Volume 47 - Issue 2

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THE BONDS THAT TIE BDSM & LEATHER IN DOWNTOWN NEW HAVEN, PG 30

STAFF publisher Briton Park editors-in-chief Eric Boodman Julia Calagiovanni executive editor Ike Swetlitz managing editor Maya Averbuch senior editors Caroline Durlacher Katy Osborn Noah Remnick Ezra Ritchin A. Grace Steig associate editors Ashley Dalton Emily Efland Caroline Sydney Isabelle Taft copy editors Adrian Chiem Eva Landsberg Adam Mahler Douglas Plume

members and directors Emily Bazelon, Peter B. Cooper, Jonathan Dach, Kathrin Lassila, Eric Rutkow, Elizabeth Sledge, Jim Sleeper, Fred Strebeigh advisors Richard Bradley, Jay Carney, Joshua Civin, Richard Conniff, Ruth Conniff, Elisha Cooper, Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, Jennifer Pitts, Julia Preston, Lauren Rabin, David Slifka, John Swansburg, Steven Weisman, Daniel Yergin friends Michael Addison, Austin Family Fund, Steve Ballou, J. Neela Banerjee, Margaret Bauer, Anson M. Beard, Jr., Blaire Bennett, Richard Bradley, Martha Brant, Susan Braudy, Daniel Brook, Hilary Callahan, Jay Carney, Daphne Chu, Josh Civin, Jonathan M. Clark, Constance Clement, Andy Court, Masi Denison, Albert J. Fox, Mrs. Howard Fox, David Freeman, Geoffrey Fried, Sherwin Goldman, David Greenberg, Stephen Hellman, Laura Heymann, Gerald Hwang, Walter Jacob, Jane Kamensky, Tina Kelley, Roger Kirwood, Jonathan Lear, Lewis E. Lehrman, Jim Lowe, E. Nobles Lowe, Daniel Murphy, Martha E. Neil, Peter Neil, Howard H. Newman, Sean O’Brien, Laura Pappano, Julie Peters, Lewis and Joan Platt, Julia Preston, Lauren Rabin, Fairfax C. Randal, Robert Randolph, Stuart Rohrer Arleen and Arthur Sager, Richard Shields, W. Hampton Sides, Lisa Silverman, Scott Simpson, Adina Proposco and David Sulsman, Thomas Strong, Margarita Whiteleather, Blake Wilson, Daniel Yergin and Angela Stent Yergin

staff writers Gideon Broshy Ashley Dalton photo editor Jennifer Lu design editors Annie Schweikert Edward Wang Madeleine Witt

The New Journal is published five times during the academic year by The New Journal at Yale, Inc., P.O. Box 203432 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520. Office address: 305 Crown Street. All contents Copyright 2014 by The New Journal at Yale, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction either in whole or in part without written permission of the publisher and editors-in-chief is prohibited. While this magazine is published by Yale College students, Yale University is not responsible for its contents. Four thousand copies of each issue are distributed free to members of the Yale and New Haven communities. Subscriptions are available to those outside the area. Rates: One year, $50. The New Journal is printed by Turley Publications, Palmer, MA; bookkeeping and billing services are provided by Colman Bookkeeping of New Haven. The New Journal encourages letters to the editor and comments on Yale and New Haven issues. Write to Editorials, 203432 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520. All letters for publication must include address and signature. We reserve the right to edit all letters for publication.

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THE NEW JOURNAL

Volume 47 Issue 2 October 2014

www.thenewjournalatyale.com

FEATURES

20

Up for Debate

30

The Bonds That Tie

Yale coaches bring New Haven teenagers into the privileged world of high school debate

by Caroline Durlacher The gay leather community crowns its newest ambassador

by Aaron Mak

STANDARDS

4

profile

6

snapshot

8

snapshot

Classical Counterpoint

by Eric Lin Cinderblock Manor

by Nate Steinberg The Prophets’ Network

by Arizona Greene

17

snapshot

27

critical angle

38

endnote

The Miniature Holy Land

by Libbie Katsev Scarlet Letters

by Olivia Klevorn Squeak, Don’t Eat Me!

by Micaela Bullard

12 profile

When a Cop Calls

by Alexandra Golden

Cover by Madeleine Witt, Edward Wang, and Annie Schweikert

OCTOBER 2014

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PROFILE

CLASSICAL COUNTERPOINT Yale School of Music’s only female composition professor shares an unconventional voice

H

annah Lash’s first love was Bach. She remembers the first time she heard his music: “I wanted to create it. I wanted to figure notational things for me,” she explains.

Decades later, Lash continues to compose; she teaches composition at the Yale School of Music, where she is the only female professor of composition alongside four men. The situation is similar in universities across the country, where fifteen percent of the composition faculty is women, according to WQXR, New York City’s classical music station. Historically, the disparity has been even starker.

Ask readers to name female authors, and they’ll probably be able to name some—Emily Dickinson and Jane Austen, at the very least. But most classical music listeners would have trouble naming a single female composer. Virtually all of the canonical composers are men.

So Lash, like most female composers, often encounters what she calls the “dreaded question”: “What is it like to be a female composer?” The best response she says female composers can give: “What is it like to be a male composer?”

HANNAH LASH IS AN AWARD-WINNING COMPOSER AND PROFESSOR AT THE YALE SCHOOL OF MUSIC. PHOTO BY JENNIFER LU.

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Lash grew up in upstate New York. Her parents, who were both librarians, educated her themselves instead of sending her to school. “Their philosophy was to give me free rein in the library,” she says.

At 16, Lash began studying at the Eastman School of Music, under the instruction of composer Augusta Read Thomas. At the time, Thomas was the only woman on Eastman’s composition faculty, and her music challenged stereotypes about female composers’ work: essentially, that it was less ambitious.

But Lash simply took Thomas’s music for what it was: great music.

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Even today, those stereotypes persist. Lash says that audience members and even some musicians believe—whether consciously or not—that women write intuitive, emotional music, while men write grandly orchestrated, intellectual works. For her, this idea is preposterous. As she puts it, “Music transcends the idea of gender.”

And misconceptions about women’s compositions have hardly stopped Lash from coming into her own as a composer. She has won awards ranging from the Charles Ives Scholarship from the Academy of Arts and Letters to the Fromm Foundation’s the Naumberg Prize in Composition, as well as a scholarship to the Yaddo artists’ colony. Prior to the 2010 premiere of “Blood Rose,” the chamber opera she based on the story of “Beauty and the Beast,” The New York Times wrote: “Ms. Lash has created an impressive body of work, combining avant-garde techniques with a post-Romantic expressiveness.” In 2014, The Los Angeles Times praised her as a “sensitive orchestrator [who] applied vibrant dabs of color to an essentially Messiaen-like sound world,” for a composition entitled “This Ease.”

Lash entered Eastman to study harp performance, before moving on to composition. Most of her friends were men, because the composition students were predominantly male, though many of her fellow harpists were female. She says people found her “less aggressive,” and her playing “picturesque,” largely because harp is generally considered to have a more delicate quality. But for her, this image has nothing to do with musicians’ real work. She insists that her male classmates never approached her music with preconceived notions based on her gender.

While studying, she came to emulate the academic style of her male teachers. She found much of her identity as a composer through this kind of imitation. But she worked to maintain her individual style: “I also wanted to feel that I could establish a persona that would feel comfortable to me,” she says.

Her compositions—and the way she talks about them—are marked by a streak of defiance. When Lash was a composition student in the Ph.D. program at Harvard, she insisted on writing a fugue— a composition in which the melody is introduced and then repeated, while intertwining with other parts. Fugues were popular 350 years ago, in the age OCTOBER 2014

of Bach and Handel. Today, most composers do not even consider writing in the form. Martin Bresnick, a colleague at the Yale School of Music, explains that it was “like someone writing an oration in the style of Cicero” today.

Even when her music does seem to follow the stereotype of the serene harpist, she won’t let you think that for long. She remembers a man telling her that he thought her music was very feminine because “the textures are just so beautiful,” to which she responded, “Does the Impressionist movement seem feminine to you because the textures are beautiful?”

Sexism, she says, doesn’t really affect the way she composes. “It’s more about numbers for me, and feeling as though I want to teach by example and be a good colleague,” she says. Just as Lash was allowed to shape her own musical education, she believes that her students find themselves better when they are not explicitly told what to do. “A composer needs to have a very solid sense of himself or herself,” she says.

One of her students, Tiange Zhou, explains that Lash’s focus on students’ individual identities is what made the Yale School of Music such a special place for her. The school gives students “this very big space to do things for themselves. Not only to imitate someone, but to be a person.”

And it is through music that Lash and Zhou have formed a lasting relationship. For Zhou, Lash is “not only a teacher, but a friend.” More than that, though, Lash is the role model for Zhou that Augusta Read Thomas was for her. When Zhou thinks of Lash, she tells herself, “That is a possibility. That is how a female composer can be.”

Eric Lin is a freshman in Morse College.

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SNAPSHOT

CINDERBLOCK MANOR New Haven’s alternative to inner-city projects falls into dangerous disrepair

“I

was born there,” said Damien Mabry, jabbing a finger at a plain cinderblock house. “And now I live there.” This time, he pointed at another residence nearby, nearly identical to the first.

Mabry and I were standing in the neighborhood of Westville Manor, a public housing complex in the northwest corner of New Haven. It is only a fifteenminute drive from downtown, but it feels much farther away. It is surrounded on three sides by the dense foliage of West Rock State Park, and its main drag, Wayfarer Street, is a two-lane road that ends in a cul-de-sac. The smaller streets that branch off it are also dead ends.

As we stood outside, old newspapers fluttered over the pavement.

Elm City Communities, formerly known as the Housing Authority of New Haven, is focusing on low-density, suburb-like landscapes like Westville Manor as an alternative to towering urban projects.

The approach has proved immensely popular. Though competition for public housing spots is always high, a New Haven Independent article from 2011 recounts how difficult it was to snag a coveted spot in Fair Haven’s Quinnipiac Terrace. Out of the 4,000 who entered the lottery, only 900 struck it lucky and were assigned an apartment. In response, the Housing Authority commissioned a $200 million reconstruction of another low-density complex near West Rock: Westville Manor.

