#buzzfeed buzzreads

[mediamattress]

William Suess Thought He Was An American Until The Day He Was Deported

By Mike Giglio, BuzzFeed BuzzReads (October 24, 2013)

Deportation dates are usually not announced ahead of time, so as to discourage escape attempts. William Suess was in a jail cell at the federal detention center in Charleston, Mo., when he got a knock on his door. He put on jeans, a flannel shirt, and white tennis shoes. Then a pair of immigration agents took him to the St. Louis airport. 

Suess, then 49, had a packed suitcase his mother had left for him and a plastic bag with his T-shirts and underwear from detention. He and the agents checked their bags, cut in line for security, and boarded the plane first. Suess sat in a center row near the back with an agent on either side. The agents slept during the flight, but Suess stared at the GPS map on the screen in front of him. The plane traced an arc over Canada, Greenland, Iceland, and England. Suess asked a flight attendant why the path wasn’t straight. She said the strange trajectory reflected the shape of the Earth.

The plane landed in Frankfurt, a city of about 700,000 on the Main River in Germany. Suess turned to the groggy agents and asked, “Now what?” They deplaned with the rest of the passengers.

A boyish officer from the Bundespolizei, or federal police, met them at the gate. Suess thought for a moment he was headed to a German jail, but the officer made polite conversation in accented English as he led the trio to an office in Terminal C. Suess stood uncertainly beside a desk while an older officer typed and the younger one inquired about his crimes in America.

“Have you ever been in trouble in Europe?” the officer asked.

“This is my first trip abroad,” Suess said.

“You have a clean slate in Germany, then,” the officer said. “You’re free to go.”

I don’t even know where I am, Suess thought, as he made his way alone to baggage claim. Where the fuck am I going to go?

He wandered the airport for an hour, holding his suitcase in one hand and the plastic bag with his shirts and underwear in the other. He passed a crowd of hired drivers who held signs with the names of passengers. At the edge of the crowd stood a man with a piece of notebook paper at his chest. The paper said, “Wilhelm Süß.”

The man brought him to a cab, and they drove together to the city’s red-light district, the Bahnhofsviertel, a seething slab of nowhere wedged between the skyscrapers that shadow the European Central Bank and the annihilating, stone-and-glass train station, the Hauptbahnhof, a nerve center of train tracks and subway lines. The area swarmed with hustlers, sex tourists, and junkies, some asleep on the sidewalk with needles in their arms. The cab stopped at the curb before a six-story homeless shelter at 18 Rudolf St. “The people here will help you,” the man from the airport said.

The door to the shelter was locked. Suess pushed an angry-sounding buzzer, and it opened with a click.

BuzzFeed BuzzReads

[mediamattress]

Was An American College Student Kidnapped By North Korea?

By Leslie Anne Jones, BuzzFeed BuzzReads (September 20, 2013)

David Sneddon flew to Beijing in April 2004 for summer Mandarin courses before his final year majoring in Asian languages and business. Languages were his thing: At 24, he was already fluent in Korean after spending two years as a Mormon missionary in Seoul. In the coming semester at Brigham Young University, he planned to learn one more: When classes finished, he tossed a Spanish primer in his bag so he could prep as he backpacked across China.

David wrote in an email to his mother that he was pumped to do “some hard-core traveling,” but he had only three weeks to spare, so he planned out a brisk journey through southern China. “If you never hear from me again,” he wrote, “look for my body in the western Yunnan Province of China or the Yellow Mountains of Anhui. Just kidding. No, I’m really so excited.” On Thursday, Aug. 5, along with BYU roommate George Bailey, David headed to Yangshuo, the southern backpacker town along the Li River whose misty limestone cliffs are so stunning they grace the back of China’s 20-yuan note. After a weekend of hiking and biking, George was heading north to meet friends, while David continued west to Yunnan. The gateway to China’s wild west, Yunnan is one of the country’s most culturally and geographically diverse provinces, with southern areas that feel more like Southeast Asia than China, and Tibetan minorities and the foothills of the eastern Himalayas up north.

