabbles still unsolved. 

What makes McNutt believe it’s possible? 

The scientist leans back in his chair and crosses his arms. When he answers, it’s in the form of poetry. 

“I think man’s reach should exceed his grasp,” he says, paraphrasing Robert Browning. “Otherwise, what is a heaven for?” 

McNutt shows off his slide rule — a mechanical instrument for making mathematical calculations — which he won as a high school student for a science fair presentation on interstellar travel. (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post) 

93 billion miles from the sun 

Our sun sits on a minor arm of the spinning, star-strewn pinwheel of the Milky Way, about 25,000 light-years from the galactic core. Zooming through the cosmos at roughly half a million miles per hour, the solar system is buffeted by gusts of gas and dust and bombarded by energetic particles whose origins are a mystery. 

But we on Earth are partly shielded from this chaos by the heliosphere, a balloon-like structure inflated by the solar wind. Charged particles flowing from the sun stream out to the edge of the solar system — past the planets, beyond Pluto, through the frozen halo of the Kuiper belt, to a place called the heliopause. 

This is the liminal zone between the river of solar particles and the ocean of interstellar space; the boundary between our celestial neighborhood and the wider universe. 

Only two spacecraft have reached that zone and lived to tell the tale: the twin Voyager probes, which launched in 1977 and took more than 35 years to reach the heliopause. (The Pioneer probes left the solar system but were defunct by that time.) Now their radio communications are increasingly feeble, and several instruments have failed. 

Voyager 1, the most distant human-built object in the universe, is now 145 astronomical units from Earth (an astronomical unit is equal to the distance between Earth and the sun). At that pace, it would take 283 years to reach 1,000 AU — 93 billion miles from the sun — the place McNutt hopes to reach. 

“To really explore what’s out there . . . you want to get out of the solar system as quickly as possible,” he said. 

And for that, you need a really big rocket. 

NASA might soon have one. The ultrapowerful (but long-delayed) Space Launch System, which is capable of nearly twice as much thrust as the biggest rocket in operation, is expected to make its first flight sometime in 2020 or 2021. 

With the SLS, Interstellar Probe could leave Earth at a speed of about 9 miles per second. After looping around Jupiter, the probe would fall back toward the sun, picking up speed from our star’s gravitational pull. It would pass the orbits of the inner planets and soar through the solar corona until finally, just above the sun’s blazing surface, it would fire a second rocket and zoom off into the dark as fast as 60 miles per second. At that blistering — and admittedly aspirational — pace, it would need little more than a decade to reach the heliopause. 

The travel time would not be wasted. Kathy Mandt, a planetary scientist, has been exploring the potential for Interstellar Probe to fly past Uranus, Neptune or an icy body in the Kuiper belt called Quaoar. 

Abigail Rymer, a physicist, is dreaming up ways for the mission to assist research on exoplanets. One experiment might involve looking back at the planets with the same techniques scientists on Earth use to study alien worlds. 

“Against the backdrop of the stars,” she says, “we will see our habitable home . . . and we’ll have a better understanding of what habitability means.” 

Crossing the boundary into interstellar space, the probe could scan for dust and slurp up particles to help researchers understand the structure of the heliosphere and the material from which our solar system formed. 

And once it departed the sun’s protective bubble, it could finally study phenomena the heliosphere obscures: galactic cosmic rays from exploding stars; light from the afterglow of the big bang; disks of debris where planets are forming around other suns. 

The right time to try? 

For now, Interstellar Probe exists only in the form of PowerPoint presentations and a twinkle in McNutt’s eye. His team has received about $700,000 for concept studies, and they are waiting to hear whether NASA will give them an additional $6.5 million over the next three years to pull together a more detailed science plan and mission design. 

Their do-or-die moment will come in 2023, when the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine are slated to publish their next decadal survey for solar and space physics. These assessments, conducted every 10 years at the request of Congress and NASA, represent the official consensus on the nation’s space science goals and guide NASA’s budget in subsequent years. 

If Interstellar Probe is going to launch in McNutt’s lifetime, it needs to be ranked as a top priority. 

“It was always something we couldn’t do immediately, but set aside maybe for the future,” says Richard Mewaldt, a Caltech physicist who served as chair for the solar and heliospheric physics panel during the most recent decadal survey, published in 2013. That report ranked “advance planning” for an interstellar probe eighth among nine imperatives for NASA. 

Mewaldt notes that NASA’s heliophysics division — which would oversee an interstellar mission — gets the least funding of any of the agency’s science divisions. Interstellar Probe might fare better if the planners get an endorsement from the planetary science community, who could benefit from flights past the ice giants or through the Kuiper belt. Yet the scientific world tends to be siloed, he says, making it difficult to get missions funded across multiple NASA divisions. 

Even if the project goes forward, it’s not clear how a spacecraft could survive the solar flyby. The best heat shield humans have ever made, currently flying on NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, is designed to keep a spacecraft safe within 3.8 million miles of the sun’s surface. To achieve its desired speed, Interstellar Probe would need to get more than twice as close. 

“There is a moment for every big mission, almost an ‘aha’ moment, when the technology is ready and you’ve got a plan and it makes sense and is going to answer the science questions,” says Nicky Fox, director of NASA’s heliophysics division. The heat shield problem, she says, still stands between Interstellar Probe and that moment. 

But then again, she says, there also comes a moment for every big mission when scientists simply decide that now is the right time to try. 

Another question looms over the mission, one that goes beyond issues of budgets and bureaucracy to the boundaries of what humans can accomplish. 

Rarely has the gulf between what the world can do and what it will do seemed so vast. 

'They just can't wait for the future to come' 

But maybe, Mandt says, the apparent audacity of an interstellar mission is exactly what makes it worth trying. 

“This would be an example of a large group of people working together on something multigenerational,” she says. “Which is the same thing we need with climate change.” 

Members of the Interstellar Probe team, she noted, range from fellows just out of graduate school to people staving off retirement. They come from at least eight countries. They include planetary scientists, astronomers, engineers and a particle physicist. 

Last fall, Mandt invited Janet Vertesi of Princeton, who has conducted ethnographic studies of spacecraft teams, to advise the team on organizational issues. It is the first time they know of that a sociologist has been involved in the conception of a NASA mission. 

