Anger

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  She’d come to understand their work as opposite in that way. Sigrid looked back into the past, through layer upon layer of history, trying to excavate what had been. Her new project was a scale-model re-creation of the rooms of Matilda of Scotland, and she took what she could from books like De Gestis Regum Anglorum. From a series of petty facts, she tried, and sometimes succeeded, in re-creating lives lived and lives lost. She was almost always looking back, and she talked with a kind of lilting nostalgia. Even when she talked about what she’d had for breakfast, she said it as if she’d never have oatmeal and toast again. Marta worked in forecasting. Taking the current levels of fluorination in the water, projecting what it would look like in ten years, in fifty, in one hundred. She worked to understand how the small, seemingly insignificant particles that filled their water and their air might accumulate over time into something dreadful and awful. Five dollars was never five dollars to Marta. It was always turning into one hundred, two hundred. All she could see was trends, losses mounting every moment of every day. “You’re like Anne of Cleves,” Sigrid said one day when they were in bed and Marta was trying to explain to her why she needed to confront Thad. “Like who?” she had asked, annoyed. “Anne of Cleves.” It could be this way, sometimes. Sigrid saying things that had nothing to do with anything. Marta had learned to wait it out. She rolled onto her stomach and propped her chin up on her hand. Sigrid was on her back, reading. “Are you going to elaborate?” Marta asked. “Anne of Cleves was a wife of Henry the Eighth,” she said without looking up from her book. “What does that have to do with your thief of a roommate?” “Anne of Cleves was practical and frugal. And stubborn. But she was naive and judgmental.” “Oh, this is about that stupid question you asked me on the first night.” “It’s not a stupid question,” Sigrid said, and she sat up. “It’s an important question. It’s maybe the most important question.” “What’s so important about it?” Marta asked. She was annoyed now. She had been trying to help Sigrid, and she’d been called ugly and bullheaded, and now stupid. “The wives of Henry the Eighth were either murdered or discarded because of Henry’s capriciousness. They’re every woman in history. Their whole lives—everything they ever did or felt or thought—get winnowed down to this one thing about them, their marriage or association to a tyrant. Isn’t that awful? So when I ask, which one of them are you, I guess, it’s less about you and more about, how are we still reproducing the same awful, limited spaces for women?”

• From The Sexual Outlaw (1977)

  With two dull words the Supreme Court affirmed that grotesque spectrum of sexual ignorance. Even in states where private consensual sex acts between adults would continue to be protected, the impact of the upheld Virginia decision was major. In effect condoning anti-homosexuality, it goaded cops and other gay-haters everywhere on their psyche-terrified rampages, it armed quivering bigots to draw up referendum petitions to revoke legitimization of freedom of sexual choice. And it would certainly bestir the revolutionary fervor of sexual outlawry on the streets. Shortly after the Supreme Court affirmation, “straight” marauders in Los Angeles lay in wait in the parking lot of, appropriately, a church. As cars in the well-known gay area cruised the street, from the shadows gangs attacked with rocks and bottles. Not a single cop showed up. 2 Cops did show up, however, when a group of teenage female Explorer Scouts began appearing at Los Angeles precincts to help out with law-enforcement matters. After all, when dozens of men are out busting homosexuals, massage parlors, and book stores, an awful lot of work goes unattended—and these young girls would certainly aid. Ranging from fourteen to eighteen years of age, the girls were part of a group known as LEEGS—Law Enforcement Explorer Girl Scouts—numbering about 250, and affiliated not with the Girl Scouts but with the Boy Scouts. As it developed, for a few there was an extra “E” in the acronym: The girls and the overworked officers were exploring far more than “crime.” Or so would a small Los Angeles-area newspaper, the Valley News —scooping everyone else—proclaim in its banner headline: LAPD SEX SCANDAL M ORALS P ROBE R EVOLVES A ROUND P OLICE , G IRL S COUTS Certainly not! Hadn't there only a short time back been a memorandum—circulated among Los Angeles police and “constituents”—from a deputy chief, no less, warning against the employment of homosexuals as policemen and setting out with alarm the reasons why this must never, never be? “… The man or woman in blue is responsible for finding lost children…,” wrote the deputy chief, “instructing and counseling the young.… Police officers, like school teachers, engage in intimate and delicate relationships with children. Consider some regular Police programs.… Police Explorers, Student Workers, and Summer Camps … place an officer in the position to teach and influence young children … to mold the youthful ideals and morals of the youth of our country. All these areas pair children and the police in a very close relationship. A homosexual placed anywhere within this area would be a violation of parental and social trust. Additionally, police officers are often required to fill the role of counselor to juveniles regarding sexual matters.” Indeed! For some time, teenagers of both sexes were being used in affiliation with the Los Angeles Police Department. Among their duties was keeping watch from atop buildings on busy Hollywood streets.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  If the Devil or Hitler had offered us even a single dollar for our parents’ heads, we would have cut them off and presented the bloody, bulky packages in happy exchange. How greedy we were, we who’d learned so early the value and sinister glory of the dollar. How we’d fawn on Dollar Bill, hugging his legs and kissing his neck. How we’d squeal with excitement when we spied him coming down the walk. The grown-ups would guffaw in chorus over our gold-digging antics, pleased to see us miming their own sentiments—much as one might be pleased to see chimps mounting or presenting in inflated purple imitation a human desire less colorful but no less persistent. In a sense all of our daddy’s dollars were casters on which the furniture of our lives glided noiselessly; every dollar was assigned a function and kept out of sight. Dollar Bill, however, liberated two dollars a week from invisible utility. We loved him more than anyone we knew. Once my mother became so exasperated with me that she asked my father to beat me with a strap. He marched me into his bedroom; the bed was now neatly covered by a fitted pale yellow satin spread, an antique mirror so shiny it reflected lights and shadows if not coherent figures. “Drop your pants,” my father said. I had already started a sort of gasping, an asthmatic gasping, in anticipation of a pain that seemed impossibly cruel because I had no idea when it would descend on me nor how long it would last. My lack of control over the situation was for me the worst punishment, and I gasped and gasped for air and escape and justice, or at least mercy. Panic lit up everywhere within me; I longed to run or disappear in a burst of chemical smoke and reappear as a white, frightened animal from under a top hat, gently nibbling at the fumes. I thought I could win my father over; I said with sullen candor (I had nothing but candor to work with), “I’ll never do it again. I’m sorry.” But he was angry now. His hate, more intense than any other feeling he’d ever had for me, was making his face younger and younger. His eyes no longer had that veiled, compounded look of adults who stare at blank spots on walls or get tangled up in the tulle of thought. Now his eyes were simple and curious, eyes I recognized as those of another child. A scream caught up with me and outraced me.

