What’s New

Q: I’m a 31-year-old cis man married to a 33-year-old nonbinary partner, and our relationship has always been very vanilla. Over the past few years, I’ve discovered that I’m a kinky person, with a particular interest in both domination and submission. It took me a long time to summon the courage to bring this up with my spouse, as they have a cocktail of factors that could complicate play around power dynamics. This includes a history of trauma and sexual abuse, anxiety, body image and self-esteem issues, and residual religious guilt. In the past, even discussing sex and sexuality in the abstract has been fraught. But our first conversation went surprisingly well. My spouse is cautiously open to exploring submission, and they want to continue the conversation. I have real optimism that centering consent, boundaries, and communication in D/s play might actually make sex feel safer for them. And I hope that isn’t just dickful thinking.

So, now I’m the dog that caught the car and I’m terrified of messing this up. What advice would you give to gently ease into D/s play from a vanilla relationship? Can you recommend any books or podcasts that approach this kink at a firmly JV level and center safety and consent? My spouse is a reader and an academic at heart, and that might be a way to explore the idea from within their comfort zone. —Don’t Overwhelm My Spouse

A: “Let me address the elephant in the room right away,” said Rena Martine. “Why on earth would a survivor of sexual trauma actually want to engage in D/s sex?”

Martine is a sexual intimacy coach who has helped couples explore BDSM and other forms of erotic power exchange. She’s also a former sex crimes prosecutor, which makes her particularly sensitive to issues faced by survivors of sexual assault and abuse.

“When it comes to trauma, there’s a concept known as ‘restaging,’” said Martine, “which means the trauma survivor takes a situation where they felt powerless and ‘restages’ it, so they’re actually in the director’s chair and choosing to give up some of that control.”

While BDSM isn’t therapy, some people who have submissive desires and traumatic sexual histories find giving up control to a trusted partner empowering and low-key therapeutic. Instead of control being something an untrustworthy abuser took from them, control becomes a precious thing they loaned to someone they could trust. And when they handed it over, they knew it would be returned, either at a set time or immediately if the sub used their safe word.

“Research by Dr. Justin Lehmiller tells us that victims of sex crimes are actually more likely than nonvictims to fantasize about almost all aspects of BDSM,” added Martine. “Anyone who’s curious about the science of sexual fantasies should read his book, Tell Me What You Want. And Holly Richmond’s Reclaiming Pleasure is a great starting point for any sexual assault survivor.”

Before you attempt to engage in D/s play or even begin to discuss your fantasies in detail, Martine recommends thinking about the emotional needs that shape these fantasies. 

“What is it about domination and submission that appeals to each of them?” Martine said. “What aspects of D/S play are they excited about? Having a conversation about the ‘why’ will ensure they can each approach this new dynamic from a place of compassion and safety.”

Now, if you give thought to the “why,” DOMS, and your honest answer is, “Because it turns me on,” that’s good enough. And if your spouse’s honest answer is, “Because my partner is interested in this and I’m interested in exploring it,” that’s good enough. While some people into BDSM can point to one specific experience or something that shaped them more broadly (like a religious upbringing), you don’t need to justify your interest in D/s or BDSM by making a list of traumatic experiences. If this kind of play—this kind of theater for two—turns you both on, that’s a perfectly valid reason to explore D/s play.

As for getting started, Martine had a really good suggestion. 

“My favorite newbie recommendation for easing into D/S play is using a sleep mask,” said Martine. “It’s innocuous, easy to remove, and gives each player a chance to practice surrendering control by giving up one of their five senses.”

Taking a baby step like that—playing with a simple blindfold and nothing else—is a great way to test the waters while you keep talking about other “junior varsity” kinks you and your spouse feel safe exploring together.

“And for general D/s tips,” said Martine, “check out Lina Dune’s Ask A Sub podcast.”

Follow Rena Martine on Instagram @_rena.martine_.

Q: I’m a hetero 40-year-old woman, married to a guy who is very skilled and generous in bed. I’m also someone who absolutely needs to be in control of my body. I’ve never done drugs and only once got so drunk I didn’t remember every detail of the night. I hated that feeling. I think this need for control is why I don’t like having orgasms. I enjoy the feeling that comes immediately before an orgasm but then my body seems to suppress that last bit. Because I don’t enjoy the feeling of actual orgasms, this is fine with me. On the very rare occasions that I’ve had an orgasm, I feel gross after. But I could happily screw all night with no orgasm! I’ve discussed this with my husband, and he said that as long as I was having my best experience, he was not upset that I wasn’t having orgasms. But a friend—a friend I don’t have sex with—is convinced my aversion is a symptom of some sort of emotional scar. I did have some negative sexual experiences in the past, but I dealt with them and moved on. Should I explore this aversion even though the only person concerned is someone I don’t have sex with? Or can I be an emotionally whole person who just prefers the pre-gasm to orgasm? —Personally Prefer Pre-gasms

A: It doesn’t sound like . . .

There is more to this week’s Savage Love. To read the entire column, go to Savage.Love. 

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When Michael Fanone, the former Trump supporter and D.C. cop who nearly died at the hands of the January 6 mob at the U.S. Capitol, comes to the Chicago Humanities Festival next week to join We Are Proud Boys: How a Right-Wing Street Gang Ushered in a New Era of American Extremism author Andy Campbell on a panel about “Extremism in America,” their moderator will be a Northwestern University history professor as obsessed with the subject as they are.

