When Topeka's government did not act, he posted his first sign on a park restroom door: "Watch Your Kids. Gays in Restroom. Libby Phelps' parents, Margie, left, and Fred, center, protest in Baltimore in Libby says she misses her parents but has not had contact with them. He became convinced he and his offspring were chosen to battle a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah. They needed to take their warnings directly to the public.
Fred, now 83, describes his church as Old School Baptist and subscribes to the Calvinist belief that certain people are picked for salvation before birth. In the beginning, Libby saw the picketing as a play date with her cousins. Every week the children carried signs with messages of damnation and trudged around in a circle in Gage Park until a pattern was worn into the grass. Sometimes in the summer it got so hot that Libby's mother would wrap a wet washcloth around her neck.
In the winter, getting their snow gear on took longer than the picket. Before long, her grandfather's crusade expanded beyond Topeka. Family members were dispatched to picket government offices, schools, military bases and pop culture events for what the church perceived as acceptance of homosexuality. Libby picketed dozens of gay pride parades around the country, the AIDS quilt tour, the Academy Awards, radio broadcaster Paul Harvey's funeral, Jenna Bush's wedding, a public memorial for firefighters in California, college football games, soldiers' funerals, actor Bernie Mac's funeral, a Billy Graham event, the Sago mine disaster funerals in West Virginia and President Obama's inauguration.
She even picketed her high school and college graduations before taking part in the ceremonies. Holidays were not celebrated. She was forbidden to date. She could not wear makeup, pierce her ears or cut her hair. As her family's notoriety grew, she realized she was despised. Classmates would move to the other side of the room to avoid her. Her parents told her persecution made her stronger.
Once, when Libby was 17, Sara asked their parents what they would talk about as a family if they didn't picket. Later that night, maybe for the first time, Libby began to wonder: "Am I doing the right thing? Should I be telling people they are going to hell? After the terrorist attacks on Sept. But Libby didn't feel happy.
Soon afterward, one of her favorite cousins, Joshua Phelps-Roper, abruptly left the church. She was told to never speak to him again. Years before, Libby's oldest sister had also left the church. When her sister tried to visit home, church members told her she was not welcome. Libby saw the price of betrayal. In February , a fight over a bikini brought back rebellious thoughts that she had once swatted away. Libby was working as a physical therapist at the time her family planned a trip to Puerto Rico.
A co-worker lent her and her sister bikinis, and their mother snapped a modest picture of the two on a beach. The photo was displayed on a table before church one Sunday. By the end of the service it was gone. Libby was accused of dishonoring her parents, and an intervention was called. Church leaders told her they noticed her faith was slipping. She was afraid, but unlike her sister Sara, she did not apologize.
She reminded her critics that other church members had worn bikinis without reprisal. It only made them angrier. She was told she was trying to live in both worlds. She would have to choose. Since Libby left Westboro Baptist Church in , there have been about 10 other defections — most of them grandchildren, including Sara. Steve Drain, a Westboro spokesman, downplays the departures. Good luck with that. They have since married.
Her parents did not attend the wedding. Libby Phelps More photos. Her name is now hyphenated: Phelps-Alvarez. Now 30, she lives in Lawrence, Kan. She has new friends, a new family, a new world. But she misses her parents. Just after she left, she received an email from a church member saying her mother and father wanted no further communication with her.
Her parents did not respond to requests for an interview. Libby isn't sure what she believes anymore. She no longer hates homosexuality, but her journey is far from complete: "Everyone thinks when you leave you do this It doesn't work that way.
Sometimes she and her cousins talk about reaching out to those they hurt. Libby remembers when the Phelps clan picketed the funeral of a soldier killed in Afghanistan in He was the husband of one of her favorite instructors in college.
Contact the reporter. Brazil, Japan, sumo and food, deliciously intertwined. An early terrorist in the U. You would never catch Maitlis asking for a hug. What Theroux liked so much about that encounter, he says, was that Prince Andrew seemed to give the interview he had wanted to give. And, nevertheless, it was terrifically revealing. As frontman, as figurehead, he never seems to coerce or bully his contributors, and he hardly ever interrupts. Through a managed juggle of his interest and his inconspicuousness for about a decade he wore the same anonymous brown shirt for filming , Theroux lets people express themselves at their ease, at length, revealing their nature at their own speed.