• From The Sexual Outlaw (1977)

  As much as half a million dollars, estimates indicated, might ultimately be spent to bring three male homosexuals and one woman to trial on gauzy “sex” charges. Up to $125,000 per defendant! To many, that smacked of very, very expensive legal “pandering”—at the expense of non-consenting adult taxpayers. At one point during the hearing, the prosecutor had raged about “the perverse sexual inclinations of those people.” There it was. No statutory violation was being prosecuted here. No; not S & M—even the charges of “pandering” had come as a strained afterthought. The purpose of the raid, the preliminary hearing, and the upcoming trial was, and would be, the continuing stirring up of hatred against all homosexuals by zeroing in on its most vulnerable faction. 11:26 P.M. The Parking Lot Outside the Tuff Bar. T HE ALLEY AND THE lot are deserted for now. But Jim gets out. As he moves into the darkness, he notices that on the street beyond the alley and the lot, the chrome of parked cars reflects cold silver shafts. He stops. He sees distant street lights. Chalky dull halos, they dirty the dark. He notices the shapes of buildings carved into the night. Short and dark rectangles; and he sees the rigid lines of sidewalks connecting with the distant street. Half a block away, in a small building two windows are lit. He looks up at the highest one, on the third story. Its shade is only three-quarters drawn. From the lower quarter, a rectangle of blue-white light glows. A siren's wail funnels into a shrill peak on a street, then uncoils, dissipates, re-forms into fragments of sound from the lighted window. “… that's it.” Laughter. “Rock-a-bye-baby.” Then the light from the window is smothered along with the electronic voices and laughter. On the main street a car won't start. He can't see it, it's parked behind a darkened flowershop, its back exit cluttered with gutted boxes and frayed string. He hears the motor of the stalled car as it grasps for ignited connection. His attention hinges on the gasping sound. The motor starts. He listens for the slide of tires driving away. Nothing. The car motor stops. He walks along the alley. White, crumbling plaster creates a dirty brown map on the wall of a building. The building cuts a rectangular angle into the edge of the lot and the alley. He touches the plaster, but not the peeling part. The stone feels cold. He takes two steps, pauses again. Unlighted blind windows of houses face the streets. He looks down. Dark parallelograms, shadows, fall on the ground doubling the darkness. In the lot, the dirt—except where a car has spilled a blot of oil—is the color of the concrete sidewalks. With one foot, he shifts a portion of dirt from side to side on the ground.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  I discovered at once that he had foreseen my investigations and had planted insulting pseudonyms for my special benefit. At the very first motel office I visited, Ponderosa Lodge, his entry, among a dozen obviously human ones, read: Dr. Gratiano Forbeson, Mirandola, NY. Its Italian Comedy connotations could not fail to strike me, of course. The landlady deigned to inform me that the gentleman had been laid up for five days with a bad cold, that he had left his car for repairs in some garage or other and that he had checked out on the 4th of July. Yes, a girl called Ann Lore had worked formerly at the Lodge, but was now married to a grocer in Cedar City. One moonlit night I waylaid white-shoed Mary on a solitary street; an automaton, she was about to shriek, but I managed to humanize her by the simple act of falling on my knees and with pious yelps imploring her to help. She did not know a thing, she swore. Who was this Gratiano Forbeson? She seemed to waver. I whipped out a hundred-dollar bill. She lifted it to the light of the moon. “He is your brother,” she whispered at last. I plucked the bill out of her moon-cold hand, and spitting out a French curse turned and ran away. This taught me to rely on myself alone. No detective could discover the clues Trapp had tuned to my mind and manner. I could not hope, of course, he would ever leave his correct name and address; but I did hope he might slip on the glaze of his own subtlety, by daring, say, to introduce a richer and more personal shot of color than was strictly necessary, or by revealing too much through a qualitative sum of quantitative parts which revealed too little. In one thing he succeeded: he succeeded in thoroughly enmeshing me and my thrashing anguish in his demoniacal game. With infinite skill, he swayed and staggered, and regained an impossible balance, always leaving me with the sportive hope—if I may use such a term in speaking of betrayal, fury, desolation, horror and hate—that he might give himself away next time. He never did—though coming damn close to it. We all admire the spangled acrobat with classical grace meticulously walking his tight rope in the talcum light; but how much rarer art there is in the sagging rope expert wearing scarecrow clothes and impersonating a grotesque drunk! I should know.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  “How do you know her sister?” Milton asks, watching Nolan breathe smoke out into the air through his mouth and nose, his eyes closed, as if in a state of ecstasy. The calm that comes with the edge of pleasure after pain has given way to something sweeter. Abe takes the joint from Nolan, and there’s a pause, a silence rising out of the smoke. “How do you know her sister?” Milton repeats, and this time Nolan opens his eyes and pins Milton with a sharp, direct look. There’s confusion in his gaze, suspicion, annoyance. “Why do you want to know so bad?” “I don’t.” “Is that so?” “It is.” “Ladies,” Abe cuts across them, making a chopping motion with his hand. He’s got the joint pinched to the corner of his mouth. “Let’s not get carried away here.” “Who’s getting carried away?” Nolan says. “Okay, okay,” Tate says, and he makes to snatch the joint from Abe’s mouth, but Abe swats him hard across the face, so hard that there’s no way it’s a joke, there can be no way back from it. Tate puts his palm to his cheek, slides it down to his lip, where there’s already blood. Abe hisses, leans forward to inspect his hand, which must be hurting him now, the impact of it. Milton tenses, glances at Nolan, who is looking at them all as if from some vast distance, as if he’s already on the other side of what is to come and is looking at them with pity. Nolan leans forward and puts his chin in his hands. Milton feels a hot, hard knot press down against the back of his throat. “Pussy,” Abe says to Tate, who is not crying, just blotting the blood from his mouth with his fingertips. “Fuck you,” Tate says, spitting. “You can’t take a lick? One little slap and you’re bleeding like a pussy. Fuck.” “That’s enough,” Nolan says. “Oh, that’s enough.” “Abe,” Nolan says. “Abe. Listen to you. You’re a bigger faggot than Millie and Titty Tate both.” Heat fills Milton’s nostrils, and his vision momentarily blurs. He puts his knuckles into the bulk of his thigh and grunts. “Just a couple of little nigger fags,” Abe spits. The light from the fire is distant and inadequate. Milton leans forward to catch Abe by his throat. Abe’s eyes switch to him suddenly, widen, and then go slender with hatred. He smirks, the heft of his shoulders opening up. He’s leaning toward Milton, too. Their fingers brush, but before they can get a solid hold on each other, something hard strikes the back of Abe’s head and he gives a little jerk. The impact is dull, abbreviated. There and gone again, hardly discernible at all.

