Happy New Year.

All the best Reno!

The Truck Gene

By PERRI KLASS, M.D. NY TIMES

My younger son, I used to say, had the truck gene.

I still bring this up sometimes when I talk about the importance of reading aloud to small children, because we had assembled, when my son was 2 or 3, one of the world’s largest collections of truck picture books, a failed parental strategy to diversify our reading-aloud assignments. We had to read the favorites (for example, “Bernie Drives a Truck,” a 1992 work by Derek Radford) over and over and over.

Even today, I look at “The Truck Book” (1978, Harry McNaught) with instant recognition — amazingly, it’s still on the current Amazon list of best-selling children’s car and truck books.

We hadn’t particularly tried to develop this child’s interest in trucks, mind you, and we had plenty of books on other subjects, including a massive inheritance from his older brother which skewed toward pirates — but given the choice on any given night, it would be a truck book, and then another truck book, and then, just for variety’s sake, maybe a tractor book or a bulldozer book.

When I mention the truck gene to a group of doctors, a certain number of the mothers and fathers in the room nod knowingly — they’ve been there, and sometimes back.

But even as neuroscience finds new and fascinating ways of looking at the fine points of neural processing and the interconnections of children’s developing brains, that remarkable and somewhat inspirational individual essence remains elusive: Why do you find some particular topic interesting, compelling, memorable, when it leaves me completely unmoved (and, of course, vice versa)?

This is the mystery of personal taste and personal interest, as in, what interests you and what doesn’t, and it is part of what makes us human, and what makes us individual humans. But it’s kind of amazing that it’s present so early, and so powerfully, as children look around the world; that they are capable of being bitten — hard — by some particular bug (and yes, there are kids with the bug gene).

How come you can go into a room full of children, 3 or 4 or 5 years old, and talk to them about dinosaurs, and most of them will be somewhat interested — but one or two will be truly grabbed, truly converted, truly obsessed? They won’t all grow up to be paleontologists, though Stephen Jay Gould wrote in the dedication for “Ever Since Darwin,” his 1977 book of essays on evolution: “For my father, who took me to see the Tyrannosaurus when I was five.”

So sure, some space kids grow up to be astronauts or aerospace engineers, some horse kids grow up to ride, or go to vet school, some bug kids go into entomology. But the point is not that these are necessarily lifelong interests; many have been known to outgrow the pirate stage, and even the horse stage, the bug stage, the dinosaur stage and, thank goodness, the truck stage. The point is that you cannot make a truck kid into a bug kid; they know what’s interesting, though, like the neuroscientists, they may not know why.

And when something interests a small child, all bets are off in terms of memory and vocabulary. The world is full of sweet little voices pronouncing dinosaur names. My own child, and his collection of truck books, enriched my own vocabulary tremendously; I would point at the picture and he would say, for example, “articulated crash rescue vehicle!” (puts out fires at airports, articulated means it has a flexible part in the middle so it can bend as it goes around curves). Lots of syllables there, no helpful little rhymes in the book, and it didn’t matter a bit. Those words were graven on his soul.

Even by age 2 or 3, it’s easy to remember all kinds of stuff, from complex terminology to obscure facts, about the subject that interests you. And that doesn’t go away; when I study for my medical recertification exam, I am still working harder at the topics that interested me less in medical school (how many times have I memorized the kidney?) and still feeling smug about the ones I liked and learned properly the first time around (those fascinating parasitic worms).

Most of us have had occasion to learn as students and as adults, over and over, that you cannot just decide to be interested in something, even if it would do you some personal or professional good. You can bring yourself closer and learn more and try to work up a relationship to the subject, but be it wine or be it nephrology, if it doesn’t grab you, you’re not going to find great pleasure in reading about it, and the details may not stick in your memory.

For the most part, children’s interests and preferences are an occasion for adult appreciation: you may never come to see the magic in trucks, but that just teaches you over and over that your child is a separate person, looking out from a different brain through different eyes.

Of course, some children develop interests that actually veer toward perseveration and obsession, and that children on the autism spectrum may be prone to “highly restricted, fixated interests that are abnormal in intensity or focus.” That is, in fact, one of the possible criteria for an autism spectrum disorder diagnosis in the latest edition of the DSM. (Back when Asperger’s syndrome was recognized, this kind of special interest was thought to be particularly typical of what Dr. Asperger himself called the “little professor syndrome.”)

So we do sometimes worry about a child with a particularly unusual special interest — vacuum cleaners, for example, or string, or about a child whose special interest seems rigid or restrictive, a narrowing down of the child’s world, rather than a special portal into a larger and more fascinating sphere.

But for most typically developing kids, special interests and special subjects are a source of endless bedtime stories, specialized vocabularies, themed birthday parties and Halloween costumes (we put in quite a few pirate years in my house). Above all, when our children develop strong intellectual preferences — and never doubt it, that’s what we’re talking about here — it should bring on that mildly bemused parental headshaking sense that each child is an individual, with a remarkable, fascinating individual brain.

As the mother of a grown child, no longer expressing the truck gene (“Was I really a truck kid?” he emailed me), I want to promise you that you will one day look at these books with smiles and sentiment. And I am willing to bet that no neuroscientific research will actually tease out the individuality of it all, or satisfactorily explain the appeal to those who lack the truck gene, but find that despite our own complete lack of interest, we have managed to memorize “The Truck Book,” not to mention, of course, “Bernie Drives a Truck.”

Hard Time

Two books explore the roots of the criminal-justice crisis

CHASE MADAR

American punitiveness—in our policing, courts, prisons, and law—can’t be fully understood outside the context of white supremacy. Louisiana’s state penitentiary is on the site of a former plantation called Angola, so named because that was where its slaves came from; black men in bondage continue to farm the land. And the incarceration rate for black men in the US is an astronomical 2,207 per 100,000, nearly six times the rate for white men and higher than in South Africa under apartheid. In recent years, videos of lethal police violence against unarmed African Americans have become a constant on TV and online, making the problem virally visible.

Two new books, part of an ongoing bumper crop of necessary writing on criminal justice in the US, explore the relationship between black America and our steroidal punishment system. James Forman Jr. and Paul Butler are both lawyers turned academics who regularly publish in legal journals and the mainstream press. They combine scholarly erudition with a practical knowledge of how the system works, writing with hard-won clarity about prosecutors, judges, defense attorneys, witnesses, victims, and offenders. Approaching the same broad subject, both have produced immensely valuable books written from very different perspectives.

One of Forman’s many talents is his ability to make radical, unsettling points in the calmest of voices. For example, his 2009 article “Exporting Harshness” makes a convincing case that the so-called excesses of the war on terror are not aberrations. They are, he argues, fairly consistent with the norms of the American penal system, and if they have been harder to ignore, that’s because they have occurred in places like Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay, where they have attracted press attention and international outrage. Although journalists have described domestic law-enforcement abuses as the war on terror “coming home” and adopted CIA terms like black site to describe police torture facilities in Chicago, Forman suggests it would make more sense to refer to Abu Ghraib as a Mesopotamian Rikers Island.

In his bracing (but always generous) 2012 critique of Michelle Alexander’s best seller The New Jim Crow (2010), Forman takes on an even more firmly established piece of conventional wisdom. Alexander’s thesis has become dogma among liberal criminal-justice reformers: Namely, mass incarceration is driven by a racist backlash against civil-rights advances, carried out under cover of the war on drugs. Her argument rests in part on the widely held belief that most inmates are nonviolent drug offenders, but Forman points out that only about 25 percent of our prison population fits this description. While it’s undeniable that racism is one of the most powerful engines of our punitive state, Forman asserts that the metaphor of mass incarceration as neo–Jim Crow is limited: “In emphasizing mass incarceration’s racial roots, the New Jim Crow writers overlook other critical factors,” such as the steady rise in violent crime rates from 1960 to the early ’90s and the broad support for disciplinary overkill in overwhelmingly white places like Idaho and Wyoming, which have also seen a steep climb in incarceration rates. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, about 35 percent of the nation’s prisoners were black in 2015. Though that’s an undeniable overrepresentation of black America’s 13 percent share of the overall population, it means the other 65 percent of US prisoners were nonblack. As Forman writes, “That’s a lot of ‘collateral damage.’”

