The Astonishing Actual History Of The Gay Rights Movement

AIDS project

[Re-posted from earlier today]

I don’t care for the “right side of history” argument with respect to gay rights for a few reasons. It’s horribly condescending to people who have a sincere view against gay equality; it presupposes some sort of inevitability where there isn’t any; and it fails to understand the nature of history. History is never as dull as the concept of “progress” would have you believe. It is always, as Oscar Wilde once put it, crowded with incident.

In no case is this truer than for gay America. Our story, if presented as a Hollywood screenplay, would be dismissed as too outlandish, too melodramatic and implausible, to be taken seriously. And yet it happened, and remains with us – so close it is hard to see it, and with several sharp twists and turns.

ONE-1963.06From the extraordinary repression of the 1950s – the McCarthyite era when all gay people were threats to the republic – to the liberation of the 1960s and the frenzied libertinism of the 1970s, you had one powerful narrative. After centuries – no, millennia – of brutal sanctions against the love of one man for another, an unprecedented, ebullient flowering took place. In small enclaves, an openly gay culture began to thrive and express itself with all the understandable abandon of the suddenly free. It was still very much a subcurrent, among so many other social shifts in that era, and was surrounded by hostility and discrimination and stigma. But the sense of outsiderdom partly intensified the joy and the solidarity. The gay ghettoes of the 1970s and early 1980s did not much care about the world beyond them for a while. Freedom – even in one, small place – was exhilarating enough.

And then the plague. It is, quite simply, impossible to conceive of a more dramatic reversal. If gay men had finally struggled free from the internalized notion that they were sick, or enemies of God, or all but asking for divine retribution for their sins, that paradigm closed in with terrible, ironic ferocity. What else could explain a plague of that brutality and specificity but the wages of Satanic perversion? Jerry Falwell could not have dreamed of a more perfect scenario. Pat Buchanan, with his usual flair, intoned that the gays had declared war on nature and nature had therefore declared war on them. And in some dark way, many of us were tempted to believe it.

It would be absolutely understandable if gay men had simply collapsed under the weight of this paradigm. Some quietly did, their deaths hastened by shame and self-loathing and anger. “Tell my mother I hate her,” was one of my dying friend’s last wishes, as he languished alone in his hospital bed. My closest friend at the time both showed extraordinary courage in the face of his physical disintegration and yet also 400px-Aids_Quiltpainted on his naked back the words “Diseased Faggot.” The horror of the disease was compounded a million times by stigma. But the plague was also simply terrifying and terrorizing. No one knew what medieval bacteria would suddenly destroy his brain or liver or digestive system. No one knew who would be next.

I remember the intensified Provincetown summers of the early 1990s, where I had come to learn how to die. Each year, the band of infected brothers would come together and talk medications, buyers’ clubs, and drug trials, and care for the sick and mourn the dying and go to countless memorial services for the steadily mounting dead. (I suspect I will never go to as many memorial services in my seventies, if I last that long, as I did in my early thirties.) Some of us were intermittently crippled by the huge doses of experimental drugs we were then taking to keep the terror at bay. But we got past the nausea and the night sweats and the diarrhea to try and live before we died. We had a ramshackle night club in an abandoned house on Shank Painter Road, which we called the “Love Shack.” And every time you danced there with someone, you lost yourself in the eternal present, acutely aware that they might not come back next year, or you might not. It gave everything an intensity, a vividness, and an astonishingly fearful mindfulness.

Yes, medical progress was there, if tantalizingly distant for more than a decade. But in a perverse twist, as the medical gains fitfully continued, the deaths mounted. The worst year for deaths from AIDS was 1995 in a plague that had begun fifteen years before. And then, just as it seemed it couldn’t get worse, came the bewildering news of the breakthrough in treatments, the joy of those suddenly become Lazarus, and the deeper grief we had put off until the emergency was over. I sank into a deep depression that I subsequently came to understand as survivor guilt. Others – given a new lease on life but utterly bewildered about what to do with it – turned to drugs and sex and oblivion. Someone once observed that the members of ACT-UP after 1996 had three fates: they were either dead, crystal meth addicts or professional AIDS activists. What we had experienced during our most formative years simply made living hard, terribly hard, in the wake of survival.