• From Escape (2007)

  I had rarely heard a story as disturbing as I did that morning. The FLDS police officer wanted to take his wife up to the Steeds ranch to teach her a lesson in obedience. He put her in a pen with a bull and then tied a rope to the neck of the bull. He told his wife, who was pregnant, that she had to control the bull with the rope on orders of her priesthood head. She tried to hang on to the bull, but he ran off and she ended up being dragged until she let go of the rope. Her husband got into the pen and handed her the rope again and told her she had to hold on. But the bull pulled away from her and her husband became enraged. This time he took the end of the rope and tied it around the neck of the bull and told her she better hang on this time. But it was impossible. The third time he tied the rope to her so she could not let go. She was dragged around the ring again and so badly injured she lost the baby—which then became her fault because she was so disobedient. When I heard it I told the group I had a burning sensation in my chest—I wanted to kill the guy. The others agreed, and we talked about what we’d do if he ever pulled us over. The story was well circulated in the community because the man’s stepmother became aware of what he’d done to his wife and was so incensed that she started talking about it. No one went to the authorities because we knew the woman would deny the whole thing. We all knew we were powerless when it came to protecting ourselves. I feared that it was an example of hysteria that was manifesting itself in extreme ways. This police officer had carried the notion of “perfect obedience” to a criminal level. The obedience Warren preached was a woman’s complete submission to her husband. He said women should not work outside the home and should not even leave home unless allowed to do so by their husband. We’d always kept our coffee meetings quiet, but now we knew we had to be even more careful. We began to be much more circumspect about what we were doing as changes swept over our community. As women were required to leave the workforce because of Jeffs’ new doctrines, it became harder for some families to make ends meet.

