Daily Archives: December 9, 2021

Ruth Conniff

Refugee High: Coming of Age in America (The New Press), by Elly Fishman, tells the story of four teenagers from four different countriesIraq, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Guatemala, and Myanmarwho land at Roger C. Sullivan High School in Chicago, home to more refugee students than any other high school in Illinois. Principal Chad Adams and Sarah Quintenz, the big-hearted, foul-mouthed director of the schools English Language Learners program, share a vision of Sullivan as a welcoming place for new American teens, supporting and challenging them to succeed in their new country.

Elly Fishman spent the 20172018 school year at Sullivan, following the teenagers and their families, teachers, and friends. That year happened to coincide with one of the worst global refugee crises in history as well as a massive increase in pressure on immigrants in the United States from President Donald Trumps aggressive policies and escalating public hostility.

You cant help but root for the kids in this book, who struggle to overcome trauma and dislocation as well as the common heartaches of adolescenceand the terrible reality that the violence and poverty that caused them to flee their countries still stalk them like a recurring nightmare in Chicago.

As Alejandro, who witnessed his best friends murder by gangs in Guatemala and fled before he met the same fate, awaits his asylum hearing, his classmate is shot by gang members near Sullivan. Shahina resists her parents determined efforts to force her into an arranged marriage, and makes a harrowing escape after she is kidnapped in another state.

Despite such extreme circumstances, the kids at Sullivan are mostly engaged in regular kid stuff, and their teachers see them as whole people. Fishmans clear-eyed, empathetic portraits are a powerful rebuke to the nativism and bigotry that have gripped our country.

A Promised Land (Crown), by Barack Obama, is a hefty 701-page memoirand its only Volume I!that came out at the end of 2020, just after our last year-end review. The former President is a good writer, and this is a thoughtful book, not a ghost-written product meant to burnish his image.

Obama confesses to self-doubt, and while his accounts of the war in Afghanistan, Wall Street bailouts, and other disappointments wont assuage progressive critics, it is a humanizing read. Its also poignant to look back now, in this poisoned political era, at the optimism that propelled Obamas first presidential campaign, his search for common ground, and the idealism of his young supporters.

Obama, who saw the future of Republican politics in Sarah Palin, muses about whether John McCain would have chosen her as a running mate if he knew what he was starting. But while the ugly, know-nothing politics of the Palin/Trump variety continue to plague us, this book is a reminder of our nations better angels and the possibility that they could, again, ascend.

Ruth Conniff is editor-at-large for The Progressive and editor-in-chief of the Wisconsin Examiner.

Mike Ervin

Melanie Morrison was euphoric when she discovered that the Lillian E. Smith Center for the arts was offering a writing residency. As she recalls in Letters from Old Screamer Mountain (Resource Center for Women & Ministry in the South), To find a place of solitude and beauty in the mountains of North Georgia was appealing in and of itself; to be on the very mountain where Lillian Smith wrote Strange Fruit (1944) and Killers of the Dream (1949) was more than I could imagine.

Morrisons parents revered Smith. Her picture hung on a wall in Morrisons childhood home.

The two Smith books, the first a novel and the second a collection of essays, were about the tragic failure of white people to own up to the societal destruction wrought by racism in the United States. Smith and her life partner, Paula Snelling, operated the Laurel Falls Camp for girls on the same site from the 1920s to the 1940s. Morrisons mother, Eleanor, attended a weekend session at Laurel Falls as a college student in 1939, which Morrison describes as an unforgettable turning point in my mothers young life.

Morrison conducts anti-racism seminars for white people. She planned to use her residency to write essays about the horror of lynching. In 2000, Morrison opened the Leaven Center in rural Michigan, which, she says in the book, was devoted to equipping participants to become more effective and knowledgeable agents of social change. (I attended many Leaven retreats, and Morrison presided over my wedding in 2006.)

But when Morrisons residency began in July 2012, she was feeling ambivalent. Leaven had closed due to financial pressures less than a year earlier, and Morrison was still mourning that loss. At the same time, she was immersing herself in pictures and accounts of lynchings. So during her residency she wrote letters to her mother, who was descending into dementia, describing the avalanche of emotions and epiphanies I was experiencing.

Morrison never shared the letters with her mother because of her dementia, but theyre published in this book.

The historical amnesia about lynching is the silence that weighs heavily on my spirit, Mom, she writes in one letter. If this reign of terror remains unacknowledged by the descendants of its white perpetrators, we can be certain that the lies and fears that fomented lynching will continue to infect our white psyches and imaginations.

Letters from Old Screamer Mountain is an engaging tale of love, grief, healing, and family connection.

Mike Ervin is a columnist for The Progressive.

Brian Gilmore

The title of John Thompsons book, I Came As a Shadow: An Autobiography (Henry Holt and Company), comes from Nocturne Varial, a poem written by his uncle, the Harlem Renaissance poet Lewis Grandison Alexander: I came as a shadow / I stand now a light.

That the legendary Georgetown University basketball coach would pick such a literary reference is no surprise. He was a man who respected intellectual pursuits just as much as the game.

Thompson was the first African American coach to win the NCAA Division I Mens Championship in 1984. When asked at the time how it felt, he called the question insulting, because it implied that Black coaches before me had not been good enough to win a championship. That was Thompsonhe fought racism his way with every fiber of his being.