“Extremism in America: Pushing Back on Radicalism and Saving Our Democracy”Sat 10/22 4:30 PM, Northwestern University Norris University Center, 1999 Campus Dr., Evanston, chicagohumanities.org, $20 ($15 CHF members, $10 students and teachers)

Kathleen Belew’s first book, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America, was published in 2018, when she was an assistant professor at the University of Chicago. (She moved to Northwestern this year.) She co-edited an anthology, A Field Guide to White Supremacy, published in 2021 as a manual for journalists and anyone else seeking to understand this phenomenon. She says her focus is “history of the present.” 

Here’s an edited version of a conversation we had  this week.

Deanna Isaacs: You’ve written that the white power movement has been largely invisible because it operates as “leaderless” resistance? What’s that?

Kathleen Belew: Leaderless resistance is cell-style terrorism. It was implemented around 1983 to make it more difficult to prosecute people and to make it more difficult for informants to infiltrate. But the bigger consequence has been that this whole movement has been able to disappear. We tend to consume news about white power activism and militant-right activity as single incidents instead of part of a groundswell. We get stories about Charleston as anti-Black violence, El Paso as anti-Latino violence, Tree of Life shooting as antisemitic violence, when all of those are carried out by white power gunmen. All of this and January 6 are part of the same movement. There’s an enormous amount of circulation of ideas, people, weapons, and strategy between all of these different groups.

The current white power movement came together at the end of the Vietnam war?

Bring the War Home is a history focused on the late 1970s through the Oklahoma City bombing [1995]. The white power movement brought together Klansmen, skinheads, neo-Nazis, and militiamen. Prior to 1983, these groups were interested in violent action, but they described what they were doing as in defense of the state. So, for instance, they carried out a coordinated campaign of violent harassment against Vietnamese fishermen in the Gulf of Mexico around Galveston Bay and talked about that as a continuation of the Vietnam war. When they did border patrol actions, they talked about it as doing what the state couldn’t do itself.

What happened in 1983?

We see the rhetoric really change. They make a verbal declaration of war on the federal government in 1983. And we also see that the kind of violence they pursue changes. They become much more interested in major infrastructure attacks, major acts of domestic terrorism. It was no longer a vigilante movement that was trying to protect the government. It was a revolutionary movement, interested in overthrowing the United States and creating either a white ethnostate or a white nation or even an all-white world.

In testimony before a congressional committee in 2019, you had an exchange with another witness who argued that white supremacist extremism isn’t a major issue. Did the events of January 6 answer that claim?

There have been numerous moments where people on the right have tried to throw a bunch of dust at the scholarship around this and to direct people away from the problem. It’s not just one person. There was, for instance, a GOP talking points memo that came out after the El Paso shooting that said direct the conversation to mental illness and away from the problem of white nationalism. And that is before we get to the present moment, where we’re talking about January 6 insurrectionists successfully running for office, we’re talking about open GOP support not only for what happened on January 6 but, in many cases, for Great Replacement Theory and other far-right ideas. The bleed of these ideas into our mainstream has continued.

So where do things stand now?

In the last few years we’ve had a lot of public and institutional movement toward understanding how big this problem is, but I also think white power activity in our society has gained huge footholds. Activists in the period that I’ve studied [1970s-1990s] were interested in mounting mass casualty and infrastructure attacks, selective assassinations, and other kinds of political violence. Now there’s a second course of action, because mainstream politics is now available to these groups. That means that we don’t only have to be worried about mass attacks, terrorism, and assassination—we also have to be worried about authoritarianism as a threat to our democracy itself.

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Chicago Reader 2022 print issue dates

The Chicago Reader is published in print every other week. Issues are dated Thursday. Distribution usually happens Wednesday morning through Thursday night of the issue date. Upcoming print issue dates through December 2022 are:

10/27/202211/10/202211/24/202212/8/202212/22/2022

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2023 print issue dates

The first print issue in 2023 will be published three weeks after the 12/22/2022 issue, the final issue of 2022. The print issue dates through June 2023 are:

1/12/20231/26/20232/9/20232/23/20233/9/20233/23/20234/6/20234/20/20235/4/20235/18/20236/1/20236/15/20236/29/2023

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Q: I’m a 31-year-old cis man married to a 33-year-old nonbinary partner, and our relationship has always been very vanilla. Over the past few years, I’ve discovered that I’m a kinky person, with a particular interest in both domination and submission. It took me a long time to summon the courage to bring this up with my spouse, as they have a cocktail of factors that could complicate play around power dynamics. This includes a history of trauma and sexual abuse, anxiety, body image and self-esteem issues, and residual religious guilt. In the past, even discussing sex and sexuality in the abstract has been fraught. But our first conversation went surprisingly well. My spouse is cautiously open to exploring submission, and they want to continue the conversation. I have real optimism that centering consent, boundaries, and communication in D/s play might actually make sex feel safer for them. And I hope that isn’t just dickful thinking.

So, now I’m the dog that caught the car and I’m terrified of messing this up. What advice would you give to gently ease into D/s play from a vanilla relationship? Can you recommend any books or podcasts that approach this kink at a firmly JV level and center safety and consent? My spouse is a reader and an academic at heart, and that might be a way to explore the idea from within their comfort zone. —Don’t Overwhelm My Spouse

A: “Let me address the elephant in the room right away,” said Rena Martine. “Why on earth would a survivor of sexual trauma actually want to engage in D/s sex?”

Martine is a sexual intimacy coach who has helped couples explore BDSM and other forms of erotic power exchange. She’s also a former sex crimes prosecutor, which makes her particularly sensitive to issues faced by survivors of sexual assault and abuse.

“When it comes to trauma, there’s a concept known as ‘restaging,’” said Martine, “which means the trauma survivor takes a situation where they felt powerless and ‘restages’ it, so they’re actually in the director’s chair and choosing to give up some of that control.”

