DigBoston 2.28.19

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SPECIAL INVESTIGATION

THE SHOCKING TRUTH

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INTERVIEW:

JOHN CAMERON MITCHELL

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I come to you this week with my quadrennial attempt to explain how insanely meaningless the race for the White House is at this time. And to convince you to stop paying attention to it and to instead follow and share local news for the foreseeable future, all while giving to nonprofit media like the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism (givetobinj.org) instead of to some dumbass candidate.

It won’t be easy. I love all our readers, really I do, but I can’t be nice about this. If you think voters and the media should be spending more than five minutes a day discussing who might fill but one of countless public offices that will be vacant or warrant a challenge 20 months from now, then offending you is more of a priority than a concern.

Look: You’re reading someone who legitimately understands how national nightmares haunt us locally. From the way that Donald Trump’s bigoted immigration policies slither down through our school and police departments, to the declining quality of life and tax return checks under President Turdcutter, nobody’s sitting pretty from the middle class on down. Nevertheless, financially or motivationally investing in a corporatist fraud like Cory Booker or a warmongering joke like Joe Biden this early on won’t change any of that. Nor will letting spin doctors and pundits get you crazy.

Still don’t believe me? Let’s take a look at some recent headlines:

• There are the obvious ones: “The Country

Needs Strong Leaders to Emerge in 2020” (Washington Monthly)

• And the hopeful ones: “GOP donors: Trump campaign lacks a strategy to win in 2020” (Politico); “2020 Democratic hopefuls embrace new meaning of reparations” (Chicago Tribune)

W/ LONG BEARD W/ TWIN XL

THU. MARCH 28

• And the articles that make me want to stick my head in a car trunk: “Elizabeth Warren, Bill Weld to discuss ‘America’s future’ at SXSW” (MassLive) Since there is absolutely nothing you can do between now and September that will change anything at the national level (and really after that too, but I’m being nice), I’ll make you a deal.

Try thinking and supporting local for the next six months, and I’ll consider keeping my feelings to myself about the individual Dems you are drooling over.

After that, I’m sure that I’ll be right there with you ogling inane cable news, at least through the New Hampshire primaries (we already have a bar in Manchester rented out). Until then, I’ll be keeping it (mostly) local, and it would be great if you, Dig readers, did the same.

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CHRIS FARAONE, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Need more Dig? Sign up for the Daily Dig @ tiny.cc/DailyDig

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Swallow the Sun, Wolfheart

• Plus the ones that are basically news outlets trolling you: “Bannon predicts Trump victory in 2020, intensified political vitriol” (USA Today); “Trump unleashing digital juggernaut ahead of 2020” (The Hill) • Let’s not forget the self-serving pundit screeds: “Dems need more DiFi, less AOC” (Fox News)

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NEWS US ARC OF THE MORAL UNIVERSE SPECIAL INVESTIGATION

Mass State Police and local law enforcement have spent millions amassing an arsenal of Tasers, but there’s minimal accountability for those doing the purchasing, or for those doing the tasing

BY CHRIS FARAONE, CELINE GARCÍA, ANNIKA HOM, DAYSIA TOLENTINO, ANDREW STANTON, CURTIS WALTMAN Depending on the person doing the explaining, the story of expanding stun gun use by cops in Massachusetts is either emphatically positive, with wayward perpetrators spared from bullet-ridden endings by restrained and gracious law enforcement officers, or the most harrowing development since pepper spray and far more painful for those on the receiving end of the blast.

Ask people who have been shocked how they feel about year-over-year jumps in the deployment of stun guns, and many will describe the nightmare of having a dart probed underneath their skin, followed by a surge of electricity pumped through them as they lost control of mind, body, and muscle.

On the other side, ask those who are tasked with administering shocks, or companies that hock electronic control weapons (ECW), and you will probably hear one of the defensive arguments that ECW proponents push on their communities through friendly and complicit media. Like in 2013, when police in Stoughton used a Taser-brand stun gun to break up a brawl at a baby shower.

“This officer showed significant restraint going to the Taser instead of their firearms,” Stoughton Executive Officer Robert Devine told reporters. Adding, “The vast majority of the time the Taser gets removed from the holster and turned on, people just give up and that’s the whole point of it.”

In reality, according to a Massachusetts Executive Office of Public Safety and Security analysis of data from 2016 (the most recent statewide numbers that have been collected and crunched by the EOPSS), of the 1,328 ECW contacts with human subjects that year, approximately 12 percent began with the officer issuing no warning at all. Of those who were reportedly warned, less than half submitted.

The rest were shocked or worse.

No two tasings are the same, and many variables apply when measuring use and impact.

Semantics are important: There is the all-encompassing label of “incidents,” which, according to EOPSS, constitute events “in which an officer (or group of officers) issue a warning and/or deploy an ECW.” Incident totals may include all displays of “warning arcs,” which Taser

advertises “may deter a subject without having to use actual force.” Then there is “stun deployment,” defined by the Commonwealth as “the act of bringing the ECW device into direct contact with the subject’s skin or clothing,” and “probe deployment,” the “act of firing two small dart-like probes … which attach to the subject.” Probes can be followed by an optional “5-second electrical cycle,” or several repeated cycles.

With more than a thousand ECW incidents recorded by law enforcement officers across Mass every year since 2015, and with that number climbing, civil liberties crusaders and defense attorneys have attempted to spark awareness about stun gun proliferation. Still, the prevailing sentiment in the press, and resultantly among the public, remains, as a pandering 2014 puff piece in the Patriot-Ledger newspaper paraphrased, that “the prevalence of Tasers in movies, TV and the news has served to educate the public on the power of the shock.

Just displaying a Taser often prompts criminals [to] stand down.”

Such observations and assumptions aside, a growing number of reports and studies have raised empirical criticisms. As Reuters found in an investigation published last year, “Nearly a third of the U.S. population is at higher risk of death or injuryoffrom Likelihood law Taser enforcement officers shocks—the elderly, the pregnant, Massachusetts to those withinheart conditions and deploy ECWs in 2016, more. Yet time and by again parsed race… police continue to fire their stun guns at the vulnerable.” Another recent study bucks the notion that it’s harmless for a cop to simply display an ECW. According to University of Cambridge researchers in the United Kingdom, their “experiment with City of London police found that, while rarely deployed, just the presence of electroshock devices led to greater overall hostility in police-public interactions— an example of what researchers call the ‘weapons effect’.”

Since the beginning of last year, our team at the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism (BINJ) has examined hundreds of state purchasing agreements,

Across the Commonwealth, the overall number of stun guns in law enforcement arsenals rose from 1,656 in 2011 to 6,008 in 2016, while the number of annual ECW incidents grew from 521 to 1,241 over that same period.

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for everything from body armor and silencers to stun guns. In our research we have found that Massachusetts agencies are spending millions more than they’re allotted for various weapons and that there is little to no oversight of most of those purchases beyond the procuring departments.

Stun guns are a shocking case in point, with a single manufacturer supplying every law enforcement agency in Mass that uses ECWs, and there are several trends, seemingly related, that warrant attention. Namely, as an increasing number of cops acquire Tasers, and as entities from small towns up to state police increase ECW spending, more and more people are getting tased.

Municipalities don’t collect information on the medical conditions of the people they tase, but certain data suggests vulnerable populations are encountering stun guns in Mass; according to EOPSS, individuals younger than 20 years of age represented 6.7 percent of subjects tased in 2016, while individuals 60 years of age or older represented 1.5 percent. Furthermore, relative to the Mass population, the subjects are disproportionately people of color.

If Bay Staters really are getting their info on stun guns from television crime shows and the evening news, as many who remain enthusiastic about ECW expansion allege, there is a lot they’re missing.

KILLING THEM SAFELY

With police having used stun guns across the country for decades, there have been many high-profile cases in which an electronic control weapon was deployed, and the individual who got shocked wound up with serious injuries or dying. An incident that took place in Kansas City in 2014, and was covered in detail by the Intercept, among other national outlets, displayed the brutality of an extreme deployment via dashcam video.

In it, a 17-year-old pulled over at a traffic stop is tased for an excruciating 23 seconds, then handcuffed, dragged behind his car, and dropped onto the ground as he went into cardiac arrest.

The number of people who have been killed by stun guns in the US is up for debate, with more conservative estimates at around 500 and a group called Truth Not Tasers putting the tally well over 1,000. What’s up for less debate is that stun guns can be lethal in some situations.

According to a comprehensive 2014 survey by Dr. Douglas P. Zipes of the Indiana University School of Medicine titled “TASER Electronic Control Devices Can Cause Cardiac Arrest in Humans,” “animal and clinical data clearly support the conclusion that a TASER X26 shock can produce [the cardiac rhythm disturbance ventricular fibrillation].” Zipes concludes, “Although the risk may be

low, its number cannot be known without universal record keeping and the creation of a national database.”

In Massachusetts, there have reportedly been four deaths in cases where police deployed stun guns. One happened last Dec 27, when Erich Stelzer, a bodybuilder whose family says he suffered from “an unspecified mental illness,” died after police in Cohasset tased him to stop his violent attack on a Tinder date. At least two of the other victims were also said to have severe behavioral disorders. In 2014, a Chelsea police officer tased Dominic Graffeo, a repeat offender causing a violent disturbance.

Graffeo reportedly turned purple, perhaps in part due to an overdose, and died soon after. The following year, as surveillance video shows, Worcester police tased a man named Wilmer Delgado Soba who was running around a bodega in his underwear. He was pronounced dead 15 hours later.

Another perp died after WHITE a Taser deployment in 2016.

While serving a warrant in Fall River, police there stunned Scott Macomber, a friend of the person they were looking for. He died in custody, but a subsequent report issued by the Bristol County district attorney “concluded the BLACK [Fall River] officers did not cause Mr. Macomber’s death or use excessive force” and found “that the use of force in this matter did not constitute criminal conduct.”

Furthermore, “an autopsy performed by the Chief Medical Examiner of the Commonwealth determined the cause of death to LATINO be Cardiac Dysrhythmia due to hypertensive and atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease and that the manner of Mr. Macomber’s death was natural.” Prosecutors who reviewed the fracas even noted the concern and kindness of arresting officers, who charged that Macomber was resisting.

