The Joiner's Arms in Shoreditch, now closed (Photo via)

Beleaguered by redevelopments and rising rents, London's most iconic queer venues have had a rough year. Stalwarts such as the Black Cap and the Joiners Arms have shut their doors and many more are currently under the avaricious leer of property developers and landlords, so their cards are likely marked too. But while the well-documented gentrification of London is leaving an indelible stain on the capital's queer scene, the reality is that it's always been in a state of flux.

"Over the years, the scene has always been fluid and moved from area to area," says club promoter Wayne Shires, a titan of London's gay scene since the early 80s. "When I was 15 or 16 and first out, people were still going to Earls Court. It was everyone's scene really. People used to go out there because it was a little group of bars: Bromptons, Copacabana and the Coleherne."

All three venues have now either been closed down, reopened as mixed venues, or redeveloped entirely. Once the city's most prominent gay village, Earls Court's queer quarter—a bustling hive of pubs, cafes and saunas—has all but vanished. That particular moniker passed to Soho in the 80s, a title it's held for some time. Such is the rate of closures now though, there are fears it could suffer a similar fate. Madame Jojo's, Candy Bar, the Green Carnation, and Manbar are just some of the establishments that have recently closed. It's left many asking, what next for queer London?

East London has always housed a handful of queer venues, but it was in the 90s that the scene really thrived, with venues like the Bull and Pump on Shoreditch High Street, Oak Bar in Stoke Newington, and the legendary Joiners Arms. All may now be closed, but the area has experienced something of a resurgence; Dalston Superstore, The Glory, East Bloc, and Vogue Fabrics (now VFD) represent a new slew of gay bars and pubs.

"The scene shifts to different locations in London and that's down to economy," says Shires, who now runs East Bloc. "There were always gay things in east London; the George and Dragon was one of the first places and the Joiners had been there for 20 years. They were very much the fledglings. But obviously, over the last five years, it's really taken off. Pubs have come and gone, but it's always been about the energy and the music and the vibe that clubs and the scene create, rather than the bricks and mortar. It's always about people."

WATCH: The trailer for our new film, Chemsex

In post-war Britain, London's scene has never been stagnant. As the city, social attitudes and economic climate have changed, so too have the city's queer "villages." The scene in some areas will respond to these shifts by flourishing, others flicker and fade. Trying to deduce any sort of consistent pattern to the LGBT scene's evolution seems to be a futile exercise.

"What's interesting, when you start picking apart London's gay scene, is that at any one point there will be two or three different scenes going on," says historian Matt Cook, author of Queer Domesticities: Homosexuality and Home Life in Twentieth-Century London. "There's queer stuff happening at different levels now as well. What you can see is the commercial scene, but then there are movements like Queeruption who are squatting in places, putting on ad-hoc exhibitions, and cinema stuff and one-off nights."

"The scene will reflect a number of things, in particular the cultural positioning of queer people," he continues. "It's no surprise that some of the bars in the 1950s were private members clubs which were very discreet, where you had to sign in and be a member. So maybe it's also no surprise that there's less appetite for gay bars now that people are tending to socialize in mixed bars."

As well as a more dramatic physical shift, London's gay scene has also witnessed something of a psychological one. At the height of the AIDs epidemic in the 80s and 90s, gay pubs provided sanctuary, a platform for launching the kind of activism that raised essential awareness and funds. They fought back against a belligerent government and media.

"When I came out in the late 80s, it felt very important to have our own space," says Cook. "It felt very politically important at that moment of rampant homophobia, acute anxiety and grief, and all that community activism around Aids. Now LGBT people are much less affiliated to the Left and feel much less embattled."

The community may now be less embattled, but bigotries remain. Despite unparalleled social acceptance, LGBT-designated places are still a necessity. Places like the Royal Vauxhall Tavern offer a much-needed safe space for the vulnerable and alienated, not to mention queer artists and performers. So much so that grassroots preservation societies like "Royal Vauxhall Tavern Future" are springing up, campaigning for them to be protected against the developers. Huge support from the community has since earned the Vauxhall Tavern a listed status.

The Vauxhall Tavern is now a listed building (Photo via)

"There is still tension between queer people and straight people," says Jonny Woo, legendary drag queen and performer, and one of the owners of the Glory in Haggerston, east London. "There's still that tension so there is still a need. In that sense we've got a gay scene in east London, but I don't feel like it's ghettoized. Gay bars are definitely part of the wider community now. Dalston Superstore is partly responsible for Dalston's revival, its resurgence. I bet it's really connected to the places up there and I bet all the businesses have a lot of respect for those guys."

Aside from the usual antics that go on in an east London drinking hole, Woo's venue the Glory has become something of a hotspot for community campaigners and activists. In the last few months, it has opened its doors to HIV activists organizing blind date nights, held a fundraiser for the refugee crisis, provided a space for underground feminist publication Polyester to hold workshops and panels, and challenged chemsex culture through a performance of Tennessee William's cult classic "Suddenly Last Summer." It even held its annual "Boobathon," a night designated to raise money for trans women in the midst of their transition.

Johnny Woo (Photo Holly Revell)

Venues like the Glory and Royal Vauxhall Tavern champion their inclusivity. Progressive, considerate attitudes, particularly on the alternative queer scene, are now a fundamental expectation from patrons. As a group that faces greater persecution than most in mainstream society, the trans community has perhaps been one of the bigger benefactors of the scene's progressiveness.

"Before, it may have been the case that stealth trans people didn't go out to trans nights or gay nights, and trans people that didn't pass only went to trans nights," says Munroe Bergdof, DJ and trans activist. "The trans girls who would go out with their gay friends would get constantly confused with drag queens. Now, it's completely blended; trans girls can go out with their gay friends and not have to worry about that because everyone's a bit more clued up about what trans people go through."

Munroe Bergdof

"We're also now talking about the problems that we have on the scene like racism," continues Bergdof. "My black gay friends wouldn't go out in Soho because they felt they were looked down upon, no one would find them attractive. Now I think they don't even think about that, really. Racism does go on in the scene, but I think it's a lot less."

The rise of chemsex over the last decade is another issue Bergdof feels the community is finally addressing. As well as the media attention it's got, out on the scene nights like "Let's Talk about Gay Sex and Drugs" have been set up as an open forum for discussing the topic in a non-judgemental environment.

Queers are like cockroaches – we'll be kicked out of somewhere and we'll infiltrate somewhere else

"I do think there's much more social awareness," says Miss Cairo, a drag artist. "People are being a bit kinder to each other. People are understanding where people's insecurities are coming from better. Being queer is about a way of thinking, a way of engaging with the world and the things around you. You're not going to be able to please everyone, but you can try your fucking hardest to understand others, and I think that's definitely happening."

"Queers are like cockroaches; we'll be kicked out of somewhere and we'll infiltrate somewhere else," she continues. "It's really important that we as a community find ourselves in places where we are needed the most. Not everyone has access to the community in London, and it's about finding spaces inside and outside the capital where people can feel safe to be themselves."

With near total legislative equality, there's been some suggestions that there is no longer any need for LGBT-designated spaces. Integration, not segregation, is apparently the way forward. There's even a fear that a lack of patronage, and ultimately profitability, is the reason bars are shutting—that people feel comfortable enough in straight venues and simply aren't using their local gay spaces anymore. However, the success of new venues that have opened in the last year suggests the appetite is still very much there.

Wayne Shires

"There will always be some sort of scene and I think it would be a shame if there wasn't," says Jonny Woo. "People have different tastes and needs and wants. The energy in a gay bar, a queer venue, is different to the energy in a straight venue. I don't think gay people should stop being gay or flaunting their gayness and a safe environment is where you can do that."

For the doom-mongerers, every venue closure represents a death knell. But the strength of the scene is far more complicated than just cataloguing the number of bars that have opened and closed each year. Judging it solely on its commercial effectiveness does it a disservice.

"We're going through very conservative times," says Woo. "We've got very liberal laws and kids are very liberal now, but it's a very straight society. I think there are a lot of people who naturally have the urge to rebel or to be different, so there will always be some underground, subversive culture. I think sexual identity is always going to be part of that."

Protecting historic, iconic, and valued venues represents the latest battle for a community that's won tougher fights before—in many ways it has galvanized queer London. As the pace of gentrification quickens, the bricks and mortar may be lost, but the community, its people and its values, will remain.

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All 'Tangiers' work-in-progress screenshots from Steam Greenlight

Whatever your favorite "big" game of 2015, chances are that it's playing on existing themes, whether they be real life sports or weapons, styles of monster that have been around for generations or a man in a silly costume beating up other guys. But enough about the latest Madden.

Anyway, there's more to creativity than this "established canon of influence within the medium," as Alex Harvey, lead developer on Tangiers, tells me. Tangiers is a "first person, immersive stealth game," driven by 20th century avant-garde. It's set in a surrealist world that "can loosely be summed up as 1960s inner-city Britain meets William Burroughs."

Well, that's certainly a unique location for a game. So where did the idea come from?

"When I first started thinking about making Tangiers, it was really a reaction to what I perceived as an industry that didn't cater for me. There's a comfortable space when you stay within the territory of The Lord of the Rings, Aliens, Blade Runner et al, but personally I'm getting rather fatigued with that."

At the beginning of the 20th century, it turned out that people were getting pretty good at drawing portraits and painting landscapes, so some forward-thinking artists started to branch out. In the 1920s, Surrealism was born, where artists would explore illogical compositions and things outside of the norm. Are these same steps starting to be taken within game development?

"It all falls back to gaming's sluggish cultural progression," Harvey continues. "We're broad, yes. Dig deep enough and you'll find something for everyone. But in terms of discourse, in attempted forward motion, that's all taken in baby steps and is very inward looking. You have noticeable voices loudly pronouncing that forward movement involves making games with 'empathy' or 'emotions.' As creators, we need to throw that mentality in the bin and plough forward with more commitment and creativity. Embrace what external culture has done and has been doing for decades. Let's have a Burroughs, a Ballard, a KLF, and a John Waters. Let's aim for a definition of transgression that's more than Hatred's shock-yer-grandma lurching.

"So, so many developers, outside of the development, are just people who play video games. They grew up on video games, they go home to video games. Sometimes they go to the cinema, but video games are the main cultural reference point. A thousand games influenced by Mario and retro-styled games such as Fez, that are nostalgia for a childhood of Nintendo. That is changing, though. As development becomes more accessible, artists, creatives, people who wouldn't consider themselves 'gamers' have greater opportunity to take advantage of the medium."

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It was the adherence to the norm in video games that made Harvey perceive the industry as one that didn't cater for him to begin with. Rather than quit, though, he decided to make something that would cater to him, and hopefully people who feel the same way. That's not to say he's not looking forward to other games, however.

"I am more than a bit over-excited for the remake of Pathologic," Harvey tells me (this interview took place a while ago, and the game is now out). "The original was one of the few games that just clicked so hard with me. Points of influence, visual stylings, thematic bent, gameplay aspirations, and an off-kilter approach made it love at first sight for me. That they've improved its failings is the best industry news I've heard in years. Next to that, I'm really hoping Zeno Clash developers Ace Team take their Endless Cylinder prototype further. The four minutes they uploaded were enthralling."

The Endless Cylinder video shows a surrealist game set on a planet where an odd little creature hatches from an egg and walks around while a monolithic worm stretches as far as the eye can see. It looks like where I imagine all the creatures from Maxis' Spore were sent after people stopped playing the game.

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But what about Tangiers? It's all very well wanting to break through the zeitgeist, but if the game is no good, then what's the point? "When we first designed the game, we started off as a sort of 'Thief Lite,'" says Harvey. "Inherited mechanics, but a third-person perspective, reduced world interactions, and a very straightforward, mechanical AI." The game's changed since those original ideas. "As we've developed things and explored our potential, we've committed ourselves to evolving that into something far more mature."

A successful Kickstarter campaign helped bring new ideas to fruition. "It was a wonderful thing to bring to completion, but following that, to say we've had a rough development would be an understatement. We've had more than our fair share of unavoidable problems, and we're running a year over what our budget was designed for. But, we've managed to beat everything into shape and crawl up to the finish line, so it could have gone a lot worse. We've got plans to develop Tangiers with new features and content and console ports throughout the next year. We've no chance to catch our breath until the whole project's done and dusted."

With surrealism, there's always the worry that people won't "get it." Some may look at Dali's The Persistence of Memory and say, "OK, there are melting clocks and a weird creature on the ground... but what is it?" I ask what Harvey is doing to combat this.

"One of the challenges I set myself with the project was to create a healthy balance of accessibility and the obtuse. At the heart of Tangiers is a tried and tested model of gameplay. One that, for the most part, is readily usable and understandable. It collides and bleeds into the abstract and avant-garde, but gives the player obvious things to hold onto."