Walter Armstrong has a wonderfully perceptive piece about this phenomenon that I recommend highly. The sexual oblivion of meth had its greatest appeal and took its greatest toll on the survivors:

Crystal methamphetamine took hold in urban gay communities in the late 1990s, soon after the first effective HIV drugs converted many death sentences and restored our generation to so-called normal life. Caring for the sick, burying friends and lovers, mourning the loss of entire sexual and social networks, and protesting in the streets had consumed much of our youth. Investment in the future, career building, saving money and all the other rigmarole of a middle-class US life had been jettisoned. The end of the crisis also meant an end to the intense sense of purpose and solidarity. Normal life could not compete.

As with other populations struggling with PTSD, a minority was collectively committing suicide, after surviving a war.

All of this was understandable, even predictable, given the powerful pressures crashing in on gay life. What was entirely not predictable is that the survivors also did something astonishing. Using the institutions and self-knowledge and smarts that had somehow defeated the plague, gay men charted a future when nothing like this would happen again, when gay men would never be parted from their spouses on their death beds, when gay men’s physical and psychological health would never be treated as insignificant, when gay men would never suffer the indignity that so many endured in front of our eyes. And so we built the case for marriage equality and for open military service as a recognition of the self-worth our survival had given some of us, and to pay some kind of tribute to those who had fallen.

We went, in other words, from about the deepest hole you can imagine to a determination not just to get out of it, but to see the mountaintop in our lifetimes. I do not know exactly where this act of will came from. It was not inevitable. It was, in fact, highly improbable. A few generations of licking of wounds would have been understandable. So would a collective in-turning in grief and pain and memory. But it didn’t happen. And today, we look out at that mountaintop … and may be forgiven for feeling vertigo.

Within the next few years, it is perfectly possible to conceive of an America in which marriage equality exists in every state and in which HIV is on a fast track to disappearance. If I had told my best friend before he died that this would happen in twenty years, his eyes would have widened into saucers. And we talk so much about how this has changed America, that we don’t often examine how it has impacted gay men themselves – how it is possible psychologically and emotionally to have come from such depths to such heights in so short a period of time, and stay sane and balanced and happy.

The younger gay generations know nothing of it, of course.

Because gay kids do not have gay parents, by and large, they have not been told stories of the dark days of courage and cowardice, and of unspeakable devastation and trauma. The average gay 22 votingyear-old today simply assumes that marriage is his civil right, and has only passing interest in how it came about. As for the AIDS years, he is about as informed as the average straight guy. And this is not a bad thing as such. The whole goal of all this ordeal was to create a world with only the trace of a robust equality, and not of lingering and persistent pain.

And yet the trauma of plague still reverberates in our heads – and that includes the young as well as the old. Sex for most of us has always been synonymous with fear – and that fear has had remarkable resilience over the decades, even as the reasons for it have waned. In another new must-read, Tim Murphy shows how this overhang is still with us, even for those who never went through the trauma of the worst years:

Over coffee and pie at the Blue Stove in Williamsburg not long ago, Adam, 33, a writer and filmmaker I know, mentions that he is exactly the same age as the pandemic. “The terror was at its height when I was coming of age, postpuberty,” he says. “The message from TV shows that was drummed into us as gay boys was that we could get this disease and die and make our parents very sad. I developed this intense fear when I was having sex with someone and not even doing anything risky. I’d still freak out the next day.”

And, of course this did not just make all sex fraught with anxiety on both sides, it also divided us into two camps, the positive and the negative. For a while, I vowed never to date someone negative, and sought sex partners online via HIV-positive sites. And within the HIV world, I often left condoms behind, as impediments to the full sexual intimacy I craved and to the HIV solidarity rubber-free sex generated. And then I was famously dragged out in public and shamed for this by HIV-negative activists who opposed my politics. It was a sign that the negative-positive divide was still deep and US-JUSTICE-GAY-MILITARYoccasionally vicious. It still is. On the hook-up and dating apps, you see the following phrases all the time: “Drug/Disease-Free For Same”; “Clean”; “Negative for Same”. Since no one has tangible instant proof of being HIV-negative, it’s not particularly effective in HIV prevention. But it instills the divide that has stalked gay men during the plague and after.

