Ocean Vuong’s 2019 debut, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, was an epistolary novel addressed to someone who could not read it. The book presents itself as a series of letters written by Vuong’s alter ego, Little Dog, to his mother, Rose, a mixed Vietnamese child of the Vietnam War who never learned to read. Her illiteracy allows Little Dog to admit things he never otherwise could, most notably his secret teenage romance with his all-American best friend, Trevor. But Little Dog also fantasizes about discovering a means of communicating with his mother through sheer proximity. “I envy words for doing what we can never do — how they can tell all of themselves simply by standing still, simply by being,” he writes to his mother. “Imagine I could lie down beside you and my whole body, every cell, radiates a clear, singular meaning, not so much a writer as a word pressed down beside you.” Little Dog seems to suggest that the language of every novel contains a kind of second, unspeaking “language,” one that resembles those prelinguistic signs (crying, suckling, babbling) the infant uses to communicate with its mother.

This was, in many ways, a convenient theory of language for a young writer who was a talented poet and an insecure novelist. Vuong was clearly uncomfortable working with the novel form. “What I hoped to write with this book was pieces of debris,” he said a few years ago, citing as inspiration Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s experimental novel Dictee. “I refuse to make it legible, cohesive. Refuse to perform a temporal linearity … And because of that, a very common response to the book is that it’s pretentious.” But the fact that On Earth’s best chapter was a very good love poem that had originally appeared on BuzzFeed suggested a much simpler interpretation: The poet was bad at prose.

Nonetheless, On Earth launched Vuong into the gauzy clouds of literary celebrity. Many reviewers reserved their highest praise not for its strength as a novel but for its “powerful story,” which often seemed to be taken directly from Vuong’s experiences as a refugee. (The first chapter was first published in The New Yorker as memoir.) Vuong has rightly objected to the expectation that all immigrant writers will “perform ethnography” for the reader. Yet he remains a caricature of the diasporic poet: painfully earnest, self-consciously sage, constantly complaining about “authenticity” as a way of asserting it. The critic Som-Mai Nguyen has accused Vuong of “blunt-force ethnic credibility,” citing the poet’s tendency to pontificate about the motherland. Vuong has said, for instance, that he struggled to write standard prose because “in Vietnam, the oral tradition is elusive” — as if the Vietnamese have no novels. Such “in-group sleights of hand,” as Nguyen puts it, allow the diasporic writer to style himself as an ambassador of the very culture that, thanks to the realities of diaspora, has largely escaped him. Vuong claimed On Earth was a “conversation between two Vietnamese people” that the presumably white reader could only “eavesdrop” on. But the novel was clearly intended for the eavesdropper, whose exclusion could underwrite Vuong’s claim to exclusivity. That is, the book had to be overheard in order to have something to say.

After so much posturing, Vuong’s new book, The Emperor of Gladness, is a welcome surprise. It is a sweet, charming, conventional novel whose ambition does not outstrip its ability. The young Hai is a suicidal college dropout stuck in the economically depressed but whimsically named town of East Gladness, Connecticut. “If you aim for Gladness and miss, you’ll find us,” the narrator says before directing our attention to Hai, who is about to jump off a bridge. But before he takes the plunge, the boy is flagged down by Grazina, a zany Lithuanian immigrant with dementia. Still unable to face his mother, who believes he is off at medical school, Hai moves in with Grazina, effectively becoming her live-in nurse, and seeks employment at the local HomeMarket (a thinly disguised Boston Market). Hai’s co-workers are quirky, Wes Anderson–esque eccentrics who prove just as batty as Grazina: the manager, an amateur pro wrestler; the cashier, a Hollow Earther; Hai’s cousin Sony, an autistic Civil War buff in denial about his father’s death. Yet the delusions of others, instead of isolating Hai, end up pulling him out of his grief and into a provisional world of shared experience that, at least for a while, makes life worth living.

What a pleasure to be given characters and a plot! Emperor feels at every turn like the book On Earth should have been, if only Vuong had seen prose as an opportunity instead of an obstacle to be sandblasted away by pure force of lyricism. The author finally seems to have accepted that prose, unlike poetry, will wither and die without a reader who can actually understand it: At last, he is talking to us. Vuong says he first turned to poetry because it provided “the pressure of the hand on the skin,” a kind of nonlanguage that could express, through its aura of inscrutability, the poet’s very real experience of being misunderstood. But he has so often been crushed by the weight of his own particularity that he has forgotten — or, worse, denied — that even gay Vietnamese immigrants are capable of universal experiences. Vuong is now one of the most famous poets in America; his veil of illegibility is a choice, not an artifact of empire.

