The_Atlantic_-_07_2018

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS 22-year-old woman with a scarred chest and a broken make it all the way to medical transition, then it’s Carey Callahan voice and a 5 o’clock shadow because I couldn’t face probably going to work out well for you.” serves as something the idea of growing up to be a woman,” she said in a of an older sister to video posted in August 2016. “I was not a very emo- Carey said she met people who appeared to be a group of women tionally stable teenager,” she told me when we spoke. grappling with severe trauma and mental illness, who, like her, have Transitioning ofered a “level of control over how I but were ixated on their next transition milestone, detransitioned. was being perceived.” convinced that was the moment when they would get better. “I knew a lot of people committed to that Carey Callahan is a 36-year-old woman living in narrative who didn’t seem to be doing well,” she Ohio who detransitioned after identifying as trans recalled. Carey’s time at the clinic made her real- for four years and spending nine months on male ize that testosterone hadn’t made her feel better in a hormones. She previously blogged under the pseudo- sustained way either. She detransitioned, moved to nym Maria Catt, but “came out” in a YouTube video in Ohio, and is now calling for a more careful approach July 2016. She now serves as something of an older sister to treating gender dysphoria than what many detran- to a network of female, mostly younger detransitioners, sitioners say they experienced themselves. about 70 of whom she has met in person; she told me she has corresponded online with an additional 300. In part, that would mean clinicians adhering to (The detransitioners who have spoken out thus far guidelines like WPATH’s Standards of Care, which are mostly people who were assigned female at birth. are nonbinding. “When I look at what the SOC Traditionally, most new arrivals at youth gender clinics describes, and then I look at my own experience and were assigned male; today, many clinics are reporting my friends’ experiences of pursuing hormones and that new patients are mostly assigned female. There is surgery, there’s hardly any overlap between the direc- no consensus explanation for the change.) tives of the SOC and the reality of care patients get,” Carey told me. “We didn’t discuss all the implications I met Carey in Columbus in March. She told me of medical intervention—psychological, social, physi- that her decision to detransition grew out of her cal, sexual, occupational, inancial, and legal—which experience working at a trans clinic in San Francisco the SOC directs the mental-health professional to in 2014 and 2015. “People had said often to me that discuss. What the SOC describes and the care people when you transition, your gender dysphoria gets get before getting cleared for hormones and surgery worse before it gets better,” she told me. “But I saw are miles apart.” and knew so many people who were cutting them- selves, starving themselves, never leaving their apart- Detransitioners, understandably, elicit suspicion ments. That made me doubt the narrative that if you from the trans community. Imagine being a trans person who endured a bruising ight to prove to your PHOTOGRAPHS BY MATT EICH THE ATLANTIC JULY/AUGUST 2018 99

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS Laura Edwards- psychiatrist and endocrinologist that you are trans, in W HEN IT COMES to helping TGNC young Leeper, a clinician at order to gain access to hormones that greatly improve people gain access to physical inter- your quality of life, that relieve sufering. You might ventions, few American clinicians possess Pacific University view with skepticism—at the very least—a group the bona ides of the psychologist Laura Edwards- and Oregon’s calling for more gatekeeping. Conservative media Leeper. A decade ago, when she was working at Bos- outlets, for their part, often seize on detransition ton Children’s Hospital, she visited the Dutch clinic Transgender Clinic. narratives to push the idea that being trans is some to learn the puberty-blocking protocol pioneered She brought the sort of liberal invention. “How Carey Was Set Free there. She helped bring that protocol back to Boston, From Transgenderism” was the conservative website where she worked with the irst-ever group of Ameri- puberty-blocking LifeSiteNews’ disingenuous take on Carey’s story. can kids to go through that process. transition protocol No one knows how common detransitioning is. Today, Edwards-Leeper oversees a collaboration pioneered by the A frequently cited statistic—that only 2.2 percent between Paciic University and Oregon’s Transgender Dutch to the U.S. of people who physically transition later regret it— Clinic, within the nonproit Legacy Health system. At doesn’t paint a complete picture. It comes from a Paciic, she is training clinical-psychology doctoral stu- study, conducted in Sweden, that examined only dents to conduct “readiness assessments” for young those people who had undergone sex-reassignment people seeking physical-transition services. surgery and legally changed their gender, then applied to change their gender back—a standard In February, I visited one of her classes at Paciic, that, Carey pointed out, would have excluded her just outside Portland. For an hour, she let me pepper and most of the detransitioners she knows. her students with questions about their experiences as clinicians-in-training in what is essentially a brand- It stands to reason that as any medical procedure new ield. When the subject of detransitioners came becomes more readily available, a higher number of up, Edwards-Leeper chimed in. “I’ve been predict- people will regret having it. Why focus on detran- ing this for, I don’t know, the last ive or more years,” sitioners, when no one even knows whether their she said. “I anticipate there being more and more experiences are all that common? One answer is that and more, because there are so many youth who are clinicians who have logged thousands of hours work- now getting services with very limited mental-health ing with transgender and gender-nonconforming assessment and sometimes no mental-health assess- young people are raising the same concerns. ment. It’s inevitable, I think.” 100 JULY/AUGUST 2018 THE ATLANTIC

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS Edwards-Leeper believes that comprehensive supporting these trans youth to get the services they assessments are crucial to achieving good outcomes for TGNC young people, especially those seeking need,” Edwards-Leeper recalled. “People thought this physical interventions, in part because some kids who think they are trans at one point in time will not was just crazy, and thought the four-hour evaluations feel that way later on. This is a controversial subject in some corners of the trans community. A small I was doing were, too—how could that possibly be group of studies has been interpreted as showing that the majority of children who experience gender enough to decide whether to go forward with the medi- dysphoria eventually stop experiencing it and come to identify as cisgender adults. (In these studies, chil- cal intervention? That was 2007, and now the ques- dren who sufer intense dysphoria over an extended period of time, especially into adolescence, are more tions I get are ‘Why do you make people go through likely to identify as trans in the long run.) any kind of evaluation?’ And ‘Why does mental health This so-called desistance research has been attacked on various methodological grounds. The need to be involved in this?’ And ‘We should just listen most-credible critiques center on the claim that some kids who were merely gender nonconforming—that is, to what the kids say and listen to what the adolescents they preferred stereotypically cross-sex activities or styles of dress—but not dysphoric may have been say and basically just treat them like adults.’ ” counted as desisters because the studies relied on out- dated diagnostic criteria, artiicially pushing the per- The six trainees on Edwards-Leeper’s Trans- centage upward. (The terms detransition and desist are used in diferent ways by diferent people. In this gender Youth Assessment Team spoke about the article, I am drawing this distinction: Detransitioners are people who undergo social or physical transitions myriad ways mental-health issues and social and and later reverse them; desisters are people who stop experiencing gender dysphoria without having fully cultural inluences can complicate a child’s concep- transitioned socially or physically.) tion of gender. “I would say ‘airming’ isn’t always The desistance rate for accurately diagnosed dysphoric kids is probably lower than some of the doing exactly what the kid says they want in the contested studies suggest; a small number of merely gender-nonconforming kids may indeed have been moment,” one said. Another wrongly swept into even some of the most recent stud- ies, which didn’t use the most up-to-date criteria, from added: “Our role as clinicians the DSM-5. And there remains a paucity of big, rigor- ous studies that might deliver a more reliable igure. isn’t to conirm or disconirm Within a subset of trans advocacy, however, desis- someone’s gender identity— tance isn’t viewed as a phenomenon we’ve yet to fully understand and quantify but rather as a myth to be dis- it’s to help them explore it “I think the pelled. Those who raise the subject of desistance are with a little bit more nuance.” pendulum has often believed to have nefarious motives—the liberal I asked the students whether swung so far outlet ThinkProgress, for example, referred to desis- they had come across the tance research as “the pernicious junk science stalking trans kids,” and a subgenre of articles and blog posts idea that conducting in-depth that now we’re attempts to debunk “the desistance myth.” But the assessments is insulting or maybe not evidence that desistance occurs is overwhelming. The stigmatizing. They all nodded. American Psychological Association, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, “Well, they know what reputa- looking as the Endocrine Society, and WPATH all recognize that tion I have,” Edwards-Leeper critically at the desistance occurs. I didn’t speak with a single clinician said with a laugh. “I told them issues as we who believes otherwise. “I’ve seen it clinically hap- about things almost being pen,” Nate Sharon said. “It’s not a myth.” thrown at me at conferences.” should be,” says Despite this general agreement, Edwards-Leeper Those conference troubles the psychologist worries that treatment practices are trending toward Dianne Berg. an interpretation of airming care that entails nodding signaled to Edwards-Leeper along with children and adolescents who say they want that her field had shifted in physical interventions rather than evaluating whether they are likely to beneit from them. ways she found discomfit- A decade ago, the opposite was true. “I was con- ing. At one conference a few stantly having to justify why we should be ofering puberty-blocking medication, why we should be years ago, she recalled, a co-panelist who was a well- respected clinician in her field said that Edwards- Leeper’s comprehensive assessments required kids to “jump through more iery hoops” and were “retraumatizing.” This prompted a standing ovation from the audience, mostly families of TGNC young people. During another panel discussion, at the same conference with the same clinician, but this time geared toward fellow clinicians, the same thing hap- pened: more claims that assessments were traumatiz- ing, more raucous applause. Edwards-Leeper isn’t alone in worrying that the ield is straying from its own established best prac- tices. “Under the motivation to be supportive and to be airming and to be nonstigmatizing, I think the pendulum has swung so far that now we’re maybe not looking as critically at the issues as we should be,” the National Center for Gender Spectrum Health’s Dianne Berg told me. Erica Anderson, the UCSF clinician, expressed similar concerns: “Some of the stories we’ve heard about detransitioning, I fear, are related to people who hastily embarked on medi- cal interventions and decided that they weren’t for THE ATLANTIC JULY/AUGUST 2018 101

