Double Black Diamond in the Rough

Everyone is welcome, as long as you can walk back up once you ski down.

About 330 winding, transmission-straining miles north of Baghdad’s Green Zone, in the autonomous Kurdistan region of Iraq, Iraqi Kurds, and a few foreigners, are re-discovering skiing near the border with Iran.

Here on Mount Halgurd—the second-highest mountain in Iraq—the ski runs are good, the powder is fresh, and the tourist crowds remain nonexistent. Take a photograph and, if you Photoshop out the squat, concrete houses and the military checkpoints, you could easily be in Telluride or Whistler, Verbier or Courmayeur.

There are a few other differences, too. The Kurdish soldiers manning the checkpoints often get bored and can detain visitors for an interminable amount of time. Leftover land mines from the Iran-Iraq War, in the 1980s, remain buried beneath the snow. But neither of those obstacles deterred 35 people, including eight teenage Syrian refugees, three Americans, two Europeans, and about 20 locals, from coming here for the Third Annual Iraq Ski Rally, which took place from February 19 to 22.

Kurdish soldiers guard the area around Choman. On occasion they join in on the skiing, too.

Skiing in Iraq is not as much of a misnomer as it may sound. Black-and-white-film footage from 1952 shows Iraqis zigzagging down Mount Halgurd on wooden skis. However, there’s been little skiing since the end of the reign of King Faisal II, in 1958, after which a series of wars between the Kurds and Iraq’s central authority, Iraq’s invasions of Iran and Kuwait, and the 11-year occupation by the United States discouraged almost all tourism, let alone adventure expeditions.

Omar Hussein, 34, grew up in Choman, a village a few miles from Mount Halgurd. He often heard stories about how, in the 1970s, before Saddam Hussein seized power, his father’s friends and neighbors would climb up the mountain, clip on wooden skis, and sail down the slope. When he was a teenager, Hussein and some of his teenage friends tried it themselves. Lacking the proper ski equipment, they used their sneaker laces to tie themselves to old skis and pushed off downhill with their lives in their hands.

Choman or “Chomanix”?

Then, in 2011, a Norwegian skier named Kit Monsen came to the area in an attempt to become the first person to ski Halgurd (11,834 feet) and the nearby Cheekha Dar (11,847 feet), which straddles the Iran-Iraq border. “All I heard was that there is snow at this time of year so I brought my gear and off we went,” Monsen told Travelmag. Hussein helped lead the team, but rain and snow kept them from the top.

It wasn’t until February 2018 that the American mountaineer and Iraq War veteran Stacy Bare, in partnership with Dutch guide Jan Bakker, led the first complete ski ascent and descent of Halgurd. They went away nicknaming the mountain range “Chomanix,” a twist on the renowned French skiing village of Chamonix.

These attempts gave Hussein an idea. “I bought these other cheap skis from Iran, and we started skiing around.” Then, when other private expeditions from Europe and America arrived in Choman, he bought their skis, too. “Soon enough we had enough for a small club.” Hussein is now the owner of the adventure outfitter VI Kurdistan and co-founder of the Iraq Ski Rally.

A backcountry skier sails down a pristine run in Iraq’s Zagros Mountains.

“For those who want to just ski a nice piste, have a beer, then go to a disco, it’s probably not so appealing,” said James Willcox, co-founder of adventure-travel company Untamed Borders, which brings a group of international tourists here most years. But, he adds, “the chance to truly blaze a tourist trail is a rare opportunity.”

This year a group of holidaying NGO workers aided Hussein’s company in constructing a makeshift downhill course for the ski rally. They then helped newcomers and regulars alike strap on new K2 skis and led each other down the piste before hiking back up and doing it all again—depending on how many tumbles they had taken. On the second day of the event, the group’s top skiers climbed to a nearby ridgeline and skied down as fast as they could, with awards given to the top three “local” skiers and the top three “international” skiers.

Winners of the downhill race during the second Iraq Ski Rally. Each participant climbed up 2,000 feet before skiing down.

While the Korek Mountain Resort to the west offers the country’s one and only chairlift, and a mediocre skiing experience, to backcountry enthusiasts the area around Choman offers seemingly unlimited runs. But adventure tourists and local skiers face a tough buy-in from the regional government and the military.

Stringent searches—or “having tea”—with the local and regional police in Choman happen frequently to outsiders. And while Sasan Othman Awni, the minister of municipalities and tourism of the Kurdistan Regional Government, says he is open to adventure tourism, according to Hussein, most of the ministry’s people “don’t really know the meaning of adventure; they [only] know about tourism.”

For now, however, the slopes of Europe get more crowded, and the people of this region, who have been leaving—and dying—on boats bound for Europe, hope that the likes of Vail Resorts, Alterra Mountain Company, or the Powdr Corporation will share their vision and help popularize skiing in Iraq.

“There is more to our country than oil and war,” says Hussein. “There is so much natural beauty here and so many friendly people—it has forever been overlooked by everyone.”

A Rebel with a Cause

Kobra, Soheila Sokhanvari’s portrait of the revolutionary Iranian filmmaker Kobra Saeedi, on show now at the Barbican, in London.

Wild at Heart, Sokhanvari’s portrait of the Iranian singer Pouran Shapoori.