While BDSM isn’t therapy, some people who have submissive desires and traumatic sexual histories find giving up control to a trusted partner empowering and low-key therapeutic. Instead of control being something an untrustworthy abuser took from them, control becomes a precious thing they loaned to someone they could trust. And when they handed it over, they knew it would be returned, either at a set time or immediately if the sub used their safe word.

“Research by Dr. Justin Lehmiller tells us that victims of sex crimes are actually more likely than nonvictims to fantasize about almost all aspects of BDSM,” added Martine. “Anyone who’s curious about the science of sexual fantasies should read his book, Tell Me What You Want. And Holly Richmond’s Reclaiming Pleasure is a great starting point for any sexual assault survivor.”

Before you attempt to engage in D/s play or even begin to discuss your fantasies in detail, Martine recommends thinking about the emotional needs that shape these fantasies. 

“What is it about domination and submission that appeals to each of them?” Martine said. “What aspects of D/S play are they excited about? Having a conversation about the ‘why’ will ensure they can each approach this new dynamic from a place of compassion and safety.”

Now, if you give thought to the “why,” DOMS, and your honest answer is, “Because it turns me on,” that’s good enough. And if your spouse’s honest answer is, “Because my partner is interested in this and I’m interested in exploring it,” that’s good enough. While some people into BDSM can point to one specific experience or something that shaped them more broadly (like a religious upbringing), you don’t need to justify your interest in D/s or BDSM by making a list of traumatic experiences. If this kind of play—this kind of theater for two—turns you both on, that’s a perfectly valid reason to explore D/s play.

As for getting started, Martine had a really good suggestion. 

“My favorite newbie recommendation for easing into D/S play is using a sleep mask,” said Martine. “It’s innocuous, easy to remove, and gives each player a chance to practice surrendering control by giving up one of their five senses.”

Taking a baby step like that—playing with a simple blindfold and nothing else—is a great way to test the waters while you keep talking about other “junior varsity” kinks you and your spouse feel safe exploring together.

“And for general D/s tips,” said Martine, “check out Lina Dune’s Ask A Sub podcast.”

Follow Rena Martine on Instagram @_rena.martine_.

Q: I’m a hetero 40-year-old woman, married to a guy who is very skilled and generous in bed. I’m also someone who absolutely needs to be in control of my body. I’ve never done drugs and only once got so drunk I didn’t remember every detail of the night. I hated that feeling. I think this need for control is why I don’t like having orgasms. I enjoy the feeling that comes immediately before an orgasm but then my body seems to suppress that last bit. Because I don’t enjoy the feeling of actual orgasms, this is fine with me. On the very rare occasions that I’ve had an orgasm, I feel gross after. But I could happily screw all night with no orgasm! I’ve discussed this with my husband, and he said that as long as I was having my best experience, he was not upset that I wasn’t having orgasms. But a friend—a friend I don’t have sex with—is convinced my aversion is a symptom of some sort of emotional scar. I did have some negative sexual experiences in the past, but I dealt with them and moved on. Should I explore this aversion even though the only person concerned is someone I don’t have sex with? Or can I be an emotionally whole person who just prefers the pre-gasm to orgasm? —Personally Prefer Pre-gasms

A: It doesn’t sound like . . .

There is more to this week’s Savage Love. To read the entire column, go to Savage.Love. 

Read More

Reader senior writer Ben Joravsky riffs on the day’s stories with his celebrated humor, insight, and honesty, and interviews politicians, activists, journalists and other political know-it-alls. Presented by the Chicago Reader, the show is available by 4 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays at chicagoreader.com/joravsky—or wherever you get your podcasts. Don’t miss Oh, What a Week!–the Friday feature in which Ben & producer Dennis (aka, Dr. D.) review the week’s top stories. Also, bonus interviews drop on Saturdays, Sundays and Mondays. 

Chicago Reader podcasts are recorded on Shure microphones. Learn more at Shure.com.

Chicago Reader senior writer Ben Joravsky discusses the day’s stories with his celebrated humor, insight, and honesty on The Ben Joravsky Show.

Read More

Two years ago, when my brother in Michigan stopped taking his meds and relapsed, I had to decide if I was going to call the police and request a wellness check from two states away. I hadn’t heard from him in almost a day, and while the break from the frightening verbal abuse that accompanies his particular breakdowns was welcome, I was also increasingly worried. He’d attempted suicide during relapses before, he owned over a dozen guns, and he was alone.

In the end, I didn’t call: I was terrified of the cops showing up and shooting him. I was terrified of him shooting someone else. He needed someone who could reach the bowels of paranoia and hallucination he’d gone to, and de-escalate what could be a dangerous situation, but this “someone” didn’t exist.

From 2019-2021, police responded to calls requesting wellness checks, reporting suicide threats, or generally asking for help for someone in a mental health by shooting and killing at least 178 of the “very people they were called on to assist,” according to a June 2022 report from the Washington Post. A recent investigation by the Invisible Institute’s Kelsey Turner on police use of force and involuntary commitment in mental health cases noted, “people with serious mental illness experience police use of force at 11.6 times the rate of those without mental illness.”

That January night two years ago, gripping my phone in my sweating palm, it wasn’t the statistics on death and arrest that haunted me—it was the stories. A sister in Pennsylvania called the police after her brother, who was schizophrenic and bipolar, punched a car and tried to break into her home. “He needs help,” she said, and requested that they take her brother to a hospital. Instead, officers shot Ricardo Muñoz four times.

In Colorado, a man received delusional texts from his depressed, combat veteran brother 800 miles away in Texas. He didn’t trust the police to check on him without violence, so instead, he called the Red Cross. But the Red Cross called the police, who shot Damian Daniels twice in the chest.