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS Scott Padberg, a them, and didn’t thoroughly vet their decision either C OMPETENT CLINICIANS do occasionally 16-year-old patient by themselves or with professional people who could challenge their clients’ conception of their help them.” gender identity in order to ensure that they of Laura Edwards- are approaching the subject in a suiciently sophis- Leeper who went on Even some of the clinicians who have emphasized ticated manner. They want to make sure that a given cross-sex hormones the need to be deferential to young people acknowl- patient has gender dysphoria, as defined in the edge the complexities at play here. A psychologist DSM-5, and that their current gender identity is a con- and recently had a with decades of experience working with TGNC sistent part of who they are. If a teenager inds that double mastectomy young people, Diane Ehrensaft is perhaps the most his dysphoria lessens signiicantly when he presents frequently quoted youth-gender clinician in the himself in a more feminine way or once his overlap- country. She is tireless in her advocacy for trans kids. ping mental-health problems have been treated, he “It’s the children who are now leading us,” she told may develop a diferent view on the necessity of hor- The Washington Post recently. She sees this as a posi- mones or surgery. tive development: “If you listen to the children, you will discover their gender,” she wrote in one article. This is not to say that talk therapy can cure seri- “It is not for us to tell, but for them to say.” ous gender dysphoria. Edwards-Leeper worked to introduce the Dutch protocol of blockers and hor- But when I spoke with Ehrensaft at her home in mones in the United States precisely because she Oakland, she described many situations involving believes that it alleviates dysphoria in cases where physical interventions in which her work was far there would otherwise be prolonged sufering. But more complicated than simply airming a client’s clinicians like her are also careful, given the upheav- self-diagnosis. “This is what I tell kids all the time, als of adolescence and the luid conception of gen- particularly teenagers,” she said. “Often they’re der identity among young people, not to assume that pushing for fast. I say, ‘Look, I’m old, you’re young. because a young person has gender dysphoria, they I go slow, you go fast. We’re going to have to work should automatically go on hormones. that out.’ ” Sometimes, she said, she suspects that a kid who wants hormones right now is simply recit- Edwards-Leeper is hoping to promote a concept ing something he found on the internet. “It just feels of airming care that takes into account the develop- wooden, is the only thing I can say,” she told me. mental nuances that so often come up in her clinical work. In this efort, she is joined by Scott Leibowitz, a At the end of our interview, Ehrensaft showed me psychiatrist who treats children and adolescents. He a slide from a talk she was preparing about what it is the medical director of behavioral health for the means to be an airming clinician: “REALITY: WE THRIVE program at Nationwide Children’s Hospital, ARE NEITHER RUBBER STAMPERS NOR PUSH- in Columbus. Leibowitz has a long history of work- ERS; WE ARE FACILITATORS.” This isn’t so far of ing with and supporting TGNC youth—he served as from the deinition of the clinician’s role expressed by an expert witness for the Department of Justice in Edwards-Leeper’s students. 102 JULY/AUGUST 2018 THE ATLANTIC

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS 2016, when President Barack Obama’s administration diferent since I felt conscious of the fact that I was Orion Foss worked challenged state-level “bathroom bills” that sought to alive,” he said. For part of his childhood, that was ine with the clinicians prevent trans people from using the public bathroom with everyone around him. He was granted all the at Ohio’s THRIVE associated with their gender identity. Edwards-Leeper freedom he needed to express himself in a gender- clinic on his and Leibowitz met at Boston Children’s, where Leibo- nonconforming manner, from getting short haircuts mental health, his witz did his psychiatry fellowship, and the two have to playing with stereotypically male toys like dino- mother’s concerns, been close friends and collaborators ever since. saurs and Transformers. But the freedom didn’t last. and, eventually, When he was 7, his mom married a “super Christian his transition. While it’s understandable, for historical reasons, guy” who tried to impose femininity on him. “It’s why some people associate comprehensive psycho- really degrading,” Scott said, to be forced to wear a logical assessments with denial of access to care, that dress when you’re a trans boy. (Scott’s mom divorced isn’t how Leibowitz and Edwards-Leeper view their her devout husband two years later, and Nancy approach. Yes, they want to discern whether a patient eventually took custody of Scott.) actually has gender dysphoria. But comprehensive assessments and ongoing mental-health work are Puberty brought bigger problems. Scott started also means of ensuring that transitioning—which developing breasts and got his period. “Everything can be a physically and emotionally taxing process for just sucked, basically,” he said. “I was pretty miserable adolescents even under the best of circumstances— with it.” In 2015, when Scott was 13, Nancy took him goes smoothly. to an assessment appointment with Edwards-Leeper. “She asked me about how I felt when I was younger— Scott Padberg, one of Edwards-Leeper’s patients, was I comfortable with my body? What did I tend to is a good example of how her comprehensive- like or be interested in?,” Scott recalled. He said that assessment process looks for teenagers with a rela- getting on testosterone took what felt like a long time. tively straightforward history of persistent gender (He was on puberty blockers for about a year.) But he dysphoria and an absence of other factors that might said he understood that Edwards-Leeper was making complicate their diagnosis and transition path. I met certain he had considered a range of questions—from Scott and his grandmother and legal guardian, Nancy, how he would feel about possibly not being able to at a wrap place in Welches, Oregon, not far from where have biological kids to whether he was comfortable they live. It was a mild February day, so we sat in one of with certain hormonal efects, such as a deeper voice. the pine booths outside the restaurant. Mount Hood’s Scott told Edwards-Leeper that he was pretty certain massive snowcapped peak loomed nearby. about what he wanted. Scott, a 16-year-old who radiates calm, explained Scott told me that overall, being on testosterone that despite having been assigned female at birth, made him feel better, though also a bit more into he simply never felt like a girl. “I guess I kinda felt THE ATLANTIC JULY/AUGUST 2018 103

