This article originally appeared on VICE UK

It's enough to make you miss the M&S ad lady. Her low, moaning voice and the supermarket's slow-mo shots of rump steak kebabs or lettuce leaves bouncing on top of a spotless worktop surface are like heaven when compared to the rigidly constructed food porn that now fills social media feeds and blogs.

Instagrammed food has progressed from shitty flash-on photos in restaurants to pristinely arranged healthful bowls, always—always—photographed from above. And now we've come almost full-circle, to food like the freakshake: an oozing, aggressively layered ice cream milkshake, first "invented" at a bakery in Australia last year. It's the latest food trend to send giddy bloggers and lifestyle sites (and Scroobius Pip) frothing at the mouth.

"I wanted to do some really great shakes, and so ridiculous and over the top that people just had to take a photo of it before they ate it," original freakshake creator Gina Petridis told Mashable, without a hint of sarcasm. Predictably, it wasn't long until the shakes came to Britain. Now you can get them in Bangor, in Newcastle—where they've been christened "geet big shakes"—and from a bakery and cafe in east London.

When I first walked into Molly Bakes, the Dalston freakshake café run by husband and wife Olly and Maria, it was with a feeling of trepidation. I'd seen photos and the milkshakes were massive. Like, huge in a way that looks uncomfortable. Large on a scale that slots into the trend of food items that barely hold together, from glisteningly greasy Dirty Burgers to the Great British Bake Off "showstoppers." I was terrified. Olly, who looks after the running of the café while his wife manages their bakery down the road, told me that often people walk into the café, take one look at the menu and walk straight out.

Others stay, obviously, and the freakshake's debut at the café in January saw a queue outside that apparently ran halfway down the street. "We had to turn about 200 people away," Olly tells me excitedly. This, a queue of people standing outside a food vendor for a bite of the latest trend, is a fairly regular occurrence in London and other cities driven by money spent on things that people don't really need.

Usually it's for overly indulgent meat-based food—mega-burgers and the like. But hype food has a sweet tooth, too. See: the Creme Egg pop-up café that opened in Soho in January, or the kaleidoscopic and largely unnecessary rainbow bagels that travelled from New York to east London in the space of a few months in February.

But back to the freakshakes. I chose the caramel option because it looked the sickliest. The staff told me that everyone has their own way of eating the freakshake, but I decided to drink the liquid first then work my way through the rest. My favorite part was weirdly the decorative rim of the milkshake's glass. It was covered in little crunchy chocolate balls mixed with chocolate sauce and biscuit crumbs, and a small slice of honeycomb. As far as a dessert goes that could make you vomit, it tasted delicious. Still, I couldn't finish it.

On Munchies: This Fast-Food Cricket Milkshake Might Save the World

Nutritionist Carolina Brooks asked me if I was "OK after that milkshake" when I told her I'd sampled one—which I am, I think. Like most people in the business of monitoring how people eat, she thinks that a diet free from refined, non-natural sugar is the best way forward. That might explain her freakshake-related concern.

"We are programmed to enjoy sugar—our brain runs on glucose," she said. "So we do need the sweet taste in our lives. But once you cut out the crap," read: refined sugar, "you really notice your taste buds change, and you start wanting to eat better things anyway."

Unfortunately for sugar-free crusaders, the freakshake isn't just another gross-looking food trend that may quickly disappear; it's much more complex than that. Dr Morgaine Gaye, a food futurologist at the food trend forecasters Bellwether, told me about the significance of the freakshake to the future of food.

"Right now, we're seeing a lot of people getting involved in the anti-sugar campaign—and they should, as it is really important—but there is always a counter-trend," she said. "And this is it. Everyone is trying to be better and more successful and more beautiful. The reality is that no one can really maintain that."

"The freakshake is a rebellion against trying to cram in perfection, and says 'fuck it' to the idea that people can maintain hyper-healthy lifestyles. Slop it all on, put as many ingredients as you can in and stop trying to make a piece of perfection with a little bit of drizzle around the edge."

The freakshake definitely doesn't just have "a little bit of drizzle around the edge."There is a lot happening in this lactose intolerant's nightmare—but was it worth the "queueing down the street" hype?

At £7 each and considering that you have to travel to Dalston, north-west Wales or Newcastle to drink one, I don't think these glorified milkshakes pose a serious threat to the health of the nation. If you buy into them and their marketing technique, they could do wonders for attracting the kinds of Instagram followers still using Pinterest. If not, you're faced with a complicated sundae that costs more than a pint—but maybe imagining the M&S lady huskily saying that would make it worthwhile.

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When my brother and I were kids, my parents used to take us to Gran Canaria, an island residing within Islas Canarias, a Spanish archipelago just off the Moroccan coast. The island has been largely visited and inhabited by Scandinavians since the 1960s, but had its heydays in the 1990s when "charter vacations," or low-budget resort vacations, became affordable for the working and middle classes.

I recall many blithe childhood memories from our time in Gran Canaria: Long days at the beach, poking jellyfish with a stick, hours spent in front of an aquarium at our go-to restaurant, all in service of escaping the darkest months of Norwegian winter back home.

Last month, I returned to Gran Canaria with my parents for the first time in almost 15 years, curious to see see what had become of the place. As we drove along the coast, I lost count of the "for sale" signs standing guard outside the empty lots and hotels. The whole town seemed to be crumbling to dust. The architecture—all cheap materials with color schemes of washed-out pink, bright yellow, and baby blue reminiscent of the 60s—seemed all the more dated with the absence of tourists, who, I was told, favor AirBnB over resorts these days.

Maybe unsurprisingly, Gran Canaria left me feeling weird. After leaving the once-familiar place, I flew straight to Switzerland for a photo shoot. While there, I decided to drive to the village of Andermatt, the first Swiss skiing resort I found on Google Maps. As I drove through the small village, I felt surprised by how the tone and mood eerily paralleled my previous destination, despite it being my first time in the Alps (and the drastic change in climate): Empty luxury apartments and hotels, guest houses, local diners... even the slopes were empty, despite the ideal skiing conditions.

Both Andermatt and Gran Canaria struck me as crumbling vestiges that signify a dying generation of tourism—the type of vacation destinations that present-day visitors still book through a travel agent. While shooting at both, I aimed to document the objects and moments that inspired the same type of spooky hollowness I felt at the two distinct locales.

For more of Tonje's work, visit her website and Instagram.

All images courtesy of Ido Mizrahy

Antonio Barrera is not a great bullfighter. As the Spanish bullfighting critic J.A. del Moral puts it in Ido Mizrahy's documentary Gored, he has no "aesthetic grace." In other words, he isn't one of the "artist" matadors with an "aesthetic purity...from another galaxy." Barrera never reaches the point where the spectacle stops being "a mere fight" and becomes "a tragic ballet of extraordinary beauty."

But he makes up for these failings with unflinching bravery. Barrera is proud to "offer his life 100 percent" every time he enters a bull ring; and, with 23 cornadas, he is the most gored bullfighter in modern history. Gored gives us glimpses of his near-death experiences: On his knees in front of a thousand-pound bull in the pouring rain; hopping around the ring with a makeshift tourniquet around his bloody upper thigh; staggering, bare-chested, bare-buttocked, bleeding from various wounds, his "suit of lights" split open at the seams by the bull's horns; on a stretcher being rushed to the ringside infirmary unable to breathe. His wife is desperate for him to give it up, but when they first fell in love she promised to never ask him to retire.

Gored tells the story of the run-up to Antonio Barrera's planned retirement from bullfighting and his final fight against a beast, aptly-named Bienvenido. After making the festival rounds last spring (including a slot at Tribeca Film Festival), Gored is now available for the public to watch online. We talked to director Ido Mizrahy about his bloody doc, and why he doesn't expect bullfighting to die out anytime soon.

VICE: How did you originally find out about Antonio Barrera? Were you a fan?
Ido Mizrahy: No, not at all. My writing partner had become interested in this ancient spectacle of bullfighting. He met Antonio Barrera in Spain, and did a profile on him. They stayed in touch, and when Antonio mentioned he might retire, we thought it might make an interesting short film. Once we started filming, however, we realized it was a much fuller story... it wanted to be a feature-length documentary.

By all accounts, Barrera is not a particularly gifted bullfighter. What was it that drew you to him as a subject?
What was interesting to me is that he wasn't one of the gods of bullfighting. He didn't have the artistry, the duende that's expected from the great figuras, but rather he was just a human being trying to do this. His destiny was set in motion for him: his father was a failed bullfighter and put Antonio in front of the bulls when he was 7, but he just didn't have the goods. So he created his own brand of bullfighting that was really more about coming back from the dead, and became famous for it. And he had to keep that style because that was what drew people to see him.

Barrera is Spanish, but his career seems to have played out mainly in Mexico. Why is that?
Antonio felt much more welcome in Mexico for a variety of reasons, but mostly because Mexicans really appreciated what he put out there. The Spanish affición get pretty snarky about bravery. They tend to think, Of course you're supposed to be brave, that's a given. The big deal is to be an artist while you're doing it. Whereas in Mexico they seemed to be saying, We know you're not a great artist, but give us everything you've got anyway. We want to see you put your guts out there, and we'll respect you for it. Antonio could offer that.

Bullfighting is obviously a controversial subject. Were you confident audiences and critics would see beyond any debates about its morality?
We knew we were walking into fertile ground, but, in a way, that's what you want as a filmmaker. The choice of having Antonio Barrera as the protagonist, rather than bullfighting in general, was a good way of not hiding from the subject, but rather putting it at eye-level. Especially as Antonio isn't a poster-boy for bullfighting and doesn't exhibit that artistry, so you never get swallowed up by the romance. We're not trying to justify bullfighting, which is why I think lots of people who are anti-bullfighting have loved the movie, because it doesn't feel like a bullfighting film. It's about obsession, life and death, broken dreams, family.

But, as Antonio Barrera emphatically says at the end of the doc, "I am a bullfighter." He's not just "any man" dealing with these issues. Would someone like Antonio, or many of the themes arising from his story, even exist outside of bullfighting?
No, and that's exactly why bullfighting still exists. There's still a really visceral need to be around death in a controlled environment. Today news channels feed us death all the time, but that's very different. That's driven by politics, conquest—lots of other things. For us to be able to go into a controlled environment and see man try to submit nature in that way, and share in that incredibly difficult task, I think that's what keeps bullfighting relevant. Which is why there's so much pushback against it. If it was just fading away, people would let it be. But I think it still has so many fans and still exists because it satisfies something really primal.

Has making the film changed your view of bullfighting?
I find myself much more interested. A film takes a long time to make, so you have to be submerged in the subject. You have to learn to understand your subject without judging it. It didn't turn me into a fan, but I am not a protestor. To my sensibility, I don't necessarily enjoy it, but there's something about it that I totally understand now, and which tells me why it's still around.

How did Barrera respond to the film?
I have no idea. So here's the other reality about trying to make a movie about a matador: they are really tricky to pin down. He's like a bull; if you're not within his peripheral vision, you cannot reach Antonio Barrera. As close and as intimate a time as we had with him, when he's not in front of us physically, we can't reach him. As soon as we finished, I wanted his take on it before I even locked picture, but he never responded.

Was it difficult filming such crucial moments in his life?
We met him when he was making the most painful decision he's ever made. Getting gored over and over again wasn't painful for him anymore, but to make the decision to walk away from the bulls? That was really painful. To film his family in the days leading up to his final bullfight... they couldn't care less about us. We're filming people dealing with life-shattering decisions. And everyone had a stake in it: his wife, his daughter, his father-in-law. Everyone was so invested, and the camera was so low on their priority list, that we filmed the real stuff. It's a very privileged point of view, real access to something, which is incredibly rare in documentaries.

'Gored' is out now on iTunes, Netflix, and Amazon. For more information, visit the documentary's website here.

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Journalist Rebecca Traister's new book All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation was published this week, but the book already feels like it has the potential to become a seminal text on female identity in the West.

In roughly 350 digestible pages (or, in her recent book excerpt-turned-cover-story for 'New York'), Traister will convince readers that the 2016 election will come down to a maybe-surprising demographic, and then make you feel foolish for ever thinking otherwise. As the title suggests, we're talking about unmarried women in America, a group that is growing at an exponential rate. "Wherever you find increasing numbers of single women in history, you find change," writes Traister.

"The expansion of the population of unmarried women across classes signals a social and political rupture as profound as the invention of birth control, as the sexual revolution, as the abolition of slavery," the author explains. In other words, if history is any indication, we should expect dramatic change in America now, and Traister details why through a mixture of historical analysis, heavy research, personal anecdotes, and interviews with academics, social scientists, and both non-famous and prominent single women, such as Anita Hill and Gloria Steinem.

While rates of unmarried women are at a new high (single women outnumbered married women for the first time in 2009, and today only 20 percent of Americans aged 18 to 29 are wed), they aren't a new phenomenon, and, historically, whenever women were given options beyond early heterosexual marriage, significant societal change followed. Most of the women who led the fights for abolition and suffrage, against lynching, and for secondary education, were unmarried—as were the women who pioneered new fields such as nursing and medicine.

