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 First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  We know from the letter that his opponents challenged his authority and impugned his credentials as an apostle. They also appealed to the authority of sacred scripture, the Jewish Bible, which was also Paul’s Bible. Indeed, they had the Bible on their side. In Genesis, God’s covenant with Abraham emphatically required circumcision: “This is my covenant, which you shall keep, between me and you and your offspring after you: Every male among you shall be circumcised” (17:10). Circumcision is mentioned another five times in the next four verses in Genesis. So it had been for males entering the Jewish covenant with God ever since. Who was Paul to set aside the clear command of the Bible? Especially since he was proclaiming a Jewish Messiah? The fierceness of the conflict is pointed to by the fierceness of Paul’s response. Galatians is the most polemical of his letters—and for Paul, that’s saying a lot. It is his only letter that does not begin with a thanksgiving. Instead, he immediately counters his opponents attack upon his authority: “Paul an apostle—sent neither by human commission nor from human authorities, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him from the dead” (1:1). Then indignation, accusation, and condemnation pour out: I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel—not that there is another gospel, but there are some who are confusing you and want to per vert the gospel of Christ. But even if we or an angel from heaven should proclaim to you a gospel contrary to what we proclaimed to you, let that one be accursed! As we have said before, so now I repeat, if anyone proclaims to you a gospel contrary to what you have received, let that one be accursed! (1:6–9) Soon thereafter he calls them “foolish Galatians” and wonders if they have become possessed: “You foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you?” (3:1). Near the end of the letter, his passion surfaces again: Listen! I, Paul, am telling you that if you let yourselves be circumcised, Christ will be of no benefit to you…. I am confident about you in the Lord that you will not think otherwise. But whoever it is that is confusing you will pay the penalty. (5:2, 10) He concludes the section with sarcasm (whose etymology is “a gashing of flesh”): “I wish those who unsettle you would castrate themselves!” (5:12). Why this passion about circumcision? Because requiring circumcision for gentile male converts countered Paul’s most foundational sense of his mission as well as his vision of what “in Christ” meant. His vocation was to be an apostle to the Gentiles—and for him that did not mean first converting Gentiles to Jews through circumcision so that they could then be baptized into Christ. For him to have accepted that notion would have meant a betrayal of his calling.

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  Should it be kosher for all, with the gentile Christians deferring to the Jewish Christians? Or should it be kosher for none, with the Jewish Christians deferring to the gentile Christians? Peter, Barnabas, and Paul had first accepted kosher for none, but when James of Jerusalem, the brother of Jesus, demanded kosher for all, the other apostles agreed—all except Paul. He even said that the shift from kosher for none to kosher for all by Peter and the other Jewish Christian leaders was sheer hypocrisy: “The other Jews joined him [Peter] in this hypocrisy, so that even Barnabas was led astray by their hypocrisy” (Gal. 2:13). That was a crucial apostolic disagreement for Paul. You can sense his shock in that “ even Barnabas.” Paul’s outraged refusal and truculent language at Antioch may well have stemmed from residual shock at the fact that there had even been discussion about gentile male circumcision at Jerusalem. The topic was raised by those he calls, rather nastily, “false believers secretly brought in, who slipped in to spy on the freedom we have in Christ Jesus, so that they might enslave us” (2:4). Had Jerusalem decided in favor of circumcision for gentile Christians, Paul’s mandate from God would have been negated. You can still sense his shock throughout all of 2:1–14. Apart from his specific no-concession mood, what he said to Peter at Antioch was not actually in line with his own basic theology. We leave that for now, but return to this problem of the eucharistic meal in mixed Christian communities—not at Antioch, but in Rome—in Chapter 6 and find there a very different solution from a not so angry Paul. But, in any case, the result at Antioch was a serious breach between Paul, the other apostles, and “even Barnabas” that inevitably and necessarily left Paul free to go westward to the Aegean Sea on his own independent mission based primarily at Corinth and Ephesus. He went not only independently from Barnabas, but differently from Barnabas. And the difference was not just in geography, but in strategy. PAUL’S URBAN MISSIONARY STRATEGY Paul was a city person, and the whole of his activity as an apostle was in cities. In this respect he was very different from Jesus, who grew up in a small village and whose public activity was rural, concentrated in villages and small towns in the countryside. Though Paul moved through rural areas as he traveled from city to city, there is no indication in Acts or his letters that he ever sought to make converts in the villages and towns through which he passed. Paul not only focused on cities but mostly on cities that were capitals of Roman provinces: from birth in Tarsus of Cilicia, through experience in Antioch of Syria, and on to Thessalonica of Macedonia, Corinth of Achaia, and Ephesus of Asia Minor.