White resentniks like Megyn Kelly and Bill O’Reilly like to accuse black activists and elected officials of being indifferent to violent crime in black neighborhoods, which, like most violent crime, is committed within an ethnic group rather than outside it. But Forman shows that black politicians and community leaders have long been consumed with questions of crime and safety. In Locking Up Our Own, Forman looks at Washington, DC, where he clerked for the US Supreme Court before spending six years as a public defender, and examines how the city came to implement a series of harsh criminal-justice policies beginning in the ’70s. His history lessons scramble standard expectations of politics, Left and Right, black and white. For example, the hiring of more black police officers was once a major civil-rights demand, and one that seemed to make enormous sense. The thinking was—and among many remains—that this would not only give black officers a middle-class footing in decent-paying police jobs but also end the abusive treatment of black citizens. But “ultimately, in practice, these goals were often unrelated,” notes Forman.

He makes the motivations of DC’s black political leaders—people like city-council member Douglas Moore, DC Superior Court judge John Fauntleroy, and the District’s first black US attorney, Eric Holder—perfectly and tragically clear. Analyzing the reformist drive to decriminalize marijuana in the District, which ended in failure in 1975 after months of campaigning, Forman shows that no amount of public-health evidence could convince a critical mass of DC’s black elected officials that cannabis was not a “gateway drug” to addiction and crime. The black civic leaders who opposed decriminalization were not programmatically “conservative” or especially punitive, Forman stresses. Rather, “These leaders regarded themselves as the guardians of the black community, and especially of its young people, whom they were determined to protect from the dangers of drug use.”

This well-meaning notion had disastrous unintended consequences, as did many other measures designed to stop DC’s violent crime wave of the ’70s and ’80s, from increased penalties for firearms possession to the use of “pretextual traffic stops,” a police tactic (supported by Holder) intended to get guns off the street by granting police the power to search pretty much any driver. The result was an upsurge in arrests for mostly petty crimes, especially drug possession, in black neighborhoods. These policies derailed countless lives—their targets lost jobs and incurred the lasting damage of permanent criminal records.

While the book’s main plot arc outlines the tragedy of incrementally escalating punishment, Forman also criticizes today’s liberal reformers for their focus on nonviolent drug crimes, often at the expense of the 53 percent of the nation’s state prisoners who are locked up for violent offenses. Forman recognizes that our punitive state apparatus must be taken apart as it was built—brick by brick—starting with what’s easiest. But if every decarceration measure is washed down with a vilification of people whose violent offenses supposedly make them more deserving of punishment, then “criminal justice reform’s first step—relief for nonviolent drug offenders—could easily become its last.” What then is the appropriate response to a violent offense? Forman answers this difficult question with the story of one of his former clients, a black kid who held up a black middle-aged man at knife point when he was just shy of his sixteenth birthday. Thanks in large part to the author’s own excellent lawyering, the teenager was given a second chance, got plugged into a carpentry program for at-risk youth, and was allowed to unruin his life. The story is a powerful finale to Forman’s book, and it is all the more urgent now, as national urban-homicide rates have increased over the past couple of years: The argument for transforming our abominable justice system should not be predicated on a permanent decline in crime rates.

Throughout Locking Up Our Own, Forman stresses that the embrace of maximum-punishment approaches by DC’s black political class should not let non blacks off the hook. Black elected officials have typically favored an “all-of-the-above strategy” to fighting crime, Forman writes, which includes providing youth services, jobs, and decent health care and housing. But as he makes clear, racism—as well as the white majority’s resentment of non punitive government spending—has played a key role in making expanded police powers and harsher sentences the most readily available options:

From felon disenfranchisement laws that suppress black votes, to exploitative housing practices that strip black wealth, to schools that refuse to educate black children, to win-at-all-costs prosecutors who strike blacks from jury pools, to craven politicians who earn votes by preying on racial anxieties, to the unconscious and implicit biases that infect us all, it is impossible to understand American crime policy without appreciating racism’s enduring role. . . . Racism narrowed the options available to black citizens and elected officials in their fight against crime.

Although Foreman's book is longer on diagnosis than prescription, he does offer some ideas about what’s needed to transform the system: pretrial drug-diversion programs (preferably administered outside the justice system altogether, as they are in Portugal); better funding for public defenders (a rare area in the justice system where the federal government could make a major difference); more judicial discretion and the elimination of mandatory minimums; restoration of voting rights to felons (even while incarcerated); and, for released offenders, employment opportunities and institutional support rather than a life-wrecking stigma. “None of this will be easy,” Forman dryly notes. But his clear-eyed look at the incremental—and never fully intentional—buildup of harsh punishment practices in DC offers hope: Perhaps the system could be consciously transformed, step-by-step, even if it takes a generation or more.

The enduring punishment of black men is also the subject of Chokehold by Paul Butler, another public intellectual with zero time for easy optimism. He is a radical critic of the empty promises of liberal procedural in criminal justice, especially in dealing with ongoing racial disparities. A former federal prosecutor, Butler wrote an essay for the Yale Law Journal in 1995 arguing that black juries should nullify many criminal verdicts against black defendants, which earned him a 60 Minutes segment and landfills’ worth of apoplectic correspondence. The first chapter of his previous book, Let’s Get Free, is an account of how a mentally disturbed neighbor’s false allegations led to his own arrest and prosecution—and eventual acquittal—and highlights the many difficulties that a black man faces, even if he’s a prosecutor himself, when confronted with criminal charges. It is a masterpiece in the literature of American criminal justice.

Chokehold is explicitly intersectional in its focus on black men and their victimization by the criminal-justice system, as both African Americans (disproportionately incarcerated and more likely to get longer sentences than non blacks) and men (punished in greater numbers and more harshly than women). At the same time, Butler is at pains to distinguish his approach from “black male exceptionalism” as well as the rhetoric that “black men are an ‘endangered species,’” which he believes further pathologizes them and mystifies the crisis. His focus on black men comes with a great deal of peripheral vision: He argues, for instance, that programs such as the My Brother’s Keeper initiative launched by President Obama should always be matched by programs to help black women, who by some important measures, like income, are worse off than their male counterparts.

While Forman’s book is a fine-grained historical narrative about one city, with most of its big ideas implicit, Butler engages directly with thinkers and concepts from critical race studies and other social theories, from Derrick Bell to Michel Foucault to Kimberlé Crenshaw. Each chapter presents a sequence of well-honed micro-essays that are typically about seven hundred words long, sometimes progressing in a straight line, sometimes by knight’s moves. He follows his subject to all the disturbing places the evidence takes him: the fact that even white guys with stereotypically “Afrocentric” facial features get harsher sentences; the sexual humiliation of stop-and-frisk pat-downs; the general uselessness of Department of Justice interventions into local police departments; the way a handful of US Supreme Court decisions have granted the police “super powers,” so that our laws now act more as a liability shield for state violence than as a check against it; how even a well-intention “Ban the Box” campaign to eliminate criminal-history questions from job applications has resulted in harm to black men’s employment chances by allowing employers to give free rein to their prejudices.

Butler doesn’t flinch from facts that many reformers prefer to avoid. While it’s true that drug-use rates are broadly similar across racial groups (a key part of Alexander’s New Jim Crow narrative), Butler points out that offending rates for violent crime are higher among black men, even if the vast majority of black men have never been convicted of a violent crime. Skeptical of reformism in general, Butler joins Angela Y. Davis and others in calling for the abolition of the whole punishment apparatus. This is perhaps more prosaic than it sounds. As Butler explains, pursuing an abolitionist agenda does not mean emptying every prison overnight but rather steadily transferring resources away from police and prisons and toward education (e.g., replacing school security guards with guidance counselors), employment, and mental-health care—a similar set of solutions to those proposed by Forman.

Occasionally, Butler’s approach shows the limits of trying to understand American punishment primarily through the lens of racial inequality. For example, he makes the common claim that in contrast to the crack epidemic of the 1980's, the current opioid-abuse crisis—whose victims are predominantly white—is treated as a public-health problem. And while it’s true that, anecdotally, a sprinkling of police precincts have taken steps in this direction (and that policy elites now use more humane rhetoric), we are still light-years away from a public-health approach that doesn’t involve cops and courts. District attorneys across the country are expanding the criminalization of opioids, charging users with felony child neglect and dealers with homicide. And Florida, our third-largest state, just enacted a slew of mandatory-minimum sentence laws in a bill that makes little distinction between run-of-the-mill users and dealers. This bill passed despite the protestations of reform advocates on both the right and left.

There can be little doubt that the historical grip of antiblack racism is the single biggest factor in American punitive overreach. At the same time, even if all racism were magically leached out of the system, the racial disparity in punishment would likely remain large. This is due, in part, to the gap in offending rates that Butler forthrightly acknowledges, as well as the long-standing racial inequalities outside the justice system, from housing to the labor market.