Never one to adhere to social mores, the Iranian filmmaker Kobra Saeedi wasn’t about to start when Ayatollah Khomeini’s regime took power in Iran. On International Women’s Day in 1979, she protested the compulsory hijab and made her feelings well known by filming it. For the insubordination, Khomeini’s Gasht-e Ershad, or morality police, sent Saeedi to the notorious Evin Prison for political dissidents, which was followed by several years in psychiatric institutions. Some time in the mid-80s, the regime released her, and she fled to Germany, a refugee.

Sokhanvari at the opening of her Barbican exhibition, “Rebel, Rebel.”

But looking at Kobra, Soheila Sokhanvari’s 2022 painting of Saeedi, who went by the nom de théâtre Shahrzad, one sees a self-assured catalyst, her hair half-covered, cigarette between her bright-red-polished nails, looking lost in thought, as if plotting her next act. Saeedi is just one of 31 radical women painted by Sokhanvari for her show “Rebel, Rebel,” on now at the Barbican Centre’s Curve Gallery, in London. If the scheduling of the show seems calculated, it’s not. The Barbican had “Rebel, Rebel” on the books long before the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in Gasht-e Ershad custody sparked the demonstrations that have swept Iran since.

The Love Addict, Sokhanvari’s portrait of the Iranian singer Googoosh.

Born in Shiraz in 1964, Sokhanvari was an early witness to the 1979 revolution, before her parents fled to the U.K. three months after the overthrow of Mohammad Reza Shah. The multi-media artist has a gift for pinching the nerve of the Iranian theocracy—she has done it in the past with her “Crude Oil” drawings, using actual oil to comment on Iran’s thirst, and her “Passport” series played on government bureaucracies.

“Rebel, Rebel” is in the same vein. Sokhanvari has taken Persian miniature painting—an art that, like book illustration, uses rich color and balanced, meticulous patterns to capture deities or mythological creatures—and tweaked it to honor her own heroes: poets, actors, writers, and singers who were arrested, exiled, sentenced to death, or forced to renounce their careers and possessions when Khomeni came to power. She has furthered the apostasy by painting real women, which also contravenes the Muslim prohibition on “idolatry.”

Under the current theocracy, unless they are murdered by the state for acts contrary to the government or used for advocacy campaigns, Iranian women are likely to be consigned to an obscure corner of history. Sokhanvari has immortalized a group of strong, vocal women and given them an alternative, ethereal narrative. —Adrian Brune

Only the Sound Remains, Sokhanvari’s portrait of the Iranian singer Ramesh.

“Rebel, Rebel” is on at the Barbican Centre, in London, through February 26

Adrian Brune is an American writer based in London

Rhapsody of Innocence, Sokhanvari’s portrait of the Iranian soprano Monir Vakili.

The Original Walter White

Walter White, third from right, and others gather in support of Isaac Woodard, third from left, a veteran who was attacked and blinded by police, 1946. (The leading assailant was acquitted by an all-white jury.)

Few have heard of Walter Francis White, the civil-rights activist, key figure of the Harlem Renaissance, writer, and political horse trader. This is likely by design rather than circumstance.

Most people outside his inner circle, especially those who mattered the most in the civil-rights movement, didn’t like Walter White very much. He was annoyingly chatty, constantly on the go, prone to bragging about his exploits, miserly at his job as executive secretary of the N.A.A.C.P., and relatively selfish. Moreover, White had a knack for alienating some of his fellow crusaders, W. E. B. Du Bois among them.

White, who was born in Atlanta to Black parents in 1893, used his ability to “pass” as white to his advantage. This would come to haunt him in his later years, but early in his career White relished his role as trickster and charlatan, most of all when he could manipulate white people into telling him about the horrific lynchings and other atrocities they’d committed against Blacks in post-Reconstruction America.

White in 1930, then the executive secretary of the N.A.A.C.P.

It’s not as if no one has tried to immortalize this life—White even wrote a memoir, A Man Called White, in 1948. But today the history books tend to omit mentions of White. Other attempts to bring this character to the modern era, mostly academic volumes, have fallen on similarly deaf ears. (I even made my own attempt at a White biography after chronicling the Tulsa Race Massacre and the city’s fight for reparations for The Nation in 2002.)

None of this stopped A. J. Baime—best known for his chronicling one of the greatest Le Mans races of all time in Go Like Hell: Ford, Ferrari, and Their Battle for Speed and Glory at Le Mans, later adapted into the movie Ford v Ferrari, starring Christian Bale and Matt Damon—from taking up White as a pandemic project. Baime’s treatise, White Lies: The Double Life of Walter F. White and America’s Darkest Secret, is likely the shortest volume on its subject to date. It’s also the best chance at White’s transcendence into popular history.

Civil Rights’ Scarlet Pimpernel?

One could say that Walter F. White, the man, social crusader, and 1940s cultural icon, was birthed in blood, came of age in blood, and spent his life in blood. He was the grandson of former slaves, and his light skin descended through his mother’s grandmother, a slave who gave birth to six children allegedly fathered by her owner, William Henry Harrison, the ninth president of the U.S.

White was raised in Atlanta, the second son of an upwardly mobile middle-class Black family, thinking nothing of his skin color until the Atlanta race riot of 1906, in which a mob of white men descended on the Black section of the city.