Elm City Communities, which operates Westville Manor, calls it a “family development in a countryside setting,” according to its website. Yet a look at the architecture tells a different story. Westville Manor is a labyrinth of right angles and cinderblocks.

Though they are designed to look like traditional homes, the units are rowhouses, with each separated from its neighbors by only a thin interior drywall. The houses, which have between two and five bedrooms, are rarely larger than 900 square feet. In an article in the New Haven Register, Connecticut architect Duo Dickinson noted that these new complexes are 6

“blank and soulless,” and deprived residents of “pride of ownership.”

But Mabry talks about other, more pressing issues.

A number of times, he has had to report water and electricity failures in his house to Elm City Communities.

With ongoing structural problems—and a recent spike in violence—at Westville Manor, the “soullessness” of the houses might be the least of inhabitants’ concerns. When I visited in September, broken windows were boarded up with cardboard. Water heaters were rusted. Some houses had such little floor space that the occupants chose to convert the utility room into a bedroom. I saw an astonishing array of makeshift remedies to cover up damage, from windows bandaged with duct tape to twine suspending basement drainpipes.

Other tenants have encountered worse. In September 2013, the plaster ceiling in resident Debbie Hill’s house collapsed. One month later, Jeanette Melton, another resident, contacted New Haven Legal Assistance when she noticed water seeping through the cracks in her ceiling, the New Haven Independent reported. The attorneys discovered black mold, crumbling walls, and corroded floorboards in Melton’s household, but couldn’t go further: They lacked adequate resources and evidence. Amy Marx, an attorney with legal assistance, explained that the tenants’ rental

PHOTO BY JENNIFER LU.

THE NEW JOURNAL

paperwork was incomplete, meaning that the case would be hard to defend in court. Nearly a year later, no legal action has been taken.

Residents of Westville Manor often end up tangled up in bureaucracy. In the 1950s, the city of New Haven owned, operated, and repaired all of its own lowincome property. Later, grossly underfunded, the city council began to distribute housing funds to private landlords through the Section 8 program rather than investigating new budget-balancing methods. This new jointly operated system has created a communication gap, not only between the public and private sectors, but between the management and the inhabitants. One tenant gestured at a huge stack of paperwork on her kitchen table, telling me how little of it she understood.

And tenants feel that the management’s accountability has only worsened. Another Wayfarer Street resident, who asked to remain anonymous, described a severe cockroach infiltration on the ground floor of her house. “I’m not going to report it, because it’s never going to get fixed anyways,” she remarked.

“The unit sends someone to come look; then I never hear back no matter how often I call.”

I called Elm City Communities myself, and a representative told me that some of residents’ problems were fixed. Debbie Hill confirmed that her ceiling has indeed been repaired. But when I asked further questions about the state of the complex, I was told to contact another representative. When, after many tries, I got in touch with him, he told that I should stop calling him and directed me back to the first. The Housing Authority’s limited staff seemed too overworked to comment further.

Meanwhile, a more dangerous problem has remained unaddressed in the streets of Westville Manor: crime and gun violence. One tenant told a story of two residents robbing their next-door neighbors. Mabry, whose 7-year-old cousin was shot within the complex in August, believes that residents from nearby Dixwell and Newhallville have often been the perpetrators of these crimes. Another tenant remarked that outsiders come to the neighborhood in swarms, bringing violence and chaos. In late May, four shootings were reported within a seven-day period, and New Haven police sirens wailed ceaselessly in Westville Manor.

Violence can be a chronic problem in New Haven’s low-income neighborhoods, one that even outside OCTOBER 2014

organizations’ best efforts can’t solve. In 2000, Joanne Sciulli FES ’96, founded an organization called Solar Youth to offer children between nine and thirteen programs that focus on cooperation, tolerance, community service, and leadership. They began neighborhood-based programs in Westville Manor in 200W8, with weekly activities ranging from bike rides to reviving the ecosystems of nearby ponds. But the staff saw the realities of Westville Manor crime firsthand when the Solar Youth house was burglarized several times in 2009.

After this summer’s violence, Sciulli began to post banners around the neighborhood. One reads, “YOU ARE IMPORTANT TO US.” Another reads, “GUNS KILL, SO KEEP OFF.” One tenant further down Wayfarer Street said that Elm City Communities is unresponsive and unhelpful on issues of both crime and internal damage. “They send out a van daily to patrol the streets and help out, but a single employee can’t really do much,” said the resident.

The tenants feel as though they have been pushed aside. A few told me they plan to leave the unit within the year, planning to move to more urban areas of the city, but most do not have the means to move elsewhere. For Mabry, though, it is a question of allegiance to the neighborhood where he has lived for twenty-eight years. “There’s a community here that nobody else ever gonna see but we who live in it because nobody bother to fix it,” he said.

But for the sake of home, he will stay and wait for repairs to come. “I’m good with it here,” he said. “We’re a tight community. We take no bullshit from no one.”

Nate Steinberg is a sophomore in Timothy Dwight College.

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S N AP S H OT

THE PROPHETS’ NETWORK A social organization helps ease the transition from the working world to Yale Divinity School

by Arizona Greene

W

in Bassett caught Father Tony Jarvis just as he was leaving his office at the Yale Divinity School last April. Jarvis was in a hurry, and Bassett asked for a second of his time. They went inside and sat down. After years of working in law, Bassett had been accepted into the Yale Divinity School, and he was visiting for the admitted students’ weekend.

But he still didn’t think he could enroll. He was terrified of starting over, of leaving everything behind in North Carolina, the only place he had ever called home.

“Bassett, that’s why you have to come here,” Bassett remembers Father Jarvis telling him. “It’s good that you’re afraid of it. Every major step in my life, I have been deathly afraid to do what I was about to do.”

Bassett is now in his second year at Yale Divinity School (YDS), getting his Masters of Arts in Religion, with a concentration in literature. But he is also a Profit. Not a “prophet”—Bassett is a member of the Former Profits, a social organization at the divinity school that brings together students who had previously pursued other careers. Members range from ex-bankers to ex-teachers to exphotographers. Some used to own dance studios. Others used to work

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on Wall Street. Many members are commuters, some from as far as Boston.They have left behind oftenlucrative careers for late-life study of theology, and Former Profits eases the transition.

Many Profits feel like they are giving up everything familiar for something uncertain. The participants’ desires to help each other through the potentially difficult transition serve as the foundation for Former Profits. Though they come from diverse backgrounds, together they can admit to their doubts about whether they have made the right choice in coming to divinity school.

The group recently had it first meeting of the year, a pizza lunch, in the common room of the Divinity School. Over lunch, the new students got to know returning members. At the next meeting, a guest speaker will talk about what it’s like to adjust to a new career path, long after they thought they had chosen one for life.

Bassett’s story is similar to those of other Profits: He moved from one kind of job to another in search of a concrete way to be of service. As an undergraduate, Bassett studied electrical engineering at North Carolina State

University, but halfway through, he realized that he had no interest in becoming an engineer. He then decided to go to law school to become a patent attorney, which requires degrees in both engineering and law. He worked for eight months as a low level associate in a large international patent law firm in North Carolina before leaving, dissatisfied with the experience.

“I was tucked in an office writing memos that clients would likely never see. I wasn’t getting a lot of human interaction,” he said.

He left the job to work as an Assistant District Attorney in Raleigh, North Carolina. He wanted to become a law professor, and he thought the job would help him get there. But once again, he found himself dissatisfied.

“I experienced a lot of moral distress, particularly with young kids and low level drug crime,” Bassett said. “I found myself counseling and even pastoring these kids, trying to keep them out of jail instead of putting them in.”

Looking for alternative ways to serve children, Bassett discovered Yale’s Education Leadership and Ministry Program, founded by Father Jarvis. This certificate program, which supplements Bassett’s MAR degree, prepares students to pursue vocations as chaplains, THE NEW JOURNAL

really envied them,” Bassett said.

“And now I see exactly what that looks like.”

WIN BASSETT TRANSITIONED FROM A CAREER IN LAW TO THE YALE DIVINITY SCHOOL. PHOTO BY JENNIFER LU.

administrators, teachers, and coaches in independent schools.

Bassett hopes to work in an independent primary school so that he can help kids with education instead of punishing them in the justice system.

He studies with a clear focus OCTOBER 2014

on where he is headed, a quality that seems to separate profits from many of the students who arrived at YDS right out of college. “When I was in law school, the people who had been out in the real world a couple years always treated their schooling more seriously, and I

Many of the Former Profits are no strangers to the world of religion, even if a life of ministry may not have crossed their minds before. Cheryl Bundy, a fourth year part-time student pursuing a Masters of Arts in Religion, worked on Wall Street for twelve years and as a fundraiser in the non-profit world for another twelve. After September 11, she worked at St. James Episcopal Church in New York City doing education and outreach. In 2009, she moved to Connecticut with her family and couldn’t find a job that interested her.

“I was forty-four, and I finally asked myself, ‘What do you really want to do? What makes your heart tick?’” she said.

Partly because of how much she loved her work at St. James, she decided to study theology at YDS. Some students have spent their entire lives in service to their faith before joining the Profits. Carlos Insignares is currently in his second year of studies to earn a Masters in Divinity, a three-year degree that prepares him for ordination and ministry. He has served in the ministry since age twelve, as a liturgical committee member, catechist, and confirmation teacher.

I asked Insignares why, despite having been so involved in ministry all his life, he had waited until the age of fifty to seek ordination. He responded that this was not his first time pursuing priesthood. In the fall of 1993, after 9

receiving his bachelors in elementary education, he entered a Catholic seminary and took a job as a Catholic schoolteacher.

“I was in seminary, in the Roman Catholic seminary, and they found out I was gay. They asked me to leave, so I did—on a Saturday night, with no place to go. I was left alone and rejected.”

Unemployed, Insignares went back to his alma mater, St. Thomas University. He received his Master’s in Guidance and Counseling and taught for two years at a public school before taking a job as a guidance counselor.