Growing up in Washington, D.C., Thompson was himself an accomplished basketball player. His working-class parents stressed education and hard work, which he embraced. He made it to the NBA, playing for the Boston Celtics for two years, but found his true calling as an educator, calling himself a teacher, not a basketball coach. He used basketball as an instrument to teach and the court as his classroom.

I Came As a Shadow (actually published in mid-December 2020, after The Progressives 2020 Favorite Books package) reminds me of The Autobiography of Malcolm X. A Black man of stature, intelligence, and notoriety tells of his life in the United States. Thompsons book, written with Jesse Washington, comments on slavery, racism, money in college sports, and education. And, as his mother, Anna, taught him as a boy, Thompson always speaks his mind.

Thompson talks about his most consequential Georgetown player, Patrick Ewing, and the evolution of the superstar Allen Iverson, as well as others who are not so well known. He recounts his famous walkout during a college basketball game over the NCAAs racist eligibility policies for student athletes and gives an insiders account of the NBAs own embarrassing racist history toward Black basketball players.

Thompson remembers being forced to ride on the back of the bus on family trips to Maryland and seeing how the Black people taking communion at the familys Catholic church could go only after all the white people went first.

The racism stuck with him. He was going to fight it. And not once would he bite his tongue.

Brian Gilmore is a poet and senior lecturer in the University of Marylands MLaw program. His latest book is come see about me, marvin (Wayne State University Press).

Sarah Jaffe

This year saw a banner crop of books about work from a variety of authors, from the mainstream to the radical left. We cant blame the pandemic for thatafter all, researching and writing a book takes years and most of these projects were launched well before we knew how much our relationship with wage labor would be transformed by global catastrophe. Yet many of these books land with new urgency in the world of COVID-19, and none more so than Amelia Horgans Lost in Work: Escaping Capitalism (Pluto Press).

Horgan, an English philosopher, has written a concise yet thorough dissection of work in the 2020s, from deindustrialization to the gig economy, unpaid household work to academia. But it is more than just a look at the way work has gotten worse in recent years, particularly with the pandemic. It is a book, she writes, about how work under capitalism is bad for all of us.

The problem that we are so rarely allowed to admit to, that COVID-19 has made impossible to ignore, is that work is not something we do out of free choice. We must work in order to survive, to pay ever-inflating rents or mortgages, pay down student debt, feed our children and elderly family members, and be seen as productive members of society. That background unfreedom, Horgan notes, seeps into every work relationship, even as we tell ourselves that work is a place where we find meaning.

Horgan manages to clarify this somewhat depressing fact and have fun doing so. She uses Britney Spearss 2013 hit Work Bitch to explain our different understandings of the term, and brings in examples of present-day and past labor struggles to illuminate the ways that workers can, and do, change the conditions of theirand all of ourlives.

Its worth noting that Horgan finished her book while suffering the debilitating effects of long COVID, and she writes movingly about what the pandemic has wrought. COVID-19 did not fundamentally change our relationships with work, but it did pull back the veil that has allowed many people to pretend that the way we work now is the best of all possibilities. Horgans necessary argument is that it doesnt have to be this way, and that the change might be already beginning.

Sarah Jaffe, a reporting fellow at Type Media Center whose most recent book is Work Wont Love You Back, is a frequent contributor to The Progressive.

Sarah Lahm

Heres a radical thought: Everyone deserves to be comfortable, relaxed, and happy. This idea forms the basis of social psychologist Devon Prices new book, Laziness Does Not Exist (Simon & Schuster), which reflects an emerging zeitgeist for our post-COVID-19 world by showcasing our growing resistance to work and the grind culture that often defines it.

Grind culture has seeped into every facet of our modern lives. It is most commonly associated with Millennials, who are at greater risk of being pressured to work all day, every day. But it even affects young children, whose brains and future purchasing habits are desperately coveted by companies such as Facebook.

In recent years, activists and thought leaders like Tricia Hersey have pushed back on our demanding 24/7 work and social media culture. Hersey is a theologian, artist, and self-care proponent who started the Nap Ministry in 2016 to popularize the idea that rest is resistance. She has linked the work-till-you-drop pressure of today to a long legacy of compulsory work culture in the United States, going all the way back to the experiences of Black Americans under slavery.

Price does not mention Hersey in Laziness Does Not Exist, but the book clearly reflects the ideas she has helped popularize. Price, who is transgender, insists a laziness lie has permeated American culture ever since the Puritans first arrived on Native soil centuries ago.

Puritans were purveyors of a productivity-obsessed version of Christianity, Price notes, and this helped lay the groundwork for capitalism in this country. Then, as now, work was deemed virtuous and anyone who did not succeed was dismissed as lazy. They say this has led to a dark implication that our failures are always our own fault.

Price does not just decry this problem. They also provide strategies for resistance, including a chapter on how to establish boundaries with ones own family members to preserve ones right to rest, dream, be creative, and simply be temporarily unavailable.

The intent is to impart a message of empowerment. Step one on the path to ending grind culture might indeed be rooted in awakening individuals, as Price seeks to do, to the idea that laziness is a most damaging lie.

Sarah Lahm is a columnist for The Progressive.

Emilio Leanza

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (Macmillan), by David Graeber and David Wengrow, is a book with a very particular axe to grind.

A familiar story told in other expansive history bookssuch as Jared Diamonds Guns, Germs, and Steel or Yuval Noah Hararis Sapiensgoes something like this: For most of prehistory, an era that roughly spans from 3.3 million to 10,000 years ago, humans lived in bands or chiefdoms which, due to their small size, were inherently democratic and egalitarian; it was only with the invention of agriculture that, to paraphrase philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, we rushed headlong into our chains.