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  192 the first paul in order to be in the community “in Christ”? Some were being persuaded that the answer was yes. We do not know precisely who Paul’s opponents were. But if those gentile converts were former God-worshipers, we can easily imagine them being pulled in two different directions—toward traditional Judaism by the synagogue and toward Chris tian Judaism by Paul. We do know that the opposition to Paul in Galatia was fi erce. We know from the letter that his opponents challenged his au- thority and impugned his credentials as an apostle. They also appealed to the authority of sacred scripture, the Jewish Bible, which was also Paul’s Bible. Indeed, they had the Bible on their side. In Genesis, God’s covenant with Abraham emphatically required circumcision: “This is my covenant, which you shall keep, between me and you and your offspring after you: Every male among you shall be circumcised” (17:10). Circumcision is mentioned another five times in the next four verses in Genesis. So it had been for males entering the Jewish covenant with God ever since. Who was Paul to set aside the clear command of the Bible? Especially since he was proclaiming a Jewish Messiah? The fierceness of the conflict is pointed to by the fi erceness of Paul’s response. Galatians is the most polemical of his letters— and for Paul, that’s saying a lot. It is his only letter that does not begin with a thanksgiving. Instead, he immediately counters his opponents attack upon his authority: “Paul an apostle—sent neither by human commission nor from human authorities, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him from the dead” (1:1). Then indignation, accusation, and condemnation pour out: I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel—not that there is another gospel, but there are some who are confusing you and want to

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  admitted that he knew full well that Eisenhower’s advisers had thought him as nothing more than a “country boy.” 47 From the start of the crisis, Faubus used dual fears of racial and class violence to justify ordering the Arkansas National Guard to Central High School. In his announcement the day before the school year opened, he claimed to have reports of white “caravans” ready to descend upon Little Rock from numerous outlying areas. Whether or not a race war would arise from the conflict, he let it be known that white thugs, rabble-rousers, and rednecks were contending for a place in history. 48 Taylor Thornberry, the cross-eyed kin of Orval Faubus, as depicted in Life magazine (1957). His features underscored Faubus’s hillbilly and degenerate roots. Life magazine, September 23, 1957 Francis Miller/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images Faubus loved playing the redneck card. His continued defiance infuriated Eisenhower, who dispatched the 101st Airborne Division and federalized the Arkansas National Guard. Military protection ensured that the nine black students slated to attend Central High were not barred. On the national stage, and