All the Single Ladies also dispels myths about unmarried women, from Newsweek's infamous claim in 1986 that single women at age 40 were more likely to be killed by terrorists than get married, to the notion that women have achieved true equality in the 21st century. A New York Magazine writer-at-large and ELLE contributing editor, Traister expertly paints a modern portrait of American life and how we got here, with an intersectional approach that accounts for class, race, and sexual orientation. Even more impressive is how Traister pushes a feminist agenda without the book ever feeling like it has an agenda, or that it's pointing the finger at the reader to make him or her feel guilty. VICE talked to Traister about All the Single Ladies over the phone and through email in light of its release.

For more on marriage, watch our doc on America's lucrative divorce industry:

VICE: What was your initial goal in writing All the Single Ladies and how did it change or evolve during the research process?
Traister: My initial idea was that the book would be mostly contemporary journalism—mostly the interviews with single women, across ages, backgrounds, races, religions—about their experiences of being single. As I started researching, I became much more interested in the history of single women in America, and how profoundly they'd shaped the set of possibilities now open to today's single women.

What were some of the most interesting experiences you had during the research process?
I think that coming across some of the published commentary of the 19th and early 20th centuries—from Susan B. Anthony's Homes of Single Women speech, to a 1904 newspaper column railing against the inequities of marriage, published by a "Bachelor Maid"—opened my eyes about how long these issues and questions and tensions have been in play, and how out in the open they've been. I still think of questioning marriage's primacy as a contemporary and rebellious act, but women have been doing it for centuries in really bold, funny, resonant ways.

Also, learning the stories of women who came up with ingenious ways of expressing their ambivalence about marriage, from Amelia Earhart, who wrote this incredibly ambivalent letter to her husband on their wedding day, to Lucy Stone, who published a proclamation of her ambivalence about marriage and its gender inequities and had the pastor at her wedding read it out loud. It's just so bracing and remarkable learning about women who have done remarkable things to evade the traps that marriage historically set for them.

You make the point that most American women, across all racial and ethnic groups, do eventually marry; they are just marrying later. How is late marriage benefitting women and society on the whole?
It gets us a lot close to egalitarian marriage. I think the bigger patterns means that men and women live independently in the world, often alongside each other as colleagues, peers, and friends. By the time they join in marriage, you wind up with a far greater likelihood that they both know how to do their laundry and use a drill and have some economic stability. So when they do , the pattern of responsibility won't fall on these old patriarchal lines that cut men off from being domestically involved.

But we are constantly fed the narrative that high-achieving, successful women—particularly black women—will have a harder time finding a mate, when in reality, these high-achieving women are most likely to marry. Why is that?
That's a very old trope. We've had women be dependent on men in this country and if there is this shift, it can be destabilizing. As a result, we send a lot of messages that it's a very bad thing. The message that you're going to "independent" your way to singlehood, especially to black women, is designed, consciously or not, to herd women back into more traditional emotional and legal setups. The point is to make you doubt the things you're doing independently, whether it's going to graduate school or having a baby on your own. The message is: get back.

Staying single or marrying late can be hugely empowering for women, but what are some of the challenges these women experience, particularly poor women and women of color?
Single women and single mothers, in particular, are much more likely to live at or below the poverty line than their married counterparts and single life in working class and low income communities is intensely hard. We have such a low minimum wage and no kinds of protections like paid leave or high-quality subsidized day care. We have a criminal justice system that incarcerates and kills black men at such higher rates.

There are all kinds of systemic things that make life, including married and family life and childfree life, dramatically more challenging and difficult for low-income women and men. The idea that marrying someone, anyone, is going to help—and conservatives push this all the time—is wrong. One of the most economically devastating things in life is divorce. The solution is not marriage. Rather, we should be providing paid leave, a higher minimum wage, subsidized day care, a better health system, and lifting some of the limits on reproductive freedom. Marriage by itself does not address what is so grindingly difficult [about being poor] and may exacerbate it.

The message that you're going to "independent" your way to singlehood is designed to herd women back into more traditional emotional and legal setups...The message is: get back.

As people are marrying later in life, a trend we're seeing in many parts around the globe, do you think we are evolving out of marriage, especially as women gain economic and sexual equality?
I think we're evolving out of it as a norm and an expectation, and evolving into a world in which there are a number of romantic, sexual, and familial configurations, and that hetero marriage will be one among them. I also think we're evolving very, very slowly into an era in which marriage, and hetero partnership in general, becomes more egalitarian. As Susan B. Anthony predicted 150 years ago, part of that evolution is going through a stage in which women stop marrying men in the numbers that they used to.

Later marriage means lower divorce rates. After doing the research, how do you feel about your own "late" marriage at 35?
It's so funny that my marriage is 'late' by any historical standard; in New York City, I was amongst the first of my friends to marry. The fact that I fell in love with this guy is the most shocking part of my life, more than that I'm married. I just feel immensely lucky to have been unmarried when I met my husband. I had a lot of opportunities in front of me because I come from a fairly privileged population where I went to college and had the ability to pursue a career that I loved writing about subjects I loved living in a city I loved. This is how privilege accrues and expands for people.

In the book, you cite sociologist Bella DePaulo, who says there are more than 1,000 laws that benefit married people over singles. Now that we have marriage equality in the US, do you think "single equality" will be next?
I hope so. Bella DePaulo is absolutely indispensable on the variety of penalties paid by Americans who live outside of marriage. And I would love to see a move toward "single equality," which I think we get closer to by pushing for a lot of social policy fixes like the ones I outline in my appendix [such as stronger equal pay protections, a higher minimum wage, government-subsidized or funded daycare programs, and paid family leave for women and men, among other policies].

Do you expect any backlash toward the book? How do you hope the book ages?
I don't think that there's been much controversy yet, but I do expect conservatives to push back at my insistence that marriage is not the cure for poverty. And I expect some backlash from people who see this as a glorification of single life over married life, which it's not meant to be. I hope that the book ages as one of the many documents that chronicles the massive social, economic, sexual shifts women have made over their centuries of living in and pushing toward a more equal set of opportunities in America.

In 2012, unmarried women—who are more politically engaged than their married counterparts—made up 23% of the electorate. What role will they play in 2016?
They could play a totally determinate roll if they vote in the numbers that are possible. There are a lot of structural impediments to single women voting whether it's voting times curtailed, the hours polls are open, places to register or having to get special IDs to bring to voting places. These are things that take time that plenty of single parents and women do not have. Finally the Democratic platform is dealing with some of the fixes that single people need. Nobody talked about the Hyde Amendment until Hillary Clinton did in this election; no one has made paid leave central to a campaign—all these things are relatively new. Unmarried women could be determinative this election, but so much depends on their ability and enthusiasm to vote.

'All the Single Ladies' is out now on Simon & Schuster. Purchase a copy here.

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All photos: Michele Sibiloni, 'Fuck it,' Edition Patrick Frey, 2016

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

There's a lot that you can't officially do in Uganda. You can't legally fuck people of the same gender. You can't "promote" weed smoking. You can't "promote porn"—and that can mean images or videos featuring women in miniskirts, or ones where you can see thighs, boobs, or bums, whether or not people look like they're having sex.

The east African country's restrictive laws are great for convincing outsiders that repression is the norm in a part of the world still largely associated with negative stories. Every time news of this conservatism dominates coverage of Uganda, it does little to help us understand what life is actually like there.

But stifling people who want to have a good time may not be working out that well. Italian photographer Michele Sibiloni moved to Uganda about six years ago, started documenting the nightlife in capital city Kampala, and found a bunch of people willing to party in the face of restrictive laws. From the night guards who watch over people getting pissed beyond their limits to the pasty ex-pats, sex workers, and wasters who fill the city's bars, he pointed his lens at scenes that would look familiar to anyone who's been blackout drunk, but may not be what first comes to mind when someone says "Uganda."

Some of Michele's favorite photos from the project are collected in book 'Fuck It,' out this month. We asked him about spending most of his waking hours in the part of Kampala once apparently described as "Tijuana on acid," and what it taught him about sex, class, and stereotypes.

VICE: Hi, Michele. You seem to thrive out on the streets, as your hard news reporting on drug use and armed rebel groups shows. But how did you transition from covering heavier stuff to parties?
Michele Sibiloni: After a couple of years in Uganda, covering news in the Great Lakes region—including DRC, Rwanda, Uganda, and Burundi—I had quite good pictures and I was happy that I was learning, but something was missing. I wasn't always satisfied with my pictures and I wanted to add something personal, and more related to my life, into my work. I realised that one of the reasons I loved living here was to have the chance to be out at night.

How did the nightlife series take shape, then?
It all stemmed from one photo I took of a night guard, which is also the first picture inside the book. From that picture, I decided to do a series of portraits of these night guards. I was taking my camera out with me here and there, but not in as obsessed a way as this.

How were people reacting to your camera when you were out? Club photography's pretty normalized, but not everyone loves having a flash gun in their face at 1AM.
It depends. Some people didn't mind much, some asked for an explanation. Others also got pissed off—it was all different. But the more I did it, the more I got comfortable with it, and started to believe that it was my right to take pictures. I had to hide my camera a lot, because they check you at the door and once you're in and have taken a photo or two, people may come over and ask you to leave. Sometimes I'd have to wait, find that moment for a good picture, then take it and see whether I was going to get asked to leave.

After doing my night guard series I started to go out a lot, to bars, to parties, and out onto the streets to capture every aspect related to Ugandan society at night. The more I did it, the more interested I became, because I started to get new kinds of photos that I hadn't taken before. I didn't have a book in mind or anything. I just wanted to go out and document that part of Ugandan society, and one aspect of my life here.

What kind of places were you going to? Was that affecting your access?
It was every different place, from house parties with ex-pats to bars and clubs in Kabalagala—sort of Kampala's red light district. There are bars and clubs there, people cooking in the streets, small hotels where people would take their girls to have sex. And in a few of those bars you'd find the middle-aged white men looking for younger girls. There were smaller, more local bars too, in areas that would be considered more like slums or ghettos. By now it feels as though I've been to every pat of Kampala—maybe not every bar, but every part of town.

What was that like? What sort of people did you encounter?
I found that the special thing about Kampala is that in certain places you can find every sort of person inside a bar, from rich to poor. It's unique; there isn't that much class-based discrimination. I mean, of course, if a beer costs £1 in one bar or 75p in another, then people may tend to go to the cheaper place. But there aren't strictly places "just for rich people." Also, the same sex workers tend to go to the fancy places as to the poorer places. When I was moving around, I found that at night there was a sort of democracy where social classes didn't matter that much anymore, and people were mixing and using each other in different ways. It wasn't like what I've seen in Kenya, where there were places for rich people and others for poorer people.

You met a lot of people along the way, who have turned into characters in your photos. Tell me more about Sandra, whose tattoo of a dick (below) gave your book its name.
She's a person I know, who I've filmed and interviewed. She wrote a couple of stories for the book for me, about being a prostitute and working in Kabalagala, about HIV/AIDS. The stories were very interesting, but I didn't feel comfortable putting them in the book because I wanted the viewer to have his or her own journey through the photos. I didn't want to focus their attention on the matters of HIV or prostitutes or whatever.

The book isn't just about that, but is something that I don't want to be attached to any stereotype. When I first arrived in Africa, I had so many stereotypes in my mind that had been lodged there by news reports or stories I read in the media, and I wanted to make Fuck It feel completely different. That's why I wanted to mix as many people in the book as I could: my friends, ex-pats, sex workers, every sort of person I was encountering.

Do you think the average European consumer, who hasn't left the continent before, will understand that message, with captions or information to guide them?
I don't know... I hope so. I believe it's quite a unique story. When they saw the book, some of my friends here in Uganda even asked me when I started to hang out with "these sorts" of people. It was something new for them, too.

Did it feel weird photographing people who were wasted? Do you have pictures that you wouldn't use?
Of course. For a couple of the pictures I had to ask people if they'd be alright with being published looking a bit worse for wear. Maybe it wouldn't be one of their best moments ... but they understood the project, and agreed. And I did the edit after choosing the book title, so some pictures that I took wouldn't fit that certain attitude. A lot of people living here are maybe running away from something, and going out at night to forget about their responsibilities—they say "fuck it," and live a little recklessly. That's why the edit's turned out like this.

What were the best parties?
It wasn't about the parties for me. Or even when it was a good party, I was always just passing through on my way somewhere else. I was on a different type of journey—but of course I was partying, too. I was more comfortable being out in certain places, because when I was younger—18, 20—I raved a lot. But I wasn't in it for the parties, I just wanted the encounters and the pictures that came from them the parties. One of my goals when I started this project was to see my experience—I wanted to do something personal, like personal documentary.

Of course, it'll reflect on aspects of society, but sometimes the more you try to tell, the less you convey. So I think this tells you about one part of Ugandan society at night in Kampala. It's a politically repressed and traditionally conservative society—with anti-gay laws, a recent anti-pornography bill and laws pushed by American evangelical churches feeding people lies about sexuality—but behind closed doors, people don't really care. They party here the way they would in London, Paris, or New York.