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS Scott Leibowitz, “adrenaline-junkie stuff ” than before. (There had which had led to self-harm issues, as well a psychiatrist who been a recent incident involving Scott taking Nancy’s as what may have been an undiagnosed treats children and car for a spin despite not yet having his learner’s per- eating disorder. Orion believed that addi- mit.) When I asked him about top surgery, which he tional weight went straight to his hips adolescents in was hoping to have early in the spring, he got about and chest, accentuating his feminine Columbus, Ohio, is a as animated as I saw him during our lunch. “Oh, it’s features. At one point, he dipped down going to be so freeing,” he said. “I can change in the to 70 pounds. proponent of locker room!” In April I checked in with Nancy, and comprehensive she said in an email that the surgery had gone well: A year or so after he realized he was assessments for “He is SO happy not to have to wear a binder!” trans, he told his mother, an ob-gyn, young people seeking who took him to the THRIVE program at Scott’s assessment process centered mostly on Nationwide, which had recently opened. to transition. the basic readiness questions Edwards-Leeper and (Leibowitz didn’t work there yet.) Orion Leibowitz are convinced should be asked of any met with two clinicians for an eight-hour young person considering hormones. But his was a assessment. He told me he was “defi- relatively clear-cut case: He’d had unwavering gen- nitely intimidated,” but if “you want to der dysphoria since early childhood, a lack of serious do something permanent to your body, mental-health concerns, and a generally supportive you have to be absolutely positive that family. For other gender-dysphoric young people, there’s no other way of doing it.” mental-health problems and family dynamics can complicate the transition process, though they are by At the time, Orion was initially upset no means, on their own, an indication that someone that, because he was underage, THRIVE shouldn’t transition. wouldn’t put him on hormones without the consent of both parents (his father had I met Orion Foss at a vegetarian café in the Den- signed of, but his mother had not). He nison Place neighborhood of Columbus. Orion is an started sobbing when he found out. But expressive 18-year-old with big eyes who is where the THRIVE team made clear that it was Scott Padberg may be in a couple of years. Orion’s going to help him get where he wanted to gender trajectory was a bit different, though. As be. In the meantime, a THRIVE therapist, a teenager, he identiied as a lesbian and became Lourdes Hill, would work with Orion to involved in the local LGBTQ scene. He says that in address his anxiety and depression. 2014, when he was 14 years old and trans narratives Looking back, Orion sees the value of this pro- were starting to show up more frequently on social cess. “If I had been put on hormone therapy when I media, he realized he was trans. He was also sufer- didn’t have my identity settled, and who I was settled, ing from severe depression and anxiety at the time, and my emotions settled, it would have been crazy. ’Cause when I did start hormone therapy, hormones shoot your mood all around, and it’s not exactly safe to just shoot hormones into someone that’s not stable.” He ended up seeing Hill for weekly appoint- ments, talking about not only his gender-identity and mental-health issues, but a host of other subjects as well. “She weeded through every possible issue with me that she could get to,” he said. “I’m glad she made me wait. And I’m glad the structure was there so I couldn’t just throw myself into something that prob- ably would have made me worse of.” Eventually, his mother, who was “very hesitant,” and was refusing to sign the paperwork for him to start hormones, came around. The THRIVE team helped her come to grips with the fact that the child she had always known as her daughter was going to become her son. “Lourdes was the driving force in that,” Orion told me in a follow-up email. “Spent a lot of time with me and my mother in therapy.” When he was inally able to begin the hormone treatments, Orion said, he “immediately felt this weight of my shoulders.” His dosage was gradually increased and then, in May 2017, he got a double mastectomy. Orion’s transition has clearly had a profoundly beneicial efect. It’s changed the way he carries himself in the world. Before, “I would sit like this”—he slouched over—“and hide every pos- sible female thing about me.” Now, he said, he can sit up straight. He feels like himself. 104 JULY/AUGUST 2018 THE ATLANTIC

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS S OME PARENTS STRUGGLE with the chal- access to hormones is the difference between lenges of raising a TGNC child, and they can make gender clinicians’ already compli- suicide and survival. Leibowitz noted that a relation- cated jobs that much more complicated. Many, like Orion Foss’s mother, have trouble accepting the ship with a caring therapist may itself be an impor- idea of their child transitioning. She, at least, came around. In other cases, parents not only refuse to tant prophylactic against suicidal ideation for TGNC help their child receive treatment but physically abuse them or kick them out of the house. (Reliable youth: “Often for the irst time having a medical or numbers for trans young people speciically are hard to come by, but LGBTQ youth are 120 percent more mental-health professional tell them that they are likely than their straight or cisgender counterparts to experience a period of homelessness, according going to take them seriously and really listen to them to a study by Chapin Hall, a research center at the University of Chicago.) and hear their story often helps them feel better than But progressive-minded parents can sometimes they’ve ever felt.” be a problem for their kids as well. Several of the clinicians I spoke with, including Nate Sharon, Laura The conversations parents are having about Edwards-Leeper, and Scott Leibowitz, recounted new patients’ arriving at their clinics, their parents gender-dysphoric children online aren’t always so having already developed detailed plans for them to transition. “I’ve actually had patients with parents nuanced, however. In many of these conversations, pressuring me to recommend their kids start hor- mones,” Sharon said. parents who say they have questions about the pace of In these cases, the child might be capably navi- their child’s transition, or whether gender dysphoria is gating a liminal period of gender exploration; it’s the parents who are having trouble not knowing whether permanent, are told they are playing games with their their kid is a boy or a girl. As Sharon put it: “Every- thing’s going great, but Mom’s like, ‘My transgender child’s life. “Would you rather have a live daughter or kid is going to commit suicide as soon as he starts puberty, and we need to start the hormones now.’ a dead son?” is a common response to such questions. And I’m like, ‘Actually, your kid’s just ine right now. And we want to leave it open to him, for him to decide “This type of narrative takes an already fearful parent that.’ Don’t put that in stone for this kid, you know?” and makes them even more Suicide is the dark undercurrent of many discus- sions among parents of TGNC young people. Sui- afraid, which is hardly the cide and suicidal ideation are tragically common in the transgender community. An analysis conducted type of mind-set one would by the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention and the Williams Institute, published in 2014, found want a parent to be in when that 41 percent of trans respondents had attempted suicide; 4.6 percent of the overall U.S. population making a complex lifelong In some cases, report having attempted suicide at least once. While decision for their adolescent,” a child might the authors note that for methodological reasons Leibowitz said. be capably 41 percent is likely an overestimate, it still points to a scarily high igure, and other research has consistently W HEN PARENTS navigating a shown that trans people have elevated rates of suicidal discuss the reasons liminal period ideation and suicide relative to cisgender people. they question their But the existence of a high suicide rate among children’s desire to transition, of gender trans people—a population facing high instances of whether in online forums or exploration; homelessness, sexual assault, and discrimination— in response to a journalist’s it’s the parents does not imply that it is common for young people questions, many mention to become suicidal if they aren’t granted immediate access to puberty blockers or hormones. Parents and “social contagion.” These who are having clinicians do need to make fraught decisions fairly parents are worried that their trouble not quickly in certain situations. When severely dys- kids are influenced by the knowing whether phoric kids are approaching puberty, for instance, gender-identity exploration blockers can be a crucial tool to buy time, and some- times there’s a genuine rush to gain access to them, they’re seeing online and per- their kid is particularly in light of the waiting lists at many gen- haps at school or in other social a boy or a girl. der clinics. But the clinicians I interviewed said they settings, rather than experi- rarely encounter situations in which immediate encing gender dysphoria. Many trans advocates ind the idea of social contagion silly or even ofensive given the bullying, violence, and other abuse this population faces. They also point out that some parents simply might not want a trans kid— again, parental skepticism or rejection is a painfully common experience for trans young people. Michelle Forcier, a pediatrician who specializes in youth-gender issues in Rhode Island, said the trans adolescents she works with frequently tell her things like No one’s tak- ing me seriously—my parents think this is a phase or a fad. But some anecdotal evidence suggests that social forces can play a role in a young person’s gen- der questioning. “I’ve been seeing this more fre- quently,” Laura Edwards-Leeper wrote in an email. Her young clients talk openly about peer inluence, saying things like Oh, Steve is really trans, but Rachel is just doing it for attention. Scott Padberg did exactly this when we met for lunch: He said there are kids in his school who claim to be trans but who he believes are not. “They all launt it around, like: ‘I’m trans, THE ATLANTIC JULY/AUGUST 2018 105