Other people may not understand that surrealism isn't synonymous with "randomness." "Sure, you can throw any old crap together and it might be surreal," says Harvey, "but that wouldn't mean anything, would it? You need to back that up with something. An understanding of subject matter, of composition or of emotional impact—ideally all three. Most important, I think, is a focused creative drive behind it. Take the Dada movement, where practitioners, notably Duchamp, would purposefully lay down anything and call it art. That's a snide remark on the nature of art, but becomes a noteworthy entry in and of itself because of the channelled energy behind it."

Tangiers doesn't have a release date just yet, but you can track its progress on Twitter. Whether it will show gamers and developers how much more creative games can be remains to be seen, but it will at least be refreshing to have something a little bit different to play.

Follow Matt on Twitter.

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Illustration by Thomas Pullin

Chemsex—the use of drugs during sex, often over the course of a couple of days—is increasingly becoming a problem for a section of the UK's male gay community.

Besides drug addiction and the crushing comedowns of a three-day binge, drugs like GHB/GBL are notoriously dangerous: Take the right amount and ride a wave of euphoric horniness; take just a little bit too much and it's a spasming descent into a temporary coma. Some men have even died from G overdoses. Crystal meth and mephedrone are both known to incite paranoid psychosis, where guys who haven't slept for days start hearing voices, and long-term crystal use can cause physical damage to the body.

The sex itself is often without condoms, contributing to rising STI rates. Add "slamming"—the injection of crystal meth or mephedrone mixed with water—to the pot and there's an additional path for viruses like HIV and hepatitis C to body-hop on a needle's prick.

It's important to note that not every gay drug user has a problem with chemsex; that chemsex is still a relatively small issue, in terms of the number of people engaging in it; and that some are able to do so without it affecting their lives too much. But that clearly isn't the case for everyone—the rise of people (mostly, but not exclusively, gay men) using drugs during sex has prompted experts to issue a public health warning about chemsex.

As we see in the new VICE documentary CHEMSEX, there are various factors involved in its rise: The allure of drugs and sex is the obvious starting point, but for many there's more to it than that—issues around identity, self-worth, and a sense of wanting to belong all come up regularly. So how do we go about tackling the chemsex epidemic when there are so many potential causes to address? I asked five experts for their opinions.

THE CHEMSEX EXPERT
David Stuart, Substance Use Lead, 56 Dean Street

Competently addressing chemsex is challenging, because though it may be perceived as a drug problem, it's more of a sex problem; a cultural problem associated with how gay men understand and pursue sex, intimacy, and relationships.

A gay man can come out of the best rehab facility, but is still grossly unprepared for what he might encounter on the gay scene: widespread normalization and availability of chems; a culture that can be defensive about its right to use drugs; HIV stigma; online rejections; and body-fit, masculine, porn-star expectations.

A dialogue within our gay communities about how lovely—and very real—our vulnerabilities are would be a great start. There's a huge reluctance to admit we're vulnerable as a population. Let's address our needs to fit in, avoid rejection and seek affirmation, particularly via sexual avenues. If that dialogue extended to gay-inclusive relationship and sex education in schools and homes for our young people, then we could protect future generations of gay men from chemsex.

At the public health level, chemsex is best addressed in sexual health clinics, where the consequences of chemsex are most acute. In the UK, sexual health clinics not only treat and assess sexual health risks, but they talk comfortably about gay sex, they have the favor of gay men and they have robust psychosocial support services to address sexual behavioral issues.

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THE MEDICAL AND PSYCHOLOGY EXPERT
Dr. Owen Bowden-Jones, Consultant Psychiatrist for the Club Drug Clinic

Drugs have always been used by some to facilitate sex, both by straight and LGBT communities, but there is something new about the recent trend known as chemsex. At the Club Drug Clinic, we have seen drug use and sexual intimacy bound together, some where you can't find one without the other. Sober intimacy can become unthinkable, as does drug use without sex. Some manage to find a balance, but those who come to the clinic asking for help have lost control.

The challenge for the clinic is to help people untangle the chemsex knot. As with most problems related to drugs, the key issue is not just the drugs, but why people are using them. This is particularly true for chemsex. Fear of intimacy, low self-esteem, and internalized aggression are just some of the reasons we work with.

Although chemsex is largely a problem for men who have sex with men, it is important to remember than most gay men don't have chemsex. Challenging stereotypes is part of our work at the Club Drug Clinic, keeping the door open for those who need help, while avoiding stigma for those who don't.

THE HIV EXPERT
Matthew Hodson, Chief Executive at GMFA

Some gay men use drugs to escape because they feel unable to cope with their lives, or because of difficulties they've experienced coming to terms with their sexuality, or because they're struggling to cope with an HIV diagnosis. Tackling that hurt and damage that some gay men feel as they come to terms with their sexuality, even if it were simple to do, may not be enough.

But we should not lose sight of the main reason that many gay men take drugs: because, just like our heterosexual brothers and sisters filling the clubs in Ibiza or Ayia Napa, we think they're fun. A report by the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs found that campaigns intended to stop people taking drugs were not effective and, in some cases, increased the chance of people taking drugs.

At GMFA we're not going to tell men to stop using drugs. That simply won't work. Instead we concentrate our efforts, through our campaigns and the information we provide to gay men, on reducing the harms that may come from drug use, whether that's sexual harm, or other health harms that can arise from prolonged use or overdosing.

Related: Watch the trailer for 'CHEMSEX,' released in UK theaters on Friday, December 4.

THE LGBT CHARITY EXPERT
Monty Moncrieff, Chief Executive at London Friend

Antidote gives men a safe space to talk, and they really value having a specialist service. Ninety percent of our clients tell us it's important to have an LGBT service, and only 12 percent say they'd be happy going to mainstream drug treatment. Sexual health clinics have a big role to play here, too, as guys will go there for PEP or to get a STI treated much sooner than they'd come to a drug service, so setting up outreach in clinics like Mortimer Market and 56 Dean Street was important for us.

The wider LGBT community can help lead the discussion about chemsex through events like Let's Talk About Gay Sex and Drugs. These are a great opportunity for the community to shape our own responses and talk to our peers, and not stigmatize others' drug use and sexual choices. When problems occur with chemsex they're connected to much wider issues about belonging, identity, relationships, and intimacy, and our confidence to navigate all of this improves when we understand and support each other.

For Antidote it's about helping people do it safely, if they choose to, and helping them recognize when it's not so much fun any more, providing opportunities to get some support, hopefully before it becomes a bigger problem.

THE RESEARCH EXPERT
Dr. Adam Bourne, Sigma Research, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine

Perhaps surprisingly, I actually think one of the priorities needs to be around helping gay men who choose to use drugs to do so more safely.

There are lots of guys who don't know enough about basic harm reduction—about dosing of G, timings, potentially dangerous interactions with other drugs or alcohol. The UK is a world leader in drug harm reduction, but we haven't previously focused on the drugs most popular with gay men nowadays. Drug use isn't going to stop, so we need to provide the information to help men use them more safely.

In relation to sexual health and wellbeing, it's important that gay men are encouraged to reflect on whether the sex they're having on chems is what they really aspire to. I'm not anti-drugs and I'm absolutely not saying that guys engaging in chemsex are doing anything wrong. But I am saying that so many of the men I've interviewed about this didn't actually seem to be happy with their sex lives. Reflection and contemplation is the first big step in behavior change. We have a responsibility as a community and as health or social care professionals to start those conversations.

Follow Patrick Cash on Twitter.

Chemsex support is available in most sexual health clinics. 56 Dean Street offers one-to-one chemsex support; visit chemsexsupport.com. Antidote (London Friend) offers drug and alcohol support for the LGBT community. Call 0207 833 1674.

CHEMSEX is released in the UK on Friday, December 4. To see a full list of cinemas showing the film, click here.

CHEMSEX will be released on DVD and On-Demand in the UK on January 11.

To read the rest of the articles from our Chemsex Week—a series exploring the people, issues, and stories in and around the world of chemsex—click here.

Slash piles burn near the TransCanada pipeline right-of-way construction adjacent to the Unist'ot'en Territory in northern British Columbia, October 11, 2015.

The Unist´ot´en Camp is located on unceded traditional Wet'suwet'en Territories in northern British Columbia and stands amid a high-profile oil and gas pipeline corridor. Over the summer, energy-industry helicopters had been landing there—without permission—to continue their survey work as heavy machinery cleared trees for a TransCanada pipeline right-of-way toward the Wedzin Kwah (Morice River). The purpose of this camp is to protect the land from several proposed pipelines that would run from the tar sands in Alberta and extracted shale gas projects in the Peace River Region out to the West Coast.

While preparing for my first trip in late summer, the camp was on high alert after receiving information that the authorities were planning a raid. Access wasn't easy and I had to take appropriate steps for them to verify my credentials as a journalist. Upon making contact via social media, I was instructed to meet someone in Vancouver near the sea, and to keep my eyes open for a bearded guy in a Zodiac boat. Eventually we set out on a 15-hour road trip to northern BC.

"No pipelines, No entry" is spelled out using natural materials to be seen by industry helicopters in a high-profile oil and gas pipeline corridor on Unist'ot'en Territory in northern British Columbia, October 18, 2015.

It felt strange going to a resistance camp in my own backyard. Before returning to BC, I had spent nearly three years covering the conflict in Afghanistan, and the same feeling of insecurity came over me as I approached this spot in my home province.

An unusually high number of police cruisers and black SUVs were scattered throughout the area. Convoys of white pickup trucks rushed past us on a narrow forest service road as we neared the camp in the late-night darkness. Suddenly there was a blast of light, and the next thing I knew it felt like daylight. I heard a voice yelling, "Who are you?" We were at the checkpoint; it felt like a customs crossing into another country. The gate opened and we crossed the bridge after going through the protocol that included several standardized questions.

A camp supporter relaxes as he is tattooed at the Unist'ot'en Camp in northern British Columbia, October 15, 2015.

Like everyone who crossed to the other side, I had to respect the traditional Indigenous culture and hereditary hierarchy. I learned quickly that camp supporters leave their bullshit at the bridge as they learn how to live off the land and in an off-the-grid community.

Once I entered the camp I was looked upon as suspect: I was a new face, after all, and they were prepared to be infiltrated by authorities or industry . At the same time I was worried that I might be arrested and have my gear seized. At night I slept in back of my Jeep facing the checkpoint, looking up every couple of hours to make sure I was still safe. I even had plans to stash my film in the woods.

Over the three weeks I spent there, I met people from all walks of life, who had traveled from across North America, leaving their families and lives behind to come together for a cause. They were standing up and willing to be arrested.

Obstructions created from natural materials prevent trespassers from using the Wedzin Kwah (Morice River) as an entrance to the Unist'ot'en Camp in northern British Columbia, October 16, 2015.

Nature is an incredible source of medicine both for the body and mind. Drinking fresh water from the river, hearing the silence, devouring the wild berries and meats is part of the healing process as you disconnect from everyday distractions. This is the place where proposed pipelines, some already under construction, are slated to run through pristine valleys and under glacier-fed waterways. When I first arrived I had the idea that this was a stand against pipelines and to protect the environment. Soon I realized that it's much more; it's a collective effort to reestablish sacred traditions, languages, and practices that have been suppressed for generations.

Two years ago, VICE published a report on the "slamming" parties that were ravaging London's gay scene, a phenomenon that became known as "chemsex." Soon after, we started to make a feature-length documentary. The film tells the stories of men involved in a world of parties that last for days, where they have multiple sexual partners, on cocktails of drugs that lower inhibitions and increase desire. It's also about the consequences that this behavior has had on their lives. It paints a frank portrait of men trapped in a cycle of addiction and self-destructive behavior; it also shows that, thanks to the pioneering work of sexual health clinics like London's 56 Dean Street, and people there like David Stuart, there is a way out, and there is hope.

It is clear that health services do not yet know how to address the complex range of issues involved in the chemsex scene, in part because they are so wide-ranging. In November, a British Medical Journal report suggested that chemsex is leading to an increase in sexually transmitted infections, and particularly HIV. Regular involvement in chemsex may exacerbate serious mental health issues. The drugs involved, such as GHB and crystal meth, can be, and have been, fatal.

But chemsex is not just about sexual health or addiction, and it demands a deeper understanding. As much as it is about sex and drugs, it is also about isolation and intimacy and loneliness in the age of hookup culture. The difficult questions this film asks could be asked by many—if not all—of us: If we feel alone, where do we go to find acceptance and love?

All week, VICE will be going beyond the sensationalist headlines and exploring the many intricate threads in the chemsex story. We'll go inside the murky world of the HIV denialist movement, whose followers deny the link between HIV and AIDS. We'll look at why sober sex can be such a problem, we'll examine the need for more same-sex education in schools, and we'll report on the experience of HIV positive dating. We'll also find out how the experts would solve the chemsex crisis if they were in charge.

In order to address a new healthcare emergency, new tactics are required. We are telling the stories of those caught up in the chemsex world so that their voices are heard. Chemsex needs to be brought out into the open so it can be properly addressed.