In the growing movement to rectify the administration of American criminal justice, it is not always clear what racial equality should mean: a leveling down of black punishment or a leveling up of white punishment, or perhaps both, meeting in the middle? Lest the question seem absurd, bear in mind that in 1992, the Minnesota legislature decided to close the gap between sentences for possession of crack and powder cocaine—a disparity deemed illegally racist under state law—by jacking up the penalties for powder cocaine, not by softening the penalties for crack. The blanket application of unjustly harsh laws is justice of a kind, and equality of misery is one kind of equality. As Forman points out, a 2014 poll by the Sentencing Project shows that 73 percent of whites think the criminal-justice system doesn’t punish people harshly enough; at 64 percent, black opinion isn’t far behind. How many Americans would be at ease with a ferociously punitive society as long as the punishments were inflicted in a racially proportionate manner?

Chase Madar is the author of The Passion of [Chelsea] Manning: The Story Behind the Wikileaks Whistleblower (Verso, 2013) and recently taught a seminar on legal theory at Wallkill Correctional Facility through NYU’s Prison Education Program.

London Review of Books Lessons of Zimbabwe

Mahmood Mamdani

It is hard to think of a figure more reviled in the West than Robert Mugabe. Liberal and conservative commentators alike portray him as a brutal dictator, and blame him for Zimbabwe’s descent into hyperinflation and poverty. The seizure of white-owned farms by his black supporters has been depicted as a form of thuggery, and as a cause of the country’s declining production, as if these lands were doomed by black ownership. Sanctions have been imposed, and opposition groups funded with the explicit aim of unseating him.

There is no denying Mugabe’s authoritarianism, or his willingness to tolerate and even encourage the violent behaviour of his supporters. His policies have helped lay waste the country’s economy, though sanctions have played no small part, while his refusal to share power with the country’s growing opposition movement, much of it based in the trade unions, has led to a bitter impasse. This view of Zimbabwe’s crisis can be found everywhere, from the Economist and the Financial Times to the Guardian and the New Statesman, but it gives us little sense of how Mugabe has managed to survive. For he has ruled not only by coercion but by consent, and his land reform measures, however harsh, have won him considerable popularity, not just in Zimbabwe but throughout southern Africa. In any case, the preoccupation with his character does little to illuminate the socio-historical issues involved.

Many have compared Mugabe to Idi Amin and the land expropriation in Zimbabwe to the Asian expulsion in Uganda. The comparison isn’t entirely off the mark. I was one of the 70,000 people of South Asian descent booted out by Idi Amin in 1972; I returned to Uganda in 1979. My abiding recollection of my first few months back is that no one I met opposed Amin’s expulsion of ‘Asians’. Most merely said: ‘It was bad the way he did it.’ The same is likely to be said of the land transfers in Zimbabwe.

What distinguishes Mugabe and Amin from other authoritarian rulers is not their demagoguery but the fact that they projected themselves as champions of mass justice and successfully rallied those to whom justice had been denied by the colonial system. Not surprisingly, the justice dispensed by these demagogues mirrored the racialised injustice of the colonial system. In 1979 I began to realise that whatever they made of Amin’s brutality, the Ugandan people experienced the Asian expulsion of 1972 – and not the formal handover in 1962 – as the dawn of true independence. The people of Zimbabwe are likely to remember 2000-3 as the end of the settler colonial era. Any assessment of contemporary Zimbabwe needs to begin with this sobering fact.

Though widespread grievance over the theft of land – a process begun in 1889 and completed in the 1950s – fuelled the guerrilla struggle against the regime of Ian Smith, whose Rhodesian Front opposed black majority rule, the matter was never properly addressed when Britain came back into the picture to effect a constitutional transition to independence under majority rule. Southern Rhodesia became Zimbabwe in 1980, but the social realities of the newly independent state remained embedded in an earlier historical period: some six thousand white farmers owned 15.5 million hectares of prime land, 39 per cent of the land in the country, while about 4.5 million farmers (a million households) in ‘communal areas’ were left to subsist on 16.4 million hectares of the most arid land, to which they’d been removed or confined by a century of colonial rule. In the middle were 8500 small-scale black farmers on about 1.4 million hectares of land.

This was not a sustainable arrangement in a country whose independence had been secured at the end of a long armed struggle supported by a land-hungry population. But the agreement that Britain drafted at Lancaster House in 1979 – and that the settlers eagerly backed – didn’t seem to take into account the kind of transition that would be necessary to secure a stable social order. Two of its provisions, one economic and the other political, reflected this short-termism: one called for land transfers on a ‘willing buyer, willing seller’ basis, with the British funding the scheme; the other reserved 20 per cent of seats in the House of Assembly for whites – 3 per cent of the population – giving the settler community an effective veto over any amendment to the Lancaster House terms. This was qualified majority rule at best. Both provisions had a time limit: 1990 for land transfers based on the market principle, and 1987 for the settler minority to set limits on majority rule. The deal sustained illusions among the settlers that what they had failed to achieve by UDI – Smith’s 1965 declaration of independence from the UK – and force of arms, they could now achieve through support from a government of ‘kith and kin’ (as Smith called it) in Britain. In reality, however, the agreement drew a line under settler privilege.

The inadequacy of the Lancaster House provisions for the decolonisation of land ensured that it remained the focus of politics in independent Zimbabwe. The course of land relations and land reform in Zimbabwe has over the years been meticulously documented by Sam Moyo, a professor who directs the African Institute of Agrarian Studies in Harare. Transfers during the first decade of independence were so minimal that they increased rather than appeased land hunger. The new regime in Harare, installed in 1980 and led by Mugabe and his party, Zanu, called for the purchase of eight million hectares to resettle 162,000 land-poor farming households from communal areas. But the ban on compulsory purchase drove up land prices and encouraged white farmers to sell only the worst land. As the decade drew to a close, only 58,000 families had been resettled on three million hectares of land. No more than 19 per cent of the land acquired between 1980 and 1992 was of prime agricultural value.

As the 1980s wore on, land transfers actually declined, dropping from 430,000 hectares per annum during the first half of the decade to 75,000 hectares during the second. The greater land hunger became, the more often invasions were mounted; in response, Mugabe created local ‘squatter control’ units in 1985, and they were soon evicting squatters in droves. At this point Zimbabwean law still defined a squatter in racial terms, as ‘an African whose house happens to be situated in an area which has been declared European or is set apart for some other reason’. By 1990, 40 per cent of the rural population was said to be landless or affected by the landlessness of dependent relations.

When the Lancaster House Agreement’s rules on land transfer expired in 1990, the pressure to take direct action was intensified by two very different developments: an IMF Structural Adjustment Programme and recurrent drought. Peasant production, which had been a meagre 8 per cent of marketed output at independence in 1980, and had shot up to 45 per cent by 1985, declined as a result of the programme. Trade-union analysts pointed out that employment growth also fell from 2.4 per cent in the late 1980s to 1.55 per cent in the period 1991-97. The percentage of households living in poverty throughout the country increased by 14 per cent in five years. There was now widespread squatting on all types of land, from communal areas to state land, commercial farms (mainly growing tobacco), resettlement areas and urban sites.

The demand for land reform came from two powerful groups at extreme ends of the social spectrum yet both firmly in Mugabe’s camp: the veterans of the liberation war and the small but growing number of indigenous businesses, hitherto the main beneficiaries of independence under majority rule. At the end of the liberation war in 1980, 20,000 guerrillas had been incorporated into the national army and other state organisations, and the rest – about 45,000 – had had to fend for themselves. They found it difficult to survive without land or a job, which is why land occupations began in the countryside soon after independence.

Mugabe and the Zanu leaders tended at first to dismiss complaints from veterans as expressions of resentment on the part of the rival liberation movement, Joshua Nkomo’s Zapu, which had been marginalised in 1980. But after Zanu and Zapu signed a unity accord in 1987, former fighters from both groups became involved in land agitation. Their most significant joint initiative was to form a welfare organisation, the Zimbabwe National Liberation War Veterans Association (ZNLWVA) in 1988, which called for pensions to be paid and land redistributed. It soon gained a large membership drawn from most sections of Zimbabwean society and from the two ethnic groups – the Shona majority and the Ndebele – which had defined Zanu and Zapu respectively. Its members, about 200,000 of them, came from a variety of classes, employed and unemployed, urban and rural, with positions in different branches of the state and party and the private sector. Although their strength lay in the countryside, the war vets formed the only alliance that was both independent of Mugabe and Zanu-PF, and could claim to have national support, giving them a decisive advantage over the better organised but urban-based trade-union federation in the power struggle that would shortly tear the country apart.