That is the peril faced by every marginalized writer: He may become so accustomed to the margins he cannot recognize the center even when he is standing in it. But it is easier for the diasporic poet to loudly assert that the motherland is unknowable than to admit he happens not to know very much about it. I am reminded of one of Vuong’s stated influences, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse: “It seemed to her such nonsense — inventing differences, when people, heaven knows, were different enough without that.” I do not mean to imply that Vuong must give up those things that make him different. But to write prose — as I think The Emperor of Gladness shows — is to assume that these differences, however personally painful or politically fraught, do not prevent the writer from having at minimum one thing in common with his readers: namely, language itself.

As a poet, Vuong was a prodigy. He was an undergraduate when he began writing the poems that would make up his award-winning first collection, Night Sky With Exit Wounds. In particular, Vuong excelled at a certain kind of poetic density: small, compact phrases with the mass of planets. (“You’re so quiet you’re almost / tomorrow.”) From his mentor, the poet Ben Lerner, Vuong seems to have inherited an interest in “articulating beyond language,” pointing to the famous dashes of Dickinson as a visceral attempt to speak through silence. This example is almost certainly taken from Lerner, whose 2016 essay The Hatred of Poetry argues that all poems fail to realize the “transcendent impulse” at the heart of poetry. The best poets find a way to represent this failure for the reader by pushing language past what it can bear. Dickinson’s dashes, Lerner writes, are “markers of the limits of the actual,” placeholders for an ideal poem that can never be put into words. In fact, all prose carries within it a ghost of poetry that can be glimpsed only when language breaks down — as when the expat poet of Lerner’s novel Leaving the Atocha Station realizes that his poor Spanish listening skills allow him to “dwell among possible referents” without settling on a single fixed meaning.

Vuong has told a strikingly similar anecdote about his late mother, like Rose an illiterate mixed-race Vietnamese immigrant who worked in a nail salon. Vuong’s mother would attend his poetry readings with her chair turned toward the audience so she could study its reactions. After one reading, Vuong found her in tears. “I said, ‘Mom? You didn’t understand, couldn’t understand. Why are you crying?’ And she said, ‘I never thought I’d live to see all these white people clapping for my son,’” he recalled in an interview. “She said, ‘I noticed that, as you talk, their faces change, their postures change, and I could see your words landing on them.’” It is a moving story. But Vuong’s lapidary conclusion — “This is the power of words” — does not hold up to scrutiny. In the first place, the poet’s actual words were gibberish as far as his mother was concerned. Nor did the applause mean the poems were any good; the white people might have simply been philistines or flatterers, as Vuong never tires of telling us. Yet for Vuong, the fact that his mother could be moved to tears by glossolalia plus physiognomy seems to prove that language can be experienced through unintelligibility, rather than in spite of it. “I can see,” Little Dog’s mother tells him. “It’s gotten me this far, hasn’t it?”

There is a romance of illiteracy here, as if poetry should be looked at instead of thoughtfully read. There is, equally, a certain childish hope that Vuong’s reader will approach him with the benevolent incomprehension of a maternal figure. (“Are you my mom yet,” he asks the reader in one poem.) Vuong has often seemed to resent the demand that he make himself intelligible to white audiences, while also failing to imagine that any other audience exists. This results in some obtuseness, particularly around the question of the Vietnamese language itself, which can be found sprinkled throughout his poetry and prose. “I read in Vietnamese and the first question is ‘What did you say?’” Vuong told an interviewer in 2022. “It took me a long time to reply, ‘I’m not going to translate that.’ If I wanted to, I would have spoken in English.” But there is a world of difference between being accosted on the street for not speaking English and being asked by an attendee at a reading to explain something that you, a very famous poet, have just read aloud. In these cases, Vuong is clearly more interested in inflicting the language barrier on his American audience than in employing Vietnamese to, say, communicate with other Vietnamese people. This is fine as far as revenge goes. Notably, though, Vuong spares no thought for the Vietnamese American listener who speaks little to no Vietnamese — people like Little Dog, whose language skills do not exceed a “second-grade level.”