“I knew then who I was,” White wrote of the 1906 Atlanta race riot in his autobiography. “I was a Negro, a human being with an invisible pigmentation which marked me a person to be hunted, hanged, abused, discriminated against, kept in poverty and ignorance in order that those whose skin was white would have readily at hand a proof of their superiority. Yet as a boy there in the darkness amid the tightening fright, I knew the inexplicable thing—that my skin was as white as the skin of those who were coming at me.”

White, far right, with his graduating class from Atlanta University, circa 1916. He would move to New York to work for the fledgling N.A.A.C.P. two years later.

White’s penchant for activism was discovered early on by the eminent scholar and writer James Weldon Johnson, who would soon become executive secretary of the N.A.A.C.P. Johnson hired White as an assistant secretary in the burgeoning office in New York, plucking him out of a career selling insurance and placing him in the middle of America’s saddest and most shameful moment: the era when its white citizens made great efforts to kill or remove its Black ones.

“Many readers will find in this book occurrences that will feel impossible to believe,” Baime writes in the introduction, “events that you may think could never have happened in the United States of America. For others, this story will hit closer to home. The difference between these two readers is exactly what White Lies is about. White, Black, and the shades in between.”

“I knew the inexplicable thing—that my skin was as white as the skin of those who were coming at me.”

White’s own odyssey began with a lynching in Tennessee in 1918, after which, instead of allowing the N.A.A.C.P.’s protest to rest with letters to the governor and President Woodrow Wilson, White practically begged Johnson to allow him to “go to the scene and make a first-hand investigation,” he wrote. From there, White “started a phase of work for the association which neither it nor I had contemplated when I was employed.” White would be deployed to nearly every lynching or race massacre that took place from then until the late 1920s, when he took over as executive secretary for the N.A.A.C.P.

Other than what he gleaned through his wily street smarts, White learned practically everything from Johnson. The two shopped at Brentano’s bookstore after lunch at Horn & Hardart, an Automat in Greenwich Village. “Thus began for me a liberal education in contemporary literature,” White wrote, “as Jim [Johnson] either purchased for me or recommended my buying books of fiction, poetry, and history and discussion of social problems which he thought would be of permanent value.

White with his first wife, Gladys, and their two children in their Harlem apartment, sometimes called “the White House of Negro Harlem.”

The two men were also known for their lavish parties in Harlem, during which guests of both races—from composer George Gershwin and bass baritone Paul Robeson to writers Dorothy Parker, Du Bois, H. L. Mencken, and Carl Van Vechten—would sing, dance, and gossip into the night.

Once he ascended to Johnson’s seat, White made powerful friends—and Caesar-like enemies.

New York governor Al Smith recruited White to advise his presidential campaign in 1928, and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt had White’s ear during her tenure at the White House. He traveled the world speaking on behalf of the N.A.A.C.P., and testified in Congress in support of federal anti-lynching legislation, which, despite all efforts, still hasn’t passed to this day.

But White lived during the Great Depression and World War II—a time of great austerity—and did so with a flippant attitude. When he cut funding for The Crisis, Du Bois’s journal of African-American affairs in a cost-saving measure, he converted a former supporter into the man who twisted the knife.

With a cadre of young newcomers, including Roy Wilkins and Thurgood Marshall, Du Bois eventually pushed White to the fringes of the N.A.A.C.P. White nearly guaranteed his ouster when he divorced his first wife, Gladys Powell, a Black woman of some standing in the Harlem community with whom he had two children, and married Poppy Cannon, a white socialite originally from South Africa.

By the late 1940s, White, a three-pack-a-day smoker, was in ill health, having suffered two major heart attacks. On March 21, 1955, at the age of 61, after describing to Cannon his exciting first day back at the office following a long period of convalescence, he picked up his latest book manuscript, thumbed through it, and fell to the floor, dead from another massive coronary.

From left, President Harry Truman, Eleanor Roosevelt, and White gear up for an address at the Lincoln Memorial, in Washington, D.C.

Baime’s book conveys the highlights of White’s life without bogging readers down in the details. But some of the things he misses—the 1919 Omaha race riot, which destroyed parts of the Black neighborhood of the small city, for instance—deserve a cursory examination.

White’s own conflict and social isolation because of his skin color also needs some airing. At best, the “Negro by choice,” as The New York Times once referred to him, was a source of resentment for the many Blacks who knew of him sleeping on WHITES ONLY Pullman train cars or attending events generally reserved for white New York society. At worst, he was mistaken as a white interloper in a Black neighborhood and zinged by a bullet or two.

Still, it’s nothing short of amazing to see, for the first time, White grace the mainstream.

White’s death only highlighted his stature—a profile in The New Yorker, the covers of Time and Ebony—in the early days of the movement. More than a thousand mourners filed past his body, “laid out in a mahogany coffin, covered with white carnations,” at St. Martin’s Episcopal Church in Harlem. During the funeral, dignitaries from around the world lionized White.

But New York’s Black newspaper the Amsterdam News probably gave him the finest tribute of all: “White’s cocky aggressiveness stayed with him as long as he lived—as did his boyhood vanity. But it was these very qualities that helped to make him the best lobbyist our race has ever produced, and one of the very best of any race.”

400 pages, Mariner, $30

White Lies is available at your local independent bookstore, on Bookshop, and on Amazon.

Adrian Brune is an American writer based in London. She has written extensively on Black and post-Reconstruction history for The Nation and elsewhere since 2001

John Bird’s Big Issue

Prince Charles buys a copy of The Big Issue from a vendor, 1998.