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  I have always felt a strange mix of revulsion and gratitude toward the folks at PETA (who insist that while they support the aims of the supposed splinter faction responsible, they are not comfortable with the means). Personally, I would never buy or wear fur—while other material is available. I choose not to hunt for sport. I find it ugly and pointless. While I have shot rabbits for food, it was not an experience I enjoyed, and I would not do it again. The idea of testing cosmetics on animals seems appallingly, extravagantly cruel and unnecessary. (As opposed to medical testing, which I reluctantly, very reluctantly, accept.) I own and utterly adore a mean, six-pound runt of a cat who I adopted from a shelter, and who essentially runs my household. However annoying or offensive or tone-deaf or silly the PETA folks look at times, I've always been glad they're there, to remind all of us the cost in life and in pain of the luxuries we enjoy. If they choose to picket, to advertise, to educate, to harangue, to use every interpretation of the first amendment to embarrass fashion designers, alter public perception, and change behavior, then God bless them. This is, presumably, a free country. And if they want to put up posters and billboards mocking Rudy Giuliani's cancer (GOT CANCER?), however grotesque that might be, he's a big boy. And it makes them look far worse than even the most uncharitable view of our former mayor. But terrorizing a chef and his family? Using what is essentially racketeering and extortion to frighten chefs into changing menus—in Manrique's case, walking away from a centuries-old Gascogne tradition? This is indefensible, atrocious, and portentous of bad things to come. Already, chefs Traci Des Jardins of Jardiniere and Charlie Trotter have made the craven and ail-too expedient decision to remove foie gras from their menus, not only knuckling under at the first whiff of opposition, but turning their backs on their peers and their profession when their support is needed most.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  I have seen foie gras being produced, the ducks and geese fed in identical fashion to the way that Manrique's suppliers do it. The animals are not bolted to a board. At mealtime, they are summoned or gently prodded, by the same feeder each day, and held between his legs. Their heads are tilted back and a long funnel is introduced into their mouths and down their throats. About a handful of feed is ground in a mill and poured into their stomachs. They do not generally struggle. Often, free of any physical encouragement, they come when summoned. Certainly it is not pretty. Watching the process causes an instinctive awareness of the gag reflex. But then any number of adult film stars cheerfully inspire the same reaction. It is, no doubt, cruelty of a sort. If any time discomfort is inflicted on another living thing defines the word, then that's what it is. But in the full spectrum of cruelty and horror in this wide world—and even in our own neighborhoods—there is far, far worse. There is cruelty and neglect and murder readily at hand on Bay Area streets. But it happens to people, creatures of little concern to our clandestine warriors. There is also dog fighting and cockfighting. But the people who run those businesses tend to carry guns, and one thing we can be sure of is that the perpetrators of the Manrique extortion don't want any holes shot in their comfortable clothing. They don't want to miss a shift at the health food store. They don't want to do anything that their supporters or daddy's lawyer can't bail them out of later. Rather than risk harm or inconvenience to themselves on the real front lines—in Burma, China, Africa, or even the streets of Oakland—they have chosen to commit the relatively easy crime of extorting a chef and his family. If these people, assured Hezbollah-like of the righteousness of their cause, were capable of shame, then they surely should be ashamed. Burglary, destruction of property, and extortion are all felonies. Acting as a group, in concert, in an ongoing criminal enterprise—as these hateful and hating people inarguably have—amounts to racketeering. I dearly hope, pour decourager les autres, that when they are caught, they are tried and convicted under federal RICO conspiracy statutes and spend the rest of their lives eating prison turkey loaf. And I offer my support and my sympathy to Laurent Manrique, a great chef, a good man, and a proud Gascon. SLEAZE GONE BY "NEW YORK MUTHAFUCKIN' CITY."

• From The Ultimate Guide to Orgasm for Women: How to Become Orgasmic for a Lifetime (2011)

  Sometimes the rant is not about whatever is actually making us angry; we can rant on anything we choose. The reason for ranting is the same as the reason for kicking the dog: we are feeling a need to express the energy of the anger. Sometimes we substitute a more acceptable target for our anger, since we are told that we ought to have a good reason for being angry, but this is dishonest. We usually indulge in this dishonesty to protect ourselves, because it is too painful, or it feels futile, to think about the real reasons for our anger, or because we are ashamed of those reasons. I am not saying no one should be angry; there are many good reasons to be angry, and many things to be angry about. But responsible living includes the integrity to acknowledge the real reasons for our anger, instead of fixating on a convenient outlet and blaming others. Sometimes the original energy was not the energy of anger, but expressing it as anger makes us feel safer, less vulnerable than the original feeling. This is why so many women get impatient with men when men start to express their feelings; the first feeling that usually comes up for a man who has been trained to be tough and “manly” is nearly always anger. Anger often covers over other feelings, and it isn’t always easy to wait for a man to wade through his anger before he gets to what we see as the “real” feelings. Responsible living involves taking responsibility for what we do with the energy of our feelings, and if necessary, following that energy back to its source in order to prevent it from harming others. It means choosing not to kick the dog (kicking the dog can take many forms, from racial hatred to sexism to child abuse). It means listening to and honoring yourself. It means acknowledging your feelings and needs. And this requires absolute integrity.

• From Between the World and Me (2015)