One Sunday morning in Detroit, a man made a 5 AM phone call. His brother, who had a long history of mental illness, was in crisis: “He’s frantic and he has a knife. I’m concerned for people,” he said. Shortly after their arrival, five officers fired 38 rounds in three seconds, killing Porter Burke.

“If anyone out there has a family member or a loved one (in crisis), help them yourself,” Burke’s aunt, Michele Wilson, told reporters. “Don’t call 911; they might not make it.”

Just like those who do not have mental illness, some people with mental illness occasionally behave violently; most do not. To flatten and diminish people with mental illness into “criminal” or “non-criminal,” as the CPD still does, is to steal from them their humanity, in all its complexity, nuance, and possibility for change. In crisis, my brother has been violent toward family members before. I have no idea what part of that is his responsibility and what isn’t. I don’t know what burgeons up from his paranoia and despair. All I know is I don’t want him dead.

In the end, I bluffed my brother, and it worked. After 18 hours of unanswered messages and calls, I texted an ultimatum and a deadline: let me know you’re still alive by noon, or I’m calling the cops. “[I’m] fucking fine don’t fucking call the police,” he texted back, and there I had it: proof of life. I didn’t call for the wellness check.

Our loved one’s death or forced removal from our community are the risks we take, us lovers and roommates, siblings and parents, of the seriously mentally ill, if we call for “help.” But we need help, desperately.

Last Thursday, I sat in my friend J’s tent with him and a woman who kept up a constant, low murmur of conversation with someone only she could see. She smoked crack out of a broken pipe as she talked; several hospital patient bracelets circled her wrist.

J was frustrated and worried. He’d met the woman, who I’ll call S, the day before, wandering the South Loop barefoot, her eyes wide and straining. Having been in a psych ward a few times himself, after asking S her name, her age, and where she was from, J had asked her if she’d been given any psych meds at the hospital. S said yes. “Are you taking them now?” J asked. “No,” she said, then “ultrasound,” and raised her sweatshirt to reveal her pale, pregnant belly.

S followed him as he walked, across a busy city highway and right into his tent. He gave her his cot and slept on the ground. Today, in an effort to keep her safe, J was sticking by her side, but this vigilance came at the expense of his own well-being. If J couldn’t leave the tent, he wasn’t panhandling, which meant he wasn’t managing his own addiction or eating any food.

I asked S if there was anyone I could call for her: she said no. Texting with a Night Ministry outreach worker, I asked her if I could take her picture to share with him; she said no. The outreach worker, hustling my messages to the right people, replied that the evening outreach team would try to make contact with S at J’s tent between 4 and 6 PM. It was 2 PM. Because neither J nor S had a phone or a watch with which to track time, S’s best bet was to stay put. Out of options, I gave everyone clean pipes and multiple Big Macs.

J came with me on the McDonald’s run. “Don’t go through my stuff again,” he admonished S as we left, “and if you go outside, put on your shoes.” The area he stays in, full of rose bushes gone wild, is a shooting gallery, a secluded outdoor spot where people go to inject drugs in relative safety. Forced to operate swiftly and with no city sanitation support, drug users discard their needles on the ground, and J was worried S would get poked.

At the McDonald’s, he vented. “I don’t know what to do, man,” he said. “I want to help take care of her, but I don’t know how long she should stay.” In the end, there was nothing more he could do: when he woke up early Friday morning, S was gone.

J’s dilemma was different from the one I had faced with my brother—S was a stranger to him, and as an unhoused person who uses drugs, J risked his own freedom and safety if he called the police—but ultimately the outcome was the same: there was no one he could call for immediate help who wouldn’t send a police officer.

Various efforts to bring people other than cops to mental health crises have advanced around the country: crisis-intervention programs have rolled out in recent years in Kentucky, Tennessee, New York, and California. A Denver initiative that began sending mental health specialists instead of police to crises in 2020 has even been correlated with a decrease in low-level crime.

In July, the national 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline debuted, offering an alternative to calling 911. An analysis by WBEZ and MindSite News noted that most Illinois calls still go to out-of-state call centers, which can reduce responders’ familiarity with local resources available to callers.

Last year, Chicago started a program dubbed Crisis Assistance Response and Engagement (CARE), which sends a team comprising a paramedic, a mental health clinician, and a police officer to 911 calls involving mental health crises. Still in its pilot phase, CARE operates in select areas of the city, and only between 10:30 AM and 4 PM on weekdays.

The police department also has “Crisis Intervention Team officers,” police who have attended 40 hours of training in “the signs and symptoms of mental illness” and “how to interact, intervene, and de-escalate situations with persons in crisis.” 911 callers can specifically request a CIT officer. But they’re still cops, and still bring guns to mental health crises. In addition, according to the Policy Surveillance Program, police officers can initiate involuntary commitments in 28 states, including Illinois.

Our loved one’s death or forced removal from our community are the risks we take, us lovers and roommates, siblings and parents, of the seriously mentally ill, if we call for “help.” But we need help, desperately. For decades, my family has tried to provide my brother with the kind of care and first response our society won’t. If our love and labor alone could keep him safe and well, it would’ve worked already. Instead, it’s quite literally making us sick.

Love might be unconditional, but our own relationships and jobs, our own safety, the health of our own minds and bodies, have their limits. I understand why people make that call, despite knowing who it will summon and the potential violence those called will bring. I, too, have held my phone in my hand, weighing options that offer too few choices—and too many risks.

Read More

Reader senior writer Ben Joravsky riffs on the day’s stories with his celebrated humor, insight, and honesty, and interviews politicians, activists, journalists and other political know-it-alls. Presented by the Chicago Reader, the show is available by 4 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays at chicagoreader.com/joravsky—or wherever you get your podcasts. Don’t miss Oh, What a Week!–the Friday feature in which Ben & producer Dennis (aka, Dr. D.) review the week’s top stories. Also, bonus interviews drop on Saturdays, Sundays and Mondays. 