But that too is now collapsing. The revolution of the last couple of years is a Rubicon. We now know that any HIV-positive man on meds is no more infectious than someone who is HIV-negative. We also know that an HIV-negative man who is on Truvada cannot get infected. This means that there is no more HIV divide in the gay world – or rather that its empirical basis has just been completely erased. Which means, quite simply, that gay men for the first time since 1981 can live without fear of HIV if they so wish.

And this of course is just one more bewilderment. As we adjust to marriage equality and all that comes with it, we are suddenly offered the chance for an infinitely less anxious and less dangerous sex life as well. Men whose entire sexual identities have been wrapped, literally, in rubber, now have to navigate an entirely new world. Of course there is resistance:

Another HIV longtimer—a Chelsea store manager named Steve, 58, diagnosed in 1996—tells me frankly that, though he supports Truvada usage in theory, it mostly just pisses him off on a visceral level.

“I was at the Eagle a couple months ago,” he says, referring to the West Chelsea leather bar, “and this hot little muscly Latin guy told me that he was on PrEP and that I could fuck him raw. Boom, he just said it so easily.” Steve has lost many people he loved to AIDS. He finds even the effervescent celebrations of Gay Pride tough to witness. “I want people to understand why they’re able to take this right now,” he says. “It’s on the backs of people who have died and suffered. All that needs to be learned and honored.”

It does indeed. But I have no doubt that the beleaguered gay men of the early 1990s would be amazed and thrilled that we have come this far. They did not die hoping that their legacy would be sustaining fear in future generations for ever.

But bewilderment is not out of place. I think of the year I arrived here, and had to sign a box in my immigration form denying that I was a “communist”, “criminal” or a “homosexual”. In that year, 1984, the AIDS epidemic was just beginning to stalk the land, culling, by the time it US-JUSTICE-GAY-MARRIAGEwas finally stymied, five times as many young men as died in the Vietnam War in roughly the same amount of time. I remember the exhilaration of coming out in the 1980s and the terror of watching men my own age die horrible, humiliating deaths in front of me. I remember finding out that I was HIV-positive and immediately knowing that, for that reason, I could be deported instantly, and living in America in that limbo for twenty more years, with no guarantee of success. I remember the deaths of my friends and lovers; and the shift in 1996 as long-term survival seemed possible for the first time. And I remember the countless speeches I would give to gay audiences about marriage equality, and the glassy-eyed, incredulous stares that came back at me. I remember my military friends, in constant fear and trepidation, fired at will, struggling to square their often conservative dispositions with a sexual identity that labeled them “queer.”

I remember … and I forget. I forget because in many ways, forgetting is the only way I can actually live with some measure of freedom from a past that will never let go of me and a future that still blinds with the abundance and clarity of its light. I am not alone. We are on this mountaintop together, even as so many dead lie round.

(Photos: The cover of One Magazine, June 1963; Dr. Richard DiGioia goes to George Washington Hospital to check on his patient, Tom Kane, on September 25, 1992. Kane is deaf. Dr. DiGioia hugs Kane before leaving. By James A. Parcell/The Washington Post via Getty Images; Thousands of people gather to view the AIDS Memorial Quilt on display on the Washington Monument grounds 10 October, 1992 in Washington, DC. By Renaud Giroux/AFP/Getty Images;  A couple participates in a symbolic group commitment ceremony for same-sex couples to kick off National Gay Pride Month at The Abbey bar and restaurant on June 4, 2008 in West Hollywood, California. By David McNew/Getty Images; Seth Keel, center, is consolded by his boyfriend Ian Chambers, left, and his mother Jill Hinton, during a concession speech during an Amendment One opposition party on Tuesday, May 8, 2012, at The Stockroom in downtown Raleigh, North Carolina. Amendment One, which would ban gay marriage in the state, was well ahead at the polls. By Travis Long/Raleigh News & Observer/MCT via Getty Images; Former US Army Lt. Dan Choi (L), a gay rights activist and opponent of “Don’t ask Don’t Tell”, arrives at the E. Barrett Prettyman Federal Courthouse March 28, 2013 in Washington, DC. By Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images; Michael Knaapen and his husband John Becker react outside the US Supreme Court in Washington DC on June 26, 2013. By Mladen Antonov/AFP/Getty Images.)