And even second-grade Vietnamese can be abused. “In the Vietnamese context — and it might be similar to Chinese — words are like spells,” Vuong told the writer Hua Hsu in 2022, claiming English speakers have a basically primitive relationship to language compared with the peoples of the Far East. This is deeply insulting to Vuong’s much-invoked illiterate ancestors, who were apparently so in touch with the primordial metaphors that they never managed to convey basic information to one another. Of course, what can make the mother tongue seem like magic is the simple fact that one does not speak it very well. Like many children of diaspora — I include myself here — Vuong mistakes his own naïveté for insight. In Time Is a Mother, he writes,

In my language, the one I recall now only by closing my eyes, the word for love is Yêu.

And the word for weakness is Yếu.

How you say what you mean changes what you say.

The reader, again presumptively white, is clearly meant to suppose that Vietnamese culture understands love and weakness as two sides of the same poignant coin. But in reality, yêu and yếu are just two words that sound meaningfully different and mean different things; they are no more esoterically linked than live, laugh, and love. The pathos here thus depends largely on the reader’s total ignorance of Vietnamese. To explain the basic facts of tonal languages would break the spell.

Here Vuong is inheriting a tradition from some other illiterate ancestors: his white ones. In 1915, the imagist poet Ezra Pound went so far as to produce a “translation” of the poems of Li Bai despite speaking no Chinese, relying instead on the notes of the Orientalist Ernest Fenollosa, who argued that Chinese writing preserved the original metaphors of primitive language in visual form. This erroneous belief that all Chinese characters are ideograms — symbols that express ideas directly, without language — remains widespread today in the West. Take the final page of Vuong’s Night Sky, which bears a note from his publisher, Copper Canyon Press, explaining that its then pressmark, 詩, the character for the word for “poetry,” is made up of “two parts: ‘word’ and ‘temple.’” How poetic! But the truth is prosier: The scribes of ancient China, knowing the Chinese word for poetry sounded something like tomple, took the existing character for the word temple and added the character for the word speak as a kind of mnemonic tag. The Chinese writing system is almost entirely based on bad rhymes like this; Vietnamese scholars would stretch these rhymes further when adapting the Chinese system for their own use. For instance, the character for my Chinese surname, 朱, zhū, meaning “vermilion,” was historically used to refer to half a dozen similar-sounding but unrelated words in Vietnamese, including cho (“give”), chẩu (“protrude”), and trò (“trickery”). The point is that, in all languages, the relationship between signs and ideas is arbitrary; this is why you can call a spade a thuổng.

Vuong has long presented Vietnamese the way Pound presented Chinese: as a spiritual record of a people’s soul. We are told Vietnamese refugees “use metaphor as a coping mechanism” — for instance, one says of the deceased that they “got on the road.” The claim that euphemisms for death are somehow unique to Vietnamese culture is absurd in the extreme. But for Vuong, language is a fossil record of historical violence. “In Vietnamese culture we say chính xác, and that means ‘clear as corpse,’” he has said. “What does it say about a group of people who’ve been at war for so long, defending against multiple imperial forces, to now talk about clarity in terms of death?” Now one could just as easily say — and Vuong has — that the innocent English phrase dead serious is part of the “lexicon of American violence.” But the nature of all idioms is that their meaning cannot be deduced from their components; the phrase kicked the bucket does not put the English speaker in the mind of an actual bucket, just as the word death does not remind him terribly of the letter D. The same would go for chính xác, were it not for a factual error on Vuong’s part: The phrase is in truth a direct borrowing from an older form of the modern Chinese word zhèngquè, meaning “correct,” and has nothing at all to do with corpses.

This is to say that phrases like chính xác actually do contain a history, as the language historian John D. Phan shows in his new book, Lost Tongues of the Red River. In this case, it is the history of the gradual supplementation (at times, replacement) of native Vietnamese words with Chinese loanwords through centuries of trade, empire, and intellectual exchange. This history is material; to understand it, we must put the words into their prosaic context, rather than trying to tease out their secret poetry. “When it comes to the spiritual wisdom of how to handle something like language, Vietnam is way ahead,” Vuong told Hsu. But the idea that Vietnamese people are somehow more poetic because they happen to speak Vietnamese is an idea that belongs at the bottom of a metaphorical lake. It is hardly fair to bestow such a grave spiritual responsibility upon a country of people who, let’s be honest, have far more in common with one another than they do with Ocean Vuong, a celebrated poet whose relationship to language has been, as he constantly insists, forcefully altered by an experience of diaspora that by definition does not apply to those Vietnamese people still living in Vietnam. When a young man in Hanoi says matter-of-factly of his late grandmother that she “got on the road” this morning and by this indicates nothing more than the mundane fact of her death, does he betray the great national magic? No: He is just trying to tell someone.