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS I’m trans, I’m trans,’ ” he said. “They post it on It’s imperative to remember that Delta’s is a kind of story that can happen only in a place where trans social media.” people are accepted—and where parents, even skep- tical ones like Jenny, are open-minded enough to I heard a similar story from a quirky 16-year-old take their kid to a clinician like Edwards-Leeper. In vast swaths of the United States, kids coming out as theater kid who was going by the nickname Delta trans are much more likely to be met with hostility than with enhanced social status or recognition, and when we spoke. She lives outside Portland, Oregon, their parents are more likely to lack the willingness— or the resources—to ind them care. But to deny the with her mother and father. A wave of gender-identity possibility of a connection between social inluences and gender-identity exploration among adolescents experimentation hit her social circle in 2013. Suddenly, would require ignoring a lot of what we know about the developing teenage brain—which is more suscep- it seemed, no one was cisgender anymore. Delta, who tible to peer inluence, more impulsive, and less adept at weighing long-term outcomes and consequences was 13 and homeschooled, soon announced to her than fully developed adult brains—as well as indi- vidual stories like Delta’s. parents that she was genderqueer, then nonbinary, N OT EVERYONE AGREES about the impor- and inally trans. Then she told them she wanted to tance of comprehensive assessments for transgender and gender-nonconforming go on testosterone. Her parents were skeptical, both youth. Within the small community of clinicians who work with TGNC young people, some have a because of the social inluence they saw at work and reputation for being skeptical about the value of assessments. Johanna Olson-Kennedy, a physician because Delta had anxiety and depression, which who specializes in pediatric and adolescent medi- cine at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles and who is they felt could be contributing to her distress. But the medical director of the Center for Transyouth Health and Development, is one of the most sought- when her mother, Jenny, sought out information, she out voices on these issues, and has signiicant dif- ferences with Edwards-Leeper and Leibowitz. In found herself in online parenting groups where she “Mental Health Disparities Among Transgender Youth: Rethinking the Role of Professionals,” a 2016 was told that if she dragged her feet about Delta’s JAMA Pediatrics article, she wrote that “establishing a therapeutic relationship entails honesty and a transition, she was poten- sense of safety that can be compromised if young people believe that what they need and deserve tially endangering her daugh- (potentially blockers, hormones, or surgery) can be denied them according to the information they pro- ter. “Any questioning brought vide to the therapist.” down the hammer on you,” This view is informed by the fact that Olson- Kennedy is not convinced that mental-health assess- One clinician she told me. ments lead to better outcomes. “We don’t actually Delta’s parents took her to have data on whether psychological assessments said her trans lower regret rates,” she told me. She believes that clients talk see Edwards-Leeper. The psy- therapy can be helpful for many TGNC young people, chologist didn’t question her but she opposes mandating mental-health assess- ments for all kids seeking to transition. As she put it openly about about being trans or close the when we talked, “I don’t send someone to a therapist peer influence, door on her eventually start- when I’m going to start them on insulin.” Of course, ing hormones. Rather, she gender dysphoria is listed in the DSM-5; juvenile dia- betes is not. saying things asked Delta a host of detailed like Oh, Steve questions about her life and One recent study co-authored by Olson-Kennedy, is really trans, mental health and family. published in the Journal of Adolescent Health, showed Edwards-Leeper advised her that her clinic is giving cross-sex hormones to kids as young as 12. This presses against the boundaries of but Rachel is to wait until she was a bit older the Endocrine Society’s guidelines, which state that just doing to take steps toward a physical while “there may be compelling reasons to initiate transition—as Delta recalled, sex hormone treatment prior to age 16 years … there it for attention. she said something like “I is minimal published experience treating prior to 13.5 to 14 years of age.” acknowledge that you feel a certain way, but I think we should work on other stuf irst, and then if you still feel this way later on in life, then I will help you with that.” “Other stuff ” mostly meant her problems with anxiety and depression. Edwards-Leeper told Jenny and Delta that while Delta met the clinical threshold for gender dysphoria, a deliberate approach made the most sense in light of her mental-health issues. “At the time I was not happy that she told me that I should go and deal with mental stuf irst,” Delta said, “but I’m glad that she said that, because too many people are so gung ho and just like, ‘You’re trans, just go ahead,’ even if they aren’t—and then they end up making mistakes that they can’t redo.” Delta’s gender dysphoria subsequently dissipated, though it’s unclear why. She started taking antidepressants in December, which seem to be working. I asked Delta whether she thought her mental-health prob- lems and identity questioning were linked. “They deinitely were,” she said. “Because once I actually started working on things, I got better and I didn’t want anything to do with gender labels—I was ine with just being me and not being a speciic thing.” 106 JULY/AUGUST 2018 THE ATLANTIC

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS If you see gender-dysphoric 13- and 14-year-olds not as young people with a condition that may or may not indicate a permanent identity, but as trans kids, full stop, it makes sense to want to grant them access to transition resources as quickly as possible. Olson-Kennedy said that the majority of the patients she sees do need that access. She said she sees a small number of patients who desist or later regret transitioning; those patients, in her opinion, shouldn’t dictate the care of others. She would like to see a radical reshaping of care for TGNC young peo- ple. “The way that the care has been orga- nized is around assuring the certainty and decreasing the discomfort of the profes- sionals (usually cisgender) who deter- mine if the young people are ready or not,” she told me. “And that’s a broken model.” H OW BE ST TO support TGNC relieve immense sufering. We recognize that there Delta, a patient of kids is a whiplash-inducing is no one-size-its-all approach to treating anxiety Laura Edwards-Leeper subject. To understand even or depression, and a strong case can be made that who wanted to just the small set of stories I encoun- the same logic should prevail with gender dysphoria. transition. Edwards- tered in my reporting—stories involving Leeper counseled relatively privileged white kids with car- Perhaps a irst step is to recognize detransitioners her to take things ing, involved families, none of which is and desisters as being on the same “side” as happily slowly and to work necessarily the case for all TGNC young transitioned trans people. Members of each of these on her co-occurring people in the United States—requires groups have experienced gender dysphoria at some mental-health issues. keeping several seemingly conflict- point, and all have a right to compassionate, compre- Her gender dysphoria ing claims in mind. Some teenagers, in hensive care, whether or not that includes hormones eventually lifted. the years ahead, are going to rush into or surgery. “The detransitioner is probably just as physically transitioning and may regret scarred by the system as the transitioner who didn’t it. Other teens will be prevented from have access to transition,” Leibowitz told me. The accessing hormones and will suffer best way to build a system that fails fewer people is great anguish as a result. Along the way, to acknowledge the staggering complexity of gender a heartbreaking number of trans and dysphoria—and to acknowledge just how early we are gender-nonconforming teens will be in the process of understanding it. bullied and ostracized and will even end their own lives. Jesse Singal is a contributing writer at New York magazine. His book about why bad behavioral science Some LGBTQ advocates have called for gender goes viral will be published next year. dysphoria to be removed from the DSM-5, arguing that its inclusion pathologizes being trans. But gen- der dysphoria, as science currently understands it, is a painful condition that requires treatment to be alleviated. Given the diversity of outcomes among kids who experience dysphoria at one time or another, it’s hard to imagine a system without a standardized, comprehensive diagnostic protocol, one designed to maximize good outcomes. Experiencing gender dysphoria isn’t the same as experiencing anxiety or depression or psychological ailments, of course. But in certain ways it is similar: As with other psychiatric conditions, some people experience dysphoria more acutely than others; its severity can wax and wane within an individual based on a variety of factors; it is in many cases inti- mately tied to an individual’s social and familial life. For some people, it will pass; for others, it can be resolved without medical interventions; for still oth- ers, only the most thorough treatment available will THE ATLANTIC JULY/AUGUST 2018 107

SEARCHING РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS FOR JEAN MICHEL ESSAY Was he an artist, an art star, or just a celebrity? By Stephen Metcalf EDO BERTOGLIO, JEAN MICHEL BASQUIAT WEARING AN AMERICAN FOOTBALL HELMET (1981 . PHOTOGRAPH: © EDO BERTOGLIO; COURTESY OF MARIPOL. ARTWORK: © VG BILD-KUNST BONN, THE ESTATE OF JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT; LICENSED BY ARTESTAR, NEW YORK.

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS THE ATLANTIC JULY/AUGUST 2018 109