Chicago Reader podcasts are recorded on Shure microphones. Learn more at Shure.com.

Chicago Reader senior writer Ben Joravsky discusses the day’s stories with his celebrated humor, insight, and honesty on The Ben Joravsky Show.

Read More

Two years ago, when my brother in Michigan stopped taking his meds and relapsed, I had to decide if I was going to call the police and request a wellness check from two states away. I hadn’t heard from him in almost a day, and while the break from the frightening verbal abuse that accompanies his particular breakdowns was welcome, I was also increasingly worried. He’d attempted suicide during relapses before, he owned over a dozen guns, and he was alone.

In the end, I didn’t call: I was terrified of the cops showing up and shooting him. I was terrified of him shooting someone else. He needed someone who could reach the bowels of paranoia and hallucination he’d gone to, and de-escalate what could be a dangerous situation, but this “someone” didn’t exist.

From 2019-2021, police responded to calls requesting wellness checks, reporting suicide threats, or generally asking for help for someone in a mental health by shooting and killing at least 178 of the “very people they were called on to assist,” according to a June 2022 report from the Washington Post. A recent investigation by the Invisible Institute’s Kelsey Turner on police use of force and involuntary commitment in mental health cases noted, “people with serious mental illness experience police use of force at 11.6 times the rate of those without mental illness.”

That January night two years ago, gripping my phone in my sweating palm, it wasn’t the statistics on death and arrest that haunted me—it was the stories. A sister in Pennsylvania called the police after her brother, who was schizophrenic and bipolar, punched a car and tried to break into her home. “He needs help,” she said, and requested that they take her brother to a hospital. Instead, officers shot Ricardo Muñoz four times.

In Colorado, a man received delusional texts from his depressed, combat veteran brother 800 miles away in Texas. He didn’t trust the police to check on him without violence, so instead, he called the Red Cross. But the Red Cross called the police, who shot Damian Daniels twice in the chest.

One Sunday morning in Detroit, a man made a 5 AM phone call. His brother, who had a long history of mental illness, was in crisis: “He’s frantic and he has a knife. I’m concerned for people,” he said. Shortly after their arrival, five officers fired 38 rounds in three seconds, killing Porter Burke.

“If anyone out there has a family member or a loved one (in crisis), help them yourself,” Burke’s aunt, Michele Wilson, told reporters. “Don’t call 911; they might not make it.”

Just like those who do not have mental illness, some people with mental illness occasionally behave violently; most do not. To flatten and diminish people with mental illness into “criminal” or “non-criminal,” as the CPD still does, is to steal from them their humanity, in all its complexity, nuance, and possibility for change. In crisis, my brother has been violent toward family members before. I have no idea what part of that is his responsibility and what isn’t. I don’t know what burgeons up from his paranoia and despair. All I know is I don’t want him dead.

In the end, I bluffed my brother, and it worked. After 18 hours of unanswered messages and calls, I texted an ultimatum and a deadline: let me know you’re still alive by noon, or I’m calling the cops. “[I’m] fucking fine don’t fucking call the police,” he texted back, and there I had it: proof of life. I didn’t call for the wellness check.

Our loved one’s death or forced removal from our community are the risks we take, us lovers and roommates, siblings and parents, of the seriously mentally ill, if we call for “help.” But we need help, desperately.

Last Thursday, I sat in my friend J’s tent with him and a woman who kept up a constant, low murmur of conversation with someone only she could see. She smoked crack out of a broken pipe as she talked; several hospital patient bracelets circled her wrist.

J was frustrated and worried. He’d met the woman, who I’ll call S, the day before, wandering the South Loop barefoot, her eyes wide and straining. Having been in a psych ward a few times himself, after asking S her name, her age, and where she was from, J had asked her if she’d been given any psych meds at the hospital. S said yes. “Are you taking them now?” J asked. “No,” she said, then “ultrasound,” and raised her sweatshirt to reveal her pale, pregnant belly.

S followed him as he walked, across a busy city highway and right into his tent. He gave her his cot and slept on the ground. Today, in an effort to keep her safe, J was sticking by her side, but this vigilance came at the expense of his own well-being. If J couldn’t leave the tent, he wasn’t panhandling, which meant he wasn’t managing his own addiction or eating any food.

I asked S if there was anyone I could call for her: she said no. Texting with a Night Ministry outreach worker, I asked her if I could take her picture to share with him; she said no. The outreach worker, hustling my messages to the right people, replied that the evening outreach team would try to make contact with S at J’s tent between 4 and 6 PM. It was 2 PM. Because neither J nor S had a phone or a watch with which to track time, S’s best bet was to stay put. Out of options, I gave everyone clean pipes and multiple Big Macs.

J came with me on the McDonald’s run. “Don’t go through my stuff again,” he admonished S as we left, “and if you go outside, put on your shoes.” The area he stays in, full of rose bushes gone wild, is a shooting gallery, a secluded outdoor spot where people go to inject drugs in relative safety. Forced to operate swiftly and with no city sanitation support, drug users discard their needles on the ground, and J was worried S would get poked.

At the McDonald’s, he vented. “I don’t know what to do, man,” he said. “I want to help take care of her, but I don’t know how long she should stay.” In the end, there was nothing more he could do: when he woke up early Friday morning, S was gone.

J’s dilemma was different from the one I had faced with my brother—S was a stranger to him, and as an unhoused person who uses drugs, J risked his own freedom and safety if he called the police—but ultimately the outcome was the same: there was no one he could call for immediate help who wouldn’t send a police officer.