Her job is to “remind them of the human side,” Vertesi says: How to resolve conflict. Where to store data. How to conduct outreach so that the demographics of the project team today reflect the more diverse nation that will launch the probe in decades to come. 

“We’re testing out this notion that you can actually plan a mission up front to achieve certain social objectives, too,” Vertesi says. 

In these “uncertain times,” she adds, it’s a heady feeling to take part in something so inherently optimistic. To watch as a computer calculates the precise location of the planets on the date 50 years from now. To see scientists commit the remainders of their careers to an idea whose fruition they may never live to see. 

“These people,” she says, “they just can’t wait for the future to come.” 

At his office in Maryland, McNutt turns away from the unfinished plan on his computer screen and tries to visualize the moment when Interstellar Probe reaches the void between the stars. 

There’s no way of knowing what it will find out there, beyond the veil of the solar wind. But of one thing, he is certain. 

When the probe turns toward Earth to beam back the data it has gathered, it will have in its sights “one of the most special places in the universe,” McNutt says: the small, watery world where it was first dreamed into being. 

in Search of America’s Best Orgasm

My Road Trip in Search of America’s Best Orgasm

What started as a search for the ultimate auto-erotic experience became a fantastic voyage into my own body.

Stephanie Theobald The Daily Beast

When I attended the New York “masturbation master class” thrown by 86-year-old rock and roll feminist Betty Dodson in April 2015, I had no idea that the experience would be so mind-blowing that it would set me off on a road trip across America.

Betty’s message is that masturbation is the foundation of every woman’s sexuality and my goal was to gain more of this wisdom by meeting more of the sex-positive legends from the 1970s and 1980s. To begin with, I wasn’t sure of my itinerary, but I’d been told that former porn-star-turned-cult-sex-artist Annie Sprinkle had christened San Francisco “The Clitoris of America,” so that was where I was headed.

#MeToo was yet to happen, but these incredible women were waiting in the wings. Their message that female pleasure is political and that shame-free love of your body is the ultimate road to true “female empowerment” now seems very timely. Every night of my 3,000-mile journey I did my solo sex “homework” to keep my mojo rising. I had twenty $100 bills in my suitcase to last me for my three-month trip, so while the physical realities of my lodgings were often stark, the kinky movies I invented in my head could take me anywhere.

What started as a search for the ultimate auto-erotic experience became a fantastic voyage into my own body. Sex Drive: On The Road To A Pleasure Revolution is my account of that journey. In this passage, I have just left the Arkansas home of Joycelyn Elders, 82, the notorious African-American Surgeon General who was fired by Bill Clinton in 1994 for saying that masturbation should be talked about in schools.

I spend that night in Hope, Arkansas, the birthplace of Bill Clinton. There doesn’t seem to be much hope in Hope. My motel is called the Village Inn, although there are no garland-festooned maypoles or jaunty hanging baskets of geraniums. Still, the smell inside my room makes me feel at home. I’ve not been in a cheap American motel ($42 including tax) since I made a road trip across the US with a friend of mine fifteen years ago. The police-station lighting, the whiff that hits you when you walk through the door: high-octane air freshener fighting a battle with something dirty and seedy. And plastic curtains. Are they worried about men ejaculating on the windows?

A particularly heavy Tex Mex meal (the El Caballero Dinner: a tamale, a chicken burrito, a beef burrito and a hard-shell taco for $11.95) just outside Hope has put paid to any thoughts of solo sexual activity tonight. The meal tasted of warm foam and I knew it was my lucky day when the tax on the bill came to $1.11 (more on that later). So I curl up with my bellyache and watch a TV show called Lock Up: Extended Stay, a program about life inside different American prisons. I watch the San Antonio, Texas, episode (concentrating mostly on Latino criminals and young gay men) and then the episode in the prison in Cleveland, Ohio. This focuses on the all-black Heartless gang also known as “the Family.” It’s great TV for a foreigner like me. The stress proves too much for one Family member and he goes crazy, smearing himself with his own feces. I finish the night with the TLC channel, which has great shows about fat people, and drop off watching My 600-lb Life.

The next morning, I see that my door has been open all night because the lock is broken. Outside is a damp, grey vista: wet concrete, an abandoned swimming pool, the sound of thundering traffic, a few brave trees soldiering on. Still, I’m excited to make porridge in my $14 Sunbeam kettle from Target. Inside is a black hotplate you can make toast on. Or heat water or beans or porridge. It’s genius. I get very excited by the idea of self-sufficiency. I mix oats and linseed and let it bubble for ten minutes. It’s pretty disgusting, but at least it’s hot. I eat it, wandering around by the front of the Village Inn, wondering if I should have gone to the Yellow Top Smokery Barbeque with a sign saying “Breakfast. Dollar Menu. Trucker Special. Be Happy.” There’s a green Art Nouveau-style lamp by the derelict swimming pool. It’s a replica of one of Hector Guimard’s 1920s réverbères for the Paris Metro.

Maybe someone apart from Bill Clinton did have hope once in Hope. But then a man throwing junk into a dumpster starts looking at me like I’m weird. I get in the car and get the hell out of Arkansas.

I make a brief stop-off in the adjacent state of Texas to pick up some weed from a friend of a friend who lives in a self-sufficient rural compound in the middle of nowhere. Christina turns out to be a stoner conspiracy-theorist internet French teacher and she’s a great hostess. I’ve forgotten how vast America is. I’m exhausted after my five-hour drive and her welcome and her weed make me feel very happy.

When I hit the road the next morning, I finally experience that “Woo hoo! I’m driving west!” feeling. The sun’s out, I’m down to a T-shirt and Prince is blasting out a tune about a sex fiend called Nikki, who he meets in a motel lobby masturbating with a magazine.

As the immensity of America unrolls before my eyes, I listen to songs on my newly burned CD. By the time I hit the entrance to the 290, the sex fiend from “Darling Nikki” has captured Prince and taken him to her device-filled castle. Here, the lights go out, and Nikki starts to grind.

