Queer as Folk · Sandy Hook · Another Bad MD
Plus, hacking!
the true crime that's worth your time
The Peacock reboot of Queer as Folk has roots in true crime. The series premiered last week with a warning frame spurred by the May 24 school shooting in Uvalde, Texas (but it might as well have come from the multitudes of other mass shootings across the country), as events in the episode was inspired by the 2016 mass shooting at Orlando’s Pulse nightclub.
According to a Hollywood Reporter story from last month, the Pulse connection is one of the reasons creator Stephen Dunn was able to secure the rights to the property, which has already had two iterations in the U.S. and U.K. From Dunn:
I went very early on in the process to Orlando and started meeting with the survivors. This was organized by the Orlando United Assistance Center, which organized roundtables and individual meetings with me to meet with whoever was interested from the survivors community, as well as the community leaders that rose up in response to what happened. I am so grateful that they trusted me to come into this world and try to understand and make any kind of sense of what happened. We got to see a public image of these people who were regular people going to a bar, but then became political. They became media figures. But only one side of that story really gets told.
What you’ll see in Queer as Folk is the honest truth of what it is like to go through something like that and how it’s not this saintly victim tragedy story. These are real people and they’re not victims. They survived a tragedy, and they are human beings whose lives were completely turned upside down after this. And this community all responded in completely different ways.
Of the people we talked to, anyone who was interested was invited to be involved as a consultant on the show and read scripts and gave feedback to make sure that we were telling the story authentically because it became clear that that was something that we had to do.
After the Uvalde shootings, THR reports, this warning was added:
Queer as Folk is a fictional series about the vibrant LGBTQ community in New Orleans rebuilding after a devastating tragedy. Some viewers may find elements of the first episode distressing as it depicts the aftermath of a shooting. Our hearts go out to all of those affected by these senseless tragedies.
In a podcast interview that dropped last week (you can listen to it below), Dunn expanded on how he worked with Pulse survivors to build the current season of the show, and also said that another true crime helped the showrunners choose the setting of New Orleans for this version of the series.
Prior to Pulse, Dunn acknowledged, it was New Orleans that was home to America’s worst attacks on an LGBTQIA space, the UpStairs Lounge arson attack. It’s a crime that many folks have forgotten, as it went down in 1973 — 32 people died in a fire at the second-floor bar allegedly caused by a patron who was ejected earlier that day. (The Wikipedia entry on the case is very comprehensive, and notes that the bar site was eventually fodder for an episode of Ghost Hunters, gross.) — EB
No one could have predicted what interesting true crime revelations continue to come from home DNA testing. Of all the things sci-fi movies have gotten right over the years, the one thing Phillip K. Dick (from whom all future-related properties seem to come, right) missed was that everyone could just spit in a tube, drop it in the mail, and find out who they’re related to.
As a, um, prolific ovum donor in the late 1990s and early aughts, it’s certainly something I think about a lot now — while I’m not ashamed that I helped folks get pregnant (if I were, I wouldn’t be blabbing about it here), but I know that many of the couples I assisted chose to keep the fact that they used a donated egg to themselves. There’s a web of Eve Jr.s waiting to be discovered, if it hasn’t been already...and some day soon, I suspect I’m going to hear from someone with eyes just like mine. And THAT, my friends, is why I will never take an at-home DNA test!
I won’t say it’s dread I feel, but that’s because I didn’t do anything wrong. But what about folks like Dr. Benjamin Fiorica, just the latest fertility doctor to face allegations of nonconsensual insemination with his own, house, supply.
The Verge has the tale, which rings very similarly to Our Father, the Netflix bad-fertility-doc doc I reviewed last month. It’s a good one:
The search became an obsession for both Huhn and her husband. Seated next to each other, the two would open their laptops and look up everyone that Ancestry connected with Huhn, scrutinizing each new match that popped up on her profile. They used Facebook to build out an extended list, scouring each match’s list of friends to see who they could be related to.
At this stage, it was a “fun adventure,” something that Huhn said felt like “our own personal mystery novel.” After extensive research, the couple was able to draw something akin to a family tree and trace Huhn’s roots to a village in Sicily and to a familiar last name: Fiorica.
The name rang a bell. Could this Fiorica be Dr. Benjamin Fiorica, the man who had performed the insemination procedure on her mother and delivered Huhn as a baby? She contacted the doctor. Fiorica chalked it up to a coincidence. “I had a vasectomy years before. Good luck in your search!” he said to her on the phone.