No British institution does pomp better than Buckingham Palace, but the House of Lords comes close. Its gold-plated doors are opened by members in tuxes and tails every day. Of all the lords who huff and puff and blow hard in its stately halls, however, the one least expected there—Sir John Bird, whose story has echoes of The Pursuit of Happyness in its sheer unlikeliness—treats the place like his personal digs.

Born in a Notting Hill slum, Bird became homeless at age 5 (“My mum and dad didn’t recognize the rent man. He was not more important than cigarettes and drink,” he says), and he was in and out of juvenile-detention centers starting at the age of 12. He learned reading and printmaking in prison.

“This screw [guard] came in one day and asked me if I wanted a book,” Bird, 75, who wears a blue pin-striped suit, black shirt and tie, well-worn Doc Martens, a Royal Society for the Protection of Birds lapel pin, and a day’s worth of stubble, says. “I must’ve paused, and he said, ‘Oh, you can’t read, can you?’ I’d never, ever admitted to anybody that I’d been through Roman Catholic school and learned all about Jesus and everything, but that I was pretending I could read.”

Sir John Bird, who became homeless at age five, in Notting Hill.

Bird also started drawing and painting, and eventually won a scholarship to the Chelsea College of Art and Design. But not long after, he went on the lam from the police—once more due to petty theft—and escaped to Scotland, where he started sleeping rough again.

On the streets of Edinburgh, Bird’s fortune changed when he met Gordon Roddick, the soon-to-be husband of Body Shop founder Anita Roddick. “In 1991, Gordon was in New York and saw a copy of Street News and thought [it] was brilliant,” Bird says of the street newspaper sold by homeless people in New York starting in 1989. Roddick was inspired to start something similar in the U.K. and tapped Bird to help found and run it. They called it The Big Issue.

“He ultimately asked me to help because I had been a rough sleeper and a street drinker and had been in and out of prisons and homelessness,” Bird says. “And he said, ‘You know, you’re like these people … and you are not sentimental about the poor.’”

The Early Days

Since The Big Issue’s launch, in the early 90s, big-name Hollywood actors, including the press-shy Benedict Cumberbatch and Michael Sheen, have endorsed the publication or signed up as ambassadors, as have a number of politicians—Ed Miliband and David Lammy—and perhaps their most famous satirist, Armando Iannucci. The man who considers himself a “working-class Tory” has published exclusives from J. K. Rowling and talked the Archbishop of Canterbury into giving street sales a try.

George Michael graces the cover of The Big Issue, November 1996.

When pop star George Michael had to reckon with his penchant for public sex in Hampstead Heath, he went to The Big Issue with the story. “I did not know the music of George Michael. I probably still don’t,” Bird says. “But I knew he had had a public struggle and was trying to cope with some of the ‘shit’ that people I knew were coping with—sex, drugs, mental health. So George seemed a natural fit with The Big Issue—people winning control of demons.”

When Michael appeared on the November 11, 1996, cover of The Big Issue, “we not only sold more copies, we helped increase the reputation for a place where honesty and integrity were the hallmark of our journalism,” Bird says. “Increasingly vendors were seen as holders of news that was worth having.”

The Big Issue had arrived.

“George [Michael] seemed a natural fit with The Big Issue—people winning control of demons.”

Since then, the Glasgow-based editorial staff of about 15 people has put out an issue every week for its vendors to sell. Today, Bird sells the paper to poor and homeless vendors for £1.50 (about $2). They then sell it to the public for £3 ($3.99) and pocket the profits.

After 20 or so years as editor of The Big Issue, in 2013 Bird awoke in the middle of the night in a crisis of conscience. “I realized that the reason people were saying that John Bird and his ilk were good at thinking outside the box was because the box wasn’t working,” he says. “And the box was Parliament.”

So he applied for a position as a life peer in the House of Lords, a seat appointed by the monarch on the advice of the prime minister, in lieu of acquiring one the old-fashioned way: inheriting it. “I’ve never been a form filler, and I’ve never been good at interviews. It took about two years to get in, and then they rang me and said, ‘Congratulations, John Bird, you are now Lord Bird of Notting Hill.’”

Selling The Big Issue on the streets of London.

Bird has since become the lords’ go-to guy for poverty schemes and initiatives. He also happens to be the best thing going at local galleries. “He’s a bit like my old boss, Roger Daltrey,” says Ruth Law, Bird’s right-hand woman, who worked for the singer-songwriter and patron of the Teenage Cancer Trust before arriving at The Big Issue four years ago. “He’s very plainspoken, very down to earth, and not afraid to tell it like it is.”

During the coronavirus pandemic, Bird engineered The Big Issue to come “full circle in about two years,” says Paul McNamee, the magazine’s Glasgow-based editor, converting it from a street publication that dealt in cash to the digital world. When the first U.K. lockdown shut down street vendors, The Big Issue made subscriptions available online, with proceeds going to the out-of-work vendors.

This year marks the 30th anniversary of the founding of the publication, which has just undergone a complete redesign by Matt Willey, currently the art director of The New York Times Magazine. McNamee excitedly describes it as “a bit of the Esquire of the 60s, Time Out of the 70s, some grit, more classic features, and maximizing the great content that we have online.”