Thanks, Michele.

Fuck It is out on Thursday March 10, via Edition Patrick Frey.

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Check out Luke on his website and on Twitter.

All images courtesy of Gengoro Tagame, photos by the author.

Gengoro Tagame makes gay manga, and it's some of the best out there. His stories often involve characters in homoerotic settings or participating in BDSM scenes where the macho main character is transformed into a sub and finds his true calling in chains or fetish-gear. Tagame is not afraid of touchy subjects and taboos, writing stories featuring Nazi prisoners, bestiality, incest, scat, permanent body modification and Japanese WWII soldiers captured and tortured by Chinese liberation groups. Yet, his manga goes beyond illustrated fan fiction or quick masturbation fodder, and often feels more like it's depicting a quest for an existence beyond pain.

Tagame realized his own BDSM fetish when he was a child. After watching the scene inPlanet of the Apes where Charles Heston is dragged by a leather collar, he felt an indescribable sensation inside him, leading the artist into further research about S&M. While studying art in college in the 80s, he started publishing queer illustrations under a pen name, and continued writing erotic stories throughout his twenties while supporting himself with a job as a graphic designer. Over the next 30 years, he published more than 20 books in four languages in addition to selling hundreds of fine art prints and illustrations. Today, at 51-years-old, the illustrator continues to expand his creative horizons, and recently serialized a queer story called My Brother's Husband in Monthly Action Comics, an otherwise-hetero magazine. The manga was then collated into a book with the same title, which is now in its fifth printing due to overwhelming popularity.

One of Tagame's most notorious stories is Shirogane no Hana (Silver Flower), a historical drama set at the start of the 20th-century about a spoiled son who's turned into a sex worker before exploring his own passion for S&M. The epic, three-volume story totals 900 pages—the 1Q84 of niche, queer manga. His latest, My Brother's Husband shares the same focus on identity, despite the text being young adult-friendly and safe for work, unlike his most famous work. Both stories affirm that we should be proud of who or what we love no matter how different or extreme it may appear to be.

This past November, My Brother's Husband received the Excellence Award from the Japan Media Arts Festival by the Agency of Cultural Affairs, one of the highest recognitions in Japanese pop culture. VICE spoke with Tagame about his life and what it means to be a queer artist in Japan.

VICE: When did you first begin to understand your own sexuality?
Gengoro Tagame: Naked and bound men have excited me since I was in elementary school. I remember getting excited watching Italian Hercules movies and Hollywood science fiction films like the original Planet of the Apes. I liked the scene where Charlton Heston was ordered to take his stinky human clothes off in front of the ape's assembly, then dragged by a leather collar.

Later, I found a copy of SABU [a queer Japanese magazine] at a bookstore when I was in middle school. I got excited reading any S&M stories, including heterosexual ones, as long as the men in the stories got abused. In contrast, I was not turned on by love stories where two men make love to each other. I was confused about my sexuality, both about being gay, as well as being into S&M.

By high school, I started to question why I couldn't be honest with myself. I realized I didn't have to suffer while hiding my true emotions if I was up front about my sexuality from the very beginning. This led to me coming out during my freshman year of college.

How did you start submitting work to gay publications?
I started to submit my work during my college years under different identities. All of the work was based on BDSM; dark stories, incest, sons murdering fathers, a high school student turning a teacher into his slave, abduction, confinement, and so on... Some were just stories and others were illustrations and manga.

During this same period, I had my first trip to Europe and discovered the American hardcore S&M gay magazine DRUMMER. It featured a drawing by Bill Ward, who made a strong impression on my art. Bill had an exceptional quality beyond what I found in Japanese gay art at that time. American magazines also featured masculine gay men and guys with beards—which was unheard of in Japan. With that influence, I developed KUMA-KEI, or a "bear type," in the Japanese magazines I was contributing to.

Then, when I was working on the magazine G-Men, I made an effort to change the status quo of gay magazines. I wanted a strong emphasis on machismo, and also to make it scary, have no text on the cover, no smiles, and include bearded, tough-looking guys.

Tagame, photographed by the author

You've been creating erotic art for decades. What is it about erotic and pornographic work that keeps you interested?
Since college, I've been especially interested in religious art. I am not a Christian, but I'm moved by Christian art as well as Tibetan Buddhist art. Religious painters do not draw to express themselves. Rather, the act of creation is the highest form of respect, creating a symbol of their belief. That emotional strength comes from purity. I believe pornographic art has the same characteristic. Porn is a search for the perfect erotic expression. It's not necessarily self-assertiveness, nor a status symbol, but uncontrollable desires. Pursuing such pure pleasure is less complicated. In such pursuits, pornographic art is pure, fine art. My goal is beyond manga or porn, but to aim for the level of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio.

Cover for his new manga series 'My Brother's Husband' by Futaba Publishing Ltd.

Your newest series "My Brother's Husband" is a big hit in Japan. Tell us what made you decide to publish your gay story in a non-gay manga.
A publisher approached me and was very supportive, so the project took off quickly. At the time, gay marriage was becoming a worldwide trend, but in Japan gays are still invisible to society and the gay rights movement does not resonate with many. Manga is a part of pop culture and may be an interesting tool to spread gay rights issues to larger audiences, so I came up with a plot where the main character is heterosexual but his twin brother is gay and married to a man. This set up was easier for straight people to accept.

Do you expect Japan to change its attitude towards homosexuality in the future?
Same sex marriage is moving fast and I cannot predict what will happen next in Japan. There was no term "same sex marriage" when I started to write this latest manga, but now the SHIBUYA district in Tokyo passed "partnership recognition" and the SETAGAYA district passed a same-sex marriage bill . Reality is moving faster than the pace of my manga.

However, I don't think there are any good role models in Japanese gay society. I wrote My Brother's Husband with my known identity, hoping that sends the right message. I'm a gay artist and I don't have to hide my identity to make a manga for straight people. I'm hoping younger gay artists can see there are options here.

For more info about Gengoro Tagame's, visit his website here.

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A mom larging it, with someone who might be her daughter barely in the frame. Photo: Jay Greinsky via

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

Moms put up with a lot of bullshit from us, their children. They not only have to stagger through three-quarters of a year with another living being growing inside their bodies but then have at least two decades of housework to look forward to once that person is born—and yes, even working moms in Britain are still expected to waste the most hours of their lives cleaning up after everyone.

As it's Mother's Day in the UK, and to say thanks for all that, we decided to find out whether you can be mates with your mom or not, by talking to a guy really close to his ma and another who loves her but isn't about to go down to the pub with her on a mad one.

YOU CAN BE MATES WITH YOUR MOM

I didn't realize that most people aren't as close to their mums as I feel to mine. We speak about three to four times a week, and can talk about anything from a typical 20-minute "mom" chat about Tracey from down the road to an hourlong, detailed conversation on whether Mom can successfully pull off Beyoncé's Formation choreography in a club. She once sent me money-making ideas, including a list of escort agencies for me to join. And she wasn't joking.

This is a stock photo because the author said his mother "avoids cameras like the plague." Photo: Dawn Arlotta via

She'll pop in for a cup of tea if she's in town, or we'll go shopping together and have lunch, arguing about how I'm spending money—and what she wants for her birthday, Christmas, or Mothers' Day, depending on the visit. She also asks to be treated on Fathers' Day, for doing both jobs; this year she said she wants the ability to twerk.

She once sent me money-making ideas, including a list of escort agencies for me to join.

To quote Mean Girls, "She's not like a regular mom: she's a cool mom." The golden rule was, and still is, to never lie to each other about anything. We're very similar in a lot of ways but I think we're close because we respect and admire each other. She managed to raise me as a single parent, and managed to turn her life around. Mom was determined to make sure I wasn't another single-parent-living-in-a-council-house statistic.

Mom still looks young, and can get away with telling people that she's 36 now—I'm 28, so the math really doesn't add up. Because she looks so young, when they saw us together people assumed we were brother and sister, or boyfriend and girlfriend. That made holidays with just the two of us weird for years.

I used to get called a 'mommy's boy' a lot as a teenager and I hated it. But if it means being as understanding of each other and mom and I are, I'll take it. I love her dearly, and unfortunately I don't tell her enough. — Troy Ezra

YOU CAN'T BE MATES WITH YOUR MOM

There is something about my mom that has always seemed detached from her own self. When my sister and I were growing up, mom spent her days working for the NHS as an occupational therapist and her nights and early mornings feeding us, ferrying us to activity after activity (she was keen on occupation) and getting us off to school. She was dedicated, selfless, and sometimes hard to reach. She wasn't our mate, she was our mom.

Mini-Oscar, with his mom. Photo: the author.

There were things I kept from her—most things, perhaps. She didn't know I'd been bullied at school until I wrote about it in a newspaper. But just when I find myself thinking that we've lost touch with each other, she will say or do something that reminds me she is paying attention, which reminds me she knows me.

We've never sat in the pub sinking pints and singing our sorrows together, but we've been around each other in all sorts of states—I still remember her plying my friend Johnny with Special Brew, until he sat on the front steps of her house, throwing it all up into the street. In these social moments, these moments when we poison my friends together, there's an unspoken comradeship running between us.

I don't really have any inclination to rack up the lines with my ma—I just want to have half an idea of what's going on in her head.

Only children believe in grown-ups. The idea that we will one day arrive at a station marked "adulthood" is a fallacy, but that doesn't mean we have to treat our parents like our pals if we don't want to. I don't really have any inclination to rack up the lines with my ma—I just want to have half an idea of what's going on in her head. There's a photo I recall, but which I can't find now, where I'm a few months old, clinging to my impossibly young-looking mother for dear life.

A lot has happened since then and there are times where I think we don't talk enough, that we could hang out like mates and get to understand each other better in that way. But then I think of the photo and of what passes between us unspoken and I know that we're OK really. — Oscar Rickett

A psychedelic organ riff pours out of a taxi's stereo in Bangkok. I point at the radio and the taxi driver flips it off with a pleasant "Excuse me." He's used to foreigners and rich Thais looking down on his music, but I want him to turn it up, explaining I'm a Molam fan and headed to a nearby club to hear the same music live. He eagerly shows me a video on his phone of his granddaughter practicing Molam in her bedroom in Isaan. By the end of the taxi ride, we're both cruising to the tunes with grins on our faces.

Molam is country music that's been played in the Thai and Laotian hinterlands since the 17th century. Its Thai home is in Isaan, a region in the Northeast of the country where many working class people live. At its most simple, a traditional Molam act features only a singer and a khaen player, which is a bamboo mouth organ played vertically in bass tones designed to support a singer's voice. Beyond that, the most common additions to a Molam band are phin, a small lute with strings, drums, and bass.

Molam underwent a major shift in the 70s, thanks to the influence of the American GIs stationed at five army bases around Isaan. They brought psychedelic, rock, soul, and funk music with them from America via guitars, records, and radio stations broadcast from the bases. The Molam players absorbed these sounds and were intrigued by them. Entire riffs from bands like Black Sabbath and The Rolling Stones were incorporated into Molam songs from this era.

Until recently, Molam music was marginalized and dismissed as "taxi driver music," or entertainment for the lower classes. But with its psychedelic riffs and country jams, the genre is experiencing a new life worldwide, mostly thanks to Nattapon "Nat" Siangsukon, better known as DJ Maft Sai, who runs three record labels, a record store, and a club that is bringing modern Molam to international audiences. And the West is embracing it.

A vintage track by Dao Bandon was featured on the soundtrack of The Hangover Part II and Paradise Bangkok Molam International Band opened for Damon Albarn in Berlin in 2014. They also shared a stage with Smashing Pumpkins and Godspeed You! Black Emperor in Poland the year before that.

Maft Sai's label ZudRangMa Records, ships vinyl to fans in all over the world, with concentrated fan bases in Germany, Japan, and the UK. Two of his early compilations, Sound of Siam Volume 1 and 2, were key to introducing the genre to audiences outside Thailand. They feature obscure, hypnotic tracks from the 60s and 70s, and the second compilation earned praise from Western publications like The Quietus.

Studio Lam, his club, is celebrating its first anniversary this month. The tiny space, just a few doors down from ZudRangMa in Bangkok is a small, dark triangle that's packed even on nights when they are only hosting a DJ set. When bands like PBMIB play the club, the street in front is jammed with people drinking beer and yadong, a traditional Thai rice spirit made at the bar.

"In Bangkok, Molam hasn't been popular," Maft Sai explained to me. "A few years ago, I'd play a Molam track in a DJ set and Thais would shout out, 'This is country music, this is taxi driver music, why are you playing this shit?' But we continued throwing our parties and those people came back—and now they sing along with Molam."

Maft Sai at his record shop in Bangkok. Photo courtesy of Jim Thompson House

Maft Sai is from Bangkok but spent much of his life in Australia and the UK. "People from Isaan know more about Molam than me. Their parents listened to this when they were growing up, but they're ashamed to be part of this music. It relates back to being from Isaan, having darker skin, being working class, being in the rice fields. But after watching the Bangkok scene happen and an international audience for Molam develop, people are becoming less and less ashamed of Isaan-ness," he said.

