RENEGADES

RENEGADES

Features

The men and women on these pages will change how you think about business, music, porn, comedy, gaming and more. They’ve risked it all—even their lives—to do what they love, showing us what can be accomplished if we break the rules. Meet the Renegades of 2016

“I GOME FROM NO MONEY. I GREW UP IN A TRAILER PARK. IT WAS SO IMPORTANT TO ME TO SUCCEED. TRIAL BY FIRE. SURVIVE OR DIE.”

JASON DILL

In 2009, pro skateboarder Jason Dill had to call 911 on himself. He was throwing up blood all over his New York City apartment and suffering from a gastric hemorrhage. The Jameson, Vicodin and Percocet cocktails had finally taken their toll.

“I didn’t think I’d even survive,” says Dill, who now stars on the Netflix series Love. “When I’m on the set, I’m quietas a mouse. I’m just so blown away and thankful I’m there. And the last thing I ever wanted was the responsibility of owning a company that people expect more from—

because owning a company is a pain in the ass.”

In 2013, after kicking the pills and spending more time on his board, Dill ditched his longtime sponsor, Alien Workshop—one of the most popular skateboarding companies ever—and walked away from a partial-ownership offer to co-found board brand Fucking Awesome, an extension of his self-funded apparel side project.

In doing so, Dill dumped a bucket of ice on the once-counterculfural world of skateboarding, which in the previous 17 years had devolved

into a G-rated parody of itself to appease moms and malls, and woke it the fuck up. The exodus of Alien’s riders to Fucking Awesome was swift. It’s now one of the top-selling and most knocked-off companies in boards and streetwear, despite its provocative graphics, null social mediapresence and label that prevents mass retail saturation.

“I suppose FA is like having a kid,” he says. . “It’s got personality; it’s walking around and talking. I can’t let it go to a community college, you know? I gotta raise it right.”—Rob Brink

«BEAUTY IS

THE THING THAT MAKES IT WORTH IT. IT’S WHAT IT MAKES YOU CONTINUE TO RESPOND TO THE QUES> TION, WHY BOTHER?”

STOYA

It’s hard to capture an old friend in one ai dote, but I’ll try. The time is two A.M., and S1 and I are smoking outside an East Village A mink hangs from her shouldersThe lights catch her feline cheekbones like Stoya tells me about the mid-i9th century pi ballerina EmmaLivry. In an era when dancers routinely caught fire from stage lights, refused to destroy the ethereality of her ; soaking her tutu in flame retardant.

died of burns, she had no regrets. Stoya notes th atipan ic about safety often focuses on the bodies, and the choices, of young women. She wonders why no one thought to move the lights.

This moment hints at Stoya’s ferocious mix of'glamour, toughness and nerdery. A classically trained ballerina until an injury in her mid-teens ruined her prospects, Stoyabecame a porn star—and I use the word star in the sense that applies to Garbo. She has written

for The New, York Tirrias, starred in a Serbian sci-fi film (the upcoming Ederlezi Rising) and trained as an aerialist in Moscow. She has also moved into entrepreneurship, co-founding the genre-defying porn site TrenchcoatX. When one of the biggest porn studios in the country treated herewith disrespect, she chose to work as a waitress rather than kowtow. No matter what she does, Stoya exudes a fierce, hard-won sense of freedom .—Molly Crabapple

LAURA JANE GRAGE

Laura Jane Grace has been minutely scrutinized since she started the band Against Me! as an anarchist-inspired solo project in 1997. Punk purists frothed as the Gainesville, Florida group’s sound evolved from lo-fi folk to full-on anthemic pop punk, leading to a major-label record deal in 2007. (These days, the band releases music on its own Total Treble imprint.) Fans and critics stopped and stared when Grace came out as transgender in 2012—an event with few precedents in the

testosterone-drenched world of punk rock. This November, two months after the release of the seventh Against Me! album, Shape Shift With Me, Grace will cap off her odyssey so far with a memoir titled Tranny: Confessions of Punk Rock’s Most Inf amous Anarchist Sellout.

Back in May, Grace made headlines for burning her birth certificate onstage in North Carolina to protest the state’s anti-trans bathroom law. But her music and writing signal a more intimate strain of activism: Listening

to Against Me! songs such as “I Was a Teenage Anarchist” and “True Trans Soul Rebel,” it becomes clear that Grace has always lived where the personal and the political collide. Her painfully honest, deeply human way of articulating that friction is the definition of Grace. And she still believes in the scene that has sustained her, even as it has threatened to drown her in expectations. “The influence that punk rock has had on my life is astounding,” she says. “I just think music is infinitely important.”—Jonah Bayer

ALI WONG

Ali Wong wanted it all (career, relationship, baby), got it all and mined every last minute of it in the process. The comedian currently juggles her mom duties, her day gig as a writer on acclaimed sitcom Fresh Off the Boat and her thriving stand-up career—while taking every conventional rule of comedy and bending it to her liking.

Wong’s Netflix special, Baby Cobra, filmed when she was more than seven months pregnant, is truly hilarious and groundbreaking. Now, as a new mother, she’s on another mission: speaking openly about finding a balance between her hormones’ command to stay home with her daughter and her professional need to stick to the comedy grind. The good news? Whatever she’s doing, it’s working.