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS I N MAY 2016, a painting by Jean- I wandered through the crowd talking of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Leo- Michel Basquiat sold for $57.3 mil- to the folks about the art. I had just nardo da Vinci, punk, postpunk, no wave, lion. One year later, another one question. It was about emotional hip-hop, bebop, Lee “Scratch” Perry, Ein- painting of his from 1982, Untitled, responses to the work. I asked, what stein on the Beach, Herman Melville, and sold for $110.5 million, making it did people feel looking at Basquiat’s Jack Kerouac. The convergence of mul- the sixth-most-expensive work of art paintings? No one I talked with tiple lines of inluence is apparent in Bas- ever purchased at auction, and setting a answered the question. They went quiat’s work, and has been called a form of record for an American artist. Basquiat is of on tangents, said what they liked “creolization,” and fair enough. But there’s not the irst painter to have a canvas sell about him, recalled meetings, gener- creole, and then there’s the kitchen sink. If for a price that strikes ordinary people ally talked about the show, but some- all of his creations were lost, and you had as obscene. But when Jeffrey Deitch, a thing seemed to stand in the way, to reconstruct them going only on the prominent curator and dealer, said after preventing them from spontaneously criticism, you would end up with some the sale, “He’s now in the same league as articulating feelings the work evoked. abominable artwork. Francis Bacon and Pablo Picasso,” it was What critics seem to be striving for on hard to pin down the precise meaning of Standing before Jef Koons’s Balloon behalf of Basquiat isn’t understanding the word league. Was Basquiat now con- Dog, you take a selfie. Before Untitled, but respectability, which anyone looking sidered as great an artist as Picasso? Or which its owner is now exhibiting on a at the paintings can immediately see Bas- was he merely as expensive to own? global tour, you … do what, exactly? A com- quiat was uninterested in. These canvases Basquiat became famous in the early mon initial response—that the art is slap- were made by a young man, barely out of 1980s, when the idea that artists were dash, tender, true—feels wrong somehow, his teens, who never lost a teenager’s con- supposed to be commercial innocents as if we haven’t gotten it. Unwilling to play tempt for respectability. Trying to assert fell apart for good, and when the idea the part of the rearguard philistine any- art-historical importance on the paint- UNTITLED (1982 , ACRYLIC AND OIL ON LINEN. © VG BILD-KUNST BONN, THE ESTATE OF JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT; LICENSED BY ARTESTAR, NEW YORK; COURTESY OF THE MUSEUM BOIJMANS VAN BEUNINGEN. PHOTOGRAPH BY of the “art star”—a funnily ings’ behalf, a critic comes up ST U D I O T R O M P, R OT T E R DA M . abbreviated inversion, if you against their obvious lack of think about it, of starving self-importance. Next to their artist—irst came into vogue. louche irreverence, the lan- In 1985, The New York Times guage surrounding them has Magazine ran a cover story felt clumsy and overwrought on Basquiat, titled “New Art, from the beginning. What New Money.” Its tone was little we know for sure about both awed and suspicious, Basquiat can be said simply: with constant references An extraordinary painterly to a hot, possibly gullible, sensitivity expressed itself in market in contemporary art. the person of a young black His work was said to be sell- male, the locus of terror and ing “at a brisk pace—so brisk, misgiving in a racist society. some observers joked, that That, and rich people love to the paint was barely dry,” and collect his work. We have had a Basquiat himself was quoted hard time making these two go as worrying he had become a together easily. But so did he. “gallery mascot.” Whatever For many years, the photos else was true, as the art histo- By 1982, Basquiat’s use of color, surface, and line had grown more con dent. accompanying the Times piece rian Jordana Moore Saggese supplied the public with its has said since, “this was not image of the artist. Basquiat the starving artist the public was accus- more, we stay quiet, stranded in a vaguely is dressed in an Armani suit, barefoot, tomed to seeing.” shameful silence. In front of the painting, dreadlocked, paint-spattered. He looks— In the 30 years since Basquiat died we fear we have seen or felt too little, espe- it’s hard to tell, he stares so blankly into of a drug overdose, in 1988, at the age of cially given the $110.5 million price tag. the camera. With the beneit of hindsight 27, the prices of his work have climbed Basquiat’s works can also elicit the and some good reporting, we now know steadily upward, taking some astonishing opposite response, very much in evidence that Basquiat was being crushed under leaps along the way. Everyone remains in commentary on a recent retrospective money and publicity. At the very same fascinated by him—the life is compelling, mounted at the Barbican, in London, and time, he was being asked to reinvest paint- the person bewitching, the canvases im- then at the Schirn Kunsthalle, in Frank- ing with its foregone aura of authenticity, possible to turn away from—but nobody furt. Anxious to stake a claim for the paint- even saintliness, because he was black. No agrees on why. His work seems to elicit ings’ place in art history, critics load them human being could have survived that, one of two reactions from people. The up with extra signiication. I’ve seen the and he didn’t. The irony of his work’s ever- first, as the writer bell hooks noticed following cited as inluences on, or analo- rising prices is that, far from clarifying his when she attended a 1992 retrospective gies to, Basquiat’s work: action painting, stature, they keep alive the question he of his work at the Whitney Museum, in art brut, surrealist automatism, William repeatedly asked himself: Am I an artist, New York, is avoidance: Burroughs’s cut-ups, the schizoanalysis an art star, or just another celebrity? 110 JULY/AUGUST 2018 THE ATLANTIC

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS Live Life without pain Plantar Fasciitis • Arthritis • Joint Pain • Heel Spurs • Back & Knee Pain PATENTED VERSOSHOCK® SOLE I‘ve had lower back pain for years. Walking in these shoes SHOCK ABSORPTION SYSTEM was life changing for me. I feel like I’m walking on air. – Bill F. Enjoy the benefits of exercise with proven pain relief. 85% 91% 92% 75% Ultimate Comfort Renewed Energy LESS LESS LESS LESS Maximum Protection KNEE BACK ANKLE FOOT Improve Posture PAIN PAIN PAIN PAIN *Results of a double-blind study conducted by Olive View UCLA Medical Center. G-DEFY AVAILABLE $30 OFF MIGHTY WALK $150 YOUR ORDER Men Sizes 7.5-15 M/W/XW Women Sizes 6-11 M/W/XW Promo Code MD7GKJ7 - Gray TB9024MGS - Gray TB9024FGS www.gravitydefyer.com - Red/Gray TB9024MLU - Gray/Salmon TB9024FGP Expires November 30, 2018 Free Exchanges • Free Returns 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed Call 1(800) 429-0039 Gravity Defyer Corp. 10643 Glenoaks Blvd. Pacoima, CA 91331 VersoShock® U.S Patent #US8,555,526 B2. This product has not been evaluated by the FDA. Not intended to treat, cure or prevent any disease. $30 off applies to orders of $100 or more for this limited time offer. 9% CA sales tax applies to orders in California. Shoes must be returned within 30 days in like-new condition for full refund or exchange. Credit card authorization required. See website for complete details.

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS B A S QU I AT ’S MO T H E R , Matilde, a friend, born of an impulse universal a slim volume that accompanied the irst G L E N N ( 1 9 8 4 , AC R Y L I C, O I L ST I C K , A N D P H OTO C O P Y, C O L L AG E O N C A N VA S. was a Brooklynite of Puerto Rican among teenage boys. As 17-year-old “Jean” public exhibition, in 2017, of the surviving © VG BILD-KUNST BONN, THE ESTATE OF JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT; LICENSED BY ARTESTAR, NEW YORK. descent. In some accounts she is a explained to The Village Voice, Samo was materials from that East 12th Street squat. loving and nurturing igure, taking him designed as “a tool for mocking bogus- His terrain included “the walls and loor to the Museum of Modern Art to see ness.” He kvelled at how the SoHo types of the apartment and the building’s hall- Picasso’s Guernica and to the theater to had fallen for it. “They’re doing exactly ways, which were strewn with discarded see West Side Story, giving him a copy what we thought they’d do,” he told the appliances.” Their apartment is described of Gray’s Anatomy. (All of these appear reporter. “We tried to make it sound pro- as a heavenly cocoon, overlooking the as touchstones in his work.) In other found and they think it actually is!” It’s “shooting galleries,” the drug dens of Ave- accounts she is erratic, beating him hard, reading the piece now, not to hear nue B. They went dancing every night. for wearing his underwear backwards, him talking back to the blue blazer: “Art was life and life was art,” Adler wrote. threatening to kill her entire family with a jerk of the steering wheel. Basquiat This city is crawling with uptight, A new documentary, Boom For Real: once said his mother carried “a worry middle-class pseudos trying to look The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel line on her forehead from worrying too like the money they don’t have. Sta- Basquiat, made with the cooperation of much.” He called her a bruja, a “sorcer- tus symbols. It cracks me up. It’s like Adler, expands on a now-familiar story. ess.” She was in and out of mental hospi- they’re walking around with price “One week ago New York City tottered on tals. He told one interviewer: “She went tags stapled to their heads. People the brink of inancial default,” President crazy as a result of a bad marriage.” should live more spiritually, man. But Gerald Ford intones over the opening we can’t stand on the sidewalk all day montage of a busted-up and burning city. His father, Gerard, was a Haitian screaming at people to clean up their During this period, we’re told, a tiny sub- immigrant. He was upwardly mobile, acts, so we write on walls. set of young people, leeing boring lives middle class, and professional, and he elsewhere, gravitated to the lawlessness wanted to instill middle-class values in In 1979, he gained “his first stable and decay and created their own urban his oldest child. His oldest child wanted home,” says Alexis Adler, his roommate village. The streets may have been dan- none of it. Gerard Basquiat reportedly from the time, “the irst place he had a key gerous, but that encouraged a sociable once beat his son so severely that Jean- to.” He was 18; she was 22. In their sixth- and intimate scene. Michel went to school the next day walk- loor walk-up, Basquiat began to make the ing with a cane. (Gerard has denied this.) transition from street tagger to gallery art- The streets were as much Basquiat’s Other times, the story goes, he was so ist. “He wrote and drew on any surface,” home, apparently, as the squat, and badly beaten that he called the police. Adler recalled in Basquiat Before Basquiat, the work he made reflects this fact. He His parents separated permanently when scrawled on detritus fished from the he was 7, and his father later moved him neighborhood, on discarded scraps of and his two younger sisters from East Flatbush to a townhouse in Boerum Basquiat’s early streetscapes gave way to collage-based work featuring the human gure. Hill. Gerard, who always insisted that the Basquiats had been an elite family in Haiti, obtained a night-school degree in accounting and eventually became the comptroller for the Macmillan publish- ing company. In their new neighborhood, Gerard played the happy divorcé, in a blue blazer with brass buttons, driving a Mercedes- Benz. Jean-Michel disappeared into the crawl space beneath the staircase, cover- ing it in his drawings. What art Basquiat made, and how he made it, remained closely bound up in his own unsettled relationship to real estate. He ran away at least twice before leaving home for good at 17. That meant—and here something of a mythical fog descends—living in Wash- ington Square Park and leabag hotels, and rotating through the sofas and beds of vari- ous friends and lovers. He began his life as an artist spray- painting tantalizing koans on the walls in and around SoHo under the pseudonym Samo, short for “same old shit.” His work as Samo was a collaborative project with 112 JULY/AUGUST 2018 THE ATLANTIC