  Michael Brown did not die as so many of his defenders supposed. And still the questions behind the questions are never asked. Should assaulting an officer of the state be a capital offense, rendered without trial, with the officer as judge and executioner? Is that what we wish civilization to be? And all the time the Dreamers are pillaging Ferguson for municipal governance. And they are torturing Muslims, and their drones are bombing wedding parties (by accident!), and the Dreamers are quoting Martin Luther King and exulting nonviolence for the weak and the biggest guns for the strong. Each time a police officer engages us, death, injury, maiming is possible. It is not enough to say that this is true of anyone or more true of criminals. The moment the officers began their pursuit of Prince Jones, his life was in danger. The Dreamers accept this as the cost of doing business, accept our bodies as currency, because it is their tradition. As slaves we were this country’s first windfall, the down payment on its freedom. After the ruin and liberation of the Civil War came Redemption for the unrepentant South and Reunion, and our bodies became this country’s second mortgage. In the New Deal we were their guestroom, their finished basement. And today, with a sprawling prison system, which has turned the warehousing of black bodies into a jobs program for Dreamers and a lucrative investment for Dreamers; today, when 8 percent of the world’s prisoners are black men, our bodies have refinanced the Dream of being white. Black life is cheap, but in America black bodies are a natural resource of incomparable value. * Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage.III.And have brought humanity to the edge of oblivion: because they think they are white. JAMES BALDWIN In the years after Prince Jones died, I thought often of those who were left to make their lives in the shadow of his death. I thought of his fiancée and wondered what it meant to see the future upended with no explanation. I wondered what she would tell his daughter, and I wondered how his daughter would imagine her father, when she would miss him, how she would detail the loss. But mostly I wondered about Prince’s mother, and the question I mostly asked myself was always the same: How did she live? I searched for her phone number online. I emailed her. She responded. Then I called and made an appointment to visit. And living she was, just outside of Philadelphia in a small gated community of affluent homes. It was a rainy Tuesday when I arrived. I had taken the train in from New York and then picked up a rental car. I was thinking of Prince a lot in those months before. You, your mother, and I had gone to Homecoming at The Mecca, and so many of my friends were there, and Prince was not.

• From Between the World and Me (2015)

  But when I got off the train and came back to my hood, to my Flatbush Avenue, or my Harlem, the fear still held. It was the same boys, with the same bop, the same ice grill, and the same code I’d known all my life. If there was one difference in New York it was that we had more high-yellow cousins here in the Puerto Ricans and Dominicans. But their rituals were so similar, the way they walked and gave dap, it was all familiar to me. And so I found myself, on any given day, traveling through several New Yorks at once—dynamic, brutal, moneyed, sometimes all of those at once. Perhaps you remember that time we went to see Howl’s Moving Castle on the Upper West Side. You were almost five years old. The theater was crowded, and when we came out we rode a set of escalators down to the ground floor. As we came off, you were moving at the dawdling speed of a small child. A white woman pushed you and said, “Come on!” Many things now happened at once. There was the reaction of any parent when a stranger lays a hand on the body of his or her child. And there was my own insecurity in my ability to protect your black body. And more: There was my sense that this woman was pulling rank. I knew, for instance, that she would not have pushed a black child out on my part of Flatbush, because she would be afraid there and would sense, if not know, that there would be a penalty for such an action. But I was not out on my part of Flatbush. And I was not in West Baltimore. And I was far from The Mecca. I forgot all of that. I was only aware that someone had invoked their right over the body of my son. I turned and spoke to this woman, and my words were hot with all of the moment and all of my history. She shrunk back, shocked. A white man standing nearby spoke up in her defense. I experienced this as his attempt to rescue the damsel from the beast. He had made no such attempt on behalf of my son. And he was now supported by other white people in the assembling crowd. The man came closer. He grew louder. I pushed him away. He said, “I could have you arrested!” I did not care. I told him this, and the desire to do much more was hot in my throat. This desire was only controllable because I remembered someone standing off to the side there, bearing witness to more fury than he had ever seen from me—you. I came home shook. It was a mix of shame for having gone back to the law of the streets mixed with rage—“I could have you arrested!” Which is to say: “I could take your body.”

• From While You Were Out (2023)

  A FEDERAL INSPECTION REPORT issued in March 2010 declared patients at the Milwaukee County Mental Health Complex to be in immediate jeopardy after a rash of sexual assaults against female patients there. Four women were reported to have been attacked by the same man, including one woman with severe developmental disabilities who had become pregnant. The man, twenty-two, had a history of violence and sexual assault, but was still permitted to come and go from the hospital as he wished. He’d once punched a nurse with such force that he broke the man’s eye socket. Steve Schultze, the newspaper’s county government reporter, and I spent the next several months investigating the hospital. Readers were outraged. The hospital director appeared before the county board, which oversaw operations at the public facility, to explain why this was happening. The director said he and his staff consciously decided to house men and women on the same ward, even knowing the risks to the female patients. Sexual assaults in mixed-gender wards, he said, were a “trade-off” for more violent assaults that would happen in all-male psychiatric units. The idea of a sexual assault as an acceptable trade-off was too much for people to bear. The director was fired the day after our story appeared.

• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  Between terror and rage I chose rage. Partway down the hill I thought of my father and how I hated the way his skin smelled like ash skin yellow cigarette stains on his fingers and his big architectural hands and his pushing me and I closed my eyes… I closed them, I did, I let go of the handlebars and I put my hands out to the sides of my body. I felt the wind on my palms and fingers. On my face. My chest. Maybe blowing straight through my heart. I stopped breaking. My feet weightless. I wiped out without making any turns toward our house. Though no bones were broken, I was scraped all over. My face. My elbows and arms. My knees and legs. My strong swimmer boy shoulders. All I was was my body. Bleeding. Bleeding. But not crying. For years and years, after that.

• From What My Bones Know (2022)

  That's how I found myself in his room in the middle of the night, standing above his bed. I watched him sleep, examined his gaping mouth, his peaceful face. Then I heaved the ax up above us in a graceful arc that would end on his balding skull. And I started to scream. His whole body jumped up under the sheets, and he struggled to focus on me, on the ax, on his sorry situation, before he cried out in terror. It shames me to admit that threatening his life felt…satisfying. To hold so much power. To feel so much control. He squirmed, and for the first time in forever, I was not afraid. "How do you like it?" I said quietly, in that same chilling, deadpan, serial-killer tone I knew so well, and it felt delicious in my own mouth. "How does it feel to be on the other side of things? To be inches from death? How does it feel when someone wants to kill you?"

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  When Freud goes to interpret the scene, however, the mother’s genitals disappear. The mother becomes the “castrated wolf, which let the others climb upon it,” and the father, the “wolf that climbed.” This is no real surprise—as Winnicott has noted (along with Deleuze and others), Freud’s career can sometimes seem a series of intoxications with theoretical concepts that willfully annihilate nuance. (Or reality: Freud later suggests that the boy may have seen sheepdogs copulating and hoisted the image onto his parents, and thus asks the reader “to join me in adopting a provisional belief in the reality of the scene.” Such freely confessed swerves into the provisional are the pleasure of reading Freud; the problems come when he succumbs—or we succumb—to the temptation to mastery rather than reminding ourselves that we are at deep play in the makeshift.) In any event, at the time of his writing of Wolf Man, Freud’s plat du jour was the castration complex. And this complex demands that the woman have “nothing,” even in the face of testimony to the contrary. Freud doesn’t disappear the pleasure the Wolf Man notes on his mother’s face, but he does twist it beyond recognition. He proposes that seeing the castrated mother get fucked in this way, and seeing her enjoy it, produces a primal, destabilizing fear in the Wolf Man, “which, in the form of concern for his male organ, was fighting against a satisfaction whose attainment seemed to involve the renunciation of that organ.” Freud summarizes the psychic knot as follows: “’If you want to be sexually satisfied by Father,’ we may perhaps represent [the Wolf Man] as saying to himself, ‘you must allow yourself to be castrated like Mother; but I won’t have that.’” I won’t have that: for Freud, the “that” is castration—clearly too large a price to pay for whatever pleasure may be at hand. For some queer theorists writing in Freud’s wake, however, the “that” is something else entirely: the desire to be sexually satisfied by the father, in which case the penis is not renounced, but multiplied. This reading treats Wolf Man’s memory of his parents’ encounter “a tergo” as a primal, coded fantasy of gay male sex, a scene of proto-homosexuality. In which case, the Wolf Man’s subsequent fear of his father is a fear not of castration, but of his own homosexual desire in a world that “won’t have it.” This interpretation has appeal and value. But if the woman’s genitals have to be willfully erased in order to get there, and her pleasure distorted into a cautionary tale re: the perils of castration, we have a problem. (Rule of thumb: when something needs to be willfully erased in order to get somewhere, there is usually a problem.) Thus, Fraiman aims to return the mother’s pleasure to the scene, and to foreground her access—”even as a mother“—to “non-normative, nonprocreative sexuality, to sexuality in excess of the dutifully instrumental.” The woman with such access and excess is the sodomitical mother.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  At Christmas, the shelter workers invite us kids to help them decorate a Christmas tree. Rosie, now six, gently takes my hand and looks on with a shy smile when Santa arrives carrying a sack on his shoulder. The shelter director encouraged me to make a wish list, so I asked for new Mad Libs game pads and Highlights magazines to share with Rosie and Norm. As the gifts are being handed out, he also tells me to write a list of books appropriate for seventh grade, and he’ll sign them out of the library for me. I jot down a dozen Landmark history books to read to Rosie, and a couple Judy Blumes. I figure, why not load up? You don’t have to pay at the library. Then a few months later, in March of 1979, Cookie returns to the shelter and announces that she’s registered us back in school and rented the top unit in a duplex in Ronkonkoma. She drops us there and takes off immediately, which suits Rosie, Norm, and me fine: After having lived in the shelter for a few months, the three of us are so used to having friends around that every day after school we invite the neighborhood kids to our house. But the fun’s over one afternoon when Cookie decides to come home, taking me by the hair and dragging me into her bedroom. Our friends tear down the stairs and outside as Cookie grabs a belt then rips off my shirt. She lashes my back, over and over. I try for the door but end up huddled in the corner, and as she takes a break to regain her grip on the belt, I start fighting back. She fights for her breath as she hurls the belt and screams, “The more you fight it, you skinny little whore, the longer it’s going to take! You have boys over, you stupid slut? This is for your own good. You want to end up pregnant? Who’s gonna take care of your baby? Huh?” she demands. “Me?” When she’s finished, she drags me to my room by my arm and tosses me inside. Quickly I put on a different shirt and shimmy down the back of the house, running out of the yard, dodging the commotion on the back porch as the neighbors point her to where I’ve gone. All one-hundred-eighty pounds of Cookie come heaving after me, and again she takes me by my hair and tugs me back to the house. “Take off your jeans and your top,” she says. I glare at her. “Take off your fucking clothes, you whore. Rosie, Norman,” she says, “I want you to see what happens when you try to run away.” I make eye contact with Rosie, who’s looking on in fear as Cookie spins me so that my back’s facing her. I stiffen, hearing her arm rise high in the air. She whips me . . . and whips me . . .