No longer in the Catholic Church, he decided to find somewhere he could feel free, where he did not have to worry about his sexual orientation. This led him to an Episcopal church. Insignares considered himself too old to enter the priesthood, but his spiritual director told him it was never too late.

day have again. The standard office workdays have been left behind.

“We have had wonderful jobs.” Insignares says.

“We have given them up to be here.”

“It’s incredibly scary the whole way. I’m afraid of disappointing my parents, disappointing former mentors in the fields I left,” Bassett admits.

What keeps them together is the fact that they have looked elsewhere before coming here. No matter their past professions, they have stumbled upon similar challenges. As Insignares said, “We bring in a slew of experiences that can really only come with time.”

Even as he joins the other Former Profits for friendship and advice, his fear of uncertainty remains.

Insignares and his classmates are looking into the unknown without much control over their futures.

The faith that inspired them to turn to Divinity School, along with the community created by the Former Profits, will have to guide them toward the light.

The Profits are entering a world where the steady paychecks, healthcare, and dental insurance they were used to are now luxuries they’d like to one

Arizona Greene is a freshman in Saybrook College.

yale institute of sacred music presents Music for the Royal Wedding and More

The Choir of Westminster Abbey James O’Donnell, conductor Daniel Cook, organ

saturday, november 1 · 5 pm Woolsey Hall 500 College St., New Haven

Charles Wright, poet

The Poet Laureate of the United States Reads from His Work

tuesday, november 11 · 5:30 pm Yale University Art Gallery Auditorium 201 York St., New Haven

Both events are free; no tickets required. ism.yale.edu

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THE NEW JOURNAL

PROFILE

WHEN A COP CALLS An activist in blue bridges the gap between communities and police

by Alexandra Golden

O

n a Tuesday afternoon in September, Shafiq Abdussabur stands transfixed by one image on the wall of his office. It’s a hazy photograph of six boys playing tug-of-war, their smiles wide, their eyes focused on victory.

“We lost him,” Abdussabur says, pointing to the boy leading the pack. “He was killed two years after this photo was taken. And him, too,” he adds, pointing to another boy. Abdussabur’s own son, now 18, is also in the photo, standing near the others. “I wish I could have saved every kid. I saved the ones that I could.”

Abdussabur proceeds to dig into boxes on the floor and pull out old issues of the New Haven Register. They date from 2007 to 2009, and all of them tell stories of shootings. One of the articles is about Abdussabur’s cousin. She was shot and killed just two blocks from his office on Ashmun Street. In Abdussabur’s city, violence is personal.

The tug-of-war photo was taken on a camping trip with CTRibat, a violence prevention program for youths aged 8 to 14 that Abdussabur founded in 2006. “Ribat” means “retreat” in Arabic; the program’s name stands for “Children and Teen Retreat.” The program is dedicated to building boys’ confidence and self-respect, to help them deal with the challenges of life in an urban setting without becoming involved in guns, gangs, or drugs.

CTRibat is just one of the many social programs Abdussabur has implemented during his career. He is a Dixwell beat cop, spending his days

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walking around the neighborhood and getting to know its residents. In his off hours, he works on solutions to the problems he sees every day in the streets.

Abdussabur now lives in Beaver Hills, a New Haven neighborhood west of Dixwell, with his wife, Mubarakah Ibrahim, who is a personal trainer, and their four children. He was born in 1967, when his mother was 15 years old. Abdussabur grew up “like an outdoors kid,” growing up on his grandparents’ farm in West Haven, he says. At the time, long before his conversion from Baptist Christianity to Islam, he went by the name Thomas Fulcher Johnson. He spent a lot of time with his grandparents while his mother worked as a teacher’s aide. Wiggling his shoulders and sitting up in his chair with pristine posture, he says his grandmother always carried herself like “an aristocrat,” even though she didn’t finish eighth grade. Abdussabur spent childhood mornings with her, drinking coffee from fine china mugs and reciting his prayers.

When Abdussabur was just 5 years old, his mother brought him to a Black Panther rally on the New Haven Green. The police were there, “Fergusonstyle,” he recalls. Abdussabur considers his mother’s participation in activism as his “blueprint for social justice work.”

At his elementary school, Helene Grant School, fights broke out frequently. He wanted to be able to THE NEW JOURNAL

focus on learning without worrying about his safety, so he left after fourth grade and enrolled in Saint Aedan’s, a Catholic school. He was one of only two black students, and he recalls an incident in sixth grade when a student reading aloud from the textbook read the word “Negro.” Abdussabur raised his hand to correct him.

“Now, it’s colored, not Negro,” Abdussabur said.

The teacher shushed him, but Abdussabur continued to shout out “colored” each time he heard “Negro.” Eventually, his teacher kicked him out of the classroom.

Abdussabur scowls as he impersonates her, “You’re a disgrace to your race! Martin Luther King Jr. would be rolling in his grave!”

The memory stings, and he pauses for a moment.

Then his liveliness returns, and he chuckles, “I think I

might have spent all of sixth grade in the hall!”

Abdussabur thrived at Notre Dame, a private, Catholic, high school in West Haven where he ran track, studied painting, and conducted the school orchestra. Most of his peers were white, but “at Notre Dame, you were a Notre Dame Knight first and foremost,” he says. “They made no distinction between black and white. They only cared about the green and yellow.”

Abdussabur maintained friendships with both black and white students all through high school. He recalls how he once went fishing with a white friend from Notre Dame. On the boat, they ate ravioli out of a can and drank blackberry brandy. Meanwhile, few of his black friends were making it beyond the city limits. These different experiences, he said, made him “culturally limitless.” He was learning how to connect

SHAFIQ ABDUSSABUR WITH HIS GRANDMOTHER AFTER BEING SWORN IN AS PRESIDENT OF THE NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF BLACK LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICERS. PHOTO BY ALLAN APPEL.

OCTOBER 2014

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with people, regardless of their class or race, which institution that so frustrated him. “I put on armor to would serve him well on the streets of Dixwell. help our community recover,” he says.

After winning a Congressional art award for In his first year as a police officer, he participated one of his acrylic paintings, Abdussabur was offered in the Yale Child Study Officer Fellowship program. a scholarship to the Rhode Island School of Design. He and the other participants would meet with Yale He chose instead to accept a track scholarship at the clinicians to address traumatic exposure to violence in University of West Georgia. His stepfather had devel- children and families. After Abdussabur had spoken in oped a drinking problem, and he was ready to get a meeting, a white Yale clinician commented, “Wow! away from home.

You’re amazingly articulate!”Though she intended it as At the University of West Georgia, Abdussabur a compliment, Abdussabur was insulted and shocked. led a successful campaign to convince the university “Being black and successful in America should not be to divest from South Africa to protest apartheid. He a surprise to anybody,” he says. He calls that kind of also served as head of the Black Student Alliance. But “cultural disconnect” an “invisible barrier” between Abdussabur recalls a staggeringly high dropout rate communities, one of many that he encounters. But he among black students after freshman year. doesn’t let these things stand in his way. “Because I The university’s dean quickly became acquainted refused to recognize those invisible barriers, I didn’t with Abdussabur, who was create my own barriers.” known for stirring up trouble with his activism. In his junior year, his scholarOf the fifty-five male students HE RETURNED TO ship funds disappeared due in CTRibat’s 2006 summer pilot NEW HAVEN IN 1991, to issues with the paperprogram, approximately ninetywork, he said, forcing him five percent resided in Dixwell.

ONLY TO FIND IT to leave.

Seventy-one percent lived in a DEVASTATED BY THE After leaving West single parent family, and nearly Georgia, he used his last $300 three-fourths lived in households CRACK EPIDEMIC. to start Boldminds, an art and where the total yearly income ... “IT WAS LIKE A literature publishing comwas under $25,000.

NUCLEAR NARCOTIC pany still in existence today.

Abdussabur explains that They also produced wooden about ninety percent of the ZONE.” medallions bearing nationAfrican-American males who alist African images such die by gun violence are shot as Nefertiti heads and portraits of Nelson Mandela. within three blocks of where they grew up or where Within three years, he had sold over 10,000 medal- they live. These teenagers live in small worlds. Gang lions. He saw the objects as something that “people boundaries, police violence, probation measures, could hold onto and talk about and discuss,” prompting security concerns, and social status confine their new conversations. movement. Just venturing beyond the block can be Abdussabur returned to New Haven early in 1991, dangerous. So he takes them on trips outside of the only to find it devastated by the crack epidemic. He was city. Abdussabur raises his arms up over his head in shocked by how much the city had changed. “It was a sweeping gesture and booms, “Camping takes like a nuclear narcotic zone,” he says. He observed dis- you out!” turbing police brutality at the time, which motivated But then he gets serious and puts his hands in his him to form the Civilian Review Board to monitor the lap. “There are so many nice places in New Haven for policy department. young people to experience,” he adds. “It’s a tragedy The then-police chief Nicholas Pastore was look- that so many African-American young men in the city ing to restructure the department and recruit more only get to experience the dark side of New Haven.” community policemen. He asked Abdussabur if he Abdussabur ensures that his own children participate was interested in becoming a cop. Abdussabur said in these programs, too. He tells them, “You’re not betyes, and with that, he joined the ranks of the very ter than these kids, you’re just better off.”

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THE NEW JOURNAL

In addition to camping, CTRibat participants do As his career progressed, Abdussabur turned to artwork, go to the movies, and talk about anything writing to share his insights and knowledge with and everything, from racial profiling to how they’re a larger audience. His 2009 book, A Black Man’s doing in school. By exposing them to different types Guide to Law Enforcement in America, recounts of activities, Abdussabur says, the program provides multiple instances of police shootings and arrests alternatives to violence. In 2005, Abdussabur also involving unarmed black males. It also offers founded New Haven Guardians, a fraternal organiza- practical advice about avoiding run-ins with the tion of Elm City African-American officers who host criminal justice system. activities with CTRibat.