At its core, The Dawn of Everything is about how we live; or, to be more exact, how we choose to live in relation to each other.

Agriculture, these authors claim, was the original sin that set the stage for everything else, from kings and private property to bureaucracy, colonialism, genocide, and the contemporary nation state.

Graeber and Wengrow reject this narrative. Relying on new archaeological research, they rigorously debunk the idea that early human societies can be as neatly categorized as Diamond and Harari suggest. Early hunter-gatherer groups, for example, were not necessarily tiny, isolated democratic communes, but instead engaged in bold social experiments. This included seasonally shifting into temporary settlements, with something like a Neolithic aristocracy.

Likewise, the authors argue, the first cities were not all defined by social stratification and inequality. Among them were many large-scale ancient cities, like Harappa of the Indus Valley Civilization, that seem to have functioned without any sort of rigid, top-down government.

In fact, according to Graeber and Wengrow, the way a society worked was never solely determined by technologies (for example, the plow) or environmental factors (the availability of large, tameable livestock to pull them). Rather, the humans of the past actively debated and experimented with social formsmuch more so, it turns out, than we do today.

At its core, The Dawn of Everything is about how we live; or, to be more exact, how we choose to live in relation to each other.

As Graeber, whose untimely death in September 2020 cut short the career of one of the most brilliant thinkers of recent decades, once wrote, The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.

Our distant ancestors grasped this truth. Its up to usas we churn about in states where money is converted into political power and the environment is in perilto remember it.

Emilio Leanza is associate editor of The Progressive.

Bill Lueders

Among the panoply of issues clamoring for our attention, none are more urgent than finding less destructive ways to interact with our planet. Some of my favorite books this year are about that challenge.

For a case study in how a nations citizens can deliver stunning rebukes to the destroyers of Earth, theres The Water Defenders: How Ordinary People Saved a Country from Corporate Greed (Beacon Press). It is written by the wife-and-husband team of Robin Broad, a professor at American University, and John Cavanagh, the former director of and now senior adviser to the Institute for Policy Studies; both played minor roles in helping spare El Salvador from the environmental ravages of a proposed gold mine.

In 2016, after a seven-year legal battle, the Central American nation won a lawsuit filed against it by a global mining company ticked off about a denied permit. The next year, El Salvador became the first nation in the world to ban metals mining.

The Water Defenders of El Salvador, similar to Indigenous-led groups throughout the world, succeeded by building alliances around a simple message of water over gold. They rallied the public, enlisted experts, and secured political support. The mining ban passed the Salvadoran legislative assembly 70 to 0.

But these gains came with sizeable costs, including the still-unsolved 2009 murder and mutilation of anti-mining activist Marcelo Rivera. The Water Defenders, a deeply informed and highly readable book, does justice to his cause.

Another important take on achieving a cleaner and safer world is Prosperity in the Fossil-Free Economy: Cooperatives and the Design of Sustainable Businesses (Yale University Press), by Melissa K. Scanlan, a longtime Wisconsin environmentalist. She envisions a future where green policies go hand-in-hand with worker empowerment, and provides a detailed blueprint for how to get there.

Already, Scanlan notes, more people in the United States are members of cooperatives than participants in the stock market. Her book offers essential hope that we can yet save ourselves . . . from ourselves.

Finally, let me acknowledge the fiftieth anniversary edition of Frances Moore Lapps seminal Diet for a Small Planet (Ballantine Books), which includes a lengthy new introduction, the updates made in earlier editions, and even some new recipes. Lapp (see her essay, Acts of Rebel Sanity, on page 51) argues that the advice shes been giving about our wasteful and unhealthy food systems has become even more imperative.

The challenge now, she writes, is learning how to focus both on our everyday choices and on our courage as empowered citizens to revolt against concentrated power and achieve democratically set rules putting our health and Earth first.

To the barricades! And the dinner plate.

Bill Lueders is editor of The Progressive.

John Nichols

Critical race theory, the bane of conservative pundits and Republican political strategists, found an unexpected defender last summer when General Mark Milley, the sixty-three-year-old chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, appeared in June before the House Armed Services Committee.

As part of their cynical effort to discredit teaching that recognizes the influence that 400 years of slavery, segregation, and racism has had on contemporary laws, Republicans on the committee demanded to know why instructors at West Point were teaching students materials from a lecture by Dr. Carol Anderson of Emory University with the title Understanding Whiteness and White Rage.

This sincere desire to understand how this countrys tortured past influences its tortured present has turned a great many Americans to the writing of Carol Anderson, a historian and professor of African American studies at Emory.

General Milley did not blink: I want to understand white rage, he responded. Im white, and I want to understand it. So what is it that caused thousands of people to assault this building [on January 6, 2021] and try to overturn the Constitution of the United States of America? What caused that? I want to find that out.

This sincere desire to understand how this countrys tortured past influences its tortured present has turned a great many Americans to the writing of Carol Anderson, a historian and professor of African American studies at Emory. Anderson has written a series of transformative booksincluding White Rage and One Person, No Votethat critique how our laws and public policies developed. She does this by shedding light on patterns of racism and anti-Blackness that have always been present but that have not always been explored.