“In accordance with Fall River Police Department protocol,” their report reads, “an ambulance was immediately summoned even though Mr. Macomber was making no complaints of pain and was exhibiting no signs of distress.”

The impact of ECWs on specific groups and whole communities can be drastic beyond the most excessive token cases. Various effects have been thoroughly documented, by medical and legal researchers alike. A 2017 investigation by Reuters found “the public pays most of the liability bill as police describe difficulty keeping up with the manufacturer’s increasingly detailed safety alerts.”

Though the company has sharpened its training language over the years, coinciding with a trend of plaintiffs “suing governments, not the manufacturer,” reporters established that, “from 2004 through 2009 … [Taser] was named as a defendant in more than 40 percent of the wrongful death suits filed against local governments [nationwide].” That’s in addition to innumerable more excessive force cases in which the person who was tased survived.

Sophia H. Hall, an attorney with Lawyers for Civil Rights in Boston, says half of her cases involve officers who allegedly used force unprofessionally. Hall currently represents Terrence Coleman, a schizophrenic man who was shot dead by a Boston officer in 2016, and says she does not believe a shift from pistols to stun guns will improve relations between police and arrest subjects.

“It makes me think you’re sticking a Band-Aid on a problem without using antibiotics,” Hall says. “Taser use is still very horrific for the human body. Depending on how much you’re tased, it can be as deadly as if you were shot.”

Taser International, which rebranded as Axon in 2017, maintains that its ECWs are the “safest intermediate use of force.” The company boasts a thorough safety guide for all models and offers its own certification and training. Axon denies that its weapons pose a significant risk, but as extra precaution for the past 10 years has advised users against

deploying to the upper-chest region. In a training bulletin initially sent to ECW-certified police officers in 2009, the company instructed [Ed. note: It writes “ECD” in place of “ECW”; the terms are interchangeable]: “avoiding chest shots with ECDs avoids the controversy about whether ECDs do or do not affect the human heart.”

Axon has taken aggressive legal action to defend claims that Tasers don’t kill, and even filed lawsuits against medical examiners who suggested that electric shocks contributed to deaths. In other instances, the company has advised departments whose deployments, lethal and otherwise, were under scrutiny. Medical examiners seem to have received the message. In Fall River, the death of Macomber was found to be related to dysrhythmia and cardiovascular disease, not anything to do with being stunned, while other autopsies stemming from similar scenarios list “excited delirium” as a cause of Likelihood of law death. First identified by enforcement officers white coats at the McLean in Massachusetts to Asylum for the Insane deploy ECWs in 2016, in Charlestown, Mass, parsed by race in 1849, the condition has been linked to “the People who increasing use of cocaine … experience ECW methamphetamine … LSD contact in Mass are … and PCP,” and “has been cited as a cause of death more likely to for people tased while also under the influence of drugs.” According to a 2018 deployment if they paper in Forensic Science, are non-white, Medicine and Pathology

by Australian researcher according to Roger W. Byard, “Although Executive Office of the use of Tasers has been implicated in episodes of Public Safety and fatal excited delirium, no Security (EOPSS) data definite causal relationship has been proven.”

NO DEPLOYMENT Donald E. Wilkes Jr., DEPLOYMENT a University of Georgia School of Law professor and persistent critic of stun guns, has been less forgiving. In a 2016 paper titled “The Persistence of Fatal Police Taserings,” he writes:

neither lethal nor nonlethal.

HISTORY OF SILENCE

After six years of failing to successfully produce a nonlethal electronic weapon that sold well, in 1999 brothers Rick and Tom Smith of Scottsdale, Arizona, hit the mark with their revolutionary M26 model Taser. As recounted in Killing Them Safely, a 2015 documentary about their business, the founding brothers openly acknowledged: “If we weren’t going to have a tool that can stop an individual, we weren’t going to be successful. [The M26] could stop a motivated individual.”

To demonstrate the strength of their product, the Smiths devised a simple sales pitch for potential law enforcement customers: Bring your toughest guy, and we will drop them to the ground.

According to court documents from various cases involving Taser International, in developing enhanced devices in the ’90s, the company conducted product testing on animals, discharging electrical weapons on pigs and increasing the charge deployed until there was significant muscle activity. Through these and other experiments, the company eventually determined the ideal electrical output needed to affect human motor function.

Asked about this history, Mark Swenson, a senior regional sales manager for Axon who sells Taser equipment to law enforcement agencies in Mass, explained that with minimal exceptions, the company no longer engages in such practices: “We don’t test on animals. … Our subjects are exclusively human volunteers. … I have heard of tests on bears in Alaska, because in Alaska there are a lot of bears so people will use Taser devices on bears. So there have been people who try to figure out how to deal with that, but we don’t typically use animals to test our products.”

As for ECWs that can stop a bear in its tracks and are carried by several thousand cops and troopers across Mass, according to Swenson, “the voltage is about 50,000, which sounds scary, but voltage is basically the arc that pushes the electricity to move. The amplitude, which is the electricity that’s shocking you, is about three to four milliamps. That’s like what’s in an LED light bulb in a Christmas tree.”

In Massachusetts, officers have wielded stun guns since 2004, when then-Gov. Mitt Romney hailed them as a “modern billy club” and set up the process through which departments could start training officers. Even as crime went down across the state over the following years, Taser purchasing went up, with departments arguing that increased stun gun acquisition would lead to a decrease in police shootings. When the number of shootings by state troopers and officers climbed anyway, Taser acquisition continued.

According to a report from the US Bureau of Justice Statistics, nationwide, “The number of local police departments authorizing the use of Tasers and stun guns

experience

Originally, it bears repeating, Tasers were touted as nonlethal weapons. Unlike firearms, they were not, we were assured, lethal weapons. Nowadays, however, doubtless as a result of the undeniable persistence of fatal taserings by police, Taser International and the police agencies that use Tasers no longer proclaim that Tasers are nonlethal weapons. Instead they now use an invented, conveniently ambiguous term to describe Tasers. Tasers, they claim, are “less-lethal” weapons, whatever that means. Their assertion is absurd. … there is no such thing as a weapon that is

WESTFIELD

The number of ECWs in this department has risen from 12 in Jan 2017 to 15 in July 2018.

While the number of officers trained to use Tasers has risen from 52 to 64.

ARC OF THE MORAL UNIVERSE continued on pg. 6

WAREHAM

In the first half of 2018, 38 officers were trained to use ECWs. The department owned 47 tasers and used them nine times in that time period.

Police departments in the following cities and towns have the most ECW activity, according to Massachusetts data and municipal data obtained for this story: ● ● ● ● ●

New Bedford Barnstable Brockton Lawrence New Bedford

● ● ● ● ●

Wareham Worcester Westfield Taunton Plymouth

CITIES & TOWNS The following information was obtained through Freedom Of Information Act requests

PLYMOUTH

In a 2017 email with an assistant general counsel for the Executive Office of Public Safety and Security about the town’s ECW policy, PPD Trainer Marc Manfredi wrote, “Ok, it is crazy that they could have AR-15’s, shotguns and handguns locked in storage cases in their personal vehicles but not a taser but I understand based on how the law is written.”

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ARC OF THE MORAL UNIVERSE continued from pg. 4

increased more than tenfold between 2000 and 2013— up from 7 percent to 81 percent.” Massachusetts has followed the trend. An EOPSS “Electronic Control Weapons in Massachusetts” report released last March shows that “During 2016, twenty police departments were approved for … (ECW) use, bringing the cumulative total to 250 (ECW) approved agencies in Massachusetts”—up from 230 the year before. Across the Commonwealth, the overall number of stun guns in law enforcement arsenals rose from 1,656 in 2011 to 6,008 in 2016, while the number of annual ECW incidents grew from 521 to 1,241 over that same period.

As for who got tased, according to EOPSS, “Black subjects experienced the greatest likelihood of weapon deployment (58.2%) followed by Hispanic subjects (52.1%),” meaning those groups had the highest chance of being stunned or probed in the event that an ECW was introduced.

FULL DEPLOYMENT

MSP adopted Tasers for wide use relatively late in the game, issuing a press statement in March 2016 announcing that “895 ECW units have been assigned with members of the State Police Division of Field Services, who will [begin] carrying them immediately.”

The release noted, “The distribution is the first time that patrol troopers are being equipped with ECW. Prior to this deployment, only members of the State Police Special Tactical Operations (STOP) Team were assigned ECWs.” By that time, state police were already on the way to becoming Axon’s top client in Mass. Though MSP attorneys redacted descriptions and amounts from hundreds of pages of purchase orders and other documents they returned in response to Freedom of Information Act requests made for this story, BINJ was able to ascertain that over the past four and a half years, the department has spent in excess of $3 million on Taser ECWs and related consumables and accessories.

Some of those purchases were made through a long-term contract that began in September 2014 and is open through 2020, while others have come from subsequent multiyear purchasing programs that Swenson, the Axon sales manager, describes as “the ‘full deployment,’ which provides every field officer with a Taser device.”

MSP buyers apparently had a vendor in mind from the getgo. The department announced its request for response on Aug 27, 2014, and in it listed items that are sold exclusively by Taser International. Taser wound up being the sole bidder and submitted a signed contract to the state four days before the due date for responses. On Sept 22, 2014, its proposal to provide “Taser equipment, maintenance and accessories” manifested in a deal to sell a thousand devices plus twice that many replacement cartridges for a total of nearly a million dollars to state police.

In the process, MSP allowed Taser to adjust the state’s standard contractor indemnity clause to read: “This … liability obligation does not apply to any claim arising out of the deployment, use, or misuse of 6

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the Taser product by the State, its employees or agents, including any claims for damages and personal injuries.

The State agrees to assume all risks of loss and all liability for any damages and personal injury which may result from the deployment use, or misuse of the Taser product.”

In 2017, MSP faced public scrutiny in response to data that showed that the department saw a 93 percent increase in use of force reports from 2015 to 2016, with 402 total recorded incidents in the latter. At the time, MSP Spokesman David Procopio blamed the way that Taser use is tallied; though only 25 state police ECW uses involved actual contact that year, by state standards, 130 counted as deployments, the residual 105 stemming from times that troopers issued warnings but no shocks.

“Because of the industry standards of how use of force … is categorized,” Procopio told WBUR, “the number of times we deployed an ECW can be misleading.”