—Rebecca Nicholson, Editor-in-Chief, VICE UK

Click here to browse Chemsex Week

A portrait of Ashraf Fayadh, taken in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia in 2013

Ashraf Fayadh, a poet recently sentenced to death in Saudi Arabia by beheading, relayed a simple but grim message to the world from his prison cell.

"I'm an artist and I want my freedom," Fayadh, 35, said over the telephone last week as he spoke with colleagues from the art collective Edge of Arabia, who have been advocating for his release along with a number of other artistic and human rights groups.

Fayadh is charged with blasphemy for penning a book of love poems allegedly containing atheistic writings and uttering religiously blasphemous comments in an Abha café in 2013.

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An avant-garde painter and celebrated curator whose family is of Palestinian origin and is not a citizen of any country, Fayadh is also accused of having illicit relationships with women. He was originally sentenced to four years in prison and 800 lashes in 2014, but his appeal was dismissed and he was retried. He denies all of the charges.

"It's a pretty shocking case," says Adam Coogle, a Human Rights Watch researcher based in Jordan who has seen and verified the court documents of Fayadh's case. Coogle says that Fayadh can appeal the charge.

"This gentleman was essentially sentenced to death based on the analysis of some love poems he had written many years before which were determined by the religious authorities to contain atheism and all kinds other things," Coogle says. "For this this thin evidence to result in a criminal conviction, much less a death sentence, tells you how problematic certain aspects of the Saudi criminal justice system are."

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The judge's ruling was so severe, Fayadh's father had a stroke shortly after learning of his son's sentence; Fayadh's friends confirmed to VICE that the elder Fayadh died last week.

"I was horrified by death sentence," says Christopher Stone, an Arabic literature expert who directs the Hunter College Arabic Program in New York. "It's absurd that the things he was accused of are crimes in Saudi Arabia to begin with. The death penalty is a savage response to crime."

In Saudi Arabia, a deeply puritanical country where many aspects of life are governed by religious sharia law, censorship is common and artists must be careful not to push boundaries lest the authorities crack down on them. Fayadh's case, extreme as it is, highlights the risks involved in challenging conventions. In January, a liberal blogger was flogged for questioning the powers that be, and few people risk showing films of any sort in public.

The death sentence is shockingly common in the country—there were at least 151 executions in 2015 as of early November, according to Amnesty International, the most since 1995. People can be put to death for offenses ranging from blasphemy to dealing drugs.

"The religious authorities have a real stranglehold on the propagation of free ideas in society," explains Coogle, the Human Rights Watch Middle East expert. "They have instituted a very top-down, very homogenous narrative about what society is and how it should be. It's intolerant of other opinions. To go against that and all it's might, makes it very, very difficult for . Artists have been stifled for many, many years."

A piece from artist Nouf Alhimiary titled "Free," which features the Arabic letters "حره," the female-specific variation of the word for "free."

Nouf Alhimiary is a 23-year-old Saudi Arabian conceptualist feminist photographer based in the port city of Jeddah who has felt constrained by the religious state in every aspect of her work. "It's goes beyond censorship," she says. "There are 'no photography' policies everywhere," she added. "People will be in their niqab and they're still afraid to be photographed. A picture is used against you here."

Alhimiary, whose photographs were featured in a 2013 exhibit curated by Fayadh, learned of his sentencing last week on Tumblr, because Saudi media was not reporting it. Given the tense climate artists operate in the country, Alhimiary was not overly shocked by the ruling

Although women registered to vote for the first time in Saudi municipal elections this year, they are forbidden from venturing into public without male chaperones and are forced to conceal much of their bodies. This sort of ideology bleeds over into the art world.

Alhimiary once applied to a gallery to exhibit a series of photos she took of women in public, showing the clothes they normally wear underneath their abayas or niqabs. To avoid government interference in her work, Alhimiary exhibits mostly outside her home country, in places like the British Museum in London or exhibitions in Venice.

"I feel really sad that I can't share here that I can't freely speak about the things I want to address," she says. "Even sometimes when I want to post an opinion I have to think and rethink is this appropriate for everyone to read while I'm in Saudi."

The Ministry of Culture and Information—the governing body responsible for regulating all publicly displayed art in the country—rules the Saudi Arabian art world with an iron fist. The ministry goes so far as to perform on-site inspections before shows open. Criticizing religion and the royal family are absolute no-nos in any medium, punishable by imprisonment, lashings, and even death.

Earlier this year, Basmah Felemban, a Saudi mixed media installation artist, was censored by the ministry before an art show for referencing a verse from the Quran in an installation.

" the Qur'an shouldn't be in artwork," explained Felemban, 22, who's now based in London and working with British architects to bring Saudi art into the Jeddah public transport system.

"When you're born there, you're just raised with a natural ability of filtering your thoughts in a way to say them to people in a specific way so you don't offend anyone or put yourself in danger," she said.

Dorian Geiger is a Canadian multimedia journalist, photographer, filmmaker, and freelance reporter for VICE. He's based in Brooklyn. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram.

Correction 11/30: An earlier version of this article misspelled Ashraf Fayadh's name in the title.

The rally makes its way down Melbourne's Swanston Street. All photos by the authors

On Friday, tens of thousands of people took to the streets of Melbourne ahead of this week's United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris. Led by Indigenous environmental group Seed, it marked the largest climate action of its kind in Australia's history, kicking off protests in hundreds of other cities around the globe.

Stretching from the steps of Parliament House back to the State Library, the march attracted a broad cross-section—farmers, check-out chicks, students, baby boomers, and even Labor leader Bill Shorten.

On VICE News: Why the Paris Climate Summit Is a Really Big Deal

When VICE went down to speak to the marchers, most voiced frustration about Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull's lack of reform on climate policy. Some, however, remained quietly optimistic about the potential of their movement to push for action on global warming.

Corina is a member of the Indigenous youth-led climate network Seed.

VICE: Why are you here?
Corina: Today we're here for the People's Climate March, which was led by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. This is actually the first time that has happened in Australia, in a non-Aboriginal movement. It's really amazing, particularly because we're leading off the marches globally.

You're a part of Seed. What is that?
Seed is Australia's first ever Indigenous youth-led climate network. We launched in July last year.

Why was it important for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders to lead the march?
With climate change it always hits the most disadvantaged people the hardest. In Australia that quite often is Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. When you think about our people, how they have been able to take care of this land for over 60,000 years, it's so important that we use that knowledge and take the lead.

Earth Guy was sporting an impressive paint job.

Earth Guy: I'm here because I'm really concerned about how the Earth is being treated by big corporations—big energy, big coal, and big money.

How has the world changed since you were a kid?
That was a long time ago. When I was born there were 2 billion people on the planet. In my lifetime that's increased to over 7 billion... all of them want cars, all of them want the latest gadget but the planet can't support it.

Writer and comedian Judith Lucy (right) doesn't think we're totally fucked.

Judith Lucy: I think, like a lot of people, I'm frustrated and this is a way of feeling like I'm doing something.

Are we fucked?
It feels a little like we are... but the fact that we're out here means that, obviously, there's still hope.

This is Fergle from the Socialist Alliance, holding a sign.

What brings you to the march today?
Fergle: I believe that if we don't take action on climate change the world will end and we'll all die.

What needs to change?
The whole system. We need to get rid of capitalism and this whole system that's based on constant growth and constant consumption. We should replace it with a democratic means of production and I think that is "ecosocialism."

Other than marching today, what are you doing about it?
I'm a member of Socialist Alliance, I'm a socialist. I believe in people-powered solutions.

Looks like heaven's missing some angels.

Why are you guys here?
Gabrielle: We are, as angels, protesting the actions of governments and of fossil-fuel industries. Sending a message to these people that greater action needs to be taken in order to protect this place that has so dreadfully gone into a state of disrepair.

What do angels have to do with climate change?
Well, we look down on the earth and we see the earth and everything that's occurring here. And we look down and we weep.

"We're on the frontline of impacts but we're also, as we led the march today, on the frontline of changing this world."

Can you tell me why you've come here today?
Millie: We're here today... Oh man I don't even know where to start, there are so many reasons why I'm here today. I'm here with all of my Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander brothers and sisters who are standing up for our land, standing up for our culture, our people, our community.

How are Indigenous communities affected by climate change?
Well our communities often don't even have access to basic human rights. So when we have things like extreme weather events hit us, we're the ones who are hit first and worst. Left for weeks without emergency services coming for assistance. Our people are on the frontline of extractive industries that cause climate change. We're on the frontline of impacts but we're also, as we led the march today, on the frontline of changing this world.

Old Billy wants YOU

Why are you here?
Old Billy: Because the world is at unrest. The whole planet is in crisis and the human psyche is reflecting what we are doing to this planet. It is part of our suffering, our blindness, and our lack of awareness about ourselves and the wider world.

What needs to change?
Change ourselves! Start really communicating, be open, be honest. Love one another and respect one another. Do away with all these hierarchies and structures and money. Just be kind.

Where can we catch your next gig?
This Sunday at the Thornbury Market.

Michelle made a hefty sacrifice for climate change, but the whole family made great signs.

So Michelle you're a scientist. Give us the facts.
Michelle: We're almost averaging 400 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere, which is making the climate very much like the Pleistocene. That was a period of a lot of environmental change and a lot of species had to adapt very quickly. Here's hoping we can adapt quickly too.

What do we need to give up?
We've divested our shares in oil and gas.

Andrew: She made, not quite the ultimate sacrifice, but a significant sacrifice to give up her job.

Michelle: I was an oil and gas geologist. Not anymore.

Tanzy from Less Meat, Less Heat.

Why are you marching today?
Tanzy: I'm part of Less Meat, Less Heat an organization advocating reduced meat consumption.

What's something people really should know?
If you eat a hamburger that's the equivalent of 27 showers but people don't really know that. Fuck four-minute showers, that does nothing. You could have one-minute showers but as soon as you eat a 300-gram steak you've counteracted two months worth of showering.

One of the few banners at the rally to feature Latin

What brings you here after school?
Matt: We are here representing Aquinas College at the climate march to make sure that we are recognized as supporting the charge on climate change.

What would you tell your students coming up Christmas?
Buy less presents, don't buy junk. Buy something that's practical, functional, useful, and not wasteful.

Follow Maddison on Twitter.

Bernard O'Mahoney outside Raquel's nightclub

On December 6, 1995, three members of a gang now known as the Essex Boys were lured to a deserted farm track near Rettendon, England on the pretense of planning a robbery. As the trio sat in their Range Rover, two gunmen approached the open rear door of the vehicle. Moments later the first shot rang out. Then another. Then another. When the weapons fell silent and the gun smoke cleared, the three men were dead.

The murders of Pat Tate, Tony Tucker, and Craig Rolfe shocked a lot of people, but they impressed a whole lot more. They were failed drug dealers and low life bullies, but the Essex Boys, as they became known, were soon being compared to the Krays and described in the media as modern day Mafia Dons. Three nobodies had become somebodies because the press deemed their deaths a good story.

The Essex Boys firm has had more films made about it than any other gang in British history. These movies all follow the same format: the main characters are chipper, coke-snorting chappies who knock the shit our of their fellow human beings for the slightest perceived misdemeanor. They drive Porsches, live in luxury homes, have beautiful girlfriends, and two Rottweilers named Bruno and Tyson.

The truth about the Essex Boys firm is nothing like the films these ex-public schoolboys moonlighting as directors have made. The three dead men were heavily in debt—the Range Rover they died in was borrowed in a hire purchase agreement. All three were cowards who beat women. They would only attack people in numbers or they would select weak, straight, vulnerable victims. They demanded loyalty but mastered in deceit. We were all products of the world that we inhabited.

Bernard and Tony Tucker

I was the founder of the Essex Boys gang. In 1988, I took over security at a club called Raquel's in Basildon. Shortly afterward, the rave scene emerged and clubland was hit by a shit-ton of drugs.

I met a man named Tony Tucker who ran a large and well respected door firm. When I told him I was encountering problems recruiting reliable doormen, he suggested we form a partnership. He would run the admin side and meet the increasing demand for drugs and I'd control the door. Through Tucker I met Craig Rolfe, a sly individual with a huge chip on his shoulder. His father had been murdered by his mother's lover. His mother, who was pregnant at the time, ended up in prison, where she gave birth to Rolfe.

Not long after, we met Pat Tate. He was well known in Essex after escaping from court while he was being sentenced for a robbery charge. He beat up the officers guarding him, vaulted the dock, and jumped onto the back of a waiting motorcycle. He later surfaced in Spain and was sent to prison in Britain. Tate was determined to make up for the wasted years that he had spent behind bars. He latched on to Tucker and the two of them would spend their days taking drugs, talking shit, and entertaining prostitutes.

Tate convinced Tucker that there was a lot of money to be made at Raquel's. Instead of taking a cut from the profits of the club's drug dealers, Tate suggested Tucker start supplying the dealers himself. He'd made the right connections in prison, and knew a way we could bypass the local wholesalers and start importing drugs from Europe ourselves—cutting out all the middlemen.