In the middle of On Earth, Little Dog and Trevor ride their bikes down the “white side” of the Connecticut River, passing tenement apartments, the adult-video store, the local Italian restaurant. As they pedal, Little Dog is reminded of dozens of people he knows: a diabetic schoolteacher from New Delhi turned hunting-knife saleswoman, a Hot Cheetos–loving trans woman working at Sears, a white boy doing four years for stealing laptops from Trinity College. For the first time in the novel, we are given a sense of a real place, a social world that Little Dog and his friend inhabit. They are there, and this means we are too. What a gift, then, that the first chapter of The Emperor of Gladness reads almost like a reworking of this passage. Its narrator speaks in a warm first-person plural; like the stage manager of Our Town, he ruefully directs the reader’s attention around the weary map: “Turn right at Conway’s Sugar Shack, gutted and shuttered, with windows blown out and the wooden sign that reads WE SWEETEN SOON AS THE CROCUS BLOOM, rubbed to braille by wind.” There is the hard thwack of reality here. There is also — finally — some humor: “Against all odds, we have a library.” Taken together, it is some of the best prose Vuong has ever written.

Why does Emperor succeed where On Earth failed? For the most part, it does not cover new territory. Like Little Dog, Hai was raised by a single mother, loses a young lover to an opioid overdose, and is an obvious stand-in for Vuong himself. (Hải means “ocean.”) Yet the two young men could not be more different. Little Dog, who dictates On Earth in the first person, sounds more like a lyrical I than a fictional protagonist. His interior and exterior lives are so blended that it is difficult to see him as the subject of a concrete desire, someone who might ride a bike or eat a hamburger. When a bully tells Little Dog to “speak English,” this feels like a category of experience a little immigrant boy could hypothetically have, rather than a specific experience this little boy is having. In this way, Little Dog is more posited than imagined. But Hai is something else: a character. He may be like Vuong, but he is more than just an extension of him. Hai has internal thoughts and external constraints; he does not burst into lyric or dissolve into elegy. He can’t. He has work in the morning.

One would never accuse Vuong of becoming Hemingway; metaphor still abounds in The Emperor of Gladness. But even Hemingway knew that figurative language works only if it is grounded in a real social world. (This is the subject of his famous short story “Hills Like White Elephants.”) The metaphors of On Earth have a solipsistic quality, as if only Vuong has the right to know what they really mean. “What is a country but a borderless sentence?” Little Dog asks, an insipid comparison that illuminates only the fungibility of abstract nouns. (What is a sentence but a borderless country?) But the wooden sign in East Gladness that has been “rubbed to braille by wind” — that is more than briefly gorgeous. The metaphor succeeds, like any good metaphor, because the reader and writer agree on the denotative meaning of its terms: We know what the wind is, what braille is, what it is for something to erode. We further grasp the irony that the letters of the old sign are being reduced to their materiality as meaningless shapes. Yet to call these shapes “braille” is to suggest that, even as it loses its denotative meaning, the sign has become readable in a new way: It is now a monument to financial ruin.

Or take the terrifically elegant metaphor that ends Time Is a Mother — “I remembered my life / the way an ax handle, mid-swing, remembers the tree.” An extraordinary image that turns on an ordinary observation: In real life, ax handles are made of wood. Without that essential kernel of referentiality, there can be no metaphor at all. Metaphor is thus opposed to poetry itself, where, as Lerner writes, “the correspondence between text and world [is] less important than the intensities of the poem.” It is much more on the side of fiction, and especially the novel, which almost always relies on a set of imaginary facts to anchor the reader within its reality.

Vuong himself illustrates this difference in On Earth. Little Dog’s grandmother Lan enlists him to tweeze out her gray hairs, rewarding him with rambling myths and fables. But sometimes Lan’s stories seem to shift into a different, more personal mode. “At first I thought she was telling another one of her half-invented tales, but the details grew clearer as her voice stammered into focus on odd yet idiosyncratic moments in the narrative,” Little Dog recalls — for instance, the way the soldiers smelled “of a mixture of tar, smoke, and mint Chiclets.” The phrase “odd yet idiosyncratic” is odd in its own right. What Vuong seems to mean is that such Proustian details are unexpected but nevertheless distinctive; their unprompted specificity gives the story a verisimilitude. The mint Chiclets have a reality effect that cuts through the accustomed phantasmagoria of Lan’s stories: They imply a linguistic order where words refer to actual things like chewing gum or napalm. This does not mean Lan’s stories become “true”; Little Dog has no means of verifying their historicity. But the details feel real, not because they involve the overwhelming emotion of a poetic utterance but because they sound like mundane facts, whether or not these facts are historically accurate.