A few months later, AncestryDNA came up with a new match — someone who was genetically an aunt on her father’s side. Her name was Rosemary, and she was Benjamin Fiorica’s sister.
Huhn ran upstairs, woke up her husband, and shoved her phone in his half-asleep face. “Look, look it’s him!” she said.
This was the smoking gun. She wrote another email to Dr. Fiorica, attaching a screenshot of the results along with it. He caved.
“I must admit that I am your father,” Fiorica said in an email. “I am truly sorry that I did not admit this earlier.”
From there, things take a wild turn — unlike many products of what’s now being referred to with more regularity as “fertility fraud,” Arianna Huhn decided she wanted a relationship with her biological dad.
Reporter Kudrat Wadhwa’s longread on the Huhn case isn’t as cleanly black-and-white as Our Father, which is one of the things that makes it so engrossing — its messiness is a big part of its appeal. As DNA information becomes more and more available and we all discover more and more connections with each other, stories like Fiorica’s, or the Golden State Killer’s, or countless other crimes where genetic info was left behind will come to light. Ancestry.com and its ilk are likely keeping a lot of folks from sleeping at night. It truly is just a matter of time. — EB
I don’t think I have the fortitude to read Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth, but I’m glad I read a beefy excerpt from it on Slate this week. NYT reporter Elizabeth Williamson’s book came out in March to positive reviews, per its jacket description it is “based on hundreds of hours of research, interviews, and access to exclusive sources and materials” and seeks to unravel the misinformation campaigns that falsely claim the shooting was a hoax.
You can see why my mental health, or maybe yours either, can’t handle a whole book-length load explaining that infuriating conspiracy-mongering right now. Like so many people, I’m just so angry. But Slate’s excerpt, sub-headed “How a Tulsa grandmother became a vicious Sandy Hook conspiracy theorist—in her own words,” sucked me in. Not the least because I thought “Tulsa. Of course.”
Unlike many complaints expressed by New York Times-style writing, Williamson doesn’t seek to normalize Kelley Watt, the owner of a housecleaning business who since the 1990s has spent her free time “investigating” conspiracies related to children. In fact, Williamson works hard to make clear that Watt’s relationship with kids she doesn’t know seem more intense than her relationship with her own children.
“My whole life has been about kids,” she said. “That’s my biggest regret in life. I should have been a teacher. I would have been a really good first grade teacher.”
Watt has a Pinterest board called “Beautiful Children.” She had posted more than 100 photos there of babies, toddlers, and prepubescent girls, many of them twins. They wear fur-trimmed hoods, chic berets, oversize bows, earrings. Their hair is often flowing, framing enormous eyes with irises in unusual colors. They smile and hug, peek through doorways—a fantastical, eerie ideal for how children should look and live.
When we spoke, I asked her whether she doubted Sandy Hook because first grade children being murdered in their classrooms was too hard for her to face. “No. I just had a strong sense that this didn’t happen,” she said. “Too many of those parents just rub me the wrong way.”
I can’t speak to what conclusion you’ll draw after finishing this longread, which winds up with comments from Watt’s own daughter. I think a big part of what it helped me realize is that these folks live in a hell of their own devising, a hell that would exist with or without Facebook. Reading Watt’s story, I have to wonder how much of it — and of our false conspiracy problem in general — is as much a result of poor mental health services and educational systems than of Facebook.
Might Watt, or any of these other folks who refuse to believe that a horrific crime has occurred, be saved with treatment or just basic critical thinking skills? I wonder. — EB
The Wall Street Journal? Is this economy? A subscription to the WSJ is tough if you can’t write it off (though, if you google at the right time, you can find a pretty solid deal). However, my favorite product of the Murdoch-owned paper is its The Journal podcast, and that is gloriously free.
While most episodes of the podcast are business-y, it just launched a spin-off series called Hack Me If You Can that I’m majorly into. It’s about Dmitry Smilyanets, who led a massive hacking operation in Russia before coming to the U.S. to work in cybersecurity. I mean, he has a LinkedIn now.
It’s only three episodes long, moves at a snappy clip, and is a nice antidote to the vaguely depressing mass shooting denier item I wrote about in the item before. If you have a little less than two hours where you can use something fun in your ears, check it out. — EB
Next week on Best Evidence: Internet fear-mongering again, some more.
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