Since more recent use of force numbers have not yet been made public, BINJ filed a records request to see how often state police are deploying ECWs and against whom. According to documents obtained for this story, in the first half of 2018, troopers were involved in 52 ECW incidents. Though people who identify as black or Latino make up approximately 20 percent of the state’s population combined, they accounted for 27, or just over half, of those deployments.

SHOCKER

As Taser’s business with the Commonwealth and its cities and towns began to run into the million-dollar

Information via Reuters, Circulation, Axon, Drexel University, and the Journal of the American College of Cardiology

range, the amount the company spent on lobbying started to hit six figures. In 2015, Taser spent $102,000 retaining Rasky Baerlein Strategic Communications, which was paid to provide services related to “Massachusetts government relations regarding public safety.” Additionally, in 2015 and 2016, Taser paid another firm, Lynch Associates, more than $100,000 for “relationship development in the Public Safety sector.”

In terms of the potential for peddling political influence, Taser apparently made prudent choices. In Lynch, it picked a firm that also happened to be lobbying for Taser’s biggest Massachusetts client, the state police.

In Rasky, it was assigned a lobbyist who has personally given more than $30,000 to campaigns in Mass over the past 10 years, with gifts having gone to pols ranging from House Speaker Robert DeLeo to Gov. Charlie Baker. And that’s just at the state level.

In municipalities and counties from the Berkshires to Cape Cod, Tasers are becoming increasingly commonplace. Based on data that departments are required to submit to Massachusetts every year, BINJ solicited additional information from police departments with above-average ECW use—Barnstable, Brockton, Lawrence, New Bedford, Plymouth, Wareham, Worcester, Westfield, and Taunton. With the exception of Brockton, New Bedford, Westfield, and Wareham, none of the departments returned the details or metadata we requested. Some did not even acknowledge our inquiry.

Without help from those departments, BINJ was still able to ascertain that in certain jurisdictions, including some where cops are among the most likely in Mass to use an ECW, police are still packing the Taser X26 model.

According to multiple studies and the aforementioned Reuters investigation, that design presents a “higher cardiac risk” than others. Taser stopped selling the X26 in the US in 2014; still, police in cities, including New Bedford and Worcester, appear to be using them.

We also found that there is zero oversight of Taser acquisitions— not at the state level for MSP or Department of Correction purchases, nor in municipalities. As for rules that govern their use, in order for a law enforcement agency to obtain ECW permission, it must first submit an application to the Secretary of Public Safety and Security and wait three to four weeks for approval.

No public input is required; rather, police departments have to simply file an [ECW] “training curriculum.”

That can either come from the state’s Municipal Police Training Committee (MPTC) or directly from Axon. As the only show in town that provides electronic firepower, it even offers and assists with lesson plans and departmental policies upon request.

Whether those departments follow their adopted guidelines, and keep members of the public informed about incidents and purchasing decisions involving electronic control weapons, is another story altogether.

This story is part of a multipart collaboration on weapons use and procurement in Massachusetts by the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism, Emerson College’s Department of Journalism, MuckRock, and the Engagement Lab. Support for this story was made possible by the Online News Association’s Journalism Education Challenge Grant. To read more about the project, please visit binjonline.org.

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THE FALL OF THE GE BOSTON DEAL, PART I APPARENT HORIZON

The official narrative and the real story

BY JASON PRAMAS @JASONPRAMAS Readers might feel that this should be a time for me to take a victory lap. The GE Boston deal that I criticized from the moment it was made public in January 2016 has crashed to Earth a bit over three years later. The now-failing multinational has pulled the plug on its much-hyped and publicly funded world headquarters campus on Fort Point Channel. No new jobs—executive or otherwise—are likely to be created in its muchreduced Boston presence. The major local news media that cheered on the project have fallen silent. Mission accomplished for my colleagues and me at the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism and DigBoston, right?

But there’s nothing to celebrate. The public is still largely in the dark about an accord that may yet cost Boston and Massachusetts millions by the time the dust settles. The government and corporate officials that cut the deal are thus far being allowed to walk away from the near-disaster unscathed. And GE itself is still being treated with kid gloves by most observers.

So at this juncture, it’s worth comparing the official narrative of the GE Boston deal to as much of the actual story as I’ve been able to discern to date over the course of a dozen heavily researched columns. Before moving on to suggest some political reforms to stop such a pact from ever being tried again by local pols and their cheapskate capitalist bedfellows.

Naturally, the official account pushed by GE and its allies in government and media is the simpler of the two.

And it goes like this: Once upon a time, a megacorp called General Electric got tired of having its world headquarters in boring suburban Connecticut and decided to move the facility to somewhere super hip and awesome. In 2015, it put the word out about its plans to select government leaders and was gratified to find that Mass Gov. Charlie Baker and Boston Mayor Marty Walsh were willing to offer it an extremely generous package of incentives to move to our “city upon a hill.”

After months of hush-hush negotiations [like little kids at a pajama party, you see], the company agreed to build a new HQ in Boston and create 800 jobs there in exchange for $120 million from the state and $25 million from the city. An appropriate plot of land was identified in the Fort Point neighborhood and GE pledged to build an awesomely groovy complex on it—with a corporate logo that would be visible from space! And, like, a helipad!

Everyone that mattered agreed that this was a most excellent use of public money, and all was well and right with the world. The project was on track for completion by 2019, new jobs were on the way, billions of dollars were expected to flow into the Greater Boston economy, and the governor and mayor were lauded as heroes.

Sadly, GE had business troubles soon after the deal and started selling off major divisions to stay afloat. It went through a couple of changes in leadership, and gradually downsized its plans for Boston. Finally, this month, the ever-thoughtful and munificent concern announced that it would not be building its new tower and would sell the Fort Point property—that it had bought in tandem with the Commonwealth in a totally normal way that’s done all the time—using the proceeds from the sale to reimburse state government. And leasing back the two old NECCO buildings on the site that the state had refurbished for its use from whichever developer ended up buying it. Only 250 jobs would end up in Boston, but the city and state would be none the worse for wear since the original jobs creation contract would be scrapped, and there would still be a significant GE presence in the area. Plus, bonus (!), the company would still keep its promise to donate $50 million to Boston Public Schools, community health programs, and “diversity training programs.”

Aw, isn’t that nice? Because fairy tales usually are.

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But here’s what we know of the real story. In June 2015, the state of Connecticut passed a temporary tax slated to raise $700 million from major corporations like GE to help improve a variety of useful social programs with an emphasis on public transportation. GE’s famously antitax leadership immediately decided to move out of the state to any locale that would dump huge amounts of public lucre on it—and wouldn’t mind its screwing the people of Connecticut by pulling up stakes. Very soon after that, Gov. Baker and Mayor Walsh made it known that they were just the kind of politicians willing to do anything it took to get more big companies to move to Boston.

The aforementioned secret negotiations took place, despite the fact that such a hidden process was profoundly undemocratic and of questionable legality.

However, it was not so secret a process that government and corporate officials couldn’t prepare the PR ground hereabouts by dropping early hints to their special friends in the press.

And so it was that on Dec 11, 2015, Boston Globe columnist Shirley Leung wrote one of the most disgusting pieces in the history of the Hub news industry—literally begging then-GE CEO Jeff Immelt to screw Connecticut and come to Massachusetts where our “fiscally conservative” governor would never trouble him with anything so gauche as taxation in the public interest.

One of the first of a series of boosterish articles from Leung, some of her more pliant co-workers, and the Globe editorial board, that completely abandoned journalistic integrity in favor of cheerleading for a corporation that had quite literally laid waste to large swathes of the Bay State over the previous half century. Destroying tens of thousands of good, largely unionized jobs in cities like Pittsfield, Lynn, and Fitchburg while turning the northeast corner of the Commonwealth into an ecological disaster area. And later helping set off the subprime mortgage scandal that destroyed the lives of thousands of Mass homeowners and then the lives of tens of thousands more during the Great Recession that ensued in 2008. Also defrauding Mass communities for millions in a municipal bond fraud conspiracy in the same period.

When the deal was first announced, the incentive package of $120 million from the state and $25 million from the city was only discussed in broad strokes. A few days hence, when the five-page agreement between the parties was published in the Globe, it turned out that the city had also committed to spend $100 million to repair the old Northern Ave bridge to improve traffic to the GE site and the state had committed $25 million for improvements to “streets, transit, bikeways, and water transportation service” around the proposed headquarters. For a potential total of $270 million in government funds. A figure that the project’s many boosters now seem content to forget. To be lavished on one of the biggest tax scofflaws in the world. GE being a company that actually paid negative federal income tax—that is, got big refunds—some years.

There were a few small protest actions against the GE Boston deal in this period by a coalition of left activists.

But nothing on the order of the popular movement that had shut down the city and state attempt to bring the Olympics to Boston the previous year—much to the chagrin of the Boston Globe. Which had also flacked for that attempted exercise in corporate welfare. This time the coalition of the willing—comprised of all the major institutions of the regional ruling class from local and state government to that same “newspaper of record”— worked overtime to forestall any attempt to shut down GE’s plans. By quite literally acting in concert with the company’s PR department. And it worked like a charm.

By the time the Fort Point land deal went through later in 2016, the protest campaign had mostly evaporated. And the more or less final terms of the GE site purchase gradually became clear. Byzantine though they were. GE and MassDevelopment—“the Commonwealth’s economic development and finance authority,” according to its website— jointly bought a 2.7-acre (although other figures were initially reported) plot from Procter & Gamble. Part of the consumer goods giant’s manufacturing center for its onceindependent Gillette brand.

According to the Boston Globe, GE paid $25.6 million for what would become the site of its new 12-story building, and MassDevelopment paid $57.4 million for the roughly one acre of the plot that had the two former NECCO buildings on it. About $30 million of that state aid would go to improvements around the headquarters site. And another $5 million was tacked onto the state contribution ($125 million overall) to cover the cost of the deal itself..

The $25 million in city money was to come in the form of tax breaks between 2019 and 2037 through a Payment in Lieu of Taxes (PiLoT) contract with GE in exchange for the creation of 800 jobs at its new headquarters. Which I then proved was in fact as few as 400 jobs—since other reporters and observers apparently couldn’t be bothered to actually read the fairly short PiLoT terms. Not much of a “deal” at all upon taking a careful look behind the spin.