Tony Tucker, Pat Tate, and Bernard O'Mahoney

As the drugs came in, Tucker, Tate, and Rolfe took more and more. Their personalities began to change. One moment they would be laughing and joking, the next they would be plotting to murder someone they claimed had upset them. Tate began using heroin and not long afterward, he and Tucker began smoking crack. The harder stuff made them even more deluded—they'd talk about killing off their rivals and the millions they were going to make after they had seized control of the Essex drug trade.

Things were getting crazy. Within seven months of Tate being released from prison, he'd been shot by a former friend. Tucker and Rolfe allegedly murdered a young man, Kevin Whitaker. A teenager named Leah Betts had died after taking ecstasy that had been sold at Raquel's. All this was compounded by the fact that the drugs they eventually managed to import turned out to be unsellable pure shit.

Tucker and Tate's dreams were turning into nightmares. They went on a rampage, threatening everyone they encountered. I walked out of the club on November 16, 1995, the night Leah Betts died. Tucker saw my departure and told me if I walked, he'd shoot me. I moved my family into a hotel and waited for the worst. But I wasn't the only one Tucker, Tate, and Rolfe had marked.

Pat Tate

The night they died, they'd been coaxed into a meeting by three men they'd previously threatened to kill. They believed they were being shown a field were a light aircraft filled with cocaine was going to land. The trio had planned to rob the cargo, but the whole thing turned out to be a baited hook. As the Range Rover pulled up, the gunman shot Rolfe in the back of the head. The gunman fired at Tucker, punching a 6.5 cm hole in his lower jaw. Tate was in the back seat.

The gunman finished off Tucker, then Rolfe, and then turned to his accomplice and invited him to shoot Tate. Walking around the back of the vehicle, the second gunman aimed the shotgun at Tate, who was by now curled up in the fetal position and made no attempt to defend himself. They shot him in the chest rather than the head. He'd been the catalyst of all the trouble that had been caused and so it was deemed essential that he should watch the murder of his friends before he was executed. Their bodies were discovered by a farmer the next morning.

Before the gun smoke had even cleared, rumors began circulating around Essex and beyond. Everyone who had met the three men had a motive to kill them. For a start, they'd threatened me. Billy and Eddie Blundell—two of the most notorious and powerful ganglords in Essex—had warned them that they'd end up dead. They also had previous exchanges with former Essex Boy, Steve "Nipper" Ellis, who'd already tried to shoot Tate once.

In the end it was drug smuggler Michael Steele and his associate Jack Whomes who were convicted of the Rettendon murders in January 1998. Police claimed that they were murdered because they fell out with Steele over a shipment of cannabis from Holland, which proved unsellable. They were convicted on the word of supergrass Darren Nicholls, who was let off his own prison sentence in exchange for his testimony. Nobody knows what happened to him. He was given a new life and a new identity.

But Whomes and Steele have maintained their innocence and are supported by many. Who really killed Tony Tucker, Pat Tate, and Craig Rolfe has since become one of the greatest mysteries in British criminal history. For two decades the victims' families have had to endure criminal appeals, books, newspaper investigations, documentaries, and films, all of which cast doubt on the guilt of the alleged killers of their loved ones.

Bernard today

I'm older now, and I think about their kids, and how they have to live not knowing what really happened to their fathers. That's why I set about trying to end the torment. I interviewed everyone involved for a book, The Final Word, which has now been made into a documentary. I needed to tell the truth about how and why the Essex Boys died.

We lived through turbulent times back then. Ours were hateful, miserable existences—totally the opposite of the glamorized garbage churned out in the movies about us which totally misrepresent how we really lived our lives and destroyed the lives of others. Twenty years later, it's time to move on.

A wrap of MDMA. Photo by Michael Segalov, from 'I Walked Around Bestival Asking to Test People's Drugs'

This post originally appeared on VICE UK.

Gay drug users have long been seen as "early adopters" of new club drugs. The powders, pills, and bottled liquids sniffed and swallowed in the cubicles of gay clubs today will be the substances passed around the straight clubs of tomorrow—or so the thinking goes.

In reality, as we enter what could be described as a new, post-clubbing era, the days of drug trends trickling down from cutting edge dance floors—gay or straight—to the wider population appear to be numbered.

In June of 2013, VICE published a report on the phenomenon that would later become known as "chemsex"—groups of gay men injecting crystal meth and mephedrone at private orgies arranged on dating apps. Since then, there have been academic studies on the subject, new clinics set up to deal with the fallout, and public health warnings. A VICE documentary film, CHEMSEX, will be released in UK theaters on Friday.

One thing worth noting about Britain's chemsex scene two years down the line is that, fortunately, it's remained a minority sport. It's true these extreme sex parties are now bigger in Manchester than they were in 2013, but as yet chemsex has not rippled out to the wider gay, drug-using community. What's more, there are scant reports of this practice spreading to straight drug users.

That last point is reflective of a broader change in how gay club culture relates to the world outside of it. Neither mephedrone nor GHB—two of the most popular substances on the gay clubbing scene—have become particularly fashionable among mainstream clubbers, who have fallen back in love with MDMA. Crystal meth, a drug with a high prevalence in many parts of the world, remains largely confined to the gay community in the UK. And poppers and viagra, the other mainstays of gay club nights, aren't exactly all the rage at Ministry or the Warehouse Project.

Yet, there was a time when gay drug users—particularly those on the club scene—set the pace. In fact, nightlife as we know it is owed to a dance revolution invented by gay black men in America. It was in venues such as the Warehouse in Chicago and the Paradise Garage in New York in the late 1970s and early 1980s where the cocktail of MDMA-enhanced house and garage music was first brewed. Until then, the use of ecstasy—synthesized by Alexander Shulgin in his backyard lab in California in the late 1970s—had been largely restricted to small cliques of new-agers and psychologists' patients.

These clubs were intense places, sanctuaries where the oppressed could dance, get high, and forget about their worries for 24 hours. They attracted British pop stars such as Marc Almond, Mark Moore, Steve Strange, George Michael, and Boy George, who all spread the love back home. Almond took ecstasy for the first time in New York in the early-80s and loved it; the result was Soft Cell's debut album, Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret, said to be the first British ecstasy record.

Eventually, the drug trickled down to the clubs and football terraces of England, as well as the sandy beaches of Ibiza, and—surfing on a wave of acid house—became fully democratized during the second Summer of Love in 1988. "The biggest gift gays gave to club culture was house and garage 30 years ago, from the black gay clubs in America," says legendary club promoter Patrick Lilley, who ran LGBTQ activist organization Queer Nation.

Gay clubbers were early adopters of ketamine in the late-1990s, when it was commonly used as a partner to cocaine under the name "CK1," after the Calvin Klein perfume. As the drug filtered into the mainstream it was snorted by straight clubbers to bring them down from the high of MDMA or ecstasy. By 2012, after being virtually unheard of in the UK before the turn of the millennium, ketamine had become more popular than cocaine and a rival to ecstasy on the student and festival scenes.

And it wasn't just drugs and music where gay clubs innovated. The concept of the after-hours club—an inevitable result of the passion for drug-taking and excess that has characterized gay club culture—was pioneered by the iconic gay night Trade at Turnmills in London.

A night at Trade. Photo courtesy of Trade

So why have gay clubbers historically been seen as the early adopters of new psychoactive substances? Partly, it's because they're more prolific drug takers than straight clubbers. According to the British Crime Survey, gay people—and gay men, particularly—are three times more likely to take drugs than straight people. They take them more frequently and from a wider menu of substances, and are also bigger drinkers.

The normal clubbing experience is intensified in gay clubs because of what American therapist Alan Downs calls "velvet rage"—many of those on the dance floor will have escaped to city bars and clubs after suffering years of repression and bigotry. The music and the drugs offer a release and a place of sanctuary almost unimaginable to most clubbers just trying to shake off the working week.

"Gay people are more prolific and adventurous drug takers," says Professor Fiona Measham, who has spent two decades interviewing people in gay clubs in London and Manchester. "There is a work hard, play hard attitude, a willingness to experiment with different drugs and an openness about that."

There is a strong common bond between people who may have had similar experiences growing up—i.e. coming out and being discriminated against—and the unity around drug taking and dancing in clubs is amplified by these collective emotions. Measham points out that academics have compared the unifying intensity, hedonism, and liberation in gay clubs to the spirituality and escapism of historical "dances of death," rituals used to cope with pain and plague in the medieval era.

The more shit people go through, the more willing they are to take risks and do impulsive things, which in the context of the gay club scene means experimenting with drugs and sex. Gay clubs offer a more important role for their guests than their straight equivalents, because the stakes are higher.

"Gay men, historically, have had their lives, recreation, and sex associated with risk and danger and disentitlement," says David Stuart, head of substance use at 56 Dean Street, a charity helping gay drug users in London's Soho. "Communities do inherit historical and communal trauma, a kind of mass post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The most common symptom of PTSD is experiencing a constant sense of danger and risk."

Related: Watch the trailer for 'CHEMSEX,' released in UK theaters on Friday, December 4.

It's this context in which chemsex grew, being not only a representation of the dark side of this hedonism, but an indicator that gay club culture is dying a death.

"There is spin we are all party animals having a fantastic time, but my experience is many of us are repressed, stressed, and self-medicating with drugs," says Matthew Todd, editor of Attitude magazine. "In my 20s, going to Fridge and Astoria seemed more happy. Now, it's more intense, harder, and more sexual."

The number of nightclubs in the UK has halved in a decade, a trend that started with gay venues. The roll call of iconic but now dead gay bars and clubs is a long one, and it's not just a result of gentrification and stricter licensing; attendances are also down. Why bother going to your local club if you can meet people, buy drugs, and arrange a weekend-long orgy using an app on your phone? As David Stuart says: "The shameless queuing in nightclubs for drugs has become the shameless sharing of them online."

If a new drug—an updated ecstasy, say, or the next ketamine—were to appear tomorrow, would we see it first on the gay clubbing scene? "Five years ago I would say yes, but now it's far less likely," says Professor Measham. "Because of the internet, people don't need to hear about drugs from trendsetters who are part of some fashion and music zeitgeist. Today, a new drug is more likely to rise up from a lab in Amsterdam with some clever internet branding than some uber-subculture scene."

In his 1997 book, Altered State: The Story of Ecstasy Culture and Acid House, Matthew Collin observed how through the 1970s, 80s, and 90s "black and gay clubs consistently served as breeding grounds for new developments in popular culture, laboratories where music, drugs, and sex are interbred to create stylistic innovations that slowly filter through to straight, white society."

Now, it seems, those days are well and truly over.

Follow Max Daly on Twitter.

CHEMSEX is released in the UK on Friday, December 4. To see a full list of theaters showing the film, click here.

CHEMSEX will be released on DVD and On-Demand in the UK on January 11.

To read the rest of the articles from our Chemsex Week—a series exploring the people, issues, and stories in and around the world of chemsex—click here.

Lads, circa 2012. Photo by Kieran Cudlip

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Back in the heady days of 2012, under the shadow of a giant Mobot, the nation was gripped by one crushing, all-encompassing terror: the Uni Lad.

The Uni Lads were as maligned and debated a group as there has ever been in this country. A stateless band of no-ideologues, pumped full of supermarket lager, and drunk on creatine. They sang on buses and pissed on war memorials; they studied in the day and chugged their own piss in the evening. Like the characters in Platoon, they were from no place in particular, going no place in particular; a generation of young men promised everything by New Labour and given nothing by the Big Society. They were young, jobless, and godless, slouching towards a 2:2. They put the shits up a nation that thought it was above all that.

Looking back over the op-eds of the time, you can feel this palpable sense of fear that much of the media had of the Uni Lads, or their lesser-educated splinter group, the True Lads. It was as if journalists, editors, and shit-sayers were living through a constant waking nightmare in which a group of buffed-up sports science students in shutter shades marched down Stoke Newington Church Street, forcing beer funnels down everyone's throats and using the word "gay" as a pejorative.

Entire careers were built on fretting about their imminent threat. They were the broadsheet anti-darlings, an ever-reliable content provider through their various atrocities: sexual assault, slut-dropping, blackface, Neknomations. There was even a "summit" called to discuss how best to tackle "lad culture," but all that really came of it was this picture.

For a couple years of my life, I became very involved in this scene, both observing from a distance and spending a fair bit of time in the trenches. I drank a dirty pint, I got called a cunt in song form by the Cardiff University Rugby Team, I got stabbed with an epi-pen, lamped by a trainee marine. It became part of me. I developed a near-total immunity to Jägermeister; I once took somebody on a date to the Sports Café, not seeing what might be wrong with that. At night I dreamt of banter. I was in way too deep. Had I been a detective in a police procedural drama, they would've pulled me back into uniform patrol for being "too close to the case."

But a few years later, the smoke has cleared, and what we're left with is something very different.

The places where you'll see this shift most noticeably are on the sites where much of the language, the codes, and the ideas that defined the movement came from. The Lad Bible and its inferior cousin Uni Lad were always big, but they've now become part of the established media landscape, with Lad Bible now the 12th most popular site in the UK (above both theGuardian and theTelegraph, and only one place below Twitter).