Various efforts to bring people other than cops to mental health crises have advanced around the country: crisis-intervention programs have rolled out in recent years in Kentucky, Tennessee, New York, and California. A Denver initiative that began sending mental health specialists instead of police to crises in 2020 has even been correlated with a decrease in low-level crime.

In July, the national 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline debuted, offering an alternative to calling 911. An analysis by WBEZ and MindSite News noted that most Illinois calls still go to out-of-state call centers, which can reduce responders’ familiarity with local resources available to callers.

Last year, Chicago started a program dubbed Crisis Assistance Response and Engagement (CARE), which sends a team comprising a paramedic, a mental health clinician, and a police officer to 911 calls involving mental health crises. Still in its pilot phase, CARE operates in select areas of the city, and only between 10:30 AM and 4 PM on weekdays.

The police department also has “Crisis Intervention Team officers,” police who have attended 40 hours of training in “the signs and symptoms of mental illness” and “how to interact, intervene, and de-escalate situations with persons in crisis.” 911 callers can specifically request a CIT officer. But they’re still cops, and still bring guns to mental health crises. In addition, according to the Policy Surveillance Program, police officers can initiate involuntary commitments in 28 states, including Illinois.

Our loved one’s death or forced removal from our community are the risks we take, us lovers and roommates, siblings and parents, of the seriously mentally ill, if we call for “help.” But we need help, desperately. For decades, my family has tried to provide my brother with the kind of care and first response our society won’t. If our love and labor alone could keep him safe and well, it would’ve worked already. Instead, it’s quite literally making us sick.

Love might be unconditional, but our own relationships and jobs, our own safety, the health of our own minds and bodies, have their limits. I understand why people make that call, despite knowing who it will summon and the potential violence those called will bring. I, too, have held my phone in my hand, weighing options that offer too few choices—and too many risks.

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As fall settles into Chicago, a ghostly chill raises the hackles of those attuned to a different kind of presence in the city’s streets. We live in a city of disappearances: from the original loss of home of Chicago’s many Native tribes, to the thousands of people disappeared by the Chicago Police Department into the hidden world of undisclosed interrogation warehouses, Chicago cannot escape the specter of absence.

Today, gentrification is one of the city’s harshest disappearing forces, leaving communities scrambling to preserve distinct histories that are whitewashed with every painted-over mural and “invisible eviction” that pushes another family from their home. But as Ricardo Gamboa’s new play The Wizards shows, even as real estate speculation makes it harder to see obvious signs of who once inhabited a space, a sense of haunting reminds us of those whose physical presence steadily erodes. For Gamboa, a playwright, academic, and organizer who grew up on the city’s southwest side, The Wizards is yet another opportunity to use the occult to remind people of who and what we’re losing to these forces. 

The Wizards10/14-11/26: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM; no performance Thu 11/24 (Thanksgiving), APO Cultural Center, 1438 W. 18th St., clata.org. 45 reservations available each night through Eventbrite for sliding-scale ($20-$60), ten pay-what-you-can walk-up tickets per show.

In the play, Amado, played by Gamboa, and Sam, played by Gamboa’s partner Sean James William Parris, are forced to move back to Amado’s hometown of Chicago after being queerbashed in New York City on the night of Donald Trump’s election. Settling into an apartment in Pilsen and witnessing the rapid shifts in the neighborhood that Amado once called home, the couple soon discover a Ouija board in their new home, which allows them to reach the spirit of the Wizards, a group of four teenage Mexican boys from the 60s who formed their own Motown cover band. While the rest of the plot remains tantalizingly out of reach, Gamboa promises a thrilling journey for those trusting souls, saying that the second half of the play was written from a place of uncertainty, hoping the audience will engage the cast in the shared space.

“How do you write from a space of not knowing, where I’m not just translating points of view that I have, or that might be floating in memes on Instagram?” Gamboa asks themselves. “I’m a creator, not a translator. The goal is to use the play to navigate these contemporary questions about race and histories of violence, and to get the audience and myself to a place where we can have honest conversations about them.”

The Wizards is many years in the making, and has already led Gamboa down other, unexpected paths. After developing the play as part of the Goodman Theatre’s New Stages program, the script made its way to the makers of Showtime’s The Chi, which led to Gamboa moving to Los Angeles to write on the show for several seasons. Still, Gamboa knew the play would eventually make its way back to the neighborhood that birthed it, and its appearance at the APO Cultural Center, a focal point for Mexican American art and activism on 18th Street, brings the project full circle.

The play was directed by Katrina Dion, whose latest directorial work 57 Blocksat Free Street explored similar questions around whose stories are told in a city hellbent on erasing the subjectivities of Black and Brown people. Staged as part of Destinos: Chicago International Latino Theater Festival, and coproduced by the Chicago Latino Theater Alliance, National Museum of Mexican Art, and Gertie (a new organization aiming “to build a community of young professionals in Chicago who are ready to engage with the city and each other in new ways”), Gamboa says they see the play as an offering to the late Destinos executive director Myrna Salazar, who championed stories that often struggle to receive the support they deserve.

The Reader caught up with Gamboa in mid-September, as revelries for Mexican Independence Day kept 18th Street busy outside the theater’s doors. The interview has been edited for shortness and clarity.

Annie Howard: You seem deeply concerned about the weight of history, but this work is set in the very recent past, one that’s haunted by much deeper histories. What compels you to take that approach to look at these issues we’ve inherited and continue to struggle with?

Ricardo Gamboa: A lot of what my work does is look at these histories that are embedded and alive in the present, even if they’re not necessarily visible. We don’t see a settler arriving when we step out on 18th Street, but it doesn’t mean settler logics are still not contouring what it looks like centuries later. 