War vets were among the first targets of Structural Adjustment, when its effects began to be felt in 1991. Entire departments and ministries that had been heavily staffed by ex-combatants were disbanded and the stage set for a series of high-profile confrontations between veterans and government. Mugabe accused the vets of being ‘armchair critics’ at the inaugural conference of the ZNLWVA in April 1992; they went on to organise street demonstrations, lock top government and party officials in their offices, interrupt Mugabe’s Heroes’ Day speech in 1997, intervene in court sessions and besiege the State House.

After the Lancaster House Agreement had expired, the government tried to occupy the middle ground by shifting from the ‘willing buyer, willing seller’ formula with a new law, the Land Acquisition Act of 1992, which gave the state powers of compulsory purchase, though landowners retained the right to challenge the price set and to receive prompt compensation. By the late 1990s, market-led land transfers had dwindled to a trickle. So had British contributions to the fund set up to pay landowners, with a mere £44 million paid out between 1980 and 1992, much less than anticipated at Lancaster House. When New Labour took over in 1997, Clare Short, the minister for international development, claimed that since neither she nor her colleagues came from the landed class in Britain – ‘my own origins are Irish and as you know we were colonised not colonisers,’ she wrote to the Zimbabwean minister of agriculture and land – they could not be held responsible for what Britain had done in colonial Rhodesia.

This effective default coincided with a rise inside Zimbabwe of demands for compulsory acquisition. Veterans led land occupations at Svosve and Goromonzi in 1997, clashing with Mugabe and Zanu-PF. They were joined by local chiefs and party leaders, peasants and spirit mediums (who had played a key role in the liberation war against Ian Smith). The next year, a wave of co-ordinated land occupations swept across the country, with veterans receiving critical support from the Indigenous Business Development Centre (IBDC), an affirmative action lobby set up in 1988 by members of the new black bourgeoisie. From now on, two very different elements huddled under the war vets’ banner: the landless victims of settler colonialism and the elite beneficiaries of the end of settler rule.

It was largely for his own purposes, but also as a response to pressure from squatters, occupiers and their local leaders, as well as from sections of the new black elite, that in 1999 Mugabe decided to revise the constitution drafted at Lancaster House. Two major changes were envisaged: one would allow him to stay in power for two more terms and would ensure immunity from prosecution for political and military leaders accused of committing crimes while in office; the other would empower the government to seize land from white farmers without compensation, which was held to be the responsibility of Britain. The proposals were put to a referendum in February 2000 and defeated: 45.3 per cent of voters were in favour. But only a little more than 20 per cent of the electorate had cast a vote. The urban centres of Harare and Bulawayo were three to one against adoption; voting in the countryside was marked by large-scale abstentions. Post-colonial Zimbabwe had reached a turning point.

Very early on, the colonial bureaucracy had translated the ethnic mosaic of the country into an administrative map in such a way as to allow minimum co-operation and maximum competition between different ethnic groups and areas, ensuring among other things that labour for mining, manufacture and service was not recruited from areas where peasants were needed on large farms or plantations. These areas, as it happened, were mainly Shona and so, unsurprisingly, when the trade-union movement developed in Rhodesia, its leaders were mostly Ndebele, and had few links with the Shona leadership of the peasant-based liberation movement (Mugabe belongs to the Shona majority). I remember listening to the minister of labour in Harare in 1981 complain that workers had failed to support the nationalist movement. When I suggested that it might be useful to turn the proposition around and ask why the nationalist movement had failed to organise support among workers, there was silence.

The Shona-Ndebele divide so conspicuous in the two guerrilla movements produced great tension after independence between the mainly Shona government and the mainly Ndebele labour movement, with Mugabe’s ferocious repression in Ndebele areas in 1986 remaining the bloodiest phase in post-independence Zimbabwean history. The slaughter in Matabeleland was followed by a ‘reconciliation’ that paved the way for a unity government in 1987, but Zanu-PF leaders thereafter suspected all protest – from whatever source – of concealing an Ndebele agenda.

The Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions, formed in 1981 with the blessing of the government, had by the end of the decade distanced itself from its Zanu patrons, purged internal corruption and elected an independent leadership. In the 1990s it spearheaded the national agitation against Structural Adjustment and the one-party state that acquiesced in it. Yet its organisation in the countryside was confined to workers on commercial farms. The ZCTU had at first been an umbrella body for private sector unions. The spectacular growth of ZCTU, its organisation of public sector workers, has been written about by two Zimbabwean social historians, Brian Raftapolous and Ian Phimister. After independence, workers in the rapidly Africanised public sector had retained close links to the government. But this began to change when the Structural Adjustment Programme led to public sector job losses and many African workers – especially veterans – were dismissed. When government workers came out on strike in 1996, the ZCTU was able to establish a base in the public sector. A general strike in 1997 and mass stay-aways the following year set the trade unions against the government. Civil servants – including teachers and health workers – who had declared allegiance to the ruling party and the state now began to affiliate to the ZCTU. In 1998, it organised a National Constituent Assembly, with the participation of civic, NGO and church groups.

By the time Mugabe put forward amendments to the Lancaster House constitution, an impressive alliance of forces – not only trade unions, churches, civic and NGO groups, but white farmers and Western governments – was arrayed for battle. The Movement for Democratic Change was formed a few months before the 2000 referendum, to campaign for a ‘no’ vote. The coalition was diverse, containing, on the one hand, public sector workers trying to roll back the tide of Structural Adjustment; on the other, uncompromising free-marketeers such as Eddie Cross, the MDC secretary of economic affairs and a senior figure in the Confederation of Zimbabwe Industries, who was intent on privatising almost everything, including education.

The veterans reacted to the defeat of the constitutional proposals by launching land occupations in Masvingo province. This prompted a split in the ruling party. With Mugabe out of the country, the acting president, Joseph Msika, told the police to torch the new squatter shacks. This was consistent with Zanu-PF policy: in the early days, Mugabe had been praised as a ‘conciliator’ by the international community for ensuring the security and property of those whites who remained in Zimbabwe, and evicting black squatters. Two decades later the position had changed: the support of the whites was no longer so important to Mugabe, and he was under enormous pressure from the veterans. With much to gain from casting his lot in with the rural insurgency, he returned from his trip and announced that there would be no government evictions. As land occupations spread to every province – 800 farms were occupied at the height of the protests – the split in the government and party hierarchy deepened. Inevitable tension between the executive and the judiciary undermined the rule of law; the executive sacked a number of judges, replacing them with others more sympathetic to land reform, and enacted pro-squatter legislation.

‘Fast-track’ land reform was now underway. The types of land that would be acquired compulsorily were specified by the government: unused or underutilised land, land owned by absentees or people with several farms; land above a certain area (determined by region) and land contiguous with communal areas. The white owners of around 2900 commercial farms listed for compulsory acquisition and redistribution were given 90 days to move out. Government directives specified that ‘owners of farms marked for redistribution will be compensated for improvements made on the land, but not for the land itself, as this land was stolen from the original owners in the colonial era.’

The closing date for ‘fast-track’ land acquisition – August 2002 – came and went, but occupations continued unimpeded until mid-2003, and on a diminished scale for a year or so after that. Chiefs fought for land for their constituents and for themselves, and so did their counterparts in the state bureaucracy and the private sector. In Matabeleland, a minority of pro-MDC chiefs were sceptical of land reform, but later submitted claims. The black elite made a brazen land grab in direct contravention of the ‘one person, one farm’ policy, provoking a hue and cry in society at large and within the ruling party; the government set up a presidential commission to determine the facts. Crucially, in 2005 the government passed an amendment declaring all agricultural land to be state land. Land was seized from nearly 4000 white farmers and redistributed: 72,000 large farmers received 2.19 million hectares and 127,000 smallholders received 4.23 million hectares.

What land reform has meant or may come to mean for Zimbabwe’s economy is still hotly disputed. Recently there have been signs that scholarly opinion is shifting. A study by Ian Scoones of Sussex University’s Institute of Development Studies – in collaboration with the Programme for Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS) at the University of the Western Cape – challenges some of the conventional wisdom in media and academic circles within and beyond Zimbabwe. The problem with this wisdom is that certain highly destructive aspects of reform – coercion; corruption and incompetence; cronyism in the redistribution of land; lack of funds and an absence of agricultural activity – have come to stand for the whole process. In particular, Scoones identifies five myths: that land reform has been a total failure; that its beneficiaries have been largely political cronies; that there is no new investment in the new settlements; that agriculture is in ruins; and that the rural economy has collapsed. Researchers at PLAAS have been quick to point out that over the past eight years small-scale farmers ‘have been particularly robust in weathering Zimbabwe’s political and economic turmoil, as well as drought’. Ben Cousins, the director of PLAAS and one of the most astute South African analysts of agrarian change – who had previously argued that the land reform would destroy agricultural production – now says that the future of Zimbabwe lies in providing small farmers with subsidies so that food security can be achieved. According to researchers at the African Institute for Agrarian Studies in Harare, new farms need to receive subsidised maize seed and fertiliser for a few seasons before achieving full production. Some might give up during this period, but not many – partly because the land tenure system doesn’t allow land sales; only land permits or leases can be acquired.