I ask Theroux if he ever feels he has been too soft. If he feels that he has provided a platform that normalised objectionable behaviour. Because that behaviour exists. He seems aware that some viewers think he has been too lenient at times, or too often let curiosity drift into intimacy. Evil can come from an excess of emotion. Take the example of Maldonado-Passage, he says. He lost his first husband to a horrible illness, he lost another husband in a horrific accident [with a gun], he lost his brother in a car crash.
I suggest to Theroux that he recognised something of himself in Maldonado-Passage. He nods for a bit. We had a level of sensitivity in common, yeah. Theroux was raised around serious books and loose, liberal attitudes in a London home where the BBC World Service usually murmured away somewhere in the background.
His parents, Anne, a Brit who worked for the World Service, and Paul Theroux , the American novelist and travel writer, had met in Africa in the s. By the time the boys were growing up in London, reading was a huge part of their lives. The actor Justin Theroux , a cousin, has recalled watching with horror as little Louis and Marcel frittered away a summer in the s or s reading heavy textbooks on the Crusades.
When Theroux was about nine and Marcel 11, their parents let them read a grown-up book about serial killers. The boys were fascinated by a chapter in which a man suffocated victims with his penis.
But, the young Theroux used to wonder, how exactly? You sense that a lifelong curiosity about the abnormal, a tendency to intellectualise the grotesque, might have set in around this time. Both boys were enrolled at Westminster, an ancient independent school in central London. He did well academically and was bumped up to begin his A-level studies a year early. In a recent podcast conversation with his friend from school Adam Buxton , the comedian, Theroux described his first day in sixth form.
After school, Theroux went to Oxford University to study history, while Buxton and Cornish studied art and film, respectively, going on to land their own late-night comedy programme on Channel 4 in the mids. I would worry about what my sound recordist was thinking of my performance. What my director of photography was thinking. Something about those clunky outings for TV Nation played well on screen, though.
I just looked lost. But I suppose it made a funny and interesting counterpoint to the realms and backwoods of wild America that Michael Moore sent me into, and when I realised that saying the wrong thing was maybe part of what made it work, I suppose I accentuated that a bit. His career has gone through phases since then. In the early s, he made two series of When Louis Met…, in which he shadowed Jimmy Savile and other largely unsavoury public figures.
For about a decade after that, Theroux came and went with hour-long BBC specials, documenting trips to jails, casinos, plastic surgery clinics. Every so often, to the casual viewer, it seemed that Theroux had disappeared from the TV landscape. He knows well how quickly a thriving television career can founder. He tells me he has been reading the memoirs of the veteran British TV presenter Peter Purves , a book that, by the sounds of it, is far more harrowing than that formative one about serial killers.
Luckily I still had Crufts! I only hoped I would get another season of panto. He clicks his fingers, searching for an end to that metaphor. In a dying rainforest? He claps his hands and throws his whole body into a double-armed, Usain Bolt-style point.
The switch from TV to audio was slightly forced on him by lockdown. The musician FKA twigs agreed to talk about her experience of domestic violence. Justin Theroux came on to reminisce about family misadventures. She was a director in the BBC history department when they first met, at an office Christmas party in the early s.
They have since had three sons. Until they set up Mindhouse, Theroux would churn out his films for the BBC, never retaining much ownership over them. It felt quite old school. Yet it was unconventional, in an age when everyone from chief executives to freelance screenwriters, TV chefs to podcasters, has sought to mine their own ideas and material for subsidiary revenue. Things I was making, more-or-less for hire, in-house, and then giving away to the BBC, now I get to keep a bit more of.
I feel that little more ownership, figuratively and literally. How have they found it, working together every day? Nancy and I are taking two possible sources of anxiety, managing a personal relationship, managing a work relationship, and combining them.
Collaborating with her, seeing her thrive, has been a huge source of… Oh, this all sounds so patronising. In this year of desultory lockdowns, Theroux has been cooking a lot, doing the podcast from his home office as well as road-testing a personal theory that a high level of gin and wine in the diet may provide extra protection against coronavirus.
Otherwise, in the past few months, he has spent a lot of time wearing masks in editing suites, getting the new Joe Exotic film ready, and putting the finishing touches on a three-part film about snooker that Mindhouse will release soon. The snooker film is the first Theroux has worked on in which he does not appear. Since we have been talking, Theroux has never really settled in his seat, never stopped wriggling or checking over his shoulder.
I love that word.
0コメント