Interestingly, a version of this scene recurs throughout The Emperor of Gladness. As Grazina’s dementia progresses, she starts hallucinating, talking to the furniture and mistaking the thunder for Nazi artillery. One night, a desperate Hai impulsively introduces himself as an Allied officer tasked with escorting her to safety. Hai knows nothing of World War II, relying instead on his cousin’s Civil War trivia, but even so, their reenactments soon assume a delusional consistency. “You see this?” Hai whispers, and Grazina sees it, her memories suddenly crystallizing around a lost family member or a beloved location. Hai reflects on how odd it is that “despite her derangement of senses, she’d managed to enter such a clear, lucid state of linearity.” Yet he also begins to notice that the authenticating details of Grazina’s life — the odd yet idiosyncratic ones — do not actually line up. Finally Hai asks the old woman, “Grazina, are you making this all up?” The suggestion is that Grazina may be collaborating with her own dementia; rather than passively reexperiencing the past, she has actively invented a way to experience the present. Hai has so readily assumed that Grazina’s glossolalia is an authentic sign of historical truth that he has overlooked a more mundane possibility: that, like him, Grazina may be making up stories to spend time with her friend.

Hai learns this same lesson from his co-workers, who show him that a shared system of references — even one about lizard people who secretly control the government — can be a means of establishing love and solidarity among those whose lives have been turned to linguistic mush by capitalism. As the HomeMarket employees drive down the interstate on a mission to pay homage to Sony’s dead father, Sony and Grazina idly read out the passing billboards: “Chicopee Mutt Rescue, Dr. Klein’s prosthetic consultations, Yankee Candle Factory Outlet, Have you seen this girl?, Gavin DeGraw at Mohegan Sun, and one billboard that read, enigmatically, God Knows.” This too is glossolalia. It recalls the found poem Vuong once fashioned from his mother’s Amazon purchase history: “Saviland Holographic Gold Nail Powder, 6 colors / Nescafé Taster’s Choice Instant Coffee / Advil (ibuprofen), 4 pack / PIXNOR Pedicure Double-Sided Callus Remover.” It turns out that capitalism “naturally” produces a kind of poetic language sucked dry of referentiality. Consider the word PIXNOR, one of the many alphabet-soup brands on Amazon, like FRETREE or BSTOEM, that sell products directly from factories in Shenzhen. (PIXNOR: That is a Chinese ideogram!) Obviously this does not vitiate the whole enterprise of poetry. But it is a sobering reminder that escaping prose is not, per se, radical, desirable, or impressive. On the contrary, it’s as American as Apple Pay.

In a world that is drowning him in poetic utterances, it is a relief for Hai to feel he is part of a complete sentence. When he first starts working at HomeMarket, he is filled with a naïve sense of elation at being a cog in the metrics-driven capitalist machine. “Never in his whole life had he been so included in something as to be swallowed by it, invisible among a visible human mass,” writes Vuong. “He had become an employee and thus had obtained an eternal present, manifested only by his functional existence on the time card.” A workplace is like a found poem: a group of people with nothing in common but an empty page. But by the novel’s end, this visible human mass assembled by capital has taken matters into its many hands: They ditch the restaurant and drive the catering van across state lines to the site of Sony’s father’s fatal car accident. Finally acknowledging his father’s death, Sony says his good-byes, and the third-best HomeMarket team in the Northeast huddles around him in a group embrace, “their bodies finally touching, a mass of labor cobbled together by a boy’s hallowed loss.” Their juxtaposition has become a kind of composition: The poem has become a kind of prose.

Then it’s over. The workers return to their frustrating lives; Grazina is put into a home. The arbitrariness of solidarity leaves it vulnerable to change. “I fucked up! I chose the wrong story to live in,” a distraught Hai tells Grazina as she is carted away. But the dream of a relationship unencumbered by reality is a dream of a poem unencumbered by prose. It reflects a desire to be infantilized, to be literally infant, that is, unspeaking. In Vuong’s earlier work, the maternal function could not be separated from a fantasy of the mother’s body; in The Emperor of Gladness, that function has been dispersed into the concrete reality of a fast-casual restaurant. The love on offer at HomeMarket is not a poetic return to the prelinguistic womb; it is a low-wage service job managed by a faceless corporation in an economically depressed town. This does not make its actions pure evil: Hai’s teammates look after homeless people, help one another find work, and sell a delicious cornbread that, like the real-life Boston Market’s, is basically cake. But this kind of love is indeed prosaic. There is no great poetry that binds HomeMarket into a mythical whole, just as there is no magical reason that the four meaningless lines of 王 should be pronounced vương.