• From Action (2014)

  If someone is coming on a bit strong for your tastes (how you determine this is, as with most things related to sex, subjective), tell them to alter what they’re doing, or to stop, if you prefer. If you’re all right with the former, pull away by a few inches and say something like “Do that [more slowly, or gently, or however you’d like them to change it], please.” No matter what that directive is, don’t couch it in language like “I don’t think I want to do that yet” if you’re sure you don’t want to do that yet. You don’t have to water down what you know in your heart/parts to be true, and your boundaries are not up for renegotiation unless you say, and mean, that they are. In one of my frenches of yore, nothing much was “happening” that wasn’t kissing, on the surface, but the Francophile in question had me pressed up against a wall and I wasn’t into it, even though I was otherwise enjoying making out with her. Getting specific about what wasn’t working for me righted that weirdness: “Hey, can you back up a little?” goes a long way, and not in the sexually figurative sense. She got the message that I wanted to SLOW RIDE, TAKE IT EASY in that instance, although we had hooked up in rough, restrictive, and generally raunch-as-hell ways before. When others have rammed their tongues down my esophagus, which has happened a solid throatful of times in my life, saying, “Can you be gentler, please?” has been similarly effective. If you say, “I like it when you slow down,” and then that person doesn’t, I advise you to bail—and this advice extends to all kinds of sexual contact. First and most important: Physically separate yourself from this person, since your safety comes first, regardless of whatever they’re doing to imply the contrary. Then, if you feel comfortable doing so, let them know why you’re bailing. They should be aware that their supremely jerk-esque behavior is the reason they’re about to be alone. Then, unless you have anything more you’d like to say, just leave.

• From Action (2014)