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS canvas or a torn-of apartment door, illus- “A fascinating account of one of our trating them with street action: car acci- country’s great historical mysteries.” dents, ambulances, skylines. These works are very crude—they scarcely even count NATHANIEL PHILBRICK, as juvenilia—but they are also very sweet, bestselling author of Valiant Ambition and Mayflower and contain hints of what was coming. He began crossing out words as a way to draw “Andrew Lawler turns Roanoke into one of attention to them. He was also developing our history’s best stories, recounting not only the Basquiat became famous fascinating, little-known history of the colony itself but in the early 1980s, that of the incredible swirl of historians, archaeologists, when the idea that artists hoaxers, and experts on arcane subjects who have been were supposed to be caught up in the quest to find it.” commercial innocents fell apart for good. —Charles Mann, bestselling author of 1491 “The most enduring riddle of American history, a set of symbols that remained important throughout his career—among them the reveals more about who we are today than copyright symbol. It was meant ironically, given that Samo’s work was very much in the actual fate of the doomed expedition of 1587.” the public domain. Once he started work- —Rinker Buck, author of The Oregon Trail and Flight of Passage ing indoors, the symbols began to take on a diferent irony, at once darker and more “Riveting and carefully researched…. fragile. Is this work mine? Should I use my given name instead of the Samo tag? If so, will Lawler takes us inside one of the oldest and most it make me money? intoxicating mysteries in American history.” As Basquiat moved toward more con- —Candice Millard, bestselling author of Hero of the Empire ventional painting, he transitioned from — Illustrated throughout with maps and photographs — streetscapes to human figures. These are shown frontally, with little or no Available wherever books are sold depth of ield, and nerves and organs are Doubleday Also available in audio and eBook formats www.andrewlawler.com exposed, as in an anatomy textbook. Are these creatures dead and being clinically dissected, one wonders, or alive and in immense pain? A DLER AND BA S QUIAT lived together on East 12th Street from the fall of 1979 to the summer of 1980. That June, he exhibited his work for the irst time: He painted a mural inside the “Times Square Show,” the legendary event held in a former massage parlor of Seventh Avenue. The show featured performance art, graiti, ilm, and a car- nival atmosphere. But it was Basquiat’s contribution that was singled out in Art in America. (“A patch of wall painted by SAMO, the omnipresent graiti sloganeer, was a knockout combination of de Koon- ing and subway paint scribbles.”) The fol- lowing February, Basquiat was included in the “New York/New Wave” show at PS1, the nonproit arts space housed in a defunct elementary school in Long Island

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS SIGN UP FOR City. Of more than 100 artists, he was the crown, appears more often, but what is it, “THE FAMILY WEEKLY” only one to be given a prominent space exactly? An Apollonian laurel wreath, the for paintings. He showed more than 20 ultimate symbol of victory and honor? Or NEWSLETTER works on their own wall in the inal room a crown of thorns, which, along with the of the show. cross, is Christendom’s ultimate symbol See how families of humiliation and mockery? are changing. His paintings, the art dealer Annina Nosei later said, “had a quality you don’t Basquiat worked several canvases at theatlantic.com/family find on the walls of the street, a qual- once, dancing from surface to surface ity of poetry and a universal message of like “Ali in his prime,” according to an MODERN MEMOIRS, INC. the sign. It was a bit immature, but very assistant. He could finish two or three As-told-to memoirs & beautiful.” Nosei’s background in the in a day. Sometimes he would paint in self-publishing services art world was deep—she had worked for pajamas and slippers. At intervals, one of since 1994 the eminent dealer Ileana Sonnabend, Nosei’s assistants would walk him over to 413-253-2353 toured the country with John Cage, met a Citibank to provide him with cash. her husband through Robert Rauschen- They’re here! berg. Her connection to Basquiat’s work P AINTINGS HAVE BEEN tradable was instantaneous and serious. She was commodities since at least the 16th frantic to represent him, but there was a century, and by the middle of the hitch. Other than what he’d exhibited, he 17th century, something like an inter- had no paintings. Visiting Basquiat (dif- national market in art was up and run- ferent apartment, new girlfriend), Nosei ning. It dealt mostly in antiquities and was floored to discover that he had no old masters, and was small and illiquid. inventory to show her. “You don’t have When a trade in modern art irst arose, in anything?” she asked him, as she recalls in the late 19th century, it was deined by an a 2010 documentary called The Radiant absence of heat or velocity. An art dealer Child. And so, in September 1981, Nosei discovered unknown artists, then sup- put him to work producing canvases in ported them through years, even decades, her Prince Street gallery’s basement. of obscurity. “We would have died of hun- ger without [Paul] Durand-Ruel, all we The arrangement understandably Impressionists,” Claude Monet famously makes commentators squirm: a white said of the renowned dealer. taskmistress keeping a black ward in her basement to turn out paintings on com- Modern art was once deemed serious mand. Basquiat himself said, “That has because it derived from an avant-garde, a nasty edge to it, you know? I was never and what the garde was in avant of was locked anywhere. If I was white, they the market. This much is plain if you read would just say ‘artist in residence.’ ” With the memoirs of Durand-Ruel, and of his its large, oblong skylight, the space was successors Ambroise Vollard and Daniel- neither gloomy nor cramped, and it was Henry Kahnweiler, the original dealers continuously restocked with supplies in modern art. All three acknowledge by fawning assistants. Basquiat treated the market, and Durand-Ruel and Vol- the arrangement like a job. Nosei recalls lard make constant reference to prices. him showing up early in the morning Kahnweiler invoked Picasso’s dictum: with croissants from Dean & DeLuca “For paintings to be worth a lot of money, and apologizing if he was late. Once in they must at some point have been sold the basement, he would put on music, cheaply.” Artistic validation was a pro- often Ravel’s Boléro, incurring the bang cess, a struggle that entailed trial and con- of Nosei’s umbrella from the loor above. demnation by the market, then triumphs And then he would paint. in the market, which over time revealed the “true” value of the work in high, and Here his work begins to mature so inally exorbitant, sale prices. quickly, so decisively, one can scarcely process it. At the same time, race The appearance of the art market as enters his work more explicitly. In Irony we now know it has been traced to the of Negro Policeman, Basquiat offers early 1970s, and to one auction in par- his own excruciatingly personal take on ticular. In 1973, Robert Scull, a New York what W. E. B. Du Bois famously called taxi tycoon, sold of 50 works of contem- “double-consciousness.” Elsewhere, porary art. At the auction, Double White black men for him are at once virtuosos Map, an encaustic collage by Jasper and martyrs, Dizzy Gillespie and Sugar Johns, sold for $240,000. For Scull, this Ray Robinson featured prominently represented a 2,250 percent return on his among them. His favored symbol, the money in eight years. As the sociologist 114