In her latest book, The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America (Bloomsbury Publishing), Anderson presents a Constitutional history that exposes how the Second Amendment was designed and has consistently been constructed to keep African Americans powerless and vulnerable.

Rejecting the simplistic notion that the amendment outlines a right to bear arms in order to preserve the freedom of Americans, she describes the explicitly racist story of its drafting and interpretation over the past 230 years. The Second Amendment is so inherently, structurally flawed, so based on Black exclusion and debasement, she concludes, that, unlike the other amendments, it can never be a pathway to civil and human rights for 47.5 million African Americans.

Andersons argument is more than compelling. It takes the debate about guns and gun violence to a deeper and more vital level, as does her brilliant observation that the Second is lethal; steeped in anti-Blackness, it is the loaded weapon laying around just waiting for the hand of some authority to put it to use.

John Nichols, a frequent contributor to The Progressive, writes about politics for The Nation and is associate editor of The Capital Times newspaper in Madison, Wisconsin.

Ed Rampell

The Red Deal: Indigenous Action to Save Our Earth (Common Notions), released in April, boldly proclaims a sweeping First Peoples ecological and political caretaking vision for the humble people of the Earth and their other-than-human relatives. The Red Deal, it explains, goes beyond the proposed Green New Deal because it prioritizes Indigenous liberation and a revolutionary left position.

The book, an anti-capitalist, anticolonial manifesto, was written collectively by the Red Nation, a coalition of Native and non-Native activists, educators, students, and community organizers advocating Native liberation, and resisting targeted destruction and violence towards Native life and land.

Indigenous people have lived sustainably since time immemorial and can continue to live in reciprocity with all those we share the Earth with.

The Red Nation, from The Red Deal

The Red Deal opposes the edict of Genesis 1:28, giving humankind dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the Earth, an ideology that justified Western colonialism, the conquest of Native peoples, and the theft of their lands. The book posits that capitalists view the Earth as a resource to be exploited instead of a relative to be protected.

In contrast, the Indigenous ethos sees humans as having sacred bonds with nature, not something separate from or superior to it. Indigenous people have lived sustainably since time immemorial and can continue to live in reciprocity with all those we share the Earth with, asserts The Red Deal, which calls for decolonization, demilitarization, and repatriation of stolen ancestral lands.

In recent years, pipeline protests have magnified the impact of Indigenous peoples on U.S. policy. President Joe Biden, elected over Donald Trump with help from tribal votes in battleground states like Wisconsin, tapped Deb Haaland as his Secretary of the Interior, the nations first Native American Cabinet member. The push continues to restore national monument status to Utahs sacred sites. Octobers People vs. Fossil Fuels protests included civil disobedience at the White House and the occupying of the offices of the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

The Red Deal is thought-provoking and visionary. It synthesizes socialist and Indigenous worldviews, suggesting that theres some truth in Friedrich Engelss 1884 prophecy in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State that the next higher plane of society . . . will be a revival, in a higher form, of the liberty, equality, and fraternity of the ancient gentes.

The humble shall then inherit the Earth. Its about time.

Ed Rampell, a Los Angelesbased film historian and critic who lived and reported in the Pacific Islands for twenty-three years, is a frequent contributor to The Progressive.

Norman Stockwell

Polity Books has achieved another tour de force in its Black Lives series. I reviewed the first volume W.E.B. Du Bois: The Lost and the Found a year ago; now the third volume, Cedric Robinson: The Time of the Black Radical Tradition, provides insight into this important Black Radical thinker.

Robinson, who passed away five-and-a-half years ago, was a friend, so I may be a bit biased. But Joshua Myers, an associate professor of Africana Studies at Howard University, does an excellent job in contextualizing Robinson in this very readable biography. The new book is a worthy companion to Cedric J. Robinson: On Racial Capitalism, Black Internationalism, and Cultures of Resistance, a collection of Robinsons essays and articles, some never before published, which came out from Pluto Press in 2019.

It is a hopeful sign that Robinsons work is being rediscovered by younger scholars of the Black Radical tradition. As Robinson wrote in his 1997 book, Black Movements in America, It is always possible that the next Black social movement will obtain that distant land, perhaps even transporting America with it.

Bill Gentile, another friend and a colleague whom I first met in Nicaragua in the 1980s, has a new autobiography, Wait for Me: True Stories of War, Love and Rock & Roll (self-published but readily available in bookstores and online). As a journalist and photographer, Gentile has told intimate stories of people whose lives have been deeply affected by wars and conflict. This book gives us the tales behind the imagesillustrations of a life well lived.

From the steel mills of Pennsylvania, to the jungles of Central America, to the deserts of Iraq, to a classroom in Washington, D.C., Gentile has faithfully told the stories of his subjects. And in recent years, he has helped inspire a new generation of equally responsible backpack journalists.

This falls chaotic U.S. exit from its twenty-year war in Afghanistan came as no surprise to British journalist, activist, and filmmaker Tariq Ali, who has been writing about the region for decades. His new book, The Forty-Year War in Afghanistan: A Chronicle Foretold (Verso), a collection of previously published articles and columns, revisits his years of coverage. As he told me when we spoke via Skype on August 31, the day after the last U.S. troops pulled out, Its been a disaster on every level, as have most of the wars that have been fought by the United States in the name of the war against terror.

Norman Stockwell is publisher of The Progressive.