“Darling Nikki” turns into “A Little Respect,” Erasure’s 1988 synth-pop classic, which is by turns elegiac and euphoric. It climbs to a massively high note, which I can never quite reach, but here in the car it doesn’t matter if I’m a terrible singer. That’s the great thing about a solo drive: you can let yourself go and not care what anyone else thinks. “To-oo, oo- oo meeeee!” I miss the high note again and laugh as the blue skies and green trees whizz along outside the window. Then “Yellow” by Coldplay comes on. I know this is the thin end of the wedge of good musical taste, but I don’t care, because nobody else can hear it. It’s like masturbation. Your dirty thoughts could be the equivalent of Barry Manilow and The Teletubbies theme tune rolled into one, but if they hold you spellbound, it doesn’t matter.

By 2 p.m. the land has become desert. It’s so hot that I stop off in a desolate place called Ozona, where the only sign of life is a gas station. I pump some gas and go inside to pay. It’s wonderfully cool and I spend a while perusing the impressive jerky selection: beef jerky, BBQ jerky, green lime jerky, cowboy-style jerky and, my favorite, teriyaki jerky. At the cash desk, a man with glossy black hair is being short with one of the snowbirds, as they term the old people who drive west for the winter. It’s quite unusual to hear rudeness in Texas. When it’s my turn, the man narrows his eyes and asks me if I’m on my own. When I was hitch-hiking around France one summer in my early twenties, I would reply “Je suis mariée” to the truck drivers who picked me up and invariably asked me this same question. But now I’m nearly fifty, so I tell the man that yes, I am alone. Whereupon, without any trace of humor he says, “When you drive back this way, stop off and we can have a meal together,” with the brass of some toff back in London saying, “Darling, shall we do lunch at the Wolseley next Tuesday?”

I get back in the car and don’t really enjoy the jerky because of the man with glossy hair. And then as I drive on, the heat turns to really hot heat. This is the part of Texas where things become arid. I’m soon driving through miles of burned, scrubby land framed by ugly flat mountains and a relentless glassy blue sky. I’ve got the window open because someone told me that air con uses up petrol, but the outside air feels like hairdryer air and the noise means I can’t even hear my music any more. I try and call some friends but nobody picks up. This is the reality of a solo road trip: driving through a dry, repetitive terrain for hours on end and you’re all on your own.

I stop for the night in a place called Van Horn. It’s where Central Time becomes Mountain Time. You are literally on the edge of time. I spark up some Texan happy weed in my new motel room at the Desert Inn. It’s a no-smoking room, but one joint isn’t going to change the lemon-tinged low-income smell. When I go for a sunset wander, everything is collapsed or crumbled. La Cocina de Maria is boarded up next to a deserted welding shop. A dilapidated sign offers “Liquor and Beer” to nobody any more, but thanks to the sky, everything man-made can be forgiven. This is the part of America where the desert spell begins. An eerie pink and baby blue light bathes everything at this hour. What a show. It becomes a spectacular finale when there’s a long, plaintive wail and an endless freight train rushes across the plains. Trains make America feel like the oldest, most romantic place in the whole world, as if cowboys or brigands might leap on at any minute to hitch a free ride west.

Back in the room, Virginia and her Windex spray bottle cross my mind. I wish I’d brought the scented candle she offered me back in New York. I sit cross-legged on my hoodie on top of the polyester bedcover eating some quinoa with black bits in that I boiled up in the Sunbeam kettle. My back’s killing me and my tummy’s bloated from my imminent period, but my luxury is that I’ve come up with the idea of putting a white T-shirt over the nylon pillowcase so my face doesn’t get contaminated in the night.

I fall asleep but jerk awake at six, pre-period horny. I try and forget about the cigarette burns in the Desert Inn sheet and get down to some homework. I think, Oh God, I hope it’s not going to be the horrible glossy- haired man at the gas station. But when I close my eyes, there he is, being rude to the friendly snowbird. Then he’s in the motel with me, making me suck his dick. Virginia is in the back of my mind in all this. The sucking gets boring so I lie on top of him, but that reminds me of what I do with Hadji. And then something lights up. A red and silver chrome Kenworth truck. Three steps up into the leather passenger seat. A driver sits next to me with his ratty ponytail. A flash of calloused hands and a red velvet curtain. It feels glamorous to be sitting up here, high in a black capsule with a dashboard of glittering lights. There’s a blur of gearsticks, a jangle of buckles, the tug of old leather and a cock that feels like velvet as it knocks against my growing clit. The truck driver pulls me to the mattress behind the cab’s red curtains and luckily there’s no sense of smell in this trucker dream world. In the Desert Inn motel, I’m lying on my front, head in my white T-shirt over the pillow, the right side of my face drooling onto a sheet whose whiff I’m not aware of any more.

Sex Drive: On The Road To A Pleasure Revolution by Stephanie Theobald is published by Unbound.

Fifty Years After Stonewall

Coming Out, and Rising Up, in the Fifty Years After Stonewall

By Masha Gessen The New Yorker

A day or two after the Stonewall Riots, in June, 1969, Virginia Apuzzo, a twenty-eight-year-old nun and college lecturer, went down to Sheridan Square looking to shed her shame. The shame had been with her since she was ten and proposed to a girl who was perhaps a year older, a neighbor in an apartment building in the Bronx. “She called me ‘crazy’ and I felt red-faced, shriveled,” Apuzzo wrote in an e-mail to me. Now, down in the Village, where queer people stood up to police during a raid of a gay bar, “the energy and atmosphere gave me my first sense of Pride, of having the right to breathe out loud.” She quit the convent and joined the newly created gay-liberation movement. 

Just six years later, when Richard Burns, a student at Hamilton College, came out, gay-liberation groups had proliferated. There was a tiny one on campus, and Burns joined immediately. Gay life, gay activism, and gay pride were no longer inconceivable—they were even, with some trepidation, occasionally written about in the newspapers. What remained inconceivable was a positive image of gay life and love in the mainstream media: in those rare instances when homosexuals appeared in movies or on television, they were pathetic, ridiculous, or frightening. So for Burns, when he became an activist, the goal was “being able to come out, find people to love, and safety,” and this seemed revolutionary, because nothing of the sort was reflected in popular culture. 