“Last year in San Francisco, before Baby Cobra, they had to put some of my tickets on Groupon because I couldn’t sell all the seats,” she says. “Now this year, at that same venue, tickets for five shows sold out in less than one minute.” Sure, the crowds may be changing, but the objective of an Ali Wong show has always been the same. “I want people to laugh to the point that they can’t think.”—Jamie Loftus

“I’VE ALWAYS WANTED TO BE A HOUSEHOLD NAME AS A STAND-UP COMIC AND ALSO BE A MOTHER. I WAS NOT GOING TO ACCEPT THAT THEY WERE MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE.”

PAUL BEATTY

Paul Beatty may be America’s most hilarious— and subversive—writer. In July, the Los Angeles native’s daring fourth novel, The Sellout, was long-listed for the prestigious 2016 Man Booker Prize. The gleefullyunhinged satire follows the misadventures of one Bonbon Me, an urban weed and watermelon farmer whose father, a prominent psychologist and “Nigger Whisperer,” is gunned down by the LAPD. With the settlement money, Bonbon reinstitutes segregation, acquires an elderly slave and lands himself, stoned, before a baffled Supreme Court.

“It all starts with the language,” says the 54-year-old (who was also the first-ever Grand Poetry Slam champion, in 1990). “That’s where all the latticework is for me.” Indeed, the thrill of The Sellout lies not only in Beatty’s delirious conceit but also in his virtuoso riffs that take bull's-eye aim at race, class, pop culture and propriety in our supposedly postracial America.

“I get nervous when things don’t make people nervous,” Beatty says. “A lot of writers of color feel there are certain directions they have to take: what your point of view shoïtld be, who can do what, how positiveitdias to be. Spmebody’s always going to tell you what it meansSto be a black writer, what responsibilities ÿou have. Just trying to create some space is important to me.”

And that’s exactly what Beatty doe^, obliterating the boundaries of what is funny, W\hat is profane and what is just so sad and unfixable that we can only laugh to keep from crying. Thtere’s a bit of truth in every good joke, and perhaps in that truth we are able, after the laughs subside, to better see the world and ourselves in it.—James Yeh

NOOR TAGOURI

For anyone with preconceived ideas about women who choose to wear a headscarf every day, Noor Tagouri is disorienting. She’s simply not what you expect: a 22-year-old journalist (she likes to call herself a storyteller) on the verge of becoming this country’s first hijab-wearing news anchor. As of June, she’s an on-air reporter for Newsy, where she provokes the sort of confusion we could use right now, in part by making a surprisingly bold case for modesty. As abadass activistwith apassion for

demanding change and asking the right questions, accompanied by beauty-ad-campaign looks, Tagouri forces us to ask ourselves why we have such a hard time wrapping our minds around ayoung woman who consciously covers her head and won’t take no for an answer.

A West Virginia native and first-generation Libyan American, Tagouri graduated from college at the age of 20. In 2012, her #LetNoorShine campaign went viral. Her 2015 TEDx talk advocated unapologetic individuality,

and her YouTube channel draws tens of thousands of viewers. More recently, she collaborated with streetwear brand Lis’n Up Clothing on a fashion line that includes a Jean-Michel Basquiat-inspired sweatshirt. Half the purchase proceeds go to Project Futures, an antihuman-trafficking organization. Americans have a long way to go when it comes to how we regard Muslims, but with Tagouri burning down stereotypes and blazing newpaths, we’re a healthy stride closer .—Anna del Gaizo

“BEING

HI JABI MUSLIM WOMAN HELPS ME GAIN TRUST. I SAY, ‘I KNOW WHAT IT’S LIKE TO BE MISREP-

SEAN MURRAY

Everyone dreams of being an astronaut; Sean Murray made a game that lets you play one. This summer, the 36-year-old’s company, Hello Games, released one of the most ambitious video games in recent history: No Man’s Sky. The gorgeous sci-fi adventure allows players to explore more than 18 quintillion planets—yes, quintillion—thanks to clever environment-generation technology. Travel to massive worlds suffused with rich colors and teeming with alien creatures—then dodge galactic cops in your spacecraft.

The Ireland-born, Australian outbackraised Murray created his first game when he was just five. “My parents always joke that this is all I ever wanted to do,” he says.

Murray founded Hello Games in 2008 with three friends after quitting his job at Criterion, a big studio that got bought by E A, an even bigger studio. Sick of slaving away on blockbusters such as the Burnout series, he wanted to flex his creative muscles. Today that’s not a unique origin story for an independent game developer, but back then, in the days before the Apple App Store, it was.

“We were some of the first people to do that,” he says. “In our minds, it wasn’t some path to success. It was more like, I can’t work here anymore, and I need to go do something different.”

No Man’s Sky, the third release from Hello Games, launched in August after three years of feverish buildup among gamers obsessed with the promise of endless exploration. It’s a high-water mark for video games—and like a true artist, that’s all Murray really cares about.— Mike Rougeau