  • “You were okay with it last time.” • “I forgot you weren’t into that.” • “This is the only way it feels good for me.” All of these are real-life garbage sentences, uttered by real-life garbage people in response to my protestations about some dubious piece of the “action” we were getting. Sometimes these people were also actual rapists (because, straight-up, anyone who disregards your not wanting to have sex, or coerces you into it after you say no, fits this description). Though these phrases were deployed in different scenarios/for ostensibly different reasons, each one means, “I don’t care what you want, even though you just directly told me that it isn’t what is happening, and I don’t respect you as a person more than I do my own horniness in this one moment.” To operate under that mindset when someone has trusted you with the privilege of feeling all up on them is wholly unacceptable, and not only because you’re trying to make that person feel bad for your own repugnant behavior. (Not, you know, “you,” but some hypothetical Alex-from-next-to-the-jukebox-style garbaggio-fuck, whom I’m now itching to destroy in vengeance of your honor even though he’s technically made up.) Any person who exercises this selfishness has bought into the set of false promises made to them by male-violence-dominated societies, aka that victims of sexual assault are responsible at least in part for the harm done to them, so the aggressors don’t have to feel like it’s their fault. This is untrue putrescence. I know you (real you, this time) wouldn’t be the kind of solipsistic cretin who thinks that way, but if you find yourself in a situation where someone is reciting a passage that sounds plagiarized from one of the above excerpts from the RoBZP, please understand that your decisions are sound and worth respecting, even though said scum is trying to make you feel guilty about the fact that they’ve decided it’s okay for you to feel unhappy/uncomfortable/unsafe as long as they’re feeling sexual pleasure. The idea of even the potential of that happening to you makes me want to mail a congressperson a stink bomb and yell obscene, hideous things at a beautiful phenomenon of nature—ideally a canyon, but definitely a majestic, centuries-old sycamore, at least (in addition to my previous crimes against fictional “Alex”-type pred-nesses).

• From Between the World and Me (2015)

  I don’t know if you remember how the film we saw at the Petersburg Battlefield ended as though the fall of the Confederacy were the onset of a tragedy, not jubilee. I doubt you remember the man on our tour dressed in the gray wool of the Confederacy, or how every visitor seemed most interested in flanking maneuvers, hardtack, smoothbore rifles, grapeshot, and ironclads, but virtually no one was interested in what all of this engineering, invention, and design had been marshaled to achieve. You were only ten years old. But even then I knew that I must trouble you, and this meant taking you into rooms where people would insult your intelligence, where thieves would try to enlist you in your own robbery and disguise their burning and looting as Christian charity. But robbery is what this is, what it always was. [image file=image_rsrcPZ.jpg] At the onset of the Civil War, our stolen bodies were worth four billion dollars, more than all of American industry, all of American railroads, workshops, and factories combined, and the prime product rendered by our stolen bodies—cotton—was America’s primary export. The richest men in America lived in the Mississippi River Valley, and they made their riches off our stolen bodies. Our bodies were held in bondage by the early presidents. Our bodies were traded from the White House by James K. Polk. Our bodies built the Capitol and the National Mall. The first shot of the Civil War was fired in South Carolina, where our bodies constituted the majority of human bodies in the state. Here is the motive for the great war. It’s not a secret. But we can do better and find the bandit confessing his crime. “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery,” declared Mississippi as it left the Union, “the greatest material interest of the world.”

• From Hot Daddies: Gay Erotic Fiction (2011)

  Eric’s just so damned irresponsible with his finances. He makes enough. In case you don’t remember, he’s got a college degree. He does computer programming for a company in town. He just doesn’t know how to manage his money. Half the time he doesn’t record his debits, though I paddle his butt every time an overdraft notice comes in. It really pisses me off. I’ve never bounced a check in my life. Personally, I think that’s because when I was a kid, I got turned over my pop’s knee whenever I screwed up. Eric had never been disciplined a day in his life until he met me. The week after we moved out here, Eric’s car died and he needed another one to get back and forth to work. His credit is so bad that the bank wouldn’t finance him. Can’t say as I blame them. When I finally agreed to cosign for the loan, I made it clear it was one thing for him to screw up his own credit, but he was not going to mess with mine. I was real blunt about it. I told him if he was so much as one day late on a payment, just one day, I’d take a switch to him. He agreed. I thought this time he’d manage to be responsible. After five years together, I suppose I should have known better. Things went along pretty well for a couple of months. The new place is everything we’ve always wanted: out in the country, the upstairs half of an old farmhouse; no neighbors to speak of, except for the Pulaskis, a retired couple—our landlords—who live downstairs. We’ll be watching the place for them in the winter while they’re in Florida. Hell, there’s even room for my vegetable garden. I have to admit, I’ve been feeling pretty damned domestic. Then last Friday afternoon, Eric pulled into the driveway just as I was getting out of my car. Usually he gets home a half hour or so after me, so I figured something was up. He sounded real nonchalant when we walked in the door. That made me suspicious, especially after he hurried up the driveway ahead of me so he’d be the one getting the mail. I pretended to be busy while he sorted through the day’s delivery, mostly junk, but out of the corner of my eye I saw one of those yellow Insufficient Funds envelopes I’d learned to recognize from his earlier exploits. Eric paled and put the envelope in his pocket, but he didn’t say anything, just went back to the bedroom to get out of his work clothes. I could feel myself starting to get hot. I knew his car payment had been due that week, but I decided to wait and see what he’d do. I’d changed and was reheating the spaghetti sauce for dinner when Eric finally came back into the kitchen. He leaned up against the counter next to me.