Kassidy Tarala

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Favorite Books of 2021 - Progressive.org - Progressive.org

Disco Balls and Design: The Architectural Performance of Night Clubs

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For decades, cities around the world have been promoting their nightlife scene and the designed spaces in which these activities occur. Occasionally hidden away from the hustle and bustle, offering a sort of escapism from the day-to-day-routine behind red velvet ropes and intense security measures, or sometimes proudly on display for people from all walks of life to congregate and spend the evening under the glisten of a disco ball or flashing lights, nightclubs are an example of how fashion, culture, and societal norms influence an often overlooked and underground side of architecture.

While clubs are often viewed as a sort of abandoned space, only activated from late in the evening until early hours of the morning on the weekends, theyre actually often intentionally crafted and curated to create highly-specific experiences, and go much beyond the dramatic visual effects. Nightclubs are over-the-top exercises in creating fantasy worlds, where the details of design fall to the back in order to put spatial arrangements on center stage. By creating various atmospheres, the placement of everything becomes key. Locations of bars, bathrooms, the DJ booth, the size of the dance floor, and its adjacencies are actually more important than the lights, sound, and everything in between.

The success of nightclubs lies in their ability to blur boundaries, push thresholds, and where parties and events could come together undercover to continue the zeitgeist of a countercultural revolution. In their most simple form, nightclubs existed long before the famous celebrity-filled parties and took on a much more conservative form of working-class dance halls. As time went on people who had united in secret in order to express themselves saw an opportunity emerge in parallel with the mainstream jump in consumerist activity and advancements in technology that allowed them to play music louder and shine lights brighter. As a way to create their own space, these groups felt the need to design a new typology, one that would only serve as a nightclub instead of a space that would need to be converted, and then back again for regular public use.

In 1967, one of the first clubs that was credited with going against the societal grain was Electric Circus, located in New York City. Boasting interiors designed by famed architect Charles Forberg, it used white tented fabric to contrast psychedelic posters and projections. Within a couple of years, these parties would catch on in Europe and involved the younger generation who were a part of the Italian Radical Design Movement. Their designs also focused heavily on multi-media and multi-disciplinary collaborations.

This intercontinental emergence of club design pushed architects to think beyond the tangible aspects of space, and more about how users would interact with each other. At New York Citys now closed-down Electric Circus, Andy Warhol would host his famous Exploding Plastic Inevitable events that combined music by the Velvet Undergrounds with entrancing light shows. At the same time, Club Cerebrum, a brainchild of up-and-coming artists had guests dress in white gowns, lay on white carpets, and eat marshmallows. At the iconic Studio 54, where only the hippest celebrities of the era were allowed in, having an effective design was critical. Inside of this reconverted theater space, lighting was designed by Broadway specialists to ensure that the aesthetic was the talk of the town.

Into the early 1980s, many of these exclusive clubs lost their allure as the middle class sought out places of their own. With mainstream accessibility, prominent, modern architects began to devise their own solutions in imagining the nightclub of the future. OMA proposed a new venue for Londons Ministry of Sound that featured moving walls and a diversity of spaces that could serve different purposes, as OMA claimed that nightclubs were losing their allure. Perhaps a true statement, many cities still have one or two hot spots that people will venture to for a once-in-a-blue-moon night out. For now, the history of clubs shows us that an anything-goes mindset can continue to push the boundaries of design and create spaces where fun follows function.

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Disco Balls and Design: The Architectural Performance of Night Clubs - ArchDaily

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Kim Petras, photographed in Manhattan

Kim Petras was just coming off the high of the Met Gala when we met in her publicists West Village apartment in the fall. The nights theme was Americana, and the German-born pop star put her signature twist on the red carpet: a horse girl homage that was like Heidi meets The Godfather. The fashion statement mixed the literal and the conceptual: a tail braid on her head and an actual plastic horse head on her chest.

The morning we met, she went for a simpler look: high ponytail, glistening blue cat eyes, black sweatpants, and a crop top. She was getting ready for her day, with the help of two makeup artists and a sweet twentysomething assistant. But Petras was warm and earnest as she opened up about her career trajectory so far.

Its been an eventful year, even in a pandemic. Ive done a lot of growing during lockdown, and life has changed, and Im kind of like, You know what? Its most fun for me to make really out-there pop songs, really going for being outrageous, she said. And I feel very very liberated by that and very excited to share that.

The 29-year-old was able to launch her new era on the MTV stage, where she became the first openly trans artist to perform at the network's award shows, twice over. At the September Video Music Awards, she unveiled her Europop-inflected new sound with the neo-disco Future Starts Now in a bubblegum dress that looked like pink everlasting gobstoppers exploded on Barbarella (in a good way). In November, she staged the liberation part: bursting out of an enormous revolving coconut at the MTV Europe Music Awards, belting out her latest single, Coconuts, which sounds like Katy Perry doing a suntan lotions jingle about breasts (in a good way).

Getting on the music network was a career highlight for Petras a far cry from making the rounds of radio stations on her own just five years ago. She faced confusion from the industry about being a trans artist; her musical style, built on her shameless love of sugary melodies, was deemed too queer clubby by radio and labels.

In the beginning when I did the rounds to major labels and played them the music, people didnt really get it, Petras said. People were kind of like, Ah, I dont know who the fanbase is for this. It was kind of like almost a little bit like, Youre going to be a gay artist, and thats niche and we dont know. So I got shitty deals offered to me.

Still, starting in 2017, her euphoric bops, like the spoiled princess anthem I Dont Want It At All, and her shimmery longing-infused songs, like Heart to Break and Hillside Boys, began getting hundreds of millions of streams, thumped out of speakers in gyms and queer clubs, and made her gay famous.