Seven years after this, when I came out, as a fifteen-year-old in Boston, the image of gay people in the mainstream media was not much better, and was about to get a lot worse: homosexuality would soon be perceived as firmly linked to a terrifying, deadly new disease, at first called Gay-Related Immune Deficiency. But queer role models were available to me. Boston was an epicenter of gay and lesbian activism, whose own epicenter was the weekly Gay Community News, the only national gay newsweekly. G.C.N. held envelope-stuffing parties every Friday. I went there to volunteer, eat pizza, and silently gawk at brilliant gay activists. Burns, who had served as managing editor at G.C.N., was one of them. In 1982, he was a law student at Northeastern University, as was a lesbian activist named Urvashi Vaid. (They met on their first day at law school, in 1980.) I thought they were gods. We are acquainted socially now, and are even members of the same book group, but I don’t think they know that I had a one-sided relationship with them back then. I wouldn’t be who I am if it hadn’t been for them and about a dozen other queer people I met in the nineteen-eighties—including Apuzzo, who was then the head of the National Gay Task Force. (The organization changed its name to the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force in 1985 and is now the National L.G.B.T.Q. Task Force.) I have probably conducted more than twenty thousand interviews in my life, but I remember the first time I interviewed Apuzzo over the phone, in the late eighties. She said that, at that stage in her life, she was interested in working politically with young people, and this set my heart aflutter. 

The writer Andrew Solomon has proposed a distinction between “vertical” and “horizontal” identities. The former, like religion, ethnicity, and hereditary conditions, may be passed on from generation to generation. The latter separates children from their parents but connects them to people outside their family of birth. This type of identity may be sexuality, a condition like deafness in the child of hearing parents, or any number of other identities that parents—and, often, other older relatives and community members—cannot model. Like most queer people, I had to look outside my birth family (and run away as fast and as far as possible from the Russian-immigrant community) in order to understand who I could be and how I could live. Many of the people who were my unwitting guides have died, several of them of aids. But on the eve of Stonewall 50, I got in touch with the people who are still here. I asked them to think back to the time when they became activists and recall what they imagined then that the future might be like—and compare that to now. 

Burns, who is now sixty-four, told me over the phone that, as he recalled, “The holy grail was nondiscrimination laws—then we’d be done. There was no understanding yet of the duality between legal equality and lived equality.” The gay movement faced a backlash and setbacks before it made any measurable gains. In the late nineteen-seventies, a Christian singer named Anita Bryant toured the country campaigning against “homosexual propaganda” and spreading the fear of predatory homosexual pedophiles invading American schools. In the nineteen-eighties, aids began killing gay men and turned the living into pariahs. In 1986, the Supreme Court upheld the Georgia sodomy law in Bowers v. Hardwick, a case that began when the police entered an Atlanta bedroom, found two men in bed together, and arrested them. The court ruled that the police had been right to do so, and that the right to privacy was reserved for heterosexuals. (I didn’t have to look that up: thirty-three years later, I remember the names of the participants, including the lawyers, the details of the case, and the sickening feeling in the pit of my stomach when the decision came down.) 

In the minds of gay people there could be no doubt that we lived in a country that despised us. But, Burns pointed out, the gay community mobilized in response to every calamity. The first gay and lesbian march on Washington, in 1979, marked the beginning of a national movement. aids showed more-assimilated gay men that they were not protected, and brought them to activism. In 1987, act up was born in a speech by the writer Larry Kramer that he delivered at the New York Lesbian and Gay Community Center, where Burns had begun his twenty-two-year tenure as executive director. The second march on Washington, in October of that year, took act up national. Every time something terrible happened, Burns said, the movement got stronger: more people joined in response to the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard, and after a 2000 Supreme Court decision that upheld the Boy Scouts’ right to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation. 

The tide took a long time to turn. In 2003, in Lawrence v. Texas, the Supreme Court reversed the Bowers decision, striking down remaining sodomy laws throughout the country. The following year, Massachusetts became the first state where same-sex marriage was legal. Burns was not an early proponent of the marriage-equality fight. His roots were in gay liberation, which had its roots in the great social movements of the nineteen-sixties. “We didn’t want to get married—we wanted to dismantle the nuclear family. We didn’t want to serve in the military—we wanted to disband the military.” Now, he said, he is a “very happy beneficiary” of the expansion of the right to marry. He and his partner were married, in 2015 (Burns had to check the inside of his wedding band to make sure that he remembered the date correctly); the comedian Kate Clinton, who is Vaid’s partner, officiated. The biggest reasons to get married, Burns said, were “age and health concerns.” And love, he then added. 

Back in the day, the scholar and activist Karla Jay told me on the phone, “We had much more radical hope. Our hope was that society would have changed in a dramatic way. I’m not talking about the legalization of marriage—I’m talking about a society in which sexual orientation wouldn’t matter, because people would view others as simply human beings.” It was a vision of transformation and convergence more than acceptance and integration. Jay was a member of the Gay Liberation Front, an organization born of the Stonewall riots, and its first female chair. A favorite slogan was “We’ll never go straight until you go gay.” At a time when holding hands with your lover in public was unthinkable and same-sex dancing was illegal, Jay said, “we imagined decriminalization rather than legalization.” They wanted all love and sex to be deregulated, not to have same-sex love included in the regulatory system of the state. But when the larger world suddenly opened the door to same-sex couples, inviting them into the system, the movement giddily marched through that door, abandoning its earlier dreams and leaving behind many of its most marginalized members. “Transgender women of color, poor elders, homeless youth, people who don’t want to live in a couple, single people, asexual people, threesomes, communes—all those people have been thrown under the bus,” Jay said. 

To teen-age me, Jay showed that you could be it all: a street activist and an academic, butch, and unapologetically focussed on queer issues. Jay, who is seventy-two, was a professor at Pace University for thirty-nine years and has written and edited several key books on queer history and theory. She has maintained her radical views. But in 2004, when Massachusetts legalized same-sex marriage, Jay and her partner travelled to Northampton and got married. They had four witnesses, a blueberry pie with two plastic bride figurines on top, and, she said, “thirteen hundred rights that we got, but I don’t feel good about that.” Still, they did it for the legal protections marriage offers. “If there is anything I can do to spare the woman I love any pain if anything should happen to me, I will do it,” Jay said. “I will walk on coals.” 

This weekend, Jay will celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Stonewall at a private reunion of G.L.F. to be held at the Center, following a panel with some other former members of the organization. She expects fireworks—it was always a contentious group. “Some of the people I struggled with are still among my closest friends,” she said, “because they love the world the same way I love the world.” 