Many incidents of police violence, he writes, One goal guides Abdussabur’s work. “I aim to occur because of “an officer’s inability to identify, reduce the sea of agitation between law enforcement understand, and effectively communicate with a speand the urban community and use anxiety reduc- cific population (commonly Black) within the urban tion to empower that community,” Abdussabur says, sectors of the United States.” his voice rising. “Right now, young black males feel This communication difficulty stems in part from oppressed, not empowered. No one is walking you stereotypes that police officers have of black men and through what to do when the police stop you. That’s that black men reinforce. not empowerment. That’s a set-up. That’s dangerous.”

“Not only are you driving the car smoking weed, In the first half of 2014, seven homicides and thirty but you’re blasting music, you have a funky attitude, non-fatal shootings were reported and then when the police do pull in New Haven. In just two and a you over, you wanna go into a half weeks between Aug. 1 and Aug. whole debate,” Abdussabur said.

18, 2014, there were four reported “That behavior feeds into the homicides and five non-fatal shootstereotype that sets you up for “BEFORE THE ings. Almost all of the victims were the profile of a criminal. Now DISASTER people of color.

I’m not saying that I agree with As both a resident of the city that profile. But it is the profile HAPPENS, WHAT and a policeman entrusted to that is currently being fed to law CAN WE DO?” keep the city safe, Abdussabur enforcement.” seeks to address these racial conHe said that police offiflicts by bridging the gap between cers get most of their trainthe community and the police ing on the job. So when department. Doug Bethea, a community activ- young black men behave poorly with police, ists, and founder of the Nation Drill and Drum they are training police to believe that they Squad Corps, a youth mentoring program that are causing trouble. teaches kids discipline through percussion music, “Don’t give the police ammunition,” he laughs. first met Abdussabur fifteen years ago. Abdussabur, “They’ve got enough!”

Bethea says, was always looking for ways to engage The book also offers guidance for those already the community. charged with an offense. “Wear a lot of deodorant “Shafiq is the perfect model for [community [in court] because you will probably be nervous… policing], plain and simple.” Bethea said. He thinks Do not wear gold fronts (gold teeth inserts)… the that other officers in the force have learned from more conservative your hair style, the better,” he Abdussabur to overcome the tension and mistrust writes. “They don’t deal with you based on what that exists between officers and residents. Even sim- you know; they deal with you based on what they ple things—like buying a kid a pair of shoes, host- know.” It’s the black male’s job, he says, to avoid proing a Christmas party, or helping someone with a jecting an image that aligns with the jury’s racialized job search—can have a big impact. Bethea, who dealt conceptions—a misunderstanding that often ends with the death of his own son by gun violence, says, with a guilty verdict.

“I know his kids, he knows my kids… he was workHis philosophy can be controversial. “Some ing for me, speaking up for me.” black politicians in general have not agreed with OCTOBER 2014

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my approach to addressing racial profiling by placing some of the ownership on the black community,” he concedes. Abdussabur admits that his solutions are most often embraced by white suburbanites, AfricanAmerican women, and African-American men 35 years or older. But for his target audience—young black males—this issue is subject to debate.

Some of Abdussabur’s colleagues also disagree with his no-excuses approach. Barbara Fair, a good friend of Abdussabur and a grassroots advocate for criminal justice and prison reform, mentions an incident between her daughter and a New Haven policeman. As her daughter was driving to class at Gateway Community College, the policeman approached her without reason. Worried about being late to class, she threw her hands up in frustration. The policeman asked her if she had a problem, to which she replied, “No, do you have a problem?” He grabbed the handle of her car door, which, she said, was, thankfully, locked.

“Shafiq might have told her ‘don’t say nothing,’” Fair laughs. “But I don’t have that mentality. I don’t feel obligated to respect the man in blue if he doesn’t respect me back.”

Preventing these incidents from happening in the first place, Abdussabur emphasizes, is ideal.

“Before the disaster happens, what can we do?” he asks.

But now, eighteen months away from retirement, Abdussabur said that family and school are at the center of his life. Abdussabur is currently finishing his degree at Charter Oak State College in New Britain.

He also plans to do more writing and consulting that will address racial profiling.

Despite the success of Abdussabur’s programs, New Haven and the rest of the country have a long way to go. Ferguson, he says, was a wake-up call.

He shuffles some paper on the desk and looks me straight in the eye. “We’re procrastinating, and we’ve got work to do.”

Alexandra Golden is a sophomore in Trumbull College.

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THE NEW JOURNAL

SNAPSHOT

THE MINIATURE HOLY LAND Waterbury’s Christian amusement park opens its doors for the first time in thirty years story and photos by Libbie Katsev

THE WATERBURY, CONN. GROUNDS OF HOLY LAND U.S.A. HAVE BEEN CLOSED SINCE 1984.

“W

ARNING: Travel at your own risk. Holy Land U.S.A. under construction.” A headless statue of Jesus watches over a path of broken asphalt. The path winds past the sign, through the entrance arches and around the hill, which is ringed by a low wall.

People break off from the crowd. Even the girls in flats and skirts climb the wall and begin picking their way OCTOBER 2014

through the remains of a miniature Bethlehem. Under fallen trees, I catch of a glimpse of broken steps leading up through the rubble.

This Bethlehem is nestled in the hills of Waterbury, Conn. It marks the beginning of Jesus’ life, which Holy Land USA traces from birthplace to tomb. The park has been closed since 1984, but a restoration 17

effort is now underway. There’s no set timeline for the park’s reopening, but board members expect it to take years. In September, Holy Land opened to visitors for one afternoon.

In the 1950s, John Greco, a local attorney, built Holy Land USA on eighteen acres of land near his hilltop home overlooking the city.

“No matter how much money he had, he devoted every penny into Holy Land, and he lived like Mother Teresa did. Everything was for God,” says board member Rebecca Greco Calabrese, Greco’s great-niece.

“When you were with him, you felt holy...you felt it, coming out of his pores.”

The park’s buildings, constructed from old appliances, chicken wire, and plaster, are just a few feet tall, placed in clusters to depict different Biblical events.

Most have collapsed. Those that still stand are pale, with little arched doors and windows. They cover the hill, competing with the twisted pines, birches, cattails, and thistles that have overrun the park.

“It was beautiful for a while,” says a white-haired woman dressed in black as she waits for a shuttle to the Mass. “There was almost a reverence about the place.” In the park’s heyday, buses brought forty thousand visitors a year from all over the U.S. and around the world.

When Greco died, the park was entrusted to a group of nuns, the Religious Teachers Filippini.

The nuns eventually put the property up for sale in 2013, and Mayor Neil O’Leary and local businessman Fritz Blasius bought the property, planning to restore it. The restoration progresses in bursts, as its limited funding allows.

They set their milestones based on the liturgical calendar. First, they restored the cross in time for Christmas. Then they focused on clearing the overgrowth in time for the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, which commemorates St. Helena’s discovery of the cross on which Jesus was crucified. Chuck Pagano, president of Holy Land’s board of directors, tells me that in the days leading up to the my visit, over 7,500 trees were cut down.

A friend and I still stumble uphill over shrubs and fallen branches until I reach Solomon’s temple, also in disrepair. A sign proclaims: “YOU HAVE MADE IT.” The temple is just a cement cylinder split in half to reveal a green interior. The cupola lies in the center of the wreckage, as though launched by a catapult. Next to it, other cubic parts of the structure 18

THE CROSS AT HOLY LAND U.S.A. WAS LIT LAST YEAR FOR THE FIRST TIME IN DECADES.

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deteriorate under their domes.

We walk around the bend to find a sign that says: “JESUS IS LAID IN THE TOMB.” Unlike most of the structures, the building here is human-sized, and in relatively good repair. Mounds of pine needles weigh down the corrugated roof and the supports are more arch than wall, but the mother and daughter poking around the tomb don’t seem too worried about its structural integrity.

Despite the recent improvements, Holy Land USA still feels like it’s stuck in an abandoned past—except for the cross, which stands at the top of Pine Hill, surrounded by a fence that reads “Our Lady of Peace.” The cross is 52 feet high and 26 feet wide, illuminated by thousands of LED lights, which change color with the liturgical season. A little way down from the hilltop, another, identical cross lies face down on the ground next to its support system. “That one didn’t work,” I hear someone explain. From the outside, it looks like a fully functional piece. Like the other cross, it would have been a spiritual symbol visible for miles around—if it weren’t for some serious flaw.

From Pine Hill’s summit, the town of Waterbury looks like another small diorama. There is St. Anne’s, the Neo-Gothic church where the shuttle picked us up, and there is the interstate. On December 22 of last year, the road overlooking I-84 was closed, and thousands of people gathered on the bridge to watch as the cross was lit for the first time in decades.

“I’ll be honest, that cross lit at night says it all for me,” Pagano said, recalling a recent flight back to Connecticut. “I’m looking down OCTOBER 2014

at Connecticut when we’re starting to come down. The first thing I recognize, I see that brand new cross lit...you know where you’re at from twelve thousand feet up.”

As we make our way to the park’s chapel, we stop in front of the “HOLY LAND U.S.A.” sign, white letters with blue edges, outlined with drooping Christmas lights. Comparisons to the Hollywood sign are both unfair and unavoidable. At the foot of the sign, concrete garden edging spells out “HONOR GOD,” forming a trinity with the sign and cross in the background.

The Mass begins at 3:30 p.m., and the small chapel is packed with hundreds of people. It is a long white room with a low ceiling, wooden pews, and stained glass awning windows—all of them with the same design: a crown and cross. There are parents with children and elderly couples, community leaders and students from the rival Catholic high schools. A sort of Christian pop-punk music plays as we walk in. Then the Mass begins: prayers, songs, a homily, and Communion. Holy Land, the priest explains, is a testament to the power of community. After the service, Mayor O’Leary gives a speech, thanking the hundreds of Waterbury residents who have supported this project.

It wasn’t that surprising to me that a cross glows in the hills overlooking a Connecticut town, or that there’s a Christian theme park with a sign modeled after Hollywood’s. That just seems like one natural development of religious observance in the U.S. What caught me off-guard was how handmade Holy Land is: the carefully lettered signs, the

chicken-wire buildings. The decay.

Sixty years ago, one man wanted to create something holy, so he built a replica of Bethlehem out of plaster and scrap materials. And when other people saw what Greco was doing, it became sacred to them, too.