Gridthiya Gaweewong is curator of the Molam Bus Project, run by the Jim Thompson House, a Bangkok artspace and museum. Her office is filled with crates of Molam records, some one-of-a-kind. She has been tasked with creating a Molam museum over the next five years but, for now, they have a mobile exhibit housed in a vintage bus that they take to events and festivals.

Gaweewong explained the bias against people from Isaan. "You're American, aren't you?" she asked me. "Isaan is like being from Idaho," a backwater burg to urban Thais who view it as the place where the city's taxi drivers and domestic workers hail from.

Old Molam records. Image courtesy of Jim Thompson House

Since Molam was looked-down on in Bangkok for so long, most of the famed musicians hadn't played in the city since the 70s. To procure live music for his popular parties, Maft Sai had to trek out to Isaan and knock on doors to find the old stars. Many of them had retired to villages and were raising chickens and buffalo. "It would take six months to organize a party because I had to track down all the vocalists and musicians and convince them to play. I would spend an entire year throwing two parties."

Finding the musicians wasn't the only stumbling block to getting this music back on the map. ZudRangMa Records has been putting out reissues and vintage compilations of Thai music since 2010. "Back then, we might sell just seven copies a year in Thailand. I realized that we had to promote it abroad." That was when taste-making record shops All That Jazz, Rough Trade, and Soul Jazz in the UK started stocking and promoting this music.

The compilations featured covers with traditional Thai cloth and were marketed as "Thai funk." Influential Thais that lived and traveled abroad saw them and bought them. They'd come back to Thailand and show them to their friends, who would start coming to events. According to Maft Sai, the idea of Molam as respectable was a hard pill for urban Thais to swallow until they saw that it was sought after by foreigners.

The 20th century strain of Molam music features trippy riffs, hypnotic patterns, and drawn-out, inventive solos. Maft Sai's favorite era of Molam is slightly older than he is, though. "The modern Molam sound actually comes from the 70s. It's like reggae. They use the same lines but each band uses slightly different instrumentation and style. Some use the traditional phin and khaen, some use a brass band; some add guitar or keyboard."

According to Piyanart "Pump" Jotikasthira, the bass player of Paradise Bangkok Molam International Band, "What makes Molam psychedelic is the khaen. It has that surreal sound that people recognize. It's the way it lengthens the notes." Khaen can recreate the drama of a pipe organ but the sound can be better controlled and manipulated as the player breathes into it.

John Clewley, a music writer and musician from the UK who's been living in Thailand since the 80s, agreed, saying, "For foreigners, the khaen is a big draw. People have never heard or seen this before. Khaen players can do these big cathedral chords, like power chords, and people are amazed."

Clewley first encountered Molam at a village party in Isaan, where he lived with his Thai wife. "I loved it. I danced with the all night. It reminded me of Irish folk music, but instead of a fiddle, you've got a khaen. They start playing at 9PM and finish at 5 in the morning. We once had a party at our house and one of the bands played. The whole village, all 300 people, came. In the morning, there were people asleep in the bushes. It looked like the aftermath of a war. When they woke up, they just walked off and got noodles."

Maft Sai agrees, "If you want to see the real-deal Molam, you have to go to a private party in the country where they kill a cow, the whole village shares it and they play music until 10 in the morning."

If that sounds too intense, try a crash course in Molam by stepping into a Bangkok taxi and asking the driver to play you his favorite songs. He'll probably be thrilled.

For more on ZudRangMa records, visit its website here.

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'Skadoo' (2014) by Matthew Leifheit

It's hard to pinpoint exactly when semen became the focus of so much erotic fixation in the gay community. Maybe it had something to do with AIDS activist Tony Valenzuela coming out on the cover of Poz magazine in 1999 as an HIV+ gay man who enjoyed condom-less sex. "The unprotected sex ... was beautiful, intimate, satisfying. I didn't shower afterward," he told the magazine. "We slept with his come inside me." Or maybe the threshold was crossed in 2004 with the release of the seminal porn flick Dawson's 20-Load Weekend, in which a strapping, virile bottom has unprotected sex with a score of men. Or maybe it came earlier, when treatments for HIV/AIDS developed in the 90s made the disease more manageable and convinced many gay men not to think of semen as potential life-destroying poison.

Whatever the case, semen is everywhere these days. You can find it at CumUnion, an international "pro-choice" (a.k.a. bareback or condom-less anal) sex party series where sharing fluids is embraced. You can find it all over the porn industry, where more and more studios are producing bareback films rather than condom-only stuff, according to the blog Str8UpGayPorn. You can even find fake semen, in the form of FT Cum Lube, a sex product that bills itself as "the closest thing to jizz in a bottle." A few years ago, the Centers for Disease (CDC) control reported that bareback sex between men had increased 20 percent between 2005 and 2011—and with the advent of PrEP, or the practice of taking a pill that makes it much more difficult (though not impossible) to contract HIV, it seems safe to assume that more men are going out in the world unprotected.

Watch our doc 'The Truvada Revolution' about efforts to end the HIV epidemic:

For 15 years, Steve Gibson has been a leading figure in San Francisco HIV prevention for the gay community, as well as a member of the SF AIDS Foundation. As someone working in the trenches of sexual health, Gibson does not see the pro-cum choice attitudes I've recently noticed as isolated incidents.

"Yes, there are groups of men who identify as cumpigs," says Gibson. "I don't think this is a unique phenomenon. It shows the power of male sexuality."

Gibson says that a second major shift in semen relations is happening right now as PrEP is breaking down more barriers between HIV+ and HIV- men. "For so many years, semen was feared. The most intimate expression of gay sex was lethal," Gibson adds. "But for the first time people aren't afraid."

There are also many sociological reasons why gay men might want fetishize bodily fluids—to be cumpigs, in other words. Since the 1970s, Dr. William Leap, currently a professor at American University, has studied the ways gay people use language to express sexual identity. Leap says the language surrounding bareback sex, including words like "breed and seed," imply the transmission of power from one man to another. Leap cites a puberty ceremony of the Sambia people of Papua New Guinea as an example of how semen can take on mystical qualities; part of the ritual involves boys ingesting the semen of tribal elders to absorb a life force and fully become men. The idea that gay men might be recreating such rituals in the bedroom may not be that far off.

Adult entertainment insiders echo Leap's notion. According to Leo Forte, a director and videographer for Kink.com: "In porn, we worship this image of guys with the biggest dicks. The bigger the cock, the bigger the load, and the more masculine the man whose seed will be inside of me."

Leap thinks it may not be just the literal viscous semen that is desired, but the feelings of transgression surrounding the act of transmission. And, like many sexual taboos, these feelings become something to fantasize over, fetishize, exploit, or even be addicted to.

"Real queerness means pushing boundaries of what is forbidden," says Leap. "Semen transmission is a form of personal contact that normative society says is wrong for gay men to do. The idea that there is risk is what makes gay sex attractive; it's illegal, condemned, and justice may come crashing down on you at any moment."

"Cum is glorified so much because it contains the essence of taboo," agrees Forte. "Look how it is spraying all over this guy's face. It's going near his asshole, oh no!"

"Semen transmission is a form of personal contact that normative society says is wrong for gay men to do." — Dr. William Leap

There's evidence that these taboos around semen have loosened since PrEP was approved by the FDA in 2012. One 32-month study of PrEP users released by Kaiser Permanente in 2015 found no new HIV infections among participants—but 41 percent of them reported using condoms less often.

It's probably simplistic to attribute the rise in barebacking simply to PrEP. This week Howard Grossman, a gay doctor in New York who sees a lot of LGBT people, wrote that he has observed spiking STI rates in patients who are on PrEP and not on PrEP, both HIV+ and HIV-. This dovetails with CDC reports that syphilis, a disease that disproportionately affects men who have sex with men, is on the rise.

Grossman suggested that PrEP wasn't the culprit in all this. "The real problem, in my view, is that adequate screening and treatment for STIs is often not available, and education about STIs in the United States sucks (to put it mildly)," he wrote. "For the last 30 years, the only message about sexual health that many young people received was either to practice abstinence only or, in more liberal venues, to wear a condom every time to prevent HIV."

Despite these problems, there are reasons to be hopeful—today many gay men have more open attitudes toward sex and semen than they once did, but more importantly they are not forced into the shadows as previous LGBT generations were. Queer rights and acceptance have given us freedoms that were unimaginable in the immediate post-Stonewall era—we're in a place where the first known man to get HIV while properly using PrEP can tell Poz, "I believe in personal accountability and responsibility for your own health. I'm open and upfront with all sexual partners, from my status to my dislike of condoms."

Maybe the recent rise of unprotected sex is an aberration; maybe the pendulum will swing back the other way and condomless sex will once again be regarded as practically a crime. But for now, I can't get cum out of my head, or off my face.

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Former State Senator Frederica Wilson calls for ex-felons to have their voting rights restored in Florida in 2003. Well over a decade later, the state remains one of the harshest in America on ex-cons. (AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee)

Desmond Meade's life unraveled in 1996, three years after he finished a stint in a military prison for drug use and larceny committed while serving in the US Army.

"My mom passed away, and I dove into drugs big time," the 48-year-old Miami native tells VICE. "I was addicted to powder and crack cocaine."

Over the next five years, he says, he racked up felony convictions in his home city for aggravated battery, battery on a law enforcement officer, resisting arrest with violence, cocaine possession, and fraudulently using someone else's identification. After bouncing in and out of jail and probation in Miami-Dade County, Meade was found guilty of possession of a firearm by a convicted felon in 2002, earning him a three-year state prison sentence.

Today, Meade is clean and sober, hasn't been arrested since he was released early in 2004, has a law degree from Florida International University, and is helping lead a ballot petition drive that would give state voters the opportunity to decide whether an estimated 1.5 million Floridians with felony convictions should have their civil rights restored.

"America is a country of second chances," Meade says. "The only way to change things is through a citizen's initiative that lets voters decide whether an ineligible person should be allowed to vote once they have paid their debt to society."

Fifty-one years after civil rights leaders Hosea Williams and John Lewis led voting rights activists on a brutal and bloody march out of Selma, Alabama, toward the state capital of Montgomery, nearly three-dozen states deny or limit felons' right to vote. Florida joins Iowa and Kentucky as the only states in the union where a person's voting rights are banned for life unless restored by the governor or a clemency board. Civil rights advocates claim barring felons from voting disenfranchises minorities from participating in the democratic process; according to 2015 data released by the Sentencing Project, one in 13 African Americans nationwide is unable to vote due to felony convictions.

In Florida, 23 percent of the 1.5 million felons ineligible to vote are black—and roughly the same portion of all black eligibles can't actually vote because they're ex-cons.

The latest felon rights restoration effort in Florida comes just a few years after voter identification laws that critics say hurt Democratic candidates gained nationwide traction. Meanwhile, Donald Trump is on the cusp of winning his party's presidential nomination in part by fanning the flames of racial and ethnic division in America.

For some perspective, those ex-cons who can't vote might easily have decided the 2000 presidential race given George W. Bush technically only won Florida by 537 ballots. And they could well have been the difference in the 2014 Florida gubernatorial race in which incumbent Rick Scott narrowly beat Charlie Crist.

"Florida is one of the states with the harshest felon disenfranchisement laws," says Leah Aden, assistant counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. "Absent federal legislation or courts striking down these laws under the Voting Rights Act, ballot initiatives, state legislatures, and gubernatorial executive orders have been the only avenues for restoration of felons' rights."

Of course, groups that oppose automatic rights–restoration for felons argue people who commit crimes must show they have redeemed themselves before rejoining the democratic fray.

"You can't assume people are going to turn over a new leaf the day they walk out of prison," says Roger Clegg, president and general counsel for the Center for Equal Opportunity, a conservative think-tank. "The unfortunate reality is that some people who walk out of prison walk back in."

In the last few years, the NAACP, along with the Brennan Center for Justice and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), have worked in various states to challenge laws barring felons from voting. For instance, civil rights groups lobbied Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe and his predecessor Bob McConnell to push through executive orders that allowed the state's non-violent felons and anyone with a felony drug offense to have their voting rights restored at the end of their sentence. Those orders also effectively reduced the waiting period for violent felons from five years to three.

In 2013, Delaware Governor Jack Markell and his state legislature agreed to amend the State Constitution to allow non-violent offenders who complete their sentences to vote. Last year, approximately 60,000 ex-felons in California were granted the right to vote after the state agreed to settle litigation over laws blocking low-level offenders under community supervision from casting ballots. And just last month, the Maryland legislature overturned Governor Larry Hogan's veto of a bill that allowed felons to vote before they complete probation and parole.

In the Sunshine State, progress has been harder to come by. Meade co-founded the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition in 2011, shortly after the state clemency board—comprised of Republicans Governor Scott, Attorney General Pam Bondi, Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam, and Chief Financial Officer Jeff Atwater—eliminated 2007 reforms passed by Crist, his predecessor. Under Crist, past offenders convicted of less serious felonies could have their rights restored without a clemency board hearing; more than 150,000 people regained their voting rights while Crist was in office.