Monday morning, David woke early to catch his bus. Groggy and bed-headed, George sat up as his friend went out the door. “See you in Provo,” was the last thing they said to each other. David’s family started to worry when his emails stopped, but perhaps he was just busy having fun or couldn’t find a good internet connection in the remote mountains of China. They knew something was wrong when he didn’t show up in Seoul for a scheduled meet-up with his older brother Michael. Local Chinese authorities and State Department officials thought David may have fallen when hiking Tiger Leaping Gorge, perhaps washed away in the branch of the Yangtze River that runs through it. He wouldn’t be the first traveler to do so, and the Yangtze is in full flood in August. But the Sneddons didn’t buy it — David was an Eagle Scout. Though he was raised in the flats of Nebraska, David had trekked hundreds of miles in the Rocky Mountains on family trips. He could handle himself outdoors. David’s father and two of his brothers decided to go to China and retrace his journey. By the end of their investigation, they were sure David made it through the gorge. Nine years later, the Sneddons have never wavered in believing that David is alive. And they now believe he is somewhere in North Korea, abducted by the Hermit Kingdom’s secret agents from the town where he was last spotted in Yunnan, Shangri-La. This sounds ridiculous, like the far-out invention of a family unwilling to face the reality of a loved one’s disappearance. The Sneddons would agree — they didn’t know what to think the first time the theory was presented to them either. “I just flat out did not believe it,” Michael Sneddon, the eldest of the family’s 11 children, recalls. But then he started doing the research: North Korea’s penchant for abducting innocent civilians goes all the way back to the Korean War. They’ve taken people with useful skills, people who could teach language and culture to secret agents, people whose identities could be co-opted by spies, people to be married off to other foreigners living in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and people who were just unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

And though no American citizen was known to have ever fallen into the latter category, the more the family learned about this bizarre history, the more it seemed plausible that David could be the first. Among the many victims — potentially tens of thousands have been interned in the country against their will since the 1950s — some of the most widely publicized cases were in no way connected to North Korea, and had no leads for two decades or more, twice as long as David has been gone.

BuzzFeed BuzzReads

[mediamattress]

The Man Behind The Historic Implosion Of The Ex-Gay Movement

By David Peisner, BuzzFeed BuzzReads (August 22, 2013)

It’s mid-afternoon on a Monday in July and the offices that once housed Exodus International are quiet. Exodus, which for 37 years was more or less synonymous with the ex-gay movement and at its peak employed 24 people in this office, closed down in June. Since then, a skeleton crew of three people has rattled around the largely empty workspace overseeing the dismantling of an association that once included more than 150 Christian ministries in 17 countries, all devoted to the idea that homosexual feelings need not lead to eternal damnation. They could be managed, ignored, overcome, repented for, and perhaps even transformed into something more biblically acceptable. Just as long as they weren’t acted upon. Its mission statement: “Mobilizing the body of Christ to minister grace and truth to a world impacted by homosexuality.”

The building — a fading white, multistory rectangular block situated on a side street in an area of Orlando well-stocked with dreary strip malls and office parks — is wholly unremarkable, the kind of place you’d drive by a thousand times without taking a second glance. Exodus bought it five years ago, but it hasn’t been a great investment, and in light of the organization’s demise, the property is now up for sale.

Despite recent upheaval, Alan Chambers looks pretty comfortable ensconced in his large corner office on the second floor. Chambers, 41 — who after living as a gay man in his younger years now has a wife and two children — led Exodus for its final 12 years. He’s long been a poster boy for the Christian right’s belief that it was possible to “pray the gay away.” Chambers disputes the notion that he ever promoted Exodus as the “gay cure” ministry, though there is plenty of evidence to the contrary, not the least of which is the book he wrote in 2009 called Leaving Homosexuality: A Practical Guide for Men and Women Looking for a Way Out. He maintains that his overarching goal was always to provide homosexuals with the comfort, fellowship, and love they’d been denied by traditional churches. And yet, for example, in a 2005 Exodus newsletter, he wrote, “One of the many evils this world has to offer is the sin of homosexuality. Satan, the enemy, is using people to further his agenda to destroy the Kingdom of God and as many souls as he can.”

The following year, he and his deputy at Exodus, Randy Thomas, visited the White House at George W. Bush’s invitation as Bush announced his push for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. Chambers was also a prominent supporter of Proposition 8 in California. In 2009, an Exodus board member — not Chambers — traveled to Uganda and spoke at a conference on the evils of homosexuality that helped build the hysteria there that led to the country’s infamous 2009 “Kill the Gays” bill, which prescribed a potential death penalty for “aggravated homosexuality” or life imprisonment for “the offence of homosexuality.” (It has never been voted on but was reintroduced last year.) It took Chambers nearly a year to publicly disavow his organization’s involvement.

And yet this June, Chambers not only closed Exodus in sudden and dramatic fashion, but acknowledged the ineffectiveness of gay-to-straight reparative therapy and offered a remarkable mea culpa that apologized for his organization’s many missteps. He’s now founding a new organization focused on bringing Christians and homosexuals together, called Speak. Love. Many in the LGBT community hailed Exodus’ demise as a victory in the culture wars but were disappointed Chambers hadn’t gone further in his support of gay rights or his renouncement of the religious underpinnings of the ex-gay theology. To many evangelicals, the man who had not only been a leader of the ex-gay movement but also a living example of its successes was now a lost sheep, or worse, a heretic.