All of this is catastrophic only if you believe that limitless access to the mother — and her tongue and her land — is the only authentic way for diasporic people to relate to one another. I would submit to you that it is not; I would submit that it is no way to do anything. In her new collection, Becoming Ghost, the poet Cathy Linh Che reflects on a single can of beer shared by her parents, refugees of the war who spend their days waiting out the ordinary unhappiness of their marriage. “Is this love, I think,” Che asks. “To misunderstand / each other, but to stick around?” This is as good a definition of prose as any I can think of. Misunderstanding is the natural by-product of the communicative attempt; we cannot genuinely fail to understand one another without allowing that, one of these days, we might succeed. That is the weakness of prose — which is to say, by the magic of language, the love of prose, too.

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On Sunday afternoon, three Seattle Police officers showed up to the queer hangout and nude beach Denny Blaine and told the naked people there that being naked outside, which is legal in Seattle, was actually illegal and that everyone had to put their clothes on. by Vivian McCall

On Sunday afternoon, three Seattle Police officers showed up to the queer hangout and nude beach Denny Blaine and told the naked people there that being naked outside, which is legal in Seattle, was actually illegal and that everyone had to put their clothes on.

Witnesses who spoke to The Stranger at the beach say the cops stuck around talking to beachgoers for close to two hours, and told one transgender woman, who was lying naked face down on the ground, not to come back to the beach for a week.

While police were talking to beachgoers, there was also a man parked at the beach who told an advocate that he was with a private security firm that was representing “community interests.”

Advocates and beachgoers confirmed that this was not the first time in recent weeks that police have shown up at the beach investigating claims of lewd activity.

Neighbors have been going after the nude beach for over two years now. In late 2023, beachgoers learned of a plan to construct a playground at Denny Blaine, after neighbor and millionaire owner of University Village Stuart Sloan anonymously donated $1 million for its construction. The plan failed after public uproar, but last month Denny Blaine Park for All, a group of neighbors that includes Sloan, sued the city for allegedly allowing the beach to become a “regional venue” for public masturbation and public sex, a characterization that more than 50 beachgoers who’ve spoken to The Stranger in the last year and a half totally dispute. Advocates say that masturbation does happen at the park, but it’s rare, and the overwhelming consensus is that the community knows how to deal with it and that the police do not need to swoop in. The suit also goes after legal nudity, making the argument that the Parks Department is violating its Code of Conduct by depriving neighbors enjoyment of the park. Surely this is remedied by making sure nobody else enjoys it either.

Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office has told The Stranger numerous times that he supported the right of people to use the park nude. It did not respond to a Sunday request for comment. The Seattle Police Department, whose public affairs office is closed on weekends, also did not respond to a Sunday request for comment or a Monday morning follow up email.

Beachgoers say police arrived around 2:40 pm.

Carlos, who didn’t want to use his full name to protect his privacy, says he was lying naked on the grassy upper level of the park when an SPD officer approached him and said he needed to cover up.

Carlos, who has been coming to the beach for seven years without issue, told the officer this was not true. He’s right.

Nudity has been legal in Seattle since the 1990 case Seattle v. Johnson found a later repealed local law against lewd conduct violated the right to free expression. Washington State has a law against indecent exposure, but SPD guidance posted by former chief Gil Kerlikowske in 2008 says that officers shouldn’t take action unless there’s “lewd or offensive behavior.” Carlos says he was only sunbathing, as was the transgender woman who was trespassed, witnesses say. 

Carlos says the officer told him she didn’t see the difference between nude sunbathing and indecent exposure. Soon, she was joined by a sergeant and another officer.

Carlos texted a telegram group for beachgoers run by Friends of Denny Blaine, the park’s queer-led stewardship group, to sound the alarm about cops telling people to put their clothes on.

Colleen Kimseylove, co-founder of the friends group and a key activist who organized against the playground plan, says they rushed over and spoke to all three officers.

The responding officer told Kimseylove repeatedly that nudity was not legal in Seattle, “period, end of story.” The sergeant told them that nudity at Denny Blaine was a low enforcement priority and that he thought there had to be a “reasonable solution,” but that “they had been directed by our higher-ups to engage in regular patrols of the park.”