After the mass, a group of Catholic high school students ends the festivities by releasing a flock of white doves into the air. Members of the crowd turn their heads to watch before piling back into the buses and heading down the hill.

Libbie Katsev is a sophomore in Davenport College.

19

UP FOR DEBATE

BY CAROLINE DURLACHER

Yale coaches bring New Haven teenagers into the privileged world of high school debate 20

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“O

pposition? Partner? Speaker?” Matt asks as he stands before the judge, taking stock of the room before he starts his speech. His partner is seated to his right, and his opponents, Zariah Altman and Xavier Sottile, are waiting on the left. He places his cell phone timer on the conference table. “All right, I’ll begin.”

The room is quiet.

“From Russia, to China, to Iran, to Syria, to ISIS, far too long the U.S. has been proven to be weak on the international stage.”

His speech aims high, but its wording comes across as a bit clunky.

“There are numerous actions that you could use to confront aggressively,” he continues, “including but not limited to resuming aerial surveillance flyovers, excluding China from the G20 summit, quotas on treasury buyback programs, and enforcing extradition and environmental treaties as written by the U.N.” It’s a Saturday afternoon, and we are in a classroom in Yale’s Kline Biology Tower. They’re competing in the parliamentary debate division at the Yale Invitational, an annual tournament hosted by the Yale Debate Association each September. Matt and Jack, two blond boys from a wealthy Long Island public school, are teamed up against Zariah and Xavier, seniors at New Haven public schools who are a part of the New Haven Urban Debate League (UDL).

UDL is a Yale organization that sends undergraduates to New Haven public high schools to teach competitive debate. The league has been around for a decade, but in the last few years it has grown to encompass more than thirty-six Yale student coaches and a hundred New Haven students. UDL students compete against teams from around the state, and recently, have started to hold their own against teenagers from the affluent suburban districts who have traditionally dominated the debate scene.

The stakes are high—this is the fourth round, and Zariah and Xavier think that they won their first three matches. Opponents are assigned based on a win-loss record, and Zariah and Xavier are now up against debaters who are older and more experienced PHOTOS BY JENNIFER LU

OCTOBER 2014

21

than their previous opponents. If they win this round, they’ll compete in the final rounds tomorrow.

Today’s resolution: “This House would aggressively confront China.” In the world of debate, “resolutions” are the polemical but vaguely worded statements that students argue for or against. The team speaking in favor defines the terms, so the “House” could be the U.S. House of Representatives—or, if the team gets goofy, it could be defined as the ruling dynasty of Mars. These kids, however, are taking it all very seriously.

As Matt speaks, his teammate looks down at his notes, which he keeps in a leather portfolio. Zariah and Xavier bend their heads over their legal pads, outlining their opponents’ speeches next to their own hastily scribbled arguments. The sheer volume of information these two boys know—the intricacies of international politics, the minutiae of U.S. foreign policy—doesn’t intimidate Zariah or Xavier. In just a few minutes, they’ll have a chance to knock it all down.

Unlike the other urban debate leagues that began to pop up across the country in the 1990s, UDL is unaffiliated with the National Association of Urban Debate Leagues. Run by a team of volunteer Yale students, it operates without the endowment and permanent staff that the national association requires for membership. Instead, Yale’s UDL relies on students’ time and resources from Dwight Hall, the umbrella organization for Yale’s social justice groups.

Aaron Zelinsky ’06 LAW ’10, founder of New Haven’s UDL, got the idea from his great-uncle Seymour Simon, a justice of the Illinois Supreme Court in the 1980s who worked on Chicago’s UDL program. Simon told Zelinsky about the program at a family bar mitzvah, and Zelinsky pitched the idea to Reggie Mayo, who was then the superintendent of the New Haven public schools, in 2004.

The program had trouble getting organized, but it has grown steadily since then. “We got no money from the schools,” Zelinsky says. “The way I sold it was: This is zero cost. That was the only reason we were able to do it.” Only six high school students showed up to the first tournaments, so two Yale students had to step in and debate to even out the numbers. As late as 2011, when Becca Steinberg ’15, the current president of UDL, began coaching students, 22

the league had to occasionally cancel tournaments because not enough kids had signed up.

Last semester, UDL expanded into three new schools, and this semester, into two more. Twelve New Haven public schools are now part of the league, and tournaments haven’t been cancelled for lack of debaters in at least a year. More than that, UDL kids have done well in the last few years at state and national tournaments. At the 2014 Osterweis Debate Tournament, a free event for Connecticut high school students financed by Yale’s Jonathan Edwards College, the top two teams were from UDL. In both 2013 and 2014, the top-ranking junior in the tournament was a UDL debater. The most recent was Zariah.

The demographics of the UDL students are very different from those of the largely white, affluent students who won—or even participated in—these competitions prior to the founding of the New Haven league. At some UDL schools, such as Wilbur Cross, over eighty percent of the students qualify for free or reduced-price lunches, and even at schools with slightly more middle-class students, such as the Sound School, nearly half qualifies. At all but one of the twelve schools in which UDL debates, minority students outnumber white students.

John Buell, a civics teacher at the Sound School who is the faculty advisor for the UDL team, says the kids on the debate team tend to be more academically inclined in the first place. UDL has had champion debaters ranging from the children of Yale professors to kids who are undocumented immigrants, but after six hours at school, they all have to sit down and listen, think hard, and argue. UDL offers students a safe space to work through these intellectual challenges together. “That feeling of insecurity that a lot of these kids can have when they’re suddenly facing wealthy white Connecticut out there in a broader venue—they don’t get that, they’re sort of just amongst themselves,” Buell says. “And the judge is being incredibly supportive in the critiques that they’re giving.”

The idea is not only to train them to debate better, but also to learn to communicate effectively outside the world of debate. Something that Zelinsky says sticks with me: “Not every kid that comes out of the UDL is going to be going to Yale College. And not everyone has to be…if it helps a kid walk into a job interview and be able to present cogent arguments, then he’s learned something useful. If it helps someone feel a little more confident when they’re speaking, THE NEW JOURNAL

that’s useful. [Maybe] you can help some kids who wouldn’t otherwise go to college, or wouldn’t otherwise get a job if they’re not going to go to college.”

In Zelinsky’s terms, “This is giving people a voice. That’s what you’re doing, you’re giving people a voice.”

Zariah grew up in Stratford with her mother and grandmother. Her father left when she was 2, and she only occasionally visited the Native American reservation where her father’s family was from. She moved to New Haven in elementary school, and she started competing in UDL when she entered the Sound School as a freshman in 2011. In mid-September, she along with three other teammates, have come to Dwight Hall for their weekly practice. They’re working with Steinberg to prepare for the upcoming Yale Invitational tournament.

“Have you guys heard of soft power versus hard power?” Steinberg says.

“Yes,” Zariah immediately jumps in. “In California, I did.”

Zariah won a half-tuition scholarship to a debate camp at Stanford University last summer because she was the highest-ranking junior at the Osterweis Debate Tournament. She tells me that she didn’t find out till a few weeks ago that her scholarship was only half-tuition: Without telling her, Steinberg held a bake sale to come up with the other half.

She is now waiting to hear whether she will have the chance to attend an elite university, like Stanford, as an undergraduate. In September, she submitted her applications to the Questbridge program, which aims to connect underprivileged, high-achieving high school students with top-ranked schools.

Two of the other debaters, Dhaval and Vishal, have to go home early, so Steinberg has Zariah and Xavier debate alone against one another.This kind of debate is called “Ironman.” After the details are settled and the kids have time to prepare their arguments, Steinberg gets her cell phone out to time the speeches.

Before they begin, she says, strict but smiling, “Now, Zariah, you’re going to talk slowly and loudly, right?” She turns to me and explains. “Ever since Zariah got back from California she’s been talking incredibly fast, which is how they debate there.”

When Zariah begins to speak, I understand Steinberg’s concern. Zariah is authoritative and OCTOBER 2014

unapologetic, and she argues very, very fast. She brings indignation to whatever argument she takes up.

When she finishes a claim, she says “right,” not as if it’s a question, but as if it’s an affirmation. She holds out her arm, palm outward, for the audience’s (or the judge’s) recognition, or raises her palm outward, like “stop,” to ask them to join in her rejection of the opponent’s argument. She looks the judge in the eye.

I’m at the Sound School one afternoon in October, waiting for UDL practice to begin. The kids have trickled in from their classes, chatting and joking with one another. “I love you, Giovanni,” one girl repeatedly calls to her schoolmate. “Love you too, girl,” he says back.

The resolution for the day’s trial debate is especially hard. Once the teams have paired up, Steinberg writes the resolution on the board: “THBT American

STUDENTS FOCUS INTENTLY ON A PARTNER DEBATING.

23

search engine companies should not do business in countries that censor the web.”

“What’s THBT?” a skinny blond kid asks.

“This house believes that,” explains Zariah.

At another table, Steinberg is fielding other questions about the resolution, which the kids don’t quite understand.

“Like, you can’t go on Facebook in China,” Steinberg explains.

“On Facebook?” the girl responds, shocked. “What!”

Meanwhile, Zariah is trying to get her team’s arguments ready. Google is a massive American company, she says, and it would be hypocritical for the American government to promote free speech while allowing American companies to cooperate with censorship laws.

“Does that make sense?” she asks them.

“Yes…” her teammate says hesitantly, playing with his pencil.

“Are you just saying that?” she laughs and explains it again. It isn’t at all condescending: She’s older, and has been debating for a long time. The younger students listen to her.

Most practices go like this. The coaches also have monthly curricula, which attempt to fill in the gaps, teaching students history, philosophy, and civics that their schools haven’t covered. I even learned a new phrase at a practice I attended: “Stare decisis,” to stand by decisions, usually those by previous courts.

On the way back from practice, Steinberg tells me that when Zariah first started debating three years ago, the Sound School team had only two students. The coastal school’s popular rowing team still monopolizes many students’ after-school hours, but the debate team has grown steadily each year.