Vocal Cords With Character

Emily Mullin describes how developing a voice disorder altered her sense of self:

A few months after the onset of my strange symptoms, I was diagnosed with spasmodic dysphonia, a rare neurological disorder that causes muscle spasms in the vocal cords and affects one to four people in 100,000, according to the National Institutes of Health. The result is choppy, unstable speech quality. I was told there was no cure but treatment was available in the form of voice therapy and shots of botulinum toxin, or Botox, directly into the vocal cords. But even with treatment, my doctor told me that my voice would never be the same again. I had lost my voice.

Like other physical characteristics such as height, weight, and hair color, our voices help identify us.

The sound of our voice influences how other people perceive us—possibly even more than the words we actually say. “Our voice is our ambassador to the rest of the world,” says Dr. Norman Hogikyan, director of the University of Michigan Health System Vocal Health Center. “Often a first impression is based upon a person’s voice.” For people with voice disorders, a part of our identity is stripped away. Our weak voices can be unfairly associated with emotional sensitivity, a lack of confidence, lower intelligence, and sometimes, physical illness.

Meanwhile, Adam Clark Estes discusses how becoming partially deaf affected his relationships with others:

I got pretty good at reading lips. I got great at nodding and smiling. I found myself always retreating into music, because good ear buds would pump sound waves straight past my broken ear drums, past those tiny bones, and straight to my brain by way of the auditory nerve which, luckily, managed to remain intact despite the infections. Bass felt good, because I could feel it.

My reality was a quiet one, peaceful even. The busy streets of Brooklyn never bothered me at night because I simply couldn’t hear the car horns or the garbage trucks. It was easy to stay cool in tense conversations, because it simply didn’t register when people raised their voices. Maybe I did become a little brusque over time. But I was luckier than many people with hearing loss. My right ear was in better shape than my left, and I leaned on it like a crutch. When walking down the sidewalk, I made it a habit to keep people on my right side. I figured out how to get by, but I was constantly thinking about my hearing loss, as I tried to piece together conversations from muffled voices.

23 – 1

Tensions Remain High At Israeli Gaza Border

As we enter yet another phase in yet another bombardment of Gaza, I find myself nodding my head to much of Roger Cohen’s latest column (he’s been on a splendid roll lately). Part of me doesn’t want to look or write about it, because there is little point. There is even less of a point in actually trying to defend the Palestinians or to express grief that so many are being killed by Western armaments.

Hamas has indeed made itself again a pariah – for its refusal of any cease-fire, for its desperate aggression with its hundreds of largely useless but still traumatizing rockets, and for its cynical preparedness to allow civilians to die in the rubble made by the Israelis, as they “mow the lawn” yet again. On this subject, the world is full of passionate certainty, and it is a fool’s errand to care.

But I cannot help myself, because I do care. And, yes, I’m aware of the now-exhausted arguments about proportionality. We have gone over this once before in the 2009 Gaza war. But my view remains a relatively simple one: when one side has overwhelming military, economic and diplomatic superiority, it is not now and never has been a fair fight or a just war. And the fatalities on both sides prove that in staggering ways:

IP_conflict_deaths_total

Max Fisher notes that since January 2005,

when the conflict began to change dramatically, it has killed 4,006 people, of whom 168 have been Israeli and 3,838 Palestinian. That means that, since January 2005, only four percent of those killed have been Israeli, and 96 percent Palestinian. Since January 2005, in other words, the conflict has killed 23 Palestinians for every one Israeli it claims.

That is why when I hear Israeli outrage at the devastation of Israel’s security and peace by the latest Hamas offensive, it sounds to me like over-compensation. Yes, many are indeed traumatized by sirens and drills and rockets. I do not mean to minimize that or the Israeli deaths and injuries – but it is objectively infinitesimal compared with the living terror under which Gazans now live.

And look at the photograph above. Do these Israelis look terrified? They are watching Gaza get pounded into dust from a Sderot mountain. They’re within the rocket range, but they sure don’t look worried. They’ve brought chairs and beer and, yes, popcorn! Mackey has an excellent and devastating report on the atmosphere. When the sound of blasts occur, there is applause. And the same viewing parties happened in 2009, as children were being dragged out of rubble. Yes, Palestinians cheer Israeli deaths. But they have no power. To cheer even as you have overwhelming force and superiority tells you a lot about what has happened to the moral compass in Israel today.