Back in the House of Lords …

Bird chats with people here and there as he leads me onto the outdoor terrace of the House of Lords, where a sticky toffee pudding awaits him, and continues with his discourse on the issue nearest to his heart: the homeless.

“Most of the other lords are angled toward giving the poor relief, holding their hand, helping to sustain them, and few pieces of legislation are actually geared toward moving people out of poverty,” says Bird. His dedication to The Big Issue illustrates a different approach to tackling the problem: giving people jobs.

Bird, left, Gordon Roddick, right, and members of the Big Issue staff at the newspaper’s launch, 1991.

Today, Bird is preparing for an address requesting £360 million (nearly $409 million) for rent arrears that he will soon deliver to the Lords Chamber. “Because I had been poor and I’d got out, I don’t look at the poor as another species,” he tells me. “If they are another species, then I have just managed to leap the species gap.”

The time for the speech arrives. Bird’s legislative aides rise from their chairs and make eyes toward the gilded chamber doors—their signal for Lord Bird to quit chatting. Shortly after, Bird appears on the floor, asking that his fellow lords take note of the combined impact of the end of pandemic aid and the rising cost of heating due to new environmental regulations as, “and I am sorry to use the cliché that everybody talks about … a perfect storm for hundreds of thousands—millions—of people who are caught in this kind of trap.”

For 15 minutes, Bird speaks about the never-ending cycle of poverty in the U.K., the importance of investing in social education, government tokenism, and how Winston Churchill had to “borrow the future—an enormous amount of the future—to defeat the Nazis.... We cannot poodle around with poverty.”

Bird listens to another hour of mumbled responses from his contemporaries before ending in scratch-your-back flair. “When I saw [Prime Minister Boris] Johnson immediately after he got elected, he came and he put his arms around me … and he said, ‘Thank you, John, for the job.’

“I said, ‘Do me a favor.... Remember the homeless.’ … He owes me, and I’m calling it in.”

Adrian Brune is a London-based journalist

To support The Big Issue, you can buy a copy of the magazine from your local London vendor, buy a subscription (vendors receive 50 percent of the net profits), or make a donation to the Big Issue Foundation

Kate Moennig

The L Word actress, right, and her co-star Leisha Hailey are the voices behind the Pants podcast.

Kate Moennig is a Philly girl through and through. While everything about her may point to Hollywood—daughter of a showbiz mother, cousin of Gwyneth Paltrow, drama-school graduate—her accent gives away her upbringing as Center City–born, cheesesteak-eating, Catholic-school rebel.

These days Moennig (pronounced “Mehnig”), aged 43, lives in Los Angeles, where she moved a few years before filming The L Word, the long-running Showtime series following a group of lesbians, alongside her friend and co-star, Leisha Hailey. When the coronavirus hit the U.S., in the late winter of 2020, Moennig and Hailey decided to start their own podcast, which premiered in June of that year. They called it Pants. (The name comes from the duo’s L Word nickname: two legs of the same pair of pants.)

When they started off, “we didn’t have a concept,” Moennig tells me from her home. “We didn’t know anything except each other and our friendship and our history.”

Moennig and Hailey in The L Word: Generation Q.

“People enjoyed the friendship between Shane and Alice”—their characters on The L Word and now the reboot for the millennial crowd, L Word: Generation Q—“and there is only so much real estate on TV,” Hailey adds. “So, we thought, Let’s just talk about who we are and see if people dig it.”

Pants features interviews—Paltrow makes a cameo—as well as talk about the show that launched Moennig’s and Hailey’s careers. The hosts also field questions phoned in from lesbian fans around the world; most recently, Moennig and Hailey launched a live podcast tour. (The first show took place in Nashville in early August, while the next one, likely in October, will happen virtually due to concerns over the Delta variant.)

“People actually relate to [Pants], and that proves a point that we didn’t intend to put out there,” Moennig says. “We all have similarities. We’re all just trying to function in this world and get things done and live our lives and figure it out.”

Sister of the Traveling Pants

The only child of Broadway dancer Mary Zahn and violin-maker William Moennig—the half-brother of Blythe Danner—Kate “was the baby of The L Word” when, at 27, she starred in the show’s 2004 debut. Back then, most everyone could have guessed that Moennig played for the same team. Everyone but Moennig.

Moennig, right, with her wife, Ana Rezende.

“I grew up Catholic and I went to Catholic school…. I wasn’t really in an environment where I could explore that, especially in the 80s and the 90s,” Moennig says.

“Back then, that shit did not exist,” Moennig told RuPaul on his What’s the Tee podcast in 2019, one of the first occasions in which she publicly discussed her sexual orientation. “Oddly enough, when I got The L Word, that’s where my wheels started turning…. But I didn’t have the vocabulary for it. [The L Word] reshaped my life. It was the first time when [being gay] was welcomed and discussed, and everyone was so open and proud and confident. I had never seen it before.”

After The L Word came to an end, in 2009, Moennig, who is married to the Brazilian filmmaker and musician Ana Rezende, appeared in a few independent films and joined the cast of another Showtime series, Ray Donovan.

“We all left the show in 2009 feeling like we never really finished,” Hailey says. “We all could have gone on much longer, but it was back in the era when television series stopped at six seasons … and no show came along, which we always assumed it would, to fill the shoes of The L Word.”

For many people, Pants has occupied that space. And Moennig and Hailey have managed not to get sick of each other—though, like a true Philadelphian, Moennig believes she is the better driver. “There is a lot of braking involved with Leisha—a lot of running up to the light and jamming on the brake,” Moennig says.

