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 The Sexual Outlaw (1977)

  Why then did it feel as if they — …? What the fuck was happening here? So they held their bully clubs. For a glaring moment seeing their drained faces, I felt-almost, almost, almost —a scent, almost a scent, of pity for them, those inheritors of the straight-world's hatred of homosexuals, a hatred exacerbating their self-doubts. But it wasn't even that simple. What myriad resentments, against the life they were forced to live, within their profession of paranoia, the locked boundaries of a cop's ugly world—what myriad resentments were aroused by the people whose worlds they could touch only as bullies?… But no. It was quickly drowned, that spark of pity for them, drowned in the memories of bashed heads and violence, in the graphic representation of their utmost lack of courage, the bully “courage” that depends on arbitrary authority, on a badge, only that; the greatest cowardice. More sirens infected the air. Red lights flashed like popping bulbs. Shirtless, lolling, a cluster of malehustlers gathered in tense good humor. Also heckling. Then a firecracker burst. Another. The cop sticks rose. Cops rushed the three hustlers. Handcuffs clicked tightly. “Pigs, pigs, pigs, shit pigs, pigs!” Barely inches away, I felt the inundating rage sweeping the street, and I had a vision of the inevitable gay apocalypse—of thousands of homosexuals rushing against the helmets and the sticks, the guns—thousands of gay men and women riding a tide of pent-up rage released at last. Abruptly that vision of apocalyptic violence stopped. Yes, that would be righteous—but was that indeed what the gay apocalpyse would be? Perhaps. Yes, perhaps. Suddenly I laughed aloud. But might it not be, instead, the ultimate, the liberating, public sex orgy? “Please, please, gay brothers and sisters, please disperse, this is your gay monitor, walk to other corners. Please, leave the street, leave the street peacefully, this is your gay parade monitor, please let's avoid any violence.” Someone laughed bitterly. It was over. For now. 11:47 P.M. Selma. R ESURRECTED OUT of the dread death, rejection—the vacant period ended—Jim still needs the further assurance which only hustling can give him. And it's Saturday night, the busiest night on Selma. There, a slow-moving squad car is flashing brash lights on the slowly scattering outlaws. Jim waits in his car. The cops leave. The outlaws return. Jim gets out. Now he waits by the steps of the Baptist Church, imagining his tanned body stark against the white columns. Pretty, street-hip, a youngwoman, 20—older, younger-glances at him, moves on, looks back, smiles, returns: “What's goin on?” Jim is friendly. “Getting along.” He recognizes her as one of that breed of straight girls attracted to malehustlers, making it from day to day, knowing—perhaps turned on by it—that their “old men”—the hustlers they often live with— sell their bodies to other men. “You know something?—you remind me of my old man,” she tells him. “Remember him?

• From Escape (2007)

  Judge Barbara Walther ruled that Barbara was unable to protect her daughter and gave custody of the fourteen-year-old girl to the state. Barbara, who has rarely ever been held accountable, apparently still has a hard time believing that laws apply to her. After the judge ruled that her daughter must go into state custody, Barbara asked the representative from Texas CPS if she could send the girl’s cousin into custody instead of her own. Barbara clearly believed she had the power to take another woman’s child. But CPS told her, “We do not trade children,” and that the case was about protecting her daughter from her. Barbara’s daughter is only one of the 440 children seized in the raid who is now in state custody. Two hundred and thirty-five cases have been settled or dropped. On September 5, Patrick Crimmins, a CPS spokesman, said in the Salt Lake Tribune that cases are being dropped “as fast as we can because they’re a burden on everyone.” He added that that does not mean abuse didn’t occur, only that Texas authorities now believe that the children can live safely with their parents or guardians. I think that’s outrageous and so do people who worked closely with the children in this case. I know because they’ve talked to me about how upset they are by what has happened. They know how abused and damaged many of these children are. The heartbreak for those who pledged to protect them is that the children feel they’ve been returned to the perpetrators of the abuse and mothers who can’t keep them safe. What do I think happened? CPS found itself up against an army in the FLDS with unlimited resources to hurl at them. A simple example: while in custody, the children were going to be immunized, something the FLDS opposes. (My children had whooping cough when we were still in the FLDS because they never had shots.) The children in custody were loaded onto buses to take them to be immunized when the FLDS got a court order and stopped it. The immunizations never happened. Texas also was unable to do comprehensive medical and psychological exams on the kids. For example: long bone scans were never done, which would have revealed more of their abuse history. Some cases of broken bones were identified because doctors could easily spot the failure of a bone to heal properly or a joint to move correctly. CPS is more typically up against a mom addicted to methamphetamine. The guardians who represent their children rarely argue that custody should be restored to those mothers if they’re still using drugs. The threat an addict poses to her children is well understood.