There is also the question of rank ahistoricity in the coverage. Without an understanding of how Israel and Gaza got to this point, it is hard to put it in perspective. A reader puts it well:

Why is it that these seemingly now-routine flare ups of violence are treated as though they were unique situations? It’s always “they did this, so we responded” and an endless tit-for-tat follows until Hamas finally gives up. Rarely does there seem to be an appreciation of the consequences of having created an open-air prison on the West Bank with similar levels of control in Gaza.

I ask Goldblog and your dissenting readers, if not for these rocket attacks, are the Palestinians even relevant to the Israelis in any meaningful sense? The West Bank, in comparison to Gaza, has stayed relatively peaceful, but what does Fatah have to show for it? Ignorance of Palestinian suffering by the Israeli people, endless expansions of settlements, and lives utterly dictated by Israeli policy over which they have no influence. The Arab shopkeepers in Jerusalem staged a very visible protest and nobody cared. And now that Netanyahu has ruled out the possibility of a sovereign Palestine, they also have no future of their own. They are doomed to imprisonment forever, “state” or no “state.”

I keep returning to this article you posted by Max Fisher that early on remarks, “the occupation is wrong, it is the problem, and Israel is responsible.” I think this applies to Hamas’ futile rocket campaigns. I don’t believe that Hamas fires the rockets simply to raise the death toll, although that is probably part of the thinking there. Instead, I view this through the lens of street culture: they are firing these rockets for respect. The occupation is an endless line of indignities that Palestinians are subjected to every day, a fact that barely seems to register among Israelis, and Hamas is demanding they at least look them in the eye as they do it.

Returning to my earlier point, violence is the only case in which they are relevant to their captors, so they fire these rockets as a release, much as an ostracized kid will act out just to be noticed by someone else. They might be dominated in every sense by Israel, but they won’t be reduced to human livestock or a dehumanized “lawn” that must periodically be “mowed” to maintain an illusion of peace. Their lives may be completely dictated by Israel, but at least in this one case, they can defy that rule and be noticed for it – even getting the other side to admit their own powerlessness to truly stop it. Can Fatah claim to have ever gotten the Israeli government to admit defeat in any sense whatsoever? Hamas can.

And so the beat goes on …

The Heart Of Vegetarianism

Looking back at the arguments in Peter Singer’s groundbreaking 1975 book, Animal Liberation, Thomas Rodham Wells realizes he became a convert to vegetarianism more through his heart than his mind:

What won me over was not the rigour or deftness of Singer’s intellectual moves, but a much more basic reshaping of my moral sentiments. I don’t feel a triumph of rationality over desire. I didn’t conclude that I should stop eating meat because that would make the world a better place. Rather, I found my tastes themselves changed by the recognition of the obvious sentience of non-human animals, their possession of personalities, emotional states, and perhaps even firm opinions on some issues (favourite kinds of grass, for example). The repugnance I have come to feel about eating them is an extension of what I would feel about eating my pet cat rather than the product of some calculation of quanta of suffering. My vegetarianism is built up from my moral sentiments, a reluctance to be implicated in the unnecessary suffering of sentient creatures that might be characterised as a kind of moral disgust for cruelty. Unlike the official highly theoretical justification for vegetarianism offered by Singer, mine is visceral, muddled and inconsistent, as I think much of real moral life must be.

Read previous Dish threads on vegetarianism here and here.

The Public Opinion Of Court

Gallup’s latest poll on the Supreme Court shows a sharp uptick in support among Republicans and a concomitant decline among Democrats:

SuCoGallup

Aaron Blake attributes the partisan split to, well, partisanship:

Just two years ago, after the court upheld the individual mandate portion of Obamacare, Democratic support for the court spiked to 68 percent – near a decade -high. Today, after the Supreme Court ruled that religious employers should be exempt from providing birth control to their employees and continuing rolling back campaign finance rules in McCutcheon v. FEC, the 44 percent of Democrats who endorse the court’s work is near a new low. Similarly, GOP support for the court plunged to 29 percent after the Affordable Care Act decision in 2012 — a new low for the 21st Century. Today, it has spiked to 51 percent — higher than Democrats’.