Naturally, Hailey disagrees. “Kate is a grumpy driver. She takes on the whole journey … ”

Ons Jabeur

Celebrating a victory over Russia’s Daria Kasatkina.

There are few knowns in the life of Ons Jabeur—even without the coronavirus mixing it up. The 26-year-old Tunisian tennis player went into England’s grass-court season earlier this summer unsure of how she might perform after months of tournament bubbles. She could hardly have predicted that she would emerge from the Viking Classic Birmingham with her first W.T.A. singles title and from Wimbledon Centre Court with a win over tennis icon Venus Williams.

But Jabeur had dreamed of—and practiced for—one definite: her post-match interview. She had been rehearsing it in her head for years, over dozens of grueling hours spent on the largely unnoticed backcourts of Grand Slams.

When her time in the spotlight finally came, Jabeur said there are “so many Arab people watching me and supporting me.… I don’t want the journey to stop here. Hopefully, whoever is watching—and I hope so many of the young generation is watching—they will be inspired and I can be playing with a lot of players [from Tunisia] next to me.”

A killer shot if there ever was one, at Wimbledon last month.

Indeed, as many surprised commentators have alluded to since Jabeur’s disruptive 2020 season, 2021 might prove to be her year as she enters the U.S. Open season. Jabeur has cracked the Top 25 in the world rankings; tied this year’s Wimbledon champion and W.T.A. No. 1, Ashleigh Barty, in tour matches won; and has earned nearly $1 million in prize money. Just yesterday, she topped 2019 U.S. champion Bianca Andreescu in the Canadian Open. “Is Ons Jabeur … a veteran? Or is she the Next Big Thing?” asked the tennis writer Steve Tignor.

But Jabeur is not new; in fact, she has been one of the most enduring—and endearing—professional players on tour since 2011, when she came on the scene with her junior French Open win just months after Tunisia re-emerged from the Arab Spring. Does it annoy her that it has taken tennis’s talking heads so long to come around? Jabeur, speaking from her home in Tunis, is diplomatic: “I am happy that curiosity about tennis in Africa is growing.”

“Sometimes you need someone to show you the path,” Jabeur says. “When I was young … I struggled and I didn’t believe in myself, because I didn’t see many Tunisians before me. I had to say to myself, O.K., it’s a small country. It’s Africa, but we are human beings, we are capable.

“I hope we can change this overall mentality one day.”

Ons Jabeur with her mother, who started bringing her to tennis courts at the age of three.

And, backcourt by backcourt, Jabeur is changing it. She has paved the way for other Middle Eastern and African tennis professionals, including Egyptians Mayar Sherif (W.T.A. No. 97) and Mohamed Safwat (A.T.P. No. 175), fellow Tunisian Malek Jaziri (A.T.P. No. 269), and Algerian Ines Ibbou (W.T.A. No. 610).

“Knowing where she comes from and the conditions she faced, she wouldn’t be at that level without a strong, deep determination,” says Ibbou, who spent time training with Jabeur during the coronavirus lockdown. “Because of that, I really think she can achieve something big, like winning a Grand Slam soon.”

Safwat, who experienced his own 2020 boost after winning the African Games in 2019, agrees. “What [Jabeur] has done so far is inspiring for all of Arab tennis—male and female players,” he said from the Tokyo Olympics. “I believe she can still do more.”

Eyes on the Prize

The youngest of four children, Jabeur grew up in the coastal town of Sousse and started playing tennis at the age of three. After playing the African circuit for 10 years, Jabeur first gained international attention with her 2011 girls’ singles Grand Slam as well as with her style of play. She loves to “mix it up,” she says, hitting a baseline stroke, a drop shot, and a winner—sometimes all in the same point.

At age 13, Jabeur moved to Tunis to train, and then, briefly, to Belgium and France, where she resisted her coaches’ instincts to mold her into a power baseliner. “They wanted to change my game and told me to play like Sharapova,” Jabeur says. “I thought, How can I be like Sharapova when we are completely different players? Now I rely on myself much more.”

Tunisians have taken to referring to Jabeur as “Onstoppable.”

Since her landmark appearance at Wimbledon last year, Jabeur has “joined the greats,” read a headline in the Arabic-language newspaper Al Chourouk. Tunisians now call her “Onstoppable,” and as the country battles the highest coronavirus-death rate in the region—and braves renewed political turmoil following the president’s coup-like power grab last week—it looks to her for moxie. Earlier this summer, Jabeur auctioned off the rackets she used in her Wimbledon victories to raise $26,900 for coronavirus treatments in Tunisia.

And while the young star still battles herself more than any other opponent, Jabeur also knows “that I am going to have that [Grand Slam] title that I always wanted in my life.

“I have a very good imagination, and trust me, as I fall asleep, I can see myself raising that trophy and giving the speech.”

Adrian Brune is a London-based journalist

The Fight for Tulsa’s Soul

Sometimes it’s hard to know whom to believe: the philanthropist or the preacher, the Good Samaritan or the man of God. Only, in this case, the future of a small Southwestern city—which 100 years ago this week saw the brutal massacre of as many as 300 people—may be at stake.