• From Escape (2007)

  I began by giving each person at the table a copy of my two-page list of abuses. It delineated the numerous marriages I had witnessed among under-age girls and the emotional devastation this had caused. I described how women were taken from their husbands and arbitrarily given to other men. I told how young boys were trained as spies to go into FLDS homes and report back to Warren. I explained how Warren had terrorized young children by having animals tortured to death in front of them. I told them about the day all the dogs were destroyed and how Warren taught that a society that treated animals humanely was corrupt and had turned away from God. It was chilling to recount what had become routine in my life. I talked about the teenage boys who were kicked out of the cult, dumped on highways, and told never to return. In a polygamous culture, boys are disposable, I told the attorney general. Sometimes they’d be kicked out on trumped-up charges—exposure to CDs or movies or kissing a girl. More often than not, they’d simply be told one afternoon that they had to be gone the next morning. (Dan Fisher’s foundation for these boys knows the names of four hundred who have been summarily expelled.) The attorney general was riveted. He asked me question after question, seeking more detail and specifics. We were there for well over thirty minutes; every so often he would ask his assistant to cancel his next appointment. I explained that for seventeen years, I was married to one of the most powerful men in the FLDS community. I knew Warren Jeffs and how he behaved. He was consistent, predictable, and to my mind very dangerous. Two and a half hours later, when our meeting was finished, Mark’s aloof, professional demeanor had shifted to one of sheer outrage. He stood up and addressed everyone at the table. “This situation is really serious, and it has the potential of becoming a mass suicide. We have got to pull more help in on this situation immediately. We need to collaborate with the state of Arizona and pull in the feds.” The meeting was ending and we hadn’t even talked about my custody case. Dan jumped in and insisted we focus on it. I was the first woman who had ever taken the FLDS to court for custody of her children. Most of the time, if a woman left, she did so knowing she might not be able to get all her children out. The reality of abandoning some of her children was the price a woman had to be willing to pay for her freedom. Dan told Shurtleff that Merril had hired one of the highest-paid attorneys in the state to fight me. Dan and I knew that if Merril could win his case against me, no woman would ever again try. A representative who was at the meeting from Child Protective Services agreed completely.

• From The Sexual Outlaw (1977)

  Will you, as so many before you, throw him out? And to the straight blacks and Chicanos in the audience: Why do so many of you—who should know so well what it's like—oppose us while you wallow in transparent machismo? The evil that pursues us is the same evil that pursues you. It only begins with us. We provide a barometer for tomorrow's general repression. We're first— but you're next. “What makes a homosexual?” a nice lady or gentleman in the audience asks earnestly, trying-hard-to-understand. What makes a heterosexual? It's that relevant. “Does the sexual outlaw you've described oppose heterosexuality?” asks a man, forcing his voice low, low. If you think so, you've misunderstood entirely. He would not replace one restrictive tyranny for another— homosexual fascism for heterosexual fascism. He opposes only the totalitarian imposition of the heterosexual norm on him. Is he against love and relationships? No. He merely upholds the right to have sex with or without love, with one or with many. Within or outside marriage. I go on, anticipating: And how can you say that our sexual presence intrudes on your lives? Even when we have sex on the streets, we're invisible to you—you don't know we're there. (Just us and the cops, man.) Have you ever, once, seen us make out? And if occasionally we trespass into your garages to fuck (and even then you don't see us), what is that compared to how you've trespassed into our lives, trampled on them? What cops can we call to thwart that? Your hatred has thrust us out of your world and we have formed our own, unseen by you. You allowed us no “security” and now we live to question the props of yours. The impermanence you've pushed on us, we've converted from an aimless hell into, at best, a joyous promiscuity to confront you and question your "permanence.” Now I relent in my imaginary speech. Especially because I see in it some of my most beloved friends. We accept your heterosexuality. Now accept our homosexuality, as equal. It is an acceptance that will enrich and free us all. 4:58 P.M. The Movie Theater. H E DROVE TO his apartment. He took a shower, changed to fresh jeans, mixed more of the protein liquid. Still drenched in anger at the attack on Griffith Park, he drove to Greenstone Park. No one there. He remembered the strange man who spat, last night, when— … He goes to a gay movie theater where he knows hunters congregate in the afternoons. He enters a darkness so dense that not even an outline can be seen. But he's aware of presences in the roiling blackness. On the screen, a movie with unsynchronized sound and bleeding unreal colors is flickering; orange bodies grind on a green bed. Jim waits until his eyes adjust. Slowly, outlines emerge.