But Scott, Bondi, Putnam, and Atwater reinstituted the lifetime voting ban for felons unless clemency is granted by the board or the governor. At the time, Scott told the News Service of Florida: "Felons seeking the restoration of rights must show they desire and deserve clemency by applying only after they have shown they are willing to abide by the law."

In addition, nonviolent offenders now have to wait five years after completing all terms of their sentence, including probation and parole before they can even apply to have their civil rights restored.

For his part, Meade says he applied for clemency in 2006, but it was delayed due to a backlog of more than 100,000 applications for rights restoration. Under the rules enacted by the Scott-led clemency board, Meade falls in a new category of felons who must wait at least seven years after completing their sentences because of his convictions for aggravated battery and firearm possession. Spokespeople for the four clemency board members did not respond to multiple requests for comment via email and voicemail, though in January of last year, Bondi spokeswoman Whitney Ray told the Sun Sentinel, "This issue is about felons proving they have been rehabilitated before having their civil rights restored."

So a conservative political establishment that continues to have success in off-year elections stands between hundreds of thousands of ex-cons and the voting booth.

Two years ago, the Florida Restoration Coalition teamed up with the ACLU, NAACP, and the League of Women Voters to form Floridians for a Fair Democracy, a political committee handling the petition drive to have the state's citizens decide if felons should get their voting rights restored. The group needs more than 600,000 signatures to get on the ballot, but should the measure go before Florida voters, it will mark the first time since 2006 that regular people decide whether felons should be able to vote, according to the NAACP's Aden.

That year, a state coalition in Rhode Island that included local chapters of the ACLU and NAACP led a successful ballot initiative to restore the voting rights for felons on probation and parole.

While the Florida committee missed a deadline to get the felons rights question on the 2016 presidential election ballot, Meade says the group is confident the measure will go before voters in 2018, Scott's last year in office.

And that this time will be different.

"It's a pretty challenging task," Meade says. "But as we go out in the community and engage voters, there is overwhelming support for this initiative."

Follow Francisco Alvarado on Twitter.

Peter Bagge is one of the greatest cartoonists of all time.

His comic series Hate, detailing the life and misadventures of Buddy Bradley, is one of the best pieces of comics literature ever made. It was published in the early 90s and told the story of what it's like to be an American male in your 20s—what it's like to deal with crazy roommates, family members, girlfriends, and shitty jobs. It was known as the "grunge comic" because it was set in Seattle when that scene was going on, but it's more than that.

He also recently made Woman Rebel, a graphic novel about the life of Margaret Sanger, the mother of modern birth control and Planned Parenthood.

Now, he's doing comics for us! I did this interview with him to brag that he's now doing comics for VICE. Here's a photo of us enjoying each other's company a couple years ago at Desert Island Comics.

VICE: What's interesting to you lately? What's on your mind? Is there anything that you're into that you want to talk about?
Peter Bagge: You sound like a shrink! Nothing is weighing on my mind in particular. I listen to old music, hate on all politicians, and read biographies of dead people. Typical old man stuff.

Tell me about Musical Urban Legends. Didn't you start doing that comic for Spin?
It was for Magnet Magazine, another indie-rock mag. Interestingly, the first MUL comic I did was of an actual urban legend involving some unnamed band. After that, I simply relied on stories involving well-known people at their most embarrassing moments.

What comics did you like as a kid?
I loved MAD Magazine from 1965 to 1971, when I was roughly seven to 13 years old. After that, I became too aware of the magazine;s formula, and then the National Lampoon came along. I liked Gahan Wilson, Sam Gross (whose night class I took at the School of Visual Arts—SVA), Rick Meyerowitz, Charles Rodrigues, M. K. Brown, Ed Subitzky, Ron Hauge etc.

Also, funny daily comic strips, mainly Peanuts.

Do you think your sense of humor was largely informed by MAD and the Lampoon?
They were a big influence, sure. Plus, they were both wildly entertaining for someone my age.

What were your earliest comic attempts like?
My earliest attempts were me trying to imitate my older brother's comic strips. I thought he was really funny. His comics were a combination of satirical and absurdist. They had a simple, yet funny drawing style. Sam Henderson reprinted some in the latest Magic Whistle. I mainly recall a character named "Dick Disease." He had diseases.

Was your brother anything like Buddy Bradley's brother in the Hate series?
Butch Bradley is vaguely based on my younger brother when he was little. My older brother, Doug, was rather neurotic—very anxious and, well, weird. Also bossy, in that, if you wanted to hang out with him, you had to do things and see things his way. At one point, his group of friends seemed more like a cult, with Doug as the leader.

What are your siblings like now? How did they feel about the portrayal of the Bradleys in your comics?
My older sister is the principal of an English language school in Peru. She and her husband have also taught in China and Japan. My other sister is married to a contractor, and she has done various art-related odd jobs throughout her life. She's a talented artist and painter. My younger brother worked at an art foundry for most of his adult life. My older brother, Doug, passed away 20 years ago. My parents are also both gone now. None of them ever had much to say about the Bradleys. They found the stories amusing, and they saw how it was inspired by our upbringing. If any of them were put off by my stories, they never said so.

Was there anything you were trying to emulate or that you were thinking about early on in your comics or drawing style?
As for emulating, I remember around the age of 11 or 12 earnestly trying to copy certain MAD artists: Paul Coker Jr. especially, since I felt like his art was the perfect blend of cute and garish, if you know what I mean. But I fell so far short of the mark that it was disheartening. I also occasionally was inspired to recreate certain drawings by Mort Drucker and Jack Davis, just to see if I could get anywhere close to approximating what they were doing, only to be even more discouraged by the massive gulf, skill-wise, between kid-me and them. The way they drew didn't seem humanly possible. After that, I rarely copied directly from other artists' work, and I mostly just drew from my head, which lead to more of a "doodle-y" style.

What was your first published work?
A strip for the East Village Other in 1980. It was a Goon on the Moon strip, I think. My memory is failing me—I meant the East Village Eye, which was more arty/new wave-y. The Other was gone by then. Those guys were also using John Holmstrom, occasionally. I don't recall any other cartoonists whose work I know. They paid very little—possibly nothing.

What about Comical Funnies?
Comical Funnies was a collaborative effort between me and the cartoonists behind Punk Magazine: John Holmstrom, Bruce Carleton, and Ken Weiner, as well as J. D. King. We pooled our pocket change to make a short-lived comics tabloid in the early 80s. My involvement with Weirdo started shortly after that.

How'd you end up editing R. Crumb's Weirdo Magazine?
He asked me to. We didn't even know each other, other than a short snail-mail exchange. Go figure. He told me later that I was the least neurotic person he could think of. Faint praise!

The biggest thing I see you and Crumb having in common, besides your ability, is that you both managed to define and describe the hip culture around you while being outside of it.
Yes, I suppose, though he always felt even more alienated from it than I ever did. His extreme outsider status is a big part of his identity.

Your hallmark creation is the comic series Hate, which stars Buddy Bradley. Did you come up with the name Buddy Bradley or draw him first?
I believe I named him the first time I drew him, or perhaps by the second Bradleys strip. I was going for something generic, as I often do, and the name just stuck. I did a little one-page "Meet the Bradleys" strip, where I introduced this typically dysfunctional family, much like my own, as if they were some lovable TV Brady Bunch–type clan.

At what point did you consider expanding the Bradleys from the initial strip to a more fleshed-out series of stories?
They just sort of took over, especially Buddy, while I was doing my one-man anthology Neat Stuff in the late 80s. I had more ideas for them than any of my other characters, since they were the most autobiographical, I suppose.

When I made the Hate series, I simply wanted to do more auto-bio type stories, and rather than invent a new stand-in for myself, I simply aged Buddy by four or so years.

It seems like Buddy is largely based on you, but when I talked to Dan Clowes about Buddy's girlfriends, he mentioned that you'd been dating your wife since college. Who were Lisa and Valerie based on?
They're both based on many different women I've known throughout my life. There's a wee bit of my wife Joanne in both Val and Lisa, but not nearly enough to say that either are her. The character Bunny Leeway, from the Chet and Bunny Leeway stories, is very much based on my wife.

Have you met a lot of fans who wanted you to be more like Buddy Bradley than you are?
No. People used to assume I'd be some biker type. As time goes by, that makes less and less sense to me.

Tell me about Buddy's love of yellow food. This is one of my favorite details of Buddy's personality.
My wife actually used to make fun of my "all-orange lunch" when I first met her: A carrot, an orange, and those orange-colored peanut butter and cheese flavored crackers that I'd buy from SVA's vending machines.

What was your time at SVA like? I went there too.
I only went there for a year and a half. I dropped out because I ran out of money, but I had no real intention of going back. It was OK—I met nice, interesting people and my wife, Joanne, there. Joanne was a fine-arts major when I met her. She painted and sculpted and drew and worked with stained glass. She owned a deli with her sister for eight years. Now, she colors my work, nannies for some friends, and cooks for people she likes.

I also quickly figured out that I could learn stuff a lot faster and cheaper just by befriending professional cartoonists, which I did. Plus, it was the 1970s, so certain art styles and attitudes held sway there. Abstract and conceptual art, mainly, which three generations after Duchamp had devolved into a very predictable genre—but I couldn't tell its practitioners that. They were the "real" artists! While what I did wasn't considered art at all to them.

Did you kill off the character of Stinky in Hate because you didn't like him?
Ha, no. The reason was more like, "Where do I go with this guy, and what is likely to happen to a guy like this?"

What was the reaction to Stinky's death like?
Everyone was very surprised, which surprised me. I thought I had foreshadowed his death—or some kind of unpleasant fate—rather well. Obviously, I hadn't.

What's the general reaction to your female characters? It's pretty impressive how you had Lisa cheat on Buddy with his sister's kid's dad without painting her as a bad person.
Readers had a love/hate relationship with Lisa, especially around that time. That particular incident was a symptom of her starting to panic—a full-blown personality crisis, if you will. And she was becoming such a handful for Buddy that he wouldn't have been all that devastated by it if he knew, just grossed out and fed up. She had to go off on her own and get all the stupid out of her system, which she did. There was nothing he could do to help her at that point.

Have you ever considered going backward in time, like the Hernandezes sometimes do, and telling a story of the characters of Hate in their younger days?
I have considered it, but not seriously. I'm not comfortable with the idea. But who knows, maybe one day, if it feels right.

What made you want to make a comic about the life of Margaret Sanger?
I was researching other women from her era for bio-writing purposes. I was curious as to how they avoided unwanted pregnancies. That led me to Sanger, which totally derailed my original interests. Sanger was amazing.

You never really learned how to draw, but your comics look great. Most people who try to make comics without learning to draw make garbage. How did you figure out the drawing style you have?
Well, I can draw people and things that look like what I'm drawing while looking at it/them. But that bores me, and I assume it would bore the viewer of the results as well. So I prefer to draw from my mind's eye, and I take my chances from there. I'm almost never happy with the results, though, so I have a hard time arguing with anyone who thinks my art looks awful.

Initially, I was trying to duplicate the way old cartoons look, specifically ones directed by Bob Clampett. Later on, I was also mimicking early comics drawn by Harvey Kurtzman, in his old Hey Look! one-pagers and such.

It's a very polarizing drawing style, though. Goodreads has all these rave reviews of Woman Rebel by all these woman's studies majors who love the content of the book but give it three or four instead of five stars, simply because they can't stand my art!

Check out Peter Bagge's comics every Monday on this very site.

Follow Nick Gazin on Instagram.

Photo via Flickr user Ted Eytan

Everything you need to know about the world this morning, curated by VICE.

US News

• Clinton and Sanders Call for Governor to Resign
  Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders both used the the democratic debate in Flint to call for Michigan Governor Rick Snyder to resign over the city's water crisis. The pair clashed on guns, the auto industry, and Wall Street bailouts. Sanders said Clinton's backers "destroyed this economy."—USA Today
• Cruz-Supporting Pastor Shot in Idaho
  Idaho pastor Tim Remington was shot and critically wounded in his church's parking lot, a day after he delivered the prayer at a Ted Cruz campaign rally. Police identified the suspect as Kyle Andrew Odom, a white man in his mid-30s who is still at large.—NBC News
• Anti-Trump Money Pours In
  A series of conservative groups determined to stop Donald Trump are deploying $10 million in attack ads ahead of the March 15 primaries. It follows Trump's losses to Ted Cruz in Kansas and Maine, and closer-than-expected victories in Louisiana and Kentucky. —The New York Times
• Woman Dies in Flooded Car
  Chia Xiong, 51, died after being trapped in a car submerged in floodwater on a section of highway in Northern California. A storm in the state led to the evacuations in some low lying areas, and thousands lost power after powerful winds toppled power lines. —The Washington Post

International News

• EU Asks Turkey to Take Back Migrants
  Turkish and EU leaders are meeting in Brussels for an emergency summit on Europe's migrant crisis. With some 30,000 migrants coming from Turkey now stranded in Greece, the EU will press Turkey to take back economic migrants, pledging $3.3 billion in support. —Reuters
• Sydney Factory Gunman Shoots Himself Dead After Siege
  A gunman at the center of a six-hour stand-off with police at a Sydney factory has shot himself dead. The siege began after the gunman opened fire at the factory, killing one man and injuring two others. Police found three factory workers alive inside the building. —ABC News
• Suicide Bomber Kills Eight in Pakistan
  A suicide bomber who blew himself up outside a court in northwestern Pakistan has killed at least eight people and injured 18 others. There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but it follows attacks on police targets by the Pakistani Taliban. —Al Jazeera
• North Korea Threatens 'Indiscriminate' Attack
  North Korea has threatened an "indiscriminate" nuclear attack and a "pre-emptive nuclear strike of justice" on the US and South Korea, as the two countries begin military drills. The exercises happen annually in South Korea and generate fiery rhetoric from Pyongyang. —BBC News

Kesha. Photo via Wikimedia.