I ask what Zariah was like back then, when the only other debater was Jake Colavolpe, who is now a freshman at Yale. “She was so bad,” Steinberg laughs, sheepish. “The first time I saw the two of them debate, the topic was, should the New Haven Green have a Christmas tree? And their speeches were, like, forty-five seconds long.” Not filling the allotted time is a sign of a rookie debater, she explains.

How did Zariah get so good? I wonder. Steinberg tells me that once they got a little better, Zariah and Colavolpe would debate against Yalies. The high schoolers would often lose, but they wouldn’t give up: “Every time that happened, they worked five times harder,” Steinberg says.

24

I think of the sheer number of hours Steinberg has spent with the students she coaches. I meet Colavope on a bench in the center of Yale’s campus to talk. “Undoubtedly, a very big reason why I’m sitting here on this bench is because of them,” says Colavolpe, referring to Steinberg and her fellow coaches. Steinberg tutored him for the SATs, read his college essays, and baked and sold cupcakes to raise money for his trip to a debate camp at Stanford, the same one Zariah attended the following year.

“Throughout high school they were just a phone call or a text away if I needed them.” It’s no wonder Zariah sounds like a younger version of Steinberg when she addresses her teammates.

At the Yale Invitational, the tournament the kids had been practicing for, nearly a thousand kids in ill-fitting suits are looking for coffee and breakfast.

Parents are trying to find where tours of the campus start. Inside the Sloane Physics Lab, parents take awkward iPhone photos of the kids clustered in the auditorium. No New Haven public school student was on the roster until 2012, as far as Steinberg knows.

This year, there are four.

It’s easy to pick Zariah out of the crowd—she’s the only black student competing in parliamentary debate. When Steinberg asks Zariah where her suit jacket is, she says, “It seemed really big. I’ll wear it tomorrow.” Her hair is straightened, kept short above her shoulders, and hoop earrings dangle from her ears. She’s talking to her debate partner, Xavier, a pale kid in a navy suit jacket with bright, fake-brass buttons. His black dress shoes remain untied all day.

Steinberg tells me that New Haven UDL tournaments, kept within the New Haven league, are normally held on Friday afternoons so that they don’t interfere with students’ part-time jobs. Today, on a Saturday, some cannot make it to the competition because of work. Still, urban teams from Detroit and New York City join the four UDL debaters present.

The tournament is late to start, so the kids chat for a while. When they start talking about Yale, Vishal says, “The funniest thing I’ve heard Yalies say has to be—this one Yalie on the Green says to the other, in the middle of the Green, ‘Are we in the ghetto yet?’”

Zariah and Xavier also run into a team from UDL’s multi-day summer program, run by Yale students, which draws students from across the state.

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ZARIAH ALTMAN AND XAVIER SOTTILE PREPARE FOR THEIR NEXT ROUND OF DEBATE.

One of the students is wearing a grey sheath dress, her smooth blond hair tied back in a bun. The girl’s fancy new nude patent leather pumps have given her a blister, and at one point she texts Steinberg, who is helping coordinate the event, to ask if she has a Band-Aid. She tells me that she attends the affluent Greenwich High School and that she’s applying early to Princeton. She has an edge up, because one of her parents went there.

This girl’s background confirms what I’ve heard about debate culture outside UDL. Zelinsky, the founder of UDL, told me, bluntly, “Debate’s a rich kids’ sport.” In some way, Yale Debate Association capitalizes on the market of kids who are willing to fly across the country to compete; the association organizes the Invitational in part to fundraise for their own collegiate competitions. However, at Steinberg’s suggestion, the YDA instituted a policy that allows some students to waive the tournament entry costs, which run $60 to $90 per team.

Xavier starts to flirt with the blonde girl.

He asks her what the difference is between Connecticut Debate Association kids and UDL kids.

OCTOBER 2014

“We’re cooler,” she says, teasing. “What! No,” Xavier replies, “We’re the home team!”

“Let me just explain to you what the social contract is,” says Zariah, as she faces Matt and Jack back in the Kline Biology Tower and begins to take a part their argument.

She criticizes their blinkered vision in foreign policy. “So the first point we have is diplomacy,” she begins. “Side Government would have you think that there’s no other option besides flying over China and pissing China off.” Her style is elevated where it has to be, but also to the point.

She tells me at the debate camp she’d attended, they’d taught her four ways to refute an argument. It could be wrong in itself: self-contradictory and invalid.

It could be unsound: Its logic is valid, but not all of its premises are true. Or the claim could just be completely irrelevant. Finally, it could fail to be persuasive: An argument can be valid and sound, but insignificant compared to another, stronger argument. “My dream is to refute an argument in all four ways,” Zariah says, 25

laughing. She comes close this time. She and Xavier win the debate round, but they don’t make it to finals.

There’s a run-off, and they come out behind.

Still, they’ve come a long way.

On Friday, October 10, in William L. Harkness Hall, UDL has its first tournament of the season. It’s their largest tournament yet, with seventeen teams competing from nine different schools. It’s here, with students gathered from all over New Haven, that I get a sense of the community of debaters that UDK has built in this city. The students filter into the small auditorium, most in their school clothes, though one or two have put on a suit jacket or a skirt for the occasion.

Zariah greets friends from other schools, some of whom she’s encouraged to join the league. “I pretty much just yell at them until they come,” she says, laughing. She teases a childhood friend of hers, Kyle, who wants to debate her on his first round. Coming from Metropolitan Business Academy, which only started a UDL program last semester, he has never competed before. Tatiana, another friend, jokes, “He’s begging to go against her on his first debate, when everyone else in this room is praying not to get her!”

They do end up teamed up against one another, and at the end of the debate, Zariah smiles widely at Kyle. He looks impressed, if a little shell-shocked. “It was so, so great debating with you,” Zariah says to him, pinching his cheek affectionately.

At the awards ceremony after three rounds, Zariah and Xavier place first in the varsity division, though other students take the award for best speaker. At the end of the evening, the kids eat the pizza UDL has brought for them, and they say their good-byes to the kids from other schools. They won’t see them until the next tournament, in November. It’s dark and chilly outside compared to the halogen lights and central heating of the building. Their parents have pulled up their cars over on Wall Street to pick them up and bring them back from Yale, or they walk with their plastic medals around their necks over to the Green to catch the bus home.

Caroline Durlacher is a senior in Jonathan Edwards College.

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THE NEW JOURNAL

CRITICAL ANGLE

EDWARD WANG

SCARLET LETTERS What can a single grade say about a school?

by Olivia Klevorn

“I

never, in a million years, in my right mind, wanted to set foot in this school. Then I got here,” wrote Kiana M. Hernandez in the Proclamation, Wilbur Cross High School’s student newspaper. Hernandez, who is now a freshman at Yale, came to Wilbur Cross knowing its reputation for having kids who “do nothing but fight and bully and argue.” But she quickly found out the reputation was false. She took rigorous classes and joined a varsity sport team, she writes in the June 2014 edition. The issue includes everything from reviews of classic films to an editorial on the high price of a college education.

Students dressed up in prom regalia grin out from the cover, preparing to say goodbye to a school many of them are sad to leave.

OCTOBER 2014

This year, Wilbur Cross earned the label “failing school” from the Connecticut Coalition for Achievement Now (ConnCAN), an advocacy group that focuses on improving public education statewide. When the organization created its standardsbased ranking of Connecticut public schools, it didn’t take school newspapers into account. It didn’t ask students if they liked their classmates, had close relationships with their teachers, or felt that they were being prepared well for college or the workforce. Instead, it turned to a more simplistic metric: test scores.

Since 2006, ConnCAN has published annual “report cards” for public schools in Connecticut. For the past three years, it has relied on the “School 27

Performance Index,” a system that assigns grades based on a school’s standardized test scores, to help the public understand the available data. Of the 944 schools it graded across the state, sixty-three failed, including ten in New Haven.

ConnCAN says the reports are as a way to commend “schools that are providing students with a high-quality education regardless of race, wealth, or ZIP code.”

But, as a result, other schools’ shortcomings, as measured by test scores, are on display. Color-coded and printed in large, foreboding letters, the report cards make it easy to distinguish failing schools (marked in red with large Fs next to their names), from passing ones. And, for each of the three years ConnCAN has issued the SPI reports, Wilbur Cross has failed.

But a debate continues: Is this noexcuses approach the way to get a school to turn around?

For Chris Willems, who taught at Wilbur Cross from 2005 to 2012, criticism of the school is nothing new. “When they first started a failing school labeling system they labeled us ‘dropout factories,’” said Willems, referring to a controversial 2007 study by Johns Hopkins University. “Yeah, there are a lot of challenged children in our school.

Yeah, there’s a lot of stress. Yeah, they’ve had traumatic lives…but, a ‘dropout factory?’”

The school has seen recent improvements. The four-year graduation rate rose to over seventy percent in 2012 with the assistance of multi-million dollar state grants. But ConnCAN’s improvement grade for the school, which measures change in test scores 28

from year to year, is a B. Still, the B lies at the bottom of a list of Fs for student performance in math, reading, and science.

Even the district’s highestlevel administrators take issue with the system. “Unfortunately, the ConnCAN report falls victim to oversimplification in the assignment of grades in ways that I think assign blame to educators and school communities that is counterproductive to its goal,” New Haven superintendent Garth Harries said.

BUT A DEBATE CONTINUES: IS THIS NO-EXCUSES APPROACH THE WAY TO GET A SCHOOL TO TURN AROUND?

ConnCAN CEO Jennifer Alexander maintained that the report cards’ bold design is meant to satisfy the public’s “hunger for clear and user-friendly information” and to help influence public policy. And from a publicity perspective, the report cards have achieved this goal. According to Alexander, they have generated a lot of Internet traffic and have appeared frequently in local media.

Borrowing principles from the business world, Alexander and other reformers believe that schools—and society—can be transformed if only we administer the right tests, collect the right data,

and motivate struggling schools to move in the right direction. She claims that ConnCAN’s list of “success story schools”—schools that serve kids from underprivileged backgrounds but achieve high test scores—helps prove that transformation is possible. “Kids can succeed at the right level regardless of their background if they’re given the right opportunities, instruction, quality of teaching, and support.” Alexander said. “Our goal and job is to prove this.”