About six months into the G.L.F.’s existence, a group of dissidents split off from the organization, which they felt was spending too much time on too many different social-justice issues, and formed the Gay Activist Alliance, to concentrate on gay liberation. In the winter of 1971, a textile designer named Jonathan Ned Katz went to a G.A.A. meeting. “I was terrified,” he told me on the phone. “I knew it was going to change my life, but I didn’t know how.” Katz joined the media committee, which convened to discuss “how we were going to get our new consciousness out to the public.” Katz, who grew up in a radical-left household in New York, with a fatherwho had taught him about the history of race relations in the United States, had written two documentary radio plays about slavery. “And I thought, There must be gay history!” Katz wrote a documentary play—agitprop is how he thought of it—called “Coming Out!,” which also served as his coming out to his mother, via an ad for the production in the Village Voice. The play led to a book, “Gay American History,” and a now nearly fifty-year career as a historian of homosexuality in America. 

A decade after Katz went to his first G.A.A. meeting, I was lurking in the library stacks at Brookline High School, reading the thousand-page “Gay American History” in single-afternoon portions. It was the only book in the library that had the word “gay” in the title. This book meant everything to me: it was proof that, as a queer person, I had a legacy, and it was also a way to connect to people who shared it. I don’t know how many other kids read the book in the stacks—it was well worn, despite having shrink wrap over its red glossy cover—but only one girl had had the courage to check the book out of the library. She had done it repeatedly; her name was written on the lending card over and over. I tried to find her, but she had dropped out of school. I did meet her eventually, after I had also dropped out and she and I were working as bicycle messengers at the same gay-run company. 

When he first started going to demonstrations, Katz told me, he had no hope for effecting change. “I did it because it was nice to be with other people—it felt good,” he said. Then again, he had felt hopeless when he was attending peace marches in the early sixties, before there was a mass antiwar movement—whereupon he stopped going, because his body didn’t seem to matter so much. The gay movement grew and changed, too. “I underestimated the ability of capitalism to take in certain rights movements, to view them as new consumer groups to market to,” he said. “I’m not against it; it’s just not the vision of human liberation that a lot of us had.” That vision was of a full realization of democracy, complete with equal resources and opportunity. 

That said, Katz, who is eighty-one, wanted me to know that he has had just the best almost-fifty years and is still full of joy. “It’s great that I no longer have to live in shame and go to my therapist and say, ‘I want to be a heterosexual.’ I have so much fun discovering gay history. I’m Jonathan Ned Katz, detective historian! I wouldn’t have become that if I hadn’t gone to that G.A.A. meeting.” 

When Urvashi Vaid became an activist in the nineteen-seventies—first in social-justice and anti-racism movements, then in the feminist movement, and finally in the queer movement, she thought that victory would come when women’s liberation was achieved, and that this victory was inevitable. “We were going to change sexual hierarchies, would end capitalism,” she told me on the phone. “I thought we would all be living in communes, and we would create new economic structures.” With every decade of activism, she has tempered her goals. Vaid, who has served as executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, worked in the foundation world and in academia, and now runs her own consulting group. There has been less policy change and less accumulation of political power than she had expected: somehow, the math, which showed that women and progressives were in the majority, has not resulted in a redistribution of political power. But there have been unexpected gains, too—many religious communities have come to accept homosexuality, for example. And there is marriage.

“If you had told twenty-year-old me that I would be married, I would have laughed in your face,” Vaid, who is sixty, told me. “Marriage is property; property is theft!” She and Kate Clinton have been married for five years, together for thirty-one. “It’s an amazing thing,” she said, of marriage. “It transformed outlaws into in-laws. It domesticated us, which is a complication.” And yet, she believes, same-sex couples are also changing the institution of marriage, simply because “we don’t do gender roles the same way. We just don’t.”

It wasn’t the focus on marriage that left the more marginalized members of the L.G.B.T. community behind, she believes—it was the lack of focus on economic justice, gender, and race. But while that may not be changing in the mainstream L.G.B.T. movement, something else has happened that excites Vaid far more than marriage. “Queer people are the leaders of the progressive movement,” she said. “I always expected it, and now it’s happened.” Queer African-American women founded the Black Lives Matter movement; queer organizers are central in the fight for immigrants’ rights; and two of the country’s largest labor unions, Service Employees International and the American Federation of Teachers, are led by lesbians. “The left didn’t get race, didn’t get gender, didn’t get sexuality in the seventies, eighties, and nineties—and then it changed.”

After I dropped out of high school, I spent a year living on Beacon Hill, one of Boston’s gay neighborhoods. Everyone knew one another—it was an intricately interconnected multigenerational community, mostly of gay men, but with a sizable lesbian minority. These were the lesbians who liked to dance and who idolized Bette Midler; the other lesbians, who hosted potlucks and listened to women’s music, lived across the river, in Cambridge and Somerville. Everyone I knew had a story of rupture with their family. Many of my friends had run away from home—a couple were teen-agers, like me, and several were in their twenties but had been on their own for a decade. Older men gave shelter to younger men and boys. My girlfriend had got away from her family by enlisting; she was now going to college on the G.I. Bill. I moved to New York to go to college, at Cooper Union. In the spring of my freshman year, I read about a gay high school opening in the city. There were twenty students, the article said, mostly effeminate boys and butch girls who had trouble fitting in at their old schools. I remember feeling like I had missed out—I wanted to go back to high school with other queer people. At Cooper Union, I didn’t know any students who were queer, though I did run into my sculpture professor at the lesbian club the Cubbyhole almost every weekend.

Even though I never went to Harvey Milk High School or the Institute for the Protection of Lesbian and Gay Youth (now the Hetrick-Martin Institute), a resource center for homeless gay and lesbian youth that preceded the school, I felt somehow connected to them. I was still the same age as the teen-agers who were there; back in Boston, I’d left friends who had been turned away by their families. The founders of these institutions showed that we could take care of our own—something that we would see on a much greater scale during the aids crisis.