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS ITED TIME OFFER The Skeptic’s Guide ORD to American History LIM 70% BER 7 Taught by Professor Mark A. Stoler off THE UNIVERSITY OF VERMONT LECTURE TITLES ER BY SEPTEM 1. Religious Toleration in Colonial America? What Really Happened 2. Neither American nor Revolutionary? in Our Nation’s Past? 3. The Constitution Did Not Create a Democracy 4. Washington—Failures and Real Accomplishments Our knowledge of American history is built on a set of long-accepted 5. Confusions about Jeferson and Hamilton beliefs. But what if those beliefs—however familiar—don’t really tell 6. Andrew Jackson—An Odd Symbol of Democracy the whole story? What we believe to be history is the lens through 7. The Second Great Awakening—Enduring Impacts which we view the world. And when that lens is distorted with 8. Did Slavery Really Cause the Civil War? misleading information, it has powerful effects on everything from 9. The Civil War’s Actual Turning Points how we vote to how we interpret the news. 10. The Myth of Laissez-Faire Now you can reexamine many commonly held myths and half-truths 11. Misconceptions about the Original Populists about U.S. history in The Skeptic’s Guide to American History. 12. Labor in America—A Strange History Delivered in 24 lectures by award-winning Professor Mark A. Stoler of 13. Myths about American Isolation and Empire The University of Vermont, this bold course will make you consider 14. Early Progressives Were Not Liberals what actually happened in the nation’s past—as opposed to what many 15. Woodrow Wilson and the Rating of Presidents believe happened. More than merely debunking accepted accounts, 16. The Roaring Twenties Reconsidered you’ll be able to replace these misconceptions with insightful truths. 17. Hoover and the Great Depression Revisited 18. What Did Roosevelt’s New Deal Really Do? Ofer expires 09/07/18 19. World War II Misconceptions and Myths 20. Was the Cold War Inevitable? THEGRE TCOURSES.COM/4 TL 21. The Real Blunders of the Vietnam War 1-800-832-2412 22. Myths about American Wars 23. Who Matters in American History? 24. History Did Not Begin with Us The Skeptic’s Guide to American History Course no. 8588 | 24 lectures (30 minutes/lecture) SAVE UP TO $195 For over 25 years, The Great Courses has brought the world’s foremost educators to millions who want to go deeper into the subjects that matter most. No exams. No homework. Just a world of knowledge available anytime, anywhere. Download or stream to your laptop or PC, or use our free apps for iPad, iPhone, Android, Kindle Fire, or Roku. Over 600 courses available at www.TheGreatCourses.com.

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS Darwin Panama Olav Velthuis discovered through exten- work for him, supplies, and, waiting at the sive interviewing, dealers and artists end of this pipeline, collectors to buy his A warm weather hat with Australian point to this as the moment when the “art art. Basquiat had arrived, but he, at least, styling, handwoven in Ecuador from market proper [turned] into a commodity didn’t seem sure where. toquilla iber. Braided kangaroo leather or investment market.” band. Reinforced 4½\" crown, 3\" brim. The Crosby Street loft was on the sec- And then, in September 1980, the Jas- ond floor, and visitors would either hit Finished in USA. per Johns painting Three Flags was sold to the buzzer, which Basquiat had labeled the Whitney Museum for $1 million. This TAR in trademark Samo handwriting, or S (6¾-6⅞) M (7-7⅛) L (7¼-7⅜) was a record price for a work by a living call up from the street. Collectors would XL (7½-7⅝) XXL (7¾) artist, though it wasn’t only the money drop in, and if they wondered aloud that made the sale notable. A Connecticut whether a painting might blend in with #1649 Darwin Panama $139 delivered couple, the Tremaines, had acquired Three their decor, Basquiat would chase them Flags in 1959, for $900, from the legendary away, often hurling abuse, or sometimes Shop online or request a catalog art dealer Leo Castelli. Selling it, they had food—cereal, rice, milk—from the win- bypassed him completely; and this, Cas- dow down on their heads. Graffiti kids, #KBE-13-FH telli felt, violated the established courte- groupies, celebrities, and, not least, drug sies of his profession. buddies—people came day and night #1622 #1648 and found a space strewed with art, gar- Castelli had presided over a market that bage, toys, magazines, books. A Haitian ^ was not a free market at all. It was a ield voodoo statue stood in a corner. The bed of action dense with personal meaning— had a polyester Superman comforter and 800-324-4934 davidmorgan.com handshake agreements, favoritism (in the a cocaine mirror on the headboard shelf. form of a waiting list and some genteel Reports from this period converge on two 11812 N Creek Pkwy N, Ste 103•Bothell, WA 98011 price discrimination), and, most crucial, details: The television was always on, and a blacklist of collectors who resold works. the fridge was always illed with gourmet Autobiography of a Yogi Together these customs restricted supply, sundries—chocolates, pastries, Russian protecting collectors from a looded mar- caviar—slowly going bad. “A timeless ket while keeping ultimate jurisdiction classic over a painter’s career in the hands of his Basquiat’s girlfriend at the time, dealer. “It was bucolic,” Castelli said of the Suzanne Mallouk, remembers him cover- in spiritual period. “Money was not so important.” ing the windows with black paper, banish- literature.” ing daytime from the living space and the The sale of Three Flags made the front internal clock from their bodies. They did -DEEPAK CHOPRA page of The New York Times. It heralded, more and more coke, and Basquiat began Velthuis has argued, the arrival of “super- freebasing. Along with drugs, renown, The life story of star prices” in contemporary art. By late hangers-on, and paranoia, money was Paramahansa 1982, thanks in part to the onset of the now a force in his life, and large bills were Yogananda Reagan-era economic boom, a period stufed in books and under the carpet, or of reckless, almost spastic, buying had left to drift where they may. Basquiat SRFbooks.org begun in earnest. Whatever else was true, once binged on expensive electronics, the garde was no longer avant, and prices then sat on the loor surrounded by his Roll-up Panama $110 were rising fast. In 1983, Julian Schnabel’s latest gadgets and cried. Notre Dame was auctioned at Sotheby’s Handwoven straw. Made in Ecuador. for a winning bid of $93,000—a three- In March of 1982, he exhibited work Sizes: S - 2XL. Ideal traveling sun hat. year return on investment of more than he had made in Nosei’s basement—Arroz Colors: dark natural or light natural. 2,500 percent. Relationships between con Pollo, Crowns (Peso Neto), Untitled (Per Check or credit card w/ exp. date. artists and dealers were becoming more Capita)—in the upstairs of her gallery. Add $15 S/H. www.johnhelmer.com nakedly transactional. When the painter This was his irst solo show in the United and sculptor Donald Judd left the presti- States, and his irst solo show as Basquiat. John Helmer • Est. 1921 • (503) 223-4976 gious dealer Paula Cooper for the Pace (He had recently shown as Samo in Italy.) Gallery, Cooper said, “Artists today are It sold out in one night. He was 21 years 969 S.W. Broadway, Dept. T078 • Portland, OR 97205 like baseball stars.” old. He followed up his debut in New York City with a mob-scene opening in Los /,7(5$5<$:$5'6 I N OCTOBER 19 1, Nosei included Angeles, and a solo show at the Galerie Basquiat in a group show. She gave his Bruno Bischoberger, in Switzerland. 6(1')25285)5((%52&+85( six paintings the entire back room of (DWRQ/LWHUDU\\$JHQF\\ her gallery, and after his work sold, she Shortly after his triumph, he was lown 32%R[ was ready to make another proposal. back to Italy, and in an airplane hangar in 6DUDVRWD)/ She ofered, in a stroke, to put the entire the industrial outskirts of Modena, Bas- apparatus of the working artist in place quiat was deposited in front of massive ZZZHDWRQOLWHUDU\\FRP around him. She would give him a loft to 25-by-15-foot canvases, stretched and live in, a studio to paint in, assistants to ready, and was given just days to pro-  duce fresh material for a second Italian 116

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS opening. He was attended by his Italian WhiteWalls® dealer, as well as by Nosei and Bischof- berger. “They set it up for me so I’d have Steel Whiteboard Wall Panels to make eight paintings in a week,” he later told The New York Times Magazine. “I \"You wouldn’t believe how much creativity is sparked when made them in this big warehouse … It was you have the entire room as your writing surface\" like a factory, a sick factory.” Office Manager, Label Manufacturer, Brea CA Two months later, he snuck into WhiteWalls.com 800-624-4154 Nosei’s basement and destroyed 10 of his canvases. Using a box cutter, he slashed LOVE them down to rags, and then, as if to THE make sure that they could never be resur- ATLANTIC? rected as salable art, he doused them with a bucket of white paint. Get more from us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. W HEN I SAW “Basquiat: Boom For Real,” the major retrospective of , H ‘ @TheAtlantic his work that recently closed in Frankfurt, the exhibit was not only well, but reverentially, attended. View- ers paused over items as if they were holy relics. (Someone knew to save this, I thought over and over.) The presentation lowed gracefully from Samo to the East 12th Street material through to the danse macabre of his last major works. Mostly glossed over in the catalog commentary and exhibit photographs was the fact He slashed his canvases down to rags, and then, as if to make sure they could never be resurrected as salable art, he doused them with a bucket of white paint. that, after he became famous, Basquiat went, in quick and ghastly succession, from sweet East Village magpie to café- society boor to dead. The artist who pre- sided at the show instead is the pre-boom Basquiat, the marvel of a crumbling yet vibrantly creative New York City. What is he being made innocent of here if not the market, the 1980s art market in particu- lar? Yet to make him innocent of the mar- ket is to cleave him in two, and discard the struggle that deined him as an artist. By early 1982, Basquiat had plainly entered a new phase. He started replacing the incidental crud of his surfaces—torn bits of paper aixed with glue, sneaker prints—with something more calcu- lated, deploying techniques of collaging THE ATLANTIC JULY/AUGUST 2018 117