• From The Sexual Outlaw (1977)

  Your cops, the executors of your hatred, a hatred that kills even your own children; do you know that over half of child suicides are because of sexual identity? We live each moment of our lives with the stupid judgment of your psychiatrists (will they change unhappy heterosexuals to homosexuals?), your judges, lawyers, juries (who in one moment can wreck our lives forever), your priests, rabbis, ministers, preachers (making damn sure we'll experience an aspect of hell). What they do, you condone. What you condone, you do. Imagine this: Your heterosexuality is legislated against. Even a proposal of a sex encounter renders you a criminal. Every moment you try to connect sexually, you're threatened with prison. You sit in a bar, you ask a woman who's been smiling at you to make it with you at home. Busted for it, you may be jailed for years. If you're the woman and you accept, you'll be busted too and forced to register as a “sex offender” the rest of your life; you may be pulled out of your home and into a police lineup on the flimsiest reason. Imagine that your bars are raided. Cops pick you out at random, just for being there; they handcuff you, jail you— and you keep wondering, Why? Imagine you're at a party and ask someone, or accept someone's invitation, to go home and make it—the other turns out to be a cop infiltrating the party. Busted. Imagine you're making out in a car—and you're sentenced to prison for eight years. Not merely told to move on—but sentenced to prison for eight years. Will you stop being a heterosexual, or will your defiance flare? Imagine that any mad cop can call you sick; imagine that any quivering preacher, priest, rabbi can hound you from childhood for being “damned.” Will you stop being a heterosexual? Now in my speech to heterosexuals I focus on liberals: Why don't you support us like you do blacks, Chicanos, farmworkers? Do you know that there are constant mass roundups and beatings of homosexuals? That our civil rights are routinely violated every day? Do you know that one who says “faggot” also says “nigger,” “broad,” “chink,” “kike,” “spic"? We are the minority ostracized by both the right and the left. Not so, says a radical woman in the audience. “The S.L.A. condoned upfront gay relations.” Oh, sure—for women. And that's a male-heterosexual fantasy trip. Did they have one word of revolutionary doctrine about gay men? Were the men being encouraged to make it? And to the parents in the audience: One of your children, right at this very moment, may be struggling to bring himself to tell you that he's gay. You love him—he knows that. But will you still love him when he tells you?—will you turn him into a stranger?

• From Escape (2007)