“Accountability” is the buzzword of the day in education policy, and ConnCAN’s reports are a symptom of a system that has embraced a punitive approach: schools can be fixed if they are held “accountable” for their shortcomings. Under the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, states receive federal funding in order to administer standardized tests to all public school students. Title I Schools like Wilbur Cross, which receive additional funding for students from low-income families, are required to demonstrate “Adequate Yearly Progress.” Since Connecticut obtained a waiver from the Obama administration in 2012, it has continued to receive funding while escaping some of NCLB’s strictest and least realistic expectations, such as the requirement that 100 percent of students demonstrate proficiency in reading and math by 2015. But in order to obtain the waiver, Connecticut had to present new methods for holding schools accountable.

Willems, echoing a national chorus of educators, believes the emphasis on test scores has forced teachers and schools to change THE NEW JOURNAL

their focus. Labels like the one ConnCAN applied to Wilbur Cross “encourage a narrowing of the curriculum that prevents us from creating considerate, intellectually stimulating environments for children at the high school level,” Willems said. “We’ve lost arts, physical education, music—joy.”

All three teachers I contacted characterize ConnCAN’s rankings as outdated and unproductive, but their response is not only about their own grades; it’s about what it means for their students, as well.

“My instinct is that I really want to defend our school against what I think is an unfair rating system that unfortunately gets too much press,” one teacher, who asked to remain anonymous, told me.

The numbers also fail to take into account the realities of students’ lives, and what Willems called “the critical thinking skills my children need to employ to do the incredible things they do”— while they are “raising children on their own, coming to school, and working.”

Willems and his fellow teachers are not the only ones who realize the system is broken. Though Alexander stands by ConnCAN and the report card system, she admitted that she hoped the Connecticut public school system would soon find a more comprehensive way to use testing data. “We know that children, if given the opportunity to meet high expectations, will get there,” she explained. “But

we know…that they are starting from different places. We need to develop an accountability system that acknowledges those different starting places.”

The editors’ note in the June 2014 edition of the Proclamation reads, “The future of our school is not in any person’s hands. Every student, teacher, administrator, and staff member can choose to move forward. Or we can stagnate.”

But despite the optimism of its students and the determination of its faculty, Wilbur Cross will continue to bear the “failing” label, even if it is the grading system itself that has failed.

Olivia Klevorn is a sophomore in Silliman College.

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OCTOBER 2014

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THE BONDS THAT TIE “I

The gay leather community crowns its newest ambassador

by Aaron Mak

LEFT: OMAR BOOTS WAS CROWNED MR. CONNECTICUT LEATHER IN 2013.

PHOTO COURTESY OF OMAR BOOTS.

OCTOBER 2014

t’s not just about sex,” J.R. Ramos tells me. J.R. is a bald man with a full, dark beard. His bare, tanned potbelly protrudes from under his black leather vest, which matches his chaps and boots. Most of the other patrons here at 168 York Street Café on the night of September 5 share Ramos’s affinity toward leather outfits that expose a lot of skin.

In fact, their common dress code has brought them all together for a weekend-long convention for gay men who have a penchant for leather and BDSM. They’re known as “leathermen,” and they have come from around the Northeast to attend brunches, mixers, a cigar social, and seminars on leather culture. The main event is the Mr. Connecticut Leather contest, an annual pageant begun in the 1970s to select the ambassador for Connecticut’s leather community.

Ramos is one of the judges of the contest, and he’s trying to explain to me that the leather community is not solely devoted to satisfying its participants’ 31

unorthodox desires: “Ninety percent of the time we’re vanilla.

Vanilla’s fine, but during the other ten percent we add other things to it.” The leather community selects an ambassador partly to help dispel the stereotype of the sexobsessed BDSM practitioner. Mr. CT Leather is expected to highlight the leathermen’s philanthropic side by fundraising and bringing awareness to local charities.

Ramos appears uncomfortable that this party is my first glimpse into leather culture, which is understandable: The ambience is hypersexual. While there is nothing particularly outlandish happening downstairs—just forty to fifty leathermen socializing around your garden-variety bar— the long, narrow room on the second floor is a shrine to BDSM. A human-sized birdcage stands next to a wooden pillory, a painting of a muscular, nude man in repose hangs in the center of the room, and a folding table towards the back holds various whips and paddles. Chains hang from the ceiling, and the lights are dimmed.

My eyes keep wandering from Ramos to the opposite corner of the room, where a man stands facing the wall with his hands bound above his head. He is shirtless and his khaki shorts are pulled down to his ankles, revealing grey boxer briefs. Behind him stands Rick

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Jones, a portly man in his mid- public, they put on BDSM demfifties with a milk-white Mohawk onstrations like the one Jones is and boxed beard, who flogs his conducting now to introduce the bare upper back with a cat-o’- uninitiated to leather culture. “The nine-tails whip. Jones—whose motivation [behind the demonname has been changed to protect strations] is to give men who are his privacy—augments the stan- interested in BDSM a place where dard attire of a black leather vest they can learn in a safe and comand matching boots with a pair of fortable environment,” Jones says. camouflage shorts, giving him the At the other end of the room, look of a punk-rock Santa Claus. a slender drag queen, also shirtless, His disposition is nonchalant; he puts her hands through the pillory. moves the whip haphazardly up This is Harlette Lefleur, the High and down and side to side in the Empress of the Imperial Sovereign same way that he might paint Court of Connecticut, a charitable his house. Leathermen in various Hartford-based drag queen group. states of undress watch and chat.

Omar Boots, a muscular man in his twenties with an impressive mustache, walks up behind Lefleur BEHIND HIM and gently places his leather-clad hand on the small of her back. He STANDS RICK then picks up a paddle and begins JONES, WHO striking the area around Lefleur’s shoulder blades.

FLOGS HIS BARE Boots won the Mr. CT Leather UPPER BACK competition last year. His leather outfit is more elaborate than the WITH A CAT-O’others: skin-tight trousers, boots, NINE-TAILS WHIP. gloves, and a short-sleeve jacket that buttons down the front.

He wears a sash that reads “Mr. Jones is the co-founder of CT Connecticut Leather, 2014.” This Cruisers, a fraternal organization ensemble is called “formal wear,” of leathermen. The CT Cruisers are in leather parlance. Compared to helping Mr. CT Leather Inc. hold Jones’s, Boots’s technique seems the competition this year, though much more intimate. His movethey are known mostly for the “bar ments are slow and deliberate, and night” they hold each month. At he pauses now and then to kiss the parties, which are open to the the nape of Lefleur’s neck. At one

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point he takes a tumbler from a Haven Hotel, hungover and table to his left and pours its con- bleary-eyed. The term “boy,” I tents down Lefleur’s back. learn, refers to leathermen who For all the finesse Boots exhib- prefer taking the submissive role its in his demonstration, he is still in BDSM relationships. Their couna fairly new to the leather com- terparts, “sirs” such as Boots and munity; he won last year’s title Jones, are the dominant figures. A only a few months after join- number of boys told me over the ing the group. Like many other weekend that their day jobs come leathermen, he was introduced to with a lot of responsibility—some the concept of leather and BDSM are tech administrators or executhrough pornography. “It was just a fantasy. I didn’t know there was such a thing as a titleholder. I THIRTY YEARS thought it was just hot guys wearAGO, BOYS ing leather,” recalls Boots. But the KNEW THEIR summer before last, eight years after moving to New Haven, Boots PLACE AND asked one of his drag queen friends SIRS KNEW to introduce him to some leathermen. That was how he found THEIR PLACE. CT Cruisers.

During his tenure as Mr. CT Leather 2014, he has fundraised for AIDS Project New Haven and the tives at consulting firms—and Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen. they see giving up power in their He is also largely responsible for personal relationships as a release expanding the New-York-based from their professional lives.

Leather Cares Ribbons, a leather The moderator is David and HIV/AIDS awareness organi- Bielski, the Sergeant at Arms for zation, into other Northeastern the Leather Boys of New England, states. “The non-sexual part is another BDSM fraternal service helping the community and doing organization. He starts off by charitable work. The sexual part is explaining, “This is meant to be embracing yourself and exploring open book. If there’s anything anyyour kinky side,” says Boots. body wants to talk about, we’ll talk about it. There’s no real set plan or agenda.” He then chuckles, “which At a morning session titled kind of might be saying I’m not “Boys Will Be Boys,” eighteen too prepared.” leathermen gather in the conWe go around the room with ference room of the Omni New the customary introductions.

OCTOBER 2014

At my turn I tell them, “I’m a student reporter doing a story on this whole weekend. Thank you for having me.” Jones, to my left, interjects, “Well, we haven’t had you yet.” The room erupts in laughter.

Leathermen trace their roots back to motorcycle gangs and the closeted soldiers returning from WWII in the 1940s. But the leather community, like any other, faces the challenge of maintaining its customs in an ever-shifting milieu, as the so-called New Guard strains against the customs of the Old Guard. In the early stages of leather culture, when being homosexual was a punishable offense by law, it was dangerous to be involved with gay BDSM. Since people risked both their professional and their social standing, leathermen had to proceed with caution. But now, in a more liberal society, today’s leathermen have realized that die-hard traditionalism is unsustainable. They walk the fine line between preserving the traditions of their seventy-year history while also embracing modern trends.

The sir-boy dynamic requires, arguably, more trust than other varieties of erotic relationships, because of the incredibly intimate power exchange that bondagerelated sex involves. Boys give up control to their sirs by submitting to constraining and physically painful situations, so confidence in one’s partner is vital in managing the inherent risks of BDSM. In 33

the past, the trust that sirs and boys had developed through sex naturally lent itself to creating tightknit groups of leathermen who could help each other evade the morality police of earlier decades.

“Thirty years ago, being a boy was a completely different experience. There were boundaries. Boys knew their place and sirs knew their place,” one of the older men in the circle comments.

Relics from this era are still present in modern leather culture. The sir-boy hierarchy is an obvious example, but not the only one.

At the conference, men also have handkerchiefs peeking out from their pockets, and leather bands around their wrists. Many wear either a Muir cap or a padlock collar. The accessories were originally covert signals to other leathermen.