Not only has the company moved towards the establishment in a corporate sense, setting up proper offices and going on a massive recruitment drive, it's also moved away from the boorish yet eminently shareable (and sellable) content that defined its halcyon days. And against all expectations, it's shifting its mindset to a new-left perspective, where Owen Jones or Jeremy Corbyn or Frankie Boyle is every bit as much of a legend as Adam Richman, Mario Balotelli, and the thousands of unknown lad soldiers pranking their girlfriends with exploding ketchup and throwing Goldeneye-themed stag-dos.

Look over the recent uploads and it's clear that not only has the content shifted, the comments have too. The Lads, who were once keen to comment "must do better #SHITLAD" or the same tired Patrick Stewart memes on pieces like "How to Pull a Fresher" seemed to have picked up a copy of Chomsky's Hegemony Or Survival (or at least Owen Jones' Chavs) and are now churning out the same new-left truisms that you'd usually see shared on an NUS delegate's Twitter feed.

The most-liked comment on a recent piece about ISIS and the bombings in Syria was one which accused the US of hypocrisy. The most-liked comment on a piece about a man who spent 44 years in prison for a crime he didn't commit advocates sentencing for police officers who murder people. They have essentially become Bahar Mustafa in a Jack & Jones hoodie. It's quite a turnaround.

Read on Broadly: Why More Women Are Having Sex On Drugs

So what happened? Well, I think the key to understanding this shift is imagining that the Uni Lad/Lad Bible sites are a personification of the demographic that they were originally aimed at.

Forget about them as websites run by teams of people with editors, advertisers, interns, and front-of-house managers. Instead, imagine them as a young man who would have been in his second year at Leeds University in 2012 and is now three years older. Because, in their informal, social-media-led style, they were always supposed to come across as somebody you might be friends with on Facebook, rather than a media platform. That was the genius of them: that they seemed like somebody you might know. They were started in British universities by people of university age, for people in universities. And now they're simply reflecting the changes that generation may have gone through.

Because nobody—not even members of the Bullingdon Club—can stay a higher education hellcat forever; that lack of responsibility to anyone else other than yourself will eventually leave you. You will become concerned with your neighbors in an empathetic way, rather than merely trying to out-drink them on the Otley Run Pub Crawl. Things like world conflict, antibiotic immunity, food banks, and Yanis Varoufakis will enter your mental sphere as you begin to worry more about your own mortality, the lives of other people around you, and your children 's children. Your six-pack will become harder to maintain, and gonorrhoea will become all-too-real a threat. He might be living the same lifestyle, only with £6 Peronis replacing £1 Carlsbergs, but things will weigh heavier on the Uni Lad as he leaves university.

The culture around them, too, has shifted. Craft ales have replaced those luminous blue cocktails; Jamie xx has replaced Swedish House Mafia; Ricky Hill has replaced Alex Reid as the man everyone wants to look like. Male youth culture has been both hardened and softened—you're no longer supposed to shave every day, but you're also no longer supposed to flush your best mate's head down a toilet when he's passed out.

You'll still see gangs of pampered, disenfranchised young men on the pedestrianized streets of Britain and the promenades of Platja d'en Bossa, but by and large they have become older, more discerning, and their younger brothers are no longer interested in the gauche, lurid, homoerotic culture their elders thrived upon.

A lad in 2012. Photo by Kieran Cudlip

For people slightly younger than the original Lads, a new kind of aspirational urbanism has become the feeling of the time: Huaraches, balloons, bucket hats, swegways, Wavey Garms, YouTube hauling, "That's Not Me," and a summer trip to Croatia rather than Shagaluf. It's just as macho, but a lot less camp. Youth culture simply takes itself more seriously these days—and as much as I bemoan the loss of the simple, shallow pleasures of the Uni Lad lifestyle, you can't help but think it 's a good thing for wider culture. It's OK to be cool again, and that means things can keep moving forward at the rate we all want.

But part of me keeps wondering about what happened to the original Uni Lads—about what became of their hopes and dreams, and whether they could really keep that lifestyle up. So I started digging into the social media lives of the ones I spent a fateful night out with in Newcastle in the spring of 2012. The changes were subtle, but totally noticeable. Many of them have become gym employees, rather than gym bunnies. They now help the same people they use to pull to maximize their potential, in a friendly and encouraging manner.

Instead of the muscles and funnels, their profile pictures are of themselves posing with their girlfriends (they all have girlfriends now) by the Blue Lagoon in Reykjavik, sitting on the backs of camels, smiling and looking stable and happy and as far away from those broadsheet pariahs as you can possibly imagine.

In essence, the Uni Lads grew up and become their own dads, just as many a mod, punk, raver, or emo kid had to do before them. They look quieter, more reflective, like they've seen enough, like they might not just have the energy any more. But at night I'm sure that urge to rage at the moon, shirtless, on an imaginary bucking bronco, still follows them around as those nights in with First Dates and a Franco Manca become ever more frequent.

Then I looked through my own social media feed and realized that very little has changed at all. The same bars, clubs, and people are there, just in different trainers. There 's a bit less stupidity than there used to be. For all the scorn from the London cognoscenti directed at the Lads, it's them who eventually grew up, not us.

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Women at the Malibu Conservation Camp #13 in California's prison system. All photos by Tobin Yelland

A short, winding drive from the glorious beaches of Malibu, amidst the private vineyards of the Santa Monica Mountains, a group of several dozen women stand in line as a supervisor calls them forward one by one.

"Vasquez."

Samantha Vasquez, 26, steps forward. She pauses to stamp her heavy black work boot in the dirt, which gives her supervisor just enough time to match her face to the photo ID he holds in his hand.

"Vasquez," she replies. Stamp.

Like the rest of the women in line, Vasquez is an inmate of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) at Malibu Conservation Camp #13. Also like the roughly 75 other women at the camp, Vasquez's hair is pulled back and pinned into place, revealing the tattoo on the left side of her neck memorializing her daughter's father. Her eyebrows and her makeup are immaculate. She had never imagined becoming a firefighter before coming to camp, but now she's found her calling.

"I love it," she declares, adding that she wants to continue the work after she paroles. "I love the cutting, I love the chainsaw, I love being on the mountains. It's one of the places where you feel free. You feel like you're giving back."

The one-by-one identification and boot-stamping are part of the daily ritual known as "crossing over"—that is, crossing over from state prison supervision to that of the Los Angeles County Fire Department (LACFD), which jointly runs the camp with the CDCR. Malibu is one of three conservation camps—more commonly referred to as "fire camps," since the majority of the work inmates do is fighting and helping to prevent wildfires—where female inmates can serve their time in California. Each day an inmate serves in fire camp counts as two days toward the completion of her sentence. In a state with the third-highest number of imprisoned women (Texas and Florida have the most) in a nation that incarcerates more of its citizens than any other on earth, the firefighting female inmates of Malibu enjoy a genuine departure from the typically brutal carceral policies of the "golden gulag."

Watch: The Real Nancy Botwin?

California's inmate firefighter program was established in 1946, and the first women joined in 1983 (at least one other state, Nevada, has its own female fire camps). Today, approximately 225 of the program's 4,000 participants are women, according to CDCR spokesperson Bill Sessa. They are divided between three camps: Malibu, Puerta La Cruz, and Rainbow.

Getting a spot at fire camp isn't easy. An inmate must have earned "minimum custody" (low-risk) status, have no more than seven years left to serve, and have shown good behavior in prison. "We rely on teamwork on the fire lines, where an inmate's ability to work with other people on the team can be a life or death situation," says Sessa. Inmates must pass rigorous physical fitness tests for admission—fighting wildfires takes substantial strength and endurance, and the ability to go with little or no sleep for up to 24 hours. Fire camp inmates can range in age from late teens to mid-60s. At Malibu, the oldest current inmate is 52.

"Females do a quality job," LACFD Foreman Matt Stiffler tells me. "At times the production level is less, but the quality is significantly better with females, generally speaking." Another LACFD employee made the same observation within earshot of one of the crews, noting that the women are more meticulous, though they move slower. Later, one of the women approached me to let me know that she resented that comment—we move fast, she said.

There are certain refrains that come up again and again around California's prison fire camps. One is that the program is a "win-win-win," which I hear from both LACFD and CDCR personnel at the camps. That sentiment comes up in sociologist Philip Goodman's 2012 scholarly work on the subject, " 'Another Second Chance': Rethinking Rehabilitation through the Lens of California's Fire Camps."

The first win is for the CDCR, which gets positive PR from the program and can offer some corrections officers a relatively sweet gig at camp. Steve Schlund is the most senior officer at Malibu, with 15 years under his belt. Before that, he worked in conventional prison settings with male inmates, where he became accustomed to daily violence and struggled to keep the strain of the prison environment separate from his home life. "You got used to it," he says. "Like, 'Oh, it's just another stabbing or just another fight.' But there were days you'd go home very stressed out—anybody who says there weren't, they'd be lying to you." At Malibu, he tells me, it's more peaceful. The women are better able to get along across racial lines than the male inmates he worked with, and the only thing he has to complain about is that his senior status doesn't offer him scheduling privileges.

The second win is for the inmates. The food is better than in conventional prison. And the wages, though abysmal, are higher than any other prison job in California, according to CDCR's Bill Sessa: Women earn about $2 per day at fire camp and an extra $1 an hour when working on the fire line, and an officer at Malibu told me that CDCR is considering raising that to $3 an hour.

Several of the women tell me they are treated with respect at fire camp, particularly by LACFD staff, in stark contrast to the treatment in the prisons they transferred from (inmates can only be assigned to fire camp from prison, but not directly sentenced there). They get to be outside every day, and when there's a fire in another part of California, they travel. Their families can visit without enduring hours of wait time, invasive searches, and grim, institutional visiting rooms. And they get to feel they are "giving something back"—another common fire camp refrain. And there is no doubt that they are: Fire camp crews are dispatched to every brush fire that LACFD gets sent out to, says Captain Keith Mora. In 2014, that number came to 453 fires. Even when there are no fires to contain, the women perform intense physical labor five days a week on various conservation projects.

Every woman I speak to, both those hand-picked by CDCR and the ones I approached myself, expresses gratitude in the strongest terms for being at fire camp. Indeed, close to half a dozen women say they plan to continue the work when they parole. (One LACFD official tells me that this might be more challenging than inmates expect because many fire-fighting organizations will not hire anyone with a felony conviction. But some inmates and CDCR staff are still in touch with women who have paroled and gone on to do firefighting or conservation work anyway.) The women describe a feeling of being part of something larger than themselves, feeling part of a team, proud of their own competence and endurance, feeling transformed by the military-style structure and discipline at camp.

Each woman I speak to describes having undergone a personal transformation to one degree or another, often in the context of becoming a better mother and a more positive role model for their children. "When I first went to prison, I was a wreck," Samantha Vasquez says. "This program has taught me how to work hard and how to appreciate what I work for." When she paroles, she says her focus will be on her daughter. "I have this little person looking at me. She's going to copy everything I do, not what I say. So if I show her, 'OK, mommy has to go to work now, this is what you do,' she'll know this is what you do, you go to work so you can pay your bills."

Alicia Gilbert

Alicia Gilbert, 35, is a petite blond mother of three and bursts with friendly energy. She's been at Malibu for two and a half years, making her one of the camp's longest-term residents, and is a sawyer (or chainsaw operator), the highest-responsibility position on a crew. Her family visits twice a month, making the drive from Santa Barbara County. "My kids think it's pretty cool," she says of the work. "A few times during their visits here, the fire alarm has gone off so I've had to jump in the bus. My littlest one is three, and one time she tried to run onto the bus with us," she laughs. Before admission to fire camp, Gilbert was at the California Institution for Women in Corona, an environment so grim she would not allow her children to visit. "They don't know anything else but this place, which is good."

The third "win" is for the state, and here is where some prison reform and labor advocates believe that things get murky, to put it gently. CDCR estimates that the fire program saves California $80-$100 million yearly by employing inmates to fight fires and do other conservation work. (California Attorney General Kamala Harris recently had to do some damage control after her lawyers argued in court that a federally-ordered prison release order for nonviolent criminals would cut too deeply into the cheap labor pool provided by inmates.)

"It's not just slave labor, it's very dangerous slave labor," argues Paul Wright, editor of Prison Legal News and executive director of the Human Rights Defense Center. For its part, CDCR does not officially track injury rates among fire camp inmates, and a group of LAFCD personnel tell me that the worst injury they know of occurred when a male inmate was struck in the leg with a rolling rock about the size of a bowling ball. They said they had never seen loss of life nor limb.

"This is a prime example of how prison slavery undermines salaries and wages for non-prisoners," Wright argues. "If they weren't having the prisoners do the work for whatever pittance they pay them, they would be paying non-prisoners 15-20 dollars an hour plus benefits." LAFCD Fire Captain Mike Velazquez agrees with the estimate, saying that a typical salary for similar work would be around $40,000 per year.