Zimbabwe has seen the greatest transfer of property in southern Africa since colonisation and it has all happened extremely rapidly. Eighty per cent of the 4000 white farmers were expropriated; most of them stayed in Zimbabwe. Redistribution revolutionised property-holding, adding more than a hundred thousand small owners to the base of the property pyramid. In social and economic – if not political – terms, this was a democratic revolution. But there was a heavy price to pay.

The first casualty was the rule of law, already tenuous by 1986. When international donors pressured the regime in the run-up to the parliamentary elections of 2000 by suspending aid and loans – a boycott favoured by the MDC and the unions – the government simply fixed the result in its favour. In the violence that followed, more than a hundred people died, including six white farmers and 11 black farm labourers. Some of the violence was government-sponsored and most of it state-sanctioned. The judiciary was reshaped, local institutions in rural areas narrowly politicised, and laws were passed which granted local agencies the powers necessary to crush opponents of land reform. Denouncing his adversaries in the trade unions and NGOs as servants of the old white ruling class, Mugabe authorised the militias and state security agencies to hound down opposition, as repression and reform went hand in hand. In 2003, the leading independent newspaper, the Daily News, was shut down. While jubilant government supporters applauded the sweep of the revolution in agrarian areas, the opposition denounced the repression that accompanied it. Land reform had been ruthless, but in 2004, the violence began to abate. There was noticeably less violence surrounding the parliamentary elections of 2005.

In retrospect, it is striking how little turmoil accompanied this massive social change. The explanation lies in the participation of key rural figures in ad hoc but officially sanctioned land committees. When first introduced in 1996, these committees had mixed fortunes, some not functioning at all, others becoming instruments of this or that group of squatters. But a radical change occurred in 2000, when the committees were expanded to include centrally appointed security officials, ruling party representatives and local government personnel, as well as local veterans and traditional leaders. Charged with implementing fast-track land reform, these committees sidelined the old local administrative structures. They also had a national impact, since they reported to similarly constituted provincial committees, which in turn reported to the Ministry of Local Government. It was the infusion of veterans that gave the new semi-bureaucratic committees the edge over their wholly bureaucratic counterparts. Local committees usually comprised between 15 and 30 members. The veterans formed ‘base camps’ represented by ‘committees of seven’ which took the lead in identifying land for acquisition as well as finding prospective beneficiaries (mostly from veterans’ waiting lists and rosters in former ‘communal areas’). They also judged disputes, punished petty criminals and allocated farm equipment, seeds and so on. In a word, the committees co-ordinated everything, thus constituting new centres of power.

The second casualty of the reform was farm labourers. There were about 300,000 in all, around half of them part-time. Fast-track reform resulted in a massive displacement of these workers, who were traditionally drawn from migrant labour. Nearly a fifth came from neighbouring states and were regarded with suspicion by peasants in communal areas; even if they’d been born locally, they were often seen as foreigners and denied citizenship rights. Migrants and women (many employed as casual labour) were the weakest links in the rural mobilisation for land reform. Many were thought to have been encouraged by landowners to vote against the government’s constitutional proposals, and the anti-land-reform lobby certainly tried to organise farm workers, ostensibly to protect their jobs, but really to protect the white ownership of farms. When the workers rallied by the MDC, civil society activists and white farmers clashed with veteran-led occupiers, they came off badly. Occupiers held meetings to explain to workers what was at stake and eventually came themselves to distinguish between white farms, not only on the basis of size, proximity to communal areas, and the amount of unused land, but also on the basis of the farmer’s attitudes, particularly on race and towards his workers, and whether he had participated in the counter-insurgency during the independence struggle.

Some of the 150,000 full-time farm workers threw in their lot with the occupiers, though usually not on the farms where they had been employed. About 90,000 kept their jobs on sugar and tea estates, and on new or already established tobacco and horticulture farms. About 8000 were granted land, but most were denied it on the grounds that they or their elders had come from foreign countries, though some were given citizenship. Many went from steady employment to contract or casual work; many others were forced to supplement their meagre incomes through fishing, petty trading, theft and prostitution.

The best publicised casualties of the land reform movement were the urban poor who hoped to benefit from extending land invasions to urban areas. The veterans spearheaded occupations of urban residential land in 2000-1. Housing co-operatives and other associations followed their lead and set up ‘illegal’ residential or business sites. But the state feared that it would lose control over towns to the MDC if the land reform movement was allowed to spread and met these occupations with stiff repression, including Operation Restore Order/ Murambatsvina, a surprise military-style intervention in 2005 in which tens of thousands of families were evicted. Not surprisingly, those who opposed land reform in rural areas were the strongest critics of government efforts to stifle occupations in urban areas.

The final casualty was food production: Zimbabwe, once a food surplus country, is today deficient in both foreign exchange and food. In 2002-3, half the population depended on food aid: this was a drought year and the figures improved in 2004-5. The UN now estimates that nearly half the country’s 13.3 million inhabitants will once again be dependent on food aid in 2009, after another drought year. A million of these are poor, urban residents who can’t afford imported food. The rest are peasants, most of them hit by drought. Climate change is clearly a factor here, its role most obvious in marginal land: the communal areas worked by millions of small farmers. A 2002 World Food Programme study noted that there had been three droughts in Zimbabwe since 1982 and that the 2002 drought, which also affected several neighbouring countries in Southern Africa, was the worst in 20 years. The WFP estimated that 12.8 million people in the region would require assistance as a result of that drought and that in Zimbabwe alone, overall production would decline by 25 per cent, with cereal production down 57 per cent and maize, the staple in the diet of ordinary Zimbabweans, down by a devastating two-thirds.

To separate out the effect of drought and that of reform – and thus to understand how land reform has hit production – one needs first to distinguish between three groups of agricultural producer: local white farmers, who were the target of the land reform; peasants with farms in communal areas; and foreign corporations, whose large farms (except for small tracts of unused land) remain intact. Harry Oppenheimer, for example, lost most of his private land, but his firm, Anglo American, kept its sugar estates, which it then sold to Tongaat Hulett, a South African firm with 15,000 hectares in Zimbabwe. In a nutshell, white commercial farmers focused on export crops, whereas communal farmers were the major source of food security. The production of tobacco, hitherto the main source of foreign exchange, is concentrated in large-scale commercial farms; it has seen the most severe decline, almost entirely as a result of land reform. Maize and cotton are peasant crops and have not really been directly affected by land reform, but have suffered badly from prolonged drought – maize production was down by 90 per cent between 2000 and 2003. In contrast, the production of crops – sugar, tea, coffee – grown mainly by the large corporate plantations has remained steady.

Besides drought and reform, there is a third cause of declining production: the targeted donor boycott. Zimbabwe has been the target of Western sanctions twice in the last 50 years: once after UDI in 1965 (very ‘soft’ sanctions, which did not stop the country becoming the second most industrialised in sub-Saharan Africa by the mid-1970s) and again after Zimbabwe’s entry into the Congo war in August 1998. Zimbabwe’s involvement in the war was not well received in the West. Participants in the donor conference for Zimbabwe that year were decidedly lukewarm about committing funds. Britain announced a review of arms sales to Zimbabwe and, after the conference, again disclaimed any responsibility for funding land reform. The following year the IMF suspended lending to Zimbabwe, while the US and the UK decided to fund the labour movement, led by the ZCTU, first to oppose constitutional change and then to launch the MDC as a full-fledged opposition party. Its enemies have claimed that, by the late 1990s, the ZCTU was dependent on foreign sources for two-thirds of its income. Once ‘fast-track’ land reform began in 2000, the Western donor community shut the door on Zimbabwe.