The philanthropist is George Bruce Kaiser, a native Tulsan, son of Holocaust survivors, and resident billionaire. Before he built his own local socio-political empire around fighting the segregation and inequality that still exists in Tulsa, Kaiser, 78, ran the day-to-day operations of his family’s oil-exploration company, Kaiser-Francis, followed by Bank of Oklahoma, now the state’s largest bank. Kaiser is close friends with Tulsa’s mayor, George Theron (G. T.) Bynum IV, the latest in a long line of oil-baron Tulsans to helm the city.

The Bloomberg of Tulsa, billionaire philanthropist George Kaiser.

The preacher is Reverend Robert Turner, the 38-year-old pastor of the Vernon A.M.E. Church and the voice of Tulsa’s Black community, as well as a thorn in the mayor’s side.

Bynum is the first mayor to take serious steps toward publicly acknowledging the Tulsa Massacre, which saw a white mob attack residents, homes, and businesses in the predominantly Black Tulsa neighborhood of Greenwood. In addition to claiming a staggering number of lives, the mob left destruction in its wake—in fact, Turner’s church is the only surviving structure left over from the massacre—and the few remaining survivors carry the trauma of what some have called the American Kristallnacht with them to this day.

Not only has Bynum helped bring renewed attention to the horrific and largely forgotten events of 1921, he has also backed the excavation of a mass grave thought to contain the bodies of those killed during the massacre, in order to give them proper burial.

But Turner is demanding something Bynum won’t budge on: reparations.

Same, but Different

While Kaiser has used his money to back projects that help the city’s poor and underserved, a large percentage of whom are Black or Hispanic, through the George Kaiser Family Foundation (G.K.F.F.) and the Tulsa Community Foundation (T.C.F.), Turner and his followers have taken to the streets to push for reparations for the events of 1921.

And although Kaiser and Turner have been around each other, most notably as a part of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission (Turner serves on the board with several Kaiser representatives), nowhere will the two men’s divergent opinions be more on display than during the events of the 100th anniversary of the massacre this weekend.

The Reverend Robert Turner holds the remains of Ed Lockard, a victim of the Tulsa Massacre and member of the church that Turner now helms.

“I believe in reparations in the broader sense,” Kaiser told me. “To repair the damage to those who have been denied an equal opportunity for life success” through private investment in the community, “not just to compensate for one unspeakably evil event or the survivors or heirs of it.”

Turner, on the other hand, refuses to endorse a private solution to a government atrocity, even if that fix comes from one of Tulsa’s most powerful—and wealthy—citizens. “The white community once called [the massacre] a myth, and any Black person who said anything was killed or run out of town,” Turner told me. “But if you burn down someone’s house, you do something. You atone. You make repair. That is the definition of reparations, and they don’t work if they are not from (the agencies) that caused the harm.”

That the centenary of the massacre comes at the heels of the Black Lives Matter movement, and with major thinkers such as Ta-Nehisi Coates, New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, and Harvard’s Henry Louis Gates Jr. advocating for reparations, puts Tulsa in the midst of a racial reckoning.

“If you burn down someone’s house, you do something. You atone.... That is the definition of reparations.”

Adding fuel to the flames, in mid-October, 12 wooden coffins emerged that could contain victims of the massacre. The coffins, a grim reminder of an unreconciled past, were discovered around the same time as the city was breaking ground on the $30 million, state-of-the-art Black-history center, Greenwood Rising, which was partially funded by the G.K.F.F.

Around this same time, a collection of parties, led by then 105-year-old massacre survivor Lessie Benningfield Randle, sued the city, alleging, among other matters, that Tulsa’s leaders had hatched “a plan to profit off the Massacre by turning it into a tourism attraction and primarily White-owned commercial hub,” and calling for reparations to remedy “this brutal, inhumane attack [which] robbed thousands of African Americans of their self-determination … and rendered members of the Greenwood community insecure in their lives.”

At 106 years old, Lessie Benningfield Randle is one of the last living survivors of the massacre. She is calling for reparations for survivors and their families.

In 2003, led by attorneys Johnnie Cochran and Charles Ogletree Jr., massacre survivors sued for civil-rights violations in a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court before getting dropped. It resulted in a poorly remunerated effort at private reparations (just $28,000, or roughly $200 per survivor).

So far, Greenwood Rising remains on track for completion by late summer. The Randle lawsuit has yet to be settled.

Changing the Game

Reparations, at least in the rest of the country, are gaining traction. In 1994, then Florida governor Lawton Chiles signed a bill granting survivors of the 1923 Rosewood Massacre $2.1 million. And earlier this year, the city of Evanston, Illinois, pledged $25,000 to 16 households as part of a $10 million resolution to address discriminatory housing policies in the Chicago area from 1919 to 1969.

Bynum said recently that mayors of other small cities in which racial atrocities took place, including the sites of the Red Summer of 1919, have called him for guidance. But the Tulsa mayor sees the situation as a criminal-justice issue. “If a member of your family is murdered here, then we will do everything we can to find out what happened to them,” he told The New York Times in February of last year.

“I know people have opinions when it comes to reparations, but the things I’m focused on is just not a cash payment to people,” Bynum has said. “Making cash payments to people really divides the community on something we should be united on.”

While Bynum is staunchly opposed to reparations, both Kaiser and Turner embrace the term, openly and frequently, if not with the same voice.