Asked if he sees any upside to the fire camp program, Wright retorts, "I'm not sure I've ever met anyone who saw anything uplifting in the financial exploitation of people. That's like saying slavery taught African Americans a work ethic."

The women at Malibu are familiar with Wright's argument, but their day-to-day lives unfold on a different plane than abstract ideas of justice, no matter how elementary or irrefutable. Jelena Supica, 26, is tall, remarkably poised, with a military bearing. "It is controversial," she says. "You could look at it that way, as being exploited for labor. But you've got to look at it as the glass half full, because I was a lost little girl before I came here. This program is helping us to become helpful members of society. It's beautiful. If anything, they should open more camps like these." Supica wonders why there is no camp for female juveniles, only males—she sees that as a squandered opportunity.

Jelena Supica

CDCR typically doesn't track data on recidivism rates by institution or program, because "it's too simplistic a measure," according to Bill Sessa. Only one report in recent years has done so, and it indicates that the recidivism rates of camp parolees, male and female, are among the lowest of any program—52 percent, compared to roughly 63 percent among the general inmate population. Goodman, the sociologist, noted surprise at how "strikingly disinterested" CDCR is in comparing recidivism rates between fire camp and general inmate population parolees. Instead of CDCR's usual focus on recidivism as an indicator of success, Goodman argued, the focus is on something less tangible: "[Inmates, staff, and administrators] view the camp program as an enabler of change for those inclined to engage in self-transformation. The primary focus is therefore on moral, as opposed to actuarial, reform."

This points to the strange central tension of the fire camp project on the whole. For the individual inmate, fire camp is understandably sought after: the respect given, the higher wages earned, the relative autonomy, the better food, the access to visitors. On an anecdotal level, on an individual level, fire camp can be a life-changer. But what does it mean to celebrate any part of a regime as troubled as the California prison system, one that uses the word "rehabilitation" in its name but offers but offers only about 3 percent of inmates the opportunity to take part in fire camp?

For female inmates in particular, there's another troubling layer. During my visit, several inmates and even one LACFD employee at Malibu matter-of-factly refer to women serving time there who are not guilty of a crime. "We're all here for a reason, even if we might not have done the crime," as Jelena Supica puts it. She's talking about women convicted of conspiracy charges on the basis that they lived with a husband or boyfriend involved in drug sales, or were otherwise " caught in the net" of sweeping, draconian drug policy. Whether these women have been granted an opportunity to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and start over, or whether they've become slaves of the state due to a series of unfortunate choices, depends on whom you ask.

Follow Lauren Lee White on Twitter.

Lots and lots of marijuana plants. Photo via Flickr user Mark

Read: Listen to the New Animal Collective Single, 'Floridada'

On Thursday, a Quebec judge called out Canada's "ridiculous" marijuana laws, noting that lawyers and others who work in the legal system are probably getting high themselves. The judge, Pierre Chevalier, then handed down a $1 fine to man who was prosecuted for owning 30 marijuana plants.

Mario Larouche, 46, suffers from pain stemming from a car accident; he was found in possession of the plants illegally after he tried unsuccessfully to get a medical marijuana prescription from his doctor. According to Le Droit, the crown counsel in his case requested he be jailed for 90 days and ordered to pay a $250 fine.

Chevalier dismissed that recommendation and said Larouche was the victim of a system that "does not give people access to a natural medicine that goes back centuries."

Characterizing current marijuana laws as "obsolete," he added that there's little doubt that crown attorneys, defense lawyers, and judges are among the 50 percent of Canadians who use weed.

"I think it's time we look much more leniently things that happen."

He also expressed approval of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's plans to legalize weed.

"We've stagnated on this in Canada because, politically, the people were probably not ready for laws to evolve to this level," he said, adding previous politicians have been too afraid of losing votes to change the laws.

Members of Quebec's Liberal government have expressed concern over legalization. Public Security Minister Lise Thériault said public safety needs to be a priority when the new laws roll out.

With taxes, Larouche was fined a grand total of $1.30.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

Tarantino speaking about the police controversy with Bill Maher in November. Thumbnail image via Flickr user Sir Mildred Pierce

Read: The Largest Police Union in the Country Ominously Says It Has a 'Surprise' in Store for Quentin Tarantino

The New York Police Department recently launched a sort of rhetorical vendetta against Quentin Tarantino after the director spoke out against police brutality during a rally in Manhattan.

Now the fine folks over at the New York Post have joined in.

The NYPD initially called for a Tarantino movie boycott after the filmmaker (sort of) called cops who kill unarmed people of color "murderers," and then the largest police union in the country followed up with some vague threats about how they had a "surprise" in store for him.

Enter the Post, which, as usual, is pretty blatantly on the side of the police. The paper published a story on Sunday alleging that Tarantino has been lying for years about doing jail time in his 20s to look like a "tough guy."

The director has long discussed a week-long stint in lock-up for unpaid tickets stemming from minor traffic violations, and his accounts have varied a bit over the years. But the Post claims the whole tale—which is allegedly "key to his creation myth"—to be a complete fabrication.

The tabloid cited the LA County Sheriff's Department, which couldn't find any "evidence that Mr. Tarantino was ever incarcerated" in their jail system. Of course, "no evidence" doesn't necessarily mean Tarantino was full of shit—he's yet to comment on the Post story. But hey, at least the paper got a good pun in, calling the director's jail story "Pulp Fiction." Zing!

Once again, Britain is getting ready for war. The Prime Minister is expected to hold a vote on bombing Syria as early as tomorrow; members of the political class have taken to the airwaves, putting on their serious voices, and saying things like "International Community" and "A Compelling Case"; and a UN Security Council Resolution has been used to give the whole project a veneer of legitimacy. All we need before we start dropping bombs is a Stop the War Coalition protest in a neatly demarcated space outside Downing Street, complete with speeches from the left's big hitters and ambient art-rocker Brian Eno.

And that's what we got this weekend. Unlike Stop the War's famous march before the 2003 invasion of Iraq—notable for being the biggest anti-war protest of all time before a war even started—the sense of fatalistic gloom arrived early, hovering over the speakers' podium. A feeling of fatigue was detectible in the crowd too—except among the 100 or so who broke free and organized a sit-down on Whitehall—perhaps because the war everyone there wants to stop is already happening.

The US-led coalition of 12 nations has led over 7,000 air strikes in ISIS territory in Syria since August last year (killing suspiciously few civilians in the process), and Britain is already bombing and droning northern Iraq in coordination with Kurdish forces: a tactic that's unlikely to be successful as long as ally Turkey continues shelling them.

Since the Paris attacks—which were committed by Europeans, not Syrian refugees—France and the US have intensified sorties over Syria, and Russia has even started using the odd chemical weapon to brighten things up. While this has boosted the confidence of the Syrian Army, it has done little to threaten ISIS: The caliphate continues to consolidate power, monopolize violence, and think of new feature ideas for the next issue of Dabiq, its monthly online propaganda magazine.

Should Parliament vote "Yes" to joining the aerial bombardment of Syria, British ministers will no longer feel "embarrassed" (MP Crispin Blunt's actual word) for "outsourcing" (David Cameron's actual word) their killing in Syria to the big important countries.

So, the reasons for war are clear: It's about stopping generals making jokes about us at the NATO Christmas dinner; it's about preventing Michael Fallon from feeling left out, looking down sheepishly at his Brussels sprouts while the other defense secretaries makes in-jokes about their time together in "Operation Inherent Resolve."

But what about the arguments against? On Saturday, I headed down to Whitehall to ask some of the 4,000 people protesting for their thoughts. The whole affair is creating a headache for Jeremy Corbyn, who is hoping for some grassroots support in his attempts to convince his party to oppose the war. Various members of his shadow cabinet support the war, which is causing a lot of arguing within the party. Since people standing around with placards seems to be the definition of grassroots, I asked them about Labour's handling of the situation, too.

Nick

VICE: Nick, what brought you out here today?
Nick: I'm here because making lives in Syria more miserable is not going to solve the problem. I'm being very selfish: It makes us ever more a target for terrorism. But I think the real reason is bombing never solves any problem in the world at all.

So how do we combat this apocalyptic death cult of pure unadulterated evil?
I do not know. It's a battle of ideas, and it's a long process in terms of trying to persuade those of the Islamic faith that fundamentalism is not the way to go. There's also a battle to be had in persuading, for example, Saudi Arabia, in being more liberal in its views and other countries that formalize more extreme forms of Islam into their legal system.

Jeremy Corbyn said he's going to try and use this movement to build a grassroots opposition to the war.
I'd rather not comment on that... ... to be a bit mealy-mouthed about it: Jeremy Corbyn is a man of great principle. But I don't think he's a unifying force in the Labour Party.

Toby

VICE: Hi Toby. Why are you here?
Toby: I completely disagree with bombing Syria. I think it just perpetuates terrorism and it makes us responsible for terrorism—and we shouldn't be responsible for it.

Do you think they're gonna bomb anyway in spite of all the people who don't want it?
Yes.

Is that depressing?
I think it's just, you know, we live in democracy and it's our right to protest and we should. It lets people in other countries know that we're against what our government is doing and shows that there's a failure somewhere in the democratic process.

Carole, Ian, and a Bearded Man from East Ham

VICE: Hi guys. What's the point of opposing the bombing of Syria if we're basically already bombing Syria?
Bearded Man: Because we don't want to escalate it. There's a terrible civil war going on in Syria, we should be helping refugees, not bombing them!

But don't the attacks in Paris make this necessary?
That's a load of nonsense! If anyone wants to commit criminal acts and do whatever, they'll do it. That's about policing and intelligence.

Ian: Actually it'll mean there are more terrorist attacks. The people who are being bombed, ISIS, are actually in favor of being bombed. It makes them martyrs. They're not afraid of death, are they?

Do you sympathize with Corybn's position right now?
Carole: I'm not a member of the Labour Party either but I paid my £3 to vote for him and so far he's been excellent. I'm an old woman now—the same age as Corbyn—and I know what war's about. We haven't got the right in anybody's name to commit all these young people to another war.

Bearded Man: Who do you write for?
It's called VICE.

Bearded Man: Vice! Carol knows all about vice. Ask her what she got up to in the 60s.

Carol: I'll tell you something about vice. When you get to my age, you've got two alternatives: either you pay for it or you have a vivid imagination. My imagination is boundless.

Thanks Carol.

Kim and Josie, from Gloucestershire

VICE: Where have you guys come from and why?
Kim: I took the train all the way down from a tiny place in Gloucestershire because the last time there was a big protest, before the Iraq war, my children were a lot younger and I couldn't come. And every time I heard something about it afterwards, I thought, 'I should've come.' Not because I think being here will make a difference but because it means whatever little power I've got, I've done something.

What about the argument that the Paris attacks means we need to do something?
It's not a good argument. Violence doesn't solve violence. That said I don't know what the answer is. But if I'm stood in my cosy kitchen and I hear on Radio 4 that they've just bombed a school... I don't want it to be as a result of my government.

Josie, what do you think of Corbyn?
Josie: I'm a big fan. I think he can make it through to the next election.

What about the others in his party who want him to resign over this?
The idea of a party whip and everyone in the party having the same beliefs is ridiculous. There should be internal conflict. You want there to be debate not just across parties but within them. It's not something that invalidates the leader.

Kasya (pictures center), from London, was defying the police and sitting down in the road, blocking the traffic.

VICE: Hi Kasya. Why are you here?
Kasya: I'm here because dropping missiles in Syria isn't going to solve our problems. It's a short-term answer to a long-term problem. This has been happening for long enough... starting another way in another country is not going to solve the problem. We need peaceful solutions.

And how long are you going to sit here?
As long as it takes!

Bashir

VICE: Why did you come here?
Bashir: I didn't. Well, I didn't know this was going on. (laughs)

Well what do you think of it?
I just saw the signs..."Don't Bomb Syria." People need to be aware of what's going on in the world. The things that are happening in Syria are really bad.

Will bombing make things worse?
Of course. That's how ISIS started. When people lose their homes, lose their family, they get angry. And they need to put their frustration somewhere. And this is where it starts. Then things like Paris happen. It'll lead to more violence.

Barney, Sam, and Ifti Shah from the Revolutionary Communist Group

[Owen Jones finishes his speech on the podium]

VICE: Do you like Owen Jones?
Ifti Shah: He's a problem. He's an apologist for imperialism. He hasn't said once that Britain is the cause of all these global problems. He hasn't once talked about capitalism. He hasn't once talked about racism. He's just playing his part in the mainstream bullshit politics that this country is a professional at disseminating. Fuck this man! Fuck Britain! Fuck the British state!

Sam: Owen just quoted Einstein who said: "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing again and again and expecting different results." So he's attributing to the British state the assumption that it's trying to solve the problem by bombing ISIL and Syria. The implication is Britain is just getting it wrong and they expected it to work.

What are Britain's real motivations?
They don't give a shit about the people of the Middle East. They want to control the region.