• From The Sexual Outlaw (1977)

  But the right must be held to decry what is destructive, in one's own sexual, social, or racial group, or in another's. Not a subject to be shunned, S & M should be of primary internal concern within the homosexual world; a subject to be explored thoroughly and honestly. When it is discussed, it is often defended as a lifestyle; even by those who claim too emphatically not to participate in it; even by those who put down “queens” and “sissies” (and most leather gays do so, loudly) for hurting our image. (Ironically, it is a notorious truth that mass arrests of transvestites almost inevitably result in rough, heavy punching out of the cops, whereas a mass raid in a leather bar will result in meek surrender, by both “M” ‘s and “S” ‘s.) Is S & M simply another gay lifestyle?—like hustling, transvestism, promiscuity? Substitute the homosexual in an S & M relationship with another minority: A black playing white red-neck sheriff uses electric prods on another black and calls him a “dirty nigger.” A “lifestyle” to be applauded by blacks overcoming white humiliation? A Jew tortures another in a charade of concentration camp. A “lifestyle” to be supported and endorsed by other Jews decimated by genocide? (Significantly, the language of S & M is often racist—the usage of “nigger”—and it also uses “fag”—is not rare.) Apologists for and adherents of S & M present three main arguments. The first, now a cliché, is that S & M merely imitates nature. There are always the weak, and there are always the strong. The ritual of S & M imitates, and therefore respects, nature. True enough, of a certain nature—but is it a desirable imitation? It belies man's basic evolutionary struggle—to overcome nature's destructiveness, from the exterior manifestation of floods and earthquakes to the interior ones of rape and murder. The second argument—made by proponents—is that, no, S & M does not involve hatred; “it involves a new dimension of love.” No, S & M does not involve pain; “it involves a new sensation of pleasure.” No, S & M does not alienate its participants; “it brings two people much closer in a sharing of pain.” In the very necessity to invert terms—to defend pain by saying it isn't pain, to defend hatred by calling it love—is an implicit judgment—that if there is pain, if there is hatred, then there is destruction, because pain and hatred are negative by definition. So call it love! One supports the inversion in a sophistic argument that acknowledges, more than anything else, the destruction involved.

• From Escape (2007)

  What was most heartbreaking for me was to hear my former “sister wife” Cathleen talk about her grandchild when we were both being interviewed by CNN’s Anderson Cooper shortly after the raid. When she mentioned the age of her grandchild, I realized her daughter had become pregnant at sixteen. Cathleen had not stopped her daughter from becoming an underage bride. Listening to the women from the YFZ Ranch speak was also disturbing. They were robotic echoes of their former selves. “All we are here to talk about are the children,” was the mantra they’d been programmed to repeat. My anger swelled when I saw women who were once my friends looking emotionally ransacked and much older. Some, I knew, had been reassigned in marriage to other men, their children given to new fathers. Merril and the other men in the FLDS used women like human shields to cover up their crimes. Of course mothers cry when their children are removed from them. But a child’s first right is to safety. I knew those kids were not being protected on that ranch because many—not all, but many—of the women’s first loyalties are to the FLDS instead of to their children. Shortly after the raid, officials said forty-one children showed signs of having had broken bones. How does a one-year-old who is not walking manage to break her arm and leg? I was inundated by the media after the raid. It was exhausting. Because of the time difference between Utah and the East Coast, I’d have to be up by 3:00 a.m. to get to a nearby local studio by 4:00 a.m. to do a live interview on the Today show or Good Morning America. The days would often not finish until I’d done an interview at night with CNN’s Larry King, or Anderson Cooper. In between the news shows I did radio and newspaper interviews. After the raid, I spent considerable time talking to Texas Child Protective Services (CPS) workers and others caring for the FLDS children from the compound. I told them what I knew about how the children behaved and interacted. Reports I heard from people working with the kids were wrenching but not surprising. Merrill hadn’t changed the way he ran things just because he’d moved to Texas and lived in greater secrecy with more power. When the ranch was opened up to the media I was struck by the fact that there were no toys evident anywhere in the compound, but there was a portrait of Warren Jeffs hanging in every room.

• From Escape (2007)

  If a man shows favoritism or appears not to be in control of his family, it damages his image in the community and opens him up to accusations that he does not have the spirit of God within him. One of the reasons Merril tried to keep us all pregnant was that it created the illusion that he was having a relationship with each of us. But that was a myth. The reality was he loved Barbara and no one else. Merril was a polygamist in body but a monogamist in soul. He enjoyed the power polygamy gave him, and as a narcissist, he craved the attention. But Barbara was the only woman he ever loved. When I heard about the Hawaii trip, I knew there would be no way Merril could take Barbara with him so soon after their trip to Washington. At my father’s I heard that my father had paid for extra tickets so Merril could take three wives. I was furious. No one ever traveled with multiple wives. It never worked. It was an insult and humiliating to think that Merril was even considering taking three wives. I told both my mothers I didn’t want to go. My mother accused me of being ungrateful and said I didn’t know what my father had gone through to see that I was included on the trip. I still didn’t care. My father knew Merril was unfair to his wives but he didn’t know to what extent. He sensed my unhappiness but not the depth of it, and I think he believed the trip might give me hope that things would get better. I was twenty-two and thought this would probably be the only big trip I’d ever have in my lifetime. Merril was unfair in doling out rewards in his family, and Barbara was so clearly his favorite wife I knew that he’d continue to travel with her as often as he could. As women, we had no right to travel by ourselves. I didn’t want to share what would most likely be the only major trip of my lifetime with two other of Merril’s wives. Tammy got wind of the trip within days and confronted Merril immediately in his office. Like me, she was outraged that he was taking three of us. “If Carolyn’s father is paying for this trip, then Carolyn should go. Anyone else who comes along is just an intruder,” Tammy said. Merril was unfazed. “This is my trip and I can invite whomever I choose. If I choose to invite my lovely wife Tammy, I would think she would be honored to accept the invitation.” Tammy shot back in a rare burst of self-assertiveness, “How can you say that like a compliment? You are inviting me on the trip to destroy Carolyn’s opportunity to have a trip with you. How is that a compliment?”