Kaiser, a slight, demure Harvard Business School grad who avoids society events, seldom gives interviews, and plays down his Forbes ranking, thinks cash reparations can’t work. “I participated in funding a reparations plan for just the then living survivors 20 years ago,” he says, “but the funding was never completed because of the [Cochran and Ogletree] lawsuit.” Kaiser sees his community building as a more efficient form of reparations.

“My family did not arrive in America or Tulsa until almost two decades after the massacre, through a last-minute escape from Nazi Germany, which orchestrated the murder of fully one-third of the worldwide Jewish community,” Kaiser says. “I have not supported [racial reconciliation in Tulsa] for any sense of personal or familial or even community guilt or responsibility, but just because it is the right thing to do.”

Turner sees things differently. A University of Alabama graduate and self-described millennial who is “passionate about my calling to speak truth to power,” he has gathered a crowd outside City Hall to demand reparations for massacre descendants nearly every Wednesday since he landed in Tulsa, in 2017. “For certain people to admit what happened was wrong, but not wrong enough to do something about it, shows just how little Black lives matter in Oklahoma,” Turner says.

“I have not supported [racial reconciliation in Tulsa] for any sense of personal or familial or even community guilt or responsibility, but just because it is the right thing to do.”

In the end, shouldn’t Tulsa’s next steps boil down to the wishes of the Black community?

Drew Diamond, a former board member of the Tulsa Reparations Coalition, thinks so. “We wanted educational funding and family payments, and we got a park with a monument in it. That’s the three-card monte,” Diamond tells me. “You find the card that makes us peaceful—reparations—but that card isn’t even on the table. Instead, Tulsa leadership says, ‘We gave you a park. We gave you the first Black police chief. Why are you complaining?’ The object is to get the communities worn out,” Diamond says, “so that they just give up.”

Despite the city’s phenomenal growth in the past 20 years, due to natural-gas wells and infrastructure investment, things are only getting worse for the Black community. The Tulsa Equality Indicators 2020 Annual Report (published by the Community Service Council, another organization Kaiser helps fund) found—among many other inequities—that the median household income by race from 2019 to 2020 increased for whites and decreased for Blacks, and that unemployment for Blacks was more than double that for whites.

Reverend Turner leads a march for reparations in Tulsa.

If the Randle reparations lawsuit doesn’t meet its end in Tulsa County District Court, where, coincidentally, Bynum’s uncle, Bill LaFortune—another former mayor and heir to an oil fortune—serves as a judge, it could be tossed to the Oklahoma Supreme Court, where Tulsa’s white-majority Republican ruling class is well entrenched. It could throw out the suit, or recommend that Tulsa leaders come up with a solution, bringing matters straight back into the hands of Bynum.

“You find the card that makes us peaceful—reparations—but that card isn’t even on the table. Instead, Tulsa leadership says, ‘We gave you a park. We gave you the first Black police chief. Why are you complaining?’”

While few will dispute the fact that Bynum has done more to solve Tulsa’s race problem than any other mayor, he favors Kaiser’s approach over Turner’s. “He’s a brilliant man who wants the best for Tulsa, so I appreciate having him as a sounding board when the occasion merits such a discussion,” Bynum has said of Kaiser. Bynum’s wife, Susan, is similarly close with Kaiser, working for Frederic Dorwart, Lawyers, which represents Kaiser in nearly all of his dealings.

So it should come as no surprise that despite demands for Tulsa’s white community to “Stop with these half-hearted efforts … and the illusion of action,” as summed up by Regina Goodwin, the state representative for the district that holds Greenwood, the Massacre Centennial weekend’s planned activities feel torn from the Kaiser playbook—well intentioned, perhaps, but not putting the needs and demands of Black people first.

The Centennial, which counts Kaiser among its sponsors, will see the release of Fire in Little Africa, a hip-hop album recorded at the mansion of a former Tulsa merchant, city founder, and Klansman.

“Remember and Rise,” the Centennial’s headline event featuring “celebrities, performers, and other VIPs,” including John Legend, was slated to be broadcast on national TV from a baseball stadium built smack in the middle of Greenwood. The event was canceled suddenly on Thursday, just four days before it was scheduled to take place. CBS News reported that the cancellation follows demands from lawyers representing survivors and their heirs—including $1 million each for survivors of the massacre and a non-negotiable $50 million pledge to a fund for survivors and descendants—that the organizing commission considered unreasonable. (Ken Levit, executive director of the G.K.F.F., did not respond to AIR MAIL’s request for comment about the cancellation.)

This same weekend, during the KitchenAid Senior PGA Championship at Southern Hills Country Club, players are expected to wear black ribbons and recognize the massacre with a moment of silence. The country club, which still has a very limited Black membership, is predicting up to 8,000 spectators per day for the four days of the tournament—a fraction of whom will know anything about the massacre-commemoration events six miles to the north.

Both Kaiser and Turner will be in attendance for the Centennial. “I am energetic and committed but old and impatient to see major progress in my lifetime,” Kaiser says, “and have the comfort and pleasure of knowing that my children, and the other G.K.F.F. trustees, are committed to seeing this happen.”

Turner is “more optimistic than I have ever been in my life,” he says. “People would be mistaken to consider … even reparations as an end. We still have those against progress, but the fact that we have individuals that are willing to take a stand for what we believe in, and against the status quo, especially as it relates to white supremacy, means that we are one step closer to a world in which we are seen by the content of our character and not by the color of our skin.”