Shes been interviewed by Paris Hilton (who cameos in one of her earliest videos) for the cover of Paper magazine, collaborated with Kygo, performed at Lollapalooza, opened for Troye Sivan, and drawn stan Twitter backlash for trying to defend working with Dr. Luke (before apologizing).

Pop stardom is all about timing, though, and right now queer is in in a different way. Bottoming anthems and gay lap dance videos are par for the course; Sam Smith and Demi Lovato came out as nonbinary, as did Halsey and Kehlani. The world and industry seem open to new kinds of stars, and it looks like it might finally be Petrass moment. Of course, being a pop star is about a musical style, a narrative, and the zeitgeist all aligning. Those other acts were all already celebrities when they came out. Petras has had a very different journey.

Kim Petras always lived for pop music. She was born in Cologne, in 1992, to an architect dad and dance teacher mom, and music was an integral part of her household. The late 90s and early 00s were all about Orlando teen pop and Britney Spears and boy bands. She was obsessed with Max Martin machine pop songwriting and stardom. She loved the Spice Girls movie and yearned to be a Disney kid. I have two older sisters, she said. We used to lip-synch Disney songs.

As a teen, she was shy; music, though, was her outlet. Shed enlist her sisters to film her videos, and she started working on music for real, with a sisters friend, who had this little studio where he only did, like, metal bands, she said. Its literally in his attic, sometimes he would give me studio time, and Id just record my demos. Id be on my laptop and make little productions.

Back then I wanted to get discovered more than anything, she remembered, smiling at her navet. But I never did. And then I learned like, Shit, I gotta do it myself.

Shed use MySpace and YouTube to try to get the music out there. There are still traces online of that 15- and 16-year-old Petras, debuting songs on then-file-sharing site Napster, with titles like Fade Away (2008) and Last Forever (2009). The style was synthy Europop, with lyrics about breakups and love drama.

A decade later, when Petras first started getting press coverage in the US, the headlines often emphasized her supposed desire to Just Be a Pop Star, as if she wanted to transcend her transness. I dont care about being the first transgender teen idol at all, the New York Times quoted her as saying in 2018.

But what shes actually battled is trying to exist as a musician without having her celebrity defined by her trans identity outside of her terms. This is what happened early on. In the early 2000s, she became Germanys protoJazz Jennings, through documentaries about early transition, which exposed invasive details. I was 13, she said. My whole school saw that, and it was I felt used, I felt not seen, I felt not protected.

Today pop culture understands trans teens only just a little better; young celebrities like Hunter Schafer have storylines on teen dramas like Euphoria. But Petras felt isolated in school. I grew up going to gay clubs way too young, she said. I loved gay club music. I felt very at home with my gay friends and felt understood.

I wanted to be a raver, and I wanted to wear crazy outfits, she added. When she would step out into the media, on talk shows, they used her as a spectacle rather than an ambitious teen who wanted to be a musician. So she made the decision to get out of Europe, she said. Im seen as a joke, and nobody wants to talk about my music, people dont want to work with me. Im just, like, the tranny on TV to people.

Back then I wanted to get discovered more than anything, she remembered, smiling at her navet. But I never did. And then I learned like, Shit, I gotta do it myself.

Kim Petras preparing for the Met Gala in New York, September 2021

Fantasy is often better than reality, Karl Lagerfeld once said at least according to those refrigerator magnet quotes that attach themselves to celebrities. Petras cites that as her artistic philosophy: Imagining what I would be like if I was some spoiled Hollywood brat. The fantasy of something is super interesting, and new things can come out of that.

In reality, around 2011, when she was only 19, Petras came to LA with only $500 in her pocket, which meant $10 a day for food. Little Caesars pizza and Subway was my shit. She slept on a producer friends couch and started making connections. The Stereotypes, a production crew that later produced Bruno Mars massive hit Thats What I Like, gave her the first break: use of their studio.

They believed in me, she remembered fondly. For a pophead, she said, it was an honor to work with the makers of MTV reality trio Danity Kanes debut hit, Damaged. Through them, she ended up writing on JoJos 2013 album Jumping Trains, which was shelved; Fergie recorded one of her songs and never ended up using it; she ghost sang on one of the 2014 Danity Kane reunion songs. Finally, one of her songs, Bratz Whats Up, made it onto a 2015 Bratz web series.

A publishing deal contracting her to write songs with Dr. Lukes Prescription Songs allowed her to move into her own place, and she blew a lot of the money to live in the Hollywood Hills, that mythical slice of reality show dreams. She made industry friends like English electropop star Charli XCX, who featured her on 2017s Unlock It and fellow songwriter Aaron Josephs at a Halloween party in Toluca Lake. There wasnt a plan, she said. It was just kind of like, OK, use studios with Aaron, make more songs, make more demos, write songs for other people, maybe. But she decided to write for herself.

Josephs, a lover of Rage Against the Machine and Metallica, became a pophead like Petras after falling for Rihannas Only Girl (in the World). We love things that are silly and fun, and flamboyant and careless, he said of their chemistry. I think we just were both escapists. We wanted to make music that took you out of real life and was about having fun and living a fantasy, or just making people want to dance.