Everything Else

• The Godfather of Email Dies
  Tributes have flooded in for Raymon Tomlinson, the man credited with inventing modern email, who died at the age of 74. His company Raytheon said he was "a true technology pioneer." —The Guardian
• Peyton Manning Retires
  Denver Broncos quarterback and Superbowl champion Peyton Manning will announce his retirement at a press conference today. The five-time NFL MVP will step away after 18 seasons. —ESPN
• Kesha Receives Human Rights Award
  Kesha gave an emotional speech after being awarded the Human Rights Campaign's Visibility Award. "My message has always been about being yourself," she said. —The Huffington Post
• Total Eclipse Due This Week
  NASA scientists are hoping to learn new things about the sun from a total solar eclipse due March 9, visible in Southeast Asia. They will study the sun's atmosphere, or corona, in a bid to discover the acceleration of solar winds. —Motherboard

Done with reading today? Watch our new video 'How the Philippines's Strict Laws Have Driven Women to Seek Backstreet Abortions.'

Illustrations by Dan Evans

There are now so many UK actors in Hollywood that Americans are trying to mobilize to stop them getting all the roles. Tom Hiddleston, Ben Whishaw, Benedict Cumberbatch, Michael Sheen, and David Oyelowo basically have a standing invitation to award ceremonies while David Harewood, Damian Lewis, and Dominic West have proven that, if you can get the accent right, you don't need to be American to be huge on American TV.

Many of the stars leading this takeover graduated from one of three small prestigious drama schools in London: the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (Rada), London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts (Lamda), or the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. In the acting world, these institutions are as prestigious as Oxford or Harvard, and have been producing movie stars for generations. Their training is all-encompassing, focusing heavily on method acting and movement.

To outsiders, their methods can seem bizarre, such as spending hours every week just learning how to stand still or going to the zoo to study the movement of the animals. Much of the training gets to the very essence of an actor's presence; it's a way for him to bare his soul.

To find out what really goes on at drama school, we spoke to three people who graduated in the past five years. They asked us to change their names, so they wouldn't be ostracized from all the nice theater bars in Soho.

KAREN, RADA

VICE: When you look back on Rada now, what are your happiest memories?
Karen: There was this one wonderful teacher who was really old and tiny, and she just wore tie-dye. She was the sweetest, kindest woman, and she'd get us to be a baby crawling on the floor, or a tadpole, or an octopus. Those lessons were so delightful—she'd put on Debussy, and we'd be octopuses for hours.

What's it like being with your friends when they're all being tadpoles too? It must be so embarrassing.
I'm really self-conscious, so I found it really difficult to take it seriously, but you kind of have to, otherwise you're just wasting all this money. Rada is great at helping you financially, but then you feel indebted, so you know that you have to take it seriously. A lot of the time I found it unbearable, but you kind of just have to do it. Especially with things like master and slave.

What's master and slave?
It's normally done about six months into your first year, when you still have loads of boundaries up, still mortified about the prospect of doing most things in front of most people, but have started to trust your peers more.

You go in thinking it's just a normal improvisation lesson, and then the teacher brings up this game: master and slave. You go into pairs. One person becomes the master, and the other is the slave. The slave has to do anything the master says.

It starts off incredibly easygoing, like go and sit on that chair or go and play the piano and then slowly but surely the asks get a bit more intense, like "suck my big toe." After a while, the masters start playing with each others' slaves. So they get slaves to make out or whatever, or start fighting each other.

Then at the end of it, they switch over, so the slave becomes the master. So they seek revenge, and it gets really out of hand. I got asked to kiss the teacher on the mouth, which felt like crossing so many boundaries, but I just did it.

A couple of people really go for it; there's no leeway. They take the exercises very seriously. This guy got asked by his master to get his dick out and whack it in my face, which he did very obligingly. So I got a dick slapped in my face. I was absolutely appalled.

At some point, the masters noticed their behavior was getting a bit overboard and stopped going so far—I think they began to realize it was a bit morally wrong, that these are their peers.

It's an interesting psychological experiment.
Absolutely. Same with the animal studies.

What are animal studies?
So animal studies is a huge part of drama school. When you first join, you get free entry to London Zoo for an entire year. You spend hours and hours researching the animal that's been chosen for you. Then in class you have to be that animal for a long time. Then you do a showing, where you all do your animal in front of all the teachers.

He was walking round the room on all fours. Then the teacher asked him to mount me.

During rehearsal of plays, later on in your training, they'll ask you what animal a character is. I remember one lesson I had to be a little deer and my partner was a stallion. He was walking round the room, and the teacher asked him to mount me. Then there he is getting on top of me, mounting me from behind. It's difficult because you don't want to let your team partner down, but you're completely aware of the obvious, and you are in front of all your classmates.

That all sounds quite intense. Was there any support if it all got a bit much?
Yeah so much. The school had CBT on tap. So if it was causing you any damage, you're not going to go mad. But, of course, people drop out of drama school all the time. It is a really intense process, and it's not for everyone. Have you seen the film 20 Days of Sodom? Actors had to make that film. They're preparing us, not necessarily for roles as intense as that, but in the real world of theater and film, you're going to be asked to do some really crazy shit. So it's important to have the chance to do it with people you trust and respect.

So at the end of it all, do you feel like there's method to the madness?
It definitely changed me a lot. I used to have a lot of difficulties with people getting too close, and it's helped me in such a profound way. I think it has made me a better actor and a better person.

STEVEN, LAMDA

VICE: Was drama school something you'd wanted to do for a long time?
Steven: No, not really. I went to university first before I went to Lamda. So I was a bit older than the other 18-year-olds who went, and potentially equipped with a tiny bit more maturity and the ability to say "fuck off" to things.

Were there things that you wanted to say "fuck off" to?
You're really eased into it. The first six months is basically just standing still. There was one class we had where would literally just stand with our arms by our side and swing them back and forth, and we'd do that twice a week for 45 minutes. The idea behind that is it sorted of grounded you. When I describe it to people who aren't actors they're like, "What the fuck is that?"

Is that to make you feel confident on stage?
Yes. But also the whole course, while equipping you with technical abilities, is designed to make you fail every day, and embarrass you into losing your inhibitions. So you'll be an animal for two hours, or be either earth, wind, or fire for 90 minutes, with all your peers in the room.

Every day you have to get up in front of your peers and do something new: either an improvisation or a clowning thing or a Shakespeare speech. But the teachers would constantly push you and not give you enough prep time so that you fail or embarrass yourself or do shit work in front of everyone. Eventually, you're able to say, "Fuck it, I can move on from that," as opposed to the crippling pain of feeling like a failure in front of your peers and teachers. They probably wouldn't explicitly say that's what they're teaching you, but that's certainly what a lot of people took it to be.

One girl smashed her nose, another girl broke her rib. They don't do that lesson any more.

Did being constantly embarrassed ever get too much?
We had certain teachers who would push you in ways some people would consider too far. Like we had this weird exercise that we did every single week, where half the class would be watching and the other half would be standing. They'd play some loud club music, and we had to stare at someone sitting down, as if we're seeing him across the room at a club and start flirting and try to pick him up, just with our eyes and our dancing.

After a bit the teacher would be, like, "OK, that's only one out of ten, I need you to bring up to two... OK, now three." By the time it got to a "seven," people were like, fucking the floor and ripping off their clothes, just because it's not enough for the teacher. So the girls would just take off their tops, and the boys would just start humping things. It was totally bizarre.

Some people were like, "Fuck this, I don't need to get naked to prove that I'm a good actor." Other people got into it and would just take it further and further each time. The positive of that is, people really did lose their inhibitions. You've got this group of 30 people that you see every day, and they've seen every bit of you, so you don't have any nerves in front of them. But at the same time, you have these existential moments where you're like, "What the fuck am I doing this for and why am I paying for this?"

Has that training come into use since you've become a professional actor?
Definitely. I've had jobs where I have to show up at 6 AM to start filming, and I only get the script that morning, and in the first scene, I have to kiss a 50-year-old man. The loss of any embarrassment or inhibitions really has helped me to do that. You could be be sort of embarrassed, but the drama school attitude is just: Who gives a fuck? Just do it.

Was there support if you ever found it too much?
Yeah, it was very, very supportive. We had pastoral care, we had financial care, we had everything in place. A couple of teachers and classes were complained about, and the school reacted immediately.

What sort of things would get to a complaint level?
Well, once there was an exercise where everyone had to be blindfolded, and you had to trust the room and learn the energy of the room, and it built to like a running frenzy where no one could see anything. So inevitably one girl ran into a wall and smashed her nose, and another girl fell over and broke a rib. So that was a mental idea, and people felt their trust had been abused. They don't do that anymore.

Here was another one: They riled you up by getting someone to hold you down, and you had to sort of struggle against him or her. And often the big boys would get quite angry and aggressive because the teacher was trying to bring that out of them. Then, suddenly, they would get uncontrollable and start punching things and other people in the room would really get quite scared. So it was a bit like, "OK, you've literally just unlocked that guy's madness, and I don't know if that's a good thing, because really you do need some degree of control in acting."

Do you think you have to push it too far to know what too far is?
Yeah, but my bottom line is, I had a great time, and I wouldn't change it for the world. I couldn't have got where I am now without it.

PRATIK, RADA

VICE: Had you always wanted to go to Rada?
Pratik: No. I'm actually from India, and I'd already studied abroad. Then I went back to India and joined a theater group and was touring with them, but I wanted to train more in theater. Rada was the one that was known to me most. It was the biggest name.

At that point, did you know what drama school was going to be like?
Honestly, I was told that there would be amazingly attractive people from all over the world, and we would all have these massive orgies all the time and create art and then everyone would go on to win BAFTAs and Oscars. That's really what I thought initially. That was not the case.

What do you remember about your first couple of months?
I realized I was one of the oldest people in the year. I was 24 when I started, and most of them were 18 from small towns in England. These kids were very talented, but they were very conservative as well, in their outlook about life and their thought process. They would make fun of alternative theater: wank this, wank that. Wank was their favorite word. It was like high school again, and I was too old for it.

They must have really felt like children to you.
Yeah they did. And a lot of them had relationships from back where they were from. I was like come on, you are all going to break up and have sex with one another and take lots of drugs. And they were all really flabbergasted: "How can you even say this? I love my boyfriend." At the end of three years, I was the one left behind. I didn't sleep with anyone in my year. I was a martyr, but I was fine with standing alone on the burning ship.

I'm sorry to hear that. What did you enjoy most about the lessons?
I loved being an animal. I was a dragon for an hour. I loved anything physical, because for me, theater is very physical, and even now, when I do TV and film stuff, I always approach a character through the body rather than through the mind.

There were some very weird things like 17th century dance, which I rebelled against at first, but I realize that they were all very good for me. They somehow connect up into proper acting. I loved singing. I can't sing at all, but I loved the singing part of it, and I loved voice class. There was also sword-fighting and stage combat. That was great fun.

Did you find you were more willing or enthusiastic than some of the British students?
So, I come from this Indian school of thought, where, in theater, you basically get there and become naked. It's a theory very influenced from the Polish and Germans, where your body is your thing, and you have to strip yourself down and all that. In Kolkata, I started a theater group, and we were quite experimental. We did devised plays. It was quite controversial. So I came from that and thought we were going to step it up a notch at Rada. But we didn't. I mean, we did in some ways, in terms of acting, but not in terms of being controversial at all.

So when we were in an acting class, obviously we are going to act and cry and break down. I found it annoying when people were like, "Oh I can't do it!" I was like come on, then why are you here? I'm being mean, but it was annoying. Stop crying and act. Although Rada actually pushed people through that process, which was great. They are all really amazing actors now.

I guess if people think about Rada, they imagine a lot of posh English actors like Tom Hiddleston. Is that the case?
I think people always assume that drama school, and especially Rada, are places where only privileged kids go, but everyone was diverse. There were lots of kids from really small towns, who had barely enough money to scrape through and weren't exposed to the world that much.

I was also only used to the posh English accent, so when I came here, I could not believe what I was hearing. These accents are very hard for me. I'm good at English, I got into Rada, but these people, I just could not understand. I'd never even heard the word banter before I came. I had no clue what was going on. Eventually, I became closer with people who are still my friends today.