The color of the handkerchief told others what sexual act you were interested in, while the hand on which you wore your leather band would communicate whether you were dominant or submissive.

Boys wore padlock collars to signal

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that they were “collared,” or in a relationship with a sir, while sirs would wear Muir caps as a symbol of their position.

With anti-sodomy laws now struck down and gay marriage gaining legal recognition across the country, leather and BDSM have become much more socially acceptable. As a result, the preexisting leather community is facing an onslaught of newcomers who know nothing about the old customs. A common complaint is that leathermen now indiscriminately don the Muir caps, which they once had to earn the right to wear.

The padlock collars that formerly symbolized a close bond between a sir and his boy have been reduced to trinkets that people lock and unlock on a whim. Yet correcting new members’ faux pas is a challenge, in part because fewer members of the Old Guard remain: “We lost a whole generation of people to the AIDS scourge,” Bielski notes.

Social media has also taken a toll on leather culture. Where it was once necessary to become

involved with a leather group in order to meet potential partners, social apps for gay men such as Grindr and Recon make it easy to find a hookup without joining the leather community. Leather gay bars, where people used to mingle, are slowly falling out of use.

“People just want to get their fantasy over with and then go home,” Jones laments. One-night stands, of course, are not conducive to building the sort of trust that BDSM requires, but the Internet makes them easier to arrange— and makes BDSM becomes more dangerous. Agreeing to let someone tie you up and whip you after meeting online can be a recipe for disaster.

Members of the Old Guard have founded fraternal organizations such as CT Cruisers and the Leather Boys of New England in order to pass down traditions, but they are fighting an uphill battle.

Still, some members of the New Guard embrace their customs.

“The Old Guard is really important to me because they have our

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TOP: OMAR BOOTS REFLECTS ON HIS YEAR AS MR. CONNECTICUT LEATHER 2014.

BELOW: DAVID GERARD, THE NEWLY CROWNED MR. CONNECTICUT LEATHER 2015 (CENTER), POSES WITH RUNNERS UP JEFF VICTORIA (RIGHT) AND TRELL WALTERS (LEFT). PHOTOS COURTESY OF OMAR BOOTS.

OCTOBER 2014

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roots, but the New Guard is also important because we need to accept the new generation. I believe in Old Guard and New Guard,” Boots says proudly.

Ten hours later, we’re back at 168 York Street Café for the Mr. Connecticut Leather competition. The building is packed with a menagerie of prominent figures from every corner of New England’s LGBTQ scene. There are not just leather boys and sirs; bears, cubs, drag queens, monarchs, pups, and rubbermen crowd around the stage in the café’s patio. Trying to discern everyone’s titles and affiliations is an impossible exercise in queer taxonomy.

The contest was supposed to start at 9 p.m. It’s now 10:15, and blood alcohol levels have

risen. But the bacchanalian feel of the night is interrupted when the pageant begins, unexpectedly, with a eulogy. David Murphy, Mr. Connecticut Leather 2006, walks onto the narrow stage in formal leatherwear. His stage fright is visible as he clutches the microphone, looks down at his typedout speech, and begins: “On the whole, we’re a pretty hardy bunch.

It’s pretty much impossible to kill us. But hey, we lost one of our own last year. It’s been a very hard time for a lot of us, and I’m going to tell you a story.”

Jayson Scott, Mr. Connecticut Leather 2007, passed away in 2013 from colon cancer. Scott and Murphy’s friendship spanned over ten years, and Murphy recounts how their lives intertwined—how Murphy calmed Scott’s nerves before his big speech in the 2007

JAYSON SCOTT, MR. CONNECTICUT LEATHER 2007

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contest; how Scott used to give Murphy’s infant son formula on road trips; how Murphy held the sick bowl for Scott as he vomited in the last twenty-four hours before he passed away; how, in the weeks afterward, Murphy had to hide Scott’s leather paraphernalia from his mother, who, even after her son’s death didn’t know about his involvement in the leather community. The speech ends with the unveiling of a disco ball, which Scott had requested they display for all future contests. After sharing a moment of silence, bathed in the ball’s glittering light, the leathermen, bears, and drag queens, tears still in their eyes, join together in singing the national anthem.

The rest of the pageant is far more light-hearted, featuring porn and sex toy raffles, roasts, and lipsynced renditions of Celine Dion’s

DAVID MURPHY, MR. CONNECTICUT LEATHER 2006 PHOTOS FROM MRCTLEATHER.ORG

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greatest hits. Then the contest itself begins. The three contestants strut their stuff in formal wear, bottomless chaps, and jock straps—they turn around and bend over to show off.

But physical appearance matters little to the judges. Most important are the interviews, held in private earlier in the day, which ask the contestants about their goals in representing the community and their knowledge of leather history.

After all, Mr. CT Leather needs to be an ambassador for current and past leather communities.

Contestants also give a stump speech, and are required to tell a dirty story based on a prompt, such as: “You’re beginning a scene with a judge of your choice. Pick a kinky fetish, and include the following three items. The first item is a toilet plunger; the second item is a feather duster; the third item, three marbles.” The stories pose an interesting challenge for Susan, the sign language interpreter; sign language is very literal when it comes to erotic subjects, essentially forcing Susan to pantomime sex acts.

As much as this is a night to pick a new ambassador, it is also an occasion to celebrate Boots’ time as Mr. Connecticut Leather.

Projected on the wall to the left of the stage is a slideshow dedicated to his year of service; he is shirtless in at least half the photos. “I want to thank the community for opening the door for a new journey for my life,” Boots says, on the verge of tears. “Thank you to the leather community; I got a chance to explore and see the person I really am.”

After imploring the crowd to be accepting of all creeds and colors, he removes his sash, his OCTOBER 2014

smaller affair—around twenty people sharing mimosas and eating eggs and sausage off of aluminum trays. Even with the smaller crowd, the Court still puts on a revue of lip-syncing cross-dressers and bears.

It is difficult to say whether Mr. Connecticut Leather, as an institution, can bring back the decorum and values that leather culture has lost over the years. In an age when leather newcomers are either THE REST OF THE ignorant or uninterested in the PAGEANT IS FAR culture’s foundations, and kinky hookups require only a few keyMORE LIGHTstrokes, Mr. Connecticut Leather HEARTED, might be swimming upstream.

FEATURING PORN But Boots and Jones and countless others are not about to give up and AND SEX TOY allow leather to be reduced to just RAFFLES, ROASTS, another fetish. For them, being a leatherman is so much more.

AND LIP-SYNCED Toward the end of the proRENDITIONS OF ceedings, the MCs call Boots to the stage again. Arsenio Amadis, CELINE DION’S a former leather champion in GREATEST HITS. New York and Boots’s close friend, declares: “We’re going to cover Omar today.” The term “cover” head slightly bowed. This is the refers to the donning of the Muir first time I’ve seen him without it; cap. The leather brim may be fliphe seems mousier now. After the pantly worn elsewhere, but at CT crowd takes a moment to cheer, Leather events, it is given only to the contestants walk onto the stage sirs who demonstrate exceptional to hear the results. When the win- dedication to the community. ner, David Gerard, is named, Boots Boots kneels before Amadis, who takes another sash and wraps it places the cap upon his head like around the new Mr. Connecticut a crown and announces to the Leather. He gives each contestant a audience, “I now present to you, hug, raises his hands in applause, Sir Omar.” The cap is primarily a and exits stage right. symbol of his dedication to his charitable work—but the fun of the pageantry is never lost.

At 11 a.m. the Sunday after the competition, the Imperial Court, Aaron Mak is a junior in the Hartford-based drag group, Berkeley College. holds a victory brunch at the café to celebrate Gerard’s title. It’s a 37

ENDNOTE

SQUEAK, DON’T EAT ME! A furry rodent crosses cultural boundaries

M

y first week as a foreign college student was filled with embarrassing confessions about my home country. I told my friends that in Peru we’d had seventeen presidential candidates in our last election, one of whom declared himself a direct descendant of the warrior Inca Pachacutec. In return, they vowed to never again complain to me about Obamacare. But I knew I had crossed a line when I told them that, back in Peru, I ate guinea pigs.

The reaction was instant: wide eyes, gasps, nervous laughter, disbelief. One of them spat out her Mountain Dew. How? When? Why? Doesn’t the guilt consume you? Doesn’t it keep you awake at night? How could you, Micaela? It was as if I had eaten their grandmothers.

I found it difficult to understand eating guinea pigs as anything other than completely ordinary. In museums in Peru, I saw ancient ceramics decorated with portraits of roasted rodents. In the Cathedral of Santo Domingo at Cusco, I stood in awe before the huge painting of the Last Supper hanging over the altar, in which Jesus Christ and his twelve apostles look down reverently upon a plate of baked guinea pig. The Chavín ate them. The Incas ate them.

The Conquistadores ate them.

We have eaten them for centuries.

Guinea pig tastes, yes, like chicken—with undertones of rabbit! But its taste is not the only thing that makes it popular in Peru. Guinea pig is affordable for even the poorest of Peruvians. The animals reproduce rapidly, require little space, and can subsist off of the vegetable scraps of a small family. This makes make them ideal livestock for subsistence farmers in the mountain regions.

Guinea pigs became popular as pets after they were brought to Europe from early voyages to the Americas. Transported across the oceans on Spanish galleons, a growing number of guinea pigs escaped the pot to become the pampered companions of the nobility.

Their descendants now live comfortable lives in the homes of hundreds of thousands of Americans. Friends here tell me that the guinea pigs they know luxuriate in fully furnished cages

and know how to perform tricks.

They are company, not food. That they could ever end belly-up with a side of sweet potatoes is, understandably, horrifying.

The guinea pigs have taught us a lesson in tolerance. They have pattered their way up and down the barriers of our cultures. My friends now know Peruvians have a reason for eating their guinea pigs, just as I know Americans have a reason for teaching tricks to their own. Maybe one day my friends will taste guinea pig. Maybe one day I’ll get one for a pet. For now, my friends will still look askance at me every time we pass a squirrel.

Micaela Bullard is a freshman in Calhoun College.

ILLUSTRATION BY IVY SANDERS SCHNEIDER

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