Even before the current court took over, though, this “what have you done for me lately” attitude was apparent. Republican support for the court peaked at 80 percent after the court signed off on George W. Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign victory. It stayed higher than Democrats for most of the next decade, until more liberal justices were introduced on the current court.

To Ian Millhiser, the chart shows “that most Americans have very short memories when it comes to the Supreme Court”:

And it also suggests that public opinion of the Court is driven by singular, high-profile events rather than by a holistic assessment of the Court’s performance. Democratic support for the Court remained fairly high, for example, after the Supreme Court struck down the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act in 2013, even though the justices also gutted much of the Voting Rights Act and shielded many bosses who engage in sexual or racial harassment the very same week as the DOMA decision.

Hey Baby

Straight guys often try to charm the ladies with a form of baby talk:

In an article soon to be published in the journal Evolution & Human Behavior, [psychologist Juan David] Leongómez and his colleagues discovered that when (heterosexual) men, for instance, are asked to flirt with a beautiful woman, two noticeable things begin to happen to their voices. First, their voices get deeper … or rather their voices achieve a deeper minimal octave than under comparison conditions. And second, men’s voices become more sing-songy or pitch-variable when speaking to a pretty woman, sort of like, well, how you’d speak to a baby.

It isn’t quite as pronounced as such prosodic “infant-directed speech” (and it’s probably unwise, I hasten to add, for a man to speak to any woman as if she were a puppy), but nonetheless, the investigators found these male voice adjustments during verbal courtship to be an empirically demonstrable effect. What this means is that not only do men’s voices get deeper when they’re chatting up some lovely woman, but they also get higher compared to when their speech is directed at another male or to an unattractive female listener. This effect appeared in both of the language samples tested – native male English and Czech speakers – and even after controlling for the unscripted content of the men’s speech.

What the researchers found about how straight women talk to men:

Interestingly, this so-called paralinguistic courtship modulation effect didn’t occur in women’s voices when they believed that they were speaking to a good-looking man, but it did occur when they were speaking to an attractive woman. That’s to say, when (heterosexual) women thought that they were communicating with an especially pretty member of the same sex, they began to stress their pitch modulation. The reason for this isn’t entirely clear, but it could be, as the authors suggest, that these female speakers’ intended audience is in fact desirable male mates, such that women are attempting to enhance their vocal appeal relative to these highly desirable female competitors. “Pfft. She’s not all that,” in other words. “Check out my natural speaking range.”

Update from a female reader:

I skimmed the post and got to the end and read the ridiculous conclusion of why heterosexual women’s modulation changes while speaking to other attractive heterosexual women, and I scrolled back-up and knew that the study was written by a man. So a heterosexual woman when speaking with an attractive man doesn’t find it necessary to change her voice modulation to attract him but she’s so competitive with other attractive women for a male’s attention that she changes her voice modulation for her? That makes no sense. When I go out with my friends, especially if I haven’t seen them in awhile, I always up the make-up. I wear eye-shadow for my girlfriends. I am not alone. I saw a dear friend this weekend, and after we hugged she said, “I curled my hair for you.” So maybe these women are more focused on what the women think of them, and not focused on knocking them off as competitors.

Also, your post on the plague and after is why I read you religiously, and why even when you piss me off I will continue to read you.

… she says in a baby voice.

Papers, Please

After visiting McAllen, Texas, to participate in a vigil, Jose Antonio Vargas realized that, “for an undocumented immigrant like me, getting out of a border town in Texas—by plane or by land—won’t be easy. It might, in fact, be impossible”:

[S]ince outing myself in the New York Times Magazine in June 2011, and writing a cover story for TIME a year later, I’ve been the most privileged undocumented immigrant in the country. The visibility, frankly, has protected me. While hundreds of thousands of immigrants have been detained and deported in the past three years, I produced and directed a documentary film, “Documented,” which was shown in theaters and aired on CNN less than two weeks ago. I founded a media and culture campaign, Define American, to elevate how we talk about immigration and citizenship in a changing America. And I’ve been traveling non-stop for three years, visiting more than 40 states.