• From Action (2014)

  Unfortunately, we have to keep talking about the particulars of how we’re socialized to absorb and display the expectations for our genders. One of many cogent reasons: They’re wrecking our sex lives. And if you think that seems trivial? (a) This may not be the book for you; and (b) consider every vicious politician who’s ever sublimated his terror that liking a finger in an orifice means he’s GAY into a law that kills or maligns or otherwise tries to place a harness on the population writ large, then maybe get back to me. I’ll be right here, combing my beautiful female handbag as I wince back my anger, just like I’m supposed to! Far more preferable, far more loving, far more honest, far fucking hotter: Asking for and paying attention to the User’s Guide for how each of your specific partners wants to feel good and checking that information against whether their proclivities dovetail with what it is that does it for you—and not making your bedfellows feel ashamed about the things they like and want that you’re not down to try out with them. Having as many (or as few!) orgasms as you want, with whomever you want, as long as everyone involved is okay with that. Seeing all of what the world can give you and the other way around: Filling your dance card with other living, thinking, boning beings before you go check out the afterlife. (Freud describes sex, or eros, as the “life instinct” that human beings use to combat Thanatos, or the underlying knowledge, in all things, of the reality that we’re all going to kick one day.) Doing all the weird shit you search for on the internet—and doing it consensually. Most crucial: talking about sex. Not just in the beginning of whatever affair you might be having at the moment, but throughout and beyond the actual doing-of-it. You don’t need to narrate every last gesture that takes place between you and a sexual attaché—once consent is in place, a lot of what’s great about fucking, in the moment, is ineffable—but to treat it, more generally, as taboo is to stiffen and truncate its unknowns. You don’t have to worry about whether that makes you “gay,” or whatever, because that’s up to you and only you to decide. Please stop voting otherwise, if you are.

• From When Breath Becomes Air (2016)

  After surgery, we talked again, this time discussing chemo, radiation, and prognosis. By this point, I had learned a couple of basic rules. First, detailed statistics are for research halls, not hospital rooms. The standard statistic, the Kaplan-Meier curve, measures the number of patients surviving over time. It is the metric by which we gauge progress, by which we understand the ferocity of a disease. For glioblastoma, the curve drops sharply until only about 5 percent of patients are alive at two years. Second, it is important to be accurate, but you must always leave some room for hope. Rather than saying, “Median survival is eleven months” or “You have a ninety-five percent chance of being dead in two years,” I’d say, “Most patients live many months to a couple of years.” This was, to me, a more honest description. The problem is that you can’t tell an individual patient where she sits on the curve: Will she die in six months or sixty? I came to believe that it is irresponsible to be more precise than you can be accurate. Those apocryphal doctors who gave specific numbers (“The doctor told me I had six months to live”): Who were they, I wondered, and who taught them statistics? Patients, when hearing the news, mostly remain mute. (One of the early meanings of patient, after all, is “one who endures hardship without complaint.”) Whether out of dignity or shock, silence usually reigns, and so holding a patient’s hand becomes the mode of communication. A few immediately harden (usually the spouse, rather than the patient): “We’re gonna fight and beat this thing, Doc.” The armament varies, from prayer to wealth to herbs to stem cells. To me, that hardness always seems brittle, unrealistic optimism the only alternative to crushing despair. In any case, in the immediacy of surgery, a warlike attitude fit. In the OR, the dark gray rotting tumor seemed an invader in the fleshy peach convolutions of the brain, and I felt real anger (Got you, you fucker, I muttered). Removing the tumor was satisfying—even though I knew that microscopic cancer cells had already spread throughout that healthy-looking brain. The nearly inevitable recurrence was a problem for another day. A spoonful at a time. Openness to human relationality does not mean revealing grand truths from the apse; it means meeting patients where they are, in the narthex or nave, and bringing them as far as you can. Yet openness to human relationality also carried a price.