Georgia, from New Cross

VICE: Why are you here?
Georgia: Just because I think we're making the same mistake we've made a million times. It's just repetition, repetition, repetition. I don't understand it.

So how do we defeat ISIS?
Not through bombing. Things have gotten way worse since we started bombing. We're already bombing in Iraq. I don't understand the logic of bombing for peace.

Some protesters

Zuhair came with her two children. She is Syrian. She did not want to be photographed.

So you think Syrians don't want more Western bombs?
Zuhair: Absolutely. We don't want another war. We saw what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan and everywhere, and we don't want another war. The war will not sort out ISIS.

What do you think of the way Jeremy Corbyn's handled his response? He's looking to grassroots support like this to oppose the war.
I think it's absolutely fantastic. We all have to stand by him. I think he has a big challenge in parliament and I'm absolutely with him. We need to support him more and educate people more so they know what war is about. We have a lot of evidence that war doesn't sort out the problem at all.

Was it important that your children came here too?
Absolutely. It's very important for them to see what's happening. They are too small to understand. They are very young. But they need to see. They have cousins in Syria. And they need to see what is happening.

Follow Yohann on Twitter.

Follow Chris on Twitter.

Read: Why You Actually Should Care About Hillary Clinton's Damn Emails

According to some new poll results from last week, America trusts Hillary Clinton to fight terrorism more than Donald Trump, or any Republican presidential nominee (although Jeb Bush is within the margin of error). That's especially good news for Clinton as a Democrat, since polls typically show that voters trust the Republicans more than her party when it comes to keeping the US safe from groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda.

But as with any issue during a presidential election, it's impossible to know whether that kind of trust is earned, or based on the emotions Americans feel after watching campaign commercials.

But Clinton spent a little over four years as America's top diplomat, and in that period of time, her role as Secretary of State put her front-and-center in America's anti-terrorism efforts. That also means the public is entitled by law to dig through all of her correspondence from that time, as long as doing so doesn't jeopardize national security.

The full record of her emails from that time still only exists on a private email server she set up—a legally questionable state of affairs. But after some legal grappling with VICE News, the State Department has released thousands of her emails, revealing—to anyone committed to, as VICE News' FOIA expert Jason Leopold put it, "actually sitting down, and fucking reading every goddamn motherfucking email"—what went on behind the scenes when Hillary Clinton was the one shaping foreign policy.

Jason is one of the few people who actually does just that—or at least gets pretty fucking close. Since he uses the same coffee machine as me, after I read those poll results, I thought I should sit down and ask him what the emails can tell us about Clinton's potential presidency, and specifically how a future President Hillary would deal with the terrorist threats facing the US.

VICE: You probably saw this new poll that shows that more than any other 2016 candidate, America trusts Hillary Clinton to fight terrorism. What do you think about that?
If anyone took the time to really dig into the emails, you can see that Hillary is very, very aggressive on issues revolving around terrorism, that she has not made any decisions—at least from what I've seen—unilaterally, on her own, on issues related to Al Qaeda.

So what was she up to?
During that first year when she was Secretary of State, she was not just becoming sort of adjusted or adjusting herself to this sort of position, she was also sort of laying the groundwork basically for what kind of president she would later end up being—particularly related to issues of foreign policy. As Secretary of State, she was the nation's top diplomat, and you can see this evolution of how aggressive she was.

Specifically, what did the emails say about her involvement in the war in Afghanistan?
she needed to be tougher; she needed to get behind the generals who were saying that we need to root out remnants of Al Qaeda and put the Taliban in its place. We look to her as this figure of someone who's sort of hawkish.

It's not wrong to think of her as a hawk though, is it?
She is very hawkish. But she's also somebody that takes a lot of advice, and had to be talked into it. She did have to be talked into it. There was another There were instances with Boko Haram and the fact of what they were doing, and that the US needed to step in and help, but nothing that sort of rose to the level of 'let's bring 'em to the US.'

I could see why people may look at this like, 'Oh yeah, now we like her!' But that's the whole point of the emails!

Are there clear examples in the emails that inform us about what actions she would take as the leader of the country?
Well, with Pakistan, she was told that the Pakistanis have to more aggressively pursue Al Qaeda—that's what she was told to say. That's exactly what she did. When she ended up visiting Pakistan on October 28, 2009, she accused Pakistani officials of giving safe haven to Al Qaeda terrorists. So that's what she said publicly, and weeks before she was getting all of this advice.

So when you imagine her coming up with a terror platform today, you picture her getting similarly hawkish advice from her friends?
You can certainly see how she would act as president. She has a lot of foreign policy experience. Particularly right now, you can look at what she's saying with regard to the Islamic State—that we need to be more aggressive—appealing to people who want to hear that, versus the current president, who is saying that it doesn't make sense to send troops out there.

So basically, she's complex? That's what we've learned?
You don't get a complete picture, but you get a pretty damned good picture of what she was like as the nation's top diplomat, and how she served in that position with regard to dealing with countries that were allegedly giving safe haven to terrorists, like Pakistan. And how she sought out advice. Then you've got another side of her—this complete human side—where here's a person who's actually seeing a young girl suffering human rights abuses. So yeah, you know, that's what makes this person a very complex character.

Careful man. You might accidentally make people like her.
I could see why people may look at this like, 'Oh yeah, now we like her!' But that's the whole point of the emails is that it underscores that she's a complex political figure, where she makes some decisions that the public might get behind and other decisions that might be cause for concern, particularly on foreign policy.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter. Follow Jason Leopold on Twitter too.

A few weeks ago a new Adventure Time video game was released, based on Pendleton Ward's award-winning series. I realize that the show has a rabid fan base, eager to buy up every last bit of Adventure Time paraphernalia they can get their paws on, but I would advise gamers and casual fans alike to leave this one on the shelf. It's not that Finn & Jake Investigations is the most hideous crock of licensed shit you can force yourself to sit down in front of—and to begin listing the worst offenders here would take us well into next week—it's just that it gets so dull, so fast. Which, for a game based on one of the brightest, most colorful and fantastically imaginative animated productions the 21st century has seen, is absolutely criminal.

But there's precedent to appreciate, which in turn tempers expectations. Investigations is the fourth major video game based on Adventure Time, and not one of them has come close to representing a worthy companion game to the show. The best game of the four is probably the first, Hey Ice King! Why'd You Steal Our Garbage?!, which mixed top-down map wandering with 2D sequences of jumping and fighting. The other two are better tossed into the Sea of Sure Death than slipped into a games console. Investigations avoids a dropkicking into the wet stuff, but at times it sure comes close to receiving a swift yet firm boot to the ass.

Firstly, it's worth noting this isn't a full-price, "premium" title that's going to show off the capabilities of your console of choice. There, said it, disclaimer-ed. But all the same, Investigations is for the most part an ugly game that likely wouldn't push the PS2's emotion engine. It adopts a 3D approach for its visuals and comes up short in almost every respect, save for the palette, which is as retina stinging as the cartoon. The models never look right, lip synching is non existent, environments are limited and at times downright bland, characters just disappear off the screen once their role is at an end, and it's sometimes incredibly difficult to notice important items or locations on the screen, and interact with them once they're spotted, thanks to janky detection—a problem given the nature of this game.

Related: Watch VICE's film on seeking out Mexico's top skate spots

Which I should probably explain, really. Investigations is essentially a point-and-click puzzle game where clues are found around the game world and used in conjunction with other characters and/or objects to progress each of the game's five stories, or cases. Sometimes these pick-ups need to be combined, so as to make one useful tool—you won't be able to paint a friendly NPC the colors of a penguin before you combine brushes with paint cans in your inventory. Solutions are occasionally incredibly unintuitive, leading to the random mashing together of items in fussy menus until something sticks. Need to clear a fire wolf from a basement? You're going to need some handlebars. If that all sounds fairly Monkey Island-y to you, bingo, you've gone and got it—fist-bump yourself, algebraically. It's just a shame that the show's humor isn't transferred to elevate Investigations' rudimentary gameplay.

There are smiles to be had across Investigations' ten-hour duration (you may finish it quicker, but I spent a lot of time missing obvious items, revisiting areas to scour for clues that weren't there, either because I'm an idiot or because the game really doesn't make itself clear), but no proper laughs. I'd not seen South Park in years before playing 2014's RPG based on the show, The Stick of Truth, but I howled hard in the face of its scatological humor. That's an adaptation that nailed its source lateral perfectly. For me, the funniest moment of Investigations was probably when I used Ice King's stinky pants as a stretchy catapult, to launch a slice of mushy pizza found under an easy chair into the beak of an errant penguin. I smirked, I guess, just as I did every time a penguin went "wenk" (because I'm British and it's almost rude). So there is fun here, just a little, but it's so cack-handedly conveyed. The show's original voice actors naturally struggle with a stunted script, while the player constantly has to overlook lazy stuff, like characters not facing each other when in conversation, in order to visualize what this game could have been. A little more love, a little longer in testing, and who knows.

When you're not pushing Finn (the human), always followed by Jake (the dog) although you never directly control him, into every extremity of every new area, so as to maximize your chances of picking up a vital clue, you're engaging in button-mashing combat sequences that rarely feel necessary, outside of lightly puzzle-based boss battles. I understand that fighting almost needs to be an element of any Adventure Time game—the show is at least partially inspired by Dungeons & Dragons, which I believe has its share of stabbing and the like—but here it's uncomfortably shoehorned into place. There are some cool powers that Finn can call upon, depending on which sword he's using (it's swapped for newer, better blades as you progress), and stringing enough hits together sees the pair team up for some special attacks; but it's all so risk free that every new "combat time" becomes more chore than challenge, however much loot you come away with.

There are some story beats in Investigations that link to season six of the show, most obviously a case involving Lumpy Space Princess, which is nice; and all of the characters you'd ever want to appear in an Adventure Time game duly show up, even the massive jerk that is Magic Man. But it's box-ticking stuff, really: familiar faces deployed to play hollow roles upon stages made of popping candy. Younger gamers and air-headed adults might enjoy the "random" side to certain situations, and chuckle lightly every time somebody says "dog buns," but unless you really are entirely too far gone in your Adventure Time obsession, and couldn't give a crap whether a video game's good or just does enough to not make you want to punch a hole through your TV, you don't need this. It's more mediocre than mathematical, sorry.

Adventure Time: Finn & Jake Investigations is out now for pretty much every contemporary platform on the face of the planet, but was tested for this feature on Wii U. Because it's nice to play something new on the Wii U, isn't it?

Follow Mike Diver on Twitter.

Read more comics by Lauren Monger at her Tumblr and Twitter.

All stills from 'Can You Dig This.'

Before the urban farming boom—even before Michelle Obama popularized the phenomena of "food deserts"—there was Ron Finley—a man who calls himself a "gangster gardener," and who started urban gardening on the strip of dirt outside his home in South Los Angeles. In 2013, it was Finley who convinced the LA City Council, after years of debate, to allow fruit and vegetable plots on public parkways.

Los Angeles-based filmmaker Delila Vallot heard about Finley's efforts, and decided to dig past the rhetoric to see if urban gardening was delivering on the hype. Her journey through the gardens of LA's neediest neighborhoods culminates this week in a new documentary, Can You Dig This, which will be available on VOD Tuesday. The documentary, which features Finley, follows four residents of South LA: two 20-somethings who join the Compton Community Garden, a halfway house resident who learns to garden, and an eight-year-old girl who turns her garden into a money-making venture. As each of the subjects struggle to overcome personal hurdles and systemic challenges in their communities, the film focuses on the small-scale victories they get from urban gardening.

On MUNCHIES: This Rooftop Garden Is Feeding Atlanta's Homeless

I spoke with Vallot and Finley about their vision for the film, the importance of having a hand in food production, and how gardening can be a seed for social transformation.

VICE: Delila, what inspired you to make this project?
Delila Vallot: I wanted to explore more about Ron, and his very cool diatribe about changing lives through planting seeds. I wanted to find out first-hand if that was real or not. Through the process of shooting him, I realized that while there were some people who knew him through this TED talk and all the buzz, there are a lot of people who might be encountering him for the first time. So what I wanted to do was see a day in the life of Ron, to have him talk to us as if you were going to someone's house that you really look up to, that you want to have an intimate conversation with. That was my idea as far as shooting Ron, and I wanted to have representatives of his ideas in the movie—actual test cases, if you will, who are examples of his message.

So how did you find those test cases? The film depicts four subjects at vulnerable points in their life, dealing with very difficult challenges.
Vallot: I did a lot of research. It took me at least six months to get to where people trusted me enough to start to open up for me to realize that they would be characters. I did spend a lot of time with gardeners in gardens, and a lot of time on the phone doing research.

One of the key things I learned while shooting the doc was that if I didn't open up about real stuff about my life, they had no reason to either. People don't necessarily want to be on camera, even though we think that they do. They didn't necessarily care—they have their lives to lead. It was about forging real friendships with people, and capturing those friendships.