  We were approved! Jayne and I were elated. I’d never done something so empowering. I was proud and determined to make this school work. When the Arizona State Board of Education reviewed our charter, we were told it was one of the best assessment plans they’d ever seen. Merril was impressed with our accomplishment and said he’d tell Uncle Rulon. Word got back to Warren Jeffs in Salt Lake City about our triumph. Warren was still running the private FLDS school there and handling a lot of the day-to-day running of the sect for his ailing father. Warren’s teaching style consisted in beating students with yardsticks. Only two teachers in the school had teaching degrees. The rest had, at most, high school degrees. Their only qualification was their loyalty to the FLDS and to Warren. Warren heard that our charter school proposal had a big computer program. He had banned computers from his school. He knew I was developing my own reading books to complement my reading program, which was also threatening to him. Well-educated children might one day think for themselves. I think Jeffs knew this could ultimately undermine his leadership. So maybe I should have been better prepared for what happened next. Merril went to talk to Uncle Rulon about the school. He told Merril it wouldn’t happen. I have no idea if Merril even tried to change his mind. All I was told was that the prophet was opposed. There would be no charter school. Alvin Barlow, the superintendent, was upset. Merril forbade me to do anything more with the charter school. I had been the backbone of the entire operation. I was furious. My anger touched a core in me that burst into flame. Nearly everyone in the community wanted this school. For the first time, I began to see how religion could suppress something positive and life-giving. Failing to educate our children was unconscionable. What was also maddening was that I was not allowed to present my case to Uncle Rulon before Warren turned him against the school. Pieces were beginning to come together, but I had not yet added up the sum of the parts. I was too upset. I stopped eating for a week. We told the state of Arizona that we couldn’t pull the building together in time and that we were canceling the charter. This was a lie. (The state called us every year afterward asking what it could do to help get the school built. Jayne kept coming up with excuses but said sooner or later she’d blurt out the truth: the prophet opposed the school and would not allow it to happen.)

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters and the simultaneous revelation that Jesus had quite literally died for her sins. She spoke with peculiar emphasis about the nails in Christ’s wrists and hands and she even drew a little sketch on the telephone message pad of how she thought the nails had looked (she’d been doing some research into Aramaic pig iron). When I nodded respectfully but with a visible mote of scorn in my eye, she quite accurately read my thoughts. “Oh, I see, you think I’m some no ’count Baptist, huh, some raving redneck?” She spoke with an unaccustomed crudeness. “Well, I respect your religion,” I spluttered, “but I’m a bit of an agnostic personally and I—” “You’re full of shit,” she told me. She was looking right into my eyes. She was breathing emphatically, as though breath were psychic italic marks. She’d pushed her pageboy back from her face and shoved the sleeve of her madras blouse up to expose a pale biceps. She was halfway up out of her chair and leaning toward me. “Shit,” she said, her eyes darting for a second up to some invisible cue card before fixing me again. I felt she was torn between shyness and holy fury. “Jesus died for you,” she said, “and that’s something the greatest poets, Eliot and Dante and Donne, that’s something they knew—and they weren’t Florida crackers.” “Bravo,” DeQuincey whispered in awe. He turned to me with an isn’t-this-gal-great? grin—“She’s done it again, she’s really done it this time”—and he shook his head in admiring disbelief at the sheer wacky brilliance of his wife’s spiritual daredevilry. Exhausted by her performance, she shrank back into her chair, then rose and toddled off to the dark bedroom beyond. The moment DeQuincey and I were alone he stiffened, which I attributed to the embarrassment he must be feeling about his confession to me of his homosexual past. Not that he was attracted to me, nor I to him, but the possibility of attraction existed now and our sexual self-consciousness richocheted like sunlight in the Hall of Mirrors. That autumn with the Scotts I remember as a tender haze of tiredness, as the sight of their bright windows projecting a lattice of cross-barred shadows on flower beds filled with chrysanthemums, then dead leaves, then snow. The talk was continuous, it lasted for months, with interruptions only for our lives, which we grabbed at in short, obligatory snatches. Even during the day I’d pop in for ten minutes before lunch or on my way to class. I’d find Rachel foundered on her couch, a bilingual volume of Rilke cast aside, the air around her streaky with angelic transits. More and more I was spending my long afternoons with Rachel rather than with my old friend Howie. Over the summer Howie had grown taller and his skin had cleared up.