Fast forward to several days ago, and said deal has disintegrated. As GE’s fortunes fell over the past two years, the company ultimately decided to put a spike in the idea of the grand Boston headquarters campus and call off the city PiLoT contract before it starts. In recent weeks, company and state officials have agreed to jointly sell the entire Fort Point site to a commercial developer.

Since real estate prices in the neighborhood have risen sharply in part due to the much-ballyhooed scheme, it’s expected that GE will easily make enough to pay back the $87.4 million it has cost the state (via a $90 million Citizens Bank revolving loan) to buy and refurbish the NECCO buildings. And GE and the state will split any profits over that 50-50. Which will possibly be large enough for the company to make back the money it spent on the rest of the former P&G plot.

As part of the revised deal, GE is expected to negotiate a 10-year lease on the NECCO buildings from its future owner. Meaning that it only plans to have a headquarters in Boston for half the time it had previously committed to. And only 250 employees will work in the buildings. Oh, but GE will keep its promise to donate $50 million to the BPS, community health, and diversity programs. Which sounds impressive until you read my column on a similar move by Vertex, and realize that the lumbering behemoth is only promising to basically take $10 million a year for five years out of its marketing budget and “donate” it.

Thus generating more local brand loyalty than any ad campaign could ever get them.

And so it was that on Dec 11, 2015, Boston Globe columnist Shirley Leung wrote one of the most disgusting pieces in the history of the Hub news industry

In Part II of this column: how Mass residents can stop this kind of deal from ever happening again.

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OPINION

AFTER THE EMPIRE

Could the Smollett situation affect public perception of hate crimes?

BY REV. IRENE MONROE

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Fox TV drama Empire actor Jussie Smollett plays on the show the gay character Jamal Lyon. In real life, Smollett is an African-American gay male who has been charged with concocting an elaborate racist and homophobic assault against him. Smollett’s fan base, needless to say, is flummoxed. So, too, are many Americans trying to push through this deeply polarized moment.

The big question now is about whether Smollett’s case will affect public perception of hate crimes, especially impacting people of color and LGBTQ communities. As one of millions of online commenters suggested, “Jussie has essentially set back the progression of both black folk and the LGBTQ community all while playing right into the hands of MAGA.” When his story first came out, Smollett had a groundswell of support. Specifically, he said he was assaulted by two men in the wee hours of the morning who shouted, “This is MAGA country” and who put a noose around his neck. The investigation, however, has disclosed that Smollett knew the two Nigerian-American men involved, one of whom has appeared on the Empire. Smollett reportedly paid the two men $3,500 to attack him, while the rope to make the noose was bought at a nearby hardware store and the bruises on his face and body were self-inflicted.

In the time since those developments came out, I have been asking myself the same question as Chicago Chief Police Eddie Johnson, who said during a press conference, “Why would anyone, especially an African-American man, use the symbolism of a noose to make a false accusation?” Smollett’s hoax dredges up the country’s horrors of lynching and gay bashing. For me, as an African-American lesbian, three hate crime incidents came to my mind immediately: Emmett Till, James Byrd, and Matthew Shepard. Till was lynched in Money, Mississippi, in 1955, and Byrd in Jasper, Texas, in 1998. Byrd’s killing was called a “lynching-by-dragging.” Shepard was gay-bashed to death in Laramie, Wyoming, in 1998.

Despite the recent news, Smollett is still seen as innocent in the eyes of many American-Americans—straight and LGBTQ. Despite the many inconsistencies in his story, there are communities of people of color in urban cities that have every reason not to trust the police. Chicago is still recovering from the wounds of the cover-up around the shooting of Laquan McDonald, who in 2014 was fatally shot 16 times by white Chicago Officer Jason Van Dyke. Van Dyke lied about the threat posed by McDonald and was backed up by fellow officers, but was then shown to have lied when dashcam video of the shooting came out.

“I can’t blindly believe Chicago PD. The department that covered up shooting Laquan McDonald over a dozen times? That operated an off-site torture facility?” Selma film director Ava DuVernay tweeted. “That one? I’ll wait. Whatever the outcome, this won’t stop me from believing others. It can’t.”

In many of these communities, it is perceived that Smollett has no chance of getting a fair trial. Instead, he will be seen as another victim heading toward the country’s industrial prison complex, which disproportionately holds men of color.

While Smollett’s alleged crime will regrettably affect public perception of hate crimes, it shouldn’t. There has been an uptick of bias-related incidents and actual hate crimes since Donald Trump became POTUS, from white people calling the police on blacks for no good reason, to the defacement of synagogues and even worshippers being killed. Smollett’s hoax has no doubt has tapped into our fears about safety and our concerns for a country this polarized.

All reports of hate crimes should be taken seriously. One hoax is no excuse for law enforcement not to do their job. Or for people to avoid reporting them. To believe that Smollett’s actions make it so that people of color and LGBTQs can’t come forward in the future to report hate crimes is to buy too easily into the notion that one bad apple spoils the whole bunch.

Such a belief is bias in and of itself, and suggests people of color and LGBTQs are a hoax-perpetrating monolith. Smollett may well have suckered us all, but it would be a crime to let his fraudulent actions take away from any actual hate crimes being taken seriously.

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UNIVERSITIES MUST SEVER TIES WITH SAUDIS AND UAE

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BY CHANCE CHARLEY

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R CHA O F K NG L A E

March 26 will mark the fourth year of the genocidal war against the people of Yemen led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. In addition to blockading the country and preventing basic necessities from entering, the Saudi-led coalition targets food and water infrastructure, fishing boats, and even small farms in airstrikes, directly threatening Yemen’s survival. As a result, 80 percent of the population requires humanitarian aid to survive, and one-third of the country is in “pre-famine” conditions according to a recent report by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Schools, hospitals, weddings, and funerals are among the other targets of coalition pilots—all war crimes under international law. Despite this, and despite the rapidly worsening situation for Yemenis, the United States continues to support the coalition. This support takes many forms, from direct military assistance, to companies such as Raytheon—headquartered in Massachusetts—selling arms to Saudi Arabia and the UAE, and to universities such as MIT and Boston University maintaining war ties with the regimes and companies responsible.

In recent months, students and anti-war activists protested at universities across Boston, including Northeastern, MIT, and Boston University, protesting the participation of Raytheon and similar companies at career fairs for their role in Yemen. The invitation of these war profiteers onto campus is but one aspect of how our universities are deeply invested—politically and financially—in war, corporate profits, and anti-democratic, anti-people regimes. For example, BU ran a branch of its dental school in Dubai from 2008-2012 and last October invited the consulate general of the UAE onto campus. These ties are especially clear between the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and MIT and Harvard. Last spring these two universities hosted the Saudi crown prince, Mohammad bin Salman, on campus. Despite mounting public criticism, MIT plans to maintain its ties with the Saudi government.

On top of all this, these schools make millions of dollars from investments and gifts from Saudi and Emirati companies and weapons manufacturers like Raytheon—an exact figure not known as the financial relationships of the universities are not public knowledge. This runs counter to the universities’ stated missions to “serve the world,” “benefit society,” or “work for the betterment of humankind.” Instead, it reflects their agreement with Wall Street and the whole US war machine that American empire must be preserved.

Before the Yemeni people forced the corrupt dictator Saleh—who embezzled an estimated $62 billion during his reign—from office in 2012, foreign companies and banks had near-total control over the country’s economy. For example, U.S. Hunt Oil and French Total were the primary shareholders in Yemen LNG (liquified natural gas), the largest industrial project in Yemen. Additionally, Saudi Arabia has major control of Yemen’s port cities, allegedly even attempting to build a new oil port in al-Mahra while the war still rages on. Now, the US is scrambling to maintain its power there.

Because 10 percent of the world’s seaborne oil passes through Bab-el-Mandeb strait, and due to growing Chinese economic and military rivalry in the region, the US is keen on keeping Yemen under its thumb. It is no wonder then that Yemen has been a hotspot of the so-called war on terror, victim to US drone strikes since 2002. And it is no wonder why the US has poured so much money and support into the Saudi-led war from the very start.

The US is the single largest backer of this war. It provides the coalition with jets, missiles, targeting assistance, logistical support, and much more. A Congressional Research Service report in 2016 found that under Obama, weapons sales to Saudi Arabia from 2008-2015 totaled $94 billion. And from 2016-2017, weapons sales increased 38 percent. While more recently, the devastation of this war has led to some criticism in Congress, it has amounted to only symbolic action. Ro Khanna’s recent bill for example, although it passed in the House, was gutted by both Democrats and Republicans, who added an amendment allowing “intelligence sharing” (i.e., sharing information with the coalition to decide which targets to bomb) if deemed necessary by the president. All the while, weapons designed and made in America flood into Saudi-UAE arsenals, and universities invite the producers of these weapons onto campus to recruit students to design the next tools of destruction.

The recent campus protests help to show that the war in Yemen is not as far away as one may think. Demands were made not only to kick Raytheon and the other war profiteers off campus, but for the universities to cut their many ties with the Saudi and UAE regimes and for an end to the war in Yemen. By standing with the people of Yemen as our brothers and sisters, exposing and calling for an end to all US support for this war, we build up opposition to the war in Yemen and help revitalize the anti-war movement. Time is running out for the people of Yemen, and only by standing up and fighting back can we force the US government to end its sponsorship of this genocide.

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Chance Charley is a student at Boston University and a member of the Coalition to Stop the Genocide in Yemen. Readers interested in supporting the coalition’s work can email No_Genocide_In_Yemen@riseup.net for more information, or go to facebook. com/nogenocideinyemen.

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AN ORAL HISTORY OF THE DIG: PART II FEATURE

The Dig goes to war with the Phoenix, or something like that

BY BARRY THOMPSON

The ’90z - 2003

Episode 2: The fight for free

In our previous episode, Shovel ditched its monthly zine format and rechristened itself the Weekly Dig. In doing so, the fledgling company injected fresh competition into a market entirely dominated by the venerable Boston Phoenix. And so began the battle for Boston alt-weekly supremacy. But as for the precise nature and degree of that battle, well, those are matters of relativity…

JOE BONNI (founding editor): The Phoenix went to a lot of advertisers and said, “Hey, we’ve been giving you a great rate for years because you’re a small business and we’re not going to charge you like we’d charge Budweiser and shit like that. But if you advertise in the Dig, you can forget that fuckin’ cut rate.” They did this shit.