Hillside Boys, an homage to her new home, was one of their first creations. Its the details that make a pop song, and everything in it builds up to perfect catharsis: the fizzy champagne opening, 80s synths, melodic chord changes, the desperation of the belting vocals. Boys is like pop about the euphoria of pop, and the lyrics include one of her best lines, about the fleeting nature of summer love: You only stay until our tan lines match.

The bratty I Dont Want It At All is the other side of her. I want all my clothes designer, she sings. I want someone else to buy them.

I've always been obsessed with girls who get what they want and are strong and ditch the guys, and I was never that, she said.

Petras said she draws from her personal experiences for her music. I was always kind of like the girl who was fun for a little bit and then bye, for guys, and I ended up so obsessed with them and needy, she said about those early lyrics, chuckling. But I just wanted to be someone's girlfriend, and they never wanted to do that.

Theres a haziness, a girlish romance to her synth-pop, almost like talking about boys among girls.

Her early experiences made her self-protective in her personal life; shes never online-dated or dated anyone she doesnt know through friends. And theres a romantic, diffuse lens to the boy fantasies in her songs. Heart to Break, which features desperate belting about giving up her heart to pain, is really about the illusion of not caring and giving oneself up to love; Hillside Boys is a celebration of the idea of being into men, evoked through the distance of Paco Rabanne cologne. Theres a haziness, a girlish romance to her synth-pop, almost like talking about boys among girls.

She and Josephs shopped the songs to labels. We went to everybody, he said. Wed bring a guitar and just sing acoustic and a cappella demos of songs, and it got things started for us. Theres a video of her performing Hillside Boys in acoustic mode, with Josephs on guitar wearing an I Love Pop shirt. She introduces the song in her matter of fact, vaguely Teutonic inflection, So this is Hillside Boys. Its about rich boys breaking my heart. Then she adds the wink: A tragedy by Kim Petras.

According to Petras, no labels were interested. A lot of people were like you write gay club music, she said. As if that was a bad thing. (Thats an honor for me, she added.)

I was kind of known in LA cause I was always wearing a bun, and people called me bunhead, she recalled. So in 2017 she created BunHead Records to release her own music. She made videos for the singles, enlisting Paris Hilton as the fairy godmother sugar mommy with the credit card for I Dont Want It At All. (Hilton offered to appear after Petras reached out to her stylist to borrow a Hilton dress, which is in the video.) Heart to Break featured then-rising YouTuber Nikita Dragun, whod used I Dont Want It At All in one of her first makeup ads.

But all the radio stations were weirded out, Petras said. And it was like a lot of them had probably never met a trans person, also it was like, This is, like, loud and you sing really loud, and its not whats happening right now. They were like, Sorry.

The maximalism of Petrass sincerely glossy vocals was definitely out of step during the reign of indie-pop voice. But streaming, and performing at gay clubs and pride festivals, got her name out there, and she was one of those big-voiced pop girls beloved by queer men.

Kim Petras performs during Manchester Pride on Aug. 24, 2019, in Manchester, England

Heart to Break made it onto RuPauls Drag Race, used in one of the infamous lip syncs. Some people were down to play it, she said, and it went to the top 40 on radio, which was exciting. It was streamed more than 50 million times, and it helped her accrue a highly engaged social media following.

Petras keeps her fanbase interested by constantly releasing collaborations, one-off singles, and EPs. In 2019 she collaborated with Sophie, the hyperpop pioneer who died this year. I jumped on stage with her in Brooklyn at LadyLand Festival, Petras said. Her crowd of fans is incredible. And she was such a wild artist. She would play unreleased songs. She would drop stuff that's half-finished, that's still a demo. And it was just like full freedom. And I'm still very inspired by that.

Shes tried to re-create that freedom in her career through streaming, releasing singles and EPs on her own timetable. In the whimsical Halloween-themed album Turn Off the Light, Petras plays Elvira, and the thumping club anthem There Will Be Blood became one of her most-streamed songs on Spotify. There was also Clarity, which was inspired by a breakup and included some less upbeat lyrics as well as more overtly sexy songs. It was like everyone was like, You need to do midtempos, you need to not sing, thats how were going to play you on the radio, she said. And I was like, OK, bitch, you want something that sounds like everything else? Here you go. Do Me and Sweet Spot had a more house-y feel, with subdued vocals that were still very Petras-y.

She toured from Kansas City to London and saw herself mirrored back in a fanbase thats as passionate about pop as I am. The shows were like pophead conventions, and before her own performances, they whipped up the crowd with a DJ playing hits like Potential Breakup Song and Toxic, and fans were screaming these songs; those songs are their bible as much as theyre my bible, Petras said.

Screengrabs of Kim Petras performing "Coconuts" at the MTV Europe Music Awards in Hungary

But Petrass elevated profile has also come with higher scrutiny. With trans rights under siege, and trans representation moving into contesting cis beauty standards, Petrass image and celebrity can come off as assimilationist. And in 2018, Pitchfork ran a piece about Petras and what it means to be an apolitical trans pop star.

"I think my fantasies say more about me than my actual life, because Im just like a person, waking up in the morning, same old shit.

I asked her if she has ever thought about what it would mean to write songs more specifically from a trans perspective. I think I do, she answered. I mean I write honestly, I write about my fantasies, and for me I think my fantasies say more about me than my actual life, because Im just like a person, waking up in the morning, same old shit.

The wave of attention also brought on her first backlash. Amid the growing awareness of power imbalances in the music industry, the #MeToo movement, and Keshas 2014 accusations of sexual assault against Max Martin disciple Dr. Luke, there has been newfound surveillance of women artists signed to his label or publishing companies.