Even when we’re talking about something like colonization, part of what it was fueled by was the idea of reason, linear time, and these very Western impositions on just like how to look at the world, how to look at the universe, that weren’t necessarily congruent with the people that they found in the “New World.” Alternative magic or spirituality practices were embedded in those cultures, and they were a way of looking at the world. 

It’s really disorienting to be walking through these blocks, having grown up in Pilsen and Little Village and seeing how rapidly things have changed, knowing the history that has transpired that’s been completely erased by gentrification. White supremacy has an evil magic, where it disappears people, it displaces them, and makes them into ghosts. So for me, the magic in the play is there because I believe in it, but it’s also a way of questioning the normative reality that’s been constructed. 

You’re hosting the play at the APO Cultural Center, one of the enduring institutions of activism in the neighborhood. Can you talk a bit about what it means to put on the show here?

Despite the onslaught of gentrification and capitalist speculation that has targeted Pilsen, the neighborhood has maintained a lot of its original character. It’s a testament to how resilient the community is. There’s history of struggle, and the APO Cultural Center is part of that history. 

APO was founded in 1962 as an organization to address the discrimination that Latino workers would face, and they took up residence in Pilsen in 1968. This building, which was built in 1883 as a Czech community center, was handed over by the archdiocese at that time. After that, there was so much organizing that came out of this space: campaigns for Brown worker rights, against the CTA and Department of Streets and Sanitation, a lot of political and popular education, and the arts. The Mexican American printmaker Carlos Cortéz would work out of here, and the muralists Hector Duarte and Salvado Vega, both part of the mural tradition that defines Pilsen, came out of here. 

Years ago, I realized that my dream was to do the play in this building. I talked to Leticia Guerrero, and she was like, Yo, let’s do it. We came up with a residency in honor of her mom, Raquel, who was one of the founders of APO, and the Raquel Guerrero Residency for Theater and Social Change is the banner that we’re operating under. When the show closes, I hope to have raised enough money to renovate this hall space so that it can be more in use.

Did you intend to have the play staged during the fall “spooky season,” or was that a lucky happenstance?

It’s something we wanted to tie into both Halloween and Day of the Dead, but also Thanksgiving. The play jumps through time, with Sam and Amado living in the years of the Trump administration, then going back to the 1960s and ’70s. As a cultural studies scholar, I know those moments are closer than we might want to acknowledge, part of an enduring and ongoing legacy of colonialism and white supremacy. We’re not just trying to cash in on these moments, but I believe that in October, the veil between the worlds is thinner. What happens if we honor that?

Can you talk a bit about the other programming you’re building around the production of the play?

As part of the show, we’re having two nights of community storytelling events that provide an evening alternative for community members. There’s a lot of bars that have popped up in Pilsen in recent years, but they’re not always hospitable to the Brown people that have lived here. Being able to use this space to welcome people and to have a good time.

Latinos love to tell spooky fucking stories. You go to Mexico, you’re on the rancho sitting around a campfire, and someone will start telling you about how they saw the devil in the cornfield or some shit like that. We’re playing with that cultural tradition, inviting members of the cast and local Latino Chicagoans to share stories that deal with themes of haunting, ghosts, the supernatural. That’s broadly defined: someone’s telling a story about their bedroom that’s literally haunted, but someone else is talking about they’re haunted by the specter of transphobia. We’ll also be doing a youth institute, working with young people, teaching performance and playwriting.

The goal is to remind people of this omnipresent Mexican American population that’s often ghosted out of the historic record, even in the present. It’s important to have a process and a venue that reflects that history, one that sews that principle into everything. We’re telling people: We’re putting it on here, and you’re gonna remember that this is a community that fought. We are a people that have been fighting, so let’s reanimate that spirit.

Read More

As fall settles into Chicago, a ghostly chill raises the hackles of those attuned to a different kind of presence in the city’s streets. We live in a city of disappearances: from the original loss of home of Chicago’s many Native tribes, to the thousands of people disappeared by the Chicago Police Department into the hidden world of undisclosed interrogation warehouses, Chicago cannot escape the specter of absence.

Today, gentrification is one of the city’s harshest disappearing forces, leaving communities scrambling to preserve distinct histories that are whitewashed with every painted-over mural and “invisible eviction” that pushes another family from their home. But as Ricardo Gamboa’s new play The Wizards shows, even as real estate speculation makes it harder to see obvious signs of who once inhabited a space, a sense of haunting reminds us of those whose physical presence steadily erodes. For Gamboa, a playwright, academic, and organizer who grew up on the city’s southwest side, The Wizards is yet another opportunity to use the occult to remind people of who and what we’re losing to these forces. 

The Wizards10/14-11/26: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM; no performance Thu 11/24 (Thanksgiving), APO Cultural Center, 1438 W. 18th St., clata.org. 45 reservations available each night through Eventbrite for sliding-scale ($20-$60), ten pay-what-you-can walk-up tickets per show.

In the play, Amado, played by Gamboa, and Sam, played by Gamboa’s partner Sean James William Parris, are forced to move back to Amado’s hometown of Chicago after being queerbashed in New York City on the night of Donald Trump’s election. Settling into an apartment in Pilsen and witnessing the rapid shifts in the neighborhood that Amado once called home, the couple soon discover a Ouija board in their new home, which allows them to reach the spirit of the Wizards, a group of four teenage Mexican boys from the 60s who formed their own Motown cover band. While the rest of the plot remains tantalizingly out of reach, Gamboa promises a thrilling journey for those trusting souls, saying that the second half of the play was written from a place of uncertainty, hoping the audience will engage the cast in the shared space.