JEFF LAWRENCE (founding publisher): The way that I remember it was I had a conversation with the owners of the Middle East, and they’d been contacted by one of the higher-ups at the Phoenix. I don’t know who it was.

And they basically gave them an ultimatum and said, “Oh, we’ve held your ad rates at ‘x’ for so many years.

Now you’re advertising with the Dig as well. Clearly, you have enough money. Maybe we’ll raise your rates unless you stop advertising with the Dig. And it was one of the brothers who own the Middle East who called me and said, “We’re in. Fuck the Phoenix.”

GRAHAM WILSON (founding sales manager): When we got our first street boxes, we had three of ’em. One in Allston, one in Harvard Square, and one on Newbury Street. We probably debated for a whole day where to put these two or three stupid street boxes. But we were so happy to have them; metal, orange, old school street boxes that were like tanks. All we could afford were three, but we could go to our advertisers now and say, “We’ve got street boxes!”

BONNI: Some-fucking-how we did a thorough listings section. That was one of the great things about alt-weeklies before the internet. Craig [Kapilow] did the listings of every-fucking-thing going on in every club and every gallery. And that’s what made people pick you up even if your content was sketchy or not proofread very well. People were fuckin’ leaving us on subway trains.

MIKE CANN (Blunt Truth columnist): I used to do a lot

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of benefits for MassCann, booking the shows and stuff. I used to send the Dig a lot of info, and they would always print it. When print was still the only game in town, you needed the Phoenix and the Dig if you had an event to promote.

worry about them.” And when the Phoenix went free, the Globe asked Mindich, “Are you going free because of the Dig?” And he said we were going to be gone in six months.

That was a rallying cry to me and the entire staff. We were like, “Oh, so we’re just going to die?”

BONNI: The thing about the Boston Phoenix in the 1990s was it was part of Phoenix Media/Communications Group, which had four newspapers, their own printing press, and a couple of other companies. We were making the case that we were truly independent media and the Phoenix had long since slipped away into a corporatist mentality of, like, “How much advertising can we bring in while nominally covering what’s cool?”

WILSON: Before that point, the Phoenix was [$1.25], so my pitch to potential advertisers was, “Listen, we’re free.

We’re in the pubs. You’re a rock club? My newspaper is free in all the rock clubs. The Phoenix isn’t.” So when we launched, Mindich puts out this friggin’ internal memo about about how the Dig will be done in six months. Six months after he sent out that memo, the Phoenix went free.

DAN KENNEDY (former Boston Phoenix media columnist, Northeastern University journalism professor, and longtime Boston news media commentator): For many years, the Phoenix had huge cash machines that had nothing to do with the paper. You go back to the ’70s, and they had this huge business typesetting and printing college newspapers. We used to do the Northeastern News and the Suffolk Journal and a bunch of others. Then desktop publishing came along, the college kids started doing it themselves, and that was the end of that. At the same time, the Phoenix came up with voice personals, and, again, the company’s making a fortune that has nothing to do with the Phoenix.

KENNEDY: What we were told internally was we had a free website and a paid paper. And we were constantly going through these debates of, “Oh, we don’t want to put this or that story on the website, because we want to charge for it in the paper.” And people who at the time seemed like they were more rational and forward thinking—looking back, maybe they were the ones who were wrong—were saying, “We’ve got to end this stupid debate. Let’s just make the website free, and paper free, and the paper’s the website and the website’s the paper.”

That’s what I heard. I never heard it was about the Dig.

BONNI: Back in the ’90s, before online dating was popular, you might remember seeing 1-900 number dating ads. They might say, “Single white male, blah blah blah.” And if you’re like, “I’m interested in this fucking person,” you call a 900 number for like a dollar per minute, and you leave a voicemail in their mailbox.

The newspaper makes money off that shit. And the Phoenix didn’t just do this for themselves. One of their subsidiaries handled, if I remember correctly, the personals sections for almost 200 newspapers.

KENNEDY: Stephen Mindich, who I think was a brilliant businessman, could never really figure out how the Dig could stay alive. He’d look at it and he’d say, “Well, you look at the ads, you look at the fact that it’s free … I don’t know how this stays alive.”

LAWRENCE: We were often treated as an afterthought.

From what I’ve heard from Phoenix personnel, the attitude was, “the Dig isn’t serious; We don’t have to

WILSON: Of course Mindich played going free up like, “We’re doing this for the people and for society, maaaan.

We want our work to get to the people,” and it was such bullshit.

BONNI: We came out with a Monopoly board centerfold for one issue. All the traditional Monopoly squares were taken up by a company in the Phoenix Group, and there was a very sarcastic piece of text that had some guy named “Stephen Inditch” going through his day using every friggin’ product. If you worked in a cool place in or near Boston, the amount of influence the Phoenix Group had on what we could call the “hipster” culture of the ’90s was monstrous, and it was homogenous. They were adjusting to the role of having another player in town, and they weren’t happy about it.

Keep your eyes peeled for the next episode, in which the difficulties of urinating with a Prince Albert piercing are revealed, at long last.

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JOE SENT ME, CAMBRIDGE EATS

Not really a speakeasy, but a great neighborhood bar

BY MARC HURWITZ @HIDDENBOSTON

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STAVESESSIONS.ORG 14

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Chances are, when a bar calls itself a speakeasy, it’s really not, since not too many bars from the Prohibition era still exist. But it doesn’t really matter that they use this label, as many if not most of them are great places for hanging out simply because of the atmosphere, whether truly authentic or not. One good example of this is a watering hole in North Cambridge called Joe Sent Me, which resides in a charming old space and has the feel of a Prohibition-era bar when in reality, it had once been home to at least one very scary dive. But JSM is anything but scary, and it has the type of old-school atmosphere found at such legendary spots as Doyle’s and J.J. Foley’s. And it also has a decent enough food and drink selection to make all but maybe the pickiest people happy.

Joe Sent Me sits along a mini-restaurant row on Mass Ave a few blocks from the Arlington line, within walking distance of Qingdao Garden, Suvaai, Shega Cafe, Hana Sushi, Greek Corner, Frank’s Steak House, Fiorella’s Express, the Table at Season to Taste, and UpperWest (which is technically on Cedar Street). But oddly enough, this is the only true bar along this stretch of road, which actually used to house several local drinking joints years ago, including the Lion’s Den, the aforementioned scary bar that was once in Joe Sent Me’s space and which was not exactly for the faint of heart.

As mentioned earlier, this isn’t a place to be wary of by any means; instead it’s a simple spot to have a bite to eat and a drink in the dining areas or maybe a round or two at the bar while watching a game or listening to music on the jukebox. The front and rear dining sections (and the short hallway that connects the two) are where the historic-feeling “speakeasy” vibe tend to come through the strongest, with the tin ceiling, exposed brick, dark woods, and various memorabilia, knick-knacks, and pictures—including some great ones of Dean Martin, Mick Jagger, and Paul Newman—adding a ton of character to the space.

One thing that is definitely not a feature of a true speakeasy is the large windows in the front dining room, but these are great for doing some always-interesting people-watching along Mass Ave. When it comes to food, places that go with a speakeasy theme run the gamut from elevated comfort food (like the wonderful Lucky’s Lounge in Boston’s Fort Point) to places with limited food options that instead focus on beverages (the renowned Drink in Fort Point comes to mind) to pub grub and American classics.

Joe Sent Me is firmly entrenched in this last category, offering great but simple takes on burgers, steak tips, fish and chips, macaroni and cheese, fajitas, hand-cut fries, and wings.

For standouts, the burgers and wings are especially impressive here, with the wings challenging some of the best found in the Greater Boston area, though perhaps not quite at the level of the legendary Buff’s Pub in Newton Corner.

Drinks are similarly simple and straightforward at Joe Sent Me, with the beer list including a mix of mass-market options and craft brews from New England and beyond, while basic cocktails and shots are a good bet (but don’t come here looking for specialty drinks like you might find at Lucky’s or Drink because it’s not that kind of place). Prices are very reasonable for nearly everything, though if you start doing shots of certain whiskeys (and they do have some good whiskeys here), the bill can go up pretty quickly.

Let’s face it—Joe Sent Me didn’t exist in the 1920s and people have never had to give a password out front or go through a curtained door or winding staircase to get in. But when you come right down to it, who cares, really, that the speakeasy theme is just that—a theme—because the bottom line is, this is a cozy and comfortable neighborhood spot that has good food, decent drinks, and the type of atmosphere that’s about as far from the generic chains as you can get.

And when you really think about it, what more do you want from a neighborhood bar? For some of us, at least, not a whole lot more than what JSM has to offer. [Ed note: Joe Sent Me can also be found on Main Street in Waltham.]

ALBATROSS +CITRA BRAU BOSTON BETTER BEER BUREAU

These are the perfect sipping beers, got it!

BY CITIZEN STRAIN

I can’t recall the origin of the quote I am about to butcher and rewrite for wokeness, nor can I find any trace of it on Google, but in any event here it goes, dated and untraceable as it may be: Whatever it is that physically attracts heterosexual men to women, Marilyn Monroe appears to possess more of it than any other woman on the planet.

Another version of this, I think, is the phrase coined by US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart in describing his personal barometer for hardcore porn during the 1964 case Jacobellis v. Ohio: “I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.”

All of which is more or less my awfully longwinded way of saying that Albatross! by Medusa Brewing Company in Hudson, Mass, is extra special. I can’t exactly put my finger on it, other than to tell you it’s an ideally clean and sweet IPA, though there is some official info that helps. Specifically, one version that we found packs Galaxy and Motueka hops, as Medusa’s “rotating series of American-style IPAs is hopped exclusively with Southern Hemisphere varieties from Australia and New Zealand.” While another one incorporates Nelson Sauvin, Vic Secret, and Green Bullet hops, and is as delicious as its brother brew if not a smidgen more. It’s truly a race to the top.

In any case, those descriptions are mere words. Try this one for yourself; it’s perfect, with an Oh snap! in each taste. Whatever it is, I know good beer when I taste it, and this is that. Just be careful; despite the velvet nature of this beer, it’s a beast at 6.9% ABV. The only other can that I have been Albatross-level excited about over the past month or so is the latest spring seasonal from Jack’s Abby in Framingham. Available only in New England, the ace brewers there are offering a Citra Brau that’s a “deep golden … color … Pilsner-style lager … bursting with aromatic American Hops.” “By using Citra Hops throughout the entire brewing process,” they pledge, “Citra Brau [gets] a tropical, fruity flavor, and juicy finish.”