Of course, I can only travel within the United States and, for identification, when I fly I use a valid passport that was issued by my native country, the Philippines. But each flight is a gamble. My passport lacks a visa. If TSA agents discover this, they can contact CBP, which, in turn, can detain me. But so far, I haven’t had any problems, either because I look the way I do (“You’re not brown and you don’t look like a Jose Antonio Vargas,” an immigration advocate once told me), or talk the way I do—or because, as a security agent at John F. Kennedy International Airport who recognized me said without a hint of irony, “You seem so American.”

I might not be so lucky here in the valley. I am not sure if my passport will be enough to let me fly out of McAllen-Miller International Airport, and I am not sure if my visibility will continue to protect me—not here, not at the border.

And today, just as he predicted, Vargas was detained:

A TSA agent checked Vargas’ Philippines passport and compared it to his ticket, according to a video of the exchange as well as sources familiar with the exchange. Satisfied, the agent initialed the ticket and cleared Vargas for travel. At that point, a Border Patrol agent took the passport from the TSA.

“Do you have your visa?” he asked.

“No, there’s no visa,” Vargas replied.

The agent asked Vargas a few more questions, then placed him in handcuffs and escorted him to the McAllen Border Patrol station for further questioning, according to the source. The station is not a detention center.

Dara Lind explains why the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist won’t necessarily be deported:

The government has “prosecutorial discretion” to determine what to do with unauthorized immigrants. That means it can decide whether or not to put Vargas into deportation proceedings in immigration court. The Obama administration has said, repeatedly, that its focus is on deporting unauthorized immigrants who fit its administration “priorities”: convicted criminals, “recent border crossers,” and people who have been deported and returned to the US. 98 percent of all people deported last year fit into one of those priorities. Vargas doesn’t meet any of those criteria.

Charles Cooke is sympathetic to Vargas but thinks the authorities had no alternative:

[T]his is a horribly sticky situation. Without question – and through no initial fault of his own – Vargas has found himself in a veritable nightmare. As he tells the story, he was brought here at a young age and told that he had legitimate papers, only later to discover that those papers had been forged. From that point on, his options were severely limited.

Conservatives who ask, “but why didn’t he just apply for legal status?” are rather missing the point. Under current law, he is unable to do so without leaving the country in which he has built his life. (Or marrying a U.S. citizen.) Because he did not have a petition filed before 2001, he didn’t qualify for relief under Section 245(i); because he is too old, he doesn’t qualify for the deferred action policy that President Obama illegally put into place in 2012. He’s genuinely stuck. Moreover, there really is no “home” for him to “go” to. This is it. If I had my way, he would be among those to whom some form of amnesty was extended. Those who have known nothing else should not be sent abroad.

Still, this is really not the point. The law that I would like doesn’t yet exist. And, knowing this better than anyone, Vargas willingly placed himself in this position. What were those charged with enforcing the rules supposed to do, exactly? Slip him under the desk?

Update:

A Theory Of Nail-Biting

Tom Stafford, a biter himself, advances one:

I propose that there is no special cause of nail biting – not breastfeeding, chronic anxiety or a lack of motherly love. The advantage of this move is that we don’t need to find a particular connection between me, Gordon, Jackie and Britney. Rather, I suggest, nail biting is just the result of a number of factors which – due to random variation – combine in some people to create a bad habit.

First off, there is the fact that putting your fingers in your mouth is an easy thing to do.

It is one of the basic functions for feeding and grooming, and so it is controlled by some pretty fundamental brain circuitry, meaning it can quickly develop into an automatic reaction. Added to this, there is a ‘tidying up’ element to nail biting – keeping them short – which means in the short term at least it can be pleasurable, even if the bigger picture is that you end up tearing your fingers to shreds. This reward element, combined with the ease with which the behaviour can be carried out, means that it is easy for a habit to develop; apart from touching yourself in the genitals it is hard to think of a more immediate way to give yourself a small moment of pleasure, and biting your nails has the advantage of being OK at school. Once established, the habit can become routine – there are many situations in everyone’s daily life where you have both your hands and your mouth available to use. …

Nail-biting, in my view, isn’t some revealing personality characteristic, nor a maladaptive echo of some useful evolutionary behaviour. It is the product of the shape of our bodies, how hand-to-mouth behaviour is built into (and rewarded in) our brains and the psychology of habit.