• From Escape (2007)

  The minute Merril saw the man from CPS show up, he started screaming at him and told him to leave at once. The man insisted on talking to Luke. Merril refused. Luke heard all the shouting and went outside. He convinced Merril to allow him to talk to the man, and the three of them met in Merril’s office. Then the investigator talked to Luke alone. Luke said that his parents didn’t understand the rules at the hospital and that there had never been any ill intent on their part. The investigator promised to write a full report. No one ever heard from him again. I was not surprised. What did surprise me was that Luke’s surgeon, who also took care of Harrison, had a completely different attitude toward Harrison and me when she saw us the next time. The pediatrician felt strongly that Harrison’s port should come out because the infection hadn’t cleared. But the surgeon disagreed and refused. Her concern was that if this port came out there wouldn’t be a way to put another one in. That’s because there are only several veins large enough to hold a port. Once those accesses are exhausted, there are no other options. She finally agreed to take it out but made it very clear to me that she would never do another surgery on Harrison and that she was the only surgeon in the area capable of doing a procedure like this. If we ever needed to attempt something like this again, we would have to take Harrison back to Phoenix. Her attitude toward me seemed harsh. I suspected that she’d put two and two together and realized Harrison and Luke had the same father. She had always been friendly toward me. Now she acted as though she didn’t want to have anything to do with us. I was so upset that Merril put his children at risk through medical neglect. I hated that the surgeon thought I was as neglectful of my children as Ruth and Merril were. Neither she nor my pediatrician knew anything about the polygamous lifestyle that I was living. We never talked about polygamy to outsiders. We lived in fear of outsiders. Even when I had a long relationship with physicians, as I did with Harrison’s doctors, I had no way of really knowing if I could trust them. I could not take any risks because if Merril ever found out that I had told the truth about my life to anyone outside the community I would have been sentenced to hell in the afterlife and shunned by my community in this life. Warren Becomes the Prophet By springtime in 2002, it felt like I’d been given a reprieve. Harrison’s staph infections stopped once his port was removed, and Bryson emerged from his first fragile months into a sturdy and healthy baby. He was nursing so steadily that I had extra milk. This gave me an idea.

• From Escape (2007)

  The next day, Betty and LuAnne launched a verbal attack on me. They accused me of having bad feelings toward my sister wives and said I needed to learn how to forgive. I was told that I was trying to drag them to hell and see them destroyed only to satisfy my own selfish emotions. Both of them accused me of being the abuser and claimed it was I who had always been abusive to them, not their father. They said I’d told the court that Merril had starved them for several months. This was news to me, because it was untrue. There was plenty of abuse to report in court; I didn’t need to make any up. “You’re an apostate, owned by the devil!” Betty said. “He wants your soul and he wants ours.” “You can’t be our mother because you put yourself under the power of the devil,” LuAnne wailed. “None of us wants to be with you!” It was awful to feel them lash out this way. I called Lisa again to make another complaint. She told me to write down everything they were saying. She also called Rod Parker, Merril’s attorney, and complained to him about the fast. Parker was put on notice that if Merril’s abuse toward the children did not end, he’d be called back into court. Parker said that Merril was eager to have Bryson for visitations, too. Bryson was nearly two. If I didn’t allow him access to Bryson, Parker said I could expect to be back in court. I was still nursing Bryson and planned to do so until his second birthday. I usually nursed my babies for eighteen months, but Bryson had been so premature that I wanted to give him an additional boost. Since I was still nursing him, I couldn’t send him off for those weekends with Merril. Being deprived of him infuriated Merril. We were at the shelter for five weeks. The breakthrough came when a woman who knew what we were up against, Rhoda Thomson, raised some money to help me get a roof over our heads: two trailers that combined to give us five bedrooms and four bathrooms. We had a beautiful front yard and space out back where the children could roam and play. When Merril heard about our new living arrangements, he was furious. I think he hoped that I’d be forced from the shelter into the streets and then back to him. He couldn’t have been more wrong. Our First Christmas

• From Hot Daddies: Gay Erotic Fiction (2011)