The sanctions regime, led by the US and Britain, was elaborate, tested during the first Iraq war and then against Iran. In 2001 Jesse Helms, previously a supporter of UDI, sponsored the Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery bill (another sponsor was Hillary Clinton) and it became law in December that year. Part of the act was a formal injunction on US officials in international financial institutions to ‘oppose and vote against any extension by the respective institution of any loan, credit or guarantee to the government of Zimbabwe’. In autumn 2001 the IMF had declared Zimbabwe ‘ineligible to use the general resources of the IMF’ and removed it from the list of countries that could borrow from its Poverty and Growth Facility. In 2002, it issued a formal declaration of non-co-operation with Zimbabwe and suspended all technical assistance. The US legislation also authorised Bush to fund ‘an independent and free press and electronic media in Zimbabwe’ and to allocate six million dollars for ‘democracy and governance programmes’. This was fighting talk, Cold War vintage. The normative language of sanctions focuses less on the issues that prompted them in the first place – Zimbabwe’s intervention in the Congo war and the introduction of fast-track reform – than on the need for ‘good governance’. In citing the absence of this as a reason for its imposition of sanctions in 2002, the EU violated Article 98 of the Cotonou Agreement, which requires that disputes between African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries and the EU be resolved by the joint EU-ACP Council of Ministers.

Clearly, the old paradigm of sanctions – isolation – has given way to a more interventionist model, which combines punishment of the regime with subsidies for the opposition. So-called ‘smart’ sanctions are intended to target the government and its key supporters. In 2002, the US, Britain and the EU began freezing the assets of state officials and imposing travel bans. Only four days after the EU imposed sanctions, the US expanded the list of targeted individuals to include prominent businessmen and even church leaders, such as the pro-regime Anglican bishop, Nolbert Kunonga.

Nonetheless, sanctions mainly affect the lives of ordinary people. Gideon Gono, governor of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe, wrote recently that the country’s foreign exchange reserves had declined from $830 million, representing three months’ import cover in 1996, to less than one month’s cover by 2006. Total foreign payments arrears increased from $109 million at the end of 1999 to $2.5 billion at the end of 2006. Foreign direct investment had shrunk from $444.3 million in 1998 to $50 million in 2006. Donor support, even to sectors vital to popular welfare, such as health and education, was at an all-time low. Danish support for the health sector, $29.7 million in 2000, was suspended. Swedish support for education was also suspended. The US issued travel warnings, blocked food aid during the heyday of land reform and opposed Zimbabwe’s application to the Global Fund to Fight Aids – the country has the fourth highest infection rate in the world. Though it was renewed in 2005, the Zimbabwe grant is meagre. Agriculture has been affected too: scale matters, but no one disputes that subsidies are vital for agriculture to be sustainable, and sanctions have made it more difficult to put a proper credit regime in place.

Despite the EU’s imposition of sanctions in the run-up to the parliamentary elections of 2002, Mugabe polled 56.2 per cent of the vote against Morgan Tsvangirai of the MDC’s 42 per cent. There were widespread allegations of Zanu-PF violence and last-minute gerrymandering, with polling stations in urban areas – Tsvangirai’s electoral base – closing early and extra stations being set up in rural areas, where Mugabe’s support was assured. Nonetheless, it was clear that support for Zanu-PF was higher than in the pre-fast-track elections of 2000. Bush and Blair refused to recognise the outcome, but Namibia, Nigeria and the South African observer team, which had monitored the elections, concluded that the result was legitimate. Whatever the truth of the matter, the Africans could do little in the face of mounting Western pressure, from Britain especially: a three-member panel of Commonwealth countries – Australia, Nigeria and South Africa – was convened to consider the question of Zimbabwe. There were reports of intense pressure from Tony Blair on Thabo Mbeki. The panel suspended Zimbabwe from the Commonwealth for a year. Zimbabwe withdrew from the organisation.

The experience of land reform in Zimbabwe has set alarm bells ringing in South Africa and all the former settler colonies where land shortage is still an issue. In South Africa especially, the upheaval and bitterness felt in Zimbabwe seems to suggest that the ‘Malaysian path’ to peaceful redistribution and development is not inevitable. An anxious South Africa and less powerful members of the Southern Africa Development Community tend to feel that sanctions, along with other destabilising policies pursued by the West against Zimbabwe, have only made matters worse. SADC states have long tried to reconcile the need to resist Western influence with the fact that they serve as a bridge between Africa and the wealthy Western economies, but South Africa’s non-confrontational policy vis-à-vis Mugabe – which Mbeki pursued despite mounting criticism from the ANC and the unions in South Africa – along with its provision of fuel and electricity to its northern neighbour, set it at odds with Western governments. South Africa and the SADC states describe their approach as one of ‘non-interference’, ‘stabilisation’ and ‘quiet diplomacy’, but the West sees it as a deliberate effort to undermine sanctions, and critics in South Africa – most recently Mandela – have found the Mbeki line much too conciliatory.

In 2007, SADC called for an end to sanctions against Zimbabwe and international support for a post-land-reform recovery programme, but earlier this year Western countries brought their influence to bear on key SADC members – Botswana and Zambia – to split the organisation. Ian Khama, the president of Botswana, went so far as to announce publicly that he would not recognise the results of the 2008 elections. The pressure on SADC came not only from Western countries, but from trade-union movements in the region, in particular Cosatu of South Africa, which has strong links with the ZCTU. Here is another striking aspect of the current Zimbabwe crisis: it is not just Western and pro-Western governments that have joined the sanctions regime, but many activists and intellectuals, for the most part progressives, have aligned themselves with distant or long-standing enemies in an effort to dislodge an authoritarian government clinging to power on the basis of historic grievances about the colonial theft of land. Symbolic of this was the refusal by Cosatu-affiliated unions to unload a cargo of Chinese arms destined for Zimbabwe when the An Yue Jiang sailed into Durban in April.

The arguments, which are not new, turn on questions of nationalism and democracy, pitting champions of national sovereignty and state nationalism against advocates of civil society and internationalism. One group accuses the other of authoritarianism and self-righteous intolerance; it replies that its critics are wallowing in donor largesse. Nationalists speak of a historical racism that has merely migrated from government to civil society with the end of colonial rule, while civil society activists speak of an ‘exhausted’ nationalism, determined to feed on old injustices. This fierce disagreement is symptomatic of the deep divide between urban and rural Zimbabwe. Nationalists have been able to withstand civil society-based opposition, reinforced by Western sanctions, because they are supported by large numbers of peasants. The tussle between these groups has even greater poignancy in former settler colonies than it had a generation earlier in former colonies north of the Limpopo, for the simple reason that the central legacy of settler colonialism – the land question – remained unresolved and explosive after independence. Southern African leaders have tried, with some success, to put out the fires in Zimbabwe before they spread beyond its borders. It is worth noting that the agreement between Zanu-PF and the MDC signed in September and brokered by Mbeki accepts land redistribution as irreversible and registers disagreement only over how it was carried out; it also holds Britain responsible for compensating white farmers. In the wake of Mbeki’s resignation as president of South Africa it is vital that this agreement remains in place. Few doubt that this is the hour of reckoning for former settler colonies. The increasing number of land invasions in KwaZulu Natal, and the violence that has accompanied them, indicate that the clock is ticking.

Gore Vidal Loved Scotty Bowers,

Why Gore Vidal Loved Scotty Bowers, Hollywood’s Best-Known Pimp 

Tim Teeman The Daily Beast

Warning: contains sexually explicit material

In December 2011, around seven months before he died, Gore Vidal turned to his good friend Scotty Bowers as the two relaxed in Vidal’s home on Outpost Drive in the Hollywood Hills.

“You suppose we could find Bob and bring him over?” the frail, nostalgic Vidal, then 86, asked. “Bob” was Bob Atkinson, a favorite hustler of Vidal’s that Bowers had first set him up with in 1948. They had long lost touch.

“Gore liked Bob because he had been in the Navy and he had a cock as big as a baby’s arm,” said Bowers, who recorded his life as a trick, then pimp, to Hollywood’s rich and famous in Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars.

“Scotty was the closest person to Gore in the last four years of his life who wasn’t a servant,” said Matt Tyrnauer, Vidal’s close friend, and onetime editor at Vanity Fair.

Tyrnauer is also the director of the documentary, Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood, which receives its U.S. premiere today at the NY Doc festival. The film is dedicated to Vidal, and is a subtle and moving investigation into Bowers’ picaresque life.

For all the sex Bowers has had and all the sex he has arranged, and for all his long-suffering wife Lois casts despairing glances toward the camera, you worry for both of them falling through the rickety-looking boards of their outside balcony.

Bowers, 94, remains a charismatic storyteller, and even though he is now famous for revealing all, he remains by nature discreet. I spent three, delightful hours with him in 2013 interviewing him for my book, In Bed With Gore Vidal: Hustlers, Hollywood, and The Private World of an American Master, and—as candid as Bowers was—he was also respectful, and when it came to sex and sexuality utterly without shame and judgment.