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS reminiscent of Rauschenberg’s. His use To insist that Basquiat was a virtuoso martyrdom of the black virtuoso the sub- of color, surface, and line to achieve is to turn away from the paintings all over ject of his work. To be the irst black artist expressionistic affect showed a new- again, to miss their ultimate dare. The who was not a black artist, while never found conidence. At the same time, he search for authenticity of form and feel- not being a black artist: This is to make was suddenly making paintings for the ing that led white artists toward naive of yourself a holy singularity. market, and making a lot of them quickly (even childish) techniques and human and under pressure. primitives—what does that quest mean T H E N E W O W N E R of Untitled, when a black artist pursues it? It’s a good Yusaku Maezawa, has indicated The result was a heroic mastery question, a biting one, and we’ve become that the proper fate of the paint- combined with the randomness of trash accustomed to asking it of Basquiat while ing is not to be hoarded, but to be seen. buoyed in the wind. Basquiat became leaving the follow-up hanging in the air: I went to see the single-painting show frenetic in his inclusion of materials he What does it mean when a black artist “One Basquiat” in March, at the irst stop found ready to hand, illing his canvases vaults altogether beyond technique, or on its global tour, the Brooklyn Museum. with yet more symbols: renditions of dol- formal training, or deep study? On his The viewing room was chapel-like. At lar signs, coins, Federal Reserve notes, canvases, Basquiat turned to the black ath- the near end, a glass case held Basquiat’s Japanese yen, Afro-Cuban ideograms, letes and musicians he venerated, to Hank junior museum membership card. On logos, cars, airplanes, feathers, feet, Aaron and Charlie Parker. They were the the far wall hung the most expensive (for skulls. To do this, he grabbed at anything now) artwork by an American. that might serve as raw material—from What does it mean when Henry Dreyfuss’s Symbol Sourcebook: a black artist vaults Viewers feel stared at by Basquiat’s An Authoritative Guide to International altogether beyond paintings, one commentator has said, and Graphic Symbols to the 1980 catalog of technique, or formal I agree. But in their presence, I also have the Met’s permanent collection. By 1984, training, or deep study? the feeling of happening upon something his collaging technique had become more I was never supposed to see. Basquiat’s sophisticated. He’d sometimes layer the consummate virtuosos, yet Aaron was art was made under conditions that, one canvas densely with color photocopies, viliied when he displaced Babe Ruth, the has to believe, are anomalous in the his- which he would then paint over. He even greatest of white American athletes, as tory of art, and yet we would apply to it the began using Andy Warhol’s trick of silk- the home-run king in the sport that is a traditional standards and vocabularies of screening to repeat images both within stand-in for national innocence. Parker, art history. On the one hand, Basquiat and between canvases. as one of the pioneers of postwar bebop, was a heroic master like Picasso, even took “Negro genius” to abstruse places it though he was rushed to market before Warhol reported in his diaries that was never supposed to go. he could fully develop his mastery. On when Bischoberger irst saw these works the other hand, we need him to be one of he gave them a “sour look.” The approach What does it mean to have depicted the ultimate authentics, à la Vincent van had “ruined [Basquiat’s] ‘intuitive primi- them in paintings that are easily mis- Gogh, even though he interacted directly tivism.’ ” There is a kernel of truth even to read as lazy, among the most loaded of and on a continuous basis with the mar- this casual racism. Inevitably, words like racist terms? Black American genius has ket. To this day, he is asked to restore the primitive, unschooled, undisciplined are per- long been forced into music and sports, symbolic capital of the starving artist to a ilous, given how carefully vetted Basquiat where it has been asked to further vindi- system that otherwise does everything in criticism is for ofensiveness. Yet if you are cate itself by displaying a total virtuosity, its power to destroy it. And so he remains, afraid, you will never understand who he only to be martyred when that genius to this day, a perpetually uncertain thing. was or what he was getting at. The curators breaks out of the mold that respectability and critics of “Basquiat: Boom For Real” and conformity has made for it. Basquiat Untitled, an agonized skull from the tried running in the opposite direction, refused to play that game. First, he Crosby Street period, was irst purchased describing him as a maestro in all things, rejected the role of ingratiating virtuoso, in 1984 for $19,000. At its recent sale price, with one contributor to the catalog go- placing himself instead within the lin- it had increased in value by 581,479 per- ing so far as to call him an “extraordinary eage of the (white) modernist genius, cent. One shakes one’s head in disbelief painter and draughtsman.” But Basquiat of “Twombly, Rauschenberg, Warhol, and thinks: Whatever the market will bear. wasn’t even a good draughtsman, and he Johns,” as he said. Then he made the At the same time, one bows one’s head in cheerfully admitted it. It is useless to pre- awe and thinks: Worth every penny. tend otherwise: Unlike Jean Dubufet, he made unschooled images because he was Stephen Metcalf, the host of Slate’s unschooled. Unlike Picasso’s, his igures Culture Gabfest podcast, is at work on a were crude because he could barely draw. book about the 1980s. The Atlantic (ISSN 1072-7825), recognized as the same publication under The Atlantic Monthly or Atlantic Monthly (The), is published monthly except for combined issues in January/ February and July/August by The Atlantic Monthly Group, 600 New Hampshire Ave. NW, Washington, DC 20037 (202-266-6000). Periodicals postage paid at Washington, D.C., Toronto, Ont., and additional mailing oices. Postmaster: send all UAA to CFS (see DMM 707.4.12.5); NONPOSTAL AND MILITARY FACILITIES: send address corrections to Atlantic Address Change, P.O. Box 37564, Boone, IA 50037-0564. Printed in U.S.A. Subscription queries: Atlantic Customer Care, P.O. Box 37564, Boone, IA 50037-0564 (or call 800-234-2411). Privacy: we make portions of our customer list available to carefully screened companies that ofer products and services we believe you may enjoy. If you do not want to receive this information, please write to the Customer Care address above. Advertising (646-539-6700) and Circulation (202-266-7100): 600 New Hampshire Ave. NW, Washington, DC 20037. Subscriptions: one year $39.95 in the U.S. and poss., add $8.00 in Canada, includes GST (123209926); add $15.00 elsewhere. Canada Post Publications Mail Agreement 41385014. Canada return address: The Atlantic, P.O. Box 1051, Fort Erie, ON L2A 6C7. Back issues: send $7.50 per copy to The Atlantic, Back Issues, 1900 Industrial Park Dr., Federalsburg, MD 21632 (or call 410-754-8219). Vol. 322, No. 1, July/August 2018. Copyright © 2018, by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved. 118 JULY/AUGUST 2018 THE ATLANTIC

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS special advertising section EMPORIUM I AM IN MY summer fun loving


  89TH YEAR Bring the casual comfort of a hideaway
 
  845-754-8696 resort to any space with the Jaxx Outdoor Bean Bag Collection. Sophisticated and    modern, our outdoor loungers are elegantly 
 draped with premium Sunbrella® solution- dyed fabric which makes each piece


    impervious to the elements. jaxxbeanbags.com +    want ergonomic comfort? Because of a book I read at Brigger Seats, made to fit your body, is our he Choate School about answer. Chairs, rockers, recliners, and sofas he Fathers of Modern come in standard and custom sizes. Many Chemistry: “Rapidly heating and have become favorite companions for read- cooling water stops disease!”… ing, watching, and relaxing. We have helped ultimately saving my life! many customers with back problems or How about your food and the health and age-related sitting issues. Call to “Fathers of Modern Chemistry” that find out what we can do for your comfort. changed water properties to lush disease (FTC chart returned to us kleindesign.com on facing page) and pollutants out of 800.451.7247 the blood stream unlike the “purest water” from home lters or distillers athena heromonestm that CAN’T make pure water because ordinary distillers (like a Unscented
    covered pot) produce high steam cosmetic fragrance additives pressure/ velocity that carry over for men and women

 some 80,000 chemicals including very light plastic phthalates! ATM    13 PATENTS 332 FDA TESTS Biologist’s formula scientifically proven to 


  increase a ection. Dr. Winnifred Cutler LEARN MORE AT co-discovered human pheromones in 1986.  JohnEllis.com “I have a scientific background. Your 10X  ! \"#$ %& '(  does have a noticeable e ect! That’s the )* +, gentlemanly way to say it!” —Doug, WA -*#\".)* 4-6 month supply from $98.50. Cosmetics. /0 Athena Institute, Chester Springs, PA 19425 athenainstitute.com 610.827.2200 To advertise contact Susan Boucher at 860-542-5180 or [email protected]