Like Saweetie and Doja Cat, Petras has been made to answer about why she works with his label. And Petrass first unofficial statement on the matter, casually dropped during an interview I would like my fans to know that I wouldnt work with somebody I believe to be an abuser of women, definitely not upset a lot of her fans.

The comment continues to follow her, and when Troye Sivan asked her in 2018 to join his tour she issued another statement: She did not want to "dismiss the experiences of others or suggest that multiple perspectives cannot exist at once."

When I brought this up in our interview, Petrass publicist got uncomfortable. Even though we did a preinterview and she knew Id ask about the backlash, she broke in: Thats not a fair question to ask her.

I just feel like a lot of it is like getting transferred to me, Petras said. A lot of people like to blame it on the women. I asked her if she understood that the questions are all part of a wider conversation around women in music and Svengalis. Of course. But I think I'm sometimes being held to a different standard than other artists, she countered.

Some stans have started shifting the conversation from the artists signed to Dr. Lukes companies to his continued dominance in the industry, and his power over women he signed early on in their career. Doja Cats fans theorized that theyre tied to contracts in which Dr. Luke gets publishing credits regardless of his involvement. Becky G eventually sued him because of the restrictiveness of her contract. Petras was guarded on what she could say about her agreement. So people want me to quit making music? she said at one point. Because thats the option.

But when news came out of her signing to Republic this year, fans uncovered that it was for a Dr. Luke sublabel, Amigo, and wrote about the ethics of supporting her music. I've kind of become a punching bag for that, and thats what it is, and thats OK.

The afternoon we met, Petrass long nails were shaped like bloody knives in anticipation of a Halloween Kills premiere party. She was going to a dinner with Marc Jacobs and Sofia Coppola later that night. The publicists apartment had music history on the walls, including a Bob Dylan painting in the living room, and in the kitchen, a picture of bubblegum punk pioneer Debbie Harry cooking in the kitchen. With Britney blasting in the background, Petras would later pose on a piano and a rooftop, as the apartment suddenly became a stage.

Im a shy person until I get onstage, she said. I get to be this person I wish I was in real life. Thats when I feel like I don't think about what I do. I just am and I feel powerful, and I feel like I can do anything.

But theres still a shyness to Petras, and not in the annoying way of extroverts who claim to be introverts. She comes off more like an excited studio nerd than a diva performer. I was kind of more fearless as a kid than I am now, to be honest, or that I became later, she said.

During the pandemic, Petras got three dogs: a pug, a Pomeranian, and a Chihuahua mix. They help her unplug. She started writing for her new album, moving in with Aaron Josephs and queer DJ Alex Chapman. Into an Airbnb in LA, and we started writing sex songs, a million sex songs, and there is this element of Europop in it, which I dont think Ive fully explored, she said.

The result was on view in her homecoming performance on the MTV Europe Music Awards in November. On that stage, in Hungary, she unveiled her newest songs and a more out-there sexual persona. She turned the stage into a tropical Carmen Miranda fruit stand, shimmying as she sang about giving her chest pet names. Mary Kate and Ashley, she sang-sashayed, everybody loves the twins.

In Hit It From the Back, she mixed her love of heartbreak drama with the specter of anal (Before you break my heart / Ill let you hit it from the back). In the performance, she hip-thrusted a rope with a bevy of jockstrapped dancers. (I came I pegged I conquered, she tweeted after.)

The high-budget staging was unlike anything Id seen from Petras before. Shes now working with Wendy Goldstein, the same woman who helped guide the careers of pop titans like Ariana Grande and The Weeknd. I have full creative freedom, in which I make the decisions, she said. I get to release whatever I want whenever I want, but I still get the advice.

When we talked, she admitted that starting with the neo-disco track Future Starts Now on the VMAs was a bit of a misleading first single in a way. She said the untitled forthcoming album (no release date yet) is a lot more the songs [she] didnt dare to do, its a lot more sex, its a lot more going for really going for being outrageous. When I first heard the lead single, Future Starts Now, it sounded more like Dua Lipa than Petras, and maybe a concession to a label asking for a broad song for a big audience. You're more than just anybody, she sings. One day, everyone will notice.

But relistening to it after we met, I can hear how she smuggled her message in; its really a queer club-kid anthem. Dont let love get out of focus, she sings. And she doesnt mean romantic love, but love as life energy, the kind that powers people on dance floors. I know you can take the pressure, it continues. Take the pain and make it pleasure. Its the philosophy that has carried her this far.

The newer songs push the envelope of white girl pop divas; Hit It From the Back is like a less metaphoric version of Grandes Side to Side (which is saying something). The tracks come off differently on an MTV stage than in a gay club, though, where theyre received by a queer gaze that loves femininity outside of cis-hetero anxieties. In the broader pop landscape, these songs could still seem out of step with a moment when even aspirational Disney princess pop divas have gone punk.

I asked Petras if she thought shed have to edit herself for broad appeal. I wouldnt enjoy what I'm doing, she said. I want to love my life, I want to feel free as an artist, I want to express myself, she added, with conviction. I dont really need a huge hit to feel successful. Ive been feeling successful since I could tour. That's what's driven me, my career and this goal of me on a huge stage, with people who sing my songs. That was all Ive ever dreamt about.

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Kim Petras Wants To Be The Next Big Pop Star - BuzzFeed News