  What the hell was he trying to do, taunt me? I didn’t want any more of his game-playing. I’d wasted my time online trying to hook up for way too long. Still, I checked his profile. He was local—as in, my city. That’s a rarity. Most of the IMs I get are from guys in places that require a plane ride. It’s as if they use the Internet to say hello and disappear like the cockteasers that they are. what do they say about me? lots of stuff like how u are a worldclass prick who told you that? lotta guys here say u won’t date anyone younger than urself I grunted. not exactly true i date guys around my age I stared at the screen for a moment and resumed typing. what the fuck do you want? let’s meet why should i meet you if youre not answering my question??? meet me tmw nite at giorgios 6 pm i’m paying With that he logged off. The little fucker didn’t even give me a chance to turn him down. I looked at his picture again. He was wearing a white undershirt. There was some saying in Spanish—or Portuguese—tattooed on the underside of his forearm. He had a nose ring. His blond hair was probably dyed. He looked Hispanic, maybe Brazilian. I couldn’t tell; It was hard to judge with photographs taken with a cell phone. Maybe it was an old picture. Maybe he was older than eighteen. Either way, I wasn’t interested in barely legal guys. I couldn’t sleep that night. It had been a long time since someone asked me out on a date. I’ve got a small stable of friends with benefits, but when they found young men going gaga over them, I didn’t get much action. Then it was just me and my left hand. It sucks, but that’s life. Also, it takes me a lot longer to shoot now. I used to shoot three or four times a day, easy. Then after the AIDS crisis happened, guys my age started doing the relationship thing. I thought it ridiculous. Why did they want to emasculate themselves by emulating straight folks? Men were designed to spill their seed as often as possible. I preferred to live alone with my cat and my books. Sometimes I light up a cigar and let its smoke drift through my house. I’m up front about this in my profile: if you don’t like cigar smoke, stay away.

• From Escape (2007)

  Barbara still felt that I was the only one of Merril’s wives who had never completely submitted to her, which was true. Faunita, defeated and broken, stayed in her room watching movies. Tammy spent her time flattering Barbara and Merril. Cathleen had given up and did what she was told without complaint. When Ruth was not in the throes of madness and watering the shoes in her closet, she obsessed about being in perfect harmony with Merril and following Barbara’s orders. My strategy was to ignore Barbara and live around her. But by late 1993 she and Merril had decided to try to make me surrender to her one-woman rule. Money was the weapon they decided to use against me. Merril cut off every account in town and then informed us that if we needed something we had to come to him directly and ask for it. I was still teaching and turning over my entire salary to him, which, after taxes, was about $500 every two weeks. I had no money of my own, but in the past this had not been a problem because we had charge accounts everywhere in town. Merril seemed to think that if he denied me the basic necessities for me and my children I’d submit to Barbara’s rule. Merril told me he was having financial problems again. I believed him initially and tried not to ask him for money. But then I discovered everyone else in the family was still spending at the same levels. When they went to Merril, he instantly gave them the money they needed. The first time I went to his office I told him I needed a few items. He ignored me and didn’t even speak. I left, suspicious. The next week I went into Merril’s office to turn over my salary check. When I did, I asked Merril for five dollars to buy Arthur a pair of shoes. He ignored me again, refusing to respond. I sat down in his office. I wanted an answer. Barbara came in and asked Merril for money to pick up pictures in town. He wrote her a check that was almost equivalent to the paycheck I’d just handed him. When Barbara left I said, “It looks like you have plenty of money if you can spend nearly as much as I make in two weeks on pictures. Surely there must be money for shoes for your son.” Merril’s face turned crimson. “There is money for those who do the things I want.” I knew that was the opening for an argument. But I also knew he held all the cards. If I challenged him, he’d berate and humiliate me. I walked out of his office determined to never again ask him for a dime.

• From The Sexual Outlaw (1977)

  He said three of the detained persons, ‘including one older, dignified-looking man who was obviously frightened,’ didn't have ID's, and expected to be taken to the Hollywood station to be booked. “He said two complaints were filed on him and his two companions. “[A witness] determined from talking to some of them that ‘gays were arrested even outside the restricted areas.’ He said, ‘One guy was picked up who was just sitting by his car reading’ and ‘another had just been strumming his guitar right out beside the main road when he was handcuffed and taken to the bus….’ “… The [Los Angeles] Times, [accepting] without question … the official LAPD explanation for the roundup … reported only that 39 persons had been held ‘until their names and addresses were taken’ and made no mention of the ‘enforcement area’ or … of gays … detained. “… According to the first arrested witness, both buses in the maintenance (compound) area were ‘almost packed’…. Another witness … said he drove ‘on every road and I saw no cops anywhere else except in the gay area—not by the zoo, not by the merry-go-round, not anywhere, despite the fact that the last major fire in Griffith was near the zoo.’ “Other observers asserted they had seen ‘straight couples …’ in posted areas who were ‘not molested’ by police. “… [A police captain] said vice officers had been used because of ‘a manpower shortage for such an operation’…. He also said it was ‘ironic’ that so many arrested witnesses were reportedly handcuffed ‘when … I left whether or not a person would be handcuffed to the individual officer's discretion.’ “… One witness also noted that when the operation apparently disbanded shortly after 4 P.M. ‘the remaining cops [at the command post] broke out a couple cases of cold beer and celebrated the end of their successful hunt.’” —Doug Sarff, The Advocate, October 24, 1973 N OTE: The arrested men were charged with misdemeanors and fined. A few days later fire did erupt in Griffith Park. In a straight area. VOICE OVER: Imaginary Speech to Heterosexuals VOICE OVER: Imaginary Speech to Heterosexuals I IMAGINE that I speak to a group of assorted heterosexuals: Do you know how much we often distrust you? Even at times hate you. Not all of you, nor arbitrarily the way you hate us, if only because among you are our mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, even sons and daughters. We have every reason to hate the men who take out on us their terror of facing themselves. Women who try to “save” us. Posturing males measuring each other's cocks by joking about us. The marauders your hatred turns loose in our areas. Your ignorance about us. Every reason to hate your heterosexual fascism. Your television, newspapers, magazines feeding us condescending crumbs.