Joyce Hunter, a co-founder of the school and a founding member of the institute, was herself once a high-school dropout estranged from her family. When she went to her first women’s dance, run by the G.A.A., in 1971, she was married to a man, working at a factory, and raising two kids. When she became an activist, her biggest concern was getting to keep her kids—at the time, many women lost custody once they came out as lesbians. Hunter’s kids stayed with her. She went back to school and then started her own school. Now eighty, Hunter is living in Sunnyside, Queens, with her partner of thirty-nine years. They married two years ago. “My grandkids married us,” Hunter told me. “We decided we needed to, because of our age and financial issues. But we are lucky because we have families that love us.”

The Harvey Milk School, on Astor Place, is now one of the many small high schools run by the Department of Education. “But for kids who don’t live in Manhattan, it’s still hit or miss,” Hunter said. “They may see gay people on TV, but they are still on Staten Island, where they are different.” Still, Hunter is probably the most hopeful of the people I interviewed for this article. It was always at the core of her work with young people—she created places where they could feel hope, and observing them gave her hope. “I feel strongly about the hope,” she told me.

That feeling I first experienced at eighteen, when I read about the queer high school—the feeling of missing out on something that should have been my life—was a preview of witnessing social change while aging. The writer Sarah Schulman told me that she felt it in 2003, when the Supreme Court struck down sodomy laws. “I knew that I would never personally benefit from that decision,” she told me on the phone. She didn’t mean that she feared being prosecuted for homosexual sex—it was the court’s acknowledgment of the basic humanity of queer people that came too late for her. “I had been devastated by familial homophobia. I had a totally marginalized career. This was never going to go away.”

I met Schulman in 1990, the year her novel “People in Trouble” was published, and I walked around the city with lines from the novel playing in my head. Schulman, who was thirty-two then, was everything I wanted to be: an activist, a writer published by a big New York house, a popular speaker. She seemed like the trailblazer of the big gay writing breakthrough. In retrospect, she said, this was the period when publishing discovered niche marketing. Barnes & Noble now had a gay section, and this was where Schulman’s and other gay-themed books were shelved. They went from being writers to being “gay writers.”

The problem with being a “gay writer” is the assumption that your writing is interesting only to gay people. Schulman said that, when she went to her high-school reunion, she could instantly tell who among her old classmates was gay: they had read her books, while the straight attendees asked her what she did. Schulman has received enough conventional honors—she is a distinguished professor in the cuny system, a fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities, and currently a fellow at the MacDowell Colony—to have a sense of how much more recognition she would have had if she were not perceived as solely a lesbian writer. “I am never called upon as a public intellectual, except on gay topics,” she told me. “Only recently have straight people started to read my work.” The New Yorker wrote about her 1990 novel in 2017. I asked Schulman if she has a revenge fantasy, or at least a fantasy of finally getting the accolades she deserves. She said that, if it came, it would probably feel like it was too late, like the Supreme Court decision, a bittersweet and insufficient resolution to a lifetime on the margins.

When we spoke, Shulman was at MacDowell, revising a draft of her monumental history of act up, an organization in which she was active and the memory of which she has maintained by working on a large oral-history project and a documentary film, “United in Anger,” which came out in 2012. A lot of the media coverage of the fiftieth anniversary of Stonewall has seemed to obscure the aids epidemic, to mention it as almost a footnote, or at least just one chapter in a story of many losses and more gains. For queer people of my generation and older, the epidemic shaped our understanding of life itself. When we talk about aids, it seems, we can talk about nothing else, because nothing else looms as large. It seems that there may be no way to talk about aids in a way that reflects its impact on the gay community, the L.G.B.T. movement, and, indeed, American culture and politics. For younger generations, though, and for writers and historians crafting a longer narrative for the current festivities, the aids epidemic has become a self-contained historical episode.

In fact, some forty million people in the world are living with H.I.V., more than a million of them in the United States. In 2017—the last year for which statistics were available—almost a million people in the world died of aids. In the United States, tens of thousands of people become infected with H.I.V. every year; most of them are gay men, and most of these men are either African-American or Latino. This is happening twenty-three years after researchers announced that aids would now be a manageable chronic disease. It is true that current treatments help a majority of people with H.I.V. who take them, but millions of people who need it do not have access to treatment, and many more don’t even know that they are infected. It is also true that H.I.V. transmission can now be effectively prevented—both by treating people who are infected, until there is no virus in their bodily fluids, and by taking anti-H.I.V. medication preventively. But a majority of Americans who would benefit from preventive treatment do not receive it. Still, the conventional narrative is that aids is a plague that began and ended a very long time ago.

For me, Larry Kramer, the writer who founded act up, is a model for turning one’s fears and feelings of helplessness into anger and action. He was the first to raise an alarm, in the gay media, in 1982, about gay men dying of a mysterious disease. Gay Men’s Health Crisis, a service group devoted to taking care of sick and dying men, started in Kramer’s living room. In 1987, he gave a speech that managed to be desperate and inspiring at the same time. It started act up. Now Kramer, who is eighty-four, once again finds himself unable to think about anything but aids—and his own anger.

“aids activism and writing about it have been my whole life,” Kramer wrote, in an e-mail. “The future I hoped for was its elimination. Instead it has only got worse. We have lost the war against aids and are continuing to do so. It’s all getting much much worse for us and this won’t stop.” He added, “Too many people hate us and are accelerating this hate.”

Political activism, if it is successful, benefits younger generations more than the people who created the change. Kate Bornstein, the writer and performance artist, told me that she expects the gender revolution that she has been working toward to happen in my lifetime, but not in hers. She is seventy-one. In 1991, she was the first person I saw speak about the possibility of being neither a man nor a woman. The idea was fairly new to her, too. She had begun transitioning from male to female in 1984. Her therapist suggested that she get out and meet people by joining an activist group, and she went to the National Gay Task Force, which was then a small office in New York where people were planning for the 1987 march on Washington. Bornstein thought of herself as a transsexual lesbian woman and, she said, “I just wanted to disappear into the lesbian community. It was warm: they had potlucks and game nights. It was family.” But the aids crisis ended the cozy lesbian life that had welcomed her in Philadelphia and San Francisco, Bornstein noted. “Potlucks and game nights became phone trees and ‘Who can take care of Don.’ ”

The idea of a transsexual lesbian was novel, and Bornstein’s new friends asked a lot of questions. Mostly they wondered how someone who had not been socialized as a girl and a young woman could become a woman. The questioning was not hostile. “They asked me, ‘How?,’ ‘What?,’ ‘Explain, please.’ And the more I was explaining, the more I realized, You are right, I’m not”—not a woman, a lesbian woman. At the same time, Bornstein knew very well that she wasn’t a man. “And that was the scariest time,” she said. “That left me with no ground under my feet.” To find a way to talk about herself, Bornstein started writing and performing her thinking about gender. (She now identifies as nonbinary.)