They’re not kidding. Do me a favor. Do you a favor. Do us all a favor, and stick your nose right up to your can of Citra Brau after you crack it. Better yet, wait 20 or so seconds. It’s a metaphor made for your nostrils—you can tell there’s something sweet, even special tickling your senses, and unlike with the kinds of heavy in-your-grill IPAs that we tend to love in these pages, there’s nothing even close to bitter or offensive in this craft ringer from Jack’s Abby. The scent parallels the taste, which is all-around spectacular.

If you have an anti-craft dimwit in your life—say, your Trump-supporting uncle who busts endless balls at family functions as he cranks through Silver Bullets—then you’re probably familiar with the argument that certain people like cheap water piss beer because it goes down so easily. Unlike snobby selections, they say, their American lagers and light crap etcetera are just so incredibly sippable.

I’m sure they won’t listen to reason, but Citra Brau puts that kind of ridiculous reasoning in check. It’s light, exquisite, and sophisticated, and at 5.5% ABV you can even sip along with your Budweiser buddies without getting stupidly plastered.

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MASS ROOTS MUSIC

A new book and compilation brilliantly showcase the first decade of reggae in Boston INTERVIEW BY CHRIS FARAONE @FARA1 It’s sadly still quite shocking to a lot of people that the Hub was basically the first place in the US to warm up to reggae. That’s right; in the early ’70s, it was students around Boston who truly embraced Jimmy Cliff’s The Harder They Come, turning midnight shows at the Orson Welles Theatre in Cambridge into a regular jam, while more importantly, it was right here in New England where Jamaican artists, along with a kaleidoscopic range of collaborators, began building a stateside roots scene.

A new compilation and accompanying book tell the Mass reggae story in detail and allows fans of the genre to experience critical tracks all together for the first time. The latest throwback goodie bag from the record collectors at Cultures of Soul, Take Us Home: Boston Roots Reggae from 1979 to 1988, features absolute gems from the iconic likes of the I-Tones, Danny Tucker, and Zion Initation. And thanks to a companion chronicle by historian-journalists Noah Schaffer and Uchenna Ikonne, the cuts are put in vivid context. As Abdul Baki, who played in Zion Initation and the I-Tones, told the biographers: “We weren’t just at clubs—we’d play churches, the Joy of Movement Center, and we’d hold events at the MLK School in Cambridge … The women would come with their hair up. It was a real cultural exchange.”

To learn some more about this remarkable cultural dig, and about Boston in an era when Rolling Stone called the city the “North American hotbed of reggae,” I sat down with Shaffer, a longtime friend and sometimes Dig contributor whose knowledge of our region’s diverse music scene is second only to some of the local legends he works with and writes about.

That’s what makes it most uniquely Boston, that great mix of immigrants and students, which is what our city is.

On Musical Discovery

A lot of times, because I like older music, people will say, Don’t you wish you were alive in the ’60s? And You could have gone to see John Coltrane and Otis Redding?

Yeah, that would have been great, but I doubt that I would have been able to find out about as many things as I find out about now. …

If you kind of figure out who the main movers are in any scene, and follow them on social media or listen to their low-power radio station, which I listen to a lot, then it’s pretty easy to find out about shows. I doubt that if I was around in the ’60s that I could have gone to a killer jazz show, a bluegrass show, and an Ethiopian show all in the same weekend. …

One thing that’s been really great has been the proliferation of low-power radio stations being able to web cast. I used to wake up on Sunday mornings at 7 am, put a cassette tape deck on to tape the traditional gospel radio show, wake up again at 7:30, turn the tape over … Now, that same DJ, Bishop Branch, he’s on Pastor Bruce Wall’s [Boston Praise Radio], and you can just get the whole last week on YouTube. …

It kind of infuriates me when people are like, Gee, how did you end up [at a certain show]? Or think it’s strange that someone would go to this or that. It might cost 30 bucks, but it’s a big name in that world. …

Honestly, living next door to a Haitian restaurant helps a lot [in discovering shows]. I just look at [the signs in] the window. Also, in JP there’s a place called Franklin

CD, and if you want to know what good music is going on, just walk down that block. It’s not that hidden. You’re going to see it.

On Boston Gems

I remember some of these bands from when I was in high school. Some of them lasted into the ’90s. Danny Tucker recently moved back to Jamaica, but for years he remained here with his own band. …

The I-Tones were the biggest band in their day. They were a massive regional band, they were being played on WBCN. They had, like, roadies, and the number one agent in town represented them. … A band like Zion Initation had a heavy following as a classic dub band from the era of roots reggae, and people who are connoisseurs of that had found them, but these were definitely not on Spotify. A few tracks made it to YouTube. …

It blows me away how much these bands were able to play. …

The drinking age was lower, there were fewer home entertainment options, and let’s be honest, there were laxer drunk driving laws. There was a demand for live music we’ll never see again. A band could play a community event on Wednesday night, a college on Thursday night, the Western Front Friday and Saturday night, and a residency on Sunday or Monday. …

On Best Archival Practices

When these projects are really done right, it’s remembered that these aren’t just great records, but also that there are people behind them who made them.

I think there can be a danger in just fetishizing the vinyl because it’s rare, without finding out who made it and what the circumstances were. There have been tons of great reissues that have done just that—found the people, told their story, and best of all given them a few bucks for their efforts. Usually not gobs of money, because they’re often niche efforts and will only sell so many copies, but I think now, without question the best practice is finding the artist and making sure you’re licensing it from them or their heirs if they’re not around anymore.

Any artist from this era has their share of bad stories about the music business, and you don’t want to perpetrate that. …

Jeff Swallom, the owner of the label [Cultures of Soul], produced the project. He loves finding obscure little gems and is big into Caribbean music, reggae included. Over the years he’s found these records, and there’s an address—such and such street in Dorchester, or such and such street in Cambridge. He had amassed his own collection of Boston reggae, and basically decided it was time to put it out in a format like this.

He said, “I have these records, and we have to find these people.”

He handled the licensing, and I got to write about it. The first guy we found was Ram from the [I-Tones], and he had kept in touch with some people, so he put us in touch with someone else, and so on. Some took a little longer, but there wasn’t anyone we weren’t able to find eventually.

>> TAKE US HOME RELEASE PARTY. SUN 3.3. BULL MCCABE’S, 366 SOMERVILLE AVE., SOMERVILLE.. GET A COPY AT CULTURES-OF-SOUL.MYSHOPIFY.COM. 16

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The Boston Sound

The first Boston reggae album comes out in 1979.

It’s Danny Tucker’s Take Us Home, the title track of the album. …

At least half the tracks [on the compilation] were recorded in Jamaica. Bands lived here, but they had links in Jamaica. …

People who did record here sometimes found that studios really got it—there was one called Downtown Recording Studio that was around Newbury Street that a lot of these bands used. That became the reggae-friendly studio. …

What I think makes the bands uniquely Boston is that you have a mixing of the diaspora scene. It’s not purely Jamaican. I think in New York, the scene is very Jamaican. Like Ras Jackson from eZion Initation is from Montserrat. Other guys are from Grenada. So you had on one hand this pan-Caribbean scene, but a lot of them are also studying jazz at Berklee. And there are kids who also dabble on the rock scene.

That’s what makes it most uniquely Boston, that great mix of immigrants and students, which is what our city is.

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PERFORMING ARTS

JOHN CAMERON MITCHELL LOOKS BACK ON WHERE HE’S FROM The Hedwig and the Angry Inch co-creator and original star brings his Origin of Love tour to Boston

BY CHRISTOPHER EHLERS @_CHRISEHLERS I’m sure that you’re asked all the time to sing these songs. How much of that do you field on a regular basis?

Well, you know, not that much. The thing is, I’ll always sing these songs in some form or another. Whether I do the part again, I’m not sure, but in this case I’m telling the stories of how it was made, the people that inspired it, the philosophy behind it, and how it stands up now with things that we’re dealing with. So it’s just fun to be associated with something that has introduced me to my favorite people in the world, and it enabled me to do all the other things that I love. We did it for love; we didn’t do it for career or money, because it was so weird. And it turned out to be something that people took to heart, and I love that people pass it on to their friends or their kids. I love that it keeps living on without us.

So this is less a show about you and more about the creation and the origin of Hedwig?

Yes, but also related to my life, of course, because it was happening while I was living. [laughs] It’s just sort of the stories behind the story.

What songs do you sing that aren’t from Hedwig?

We do an outtake song that was a Tommy song that [composer] Stephen [Trask] started and we didn’t really find a place for, and I also do two songs from my new musical, Anthem, which will be first heard in podcast series form that comes out at the end of April on a new podcast network called Luminary. That kind of started as a Hedwig sequel but Hedwig had too much baggage so the character really became an alternate version of me. It’s a new form, the fictional podcast; friends of mine have been doing it and we kind of wanted to push it. We have 40 actors, six Tony winners, 31 songs—it’s very dense. People like Glenn Close, Patti LuPone, Cynthia Erivo, Laurie Anderson, Marion Cotillard—it’s an amazing cast.

It’s interesting that you say that you’re trying to “push it,” because when I think of the things that you’ve done, that’s a commonality between a lot of your work. Hedwig was ahead of its time, Shortbus was certainly—as you say—pushing it to the limits of what people want to talk about or see on screen. What do you look for when you’re thinking about projects? Is pushing it a consideration for you?

I do like to push the envelope but I like to do it in a way that’s, what you might call, “pop.” I’m very much a fan of the Aristotelian unities of telling a story with beginnings, middles, ends, and jokes: all the things that I’ve learned from Broadway and drag and stand-up and well-made plays. But the content is what interests me to push. This party—which I think of as more of a party than a cabaret act or a show—has some structure to it but anything can happen. In DC I had a whole monologue that I improvised about Melania. We used to be besties and we’re like, “We’re gonna get outta here and help each other. Whoever goes higher helps the person who is lower.” I’m trying to help Melania because clearly she’s fallen very low.

Wouldn’t that be a great prequel to Hedwig.

Yeah. [laughs] “Melania, I know we have to get the biggest piece of the pie, but you’ve got a pie in the face now.”