• From Escape (2007)

  When Jeremy returned from his break, I left for the weekend. He let Jason go into the laundry room to do his wash. This created problems because it gave him access to our house. Things started disappearing right and left, like towels. I had fought hard to keep the motel well-stocked with towels and when large numbers started to disappear I was suspicious. I called Merril and told him my suspicions. Merril said I should not blame an innocent person. He said we were short on towels because of my laziness and accused me of using Jason as a cover-up. I slammed the phone down. Jason started making incessant demands on my time. He would come into the motel nearly every ten minutes with a question or a complaint about the job he was working on. He’d always have an excuse for why he couldn’t start or finish a project until Merril got back. Again, I turned to Merril and asked him to deal with Jason. He made light of the problem but said he’d talk to Jason. Nothing changed, except that Jason’s advances became bolder. Once when he came into the lobby on some pretext he grabbed my hand as I was handing him an item. “I don’t know what to do with my girlfriend,” he said. “She’s jealous because I spend all my time with you.” “Well, why don’t you spend more time with her?” I asked. The minute the words were out of my mouth I knew I’d regret them. “I don’t like being around her because she isn’t nice like you,” he said. The next weekend it got so bad I called Merril. Jason was harassing me at every turn. If I was scrubbing the bathroom, I’d look up and see him standing behind me. He’d follow me to the laundry room and watch me move clothes from the washer to the dryer. I told Merril that I was as sick as I’d ever been during a pregnancy and that I had all I could do to get through the day. Jason was making a bad situation intolerable. Merril told me the only reason Jason was following me around was that I was encouraging him. If he was abusing me, it was because I asked for it. He accused me of using my pregnancy to try and get his sympathy. I was infuriated. Merril had let a criminal into our midst and put our lives and business in jeopardy. Again I knew what I had always known: Merril would never protect me. I would have to defend myself and my children. I told Jason he could talk to me only once a day, at 6 P.M. We would make arrangements then for any supplies he needed for his various jobs. I locked myself into the lobby and locked all the doors to the house. He would stand outside and ring the bell relentlessly. I disconnected the bell.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  “So you’re going to have this child with this man? You’re going to stay with this man another eighteen years? Are you crazy?” “God spoke to me, Trevor. He told me, ‘Patricia, I don’t do anything by mistake. There is nothing I give you that you cannot handle.’ I’m pregnant for a reason. I know what kind of kids I can make. I know what kind of sons I can raise. I can raise this child. I will raise this child.” Nine months later Isaac was born. She called him Isaac because in the Bible Sarah gets pregnant when she’s like a hundred years old and she’s not supposed to be having children and that’s what she names her son. Isaac’s birth pushed me even further away. I visited less and less. Then I popped by one afternoon and the house was in chaos, police cars out front, the aftermath of another fight. He’d hit her with a bicycle. Abel had been berating one of his workers in the yard, and my mom had tried to get between them. Abel was furious that she’d contradicted him in front of an employee, so he picked up Andrew’s bike and he beat her with it. Again she called the police, and the cops who showed up this time actually knew Abel. He’d fixed their cars. They were pals. No charges were filed. Nothing happened. That time I confronted him. I was big enough now. “You can’t keep doing this,” I said. “This is not right.” He was apologetic. He always was. He didn’t puff out his chest and get defensive or anything like that. “I know,” he said. “I’m sorry. I don’t like doing these things, but you know how your mom is. She can talk a lot and she doesn’t listen. I feel like your mom doesn’t respect me sometimes. She came and disrespected me in front of my workers. I can’t have these other men looking at me like I don’t know how to control my wife.” After the bicycle, my mom hired contractors she knew through the real-estate business to build her a separate house in the backyard, like a little servants’ quarters, and she moved in there with Isaac. “This is the most insane thing I’ve ever seen,” I told her.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  LEUCIPPE’S SHIELD AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF ROMANCEIn the last of a long series of threats to her chastity, the heroine of a second-century Greek novel, Leucippe, stood in imminent danger of suffering sexual violence at the hands of a man claiming to be her master. The romantic novel, the characteristic literary invention of the Roman Empire, was a genre built out of such theatrical endangerments to feminine chastity. In the scene of her attempted rape, Leucippe is threatened by Thersander, a caricature of a villain whose very name means “Savage Man.” Leucippe, a freeborn girl of unparalleled beauty, has been enslaved by pirates and sold to this stereotypical brute. It was “fate’s wish” that she be a slave for a time, but her true status is never really in doubt, and the problematic relationship between status and behavior runs as a thread throughout the entire confrontation between Thersander and Leucippe. When Thersander puts his hands beneath Leucippe’s chin and lifts her face upward for a kiss, she resists and reproaches him, “You are not acting as a free man, nor as a wellborn one.” While his hopes were still high, Thersander remained “wholly enthralled” by Leucippe, but the disappointment of rebuff lets loose his fury. He resorts to physical and psychological violence, striking Leucippe across the face and calling her a “miserable slaveling.” “You should be grateful that I speak to you, and count your lucky stars that you seem worthy of my kisses.… I know that you’re just a little whore, and the man you love is an adulterer. Since you don’t want to accept me as your lover, you will experience me as your master.” In the slave society of the Roman Empire, where the routine sexual exploitation of slaves was an integral part of the sexual economy, the narration of such pedestrian violence was highly unusual, and surely jarring. But the author builds up the uncomfortable potential of the scene, only to let it dissipate in arch melodrama.1