Photo of Jimmy Trimble Gore Vadal's life love 1945

The book and film are rich in gossip, casting an unsparing spotlight on a Hollywood of old, where secrecy was all and the stars protected by a ruthlessly powerful studio system, aided by a media that, while frothing in gossip, rarely if ever trespassed too far into the sex lives of celebrities.

In his memoir, Bowers reveals how, while an attendant at the Richfield gas station at 5777 Hollywood Blvd., he met, then had or arranged sex for Hollywood’s gay elite (and quite a few horny straight stars too). He had sex with Walter Pidgeon, Cole Porter (“He could easily suck off twenty guys, one after the other. And he always swallowed”), George Cukor (who would “suck dick” with a “quick, cold efficiency”), and Cary Grant and his partner Randolph Scott (“The three of us got into a lot of sexual mischief together”).

Cecil Beaton would carefully tuck away and de-crease the sheets and blankets of a bed before sex; Bowers had three-ways with former English King Edward VIII, the Duke of Windsor (“He sucked me off like a pro”) and the woman he abdicated the throne for, Wallis Simpson (“she definitely preferred homosexual sex”).

Edward VIII

Further, Bowers writes, Spencer Tracy “took hold of my penis and began nibbling on my foreskin,” while Vivien Leigh “had orgasm after orgasm” with him, “each one noisier than the last.” “Penetrative sex was out” with Noel Coward—“it was strictly oral”—while Bowers made “long slow love” to Edith Piaf “until she dozed off as dawn broke.”

Bowers has had sex with men and women, and keeps his sexuality as undefined as Vidal did.

Charles Laughton liked eating pretty young men’s excrement on his sandwiches, while Tyrone Power enjoyed being urinated on; Montgomery Clift was so “fastidious” about the tricks Bowers arranged for him he complained when one trick’s penis “was an inch too long.”

“Scotty doesn’t lie—the stars sometimes do—and he knows everybody.”

Some have questioned the veracity of Bowers’ stories. But the biographer William J. Mann, who spoke to Bowers when researching his 2006 book Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn, said, “I found him forthright and honest and not interested in personal fame or gain,” turning down at that stage Mann’s offer to write about him or introduce him to a literary agent.

“Several people I respect vouched for Scotty’s essential truthfulness and reliability as a source,” Mann stated, including the journalist and author Dominick Dunne and film director John Schlesinger—as well as Vidal himself.

It is telling that in Bowers’ book of scandalous revelation there are only four decorous, entirely sex-free sentences about Vidal, praising him as “one of the nicest, brightest men,” Bowers has known.

Vidal himself supplied a laudatory cover quote for the book, testifying to Bowers’ veracity: “I have known Scotty Bowers for the better part of a century. I’m so pleased that he has finally decided to tell his story to the world… Scotty doesn’t lie—the stars sometimes do—and he knows everybody.”

At Bowers’ book launch, in what would be his last public appearance, Vidal told guests that he’d never “caught Bowers in a lie” in the many years he had known him in a town “where you can meet a thousand liars every day.”

Presumably, then, he would sanction as fact Bowers’ revelations to me that Vidal not only had sex with him, but also “many” hustlers Bowers arranged for him, as well as Hollywood stars Rock Hudson, Tyrone Power, and Charles Laughton.

Tyrone Power

Vidal’s long friendship with Bowers was one of the most consistent of his life: He feuded and broke up with a number of close friends, especially as dementia exerted its grip in the last few years. “There’s no one who can say they were friends that long because Gore didn’t keep friends that long. I never had a cross word with Gore,” said Bowers. “He was very opinionated, I was very easy going.”

They met after the end of World War II. A friend of Vidal’s had told him about Bowers’ gas station on Hollywood Boulevard, and Bowers had been told Vidal might be coming in.

“That’s how word got around in those days,” said Bowers. “If you had money, you couldn’t advertise as well as this. You take a queen, tell him a secret and swear him to secrecy, and you just got the word all over town.”

The first time he met Vidal, Bowers recalls him driving in one evening just after 8 o’clock at the wheel of a two-tone ’47 Chevrolet. He said, “I’m Gore” to Bowers and hung out for around an hour, looking at the ‘trade’ (hot young male hustlers) on display. “Wherever you looked there was someone,” said Bowers.

Vidal told him that day, “I can see this is going to be a fun place, I’m going to be here often.”

For $20 Bowers fixed his clients up with hustlers: “If a guy wanted to buy you a car or give you more money, that was his business. I never took a cut.”

Bowers and Vidal connected well: Vidal had been in the Army, Bowers in the Marine Corps, which probably made Vidal more open with him than others. Vidal was two years older than Bowers.

On that first night Bowers was working till midnight, so sent Vidal “off with someone else he liked, a clean-cut all-American looking guy, his type.” A couple of days later he returned and said, “That was great, do you have someone else?” Bowers introduced him to Bob Atkinson, and Vidal saw him “quite often.”

“Gore had a medium sized cock, seven inches, he looked circumcised but wasn’t,” Bowers recalled. “He was basically a top [he liked to penetrate, rather than be penetrated], but with Bob he allowed himself to be fucked. With some men I fixed him up with he didn’t have sex with them at all. He just talked to them if they were very bright. Gore enjoyed talking to people.”

The few times Bowers had sex with Vidal was “pleasant, not mad love.” Vidal was always “on the ball, not bashful or shy, rather aggressive and pushy,” and was “more or less into a quick trick. He did everything sexually, you sucked his cock, he would suck yours, but he preferred to fuck. Gore and I fucked and rolled around and played with each other’s cocks. He’d grab your cock and, boom, he was young and hot and sex was rather quick.”

“Rock, Gore and I had three-ways a dozen times, and I’m sure they did it on their own a few times.”

Did Vidal have sex with any of Bowers’ other famous friends, I asked Bowers.

“I fixed him up with my friend Tyrone Power, which Gore asked me for as a favor, and he did me a favor and had sex with Charles Laughton,” Bowers revealed. “Charles Laughton was not Gore’s type, but Gore went with me for kicks.” It was a three-way? “Yes, Charles was a dirty old man, but they wanted to meet each other. It was the same with Tyrone Power.”

Bowers laughed that he “probably introduced Gore to more famous people than he introduced me to.”

He recalled Jacqueline Kennedy at one party going off to a bedroom with one man: her parting shot to Bowers, “I can’t fucking help myself.” Bowers said: “They always talk about her husband [JFK] fucking people, but she was a regular little tramp too. She’d fly out here just to see William Holden. So would Grace Kelly. When I fixed up Edward and Wally [the Duke and Duchess of Windsor], I fixed them up with a Beverly Hills hotel bungalow, she was the boss, he was shy and bashful. She told him what to do with guys: ‘Suck his cock, do this, do that.’”

Wallis Simpson

When Vidal and Power got together, Bowers recalled, it was a “sucky-fucky thing. Gore put his cock between Tyrone’s legs and fucked him between his legs. They sucked each other off and played together.”

Bowers laughed and added: “Gore told people I had introduced him to people he wanted to know and that was certainly the case with Tyrone Power. Both Charles and Gore sucked each other off and of course Tyrone liked being pissed on, so we did that. Gore went right along with it.”

Bowers introduced Vidal to Rock Hudson; the men “hit it off” and they “buddy-buddied” together as friends too.

“We had three-ways just when Rock was getting started as an actor,” said Bowers. “I met him in 1947 when he was living in Hollywood with a little queen who was a car-hop in a drive-in. They had an Irish Setter dog. Gore did a little bit of everything with Rock. He started necking with him and pretty soon he was playing with his cock. Gore was quite into fucking people between their legs. He did that with Rock.

Rock Hudson

“Rock had a steam room and that was across the courtyard as you came in. We went into the steam room. Gore was rubbing Rock and sucking his prick. There were hands here and hands there. We were necking, sucking and fucking: whatever position you wanted to be in you got in. We had three-ways a dozen times and I’m sure they did it on their own a few times. When you fix up two people very often they see each other. Separately they both told me how glad they were I introduced them. I know without a doubt they got together other times on their own and I’m sure, when they did, that Gore fucked Rock.”

(Richard Harrison, the former beefcake model and actor who used the same gym as Rock Hudson, recalled: “He would sit in the sauna. His cock was so big it would hang down to the next step. All the old guys would complain about it. But he didn’t use it—he was a bottom.)