Was there a lot of outrage about exercises like master and slave?
The craziest thing that happened with the master and slave thing was when one guy had to strip and stand on the piano and masturbate. But he was masturbating with his pants still on, through the material. I said, "Come on! Don't do half measures here." There was a lot of making out and stuff like that, but it was mostly tongue in cheek. If I'm honest, I really did think it wasn't that big a deal, but then I saw people crying in the corridor saying, "Oh God, I can't believe I've gone that far!" I thought, What do you mean? That doesn't make sense. You haven't done anything. Maybe this is a harsh judgment, but in Europe, it's harder to be an actor, because we have a reserved way of social interaction, whereas in India, people are already letting their emotions out.

Are you glad you went?
I think the most important thing it gave me was discipline. In India, when you become an actor, you do loads of drugs and get drunk and explode on stage.

More like a rock star?
Yeah, but what I liked about England was that acting was a job. You go to work, that was really good for me. Now, I am actually doing more TV and film than before. I have an English agent here now. So even though Rada never trains you for the TV specifically, without the training, I think you would feel a bit lost in front of the camera. I really do think it changed my life.

When presented with passages from these accounts, Rada told us the school uses "a variety of exercises within its classes, all of which are widely used within the industry and have a long heritage in acting training." The administrators said they take "a zero-tolerance policy towards, and would never sanction training or exercises that compromise the safety or wellbeing of our students, both physically and psychologically," adding that "the organization takes every measure to ensure the safeguarding of its students and has strict guidelines over the behavior of its teaching staff."

Lamda chose not to comment.

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On this episode of Daily VICE, we sit in on a listening session at the Laurel Canyon Animal Company, a record label making music for dogs with the help of animal psychics.

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Still from Sophia Luvarà's documentary, 'Inside the Chinese Closet.'

In China, homosexuality has been legal since 1997, yet the social stigmatization of LGBT people pervades, with gay relationships largely frowned upon by the state. This week, the Chinese government banned portrayals of same-sex relationships from television, having previously removed videos that featured LGBT couples from the internet. No wonder many young gays and lesbians in the country are having to find innovative ways to conceal their sexuality and save their families the perceived shame of having an unmarried child.

One answer to this has been the rise of fake heterosexual weddings between gay men and lesbians. Inside the Chinese Closet, a new documentary from Italian filmmaker Sophia Luvarà, has all the hallmarks of a classic, sappy romcom: awkward matchmaking, failed attempts to find "the one," and potentially life-ruining in-laws. The only difference is, the film doesn't follow people looking for true love, but rather a fake partnership.

The film focuses on a hapless gay man named Andy and a lesbian named Cherry as they each search for a sham suitor in speed dating-style scenarios. They attend "wedding fairs," which match gay men and women who are looking for the same thing; someone who can convincingly pose a spouse, maybe have a kid via IVF, and live under the same roof. It's like a professional beard service, only the arrangement is meant to last a lifetime.

To find out more about why young Chinese LGBT people don't just abandon their disapproving parents, move to the UK, and spend the rest of their days in leather bars, we talked to Luvarà about her experiences making the documentary. What are these gay matchmaking fairs like? What happens after the wedding? And are they really that different from "real" marriages anyway?

VICE: You have such intimate access to the people in this film. How did you find them?
Sophia Luvarà: It took two years to research the whole thing, and the hardest part was finding characters that would be in the film. I started going out to gay clubs every night with my researcher—it was fun but tiring. We were desperate. Shanghai is a big city: There are 23 million people, and apparently, there are very few openly gay guys. We spoke to people and kept getting given the same names. Eventually, I met my protagonist, Andy, through friends of friends of friends. He was the perfect character I was looking for—he's so troubled, constantly battling with himself and his father figure. And then Cherry came along much later by chance. I wasn't looking for another character, but I met her, and she was so charismatic that she had to be in the film.

What's the social climate like for gay people in China, from what you saw making the film?
Well, since 2001, it's no longer been considered a mental disease to be homosexual, but you still find clinics where they say they can cure you—they give you pills or electric shock therapy. Although you can't go to prison for homosexuality, on a social level, it is problematic. Firstly, your family most likely wants you to have a child, especially because of the one child policy in China, which means that it's likely you're the only child and the only one who can continue the family name. The second problem is the workplace—there is still a lot of discrimination that might mean it is unlikely you get a promotion, for example, if you are openly gay.

In the film, Andy came out to his parents and then was kind of asked by them to retract it and find a wife. Was Cherry ever open with her family? Were they just in denial?
She never came out completely but she hinted. The mother probably understood, and the father too, because when she was at school, the principal found out she was having a relationship with another girl. But because they come from a small rural town, people just don't fully understand what gayness is. They think she's simply rebelling. People are very ignorant, which actually means that gay people don't seem to worry about the way they look or sound as a giveaway.

Why didn't they abandon the parents altogether?
It's a cultural thing. In Chinese society, the family is the most important thing. At the same time, I did choose people who struggled to please their parents, wanted to be accepted, and wanted their parents to be proud. I felt that the film would be stronger because, on a human level, this need connects everyone—we've all at some point in our lives tried to please our parents.

What was the atmosphere at the matchmaking fair like?
It's bizarre! Very controlled. You have to go and say openly what you're looking for—money, baby, marriage terms. It's very pragmatic. It's funny to listen to that as an outsider. It was like a market where you can sell vegetables or eggs; it's so unemotional. It makes perfect sense, though, because both parties need the same thing. Sometimes, it ends well in marriage; other times, it ends badly, especially for the woman who might, somewhere down the line, be pushed into having a baby by the husband's parents. It can be quite distressing for both parties.

Why did you decide to end the film before a sham marriage, before either of your protagonists had found their fake love?
I did find people already in marriages—some successful, others less so. But I didn't want to take the focus away from these two protagonists. I didn't want to wait for Andy to get married because it's not the focus of the film. It's much more about his personal quest. And also, who knows if he will get married, he still hasn't found anyone.

How was it working out for the people you met who were in sham marriages?
I had one particular case where four people lived together, a male couple and a female couple, and one of the boys was married to one of the girls. They are all having a baby together. It's like a commune. The big question is: What is love if you think about it? In the beginning, sure, people are sexually attracted to each other, but then it often does turn into a friendship. It's the same for these gay couples.

So, in making a film about this, were you hoping to change anything? Can you even show the film in China?
I talked to my characters, and they don't want the film to be shown in China. Also, if you want to show a film on TV, you have to have a green stamp from the state, which I obviously didn't get because the film is so controversial to the government. We will show it at LGBT festivals in China, though: They country has two, one in Beijing and one in Shanghai. I'll also use the LGBT networks of people we met there. We hope it can help. Especially in raising awareness about homosexuality in more rural areas. We definitely want it to reach other people who are going through this.

Inside the Chinese Closet is showing at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival in London, March 9–18.

Screenshot via YouTube

Modern medical science has made us all a little careless about our limbs. Lost a hand chopping a carrot? Who cares! The doctor can get you a replacement. Lost a leg trying to impress people by standing in a fire? So what! Pop over to your local walk-in, and someone will hand you a brand new one for free!

The same goes for internal organs—take English actor and man of loud voice, Brian Blessed, for instance, who after a recent on-stage heart attack had a $38,000 pacemaker installed, which he claimed made him feel like a "million dollar man." Afterwards, he said: "Now I can do anything. I just wish they'd given me another cock. That's what I said to the doctors. They said, 'How are you feeling Brian?' I said, 'Great! Now I'd just like a 20-year-old cock!'"

Turns out Brian's demand wasn't as unrealistic as it sounds. In 2014, a South African doctor was the first to ever successfully transplant a penis that went on to actually work. So what's the latest? Could an aging actor have his penis swapped out for another, younger penis without too much hassle? I spoke to urologist and andrologist Dr. Kostas Konstantinidis to get an update.

VICE: How does—or would—a penis transplant work?
Dr. Kostas Konstantinidis: The penis transplant involves connecting the donor penis to the patient. Only patients who have corpora cavernosa tissue can have a penis transplant. This means that female patients who are looking to have a sex change operation are not candidates. The surgery itself mainly involves connecting the blood vessels and nerves of the donor penis to the patient.

What problems might you encounter?
The challenge is for the blood vessels to remain unblocked the first few days after the operation, because they're very small. Following a successful penis transplant, the penis should work normally in terms of erections, urination, orgasm, and ejaculation. However, sensation at the penis glans will most likely be compromised. The main problem with penis transplants in comparison to phalloplasty is that the patient would need to take immunosuppressive drugs for the rest of his life.

Where do the donors come from? Is "penis" something you can check on a donor card?
Donors would need be dead or brain-dead men, as with other types of transplants. There are very strict bio-ethical issues around getting donor organs from living patients. Also, men getting genital re-assignment surgery cannot donate their penises because a number of anatomical parts of the penis are used to construct a vagina.

Why might someone want to get a penis transplant?
There are a number of reasons why a patient might have had a severed penis, such as injury or failed surgery. Also, some men suffer from a condition called true microphalia . In the majority of these cases, as well as with female-to-male transgender patients, the treatment is a surgery called phalloplasty. This involves reconstructing a penis with skin and muscle from the patient's thigh or forearm. Sexual function can be restored with a penile prosthetic placed inside.

Have you ever had any purely aesthetic requests for either transplants or any other penis surgery?
Penis transplants are at a very experimental level and only a handful have been attempted. Also, because they require the administration of immunosuppressive drugs and a donor penis, they are unlikely to ever become as common as phalloplasty surgery and should never be performed only for aesthetic reasons. If patients need a larger penis, there are a number of surgical and non-surgical ways to achieve this, which are in fact very straightforward.

Like what?
In all men, a part of the penis extends inside the body and isn't visible. This hidden part is attached to the pubic bone through the so-called suspensory ligaments. Ligamentolysis involves cutting some of the penis ligaments, which allows part of the "hidden" penis to move downwards and outside the body. Fat injection is the most widely used technique for penis girth enhancement. For men who aren't good candidates for a full penis enlargement surgery or are unsure about it, it's possible to increase the girth and glans of the penis with the use of a filler called hyaluronic acid. But this is absorbed by the body over time, so it needs to be repeated.

Are there many requests for penis transplants?
There are a few patients requesting penile transplants, but this just isn't offered at the moment. It took the South African team five years of planning to tackle the bio-ethical barriers around performing the operation. It's strictly experimental at the moment, and since an alternative treatment exists that does not require the administration of immunosuppressive drugs—phalloplasty—we doubt that this kind of operation will ever be performed routinely. The more interesting research route, which is still at a very embryonic phase, is around tissue engineering, whereby a penis is grown in a laboratory from a patient's own cells. This route is being explored by Dr. Anthony Atala and has already been successfully achieved with rabbits. Of course, translating that to humans is much more difficult.

If a transplant was successful, would there be full functionality?
Yes, there would be full functionality, but reduced glans sensation.

Follow Tom on Twitter.

The sleeve for Data Discs' 2016 vinyl version of the 'Streets of Rage 2' soundtrack

1992's Streets of Rage 2 isn't simply one of the best Mega Drive games of all time. It also had—has—one of the greatest soundtracks of the 16-bit console era. SEGA's side-scrolling fighter, the sequel to the company's original cooperative brawler of a year earlier, was largely accompanied by the music of Yuzo Koshiro. Twenty-five at the time of the game's release, Koshiro's work had been heard on preceding titles like action-platformer ActRaiser on the SNES, the Game Gear-specific version of Shinobi, and the first Streets of Rage. But SoR2 was something else.

Apparently arranged using an NEC PC-8801 and a personalized twist on BASIC, Music Macro Language, Koshiro's contributions to Streets of Rage 2 were hugely influential. He was responsible for all but three tracks on the game—said trio coming from Motohiro Kawashima—and contemporary artists and producers like Ikonika, Labrinth, Joker, and Just Blaze have cited him as an essential influence on their work. But that doesn't mean everyone with dance music in the blood has actually heard his stuff.

Angus Harrison is staff writer at VICE, Thump, and Noisey in the UK. He's pretty much a walking, talking encyclopedia of electronic beats and breaks. But ahead of me sitting him down to listen to the soundtrack to Streets of Rage 2—it's receiving a beautiful double-vinyl release through London's Data Discs in April (it has previously released the soundtracks to Super Hang-On and Shenmue, among others)—he'd only known Kushiro through reputation alone.

"I know of Koshiro because of his links to club music, though even then my knowledge is quite vague," Angus tells me, as we sneak away to a corner of the VICE office for a listen. "I know that he's someone who brought textures and sounds of club music, especially 1980s club music, into video games soundtracks." I figure it's best to begin at the beginning.

Mike Diver: Let me play you "Go Straight." This is the music from the first level of the game. I'm putting you on the spot a bit here, but what does this remind you of, maybe, from a more contemporary perspective?
Angus Harrison: So that's the start of the game? Jesus. I'm struck by just how direct it is. It's like a big acid house tune. I was expecting something that used instrumentation or structures from club music—but that is basically a fast and hard acid house track. Stuff like Vamp's "Outlander" is an older tune that's pretty similar, in terms of its pace and the tone it sets. In terms of artists making music like that today, I mean, it'd be people making deliberately throwback stuff.