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  The government had failed us but, as we were soon to learn, it had done far worse. It turns out the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had been conducting its own mind control research. It was experimenting with some of the very same techniques—and some far more ruthless—that had killed over 900 people at Jonestown. What’s more, it had been carrying out these covert experiments on an often unwitting group of Americans since the late 1940s. The government was guilty of the very offense it claimed to be protecting us from. Credit goes to author John Marks, who in 1975 read one sentence in a government report that led him to investigate the CIA’s secret activities. In 1979, he published his famous The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, to widespread national attention. Inspired by Marks’ initial discoveries, Alan W. Scheflin and Edward M. Opton Jr. undertook complementary research, which culminated, also in 1979, with the publication of The Mind Manipulators. Both books laid out in detail the mind control research that was being performed by the Central Intelligence Agency from the late 1940s through the early 1960s, and that involved subcontractors at over 80 American institutions. Code-named MK-ULTRA, the CIA’s mind control research program was a clandestine and illegal program of experiments on human subjects that was intended to identify methods that could be developed for use in interrogations and torture. MK-ULTRA left no stone unturned in the quest to find ways to manipulate people’s mental states, alter their brain functions, and control their behavior. The techniques used in MK-ULTRA’s experiments ranged from the chemical—LSD and other psychotropic drugs (including the notorious BZ, which never leaves the human system and was given to hundreds of unsuspecting GIs); to the physical—brain surgery, electroshock; to the psychological—sensory deprivation, isolation, hypnosis, sexual and verbal abuse, and more. Scheflin and Opton actually uncovered a 1953 speech by Allen Dulles, then CIA director, frankly admitting this to be true.197 Dr. Ewan Cameron, who was president of the Canadian, American and World Psychiatric Association, supervised mind control research in a Canadian psychiatric hospital. This meant that at the same time that the government was dropping the ball on the Jonestown investigation, it was covering up a program far beyond anything that Jim Jones could have ever imagined. Other researchers attempted to follow up on this work but, by then, the CIA—in violation of many federal laws—had destroyed almost all of its relevant files. The MK-ULTRA records were virtually all destroyed except for a few boxes of financial records, making it impossible for investigators to find out what really happened. ABC aired an excellent documentary on the secret program called Mission Mind Control.

• From The Sexual Outlaw (1977)

  Equipped with smart walkie-talkies, they could communicate to patrol cars any “unusual” activity, whatever that included. They also went on cop beats and block patrols, these busy teenagers, and they learned crowd control. They were taken camping on some weekends. There, reportedly, was where “exploration” of another kind may have occurred—perhaps while one or another of the cops was filling “the role of counselor … regarding sexual matters.” Rumors had floated around police stations that some cops were involved with underage girls. Then one of the LEEGS girls, herself reportedly not involved, told a police lieutenant that the weekends had turned into “sex orgies.” Approximately 30 Hollywood Division uniformed officers and 6 teenage girls, some as young as fourteen, the informant to the Valley News alleged, were involved. An investigation by the internal division of the police department had been going on, quietly, for a month, a police captain acknowledged, and the results might involve criminal action. He denied that there were any “sex orgies,” that fourteen-year-old girls were involved, and that the incidents had occurred during camping trips. Badgered at a news conference, an assistant police chief insisted doggedly that none of this constituted “a sex scandal”: “There was no rape, no seduction, there was a lot of agreement. We don't have any outraged parents, which is kind of disappointing, I guess. We don't have any outraged young people. We've got outraged police officers. But I don't think you can call it a sex scandal.” He emphasized that only private situations were involved, all with off-duty officers, none in the LEEGS Program themselves. And so, one could at least allow a sigh of relief that no explorer perched on a rooftop had allowed her eyes to stray from the busy streets. Goddamnit, there was no sex scandal! 16 FACE CHARGES IN LAPD SEX SCANDAL In its new headlined story, the scooping Valley News indicated that the alleged 30 police had, not unexpectedly, shrunk to an alleged 16; the number of teenage girls, including 4 juveniles, was holding strong at 6. Nine of the 16 cops might face felony charges of unlawful sex with a person under eighteen, 4 to 5 might be charged with misdemeanors of contributing to the delinquency of a minor. All 16—unnamed—faced disciplinary action, and some, now, insubordination and failure to cooperate with the internal-affairs investigation. Raising the age one year on each side, the deputy chief now alleged the exploring girls were fifteen to nineteen years old. Soon the 16 police dwindled to 3 facing felony counts, while 6 others might still be charged with misdemeanors. And: The girls, the acting chief now declared, were between sixteen and eighteen. (When? Two years ago? Now? That was left unclear.) One could expect that before the matter was over, the “girls” would be middle-aged matrons. The girls resigned, the cops remained on duty.