I think we know where Melania got her hair inspiration from. [laughs] Yes. “Love your hair.” “Thanks, just bought it.”

Was doing a show like this something that’s been on your mind for a while?

It really came from Mom needing money. My mom has Alzheimer’s and she’s very happy, she’s in a great place but it’s very expensive, and I just couldn’t afford it. I thought about this tour for her—it’s really for her—and I’m also acting in a TV series that’s coming out in March called Shrill, which is really good, and so it was like, “I’ve got to get money for Mom.” And then it turned out that the things I was lucky enough to set up were fun as hell. So that’s where it came from, but now that I’ve made it, I just love it.

I can imagine doing this show off and on forever. I just love telling stories.

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So at what point did you discover theater? Was being a performer always a goal for you?

I did really love theater when I discovered it in high school, and it was the time that Fame and All That Jazz came out, so the Godspells and the Bob Fosses were my heroes. My favorite shows, of course, were Cabaret and Oliver!, though I wasn’t a student of musical theater. I still haven’t seen West Side Story and I just saw Fiddler on the Roof for the first time. I was more of a ’70s kind of guy, so I

I was so overjoyed when you finally got your Tony a few years ago. Tell me what that was like.

Oh! Well, you know, it was very gratifying, but … like, somehow when you’re young you see all the things you’re supposed to get … I always knew I was off. Maybe it’s just being openly gay in the ’80s and ’90s but I just knew that I was never going to fit into what I was supposed to. So I lost the desire to. So to me, awards and recognition are always a bit of a lovely surprise. Neil Patrick Harris starring in [Hedwig] on Broadway was great. I didn’t feel the need to and I was thrilled when he won the Tony and we won a Best Revival Tony as writers, but it felt after the fact. When it first came out we were kind of the ugly stepchild of Off-Broadway. Stephen Sondheim, who is very nice (but very direct) was like: “I don’t like it. John, I love you, but I don’t like the show. It’s not my thing. It’s too loud.” No way did I feel bad because it just didn’t fit in to his aesthetic and it didn’t fit in to Broadway or even OffBroadway. It was never a big financial hit, we were never sold out all the time, we just hung on. Hedwig is like a bad cold that just sort of hangs on and never goes away. So when a Tony comes around 20 years later, it’s like, oh, that’s so nice. I think I said: “Thanks for having an old drag queen uptown.” It’s great. But I also don’t belong at the Oscars and the Tonys, personally. I feel like a kind of transfer student who won a popularity award for being the weird transfer student, so I don’t go after those things. I also don’t run after money without a purpose, like the mom thing, so I’ve never made much money. I don’t own things, I never got a JOHN CAMERON MITCHELL. PHOTO BY MATTHEW PLACEK. mortgage. But I’ve been quite free to do things I like by keeping my overhead low.

And that’s just my style.

It’s interesting that you think of yourself as an outsider.

To me, you’re a beloved figure.

I’m a beloved outsider like the lesbian aunt who traipses in once in a while to the family gathering. I’d like to be the special outsider, but I’m also kind of a loner, so I don’t need constant coddling. I traveled the world as a kid and it was sometimes sad because I’d get ripped apart from my friends, but there is a beauty in the freedom, too.

I feel like I could live anywhere and start a new life if I had to. When I was kid I always weirdly thought I’d be able to handle a hostage situation. And I don’t know why I kept thinking about that, I think it was the army thing. My dad grew up in Germany and there was always terrorism in

>> JOHN CAMERON MITCHELL: THE ORIGIN OF LOVE TOUR. SUN 3.2. BOCH CENTER’S SHUBERT THEATRE. BOCHCENTER.ORG 18

the ’70s [against] the American forces so there was always a flux and romantic danger. I felt a little trapped but I was always like, “I know what to do, I’d write a novel in the dust.

If I were in solitary confinement, I’d find a way.”

was more into the Fosse pushing the envelope thing and you can see All That Jazz, that film actually affected the Hedwig film. I loved Ain’t Misbehavin’, and I was a huge soul music fan, blues, and jazz. But I also loved Noël Coward and his queer aesthetic that was very British. My mother is Scottish and was into theater and that absurd wordplay of British humor was instilled in me very early. So all of these things combined with David Bowie, glam rock, Lou Reed, all of those kind of were a thousand points of light that illuminated Hedwig, which was a combination of all those things. She used up everything I knew. A dumpster fire of my life.

THEATER REVIEW PERFORMING ARTS

BY CHRISTOPHER EHLERS @_CHRISEHLERS

ON STAGE NOW: A CHURCH DIVIDED, AND ONE OF THE WORST PLAYS I HAVE EVER SEEN BARE STAGE AT FESTIVAL THEATRE COMPANY (Zero stars)

If I do nothing else this year but spare you from suffering through Michael Walker’s bare stage, then 2019 will have been a very successful year for me.

Undeniably the most miserable, misguided, and self-indulgent play I have ever seen, bare stage follows a young actress who is cast in a high pr0ofile, pre-Broadway production by an A-list writer and director. But there’s one catch: A bunch of them will have to get naked.

Did I mention that bare stage contains nudity? That’s right! This play within a play within a play (I think that’s right) examines nudity on stage by… featuring nudity.

But let me ask you this: Is onstage nudity really a problem? Is this some widespread industry woe that we just don’t hear about? Really, though, it doesn’t matter. The play is written so poorly and directed with such woeful negligence that the questions I pose are completely irrelevant.

Oh, and for what it’s worth, asking an actor to perform in a play like bare stage is far more offensive than simply asking them to show a little skin.

Theatergoer beware.

FROM HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH

JOHN CAMERON MITCHELL

BARE STAGE. THROUGH 3.2 AT THE PLAZA THEATRE, 539 TREMONT ST., BOSTON. BOSTONTHEATRESCENE.COM

THE CHRISTIANS AT APOLLINAIRE THEATRE COMPANY

After having a conversation with God while sitting on the toilet, the pastor of a megachurch—one that he built from the ground up—has a revelation. When he reveals this shocking revelation about hell and salvation to his doting congregation, he invites a hell storm of controversy from the church, his parishioners, and his wife, who sits silent for the first hour of this 90-minute play.

Written by Lucas Hnath, the wunderkind playwright behind A Doll’s House, Part 2 and Red Speedo, The Christians has garnered critical acclaim since its 2014 premiere at Humana. But at Chelsea’s Apollinaire Theatre Company, where the Brooks Reeves-directed production runs until March 9, the reasons for its acclaim remain something of a mystery.

There are fine performances all around, particularly Michael Poignand’s tearyeyed, intense Pastor and Alison Meirowitz McCarthy’s stirring and wrenching turn as Jenny, a devoted congregant who feels betrayed by the pastor that she put so much faith into. Jenny is on welfare with a child yet still donates 20 percent of her income to the church, 10 percent above and beyond what is customary. But Jenny’s generosity here doesn’t achieve Hnath’s desired effect of underscoring the immensity of her faith but rather exposes the church for the predatory institution that it is, preying off of poor believers like Jenny. This, of course, isn’t the point.

But what is the point of The Christians? I just don’t know.

Worse, I just don’t care.

THE CHRISTIANS. THROUGH 3.9 AT APOLLINAIRE THEATRE COMPANY, 189 WINNISIMMET ST., CHELSEA. APOLLINAIRETHEATRE.COM

SATURDAY, MARCH 2 SHUBERT THEATRE

BUY TICKETS AT BOCHCENTER.ORG THE CHRISTIANS. PHOTO BY DANIELLE FAUTEUX JACQUES.

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THE BOYS’ CLUB FILM

Women, film criticism, and the fight for visibility, on screen and off

BY CASEY CAMPBELL

With the post-Academy Awards discussion around what voices are written and represented by whom in Hollywood, here’s another important point to consider: Men outnumber women in film criticism at a rate of 68 percent to 32 percent.

This vast discrepancy, where there are approximately two men for every one woman, has been corroborated not just from the anecdotes of many writers, but also in the “Thumbs Down 2018” report from the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University.

The paper shows that the number of reviews written by women is even lower than the number of women writing reviews. Seventy-one percent of all reviews are written by men, where the remaining 29 percent are written by women. In other words, there’s a problem.

I spoke with three women working in film criticism— Hunter Harris, Monica Castillo, and Erin Trahan—about their stories. Each has braved an industry in which not only journalism, but the niche side of arts journalism seems to be on its last leg. With dwindling audiences and difficult to monetize platforms, it’s a world that’s tough to enter, and Harris, Castillo, and Trahan have found success.

“It’s really, really shocking,” said Hunter Harris, a film writer at Vulture. “I feel like every screening I go to, there are mostly men. And even just looking at the major critics, I mean like critics at major papers and magazines, they’re mostly men.”

Harris has been writing professionally since graduating from Emerson College in 2016 and isn’t shocked by the barriers inherent in film journalism. She still finds them frustrating, especially when reasoning with the current state of the media.

“I feel like the barriers for women in criticism are the same as the barriers in media and journalism, but just on a smaller scale,” she said. “There aren’t a lot of jobs, and it’s hard to find something stable that will pay you to write criticism full-time.”

In other words, the issues facing women in criticism are largely the same as women in journalism; the former is a microcosm of the latter.

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According to “Thumbs Down 2018,” she’s right: “Men outnumber women writers in every type of media outlet considered. Men account for 79 percent of those writing for radio/TV, 70 percent for trade publications such as Variety and The Wrap, 70 percent for general interest magazines and websites, 69 percent for a news website or wire service such as the Associated Press, 68 percent for newspapers, and 68 percent for movie or entertainment publications.”

Monica Castillo received her M.A. in journalism from the University of Southern California, where she was the first winner of the “Film Criticism Fellowship” in USC’s Annenberg School. She has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Village Voice, DigBoston, and NPR, among others.

“I was either a student, or very young reporter or critic, and I could see I was maybe one of two, or one of three women, [and] one of the only women of color. The only person of color in the room sometimes,” Castillo said. “It was really kind of disconcerting. It kind of made me feel like, ‘Did I accidentally fall into this space that I’m not supposed to be in?’”

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the only time she doubted her presence in the theater or among other critics. A writer she described as “older” and whom she looked up to once got in the way of her finding a voice. He said that her feminism was getting in the way of criticism. That she was, somehow, doing it wrong.