“How do you write from a space of not knowing, where I’m not just translating points of view that I have, or that might be floating in memes on Instagram?” Gamboa asks themselves. “I’m a creator, not a translator. The goal is to use the play to navigate these contemporary questions about race and histories of violence, and to get the audience and myself to a place where we can have honest conversations about them.”

The Wizards is many years in the making, and has already led Gamboa down other, unexpected paths. After developing the play as part of the Goodman Theatre’s New Stages program, the script made its way to the makers of Showtime’s The Chi, which led to Gamboa moving to Los Angeles to write on the show for several seasons. Still, Gamboa knew the play would eventually make its way back to the neighborhood that birthed it, and its appearance at the APO Cultural Center, a focal point for Mexican American art and activism on 18th Street, brings the project full circle.

The play was directed by Katrina Dion, whose latest directorial work 57 Blocksat Free Street explored similar questions around whose stories are told in a city hellbent on erasing the subjectivities of Black and Brown people. Staged as part of Destinos: Chicago International Latino Theater Festival, and coproduced by the Chicago Latino Theater Alliance, National Museum of Mexican Art, and Gertie (a new organization aiming “to build a community of young professionals in Chicago who are ready to engage with the city and each other in new ways”), Gamboa says they see the play as an offering to the late Destinos executive director Myrna Salazar, who championed stories that often struggle to receive the support they deserve.

The Reader caught up with Gamboa in mid-September, as revelries for Mexican Independence Day kept 18th Street busy outside the theater’s doors. The interview has been edited for shortness and clarity.

Annie Howard: You seem deeply concerned about the weight of history, but this work is set in the very recent past, one that’s haunted by much deeper histories. What compels you to take that approach to look at these issues we’ve inherited and continue to struggle with?

Ricardo Gamboa: A lot of what my work does is look at these histories that are embedded and alive in the present, even if they’re not necessarily visible. We don’t see a settler arriving when we step out on 18th Street, but it doesn’t mean settler logics are still not contouring what it looks like centuries later. 

Even when we’re talking about something like colonization, part of what it was fueled by was the idea of reason, linear time, and these very Western impositions on just like how to look at the world, how to look at the universe, that weren’t necessarily congruent with the people that they found in the “New World.” Alternative magic or spirituality practices were embedded in those cultures, and they were a way of looking at the world. 

It’s really disorienting to be walking through these blocks, having grown up in Pilsen and Little Village and seeing how rapidly things have changed, knowing the history that has transpired that’s been completely erased by gentrification. White supremacy has an evil magic, where it disappears people, it displaces them, and makes them into ghosts. So for me, the magic in the play is there because I believe in it, but it’s also a way of questioning the normative reality that’s been constructed. 

You’re hosting the play at the APO Cultural Center, one of the enduring institutions of activism in the neighborhood. Can you talk a bit about what it means to put on the show here?

Despite the onslaught of gentrification and capitalist speculation that has targeted Pilsen, the neighborhood has maintained a lot of its original character. It’s a testament to how resilient the community is. There’s history of struggle, and the APO Cultural Center is part of that history. 

APO was founded in 1962 as an organization to address the discrimination that Latino workers would face, and they took up residence in Pilsen in 1968. This building, which was built in 1883 as a Czech community center, was handed over by the archdiocese at that time. After that, there was so much organizing that came out of this space: campaigns for Brown worker rights, against the CTA and Department of Streets and Sanitation, a lot of political and popular education, and the arts. The Mexican American printmaker Carlos Cortéz would work out of here, and the muralists Hector Duarte and Salvado Vega, both part of the mural tradition that defines Pilsen, came out of here. 

Years ago, I realized that my dream was to do the play in this building. I talked to Leticia Guerrero, and she was like, Yo, let’s do it. We came up with a residency in honor of her mom, Raquel, who was one of the founders of APO, and the Raquel Guerrero Residency for Theater and Social Change is the banner that we’re operating under. When the show closes, I hope to have raised enough money to renovate this hall space so that it can be more in use.

Did you intend to have the play staged during the fall “spooky season,” or was that a lucky happenstance?

It’s something we wanted to tie into both Halloween and Day of the Dead, but also Thanksgiving. The play jumps through time, with Sam and Amado living in the years of the Trump administration, then going back to the 1960s and ’70s. As a cultural studies scholar, I know those moments are closer than we might want to acknowledge, part of an enduring and ongoing legacy of colonialism and white supremacy. We’re not just trying to cash in on these moments, but I believe that in October, the veil between the worlds is thinner. What happens if we honor that?

Can you talk a bit about the other programming you’re building around the production of the play?

As part of the show, we’re having two nights of community storytelling events that provide an evening alternative for community members. There’s a lot of bars that have popped up in Pilsen in recent years, but they’re not always hospitable to the Brown people that have lived here. Being able to use this space to welcome people and to have a good time.

Latinos love to tell spooky fucking stories. You go to Mexico, you’re on the rancho sitting around a campfire, and someone will start telling you about how they saw the devil in the cornfield or some shit like that. We’re playing with that cultural tradition, inviting members of the cast and local Latino Chicagoans to share stories that deal with themes of haunting, ghosts, the supernatural. That’s broadly defined: someone’s telling a story about their bedroom that’s literally haunted, but someone else is talking about they’re haunted by the specter of transphobia. We’ll also be doing a youth institute, working with young people, teaching performance and playwriting.

The goal is to remind people of this omnipresent Mexican American population that’s often ghosted out of the historic record, even in the present. It’s important to have a process and a venue that reflects that history, one that sews that principle into everything. We’re telling people: We’re putting it on here, and you’re gonna remember that this is a community that fought. We are a people that have been fighting, so let’s reanimate that spirit.

Read More