• From The Sexual Outlaw (1977)

  In the framed mirror, Jim saw his own cum spill in slow arcking spurts as the man directed the white liquid onto his clothed body, on the jockstrap, on his face, on his lips, over the open magazine, and on the photograph in it of a muscular man standing naked over a clothed man surrounded in bed by magazines of photographs of muscular nude bodies. 3:46 A.M. Terrace Circle. No, Jim does not want to go with him again. He prefers to leave the memory perfect. The outlaws scattered from Albertson Avenue have fled to Terrace Circle, a residential district of neatly decorated, attractive houses. Perhaps half the residents—more than that—in these six or seven blocks are gay. Along leafy ledges, men walk the dark streets. Even the sound of loud footsteps is out of place, disconnected. A lighted window; a man on the lawn stands staring into it at a naked man inside. A man before the open door of his house calls out to Jim: “Wanna come in? Me and my roommate are getting people together for an orgy. Can't start till we have ten. You'll be the seventh.” “Why ten?” Jim asks. “Less than that's too little, more's a mess,” the man answers. Jim shakes his head, not turned on by the prospect of a strict orgy. A car parks next to him. Jim stands in the middle of the block. The driver shifts to the passenger side of his car. His head strains out the window toward Jim. Jim moves closer. Suddenly there's the motion that announces cops in the area. The lingering becomes hurried, like a slightly speeded-up movie seen earlier in slow-motion. Forms slide into garages, others move into cars, cars desert the area, doors of houses open here and there, sheltering the threatened outlaws. And here they are, lights flashing, two squad cars. Four cops rush out, gathering men at random; they'll question them here or take them to the station for “investigation.” Quickly, the man in the car by Jim opens the door for him, Jim gets in; the man drives a few blocks away. He parks. “We're safe now,” he says. Anger wrenches Jim at the thought of the attacking cops. This time his cock hardens immediately when the man bends over it. Minutes later, back on Terrace Circle, the cops are gone, and new men and cars are cruising the area. Driving away, Jim avoids glancing at his watch. 4:12 A.M. Greenstone Park. Speeding! He drives into the park, to end the night's hunt. He walks along the dark path. Past hunters, shadows among the trees. He returns to his car and drives down the hill. Before dawn.

• From Escape (2007)

  Barbara went immediately upstairs to Merril’s office and told him what Cathleen had said. She returned to her bedroom. Merril stood outside Cathleen’s room and began pounding on her door. Cathleen did not respond. Merril was shouting outside her door. “You’re in serious trouble and if you know what is good for you then you will open this door before I break it down.” “Do whatever you want. I’m not going to talk to you,” Cathleen replied. Merril went and banged on the door to the children’s nursery. Cathleen’s children were too terrified to refuse their father’s commands. They opened the door. He barged into Cathleen’s bedroom and ordered her into his office. “Cathleen, if you are going to challenge Barbara when she acts on my orders, then you will have to face consequences.” Cathleen refused to get out of bed. “Merril, I’m not going anywhere with you. You better leave now.” Merril grabbed Cathleen and threw her on the floor. Her son, Johnson, was sleeping in her recliner and woke up screaming. “Leave now, Merril. Get out of here.” Merril threw her back on the floor, but this time even harder. Her children were screaming from the nursery, “Go with Father, please, please.” Merril grabbed Johnson from the recliner and threw him into the nursery and locked the door. Johnson was a shy child who had always been terrified of Merril. Merril berated Cathleen for upsetting her children. Cathleen’s daughters were screaming in the nursery. Wendell, who had fallen asleep, started whimpering again. Cathleen knew she was out of options. “Merril, if you will allow me to take Wendell to Sara, I will go to your office.” Sara was Cathleen’s eldest daughter. Merril screamed at her for hours in his office. He told her that she was never, under any conditions, to sass Barbara. The next morning when Cathleen awakened me for coffee, her eyes were swollen and red. She told me everything her children had told her about what happened to Wendell the night before. “Carolyn, Merril can batter me and berate me. But I am not going to allow Barbara to hurt my children. I’m going to see Warren.” I warned her against that. I told her about the seventeen-page letter I had given to Warren Jeffs documenting Merril’s abuse. I explained how Warren had discounted my charges because I failed to confess my own sins of immorality. Cathleen latched on to that in the wrong way. She suddenly thought that if she confessed her sins to the prophet, then he would help her. I felt sick. “Cathleen, that was only an excuse. Warren needed a reason not to help me. The reality is he never intended to. He will do everything he can to cover up Merril’s abuse.” She was unshakable in her conviction that if she told Warren the truth about her sins, he would respond to her honesty with help and protection.

• 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.