"Billions and billions of dollars grow on trees every day. We need to have people realize that this apple you just grew is currency." — Ron Finley

By the end of the film, Quimonie—a young girl in the projects—isn't just helping her family eat better; she's helping pay the bills. Do you see the future of urban gardening as becoming a model for local businesses?
Ron Finley: No doubt. That's exactly where it's going. You're showing someone life skills, you're showing them how to take care of themselves, and you're showing them how you can grow resources. We've been taught all our lives that money doesn't go on trees—but it does. Billions and billions of dollars grow on trees every day. We need to have people realize that this apple you just grew is currency. It's not about being frivolous and getting your hands dirty—it's about changing people's lives and employing people. This is a way you can be self-sustaining. That's what to me this is about.

Watch: Hi-Tech Guerilla Gardening

What are some of the obstacles in trying to scale up gardens into businesses?
Finley: The biggest obstacle has been people. culture is not built for you to be sustainable, to be an entrepreneur. As far as I'm concerned, this culture's built for slavery. That's for everybody—I don't care what color you are. If you don't have a hand in your food, you're a slave. It's something that's so important to you, yet you're getting someone else to do it for you.

My thing is to change the culture so people realize how important this is, and to get people to have reverence for the soil, what comes out of it, and what goes into it. People don't want to get it because the current system serves them. Some people are happy with the status quo, some people are happy with being politically correct; I'm not. Being politically correct is what got us into this shit. It's time for people to be renegades; it's time for people to say, 'I'm tired of this, dude.' We gotta change this. I know a ten-year-old who is 300 pounds. It's not cool. It has to change.

Los Angeles has 26 square miles of vacant lots. Is there any kind of initiative to open that land for public use?
Finley: I would love to be able to do that, but this is LA, where land is a premium. Nobody's just trying to give it up. Hopefully some opportunities are developing, where we have the ear of some politicians that say they want to make it happen, and use this land to put people to work and change their lives. But something's gonna happen—if we have to take it, something's gonna happen.

Vallot: Is it the bureaucracy that's in the way?

Finley: Oh, totally. The bureaucracy injures everything. But the fact that we're all having this conversation says a lot. People are waking up and being inspired to know they can change their lives.

"You feed them this bullshit food every day, and then expect them to excel. How? They're not getting the nourishment for their bodies or their brains to develop." — Ron Finley

Many of the challenges the film's subjects are dealing with—from unemployment to being prejudicially targeted by law enforcement—intersect with concerns raised by Black Lives Matter activists across the country. Do you see urban gardening as a way that black communities can organize to remedy some of those problems?
Vallot: You'll notice in the film I really tried to leave everything with an inspirational message, because I feel like when we talk about things that are wrong and negative, that creates a recording in our brains and we keep going to a place where we're victims. So the idea was to leave it with all the positive things that gardeners can do, and bring up the fact that there aren't enough gardens in black neighborhoods, and that it does create community and all of its positive benefits. That will create more positivity, and that's a form of activism—passive activism—and that's what I stand behind. Well, Ron feels that it's not passive activism.

Finley: Why I do what I do is everything you just mentioned: the fucked up school systems, the bad food that they're feeding these kids, the lack of opportunity. African Americans are 13.2 percent of the US population. How the fuck are we 70 to 80 percent of the people who're in prison? That means I'm a crime machine, dude! I'm robbing this person, I just broke into this house, and I'm assaulting someone and stealing their car if those numbers make any fucking sense whatsoever. They don't! People are waking up and seeing that, man. These kids don't even know that they're being set up, from birth. You feed them this bullshit food every day, and then expect them to excel. How? They're not getting the nourishment for their bodies or their brains to develop. How are they supposed to compete with kids in Japan, or Spokane, Washington? They can't. You're telling me that they don't know this? You're telling me this isn't by design?

Vallot: We're talking about breaking the cycle. And it does sound overly simplistic, but by surrounding ourselves with a lot of healthy greens, beautifying our neighborhoods, and doing something that is actually feasible—planting a seed in the ground—I saw people's lives changing. When I went into the garden on Long Beach Boulevard, which is filled with prostitution, drug dealing, and all that stuff, I saw that that garden was an oasis, and you really do feel safer there. It's something that really does create change.

Can You Dig This premieres on VOD December 1.

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Robert Lewis Dear. Photo via Colorado Springs Police Department

On Friday afternoon, shots rang out at a Planned Parenthood facility in Colorado Springs. The suspected shooter holed up inside the clinic, and police arrived to a tense and bloody standoff that lasted five hours. Three people—a police officer, an Iraq War veteran, and a mother of two—were killed (and nine more were injured) before Robert Lewis Dear, 57, was convinced to surrender.

Though his motives remain hard to pin down, over the weekend a clearer picture of Dear took shape, one that adheres all too well to the familiar archetype of the aggrieved, troubled white man with a history of anger against women.

Dear's widely-reported statement to police that there would be "no more baby parts" seems to support the views of Vicki Cowart, president of Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains, who told CNN she believes he "was motivated by opposition to safe and legal abortion." But Dear has reportedly said a lot of stuff to law enforcement while in custody, including, NBC News reports, some kind of mention of President Barack Obama.

Neighbors of Dear—who before moving to Colorado last year lived in a shack in the mountains of North Carolina that had no running water—have told the press he kept to himself, avoided eye contact, and rarely made sense when he spoke. "If you talked to him, nothing with him was very cognitive—topics all over place," his longtime neighbor James Russell told the Associated Press. Dear was the kind of guy you "had to watch out for," he added.

"He was a very weird individual. It's hard to explain, but he had a weird look in his eye most of the time," a neighbor who wished to remain anonymous told the Washington Post.

But neighbors there said abortion, politics, and religion didn't really come up when talking with Dear, even if he "complained about everything," as another neighbor put it. Dear sounds paranoid and hermit-like, and apparently believed everyone was out to "get him."

"It was very crazy," the former neighbor told the Post.

Last year, Dear bought a $6,000 chunk of land in Hartsel, Colorado, and parked a trailer on it. A neighbor, Zigmond Post Jr., lived about a quarter mile away, and recalled one brief but odd run-in with Dear, which occurred after Post's dogs ran onto Dear's property. "We got the dogs back and everything and as we were getting ready to leave he handed us some anti-Obama pamphlets and told us to look over them," Post told Reuters.

Another Colorado neighbor told the New York Times that Dear "preferred to be left alone," though was apparently living with a girlfriend prior to the incident. The paper visited with Dear's ex-wife, Pamela Ross, who told them he was born in Charleston, South Carolina, and grew up in Louisville, Kentucky. Dear's father, who passed away in 2004, was a graduate of the Citadel, and served in the Navy during World War II. Ross told the Times Dear "was not obsessed with politics" and, though he believed abortion was wrong, "it was never really a topic for discussion." (The paper also reported that Dear apparently "sought partners for sadomasochistic sex" online.)

The "baby parts" Dear referred to while in custody is perhaps a vague reference to video tapes, recorded secretly by an anti-abortion group called Center for Medical Progress. In the videos, which were released this summer, employees of Planned Parenthood are depicted discussing the body parts of aborted fetuses, which they were looking to sell for research. Though analysis has proved the videos to be altered and largely deceptive, they stoked much outrage, even among Republican presidential candidates. The defunding of Planned Parenthood has been hotly debated since the tapes have been made public, and Congress may vote on the question when deciding whether to fund the government in a matter of days.

Planned Parenthood operates more than 700 clinics in the United States, and bills itself the largest provider of reproductive health services in America. In 2013, they saw an estimated 2.7 million patients, 80 percent of whom came in for low-cost birth control prescriptions or screening for sexually transmitted diseases. The group is also the country's largest provider of abortion, but even though it is federally funded, tax dollars are not spent on abortion services as part of a Reagan-era budget compromise.

Records show Dear has had several run-ins with the law over the years, and in the past he's been accused of being a "peeping Tom," domestic violence—his ex-wife declined to press charges—and was charged with two counts of animal cruelty. He is currently being held without bond by the El Paso County Criminal Justice Center, and was set to make his first court appearance on Monday afternoon, where he will face state murder charges. Justice Department officials are also reportedly weighing the possibility of federal charges for Dear, which could be feasible under the 1994 Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act. That law makes it a crime to injure or intimidate reproductive health clinic patients and employees.

Follow Brian McManus on Twitter.

This post will be updated as more information becomes available.

Selina Thompson on the set of her show 'Dark and Lovely'

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

"Hair is just hair." Selina Thompson has repeated this six or seven times to 40 assembled strangers before they have to be prompted to turn it into a chorus. "OK, you're not really getting it, are you?" she says, cajoling us to join her in what quickly becomes to feel like part of a ritual. Hair is just hair. Hair is just hair.

But nine years ago in a bathroom in Erdington, Birmingham, her hair wasn't just her hair. When a 16-year-old Thompson looked at herself in the mirror and decided the only solution for her heat-battered afro, damaged after years of exposure to home relaxers, was to buzz the whole lot off, hair wasn't just hair. Nor was hair just hair when her mother sobbed and her dad shut down and refused to engage with his freshly-sheared daughter.

"I was just so confused," she tells me once she's emerged from the tumbleweave of hair-extensions that forms the set of her one-woman show Dark and Lovely—an exploration of how hair informs ideas of race, gender, and beauty. "Watching all these reactions happen around me. I couldn't understand it. My dad's reaction was the most difficult one to deal with, he was just so angry. But I didn't regret it, just because I'd been so deeply unhappy with the state of my hair before."

The "hair is just hair" motif is Thompson's response to some of the reception that early scratches of Dark and Lovely received, mostly from people who couldn't fathom why it was a subject worthy of the kind of ceaseless attention the Leeds-based artist has shown it over the last two years. The answers are condensed into just under two hours of stories gathered from the floors of hair salons in ordinary working class black communities, where the politics of what it means to be a black woman come resoundingly to life.

Thompson began putting her material together by spending time in hair salons, with barbers and black hair in beauty shops in the Chapeltown area of Leeds, finding that the best way to get under the skin of these places was to muck in and help out. "I found that by going in with a notepad and a dictaphone people became stressed-out and didn't want to speak to me. So instead I would just spend the day working there.

"I learned a lot about what it is to be black and British, and the multiplicity of that. I learned about how, for these women, getting their hair done is a moment of community and bonding and almost a spiritual time to be shared between people. But I also learned about times when it is exposing and revealing of deeper and darker tensions within the black community."

The centerpiece of Thomspon's show—a seven-foot-high igloo of hair extensions decked-out with a barber's chair and the odd photo—is where she creates a momentary community that brings her audience right into the bosom of the black lives that she's explored.

The scene inside is unflinching in its purity for the way it generates spontaneous and real conversation between Thompson and her audience. For those familiar with her reference points—the night I attend in Sheffield, black women make up about half of those in the audience—it provokes a hum of knowing laughter and uninvited but welcome interruptions as her stories tap into the fabric of lives led.

For those in the audience who didn't grow up with the unusual pressures that black hair places on its bearer, the tumbleweave is a place where facts and stats—and Thompson has plenty—morph into real people and real experiences. For example, L'Oreal estimates that black women spend six times as much on their hair as any other ethnic group; women in the UK spend £5.2 billion on their hair, 80 percent of which is spent by black women despite the fact they make up fewer than 3 percent of the population.

Some of the stories Thompson tells are domestic and simple. Others are more layered. "There's a story about a little white girl" she tells me, "who comes back from holiday and goes into school with cornrows. She's told that the cornrows aren't suitable for the school environment so her parents write in and ask why.

"They point out that there are black girls who also have their hair in cornrows. The teachers say that the school makes allowances for other people's cultural heritage, but the little girl's hair is too urban so she can't wear them in cornrows. I think about that story a lot. There's so much going on but I can't quite unpick it."

Hair is not just hair; it is more. It's a kind of shorthand for black experiences lived out in a white world. A world where an 18-year-old student has to travel to the other side of a new city just to find the kind of products that her hair needs, passing dozens of chain outlets en route. It's not necessarily a story of victims and oppressors, but one of a young girl who wonders why she has to give up an afternoon to attain basic convenience.

"You can't undo 400 years of damage with a hundred years of trying really hard," says Thompson. "For centuries black hair was 'othered' and talked about really aggressively as if it was fur or wool. The changes we make to it are all about changing the texture to make it look a bit more like Caucasian hair, and that throws up so much to do with race and beauty politics and who is and who isn't beautiful, and the cultural value that goes with that.

"At the other side of all that black hair is still 'other,'" Thompson continues. "It's the complete opposite end of the beauty spectrum."

Even after two hours of careful exploration it's clear that this is a complex issue. To reduce the process that Thompson and millions like her have gone through to "a struggle" seems too bleak, and it denigrates an experience which seems to be at the heart of black female identity.

"I hope that if and when I have kids that I would surround them with lots and lots of imagery of afro-hair that was not just beautiful but also cool." She laughs, and it's the kind of laugh that gets in your ears and warms them up. "But it's hard to know what kids think is cool."