“There are times when I feel like I don’t have a country,” Chambers says, not far from a wall of photos that include shots of him with his wife, with his kids, and with Mike Huckabee. “There are people who have been invested in this fight for years on both sides. It’s the vocal minority on either side that gets the microphone. What I believe is there are far more people in the middle.” It’s this middle group that he’s hoping to represent and talk to. The question is, will he have the chance? At the moment, he’s working on defining specific plans for the new organization and raising money to keep the lights on. But in order to succeed, he’ll need to convince people that his divisive past has indeed passed, and that his own personal struggle won’t get in the way of his public mission.

BuzzFeed BuzzReads

[mediamattress]

Tig Notaro And The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Yet Somehow Completely Amazing Year

By Sandra Allen, BuzzFeed BuzzReads (August 8, 2013)

In the sketch “Cancer Excuse,” from her Comedy Central show, Amy Schumer complains to a friend about having to go to a bridal shower. She looks at her phone and exclaims, “Oh my gosh. Tig has cancer.”

“Who?”

“One of the writers on my show.”

“Amy, you must be so upset right now,” her friend says. Schumer, whose persona on the program is George Costanza-esque, realizes the opportunity here. Her friend insists she just go home, to which Schumer replies, “Yeah. I’m so sad. This is a hard time.” As the sketch progresses, she uses Notaro’s cancer to get out of bigger and bigger obligations until the bubble’s burst.

The premise of the sketch, which Notaro helped write, is nonfiction: Schumer had hired Notaro to write her show when, a year ago this week, Notaro was diagnosed with stage 2, invasive cancer in both breasts. (In reality, Schumer rented a New York apartment where the two of them and Notaro’s best friend and podcast co-host, Kyle Dunnigan, could live and work while Notaro was in chemo.)

If everything you know about Tig Notaro is from stories written in the past year, then you could be forgiven for thinking that she, too, has benefitted greatly from this bad news. Her instantly legendary 31-minute set at Los Angeles club Largo just after her diagnosis last August, which began with her saying, “Hello, I have cancer,” went viral in ways that entire stand-up routines simply do not. She sold 100,000 digital copies of the show (her second album) in just six weeks, good enough to make it the biggest comedy album of the year. It was a tour de force of grace and wit and became the definitive moment of her career, the kind of break that grizzled, cutthroat stand-ups dream about (except for the almost dying part). But who wants to be defined by that?

“Before this, I was very happy with my career,” Notaro, 42, says outside at a Brooklyn bar, late on a summer evening. “All I can do is go, ‘OK, that happened, and now I have a lot of work to do.’”

She’s ordered a soda water, no ice, with a lemon and a lime, and is wearing more or less the same thing she does every day: jeans and a plaid button-down. (In colder weather, she adds a fleece-lined, tan corduroy jacket.) She’s thin but not sickly. Her chin is elvish and skin taut, and her hair a mop friends and fans adoringly call “the Tig wig.”

Now cancer-free, Notaro is busier than she’s ever been, still recording her popular podcast, Professor Blastoff, with Dunnigan and comedian David Huntsburger, and touring with and without them. She has roles in movies like Lake Bell’s In a World, Ryan Phillippe’s Shreveport, and next year’s Walk of Shame. A documentary is being made about her (Huntsberger jokes she’s become a Kardashian). Showtime just green-lit a series called Knock Knock, It’s Tig Notaro, in which she’ll perform comedy in peoples’ basements, backyards, and barns. She’s also in the thick of writing a still-untitled memoir, to be published by Ecco; publishers were having a bidding war over it last fall while she was literally unconscious, undergoing the double mastectomy that also revealed the cancer had not spread to her lymph nodes. She then flew to New York and moved in with Schumer and Dunnigan. (He and Notaro slept on Ikea bunk beds — “I highly recommend them,” Dunnigan says). This kind of ubiquity in the entertainment business is hardly a given when you’re an androgynous lesbian whose comedy isn’t about her sexual identity or, really, her personal life at all; she’s more Demitri Martin than Margaret Cho. Her bits are jokey and her delivery slow, she seems to relish in an audience’s discomfort. And even with this good fortune, there is caution.

“I know my next album won’t sell the way that did,” she says. “It was the number one best-selling comedy album of 2012. I can’t do that again. You know?” But what if she can? What if this was not a definitive moment but merely an incidental, incremental bump in a snowballing, singular career? What if she’s, like, the Beatles? “I’m pretty sure I’m not the Beatles,” she says. “Though I thought I was in the Beatles when I was in fifth grade.”

Which one?

“The fifth one. Tig.”

BuzzFeed BuzzReads