Both Sides Now

Shortly after Donald Trump’s inauguration, the journalist Lewis Raven Wallace posted a short piece on Medium with the provocative title “Objectivity is dead, and I’m okay with it.” In those first surreal days of the new regime, mainstream media outlets were reacting to Trump’s shock-and-awe tactics by doubling down on their own self-regard. Even as they rushed to normalize the new administration, news purveyors like the New York Times and NPR suggested that their own unbiased, verifiable content—in a word, their objectivity—was the best antidote to the president’s unchecked mendacity.

Wallace—who

print Summer 2019

True Lies

At the time he was compared to Jean Genet, but to be honest, the books don’t add up to much on their own. J. T. LeRoy wrote three. The ﬁrst and most ambitious was Sarah, a novel about a gender-ﬂuid child named Cherry Vanilla growing up among truck stop prostitutes in West Virginia. The lot lizards’ world is dangerous and dirt poor, but it is also—seen through the eyes of a boy who likes lipstick and cock—a queer utopia. Cherry Vanilla is instructed in the arts of love and adored for his girlishness by pimps, truckers, and older sex workers like his mother, Sarah. Cherry Vanilla slyly hopes to