There was, in fact, a history to what Bornstein was living, writing, and acting. Before Stonewall, queer people were subverting gender roles, playing with gender roles, and camping it up. (The documentary “Before Stonewall,” restored and rereleased this month, provides more than an hour of delightful footage of largely this.) At Stonewall, said Bornstein, “there were people who were nonbinary. There were transsexual women. They were not closeted or middle class.” But she was not there. “I was a middle-class white Jewish closeted transsexual.” It was the year Bornstein graduated from college. Fifteen years later, she said, “I grabbed onto Stonewall’s coattails.”

Some of the people I interviewed are marching this weekend—a few with the official Stonewall 50 march, but more with the Queer Liberation March, which will have no police protection and no corporate sponsors. Schulman is sitting the festivities out at MacDowell, and Bornstein is staying home because she is not well enough to march. I will be joining both marches with my daughter and her friend, two teen-agers who are growing up in a world that is not quite what I imagined: I thought we would have retired the concept of sexual orientation by now and would have made a bigger dent in gender. Still, this world is much better than the one I came out in—for now.

“We have achieved so much more legal equality than I ever thought we would in my lifetime,” Burns said. “And now a lot of that is under attack. I always assumed, naïvely, that, when we made progress, it would be permanent. We are always going to have to fight to keep the gains we have made.” In the insanity of the Trumpian news cycle, the threats are barely registering: the Administration is packing the federal courts; proposed regulations in Health and Human Services and Housing and Urban Development would legalize discrimination in housing and health care on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. “This will have devastating consequences, especially for transgender people, who are the canary in the coal mine,” Burns said.

“I am ambivalent about the fiftieth anniversary,” Apuzzo wrote to me. “Seeing so many young people being so relaxed in their sexuality, so free to express their right to be who they are—I celebrate that enthusiastically! I celebrate the fact that we have learned that ‘getting government off our backs’ isn’t enough by a long shot. In fact, we had to learn how to make government responsive to its people, and that we must demand the right to be involved in the decisions that affect our lives. I can celebrate the fact that, for the most part, we have gone from a political ‘issue’ to a constituency.” But, she continued, “In these days, when the ground is always shifting, when truth is obscured by so many layers of lies and the very institutions utilized to get us to a fiftieth anniversary are being undermined and their power diminished, what’s the plan?”

Several of the people I interviewed for this article admitted that they have only recently stopped assuming that progress was linear and irreversible. Indeed, Bornstein pointed out, queer people have been here before. “A similar moment happened in Weimar Germany in the thirties,” she said. “Gender and sexuality exploded. The arts were amazing. And fascism was on the rise. And then fascism won.”

But this time, she said, things will be different, because changes in the legal status of L.G.B.T. people and the perception of gender and sexuality are a global phenomenon. She is convinced that change will continue. The next frontier is a total reconfiguring of gender, and it will be like nothing we’ve ever seen.

From Audase: The truth of human sexuality is not going away. Every great idea waxes and wanes, Gay rights might challenged, but won't be defeated. We might see a few years of revisionism and retrenchment, but there's no going back. Politics is often progress and then a step back, 

The Most Irrational Animals

Why Humans Are The Most Irrational Animals

Our complex imagination makes us more irrational than other creatures. Nimals Online

Bence Nanay | Professor of Philosophy at University of Antwerp and Senior Research Associate at Peter house, Cambridge University

It is easy to make fun of the Aristotelian idea that humans are rational animals. In fact, a bit too easy. Just look at the politicians we elect. Not so rational. Or look at all the well-demonstrated biases of decision-making, from confirmation bias to availability bias. Thinking of humans as deeply irrational has an illustrious history, from Francis Bacon through Nietzsche to Oscar Wilde, who, as so often, came up with the bon mot that sums it all up: "Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason." 

My aim is to argue that humans are, in fact, not more rational, but less rational than other animals. Aristotle talked about rationality as the distinguishing feature of humans compared to other animals. I think we can use irrationality as a distinguishing feature. It’s not just that humans are irrational animals; humans are more irrational than any other animals. 

This is not a completely new line either, although the point has often been made merely as a provocative overstatement. In fact, according to the standard account of biases, irrationality (in the guise of biases) is explained by simpler cognitive mechanisms taking over. And these simpler mechanisms are exactly the ones we share with animals. So if human irrationality is explained by animal cognitive mechanisms, then humans will not come out as less rational than animals. 

I have a different argument, one that focuses on the importance of imagination in our mental life. I argued here and here that imagination plays a crucial role in making most of our important decisions. Think back to some of the big decisions you have made over the years. Break up with your partner or not? Which college to choose? Go to grad school or not? Which job offer to take? Which house to bid on? And so on. My guess is that you made all of these decisions by imagining yourself in one of the two situations and then imagining yourself in the other and then comparing the two. 

"When we make these grand decisions, we imagine what we imagine to be our future selves in imagined alternative scenarios. Imagination is used three times. And none of these uses of imagination is particularly rational" 

Here is an example from my own past. After college, I was accepted in grad programs in the US and in the UK. I thought, probably correctly, that this choice would have a major impact on my life course and was really struggling with this. I could narrow down the US options to what seemed the best (within the US) and I did the same for the UK options. But deciding between becoming American and becoming British was just too difficult. I imagined myself in Britain, at fancy college dinners, wearing a gown and sipping port. And I imagined myself in California diners in flip flops with Oreo shake in hand. Not an easy comparison. 

The point is that I really had very little idea about just what situations I will find myself in. So I actually imagined myself in imagined situations – ones that were more informed by films I have seen than reality. But imaginative episodes of this kind are even more complicated. Imagination is used not even twice, but three times. Let’s suppose I am making this decision now. Who am I imagining in that California diner? My current self will never be there, so imagining my current self would not be particularly helpful. It is my future self who has the chance to hang out in California, but the problem is that we don’t have any firm information about what our future selves will be like. So it is really my imagined future self who I should imagine. 