Well, this game came out in 1992, and even then Kushiro was using some pretty dated gear—he wrote most of this soundtrack, I'm led to believe, on a PC-8801, which the internet tells me was first introduced to the Japanese market in 1981. I'm sure he used a later model, but all the same—he wasn't quite "with the times" when making this music.
I think an interesting thing to me, which might be overanalyzing things, is the juxtaposition of the music of that era being tied to this sense of communality and love—all around the arrival of ecstasy—and it being put under this game of fighting, this violent experience. But then, it kind of makes sense, because that beat is so aggressive.

The game was made in Japan, but actually came out in the States before anywhere else. Do you feel this sounds like a Japanese artist's take on the sounds coming out of the clubs of the West?
I can see how it might be, though I'm aware that those sort of sounds weren't really reaching Japan at all. Well, that's simplifying things—they were, but not in any kind of comprehensive way. I think you'd probably have to go to where that music was being made to get it. You'd have to physically leave Japan to experience a house or techno scene in a fundamental sense. But, that being said, you can hear this strange conglomeration of different things in the track. It feels totally natural, but there are shades of Detroit techno coming through. There's also this Manchester, Hacienda–type acid house.

I'll play another one. See what you make of this. It's "Dreamer," which comes quite early on in the game still.
This is really interesting. On the one hand, those piano chords are very house; that's like a foundation of house. But a lot of the other stuff going on, that synth melody for example, that's kind of like what some Glaswegian producers have been making in just the last five years—like Rustie and Hudson Mohawke. And I guess by extension, that's bled into the whole PC Music scene, with this high-octane, often slightly tacky-sounding, sugary music.

Because this was designed for a video game, and not to be played out on stereos, you have compression—but that's a quality that a lot of producers now are putting into their work, deliberately. I think you can definitely hear some of this in Rustie's recent stuff. He's maybe stepping more into happy hardcore territories, but he has these very spacey passages. His music is more amped-up, but it has that same deliberate tackiness—and I use tacky in a positive way.

Cool. Let's try "Slow Moon."
See, this feels like a bridge between disco and house. That slower pace, and the way the bass line is walking, I feel that if that was a full production, made today, it'd have more live instruments and probably a string section. It's got that luxurious sound—it's warmer than what I've heard before.

It's a bit like the early stuff Frankie Knuckles was doing, taking disco and producing this fuller, but still driven sound. It's a little like the dance music you'd hear in France just before Daft Punk came out, like a form of garage—not UK garage, but in terms of Brooklyn's Paradise Garage, like what Larry Levan was DJing there. That, to me, sounds like it's a huge-sounding record restricted by the equipment he had at the time, and the medium he was writing the music for.

From what you've heard so far, would you guess that Koshiro had a pretty decent record collection at the time of writing this music?
Definitely. To me, he sounds like someone who's... Well, he's really tapping into all of electronic and dance music, at once. And this soundtrack is like being hit by a wall of that, because it's not specifically attached to one scene. There are so many shades of basically all of what was going on in several different places at that time, which I find really interesting. That definitely suggests he had a pretty wide selection of records.

A look at the forthcoming Data Discs release

OK, I'll throw on a couple more, starting with "Under Logic."
This is a classic, like, hands-in-the-air screamer. I'm amazed at the sound he's achieved, how full it is. I know I said earlier that he's restricted, but this really isn't, it's totally full on.

The last track I'm going to play is a boss theme, actually. It's called "Revenge of Mr. X." It actually plays right at the end of the game, when you face off against the final boss, who's obviously called Mr. X.
This has a lot more layers to it than what my head says there should be in an early 1990s video game. I know that electronic music and video games are closely linked, but I always thought that composers for games were just using, like, interesting synthesizers from the dance world. I didn't realize that anyone was making full-on dance tracks for a video game. Because that's basically what these are. This one has a real Detroit techno feeling to it.

Streets of Rage 2 is a game with very few guns in it. Actually, I think the only one in the whole game, in terms of one that fires bullets, is used by Mr. X as this track plays. Does the track maybe capture that—does it feel slightly, I guess, mechanical? And deadly?
There is that sense of extra threat to it. I think it's interesting that, for music like techno and house, the capacity for interpretation is so diverse. It's music to be played in dark anonymous spaces, by anonymous people. So you have that shut-off with the visuals—but you make your own visuals. And you telling me this is a boss track, of course it is. Of course, he's unleashing hell.

The game is beatable in an hour, or not much more. Do you think its short duration helps the soundtrack have this legacy, because it's almost album length? Not one track ever outstayed its welcome—unless you really, really sucked.
I can see how that would be the case. With a collection of tracks like this, it's advantageous that it all sits together quite coherently. The connection you form between the music playing and what you see on the screen, that must also help the game's legacy. Having heard this particular track, like, you know where that is in the game. And that, to me, says a lot about what impact this music has on the legacy of the whole game. Because it must make other people nostalgic for it, and immediately remember what level that certain track is from.

There might be a clear comparison to draw here between the gaming experience and the clubbing experience. If you try to explain gaming to outsiders, they might just think it's sitting in front of a screen, pressing some buttons. Clubbing might seem like standing in the dark, dancing to repetitive music. But there's a similarity between them, where the repetitiveness isn't about one singular moment, but finding an experience within a pattern. It doesn't surprise me that music works so well with video games. Clubbing and gaming are both about dedicating time, and finding that experience for yourself.

Do you think you could slip one of these tracks into a set today and get away with it?
I think you could totally get away with it. I reckon if you were playing a big room, doing a house set, and you dropped "Under Logic," the crowd would go wild. With that break, there's no way people wouldn't have their tops off.

Find more information on Data Discs' Streets of Rage 2 soundtrack release, expected out in April, at the label's official website, here.

Follow Mike Diver on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on VICE Romania.

Băile Herculane is the most famous spa town in Romania. From the Ancient Romans in the area to Austro-Hungarian Empress Sisi, the town was for centuries the place to bathe. I grew up in Băile Herculane during the communist regime and had my first taste of democracy there. But after I left home to study abroad in 1993, I would only return once a year for the holidays.

With each visit, I would become increasingly aware that the town was deteriorating—every historical building in a worse state than the last time I'd left. All the thermal swimming pools are deserted now; they're completely empty. For over 20 years, the government has been promising funds to bring the resort back to its former glory. Instead, it has sold property like the baths, an old casino, the library, and a number of beautiful old hotels to private investors, who flipped them for profit and did nothing.

There used to be a constant stream of tourists to the town, attracted by the hot baths, the natural beauty, and the fresh air. There are still some tourists these days—usually on state-funded holidays for their health. They ogle the dying town, while soaking in the sulfur water on the banks of our river.

Here are some recent photos of Băile Herculane.

By 1970, after just three years on the shelves, OZ—the Sydney-founded, London-based counterculture magazine—was accused of losing touch with its younger readers. The best way to remedy that, thought the editorial team, was to place an advertisement in issue 26 that read:

"Some of us at OZ are feeling old and boring, so we invite any of our readers who are under 18 to come and edit the April issue... you will enjoy almost complete editorial freedom. OZ belongs to you."

Twenty high school students were taken on to edit the May 1970 issue, which would eventually become known as the infamous "School-kids OZ." This temporary editorial staff included 15-year-old Vivian Berger, who—in his mini-biography in the front pages of the magazine—admitted to smoking cigarettes at age nine and tripping for the first time at 11. For the issue, Berger created a Rupert Bear parody by pasting Rupert's head onto X-rated drawings by cartoonist Robert Crumb. Mary Tourtel's much-loved character now sported a huge erection, which he repeatedly tried to insert into an oddly virginal "Gipsy Grandma."

Maybe because of the combination of the "kids" title with advertisements for "vibrating massagers," leather posing pouches, and Swedish porn magazines, the School Kids Issue didn't sell particularly well and was quickly forgotten by the OZ team. However, two months after its release, in July of 1970, the magazine got a reminder in the form of the Obscene Publications Squad raiding its Holland Park office. OZ's Australian founder, Richard Neville, and co-editors Jim Anderson and Felix Dennis, were all charged with producing a magazine that would "debauch and corrupt the morals of children arouse and implant in the minds of those young people lustful and perverted desires."

Geoffrey Robertson, then a fresh-faced Australian Rhodes Scholar, offered to help with the OZ team's defense, while John Mortimer QC—celebrated barrister and author, and father of actress Emily Mortimer—agreed to defend the magazine in court at the eleventh hour. Germaine Greer, an old friend of Neville's from Sydney, was in America publishing The Female Eunuch, but offered to fly back to help. Robertson pointed out that her testimony might not go down all that well in court, as she had recently allowed her anus to be photographed for the Amsterdam-based underground magazine Suck.

The back cover of an issue of 'OZ,' advertising a benefit event to help pay the costs of the obscenity trial

The following year, during the trial at the Old Bailey, the defense counsel Brian Leary seemed obsessed with Rupert Bear's erection. At one point, he read out Jim Anderson's editorial that described Vivian Berger's work as "youthful genius." Leary described the simple process of glueing together two artists' work and asked the OZ editor, "Wherein lies the genius?" Anderson tried to explain: "Er, I think it's in the juxtaposition of two ideas, the childhood symbol of innocence..." Leary interrupted: "BY MAKING RUPERT BEAR FUCK!?"

A few days later, and still preoccupied, Leary asked the witness, academic Edward de Bono, "What do you suppose is the effect intended to be of equipping Rupert Bear with such a large-sized organ?"

"I don't know enough about bears to know their exact proportions," replied de Bono gravely. "I imagine their organs are hidden in their fur."

Presiding Judge Argyle—who, from the outset, seemed to think OZ magazine threatened the fate of Western civilization—at interrupted at one point to ask another defense witness, the jazz singer George Melly, what he meant by the word "cunnilinctus." Melly helpfully explained the meaning: "Sucking. Blowing. Or going down or gobbling. Or, as we said in my naval days, 'yodeling in the canyon.'"

Read on Motherboard: These Amber-Encased Lizards Lived 99 Million Years Ago

Later in the trial, Leary, also having problems with some of the words in OZ, asked Neville: "The cover of the magazine portrays, does it not, a series of lesbian poses?"

"Yes, there are depicted three or four ladies enjoying themselves," Neville replied.

Leary then pointed at a phallus strapped to one of the women. "I think it's called a dildo."

"Er, I don't think so," Neville pointed out, to which Judge Argyle interrupted: "I think we'd better call it an 'imitation male penis.'"

"Your Honor," Neville responded, "I think the word 'male' is unnecessary."

Richard Neville has admitted that he was rather pleased with himself for making this comment—but it's worth noting here that objectifying images of women were continually used on the cover and inside OZ. Marsha Rowe, co-founder of feminist magazine Spare Rib, who helped with the defense at the OZ trial, noted that women who worked on the magazine "did the office and production work rather than any editorial work." Only four of the students who worked on the "School Kids" OZ were girls, and one of them, 15-year-old Berti, was featured in a pull-out "jailbait of the month" poster.

"God Save Oz" by John Lennon, written and recorded to help fund the OZ team's defense

After Judge Argyle had finished summing up, doing very little to hide his contempt for the defendants, the jury retired to consider its verdict. At one point, the jurors asked for the exact meaning of "indecency." Argyle replied: "If a woman takes her clothes off on a crowded beach, we think that is indecent in this country." After a total of four hours, and armed with this helpful explanation, the jury found all three defendants guilty.

"Send them down!" shouted Argyle.

A week later, the three accused—now with shaved heads courtesy of Wandsworth prison—returned for sentencing. They were all given up to 15 months imprisonment, a sentence some commentators criticized, saying you could quite easily find much harder porn in Soho than in the pages of OZ.

This kind of talk worked in the OZ team's favor. When the case went to appeal, the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Widgery, gave a clerk £20 and sent him to Soho to buy the most hardcore porn he could find. The images in OZ paled in comparison to what he returned with. Because of this—and because Judge Argyle had provided "very substantial and serious misdirection" to the jury—the convictions were quashed.

Read on Broadly: Cannabis Use Can Elicit 'Autistic-Like' Behavior

Reginald Maudling, the Conservative Home Secretary, hauled in Detective Chief Inspector George Fenwick of the Obscene Publications Squad and asked him to explain exactly why Soho's sex shops were operating with impunity while there were continuous raids on relatively innocuous "alternative" magazines. Fenwick blamed the publicity of the OZ trial but had no real answers, so Home Secretary Maudling initiated a major corruption inquiry into the Metropolitan police.

These investigations—helped along by a new Met commissioner, Robert "Mr Clean" Mark—revealed that there was systemic corruption "on a scale that beggars description" at the heart of the London's police force, with investigators finding that many of Soho's porn merchants were making weekly payments to some of the most senior police officers in the UK. In 1976, George Fenwick was sentenced to ten years in prison.

Although OZ magazine gained readers after the publicity of the trial, its popularity faded over the next 18 months, and in November 1973, £20,000 in debt, the magazine closed down for good.

Every back issue of OZ is now available online, via the University of Wollongong.

Follow Rob Baker on Twitter.