And so, in the dramatis personae of one of her plays, the savage Black character is the one person who offers the heroine “the possibility of love.” But perhaps the main exhibit in the case against Kusama is a wild and surreal novella she published from the 1980s centered on a recent N.Y.U.

grad named Henry who, struggling with addiction, falls into the clutches of a Chinese woman, Yanni, and the escort service she runs for a rich gay clientele.

“Different readers make different readings,” as the scholar Kobena Mercer observed, in an influential essay that — discussing Jean Genet, Robert Mapplethorpe and Rotimi Fani-Kayode — interrogated “racial fetishism” as a catchall dismissal.

If the letter writer is a practicing Catholic who believes in the Church’s canon laws on marriage, he should not feel obligated to serve as his cousin’s witness for an annulment.

It’s been decades since I left the Church, but it seems to me that if the letter writer’s cousin is basing his annulment petition on false testimony from friends and relatives, his second marriage cannot be viewed as valid, either.

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