Castillo also said that, when she was just getting into the business, she would be mistaken for the publicist at screenings, and that critics would go to her with questions regarding the film.

“No, I’m like you,” she would have to say.

Erin Trahan is a film critic at WBUR, one of Boston’s two NPR stations, and a professor at Emerson College.

With more than 15 years in the field of professional journalism, Trahan has written for the Boston Globe, Women’s Review of Books, the Independent, and New England Film, as well as several nonprofits. While studying at the University of Notre Dame, Trahan found herself in largely “boy-centric” film-studies classes. She

noted a stifling and ever-present sense of masculinity in discussions.

“The conversation, the feel of the place, what they liked, and what would then be discussed. It always came back to them, [to the] young male experience of the world,” Trahan said.

“It felt hard to deviate from it, and it felt strange to be female in those classes.”

At the time, Trahan was also trying to make films, though her passion for that side of the business dwindled to the point where she “worked in production and hated it,” all as her love of watching and writing about film grew more prominent. These days, Trahan’s main focus within film is on female-driven stories, both behind and in front of the camera.

Generally speaking, these women say, it can be hard to find a wider audience, largely due to certain people being siloed or boxed in due to gender or ethnicity.

“I feel like something that happens a lot,” Harris, the Vulture writer said. “As a woman in the industry, but also as a person of color, it’s always like we want to hear a woman talk about Lady Bird, or a black person writing about Moonlight. Which I think is completely fair, and very important. But also, it should be just as important for these voices to be writing about movies about white men and movies about white people.”

Harris expressed a need for more equality in criticism.

She says that she should not be tasked with strictly writing about film with feminine or black themes just because she happens to be a part of that intersectional spectrum. In the same vein, Castillo has faced editors who only contact her to work on particular stories.

“I can get boxed in and not write about general releases because they only think that I have something to say about movies with Latino characters, directors, or talent,” Castillo said.

More recently, Castillo said she has been able to break out of that box. As a freelancer, she pitches original ideas, and ultimately has more say in what she’s assigned.

Similarly, Trahan picks the films she covers.

“Part of the barriers is my own tastes, which have never been mainstream, and have never been celebrity driven,” Trahan said. “I don’t attend press screenings regularly. … The truth is, so much of what I’ve done has been focused on independent filmmaking and filmmakers.”

Interested in this topic? Check out “5 Women Filmmakers” at the Museum of Fine Arts from March 3–20. Includes new films by contemporary women filmmakers including Cristina Gallego, Lynne Ramsay, Debra Granik, Josephine Decker, and Lucrecia Martel. More info at mfa.org/ programs.

VOL 13

Saturday • March 9 2:00 PM - 4:30 PM

Art by Cagen Luse

Grove Hall Branch of the Boston Public Library 41 Geneva Ave • Dorchester 02121

Comics In Color is a safe space where you can come and nerd out about illustrated stories by and about people of color.

THIS MONTH! Featured Guest: Basil El Halagway

Basil will do workshop for all ages with an interest in creating a costume including armor or a headpiece.

Discussion: Collaborative comics making • All-levels comics making activity • Samples of Black Comics • SNACKS! All are welcome but this is an event focused on comics by and about people of color.

COMICSINCOLOR.ORG

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TRUTHOUT SAVAGE LOVE

BY DAN SAVAGE @FAKEDANSAVAGE | MAIL@SAVAGELOVE.NET I’m a gay guy in my late 40s with a straight sister in her early 50s. She’s been married for a bit over two decades to guy who always registered as a “possible” on my average-to-good gaydar. But I put “BIL,” aka my brother-in-law, in the “improbable” bucket because he actively wooed my sister, was clearly in love with her, and fathered four boys with her, all in their late teens now. I’m sure you already saw this plot development coming: It turns out BIL has been far more “probable” than I thought.

He has a boyfriend but is still very much closeted and denies he is gay. My sister has apparently known about this arrangement for four years, but has kept it a secret for the kids’ sake. But she recently filed for divorce and told our parents and me what’s been going on. Their kids have been informed about the divorce, but not about their father’s boyfriend.

BIL needs to gay-man-up and admit the truth to himself and the rest of his family and start the healing process. That’s obvious. Unfortunately, there’s no way I can talk him into it (we’re not close), and my sister is left holding this terrible secret while her bewildered kids watch their parents’ marriage crumble with no clue why. I think the kids deserve the truth, and that neither my sister nor the kids can start to heal until that happens. If BIL won’t do the right thing, my sister is going to have to tell them the truth. What can I do to help her with this? She’s awfully fragile right now and I don’t want to pressure her and I can’t tell the kids without causing a big stink. But dammit, Dan, someone needs to start speaking some truth in that house.

Dishonest Gay Brother-In-Law Secret second families—and a secret boyfriend of four years counts—aren’t secrets that keep. So your nephews are gonna find out about dad’s boyfriend sooner or later, DGBIL, and sooner is definitely better. Because in the absence of the actual reason why their parents are splitting up—in the absence of the truth—they’re likely to come up with alternate explanations that are far worse. And when they inevitably discover the real reason, your nephews’ anger at having been lied to or left in the dark will reopen the wounds.

Backing way the hell up: seeing as BIL actively wooed and “was clearly in love with” your sister, and seeing as he successfully scrambled his DNA together with hers four times and remained married to her for two decades, DGBIL, I don’t think BIL is a closeted gay man. My money’s on closeted bisexual man.

I shall now say something that will delight my bisexual readers: I’m sure you’d like to live in a world where everyone is out, DGBIL, or, even better, a world where no one ever had to be in. But in the world we live in now, bisexuals are far less likely to be out than gays and lesbians, DGBIL, and the belief that a guy is either gay or straight keeps many bisexual guys closeted. Because if a bisexual guy who’s married to a woman knows he’s going to be seen as gay if he tells the truth—if no one will ever believe he loved his wife or wanted all those kids—he’s unlikely to ever come out. So you can’t fault BIL for not being out, DGBIL, when it’s attitudes like yours that keep bi guys closeted in the first place.

I shall now say something that will piss off my bisexual readers: a family-minded bi guy can have almost everything he wants—spouse, house, kids—without ever having to come out so long as that bi guy winds up with an opposite-sex partner.

Coming out is a difficult conversation and it’s one many bi people choose to avoid.

And who can blame them? I wasn’t thrilled by the idea of telling my mom I put dicks in my mouth, but it was a conversation I couldn’t avoid. Faced with the choice between telling my mother the truth and possibly being rejected by her and thereby losing her or cutting her out of my life in order to keep my secret and definitely losing her, I chose to tell her the truth. If I’d been, say, your average hetero-romantic bisexual man instead of a huge homo—if I enjoyed sex with men and women but only fell in love with women—I could’ve avoided coming out to her and very well might have.

Back to your nephews, DGBIL: they should be told the truth but you shouldn’t be the one to tell them. Their parents should. Sit down with your sister and make the argument I did above: Yes, your kids are upset about the divorce and it will add to their upset to learn their father is in a relationship with a man. But they’re going to be angry about being lied to when they inevitably find out. And if she’s keeping this secret solely at BIL’s request, well, he can’t ask that of her if doing so will damage her relationship with her kids. I don’t think she should immediately out BIL, but she can and should let him know that she will have to tell the children if he doesn’t. You should have a conversation with BIL. Open it by telling him that life is long, marriages are complicated, and that you know he loved your sister. But to stick the dismount here—to end his marriage without destroying his relationship with his kids—he can’t hide from them. If he doesn’t want to tell his boys about his boyfriend because he fears he might lose them, DGBIL, then he’ll have to cut his kids out of his life—and that means losing them for sure. And then butt the fuck out.

HELP THE MUSEUM OF BAD ART FIND A NEW HOME VISUAL ARTS

BY DIG STAFF @DIGBOSTON

This just in from Louise Reilly Sacco, permanent acting interim executive director of the Museum of Bad Art: The Museum Of Bad Art (MOBA) is looking for a new home. For over 10 years, we’ve had a gallery in the basement of the Somerville Theatre in Davis Square. The theater now needs that space for other uses.

Since 1994, MOBA has collected, exhibited, and celebrated “art too bad to be ignored” according to curator Michael Frank. Locations have included a residential basement, 2 movie theater basements, a cable TV studio, and an animal hospital. MOBA has also exhibited in Taiwan, Tokyo, Sante Fe, Calgary, and many more US locations.

We hope to, once again, find free space. Executive director Louise Reilly Sacco says “When we find the right spot, we’ll bring foot traffic and attention to a Boston area location.” MOBA needs a gallery that is accessible to the public and close to public transportation. Possibilities include a brewery, building lobby, underused event venue, or (honoring our history) space in a movie theater.

MOBA’s art is often acquired from yard sales, thrift stores, and curbside trash or is donated by friends of MOBA around the world. MOBA’s unique approach to these works is to provide a thoughtful interpretation of each piece.

Readers who know of a possible space can contact: MOBA@MuseumOfBadArt.org.

RUTHERFORD

BY DON KUSS DONKUSS@DIGBOSTON.COM

On the Lovecast, Dan chats with Johann Hari about the depression epidemic: savagelovecast.com.

“told you it wasn’t a seafood buffet” 22

02.28.19 - 03.07.19 |

DIGBOSTON.COM

WHAT'S FOR BREAKFAST

BY PATT KELLEY PATTKELLEY.COM

HEADLINING THIS WEEK! Jared Freid MTV, Comics Come Home Thursday - Saturday OLD OUT

ALL SHOWS S

Jared Freid’s The J-Train Podcast LIVE Special Engagement: Saturday @ 5 PM

COMING SOON Des Bishop

Comedy Central Mar 7-9

Alex Clark

THE WAY WE WEREN’T

BY PAT FALCO ILLFALCO.COM

Special Engagement: Sun, Mar 10

Vicki Barbolak

America’s Got Talent Mar 15 + 16

B. Simone

Special Engagement: Weds, Mar 20 OUR VALUED CUSTOMERS

BY TIM CHAMBERLAIN OURVC.NET

Sam Morril

Comedy Central Presents Mar 21-23 617.72.LAUGH | laughboston.com 425 Summer Street at the Westin Hotel in Boston’s Seaport District NEWS TO US

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®

2019 Friday, March 8 | 6:30pm–11:00pm Saturday, March 9 | 1:00pm–7:00pm