Vidal wanted Bowers to introduce him to James Dean, “and I told him Jimmy Dean was a little prick. But I introduced them. Gore thought he wanted to have sex with Jimmy, but after meeting him, he said ‘Fuck him. He’s into his own thing.’”

Bowers fixed Vidal up with “dozens of people,” including in Italy men who he knew in Europe: They were, as so many friends recall, “clean-cut, all-American type guys, not rough trade or weird muscle boys, not a bum or someone with long hair.”

Charles Laughton

These men were mainly chosen in the image of Vidal’s childhood love, Jimmie Trimble. “I was on Iwo Jima and had a brother who was killed there,” said Bowers (Trimble had fought and died there). “He mentioned him so often. He would say how fond he was of Jimmie and how much he liked him. I got the feeling he was one of Gore’s first loves.”

Vidal “had a healthy sexual appetite, but he had to like the guy too,” recalled Bowers. “He’d come into the gas station and say, ‘Scotty, that guy leaning against the car, that’s my type.’ It wasn’t always younger guys. Once in the Beverly Hills Hotel he indicated a handsome guy who wasn’t that young. He had good-looking assistants too. I don’t know if he had sex with them, but Gore was the kind of ‘put your hand down there and grab the cock’ type. Anybody around Gore knew that score. I don’t know if he had sex with Paul Newman, but that’s not impossible. He always said Paul had done it with guys.”

The first time Vidal heard a hustler in the U.S. charge $100 he wanted “to leave the country,” he said to a friend; Bowers had charged $20.

“They got along like two young businessmen, no petty arguing as to who ate a slice of bread or drank the Coca-Cola.”

Bowers saw, at close quarters, Vidal’s innate resistance to being out about his homosexuality, or being described as gay, being born and raised in an era when “gay” meant effeminate or camp, someone outside society, a freak—not things the patrician, Establishment-inhabiting Vidal saw himself as.

“Gore was not a gay person, not a queen,” said Bowers. “He would say, ‘I have gay sex but I’m not gay.’ I heard him say that numerous times. He meant he wasn’t what he thought was a queen, the kind of guys where it’s like ‘How much was the operation to have all those bones removed from your wrist?’ You can spot a queen. Gore was not ‘gay’ at all in appearance.”

When I said to Bowers what a narrow encapsulation of being “gay” that amounted to, he replied, “Gore was gay but didn’t look gay, act gay, but he had gay sex.”

But he was also a gay person, even if he didn’t say it, I said.

“Yes,” said Bowers.

In the 1980s, Vidal talked about HIV and AIDS intermittently, Bowers recalled. “When AIDS first started Gore said to me: ‘I can see your point in not fixing people up anymore and I’m very concerned about meeting people.’ He said, ‘You never know,’ but Gore said if a guy looked healthy and clean-cut it’s possible he doesn’t have it, but he wouldn’t fuck anyone looking drawn. That’s what people thought at the beginning,” said Bowers.

Did HIV and AIDS change his sexual behavior? “He met some guy: he just wanted to jack off and watch the other guy jack off, not touching. I never saw him use a condom but he might have. Possibly.” Did he ever bottom? “Not really. I knew him as a top, so he worried less about contracting HIV.”

Bowers recalled Vidal once wanting to watch Bowers have sex with a woman: “There was something about her he liked, so he sat and watched us fucking and jacked off. He liked her because her personality was like his. I had a good-looking guy who was gay. Gore liked him, and used to fuck him too. I would stop fucking this guy and Gore would plunge his prick in, and boom, blow his nuts.”

Edith Piaf

Over the years Bowers came to know Howard Austen, Vidal’s longtime partner; the pair met in 1951 at the Everard Baths in New York City, and stayed together for 52 years until Austen’s death in 2003. Austen would go out cruising, pick up guys and share them with Vidal, said Bowers.

“It wasn’t just prostitutes but also young men who were available. Howard picked up many men who weren’t hustlers and picked up more men in general than Gore. Howard was a nice guy,” he says. “They were a great couple and made you feel very welcome.”

Austen seemed “like a nice guy” to Bowers. “It seemed like an equal relationship to me and not lopsided. They got along like two young businessmen, no petty arguing as to who ate a slice of bread or drank the Coca-Cola. It was very honest, above board, cool, everything done nicely, not in a queeny or chintzy manner. Howard did his own thing between singing and cruising and fucking around.”

Bowers never heard Vidal express a sexual interest in underage men. “Hell no. The guys I fixed him up with early on were his own age, and later in his life were in their twenties and thirties, never younger or illegal. The guys I saw him and Howard cruise in Italy were in their twenties.”

“I didn’t realize how much I loved Howard until now that he’s gone.”

After Austen’s death in September 2003, Bowers would go over to Vidal’s house for supper, then afterward Vidal would put on his much-cherished CDs, featuring Austen singing.

“He would sit there with tears in his eyes, and I would hold his hand, run through ten or twelve songs, then begin the CD again. Pretty soon it was four in the morning, and there were still tears in his eyes. He never said, ‘I miss him,’ but rather, ‘Howard’s great.’ When he was sad he talked about happy things.”

Vidal told Bowers, Bowers said, “‘I was really in love with Howard.’ He’d cry. ‘I didn’t realize how much I loved Howard until now that he’s gone,’ he’d say. He’d sit there with tears in his eyes for ten to fifteen minutes. I sat there playing with his big yellow kitty. It didn’t surprise me: many people don’t realize until someone has gone how much they love or care about them… like having a little doggy who you love and don’t realize until they’re gone that you’ve taken them for granted.”

After Austen’s death Vidal still used hustlers, “though not in the last year,” said Bowers. “He was in a wheelchair and not really able to move. But he still wanted to see people. I would go to the house and sit with him. Sometimes there would be guys there, in their thirties and handsome, he had met. Nothing happened. He thought he wanted someone in bed, but Gore just wanted company.

“We’d talk, have four, five, six drinks and soon Gore would fall asleep. In the last couple of years he was not in the position to have sex. One of the guys he thought was wonderful. Gore held his hand and talked to him about knowing me for so long, and then after a couple more drinks, halfway into a conversation, he’d fall asleep. He’d drink wine, Scotch, Portuguese port, and I’d sit there and think, ‘He hasn’t got up to take a piss.’”

Bowers was not the only pimp Vidal used in his later years. Bowers said he also employed the services of Dave Damon, who had a small statues and ceramics store in West Hollywood. (Damon died in 2005.) “Dave cruised for numerous people, and picked up people every day,” said Bowers.

“He was one of the best cruisers in world and such a nice guy. He was out picking people up all the fucking time. Gore always agreed with me that Dave was one of greatest picker-uppers there ever was. We were different in that the people I used I knew personally, Dave had no fucking idea who he was sending round to you, but Gore used Dave for years.”

Vidal’s physical decline in the last three years of his life was dramatic and painful and shocked his family and friends, as he continued to feud with some and excommunicate others. Bowers remembers him talking about being interred next to Austen.

“His fucking feet and ankles swelled up. He couldn’t move, he was drinking heavily and taking the pills he was supposed to, but so many pills I said ‘Don’t drink.’ That fucking wheelchair: I remember how vibrant he was.”

Vidal’s last public appearance, on Feb. 8, 2012, was at the launch party for Bowers’ book at the Chateau Marmont, where he made a short speech. Days later he was admitted to St. John’s Hospital with pneumonia, where he stayed for around a month and a half. Then he went home and got “very sick again,” said Bowers. Vidal was readmitted to hospital: this time Cedars Sinai.

“I went to Cedars three times,” recalled Bowers. “He was unconscious and looked like he was dead. I held his hand and kissed him, but he didn’t know I was there. There was a tube in his stomach feeding him, poor baby.”

After two months in Cedars, Vidal went home. “I saw him there and he was totally unconscious,” said Bowers. “I held his hand and said, ‘Gore, you sweetheart, to think what a great on-the-ball guy you were, it’s really sad to see you like this, poor baby.’ Some people are dull in life, but for someone that sharp to end like that…” Bowers’ voice clotted and he teared up.

Bowers’ voice also broke when he talked about missing Vidal, who died in July 2012. “He was a wonderful guy, nice guy, a sweet guy, an all-American guy, he was pissed off a lot at the way the country was run. My thoughts of Gore will always be great. I think of him all the time, every day. He was a sweetheart, one hundred percent.”

Bowers is, at least, keeping alive the Vidal tradition of “no-labels” when it comes to enjoying sex. “The last time I had sex with a guy was a week ago, a 95-year-old,” he told me. “I still have sex with several younger men too.”

His wife Lois was “cool” with this, Bowers insisted. “I don’t go into detail.”