“It’s very ominous to speak to representatives of the law in Seattle who don’t know the law of Seattle and are willing to act on the beck and call of millionaires,” Kimseylove says. “It’s not a good feeling.”

The officers told Kimseylove that people would be trespassed if they didn’t put their clothes on immediately, or arrested if they proved belligerent. Kimseylove then asked the twenty or so people there to put their clothes on. Only one person, a trans woman, refused.

John, a man who sat on a wall at the park with his bike, says the woman shouted that people “did not have to comply,” and several witnesses say she was threatened with arrest. Police told her not to come back to Denny Blaine Park for a week, witnesses say. The Stranger was unable to reach the woman.

Several beachgoers say a blonde man parked in a grey Chevy Tahoe, allegedly spoke to one of the officers when she arrived, and they suspected that he made the call.

The man would only smile sheepishly at The Stranger, but he would speak to Kimseylove—who says the man did not give his name or the name of his employer but says was hired as private security by “interests in the neighborhood.”

This weekend’s events are the most recent in a new wave of neighborhood actions against the beach. In addition to the lawsuit against the city, it seems the Seattle Police have been keeping a special eye on Denny Blaine recently. This isn’t even the first time they’ve told people to put their clothes on.

On April 2, Blake Waddell was “Pooh bearing it” (shirt, no pants) at Denny Blaine when an SPD crisis officer approached him and asked about reports of “indecent exposure” at the beach. It was a cold, not so “glorious day” at the beach, Waddell says. Not many people were there. None of them were masturbating.

Slipping on his boxer shorts, Waddell explained to the officer the local nudity law and the history of the beach. The officer, who admitted he didn’t know much of that history, stood thumbs in his armpits, and told Waddell that if a parent with a child had been “affronted or surprised” by nudity there, it could count as indecent exposure. The officer also told Waddell that the enforcement priority at Denny Blaine was coming from a “higher level,” echoing what officers told Kimseylove on Sunday. In a recent email, SPD said it did not know the nature of Waddell’s conversation with the officer.

Two days later, on April 4, Waddell took video of a police boat cruising slowly by the beach. About thirty minutes later, he says two squad cars rolled up. Waddell again slipped on his boxers to meet them in the parking lot, a little angrier this time. He says three officers stepped out and gave him the “same spiel” about stepped up patrols over reports of public urination and masturbation. Again, Waddell saw nobody urinating or masturbating at the beach. Video shows a mostly empty beach.

Waddell, who was at the beach Sunday, says he filed an official on-the-spot complaint with the police sergeant.

Another beachgoer and volunteer with Friends of Denny Blaine told The Stranger that he’d been removing invasive blackberries from the shore on March 26 when two Seattle Parks Department Park Rangers told a naked man to either put his clothes on or move to a lower level of the park away from the street. The volunteer talked with the rangers for about 30 minutes, and like Waddell, explained to them both the law and the park’s long history of nude sunbathing.

The volunteer emphasized that the rangers, polite and receptive, listened intently. He believed it could have been a mistake. The Parks department told The Stranger that it was a mistake and that the police would take reports of lewd behavior from then on.

Beachgoer Nicole Baich says she has also seen police patrol boats cruise slowly by in recent weeks. She called the police presence Sunday “gross.”

“I didn’t expect to pull up to the beach at 3 pm on a lovely, cloudless Sunday afternoon and have it be devoid of my friends and culture because of the cop cars that are down here,” she says. “They’re menacing.”

John, the man with the bike, didn’t know what to think. His friend Bill sitting on the wall next to him did. He cut in.

Bill says he’s come to Denny Blaine for more than ten years. The only people unhappy with the beach were the neighbors. He turned his head to Sloan’s house and said they were here before it was even built. Bill remembers the old brick mansion that used to be there being rolled onto a barge on its way to Bainbridge Island.

But even then people complained. They’ve always complained and the cops have answered those complaints by telling them to put their clothes on. They’d comply, only to take them back off when they left. (Back in 1988, The Seattle Times ran a story about police cracking down on topless sunbathing. Even earlier in 1982, The Seattle Gay News ran a similar story of police citing a woman. Nudity wasn’t legal yet, but the women argued the law was sexist. Nobody was cracking down on topless men).

“You know, there are people who are wealthy who are naked-friendly, and this would be an ideal house for one of those people to buy,” he says. “They paid premium money for it. Then they could invite us over to their hot tub.”