So things are a bit complicated then: when we make these grand decisions, we imagine what we imagine to be our future selves in imagined alternative scenarios. Imagination is used three times. And none of these uses of imagination is particularly rational. Imagining our future selves is especially unreliable, as we systematically underestimate how much we will change in the future – see the psychological phenomenon of the End of History Illusion. 

And the scenarios we imagine ourselves in have very little to do with the actual situations we would find ourselves in. I spent relatively little time in Cambridge sporting a gown and really almost no time in Californian diners in flip flops (the Oreo shake is another question…). The general point is that because of the irrationality of imagination, we make irrational decisions. And while animal decisions are not maximally rational either, they are at least not (or not to the same extent) influenced by the irrationality of imagination (as it doesn’t seem likely that animals would be capable of this triple embedded imaginative episode). In this sense humans really are more irrational than animals. 

Is this all bad? I don’t think so. The first reason for this is that it is a bit difficult to tell what would be the rational decision in these scenarios. Take again the third use of imagination in decision making: the one concerning the self. It is not really possible to imagine your future self that will be in California or Cambridge because your future self will largely be formed in response to the decision that you’re about to make. So you are not in a position to rationally imagine your future self in order to make a decision, because your future self is a result of this very decision. 

The second reason is that irrationality may not be such a terrible thing. And the irrationality of imagination may actually be a liberating mental facility. As Fernando Pessoa said, “Because I am nothing, I can imagine myself to be anything. If I were somebody, I wouldn’t be able to. An assistant book-keeper can imagine himself to be a Roman emperor; the King of England can’t do that, because the King of England has lost the ability in his dreams to be any other king than the one he is. His reality limits what he can feel.” 

Bence Nanay 

The Trump administration's dangerous fever dream about Iran

The Trump administration's dangerous fever dream about Iran

Michael H Fuchs London Guardian

The Iran debate in Washington is increasingly divorced from reality – and that should worry us

 

National Security Adviser John Bolton 

The Trump administration is caught in a fever dream about Iran, and the fever is becoming dangerous.

In the wake of attacks on oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman – which the US blames on Iran, though questions remain about the attack – the discourse on Iran being pushed by the administration and others is reaching fever pitch. Senator Tom Cotton has called for a “retaliatory military strike”. The New York Times columnist Bret Stephens says the US should threaten to sink Iran’s navy.

This, of course, is not surprising to anyone who has watched the Iran debate in Washington. It’s divorced from reality.

Everyone knows that Iran’s government is dangerous. It represses the Iranian people. It sponsors terrorism across the Middle East. The question is not whether Iran is bad – the question is what the best strategy is to deal with the threats.

During the end of George W Bush’s administration and Barack Obama’s terms, the priority was stopping Iran’s nuclear program. After years of a carefully coordinated global sanctions campaign, the Obama administration secured a deal that stopped Iran’s nuclear program. The International Atomic Energy Agency and even the Trump administration certified that the deal was working. Before, during, and after the deal, the US has countered Iranian terrorism and bolstered Israel’s defenses.

None of it has been good enough for those trapped in the fever dream. The fever dream convinces policymakers to cozy up to regimes from Saudi Arabia to the United Arab Emirates that are themselves awful. It rationalizes support for a devastating war in Yemen. It causes the State Department to fund, until recently, a group that attacked journalists and experts for not being anti-Iran. Locked in the fever dream’s grips for years, John Bolton in 2015 called for bombing Iran.

All of this is in lieu of a realistic set of goals or a strategy for actually achieving them. It’s a fever dream, and only those with the fever seem to be able to make sense of the dream. US allies from Europe to Asia are frustrated with how much sway the fever dream has over US policy; they wonder what could possibly drive the US to abandon such a successful deal.

It reminds one of the absurdity and recklessness of those who talked about bombing North Korea in 2017 – which could have started a nuclear war – and how completely they ignored the catastrophic consequences.

Most worrying, it reminds one of the run-up to the war in Iraq in 2003 – how the Bush administration lied about Iraq’s possession of WMD and links to terrorism, and how Americans were told the invasion would be a “cakewalk” and that America would be greeted as a liberator. Reports of a rare, recent high-level meeting on Iran at the CIA before the latest round of warnings over Iran should concern those who remember the politicization of intelligence before the Iraq war.

The result of it all is a heightened risk of conflict. And though the Trump administration claims it does not want war, secretary of state Mike Pompeo reportedly said that the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) – passed in order to fight those involved in 9/11 – could authorize a war with Iran (which the AUMF does not).

America needs to have a real conversation about Iran. We need to make clear that Iran is not ten feet tall.

We can’t let the fever dream drive US policy in the Middle East. Israel has the region’s strongest military, and with continued US support it can defend itself. America will continue to counter Iranian-sponsored terrorism. America does not need to blindly support countries such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE in the name of countering Iran. These governments repress their own people, stoke regional conflicts, and have funded terrorism and radical indoctrination abroad. When the United States partners with Saudi Arabia by supporting a war in Yemen – supposedly to counter Iran – that creates a humanitarian disaster, America has lost sight of its interests.

To develop an effective strategy, America needs to put itself in Iran’s shoes. After the US invaded two of Iran’s neighbors – Afghanistan and Iraq – tensions got even worse with Iran’s pursuit of a nuclear weapon and deadly fights between Iranians and American soldiers in Iraq. America believes Iran’s aggression has intensified while Iran believes America is surrounding Iran.

Lost in the fever dream is the need for a dialogue with Tehran. A strategy of pressure alongside dialogue produced the nuclear deal. The US should talk to Iran about the future of Afghanistan and Iraq. And there is a broader dialogue to be had – alongside pressure – about regional security.

Iran could do more to push a crisis to the brink as well. With Trump ripping up the nuclear deal, Iran is saying it will enrich uranium beyond the limits of the nuclear deal. If it was responsible for the oil tanker attack, more destabilizing acts could follow. That could lead to a vicious cycle that raises the chances of war.

We need to wake up from the fever dream and have a real debate about Iran, develop a real strategy for Iran, and start a real dialogue with Iran.

Michael H Fuchs is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, and a former deputy assistant secretary of state for east Asian and Pacific affairs