Gun violence continues to impact communities nationwide, with Seattle being no exception. Recently, community members, leaders, and youth convened at the Northwest African American Museum for an event titled Voices for Change: A Future Without Gun Violence. Organized by Seattle Cares Mentoring Movement and the 4C Coalition, the event focused on fostering open dialogue and developing community-driven solutions to tackle the issue.

Don Cameron, Executive Director of Seattle Cares, meets with Christopher B. Bennett for this episode of the Seattle Medium’s Rhythm & News Podcast.

Hi friends! We’re on week three of my 12-week practice in writing one bite-sized topic per week — scoping it down, writing straight through, trying real hard to avoid over-writing or editing down to a pulp.

Week 1 — “On Writing, Social Media, and Finding the Line of Embarrassment”
Week 2 — “On Dropouts and Bootstraps”

Three points in a row makes a line, and three posts in a row called “On [Something or Other]” is officially a pattern.

It was an accidental repeat last week (move fast and break things! ), but I think I like it, so I’m sticking with it.

Next on the docket: pronouns and mandates

This week I would like to talk about pronouns (as in “my name is Charity, my pronouns are she/her or they/them”) and pronoun mandates, in the context of work.

Here’s where I stand, in brief:

• Making it safe to disclose the pronouns you use: GOOD
• Normalizing the practice of sharing your pronouns: GOOD
• Mandating that everyone share their pronouns: BAD

This includes soft mandates, like when a manager or HR asks everyone at work to share their pronouns when introducing themselves, or making pronouns a required field in email signatures or display names.

I absolutely understand that people who do this are acting in good faith, trying to be good allies. But I do not like it. And I think it can massively backfire!

Here are my reasons.

I resent being forced to pick a side in public

I have my own gender issues, y’all. Am I supposed to claim “she/her” or “they/them”? Ugh, I don’t know. I’ve never felt any affinity with feminine pronouns or identity, but I don’t care enough to correct anyone or assert a preference for they/them. Ultimately, the strongest feeling I have about my gender is apathy/discomfort/irritation. Maybe that will change someday, maybe it won’t, but I resent being forced to pick a side and make some kind of public declaration when I’m just trying to do my goddamn job. My gender doesn’t need to be anyone else’s business.

I totally acknowledge that it is valuable for cis people to help normalize the practice by sharing their pronouns. (It never fails to warm the cockles of my cold black heart when I see a graying straight white dude lead with “My pronouns are he/him” in his bio. Charmed! )

If I worked at a company where this was not commonly done, I would suck it up and take one for the team. But I don’t feel the need, because it is normalized here. We have loads of other queer folks, my cofounder shares her pronouns. I don’t feel like I’m hurting anyone by not doing it myself.

Priming people with gender cues can be…unwise

One of the engineering managers I work with, Hannah Henderson, once told me that she has always disliked pronoun mandates for a different reason. Research shows that priming someone to think of you as a woman first and foremost generally leads them to think of you as being less technical, less authoritative, even less competent.

Great, just what we need.

What about people who don’t know, or aren’t yet out?

Some people may be in a transitional phase, or may be in the process of coming out as trans or genderqueer or nonbinary, or maybe they don’t know yet. Gender is a deeply personal question, and it’s inappropriate to force people to take a stand or pick a side in public or at work.

If **I** feel this way about pronoun mandates (and keep in mind that I am queer, have lived in San Francisco for 20 years, and am married to a genderqueer trans person), I can’t imagine how offputting and irritating these mandates must be to someone who holds different values, or comes from a different cultural background.

You can’t force someone to be a good ally

As if that wasn’t enough, pronoun mandates also have a flattening effect, eliminating useful signal about who is willing to stand up and identify themselves as someone who is a queer ally, and/or is relatively informed about gender issues.

As a friend commented, when reviewing a draft of this post: “Mandating it means we can’t look around the room and determine who might be friendly or safe, while also escalating resentment that bigots hold towards us.”

A couple months back I wrote a long (LONG) essay detailing my mixed feelings about corporate DEI initiatives. One of the points I was trying to land is how much easier it is to make and enforce rules, if you’re in a position with the power to do so, than to win hearts and minds. Rules always have edge cases and unintended consequences, and the backlash effect is real. People don’t like being told what to do.

Pronoun mandates were at the top of my mind when I wrote that, and I’ve been meaning to follow up and unpack this ever since.

Til next week, when we’ll talk “On something or some other thing”,
~charity

(835 words! )